Crowe’s first questions seemed like an effort to nudge Dr. Peterson into a discussion about food and farming. He asked about how farmers may be impacted by all this, and he asked about land grant universities (they’re in danger “of the same process that swamped the humanities,” Peterson replied). He pointed to the words on the slide and mentioned that many people in the room might be proud of efforts to improve diversity and inclusivity.

“There’s no evidence whatsoever that diversifying your workplace has a consequence of increasing the number of groups that are included, or constitutes an improvement in the diversity of thought. That’s an absolute fallacy,” Peterson interrupted. Crowe declined to comment immediately after the talk.

Later, Peterson careened between apparently denouncing equal rights advocates in one sentence (”It’s not happiness, it’s not rights, all that shallow idiocy that we’re being spoon-fed”) and imploring his audience to take care of others in the next (“How can you have any respect for yourself without taking on some of the burdens of the world?”), with little to no concern for the evident contradiction.

In his next breath, Peterson delivered the two sentences that were greeted with the most enthusiastic applause of the day. “Bearing up nobly under the burden of life [is] a much better alternative than turning to the blandishments of the far right and discovering your ‘white identity’ and joining the bloody neo-Nazis, or drifting off into the left where everything’s about resentment, victimization, and privilege and tearing down the damn system. It’s sickening, as far as I’m concerned, and it’s time that it comes to a stop.”

It was unclear whether Peterson won over his audience in the end. There were several moments, like the one above, that drew enthusiastic applause. But there were also moments, especially during the introduction, that didn’t seem to land quite so well—members of the audience shifted in their chairs and looked around the room. But Peterson certainly didn’t face any of the loud protesters he’s met regularly at appearances in Canada. After the talk, several people lined up to take selfies with him. I overheard one man tell Peterson “you have to talk to my daughter.”

Billy Bishoff, the farmer from Maryland, didn’t want to discuss Peterson’s talk as a whole, saying he needed more time to think about it all. But he said there were moments that did resonate with him. He lives in an area near a tourist attraction, and he says wealthy vacation home owners play an outsized role in driving local policy.

“Those folks come there and retire and they have money and they’re willing to participate on our community college foundation board,” he said. “Well, then they want to bring in their ideas, which include diversity and those words on the board. The way that mechanism actually plays out is we now have a significant population of students at our community college which are from urban areas. They’re being brought in there to play sports and are given scholarships to come out into our rural area, and they never really fit in. But the intellectual idea is that they’re teaching diversity to our local kids. And the local community is not having any of it.”

Bishoff agreed that Peterson’s statements about independence—what Bishoff calls the “yeoman spirit”—resonated with the audience as a whole. “I don’t know I completely buy into what Dr. Peterson is saying, or the mechanism he’s advocating,” Bishoff said. “But the end result is certainly showing up, and that’s a polarity in our society. And that is, I think, extremely worrying.”