Love him, hate him, or don’t know him, the rising influence of Jordan Peterson, who occupies some role between public intellectual and national father figure, is something that cannot be ignored. Is this a positive move away from the nihilism and chaos of both the left and right, or is his conspicuous refusal to talk about race something to worry about? Filip, Jess and Teen get together to discuss.

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The following are edited excerpts from “Can We Trust Jordan Peterson?”, the 18th episode of Plan A’s podcast, Escape From Plan A.

White Dalai Lama…I promise I’m not high.

— Jess

I think Asians present a problem for his theory then. One of the problems with how he presents this is that he is at times very concrete in what he says. What he said is that competence in the modern world is largely about jntelligence. And there is really only one relevant measure of intelligence and that’s IQ. And he’s adamant about that, he says this theory of multiple intelligences is utter bullshit. There’s a clear agenda to this, as white men tend to do better on IQ than other groups. Except for Asians. Okay, if IQ is the sole indicator of intelligence, and intelligence is the most important factor in competence, why aren’t Asians climbing these competence hierarchies at rates higher than whites, and white men in particular?

— Teen

A question that came out from [the pushback to Plan A’s Jordan Peterson and White Techies articles] is… What is this profile of Asian men who are susceptible to being OK with movements like Jordan Peterson’s, and being on the side of white men who usually are not your allies.

— Filip