Full: War, Controversy, and Political Polarization | Iceland Channel 2 Interview

So Mr. Peterson, welcome to Iceland! Thank you for being with us. Um, how do you like the place?

"It's great! That's why I came back. I was here four years ago, and I had a really good time. I brought my mother and my aunt, elderly women. We, along with my wife, traveled all through Iceland. We went up to see the origins of the parliament; that was very interesting. The geology's interesting. The whole place has a good feeling, a feeling of, I would say, stability and kind of hominess, and also an entrepreneurial twist that's very positive.

And so, it's a small country, but it seems to punch above its weight culturally and has a reputation, I think, internationally for being like a cool destination and an admirable place. So that's all great as far as I'm concerned."

You're speaking to an audience of maybe a thousand tonight; it's sold out. People won't see you here. What are you going to tell them tonight?

"I don't know. I've been doing Q&A format presentations, and so we use a good technology called Slido (sli.do) that enables the audience to submit questions and then to vote them up very rapidly with no technological delay. I usually pick— I say 'we' because my wife asks me the questions. We usually pick one deep question, and I spend 40 minutes or so answering that, depending on how long it takes, and then a series of more practical questions.

So, it's a very good technique, let's say, or strategy to try to go into the depths and also to connect that to the practicalities on the ground. I usually touch on religious issues and then cultural issues, pertaining mostly now to the culture war that we seem to be engulfed in, I would say not only in the West but in the rest of the world. And which has actually broken out into a real war, because I believe that the war between Russia and Ukraine, or really between Russia and the West—rest of the West—is a civil war, not just what would you call it? Post-Soviet territorial expansion on the part of the Russians."

What values do you think there are at stake there, like Russia against the West? What do you think it's fighting? Is it liberal values against conservative, or is it something more?

"No, it's complicated. It's more complicated than liberal against conservative. Well, I think the Russians are—or yes, I think Putin has weaponized a certain degree of anti-woke sentiment among Russians, and some of that anti-woke doctrine, let's say, which is more conservative, he may also believe. But minimally, he's managed to use it very effectively on the propaganda front, and that's certainly one of the factors that's driving the war and sustaining it and causing it.

But in terms of Russia and the war, people worry about the expansion of Russia, and that's why America is helping Ukraine. Well, there are— that's not very—like, there are many explanations to it. But like, what do you think is the bigger threat? China or Russia? Should we worry as much about Russia as we do? I mean, they're Christian and they are more like us than China."

"Well, we have to worry about them at the moment, that's for sure. And they do have nuclear bombs—lots of them—which they're rattling quite vociferously at the moment. And China, I have two minds about. I think the Chinese government is— to call it 'reprehensible' barely scratches the surface. In China, translated my maps of meaning, I shouldn’t have allowed it, but the book— the first book I wrote is a very thick book—it's about 400 pages of dense text in English, and I think the Chinese translation was that thick, 3/8 inch, and pretty big type. I have no idea what it says, but the probability that it says anything like what I wrote is pretty damn low.

And China's social credit system, which we are rushing to imitate—just like we imitated the totalitarian response to COVID—that's a major threat to long-term freedom in every sense of the word. That's a dreadful fascist intervention, and I say 'fascist' because it involves the union of the state and media and the technocratic apparatus, and that's definitely a huge threat to us. China has devolved in many ways on the political front over the last five or six years.

We were hoping that integrating China into the Western economy would produce a certain liberalization on their part, and to some degree that's happened. And certainly, that's addressed the problem of poverty in China, which was a very good thing. But the Chinese are not our allies. We're very foolish in the West to allow ourselves to become fractured. I think it's a catastrophe that we didn't integrate Russia into NATO when we had the opportunity, because we had the opportunity, and we squandered it, and that was a big mistake.

And God only knows what we're going to pay for that. I'm very nervous about the fall because the food front looks dismal, and the best projections I've encountered suggest that 150 million people will be hungry by the fall, and that'll mean mass migration into Europe minimum, apart from the deaths, which fall particularly heavily on children in all likelihood.

So yeah, we've got a mess on our hands. And then, you know, everyone seems to be fiddling while Rome burns. The Biden Democrats are occupied with the most preposterous idiocies that can possibly be imagined at the moment when there's this terrible occurrence on the international front that could pull us all in, and we do seem to be doing everything we can to be pulled in."

Speaking on the Biden administration, since we're talking about politics, there have been great shifts in politics—oh, just a couple of years, three years maybe, two years. A lot of Democrats, when they saw Bernie being removed by the establishment and Biden put in, they became so disappointed with the Democratic Party that they moved maybe further to the right or to being more conservative.

Now we have Russell Brand endorsing Tucker Carlson. They have a space where they are being conservative together—same thing with Bill Maher.

"Yeah, well what's happening is that I think because of the disproportionate effect of a tiny minority of people, probably amplified by social media, the political—acceptable political landscape—I guess they call that the Overton window—has shifted tremendously to the left.

So for example, in Canada, this is also a policy issue: the liberals are farther left than the socialists were 10 years ago in terms of their policies and their pronouncements. And so that's left a lot of people who would have been on the center now uncomfortably straddling the divide between liberal and conservative. And you definitely see that reflected in people like Russell Brand and Bill Maher. Brand has got a pretty vicious libertarian streak, and that mitigates against some of his more leftist ideas, and Maher just seems to be waking up finally."

You're doing a lecture here tonight, and in the wake of you coming here, we had—which was maybe foreseeable on Twitter, people are saying like old comments of yours surface...

"What, the one about the lipstick? What the hell do people think lipsticks are for? You know, that’s such a— that's such a dismal and idiotic criticism. The idea that lipstick and makeup has nothing to do with sexual attractiveness, if you believe that, you're an idiot. And so I don't mind restating that quite vociferously."

And is there a place for that in the workplace?

"That's a good question, and it's not a question that we've been able to debate intelligently. You weren't saying it wasn't possible; you were just asking it like it was a question, right? It's a question about appropriate behavior in the workplace. And I'm also not saying that women shouldn't wear makeup in the workplace. I said it's a question."

Yeah, and these, you know, this Twitter people who—if you look at social media, it looks like I’m faced by an overwhelming opposition, but it's simply not true.

"It's just not true! I just wrote an article for The Telegraph, which was the most devastating article I could write. I thought I was done for by writing it. I basically called for the jailing of the butchering surgeons who are doing gender reassignment surgery, so-called, on minors, and I called the American Psychological Association a pack of spineless cowardly liars. And that's pretty cut and dried, I would say, and all of the comments are positive—all of them. So there's a tiny minority of people who take issue with what I say from time to time, and they're very noisy.

And many of them are journalists, especially female British journalists, as it turns out. But what that seems to manifest itself in in the public domain is nothing. I've had no protests to speak of on this tour; we've gone to 60 cities, I think, in three months—a handful of protesters, a couple of newspaper articles dragging up mostly old lies, and all the rest of it is thousands and thousands, tens of thousands of people who are trying to put their life together, and who are very civil and positive and not particularly interested in polarizing political discussion.

And that's the reality on the ground on the trans issue."

Because you have been vocal about it, written articles and tweeted. Is there another part of you that maybe is afraid that in 30 or 40 years it will be like having been against gay marriage or...

"Yeah, absolutely, 100 percent!"

Do you think that this time is different?

"Or it's definitely different. Most of the kids who are being surgically mutilated would have grown up to be gay, and the gay community is starting to wake up to that. So now, if you're a 10-year-old boy and you're ambivalent, let's say, or a 12-year-old boy or girl and you're ambivalent about your identity and perhaps about your sexuality—we know the data suggested that a large proportion of kids with that gender body dysmorphia and gender dysmorphia would grow up gay.

But most of them would settle into their body—like 85 percent of them or so—who have gender dysphoria at the clinical level would settle into their body by the time they're 18. And now, well, a good number of them are slated for hormonal and surgical mutilation. I do not think that we as a country should tolerate the changes."

Or do you think we should ban the conversion of minors to people of the opposite sex, so to speak, if they're under 18?

"I think we should ban the conversion of minors to people of the opposite sex, so to speak, if they're under 18. And I think we should restore their ability to sue medical professionals who dare to intervene."

But others, do you think, should be for adults?

"That's a whole different story. You know, most people—if people want to go to hell in a hand basket in their own particular way, they have the right to do that. That's a different issue. But minors—especially minors—period, no. No, and the fact that we are even having this discussion just strikes me as preposterous."

All sorts of Western countries have just moved to ban so-called conversion therapy, which wasn't a problem to begin with. There were a handful of fundamentalist Christian, mostly therapists in the U.S. who purported to offer services to aid homosexual individuals who perhaps wanted to go straight, and the gay community was upset about that.

And so now we have legislation banning conversion therapy, so you can't even—if you're a therapist, you can no longer really even question the identity claims of your clients, but you can convert kids surgically. So tell me how we can be having this conversation even. It's just beyond comprehension."

Yeah, it's— I think people have very different views. A lot of people just want to tolerate it and say this is fine.

"What? Tolerate what? Castration and double mastectomies for 13-year-olds? No, seriously man, that's not tolerance— that's crossed the line! That is not tolerance; that is an inexcusable silence on the part of the majority who knows this to be wrong in the deepest possible sense.

Most of the bloody Nazi propaganda that led to the extermination policies at the beginning of World War II were predicated initially on compassion and tolerance. So this whole 'we're being compassionate and tolerant'—it's like no you're not; you're aiding and abetting the surgical mutilation of minors. That is not compassionate, and it's not tolerant."

Let's see, Mr. Peterson. In the past couple of years, I've seen it on maybe your Twitter, and now, and maybe the way you speak—you, like, people are getting more polarized. We have a huge problem with polarization, like polarization in the U.S.—like no one knows how that will end.

"It'll end with a huge Democrat defeat in the fall. That'll be part of it."

Yeah, you've grown to be somewhat more political, right? You sound like you may be running for office one day. You really have problems with your current Canadian government.

"The reason that I've become more political is because the political types won't stay in their wheelhouse. So the reason I opposed Bill C-16 to begin with—which was the first political move I ever made—was because I knew what was going to happen. I knew bloody well what was going to happen. I knew that this pronoun nonsense would produce a psychogenic epidemic of gender dysphoria, mostly affecting young women, and that the consequence of that would be that thousands of young people would be sacrificed to hypothetically save a tiny minority of people who aren't being saved in any case. I bloody well knew that because I knew the literature on psychogenic epidemics and how that was going to lay itself out.

So this new gender dysphoria problem, which particularly affects young women, is the same psychological manifestation as, say, the cutting epidemic in the 1990s and the 2000s. And those psycho-psychogenic epidemics used to be called mass hysteria. There's a history documenting their arising going back 300 years; it's a very well documented phenomenon.

And so when the politicians get out of politics and start infringing on basic rights, which are theologically founded, they're no longer political. And at that point, as far as I'm concerned, people have an ethical obligation to step forward."

So, you don't want to run for office?

"No, no. But I can't—I don't have the temperament for it."

But wouldn't it be nice if we could just, as societies, all be friends, like whether you're trans or not trans—just everyone be a little more in peace?

"And peace is very difficult to achieve."

Go forward with our societies, try to build some economies, try to build societies where we can all, like—because they are splitting into factions?

"Yeah, yeah. Well, who is it who is polarizing it? The radical left."

Are you sure?

"Yes, yes I’m sure!"

Yes, I’m sure! Look, I'll give you an example. I have lots of friends and colleagues on the left and the right, and I've been working with the left for a long time, especially with the democrats in the U.S., to pull the Democratic Party to the center.

And we've had some success with that, although the Democrats will not—they refuse to draw a line delimiting their moderation from the radicals; they will not do it. Now, part of that's a technical problem—it's hard to determine when the left goes too far. I have one suggestion: when you're expressing the sentiment that your tolerance and compassion requires the surgical mutilation of minors, that's when you've gone too far, definitely.

I also think you've gone too far when you trumpet equity as a virtue. But the dividing line is difficult, and the Democrats won’t draw it, and that's because they think they need the radicals for electoral victory and because they're afraid of being mobbed. And those are both fears.

But the left—people on the left, I've tried to get them to communicate with people on the right and vice versa. The people on the right will always talk to everyone on the left, and the people on the left will frequently refuse flat out to talk to people they regard as their political enemies.

And then you add to that the fact that the institutions of higher education in particular are 100 percent captured by the left. There are no Hillsdale Colleges! Like, where are the conservative educational establishments? Oh, there's Hillsdale College! Yeah, it's like one. And they're thriving, by the way.

And so, no, it's not—it’s not just—it’s not an equally divided polarization, not in my estimation. And the ideas that threaten us are this pathological combination of postmodernism, which has its virtues by the way, and a default Marxism that's pulled in to fill the philosophical gaps left by the nihilism of postmodernism."

Are you hoping for Trump again in 2024?

"No, no! Trump has many problems. One is he should have never declared that he was illegally defeated after the last election; it's an off-brand claim. Trump is a winner— that's his brand, right? And winners don't have the election stolen from them by losers.

And so I think he made a catastrophic strategic mistake—as well as, and it's also the case that his claims have really failed to be supported by the relevant evidence—they've been tried in many courts. He’s also—he’s got a bullying tendency that I would diagnose, so to speak, as about nine to eleven years old.

He makes self-aggrandizing bombastic claims that, to me, are reminiscent of a juvenile bully, and he's a divisive figure. And so no, I hope the Republicans have enough sense to go with someone who's a more mainstream politician and that they're guided by a vision of what could be instead of a mere reaction to the idiocies of the woke and progressive left."

Yeah, they just ruled out Roe v. Wade.

"What do you think about that?"

"Well, I think the Democrats will attempt to capitalize on that to stave off electoral catastrophe in the fall. I think that we need to have an intelligent conversation in our society, which we're probably not mature enough to do, about abortion in general.

I know that in Hungary, the family-friendly policies that have been implemented there have raised the birth rate and cut the abortion rate in half without the use of compulsion. I think that devolving responsibility for abortion laws to the states—that's actually an idea that I'm positively predisposed to, because I believe in decentralized solutions.

And that will mean the U.S. can experiment with a wide variety of approaches to the issue of abortion. And to me, that is what is necessary in the face of an intractable and intractably polarizing political and moral conundrum."

Can we end with one question, Mr. Peterson? We're here in Iceland. We've had a quite normal social democratic welfare state for years now. You've talked about the power law—that people automatically at the top become richer and more famous and more powerful.

We've tried to tamper that with our government system. Do you think that's a good idea?

"I would say it depends on how it's done, but almost all developed Western countries have experimented with variants of that, and it's very difficult to make the claim that that hasn't been a net good. The balance between legislation and radical free market solutions is a tough one to strike. It's hard for me to think that the provision of old age pensions—universal provision of old age pensions—was an error.

The delimitation of the work week—healthcare is a much more complicated problem, because it's also not a monolithic problem. There's no such thing as healthcare; right? Health is well-being and physical and psychological integrity, let's say—that's a multi-faceted problem, and it shouldn't be conceptualized in that unitary manner. It has to be broken down, and there's undoubtedly a role for the private sector to play in the provision of broad healthcare services and a place for public intervention. Different countries do that in different ways, and we're trying to sort that out. But no one, I don’t think anyone who's credible makes the case that all of that should just come to a halt."

"It's very difficult. The Pareto distribution problem is a very difficult one to solve; you know—the tendency for both power and ability to aggregate in the hands of a small number of people. It's a socially destabilizing force, and it has to be contended with, and we don't know how to contend with it.

Because it's such a powerful force. One way not to contend with it is to blame it on capitalism, because all that means is—that's what the leftists do all the time: 'Inequality is a consequence of capitalism.' It's like, 'No, it's not!' And also, if you think that, you're not taking the problem seriously enough, and you're also attacking the only system that has made poor people rich."

So, I think we will make that be the final words. Thank you so much for being with us, and good luck tonight, and enjoy the rest of your stay in Iceland, Mr. Peterson.

"Thank you! Thank you for the interview and your wonderful country."