5 Minute Teaser - Jordan Peterson Responds to Channel 4 Interview Controversy

Then the memes came and then a day later kind of took a joyless turn. Yeah, yesterday and today, right now. Yeah, well, it's amazing.

Well, so here's the strange thing. Hey, so I kind of played, let's say, knight on white horse. The Guardian yesterday published an astoundingly reprehensible article.

• About your book?
  No, about the Channel 4 interview. No, they've done some nice interviews about my book, so they've been kind of all over the place with me, you know. But the Channel 4 people claim that Kathy has been targeted with threats, you know? A torrent of online abuse by internet trolls; it's like 50,000 trolls. You know, that's a lot of trolls.

You might start thinking maybe they're not all trolls, but in any case, overwhelmed by misogynistic abuse and threats, and that they had called in a security specialist to assess the level of threat. So it was the beginning of the attempt to twist the story around so that the story became: Kathy Newman - poor embattled Channel 4 newscaster was merely trying to do her job even though she might have been a bit provocative, interviewed alt-right hero Dr. Jordan Peterson in an honest manner to expose his agenda, posted the results to YouTube, and was immediately mobbed by his army of Internet trolls.

Right, so she went from - so, my sense is she went from journalist playing a variety of complicated games to target of criticism online to heroine, embattled heroine in the panoply of martyrs to whom similar things have happened in the past.

And what's terrible about it - So, and I inadvertently I would say contributed to that because when the Guardian story came out, I read it and the story purported to be about the threats that she had received.

But really this story, because the story opened with the description of me, and the description was, let's call it far from flattery, you know? It was the same old thing: Dr. Peterson, he's a provocateur. He has an army of trolls.

If anybody ever dares to challenge him, let's say, I know all they're doing is honestly charging; the trolls come out and then they have to fear for their lives, and that was that was the story (that's the narrative now). The threat, that threats were just the prerequisite for the story.

And then, yeah, like a dozen UK news media sources, that the newspapers in particular, have picked this up, some even more critical of me than that, some in a slightly more balanced fashion.

But, you see, when the Guardian story broke, I tweeted something, I said, look, if you're-- I've looked at the tweet too. Are they? YouTube comments and most of them were merely criticism. But if you're threatening her, well, stop, you know, because we had an exchange of words, which is what we're supposed to do.

I think this message to your followers was one of the most liked tweets you ever put out.

• Yeah, but here's the terrible thing about it. You know, what happened was that the fact that I tweeted that was instantly used as validation for the claim that there were threats, and that was just, yeah, that's what happened.

And see, it's weird because when I wrote that, I thought—was part of me that thought that that might happen. There was a little warning bell that went off that said, look, you know, there's no evidence that these threats are credible, and if you respond by asking people to back off, you're also implying that there are people who should back off; that this is real.

And I thought, no, I'm going to do it anyway because she has been targeted. She has been subject to a very large number of very vitriolic comments, and maybe that's enough. And so, you know, it's okay to come out and say that's enough.

But the thing it wasn't okay because as soon as I did it, then the fact that I did it was used as proof that all of these claims were valid. And now that just floored me. Like, I was very distraught, I think is the right word, about that this morning because I didn't see that coming.

Then were there threats against her? Have you seen them?
Define threat. Fresh Suffice. There's no threats that were sufficient to get the police involved.