Thanks, Teri. In my experience, the types of SJW Peterson is concerned about are protesting on college campuses. They are very few in number, not very powerful and are often used as stand-ins for all liberalism on popular right wing propaganda outlets such as Fox News Channel.
At the same time, there are lots of protests on college campuses by the same groups but they’re about lowering tuition, organizing student and educator unions and other issues that don’t get as much attention as free speech debates.
I’d also add that Peterson’s concerns about the academy don’t necessarily apply to the outside world. A lot of academics I’ve worked with in my career tend to treat universities as stand-ins for the rest of the culture and political system, but only a very small percentage of us interact w/ universities with any regularity.
Just this week, the Supreme Court allowed Ohio to continue with a program of purging voters from the rolls even though its program is desigend to purge black voters at twice the rate of white voters: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/06/the-supreme-court-is-helping-republicans-kill-a-key-voting-rights-law/
When public figures like Peterson offer criticisms of “identity politics” that fail to deal with real-world cases of policy-level discrimination like this, it’s hard for me to take their political analysis seriously.
At the same time, I do think he brings value to a lot of his audience members who want to get into individual morality and life advice. But to bring people to that conversation by misrepresenting the political work the civil rights movement is doing as “identity politics” is wrong in my view.
Thank you!