If you want to watch a masterclass in how to deal with Leftist interviewers you need go no further than this, Canadian Professor Jordan Peterson’s handling of his Channel Four interviewer, one Cathy Newman.
Petersen is a top-drawer academic, but more importantly a man of iron integrity and piercing common sense about whom we have written before. It was over his refusal to use of ‘non-binary’ gender pronouns zee, hir and per that he became a more of a household name. So what, you might say. But for a professor employed by the University of Toronto, backed up by the Ontario Human Rights Commission, it constitutes discrimination, and is punishable by law. In taking this public position he ran a very real risk of losing his job, having his licence to practise clinical psychology revoked, research funding withheld and being heavily fined.
He has been in the UK over the last week to talk about his new book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. Hence the Channel Four interview in which the idiocy of the smug, emotion-led liberal elite that Newman represents was shown up in all its appalling glory against Peterson’s cold and laser-like analytical precision.
It was a veritable masterclass in answering simply and factually and leaving it there. What comes across is Newman’s complete lack of intellectual curiosity – and inability to handle simple factual truth. The most devastating moment (for her) was when Peterson said that the ‘gender pay gap’ wasn’t about gender when you looked at it using multivariate analysis and Newman just ploughed on regardless, falling back on repeating the same tired mantras, as feminists always do.
Newman of course is a notorious equal pay/social justice zealot. Sadly her performance proves her own pay grade is Less Than Zero, or that she is the living proof after her display of dismal analytical ability that Jess Phillips is actually right – we need more women in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics), or at least more sour-faced female Channel 4 presenters.
As Douglas Murray says in his Spectator article about Peterson’s treatment by Britain’s Leftie broadcasting media ‘If I was Channel 4 I would take it down. If I was Cathy Newman I would sue or seek a super-injunction. I don’t think I have ever witnessed an interview that is more catastrophic for the interviewer.’
