“Maher grilled Shapiro about Trump’s excesses but did not address the problem of the ideological possession of the left.”
Jordan Peterson called out Bill Maher Saturday for allegedly criticizing President Donald Trump while giving liberals a pass.
Referring to the comedian’s interview Friday with conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, Peterson tweeted: “Maher grilled Shapiro about Trump’s excesses but did not address the problem of the ideological possession of the left.”
Maher grilled Shapiro about Trump”s excesses but did not address the problem of the ideological possession of the left: https://t.co/HRvvZvqLoC @BenShapiro @Billmaher @RubinReport @EricRWeinstein @Joerogan pic.twitter.com/iuN5lOUGQf
— Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) June 30, 2018
On “Real Time With Bill Maher,” the host pressed Shapiro on how conservatives such as himself could continue to support Trump when the president seems to be governing in ways that run contrary to traditional Republican positions on deficit spending, Russia, and free trade.
“I mean how do you turn on a dime so quickly in a couple of years?” Maher asked.
Shapiro conceded the points but said he likes other things about Trump.
“I think all of that is idiocy,” Shapiro said. “But again I think that with regard to judges, with regard to taxes, with regard to Middle Eastern policy, particularly Iran and Israel, I’m much more of a fan of President Trump than I certainly would have been of Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. And by the way, I didn’t vote for President Trump in the last election because of my concerns about him.”
Maher later wondered how Shapiro could decry liberal incivility when Trump has threatened to imprison political adversaries, including his Democratic opponent in the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton, former FBI Director Jim Comey, and journalists.
“How about we stop the ‘Lock them up?'” Maher said. “Shouldn’t the civility arguments start there before we care about who gets their entree?”
But Shapiro pushed back, saying, “I needed 600 officers to protect me at Berkeley” — referring to the security required for his talk last year on the famously politically progressive campus.
Maher also said he was confident the Trump campaign had colluded with Russia during the election. Shapiro, on the other hand, pointed out that Trump has been tough on Russia in practice, if not in word, and said the president is “too ignorant to collude.”
Ultimately, Shapiro said, he is waiting to see the evidence of presidential wrongdoing.
Peterson, a Canadian psychologist and a public intellectual, made clear in his tweet that he would have liked Maher to focus more on the sins of the left — which he has accused of being in the grips of “radical post-modern neo-Marxist” ideology that threatens to crush freedom of speech and thought.
Meanwhile, Peterson, who has said he would have voted for Trump if he were a US citizen, has been accused of committing the opposite sin he attributed to Maher: Lashing the left while holding back on Trump.
In an interview with Britain’s The Spectator published Saturday, neuroscientist Sam Harris — who like Peterson is a member of the “Intellectual Dark Web” — criticized Peterson for not doing enough “to make it uncomfortable for the Trump supporters in his fan base.”
And Vox’s Zack Beauchamp in May characterized Peterson’s worries about a “loosely” defined postmodernist threat as overblown, saying, “there is no evidence that 20th-century French thinkers have a dominant influence on any sector of the left in contemporary Western politics, let alone society as a whole. I know of no credible political scientist who believes this.”
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