Sensible workers take on ‘luciferian elites’: Jordan Peterson on how we ended up with Trump

Jordan Peterson believes the working class is getting its justice – and its revenge – through Donald Trump, as the Canadian’s Alliance for Responsible Citizenship takes the world by storm | WATCH

Donald Trump’s triumph is a victory for the working class against a “Luciferian” elite, according to Jordan Peterson, the popular Canadian author, speaker, podcaster and sage of conservative activism.

“The discontent of the sane and well grounded but inarticulate working class has found its anti-Luciferian expression in Trump’s victory,” Peterson said in London in an interview at the second conference of his Alliance for Responsible Citizenship.

ARC’s first big international conference was held in London in late 2023. It attracted 1400 participants from all over the world. This time there are 4000 mostly paying people there. It’s the pro-Western civilisation version of the World Economic Forum, held each year in Davos.

Peterson believes some recompense for the working class, specifically in the US but more generally across the West, is long overdue: “I think the working class has been sold out in an appalling manner by the progressive elites and their unconscionable, counterproductive, destructive, anti-industrial and anti-human virtue signalling, especially on the net zero front.

“I read this week that the Trump administration has stopped research funding for scientists who prioritised DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) mantras in their grant applications.

“For me, that’s hooray. That (DEI emphasis) was a profound corruption of the scientific enterprise. The subjugation of the scientific enterprise to the niceties of the woke mob – that had to go.”

The sense of a cultural dam-burst arising from the Trump election also owes a great deal to Elon Musk, in Peterson’s view, and the way he reformed Twitter, now X, emphasising free speech: “It was a kind of precursor. It was a very daring and revolutionary move on Musk’s part.

The Australian's Foreigh Editor Greg Sheridan interviews Peterson

“The woke mob made a very big mistake turning Musk into an enemy. I interviewed Musk (for a podcast) and he talked about his son who had fallen afoul of the gender-affirming care butchers, and I could tell by watching Musk, he’s staking his life on this. This is a war to the end and he’s a very formidable person.”

Peterson is pessimistic about the US Democrats: “I would be very happy if the Democrats got their act together, but it’s very unlikely. The Democrats are completely bereft of leadership and have no policy. All the courageous Democrats are in the Trump administration. Even Trump himself, for God’s sake, it’s not like Trump is a classic Republican.

Tony Abbott speaks at the ARC Conference. Picture: Andrew Parsons / Parsons Media

Nigel Farage. Picture: Andrew Parsons / Parsons Media

“The Democrats are trying desperately to cling on to this postmodernist equity idiocy and that’s not going anywhere. That was pathological to the core.”

I have asked Peterson a series of political questions and he was kind enough to give me direct answers. But it would be deeply mistaken to think of Peterson primarily as a political, much less party political, figure. He operates mostly at the deepest level of cultural, and indeed scriptural, analysis.

And this remarkable creation, ARC, straddles at least the cultural and political, and to some extent even the religious, all reflecting Peterson’s kaleidoscopically diverse, yet ultimately integrated, intellectual interests.

He explains that ARC grew out of a tour of eastern Europe he took around 2020: “I kept encountering the same reaction. What I heard was disbelief that the West – meaning North America, Western Europe, Australia and New Zealand – had fallen prey to this set of neo-communist ideas that the east Europeans knew from painful experience were deadly. They all described themselves as voices in the wilderness. I wondered why do they suffer from the delusion, the conviction, that they’re alone?”

Jordan Peterson speaks at the ARC Conference in Lodnon. Picture by Andrew Parsons / Parsons Media

Something like ARC began to form in Peterson’s mind. He discussed it in London with Philippa Stroud, then of the Legatum think tank, with hedge fund manager and philanthropist Paul Marshall, who now owns the Spectator magazine, and John Anderson, former Deputy Prime Minister of Australia. They all not only liked the idea but gave every active support they could. ARC has now held its two major London conferences, and Australian and German sub-conferences.

“What we’re hoping for at ARC is a return with enhanced understanding to the conservative foundation of the free West, and the union of the conservatives with the classic liberals, which is the proper union. I suppose that means the sidelining of the progressive globalists, the false green Utopians.”

Peterson writes at length and with great power about Christian and Jewish scripture. This is not disconnected from his cultural and political concerns, as he explains.

A lot of ARC’s work, he says, is about projecting a different narrative for the West: “The fundamental narrative of the West, the fundamental book of the West, is the Bible. There’s no getting away from that, not without paying a major price.

“The culture war goes all the way to the bottom. It’s not a political war, it’s not just a culture war. It’s a foundational war. The religious is the domain of first principles. There are self-evident truths, that the founders of the Declaration of Independence pointed to. But religious axioms are what makes self-evident truths self-evident.

Jordan Peterson at ARC. Picture: Andrew Parsons / Parsons Media

“When the culture is so fragmented that those presumptions become questionable, then the split goes all the way to the bottom. The question we’re asking ourselves after the death of God, so to speak, is what spirit rules?

“The classic answer to that is that when the unifying deity suffers its demise, it’s always the diversity of pagan hedonism, and the clamour for power, that emerges. Those are the principles that society collapses into when a more transcendent, unifying ethos disintegrates. It’s power and hedonism. Those two dance. It’s not sustainable.”

Though Peterson’s analysis is always sobering, he is also always positive, even optimistic, a quality he draws not least from the positive reaction to ARC.

“The response to ARC has been ridiculously positive. First of all, weirdly enough, we’ve encountered zero opposition and that’s completely incomprehensible. The press by and large has treated us neutrally or positively – who can account for that?

“This conference is three times bigger (than the first). We have enthusiastic participation from political leaders all through Europe, central America, central Asia, Australia and New Zealand.”

And of course, though he left them out of that list, the US. The Speaker of the US House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, beamed into the conference.

Peterson doesn’t know quite where this ARC movement will lead. One of the striking features of the 4000 folks in attendance is how many young people were there. ARC is more than Peterson, but he has certainly been a magic ingredient.