If Jordan Peterson can turn the tables on Cathy Newman, why not the deputy editor of the New Statesman? One North London media luvvie is much like another.

So I watched Jordan Peterson taking on NPC lefty Helen Lewis, and he actually got to say how frustrating it is to be interviewed by someone with absolute conventional-wisdom opinions. Imagine being on the receiving end of that!

He is right: lefties are hopelessly unable to see any reality outside their lefty bubble.

A lot of people are thinking about the peculiar ideological blindness of the left in our society. As John Derbyshire in his October Diary writes:

We Badwhites understand perfectly well, in fine detail, what the Goodwhites believe…

Goodwhites, however, have no clue what Badwhites believe. Any thinking outside the Narrative is utterly opaque to them. They never engage with it. They have a sort of comic-book caricature of it in their minds -- racists, Nazis, guys with hoods, wife-beaters: supremacy! racial purity! hierarchy! superiority! patriarchy! -- but it’s nothing like reality.

So it is no surprise to discover, as she interviews Jordan Peterson, that Helen Lewis, deputy editor of the New Statesman, has utterly conventional lefty opinions on redistributive taxes, the threat of authoritarian strongmen, climate change, overpopulation, gay parenting, and really has no clue why anyone would think differently.

Finally, Helen Lewis upbraided Peterson for getting photographed with Pepe the Frog. Didn’t he realize that he could be tarred with the same brush as “Nietzsche, the Nazis’ favorite intellectual?”

Really, Honey? Isn’t that a kinda Mean Girls remark? Eeuw, you don’t want to be friends with her; her brother once almost rushed for a fraternity!

Here’s an idea. Let’s anathematize all lefties, and call them all mass murderers, because Marx was Stalin’s favorite intellectual. And Mao’s. And Fidel’s.

We demand to know, Helen Lewis, when you will denounce Marx and all his works because he inspired human monsters to kill something north of 100 million humans in the 20th century, to say nothing of their environmental crimes? I mean, who could take seriously anyone that inspired the horrors of the gulag and the laogai?

Listening to clueless women like Cathy Newman and Helen Lewis reminds you that it wasn’t just the patriarchs in Jane Austen novels that wanted to “form” women’s minds. The modern left wants to “form” women’s minds too and, judging by Cathy and Helen, is doing a pretty good job of it.

And where the “studies” lefty professors fail, the Women’s Gossip Network finishes the job. Women’s gossip, I realize, is about defining, among the women of a village, who has done what to whom, and who has said what to whom. It is also, I realize, about defining the boundary of respectability, of what it means to be a Good Little Girl in in your community: Attended Women’s March, wore vagina hat: good girl. Selfie with Pepe the Frog: eeuw.

The more that women get into journalism, the more that they seem to transform it into a women’s gossip network.

The guy version of this, I suppose, is the anathematization of Peterson in Vox Day’s world, where the male version of solidarity is invoked, and you are either one with the band of brothers, or a vile traitor and confused practitioner of “Jordanetics.”

So women turn everything into Mean Girls, and men tend to turn everything into Sharks vs. Jets.

On the bright side, Jordan Peterson got to make his point against the lefty hegemony: that the meaning of life, the universe, and everything is found at the border between Order and Chaos, and that the indispensable person is found at that border trying to make sense of it, and that it ain’t easy. He is saying that the lefty feminist prattle of a Helen Lewis is boring and suffocating, mere repetition of gossip, and the rightist tough-guy posturing is dull and stupid, the foolish tyranny of tough guys making like power is the purpose of life.

For us, we can do the Peterson thing at a modest level, by accepting the call of responsibility in everyday life, as in Peterson’s 12 Steps, or we can do it at the level of the Christlike Sacrificial Hero, where you benefit mankind in exploration of the knife edge of the world between Order and Chaos, as in Peterson’s Maps of Meaning.

My judgement of Jordan B. Peterson is that he understands very well that his present performance on the border between Order and Chaos is very likely to culminate in Sacrificial Heroism, and that he accepts this possible outcome.

But I think it would be a tragedy if the final result of women like Cathy Newman and Helen Lewis emerging into the public square would be to transform the public square into the Lefty Mean Girls Gossip Network.

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.