RE: Jordan Peterson
I've been following him since 2012 on youtube, well before he exploded as a conservative icon and bogeyman for leftists. His psychology lectures are excellent, which is what I used to watch mainly. They are very technical in many places, and tell you a lot of very interesting information about personality and brain function. They are really worth watching- in particular 'Personality and its transformations'. His lectures seldom editorialised on anything political (although I'm sure if you are far enough to the left than the inclusion of a lot of psychological data runs contrary to dogma and so can be viewed that way).
For me his lectures and in particular the 'Self Authoring' course was literally life changing in the most positive possible way. I was very directionless and had spent most of my life in a hyper-liberal bubble surrounded by leftists and anti-religious eastern spiritual types - so that was my norm. Peterson's lectures had a profound influence not just for me but for my whole family.
My entire family gets on very well now - due to all of us 3 brothers and a sister gaining the perspective we have gained from Peterson and putting it into practice. We have far more structure, mutual respect and care in dealing with eachother. We grew up in a high-conflict environment around our parents and his influence has been critical in this changing.
Peterson's advice for raising young children has also been excellent - we have a three year old who is very confident, able to form friendships easily, knows how to behave in public, gets compliments from adults etc - and the comment we get most often is that he is a very happy child - from friends and strangers. So for a ruthless right wing insidious bastard (etc), Peterson's advice has put us in good stead with child rearing so far.
As for why Peterson is so polarizing, when essentially if you were to plot him on a graph he would be pretty much centrist or just right of centre?
I think people's reaction to Peterson is largely down to what they see as the most restrictive and dysfunctional political influence in their life. For me, having been raised in a bubble of leftist values, I was suffering from an incomplete toolset - my life would not work because I was only employing half the tools I needed to make things work. I had been brought up to treat the term 'right wing' as synonymous with 'immoral' (putting it mildly), which is actually a highly restrictive and ignorant mindset but was prevalent. Coming to the centre ground or even learning to understand moderate socially conservative viewpoints was highly taboo and in practice led to an immune reaction from most of the people I knew if I voiced it.
By contrast, people who have grown up in environments where social conservatism is the restrictive force will think that Peterson is more of the same, and they'll see him as someone who is helping the already dominant restrictive forces of society get even more of an upper hand. Unfortunately these people don't realise the breadth of situations people find themselves in.
Usually these people can't differentiate moderate, mainstream social conservatism from extreme right-wing thought. Either they can't, or hyperbole of this kind is their main argument against any dissent to their narrow dogma. People like this actually have very low perspective bandwidth, and they aren't worth listening to regarding Peterson until you've reviewed him yourself.