France has probably produced the most reprehensible coterie of public intellectuals that any country has ever managed

From an in with Dr. Jordan Peterson. My transcription.

What happened in the 1960s, the later 1960s, as far as I can tell, this happened mostly in France, which has probably produced the most reprehensible coterie of public intellectuals that any country has ever managed, is that in the late 1960s when all the student activists had decided that the Marxist revolution wasn't going to occur in the Western world, and had also finally realized that apologizing for the Soviet system was just not going to fly anymore. Given the tens of millions of bodies that had stacked up, they performed a philosophical sleight of hand and transformed the class war into identity politics war. That became extraordinarily popular mostly transmitted through people like Jacque Derrida who became an absolute darling of the Yale English department and had his pernicious doctrines spread throughout North America partly as a consequence of his invasion of Yale. What happened with the postmodernists is that they kept on pedaling their murderous breed of political doctrine under a new guise. Resentful people all over the world fell for it.