“Communism bad”
“Why?”
200 year old tropes so ancient they were debunked by Marx himself
Of course, you go through the motions of explaining the most basic political concepts that could be grasped by skimming the cliff notes for literally any Marxist works
“Friedrich Engels? Is he like the president of Germany or something?”
It’s like a kindergartener trying to teach you calculus.
I believe he said he read it once in his earlier days.
(Maybe his youth? I feel like it was in his livestream where he responded to a question asking what he's doing to prepare for the debate and he told on himself because he said "well, there's a lot you can do in 24 hours" and proceeded to say that he's going to do a "close re-reading" of the manifesto, which he reported to have read many years prior, but I could be getting confused here.)
Bruh.
You don't read The Communist Manifesto because you're a fraud and a charlatan.
I don't read The Communist Manifesto because it's a rushed pamphlet drafted with the intent to inform the demands of the European masses during the revolutions of 1848 and as such it holds very little value as theory.
We are not the same.
It's clear he didn't particularly understand it either. He took the manifesto as a call to make paradise on Earth. His opening statement was saying that paradise cannot exist on earth, because living as a human means existing within brutal, uncaring nature.
He brought up that the manifesto doesn't mention nature like this, which is true, it's a political manifesto for organizing factory workers. If he had read Capital he'd know Marx defines labor as transformation of natural resources through human ingenuity.
I don't think Peterson ever cared about history or theory as much as vibes. I don't think he even regards facts as important. He likes little anecdotes that signal things with metaphorical truths.
100% agree.
I don't think he actually read the whole Manifesto through tbh and if he did, he was too busy coming up with his own personal objections to each sentence that he was clearly unable to see the forest for the trees.
I'm not saying that he would have come out of the reading as a freshly-minted Marxist but he was really grandiose and slimy about his refuting of the communist manifesto in a way that was obvious he thought he had this list of epic gotchas but it just showed that he didn't go into reading it with the intent of understanding it or refuting it from its own internal logic.
I'd tolerate his approach to the manifesto better if he made asides to how it didn't address this or that issue before proceeding to critique the actual content and arguments of the manifesto itself but to expect that someone would provide an account of human nature in a 30 page pamphlet while expounding upon their entire political philosophy is, frankly, ridiculous (and even moreso when you're expecting Marx of all people to do that.)
Peterson is such a pseud.
I bring this up a lot and I'm sorry if people here have to read it over and over, but I'm always gonna bring it up since it's central to who Peterson is. During that debate Zizek asked Peterson to specifically name any alleged Marxist professors. Peterson had no names, probably because he wanted to say Foucault or Marcuse, guys who've been dead for decades. Zizek offered the name David Harvey, the British scholar who's an expert on Marx's Capital. Peterson didn't recognize the name.
I still can't believe that this wasn't the big "Emperor has no clothes" moment that, by rights, it should have been to the Peterson fanboys.
It was super funny how before the debate Jorp was all
”I've studied communism”, but during the debate he was more like 
”Oh shit oh fuck I haven't done the reading and the teacher's asking me questions”
I think the manifesto is based and filled with bangers tbh
Fair.
I'm happy to take your word for it. I watched that debate with Zizek when it came out and tbh I was a mixture of confused and infuriated. Very happy to accept I missed his exact point. I agree with your other comment below, too: whenever he read it, he didn't understand it.
I'd take it with a healthy dose of skepticism.
I did write "he said" intentionally there because he's also the guy who said he read 200 books on climate change in two years when he was advising some CEO who was on a UN committee on climate change and the only way Peterson has read books on climate change is if their titles are something like "Climate Change: What The Government Doesn't Want You To Know" and "The Great Climate Hoax". But if you're trying to become educated about climate change then you shouldn't be reading books anyway, you need to be reading scientific articles instead. Of course there's no way that you could ever disprove his claim and he'd never appear in front of a camera opposite a person who is an actual climate scientist because he knows that he'd get called out for his towering ignorance on the subject.
Suffice it to say that the guy's full of shit and you have my full support if you choose not to believe what he says.
Lol I saw the start of a breakdown of his bullshit video. It takes clips from multiple interviews, 'speeches', etc. One of the early themes is his climate change work. In different clips he says completely opposite things. An advisor in one. A panelist in another. Etc, etc. He's an unabashed bullshit artist. The real problem is what it means for the modern 'intelligentsia' if he could blend in for so long (not sure how many people in the academy believe him nowadays but I bet there are some; I saw his 12 Rules listed as a course text, for example, in a shocked Twitter screenshot).