Sam Harris was just (and is) generally intelligent. The thing is that, as a Globalist, he can't see Trump as anything beyond purely evil, because Trump is resisting what he sees as an innate moral imperative of Globalism.

However, the appeal of the New Atheist movement at the time was that they were actually intelligent, articulate, and making reasonable arguments; compared to the Evangelicals who never made any good cultural arguments at all. There is a reason that Crocoduck, "the banana perfectly fits the hand", "tides go in, tides go out", "Pokemon are demonic", are all memes. The Evangelicals (for about 30 years) made appeals to authority as justification for anything they believed, pushed divine command theory as an ethical framework, and when they were forced to try and explain their own positions rationally they tended to take a bad faith approach. Although people have been saying, "The Evangelicals may have been right" about things, the problem is that: how the hell would anyone have known that? TentElephant is more informed on institutionalized sexual degeneration than the entire Evangelical movement combined. Had any Evangelical known who John Money was, they probably would have made more progress.

Peterson is a tipping point in that he's one of the first pro-Christian intellectuals, making good arguments, I've seen in the entirety of my life. Not only does he know about Cultural Marxism, he also happens to know why lots of Christian traditions work and can explain it. He was brought to a private Christian university to sit in on a panel discussion about religion in America, next to the head of the university as well as their leading academic on theology, and it was like he was talking to teenagers. They don't really know anything about why things are the way they are, why they believe what they do, or what is actually happening from the aggression of Fabian Socialism.

Contrast this with someone like Michael Knowles: who has a deep grasp of Theology, and Luke Avery: who has a deep grasp of the biblical metaphors and meanings. They are basically the only 'Christian Intellectuals' that I can think of without having to refer back to Kant, and the "intellectual" is being stretched to incredulity there. I've personally turned around quite a bit on Glenn Beck, but... the man is not an intellectual powerhouse.