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Copyright

Matthias J. Becker

Published On

2024-06-21

Page Range

pp. 47–74

Language

  • English

Print Length

74 pages

2. Jordan Peterson and Conservative Antisemitism Online

The Dethroning of an Intellectual Icon Following His Interview with Netanyahu

Chapter of: Antisemitism in Online Communication: Transdisciplinary Approaches to Hate Speech in the Twenty-First Century(pp. 47–74)
The age of digitalisation is characterised by an explosion of information as well as opinion exchange, but also by uncertainty and disorientation. In view of the polyphony of speakers and multitude of information, many web users tend to orient themselves to a range of new opinion leaders who could not have established their huge visibility prior to the era of the interactive web. Jordan Peterson, a former psychology professor, embodies perfectly the new ‘globalised’ public intellectual surrounded by a bevy of followers.

In December 2022, Peterson interviewed Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The reactions of web users were numerous and―in stark contrast to the bulk of Peterson’s contributions―clearly negative. Peterson’s fascination with political heavyweights or strongmen is nothing new. Here, however, he provided a forum to one of the world’s best-known Jewish figures and the representative of the Jewish state. Peterson and Netanyahu’s conversation seems to have triggered various antisemitic ideas among those with a far-right worldview. However, many of the comments seem to come from the conservative online milieu to which Peterson belongs. The online thread discussing the clip thus forms a symbolic arena for proximity and friction between conservative and alt-right milieus in relation to Jew-hatred―a relationship that is not given enough space in the media and in academic analysis, as the focus is too often on the confrontation between the left and the alt-right and white-supremacy milieus.

This paper qualitatively examines the commenters’ diverse reactions―of disillusionment and reorientation, but also of their devaluation and exclusion of a former idol―identified in the corresponding YouTube comments section and reconstructs the underlying concepts in a pragma-linguistic framework.

Contributors

Matthias J. Becker

(author)
Project Lead of Decoding Antisemitism, Postdoc Researcher at ZfA at Technische Universität Berlin
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2847-4542

Dr Matthias J. Becker is a linguist, with a strong focus on pragmatics, cognitive linguistics, (critical) discourse and media studies, research on prejudice and nationalism, as well as on social media studies. At Freie Universität Berlin, he read linguistics, philosophy and literature, and has worked in several research projects on the use of language in political and media campaigns. His doctoral dissertation, published with Nomos in 2018, analyses the linguistic construction of national pride, antisemitic stereotypes and demonising historical analogies in British and German discourses on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. An English version of the book (entitled Antisemitism in Reader Comments: Analogies for Reckoning with the Past) was published with Palgrave Macmillan in 2021. A consistent link between all his research activities is the question of how implicit hate speech―apparently accepted within various milieus of the political mainstream―is constructed and what conditions its production is subject to. Matthias is the creator and lead of the Decoding Antisemitism research project.