Dr. Jordan Peterson is making the rounds to warn that the political right faces a new need to bar “psychopaths” from insinuating themselves among us and using social media platforms to acquire attention and power.
I agree!
However, Peterson says he is particularly concerned about psychopathic antisemites taking over the right, and on this point he deserves some pushback.
“Antisemite” is a term that has become both more meaningful and almost meaningless in recent years. More meaningful in that there has been a sharp increase in genuine anti-Jewish bigotry on the political right. More meaningless in that political and media elites (including on the political right) now smear as “antisemitic” anyone—including any Jew or other Semite in the Holy Land—who opposes the ongoing deadly actions of the state of Israel against the people of Gaza.
So, my response to Peterson would be that if he wants to protect the political right from being manipulated by “psychopaths” who are seeking “their own gain,” as he has said, then he should put first things first.
Rather than going on a booby-trapped quest of condemning “antisemites,” now is the time to call out the group that has already very successfully insinuated itself on the political right: The radical Zionists who empty the word “antisemitic” of its meaning (therefore making it impossible in the first place to meaningfully oppose Jew hatred), and who use both Jews and the political right for the shallow purpose of paving the way for the military ambitions of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Netanyahu certainly does not deserve the affection and loyalty of America’s right wing. He isn’t merely an ordinary politician in a foreign country—though he is that, too—but a corrupt and unpopular one who seems to be sustaining the war in Gaza as a means to secure his grip on power.
The radical Zionists who have insinuated themselves among us in America, however, present Netanyahu’s goals as fundamentally beyond critique. In fact, unlike the “antisemites” Peterson warns us about, these “psychopaths” have so much influence that you’d be hard-pressed to find a respectable conservative American treating Netanyahu as anything other than a perfect representative not only of the state of Israel, but of all Jews.
But this isn’t just about Netanyahu and Israel. Indeed, these “psychopaths” strike at the root of the Western civilization that conservatives are supposed to stand for.
As I wrote recently elsewhere,
Western Civilization is founded on God’s revelation that every human person is made in His image. And it’s founded on Christ’s insistence on associating Himself most intimately with the most vulnerable among us—the widow, the orphan, and all of those rejected by the powerful and living under urgent threats of violence…
That Gospel truth is the meaning behind all the best articulations of Western Civilization. It’s in the Magna Carta’s words of warning against unjustly arresting and punishing individuals without trial. It’s in the Declaration of Independence’s recognition of “Nature’s God,” before Whom “all men are created equal” with “inalienable rights.” It’s in the United Nations Charter of Human Rights and in the West’s condemnations of Nazi offenses against human dignity at Nuremberg.
Contrast that foundational conservative principle with best-selling author Douglas Murray’s calling Arabs “a people of death” and suggesting they are inherently a noxious threat to the West—including, presumably, their women and children dying in the tens of thousands in Gaza.
Or with mainstream Christian conservative commentator Erick Erickson’s encouraging the Israeli military to “carpet bomb” an entire city in Gaza.
Or with the numerous other expressions of dehumanizing hatred—even more mainstream in the sense of being more pervasive—among smaller but still significant right-wing social media accounts like this one, whose crude and brutal language I dare not quote here.
Of course, Douglas Murray and Erick Erickson do not strike me as actual clinical psychopaths, but their pronouncements do represent a tide of small-minded bigotry that Peterson ignores.
But, thank God, that tide may be turning, in part due to the bluntness of President Donald Trump. Last week, Trump recounted that, during his last talk with the prime minister, he said, “You got to be good to Gaza.”
“Those people are suffering,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One. “There’s a very big need for food and medicine, and we’re taking care of it … We’re pushing [Israel] very hard.”
Given Trump’s incredible influence on conservative discourse, such statements are significant, and hopefully matched by real action.
I’m not here to say Dr. Peterson’s warning about bad actors using conservatives for their own sinister purposes doesn’t make any sense or isn’t true in principle.
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On the contrary, what concerns me about it is just how true it already is—and has been since long before Peterson got it into his head to defend the political right from infiltrators.
In fact, Peterson’s message itself may prove more than anything else just how vulnerable the political right is to the kind of infiltration he’s warning against.
The evidence? Right now, at the high-water mark of conservatives’ moral indifference to the people of Gaza—if not active hatred for them—a great conservative-leaning intellectual like Peterson is drawing the public’s attention away from the plight of the Palestinians and helping to pathologize criticism of the state that is brutalizing them.
