Photo via @ParkerMolloy/Twitter, Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)
April 6, 2021, 10:23 am
Jordan Peterson, right-wing podcaster and inspiration to much of the online “man-o-sphere” in which insecure men talk about how mean feminists are to them, seemed to recognize the rhetoric used by Nazi supervillain Red Skull in a recent Marvel comic written by journalist and author Ta-Nehisi Coates.
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He posted multiple breathless tweets showing images from the comic including one of Red Skull’s website, which features a photo of him alongside headlines like “Chaos and Order” and “Ten Rules for Life,” which seems likely to be a parody of Peterson’s book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos.
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Peterson made a name for himself among the right by railing against “identity politics” and “political correctness,” saying that courses like women’s studies should be defunded and that people should avoid the topics of sociology and anthropology because of something about “cultural Marxism.”
The Venn Diagram of Peterson fans and people who engage in fascist rhetoric up to and including blatant Nazism is nearly a circle.
Which is probably why Coates did this:
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“Do I really live in a universe where Ta-Nehisi Coates has written a Captain America comic featuring a parody of my ideas as part of the philosophy of the arch villain Red Skull?” he asked.
Although, it’s not so much a “parody” of Peterson’s ideas as it is just a barely-rephrased copy of exactly the kinds of things that he has literally published in books and articles.
“What has happened to the men of the world is truly one of the great tragedies of our time,” says Red Skull in the comic. “Once, the American man was a conqueror. Now he is but a caretaker.”
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“No more shall women be summoned to fight your battles,” he continues to scenes of women saving Captain America. “I offer you steel for your spine and iron for your gut. I offer you the sword of manhood.”
Peterson has argued that society and/or the political left is trying to “feminize” men, blaming the global resurgence of fascism on efforts to promote gender equality and end toxic masculinity, claiming that the “masculine spirit is under assault.”
Meanwhile, Coates laid out a great summary for why disaffected young men are drawn to the kind of rhetoric spouted by Peterson and his many online clones, speaking through Captain America.
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“He tells them what they’ve always wanted to hear,” says the hero. “That they are secretly great. That the whole world is against them. That if they’re truly men, they’ll fight back. And bingo—that’s their purpose. That’s what they live for. And that’s what they’ll die for.”
Peterson has now pinned his tweet in which he has an existential crisis over the comic and has spent the remainder of the day sulking on Twitter, retweeting a bizarre comic that apparently supports the podcaster by turning him into “Lobsterman,” whose superpower is telling kids to clean their rooms.
It doesn’t seem exactly like flattery, but what do we know?
*First Published: April 6, 2021, 10:23 am
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