ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates how three masters of political Newspeak—Marine Le Pen, Tucker Carlson, and Jordan Peterson—have laid the ground for normalizing discrimination against racial, ethnic, and religious minorities. All three figures justify their arguments by exploiting the difficulties that all liberal-democratic states encounter in seeking a balance between two potentially contradictory objectives: the commitment to minimize government infringement upon individual freedom and the need to overcome existing social inequalities among their citizens. Carlson appeals to the American mythology of individual advancement to campaign against diversity programs, while portraying the country’s white, Christian majority population as the victim of leftist radicalism. Le Pen draws upon the distinctively French idea that freedom can only be realized through an exclusive identification with the nation to advocate exclusionary policies against religious and ethnic minorities. While Peterson is not always characterized as a far-right thinker, his defense of absolute freedom from government interference enjoys widespread popularity among extremist groups. Upon close inspection, the implications of Peterson’s arguments about the role of natural human hierarchies in maintaining social order could lead to even greater inequality than those of Carlson and Le Pen.
