A smartphone displays a folder of social media applications, including TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, X, Snapchat, and YouTube. Photo: Samuel Boivin via Reuters Connect

On July 10, Braden Peters — known to a Gen-Z audience of many millions as “Clavicular,” the most prominent face of the “looksmaxxing” subculture — announced his first livestream from Tel Aviv. The reply section got very active before the stream even began.

Dan Bilzerian, one of the manosphere’s most-followed figures, wrote: “Good way to destroy your reputation.” The comment drew roughly 26,000 likes, making it the single most-engaged reply of the entire week. It contains no slur and no conspiracy claim. What it asserts is simpler and, for this audience, sufficient: contact with Israel ends careers.

Peters, 21, made international headlines in January as part of the Miami nightclub group singing along to Ye’s “Heil Hitler.” Six months later he spent a week in Israel — streaming from Tel Aviv, visiting the Western Wall, appearing beside an IDF soldier.

The visit split pro-Israel and Jewish discourse into two camps. One argued that his enormous reach extends into a young male milieu that no Jewish organization, no government spokesperson, and no legacy outlet can touch, and that exposure to ordinary Israeli life might soften attitudes there.

The other argued that hosting him legitimized a figure embedded in antisemitic and misogynist online environments, at unacceptable cost. Both camps were arguing from assumptions about how his audience would actually respond. Nobody had data. So my team collected it.

The Data

Over the week of the visit, the Decoding Hate project at NYU’s Center for the Study of Antisemitism gathered every recoverable reply under six of Peters’ own X posts — 1,379 coded units from nearly 1,200 authors, text and images alike.

Each unit was coded against the Decoding Antisemitism Lexicon (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024), a published catalog of 40 historically documented antisemitic predicate-clusters and the phrases that signal them in contemporary discourse, developed over five years of empirical research and applied to more than 300,000 online comments to date.

Across the corpus, 41.5 percent of units carried antisemitic content.

Under the influencer’s arrival announcement, the figure was 55 percent; under his July 11 post celebrating his status in Israel, 61 percent.

Counted by attention, the picture is starker still: of roughly 119,000 likes recorded on coded replies, 88 percent sat on replies containing antisemitic content, and all ten of the most-liked replies in the corpus were antisemitism-coded.

Counter-speech — users pushing back on the hate — amounted to 1.5 percent of the corpus. Antisemitic units outnumbered it 27 to one. Whatever the silent majority of Peters’ audience thought, the discourse it scrolled past rewarded one register overwhelmingly.

But the most revealing finding is not the volume of the antisemitism. It is what the antisemitism was for.

The Disciplinary Sequence

The dominant hostile storyline was not abstract “Jewish control” rhetoric. It was that rhetoric applied to Peters personally, in a fixed sequence. First he was a sellout. Then he was controlled. Then he was controlled by Jews — bought with “shekels,” blackmailed, handled. And finally he was declared a Jew himself: “Stfu jew” (roughly 730 likes), “Kikevicular” (roughly 490), memes editing a kippah onto his head, and — at about 7,900 likes, outdrawing Peters’ own post eight to one — the single word “JEWMAXXING,” the subculture’s signature suffix fused to the reclassification.

A community that built its entire identity on measuring faces converted its own core practice into the oldest physiognomic stereotype in the antisemitic repertoire, mocking his nose job as proof of what he “really” is.

We have seen this sequence before. When Jordan Peterson interviewed Benjamin Netanyahu, his audience ran the identical arc — disappointment, capture, “Juden Peterstein,” expulsion. That the same pattern reappears years later, in a younger and more visual milieu, on a different platform, suggests this is not one fanbase’s tantrum. It is a recurring disciplinary mechanism: antisemitic repertoires deployed to punish a community’s own member for affiliating with Jews, as a public warning to everyone watching.

The punishment for being seen with Jews is to be declared one.

The Woman and the Fake

The mechanism needed a woman, and it found one. When Peters posted a photo beside an Israeli soldier on July 13, Sneako supplied the frame within hours: “You need to know that you were her assignment” — roughly 7,000 likes. In that thread, 30 of 48 misogyny-coded replies were simultaneously antisemitic, most targeting the soldier as a honeypot, an intelligence asset, state property. Notably, the honeypot narrative predates its own evidence: a reply on July 9 already cast Peters as controlled by a Jewish girlfriend, four days before any woman appeared in his trip coverage. The photo did not generate the story; it was slotted into a story already waiting.

Nor did the punishment stay online. Creators who collaborated with Peters during the visit received death threats; a prominent female advocate of engagement drew character-directed attacks that her male counterparts, making the same arguments, did not. And the bitter coda: the only participant in the entire episode to face any institutional sanction was the soldier, disciplined by the IDF — while the influencers who hosted and amplified Peters faced none.

Part of the outrage, meanwhile, responded to events that never happened. A fabricated image of Peters posing with Minister Itamar Ben Gvir — watermarked by a self-labeled parody account — circulated as real, recurring at least six times in the arrival thread and anchoring a measurable cluster of hostile replies, including one condemnation at over 900 likes. No press coverage reports any such meeting. Generative tools manufactured the evidence the narrative needed, and the discourse absorbed it without friction.

What the Reception Tells Us

Two cautions belong here. Reply sections over-represent engaged and hostile voices; they cannot measure silent viewers or private attitude change, and our findings describe one influencer, one event, one platform. And hostility without antisemitism was fully available in these threads — 17 percent of units attacked Peters or the trip with no group-based content at all.

The 41.5 percent who reached for antisemitic material were making a choice, not following the only script on offer.

These findings should matter to readers on both sides of the engagement debate — and most of all to those who favor outreach, because it is their strategy that has to survive this reception environment.

The debate over the visit asked whether engagement could change minds in this milieu. In the most public layer of Peters’ own community — the space every onlooking fan and creator could read — we found almost no evidence of reconsideration. What we found was a ready-made apparatus for punishing the affiliation itself, rewarded with nearly nine of every ten likes in the corpus. Anyone weighing outreach to these audiences needs to reckon with that apparatus, because it disciplines the messenger faster than any message can land.

And Jewish institutions should register what this case demonstrates about antisemitism’s current function: it no longer polices only Jews. It polices everyone’s proximity to them.

Matthias J. Becker, PhD, is AddressHate Research Scholar at NYU’s Center for the Study of Antisemitism. He is the founder and lead of Decoding Antisemitism — now its successor project, Decoding Hate — Research Advisor to AddressHate, and Editor-in-Chief of Digital Hate Review.