Daily Archives: April 9, 2021

Jordan Peterson, the conservative psychology professor and podcast host, has claimed on Twitter that hes inspired the villain Red Skull featured in Ta-Nehisi Coates run of Captain America comics.

In Captain America Volume 9 #28, which was released by Marvel Comics on March 31, Red Skull preaches his Ten Rules for Life as well as Chaos and Order and The Feminist Trap. This appears to reference Petersons self-help book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos released in 2018, and Petersons contention that chaos is represented by the feminine.

Late on Monday, Peterson posted screenshots of the Captain American issue, asking his followers to verify his suspicion that he was the inspiration for Red Skull in its story.

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 tweeted. He currently has the tweet pinned on his profile.

A representative for Marvel Comics did not respond to a request fromVariety to comment.

The main theme of the issue alludes to internet influences who use their platforms to radicalize young men online in order to fuel reactionary fires and their own agendas.

What has happened to the men of the world is truly one of the great tragedies of our time. Once, the American man was a conqueror. Now he is but a caretaker, Skull says in one of his online speeches. No more shall women be summoned to fight your battles. I offer steel for your spine and iron for your gut. I offer you the sword of manhood.

Captain America mentions a young boy disappearing into the internet, emerging with a new theory of the world fed to him by Red Skull what appears to be another reference to followers of Petersons who have taken to his philosophy largely through his YouTube channel.

[Skull] tells them what theyve always longed to hear, Cap says. That they are secretly great. That the whole worlds against them. That if theyre truly men, theyll fight back. And bingo. Thats their purpose. Thats what they live for and thats what theyll die for.

Coates issue eludes to other issues that are currently roiling the US. One page depicts a divided rally, with one sides picket signs reading America Forever! while the others read Equality Now and Stop Hate Now. At the end of the issue, Sharon Carter is tending to Captain Americas wounds, while telling him about how the Power Elite, a Hydra-based group inspired by Red Skull, is trying to attack the idea of America, and references attacks at the US Capitol.

Coates is an influential best-selling writer who came to prominence first with a 2014 reported essay in The Atlantic titled The Case for Reparations, followed by his 2015 book Between the World and Me. Hes also written Black Panther comics for Marvel, and started his current run on Captain America in 2018.

In February, Warner Bros. tapped Coates to write the script for a new Superman film with J.J. Abrams Bad Robot.

Excerpt from:

Jordan Peterson Says He Inspired the Villain in Ta-Nehisi Coates Captain America Comic - Variety

Getty Images/Marvel Comics

Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson has recently taken to Twitter, reacting against several published images from the forthcoming Captain America #28 comic, written by author, essayist, and Atlantic contributor Ta-Nehisi Coates

Peterson tweeted his reactions to the character of Red Skull, the apparent villain of the comic issue, who throughout his Marvel comic run is depicted as a Nazi and war criminal. In Coates latest Captain America issue, Red Skull appears to be using rhetoric similar to Petersons. In one panel, Red Skull is depicted on a laptop screen, as if the viewer were watching a YouTube video (one of Petersons platforms); beside Red Skull are the words Ten Rules for Lifea seeming reference to Peterson's 12 Rules for Life.

Peterson tweeted an image of this panelwhich also includes labels like chaos and order (themes Peterson often discusses, and a possible reference to his own latest book Beyond Order) the feminist trap, and Karl Luegers genius (a reference to an Austrian politician whose anti-Semitism is regarded a precursor to Adolf Hitlers). While these latter quotes dont seem to be direct references to Peterson, their proximity to an explicitly Peterson-inspired title makes the case for some connection. Beside an image of the comic panel, Peterson captioned his tweet: What the hell?

This content is imported from Twitter. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

A series of other panels now circulating on Twitter depict Captain America outlining Red Skulls appealand so, comic readers might infer, Petersons: Its the same for all of them, young men. Weak. Looking for purpose He tells them what theyve always longed to hear. That they are secretly great. That the whole world is against them. That if theyre truly men, theyll fight back.

Peterson responded to these panels by tweeting, 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?

Men's Health

The comparison is likely to be especially irksome to Peterson, whose academic work has, among other things, centered on issues of belief and ideologyparticularly how it leads participants to commit atrocities. Peterson's early work focussed on Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Red Skull represents the former.

Whatever the nature of the allusion, Coates, whose run of Captain America comics has been going since 2018, and will wrap with Captain America #30, isnt likely to see too much of Petersons followers vitriol. He's been off Twitter for years. And off Twitter is probably the smartest place to be.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io

Read the rest here:

The Red Skull and Jordan Peterson Sure Have a Lot in Common in a New 'Captain America' Comic - menshealth.com

In the 25th issue of Ta-Nehisi Coates run as the writer on Captain America, a side story follows the main event where the titular superhero speaks at the funeral of a Korean immigrant lawyer named Sung Jin Jeong. The story of the humble lawyer falls somewhat afoul of stereotypes, leaning rather heavily on the antiquated overqualified immigrant trope and not really using an appropriate ethnicity for that kind of story besides, given that South Korea is a developed democracy with an infamously byzantine legal code.

But for this brief story, Coates nevertheless does a good job staking out his ideal vision of what the United States is and should be. Then, a mere three issues later, we get the surreal visual of Red Skull corrupting the youth with a Jordan Peterson-style media empire.

Such is the great irony of our social media moment, when Peterson reacted with bewilderment on Twitter when a fan informed him of the comic in question. Ta-Nehisi Coates and Jordan Peterson were two of the more important political thought leaders of the teens, but no one would have expected their names to come up simultaneously in this, of all contexts. The shock would be particularly harsh for those who havent been paying attention to them for the last few years. Coates went from meditating on race in The Atlantic to writing superhero comic books. Peterson went from a conscientious objector on the topic of referred pronouns to a self-help guru. So why are they having a spat now?

The answer is more intuitive than you might expect. Both men are still hard at work in the culture war, theyre just doing so from a passive angle now. Coates works in comics because of the abiding belief in liberal circles that pop culture is a direct influence on proper culture, and that social-justice-oriented themes can trickle down to the masses. Peterson has a more direct approach. He observes that people in the United States, and young people in particular, are quite depressed. So he puts out motivational videos and encourages his fans to build up their self-esteem.

His famed 12 steps involve such harmless platitudes as trying to be articulate, making supportive friends, and telling the truth. This aspect of Petersons career is quite unobjectionable on its own. To liberals, the main charge that can be leveled against Peterson is that he uses his genuinely good life advice as a Trojan horse to infect the masses with objectionable right-wing beliefs.

So its easy to see how Coates ended up concluding that turning Red Skull into a Peterson-esque figure was socially relevant, absurd though that idea may seem out of context. But even in the context of his Captain America series, which has visited this theme previously in less bombastic ways, the delivery has fallen flat. With Red Skull previously in the background, Selena Gallio had emerged as the previous high-profile politically themed villain. A nigh-immortal psychic with vampiric abilities, her master plan involved building a cult styled on the old America and farming the gullible humans who joined up for their life energy.

The people who populate this outland village are an obvious template for economic anxiety. They bemoan their lack of opportunities and are grateful for having the chance to just do hard work in a larger community. All of the various normal people who have been turned against their own interests by the villains in Coates Captain America run are like this. The closest Coates gets to convincingly representing them as bad people is via obvious toxic masculinity. They resent the fact that they cant protect their women, or that women have to do the fighting for them, and can even be seen attempting to beat women up.

Coates likely wrote this ambiguity intentionally, to try and avoid overly demonizing his subjects. The problem is, as the absurd Red Skull Peterson climax demonstrates, this has created a world where encouraging people to try and take their life in their own hands and show initiative is evil. Captain America and his superhero co-stars are both incapable of and apparently completely disinterested in trying to push a competing vision.

In all fairness, given that Captain America came out as a Nazi prior to Coates run, their incompetence in this regard is understandable. This too can work at cross purposes. One economically anxious character cites watching helplessly as HYDRA marched through the streets to show his frustrations with the apparent impotence of modern American culture. Its clear that whatever supervillain people end up rallying behind, the chief motivation is less the charisma of the supervillain and more the general despair of everyday life.

Despite framing the ideas these people have for self-improvement as based on displaced nostalgia, Coates himself engages in far greater whitewashing of the past crimes of the United States than the antagonists of his own comic book. Coates introduces the Daughters of Liberty, a group of women from the eighteen century inspired by Enlightenment ideals to fight for freedom. This also includes freedom for slaves, with Harriet Tubman appearing as a member.

Coates should know better than to suggest that liberal thought of the 18th century was conducive to anti-slavery, given how the practice flourished under the watchful eyes of its biggest proponents. Harriet Tubmans own sense of purpose widely understood to derive from her religious conviction, with the Underground Railroad relying heavily on people with more loyalty to God than the United States government.

While Coates is comfortable calling certain idealogues wrong and even expressing sympathy for them, hes frustratingly vague as to what is right. At one moment Captain America shows sympathy with disaffected young Americans, comparing himself with a young man who was unable to join his elder brothers in the NYPD. There is obvious irony in citing the police as a bedrock for solidarity, given the scrutiny they are under both in the real world as well as in the comic universe.

The story of Sung Jin Jeong sticks out chiefly because its the closest Coates Captain America comes to endorsing a certain kind of behavior. But even then, the story is about Sung Jin Jeong rather than Captain America, with the title character coming off as a bit of an afterthought even in the main story. When Red Skull accuses Captain America of standing for an amorphous dream of nothing, the critique hits far harder than it should. Captain America is, literally and figuratively, a fetishization of patriotic World War II era propaganda. Hes just not relevant to our daily lives.

Yet rather incredibly, Peterson is. Hes the whole reason were talking about the Coates run on Captain America at all. Considering that Coates just got a deal to write a new Superman movie and Peterson is still recovering from severe pneumonia, maybe Coates is right to see Peterson as such an ideological threat to his vision of America. Unluckily for Coates, the real Peterson isnt a Nazi, and cant be discredited by just applying red makeup to make him look more evil.

Go here to read the rest:

Jordan Peterson is the Red Skull: Secret Wars - Book and Film Globe

Home Comics Jordan Peterson's Red Skull Vs Captain America and Agatha Harkness

In last week's Captain America #28 by Ta-Nehisi Coates and Leonard Kirk,the long-standing Nazi villain of the comic, The Red Skull, went viral. The run has seen The Red Skull return to the fore of the title, but using new tactics to spread fear and hatred for the modern age, which he can then take advantage of in his usual might-makes-white supremacist ways. And with Captain America forced to take on a mob of average, everyday folk led astray. It's not the first time we have seen this kind of story in Captain America, but its parallel with modern social media issues has given the story a new twist.

But one of the parallels Captain America #28 seems to be drawing is with the right-wing psychologist, pundit, author, lecturer and commentator Jordan Peterson.

The Red Skull lines such as "Ten Rules For Life", "Chaos And Order" and "The Feminist Trap" parallel Jordan Peterson's 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos from in 2018 which among other things state that "chaos is represented by the feminine." One might wonder if Jordan Peterson would be reading Cerebus more than Captain America.

There is also plenty to compare between Red Skull's speech and Jordan Peterson's views of masculinity. There's also a line regarding the Gospel message that "the meek will inherit the Earth" with Peterson station that "what it means is this: 'Those who have swords, and know how to use them, but keep them sheathed, shall inherit the world'."

Anyway, Jordan Peterson has his own swords of manhood to worry about. And has been posting to Twitter after the similarities were pointed out to him, saying "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?'"

Oh look, there's another one that he missed, "Barbarians at the gate" was the name of one of Peterson's lectures about protestors who broke a window at a university.

It may also be relevant that Jordan Peterson has a thing about witches. When the New York Times interviewed him, they reported;

Mr. Peterson illustrates his arguments with copious references to ancient myths bringing up stories of witches, biblical allegories and ancient traditions. I ask why these old stories should guide us today. "It makes sense that a witch lives in a swamp. Yeah," he says. "Why?" It's a hard one.

"Right. That's right. You don't know. It's because those things hang together at a very deep level. Right. Yeah. And it makes sense that an old king lives in a desiccated tower."

But witches don't exist, and they don't live in swamps, I say. "Yeah, they do. They do exist. They just don't exist the way you think they exist. They certainly exist. You may say well dragons don't exist. It's, like, yes they do the category predator and the category dragon are the same category. It absolutely exists. It's a superordinate category. It exists absolutely more than anything else. In fact, it really exists. What exists is not obvious. You say, 'Well, there's no such thing as witches.' Yeah, I know what you mean, but that isn't what you think when you go see a movie about them. You can't help but fall into these categories. There's no escape from them."

Well, in Captain America #28, Steve Rogers is assisted in his struggle with an old friend who has become known to many more people of late, courtesy of the TV show WandaVision. Regular Marvel Universe character, Agatha Harkness, Princess Of Darkness, who has her own coven of witches.

And finds that the Red Skull is using and abusing an old spell of her own to help women stand up and stand out at a certain time in history now being used to enrage and encourage men?

I don't think Jordan Peterson got to that part of the comic book yet. But he has now gone beyond parody and is tweeting his own inspirational quotes on images of the Red Skull from the Marvel movies. Who knows what will happen if he actually picks up a copy of the comic in question and reads it? Two more issues until this run ends. Captain America #29 will be out on the 19th of May.

CAPTAIN AMERICA #28MARVEL COMICSJAN210663(W) Ta-Nehisi Coates (A) Leonard Kirk (CA) Alex RossSKULL FRACTURE! Rated T+In Shops: Mar 31, 2021 SRP: $3.99

CAPTAIN AMERICA #29MARVEL COMICSFEB210626(W) Ta-Nehisi Coates (A) Leonard Kirk (CA) Alex RossAs ALL DIE YOUNG races to its climax, Cap faces overwhelming odds as he battles to vanquish the Red Skull and the Power Elite! Rated T+In Shops: May 19, 2021 SRP: $3.99

CAPTAIN AMERICA #30MARVEL COMICSAPR210914(W) Ta-Nehisi Coates (A) Leonard Kirk (CA) Alex RossTHE FINAL ISSUE OF TA-NEHISI COATES' LANDMARK RUN!"ALL DIE YOUNG" ends here! Ta-Nehisi Coates concludes his run on CAPTAIN AMERICA with an all-out fight to the finish with the Red Skull and the Power Elite!32 PGS./Rated T+In Shops: Jun 23, 2021 SRP: $3.99

View original post here:

Jordan Peterson's Red Skull Vs Captain America and Agatha Harkness - Bleeding Cool News

Who among us hasnt awoken one day to learn weve potentially inspired the lunatic ramblings of a monstrous comic book villain? Such was Tuesday for Jordan Peterson, the controversial professor, psychologist, podcaster, and conservative firebrand, who discovered his beliefs seemed to have been parroted by no less than Captain America baddie Red Skull, in a new comic penned by acclaimed writer Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Peterson has made a name for himself by attacking political correctness and identity politics, in media appearances and in self-help books like 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, plus its sequel Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life. In the former, he referred to chaos as the eternal feminine, and labeled women choosy maters (unlike female chimps, their closest animal counterparts). He is very popular among lonely men.

So imagine Petersons surprise when someone pointed out some of the things Red Skull, one of Caps most iconic adversaries, was saying in Coates latest issue. Cap talks about a young boy he knew disappearing into the internet, only to return with a new theory of the world one he learned by watching Red Skull videos on YouTube.

What has happened to the men of the world is truly one of the great tragedies of our time, Skull rants. Once, the American man was a conqueror. Now he is but a caretaker. He goes on: No more shall women be summoned to fight your battles. I offer steel for your spine and iron for your gut. I offer you the sword of manhood.

Cap, at least, sees right through it. [Skull] tells them what theyve always longed to hear, Cap says. That they are secretly great. That the whole worlds against them. That if theyre truly men, theyll fight back. And bingo. Thats their purpose. Thats what they live for and thats what theyll die for.

Neither Marvel nor Coates the former Atlantic correspondent and author of the beloved book Between the World and Me, who has long moonlighted as a comics writer have yet publicly commented on whether or not Peterson served as the basis for the Marvel villain, last seen onscreen in a brief appearance in Avengers: Endgame and played by Hugo Weaving in 2011s Captain America: The First Avenger. But Peterson seemed convinced, spending much of the day afterwards tweeting and re-tweeting about it.

Others pointed out that maybe its not great if you recognize your tenets and beliefs in a larger-than-life villain.

Many agreed that this is really funny.

Others praised Coates for (possibly!) trolling Peterson in such a fashion.

Others put actual Peterson quotes over top Red Skull images to see if they gibed.

But it turns out Coates isnt the first comics writer to lampoon Jordan Peterson.

Others speculated whether or not Petersons own backstory sound similar to the one for another comic book baddie: DCs Scarecrow.

And some imagined a future in which every comic book villain is a thinly veiled takedown of far right pundits.

View post:

Jordan Peterson Pissed He May Have Inspired Red Skull In New Comic - UPROXX