Category Archives: Jordan Peterson

Many are optimistic about what the Arizona Cardinals can do in 2020. However, no one appears to be more publicly bullish about the team than cornerback Patrick Peterson.

He already recently declared that this roster of players is the best team, at least on paper, he has been on in his almost decade in the league.

After four postseason-less seasons and only eight wins combined in the last two years, he is putting no limits on what this team can achieve.

The sky is the limit for this football team, he said in a video conference with the media this past week. I truly believe we can go as far as we want.

Both in a previous interview he gave on a podcast and in this meeting with the media, he emphasized how it is on the players to perform and that they must have a common vision, trust each other and commit to the goal to be able to be as good as they can be, but he isnt shying away from giving lofty expectations for the potential of the team.

It started with the offseason, he said.

The offseason has been great for us. The draft has been great for us, he said. We really hit all areas in this offseason to give not only the fans something exciting to look forward to but also putting us in the best opportunity to win. I definitely think this is a championship-caliber team from top to bottom.

The trade to acquire receiver DeAndre Hopkins got Peterson excited. General manager Steve Keim started with a bang.

The acquisition of DeAndre, that was huge for us, Peterson said. To add a top-two receiver to your roster, that just doesnt happen. That just doesnt fall in your lap. For that trade to be pulled off, I thought (it) was a great sign and a great start to the offseason.

So what makes this team so potentially special?

He described both the defense and the offense.

He began with the defensive backfield, where he plays.

The youth we have in the back end, I believe that speaks for itself, he said. We have young talented players that love the game that can cover sideline to sideline, that can be the enforcer. I believe that is very important for a football team.

Peterson himself returns for a full season after missing six games to suspension. Cornerback Robert Alford comes back after missing the season with a broken leg, which is going to be huge, Peterson said.

At safety, they have Budda Baker and Jalen Thompson. He called Baker the enforcer and a Tasmanian Devil. He raved about how Thompson played late in the season when he saw Thompsons confidence go through the roof.

He then moved to the defensive front seven, noting the presence of linebacker Jordan Hicks, the addition of rookie linebacker Isaiah Simmons and the pass rushing of Chandler Jones.

With the signing of Jordan Phillips, the return of Jonathan Bullard and the selection in the draft of Leki Fotu and Rashard Lawrence, youve got pass rush, youve got D-line, youve got rotation now.

Then, on offense, he spoke of quarterback Kyler Murray.

I believe its going to be a huge year for him, he said. We all know he hasnt even scratched the surface yet.

With running backs Kenyan Drake and Chase Edmonds, Murray has a great backfield to help him out.

Then, with the addition of Hopkins to the receiver room with Larry Fitzgerald and Christian Kirk, the Cardinals have three receivers that you pretty much cant double.

Kylers going to be like a kid in a candy store, Peterson added. Hes going to be able to pick whatever candy he wants. Youve got the opportunity to throw touchdowns to red-zone Fitz, take shots with DeAndre, anddownfield shots with Christian as well.

When you look back at the teams that Ive been a part of, thats everything we had, he said, thinking back to the seasons from 2013-2015 when the Cardinals won 10 games or more a year. But I believe the only thing different in this group is were a little bit faster and we got younger and having that youth in this day in age is big for us.

It isnt a prediction for what will happen, but it is a declaration of what is possible.

If we all come together, focus on our one goal, we can take definitely take it the distance, he said.Im very optimistic about where we can be at the end of the year, but right now were just a good team on paper.

It gives Cardinals fans a reason to get excited.

We have everything that you need, and if youre trying to build a championship-caliber football team, we have the players, he said. This is that type of roster.

Listen to the latest from Cards Wires Jess Root on his podcast, Rise Up, See Red. Subscribe on Apple podcasts or Stitcher Radio.

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Patrick Peterson sees 'championship-caliber team from top to bottom' in Cardinals - Cards Wire

In April 1936, three years before his death, WB Yeats received a letter from the writer and activist Ethel Mannin. The 70-year-old Yeats was a Nobel prize-winning poet of immense stature and influence, not to mention Mannins former lover, and she asked him to join a campaign to free a German pacifist incarcerated by the Nazis. Yeats responded instead with a reading recommendation: If you have my poems by you, look up a poem called The Second Coming, he wrote. It was written some sixteen or seventeen years ago & foretold what is happening. I have written of the same thing again & again since. This will seem little to you with your strong practical sense for it takes fifty years for a poets weapons to influence the issue.

Yeats was justified in taking the long view. Written in 1919 and published in 1920, The Second Coming has become perhaps the most plundered poem in the English language. At 164 words, it is short and memorable enough to be famous in toto but it has also been disassembled into its constituent parts by books, albums, movies, TV shows, comic books, computer games, political speeches and newspaper editorials. While many poems in Yeatss corpus have contributed indelible lines to the storehouse of the cultural imagination (no country for old men; the foul rag and bone shop of the heart), The Second Coming consists of almost nothing but such lines. Someone reading it for the first time in 2020 might resemble the apocryphal theatregoer who complained that Hamlet was nothing but a bunch of quotations strung together. Whether or not it is Yeatss greatest poem, it is by far his most useful. As Auden wrote in In Memory of WB Yeats (1939), The words of a dead man / Are modified in the guts of the living.

As the world is wrenched out of joint by the coronavirus pandemic, many people are turning to poetry for wisdom and consolation, but The Second Coming fulfils a different role, as it has done in crisis after crisis, from the Vietnam war to 9/11 to the election of Donald Trump: an opportunity to confront chaos and dread, rather than to escape it. Fintan OToole has proposed the Yeats Test: The more quotable Yeats seems to commentators and politicians, the worse things are.

Turning and turning in the widening gyreThe falcon cannot hear the falconer;Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhereThe ceremony of innocence is drowned;The best lack all conviction, while the worstAre full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;Surely the Second Coming is at hand.The Second Coming! Hardly are those words outWhen a vast image out of Spiritus MundiTroubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desertA shape with lion body and the head of a man,A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,Is moving its slow thighs, while all about itReel shadows of the indignant desert birds.The darkness drops again; but now I knowThat twenty centuries of stony sleepWere vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

The first stanza is a series of punchy declarations about a crisis of authority, almost as if Yeats were an op-ed writer in full thunder. The oracular second stanza asks why this is happening and imagines what might follow the phase of anarchy: the second coming will be a reversal of the first.

Yeats began The Second Coming during the tense, eventful month of January 1919. The first world war was barely over and the Russian Revolution, which dismayed him, still unfolding, while another war was brewing on his doorstep. On 21 January, the revolutionary Irish parliament met in Dublin to declare independence while, in a quarry in Tipperary, members of the IRA killed two officers of the Royal Irish Constabulary. The birth of Yeatss daughter, Anne, in February was also freighted with danger. During her pregnancy, his young wife Georgie Hyde-Lees had been stricken by the Spanish flu that was burning through Europe. Events conspired to put Yeats in an apocalyptic frame of mind.

He found the metaphors to express it via hundreds of automatic writing sessions, during which Georgie convinced her husband that she was channelling the wisdom of Controls and Instructors from the spirit realm. From these sessions, Yeats constructed an elaborate, world-explaining System, which he eventually laid out in bewildering detail in A Vision (1925). Crucial to The Second Coming was the symbol of the gyre (a cone or spiral) and Yeatss conviction that history moved in 2,000-year cycles. The age of Christ (twenty centuries of stony sleep) was coming to an end and a new era antithetical to progress and reason would begin with the birth of the rough beast in Bethlehem.

Early drafts of the poem illustrate Yeatss dedication to universalising his message, as he deletes specific references to the French Revolution and the first world war and replaces terrestrial images of judges and tyrants with figures from dreams and myths. This productive vagueness, says David Dwan, an associate professor of English at Oxford University, is what makes the poem ever-relevant. Evident, too, in the drafts is Yeatss painstaking refinement of each line. All things have begun to break and fall apart is distilled into Things fall apart; The centre has lost becomes The centre cannot hold. The beast that has blandly set out for Bethlehem slouches instead. In the final version, every phrase has vigour and weight. The poem is built to last.

The Second Coming was published in both The Nation and The Dial in November 1920 and then in Yeatss collection Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921). Yet it did not attain what Dwan calls its problematic ubiquity until some time after the second world war. By 1963, the aphoristic couplet about the best and the worst was enough of a cliche to irritate the critic Raymond Williams. The lines are regularly used as rhetorical tactics in the defence of anybodys sanity against anybody elses enthusiasm, he complained.

One reason for the poems booming popularity was its supporting role in two influential masterpieces. Chinua Achebes Things Fall Apart (1958) enshrined it in the vocabulary of African independence. By 1971, the Guardian observed, the title had become an African catchphrase. Joan Didions essay collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) had a similar effect in the US at a time of stomach-churning flux. Didion opened her book with the poem because its lines had reverberated in my inner ear as if they were surgically implanted there the only images against which much of what I was seeing and hearing and thinking seemed to make any pattern.

After Achebe and Didion, lines from the poem popped up with growing frequency in coverage of China, India, Africa, Indonesia, Northern Ireland and Britain. There was apparently no geopolitical drama to which it could not be applied. In 2007, after the Brookings Institute called its report on Iraq Things Fall Apart, the New York Times claimed: The Second Coming is fast becoming the official poem of the Iraq war. You could find similar claims being made regarding the financial crisis, the Arab spring and, now, the age of rightwing populism. In August 2016, as Trump slouched towards Washington, the Wall Street Journal declared: Terror, Brexit and US Election Have Made 2016 the Year of Yeats, after the research company Factiva found that phrases from the poem had already notched up more appearances in the press than in any other year in the previous three decades. Since then, the poem has been invoked by Jordan Peterson and Slavoj iek, ransacked for anti-Trump song titles by Moby and Sleater-Kinney, recited in the season finale of Alex Garlands Devs, and quoted six times in parliament.

The post-2016 turn to Yeats is no surprise, because the image of the centre not holding has long made the poem a touchstone for anxious centrists. Shortly before running for president in 1968, Robert F Kennedy warned: Indeed, we seem to fulfil the vision of Yeats. In 1979, Labour grandee Roy Jenkins quoted it at the climax of his celebrated Dimbleby lecture about the radical centre, a speech that paved the way for the launch of the SDP.

Yeats himself was not exactly SDP material. With his taste for autocracy, contempt for the masses and fascination with fascism (at least in its first decade), he would have been surprised to find his poem deployed as a spur for the defence of liberal democracy. As late as 1934, he privately admitted in reference to Irish politics: I find myself constantly urging the despotic rule of the educated classes as the only end to our troubles. The following year, he recalled that when he was a young contrarian in the age of Victorian optimism, everybody talked about progress, and rebellion against my elders took the form of aversion to that myth. I took satisfaction in certain public disasters, felt a sort of ecstasy at the contemplation of ruin.

Enough of that youthful appetite for destruction survives in The Second Coming for readers to be divided over whether Yeats fears the rough beast or welcomes it. But surely the two emotions are entangled. Just as dystopian authors get a kick out of dramatising their worst fears, great apocalyptic art has a dreadful vitality, its pulse quickening in proximity to catastrophe. The dynamic ambivalence of The Second Coming, mingling horror with excitement, explains its embrace by popular culture. Offering the reader mayhem, terror, suspense and a mysterious nemesis, it is a kind of disaster movie for modern civilisation. A lot of money has been made from inspiring ecstasy at the contemplation of ruin.

In pop music, artists as diverse as the Roots, Zomby and Cristina have released records called Things Fall Apart. On television, shows including The West Wing, Battlestar Galactica and Babylon Five have riffed on The Second Coming. In the final season of The Sopranos, reading the poem leads an anguished AJ Soprano to attempt suicide, prompting his mother to ask: What kind of poem is that to teach college students?!

So many allusions in mainstream entertainment cannot be intended solely for the amusement of their writers. When Gordon Gekko quipped, So the falcons heard the falconer, huh?, in the film Wall Street (1987), it must have been assumed that more than a few viewers would clock the reference. In Stephen Kings colossal bestseller The Stand (1978), in which a weaponised superflu wipes out most of humanity, one character says: The beast is on its way. Its on its way, and its a good deal rougher than that fellow Yeets [sic] ever could have imagined. Things are falling apart. Some knowledge is also required to appreciate the parodic final line of Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchetts Good Omens (1990), in which the Anti-Christ is seen slouching hopefully towards Tadfield.

It would be unwise to claim that The Second Coming is more relevant than ever because that has been said so many times before. If it feels especially potent now, perhaps it is because we have become painfully accustomed to the idea that progress is fragile and it is all too easy to fall back. In an age of shocking reversals, Yeatss theory of historical cycles day & night, night & day for ever, as he once put it rings true. The only consolation the poem offers is the knowledge that, for one reason or another, every generation has felt the same apocalyptic shudder that Yeats did 100 years ago. Thats why it is a poem for 1919 and 1939 and 1968 and 1979 and 2001 and 2016 and today and tomorrow. Things fall apart, over and over again, yet the beast never quite reaches Bethlehem.

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'Things fall apart': the apocalyptic appeal of WB Yeats's The Second Coming - The Guardian

Myth and Mayhem: A Leftist Critique of Jordan Petersonby Ben Burgis, Conrad Hamilton, Matthew McManus and Marion Trejo(Zer0 Books, 14.99)

JORDAN PETERSON is the Canadian so-called intellectual guru of the alt-right, whose 12 Rules for Life, a self-help primer with a conservative subtext, has sold over three million copies.

In this response to his significant influence, four leftist US intellectuals provide an overview of Petersons work, an analysis of his strictures on the left and, in a final section, discuss Peterson on feminism and reason.

In the book's foreword, Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek gets to the gravamen of the overall case against Peterson: He is most critical [about] postmodern neo-Marxists. The issue is that nobody would describe themselves thus post-modernism and Marxism are incompatible.

Yet it is typical Peterson. He creates a caricature enemy embodying all that he dislikes as a threat to the Western Judaeo-Christian legacy and then attacks that straw man with the same lack of intellectual rigour with which he created the imaginary enemy, one he created to slake the hatreds of his paying audience rather than shed enlightenment.

Attacking a caricatured position characterises his work on the left, Marx in particular, and the book makes it clear that he knows little about Marxism.

His misconceptions are dealt with effectively point by point and his ignorance is understandable given his admission that of all Marxs works he has only read the Communist Manifesto and that four decades ago. Yet he still feels able to offer criticism and demand that he be taken seriously.

Marion Trejo, in her contribution on Peterson and feminism, contends that it is bordering on absurd to equate demands for equality before the law, respect, the right to live free from violence and exploitation and the right to be addressed by ones preferred pronoun with a tyrannical, almost totalitarian, desire to remake man and woman.

His criticism of those longing to restructure the human spirit in the very image of the feminists preconceptions alludes to his hostility to using pronouns preferred by transgender people, the issue that propelled him to global fame.

It encapsulates Petersons schtick of taking a feature of something he hates, extrapolating that feature to absurdity, and then attacking the outcome of that speculation rather than that which people have actually said they believe.

An informative book, Myth and Mayhem is nevertheless a largely abstruse exerciseaimed at a left-leaning audience familiar with philosophical discourse, and Im not convinced Id give it to someone I wanted to dissuade from following Peterson. An objectionable charlatan he may be but he gets his point over well and engages with his following on an emotional and intellectual level.

This take on Peterson begs the question of how we break out of addressing each other and connecting with those outside the tent. To quote Fyodor Dostoyevsky, one of Petersons favourite writers: It takes something more than intelligence to act intelligently.

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BOOKS Preaching to the converted? - Morning Star Online

By: Nick Piastowski May 28, 2020

Jordan Spieth greets fans during last year's Charles Schwab Challenge.

Getty Images

A revised Texas state order will allow fans to attend outdoor professional sports events during the coronavirus pandemic, including the PGA Tours first tournament after a three-month hiatus, the Charles Schwab Challenge in Fort Worth.

The Tour said right now it is sticking to its plan to not allow fans.

Last Friday, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott issued a revised proclamation allowing spectators at outdoor events up to 25 percent of the venues capacity, though it was not publicly announced, according to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. The revision came four days after Abbott announced pro sports may resume in the state, albeit without fans.

The medical team advising Abbott on reopening Texas unanimously approved allowing fans, an Abbott spokesman told the Star-Telegram on Thursday.

It was brought up again in another call with the doctors, and the medical team said that they could move forward with 25 percent capacity, John Wittman told the Star-Telegram.

The Tour wont at the moment.

A Tour spokesman told the Star-Telegram that our focus right now is playing the Charles Schwab Challenge, from June 11-14 at Colonial Country Club in Fort Worth, without fans. Brad Townsend, a reporter for the Dallas Morning News, tweeted Thursday afternoon that the tournament director, Michael Tothe, said the proclamation wont affect the tournament. No changes. No fans. Too late to change, Townsend tweeted Tothe as saying.

In announcing its revised schedule in April after ending play after the first round of the Players Championship in mid-March, the Tour said it would play its first four tournaments without fans. Thursday also revealed it might be longer.

News of Texas allowing fans comes on the same day that the Tour announced that the first tournament to allow spectators, the John Deere Classic in Silvis, Ill., would not be played this year due to local- and state-related challenges related to gathering restrictions. Illinois reopening rules would allow for gatherings of only up to 50 people by the time the tournament would be played in mid-July.

The Tour said it would replace the John Deere Classic with a new tournament.

Because of the ongoing health and safety concerns related to the coronavirus pandemic, the difficult decision was made to cancel the 2020 John Deere Classic, John Deere Classic tournament director Clair Peterson said on a release on the Tours website. While we considered several alternatives for the Classic, this was the choice that made the most sense for our guests, the players and the Quad City community at large.

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PGA Tour: Colonial right now wont have fans even though Texas says it... - Golf.com

It doesn't take much to tick off Michael Jordan.

As we saw repeatedly in "The Last Dance," His Airness could hold a grudge against anyone he'd even create fictitious slights by opposing players and use that bitterness to fuel his competitive drive.

MORE: The greatest Michael Jordan game you definitely don't remember

It turns out that drive goes back to well before his days as a professional. As a senior in high school, Jordan had caught the attention of big schools all over the country, with the most interest coming from Atlantic Coast Conference programs.

Everyone knows that Jordan chose to play for Hall of Fame coach Dean Smith at North Carolina, where he helped lead the Tar Heels to the 1982 national championship as a freshman by knocking down the go-aheadshot from the left wing with 18 seconds remaining in regulation. But what if he had chosen differently?

As it turns out, Jordan had interest in another ACC school: Maryland.

The Terrapins, also coached by a Hall of Famer in Lefty Driesell, were national contenders at the time as well. They'd finished first in the 1979-80ACC regular season and were runner-up to UNC in the 1981 ACC Tournament, losing a one-point thriller in the final.

'LAST DANCE': We wanted to see more aboutthese seven topics

Maryland was also interested in recruiting Jordan, though not as much as the young shooting guard might have liked. According to Buzz Peterson, Jordan's roommate at North Carolina, Driesell dangled his last scholarship spot in front of three recruits: Jordan, Petersonand Jeff Adkins.

"(Driesell) says, I've got one scholarship left, and the first one who takes it gets it,'"Peterson told Washington City Paper.

That apparentlydidn't sit right with Jordan (shocker, right?). To pile on, Peterson and Adkins were namedParade MagazineAll-Americans in 1981while Jordan was left off. Adkins ended up taking that scholarship offer from Driesell, and Jordan and Peterson went to UNC.

As if that wasn't enough motivation for Jordan, he got a little more incentive to hate the Terps at the 1981 McDonald's All-AmericanGame. Jordan put together a 30-point performance on 13-of-19 shooting from the field and4-of-4 shooting from the free throw line to go with six steals and four assists. He also made the game-winning free throws with 11 seconds remaining to help the East All-Stars beat the West96-95.

But the co-MVP honors went to Maryland commit Adrian Branch (24 points for the East) and Aubrey Sherrod (19 points for the West), who went on to play for Wichita State.

With all that in mind, it's pretty easy to figure out which team was on Jordan's mind when he looked at UNC's schedule and saw the Terrapins twice every year.

"He was interested in Maryland," Peterson said. "Maryland was the one that he would talk about."

Jordan used that anger as fuel, posting a 5-1 record against the Terrapins in his three years of college.

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The one ACC team Michael Jordan wanted to beat most while at North Carolina - Sporting News

At dawn last Tuesday morning, the police took a man named Andrs from his home in northeastern Hungary. His alleged crime? Writing a Facebook post that called the countrys prime minister, Viktor Orbn, a dictator.

Andrs has a point. After winning Hungarys 2010 election, the prime minister systematically dismantled the countrys democracy undermining the basic fairness of elections, packing the courts with cronies, and taking control of more than 90 percent of the countrys media outlets. He has openly described his form of government as illiberal democracy, half of which is accurate.

Since the coronavirus, Orbns authoritarian tendencies have only grown more pronounced. His allies in parliament passed a new law giving him the power to rule by decree and creating a new crime, spreading a falsehood, punishable by up to five years in prison. The Hungarian government recently seized public funding that opposing political parties depend on; through an ally, they took financial control of one of the few remaining anti-Orbn media outlets. This month, the pro-democracy group Freedom House officially announced that it no longer considered Hungary a democracy.

Andrs was detained for hours for daring to criticize this authoritarian drift. The 64-year-old was ultimately released, but the polices official statement on the arrest noted that a malicious or ill-considered share on the internet could constitute a crime. Andrs, for one, got the message.

I told [the cops] their task had achieved its result and would probably shut me up, he told the news site 444.

Andrss arrest is an unusually naked display of what Hungary has become a cautionary tale for what a certain kind of right-wing populist will do when given unchecked political power. Yet among a certain segment of American conservatives, Orbn is not viewed as a warning.

Hes viewed as a role model.

Orbns fans in the West include notable writers at major conservative and right-leaning publications like National Review, the American Conservative, and the New York Post. Christopher Caldwell, a journalist widely respected on the right, wrote a lengthy feature praising the strongman as a leader blessed with almost every political gift.

Patrick Deneen, perhaps the most prominent conservative political theorist in America, traveled to Budapest to meet Orbn in his office, describing the Hungarian government as a model for American conservatives. Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychologist and right-wing cultural icon, also made a pilgrimage to the prime ministers office.

Chris DeMuth, the former head of the American Enterprise Institute, interviewed Orbn onstage at a conference, praising the prime minister in opening remarks as not only a political but an intellectual leader. The event was organized by Yoram Hazony, an Israeli intellectual widely influential on the American right and another vocal Orbn fan.

The Hungarian government has actively cultivated support from such international conservatives. John OSullivan, an Anglo-American contributor to National Review, is currently based at the Danube Institute a think tank in Budapest that OSullivan admits receives funding from the Hungarian government.

Pro-Orbn Westerners tend to come from one of two overlapping camps in modern conservatism: religiously minded social conservatives (Deneen, for example) and conservative nationalists (Caldwell, Demuth).

Religious conservatives find Orbns social policies to be a breath of fresh air. Orbn has given significant state support to Hungarys churches, officially labeling his government a Christian democracy. He provided generous subsidies to families in an effort to get Hungarian women to stay at home and have more babies. He launched a legal assault on progressive social ideals, prohibiting the teaching of gender studies in Hungarian universities and banning transgender people from legally identifying as anything other than their biological sex at birth.

Conservative nationalists focus on the Hungarian approach to immigration and the European Union. During the 2015 migrant crisis, Orbn was the most prominent opponent of German Chancellor Angela Merkels open borders approach; he built a wall on Hungarys southern border with Serbia to keep refugees from entering. He has repeatedly denounced the influence the EU has on its member states, describing one of his governing aims as preserving Hungarys national character in the face of a globalist onslaught led by Brussels and philanthropist George Soros.

For Western conservatives of a religious and/or nationalist bent, Orbn is the leader they wish Donald Trump could be smart, politically savvy, and genuinely devoted to their ideals. Hungary is, for them, the equivalent of what Nordic countries are for the American left: proof of concept that their ideas could make the United States a better place.

Yet while the Nordic countries are among the worlds freest democracies, Hungary has fallen into a form of autocracy. This presents a problem for Hungarys Western apostles, as they do not see themselves as advocates of American authoritarianism. Their encomia to Orbn tend to either overlook his authoritarian tendencies or deny them altogether, claiming that biased Western reporters and NGOs are unfairly demonizing Budapest for its cultural and nationalist beliefs.

Hungarys leadership ... is more democratic than most of the countries that lecture Budapest about democracy, Catholic conservative Sohrab Ahmari writes in the New York Post. Hungarys leaders have had it with Western liberal condescension and tutelage.

In reality, its not the Orbn regime thats being persecuted: Its ordinary Hungarian citizens like Andrs. The Western defenders of Orbn are so preoccupied by the culture wars over gender and immigration that theyre overlooking who, exactly, theyve gotten in bed with.

Rod Dreher, a senior editor at the American Conservative, is one of a handful of influential Western writers courted by the Hungarian government. Hes met with Orbn and even had plans to take up a fellowship in Budapest before the coronavirus scrambled everyones lives.

While Dreher has a number of views that liberals find either kooky or reprehensible, hes a talented writer whos hugely influential on the religious and nationalist right. When I asked Dreher for the strongest possible version of the conservative case for Orbn, he sent me a series of lengthy and reflective notes on the subject.

I want to be clear that I dont want to be understood as approving of everything Orbn does, he told me. My approval of Orbn is general, not specific, in the same way that there are people who dont agree with everything Trump does, but who generally endorse him.

This general endorsement is rooted in a sense that the Hungarian leader challenges the liberal elite in a way few others do. In Drehers analysis, the dominant mode of thinking in the West is secular and liberal a political style that suffocates traditional religious observance and crushes specific national identities in favor of a homogenizing, cosmopolitan ideal.

He [Orbn] knew that in 2015, to allow all the Middle Eastern immigrants to settle in Hungary would have been surrendering a Hungarian future for the Hungarian people...and all the traditions and cultural memories they carry with them, Dreher told me. Broadly speaking, the ideology of globalism presumes that those traditions and those memories are obstacles to creating an ideal world. That they are problems to be solved rather than a heritage to be cherished.

This sense of persecution at the hands of secular globalist elites is at the center of the mindset held by Dreher and much of the modern intellectual right. The contemporary fusion of religious and nationalist ideas has created a unified field theory of global cultural politics, defined by a sense that cosmopolitan liberal forces are threatening the very survival of traditional Christian communities. This line of thinking animates many prominent Trump supporters and allies who are Christian conservatives, including Attorney General Bill Barr.

For people like Dreher, who has written that my politics are driven entirely by fear [of] the woke left, Orbn is Trumps more admirable twin. The American president is, as Dreher once argued, a small, ugly, godless and graceless man though one hed rather have in office than a progressive Democrat. The Hungarian leader, by contrast, is in his view both a true believer and a much more effective head of state.

What I see in Orbn is one of the few major politicians in the West who seems to understand the importance of Christianity, and the importance of culture, and who is willing to defend these things against a very rich and powerful international establishment, he tells me. I find myself saying of Orbn what I hear conservatives say when they explain why they instinctively love Trump: because he fights. The thing about Orbn is that unlike Trump, he fights, and he wins, and his victories are substantive.

What I find fascinating about Drehers take which largely typifies the pro-Orbn arguments among both religious conservatives and conservative nationalists is that the issue of democracy plays a secondary role in the conversation.

Dreher doesnt admire Orbns more authoritarian tendencies; indeed, he admits that the man has made mistakes, including in Andrss case. I have no doubt that Viktor Orban is not the philosopher-king of my Christian conservative dreams, he tells me.

But whatever his concerns about threats to basic democratic principles like freedom of the press and fair elections, they dont play a primary role in his thinking. His evaluation of Orbn centers culture war issues like immigration and religion in public life, an ideologically driven view that obscures the damning democratic deficit in Hungary.

In our exchange, Dreher compared his admiration for Orbn to the way Hungarian conservatives hes met admired Trump. When he told his Hungarian acquaintances that he liked what Trump stood for in theory, but had serious issues with the man himself and the way he governs, they were incredulous: Whats not to like about someone whos so willing to stick it to the globalist liberal elites?

They read Trump through Hungarian ideological categories, not American reality and it showed.

Maybe Im seeing Orbn in the same way my Hungarian interlocutors see Trump. ... If I lived in Hungary, perhaps I would find a lot to dislike in his everyday governance, Dreher told me. But he and other European politicians like him are speaking to needs, desires, and beliefs about religion, tradition, and national identity, that the center-right politicians have ignored.

Yet when it comes to modern Hungary, the authoritarian devil is truly in the everyday details.

Orbns effort to cultivate Western intellectuals funding their work, inviting them to meet with him as honored guests in Budapest, speaking at their glitzy conferences is part of a much more ambitious ideological campaign. He describes himself as the avatar of a new political model spreading across the West, which he terms illiberal democracy or Christian democracy.

Advocates of illiberal democracy, like Trump and European far-right parties, aim to protect and deepen the specificity of each European countrys religious and ethnic makeup Hungary for the Hungarians, France for the French, and Germany for the Germans. Orbn frames this goal in precisely the culture war terms people like Dreher find so appealing.

Liberal democracy is in favor of multiculturalism, while Christian democracy gives priority to Christian culture, he said in a 2018 speech. Liberal democracy is pro-immigration, while Christian democracy is anti-immigration.

This language is at once incendiary and misleading. The rejection of liberalism infuriates mainstream European and Western intellectuals, thus further convincing the right that Orbn is the enemy of their primary enemy. But by framing his struggle as a conflict between two subspecies of democracy between liberal and Christian democracy Orbn obscures the fact that his regime is not any kind of democracy at all.

This insistence on falsely referring to his authoritarian regime as a democracy is vital to both its domestic and international project.

Orbn and much of his inner circle are lawyers by training; they have used this expertise to set up a political system that looks very much like a democracy, with elections and a theoretically free press, but isnt one. This gives intellectually sympathetic Westerners some room for self-delusion. They can examine Hungary, a country whose cultural politics they admire, and see a place that looks on the surface like a functioning democracy.

When such observers travel to Budapest and see what looks like a democracy in action, it becomes easier to dismiss concerns about authoritarian drift from journalists, pro-democracy NGOs, and academic experts as mere cultural prejudice: the liberal elite smearing a right-leaning elected leader as an authoritarian because they dont like his cultural politics. Orbn isnt an authoritarian, in this view, but the avatar of what the silent majority of Americans and Europeans really want.

A staple of these arguments is to make the point that Orbns Fidesz party has won three consecutive elections.

One of the strange things about modern political rhetoric is that Viktor Orbn should so often be described as a threat to democracy, although his power had been won in free elections, Caldwell, the eminent conservative Europe reporter, writes in the Claremont Review of Books.

But after coming to power in 2010, Orbn rewrote Hungarys constitution and electoral rules to make it nigh impossible for the opposition to win power through elections. Tactics including extreme gerrymandering, rewriting campaign finance rules to give Fidesz a major leg up, appointing cronies to the countrys constitutional court and election bureaucracy, and seizing control of nearly all media outlets have combined to render elections functionally non-competitive.

The mechanisms of control here are so subtle (who outside of Hungary cares about staffing choices at its electoral administration?) that its easy for an intellectually sympathetic observer to dismiss them as overblown. In Caldwells Claremont piece, for example, he challenges concerns about press freedom by pointing to Lajos Simicska a media magnate and former Orbn right-hand man who turned on him in 2015 and campaigned against him in the 2018 election.

When Orbns friend Simicska broke with him, he used his newspaper Magyar Nemzet to attack Orbn in the most vulgar terms, comparing him to an ejaculation, Caldwell writes. Orbns powerful mandate, his two-thirds majority, gave him power to amend the countrys constitution at will. This was not the same thing as authoritarianism there arent a lot of reporters in Beijing likening Xi Jinping to an ejaculation.

There arent that many left in Hungary, either. After 2015, Orbn used his unfettered powers to demolish Simicskas business empire, cutting off government contracts not only for his old friends media holdings but also for his construction and advertising firms. Simicskas businesses shrank and his personal fortune declined; the 2018 electioneering was a last-ditch effort to challenge a system that he himself described as a dictatorship.

After Orbns unfairly won 2018 victory, Simicska told allies that it is clear that they [Fidesz] cannot be defeated through democratic elections. He shut down Magyar Nemzet; a government mouthpiece currently publishes under its name. Simicska eventually sold his entire media empire to a Fidesz ally, including the popular television station Hr TV which, after the sale, openly proclaimed it would adopting a pro-government line.

Today, Simicska lives in an isolated village in western Hungary. His only remaining business interest is an agricultural firm owned by his wife.

This is obviously not a story about democratic resilience in Hungary: Its an instructive tale in the precise and subtle ways Orbn uses political patronage and the powers of the state to maintain political control. The Hungarian government is a species of authoritarianism just a less coercive and more elusive version of its Chinese cousin.

Clearly, Hungary is not a democracy. But understanding why requires a nuanced understanding of the line between democracy and autocracy, Lucan Ahmad Way and Steven Levitsky, two leading academic experts on democracy, write in the Washington Post.

This subtlety is what allows his conservative fan club in the West to operate with a clean conscience. Its also what makes it so disturbing.

There are examples throughout history of people on both left and right blinding themselves to the faults of their ideological allies. The great British playwright George Bernard Shaw saw Josef Stalin as a shining example of Shaws own egalitarian values. Friedrich von Hayek, arguably the defining libertarian economist, defended Augusto Pinochets murderous dictatorship in Chile on grounds that the dictator was friendly to the free market.

Orbns crimes, of course, pale in comparison to Stalins or Pinochets. If such great thinkers in history can trick themselves into forgiving much more egregious assaults on human rights and democracy, its understandable that modern conservatives might fall prey to the same tendency to see the best in ideologically simpatico authoritarians.

But the fact that this tendency is understandable doesnt mean its excusable or without its own set of dangers.

In the United States, the Republican Party has shown a disturbing willingness to engage in Fidesz-like tactics to undermine the fairness of the political process. The two parties evolved independently, for their own domestic reasons, but seem to have converged on a similar willingness to undermine the fairness of elections behind the scenes.

Extreme gerrymandering, voter ID laws, purging nonvoters from the voting rolls, seizing power from duly elected Democratic governors, packing courts with partisan judges, creating a media propaganda network that its partisans consume to the exclusion of other sources all Republican approaches that, with some nouns changed, could easily describe Fideszs techniques for hollowing out from democracy from within.

In this respect, Hungary really is a model for America. Its not a blueprint anyone is consciously aping, but proof that a ruthless party with less-than-majority support in the public can take durable control of political institutions while still successfully maintaining a democratic veneer.

Conservative intellectuals bear a special obligation to call attention to this dangerous process. Its always easier for writers and intellectuals to criticize the opposing side precisely because its less effectual: Your targets already dont pay attention to you, and your audience already agrees with your critique. When your team is crossing lines, criticizing it is much more likely to ruffle feathers but also more likely to change minds.

The Hungary situation has been a trial in this regard, a way of assessing conservative intellectuals ability to perform this vital form of self-policing.

I find Orbans attack on trans rights and treatment of migrants reprehensible, but I dont expect those on the broader right to agree with me. I do, however, believe they ought to have a baseline commitment to democratic norms: a sense that disagreement itself is not illegitimate, and that governments that use their powers to crush their opponents can never be fundamentally admirable.

Yet thats not what has happened. Much of the conservative leadership cannot break out of their sense of victimhood; the world is a struggle between righteous conservatives and oppressive secular progressives. It does not compute, to them, that a traditionalist regime might actually be the one mistreating its opponents and attacking democracy; they come up with excuses for whatever Orbn is doing, offering misleading half-truths that at times literally echo government propaganda.

If these thinkers continue to insist that Hungary is just another democracy despite copious evidence to the contrary how can we expect them to call out the same, more embryonic process of authoritarianization happening at home? If American conservatives wont turn on a foreign countrys leadership after it crosses the line, what reason would we have to believe that theyd be capable of doing the same thing when the stakes for them are higher and the enemies more deeply hated?

The admiration for Orbn has convinced me that, no matter how far down the Fidesz path the GOP goes, many conservative intellectuals will use the same culture war uber alles logic to justify its trampling over American democracy.

Hungary is a test for these American thinkers. And they flunked it.

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Meat, salt, and water. A diet more associated with yellow-teethed pirates than athletes. But one that is allegedly putting modern men in the best shape they have ever been in. Behold, The Carnivore Diet.

While humans are widely regarded as omnivores, personalities like Joe Rogan have experimented with completely eliminating everything but meat to much (anecdotal) success.

On that note: since icons like Rogan and Canadian psychologist (and self-help guru) Jordan Peterson have spruiked the controversial regime, more and more people seem to be giving it a try.

Enter: another loyal meat-eating member, rugby union star and former Wallaby, Quade Cooper, who recently made headlines for speaking out about the benefits of radically changing what he puts on his plate.

Even though some nutritionists suggest The Carnivore Diet is micronutrient-suicide, athlete Quade Cooper has joined the extreme no-carbers, telling The Daily Telegraph that it has had a hugely positive effect.

Im no expert in this field, this is my science, its what works for me, Quade said.

Ive been on the carnivore diet for eight months, before that I wasnt a full vegan but I was trying to eat healthy like that, trying to stay low on my meat and eat more veggies, no dairy, he added.

Now Ive combined this diet with pre-hab, looking after my body before I get on the field, before I leave the house, that has been a game-changer.

While in the past regimes like the Keto diet were fringe, low carb dieting and its (arguably) illogical extension, The Carnivore Diet has reached the mainstream arena.

According to Healthline, The Carnivore Diet is claimed: to aid weight loss, mood issues, and blood sugar regulation, among other health issues. Judging by Quades physique, it also helps keep you shredded.

If you plan on following Quade Coopers strict daily menu, here it is:

Before you sink your teeth into a protein party, however, wed recommend you read the following breakdown of The Carnivore Diet, along with its pros and cons.

For some, the diet follows a strict guideline of beef, salt, and water, while others consume a variety of meats like chicken or lamb and may include fish as an alternative to the red meat recipe.

The Carnivore Diet completely excludes all other foods, including fruits, vegetables, grains, nuts, and seeds.

While some suggest the diet to be a fibreless, scurvy inducing regime whose only benefit comes via placebo, others reckon its an energy-boosting weight loss program that can cure arthritis, anxiety, and autoimmune diseases.

Healthline states that The Carnivore Diet stems from the controversial belief that human ancestral populations ate mostly meat and fish and that high-carb diets are to blame for todays high rates of chronic disease.

Shawn Baker, the author of The Carnivore Diet and former American orthopedic doctor, cites testimonials from those undertaking the diet as proof that it has the capacity to treat mental health issues like anxiety and depression, and physical conditions like obesity and diabetes.

In terms of verified science in the form of peer-reviewed studies and the like Healthline claims no research backs The Carnivore Diets professed benefits. Quade Cooper might have something to say about that?

Until more people try it and more broad-scale studies are conducted into different body types, lifestyles, etc, it will remain an area of dispute.

Saturated fat and cholesterol levels will likely increase if you are a recipient of the diet (for the knock-on effects of that, click here). Along with a noticeable energy slump, you may be prone to explosive diarrhea (see: here).

If you do choose to join this regime, it is worth noting that the quality of your meat will drastically change the results that come from The Carnivore Diet. So the better your meat, the better the results.

However, the diet is extremely restrictive and likely unhealthy in the long term. Plus, no research backs its purported benefits, Healthline said.

This is pretty straight forward: meat. This includes but is not limited to beef, lamb, chicken, and pork. Seafood: anything from salmon to oysters to crab will do the trick. Other animal products like eggs, bone marrow, and bone broth also fit into the diet.

In small amounts, butter, and cheese also satisfies the criteria. And yes, you can have water.

There is no question that meat is a big part of many peoples lives. Whether we eat it or not, we see it everywhere we go. To be fair, we are pieces of meat. But why should you join The Carnivore Diet?

Many other high (and low) profile individuals report positive findings (once they got over the hellacious diarrhea). However, as Healthlinepoints out, youre still going out on a limb trying this diet as no long term wide-scale scientific studies have been conducted into it yet.

Nutrition is very much individual dependant though, so experimenting, with the help and guidance of a qualified nutrition, could potentially help you.

Want to learn more? Check out the following.

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Quade Cooper's Carnivore Diet Could Be Your Ticket To Becoming A Shredded Beast But At What Cost? - DMARGE

Arizona Cardinals cornerback Patrick Peterson enters his 10th season in the NFL. He has been part of some terrible Cardinals teams and has been on some of the very best. He is very impressed with what the team has done in the offseason and goes as far to say he hasnt been on a more talented team in his career.

This is probably the best football teams I hav been a part of on paper, he said on the Hyperice Lab podcast. Weve got young guys in the secondary, pass rushers and speed.

He mentioned adding linebacker Isaiah Simmons, the season linebacker Jordan Hicks had, the addition of defensive lineman Jordan Phillips and defensive lineman Rashard Lawrence.

What weve been able to add to this team this year, what the front office has been able to accomplish this offseason due to not being able to see guys, not being able to be around, its been second to none, he said.

He believes the Cardinals have the talent to bring home a championship. It will take individual work and good player leadership.

Its not just going to happen by putting a bunch of pieces together, he explained. It going to happen by guys believing in the one goal, trusting in the guy that hes doing whatever he needs to do behind closed doors to make sure that hes prepared to put his best efforts forward and believe hes going to get the job done when his number is called.

He considers himself a leader on the team and mentioned other leaders like Chander Jones, Larry Fitzgerald and even Kyler Murray. The leaders will have to step up to keep the team on track.

Its going to come down to us to manage the locker room, manage the egos and make sure everybody is on the same page and understand that we have to commit to one another, believe in one another and trust one another, he said. If we do those three times, we can be in Tampa ready to face whoever and hopefully to bring the first Lombardi Trophy home to Arizona.

The recipe is there. There is continuity in the staff and much of the roster. Where they added new players who could start, they are clear upgrades. If they come together quickly and stay relatively healthy, the Cardinals very well could be a team to surprise many.

Listen to the latest from Cards Wires Jess Root on his podcast, Rise Up, See Red. Subscribe on Apple podcasts or Stitcher Radio.

Ep. 267

Ep. 266

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Patrick Peterson says 2020 Cardinals are, on paper, best team he has been on - Cards Wire

Three years ago, an esteemed Canadian magazine published a fine essay entitled What Happens When Authors Are Afraid to Stand Alone?, in which author Jason Guriel noted that the idea of the writer as an individualistic outsider has acquired a layer of dust. We used to be OK with literary types asserting independent, fortified egos. Poets and novelists were almost expected to be aloof, even anti-social. But today, were too savvy to indulge such a romantic myth. The aloof rebel is nothing more than an affectation.

Anyone who has tried to produce art, or even write a half-decent essay, will recognize the almost tautological truth of Guriels argument. It is absolutely correct that there are plenty of people who write important tracts dedicated to the interests of this or that community. Those tracts are laws, press releases, pamphlets and tweets. If youre trying to write something fresh and original while also bending the knee to this or that community, on the other hand, youre certain to fail at the former, and likely the latter as well.

Long before it was co-opted by the likes of Ayn Rand, this truth was anchored within the foundations of the hell-raising Jacobin left. Jean-Jacques Rousseau himself famously announced his scandalous La Nouvelle Hlose by warning that this book is not made to circulate in society and is suitable for very few readers. As Nicole Fermon commented, Rousseau despised the society of Paris, which he judged to be almost completely vitiated by never-ending demands of self-interest or amour propre. And in adapted form, his bold individualistic spirit came to infuse every countercultural movement tilting at establishment conventions, from beat poetry to postmodern literary subcultures.

But now that the central fixation of salon society is an insistence on salon societys own irredeemable bigotry, Rousseaus countercultural postures have turned in on themselves like an ouroboros. And so the highest calling in literature and art now is imagined to be a retelling of the same stencil-set messages about privilege and victimhood, dogmas that have come to be enforced by a salon establishment that still masquerades as a Rousseauvian insurgency. Which is why What Happens When Authors Are Afraid to Stand Alone? attracted so much controversy, by suggesting that people should simply write what they want. In a rebuttal published in the same magazine, English professor Paul Barrett argued that Guriels putative lone genius is but the unknowing heir to an invisible community of privilege, since the history of Canadian literature is the forgery of a white Canadian definition of literary excellence. By contrast, non-white writers simply dont have the luxury of believing that there is a voice outside of community; community participation and esthetic excellence are not merely related they are politically and culturally inextricable.

Now the central fixation of salon society is an insistence on salon societys own irredeemable bigotry

Ive met Guriel, and can attest that hes almost as white as me. And based on his university webpage photo, Paul Barrett seems to have us both beat. And so I dont really expect many Indigenous and black writers and artists to be particularly interested in this lily-white forge-o-rama three-way. But for what its worth, Id say that Barrett might have things backwards: as the recent furor surrounding Cree artist Kent Monkman attests, the strictures imposed by community can, in some instances, be even more stifling when theyre applied to minority artists.

As some of my regular readers know, I often like having a bash at the government-subsidized amateurs who populate the field of Canadian arts and letters. (Its not their fault: When the government pays for something, you often get too much of it.) But Kent Monkman is very, very much not in that category. He produces big, colourful epics that dramatically mash up the visual idioms of Judeo-Christian historical tradition with Indigenous characters and narratives. He often inserts an alter ego he names Miss Chief Eagle Testickle to (as he puts it) reverse the colonial gaze to challenge received notions of history and Indigenous peoples. This all sounds rather pretentious, I realize, but art either works or it doesnt. And Monkmans works well enough that he can charge $175,000 a pop, which is approximately $175,000 more than your average art-school grad. Whats more, he is a living, breathing advertisement for the value of diversity in art by which I dont mean diversity of bloodline, which is meaningless, but diversity of perspective. No white person could have produced his masterpieces any more than Mordecai Richler could have written The Handmaids Tale.

No white person could have produced his masterpieces any more than Mordecai Richler could have written The Handmaid's Tale

Great art often is produced by outsiders as, either by choice or necessity, they are the ones who can stand back from a societys accepted conventions, and who assign themselves the most moral latitude in defining or satirizing them. This not only explains how My People took over Hollywood, but also why Rosedale hedge-fund managers are climbing over each other to plunk down the cost of an Audi R8 so that dinner-party guests can enjoy the image of if you will forgive my lapse into sophisticated gallerist parlance Justin Trudeau on all fours after taking it hard and bloody.

What I am describing here is Monkmans new painting Hanky Panky, an image of which, I am hoping, accompanies this column. (For reasons described below, certain other media outlets are treating it like those 2005-era Muhammad cartoons that were originally published in Jyllands-Posten. But I give my own National Post editors marginally more credit.) The thing is classic Monkman: violent, shocking, subversive and brutally original. It also fulfills that trite but true definition of art as that which makes you think. And much will be thunk by those who gaze upon dozens of Indigenous women laughing hysterically as sallow white patriarchs from out of Canadas past look on at the MeToo-ing of a none-too-pleased-looking Justin Trudeau.

Over time, we have become numb to the endless calls for solemnity and contrition over the legacy of Residential Schools, MMIWG, and the rest of the horrors that whites have visited upon Indigenous people. Its all become predictable and performatively morose, which is why every new commission or inquiry has to keep ramping up the genocide rhetoric to keep our attention. It takes a true artist to find new ways to shock the conscience, to elevate our focus from the tragedy of each brutalized life to the dark comedy of a confused Canadian nation that remains caught between proud old fables of Macdonald and Laurier and lacerating self-loathing. Like every country on Earth, Canada is a bolted-together gag-ball of hypocrisy and myth. And the women in the picture are absolutely right to laugh at us insofar as we are metaphorically represented by the humiliated PM and the passed-out victim in red serge. (Oh right, forgot to mention: An RCMP dude also gets the MeToo treatment.)

But of course, the first rule of social justice is Thats Not Funny. And on Canadian Twitter, fury predictably erupted. Not among progressive white Canadians alarmed at seeing their PM sexually humiliated on canvas. Rather, the hue and cry was raised in the rarified cancel-culture circles presided over by the likes of Indigenous author Alicia Elliott, the unofficial church lady of Canadian arts and letters. Before retiring in a state of claimed emotional exhaustion, Elliott declared on Twitter last weekend that Monkman took Indigenous womens laughter, which is one of the most healing sounds in the world, into a weapon he could utilize to titillate and shock white folks. I dont care if he claims the Trudeau lookalike was consenting.

She then went on, in all-caps, like some CanLit version of Donald Trump, HE USED A MMIWG2S SYMBOL THAT IS ABOUT GIVING WOMEN A VOICE AS A BUTT PLUG, THEN DISMISSED INDIGENOUS WOMEN AND 2SQ FOLKS WHO COMPLAINED. AKA SILENCED THEM. AND DOESNT UNDERSTAND THE IRONY. (Yeah, this is definitely someone we want deciding what art gets produced.)

Like every country on Earth, Canada is a bolted-together gag-ball of hypocrisy and myth

In my ideal world, Monkman would have dashed off a new painting, indicating to Elliott exactly where she could stick her complaints. But Monkman is in a tough place, as he is not only a successful artist but also a much-admired member of the Indigenous community, a community that, as he is constantly told, he must listen to and support. And so he walks a fine line.

The Globe & Mail headlined its Thursday coverage, Provocateur artist Kent Monkman apologizes for painting depicting sex assault. But thats actually not true. In a statement posted to Facebook on May 18, he did say he deeply regret(s) any harm that was caused by the work, and acknowledge(s) that the elements I had included to indicate consent are not prominent enough. But he isnt destroying or renouncing the work. I know this for a fact because I inquired about buying it, figuring that the controversy surrounding the piece might lower its price and provide me with a singular opportunity to get a real Monkman at a big discount, this being the way of My People. But this hope proved to be very much misguided. So the Hang in There! poster with the cat on the tree branch wont be coming down anytime soon.

Perhaps the surest sign that Monkman sits at the absolute pinnacle of Canadian artistic excellence is that he is now being treated to the same tall-poppy-cutting treatment as the few non-Indigenous Canadians who have risen to his level of fame and influence. In its old-stock national soul, Canada embraces a cult of mediocrity when it comes to artists and writers. Having worked (as a fraud) in the boiler room of one particular CanLit institution, I can attest that the most venerated figures among the toiling acolytes often are righteous obscurities who subsist on grants and church-basement vernissages. Once someone shows true skill and gets feted in New York and London, Canadas great and good worry that hell overshadow everyone else (take up too much space, in the Twitter parlance), and, possessing the financial means necessary to shake off the constraints imposed by funding councils, go ideologically rogue.

And so it is no coincidence that almost every Canadian whose work is culturally influential outside Canadas borders Margaret Atwood, Steven Galloway, Jordan Peterson, Joseph Boyden has at one time or another attracted a mob of pious nobodies seeking to take them down. Until now, Monkmans Indigenous identity had protected him somewhat. But no longer. Indeed, his perceived obligations to community make things more complicated, as all it takes is one slip-up to get smeared as a two-spirited Judas. According to one Indigenous poet on Twitter: Its become disturbing clear that (Monkmans) work was never for us. It was never intended to keep us safe, nor empower us. In fact, it trivializes many of our experiences with sexual assault.

Canada embraces a cult of mediocrity when it comes to artists and writers

Such critiques, widely retweeted over social media in recent days, show how a fixation on community can be just one more burden on non-white artists and writers: Despite all the dumb things Ive written over my career, never once did a white guy ever respond by tweeting that Jonathan Kays work was never for us.

Three weeks ago, well before the controversy over Hanky Panky began, Canadian Art magazine ran a scathing attack on Monkman, bitterly denouncing the installation of two of his paintings in the central interior entrance area of New Yorks Metropolitan Museum of Art. When it comes to identity politics, Canadian Art is well known to exist in a land beyond parody. But this article particularly stood out because of the absurd Jaccuse question embedded in the headline: Who is the audience for these works?

After dispensing with the pro forma bafflegab about Monkmans failure to question art-historical inequalities between settlers and Indigenous peoples, the author proceeded on a tedious brushstroke-by-brushstroke hunt for neo-colonial esthetic heresies, like an old Papist inquisitor rifling through a Portuguese merchants ledger-book for a doodled penis or boob. Only at the end did we get to the main indictment that these paintings are made for a predominantly white audience, presented in an institution historically composed of white cultural workers and displayed in harmony with, rather than in contradiction of, a colonial institution. Oh, how much more pure the world would be if Monkman had instead burned these masterpieces and focused instead on putting on culturally authentic Cree-language puppet shows outside his home in Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory. Hey, maybe hed even get a grant for it.

For those whove never been to the Met, I can attest that its full of white people. A lot of museums are even, horror of horrors, right here in Canada. If you tell an Indigenous artist that he shouldnt be pitching his work to this audience, youre basically telling him to go live off charity for the rest of his life, just like all those downwardly mobile white kids churning out triptychs about their pronouns from the rec-room space over their parents Woodbridge garage.

I, too, belong to a community. Its the community of white cultural workers that Canadian Art dislikes so much (even if most of the magazines own staff resemble the standing-room section at a David Sedaris book reading). And if I may presume to speak on behalf of this community, Id like to say that Hanky Panky suits our colonial white gaze just fine. By which I mean that it makes us think about our country in a different and more honest way, and that it challenges a lot of what we think we know. These are the things that a great artist does, notwithstanding the spirit of self-interest and amour propre that suffuse the hectoring of lesser talents.

Email: jonkay@gmail.com | Twitter:

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Jonathan Kay: It takes a true artist to find new ways to shock the conscience. Kent Monkman has done that - National Post

Due to restrictions related to COVID-19, the graduation ceremony will be postponed to a date to be determined in July.

Valedictorian: Joseph Armbruster. Salutatorian: McKenna Manske.

The class motto is 2020: A class with a vision. The class flower is a white rose with red tips. The class colors are red, black and silver.

Class of 2020 officers: President Conor Vatland, Vice president Bree Hatlan, Secretary Claire Griffin, Treasurer Josi Bishop.

Candidates for graduation: Karly Anderson, Joseph Armbruster, Andrew Bechtel, Noah Benish, Melody Berg, Josi Bishop, Luke Bjorklund, Rebecca Buckles, Jackson Bunch, Manuel Chavez, Tyler Christianson, Jaden Cronn, Dominic DelMedico, Alexis Ellefson, Gabriel Engh, Kyle Falkers, Gabriella Felten, Estelle Fischer-Fortney, Cohner Fish, Robert Frydenlund, Faith Gardner, Carlos Gastelum, Jordan Gettelman, Brenden Griffin, Claire Griffin, Joshua Gunderson, Haley Hagen, Riley Hagen, Austin Hall, Zachary Harris, Bree Hatlan, Evan Hendrickson, Ashton Hill, Liza Jackson, Karalyn Jaeger, Kaydan Jothen, Hailey Kittle, Jake Krause, Abigail Larrington, Tyler Lasky, Eva Lee, Cooper Lipski, Mason Mageland, McKenna Manske, Amanda Marshall, Izaak McCauley, Mitchell McKittrick, Cody Meyer, Ty Milutinovich, Austin Mowery, Jullian Nagle, Devin Nelson, Haley Nelson, Noah Nelson, Payten Nelson, Anna Ofte, Gavin Olson, Cora Ostrem-Hanson, Logan Paduano, Cole Peterson, Evan Peterson, Robert Purvis, Savana Radke, Sedona Radke, Andy Role, Ezequiel Santiago, Benjamin Schmidt, Linda Schmitz, Kassandra Sherpe, Dylan Songer, Davontae Spears, Chloe Stellner, Molly Stenslien, Kaili Swanson, Adam Teadt, Finnegan Trautsch, Logan Turben, Conor Vatland, Lucas Wieczorek, Alayna Winterfield, Theresa Wintersdorf, Katherine Wollman

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Graduation 2020: Westby Area High School - The Westby Times