Monthly Archives: May 2020

Its day 2,346 of staying home, and if youre like me, youve streamed yourself into a coma. I actually watched the John Gotti biopic starring John Travolta the other day, thats how bad its getting (It wasnt as bad as youd think).

If your brain and soul are hungry for something deeper, two surly, foul-mouthed British comedians are here to the rescue. In the most recent episode of his podcast Under the Skin, comedian Russell Brand interviews fellow British comedy luminary Ricky Gervais. I became a fan of Brands podcast after his two amazing conversations with Jordan Peterson, both of which also provide excellent intellectual calisthenics.

The hour-long episode covers everything from Gervaiss love for animals, their narcissism, and the nuances of God, spirituality, and religion. While you may not agree with either, seeing these two exceptionally bright, self-effacing, piss-and-vinegar comedians exchanging barbs and wisdom is just the mental stimulation you need today. Their own search for the truth might even prompt the sort of self-reflection we all could use at this time. Heres a sneak preview.

Brand and Gervais are millionaires many times over and enjoy even greater fame in Britain than in the United States. Still, neither came from wealth or acclaim. Brand was an only child raised by a single mom. Gervais signature edgy humor is inextricably tied to growing up in the working class. Knowing where they stand in society can be tricky.

As Gervais explains, Were court jesters we have to be court jesters. We have to have low status. Were in the mud with all the other peasants, teasing the king. But we have to keep our low status somehow, I think. I feel I want to.

Gervais is the creator of the original The Office series, and Brand talks about feeling sorry for his character, David Brent. The pair both see him as a sad figure, engaged in ever more absurd acts in order to reach a place of acceptance or worth. Compared to our reality TV culture nowadays, this character isnt even absurd anymore.

As Gervais jokes, Big Brother contestants make deals with the producers to get on the show. Let me in there, and Ill start a fight and take my clothes off. It facilitates the emotional destruction of people who just want to be loved and the public eats it up. As Brand puts it, Theres been a glorification of idiocy in culture.

Gervais laments the toll this takes on fame-seekers. This obsession with seeing normal people destroy themselves. These people keep going back to fame and going, Do you love me yet? No, they dont love you, they want you to fail!

Gervais is a well-known atheist. While both men have substantial criticism for organized religion, Brands travels through addiction and mental illness have given him a firm belief in some kind of god and a sense of interconnectedness.

Im a solipsistic, narcissistic person, Brand says. Ive been through the mills of addiction, sex, fame, drugs, money, and all that kind of stuff, and its placed me at a point where Ive had to open myself up to different ideas.

He means this as a challenge to Gervais that while they both have criticisms for organized religion, Brand sees Gervais as having a similar sense of wonder and awe at the universe, the same wonder that prompted Brands spirituality.

Gervais concedes, I seem like a spiritual person, but not literally, which is totally true. I am in as much awe at seeing a tree, or a mountain, or a bird, or a river as anyone who thinks God made it. I see the beauty of nature.

While Brand sympathizes with Gervais distaste for the constraints of organized religion, he explains, Ive gone on sort of the opposite journey, in that I feel like I started off atheistic just in that I would reject any attempt to impose regulation or control on me for the purposes of domination.

But as Ive gone through my own stuff with addiction and mental health or whatever it is, Brand continues, my own sense of despair particularly looking at it from a perspective of mental health issues and addiction is that there is an unaddressed yearning for a kind of oneness, togetherness, and for love.

While Gervais understands that desire for connectedness, he doesnt think desire alone is enough to make it true. It is a terrifying prospect that well never exist again, I think, but it doesnt mean its not true, says Gervais.

The bottom line is I cant believe something I dont believe. So how do I find meaning? Well, we are here. The chances of us being us you being you and me being me, existing now, that sperm hitting that egg is 400 trillion to one. Were not special, but we are lucky. We do exist. Its incredible.

As were looking for ways to occupy our minds in this strange time, this conversation is worth a listen. You may disagree with Brand or Gervais conclusions; I do. The redeeming undercurrent, however, is that both men are seekers of the truth. Their convictions are born of deep consideration, and they are willing to follow them to their natural conclusions, no matter how disappointing or inconvenient. Now might be just the moment we need to consider what we really believe as well.

Caroline D'Agati is a writer, former park ranger, and New Jersey expatriate living in DC. She studied English at Georgetown and media studies at The New School. You can follow her on Twitter at @carodagati.

Originally posted here:

Russell Brand And Ricky Gervais Are Just What Your Brain Needs - The Federalist

Screenshot: YouTube (Herd Nation)

And with the 159th pick in the 2020 NFL drafts fifth round, the New England Patriots select...the right-wing, paramilitary-supporting kicker from Marshall.

On Saturday, the Tom Brady-less team from the same town that brought you Aaron Hernandez, the gang-affiliated double-murderer from Florida, drafted Justin Rohrwasser, a heralded kicker whose left arm just happens to display the insignia of the Three Percenters, one of the right-wing paramilitary groups that The Root has referred to as Yall Queda.

As soon as the Patriots Trump-supporting coach and owner gave Rohrwasser the nod, Resist Programming noticed that the draftees social media history seemed to show an affinity for far-right zealots like Jordan Peterson, an opponent of transgender pronouns and the feminization of men.

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But it was the 23-year-olds Three Percenter tattoo that raised the most eyebrows. Although Rohrwasser claims he got the tattoo when he was a teenager, he didnt have it in high school. It also doesnt appear in photos when he played at the University of Rhode Island in 2015.

Make no mistake about it, the III percent is a gang.

Maxime Fiset, a former neo-Nazi who works with the Centre for the Prevention of Radicalization Leading to Violence in Montreal, called Three Percenters the most dangerous group in Canada. They provided security for neo-Nazis at the Unite The Right rally in Charlottesville, Va. In 2019, a jury convicted Jeremy Drake Varnell of attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction to blow up an Oklahoma City building after Varnell admitted that he subscribed to III% ideology, according to the Associated Press.

As we previously reported:

Founded by another patriot named Mike Vanderboegh, the Three Percent movement stems from its belief that the American Revolution was won by an army composed of 3 percent of the population, which, according to this liberal ideology called numbers, is pretty wrong. (The number was closer to 15 percent, but perhaps they forgot to carry the 1 when they were doing the math. Hey, it involves both algebra and fractions, so dont laugh.)

Unlike the Oath Keepers, anyone can simply declare him- or herself a Three Percenter, although the group does have meetings on a local level, according to its website. It was surprisingly also founded immediately after Obama was elected, in Alabama, of all places (I actually heard your brain say, Seems about right).

Like the Oath Keepers who showed up in Ferguson, Three Percenters are famous for descending on the Bundy ranch in Nevada, but used money donated by supporters to bail out other Threepers to buy iTunes music, car washes and food. They are the same people who also occupied an Oregon wildlife refuge in 2016, an occupation that ended after a shootout when the mighty Three Percenters umm ... well ... kinda just gave up because standoffs are kinda hard.

So what was Rohrwassers excuse?

I got that tattoo when I was a teenager and I have a lot of family in the military, Rohrwasser told reporters during an introductory press conference. I thought it stood for a military-support symbol at the time. Obviously, its evolved into something that I do not want to represent. When I look back on it, I should have done way more research before I put any mark or symbol like that on my body, and its not something I ever want to represent. It will be covered.

Of course, the NFL is known for highlighting the pasts of its darker-skinned draftees. In 2016, projected No. 1 overall pick Laremy Tunsil lost millions when a video of him smoking marijuana through a gas mask caused his draft stock to tumble to the 13th pick. Wide receiver Desean Jacksons career has been plagued by rumors of gang affiliations. Since he joined the NFL, he has been arrested forHold on, let me check his extensive rap sheet...Jackson has been arrested a grand total of zero times. And then theres the revealing photo of how the NFL treated Rohrwassers fellow draft class members

But Rohrwasser is different, see. He didnt know that he was gang-affiliated.

And finally, hes a real Patriot.

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Patriots Draft Pick Has Right-Wing Paramilitary Gang Tattoo. But It's OK, He Didn't Know What It Meant - The Root

The problem here is that one mans stable hierarchy and proud tradition is anothers tyrannical oppression and ideology.

Introduction

Instead of casting away all our old prejudices, we cherish them to a very considerable degree, and, to take more shame to ourselves, we cherish them because they are prejudices; and the longer they have lasted and the more generally they have prevailed, the more we cherish them. We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason; because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages. Edmund Burke inReflections on the Revolution in France: And on the Proceedings in Certain Societies in London Relative to that Event

Many have been puzzled by post-modern conservatisms distrust of so-called liberal elites and the appeals these liberal elites make to scientific consensus, academic authority, and other rationalistic tropes. Less appreciated is the fact that this animosity on the part of post-modern conservatives has a longstanding basisfar-right priests of reason and logic notwithstanding. Conservatives have long defended tradition as the stored locus of wisdom and insight, which is only to be deviated from with great caution. This is linked to the longstanding conservative skepticism of reasons power to accurately know what is and what should be. The store of insight available to even the most intelligent personalities is so limited that it would be unwise to put faith in its power. This inclination goes back to Edmund Burke, who castigated the rationalistic philosophes of his day for thinking they could simply recreate the world wholesale from the idle speculations of their pens. For authors such as Burke and Michael Oakeshott, the skepticism towards universal reasonand the over-educated intellectuals who swear by itcan lead to flirtations with the virtues of a politics of faith. At its most extreme, in the work of figures such as Joseph de Maistre and Carl Schmitt (and the counter-Enlightenment movements they cheered on), it can trend towards an outright embrace of irrationalism.

The unusual feature of this embrace of tradition is that it is often very hard to tell what insights conservatives think we should glean from it. This relates to another fundamental feature of the conservative mind, which is that it is driven more by what Russell Kirk called an attitude or disposition that is resistant to the changes put forward by liberals and, especially, the political left. As my friend Nate Hochman put itin National Review ,the path to conservatism begins as a knee-jerk reaction to the contemporary Left: a feeling that its assertionsmustbe wrong, with little understanding of exactly why. This means that many of the defenses conservatives put forward of tradition are rationalizing, rather than rationalistic. Conservatives sense that this or that venerable institution or principle, which is being attacked for its prejudices, serves a valuable function, and they, then, set out to justify its existence. This is quite different from liberals and progressives who hold certain first principles to either be self-evident or required for any society to be called just and, then, seek to steer their own in the correct direction.

The Problem with Rationalizing Tradition

The effort to rationalize tradition is understandable. Logic bros notwithstanding, most conservatives have long understood that people often have deep emotional attachments to their shared ways of life and histories. Critics from Kant through to Benedict Anderson have often pointed out that these attachments are not nearly as natural as many suppose; states spend billions of dollars per year inspiring a sense of fidelity and loyalty to their flags. At some level, we are all intuitively aware of this, as the deepening hostility towards government officials and rhetoric implies. But that has never been sufficient to entirely break the spell of non-rational attachments to collective traditions. Moreover, as other thinkers, such as Jordan Peterson, have pointed out, these attachments reflect an even deeper need on the part of individuals for a sense of order in reality. Human life is filled with tremendous precarity, as well as the ultimate threat of total annihilation, which is tied to our existential finitude. Shared tradition provides a partial barrier against the to-and-fros of the world. And tradition cannot be easily replaced by institutional changesor even effective egalitarian economic reforms to spread wealth more evenly to protect individuals against material destitution.

However, the problems with this position are also easy to note. The first is that since conservatism is a disposition or attitude rather than a rational outlook, it will often be forced to play a reactive and defensive role against its opponents. Liberals and progressives will make a case against some institution or principle conservatives cherish, and their opponents will have to respond by building a case for it. This, often, gives conservative intellectualism a frenetic quality, with its advocates raising to a pastiche or even self-contradicting bricolage of principles, data, and even crude appeals to faith. The efforts by fusionists to reconcile an unbridled support for capitalism and freedom with support for social conservatism and religion (when the hedonism and permissiveness of the former will always undermine the latter) are representative. It also means that conservatives are always at a disadvantage. Since liberals and progressives are always on the offense, they need only win a battle once to typically triumph in perpetuity.

Conservatives must always succeed or resign themselves to the institutions and principles being cherished joining others on the ash heap of history. While it is untrue that history moves in one directionand that there cannot be successful counter-revolutionsthe inexorable entropy of existence inclines to change, rather than permanence. Finally, conservative rationalizations often fall into the performative contradictions, which inevitably tar any efforts to reject reasons authority. To demonstrate the limits of reason to challenge hierarchy, conservative intellectuals must inevitably raise rationalizing objectionsor fall into mere dogmatic assertions of fidelity. But if they do this, they also concede that there are ways to assess the value of a tradition; if the tradition is found wanting, there may be a powerful basis for abandoning it. The mere assertion this is the way we have always done things is no argument for its efficacy. People clung desperately to the idea that the sun revolved around the earth, that there were natural slaves, and that God apparently granted a divine right to rule to even the most incompetent monarchs. This brings me to a more crucial point.

Conclusion

More damning is that the conservative disposition can become so attached to order that it comes to support even the most unjust or evil hierarchies, if they provide the only defense against liberal and progressive change. Roger Scruton even acknowledged as such when he pointed out that conservatives will be far more willing to tolerate levels of injustice that are known and acceptable, rather than take their chances with the fickle promises of reform. The problem here is that one mans stable hierarchy and proud tradition is anothers tyrannical oppression and ideology. When the American Founding Fathers mused on the evils of slavery but conceded that changing it would bring too much disruption, they committed a banal act of moral indifference. The rot of this choice corrodes the United States to this day. Joseph de Maistre lambasted the violence of the French Revolution, while nodding approvingly at the possibility of millions of people being killed as divine punishment for beheading their monarch. J.S Mills calls for women to be granted the right to vote and to enjoy status beyond being property of their husbands were lampooned as unnatural (perhaps a reason he infamously claimed Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives). Ironically, this point was well-described by F.A Hayek, the libertarian economist in his essay Why I am Not A Conservative:

In the last resort, the conservative position rests on the belief that in any society there are recognizably superior persons whose inherited standards and values and position ought to be protected and who should have a greater influence on public affairs than others. The liberal, of course, does not deny that there are some superior peoplehe is not an egalitarianbut he denies that anyone has authority to decide who these superior people are. While the conservative inclines to defend a particular established hierarchy and wishes authority to protect the status of those whom he values, the liberal feels that no respect for established values can justify the resort to privilege or monopoly or any other coercive power of the state in order to shelter such people against the forces of economic change. Though he is fully aware of the important role that cultural and intellectual elites have played in the evolution of civilization, he also believes that these elites have to prove themselves by their capacity to maintain their position under the same rules that apply to all others.

There is nothing wrong with tradition in and of itself. It is often a source of meaning and stability for individuals in a strange and chaotic world. However, there is also nothing inherently good about it either: whether one means inherited wisdom, or providential arrangements of hierarchy to the benefit of all. A mere attitude fearful of change and rationalizing justifications to avoid it is no basis for preventing important reforms that need to happen.

Matt McManus is Professor of Politics and International Relations at Tec de Monterrey, and the author of Making Human Dignity Central to International Human Rights Law and The Rise of Post-Modern Conservatism. His new projects include co-authoring a critical monograph on Jordan Peterson and a book on liberal rights for Palgrave MacMillan. Matt can be reached atmattmcmanus300@gmail.comor added on twitter vie@mattpolprof

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The Problem with Edmund Burke and Defenders of Tradition - Merion West

The New England Patriots spent their first three picks in the 2020 NFL Draft on the defensive side of the ball. They notably nabbed Division II safety Kyle Dugger with their first pick in the draft at No. 37 overall, but they made another second-round pick as well.

With only a handful of picks left in Round 2, the Patriots traded up to select Michigan edge rusher Josh Uche. The hybrid linebacker/defensive end should have a chance to make an impact on the team's defense right away and will join 2019 third-round pick Chase Winovich, another Michigan man, on the edge.

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It wasn't a surprise to see the Patriots move up in the draft. After all, they had an overage of picks on Days 2 and 3 of the 2020 NFL Draft. Butthere was a specific reason that the teamultimately decided to move up to the 60th pick tograb Uche,according to Andrew Callahan ofThe Boston Herald.

According to a league source, had the Patriots failed to trade up for Uche, he would have been taken by one of the teams that owned the next three picks after 60th overall; the Titans, Packers or Chiefs. Instead, late in the second round, the Pats shipped the 71st and 89th picks to Baltimore in exchange for No. 60 and a fourth-rounder.

That certainly explains why the Patriots felt the need to move up 11 spots. All of the three teams mentioned would've made sense as landing spots for Uche.

The Titans have a need for a potential long-term starter at rush linebacker across from former Boston College product Harold Landry. They signed Vic Beasley this offseason, but he has regressed since a 15.5-sack All-Pro campaign in 2016.

As for the Chiefs, Andy Reid loves to bolster the trenches and they still need a replacement for Justin Houstonwho was cut last offseason. The Chiefs have former Michigan pass rusher Frank Clark as their big name on the edge and spent a fifth-round pick on another Michigan edge player, Michael Danna. So, it stands to reason that they could've targeted Uche in the second round had he been available.

And finally, the Packers could've made sense for Uche as well. Preston and Za'Darius Smith are two solid starters, but the team doesn't have a lot of quality depth behind them after the departure of Kyler Fackrell in free agency. They spent a first-round pick in 2019 on Michigan's Rashan Gary -- another edge player --so maybe they got a good look at Uche while scouting Gary and liked what they saw.

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Either way, the point is moot since the Patriots traded up to get Uche. And from the description of Uche provided by his former defensive coordinator at Michigan, Don Brown, it sounds like he'll fit in very well with the Patriots.

"Hes a football junkie. He wanted to know everything he could possibly know," Brown said, per Callahan. "Our strength coach did a really good job developing his hand quickness, and really, I thought was instrumental in helping us out. But Josh, hell do exactly what you tell him to do and you know, some pass rushers they think they can win it all. Hell do exactly what hes supposed to do."

So basically, Uche is athletic, absorbs a lot of information,and likes to do his job. Maybe that's why Bill Belichick fell in love with him and felt comfortable moving up to acquire his services.

During his final season at Michigan, Uche logged 33 tackles and 7.5 sacks for the Wolverines. The Patriots will hope that he can make an immediate impact as a pass rusher in a rotational capacity, much like Winovich did as a rookie in 2019 (26 tackles, 5.5 sacks).

Excerpt from:

Why are the Pats suddenly betting favorites to land Cam Newton? - NBCSports.com

Dave Rubin, the YouTube talk show host with over a million subscribers, an audience that rivals many cable news shows, is probably best known as the "Why I Left the Left" guy.

That was the title of a video he did for the conservative site PragerU, which has been viewed more than 13 million times on YouTube and which Rubin says was the original title of his new debut book, since renamed "Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason."

Now a self-described "freethinking classical liberal" or "old-school liberal," he's become the right's favorite ex-leftist, an identity he uses to warn right-leaning audiences that the left will come to destroy all the freedoms they hold dear. He knows, he says, because he was one of them.

His publisher writes that "in a time of madness" the book will give "you the tools you need to think for yourself."

A representative passage reads: "I want you to walk into a bar and order a full-bodied opinion. I want you to get absolutely wasted on facts until 3:00am, and then, when you're just about ready to pass out, I want you to get another glass of reality and chug it."

With that level of humor and sophistication, "Don't Burn This Book" seems to signal that there's nowhere for Rubin to go from here, because for all his relentless use of the word "ideas," he doesn't appear to have many.

In the book, Rubin proudly repeats a story he's told many times before, about how he changed his entire worldview on racism after it was clear he was hopelessly unprepared for an interview with a black conservative radio host. He calls it "the best and worst moment" of his career.

Rubin, a former comedian, was only a few months removed from hosting his eponymous show for the progressive The Young Turks online network. He described the original version of the show as "a comedy panel talk showlike 'The View' meets 'SportsCenter.'" For a political network, the show wasn't particularly political.

Now hosting a new iteration of his show featuring long-form interviews with iconoclastic guests, in 2016 Rubin interviewed Larry Elder, a veteran conservative talk radio pugilist.

Elder challenged Rubin's use of the phrase "systemic racism" by rattling off a series of contextless statistics about black-on-black crime and anecdotes about misreported incidents of police brutality.

Rubin, visibly flummoxed, folded.

Elder in just a few minutes had completely changed Rubin's thinking about racism in America, namely that he now believes there basically is none, except that which comes from the woke left.

But Rubin's newfound "freethinking" would not include challenging his new viewpoints by, for instance, hosting a Black Lives Matter activist or an expert on police brutality to express ideas that ran counter to Elder's.

His mind had been changed, and no further discussion favorable to those bad "regressive" ideas he once held was necessary.

Through interviews on his show, Rubin linked up with the "Intellectual Dark Web," a loosely affiliated group of online personalities generally bound together by a mutual loathing of left-wing censorship and "woke" identity politics. Then, as Jordan Peterson's hype man on an international tour, he was able to reach a massive audience of mostly young people.

Now he's a regular on various Fox News shows, and his YouTube show is re-broadcast on Glenn Beck's The Blaze network. He also does regular paid appearances with Turning Point USA, the pro-Trump student group with close ties to the administration.

Though he's very careful to never fully endorse President Donald Trump, he won't articulate any meaningful criticism of him. In fact, Rubin recently gushed about briefly meeting President Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago and hosted the president's son, Don Jr., for a backslapping appearance on his show.

Rubin's interviewing style is to rely on "civility," which in practice serves as a platform for the guest to present their arguments unchallenged. But that idea seems to apply only for one side.

In a 2019 interview with then-Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson, Rubin scolded her for making what he called "a "slippery slope" argument in comparing the Holocaust to slavery.

Guests like far-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos (who said Jews control the banks and media), Stefan Molyneux (who said blacks have smaller brains than whites), and Lauren Southern (who defended Richard Spencer's "white nationalism" as distinct from "white supremacism" and whom Rubin later called "fearless") were met with no pushback at all when making egregious statements on "The Rubin Report."

If you're at all familiar with Rubin's show or Twitter feed, "Don't Burn This Book" is unlikely to contain any surprises. Despite its provocative title, it's hard to imagine anyone being so angered by a book loaded with the same milquetoast arguments that he's been hammering for years.

He again posits that "classical liberalism" essentially libertarianism in US political terms is the true form of "liberalism," which he says has been bastardized by progressives or anyone affiliated with the Democratic Party.

In a chapter titled, "Learn How to Spot Fake News," he again refers to non-right-wing news outlets as being hopelessly inundated with left-wing "activists" and repeatedly puts the word "journalists" in scare quotes. True to form, he levels no criticism whatsoever for institutional bias or even the occasional inaccuracy at right-leaning outlets like Fox News.

Though he says he hates identity politics, Rubin never misses an opportunity to remind the reader that he's a married gay man as evidence of his "liberal" bona fides.

Rubin touts his paid appearances at conservative events as proof of their open-mindedness and tolerance, especially compared to the rigidly dogmatic left.

And even when presented with an easy lay-up of an opportunity to take issue with Trump, he demurs. Writing about Trump's border wall, something generally opposed by libertarians, Rubin refuses to take a stand, literally writing that he's not advocating for it but also doesn't oppose it. He adds with comedic flourish, "you could say I'm sitting on the fence waka! waka!"

He makes gobsmackingly reductive arguments. Among them, the Nazis were actually of the left because the word "socialist" is in the National Socialist Party name and Hitler was an "art-loving vegetarian." He argues that the disastrous and immoral US military intervention into Vietnam was good because "our contribution secured much-needed freedoms."

Rubin the "old-school liberal" even deploys the old Republican saw about the "Democrat Party" being the party of slavery 160 years ago, as if neither party had undergone substantial philosophical and demographic shifts in the century-and-a-half since.

"Don't Burn This Book" contains one of Rubin's most oft-repeated lines about discussing "ideas, not people." The point, if I surmise correctly, is that one should not attack one's opponent with ad hominems, but engage their ideas.

He rarely lives up to this stated principle, or any of them.

His Twitter feed is loaded with name-calling and personal attacks on his political adversaries and the "mainstream media." Rubin saves particular venom for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who he has called "an extraordinary idiot" and "a genuinely terrible person," and outlets like Vox, The Daily Beast, and HuffPost, which he refers to as "Pox," "The Daily Barf," and "HuffPoop."

Relatedly, he's a self-described "free speech absolutist" who like Trump supports "mass lawsuits" against media organizations for libel. His book contains not even a passing mention of the many government-imposed conservative assaults on free speech.

He hates identity politics and the left, but presents himself as the "gay liberal" when flattering conservative audiences. He's the former progressive and comic who now makes jokes about "HuffPoop." He's a brave freethinker, who keeps himself hermetically-sealed from potentially contentious interviews and debates.

And he's branded himself as a paragon of "civility," despite not being particularly civil to people with ideas that offend him.

Dave Rubin has one tune to play: "Why I Left the Left." Given the opportunity to explore new ideas across more than 200 pages, it's clear he hasn't learned any new chords.

If you never criticize Trump or the right, but relentlessly shriek about "mainstream media," the "Democrat Party," and "social justice warriors" as threats to Western civilization, it's hard to convincingly make the case that you're not just a basic tribalist conservative media personality.

There's only so long you can trade on a former political identity as the main credential for a new one, without offering any new ideas.

The rest is here:

Dave Rubin is out of ideas - Business Insider - Business Insider

Michael Jordan and Buzz Peterson played together all three years His Airness worked his magic at the University of North Carolina.

He also won North Carolina high school basketball player of the year over Michael Jordan before they each joined Dean Smiths squad. Now he works for his as assistant general manager for the Charlotte Hornets. So one could say that Peterson has seen it all when it comes to Michael Jordan. Or at least considerably more than most.

With ESPNs The Last Dance taking over the dormant world of sports, Roderick Boone of The Athletic spoke with Peterson about his days playing with the GOAT in Chapel Hill.

He says that anytime someone brings up his winning player of the year over Jordan, Michael replies, Yeah, Buzz got that award because in North Carolina there are seven major newspapers and his dad owned six of them. So thats how he got the award.

Little did he know that Jordan would go on to become one of the most dominant players in college basketball.

at first, the success he was having, it was tough, Peterson recalled. Personally, it was very hard for me, and at the time it was like, OK, this guy, hes really good, Buzz. Hes really good. For you to beat him out, its going to be really difficult. Hes just very gifted. But you can still be one of the guys to play out there with him. And so once I made my mind up and just to see him the unique thing was how he got better each year at Carolina from freshman to sophomore, sophomore to junior, how his game got better and better.

Embed from Getty Images

Peterson also recounted how Jordan would more than hold his own over the summer between his freshman and sophomore year going up against North Carolina legends like James Worthy, Walter Davis, and Al Wood.

However, there was one former Tar Heel that Peterson claims actually scared Jordan.

There is one guy that I always thought, and I know to this day I dont know if Michael wont admit or not, but I swear that he had a little bit of fear of and it wasnt a basketball player. It was a football player by the name of Lawrence Taylor. LT, phenomenal athlete. Could guard east to west, as quick as anybody, could jump, big hands, strong and was a bit crazy. So Michael in the back of his mind said, Sh-t, I better be careful with this guy. And LT always wanted to guard him.

He also remembered that during his four years at North Carolina he roomed with Michael Jordan for two years and Brad Daugherty for two years.

Ill never forget, I remember seeing something in Sporting News one time, said Peterson. They said, If you want to pick the right roommate, call Peterson because he chooses the right millionaires to be roommates with.'

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There Was Only One Player Michael Jordan Feared Playing, According To Former Teammate At UNC - BroBible