On a single day this week, your correspondent found himself in two conversations about how rugby league should respond … not to the rise of Donald Trump but to the triumph of what many like to call populism.
Yes, I know enough people who would ponder such an obscure and esoteric concept that I can run into two of them on the same day by sheer coincidence.
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Wayne Bennett hits back at media
Englandâs new rugby league coach Wayne Bennett explains to the media why he thinks press conferences are a waste of time.
The first context for the beard-scratching was that in any time in the past, an England coach sitting down at a press conference and saying he didn't care what anyone present wrote about him because he never read it would be considered a public relations disaster.
But in this era where traditional media is widely distrusted and increasingly bypassed, Wayne Bennett probably won over many thousands of admirers by dismissing its relevance.
Secondly, if rugby league itself is a social movement shunned by the elite, should it not be able to ride the wave of populist politics? If even a slight majority of the people who have, or who are about to, overthrow "the establishment" are from rugby league's demographic, should it not now be pandering to them because they are about to inherit the earth?
Some practical examples are the punching ban and the shoulder charge ban.
There are legal and medical reasons for these but there is also a little bit of high-mindedness. Punching and shoulder charging are dangerous and wrong and will prevent parents from allowing their children to play rugby league, according to the current thinking.
But if banning visitors based on their religions, repealing abortion rights, pulling out of climate accords and admitting to groping women can't stop someone being elected president, can the odd knuckle sandwich really harm the fortunes of a sport in the eyes of the masses?
If people want more knuckle sandwiches and these people outnumber those who don't, shouldn't we just give it to them?
It's dangerous to simply argue that rugby league fans did, or would if given a chance, vote for Brexit and Trump. We just don't know. Not one question in any political poll also appeared in, say, the Rugby League Week Players Poll.
But it doesn't hurt to lick an index finger and hold it up to the breeze of public opinion.
And public opinion is currently against "political correctness". Public opinion is currently in favour of expressing distrust, fear and anger openly.
Having said that, anyone wanting to climb on the back of the alt-right dragon and ride it had better be very canny indeed. No business, no matter how savvy, can be seen to be openly courting hatred or intolerance. It would be daft to suggest a sport should align itself with the specific policies of either the right or the left.
What I am saying is that, as a tree-hugging, bleeding heart journalist leftie, I should probably be ignored by rugby league for the time being. I'm part of the liberal media elite (as long as "elite" doesn't equate to wealth) and, quite frankly, we lost.
Society's current apparatus for an institution finding out what its constituents want is clearly broken. Many people don't have a voice and will respond when given one. Who knows? Perhaps Todd Greenberg and John Grant really should have brushed an international board meeting to deal with domestic issues.
Perhaps we are better off with punching. And shoulder charges. Maybe refs should be accused of having agendas because they are to blame. Bugger America, let's have all World Cups in Yorkshire, Lancashire, NSW and Queensland because no-one else cares.
The NRL's responsibility is to its clubs and to bush football, not pie-in-the-sky expansion and internationals. If players want to take recreational drugs its their own business. Leave them alone.
Players talk to us on Twitter. Why should they have to answer questions? That stuff is none of our business. Bugger the papers, put everything on the NRL's Facebook page.
Oxford Dictionary's word of the year is "post truth". What's right for rugby league in 2016 may be what, to me, is utterly wrong.
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