i'm going to keep this simple because it's probably a shit post thread

coleman hughes, kmele foster, thom chatterton, thomas sowell, chloe valdery, john wood jr, carol swain, john mcwhorter, john woods jr, glenn loury,



Add to the list if you know more.

Complain if you are a racist.

whats idw?

i will pickup and jump to conclusions

Intellectual Dark Web. Ie conversations of thought that exist outside the machines behind media and social media

It's a phrase meant to invoke a victim mentality... as if these people are being held down by the powerful. The original members of this stupid label are Joe Rogan, who has an insanely popular podcast and just got paid 100m+ by Spotify. Ben Shapiro, who trends top 5 on Facebook everyday, has a very successful website, and gets spots on the most popular news network in the country. There's others as well.

The most offensive part of it is calling these guys intellectual. Rogan says himself that he's an uninformed idiot... Shapiro moves closer and closer to Trump in order to keep his business viable. He's in the business of attacking the worst arguments from the left. Sophisticated political observers from the right typically move on from the Shapiros of the world onto more serious avenues.

As far as the darkies, there's value in getting the perspective of the people listed. McWhorter writers articles for The Atlantic, a center-left magazine and news site. I've seen some of the others on Fox News and testifying in front of Congress. Dark web usually implies you have to jump through a bunch of hoops to get the content... not in this case.

In all cases though - Their business is in ideas rather than anything else. The goal posts may be moving on what constitutes an "intellectual"

15 years ago Shapiro wouldnt be considered an intellectual by pretty much anybody.

Fundamentally, Shapiro is not honest. Hes interested in owning the libs and so he constantly makes really dumb and inconsistent arguments. Its not about being right, its about his brand and making money from it.

This post was edited by Thor123422 on Sep 27 2020 11:50am

Thomas Sowell was alive through the 1960s and offers some poignant commentary.

Considering what he lived through, it must be pretty galling to hear the "nothing has changed" takes.

That's a smear of how the label started. Eric Weinstein coined the phrase to simply describe a group of people who would have civil conversation regardless of their differences. Most of them had experience with mobs trying to 'cancel' them in some way.

Bret Weinstein is probably the one who suffered clear victimization at Evergreen. He's also the most progressive 'member' as far as I can tell.

Shapiro had much of his advertising pulled due to twitter mob. He weathered that easily and likely profited largely off of it.

Rogan has been targeted for his opinions often obviously.

IDW fits these personalities perfectly if you use the original intent.



I will listen to anything with Mcwhorter tbh. His conversations with Loury are some of the best.

That's because there's no market for intellectual conservatism. There's a huge market for pseudo-intellectual conservatism though. It allows idiots to parrot strawman arguments in order to own the libs.


Coleman Hughes is an incredibly well spoken individual and the man has a very bright future ahead of him. I can't speak to the others but I've seen some Thomas Sowell quotes every now and then. I think some of the black thinkers who go against the grain make perfectly valid arguments in a vacuum. The issue is that intellectual dishonest people will use these arguments in order to ignore some very pressing issues in this country. Yes, MLK wanted people to be judged on the content of their character and not the color of their skin. But that doesn't mean we should be color blind, ignore our history, and ignore the racism that currently exists in this country. I should note that racism takes on many forms and we've certainly made progress since the 60s, but that doesn't mean it's not prevalent.