quote:

Julius Krein, the conservative founder of the new publication American Affairs, has noticed the new allies.

“There is a lot of interesting convergence on some of the anti-woke thinking and many things that, perhaps surprisingly, we agree on, for different reasons,” he said. One of the Chapo hosts contributed a piece to his magazine.

“It’s fairly easy to have fun, pretty exciting dialogue between right-wing anti-neoliberals and left-wing anti-neoliberals.”

Atrocious Joe posted:

lol thanks for giving the NYT this lay up opportunity Amber

also lol that the Julius guy assuming he won't be in Central Park after the revolution

Siljmonster posted:

holy poo poo the venue that chapo was at has gotten worse and shittier with how they treat people

quote:

While Hitler jokes are well understood as vile, there is less consensus on what to do when Stalin is the punchline.

“If you want to kick off ironic Nazis, what do you do with the ironic Maoists and ironic Stalinists?” said Andrew Marantz, author of “Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation.”

bring back old gbs posted:

lmao


the unnamed podcast

Trabisnikof posted:

Of course Greenwald likes Truanon he and Brace have the same employer.

Trabisnikof posted:

Of course Greenwald likes Truanon he and Brace have the same employer.

Doctor Jeep posted:

https://twitter.com/yashalevine/status/1233805845382615040

Goast posted:

nice 2020 redtext

Farm Frenzy posted:

this article is amazing lol its written to closely resemble all those ones about pepe nazis from 2016 but they cant accuse them of anything more serious than being rude to opinion columnists

Sheng-Ji Yang posted:

https://twitter.com/kenklippenstein/status/1233806705592602626

exmarx posted:

nah, those articles were way more fawning

quote:

In blurring occasionally violent humor, jovial community meetups and radical politics, they are the Tea Party reborn for progressives, and for their fans the appeal is in a bawdy offensive balance to cautious mainstream liberal politics.

They are known collectively as the Dirtbag Left, a shorthand they embrace that winkingly dispenses with any notion of liberal purity or inclusion, a defense mechanism that doubles as a nickname.

quote:

Today, people like them who dare venture into this “There Be Dragons” territory on the intellectual map have met with outrage and derision — even, or perhaps especially, from people who pride themselves on openness.

It’s a pattern that has become common in our new era of That Which Cannot Be Said. And it is the reason the Intellectual Dark Web, a term coined half-jokingly by Mr. Weinstein, came to exist.

What is the I.D.W. and who is a member of it? It’s hard to explain, which is both its beauty and its danger.

Most simply, it is a collection of iconoclastic thinkers, academic renegades and media personalities who are having a rolling conversation[ — on podcasts, YouTube and Twitter, and in sold-out auditoriums — that sound unlike anything else happening, at least publicly, in the culture right now. Feeling largely locked out of legacy outlets, they are rapidly building their own mass media channels.
...
But they all share three distinct qualities. First, they are willing to disagree ferociously, but talk civilly, about nearly every meaningful subject: religion, abortion, immigration, the nature of consciousness. Second, in an age in which popular feelings about the way things ought to be often override facts about the way things actually are, each is determined to resist parroting what’s politically convenient. And third, some have paid for this commitment by being purged from institutions that have become increasingly hostile to unorthodox thought — and have found receptive audiences elsewhere.

quote:

The topic is inequality, raging against the rich.

Progressives who are more concerned with racial equality or gender parity have had to figure out how to either go against the Dirtbag movement or resign themselves to this singular focus, which occasionally runs roughshod over all the rest.

But what some call an exciting dialogue can feel exclusionary to others.

quote:

“People are starved for controversial opinions,” said Joe Rogan, an MMA color commentator and comedian who hosts one of the most popular podcasts in the country. “And they are starved for an actual conversation.”

That hunger has translated into a booming and, in many cases, profitable market. Episodes of “The Joe Rogan Experience,” which have featured many members of the I.D.W., can draw nearly as big an audience as Rachel Maddow. A recent episode featuring Bret Weinstein and Ms. Heying talking about gender, hotness, beauty and #MeToo was viewed on YouTube over a million times, even though the conversation lasted for nearly three hours.

Ben Shapiro’s podcast, which airs five days a week, gets 15 million downloads a month. Sam Harris estimates that his “Waking Up” podcast gets one million listeners an episode. Dave Rubin’s YouTube show has more than 700,000 subscribers.

Offline and in the real world, members of the I.D.W. are often found speaking to one another in packed venues around the globe. In July, for example, Jordan Peterson, Douglas Murray and Mr. Harris will appear together at the O2 Arena in London.

But as the members of the Intellectual Dark Web become genuinely popular, they are also coming under more scrutiny. On April 21, Kanye West crystallized this problem when he tweeted seven words that set Twitter on fire: “I love the way Candace Owens thinks.”

Candace Owens, the communications director for Turning Point USA, is a sharp, young, black conservative — a telegenic speaker with killer instincts who makes videos with titles like “How to Escape the Democrat Plantation” and “The Left Thinks Black People Are Stupid.” Mr. West’s praise for her was sandwiched inside a longer thread that referenced many of the markers of the Intellectual Dark Web, like the tyranny of thought policing and the importance of independent thinking. He was photographed watching a Jordan Peterson video.

All of a sudden, it seemed, the I.D.W. had broken through to the culture-making class, and a few in the group flirted with embracing Ms. Owens as their own.

Yet Ms. Owens is a passionate Trump supporter who has dismissed racism as a threat to black people while arguing, despite evidence to the contrary, that immigrants steal their jobs. She has also compared Jay-Z and Beyoncé to slaves for supporting the Democratic Party.

quote:

An additional challenge is that as the free-floating anger they stoke finds community, it is escalating and souring into sometimes violent and ugly rhetoric — the kind of rhetoric that other Democratic contenders have fashioned into a major critique of Mr. Sanders.

On Monday, the Sanders campaign fired a campaign organizer, Ben Mora, after his private Twitter feed was revealed to include derogatory comments about 2020 candidates. The Chapo hosts publicly supported Mr. Mora, praising his organizing work and saying, “I hope the campaign doesn’t cave to these whiners and losers.”

For the hosts and their fans, those sort of tweets and the podcast language are all jokes. The audience understands the difference, they argue, and anyway the real problem with the Democrats is that they’re overly sensitive. A bunch of self-serious P.M.C.s (members of the professional-managerial class).

Over the summer, the “Chapo Trap House” message board, which has nearly 153,000 members who chat about the news and memes of the day, was censured by Reddit, which hosts it. The page now has limited reach and is in a sort of digital purgatory, where it remains.

“The reason for the quarantine is that we have observed repeated rule-breaking behavior in your community, especially in the form of encouragement of violence,” Reddit administrators wrote to the group. Comments considered in violation included jokes around historically violent left-wing populist revolutions, like who goes to the guillotine first.

While Hitler jokes are well understood as vile, there is less consensus on what to do when Stalin is the punchline.

“If you want to kick off ironic Nazis, what do you do with the ironic Maoists and ironic Stalinists?” said Andrew Marantz, author of “Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation.”

After receiving their punishment, Chapo moderators wrote to Reddit frustrated: “Are all references to gulags to be considered violent content?”

quote:

Emphasis is one problem. Associating with genuinely bad people is another.

Go a click in one direction and the group is enhanced by intellectuals with tony affiliations like Steven Pinker at Harvard. But go a click in another and you’ll find alt-right figures like Stefan Molyneux and Milo Yiannopoulos and conspiracy theorists like Mike Cernovich (the #PizzaGate huckster) and Alex Jones (the Sandy Hook shooting denier).

It’s hard to draw boundaries around an amorphous network, especially when each person in it has a different idea of who is beyond the pale.

“I don’t know that we are in the position to police it,” Mr. Rubin said. “If this thing becomes something massive — a political or social movement — then maybe we’d need to have some statement of principles. For now, we’re just a crew of people trying to have the kind of important conversations that the mainstream won’t.”

But is a statement of principles necessary to make a judgment call about people like Mr. Cernovich, Mr. Molyneux and Mr. Yiannopoulos? Mr. Rubin has hosted all three on his show. And he appeared on a typically unhinged episode of Mr. Jones’s radio show, “Infowars.” Mr. Rogan regularly lets Abby Martin — a former 9/11 Truther who is strangely sympathetic to the regimes in Syria and Venezuela — rant on his podcast. He also encouraged Mr. Jones to spout off about the moon landing being fake during Mr. Jones’s nearly four-hour appearance on his show. When asked why he hosts people like Mr. Jones, Mr. Rogan has insisted that he’s not an interviewer or a journalist. “I talk to people. And I record it. That’s it,” he has said.

Mr. Rubin doesn’t see this is a problem. “The fact is that Jones reaches millions of people,” he said. “Going on that show means I get to reach them, and I don’t think anyone is a lost cause. I’ve gotten a slew of email from folks saying that they first heard me on Jones, but then watched a bunch of my interviews and changed some of their views.”

Atrocious Joe posted:

The new Richard Stanley movie Disco Elysium 2 is looking good though

Dikkfor posted:

Homeless Friend posted:

absolutely criminal that comments are not on

Atrocious Joe posted:

lol thanks for giving the NYT this lay up opportunity Amber

also lol that the Julius guy assuming he won't be in Central Park after the revolution

Homeless Friend posted:

thanking joe biden tonight for teaching those chapo boys a lesson

Crowsbeak posted:

It was an awesome article and woke PMC are what liberals like this articles writer depend on and must be flushed out from the left.

Shipon posted:

i keep hearing people talk about the slurs the chapo boys use and it's like, i can't think of anything they've said other than maybe "retard" in their early episodes. it's all hearsay from people who don't listen but say they've heard things

Shipon posted:

i keep hearing people talk about the slurs the chapo boys use and it's like, i can't think of anything they've said other than maybe "retard" in their early episodes. it's all hearsay from people who don't listen but say they've heard things

Retromancer posted:

the real n-word is neoliberal

Shipon posted:

i keep hearing people talk about the slurs the chapo boys use and it's like, i can't think of anything they've said other than maybe "retard" in their early episodes. it's all hearsay from people who don't listen but say they've heard things

Doctor Jeep posted:

https://twitter.com/yashalevine/status/1233805845382615040