1. A thread on the now notorious @bariweiss Dark Web centrism piece - nytimes.com/2018/05/08/opi… . Short version - relative losses explain why Weiss and others feel embattled.
2. The lines of battle over the last 36 hours or so were pretty clear. Weiss's thesis was that many unorthodox thinkers, committed to civil but lively debate were being "purged from institutions that have become increasingly hostile to unorthodox thought."
3. Her critics, mainly but not exclusively on the left, guffawed at the notion that talking heads like Ben Shapiro, best selling authors like Jordan Peterson etc had being purged. Much mention also of the Kevin Williamson "I Has Been Silenced" tour through multiple media outlets.
4. But here's the thing. In a sense, both sides are right. Weiss and many people on the "Intellectual Dark Web" don't have much trouble finding media venues. But their position is far, far weaker than that of their ideological cognates two to three decades ago.
5. Back then, The New Republic could run entire issues devoted to the proposition that black people were stupider than white people. @saletan wrote pieces for Slate based on J. Philippe Rushton's racist theories of IQ.
6. TNC has said (and it is almost certainly either true or nearly true) that the New Republic did not have a single black employee - huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/leak-the…. The centrist ideological hegemony embraced racist ideas and people as racy, daring and stimulating.
7. More broadly, it was considered acceptable - even laudable - to look to the Know-Nothing right for ideas and intellectual sustenance. After all, the left was full of extremists too, and too intimate a connection could threaten one's perceived intellectual independence.
8. Things are very different now. When Sam Harris tries to revive IQ debate he gets angry and sustained pushback. The New Republic has been taken over by the leftist barbarians. Slate don't do that no more. To his credit, @saletan has written a mea culpa slate.com/news-and-polit…
9. This, I think explains the psychological underpinnings of Weiss's article. In a very broad sense, they're not all that dissimilar to some of the urges that got Trump elected. They are rooted in relative losses of status - people who once felt in control have been demoted.
10. For sure, right-fancying centrists and centre-fancying rightists still have plenty of venues they can talk in. But they do not enjoy cultural hegemony any more. They are tolerated, because of perceived need for intellectual diversity, and for a nominally 'sensible' right.
11. But they are not loved by many of the other people in a liberal-to-center-left that is increasingly defining itself not only by opposition to Trump, but to the politics and intellectual climate that helped produce him. Their awareness of this leads to bitter ressentiment.
12. This, finally, helps explain their attraction to Alex Jones, Mike Cernovich etc. Like incels, MRAs and Moldbug-groupies, they feel oppressed in some vague but indescribable way, as the verities that they have lived by fade away and are replaced by new rules favoring others.
13. They're looking to be redpilled, to be given an outer view of the True World, the invisible Matrix of gender and racial sensitivity rules that imprison them all. My guess is that over the next couple of years, more and more of them will happily gulp the pill down. Finis.
