James Lindsay

Wednesday

Matthew Foldi

Funding frozen for conservative student groups at Northwestern after James Lindsay event

Northwestern University’s student government is retaliating against its College Republicans and Young America’s Foundation chapter for hosting James Lindsay, a conservative speaker, by freezing their funding and demanding the university open an investigation that may or may not already be ongoing. In an emergency meeting, the school’s Associated Student Government, or ASG, scrambled to pass a resolution that condemned the two groups for their event flyers, which mimicked the design of one of the guest speaker’s books, by adding a skull and crossbones cartoon onto sunglasses with the Pride flag.

northwestern
Ben Sixsmith

Dave Rubin’s lazy new book

I didn’t want to review Dave Rubin’s Don’t Burn This Country. One Dave Rubin book seemed like enough — arguably too many — for a lifetime. Yet like a burglar who retires from his life of crime only to pass a mansion with its doors wide open and the glint of jewels beyond the hallway, I was pulled in again. Just one more job. In case anyone has never heard of Mr. Rubin, he is an interviewer and commentator who began as a mildly left-wing contributor to the Young Turks and then drifted towards the “anti-woke” realms of the “Intellectual Dark Web,” where his talk show became a hub of the phenomenon as he interviewed anyone and everyone who didn’t like “safe spaces” and blue-haired transsexuals.

Tuesday

Pedro L. Gonzalez

Down with the Intellectual Dark Web

In the winter of 2018, Politico magazine ran a 'Culture Wars' issue, providing its delicate, cosmopolitan readership with a glimpse of the intellectual stirrings in the provinces of the empire. One of the articles, 'The Voice of the “Intellectual Dark Web”’, profiled Australian journalist and founding editor of Quillette, Claire Lehmann. At the time, the ‘Intellectual Dark Web’ represented a kind of vanguardism, or at least prestigious media coverage portrayed it as such. For example, Bari Weiss, then a writer for the New York Times, romanticized the concept in a story for the paper. ‘What is the IDW and who is a member of it? It's hard to explain, which is both its beauty and its danger.

intellectual dark web