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Jan. 30, 2018 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
06:02
What is The Intellectual Dark Web? | DIRECT MESSAGE | Rubin Report
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06:02
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dave rubin
If you've been watching this show for a while, you know that some of my favorite guests include
people who are firmly on the political left, such as Sam Harris, Brett Weinstein, and Eric
Weinstein.
Some people who are on the political right, such as Ben Shapiro, Dennis Prager, and Larry
Elder.
As well as some people who are hard to place on the conventional spectrum, such as Jordan
Peterson, Phil DeFranco, and Brendan O'Neill.
Of course, if you've been watching for a while, you also know that I think the left-right paradigm of politics is becoming increasingly meaningless, and the new, more relevant spectrum is one of personal freedom vs. state power.
You're either for a society based on laws which treat individual people equally with minimal involvement from the government in their day to day lives, Or, you prefer a society which treats certain groups differently based on immutable characteristics, and thus the government must play a major role in whether they succeed or fail.
The simplest way to say this is you're either for your own determination, or you want to hand it off to someone else.
If I've changed on anything in the past few years, it's that I consistently find myself agreeing with people who fight for individual choice over governmental authority.
If you watch cable news or really listen to any of the mainstream media, this conversation about your ability to live your life as you see fit, which I believe to be the most important conversation happening right now, is barely happening at all.
Actually, I believe almost nothing of real value is happening anywhere in mainstream media.
Cable news is force feeding you an endless back and forth by pundits who consistently get everything wrong, remember Hillary's 99% chance of winning in 2016, while at the same time they mask their opinions as facts and argue about the endless minutia of a broken Washington DC instead of arming you with real knowledge and new ideas.
I don't know that there's anyone specifically to blame for this other than the mainstream media is based on an old dying model that is being replaced by new media and new technology so quickly that it's faults are becoming glaringly obvious.
Fortunately, thanks to YouTube, podcasting, and however else you get shows like this one, the mainstream media's stranglehold on information Which really is a stranglehold on your ability to think clearly about the issues of the day is crumbling at an incredible rate.
Now the question is who and what will replace it?
A few months ago one of my favorite people to sit across this table from, Eric Weinstein, came up with the phrase intellectual dark web to describe this eclectic mix of people from Sam Harris to Ben Shapiro to his brother Brett Weinstein to Jordan Peterson.
All of whom are figuring out ways to have the important and often dangerous conversations that are completely ignored by the mainstream.
It's why I would argue that this collection of people are actually more influential at this point than whatever collection of cable news pundits you can come up with.
And it's not just those names I mentioned above, but people like Joe Rogan who's absolutely killing it on his podcast every week.
It's people like Christina Hoff Summers who's fighting the intersectionality of third wave feminism while still holding hope for feminism's original ambitions of equality of opportunity.
It's also people like James Damore and Lindsey Shepard who are fighting for the true diversity of ideas at Google and universities.
This wide tent of people we're talking about have tremendous political differences when it comes to taxes, abortion, foreign policy and more, but we've all committed ourselves to fighting for our ideas honestly and passionately, but more importantly than that we've committed to the open exchange of ideas and not silencing our opponents no matter how many times they refuse to extend that same courtesy to us.
If you think I'm being hyperbolic about the growing influence of this group, just check the traction these people get on Twitter or Facebook compared to our mainstream competitors.
Twitter may not be real life as I say in my Twitter bio, but it is some barometer of what the zeitgeist is right now.
Not only will the numbers stand on their own, but when you realize that the mainstream people we're talking about have massive amounts of money and influence behind them, and all most of us have is grassroots support from people like you, you can really see what's happening here.
Even look at this very show.
We've come together because we're fighting for our ability to agree to disagree before it's taken away from us.
Last year I talked about a new center in politics, a place where liberals, libertarians, conservatives, anyone who wanted to fight authoritarianism could put aside their differences and come together to find some new solutions as we watch our old institutions of politics and media crumble.
I now realize that the answer I was looking for wasn't purely political, but really cultural as well.
There's something else happening here that we all kinda know, but we haven't been able to totally define.
It's why you, watching this right now, are actually part of this intellectual dark web.
If you engage with these ideas, and you're trying to figure out what the hell is going on, then you are as much part of this thing as I am.
The more you tweet, share, post, and get out there and fight for what you believe, the more space we have to continue to do whatever it is each of us are doing.
There are markers where some of this breaks through to the mainstream, such as Ben Affleck's gross and racist comment hurled at Sam Harris, or when Ben Shapiro smacked down Piers Morgan about guns on CNN, or just this past week when Jordan Peterson calmly dissected an interviewer who was trying to paint him as an extremist for defending free speech.
I suspect there will be many more moments like that this year because the mainstream is finally picking up on what you and I already see.
As I said at the beginning of the year, I believe 2018 will be the year of unusual alliances, and this new intellectual dark web will be at the forefront of that movement.
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