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aristarchus [soylentnews.org] writes:

The alt-right rebellion against conformity, political correctness, sanity, and science, continues. Coverage, extended coverage, of Quillette [quillette.com], or at least its founding editor, is to be found at Politico [politico.com]:

One evening this fall at a house in West Hollywood, the Australian editor and writer Claire Lehmann had dinner with the neuroscientist Sam Harris and Eric Weinstein, the managing director of tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel’s investment firm. Joe Rogan, the podcast host, joined later on, when the group decamped to a comedy club.

Aussie, eh? Crickey!

You could think of the gathering as a board meeting of sorts for the “intellectual dark web,” or IDW, a loose cadre of academics, journalists and tech entrepreneurs who view themselves as standing up to the knee-jerk left-leaning politics of academia and the media. Over the past year, the IDW has arisen as a puzzling political force, made up of thinkers who support “Enlightenment values” and accuse the left of setting dangerously illiberal limits on acceptable thought. The IDW has defined itself mainly by diving into third-rail topics like the genetics of gender and racial difference—territory that seems even more fraught in the era of #MeToo and the Trump resistance. But part of the attraction of the IDW is the sense that many more people agree with its principles than can come forward publicly: The dinner host on this night, Lehmann says, was a famous person she would prefer not to name.

This is where things start to get interesting. Are they being oppressed?

For readers and thinkers who regard themselves as intellectually curious but feel alienated from the lock-step politics of universities and the broader left, Quillette has become a haven for stories like this—and topics treated as taboo elsewhere. At times, it has drawn intense social media backlash, with contributors labeled everything from “clowns” to “cryptofascists” on Twitter. But fans of the site include pop psychologist Jordan Peterson, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, psychology professors Steven Pinker of Harvard and Jonathan Haidt of New York University, and columnists like David Brooks, Meghan Daum and Andrew Sullivan.

So are they intellectual, or are they "dark"? Given the term, "enlightenment", you would think one would have to make a choice between the two!

This kind of prominence hardly seemed inevitable when Lehmann, now 33, founded Quillette in 2015. She was pregnant and had recently decided against finishing her master’s degree in forensic psychology. The site, with the tagline “a platform for free thought,” began as a repository for psychologists, particularly evolutionary ones, to write in an accessible way about topics relating to human nature. Contributors often shared Lehmann’s interest in debunking the “blank slate” theory of human development, which postulates that individuals are largely products of nurture, not nature. But, Lehmann told me, it quickly grew beyond that topic. In “setting up a space where we could critique the blank slate orthodoxy,” she says, Quillette “has naturally evolved into a place where people critique other aspects of what they see as left-wing orthodoxy.”

Well, that is probably enough to whet the appetite of anyone interested. But I do notice one thing. Why are all these "heterodox" things founded by people who have failed or dropped out of the actual world? One is reminded of Erik Prince playing Navy SEAL, or D'nesh D'Souza being a University president. And what is it with the Commonwealth countries, notably Australia and Canada, being the hotbeds of alt-right "thinking"?

In any case, the piece in Politico is rather enlightening in and of itself, and is highly recommended by yours truly. And maybe it is time we all read this new book, The Curdling of the American Mind [theguardian.com], which is well reviewed by The Guardian [theguardian.com]. Mmmm. Cheese.

Original Submission