Henry Farrell has an interesting take on the Intellectual Dark Web. He argues that their sense of resentment is in some ways justified, because they actually have been displaced from the respect and appreciation their views might once have had. In other words, their shitty opinions no longer get the old beard-stroking regard they would have 10 or 20 years ago.

The traditional safe spaces for pseudoscientific speculation have been taken over, almost literally. The New Republic — which Ta-Nehisi Coates has asserted had perhaps two black staff writers or editors in its heyday and was certainly overwhelmingly white — is now being edited by the leftist multicultural barbarians. Slate has moved away from reflex contrarianism toward a more robust liberalism. And William Saletan, to his genuine credit, has written a serious mea culpa for his previous flirtations with race-IQ theorizing.

Today, contrarianism on race and gender is liable to get fierce pushback in the publications of mainstream liberalism. Intellectual ties to the right can win you toleration if you are David Frum, Ross Douthat, or David Brooks. You may be recognized as a member of a minority that needs to be acknowledged, and as a possibly unreliable ally against Donald Trump Republicanism. However, you are unlikely to enjoy real love or deep acceptance.

In absolute terms, dark web intellectuals enjoy far more access to the mainstream than genuine leftists. But in relative terms, they have far lower status than their intellectual forebears of 20 or even 10 years ago. They are not driving the conversation, and sometimes are being driven from it. This loss of relative social status helps explain the anger and resentment that Weiss describes and to some extent herself embodies. It’s hard for erstwhile hegemons to feel happy about their fall.

There is also an irritating but genuine grain of truth deep beneath the layers of whining. Campus leftists and their allies in the media are often no more open to alternative perspectives than the New Republic white male elite of two decades ago; they can behave badly too. But where dark web intellectuals veer from analysis of that phenomenon into self-pity is in their consistent tendency to treat all skeptical criticism of their purported commitment to truth-seeking as further symptoms of political correctness gone mad.

In that sense, it’s kind of a promising development that they now have to get their photos taken while lurking in the bushes at dusk. The flip side, though, is that while the intelligent, educated people have had enough of their bullshit and are willing to rip into them when they open their ignorant mouths, that gives them an additional cachet with the ignorant…and there’s more of them than there are of us. Hence, all the buckets of money being poured over them.

Because it just might.

Police in California detained four women on potential felony charges after a white woman called 911 because the woman of color didn’t return her wave.

Kells Fyffe-Marshall explained how the four women, three of whom are black, were surrounded by 7 cop cars during the ordeal and were told that a helicopter was even tracking the women.

Wow. Detained on potential felony charges because they rented an AirBnB while black.

So, when are these scaredy-cat racist white people going to get surrounded by cops for calling in a false accusation? Or maybe even better, when will the police learn restraint?

I can imagine how the faculty and staff at Colorado State are feeling about this PR disaster. The cops pulled two native American students out of a tour group because someone else in the group phoned in a complaint.

Police body camera footage and telephone recordings captured an incident in which two Native American teenagers were pulled from a Colorado college tour and questioned after another tour member reported “odd” behavior by “creepy kids.”

The accusation: “people were worried because you were real quiet”. Quiet. That’s a crime now? They behaved politely and didn’t cause any trouble…clearly a case for cops.

I blame the racist woman who called this in, but I also blame the police: they should have asked her what they were doing, and when she said they were “real quiet”, they should have said that that’s not a problem, and if you’re going to call up the cops with such bullshit complaints, she’s the one who ought to be pulled out of the tour group and questioned. But no, they take two quiet young men aside and frisk them and ask for proof that they’re actually invited members of the tour.

The CSU president has published a statement about the incident.

Two young men, through no fault of their own, wound up frightened and humiliated because another campus visitor was concerned about their clothes and overall demeanor, which appears to have simply been shyness. The very idea that someone – anyone – might “look” like they don’t belong on a CSU Admissions tour is anathema. People of all races, gender identities, orientations, cultures, religions, heritages, and appearances belong here. As long as you want to earn a great education surrounded by people with the same goal who come from every part of our state, our country, and our world, then you belong here. And if you’re uncomfortable with a diverse and inclusive academic environment, then you probably have a better fit elsewhere.

It would be unfair to penalize the child of the woman who made the baseless complaint, but I hope she at least feels unwelcome at CSU.

We are, in fact, in a battle with hate within our communities. While much of what we have been speaking about is born of ignorance, we can educate against ignorance. The hate that is in the hearts of white supremacists as they attempt to frighten and isolate people across this country is not ignorance. It’s a malignant choice. The increase in racist and anti-Semitic symbols and language and demonstrations across America’s college campuses has been well-documented. We at CSU have simply chosen to deal with these issues in a more open manner, and that comes at a potential reputational cost to CSU for being public when such things occur. But history has shown us that hate grows in the face of silence. Hate is not made uncomfortable. Hate does not shrink from fear. What affects hate is our willingness to shine a bright and unwavering light on it and to face it and confront it.

There is no place for hate at Colorado State University, and we will not be silent when we see it.

Now…chew out the cops, too. Don’t accept the excuse that they were just doing their jobs, because part of their job should be recognizing when exercising pointless authority causes more trouble than it solves.

Hank Azaria has responded to the Apu controversy on The Simpsons. Recently, people woke up to the fact that the character is a terrible stereotype (Hari Kondabolu made a whole movie about it), and Azaria finally thought about it and publicly recognizes that Kondabolu is right, and that the show should change.

Thank you, @HankAzaria. I appreciate what you said & how you said it. https://t.co/Otmxygf3DP

— Hari Kondabolu (@harikondabolu) April 25, 2018

They need real representation in the writer’s room? Yep, that’s always true. If you’re going to feature an ethnic character, you better talk with someone of that ethnicity.

He could have gone the Mickey Rooney/Breakfast at Tiffany’s route.

Rooney, who occasionally shows the Mr. Yunioshi clip as part of his traveling stage show, added, that “Never in all the more than 40 years after we made it — not one complaint. Every place I’ve gone in the world people say, ‘ … you were so funny.’ Asians and Chinese come up to me and say, ‘Mickey you were out of this world.'”

Don’t worry. Rooney forgave people who were offended.

Rooney said that if he’d known people would have been so offended, “I wouldn’t have done it.”

“Those that didn’t like it, I forgive them and God bless America,” he said. “God bless the universe, God bless Japanese, Chinese, Indians, all of them and let’s have peace.”

Azaria’s response is real progress.

One must be guided there, gently, with a series of increasingly radical leaders.

Over at the really racist forum, “The Right Stuff”, the mob of neo-Nazi scum there were chatting about their path to open, proud, assholery, and the SPLC has dissected their commentary. There are no surprises here — they all cite the same old familiar scum, with Jared Taylor and 4chan at the top of the list of influencers.

The number of times each individual or platform was mentioned as an influence was tallied, and those mentioned by three or more posters are listed in the chart below. Disconnected as they might seem, the most cited influences — the “politically incorrect” 4chan board /pol/ and the American Renaissance editor Jared Taylor — hint at two common paths to the alt-right: either through participation in the rampantly racist and misogynistic online trolling culture of 4chan and its offshoots, or through exposure to Taylor’s variety of pseudo-academic “race realism” that couches timeworn racist tropes in the language of science.

Within alt-right spaces like TRS, these two fibers of the movement are woven together — resulting in an ironic, meme-ified version of old-school race science — and embellished with antisemitism.

Taylor is a terrible, awful fraud who pretends to be scientific, but here online you may be more familiar with the poisonous taint of 4chan, which was also heavily into promoting Gamergate. You remember Gamergate — that obnoxious movement of young men who piously declared that it was all about “ethics in gaming journalism”, a phrase that can only be uttered sarcastically, but was really about flaming misogyny. This guy admits it:

Chan culture was male-dominated and heavily misogynistic. The sexism of these spaces eventually led many into the alt-right. According to one poster, “I always hated feminism and female empowerment, despite liking many elements of the left. When I got older and realized the left was only open to feminists or allies i stopped claiming it.”

This extreme anti-feminism gave fuel to various factions of male supremacy, like Men’s Rights Activists (MRAs) and MGTOWs (“Men Going Their Own Way”), who profess to forswear women completely, then complain about them constantly on the internet. Then came Gamergate, a harassment campaign against women in gaming that began in 2014. Anonymous harassers targeted women who worked in or commented on the industry for daring to enter a male-dominated space. Abusers used 4chan and other platforms to organize. After choosing their targets, the mob would dox them, send them rape and death threats, distribute fake pornographic images of them and generally stalk and torment them relentlessly.

It was an extremely important moment in the development of the alt-right, when young men from right-wing online spaces came together in a shared campaign against the “politically correct” culture of the left. One poster described the years 2012 to 2014 as a political “void,” but explained that he was brought back into politics — and entered far more extreme spaces — thanks to Gamergate. After 4chan’s founder Christopher Poole banned discussions of Gamergate from the site, the campaign’s supporters migrated to the more extreme 8chan.

It was all in good fun, right? Funny how the people who drop the word “witch hunt” into conversation so rarely apply it to Gamergate.

Also, I wish this weren’t the case, but there’s another gateway to racism low on the list.

The “skeptics” movement — whose adherents claim to challenge beliefs both scientific and spiritual by questioning the evidence and reasoning that underpin them — has also helped channel people into the alt-right by way of “human biodiversity.” Sam Harris has been one of the movement’s most public faces, and four posters on the TRS thread note his influence.

Under the guise of scientific objectivity, Harris has presented deeply flawed data to perpetuate fear of Muslims and to argue that black people are genetically inferior to whites. In a 2017 podcast, for instance, he argued that opposition to Muslim immigrants in European nations was “perfectly rational” because “you are importing, by definition, some percentage, however small, of radicalized people.” He assured viewers, “This is not an expression of xenophobia; this is the implication of statistics.” More recently, he invited Charles Murray on his podcast. Their conversation centered on an idea that lies far outside of scientific consensus: that racial differences in IQ scores are genetically based. Though mainstream behavioral scientists have demonstrated that intelligence is less significantly affected by genetics than environment (demonstrated by research that shows the IQ gap between black and white Americans is closing, and that the average American IQ has risen dramatically since the mid-twentieth century), Harris still dismissed any criticism of Murray’s work as “politically correct moral panic.”

Oh, yeah, other phrases I’ve come to despise: “politically correct” and “moral panic”. Harris is really good at using all the buzzwords frequently; no wonder he grates on me so much.

Anyway, although I’m sure there are plenty of people who’ve grown up steeped in raging racism from birth, it’s interesting to see how new blood is nurtured into pure evil.

Watch this Ohio couple try to explain how the display of confederate flags, and lawn jockeys with bright red lips and afro wigs are not at all racist — why, they’re just honoring Ohio’s role in the Civil War.

It used to be that if you wanted to stereotype someone as stupid, you’d give them a Southern drawl and have them pretend to be a racist redneck. It’s so nice of Midwesterners to step in and break down our prejudices by showing that people can be thick no matter where they live.

There’s an ongoing protest at a Michigan high school, with Confederate flag waving students irate about an incident in which a black student ripped a traitor’s flag off of a white student’s truck. Now there are dozens of trucks cruising the school with their silly little flags.

I had to ask myself, “Wait a minute, Michigan is as far north as Minnesota, isn’t it? Were they a rebel state, too?” That’s rhetorical, by the way. I looked it up, even though I didn’t need to.

Michigan made a substantial contribution to the Union during the American Civil War. While the state itself was far removed from the combat theaters of the war, Michigan supplied a large number of troops and several generals, including George Armstrong Custer. When, at the beginning of the war, Michigan was asked to supply no more than four regiments, Governor Austin Blair sent seven.

Didn’t these kids learn any history in their high school?

Myers [NO RELATION] said the flag represented “a country boy thing” to him and his friends, and he told a reporter the symbol has been “part of American history” since the founding of the U.S.

“We’re flying the flag because of injustice,” Myers said. “It looks cool in the mirror,” he said.

No, apparently they did not.

I guess flying a flag representing slavery is actually “because of injustice”, just not the way they understand it.