Candace Owen on Joe Rogan

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I'll say watch this at your own risk, because I know a lot of people here would probably have blood shooting out of their eyes over this, my advice - save your health, let someone else watch it.

While I'm watching/listening to this I'm mainly chewing over the question of Candace Owens and Kanye West getting associated with the Intellectual Dark Web. I already had some thoughts on this and this interview so far (I'm maybe an hour in) underscores what I was already thinking - this has more to do with a black/afro-American conservative/libertarian ethos finding itself as a thing in the broader culture. It could have happened a lot earlier if Thomas Sowell had been a household name or had celebrities tweeting about him but he did most of his work at a time that might have been too soon to catch on and I'd add that his work came also at a time where network news had the narrative, thus his thoughts mainly stayed in a certain corner of academia and the silent minority of the minority, ie. black conservatives who were ignored by network news, were reading his work.

I get the importance that Candace said that Kanye's tweet had for a black community who already has a fair amount of Trump supporters, ie. that with the internet and social isolation by immediate proximity not being a thing anymore there's a sort of up-welling of the libertarian ethos without it necessarily being Hotep, Five Percent, Nation of Islam, or anything like that.

But it makes me wonder though, what would we consider the substance of the IDW? Dave Rubin was talking to Niall Ferguson (political history professor, author, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali's husband) and they agreed that IDW is sort of splitting off into two camps, allied and friendly camps nonetheless but their ethos and center of focus tends to be a bit different - and I'd fully agree. With Candace, Kanye, and I'd even add Ben Shapiro to this circle, is they're the portion whose trying to either re-bake/purify neoconservative ideals and/or broaden their relevance to people who weren't in it or felt alienated from it before. Somewhat to the other side you have Brett and Eric Weinstein, I might add Sam Harris and Jonathan Haidt to this group as well, who might fit the newly coined term neo-progressive, in that they're trying to reclaim 'progressive' as truly about progress and making social progress rather than term being a stand-in for a slush fund of Marxism, identity politics, and post-modern philosophy. In some ways I see Jordan Peterson, Dave Rubin, and Joe Rogan sort of on the fence on this, Dave and Joe because they're the guys who sort of help bring everyone together and Jordan for perhaps more important reasons - ie. he doesn't really fit the left/right dimensionality of this and his interest really seems to be more dedicated to hashing out the public psychological state and forecasting what he thinks are the worrying cultural trends in the areas he's familiar with.

What they all have in common is that they can have productive conversations and I think their main divisions aren't even necessarily of a variety that will end up being problematic, I think it's more like just having different areas of specialty or focus.

I think the one thing that Niall did say that worried me was that IDW couldn't be a closed network without having someone within it be the gatekeeper, which tends to cause more problems than it's worth, and the alternate is to make it an open network - which I do worry exposes them to an injection of cukes. I do wonder if that last bit, aside from these odd smears that the MSM has attempted to build by associating Jordan Peterson in one breath with Milo and Alex Jones, might suggest that if the smear pieces don't work the next step will be sending the sort of trojan horse figures into the IDW to poison the well that way.

Any which way I think it's important to keep track of what people are thinking in, above, and below the center rather than worrying so much about the far right and left and in that sense this groups is definitely worth paying attention to because they're likely to grow in relevance as a culture-shaping force over the next several years rather than decline.