Recently, Dave Rubin tweeted a video of Will Smith giving credit to Kanye West for his endurance through the blowback by media and Hollywood, resulting from his pursuit of “ideas.”
“It’s not an easy task to say and do things that elevate people. That’s what I love about Kanye right now, and he is willing to take the smash down in order to push ideas,” said Smith.
Rubin welcomed Smith to the Intellectual Dark Web (IDW).
IDW is a controversial subject to some, an unknown acronym to others, but most importantly, it’s an informational safe haven.
As reported by The New York Times, the IDW “is a collection of iconoclastic thinkers, academic renegades and media personalities who are having a rolling conversation — on podcasts, YouTube and Twitter, and in sold-out auditoriums — that sound unlike anything else happening, at least publicly, in the culture right now.”
It is a break from the controlled narrative, a glitch in the system, and a powerful movement that is wrecking through the ironclad control of establishment media.
Dr. Eric Weinstein, accredited with coining the term IDW, elaborated further on a Rubin Report podcast: “We have gained the confidence with each other that [dialogue] won’t devolve into name-calling.”
In a hyper-polarized culture, when losing the battle of ideas, some lose gracefully, while others not so much. The dialogue begins to break down and the integrity of the process is lost: winning only matters, not being accurate or honest.
The New York Times paints a vivid picture of a potential IDW meeting: “First, they are willing to disagree ferociously, but talk civilly, about nearly every meaningful subject: religion, abortion, immigration, the nature of consciousness. Second, in an age in which popular feelings about the way things ought to be often override facts about the way things actually are, each is determined to resist parroting what’s politically convenient.”
Confirming the intellectual honesty and rigorousness of the IDW, Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro reflects on a conversation with Sam Harris: “I want to hear the most sophisticated version of the pro-choice argument, not the simplest. There is something adventurous about someone who is exposing a rift in your thinking that now has to be [reckoned] with,” Shapiro stated.
Dr. Jordan Peterson makes the observation that by getting points of view intelligently challenged, one can refine rhetoric as well as the ability to manage reality effectively: “I know my arguments are part of a tool kit that I use to operate effectively in the world, and if my arguments are more fine-tuned and sharper, and if I’m able to account for a wider range of phenomena because someone has put facts that are harder for me to incorporate, then I can operate more effectively in the world.”
Below is Shapiro discussing why “Leftists fear the IDW” on his podcast back in May: