Thread by @keikoinboston

1. A couple of people sent me @meghan_daum's latest (h/t @kittypurrzog). It's a 28 minute read but I finally got through it and although I haven't been through a divorce in the past few years, so much of what she wrote is familiar.

https://twitter.com/meghan_daum/status/1033047338582007813

@meghan_daum 2. The point at which I realized that some of the left was off the rails was when I covered the June/July 2015 #KimonoWednesdays protests at Boston's MFA. What I thought would be a one post response turned into weeks of coverage & a 3 part postmortem.
japaneseamericaninboston.blogspot.com/2015/07/monets…

@meghan_daum 3. I’m not on Facebook but I started seeing this sort of thing crop up among my friends here and there. Forums, mailing lists, private conversations.

@meghan_daum 4. Yes, definitely from a lot of Gen Xers, picking up the lingo from millennial media or younger friends.

@meghan_daum 5. LOL. Have been here! I actually think my entree into what some now call the intellectual dark web was also through The Glenn Show on @bloggingheads. I saw the show mentioned by some rando on Twitter and dug up the convo with @GlennLoury & @JohnHMcWhorter.

@meghan_daum @JohnHMcWhorter 6. I knew of John’s work as a linguist and had some vague idea that he did race commentary but I had NO IDEA what I’d been missing.

@meghan_daum @JohnHMcWhorter 7. I sent this email to a friend on 8/27/15 when I was struggling to finish the #KimonoWednesdays postmortem. I hadn’t really understood what I had witnessed at the MFA & John’s Daily Beast piece was exactly what I needed.

Links:
bloggingheads.tv/videos/36141
thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/…

@meghan_daum 8. Not sure how many months I took me but after watching a few more of Glenn & John’s convos I went through their entire back catalogue of conversations, going back even before The Glenn Show was The Glenn Show! 😂

@meghan_daum 9. I may have dashed off excited emails to a friend who is also a Glenn & John fan and stayed up until 3am watching the latest episode, umm, a couple of times…

@meghan_daum 10. Not at parties in brownstones but I’ve held my tongue more times than I can count, usually by just chewing my food slowly and staring off into the distance while people cited statistics I knew were wrong or misleading or talked about the latest outrage without nuance.

@meghan_daum 11. But, like Meghan, there were a few conversations with a handful of friends where people rolled their eyes and said things were getting out of control. You couldn’t express an opinion without being speech policed, thought policed, or sometimes identity policed.

@meghan_daum 12. "When combined properly, these pills produced the desired effect of making me feel less crazy.”

There have been times in the past few years when John, Glenn, and a few others on the left were the people keeping me sane. I had wondered for a time if I had become conservative.

@meghan_daum 13. When @BretWeinstein & @HeatherEHeying came on the scene and proclaimed that they were holding on to their progressive values despite what happened to them at Evergreen I realized that it wasn’t I who had changed but others on the left.

@meghan_daum @BretWeinstein @HeatherEHeying 14. Although it’s been 3 years since I found some of the same "YouTube friends” as Meghan, I still do this with the handful of friends I’ve found to also be interested. 😂

As weird as this may seem I’ve been converting some online friends into also being offline friends.

@meghan_daum @BretWeinstein @HeatherEHeying 15. I know some people find the idea of the IDW hokey, distasteful, and any number of other negative attributes but I don’t think this loose coalition is going away.

The have changed the conversation enough the the MSM now reports on more prominent figures in the coalition.

@meghan_daum @BretWeinstein @HeatherEHeying 16. I’ve seen a lot of people say the people in the IDW have made them feel less crazy, less alone. Have also seen some people loosely connected with that part of the YouTube commentary sphere moving into real life meetups and meetings.

@meghan_daum @BretWeinstein @HeatherEHeying 17. Hard to say where it’s going at the moment but anyone writing this group off as must a bunch of “free speech grifters” and their fans a bunch of white male bigots and trolls is missing that there is something afoot here.

@meghan_daum @BretWeinstein @HeatherEHeying 18. People seem starved for nuance, critical thinking, and intelligent arguments over soundbites. Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris, and others wouldn’t be packing theaters if there was nothing going on here.