A bad mash-up of Mad Max and Lord of the Flies.

Over the past few years the Mandarin Class (especially academia and the mainstream media) have been desperate to create a counterbalance to some their own darker attributes.

Antifa is one of the more noticeable fringe left movements. It is impossible to characterize them as anything but far-left and they are notorious for their constant "direct" action against people with whom they disagree. Direct being a euphemism for "violent vattack". They are brutal, angry and a blotch on any sort of brand management campaign to save the image of the left. Videos circulate weekly, if not daily, of some dust-up somewhere of Antifa members attacking virtually everyone else anywhere else. (See here for a not atypical case.)

The Mandarin Class have also had to deal with the fact that they are so monolithically in control of academia and the mainstream media. When 70, 80, 90% self-identify as Democrat or left, it is a little hard to establish the credible argument that there is balance and representation.

The counter to these two issues has taken the form of much bandied about claims regarding alt-right, rising white supremacism, and, most recently, the rising intellectual dark web.

The media in particular have been diligent in pushing these ideas despite the virtual absence of any credible evidence supporting an actual alt-right or any sort of rise of white supremacism. These are pretty much conjured up as useful rhetorical cudgels but without any underpinning in reality as I have documented elsewhere.

The idea of the intellectual dark web is even more laughable. When virtually all the "dark web" intellectuals are self-identified intellectual classical liberals who simply refuse to be brow-beaten or bullied into compliance by an extreme ideology, it is really hard to make them appear sinister and evil.

Sommers, Pinker, Haidt, Harris, Weinstein, Rubin, Murray, Paglia, Peterson, Lehman, Soh - They come in all colors, ages, religious traditions, orientations, etc. The only thing intimidating about them are their accomplishments and their intellectual horsepower. These are not radicals a la Antifa. Take the top 1,000 IDW members and you can rebuild a wonderful, prosperous civilization. Take the top 1,000 intellectual postmodernists, radical feminists, social justice jacobins, etc. and all you get is a bad mash-up of Mad Max and Lord of the Flies.

More than that, this effort by the Mandarin Class to create offsets to their Antifa and intellectual monocultures misses the mark. The opposites of the Antifa and the academy are not the mischaracterized intellectual dark web.

I would argue that there are a couple of candidates for the mirror cognitive counterpoint - 4Chan and Reddit. They are the riotous and provocative counterpoints to Antifa and the academy.

Granted, they are really much better described as anarchists or radical libertarians than anything which might be credibly characterized as conservative, but they are the source of endless assaults on the Mandarin Class and they are the architects of innumerable Mandarin Class pratfalls.

All this was brought to mind by a trashy article about a current embarrassment architected by 4Chan for a mainstream media outlet - The great vegan lasagna entrapment of May 3, 2019. From The Today Show deletes article on vegan lasagna after getting punked by ‘Dick Chmeller’ [screenshots] by Greg P.

a guy from 4chan fooled the today show with a cuck story and the name dick chmeller pic.twitter.com/qnTBsNceux

— coochiepls (@kindman69) May 3, 2019

Leading to this embarrassing acknowledgment.

Click to enlarge.

What is more embarrassing is the fundamental deceit of the Today show. Notice how they positioned a "trend" based on a story from the hot house imagination of a 4Chan member claiming to having fixed this vegan lasagna for his wife and her lover owing to himself having "lost most his genitalia" in an industrial accident. Just how many red flags do there have to be on a story before someone bothers to check whether the reporter did any basic fact checking before simply writing up a trending story they found on the internet, legitimizing it with "A lot of people are really, really into the idea" of vegan lasagna.

Yet another Great Revealing - The mainstream media no longer report, edit and fact-check. They rewrite press releases and summarize cool things they have seen on the internet.