Re-enter Phoebe Maltz-Bovy, Kat Rosenfield, Katie Herzog, and Jesse Singal. Like Daum, I made my discovery watching Bloggingheads (which is not necessarily a contrarian space as much as one that brings in many different viewpoints). Executive editor Aryeh Cohen-Wade played in the adjacent-to-the-movement Joe Rogan role by providing a platform along with some sympathy for their insights. This is a group of liberals who don’t mind expressing serious reservations about liberal and leftist group-think — an “Intellectual Lite Web,” if you will (that’s ILW for short, thank you very much). There’s significant overlap with the IDW’s concerns, but I’ll argue the ILW is a much more sobered-up version of contrarianism. If any of you have flirted with or otherwise had “affairs” with the stances of Jordan Peterson, Dave Rubin, the Weinstein’s, etc., then the Intellectual Lite Web offers the thinking you might want to settle down with.

Starting with Jesse Singal, Cohen-Wade had him on Bloggingheads in February 2016 to discuss his article, “How the Fight Over Transgender Kids Got a Leading Sex Researcher Fired.” It’s hard to discuss the article without instead discussing the controversy surrounding it, which continues literally up to the time of this writing. Up front, I should tell you that, unsurprisingly, I am not an expert on this topic, and it’s a topic Singal has covered extensively. I submit that one important question isn’t so much whether Singal’s work is right or wrong, but whether it’s warranted and credible on the one hand, or beyond the pale, on the other. Singal’s detractors assert that he’s not only wrong, but trans-phobic. Again whether Singal’s work meets the standards of experts in the field is not my area, but it’s certainly engaging work, and it’s at least not inarguably trans-phobic.

An obstacle to mutual understanding is that Singal’s accusers typically seem unprepared to justify their accusation of trans-phobia, as opposed condemning anyone who doesn't already find it obvious, and I plead guilty to not already finding it obvious. It’s important here to separate any possible 1st order disagreement on the quality of Singal’s work, a level on which there can be intense disagreement without getting personal, and 2nd order disagreement on whether or not Singal’s work is so egregiously wrong or otherwise malicious so as to count as out-of-bounds for serious people. The latter is a much higher bar for detractors to clear.

In the Bloggingheads conversation, Singal delved into the reaction his article garnered, acknowledging the daze and perhaps even downright trauma of a not uncommon occurrence in today’s climate, and that’s being on the receiving end of continuous condemnations by seemingly hundreds of people, day after day, sometimes including attempts to get people fired, and sometimes even more. But he quickly added perspective, saying “The one thing I want to say is, as I’m whining and bitching to you, I’m eating an M&M cookie and drinking a beer, in my office at my job that I love. I want people to imagine, the shit that happens to me happens to people who are much less able to take it. I’ll totally be fine. I’m over it, other than being a little bit pissed off. Often this stuff targets people who are much more vulnerable and marginalized” (per the beer and cookie, conversations on Bloggingheads often occur in a very informal setting, sometimes including house pets walking by the screen).

In an earlier part of the conversation, the topic of science denialism on the left was broached, and Singal again clarified “I should be clear that … right-leaning science denialism does a great deal more damage. Climate denialism could eventually kill us all. You have Republicans aggressively lobbying to prevent the CDC from studying gun violence. You have all kinds of stuff like that.” That sounds fair. You can read a defense of his work Signal wrote, along with a collection of articles advancing serious objections.

Katie Herzog is up next. She writes for The Stranger, a Seattle based alt weekly. Herzog has been heavily involved in many tug-of-war disputes on the proper boundaries of political conversation as well, but in particular her take on Jordan Peterson is instructive here. She discussed it on Bloggingheads on Cohen-Wade’s show Culturally Determined, defending Peterson for at least being misinterpreted at times. “The reason that I’ve become sort of a defender of Jordan Peterson is because of the outsized reaction to him.” It’s not uncommon to hear him accused of white supremacy, rape culture, etc. She also stated bluntly, “I find him pretty boring” and referred to his speculations as “bullshit.” So does Herzog like Peterson, or doesn’t she? Nuance is hard, but suffice it to say, Herzog’s reporting invites us to hold multiple thoughts in our heads at once — multiple thoughts, or short of that, stepping back and surveying the situation.

That’s what Herzog recently recommended (on Nightline) on the latest cultural and political battle that took over our devices and conversations, the incident involving the Covington High School or “MAGA boys” and their hostile interaction with a drum-beating elderly Native American man at the Lincoln Memorial. To advise “caution” on that topic on national television, this soon after the incident, is to really put your head in the wood chipper, something Herzog’s perfectly willing to do if need be. Of course none of this is an obstacle to keeping track of the relative harm caused by each side of the aisle, as Herzog does in this piece trying to get through to Dave Rubin.

It’s not all gloom and doom with these thinkers. Herzog is also, how should I say it while doing it justice, quite interested in the marijuana beat. A run-down includes, “Crafting Ideas for People Who Smoke a Lot of Pot,” “Most Regrettable Mistakes in the Pot Industry in 2018,” “Instagram Shuts Down a Popular Cannabis Account — Repeatedly,” and “Mexico’s Supreme Court Rules in Favor of Cannabis Legalization.” Of course, she’s in the Pacific Northwest. I’m in Texas, so that all still absurdly counts as subversive.

The next two thinkers are Phoebe Maltz-Bovy and Kat Rosenfield. Mentioning them together fits, as after appearing on Bloggingheads several times as guests, they started a regular show of their own called Feminine Chaos, a light jab at Peterson’s blather. Maltz-Bovy and Rosenfield cover general issues — everything from the all-beef diet of Jordan Peterson’s daughter Mikhaila Peterson, to the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, with a myriad of subjects in between. Recently, they looked under the rock of the ambiguities of affirmative consent on college campuses. Another incredibly fraught area.

Rosenfield and Maltz-Bovy provide a 1–2 punch, but each are convincing enough on their own (and incidentally, they probably have the highest rate of unscripted pet appearances on all of Bloggingheads). Rosenfield is a freelance journalist, pop culture reporter and author of two Young Adult (YA) novels. She’s been “mobbed” for her ideas enough to know the inhospitable terrain. One such occasion was when she broke down a controversy in the YA fiction genre surrounding The Black Witch, a fantasy novel accused of racism.

The backlash was over her article “The Toxic Drama of YA Twitter,” which defended the book (Laurie Forest’s debut novel), at least from tactics that sought to lower its rating by heading over to Goodreads en masse and giving it 1-star reviews, of course without ever having read it. In fact, Rosenfield tells us, people took to tweeting out, “If you plan on reading The Black Witch, unfollow me.” Maybe it sounds quaint, but I would think that determining the merits of each side’s case would involve reading the book and the objections, but of course you can’t do that if you can’t, you know, read the book?

The form of the objections are helpful to situating them. Even the most blistering review stated that the book was intended as anti-racist, it just failed so horribly that it turned out to be “the most dangerous, offensive, book I’ve ever read.” A more grounded critical review (the main editorial review on the book’s Amazon page) stated “In a particularly rough, tone-deaf scene, mean girl Fallon berates Effrey, a purple-skinned enslaved Urisk girl. Elloren eventually comes to the rescue, and Sparrow, another enslaved girl, approves of her actions with a smile — just one of the many white savior — like moments throughout.” The critiques are in line with Rosenfield’s take that the book was called-out for centering “the wrong kind of person,” not that it presented the wrong macro lessons on racism.

It seems completely fair to have conversations about the patterns in books, movies, etc., which repeatedly place white characters in central roles even when the main context is one of racial discrimination against people of color. What’s more, these white characters are usually the most crucial in achieving a positive outcome for the marginalized races, i.e. the “white savior.” But Rosenfield explains that this was a new author who lacked the fan-base to defend against this kind of online pile-on. The tactics of the pile-on made reading the book irrelevant, except if you had, in which case you failed as an ally. Again, we can hold multiple thoughts at once, which in cases like this would likely involve putting the book’s (hypothetically!) facile treatment of race in its proper context, which likely wouldn’t include it being “the most dangerous thing” anyone has ever read. And again, that assumes that the claim of a weaker racism is true, which is undetermined.

The enlightened left wants us to see dust-ups like this as marginal, a few college students being dumb here and there, which is nothing newsworthy. It’s hard to do that when there are tangible consequences, and in any case when you have enough examples like these, and everyone knows something like this happens pretty frequently, it seems, well, newsworthy.

Rosenfield’s most recent work was on “performative male allies” in the piece “Birth of the Cool Guy,” which examines a familiar person we all know: the too preening, ready-to-pounce and demonstrate that he’s a wokebro ally, or in this case, the Cool Guy. Whether he’s “disavowing masculinity entirely or only distancing himself from it — the Cool Guy’s performance inches him incrementally closer to the new nexus of cultural power.” The writing is scorching. The last thing you want after reading the piece is to be the Cool Guy. It’s almost enough to make a fella want to counter-signal. If you’re new to this intellectual neighborhood, it can be hard to keep up with who’s signaling what at this point. In other words, both sides can accuse the other of taking a stance to merely signal a certain kind of in-group status or just to spite someone (i.e. “virtue signaling,” “contrarian” etc).

Phoebe Maltz-Bovy is the other half of the “Feminine Chaos” duo and a writer and French Lecturer at the University of Toronto. Her book The Perils of “Privilege” outlines the complications and limitations of a “privilege” based social justice framework. Putting “Privilege” in quotations, Maltz-Bovy explains, is to avoid the impression the term would give without quotations, which is that genuine privilege is a real burden. Yet with the quotes, it’s meant to be about a certain conception of privilege, a conception that’s in dispute.

If you’ve grokked the spirit of the group I’ve sketched so far, it won’t surprise you that the book is not a partisan screed against the most basic concept of privilege. As Maltz-Bovy explains in a Canadian TV interview, she believes that privilege is real, that systemic inequality is real. Yet, there’s a specialized context in which accusations of privilege come — e.g. “check your privilege” — and that context doesn’t track other normal uses of the term. She explains that if one is cisgender (identifying with the gender one is assigned at birth) then that’s surely easier than being transgender, yet the vast majority of people who are cisgender are not privileged in any other context, so there’s no existing precedent for people to use or rely on. The disconnect leads to people “missing the point in a way they wouldn’t necessarily miss the point if this had been phrased otherwise.”

Further, the concept is often used only as a cudgel among similarly situated people, such as two white people or two wealthy people. Or worse yet, two wealthy white people, (think of a casual political conversation in Brooklyn, for example, that takes place with all the rhetorical weapons of woke vocabulary). When the accusation comes in that context, it’s not clear what the called-out party should do to ameliorate or correct the situation. The account of who possesses privilege will also change as the perspective changes. About half-way through the interview, when considering who has privilege from the point of view of a Trump supporter, Maltz-Bovy first clarified “I am not a Trump supporter at all. I am very very anti-Trump myself.” She somehow still didn’t seem confrontational saying it.

That’s because Maltz-Bovy has a self-possessed delivery that you naturally trust. She’s the good Rubin — composed, but in a way that gets you somewhere. I’m imposing a characteristically male, adversarial frame on this that doesn’t really line up with her style, (wait, I keep forgetting I don’t have to perform that here!). OK if you were, say, a public figure on twitter who frequently goes around challenging people to debate, you might see someone like Maltz-Bovy, carefully crafting her thoughts in real time in order to deliver the most pristine and justified statement, and you might think you could roll to victory on bluster alone. You would be wrong. While she’s crafting her statements with maturity and you’re chomping at the bit to deliver a pedantic point, you would miss the hard-to-handle insight she articulates. The reason she crafts her statements carefully is that she appears to care a great deal about giving the most thoughtful diagnosis on the topic at hand, but also because she’s dealing with more information, way more information than you’re dealing with (remember, you’re this hypothetical twitter jock). She’s going into territory that requires navigating through and around potholes and crevices and by ravines and roving bandits and still bringing the point home, all while you’re impatiently waiting to speak.

This is communicative virtue, and each thinker I’ve highlighted in this new group displays it in one way or another. Some of us care a great deal about these kinds of communicative values — speaking for myself, in some cases even as much as the issues themselves. Others on the left see a prioritization like this one as a kind of crypto-conservatism, and we haven’t moved far beyond this impasse.

In any case, Herzog, Rosenfield, Maltz-Bovy, and Singal (see how much easier it is to just say “ILW?”), are rounded out by interests other than the kinds of disputes I’ve highlighted, but circumstances have partially shifted their attention to dissenting from or tempering prevailing trends. There may be others who fit into this niche as it evolves over time. Will Alice Dreger break down and join this group? Will Meghan Daum start anew with the ILW? Will John McWhorter come over if Glenn Loury gets on his nerves? I’m kidding with those questions. A little. McWhorter and others have made the point that independent minded people aren’t “joiners” so they likely won’t see any value in attaching a specific group-name to themselves.

But there are no membership contracts here, just helpful labels that pick out distinct phenomena, and at the very least mentioning these thinkers is me taking a stab at the kind of expansion I could see as consistent. My main point is just that this space exists and should be seen as related to but distinct from the IDW (Dreger has referenced a similar sounding “Intellectual Light Web” before, and Nathan J. Robinson employed the same term in a different context, but neither seem tightly connected to the specifically pro-contrarian, anti-IDW space mapped out here).