Daum writes about feeling old, spending too much time online, and getting ornery about the politics of young people. Photograph by Nina Subin

The writer Meghan Daum has told her life story in her books. She documented her salad days of debt and dating in New York in “My Misspent Youth.” She novelized the story of an idealistic move to Nebraska in “The Quality of Life Report.” In “Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House,” she described moving to Los Angeles and buying her first home. In “The Unspeakable,” she wrote about the death of her mother, an illness that almost killed her, and her decision not to have children.

In 2015, Daum separated from her husband and moved from Los Angeles to New York, a city she had left some fifteen years before. Confronting divorce and passing into her late forties, she began a descent along “a downward slope of my youth that was far steeper than I had any grasp of at the time.” She was spending a lot of time on the Internet—by her own reckoning, “three-quarters of my waking hours”—when Donald Trump took office. “By the time #MeToo reached full force,” she continues, “my brain no longer felt connected to my body.”

It was in this state that she started feeling annoyed. It began with the tone of feminists online. The women’s movement, she thought, had lost the capacity to process nuance; it was instead becoming a “noisepool” of complaints. “I was tired of the one-note outrage, the snarky memes, the exhibitionism, the ironic misandry in the vein of #KillAllMen, the commodification of the concept of ‘giving zero fucks,’ ” she writes. Daum wondered when women became so pleased about thinking of themselves as victims. Were they, in fact, so oppressed? She decided to write “a book about feminism and only feminism.” The book was going to be called “You Are Not a Badass.”

Then Trump got elected. The scope of her irritation expanded beyond feminism to “everything.” Now it was not only the rah-rah feminists who bothered her but also the “smug vibe of many young activists within the new left,” especially the ones who considered themselves “woke.” The Internet she explored every day was filled with “hollow indignation and performed outrage.” When, in the fall of 2017, the accusations against Harvey Weinstein prompted an outpouring of stories about sexual harassment and rape, Daum’s annoyance turned to concern. Men were being punished for sexual assault without what she thought to be due process. The definition of sexual assault, in her opinion, had become too broad—unwanted kissing, groping, or ejaculating inside someone without her permission weren’t really acts of violence. Her book changed from an argument about feminism to “The Problem with Everything: My Journey Through the New Culture Wars,” about feeling old, spending too much time scrolling through social media, and getting ornery about the politics of young people. “I’ve never been more afraid of writing a book,” she writes. “I’ve never been more certain I had to.”

In the midst of Daum’s ennui, in 2015, she discovered a number of online cultural pundits who quickened her pulse and made her feel alive: they included the economist Glenn Loury and the linguist John McWhorter, who discussed American race relations on BloggingHeads.tv; the YouTube talk-show host Dave Rubin; the neuroscientist and podcaster Sam Harris; the “factual feminist” philosopher Christina Hoff Sommers; and the notorious Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson. Members of this group made self-recorded videos on what Daum calls “Free Speech YouTube” or appeared as guests on “Real Time with Bill Maher” and “The Joe Rogan Experience.” Some of them were tenured professors or essayists who wrote for magazines such as The Atlantic and Reason. In their essays, panels, and podcasts, they rejected the idea that sexist, racist, and homophobic microaggressions are as traumatic as college-educated liberals in the United States tend to believe, or that the “privilege” bestowed by being white, heterosexual, or cisgender is rooted in empirical fact. Some have disputed the data that indicate systemic inequality exists. Others have argued that structural inequalities reflect innate biological or genetic propensities across groups, or insist on seeing gender as an immutable biological difference. What they have in common is a belief that attempts to correct the wrongs of history and remedy inequality have resulted in authoritarian overreach and a culture of censorship.

In the past couple of years, what was at first a loose collection of individuals has evolved into a retweeting cohort. In 2018, the Times columnist Bari Weiss characterized them as a movement, in an opinion piece that popularized their self-christening as the “Intellectual Dark Web.” The “Dark Web” part is a misnomer—you can’t buy LSD on YouTube, as far as I know, and you can watch a Bloggingheads video without knowing how to use Tor. But evoking illicitness is important to their identity—it gives them the frisson of speaking the forbidden, a rhetorical strategy that Daum also deploys. She writes of being thrilled at Loury’s and McWhorter’s criticism of white fans of Ta-Nehisi Coates, whom she describes as “the unofficial paterfamilias of the wokescenti.” She quotes McWhorter saying that “the elevation of that kind of dorm-lounge performance art as serious thought is a kind of soft bigotry.” I thought of George W. Bush, who first described “another kind of bias: the soft bigotry of low expectations,” in a speech about No Child Left Behind. It’s one thing to critique Coates’s writing or ideas and another to hint that the millions of readers who found meaning in his work were grading him on a curve.

Daum insists that she was not red-pilled, making few ideological commitments in the book beyond valuing disagreement. Her own “nuance” seems to preclude commitment to any particular position. She can’t quite bring herself to defend Peterson—who has framed his transphobia as a free-speech issue (he refuses to use gender-neutral pronouns) and his sexism as science (he believes that sex and class hierarchies are determined by biology)—but she can at least defend “his right to exist.” Daum hems and haws about his popularity with young fascists. Many of Peterson’s ideas “seem perfectly reasonable once you get past his bluster,” she writes.

Daum presents herself as a bit of a lurker, haunting the fringes of this world without becoming one of its pundits. She portrays herself instead as a liberal inspecting her own house for evidence of hypocrisy. “I felt an obligation to hold the left to account because, for all my frustrations with it, I was still of it,” she writes. As long as she doesn’t commit to some of the views of Free Speech YouTube, especially those that emphasize the rightness of hierarchy, I suppose she can still say she is “of the left,” which she also fails to define. But being “of the left” is not a purely materialist position. Right now, it also indicates a set of values, most obviously fairness, in which political correctness is a form of good etiquette practiced by well-intentioned people.

Daum argues that her annoyance with the demographic she calls the “sensitivity readers” is a generational one. She was born in 1970, a proud member of Generation X. She recalls a childhood when children’s clothing was unisex and young people were less coddled. To Daum, someone only ten years younger than her “might as well belong to a different geological epoch.” “In this epoch,” she continues, “there are no pay phones for calling friends at the spur of the moment. The contact highs from walking down the street have been replaced by dopamine hits from Instagram likes. To a young person, someone like me is not so much an elder as an extinction.”