22 Comments
User's avatar
Justus's avatar

The IDW did not age well.

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Matt Whiteley's avatar

They did not

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Lisa Brockwell's avatar

brett is nostalgic for it and brings it up even now. its few sane members rejected it. but it was the one time BW got to be in a club. in his defence - jeez can you imagine the burden of growing up the thicker weinstein brother

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Thomas Jardine's avatar

I watched that episode. I stopped watching and went outside to work in the yard, pulling vines off the fence, digging up a few weeds.

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Brian M's avatar

Are you overthinking this? Maybe he’s just become mentally ill? Like so many of those Alpha Male dark web dweebs

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Matt Whiteley's avatar

You may have a point

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Virgin Monk Boy's avatar

Bret Weinstein is what happens when a smart man decides the only peer review he needs is a ring light and a YouTube login. His so-called “evolutionary reasoning” feels less like Darwin and more like dorm-room Darwinism, where vague feelings about the end of the world get dressed up in natural selection metaphors and sold as insight.

You nailed it. He’s not Icke. He’s worse, because he sounds plausible to people who confuse word count with wisdom. And somehow “being silenced” now comes with subscriber perks and Rogan appearances.

The tragic part? It’s not just the meandering theories. It’s the lonely model of thinking. One where feedback is exile, and every disagreement is proof of persecution. That’s not rationalism. That’s intellectual monasticism pretending to be courageous inquiry.

Anyway, thanks for this dissection. If bad ideas could fossilize, Bret would already be studied by future archaeologists of the internet.

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Bill Simpson's avatar

The internet gives platforms to people who are smart at one thing to show how stupid they can be at many other things.

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Jan's avatar

I used to listen to Bret all the time...Jordan too. Their falling out of favor was so subtle I didn't even notice their absence.

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Persnickety Poore's avatar

Well, had there been more freedom of speech and intellectual diversity inside academia, both he and Jordan Peterson would still be teaching and doing research, rather than be influential in the public sphere, despite their questionable stability.

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Matt Whiteley's avatar

This is true, neither of them should have been chased out in the first place, they're both middling professors who would be much better off in their original environment.

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George MF Washington's avatar

Weinstein is definitely one of those guys who, if your critical thinking faculties are in good working order, you stopped paying attention to several years ago.

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Bruno S.'s avatar

And Jordan Peterson is the same thing for anyone with an actual classical education.

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George MF Washington's avatar

What a lot of them have in common is that they are struggling to come up with something as culturally relevant as the thing they first became known for. And the temptation is to follow the algorithm down into insanity

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Dogscratcher's avatar

“…like a kind of philosophy where you just rationalise an answer rather than an epistemology that requires rigorous evidence in a scientific context that recognises evolution is not an abstraction but a history.”

Very well said

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Johanas Silento's avatar

Solid thoughts and commentary. Brett is an interesting character, and your review of his intellectualism is fair. Your point regarding his perspective on the holocaust tracks given Brett's understanding of reality, namely, it's all mere matter in motion... it is all surface. There are no men with morals, only biological machines acting off "instinct". His doom narrative is inescapable because machines do not reject programming; how could they? However, if we applied this to him and his choices, I would assume inconsistencies would quickly emerge.

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Stefan Kelly's avatar

Honestly sounds like psychosis, very common to think you are an all-seeing messiah type

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Fr. Isaac Bradshaw's avatar

Not sure if you’re aware of the Decoding the Gurus podcast, but their episode on Bret puts a lot of the grievance mongering/Cassandra-as-personality disorder into context.

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Athos's avatar

I think what these types of critiques often miss is why conspiratorial thinking has proliferated in recent years. You can blame the producers of this sort of content, but it does not explain why so many average people are receptive. Many people, who ten years ago would have scoffed at many of these conspiracy theories, are now the biggest purveyors. The receptiveness of the general population is completely the fault of mainstream news, educational, and political organizations proving to be unreliable at best and outright deceitful at worst.

Odd-ball conspiracy theorists, who challenge the main stream narratives, will always exist. How much legitimacy they are given depends on the reliability of traditional mainstream institutions.

Been enjoying your articles recently, thank you for sharing.

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JimmyB's avatar

Thanks for shining a lamp on the intellectual dark web, which seems to be mostly composed of dusty cobwebs hanging from the underside of neglected and rotten barn beams. There is, of course, a reason the spiders were left free to spin, but it's done nothing to repair the structure.

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Daniel Khastou's avatar

I remember watching the small documentary made about what happened at the evergreen college and I remember it being absolutely insane. I think it’s hard to come out of something like that fine without some time to process it, and then when Covid hit he probably just went full spiral. Not saying he was ever a great thinker to begin with, but it’s interesting to see how someone who was able to deal with what happened at that college has now become completely deluded in a different way.

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The JAB's avatar

I used to like Bret until I read his book. One of the claims in it was, “maybe we should reconsider everything about how we treat broken bones.” The “evidence” he put forward in support of this were 2.5 personal anecdotes, one of which undermined his argument. He would have been given an F if he turned that in as a high school paper.

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