"I'm Just Asking Some Questions"

"I'm just asking us to imagine a strange world in which the interests of the wealthy mattered far more than the interests of the poor, and in which the good people got left behind while the bad people were honored and celebrated. But let's stick with the idea, just a moment longer. In this kind of world, what would we make of people like the members of the 'Intellectual Dark Web,' who insist that their ideas pose a challenge to the mainstream consensus? Well, first we'd have to look at the ideas themselves. But if those ideas turned out to coincide remarkably well with the interests of those who are already wealthy and powerful, and if those ideas seemed to downplay, deny, and evade all of the contrary evidence, we might begin to suspect that these Dissident Intellectuals should not, in fact, rightfully be considered dissidents. In this kind of world, the real dissidents would be the ones whose names we didn't know, the ones who were trying to dredge up the truths nobody wanted to listen to, rather than the people whose faces and opinions were constantly in the newspapers. The dangerous ideas would be the ones that weren't spoken from the White House and on cable news, because they actually indicted those institutions rather than benefiting them."

Nathan J. Robinson of Current Affairs proposes "a thought experiment."