In recent years, YouTube has become a public intellectual arena in its own right. The YouTube video is one of the main vehicles for public intellectual interventions, which are circulated on YouTube by both intellectuals, intermediaries, and audiences. Focusing on the case of Sam Harris, member of The Intellectual Dark Web, a loose collection of intellectuals and YouTube stars, I present part of my PhD thesis, which illustrates how reason and emotion are often juxtaposed and used to position participants of the online culture wars. I exemplify this point by close reading Sam Harris’ public intellectual performance on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher in which a much debated argument with Hollywood actor Ben Affleck came to represent the positional characteristics of contemporary public intellectual discourse.