IMO (4) is a fatal and clumsy misstep for the entire article, and betrays a profound lack of contact with Nietzsche's own writing on the part of the author.
Nietzsche never would have uncritically claimed mainstream culture does our best thinking any more than he would have given such an honor to academia. So it's bizarre to see his thought appropriated to that end. He was, in fact, extremely concerned with the difference between culture that is merely popular and a genuine, healthy, thriving culture. He saw academics and journalists as frequent accomplices in the destruction of a thriving, healthy culture by their appeals to popular taste and public opinion. By their spinning rigorous sounding tales that merely served to comfort (or discomfort) individuals and reinforce their existing opinions no matter how deleterious or suspect such opinions were (eg. about morality, the nobility of the common man, the goodness/badness of state institutions, etc). Additionally, he was just as concerned about the influence exerted by nation states on thought as he was about the similar influence exerted by public opinion, common sense, and mainstream culture.
To simplify the formula down to "mainstream culture" vs. "the state influenced academics" is to be overly reductionist and to overlook the part every segment of society plays in producing uncritical thought.
For more clarity here I would read Nietzsche's "Untimely Meditation" on 'cultural philistinism' - "David Strauss: the confessor and the writer", and "Beyond Good and Evil" namely the section "Peoples and Fatherlands" for an idea of his approach to critique of mainstream culture in his time.
I don't see the article claiming Nietzsche would praise popular culture - it seems to claim otherwise ("Anti-academic Nietzsche may have been, but his mistake was in pinning his hopes on “high culture”") and it's rather solely what the author of the article thinks himself.
Yeah, that's how I read it. And that last bit seemed so shoehorned on there that it almost seemed like it was an effort to give the story some kind of hook that the author or an editor might have thought it lacked.
The fact that the author took the precaution to say that Nietzsche himself would have disagreed with his supposedly Nietzsche-inspired theory, doesn't make his conclusions regarding mainstream culture any less of a non seguitur.
Nietzsche never would have uncritically claimed mainstream culture does our best thinking any more than he would have given such an honor to academia. So it's bizarre to see his thought appropriated to that end. He was, in fact, extremely concerned with the difference between culture that is merely popular and a genuine, healthy, thriving culture. He saw academics and journalists as frequent accomplices in the destruction of a thriving, healthy culture by their appeals to popular taste and public opinion. By their spinning rigorous sounding tales that merely served to comfort (or discomfort) individuals and reinforce their existing opinions no matter how deleterious or suspect such opinions were (eg. about morality, the nobility of the common man, the goodness/badness of state institutions, etc). Additionally, he was just as concerned about the influence exerted by nation states on thought as he was about the similar influence exerted by public opinion, common sense, and mainstream culture.
To simplify the formula down to "mainstream culture" vs. "the state influenced academics" is to be overly reductionist and to overlook the part every segment of society plays in producing uncritical thought.
For more clarity here I would read Nietzsche's "Untimely Meditation" on 'cultural philistinism' - "David Strauss: the confessor and the writer", and "Beyond Good and Evil" namely the section "Peoples and Fatherlands" for an idea of his approach to critique of mainstream culture in his time.