Sometimes called “the intellectual dark web,” it lives largely on the internet, but it isn’t a site or a channel, it’s a collection of thinkers (and it’s not the dark web of anonymous cybercrooks you’ve probably heard of). I actually see it not so much as a web but a nest containing rare birds that turn out to be more common than you might think. They use YouTube and podcasts to criticize political correctness and what they call “the regressive left” meaning extremes in left-wing politics.
Why The IDW Fell Apart
Support our independent coverage of the intellectual movements influencing today’s politics by signing up for a free or paid subscription to The Bulwark. Roberts describes the spirit of Wokeness as a “Slave Morality” of binary, black-and-white thinking characterised by vengeance. “Some in the IDW think that this virus is a civilisation-level threat,” Roberts writes.
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For the people like Harris, Peterson, Rogan, Rubin, Sommers, Shapiro, Maher, and Weinstein, the noxious effects of political correctness on American society was the central lesson to be drawn from this recent history. And if the often glowing portraits of the dark web in publications like The New York Times and The Atlantic are any indication, or Peterson’s appearance at this year’s Aspen Ideas Festival, many liberals seem to agree. But though these figures believe their discovery has led them to form the basis of a new intellectual center in this changing context, recent history suggests their ideas may more likely find a home on the right. The intellectual dark web does not only recycle conservative theories explaining our supposed wave of left-wing irrationalism.
The only people that might care about human rights are people on the coasts and elite capitalists, including so-called red capitalists. They have an interest in maintaining their lucrative relationship with the West, so they care a bit. The government officials in inland China would be better off murdering this comprador class and shutting the door to the West. The greater world would be against them, but who is truly willing to attack the nucleus of the Islamic State?
An Academic Look At IDW
He fails, however, to reconcile the long history of destruction, deceit, and dehumanism levied against our Muslim neighbors, pointing instead to their combative, however legitimate, disdain for Western imperial incursion. His insatiable concern is rooted in scientific jargon, yet he conveniently neglects the social science of generational trauma and the inherited psychology of the oppressed. These movements can be hard to take seriously — Yuyencia’s website, for example, describes their proposed nation as having a “unique national language,” called Yenpolish, and a national religion, which will be Roman Catholicism.
Image For IDW
If the IDW’s ranks expand far enough to encompass conspiracy theorists Mike Cernovich and Alex Jones, then things quickly escalate from dated to dangerous. Meanwhile, others lauded the piece, including cognitive scientist Steven Pinker who described it as an “excellent analysis” (shown below, left) and journalist John Podhoretz who referred to it as “intellectual journalism at its best” (shown below, right). A new study from the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG) in Brazil sheds some light on this phenomenon. The study analyzed more than 331,000 videos from what the study authors categorize as a broad, right-wing spectrum to paint a portrait of exactly how viewers become acclimated to increasingly far-right views — and the central role that YouTube‘s algorithm, which recommends related videos for its users, plays in the radicalization process.
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After denouncing Trump as a corrupt liberal in 2016 (Weiss notably omitted this motivation in her IDW piece), he is now 100 percent in favor of electing Trump in 2024. This is where the “Intellectual Dark Web,” with its warmed-over libertarian bromides, has been particularly useful for Republicans. While libertarianism is a conservative cousin of neoliberalism, because it claims to adhere to principles advocated by 19th century liberal figures like John Stuart Mill, it can be less authoritarian than Trump’s apocalyptic fascism, even as it also has been an important source of his racist rhetoric. Being a conservative rather than a reactionary, Roosevelt’s former general, Dwight Eisenhower, reconciled with social welfare state and promoted integration once he won the presidency back for Republicans in 1953. But his approach was despised by a group of young reactionaries who aimed to completely eradicate all “communistic” welfare programs, protect segregation, and install an explicitly Christian supremacist government. Three of the most prominent leaders of this faction were National Review creator William F. Buckley Jr.; Robert Welch, founder of the John Birch Society; and Leo Bozell Jr., Buckley’s brother-in-law, coauthor, and sometime business partner.
But if you’re unwilling to make the hard decisions, you’re going to be left behind. As the group was confronted with a series of real-world political decisions—the rise of Trump, the COVID crisis, and the anti-CRT movement—it fractured, splintered, and decomposed. With some notable exceptions, such as Dave Rubin, Jordan Peterson, and Bret Weinstein, the “centrists” of the IDW could never move from the domain of criticism to the domain of action. They acted as if they could solve political problems through interminable podcast debates and failed to offer a viable theory of change. For postmodern thinkers, the task of the intellectual activist is to prevent or transform the speech of the powerful.
While Harris is still pretending that he isn’t just another secular conservative, everyone else can see who he and the entire Intellectual Dark Web really are. Having failed once again to mask reactionary ideas in moderate-sounding language, the right wing’s lavishly funded marketing firms are surely hard at work trying to devise a replacement for the IDW. And if past is predicate, the only thing in doubt is who will be the New York Times’s next leopard-print cover model. After the Tea Party’s extremism had become an electoral liability, right-wing elites were loath to make Donald Trump, a serially bankrupt New York real estate owner and former WWE sideshow act the face of their latest rebranding attempt. While Bozell sought refuge in Catholic fascism, his far-right colleagues went back to the drawing board, eventually uniting behind a new champion, California Gov. Ronald Reagan, a former actor whose folksy personality made him a much better spokesman than the dour Arizonan.
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THESE ISSUES ALSO HAVE SOME relevance to Bari Weiss’s own career six years after she first introduced the IDW to the wider public. In July 2020, Weiss quit the Times in protest against the forced resignation of her boss James Bennet, then the paper’s editorial-page editor, over an op-ed he had published by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.). Weiss subsequently set up a Substack newsletter that became a multi-contributor magazine, the Free Press, and a podcast—thus migrating into the independent media-land of the IDW. IT SEEMS LIKELY, IN RETROSPECT, that the IDW concept itself was conducive to such corruption. Bioethicist Alice Dreger, who left Northwestern University in 2015 with complaints about administrative censorship and has been targeted for campus protests over accusations of “transphobia,” refused Weiss’s invitation to be included in the IDW article for several reasons. Not surprisingly, the IDW’s slide into crankism has coincided with a slide into Trumpism—or anti-anti-Trumpism pushed to degree where it becomes indistinguishable from Trumpism tout court.
But after experiencing decades of censorship in one form or another, Roberts wasn’t going to compromise. “Pretty funny that the first major book about the premiere free speech movement of our time was silenced,” he says. While the publisher didn’t choose to communicate the nature of the complaints to Roberts, I think it is easy to guess. The book was politically incorrect and didn’t pay due homage to “cultural” (scare quotes intended) norms.
- It would only be a formality, however, since like Murray, Harris seems to be an extreme enthusiast for Gazan casualties.
- Likewise, it’s unclear that Weiss and her predecessor, James Atlas, were aware that they were being used in a process that had already repeated itself several times before the late nineties.
- Since the discovery of Chinese troll farms churning out social media posts, it’s easy enough to imagine the jargon and rhetoric of the king troll of the intellectual dark web being weaponized, too.
- One need not doubt that some of the dark web’s critiques are made in good faith and based on valid interpretations of social science data.
Intellectual Dark Web
For decades, contrarianism on questions of race and gender — ranging from opposition to certain feminist projects or to affirmative action, to flirtation with the idea that black culture and even black brains were intrinsically inferior — was part of the intellectual mainstream of the center. Andrew Sullivan published an entire issue of the New Republic devoted to presenting, and debating, Charles Murray’s claim that black people were, on average, less intelligent than white people. Whether the figures involved with the IDW can take credit for opening up the Overton window, though, is doubtful. That’s not much of a legacy, since “social media leave so many other people Telling Truths as well as those guys were trying to do,” McWhorter observes wryly. Maybe Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying deserve some credit for that, but at least as much is owed to Yale faculty members Nicholas and Erika Christakis, who are not affiliated with the IDW and also not crazy.
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Twenty-nine years after Laura Ingraham was the Times’s cover model, no one imagines that she is anything but a conventional Republican talking head. Likewise, as my friend Eiynah Mohammed-Smith and I discussed recently on her podcast, nearly everyone profiled by Weiss has dropped the pretense of being anything other than right-wing. Although almost no Americans agree with the eldritch particulars of official Libertarianism, more than a few have affinities for its sentiments, especially those who are young and nonreligious. Secular conservatives have next to no power in the Republican party, but there are quite a few of them in the general population, as surveys from the Pew Research Center have shown over the years. It’s a mirror of how things are for Democrats, who have many voters with religiously conservative viewpoints who support the welfare state. Nine years into the Trumpian infection of America’s politics, however, most right-wing oligarchs have decided to bend the knee, largely out of financial interest now that President Joe Biden and other national Democrats are finally getting serious about economic inequality and business monopolies.
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Harris demurred, saying most of the people he’s now embarrassed by are IDW-adjacent figures he says he’s never met (or maybe met once). The intellectual dark web, in its commitment to reality, also bemoans the postmodern devaluation of merit. “I think the pathology that’s at the core of the culture war is an attack on competence itself,” says Peterson. The 1960s saw the rise of poststructuralism, which led to postmodernism from the 1980s. The latter was influenced by the ideas of French philosopher Michel Foucault, who was concerned with dissecting power.
Peterson exhorts men to follow a middle path between emasculation and being like the misogynist influencer Andrew Tate. These kinds of discussions had, for decades, been routinely shut down in universities. For example, last year, students called for the cancelling of “gender-critical feminist” Holly Lawford-Smith’s course on feminism at the University of Melbourne, due to her arguments for the significance of biological sex. The rise of podcasting coincided with campus politics spilling over into the wider world. “Cancel culture”, which grew out of this, has often been mentioned on Rogan’s podcast as a problem.
