This is all terrible metaphors here, I recognize, but the way that you posited this is maybe it's just a society-wide thing and the campus is a place where obviously people are ready to go and kind of clash and do battle, as it always is. Jamie Q. Roberts has written a valuable intellectual history for non-intellectuals. Although the New Atheists are also very prominent in this book, Professor Roberts has not explained why so many New Atheists instead turned to the activist mysticism of ‘Wokeness’ instead of joining the IDW. Also per the subtitle, Roberts suggests that the intellectual impact of IDW will last much longer.
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And there were plenty of other well-documented incidents of intolerance and groupthink on college campuses, in literary communities, and elsewhere (e.g., the media frenzy over British scientist Tim Hunt’s alleged sexist tirade at a luncheon honoring women in science, later confirmed to have been a self-deprecating joke about his own supposed male chauvinism). Weinstein and Heying told me of a colleague and her students being ejected from a no-whites-allowed campus event on that day; the faculty member herself recollected that she and the students made a voluntary exit after realizing that the event was meant as people-of-color-only, despite being told they were welcome to stay. Why have some people gone off the deep end and others pulled back from the brink?
In fact, while Weiss wrote that some IDW intellectuals had been “purged” from institutions grown uneasy with dissent, one of the points of the piece was that the new media ecosystem had allowed them to find lucrative platforms and receptive audiences elsewhere. A recently published short book by University of Sydney lecturer Jamie Roberts that charitably examines the IDW and its contributions to political dialogue, The Way of the Intellectual Dark Web, refers to it in the past tense. Meanwhile, another IDW star profiled in the original article, erstwhile progressive Dave Rubin, the comedian and podcaster who voted for Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson in 2016 and promised to be “the first to hold Trump’s feet to the fire once he’s in office,” told Fox & Friends in 2020 that he was voting for Trump as “the last bulwark to stop the radical left.” As for holding Trump’s feet to the fire … well, he did, in 2018, call out Trump on Twitter for suggesting that video games cause violence (a real profile in courage!).
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It at least, perhaps, seems to be particularly concerned with these kinds of phenomena that are occurring on the left. If those kids who actually haven't spent much time racing down hills on bikes or climbing trees and falling and experiencing gravity in real time, are told, "Actually, objective reality is a sign of the patriarchy and it's about power and it's not actually about reality," that feels really confirming to certain people. And it's in part—these issues have been discussed widely—but it's about the rise of iPhones and tech and the decrease in children spending time outside and getting physical experience with their world, and becoming more social creatures.
Why some people are less susceptible to this mentality than others is a question that undoubtedly has multiple answers. The very framing, she wrote, implied that the featured “heretics” were huddling in dark corners or catacombs to exchange forbidden opinions; in Dreger’s view, it also valorized opinions over facts and easily lent itself to prioritizing “clicks, skirmishes, and dramatic photos at sunset”—a dig at the cringey pictures illustrating the article, which showed its protagonists in eerily dark forest settings, clearly meant to convey that there was something shadowy and forbidden about their activity. 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. Several people who got pulled into our orbit were bad actors from the beginning—Trumpist grifters and conspiracists—and a few of the original members got corrupted or revealed their truer, baser selves. Joe Rogan, whose massive audience and folksy just-asking-questions manner ensure that he can still book respectable guests, was prone to falling for the dumbest conspiracy theories long before the IDW was a gleam in Eric Weinstein’s eye. But again, plenty of people—Chait, Applebaum, Bovy, McWhorter, and other journalists, commentators, and academics—managed to push back against those trends and not, as McWhorter put it to me, “drift into poised lunacy.” Some IDW figures avoided that drift; some IDW-adjacent people who were not part of Weiss’s article were at its forefront.
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Like most political movements and subcultures, it is largely male. So, I wanted to look for the good in the ‘IDW’ — and how better than to read a left-wing analysis of the phenomenon! As I noted in my review of Dave Rubin’s book, there was too much talking about talking about ideas, and too much using free speech to talk exclusively about free speech. This vision of two parallel societies may be dispiriting for early fans of Rubin — after all, this was the host who promised to bring together people of all different political stripes. In time, these boundaries may solidify as some thinkers renounce the movement and others join it, as some ideas are rejected and others sanctioned. Supports would point to Rubin’s remarks, noting the mainstream ignores conversations that are politically inconvenient.
With neoliberalism finally being challenged within the Democratic party beginning with the rise of Sen. Bernie Sanders, many libertarians began imagining that the party had somehow betrayed its beliefs, instead of realizing the truth that Democrats gone astray under Clinton. This contest, which Antonio Gramsci called “the war of position,” is now commonly referred to as the battle for the “Overton window,” the ever-shifting locus of political possibility. Lacking a majority of people who wholly agree with their positions, progressives, liberals, conservatives, and authoritarians have been caught in a decades-long struggle to mobilize people who partially agree—without excessively antagonizing those who partially disagree.
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Meanwhile, as we’ve seen, opponents believe the IDW isn’t ignored by the mainstream; they simply aren’t viewed as an unassailable narrative driving force. In fact, as Pullmann points out, Rogan, Peterson, Shapiro, and Rubin have a combined reach that competes with Fox News and legacy media such as the Times and the Washington Post. It’s why I would argue that this collection of people are sic actually more influential than whatever collection of cable news pundits you can come up with.” IDW affiliate Dave Rubin sees this network as one that opposes the ideologically stagnant gatekeepers of old media. “This loss of relative social status helps explain the anger and resentment that Weiss describes and to some extent herself embodies.” Others have argued it is a cover for dated ideas, such asrace-IQ theorizing, that society has already tested and rejected.
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Recent political science research suggests that Trump’s popularity in the 2016 presidential election was based on “status threat.” Members of high-status groups that had lost prestige were more likely to be receptive to Trump’s rhetoric. There is also an irritating but genuine grain of truth deep beneath the layers of whining. This loss of relative social status helps explain the anger and resentment that Weiss describes and to some extent herself embodies. They are not driving the conversation, and sometimes are being driven from it.
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As for why the IDW can’t get along with mainstream media, that depends on whom you ask. Today, the radio waves have simply been replaced by YouTube, podcasts, and social media, platforms that can reach much larger audiences than the AM signals of yesteryear. According to Rubin, the IDW are people “who are figuring out ways to have the important and often dangerous conversations that are completely ignored by the mainstream. Eric Weinstein referred to the IDW as an intellectual movement in Weiss’s article but has since revised the labeling. “IDW members are not driving the conversation, and sometimes are being driven from it,”Henry Farrell, a professor of political science at George Washington University, writes.
So did the invasion of Ukraine, another point on which the mainstream media narrative had turned out to be correct. It was a tongue-in-cheek name for a dozen people who were inclined toward a certain style of conversation—essentially a rejection of political correctness—mostly in podcast form. Columbia University professor and author John McWhorter, a liberal critic of the progressive left with no connection to the IDW (despite jokingly describing himself in a 2018 podcast as part of “the black wing of the Intellectual Dark Web,” a casual comment which he ruefully notes has “resonated for years”), is harshly dismissive of critiques like Farrell’s. Some early critics, such as Henry Farrell at Vox, argued that the stars of the IDW were “white intellectuals” resentful of being displaced from a dominant cultural position and having to endure pushback against their ideas, including sexist and racist ones.
Comments On This Article
- However, for some time, the arts and social sciences have been a political monoculture.
- If we want the effort to be about truth-seeking, the truths of our weaknesses and psychological blind spots are probably the most important truths to examine collectively.
- The first recorded usage of the term was on a 2017 episode of Sam Harris's podcast, when Weinstein used it to refer to a group of thinkers, including Weinstein and Harris, who used digital media to offer alternatives to mainstream media narratives.
- In 2020, at the height of the Black Lives Matter protests, Sam Harris spoke some then-taboo truths about the absurdity of calls to defund the police in the US.
- Someone whom I admire, John McWhorter, wrote a great book titled Woke Racism.
- Meanwhile, another IDW star profiled in the original article, erstwhile progressive Dave Rubin, the comedian and podcaster who voted for Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson in 2016 and promised to be “the first to hold Trump’s feet to the fire once he’s in office,” told Fox & Friends in 2020 that he was voting for Trump as “the last bulwark to stop the radical left.” As for holding Trump’s feet to the fire … well, he did, in 2018, call out Trump on Twitter for suggesting that video games cause violence (a real profile in courage!).
He also realized that because the political press mostly spent its time spectating at news conferences and collecting gossip, he could very easily present a sanitized message to the public while privately being far more radical. They hailed the authoritarian efforts of Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy to intimidate and slander government officials, and wanted them expanded into other areas, including the suppression of non-believing and socialist college professors, as Buckley demanded in his first book, God and Man at Yale. 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 instead of updating their ideas to ones that are more workable or responsive to public sentiment, reactionaries simply rebrand their policies every few years in a cycle that is as predictable as fashion designers trying to bring back flared pants.
His conversations with academics, politicians and media personalities went for hours and were uncensored, and his approach was very different from the heavily produced interviews of mainstream media. The Big Idea is Vox’s home for smart discussion of the most important issues and ideas in politics, science, and culture — typically by outside contributors. It would not be surprising to see many of the people discussed in Weiss’s piece defect to the forces of darkness over the next couple of years. However, the political and social resemblances are obvious. However, intellectual openness is not the only possible reason the dark web is flirting with the dark enlightenment. Still, she is obviously troubled by the new movement’s tendency to embrace right-wing conspiracists such as Pizzagate rumormonger Mike Cernovich, lite-alt-righter Milo Yiannopoulos, and the frothing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.
- In some intellectual conversations there seems to be an extreme allergy to “not take people at their word”.
- Yes, they could have sat this one out—lifelong Democrat and central IDW figure Eric Weinstein refused to endorse a candidate—but sometimes, especially in a binary system, people take a side.
- The latter was influenced by the ideas of French philosopher Michel Foucault, who was concerned with dissecting power.
- Their enthusiasm for discomfort did not then extend, however, to examining the awkward politics beneath their own contrarianism.
Such is the case of the privileged contrarians, the exiled academics who have sloppily formed the vestiges of an “Intellectual Dark Web;” a neoliberal enclave of “public intellectuals” determined to reduce the progress of pedagogy to the sterile hierarchy of pedanticism. Yes, they could have sat this one out—lifelong Democrat and central IDW figure Eric Weinstein refused to endorse a candidate—but sometimes, especially in a binary system, people take a side. It primarily critiqued academia and mainstream media, but also the corporate world, government ,and Hollywood.
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. This is where the “Intellectual Dark Web,” with its warmed-over libertarian bromides, has been particularly useful for Republicans. But while Trump fits the far-right ideal of “a Republican with enough working digits to handle a pen,” the fact that he spent his entire adult life stiffing small contractors, hawking fraudulent business classes, stealing from charities, and sexually assaulting women does make it somewhat difficult to sell him as a tribune of the plebs. 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. Once elected to Congress, Tea Party Republicans like Ted Cruz and others proceeded to shut down the federal government rather than attempt to reform it.
Right now cancerous ideas are ubiquitous as institutional models are collapsing simultaneously from Journalism to Universities to Political parties. Even people close to me have become completely confused. It was clearly inspired by satirical American and British shows about politics As a believer, I see signs that Christ is moving in the minds and hearts of secular intellectuals I hope the IDW has tarnished the romantic image of revolutionary leftism in academic and cultural spheres.Nonetheless, I have to admit that Against the Web does offer good advice to Brooks’s comrades. Of course,those are important subjects, but informing sad and lonely men that the cure for what ails them is far left activism feels more opportunistic than anything Peterson says.
Indeed, it was Rubin’s obsequious flattery—now mostly reserved for MAGA and DeSantis stans—that made his show an attractive platform for people like Harris and the IDW in the first place. Regarding Harris’ career-making endorsement of Rubin—the evidence was always in plain sight that Rubin’s utility was serving as a professional sycophant—a hype-man armed with a thin intellect and possessing no actual political convictions. It’s frustrating (and sometimes even embarrassing) when your judgment fails you in assessing a person, be it in a personal or professional relationship. Such highlights of the genre include his obsessive tweets suggesting Jeffrey Epstein didn’t kill himself, and that media outlets are colluding to suppress coverage of the story. 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).
You have a splintering, you have a decomposition, you have really, honestly, a collapse of this movement as a coherent ideological force, intellectual force, and certainly political force. Although the movement deserves credit for pointing out the problem of left-wing overreach in America’s institutions, this critique is now part of conventional wisdom and is no longer sufficient. These new figures were also using new media, especially podcast platforms, to reach younger audiences and generate buzz for their intellectual movement.
