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.
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- 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 New Republic — which Ta-Nehisi Coates has asserted had perhaps two black staff writers or editors in its heyday and was certainly overwhelmingly white — is now being edited by the leftist multicultural barbarians.
- As documented by historian Elizabeth Eisenstein, this had far-reaching disruptive consequences including the Reformation, the Thirty Years’ War, the modern nation-state settlement, and the scientific and industrial revolutions.
- Fascism feeds off a narrative of supposed national humiliation by internal enemies.
- The protests on campus were the result of an infantilizing and inconsiderate approach by Mr. Weinstein, to dismantle the objectives of student groups such as the First Peoples Multicultural Advising Services (now the First Peoples, Trans, and Queer Support Services) and their allies.
It’s not about liberals beating up on liberals but, rather, understanding that the same tribalism and regressive thinking that is damaging the Republican Party, perhaps beyond repair, is also wreaking havoc on Democrats and their allies. For the record, I first had such questions several years ago when I interviewed the couple, around the time Weiss’s IDW piece came out, for an article I ended up shelving. 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. When I relayed this back to Weinstein and Heying, they quickly concluded that the Evergreen administration had pressured the woman into changing her story—not an impossibility, but also not a claim that could be accepted without evidence. Depressingly, but perhaps unsurprisingly, the researchers found that all three communities had grown exponentially since 2015, the year Donald Trump announced his candidacy for president. But it also wanted to determine whether there was any weight to previous claims by people like former far right extremist Caleb Cain, who was featured in a New York Times report analyzing his YouTube history, that IDW and alt-lite content could lead to increasing interest in extremist white-nationalist content.
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“There is no point to any success that is founded on lies. I mean, sure, you might get some money, but everything else is hollow. And in the end, we are all alone with ourselves.” And what account of dignity is dependent on minorities in society giving way, somehow, to some expectation? All of this seems to me to be kept in the dark—crucial, basic definitions deliberately omitted, which is not just anti-philosophical but anti-intellectual. In this instance, McWhorter is referencing actual critical race theory, not the catch-all buzzword pushed by Rufo et al.
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Times columnist Meghan Daum contends that dark-webbers “wish to foster a new discourse that can allow innovative thinkers to wrestle with the world’s problems without having to tiptoe around subjects or questions deemed culturally or politically off-limits.” Apart from those more academic works and translations, Liu was sharing this thoughts online, posting on Douban as Shùjuǎncánpiān 数卷残篇 (“a few tattered volumes”). That’s the “audience capture” phenomenon—a term that, ironically, appears to have been coined by the same Eric Weinstein who christened the IDW concept.
Like their comrades on 4chan, Chinese internet users go looking for stronger stuff, too, and it often leads them to an intellectual and blogger by the name of Liú Zhòngjìng 刘仲敬, who made a name for himself in the early-2000s on social media platforms like Douban 豆瓣 and Zhihu 知乎 (China’s version of Quora). Like Sargon of Akkad or Black Pigeon Speaks, Liu lays a scholarly, scientific veil over ideas far more extreme than anything found in the mainstream. Of the IDW stars profiled in Weiss’s article, several—former Evergreen State College biology professors Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying, a married couple; Canadian psychologist and bestselling guru Jordan Peterson; podcaster Joe Rogan—have devolved into full-blown cranks. In a recent podcast episode, Peterson goes full Alex Jones on COVID-19 vaccines, claiming they caused more deaths than the “so-called pandemic,” and barking his skepticism about childhood vaccination in general. Weinstein and Rogan recently used Rogan’s podcast, which has an audience of millions, to push not only the notion that mRNA vaccines, including the COVID-19 ones, are lethally dangerous but the idea that HIV isn’t the real cause of AIDS and that HIV-skeptical maverick scientist Kary Mullis’s death in 2019 may have been engineered by Dr. Anthony Fauci. The ranks of the cranks also include author and podcaster Maajid Nawaz, briefly mentioned in the original IDW piece as a “former Islamist turned anti-extremist activist”—now a vaccine and 2020 election conspiracy theorist, and most recently seen boosting the Kremlin’s efforts to link Ukraine to the ISIS terror attack in Moscow.
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As Philip Kitcher, the famous philosopher of science, suggested back in 2001 in Science, Truth, and Democracy, there is an “epistemic bias” in favor of the sorts of arguments these thinkers embraced. It takes until page 302, literally, before you get to him bitching about postmodernism on college campuses. I really thought he would all just be “feminazis,” and it really is not that.
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After looking at more than 79 million comments on hundreds of thousands of videos, they found that, as Ribeiro puts it, “there is migration among users from the Alt-lite and the I.D.W. to the Alt-right,” confirming that less extreme right-wing content did indeed serve as a gateway of sorts for radicalization. On the far-right end of the spectrum was alt-right vloggers like Faith Goldy, who has been referred to by the Cut as a “white nationalist poster girl” and appeared on the podcast for the neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer; and James Allsup, a member of the white supremacist group Identity Evropa (whose account was banned by the platform as of Tuesday). The researchers defined all three as “contrarian” communities, or groups formed in opposition to the perceived wave of political correctness on the left. The lone holdout among the dark self-proclaimed intellectuals who hasn’t proclaimed an affinity for the Republican Party is Sam Harris.
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The ideas they claim to defend from politically correct opponents of truth are themselves a longstanding part of the United States’s conservative tradition. A common refrain on the dark web is to debunk various left-of-center critiques by arguing that what appears to be systemic inequality is actually the result of individual choices or behavior. In either case, the dark web’s impulse when confronted with claims of inequality is almost always to deny or justify it. Either the left is making up injustices where they do not exist, the argument goes, or they disregard evidence that social disparities are in fact grounded in scientific reality.
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. Bret Weinstein, once a Bernie Sanders-supporting leftist, now says that he “appreciates Trump” and would consider voting for him if he just got more fully on the Covidiot bandwagon (and agreed to pardon Julian Assange). In 2020, Weinstein peddled “concern” about the possibility of “substantial fraud” in the election. Today, he suggests that electing an “obviously senile” Biden amounts to a coup handing power to “a cabal of unelected powerbrokers” from the Democratic National Committee, and posts cryptic tirades against Joe Biden supporters. Support our independent coverage of the intellectual movements influencing today’s politics by signing up for a free or paid subscription to The Bulwark.
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If the IDW ever really existed as anything more than a catchy, not-quite-serious brand name for an informal intellectual community, there is little doubt that it no longer does. 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. Onetime IDW fellow traveler Christopher Rufo wrote its obituary a year ago, arguing that the IDW fell apart because some of its members found Trump too icky and orange, some were unwilling to part ways with establishment science on COVID, and most of the rest lacked Rufo’s appetite for using political power to vanquish perceived enemies. Liberalism, which recognises human nature, is “the middle path” between identity politics on the left and reactionary politics on the right. Roberts had concerns about this in 2024 which are prescient of Lindsay’s post-election admonitions against the “Woke right”.
And though Christina Hoff Sommers may appear to break with neoconservative opponents of the women’s movement such as Midge Decter and Gertrude Himmelfarb by calling her video blog “The Factual Feminist,” one should not fail to notice that the channel is hosted by the American Enterprise Institute, the think tank where both elder women were once affiliates. These sorts of claims are once again continuous with the decades-old conservative campaign against political correctness. Neoconservatives of the 1980s and 1990s did not always make the same appeals to statistical certainty. But that did not stop writers like Dinesh D’Souza from arguing that politically correct practices like affirmative action in college admissions were an affront to “equality of opportunity.” This latter term has long been part of the American right’s vocabulary, a central pillar of arguments against attempts at achieving greater social equality.
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The intellectual dark web appears with each passing day to be earning itself a place in the American conservative tradition. The fact that many of these figures have no links to the conservative movement or denounce the Republican Party is hardly evidence to the contrary. Allan Bloom was a member of the Democratic Party, and the campus war debates he helped to start provided the opportunity for many younger writers to gain national notoriety as conservatives for the first time. Despite some of the novelty attributed to the dark web intellectuals, perhaps the signs of their belonging to the right have always been there. Dave Rubin’s YouTube show and Harris’s podcast, for example, have featured a number of mainstays of the old PC debates, including D’Souza and Charles Murray.
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. Progressives and leftists can and should deal with these claims on their merits and faults, both in moral and empirical terms. But they should not indulge the intellectual dark web’s veneer of novelty or appeals to transpolitical reason. These thinkers ought not to be allowed to pretend that its ideas are, historically speaking, anything other than conservative.
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. Douglas Murray, who originally became prominent as a “New Atheist,” is another IDW figure who has slotted perfectly into the conventional far right via his anti-immigrant screeds which routinely propagate white nationalist talking points and anti-Muslim bigotry. He’s also been a cheerleader for Israel’s massacre in Gaza, claiming that all Palestinians are responsible for the terrorist attacks Hamas carried out Oct. 7 of last year, a violent sentiment no different from what Al Qaeda routinely says about its civilian targets.
