This thirst explains how Johnson, a Christian husband and father, embraced and emulated Andrew Tate, a Muslim pimp and self-professed abuser of women, before defending himself by misappropriating a Bible verse. This thirst explains how Candace Owens went from being an immovable supporter of Israel to one of its most enthusiastic (and spectacularly ignorant) critics seemingly overnight, regurgitating the same antisemitic Wikipedia articles that were available while she was flying to Israel to celebrate the opening of the U.S. In recent years, a group has emerged that, while existing outside of the mainstream, represents the antithesis of the intellectual dark web. Its members make up the unintellectual dark web, where “unintellectual” doesn’t necessarily describe its members — well, not all of them — but it certainly describes its members’ output.
Image For IDW
- Outside of the progressive academics and activists whose ideology came to dominate the West in the second decade of the twenty-first century, arguably no group influenced public discourse as much as the Intellectual Dark Web.
- Interestingly, in the week after the election, MSNBC’s viewership was down 39% and CNN’s down 22%, compared with their October averages.
- His journalistic writings have appeared in numerous publications in both English and French; and he has translated the authors Michel Foucault and Marcel Gauchet.
- This was reinforced by individual intellectual incentives to cultivate contrarianism for the sake of fame, or, as Kitcher describes it, the “temptation to gain a large audience and to influence public opinion by defending ‘unpopular’ views” — views that, in truth, mirrored widespread societal prejudices.
- There is, decidedly, a lack of this exhibited by those who fall under the moniker of the IDW.
So, here’s one cheer for Sam Harris for naming and shaming (some) of his past allies and their unsavory career moves. But only one cheer, because he’s still letting some mortifying IDWers off the hook for behavior he’s decried in others, and he hasn’t yet truly reflected on why he was so taken in by dim careerists and a movement built more on emotional opposition to wokeness than a noble pursuit of truth and vigorous debate. 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. Harris thinks Rubin has changed, when really he’s just evolved into a more unapologetic version of the clout-chaser he was back when he was still in Harris’ favor. 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. Rubin has frequently said that his political “awakening” (or why he “left the left”) was inspired by watching Harris and Ben Affleck argue about Islam on an episode of Real Time with Bill Maher.
In other words, anyone can say they are a member, and no one has the authority to deny it. Unlike Roger Kimball, Peterson does not make much of an effort to link these academic trends to the radical politics of the 1960s. And not all of his allies adopt his analysis of “postmodern neo-Marxism” in full. But in various forms throughout the different public platforms of the “intellectual dark web,” one finds countless repetitions of the notion that leftist college professors armed with dangerous theories from the Old Continent are turning generations of young progressives into enemies of liberal democracy. In some versions of this refrain, the dark web goes further than the neoconservatives of decades past, whose paeans to traditional college curricula often had little implications outside the campus walls. The implication is that zero-tolerance prohibitions in many newsrooms, classrooms or on social media that forbid dissent (or sometimes, even discussion) on these subjects has contributed to some once-reasonable people going down conspiracy theory rabbit holes.
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Dennis Prager, the reactionary radio host and founder of video propaganda mill PragerU, described the strategy explicitly during a conversation with Dave Rubin, a podcaster who now identifies as right-wing, but was pretending to be progressive when he was included in Weiss’s article. An insightful read both for followers of the IDW looking for a coherent and critical overview and for students of popular culture looking to understand this massive but decentralised popular intellectual movement. So at the end of these three decision points, you’re left with very few people still standing. 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. This core group amounts to about 8-10 prominent figures, but the broader “umbrella” of the IDW can extend to other intellectuals and commentators who share similar principles or participate in related discussions, possibly including dozens more.
Dave Rubin
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. Eight years ago, Shapiro wrote that Barack Obama was “the worst president in American history.” If Shapiro thinks Biden is worse than Obama, then logically he thinks Biden is the worst president in American history, which at least bodes well for the reputations of James Buchanan and Andrew Johnson.
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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. As for the larger group, conspiracy theorizing was always a key plank in the Intellectual Dark Web’s branding (I mean, just say the name out loud and you’ll sound like you need to go touch some grass). It’s hardly surprising that many of the people who embraced such a label would drift so quickly into a version of Alex Jones with a thesaurus. It’s frustrating (and sometimes even embarrassing) when your judgment fails you in assessing a person, be it in a personal or professional relationship. 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 only future for the people that live under an empire of fellaheen (fèilā dìguó 费拉帝国) is a process that he calls “ethnic invention” (mínzú fāmíng 民族发明) — basically, concoct a local Culture (capitalized after Spengler, who saw Culture as the seed and Civilization as the plant into which it grows). The process involves de-Sinicization and rejection of Han culture (tuōzhī 脱支, “to escape Shina,” borrowing the derogatory archaic Japanese term for China). The need to build new tribal nations is made all the more pressing by Liu’s prediction of a Great Flood (Dàhóngshuǐ 大洪水), an impending apocalyptic event that will see much of the world’s central governments collapse. It was partly on Douban’s Auntie-loving Distant Evil 远邪 discussion board that the term “white left” was popularized, according to Fāng Kěchéng 方可成, academic observer of reactionary discourse. Liu’s later publications, including one of David Hume’s Tory revisionist The History of England and a biography of Ayn Rand, received mixed reviews (his skills as a translator have been called out repeatedly, most notably in this piece by Méi Zǔróng 梅祖蓉 for The Paper.
If That’s The Case, Then What Does It Stand As An Alternative To?
In a time of noise, confusion, and spin, we’re committed to clarity, truth, and depth — even when it’s hard. The Intellectual Dark Web involves me, it involves Heather, it involves Eric. It involves Jordan Peterson—he’s a little bit right of center, but if you actually listen to him, there are certain topics on which he sounds downright conservative, and then there are other topics where he really doesn’t. 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. The content of this site is published by the site owner(s) and is not a statement of advice, opinion, or information pertaining to The Ohio State University.
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In the face of the politically correct left, and to a lesser extent the neo-fascist alt-right, these thinkers aim to present themselves as defenders of “reason,” “truth,” and “facts.” This attachment to rational principles — not to parties or tribes — leads them at times to characterize themselves as a new political center. 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. 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.
Kamala Harris had a long line of celebrity backers, from Beyoncé to Bruce Springsteen. President Trump’s nominee has written about how religious views and judicial views intersect — and sometimes collide. 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.
The IDW Never Had A Viable Theory Of Change
But I think the IDW has been and will continue to be, with other names and leaders, part of the ongoing dialectic evolution of our society. 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.
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.
