I mean that a podcast, even a brilliant argument sustained over a number of years about the evils of critical race theory, for example, will not change the K-12 curriculum in a public school system. The first is that these are ultimately political problems. And so, what happens is that over this period of four or five years, events surpassed the IDW and it turned the IDW into a spent political force, as the world moved beyond critique and accepted the critique. We oppose coercive DEI bureaucracies, but we are unwilling to go along with Republican politicians who want to do something about it, who want to use democratic power to restrict critical race theory, to restrict DEI bureaucracies and K-12 schools and public universities. They thought that he was an incarnation of evil, anti-intellectualism, and corruption—and he had a really distasteful skin coloration. There are three key decision points that started this splintering of the group, which revealed that it wasn’t an intellectually coherent group, but actually an alliance of convenience against an orthodoxy, but not an alliance capable of creating a replacement or a substitution for that orthodoxy.
Members Of The Intellectual Dark Web Want To Be At The Center Of Intellectual Debate But The Center Has Shifted
The intellectual dark web championed free speech as the pathway to truth. For the intellectual dark web, the worst aspects of campus politics are driven by postmodernism’s degradation of traditional liberal values. But where dark web intellectuals veer from analysis of that phenomenon into self-pity is in their consistent tendency to treat all skeptical criticism of their purported commitment to truth-seeking as further symptoms of political correctness gone mad. In absolute terms, dark web intellectuals enjoy far more access to the mainstream than genuine leftists. "Musk’s politics were centre-left, but in recent times (post 2022) his politics… can be explained by a well-known cartoon produced by Colin Wright," explains Roberts in the book. The Guardian characterizes the IDW as an ill-defined movement composed of figures from both "the right and sometimes left extremes of the political spectrum" who share a belief in "hardcore libertarianism".
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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. Given that such topics are a major focus of the IDW, commentators have argued the movement is a merely bull-polishing to shine up old ideas for clicks and Patreon donations. “Of course, the whole notion of drawing lines to keep people out is exactly what inspired the Intellectual Dark Web folks in the first place,” Weiss writes.
Three Decision Points That Broke The IDW
Support our independent coverage of the intellectual movements influencing today’s politics by signing up for a free or paid subscription to The Bulwark. We must embrace the principles that gave rise to the intellectual dark web and dump, once and for all, the principle-free world of the unintellectual dark web that values nothing but clicks and cash. Yet no matter how wrong, shameless, or moronic the unintellectual dark web becomes, it continues to gain steam.
Describing Alt-Right Communities And Their Discourse On Twitter During The 2018 US Mid-term Elections
At the center of the unintellectual dark web, there are members pushing views that are outside of the mainstream, not because they threaten mainstream powers but because they are wrong. In recent years, a group has emerged that, while existing outside of the mainstream, represents the antithesis of the intellectual dark web. (Weinstein also coined the term “intellectual dark web”—which he has at various times described as a half-joke, but also a meticulously calibrated bit of mathematical genius.)
- I have met a remarkable number of the people mentioned in this book at Genspect conferences.
- And so, if Duverger’s Law holds—I think that it does, the evidence suggests that it does—we are going to have a two-party political system for the foreseeable future.
- After a failed trial run in 1976 Republican against then-president Gerald Ford, Reagan won the party nomination and the presidency in 1980 and again in 1984.
- If I included this pseudo-scholarship, it would be like including astrology in a book about psychology (well, almost).
The necessity of rebranding the right began during Franklin Roosevelt’s administration when his opponents utterly destroyed their credibility with the public by urging the federal government to do nothing to stop the Great Depression and then later by singing the praises of Adolph Hitler while trying to stop the U.S. from entering World War II. 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. 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.
How Many Episodes Does The Intellectual Dark Web Podcast Have?
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. Despite this potential to achieve a greater clarity in our public discourse, there are still reasons to worry about the future of the intellectual dark web. Treating the beliefs of the dark web as politically conservative views, rather than a sort of transpolitical meta-position — that is to say one critique of political correctness among others, albeit an extreme one — could do much to bring these sorts of left alternatives into the public debate. It is no surprise that college students often experiment with activist projects that push the boundaries of liberal norms, and the members of the intellectual dark web are not the only people to have worried about the implications of some student rhetoric.
The Intellectual Dark Web: A History (and Possible Future) Paperback – March 17, 2025
But I think it does mean that the conservative party in the United States is the only reasonable path to having a governing majority, to having legislative power, and to answering political questions as our founding fathers and our constitutions intended, which is through the political process. It doesn’t mean that you have to blindly follow the political leaders of our time. This doesn’t mean you have to give your unconditional loyalty to one political party or another. I think it was actually a necessary and healthy corrective at the time, but one that has splintered to such an extent that it no longer can serve a practical political function. How are you going to persuade that organized political faction to defeat “woke racism”? The political Left for the foreseeable future is captured by its vanguardist faction.
This is what I am calling a “dark conversation”. ” The social taboo, familial pressure, or in some locales, state sanctioned violence to not blurt out that line is strong enough to keep the lid on the outward expressions of atheism. The word “dark” is the one I want to focus on here.
The Intellectual Dark Web: A History (And Possible Future) By Jamie Q Roberts
You get to ask all those formerly hush-hush questions and seek what truths you can find together. And you might feel a bit of new found confidence and cocky rebellious attitude where you smirk at all the pearl-clutchers who are horrified that you’d dare attend such a meeting, or read such a book, or utter such an un-utterable opinion. Once you’re in a dark conversation it can be pretty fun.
What exactly are the ideas that have made people like Weinstein, Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, Dave Rubin, Ben Shapiro, and Christina Hoff Sommers into what a recent New York Times profile described as intellectual “renegades”? Mathematician and financier Eric Weinstein coined the term intellectual dark web, and he meant to point out not that this group is obscure — it isn’t — but that its figures all pride themselves on upturning conventional beliefs. Despite their various differences, all members of the movement believe their ideas are being stifled by an epidemic of “political correctness.”
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. 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.
THE FIRST DISTINCT intellectual movement to have emerged during the Trump presidency is not the alt-right, which rose to prominence during the 2016 campaign. 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. Bret Weinstein, meanwhile, has followed the well-trod “Pastel QAnon” path, going from Bernie-Sanders-supporting college professor to deranged conspiracy theorist podcaster who constantly claims his ideas should be debated while also refusing to ever actually book his critics on his show. Like nearly all libertarians, the members of the IDW were insistent that they were not just Republicans with an accent, and that in fact, they were actually leftists. The fascist movement in the Republican party has turned to critical race theory instead.
