It is the recognized life of inner mastery, which allows for a certain agency of repose. There is, decidedly, a lack of this exhibited by those who fall under the moniker of the IDW. Their lucrative, “free reach” populism, set on debasing the truest forms of free speech, and on dictating the parameters of cultural relativism, can only be countered through utmost vigilance, in media and beyond. One cannot claim to be an expert, without also proving their ability to be flexible.
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Taken together, these changes have tended to be narrated in hindsight as self-evidently positive, irreversible progress — what the historian Herbert Butterfield called “Whig history”. This settlement is also, broadly speaking, what IDW advocates gesture at when they use terms such as “classical liberalism” and “Western civilisation”. Today, the radio waves have simply been replaced by YouTube, podcasts, and social media, platforms that can reach much larger audiences than the AM signals of yesteryear. 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. Sidestepping the fact that many of the IDW’s members have appeared on cable TV (as pundits no less), Rubin’s take aligns closely with Weinstein’s.
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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. It would only be a formality, however, since like Murray, Harris seems to be an extreme enthusiast for Gazan casualties. 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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A teacher has no reason to teach if they are unwilling to learn from their students. The filter-bubble emanating from the IDW is a consequence of 20th century academia with its back against a wall. The price paid is in actual violence threatened by disturbed ideologues against truly progressive outlets for growth. Similarly, Sam Harris, a “New Atheist” and IDW apologist, has long opposed Islam on the basis of what he perceives to be a causal link between belief and behavior. 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.

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.
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For Liu and his followers, these proposed nations organized around ethnicity and language are part of a struggle for independence from the People’s Republic of China and other states in Asia. This is a massive simplification, trimming Liu’s ragged bush of fascist historiography, Christian millenarianism, conspiracy theory, and anti-left extremism into a tidy landing strip. 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.

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The IDW is a nexus of commentators that emerged in the 2010s to challenge the solidifying “woke” consensus on topics such as gender and academic freedom. Usually emphasising rationality, open debate and free speech, this caucus sought to defend the classical liberal worldview in an increasingly censorious and “post-truth” climate. But this typically did not include much consideration of the enabling terms of thought or discussion itself — least of all, of the media within which these take place. Douglas Murray has been fighting with Joe Rogan and comedian Dave Smith over Palestine and Second World War revisionism. In response, Triggernometry host Konstantin Kisin has published a video and article defending Murray’s arguments from expertise and personal experience. Kisin cites the increasingly poor quality of public debate as evidence that he was mistaken in the core “anti-woke” contention that open debate always tends toward truth.
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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.
- LIWC relies on decades of empirical research and provides specialized means to comprehend, elucidate, and quantify psychological, social, and behavioral phenomena.
- A bombastic convert to Roman Catholic fundamentalism, Buckley’s brother-in-law was insistent that everyone be made to live according to his newfound beliefs, and he shoved them into the public eye at every opportunity, most prominently as the ghostwriter for Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater, the Republican Party’s 1964 presidential nominee.
- “At the deepest level, I struggle to understand why so many people put social games ahead of truth,” concluded Roberts.
- Also per the subtitle, Roberts suggests that the intellectual impact of IDW will last much longer.
- For starters, it did not determine exactly how long this radicalization process takes (though Ribeiro says he hopes to answer that question in the future).
This thirst explains how Carlson dismissed those caring about Oct. 7 as being obsessed with “foreign” matters before traveling to what seems like every country in the world to extol their virtues, fictional or otherwise. 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.
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. 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.
Defectors from academia are generously represented here, but the concerns of the intellectual dark web go far beyond performative wokeness on college campuses or Twitter pile-ons in the name of social justice. The essence of the movement, as I see it, is having the courage to stand up to groupthink, even if it means losing friends or having your positions willfully misconstrued because they don’t fit neatly in a particular ideological box. 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.
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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 ideas they claim to defend from politically correct opponents of truth are themselves a longstanding part of the United States’s conservative tradition.
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. Neither text, nor links to other websites, is reviewed or endorsed by The Ohio State University. Liu Zhongjing believes that the Chinese, beginning from the administration of the Qin Dynasty, had become a fellaheen nation. Therefore, there is no Han ethnic group because the supposedly Han people are fellaheen. Fellaheen is not an ethnic identity, so they are simply slaves laboring under imperial bureaucracy.

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. To just reduce him as an alt-right caricature or a fascist character, which I think they were trying to do in The New York Review of Books recently, is just a gross misread of the situation.
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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 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. Dark web intellectuals too have seen their culture invaded by women and minorities.