This week Christopher Rufo and I do a deep dive post-mortem on the Intellectual Dark Web, an outgrowth of a very particular time and place that is now long past its expiration. Why this movement imploded is worth careful consideration. Bari Weiss was surprisingly prescient in her concerns over... the micro-zeitgeist she was memeing into existence with her article about it in 2018 in the New York Times. Even then, she was struggling with the question of effective gatekeeping––who to let in, who to exclude––but this was the wrong question. Among other things, the failure of the IDW was not only its people, but that it never understood its own "classical liberal" project. It's not that it couldn't police its membership that made it fail, it's that the IDW remained afraid to honestly discuss the full implications of the heterodox "truth-seeking" it supposedly championed, and instead resorted to heterodoxy for heterodoxy's sake. This is a common failure mode among "dissident" intellectual movements, and one to be very cautious to avoid.show more

The IDW was a mid 2010s movement that would have been a little dated by the 90s. It’s ‘success’ was mostly insofar as it managed to drive clicks of people who had been sidelined and refused to accept reality, or those so young they had no other formative lens to understand the world through.

@christopherrufo @bariweiss This was a great episode. It echoed a 2024 piece of mine which I think you'll find interesting, comparing the IDW to the original neoconservatives as a means to showing why the IDW failed.

@christopherrufo @bariweiss Oh nice. Yes I make this exact comparison to the neocons. Though the original neocons were far more successful.

@christopherrufo @bariweiss Excellent. That's exactly the argument I made. Cool that we reached the same one independently.

The full episode is here:

@christopherrufo @bariweiss Heterodoxy? wtf speak English

It’s because the whole thing was a limited hangout to subvert the alt right movement ideology diverging from foreign interests. It was designed to capture the zeitgeist from Peterson and Rogan, who are the only two people that do not share the same ethnicity with the rest of those who were added to the “IDW.” This doesn’t mean the other members were all in on it as a strategy, but that was the strategy who ever wrote the script. The downstream effects gave a voice of legitimacy to people who otherwise would have gone unnoticed the past few years.

@christopherrufo @bariweiss “Lomez talks about this”

@christopherrufo @bariweiss Really agree on how much of the new right media movement is driven by a demand for market share. If Daryl Cooper went on Tucker and had the VDH take on WWII no one would watch. The Churchill was worse than Hitler is a market differentiater and its worked.

@christopherrufo @bariweiss The idw originated out of Hebrew day schools and Brown University

@christopherrufo @bariweiss There is only one issue that connects all of them except Rogan. Bari Weiss being part of the roll out is a chefs kiss

@christopherrufo @bariweiss We discuss this (also Jordan Peterson)

@christopherrufo @bariweiss I watch no news at all now. I trust no one bc everyone seems to not just do the accurate who what where when. They pretend they know the why when that’s not journalism.

@christopherrufo @bariweiss It fell apart because most of the people turned out to be cranks and frauds, unfortunately.