At his peak, Peterson was a true force to be reckoned with: one of the first Anglosphere academics to stand up to the madness not only of gender ideology, but of the excesses of wokeness more generally. When nearly everyone else was too afraid to speak up, Peterson planted his flag against the crybullies. Following his resignation from the University of Toronto, and ejection into the wilds of self-employment, thousands of frustrated people began discovering Peterson’s psychology lectures on YouTube.

That space, far from the petty tyranny of campus HR officers and faculty subcommittees, is one many still believe offers the ultimate balance between freedom of thought and financial gain — especially when combined with social media fame. Peterson’s trajectory, alongside that of others in what came to be called the “intellectual dark web”, suggests otherwise. More than that, far from providing the space to explore new and challenging ideas, social media fame demands a brand of conformity every bit as anti-intellectual as its progressive mirror.

The intellectual dark web, as a phrase if not a movement, emerged from an unlikely source: The New York Times. The term was coined in 2018, by then-columnist Bari Weiss. The Free Press founder would, of course, go on to have a varied and dramatic career herself, but in those early days she looked to others for inspiration. That included Peterson, but also Bret Weinstein, Christina Hoff Summers, Sam Harris, Steven Pinker and Jonathan Haidt.

In her piece, Weiss praised Peterson and the rest’s willingness to “disagree ferociously, but talk civilly about nearly every meaningful subject”, as well as their readiness to be “purged from institutions that have become increasingly hostile to unorthodox thought — and have found receptive audiences elsewhere.” Weiss wasn’t wrong there. But what she didn’t anticipate, a pattern reflected in her own trajectory too, is how those “receptive audiences” would ultimately constrain these same “heterodox” thinkers.

To understand Weiss’s enthusiasm you must first appreciate the political context of 2018. With Trump’s first term riven by liberal angst and pussy-hat protests, there was much talk of a new heterodox movement that could finally question the assumptions of the emerging woke orthodoxy. By its very nature, the concept of “heterodoxy” entails something almost Marxian in the sense of the theorist’s famous call for a “ruthless criticism of everything that exists.” And while that might seem odd coming from intellectuals on the Right, in those early days the idea of building new, fearless institutions, ones that encouraged a relentless criticism of all sides, seemed not only necessary but possible. That possibility has since evaporated.

In the same way it’s now clear that Trumpism amounts to little more than a corrupt, less competent version of Bush-era neoconservatism, it’s equally obvious that the heterodoxy once promised by Peterson, Weinstein, and Weiss amounts to little more than a reaction to the social excesses of Obama-era wokeness — echoing, in a thinner and much less serious form, the communitarian philosophical movement of the Eighties.

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Like today’s heterodox push, communitarianism’s campaign against the narcissism of the Sixties “me generation” was quickly co-opted by both the establishment Left and establishment Right. But while communitarianism never amounted to much policy-wise, it at least produced volumes of serious scholarship. Philip Selznick, for instance, warned that market logic was eroding the moral foundations necessary for democratic life, while Michael Sandel’s critiques of hyper-individualism challenged the notion that people could be understood merely as atomized consumers.

More recent heterodox enthusiasts simply lack these insights. Just look at Peterson. Over the last few years, he has devolved from an earnest Toronto professor to an archetypal over-tanned Arizona snowbird, one who claims that Marx was summoning the power of the Devil. Or else there’s Weiss, who first rose to prominence criticizing the feminist Left’s embrace of antisemites — but whose brand of “viewpoint diversity” now leaves little space for thoughtful critiques of Wall Street, tech monopolies or Israel.

It’s clear, at this point, that the intellectual “heterodoxy” movement died on the vine. ​​Whatever promise heterodoxy had is now long gone, with Peterson most recently becoming a podcast host on Ben Shapiro’s shamelessly partisan Daily Wire operation.

Peterson, then, is no Galileo — and that’s a pity. After all, he was an elegant example of Canada’s Tory tradition, a brand of conservatism largely absent from US politics since the Revolution. Unlike the American Right’s fixation on radical individualism and market absolutism, the Canadian Tory tradition emphasized social cohesion, moral order, and the idea that communities and institutions possess obligations that transcend pure economic efficiency. Its greatest modern theorist was the philosopher George Grant, whose 1965 classic Lament for a Nation warned that American-style capitalism was dissolving older forms of communal life.

Introducing Daily Wire fans to ideas of a Grantian hue — or even Burke or Oakeshott — would have been a genuinely heterodox accomplishment. How frustrating, then, that once the professor became an American media personality, he did little more than mimic the wealthy libertarian mentality that punk rock critics like Jello Biafra once dubbed “kill the poor”.

How to explain the heterodox crowd’s dreary lack of economic imagination? Part of the answer lies in the fact that most of its leading figures never truly departed from the assumptions of market liberalism. Peterson, for instance, has repeatedly argued that inequality is an unavoidable feature of “competence hierarchies”, while describing redistributive politics as driven mostly by “hatred of the rich”. Sam Harris, meanwhile, has often spoken about populist economics as though it were merely another form of irrational tribalism.

This is surely a marker of the IDW’s financial success. It’s easy to demean people reliant on government “entitlements” when you’re given multi-million-dollar contracts to host podcasts without any journalistic experience. If you just “clean your room,” “work hard” and “show up,” everything does indeed work out for you: assuming, that is, you’re considered a prodigy from a very young age.

Funding is important in other ways too. Much of the seed money for the Daily Wire’s initial startup came from the Texas billionaire brothers Farris and Dan Wilks, Christian nationalists in their social bent and Social Darwinists in their economics. These billionaire brothers also fund Ted Cruz, PragerU, and, of course, Donald Trump’s presidential campaigns. Little wonder almost none of the big-name heterodox critics, aside from outliers like Musa al-Gharbi, dare touch income inequality or issues of class — because even raising those questions remains professionally radioactive.

I speak here from direct experience. When I taught in one of the country’s first higher education civics departments at Arizona State University, there was plenty of talk both publicly and privately about “viewpoint diversity”. That even included welcoming “heterodoxy.” And so, for three years, I hosted a podcast for my department, one that said positive things about labor unions and which expressed skepticism that middle-class harmony could ever return without them. Then, all of a sudden, within weeks of publishing some work sympathetic to New Deal-style social safety nets, the director of the program informed me that my podcast would now have to be “supervised” by their marketing director.

This 28-year-old staffer now had to edit all my podcast interviews, without my ultimate approval, before they went live on the university’s public media platform. Otherwise, the project would be immediately stripped of all its funding. When I refused and reported the issue to the university’s faculty ombudsman, my department director refused to meet with him, then swiftly filed paperwork to cancel my teaching contract for the following year. (Yes, this type of thing is completely legal in red states).

Overnight, I went from being invited to events all across “heterodox” academia, receiving awards I hadn’t applied to, to being effectively blacklisted. I had touched American politics’ forbidden fruit — but isn’t that exactly what heterodox thinkers are supposed to do?

Apparently, intellectual heterodoxy and all its calls for “viewpoint diversity” do not include welcoming anything that challenges the economic fundamentals of our low-wage, low-benefits neoliberal order, an economic paradigm where nearly all productivity gains are funneled to the tech industry, real estate hoarders, and market speculators. All those injustices are just fine for the heterodox crowd, it seems, so long as we get rid of DEI schemes and gender pronouns in email bios. Economically speaking, it’s the same arrangement with different branding.

Wokeness has always been a convenient distraction from the fact that the middle-class equilibrium that once underwrote liberal democracy has vanished and shows no signs of returning. In its place we have credentialed serfdom, institutional capture, and a cultural caste system dressed up in platitudes about “equity” and “inclusion.”

Of course, we cannot talk enough about the damage done when higher education institutions across the English-speaking world abandoned the pursuit of truth in favor of fashionable concepts of “social justice”. Yet a broader development is that contrarian thinkers — no matter their political bent — have been forced out of the academy entirely. The right to put forth unpopular ideas, which tenure was meant to protect, is simply no longer possible inside higher education, while the disappointments of the “heterodox” gang prove that social media stardom provides no sanctuary either. If anything, it just imposes a different kind of conformist pressure.

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As Andrew Keen presciently argued a decade ago, social media not only produces but practically demands what he called the “culture of the amateur”. After being cast out of their academic positions, Peterson — as well as Weinstein, who left a job at Evergreen State College under similar circumstances — had almost no choice but to lean into their fame among the online Right and make the best of it. Whether by hook or by crook, they both ended up becoming little better than any other podcast talking head riffing on contemporary political topics and international affairs, subjects neither man studied nor worked in professionally. The result? Embarrassing displays like Weinstein’s cringe-worthy 2020 proposal for a “unity” presidential ticket: pairing a center-left and center-right candidate selected through online polling to run jointly for the presidency. The problems with such an idea are too obvious to dwell on. But that’s just the culture of the amateur running its course.

For scholars to pursue knowledge without the audience pressure that comes from journalism and modern mass media, they ultimately need three things. First, the space and time to pursue their studies. Second, a community of knowledgeable and earnest interlocutors who can sharpen their ideas and push back on pitfalls. Third, a stable income independent of random funders with political axes to grind.

Academic peer review was designed for just this purpose, but it long ago broke down. It’s simply far too easy for journal editors to “desk reject” ideas they don’t like, flatly refusing to send work out for review — or else purposefully sending undesirable research to reviewers who’ll reject it — based on cherished orthodoxies or to protect the reputation of favored colleagues.

This doesn’t mean peer review is unnecessary, nor that a genuine heterodox movement couldn’t prosper. It just means that, as with so much else in contemporary politics, we were promised one thing and delivered another. The communitarians, for their part, benefited from doing their best work at a time when peer review and academic hiring were still mostly non-ideological. Their heterodox successors, of course, enjoyed no such luck. And if that led to an intellectual collapse, I’d also argue that the unhealthy incentives foisted on the IDW have led to a striking degree of personal suffering.

Whatever demons Selznick or Sandel may have faced, their far gentler milieu meant they could easily slip back into obscurity. Unfortunately for Peterson, his health struggles have become a punchline on both the online Right and Left. But this bipartisan fixation on the oddity of his condition — armchair diagnosing it, mocking it, politicizing it — obscures what Peterson’s sad trajectory actually reveals. The Canadian’s fall from grace is not just a personal failing, nor merely a story of fame gone wrong. It reflects, rather, how the absence of any stable, supportive intellectual home reduces heterodox thinkers to circus acts, dancing for the nickels of the donor class and moronic reply guys.

Inside academia, heterodox work is still very much constrained, if not actively punished. Outside it, the incentives of audience capture, donor pressure, and constant performance distort it to the point that those attempting to sustain heterodox thought become caricatures of themselves — unstable, unreliable, and easily dismissed by the institutions they once challenged. And no wonder. Wokeness was never a glitch in the neoliberal order, instead reflecting, as the communitarians understood, the natural outgrowth of instrumentalist reasoning and deepening inequality. Both are part and parcel of liberal capitalism pushed to its functional limits. What a shame that heterodoxy as currently constituted leaves all of this untouched.

I’m referring, of course, to three of the superstars of the so-called “intellectual dark web”: Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, and Ben Shapiro. It was in a hagiographic New York Times profile by Bari Weiss in 2018 that the creaky tricycle of Rogan-Shapiro-Peterson rode into the mainstream of American life. Weiss praised them, and their inner circle of guests and fellow podcast hosts as “a collection of iconoclastic thinkers” having conversations unlike anything else in the culture.

Agree with their politics or not — “Identity politics is a toxic ideology that is tearing America apart” is one example Weiss seizes on — there was an obvious problem even back in 2018. From the claim that free speech was under the assault from the left to the accusation that transgender women were destroying women’s sports, all the IDW’s views were orthodoxy of the Republican Party, and all had the bullhorn amplification of Donald Trump, Republican congressional leadership, and the highest-rated cable news network in America.

Since then, the iconoclasts have huddled more tightly around the MAGA consensus while exaggerating their personalities to unintentionally comedic effect. Rogan, for his part, has become a billionaire sycophant, all but crediting Elon Musk with saving the world and seeming to take Marc Andreessen at his word when he claimed that Biden staffers told him they’d “kill AI”. Another high water mark includes boasting that “bringing back” the word “retard” is one of his “greatest achievements”. His friend, Jordan Peterson, has transformed from an insightful psychotheorist, who picked up the mantle of Joseph Campbell, into someone who says, with a straight face: “Up yours, woke moralists. We’ll see who cancels who.”

And if all that’s not embarrassing enough, the trio’s political trajectory is similarly uninspiring. With the exception of Sam Harris, an IDW-adjacent figure who has now become a Left-leaning outlier, all of 2018’s “new media” superstars now mostly parrot the same lines on issues from Covid and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, to anti-Trump hysteria, transgenderism and DEI. Shapiro has broken with Trump on tariffs, and offered surprisingly strong criticism on the US president’s brazen corruption in dealing with Qatar, namely accepting the $400 million jet as a “gift”. Similarly, Joe Rogan has shown signs of humanity by expressing doubt and outrage in response to the Trump administration deporting immigrants and refugees, without due process, to an El Salvadoran gulag. Despite their occasional rebuke of Trump, they still occupy a Right-wing world with a culture that they helped to create. As a consequence, the so-called “heterodoxy” will only go so far. Don’t expect Shapiro to interview guests about climate change and universal health care. And don’t hold your breath waiting on Rogan to consider the costs of structural racism and cultural misogyny.

Suffice to say that it is a little strange that a group of “iconoclasts” and “renegades” march like wooden soldiers to the same tune on nearly every issue in modern politics. Complaining about the phantasmic threat of the all-powerful “Left” — even as Donald Trump ignores a unanimous Supreme Court ruling, and implements a Maoist defunding purge of entire sectors — is straight out of surrealist theater. Yet the absurdity is successful: so successful that other media figures have muscled in on the act too. On their respective podcasts, Bill Maher and Stephen A. Smith routinely denounce the “woke Left” while downplaying Trump’s offenses. California Governor Gavin Newsom, proving his favorite hair product is snake oil, has started a podcast too, sitting down with Right-wing activists such as Charlie Kirk to, you guessed it, ridicule progressives.

Nor can you really blame them: beyond the continued popularity of the original IDW trinity — Rogan reached 20 million listeners a week in 2024 — they’ve also turned politics into a remarkable moneymaker. To emphasize they’re in business, Peterson, Shapiro and the rest will take occasional pauses from their identical rants to pitch nutrition supplements, sleeping pills, and life insurance. It leads to awkward moments. Shapiro’s robotic, mile-a-minute delivery of his latest take on the widespread slaughter in the Middle East, suddenly transitions into shilling for a phone company. This stuff is easy to mock, but then again Shapiro himself can chortle all the way to the bank. Estimates of his yearly earning range from $10 to $20 million.

And with an audience comes influence — not just of the straightforward political variety either. Thanks to Jordan Peterson, the IDW podcast world has suddenly found Jesus. For example, Rogan, who once famously identified as an atheist, now declares that it would be a good time for “Jesus to come back”. One is tempted to quote the late George Carlin — “Jesus is coming. Look busy” — but several of Rogan’s fellow podcast bros have adopted a similar line. In a new media chicken-and-egg paradox, it difficult to determine if the podcast world is influencing clerical authority or vice versa, but the Catholic Church has created, in the words of one report, a “Catholic right celebrity conversion complex”, relying on figures like Candace Owens, Jordan Peterson, Russell Brand, and other hosts to “make faith-appeals” and fight the supposedly “feminized church”.

It isn’t enough to speak with uniformity about politics and culture; the new media rebels must also express agreement that atheism is destructive, and religion gives society purpose and meaning. New friend of the IDW, Russell Brand, currently facing sexual assault charges in the UK, now baptizes people in tighty-whities, even as he recites scripture and leads his audience in prayer. While praying at a rally over the summer, he caused Jordan Peterson to break the third wall and laugh at a plea for God to rescue the West from “Kafkaesque, Huxleyan, Orwellian” forces. Peterson himself provoked laughter during his recent appearance on the “Jubilee Debate” in which he squared off against 20 college atheists. He sputtered, refused to answer if he is an actual Christian rather than some kind of vague theist who finds inspiration in the Bible, and even played the part of the hall monitor when he abruptly ended an exchange with one young man over his sarcastic and contemptuous tone. The decline of Peterson is unfortunate, because he can produce genuine insight in his field of psychology, and he could have positioned himself as a Joseph Campbell-style psychotheorist for the new media age. Instead, he’s become yet another casualty of the increasingly imbecilic culture war. On the right side of the battlefield, his audience shows all the signs of loyalty, and his popularity will likely endure for many years.

Taken together, then, the brave, exciting new world of uncensored, authentic media — where “dangerous” ideas thrive — has collapsed into Fox News with infomercials. And for all of the familiar complaints about “liberal media bias,” the mainstream press continues to salivate over reactionary, manosphere “new media” stars, both oldies like Rogan and newcomers like Theo Von. A comedian turned political provocateur, Von peddles updated variations of antisemitic conspiracy theories. According to him, you apparently “have to be afraid to even say ‘Jew’” in Hollywood. Von has admitted to not knowing that Judaism precedes Christianity, and that there are practicing Jews of all races. Despite his ignorance, the New York Times profiled him as a “proxy for the average American citizen” having “vibey conversations” that “dismantle the interview show”.

In other words, then, the IDW continues to go from strength to strength. But that still leaves the question of why. As those bursting accounts imply, I think one answer is money, not just made but spent. As Eoin Higgins details in his new book, tech billionaires have coalesced with “anti-woke” activists in the podcast world to shift “alternative” media away from heterodoxy — and towards the kind of conservative conformity that dominated talk radio in the Nineties and 2000s.

There’s plenty of practical evidence here too. Marc Andreessen, a billionaire and Trump enthusiast, is a leading investor in Substack. For his part, Peter Thiel owns Rumble, the Right-wing version of YouTube, while David Sacks has a large share of Facebook. Speaking of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg recently joined the digital MAGA commune, largely because Trump falsely promised the end of an antitrust case against Meta over its purchase of Instagram. The allegation that the Kremlin, through a false front company, paid podcast hosts hundreds of thousands of dollars to unknowingly sow discord among the American electorate, has also done nothing to soften the Right-wing cacophony that advertises itself as revelatory commentary.

There are other cases where the influence is more subtle: the result of networking, shared interests, and overlapping incentives. In Manufacturing Consent, Noam Chomsky details how one of the most powerful filters of media influence is the “ownership filter”. When tech-billionaires own the most powerful platforms, and they all have the same low tax, monopolistic agenda, it is hardly surprising that those platforms most heavily promote (and compensate) hosts who excoriate progressives: who also just happen to back antitrust actions against Silicon Valley.   

Not that demolition of heterodoxy and variety is just about funding. There are cultural factors at play too. In 2005, the late David Foster Wallace shadowed Jon Ziegler, a Right-wing talk radio host in California. Ziegler has since become a “Never Trump” Republican. But when Wallace met him, he attracted attention by making racist jokes, objectifying women, and pushing the boundaries of conservative opinion on issues ranging from welfare to profiling of Muslims in airports.

 Though Wallace acknowledged the importance of financial interests — explaining that “my radio company has zero incentive to promote the public good” — he also argued that “anger” and “clarity” sell better than emotions like joy and satisfaction, and certainly better than things like nuance and complexity. It is easier to structure a worldview, and therefore an entertainment product, around a simple, enraged perspective. Wallace observed that the motive for simplicity creates a dangerous game for Right-wing hosts who pride themselves on violating standards of political correctness. To appear more authentic and daring, the talk radio (or podcast) host has to venture further and further beyond the limits of polite society.

Joe Rogan recently displayed this dynamic at work by hosting, in separate episodes, Ian Carroll and Darryl Cooper, antisemitic conspiracy theorists who have made sympathetic remarks about Hitler while claiming that Winston Churchill was the “chief villain” of the Second World War. He’s also hosted Suzanne Humphries, a street corner crank who believes that tuberculosis is a side effect of the smallpox vaccine, and that the Covid vaccine contains snake poison. 

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The political consequences are not minor. As recently as 2012, it was common knowledge that Republican officials lived in fear of Rush Limbaugh’s denunciation. Now, second only to Donald Trump, they move like lemmings according to the orders of Right-wing talk show hosts and podcasters. Historian Nicole Hemmer has described how “conservative media became the institutional and organizational nexus of the conservative movement” — helping to solve the political mystery of why one of America’s two major political parties demonstrates more interest in mocking and irritating “the woke” than addressing the dysfunction of American health care, public education, and social services. 

Of course, the dumbing down of American life did not happen overnight. Richard Hofstadter wrote his classic Anti-Intellectualism in American Life back in 1966, and despite the mainstream nostalgia for so-called better days, Right-wing media doesn’t have a friendly history. As an example, William F. Buckley opposed the civil rights movement and suggested, in print, that the government force gay men with AIDS to get tattoos indicating their positive status above their buttocks.

In other words, then, the “new” media is merely the same old wine in a fresh bottle. What has changed, though, is that the attention span of the American public is increasingly fractured and shortened, and that legacy institutions from newspapers to political parties can no longer exercise any restraints over discourse. It is likely that the problem will get worse, and eventually, poison the Left too. Certainly, the New York Times and Slate offering glowing profiles of Hasan Piker is ominous. Piker is a podcast host who claims to hate capitalism while selling clothing apparel with his face on it, laughs at people who show sympathy for Israeli hostages, and declares that “America deserved 9/11”.

David Foster Wallace concluded his profile of Ziegler with what he called an “editorial note”. As he put it: “One can almost feel it: what a bleak and merciless world this host lives in — believes, nay, knows for an absolute fact he lives in. I’ll take doubt.” Wallace might not have predicted the medium, but he certainly understood the message. The psychological algorithm has met the technological algorithm, leaving us in a bleak world indeed.

A new book on the IDW takes a dimmer view of these above-the-fray intellectuals who claim to be motivated by hostility to ideological orthodoxy. Indeed, Against the Web: A Cosmopolitan Answer to the New Right is the most substantial critique of the IDW and its brand of ‘classical liberalism’ to date.

The book’s author is Michael Brooks, an American political YouTuber and a socialist. For Brooks, the IDW use a veneer of ‘reason’ and ‘science’ to justify prevailing inequalities. In a context where Donald Trump is the occupant of the White House and neo-liberal capitalism remains dominant (Jeff Bezos is forecast to become the world’s first trillionaire by 2026), the IDW’s cringeworthy posturing as a “persecuted minority” is glib and largely vacuous, in Brooks’s telling. As Brooks writes, the IDW “brand themselves as unclassifiable renegades even as they all share elements of an unmistakable anti-left agenda”.

The IDW’s lodestar is Jordan Peterson, the Canadian clinical psychologist and self-help guru who likes to talk about hierarchies and gender differences while dissecting Left-wing totalitarianism for the YouTube generation. Peterson has been preaching the same material for years. Yet he only truly gained prominence in 2016 following a campus row over pronouns for transgender students. The campus Left went berserk and Peterson started getting invited onto popular talk shows to rail earnestly against “post-modern Neo-Marxists”.

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Yet as time went on, what the ‘renegades’ of the Intellectual Dark Web were really reneging on was their previous commitment to the Left. As Brooks writes, “[the IDW] generate their audience by publishing a neverending stream of ‘oh my God, look at these leftists being crazy’ articles”.

Aside from Ben Shapiro, a religious conservative who refers to abortion as “killing babies”, the IDW is largely made up of former liberals who have been “mugged by reality”, in Irving Kristol’s famous phrase, even if they nowadays often sound indistinguishable from what Brooks describes as “old school reactionaries”. Dave Rubin was once a member of the progressive Young Turks network who today decries “oppression Olympics”. Sam Harris is a fellow New Atheist ‘Horseman’ and one-time supporter of Hillary Clinton who conducts thought experiments on torture and a nuclear first strike against Iran. Meanwhile Jordan Peterson implores readers of his bestselling book, 12 Rules for Life, to “Set your house in perfect order before you criticise the world”.

Underlying much of this, Brooks argues, is an acceptance of prevailing inequalities — economic, gender, and racial — as natural. The IDW’s leading lights uncritically defend capitalism while drawing on biology and the dreary science of ‘IQ’ to bolster the status quo. They aim to “naturalize or mythologize historically contingent power relations”, as Brooks puts it. Behind every one of Peterson’s self-help homilies is an unbending fealty to the status quo. Hierarchies are hard-wired because lobsters follow them. Gender differences are real because women gravitate towards people and men towards things. Envy and resentment at the success of others will rot your soul. Oh, and stand up straight and make your damn bed.

The Left takes a dim view of the self-help movement — related, I suspect, to its own paternalistic preference for people who are on their way down rather than on their way up. Sinecured academics and privately educated scribblers make a handsome living telling poor people that they should “rise with their class, not out of it”. The sort of self-betterment promoted by the likes of Dr Peterson — so the argument goes — would be better channelled into a focus on structural change. Ironically, much like the Petersonian self-help mantras they disparage, large sections of the Left also want the poor to defer gratification — albeit until after the Revolution.

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But self-actualisation has its obvious limitations. As Brooks notes, “sometimes people’s houses aren’t in order precisely because of the condition of the world”. In contrast to many of his comrades on the Left, however, Brooks argues that, rather than dismissing Jordan Peterson’s fanbase — largely white, male and self-taught — as ‘deplorables’, the Left should try to win them over to a more substantive programme. “One of the most dangerous things the Left can do is to write off the demographic to which Peterson appeals because of its relative racial and gender privilege,” Brooks writes.

Brooks’ critique of the IDW is at its best when he pulls apart the latter’s penchant for “naturalising instead of historicising”. Much IDW thought seeks in effect to depolitisise politics. We cannot fundamentally change the world therefore we should only try to describe it. Particularly absurd, as Brooks points out, is the way in which ideology is portrayed among members of the IDW as something other people subscribe to, whereas they are merely disinterested, above-the-fray intellectuals. Thus Peterson launches tirades against the principle of absolute equality, which few people believe in anyway, while earnestly drinking the meritocratic Kool-Aid, which is as much an ideological mirage as anything Peterson opposes. Meritocracy, as the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu once put it, is an imaginary world in which “every prize can be attained, instantaneously, by everyone, so that at each moment anyone can become anything”.

The belief in actually existing equality of opportunity is particularly credulous when it comes to accounting for racial injustices in the contemporary United States. Charles Murray, author of The Bell Curve, whose work is frequently cited by members of the IDW, made the astonishing claim during a 2007 debate that “most of the juice” had gone out of environmental explanations for racial inequality “by the 1970s”. This too is an ideological point of view. As Brooks notes with incredulity, this was “a single decade after the ‘Whites Only’ signs came out of the restaurant windows and black people started to be allowed to vote”.

Of course, one needn’t be affiliated with the IDW to understand that the movement’s popularity — Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson can easily pack-out auditoriums — is partly a backlash against the excesses of the Left. It was once said that the Bolsheviks sought to politicise sleep. Their successors on today’s social justice scene deploy the truism that everything is political as a licence to shut down opposing opinions as ‘phobias’ and ‘microaggressions’. Peterson is not entirely wrong when he compares the campus activist who vibrates with rage at some minor rhetorical transgression to the Cheka officer whose gloved-hand raps on the door in the middle of the night. The difference is one has political power while the other does not.

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This remains an important distinction, however, especially in Donald Trump’s America. The cloying self-regard of much IDW debate is bad enough, but it seems especially self-serving to pose as a purveyor of ‘unorthodox thought’ when taking on the comic turbulence of campus politics — all the while saying very little about the moral abominations of the Trump Presidency. Flattering the likes of Charles Murray may constitute subversive opinion in some quarters, but it’s hardly Charter 77.

Despite his opposition to Peterson and company, Brooks is of the Marxist-influenced Left, which has little time for the hair-splitting narcissism of identity politics and what he refers to contemptuously as the “shallow analysis” of the “ultra-woke”. Brooks calls instead for a return to universalism because “good and liberating ideas, like bad and reactionary ones, have thrived in a variety of cultural settings”.

This is a welcome blast against the dominant fetish for what Brooks describes as “drawing artificial lines between cultures”. Campus-driven heresy hunts are a distraction and a turn-off for ordinary people, as Brooks notes. Damning someone for being male or having a white skin may provide some cheap and ephemeral thrill, but it is not a serious approach to winning political power. As Brooks writes, “comradeship and solidarity across racial and national lines… is going to have to be central to any kind of viable movement to achieve a better world”.

Moreover, by the time Peterson and co appeared on the scene, many liberals had apparently forgotten how to argue for the things they believe in — thinking that moral indignation alone was enough. The brass standard here is Cathy Newman’s flailing attempt to interrogate Peterson in a 2018 interview for Channel 4 News. The interview went viral on the back of his running rings around her. Newman’s subsequent attempt to blame the humiliation on “men with an agenda” was as fatuous and complacent as her interview style.

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But the Intellectual Dark Web — Peterson in particular — have thrived off the back of an overblown fear, particularly prevalent in the United States, of a resurgent Socialism. This would probably find a less substantial audience if people like Michael Brooks stopped trying to resuscitate Marxism-Leninism. Brooks contrasts the reactionary Left-baiting of the IDW with his own fruitless search – encapsulated in the pages of the socialist magazine Jacobin — for a “rejuvenated, humane, internationalist, and appealing version of the politics of the Finland station”[1].

In setting out what he believes in (as opposed to the IDW), Brooks evokes St Petersburg’s Finland Station to convey his sympathy for the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Brooks concedes that one should not be an “uncritical apologist for everything that happened in the years after Lenin arrived at the Finland Station” — which is big of him — but he contrasts the reactionary politics of the IDW with his own dream of Communism with a human face. This reader wasn’t persuaded. Indeed, this sort of Socialist wish-thinking was once likened by the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski to trying to cook a “dish of fried snowballs”. Leninism leads to famine, terror and forced labour camps — even if Jordan Peterson and the IDW say so.

Anti-Communism comes in a variety of hues though, some of which are more interesting than others. One irony of the ongoing culture war is the sense — to those of us standing on the sidelines at least — that one extreme sustains its opposite, and vice-versa. Christopher Hitchens briefly appears in Brooks’s book — only to be showered with abuse about his “failing liver”. Once upon a time Hitchens cautioned his friend the novelist Martin Amis to be careful about the type of anti-Communist he turned into. Brooks similarly reprimands the IDW for “obsessing about ‘freedom’ while getting chummy with authoritarians like Viktor Orban”. The IDW might here be reminded of Peterson’s Rule #6: Set your house in perfect order before you criticise the World.

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One should also look at the material reasons why, historically, socialism has gained traction, but this doesn’t seem to interest the IDW. This might after all indicate that something was rotten with the status quo. Indeed, one can imagine Ben Shapiro or Dave Rubin reading Dickens’s classic revolutionary drama, A Tale of Two Cities, and coming away looking for Jacobins under the bed — while entirely missing the line which warns: “Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and it will twist itself into the same tortured forms.”

The Whiggish liberalism of the Intellectual Dark Web sometimes feels like an ideology for affluent and comfortable times — in common with the narcissistic culture of identity politics it defines itself against. In this sense the IDW bring to mind an older generation of 19th-century liberals and conservatives who, in the words of Czesław Miłosz — a far more interesting anti-Stalinist than anyone the Intellectual Dark Web has produced — continued to “mouth 19th-century phrases about respect for man” — while all around them the world burned.

But the culture wars haven’t gone away. As we’ve seen with the recent Black Lives Matter protests: Covid-19, stagnant economies and mass unemployment are lighting a fire beneath ongoing ideological battles over history and social justice. One therefore imagines that the IDW will go on having the “important conversations that the mainstream won’t”, as Dave Rubin portentously phrased it. For Brooks, however, those seeking answers to the big questions of our time be better off looking elsewhere.

[1] Jordan Peterson may call Lenin “an ideologue & mass murderer”, yet the hero in Lenin’s favourite novel — Chernyshevsky’s What Is To Be Done? — is a man called Rakhmetev who eschews sex and alcohol and eats only raw steak while following a rigorous exercise programme. Which sounds an awful lot like Jordan Peterson.

Patreon, for those who haven’t heard of it, is an online membership platform where people can seek crowdfunding from fans. There are ‘creators’ who use the platform to get people to support them, and there are ‘supporters’ who donate to those whose work they favour. To an extent, Patreon, and companies like it, have filled the space that the internet destroyed as it popularised the idea that you can get almost anything you like for free.

So companies like YouTube, for example, allow people to infringe copyright by ripping videos from actual ‘creators’ (musicians, writers, public speakers and others). Nearly all the benefit goes to the platform; a tiny amount (through advertising) in very specific and approved cases potentially goes to the person who has posted it, and zero goes to the person who has actually created the content. This is the way that the internet has been for many years now, and it has come to be accepted as though it was part of nature, rather than the greatest intellectual property heist in history.

Enter Patreon, which has become popular because it fulfils the function of providing salaries to people the internet has already taken salaries away from. Journalists, who would once have been paid for their work when they delivered it, can instead be supported through the site. Bands and other acts who have lost the money they would have made in record or CD sales to free online streaming services can similarly make up some of that shortfall on Patreon.

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It also secures funding for figures who might have had trouble breaking through in the old media landscape. It is in the nature of such things that anybody who has a large (or potentially large) following, but has been unable to find a place in the mainstream, is likely to be edgy – unlikely to crop up in the broadsheets or be invited on terrestrial television discussion shows.

But it is precisely these ‘edgy’ figures who have given Patreon such a headache. Take the Canadian blogger and activist Lauren Southern. Her provocative stunts (she has since branched out into documentary making) and statements all coming from a vantage point that might be described as ‘alt-light’, were never going to sit comfortably with the deciders in Silicon Valley.

Sure enough, eventually she did something which handed Patreon a reason to ban her from their platform. Southern became involved with a group called “Defend Europe” which was sailing the Mediterranean with the purpose of encouraging shiploads of migrant vessels to go back to the north African shoreline whence they came.

There was some dispute between Southern and Patreon over the ban. They claimed they blacklisted her because she was using the funding to embark on a mission which was “likely to cause loss of life”; she said she was only reporting on the group’s activism and hadn’t used any of the Patreon funds in order to do so and so was not in violation of their terms of service.

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But whatever the truth of the matter, you do not have to agree with Southern’s actions or her interpretation of events to recognise that Patreon’s move to bar her from their platform was a highly political one. No action had been taken by the website against groups openly supportive of illegal immigration, so taking a stance against someone clearly opposed to it opened them up to charges of clear bias.

The ban proved to be an early warning sign. At the time, back in July 2017, a number of prominent Patreon users, including Sam Harris, asked the question: if Southern wasn’t satisfying their ethical standards, then who might next fall victim to the ‘purge’? In response, Patreon’s founder and CEO Jack Conte gave personal assurances that there were specific reasons why Southern was a Patreon persona non grata and insisted that others should have no such fears.

But then, just before Christmas last year, Patreon closed the account of the controversial commentator, Carl Benjamin, also known online as Sargon of Akkad, who has almost 900,000 YouTube followers and who was reportedly earning around $12,000 a month from donations. His content roves over a lot of terrain, from political correctness to how to date women and more. It is not to everyone’s taste, but it is demonstrably to a lot of people’s taste.

In justifying their decision to ban him, Patreon claimed he had been found guilty of using “racial and homophobic slurs as insults in a conversation shared online”. In his rebuttal, Benjamin makes the claim that the conversation in question – the contents of which he disputes – was not featured on Patreon and did not have any link to its platform. Nevertheless, the ban remains in place.

In an interview with Dave Rubin, in 2017, Jack Conte had sworn that decisions to expel people from his platform were taken only on the basis of behaviour and not on the basis of political ideology.

Yet the decision to expel Benjamin from the platform without any appeal looked like a specifically ideological move. It also followed hard on the heels of the banning of other controversial Right-wing figures, including Milo Yiannopoulos and James Allsup earlier in 2018.

It was at this point that a movement away from the platform began with the announcement, by Sam Harris, that he was leaving the site. “Although I don’t share the politics of the banned members,” he wrote, “I consider it no longer tenable to expose any part of my podcast funding to the whims of Patreon’s ‘Trust and Safety’ committee.”

https://twitter.com/SamHarrisOrg/status/1074504882210562048

Then, at the beginning of this year, Dave Rubin and Jordan Peterson (who has been one of the most successful and high-profile users of Patreon) jointly announced their withdrawal from the platform.

In none of these cases has the choice been made easily or glibly. It takes time to grow support on a crowd-funding platform, and switching to another platform will doubtless mean that some of those supporters will be lost along the way.

It remains to be seen whether Patreon will do anything to stem the flow and whether other platforms will be able to match its success. But in the meantime there are a number of important points to be made about its online experiment.

Patreon should have seen this coming. It should have anticipated – just as Facebook should have – that it was going to become an arbiter of what is or is not acceptable speech. As Conte’s interview with Rubin showed, these companies are now attempting to solve dilemmas which, with a little foresight, could have perfectly easily been avoided. If they had stuck to only banning people if their activities were illegal, or if the ‘Trust and safety’ committee’s guidelines had been explicit from the outset rather than a wildly evolving work in progress, then users could have known what they were signing up to and the company would have been within its rights to expel those who broke the rules.

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The second point is that we are seeing John O’ Sullivan‘s law in action in the tech world. That law (which states that all institutions that are not explicitly Right-wing will drift to the Left over time) would seem to be playing out at some of the most important companies in Silicon Valley. And given that Twitter, Patreon and various other online companies started from a fairly Left-wing position, it’s unlikely their direction will be reversed.

Doubtless the political slant has been reinforced by the Hoovering up of all those political activists out of office since the Democrats lost the White House. These people need to find something to do to justify their salaries and it seems their idea of ‘doing’ is shifting the rules regarding acceptable speech. In one particular political direction.

This might all seem a bit inside baseball. But, in fact, it is one of the most important speech wars of our time. A journalist or artist who successfully uses a platform like Patreon will swiftly exceed the salaries available in the struggling older media. In time, this could well challenge the grip as well as the attractiveness of what was regarded as the consensus on a whole range of issues. And that’s why the flight from the site matters. Patreon provided a base for those who wanted to challenge a whole set of dogmas. Let’s hope they can be challenged from elsewhere.

The ‘Intellectual Dark Web’ is, therefore, an over-dramatic metaphor – a buzz phrase for the loose grouping of academics, journalists and other thinkers profiled by Bari Weiss in the New York Times.

Some of the best-known names include Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris and our own Douglas Murray. Some are libertarians, others are liberals or left-wingers. Though a largely secular bunch, their altitudes to religion range from outright hostility through to friendly engagement. What they have in common though is that they have all, in some way, violated the strictures of contemporary political correctness.

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But so what? That’s true of lots of people – probably most people. It’s not as if they don’t get to have their say or can’t find publications that reflect their point of view.

For instance, one of the biggest news websites in the world is Mail Online – an extension of Britain’s lavishly un-PC Daily Mail. Another massively successful example is Fox News – the right-wing echo chamber par excellence.

So what on earth is the New York Times doing talking about an ‘Intellectual Dark Web’ as if the opponents of the PC-left were dissidents in a totalitarian state?

Well, let’s start with the word ‘intellectual’. The Daily Mail can be accused of many things – but having intellectual pretensions is not one of them. Of course, the right-leaning media does have its high-brow publications too – but almost all of these cater for a conservative audience with an interest in conservative themes. The IDW is broader than that – not only in terms of ideological outlook, but in seeking to participate in a discourse that is public not partisan.

Public intellectualism needs an ‘intellectual commons’ – universities, libraries , bookshops, museums, theatres, public service broadcasters, respected journals, and ‘newspapers of record’. Some of these public institutions may in fact be privately-owned and/or have their own ideological biases. Nevertheless they make it their mission to provide a platform for a genuine exchange of ideas across ideological divides.

The problem is that that the post-modern left is marching through these institutions – and not only disagreeing with other points of view, but seeking to delegitimise them.

The intellectual commons has become an increasingly hostile space. Several members of the IDW – including Jordan Peterson, Brett Weinstein and Christina Hoff Sommers have been subject to harassment. The problem isn’t just the rentamob, but also the academic, journalistic and cultural establishments who acquiesce or actively cooperate with the PC-left’s programme of delegitimisation.

To help understand what’s at stake I’d recommend Chris Beck’s profile of Claire Lehmann for Splice Today. Lehmann is one of the youngest members of the IDW and the founder what could be called its ‘house’ publication – Quillette:

“Lehmann contributed to a number of publications before launching Quillette, but claims the Australian media blacklisted her as soon as she started criticizing feminism. She rejects the ‘blank slate’ view that feminists, and progressives in general, have made a centerpiece of their dogma. It’s the belief that humans are strictly the product of culture and socialization, and the rejection of the idea that humans are born with certain innate characteristics.”

Note that challenging this form of feminism is not tantamount to anti-feminism. Indeed, if you believe that there are some ‘hardwired’ differences between the sexes, then it’s all the more important that things shouldn’t be arranged to the convenience of only one of them.

Of course, such subtleties are entirely lost on Quillette‘s critics:

“Quillette’s a place where people of various political persuasions can escape what Lehmann calls the ‘polarization entrepreneurs’—those who boost their careers by promoting divisiveness. Left-leaning critics call it a repository for reactionary thought, or a forum that polishes crude alt-right talking points so they appear erudite. Lacking substantive grounds for attack, they resort to name-calling.”

To the post-modern, PC, intersectional left, error has no rights. Any dissent from its theories is interpreted as oppression or even ‘violence’ – and must therefore be excluded from public debate.

It is this circular logic that spins the real intellectual dark web.

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