Intellectual dark web

In the winter of 2018, Politico magazine ran a 'Culture Wars' issue, providing its delicate, cosmopolitan readership with a glimpse of the intellectual stirrings in the provinces of the empire. One of the articles, 'The Voice of the “Intellectual Dark Web”’, profiled Australian journalist and founding editor of Quillette, Claire Lehmann. At the time, the ‘Intellectual Dark Web’ represented a kind of vanguardism, or at least prestigious media coverage portrayed it as such. For example, Bari Weiss, then a writer for the New York Times, romanticized the concept in a story for the paper. ‘What is the IDW and who is a member of it? It's hard to explain, which is both its beauty and its danger.

Pity the poor rockstar who finds himself embroiled in the culture wars because he liked the wrong book. Winston Marshall, banjo player for  the hugely successful band Mumford and Sons, almost certainly had no idea what he was getting himself into when he decided to tweet praise at Andy Ngo, the conservative journalist, for his best-selling book about the horrors of antifa. 'Finally had time to read your important book. You’re a brave man,' tweeted Marshall, referring to the conservative journalist’s latest periodical Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy. The book describes itself as telling 'the story of this violent hate group from the very beginning'. Queue a barrage of condemnation from the Twittersphere, accusing Marshall of 'endorsing fascism'.

The race debate is rapidly descending into a one-note diatribe where white accountability has become the only game in town. White liberal voices now dominate an increasingly febrile narrative but alongside mainstream flagellations about systemic racism and white supremacy, a less hysterical, more nuanced discussion is taking place. Black centrist and conservative intellectuals have been quietly trying to unpick what's really been going on across western democracies. Their conclusions run counter to the mainstream story we are all being impelled to sign up to, namely that injustice runs deeper than mere skin color.

Instead of telling us about America, or even the world outside, American journalists now tell us about other American journalists. The dirty laundry of America’s journalists is aired hourly on Twitter, where it stinks the place out. None of it is news and nobody will remember any of it in 10 months, let alone 10 years. It’s amazing to watch adults setting their emotional temperatures by palace intrigues at the New York Times. A series of laughably esoteric conflicts have consumed the industry in recent days. Each has generated thousands of self-referential tweets, articles, think pieces and podcast episodes.

‘I want you to walk into a bar and order yourselves a full-bodied opinion,’ Dave Rubin writes in his new book. It seems the podcast host’s habit is more along the lines of glancing over to the next stool and saying ‘I’ll have what she’s having.’ Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in the Age of Unreason is currently sitting in 12th place on the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list. Reviews, though, have not been particularly kind. 'Despite its provocative title, it's hard to imagine anyone being so angered by a book loaded with the same milquetoast arguments that he's been hammering for years,' wrote Anthony L. Fisher in Business Insider. 'Don’t Burn This Book is not a serious work.

This article is in The Spectator’s February 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. Last summer, at a secretive dinner in Manhattan, I heard a New York Times staffer regale our table with some tales. He told us about how a dozen or so people had, like him, faced the most perilous horror imaginable for a blue checkmark Twitter person. They’d been canceled. For some, it was a tweet. For others, posing in a photograph with a Republican, or clicking ‘like’ on a Facebook post written by a known transphobe, or perhaps expressing an unhealthy familiarity with the work of Milton Friedman. For the Times staffer, he deigned to question gender theory in the office and sent half his team hyperventilating into paper bags and the other privately giving him the thumbs up.

It’s a normal hot day in Los Angeles somewhere east of the 405 freeway. It’s also the day after Labor Day, so talk show host Dave Rubin, like most Americans, is back at work. For him, though, it was more than a long weekend. He’d been off the grid for 33 days straight, the whole of August and then some. No news, no phone, no nothing. So the first thing he says to me when I walk in the door is ‘Don’t tell me anything about current events! That’s part of the deal on the show today. The guest host is going to tell me what I’ve missed.

A common view is that the mainstream media loves censorship. Mainstream commentators smear people as bigots, mainstream social media platforms close their accounts and mainstream politicians applaud their efforts. Alternative tendencies like the 'Intellectual Dark Web' have emerged to oppose censorship. But is the alternative media free of its own censorious trends?One of the more memorable episodes of The Joe Rogan Experience involved the comedian cum commentator-cum-podcaster Mr Rogan sitting down with his friends, the comedian Bryan Callen and the UFC heavyweight Brendan Schaub. Schaub had just come off a loss by technical knockout and expected to discuss the bout in a collegial fashion.

Readers can be forgiven – indeed, should bless the Lord – for not knowing ‘Tana Mongeau’ and ‘Fousey’ but on the strange alternative universe that is YouTube they have 3.7 million and 10 million subscribers respectively. Young people have flocked to hear their crazed, interminable ramblings about fashion, music and ‘drama’. This year, both decided to take their newfound fame into the outside world and hold festivals where they could meet and entertain their fans. Both of their events were catastrophic. Mongeau’s resulted in gigantic queues after she overlooked the elementary task of selling tickets according to the venues capacity. Ambulances were called after her fans suffered from dehydration in the summer heat.