In May of 2018, then New York Times journalist Bari Weiss introduced the world to the Intellectual Dark Web: Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris, the Weinstein brothers, and a collection of heterodox thinkers challenging progressive cultural domination. Their appeal was obvious. These were serious, credentialed intellectuals willing to ask the forbidden questions and challenge prevailing opinion. They exposed the hypocrisy of the institutions, defended the principle of free speech, and gave people permission to think.
But now, almost ten years later, the IDW has vanished. Jordan Peterson suffered a series of health crises. The Weinstein brothers have gone down the rabbit hole of various conspiracy theories. The others have mostly disappeared from the public debate.
In today’s conversation, we’re going to look back at the original New York Times article and examine the collapse of the IDW. We’d like to answer a number of questions. Was this outcome inevitable? Was there some flaw with the individual personalities? Was the IDW’s intellectual project doomed by its own contradictions? And most importantly, where do things go from here?
RUFO: Lomez, it’s been almost ten years. What are your thoughts reading “Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web” all these years later?
LOMEZ: My first impression going through this again was that Bari Weiss is remarkably prescient in ways that I did not anticipate. I had a certain view of what I thought the article would be and what I thought she was trying to accomplish with it, which still holds. But what I left out of my memory of this moment, in which the Intellectual Dark Web became a matter of public importance and these figures were being mainstreamed, is that Bari, to her credit, understood at the very start what some of the dangers were here.
She understood what might be some of the failure modes of this particular set of people taking an outsized place in the discourse and, in some way, displacing institutional authorities that tell us what is true about the world.
RUFO: To put a little meat on that, she’s identified this cohort that has what were at the time, and in some cases have continued to be, marquee names: Jordan Peterson, the Weinstein brothers, Sam Harris. She uses the phrase later, when she’s contemplating whether she too is part of this movement, that these are “classical liberals.”
The argument of the piece is that people who could be defined as classical liberals—Bernie voters, Hillary voters, Democrats in good standing—have been cast out of the discourse in favor of the censorious rise of woke culture, and they should be welcomed back in. But someone like Milo Yiannopoulos, Kanye West, or Candace Owens might take it too far and might not be contributing to the intellectual discourse, and therefore should, in some ways, be excluded.
You’re saying that now, eight years later, she was right to identify the complexities here?
