Berniewood Hogan
IT'S BERNIE SANDERS WITH A STEEL CHAIR!
Remember this next time the conservative trolls complain that HL is a liberal circle jerk where their views aren't tolerated. It's nonsense.
Pretty Loud For Being So Silenced | Current Affairs
Pretty Loud For Being So Silenced | Current Affairs
![]()
Irony can be a difficult concept to grasp, but some hypothetical examples can illustrate it clearly. It would be ironic, for instance, if people who claimed their free speech was being trampled on were actually being heard more than anybody else. It would be ironic if television hosts and podcasters who believe in “engaging in debate with the other side” never actually engaged in any debate with the other side. And it would be ironic if a journalist who believes in “facts” and “listening to critics” ignored facts and never listened to critics.
Of course, you might think that ironies this obvious rarely occur in the real world. Surely life is much more subtle. But if you assume this, you haven’t yet read Bari Weiss’ New York Times op-ed/fawning profile, “Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web.” Weiss uses the nation’s paper of record to introduce audiences to a group of people whose voices are supposedly being kept out of mainstream institutions, but who for some reason I seem to hear about all the damn time.
The “intellectual dark web” is neither on the dark web nor comprised of intellectuals. It is a phrase coined by one of Peter Thiel’s deputies to describe a group of people who share the following traits in common: (1) they are bitter about and feel persecuted by Leftist Social Justice Identity Politics, which they think is silencing important truths and (2) they inhabit the internet, disseminating their opinions through podcasts, YouTube, Patreon, etc. The group includes: Eric Weinstein, the aforementioned Thiel subordinate; vacuous charlatan Jordan Peterson; cool kids’ philosopher Ben Shapiro; deferential interview host Dave Rubin; ex-neuroscientist Sam Harris; former Man Show host Joe Rogan; American Enterprise Institute scholar Christina Hoff Sommers; and former Evergreen State University professors Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying. Weiss says that together these people form:
…a collection of iconoclastic thinkers, academic renegades and media personalities who are having a rolling conversation—on podcasts, YouTube and Twitter, and in sold-out auditoriums—that sound unlike anything else happening, at least publicly, in the culture right now. Feeling largely locked out of legacy outlets, they are rapidly building their own mass media channels…
Weiss says they have three things in common:
[First,] they are willing to disagree ferociously, but talk civilly, about nearly every meaningful subject: religion, abortion, immigration, the nature of consciousness. Second, in an age in which popular feelings about the way things ought to be often override facts about the way things actually are, each is determined to resist parroting what’s politically convenient. And third, some have paid for this commitment by being purged from institutions that have become increasingly hostile to unorthodox thought—and have found receptive audiences elsewhere.
Weiss says that “offline and in the real world, members of the I.D.W. are often found speaking to one another in packed venues around the globe,” such as the O2 Arena, where they dare to say “That Which Cannot Be Said,” offering “taboo” thoughts like “There are fundamental biological differences between men and women. Free speech is under siege. Identity politics is a toxic ideology that is tearing American society apart.” (Gosh, perhaps it’s just the fringe conservative circles I move in, but I seem to hear that stuff constantly!)
Well, are they right? Are they being “purged” as part of a “siege” on free speech by the illiberal left? It’s interesting that Weiss chooses to use the formulation “feeling locked out of legacy outlets,” since I seem to remember a great philosopher once saying that Facts Don’t Care About Your Feelings. These people may feel as if they are persecuted renegades, suppressed at every turn by Postmodern Neo-Marxists. But there are a lot of facts to say otherwise.
First, even from the evidence in Weiss’ article, we can see that freely speaking about the “siege on free speech” is impressively lucrative. Dave Rubin’s show “makes at least $30,000 a month on Patreon” while Jordan Peterson “pulls in some $80,000 in fan donations each month” and recently released a bestseller. Ben Shapiro gets 15 million downloads a month and has published five books, Sam Harris gets a million listeners per episode and has published seven books. Though Joe Rogan insists “he’s not an interviewer or a journalist” (I wouldn’t disagree) his three-hour podcast conversations are among the most downloaded in the world. These dissident “intellectuals” each seem to make about as much money in a month, with far larger audiences, than is made annually by the critical race theorists and gender studies professors they think are keeping them from being heard.
But perhaps it is still true that they are “shut out” of the mainstream media. It might be true that you can get rich from the Dangerous Truths and sell out the O2 Arena, but maybe newspapers and television won’t give you a voice. Why, just look at what happened to Kevin Williamson: He was hired by the Atlantic, but the moment they found out he held a Dangerous opinion (in this case, the opinion that women who get abortions should be hanged and that little black boys can be appropriately described as “primates”), he was fired. Why are mainstream institutions punishing heterodox thinking?
Williamson is an instructive case, though. Immediately after the Atlantic dropped him, the Wall Street Journal published Williamson’s long account of “When The Twitter Mob Came For Me” as its featured weekend essay, and Bret Stephens spoke up for him in the New York Times. (Even the Atlantic published a defense of him!) This often seems to be what happens. A major publisher offered Milo Yiannopoulos a $250,000 advance for his book on how dangerous his opinions were to the establishment. The book instantly ascended to #1 on Amazon, and Simon & Schuster only withdrew Yiannopoulos’s contract when conservatives turned on him after he appeared to endorse pedophilia.
In fact, all of the persecuted intellectuals appear constantly in major outlets with huge reach. Whether it’s Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson appearing on HBO’s Real Time, Christina Hoff Sommers writing for Slate, the Atlantic, and the New York Times, Milo going on CNN, Bret Weinstein being interviewed on FOX News, Andrew Sullivan being racist in New York magazine, Peterson getting invited on the NBC Nightly News, or Ben Shapiro being profiled in the New York Times, not one of these individuals ever seems to lack for a mainstream perch from which to squawk. It’s a strange kind of oppression in which silenced dissidents keep getting book deals, op-eds, sold-out speaking tours, lucrative Patreons, millions of YouTube views, and sympathetic profiles in the world’s leading newspapers. How much more attention do they want? How much freer can speech be? Weiss’ article itself pushes the absurdity to its limits. It features half a dozen staged photographs of its subjects moodily lurking amidst topiaries, and is the longest piece yet in Weiss’ ongoing series on the illiberalism and repressiveness of the left. As one commenter put it, Weiss’ argument is “that unseen forces are preventing her and those like her from making the exact arguments that she’s making, right now, in the exact venue where she’s making them, right now.”
Weiss says members of the Intellectual Dark Web have been “purged” from institutions. It’s not clear, though, which institutions she means. Peterson is a full professor at one of the world’s top research universities. Steven Pinker and Jonathan Haidt, who have similarly spent time condemning campus leftists, have positions at Harvard and NYU, respectively. Charles Murray spoke at Harvard and Yale last year. Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying did choose to resign from Evergreen State after the protests there, but Weiss doesn’t mention that they took half a million dollars with them after filing a $3.8 million lawsuit against the university for failing to protect them from the Social Justice Warriors. (What kind of snowflake files a lawsuit because they can’t handle a little free speech?)