Bari Weiss promotes the IDW ~ 2020 edition

Contempt for women

This is where the Dirtbag Left, the IDW and Trump supporters find common ground: contempt for women


New York Times columnist Bari Weiss famously promoted her friends, mostly right-wingers as the "Intellectual Dark Web" two years ago.

Since then, the Intellectual Dark Web has had its ups and downs. Ben Sexmith of the right-wing, Trump-loving Spectator USA was ready to perform an autopsy on it just this month:

The ‘Intellectual Dark Web’ has fractured now. Sam Harris is still droning on his podcast with more soporific power than a packet of Restoril. Rubin has become an overblown Fox News personality. God bless Jordan Peterson, wherever he is. The phenomenon left lots of people with a lot of questions. If we want them to have answers, well — now is our chance.

And Quillette certainly isn't what it was in 2018. Sure, it's still a sausagefest - I counted two bylines from women among twenty-four on its homepage today, but lately the coronavirus pandemic has shifted its focus from Quillette's usual enemies list: liberals, socialists, feminists, Muslims, and opponents of race science. Although reliably there is an article attacking transgender activism as a mob by bigot and hypocrite Jon Kay.

According to Graphetron, Quillette has fewer patrons now than when Bari Weiss promoted it in 2018 as "...the publication most associated with (the IDW) movement."

But Quillette is not dependent on individuals, it has an admitted funder, right-wing plutocrat Mark Carnegie, and other unnamed funders. My bet is one of them is Koch.

And speaking of sausagefests - Joe Rogan is the most successful of Bari's IDW friends. Bari wrote an article for the NYTimes today celebrating Rogan's Spotify deal:

When I saw the news that the king of all podcasting, Joe Rogan, had inked a deal with Spotify for his widely popular show I texted to congratulate him on getting crazy rich. How rich? 

“Weirdly richer,” he replied. “Like it doesn’t register. Seems fake.”
According to The Wall Street Journal, the deal could amount to more than $100 million, a number that Rogan doesn’t want to discuss. “It feels gross,” he told me Thursday night. “Especially right now, when people can’t work.”

News of Tuesday’s deal, which gave Spotify exclusive rights to “The Joe Rogan Experience,” sent the company’s stock soaring: It added $1.7 billion to its market cap in 23 minutes. The musician and critic Ted Gioia pointed out on Twitter that “a musician would need to generate 23 billion streams on Spotify to earn what they’re paying Joe Rogan for his podcast rights.”

OK, so it’s a lot of money. But Spotify reportedly paid almost double for Bill Simmons’s podcasting company, the Ringer, earlier this year. Money is not the only reason this deal matters. 

Rogan is a friend of mine, and I’ve been on his show. But I still find the extent of his popularity mind-boggling. Imagine if I had told you, a dozen years ago, that the former host of “The Fear Factor,” an MMA color commentator who loves cool cars and shooting guns and working out, a guy with a raw interview show featuring comedians, athletes and intellectuals, was more influential than the entire slate of hosts on CNN.
You’d think I was nuts. But it’s true. His fans are everywhere — I’ve met them working behind the register and wearing loafers at hedge funds.

With "His fans are everywhere" Weiss links to an article in The Atlantic about Rogan. But Weiss never mentions a major point in The Atlantic piece: Rogan's fans are overwhelmingly male.

Most of Rogan’s critics don’t really grasp the breadth and depth of the community he has built, and they act as though trying is pointless. If they decide they want to write off his podcast as a parade of alt-right idiots and incels (as opposed to a handful of cretins out of about 1,400 guests) they will turn up sufficient evidence. And his podcast is a parade of men. So many men. Talking so (so, so, so) much about the things men talk about in 2019 when they think no one’s listening.

 It's curious that Weiss omits this - possibly because she's trying to help out her self-declared friend Joe Rogan achieve a bigger audience.

Although the article is about Rogan, Weiss can't help mention other members of the IDW:

But there is also a very practical reason Rogan can say whatever he thinks: He is an individual and not an organization. Eric Weinstein, another podcaster and a friend of Rogan, told me, “It’s the same reason that a contractor can wear a MAGA hat on a job and an employee inside Facebook headquarters cannot: There is no HR department at ‘The Joe Rogan Experience’.” 

Eric Weinstein is not only a member of the Intellectual Dark Web, he's its founder. If Bari Weiss is getting paid as the IDWs press agent, Weinstein would be the one cutting the checks.

And Joe Rogan has done exactly as the IDW would want. Before it was clear that Biden was the front-runner, Rogan supported Sanders. After Biden was the presumed nominee, he supported Trump and he said it while he was talking to Eric Weinstein who works for Trump supporter Peter Thiel.

In standard IDW fashion, Weiss claims several times in the article that Trump-supporting IDW Joe Rogan is not political. But he is absolutely political and he clearly is right-wing and has a special antagonism towards women. This is again from the Atlantic article Weiss linked to:

Rogan’s most recent Netflix special is often funny because Joe Rogan is a professional stand-up comedian, but if you look past the jokes themselves and focus on the targets he’s choosing, the same patterns emerge. Hillary, the #MeToo movement, why it sucks that he can’t call things “gay,” vegan bullies, sexism. Of all the things in the world for a comedian to joke about right now, why these? “I say shit I don’t mean because it’s funny,” he says during the special, which is something all comedians say, and is sort of true but also sort of not. People reveal their deepest selves in the subjects they keep revisiting, and the hills they choose to die on. With Rogan, you can often see and hear the tension between what he knows he’s supposed to believe and what he really thinks. Joe Rogan may be all about love, but beneath the surface he’s seething.

The members of the dirtbag left
 that Bari Weiss likes

In the article, Weiss mentions podcasts she likes to listen to, including one by Sam Harris. She also mentions a podcast called Red Scare, which is part of the Dirtbag Left. One of the hosts of Red Scare is Anna Khachiyan known for trashing feminists with Chapo Trap House's Amber A'Lee Frost in Spiked, a media outlet funded by Koch to run its free speech grift called the "Unsafe Space Tour", the one in which Steven Pinker made his pro alt-right remarks.

Red Scare demonstrates exactly where the Dirtbag Left and the IDW meet, in their admiration for Camille Paglia, stating at one point in their podcast which promotes an article by her: "(Paglia's) right about everything."

Camille Paglia is the ideal feminist for the IDW and the Dirtbag Left because she has utter contempt for women, proclaiming:

"If civilization had been left in female hands we would still be living in grass huts."

Quillette founder Claire Lehmann referenced this remark by Paglia with approval.

Many members of the IDW admire Camille Paglia: Michael Shermer, Christina Hoff Sommers, Steven Pinker, Jordan Peterson, Claire Lehmann (of course), Charles Murray, Eric Weinstein, (Anna Khachiyan and Eric Weinstein admire Paglia together on Weinstein's podcast)

This is where the Dirtbag Left, the IDW and Trump supporters find common ground: contempt for women. As the Atlantic article says:

In 2019, men feeling thwarted and besieged is a bipartisan experience. This is the era of the Angry White Man, and it’s not just the MAGA army. It’s a description that also matches your garden-variety “Bernie bro,” the Biden guy who just wants to change the subject, and that walking man bun who charged the stage at a Kamala Harris campaign event and showed his “profound respect” for all the women present—for a conversation about equal pay—by grabbing the microphone to lecture her about animal rights. All kinds of men out there are pissed off and looking for someone to blame.

They are looking to blame women. Especially women who don't know their place in what the Dirtbag-IDW-Trump coalition consider the natural male-dominated order of things.

This is especially well-illustrated by a recent NYTimes article about Chapo Trap House, the leading Dirtbag media outlet:

They dove into a discussion of the caucuses, and polling, and whether the media is fair to Mr. Sanders (they think not). 

“Should everything go according to plan on Monday, you will have the opportunity to drive a stake through the heart of every single one of the most insufferable cowards in the world,” Mr. Menaker said. 

“I’ve been keeping a list,” Ms. A’Lee Frost said. “Have you been keeping a list?”

There was a case of White Claw, an alcoholic seltzer water, onstage. 

When Hillary Clinton’s name came up, the reaction was nearly indistinguishable from a Trump rally.

“Lock her up,” the co-host Matt Christman said to the crowd.

The crowd began to chant: Lock her up. Lock her up. 

“She never really cracked the glass ceiling,” Mr. Biederman said. “She more like fell down the glass staircase.”

This photo from the NYT article demonstrates the male:female ratio for the 
Chapo Trap House audience is about the same as Quillette's bylines

Speaking of misogynist media that is doing very well financially, Chapo Trap House rakes in millions of dollars. Someone on Twitter posted a listing of how much money leftist podcasts make and it's a lot, especially because for some of the podcasters, like Jacobin and the Bruenigs, the podcast is a side hustle.

Ken Klippenstein, an author at The Nation magazine, found it offensive that someone pointed this out.

The top four earners in this list are part of the Dirtbag Left, and #5 on the list, The Dig, which is Jacobin, is very friendly with the Dirtbag Left and has the same hostility to feminism as the Dirtbags.

Jacobin recently published an article in which it was asserted that feminism isn't about women, it's about every gender. Although this being Jacobin the actual point is that women should stop focusing on their own rights like selfish capitalist bitches and learn where they rank in the socialist hierarchy (not very high.)

 I'm still waiting for Jacobin to publish an article about Black Lives Matter declaring it's not about black lives.

Weiss' article tells us that Joe Rogan is the new mainstream, but ends like this:

The real question for Rogan Nation is whether their man will be changed by a Spotify contract. “Why would I sell out now? You sell out to get what you want.”
And he’s got it.

Now that Rogan is taking Spotify's money, its guidelines may well change Rogan's show. According to Spotify's web site:

Hate content is content that expressly and principally promotes, advocates, or incites hatred or violence against a group or individual based on characteristics, including, race, religion, gender identity, sex, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, veteran status, or disability. We do not permit hate content on Spotify. When we are alerted to content that violates this standard, we will remove it from the platform. If you believe a piece of content violates our hate content policy, complete the form here and we will carefully review it against our policy. We are also continuing to develop and implement content monitoring technology which identifies content on our service that has been flagged as hate content on specific international registers.
Repeated violations of our prohibited content policies can result in losing access to the Spotify platform