Is Joe Rogan the king of morons?

What "Happened" to Joe Rogan? is the title of the most recent Some More News channel video and it's great. 

Joe Rogan, like Candace Owens, is a member of the Intellectual Dark Web that I have rarely mentioned over the past six and a half years that I've had this Pinkerite blog. And Rogan was even one of those who had his photo taken lurking in the dark, like the other grifters. 

From left to right:
Racist Michael Shermer, Thiel-tool Eric Weinstein, Ivermectin-shilling Heather Heying,
king of the morons Joe Rogan, grand arch-duke of the morons Dave Rubin, queen of the
free speech grifters Christina Hoff Sommers, race pseudoscience-shilling Sam Harris
and Game Theory fan Bret Weinstein

This Some More News video traces Rogan's journey from being a sort-of outsider to being part of the American fascism power structure. 

The host, Cody, keeps coming back to the fact that at one time Rogan referred to Trump as the "king of morons" long before he endorsed Trump. This video convinced me that Rogan is king of morons. 

And so is Trump but all non-morons knew that long ago.

I especially like this because I think there's likely some cross-over between Rogan's audience and Some More News' audience, and Rogan's audience needs to hear this - there may be hope for the percentage of Rogan's audience who are not morons.

 

From the Majority Report: Dave Rubin And Russell Brand Have An Idiot Contest

Dave Rubin was named in the infamous Bari Weiss article as a member of the Intellectual Dark Web - and even had his photo taken in the dark:

“I’ve been at this for 25 years now, having done all the MSM shows, including Oprah, Charlie Rose, ‘The Colbert Report,’ Larry King — you name it,” Michael Shermer, the publisher of Skeptic magazine, told me. “The last couple of years I’ve shifted to doing shows hosted by Joe Rogan, Dave Rubin, Sam Harris and others. The I.D.W. is as powerful a media as any I’ve encountered.”

Mr. Shermer, a middle-aged science writer, now gets recognized on the street. On a recent bike ride in Santa Barbara, Calif., he passed a work crew and “the flag man stopped me and says: ‘Hey, you’re that skeptic guy, Shermer! I saw you on Dave Rubin and Joe Rogan!’” When he can’t watch the shows on YouTube, he listens to them as podcasts on the job. On breaks, he told Mr. Shermer, he takes notes.

“I’ve had to update Quillette’s servers three times now because it’s caved under the weight of the traffic,” Ms. Lehmann said about the publication most associated with this movement.

Even so, I have rarely mentioned Rubin on this blog.

But I had to share this Majority Report episode - just the title alone is perfect but the debate about exactly HOW Rubin lied is hysterical.

Some More News: O Their Prophetic Souls

 Well I decided to take a break from posting videos from The Majority Report and instead post another video from Some More News. I love these guys and you should too and you should give them money every month like I do. YouTube shows like this are like the Daily Show in the early 2000s.

Topics for this episode include The Twitter Files; Elon Musk; Repealing Roe V. Wade; the Metaverse failure; the Fake Shoplifting Crisis - Candace Owen gets a shout-out for her Nazi shit; Havana Syndrome is not a thing; Grifters - includes Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson and Dave Rubin; and Tucker Carlson.

SOME MORE NEWS vs. the IDW

I've mentioned "Some More News" recently, but I want to praise this almost-perfect video from them, explaining the Intellectual Dark Web's attempts to deny the importance of history and the existence of systemic racism. 

Like Steven Pinker, who as I pointed out the other day, does not believe that poverty or racism has any influence on crime - or the Black crime rates that Pinker said, back in 2018, were being hidden by the media.

Unfortunately the video doesn't mention Pinker - it would be full-on perfect if it did - which is a reason why Pinker is so much more insidious than the rest. 

Nobody else associated with the Intellectual Dark Web, as far as I am aware, was invited to the United Nations to express opinions. Steven Pinker was. 

And yet he holds the same beliefs as Sam Harris and others associated with the IDW and race pseudoscience. He's careful not to directly state those beliefs, especially since the brouhaha in 2018, but it's easy enough to infer his beliefs by who he supports and his statement that:

The left was uh completely out to lunch when it came to... the um causes of crime, badly badly wrong when it uh - it still does... when it attributes crime to um poverty and racism... 

I really wish I had been aware of Some More News long ago, I would have loved to post this video when it was first released two years ago. When the argument against the race beliefs of the IDW is stated so clearly you really have to wonder - is the IDW simply evil - or are they basically too stupid to grasp the complexity of socio-cultural-historical interactions, but have been socially promoted waaaay above their intellectual abilities.

We know how they have been promoted - racist plutocrats like Charles Koch and Peter Thiel have been funding them. Pinker was funded by Koch in 2018 when he made those controversial statements.

The best part of this video might be the analogy at minute 56:25, showing a Mario Cart race with Mario representing white people and Luigi representing Black people. It's so good but basic, even a sociobiologist might be able to understand it.

Steven Pinker and the race pseudoscience network

Carole Hooven was seen last August on Pinkerite, along with Larry Summers, when each was promoting Quillette's racist/neo-Nazi editor Bo Winegard last year.

It seems that Hooven's career is now supported by Steven Pinker. I'm not surprised.

Pinker is a long-time supporter and some-time contributor of racist rag Quillette, and an admirer of Bo Winegard.

Pinker is no doubt a supporter of Hooven because she's another believer in the sociobiology/evolutionary psychology school of gender and race essentialism, the "scientific" justification for right-wing bigotry.

In this article in the September 2022 edition of the Archives of Sexual Behavior,  Hooven defends Larry Summers' belief in the inferiority of lady brains in STEM.

In spite of Summers' claim, women's participation in STEM is steadily rising. 

We know that's not due to women's genetics or brain structure changing in such a short period of time. 

Maybe it's due to pushback against the essentialist beliefs that sociobiologists like Summers, Pinker, Winegard and Hooven cling to for dear life.

In the article, Hooven proposes the crackpot social affinity theory that is the absolute favorite sociobiologist explanation for why people are hostile to their pseudoscience-based claims. Bo Winegard is a big fan.

Hooven:

Why do people direct such outrage at scholars who are trying to do their jobs, discovering and communicating how the world works? In the aftermath of the Summers imbroglio, Steven Pinker, the well-known professor of psychology at Harvard, argued that Summers had been met with such vitriol because he had violated a cultural taboo. (Pinker 2005)  People who belong or want to belong to a social group, whether centered around political views, or a country or school, ethnic or gender identity, can signal their loyalty to the group and its values by demonstrating their "moral purity." (Paresky, 2022)

Paresky is Pamela Paresky, who has been on the Koch payroll.

This fanciful explanation demonstrates how detached sociobiologists are from basic human social reality - maybe that's why they believe so reflexively that virtually all contemporary human behavior is the result of evolved biological essences.

The far more likely explanation for the Summers controversy is because at the time Summers made the statement he was the president of Harvard, speaking at a conference on why women were underrepresented in STEM, and Summers suggested the problem was women themselves.

To spell it out in a way that even a sociobiologist might grasp, Summers represented a clear institutional threat to women who were interested in STEM careers. How idiotic do you have to be to seriously believe the controversy was due to "moral purity"?

I would say that Hooven, Pinker, Paresky and Winegard are being deliberately obtuse, but I'm afraid it might not be deliberate. 

In this recent video, at minute 1:10 Hooven says:

...(Pinker's) also interested in, obviously, at lot of the kinds of issues that I'm interested in, The Blank Slate, is, you know, his early book, had a big impact on me and my thinking - how I thought about sex differences...

...more than anyone else at Harvard... he gave me a new office, he took me into his department, he stood up for me, he counseled me, it's been a really difficult time and he, if it weren't for him I really would not be at Harvard any more and I am because of him.... 

But Pinker has long been a champion of those who support sociobiology, as his ongoing support for hardcore race pseudoscience extremist Linda Gottfredson demonstrates.

And of course his support for the career of professional racist Steve Sailer.

"The Blank Slate" was Pinker's evolutionary psychology manifesto, so perfectly reviewed by Louis Menand in the New Yorker when it was released in 2002:

Having it both ways is an irritating feature of "The Blank Slate." Pinker can write, in refutation of the scarecrow theory of violent behavior, "The sad fact is that despite the repeated assurances that 'we know the conditions that breed violence,' we barely have a clue," and then, a few pages later, "It is not surprising, then, that when African American teenagers are taken out of underclass neighborhoods they are no more violent or delinquent than white teenagers." Well, that should give us one clue. He sums the matter up: "With violence, as with so many other concerns, human nature is the problem, but human nature is also the solution." This is just another way of saying that it is in human nature to socialize and to be socialized, which is, pragmatically, exactly the view of the "intellectuals." 

My theory for why Pinker tries to "have it both ways" is because he wants plausible deniability for his actual beliefs about Black people.

The New Yorker review mentions Judith Rich Harris, but the review does not mention how instrumental Pinker was in promoting the career of Harris. 

Moreover, when her great encourager Steven Pinker and I each nominated her paper for the annual award for “outstanding paper on general psychology,” the judges selected her as co-recipient of the—I am not making this up—George A. Miller Award. (To his credit, Miller later termed the irony “delicious.”)

Harris is so popular among believers in sociobiology that a leading promoter of "biosocial criminology," Kevin Beaver, is the Judith Rich Harris Professor of Criminology at Florida State University.

Beaver is on the editorial board of Evolutionary Psychological Science along with Pinker and other believers in race pseudoscience such as Todd K. Shackleford, Sam Harris, David C. Geary, as well as the infamously misogynist Dario Maestripieri and the guy who can't tell female desire from female slavery, David Buss.

Biosocial Criminology holds that Black people are innately less intelligent, and more criminally-inclined than members of other "races." We know this because there is a book edited by Kevin Beaver, Biosocial Criminology: New Directions in Theory and Research in which his fellow biosocial criminologist John Paul Wright is given a chapter to argue that belief:

Page 149:

...Areas afflicted by crime and other social pathologies are more frequently black than white, and even less frequently Oriental. Part of the reason for these visible and dramatic differences may have to do with the differential abilities of races to organize socially. 

Page 150:

From the available data it would seem ludicrous to argue that "race" is a construct devoid of a biological or evolutionary backdrop. That evolutionary forces have produced biological variance across races is now scientifically undeniable. That many of the characteristics that define races appear to be universal and time stable is also undeniable. Evolution can produce many forms of adaptations, but it cannot produce equality. 

The connection between race and criminal behavior is clearly complex and involves a range of historical, social, psychological and individual variables. Evolution however, provides a powerful mechanism to understand the development of human races and the distribution of traits and behaviors within and across races. It helps explain why races would appear and under what conditions races would appear. It helps to explain why certain traits would be beneficial and why these traits such as higher IQ, would be unequally distributed across races. Moreover evolutionary theory helps explain why race-based patterns of behavior are universal, such as black over-involvement in crime. No other paradigm organizes these patterns better. No other paradigm explains these inconvenient truths.

I have no doubt Pinker holds similar beliefs. He has consistently promoted and supported those who hold these beliefs (Razib Khan, Bo Winegard, Linda Gottfredson, Steve Sailer) and his beliefs echo those of racist Amy Wax.

Unfortunately any time Pinker is interviewed, the interviewer treats him with kid gloves, due to the rarely broken gentlemen's agreement and refuses to make Pinker express exactly what he believes, as in this interview:

The left was uh completely out to lunch when it came to... the um causes of crime, badly badly wrong when it uh - it still does... when it attributes crime to um poverty and racism...

So if the problem isn't poverty and racism... what exactly is the problem? Pinker is too much the weasel to come right out and say it.

Pinker's influence extends to the promotion and support of the much debunked claims of the hypothesis called "Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence" created by two racists, who were brought together by racist Steve Sailer.

The publisher of the Hooven video, Freedom Pact likes to platform members and friends of the IDW including Bret Weinstein, Heather Heying, Niall Ferguson, Chloe Valdary, Dave Rubin, Douglas Murray and David Buss. 

The Freedom Pact website reveals nothing about who is funding them, but given how IDW-leaning its guests have become since 2018, including two interviews with Ivermectin-promoting Bret Weinstein, the brother of Peter Thiel's employee and apparent crackpot, Eric Weinstein, and given Thiel's reported financial support for race pseudoscience-promoting and IDW-connected Quillette, I have my suspicions.

And I predict that one day Carole Kennedy Hooven will have her own Quillette byline, where she can share her grievances with Quillette's far-right, racist and mostly male readership.

If Quillette will support Amy Wax's right to be a public racist troll while working for an educational institution, they'll certainly support Hooven. 

How is Libs of TikTok Chaya Raichik able to live her best life as a terrorist?

The rightwing in the United States is currently trying to achieve power through slandering and demonizing LGBTQ people.

One of the most prominent voices of hatred is an individual named Chaya Raichik, who runs a Twitter account called "Libs of TikTok." At one time Raichik referred to herself in her Twitter account as a "stochastic terrorist."

She may be evil, but at least Raichik is self-aware. 

For a deeper dive into stochastic terrorism, check out Scientific American's How Stochastic Terrorism Uses Disgust to Incite Violence.

The Anti-Defamation League describes Libs of TikTok:

Libs of TikTok is a popular anti-LGBTQ+ twitter account operated by former real estate agent Chaya Raichik. The account, which has over 1.3 million followers as of August 2022, attempts to generate outrage and stoke anti-LGBTQ+ hostility by reposting selected out-of-context social media content created by LGBTQ+ people and liberals. The individuals, events and organizations targeted by the account are frequent targets of harassment, threats and violence.

Today Slate writes:

Barely 24 hours after a gunman killed five people and injured 19 others at a gay bar in Colorado Springs, Elon Musk's new Twitter responded to the massacre by reinstating the account of James Lindsay, the right-wing activist responsible for popularizing the anti-LGBTQ slur "OK groomer," which over the last 10 months has been used to imply that demands for LGBTQ rights or representation are tantamount to child molestation. In August, Lindsay was banned from Twitter for using a variation on the term, which under Twitter's old regime was prohibited as a form of hateful conduct. But by Monday night, not only was Lindsay back, but "OK groomer" was trending on the platform under its new ownership. 

This is "stochastic terrorism" in action. James Lindsay was kicked off Twitter for being a neo-Nazi, and the would-be assassin of Nancy Pelosi was strongly influenced by Lindsay. Of course idiot Elon Musk would bring him back:

Elon Musk’s Anti-Trans Twitter Regime

Not content with reactivating accounts that spewed anti-trans content, Musk’s Twitter has now banned a group that organizes to protect people at LGBTQ events from far-right violence.

The Slate article continues:

Since last spring, the prominent right-wing Twitter account Libs of TikTok has been a major player in driving anti-LGBTQ animosity, with an ongoing series of posts highlighting LGBTQ events around the country, often including dates, locations and names and pictures of people involved. Last June, it became clear that such posts were being used as a roadmap for harassment or violent confrontations, including a particularly hateful protest outside a Dallas gay bar that was holding an all-ages drag brunch to celebrate Pride Month, which resulted in patrons and their children being chased back to their cars and far-right protesters calling for all attendees to be shot.

The LA Blade writes:

Libs of TikTok has been suspended several times on multiple platforms, including Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. Raichik had previously been suspended from Twitter for accusing LGBTQ people of “grooming” children, which Twitter confirmed violates its policies against hateful conduct after facing pressure from Media Matters and others. Her Twitter account was also suspended after she targeted multiple hospitals for providing gender-affirming care, leading to violent threats against patients and providers and forcing at least one hospital to request support from law enforcement. (On September 5, Raichik baselessly claimed that a bomb threat against Boston Children’s Hospital “was probably a left-wing person trying to get me suspended.”)

Notably, Raichik previously pledged to redouble her attacks on hospitals providing trans people with health care after she was suspended from Twitter in August. 

So, what does the Intellectual Dark Web have to say about this raging right-wing homophobia? A few members of the Quillette/IDW industrial complex are LGBTQ.

• In July of this year, Bari Weiss's girlfriend Nellie Bowles was gleefully promoting Libs of TikTok on Bari Weiss's Substack:

Another week and another funny investigative report from Libs of TikTok, this time about a Portland lesbian bar, Doc Marie’s, that closed a week after opening...

• Cathy Young tried a "both sides" claiming that reporting on Libs of TikTok was just as bad as Libs of TikTok. But then, I think Cathy Young was a pioneer in stochastic terrorism, thanks to her enthusiastic cheerleading for Gamergate.

• Enthusiastic transphobe and one-time Quillette editor Colin Wright recommends Libs of TikTok.

• Dave Rubin retweeted Seth Dillon in March.

• Michael Shermer is a big fan of Libs of TikTok

How is Chaya Raichik able to live her best life as a stochastic terrorist? 

She is funded by Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon.

Seth Michael Dillon, CEO of The Babylon Bee "satire" website, said he has a "deal" with Chaya Raichik, owner of a Twitter account who claims gay and transgender people “groom” children to accept sexual abuse from adults.

When Libs of TikTok was suspended from Twitter, Seth Dillon tweeted: 

“BREAKING: Twitter has once again hit Libs of TikTok with a 7-day suspension for ‘hateful conduct.’ No specific tweets were flagged. We’ve since fired off another letter to Twitter (attached). They’re on notice that we will sue them if they permanently suspend us,” Dillon tweeted.

That's ironic because I think that Seth Dillon will eventually be sued - for funding terrorism. 

Both Dillon and Libs of TikTok have Substacks, because of course they do. Substack has no standards and I suspect it is financially supported by right-wing plutocrats.

Meanwhile advertisers are leaving Twitter.

More from Media Matters.

There should be some legal and financial consequences for spreading stochastic terrorism. For Chaya Raichik, Seth Dillon and Elon Musk.

Helen Pluckrose, James Lindsay and Peter Boghossian: shameless weasels

3 stooges of right-wing griftery

There have been other debunkings of the Pluckrose, Lindsay and Boghossian hoax grift, but new debunkings are appreciated, and the latest one published by Haaretz is a welcome addition to the genre.

Mikael Nilsson's piece 'Mein Kampf' and the 'Feminazis': What the Hitler Hoax Really Reveals About 'Woke' Academia – and Its Critics says...

According to their own account, the writers took parts of the chapter and inserted feminist "buzzwords"; they "significantly changed" the "original wording and intent” of the text to make the paper "publishable and about feminism." An observant reader might ask: what could possibly remain of any Nazi content after that? But no one in the media, apparently, did.

Indeed, in public, the trio constantly downplayed the amount of re-writing they did to the original text. On Joe Rogan’s podcast in October 2018, Lindsay described how they'd "modified the words and added theory around it so that it would fly," and in another interview explained that this was to "get past plagiarism." 

Chapter 12, he noted, included sentences like: "This is why we need the Nazi Party, and [this is] what is expected of people who are going to be part of it." What did they change? "We took that out [the Nazi party reference] and replaced it with ‘intersectional feminism.’" What's left is an entirely anodyne sentence, stripped of any identifiable Nazi vestiges. Hardly "owning the grievance warriors."

So what did the text in the article accepted by Affilia actually look like? Was it, as Fox News claimed, a "feminist Mein Kampf", suggesting men should be treated the same way as Hitler victimized Jews?

It is surprising, to say the least, that none of the journalists reporting on the controversy actually bothered to compare the two texts. If they'd done so, they would have found that the Affilia article didn't contain anything that could be recognized as "Mein Kampf" even by a Hitler expert, let alone a lay person.

The article makes the case even more strongly after that, you should read it. The piece also notes how much the 3 stooges were loved by the Intellectual Dark Web:

What is clear is that the hoax and its controversy propelled Boghossian and his co-writers into the media limelight, big time, with multiple article in the mainstream press and a particularly warm welcome from right-leaning platforms: Dave Rubin’s show The Rubin Report and Peterson’s own YouTube channel, but also from more centrist outlets like Joe Rogan’s podcast.

Boghossian deepened his longstanding allyship with right-wing provocateur, Andy Ngo, and won a phalanx of new fans from Richard Dawkins to Bari Weiss, Andrew Sullivan to Megyn Kelly.

Please note Weiss, Sullivan and Megyn Kelly are also Advisors of FAIR. As is, of course, Steven Pinker.

One more point - Nilsson says: 

It is surprising, to say the least, that none of the journalists reporting on the controversy actually bothered to compare the two texts. If they'd done so, they would have found that the Affilia article didn't contain anything that could be recognized as "Mein Kampf" even by a Hitler expert, let alone a lay person.

It's no surprise that the right-wing media didn't compare the two texts - they certainly weren't going to look a grift horse in the mouth. 

The real shanda was the mainstream press that promoted the grift without question. But this is the same media that refuses to ask Steven Pinker about his decade-long support for professional racist Steve Sailer. Pinker no longer talks about Sailer, but Sailer still has Charles Murray proudly in his corner.

Charles Koch is still alive

I first got the news that David Koch died via the Twitter account of Jane Mayer, author of many New Yorker articles about the Kochs.

But as the NYTimes obituary makes clear, the most pernicious of the Koch brothers is Charles.

And of course the Kochs have heirs.

“David is more of a philanthropist in the classic sense of the word,” Mr. Schulman, the Koch biographer, said in a “Fresh Air” interview on NPR in 2014. “He funds medical research, science; he funds the arts. Charles’ lifelong mission has been to change the political culture and mainstream libertarian ideas.”

So the various members of the IDW who have taken Koch money including Candace Owens, Charlie Kirk, Charles Murray, Christina Hoff Sommers, Ben Shapiro and Steven Pinker don't have to worry.

Mayer recently reviewed a book which makes it clear that should humanity survive the effects of climate change, the Kochs, and especially Charles, will be known as people who did the most harm, personally, to the planet Earth.

From Mayer's review:

Because the Kochs opposed the candidacy of Donald Trump, in 2016, many have assumed that they are antagonistic to the Trump Administration. To the contrary, Leonard writes, with the help of allies such as Vice-President Mike Pence, “the politics that the Kochs stoked in 2010 became the policies that Trump enacted in 2017.” Whether announcing his intention to withdraw from the Paris climate accord, placing shills from the oil and coal industries at the head of federal energy and environmental departments, or slashing taxes on corporations and the ultra-wealthy, Trump has delivered for the Kochs. “Kochland” quotes Charles Koch telling his allied political donors, in 2018, “We’ve made more progress in the last five years than I had in the previous fifty.”

The IDW rightwing plutocrat support report - UPDATE

UPDATE - adding Candace Owens - so that is now five IDWs getting direct Koch funding.


Charlie Kirk, is the founder of Turning Point USA.

TPUSA’s upcoming Student Action Summit in December has additional sponsors including the Reason Foundation, the Koch-connected Generation Opportunity Institute and the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. (International Business Times)

Candace Owens

Communications director for Turning Point USA (Source: Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web)

Charles Murray - AEI scholar.

David H. Koch is on the American Enterprise Institute's National Council, whose members "serve as ambassadors for AEI, providing AEI with advice, insight, and guidance as [it] looks to reach out to new friends across the country."
Between 2002 and 2013, the American Enterprise Institute received a total of $867,289 in funding from the Charles G. Koch Foundation. (Sourcewatch)

David Rubin - political commentator whose work is supported by Learn Liberty

Learn Liberty is a project of the Institute for Human Studies. Members of the IHS Board of Directors includes Charles Koch and Koch-related organization employees. 

Christina Hoff Sommers - AEI scholar

Meet the ‘Feminists’ Doing the Koch Brothers’ Dirty Work

More IDW-rightwing plutocrat connections as they are discovered...

Steven & Bari & Stefan & Eric

A little over a year ago Bari Weiss published "Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web" subtitled "An alliance of heretics is making an end run around the mainstream conversation. Should we be listening?"

Weiss wrote:

Go a click in one direction and the group is enhanced by intellectuals with tony affiliations like Steven Pinker at Harvard. But go a click in another and you’ll find alt-right figures like Stefan Molyneux and Milo Yiannopoulos and conspiracy theorists like Mike Cernovich (the #PizzaGate huckster) and Alex Jones (the Sandy Hook shooting denier).

Eric Weinstein, his brother Bret and his sister-in-law Heather Heying all appeared in the silly photoshoot for the article, and were interviewed by Weiss, so there was certainly a high level of cooperation on the article from them. But Eric, who has been given credit for the name "intellectual dark web" does not consider Molyneux to be a member of the gang, in spite of Weiss's including him in "the group". As we can see in this tweet exchange from September 2018.

Later the same day Weinstein claimed he never met Molyneux and that he barely knew his ideas.

In January of this year, Weinstein still says he does not know Molyneux.

It seems that Bari Weiss did not speak to Molyneux for the article. 

As we can see by his reaction.

Weiss has never been on Molyneux's show, although several other people she included in the IDW have, including Michael Shermer, Charles Murray, Jordan Peterson and Candace Owens. Meanwhile Dave Rubin and Joe Rogan both had Molyneux on their shows. Weiss appeared on Rogan's show.

Weiss opened her Intellectual Dark Web article like this:

Here are some things that you will hear when you sit down to dinner with the vanguard of the Intellectual Dark Web: 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. And we’re in a dangerous place if these ideas are considered “dark.” 

I was meeting with Sam Harris, a neuroscientist; Eric Weinstein, a mathematician and managing director of Thiel Capital; the commentator and comedian Dave Rubin; and their spouses in a Los Angeles restaurant to talk about how they were turned into heretics. A decade ago, they argued, when Donald Trump was still hosting “The Apprentice,” none of these observations would have been considered taboo.

Before I continue, there are skeptics who doubt Sam Harris is an actual neuroscientist and that Dave Rubin has ever been a comedian.

Also "fundamental biological differences between men and women" is not nearly the extent of what they believe, and the description doesn't mention race, which is at least as important to IDWers as gender.

This is Weiss's group definition in the article:

Most simply, it is 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.

Then Weiss links to this web site as the "closest thing to a phone book for the I. D. W." which includes many people not mentioned explicitly by Weiss, including Carl Benjamin, AKA Sargon of Akaad, described in his Wiki:

British political commentator, politician, anti-feminist, polemicist and YouTuber with the online pseudonym Sargon of Akkad. He was a UK Independence Party (UKIP) candidate for the European Parliament's South West England constituency in the 2019 election, although he failed to win his election. Benjamin grew to prominence through the Gamergate controversy. Since Gamergate, he has covered topics such as identity politics, the alt-right, Brexit and political correctness.

However, the site does not include Milo Yiannopoulos, Mike Cernovich, Alex Jones nor Stefan Molyneux. Weiss writes:

But in typical dark web fashion, no one knows who put the website up.

By the end of the article, there is still no explanation for why Bari Weiss grouped Molyneux in with the IDW. She writes:

I get the appeal of the I.D.W. I share the belief that our institutional gatekeepers need to crack the gates open much more. I don’t, however, want to live in a culture where there are no gatekeepers at all. Given how influential this group is becoming, I can’t be alone in hoping the I.D.W. finds a way to eschew the cranks, grifters and bigots and sticks to the truth-seeking.

But I think that what Pinkerite has been demonstrating, blog post by blog post, is that in fact there really are few differences in point of view, especially about race and gender, between those Weiss considers respectable, like Steven Pinker, and "the cranks, grifters and bigots."

The IDW rightwing plutocrat support report

So let us review how many members of the "Intellectual Dark Web" are receiving funding from the Kochs. So far the definites are:

Charlie Kirk, is the founder of Turning Point USA.

TPUSA’s upcoming Student Action Summit in December has additional sponsors including the Reason Foundation, the Koch-connected Generation Opportunity Institute and the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. (International Business Times)

Charles Murray - AEI scholar.

David H. Koch is on the American Enterprise Institute's National Council, whose members "serve as ambassadors for AEI, providing AEI with advice, insight, and guidance as [it] looks to reach out to new friends across the country."
Between 2002 and 2013, the American Enterprise Institute received a total of $867,289 in funding from the Charles G. Koch Foundation. (Sourcewatch)

David Rubin - political commentator whose work is supported by Learn Liberty

Learn Liberty is a project of the Institute for Human Studies. Members of the IHS Board of Directors includes Charles Koch and Koch-related organization employees. 

Christina Hoff Sommers - AEI scholar

Meet the ‘Feminists’ Doing the Koch Brothers’ Dirty Work

And then there is the case where Steven Pinker made remarks blaming the media and academia for radicalizing the alt-right at the "UnSafe Space" tour by Spiked, funded by the Charles Koch Foundation.

I strongly suspect that Claire Lehmann/Quillette also receive funding from the Kochs but so far don't have anything definite. We do know that Quillette is supported by rightwing Australian plutocrat Mark Carnegie and others whom Lehmann won't name. Several Quillette authors, although not named as members of the IDW in the Bari Weiss article,  are funded by the Kochs including Cathy Young and Pamela Paresky.

More IDW-rightwing plutocrat connections as they are discovered...

Sam Seder v IDW

Sam Seder's channel is really good at keeping tabs on the more outrageous and media-centric members of the Intellectual Dark Web:

• Mike Cernovich
• Alex Jones
• Charlie Kirk
• Candace Owens
• Jordan Peterson
• Joe Rogan
• Ben Shapiro
• Milo Yiannopoulos

and of course Dave Rubin who has a feud going on with Seder.

Shermer celebrates the IDW, is ratioed and mocked

For those who are not involved in Twitter, getting ratioed is what happens when there are significantly more comments than likes in response to your Tweet. In Shermer's case the ratio is 412 comments to 199 likes as of the time this screen cap was made. An almost exact 2:1 ratio.

The image Shermer so proudly shares is made of the photos from the original Bari Weiss article Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web, turned into a collage.

In case you're keeping score, the members of the IDW in the image are, from left to right, Michael Shermer, Eric Weinstein, Heather Heying, Joe Rogan, Dave Rubin, Christina Hoff Sommers, Sam Harris and Bret Weinstein.

The IDW is so tolerant that Jordan Peterson has sued people for insulting him, so in favor of free speech Charlie Kirk advocated for Donald Trump to regulate tech companies over "viewpoint discrimination" and loves liberty so much that Christina Hoff Sommers and Dave Rubin never mention how they are supported by Charles Koch.

What the IDW actually stands for is the same as the editorial positions of Quillette: anti-trans, pro-nuke, Islamaphobic, anti-socialist, anti-left, anti-feminist, pro-race science and constantly banging the drum about free speech in Academia over rude college students while ignoring plutocrats buying themselves their own academic hacks.

Ultimately the IDW is about is the grift.

Sam Seder & crew on the DW - IDW connection

Especially Dave Rubin.

Another IDW - Koch connection: Dave Rubin

The Majority Report reported a year ago about Dave Rubin's Koch connection.

Specifically via Learn Liberty a project of the IHS, since September 2016.

Since 2011, Learn Liberty has been committed to tackling big questions about what makes a society free and how to improve the world we live in. In just five years, we’ve partnered with over 150 professors and other intellectuals to help explore these ideas.
Today, we’re announcing a new partnership between Learn Liberty and the wickedly talented David Rubin of The Rubin Report!

The Institute for Humane Studies is crawling with Koch influence. Not only is Charles G. Koch himself on the Board of Directors, but his flunkies are also on the board of directors: two employees of the Charles Koch Foundation and three from George Mason University, one of which is Tyler Cowen, seen here interviewing Claire Lehmann - Lehmann is very likely also getting Koch money for Quillette.

Trouble in IDW land last week

In what I think is an unprecedented move, Quillette actually attacked a fellow member of the IDW.

Dave Rubin is winning

Original

Good article: "The 'Intellectual Dark Web' is Nothing New"

I wasn't aware of the LA Review of Books article entitled The "Intellectual Dark Web" is Nothing New by Jacob Hamburger until recently. I'm sorry it took so long to find it, it has a lot of good stuff.

Favorite bits:

...What exactly are the ideas that have made people like Weinstein, Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, Dave Rubin, Ben Shapiro, and Christina Hoff Sommers into what a recent New York Times profile described as intellectual “renegades”? According to the Times writer Bari Weiss, most emphasize the biological differences between men and women, a feeling that free speech is “under siege,” and a fear that “identity politics” is a threat to the United States’s social fabric. 

A listener of Harris’s podcast might add to the list a vociferous defense of the validity of genetic explanations for IQ differences between racial groups, a follower of Peterson’s videos might insist on the nefarious influence of “postmodern neo-Marxism” on college campuses, and a fan of Ben Shapiro might contribute a skepticism toward the reality of “transgenderism..."

Right on the money. These two paragraphs list several of Quillette's political positions: pro-race science, pro-evolutionary psychology, anti-trans, anti-left.

Though opposed to political “tribalism,” as one writer put it in the online magazine Quillette — the closest thing there is to a party organ of the dark web — the movement does tend to think of liberals, progressives, and leftists as its primary adversaries. But not only do these thinkers oppose themself to “the left,” broadly speaking, they recycle the neoconservative indictment of “postmodernism” in order to explain why this left has been taken in by political correctness.

Check check - the pretense that Quillette is centrist while it is obsessed with attacking the left-of-center.

I was surprised though, that Hamburger doesn't seem to be aware that in addition to Decter and Himmelfarb, Sommers herself is associated with the AEI.

...Despite some of the novelty attributed to the dark web intellectuals, perhaps the signs of their belonging to the right have always been there. Dave Rubin’s YouTube show and Harris’s podcast, for example, have featured a number of mainstays of the old PC debates, including D’Souza and Charles Murray. And though Christina Hoff Sommers may appear to break with neoconservative opponents of the women’s movement such as Midge Decter and Gertrude Himmelfarb by calling her video blog “The Factual Feminist,” one should not fail to notice that the channel is hosted by the American Enterprise Institute, the think tank where both elder women were once affiliates.

He's absolutely right that the Intellectual Dark Web is just a variation on traditional conservatism. And Sommers is old enough to have been part of that tradition, long before Claire Lehmann rolled onto the public stage. I think the only thing that is different between the older and the newer conservatives is that conservatives were once very anti-gay, as Mother Jones remembers in its article Remember How Dinesh D’Souza Outed Gay Classmates—and Thought It Was Awesome? This new iteration of the Right has accepted gay rights.

Unlike every other article on the IDW I've found in mainstream sources, Hamburger recognizes the political potential of the IDW:

...this intellectual right in waiting has amassed an incredibly large audience through its various social media platforms. Much of this audience is composed of young men for whom these entertaining take-downs of political correctness is their first exposure to “intellectual” discussions of politics and culture. When this dark web finally does come out of the shadows, it may prove a formidable weapon for the next iteration of the conservative movement.

And he didn't even mention the Koch connections or the fact that Claire Lehmann was working for Ezra Levant right up until the connections between Rebel Media and the Charlottesville atrocity became well-known.

And there is little doubt that many of these young - and I suspect mostly white - men being cultivated by the IDW are happy to learn via race science and evolutionary psychology that white men are naturally more intelligent (among other virtues) than people who are not white and not men.