Down with the 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.’ According to Weiss, venture capitalist Eric Weinstein half-jokingly coined the term to refer to a cohort of dissident, largely ‘classical liberal’ personalities who resent the mainstream’s stifling intellectual culture and hard-left turn. It includes figures from Lehmann to the Daily Wire’s editor emeritus Ben Shapiro. Thes Read Full Article »