Brooks wants it to be a ‘group of men’ because it suits his ideological framework. Any sensible analysis of the phenomenon, however, would place Heather Heying, Christina Hoff Sommers, Claire Lehmann, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and others in its sphere. Like most political movements and subcultures, it is largely male. So, I wanted to look for the good in the ‘IDW’ - and how better than to read a left-wing analysis of the phenomenon! Michael Brooks begins his study of the ‘Intellectual Dark Web’, Against the Web, by defining the ‘IDW’ as a ‘group of men’. But am I being too cynical? Is it not a failing of opinion columnists that we live to drag people down and not to build them up? Perhaps. There was no systemization or institution-building but a constant stream of monotonal discourse. As I noted in my r eview of Dave Rubin’s book, there was too much talking about talking about ideas, and too much using free speech to talk exclusively about free speech. Curious browsers were trapped in long-winded podcasts, paralyzed by anti-leftist platitudes, and gobbled up by ‘classical liberalism’. Soon, the ‘web’ in the name evoked not the Dark Web but a spider’s web. Also, somebody had made the well-meaning decision to photograph the likes of Weinstein, Sam Harris and Dave Rubin in night-time shots that made them look like the supporting cast of a dirt cheap neo-noir independent film. Sex differences and transgenderism are controversial subjects, no doubt about it, but the intellectual equivalents of the drugs and guns that are traded on the Dark Web are not profiled in the New York Times. The name might have been coined jokily by the mathematician Eric Weinstein, but once it was affixed to the subculture it became absurd. And third, some have paid for this commitment by being purged from institutions that have become increasingly hostile to unorthodox thought…’ The article was smothered in cloying pretension.

Describing a subculture of liberals, conservatives and disaffected leftists who were engaging in conversations about free speech, left-wing censoriousness and un-PC subjects like sex differences and transgenderism, Weiss described three common features of these different people: ‘First, they are willing to disagree ferociously, but talk civilly, about nearly every meaningful subject… 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.

Exactly two years ago, on May 8, 2018, Bari Weiss published an essay in the New York Times titled ‘ Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web ’.

Against the Web by Michael Brooks