The ‘Intellectual Dark Web’ and the long history of right-wing rebranding

For nearly a century, Republicans have been pretending to be the ‘real liberals’

Conspiracy theorist Bret Weinstein makes an appearance on Canadian incel guru Jordan Peterson’s podcast. April 26, 2024. Photo via screenshot

This essay is the fourth in a series called “How This Happened,” examining larger trends in American political history and how they manifest in today’s politics. Please subscribe to receive future installments.

Just over six years ago, the New York Times published a splashy essay by staff editor and writer Bari Weiss hailing an “alliance of heretics” called the “Intellectual Dark Web” whose members supposedly existed apart from the traditional left and right political spectrum.

The article received a fair amount of attention, but few noticed that Weiss’s paean to internet personalities like podcasters Joe Rogan and Bret Weinstein was a recapitulation of a profile that the Times’s inhouse magazine had published in 1995 of a “Counter Counterculture,” a new generation of reactionaries who were supposedly different from their predecessors.

The similarities between the two pieces are too numerous to list here, but perhaps the most striking is that the women who were photographed in both were dressed in leopard-print apparel. In the earlier package, future Fox News Channel host Laura Ingraham was foregrounded in a group shot wearing a miniskirt bearing the great cat’s distinctive rosettes, while in 2018, author Christina Hoff Sommers donned a jacket that appeared to be made of leopard fur.

It’s unknown whether the Times intended the sartorial parallelism. Likewise, it’s unclear that Weiss and her predecessor, James Atlas, were aware that they were being used in a process that had already repeated itself several times before the late nineties.

Although many journalists style themselves as historians of the present, few seem to have actually read the stuff. Nowhere is this more evident than in the national press’s widespread ignorance of the fact that the ideas and moral philosophy of the American right have remained essentially unchanged since the 1920s: religious fundamentalism, economic policies that encourage businesses to oppress workers and the public, a belief that poverty is the result of immorality, and a deep suspicion of feminism and non-Anglo ethnic groups.

Despite the obvious appeal these failed viewpoints have to wealthy white Christians, they have been unpopular with most Americans. But instead of updating their ideas to ones that are more workable or responsive to public sentiment, reactionaries simply rebrand their policies every few years in a cycle that is as predictable as fashion designers trying to bring back flared pants.

Dennis Prager, the reactionary radio host and founder of video propaganda mill PragerU, described the strategy explicitly during a conversation with Dave Rubin, a podcaster who now identifies as right-wing, but was pretending to be progressive when he was included in Weiss’s article.

“I want you to continue to say you’re a liberal because you’re of great use to good values,” Prager said. “You are valuable in the best sense of the word, because America needs people who are clearly liberal and, to be honest, fall into the category of kosher as gay to say: ‘Hey hello, the conservatives are not hatemongers. Hello, they should be heard.’”

The necessity of rebranding the right began during Franklin Roosevelt’s administration when his opponents utterly destroyed their credibility with the public by urging the federal government to do nothing to stop the Great Depression and then later by singing the praises of Adolph Hitler while trying to stop the U.S. from entering World War II. Roosevelt’s New Deal and Social Security programs were enormously popular and provided a stark contrast to the laissez-faire approach that had contributed to the economic collapse. His successor, Harry Truman, expanded on them while also taking a bold stand against racial segregation in the armed forces.

Being a conservative rather than a reactionary, Roosevelt’s former general, Dwight Eisenhower, reconciled with social welfare state and promoted integration once he won the presidency back for Republicans in 1953. But his approach was despised by a group of young reactionaries who aimed to completely eradicate all “communistic” welfare programs, protect segregation, and install an explicitly Christian supremacist government. Three of the most prominent leaders of this faction were National Review creator William F. Buckley Jr.; Robert Welch, founder of the John Birch Society; and Leo Bozell Jr., Buckley’s brother-in-law, coauthor, and sometime business partner.

Incensed at Eisenhower and the conservatives, the self-described “individualists” worked tirelessly to impose their ideology on the Republican Party and the nation as a whole. They hailed the authoritarian efforts of Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy to intimidate and slander government officials, and wanted them expanded into other areas, including the suppression of non-believing and socialist college professors, as Buckley demanded in his first book, God and Man at Yale. Welch went even further, writing a book advancing the obnoxiously stupid notion that Eisenhower was an agent of the Soviet Union.

Despite his fervent commitment to extreme beliefs, Buckley understood the importance of branding. He also realized that because the political press mostly spent its time spectating at news conferences and collecting gossip, he could very easily present a sanitized message to the public while privately being far more radical. Even as Buckley advocated for authoritarian policies such as racial segregation, invasions of foreign countries that were insufficiently capitalist, and criminalizing abortion and birth control, he portrayed himself as a sybaritic harpsichord player who spoke with a Transatlantic accent. The National Review founder also used his PBS television show Firing Line to present himself as a reasonable conservative.

Publicly, Buckley distanced himself from overtly extremist groups, but privately he maintained extensive connections with them, a dual approach that he maintained for decades, particularly with regard to Welch and his John Birch Society.

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Despite his best efforts, however, Buckley’s rebranding attempts were undermined more than a few times thanks to Bozell, his former college debate partner and the coauthor of his second book, McCarthy and His Enemies. A bombastic convert to Roman Catholic fundamentalism, Buckley’s brother-in-law was insistent that everyone be made to live according to his newfound beliefs, and he shoved them into the public eye at every opportunity, most prominently as the ghostwriter for Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater, the Republican Party’s 1964 presidential nominee. But Bozell’s convention speech line that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice” set off alarm bells among the general public, and Goldwater went down in flames.

Angry at Americans’ overwhelming rejection of his views, Bozell moved his entire family to Francisco Franco’s fascist Spain in 1965. A few years later, he returned to the United States, which he began treating as a satanic force following the Supreme Court’s Roe vs. Wade decision which established a national right to abortion. “The Catholic Church in America must break the articles of peace, she must forthrightly acknowledge that a state of war exists between herself and the American political order,” Bozell’s magazine, Triumph, proclaimed.

While Bozell sought refuge in Catholic fascism, his far-right colleagues went back to the drawing board, eventually uniting behind a new champion, California Gov. Ronald Reagan, a former actor whose folksy personality made him a much better spokesman than the dour Arizonan. It worked. After a failed trial run in 1976 Republican against then-president Gerald Ford, Reagan won the party nomination and the presidency in 1980 and again in 1984.

Reagan’s success set the tone for future Republican politics, with the party oscillating between figures who embraced the core extremism and those who papered it over. George H.W. Bush’s attempt to present a “kinder and gentler” America in 1988 faced challenges from within the party, but he was able to preserve the last shred of Reagan’s brand to win the presidency on his own. Four years later, the overt radicals, including one of Bozell’s sons, found their champion in Pat Buchanan, who challenged Bush during the primaries and later delivered a scorching Republican National Convention speech proclaiming “culture war” on the rest of America.

After Bush failed against Democrat Bill Clinton (who had led a libertarian insurgence in the Democratic party) Republicans rebranded once again, this time with the “Contract with America,” which bundled together poll-tested ideas to regain political ground in 1994. Once in office, however, the document’s architect, Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, unveiled his true radicalism through gigantic budget cuts and government shutdowns which enabled Clinton to easily win reelection in 1996, even though Republicans held onto Congress.

Despite James Atlas’s insistence that the Gingrich Republicans were just as sexually liberated as their Democratic counterparts, the party proved disturbingly obsessed with Clinton’s libido, which the American public did not appreciate. In the 1998 congressional elections, Democrats gained seats, the first time this had happened for an incumbent president’s party since 1934, and Gingrich was forced to resign.

George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” campaign in 2000 marked the next Republican rebrand that quickly dissolved. Although he campaigned as a different, more centrist type of Republican, the younger president Bush showered corporations with regulatory and tax giveaways and launched a “global war on terror” which only further inflamed the theocratic Christian supremacists whose power had been growing ever since Reagan had invited them into the party. His one concession to a more pluralistic society, a 2007 immigration reform bill, was shot down easily by the party’s far-right flank.

The financial and foreign policy disasters brought on by Bush’s policies led the public to overwhelmingly reject Republicans in 2008 as the first-term Democratic Sen. Barack Obama swept into the White House. Almost immediately, however, Republicans were ready with another rebrand, the Tea Party movement, which insisted that it was nonpartisan, while being financially backed by the same right-wing oligarchs who’d backed Reagan and the Bushes, and staffed by same radical Christian fundamentalists they had enabled. Once elected to Congress, Tea Party Republicans like Ted Cruz and others proceeded to shut down the federal government rather than attempt to reform it.

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After the Tea Party’s extremism had become an electoral liability, right-wing elites were loath to make Donald Trump, a serially bankrupt New York real estate owner and former WWE sideshow act the face of their latest rebranding attempt. It wasn’t because of Trump’s policies, which were overwhelmingly similar to those favored by Paul Ryan, the donor class golden boy who completely dictated Washington Republicans’ agenda, but rather that Trump’s trashy image and primitive vocabulary made it undeniable that left-wingers were completely correct about reactionaries’ fundamental dependence on stupidity.

Nine years into the Trumpian infection of America’s politics, however, most right-wing oligarchs have decided to bend the knee, largely out of financial interest now that President Joe Biden and other national Democrats are finally getting serious about economic inequality and business monopolies. But while Trump fits the far-right ideal of “a Republican with enough working digits to handle a pen,” the fact that he spent his entire adult life stiffing small contractors, hawking fraudulent business classes, stealing from charities, and sexually assaulting women does make it somewhat difficult to sell him as a tribune of the plebs. Similarly, Trump’s open contempt for election administrators and constant glorification of violent Capitol insurrectionists also makes it hard to sell him as some sort of moderate.

This is where the “Intellectual Dark Web,” with its warmed-over libertarian bromides, has been particularly useful for Republicans. While libertarianism is a conservative cousin of neoliberalism, because it claims to adhere to principles advocated by 19th century liberal figures like John Stuart Mill, it can be less authoritarian than Trump’s apocalyptic fascism, even as it also has been an important source of his racist rhetoric.

Although almost no Americans agree with the eldritch particulars of official Libertarianism, more than a few have affinities for its sentiments, especially those who are young and nonreligious. Secular conservatives have next to no power in the Republican party, but there are quite a few of them in the general population, as surveys from the Pew Research Center have shown over the years. It’s a mirror of how things are for Democrats, who have many voters with religiously conservative viewpoints who support the welfare state.

Lacking a majority of people who wholly agree with their positions, progressives, liberals, conservatives, and authoritarians have been caught in a decades-long struggle to mobilize people who partially agree—without excessively antagonizing those who partially disagree. This contest, which Antonio Gramsci called “the war of position,” is now commonly referred to as the battle for the “Overton window,” the ever-shifting locus of political possibility. With neoliberalism finally being challenged within the Democratic party beginning with the rise of Sen. Bernie Sanders, many libertarians began imagining that the party had somehow betrayed its beliefs, instead of realizing the truth that Democrats went astray under Clinton.

On the other side of the partisan divide, Donald Trump was remaking the Republican party in his own personal image: angry, intellectually vacant, thoroughly corrupt, and utterly beholden to a Christian Right that had now radicalized itself into outright fascism. But instead of being concerned about a dangerous political personality cult led by the only president in history to send an armed mob to attack Congress, Weiss and her IDW band of libertarians have decided to endlessly focus instead on unemployed college students and anonymous internet shitposters who supposedly are the real threat to free society.

This delusion is a familiar one, as Jason Stanley wrote recently at The Guardian:

For a far-right party to become viable in a democracy, it must present a face it can defend as moderate, and cultivate an ambiguous relationship to the extreme views and statements of its most explicit members. It must maintain a pretense of the rule of law, characteristically by projecting its own violations of it onto its opponents. […]

The Nazis used Judeo-Bolshevism as their constructed enemy. The fascist movement in the Republican party has turned to critical race theory instead. Fascism feeds off a narrative of supposed national humiliation by internal enemies. Defending a fictional glorious and virtuous national past, and presenting its enemies as deviously maligning the nation to its children, is a classic fascist strategy to stoke fury and resentment.

In a world in which religious fundamentalism has been totally and completely debunked, authoritarian ideologies have no intrinsic moral or intellectual authority on which to base electoral appeals. This is why they seek to steal the identity of conservatism and market conservatism as moderation.

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Like nearly all libertarians, the members of the IDW were insistent that they were not just Republicans with an accent, and that in fact, they were actually leftists. (They supported same-sex marriage and weed legalization, after all! Never mind that in public opinion surveys, most Republicans want legalized pot and about half of them support marriage equality.) From the very beginning, it was evident that the IDW’s branding was demonstrably untrue, but the intervening six years since Weiss published her piece have removed all doubt. Twenty-nine years after Laura Ingraham was the Times’s cover model, no one imagines that she is anything but a conventional Republican talking head. Likewise, as my friend Eiynah Mohammed-Smith and I discussed recently on her podcast, nearly everyone profiled by Weiss has dropped the pretense of being anything other than right-wing.

Jordan Peterson, a former professor of psychology, has since turned himself into a guru for incels and white evangelicals who also writes violent free verse poetry on Twitter. He currently is under contract with the Daily Wire, a far-right propaganda mill founded by bizarre Christian supremacist brothers, David and Farris Wilks

Ben Shapiro, an Orthodox Jewish podcaster whose political views are so extreme that he has even appeared on a neo-Nazi podcast, is Peterson’s Daily Wire colleague. After denouncing Trump as a corrupt liberal in 2016 (Weiss notably omitted this motivation in her IDW piece), he is now 100 percent in favor of electing Trump in 2024.

Like Shapiro, Dave Rubin, who once identified as a liberal atheist, is now also a hardcore Trumper. But he hasn’t just flip-flopped politically, he’s also done so about religion as well. It would be no surprise if he announced next week that he’s joined fellow reactionary Milo Yiannopolous in claiming to be an “ex-gay.”

Rubin isn’t the only IDW member who has since claimed to have found religion. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, an ex-Muslim recently announced that she was getting in on the grift as well, in order to stop the phantasm of “woke.”

Bret Weinstein, meanwhile, has followed the well-trod “Pastel QAnon” path, going from Bernie-Sanders-supporting college professor to deranged conspiracy theorist podcaster who constantly claims his ideas should be debated while also refusing to ever actually book his critics on his show. It’s a measure of how far to the right he’s gone that even Elon Musk, who’s become infamous for his own reactionary views, has blocked Weinstein for being an annoying lunatic.

Douglas Murray, who originally became prominent as a “New Atheist,” is another IDW figure who has slotted perfectly into the conventional far right via his anti-immigrant screeds which routinely propagate white nationalist talking points and anti-Muslim bigotry. He’s also been a cheerleader for Israel’s massacre in Gaza, claiming that all Palestinians are responsible for the terrorist attacks Hamas carried out Oct. 7 of last year, a violent sentiment no different from what Al Qaeda routinely says about its civilian targets.

The lone holdout among the dark self-proclaimed intellectuals who hasn’t proclaimed an affinity for the Republican Party is Sam Harris. It would only be a formality, however, since like Murray, Harris seems to be an extreme enthusiast for Gazan casualties. He’s similar to Murray as well in being an atheist who is utterly unconcerned that Donald Trump has turned his entire political agenda over to Christian nationalists who believe that America “has to obey God, and there is only one true god, and that is Jesus Christ our lord.” Harris is so totally unbothered by right-wing Christians that he has, according to his own website, never once used the term “Christian nationalism” in his content.

While Harris is still pretending that he isn’t just another secular conservative, everyone else can see who he and the entire Intellectual Dark Web really are. Having failed once again to mask reactionary ideas in moderate-sounding language, the right wing’s lavishly funded marketing firms are surely hard at work trying to devise a replacement for the IDW. And if past is predicate, the only thing in doubt is who will be the New York Times’s next leopard-print cover model.