its all less intellectual and more web click bait economics. which means shock grift demagoguery. say alarming stuff, trigger adolescent minds. get sponsored by pill companie$. if big tobacco was alive today they'd be the number 1 sponsor of all these demagogues.
It's definitely not intellectual. That's the reason the IDW almost never does real debates with anyone, nor do they write lengthy, well-researched books. It's almost entirely just interminable and unstructured podcasts that run for 4 hours.
Do you think Barri Weiss or any of the leading figures of the intellectual dark web voted for Trump in 2016 and if so who?
If most of them didn't vote for Trump in 2016 and rarely if ever voted for Republicans before and weren't registered Republicans,how then do they become portrayed as a republican rebranding -- even if their agenda matches most of the Republican agenda?
Who one chooses to vote for or what party one registers for is really rather immaterial to their thinking. Many of the individuals in the IDW lived in electorally lopsided states when Weiss wrote her article so chances are they probably didn't even bother voting.
Obviously they all are in favor of Trump in 2024 though, except for Harris, but he obviously is not concerned with the individuals who will run Trump's administration--Christian supremacists--as I demonstrated in my essay. He doesn't like Trump's vulgar personality and wanton criminality, but this is honestly a very baseline ethical norm.
I thought this was very thoughtful but you really are missing as some other comments here note the origins of these intellectuals and journalists migrating into right-wing positions. Culturally and politically they came out of liberal ideology and academia and then moved right, so they're closest for bears would be the neoconservative movement led by largely Jewish intellectuals such as Irving Kristol who then turned right, supported Republicans and provided the intellectual firepower for the fake justifications for the invasion of Iraq. I would wager that almost all of the people on the intellectual dark web rarely voted for Republican candidates for office before 2016 and possibly not even during that election and don't have family backgrounds that supported Republicans.
And not every liberal who attacks what they see as the excesses of woke culture has become pro Trump: I e. James Carville, George Packer and Bill Maher.
I think you're missing part of the story. I think Rubin and especially Bret Weinstein really WERE on the left and then they got twisted, and I think Joe Rogan started out as a sort of uninformed genuinely uncommitted stoner/comedian/interviewer guy, and slowly drank the right-wing cool aid. Peterson and Shapiro were always conservative. I think at the time the IDW was named, it was more legitimate to locate them outside of the conventional Left-Right continuum, but pretty quickly they solidified as pro-Trump, anti-Left, anti-Vax brats. I don't think it works though to call them a "rebrand" of conservatism. They're a mixture of former lefties who moved to the right and right-wingers who want the "cool rebel" factor that the Left has without adopting the values of the left. I think when the IDW was first named, it made sense to include Sam Harris in it, but it no longer does.
Rogan has always been a libertarian and like many unknowledgeable libertarians, he actually thought he was a liberal because he never paid attention to progressive political philosophy. As some Democrats began pushing back the libertarian neoliberals who were brought in by Bill Clinton, this has confused a lot of Gen X libertarians who did not know the history of their ideas. Something similar happened in the alt-weekly newspaper market, as I have discussed on a Theory of Change episode: https://plus.flux.community/p/weekly-newspapers-transformed-journalism
Weinstein's political activities before his day of absence controversy are mostly unknown, as far as I can tell. By the time he was profiled by Weiss though, he had become just a regular libertarian.
I enjoyed this piece and generally agree, but I think you mischaracterize Sam Harris’s positions. He publicly “hand[ed] in [his] membership card” to the IDW in 2020. He has been one of the loudest, most consistently anti-Trump voices out there, and frequently calls out the fellow travelers who have capitulated. Yes, he plays footsies with right wing reactionaries like Peterson, Shapiro, and Murray, but his actual views are a lot more nuanced than they’re presented above.
Harris has never done a single episode on Christian nationalism, by far the biggest threat to free speech and free expression since WWII. He's shown his political valence by making this choice. It's absurd to think that some annoying college students are a greater threat to free society than Russ Vought, the totalitarian Christian who will likely be Trump's chief of staff. And there are thousands of people exactly like Vought who will write the Trump agenda. Vought and several other far-right Christians are literally writing the 2024 Republican platform.
As I said, conservatives do not necessarily agree with authoritarians all the time, and this is why Harris does not like Trump. But he manifestly does not place Trump's dictatorial aspirations and support base into the appropriate context.
Well written and interesting history. Everyone needs to read this to understand how American conservatism arose and works. It is not new or modern.
I now understand why there was such concern over electing a Catholic, Kennedy, even though he was Democrat. They thought he would take his orders from the Pope. As a young voter that never made any sense.
This article also explains why the Republicans are such abysmal presidents even those who were 'nice' but then did nothing to help the American people.
Thanks! Unfortunately, the US has been stuck in a continual repetition of this cycle because the Democrats do not push back sufficiently in the media. They constantly complain that the MSM will not do its job, but then refuse to build advocacy media to counteract the right wing propaganda machine. Regular Americans who are not political junkies do not have the time or the knowledge to see through the rebranding lies.
I agree with your critique of feckless Democratic messaging and weakness countering lies and falsehoods or effectively labeling Republicans. Here is my interview with Rachel Bitecofer in The Washington Spectator.
There she makes important points about the complete lack of knowledge by most Americans about politics which provides an opening for Republicans.
Even now 30% of the American public doesn't know that Trump was indicted, let alone convicted, according to one recent poll.
And how weak and timid Democrats are in labeling Republicans as fascists and threats to your economic freedom ,reproductive freedom and other rights, using the lens of "negative partisanship" to motivate turnout.
its all less intellectual and more web click bait economics. which means shock grift demagoguery. say alarming stuff, trigger adolescent minds. get sponsored by pill companie$. if big tobacco was alive today they'd be the number 1 sponsor of all these demagogues.
It's definitely not intellectual. That's the reason the IDW almost never does real debates with anyone, nor do they write lengthy, well-researched books. It's almost entirely just interminable and unstructured podcasts that run for 4 hours.
Do you think Barri Weiss or any of the leading figures of the intellectual dark web voted for Trump in 2016 and if so who?
If most of them didn't vote for Trump in 2016 and rarely if ever voted for Republicans before and weren't registered Republicans,how then do they become portrayed as a republican rebranding -- even if their agenda matches most of the Republican agenda?
Who one chooses to vote for or what party one registers for is really rather immaterial to their thinking. Many of the individuals in the IDW lived in electorally lopsided states when Weiss wrote her article so chances are they probably didn't even bother voting.
Obviously they all are in favor of Trump in 2024 though, except for Harris, but he obviously is not concerned with the individuals who will run Trump's administration--Christian supremacists--as I demonstrated in my essay. He doesn't like Trump's vulgar personality and wanton criminality, but this is honestly a very baseline ethical norm.
I thought this was very thoughtful but you really are missing as some other comments here note the origins of these intellectuals and journalists migrating into right-wing positions. Culturally and politically they came out of liberal ideology and academia and then moved right, so they're closest for bears would be the neoconservative movement led by largely Jewish intellectuals such as Irving Kristol who then turned right, supported Republicans and provided the intellectual firepower for the fake justifications for the invasion of Iraq. I would wager that almost all of the people on the intellectual dark web rarely voted for Republican candidates for office before 2016 and possibly not even during that election and don't have family backgrounds that supported Republicans.
And not every liberal who attacks what they see as the excesses of woke culture has become pro Trump: I e. James Carville, George Packer and Bill Maher.
I think you're missing part of the story. I think Rubin and especially Bret Weinstein really WERE on the left and then they got twisted, and I think Joe Rogan started out as a sort of uninformed genuinely uncommitted stoner/comedian/interviewer guy, and slowly drank the right-wing cool aid. Peterson and Shapiro were always conservative. I think at the time the IDW was named, it was more legitimate to locate them outside of the conventional Left-Right continuum, but pretty quickly they solidified as pro-Trump, anti-Left, anti-Vax brats. I don't think it works though to call them a "rebrand" of conservatism. They're a mixture of former lefties who moved to the right and right-wingers who want the "cool rebel" factor that the Left has without adopting the values of the left. I think when the IDW was first named, it made sense to include Sam Harris in it, but it no longer does.
Rogan has always been a libertarian and like many unknowledgeable libertarians, he actually thought he was a liberal because he never paid attention to progressive political philosophy. As some Democrats began pushing back the libertarian neoliberals who were brought in by Bill Clinton, this has confused a lot of Gen X libertarians who did not know the history of their ideas. Something similar happened in the alt-weekly newspaper market, as I have discussed on a Theory of Change episode: https://plus.flux.community/p/weekly-newspapers-transformed-journalism
Weinstein's political activities before his day of absence controversy are mostly unknown, as far as I can tell. By the time he was profiled by Weiss though, he had become just a regular libertarian.
I enjoyed this piece and generally agree, but I think you mischaracterize Sam Harris’s positions. He publicly “hand[ed] in [his] membership card” to the IDW in 2020. He has been one of the loudest, most consistently anti-Trump voices out there, and frequently calls out the fellow travelers who have capitulated. Yes, he plays footsies with right wing reactionaries like Peterson, Shapiro, and Murray, but his actual views are a lot more nuanced than they’re presented above.
Harris has never done a single episode on Christian nationalism, by far the biggest threat to free speech and free expression since WWII. He's shown his political valence by making this choice. It's absurd to think that some annoying college students are a greater threat to free society than Russ Vought, the totalitarian Christian who will likely be Trump's chief of staff. And there are thousands of people exactly like Vought who will write the Trump agenda. Vought and several other far-right Christians are literally writing the 2024 Republican platform.
As I said, conservatives do not necessarily agree with authoritarians all the time, and this is why Harris does not like Trump. But he manifestly does not place Trump's dictatorial aspirations and support base into the appropriate context.
https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/169-omens-race-war
https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/121-white-power (Worth noting Harris released an addendum disputing some of the statistics cited in this episode)
https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/the-most-powerful-clown
Those seem to be about white nationalism rather than Christian nationalism. They are often related, but many times they are not.
Well written and interesting history. Everyone needs to read this to understand how American conservatism arose and works. It is not new or modern.
I now understand why there was such concern over electing a Catholic, Kennedy, even though he was Democrat. They thought he would take his orders from the Pope. As a young voter that never made any sense.
This article also explains why the Republicans are such abysmal presidents even those who were 'nice' but then did nothing to help the American people.
Thanks! Unfortunately, the US has been stuck in a continual repetition of this cycle because the Democrats do not push back sufficiently in the media. They constantly complain that the MSM will not do its job, but then refuse to build advocacy media to counteract the right wing propaganda machine. Regular Americans who are not political junkies do not have the time or the knowledge to see through the rebranding lies.
I agree with your critique of feckless Democratic messaging and weakness countering lies and falsehoods or effectively labeling Republicans. Here is my interview with Rachel Bitecofer in The Washington Spectator.
https://washingtonspectator.org/rachel-bitecofer-on-how-to-stop-trump-maga-save-democracy/
There she makes important points about the complete lack of knowledge by most Americans about politics which provides an opening for Republicans.
Even now 30% of the American public doesn't know that Trump was indicted, let alone convicted, according to one recent poll.
And how weak and timid Democrats are in labeling Republicans as fascists and threats to your economic freedom ,reproductive freedom and other rights, using the lens of "negative partisanship" to motivate turnout.