Conservative retrograde reactionary thought is, in my opinion, the most overly hyped and subsidized phenomenon in culture today. I’m not even going to call it “Conservative Thought” or “Conservative Politics” because to be considered a system of thought or political beliefs, there has to be a consistent set of fact-based guiding intellectual principles. Trickle down economics and “triggering libtards” does not make a coherent political theory.
From the New York Times obsessive fetishization of “The Trump Voter” to The Atlantic’s shameful rush to hire a man who advocated for the murder of women who dared exercise their Constitutional right, right wing politics has for some reason or another, found eager subsidizers for their toxic strain of psuedo-intellectualism. Regardless of how little demand for it there is. All one has to do is look at the current polling on political issues such as social security, medicaid for all, equal pay for women, climate change and a plethora of other issues and you’ll see that society as a whole is trying, for better or worst, to move in the right direction.
Yet mainstream media for some inexplicable reason is desperate to prop up the fringe, forgotten, or just plain ugly politics of the right. And no better piece exemplifies this trend than the article ran in the New York Times called, Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web.
From the title alone, images of the seedy, anonymous TOR dark-web come to mind, where individuals under the guise of anonymity trade in illicit wares, drugs and porn. But, who is included in this article on members of the “intellectual dark web?”
Ben Shapiro
Jordan Peterson
Bret Weinstein
Majid Naawaz
And the article further discusses Joe Rogan, Dave Rubin, Sam Harris, and even namedrops Candace Owens of Turningpoints USA! Yes, the same right wing billionaire propaganda machine Turningpoints USA that’s funded by Foster “Asprin between your knees” Friess and the Koch Brothers.
Wow. So edgy.
Yeah. Call me unimpressed and dubious at the dark web comparison, to say the least.
The article goes on to say that these “dark web intellectuals” have been “purged from institutions that have become increasingly hostile to unorthodox thought — and have found receptive audiences elsewhere.”
As if these lone prophets of intelligent, rationale thought have been cast off into the wilderness by pharisees who worship on the alter of “orthodox thought.”
I find it interesting that the author props up their ideas as something new or revolutionary; as if no black person has ever heard Candace Owens’ crass comparisons of black voters living on the “Democrat Plantation” or used “The Left Thinks Black People Are Stupid” tropes. I mean, it’s not like there isn’t a cadre of black conservatives parroting the same fucking lines verbatim like Larry Elder, Ben Carson, E.W. Jackson, Star Parker, and more, right?
Truly, that’s groundbreaking race-related discourse.
But what I truly find so exhausting, disgusting and odious about this article is how it paints conservative retrograde thought as a sort of renaissance of new ideas; as if it were a movement of free-thinkers trying desperately to inject “controversy” and “intellectual wildness” into mainstream discourse. God forbid The New York Times actually gives editorial space to real intellectuals with weight to their names like Noam Chomsky, Enrique Dussel, James Heckman or anyone who has more to their credit than a youtube following. No, instead it would rather pick low-hanging, low-intellectual grade fruit from the tree of youtube/social media stardom which is heavily subsidized by right wing front groups and troll armies on the web hoping to further shift the Overton Window to the right.
As if Sam Harris and Charles Murray debating the merits of “The Bell Curve” is some sort of breath of fresh air. The author somehow missed that these ideas have been around for a very long time. “The Bell Curve” was published in 1994, and the ideas it espoused on race and IQ have been around since the 1960s. Arguably longer if one really traces back to the roots of these “theories.”
Conservative male, chauvinistic thought is as old-hat as the religious tithe. Jordan Peterson questioning if women are capable of working with men in the workforce is now exemplary of “intellectual wildness?”
I guess two people fucking in porn is considered novel now, too.
For now, I’ll offer my deepest apologies to those in the “Intellectual Dark Web.” I apologize that I and others don't find it intellectually stimulating to debate the value of our humanity or whether or not we deserve equality and respect. For now you will just have to endure being “silenced” while also raking in thousands of dollars from right wing billionares and youtube ad revenue.
What a lamentable fate they must suffer, huh?