Every US election throws up a cast of figures adjacent to the campaign who endorse one candidate or another. Kamala Harris had a long line of celebrity backers, from Beyoncé to Bruce Springsteen.
Donald Trump had his own celebrities, such as Hulk Hogan, but he was also supported by a group of converted Democrats: Joe Rogan, Tulsi Gabbard, (just chosen as Trump’s director of national intelligence), Robert F. Kennedy Jr (Trump’s pick to head the federal health agency), and Elon Musk, who has been selected to co-lead Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency.
These figures are notable not just because they switched sides, but because they were part of an immensely popular online phenomenon born in the mid-2010s: the intellectual dark web. (Not to be confused with the dark web.)
After Trump’s victory, I found myself exclaiming: my God, the intellectual dark web just won the election! Though the name is now rarely used, understanding the phenomenon can help us understand what just happened.
The intellectual dark web became increasingly well known during the first Trump presidency. It gained mainstream attention through a 2018 New York Times article, which described it as “a collection of iconoclastic thinkers, academic renegades and media personalities who are having a rolling conversation – on podcasts, YouTube and Twitter, and in sold-out auditoriums – that sound unlike anything else happening, at least publicly, in the culture right now”.
Many of these figures, the Times noted, were building their own media channels. It identified The Joe Rogan Experience podcast, which has an audience in the tens of millions, as a focal point. “People are starved for controversial opinions,” Rogan has said. “And they are starved for an actual conversation.”
In the week before the election, podcast episodes with Trump, JD Vance and Musk gained 80 million views on YouTube alone. Interestingly, in the week after the election, MSNBC’s viewership was down 39% and CNN’s down 22%, compared with their October averages. The audience of Fox News jumped 39% in the same period.
What was the intellectual dark web?
In the mid-2010s, longform podcasts became an unexpected success. Rogan’s was one of the most successful. His conversations with academics, politicians and media personalities went for hours and were uncensored, and his approach was very different from the heavily produced interviews of mainstream media.
The “core” of the intellectual dark web included Rogan, psychologist and bestselling author of 12 Rules for Life Jordan Peterson, neuroscientist Sam Harris (who voted for Hillary Clinton), and Eric Weinstein, managing director of Peter Thiel’s venture capital firm until 2022 (and a Bernie Sanders supporter).
However, there were 50 or more others like Musk and Gabbard who appeared on Rogan’s podcast (and those of other core figures), who had similar values and concerns.
Musk and Gabbard both first appeared on Rogan’s podcast in 2018. Musk has appeared five times and Gabbard seven times. Kennedy Jr, a latecomer, has appeared once so far, in June 2023.
Gabbard, a former congresswoman for Hawaii, even announced her resignation from the Democratic party on Rogan’s podcast, in October 2022. “The people in charge of the Democratic party… have created this cult-like atmosphere,” she said. “The Democratic party of the past – the party that I joined – doesn’t exist anymore. The party of JFK, of Dr Martin Luther King … The big tent party that welcomed and encouraged this marketplace of ideas.”
The rise of podcasting coincided with campus politics spilling over into the wider world. “Cancel culture”, which grew out of this, has often been mentioned on Rogan’s podcast as a problem.
For the intellectual dark web, the worst aspects of campus politics are driven by postmodernism’s degradation of traditional liberal values. Once, the great liberal objective was to try to grasp the truth – the nature of reality. This was done through open and civil discussion, and by drawing on reasoning and evidence.
Postmodernism, ‘woke’ and disputed realities
The 1960s saw the rise of poststructuralism, which led to postmodernism from the 1980s. The latter was influenced by the ideas of French philosopher Michel Foucault, who was concerned with dissecting power. Foucault believed power “produces reality”.
Postmodern thinking argues there is no objective truth: apparent claims to it are always related to power. Postmodernism became the unofficial philosophy of identity politics – what many now refer to as being “woke”.
For postmodern thinkers, the task of the intellectual activist is to prevent or transform the speech of the powerful. The introduction of gender-neutral pronouns (they/them) and, relatedly, the term “Latinx” (a gender-neutral term for Latino) are examples. For postmodern and “woke” thinkers, the “truth” that matters belongs to those without power in our society. According to this way of thinking, the less power you have, the greater your worth, and vice versa.
“There’s no real world. Everything’s a social construct,” Peterson said of postmodernism. “And it’s a landscape of conflict between groups.”
The intellectual dark web’s criticism of “woke” politics is centred on this disputed reality (and ideas about power) – spanning issues as diverse as biological sex and gender, debates over police violence and Black Lives Matter, and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) policies. While they accept that social norms influence us, they object to the idea that language conjures reality into existence.
These kinds of discussions had, for decades, been routinely shut down in universities. For example, last year, students called for the cancelling of “gender-critical feminist” Holly Lawford-Smith’s course on feminism at the University of Melbourne, due to her arguments for the significance of biological sex.
And these opinions (which are associated with conservatism) are rarely heard in the liberal mainstream media, where conservatism is the enemy.
Free speech as the path to truth
The intellectual dark web championed free speech as the pathway to truth.
Intellectual dark web thinkers do not believe in gender as a social construct: they see it as a biological reality, with real implications for men, women and relationships between them.
Louise Perry, author of The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, who has appeared on intellectual dark web podcasts, argues gender difference is not just physical, but psychological – and that women do not benefit from casual sex, despite liberal feminism encouraging it. Peterson exhorts men to follow a middle path between emasculation and being like the misogynist influencer Andrew Tate.
Yes, the manosphere is real: Rogan’s audience is mostly male, as is Peterson’s. And Rogan’s guests are also mostly male. But the term “manosphere” is inherently dismissive. It ignores concerns that seemed to resonate with many US voters.
The intellectual dark web, in its commitment to reality, also bemoans the postmodern devaluation of merit. “I think the pathology that’s at the core of the culture war is an attack on competence itself,” says Peterson.
For me, Raygun’s recent performance at the Olympics, which was internationally criticised as poor, is a clear example of the postmodern devaluation of merit. As Rogan said: “It’s an offense to actual breakdancers that that lady did that. Actual high-level breakdancing is an athletic art form.”
This devaluation of merit is at the core of the intellectual dark web’s criticisms of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives. Black economist Glenn Loury, a member of the intellectual dark web, argues such initiatives don’t even help those they are designed to help. “I hate affirmative action,” he says. “It is a substitute for the actual development of the capacities of our people to compete.”
In such ideas, there is a recurring tension between creating equality of opportunity and equality of outcome. For instance, US President Joe Biden was urged to pick a Black woman as vice president and promised to nominate a Black woman to the Supreme Court – both of which he did. He has been criticised for making these choices based on identity rather than merit.
These are complex discussions: there is a long history of Black people and women suffering discrimination when they have merit. But, arguably, the Democratic party has increasingly become concerned with a superficial equality of outcome, at the expense of the party’s erstwhile base: workers.
As US Senator Bernie Sanders said following Trump’s election win: “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.”
Rogan endorsed Sanders, who appeared on his podcast in 2019, as the Democratic candidate for the 2020 presidential election.
In 2020, at the height of the Black Lives Matter protests, Sam Harris spoke some then-taboo truths about the absurdity of calls to defund the police in the US. “Having a police force that can deter crime, and solve crimes when they occur, and deliver violent criminals to a functioning justice system, is the necessary precondition for almost anything else of value in society,” he said.
“Woke capitalism” is a concept that circulated within the intellectual dark web. It argues that identity politics might seem radical, but in fact works hand-in-glove with the corporate world. Rather than actually improving the lot of workers, many corporations prefer to make costless gestures by running diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
Where to now?
While Trump won for many reasons, including immigration and the economy, my sense is that Trump, forever the populist, harnessed a widespread dissatisfaction with a form of identity politics promulgated by a quite often well-paid, white-collar class: psychologist Steven Pinker’s “chattering class”.
The intellectual dark web, which can be seen as a broad populist movement spanning the left and right, has been going on about identity politics and its postmodern roots for more than a decade. Now, its ideas and figures have helped elect a president, and some of them – Musk, Gabbard and Kennedy Jr – have roles in Trump’s administration.
Jamie Q Roberts, Lecturer in Politics and International Relations, University of Sydney
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.