Weiss says that “offline and in the real world, members of the I.D.W. are often found speaking to one another in packed venues around the globe,” such as the O2 Arena, where they dare to say “That Which Cannot Be Said,” offering “taboo” thoughts like “There are fundamental biological differences between men and women. Free speech is under siege. Identity politics is a toxic ideology that is tearing American society apart.” (Gosh, perhaps it’s just the fringe conservative circles I move in, but I seem to hear that stuff constantly!)
Well, are they right? Are they being “purged” as part of a “siege” on free speech by the illiberal left? It’s interesting that Weiss chooses to use the formulation “feeling locked out of legacy outlets,” since I seem to remember a great *********** once saying that Facts Don’t Care About Your Feelings. These people may feel as if they are persecuted renegades, suppressed at every turn by Postmodern Neo-Marxists. But there are a lot of facts to say otherwise.
First, even from the evidence in Weiss’ article, we can see that freely speaking about the “siege on free speech” is impressively lucrative. Dave Rubin’s show “makes at least $30,000 a month on Patreon” while Jordan Peterson “pulls in some $80,000 in fan donations each month” and recently released a bestseller. Ben Shapiro gets 15 million downloads a month and has published five books, Sam Harris gets a million listeners per episode and has published seven books. Though Joe Rogan insists “he’s not an interviewer or a journalist” (I wouldn’t disagree) his three-hour podcast conversations are among the most downloaded in the world. These dissident “intellectuals” each seem to make about as much money in a month, with far larger audiences, than is made annually by the critical race theorists and gender studies professors they think are keeping them from being heard.
But perhaps it is still true that they are “shut out” of the mainstream media. It might be true that you can get rich from the Dangerous Truths and sell out the O2 Arena, but maybe newspapers and television won’t give you a voice. Why, just look at what happened to Kevin Williamson: he was hired by The Atlantic, but the moment they found out he held a Dangerous opinion (
in this case, the opinion that women who get abortions should be hanged and that little black boys can be appropriately described as “primates”), he was fired. Why are mainstream institutions punishing heterodox thinking?
Williamson is an instructive case, though. Immediately after The Atlantic dropped him, the Wall Street Journal published Williamson’s long account of “
When The Twitter Mob Came For Me” as its featured weekend essay, and Bret Stephens
spoke up for him in the New York Times. (Even The Atlantic
published a defense of him!) This often seems to be what happens. A major publisher offered Milo Yiannopoulos a
$250,000 advance for his book on how dangerous his opinions were to the establishment. The book instantly ascended to #1 on Amazon, and Simon & Schuster
only withdrew Yiannopoulos’s contract when conservatives turned on him after he appeared to endorse pedophilia.
In fact,
all of the persecuted intellectuals appear constantly in major outlets with huge reach. Whether it’s Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson appearing on HBO’s Real Time, Christina Hoff Sommers writing for Slate, The Atlantic, and the New York Times, Milo going on CNN, Bret Weinstein being interviewed on FOX News, Andrew Sullivan being racist in New York magazine, Peterson getting invited on the NBC Nightly News, or Ben Shapiro being profiled in the New York Times, not one of these individuals ever seems to lack for a mainstream perch from which to squawk. It’s a strange kind of oppression in which silenced dissidents keep getting book deals, op-eds, sold-out speaking tours, lucrative Patreons, millions of YouTube views, and sympathetic profiles in the world’s leading newspapers. How much more attention do they want? How much freer can speech be? Weiss’ article itself pushes the absurdity to its limits. It features half a dozen staged photographs of its subjects moodily lurking amidst topiaries, and is the longest piece yet in Weiss’
ongoing series on the illiberalism and repressiveness of the left. As one commenter
put it, Weiss’ argument is “that unseen forces are preventing her and those like her from making the exact arguments that she’s making, right now, in the exact venue where she’s making them, right now.”
Weiss says members of the Intellectual Dark Web have been “purged” from institutions. It’s not clear, though, which institutions she means. Peterson is a full professor at one of the world’s top research universities. Steven Pinker and Jonathan Haidt, who have similarly spent time condemning campus leftists, have positions at Harvard and NYU, respectively. Charles Murray spoke at Harvard and Yale last year. Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying did choose to resign from Evergreen State after the protests there, but Weiss doesn’t mention that they
took half a million dollars with them after filing a $3.8 million lawsuit against the university for failing to protect them from the Social Justice Warriors. (What kind of snowflake files a lawsuit because they can’t handle a little free speech?)
The members of the Intellectual Dark Web are attacked, supposedly, for their “ideas,” which they are eager to discuss “civilly” but which the left will not debate because it hates rational discourse.
It’s a strange definition of civility, though. Shapiro’s speeches contain such civil remarks as “you can all go to hell, you pathetic, lying, stupid jackasses,” and he has repeatedly made vile racist remarks about Arabs. Peterson, when criticized in the New York Review of Books, did not respond with an extended rebuttal, but by calling the writer a “son of a bitch” and a “sanctimonious prick” on Twitter, and threatening to slap him in the face. (Not the first time that criticism has caused genteel conservative “civility” to give way to threats of violence.) Sam Harris goes from cool reason to angry denunciation and accusations of bad faith when people dare to suggest to him that Charles Murray is a racist. For men who care about facts, they sure have a lot of feelings!
Here’s another reason why I’m skeptical that our national Martyrs for Free Speech and Rational Debate are uninterested in actually debating ideas: I’ve tried to get them to do it. I wrote a long explanation of why I thought Ben Shapiro’s logic was poor and his moral principles heinous. Shapiro mentioned me when we both gave
speeches at the University of Connecticut.
Did he rebut my case? No. He said he hadn’t heard of me and that my crowd was smaller than his. (I admit to being obscure and unpopular, but I’d ask what that says about which speech is mainstream and which is marginal.) When I wrote about Charles Murray, explaining in 7,000 words why I think his work is bigoted, Murray
dismissed it with a tweet. When I wrote 10,000 words meticulously dissecting Jordan Peterson’s laughable body of work, Peterson responded with about three tweets, one
misunderstanding a joke and
another using fallacious reasoning. (See if you can spot it!) The wonderful
ContraPoints recorded a highly intelligent 30-minute explanation of why Peterson is wrong. Peterson’s only reply: “No comment.” So much for wanting a debate with the left.
thats lit