In a new and compelling profile of the “Intellectual Dark Web,” Bari Weiss of the New York Times reported on the growing audience for content from thought leaders like Christina Hoff Sommers, Joe Rogan, and Jordan Peterson.
Thinkers who dominate the “IDW” tend to be dissidents from their professions or identity groups, like Sommers, a feminist former professor whose criticisms of the women’s movement earned her scorn in academia.
Now, however, the Sommers, Rogans, and Petersons (and Bret Weinsteins) of the world are in high demand online, though their contributions may still be unwelcome in academia or the mainstream media.
Writing on that demand, Weiss reported:
Ben Shapiro’s podcast, which airs five days a week, gets 15 million downloads a month. Sam Harris estimates that his “Waking Up” podcast gets one million listeners an episode. Dave Rubin’s YouTube show has more than 700,000 subscribers.
Ben Shapiro’s podcast, which airs five days a week, gets 15 million downloads a month. Sam Harris estimates that his “Waking Up” podcast gets one million listeners an episode. Dave Rubin’s YouTube show has more than 700,000 subscribers.
“Mr. Rubin said his show makes at least $30,000 a month on Patreon,” she noted later. “And Mr. Peterson says he pulls in some $80,000 in fan donations each month.”
Some of those numbers are eye-popping. For all his successes, I still maintain Ben Shapiro’s reach is underestimated in the Beltway — in recent years, college students even beyond the small but mighty conservative activist demographic have told me they’re regular listeners.
What just about all IDW thinkers have in common is an eager ability to facilitate or participate in productive debate, and reasonable ideas that are mistakenly relegated to the fringe by the arbiters of mainstream conversation. This growing hunger, underscored by the massive demand for some of these intellectuals online (which largely goes underestimated), seems to be a referendum on the media’s ability to satisfy curious consumers.
People want the gatekeepers to let thinkers like Sommers in, and value the debate created by doing so over the status quo, which usually seems to involve elevating only orthodox progressives, or pitting them against representatives of another extreme.
I concur with Weiss, who at the end of her story affirms the importance of gatekeepers (without them, there will be more confusing cases like Candace Owens’). “Given how influential this group is becoming,” Weiss writes, “I can’t be alone in hoping the I.D.W. finds a way to eschew the cranks, grifters and bigots and sticks to the truth-seeking.”
Perhaps if the gatekeepers paid more attention, they would realize there’s a market incentive to inviting reasonable, if ideologically homeless, voices back into the mainstream conversation.
