Intellectual Dark Web IDW – Splitting and Confusing the Centre then Nudging Voters to the Right?

What is the IDW Intellectual Dark Web? The Bulwark’s Cathy Young explains some of the issues in ‘From Intellectual Dark Web to Crank Central’ while from the outside it seems obsessed about university campuses, ‘woke’, liberals, women, science, free speech, men’s rights, Covid etc., creating doubts about centrist policies and nudging to the right.

However, others have researched to argue that it’s in fact promoting base social – Darwinism by denigrating centrist or liberal issues of the day, while disappearing the right and white Christian nationalists, to avoid both scrutiny and criticism?

Further, one sees the IDW movement, described as ‘Pinkerites’ in some circles i.e. the people, activists, journalists and related think tanks, include the Pioneer Fund, Spiked Online, Quillette, AEI American Enterprise Institute, InfoWars and American Renaissance.

Technically it seems to focus on writing and publishing articles creating doubts about the centre, liberals etc. to nudge people towards the right, or not vote, but when easily linked to both Koch and Tanton Network, then one infers social Darwinism for <1% supported by conservatives through to white Christian nationalists, with a whiff of fossil fuels.

From Intellectual Dark Web to Crank Central

Was the loose-knit band of rebels always destined to go fringe?

CATHY YOUNG

APR 08, 2024

AMID THE RECENT CONTROVERSY about Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire website finally dropping conspiracy theorist and antisemitic ranter Candace Owens, one minor but fascinating detail went unnoticed: Six years ago, both Shapiro and Owens had cameos in a much-ballyhooed New York Times Magazine article that introduced the world to the “Intellectual Dark Web”—mathematician Eric Weinstein’s semi-facetious label for an informal network of authors, journalists, and academics who saw themselves as “heretics” and “renegades” in rebellion against the establishment. Shapiro, then an anti-Trump conservative, was briefly discussed as an IDW figure; Owens, then a rising “black conservative” activist/provocateur whom some in the IDW saw as a potential ally, was held up as a warning against embracing “cranks, grifters and bigots.” (In those days, Owens was not yet talking about “Jewish gangs” in Hollywood, but she was already claiming that immigrants are stealing jobs from black Americans and comparing celebrities who support the Democratic party to plantation slaves.)

Although the May 2018 article’s author, Bari Weiss, was largely sympathetic to the IDW, she wondered, “Could the intellectual wildness that made this alliance of heretics worth paying attention to become its undoing?”

In 2024, this question seems uncannily prescient.

Of the IDW stars profiled in Weiss’s article, several—former Evergreen State College biology professors Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying, a married couple; Canadian psychologist and bestselling guru Jordan Peterson; podcaster Joe Rogan—have devolved into full-blown cranks. In a recent podcast episode, Peterson goes full Alex Jones on COVID-19 vaccines, claiming they caused more deaths than the “so-called pandemic,” and barking his skepticism about childhood vaccination in general. Weinstein and Rogan recently used Rogan’s podcast, which has an audience of millions, to push not only the notion that mRNA vaccines, including the COVID-19 ones, are lethally dangerous but the idea that HIV isn’t the real cause of AIDS and that HIV-skeptical maverick scientist Kary Mullis’s death in 2019 may have been engineered by Dr. Anthony Fauci. The ranks of the cranks also include author and podcaster Maajid Nawaz, briefly mentioned in the original IDW piece as a “former Islamist turned anti-extremist activist”—now a vaccine and 2020 election conspiracy theorist, and most recently seen boosting the Kremlin’s efforts to link Ukraine to the ISIS terror attack in Moscow.

Not surprisingly, the IDW’s slide into crankism has coincided with a slide into Trumpism—or anti-anti-Trumpism pushed to degree where it becomes indistinguishable from Trumpism tout court. Peterson has long sympathized with Trump as an anti-establishment rebel. Bret Weinstein, once a Bernie Sanders-supporting leftist, now says that he “appreciate[s] Trump” and would consider voting for him if he just got more fully on the Covidiot bandwagon (and agreed to pardon Julian Assange). In 2020, Weinstein peddled “concern” about the possibility of “substantial fraud” in the election. Today, he suggests that electing an “obviously senile” Biden amounts to a coup handing power to “a cabal of unelected powerbrokers” from the Democratic National Committee, and posts cryptic tirades against Joe Biden supporters.

Meanwhile, another IDW star profiled in the original article, erstwhile progressive Dave Rubin, the comedian and podcaster who voted for Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson in 2016 and promised to be “the first to hold Trump’s feet to the fire once he’s in office,” told Fox & Friends in 2020 that he was voting for Trump as “the last bulwark to stop the radical left.” As for holding Trump’s feet to the fire … well, he did, in 2018, call out Trump on Twitter for suggesting that video games cause violence (a real profile in courage!). More recently, as a Ron DeSantis supporter, Rubin ripped into Trump for spouting “seriously dishonest bullshit” and treating his base like “a bunch of morons.” But don’t worry: Rubin still thinks there are “plenty of good arguments to make for voting for Trump,” even if he’s prone to “lying about everything.”

Oh, and Rubin is among those who have made the bizarre and baseless insinuation that “wokeness” led to the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore.

As for Ben Shapiro, there never was a story of more woe: Described as “an anti-Trump conservative” in the original IDW article, he’s now not just voting for Donald Trump but even cohosting a fundraiser for him, and he told his podcast audience that he would “walk over broken glass to vote for [Trump]” because Joe Biden “is the worst president of my lifetime.”1

Not all of the IDW-associated figures featured in Weiss’s article have veered crankward. American Enterprise Institute senior fellow emeritus Christina Hoff Sommers remains eminently sensible (and an anti-Trump centrist). Two others, Sam Harris and Claire Lehmann, have openly broken with and criticized the IDW. Harris—a philosopher, neuroscientist, prominent atheist, and author—said in November 2020 that he was disassociating himself from the IDW label over other IDW figures’ embrace of Trump’s election-fraud claims and other conspiracy theories, noting that some of them were “sounding fairly bonkers.” Harris has made even sharper criticisms since then, especially over the anti-vaccine rhetoric. Lehmann, who founded the online magazine Quillette as a hub for heterodoxy in 2015 and was featured as the “voice” of the IDW in Politico in late 2018, first clashed with some fellow Dark Webbers over her willingness to publish articles, including one by me, criticizing certain aspects of the IDW—such as a tendency toward its own brand of groupthink and tribalism—as well as some of its members, such as Dave Rubin. (It turned out Lehmann meant it when she told Politico she didn’t want Quillette to be an echo chamber.) More recently, Lehmann has talked about the IDW’s fracturing over COVID-19, conspiracy theories, the war in Ukraine, and other issues.

If the IDW ever really existed as anything more than a catchy, not-quite-serious brand name for an informal intellectual community, there is little doubt that it no longer does. A recently published short book by University of Sydney lecturer Jamie Roberts that charitably examines the IDW and its contributions to political dialogue, The Way of the Intellectual Dark Web, refers to it in the past tense. Onetime IDW fellow traveler Christopher Rufo wrote its obituary a year ago, arguing that the IDW fell apart because some of its members found Trump too icky and orange, some were unwilling to part ways with establishment science on COVID, and most of the rest lacked Rufo’s appetite for using political power to vanquish perceived enemies.

But while the IDW may be dead, its ghosts continue to haunt our political and cultural scene, and its rise and fall are worth examining. Was it a worthy project gone bad, or was it always a fraud based on spurious grievances? Why have some people gone off the deep end and others pulled back from the brink? Does the IDW have a redeemable legacy? And has its first chronicler, Bari Weiss, managed to avoid the perils that she warned about in the 2018 piece?

WHEN WEISS’S ARTICLE, “Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web,” first appeared, it elicited strong reactions—and some patently unfair attacks. As I noted in Arc Digital at the time, a number of Weiss’s detractors, including her then–New York Times colleague Paul Krugman, seemed to assail an imaginary article that they believed she had written: an IDW advertorial that depicted its members as silenced and/or oppressed martyrs. In fact, while Weiss wrote that some IDW intellectuals had been “purged” from institutions grown uneasy with dissent, one of the points of the piece was that the new media ecosystem had allowed them to find lucrative platforms and receptive audiences elsewhere.

Some early critics, such as Henry Farrell at Vox, argued that the stars of the IDW were “white intellectuals” resentful of being displaced from a dominant cultural position and having to endure pushback against their ideas, including sexist and racist ones. Columbia University professor and author John McWhorter, a liberal critic of the progressive left with no connection to the IDW (despite jokingly describing himself in a 2018 podcast as part of “the black wing of the Intellectual Dark Web,” a casual comment which he ruefully notes has “resonated for years”), is harshly dismissive of critiques like Farrell’s. “Nonsense,” he wrote in an email to me last month. “It’s [Critical Race Theory]-speak, this idea of white people circling their wagons.”2 One could also argue that the stars of the IDW were far too eccentric to have been in a culturally dominant position prior to the cultural shift toward identity politics and social-justice progressivism in the 2010s. Peterson had been an obscure University of Toronto psychologist whose Jungian psychology–based first book, Maps of Meaning, reportedly sold about a hundred copies when it was first released in 1999; Weinstein and Heying had been faculty members at a tiny, very left-wing liberal arts college in Olympia, Washington.

The IDW figures were hardly the only public intellectuals critical of the rise of illiberal progressivism in academia, social media, and mainstream journalism. Numerous liberals who were not a part of the IDW coterie, such as New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait, the Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum, and Canadian critic Phoebe Maltz Bovy were concerned about the phenomenon at the time. What distinguished the IDW figures was their outsider status. Some of them, Weiss wrote, were “purged from institutions that have become increasingly hostile to unorthodox thought,” and they came to define themselves by, and even take pride in, their exile, finding a new community there.

One may debate the extent to which specific narratives by IDW figures were overdramatized; Weinstein and Heying’s tumble into crackpottery, for instance, has made some former supporters question the reliability of their account of their IDW ‘origin story,’ which involved turmoil at Evergreen in 2017 after Weinstein challenged a proposed “Day of Absence” for white faculty and students. For the record, I first had such questions several years ago when I interviewed the couple, around the time Weiss’s IDW piece came out, for an article I ended up shelving. Weinstein and Heying told me of a colleague and her students being ejected from a no-whites-allowed campus event on that day; the faculty member herself recollected that she and the students made a voluntary exit after realizing that the event was meant as people-of-color-only, despite being told they were welcome to stay. When I relayed this back to Weinstein and Heying, they quickly concluded that the Evergreen administration had pressured the woman into changing her story—not an impossibility, but also not a claim that could be accepted without evidence.

However, while there is some debate about whether the one-day white absence from the Evergereen campus was meant to be voluntary or enforced, the activist students’ ugly physical intimidation of both Weinstein and the college president was captured on video. And there were plenty of other well-documented incidents of intolerance and groupthink on college campuses, in literary communities, and elsewhere (e.g., the media frenzy over British scientist Tim Hunt’s alleged sexist tirade at a luncheon honoring women in science, later confirmed to have been a self-deprecating joke about his own supposed male chauvinism). In other words, the IDW was to some extent pushing back against trends that deserved a pushback.

But again, plenty of people—Chait, Applebaum, Bovy, McWhorter, and other journalists, commentators, and academics—managed to push back against those trends and not, as McWhorter put it to me, “drift into poised lunacy.” Some IDW figures avoided that drift; some IDW-adjacent people who were not part of Weiss’s article were at its forefront. (James Lindsay, anyone?)

Partly, it comes down to personalities. It seems likely that Weinstein and Peterson were a bit kooky before they traveled the full distance to unhinged. Joe Rogan, whose massive audience and folksy just-asking-questions manner ensure that he can still book respectable guests, was prone to falling for the dumbest conspiracy theories long before the IDW was a gleam in Eric Weinstein’s eye. (From 2012 to 2017, Rogan was a moon landing denier—no, really.) In an email last month, Sam Harris told me:

The IDW was never a cohesive group. It was a tongue-in-cheek name for a dozen people who were inclined toward a certain style of conversation—essentially a rejection of political correctness—mostly in podcast form. The only thing uniting these disparate characters was their unwillingness to be cowed by attacks from the Left. Several in the group (the imbeciles) were quite eager to pander to the Right. . . . Several people who got pulled into our orbit were bad actors from the beginning—Trumpist grifters and conspiracists—and a few of the original members got corrupted or revealed their truer, baser selves.

IT SEEMS LIKELY, IN RETROSPECT, that the IDW concept itself was conducive to such corruption. Bioethicist Alice Dreger, who left Northwestern University in 2015 with complaints about administrative censorship and has been targeted for campus protests over accusations of “transphobia,” refused Weiss’s invitation to be included in the IDW article for several reasons. The very framing, she wrote, implied that the featured “heretics” were huddling in dark corners or catacombs to exchange forbidden opinions; in Dreger’s view, it also valorized opinions over facts and easily lent itself to prioritizing “clicks, skirmishes, and dramatic photos at sunset”—a dig at the cringey pictures illustrating the article, which showed its protagonists in eerily dark forest settings, clearly meant to convey that there was something shadowy and forbidden about their activity.

McWhorter also feels that “the ‘dark web’ moniker was unfortunate because it implied connection with the truly evil forces on what was being discussed with that name at the time.” (The term “intellectual dark web” was allusion to the “dark web,” itself a term that has since fallen into disuse, which referred to hidden, anonymized parts of the internet where one could buy hacked personal information, stolen credit cards, illegal guns and drugs, etc.)

When being an outlaw or even just a permanent outsider becomes central to one’s identity, contrarianism and reflexive suspicion of anything associated with the “establishment” can easily become not only a temptation but a habit, even a norm. The correct observation that mainstream media have often uncritically recycled progressive claims about race and gender becomes a steppingstone to the assumption that the media lie about everything (COVID, the 2020 election, Ukraine. . .) and that the rebels are champions of suppressed truths. Next thing you know, you’re hawking Ivermectin as a COVID cure or regurgitating Kremlin talking points on the war in Ukraine.

Why some people are less susceptible to this mentality than others is a question that undoubtedly has multiple answers. In Harris’s case, for instance, his mainstream success as a bestselling author despite left-wing blowback on such issues as his criticism of Islam may have made him less receptive to anti-establishment grievance. One’s character and habits of critical thinking are undoubtledly relevant as well. Quillette’s Lehmann told me in a Zoom interview that she started out as “broadly anti-anti-Trump” after the 2016 election and assumed that warnings about Trump refusing to accept a loss in 2020 were “hysterical nonsense”—until it actually happened. So did the invasion of Ukraine, another point on which the mainstream media narrative had turned out to be correct. “It really made me reassess my priors,” says Lehmann. “I realized that I had had a blind spot on those two huge issues. So I updated my beliefs.” Others preferred to adjust the facts to fit their priors—or, Lehmann suspects, pretended to do so “because they don’t want to lose the audiences they built.”

That’s the “audience capture” phenomenon—a term that, ironically, appears to have been coined by the same Eric Weinstein who christened the IDW concept. In a polarized political climate, the IDW attracted a base of primarily right-wing fans intensely hostile to all things “establishment.” To those fans, opposition to Trump, rejection of the “stolen election” lies, support for mainstream science and public health measures on COVID, and eventually even support for Ukraine in its defense against Russia’s war of aggression signaled betrayal and selling out. Harris, who left Twitter in late 2022, was the object of intense vitriol from former fans directed at his alleged “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” (“Trump broke him” is another go-to trope.) Lehmann, no stranger to social media wars, told me that the “vicious response” she received for pushing back against hyperbolic claims that the COVID lockdowns in Australia were Nazi-like was “one of the most difficult experience I’ve had on social media, or to do with Quillette in general.” Yet Lehmann also believes that Quillette ultimately benefited from shedding much of its hard-right following as a result.

It may be that, because of the dynamics in today’s intellectual and political marketplace, any commentator, media outlet, or group that opposes the illiberal left but doesn’t explicitly oppose far-right Trumpian populism in in danger of being co-opted by it.3

THESE ISSUES ALSO HAVE SOME relevance to Bari Weiss’s own career six years after she first introduced the IDW to the wider public. In July 2020, Weiss quit the Times in protest against the forced resignation of her boss James Bennet, then the paper’s editorial-page editor, over an op-ed he had published by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.). Weiss subsequently set up a Substack newsletter that became a multi-contributor magazine, the Free Press, and a podcast—thus migrating into the independent media-land of the IDW.

The Free Press, whose staff includes veteran journalists such as Emily Yoffe, Peter Savodnik, Eli Lake, and Nellie Bowles (who is married to Weiss), was recently described by Chait as “interesting as well as frequently infuriating.” Chait grants some truth to the project’s basic premise: that a lot of mainstream media have abandoned objectivity on identity-related issues (whether due to ideology, activist pressures, or both), and that the resulting distortions in news coverage have left a gap to be filled.4 He also believes that the Free Press has sometimes filled this gap in important ways—for instance, with a hugely controversial 2023 piece in which Jamie Reed, a former case manager at a youth gender clinic in St. Louis, alleged that many children were being rushed into hormone treatments without proper counseling or mental health examination. Many progressive journalists rushed to accuse Reed, a self-identified “queer” leftist married to a transgender man, of promoting a “right-wing transphobia panic”; but a New York Times investigation later corroborated many of her claims.

Yet Chait also points out that the Free Press’s stance with regard to Trump has been increasingly “defensive,” portraying him as a victim of left-wing and elite animus—one article, by Martin Gurri, even predicts that Trump will be “broken on the wheel of elite hatred” before Election Day—and complaining about his voters being “villainized.” While the Free Press has lamented attempts to remove Trump from the ballot because of his role in the January 6th insurrection, it seems to have nothing to say about Trump’s increasing embrace of the “J6 patriots” on the campaign trail.

This is likely the result of both contrarianism and audience capture: Judging by the comments on the Free Press site, the MAGA right certainly makes up a substantial portion of its readership.5 Either way, the Free Press’s current anti-anti-Trumpism is a startling contrast to Weiss’s stance in 2018, when she pointedly criticized IDW members who “talk constantly about the regressive left but far less about the threat from the right” and quoted Harris’s barb against those who claim to care about truth but never have anything to say about Trump, the serial truth-assaulter.

Harris, for what it’s worth, stressed in our email exchange that while he may not agree with everything in the Free Press, he still admires it and wants it to succeed. So do I; but real success requires avoiding blind spots this big.6 The bottom line is that the site sometimes stumbles into the same pitfalls about which Weiss warned the IDW, including the embrace of “grifters”: Last August, Weiss conducted a spirited but respectful interview with then–presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, the guy who not only thinks that Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky are “two thugs” vying for turf in Eastern Europe but has repeatedly suggested that January 6th was an “inside job” and flirted with 9/11 “trutherism.” Obviously, a presidential candidate, even one with no chance of winning, is a legitimate subject for an interview. But Weiss treated Ramaswamy as an interesting and fresh voice on the political scene—and, despite some pushback on the Ukraine issue, did not delve into his more extreme statements. That’s not just an interview, it’s validation—and misleading validation at that.

WHAT, IF ANYTHING, is the IDW’s legacy almost six years later? Both Lehmann and Harris believe that recent cultural trends make a community of heterodox intellectual unnecessary. Lehmann sees “real progress in the media ecosystem opening up,” though she believes heterodox advocacy is still necessary in academia. Harris says he is “hopeful that we have seen peak ‘woke’ and that the pendulum of sanity is in the process of swinging back,” especially after the social justice left has “thoroughly discredited itself” after the October 7th attacks in Israel. (He warns, however, that “if Trump gets re-elected, this will change.”) And indeed, many of the issues IDW members were championing six years ago—such as freedom of speech and the overreach of progressive “cancel culture,” or the need to address the struggles of many boys and men in a world of changing gender roles—are now the subject of flourishing mainstream discussion. Even controversial aspects of transgender advocacy, from youth gender therapy to denials of the reality of biological sex, are being debated in the pages of the Atlantic and the New York Times.

Ironically, this cultural shift probably contributed to some IDW figures’ slide into cuckooland. What do you do when you define yourself as a rebel and an outsider but the “dissident” ideas you’ve championed have gained “insider” respectability? One possible response is to cling to outsider status by moving further to the fringe: the 2020 election was stolen, the COVID vaccine kills massive numbers of people, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is gay.

Whether the figures involved with the IDW can take credit for opening up the Overton window, though, is doubtful. Stating provocative ideas? That’s not much of a legacy, since “social media leave so many other people Telling Truths as well as those guys were trying to do,” McWhorter observes wryly. Putting campus illiberalism on the map? Maybe Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying deserve some credit for that, but at least as much is owed to Yale faculty members Nicholas and Erika Christakis, who are not affiliated with the IDW and also not crazy. Making the case for intellectual tolerance? The 2020 Harper’s magazine “Letter on Justice and Open Debate,” which drew some of the same ‘white people protecting their privilege’ objections as the IDW, unquestionably had a far greater impact.

Thus, in the end, it seems that the IDW’s principal legacy today is a cautionary tale. Don’t get caught up in a “dissident” identity, especially if you live in a liberal society (however flawed). Don’t confuse skepticism with contrarianism, or truth-seeking with conspiracy theory. Stay away from toxic allies (you know the ones: the cranks, grifters and bigots). And, of course, never go full MAGA.’

For more blogs and articles related to Business Strategy, Conservative, Economics, Koch Network, Libertarian Economics, Media, Political Strategy, Radical Right Libertarian and Tanton Network click through

Environment – Fossil Fuels – Climate Science Denial – Populationism – Anti-Immigration – Far Right – Tanton Network

Posted on November 30, 2023

Jeff Sparrow in Overland rebuts a counter critique of his book ‘Crimes Against Nature’ by a faux expert Edward Smith who appears to be au faire with faux environmental and anti-immigrant arguments promoted by the US Tanton Network linked NGO Sustainable Population Australia.

Conspiracy of Denial – COVID-19 and Climate Science

Posted on August 24, 2020

Some would not be surprised with the doubts and confusion being created round the COVID-19 crisis, especially by those wanting all economic activity to continue and ignore the human costs. 

However, much of this agitprop, astro-turfing and junk science used by non experts has much in common with the information, media and political techniques used by radical right libertarian think tanks funded by the fossil fuel sector and related media, to influence society on climate science to avoid constraints and preserve income streams, with some eugenics in the background.

Covid-19 Climate Science Vaccination Misinformation PR and Astro Turfing

Posted on May 6, 2020

In recent months there has been an increase in confusion, misrepresentation and misunderstanding in news and social media round Covid-19 using same techniques as in tobacco, climate science denialism and anti-vaccination movements that seem to benefit US radical right libertarians’ preferred ideology and politics.

Monbiot – Radical Right Libertarians – Fossil Fuel Think Tanks – Koch & Tanton Networks

Posted on January 14, 2024

Good overview via Argentina by George Monbiot in The Guardian ‘What links Rishi Sunak, Javier Milei and Donald Trump? The shadowy network behind their policies’ and concerning dynamics around national politics, media, think tanks and governance.

The ‘junk tanks’ he talks of, observed in Anglosphere and globally are Atlas – Koch Network and another that shares donors in the US, Tanton Network. The former does low tax, low regulation and small government while the latter is faux environmental via demographics, population and migration ‘research’.

Mont Pelerin Society MPS – Social Darwinism – Free Market Economics – Atlas Koch Network

Posted on April 25, 2024

The Mont Pelerin Society (MPS) another fulcrum of influence for radical right libertarians, climate science deniers and fossil fuels, the less than 1% and Austrian-Chicago School of social-Darwinist economics, with its influence continuing via Atlas or Koch Network and ultra conservatives.

MPS has been behind and influenced a network of think tanks globally via Atlas or Koch to promote climate science denial, fossil fuels, deregulation or lower standards etc. then leveraging right wing media, influencers, advisors and politicians to adopt the same policies, see ‘bill mill’ ALEC.

James Buchanan – Economist – Koch Influencer – Radical Right Libertarian – Anglo Conservatives

Posted on October 10, 2022

We hear much about the influence of right wing or conservative economic ideology in political policies whether GOP Republicans, UK Tories, Australian Liberal conservatives etc., think tanks and related media calling for lower taxes or cuts, smaller government, fewer services, immigration restrictions, white nativism, climate science denial, less red tape and moving the Overton window to the far right. 

However, as witnessed recently in the UK, with ‘Trussonomics’, these policies are presumed to be native and grounded through good policy development, but are they? 

Ghosts of Galton and Eugenics Return – Society, Population and Environment in the 21st Century

Posted on November 25, 2021

We have already looked at some other key players of the past related to eugenics, population via Malthus and liberal economics of Adam Smith, now we look at Galton, if not in detail, a broad sketch of his life and later impact on society, especially in the Anglosphere.

This has been exemplified by how eugenics theory never went away, even after the Nazis post WWII, but reemerged via the US using an environmental and climate prism, with a focus upon Malthusian population obsessions; supported by ZPG, UNPD data, Anglosphere media and think tanks to avoid regulation and business constraints, while encouraging xenophobia.

Nativist Conservative MPs for Fossil Fuels versus Science, Education, Research, Analysis & Society

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Interesting article from a science journalist at The Guardian on comments made about ‘woke’ science by the Tories in the UK at the Conservative Conference in  ‘Science hasn’t gone ‘woke’ – the only people meddling with it are the Tories’ by Philip Ball.

However, this is neither unique to the UK Conservatives nor dissimilar elsewhere, but it is a long game strategy against grounded science, research and analysis, like Trojan horses to disrupt curricula and universities, why? 

It’s both protection for fossil fuels and avoiding climate science (Covid too) while denigrating centre right through left moderate attitudes and policies as e.g. ‘woke’, to energise older right (and too many left) voters including Brexit, Trump and now in Australia ‘The Voice’ Referendum on Aboriginal recognition.

The fulcrum globally is Koch Network think tanks found at Tufton St. London, of course the US, Australia and other parts including links via Atlas Network and in Hungary, Heritage Foundation partnered with Danubius Institute, sharing anti-EU and pro fossil fuels sentiments, shared with Putin’s Russia and fossil fuels oligarchs, also includes the EU’s regulation for environment and financial transparency.

Overall, like Covid and climate science denial, denigration of experts, analysis and universities, with the nativist Tanton Network that shares donors with Koch in the US, is used to deflect from climate science by highlighting immigrants and population growth as environmental hygiene issues.

The end game is more alarming with their and e.g. Murdoch media support for corrupt nativist authoritarian leaders and governments who deny climate science and humanity?

Science hasn’t gone ‘woke’ – the only people meddling with it are the Tories

Michelle Donelan’s plan to “depoliticise” science with new guidelines on sex and gender research is a chilling move

The science secretary, Michelle Donelan, told the Conservative party conference this week that the Tories are “depoliticising science”. Or as a Conservative party announcement later put it, in case you didn’t get the culture-war reference, they are “kicking woke ideology out of science”, thereby “safeguarding scientific research from the denial of biology and the steady creep of political correctness”.

Scientists do not seem too delighted to be defended in this manner. “As a scientist, I really don’t know what this means,” tweeted Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, professor of psychology and cognitive neuroscience at the University of Cambridge. “This is totally shocking and is something I never thought I would see in the UK,” said Buzz Baum, a molecular cell biologist for the Medical Research Council.

What exactly does Donelan think science needs protecting from? What is this woke threat? At the conference, she expanded on that. “Scientists are told by university bureaucrats that they cannot ask legitimate research questions about biological sex,” she claimed, adding that Keir Starmer thinks the “legitimate concerns of the scientific community” on these issues of sex and gender “don’t matter”. She said she will launch a review of the use of gender and sex questions in scientific research, apparently to be led by Alice Sullivan, a professor of sociology at University College London, which will be used to formulate guidance.

You would need to have been hiding under a rock not to appreciate that questions of sex and gender have become controversial, bordering on incendiary, in some areas of academia. As a recent exchange by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and professor of humanities Jacqueline Rose in the New Statesman revealed, academics are often talking at cross-purposes: Dawkins defended the binary nature of human sexes from an evolutionary angle, Rose the socially constructed aspects of gender identity. On top of that, there are the complications of developmental and cognitive biology, which, among other things, can produce intersex individuals and conditions where, say, people with a Y chromosome can be anatomically female.

But one doesn’t need to take a strong stand about rights or wrongs in these debates to recognise that they are difficult and subtle – and to acknowledge it is proper that they be rigorously discussed. Arguably, this is an area where science can’t supply definitive answers to all the germane societal questions.

This is not a case of academic research being trammelled by an imposed ideology, but rather, of a range of differing views among academics themselves. Besides, rather than await clarification, Donelan has evidently formed her opinion already: she called guidance that data on sex should only be collected in exceptional circumstances “utter nonsense” and a “denial of biology”. What is the point of a review if you have decided already what it must say?

More to the point, why is the government getting involved in the first place? What chills Baum is the idea of “politicians telling scientists about the nature of biology”. Some scientists can’t help thinking of previous instances where governments imposed their views on the subject: the spurious “race science” of the Nazis and the anti-Darwinian denialism of Stalin’s regime. While that might sound a slightly hyperbolic response to a transparently desperate ploy to stoke culture-wars division, the principle is the same: a government deciding an approved position on science and demanding that academics toe the line.

Much as Donelan tries to position herself as a champion of the objectivity and freedom of science, this intervention supplies more evidence of the government’s distrust of academics in general and scientists in particular – it’s of a piece with Rishi Sunak’s assertion that scientists were given too much power during the pandemic. Witness the disturbing way this policy direction is framed. However contested and emotive this particular issue, it is hardly relevant to the large-scale practice of science – yet Donelan is seeking to leverage it to imply that all of science somehow stands at risk from “woke ideology”, as if the integrity of truth itself were at stake.

That is perhaps the most ominous aspect of this announcement. The creation of a fictitious, ubiquitous enemy to scare the population is indeed straight out of the fascist playbook. It was thoughtful of the Conservatives to drive this point home with the spectacle of party member Andrew Boff, chair of the London Assembly, being escorted from the conference hall by police on Tuesday when he voiced protest at Suella Braverman’s criticism of the term “gender ideology”.

The notion that science can be “depoliticised” at all, let alone by an agenda-driven political party, is understood to be nonsensical by those who study the interactions of science and society. Of course political agendas should never dictate research results. But the questions asked, priorities decided and societal implications of advances made absolutely make science inextricably tangled with the political landscape – not least in a controversial area like sex and gender. That entanglement can get messy, but no true democracy tries to control the narrative.’

  • Philip Ball is a science writer and the author of the forthcoming book, How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology

For more related blogs and articles on Climate Change, Conservatives, Environment, EU European Union, Fossil Fuels, Koch Network, Media, Science Literacy, Tanton Network and University Teaching Skills click through

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Anglosphere Oligarchs – Koch Atlas Network Think Tanks

Radical Libertarian Disinformation Machine – Koch Network by Nancy MacLean

BBC: 55 Tufton Street London – Libertarian Think Tanks – Koch Network

Rishi Sunak and US Radical Right Libertarians in UK – Koch Atlas Network Think Tanks

55 Tufton Street London: US Koch & Tanton Networks’ Think Tanks – Radical Right Libertarians and Nativists

Koch Industries: How to Influence Politics, Avoid Fossil Fuel Emission Control and Environmental Protections

Climate Change Science Attitudes Australia and Koch in USA

Trojan Horses – Ultra Conservatives Disrupting Education Curricula to Influence Youth

Critical Thinking or Analysis: Importance for Education, Media and Empowered Citizens

Mainstreaming Extremism – How Public Figures and Media Incite Nativist Beliefs Leading to Violence

Eugenics and racism have been apparent for centuries, but nowadays we are not surprised at extremist events in the Anglosphere, especially shootings in the US, mostly from the white nativist right, with incitement from media, or those accessing media. 

Below is an article repost from Bryn Nelson in Scientific American: ‘How Stochastic Terrorism Uses Disgust to Incite Violence. Pundits are weaponizing disgust to fuel violence, and it’s affecting our humanity.’ describing how people are encouraged to view what should be neutral sociocultural issues with ‘disgust’. 

Rewind, the Brexit campaign in the UK followed years of Tufton Street think tank informed media dog whistling of immigrants and/or European Union, exemplified by remarks made by then Prime Minister Cameron, using the language of entomology for insects to describe human beings i.e. eugenics:

‘spoke of “a swarm of people coming across the Mediterranean, seeking a better life, wanting to come to Britain”.’ egregiously ignoring causes of migration, such as Iraq then Syrian wars.

This was then followed by the right wing extremist murder of Labour MP Jo Cox, but initially described by disbelieving media as an unfortunate incident while again ignoring causes. The US based SPLC on the murder of Jo Cox, knew more about the incident and perpetrator within 24 hours, identifying him as a neo Nazi, than UK media, MPs and security services?

In Australia there are echoes of old ‘white Australia policy’ of immigration restrictions in media and politics dominated by Anglo Irish cohorts (influence is in decline, now only 54% identify), Murdoch media, Koch Network think tanks and Tanton Network nativism for same media content i.e. dog whistling refugees, international students, immigrants and population growth, as an environmental issue to deflect from fossil fuels and attract above median age voters.

Interestingly, Murdoch outlets like Fox News, Sky News After Dark (in Australia), TalkTV, print and radio media share common nativist messaging, repeatedly, to reinforce the Tanton tactic of voters making negative associations with ‘immigrants’; then picked up by other media in lock step.  After the appalling Christchurch shooting of Muslim worshippers by an Australian extremist Brenton Tarrant who follows the ‘great replacement’, right wing media and politicians quickly deflected and took no responsibility for creating the public ecosystem where his ideas were acceptable.

The Scientific American article follows:

By Bryn Nelson on November 5, 2022

How Stochastic Terrorism Uses Disgust to Incite Violence.  Pundits are weaponizing disgust to fuel violence, and it’s affecting our humanity.

A week and a half before the midterm elections, a man broke into Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s house, screaming “Where’s Nancy?” and attacked her husband with a hammer. David DePape, charged in the attack, had posted a slew of rants that included references to a sprawling conspiracy theory known as QAnon, which claims that Democratic, Satan worshipping pedophiles are trying to control the world’s politics and media.

Several hours before, Fox News’s Tucker Carlson interviewed right-wing activist Christopher Rufo, who claimed drag queens participating in book readings were trying to “sexualize children.” The people who support these events, he said, want to create “a sexual connection between adult and child, which has of course long been the kind of final taboo of the sexual revolution.”

With the support of former President Donald Trump, the pedophile conspiracy theory has contributed to a widening spiral of threats and violence, including the deadly January 6 Capitol insurrection. A revival of the “groomer” smear against the LGBTQ community (a reference to a pedophile) has ramped up the aggression. Right-wing media personalities and activists have created or amplified conspiracy theories about Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, Bill Gates and others.

Dehumanizing and vilifying a person or group of people can provoke what scholars and law enforcement officials call stochastic terrorism, in which ideologically driven hate speech increases the likelihood that people will violently and unpredictably attack the targets of vicious claims.

At its core, stochastic terrorism exploits one of our strongest and most complicated emotions: disgust.

In my new book Flush, I describe how psychologists have come to view disgust as a kind of behavioral immune system that helps us avoid harm. Whether in response to feces or rats, disgust triggers an aversion to things that can make us physically sick. The emotion has a darker side, however: in excess, it can be weaponized against people.

Propagandists have fomented disgust to dehumanize Jewish people as vermin; Black people as subhuman apes; Indigenous people as “savages”; immigrants as “animals” unworthy of protection; and members of the LGBTQ community as sexual deviants and “predators” who prey upon children.

That horrifying history is now repeating itself, as political extremists create dangerous new strains of contempt and hatred. During the COVID pandemic, there has been a surge of racism and xenophobia, as well as violence against foreigners who are baselessly blamed for importing disease and crime. 

Even when disgust doesn’t incite outright violence, it can still cause harm. Clinical psychologist Steven Taylor, author of The Psychology of Pandemics, told me that the ongoing monkeypox outbreak has further amplified bigotry. The disease’s mode of transmission through close physical contact and its symptoms of pus-filled sores, he says, make it a perfect vehicle for eliciting disgust. Its name and origins in Africa have stoked racist misinformation about how it spreads, and its link to men who have sex with men has fueled stigma and homophobia as well.

People who are trying to outlaw gender-affirming care for transgender kids and purge pro gay books from library shelves have stirred up disgust by invoking the specter of sexual “grooming”; others have made the same accusations against those speaking out against such legislative efforts, and some have used the idea to fuel disinformation about the cause of scattered pediatric monkeypox cases. The manufactured grooming mythology has spurred another round of moral disgust and outrage.

In response to Rufo’s diatribe, Carlson—who has an average of over three million viewers— explicitly linked drag queens to pedophiles: “Why would any parent allow their child to be sexualized by an adult man with a fetish for kids?” Rufo then suggested that parents should push back and “arm themselves with the literature” supposedly laying out the child sexualization agenda. Carlson replied, “Yeah, people should definitely arm themselves.”

Some people have. Researchers have estimated that transgender people are more than fourfold more likely to be the victims of violent crime than their cisgender counterparts, and while not a direct link to violence, other scientists have linked disgust sensitivity and authoritarianism to a higher opposition to transgender rights. Over the past few months, assailants repeating the groomer slur have threatened to kill drag queens and LGBTQ people, as well as educators, school officials, librarians, parents and lawmakers who have come to their defense.

In the lead-up to the midterm elections, a blitz of far-right radio ads targeting Black and Hispanic stations in swing states has repeated falsehoods about transgender people and a QAnon warning that the Biden administration will make it easier for children “to remove breasts and genitals”—an attempt to evoke disgust. Other ads aimed at white audiences claim minorities are the true aggressors and destroyers of social norms. One decries “anti-white bigotry.” Another warns ominously, “Stop the woke war on our children.”

The cynical appeal to protecting children by attacking minorities has exposed a bitter irony: disgust is an emotion that evolved to keep us out of danger, but people have long misused it to inflict cruelty and catastrophic harm.

No single intervention is likely to reduce the boil of this toxic stew. But a better understanding of how disgust works and how we can be manipulated by our sense of revulsion may help us turn down the heat. Just as we can overcome our fears, Taylor said, we can break free of disgust. Desensitization and habituation can lessen its potency. Other research suggests that interventions based on compassion, empathy and trust-building can help weaken its contribution to prejudice. Awareness and education can uncover unconscious biases and expose the tactics of those who weaponize it, like those inciting the current wave of ugly antisemitism.

A day after the attack on Paul Pelosi, Hillary Clinton reacted to the suspect’s apparent far right influences by tweeting, “The Republican Party and its mouthpieces now regularly

spread hate and deranged conspiracy theories. It is shocking, but not surprising, that violence is the result. As citizens, we must hold them accountable for their words and the actions that follow.” In response, new Twitter owner Elon Musk tweeted a hateful conspiracy theory by a notoriously misleading news site that blamed Pelosi’s attack on the LGBTQ community; Musk later deleted the tweet, but then joked about it.

What can stop stochastic terrorism and break the cycle of disgust-fueled vilification, threats and violence? 

Turning off the source of fuel is a start. Programs to counter violent extremism, particularly those that emphasize early intervention and deradicalization, have yielded some successes in at-risk communities. Other programs disrupt the ideological ecosystem that creates radical conspiracies through counseling, education and other community interventions. Beyond understanding how our emotions can be exploited to demonize others, we can refuse to buy into “both-sides” false equivalence and the normalization of dangerous rhetoric and extremism. We can do better at enforcing laws against hate speech and incitement to violence. And ultimately, we can disengage with media platforms that make money by keeping us disgusted, fearful and forgetful of our own decency—and shared humanity.’

For more related blogs and articles on Ageing Democracy, Australian Immigration News, Australian Politics, Conservative, Demography, Environment, EU European Union, Eugenics, Media, Nationalism, Political Strategy, Population Growth, Populist Politics & White Nationalism click through:

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Afghan and Islamic Refugees – ADL – The Great Replacement Theory – Nativist Conservative Media, Politics and Public Discourse

Research of Social Media – Fake News – Conspiracy Theories – Junk Science

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Fake Freedom of Speech Crisis on University Campuses

In recent years we have observed the supposed issue of ‘free speech’ emerging in politics, media and higher education in the Anglosphere of the US, UK and Australia, but the evidence shows that this has been a confected issue looking for a solution that restricts academic freedom, learning and innovation.  Further it can also help denigrate not just the image of university research, higher education and learning, but science too aka climate science.  

Unsurprisingly this tactic is central to Koch’s libertarian ideology that is promoted via think tanks globally and includes climate science research denial and hyperbolic claims regarding China or the CCP influence on campus.  Also about dismissing minority issues as ‘political correctness’ that then allows alt right or nativist conservatives to denigrate others on the basis of gender, race and sexual orientation; claims that society cannot trust ‘experts’ as they hinder the corporate sector and ‘owned’ conservative politics.

Following are excerpts from three articles summarising concerns of universities in the UK and Australia, concluding that Kochs are central in funding, organising and spreading further afield.  In the Australian context there are several key protagonists including the Koch linked IPA (AtlasNetwork) and the LNP, former Attorney General Brandis declaring freedom of speech means the right to denigrate on race (after an infamous NewsCorp commentator lost a legal case brought by an indigenous woman, on race). 

While media outlets like the Koch supported SpikedOnline in the UK promote ‘freedom of speech’, more recently it has been  Drew Pavlou at University of Queensland promoting freedom of speech and claiming how it is unfairly limited on campus in relation to China (while telling everybody without asking that he has nothing to do with the IPA, just in case…) and a promoter of men’s issues Bettina Arndt, provoking freedom of speech issues at the University of Sydney.

What is the objective? Authoritarian and self appointed elites in media, radical right libertarian think tanks, some corporate entities and supporters of eugenics with antipathy towards poor people, immigrants and ‘other types’, to create society in their image and creating targets.  A society where everyone will know their place, sub-optimal democracy and ‘owned’ conservative parties e.g. hollowed out white Christian nationalist GOP, Tories and Australian Liberals, lack of common human rights, religion is promoted and business is favoured, all over the interests of society.

Following are excerpts from relevant articles from media on freedom go speech:

Ignore this manufactured crisis: free speech is alive and well in our universities

Higher education faces many challenges, but freedom of expression is well protected by the existing legal framework.

Political and press interest in what happens in universities is intense and the freedom of speech issue is at the centre of the culture wars being fought by this government. Antagonism by the press and some right-leaning think tanks towards so-called “woke warriors” means that what is discussed on campus – and who is invited or disinvited to speak to students – has become a major political issue.

The stereotypical view that universities are political monocultures and that debate is stifled is not one that we recognise….Yet even with the many challenges posed by Covid-19, the highly politicised approach to discussing freedom of expression at universities, which has been stoked by the government, will not be going away soon….

…Yet even with the many challenges posed by Covid-19, the highly politicised approach to discussing freedom of expression at universities, which has been stoked by the government, will not be going away soon. Last month, Gavin Williamson, the embattled secretary of state for education, wrote to the Office for Students (OFS) about his confected concerns and quickly followed this up with a policy paper on free speech and academic freedom largely culled from previous Policy Exchange papers. There is to be no consultation about it; a sledgehammer of legislation is on its way.

Mr Williamson suggests that there is growing evidence of a “chilling effect” on campuses which means that cultural, religious or political views cannot be expressed without fear of repercussions. The evidence cited is scant.

From The Conversation:

How a fake ‘free speech crisis’ could imperil academic freedom

August 25, 2020 9.08pm BST

Forceful suppression of political and scholarly views in universities has a long and shameful history……..

We imagine our modern universities to be more civil. Certainly, in the 1950s, when Russel Ward’s appointment to the New South Wales University of Technology (now UNSW) was blocked for political reasons, this was frustrating, but not deadly. In Soviet Russia, by contrast, scientists who disagreed with Stalin’s approved theory of genetics went to prison. Some were executed.

These events show why academic freedom matters. Academic freedom is related to free speech in universities, the subject of a public debate that prompted the federal government to commission a review of the issue in 2018. This month the government appointed Professor Sally Walker to monitor universities’ adoption of a code of free speech arising from the review.

This sounds like a good thing, which we would expect to reinforce academic freedom. However, in this case, the category of “free speech” actually conceals particular political interests that could threaten academic freedom.

Free speech and academic freedom

Academic freedom has been very hard won. Such freedoms are important because they are how we know we can trust scholars to tell the truth about the discoveries they make, even when that means society, politics or the economy may need to change as a result. If Stalin had allowed his geneticists academic freedom, for example, they might well have prevented widespread famine.

So, when the Institute of Public Affairs and the Centre for Independent Studies used a system of policy “auditsimported from overseas to declare a “free speech crisis” in Australian universities, this was taken seriously….

A ‘crisis’ born of an anti-PC campaign

The so-called “free speech crisis” is actually an anti-political correctness campaign waged by particular groups of conservative intellectuals. French’s review shows some Australian conservatives looked to the success of such campaigns in the United States and the United Kingdom in increasing the political right’s power. They manufactured a similar “crisis” in Australian universities to achieve the same ends here.

Anti-political correctness is a philosophy that is not the same as free speech. Anti-political correctness claims that conservative students, lecturers and visitors to university campuses are unfairly limited in what they can say. Often this relates to so-called “politically correct” subjects such as race, gender or sexuality.

The difference from free speech is obvious. Anti-PC advocates want to be able to say what they like, but they do not want to be called “racist”, “sexist” or “homophobic” in response. Anti-political correctness is always earned at the expense of someone else’s free speech…..

Imposed ‘solution’ threatens academic freedom.

Imposing anti-political correctness on all members of the university as a compulsory philosophy undermines, rather than promotes, academic freedom. To do so under the cover of “free speech” is not only disingenuous, it further jeopardises our universities, which are already facing risks to academic freedom. These are increasingly due to the commercial pressures universities face.’

From Prospect:

Why Should We Care About Faux Free-Speech Warriors? Because the Koch Brothers Are Paying Their Bills.

Money from the Koch network is finding its way into the hands of the loudest online promoters of free speech—or at least, free speech for conservative viewpoints. By Aaron Freedman 20 June 2019.

…..It’s easy to dismiss the outrage and inconsistency of online free-speech warriors who profit off of controversy. But there’s a more serious and troubling dynamic at play: The “free speech movement,” including not only online pundits but also think tanks, academics, activist groups, and their mainstream popularizers, has always been about free speech for the right—and suppressing the speech of everyone else. It is by and large funded by right-wing billionaires like the Koch brothers, who whip up anger about the “intolerant left” in order to stymie opposition to their social, economic, and political agenda.

At a time when the far right has declared war on dissent, protest, and the press in much of the world—from Orban’s Hungary to Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel to Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil to Donald Trump’s United States—the cover that the false prophets of free speech give to demagogues could not be more dangerous.

Don’t take my word for it—Richard Fink, president of the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, has openly bragged about it. According to his “Structure of Social Change” philosophy, the goal of the Koch Foundation’s philanthropy is to make grants in a strategic way so as to best affect public policy and influence broader social change. And what does Fink insist is a key part of this strategy? You guessed it—college campuses. Koch money is all over organizations that advocate for campus free speech, like the infamous astroturf group Speech First.

For more blogs and article about Ageing Democracy, Australian Politics, Conservative, Libertarian Economics, Media, Pedagogy, Political Strategy, Populist Politics, Radical Right Libertarian, Science Literacy, SME Subject Matter Expert, Teaching in Australia and University Teaching Skills.