One of the three superstars of the so-called 'intellectual dark web'. Syfy / NBCUniversal / Getty Images
Every era has a class of leading intellectuals, those rare scholars who can break outside the cloister of academia to penetrate the public consciousness. In the mid-20th century, Europe had the existentialists, while America boasted luminaries such as Sontag and Vidal. It’s perhaps appropriate that our modern political fever dream has replaced intellectuals with a former gameshow host who posts videos of himself taking ice baths; a psychologist who petulantly shuts down debate when he’s offended; and a failed screenwriter famous for “owning” college freshmen.
I’m referring, of course, to three of the superstars of the so-called “intellectual dark web”: Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, and Ben Shapiro. It was in a hagiographic New York Times profile by Bari Weiss in 2018 that the creaky tricycle of Rogan-Shapiro-Peterson rode into the mainstream of American life. Weiss praised them, and their inner circle of guests and fellow podcast hosts as “a collection of iconoclastic thinkers” having conversations unlike anything else in the culture.
Agree with their politics or not — “Identity politics is a toxic ideology that is tearing America apart” is one example Weiss seizes on — there was an obvious problem even back in 2018. From the claim that free speech was under the assault from the left to the accusation that transgender women were destroying women’s sports, all the IDW’s views were orthodoxy of the Republican Party, and all had the bullhorn amplification of Donald Trump, Republican congressional leadership, and the highest-rated cable news network in America.
Since then, the iconoclasts have huddled more tightly around the MAGA consensus while exaggerating their personalities to unintentionally comedic effect. Rogan, for his part, has become a billionaire sycophant, all but crediting Elon Musk with saving the world and seeming to take Marc Andreessen at his word when he claimed that Biden staffers told him they’d “kill AI”. Another high water mark includes boasting that “bringing back” the word “retard” is one of his “greatest achievements”. His friend, Jordan Peterson, has transformed from an insightful psychotheorist, who picked up the mantle of Joseph Campbell, into someone who says, with a straight face: “Up yours, woke moralists. We’ll see who cancels who.”
And if all that’s not embarrassing enough, the trio’s political trajectory is similarly uninspiring. With the exception of Sam Harris, an IDW-adjacent figure who has now become a Left-leaning outlier, all of 2018’s “new media” superstars now mostly parrot the same lines on issues from Covid and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, to anti-Trump hysteria, transgenderism and DEI. Shapiro has broken with Trump on tariffs, and offered surprisingly strong criticism on the US president’s brazen corruption in dealing with Qatar, namely accepting the $400 million jet as a “gift”. Similarly, Joe Rogan has shown signs of humanity by expressing doubt and outrage in response to the Trump administration deporting immigrants and refugees, without due process, to an El Salvadoran gulag. Despite their occasional rebuke of Trump, they still occupy a Right-wing world with a culture that they helped to create. As a consequence, the so-called “heterodoxy” will only go so far. Don’t expect Shapiro to interview guests about climate change and universal health care. And don’t hold your breath waiting on Rogan to consider the costs of structural racism and cultural misogyny.
Suffice to say that it is a little strange that a group of “iconoclasts” and “renegades” march like wooden soldiers to the same tune on nearly every issue in modern politics. Complaining about the phantasmic threat of the all-powerful “Left” — even as Donald Trump ignores a unanimous Supreme Court ruling, and implements a Maoist defunding purge of entire sectors — is straight out of surrealist theatre. Yet the absurdity is successful: so successful that other media figures have muscled in on the act too. On their respective podcasts, Bill Maher and Stephen A. Smith routinely denounce the “woke Left” while downplaying Trump’s offences. California Governor Gavin Newsom, proving his favourite hair product is snake oil, has started a podcast too, sitting down with Right-wing activists such as Charlie Kirk to, you guessed it, ridicule progressives.
Nor can you really blame them: beyond the continued popularity of the original IDW trinity — Rogan reached 20 million listeners a week in 2024 — they’ve also turned politics into a remarkable moneyspinner. To emphasise they’re in business, Peterson, Shapiro and the rest will take occasional pauses from their identical rants to pitch nutrition supplements, sleeping pills, and life insurance. It leads to awkward moments. Shapiro’s robotic, mile-a-minute delivery of his latest take on the widespread slaughter in the Middle East, suddenly transitions into shilling for a phone company. This stuff is easy to mock, but then again Shapiro himself can chortle all the way to the bank. Estimates of his yearly earning range from $10 to $20 million.
And with an audience comes influence — not just of the straightforward political variety either. Thanks to Jordan Peterson, the IDW podcast world has suddenly found Jesus. For example, Rogan, who once famously identified as an atheist, now declares that it would be a good time for “Jesus to come back”. One is tempted to quote the late George Carlin — “Jesus is coming. Look busy” — but several of Rogan’s fellow podcast bros have adopted a similar line. In a new media chicken-and-egg paradox, it difficult to determine if the podcast world is influencing clerical authority or vice versa, but the Catholic Church has created, in the words of one report, a “Catholic right celebrity conversion complex”,relying on figures like Candace Owens, Jordan Peterson, Russell Brand, and other hosts to “make faith-appeals” and fight the supposedly “feminised church”.
It isn’t enough to speak with uniformity about politics and culture; the new media rebels must also express agreement that atheism is destructive, and religion gives society purpose and meaning. New friend of the IDW, Russell Brand, currently facing sexual assault charges in the UK, now baptises people in tighty-whities, even as he recites scripture and leads his audience in prayer. While praying at a rally over the summer, he caused Jordan Peterson to break the third wall and laugh at a plea for God to rescue the West from “Kafkaesque, Huxleyan, Orwellian” forces. Peterson himself provoked laughter during his recent appearance on the “Jubilee Debate” in which he squared off against 20 college atheists. He sputtered, refused to answer if he is an actual Christian rather than some kind of vague theist who finds inspiration in the Bible, and even played the part of the hall monitor when he abruptly ended an exchange with one young man over his sarcastic and contemptuous tone. The decline of Peterson is unfortunate, because he can produce genuine insight in his field of psychology, and he could have positioned himself as a Joseph Campbell-style psychotheorist for the new media age. Instead, he’s become yet another casualty of the increasingly imbecilic culture war. On the right side of the battlefield, his audience shows all the signs of loyalty, and his popularity will likely endure for many years.
Taken together, then, the brave, exciting new world of uncensored, authentic media — where “dangerous” ideas thrive — has collapsed into Fox News with infomercials. And for all of the familiar complaints about “liberal media bias,” the mainstream press continues to salivate over reactionary, manosphere “new media” stars, both oldies like Rogan and newcomers like Theo Von. A comedian turned political provocateur, Von peddles updated variations of antisemitic conspiracy theories. According to him, you apparently “have to be afraid to even say ‘Jew’” in Hollywood. Von has admitted to not knowing that Judaism precedes Christianity, and that there are practising Jews of all races. Despite his ignorance, the New York Times profiled him as a “proxy for the average American citizen” having “vibey conversations” that “dismantle the interview show”.
In other words, then, the IDW continues to go from strength to strength. But that still leaves the question of why. As those bursting accounts imply, I think one answer is money, not just made but spent. As Eoin Higgins details in his new book, tech billionaires have coalesced with “anti-woke” activists in the podcast world to shift “alternative” media away from heterodoxy — and towards the kind of conservative conformity that dominated talk radio in the Nineties and 2000s.
There’s plenty of practical evidence here too. Marc Andreessen, a billionaire and Trump enthusiast, is a leading investor in Substack. For his part, Peter Thiel owns Rumble, the Right-wing version of YouTube, while David Sacks has a large share of Facebook. Speaking of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg recently joined the digital MAGA commune, largely because Trump falsely promised the end of an antitrust case against Meta over its purchase of Instagram. The allegation that the Kremlin, through a false front company, paid podcast hosts hundreds of thousands of dollars to unknowingly sow discord among the American electorate, has also done nothing to soften the Right-wing cacophony that advertises itself as revelatory commentary.
There are other cases where the influence is more subtle: the result of networking, shared interests, and overlapping incentives. In Manufacturing Consent, Noam Chomsky details how one of the most powerful filters of media influence is the “ownership filter”. When tech-billionaires own the most powerful platforms, and they all have the same low tax, monopolistic agenda, it is hardly surprising that those platforms most heavily promote (and compensate) hosts who excoriate progressives: who also just happen to back antitrust actions against Silicon Valley.
Not that demolition of heterodoxy and variety is just about funding. There are cultural factors at play too. In 2005, the late David Foster Wallace shadowed Jon Ziegler, a Right-wing talk radio host in California. Ziegler has since become a “Never Trump” Republican. But when Wallace met him, he attracted attention by making racist jokes, objectifying women, and pushing the boundaries of conservative opinion on issues ranging from welfare to profiling of Muslims in airports.
Though Wallace acknowledged the importance of financial interests — explaining that “my radio company has zero incentive to promote the public good” — he also argued that “anger” and “clarity” sell better than emotions like joy and satisfaction, and certainly better than things like nuance and complexity. It is easier to structure a worldview, and therefore an entertainment product, around a simple, enraged perspective. Wallace observed that the motive for simplicity creates a dangerous game for Right-wing hosts who pride themselves on violating standards of political correctness. To appear more authentic and daring, the talk radio (or podcast) host has to venture further and further beyond the limits of polite society.
Joe Rogan recently displayed this dynamic at work by hosting, in separate episodes, Ian Carroll and Darryl Cooper, antisemitic conspiracy theorists who have made sympathetic remarks about Hitler while claiming that Winston Churchill was the “chief villain” of the Second World War. He’s also hosted Suzanne Humphries, a street corner crank who believes that tuberculosis is a side effect of the smallpox vaccine, and that the Covid vaccine contains snake poison.
The political consequences are not minor. As recently as 2012, it was common knowledge that Republican officials lived in fear of Rush Limbaugh’s denunciation. Now, second only to Donald Trump, they move like lemmings according to the orders of Right-wing talk show hosts and podcasters. Historian Nicole Hemmer has described how “conservative media became the institutional and organizational nexus of the conservative movement” — helping to solve the political mystery of why one of America’s two major political parties demonstrates more interest in mocking and irritating “the woke” than addressing the dysfunction of American health care, public education, and social services.
Of course, the dumbing down of American life did not happen overnight. Richard Hofstadter wrote his classic Anti-Intellectualism in American Life back in 1966, and despite the mainstream nostalgia for so-called better days, Right-wing media doesn’t have a friendly history. As an example, William F. Buckley opposed the civil rights movement and suggested, in print, that the government force gay men with Aids to get tattoos indicating their positive status above their buttocks.
In other words, then, the “new” media is merely the same old wine in a fresh bottle. What has changed, though, is that the attention span of the American public is increasingly fractured and shortened, and that legacy institutions from newspapers to political parties can no longer exercise any restraints over discourse. It is likely that the problem will get worse, and eventually, poison the Left too. Certainly, the New York Times and Slate offering glowing profiles of Hasan Piker is ominous. Piker is a podcast host who claims to hate capitalism while selling clothing apparel with his face on it, laughs at people who show sympathy for Israeli hostages, and declares that “America deserved 9/11”.
David Foster Wallace concluded his profile of Ziegler with what he called an “editorial note”. As he put it: “One can almost feel it: what a bleak and merciless world this host lives in — believes, nay, knows for an absolute fact he lives in. I’ll take doubt.” Wallace might not have predicted the medium, but he certainly understood the message. The psychological algorithm has met the technological algorithm, leaving us in a bleak world indeed.
