​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​dark webster / dark webster / n. a member of the Intellectual Dark Web, or IDW (Eric Weinstein).

​

​

​

​

THE DARK WEB is the new gulag.

​

By gulag I mean that vast prison system described in Solzhenitsyn's novel The First Circle, a title cribbed from Dante's Inferno, where virtuous pagans like Socrates and Plato are sequestered in the near-tolerable outskirts of Hell.

​

In the novel, intellectuals who question Marxist ideology are sequestered in near-tolerable regions of the gulag called sharashkas. In real life those who question Progressive ideology are banished to what Eric Weinstein calls the 'Intellectual Dark Web', or IDW.

​

IDWs are supposedly contrarian, so you'd expect them to  disagree with each other, like conspiracy nuts at Comic-Con. Yet their various heresies show remarkable consilience. How come?

​

And what's with all the Canucks? Jordan Peterson, Gad Saad, Janice Fiamengo, Stefan Molyneux. . . for a circle formed in Joe Rogan's California basement its intellectual centre of gravity seems weighted far towards the Great White North. What gives?

​

To answer the first question I will explore not just the ideas of the IDW, but the connections between them, rendering it a web in the truest sense.

​

To answer the second I will draw parallels with that first great flowering of English thought, the Scottish Enlightenment - David Hume, Adam Smith, Thomas Bayes et al., who built the modern world, despite being sequestered far to the north of London amidst the tenements of Edinburgh, a sooty hell-hole where it rains a thousand days a year and all the women are whores.

​

Sorry. I went too far. Actually it's a lovely town, just a bit too rainy for me. And the food was crap until we got curry and kebabs in the 70s. Thank God for immigrants. But I digress.