Quite interesting till he started chirping about how the free-market and Elon Musk can solve all our problems. This thinking is as woolly-headed as the woke fraternity’s.
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Dave Rubin: why the ‘Intellectual Dark Web’ split up
The IDW convenor explains how the group became ideologically divided
by Freddie Sayers
The group of thinkers now known as the “Intellectual Dark Web” — Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris, Bret and Eric Weinstein, Ben Shapiro — were convened in Dave Rubin’s garage and on his YouTube channel, The Rubin Report. And yet he has always suffered the accusation that he wasn’t a ‘real’ intellectual.
“What I thought and believe now that I am good at is that I can sit with these people and take a lot of that stuff and distil it into something that the average person can understand enough of. I love that space,” he tells me in a wide-ranging and philosophical discussion on LockdownTV.
He sees the old IDW gang as divided now along a crucial ideological split. There are those who believe the tools of liberalism can still be deployed to persuade the Woke Left to change their mind (he includes Bari Weiss, Sam Harris, Bret Weinstein in this group); and then there are those, like him, who have decided that it simply isn’t possible, and they’re better off building bridges with the Right:
They’ve made what to me seems to be a very obvious fatal mistake, that you can use any of the tools of Liberalism — of open inquiry, freedom of speech, respect for your fellow human beings, individual rights — that you can use any of these things to rationalise with the monster that is coming to burn your house down. And that’s why we’ve seen in effect the liberals have no defence over this, which is why all the liberal institutions are crumbling.
What I’m seeing, and I would say this is more me, Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, is that there’s all sorts of bridges to be built the other way. If you would have told me five years ago that I would consider Dennis Prager and Glenn Beck and Larry Elder and many other conservatives not only friends but the type of intellectual that I want to be — I would be shocked.
- Dave Rubin, UnHerd
His hope is on the Right, and the long-term vision is of building parallel institutions to those controlled by the liberal Left:
Maybe we’re just going to build parallel societies. I think that that may start to be — woke culture will have its own TV, apps and all their institutions, and then the rest of us will have a whole bunch of other stuff. But my money is on those guys building the right thing.
- Dave Rubin, UnHerd
This vision of two parallel societies may be dispiriting for early fans of Rubin — after all, this was the host who promised to bring together people of all different political stripes. There was something genuinely counter-cultural about the way in which figures from the Reaganite Right all the way through to the progressive Left gathered under Dave’s roof to exchange and debate ideas. But Rubin insists that there are still “bridges to be built in the other way” — we’ll be watching and hoping so too.
Our thanks to Dave for a fascinating conversation.
I’ve been following Dave Rubin for a couple of years now and catch some of his show almost every day. His original interview format introduced me to a number of the US’s leading cultural, media and political figures. He is a considerable thinker, especially and regard to his ‘locals’ initiative, which give conservatives an online space that cannot be taken away from them by Big Tech. This is incredibly important.
I apologize for the above comment – I did not know this interview was live streaming so just saw the end – I now watched the entire thing and it is much better – just seeing the end and thinking that was it I did not get the actual interview.
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