The reasonable middle has always been an elitist mirage
Bari Weiss's incompetent rebrand of CBS is just the 2000s-era reactionary "free thinker" grift adapted for the age of Donald Trump
In the mid-2000s, a minor current of right-leaning writers and intellectuals briefly had their bright but fleeting moment in the sun. Members of this group tended to be liberal-ish in both style and affect, but their views on certain issues heaved closer to neoconservatism. This, it turned out, was for a time a very profitable grift. The War on Terror and its accompanying manias had yet to fully recede, and shallow books about the sinister Islamic menace could still peddle in rank bigotry and find acceptance in some corners of respectable liberal opinion — especially when they invoked science or came packaged in a foil of freethinking objectivity. For a precious few years, this schtick was very handy for selling books and securing media appearances. But, on a substantive level, it was at once too niche and too blandly orthodox to cohere into anything more lasting that held broad appeal.
Back in 2018, Bari Weiss sought to give it new life in her astroturfed profile of the so-called “Intellectual Dark Web” but the label, tellingly, never stuck and was usually a punchline among those who remembered it. The supposedly iconoclastic denizens of the IDW included Sam Harris, a veteran of the New Atheist movement who somehow found the courage to endorse a civilizational war against Islam in the aftermath of 9/11. Also there was Jordan Peterson (who if nothing else did manage to cry in public a bit less in those days) and dumb-as-paint former Young Turk Dave Rubin, whose inclusion on the list remains an insult to both intellectuals and webs of any shade or colour.
