THE 2023 ALLIANCE FOR RESPONSIBLE Citizenship (ARC) Conference at London’s O2 Arena set itself the task of discovering a better story about the West and pushing back against the narratives of decline that seem to be the motivating force of our intellectual and cultural classes. It was interesting for mapping out a possible new way of thinking, but it also represented the endpoint of the dissident intellectual ecosystem known as the Intellectual Dark Web (idw).
The term was coined by Eric Weinstein, the hedge fund manager who worked with Peter Thiel. In a 2018 profile, Bari Weiss included in the group not only Weinstein, his brother Bret and sister-in-law Heather Heying, the evolutionary biologist, but Jordan Peterson, podcasters Joe Rogan and Dave Rubin, “factual feminist” Christina Hoff Sommers, Sam Harris and the only outright conservative, Ben Shapiro. Others who might also have been included were the writer Douglas Murray and academics Peter Boghossian, James
