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Regardless of your political leanings or biases about parasocial relationships, you probably aren't going to understand the Intellectual Dark Web (IDW) without studying this graph and the research behind it. That research is not fully populated yet, and might take a substantial portion of my time even if I decided to focus on it (which I cannot). My goal here is to help people question the IDW, and perhaps the so-called "alt-media" in general—even if I might be inclusive in the alternative media by some definitions.
I am under no illusion that this article is thorough or complete. Feel free to add observations in the comments. I plan to update and edit.
Relationships, Ideas, and Institutions, Not Definitions
Defining the IDW seems problematic, and I suspect that was intentional. People will immediately argue about who should be included in the IDW, and how independent the people are who have been labeled as such. I'm going to skip past any formalization of who exactly belongs in the IDW circle, and focus on the powers and interests (political or economic) within and closely around the group. Many people could potentially be chosen to have the public conversations being staged by the IDW, but the IDW was oddly inclusive, for instance, of Camille Paglia, who both critiques some of the feminist culture war and also adult-child sex relationships, and Claire Lehmann who considers concerns about pedophilia to be overblown "moral panic". Lehmann blocked me on Twitter when I offered to give her an exclusive interview about what went on inside the government-supported Neo-Theosophy cult I grew up in. That was prior to my knowledge of the now-public lawsuit over the child rape camp. Paglia gets barely included in the IDW discussions, so far as I can tell, though she gets name dropped fairly frequently.
And if we seem to be heading down promotional material for sexual degeneracy, we might question whether Eric Weinstein's promotion of Sugar Baby University does more to make whores out of young women than to solve the economic problem of navigating an expensive secondary education process in a wage market that rarely favors service providers in traditional industries. The Weinstein brothers also brought the Esalen Institute's Daniel Schmachtenberger into the mix. The Rockefeller-funded Esalen Institute pushes essentially every message in concert with the New World Order agenda. It looks on its face like a well-disguised patriarchal center of the sort of free love that favors the gurus that make up the GANG culture. Within the larger context of MKULTRA and mind control programs—many of which intersected with Esalen—there has long been talk of Monarch programs where children are raised as sex slaves and performance artists. When confronted about men there sexually assaulting women, Esalen's response was an all-male panel that talked in a friendly tone around the problem, which was then deemed a non-problem. Esalen was also where my oldest brother, Andrew, was asked to ferry underage girls to Silicon Valley elite when he decided that it was time to escape from the Military Occult Banking Syndicate (MOBS) that is ever-present in the artificial counterculture circles.
And, for those willing to do the reading, the Esalen Institute—like the also-Rockefeller-funded Tavistock Institute—has always meandered around "don't drink the kool-aid" territory of the MOBS mind control map.
Note that this core includes Ayaan Hirsi Ali who is a Research Fellow for the heavily-Rockefeller-funded Hoover Institution where her husband, Niall Ferguson, works as Senior Fellow. Ali, Ferguson, and numerous other Hoover Institution associates have joined the Jordan Peterson spearheaded Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC), which might be termed the "alt-WEF". Because…you have a choice of color regarding the trim of your new jail cell, citizen.
There are numerous first- and second-degree connections between the IDW and Steve Bannon, which set the stage for relationships during the declared-pandemic. Similarly (and startlingly) there are also connections to Jeffrey Epstein, whose real mission in life was probably directly related to the plandemonium. Diddling little girls was merely a tool, a hobby, or both for the mysterious financier. His larger mission seemed to revolve around the Harvard-MIT genetics circles developing tools that would allow for such frightening possibilities as the remote reprogramming of other people's genomes, and intersected with the work of Eric Weinstein's podcast guestJamie Metzl.
If it sounds odd to group Bannon and Epstein in a single paragraph, consider what the ultimate Epstein-authority Whitney Webb isn't telling you about the Epstein story, which is that Bannon may be the man who spent the most time at Epstein's Manhattan digs between his two arrests. Yeah. Two thick volumes, and many scores of interviews and you don't get that. In the early 1980s, Bannon reported directly to the Secretary of the Navy at the Pentagon, a fact that the MSM seems to cooperate with the alt media in rarely mentioning. This may reasonably lead us to ask whether Bannon was taking control over Epstein's network on behalf of the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI). Seems important at this juncture, right?
Why does it always seem like the ONI creates or handles cults and traffickers?
You don't need to pass through Bannon to connect the dots between the IDW and the most prominent members of the PayPal Mafia (henceforth "PP Mafia"). In particular, Eric Weinstein, who seemed to take the role of "leader of the IDW", [supposedly] worked as the head of PP Mafia member (Peter's) Thiel Capital Management.
Reminder: The PP Mafia was the inception of digital money transfer, a technology powerful enough over which you might imagine wars (or World War E) being fought.
Obligatory reminder: The PP Mafia also includes YouTube cofounder Steve Chen.
Additional reminder: PP Mafia and X-Man Elon Musk thinks synthetic mRNA can basically do anything. "It's like a computer program. You can probably stop aging…reverse it. You can turn somebody into a butterfly with the right sequence." He definitely means "butterfly" as in a flying insect, and not a Monarch mind slave. For certain.
I will probably dig into the PP Mafia more deeply in a future article.
Assembled for the Culture War? Or for the Plandemonium?
You can read my several articles on the culture wars, but ultimately I've leaned more and more over time to thinking that the culture wars were intentionally ramped up as part of the plandemonium. And I now regard the plandemonium as having begun with the mortgage bond crisis—call it 2007. Was that the point of no return for the dollar? Or at least the point at which an operation was forced to commence in order for the MOBS to maintain their grip over the world?
I bring up the culture wars because the IDW seemed to orbit, most of all, around culture war topics. These topics were hard to ignore because so much of us were attacked by whatever the blob was that irrationally picked targets to traumatize. I'm tough enough to shake off much of the peer assault myself because I built a life devoid of most sorts of institutional ties, but I was forced to jettison some friends, and it is always sickening to find out that people you invested yourself in suffer from the mind virus, or are compromised by some larger set of MOBS forces.
People very clearly wanted to talk about the culture wars. They're painful. Sometimes brutally so. And the conversation in the mainstream media was bizarrely one-sided despite the Woke critique targeting…the state of mainstream institutions?! What a brilliant way to shift blame onto foul-mouthed dudes playing Call of Duty X eight hours a day.
The response in the alt media was similarly one-sided. And it doesn't take a genius to recognize that obtuse messaging from centralized ("mainstream") media (MSM) begins to radicalize the larger population who immediately seeks alternative media. Whether this is the best strategy to keep the population at bay [from the MOBS] may be a conversation for another day. Populist backlash is not hard to predict at times like these, and if somebody planned the ramping up of the culture wars, they were probably thinking about the resulting…should we call it "mass formation"?
Into the chaotic soup stepped the IDW, which got help from a trusted liberal member of the MSM, Bari Weiss, who seemed to define a group she might very well belong to, but from an ostensibly neutral position. Call it the Wikimedia cheat code: second hand sources from established newsgroups do improve the delivery of propaganda. The cheat is that observers can cling to their biases more easily than if they detected kayfabe and thought through their Gell-Mann amnesia. The cheat conveniently helped the usual consumers of the MSM—many of whom are understandably appalled by the institutional level of the culture wars—find the IDW. The IDW then built trust with audiences of millions of alt media consumers breaking down the bizarre illogic of some culture wars topics from largely academic positions, with largely academic-level language and knowledge of history. You can ignore the parts you don't like with ease.
All this chaos, and the easy channeling to the alt media, plays to the strengths of the academically-oriented IDW folks. It's like watching professional baseball players getting tossed softballs while reminding you the importance of making your bed. The only difference between you and them is that they got good grades in high school, right?
Fanatical Vaccine Promoters Promoted by the IDW
"I look totally artificial. And I like to think that I'm totally real." -Dolly Parton
Peterson had gained popularity and fame pushing back against Wokeness (a Team Too Late introduction) and authoritarian censorship (also Team Too Late), and telling poorly-parented men to make their beds during the years leading up to the plandemonium. But, you know, he really schooled Cathy Newman that one time…
"Who?"
Reasonable question. I had to use Wikipedia. She's one of those people the BBC promotes as a talented talker, like Russell Brand.
Peterson is a veteran of global political discussion whose book Maps of Meaning (1999) pursues the development of a universal system of morality through a Jungian lens. This puts Peterson in the realm of the cadre of psychiatrists and others involved in the Tavistock Institute and its Pacific Coast relative the Esalen Institute. These organizations have been associated with the UFO religions/cults that have worked with the League of Nations and the United Nations, and even prior, toward the goal of a New World Order under a single religious framework.
Let's go one step further. Jungian [mass psychology] involves the building of The Matrix(™) through ritual participation of a population, focused on primordial archetypes, embedded in the collective unconscious. Jung was both impressed and excited to see such energy rise out of the occult proto-Nazi Lebensreform. I wonder if JBP would appreciate this map I started:
Might the IDW be on a mission to steer the collective unconscious of the controversially labeled "alt right", who are really the politically homeless through a combination of rejection and self-selection, but who notably have no seat at the political negotiation table?
Obligatory speculative question: Are IDW followers meant to be the new brown shirts?
As an aside, it made me scratch my head when Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying chose to relocate to Portland after their brush with a mob. But that was before I looked closely enough at MAGA-antifa-ish skirmishes always posted by guys without adult names ("Mike BlueHair" this time) to recognize signs of controlled violence (see J6 for additional examples).
While Lindsay Shepherd might not make every IDW list, her story emerged as an Orwellian instance of academic prejudice targeting a minor thought-criminal who takes an appealing glamor shot.
IDW member Sam Harris, whom I will henceforth refer to as "WooDawg" as the more overtly New Agey person [who declares, befitting of the ideological stereotype, that he does not want the IDW label], wrote a book about how awful lying is. And that's great…we needed such a book. Because whatever else anyone ever said about lying, it didn't stop people. Perhaps more importantly, it establishes WooDawg as a highly moral person who certainly wouldn't deceive anyone. WooDawg is the atheist who volunteered to guard the Dalai Lama.
Harvard Psychology Professor Steven Pinker was grouped into the IDW shortly after he stopped coloring his hair (with kool-aid, I think). Pinker promoted the experimental quasi-vaccines as a "miracle":
Pardon—a "freaking miracle".
This description (both freaky and miraculous) stands out as emphatic given that Pinker routinely dismantles paranormal replacement of rationality. But Pinker has a greater love of talking down to other members of what he deems "our sorry species" (below). What else stands out is the way Pinker began to target "anti-vaxxers" between the inception of the IDW and the outset of the plandemonium.
In fact, he just sort of happened to publish a book in 2018 that took up substantial space declaring vaccination among the greatest events of progress in the history of…what did he call us?…"our sorry species".
Perhaps the timing is mere coincidence, and has no relationship with all the Gates money guys like Jeffrey Epstein were ferrying to Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Ben Shapiro went online with a well-prepared, but entirely unsourced conclusion that there was a positive risk-benefit to people older than 30 taking the vaccine. He gave no consideration whatsoever to the raging debate over such conclusions, or the existential risk of everyone participating in an experiment with a new technology of unknown long-term risk all at the same time. It was absurd, but it sounded good. While he does not support vaccine mandates, he declared himself to be strongly pro-vaccination.
Dave Rubin says that he didn't take the vaccine, but among the IDW, Rubin really only holds intellectual sway with dog walkers. But Rubin was the (chosen?) founder of Locals in 2019, riding the wave of the IDW into the plandemonium. Locals was acquired by Peter Thiel-backed Rumble in October 2021. That's quite an exceptionally rapid acquisition from the founding date. But then Rumble quickly moved to public trading in September 2022, then quickly lost nearly 80% of its IPO valuation.
Part of the reason that I'm still suspicious of Maher is that in this Mindwar world, stunts like his Trump birth certificate crack serve to create circumstances that keep attention on people. No publicity is bad publicity:
In 2013, Maher became one of the executive producers for the HBO newsmagazine series Vice.[55][56] Also in 2013, Maher appeared on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and offered to pay $5 million to a charity if Donald Trump would produce his birth certificate to prove that Trump's mother had not mated with an orangutan. Maher said this in response to Trump having previously challenged President Barack Obama to produce his birth certificate, and having offered $5 million payable to a charity of Obama's choice if Obama would produce his college applications, transcripts, and passport records.[57][58]
In response to Maher's offer, Trump produced his birth certificate, and then Trump launched a lawsuit after Maher was not forthcoming, claiming that Maher's $5 million offer was legally binding. "I don't think he was joking", Trump said. "He said it with venom."[57] Trump withdrew his lawsuit against the comedian after eight weeks.[59]
If you're uncertain what I mean, ask yourself if you think Maher's comments about Julian Assange and Wikileaks helped Trump more or helped Hillary more. Can you kill a candidate with poorly justified critique of their opponent?
And that brings me to Dan Carlin, of whom I was completely unaware in my generally low awareness of pop culture celebrity gurus. I have no idea what Dan's views are about vaccines or plandemonium, but I found this interesting in a Jungian mental pot stirring sort of way:
HBO has scrapped this week’s episode of Real Time withBill Maher after the comedian tested positive for Covid-19. Maher, who is vaccinated and asymptomatic, tested positive during the premium cable network’s weekly PCR testing ahead of the show.
It is a blow for the late-night show, which was set to entertain astrophysicist and StarTalk podcaster Neil deGrasse Tyson as the top-of-show interview guest, and World War Z author Max Brooks and Hardcore History podcast host Dan Carlin as panelists.
Sometimes redditors do distill the narrative. Or is it that the narrative writers know what to embed in reddit? Maybe Ghislaine Maxwell knows.
Maybe members of the IDW have some realistic sense that the median COVID-19 death in 2020, however that was determined (ahem), was a mid-octogenarian? Right?
That's some serious fear mongering. In a world in which no healthy teenagers are dying from Disease X, should we get our teenagers quasi-vaxxed with [“Let’s hope this works”] new genetic transfection technology…for Disease X (really)?
Ayaan Hirsi Ali made the evidence-free claim extremely early on that the arrival of the vaccine would return everything to normal, including sexual assault of women in the same breath.
So, you know…buy her book [in the next tweet in the thread].
“Just buy the damn book.”
You can watch JJ Couey take Bret Weinstein to task over Bret's terrifying equivocation regarding mRNA transfection during his interview with Tucker Carlson. You might almost think that Bret's role is to save mRNA technology after some reconfiguring. Why would that be? Maybe that will give Thiel time to organize a ticker tape parade?
It was always curious to me how Claire Lehmann, the owner and publisher of the pseudo-libertarian wannabe Pacific-to-the-AtlanticQuillette that just happened to be launched in time for pre-plandemonium culture wars, became a member of the fierce IDW circle. Was it to promote vaccine passports? Because tracking and surveillance fits squarely within the general libertarian philosophy?
Claire spends substantial time promoting herself with racy beach photos and carefully crafted "I'm a thoughtful thought leader thot" shots. Perhaps she should spend some of that time looking more closely at the data?
Oh, look, there's Yuri "I wasn't bought off shortly after speaking out, honestly" Deigin.
Lehmann clearly does not know much about science. At all. That's fine---plenty of people do not, and it's not required that all of humanity does. But it is startling how confidently she asserts authoritative opinions on the topic that read like total nonsense. Sadly, she seems to be influencing the following she gathered by hitching a ride onto the heterodoxy movement. Except that she doesn't find much value in heterodoxy with respect to mass human experimentation, and doesn't recognize that labeling over public health is no different than other aspects of identity.
The absurdities are enough to make one wonder if the IDW was a puppet show to lead people to the conclusion that there is no solution to culture war politics, which might in turn imply that there is no solution to the plandemonium.
It is not simply difficult to understand an intellectual circle's interest in Claire; her inclusion as quasi-libertarian rabid pro-vaxxer at a time when coercion and mandates are a front-and-center global issue is more than a little suspicious. Maybe she completed a Venn diagram? Like a DIE project? (I'll leave it to the reader to decide if I just made a joke.)
That interview promoting ticker tape parades is from December 7, 2021, long after many of us were calling for a conversation about the seriousness of the data following the mass human experiment. And I'm fairly certain that Thiel knew about the questions I was raising, specifically, because I was talking to half a dozen people who know him or worked for him. Yet, Thiel specifically seems to want ticker tape parades to come back so that we can celebrate mRNA transfection technology?
Understand that I agree with plenty of things Thiel says. In this case, I'll go with, "If you're forced to say nice things, it's probably the case that somehow the truth is very far from nice, and you're very far from it."
In the spirit of Taylor Swift, let's move on to the country…
In the years leading up to the pandemonium, I started listening to more podcasts—particularly when I would go for my then-daily walks, which usually lasted more than an hour. Just the right amount of time for most podcasts. Numerous times, I listened to some member of the IDW or another. Some of the idea sharing seemed good, though on the whole I had a sense of a lot of "Team Intellectual as Captain Obvious". But the IDW certainly includes some experts, and listening to experts is often a good way to learn more while gaining a foothold on the jargon of their fields. Even when you don't learn something new, the jargon itself is often the common language because it encapsulates certain ideas in the simplest possible ways.
On one of those walks I recall hearing Eric Weinstein make a clever quip about Dolly Parton (recording here), which was that her big boobs were the "least interesting [interesting thing]" about her. From the transcript of The Portal, Episode 19 (slightly edited for greater accuracy):
Eric Weinstein 13:40 Great. Okay. Are we done? We are good. With that aside, my concern, you know that I play this game, which is called what is the least interesting interesting thing about x where I take a person and I take their top characteristic so for example, The least interesting interesting thing about Dolly Parton is that she’s busty. The most interesting thing is that she’s a genius level songwriter, and a fantastic singer and entertainer and a great businesswoman doesn’t matter. But the key point is we get hung up on some stupid superficial characteristic and we don’t see the actual interest or majesty in a person and I feel like that has happened to you.
At the time, Eric was promoting his less well known (and less insufferable at the time) brother, Bret, while drawing in the portion of the audience who either appreciates Dolly Parton, country music, or simply appreciates the next level appreciation of talent beyond the superficial. There are multiple coincidences here, but you'll have to keep reading to understand.
The fourth of twelve children who grew up in a one-room cabin, Dolly started singing early, attracting attention from Johnny Cash, who told her to follow her instincts. That seems to have turned out well for one of entertainment's most energetic and caring superstars.
That's definitely not the least interesting interesting butterfly, but here is another from Dolly Parton’s Spotify profile:
With that much money, you might have a lot of people whispering in your ear about what to do with it, whether or not you are a butterfly. Does anyone else wonder how much knowledge of the biotech world might be absorbed by one of the world's most prolific songwriters who spends so much additional time as an entrepreneur?
Dolly did not profit from her investment in the Moderna vaccine. She made a $1 million donation to research ongoing at Vanderbilt University, for which she received the Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy. And that is not at all the least interesting interesting thing about the country music megastar.
Richard Dawkins also played a non-core role in the IDW theater.
Also noted by CJ Hopkins (H/T x 2) is Žižek Slavoj whose profile picked up among American audiences as he spoke with members of the IDW and debated Jordan Peterson.
You can watch Slavoj getting extremely worked up in support of Covid “vaccine” mandates, and mocking people who care about “silly” things like their personal bodily autonomy, with Briahna Joy Gray in 2021, if you think you have the stomach for it …
VIPs like Dawkins and Žižek are not “divisive.” They are very important A-list persons who are committed to universal human rights, and freedom of speech, and all that kind of stuff, unless, of course, the authorities announce that they need to go full-blown totalitarian and lock down and segregate and censor everyone because of a virus with a 99.8% survival rate, in which case, you know, “Sieg fucking Heil!”
All this pisses me off, because most of the vaccine refusers in this country are doing so out of sheer rebellion, believing lies and misinformation, and a selfish refusal to cooperate with protecting those who legitimately can’t get vaccinated, because of young age or contraindications to vaccination.
Just to make sure you understand that you're the problem, Lissa Rankin connects all this to every single problem humanity faces, real or imagined, and are the reasons you need to submit to a guru:
I, for one, am angry about all this. I’ve about had it with my fellow country mates who refuse to cooperate with solving problems that require global cooperation- not just Covid, but climate crisis, overconsumption and out of control capitalism, world hunger and lack of access to clean water, poverty, environmental issues, and equal rights for people of all races, genders, sexual orientation, disabilities, and any other way in which people get marginalized and oppressed, among other things.
The question is worth asking after seeing Bret Weinstein tell Chris Martenson that the way out is for the world to adopt Western values. This from the mouth of a supposed progressive?
You definitely don't think he means by force, right? Like…Asia is just going to change course and become more American in some way, while making our clothes and sorting through our plastic?
Does this have anything to do with the Sinophobic take on the border psyop?
Are we moving away from the vaccine discussion now? What's the schedule on the narrative shift? Is it time, yet? I can't read my watch in the dark. Anyone have an enlightenment?
Never Forget! Watch folks from Jordan Peterson to current “whistleblowers” get all worked up pushing the vaxxine clot shots and ripping into those that value bodily autonomy. How much we've already forgotten! Disgusting
Like yourself I was a fan of those podcasts like the Portal & Peterson, reassured as the hysteria began to ignite in 2020 that these bright sparks would calmly dissect and ridicule the mad crowd… any yet one by one they all missed the mark, how could this be possible, clearly we were the mark. Funny thing is now these fakes need to be propped up with fake likes to make it appear they still have reach, I suspect the sane have moved on abandoning the egos to their halls of mirrors. Nice word apocalyptic, anyone for arc?
Never Forget! Watch folks from Jordan Peterson to current “whistleblowers” get all worked up pushing the vaxxine clot shots and ripping into those that value bodily autonomy. How much we've already forgotten! Disgusting
Like yourself I was a fan of those podcasts like the Portal & Peterson, reassured as the hysteria began to ignite in 2020 that these bright sparks would calmly dissect and ridicule the mad crowd… any yet one by one they all missed the mark, how could this be possible, clearly we were the mark. Funny thing is now these fakes need to be propped up with fake likes to make it appear they still have reach, I suspect the sane have moved on abandoning the egos to their halls of mirrors. Nice word apocalyptic, anyone for arc?