On Wednesday, Vanity Fair ran a long piece by columnist Tina Nguyen about the supposed seduction of Kanye West into the “far right.” The evidence for this contention: Kanye retweeted Ali Akhbar and Candace Owens. But West also is a “fan of Jordan Peterson,” whom she describes as a sort of pied piper and “gateway drug” for the “far right.” This, in and of itself, should have let Nguyen know that she was barking up the wrong tree — Peterson is an outspoken opponent of identity politics and the alt-right, and is hardly a “far right” conservative. But never let facts get in the way of a good story.
Nguyen writes that “The red-pilling of Kanye West marks a turning point for the conservative-media universe, which has undergone a revolution in the months and years since Trumpism took over American politics.” Using the term “red-pilling” to describe West is deliberate; it’s a term frequently used by the alt-right, and meant to suggest such associations. And indeed, Nguyen then draws associations between characters and movements that have no such association. She writes:
In that time, the movement formerly known as the alt-right has splintered: trolls like Milo Yiannopoulos have flamed out; white nationalists like Richard Spencer have failed to go mainstream; rabid conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones remain a sideshow; the vanguard of the populist-nationalist movement, Breitbart News, and its former chairman, Steve Bannon, have fallen out of favor. Instead, the dragon energy in the far right has been supplanted by a nebulous “intellectual dark web” comprised of right-wing pundits, agnostic comedian podcasters, self-help gurus, and disgruntled ex-liberals united by their desire to “red pill” new adherents—breaking the spell of political correctness, as Neo’s eyes are opened in The Matrix. For those hoping to rebrand as iconoclasts, rather than Breitbartian race realists, recruiting West was the shot in the arm they needed.
This is nonsense. All of us in the so-called Intellectual Dark Web were here in 2016. Our audiences grew as most of us vocally opposed the identity politics and conspiratorialism of the Milos and Spencers and Joneses. Not one member of the Intellectual Dark Web is a “race realist.” If some people were sucked into the orbit of fringe thinkers, and now have mainstreamed themselves by watching less fringe voices, good. But to suggest that the Intellectual Dark Web swooped in and took over the Jones/Yiannopoulos/Spencer/Bannon crowd is utterly inaccurate.
We didn’t hijack an audience of kooks. We grew our own.
But according to Nguyen, West engaged in “self-radicalization” (her term) thanks to the Intellectual Dark Web. And those Intellectual Dark Web forces are merely deviously guised stand-ins for the original “Breitbartian race realists.” Who are these nefarious conjurors?
The conservatism of Jordan Peterson isn’t about Republicanism, it’s about self-reliance. Sam Harris doesn’t preach Islamophobia or race realism, he advocates moral objectivism and academic freedom to discuss genetic differences in intelligence. Owens’s criticism of black victimhood is dressed up as a celebration of self-realization…. The trend toward conservative influencers has also given a boost to Prager University, a massive media platform that pumps out slickly produced explainer-type videos by firebrands like former Google engineer James Damore, pro-Trump sheriff David Clarke, publishing exec Steve Forbes, New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, and National Review editor Jonah Goldberg, all of which somehow manage to coexist.
Nguyen doesn’t explain how these people are united as heirs to the “deplorables.” But merely placing their names in general proximity to one another seems to be enough. For example, Nguyen quotes me alongside Mike Cernovich — a ridiculous joke, to say the least. But that’s supposed to show that we’re all part of the same movement.
We’re not. We never have been.
But in that respect, the article is illuminating, because it illustrates precisely the point upon which I’m quoted:
“If the left is so narrowly defined itself that identity politics and hating Trump are its two main criteria, you’re going to find a lot people who, mainly at the identity-politics front, they’re going to say, ‘Well, hold on a second,’” Shapiro said. “I have lots of fans from all over the spectrum [saying], ‘I made it on the basis of my capacity and my grit and my hard work, not on the basis of my skin color. If you’re gonna boil me down to whatever it is you think I am based on my group identity, well, go to hell.’”
If you’re going to boil Kanye West down to a black Hollywood performer rather than an individual, he’ll start listening to Jordan Peterson. And if you group together everyone from Bret Stephens and Jonah Goldberg to Sam Harris and Dave Rubin as one basket of deplorable heirs to the “Breitbartian far-right,” there will be a lot more Kanye Wests ready to “red-pill,” as Nguyen writes. The intellectual box constructed by the hard Left is simply too small to fit that many people. More and more Americans will seek to escape it, from liberal to conservative and everywhere in between.