Opinion | Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web →

As is fitting for the New York Times, everybody labelled a “free thinker” in this article is one or two degrees of separation from billionaire dark money.



Lets start with the author. Bari Weiss made her fame leading a campus crusade against pro-Palestinian professors, as well as Arab professors in general, during her time at Columbia University. Weiss received heavy promotion from a number of dark money-financed groups tied to pro-Israel causes, especially Campus Watch, a project run by Daniel Pipes under the auspices of his Middle East Forum group. MEF has received tens of millions of dollars in funding from groups like Donors Capital Fund/Donors Trust (Koch Brothers), Abstraction Fund (Sears-Roebuck heiress), The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation (Rockwell Automation heir), the Shillman Foundation (Cognex Corp), and the Snider Foundation (Spectacor, owner of Philly sports teams, also financier of the Atlas Shrugged films). MEF in turn acts as a sort of go-between fund for pro-Israel groups like CAMERA, David Horowitz Freedom Center, the Gatestone Institute, and the Center for Security Policy, targeting donor money to these groups and allowing them to operate. Campus Watch was a particularly odious project, producing “dossiers” of the pro-Palestine activity of professors at campuses across the world and allowing targeted harassment and smears of them. After Columbia Professor Rashid Khalidi’s dossier was published, for instance, he received a number of threatening phone calls, including one that he recorded where the caller cited Campus Watch. Weiss’ career was largely built off the attention she received from this episode.



Sitting at her dinner table are two major media personalities, Dave Rubin and Sam Harris, whose podcasts see a heavy rotation of guests associated with think tanks, charities, and organizations awash in dark money. They don’t tend to work for these organizations, but they do speak on their behalf from time to time. Rubin for instance does monthly interviews for Learn Liberty, a project of the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University. The university is practically owned by the Koch Brothers, who have given tens of millions of dollars to it. Until recently, Charles Koch was the IHS’ chairman of the board of directors, and it hosted the Charles G. Koch Summer Fellow Program, which placed interested students at right wing think tanks like the Cato Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and the National Taxpayers Union Foundation. It’s unknown how much money Rubin makes off this arrangement. Some of Rubin’s dark money guests include the aforementioned David Horowitz and his apprentice Ben Shapiro, the Freedom Center being a major dark money think tank in its own right, Christina Hoff Sommers, Dinesh D’Souza, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali of the neocon American Enterprise Institute, which exerted strong influence over the George W Bush Administration, Douglas Murray of the neocon Henry Jackson Society and author of Neoconservatism: Why We Need It, Maajid Nawaz of Quilliam, funded largely by Islamophobic billionaires and UK counter-intelligence, Dennis Prager, who writes for publications owned by Horowitz and Pipes, Lauren Southern of The Rebel Media, also funded by Pipes’ ME Forum, and Tommy Robinson of Quilliam, The Rebel Media, and even the Shillman Foundation directly.

Harris ran his own slush fund of sorts, Project Reason, that solicited donations for pro-Atheist work but really just funded his PhD. He recently became a dark money donor himself with his $20,000 donation to Quilliam. Quilliam employs numerous people who worked with Pipes and dark money Islamophobe Frank Gaffney, like managing director Haras Rafiq and senior researcher Usama Hasan. It also works closely with the Henry Jackson Society. Quilliam’s employees Ghaffar Hussain and Raheem Kassam have worked for both simultaneously. Its major backer since UK counterintelligence stopped sending it money in 2011 is the John Templeton Foundation, criticized heavily in 2007 for the religious bent of its scientific funding by Harris. Harris’ podcast also has a number of dark money guests: Michael Weiss and Douglas Murray (thrice) from HJS has been on, James Kirchick of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and Brookings Institute, Maajid Nawaz of Quilliam, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Charles Murray, Anne Applebaum (twice) and David Frum (thrice) of the American Enterprise Institute, Fareed Zakaria of the New America Foundation, Ben Shapiro of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, Niall Ferguson of the Hoover Institution (and husband of Ayaan Hirsi Ali), Robin Hanson from the George Mason (Koch) University, Eliezer Yudkowsky who accidentally created the Dark Enlightenment, and Elon Musk’s lapdog Max Tegmark (twice).

The third guest at the table, Eric Weinstein, is famous largely because the aforementioned people started talking about him and his brother. He’s been on Harris’ show twice, his brother once, and his brother was on Rubin’s show. He also works for Thiel Capital, run by dark money baron and Dark Enlightenment patron Peter Thiel.

Really, I’ve already got this much and I’m not even past the second paragraph. And when we scroll down the article, we get a number of names already mentioned: Douglas Murray, Maajid Nawaz, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and even a full photograph of Christina Hoff Sommers. All of these people are making big money from billionaires and then pretending like they’re being harangued and silenced and collecting money from patreon type gigs.

Nowadays Ms. Soh has a column for Playboy and picks up work as a freelance writer. But that hardly pays the bills. She’s planning to start a podcast soon and, like many members of the I.D.W., has a Patreon Account where “patrons” can support her work. These donations can add up. Mr. Rubin says his show makes at least $30,000 a month. And Mr. Peterson says he pulls in some $80,000 in fan donations each month.

Somehow I doubt that work “hardly pays the bills”. And do we need another podcast?

The organizations that fund these people all have certain characteristics in common. A commitment to some form of Libertarian economics, pro-Israeli politics, a strong Islamophobic bent, and fear of being in the spotlight. The donors build up a layer of protection around themselves by shuffling money through front groups, like the Koch Brothers’ Donors Trust/Donors Capital Fund. Not only do they pay for academic work through think tanks, they also donate to certain universities heavily to bias research in their favour, which can then be cited by their think tanks and other publications. They also generally stay away from direct involvement in political campaigns. Instead, they tell politicians when they donate to pay attention to the dictates emanating from certain think tanks, which in turn determine the policy of those politicians. The Federalist Society, for instance, has prepared virtually every judge nominated by the Republican Party under both Trump and Bush. They act in coordinated fashion, which is why Bari Weiss had access to these people, why they had a flashy website nobody had ever heard of up for the article’s publication, and why Weiss already had an interview lined up on the TV show of a former Republican congressman and the daughter of a former Secretary of State before her article was published. As usual in the halls of media orthodoxy, where everything is the opposite of what it actually is, “free thought” is a giant corporate PR campaign in which everyone stays on message.



If you want to read about a few of these foundations, see here and click around on here and here.

