In a now infamous 2018 profile in the New York Times penned by Bari Weiss, the world was first introduced to the so-called “Intellectual Dark Web” (IDW): a group of would-be mavericks who were said to be waging a righteous crusade against the rising tides of political correctness and intellectual conformity. There was, of course, an obvious irony to the piece’s central conceit: its supposedly renegade protagonists claiming to be victims of a stifling cultural climate while enjoying tremendous influence and receiving a glowing profile in a global newspaper of record.

As Michael Brooks observes in the opening chapter of his new book Against the Web, the contradiction is hardly a new one. Reactionary figures, after all, have projected a narrative of cultural victimhood going back to the earliest days of William F. Buckley Jr and the National Review.

Complaints about a stifling and censorious climate of political correctness are also far from a novel development. Nonetheless, as Brooks argues, the so-called IDW still represents something more than just garden-variety cultural conservatism even if the two share plenty of terrain.