Before social media and the bandwidth-intensive media platforms that dominate the internet today, a massive genre of message boards relied on a simple format: users submitted stuff they found online, and then everyone talked about it. Back then, I spent a lot of time on a site like this called Portal of Evil. If you’d like to know more New York magazine published a good piece on it a while back, but the gist is that users focused on finding the most bizarre and fringe stuff we could find. Sites about cults, conspiracy theories, crank science, fringe subcultures, niche political sects, and so on.

As you can imagine, conversations on PoE often involved laughing at the stuff we’d found. At the same time, however, the site’s culture also revolved around a genuine interest in ideas — especially controversial and obscure ones — that was hard to miss. There was a real enthusiasm for finding new sites with new ideas and cultures that none of us had encountered before. There was a “Prime Directive” rule in place that forbade users from contacting people we found, because the point wasn’t to shame them or persuade them or anything like that; we just wanted to learn about them. Users even developed an elaborate crowdsourced directory where we scrupulously catalogued our finds:

For my part, I’d say that the time I spent on PoE encouraged an interest in unpopular and unconventional cultures and ideas that’s with me to this day. Right now, for example, I have a group of friends on Twitter who spend an honestly hilarious amount of time watching and talking about a sect of grifters who sell How To Be Rich And Manly type advice. They’re a whole micro-industry of scam artists, unprosecuted criminals, and would-be playboys who have a very specific subculture and a hilarious body of associated lore and drama. They’re fun to laugh about, but they’re also just genuinely fascinating on an intellectual level; for example, they have specific distinct philosophical influences (they love Machiavelli).

Is the right interested in ideas?

I bring up PoE to make a pretty simple point: I think we all know what it looks like when people are actually interested in ideas. Especially when they have a kind of general interest in ideas that are controversial or outside of the mainstream, or a principled interest in giving people the opportunity to listen and talk about them.

And this is absolutely not what we see from this genre of pundit whose idea of being “open minded”, “tolerant”, “interested in heterodox ideas” and so on really just means:

1. Promoting politics within a narrow spectrum of positions (right-populist, libertarian, and hard right, along with some novelty monarchist and techno-utopian positions) associated with the US right in general and the Republican Party in particular; and

2. Promoting particular “independent” or “left” figures, and their ideas, when and only when they are taking positions within that narrow spectrum.

This posture of neutrality and disinterested curiosity, adopted while promoting a very particular kind of politics, has become so ubiquitous on the right that it would probably be easier to name the pundits who don’t do this. And the strategy isn’t new, either; Fox News, for example, was already branding itself as “fair and balanced” decades ago.

Ordinarily, when leftists want to expose this strategy, their standard move is to demonstrate a left-right imbalance: they show how a pundit disproportionately praises one side and criticizes the other, or how one side is only given a token and superficial hearing, and so on. This is the most direct approach, but it also has its perils. If for example you try to demonstrate that Tucker Carlson promotes a disproportionate number of right-wing voices, you had better be prepared for critics to bring up counterexamples and for the argument to devolve into judgment calls about what the right proportion would actually be.

Here’s a simpler question to ask: why don’t any of these people talk about Time Cube?

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The most cancelled man on earth

Hear me out! For those who are unfamiliar: Time Cube is the name of a kind of grand theory of everything developed in the late nineties by a man named Gene Ray. Today it is generally regarded among people who pay attention to this stuff — the sort of people who spent time on Portal of Evil, for example — as the paradigm example of crank internet intellectualism. I won’t attempt to summarize Time Cube exhaustively, but there’s a lot about it out there if you’re interested. Here’s a mirror of the original website; here’s the Wikipedia entry; and here’s a documentary about it.

For this post, there are just three points about Time Cube that you need to know:

1. It is, again, probably one of the most famous crank theories there is. I wouldn’t put Gene Ray on the level of figures like Lyndon LaRouche, L. Ronald Hubbard, or David Icke, but if you know much about all three of those guys then you probably know about him. This is not some ultra-obscure internet lowbie that you can’t expect people to have heard of, particularly people who are interested in ideas.

2. Time Cube is extremely political. It is a scientific theory, but it also makes all kinds of claims about race, sex, civil rights, energy (both nuclear and fossil fuels), education, and more. I would say that its politics are generally reactionary but it really does not fit well within the left-right spectrum, particularly when we take its reasoning into consideration.

3. Gene Ray was probably one of the most cancelled men on earth. His ideas were not taken seriously or treated respectfully; he was widely ridiculed, and almost always dismissed without argument. He was also widely regarded as a bigot. And he wrote about being cancelled constantly: a major ongoing theme in his writing concerns the way that academic institutions in particular shut him out and refused to give him a hearing. Ray was writing about cancel culture decades before any of our current pundits.

I don’t think anyone can seriously dispute any of these points, but if we take them seriously they raise a simple question. Why don’t any of our pundits who are interested in heterodox ideas, particularly those that have been cancelled with accusations of bigotry and denied a platform by powerful institutions, ever talk about Time Cube? If you really are trying to keep an open mind about political ideas, and if you aren’t making value judgments when you promote or engage with them, then why would you never have a word to say about poor Gene Ray?

This may seem like a silly line of criticism, but it’s only silly because it takes the rhetoric of our very curious and disinterested right-wing pundits seriously. It’s obvious that Carlson has never brought on a guest to talk about Time Cube. More to the point, it’s obvious that he would never do this, or do anything like it. Similarly, when right-wing YouTube competitor Rumble loudly announced that it was onboarding a “diverse” roster of pundits1, they didn’t cut any deals with a LaRouchite, or a Scientologist, or a fan of David Icke — and of course, no one ever even expected them to.

The boundaries of the respectable

To make this point even clearer, let’s set it in contrast with another right-wing pundit: Joe Rogan. A few months ago, Freddie deBoer wrote a very good piece demonstrating how Rogan’s supposed intellectual “openness is a pose designed to camouflage a specific political project.” And he did this as it’s often done: by demonstrating a left-right imbalance among Rogan’s guests and in the way that he engages with them.

But there’s a reason Freddie had to do it this way: say what you will about Rogan, but he actually does platform some weird ideas. He talks about UFOs, sensory deprivation chambers, and other dimensions on a regular basis. He is precisely the sort of guy you might have found in the Portal of Evil forums years ago; I would be pretty surprised if he hasn’t heard of Time Cube or Gene Ray2. And we all know this about Rogan, which is why if you want to demonstrate that he has a bias, you have to talk about an imbalance in his coverage.

But when (for example) Yascha Mounk’s Persuasion describes itself as “a platform for publishing interesting ideas,” does anyone in the universe think that they’ll ever host a conversation about Ray, LaRouche, Hubbard, or Icke? Are they ever going to let a Q guy make his case? Can we even expect significant representation from the anti-capitalist left, a mainstream perspective all over the world? Of course not. Here’s what they have in mind when they say they’re interested in ideas:

We have assembled some of the most insightful, principled, and stylish thinkers from across the ideological spectrum and from around the world: Our community includes Thomas Chatterton-Williams and Garry Kasparov, David French and Emily Yoffe, Elif Shafak and Francis Fukuyama

This isn’t even a particularly diverse group by the narrow standards of mainstream US politics: they’re all neoliberals who think that “wokeness” has gone too far. But this, of course, is also what the right usually means when they talk about open-mindedness and ideological diversity; all of the same boundaries of what is “respectable” and “relevant” are still there, they’re just drawn in different places.

The strongest argument for giving socialism a hearing, of course, is that its ideas about politics and the economy happen to be the right ones, and are extremely difficult to contest when they are actually on the table. But when our right-wing pundits just-so-happen to deny that hearing to socialists while promoting libertarians, Republican operatives, and self-identified fascists on a regular basis — and do it all in the name of nonjudgmental open-mindedness — you don’t need to make the case for socialism to call their bluff. Just ask them to talk about Time Cube.