When we consider the way video has helped fuel the movement that’s sometimes described as the Intellectual Dark Web, we often think about famous thinkers such as Jordan Peterson delivering speeches or lectures on YouTube and other social media sites. It’s a phenomenon I wrote about back in September, in a Quillette piece entitled Amidst the YouTube Junkies of MythCon, wherein I described the extraordinary popularity of video pundits collecting millions of hits with thoughtful—but often simple and low-budget—monologues delivered from their basement, bedroom or kitchen table.

But Washington, D.C.-based documentarian Rob Montz, co-founder and CEO of Good Kid Productions, takes a more ambitious approach. Montz has produced tightly narrated, inventively shot documentaries about American politics and campus life that manage to be both intellectually penetrating and surprisingly funny. One of his 2017 documentaries, published on We the Internet TV, won the 2018 Reason Video Prize. And his work has been covered in The Economist, The New York Times and the Washington Post.

Caricaturing the Left Doesn’t Benefit the Intellectual Dark Web

Sydney. London. Toronto.

QuilletteUri Harris

In late March, I interviewed Montz for the Quillette podcast—a conversation you can listen to here. And for those looking to take a deeper dive into Montz’s work, here’s a selection of some of his most entertaining work, which tells the story of how, and why, sections of the American intelligentsia seem to have slipped into a state of febrile lunacy in recent years.