Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right?

It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream.

Listen to Evil Genius on BBC Sounds.

Hello, I'm Philip Dodd and welcome to the Arts and Ideas Discussion Program from BBC Radio 3,

which brings together leading artists, writers and thinkers.

If you enjoy what you hear, do subscribe to the Arts and Ideas podcast,

and wherever you get your podcast from, do rate and reviewers.

It'll help other people to find us.

This is the BBC.

A loose network of thinkers and media people forced to become heretics

and who claim they're simply free thinkers.

This is one account of those who belong who are said to belong to the

intellectual dark web, a term half-jokingly conjured up by one of its members. They are the

subject of this edition of free thinking. Free speech, identity politics and religion, especially Islam, are for many of them key issues.

And their argument is that educational and mainstream media are in thrall to a politically correct elite and social justice warriors

who wish to regulate what can be said and who can say it.

Some may say that the intellectual dark web is simply North American,

but actually it has threads here, one of whom is in the studio,

Douglas Murray, journalist and author of the Strange Death of Europe,

which speaks of Europe's cultural suicide. My second guest is Barry Weiss,

a New York Times columnist with some sympathy for the ideas of the intellectual dark web,

who wrote a long opinion piece on the network. She's down the line from New York. And last but

...