Douglas Murray and His Continuing Fight against the "Madness of Crowds”

we are asked to agree to things which we cannot believe douglas murray author of the madness of crowds on uncommon knowledge now [Music] welcome to uncommon knowledge i'm peter robinson associate editor of the london spectator douglas murray is the author of a number of books including the strange death of europe which appeared in 2017 his most recent book published last year the madness of crowds gender race and identity douglas welcome you're you're where right now i'm actually holed up in an apartment in central europe in budapest um and uh last time we met of course we met in uh fierzole i think approximate or nearer there than i think you are oh very much so i'm just sorry we can't i'm sorry we can't reconvene in florence life isn't over yet we'll get we'll do it again how long were you in this country writing columns from for the spectator from the united states for a month or so i was yes i was i was in the states for five weeks up until the election and just until shortly afterwards touring around your country right well we'll come back to your tour of this country in a moment first the madness of crowds the argument i'm quoting the book now douglas the interpretation of the world through the lens of social justice identity group politics and intersectionalism is probably the most audacious and comprehensive effort since the end of the cold war at creating a new ideology explain that yes i'm sure all of uh your viewers and listeners uh have observed that in the last few decades the last few years in particular sped up there's been a new attempt to basically institute a new form of ethic i've been trying to work out for some years what that is exactly um how you prove you're a good person in the society that we find ourselves in the desire to prove yourself to be a good person doesn't disappear the desire to be thought well of by your peers doesn't disappear even if religion does uh i believe that what we've come to call intersectionality identity politics um rights acquisitions have basically become the new form of religion in our societies it's a pretty audacious land grab but it fills a void i write about the void in the strange death of europe i write about the void left by the retreat of faith whatever view you take of that but the void is being filled has been filled i think it's been filled unsatisfactorily i think reprehensively in many ways but it's something to do and for a lot of young americans young people in the west in general it's it is a particularly western thing you don't find this in china you don't find it in in russia or much of it in eastern europe uh but in in the west it has given people something to do a purpose in life a great crusade to be a part of and it's given them meaning you recognize you mention or examine four instances in particular of identity politics you do is at book length this is a this is a video conversation so we we have the problem of compressing an ox to the size of a bullion cube women's rights again i'm quoting the madness of crowds women's rights had been steadily accumulating throughout the 20th century they appeared to be arriving at some sort of settlement then just as the train appeared to be reaching the desired destination it went crashing off the tracks close quote explain that and this this this is the case you mentioned that we'll come to this but you mentioned in in each instance the rights the question of rights seem to be getting someplace someplace generally agreed upon and then yes that's right uh well take feminism like all of the cases i write about and there's a perfectly reasonable indeed almost impossible to disagree with foundational basis which is we would like to make sure that no woman is ever held back from attaining what she can achieve in her life and decides to do by dint of the fact that she happens to be a woman uh feminism starts from that standpoint of equality equal rights for women equal opportunities for women the like the right to make their own choices this this exists through first second wave feminism second wave feminism there's a bit of a problem as as man-hating or misinjury starts to creep in they're already people in second wave feminism saying things like you know we don't need men and that that goes on in the semis but it's kind of fringe by third and now fourth wave feminism uh this just exacerbates beyond any reasonability uh to the stage we're now at where fourth wave feminism actually clearly is not seeking consensus there's a new book out in france that's been making a fair amount of noise that says at the opening how much the author the female author loves hating men and how much she loves making them feel terrible and has contempt for them this isn't a movement at this stage seeking to find agreement or compromise or or you know any kind of equitable arrangements between the sexes it isn't seeking to make sure that women aren't held back from achievements it's seeking to try to carry out an act of historic revenge which the perpetrators believe will in some way make up for what they perceive correctly as it turns out to have been lesser opportunities in the past for women it's a common thing in all these rights claims at the moment there seems to be if this is the sort of if this is a if this is equality and this was a situation in the past various points say for women the desire of these groups seems to be let's go way past equality let's like let's make men feel awful let's talk about them in horrible terms and then maybe at some point it'll come back like this and i think these people are woefully misguided if they've given it even that much thought they want to carry out acts of revenge that's why we have attacks on masculinity as well as men masculinity is the problem never femininity only masculinity they say that masculinity always goes wrong and so on and so forth and this this is a concerted campaign it doesn't seek for equality it seeks revenge civil rights the madness of crowds again the civil rights movement in america again the pattern the civil rights movement in america looked like it was moving towards some sort of hoped-for resolution but yet again near the point of victory everything went sour yes would we ever have expected i think even if we've spoken a few years ago that in our lifetimes every bookshop in america would be filled with this moral effluence from people pretending that they're anti-racist simply spewing racism out into the american public system spewing out hatred of people because of their skin color generalizing exactly the sin that people were meant to be guilty of some years ago but generalizing with abandon about everyone who's white saying that white history is only one thing that white people are only one thing but white people can't be differentiated or any moral differences made but are all guilty and equally reprehensible and need to be beaten up upon this is once again i'm thinking of ibraham candy i'm thinking of tanheesie coates and thinking of robin d'angelo and thinking of the growing list of race hucksters of all different races who've decided to make themselves rich and famous by attacking a racial group by dint of their racial origin they seem to think that this again is if there has been a inequality in the past and once again there has the way to get to equality is not to settle it equal but to go to better that black people are better more virtuous more morally wise than white people have a better history indeed have no sin in their own history and on and on so that at some point it'll come back to this lovely point of equality again i don't know if they've really thought it through all that much they're certainly wanting to behave like the fourth way feminists in the tone of vengeance my own suspicion once again is that what happens at the end of this race baiting is not that we swing back to something like equality gay rights the third of the four again i'm quoting you douglas a decade ago almost nobody was supportive of gay marriage even gay rights groups weren't in favor of it a few years down the road and it has been and it gay marriage has been made into a foundational value of modern liberalism how did this happen yes same kind of pattern same pattern same pattern um gaze by the way this is you know the one sort of crampon on the mountain of social justice that i can claim to have ownership of um gays haven't been very good in victory actually i think uh having got all of the uh equal rights in a society like my own the united kingdom and in the us um for instance uh not expressing the tolerance to others that uh that we sought ourselves when seeking equal rights uh have gone into for instance a strange vengeful vengefulness against the religious um having attained frequent for instance equal marriage rights in states and civil terms berate churches principally churches of course they tend to lay off the mosques on this one but lay into the churches that will not uh change their teachings about homosexuality because of what is a very recent moral shift i think a desirable moral shift but a moral shift in western again western uh liberal societies um and there's something else to that which is that once again we have this strange uh oddity that at the the the point of victory and again with with the gay campaign is as with others we're dealing with relatively small but very noisy groups of people who have the cultural dominance they they i mean i'm thinking of pathetic legacy gay publications the the the pathetic figures who hold themselves out as gay leaders basically people have not got any better job to do and wouldn't be employable in any other sector uh who hold themselves out at this point as carrying out a sort of act of revenge they do it on the churches they do it on religious freedom but they also do it in another way which is and i give examples of this i mean this i'm in agreement with brett east and ellis i might not ordinarily be in much agreement with but brett easton ellis gave the example of the the interpretation by certain modern gay activists as gay as being not equal or the same as but slightly better than and i say in the manners of crowds we've got that in our culture at the moment uh we have this sort of strange thing that you know to be heterosexual is to be rather disappointing uh um rather rather bland a shame you have nothing to say for yourself uh unlike the magical fairy dust pixie gay people who sprinkle fabulousness and wondrousness everywhere they go and um liven up an otherwise benighted heterosexual world this is this is once again really the language of better not of equal the last of the four groups that you examine the trans movement again the madness of crowds then finally we all stumbled baffled into the most uncharted territory of all this was the claim that there lived among us a considerable number of people who were in the wrong bodies close quote what is this where did such a this is one all right the three we've discussed gay rights women's rights civil rights in one form or another these have been around for decades the notion of trans well i guess well you tell me how to the correct give me a brief history list we just jan morris the transsexual writer great writer as far as in my judgment just died the other day at the age of 94 and jan morris nay so to speak james morris uh was what the the the transition in the seventies was that right seventeen long time ago at the same time this notion of trans rights seems to have emerged the day before yesterday um yes well all as i say in the manuscripts i'm very very on all of these issues i'm interested in getting to the truth i'm interested in getting to what's really going on and i and i read and i research and i interview people as widely as i can to try to work out what's going on the trans one i do last because it's the most it's the newest in a way and the most interesting and the one we know least about and the one as i say as a result we should be most humble about uh people should be very humble about we if if if if trans if if knowledge of trans was 100 what we know about it currently is a decimal point percentage we don't know very much about trans and we should be humble about that certainly before for instance meant making medical experiments on kids of the kind that were going on in the u.s and which i write about at some length in the madness of crowds um but i say that for my readings my interviews with people much more there are several things you can say one is most societies in history have some kind of complex between the sexes like issue that goes on we have it in greek legend we have it uh in all sorts of societies around the world uh from samoa to india to all sorts of places have it um and and have different understandings of what it is in some societies that's sort of the gay bit there's sort of also cross-dressing things everyone knows that the sexual fetishes around things like transvestism and this has all been something which has existed in societies it's not been very much looked at for all sorts of reasons but it's relatively recently and i write about jan morris i hugely admired and whose book conundrum is is is one of the books that persuaded me that her book about the transition from this is one of the books that persuaded me that one should take morally seriously a claim that is being made which is that some people really do feel that they are born in the wrong body but as i say in the madness of crowds i try to do in that chapter if you slice along what is happening in this it is a long way from that to for instance and as a result there is no such thing as sex as in right there's no such thing as um as chromosomes uh chromosomes are a performative thing uh or now uh non-binaryism which is that one day you're feeling kind of a bit masculine the next you're a bit feminine or today if you were feeling kind of uh her an hour ago and for lunch or him um this is all these are all wildly new claims and because society society has been nervous very nervous about exploring any of this we've just washed stuff through washed it through and i i know i've interviewed people who've who've who for instance i mean a gay and were persuaded instead when they were young that they must be trans and started taking life-changing drugs and now their entire life is altered uh aren't able to have children all sorts of things and i'm i'm horrified by the fact that in the name of uh simply trying to all get along this very very interesting issue has been just just just washed through brush brush it get it through and what's more now you're a transphobe in the same way that you know you're a homophobe a racist a misogynist and elsewhere these are the ex-communicating terms of the new religion douglas another a couple of final points in your argument and again it's a big expansive book with examples and interviews and essays within essays so to speak i want everyone to understand that that we're talking about a large and careful argument here that we're reducing but there's no choice one of the striking aspects across all four of these groups is the speed with which it all arose you've discussed that already but the madness of crowds quote the unbelievable speed of this process has been principally caused by the fact that a handful of businesses in silicon valley notably google twitter and facebook now have the power not just to direct what most people in the world know think and say but have a business model which has accurately been described as relying on finding and this is within your quotation a quotation customers ready to pay to modify someone else's behavior close quote explain all of that that's right well this is a great phenomenon of our time where people log on to their social media accounts in the morning to find that day's hate speech or hate figure and try to destroy them usually for saying something that everybody said until the day before yesterday um so many examples of it now jk rowling the harry potter author is one rather notable one there are some people who seem to think their full-time job is trying to uh defenestrate the harry potter author uh for wrong think when in actual fact she's just said perfectly sensible things none of which could be remotely described as transphobic by anyone uh reasonable uh but um yes there is a there is it is all part of this new religion is that you you need i mean you need practices religions need practices and they need as i say ways to demonstrate that you're good i remember some years ago saying to some atheist friends as a prominent atheist you know it's a problem isn't it this thing that atheists you know don't get together and sort of think and stop like once a week they don't just get to turn off their blackberries and and read marcus aurelius or something and this is a big disadvantage and these atheist friends said well yeah it is a disadvantage the social justice activists have got around this problem by congregating 24 7 online to worship the latest claim the latest unproven and unprovable claim to make unprovable and uh unproven assertions and to try to find heretics and that's how they show that they're good people um and all of these things have intermingled this is one of the interesting things they've all intermingled so that remaining legacy gay publications campaigned for blm uh by the way that favor isn't always returned but we might drop that for another another time um you know the feminists and and the uh the social justice activists it's all it's all it's all wrapped up uh but but one of the points that i try to bring out in the madness of crowds is one of the reasons why people shouldn't fall into this it's not just that it's a horrible retributive and unforgiving religion which doesn't actually have any redemption for the individual or the society it is that even by its own uh standards and i i read all the foundational texts of this movement and i thought i was going to find some interesting and deep challenging intellectual thought in them i didn't i found only assertions made by by the founders of the social so-called social so can i just i wanna i wanna take that point you being you have read things that i confess i have no intention of reading and you proved it a few moments ago by talking about you actually know the distinctions between first wave second wave third wave and fourth wave feminism you've gone into it you've read the so-called foundational texts and there's nothing there well there is some there is there is a slight thing there what what is there is this uh it is an attempt to uh i'm now gonna i'm gonna sort of steel man it's an attempt to this is the intersectional bit it is an intent to say the world is um has unfairnesses in it it has inequalities in it there are some people who are more advantaged in their lives than others all that is true um now any religion could tell you that indeed any non-religious person any just observer of the world could tell you that the intersectionists however say all of these um inequalities and inequities are interlinked so they're like they're like a great system of interlinking they get some of this from marxism by the way and they get some of it from foucault but they again were they had to read but what they say is the whole thing is interlinked and to address one of these things you must address them all so you can't just for instance advocate for women's rights uh uh you must advocate for the rights of black women because black women have an extra layer of oppression which they have to come out of and you see that's how we end up with the magical unicorn figure of our day which is the black trans woman because the black trans woman the great unicorn of the era which everyone is in search of um is is the most depressed bit in this and if we could only make sure that the black trans woman no it does not exist in very large numbers i should stress but that the black trans woman must always be as free as possible means that if you unlocked that you would unlock all of the others and all the women would be free and all the black people would be free and all of the trans black people would be free and therefore everyone else would be free by extension that's something like the claim that they make that they're not i'm i'm not being self uh uh um um aggrandizing here but i think i've just explained it in a simpler and more and more and much clearer manner than they actually do because what they tend to do is get knotted up in their own argument but that's basically the claim that they're making now i say that's not going to work for lots of reasons can i can i quote you to yourself my identity politics is a system making demands that are impossible toward ends that are unachievable close quote so you make the strong claim not only that this is a mess in practice but that it cannot work in principle yes correct yes that's right that's one of the reasons why i'm so um confident that that anyone who wants to pull this thing apart is going to win this one um it's not going to work let me give the obvious example is that this on its own terms it doesn't work because because for instance gay rights and trans rights are clearly in contention if not in total opposition for instance the trans lobby says a young girl who's got tomboyish tendencies and likes to play with the boys more than the girls that likes to be a bit boy she might like have her hair short is not a tomboy that has been a thing throughout history uh but is actually a a a boy in a girl's body and must be helped to us and assisted to change a body in a way which by the way they always talk about frivolously and i can tell you from again having to look at this is no straightforward process um so so that's just one example but then the gay answer to that would be well that would be that that that's like it well first of all it's very likely that that tomboyish girl is going to grow up to be a perfectly happy heterosexual woman it's also possible that tom boyce girl may grow up to be a perfectly happy lesbian it's it's it's it's it's quite unlikely actually given the number of tomboyish girls around that that all tomboys or even a large proportion of tomboys are actually men who need to be transitioned from female bodies into male bodies you can play the same exercise with vaguely effeminate or slightly girlish boys so a lot of a lot of gay people have been wondering about and worrying about this increasingly all the smart gays have been worrying about this for some time they've been noticing actually it doesn't quite work clearly we're being told something is not true and then we're being told something that could easily have affected our younger selves let's take the other example where there's a messy messy intersection the messy intersection of women and trans why by the way i should just quickly say whenever i write about this and i speak about this whenever we were able to speak in public and meet in groups of more than four and i often raise these questions and i get very little pushback but i notice the pushback that women who speak about what i'm speaking about here on the trans get there's a very strange thing that the number of feminists and women who are not feminists who have noticed that trans treads significantly against women's rights now that's why jk rowling and many other feminists and mainly left-wing feminists i think of people like julie bindle julie burchell suzanne moore all distinguished writers of an older generation jermaine greer weren't willing to bow to the trans one because they said hang on a minute the thing that trans is saying among other things says something about the nature of womanhood which is precisely what we as feminists were trying to leave behind we were trying to leave behind the idea that women have to behave a certain way and look a certain way and act a certain way so how come now this group is coming along saying i'm used to be a man but now i'm a woman and i have to be the following way but let's take it to the other the other extent of that of course which is the one of you've got to say i'm a woman even if i was born a man even if i've got all the attributes of a man still including the physical attributes between my legs even if that is the case and i say i'm a woman you've got to say i'm a woman well a lot of women are saying no to hell with that i can't agree with that i'm not going along with that and there are all of the examples of women's safe spaces of female prisons the female changing rooms and much more which are which our era has been driving itself mad over doug could i ask you just to comment on on one again you the argument you're making now arises from literature and interviews and so forth that somebody like me just hasn't read and can get confused by very quickly but here's something that's in that makes it into the mainstream news i think they're uncomfortable about with it so maybe we've seen the last of these stories but a man who transitions into becoming a woman and then insists on competing against women in tennis track yeah you name it now that's that's a moment where the argument the conflict between these different views actually emerges into public in a way in which even a chump like me can say wait a minute something very odd is going on here can you comment on that one example yes yeah the sports sport's a very good one joe rogan was was one of the early people on this because joe rogan does mixed martial arts and he noticed that there was something a bit off because mixed missed martial arts is i'm not very interested in it but i quite like to hear about it as i understand it involves just getting into the ring and beating the hell out of your opponent roughly i think that's correct yeah i think i've got the rules around the walls right yeah um and joe was one of the people who noticed that when you had somebody born a man competing as a woman they almost always very successfully beat the hell out of the woman and that's because of all sorts of things which even if you're on uh transitioning drugs are not going to change a size of limbs bones muscle mass and on so so yeah it's very interesting but i write about the sports one a bit as you know because it is one of the places where it notices another one where it notices is again one of the things we were told wouldn't be an issue many years ago which was uh female prisons uh we've had a case we had a case in the uk by the way where uh all these uh trans actress all these right on lgbtqi people uh all said uh what are you doing talking about uh trans people in women's prisons trans women are women shut up bigot and then we had a case of uh one famous case of a guy who said he was a woman who went into a women's prison he'd been done for rape before he still had a penis and he went into a woman's prison raped load of women now all the trans people said no that's not the sort of thing that's going to happen that'll never happen trans women are women shut up bigot these people these people have stretched all of our patients quite long enough by making their unprovable claims making assertions keep proving to be wrong but by the way who may say so one of the problems in this is it's also all made our age so much stupider which is what i mind i think that the moment you you allow the injection of stupidities and irrationalities and unprovable unassert unassertible things into your society you waste everybody's time and you mean you make it the case as it is at the moment that at the most advantageous point in human history some of the best minds of our time are spending their time talking about lavatory arrangements to hell with these people for wasting our time like this and i think that the energy of our time should be better spent elsewhere and it's only because of these intersectionalists and these people with their crazed ideas that we are wasting our time on these issues douglas let me read you two quotations one is from the madness of crowds and another i'll come to in a moment it's a quotation that came to my mind when i was reading the madness of crowds and then you tell me whether i'm being intendentious by putting these two quotations together or whether in one way or another they fit here's the first quotation and it's you the madness of crowds while the endless contradictions fabrications and fantasies within identity politics are visible to all identifying them is not just discouraged but literally policed so we are asked to agree to things which we cannot believe close quote now here's the second quotation and this comes from natan sharansky now a prominent parliamentarian in israel but a refuse nick in the old soviet union who did time in prison this is nathan sharansky quote i was a loyal soviet citizen until the age of 20. what it meant to be a loyal soviet citizen was to say what you were supposed to say to read what you were permitted to read to vote the way you were told to vote and at the same time to know that it was all a lie yes yes i've had the privilege of meeting schweinsteiger a couple of times is a great moral hero of mine um yes there is something um in this i i have like all of us spent a certain amount of time in recent years thinking about uh totalitarianism and of uh particular evils of communist totalitarianism and the way in which lies were expected of the citizenry and why that was and i think it was uh soldier nitzin who i first became aware of this through um but other writers are written about it anthony daniels but his writer writes under the name theodore dalrymple as you know um also identified this in his book on the wilder shores of marx in 1989 he said he often wondered why it was the the communist systems demanded that people said things and agreed to things which they knew weren't true and he came to the conclusion as sharon sultan's and others did that it was precisely that this was the way to demoralize people yes now i believe that there is no grand plot but that the people at the moment who have been trying to make everybody agree to these ridiculous claims just shut up and say trans women are women and there's no difference just shut up and say all of these things in the case of america at the moment just stick the don't hurt me blm sign in your window and make the crowd and mob pass all of these things are designed to demoralize people at some level that you're you're meant to just go along with it because it will make you a more cringing and therefore more pliable human being for whatever is to come next and that's why i think now as at every other point in history it's the duty of anyone who thinks themselves and can speak up to say no i'm not agreeing to whatever you make me say today i'm my own person i will not imbibe lies and i will not spew them out either and i that's why i encourage as many people as possible to do that but we undoubtedly in the modern west live in countries now where we are asked to imbibe and spew lies if we work for governmental organizations for non-governmental organizations increasingly for what used to be serious corporate entities and almost every sector of public private life and i think this is sinister i think it should be stopped now and i i'd like to see other people increasingly start to do so so there was the madness of crowds came out what something like 18 months ago we were hoping we could get together long before this but in any event so it's been out for a while it's been the updated edition has only come out in the last month yeah all right here's my point i have notes here on there's a chapter in effect on what is to be done and if i may say so correct me if i'm wrong about this but the what is to be done is strikes me as a little tepid um we might ask more more regular i'm quoting you we might ask more regularly and more assiduously compared to what that is to say trans gay civil all of this our societies are bad compared to what to islamic societies compared to the treatment you receive that's your point and another point you say can the spirit of generosity be extended anymore you've seen quite a lot your line has hardened well on just on the evidence of the way you put it just now to help with these people for wasting our time your line has hardened since you wrote that book well it's harder because everything i've described has got a lot worse and a lot more vociferous most obviously on the race issue um everything i feared and wrote about that seems to have got worse and the road map i chart appears to have got even more precarious than it was when i was charting it uh you're right in a way i i certainly feel particularly on that one that i'm i'm more and more intolerant of the husterism and extremism and the racism of the new anti-racists but uh uh i just add and as i say that all of all of the trends of forcing this through at corporate levels and much more has got just infinitely worse since i since i mean when i was writing the bands of crowds researching it that was the one that shocked me most i thought i thought i know i know ngos will do this i know the governmental organizations but fortune 500 companies all doing this crap i mean i mean wow and i have a of the explanations for why that is but that was the one that shocked me it's got infinitely worse in the year since the first edition came out but but here's the other thing the reason why uh those suggestions i make at the end are what you describe as a slightly temple i comparison i feel dreadful for it no i mean it's a wonderful book in a hundred ways but all right [Laughter] i wanted to try to give answers that were deep general and did not require as it were a phd in intersectionality to address because it's my belief that and it's why i wrote the book reading i want people to get around it out of it over it through it as fast as possible i don't want us caught on this crap i don't want us stuck on it and it's my belief that if we can identify the fundamental errors and indeed injustices in this system it's better than for instance having the best possible shoot down quote of kimberly crenshaw or peggy mcintosh to apply to this because then we're going to spend all our time talking about this and we're not going to read uh any of the we're not going to read sharansky or or solzhenitsyn we're not going to read any of the classics we're going to spend all of our time trying to read different papers associated with this gunk and we're not going to get on with our lives the reason i address these at the at the very basic level like what's the place for forgiveness in this or just ask what they're comparing it to is because i think these are short cuts i think these are the other things i suggest just shortcuts for people particularly young people to know that they've got a way through when this stuff comes at them i want when somebody is in their office and they're told that they're going to have a race awareness training thing and the white people are all going to be told how awful they are i want them not to have to argue back on racial grounds i don't want them to have to imbibe all of the unreadable if very well selling books of the current race hucksters but i do want them to know what sort of thing they can say to the people telling them to educate themselves who are always and everywhere less educated than the people they're telling that to all right this brings us to your five weeks in this country can i all right we and and the unavoidable topic here is donald j trump who has faults you may have noticed to what extent and yet here here he ended up getting something like nine million more votes this time around than he got four years ago to what extent is the phenomenon of donald trump and the notion that for all his faults of comportment and i won't list them 48 of the country voted for him to what extent did they do so because he's talking back to this stuff people look at him they understand there's something in the in the discourse now that's poisonous and and after them and one way or another you look across the landscape of political figures republican and democratic and you say wait a minute that man is talking back at least he's doing that does that strike you as as in other words has your argument in one way or another worked its way right into the center of american politics i i think so because i i agree this is obviously one of the things underlying this the classic example to give is you're an unemployed steel worker somewhere in the center of america and then on top of everything else you've got to be told every day in the media that you've got white privilege right right really really you you you uh have a child with a woman you separate she gets most access to the child and you get to see your child every other weekend say for half an hour and you're told you've got male privilege like there's a lot of unpleasantness that's been allowed to run on unaddressed in recent years and a lot of unforgivingness that has been allowed to run against people because of characteristics over which they have no say and we would have called this out a long time ago if the victims have been gay if the victims had been women if the victims had been black or only black and instead we have this note of vengeance that i think a lot of people have picked up on and i think it's i think it's definitely one of the things that propelled donald trump he would of course some people say and this is a perfectly good argument historians will of course argue over this that that in some ways donald trump made all of this worse because once his opponents realized that he was opposed to that they doubled down made even more crazy claims simply in order to enrage trump and and and and and uh his his supporters there might be something in that um but you know in america it's not like the race issue has got better in the last 10 years the polls i cite in the mansa crowd show the number of americans who think that race relations are worse now and that and that it's always got to be remembered was happening in the obama years as well you know black lives matter began when president obama was in office they were getting away with making their claims about america when obama was in office they've been able to double down them and make much crazier claims since trump's been in office but but yes this is this is by the way this is there's a specific set of american culture wars which have sadly spilt out and polluted the whole western world it's a shame to me because i admire america for all sorts of reasons and i've always loved it but on this you've exported some of your worst viruses and made them go global and in particular i'm thinking of the american race problem the rate the interpretation of the american race problem uh which obviously you know is now an interpretation which has been exported elsewhere often to countries that simply don't have it the famous example i always give is of the british uh uh of britain which has had some of our own race problems but we don't have the we don't have the we haven't had the dialogue and dialectic that's been going on in america until america reported it recently i wrote a piece in the new york post last month saying thanks for that america that's one export we could have done without a longish quotation here so you were in this country for five weeks you reported from portland you went downtown and spent time with the demonstrators and you watched the way the police responded to the demonstrators and said that you thought the police demonstrated remarkable patience then you're in the district of columbia washington downtown washington on the eve of the election and you note that it's boarded up and nearly empty this is a longish quotation but well let me just read it and ask you you begin by mentioning a nature documentary that you watched at some point in which an elephant was to you mysteriously it permitted itself to be brought down by a pack of little small smaller creatures everything smaller than an elephant by a pack of predators and you couldn't work out as it was happening on the film why the elephant didn't just shake them off or kick the first one or trample on the first one and move on america is not being brought low by one beast but by a whole pack of them these predators include but are not limited to ignorance educational failure radical indoctrination pandemic poverty narcissism boredom the disappearance of of the adults the belief that law enforcement is the enemy and much more why america didn't throw off the first attacker and keep on moving is a question i cannot shake yes i wrote that in the spectator after i think leaving portland and then seattle these are immiserated cities in your country these are very sad sad places to visit uh america should be ashamed of them americans should be ashamed of them to have businesses attacked nightly as is going on still in these places to have uh i spoke with one uh owner of a restaurant who just opened a restaurant but because there were photos of first responders on the walls people had fired live rounds of ammunitions through his the windows of his new business he happened to be black by the way this very noble very brave very good american businessman he happened to be black but they didn't detain themselves on that i thought there i thought in portland i thought in seattle i thought in california i just thought these are these are cities where the stupid have taken over and where the ignorant have taken over and the adults have evacuated the terrain uh literally in portland uh there was a mayoral fight then going on between ted wheeler the uh the the mayor who had who was so weak who is so weak and and emasculated that he actually had the antifa activists at his own apartment block and moved um and he was being owned he had only one person competing against him at the election which he i say fortunately fortunately won and that was a female um far left-wing actress who actually supports antifa so that was that was the choice for the residents of that city uh it's a miserable place it has no history anymore all the statues are down everything's uh barricaded up most the shops are closed the homeless wander around by the thousands living on the streets pitching up on people's property uh uh uh this is and and i say i say in that piece one of the things i can't shake is the fact that part of this has to do with permitting people to get away with lies about the american past i'm afraid that your country that america suffers from a particular brand of what i describe as parochial internationalists people who think they know so much about the world but have barely ever watched further than their own navels people who have all sorts of theories but have never been anywhere who have all sorts of claims about the horror of the society they've grown up in and know nothing about history and you have to know nothing about history to think that growing up in america in the early 20th century the early 21st century in the late 20th century is to have been born into this benighted land they have no perspective on anything they've been educated appallingly they've been put into debt whilst being educated appallingly and the hope always was that these people would go out into the world and find that the world didn't need them and they'd retrain and become better and more useful moral beings but it turns out that they graduated into a world where there were faked up jobs for them in corporations and in and in and in organizations that did need to push and pump this stuff back around and around so the effluents just went round and round in american society and was never cleaned and yes it's it's it's an american it's an american problem which any friend of america and any american citizen ought to apply themselves to and it horrifies me that what's instead happening is exactly what my namesake but not relative charles murray described in coming apart which is that effectively i see that american society is increasingly this society with ever fewer ladders but completely covered with snakes but the board is is rigged in a way which people sense and worries them deeply and i would like to see this addressed douglas from the united states to europe i have to ask for an update essentially on your previous book the strange death of europe which we did discuss what was that 14 months ago last time we saw each other and the argument is that europe was is was being permitting it permitting itself to be overwhelmed by an alien culture which took the form principally of the immigration to europe of hundreds of thousands in one year angela merkel permitted a million into germany islamic immigrants and contained within them a number of radical muslims france and the united kingdom in france this past autumn an islamic radical beheaded a french elementary school teacher for instructing his students in freedom of speech and showing some of the famous charlie hebdo cartoons which caused an uproar several years ago warned the students beforehand that what he was going to do but he showed these as an illustration of freedom of speech president macron has responded he gave a televised address from the elysee he recalled the french ambassador from turkey he called for the expulsion of turkey from the european union he doubled french forces at the border he reasserted the secular value secular but distinctively western values of the french republic and douglas murray notes that he has done this so far without a word of support from angela merkel of germany or the prime minister of the united kingdom and you write simply where are france's friends and allies close quote so i read this and i think to myself what does douglas make of this on the one hand hmm silence from boris johnson and angela merkel on the other hand the president of the republic is standing up to this is europe groping towards some sort of resistance self-defense what what do you make of this it's just one very quick addendum that it's the uh customs union that macron uh asked i'm sorry i'm trying to throw that off because uh mercifully mercifully partly because the french influence uh the uh turks have never been allowed in they've only applied right right yes all right sorry i'm sorry thank you for the correction no no uh i'm enormously confused by president macron uh and his stance it's uh it doesn't i have absolutely no problem in praising him and and his uh government and their reaction to this i think by the way sorry to continue i've done this american note but i do think that what has happened uh that has been misunderstood about france is not just from the islamic world but from the american left let me just explain very quickly it's true that president edwan an old time enemy of mine uh uh has been trying once again in a very common huckster-ish way that he has to try to be the caliph of the world's muslims by lying about france he's not a stupid man i wish he was just a stupid man but he's an opportunist and he's very widely opportunist and he saw the opportunity to pretend that uh macron was insulting all muslims he knows that's not the case but edward would like to be the leader of the world's muslims so he pretended so the same thing with imran khan the former playboy and cricketer who now poses some stern-faced muller and rep the french for daring to be a secular and to assert their principles in the way they have both of these men know what they're doing they're just trying to make sure that their benighted populations particularly in imran khan's case live in a miserable situation in the main and in an economy he cannot improve uh will be placated partly by their political leaders pretending that they are leading the world's muslims against the terrible infidel secularists of france so that's going on from from parts of the muslim world the american left i'm particularly thinking of the new york times but there's a london equivalent of the financial times so lied about the french republic that mr macron had to pick up the phone to the new york times and correct their lies and write to the financial times and correct their lies over the weekend just before we're speaking a journalist from the washington post a journalist from the wall street journal and a journalist from the guardian spread completely defamatory claims about what the french state is doing all over social media they claimed for instance that macro has a new bill to try to do identity cards to identify muslim children and segregate them off in some way it's a total lie pumped around by the wall street journals journalists by the washington post journalist by al jazeera of course of course because if you if you're if you're if you take the shilling of the free state of qatar then of course you have the right to lecture the french people on their rights um these uh these lies have been pumped around about the republic but there is something very interesting going on here you see one of the fears some of us have had on the right in recent years has because it might be boiled down to this what if the enlightenment didn't go as deep or as wide as we had hoped what if the enlightenment didn't go as deep or as wide as we'd hoped now i'd say that america in particular in recent years has been a demonstration that that fear may be vindicated but in france the principles of the enlightenment and particularly of secularism are very very deeply dug the left and the right are in agreement on them and will defend them it's the american left that doesn't understand this it's the elements of the british left that do not understand this it's these people who think that an assertion of secularism that treats people exactly the same whatever their religious background is in some ways to use one of the croc terms of the era islamophobic so it's not the french fold i think that france is making an extraordinarily important defense of its values and in doing so it's actually defending one of the most important values of the whole of the west douglas i don't want to go off on a tangible this just occurs to me and i don't know when we'll get a chance to speak again so let me ask it the french the french values of the enlightenment dug in and supported and you just made a a riveting point by the right and the left in france i i am not an expert on france not by any me i'm the most casual observer friends you can imagine sitting here in california but it's my impression that if you look across the sweep of europe perhaps with the exception of poland in france the roman catholic church is still alive in some basic way still a force in the culture of france still attractive remarkably enough to young people has in the archbishop of paris michelle oberti a remarkably articulate spokesman he was a medical doctor before becoming a priest is france demonstrating that the enlightenment and the tr that the well just i'll just put it this way that the enlightenment of the church of course i'm talking specifically in this case about the roman catholic church but there is some opening there's openness within the enlightenment properly understood to a renewal of faith which may be one way out out of the struggle here is that is that is france demonstrating such a thing it it i i think it is uh it's always been a contention of course one of the um sort of burkian critiques of um the enlightenment project in france was not just the awfulness and horrors of its origins which are uh impossible to to to ignore but that it didn't leave a space for faith in the way that we now i think can see that it has and actually in actual fact the church in france you could say uh um as you just uh partly outlined benefits precisely from not having that established position that for instance the church of england does in other words we see as ever the in in the history of christianity that the more that it can be slightly on the outside the more it is capable of prospering uh one of the great paradoxes of christian history but i think there's something else as well here which is that what has happened in france has been that there has been a unity caused by the opposition and the opposition here once again to stress the point that macron has made we're not talking about all muslims but we are talking about the islamists the islamists have been very very assiduous in their choice of targets in recent years and what we've seen in recent months is a replay of what we saw over the year of 2015. the year of 2015 remember begins with the massacre of the staff charlie hebdo magazine and it finishes with the massacre the decapitation of a priest whilst he is saying mass at an altar of his church in rural now that is a that is an attack on the total character history belief of the republic what we saw in uh october november this year was a very short replay of that starts with this 18 year old chechen going with a meat cleaver to decapitate a school teacher for teaching secular values to his students and only a few weeks later a man who had just recently arrived in arrived in from in september from tunisia via the island of lampedusa in italy which i reported from at the height of the crisis and said at the time this is your soft underbelly you've got to get this in order they never did they never bothered to properly sort it out and they still haven't but in in late october it's a young man who has just arrived through lampedusa from tunisia who goes to the church in uh nice uh the church of notre dame in nice and decapitates and murders three worshipers as they're leaving church so this is the same pattern everything from the secular value to the right to worship religiously and freely if you're a christian in france now i put it to you like this if this had happened in america you would have your idiots of course you would but if your most prominent secularists and atheists in america were murdered one week and then two weeks later there was a massacre of worshippers at the the cathedral in washington or saint patrick's or saint thomas on fifth avenue we might see some people in america wise up to this and realize that us in europe i say us wisely those of us in europe who have been raising alarms on this are not motivated by bigotry but by a realistic estimation of a threat that we live with now daily nobody lives with it more than the french and i think that it is absolutely despicable that an element of the the radical american left who have made their way like a bacillus into the center of the news organizations of america are defaming the french republic as a whole for having the right to object when everyone from their secularists to their worshipers at church are the target of the islamists so this is as i say an era of interpretation the era is not the french republics the french republic deserves the solidarity and support of all people who believe in freedom the united kingdom since we last spoke when we last spoke the united kingdom was dominated as it was for month after month after month by the simple question how do we get out of this mess we voted to leave the european union now we can't sort out how to do so well there's been an election the tories have a majority of 80 they've passed the necessary legislation to leave the european union that will happen at the end of this year under under terms that remain to be finalized but it's going to happen so that's done one impulse and plenty of people said it was a racist impulse but one impulse behind the decision to leave europe surely was to recapture control of britain's own borders yes to decide for itself who may enter the country and under what terms yes does this represent to you and then as i say since you and i spoke there's been an election the tories who backed brexit won a large majority in commons good news correct uh yes absolutely unambiguously um well um i have a lot of criticisms of the johnson administration which has proven itself to be um uh wet instinctively leftist in all sorts of ways and that sort of well just the conservative party always lets you down uh the conservative party always lets its voters down uh it's um without getting into that the by the way again this is i observe the united king just slightly more closely than i observed france so i have another thought here that may strike you is just ridiculous but is it possible that boris johnson had one job really one job and that was to see through brexit yes now that it's done he has already become yesterday's man uh he's at risk of that absolutely he's got he's got a very short time actually to turn this around he's not if we leave the eu with or without a deal i think that's that's boris johnson's job done uh he has proven so far to be a very uh disappointing premiere the excuses for that are um mainly center around the fact that he got the crown of virus very badly and then it shook him and that he's taken some time to shake it off there's considerable public sympathy for that but i think it runs out at a certain point if not already um he has proved to be woefully quiet on things like as i say when we inherited the american blm movement in early june and we started getting statues toppled in the uk as if that had anything to do with us uh johnson uh uh wasn't able to speak out for weeks uh he he saw his own i mean boris johnson's never never retreated from comparisons between himself and winston churchill um and has indeed by writing about church or book length has maybe be said encouraging of them uh when his own personal hero statues were attacked repeatedly johnson remained silent uh so it brought it up there are lots of things like this which are just you were a really good conservative prime minister would never have done margaret thatcher would never have tolerated that for a moment wouldn't have said let's keep our head down particularly not after winning an 80 seat majority but all sorts of reasons boris johnson is so far a very very serious disappointment and i think the conservative party will be right to get rid of him if he continues along this trajectory but the 80-seat majority thing mattered in december because we were stuck in a constitutional crisis in the uk we were stuck in a position of parliament against the people of a dead defunct parliament filled with people who were not willing to see through the result of the 2016 referendum it was a very ugly period in my country's history a very ugly period to be in the uk it was a it was it was a relief i think even for some people who voted to remain simply a relief uh last december that at least now we knew where we were going to go and that we were indeed going out and of course just one other thought on that is as you know in the united states the most important thing really is not it's not that who wins an election or who loses but the the election happens and the government acts based upon it if that fundamental patch breaks down if the 2016 referendum had just happened and as looked likely our parliamentarians have refused to do what the public had said we had a fundamental breakdown in the democratic pact and once that happens anything can happen so i was relieved that we had got to the stage where we were just knew where we were going uh and that is that is a that's not nothing douglas last question and again if i may i'm going to pair two quotations and again the first is you douglas murray in the madness of crowds the agenda of identity politics is now going to be attempted to be rolled out across the western world with unbelievable force energy and determination and all in a spirit of exacting considerable vengeance close quote here's the second quotation and this is president trump speaking in warsaw in 2017 the defense of the west ultimately rests on the will of its people the fundamental question of our time is whether the west has the will to survive do we have enough respect for our citizens to protect our borders do we have the desire and the courage to preserve our civilization in the face of those who will hurt and destroy close quote um you're charming and erudite and a little dark can you cheer us up in answering this last question do you can you can you give us grounds for optimism does the west in the face of the threat from islamicism and the madness we're suffering within does the west have the will to survive um here's one way that i i can answer that which is that we first of all i think we should be very wary of looking for the perfect leader to lead us out of problems that we are in i was very struck the other week in oregon i interviewed a policeman who happened to be black who had spent many decades in the police and was telling me just the the roughness of what police in america have been put through in recent months uh the race is very sobering story he said something very interesting to me at one point he said you know he said they always talk about the the duties of the police but nobody ever talks about what the duties of the citizenry is um uh you know what what if this citizen i mean i'm now extrapolating myself what if the citizens ought to turn out night after night and throw things at public buildings what if the citizenry ordered to treat all law enforcement as some appalling group of reprehensible racists who need to be cleansed from the public square what is the duty of the citizenry now i say this because i've noticed in my life that people always wait for the perfect leader to come along or the perfect figure they always hope that a combination of churchill and roosevelt is going to emerge at the next electoral cycle and you can hear it in in the disappointment which i shared a little bit of that it was that it had to be donald trump giving that speech in warsaw um i i can't deny that although some of it was very much in line with things i've written i can't deny that when i heard donald trump saying we write symphonies i thought yeah i'm not sure youtube made but anyway um i i i we're never led by the perfect person but there's something in the system that persuades us that that's where we'll somehow find redemption or victory and much more and i i'm not persuaded that that is the case in fact i think it's probably the worst way to do it i think the best way to do it is for people to take it upon themselves and i think we touched on a little of this and we spoke what spoke before in the beautiful hills about florence which is that that the owners if you value what we have in the west if you value these freedoms including the freedom of inquiry the freedom of speech freedom to pursue knowledge and indeed to pursue truth don't wait for some political leader to give you the right to speak don't wait for donald trump or kamala harris or joe biden to permit you to think do it yourself find your own way locate your own route through this era don't wait for somebody else to save you from the madness find a way to stay sane yourself you know don't don't don't don't be one of those people and there's cringing people who says things and i come across this all the time who says things like well no one ever told me about that no find out for yourself don't blame other people for your ignorance i was never told about this no most people aren't ever told about anything they find things out for themselves and they educate each other so the great hope i think we have at the moment and i see this all the time is the fact that the smart younger people the smart younger people what we used to call the cool kids yes i'm not interested in this unpleasant protributive doctrinal crap that the radical left has pushed on them the smart kids the cool ones i might say are finding that it is much better to live in a realm of knowledge which includes knowledge which is dangerous and challenging it's much more interesting to hear a plurality of opinion than to have to chant only one through your life my experience is that the better people the smarter people of all backgrounds doesn't matter whether they've got degrees or ever been near a university sometimes it's a lot better if they haven't but the smarter people of every imaginable background are finding a different way through this era they're the people who are going to save this it's not reliant on any politician it probably never was it was reliant on individuals it's the case now just as it always has been in history and today the individuals in our society have a better chance than any of our ancestors did to do this with minimal violence with minimal risk to ourselves and with maximal potential douglas murray author of the strange death of europe and now more recently the madness of crowds thank you douglas it's a great pleasure for uncommon knowledge the hoover institution and fox nation i'm peter robinson [Music] you

Channel: Hoover Institution

Views: 2,819,677

Keywords: Uncommon Knowledge, Peter Robinson, Hoover Institution, Hoover Institute, Gender, Race, Identity, Douglas Murray, Social Justice, Intersectionalism, Identity Group Politics

Id: lp4XhZytdD0

Length: 76min 24sec (4584 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 01 2020