Douglas Murray explains why the West is under attack

as douglas caswell just mentioned um i've written a number of books in recent years which i think this i feel like this one is a sort of culmination of them in some ways because pretty much all of my life i've grappled with one particular problem in the realm of of politics which is um the issue of self-hatred that has been going on in the west in i think throughout my lifetime uh i'm now in my 40s and uh it's been a sort of consistent theme in a lot of my writing um some years ago i wrote a book on immigration called the strange death of europe and um in that question i i looked into the the issue of immigration not just in europe uh specifically then the migrant crisis that was going on in 2015 which i witnessed close up but what the situation is in immigration in all of the developed world um it's an extraordinary thing but you know the developed world obviously attracts people from the developing world who want to come because they're fleeing war sometimes more often fleeing economic deprivation and yet at the same time that the world is demonstrating it wants to come to particularly the west the west has been doing this very strange thing to itself in effectively debasing itself destroying itself i'd argue almost as part of the same process people increasingly in europe and in britain were against borders i noticed as if as if borders were the problem and some politicians even said this that the borders were the problem and the migration was yanser and i thought that was a very curious thing for any society to start to think anyhow i i addressed that issue of immigration assuming that i was going to end my career and um and then i found out i woke up one day and as i was still here so i thought well maybe i'll find the remaining taboos of my time and jump all over them and see if i survive and so i did i wrote a book called the madness of crowds which came out a few years ago and addressed what i say the strange things that have been going on in in western societies particularly in america the odd way in which for instance um identifying as part of a nation state has become more and more unacceptable or we're told it's unacceptable whereas to identify by some other grouping is what you're meant to do you know you're meant to identify by your sex yeah if you're a woman um you want to identify by your sexual orientation if you're gay you're meant to identify by your race as long as you're not white and i saw this strange way in which america in particular was sort of fracturing into these interest groups effectively so that politicians were talking about voters not not as americans or left or right but by these interest groups you know we want to appeal to this particular group and i thought that was very strange in some of those cases very new um and i also noticed then that there was a strange um strange politicization to all of these issues so that you know a distinguished feminist for instance was no longer a feminist if she stopped being left wing you know i thought this is very strange when kanye west came out for republicans he was denounced in the atlantic magazine as no longer black you know a very strange strange rule this when peter thiel came out for donald trump the main gay magazine in new york said that peter thiel wasn't gay any longer very very strange set of sort of ideas that were being pushed on to everyone but so i was sort of going through that in the madness of crowds and then in the last couple of years in particular i i sort of felt like i was getting to the point i was trying to make and putting my finger on it i particularly felt this in the summer of 2020 the post-george floyd period in america because in my mind something very curious happened as you all know in that period the original part of the corona virus era um people were told to stay in their houses and we've all litigated and debated the wisdom of that and much more and it was different from state to state and country to country but broadly speaking in the run-up to those events we had been forced into solitude by government by off by the authorities and one of the things about this that has not been commented upon very much is if you're forced into isolation you lose among other things your social antenna you know um in normal times if somebody says something about you or about your society you know you you see friends that evening go to a bar what do you think about this you know you can have ideas out and you can get a good sense of what people are actually feeling and the post george floyd moment in america i thought was very very worrying because we didn't have our social antenna and around the world i happen to be in the uk at that point i live in america now but i happened to be in the uk at that point um we went in no seconds flat from stay at home because the coronavirus is the problem to go out on the streets and protest in large crowds because racism is a problem and i thought that is a first of all that is a very strange i mean you can get whiplash from that and some of us did um there were medical professionals hundreds of medical professionals in america who signed a letter having told us all to stay in our homes not to see our loved ones not to see relatives and they were dying not to have proper funerals for people much much more not to celebrate the normal passages of life were told not to do these things and then suddenly hundreds of american healthcare professionals said racism is the virus you need to get out onto the streets and i thought this was very troubling for lots of reasons one of which was as i say we'd lost around 10 irons so and a version of america was not just played out in america but played out across the world which i at any rate instinctively felt was totally untrue um now one of the things that that happened in that period was of course it's the nature of mass information in this age one terrible appalling thing can be blown up in such a way that it gives completely distorted view of a society but if your society at that point is not is totally fractured into individuals having to sit in their homes you can doubt that even i did for a time i had a moment thinking are you allowed to do that in america do people do that of course the answer is no this is highly highly uncommon thing that happened an appalling thing but it wasn't america this this was this didn't represent the nation and yet immediately the american public square and the wider international public square was filled with people saying no this is absolutely typical of america first of all they started off with this is characteristic police behavior in america then it was this is because of american society institutional racism endemic racism then it was this is actually not just the case with the us but with the uk and all other western countries as well this is a this is a western problem and i thought that this was a massive massive uh misrepresentation and the way i started to think of it was you know because i was very interested in recent years every single time there was any terrible interaction between the american police and anyone who was unarmed and black everybody in america fought over every detail of it you know and as an outsider i sometimes thought why did they fight so hard over every detail and in the summer of 2020 i was asked by a friend in new york if i wanted to meet a very famous comedian whose name i won't give away in case i self-cancel myself but um and i said yeah of course i'd love to and we met up and the entire conversation consisted of a discussion about the ballistics report into the death of briona taylor and i remember thinking well there are things i thought you were a lot funnier on the screen but anyway um but i thought this is totally normal in america now for everybody to obsess over these specific things i thought why do we obsess over them so much and the answer is because in america it matters because in america it matters and i started to think this is like in america it's like one of those old projection machines you know you if you get the you have to get the details right down here because once you put a light behind it and project this up onto a wall if one of these details is out of place the projection on the wall is completely distorted i think that's what's happened in america in recent years i think we've fought over the details americans have fought over the details in the knowledge that getting the details right in america matters with no disrespect to my country of birth in britain it matters quite a bit in some other countries like belgium it wouldn't matter at all but in in america it really matters america's most important country not only in the west but in the world so so when these misrepresentations of america start to happen you see that the whole projection of america on the wall of the world changes now the actual immediate implications of this are actually provable i give the example in the war on the west of a poll was carried out in 2020 2021 asking americans how many unarmed black americans they believe are killed every year by the american police among people who identified as liberal a significant chunk around 40 percent said they thought that the figure was somewhere between 1 000 and 10 000. among people who identified as very liberal they thought that the number was over ten thousand over ten thousand unarmed black people being killed every year in the us by the police the figure in the quest of the year in question was ten so this showed demonstrably that a significant chunk of america is off by several orders of magnitude about one of the most terrible things going on the year after that the figure was six and by the way i should mention put this in context um that figure of ten more american policemen were killed by armed black men that year than 10. and actually if you want to know i mean one of the ironies i said is to douglas carswell earlier of that figure of ten thousand is that ten thousand actually the number of of black americans killed by other black americans in that year and i i just i think it's astonishing that this this version of america has been projected which which we can now prove includes americans who have a misunderstanding of the country they live in at the most fundamental practical everyday levels now this has other consequences as well which i go into in the book one of those consequences is if you fall for this interpretation of american societies being forced upon america within america by other americans um absolutely everything in america gets looked at in a different light now i was reading the other day um the british historian paul johnson's history of the american peoples and the opening line of this book is he says i'm going to slightly misquote it he says something like the opening line is the history of the american people is the greatest history in the world now i've read that the other day i thought that was only published in 2000 can you imagine somebody a popular mainstream historian opening with that line today they would be crucified for it what do you mean how dare you say that why because everything in the past in america and the wider west has also been played through this same incredibly negative hostile lens everybody in the past is now held to the standards of 2022 and by the way this same thing happens in the uk our greatest national hero winston churchill has also gone through a toppling process in recent years now whenever his name is published by the bbc they link to an article which says the 10 worst crimes of winston churchill one of the crimes was that he had some victorian attitudes about race well he was born in victorian england so it's not that much of a surprise but we saw in the summer of 2020 when the iconoclasm burst out in america we saw the same thing happening in the uk and churchill's statue in parliament square was repeatedly attacked and eventually was boxed up in an iron box so that it wouldn't be pulled down and as i discovered at that point when i was debating with people who were very very hostile about churchill i kept thinking why would you come for churchill and one of the reasons this question kept coming to my mind was first of all why do you why can you put nothing in context you know okay you think he did this thing in 1911 where one miner died in a police response in wales on the other hand he saved the world from nazism you know so surely that's got to count for something um he once said this thing that i don't approve of in 2022 again work out the ledger please um but i was repeatedly thinking why would they come for churchill and one of the answers i came to was because if you want to attack britishness you have to attack winston churchill because that's one of the places where our sense of pride purpose what our parents and grandparents fought for died for this is the one the person who represents this um well a similar process a much bigger much much worse process has been going on in america um as i show in the war on the west absolutely everything in american history has now been run through an entirely negative lens and the negative lens always relies on the following things racism connections with slavery and in the case of the uk of course you have the added issue of empire and something very strange has happened uh first of all you have movements like the 1619 project of the new york times i i write about this project in in in the book a bit and there's and then this project has been torn apart by other people but it was a pleasure to do it again i mean the 1619 project says said that its aim was to rewrite the founding date of america so that it was clearer this is the words of the authors that america was born into the sin of slavery that slavery is the foundational element in american life the way the authors also um i mean they did hit jobs on everything including by the way one that hasn't had enough attention uh was american capitalism um i should um i should tell you that i have some fun with this because the new york times commissioned a completely illiterate sociologist to basically attack american capitalism by saying that it was connected to the plantations he said in particular he says this is new york times doing this that when people sit down in their at their desks in america in the morning they are using things like tracked recorded and analyzed vertical reporting systems double entry record keeping and precise quantification many of these techniques that we now take for granted were developed by and for large plantations as i say um could there be any reason why a system in which things are quote tracked recorded and analyzed might work better than the system in which things are for instance lost ignored and forgotten about the point is that everything by the way part of the illiteracy of that claim of course is the plantation system was nothing to do with capitalism it was a feudal system it had nothing to do with capitalism but the 1619 project the new york times no small thing aimed to rewrite everything in america in this completely negative light and then bit by bit we saw this same thing go through everything in american history we saw it first of all statues of southern generals and others and people were very confused and conflicted about that and i said at the time we have debate about all of that but i i wrote this in the new york post where i come i said i said does anyone know where the stop button is on this thing and in absolutely no time we discovered nobody did um because that same iconoclastic movement of course went for columbus again on again the presumption that it would have been better if columbus had not discovered the americas and that he should either have gone back home and stayed silent or gone back home and said i have discovered a large piece of real estate but it doesn't have any potential you know i mean the attacks on columbus are so strange um and comprehensive now that is i mean dozens and dozens of representations of columbus have come down of course um then we get onto the founding fathers you know we get to the point in 2020 in the summer of 2020 where when then president trump gives his speech at mount rushmore the cnn correspondent says the president is going to kick off independence day weekend this weekend by standing in front of an image of two slavers on standing on stolen land i thought if you've decided that mount rushmore is stolen land and your founders are just slavers nothing else to be said about them then what exactly is left of this republic what are you what are you talking about um and so it moved on to the founding fathers this very strange thing thomas jefferson completely rewritten one aspect of jefferson's life that was maybe not that well known about 100 years ago becomes the only thing that any school child knows and in the city where i live in new york again this had consequences just last year thomas jefferson statue is voted to be removed by the council they pull him down crate him up and wheel him through a back door and one of the members of the new york council said well of course because thomas jefferson doesn't represent our values well anyway um you move forward you get to the civil war you get of course the criticisms of the south but you also get the same criticisms of the north you have one of the most admired figures in american history lincoln there used to be some unity about um portrayed in the same night i was in portland oregon the morning after they pulled down the mob pulled down the statue of lincoln there and a few months later the authorities in boston didn't even have to wait for the mob they took down their statue of link lincoln before the mob got to it um and then i came back to the same thing i was thinking in the case of britain well why would you come for abraham lincoln i mean i speak to one of his biographers recently and aside from his extraordinary success as president um i mean that story of lincoln is one of the great american success stories i mean as this biographer has said to me abraham lincoln was basically born in the iron age i mean they had nothing nothing you know abraham lincoln had maybe one year's formal education in his entire life the rest was all self-taught all self-taught and he ra and he rose to the highest position in the land so this is one of by any standards this is one of the great american stories it's a story of heroism it's a story of achievement it's a story of pulling yourself up and making something of your life so i came back to the same thing i had with churchill was of course you have to come for the founding fathers of course you have to come for lincoln you have to come for roosevelt you have to come for absolutely everybody even come from martin luther king now who's also deemed not to be up to scratch by the standards of the 2020s you've got to come for absolutely everybody because then we lose our story then americans lose the right to their own story they're told first of all your history is terrible and then you have no right to feel any pride in it because there's nothing good in it now this remorseless lens i should say is not used by any society other than western societies on itself this is a very strange thing going on in the modern west you know most peoples want to think well of themselves all societies have something good to be said about themselves only today in the modern west do we allow ourselves to be talked about in this extraordinary relentless hostile light and i was doing another interview last night and a journalist said to me well you know isn't part of the point of history you know that things get rewritten and reapproached and we're always you know i said sure as i say in the book i i don't want to stop any debate i enjoy it i think we can always benefit from it and sometimes we can laugh at it but but in this interview said well well what are you against and i said i'm i'm against people who are entirely negative and hostile about the societal critics and this the interviewer said well how can you tell the difference and i said to him well it was a radio interview i said you know you can tell it in your life i can tell it in my life i said to him if if i said to you now look you're no good as a radio presenter well if i said him first i said if i said to you look you're a great presenter but there's this thing you could do to be better you might listen to me you might not you don't have to but if i said to you you're no good as a radio presenter in fact you're terrible you've got a face for radio but you don't have a voice for radio um you don't seem to know anything and everyone hates you and much much if i just went along like this i said would you say what an interesting critic or would you say this guy really doesn't seem to like me and i'm going to try to ignore what he says well i think it's the same thing with nations i think if somebody says and it always is the case there are things you can improve in your society then we listen i mean america in particular listens to that western democracies are very good at listening to criticism that's how we've developed how our opinions have changed how societal norms change we listen we're interested but if somebody says there's just nothing good about you you know you've been rotten from the start you're not dealing with a critic you're dealing with an opponent and you know i i i try to put i try in the war on the west to add the context which nothing in our time seems to have you know i make the point that you know none of this is what about tree which is one of the left's claims i make the point that for instance at the time that america was involved in slavery everybody in the world was involved in slavery every civilization in history had had slavery of some kind you know if we're going to pull down things created by slavery you better get going on the pyramids in egypt uh people who built those weren't paid a fair day's wage for fair day's labor um you know the parthenon in athens wasn't built by our sabbaties it was built by slavery um you've got to pull that down you know america was normal at the time for this by the way i mentioned in in the uh in the war in the west that this isn't to diminish the transatlantic slave trade but the atlantic slave trade saw perhaps 12 million people taking apostate across the atlantic most to america i always remind not most not to america so i have to remind people i mean the brazilian slave trade continued until the 1880s um but at the same time 18 million one eight million people were taken from africa and sold into slavery in the arab countries why do we not know anything about this why does nobody mention this well among other things because all 18 million of them were deliberately made sure there would be no future generation the arabs castrated all the males so there would be no more black africans in the arabian peninsula that has a consequence to this day by the way i have a great friend was born in somalia who spent part of her upbringing in saudi arabia and she was the first person to alert me to the fact that in in saudi arabia and other countries in the middle east today the word for a black um person is abid or abeed which is slave literally the word they use in the arab countries for black people is slave um and one of the things i think that is coming to us through this strange period of self-hatred of ourselves is an inability to look around the rest of the world we are so busy tearing at closed wounds in our own societies i wonder whether we even have the interest in looking around the rest of the world today you know there are forty million four zero million slaves in the world today that is more slaves than there were in the world in the 19th century and if we could just get the past in america and the rest of the west into some perspective we might do something about that you know uh whilst we talk about racism in america and endlessly tear over you know six or ten bad police interactions with black americans in a year 1 million chinese muslims are in concentration camps as i speak might we get some of this into some perspective it seems to me that getting that into some perspective is absolutely crucial you know and i'll i'll hand over to you shortly but in the 21st century there's there's only one power in the world likely to overtake america as the world's foremost economy and that's china run by the chinese communist party and i i i often try to find it goes back to what carl said earlier about young people and trying to make sure that some of these ideas get to them i often try to like put in a nutshell what what you should say to various critics indeed haters of america in the west and one of the things i often say to people is you know people who complain about the appallingness of our own societies how we're terrible we're racist we're this we're that i would say you know if you if if you didn't like the american period of power you're going to love the chinese communist one you know do take your your human rights camp complaints to the chinese communist party and see what they say you know and in a way this is important to bear in mind because again it comes back to this thing that the things that we attack ourselves on are so often our virtues you know the late daniel patrick moynihan once said that in his time at the united nations in new york and then not the happiest job for anyone to have um he's daniel patrick moynihan said that one of the things he realized was that claims of human rights violations could almost always be said to be an exactly inverse proportion to the number of human rights violations explain what he meant a country in which you hear endless talk about human rights violations is likely to be a country that is concerned about that whereas countries in which you never hear about that is because they don't care now there's a follow-on problem for that which young people in particular in particular can fall into which is the mistaken assumption therefore the societies in which human rights violations are most commonly said to occur a young person might think are indeed the worst countries that i would submit is one of the things that young americans have been told in recent years have been persuaded into that the country they hear the most about is in fact not the best but the worst and just to finish before i i say in uh in the book that you know there are some very practical things people can do to turn this around i've taken enormous inspiration in the last year or so from the action that american parents have taken you know american parents who discovered apart from anything else doing covered what their kids were being taught and you know they didn't wait for a political leader to come along and tell them you know what to think or anything they you know they needed support but this was just americans rising up and saying no you don't get to do this and there's an enormous amount that can be achieved by exactly that there's a lot of very practical and good things that are happening here in america but the second thing is one of the things i sort of close on in the book is but we have to find a way to turn around this society in which resentment has become key and i say resentment because as i say resentment is one of the deep deep human emotions and we can all have it we all fall prey to it at some point and some people as we all know get stuck in it and this is nothing to do with racial it's not nothing religious it's nothing it's not even by socioeconomic class who doesn't know somebody who's got almost nothing materially but is somebody filled with gratitude and love and and equally who doesn't know somebody who seems to have a lot and is filled with resentment about not having more or somebody did them down once my point is is that that's a very fundamental human emotion resentment and you can be encouraged into it you can be encouraged into being a resentful person well it's the same thing with a society a society can be encouraged into being a resentful society you don't have everything you want and somebody else is to blame not everything in the past was exactly to your liking so tear down the past somebody in history 200 years ago had a wrong done to them and you're going to assume that wrong unto yourself you're going to tear at a closed wound and then cry about the pain that's being caused to you you know that that is a perfectly possible human emotion we can be encouraged as individuals and as a society into it but the opposite is also possible the only thing that cancels out resentment in your life and as a country is gratitude is the only deep answer to the resentful person there is by the way nietzsche says this but there is a there is one very unpleasant thing you can do to a resentful person which is not very popular but i'll tell you what it is by the way is to say you're right there is somebody who's destroyed your life there is somebody who's held you back there is somebody who stopped you getting forward the person's you problem is nobody wants to hear that but it's it's necessary at times but other than that direct intervention the most important thing you can do is to turn your life around into gratitude and that's the thing that i think we need to try to encourage a new generation of americans and other people in the west to have not why was everything in the past not directly in line with what i believe and want in my life now but what what was good that has allowed me the things i've had i have now that are good and as i say towards the end of the war in the west we know that there must be something good about the west and the world knows there must be something good about the west because the number one destination in the world that people want to come to is america and there's a bit of a gap after that but numbers two three and four are britain canada and and uh somewhere else in europe i can't remember where the point is is that if um as i thought when i was covering the migration crisis in 2015 the boats came in only one direction the boats were coming into europe from north africa in the middle east boats heading off from north africa to the southern shores of europe do not meet boats coming the other way they don't meet french people and italians trying to flee tuscany and make it to north africa you know they and it's the same in america the millions of illegal migrants who come over the border every year is a massive challenge for this country but those migrants walking north breaking into america do not meet people going the other way they do not meet millions of texans desperate to make it to venezuela okay there's a reason and one of the reasons i submit i say in the book is that's because the world recognizes that the west has done something right and they want to be part of it and my suggestion to the people of the west is to recognize first of all that fact that the footfall tells us something the footfall tells us something and secondly to recognize that if you've got something good now which we have it's not a sheer chance it's because you did something right in the past if you're good in the present it means something must be good about you in the past now people around the world know that part of my hope part of my aim with this book is to make sure the peoples of the west know that thank you well that was outstanding um do you have some questions who would like to hey douglas great speech um i want to get your thoughts on the bible administration's new ministry of truth or disinformation governance board and um if you see any hope in the future of us coming out of this cancer culture that we're being dragged [Music] yes i'm sure you're all familiar with the new ministry of truth being set up by the department of homeland security which isn't at all an example of government overreach um it's amazing isn't it fantastic that the um the lady who they want to appoint um herself seems to have got absolutely everything wrong she claimed that the hunter biden laptop story was a disinformation so if your disinformation czar believes that a story that's true is disinformation it seems to me she's not greatly qualified for the role um and by the way that that is a very sinister one i mean you know i i just i write a comment in your post i'm writing it today but i was saying in that that you know we have the answer to these problems already in america it's called the first amendment the first amendment allows you to argue things out not in the idea that you just have a noisy cacophony but in the fact that you get to the truth the minute you appoint people you decide what americans can hear as well as what they can say you don't have that situation you have to rely on your i said this on fox the other morning i wouldn't trust myself to be the disinformation czar i wouldn't because nobody could perform that role i couldn't perform it this stuff is litigated in the public square by the american press and free media arguing things over politicians arguing things over the american public arguing things over that's the only answer but i mean who would you appoint to tell you what you're allowed to read in advance of an election i mean you know we saw actually with again the new york post story we saw that the people the tech companies appoint they're totally unsuited for the task they don't know what they're doing so it worries me immensely as for the um the question of the council culture i'm very positive about this long term as i say i think in the short term we're in for rocky old time but in the in in the long term i think it's going to be okay and already there are some signs of of it being okay we were discussing with dinner last night that um i have an analogy for what council culture is which some people in this audience will will recognize it um if you've ever seen a sheepdog trying to hurt a flock of sheep you'll know that there it doesn't run straight into the middle of the pack you know it doesn't doesn't run straight it runs to the edges of the herd and it nips at them well that's what the council culture people are trying to do and have been doing in recent years they find people on the edges of the herd and they nip at them in order the rest of the herd says oh gosh you know i'm going to have to go this way and the radical left in america has been really effective at that you know they they call people right-wing who are libertarians they call people far-right who are leftists they they smear everyone you know most recently by the way and with some consequences what they've been saying about dave chappelle and they get one of america's most talented and brilliant comedians and they defame him until of course somebody's going to take a run at him on stage at some point because you've said this guy is a danger because because words are violence but violence isn't violence you know and um but they've been doing these horrible attempts to take out my friend joe rogan who i saw a couple of weeks ago in austin i said this to him on his podcast you know they really came for him to take him out i caught this every single trick in the book and i said to him you know well done for surviving and he said well it helped the people leading the charge with cnn because no one believes them um but but you know these people they try to take out they've actually there are now people they're surviving that and they're more than surviving like joe they are really thriving so i'm hoping that if you identify that that's what's happening that we're being nipped at the edges to behave in a certain way the thing to do to avoid that is is don't allow them to take anyone out by those means you know and in particular stand up for your friends and the people you know and you like when that's tried on them you know it's one of the absolute cardinal rules i think we can get through that um there are some strategic things you could do one of which is to try to nip at them in turn but um but in general yeah i i i have this this instinct that it'll it'll it'll be okay after a few more kind of rough years but the rough years include people not giving up things they know to be true and not conceding to things they know to be lies you know absolutely don't be demoralized into saying yes when you know that that's not true you know okay you might have to shout out so how did we get to the point where we can have those conversations where you're not just surrounded by people who look like you or who are going to agree with you how do we get to a comfortable space not that it won't be and make us uneasy but how do we get to a space where we can have those conversations with each other and do not feel canceled or my parents who fought for the rights of that march how can we say that two things can be bad like we are capable of saying that there are multiple things that have happened and they thought it occurred um but i'm not carrying my parents burden right but i can acknowledge their burden and what they mentioned because my mother's very much thought how do we get to that yeah it's a very good question um i mean you know the first thing is i mean uh i speak all over the place and all sorts of audiences and very diverse and you know um travel all over this country and as i'm saying lunch always go in particular anywhere i haven't already been you know um and as as for the the how you have a proper discussion on it i mean i think there's several things i mean one is you cut is not allow bad actors into the space a bad faith actors and i think that that has been something which has happened recently let me give you a quick example one of the people i i critique particularly in the opening of the war in the west is this person called robin d'angelo who wrote a book called white fragility you probably know i mean i actually had to read the book i mean lots of people bought it but i actually had to read it and d'angelo is a real piece of work because she she's white herself of course and she just makes assertions that are totally untrue i mean she was interviewed on one of the networks um by a female journalist a couple years ago who said to her um you know you say that um and she she put one of d'angelo's crazily like racist as she saw statements to diane jones said what evidence do you have for this and d'angelo's response was i think she said i think there's a type of glee among white americans when black bodies are punished so she answered one unproved assertion by making another even wilder unprovable assertion um and nobody sort of picked her up on this and in fact d'angelo will not i jordan peterson and i had offered um money to debate deangelo the money to go to a charity so come out and debate your ideas you're meant to be a public intellectual public intellectuals go out into the public arena and they they argue she will not debate anyone same thing with ibrahim excandi he's one of the other big figures of the era he will not debate his own ideas so i think that's a problem you know i always say i i've i've debated all kinds of people in my life you know and i think it's part of your job as a public intellectual to do that whenever you're asked whenever you can but i am very struck by the fact that the people making the most radical assertions about america today will not debate them and that is a very negative development that did not used to be the case you know like in your mother's generation you guessed it healthiest but that was not the case with prominent american black intellectuals for instance i mean they goodness knows they knew how to argue in public and have their ideas out and be challenged and challenged in return you know it's impossible not to see something like james baldwin's debates like his debate against william f buckley and not i mean just be that wasn't somebody who was afraid about debating his ideas you know but this there is a new generation of people forcing much much more radical ideas much more radical ideas on the american public who will not discuss them i always go wherever i'm asked you know to talk about my ideas and i always say whenever i speak to university for instance i always say i'm here for as long as you've got you know answered many questions as you have because i think that's part of the fun of it but i am really struck by an an unwillingness now to engage in ideas but so i mean anytime you can find me anyone who's actually willing to you know do a debate a different audience in a different place i'm there but my own ticket that's where i hand up here uh hey douglas uh i uh i really enjoyed your speech and i loved your book uh in it uh in it i noticed you you very uh several times you you would differentiate between good faith arguments and bad faith arguments from the left um uh i i guess my question is you know if you look back in the past of conservatives and people on the write up sometimes just been a bit reflexive against the left uh and uh you know the william that's buckley quoted about history and yelling stock comes to mind uh how do conservatives and freedom-minded people uh fight the war on the west without just pulling into the trap of becoming a reflective against uh the everything that's a very good question actually because it's um it's slightly linked to the previous one because there is a big temptation always in political life and cultural battles and so on um to do back to your opponents what you think they've done to you you know and it's a big you know there's a big issue on that the ron desantis bill is an ex example i think the descent is what he did was smart and and i think that if a company makes wild political interventions and has protected status in a place then you know okay you're not any longer an entertainment company or some kind of weird political actor and i actually i think that sort of action is totally reasonable there isn't there is a there is however a layer you can get to which is very dangerous and it's a layer i've spoken about before which exists in all of our politics today which is the desire not just to defeat your opponent opponent but to hurt them you know and i worry about that because in the process of that you do something which is likely to not only hurt your opponent but hurt you as well you know who famously said when a man is willing to pick up any stick to beat an opponent he might find that he's picked up a boomerang um there is a there is something that you destroy in yourself if you give up all principles all rules you know you become the thing you think you're battling um but i think that i think that this is a challenge that conservatives are thinking about at the moment is effectively you know do we fight fire with fire if so is there a limit to how we do it or can we do it in a reasonable way and there's a there's a big debate on the american right in this i just wanted to make one other point as i say is related to the previous question as well which is um i think we have to be very very careful in america in particular at the moment that we don't end up in this vengeance cycle and i think it can happen politically and i think it happens on the race issue as well um the person i just referred to ibrahim x kendi in his book um titled i think rather inaccurately how to be an anti-racist says the answer to past discrimination is present discrimination and the answer to past injustice is present in justice this this reminds me of something i wrote about in the madness of crowds there was a because i think this is something it's a temptation in all social movements and it's particular in our day to do with racism there are people like kennedy who say because it was undoubtedly the case that black americans historically were prejudiced against we should be prejudiced against white americans today it's almost if you could it's like an over-correction let's let's do that in order to get to normal one thing i say is in my observation you never do get back to normal in that if you over swing the pendulum it doesn't reassert itself by some force of nature you might have just sent the whole thing spinning off elsewhere i give the example in my previous book in the madness of crowds on this with the worst fringes of the feminist movements the best fringes of feminist movements or the best parts of the feminist movement delivered right you know votes for women and much more but there was a moment in third and fourth wave feminism where you got particularly strident american feminist who said things like men are the problem like at that point you get what you're doing at that point is saying because women didn't have the same opportunities as men historically let's beat up on men now right well are you sure that's going to work you know are you sure you're going to win your battle by alienating 50 of the population you know um and and i think we have to really resist that temptation in america and the west that this idea that the the response to past injustice is present-day injustice you know the response to past injustice for any group is present-day equality that's it time for a couple more questions um did anyone i saw a hand up at that table yes sir i had more of a kind of an observation to see what your thoughts were but one thing that comes to mind that implements the era is the uh image created by goya sleep reason gives birth to demons and looking at working with history and interpretation for decades i've seen what's been presented has been prior to all this pc stuff it gets very naive i noticed in your early pages of boral the west give the image of the national trust properties in britain and how they're initially interpreted as just in terms of just the facts just beautiful things to see but now they're being twisted into something used in a bludgeon and there in the earlier presentation you don't see a real awareness but consist of a bigger picture that would compel people and in in that void created by this you've had these the uh leftist marching in and much of this being perpetuated by the institutions we'll send the united states uh preservation agencies have created a result of the national historic preservation act 1966 they're just basically like the national trust creating neutral impotent symbols of the past that don't motivate anybody and now in that vacuum comes in today yes it's a great image the the sleep of reason by the way it's also it's a very practical thing in our own day i i in the chapter on religion in this book i talk about not only the attack on judeo-christian values but the attack on secular and enlightenment values of the kind that the american founding fathers were very familiar with in recent years every single enlightenment philosopher has been brought down quite literally um voltaire the great french secularists his statues now disappeared in paris it was assaulted so many times the authorities removed it people used to credit voltaire as being one of the most important figures in helping lead to the separation of church and state um david hume who spent much of his life working to ensure make sure that rationalism became the basis of discourse not clerical claims uh has had his name removed from buildings in his native scotland because of you know things that have claimed about him in the past same thing with almost everybody john stuart mill all the people who gave us the modern understanding of rationalism and reason have one by one being torn down and by the way there's a consequence from that that comes from that there's a consequence that comes from that and we see it in a really practical way in america um i i towards the end of the book i talk about what what is happening in teaching terms in america as a result of these you know 50 000 feet ideas where they hit the where the rubber hits the road um one of them you can see in the american teaching unions with for instance the claim in what's now called equitable maths actual math that um that correct answers in maths are racist and that in the western scientific method is racist why because they could say it was come up with by dead white men which is actually also not true um it's partly true but all of these things now are said to be the products again of racism and much more and this has results i mean it's the same thing as the claim that for instance um we should do away with standardized testing because standardized testing is racist this is why we ran no lesser figure than randi weingarten says this um these claims are disastrous reason the process of reason testing standardized testing accuracy and much more are the way are the best ways not only for society to work they're also the best ways for any individual any economic any racial background to get out of economic deprivation the best way to work hard to be tested to prove yourself to get up and out these these are the ladders that have been created in in the west to get people out and the attack on reason the sleep of reason in the west now includes this pretense that the things that are actually the best ladders in our society need to be brushed away i think it's disastrous i'm going to come in with um the last question of my own if i may um i think it's really important to always leave an event like this on an upbeat note your book is certainly an alarm call for america you identify lots of things that have gone wrong throughout the west but you are first and foremost i think an optimist why yeah it's it's it's true i'm very glad you answered tonight i thought when you said i'm going to come in with a question i thought douglas carson was going to really come in for the kill um no i am it's true i say short term as i mentioned earlier short term i think there's a lot of um a lot of challenges in this country and in the wider west but long term i think that it's i think there's an enormous amount of optimism that we can have and it is it is that thing i said earlier it's what douglas you made to achieve here with the crt bill it's it's it's what it's what i mentioned in the sort of the parents revolt i think this is this terrific thing in america in particular where you know i said it's a tucker castle a while ago in an interview you know there's a moment in life when you realize that this the cavalry never comes you're the cavalry you know um the cavalry is you um and and i think americans are better than anyone else that realizing that they're like you're the cavalry that saves the day you can't just sit around put your feet up and expect someone else to be you know is that all of this gets solved by the american public making good decisions and you know i i mentioned earlier that issue of you know as it were the luck we feel that we have in the west and some people don't know what to do with at the end of the quote the book i quote somebody might be surprising branch ricky once said a beautiful phrase we've become very fond of he said he said luck is the residue of design luck is the residue of design i love that phrase is that what you have is not just luck it's it's that people have made good decisions in the past for you that have allowed you to be in the situation we're in today in a state like this you know people making good decisions before us is why we have the freedoms we have today and if you accept that then a very important mantle falls on your shoulders which is then it's our job to make good decisions today for the people who come after and as i say i'm of the opinion that we don't wait around for any statesman to lead us to that position because the greatest person doesn't just turn up and you know wait for you to vote for them it's it's it's the american public and i have i have developed in the time i've been here and for many years before i've developed a great trust that the american public will come to their own rescue that's why i'm optimistic [Music] [Applause]

Channel: Mississippi Center for Public Policy

Views: 14,920

Keywords: douglas murray, reparations, western culture, mississippi

Id: dLa9pflLwWw

Length: 57min 51sec (3471 seconds)

Published: Thu May 12 2022