Douglas Murray: Reflections on the Revolution in America

well good evening everybody thank you for uh being here this evening nice to get back out in person to actually be around people just to make this clear chris this is not a zoom meeting it's not a zoom meeting great it's nice to see friendly faces and my name is mike ferguson i'm the host of the morning show on news talk stl uh wonderful to work with my friends at the show me institute again i've spent a lot of time actually used to work for the shelby institute uh with show me opportunity as well and now here we are with news talk stl if you have not checked us out yet please do in st louis city we're at 101.9 and if you are in st charles county north and into the illinois area it is 94.1 of course newstalkstl.com and we've got all of the social media sites that uh that you can join us on facebook twitter i've heard we're on instagram my daughter tells me i'm not cool enough to be on instagram but newstalk stl is uh out there so we've got a couple of introductions there's probably a few people still looking for some parking uh so we'll have a few people trickle in so a few introductions for everybody but i just wanted to again say thank you it's so nice to get out in person we've got a great night of just thought provoking conversation we are going to have a question and answer session um after this so uh when you're listening to uh to douglasbee be thinking about what you want to hear from him because we're going to answer as many questions as we possibly can and with that i'm going to hand it over to the co-host of our afternoon program chris harps thank you and as mike said i am the co-host of the tim jones and chris arps show and before we get started i just want to acknowledge some of the newstalk stl staff that are here first and foremost i want to acknowledge the greatest executive producer in radio katie fitzpatrick i want to also introduce the producer for the mike ferguson morning show ken williams back in the back and then i want to uh introduce the 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proud to say that i was a staffer for senator talent at one time and rumor has it and i don't think it's a rumor is that she was the one who ran his first campaign for congress brenda's passion is for missouri to be a light of freedom and prosperity among other states brenda tallant thank you chris the show me institute is so pleased to partner with national review institute with news talk stl and show me opportunity to bring you this program tonight i see many faces that know about the show me institute but if you don't we are an independent research and education organization we focus on missouri fiscal and economic policies from a free market lens we don't believe that more government is the solution to every problem facing our citizens instead we promote solutions that really try to empower people to to to tap into their creativity their individuality to solve the problems facing our state please learn more about us at showmeinstitute.org on facebook at show me institute or on twitter at show me and we do have materials right over there which you can pick up and if you'd like to learn more we have cards that you can fill out so i'd encourage you to do that so now i turn to my main uh job for this this evening and that is to introduce you to chris cien cimino chris is the director of regional development and national review institute in this role he's responsible for managing relationships with the national review institute friends and donors um all in the midwest he's in a he came to town from milwaukee where he lives with his wife two daughters two dogs and two cats and rumor has it that he's a brewers fan but we'll try not to hold that against him so chris would you like to say a few words [Applause] thank you brenda it's a true it's not just a rumor it's true and we went out with a whimper but i think we lost to the eventual champion so at least i can take some solace in that uh like brenda said my name is christine cimino i'm director of regional development for national review institute i typically go on way too long with these things i'm going to read right from my script and i apologize first brenda i want to thank you and your absolutely fantastic staff who's here for bringing this all together thanks to news talk stl for co-hosting this and promoting it i always came into town yesterday i heard it on the radio and i heard there was going to be a great crowd which is news to me and i was thrilled that that it was it's turning out that way i see a lot of familiar faces in the room so nice to see a lot of people that i know and making looking forward to making some new friends while i'm here national review institute if you are not familiar is a the non-profit organization founded by william f buckley jr to support the editorial mission of national review magazine today we strive to preserve and promote the legacy of william buckley jr and we do that by supporting some of the top talent at national review and also by building programs that support their work and we're expanding the kinds of programs that we have so that we can support other aspects of bill buckley's legacy to the millions of americans that whether they're familiar with bill buckley or not have been touched by the conservative principles he championed and the movement he spearheaded one example for instance is our new national review capital matters project which champions unabashedly capitalism this new section in national review magazine features articles on economics finance and polynet policy analysis and is done from a strictly pro-business pro-free market perspective with what we call a national review sensibility you won't find any headlines in capital matters about the failures of capitalism or the term fair share while there are plenty of business sites out there as you know very few with the possible exception of the wsj editorial page offer this unapologetic perspective even that's maybe debatable these days national reviews online platform reaches over 6 million readers a month and with national review institute support it is able to continue expanding this section to our growing audience we do have some swag and some magazines back there so if you pick up a national review magazine you'll see capital matters section i didn't put it in my remarks but you can visit nrinstitute.org to learn more information about what we do in our programming another example of some of our programming expansions what we call our brick to buckley program an eight session dinner discussion series for mid-career professionals this program explores the foundations of conservative thought and builds a network of talented individuals who wish to engage in a rigorous examination of conservative principles and how they apply to the issues of the day incorporating readings from burke to buckley as you get as you can expect participants discuss the readings each week with a leading conservative thinker currently operating in dallas new york chicago and philadelphia we are pleased to be expanding this program to miami this spring if you happen to know anyone in any of those cities that would like to participate please have them visit our website those are just two simple ways where national review institute works to amplify the work of the magazine and promote our top writers beyond those pages and speaking of our top writers which gets me to my key job tonight we are so pleased to have one of them with us tonight in douglas murray douglas is a best-selling author an award-winning political commentator and a senior fellow at national review institute he has written books on terrorism and national security freedom of speech douglas's latest book the madness of crowds gender race and identity which i see several copies of tonight i see some people got it autographed very well done investigates the rise of woke culture and identity politics he's associate editor of the spectator which if i have my history correct is the oldest weekly magazine in the world and a fox news contributor his new book the war on the west is coming out this april and you can pre-order that now it will inform some of his talk tonight we are so pleased to have him stateside with us tonight ladies and gentlemen douglas murray thank you very much [Applause] thank you thank you so much um what a great pleasure it is uh to be in this fine city and to see all of you here tonight it's a real pleasure it's my first time here and i should thank the show me institute the national review institute and news talk stl for arranging this evening and i'm really looking forward to mike and chris um who i i i don't know if we're having some questions before we go to you or whether the plan is that they are here to protect me from you in some way we'll have to see but um i i really am up for any questions you want to ask or anything i mention in my remarks and and anything i don't as well please feel free to when we get to q a ask whatever you like because it's a bit i really enjoy um let me just say also it's um a particular thrill to be in st louis because um s lewis was the birthplace in home of a man who completely changed my life um and i've spent part of today on the trail of him that man is t.s eliot um i went uh this morning to locust street to see the the place where he was born and spent his childhood years and and then to westminster which is a more salubrious street these days than locust street and um without making any slight against the fine residents of locust street who doubt this are all here tonight and are going to speak in the q a um but i wanted to mention him because uh the reason he changed my life was the same reason that he changed the life of one of my great friends and mentors the late roger scrutin roger wrote in his memoir in his own memoirs uh gentle regrets that t.s eliot had saved him from oswald spengler let me just tease out what that means uh spengler wrote a very famous work in the uh 19 teens called the decline of the west and this saw western decline as effectively inevitable for reasons that spangler lays out at enormous length and it's extraordinarily searing and intense work which swept a lot of people along including the young roger scrutin and roger says in general regrets that that it was t.s eliot who saved him from spenglerism and i had exactly the same experience not just with spengler but with other writers as well what is it that made t.s eliot able to have this influence and have have this influence still um if i was to nail it down to one thing it isn't just his extraordinary insight into the possibility of the regaining of time which is a concept which i could go on about all night it's it's about something else it's about the possibility of cultural revival it's a possibility that things that are dead can be reborn things that seem to be lost can be found just because something has gone for a period sometimes of millennia does not mean they're lost forever uh there are quotations he gives in his works particularly in the wasteland uh which from for instance from dante if you meet any student at any western university and ask them to tell you something about dante the most likely thing is they know about dante because of t.s eliot so a man born in saint louis has in our own day led students back to a florentine poet from the 15th century and that's a remarkable thing not just because it demonstrates that's possible in literature it demonstrates that it's possible across the wider culture the possibility of revival revivification of the culture now um this slightly cheekily titled talk reflections on the revolution in america is of course referring to a work which uh by the somebody who has just mentioned edmund burke edelman burke now regarded as perhaps the greatest foundational philosopher of conservatism was in his day perhaps not really regarded so much as a philosopher he was a parliamentarian and a pamphlet here and much more but his reflections on the revolution in france another searing work had one intention in particular uh not to simplify this work it was to do this thing it was to cut britain off from the influence of revolutionary france after 1789 thinkers like burke parliamentarians like burke patriots like burke in my country of birth were horrified by what they saw across the channel this was if you like an early form of socialism it was an early form of marxism it was it pre-marks marxism uh the slogans of the revolution in france were all the slogans that you can hear today about uh equality and fraternity and uh edmund burke was not the first well he was one of the first but he was certainly the most perceptive to recognize the people talking about equality did not seem to be very good at it in practice and there was an awful lack of fraternalism when they got to the terror and burke's insight apart from things and one of the things that makes him a conservative philosopher is that he had this instinct that sometimes drove him to excess in the reflections and the revolutions in france he ends up in one passage famously not just defending but revering mary antoinette which in historical terms is is a dubious proposition she she has good critics um but but he does this why because his instinct is that whatever the status quo was whatever its downsides everything that the revolutionaries were planning was going to be a hell of a lot worse and he was right he foresees everything that's going to come next there's a wonderful moment in hillary mantel's novel on the french revolution a place of greater safety where the revolutionaries are in the parliament trying to debate their rights that they're going to now acquire they're so thrilled about the rights they're going to have and hillary mantel has a great moment where she says some people in the council wanted to talk of laws but that was a less exciting proposition so that was put off for another day um so burke in his day was trying to cut england off from the influence of revolutionary france and he was one of a huge number of people who had an effect to help make that possible one of the reasons i chose this title uh say cheeky title for the talk tonight is because something slightly similar is happening in our own time and it's something which a lifelong admirer lover of america saddens me enormously which is that there is now a global attempt around the world particularly in the west for countries to cut themselves off from america and specifically from american culture this by the way is a new thing i've written quite often in the past about bad thought ideas that have permeated from my side of the atlantic to this side of the atlantic and hands up there's no shortage of them particularly from france i should say um but uh but to a great extent you know america has imported some terrible ideas from the european continent today something extraordinary is happening countries across western europe across the whole of europe my own country trying to cut themselves off from the influence of american culture as it now is in france this is perhaps most developed french academics recently joined together to sign a declaration which in france really matters they signed this this joint letter saying that we mustn't allow the importing of american academic culture to our country we must keep it out uh the president of the republic the president macron who's not a man of the right sort of squidgy center somewhere president macron has said the same thing we want to cut ourselves off from these cultural imports coming from america that is a quite extraordinary thing to have and to be hearing from uh the french president and from senior thinkers and philosophers across france why are they doing it it's the same reason that the my own country of birth great britain this is happening to some degree it's because people are realizing that there is some terrible thought disease that has been coming out of this country which works hideously in this country and is highly unlikely to be working around the rest of the world so having given you some bad ideas you seem to be giving us some back now what is the revolution some people say it's the media and i could go on all night about the nature of the media and what's been going wrong in this country and other countries in the west the media which i've spent my life in is um is riven with troubles these days you by the way have some troubles that we don't have back home some of us were talking about this over dinner last night in britain we have a very strong right of center print media i noticed that can't be said in the u.s or indeed in this state um but there is definitely a problem in our era of people effectively bifurcating we absorb different media we absorb different opinions absorb different news and then there's this follow-on from that that's got so much worse in american culture in recent years something i noticed last year when i was covering the election and went through only about 10 states or so but i noticed it very close up and wrote about this for national review among other places you noticed that uh people now had their own facts and just couldn't agree on things that had happened i i was wondering having not at that point been in the u.s for a couple of years i was wondering why whenever i sat down an american dinner table when i was invited uh why i would find that people would just row furiously with each other [Music] families friends former friends everyone was falling out over everything and i realized that one of the fundamental things is that we couldn't agree on things that had happened i i realize that many people as with couldn't agree that donald trump had won the last election the 2016 election they just didn't think he had uh then we had the added problem after the last election of another part of the population saying that that election had gone the other way so if you can't agree on who wins elections you're in real trouble i mean you're in real trouble not least because one of the great things about losing elections and i say this um having many friends who've lost many elections in many countries one of the great things about losing an election is that when you lose you need to work out why you've lost and try to win next time and i mean the fact that the democrats spent four years not working out why they lost in 2016 and pretending it was because of a russian bot was their loss but it was also america's loss i think and the same thing is at risk with the republican party i have to say i think that there is a great risk that if uh if there can't be a real reckoning with how this happened and sorting out of it this isn't going to get any better now all that can be said about the media about echo chambers about uh um the loops that people are in the positive feedback loops that people are in but that seems to me not to be the absolute center of what is going on in this country that's so difficult at the moment the central thing that's going on this country at the moment is so difficult it seems to me is this it is that there has emerged a very fundamental attempt to rewrite the story of america to entirely reframe the history of this great nation uh and i want to give just four examples of where i see this really clear in uh just the last couple of years and i'm gonna refer to direct quotes just so that i don't get any of this wrong the first you'll be unsurprised perhaps to hear is the 1619 project launched by the new york times this by the way is an example not just of an attempt to rewrite history but an extraordinary intervention by a newspaper for a newspaper to decide to change the founding state the founding date of the state they're in is a thing i can't think of in any previous era as being even imagined to be the role of a newspaper i'm meant to report the sports you're meant to report the news you're not meant to rewrite history but this was a stated aim of the new york times when they launched the 1619 project they said i'm quoting the 1619 project is a major initiative from the new york times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of american slavery it aims to reframe the country's history understanding 1619 is our true founding and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black americans at the very center of our national narrative now um [Music] they've been rather weasely about this since um because a lot of people said you said that you're actually reframing the dates of our true founding you're saying we were truly founded in 1619 um the new york times since has quietly silently edited its website so that little bit is not in there at the moment so let me say we didn't say that well you don't say it at the moment but you did say that um this uh the the uh the non-historian who was hired by the new york times to lead this project nicole hannah jones has no training as his historian he's not respected as a historian he's a very strange person to hire as a historian it's like hiring me to run your local basketball team i mean you could it's just strange um she said uh um she said that making this claim about 1619 being our true founding is the purpose of it she said uh the 1619 project does not argue that 1619 is our true founding and and was just caught out immediately afterwards because her own editor of the new york times said the following he said jake silverstein we sort of proposed the idea in a variety of ways that if you consider 1619 as a founding date of the country rather than 1776 it just changes your understanding and we call that a reframing of american history like you're moving the whole picture over to a new center point they now say we never said we're trying to reframe the history of the country they are they stated it repeatedly until people caught up with them and then they said that wasn't what they were doing number two the complete rewriting of the founding fathers it's uh just astonishing to me i was saying this to a friend last night that routinely it happened again the other week a statue of thomas jefferson has to be hidden at an american university it has to be removed put inside into as it were a safe space for the statue i i'm um i went around portland oregon uh for the purposes of disaster tourism really um last uh last october ahead of the uh election and and to seattle which was a very very sad site these days gosh that used to be a beautiful city gosh it used to be a beautiful city and wow is it a dump now uh they have just wrecked that city um and i was going around portland oregon and they had by then the just as i got there they took down the last statue it was a statue of lincoln so i said to a friend who was showing me around i said the only opportunities for tourism in portland going forward is if anyone's really interested in empty plinths if you're into empty plinths it's a fine vista in portland you can just get empty plinth after empty plinth if you're interested in statues there's nothing to see uh but this this we were told when this outburst of iconoclasm began we were told that this was just confederate monuments and there were arguments about that but wow in no time did it move straight to the founding fathers straight to lincoln straight to every major figure in american history let me give you another example of the same this is independence day last year this was just ahead of the president's speech at mount rushmore when you remember president trump tried i thought rather rather well to sort of reclaim the narrative and say no i'm going to tell you about who the four four remarkable men behind me are this was how cnn's correspondent reacted when cnn went live to mount rushmore leila santiago described the upcoming events she said kicking off the independence day weekend president trump will be at mount rushmore where he'll be standing in front of a monument of two slave owners on land wrestled away from native americans and again you don't have to go back very many years to wonder when mount rushmore would have been described so blithely in such terms it's a very new thing even 10 years ago i think we could have got a majority of americans to recognize this is a very strange way to describe that particular national monument now the fourth example i wanted to give on this is perhaps the most dangerous and divisive of all and that is what's become known as crt or critical race theory or whiteness studies this is i warn you from the outside one of the most toxic ways in which you can blow up a society the de-racialization of politics culture and everything else colorblindness as it was called until an academic from duke university said that color blindness was itself racist um this is absolute deadly the moment you try to teach children that they are of any racial background that they are in any way evil or bad or complicit or anything else simply because of the color of their skin whatever group of people you did that to you are poisoning the minds of those children you are wrecking the perspective they're going to have in their lives and you are going to profoundly and negatively influence everything in the world around them because they are going to instead of taking race out of every opportunity they are going to be putting it in at every opportunity because that's what they've been taught to do now if you were to steal man this argument we all know what straw manning an argument is but if you were to steal man the argument of what i've just described it would be you would say well america is going through a correction that there wasn't enough attention in the past to racism that there wasn't enough attention in the past to slavery there wasn't enough attention in the past to injustice and there wasn't enough attention to bad things that happened in american history it's a similar argument that you hear on the other side of the atlantic about post-colonialism they say well there hasn't been enough uh study of the colonial periods downsides there hasn't been enough uh looking at the bad side of empire by the way i recently for my next book i i studied quite a lot of american textbooks and this this is completely wrong already american school children are already taught about these things they are not being non-informed about aspects of this country's history that like every country's history they need to know about but it isn't the case that this is hidden knowledge it's not the case that america never addressed the issue of slavery it was addressed in a very big way in a very prominent war two centuries ago that is studied by every american school child and so i find this claim that this is merely a correction to be fallacious what if what i think is going on is that we are in the midst of what i described in a different context in the manners of crowds as an over-correction this is quite common in our era by the way the over-correction relies apart from anything else on not just justice but the moment at which justice swings into what nietzsche describes as revenge it can happen in politics and it can happen from any direction in politics you want to correct what your political opponents have done but sometimes also that ugly human instinct to also kick them in the shins comes in and we all have it and we're all lying if we don't but the over-correction revels in that place i described in the manners of crowds for over corrections in relation to social issues uh sexual issues and more where i think uh you know when you hear feminists talking about men as if like men have no good thing to be said about them you know you're in an over-correction you can be pretty confident that you're in an over-correction then you think okay you can criticize men a bit but must be something we can do right um this there's um there's a lot of other areas in social issues where the same that same ugly instinct has come in but the most dangerous one is where it comes in by reevaluating your entire history let me give you uh a couple of examples of where that has happened in uh recent times in america and i'm going to use just one uh exam one media organization as an example of of where this is i think gone wrong because i think what has gone wrong is not an understanding of the american past that is wrong but a misperception of the american present and i'm going to get on to exactly why that is but let me just first give you some of the the facts of how i think this has come about it's a lethal thing when you fail to accurately understand the world around you and the society around you and that to a great extent and indeed provably as i'm going to show you is where america is at the moment on a range of the most dangerous tricky issues um everybody here well knows the situation that occurred in ferguson everybody knows the way in which the press reported it at the time and everybody knows how much little coverage there was when some of the facts finally came out about exactly what had happened there and it was a different story now some of the media had the good grace and the honesty to admit that they'd got it wrong one such paper was the washington post they actually they actually ran the story of saying that michael brown had not shouted hands up don't shoot and had not been unarmed much more by the way an example of the way in which this stuff spills over these days i went to the first blm protest in london in 2014 2015 uh observing it as a journalist and if your pardon the levity about what is a serious subject but um the protesters in london about a thousand of them were marching down oxford street with their hands up in the air saying hands up don't shoot accompanied by unarmed british police officers who couldn't have shot them if they'd wanted to there's we don't have an armed constabulary so i watched this with an element of rhinos but the washington post did have the decency to correct the record which not every paper did i can assure you um but even a paper like the washington post once venerable is not immune from introducing insane content concepts into the body politic after the election last year it's just after election in november when whatever else had happened donald trump had very demonstrably increased the share of the vote for the republican party among black men in this country among hispanics and other groups and had of course very interestingly declined among uh certain portions of white uh communities in the us now again as an analyst of these things there are all sorts of interesting things to be said about that as a partisan you can play all sorts of games around that from both sides but what did the washington post do it decided to do what so many people in this country do now and it decided to completely miss the point the washington post decided to look at these facts of the republican share of the vote among ethnic minorities rising and come up with a term you can't do this with a straight face multi-racial whiteness [Laughter] multi-racial whiteness is when you're not white but you behave as if you are by voting for the republicans and this is um i mean there is so there's a as i think about that somebody says of basil faulty in faulty towers to say the psychiatrist says of him remember he says there's a whole conference in that one there is a whole conference in the concept of multi-racial whiteness rather than this is fascinating that this group of this group of people who are historically more voting that way are now voting more that way that's what a journalist would do you'd just be looking at what the facts are that's fascinating but no it's coming up with these very strange theories now on a more serious note what does this mean when you end up misrepresenting your society so much that people actually have uh a totally false wildly off understanding of their society you get to the situation we're now provably in in america and let me just zone in on that the most uncomfortable conversation in america police shootings involving black americans actual public understanding of this issue is wildly and provably out of sync with reality um when u.s citizens were polled recently and asked how many unarmed black americans they believe are shot by police in a year the year in question selected was 2019. when americans were asked how many unarmed black americans they believe were shot by the police in 2019 the numbers were out by several orders of magnitude several orders of magnitude among people who described themselves as quote very liberal 22 percent of those people said that they thought that the american police shot about or more than 10 000 unarmed black men that year about or more than 10 000 black men in a year and now among self-identified liberals that's not very liberals liberals 40 thought that the figure was somewhere between 1 000 and over 10 000. the actual figure was somewhere around 10. and that's a terrible fact it's a terrible fact on its own but it means that the public perception is wildly out of kilter with the reality by the way by proportion it is the case that unarmed black americans are slightly more likely to be shot by the police and unarmed white americans but as it also happens figures again compiled by the washington post police shootings database confirms that in the years before the death of george floyd more police officers were killed by black americans than unarmed black americans were killed by the american police and these are these are very difficult corners but here's what i think has been happening and i wrote about this in national review recently what has been happening is something like the effect when you have a magic lantern one of the reasons why america fights so intricately on these cases is that what happens here matters and what happens in cases like this matters and if you just minutely alter the reality in the country when it's america what is projected onto the wall of the world is a vast misrepresentation you only need to tweak a little bit to the source of what you're projecting when it's america you're projecting if it was luxembourg or something else it would be different this is america what is projected when you change it even slightly when america is projected on the wall shows a whole different beast and we have on top of that the fact that in the covered era we were all confined to our houses and many people genuinely were wondering is the thing i am being shown actually the society i'm in are we like that maybe we are i don't know i haven't been allowed out of the house for the last three months anything could have happened but this has just made things infinitely worse in our era so i'm going to wrap up and i just wanted to wrap up by saying these things um we have to find some way to get back to shore in america and i say that as i say for the sake of i think the whole west not just this country i have several uh suggestions i'm not going to linger over them i write about them in the forthcoming book but let me just throw out a couple before question the answers um the first is going to have to find some things to agree on in this country just going to have to find some things to agree on it could be facts it could be agreed history it could be agreed heroes it could just be agreeing on an event that just happened but there has to be some way to find ourselves once again agreeing on what has happened and shutting as much as we can this alternative reality which we found ourselves stuck in second thing and i could linger on this all night but i promise i won't is just to look at the damn alternatives you know i see this so clearly from outside this country i before covert i was usually in a different country every week now i'm just in a different state every week but i used to be in a different country every week and i've been to many countries in the world and many beleaguered places i can tell you any young american who complains about their lot in america may well complain about their lot but they honestly should go anywhere else in the world anywhere else and and so much could just be improved by realizing your goddamn luck and being grateful for it so i'm here because uh this is to my mind the place where all this matters i like britain there are lots of places i like i like greece like italy but there's not much of interest happening that's terrible i'm gonna lose all my greek and italian friends um but what happens here does matter and if you get this century wrong wow the rest of the world goes wrong if you get it right the rest of this century more can go very well indeed and cities like this one can restore themselves to former glories and go better um things go the other way everything goes south so to quote the um son of this city who i started off from he describes the still point of the turning world that's something like what we're in maybe the noisy point of the still turning world anyhow thank you douglas thank you very much what we're going to do now is we've got not quite 15 minutes we're going to do a question and answer session and one of the things that tends to happen at things like this is somebody before they ask a question make their own speech uh we want to get as many questions as we can so what we'll do is chris arps up front and i will go back and forth between the front and back to get everybody everywhere we can a chance to ask a question but please go right to the point of the question but before we do that i missed somebody chris we missed somebody earlier the the most popular weekend host in st louis radio history is mr randy tobler and he got in and i didn't realize it so great to see you doctor and uh with that uh chris if you have a question just go ahead and raise your hand chris you pick somebody at random up front then i'll go from here and again please go right to the question and we'll get as many exchanges as we can in as possible we've got this uh young man right here uh you said that the program was to rewrite the history of america and i thought she said you had four points so i got the new york times with the 1619 project rewriting the founding fathers and the crt and whiteness did i miss one and independence the independence day as it were the post-founding fathers so that even even lincoln you know because that's where they started off they started off with you know it's only these people then it's only these people then it's you know and then on and on so there's no one left i mean literally no one left other than a couple of ignoramuses working today thank you so much for for setting the standards of argument and hope one of the most effective things is getting more good jokes to criticize and the issue is how to dramatically improve the jokes that spread like wildfire i'm hoping you've got one for me um humor is enormously uh effective is it i've i occasionally use it in hostile crowds because um if you not this is a hostile crowd i hope but well we'll see um uh but i usually use in hostile crowds because if you make people laugh at a thing there's you've sort of you've got them to admit something it's very it's very interesting in when i did my book on um on the european migration crisis called the strange death of europe i had one um i had a really tough audience once in scandinavia and the scandinavian church archbishop had written a book called jesus uh was a migrant and and and this was why he said that the southern borders in europe ring any bells should uh should be open and i remember had this very very hostile audience in in in sweden and i said uh and somebody said you know jesus was a migrant and i said well you've got to be careful with that argument because he also went back to where he came from and i felt the audience kind of laugh then gasp and then and then they were horrified at themselves they were just horrified at themselves so you're right it can be affected quick question as a non-american omniscient narrator or observer of what's going on in this country does this not seem to you like either the best or the worst monty python skit we've got a president who got elected by hiding in a basement not telling anybody what he believed who got elected who has a vice president who's invisible who has a four-star transgender yes first transgender one who has an energy secretary who laughs about reducing the prices i mean how do you get back to a centrist view yeah when you've got the gung show going on in and and they're leading this country the um you're right that it becomes hard i actually have a friend who she's a historian a very fine historian he also writes novels satire very funny satirical novels called ruth dudley edwards and she was trying to do one on she sets them in various institutions and uh she was gonna she's been trying to do one in recent years on um she even managed to do modern art by the way i mean that's hard to satirize she uh she tried to do one set in a campus and she just gave up it just gave up there was just no way you could do a satire set on a campus because they you sit down your desk in the morning and they've done something madder than you can imagine and and we do we do i mean when i saw that cia recruitment video a little while ago i'm sure you all know the one i'm referring to and like what was it that the woman said she said um i'm she talked about her background and her racial identity her sexual identity she said she had various um psychiatric disorders and you go yeah i mean i hope you're not in charge of the drone program it would be good if it was taken out of your hands if you are um but i mean i'm all for destigmatizing mental health problems but i mean we're in a very weird realm when the cia is actively recruiting people who are mentally ill and boasting about it and and uh the the uh the one the other week or the the first was it the first openly transgender admiral i i i said i said the one the great phrase one of the great things about that phrase was it suggested that in the past there were a lot of secret transgender admirals right like midway was entirely run by secret transgender animals so yes it's it's beyond i don't know how i don't know how a satirist can operate these days douglas if i could just follow up on what he said regarding things to to joke about could you give your assessment and viewpoint of what we call cancel culture now where you may not run afoul of the law but uh you can run afoul of a mob that once wants corporations in the private sector to to end your career and ostracize you and then i know we have a question in the middle here and we've got one here um i'm not a great fan of the phrase cancer culture i'll tell you why i'm not a great fan of whinging it's a maybe it's a british thing um i don't know i don't like whining and bellyaching and when people say oh i've been cancelled i fear it's got too much of that um most of the time now i speak from a very privileged i'm confessing my privilege i speak from a very privileged position in that i've been a writer all my life and i can say what i want it's wonderful by the way um i recognize that a lot of people in their places of work do not have that privilege and that really is a privilege now my hope is that in sector after sector it becomes easier uh the evidence in recent years has become harder and harder we had a man in the uk worked in the supermarket asda who was fired for a facebook video he shared from the hilarious scottish comedian billy connolly making a joke about islam and i think it's outrageous that a joke should be made by our best love most foul-mouthed comedian and he gets millions of pounds for doing it and this supermarket worker gets fired for sharing it and that's completely unjust and it's those cases i worry about more in a way i think the ones that are sort of famous i mean like jk rowling hasn't been cancelled you couldn't cancel jk rowling you can't like get rid of harry potter that's it's he's been horribly attacked and and horribly defamed by ghoulish people um but she's she's not destroyed you know there are people who have been and senior people like there's a boss at kpmg one of the partners who said in a meeting he's from australia god i love the australians he said uh he said in this meeting uh crt is a crock of you know now that you may say that that was um firm talk but it was not untrue in fact i can prove it's true um but he was he was fired he was fired he was a partner at that huge firm so that is real and it's a big problem uh but it has to be pushed back against and i want it to be pushed back by a bit of civic courage and that's what i always encourage i think people can do it i think we can all do it everyone in their lives can do it you just speak up a little bit more if everyone you know it doesn't require kamikaze acts of bravery by people i really not i'm not urging that if anyone writes to me tomorrow and says i told my boss what i thought of you know i reiterate no kamikaze moves or at least i'm not liable um but if everyone just took a bit of a step forward just a bit of a step forward with their friends their family with their colleagues make things a hell of a lot easier all the polls show this strange thing in america as in britain that the public believe one thing and everything you were meant to say is another and by the way so very quickly uh because there was a segue from the comedian point we gotta pay tribute to the fact that american comedians have all become sermonizers i mean wow when did that happen i wrote recently national review about john oliver i mean it's like watching the court jester shoved into a casserole and put in the pulpit and giving you a sermon every damn sunday morning and so unfunny and so lacking in perception or originality or anything else just a boring lecture of regurgitated third grade pap and people call this comedy honestly i'm still trying to learn the language i was at the eye doctor yesterday and i saw a mask that said she they and i didn't know how one person can be a they i'm still trying to figure that out that's not my question um my wife and i have been talked numerous times about what when would you like to be alive now and we want to go back to the 50s so my question to you is are we better off post world wide web or pre world wide web as a society well that's that's a great question by the way the the uh the she her they them i say the look at me people um um i i have a new one which is if somebody says pronouns in bio i say chromosomes in bio and took a beat but it's a very effective thing well i'll tell you my chromosomes if you like if you can't guess them um but no uh um i'm look this is just the greatest time to be alive um first of all the 50s it depends when you if you want to be born in the 50s live in the 50s if you live in the 50 you have to live through the 40s my late friend clive james a wonderful australian polymath um once said to me towards the end of his life he was born in 1939 the opening of his first volume of memoirs unreliable memoirs memorably begins i was born in 1939 the other main event that year but clive was just heaven and he once said he said you know he died a few years ago he said douglas he said have you ever seen that buster keaton movie where buster keaton is standing in the doorway of the house you know in front of the house and the house starts to collapse and it turns out to be a stage set house you know when it comes down it's a brilliant trick and the whole thing comes down like this and it misses him and he stays standing and clive said to me it's so moving he said douglas i was born in 1939. and that was my generation we were buster keaton he said the whole damn house fell in and it missed us that's true that's true we have time for one more question i believe was it right here yeah education in america is sort of a closed culture not only in elementary and secondary as far as teachers you have to be certified you have to join the union whatever and and i think a lot of the things that that are coming out of those elementary and secondary liberal teachers is what's you know formulating these issues that we're talking about any insight on education in america as far as how to to turn that back you've got to focus on the basics you know in in the early 2010s when the conservative coalition government came in the uk we had a big drive very impressive drive to open what we call free schools which is where um children they have as it were a pot of money i mean you have something similar in some states here and the pot of money follows them whichever school they go to and you know parents overwhelmingly want their children to go to schools with strict standards strict rules there are several i've visited in the uk just incredibly moving like there's one where every child is of immigrant background and one child you could count as middle class the rest all working class or unemployed parents and wow the standards of that school are great and they've now got amazing entry level uh entry to oxford and cambridge better than some what we call private schools and the way you do it is you focus on the basics and this is what i wish people in this country would do with the demagogues and the teaching unions you know at the time that this started in the uk this thing the teaching unions went crazy but i always said at that stage one in five students leaving schools in britain were functionally illiterate when they left functionally illiterate if you're functionally illiterate when you leave school you're going to be functioning illiterate throughout your whole life and if you can't do basic subtracting and addition and you can't write you just your life chances your best chance in life has been taken from you it's just a tragedy and there are similar statistics across this country so when people say things like we've got to address multi-racial whiteness or we've got to address you know and they come up with this jargon i say teach have you got the basics right have you got every american child in the optimal position of learning how to spell learning how to read learning how to subtract and add up learning basic literacy skills learning just all the basics have you done that yet because they talk as if they've nixed all of that they talk as if the american school child leaves school in this country you know quoting homer and whistling stravinsky i mean it's it's not the case if that was the case then maybe these obscure and i think highly damaging ill thought through non-theories we could play with but wow not in the meantime not in the meantime and every parent knows that in this country so if they could get the basics right then i'd listen to them until then my what i don't want them to give another damn address about crt or any other theory that doesn't work in theory and is hellish in practice thank you thank you it was wonderful thank you douglas for a wonderful presentation i i can tell the crowd agrees with me we really enjoyed your insights and he gave me a great springboard for our next event the show me institute will be hosting an event at noon on december 18th you can go to our website to sign up for it the presenter will be our director of research and education policy susan pendergrass who's going to be talking about our most recent project it's missouri school rankings which will give you the information about how in each school in each school district how the children are doing in math and english and you will be very disappointed with what you see but come and join learn more because that's what we need to change the state again thank you douglas thank you news talk stl thank you national review institute and thank all of you for joining us this evening you

Channel: Show-Me Institute

Views: 180,655

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Id: 4CR4f559SWk

Length: 63min 50sec (3830 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 11 2021