Douglas Murray talks Woke Agenda, Cancel Culture and Covid with Dan Wootton

tonight i'm delighted to be joined by the superstar associate editor of the spectator political commentator and the author of six best-selling books douglas murray from cultural tokenism to transgender pronouns douglas has been a critic of the rise of liberal wokeness in his writing saying our obsession with diversity is now holding us back as a nation as douglas puts it happily in his book the madness of crowds this interpretation of the world through the lens of social justice identity politics and intersectionalism is probably the most audacious and comprehensive effort since the end of the cold war at creating a new ideology douglas has also delved into immigration in his brilliant book the strange death of europe where he argues uh the eu was committing suicide by allowing non-european immigration into its borders and losing its faith in its beliefs the controversial book spent almost 20 weeks on the sunday times bestseller list and was described as the most compelling political book of the year however his critics accused douglas of promoting far-right conspiracy theories and of being islamophobic during the pandemic douglas has also been outspoken on the government's lockdown measures dubbing them absolute madness and simply unsustainable indeed as one of the directors of the free speech union douglas is a staunch defender of being able to speak your mind and believes those who impose woke group think on others should be lampooned ridiculed and chased out so douglas let's do some of that chasing out today it is absolutely brilliant to have you here on the big question uh for the first time today and i was i was struck by a line in one of your recent columns for the telegraph where you just summed it up in one sentence today's woke agenda and the cancel culture madness are weighing our societies down so douglas what on earth can we do about it because as you also point out every major institution in the country seems to have been overtaken by this madness uh that's right first of all it's very good to be with you dan uh and you're right everything has been taken over by it every day there's a new example of that and they get ever more ridiculous recently we had the example of kew gardens again uh seeking to decolonize its collection of plants and moss we've had a spate of that incident i mean that's not the first time we've had what's what i jokingly call racist gardening um there's no area of life uh the national trust you can't uh just go and have a cup of tea and see a beautiful home uh you've got to have an ideology ram down your throat um every area of our national life is like this and as i often say it's it's no good government occasionally sort of pitching in on this and then being accused of playing culture wars when government does this stuff itself you know it's it's uh government departments that signed up in recent years to have stonewall come in and mark their homework tell them whether they were good boys and girls and thems or not and uh it's government departments that have been doing implicit bias training and all this sort of thing so it's not as if this is only a problem in one sector it's a problem across every section in our society and i believe that it is stopping us as a country from being able to address major issues and i think there's an obvious a reason for that which is that there's a certain attraction in simple narratives the simple narrative that you know you've just got to do whatever you can today to advance ex rights group is straightforward many many more complex issues face our society issues like how young people are going to be able to accumulate capital to ever get on the housing ladder that's a really big and difficult question and it's harder to address and so we sort of dodge that and what i urge us all to do is to try to get these identitarians of all kinds out of our way stop bogging us down so we can actually get onto the issues that do matter no indeed indeed well douglas as you can imagine we've had so many questions and for you so i want to get to them now because they cover some of those really important issues that maybe aren't discussed as much as they should and i wanted to kick off uh with karen who actually i believe has sent us uh this video question i think we have karen on video so let's have a watch of this hello douglas murray i really enjoyed your article on the spectator about uh chinese government oes reparations for coronavirus damages and which leaves me on answer this question how would that actually be possible uh because the chances of that happening is very slim so how could it happen chinese reparations yeah it's it's a it's a very good question and i'm afraid i don't have the answers to it entirely i have some ideas as i think i said in that piece yes this refers to a piece i wrote in december i'm one of those who said throughout the quran i'm not an expert in pandemics and so i've been relatively quiet throughout this because i don't like to talk about things i don't know about but there are certain times when this issue of the pandemic does cross your competencies and you do want to make sure that it doesn't cross them completely unmolested and one of those is in the area of foreign policy it remains to me absolutely astonishing that the one country to have come out of 2020 with economic growth forecasts was china and as i said in that piece in december it seems to me that in a situation when uh accidentally or otherwise um whether it's from a lab or a wet market the chinese authorities chinese communist party did a whole pile of things at the start of a pandemic that made it infinitely worse they shut down internal flights while still allowing flights out they disappeared scientists who knew about the origins of the virus and have disappeared journalists internally in china who've questioned it i think that they have done everything possible to make it harder than than we can possibly imagine to find how this virus got out what the sources of it the origins of it are and this is a virus that has crashed the global economy among other things the ccp through their actions as they say accidental or otherwise managed to ensure that their main economic competitor the united states had to have its economy shut down it's an extraordinary thing to have happen and again i come back to this point i made earlier about us not allowing ourselves to be distracted very easy to be distracted in the modern world there's always a scandal there's always something to laugh at there's always something to titter at but if if it is the case that the chinese communist party gets away with what happened last year then i think a great error will have occurred i don't think they should be allowed to get away with it scot-free i think they should pay an international price for it now as our guest there just mentioned the question then is what uh there's a whole load of things if there was agreement across the free nations you could have tariffs agreements you could put heavy tariffs on chinese goods for instance you could get into a tariff war that's true but my point is is that no country that has behaved no government that has behaved as the chinese communist party has behaved in the last year it seems to me should be able to get away with their behavior and i just had one other rider to that which is that as you well know that the bullying nature of the ccp against our allies as well as this country is i think something that deserves an answer i think it is intolerable when the ccp threatens our friends in australia i think it is intolerable when they effectively silence descent in new zealand by buying up uh significant chunks of the place and then leveraging it leveraging it for their own diplomatic advantage i don't think these are things that should simply pass unnoticed and i fear that they are being i fear that we're there that we're ignoring them so just to answer so rather long-winded answer to a short question but to answer the question i think we should explore every possible avenue for seeing what could be done to simply make sure that the ccp having crashed the world doesn't just walk away from the scene of the crash couldn't agree more couldn't agree more but let's go closer to home pete has sent us a great question to gb views about uh the badly and spend by-election of course it is coming thursday night douglas and and he says where is the tory and labour party support for the battley grammar school teacher we know that teacher throat showed the cartoon of the prophet muhammad in class now so terrified for their life has been unable to return home and certainly unable to return to work and during the campaign douglas labour and the tories seem to not want to address this issue no they're literally running away from the issue um it's an incredibly difficult one for them and it shouldn't be it should be absolutely straightforward this teacher did nothing wrong what always happens is that people start to use weasel words like saying um well we have to respect etc etc if you're doing a presentation in an re class and you're talking about blasphemy for instance it might be a good idea to give examples of what people have seen as being blasphemous i've never heard an example of when for instance the uh there were some years ago in new york there's an exhibition that had a crucifix that was um uh um it was sort of swimming in urine and uh um i've never heard of a case where when that photograph has been uh you know given as an example of something seen as blasphemous by some christians that that although there was a campaign against the artwork at the time being displayed in a publicly funded gallery i've never heard of anyone saying oh my gosh somebody has dared to show a photograph of this and therefore they should be killed i've just never heard it uh um i've never heard of people saying oh no no if people did threaten to kill somebody who showed that image that is offensive to some christians we must start to talk about respect and so on no we can't have this this is about a basic liberty the basic liberty to discuss ideas uh to um uh discuss very important ideas like blasphemy which is i mean i wish it was not an important idea but in an extremely diverse country as britain has become a blasphemy is back on the table i'd like to have that argument out on the terms of a free society not as has happened in badly on the terms of a bunch of extraordinarily backwards sort of local self-appointed imams and and people who who are standing outside the school gates going very very um close to incitement comments right if they weren't bordering going over the border of incitement they know what it means in our era after charlie hebdo after the danish cartoons affair of 2005. they know what it means when they say you know i'm not necessarily going to kill anyone myself but you know members of the community are getting very head up they're getting very annoyed there's only one answer you can do to this which is to say i'm very sorry if you have a problem with that then you clearly have a problem with the rules in our country and our country allows free speech our country allows blasphemy it allows the exchange of ideas it doesn't give special protection to the islamic religion or any other religion to that matter it doesn't give special blasphemy protections it will not permit a school teacher who has done nothing wrong to have to live in hiding fear of his life it will be on the side of the teacher and of education and not on the side of some backward illiterate and this is the great problem is that our politicians don't have the knowledge to do that and i should just add they could they could have the knowledge to do that they could have the guts to do that in france this is now not an extraordinarily complex political issue because the country has had to go around this blasphemy era in a very bloody and brutal way in recent years in france left-wing politicians can say what i've just said and be still on the left right-wing politicians say it and there's no problem there is complete political unanimity in france that people should have the right to talk about religion without their their throats being cut and in britain we have this weird we always have had this we had it in 1989 with the satanic versus controversy but conservatives got it wrong admittedly on that occasion the conservative government did protect salman rushdie but we had people of the right and the left who did the same weasel talk well it's about you know community uh cohesion and about and all this sort of thing no it's about whether or not you understand the society that you're in if you don't understand the society then that you're in then you should go and find another society that you do understand and live there and that has always been my argument i cannot understand why it's hard for politicians in great britain to make i regret the case the fact that it's hard for them to make but i think more people should say it it's an absolutely cut and dry case and i i just feel deep deep sorrow for the school teacher who is going through that because he must feel tonight as in every night recently the loneliest man in britain yeah he's been hung out to dry charlie in west wales now douglas sent us this you've been around the sea now for some time whether that's challenging islamist extremism or you know open borders and recently the the woke ideology but what would you say is the greatest challenge to sort of british civilization out of all of these ideologies that you've contested in your work oh great question douglas what a good question these are all really good questions you've got terrific viewers i must say um yes we do it's a very good question and i would say this it's a question about self-confidence and about knowing who you are the all of the things that i've written about in my career i've been quite quite a large number of things but often they have come down to these these things i think of as being um issues that wouldn't come up if your society was healthy i mean the example we've just had i i it wouldn't come up if we had a healthy society uh that have confidence in itself it doesn't have to be dogmatic i'm not i don't know somebody who believes in sort of you know um tub thumping patriotism but but i think that you should you should um you should be proud of your society when your society has done things which are worth pride and you should be able to have confidence in a civilization that has done an immense amount of good in the world and you know as i always say the the the the footfall speaks for itself you know the world wants to come to countries like britain and america and yet these are the countries currently so so divided and increasingly divided and increasingly lacking in self-confidence the footfall doesn't go the other way there is no meaningful migration to north africa there's no meaningful migration to the middle east nobody wants to move to the great freedom of saudi arabia or of the communist party of china's homeland they want to come to societies like britain why is that i don't blame them but why is it it's because there must be something good about us there must be so the problem with all of these things whether it's the woke ideology recently or the islamists extremism and other issues the one that just just unites all of these things is that they wouldn't happen if we had a bit of um pride in ourselves and again it doesn't have to be flag waving it doesn't have to be tub thumping it's not nationalist but just to recognize there must be some things we've got right i mean the fact that we have all these debates is one of the many things that we have got right um but there has been in our lifetimes i think a very serious loss of civilizational confidence there's all sorts of reasons for that i wrote about mainly in the strange death of europe but i would like to just get some of that confidence back i'd like us as i say to remind ourselves of our virtues not just our vices i'd like to remind ourselves of all the things that our country has got right not just the things it's got wrong and i don't like the dominance in the narrative of people who just list things that they whine about and never give a moment of credit to all of the things that are good that mean that we're here in the first place you're so right look standby douglas murray is going to stick around after the break but also coming up in uncancelled i'll be joined by the political commentator and campaigner richard taylor to discuss why there was so little mention within the media yesterday of the anti-lockdown protests in london and all of tomorrow's news tonight in the media buzz 2 including the newspaper front pages as they drop so don't go anywhere [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] e i think that's lesser priority than fixed welcome back douglas murray is here for tonight's big question my panel with me too dominique samuels is a political commentator columnist and broadcaster tom harwood is the gb news political correspondent and we're also joined by richard powers-saeed the labour commentator and author richard i believe you have a question for douglas yeah douglas i was wanting to ask you a question in your role as chair of the free speech union in the last month we've had pressure on the bbc by tory mp to pull an episode of death tile and discs because it had a famous socialist alexi sale being featured on it we had a photographer press photographer being arrested by police on spurious grounds for taking photos outside napier barracks we had a university group um assessing churchill's views on race and empire axed after a campaign by the sun i was struck by the fact that we didn't hear anything from the free speech union on any of those very significant and very prominent free speech issues whereas we did hear from the free speech union about how the political expression of taking the knee should be banned at a particular sports event i wonder if you have any thoughts on that just a correction at the beginning i'm not the chair of the free speech union i'm on the board of it which is a different thing but yes it's a good question i think all of these issues are important there's one other correction i should make which is you're wrong on where the political pressure came on the churchill college um panel uh my understanding of it first of all it was not the sun um only that objected to what happened and just for viewers who don't know what occurred was that uh three very minor figures uh one of whom isn't even historian um took part in a panel at churchill college where they discussed the alleged racism of winston churchill and they made so many um categorically false statements and uncontested statements it was three exceptionally hostile haters of winston churchill um who were chaired by a fourth person who has also consistently sought to demonize winston churchill none of them have any particular qualification in the area they were talking about i know that the churchill family was deeply upset i know that uh churchill college seemed to have realized that by giving a platform to force such uninformed people to speak unopposed and that was really the issue um there was a problem policy exchange published a pamphlet about it uh afterwards uh co-authored by the distinguished biographer of winston churchill andrew roberts and it just exposed so many uh things that had gone wrong on the panel for instance i mean just not go on about it but it is quite important uh the panelists claimed unopposed that uh anyone could have led the conservative party equally well and led the country in world war ii as winston churchill there was nothing special about him it claimed that britain's contribution hadn't at all helped to win the war it claimed that in any case it didn't matter because the allies winning the war was the same as the nazis winning the war one of the panelists extraordinarily said all that happened by the allies winning was that one form of white supremacy replaced another form of white supremacy and of course you can tell from statements like this that this was not an academic exercise it was a um a sort of low-grade drive-by shooting on winston churchill joe winston churchill's reputation by a college founded uh to honor him

Channel: GBNews

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Keywords: GB news, gbnews, Colin Brazier, Gloria De Piero, Michelle Dewberry, Andrew Doyle, Inaya Folarin Iman, Kirsty Gallacher, Liam Halligan, Tom Harwood, Rebecca Hutson, Darren McCaffrey, Simon McCoy, Nana Akua, Mercy Muroki, Andrew Neil, Neil Oliver, Alastair Stewart, Dan Wootton, Rosie Wright, Great Britain, United Kingdom, England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, Alex Phillips

Id: KVMXmqWP02U

Length: 24min 47sec (1487 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 27 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/rayz0101]

I think the intro is slightly wrong. Wokeness is fervently and demonstrably anti liberal. I don't think Douglas would have a problem with it if it were.

[u/VladimirJames]

DM is a very important thinker nowadays