Nigel Farage meets Douglas Murray | Stepping Up with Nigel Farage #3

well joining me for stepping up today is somebody who really has stepped up in fact i'm beginning to wonder looking at his latest book the madness of crowds i'm beginning to wonder whether he's an even bigger controversialist than i am so i'm in conversation today with one and only douglas murray douglas this is the latest book and i couldn't help but look at the chapter headings chapter one gay chapter two women chapter three race chapter four trans i mean are you are you setting out to just try and enrage everybody no i'm not i am you know i was recently doing an event at a university and uh the student who was interviewing me started by reading that page and there was this wonderful they had absolutely packed hall and everybody sat in silence as he went through the list and when he got to the end i just looked at them and smiled and we all burst out laughing and i was you know i think there is a knowledge isn't there that there's we now know what the things are you're meant to not talk about they happen to coincide with things that are very very interesting and which i think we should be able to talk about so i yeah i do it deliberately in a way i say why don't we have a talk about this why don't we address this issue and my belief is and the response has been that the public want to have these discussions too it's interesting the madness of crowds i i love the title because over the last few months everywhere i go you know i get out of the car and put petrol in the car people walk up to me say nigel what's going on right what's happening so i think you're right i think there's a big silent majority out there very very worried about what's happening to free speech but can you just i know the basic thesis of this book is that all these groups had every right to feel a degree of discrimination against them they fought for equal rights in a number of ways and pretty much achieve them but the thesis of the book is that they've kind of not stopped with the victories did we just explain that that's very common in lots of movements isn't it historically that that you know um there's a famous uh quote eric hoffer said that every good cause you know starts as a good cause becomes a business and degenerates into a racket and that's happened in almost every rights case i can think of gay which i do the first movement gay rights you know basically got there some years ago uh but there are all these organizations like stonewall uh what do you do if you're one of the big gay panjandrums at stonewall you want your pension you want your your salary you've got to find a new course you've got to find a new cause now stonewall found trans and now it goes around telling people in schools what they should teach kids about trans and of course at this stage having won they've never been richer they've never been more mainstream they get in all the corporate donations and then before you know it you get the situation we've got where corporations invite stonewall in to give them a mark like whether they're good boys or not um so this is ridiculous this has nothing to do with the original aim of the gay rights movement which was just to get to equality and stop these people find it really hard and i mean jk rowling who who who hardly is a political controversialist and he had a sort of face quite a degree of hatred over this uh they say the same thing all these things are interconnected i say in the chapter gay is a minority issue relations between men and women is a majority issue certainly used to be and releases between men and women cannot be as divisive as they've been made in recent years i say there though you see what we've got this problem with is what happens when the feminists have won feminists throughout the 20th century say we want to have equality with men they get to equality and then you get this weird overreach because you've got all these professional feminists you have people who want a cause you you have people who are in the habit of standing at barricades and they don't have anywhere else to go but in the case of black lives matters you know you know america pretty well as i do you would i would say that it's a reasonable assumption to think that we have uh perhaps been a fairer country in terms of race than parts of the usa i mean what i'm saying is yeah you know i mean i can't stand the tearing down of statues and we saw that extraordinary picture the other day of a woman innocently sitting outside a restaurant being surrounded by a mob and it was compared to 1933 in germany and people being made to raise their right arm in support of the fuhrer i mean so we've seen all of that but does the black lives matter movement in america does it does it need to exist in some form so all again all of these rights claims start somewhere decent which is a request for equality now i entirely agree by the way america and britain are very different countries i resent the importing of a specific american racial issue to the british context for instance i was brought up in a britain that was very diverse already we didn't know about people's skin colors we didn't notice it we were brought up to who cared we were we were of course there were some people who've had experiences of racism but broadly speaking britain by the last few decades we didn't care about this so how is it and i agree with you i think i mean after all my years in europe i learned that we are by far more tolerant than our european neighbours on a range of religious and racial issues absolutely there's no other country in europe that would have the kind of diversity in the cabinet that we have and it's not like it's got any opposition how how and i agree with you on that how is it that within a nanosecond the death of george floyd in america becomes huge organized and it looks like quite well-funded protests in this country how did that happen well it's the same story again in the case of america there is a specific racial issue which that country has been struggling to address for a long time you get something like the death of george floyd and by the way i think everyone has to be really careful about this the the the cop in question has no defenders you know nobody thinks that that arresting cop and and the again it's never mentioned but like a diverse group of people who he was working with nobody defends what they did that day black lives matter as an organization would you defend it what he did yeah no no i mean you know the arresting officer clearly did it as badly as anyone could we will i suppose find out at his trial whether there was a racial component to it or not but as my friend sam harris pointed out every year in the united states there are 10 million interactions between the police and the citizenry the most armed citizenry as you know in the world and so there are difficulties in american policing which we shouldn't underestimate the idea though that you respond to it by saying all of the american police are racist or all of america is racist and then much worse oh britain is racist and then all of britain's past is racist and then there's nothing good to be said to a country like this how did it explode because they were primed and ready and waiting to go this is a movement that needs martyrs it seeks martyrdoms it has given us already false martyrdoms we had the shooting in ferguson missouri in 2014. uh this is one of the main things that starts the black lives matter movement it's claimed that the man who was shot had his hands in the air and said hands up don't shoot this is what black lives matter protesters used to say at the subsequent trial it turned out and even blm ended up basically admitting they didn't admit it they just dropped it the the man in question didn't have his hands in the air he was lunging for the arresting officer's gun when he was shot and that is the sort of thing that gets you shot in america police except they were looking for mars they were ready and organized in the uk as well yes and the crucial thing is we have allowed in britain as in america but in britain as we say with much less cause we have allowed a movement to be gestating a way that has in its sights everything in our history there's two generations in america who have been taught that america is the worst country in the world they're not taught that it has flaws like all countries they don't know by the way about any other country i mean the staggering ignorance of so many people who are the ones by the way at the moment who always say educate yourself you know you need to educate yourself these are always the most ignorant people you can come across but the educate yourself brigade know nothing about the world they've never been anywhere they can't compare american civilization with any other civilization they think that america is the only country that ever had slavery every civilization in the world had slavery they think that britain is to be defined by slavery they don't even know that this country tore itself apart over the slavery debate centuries ago and it cost us and we paid the price fifty years the royal navy the west africa squadron driving slavery off the island we paid the price for this because we thought morally it was a price worth paying and these people now come along and say but to an ignorant generation you don't need to know about the education there's no racism educated people in this country know about the abolition of slavery they know about the wilberforce uh campaign over 25 years they i think he's rather like the first you're a skeptic you know taking on the establishment of winning but it's taking a long time but but think about the media in this country think about our big corporate businesses in this country these are the educated groups yeah these are the people that know the truth about britain's relationship with slavery as opposed to the rest of the world how is it and you've been through this too but how is it that i can appear a couple of days after the colston statue was toppled in bristol and i can say to an itv audience that black lives matters is actually more about bringing down capitalism getting rid of the structures of state defunding the police and i'm called on prime time television a liar for saying something that's actually on their website what happened to the media what's happening to our corporates why there's lots of things going on in that one is there are some people who genuinely are so ignorant that they think this is the case but but surely not in that surely not in those circles of the media in business now in the circles in media and business we're dealing with another phenomenon we're dealing with cowardice cowardice being called a racist is about the worst thing you can be called in our society uh some people say well clearly it's not because you survive after i've called you a basis no it isn't it is about the nastiest thing you can say it's also by the way and i've written about this in the past one of the fascinating things about it is it it's impossible to prove there is no agreed upon definition and it is impossible to disprove of course um because of course we have had in this country for 20 years the idea is all in the eye of the beholder so that if you think it's racist ergo it is racist this is an incredibly damaging thing for a society now this is where black lives matter and other such movements do very well they mop up very happily and nicely in this terrain because they say anybody who opposes us and everything we're smuggling in behind our first demand must be a racist now it is high time that more people in corporate life more people in government life and elsewhere said no we know what you're doing there are so many examples by the way of this happening in the past you have a peace studies peace studies mysteriously cropped up during the cold war peace studies if you didn't like this totally bogus croc often it has to be said russian-funded studies you were against peace how could you be against peace that must mean you want to nuke everyone so what what what words do they call you douglas what do you get called oh i don't know come on give us this i imagine i get everything i mean i'm obviously i'm obviously a terrible bigot in every way horrible transfer but obviously a gay homophobe uh um obviously um i mean i'm myself clearly from every available bigotry um but i mean the reason i'm asking you is because you know i think i've received more than my fair share of abuse over the years more than anybody had a thought anyway and i just wonder how do you deal with it oh i don't care i genuinely don't care um to my mind the formation of character is in large part reliant on knowing who you should care about and who you should not knowing who you should listen to and who you should not now there's a small number of people family loved ones my best friends people i admire who if they say you know douglas i think you're wrong on that i would listen definitely would listen yeah but if somebody called you know xena warrior princess one two three social justice now says that they think i'm something you don't worry soon i don't lose anything but you are you're an interesting phenomenon because you know in france intellectuals are you know held up on a pedestal they're a very important seem to be a very important part of this i've often admired this aspect of french culture but you're an intellectual and yet you know you're producing these books that are best sellers how how do you cut it as an intellectual in britain um well we do have a very fine intellectual tradition in britain but it's not respected uh i wouldn't say it's not respected there is there is an enormous uh oddity about this country which i think i could sum up as follows the british are traditionally suspicious of ideas and those of us who are um right of center or conservative thinkers have here a great conundrum the british suspicion of ideas is because we muddle through yes the british suspicion of ideas to a great extent is itself a good idea my late friend roger scrutin was very eloquent on this point because the innate instinct of somebody to be for instance concerned about ideas is in part a concern about utopians you see the continent has in history repeatedly fallen prey to utopian ideas and the british people haven't historically liked that and and that is an enormous advantage but of course if you're interested in ideas yourself then you have this this conundrum i and i i would put it like this the suspicion of grand ideas is a good suspicion to have because when people come at you with an idea that they know better than you how you should live your life you should run a million miles yes but sometimes i agree with you sometimes you live in an era replete with terrible ideas and it is not enough to say i will just ignore them because you're living among them they surround you they're in the air you breathe what your children are being given that's why you're challenging them yes i think it is vital vital that the british public realize that their children are being given ideas that are rotten now this is what i want to go next with this conversation because i've been reading what you've been saying about universities i remember when blair said 20 years ago that we sent 50 to university and i sort of slightly wondered is this a way of producing lots and lots of new young labour voters little did i know little did he know how successful he would be i i'm not an intellectual you know i think i'm more of a business pragmatist but i i can see that from the age of i don't know 13 14 right through school university we need to teach people critical thinking yeah here's a problem here are two solutions you make your mind that which of these you agree with and i think what we're now doing and you've studied this more than me but i think what we're doing is we're saying to people here's a problem here are two solutions one is virtuous and good and one is evil and we're not teaching i mean is that at the root of what's wrong with our universities i mean how bad is it in your view my view is every age has a religious instinct all people have religious instinct in our own age the religious instinct has been subsumed into a cultural religious instinct people are being indoctrinated into a cult-like religion they are being told what good behavior is and what bad behavior is what a good person would be and what a terrible person looks like and this is in terms of attitude these are attitudes not behaviors no this is uh um what's more of course this because this is all part of the racket what signals should you give off to demonstrate that you're in the good group and what's more what if you are in the group say for instance you have the horrible horrible tendency to have been i know a white male for instance what can you do to demonstrate you're not one of the evil group oh well now now like the most huckster-ish religion you can demonstrate that you're a good person by showing solidarity with the latest croc cause you can show that you're an ally of anything that you're meant to ally with today you can say how shamed you feel the these all religious instincts you can even pay your tithes if you're a corporation if you're a corporation by the way never mind universities you know that this mob might come for you cheapest way you can get out of it oh dear we seem to be a a bank that has a reputation for employing lots of men for instance well why don't we just pay our tithes to black lives matter and get over it whitening the dane girl as well paying the danger so so this is what's happened we've got a new morality a new religion that has come in in this country i've tried to identify it for years and this is the clearest example of it so the real question it's one thing to stand up and try and raise issues and you've done a huge amount on this i myself in a more modest way trying to raise the issue of what was happening across the english channel yeah earlier this year i don't know you wrote about this with sort of the death of europe a few years ago talking about the mediterranean and what was happening so i you know like you uh i think i'm quite good at raising issues getting people thinking and talking about things but what are we gonna do to try and solve this what are we going to do i mean to begin with what are we going to do to get our universities back to where they need to be i'm a great believer in truth i honestly believe that truth has an extraordinary ability to cut through in the end in the end god knows it's unpleasant in the interim period but let me give you an example i've just been writing about a book by a very distinguished neuroscientist uh from canada called dr deborah so she's just written a book called the end of gender and she she just lays out she's a liberal thinker she just lays out you can't keep pretending that sex doesn't exist you just can't and this is what you're going to do now the people who've been wading through that argument have had a tough time but it's the same as you know on every argument the argument i said in the strange death of europe over the migration question was we haven't asked the big question what is the big question in migration i would say it's this the following conundrum we would like to be kind and welcoming to people in the world who have just the worst luck living in war zones horrible situations in terrible countries that have been run down by despotic leaders we'd like to be generous to them can we take them all in no so what do we do i have tried for years to persuade people to think about that but so what we have and i do this all the time with my as it were left-wing liberal friends and and and interlocutors on this is to say you know that's the conundrum you know it's that you know we can't take in everyone in the world who lives in worse situations than us what do you do all they can do is to dodge that question they've dodged it for years all they can do is dodge it and say anyone who doesn't agree with them today is racist what they're doing is unsustainable what they're arguing is unsustainable and i find on each of these issues as with the migration one that's why i'm confident about it if we win if we win the intellectual argument does political action then necessarily follow no you can win an intellectual argument and lose politically maybe we are in a do we have a conservative person well that that's another version of it you win politically and lose intellectually that's the flip side that's the one i think that we are at least in part in in the uk we have a conservative government with an 80 seat majority and yet every day there is an example of something which no conservative could possibly agree to when uh um our government was missing an action when our um i wouldn't just say statues our holy places as a nation were being assailed when the cenotaph was daily being defaced and we saw a video of black lives matter protesters saying to that extraordinary young group of volunteers young men and women who turned out to be from the household cavalry who for on their own time came to clean that somebody said from black lives matter you're you you care about your precious monuments that was when we should say yes yes we care about our precious monuments they're not precious little monuments these are our holiest places and we make no apology for it now nobody from government said no that nobody knows middle england is saying it i sense it i feel it uh and i think the bbc have overstepped the mark completely on the words of land of hope and glory and raw i cannot understand what the bbc is thinking on this they they they give the impression of a guiltiness that makes me very suspicious what had the bbc to do with the killing of george floyd why do they present it as if they were in some way complicit they run a video the other day say we've always tried to do our best we know we need to do more what are you hiding what's the problem with you people why do you think that in the because of a minnesotan policeman's actions we're not allowed to sing rule britannia you think we can't cope with a few verses of song you think we're going to invade france if we sing rule britannia you think we're going to start lynching people if we sing lando perhaps i don't know i think this is very revealing these people do not trust themselves so they don't trust us but we do trust ourselves we know we know that the british people are a decent people and that we can cope with songs this is almost isn't it the remain leave divide because i've noticed on many of these debates about how disgusting british history isn't how we should all be ashamed of it quite a lot of remainers seem to be leading those arguments i i really have noticed that yes i mean it's fundamentally whether you believe in the country or not and if you believe in the country you accept it may have had past failings yes one of the things i'm trying to do at the moment on this is to encourage people to a better um all these people say they want us to understand our past better i say yes sure everybody can understand the past better but that has to be a rounded and proper understanding of the past and here's here's the problem we are facing on that issue as on so many others critics who do not have our best interests at heart it comes back to what we said about who you would listen to as a person i listen to my friends and my family and my loved ones because i know they desire me well they want me to do well they want me to do the best i can i don't listen to somebody who has my worst the worst possible hopes about me because i know they don't want me to do well well it's the same as a nation i will listen endlessly to people who recognize the generosity and greatness of britain across the centuries when they say there is this thing you could do better at or this element of your history you should understand better i'm i can listen to that forever what i am now unwilling to listen to is people who think there was nothing good about this country never was anything good just as there are people who think there was nothing good about america better had columbus never sailed off don't listen to these people they don't wish to improve you they wish to end you in five years time if i sat back here with you would we have reversed this current madness that is sweeping the western world i'm actually confident confident that we can but i'll tell you what that's a pretty good note to end on be confident big ideas and i tell you what if you've got a really woke friend you want to upset them what a great present thank you thank you

Channel: Nigel Farage

Views: 326,574

Keywords: Douglas Murray, Nigel Farage

Id: MKQmgP61LUI

Length: 25min 25sec (1525 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 30 2020