The Madness of Crowds? Julia Hartley-Brewer meets Douglas Murray

welcome to the julia hartley brewer podcast my guest this week is douglas murray he's an author he's a journalist his last book the strange death of europe was published in 2017. it was an instant international bestseller spending 20 weeks on the sunday times best seller list his new book threatens very much to do the same the madness of crowds gender race and identity douglas murray welcome it's great to be with you julia okay well your last book obviously tackled a lot of very i suppose controversial issues people like to think these issues are controversial about immigration islam and issues like that um what's this book about well it's about what i think of as being uh my repost to the effort to embed a new religion into our societies i think this effort has crept up on us for a very long time it's called under various guises intersectionalism identity politics and at this point lots of people go what earth are you talking right it's basically the attempt to make issues to do with gay rights lgbt particularly trans now all issues about race issues to do with gender the sexes in particular relations between the sexes to make these the basis of almost all our modern ethics and indeed politics indeed about everything now i've seen this coming for some time but it's been particularly sped up in the last decade for reasons we might get into but it's now so overwhelming it's so presumed that this is the basis of all politicking or personal meaning that i think it needs to be undone okay now this this is a massive sea changes and i can remember very much being brought up in the you know born in the 1960s brought up in the 70s and 80s by very lefty liberal 60s parents and and certainly not brought up to be racist or sexist or or homophobic or any of any of the iss or ics um and and all that was about you saw people as individuals and this has been a really big theme in the post-war years isn't it about you know you you are douglas murray you may or may not be a white man i'm a i'm julia hartleber you know white woman not my white privilege of course we'll get on to that um but we're individuals and are to be judged based on what we do what we can say our character famously martin luther king had to say now people are judged based on which group they belong to and particularly which victim group they belong to right i i compare it to seeing a train drawing into its desired destination and just as it seems like it's about to draw in suddenly getting steam up and going shooting off down the tracks into the distance and scattering people in its wake this is the case i submit with gay rights everything to do with racial rights everything to do with women's rights that basically we weren't completely there but we were pretty much as near as dammit and then something happened and all of these things went roaring off down the tracks when when the situation had never been better it was suddenly portrayed as if it had never been worse now this is the key thing isn't it because i meet a as a 51 year old an awful lot of young women let's let's talk about women first and gender first because there's there is so much to talk about yeah i do in each chat i do gay in one chapter i do women i do race i do trans and various things in between so let's start with the women thing because i i'm constantly being told a that i'm not a feminist um okay play along with that uh and and and i've got internalized misogyny because i don't accept that women are all victims all of the time um talk about that i'll tell you what i think this is i think it's a second are you mansplaining to me right now douglas i certain to be i'm guilty of i'm certainly guilty as you are of so many problems i think this is nothing more than brute politics the problem is you're not the right kind of woman you don't have the right kind of views you don't have the right kind of politics you're not allying yourself with the desired uh group politicking i get this i get it a little bit for the gay thing my only tiny card i can play in this silly game one bit of privilege you don't have to right and uh um you know this uh there's become in all of these issues particularly to do with women but it's been happening in recent years to do with gay lgbt it's been happening in relation to racial rights people are portrayed as not being of the identity group that they are undeniably a part of if they have the wrong politics so in recent years a very prominent example was jermaine grier there's there's one particular issue a debatable issue about women's rights at the end of the road which is whether or not trans women are women and she won't do that and so she gets cast out of feminism and as i say in the book i i quote people saying jermaine grier is no longer a feminist and you want to say you what if jermaine greer isn't a feminist and nobody's a feminist it doesn't mean anything anymore but this same thing has happened in everything i give the example of peter thiel famous silicon valley uh tech billionaire he happens to be gay at the republican convention in 2016 he comes out for the republican nominee that's not allowed he's immediately denounced by the main gay publication in the us as not gay they say he may they say he may sleep with men but in no other sense is he gay and the same thing has happened with racial issues people like kanye west uh candice owens have the wrong politics we've had this politics my very first podcast with james cleveland uh uh tory party chairman being told you know along with other uh leading uh uh brexiteers and tourists being told you know you're not you know you're you're actually returning on your own race the assumption is the assumption is on all of these things it happens with james cleverley it happens with a distinguished america american scholar and author thomas sol uh with uh the rapper kanye west and you can go from a scholar to a rapper both happen to be black it's about the only characteristic they share um but they are alleged not to be black because they have the wrong politics this is a really confusing thing for for those of us who like to think of ourselves as you know fairly sane on these things which is that um i don't think that my entire identity is wrapped up in whether i've got fallopian tubes or not a very boring way to go about it i'm i'm pretty sure that i've got my own ideas and i'm pretty sure that not everything about me is about being white uh or middle class or anything else i've known lots of different things about me but mostly it's i'm i'm me i'm individual i was raised to say to judge people as individuals now we have to judge people as good and bad based on the group to which they are supposedly from that gets into very fraught difficulties when you have particularly you know white straight males the old male and still which is now almost almost an insult yes or almost uh ward upon there's uh an attitude of revenge in the air they've done they've done something wrong yeah and i one of the points that i try to do with this book is not just to undo this game that's being played for game it is but to explain why it's dangerous and why we need to get out of it and one of the reasons is we cannot get stuck in this because there will be a game played back yes you you can't war on men for being men and not expect some kind of backlash you can't war on people because of their skin pigmentation and not expect a backlash it's it's something we need to we are saying we talk about the patriarchy capital t capital p people talk about toxic masculinity the metoo campaign and the and the idea again of of women again women are always in the role of victim we see that even when we're in a situation where we have you know lost uh female lost candidates democrats for american presidency was a woman uh that we've had secretaries of state two women in america here in britain two female prime ministers at the time where we had a female prime minister i think a female home secretary and a female metropolitan police commissioner we were being told that women can't get ahead and we all live in a terrible time it's part of this this this creation of this weird identity politics as most people know it is that because we've never had it so good i mean i i look i i went into political journalism at a time when there were very few women doing it um and i'm told constantly now by women who are now you know half of the mix you know i'm not a feminist and i can't quite work out what it is they think i've done wrong other than staying around for so long but um and you say having the wrong views but but is it is it that the people who are saying this now largely young but sometimes older people are old enough to know better right is it that they just don't know how far we've come you have to break it down by uh different groups there are certainly people who know that they're lying that they know i give examples of people who are just doing sheer politics who do you think they are they just well people of an older generation have decided that this is the best way to win because we can see it every day in every country in the developed west uh to to use racists against someone is basically to win or very nearly win certainly it's to significantly trounce your opponent throw them off their balance and then you can do anything they're a bad person if if you can accuse them of homophobia or transphobia or being anti-female in some way you can also you can also win so there are some people who at this stage you can clearly see and i list some of them in the book it's just clearly doing this in politics but one of the audiences i particularly want to reach is the younger audience who are falling for this and this is different this is this is younger people who have adopted this form of catastrophizing in every area in every area the world is a terrible terrible place and it's getting worse and there are some there are some i mean you know to sort of steal man their case there are certain reasons they might have for some of that i say in the introduction of this book that in the last 10 years the last 10 years is flooded into the mainstream and the last five that it's just metastasized but these bad ideas were around since the mid-80s at least one of my contentions is that this is a post-financial crash issue and that when young people in particular don't have much love of capitalism because they don't see how they can accrue much capital there are a whole set of things in society that their parents may have expected their parents didn't get it easy but but but got in the end home ownership for instance and younger people uh uh think i can't see how i can ever own a home it's it's perhaps inevitable in that situation you are vulnerable to an ideology which says you could solve every form of human inequality and inequity in the world like it's tempting isn't it it's a it's it's a meaningful thing to do i would argue to these people i do argue in the book they've got to get off this for reasons i explain the thing that they have got on first of all cannot provide them with meaning and secondly is going to provide us all with one almighty car crash and the car crash comes because it's not just it's not achievable but that actually it's going to almost bring about the exact opposite of what people want because we are in a situation i mean it's sticking with women for the time being after the me too uh stuff and again look is anyone here saying we think it's a good idea that senior very powerful men should sexually assault or abuse or or insist on blackmail women in the workplace who have less power than them to get ahead and get jobs no so let's just state that as a given um that would be a given for all sane and reasonable people and yet to question whether or not that some of the talk about what's going on in the workplace the idea that all women are going to work terrified of being sexually harassed at all times and that women somehow have to be given some unique protection in the workplace that women are put upon because they're not paid as much as men they're they in every possible way they are vulnerable this has simply resulted let's face it a lot of companies saying i think i'd rather not employ women yes i mean this is the the one of the many catastrophes here is when this enters the workplace i mean none of this is i should just reiterate none of this is to say that racism doesn't exist exist that sexism doesn't exist there's some homophobia in society and and more but what we need to do is to de-weaponize this and when we've entered instead a nuclear arms race and uh the issue you give of women is a very pertinent one because it's it's probably the most prominent of in certain characteristics in that we're confused give let me give an example of what i think part of the confusion is are women exactly the same as men are they less than men or are they better than men now i would like to settle and would like to think our society could settle on absolutely equal but that doesn't mean that everything about them is exactly the same as men now we we are finding i think 95 of the population would agree with you on that but this is almost death for people to say in public because the thing we have in public there's been no platform at many universities yeah um the the the the the main thing we've settled on for the time being is what i think of as described as the christine lagarde position christine legard former head of the imf one of the most distinguished people in the world let alone one of just one of the most famous people in the world and one of the most uh um uh experienced in her position now christine lagarde did not get to her position as head of the imf because she's a woman she got there because of her competency which is how we'd like anyone to be able to get anywhere but she isn't averse to playing this game she has said repeatedly since the financial crash that if lehman brothers had been layman's sisters the crash might not have happened so okay this this this gets me to to the core of that issue what are you saying are you saying that women are exactly the same as men and magically better and if so how but we had the same thing with caroline lucas didn't we suggesting recently that we should have a new cabinet appointed to be another opposition parties but it would be uniquely made up by women or interestingly of course then they got in a bit of a state because it was white women those of us who who are not worked or thought this was hilarious but again it's this same is it it's double thing though isn't it it's double think women are exactly the same as men but they're completely different and there's a young um american writer called coleman hughes very very talented young journalist who happens happens to be black uh who described it recently in a piece as saying he said he said it happens to that as well i said the presumption that there is some moral superiority from being black and you can see us in each of these uh um sort of rights wars uh um are our gay people slightly better now this is this is dangerous this is dangerous stuff it's quite again it's quite different from saying um there should be nothing in the way of somebody who has a competency to perform a task whoever they are whatever they are whatever their characteristics or background this is quite different this is saying a characteristic ought to make this person more suited and that that's where we get into positive discrimination well look let's let's people because there's so there is so much to talk about in this book let's talk about the issue of race and you touched on that as well there is an awful lot about white privilege going on in the media these days uh there's an awful lot about prejudice anyone who who says anything or who is white is instantly about any subject close to close to race not even at risk is is instantly targeted with racist bigger this is all got caught up with the brexit affair uh um with people constantly anyone talking about immigration as you've had you're a bigot you're you're you know you're you're islamophobic you're everything is um and that has got very confused because again you're then into again almost race balls and when this idea for instance that that uh you know a black community needs to have a black representative so so is it are we are we okay with white communities saying we only want white people representing because i'm not okay with that um when i have been on shows like question time and people talked about wanting peace representation of women or diverse groups and i've said you know what i couldn't care less as someone's good at the job i've had you know standing ovations from the audience it seems to me that actually the most ordinary people just think this is madness yes but unfortunately we're all being whipped into the madness i mean if this was just uh if this was just the product of crazy liberal arts colleges in the us we could all ignore it we could all ignore it and the truth is again we did ignore it this stuff was milling around in berkeley university and other other universities in america for years for decades it's only the last decade it's come rushing in because people have people have not known how to resist it it's it's a it's a pretty irresistible campaign in some ways but is that people accepting it and agreeing with it or is it people bullied into it being bullied and just sort of going you know what it's not well there are sometimes i think i'll post something on twitter and i think oh do you know i've got a busy day ahead i haven't got time for all the hate today yes um and people just and there's also an urge from lots of other people who who don't really believe it but play along and they signal their virtue by by announcing these things and the only people by the way the only people in my experience who aren't as worried as they should be about this are people who are self-employed and don't have to go into any office because anybody not everybody yet but most people in my experience whatever their line of work are starting to encounter the formalization of this ideology i describe in the book the the quota systems the commitments to diversity the need to promote people of different types of identity and you know in in the uk you've already got to start providing your your payment ratios for people based on gender and based on racial background and there are efforts to do this in every company with over 50 employees now what this does is create a huge bureaucratic class that is often the only growing part of the organization as we know from some media organizations among others uh uh you know that can fire journalists but hire ever more equity and equality enforcers um all of whom by the way are much better better salaries than the journalists but but i mean this becomes an embedded problem because these people need to find more and more problems to not solve to not solve because if you solve them you're out of you're out of a job so again that implies one could solve the problem right so that's one of the other things all of this is unsolvable why do you say that um well can we ever ensure i mean the language around it the extremism of the language is a terrible giveaway can we be absolutely sure that we can create a situation in the world where nobody has any forms of bigotry towards other people no no you're not saying oh we just accept that some people are right i mean look there are there are employers there are landlords there are people in you know in daily life who who will not not accept a tenant or give a job to someone because they're black or asian those people exist so those blind tests have shown that is absolutely the case but we don't just say that's okay no but we have among other things we have among the things legal protections for much of this if not most of it by now and this this effort to come out the other side of it and enforce a version of this for reasons i lay out in the book is already starting to undo it um let me give you an example um what happens when you decide to enforce gender quotas in the company first of all of course there's a misapprehension that if you for instance put more women on the board uh doing interviews that they will inevitably recruit more women in fact the research shows quite the opposite is the case which is fascinating um but you know it's just not the case that women automatically want to employ more women um but but but take the example of that if you do uh play the game of swift let you know leg up in this positive discrimination it's like the all-women shortlist in labor party what do you do what do you do but give people a leg up who are very nearly there anyway or people who wouldn't make it otherwise who shouldn't be there right so we have the phenomenon in the british parliament of whenever people want to accelerate the ethnic diversity one you see a version of this this happens as well in companies which is uh you say we need more representation from ex-ethnic group and you give people a leg up who are very nearly there anyway and i mean there are specific examples they don't want to name names but you get a lot of black old etonians okay or you get a lot of women who've gone to really good schools and the best universities and there's something down the line from that which people then discover and i've spoken to so many people from the corporate world who've given me exactly the same story somewhere along the line from this you discover you're doing really well on a female representation you're doing really well on lgbt representation you've you've given all the gays a leg up and uh you're doing you're doing pretty well on uh racial quotas and you discover you've got no class mobility yeah none because you've just accelerated all the people who are nearly there anyway what are you going to do about that nobody knows yeah but again and then that's picking and choosing so which which group takes priority which doesn't and we see this sort of is falling away in these constant attacks on on working class white brits constantly told they've got white privilege and sitting on a council estate in a in a sort of a former manufacturing town being told in your in your housing estate look at you with all your white privilege i think i can understand why they're saying really yeah what jd vance shows in hillbilly elegy you know these people who who are told at the end of being unemployed for a lifetime in a desiccated rural community that they also suffer from privilege i mean one of the things i want to try to undo in this book is this privilege game by pointing out why again it's not going to work the privileged one is is is toxic itself for a lot of reasons at the beginning we see all these you know everyone has to you have to declare it even in a tweet or a social media post of any kind or or the beginning of a speech yeah i'm i'm apologizing for the genetic and again heritage i've got it's the content of what you're going to say that matters surely surely for anybody but i've been told i've certainly been on tv debates where i've been told but you're not gay so you can't make that you're not black so you can't you know but again i go i i play the woman card then and i do and there's obviously a case where if someone is looking from the perspective of someone saying say if a load of white people in office say look there's no racism in this office and the two black people they're saying yeah there is um what's listening to you it doesn't necessarily make people right or wrong but it's clearly someone is coming from the perspective of being the victim of it or seeing it through different eyes that's valid but that's very different from everyone of one particular color or gender or sexuality is right and one and every other is wrong so one way of seeing some of this i think is to see it as an over correction and so does it come from a good place then well some of it does of course i mean much of it doesn't like who doesn't want equality uh uh where you can find it i mean uh who doesn't want uh um anyone of any particular competence who wants anyone who's competent to be held back because of a characteristic they have no control over um this is one this is one of the reasons again this is one of the reasons why it's so it's proved so hard to resist but if this is an over correction as i think it is we need to start to work out where the correct place would be one example i have that's in my mind on this is what do you do about the fact that studies show that lgbt well lgbt people particularly gay men and women actually earn disproportionately better than their heterosexual counterparts across the course of their careers one might call it gay privilege what are you going to do about that are you going seriously to take some money from the gays and give it to the straight people to compensate the straight people for among other things the nuisance of having to bring up the next generation in larger numbers than the gay population is likely to um to see these things is to see that we don't currently have the means to correct the over correction and we've got to start thinking about it we've got to start thinking about it in all of these ways and to and that one of the most important things is to is to head on address this issue of privilege because the problem is that the privileged game is an endless game and one that i think is unsolvable because we can't even tell within our own lives where we've actually benefited from privilege and where we haven't there are people who seem to have the most privileged lives who just their lives are hell and an outsider doesn't have the right to judge them on that or declare that they have to declare every time they speak exactly where they stand in the privileged hierarchy today the need to take responsibility not only for things that are beyond your control in your own body the colors your skin the gender your sexuality your whether your parents had money when they brought you up or not but but also now almost to take responsibility or or take offense at everything that was done to previous generations even two or three hundred years ago and that's when we get into the uh you know reparations for black slavery as if as if there hasn't been slavery forever until until it was and by the way britain thank you very much actually played a leading role in that and also as if to pretend that it wasn't black africans selling other black africans to white europeans how far back do people want to go in this historical uh um uh reparations game and i'd quite like some money back from the italians for the romans invading but also but also the idea that the idea that most people living in britain now who apparently have benefited from white white you know white's uh exploitation of black slave trade and in america the idea that at the time it was taking place they were living leaving this wonderful privileged life as opposed to living you know hand-to-mouth working you know 14 40 60 hour weeks in my formation working on a croft in the outer hebrides yeah and and i don't think suffered greatly from a privilege overdose but i just again we need to de-weaponize this they have been since the uh success of of the campaign not that it's that it's actually i think going to work at the moment but it might do in some future administration us the the relative success of the campaign and calling for racial reparations based on racial background has already led to people quite seriously urging that there should be reparations to gays i mean the people who didn't suffer themselves should on behalf of dead gays get some kind of reparation this has to stop for very obvious reasons but one of them is history was hell for everyone yeah history was held for everyone and we cannot do an audit sheet we cannot work out the balance of this we're just we should be looking i mean one of the things i urge people to do is look at history in a manner of forgiveness among other things not as something to weaponize to further your own cause in the presence looking at history and saying look how far we have come whether it's women's rights gay rights and acceptance and and and racial harmony because again i'm white not black so obviously i'm not going to ever suffer uh racial uh uh uh abuse or discrimination you could suffer your own form of racial abuse at the hands of a different person yes because yes because i'm the wrong perceived to be the wrong race at that time but but this is the thing um we're in this strange situation where look it's all getting better and getting better but we're constantly told now but it's not good enough and it may it may well not be good enough for lots of people but it seems to me that instead of just saying it's it's no we're not where we want to be we are now trying to judge everything on say on a perfect scenario which you say probably unachievable probably not that desirable when you see where it actually goes but but also looking at the fight we're going to go through together and looking back at history and judging it on today's term so this whole sort of ripping down of statues to people who who you know who who who did wonderful things just like us didn't think just like that now this thing the this is something you tackle very early on in the in the madness of crowds where you talk about how quick the rate of change has been now the rate of change in terms of women's emancipation uh um you know civil rights for for people of different colors and and gay rights again each time it's got faster and faster and faster trans again another issue let's tackle that uh again just absolute speed of light transformation from where the vast majority of people would have been even five years ago even a couple of years ago to the only acceptable point of view you are allowed to hold today and it's this speed of transformation in terms of not what lots of people think but what you are allowed to think and allowed to say yes one of the causes of this is a professional class identifying the book a professional class who is caught in what the late australian philosopher ken minogue described as georgian retirement syndrome so georgian retirement syndrome is that george slays the dragon and gets huge acclaim for slaying the dragon and as a result careers around the land looking for more dragons to slay until eventually having slaughtered smaller and smaller beasts he can be found swishing his sword at thin air um everybody of the generation that you describe that's coming up would love to have been saint george they would have loved to have have have been on martin luther king's march on washington they would have loved to have been there at the stonewall inn they would have loved to have been at the forefront of the second wave feminists they weren't they're benefiting from what these people did and should be so damn grateful for for that but it does not mean that when there are smaller and smaller dragons or indeed at some point perhaps no dragons that the attitude of the sword slaying destruction of our enemies things should persist however attractive this is where we are in the last few years where this this terrible terrible injustice has been brought upon news readers at the bbc who were women who who were paid over 100 000 pounds a year but not as much as some of the men i mean if this is if this is where we are in terms of gender inequality in this country you know i'll i'll take that i think i live in quite a nice country so this is one of the things i i try to try try to urge people let's think about better things let's think about more important aspects of these fights for instance i mean i i say i quote a really remarkable thing that camille paglia uh wrote a few years ago um when she said she said somewhere that that that feminism never never really dealt with motherhood yeah it never really addressed motherhood and and uh paglia cites her three feminist heroes of the 20th century which include amelia earhart and uh and jermaine greer but she mentions that all her heroes were childless so why are we in fourth wave feminism having these horrible horrible online campaigns and real world campaigns against men when surely our attentions will be better paid to talking about and thinking about how motherhood could be better achieved so much of this is i i debate this either on air or on twitter all the time nearly always with women in their mid-20s without children i'm a mother of one would love to have had more but took maternity leave i've got to be honest as a career woman best time of my life absolutely loved it and one of the things i found fascinating is the constant debate that we have about how women earn less than men women take part-time jobs they are undermined in their careers and it's all because the patriarchy and this awful situation women are held back and basically they're forced they're forced i mean mike can you imagine my husband forcing me chaining me chaining me to the kitchen and this absolute refusal to accept that again the men are women and women are different mothers and fathers are different i'd be perfectly happy with uh people you know two gay moms two gay dads there's no one gay mum one gay dad one straight whatever parents are different and and different genders form different roles but crucially is it is that i want as a mum to be at home with my daughter whenever i can be given the precepts of my career and most women do the fact that the polls say again and again that most women want to work part-time certainly when they've got children who are under the age of secondary school and yet every single government policy pushed by the feminists not feminists i don't think they're feminists it tells women you should be out at work you shouldn't be looking after your children your man should be doing it whether he wants to or not and it's almost like totally just upsetting the entire apple cart without ever asking the women what they want to do themselves right and i i you see i can't help thinking that in all of these things there's a double problem going on one is we're pretending to know a lot about things we don't know enough about and the second is that we're pretending not to know things we all knew till yesterday till yesterday we all knew that the woman was more likely to be a more successful rearer and nurturer than the husband's rubbish at lactating right i've seen rubbish that's quite uh a common problem across his gender um uh but you know we we have been one other way i i i try to think about this is why have we decided like back backup moment on on the on the lgbt bit on this because the lgbt bit and the feminist bit on this is really important we've been going through this period where in order to gain rights it's been seen as being necessary to say that what what might have been portrayed as a software issue is a hardware issue so gay rights succeeded most when it was portrayed rightly or wrongly i think mainly rightly but there's still there's still a dispute about this which is why we shouldn't be quite so certain that that it wasn't a it wasn't a matter of a lifestyle choice but a matter of born this way now as i say we should be less um um dogmatic about it it's irrelevant i haven't chosen it and therefore you can't it's not entirely irrelevant because it is relevant for the right's claim because more and more sympathy can be accrued if you say it's something you can't help yeah so like don't be a git about it it'd be like why don't we tease why don't we tease people for being disabled because what kind of a monster would pretend that that person wanted to be in that station it's like they chose it so we know that hardware issues are quite rightly more deserving of sympathy now the trans issue has campaigned for sympathy and recently it's based on that but here's the thing at the same time we've tried to say that these things which may or may not be hardware issues are hardware issues we've pretended that being a woman is a software issue that's a very good point a matter of choice it's a matter of choice yes the the feminist uh theorists who have uh been deranging the universities and then allowed and then were allowed to have their crazed ideas flood into the mainstream in recent years claim that uh being a woman is a matter of performativity if you perform being a woman you become one if i performed long enough i would effectively have a uterus it ain't gonna happen however hard i perform and one of the things in this is again i don't want young people to be lied to i don't want young women to honestly think that their biological clock continues at the same rate as the male biological clock because you will have the situation that i know and i think we all know a lot of women who are in this position that they've been told that they imbibed that they believed it and then they discovered they've been lied to and you can see this i give the example i'm i'm i'm very dubious about some of the issues around gay parenting for instance i don't i don't it's true you can have children if you're gay if you're rich yes you could afford the idea if you can afford the ivf i don't like this idea that you say to young gay men particularly because young women is a bit easier in a way for a very obvious reason that they can just become parents if they want it's it's a bit harder than that that isn't to say that nobody who's gay should bring up children it's not that at all it's just can we please have an honest discussion about some of this and we've we've deliberately avoided having honest discussions on all of this because we think we can't handle it and because immediately someone will shout transphobia and even what you've said now perfectly reasonable measured thoughtful comments you're instantly going to be labeled a transfer and the thing the trans issue has really come to the fore in the last few months certainly in the uk i know it'd be a big issue in the united states particularly over issues of uh prisoners male prisoners often actually convicted for sexual offences against women now identifying huge percentages of men in prison now identify uh far greater than the outside population as women to get transferred to a women's prison we've actually had an incident in court a court case in which the kate the court has actually heard in court this blows my mind um she the prisoner was reported by her her chosen name even though quite clearly biologically and was slid intact email uh she assaulted the woman prisoner with her penis and we i mean and and that was said in court and people were expected to keep a straight face now this is exactly the sort of thing we were told wouldn't happen exactly and also we got the issue again the whole places like topshop saying yes we we absolutely we completely accept someone anyone who identifies as a woman can go in the uh ladies changing room you know what not when my 12 year old's in there he or she can't um if you've got a penis i don't think you should be in that changing with my 12 year old i don't think that's transphobic i think that's just being a good mum i i think that the trans one we have to think really carefully about the trans one and that is that is perhaps the best example of something we're pretending we know about when we don't you think no but we most people aren't pretending most people are just saying this is all insane sure you and i know that and they're saying it in private oh yeah they're saying it in private like so many of these things people don't dare to do it in public because they will be shouted down for doing so but i i try in my channel taken off social media they had their uh you now in britain have the can have the police at your door have the police at your door if you say there's some there's a difference between a trans woman and a woman and and so well i'd say oh i'd do this on airtime i make this point i'm not a cis woman i'm a woman right i'm with jermaine grier you know i'm a woman i i show the courtesy to my trans guests we talk about these issues a lot and always show the courtesy just as a matter of politeness good manners if you prefer to be called her or she absolutely and that's not in a court of law if there were a crime committed no i would not show you that courtesy but however you you know she would be called jane and referred to as she or her absolutely but i but that doesn't make you a woman that makes you a trans woman and i'm a woman that's not an insult it's just a statement of biological facts and and uh there are plenty of trans people who would agree with what you've just said so so this brings us on to the one of the issues of why this is happening and the trans one uh really interesting open interestingly opens this up i lay out in the chapter on trans in this book what i think is going on and look if you start at the beginning of it let's let's try to work out what along this line of this argument is plausible and what is not there is a thing it's known as intersex which is people born with genital abnormalities uh um it it it's it's it's very rare although it's not quite as rare as a lot of people think it needs to be quietly covered up by the doctors right quick snip and it's it's okay it's a hardware issue that's a hardware issue that's that and als also by the way who wouldn't have sympathy for somebody with that like that's that's a that's a bad deal to get at the beginning of your life when you when nobody's life is easy anyway that's that's not an optimal way to start and so i think the sensible thing to do with this would be to start with calling for for better understanding of intersex issues that hasn't happened the intersex debate has not happened what we've had is we've run right to the end of this and i chart each bit carefully i think it can be done a salami slicing what along the line of this issue on trends is is a plausible and legitimate argument and which bit is not and the strangest thing on the trans one is we have dashed in record time ignored left over intersex and run all the way to if the big bearded man with a penis says he's a woman he's a woman and how dare you say otherwise you phobe and also if the three-year-old child little boy wants to address or or is a girl wants to dress up suddenly saying you're trans as opposed to just just just a kid or and i i've spoken to many people uh in researching this book including people people who have been through this and parents of young people and it's just deranging to a society to say we should give life-changing medicines and carry out um new procedures that we don't know the consequences yet of on children and if you object you are suffering from a phobia so so let me just get if i made to the the thing that i think the trans thing in particular opens up what it opens up is something that have been on my mind for some time with each of the other rights claims and issues in this book on gay on women on race which is that there's something in the air i referred to it earlier something like retribution an air of retribution a feeling of retribution in the air the trans one exposes this very clearly because as i say if you wish to make an argument for trans rights you would have done intersex they didn't they went to the most extreme one and said try to try to do that say yes to that and people instinctively feel no but they're told they can't say no so what is this really uh this is what i think it is i think it's an attempt to use a battering ram against the foundations of our society and you can see it in a significant portion of the gay rights campaigns you can see it in what i describe as the difference between gay and queer people who are gay just happens they're attracted to people of the same sex for whatever reason and people who think that being gay is merely the first step to bringing down the western patriarchal system of hegemony and capitalism okay before last time i never saw it as that but but there are people for whom that is the case again is being a woman just something that you that you are you're having to be born a woman and that means there are various things that you will have to address in your life that are slightly different for men but otherwise it's pretty much the same run you get or is being a woman merely the first step to bringing down capitalism is is being black just a fairly uninteresting issue of a racial characteristic which we hope people can as much as possible get over and be our uninterest disinterested in in order to make the conditions optimal for people whatever their skin color or is being black and i give some examples of this in the book that are horrifying is being black simply the first step to some massive political movement now the trans one opens this up because it is so blatant the people who are using the trans thing i don't believe are interested in intersex rights i think they just want to piss everyone off enrage them anger them and demoralize the society that's it but the individual people who are making these points and people who will tweet and these woke sort of snowflake students who who need safe rooms and get upset by by anyone using what they think is in the correct language that day bearing in mind the language that's correct that day would be different from last month and the month before and a year ago and certainly 10 years ago um but they're not they don't they're not all sort of in part of this secret secret society this conspiracy are they just being sort of dragged along with the wave well as i said i think the wave is hard to resist because firstly it's exceptionally bullying and that's i mean most people want a quiet life and and and more than that in most systems and hierarchies at the moment people are very vulnerable yeah i i one of the reasons i've written this book and one of the reasons i've been thinking about this for such a long time is because i think that the only people who can tell the truth in this era are people who do not have a hierarchy above them i think it's writers and thinkers who don't have a hierarchy and yet we have seen writers and thinkers academics and others journalists suppose new free thinking journals losing their jobs because they haven't said or done the right thing and haven't apologized quickly that doesn't appear with social media there's even any way back you're punished for life you are now a bad person you may not come back um so we talked about how we got here i think the vast majority of people in this country in any other uh country watching this right now or listening to this right now i think will agree with you and me not just not just because they particularly chose to tune in to douglas murray and julie harley brewer talking but because most people are sensible most people are getting on with their lives they can see they can see what makes us similar and they can see what makes us different most people we know in certainly in britain are are not racist we we know that we have we have an extraordinary good record on this huge rate for instance mixed race marriage huge acceptance of gay right to marriage absolutely and in terms of you know we've had two women prime ministers don't tell me there's a glass ceiling for women if they want to get there the reality is though those people are are representative of you know vast majority of sensible people they're clearly not getting certainly the political representation on this and the cover for this to speak out on these things i have a funny feeling though they will do what they did in america with trump they will vote for the person they'll burst out and we're going to correct our own trump here but this is the thing um what is the solution other than you say writers people need to speak out i speak out on this stuff you speak out in this stuff there are lots of other people far braver than me who speak out on this um and whether the storm of the abuse whether or not i eventually lose my job before speaking out on this i don't know but i'll take i'll take the risk because i think it's important who who is going to save us from the madness well we have to save ourselves from it how do we do that firstly we have to recognize what it is that's happening we have to recognize the full grandiosity of the effort it's not just accidental that all of these tripwires exist in the exactly just a silly little thing about about pronouns it's or it's a little thing about trying to be right on or being woke it's you think it's much much more sinister and significant well it's not just since it's it's it's it's a serious claim and it should be taken seriously i think it's i think this whole issue is basically the the the grandest effort since the end of the cold war to create a totalistic structure for our societies what do you mean by that to embed an entirely new form of metaphysics in the society to make the products of liberal rights the foundations of liberal rights and one of the reasons why i say this cannot work it will not work is because all of these things are wobblier than we like to pretend as you can see that's where the whole phrase the left will eat itself so when you end up with the sort of the you know the the trans groups against the revolutionary feminists so yes because well first of all all of them are unstable components in and of themselves we just don't know as much as we're pretending but the second thing is they all run against each other so the intersectional theorists think that what's happening here is that there are systems of interlocking oppressions and if we unlock them we end up in what state something they haven't quite figured out yet but it's obviously justice it's nirvana of some kind like the marxists they're very um which they get lots of ideas from it's it's it's sort of left opaque because otherwise all the claims will look ridiculous so that's the first thing they claim this is going to interlock and in fact it all goes in at an angle it deranges you can't do the women thing and the trans sing simultaneously you can't do the trans thing and the gay things simultaneously and there's a big issue now is race because we have for instance things like the case in harvard of asian students suing the university of harvard because harvard in its effort to to get more black americans into harvard which is a perfectly noble aspiration nevertheless ends up being racist it ends up marking down asians on on characteristics to do with personality in order that asians don't come in to harvard in the numbers they would come into because they're getting the grace so my point is we just have to we have to lean less heavily on these heuristics we have to lean less heavily on these claims but so first the first thing is we've got to work we've got to realize what this is and take it seriously identify the problem first and then we've got to undo it and then we need to work out what we should spend our time doing that is better i i don't deny that one of the reasons this is caught on is because it fills a void it fills a void that exists in the capitalist democratic liberal west where to some extent people are bored to some extent they don't know what to do to some extent there is little speaking to the void in their lives i know you've written a lot about you know the the death sort of religion religious beliefs obviously particularly christianity i mean i was raised an atheist there's not one for me but certainly one of the things i see is is yes a sort of a sort of loss of purpose a loss of identity and it's a terribly fractured world and then of course so you latch on to your identity in this group and you regard you regard uh the meaning of life as coming from campaigning yeah that's why that's why when time magazine puts trans issues on the cover in 2015 says the new rights battle question mark okay they want a battle now i don't i urge people among other things to think differently about what the purpose in their lives should be politics as you and i know is a fascinating fascinating thing political battles are a fascinating thing they are a very poor source of all of life's meaning it's a very bad idea to to lean on that for all of your sense of meaning in life so first of all it's say what ought we to be doing a second thing in that by the way is why why do people think that it's going to be that interesting to work the interlocking natures of this out we shouldn't at this i i would just urge again young people particularly students we can play the game endlessly because it's unresolvable why aren't people trying to work out what we can do in this generation why a friend pointed out recently why why aren't we why aren't young people at university trying to work out how we live in underwater cities yes that's that would be or or put serious attention on to on to issues like plastic in the ocean or or living on mars rather than working out all the issues of your own characteristics and trying to weaponize them against other people and also thinking that i do think they're a massive issue with young people to young people today what do i sound like they think that the world is a terrible place or by every metric every single metric the number of people who die in wars from disease how long people live child mortality maternal mortality literacy people living there is no metric at all which is not not just getting better but getting better at this scale financially and and exactly we we aren't we seem not to be very good at realizing our luck being born today is as good as it's as best it's ever been other than being born tomorrow and hopefully hopefully but here's the thing if we don't recognize this as i say we risk pulling the whole thing apart including the things that got us here to the things we want okay and and just a thought on that quickly which is that i try to give in the conclusion this book some of the shortcuts to how we think should think about this and one of them is how about always responding to people by saying compared to what when somebody says you know we live in the most patriarchal oppressive racist society compared to what compared to where and when and most of history was hell for most people for most people and most of history was held even for the people who were the most privileged people in those societies and you know i i have a chapter in the book on forgiveness because i am obsessed with this because we think all the time about the consequences of action in the world and nothing about how we can resolve them and i i think this is a deep issue we have to resolve but the first so the first thing is as well work out what the resolution mechanisms could be for the problems we're setting up and then work out how more people could have access to them don't live in this world where people get punished all of their lives for one misspeak but work out what it would look like to forgive people for that slip assuming we are all going to slip ourselves there but for the grace and and realize that that doesn't just happen with history to be forgiving towards history because we would like the future to look back on us with something like forgiveness or understanding but also to try to practice that in the present to try among other things not to interpret everyone's words including our political opponents words in the worst possible terms but think how can i try to approach even my political opponent's terms in a spirit of generosity i wonder how long it will be till that happens douglas murray i could talk with you for hours the book just like the strange death of europe which was a huge bestseller uh and absolutely loved that book this is going to be just as big the madness of crowds gender race and identity by douglas murray thank you very much indeed for talking to me uh this has been the julia hartley brewer podcast don't forget to do all the things you're supposed to do video podcast and like can you like it can you review it say something nice if you can and please subscribe as well and thank you very much indeed

Channel: talkRADIO

Views: 662,031

Rating: 4.9076548 out of 5

Keywords: talkradio, Douglas Murray, the madness of crowds, julia hartley brewer, race, gender, identity, book, technology, culture wars, social justice, identity politics

Id: cTviaHRguVU

Length: 55min 30sec (3330 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 17 2019