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Oct. 27, 2020 - The Charlie Kirk Show
45:02
Escaping the Left's Postmodernist Wasteland with Douglas Murray
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Douglas Murray on Critical Thinking 00:03:06
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Hey, everybody.
Welcome to this episode of The Charlie Kirk Show.
I am super thrilled to be here today with Douglas Murray, who's associate editor at The Spectator and also the author of a phenomenal book, The Madness of Crowds.
He'll talk about that throughout the episode.
But I just want to first say Douglas is one of the wisest, most clever voices in the conservative movement.
Douglas, I heard you on Dennis Prager's fireside chat last week or two weeks ago.
Identity Politics as a Weapon 00:06:17
And it just been a while since I had kind of listened to your content.
And you just made some phenomenal points.
I want to start with one point just right off the bat.
You said something, and I have been using it in a lot of my speeches, that it seems as if there's a supply and demand problem with fascists and racists in the West, that there's an incredible demand from the left to find them, but such a lack of supply.
I just love that.
Can we just start with Darren?
Can just build that out?
Sure, of course.
Well, first of all, it's a great pleasure to be with you.
Yes, I'm a great admirer of Dennis's as well.
And I mentioned this to him.
It's been something that's been on my mind a lot in recent years, what I call the supply and demand problem, where there's a huge demand for fascists, white supremacists, racists, and so on in the West, and a relatively small supply.
Thank goodness.
Anyone should be pleased about the fact that all opinion polls and much more show that indeed the experience and evidence of our everyday lives shows that where racism does exist in a society like the UK or America, it's pushed to the farthest margins, it's not tolerated, it's certainly not welcomed or in any way acceptable.
And yet we have people claiming that almost everybody is a white supremacist or racist or an extremist if they don't like them.
And I haven't actually been in the US for a couple of years, but I've been thinking about this a lot and thinking about it from a distance and noticing how much in your country, and I've been here touring around the country for the last month, how much this now applies to modern America.
You know, you have people being called these things who are just obviously, demonstrably, provably just not those things.
And there is a very dangerous game being played by all those who would apply such labels in order to win some short-term political game and use those labels and diminish those labels and in the end demean and make them pointless.
And, you know, because if everyone's a fascist, some point nobody is.
You know, if half of the country is fascist, then obviously they're not.
And in the end, you don't know how you can identify anybody who actually might be.
So there's a huge terminology problem, not to sound too sort of academic about it.
There's a huge terminology problem in American politics, which I've just noticed since the last time I was in this country and is rampant today.
I completely agree.
And even just basic terms such as what is racism, we're talking about two completely different things.
You and I would believe that racism is an individual person expressing prejudice against another person based on skin color, language, culture, any of those categories.
Whereas someone on the left, they would say racism is actually a power struggle between two groups, that a black person cannot be racist and a white person might be racist without you ever even knowing it and you can't even prevent it.
This is a very dangerous sequence of events that is taking place in the West.
And I love what you said, terminology problem.
I actually have said, I said this two weeks ago, where I said, we're talking about different things when they're interfacing sometimes with the other side.
And they're intentionally changing the terms, I think, to try and either, I think they're communicating to populations disgust for the terms while also using a different definition of the terms that actually making it perfectly clear.
A great example is they do not believe someone can be gay, can be black, or can be Hispanic if they're not also on the left.
You've experienced this in some way.
Can you talk about how they tie identity to leftism?
And if you aren't on the left, you're stripped of that, any sort of identity that might come with it.
That's right.
I describe this in The Madness of Crowds.
As you know, in each chapter, I do a different identity Grouping.
A lot of people look at the contents page of the madness of crowds and either shriek or think few because you can't help seeing the list.
You know, I think it's gay, women, race, trans, which makes a lot of people gulp.
But, you know, I just don't think these are all fascinating subjects.
We don't have them out honestly enough.
We don't really talk about what's interesting in them.
We just have this boring ideological weaponization of all of these terms.
I'm not much interested in that.
I am interested in things that are genuinely interesting.
Anyhow, yes, in each of these cases in The Madness of Crowds, I give an example of somebody who is of the identity group in question that the left would like to weaponize, who is said no longer to be in the identity group once they don't have left-wing politics.
So I give the example in the gay chapter of Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley technique, who is a gay man and who, when he comes out for President Trump, is said by The Advocate, which is the remaining pointless legacy gay publication in the U.S., is said by the advocate to be in any way gay.
They say he may, Peter Thiel may sleep with men, but in no way is he gay.
You would have thought that the sleeping with Membit was sort of central to the whole business.
But anyway, they say, no, no, no, he's not a leftist, therefore he isn't gay.
When Kanye West says he's not of the left, he says he's even going to vote Trump and all of that a few years ago, the same thing happens.
Tanahesy Coates, the most celebrated, I'd say over-celebrated writer of his generation in America, writes a piece in the Atlantic saying that Kanye is, to all intents and purposes, no longer black.
And we've seen this in other areas.
The most distinguished feminist of the late 20th century, Jermaine Greer, doesn't have 100% of today's lockstep views on the trans issue and is chucked out of the church of feminism a few years ago.
The new feminists say Jermaine Greer is no longer a feminist.
And as I say in The Madness of Crowds, if Peter Thiel isn't gay and Kanye West isn't black and Jermaine Greer isn't a feminist, then we're not really talking about the facts here.
Kanye and the Black Label 00:04:48
What we're talking about is people who wish to use identity groupings as a political weapon.
And it's very, very dangerous.
I regard it, I mean, I happen to be gay, and I don't think it's a very important part of my political or other parts of my life.
But I deeply resent people who think that because you happen to be gay, just as if you happen to be black or anything else, ergo you must be not just of the left, but now, of course, they say in favor of, and let's do the list, dismantling capitalism, dismantling the patriarchy, dismantling the family, dismantling cis heteronormativity, and the whole boring, turgid list of other claims that they make.
No, no.
We should respect individuals.
We should respect individuals.
And individuals will fall out differently with different views.
And there is nothing wrong in that.
And there is something not just sinister but totalitarian in the idea that that is what we should do.
Hive off people into blocks and say, if you are this thing, then you must believe the following.
It's demeaning and not just demeaning of the individuals, but demeaning of all of us as human beings.
I couldn't agree more.
And the danger is that there will be a collision point when you start to hive people off into these different groups.
And the only way I can reconcile why they're doing this is they actually want that collision point.
I think they really do.
There is no way that you could try to, there's no way that your goal can be harmony and do what they are trying to do.
And what I mean they, the critical race theorists and the postmodernists and the people that you mentioned this list and it's so perfect.
Dismantle this and disintegrate that and destroy that.
They don't want to build anything.
They are not in, they're not in the game, if you will, of trying to build things around beauty or goodness.
Instead, it's what can we displace or destroy?
And by the way, on this visit to America that I've been involved in this month, I've seen all of this firsthand.
I saw it in Seattle and I saw it in Portland when I was there the other day.
These are places filled with people who believe this mad idea that America is this incredibly patriarchal, cis-heteronormative, racist society and all of that list.
They actually believe it and they believe in the name of that.
They must pull the whole damn thing down.
And here's the thing: we can already see the results of that.
We can already see the world you inhabit when you do that.
It is what these places are like.
And I don't know when the last time was you were in Seattle or Portland, but they are horrible, horrible places.
They are places where I was reminded of a friend who writes under the name Theodore Dalrenpol.
His real name is Anthony Daniels, a retired prison doctor in the UK, who said many years ago when he visited Cuba that watching the people of Cuba in the 1980s walking among these beautiful French colonial buildings, he was reminded of it was as if they were in a civilization they had found themselves in but could not sustain or in any way hold up.
And it's the same with people in Portland and in Seattle.
They find themselves among these buildings.
There are still federal buildings and courthouses and police stations and libraries and things, but they've all been graffited over.
They've all been molested.
They've all been shot at or hacked at or thrown things at.
They're all boarded up.
And so you just have these people who think that if they just pull down the one remaining statue, they will be free from their past and they'll be able to enjoy the urine-stenched wasteland that they deserve.
But that's the problem, is that's all they do inherit.
They can't even build buildings.
All they have are tents everywhere among the remnants of buildings that people better than them put up.
And this is a major problem.
It's a major problem for American society.
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So I want to ask you about something you also said to Dennis Prager.
I've heard you say it on some of your other recent interviews.
And I don't know if I agree with this, but it gives me hope.
Where you said you think that postmodernism is going to reach an apex of atonality and eventually people will want to go back to pursue beauty, truth, and goodness.
Can you build out that argument and also kind of go a little bit deeper about how you think that postmodernism actually might be hitting a ceiling?
Well, I do think that's the case.
I'm so glad you raise it because it's a major thing going on underneath all of our feet.
Throughout our lives, we've been living in the sort of wasteland created by the postmodernist movements.
These are lots of things, not to get too theoretical about it, but things like deconstruction and all of that.
And as I say in the Manners of Crowds, this came from universities, first of all, from departments that wanted to deconstruct everything apart from themselves.
And these departments at American universities played a sort of game.
And the game went out from beyond the control of the departments in question.
The game was things like pulling things apart, forgetting the big stories.
And I mean, many people have observed this.
Neil Ferguson some time ago said that his shorthand for this was: you know, whenever a colleague of his in the university retired, you know, who was an expert in, say, Russian history, they were always replaced by somebody who was a sort of field of study was infinitely narrow within an infinitely narrow field.
You know, the big studies, the big knowledge was being lost and always ended up going to these mean-minded and small-minded people.
Now, the thing I think has been happening recently has been that we have been able to see very clearly that postmodernism can deconstruct, but it can't construct, that it can't build.
Now, this is something, by the way, that all parents know.
It's the experience that happens when a child takes a bicycle apart and then can't put it back together, just doesn't know how.
Because this is a lesson we all learn.
We all learn this very early in life.
It's very easy as children to pull things down.
It's very hard to create.
Now, this is a central, we might say, Burkean insight of conservatism.
But here's the thing that I think is happening.
And there have been a number of cultural shifts in recent years that speak to this.
I think that people are starting to recognize that the deconstructed wasteland is not that enjoyable a place to live in.
That people do not want to live in the thing that is simply endlessly picking apart and pulling down.
We can see this in architecture.
We can see it in housing.
Offered a chance, people want to live in beautiful housing.
It was one of the great insights of the late Roger Scruton about this: that people do, if they can, if they have the means, want to live in beautiful surroundings.
The rich do live in beautiful surroundings because they have the opportunity to do so and they make their choice.
The less well-off have less of a choice, and government has tended to give them the ugliest imaginable buildings.
But if you grow up around this, if you see this and you see that there are alternatives to this, there is an alternative in the world.
There is a chance for us to live in harmony with our surroundings, not in a brutal surrounding.
And the point is that in recent years, I've noticed, I've noticed it with my own writing and audiences and others, and I've noticed it in some of my contemporaries and others like Jordan Peterson, that there is a very clear vacuum.
And the vacuum needs to be spoken to and is finally being spoken to.
The vacuum is that, as I say in the madness of crowds somewhere, we may be the first people in human history to live without any explanation of what we're meant to be doing here.
Now, the radical left has given people an explanation.
It has said you should spend your lives warring against the following things.
And I don't by any means say this isn't a purpose.
A lot of people clearly do find purpose in this, but there isn't that much purpose in it.
There isn't that much meaning.
However, and this is a crucial thing, the right has not spoken to this absence of meaning.
It's beginning to do so.
And when it does so properly, along with the elements of the left that can do the same, we will genuinely see the end of the deconstructionist postmodernist movement because it has nowhere else to go.
So, Douglas, I want to just challenge this a little bit.
You have presented a thesis, if you will, for lack of a better term, that when postmodernism and some of these deconstructionist ideas are fully implemented on the political, sociological, and cultural level, that eventually there's such a atonality to it, there's such a darkness, for lack of a better term, that eventually people will reject it and try to get back to at least a pursuit of truth or goodness.
I don't know if we're seeing that yet in the West.
We are seeing places like Portland and Seattle where they're taking down the statues, they're destroying any form of the Western tradition or ethic, and it's a miserable place.
What will that breaking point be?
Does it require those of us that actually believe in these sorts of ideas of pursuing truth and trying to say that there's better music than others to go into those vacuums of darkness?
Or what do you think that breaking point looks like?
It will be different for different people.
And by the way, it may well take a long time.
I mean, in historical terms, what we're going through is a nanosecond.
And this may well be the course, this may well take place over the course of a century or far more.
It may take four centuries.
There are several options.
For people in the wastelands that I describe, there are very easy ways out.
The obvious way out is to dope yourself out of existence, is to use narcotics to decide, as a lot of Americans have, and a lot of people in my own country, that basically they will get around the horror of the existence that they are in, often through no fault of their own, sometimes through fault of their own, and decide to sort of numb themselves in a way that Aldous Huxley and others predicted that modern man may indeed do.
Brave new world.
Yeah, exactly.
And so that's definitely an option.
Another option, however, is to say no to this and is to try to, among other things, find a harmony with what has gone before you and to find a place in it, to find indeed a place in the great stream of events, culture, and much more.
Now, I'm struck by this because, as I say, the right has basically given up on a lot of this discussion in recent years.
Very few figures on the right have been much interested, it's to their great detriment, have been much interested in things beyond the realm of the economy.
They have fought culture wars, but have primarily fought culture wars in order to push back the latest madness of the left.
They haven't then said what should replace that madness.
And I think this has been a great failing because a lot of people intuit, a lot of clever people intuit, a lot of people with, you know, you don't need a high IQ or something to intuit this, but just intuit that they do not want to live the life of endless struggle.
And struggle is the portrayal of meaning that the left is holding out.
Now, I know a lot of people on the decent liberal left who genuinely don't like that either.
They regard politics as being, like I do, a very important thing, but not the meaning of life.
And yet we have lost the explanations we used to have for what you do to lead a meaningful life.
We've even lost the terms for it.
I mean, when did you last hear anyone but me refer to, for instance, a life well-lived?
That was something that was a very common thing people used to talk about.
You know, what is a life well-lived?
And there was a phrase for it because there was an idea of it.
And if you don't have the phrase for it, if you don't have an interest in the phrase, it's partly because you don't have an idea of it.
Now, I do have an idea of it.
I think a lot of us do, but we're not very good or haven't been very good in explaining it.
And we will have to, because we will have to explain to people that the kind of nihilistic despair that a portion of the radical left is offering is not going to answer the deep needs of their souls.
I think this is the work of, as I say, generations.
But it can be done.
It's been done before.
There have been many times when civilization has been pulled back from a brink of nihilistic despair.
In fact, you might say that that brink is one of the things that keeps us limber and keeps us going, exactly the knowledge of where we could fall.
So one needn't despair about it.
And it is something which the good news of it, among other things, is that an individual can do it for themselves.
They do not need to find the optimum conditions in society to do it.
They can save themselves from that abyss today.
They can step away from it themselves.
They can stop having warring fights with their family and loved ones and with their past and their culture and their history.
And they can learn, as I say, among other things, to reconcile themselves with things in the world.
This is one way to start.
It's not the whole thing, but it's a start.
And I think one of the biggest difficulties, and something that you definitely agree with, that we have been struggling and battling is the universities do a phenomenal job of almost imparting an evangelistic nihilism upon young people.
That it's not enough that you believe in the nihilistic worldview.
You must go find new converts.
It's almost the Matthew 5 of the nihilistic worldview that you must go make not salt and light, but dark and death in the world.
And I find that this is their purpose.
And you're exactly right.
The purpose has its limitations.
But I have seen young people have not a fulfilling 20s, but a motivated 20s, you know, their 20s, trying to go forth in the world and convince people that all Western art, culture, poetry, literature is rubbish and garbage, and it must be destroyed at all costs.
And one of the things that we do so wrong in America, and we have done over the last couple of decades, we haven't realized it, is that we tell 16 and 17-year-olds not that, hey, there's some truth and goodness out there.
Let's tease you and maybe we can find it together.
Instead, we set the baseline when they're 16.
There is no truth.
There is no goodness.
We're going to teach you how to become a better complainer about all the stuff around you and the planet that exists.
I think the question for those of us, and I don't even like to use the word conservative, because who even knows what that means?
It's such a, you know, but conservative or someone that just believes in the West is how do we properly interface against a left, the left or the deconstructionists or the nihilists that are so motivated, they're so energized and they control so much terrain.
How do you think that we should best embark on that?
Well, one, I think, hope, which I suspect is a false hope, which a lot of people on the right have had, is that the left extremism would fall apart under its own contradictions.
It can fall apart in parts.
Bits of the left can fall away when they realize the contradictions, but a significant portion simply see the contradictions as further evidence that there are contradictions, which themselves must be embraced and will lead to further contradictions.
It's not inevitable also that when things fall apart, they fall apart and come back together again in the right's favor.
That's another myth on the right, you know, that if you allow a thing to hit rock bottom, people will magically realize that the right was right all along.
And I don't think this is the case.
History shows us that when things hit rock bottom, you discover a whole new inferno underneath it that you haven't considered yet.
And by the way, this is the case in America.
I notice it very much in my travels of recent weeks.
You know, I think sometimes I said it to a friend, I think, in Oregon somewhere, that, you know, I said, don't you sometimes you see some of the people protesting all the luckiest generation in human history.
You see some of them protesting like mad men and mad women and mad they suppose one must say outside of public federal buildings in America.
And I said, you just sometimes really want to just slap them.
And I said to this friend who I confessed this to, I said, the problem is that if you did slap them, they would immediately say, here is a white supremacist slapping me.
Here is a Nazi, and it is evidence of Nazism.
And off you'd go again.
You know, it's wrong to think that there will be this sort of moment of great awakening when it might just be ever, ever more maddening.
I think the crucial thing is how you save sensible and reasonable people from this.
The big problem you have in America is obviously that too many people in America go to university and become stupider.
And I don't know how you address that long term, other than encouraging people to go to the better colleges and to not get themselves indebted to study non-specialisms that just make them bitter.
But there must be a way for America through that.
And I do think you have a way.
I think there are very many reasonable Americans of the center, the center left and the center right, who do think, you know, there are problems in our past, but the fact that the past had problems doesn't mean that you should hate everyone in the past and make yourself the king in 2020.
You know, I think many people, it doesn't matter how educated or otherwise they are, do have a reasonable view of history.
And it isn't the strange, vindictive assault on the past that is being presented to them.
So I do have some faith in that.
And I think that those people need to be given help, arguments, information, facts, and much more that help to bolster them through the facts and the truths that they instinctively have.
And I think the false hope we have that when things begin to fall apart, they'll eventually come back to conservatism.
There's very little evidence of this.
Back when I was a sophomore in high school, we read a book by Chinua Echebe called Things Fall Apart.
I don't remember about this book.
Very well read in America and the West.
And I didn't realize this until the last couple of years.
But the underlying reason why they made us read this book was it frames Europeans as colonialists and all these, you know, all the same sort of colonial framing.
But more than anything else, the title is almost that things are going to fall apart, so why even try to keep them together?
It's almost this, and it's almost like the second law of thermodynamics.
Like this civilization is going to decay.
Tech Companies Muffling Opponents 00:15:24
Why even put in the effort?
Can you comment on that?
Yes, by the way, that, I mean, these are very worrying signs that these are the messages being imparted to young people in America.
That is a very late empire thing to happen.
I mean, I've given you some hope, But here's some negativity.
I mean, that is a very late empire thing to happen.
It happened at the end of the Soviet regime when the people in charge no longer believed in the thing and decided just to have fun whilst it was still running.
That is one of the things that this speaks to.
It's all going down, so why not sort of vaguely enjoy yourself in the embers as long as they last?
It's a very worrying, very, very worrying thing.
It speaks also to an American naivety, if I may say so, which has come about because of the totally fallacious idea in America that whenever you shake out human society, it always comes out looking something like Boston in the 20th century, whereas most of the world comes out looking very, very different all the time.
You know, what you have in America in your own lifetime is totally exceptional in human history, and it doesn't require any jingoism to say that.
It's simply a statement of fact.
So we do have a great problem if this impulse, this, well, it's all falling apart, so why bother anyway, has indeed embedded itself because it's a very dark impulse that can lead nowhere.
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So, Douglas, I want to talk about how Europe is on almost a trajectory for perpetual decline.
We were given hope through the UK vote of Brexit, and almost the deep state of the European Union did everything they could to try and subvert the will of the people throughout that process.
And the European system is very much different than the American system.
The idea of states' rights does not exist in many European countries.
This idea of an electoral college or even having a sole executive elected outside of the legislative branch to use the equivalent of the United Kingdom is not something that the UK in particular quite has the same sort of system.
President Donald Trump, I think, is an outgrowth of a lot of the trends you've been talking about in response to them.
I think that some people feel something when they see President Trump with 50 different flags behind him, bashing political correctness, being different than the traditional political class, because he's almost a manifestation of the response and to the repulsion that people have to kind of the decay of the country around them.
Without getting too big into the political side of it, because I think it's more interesting to get into the philosophical, you know, kind of reasons why he is succeeding.
What is your analysis of President Trump in this moment as an outsider looking in this country and what his political opponents represent?
And also, this represent a hope for America or is this just kind of a last-gasp effort?
Well, we'll see.
I mean, all of this could go in any direction.
There are, for instance, on the sort of woke agenda, there are several ways of seeing it.
Some people see President Trump as being the great sort of anti-woke hero.
Others see him as actually having exacerbated the trend and made it harder to solve.
Because if you have this effect that I've described as the snowplow effect, where anyone who treads into the center of what used to be the reasonable part of the road of American politics suddenly sees this snowplower coming towards them that hurtles them.
Aha, you're a Trump supporter.
You must therefore think the following things.
Or you are a supporter of Bernie or whatever.
And this is a very, very dangerous game.
And it is one that Trump has himself exacerbated to some extent.
However, the thing that is most interesting to me about American politics in recent years is one thing in particular, which is mirrored in our experience in the UK.
I was a supporter of the Leave campaign in the vote.
I voted, like the majority of my countrymen, to leave the European Union because I didn't think that the arrangement suited us as a country.
I've always said if it suits the other countries very well and good, I wish them luck.
But it didn't suit us and we voted to leave.
However, as you say, not just the deep state of Europe, but in our own country and the political class in our country, we tried everything they could to stop us leaving the European Union.
They tried not to implement the will of the people.
We had an extraordinarily perilous few years in British politics where we had a parliament that was by majority in favor of remaining, meant to be implementing the will of the people to leave and not doing so.
We came to see one of the fissures in British society that we hadn't seen for 400 years since the Civil War start to emerge.
So this is a very dangerous time.
What I see in America is particularly one thing that is similar, which is the extraordinary opportunity costs of the American president's opponents in this period, because they have done exactly what the pro-EU people did in the UK.
They could have heard a lesson.
They could have listened and listened deeply.
In the case of my own country, they could have said, What was it about the EU that for decades hadn't been able to impress the British people enough to make them think that this fraternal organization that was also federalist was something for them?
What might have been wrong about the European project as it emerged?
Now, that would have been a useful set of questions.
None of them were asked by the people in favor of the EU.
And I see the same thing in the US.
You have people now, four years almost after Donald Trump's last election victory, not having learned a thing about his victory in 2016.
And to me, one of the most interesting things is everything about the character of Donald Trump is completely transparent and obvious to absolutely everybody.
It's one of the reasons why he isn't very interesting to write about, because you can't say anything that the reader hasn't thought themselves, for good and ill.
And so why did the opponents not decide after 2016, my gosh, this is a candidate who not only broke the GOP, but then defeated the Democrats?
And what are the plausible and legitimate reasons this could have happened?
And what might we listen to in it?
They didn't do it for a nanosecond.
They got onto all of the fake conspiracies and they wasted not just their time, but America's time for four years.
I think it's an extraordinary thing.
And we will see, obviously, with the election in nine days' time now what happens.
Maybe if he wins again, they will listen and think, okay, now we have to listen.
That's what's happened in my own country.
That's what's happened in the UK after the election victory for the Conservatives in December.
The people who tried to trick us to remain in the European Union had to finally accept, okay, we will get past all the stages of grief and finally accept that this has happened.
Now, what happens in November in this country will dictate whether or not that portion of the country that didn't accept reality in 2016 can accept it now.
Whether they do or not has every single implication for the future of the Republic.
I completely agree.
And the scary thing is that the wealthiest, richest, most powerful, and connected people are unanimously in the same sort of viewpoint that Donald Trump must be obliterated.
And they're not going to have any less financial or technological power post-election.
And so that's a scary thing to think about.
I was very struck.
I went to the rally of the presidents in Pensacola, Florida, the other day.
And I was very struck by not just the happiness and the decency of the crowd at the rally, but the fact that you had this, a couple of people I spoke to were those crucial people who said that they had never voted before in their lives, but voted for Donald Trump.
Now, this is the same thing as happened in the UK with Brexit.
And these people get the most condescension from the political class, but they are in some ways my heroes.
And I would say that really, however, they had voted.
I think there is something so beautiful in the UK about people who had never engaged in the political process, but had held on to a deep truth.
And that deep truth, they spoke once on the one occasion they were offered the chance to speak to it.
Now, in America, it is a different context, obviously.
But I think there is something profound about this, of people saying, I never felt I could send a meaningful message before.
I do now.
And I would just urge that people should listen to that message and not deride and dismiss people who have something very strong to say.
You know, if people have felt disenfranchised from the political process, whatever their background, they should be listened to.
And I think that that desire to double down and insult them again is the worst possible thing.
And we have it in America, sadly, from the media in spades, as well as the political class.
I find it absolutely reprehensible.
And if they keep going with that, whatever the results of the election, I think that the next thing they get will make them long for Donald Trump.
The last thing I want to ask you about, Douglas, and you do a lot on social media.
You do a lot of interviews with people with big followings.
You know, we have a pretty generous following.
These tech companies are now using the very agenda that you pick apart piece by piece in the madness of crowds almost as their playbook to enforce community standards.
Can you just talk about the rising centralization of power within these tech companies?
Because it also affects the United Kingdom.
But the madness of crowds has almost now been centralized into 10 or 15,000 social media oligarchs that have complete control over what we can and cannot say in Western civilization.
That's right.
I do a chapter on this, as you know, in The Madness of Crowds about the deranging effects of technology on our society, something which has caused us to have the treadmill underneath us running faster than we can catch up with.
And that's definitely a major effect.
But the most sinister development is the clarity now that we have on what the tech companies are really up to on some of this.
I was alert to this some years ago when I became aware of the term shadow banning, which you will know, many of your listeners will.
This was something that Twitter pretended it didn't do.
It was to muffle certain voices.
They used to do this with my own account on Twitter.
I've caught them at it a number of times.
They try to muffle certain voices, particularly on certain subjects.
Now, the obvious explanation for this is that so many of the people who lost at the ballot box went straight into Silicon Valley.
It happened in America with the Obama administration when, after 2016, all the people who thought they were going to get cushy jobs in the Clinton White House and other parts of her patronage system found themselves needing a job and swept into Silicon Valley.
It happened in my own country with the Liberal Democrats who lost in the 2017 election and went into Silicon Valley.
I mean, the head of the most appalling left-wing cynical politician in the UK went straight into Facebook after losing his seat in Britain.
Now, these people have used their position of privilege to muffle their opponents.
And now, as you know, in recent days, it's become truly sinister because we see a tech giant, two tech giants, in fact, Facebook and Twitter, trying to stop the New York Post from being able to be read.
And the New York Post, as I don't need to tell you, founded by Hamilton.
It's been running for 200 years.
Before, the tech people used to say, well, this is just some wacky alt-right nut job on Twitter that we can get and do all of those other defamations of individuals.
And nobody cared much because they didn't notice or they didn't have sympathy for the people it was being done to.
And when people were chucked off platforms, they were often reprehensible people who nobody wanted to stand up for.
And now we have the New York Post.
We have the New York Post in the same bucket.
So what should happen?
I suggest that after the election, whoever wins, the tech giants must finally be taken on.
In my own country, we had something called the Monopolies and Mergers Commission, which used to operate and stop people from being able to dominate a market unfairly.
At this stage, it is perfectly clear that some of the tech markets, tech companies have exactly that advantage.
The recent antitrust suit with Google proved much of this.
And I think that we have to get the tech companies in our sights.
And we have to say you cannot derange the societies and then try to reprogram them and not expect some pushback.
The pushback must be real.
It must be hard.
It must hit them in the only place the tech companies really care, which is at the bottom line.
And I, for one, can't wait for it to happen.
It's long overdue.
And what I think the president needs to do in addition to domestic pressure, the president should pressure every European nation to file similar antitrust monopolistic complaints through their own domestic laws.
Make these tech companies fight in 20 different courts at the same time across the planet.
That's the power of alliances, right?
That's why they tell us we need NATO and these European project constructs.
Why don't we start using them?
Have them defend their monopolistic practices in France, in Switzerland, because they have users all across the planet.
And if there's a Western democracy that has these tech companies, the United States and the UK could put that kind of pressure on.
Douglas, you've been amazing.
Madness of crowds.
Also, we didn't get a chance to talk about the strange death of Europe, but we'll get to that next time.
And you're crisscrossing the country.
This is one of my favorite interviews we've done.
Thanks so much for joining us.
Huge pleasure.
Speak soon, I hope.
All the best.
Thank you.
See you, Douglas.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
You guys can always email us your questions, freedom at charliekirk.com.
Get involved with TurningPointUSA at tpusa.com.
And if you want to help support this program, go to charliekirk.com/slash support.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
Talk to you soon.
God bless.
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