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Sept. 30, 2019 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
01:03:35
Delingpod 39: Douglas Murray
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Welcome to the Dellingpod with me, James Dellingpod, and I cannot tell you how excited I am about this week's guest.
There's possibly a clue here, the book, it's Douglas Murray.
Douglas, welcome to the podcast.
Very nice to be with you.
So Douglas, the last time I saw you, which is a brilliant podcast as well, as this is going to be, it was just before I think your last book had come out.
And so you had yet to become this best-selling author and author.
Public intellectual, as you've been described in the Sunday Times.
And you've only just turned 40, you bastard!
And the other thing, okay, while I'm ranting, two more things.
First of all, the thing I really hate about your new book, The Madness of Crowds, is that It's basically killed the market for those of us who wanted to write a book about this social justice craziness that's infected the world we live in now.
I think this book is going to be the first and last word on it, number one, so I hate you for that.
I also hate you for my failure to look at the invitation to your book launch.
I mean, I've missed out on a few things in my life, a few things which I've really, really regretted.
And this is high on my list, your book launch, because I gather there was an amazing, amazingly weird, disparate crowd of people there.
Who was there?
Well, a lot of people from a lot of different parts of my life.
Book launches are always a bit like, I imagine, that weddings are like.
You throw everyone you love into a room and hope they get on.
Yeah, yeah.
But I read, and this is the jealous thing, and this was why I've been...
I've kind of wanted to kill myself ever since, actually.
Seriously, I have.
That Michael Gove was seen talking to Kevin Spacey.
Now...
Kevin Spacey, is he not emblematic of the weirdness of the world we live in?
Because you and I are old enough to remember The Usual Suspects, all these Kevin Spacey films that he made, and he was one of the preeminent American actors.
He could do stage, so he came over to do The Young Vic or The Old Vic or whatever.
He was gold, wasn't he?
He was acting gold.
And now he's presumably nobody.
I mean, he's been completely anathematised.
And one of the things I think you try and analyse in the book is how this shift happened.
Because it's not like Hollywood, for example.
Hollywood's always had its share of dubious characters.
Uh...
And there's been a certain amount of tolerance towards their foibles.
Well, the thing's being described as cancel culture.
Yeah, without doing individual cases, I mean, the way in which people have tried to build an ethic based on Hollywood is obviously a bad place to start.
Hollywood's always been unusual, always will be.
I think that much has gone on in the post-MeToo era, which is one of the things that crops up in the background in this book, because my own view is that basically what's been happening in recent years is we've been pretending that we know about things we don't really know much about, and we've been pretending to forget things that everyone knew till yesterday.
So in the things we pretend we know lots about which we really don't, I would obviously put trans We don't know very much, if anything.
But we pretend we know masses, which is why we're willing to experiment on children.
Into the bucket of things everyone knew till yesterday is a considerable amount of information about relations between the sexes, which was stored knowledge which we've now pretended we don't know.
So, for instance, I do this because in The Madness of Crowds I take these issues one by one.
Gay, women, race, trans.
The women chapter is the one most filled with forgotten knowledge.
For instance, and this is the point at which lots of people become uncomfortable, but why don't we just plow on?
One of the questions I sort of have in the background of that chapter is, we've been pretending that there's only one type of power in this world, and it's elderly white male power.
Are there other forms of power in this world?
Yes.
Are there forms of power that only women have?
Yes.
Do some women use them?
Yeah, you bet.
Are we able to talk about this in any way in our societies?
Oh no.
We pretend we don't know it.
So this is one of the deranging things in our time.
Pretending that we know about things we don't, and pretending that we don't know things that we do.
Yeah.
Yeah, there's one of the bits I most enjoyed actually, and it really is a good book.
I'm not just saying that, Douglas.
Really, I can recommend this book.
I can't recommend it highly enough.
I almost enjoyed the women's section most because, well, we'll come on to gay and trans in a moment, but I think it's one of those things that I feel most confused by and bitter over, this collective denial.
Not by people like us.
I think we're fairly frank about stuff.
In fact, it's our shtick.
But the way that corporate culture particularly has embraced this stuff, I mean, you aren't in the position to be able to slack off the telegraph.
I am, because I don't care anymore about anyone.
I am disgusted that the paper of the conservative shires Whose readership abhors this kind of nonsense?
That this newspaper is now sponsoring, well, you describe it in the book, it sponsors women in business, and it's heavily invested in this nonsense.
And it does seem to be in denial of a fact that you raise, which is, women have the power Drive men mad and utterly destroy them.
Yes.
Just by flashing their eyes at them and stuff.
Yes.
And yet...
We all knew this.
I mean, I give the example of...
Take the meme, make him drool.
Make him drool is quite a well-recognised meme.
Right.
In advertising.
Right.
And I say at one point in the women chapter, if you want to know what you're not meant to say about women, look at the way in which women advertise to women.
Make him drool is a standard meme in this.
Wear our product, or whatever it is, and you will make the man drool.
Now, if you just type this into Google, you'll see endless results for this.
Is there a male equivalent?
Make him drool?
Make her drool?
Make her drool?
No, actually, if you look in Google, it's such an unusual phrase that if you do make her drool into Google, you get a number of articles about how to cope with dribbling in your sleep, and some on cats that dribble.
But make her drool isn't a thing in the same way.
I mean, this isn't to say that men can't present themselves to be attractive to women.
Of course they can.
But it's not quite the same thing as this knowledge that there's a type of behavior, dress, etc., etc., which women know is something to derange men, potentially, to make them so lose control of themselves that they will drool over you.
We all knew about this.
We just pretend we don't.
Well, didn't we know about it for the last 6,000 years, say, of civilization?
I mean, isn't it extraordinary that only in the last 10, 15, 20 years that we've unlearned this folk knowledge, which is fairly basic?
Yes.
The way I trace all of this is that this is a last-decade phenomenon.
It's a post-financial crash phenomenon.
We recognize always, when we look at history, that when the finances go wrong, when the money goes wrong, Something else happens.
Other things begin to go on.
And it's almost as if we've ignored that in our own time.
But the financial crash seems to me to have, among other things, disenfranchised a generation from capitalism.
And that's understandable.
I don't want to just moan about this.
It's very understandable to me that a young person who can't accumulate capital won't have much love of capitalism.
So when the right says, why are you anti-capitalism?
Well, here's a reason.
Here's a very good reason.
Is it surprising that people who can't get on the housing ladder and see no way that they ever could might be attracted to a set of ideas that presents itself as capable of answering every inequity on earth now?
Oh, I can see the attraction of that.
Yeah.
Definitely.
Easier than making the down payment.
But in the last five years...
Well, just to go back and say, my view is that when the finances go bad, when the money goes bad, when the economy goes bad, we become very...
We become vulnerable to bad ideas.
And these ideas that I write about and describe in the book, roughly speaking, you can trace them to the 80s.
And it's a few...
like Berkeley and Wellesley.
And when I looked at the, because I was very interested when I started to notice this so-called intersectionality, the ugliest word in the language.
And I assumed for a while that when people were citing the scholarship on this, that this was meaningful scholarship. - Yeah. - I was amazed when I found what this is actually built on.
I mean, take one of the foundational texts of so-called intersectionality, Unpacking the Knapsack.
I assumed this was a work of scholarship of some kind.
It isn't.
Have you ever read it?
No, no, no.
It's a few pages, a list of assertions, unbacked-up assertions, And so my point is that this was all milling around.
In the last 10 years, we've become very vulnerable to it.
In the last five years, it becomes weaponized.
And all of these things, gay, women, race, and trans, are basically used in the last five years as a battering ram to do something else.
They are being used to perform a political task.
And when you look, as I say again, when you notice, and the revelation to me in some ways of writing the book was the discovery that, you know, you think, oh, well, it's only going to be academia on the West Coast of America, for instance, that's vulnerable to this.
No, no, no.
Corporate America, corporate Britain is rife with this stuff.
And here's the thing.
It seems amazing to me that big companies and governments that have an awful lot at stake would have tried to embed so deeply a set of ideas that are based on assertions That are demonstrably wrong.
Demonstrably wrong.
The idea that we live in a universe of interlocking oppressions and if you unlock some of the oppressions, you'll unlock all.
Oh yeah, okay, great.
Let's try a couple.
Trans versus gay.
Trans versus women.
Trans versus gay means that a young man or woman in their early teens, who might have been recognized by their parents in the past as being likely to come out batting for the other side, Can now be said to suffer from gender dysphoria.
Now, roughly 80 to 85% of kids that are diagnosed as having this so-called gender dysphoria turn out not to have it.
And most of them will grow up to be gay.
So, when you say that even LGBT works together, clearly the T works against the G and the L, just for starters.
Because the tomboyish girl who might grow up to be a happy heterosexual woman or a happy lesbian Can now be said to actually be a boy who needs to have hormone therapy as a child and then be operated upon, have their arm flayed and something resembling a penis at some point constructed.
That would seem to me to run quite heavily against L. Just for starters.
Yeah.
Try another one.
T versus women.
In recent years, all of these prominent feminists have been cancelled.
Why?
Because they say you can't just become a woman.
But we thought that if we were answering the issue of women's rights and trans rights, they would answer each other.
No, they go against each other, just like it goes against gay.
So the claim that people like Mackintosh, Crenshaw and others were making about this beautiful interlocking issue, which you could just solve, turns out to be demonstrably false.
Demonstrably false.
And what they've done is currently trying to be embedded in almost every major corporation.
And you would have thought that...
You would have thought if you want to massively alter all human behavior, for instance, with things like implicit bias tests and so on, you might base it on something with some intellectual foundations.
You might have tried it somewhere once and demonstrated it succeeds before you tried to make everybody on Earth do it.
But they didn't.
Who is they?
Because, okay, it could just have remained in academe, couldn't it?
And you say that the trigger might have been the financial crash.
But what is it that explains the...
For example, suppose you're running a business.
You want to...
Well, traditionally, you want to generate value for shareholders, don't you?
You want to grow the business.
You want to make money.
Otherwise...
In the dog-eat-dog world, you die.
Sure.
Suddenly we've got companies all over the world embracing this This group thing, which has got nothing to do with the bottom line, and got nothing to do with actually even employees feeling uncomfortable, because I think it's made office relationships much more uncomfortable, hasn't it?
Sure.
So here you've got something which is completely inimical to business, which is also unscientific.
So why has this happened?
One reason is that the root of it is a lot of the claims are hard to oppose on the face of it.
So, for instance, you say you want diversity.
Yeah.
How do you respond to the claim for diversity?
Do you say, we don't want diversity?
Yeah.
What about a claim for equality?
Yeah.
What do you say if you're not for equality?
Are you for inequality?
Yeah.
They're set up to be non-oppositional, impossible to oppose.
Whereas in reality, you have to go a step deeper.
You have to go at least one layer underneath the claim.
So, for instance, is it the case...
Well, first of all, with the diversity one, what kind of quotas are we after here?
And what do we do when we've overcorrected?
Let me give you an example of that.
It's assumed in the workplace that you will become...
A more successful company if you have a wider diversity of voices.
A wider diversity in the boardroom and so on.
Throw up one which is amusing to me.
Studies show that gay men and women earn disproportionately higher in their careers than their heterosexual counterparts.
You might call it the gay privilege.
How do you correct that?
I mean, there are obvious reasons why it would come about.
Heterosexual counterparts are more likely to be raising the next generation, for instance, more likely to need to leave the office.
And it's perfectly possible, I think we probably can all think of cases of this, of the single as well as gay, but the single person being able to stay around and mop up at the end of the day.
And that's likely at some point to accumulate and be an advantage to that person.
And at the promotional stage, it's possible that such a person may find themselves promoted.
But as I say, does this count as a gay advantage, a gay privilege?
Well, you would have thought so, but how do we solve that if we're interested in the equity business?
The only way is to take some money from the gays and give it to the straights.
Surely.
Well, I'm up for that.
Bet you are.
But it's even worse than that, isn't it?
I mean, I can think of certain metropolitan police commissioners.
In fact, pretty much nowadays...
I can't speak as much for America, because you've told me about the American examples.
But the police now...
If you're a lesbian, it's the route to getting to the top, isn't it?
I mean, it's got that bad.
Well...
What happens, I submit, is that when you start playing this unwinnable game, what you end up doing really is just promoting the people who are very nearly there anyway.
So one of the challenges I put in the book about this is let's play the equity game for a moment and let's say Let's say that you do it, that you need to increase female presence on the board, for instance.
Who do you promote first?
The women who are very nearly there anyway.
What in a city like New York or London is likely to be the composition of the very high-up women who are very nearly there anyway?
It's likely that they've attended some of the best schools and the best universities, not just in the world, but in their country.
What happens when you try to promote a few gays who were very nearly there anyway?
You get the same phenomenon.
What happens when you promote people of different ethnic origins who were very nearly there anyway?
You get a lot of black old Etonians doing very well.
What do you discover at the end of this process?
You discover that in your firm you have no class mobility.
None.
None at all.
What you've got is a new elite, a very, very privileged, very well-educated people who would appear on the tin to be giving you the diversity you want, but in actual fact share all the backgrounds, all the common political and other characteristics and presumptions. all the common political and other characteristics and presumptions.
And so you've done the sort of paint job on the whole thing, but you haven't done even what you set out to pretend you wanted to do.
Well, again...
It would seem to me that something that has that problem inbuilt would be something you wouldn't be trying in every company and every government and every public service, the, in the UK, commitment to diversity.
But, as I say, to undo it, you need to go to the level underneath the claim it makes for itself.
You need to unpack it.
You need to unpack unpacking the knapsack.
Yeah.
And how do you do that?
Well, first of all, by pointing out that it can't work.
And I try to do as good a job as I can of that in the madness of crowds.
Show people what's going to happen.
Point to the pain they're going to cause along the way.
The terrible pain they're going to cause to a generation who are being told a lie about the nature of the world and the nature of the workplace.
And then, and this is one of the crucial things, direct people in a better direction.
See, one of the things that horrifies me about all of this is the way in which this phenomenon is going to make people waste their lives.
Again, I can see the attraction of it.
This battle, endless battle for rights.
The battle, even after the battle's over, by people who can't bear not being on the barricades.
I understand it.
It's very understandable.
Who doesn't want to live a moment of revolution?
But this is a waste of energy and a waste of life.
I'm urging people, among other things, and this goes against the current of the time, to depoliticize their lives.
To depoliticize their lives.
Everything tells them, in the culture and everything else, you've got to get engaged.
You've got to make everything political.
Yeah.
No.
Politics, as you and I know, is very, very interesting.
It's a horrible base for meaning in life.
Horrible base for meaning.
Yeah.
My father-in-law was at Cambridge.
You and I were at the other place.
I think those universities are lost.
And I think one example of this...
My father-in-law sent me the Cambridge History magazine, the people who'd read history at Cambridge.
And there was a big feature on a girl who was an ethnic minority, so naturally the magazine was very keen to promote her because there still aren't that many relatively ethnic minorities at Oxbridge.
And what did she achieve in her time at Cambridge?
Had she really related to studying medieval manuscripts?
You know, she really got into Edward II. No, her achievement at Cambridge was the work she put into decolonising the curriculum.
Now Cambridge, correct me if I'm wrong, it used to be a serious university.
It's not been since the current Vice-Chancellor arrived, a man called Stephen Toope.
He's a Canadian lawyer, and Canadian lawyers can do an awful lot of damage to good institutions.
He appears to have all of the presumptions that have been rife in his field in recent years and has brought them to Cambridge.
That's why in very short order you've seen a set of things happen at Cambridge University, which should be embarrassing for the institution.
You see its treatment of Jordan Peterson, who they invited to a visiting fellowship and then cast aside, tried to humiliate him as much as they could.
See what they did with Noah Kahl, the young academic whose career was trashed by the mob and who was then dismissed by the college for research, which it was claimed he was doing, which he wasn't doing.
Take two other examples at Cambridge.
Stephen Toote, the vice chancellor's decision that the university should follow the lead of Glasgow University and others.
By working out whether it had benefited from the slave trade and if so, how.
By the way, these studies are totally meaningless.
The Glasgow one found something like that Glasgow University may have benefited from between 20 and 160 million pounds.
I think that was the...
Imagine any other situation in life where that was an acceptable study.
Yeah.
I don't know.
I owe you somewhere between this and many times its multiple.
Okay, well, because it turns out it's quite hard to audit history.
Turns out it's quite hard.
Who knew?
Now, Cambridge is going down that route as well.
And then there's a final example, which is the magical bell of St.
Katz.
Have you followed this?
No, no, tell me.
The magical bell of St.
Katz is one of the great things of our time.
St.
Catherine's College was discovered to have a bell, which was displayed somewhere.
In the college.
And it was, the word went out that it could have been on a plantation.
Now, it was removed.
And I think we're in the realm of magic.
I think we're getting into the realm of magic.
This is the derangement of our era.
Why would the presence of the bell, the presence of a thing that was once in a place, possibly, and once rang, Why does it need to be removed?
Does slavery come back if the bell rings again?
How can an adult behave like this?
My shortcut, by the way, is to suggest that we have an audit of all the bells of Cambridge.
Because it seems possible to me, very likely indeed, that there are bells in Cambridge that once rang when women did not have the vote.
I suspect that there are bells in some of the college towers and in some of the chapels which could have rung when gay men and women were not able to marry each other.
It's possible.
Possible there were bells even before civil partnerships that ran.
What can we do other than audit them all and remove the lot?
Because one thing that's very important is, of course, as well as having statues of people that all agree with everything we think now, it's very important that the bells are right too, isn't it?
Absolutely crucial.
You can't have any of that bad ringing.
No.
Right.
So...
Here's the thing.
Is this a good use of Cambridge University's time and thought?
What have they done in the last year in any of their disciplines, advancing in any of the disciplines that is equivalent to the damage they've done to the culture by this kind of nonsense?
I don't know.
Answers on a postcard.
Yeah.
Well, Douglas, I think that the world has changed so much since you and I were growing up.
And perhaps I was naive.
Perhaps if you had the same thoughts, you were naive.
But I always imagined that...
People at university, dons and things, university dons and lecturers, were cleverer than the average.
So these people, as you say, are embracing this kind of fairy, pixie-land, nonsense-through-the-looking-glass view of the world.
One of the great disappointments of growing up is the discovery that there are no adults in the culture.
But do you think it was ever thus?
No.
No?
No, I think there's been, in the last generation, a massive abdication by the adults.
Right.
Broadly speaking, these things flip around at different times.
In different times in history, people want to be younger, and at other times, they want to be older.
I'll give you an example.
When I first read Stefan Zweig's memoir, The World of Yesterday, He has an amazing section on pre-First World War Vienna, where he was growing up.
And the young men in pre-First World War Vienna grew facial hair and even affected stoops because they wanted to be older.
Because there was something embarrassing about being young.
Because if you were young, you didn't know anything very much.
You weren't wise.
You didn't have much to contribute.
So young men wanted to look older than they were.
Now, I think it's not too broad a brushstroke to say that we don't live in such a world at the moment.
They still have the facial hair, Douglas.
It's come back.
Broadly speaking, if the culture ends up venerating the ideas of youth...
Particularly ideas you haven't tried out yet, then you can be in trouble.
And we are trying out incredibly useful and ill-thought-through ideas.
And they are being embedded everywhere.
And there's a reason, which is that the adults don't seem to know how to say no.
And they're going to have to.
Because this can't work.
And the problem is that I assumed when I started looking into this that the contradictions were a problem.
But one of the reasons why I lay out the Marxist roots as I see them in one of the interlude chapters, which I do, is that if you see the Marxist nature of the roots, you come across a very big problem, which is that you and I would think that...
That the contradictions would make the thing stop.
So the example I give, trans versus women or trans versus gay, that's going to cause the contradictions.
No, because as we know from the Marxist past, the contradictions are to be embraced.
Of course there are contradictions.
We were expecting the contradictions.
Let us welcome the contradictions.
There's yet more things to ponder.
But none of which seems to affect the destination of travel.
You and I know that if you find a contradiction you would at the very least think has this contradiction arisen because I'm playing the wrong game?
This doesn't seem to occur to the intersectionalists, because the game is presumed to be right.
And again, we get the same thing we had with Marxism, which is that at the end of the journey we are somewhere, and it's not quite clear what or where, it's left rather wonderfully vague.
But it's somewhere better.
And that's why we get this talk of, for instance, I quote somebody in the book who says at one point on the BBC program, an incredibly fatuous person who made a film for the BBC, who I throw up, by the way, just by way of detail, I throw up in the book what I say are the questions that cannot, conundrums that cannot be answered, such as saying that people can be sexy without being sexualized.
That's an interesting one.
One of my favourites is people complaining about being ridiculed who are clearly ridiculous.
If you're ridiculous, you'll get ridiculed.
And one ridiculous person who was complaining on the BBC about getting ridiculed mentions in passing, in passing, that it's time to try matriarchy because we tried the patriarchy, didn't work all that well.
Really?
Really?
Compared to what?
Compared to where?
What's this dismissal of everything that's got us here in your view and just a blithe, why don't we try some other game?
Why don't we try something else?
The adults should have responded to this.
And the only reason, well, the main reason I think they don't is because the intimidation game works so well.
I mentioned in the introduction, everyone knows what I'm talking about in this book when they see the tripwires.
The tripwires we've known about for years.
They are the things that kill people's careers.
They're the things that you see any public figure's eyes go wide when it comes up.
Gay, women, race, trans.
Your career will be over if you tread badly into this minefield.
Or indeed, perhaps at all.
And...
So people see, for instance, a case you know well, the Tim Hunt case.
Nobel Prize winning scientist makes a joke in Korea at a conference.
Not the best joke in the world, but not the worst and not the rudest.
One woman in the audience thinks that it's offensive, says on Twitter that there's been this unbelievable misogynist outburst.
By the time he lands back in the UK, every single post he has is over.
University College London fires him without even speaking to him.
This is a man who has a Nobel Prize in science.
This isn't even a Nobel Prize in literature where you can kind of, you know, didn't like the early stuff.
No, this is a Nobel Prize in science.
This should count as something.
No, it doesn't.
Not if you once made the wrong joke at a conference in Seoul, it doesn't.
The thing about this is we notice these cases and what we don't notice is what goes on in the background after them and in their wake.
And what happens in the background after them and in their wake is that everybody else becomes cowardly.
Nobody else will talk.
Everybody else learns the lesson.
These are very, very visible moral punishment beatings being carried out in public all the time.
Unless you've got what you describe in the book as fuck-off money, unless you're Kanye West, and what a hero he is, you can't say this stuff.
Because, I mean, you couldn't survive in the...
We know people who can no longer survive in the corporate sector because they've been anathematised.
But here's the...
There are probably only two groups of people in the culture who can do anything about this.
One is indeed extremely rich.
I put Kanye West in that category.
Even they can be vulnerable in some ways, but they're pretty able to do what they want.
And the other ones are, I'm afraid to say, and this is rather worrying, and I'm not being self-aggrandizing, but it's probably people like us who do not have a hierarchy above us that's wobbly.
See, what I think has happened is because the corporates and government and everyone else did all this stuff and sucked in the game whole, Everybody who has a hierarchy above them is enormously vulnerable at any moment to the hierarchy giving up on them like that.
It might be Cambridge University one day, it might be a media company the next, it might be a corporate the next, it might be a government body or a local council or anything.
A supermarket worker, we had one recently in the UK, who liked the wrong thing of Billy Connolly's on Facebook and lost his job at a supermarket.
Why?
Because the wobbly hierarchy above him made the decision and he was vulnerable, the poor guy.
Now that means that it's only, apart from the very, very rich, which category I know that neither of us fall into, alas, Or people who are not answerable to any such hierarchy, who can do any of this.
And my belief is that, that being the case, there is a disproportionate need for those of us who do not have a wobbly and unreliable hierarchy above us to speak, write and think, partly on behalf of the infinite number of people who cannot do that anymore themselves.
Yeah.
It's a bit like that study of how many infantrymen in World War II actually fired their weapons, and it was found that in any given unit, only a small number actually bore the brunt of the fighting while everyone else held back.
We are those ones who have to...
Well, yeah, it's important to...
I don't want to be self-aggrandizing about this because it's not the riskiest thing in the world to do what we do.
It's not like being an infantryman.
We get a lot of hate, Douglas.
This is our World War II. Yeah, well, you know, maybe not me personally.
I'm used to it.
I've got my thick skin.
But I once went to the...
I took my kids when they were younger to the Latitude Festival.
What's that?
Pop Festival.
Oh, right.
And they went off their own to the Comedy Tent.
They walked into the comedy tent.
What did they hear?
A stand-up comic slagging off their dad.
I mean, doing a whole routine about how much they hated me.
So it's a bit of a weird situation, I think, we find...
I bet that comic Bond...
I'm sure.
I'm sure he...
The curse of Delingpole killed his career.
Yeah, no, okay, so we're not like, we're not quite like storming the beaches on D-Day, but nevertheless, it's amazing how few people are actually fighting this.
Yes, that's worrying.
That's worrying that too few people are doing it.
Yeah.
But my encouraging words are always, come on in, the water's not as bad as all that.
My kids are either at university or starting at university and wondering about what careers they're going to do.
And I'm thinking, unless they become a journalist, which obviously you wouldn't want to do in a million years, that would be crazy.
But whatever environment they enter, be it corporate law, whether they become, I don't know, management consultancy, the city or whatever, They're going to enter an environment where they're going to be forced to have lectures on diversity.
They'll be forced to pay lip service to all these speech codes and so on.
It's so embedded in the system now.
Sure.
Well, we've got to un-embed it.
Okay.
But apart from writing excellent books like The Madness of Crowds and talking about it on excellent podcasts like this, how do we roll back this structural...
By, as I say, several things.
Firstly, understanding it.
That's what I tried to do at the beginning of this, but lay it out.
Make people realize, because this has crept up on most people without a lot of them noticing.
Make them realize the nature of it and the enormity of the ambitions of this movement.
Undo it, which I tried to make a start on doing at least.
Unpick it and then do something else.
The unpicking it bit, we can do.
I'm very confident that if we sit down here in 20 years' time, we will be doing other things.
The game will have changed by then.
Other stupid things, you mean?
Possibly new stupid things that we haven't dreamt of yet.
I don't think we'll be doing this because I think that people will realise I don't know how long it's going to take but that this is an unwinnable game.
And that it's a deranging game.
And that it's dementing our societies.
And it's making us do the things we think we're trying to avoid.
So in the name of anti-racism, they're making everybody think about race.
Everybody.
In the name of equality between the sexes.
They're going to make men more bitter about women.
And they're going to make a lot of women more bitter along the way.
Not least because they're going to make men that they don't want.
So I think that if we gather back here, we could even set the date.
In a couple of decades' time, we will not be doing this.
We will have got out of it.
But the third thing of that is, what ought we to be doing better with our time?
Now, here's the thing.
A friend of mine was speaking recently at a university in America and mentioned that The class with this visiting lecturer were all asking questions afterwards about identity politics matters.
Things to do with equality, diversity, equity.
And this person said, why are you doing this?
You should be trying to work out how we live in underwater cities.
You should be working out how we live on the moon.
Why are you doing this?
This is the third part of the equation and it's what we need to be thinking about.
What should we be doing that would be better than this?
And I think almost anything.
Yeah, right.
Almost anything.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's absolutely true.
Although I'm now intrigued as to think what the stupid things are as yet undreamt of that we're going to be doing in 20 years' time.
The capacity for human beings to amaze ourselves with new stupidities.
But you're right.
At the beginning of your trans chapter, you give the example of somebody in Holland...
Belgium.
Sorry, Belgium, who...
Has a sex change operation and ends up being so unhappy that they are euthanised by the state, having been encouraged, I think, first to express their transgender identity through hormones and then surgery.
Yeah, well, a mutual friend and our editor at Spectator, Fraser Nelson, has this very useful rule.
Assume that since all people in history have always done things that we look at and think they must have been mad, assume we're doing some things like that too and try to work out now what they are.
And I reckon that the example I give at the beginning of the trans chapter is as close as I can come to an example of something that I know future generations will look back at and say they tried what?
And it's a very sad case of this.
A Belgian woman, born a woman in a very unpleasant family, clearly.
The mother is clearly a monster, judging by what she said about her daughter.
All boys in the family, clearly some problem with that.
The girl ends up thinking she is a boy and ought to be a boy.
Life would be better if she was a boy.
Starts to transition in the late 20s.
It doesn't work three operations.
There are photographs of him that then was on the beach.
A lot of scarring, mastectomy scars and more.
Eventually, the grafts don't take and things.
And yes, he requests euthanasia and is killed on the state.
Nowadays, the Belgians look at their history and think how amazing it was that we did what we did in the Congo.
Yeah.
Sure.
Well, I think it's pretty amazing to try to turn a girl into a boy and then kill him in the name of kindness.
I reckon later this century there'll be inquiries into that sort of thing.
I think, by the way, a lot of the trancing is going to be stopped in the courts.
I think there's a whole heap of litigation to come, particularly in America.
When people, and I've spoken to a lot of people who have been through some of this process, There's a lot of legal action to come.
If you were persuaded or your parents persuaded you or the doctors persuaded your parents that to do anything other than to affirm was to risk your child killing themselves, and that's what parents are told, then I think at some point those doctors have got the law coming after them.
Where are you on the death of women's sport?
Is that going to be reversed, do you think?
I'm fairly confident that it will be.
Well, we obviously have the thing now, you can see it starting with the post-Sam Smith, they, them request to have non-binary, non-gender specific awards.
And quite a lot of this stuff in the culture starts at that sort of thing.
That's right, you've got the, what is it, the Brits now deciding they're going to...
If you're not going to have best male vocalist, best female vocalist, but best them vocalist, for instance, best they singer, why not in sports?
Well, the answer is, of course, that you get these very ugly things like wrestling, boxing.
Boxing's a good one for breaking this one apart.
Generally speaking, in the culture, it's agreed that a man shouldn't beat the shit out of a woman.
Yeah.
Unless they're doing it for sport.
Right.
I think that one might stop it.
All in wrestling, mixed martial arts, where the one, as Joe Rogan says, the one aim of it is to beat the crap out of the other person in whatever way you can.
Yeah.
Every time it's a male to female transsexual, the male to female transsexual beats the crap out of the woman.
Yeah.
All for sport, of course.
Yeah.
I think that's where it breaks down, and I think that's where we...
I mean, there are other less interesting examples, perhaps, for some people, but ones like weightlifting, cycling...
I mean, one of the examples I give of one of the cycling trips, you know, the winner and the runner-up is a male-to-female transsexual, but the woman who should have come first in the women's cycling is, like, barely near the rostrum.
And we get to this strange position where you're not allowed to take testosterone supplements if you're in competitive sport.
Unless you're transitioning, in a case where you can take masses of the stuff.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's a shame, isn't it, that lawyers, who are probably partly responsible for this problem in the first place, are going to be the ones that are going to have to end up resolving it.
A few action suits.
It would be one of the ways.
I missed the opportunity for a joke earlier on.
We were talking about...
Do you want to go back?
Do it again?
I'm just going back.
No, no.
I'm going to insert it naturally.
I'm not going to cut it in, like, in a cheating way.
Bet you do.
Bet you do.
I bloody, absolutely sodding don't.
That's not my style, Douglas.
Stop it.
I was going to say that if they're going to have Sam Smith in any future pop awards, presumably he gets the best group award because he's there.
Very good.
That was worth it.
I wouldn't mind if you spliced that in afterwards.
I'm not going to splice it in.
People will witness this and they're going to write you hate letters saying how dare you diss James.
Incredibly devoted Dellingpoleans.
Let's talk about...
I was going to talk briefly about gay.
Because I reckon...
How long have I known you?
For about...
10, 15 years?
Yeah.
I reckon 15 years ago, I was in the position where I had quite a few gay friends who were all really sound.
Some gay men are really soundly conservative, aren't they?
Like lots of people.
Almost like people.
But actually, my soundest friends were either gay or Catholic, generally.
Or both.
That's a hybrid.
I don't know what the reason for that is.
Anyway, but...
Whenever I wanted to show how socially liberal I was, I could just say, well, of course, not that I ever used this phrase, but I could have done.
I could have said, well, of course, some of my best friends are gay, which showed that you can't do that anymore.
It's not enough to have friends who are gay and be comfortable with homosexuality.
Now you've got to applaud when you see a police car which has been sprayed at presumably great expense in the rainbow flag.
You're supposed to think that this is a really progressive thing, and you go to the...
Cross the road in certain parts of London and you now see The police seem to have got to this stage where, okay, they can't really deal with knife crime or Islamist terror or anything like that, but they're really fucking amazing at gay pride and dancing with the best of them.
What's that about?
It's the gaying of everything.
Right.
The gaying of everything.
Where...
Pride, I dislike pride.
I dislike the whole thing.
I think pride is a demonstration of what I call passing equal and going to better.
We've had a thing in our culture in each of the ones I described where we've tried to go past equality and to better.
So it's not just equal to be gay, but a bit better.
Ideal, if you can possibly manage it.
Same with women, past equal, and in some cases, not all, in some cases, better.
What Christine Lagarde, who the IMF, describes as the Lehman Sisters issue.
If it had been Lehman Sisters instead of Lehman Brothers, it probably wouldn't have crashed.
Why?
Either women are the same, or they're worse, or they're better, but they can't be the same and better.
No, they can't.
Right.
No.
And you get this in each of these issues.
So I think of Pride as...
I've always thought of as being a version of better.
You go past equal.
And that's why you now have this thing, which I think a lot of people, including a lot of gay people, are very uncomfortable with.
The turning of Gay Pride March into Gay Pride Day, Gay Pride Weekend, Gay Pride Week, Gay Pride Month.
My bank had rainbows everywhere in Gay Pride Month this year.
Love happens here was the rather sick-making slogan.
For a bank?
Yeah.
Now, see, I don't want love to happen at my bank.
I don't want sex at my bank.
I just want there to be more people on the tills.
I want them to cash a check faster than they do.
I want them not to charge me five pounds when I lose my back statements and need them reprinted.
I don't want them in the business of love.
Why are they doing it?
Because everyone late to the party makes up for lost time.
And they think this is of course what they should be doing and that we'll love them for it.
I submit that we don't take that view.
But yes, you see versions of this as well in not only the search engines which I go into and why the tech is deranging us, but in a number of other areas as well.
There's a sped-up version of what I identify the New York Times as doing, making everything gay.
Business sections being about gay.
Culture sections, you might assume, might be quite a bit about gay.
But making them this gay?
A story about New York City Ballet.
I highlight in the book, New York Times, a couple of pages about the fact that two men are dancing and the celebration that they can dance with a member of their own sex and how wonderful this is.
As if we all thought that the ballet world was a rampagingly heterosexual, patriarchal, etc.
We didn't need...
We didn't need you to lean this heavily on gay ballet.
It's okay.
We've got it.
We've got it.
It'll be fine.
Yeah.
We haven't...
We've barely touched on race, and I don't want it to be thought that we're avoiding the subject because it's so ultra-sensitive.
But it seems to me that we've got to a stage where...
It's okay to diss white people, and even in South Africa, to kill them just for being white.
I'm very worried about this.
And one of the ways I'm trying to put people off it is to warn them about what's going to come.
When I was growing up, race didn't mean very much.
Now, I'm not saying it meant nothing.
I'm not saying this was the same for everybody, but it was my experience growing up.
I grew up in London in the 80s, and London was already a very diverse place.
I had friends of every imaginable background, and it wasn't an issue.
To the extent that, and I'm not saying that there was no racism, but I'm fairly confident that we were getting to somewhere like a place where The destination was clear, and it was basically to be colorblind.
That race was unimportant.
It wasn't the determining characteristic or factor of a person's life or character.
And it seems to me that in the last couple of decades, sped up in the last decade, which this book centers on, there's been an enormous leaning on the issue of race, and it terrifies me.
And I think it should terrify everybody.
Because...
This won't bear the weight we're putting on it.
Take whiteness studies.
Every form of studies I'm suspicious of, by the way, I think black studies, queer studies, these, you could argue, had a utility at some point in correcting a paucity of certain people in the literature.
The correction having broadly happened, broadly happened, It seems to me that the studies don't need to keep going on.
The thing gets subsumed into the system as a whole, and that's done its job.
Now, the one study that is not a celebration but an attempt to condemn is whiteness studies, an offshoot of critical race theory.
Black studies is, rightly, an attempt to correct the paucity of some black writers in the curriculum.
Queer studies was an attempt, I think it's no longer needed, to inject some potentially forgotten gay figures from history into the system.
Whiteness studies is explicitly an attempt to problematize being white.
And as I say, problematizing being white means you have to problematize white people.
And most people don't want to be problematized because of their skin color.
And when you see people, for instance, using terms like gammon or white tears...
I don't like the sound of this, and I don't think anyone else very much does either, because you have to problematize people because of their skin color, and not everyone will like that, and it's possible there will be a backlash at some point.
And I know exactly how the backlash is starting.
I can see it.
There's a tool that is being used and picked up for the first time in the generation to hit back, and it's IQ. It's IQ. IQ is the tool that some white people have decided to pick up to hit back at problematizing whiteness.
And it's the ugliest tool in the armory.
And it will divide us in ways we haven't imagined.
Can you give me some examples of that?
Are you saying that the bell curve shouldn't have been written?
No.
No, I'm saying that what happened with the bell curve was that it became a suppressed conversation.
Right.
It was pushed under the fabric of the discussion.
But it was waiting.
And for some people, the time to reach down and get it has arrived.
And I strongly warn people away from this.
Final question for you, Douglas.
You talk about the tripwires.
How have you avoided, or have you avoided even, these tripwires?
Are you going to get blown up?
It's very hard to analyse whether your own actions have indeed had that negative effect.
I say in the introduction to the madness of crowds that I, whilst researching this book, I was speaking with a friend who was in the British Army who told me about a device called the Great Viper.
And it's a weapon that the British and US military have.
It's a rocket which you pull on the back of a trailer truck to the edge of a minefield and you fire it.
You can see this on YouTube.
You fire it and it's got this long, beautiful tail that's packed with explosives and it lands across the minefield and then detonates.
Why was this on my mind whilst I was writing The Madness of Crowds?
Gender, race and identity.
Well...
Because this device can't clear the minefield, it doesn't destroy all the mines, but it can make it safe for another person to cross, and indeed in time for a truck to cross.
And I describe the madness of crowds as my great viper system.
I want it to be safer for other people to cross this territory.
Of course the problem in the metaphor is it's not clear whether or not the person who fires a great viper survives.
But I'm fairly confident I will.
I don't know whether I'm in a good position to judge whether I've survived so far or not.
I feel like I have.
And I think that's, if there's any particular reason, it's because an awful lot of people are thinking about the same things, and they're not wrong.
Yeah.
And, you know, the usual suspects, the usual organs keep trying to take me out, and it doesn't work.
A certain paper in the UK always reviews my new books first.
Always gets in first.
And they always try to destroy me.
So far it's worked better for me than it has for them.
Does it begin with G and end in Ardian?
Could do.
Yeah.
So why haven't they managed to land the party?
Because it only matters if you want what they can give.
So if you are an urban metropolitan left-winger...
Who thinks that the paper you mention is the arbiter of taste, decency, political rightness and virtue and so on, then you'd mind.
You'd mind.
If you don't think it has that gift, you don't.
As it happens, I do care what people think.
I do care.
But I don't care what that paper thinks.
I mind what people I respect think.
And it's the same thing, you must have this with the media.
There are times when you do something and everybody hates it and it doesn't matter.
And there are times you do something and somebody you really care for or respect hates it.
That matters.
That matters.
So I mind the approval of a relatively small number of people.
Me?
Me?
No.
Oh, Douglas, that's a very horrible way to end the podcast.
I do really do.
Yeah, thank you.
I'll say I do.
I'll lie.
Just to get out of this.
You're toying with me.
Now you're toying with me.
By the way, I think you're extending the point you made earlier on, which is that basically you mustn't need the hierarchy above you.
And that's a privilege that very few of us have.
You mentioned Toby Young.
I think one of the biggest mistakes Toby made in the past, and continues to make actually, is that he does kind of want to be part of the establishment.
If you're going to go for quasi-governmental jobs, you submit yourself to the values that should have no place in your life because they're controlled by people who Yes.
Yes, you should...
I'm not thinking of...
but in general, you should not seek honours.
Yeah.
I mean, obviously, like you, I'm playing the long game and holding out for an earldom.
It's an earldom or bust.
Listen, mate, you've made it.
You've been declared a public intellectual at 40...
You bastard.
Anyway, well done on the book.
I'm sorry that you had to kind of ruin yourself in the eyes of my loyal listeners by pointing out that actually you don't care what I think.
But apart from that, I think it's been a pretty good chat and you've done quite well.
So, thank you, Douglas.
Just in case anyone has forgotten the title of your book, it's called The Madness of Crowds.
Nipped, I believe, from, is it Gustave Le Bonne?
No.
Charles Mackay.
Charles Mackay, that's right.
I can't remember what Gustav Le Bon's book was called, but yeah, Charles Mackay.
Great book.
When people Google it now, they're going to see...
They'll hopefully get my book first and not the classic of 160 years ago.
Yeah, but you've now superseded the classic and you've become the classic.
Very kind of you to say so.
Madness of Crowds by...
What's his name again?
Douglas Murray.
Douglas Murray.
Recommended highly.
Really good.
Thank you.
I love Danny Poe.
I love Danny Poe.
Go and subscribe to the podcast, baby.
I love Denny Pole.
I'll listen another time.
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