Douglas Murray’s The Strange Death of Europe exposes how Angela Merkel’s 2015 open-border policy flooded Europe with millions of migrants, despite public opposition and systemic failures like Pakistan’s refusal to repatriate rejected asylum seekers. While crime statistics—including documented rapes—spark debate, Murray insists footnoted evidence reveals migrant encampments outside Paris and a cultural void where Christianity’s decline erodes Western identity. The episode ties this to Florida school shootings, critiquing media’s emotivist focus on gun laws over mental health or systemic collapse, while warning that both immigration and tech-driven transhumanism risk dismantling human purpose—from suicide rates in underfunded facilities to AI replacing mortality itself. The core question: Can liberty survive when shared values dissolve? [Automatically generated summary]
So when I was a young man, just recently out of college, I was a small town newspaper reporter.
And one day I got a call from a funeral parlor, which was pretty common, to deliver an obituary.
And the obituary was for a kid.
I can't remember.
I think he was about 17 years old.
So I took the obituary and just said he had died and gave me the details.
There was a form you filled out to write an obituary.
And afterwards, my editor, who was, and it's important to understand this, my editor was a woman I respected as far as you can respect somebody.
She was kind, she was decent, she was smart, she was experienced.
So I always took her advice about everything.
I was a neophyte.
I had no idea what I was doing as a reporter.
And she said, look, you've got to get a cause of death.
They didn't give the cause of death.
People don't die when they're 17, so you've got to call them back.
So I called him back, and the guy admitted that the kid had been in a mental facility and had committed suicide.
He hanged himself from a radiator.
So I put that in the O-Bit.
And a little while later, the kid's mother called me.
Obviously, one of the worst phone calls I've ever had.
She begged me not to run the fact that the kid had committed suicide.
People save obituaries.
They're a sort of memory of the person that they've lost.
And she said, please do not put this piece of information that this, my son committed suicide, in the newspaper.
So I immediately said, you've got to talk to my editor.
This is not a decision I can make.
I'm a Cub reporter.
I don't know what I'm doing.
I handed it to my editor, completely thinking, well, of course, you leave it out if a mother who's lost a child.
I mean, nothing is worse than losing a child.
Here's a mother who's devastated.
She's asking you, simple thing, leave this piece of information out of the story.
So of course she would.
And so I handed it to my editor, who, as I say, was wise, kind, and knowledgeable.
And just assuming she'd immediately agree, she refused.
She, in the kindest possible way, explained that we had to tell this story, that our job as newspaper people was not to decide which facts were relevant, but just to tell the facts, and that it was going to be a small story.
It wasn't going to be on the front page.
And it kind of calmed the mother down a little bit, realizing that it wasn't going to be a big scandal.
But at the same time, she was very disappointed.
I was shocked.
So I said to my editor, you know, I can't understand why you would do this.
What difference does it make?
We talked about it until late, late into the night.
And she said to me, you know, every story is part of a bigger story that we can't know, the story of this county, the story of the county we're covering.
We can't see that story.
We can only see each individual story as it comes in.
And so our responsibility is to tell the truth as far as we know it about that story and let the true story of the county unfold as it will.
It turned out there are very few stories like this that actually have an ending, but this one does.
It turned out, in fact, that there was a spate of youth suicides going on in that county, which it's very possible that nobody would ever have known about if we hadn't reported each individual story as it came in.
She was right.
Ring Security Revelation00:03:00
I was wrong.
And of course, one of the morals of that story is that your emotions are not always a very good guide about how to do something as objective or as humanly, as objective as humanly possible as reporting the news.
Which brings me, of course, to this terrible shooting in Broward County, Florida.
I always hate these things.
They make it impossible to do a fun, funny show.
We can't play our song.
And sometimes I just feel that the argument about them is always the same and always goes nowhere.
And I want to talk about that today and why that happens.
Trigger warning.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is The Andrew Klavan Show.
Let me start by talking about Ring, which is this security.
You know, this is a big deal.
This ring thing that it's for security for your home.
And it is basically a doorbell that has a camera on it.
I just got one.
I haven't installed it yet.
But it is very cool.
You know, anywhere you are, anywhere you are, somebody rings the doorbell.
You can look and you can see who is out the door.
Very important before you unlock it.
We actually have a clip, and this is a real clip from an encounter this woman had with a guy who came to her door and rang the doorbell, and she is looking at the guy and can talk to him and doesn't have to just open the door and peek out and find out what he's doing.
And you can see, I mean, it's kind of comical.
He's got what obviously are burglar tools with him.
Let's play the clip.
Hey, sorry, we're in the middle of dinner.
Can I help you?
Yes, how are you?
Good, how are you?
Good.
I haven't seen you in a while.
I don't know who you are.
I'm Justin.
I don't know you, Justin.
I met you a long time ago when I was younger.
No, I'm sorry.
You're in the wrong place.
Okay.
Much love and God bless for both Gods.
An old trick.
Every New Yorker knows this trick.
Helen, yeah, yeah, I know you, and you're supposed to supply the place that you met.
You say, was it in Boston?
Yeah, Boston.
That's where it was.
And then they take you in.
It's an old conman's trick.
Look, I don't know what this guy was up to, but I'm glad this lady didn't let him in.
I'm glad she had a ring so she could see him and communicate with him before she went to the door.
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Media Reaction to Shootings00:08:06
You know, we're not going to, we're not going to break today.
We're going to stay on the whole time because I want you to hear this amazing interview we recorded yesterday with Douglas Murray.
Douglas has written a book called The Strange Death of Europe, Immigration, Identity, Islam.
I read it.
It was the first book I read this year.
I was blown away by it.
I think it's a fantastic book.
And it's a book about the elites letting basically a civilization go down the drain simply from virtue signaling and not knowing what to do and simply because they're not as bright as the people who are telling them to stop, namely the ordinary people.
So you know how these stories go, right?
There's a shooting.
It's terrible.
We're all brokenhearted.
A guy walks in, in this case, a guy walks into a high school, 17 people, I think, so far was the last number I heard.
I'm not going to go through the whole thing because the stories were always the same.
This was a kid that the FBI had been alerted about.
He had been expelled.
He was constantly bragging about his guns.
He actually posted somewhere that I'm going to become a professional school shooter, slip through the cracks, and he goes in and opens fire, and it's a nightmare.
And I mean, some of this stuff is caught on cell phones and videotapes, and you can watch them.
What we always know is going to happen is immediately the media comes out with one thing.
Before the facts are even known, the media always comes out.
And this is not going to be a rant about the media.
I'm not going to do that thing.
But I do have to show this montage just to remind us, this is the way that shootings get covered.
This is six.
There's been a theme in many of his remarks.
After that church shooting in Texas, President Trump said it would be a little too soon to talk about gun laws.
After the massacre in Las Vegas, he said, we'll be talking, quote, we will talk about gun laws as time goes on.
David, there has not been a very serious public policy conversation about gun control here at this administration in this White House.
The president will see if this is the one that forces that policy conversation.
This, according to Bill Bratton, the former NYPD commissioner, is yet another example of how this country seems to have this sick preoccupation with guns and it manifests itself into these really terrible mass shootings.
Is not serious about understanding where we fall short of international standards.
In this case, we're going to say we're an exceptional country.
If you look at other peer countries in places like Japan or Western Europe, they do not have the incidence of violence against children that we have in this country.
I read a stat tonight.
There have been 18 school shootings elsewhere in the world over the last two decades.
In our country alone, there have been 18 school shootings in the last 35 days.
And do you believe lawmakers failed you in that moment?
Do you believe we can do better than this?
Go a little bit bigger picture here for me.
18th school shooting this year.
I keep saying that because it's only the middle of February.
Right?
We are the scourge of the world when it comes to these.
Nobody is worse than we are.
How does that not make the MAGA agenda?
So it's all this stuff.
You know, of course, what happens is the facts come in.
Frequently, it turns out there was a law on the books.
The guy slipped through.
Nothing that they do would have made any difference, but it doesn't change anything.
They never change their tune.
That one guy that you saw, Philip Mudd, who's the counterterrorism expert on CNN, who was making a speech about how Tokyo and Europe are so much better than we are about this, he had this moment when he just completely fell apart.
Play that clip.
I have 10 nieces and nephews.
We're talking about bump stocks.
We're talking about legislation.
A child of God is dead.
Cannot we acknowledge in this country that we can't, we cannot accept this?
I can't do it, Wolf.
I'm sorry.
We can't do it.
Now, normally, I would make fun of this guy because this is CNN.
CNN is news people coming on and their lips tremble and their eyes fill.
And that is supposed to take the place of some kind of conversation.
I'm not going to make fun of him because I'm not blaming him for crying.
You know, this is, I'm going to get a little abstract here because I actually don't want to sit around talking about the shooting, which is always, again, always the same horrible, atrocious story as the last one.
But, you know, one of the reasons that Plato didn't trust writing is he said you have to be able to look at a man to get the truth.
You know, writing was a new technology, and he basically said, you know, it's going to ruin our memories and it's going to separate us from the guy who talks.
And the thing is, it's nothing wrong, obviously, with crying, even on the air, breaking down over these dead children who wouldn't.
That's what tears are for.
But the thing that you say and the way that you say it are two separate things that affect one another.
I mean, just a simple example, if I'm trying to explain to our producer, Rob, that two plus two equals four and he just can't get it, I may lose my temper and say, damn it, two plus two equals four, right?
And, you know, that two plus two, the words that are coming out of my mouth are literally true.
The tone in which I'm saying them is suggesting that Rob is dense or that there's something wrong with him.
That's not true.
So my emotions are untrue in that case.
My words are literally quite, you know, bluntly true.
That's all.
If you just put that down on paper as writing, you wouldn't see what had really happened there.
And that was Plato's objection, basically, one of his objections.
In this case, it's the other way around.
The emotions are quite reasonable, completely reasonable, but that has nothing to do with the words that are coming out of his mouth about bump stocks.
And we don't know if there were bump stocks used.
We don't know anything about this or whether any of this would do anything.
And that has become the way that issues are discussed.
You know, one of my favorite books, in fact, the book, now that I think about it, is the book that that example, a similar example about math, speaking math in an angry voice comes from.
One of my favorite books is a book called After Virtue.
It's by Alasdair McIntyre.
And it talks about why, one of the things it talks about is, I'm just about to reread this book.
So it's been a while since I've read it, but I do remember it because it really had a big, big effect on me.
One of the things he talks about is why our conversations are so endless.
Why they are so endless?
Why they go on why we keep having the same conversations over and over again?
Abortion, justice, guns.
It just keeps going on and it gets very frustrating.
Let me pause for a minute.
You know, here's an ad that I can barely do with a serious face.
The last time I did it, people were making fun of me because it's for keeps.
It's for a thing that's supposed to keep your hair from falling out.
What are you laughing at?
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All right.
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You know, give me some sympathy here.
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As my brother used to say, every man gets a certain amount of testosterone.
Some of you guys wasted growing hair.
But if that's how you've been spending your time, you want to hold on to it.
Punk's Philosophy00:02:35
The reason, one of the reasons that this book, After Virtue, says that our arguments go on forever is because we ascribe to what is called emotivism, that the way of talking about things, our way of talking about things has fallen apart.
And emotivism is the idea that all judgments are nothing but an expression of preference.
So if I say this is good, what I mean is I like this.
I prefer it.
This philosophy is nonsense, but we have sunk so deep into it that we basically think that's what we're arguing about.
We're arguing about whether this guy cries on the air.
We're arguing about whether you feel offended.
We're not arguing about whether something is right or wrong.
And one of the things that I keep saying, in order to know whether something is right or wrong, you have to know what something is for.
Yesterday on Twitter, a band called Our Last Night tweeted me and said, we saw you on Dave Rubin.
And the guy said he's a big fan of the show.
He's listening to the show, but he happened to see me do an interview on Dave Rubin.
And he wrote a song for me, inspired by me.
And it kind of cracked me up because it's this kind of punk.
Is that what would be called punk rock?
Yeah.
That I wouldn't listen to.
But the lyrics of the opening come right out of my mouth.
So it's, play this thing and you can hear me talking in it.
It's not, you know, it's pretty good, actually.
It's good.
It's a good song, and apparently they're a big cover band and people really like them.
And the video is very cool.
It gets very weird as it goes on.
It's got like this half-formed body on a table and all this.
But the stuff that I'm saying through that song, that you have to know what you're for in order for your philosophy to make sense and in order to know the good from the bad.
I mean, that is how, you know, Jesus said be perfect.
They always quote this as be perfect like your Father in heaven is perfect.
But the word for perfect there is the word for reaching your end, reaching your purpose, fulfilling what you're here for.
Freedom's Price00:06:01
So what he's saying is that when you understand that, it starts to make sense of the things like, you know, turn the other cheek.
What he's saying is you fulfill your purpose.
Don't let other people get in the way of you doing that.
And in fact, the word for sin in Greek is a word that means to miss the target.
It doesn't mean to do something bad.
It means to miss your end.
And so that's what we're really arguing about.
And when everybody is saying the same thing, you have to start to ask yourself questions because every incident, a shooting, a school shooting, a vote, every incident can be covered from a million different angles.
So if everybody is covering it from the same angle, you have to start to say, hey, there's an agenda here, right?
You might cover this just tell the facts.
That would be a good way to start.
You might cover it from the mental illness point of view.
You might cover it from the gun point of view, whatever you're doing.
When everybody is covering it from the same point of view, you have to say, why?
Why is it?
It's because they don't really have a sense of what the gun issue is about.
Yesterday, somebody wrote me in the mailbag and asked me about free will.
And I was kind of riffing on it.
I wasn't talking about it.
But, you know, there's a guy, Yuval Noah Harari, I think his name is.
He wrote this really interesting book called Sapiens.
And he's one of these guys who, like Sam Harris, just makes these absolute statements with absolute confidence that you can't possibly know whether they're true or not.
So there's no free will.
It was always an illusion.
Illusion is always an illusion.
Religion is just, it's a fiction.
Religion or just fiction.
You think like, well, wait a minute, this is an argument that's been going on for thousands of years.
And then they always use the same trick.
They always say, this may make some people uncomfortable.
As if then you feel like you're the jerk.
But the fact is it makes you uncomfortable because it doesn't make any sense.
The idea about free will that I was trying to get across is that really what we're arguing about when we're arguing is, are you there?
Is there a you there?
And this is the argument between scientism, which is not science.
Scientism is the idea that science solves everything, and the idea of spirituality, the idea that the internal, the idea of spirituality is that the internal experience you are having is what is sacred about you.
And that internal experience can be mistaken.
You can be seen having delusions.
But the very fact that you can be having delusions means that you can also be seeing things rightly.
If you can be seeing them wrongly, that must be because there is a right that you are deviating from.
What the scientists are always saying is, though, this you is an illusion thrown up by physical forces.
And that doesn't make any sense to me because what it essentially says is there has to be a physical world in order for there to be an idea.
It has to be that every, we know that there are ideas that are true.
Two plus two equals four is a true idea.
It has no physical body, but you can never experience without physical body.
You can't experience it without my saying it.
I can't experience it without my brain sending signals to my mind.
These ideas only can express themselves in physical form.
What makes sense to me is that the physical world is an expression of an idea, and it's the idea of God, and that you, your body, your life is an expression of the idea. of you, God's idea of you.
That is what the spiritual world says.
If that's true, then the important thing, the most important thing we have is you and your freedom, your ability to express who you are and live out God's idea of you to the fullest possible extent, which you can only do by having free choice.
That means you're going to make mistakes.
That means that some of you are going to do evil.
That means that the world is going to be a much more chaotic and unequal place than it would be if I can stop believing in you and start controlling you in a way that seems good to the powerful and the elite, right?
That's the argument we're having.
That is the argument we're having.
What I say is I say that you, your internal experience of you, is the most important thing about you.
The other question I always get in the mailbag is if God is good and all-powerful, why is there evil?
Same thing.
There is evil because there is freedom.
There's evil because there's freedom because the most important thing to God is you.
And this is, you know, this is the Western tradition that has come up to us through Plato, through Aristotle, through Jesus, all of these guys funneling into our lives.
And people have been thinking about this forever.
And the same people who understood that evil was a result of freedom understood that you should be free.
Why do we have guns?
That's why.
Why do they not want us to have guns?
That's why.
We want to have guns because we know that freedom means certain things.
It means you can't have equality.
If I'm free, I'm going to be, you're going to be a better basketball player than I am.
I can't do that.
Unless I stop you from being a good basketball player, you're going to be better than I am.
If we have freedom, we can't have peace.
We can't have peace all the time because people want to take away your freedom.
They envy it.
They hate it.
They despise it.
They want to take away your freedom for your own good.
As we have watched over these past weeks, we have seen that there is a large segment of this population in America that does not like freedom, that will sit there and say, oh, North Korea, isn't that wonderful?
Isn't that North Korea lady at the Olympics?
Isn't she?
Look how beautiful she is.
She doesn't even use makeup.
And look how pretty she is.
And we say, well, yeah, but they kill people en masse.
Yeah, but I mean, they're winning because Mike Pence is evil and believes in Jesus.
You know, this is what we're arguing about.
We know they don't like our freedom.
We believe our freedom is sacred.
We want guns because we know one day they might show up at our house and try to take our freedom away.
They've been trying to take it away bit by bit for a long time.
We want guns to defend our freedom and we understand.
We're not fools.
We understand.
You know, this argument where people say we're more guns, less violence.
I don't know if that's true or not.
I mean, I would like to have good people with guns and fight off bad guys with guns.
But the point is, we know there's going to be more chaos.
We know there's going to be more violence if we're free.
We believe, as God seems to believe about us, that freedom is worth it.
Freedom is worth all the bad things that happen.
So the fact that these guys go on and cry on the air, I have sympathy with their tears.
Freedom's Price00:02:24
I cry too when I hear these stories.
They break my heart.
But we are talking about something else.
And if you want to have that debate, then we can start to build the new consensus that this country needs because our old consensus has clearly disappeared.
You know, speaking of the Olympics, we've been watching the Olympics, all these guys who are so good at what they do trying to win gold medals.
But none of them knows as much about shaving as I do.
Not one of them, because I have the gold medal in shaving.
Because look, I mean, look, you don't get like this without knowing really how to shave.
And that is why, even before I started doing commercials for these guys, I have been a subscriber to the dollarshaveclub.com.
I got my notice this very day that they had shipped my new razors.
I'm waiting.
I'm going to be standing outside the door like Snoopy in the cartoons.
I'm going to be standing by my mailbox waiting for my razors to show up.
It's cool because, first of all, it's more than just razors.
It's like better than shopping in a store.
You get all kinds of things, body wash, shampoo, toothpaste, anything you want.
They have this thing that I like, which is a kind of clear gel that you can use.
Shaved butter, they call it.
I like anything called butter and anything with the word butter.
When they come to me, you know, you want your Chardonnay buttery or dry.
It's like, you know, come on, buttery, give me the butter.
So they send you, you pick the kind of razor you want.
They send you that razor every month.
If you don't want it that month, you can press the button that says skip.
If you want a different razor, I trade off between the simple two blades and the executive razor, which has 153 blades and takes four days just to shave your head, but then your hair never grows back.
So it's good.
So you can go for the shaving gold by joining Dollar Shave Club today.
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That's how much I love it.
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Let them know we sent you.
All these people, all these sponsors, let them know we sent you so they keep us on the air.
All right, we're going to go to this incredible interview, and I'll come out and I'm going to talk about Terminator and what it means in keeping with what I was just talking about.
Striking Observations on Immigration00:15:42
It actually continues the thought that I was having.
But you really should read this book, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, and Islam by Douglas Murray.
It is a brave book.
It's a smart book.
It's a restrained book and it's an intelligent book.
One of the things that is so touching about this interview is that the first part of the book is very factual and tells you what happened and how this immigration policy has basically put Europe on the ropes.
I'm not sure it's going to survive at all.
The second half is about what's wrong with Europe and the void at the center of Europe, the spiritual void in the center of Europe.
And he said he expected to be attacked over that, and nobody even noticed it.
I noticed it.
I thought it was a great part of the book.
Douglas Murray is the he founded the former London-based think tank Center for Social Cohesion, and he's an associate director for the Henry Jackson Society and associate editor for The Spectator, an excellent conservative magazine in England.
Here is a really interesting interview with Douglas Murray.
Douglas, thank you for coming on.
I appreciate it.
It's great to be with you.
You know, I just love this book.
I thought it was just a tremendously brave, intelligent, well-researched and well-reasoned piece.
And I'm wondering what has the reaction been?
I know in England, people can really take a lot of hits for expressing opinions like this.
Has it been a difficult thing to publish a book like this?
Well, in a way, much less than I thought.
I was expecting what a friend described as more witch-burning than there has been.
The book immediately became a bestseller in the UK.
It went to number one on the bestseller charts in Britain.
And most of the reaction was muted praise.
There was a little bit of attempt to shut it down, unsurprisingly, early on from some of the political left in the UK by decrying it with the usual accusations that are used.
But I tell you what, the one thing that is striking to me is on the element of the book that is about what has happened, immigration, what it has been in Europe and Britain in recent decades.
There has been some objection to me mentioning it as usual, but it's been picked up, it's been discussed.
The bit that has struck me is that absolutely nobody, I think, has picked up on what I regard as being in some ways the even more important part of the book, which is the us bit, the bit I describe as the vacuum into which people are walking.
And the silence on that, I find extraordinary.
It was my favorite part of the book, and I want to get to it, but I want to make sure that people understand what we're talking about when we get to it, as you did in the book, in fact.
Let's start about, you know, the strange death.
It's called the strange death of Europe, and the subtitles immigration, identity, and Islam.
So let's talk about immigration.
What vision are you putting forward?
What have you seen happen through immigration since basically since World War II?
So I start in the post-World War II period when Europe started to invite in the guest workers to help rebuild after the war.
But what I see is a speeding up of that process, a sort of losing control of that process by consecutive governments in each Western European country.
And then the book really focuses on what then happened in 2015, when Angela Merkel famously opened the doors of Europe to the world and added 2% of the German population in a single year alone, almost 3% to the Swedish population in a single year alone.
And I say that's just a speeding up of a process that had long been underway.
And it's a losing control of the borders and an unwillingness to really enforce the difference between legality and illegality, to decide that the law really didn't matter all that much or it was more comfortable not to enforce the law.
So that by the time that we're right up to date, you have this situation which I describe as a sort of moroseness that we've got into, where we sort of don't know who's in our countries.
When terrible things happen as a result of that, we skirt over them very fast because we don't know what to do.
And this, I think, is a catastrophic situation to be in, and indeed a deadly situation to be in.
All through this process, you describe the fact that the people didn't want it.
The people repeatedly, through every poll, they kept saying no, please stop.
And sometimes the politicians would make speeches as if they were going to stop.
Why didn't they?
Well, it became more comfortable for them not to do so.
That's my overriding impression.
By the time the Blair government came in in the late 1990s in the UK, the immigration minister at the time makes this clear.
She says removals are very difficult, both for the person undergoing them and for those enforcing them.
And so it's just easier not to do removals.
That's removals of people who have broken into the country, oughtn't to be there, have failed every round of the appeals process.
You know, but even those people.
And now, you see, when you come straight up to date by the 2015 crisis in Germany, I give an example of something I was told about whilst I was there on one occasion researching for the book, when for once, in I think 2016 into 2017, for once, even the German authorities decided that they had a group of people from Pakistan who had absolutely no right to come into Germany or Europe in 2015, who said that they wanted asylum.
They obviously weren't asylum seekers.
They just wanted to have the economic benefits of Europe.
And Germany put them on a plane to send them back to Pakistan.
A very, very rare event, this.
And the plane came straight back because the Pakistani officials simply said they wouldn't accept the people.
Yeah.
Some of the stuff we're seeing here now in America.
We're debating here now in America.
We keep hearing, especially conservatives, keep hearing these horror stories about what's going on in Sweden, Germany, the women being raped.
Women, you mentioned one story, a couple of stories in the book that I just found mind-bending, where women would be raped but wouldn't report it.
They would be afraid of seeming bigoted or making it hard for the immigrants.
Are these horror stories true?
Is this actually going on?
Oh, yeah.
I mean, everything I write in this book, I'm very conscious that there's a tendency to over-egg some of the things that have been going on in Europe in recent years.
And there's also a tendency to shut down the argument.
So what I've done in this book is through first-hand reporting and from a lot of footnoted, referenced events, names of people, names of locations.
I've made it sort of critic proof to say what's actually going on and then to say, look, this is what it is.
Are you happy with this?
I'm not saying here's how you completely change it or here's how you turn it around and say, here is a situation we in Europe have found ourselves in.
And as I say, I think that the striking thing is that you don't need to over-egg any of this.
What is going on on the ground that you can see is extraordinary.
Camps of hundreds of people living on the streets outside the center of Paris, in the suburbs of Paris, living along the sidewalks in tents.
It's not that Paris has fallen or anything like that.
If you go into the center of Paris, it's as beautiful and charming as it ever was.
It's just that if you go slightly outside, this is what you find.
It's the same in Sweden, all the other places I've traveled across the continent.
Life, you know, to a great extent goes on as normal, unless you're unlucky enough to be a member of the public and not in the highest net worth bracket, in which case, you've got to accept that the society you're born into is in the process of fundamentally changing, whether you like it or not.
You don't have a say.
And so much of this, I mean, as I said, the subtitle of the book is called The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration Identity in Islam.
So much of this has to do with Islam and the terror of seeming bigoted by criticizing Islam as if Islam were a race, as if it weren't a set of ideas, and somehow it's wrong to criticize a set of ideas.
We hear stories here of English people actually being arrested for saying disparaging things about Islam.
I should ask first if those stories are true, can you actually get arrested or penalized in some way?
You can certainly be called in for questioning arrest by the, well, invited in for questioning by the police.
If you were to, for instance, say certain things about the religion order, we seem to be saying things that are derogatory about a group.
I mentioned the Islam thing in the subtitle of this book for a very specific reason.
We've seen all sorts of immigration into Europe.
What's striking to me about the Islam bit is that it's just obviously at this stage, the bit of the immigration that Europe is finding it hardest to digest, and which, you know, maybe it will not be able to digest it.
Maybe it won't be able to accommodate it without having to undergo very significant changes, which I think we are undergoing, or, you know, with increasingly very disturbing events going on.
But the Islam bit is a serious values challenge.
We are in this very strange dialogue at the moment as a society with certainly portions of the Muslim communities in Europe, where we in Europe say, We would like you, after all of these decades, we would like you to become like us.
And a certain portion of this community says, We don't want to become like you.
Look at you, we don't want that.
And we say back, Are you sure?
We'd love it if you joined us, it'd be ever so nice.
And they say, No.
And then eventually we get to the crucial one: is that they effectively say, What are you going to do about it?
And we say nothing.
That's the current status of the dialogue.
Right, right.
And it's very frightening because the stupidity of the debate, at least here, is so intense that it does seem, it just seems a worthwhile question.
Is it possible to have a set of ideas that's antithetical to Western thought?
And of course it is.
Yes, I can assure you, you're reassure you that your American debate is positively Socratic compared to the discussion and dialogue in Europe.
I mean, at least you have a discussion and dialogue on these matters.
At least you have outriders, prominent figures who are putting their heads above the parapet.
And it is a very, very small number of people remotely willing to do that in Europe at the moment.
Yeah.
You know, let us talk about this idea of the void in Europe.
You mentioned the book Submission, which I read last year, really one of the best, certainly Willebeck's best novels and one of the best modern novels I've read in several years.
And basically, the thesis of this book, without giving it away, but the thesis of this book is there's nothing to regret if we leave behind the West.
The West is broken and empty.
You call it a sense that things are over, a sense that the story is over.
Describe that a little bit so people know what we're talking about.
This is a really striking thing to me: is that all of these things are things that have happened to us, all the immigration and so on.
But what we're reduced to now is what one French philosopher recently described is: we had this idea that our values would go around the world.
And for a time, we tried some of that.
Then that retreated.
And now we're in this morose period of, I wonder if we can hold on to them for ourselves.
Now, my view is that there is underneath all of this going on in Europe, this sense of ennui or what I call tiredness.
Though we sort of tried everything, we're unpersuaded that we should continue to take our own position in any argument.
And we've decided basically to be a sort of united nations of the world, a place where basically anyone can move in and call it home.
And I think this sense of tiredness, the void, is exacerbated by the movement of people into Europe, because you lose your sense of what it is that makes you you, or what makes your society your society, other than that it's a sort of rather nice sort of migrant camp, a grand migrant camp.
And so all those things we used to talk about, oh, you know, the British sensibility or the, you know, the French manner and so on.
All these things become, even those sort of glib bits become basically parse.
They don't really sum up what we've become or what we're in the process of becoming.
And, you know, I think that even we have this endless debate in Britain now, what are British values?
And they're basically reconfigured all the time.
And, you know, children in schools are meant to be taught British values.
And there's something really in my mind pitiful about this, because even as I was growing up, I'm only in my late 30s, I knew what British values were.
I still do, I think.
I certainly got a sense of what being British is and an immovable sense of that.
But we've had to change that because if you invite in the world, you've basically got to change your self-definition.
And so we have this thing now where instead of it being an identifiable thing you can touch, you can feel, being British is a sort of set of rather packed things about, you know, being British is about being inclusive.
It's never about anything that could keep anyone out.
It's only about things that could keep the widest possible range of people in.
And, you know, this is what we're reduced to because we're trying to include the world.
The whole point of a definition is that it excludes other things.
I mean, that is almost the definition of a definition.
You talk about, you talk about in the novel Submission, there is a scene where the protagonist tries to go back and recapture some of the feeling of Christianity.
You write in The Strange Death of Europe of how the decay of Christianity, the post living in a post-Christian world, has basically pulled out the last, the bottom block of the tower so that you have nothing to base your identity on.
Yes, this is a very painful bit in the book for me to write and for a lot of readers.
I'm just trying to say where I think we are.
A lot of people aren't willing to do that.
I'm not a believer myself.
So I say this not from a point to try to prove my own rightness, but just to diagnose, to define.
And my own view is that, yes, there's this, we are in this extraordinary void at the moment because we no longer want to sustain the things that got us here.
And indeed, we're doing something which I think is very common across the West and I think in America in particular at the moment, which is to sort of assume that where you and I are at the moment is the natural default position of mankind.
The Human Debate00:13:47
That basically, if you went through any period in history, we could be in the, you know, three, 5,000 years ago, we could be 400 years ago, it could be 70 years ago.
And basically, it would all sort of default to where we are now.
We'd be having a conversation on Skype about the same ideas.
None of this takes into account the far more obvious thing is that what you and I enjoy, what the people we know enjoy, is unbelievable blip at the end point of a process, none of which was inevitable, none of which was always going to get us here.
And so the ideas matter.
That's why, by the way, sorry, just quickly to go back to the Islam thing, that's why nobody wants to talk about what Islam's ideas and values are, because we just kind of hope that it doesn't matter and that ideas don't matter and we've always got here, you know, and the same thing with this desire to sort of basically rewrite our past.
We're always going to be here.
We're always going to enjoy these human rights.
And now all we've got to do is nix a little bit of the transgender bit still, fix a little bit of other bits of rights, make women and men exactly the same, and a couple of other really simple processes.
And then we're sort of in Nirvana.
And I think this is all predicated on lies.
It's all lies, terrible, terrible misreadings, ignorance, lies.
But at least let's be honest, whatever we think, at least let's diagnose where we are honestly.
And as I say, I find almost, well, very few, I think, ones of people willing to do that.
Yeah, you know, I am a Jew who became a Christian at the age of 50.
And I keep reading yours is maybe the fifth or sixth book, including Submission, actually, that puts forward the idea that only with Christianity can our civilization stand.
But I cannot believe as an intellectual man of the moment, I simply cannot believe.
And I think that that is where the crisis lies.
I really do think we need a new Oxford movement that brings intellectual weight to the Well, that's possible.
I mean, it's one of the directions it could go in.
There's a number of directions, I think.
One of them is that thing of, yes, returning to a source.
Now, some people, by the way, returning to the source and see it as the Enlightenment.
I'm not entirely opposed to that by any means.
I think that it has its own sort of creation myth and so on.
Yes.
But there are various ways you can go back to this.
What I just urge people to do in this book is to return seriously to this debate, to recognize the reality of where we are, to recognize the truth of how we got here, and to at least involve themselves in that serious and profound discussion, whether they're believers or non-believers.
I do say at one point in the book that if we could mend what has been the believer versus non-believer rift of recent years and recognize that I quote a former Bishop of Edinburgh, we're basically Christians whether we like it or not.
Of course.
If we sort of recognize some of that, you can get towards healing this rift.
What I do know, though, is that with all of the challenges we now face in our societies, I just cannot see any way around or through them that doesn't involve an addressing of this fundamental schism.
Yes.
Now, you mentioned the Marcella Perro book.
I wish it was one of the books I read.
And I think you're absolutely right.
I wish I could talk to you.
I could talk to you for another hour.
I really could.
But I'm out of time.
We'll do that one day.
Yes, but please, if you're in LA, please do look me up.
And I just think it's a terrific book, The Strange Death of Europe, Immigration, Identity, Islam by Douglas Murray Douglas.
Thank you so much for coming on.
I appreciate it.
It's been a great pleasure.
All right.
I think you will remember that that book actually made stuff I like, which is incredibly rare for a piece of nonfiction.
And speaking of stuff I like, here is stuff I like.
We have no noise for stuff I like, right?
I just think.
Yeah, we got to have some noise.
So listen, I'm going to talk about two works.
One is Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke, and the other is Terminator.
They're going to be spoilers.
So if you think you're going to read these books, you know, I'm giving stuff away.
There's just no way to talk about them without going through the whole thing.
But I'll give you a moment.
Turn down your dial so you don't have to listen.
You know, we're talking about the individual and what it means to believe in the sacredness of the individual experience and what it means not to believe in it.
And some of this is becoming more and more complicated as technology goes forward.
You know, I've had to wrestle with a lot of questions recently in my life.
Mostly what I do is write.
You know, that is the purpose of my life.
The purpose of my life is to write things down, to make beautiful things.
And I write fiction and I write nonfiction and I try to write things that will matter to people, obviously.
But recently, I've noticed that because as my worldview has changed and developed, I was always a hard-boiled, down-to-earth, realistic detective writer story.
You know, detective story writer, I would write crime fiction.
And recently, it's become very hard for me to write realistically and express what I want to express.
And that's where you got something like Another Kingdom, which is a sort of hard-boiled story that then goes into this fantasy world.
And now, you know, and I'm wrestling with how to do this.
And one of the things that makes fiction so difficult right now is how fast technology is developing.
So if you think about the fact that the internet has been around for like 25 years and it's changed everything, it's changed everything.
So you write a story before the internet and it's virtually out of place.
I mean, it's almost like reading an historical novel.
And so it's very hard to keep up.
And I was looking, I started to look at science fiction.
And science fiction has never been my favorite kind of fiction because it deals with ideas too often.
It doesn't deal with character and character is what I think is essential to fiction.
But I was thinking about these two questions of what's this question of where we're going with technology and these two works, Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End and the Terminator film, the first Terminator film.
I never care about any sequel.
People always tell me, Terminator 2 is a great sequel.
It is a good sequel, but only the original idea has the core, the kernel of the thought in it that makes it really come to life for me.
Now, recently, I was reading this book called Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari.
I mentioned him earlier.
He's an Israeli professor, materialist, doesn't believe in free will.
And he talks at the end of this book, and he has a new book which is about this, which I haven't read, about what is going to happen with technology.
And he talks about how we are going to evolve out of ourselves.
And there's no stopping this.
So, for instance, we're going to enhance our memory.
So, our memory, we might be able to remember everything.
We're going to be able to blend our minds.
So, I might be able to remember your memories.
We're going to be able to replace our parts with cyborg parts.
We might even be able to live forever, not just amortal, which means you live until a car runs you over, but immortal, which means you live forever.
All these things, he says, we're going to be transformed into gods.
And I thought about that, you know, the idea that we would be transformed into gods, but not human.
None of the things that we think about now, care about now, love now, that matter to us now, are going to matter to creatures who do not have the bodies that we have.
Death itself has contributed so much to the meaning of our life and to our speculation of what comes after death that it would just be, these people would be unrecognizable as human beings.
They would be a new thing.
Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke is probably his best book.
He's the guy who wrote the script of 2001, A Space Odyssey, is about these aliens who come down to Earth.
They're called the Overlords.
And they simply give the people of Earth the technology they need to have peace, to develop all kinds of medicines.
They basically create paradise on Earth.
But what they strip human beings of is their creativity, because once you have an overlord, you don't need to create things yourself.
Everything is fine.
Everything goes perfectly.
Life and people buy into this.
Most of the people buy into this.
But the one thing the overlords never do is they never show you themselves.
They won't let the people see them until paradise has really locked in.
Now you're living in paradise.
And now, like 50 years after they come down, they finally come out and show themselves.
Here's from the TV show, the sci-fi TV show, The Scene, where the overlords finally come out and show people what they look like.
And if you couldn't see it, if you're just listening, they look like Satan.
Basically, they look like the devil.
And the idea here is that people had the knowledge that they would show up and they turned them into evil people.
They're not evil.
They're just the next phase.
And what finally happens is a new generation of children are born under this regime that have special powers and can link to each other's minds.
And they are the next version of humankind.
They're one mind.
And the old version of humankind becomes sterile, ceases to have children, and life loses its meaning and they die out.
And that's why the overlords are here.
They're there to transition us into this new world where we're no longer human beings.
We're just a single mind in keeping in touch with the universe.
Usually, when you think about Terminator, you think about the killer drones.
You think about this idea that machines started building themselves.
They started building killer drones.
Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit has a piece about this in USA Today.
I think Fred Saberhagen wrote the novels that kind of inspired this vision of Skynet.
But if you think about it, what Terminator is also about is defending the human.
And we might have to defend the human from something more advanced than the human.
We might have to defend the human from something that seems to us godlike, but eliminates who in fact we are.
And of course, the classic moment, you remember Terminator.
Terminator is about a robot, Arnold Schwerzeneger, who is a cyborg, who is sent back to kill an ordinary woman.
And one of the things I love about this movie that the sequel's All Ruin is she's just a schmo.
She's just an ordinary woman worried about her hairdo, worried about the latest rock songs, worried about her dates and all this.
And she says, couldn't be more ordinary, but she is going to give birth to the hero who is going to fight back against Skynet and the machines.
And the wonderful line at the end, the wonderful line that became kind of iconic, there's so many quotable lines in the movie.
Almost every line is quotable, you know, I'll be Bach and all that stuff.
But this is the wonderful line that I always love, where the hero finally comes out of nowhere.
After this cyborg comes out of nowhere and starts to kill her, she doesn't know what's going on.
And then the hero comes out of nowhere and he has this famous line.
Come with me if you want to live.
Just love that scene.
It's come with me if you want to live.
And the emphasize is on live.
If you want humanity to live, what happens in the Terminator movie, as I'm sure almost everybody knows, is basically the hero from the future sleeps with this ordinary girl from the present, and they conceive together the hero.
And the salvific act in this moment is the act of sex, the act of a man and a woman coming together to create another person.
And of course, that is the thing that is so under threat.
You know, all these feminists, I'm always yelling about the feminists, the left attacking men and women.
They attack the fact of men and women, the differences between men and women, the complementarity between men and women, the sacredness of sex and childbirth, why we protect it with so many rituals and with marriage and why we fight against abortion, the very fact of childbirth.
We are defending the human race.
Even if it turns out the progressives are right and they are, to me, the progressives always seem like savages.
They always seem like they're regressing into the world of savagery.
But in fact, maybe they are anticipating this world that goes beyond humanity.
And what we are saying is, no, if you save the world, if you make the world a perfect place, but you don't make it a perfect place for humans, what have you done?
What have you done?
If you advance beyond your humanity, have you actually advanced at all?
Or have you simply disappeared?
Have you simply ended the human race?
You know, all of these guys, Harari, the guy who wrote this book I'm talking about, Sam Harris, they all become snake bit by Buddhism.
They all love Buddhism.
And Buddhism is essentially a supra-human philosophy because what Buddhism really says is you don't have to suffer.
You don't have to suffer.
You can rise above your suffering if you simply rise above your desires.
If you simply stop being a natural human and rise above that state, you can become something that doesn't suffer.
Jesus says something entirely different.
He says, take up your cross and follow me.
Suffer and live.
Come with me if you want to live.
We're really in a conversation about the future because some of these things are not going to be able, you're not going to be able to stop them.
When they enhance people's memory, it's going to be to solve Alzheimer's.
So who's going to stop them from making that?
But if I take it and don't have Alzheimer's, then I'll have a super memory.
So these things are going to come in a way that can't be stopped.
But, but we, we, can lay the blueprint of where we go.
We don't have to go where science can go.
We can go where we want to go.
And I think that defending humanity is a worthwhile thing.
And I really do think that's the conversation.
The conversation we're having is not about how to prevent gunshots.
It's not how to prevent evil.
You'll never prevent evil.
That's the whole point.
The conversation that we're having is whether or not the individual human experience is worth preserving now and into the future.
The Clevelandless Weekend is upon us.
Go listen to Another Kingdom.
I'm still pitching this thing.
The Clevelandless Weekend00:01:03
I got two more pitches tomorrow for the movie, the TV version or a movie version.
And we really need you to be there as an audience and to leave the ratings.
Got over 2,000 five-star ratings.
It is a really, really entertaining story voiced by some guy named Michael Knowles who did a great job.
We went long today, so you can treasure this, but the Clavenless weekend is unavoidable.
It will come.
Survivors gather here on Monday.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
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