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April 26, 2022 - The Megyn Kelly Show
01:37:32
20220426_meltdown-over-musk-buying-twitter-and-backlash-aga
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Bringing Douglas Murray 00:01:29
Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
Hey, everyone, I'm Megan Kelly.
Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show.
On the show today, truly one of the greatest intellectuals of our time.
So delighted to be bringing you Douglas Murray, the one and only Douglas Murray.
I said yesterday, when this guy speaks, I listen.
Doesn't matter what forum, where he is, in what manner he's saying it.
You always learn something and you always get new insights into how to deal with some of the issues that are plaguing our society today.
He comes at all of this stuff from an angle you just won't hear from everybody else.
And he's got a lifetime of wit and reading and intellectual heft behind it.
So you're welcome in advance for bringing you Douglas today.
He's not afraid to speak his mind.
Today is the perfect day to have him as our guest for the full show.
He is the best-selling author of seven books, including The Madness of Crowds, which he released in 2019.
His brand new book is out today, and it's titled The War on the West: How to Prevail in the Age of Unreason.
Right?
Think about that.
How to prevail in the age of unreason.
Don't you need that guide?
Right?
The world has lost its mind.
And Douglas, he's the guy who came on my show.
It was episode 55, one of my top episodes.
Jon Stewart Breaks The Mold 00:15:58
Loved it so much.
And I remember asking him, you know, these people saying, You don't understand my background.
I'm from slaves.
And it's like, maybe, maybe not.
And he said, We can all do that.
We can all do that.
Looking back at our history and playing the victim card.
That's practical advice for how to prevail in the age of unreason.
And that's what this book is full of.
He gives an impassioned defense of Western culture, institutions, and politics, and why it should not be a thought crime to still believe in and indeed defend them.
So we will get into his book.
Plus, there's so much news breaking today, including the left's ongoing meltdown over Elon Musk, and why Joy Reed is now being threatened with a lawsuit after accusing Governor Ron DeSantis and his team of using black children as props.
Douglas Murray, what a pleasure to have you back.
Thank you for being here.
It's a huge pleasure to be with you again, Megan.
Real pleasure.
No, the thrill is all mine.
Okay, so let's start with the news on Elon Musk.
Now we find out that the deal will likely close in about six months.
There is a complete employee meltdown over there.
They are tweeting out tear-filled emojis.
Some told the Washington Post they're too in shock to speak.
They can't speak about it yet.
You're getting all these lefties tweeting out that they're deleting their accounts.
You know, we can only hope that's true.
But there's basically just a full-on moral panic that somebody who all he said is I'm going to open up the forum and try to offer as much free speech as possible is somehow going to be something akin to a Hitler-esque figure at the top of Twitter.
That's right.
As you know, Megan, free speech is now an alt-right dog whistle.
I think I've got that right.
Yes, it's amazing watching this meltdown because you would think from the people objecting to Elon Musk Owning Twitter, that we're in entirely uncharted territory.
I rather look forward to the people who say that because Elon Musk, a tech billionaire, owns Twitter, I've got to leave the platform and retreat to the safety of Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and all those other platforms that are so rigorously overseen by all of the fairest and the most egalitarian public entities in the world.
No, I mean, it's ridiculous.
I feel very sorry for Musk in a way because he's being subjected to these ludicrous character assassinations.
But, you know, it's like the Joe Rogan thing.
If anyone can survive it, Elon Musk can, not just because he's rich, not just because he's successful, but because he clearly shows that these people make themselves look ridiculous.
You know, they don't make him look ridiculous.
They make themselves look ridiculous.
All he has said so far is that he wants the platform to be available for everyone.
The first thing he said the night before we're speaking, having had the news announced, was that he said, I hope my critics remain on the platform.
That's what free speech is about.
You know, just how refreshing is that to hear?
And so he has a very deep and straightforward understanding of what free speech is actually about.
You know, when he tried to acquire Twitter first about a month ago, he said Twitter has effectively become the de facto town square.
And you can't have the town square corrupted, basically.
And it is, it has been corrupted.
It was corrupted first of all by people being, you know, in the town square being quietly muted, which Twitter, of course, said that it wasn't doing, and then not only admitted it was doing, but said it could do in the terms of service.
Then they started to disappear people from the town square.
And then they just started to outright ban people.
And as of 2022, of course, as Babylon B and others showed, you could lose your account on Twitter if you just said that somebody who has male genitals and dates women and competes in women's swimming is maybe not entirely 100% a woman.
For that, by 2022, you could lose your platform.
So the whole thing started with a few flamethrowers on the far right being no platformed and nobody much cared about that.
But it went all the way into the political center and then further out.
And at this stage, it's clear that, you know, the people at Twitter who think that they should be censors don't know enough and aren't as clever as they think they are.
They're 20-somethings who believe that the idea of free speech is something they've just stumbled upon and no one thought about till yesterday.
So I think it's a great development.
I'm thrilled Elon Musk has got Twitter.
And, you know, I just hope he does all of the sensible things like putting you and me on the board.
I love your plan.
If you get on there, you wrote about it in the New York Post.
It was amazing.
Can I want to mention a shameless plug?
We're having Seth Dillon of the Babylon B on the show tomorrow.
So I'm looking forward to that.
Right.
Because he's, I really think he's to be credited for this whole thing.
His account got shut down.
He, because he tweeted something to the effect that they called Rachel Levine Man of the Year, who is a woman who's a man, who is a trans woman.
And because she was named woman of the year by some magazine or whatever, Seth Dillon tweeted out, she's our man of the year.
He's for that, he was shut down on Twitter and Elon got mad.
And when Elon gets mad, he buys fantastic.
Isn't that fantastic?
I wish more people had that power.
When a very funny satirical account gets shut down, that shutdown turns out to be the most expensive shutdown in the company's history.
It's just great.
I wish more people stood up for free speech like this.
And it's just great.
Great to see someone with Elon's influence and money actually making a stand.
And it's just terrific.
It gives you actually some hope, much needed hope.
He's a hero and he will be featured in The War on the West part two.
Speaking of leftist meltdowns, Ari Melber of MSNBC in an incredible, I guess it's to self-own.
I don't know.
We were looking at it on our team saying, is this satire?
Does he, is he just trolling us with this?
It's taking a lot of guff on Twitter today for his dire predictions of what Twitter or social media could become possibly in the future.
Here's the sound bite.
You own all of Twitter or Facebook or what have you.
You don't have to explain yourself.
You don't even have to be transparent.
You could secretly ban one party's candidate or all of its candidates, all of its nominees, or you could just secretly turn down the reach of their stuff and turn up the reach of something else.
And the rest of us might not even find out about it till after the election.
Satan so.
What?
It's all said as if it's a hypothetical, none of which has happened before.
Right?
It's amazing, isn't it?
It's like the best soundbite I've heard in days.
Fantastic.
I mean, if people aren't careful, you know, Twitter could have the power to, for instance, silence America's oldest published paper.
Imagine that.
Right.
You know.
A sitting president could be de-platformed.
A sitting.
Imagine.
Imagine ahead of an election, Twitter could deliberately mess with the algorithms and mute stories that it doesn't like so that its preferred candidate gets into power.
I mean, anything could happen, Megan.
Anything.
Deadlum pandemonium is awaiting.
It's great to see because like, I feel like people on our side, which is the side of reason, I know you're not a hard politics guy and neither am I, but I'm, I am also on the side of reason.
It's, it feels like we've had too few victories and lately we've had a spate of them and it's, it's invigorating.
It's invigorating.
It's invigorating.
It's invigorating to see the meltdowns as well.
I don't normally like to sort of engage in politics at that kind of, you know, tit for tat level, but I just couldn't help smiling also.
I'm sure you saw it.
Brian Stelt of CNN minus yesterday said on air that Elon Musk taking over Twitter, he said it's going to be the wild west, basically.
He said there are no rules.
And he said, basically, it's going to be like, I mean, like, you have to make this decision.
Like when you go to a party, you know, if there's a party where there are no rules, you know, you might decide to stay home and go not go to that party.
Well, people might decide to stay home.
Brian, I don't know how many parties you've ever been invited to.
Maybe none.
But in my experience, before a party, you don't get set of listen to rules.
There shall be none of this.
And you must not discuss that.
It only confirms a suspicion I already had, which is Brian Stelt has never been invited to a party.
Never.
But that's a personal grief.
The hall monitor does not get included on the invite list when the prom king and queen make out the invitations.
We have that soundbite just for extra kicks.
Let's listen to it real time.
If you get invited to something where there are no rules, where there is total freedom for everybody, do you actually want to go to that party?
Or are you going to decide to stay home?
The parents aren't going to be home?
Nothing?
No.
You mean we're going to go to something where there's total freedom?
My God, we've got to stop that.
I mean, I'm not going to anything where there's freedom.
I want rules, rules, particularly at parties, Megan, I tell you, rules.
His little notepad, his like safety belt, his headlamp.
High visibility jacket.
High vis jacket.
It's so great when people out themselves, you know, you realize the true character personality of the people who are running the national conversation in too many.
You know, the failure of CNN Plus has been delightful for one of those reasons.
I mean, that's one of the reasons why somebody like Jamel Hill going down, failing again.
She's out there constantly lecturing.
If people didn't want more of that, you know, it's been a terrible week for woke between the collapse of CNN.
A guy, Bobby Barack, who writes for Outkik, and he's a great commentator.
He sent out a tweet pointing out Elon Musk buys Twitter.
Jamal Hill fired again, CNN or failed again.
CNN Plus went down.
The mask mandate was killed by that judge in Florida.
Spotify dropped Michelle Obama.
And this one didn't get enough attention, but Jon Stewart is failing.
His ratings on this show are just dreadful.
They started out to 180,000 who watched his premiere.
Then they were down in his fourth episode to 40,000 viewers.
40,000.
And he's tweeting out, well, they renewed me.
It's like, well, of course they renewed you because you're woke and they think this is what people want.
And Joy Reid also hasn't yet been fired.
It doesn't mean she has any viewers.
That's right.
And no, the Jon Stewart one is a very sad story, a very sad demise, isn't it?
Because, of course, John Stewart in his heyday, you know, was a real king of his craft.
He was so impressive and he could do an awful lot and he could do it with great levity and also be serious at times.
And when he made a sort of serious interjection into the public debate, it actually used to make quite an effect.
And do you remember when he came out of sort of retirement looking a little bit like somebody in the Japanese army who hadn't realized that the war had been declared over some decades earlier?
But he sort of re-emerged about a year ago and did an interview, I think, on John Oliver, in which he mentioned Colbert.
It was on Colbert, wasn't it?
And he mentioned, Jon Stewart, that it seemed likely that the laboratory in Wuhan that actually does the coronavirus stuff could perhaps be the place where the coronavirus had come from.
And that was a very important interjection because it was actually the first time that a sort of figure of the left had unveiled publicly the fact that that was not a conspiracy theory, but was indeed a perfectly viable theory.
And maybe you shouldn't again be thrown off Twitter for saying it.
So Jon Stewart showed that he had the ability to break that horrible, you know, mechanized way of thinking where you've got to be lockstep absolutely with your tribe's thinking.
And he showed the ability that actually would be a way out of some of our current manias.
He showed that if you do step out of that lockstep mentality, you can do some good.
Because the moment he said that, you know, the more of the media on the left started to accept that they couldn't hold on to the narrative that they'd been pushing.
And I thought when this show of his started, well, that's just great.
You know, Jon Stewart could actually sort of be one of those figures who sort of breaks the mold.
Lo and behold, only a few episodes in, we've got Jon Stewart presenting the episode, the problem with white people.
And it's a struggle session where Andrew Sullivan is invited on under false pretenses, is called a racist, not only by one of the other panelists who's white, but also by Jon Stewart, the host.
And I watched that and I just thought, my gosh, this is just, this is the end of Jon Stewart, really, because, you know, he had this opportunity and instead of being able to think for himself and think out loud and try stuff out, he just fell into the same boring rut that so many people have fallen into in our time.
Let's bash on about white people.
Let's do struggle sessions for being white.
And, you know, surprise, surprise, there isn't a huge audience of masochists who want to tune in to a hilariously unfunny episode of white people talking about how ghastly white people are and punishing any white person who doesn't agree with them.
So yes, the market has once again reasserted itself.
Yes, featuring women like some white woman who goes to the dinner parties of other white women by invitation to lecture them about how racist they are and how they make it.
And charging thousands of dollars a plate.
Thousands of people.
Why wouldn't such a person?
That's Brian Skelter's party.
Well, you know, it reminds me, I wish somebody, I wish I'd been able to sort of break into one of those things because it would be the perfect thing to write the modern version of Tom Wolfe's classic radical chic about, wouldn't it?
You know, the delicious hors d'oeuvres before which you're served an interim course of racism, you know, and then a wonderful maybe filet mignon followed, you know, accompanied by a lecture about how appalling and disgusting and guilty you are.
It would have been a wonderful thing to witness, you know, and then a sorbet, maybe.
The latest few episodes of Jon Stewart, just so in case people didn't know, again, this is per same guy, Bobby Barack.
Last episode include him declaring that America prioritizes white comfort over black survival, calling Andrew Sullivan a racist.
That was shameful and disgusting.
Other notable episodes from the past season include taking responsibility for systemic racism, racism and resource guarding, and representation matters, but it doesn't solve racism.
No wonder this thing went down, right?
And he's like, well, they renewed it.
Well, that means absolutely nothing.
It doesn't, it just means it makes Apple feel good about itself.
Doesn't mean anybody wants to see it, which is in the end is the goal.
Jeff Bezos And Unconstitutional Power 00:07:24
Absolutely.
And I would, of course, I'd love to see Jon Stewart do an episode on Apple TV about the ethics of Apple.
That would be a really interesting one.
He can look into what Ricky Gervais raised at the Oscars the other year and what the actual ethics of Apple as a company are in, say, China.
That would be a great episode.
I'd watch that.
It wouldn't be very funny, but wow, I'd watch it.
Well, and the old Jon Stewart might have done that.
Who knows?
You know, back when he was in his daily show seat, perhaps he would have.
But speaking of which, it points out the hypocrisy of all these people who want to lecture America on how bad we are, Great Britain, and yet they're happy to do business with China or support companies that do.
That brings me to back to Twitter and Jeff Bezos and his bizarre reaction to Elon buying it.
So Jeff Bezos feels the need to weigh in on this, tweeting out, quote, interesting question.
Did the Chinese government just gain a bit of leverage over the town square?
This was in response to a New York Times journalist noting that Elon Musk's Tesla was extremely exposed to China.
That's Tesla's second largest market.
So his question is, did the Chinese government just gain a bit of leverage over the town square?
Well, then he got killed online, absolutely killed.
people like Glenn Greenwald pointing out this Reuters 2021 report titled, Amazon, that's Jeff Bezos' company, partnered with China Propaganda Arm, the details of which exposed Amazon removing negative reviews about a book by President Xi Jinping and then disabling comments entirely as part of a deeper decade-long effort by the company, Amazon, to win favor in Beijing.
Then, hours later, Bezos tweets again.
My own answer to this question is probably not, probably not, no, they probably do not gain a bit of leverage.
I've got a horrible feeling that Jeff Bezos realizes that the whole sort of Russia thing has been overdone recently.
If Musk had bought Twitter even two years ago, he would have been accused of being an agent of Vladimir Putin.
Bezos has moved on slightly and realized the best way to sort of drive by reputational shooting on someone now is to do that.
And of course, as people have pointed out about Bezos, Bezos is totally tied into the CCP.
He's had to do business in China.
You can't do business in China without going through the CCP.
So I don't understand how these guys, I mean, it's the same with Bill Gates.
They sort of pose as something and then the pose falls apart in no seconds flat.
And you just think, why didn't you just shut up?
You know, why did you feel the need to speak about that?
Make such an idiot of yourself.
Well, they are railing.
They like crackdowns on free speech, not dumb speech.
That's fine.
But free speech is fine with them.
And you've got tweets like from the NAACP reminding Elon and the world, quote, hate speech is unacceptable.
Okay.
And really what they normally say is unconstitutional, which is not true, not true at all.
Hate speech is not unconstitutional.
But they hate speech is unconstitutional.
Do not allow 45 to return to the platform.
Then you've got, there's a Washington Post op-ed today by this person, Anand Gerard Haradas, an NYU journalism professor, of course, MSNBC contributor, saying Musk operates from a flawed, if widespread misapprehension of the free speech issue facing this country.
It goes on to say, in his vision, the freedom to speak without restraint by powerful authorities is the only freedom of speech.
And so freeing Nazis to Nazi, misogynists to bully and harass and dox and brigade women, even former President Donald Trump to possibly get his Twitter account back.
The cutting of restraints becomes the whole of the project.
Well, yes, yes, indeed, it does.
Indeed.
Freedom means what it says.
I thought he might be the guy.
There was a guy as well who said that one of the reasons why Elon Musk shouldn't be allowed to buy Twitter is because he doesn't, he doesn't have a doctorate.
Oh, come on.
Yes, there was somebody who said that onto an academic who said, he doesn't even have a doctorate.
And why are we willing to hand over this platform to somebody so unqualified?
You know, well, one reason is all of you people who believe you are qualified, you keep showing yourselves to be totally unqualified.
And your NYU professor there is another example of that.
No, they also pretend, weirdly, that the status quo as it stands at the moment doesn't include any of the things they talk about.
I mean, I'd be fascinated to see if any of these people who are now claiming that Twitter is about to become a place where people are harassed have followed, I don't know, oh, J.K. Rowling's Twitter account and the responses she gets.
You know, it'd be interesting to see whether they've noted the fact that, you know, that anti-Semites are still, you know, trolling around on Twitter and there's no particular worry about that from these groups who are now suddenly speaking out.
You know, it's very strange.
I mean, they're talking about the platform as if it was absolutely perfect and happy for everybody until the moment that Elon Musk bought it, at which point it's going to be turned into some kind of Nazi machine.
There was somebody who said the night before he bought, said the night before he bought Twitter, I think it was, or put together the last deal, there was an academic who said that this evening on Twitter, he said, feels very much like the last evening in a bar in Weimar, Germany.
And I said the next day, I said, so what's today?
The starts of the Roundups?
Do you see it happening?
Do you see the jack boots coming for you?
Or are you once again talking what we would call in Britain, utter balls?
I like that.
Otter balls.
I was familiar with bollocks, but I've never heard otter balls.
Can I start using that one immediately?
I hand it to you.
I hand it to you as a phrase.
So what do you make, Douglas, of the thought that maybe, you know, the old goal, woke and go broke thing is actually starting to happen.
You know, between those examples I was listing, Disney stock is down some 15% now, right?
You've got BLM under investigation in several states.
You've got a pending midterm disaster for the Democrats.
You've got Biden at a 33% approval, according to the Quinnipiac poll.
It does seem like concurrent with the release of your book, people are starting to get it and they are starting to fight back.
That's my sense, Megan.
I'm glad you feel that as well.
That's my sense, is that there's been a sort of massive overreach by a certain type of activists in particular in recent years, you know, who thought that all of the toys of the town square belonged only to them and who are also sort of, and I think we briefly spoke about this when we spoke last time, and are also sort of motivated by a resentment and a desire for revenge and active glee in hurting their opponents.
Disney Gives Up On Princesses 00:03:54
That's why I said I try not, I laugh at my opponents a lot, but I try not to actively hurt them.
But these people have been actively trying to hurt a majority in the United States in particular.
You know, they sort of, they've shown themselves gleeful in trying to do this.
And perhaps the beginning of a backlash against that is beginning.
The Disney case was a very telling one.
You know, there is no reason for Disney to engage in politics.
There is no reason for Disney to misrepresent a law in Florida and weirdly sort of campaign against it.
By the way, I mean, the thing they were campaigning about, as you well know, the Ron DeSantis bill, simply aims to stop kindergarten kids and a bit above being told absolute nonsense gender ideology, which is, of course, that there aren't two sexes, but there are about a million genders still being added to.
Nobody knows quite how many or what they mean.
And that a child can become the opposite sex tomorrow if they wake up on the wrong side of the bed.
All that the bill was doing was saying that's not such a great idea and you shouldn't teach this stuff in kindergarten.
How about starting to educate American kids in, for instance, arithmetic and writing, which they still lag behind the developed world, so embarrassingly in.
Disney didn't have to misrepresent what Ron DeSantis' bill does.
They didn't have to pretend that it actually was don't say gay, as the Oscars also joined in in pretending.
You know, they don't have to lie like this.
They don't even have to speak up about this.
But, you know, if they do want to, then let them do their thing.
You know, if it is the case, as has been reported before, that at Disney parks, people shouldn't be addressed as princess if they seem to present as a girl because they might not be comfortable with that gender identification.
You know, if Disney wants to give up on the dream of princesses, let them do it and let's see what happens.
Let's see if the company that made its money in Mickey and Minnie Mouse makes any money when it presents us with non-binary gender fluid mouse.
Let them try their place in the marketplace and let's watch their shares continue to plummet.
But yes, I think that there is a turning point that we may be at, which is that the ordinary, regular, sensible folk in America in particular have simply been pushed too far and are starting quite understandably to make themselves heard.
This book will be, as I said about Madden of Kraus, this is my new Dianetics, but this book will be an able guide to help them do that.
When you talk about Disney, I'm going to squeeze a break in here in a second, but when you speak about Disney and the princesses, it reminds me.
Anybody who's gone there, especially with a daughter, knows, I mean, the princess theme is everywhere.
As soon as you walk in, it's the big Cinderella's castle.
And then you can pay extra because all the little girls want to get their hair done in the little princess cafe and they make them look like a princess and they give them a little princess dress and they give them a little princess wand.
You just try replacing that with drag queen story hour and see how things go.
See how the attendance at the park goes.
Because already Trafalgar last week, or maybe it was this week, released a poll showing that nearly 70% of voters say that they are less likely to do business with Disney.
And it's, I don't think it's as a result directly of the fight with DeSantis, though that's part of it.
It's those videos.
It's the videos of their executives on camera admitting that they are sneaking, quote, a queer agenda into their films and products wherever they can.
That's right.
That's right.
It's the same thing with Netflix, isn't it?
I mean, exactly the same thing.
Nasty Attacks On American History 00:15:35
You know, Netflix that used to be so great when it started off and has just been pumping out less and less watchable content because you think, oh, I thought I was watching a drama, but it turns out it's a sermon.
It's another diversity sermon.
It's another equality sermon.
It's another equity sermon.
You know, unsubscribe.
That's right.
Unsubscribe.
I mean, it's ridiculous, especially in the wake of, you know, George Floyd.
I know you've written about that.
If you turned on any streaming device, I mean, every single movie that was offered was some sort of a lecture on racism, how bad we are, you know, how much work we have to do.
It was like, oh my God.
Like, and as it turns out, there really isn't a market for it.
I'm so fed up of this monotone thing.
That's what that's what, apart from the fact that I disagree with it.
It's all I mine.
I mine this idea that we all have to be sort of force-fed the same product all the time.
It was like after the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, you know, remarkable woman, very, very admirable woman.
But I went into a bookshop in New York, as it happened, the Strand.
Every single book was about Ruth Vader Ginsburg, you know, children's books, adult books, and the other books are all about racism.
And I just sort of, I said to a friend, I was with, what if I don't want to buy a book about Ruth Vader Ginsburg today?
Maybe I want to read a novel.
Meanwhile, Amazon took down the documentary about Clarence Thomas, if I'm not mistaken.
That was the story.
They actually took down the club.
So it's so absurd.
All right, stand by because there's so much more to go over.
I can't wait to dive into the book.
It is well worth your time.
Buy it today.
You will not be sorry.
Douglas Murray's latest offering, The War on the West, How to Prevail in the Age of Unreason.
Don't go away.
Quick break first.
Welcome back to the Megan Kelly Show.
Here with me today, Douglas Murray.
In his new book, The War on the West, Douglas takes an in-depth look, in particular, at the left's determination to destroy the life and legacy of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.
I mean, among others, but the Winston Churchill part is amazing.
As you may remember, the left's hatred was on full display in the summer of 2020 when protesters spray painted the word racist on Churchill's statue outside of the British Parliament.
The statue was unveiled in 1973.
It depicts a famous photo of Churchill in 1941 during World War II, inspecting the damage to the House of Commons after Germany's air raid on London.
The statue eventually had to be encased in a metal box to keep it away from protesters.
In his book, Douglas writes, quote, if Churchill's good points cannot outweigh any bad points, then no one can ever do enough good in their life.
The attacks on him make all human endeavor seem futile.
Douglas Murray is back with me now.
And I heard you making this point on trigonometry, which I love too, that it's the same thing with Lincoln.
If you can't have Lincoln, you can have no one.
It's all tied together.
Absolutely.
I'd go further, as I say in the book, it's absolutely everybody in American history, as it is absolutely everybody in British history.
You know, when I grew up, the main heroes we had politically were Lord Nelson, the Admiral of the Fleet, who defeated the French.
We had, oh, we had Winston Churchill because he stood alone against Nazi Germany.
And certainly, if he hadn't been prime minister at that point, then it's almost certain that the Nazis would have been up against an appeasing prime minister or somebody not willing to stand up to Nazism and that Europe at the very least would have been flooded over by the Nazis successfully.
He was in my life also the, and for all people, I think who are British, as well as many Americans, he was the single figure who showed something about the importance of grit and determination, even standing alone against the worst of enemies.
He was the epitome of bravery.
And of course, there was something more personal in it, which is that for the generation that's now pretty much died out, he was the person who rallied them, not just to fight for their country, but to put up with night after night of bombardment.
You know, my grandparents told me this.
You know, my parents' generation grew up under the shadow of this extraordinary man because we knew that if it hadn't been for him, we would have been speaking German and much more.
So something very extraordinary happened in Britain in recent years, which was every one of our heroes, but particularly Winston Churchill, the radical left activists and others, the race hucksters and others came for.
You know, they accused him of all sorts of crimes, many of which are totally fictional.
Noam Chomsky, one of the great heroes of the left, claimed that Churchill had gassed the Kurds in the 19 teens.
He'd done no such thing.
Chomsky, as ever, was sloppy and thought that what the gas referred to was mustard gas when it was in fact tear gas of the kind that the British police and others still use on civilian populations and extremists.
So anyway, they tore down Churchill.
They said he was a racist.
They said he was a colonist and much more.
And I noticed that happening in Britain, this horrible, remorseless process whereby all of our heroes were looked at in this light.
And then, of course, I saw the closer I looked at exactly the same thing.
And much worse was happening in America.
You know, you could say there was a time a few generations back where Americans learned about the founding fathers and didn't know much about the slavery that went on in their time and the fact that they owned slaves.
You could say that was the case generations ago.
It hasn't been the case for generations.
A more rounded picture of American history has been on the curricula for a very long time, but now we've gone to a different place.
What do people know in America now about Thomas Jefferson if they've gone to American schools apart from the fact that he owned slaves?
What do they know about Washington apart from what they've been told in the same light?
So the founding fathers all came into it.
Obviously, Christopher Columbus has come into it for years.
And I think that the current settlement, as far as I can see, in American schooling and education is that it would have been better if Christopher Columbus had never set out and America had never been found by him.
I think that's the current state of play.
Either he should have taken a left and avoided America, or he should have left things to the natives.
And if so, America would be much better off in the current era and there'd be much more Native Americans and everything would be so much better.
And or he could have gone home, of course.
This is the other thing that seems to have been an option for Columbus.
He could have gone home and said, look, I've discovered this entirely new world, but there's no promise there, really.
A lot of real estate opportunity, but not really.
Best we just forget about it and pretend it isn't there.
I mean, they've already done this with Columbus and they've made him into this sort of monstrous figure.
They did it with the founding fathers.
They've done it literally in recent years with the founding date of America, where the New York Times has taken it upon itself to appoint a total ignoramus non-historian, Nicole Hanna-Jones, to come up with a new version of American history, which by its own definition, and albeit they lied about it afterwards and pretended that this wasn't their definition and actually rewrote silently and re-edited the copy that they had published.
But they said originally that their whole aim was to reframe the founding date of America so that in actual fact, America was founded in 1619 because that's when the first slaves came into America.
So in other words, America was born in sin, has always been mired in sin.
And just in case you didn't get the memo, we are going to reframe the date of the American founding to make sure that you're totally guilt-ridden forever.
But then you come up further to date, you pass the founding fathers, you get to both sides in the Civil War.
There was a time when there were people who are more critical than people on the South, but now it's equally critical the people on the North and the South side.
And even Abraham Lincoln, even the people who freed the slaves now have their statues torn down in American cities.
And if the mob doesn't get to them first, as they did, say in Portland when I was there, the Lincoln statues are now taken down preemptively by councils, worried that the mob will get to them next.
We see Thomas Jefferson statue boxed up and wheeled out of the back of the New York City Council chamber, wheeled out the back door in a crate because, as one of the council members said in New York, Thomas Jefferson no longer represents our values.
You get Teddy Roosevelt with the same treatment, you get everyone put through the same treatment.
Why?
So that America has no heroes left, just like Britain, no heroes, no one to look up to, nothing good in the past.
These people have got away with this for years, and it has to stop.
It is totally unfair.
It is totally ahistorical.
It ignores not just the truth about the great figures of the American past, like the British past, but it also ignores what the rest of the world was doing.
You know, the absolutely maddening thing about the illiteracy of the Robin DiAngelos and Ibrahim X Kendys and Hannah Nicole Jones, the absolute madness of what they have done is that they have persuaded American society, not just that American history is just totally rotten and that people today, as a result, are rotten and have to just keep on feeling guilt about themselves, even though, I mean, I never did anything with colonialism.
I never did anything with slavery.
Neither did you, nor did anyone listening.
Nobody should have any guilt about it who's alive because we didn't do anything about it.
But we're told we've always got to have that guilt.
And then, of course, you have this monstrous misrepresentation based on the fact that the people doing this misrepresentation never, ever tell anyone what the rest of the world was doing.
The founding fathers didn't come up with slavery and decide to institute it in America.
Every damn country in the world, every society was doing slavery at the time.
The remarkable thing about the Western world is that Britain first and then everyone else after actually abolished the trade that every civilization in history has involved itself in.
Do one in a million Americans know that?
Do one in a million Americans know that horrific and huge as the transatlantic slave trade was, that there was a much bigger slave trade at the same time that took Africans east to Arabia, and that the Arabs took even more people, roughly 18 million people they stole from Africa, sold into slavery.
Why do we not know about the Arab slave trade?
For one reason, among others, which is that unlike the Americans, the Arabs castrated every black male so that there could never be another generation of black Africans in the Arabian Peninsula.
Now, does one in 10 million Americans know this?
I very much doubt it.
We have been force-fed not only a false version of our own past, but a totally false version of the rest of the world's past.
So we're told and invited and we're invited and then told to think appallingly of ourselves.
But we don't have to.
We don't have to at all.
It's incredible.
You go through some of the examples so methodically to put the point to it.
They lie about the individual heroes to tear them down or reduce them to their worst quote with total ignorance of the rest of their life or willful blindness to the rest of their life.
And they do the same countrywide to Great Britain, to America, to the West.
And if you look at the specifics, it really brings the point home.
You've done it here and in the chapter on Churchill, you do it there as well.
Even at Churchill College, even at a college named for Winston Churchill, you write about this panel.
It made news when it happened that got together to take a look at his true legacy, his true legacy.
And it devolved to the point where in the book you point the following out, there were no depths to which the participants would not sink.
At one point, one of the participants started to snark at Churchill for being a coward.
Quote, I mean, was it Churchill out there fighting the war?
Because I'm pretty sure it wasn't.
I'm pretty sure he was at home.
And you go on to write, you must wonder how hostile somebody must be to ask why a prime minister who, as a young man, saw action on four continents and volunteered to fight in World War I should in his 60s have fought on the front line of the conflict like some medieval warlord.
Exactly right.
But even his own namesake college betrayed him without anyone on the panel to defend him.
That's right.
And, you know, as I say, these people, I mean, that panel in question had, again, a bunch of just non-historians, totally unqualified figures, sort of race huckster, sociologists, and others.
By the way, that panel in question was chaired by an extraordinarily venomous and unpleasant academic at Cambridge University who has made herself in Britain in recent years somewhat notorious for, among other things, tweeting out white lives don't matter.
And on another charming occasion, that she said that she finds it very hard every day because she has to every day resist the temptation and the urge to kneecap white people.
So this is what we're dealing with, of course.
We're really dealing with very, very racist people, very, very racist, anti-white people.
And if it was anyone else being spoken about like this, you know, we'd know.
I mean, you know, one of the points I make in the book is that you just, you see in panels like that, in publications like the ones I cite, you see what's really going on.
This isn't even, they don't even bother to make a fair estimation of the Western past.
They don't even bother to make a fair estimation of our Western heroes.
They just want to hurt us.
You know, I mean, we could all do it.
I mean, I could go to, I don't know, Ghana and decide to say to everyone locally that there was nothing good about Ghanaian history, that there were no good people from Ghana, and that all of their local heroes were total scumbags.
You know, I could do it, but I think people would identify what I was doing.
They would say, you seem to have a problem with Ghana and its people.
And if I were to be the sort of person who then went on to say, and also I have to resist the urge to kneecap black people in Ghana, I think people would cotton on at some point that, oh, there's a racist.
Seems to be that we're dealing with a nasty old racist here.
Well, it's the same with these people.
They're nasty, anti-Western, anti-white racists.
Pathologizing White Rage 00:15:41
And this has to be identified because these people have got away with it for far too long.
And here's one of the real things I want people to take away from this book is in my experience in recent years, people, particularly American parents, I mean, you know, you're a parent, Meg, but particularly American parents have had this sort of experience, mainly perhaps when their children get to sort of college age, that the children come back from college and are sort of crammed full with 50% of the facts.
50% is a generous estimation, but they've got, let's say, they're crammed full of one side of the argument, you know, and they come home and they basically anger or befuddle their parents with these claims about people like Abraham Lincoln, these claims about people like Thomas Jefferson, or, you know, claims that America is racist institutionally today and has been since its founding, and that therefore we must atone in some way.
And in my experience, a lot of American parents, and increasingly this has happened in recent years to me, American parents, you know, what I do, what I say in response to these things, you know, we can't all become scholars and experts in Thomas Jefferson, you know, Abraham Lincoln, all the founding fathers, everything to do with the Civil War, everything to do with the 20th century, you know, never mind, you know, world history.
We can't all do that.
What do we do?
And one of my self-appointed tasks is to arm such people with the facts that they need to push back.
Is to say, actually, there are specific lies that your children are being told.
And they're not just specific, they're also general lies.
The lie that, for instance, there should be hereditary guilt for one racial group and not for any other.
The monstrous lie that some children, white children, are born with some inherited sin and evil that they must atone for because they look like people who did something bad in the past.
You know, these, so there's the specific mistakes and crimes, and then there is the much, much larger moral crime.
of what is being taught to a new generation in America and in the West as a whole.
That's right.
And you've done a deep dive on that.
And that's where we'll pick it up right after a quick break.
There's so much.
It's such goodness with Douglas Murray and more goodness after a quick, quick break.
Don't go away.
And don't forget, folks, you can follow and download the Megan Kelly Show podcast on Apple, Spotify, Pandora, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.
There you'll find our full archives, including, I mentioned it, episode 55, which is the first time I had the pleasure of interviewing Douglas Murray.
Again, if you don't like that show, you're not going to like this.
You're not going to like my show at all because it's among the best work I could do.
He's just...
I don't want to reduce him to a soundbite machine, but he is.
His insights are invaluable.
Check it out.
Welcome back to the Megan Kelly Show.
Here with me today, Douglas Murray, author of the must-buy new book, The War on the West, How to Prevail in the Age of Unreason.
Here's an excerpt.
In the war on the West, white people are one of the first subjects of attack, a fact that has been steadily normalized and made into the only acceptable form of racism in the societies in which it happens.
And to your point before the break, I've heard you say, all the white guilt and white rage and white tears that we see in the headlines.
If somebody says that to you, that's your white guilt speaking.
That's your, oh, those are your white tears, your white woman's tears.
The question you've asked is, how dare people talk like this?
People need to be called out on what is clearly racist messaging.
Yes, absolutely.
I mean, we have this pathologizing of white people that is going on at the moment, and it is time that it stops.
It would be totally unacceptable and rightly unacceptable to do it to any other group of people.
Every month, there is a new pathologizing term about white people.
As you mentioned, Megan, you know, we've had white tears.
We've had white women's tears.
That's one that you can especially laugh at.
You know, oh, she's just crying her white woman's tears.
I mean, imagine that.
Imagine saying, oh, those are just black tears.
Those are just black woman's tears.
I mean, how disgusting it would be.
How appalled we'd be by anyone who did that.
What about the moment when Joy Reed, who you mentioned earlier, decided that that terrible case a year ago where that poor young woman was murdered by her boyfriend in America?
Exactly, and was missing.
And the press was all over it inevitably because, you know, she was a nice looking young woman and she seemed happy and she'd gone missing and it seemed like she'd been murdered.
And it turned out that she wasn't.
What does Joy Reed say?
But, oh, what we're seeing here is missing white woman syndrome, where everyone cares because no, people didn't care because the victim was white.
They cared because she was a young woman on the cusp of her life who'd been brutally murdered.
You know, that was why they cared.
But every month, there's a new pathologizing term about white people.
We had, as you say, white rage.
And again, you know, if anyone thinks what I'm describing is in any way a fringe movement, they have to remember it isn't.
No less a figure than Mark Milley, General Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testifying before Congress last year, talks about white rage.
Again, imagine a situation, whatever had happened before, whatever the situation that had happened before, where Congress heard from the chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff and asked him his views about black rage.
And he said, well, that's a very interesting subject, black rage.
I'd like to know more about this black rage.
I mean, we would know exactly what was going on.
It would be the pathologizing of white people, of black people, sorry, the demeaning of black people, the attempt to other black people, to use one of the left's favorite phrases.
Well, this is what's happening with white people.
And as you know, and I'll give a quick example, if I may, it's not hard to see where this actually leads.
And again, I'm not quoting this from obscure places or obscure sources.
This goes right to the top and all the way through Western society and American society in particular.
Here is a charming lady called Aruna Kilanani speaking at Yale University in April of last year.
She gave a talk at Yale University.
Again, not some backwater, one of the jewels in the crown of American culture and education, or at least used to be.
She gave a talk at Yale called The Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind.
Again, imagine a talk at Yale, the psychopathic problem of the black mind.
Here is, among other things, what the lecturer said.
One point in her talk, she said that she fantasized about, quote, unloading a revolver into the head of any white person that got in my way, burying their body and wiping my bloody hands as I walked away guiltless with a bounce in my step, like I did the world an effing favor.
Again, not to belabor the point, imagine if somebody gave a speech at Yale in which they boasted that they dream about putting bullets into the heads of black people and are doing the world a favor when they do.
This is psychopathic itself.
It is psychopathic behavior itself for people to talk this way about any group of people by dint of the colour of their skin.
And they're doing it about white people now.
Almost nobody has been willing to identify it.
It has to be identified.
And among other things, there's a really crucial point I have to make here, Megan, which is this.
I think if you tried this nonsense, this vicious, vicious nonsense on any group of people, it wouldn't work.
I mean, I think that if you were so psychopathic and so vengeful and so racist that you wanted to persuade a minority ethnic community in, say, the United States, that they were so disgusting,
that they were evil from birth, that they owed everybody else, that all of their ancestors had been appalling, that they had nothing good in their culture, nothing good in their present, that the best thing they could do would be to get out of life and get out of everyone else's way because they were such a nuisance and their very existence demeaned everybody else and diminished them.
And in addition, you know, you sort of said that in our spare time we dream of putting bullets in this minority's heads.
I think that wouldn't work because said minority would be highly unlikely to be wooed and attracted by the moral and philosophical and political offer being given to them.
Well, these psychopaths are trying to make majority populations believe this.
You know, the majority of people in countries like Britain and America are still white.
Why on earth would anyone think that you could actually persuade majority populations to believe that they have to hate themselves, that they have to hate their culture, that they have to uniquely hate their past and feel guilt because of it.
You know, this is, has to be said, a completely psychopathic project.
It's been pushed through our culture and we have to push it out.
You know, the response is generally: it's not racist if the comments are coming from a group that is out of power.
If the white majority is the group that has the power, then they can be spoken about that way.
And if the group doing the speaking is a minority group that traditionally or present day is out of power, then they have the right to say those things because racism is defined as hatred of other, you know, based on color, race, et cetera, plus power, plus power.
Right.
Well, exactly.
That's that's the amazing thing.
They always try to present this stuff as if it's mathematics, you know, like it's uh, we've come up with a formula.
It's uh, it's uh this plus power.
It's it's total uh total balls again, I'm afraid.
Um, but but let's run with their definition and pretend that it was it was true for a moment.
Okay, let's say I'm an American at any point between 2008 and 2016.
The incumbent president in the White House voted in two very successful election victories is Barack Obama, a black American.
So, who has power in America at that point?
I think you can say very easily that the most powerful person in the country was black.
Would that mean that anyone who was white in America, because nobody else in America has as much power as him at that point, could say racist things about black people because the most important person in the country was black?
Obviously not.
Obviously not.
So their own mathematical formula doesn't work.
It's not about power.
It's not about white people having power and black people not.
And they don't even work out that this stupid claim of theirs doesn't work on its own terms.
And here's what's actually happening.
We are not talking about people actually interested in justice.
As I say at one point in the book, quoting Nietzsche, we are talking about people who talk of justice, but mean revenge.
They talk about justice, but they mean revenge.
What they really mean is this.
Black people undeniably did not have the same rights as white people at points in the American past.
No doubt about it.
No doubt Just like women didn't have the same rights as men in all of the American past, just as gay people didn't have the same rights as straight people throughout almost all of the American past.
These things are undeniable.
But as I read about in the Madden of Crowds with relation to the second of those two things, race, sex and sexuality, you would make a huge moral error if you thought that the best way to make up for past inequality for women was to beat up on men for some time.
Or because of the situation for gays in the past, that the best way to rectify that was not to seek equality, but to beat up on heterosexual people for a bit and tell them that they were less.
You know, you've been making a huge strategic as well as moral error.
Well, this is the error that these race hucksters and others are in at the moment.
What they seem to believe is that because white people had power in the past, they have white power now.
They have power because they are white now.
All white people have this power now, and that all black people are still in the position that black people were in in America two centuries ago.
Ergo, you have to beat up the white people for a time.
Metaphorically, sometimes literally.
You know, you actually have to indulge racism against white people in order to make up for racism against black people in the past and any residual such racism today.
It's such a monstrous moral error.
And basically what Kendi has put in writing.
I mean, Kendi's own that in his own writing.
Yes, as I quote in the book, Ibrahim X. Kendi says in his book, How to Be an Anti-Racist, which is really a guide for how to be a racist.
He just should have taken the ante out of the title and he would have accurately titled his own book.
Kendi says that the answer to past inequalities is present inequalities, that the answer to past prejudice is present prejudice.
So I have quite a lot of questions for Kendi.
Of course, he won't answer them because he won't debate his ideas in public.
He just puts them out there and never, never, never debates.
You probably saw the wonderful Coleman Hughes pretended on April Fool's Day that Kendi had agreed to his offer to debate.
Of course, of course, it was an April Fool's joke.
Kendi never agrees to debate anyone any more than does Robin DiAngelo, who happens to be white, and I always describe as the miss whiplash of anti-racism.
She's paid by white men to come around and scold them for how naughty they are.
Anyhow, the thing with Kendi in particular is that he makes these claims, but obviously you have to say back at him, how long would this go on for, among other things?
Robin DiAngelo Sets Limits 00:02:10
And what are the limits of it?
Like, if you believe that we should have present inequalities and that white people have to be done down for a bit, like, how long does that go on for?
And are there any limits to it?
Well, as it happens, Robin DiAngelo, who wrote White Fragility, another one of the pathologizing anti-white books of our time, Robin DiAngelo says in her book very explicitly an answer to the thing that Kendi can't answer or wouldn't answer.
Robin DiAngelo, the miss whiplash of anti-racism, says there is no good form of whiteness.
There is no good form of being white.
And here's the rider she gives.
And whiteness is inescapable.
So again, I play the same moral exercise.
Imagine what would happen if some horrible racist were to write a book in 2021, 2022, in which they said there is no good form of blackness, no good form of blackness.
There's no good way of being black or being proud of being black, and you can't escape it.
What would we call such a person?
I think we know.
So time to call Robin D'Angelo and Ibrahim X. Kendi and the others the same thing.
We are dealing here with racists, pure and simple.
It's crazy to me, even notwithstanding the pushback on figures like that in our circles anyway, you know, right-wing media or more conservative or more independent media, they'll talk about things like that.
Even at our school, and keep in mind, you know, we talked about this last time.
We fled the New York schools because they were so crazy left and woke and part of this war.
And we found more reasonable schools in Connecticut and we're enjoying them.
But they've just formed a sort of a diversity group at one of the schools.
And the meetings, which I've been attending because I want to know what's happening, are talking about how do we get Ibram X. Kendi here?
How do we get Robin D'Angelo here?
Wealth Transfer For Descendants Of Slaves 00:05:22
I know.
That's my, like, what are you, what could you be thinking?
That you're thinking about inviting raging racists, anti-white racists to come to this school to try to influence what?
The agenda, the curriculum, the teachers.
I will fight you.
I will fight you.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
And, you know, it's worse, isn't it?
They are attaching electrodes to the brains of young Americans.
You know, they are wiring them to be miswired throughout their life.
Because, and the trans stuff, too.
Absolutely.
As you know, I wrote about the trans stuff in the madness of crowds and on and on that still goes, sadly.
But we have to identify what is happening here.
They are trying to attach electrodes to the brains of America's children.
Here is the thing, again.
I am responsible, as you are, for what we have done in our lives, for mistakes that we've made, for wrongs we've done people, and everybody in the world has.
And we have to deal with that with our own conscience and try to rectify that in our own lives where we can.
But none of us is responsible for things we have not done.
I am not responsible for anything that was done centuries before my birth by people who may have looked like me.
But here is the follow-on as well.
We are now at the stage, the stage of vengeance, particularly in the case of reparations, where people, including, again, including this, it can't be stressed enough, not a fringe thing, including the government of the United States of America, is looking into historic reparations.
And here's the deal that that includes.
It means people who look like people who did something bad in the past, giving a large wealth transfer to people who look like people to whom a bad thing was done.
Where exactly is the justice in that?
And I mean, I don't want to overstress the point, but let me belabor the point.
But, you know, we are in America in a country which seems to find it incredibly divisive to suggest that people should show a piece of ID when they go to exercise their rights at the ballot box.
You know, this is something so controversial that it is said to be extraordinarily racist in America in the 21st century to identify yourself when you go to the ballot box.
Well, here's the deal with reparations, which major figures like Tanhe Coates and again, everybody running for the Democratic primary in 2020 talked about.
What we're talking about here would be a wealth transfer, which would include taking money from people who have arrived in America in the last century, or the descendants of such people, and giving it to people who can prove that their ancestors suffered from slavery.
Well, here, among many other things, is just one of the moral problems.
Voltaire said in the 18th century, he said, the only thing more evil than what Europeans are doing in selling Africans is what the Africans are doing to their brother Africans.
Because of course, I mentioned Ghana earlier, one of the centers of this trade at the time.
It was the Africans who sold their brothers and sisters, who stole their brothers and sisters.
I have behind me on the shelf the memoirs of a quite extraordinary and heroic man called Equiano, who was one of the people who was a slave and who actually wrote a memoir of his experiences.
And he described this terrifying thing of people from a neighboring village in Africa clambering over the garden wall and stealing him from his bed.
So how do we prove exactly who is descended from somebody who was only descended from slaves and who is descended both from slaves and slavers?
Why, if we're interested in reparations, do we not go to Africa to get some of those reparations?
Why don't we find the governments and the descendants of people in Africa who stole Africans by the millions and then sold them to the Europeans?
Why don't we find them and at least take some of their money and redistribute it?
I mean, to even ask the question is to answer it.
Who honestly thinks that any of this would create racial or social harmony?
It's almost the definition of how to put a pipe bomb underneath your society and then set it off.
Which may be the point, right?
That's part of the point for some.
Politics is the point for many others.
And there's a general push in all of this.
Noah Rothman has a good book coming out.
I reviewed it in advance.
And it's about this from a different vantage point.
But one of the points he makes is they take delight in extinguishing joy.
I think it's the book's called The New Puritans.
Yes, it is.
I've seen it.
Yeah, it compares the woke to the Puritans and how really the point is to eliminate joy or you might say, you know, love of country or your, you know, your national figures.
Rex Whistler Art Mural Controversy 00:14:03
They want to eliminate the joy.
They resent it.
That's part of the point.
And your book gets to that in a different way because you sort of go through the institutions and how they've been disparaged, corrupted, manipulated.
The one that stood out to me is what's happening at the Tate with Rex Whistler.
You mentioned slavery and there's a teeny tiny piece of a Rex Whistler mural that shows a black boy being led on what appears to be like a leash or a rope.
It's not like a rope around his neck, but he's being led.
And this has wound up becoming an absolute nightmare.
And your point is people have been enjoying the mural as a whole, not this one teeny tiny piece of it for decades without any problem.
People of color, white people, conservatives, liberals writing raving reviews about it in places like The Guardian.
And now under modern day standards, it too must go.
Yes, I'm so glad you mentioned this, Meghan, because this is actually one of the things that bothers me most.
You know, I loathe the politicization of everything.
You know, I loathe the racialization of everything, the monotone, boring thing which is done to everything.
You know, using this race huckster thing to take down everything.
It's bad enough when they do it in politics.
It's bad enough when they do it in education, but they're doing it to everything in our culture.
You know, the British Library in the summer of George Floyd ordered an audit of its books and authors. to find out who was guilty of being connected to colonialism or slavery.
And by the way, they actually were totally inept at the task.
They identified people who had no connection with slavery and put them on a sort of blacklist.
It was absolutely reprehensible.
We've seen the Globe Theatre in London, the remake of Shakespeare's Globe, criticizing Shakespeare for his use of language.
One scholar in the decolonizing Shakespeare seminars announced that Shakespeare's use of the terms of light and darkness was racist language.
They said, Shakespeare's language is all over the place.
Hitherto, Megan, hitherto, people thought that William Shakespeare was quite the user with language.
I thought we were meant to admire him as one of the jewels in the crown, but no, he also racist.
Everybody else, like everybody else.
And the case you just cite with the Rex Whistler mural at the Tate is one that really bothers me.
I'll tell the story very quickly, but yes, Rex Whistler painted this mural, his first mural, the Tate Britain, as it then was, in the 1920s.
He spent months and months doing it.
It's a wonderful, beautiful, fantastical mural.
And like all of his work, for anyone who knows it, I urge people to see his work.
He was an extraordinarily talented man and loved by everybody.
And this is a sort of fantasy mural.
And like all of his fantasy murals, there's always something which says, even in Arcadia, there am I. There am I, death, suffering, evil, wickedness.
There's always something.
And in this particular, in this particular mural, there is, as you say, in one tiny section, a black child who's being pulled by a woman in a frilly frock who's laughing.
And clearly Whistler is saying, et in Arcadia, ego, even in Arcadia, you know.
It has now been, thanks to a very hostile campaign by a tiny number of people, it has been closed, the room in question.
It has been locked off from the public.
Whistler's name has been removed.
Nobody knows if it's ever going to reopen or be shown to the public again, because the whole mural has been designated by the trustees of the Tate, who are meant to look after the national collection at the Tate.
They have designated it a racist mural and they've smeared Rex Whistler as a racist.
Here's why I mine, among much else.
First of all, this is a work of art.
This is not a political manifesto.
It is a whimsical, beautiful work of art.
So I mind it for that reason first.
Here's the second reason I mind.
Rex Whistler didn't live long enough to marry and have children.
So there are not people around to defend him.
And the reason why was when the Second World War started and people in my own country of birth, Great Britain were being called up, Rex Whistler immediately signed up.
He joined a tank battalion and he died on his first day of action in Normandy in 1944.
This was a man, an artist, who could have had an easy war.
He could have tried to be a war artist, for instance.
That wasn't entirely easy, very difficult by modern standards, but he could have found ways to survive.
He decided he didn't want to do that.
He wanted to fight with the other men of England on the front line against Nazi Germany.
So here we are in the position in the 2020s where a man who died fighting Nazism is posthumously defamed by people who are meant to be safeguarding his legacy and defamed as a racist.
This is not an exceptional thing.
This is a common thing now.
Everybody in our entire cultural history, everybody is being defamed by not living in 2022, by not sharing all of our values.
We stand bestride all of our history as judge, jury, and hangman.
And we're not even curious to hear the case for our own defense.
It's an unbelievable, masochistic, devastating thing for a culture to do to itself.
Right.
And the Whistler mural isn't a celebration of slavery.
It's a depiction of this utopia where even something as awful as that could be pictured.
It's complicated.
It's art.
You point out in the book.
Take a look at poetry.
Take a look at literature.
Are we going to scrub them all of references to the slave trade or to slavery to sort of cleanse them of acknowledgement of something that did happen, not just in our country, but in many countries around the world?
This is a fruitless, pointless, virtue signaling effort that makes no sense.
And it's really an impossibility.
Yes.
And it's also, I mean, it's so, as I said, I come back to this phrase, this word, it's boring, among much else.
It's reductive and it's racist, but it's also boring.
Who wants to live in a world where everything is just stuck on one side or other of this ledger, where everything is either perfectly ideologically correct in the arts and politics and everything else in our lives, or bang, banned, scrubbed, closed?
Who wants to live in that situation?
Isn't, I mean, in art in particular, in literature, isn't moral complexity interesting?
Isn't it one of the things that makes art?
I mean, I mentioned Shakespeare earlier.
I mean, who doesn't know that a play like The Merchant of Venice is highly morally complex?
Who wants to be given?
Oh, well, the answer is anyone who still subscribes to Netflix, but who wants to be given such a bland, monotone, good versus evil, everything's always so damn obvious, moral view of the world?
Who wants to keep being force-fed this like a goose, just force-fed this pack all the time?
You know, who doesn't want a bit of complexity?
I would like a bit of complexity in this.
I'd like a bit of a recognition that, for instance, the history of art is not just something you ransack through in order to find the good guys and the bad guys and then chuck out the bad guys and actually not bother when you also chuck out the good guys.
You know, I'd appreciate some recognition that things are more complex than that.
And here's one reason why, just off the top of my head, one reason why is because we know that we're more complex than that.
That's right.
And if we don't accept that other people are complex and that history is complex and that it requires a bit of damn nuance, what are we meant to think of ourselves and our own actions in this world?
And sorry, one other thing whilst I'm on this, because it just, this is the thing that maddens me most.
You started by talking about Churchill earlier.
One of the reasons I mind this whole thing about not just art, but about history being so savagely misrepresented, particularly in America and in Britain, is this.
See, as you said in that bit of that quote you did about the Churchill section in my book.
If we have no heroes left, we don't know how to act well in the world.
And in fact, it's worse than that.
There's no point.
Because if you can give your life fighting Nazism as Rex Whistler did, first only for a century later to be defamed as a racist and none of your work to matter, none of your paintings to matter, why would you bother?
If you can actually defeat Hitlerism as Churchill did and still be defamed only a couple of generations down the road, why bother doing anything in this world?
Why bother with absolutely anything?
Why bother doing any action, any good in the world?
Because it seems that the ledger is such that even if you did do some good, a future generation will just decide it was nothing really, and it didn't matter.
So in other words, what I'm saying is it's an enervating movement, among much else.
It's a demotivating movement.
It's a movement that seems almost designed to tell us that the only thing we should really aspire to do in our lives is to find that we've been born, cringe at having been born the way we've been born and with the culture we have, sidle through life, hope that we don't take any joy from anyone else, don't experience any joy ourselves, and then sidle off silently in the hope that no one noticed us.
Well, I don't think that's a great example of a life well lived.
I think it's almost exactly the opposite.
So to hell with these people, call them out, identify them, tell them what we think of them, and show people what a good life actually is, what heroes actually are.
And it's not as if we don't have them, you know?
They may have assaulted them all, but it's not as if we don't have heroes.
It's not as if we don't have a culture.
It's not as if we don't actually have people to look up to and to emulate.
We've got an abundance of it, as much, if not more, than anyone else in the world.
D'Angelo actually recommends that as a white person, you should enter any room with a person of color by apologizing on entry and before exit, apologizing for your history as being a white person, whether you've done something or not, and so on.
And your comment, I'm going to squeeze in a break, but your comment about the demoralization that happens as a result of this, explain, I had a light bulb moment there where we've been talking a lot on the show about the malaise that people feel, just a general sense of malaise.
And I think a lot of it has to do with social media, the addiction of the iPhone, the algorithm, how it pulls you in.
It takes you to the device and away from other people, and there's no more bowling leagues and all of that.
You know, the loss of human contact, COVID exacerbated it, the political tribalism, all of that is at play.
But this, and this, I've been encapsulating by saying, and then, you know, you're told you're bad because of your skin color, or you're told you're inferior because of your skin color, but it's more pernicious than that, as you've just outlined.
It's not just, yes, all of that's happening and those messages are being given, which are not uplifting, but it really is destruction of all you hold dear on a more macro level.
Not necessarily your intimate family, but your country, your history, your love of neighbor, and of your shared history.
the patriotism we used to feel as Americans for what America stands for and what we accomplished, especially in the 20th century.
And Great Britain the same.
The destruction of it matters.
And it's kind of painful.
And it, I do think, is contributing to that malaise.
I'll give you the, I'll give you the floor and then I'll squeeze it in a break.
I couldn't agree more.
Let me just say one other thing about that.
Any civilization you want to topple, any culture you want to topple, as the history of the ancients shows, you go into the society where you infiltrate the society, you exist in society and turn against it.
And what do you do?
You come for the holy places.
You strip the altars.
You smash their icons.
You destroy their holy places.
You leave them with nothing to worship, nothing to admire, nothing to revere.
You say, look what I can do to even your holiest places.
And the people that have that done to them are a people who can then be totally subjugated.
Campus Bully Tactics Against KKK 00:11:07
That's what's going on.
Wow.
Okay.
Up next, I am going to ask you about the Joy Reid comment because I said I would.
And I've got to ask you, how do you decide?
I've been dying to ask you this.
How do you decide what book to read next?
And how can we do exactly the same thing so we can be more like you?
Douglas Murray, the one and only, more with him right after this.
Again, the book is The War on the West, how to prevail in the age of unreason.
Welcome back to the Megan Kelly Show.
Here with me today, Douglas Murray, author of the new book, You Must Buy This, The War on the West, how to prevail in the age of unreason.
One thing we haven't touched on is how damaging this messaging is to people of color.
How awful it is to people of color.
And so often the purveyors are white like D'Angelo, but you also have the Joy Reeds of the world.
And the case in point, the reason I really wanted to get to this is finally somebody is pushing back on her.
A person of color is pushing back on her and her damaging rhetoric.
So here's what happened.
DeSantis signed into law the bill that it's basically Florida's Stop Woke Act.
This is different from his other more recent legislation.
This legislation bars schools and private businesses from making students or employees feel guilt or quote any form of psychological distress or stress because of their national origin, sex, or race.
So he's trying to stop people from doing that in classes.
And when he signed it, children from the Jack Brewer Foundation's After School Club were photographed holding up signs in opposition to CRT.
Black children, white children were there.
Now, she assumes the black children are all just props.
And she tweets out, this misuse of black boys is tantamount to child abuse.
I would really like to hear the backstory on who these kids were and how they wound up at a DeSantis event.
Given how anti-black DeSantis is, using black children this way is extra sick.
Okay, so here's what happened.
Jack Brewer is a former NFL star.
He is now threatening to sue her.
He runs the American Heroes program.
He's this is a guy who played NFL for the Vikings, Giants, and others.
He once supported Obama, but he later switched and pledged to support Trump.
He spoke at the 2020 Republican National Convention.
He was a member of Black Voices for Trump.
And now he's angry about what she said.
He has, he said, Joy Reed has, quote, completely humiliated my kids and my program.
He says, you have 24 hours to apologize to these children.
And if you fail to do so, I'm going to sue you for defamation.
He says, and I quote, it is just so hurtful.
She needs to be held accountable.
She does it so often.
And you know, her words and the way that she comes across to Black America leaves a stain on all of us.
I won't put up with it when it comes to my kids.
Oh, good for him.
Absolutely good for him.
Good luck to him.
I don't know what the chances are of winning a libel case in the U.S. on such a thing, but my God, I hope he can take care of the cleaners.
There has been too easy a run for these people.
I mean, you mentioned just before the break, Megan, that that Robin D'Angelo thing of a white person going into a room and encountering a black person should apologize.
I'm just, the minute you reminded me of that, you know, I'm just, I have this horrible mental image of what would happen and what my black friends would think.
Yes.
Every time I went into a room, I said, I'd just like to, before we start drinking, you know, I should say that I...
Oh, Douglas, my little boy had his other little buddy come over for a play date the other day.
The little boy is black.
His mom came to pick him up.
The thought of me greeting her in my home being like, I just want to start with how sorry I am for my whiteness.
It's so condescending.
It's absurd.
It's divisive.
It's awful.
Yes.
Yes.
It's just, it's unimaginable, totally impractical, as well as being totally immoral.
But yes, you're right.
The people like Joy Reid do have to be stopped.
I think they have to be called out.
And I say stopped.
I think everyone should speak against it.
She has the right to her point of view, but it should be exposed for what it is.
She's engaged in a deliberately divisive game.
And again, I say repeatedly at points in the book that there are moments when you can see the game that's actually going on under the game.
You can see when everyone is torn down from the past, apart from Karl Marx, that there might be a game going on here, you know?
And when you have, in the same way, when you have a prominent black figure just spewing out the same accusations, the same malevolent, malicious accusations against white people, against black people, against everyone, constantly just like machine gunning the whole of the American public square with the same accusation.
I'm afraid we can see what's going on.
This is somebody who is using a bully tactic, a bully tactic in order to maintain their place in the hierarchy of modern America.
It does, as you say, Megan, it does profound damage to Black Americans, among others, because all this does is massively increase distrust.
We've actually got evidence, and I give some of it in the first chapter of the book, as you know, of the distorted impression that many Americans now have about their country.
We've got that evidence.
You know, the number of unarmed black people that people who identify as liberal think are actually gunned down every year in the United States is several figures.
Most people who identified as very liberal think that the American police kill more than 10,000 unarmed black people every year.
And the actual number is somewhere around 10.
You know, we know from the examples I give of the panics that happened on American college campuses in the last decade, where campus after campus shuts down when it is reported that the KKK are on the campus.
Oh, we've got to talk about the one.
Can we talk about the one?
The April 2016 University of Indiana one is amazing.
This is in your book.
Oh, that's amazing.
That's one of my favorites.
Yes, there's a reported sighting of a member of the KKK going across campus carrying a whip.
A totally common occurrence at Liberal Arts.
Sure.
I think you'll agree, Megan.
I mean, they're almost too mundane and commonplace to even notice.
But anyway, this student made the claim, others, the whole campus goes into lockdown.
On this occasion, the authorities catch up with the phantom figure, and it turns out to be a Dominican monk in traditional robes carrying a rosary.
Well, I wish.
Is that the guy who was at the frozen yogurt place?
Oh, yeah.
I mean, it's there's another one where a homeless person carrying a blanket is claimed to be a Ku Klux Klan member.
I give the example of Seattle before the last election when there was a great big sign on the Whole Foods, which is about the only remaining shop in town.
Everything was smashed up, but it was a small sign above the boarding still saying Whole Foods and a much bigger sign saying racists are not welcome here.
As if the Ku Klux Klan are famous for meeting up in the fruit and nut aisle of the Seattle Whole Foods.
You know, there's a completely fictitious view of the country which exists in this country, and which the best you could say about it is that it's like at least a century out of date, at least a century out of date.
But young people in America in particular are being given this totally false version of their country.
They're being told that a situation exists which doesn't exist.
It's like a mind game is being played on them.
And I'm afraid that the only thing you can do in that situation is for the adults to step up, you know, not to give in, not for the trustees of every institution and every university and more to just give in to this cultural revolution, but to say, you know what, we're adults.
And there are things that you learn with time.
And one of them is a reasonable attitude towards your own country because you've lived a bit longer.
And you can say a bit more clearly what the situation is actually like.
So instead of pandering to the child who believes that they see the KKK around every corner, you say, actually, there was a time in the past where that could have been the case, but it hasn't been in my lifetime or my grandparents' lifetime.
And it certainly isn't in your lifetime.
So don't be afraid of false bogeymen.
Don't be scared into believing a version of your country that isn't true.
Don't listen to the people who tell you that everyone is divided by the colour of their skin.
We are trying to get in America and in the West in general to a position where the colour of someone's skin is basically as uninteresting as the colour of their hair.
And that it is no more desirable to divide people by skin color than it is by hair colour.
You know, that's the position we're trying to come to.
We're not far off it.
You know, we're certainly much closer to it than any other societies on earth.
We're not far off it.
And there might be things we can do to make that situation more embedded and complete.
But the worst way to reach it would be to re-racialize society by telling people, the KKK around every corner, that white people are all the problem and that everyone who's black suffers from the very existence of whiteness.
And the only thing that white people can do is to go up to their black friends and neighbors and spouses and much more and say all the time, I'm so sorry for stealing your black joy.
The, instead, you should say total balls.
Total balls.
I've got to go, sadly.
I could keep this going for five more hours, but I have to ask you that question that I teased before the break because it's something I want to know as someone.
Discovering Inspiring Human Stories 00:03:35
I realize we're dealing with your 44 years of reading and wisdom and so on, whatever.
42.
42.
I'm sorry.
Sorry.
Megan.
Wow.
I know.
Oh my God.
I misstepped.
What do you do?
Like, how do you figure out what to read, Douglas?
I mean, your reference to the book about the person's experience and earlier as a slave and the books behind you.
I want to know, and I'm sure my audience would love to know, how do we even begin to educate ourselves and make good choices?
I got about a minute left.
Well, obviously, I mean, in a way, I do some of the reading so that other people don't have to.
I explain in my books, like The War on the West, stuff that I just don't want other people to have to wade through, you know, bad books like some of the ones we've mentioned.
But also some of the good books, some of the really inspiring books, including ones that I mentioned, the book, Inspiring Figures.
One of the things I definitely try to do is every time I have to imbibe a load of absolute mental junk, I try to make sure that I read really good things, you know, and read backwards, read classics, read things you haven't read before.
I'm reading at the moment Stefan Zweig's biography of Marie Antoinette, which is so beautifully, so wonderfully done.
And it's a sort of break for me in a way.
And I do urge people to do that.
You know, it's good to keep on top of the things of your time.
But as I always say in one of my favorite quotes, you know, be a part of your century, but do not be its creature.
It's very important to me always to read back, to read about other things.
You know, as I say, we live in this era where we talk all the time about lived experience, but actually your own experience is not the only thing that matters in the world.
The experience of other human beings matters too.
Part of the point of reading is to discover that.
And for me, reading is one of my great joys.
I try to make sure I never view it only as a work project.
And of course, for me, the greatest excitement of reading is that one that C.S. Lewis so famously said when he said, you know, we read to know we're not alone.
And you read across the centuries and you discover other people felt like you, other people thought like you or thought differently.
And what an amazing, amazing discovery that always is.
And the discovery just goes on and on and on.
And the first order of business is to read The War on the West, how to prevail in the age of unreason.
Do it to support Douglas Murray.
Do it to enlighten yourself and do it to arm yourself with meaningful options when people spew nonsense in your presence or the presence of your children.
Douglas, such a pleasure.
Thank you so much.
Such a pleasure.
Thank you, Megan.
Wow.
Okay.
Thank you so much for joining us today.
I hope you enjoyed that interview as much as I did.
I was just saying to my team, you can't, you can't do that kind of thing on cable news.
You know, you can't put Douglas Murray on for three minutes, get up and down on a conversation like that.
That is one of the joys of this forum, right?
I'm so delighted to have been able to bring him to you.
I hope you enjoyed it.
I know you did.
How could you not?
Right.
And tomorrow, more goodness, we've got Seth Dylan, CEO of the Babylon Bee, as I just discussed with Douglas.
Is he the reason Elon Musk just bought Twitter?
We'll get into the whole thing, how they took a stand on their tweet about Rachel Levine, how they backed Libs of TikTok after she came under attack by the Washington Post, and whether Seth actually does think what happened to him led to some really great news, I think, in the social media world.
Follow Us On Apple And Spotify 00:00:38
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