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Oct. 13, 2019 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin

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Revealing The Origins Of The Current Madness Of Crowds | Douglas Murray | POLITICS | Rubin Report

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douglas murray ▲ ● ▼		When the economics goes bad, we become vulnerable to bad ideas.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Hey, I'm your friendly neighborhood Dave Rubin with a quick reminder to subscribe to our channel and click the bell to get notified of our videos.
		And joining me today is an international best-selling author and journalist, though his greatest claim to fame is now being a three-time returning Rubin Report guest, Douglas Murray.
		Welcome back to the Rubin Report.
douglas murray ▲ ● ▼		Very good to be with you again, Dave.
douglas murray ▲ ● ▼		Who else has managed three times?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Who else has been three times?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		I believe Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, Gad Saad.
douglas murray ▲ ● ▼		Oh, this is the A-team.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, this is the A-team.
		Maybe Sam Harris snuck in there, I'm not sure.
		Anyway, it is good to have you on, my friend.
		I wish we were doing this in person, but you were across the pond.
		How is life across the pond these days?
douglas murray ▲ ● ▼		Well, you know, it's all right.
		We have our own forms of madness going on here, as you do in America.
		But broadly speaking, we're still standing, despite all of the politicians' best efforts.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		I want to get into this book because I've read about half of it so far.
		And as you know, I just wrote my first book and I was reading this going, man, I wish I was a better author because you, my friend, have a way with words.
		So I've got the book right here.
		And I always notice that on cable news, when people are going to read something, they put on glasses.
		I don't wear glasses.
		These are prop glasses, but I thought I'd put them on so that I look a little smarter as I read this, because on the inside flap you have something here that I thought just summed up almost every reason that I do this show and talk about these issues and love what you do.
		It says, we're living through a postmodern era in which the grand narratives of religion and political ideology have collapsed.
		In their place have emerged a crusading desire to right perceived wrongs and a weaponization of identity both accelerated by the new forms of social and news media.
		Narrow sets of interests now dominate the agenda as society becomes more and more tribal and as Murray shows the casualties are mounting.
		Now I'm going to slowly take off my glasses.
		How was that?
		That was pretty good, right?
		Unbelievable.
		I'm like Anderson Cooper.
		No, that little synopsis right there, I think is exactly what's on everyone's mind these days, that a small few have somehow taken over all of the narratives.
		So I guess my first question would be, when do you think this all started?
douglas murray ▲ ● ▼		I think it's a phenomenon of the last decade.
		I think that it starts in earnest after the financial crash of 2008.
		You know, when we look back at history, causes of revolutions and so on, we know that when the economics goes bad, other things happen.
		And I think that we pretend at the moment as if the crash sort of didn't happen or didn't have an effect in our culture.
		And of course it didn't.
		Of course something like that's going to.
		And I say in the introduction to The Madness of Crowds, you know, It's not a surprise that young people who can't accumulate capital in their lives don't have any particular love of capitalism.
		And it's not surprising that a generation that finds it incredibly hard to get on the property ladder, for instance, is going to be susceptible to ideologies that claim to be able to solve every inequity on earth.
		So my view is that when the economics goes bad, we become vulnerable to bad ideas.
		And the ones I write about in The Madness of Crowds, I think these ideas have been gestating since at least the 1980s.
		These things that we now know as identity politics, intersectionality, possibly the ugliest word in the language.
		And these have been hanging around since about the 80s, but they only come flooding in in the last decade.
		And then in the last five years, as you can prove, I lay out some of it in the book, in the last five years, that's when all this stuff actually became weaponized.
unidentified		Yeah.
douglas murray ▲ ● ▼		And when it started to be used as a real battering ram.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		All right, so first off, thank you for actually saying the title of the book.
		That was very unprofessional of me.
		It is called The Madness of Crowds.
		You are correct right there.
		So that's an interesting theory that you've laid out, that basically these ideas, these sort of bad ideas and totalitarian ideas, that they've been sitting there, but it takes something else, in this case an economic crash, to bring them up to the fold.
		So you think if the crash had not happened, you think that basically would have been a buffer to just kind of keep these ideas under our normal layer of discourse?
douglas murray ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think so.
		It's been on my mind for many years as I've noticed this sort of intrusion into the public space of these ideas and of these weaponized identity groupings, people being used against each other, you know, gay people seeming to be used for something to hit straight people and people of different races being used against each other and women being used against men, you know, this sort of this horrible thing we've been through in recent years so many times.
		And yeah, when I started looking into the intellectual origins of some of this, I sort of assumed that There were serious texts and these ideas came from a serious place and I was sort of stunned when I started looking into it that really it's a lot of assertions that are being made in these texts.
		You know, there's a famous foundational text of intersectionality called Unpacking the Knapsack, Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack, and I sort of thought this by Professor Wellesley, I sort of thought, well, this must be some kind of serious attempt at something.
		I might be wrong.
		But no, it's a few pages of assertions.
		And that started to make me particularly interested, because I thought, well, how did a few assertions by one Wellesley academic become one of the bases for something that is now being tried out everywhere. And
		the real shock to me as I was researching this book was, this isn't just, you know,
		it broke out from these sort of liberal arts colleges like, you know, Wellesley and a few sort of
		places like Berkeley, and Judith Buckler and this sort of stuff. It broke out
		from there, but we now see it being flooding through, among other things,
		the corporate world.
		And that was a huge... I mean, I'm just amazed at the extent to which this has gone through that now.
		I mean, you know this.
		But the only people who don't think that this stuff is coming towards them are people who are basically self-employed and don't have much connection with other people in an office or anything.
		But everybody else knows that through human resources departments, commitments to diversity, all of this sort of thing, this is all coming for them.
		And I'm just amazed, as I say, that a set of ideas which, as we'll come on to, are provably wrong, are provably not going to work, and contradictory, self-contradictory.
		It's just amazing to me that this should have flooded through governments, corporations, as if it's something that might work, when it can't.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		When you were doing the research for the book and you found some of these documents, which as you're talking about, the genesis of intersectionality, it's a couple pages basically.
		In a weird way, would you have preferred to have found a solid foundation to argue against?
		You know, something that even if you disagreed with all of the outcomes, that you would have been able to fight in sort of like an even way as opposed to fighting something that because it's not foundational, you're just kind of fighting all over the place.
douglas murray ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		That's what I assumed.
		I thought this was going to require some serious delving and so on.
		I was amazed at this.
		What's more, the academia bit in a way is the most tedious part of it, for obvious reasons.
		Once this breaks into the pop culture world, for instance, then we're talking about mass entertainment and indeed, I think, mass derangement when some of these ideas go into the pop cultural world.
		But these claims made, the foundational claims, are, among other things, written in the type of academic jargon that is so bad that it's clear that it is prose intended only to do one of two things.
		The first is to hide a meaning because there isn't one.
		And the second one is to write this badly because the author knows that what they're saying isn't true and they're trying to cover over the fact.
		But I mean, I give examples and I did the audio book for this book.
		And I mean, just reading some of them out aloud.
		I mean, I kept corpsing in the sound booth because, I mean, they are such ridiculously badly written texts.
		And as I say, I mean, I give examples, but this is fraudulence on a massive scale.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Okay, well, here's what we're gonna do.
		We're gonna dive into it.
		And one of the beauties of the book, actually, is the way you lay it out is such simplicity.
		And in fact, you really only have four chapters here, which then you have some interludes for, but it's really four main ideas.
		But I'm going to put my fake glasses on for just one more moment here, because I wanna read the two quotes at the beginning of the book, because I feel you've started us off beautifully here.
		This is a quote.
		The special mark of the modern world is not that it is skeptical, but that it is dogmatic without knowing it.
		That's G.K.
		Chesterton.
		And then this next one.
		Oh my gosh, look at her butt.
		Look at her butt.
		Look at it.
		Look at her butt.
		By Nicki Minaj.
douglas murray ▲ ● ▼		And Minaj.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		And Minaj.
		Douglas, why those two quotes?
		And now I'm putting the glasses away, my friend.
douglas murray ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, that's that's the epigraph page.
unidentified		I I sort of thought it did.
douglas murray ▲ ● ▼		It signaled what I was planning to do and what I hope I have done in the book.
		Which is in part to just show people what's going on.
		In the chapter on women, I go into the issue of mismenage.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Let's hold that for a second, yeah.
douglas murray ▲ ● ▼		The G.K.
		Chesterton quote seems to me incredibly opposite to the point I'm trying to make.
		That we have an extraordinary set of dogmas in our time.
		We're as dogmatic as any age.
		But it requires, I think, somebody to step back and say, what are the dogmas?
		And I just decided that it was worth putting them down in the four that I see most closely.
		Gay, which is the first chapter.
		Women, the second.
		The third is race.
		And the fourth is trans.
		And we basically, if I could sum up what I'm trying to do with this in a nutshell, it's that I think we are pretending to know about things we don't know about, and we're pretending not to know about things we all knew till yesterday.
		And these two things simultaneously are one of the reasons why our societies are dementing ourselves.
		We pretend to be exceptionally sure about things like trans, for instance, when we really don't know very much at all about it.
		And I lay out, you know, I lay out the most plausible, decent, reasonable case for saying what in this claim, these rights claims, is legitimate and something we need to think about, and what is it that's just dementing?
		So that's an example of something we pretend to be really sure about, and we just don't know almost anything about.
		And then there are things that we really do know a lot about, or used to know a lot about until yesterday, like relations between the sexes, which we pretend are total mysteries to us.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So okay, so I love that, as I said, four chapters, and it's just so simple.
		It's gay, women, what and trans?
		Race.
		Race and trans, thank you.
		Okay, so let's just start gay.
		That's the title, that's it.
		No cheeky titles, no nothing, just gay, three letters.
		So, I think most people watching this want gay people to live equally under the law, and that is the way it is in pretty much every Western society.
		But what you talk about here is that's not really what the gay movement is sort of about anymore, correct?
douglas murray ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I mean, I think that in each of these cases there's an argument that what we're going through is a kind of overcorrection in some way.
		I would suggest that there's always been a problem in every rights movement of knowing when you've got to equal and when some people have overshot.
		So my view is that a lot of people don't like equal, actually.
		They want to go to better.
		This is really painful stuff.
		But the extent to which being gay can be presented as if it's actually a bit better than being straight.
		Being black is not just about being equal, it's a bit better than being white.
		And I get into that in the race chapter.
		And the example with women is what Christine Lagarde, the head of the IMF, did.
		She said the financial crash at Lehman Brothers might not have happened if it had been Lehman Sisters.
		As if women are absolutely equal to men and also a bit better.
		Now, I think this is a very dangerous overcorrection in the right swing.
		And with gay, it's got a lot of unpleasant connotations, which I go into in the book, which I think were there, and I trace where they were from the beginning of the gay rights movement.
		And I particularly, I go into one thing which I don't think anyone's written about before, which is what I describe as the divide between gay and queer.
		And I say that gay is just, you know, people who are attracted to members of their own sex, like both you and I happen to be.
		We're somewhat over-represented in this conversation.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		It's very hetero-normative, our conversations.
douglas murray ▲ ● ▼		You see, being gay is not very interesting beyond that, but there's a divide that was always there within the gay rights movement, which was between people who are gay and people who are queer.
		And queer, as I describe it, is people who think that being attracted to a member of their own sex is merely the first stage for a bigger campaign such as, for instance, bringing down
		the society or queering the society or bringing down capitalism or something like this.
		And I'm amazed that this hasn't been sort of focused on before because actually a lot of the
		pain that has come from parts of the gay rights movement over the years has been precisely the
		people who didn't do gay.
		They were doing queer.
		They were using gay as merely the first thing to do a bigger political project.
		And that's common in each of these chapters.
		There's each of them.
		There is a group trying to do something like that.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So then what do we call the gays who are not trying to destroy Western civilization and the patriarchy?
		The gays like us?
		We're just gay?
		That's it?
		That's so boring.
		Did you come up with a better word?
		Come on.
douglas murray ▲ ● ▼		No, I'm sticking with gay on this one.
		But it's a very important thing to identify.
		It was always there.
		It was there Stonewall onwards.
		It was there before indeed that.
		And in recent years, something very interesting has happened with the remaining bit of the gay rights sort of groups, which is that they have become vulnerable to what I describe as St.
		George in retirement syndrome.
		You know, St George, after slaying the dragon and getting the acclaim of slaying the dragon, staggers around the land looking for ever more dragons to slay and can't find them or find smaller and smaller beasts and eventually may be found swinging his sword at thin air.
		With the remainders of, for instance, the gay press, this is what they're doing.
		They wish they'd been at Stonewall.
		They wish that they'd been fighting back in the day.
		Some of them did.
		But they get addicted to the barricade manner.
		And that's why we have this very strange thing.
		And I really, I go straight for them on this.
		Why it's turned out that, for instance, the gay press that remains is basically a sort of weird social justice warrior campaigning thing.
		So much so that Just this past week, when my book came out, the main gay magazines in America and Britain attacked me for misgendering Sam Smith, the pop singer, who came out as non-binary.
		And I said, well, my view is, which is I don't think there's any such thing as non-binary.
		I think it's just absolutely impossible to determine what the difference is between saying you're non-binary and just shouting, look at me.
		And I think that's what he did.
		And I said, so I said, I'm not doing they them.
		I'm not doing all this, all this crap.
		And both both sides of the Atlantic, the gay, the legacy gay press said, you know, right wing maniac Murray, you know, outrageously misgendered Sam Smith on radio show.
		All making sure they didn't mention that I myself am gay.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		And the best part of the whole thing, forget that they don't mention you're gay, right?
		Because they want to take away your gay card.
		But that the, uh, unless this happened more than once, I saw the video clip of the radio show that you were doing and the woman you were arguing against or having the conversation with, she kept saying that you have to use his proper pronouns.
		So in her own sentence, she was misgendering him.
unidentified		Yes.
douglas murray ▲ ● ▼		She accused me of bullying him for not using his correct pronouns, because of course I'm in a great position to bully a multi-million pound earning pop star anyhow.
unidentified		But you were bullying him, not bullying they.
douglas murray ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
unidentified		No, no.
douglas murray ▲ ● ▼		This woke stuff is harder than it looks.
		Yeah.
		But, you know, as I say, this is an example of it, that basically the legacy gay press doesn't have much to do other than attack gays who it thinks are letting the side down by not being woke enough or social justice warrior enough.
		And I just have boundless contempt for these people.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		There's a couple other interesting things that have happened through an American lens on this.
		Did you happen to see that right now, Pete Buttigieg, who is openly gay, is starting to feel the wrath of exactly what you're talking about?
		Because I've seen now the queer magazines or whatever it is, say he's just a heteronormative man.
		Who doesn't identify with being queer.
		He happens to be married to a man.
		He has sex with a man, I assume.
		But that's not good enough, even for him, who's basically a progressive.
		They still want him to live under the boot.
douglas murray ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
		I give an example in each chapter of where we see the nakedly political nature of these movements now.
		Another example before this week, one that I give in the book, is Peter Thiel, Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur and billionaire, who is denounced by Advocate magazine, the state's legacy gay magazine, is denounced by Advocate after he comes out for Trump in 2016.
		And Advocate says, Peter Thiel may sleep with men, but in no way is he gay.
		Like we've all been doing it wrong all these years.
		Turns out there's something else you're meant to be doing.
		Anyhow, but this happens on each of these.
		You know, when Kanye West comes out for Trump, he's denounced in the Atlantic as no longer being black.
		And Jemaine Greer, when she doesn't do the trans one in the right order, is denounced as no longer a feminist.
		And, you know, if gay men aren't gay and Jemaine Greer isn't a feminist and Kanye West isn't black, Then what are we really talking about with these characteristics?
		And I think what we're talking about is a naked political push used disgracefully using identity issues and people's identity as a way to carry out and batter a political project.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Do you think that there when it comes to sexuality, there's a particularly perverse version of this, which is last time I had you in studio, the last thing that I asked you about was, was that because you're gay, does it make you more sensitive, perhaps?
		to some of these movements.
		Do gay people, do we kind of see things a little bit earlier because we are the other, that sort of thing?
		And you basically said, yes, your skin might be a little bit thinner when it comes to all of these issues because as an other, you identify with the other.
		So in a weird way, the social justice movement can really use gays and minorities in a really effective way because it makes it all about them.
		So it's so twisted.
douglas murray ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, there's certainly some of that going on.
		But I must say, I mean, there are several groups you could sort of identify pushing some of these identity issues.
		And I think there are these people who who genuinely are just using this as politics, you know, that it's really identifiable now.
		I think there are, though, I mean, we should credit it.
		There are a lot of young people in their teens and 20s.
		Who have actually absorbed this worldview, who do actually believe that we live in a uniquely dangerous time, as opposed to being the most fortunate people in history ever anywhere, and who actually have imbibed these ideas that we live in this on the verge of fascism sort of state and who have very little context with history and all sorts of other things.
		One of the aims of this book is it's written for those people, and I really hope they read it, to try to get them out of that and just suggest a more reasonable view of the situation we're in.
		My experience in recent years, I think I say this in the introduction, is that on all of these issues of LGBT issues, race issues and women's issues, basically my experience in recent years has been it's been like watching a train finally pulling in to its desired destination, only at the very moment of pulling into the station to suddenly get a head of steam and go shooting off down the tracks and off the tracks and scattering people in their wake.
		It's almost like at the moment of victory, a load of people decided that victory wasn't enough.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		We see that all over the place.
		I mean, I think Sweden is probably the best example of that, where they've had this great egalitarian society where men and women are so obviously equal, and yet the social justice warriors are now trying to re-engineer society so that there'll be as many women engineers, but we know that women just aren't as interested in that.
		That's not sexist, it just is.
douglas murray ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		I mean, this stuff is dementing because we're trying to run a set of programs that can't be run simultaneously and are not going to work.
		And, you know, I mean, we can both wax eloquent about the number of contradictions, for instance, in these movements that's going on at the moment.
		And I mean, the most striking one to me is what I describe as the hardware-software issue, where... I was about to get to it!
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Take us there!
douglas murray ▲ ● ▼		Hardware-software issue.
		I think I owe this sort of insight from conversations with our mutual friend Eric Weinstein.
		But the way I see it is that every rights movement in the late 20th century discovered that the best way to get sympathy for your case was to say that you had a hardware issue.
		So Gay argues against lifestyle choice.
		by saying no, born this way, move from lifestyle choice to Lady Gaga.
		And you see, I actually say, I mean, I'm definitely chucked out of the Church of Gay for saying this, but I actually say, and I wrote this before the most recent study emerged in Science magazine, it was the largest study of gay men and women to have come out so far.
		I actually say what that study did conclude, which is that It's almost certainly got a significant hardware component, but there's also a nurture, rearing issue.
		There are lots of things that are slightly buck the settled place that we thought, or at least a lot of gay rights campaigners got to.
		But it was understandable to do hardware rather than software because it countered the sort of religious bigotry among others that did, you know, lifestyle choice.
		But the problem about this is that other movements learned from that.
		The trans movement in particular learned from that.
		And in recent years, in super fast time, has been trying to say absolutely nothing to do with software.
		This is a hardware issue.
		Trans people are born trans.
		And as I say, we actually don't know very much about it.
		But here's the dementing thing, if I may make the point, which is that We are pretending at the moment in our societies that gay is hardware, trans is hardware, but being a woman is software.
		Now that is dementing.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Right, so you can somehow pick your gender, which we know is a physical reality, but you can't pick your sexuality, which science has proven there's at least a conversation to have there.
douglas murray ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		So chromosomes are of no significance.
		But how you feel is the most important thing.
		We're trying to make hardware software and software hardware.
		And, you know, as I say, I mean, there's no wonder this sort of casualty list of feminists has kept growing, because there's a very noble, I give a role call of them in a chapter in the book.
		It's no wonder that a group of feminists kept coming across this tripwire, because it's incredibly insulting for a lot of women.
		To be told, you know, as Judith Butler and others had started off the sort of theoretical stuff and others have picked it up and weaponized it, that, you know, being a woman is a matter of performativity.
		You know, and as I say, you can't run these two programs simultaneously, but we've been trying.
		And I think that's one of the absolute bases for our dementing manner.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So I wanna do a little more on trans at the end, but we'll go in order of the chapters that you did.
		But can you just explain, I thought it was really interesting that you separated the gay and trans chapters, because it is LGBT, and I always tell people that me as the G in this case, I have no more insight into what a trans person's life is like than a straight male would, or a lesbian would, or anything else.
		These are very different things, but we've lumped these letters together.
		But why did you intentionally separate it for the purposes of the book?
douglas murray ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think they are separate things.
		I mean, I say at one point in the gay chapter, you know, that the G's don't have very much in common at all with the L's.
		I mean, never meet particularly, certainly no spaces.
		G's and L's don't really have much in common.
		The G's and the L's are very suspicious of the B's, and the G's and the L's and the B's don't have anything really in common with the T's.
		And they're all stuck in this, you know, Dave Chappelle, rather, just a week before my book came out, did this at a rather large audience on his Netflix show, you know, so in the same car, but they're very different destinations.
		And the thing with the T one that is so interesting, which I, as I say, I'm a really Delving into this and speaking to a lot of people and interviewing people and, you know, really trying to work out, as I say, what's actually going on here.
		And one of the things I think that's most striking about it and why I finish on trans is that it's obvious why trans runs against women.
		I mean, by the way, I should say the fascinating thing about this is, of course, the intersectionalists and social justice warriors all pretend that these are like interlocking oppressions and that if you undo one, you will undo the others.
		Or, you know, that you'll create this sort of harmony because women's issues and gay issues and racial issues are all the same thing.
		Now, the point I'm trying to make here is that They are exactly wrong because each of these issues actually runs against the other.
		So, as I say, it's obvious why tea runs against women because, among other things, it does things and makes claims about what women are that are highly insulting to a lot of women.
		Not all, but an awful lot.
		And then you have the run against gay that trans presents.
		And I just I think this is I think this is an absolutely fascinating corner that hasn't been gone into enough, which is that, you know, as we know now from studies, young people diagnosed with so-called gender dysphoria, what studies we have show that around 80 to 85% of the kids diagnosed with that are going to grow out of it and are likely to become gay men or gay women.
		And we all know this from our own experience, and I think that there has been a totally submerged conversation in recent years, which has only happened in private.
		And by the way, one of the nicest things about this book starting to be read is the number of people who say to me, Douglas, this is the conversation my wife and I have over dinner, and we say we cannot talk about this outside of this house, and so on.
		So I say my self-appointed role is to say aloud all of the things that everyone else
		whispers.
		But, but, but, but, but I know that this conversation has been going on in among gay people in particular,
		which is, am I totally sure that my, you know, sort of tomboy friend wouldn't have been diagnosed
		as actually gender dysphoric?
		Am I sure that my, you know, male friend who is a kind of camp, you know, teenager wouldn't, if it had been now, have been told, actually, you're not going to grow up to be a happy, healthy gay man.
		You're going to grow up to be a woman.
		And we've decided you're actually a woman.
		And that hits at the absolute root of a lot of gay men and a lot of gay women.
		And we've just passed it over as if it's all part of the same happy rainbow coalition.
		It isn't.
		It totally destroys the other bits of the coalition.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		All right, so let's just continue with the trans part then, since we're in the thick of it right now.
		Do you think there's also something bizarre about the amount of energy that the topic trans has?
		Where so gay rights, you know, you can very easily start, you know, you can go from Stonewall, you can look over the course of a few decades where there were some wins, then it happened in America at least, through states' rights, and then eventually the Supreme Court, and a cultural awareness and all that.
		And then it was almost as if the second gay marriage happened, everyone was kind of like this, and then trans, which wasn't really being talked about, and you can argue maybe we should have paid more attention to it culturally or whatever, but that it suddenly became like the it thing, and the second it became the it thing, you couldn't take any counter-argument whatsoever.
douglas murray ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, Time Magazine puts it on the cover in 2015, trans, The next rights battle.
		See, again, there are people for whom life is given meaning by having an endless set of rights battles.
		And once you've done gay, you've got to do trans.
		And once you've done trans, you've got to get on to non-binary or whatever you've made up today and so on.
		And I think that people should be intensely suspicious about people who try to get meaning in their lives.
		from this St.
		George in retirement issue.
		And yeah, I lay out why I think trans happened where it did and when it did.
		But here's the thing.
		Why trans I think is so interesting and why I finish on it is because in some ways it's the one that's betrayed itself most in recent years.
		It's shown something clearest in recent years.
		I think Eric on your show once made this point as well, that you can learn an awful lot by seeing the steps which rights movements take and the order they take them in.
		The gay rights movement didn't start with gay marriage and gay adoption and gay parenting and surrogates and so on.
		It started with basic rights, quite understandably rightly, and it makes all the way along to this bit.
		Now, that's because incremental steps are going to be necessary to build a
		coalition.
		So one of the things that's become clear with trans in recent years is that they skipped
		all of the sensible intermediary steps.
		And what I mean by that is, for instance, they skipped the intersex one.
		People born with unclear genitalia, this is a really awkward subject.
		It's not very common, but it's definitely more common than people think.
		And the people who have intersex condition are basically, I mean, basically you could
		get all the sympathy in the world for them, because it's like people with disability
		in.
		It's like, why would you be mean to somebody with this actual hardware thing?
		You know, they didn't choose it, you know.
		And so I think that a sensible place would have been to start the trans thing by starting with that.
		That's an undeniable hardware issue.
		So why didn't it?
		Why did it jump over into sex, among other things?
		And why did it get to this place where it immediately started saying the big bearded man with a penis is a woman if he says he is?
		Because, because, and this is absolutely crucial, because this is not about building a coalition.
		It is about using an identity group as a battering ram to do something else.
		And this is really key.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		All right, so let's talk about that something else for a second.
		So just in the last couple days you may have seen this at the LGBTQ forum that the Democratic presidential candidates did here in the States.
		They asked Joe Biden about prisons and Biden said it should be up to the prisoner to decide what gender they are, not up to to the prison.
		Now, of course this is, I mean, this is a truly insane thought, the idea that a man could just walk in, you know, be brought to the prison and say, no, no, I want to go to the women's prison, I identify as a woman.
		Everyone knows this is bananas.
		It's a little interesting to me that Biden, who I don't think buys this stuff, just keeps wading into it because he thinks that's his path or his path to victory or something.
		But what do you think, What do you think he or the Democrats really think they're trying to accomplish with that?
		When you do something that's so obviously, something like that, men can just pick to go to the women's prison, it's so obviously counter to any sort of sane thinking, it doesn't seem like, on its face, that it's gonna help you win.
douglas murray ▲ ● ▼		Well, no, but it stops you being beaten up that day by the small but very vocal group of people who decide every 24 hours what we're meant to think now.
		I mean, I mean, we weren't.
		That one amazed me in some ways and was totally predictable.
		I mean, we had this row in the UK and people said when when some people said, hang on, is this a good idea?
		Like, for instance, what about rapists?
		They say, oh my God, that's this transphobic, unbelievably unlikely thing.
		We had a case, I mention it in the book, only a couple of years ago, where a male prisoner, identifying as a woman, raped women in a women's prison in Britain.
		So it's like, we didn't make this up because we wanted to be especially transphobic that day.
		It's a real risk, and it happened, and there are real female victims of it.
		What do you make of that?
		Why do you weigh that up against, you know, as I say, what we're meant to say today?
		And just quickly, I think the fascinating thing about this is this requires reasonable adults to say, I'm not making anyone like some kind of, you know, I'm not trying to whip up a mob against trans people.
		I'm not trying to, as we always told, I'm not trying to make trans people kill themselves or other people kill them.
		I'm saying I don't think it's wise to, for instance, allow a male to self-identify.
		But the reason we're stuck in this is because we have prevented ourselves from having the conversation.
		What I lay out in the trans chapter of this book is, so far as I know, the most careful attempt to delineate what is reasonable
		and what is totally unreasonable in the trans debate because we've got to be able to think
		about this and speak about it.
		And the fact that Biden and others get stuck in this mess is because we have forbidden ourselves from talking about this or thinking about this issue, among many others.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So are you amazed, despite writing this book, how quickly you can get the so-called feminists of one group to betray their beliefs in the name of some other group.
		So a couple times you've sort of referenced the confusion now amongst feminists, because now you're gonna have feminists arguing that men should be allowed in women's prisons.
		You're gonna have feminists arguing that biological men should be allowed to outrace and wrestle women, which we see this happening now all the time.
		So they're betraying the very cause which they self-proclaim to be their cause, and they do it like that.
douglas murray ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, because a little bit of bullying goes a very long way.
		And we live in a society where a small number of people can bully the most powerful people in the world.
		And it's an amazing thing to watch this.
		And I just I blame people for being bullied on these things.
		You know, there is a particular problem, which is that on all of these issues, there is a problem for people who work in the sort of world where they have a hierarchy above them that is vulnerable.
		And most hierarchies at the moment in business and government and elsewhere are very vulnerable, actually.
		And we live in this very strange position where a relatively small number of us are actually able to tell the truth.
		As we see it, we may be wrong, we may try stuff out and be proved to be wrong, but a relatively small number of us actually are in a position, it seems, and it's only because we don't have to answer to and we have no one above us.
		You know, there's no one.
		If I misspeak on one of these issues or something, you know, I can't be fired by anyone.
		I just, you know, look like an idiot if I get it wrong.
		But that's fine.
		But most people aren't in that position.
		And the extent to which, as I say, bad ideas have been pumped through the system, The record speed is because too few people actually have said, hang on a minute, hang on a minute.
		I'm not going with that.
		I'm not going with the big bearded man with a penis going into the women's prison.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Are you afraid that if we don't get more of those voices, brave or just stupid, whatever it is, the few people that will talk about these things, if we don't get more of these voices and more and more people sort of bow to this loud minority, That ultimately what will happen is that when this thing gets to the breaking point, that good people are suddenly going to become homophobic.
		Good people will suddenly be transphobic.
		Good people will be misogynists and racists.
		It would be the most twisted, awful thing.
		But given the choice between not being able to say what they know is biologically true or suddenly being kind of bigoted against the people that are forcing it down their throats, that decent people are going to break that way.
douglas murray ▲ ● ▼		Well, you see, I think this is happening on each of the issues.
		You know, I say some of this in the gay chapter because I suppose I can, because it's the one card I've got in this, if you want to play that stupid game that they want to make us play.
		But, you know, I say there that there are days sometimes I read the press where I wonder how a heterosexual feels reading it.
		I give a couple of days in the New York Times, just to give an example, where the business pages are all about being gay.
		The culture pages, you know, and there's a version of this I do in the chapter on tech, which is very deranging, which is the same thing the tech companies are doing, sped up, the same thing the Times and others are doing, which is basically using gay, forcing gay down straight people's throats to say, suck it up, love it, take it, you bigot.
		I just, I loathe this tone and it's just there all the time.
		People using gays to punish bigots, particularly in America.
		It's assumed by the press and the Google companies and others that it is to do with, um, but this is basically you're punishing Trump supporters.
		You're making everything more gay to punish the bigots.
		We have it in Britain with this sort of presumption that after the Brexit vote was sort of the public need to have stuff.
		They need to be exposed as the bigots they are.
		So when you search for gay couples on Google Images, you get gay couples.
		But if you search for straight couples, you get force-fed gay couples.
		I mean, try it out, anyone watching.
		You'll see exactly what I mean.
		Why does this happen?
		It's because they're saying, basically, screw you for being so bigoted as to look up straight couples.
		Now, you get this in a really ugly way with the race one.
		And the race chapter in this book, It's so difficult.
		This is such perilous terrain.
		But let me just quickly dive into a bit.
unidentified		Yeah, please.
douglas murray ▲ ● ▼		See, I think that this weaponization of people's races at the moment is just the most terrifying one of all.
		I grew up in London in the 1980s, and London was already pretty diverse, very diverse, actually.
		And I had people of every skin color at my primary school and so on.
		I never thought about it at all.
		I never thought it was interesting or important, you know?
		It just wasn't a thing.
		Now, that isn't to say that there wasn't racism in the past.
		There certainly was, but my experience is basically that we were sort of in a colorblind place, or at least getting to a colorblind place.
		And then this extraordinary thing happens.
		Again, the bad ideas start in the American campuses and then seep outwards.
		But you get things like, you know, there's queer studies, black studies, and so on.
		And these things are basically things to celebrate people who might have been passed over and to sort of Actually, it's a sensible idea in some ways to sort of correct people being overlooked, as they have been in the past, if they're from some of these minority groups, particularly racial minorities.
		Now, I think that there's an insidious thing that happens with the creation of so-called whiteness studies.
		Whiteness studies is the first study of these studies that aims to problematize a group.
		That is that black studies celebrates black writers and others, queer studies celebrates
		so-called queer writers and others, but whiteness studies is an attempt
		to problematize whiteness.
		And what you get if you try to problematize whiteness is that you have to problematize white people.
		Now I think, and I demonstrate this with reference to the pop culture world and among others,
		I think this is meant that at the point at which we should have sought to become colorblind,
		suddenly everything has become race-obsessed, color-obsessed.
		And I think we can already see in the last few years, we can see one of the results of that, which is that I think that, and I mean, I'm just putting it out there, and I put it in the race chapter at the end, I think that one of the things that's come from this And this is a really awkward discussion, but I've wondered in the last few years, why did IQ start to crop up in the discussion?
		Subterranean at first and then sort of creeping out.
		You know this and I know this.
		You know, we've got pretty good feelers and tentacles, I think I can say for both of us, for the sort of where the debate is at.
		And I just noticed that audience members, for instance, at events I was doing and then sometimes, you know, in the pub afterwards would sidle up and ask about IQ.
		IQ isn't my thing.
		I'm not an IQ specialist.
		But I started to become aware of what was happening and what I think is happening is Because some white people, or a lot of white people, have been given this, you know, whiteness is a problem thing, and they hear these terms like gammon being used, and they hear basically the rights movement, the racial issue, moving past equal and going for a bit to better, like gay and like others.
		They see that happening.
		And some white people, I think, are reaching around for a tool to hit back with.
		And some people have chosen to use IQ to bash back.
		And this, we see here the root of a really ugly, ugly thing.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		And isn't the most crazy part of that, and you lay this out in the book, actually, that when decent people, like Sam Harris, for example, try to wade into this discussion, as he did with Charles Murray of The Bell Curve, the way that he then gets attacked as if he's a race realist or something like that, that even the very minor touch of just trying to talk about something That's going to get you pillared, too.
douglas murray ▲ ● ▼		Sure, sure.
		I mean, but I mean, this is this is the most dangerous one.
		And for America in particular, you know, I mean, you know, one of the extraordinary things in recent years has been the way in which, you know, everyone talks about the globalized world and globalization and all that.
		But actually, one of the consequences of this that's sort of not that noted is that we all become vulnerable to the worst bits of each other's culture.
		And, you know, the American racial problem is pretty unique to America, actually.
		I mean, this isn't to say we haven't had our own racial problems in in the UK and we haven't had our own racism in the UK but the way in which the American racial issue has sort of spread globally and the ideas of it have spread globally.
		I give the example in the race chapter in my book of the way in which some of this has sort of come to Britain and Europe in recent years of specific issues of the American experience and as I say one of them that's just Very, very worrying to us.
		It should be worrying is the way in which colorblindness has been passed over as an aspiration and has actually been turned into a problem.
		And I cite some of the academics who started that off, who actually said colorblindness is a problem.
		And you get to this place, you get to this place that Robin DiAngelo, a professor of whiteness studies in America, got to recently, where she was actually saying in a public talk that it's a problem when people look at people for their personality, for their character, basically, and pass over or try to ignore the color of their skin and just go, wow.
		It took you half a century to totally erase the legacy of Martin Luther King and run straight against it.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So when you hear these people speak and when you're doing research for a book like this, What is it that they want at the end?
		You know, after they've posited all their theories, and let's pretend they're all right, and we shouldn't look at the individual, and we shouldn't, you know, judge people based on their thoughts, but we should judge them based, you know, it's the complete reverse of what they're, you know, supposed to be doing.
		What is it that they want at the end?
		What should happen to the five-year-old white child who has done nothing wrong, who, He's not guilty for his parents' sins or his grandparents' sins, and maybe all his ancestors had no sins related to anything racial or anything like that.
		I mean, what is it that they actually want, do you think?
		Do you think they even think about it in that lens, or it's just about the immediate conquest of the day?
douglas murray ▲ ● ▼		I'm very loath generally to attribute motive, but I think that the political push is very, very strong at this point.
		I think that this is the thing.
		Each of these groups being used as a battering ram, as I diagnose it, a battering ram to bring something down.
		What is the something?
		The something is, what we always hear about, the white, patriarchal, cis, heteronormative, capitalist, et cetera, et cetera.
		Some people doing this are doing this, and I expose them in the book, for completely basically Marxist reasons.
		And I go into the Marxist substructure of some of this because you just can't ignore it.
		It's spelt out by some of the scholars and writers that I cite.
		They spell it out.
		The working class let us down.
		They didn't provide the revolution.
		We need to go to interest groups, identity groups, to try to produce the revolution this time.
		That is undoubtedly happening.
		It's been one of the things that's been happening for the last 10 years in particular.
		And that's why we get this fundamental hitting at the root of the society.
		To present societies like ours as uniquely racist compared to what?
		Compared to where?
		As particularly transphobic compared to where?
		And so on and so on.
		You see, I think that this has to be understood.
		The ambition of the attempt has to be understood in order for it to be undone.
		Because, I mean, you know, one we haven't touched on yet, but it is absolutely central to all of this, is this whole discussion of privilege.
		You see, I think the privilege game, and I lay this out in the book, is an unwinnable game.
		It cannot be done.
		The whole implicit bias stuff, you know, which again, it's in company after company, you know, and you would have thought that If you're going to roll something out as being the ideal for every society on earth, you'd have thought you'd have stress tested it a bit first.
unidentified		Yeah.
unidentified		No, no, no, no.
douglas murray ▲ ● ▼		Not at all.
douglas murray ▲ ● ▼		Now, again, how do you play this privilege game?
unidentified		How do you win it, actually?
douglas murray ▲ ● ▼		Is it the case that you can find out exactly where you are in this hierarchy and work out where somebody is?
		And of course not.
		I show in the book.
		You can't do this.
		It's a dementing game.
		And it's not just you can't play it, you can't win it.
		So why are we being invited to spend our lives looking at the world through this horrible zero-sum reductive lens?
		Why are we being invited to do it?
		I think we are being invited to do it by people who know it cannot be won.
		Not only those people.
		Some people actually think, particularly as I say younger people who are being wooed into this, actually think that there is value and worth in this.
		But a lot of people are inviting us to do this because they know it cannot be won, and it will, among other things, demoralize us.
		And it will.
		It is a highly demoralizing game.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Well, and it's also so bizarrely disconnected from personal reality.
		So Chelsea Handler, the comedian, for example, her new Netflix special is all her apologizing for her white privilege.
		But if she really wanted to apologize for her white privilege, she might have given that slot to a black woman, say Monique or some other black comic.
		But she doesn't really mean it.
		You don't really mean to get out of the way.
douglas murray ▲ ● ▼		She means it like I'm going to get mine and I'm going to make myself feel bad for it so that you think I'm really, One of the things that really has to be called out in this is that the problem is that some very smart people, as she clearly is, have worked out how to behave in this era.
		A lot of other people, including some smart people, just haven't had the same opportunities.
		are gonna keep crashing and burning against this.
		So the clip, I give the example, a very, we should spend some time on the heterosexuals, because they're no minority.
unidentified		They're still out there, God bless them.
douglas murray ▲ ● ▼		And they need our support, Dave.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
douglas murray ▲ ● ▼		You know, there's an example I give in the book of how a certain type of male works out how to behave in the post-MeToo world.
		And the example I give is the example of the cuttlefish, which you may be familiar with.
		The cuttlefish has an ability to, the male cuttlefish, because the ratio of men to women is not in the male's favor, the male cuttlefish can find a way to make itself smaller, to approximate the look of the slightly smaller female cuttlefish, to sneak in under the male consort cuttlefish, And so it doesn't look like it's so threatening.
		Get under the female cuttlefish and then have its wicked cuttlefish way with her.
		Now, when I was told this first, I just said, oh my God, I mean, I have seen this.
		I know this.
		I know this male heterosexual cuttlefish behavior.
		Now, as I say, this is like the Chelsea Handler thing.
		The cleverer ones work out maneuvers in this area.
		And I know a lot of, I've observed, A lot of clever, smart, often well-to-do, heterosexual males in this era, learning that this is the thing and behaving in this particular way.
		I give an example in the book.
		The moment I heard about this, I said, oh my gosh, a colleague of mine at the Spectator in London was at the Women's March protests after the Trump inauguration and described to me being at a party Sort of, I can't quite do the American accent, but the British accent would have been like, a load of guys, sort of jocks, and, you know, standing around with the girls.
		They'd all been on the march.
		They were like, yeah, yeah, yeah.
		Like, it was so totally on the side.
unidentified		Yeah, yeah, yeah.
douglas murray ▲ ● ▼		Like, fuck Trump.
douglas murray ▲ ● ▼		They would do all this stuff.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Not bad, Murray.
douglas murray ▲ ● ▼		Not bad.
		They were doing this all the time, you know.
		And then the last girl in this particular group leaves the circle, and one of the guys Elbeth nudges his maid and says, Oh my God, man, I can't believe how much pussy there is in this room.
		Okay.
		They had made themselves like diminutive feminized men in order actually to sneak in and get the women.
unidentified		This was pure cuttlefish.
douglas murray ▲ ● ▼		The point is, is that some people like the Chelsea Handler case know that the safest way through this era, for their bid, is to play the privilege game, to play the whiteness problematising game and to do all that.
		I'm not interested in Chelsea Handler's psychosis, OK?
		I'm not interested in how these people... What I am interested in and really, really worried about is how young men and women are going to get through this era if they are all made to play this game because they can't play this game.
		And they need to be helped out from this game.
		They need to be assisted out of it because this has to stop.
		We cannot have this era go on where people's skin color and sexuality and gender is constantly made into this horrible zero-sum game where women are used against men, men against women, different races.
		We can't have it.
		And as I say, the people who play the game, like Chelsea Handler at the top, Have an unbelievable advantage.
		They are playing the game.
		They've worked the game out.
		They've nixed the game.
		It's in their favor for the time being.
		But millions of other lives are going to be wrecked in trying to understand it.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So which way, then, do you think we should play the rules on this?
		Because I think this is now suddenly the debate.
		You know, we've seen Justin Trudeau caught in brownface or blackface or whatever you want to call it.
		This is the same guy who would gladly call, you know, any of his political opponents racists or sexists or homophobes.
		And we, of course, we know if it was the conservative leader that had been caught like this, Trudeau would have said he has to step down and the rest of it.
		Do you think, then, that the clear-thinking people out there who don't want to play by these rules in the first place have to apply their rules to them?
		Or are you supposed to let it slide and be better knowing that they would use a trick on you to take you out for the very same thing?
		What do you think tactically is the best way?
douglas murray ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think tactically, actually, it's important to use moments like the Trudeau one.
		to make a very important point.
		You see, I have a chapter, one of the interlude chapters in this book is about forgiveness.
		I can't get people to focus on this issue, but we have to focus on it.
		You see, one of the problems, I cite a really remarkable essay by Hannah Arendt from the 50s on this.
		She writes in the 50s, the great problem of us in the world as human beings was always the problem of action in the world because We could never undo an action once it happened.
		And we had no way of seeing what the consequence of an action would be, just like we can't actually tell the consequence of all our words.
		How did we get around this great horror?
		Only by one mechanism, which was to have a mechanism of forgiveness.
		Because everything else in the world cannot be undone.
		Everything.
		And this makes us terrified.
		Unless we have a mechanism.
		And the mechanism is forgiveness.
		Now, here's the thing.
		in the modern age.
		And this is why I don't like all this talk of young people being snowflakes and so on and so forth.
		No, I think it's a completely reasonable, completely reasonable reaction to a world in which action has never been more perilous.
		Because in the social media world and everything else, anything at any point can destroy you utterly.
		Okay?
		It's not surprising.
		It's not surprising that people become incredibly fragile about action in the world.
		But at the same time that action in the world has never been more dangerous, we spend no time in our societies thinking about the only mechanism that ever got us out, forgiveness.
		So we can try it on Justin Trudeau and it's worth doing.
		The point with Trudeau should not be to play the game back, say, ha ha, we know how you'd have behaved if it had turned out that Stephen Harper did blackface all the time or or if, you know, Donald Trump turned out to like Justin Trudeau, I mean, who couldn't remember how many times he'd been caught on camera doing it and wasn't sure.
		I mean, it turns out maybe there were a load of times he just, you know, blacked up for himself at home.
		I mean, it seemed to be his thing.
unidentified		Right.
douglas murray ▲ ● ▼		But but but the thing is not to do that and say, ha ha, we'll play it back to you, but to say, OK, Let's stop the game for a moment.
		Let's just stop this game for a moment, OK?
		We don't think that you are a big old racist, Justin, because you had this sort of fancy dress fetish thing for some time and it is embarrassing, OK?
		We all make embarrassing mistakes in our lives.
		Prime Ministers and plebeians alike, OK?
		We're all going to make mistakes.
		So let's use this as some kind of learning moment.
		And let's specifically say, We will treat you with the kind of benefit of the doubt that we would like to see you try to do to other people in future.
		So we're not going to pretend you're a big, horrible racist, but don't you start doing that in future again.
		Why don't we use this as such a moment?
		Because I think we've talked about this before.
		To a great extent, everything in the public sphere in the last decade has reduced to How can I expose my opponent as a big old homophobic, transphobic, racist, anti-female?
		And this has to stop, because we're stopping ourselves from thinking.
		We're stopping ourselves from thinking.
		I mean, I give the example in the women chapter here, I go, what could we have been thinking about?
		How about motherhood?
		How about motherhood?
		Whilst we were playing these weaponising games about which Hollywood actress was paid less millions than she could have been, Whilst we were boring ourselves with that, why did we, as Camille Paglia said, why did we bypass motherhood as a serious discussion?
		Because I think we all know the extent to which women in our society are unhappy with the fact that that question remains pretty badly addressed by feminism.
		Why an increasing number of girls were basically lied to by the society and said, yeah, you can kind of have a have a baby at any stage, basically, and didn't didn't explain the different biological clocks of men and women or said, you know, so fine, you can just freeze your eggs.
		That'll do it.
		And so and then end up at a particular point in their 30s where they rise.
		Hell, hell, this this actually I was told something that wasn't true.
		Why don't we address questions like that instead of being poured onto these dementing wastes of time?
		So one of the things I really want to do is to say to people, not just let's understand what we're being invited to and say no, but identify what we should be doing instead, because we should be doing absolutely anything instead of this.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		All right, well, that is a beautiful closing statement.
		I will ask you one more question to add on to that, though, which is the same question that I asked you last time you were in studio, and you've sort of referenced this already, but it seems to me that there is a bravery deficit all across You said something to the effect of that you might find out if you stick your toe in the pool that the water is not that cold.
		about these things. When I asked you last time what makes you, Douglas Murray, what
		makes you willing to do this and you said something to the effect of that you
		might find out if you stick your toe in the pool that the water is not that cold.
		You did that in a better British accent than I. Can you just expand on
		Because I do think we're getting to a breaking point with the average person.
		The person that's watching this or listening to this right now, they're ready to break in the right direction.
		All of the things that you've laid out here for an hour, they're on board, but still at the most personal level, they're still afraid.
		What could you give them?
douglas murray ▲ ● ▼		You know, I've been thinking about this a lot.
		I say in the introduction to this book that when I was researching this book, I spoke to a friend who was in the British Army, and he introduced me to a metaphor that was on my mind, or would become on my mind.
		There's a system that the British and American military have, it's called the Great Viper in Britain, and it's an anti-landmine device, and you pull it on the back of a truck, you fire this big missile, and it has a long cord that unravels behind it, and the cord is filled with explosives, and it goes all the way across the minefield.
		And once it's across the minefield, it detonates.
		Now, I realize this is what I wanted to do with this book.
		This is my great viper.
		The aim of it, the point is, it cannot clear the entire minefield, but it can make it safer for people to cross.
		And my aim of, with thinking out loud, on all of the hardest issues of our time, and the ugliest, and the most perilous, and the most dangerous issues of our time, is firstly that it's absolutely fascinating.
		Just fine.
		I mean, the stuff I talk about in this book, I think nobody has talked about before, about why, for instance, there is always going to be some residual issues about homosexuality and race and being a woman and more.
		And the reason I do this is because it's fascinating, but also I want other people, I want I want people not to be destroyed for trying to think about things that actually are things we should be thinking about.
		And, you know, in recent years, like you, I've just been, I've been so moved by the fact that, you know, I thought the thing you used to say was like, well, young people aren't interested.
		Young people aren't interested.
		I just have found in recent years, I'm sure it's the same with you.
		I think we've talked about this in private.
		Young people, people in their teens and twenties are turning out to things.
		And they are just great.
		You know, they are just great.
		They are so sharp.
		And I find them everywhere in the world.
		You know, I travel all the time.
		And just a few weeks ago I was in Reykjavik.
		And somebody on the street comes over and says, Hey, you're Douglas Murray.
		I know you from YouTube.
		And this guy in Reykjavik was exactly at the point in the conversation that you're at in LA and I'm at in London and loads of other people around.
		This has got the ability to actually get us forward on issues.
		And what has struck me and just really moves me is that in recent years, I've been asking people in audiences, of events I've been speaking at and at events I've been in the audience of.
		Why they're turning out, because the audience is, I experience, I'm sure this is, I know this is the case with you and events you do and the ones that Jordan has done, some of the events I've done with Jordan and with Sam and others, we don't all agree on stuff, you know, and there are other people, you know, I could add to this, who we agree with even less, but the point is, I started to say to people a little while ago, why are you here?
		And you basically get two answers.
		The first is, I'm fed up of sitting on my own watching YouTube videos, great as that is, I'm not dissing it.
		But they say, basically, I want to meet other people, not who agree with me, but who are thinking about the same things.
		And so there's a turnout of audience for some of us that's basically are rooted in that.
		But here's the other thing.
		The second thing they say, and I just, it's incredibly moving, is that they say always a version of this, which is, I want to be near people or in the same room as people who are telling the truth.
		And I want to be near them, to see them, to witness it, to be in the same room, because I would like to tell the truth in my own life.
		I would like to be able to be a truthful person.
		And so much in our culture just tells them, lie.
		Engage yourself in little lies.
		And you know, that's why I mind about the little lies.
		I don't think the little lies are just little lies.
		I don't think the, why can't you pretend there's such a thing as genderqueer and non-binary, and do they them?
		I don't think it is just a little lie. I think we're being primed for bigger lies down the road
		and all of history suggests that if you demoralize people with little lies you can make them have to
		agree to huge lies. And you see here's the thing as I say is that it's a terrible thing for our
		cultures that we should end up in this position where people starting off in their lives want,
		need to be near anyone who seems to be telling the truth as they see it.
		And I'm not being self-aggrandizing on that.
		God knows I don't have all the answers any more than anybody else does.
		And I mean, just there's a heck of a lot we've got to do and an awful lot of thinking that needs to be done.
		But I find this such a moving thing that that young people in their teens and twenties, they want to tell the truth to their colleagues, their friends, their contemporaries, to their boyfriends, their girlfriends.
		They want to live in truth.
		They want to be exploring truth.
		That's one of the great things that I just think we can do in our time.
		People like us, And there's just millions of people who, many of whom don't have a voice yet, but who will have one, who will have a voice, and who I think just, we have such an opportunity now to get off the lies and to get on to what we should actually be doing with our lives.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Douglas, you are one of the clearest, cleanest, most brutally honest thinkers that I know, and I'm proud to call you a friend.
		And what I'm gonna do is put my fake glasses on one more time, even though I don't need to read the title of the book, The Maddest of Crowds.
		The link is right down below if you're watching on YouTube.
		And I thank you, my friend, and I hope that next time we will do this in a room together, and then we'll break some bread after.
		Sound good?
douglas murray ▲ ● ▼		It sounds great, as long as we can raise the glass as well.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Well, at least one, but knowing us.
douglas murray ▲ ● ▼		Not just the bread.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		And you guys can follow Douglas on Twitter, at Douglas K. Murray.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Thanks, Douglas.
douglas murray ▲ ● ▼		It's been a great pleasure.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics instead of nonstop yelling, check out our politics playlist.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist all right over here.

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