May 1, 2022 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
01:13:54
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| We've been told about other ways of knowing, other ways of doing maths, non-race, anti-racist science and all this sort of thing. | ||
| Yet we do not go to any Aboriginal communities for vaccines. | ||
| We go to no First Peoples for cancer treatment. | ||
| We go to them for no mathematical, scientific or artistic discoveries. | ||
| We do not go to them to rediscover other languages and other cultures. | ||
| Partly, largely because such communities seem to have had not much interest in other cultures. | ||
| Unlike the Western mind, they seem not to have taken a great interest. | ||
| So, the not courteous thing would be us saying, we've been courteous for an awfully long time | ||
| and we're gonna stop because it seems not to be doing us much good. | ||
|
unidentified
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All right, I'm Dave Rubin and we are on location in my house. | |
| Does that help? | ||
| All right, I'm Dave Rubin and we are on location in my house. | ||
| I think that counts as on location. | ||
| I think it does. | ||
| Yeah, there you go. | ||
| And I am with my friend and multiple author. | ||
| You've written 800 books, if I'm not mistaken. | ||
| But your new book, his new book, is right here. | ||
| It is The War on the West. | ||
| Douglas Murray, how are you, my friend? | ||
|
unidentified
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Great. | |
| Great to be with you again. 800? | ||
| How many? | ||
| No, I think this is number seven. | ||
| Number seven. | ||
| So it's a little overshooting by him. | ||
| Number seven, but my team told me this morning that this officially, today, marks your ninth appearance on the Rubin Report. | ||
| Ninth? | ||
| Yes, and there is some debate as to whether you have now tied Gad Saad for number two at nine. | ||
| There's a question, there's one little question related to if he's actually eight or nine, depending on which way you want to count. | ||
| Jordan Peterson is 10. | ||
| But you are solidly second. | ||
| And I was your, what, second guest ever? | ||
| Yeah, you were like my second or third guest back in 2015. | ||
| We're still doing it. | ||
| However, my friend, there is a war on the West. | ||
| This country is burning. | ||
| See how I did that with my book too? | ||
| Very, very clever. | ||
| So let's sort of start with that. | ||
| You know, for all the years that we've been talking about all of this stuff that now is known as wokeism, which you write about, obviously, but all of the culture wars and all of the things that are happening. | ||
| Should we have been yelling louder, say, seven years ago when we all started talking about this, this loose group of people that were kind of signaling? | ||
| Did we miss something and maybe should have been screaming louder? | ||
| Or was it going to happen no matter what? | ||
| I think it was going to happen no matter what. | ||
| I learned from the years I was writing about Islamism that you can spend 23 hours a day dealing with a subject. | ||
| But if you're dealing with fanatics, they're spending 24 hours a day doing it. | ||
| You just can't. | ||
| We can't win in a way against fanatics in the short term. | ||
| And what we've realized in recent years is that the woke bandwagon, these people are radicals, they're extremists, they're fanatics. | ||
| They have an extraordinary set of claims and they have just managed to push them, bulldoze them right into the center of all of our lives. | ||
| As that movement has sort of crept closer and closer to people, people have realized that there were no effective barricades. | ||
| I mean, I say in the book that, you know, there was a sort of, for instance, there was a conservative idea which was mistaken, which many people, including myself, had in recent years, which was, for instance, that things like the critical race theory, the intersectionality, all of this crap, that it would stop at the borders of the STEM subjects. | ||
| It would say it would never, it would never take over engineering. | ||
| It would never get into medicine. | ||
| You mean it would never tell us that 2 plus 2 equals 5? | ||
| Exactly. You know, there's an assumption that, you know, okay, they'll do this with the liberal arts, they'll do | ||
| this with political science and stuff, but they won't do it with engineering. And the joke is, you | ||
| know, it was always, well, at some point the bridges have to stay up. And then | ||
| they say, no, it turns out... | ||
| We'll see. | ||
| It turns out they don't. | ||
| If the bridges come down now, it'll be because we live in a cis-heteronormative patriarchal racist society, which has institutional racism, which is why the bridge fell down. | ||
| So it's just flooded across everywhere. | ||
| And there's always that question of whether you could have done more or shouted more or whatever. | ||
| But I think that a lot of people didn't realize the scope of what was coming at us. | ||
| You have a line that I've quoted probably 50 times on Twitter and 50 times on my show and probably on other people's shows that I think perfectly encapsulates what's going on here, which is that one day, you said this to me probably five years ago, one day the barbarians will be at the gate and we'll be debating what gender pronouns to call them. | ||
| Does that really sum up almost exactly where we are and that really sort of gets to the title of the book? | ||
| That we really are at a societal war right now and instead of really focusing on what's going on, we are debating trans swimmers. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Women with penises and the rest of the stuff. | ||
| Yeah, no, I mean it is deranging. | ||
| I wrote about what I regard as being this sort of crowd derangement in my previous book, In the Madness of Crowds. | ||
| I could see already that this was happening. | ||
| It was getting worse and worse. | ||
| People were being demanded to say things they knew not to be true. | ||
| And now it's got to a stage beyond that. | ||
| I always thought that that thing that I described in The Madness of Crowds was a sort of step towards something. | ||
| That, you know, say the guy with the penis is a girl or, you know, you're a bigot. | ||
| And I think I may even have said it to you, that it was almost like it was preparing us for something. | ||
| Because I always maintained at the time, if you assault The basic things we know to be true, like the fact that there are boys and girls, men and women, that you're not assigned a sex at birth as if it's a sort of lottery system, which, if you've got a particularly bigoted delivery nurse, you know, she'll just kind of... You know, that's not how it works. | ||
| There are boys and girls. | ||
| But if you persuade people that that's not true, You can do an awful lot afterwards, because you've made people doubt the things they were absolutely certain about. | ||
| You know, the cry now, it's like, well, how do you know? | ||
| I mean, are you a biologist? | ||
| And as a fine British feminist said to somebody the other day, said, well, I'm not a vet either, but I know what a dog is. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| But a lot of people have been browbeaten and cowed, and I think that what I'm trying to describe here is what I think is the next stage of this. | ||
| Which is a war on the fundamentals of everything in our society. | ||
| A war on our history, a war on our past, a war on our foundations, a war on our culture, and a war on the people in the culture. | ||
| What I describe as a war on white people, which is a phrase that a lot of people sort of jump at. | ||
| There's no other way to describe it now. | ||
| Lots of different bigotries exist in the world, but the only one that's completely tolerated and indeed encouraged in 21st century America is hatred of and diminishment of people for being white. | ||
| We wouldn't tolerate it with any other skin color. | ||
| We wouldn't tolerate it if people said that black people should be treated differently because of their skin color. | ||
| Only white people is this now permissible with. | ||
| And that's because white people are the inheritors of the West. | ||
| They're portrayed as the people of the West who must therefore pay for the sins of the West. | ||
| You know, it's funny, I was watching in the last couple weeks a movie, There Will Be Blood. | ||
| Did you happen to see it with Daniel Day-Lewis? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| About the gold rush, well not the gold rush, the oil rush and going west in the 1800s into the 1900s. | ||
| And it's, you know, it's a lot of white people doing horrible jobs. | ||
| Horrible jobs in the coal mines and digging and things collapsing on them and people dying and fires and all of these things. | ||
| And it was making me think, boy, we talk about the history of this country as if these white people, first off, as if they built all of this stuff in honor of whiteness, which is completely insane. | ||
| Completely insane and not true even in an iota of a percent. | ||
| But also that these people who happen to be white, who built stuff, Yes. | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, I mean, I give a number of examples of this. | |
| There are two original sins of the West that are seen now, slavery and empire. | ||
| Both are portrayed as if nobody else in the world did them, which is nonsense. | ||
| There were no slaves before America, right? | ||
| Almost. | ||
| I reckon that not one in a million Americans knows the following fact, that 11 to 12 million slaves were probably brought across the Atlantic from Africa during the slave trade, the transatlantic slave trade. | ||
| About 18 million Africans were similarly sold by their neighbors and others. | ||
| In the slave trade that went east. | ||
| So why do we not know about the 18 million slaves that went east from Africa? | ||
| Because there's no remnant of them, because the Arabs castrated all the men. | ||
| Does one in a million Americans know that context to this? | ||
| That slavery happened, everybody was involved in it, it was a horrible thing then, it's a horrible thing now, and it's still going on now. | ||
| I've met slaves myself, people who've been born into slavery in Africa. | ||
| I don't think anyone knows this, and so everyone's got the context all out of sorts. | ||
| And the other one, of course, is empire. | ||
| And again, these things are talked about as if nobody else did this. | ||
| Countries across the world tried to form or did form empires. | ||
| If you're going to get the sense of the British Empire into context, you've got to understand that. | ||
| If you want to get the history of the transatlantic slave trade into context, you've got to understand what else was going on. | ||
| And as you say, that crucial thing that it's not like everybody in the past in the West was living in clover. | ||
| During the latter stages of the slave trade, the transatlantic slave trade, the average life of a man working in one of the mills in one of the towns in the north of England was about 37. | ||
| They lived into their late thirties. | ||
| People on slave plantations lived longer. | ||
| Now I'm not saying that the slave plantations were good or anything like it, of course not. | ||
| I'm just saying, can you honestly look at this and think that those white, if we must say that, men in the northern English mill towns were free? | ||
| Did they actually have any or much agency in their lives? | ||
| Did they have control of their lives? | ||
| Were they privileged? | ||
| No, not at all. | ||
| And it's a grotesque thing of our time that we've decided that we've got to pretend that these people were wildly privileged, as well as bigoted. | ||
| Privileged, bigoted, and again, that they did it in the name of whiteness or of power when they were literally just trying to survive and often had to leave families to take the worst kind of jobs. | ||
| So I kind of want to go through the chapters of the book, because one thing that you do that I just think is so great in all your books, you do very few chapters, which I always think is just such a clean way of writing. | ||
| So you really only have four chapters in this book, and then you have some sub-chapters within that. | ||
| But before we get to that, since we are at this place where the war seems to be here, Are you surprised at all that maybe, not the punditry class that's been warning about this, but just that our institutions didn't have better defenses? | ||
| Even now, even now, watching the colleges crumble, there's still no defense. | ||
| I remember a few years ago, the University of Chicago put out a defense of free speech and everyone said, this is it! | ||
| This will be the one that will defend. | ||
| And I remember saying, no, this isn't gonna be it. | ||
| It'll be okay there for a little bit, maybe. | ||
| Or the Harper's Letter where, People sign things and everyone goes, well, this is the one! | ||
| And yet it has just marched and marched and marched. | ||
| Are you surprised these institutions or our political leaders or something didn't have something in the tool kit to deal with this failure? | ||
| I'm surprised at the institutional failure. | ||
| I think there's a tendency we all have that in whatever is the thing we know about, we think that it may go wrong there, but it won't go wrong in that discipline. | ||
| So I had this. | ||
| I sort of thought, well, As I said earlier, surely the mathematicians aren't going to do this other ways of knowing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But here we are. | ||
| Here we are. | ||
| We've got equitable maths being taught in the US. | ||
| I thought, surely you're not going to get in the medical field. | ||
| But some of the race hucksters that I write about in this book, they flooded through the medical field. | ||
| I was speaking to a friend in the medical profession the other day, and I was saying, I just can't believe it. | ||
| I thought medical journals, like, There was no way they would start to get into stuff about problematizing whiteness, yet here we are. | ||
| So I guess my question really then is more about the political institutions, that it's not like we have, well, I was about to say, it's not like we have laws that punish people based on the color of their skin, but we kind of do. | ||
| And during COVID, we were prioritizing in certain places, COVID vaccines based on the color of skin and all that. | ||
| And other medical procedures. | ||
| And other, right, exactly. | ||
| We genuinely were. | ||
| Did we screw up something politically there too? | ||
| I mean, or just our politicians are usually just weak, except for the guy who happens to be running this state. | ||
| Well, you know, I think that politicians see a cost-benefit analysis in things. | ||
| It turns out one of the disappointments of my life has been the... | ||
| I made the presumption that people in politics are interested in truth. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's not the case. | ||
| You're not 22 anymore, are you, Douglas? | ||
| It's not the case. | ||
| They're interested in achieving and retaining power, and there are some good people in politics. | ||
| I'm not saying that all of them are guilty of this. | ||
| But you get this cost-benefit analysis, so is there a benefit to saying something that everyone knows to be true if the cost of it is a small but very dedicated number of people who are determined to destroy you? | ||
| Generally speaking, that chases people away. | ||
| You know, and by the way, that's the history of fanaticism across the eras. | ||
| Small but very dedicated groups of fanatics can do an outsized amount of damage by just running straight at things. | ||
| Right. | ||
| The original social media mob, I suppose. | ||
| Yeah, and I think politicians among others are highly susceptible to that. | ||
| They dip a toe in the water and they just You know, I had no idea it was as bad as that. | ||
| And they don't tread on it again. | ||
| Newspaper editors and others are similar. | ||
| A lot of big media companies, they don't want to touch that. | ||
| That subject's electric. | ||
| Don't do that. | ||
| So, I mean, I'm disappointed, but I'm not surprised. | ||
| All right, so let's start at the beginning. | ||
| Chapter one is about race, and we've already touched on some of the race stuff. | ||
| I guess when I think about it, And when I was reading it, we almost solved the race thing in America. | ||
| We were pretty damn close. | ||
| You allude to that in the book. | ||
| We really were pretty damn close, and now it does seem worse. | ||
| Not in my day-to-day life, but at the media level, the societal level, it does seem worse. | ||
| What a sad statement. | ||
| It's partly, I believe, a misapprehension caused by a misrepresentation of the society. | ||
| So, obviously, I have to get straight into it in the race chapter, the death of George Floyd, the summer of George Floyd riots. | ||
| If you look at the, I mean, we were all, it's always worth reminding ourselves, in most countries at that point, we were made to seclude ourselves in the months before that happened. | ||
| People were literally isolated and told by government to isolate. | ||
| And one of the things that did to us, I believe, is that it took away our societal antenna. | ||
| You know, if we meet people, if we meet strangers, friends, and everything, we sit around a dinner table or stand at a bar, you try things out, and you row about things, and you discuss things, and you josh about things, and much more. | ||
| If you remove all of that, and then something terrible happens, and a group of very dedicated people say, that shows X is the case, then You know, people start to think, maybe that is, maybe that is the case. | ||
| Now, I was in Britain when George Floyd was killed, but, you know, I had a moment, I've known America all my life, and I had a slight double-take moment, like, you know, I don't think you can just kill black people in America. | ||
| I'm fairly sure you can't. | ||
| I know you can't. | ||
| But here were these protests saying we've got to stop the fact that black people walking the streets of America can at any point be killed by a cop. | ||
| And that's not true. | ||
| But there was a moment of doubt, which is one of the reasons why police forces in, among other things, countries like my own country of birth, in Britain, really didn't know what to do at the beginning of the protests. | ||
| And some policemen were persuaded to take the knee to protesters, because they panicked. | ||
| They thought, maybe this representation that we're being shown is true. | ||
| If you look at the opinion data that we have on How many black people Americans believe are killed every year unarmed by armed American police officers? | ||
| The figures are out by several orders of magnitude. | ||
| I've got the percentages in there. | ||
| Among people who describe themselves as very liberal, A significant proportion of them think that more than 10,000 black men are killed every year by American police when those men are unarmed. | ||
| The real number, I'm not going to... It's somewhere around 10. | ||
| Yeah, it's about a dozen, yeah. | ||
| Which is actually less than the number of policemen killed by armed black men, so there's another debate there. | ||
| But yes, so it's off by several orders of magnitude. | ||
| People who describe themselves as liberal think that it's somewhere between 1,000 and 10,000. | ||
| So you're dealing with a completely grotesque, distorted picture of the present that people in America and then around the world have been persuaded to fall for. | ||
| And that has consequences. | ||
| Because if you're told that this is the case and that you live in a society that's racist, then you bring up white people to believe that they are somehow contaminated from birth. | ||
| You bring up young black kids to believe that they are able to be hunted down and killed in America by the state. | ||
| You massively exacerbate all racial differences. | ||
| But what this has fallen into has been this Not just what I described as war on white people, but this... | ||
| this set of massive overreach claims about what is underneath this. | ||
| Well, we've always been like this. | ||
| And so we have the starting of the rewriting of our history in the name of racial justice and social justice. | ||
| In America, you have the 1619 Project. | ||
| No small thing. | ||
| It's the New York Times that rolls that out, led by non-historian, non-specialists who make totally, verifiably false claims about the foundations of this country. | ||
| But you see the same thing in the UK, in Canada. | ||
| A lot of people will have missed it, but around the same time, in the last couple of years, there's been this stampede in Canada when there were some graves that were found near a church school. | ||
| And then it was claimed that these were mass graves of indigenous children killed by the Catholic Church in massive numbers. | ||
| And churches were burnt down across Canada, including First Nations churches. | ||
| Not one body has been found. | ||
| Not one excavation has occurred. | ||
| They didn't even use ultrasound. | ||
| So we have been embedding totally false claims about our collective pasts. | ||
| In the names of trying to refine the present. | ||
| What do you make of the way it spreads? | ||
| That falsehood and how it spreads? | ||
| So you go into the numbers about what's going on with policing in America, but there were BLM riots in London, as you mentioned. | ||
| The way it now spreads through the internet to then land on the shores overseas for a problem that nobody, if you would have asked the average person. I suspect if you ask the average black person in | ||
| London four years ago, do you have a real problem with policing here? I'm gonna guess | ||
| that the average person would have said no, maybe somebody had some marginal | ||
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thing. But what do you make of that, that transfer? Yeah, I mean there was a head | |
| of BLM movement in Oxford called Sasha Johnson. | ||
| I'll be careful what I say about her because I believe she's still in hospital. | ||
| Sasha Johnson wrote a tweet, led some very unpleasant protests, said horrible things about white people, said on social media that she wanted to make white people her slaves, that that was the plan. | ||
| She said she didn't want equality, she wanted revenge. | ||
| It's nice when they're honest about it. | ||
| She was completely honest about it. | ||
| I say I'm being careful about it because she's a mother and she was at a house party in London last year and she was shot in the head. | ||
| And immediately some politicians, including the black former Shadow Home Secretary, said it's appalling that this poor young woman has been gunned down for her beliefs. | ||
| She was gunned down by a gang of black young men who were shooting at a house party she was at. | ||
| So again, we have these kind of just totally false narratives. | ||
| You import the BLM thing to Oxford in England, and then you have this horrible radical, and then something terrible happens to her, and all of it, all of it is spun through the thing of white racism. | ||
| Let's do a little sidebar for a moment, because just as you spun that story together and all the lies and everything else, over the last couple of years, To me, if someone managed to stay roughly sane, like they're good in my book. | ||
| That's been my basic temperature guide on this thing. | ||
| You didn't have to get everything right. | ||
| None of us did. | ||
| But if you sort of stayed roughly sane. | ||
| Do you sympathize with the people that really lost it over the last couple years because of exactly what you just explained right there? | ||
| There is such a cacophony of nonsense being spun at all of us all the time. | ||
| It's extremely difficult and people don't have the time to siphon through all the craziness. | ||
| Yeah, I do understand. | ||
| And I have to, as it were, check my privilege in a certain way. | ||
| My privilege is that I'm a writer and I get to say what I think. | ||
| all the time. | ||
| But that's not just the privilege, it's also you do put your neck out there. | ||
| I mean, it's a privilege to a degree, but you say dangerous things. | ||
| But I say it because I think that therefore my own attitude is a bit different to some | ||
| other people because I think what is worse for people is when they see lies and they | ||
| just have no outlet for it. | ||
| I think there is enormous frustration brewing everywhere. | ||
| We've been through a couple of really difficult years. | ||
| So I do have sympathy with it. | ||
| My sympathy for that is not endless. | ||
| I don't have sympathy for the people who've Who now believe that absolutely everything is a conspiracy and believe that they've seen through everything. | ||
| I've not got much sympathy with that because, I mean, it's not just that you, it's not that you have to, you should find things to trust in. | ||
| You can't be completely cynical. | ||
| You should find things that you know to be true and hold on to them. | ||
| Right. | ||
| If you're the one guy who knows what's going on, you probably have an issue. | ||
| I worry there's a lot of that. | ||
| There's a lot of autodidacticism. | ||
| We educate ourselves in our era a lot, but I'm suspicious of the people who go from being experts on Afghanistan, to experts on vaccines, to experts on Ukraine. | ||
| Everyone's an expert in Ukraine right now. | ||
| These people who couldn't tie their shoes together. | ||
| And suddenly everyone knows everything about this nation that nobody's taught. | ||
| Hold my shoes. | ||
| I've got to go back to analyzing Afghanistan next week if anything kicks off there. | ||
| I think in a way this is because politics has become a kind of hobby. | ||
| It's more than a hobby. | ||
| A hobby and then something more for a lot of people. | ||
| It's carrying an awful lot of weight. | ||
| Yeah so we go from like the the way it travels and it jumps across ponds and then odd things are happening in England but what about the way it also shifts? | ||
| So we had two years of everything was about race but right now as we sit here everything's about gender and we'll talk more about that in a second but that sort of thing that it it seems to be guided in a way that that doesn't seem Totally coincidental to me that the way it actually shifts. | ||
| Like, we're not doing race that much in America right this moment. | ||
| It really does seem to be more about gender. | ||
| Race will come back, and then gender will come back, and then climate will come, and everything else. | ||
| And by the way, I mean, that sort of thing with climate is another one. | ||
| I mean, I listed this recently in a piece, you know, before the The Ukraine crisis, we had the COVID crisis. | ||
| I mean, literally, Dr. Fauci disappeared the moment that the Russian tanks were all in Ukraine. | ||
| It was incredible, they couldn't find him. | ||
| And then before that, we had the, what did we have before the Corona crisis? | ||
| Well, we had the racist crisis, we had the Trump crisis, we had the Brexit crisis. | ||
| Oh, we had the climate crisis. | ||
| Everything cannot be a crisis. | ||
| Everything cannot be. | ||
| You can't live at that level of hectoring. | ||
| And of all of those, one of the ones I have the least time for is the other people who shout about the climate crisis. | ||
| There are things that are important to address, but when they present it as they did at the recent summit in Glasgow, one minute left to save the planet, I think you're doing something pretty wicked now because you're You're making assertions and whipping people up into fervors that are not able to be answered. | ||
| I mean, AOC told us we got 12 years left. | ||
| That was about three years ago. | ||
| We're running out of time, man. | ||
| You know, Prince Charles said 12 years 20 years ago. | ||
| So we're gonna be okay, is that what you're telling me? | ||
| But that is one, in some ways, do you feel like that's the hardest one to talk about? | ||
| I mean, look, you spent years talking about Islamism and jihad. | ||
| That was obviously very hard to talk about. | ||
| But we've sort of shifted off that now, that's sort of shifted. | ||
| We can talk about race, we can talk about gender, but there's something about the climate one where it's like, you feel like your whole career could just go like that if you talk about it. | ||
| Could do. | ||
| I mean, it's not something I do very much on, but I just note that it seems to be one of the fallback things if other crises are not high and hot enough at the moment. | ||
| We fall back onto the climate crisis. | ||
| And again, I'm not saying that there aren't things to address, but just the way in which this is sold to the public seems to be highly deranging. | ||
| I mean, you're telling kids that they might not make adulthood. | ||
| And that's a terrible thing to do. | ||
| And you would only do it if you were 100% certain that was the case. | ||
| And they're not. | ||
| Well, they would tell you they are, but they're really not. | ||
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If they were, they would actually be doing something else. | |
| Exactly, exactly. | ||
| They'd be like living as people do when they think the plane's about to crash. | ||
| Let's shift to China a little bit because it seems like everything in the world is sort of being driven by China. | ||
| And yet I don't sense that we have as many China experts at the moment as we have Ukraine experts. | ||
| Will they shift soon? | ||
| They'll be shifting. | ||
| Do you sense they're making the move to shift? | ||
| They'll absolutely be shifting. | ||
| What's the basic way we should frame a China conversation? | ||
| Well, I do an interview on this because I say, what's the rest of the world doing whilst we're doing this to ourselves? | ||
| Because if you go to Beijing and you look back, I often find that my books come from looking back at my society from another place. | ||
| And somebody said to me recently, well, how would you define the West? | ||
| And I was like, well, one thing is you know what it is when you're not in it. | ||
| Like when you're in Beijing, you know you're not in the West. | ||
| If you're in Tokyo, you know you're not in the West. | ||
| And one of the things I say is, if you look at what we're doing from places like China or Moscow, it does look very strange. | ||
| And you would get an odd picture of us. | ||
| So among other things, I say, well, what are the Chinese doing whilst we're obsessing about social justice? | ||
| Or what are the Russians doing whilst we're obsessing about these things? | ||
| And the China thing in particular is just fascinating because there's no scenario in which Russia would overtake America in global leadership terms. | ||
| It is perfectly possible within our lifetimes we could see China become the dominant economy in the world. | ||
| In fact, as Elon Musk and others have shown, China only has to grow at the current rate to eventually get there. | ||
| And I think this is one of the things we should just be thinking about. | ||
| Some of the context we have to have in our minds is, you know, let's say, even if we in America, we in Britain, we in the West, managed to make every single field of expertise exactly, you know, dominated in America by, well, represented in America by 13% black people, you know, 50%, or just over 50% of women, 0.whatever percent of trans people, even if we did all of that, Does America beat China? | ||
| Now, that was... Even if we did all of those lofty things... That would strike me as being a really important question to sort out. | ||
| And I can't find people in America, enough people willing to think about it. | ||
| But that would be the underlying thing, is whilst we were doing all of these strange things from our past and our present, the only global competitor, which has no problem with racism, is currently operating concentration camps. | ||
|
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Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| I cite some, I mean, just terrifically awful racist things that modern China and the founders of modern China have said and done. | ||
| And again, I don't think one in a million Americans knows this. | ||
| I don't think one in a million British people knows it. | ||
| And I just, this is the context we need to operate in. | ||
| Do we have any of the defenses to stop the encroachment of China or stop that they will be the superpower? | ||
| And, you know, even just in the last couple of days, Joe Biden said there's a new world order coming and something to the effect of maybe we'll be in charge of it. | ||
| I've said for many years, you know, if you didn't like the era of so-called American hegemony, you're going to love the Chinese era. | ||
| I have a human rights complaint, you'll tell the CCP. | ||
| Yeah, they'll love that. | ||
| How interesting. | ||
| They have special rooms for people like us, I assume. | ||
| Please step this way. | ||
| It's really, it feels horribly late empire, what we're doing. | ||
| So how do we reverse course on this? | ||
| Or let's say there was, if you were advising Biden or there was a new administration, I know it's not just a political answer, I know that, but if you were guiding some sort of philosophy that was going to push back on some of this, what would you do? | ||
| Well, one thing is you've got to stop elite capture, which has definitely happened in all of our countries. | ||
| I list some of the examples of it, really worrying high profile examples in Britain, America, Australia, New Zealand, Canada. | ||
| Where people in our political elites have been bought up by China. | ||
| And maybe in the future we will treat those people as we are currently treating Russian oligarchs, finally, who looted their country and then moved to the West and spent their ill-gotten gains. | ||
| Maybe there will come a time when we actually treat the people who helped China arrive at this point from the West with that kind of Retribution. | ||
| But that would be a start. | ||
| It would also be a start to address how business is going to address this. | ||
| Because as we know constantly, businesses that have been born in countries like America and have free market principles completely adapt those principles in order to dominate in the Chinese market. | ||
| Should Americans and others in the West have an attitude towards this in the products we buy, in the products we engage with? | ||
| I think so. | ||
| Well, it's funny, now you hear Biden saying, oh, we should buy more American, or we should make more American things here. | ||
| It sort of sounds like something that that orange guy was kind of saying for a while. | ||
| Well, it was the sort of thing which, only a few years back, you would have definitely been accused of jingoism. | ||
|
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Of course. | |
| Of course. | ||
| I mean, all of us, I mean, from the corona era as well, have had this sort of supply chain issue suddenly come back. | ||
| Turns out, energy independence is quite useful. | ||
| Quite useful to be able to not rely on China for all sorts of things, from medical products all the way through to energy. | ||
| Same with Russia. | ||
| You know that the two COVID tests, remember Biden sent two COVID tests to every American during the State of the Union? | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| You know that they're made in China? | ||
| Made in China. | ||
| I have two of them. | ||
| I know. | ||
| It seems to be some unbelievably dark, grand joke. | ||
| It's like if a fiction writer was writing it, you'd be like, it's too on point. | ||
| No, come on. | ||
| It's a novel, but don't stretch our credulity. | ||
| Is there anything else we can do? | ||
| I guess know a little more? | ||
| Or is it really also that it's just like when the average person maybe is thinking about China's encroaching on the West and our hegemony and all of it's gonna collapse and you'll realize how good you had it, but it's too late. | ||
| It's like that isn't as emotionally abrasive as just like, oh, let's tear down a statue or America's racist, something like that. | ||
| It's so much to think about, truly, that this country all the world away could really be trying to upend the world that we just totally take for granted. | ||
| I think the most important thing is that we get ourselves into context. | ||
| I mean, historically, we'll come on to that, but I mean, historically, but also in the present. | ||
| I mean, again, if people in America leave America and go to certain places in the world, like China, like the Far East, the Middle East, you know, you'll see that questions you tear yourselves up over here, for right or wrong, do not bother or detain these societies. | ||
| And that should be salutary. | ||
| You go into reparations in a portion of this. | ||
| You described yourself as privileged because you're an author, but there will be a cost for talking about reparations, my friend. | ||
| Well, I do reparations after the history chapter, where I describe how the war on history, the war on our history in the West, it just has to stop. | ||
| It has to be put into proper context. | ||
| I'm all for the debate. | ||
| I mean, there's obviously a debate on empire going on again, a new debate on slavery, but all of it is as if we haven't had these debates before, as if we've never thought about them before. | ||
| And so, yes, one of the questions that's now coming up again is reparations. | ||
| Britain, by the way, paid significant reparations when the slave trade ended. | ||
| In fact, there's evidence, I analyze and explain it in the book, that Britain actually paid more to abolish the slave trade than it ever gained through the slave trade. | ||
| Of course, because Britain, after we abolished the slave trade, also policed the abolition | ||
| of the slave trade across the high seas in the 19th century. | ||
| Thousands of British sailors lost their lives in those operations, stopping the Brazilians, | ||
| for instance, who continued their slave trade into the 1880s, stopping the Brazilians and | ||
| others from trafficking people across the globe. | ||
| But also Britain paid the money in, effectively, reparations to those who'd lost money. | ||
| be all. | ||
| All British people paid a cost throughout the 19th century in an upsurge of pricing of goods. | ||
| Because if you got rid of buying goods from places that were producing them from slavery, then of course you were paying more. | ||
| So there's a lot of evidence that Britain is already paid down It's gain from the slave trade. | ||
| Well, again, not one in a million people knows that. | ||
| And so now when people say, you need to pay reparations for what you did in the 18th century, I think, well, that's interesting. | ||
| Same thing in this country. | ||
| In the United States, people talk as if this country didn't fight a damn civil war over the issue, you know? | ||
| And I think a number of times in the book I use a couple of fantastic quotes of Nietzsche on the genealogy of morals and one of his analogies which I lift is he talks of people who pick at long closed wounds and pick off the scabs and then scream about how much they've been hurt. | ||
| This is horribly pertinent. | ||
| I think that's what we're dealing with. | ||
| We're dealing with people today who are demanding money for things they didn't suffer and demanding money from people who did no wrong. | ||
| And it's got so much worse in this latest iteration. | ||
| Previous attempts or claims for reparations were different. | ||
| But by the time you get into the current decade, and Ta-Nehisi Coates basically starts off this latest round with peace in the Atlantic. | ||
| But by the time of the last Democrat primaries, all the Democrats were talking about reparations, seriously talking about how to do reparations. | ||
| One of the first things that Joe Biden did when he got into office Was to launch an investigation into whether and how this country could get into this question. | ||
| Even though Barack Obama virtually never talked about it just four years before. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And was black. | ||
| And put it to bed. | ||
| Was not called a sellout because of it. | ||
| Because this new generation has been persuaded to open a wound that they didn't suffer from and scream about how much they've suffered. | ||
| And, you know, there's actually, and this is why I do this sub-chapter on reparations, is that there's a deep moral question within this, which is, at this stage, it's people who look like people to whom wrong things were done in the past, demanding money from people who look like people who could have done the wrong things. | ||
| If you want to get further into it, you have to say, You have to basically do a genetic database of the American population. | ||
| What do you do about it? | ||
| I mean, one of the many moral problems is I don't believe that anyone living has the right to be forgiven. | ||
| And no one living has the right to forgive. | ||
| They don't have the right, and I explain why in the book. | ||
| Simply in moral terms, you do not have the right to apologize for something you did not do, and nobody else has the right to accept an apology if the wrong was not done to them. | ||
| So we're in this set of demands that are being made, which I'm afraid must be dismissed, Carefully, sensitively at times, and insensitively at others. | ||
| But it's not going to work, and this idea has to be put to bed, because we are now dealing with historic retribution. | ||
| Not just reparations, but historic retribution. | ||
| Do you think that it's also designed to intentionally inflame racial tensions? | ||
| Oh yeah, of course. | ||
| So if you said to a second generation Mexican immigrant, legal Mexican immigrant in the United States, who busted their butt, came here, now, you know, they're a parent now, and now they have young kids, and they had nothing to do with slavery, came here, don't have that much, but are working hard for the American dream, or if you took my family, that I'm fourth generation American, but, you know, Holocaust survivors on both sides of my family, All came here with nothing. | ||
| They had nothing to do with slavery. | ||
| And then suddenly you were saying to people, but you have to give money to this thing. | ||
| Even though we don't know whose ancestors, like really, are we going to really be able to track this correctly? | ||
| That you're going to end up causing people to be racist. | ||
|
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Of course. | |
| Of course you would. | ||
| Of course you would. | ||
| And it's dire every way you look at it. | ||
| I mean, here's another one. | ||
| What do you do with the black people descended from black people who sold their brothers and sisters? | ||
| Do they pay out? | ||
| I mean, Voltaire said this centuries ago. | ||
| Voltaire said the only thing even worse than what the Europeans were doing in selling black Africans and trading them across the Atlantic were the Africans who sold their brothers. | ||
| Are we going to go to Africa and find the people who descended from the people who did that? | ||
| I mean, some of the few memoirs of slaves we have, like Equiano, describe how their neighbors in a neighboring village in Africa just came and stole them with a knife. | ||
| Is there any reparation for that? | ||
| Are we going to give reparations to the millions of black people who probably don't want it? | ||
| Or the immigrants from Senegal who have thrived? | ||
| Or several other countries, Caribbean countries, who come here and thrive? | ||
| It's so obviously not possible that it's purely designed to open a wound and to claim superiority for yourself. | ||
| Do you think it's also intentionally... | ||
| counter to the way humans operate, meaning that let's say we had this grand program of reparations, | ||
| and let's say all the experts got together and Tadesi Coates and all of the... | ||
| everyone on MSNBC got their panel of experts... | ||
| And all the people who aren't willing to send... | ||
| who aren't willing to show their voter ID at the booth are willing to hand over their DNA. | ||
| That's another good one, right? | ||
| Because you don't have to show your ID to vote, but somehow you're gonna have to show some sort of ID related to this, but okay, fine. | ||
| But let's say we get the great panel of all time. | ||
| They get every socialist and communist on there and race expert on there, and they come up with the number. | ||
| They come up with a number that each black person in America should get, and let's just come up with an insane $250,000 per person, right? | ||
| It's insane. | ||
| We're going to figure out how to fund it. | ||
| I know we have no money, but let's say they do the exact perfect thing that they purport to want to do. | ||
| Do you think they also don't fundamentally understand just human nature, which is that the progressives of 20 years from now will say, look what our The progressives before us, they sold us out. | ||
| 250 grand. | ||
| And it won't solve anything, is the other part. | ||
| And a generation on, there will be new people saying that wasn't enough. | ||
| There's a very funny skit you've probably seen Dave Chappelle do on what would happen if... Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Which are brands to get shares in before that money was doled out. | ||
| It's a non-startup and it's designed to be divisive. | ||
| And here's one of the problems that comes from that, which is that it's so demeaning of our history in the West. | ||
| It's so demeaning. | ||
| Racism and colonialism and slavery were part of the story of the West as they have been part of the story of all societies throughout human history and in many societies today. | ||
| But they are not the history of the West. | ||
| They are part of the history. | ||
| They are not the history of the West. | ||
| And that has been totally misrepresented in our day, as if these sins were the only thing that defined us, whereas actually what defined the West was that these were things we recognized to be sins. | ||
| Modern China doesn't recognize that, and many other nations and countries and societies around the world don't recognize that. | ||
| Speaking of the history, let's shift to religion. | ||
| This is one, as you know, I've definitely come around on the belief side at least. | ||
| Very different than where I was, say, five or six years ago. | ||
| I think you need something behind just the liberalism that we love to keep this ship going. | ||
| Talk to me a little bit about religion. | ||
| Would you, Douglas Murray? | ||
| Well, I explained that You basically can't take down the West unless you take down the religious element of it, specifically the Judeo-Christian tradition. | ||
| What's worrying at the moment is that there is a simultaneous assault on the two traditions of the West, both the philosophical tradition, including the secular tradition, and the religious tradition. | ||
| So, the Western churches, as I go into remorseless detail, even the Catholic Church, Judaism, what's that? | ||
| They've gone woke. | ||
| They've decided the point of Judaism or Catholicism is social justice. | ||
| And to say as much, Church of England, Episcopalians, all these people have decided that they're going to do, basically they're going to give up God and they're going to go for woke. | ||
| That's not very survivable, actually, I think, because it just turns the things that are meant to be the most profound sources of meaning on your society into just another banal repetition of the banal things that you get everywhere, from an art gallery to cable news to everywhere else. | ||
| You also get it at church or a synagogue. | ||
| And so that's devastating in one way, but what makes it even more devastating is that this is happening simultaneously with an attack on the secular philosophical traditions of the West. | ||
| The tradition of Athens, the tradition of the Enlightenment. | ||
| I mean, in the last few years, every philosopher of the Enlightenment, everyone has been brought down by this crowd of anti-Westernists, anti-Westerners. | ||
| They've done for Voltaire, whose statue has disappeared in Paris. | ||
| They've come for David Hume, for John Stuart Mill, for everyone. | ||
| And again, that's because, as with the history thing, that's what you have to do if you want to destroy the West. | ||
| In the same way that if you want to take down America, you have to take down the roots of America. | ||
| You have to take down its heroes. | ||
| You have to take down Lincoln. | ||
| You've got to take down Jefferson. | ||
| You've got to take down the gods of the Republic. | ||
| If in Britain, you've got to take down Winston Churchill. | ||
|
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That's why they go for him so bad. | |
| In the same way, if you want to destroy the tradition of reason in the West, you go for the figures who gave us the tradition of reason. | ||
| And everybody from Aristotle, who the Washington Post a couple of years ago described as the grandfather of scientific racism, who among other things stood accused of being named by Charles Murray as his favorite philosopher, and this particular writer in the Washington Post was Disturbed to find that Aristotle, writing 2,300 years ago, did not agree with everything the Washington Post says in 2020. | ||
| That's a shocking discovery. | ||
| Unbelievable realization. | ||
| What are you going to do with these idiots? | ||
| Aristotle, God. | ||
| What did he know? | ||
| And it's the same with the philosophers of the Enlightenment. | ||
| I mean, you could say that one of the reasons why the philosophers of the Enlightenment have been so attacked in recent years is because they were living in the time of the two original sins, slavery and empire. | ||
| And that they stand accused now of not having spent enough time thinking about the same things that Ibram X. Kendi pretends to think about, or Robin DiAngelo. | ||
| Well, you know, David Hume was trying to work out how we got ourselves out of a period of basically superstition. | ||
| Writers like Voltaire were trying to separate out the church and the state. | ||
| These are quite important tasks and important roles. | ||
| Should they have dedicated themselves to other things that we now call social justice? | ||
|
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Possibly, but they were busy with other things. | |
| They were busy with other things. | ||
| And again, there's just this unbelievable presumption about this. | ||
| And I say, I mean, I'm very keen to play the game back at them. | ||
| David Hume is attacked now because of one footnote in one of his essays, which is known by all Hume scholars and is a racist statement. | ||
| He's attacked for this one footnote. | ||
| Kendi and others salt him for it. | ||
| I think that's probably the only passage of Hume that Kendi's ever read. | ||
| But, you know, okay, let's do this with other people. | ||
| Who might fall if you did this, if you said something racist once trick? | ||
| Who else might fall? | ||
| Here's one, Karl Marx. | ||
| I go through in considerable detail. | ||
| Karl Marx's letters and his essays are filled with racism. | ||
| Packed with it. | ||
| He uses the N-word all over the place, usually hyphenated with Jew, not used in the very flattering light itself either. | ||
| I mean, Marx was a horribly racist, anti-Semitic, really very, very bigoted figure, who by our own modern standards should not be regarded as survivable. | ||
| Nobody's done the task on him. | ||
| A new statue went up to Engels only a couple of years ago. | ||
| A new statue to Marx went up just a couple of years ago. | ||
| So why has it only happened to these people? | ||
| I think here in questions like that you see the sources of what I'm trying to get at here, which is that the war on the West is a war on all of the things we treasure. | ||
| Designed to leave behind only people who very, very militant political activists want to leave standing as the only people with an explanation for our society. | ||
| So this is sort of the same question that I asked you at the beginning in terms of why didn't our institutions have enough to stand up, our secular institutions. | ||
| But are you surprised that the religious institutions, whether you fully believe in them or not, that they didn't have better defenses? | ||
| You would think that these things that have really lasted for thousands of years and have made mistakes along the way and wars have been fought and we can do that all thing. | ||
| But that they, that every, you're not exaggerating when you talk about what's happening in the churches and the temples of America right now. | ||
| I mean, they've traded in most of what we thought their beliefs were. | ||
| And it's very strange because, I mean, I agree with the historian of Christianity, historian of the ancient world, Tom Holland, who said in the past, you know, that actually Christianity, for instance, it should do the weird stuff. | ||
| Like, what makes Christianity extraordinary are the claims it makes about the world. | ||
| The weird stuff, as Tom Holland calls it, including the virgin birth, the crucifixion, the resurrection. | ||
| But this is Christianity. | ||
| Take them away and you haven't got Christianity. | ||
| Insert in its place The same as I say, banal things that you get everywhere else in the age. | ||
| And you don't really have a religion. | ||
| You've just got another iteration of the social justice movement. | ||
| But I believe that weird stuff is absolutely central to it. | ||
| Same thing with Judaism. | ||
| It's the things that make them different from everything else that are the things that you'd want to hold on to, not the stuff you'd give up and import this crappy D'Angelo-ism. | ||
| Why would you go from angels to D'Angelo? | ||
| That's a good question. | ||
| I should have... I consider Dennis Prager my rabbi. | ||
|
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I'll have him ask that next time at the High Holidays. | |
| Well, from there, actually, that's a good segue to gratitude, which is next in the book. | ||
| Man, we could all use a little bit more of that in the West, huh? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| I think some people are kind of waking up to it now. | ||
| Do you sense that? | ||
|
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I think so. | |
| There is a feeling of, oh man, we might be really giving this thing away. | ||
| Maybe things like Ukraine remind us of that. | ||
| You know, you've got People in 2022's homes are being shelled by tanks from an invading neighboring country and, you know, it could be us. | ||
| Maybe it helps a little bit to put in proportion the luck we have in basically stable and vaguely peaceful societies. | ||
| Or broadly peaceful. | ||
| Substantially peaceful. | ||
| Mainly peaceful societies. | ||
| You know, the reason why I write about gratitude is because, apart from the fact it's been something that's been much of my mind in recent years, it's, as I say, it's the only counter you can have to resentment. | ||
| And we've lived in an age of resentment, and the war in the West is significantly a war waged by resentful people. | ||
| People who wallow in resentment, who wallow in blaming other people for anything in their lives that does not go right. | ||
| You always have someone to blame. | ||
| Nietzsche again writes about this. | ||
| The problem with resentment, the problem with resentful people is that there is actually only one true answer you can have to them to stop their resentment, which is to say to them, you are right. | ||
| There is something which is wrecking your life and is ruining you. | ||
| The thing is you. | ||
| You are the thing. | ||
| Now, the problem with that is that that is the last message anyone wants to hear. | ||
| And so there will always be an inbuilt reason for resentful people to stop ever looking inwards. | ||
| Is that the greatest trick of social justice, in a way? | ||
| That it took everything off the self, it took everything off the individual, and just put it on the machine? | ||
| It's certainly one of them. | ||
| And, you know, you have to talk to these things at similar depths. | ||
| And by the way, I think this is something the right's got very badly wrong in recent years. | ||
| The left talks in terms of resentment, and the right will talk about tax cuts. | ||
| No, that's not actually talking on the same level. | ||
| They're talking at a tectonic level, and the writer's talking at a fiddling level. | ||
| Important fiddling, no doubt, but fiddling. | ||
| The only counter to real resentment is gratitude, is to turn your attitude towards life around, and to be encouraged to do so. | ||
| Now, this is perfectly possible, but one of the things is to realize what a life of resentment actually looks like. | ||
| Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov has a fantastic passage where the devil appears and says to one of the brothers, he says to one of the brothers that gratitude is something he can't do. | ||
| And when I read that first, I thought, that's amazing. | ||
| Only Dostoevsky would throw away that insight that the devil is not capable of gratitude. | ||
| But, you know, the gratitude comes or should come from, okay, these are things that, I mean, if somebody says, for instance, well, what have you produced in the West other than slavery and racism and inequality and all of these things? | ||
| I say, okay, let me just start with cities. | ||
| Paris, Rome, Florence. | ||
| Barcelona, Madrid, Lisbon, Venice. | ||
| Portland used to be pretty nice. | ||
| I wouldn't list Portland. | ||
| In the old days! | ||
| The list could go on almost endlessly. | ||
| The great university cities. | ||
| Heidelberg, Regensburg, Oxford, Cambridge. | ||
| You think this is nothing? | ||
| I'm just talking about cities here. | ||
| I've not even got on to the rest of it. | ||
| I've not got on to scientific achievements. | ||
| I've not got on to all the cultural achievements. | ||
| But I could. | ||
| Now, if you look at it in that light, you'll be reminded that, yes, it's possible to do what the deconstructionists argued that we should all do, which is to tear everything apart, break everything down, always deconstruct everything other than their own careers. | ||
| You can do that, or you can stand back and look at what you have. | ||
| I mean, you could look at a block of marble and talk about the labor that it costs to get it out of the ground. | ||
| You could talk about the cost of labor and whether or not people were properly paid for getting it out of the ground. | ||
| Or you could stand back and look at the Pieta. | ||
| You know, these are two totally different attitudes, but they're both possible. | ||
| You can stand in Venice and say, what a terrible testimony to inequality. | ||
| Or you could marvel. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| You know? | ||
| And there's one that's better than the other. | ||
| I think that's what you're saying. | ||
| Forget what I'm leading to. | ||
| I think I got it. | ||
| I think I got it. | ||
| Culture is what you end on. | ||
| And we've sort of, this whole conversation in some ways is couched around culture. | ||
| But everyone says we're in a culture war right now. | ||
| Or the culture wars are raging. | ||
| Yes, the cultural one is the most painful one in a way, because this is where the D'Angeloism, Kendiism, this is where it is really at its ugliest. | ||
| It's when this horrible retributive game, looking at everything through the eyes of slavery and colonialism, gets put onto this horrible beam, gets put onto the most delicate, fragile and precious things. | ||
| I give examples of artwork that has actually been closed up now, including one of my favorite painters. | ||
| His work's been shut away in the Tate Gallery in London because of a claim that one of the figures in it is racist. | ||
| And the man who painted this, Rex Whistler, died on his first day in action in 1944 in Normandy. | ||
| He's posthumously been defamed by the Tate Gallery as a racist. | ||
| He wasn't a racist. | ||
| And he lost his life fighting Nazism. | ||
| And they've defamed him posthumously. | ||
| They've done the same thing with artist after artist. | ||
| They're doing the same thing with classical music at the moment. | ||
| They can't find enough black baroque composers. | ||
| So what? | ||
| So what? | ||
| But there are Baroque ensembles across America that are now tearing themselves apart over this. | ||
| Orchestras doing the same thing. | ||
| They notice that the canon of Western music and Western literature is horribly dominated by what they call dead white males. | ||
| By the way, one of the things I love in that is that they don't only attack people for being white and being males, but for being dead. | ||
| It's like, what kind of a loser would die? | ||
| The least they could do is stick around so we can attack them to their face, you know? | ||
| What kind of losers are these people? | ||
|
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Bah! | |
| So these dead white males are now assailed for absolutely everything. | ||
| And as a result, these anti-Western activists have reduced the arts to the same, again, banal, retributive, aggressive, resentful game as everything else. | ||
| They've even done it on gardening. | ||
| One of my favorite passages in this book is the passage, racist gardening. | ||
| When I was doing the audio book, I had trouble with this bit because I was just laughing so much. | ||
| I had to do so many takes because it's just preposterous. | ||
| There's even a guy in Canada who made waves a couple years ago who said that lawns are racist. | ||
| The whole idea of the perfect lawn is a racist construct. | ||
| The lawn mower is the slave master? | ||
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Something like that? | |
| I mean, his analogy doesn't... What's the weed whacker? | ||
| His analogy doesn't stand up to much attention but they've done this to everything and this causes in me a certain resentment of itself because I think that it's one of the coolest things you could do to the gifts we've been given. | ||
| They've done it on Shakespeare. | ||
| The Globe Theatre in London now has a set of seminars on decolonizing Shakespeare. | ||
| They found that some of his characters aren't right. | ||
| You can't believe it. | ||
| They weren't all perfect, Shakespeare's characters. | ||
| One Shakespeare scholar in America said, this language of light and darkness, I mean, this language is all over the place. | ||
| Well, until quite recently, people used to think that Shakespeare was quite good with language. | ||
| Better than your average American academic, for sure. | ||
| Wait till they find out about George Lucas. | ||
| He wrote a little song about the light and the dark, you know? | ||
| It's all looked at in the same light, as we are better than all of these people. | ||
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You think you stand here to judge Shakespeare? | |
| You really think you have that right? | ||
| So, as I say, the culture bit is the most painful in a way, because it's the same story as the war on white people, it's the same story as the war on our history, the war on our religious inheritance and our philosophical inheritance, and this is the war on our cultural inheritance, and it's all done in the same way. | ||
| With the same anger and resentment. | ||
| And I try to explain at the end how I think we get out of that. | ||
| You don't have to give away the ending, but give me a nice ending for this. | ||
| And then I wanna continue with one other topic that we're gonna, we'll do like two or three minutes of it for the public, and then I wanna shift the rest of it to the Locals community regarding something else that you and I have been talking about somewhat publicly and privately. | ||
| But give me a classic Douglas Murray ending to an interview as only Douglas Murray can do. | ||
| God, that put some pressure on me. | ||
| Well, here's what I think. | ||
| I think we've been being polite. | ||
| And I'm done with it. | ||
| Totally done with it. | ||
| All of what I describe in this book is only going on because we happen to live in highly tolerant societies. | ||
| So I give a set of what it would look like if we stopped being tolerant. | ||
| I mean, here are a couple of standoffs I would do. | ||
| I feel this very strongly. | ||
| If you don't respect my ancestors, I see no reason to respect yours. | ||
| If you don't show any respect for my history, I don't see why I should pretend to respect yours. | ||
| If you don't respect my culture, I don't need to respect yours. | ||
| If you don't respect me, I see no reason to respect you. | ||
| What does this look like, this lack of politeness? | ||
| Well, it would look like telling some truths that our era has been too polite not to say, in recent years at any rate. | ||
| In the end of his series on civilization, Lord Clark memorably said that courtesy was one of the things that defined the West. | ||
| It's a very interesting thing to fall on at the end of his thing, but courtesy. | ||
| Courtesy is a hugely important thing in Western society, but it's not endless. | ||
| So here would be a non-courteous thing to say. | ||
| We've been told about other ways of knowing, other ways of doing maths, non-race, anti-racist science and all this sort of thing. | ||
| Yet we do not go to any Aboriginal communities for vaccines. | ||
| We go to no first peoples for cancer treatment. | ||
| We go to them for no mathematical, scientific or artistic discoveries. | ||
| We do not go to them to rediscover other languages and other cultures. | ||
| Partly, largely, because such communities seem to have had not much interest in other cultures. | ||
| Unlike the Western mind, they seem not to have taken a great interest. | ||
| So, the not-courteous thing would be us saying, we've been courteous for an awfully long time and we're going to stop, because it seems not to be doing us much good. | ||
| So, we will pursue truth wherever we want to pursue it, through whatever means we have and whatever disciplines we have, and we will stop pretending that alongside all the great philosophy of the West, Native American philosophy is equal. | ||
| I mean, I have a bit in the book where I lampoon these American authors who you just know at the end of everything are going to find a sort of tribal leader who says something totally banal and claim that it's amazingly profound. | ||
| But I'm willing to pretend that for a bit, not really willing to pretend that we can get rid of Aristotle and Plato and Voltaire and everyone else and keep only boring tribal leader banality. | ||
| So yeah, the end process would be not playing nice anymore. | ||
| And as it happens, I don't think it would be a very nice solution in itself. | ||
| But I do fire it as a warning shot. | ||
| Like, don't push us there. | ||
| I mean, it is a totally mad thing to do within the West, and I should stress, Patrick, this is about Western anti-Westernism. | ||
| There are other types of anti-Westernism around the world, but this is about Western anti-Westernism. | ||
| And it is a very strange thing to try to persuade majority communities in societies to believe that they are evil and impossible ever to atone for that evil. | ||
| D'Angelo says, White people cannot get out of whiteness and there is no good whiteness. | ||
| No. | ||
| To hell with these people. | ||
| To hell with them for pretending that a white child, born and brought up in the 21st century in America, has to be deemed as having no good things to access through their life. | ||
| These people have to be cleared out of the way. | ||
| And I'm trying to do my small amount to make sure that happens. | ||
| Douglas Murray, you've still got it, my friend. | ||
| You've still got it. | ||
| And I will have you on for a tenth appearance if you will join me again. | ||
| But, so this is the end of the proper interview, but now I want to do something a little bit different just for a couple minutes and we'll leave some of this on YouTube publicly, but then I want to take the rest to locals because I think it's interesting. | ||
| We did a panel at MatCon. | ||
| Where they were trying to piece together, it was me, you, Yoram Hazony, and Sourabh Amari, and we were trying to piece together what a new right could look like. | ||
| And sort of where the minorities fit within that, if a society is to have any sort of traditional conservative values. | ||
| And it was a pretty damn good conversation, if I do say so myself, and there were a couple hundred people there for it. | ||
| You know that David and I made this announcement in the last couple weeks about having kids and we're obviously overjoyed and it's great. | ||
| And 99% of what I got, especially from my friends on the conservative side of the aisle, was amazing. | ||
| Nothing but love and support, a lot of it publicly, plenty of it privately, but it was all good. | ||
| But there was this mostly anonymous, frog-related, but not all, some more religious people, anger towards this, related to gay, related to IVF, a whole bunch of other things. | ||
| And I thought, I don't want to pay too much attention to what a small minority are saying, but it's not nothing. | ||
| And I often say to you at some point in all of our interviews, you so happen to be gay, zippity-doo-dah, okay, here we are. | ||
| But as a conservative or a... I don't have all the words. | ||
| I don't want to put anything in your mouth. | ||
| What do we do with this tension? | ||
| What do you think we do with this tension? | ||
| I discovered from the NetCon conference that the conservatives there think I'm a liberal. | ||
| Well, that's why I mean it. | ||
| It's like you're a liberal in the right sense of liberalism, right? | ||
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No, they think I'm a liberal in all senses. | |
| Well, they think even the right sense of liberalism, liberals are in the wrong sense of liberalism. | ||
| So yes, I'm with you on that, right? | ||
| It's quite an alarming discovery. | ||
| Right. | ||
| In some ways, you were the most liberal person on the panel in a certain degree. | ||
| It's an interesting position for me to be in. | ||
| Yeah, which is odd, right? | ||
| So you're thought of as a British conservative, but from an American context, you were thought of as a liberal. | ||
| But we had this debate. | ||
| How can conservatism come to grips grasping some of the things that you write about religion and family and that there's an inheritance over generations and all of the stuff, all of the stuff. | ||
| It's funny, I haven't talked about it publicly that much because I don't want to give too much credence to it because it was a very small minority of angry people. | ||
| And by the way, not just angry people, because some of the things I think are legitimate concerns. | ||
| If two gay men have kids, well, where's the role of the mother? | ||
| Right. | ||
| I've written about that. | ||
| Yeah, there are things to talk about. | ||
| So what do you think we do with all of this? | ||
| Well, one realization I have had since being in America is that, I mean, there are uglier things in the woodshed than I knew before on the right. | ||
| I think that is true. | ||
| So I'm trying to nip this one in the bud. | ||
| How about that? | ||
| Yeah, I think there are uglier things on the right. | ||
| I think there are uglier things on the right like there are on the left everywhere. | ||
| I think maybe part of the right got a bit complacent in recent years about this. | ||
| You know, we were so used to leftist overreach. | ||
| Jordan and I talk quite a lot, including publicly, about where the left goes wrong. | ||
| And we did so partly in the assumption that everyone knows where the right goes wrong. | ||
| But I think that the right, in America in particular, might be relearning that lesson at the moment. | ||
| Maybe it's a never-ending lesson. | ||
| I mean, there are people, I've had a couple of totally minor confrontations myself since being here with sort of ugly troll-like figures, but slightly closer to the mainstream on the right than I'd be comfortable with them being, who play with antisemitism, for instance, play with other bigotries. | ||
| I think they're sort of edgelords of the right who are basically doing the same reprehensible game that parts of the left do. | ||
| Their compares on the left, you know, play with Che Guevara and these guys play with Pinochet. | ||
| So what if we remove the troll part of it or the edgelord part of it or just like the internet part of it? | ||
| But let's say, what do you think about just the people that maybe have a purely religious Well, the strange thing in this country, again it's something I've discovered since living here, is that you have something in America which really doesn't exist in Britain. | ||
| I mean, so-called integralists, for instance. | ||
| I honestly, I didn't take these people seriously. | ||
| I honestly thought they must be kidding. | ||
| Like, you want to introduce, for instance, Catholic social doctrine as the foundation for ethics in America? | ||
| That was part of the conversation. | ||
| But I mean, like, Catholics aren't even nearly a majority in America. | ||
| There's no way that a minority can assert its moral principles over a majority in a secular republic. | ||
| I mean, no way. | ||
| You'd have to kill an awful lot of people. | ||
| And in any case, the history of Europe in the 16th century and 17th century ought to be some small reminder of why... I mean, literally this is why I couldn't believe that the Integralists were serious. | ||
| But I thought, you don't know how Europe went down on this very issue and how long it took. | ||
| Significant thinkers and brilliant figures to untangle this? | ||
| Why would you be trying to retangle that again? | ||
| Thank you for watching. | ||
| 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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