Can the West Survive? Douglas Murray [Ep. 491]

Please join my mailing list here 👉 https://briankeating.com/list to win a meteorite 💥 What happens when a civilization begins to doubt its own foundations, dismissing facts, evidence, and even reason for not being woke enough? In an age where biology, history, warfare, and even science are increasingly shaped by ideology, what does it mean to defend truth at all? Douglas Murray, one of the most influential public intellectuals worldwide, has spent his career warning us that the West is in trouble, not because of external threats, but because we ourselves have begun to question the values that built our ideals, our history, our culture, our civilization, and our sense of identity. His latest work, “On Democracies and Death Cults,” which we’ll discuss today, applies this warning to one of the most politically and morally charged conflicts of all time. It also leads us into the fundamental question of the very purpose of Western civilization. At its core, Douglas Murray’s work explores a universal issue: the battle over what counts as truth. From journalism to biology, we continue to return to the most profound question: how do we guard and protect our most sacred truths in a world that no longer agrees on what reality itself is? — Key Takeaways: 00:00 Intro 01:25 My trip to Israel and death cults 06:09 Judging a book by its cover 12:35 Academic institutions and political activism 28:27 The impact of projection and guilt 34:46 Science, progress, and Western civilization 48:39 The possibility of peace in the Middle East 53:31 How to find courage 55:41 Outro — Additional resources: ➡️ Learn more about Douglas Murray: 📚 On Democracies and Death Cults: https://a.co/d/c7y845h 💻 Website: https://douglasmurray.net/ ➡️ Follow me on your fav platforms: ✖️ Twitter:⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating⁠⁠ 🔔 YouTube:⁠⁠ https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1⁠⁠ 📝 Join my mailing list:⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://briankeating.com/list⁠⁠ ✍️ Check out my blog:⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://briankeating.com/cosmic-musings/⁠⁠ 🎙️ Follow my podcast:⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://briankeating.com/podcast⁠⁠ — Into the Impossible with Brian Keating is a podcast dedicated to all those who want to explore the universe within and beyond the known. Make sure to follow so you never miss an episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 0:26Speaker 01

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• 0:56Brian Keating?

  What happens when a civilization begins to doubt its own foundations? It starts dismissing facts, evidence, and even reason itself for not being woke enough. In an age where biology, history, warfare, and even science are increasingly shaped by ideology, what does it mean to defend truth? Douglas Murray has spent his whole career warning us that the West is in trouble, not because of enemies from without, foreign threats, but because we ourselves have begun to question the values that built our ideals, our history, our culture, our civilization, our sense of identity. His latest work applies that warning to one of the most politically and morally charged conflicts of all time. He's an associate editor at The Spectator, a prolific columnist, and the author of several bestselling books,

• 1:40Brian Keating?

  including Madness of Crowds, and his most recent book on democracies and death cults. It's currently the Sunday Times number one bestseller. He's spent decades challenging ideological movements and going to the places in which he talks about. And he's an ardent defender of civilization and truth. Douglas, I want to start off this conversation first by welcoming you. So good to see you. I haven't seen you since we spent the sumptuous week in Florence together.

• 2:02Speaker 03

  That's right. It's very good to see you again in less auspicious surroundings.

• 2:06Brian Keating?

  Douglas, you may not know it from my last name, but Keating is not a Jewish last name. But I am in fact Jewish. Both parents are Jewish. And I never had a bar mitzvah. My parents were divorced. I grew up in an Irish Catholic. Home, I loved it very much. I was an altar boy in the Catholic Church, had a wonderful experience there. Many people didn't know that I'm actually born Jewish. And so I never had a bar mitzvah. I was actually an altar boy when I should have been preparing for my bar mitzvah at age 12 and 13. So when I hit the age of four times 13, I decided I would go to Israel and this time bring my whole family and do my bar mitzvah at the traditional location, the Western Wall in Jerusalem. And my bar mitzvah portion, the parsha, appears in Deuteronomy. And it starts like this. The parsha is called,

• 2:49Brian Keating?

  "Netzavim." It says, "I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day. I have put before you life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life, if you and your offspring would live." And at that time, Douglas, I read that, it was a month before October 7, and I felt peace was possible. But I never could have imagined, who would choose death? I mean, who in that phrase could possibly want to choose curse and death? But now it seems like many people have. You quote that passage quite often, and it's beautiful, and it brings tears to my eyes when I listen to it, I read it. But tell me, Douglas, what does that passage mean to you? And are there people that really do believe in choosing death?

• 3:29Speaker 03

  It's a very good place to start. The answer is yes. Like a lot of things in Scripture that all of us in the West have grown up with, after all, the biblical tradition is one of the absolutely central foundations of the West. And as I often say, like fish in water, we sort of don't realize that some of the things that we presume are perfectly obvious are maybe obvious to us, but not only not obvious to everyone, but also some people, some groups, they have a totally different view, a totally different way of thinking about things. I'm often reminded of that new atheist critique of the Ten Commandments,

• 4:11Speaker 03

  you know, but these are all obvious. Like, we didn't need to be told not to murder. We didn't need to be told not to steal. And of course, the counter is, yes, actually, people did at the time. Not murdering had to be told to the people because people were murdering. And they had to be told not to steal because people were stealing. Things that we regard as wrong now were not always regarded as wrong. And in the same way, that passage from Deuteronomy that means so much to both of us seems obvious, and yet it is a civilizational fork. Do you choose life that you and your descendants might live? Or do you choose another way?

• 4:55Speaker 03

  And again, most people in the West would think, well, who would choose another way? Surely, we just haven't understood them, or they had bad childhoods, or there's some communication error. But no, what I describe as the death cults, Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Revolutionary Government, they really do believe in choosing death. Not all the time, but certainly on occasion, much of the time, the now late leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, said repeatedly in his unfortunate life that he used to say, as the heads of Hamas do, as the Iranian Revolutionary Government and its other proxies do,

• 5:40Speaker 03

  they say things like, the infidel, they love life, and this is their great weakness. Because we worship death. And we worship death more than they love life. And that's how we're gonna win. And anyone who thought that was abstract claim or a boast of some kind, people didn't really mean, even if they'd ignored everything that had happened before, they should have been able to see on October the 7th, what happens when that death cult does what they want. Because on October the 7th, 2023,

• 6:19Speaker 03

  when Hamas sent 4,000-odd terrorists into Israel to invade it, they worshipped death, they glorified death. They sought death for others and themselves. I explain some of the religious and political

• 6:40Speaker 03

  Junctions that have led a group like Hamas to that place. But yes, it is a fork in the road civilization. And it's one that I think people ignore their great peril.

• 6:51Brian Keating?

  Had past guests on the into the impossible podcast. I always do like to take the opportunity to judge their books by the cover because, you know, a lot of people may not be familiar with your work. I've asked my audience for some questions. You'll get those towards the end, but I do like to do this because basically we have nothing else to go on sometimes. I mean, I'm familiar with your work and meeting you and knowing you and having the opportunity over years, but take us through the title, the choice of the title, the subtitle and the cover art. As I said before, we started recording, it's not so, it's not so hard to understand, but please take us through these three major elements of the book.

• 7:25Speaker 03

  It's really a firsthand account as well as meditation on October 7th and this aftermath. I went to Israel as soon as I could after the seventh in order to see firsthand, speak to people firsthand, visit survivors and relatives of the 1,200 people murdered that day and the 250 taken hostage kidnapped from their homes and from the music festival near Reim. And I also give a firsthand account of what I saw in the war that Israel launched as a result of that invasion in which it had two military objectives, the rescue of the

• 8:05Speaker 03

  250 hostages who'd been stolen and the destruction or capture of all the leadership of Hamas. So secondly, it's a firsthand account of the war. But thirdly, it's really a meditation on what I see as being this civilizational divide that I just referred to. I believe that the war in the last 18 months and particularly the world's reaction to it has shown a very interesting and for me rather scary vision. Why would it be that on the evening of October 7th, there were jubilant crowds in London celebrating the massacres that had been going on in Israel?

• 8:48Speaker 03

  Why the next day on the 8th of October, 2023, in Times Square, was there a protest of people that I watched celebrating the massacre that was going on as they still hollered and demonstrated and celebrated? What was this? Who could get it so wrong?

• 9:09Speaker 03

  And as I say, and the purpose of the title is to just draw this line as clearly as possible. Obviously, there are lots of criticisms, any number of criticisms that people make of Israel, as you make of any country, because Israel is not perfect, any more than America is perfect, or Britain is perfect, or Australia. But why, when a fellow liberal democracy is attacked in this barbarous fashion, why should so many people in our own societies side not with the democracy, but the death cult? A group that literally worships death, that sought to glory in death. And this has been something I've thought about for a long time, obviously,

• 9:51Speaker 03

  but it brought it into really very sharp relief in the post-October the 7th period. And that period is still going on, of course, because although there are still hostages, including American-born hostages in captivity in Gaza, the world's attention, as so often, turned not on to the culprits, but on to the victims, not on to the people who perpetrated the massacres, but on the soldiers and others responding to them. And so that's why the title on democracies and death cults is, that's why I came to that title. And the subtitle about Israel and the future of civilization is because I believe,

• 10:33Speaker 03

  and as I say, I won't give it all away, but as I say at the end of the book, you know, this, there's a big question that's always lingered over my mind, as I'm sure it has over many other people, which is, we've always had this sort of question mark. If things were to get very serious again, as they did for our forbears, particularly in Britain, Europe, and America from 1914 to 18, and then 1939 to 45, if things were to get really serious, would we be able to defend our civilization? Would we be able to step up? And I think that's a good question always to ask yourself. Is our generation fit for this? Would we raise ourselves up to the moment?

• 11:17Speaker 03

  That had always been in my mind, but it had also always been in the mind of Israelis since the sixty seven and seventy three wars. Don't forget that October seventh, twenty twenty three happened fifteen years after the surprise attack of Israel's Arab neighbours in nineteen seventy three. And this question that had been lingering over Israelis has been answered, which is that, yes, the young generation there have been willing to fight, kill and die in order to protect their people and their country and their faith and their way of life. And I'm very struck by the fact that outside of Israel,

• 12:01Speaker 03

  the contemporaries of, for instance, the

• 12:05Speaker 03

  young people dancing in the early mornings at the Nova Party, found so much common cause, not with the young people raped and murdered and tortured and kidnapped, but but with the people who did it. And I ask why that is, why in the wider West there should have been? And there are lots of arguments for Palestinian self determination and much more. That's a complicated area we can get into, but there are arguments for that. But even people who think that they would like to prioritize the Palestinian cause ought to realize that in justifying, excusing, covering over

• 12:48Speaker 03

  or celebrating the actions of Hamas, they have put themselves not just against the people of Israel, but indeed actually against the Palestinian people themselves, because.

• 13:00Speaker 03

  This is for them the worst possible thing that could happen to be represented by Hamas. They voted them in, of course, in Gaza after his wedding withdrawal in 2005, but

• 13:11Brian Keating?

  And still have broad support.

• 13:12Speaker 03

  This is the worst possible thing for the Palestinian people as well.

• 13:16Brian Keating?

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• 13:59Brian Keating?

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• 14:45Brian Keating?

  Douglas, I'm curious if you can dissuade me of this notion that I have as a member of at least two democratic institutions. One is, of course, the United States, but the other is academic governance as a professor at a top 20 university around the world, the University of California in San Diego. And we have a democratic leadership. You know, my department chair can't really tell me what to do. My chancellor can't really advocate that I take on some research purpose that I'm not willing to do, et cetera, et cetera. I do have academic freedom, although I think in most cases academic freedom is kind of wasted because very few people actually take true chances. And those that do don't really need the freedom because they could gainfully employed doing a myriad of other things.

• 15:27Brian Keating?

  And the people that do need it use it to weaponize typically anti-American, anti-Israel, and sort of anti-Western notions. But that's not my point. I'm kind of meandering here. My point is, I am in an academic institution. Is it a death cult? Because after October 7th, we had the same thing. We had, outside of our student center, we had the Hamas flag waved. We had Students for Justice in Palestine basically standing right behind academic senators, you know, or Asian-American, many of them. I mean, our campus has a huge population of non-whites as the dominant, you know, member of the institution, as California is. And so, you know, that could be considered wonderful. But at the same time, this was being weaponized. Soon after October 7th, there was vigils for the martyrs, so-called martyrs.

• 16:12Brian Keating?

  The Students for Justice in Palestine's Instagram account had this over and over again. And I'm curious, it wasn't just the students. We have a Faculty for Justice in Palestine as well, and they'll have protests. And they got arrested, some of them got arrested. And the ultimate kind of irony for me is that they claim that the University of California San Diego is complicit in genocide. And yet, Douglas, and yet, when it came to them getting their degrees revoked and possibly getting suspended, they clamored that this was somehow unfair. And I want to ask you, you know, if you were, you know, playing this kind of Gedanken experiment of what would we do? If I was in 1937, you know, University of Berlin, and it was truly a Nazi institution,

• 16:56Brian Keating?

  and I, as a Jew, was mistreated and really appropriated, my existence was sort of in question, I would not clamor for a degree from that same institution. And yet, we see that at all these top institutions. Why is that? Are we just, as, you know, I like to say, there's a lot of useful idiots, there's a lot of useless geniuses in academia. What do you make of this whole phenomenon? Is it another form of death cult?

• 17:21Speaker 03

  It certainly rides side saddle with it. Several things, and one is, of course, the deep corruption of much of academia by foreign funding, particularly funding from Qatar, a state that currently still practices essentially a form of slavery, which has pumped billions of dollars into American, including to American higher education. Qatar, of course, are also one of the principal funders and backers of Hamas, and of course have hosted the Hamas leadership for many years. The idea that a terrorist-supporting state should be free to intervene in American academic

• 18:01Speaker 03

  life seems to me to be rather extraordinary, but I find very little criticism year by year of this perverting of American institutions by Qatari money. The second is, of course, that foreign-funded groups

• 18:20Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required. Compatibility and availability varies. 18 plus.

• 18:45Speaker 03

  Have managed to seemingly persuade a certain number of people. There are a certain number of people who are simply big supporters of Hamas. They love Hamas. They love the killing. They love the raping. They love the everything. There are some of those, but I don't think they form the majority. I think that the majority come along with them because they make, of course, extraordinary claims like the the complete lie that Israel has been committing genocide, as I mentioned at one point in the book, between 2005, when every last Jew, dead and alive, was removed forcibly by the IDF from Gaza. From 2005, the Israelis were first accused of having a genocide in Gaza, to the 7th October 2023, the population of Gaza doubled.

• 19:31Speaker 03

  It would be a strange form of genocide. Notice that there was no population boom in Bergen-Belsen in the 1940s. So first of all, it's totally erroneous claims that have been made, provable lies that have been mainstreamed. And then, and this is where some of the activist groups have really got their mojo, is the completely false claim. I mean, it's wild when you think about it, isn't it? That an academic institution could be accused of being involved in genocide. Why have so few people asked, how? How? What does UCLA have to do with Middle East and wars?

• 20:13Brian Keating?

  Your computer science department works on networking and CCTV that's used to track and monitor the border fence where a Gazan goes to and gets immediately machine-gunned to death. These are claims I've heard. And even boycotts of people that have worked in the Middle Eastern peace process have had their labs and offices boycotted, marched against and so forth.

• 20:33Speaker 03

  I mean, first of all, of course, it's false on every occasion. I mean, but it is an extreme claim that is being made in order to bring proximate pressure as close as possible to home. And that's all. So that whether it's Columbia or UCLA or wherever, they can sort of, the students can pretend somehow that they are involved in, at the forefront of a civil rights and human rights campaign in their time, by claiming that, you know, crazy claims like the ones you just cited, or quite often it's that, you know, somebody from the university went and did an exchange program in Israel. You know, I mean, this is, this is wild and tangential stuff.

• 21:19Speaker 03

  But it's fueled a certain number of students and faculty and to others into thinking that they have some role at the forefront of the history of their times. There's lots of things that are odd about that. One is, it wouldn't matter to the Israeli government, the IDF or anyone else, and/or should it, what the... Some faculty at UCLA think about Israel's war aims, you know. And I've always said that if any of those people were serious, I mean, really serious, then they would have by now have said, I don't like the way that the IDF is operating. Here are alternative operating procedures for fighting an extremely complicated war

• 21:59Speaker 03

  in a highly densely built up civilian area in which Hamas, a terrorist group designated as a terrorist group in the United States for America, as in Britain and other Western countries, has had eighteen years to booby trap the place and build miles and miles of tunnels underneath it in which they are still holding and torturing kidnapped civilians and continuing to fire rockets and still have arms dumps and much more. Here is my alternative strategy, would have been what any halfway serious person would have, would have done, but that isn't the case. They simply think weirdly that they should or can dictate another country's war aims

• 22:42Speaker 03

  from the far away parts of an American campus which could not be further removed from the realities of this conflict and what Hamas has brought and started. But the other thing is, of course, is that essentially, and this is a point I made the other week when I launched this book at Columbia University, which has, of course, seen a very large number of protests. One of the things that I think academia should realise about this is not just that it has been perverted and deliberately allowed to be, its students and faculty to be misrepresenting and misrepresenting facts and lying. It's also that, that the very act of protest that is being nurtured and encouraged on

• 23:24Speaker 03

  so many American campuses is in actual fact the very antithesis of the purposes of academia. I said to the students of Columbia, let me try this out on you, Brian, but what is a chart?

• 23:38Speaker 03

  What is a chant that you chant day after day, hour by hour, over and over again? Like, for instance, the chant of Intifada, Globalize the Intifada. Intifada, of course, Israel has had suffered two of them. They are bloody terrorist campaigns in which students sitting at a cafeteria in Jerusalem were blown up at their university whilst having a coffee break. That's what Intifada is. Intifada is a mother getting on a bus in Jerusalem and the bus being blown up by a terrorist. That's what Intifada is. But when people are chanting Intifada or Globalize the Intifada or From the River to the Sea or any of these other chants,

• 24:23Speaker 03

  what are they doing? Are they seeking to persuade? Are they doing what in academia is meant to be the desirable thing, which is you swap ideas? You put forward your ideas, I put forward mine. We can test them. We can, we can, we can test which is better and, and come to some kind of synthesis of our ideas in whatever area, whether it's humanities, STEM, whatever you like.

• 24:51Speaker 03

  What is the chanting?

• 24:54Speaker 03

  It is surely not an effort to persuade, because nobody listens to a group saying, "Intifada, Intifada", and on the ninth time they chant, it says, "Aha, now you've persuaded me, with your brilliant logic and use of wisdom." They say it like this because their attempt is not to persuade, but to browbeat. The attempt is to intimidate, not to persuade, but to intimidate. Now, this is surely the antithesis of what university education should be about.

• 25:25Brian Keating?

  I testified to Congress in June of last year, and I said exactly that. Never once have I felt hatred towards any of my students. I have a lot of Muslim and, and students from the Middle East, have even had Palestinian students. I serve on all their committees. Never once have I thought to myself, "Well, the real thing that is most animating me as an academic is my political opinions, and therefore I must make it known, or I refuse to work with them."

• 25:48Speaker 03

  It's deliberately politicizing with one of the most complicated and toxic international areas of conflict. It's deliberately toxifying a place which is meant to be... Non-political.

• 26:02Brian Keating?

  They're leveraging, it seems to me, the unearned media, the promotion, the platform of the university that they attended but never built up any shred of the credibility of that institution. Yet they're trading and trafficking in that for their own political purposes. I would find it wrong if it was about, you know, if it were Jews doing it just the same. I mean, it's illiberal, and it's anti-intellectual. I feel like we are regressing.

• 26:26Speaker 03

  Completely. And this is one of the things why I mind that. I mind these sort of secondary places where this war is being fought. Because of course, the real war is being fought in the region. But this is why I mind the secondary theatre of conflict, as it were, which is that the deliberate aim of the Qatari and other funded groups to turn what I think of as pretty sacred places, actually, academia, cultural institutions and others into places in which you litigate this conflict. And litigate, it has to be said again, in an incredibly inept and ignorant way. But the other thing I would say is just try it with any other group.

• 27:10Speaker 03

  Look at the extraordinary way in which one of the organisers of the Columbia protests, a group that says that they want not just the destruction of the state of Israel, but that the destruction of Western civilisation. Imagine you travel to America, you get a visa or a green card, and you say, I'm going to spend all my time calling for the destruction of Israel and the destruction of the country I'm in. Now, imagine then that one person who's been doing that gets their green card revoked or whatever. They get all the due process that they wouldn't give to anyone else, but okay, fine. But then to make such people heroes, heroes of the revolution, all you've got to do is try it with any other group. Imagine if...

• 27:53Speaker 03

  America had been unfortunate enough in recent years to bring in a large number of students who had not learned what America have learned painstakingly over the years, as with other people in the West, about the importance of tolerance toward minorities and in particular to racial minorities. And imagine it had been the curse of America in recent years who have imported a large number of people and allowed funding from some crazy white supremacist groups. And people had come to American campuses and spent day after day calling for the lynching of our black brothers and sisters, friends, colleagues, family, neighbors.

• 28:37Brian Keating?

  Their ID card would cease to function within minutes.

• 28:42Speaker 03

  Right, but imagine if they did for 18 months. They chased black students across campus. They said they should be hanged. They said that all of their people should be killed. That instead of Jewish students being screened out at Princeton and Yale and elsewhere, being told to go back to Poland, that some white supremacist thugs who had moved into America on visas went around saying that all black Americans should go back to Africa or something equally vile. You think it would have taken 18 months? You think all these people would have been allowed to do it?

• 29:17Speaker 03

  You think black Americans or white Americans or anyone else would have put up with this crap? Why is it that a movement that is supporting a death cult that seeks by its own description the genocide of the Jewish people should be regarded with such equanimity and indeed support? This is a question that the governments of universities across America should at some point be asked to answer. Because my God, they failed to date.

• 29:51Brian Keating?

  You've spoken so eloquently about, you know, what I, what I think is, is the true kind of misplaced empathy, perhaps. And that's, you know, I think you've called it the moral high ground of corpses. You know, the body count is what determines morality. And in no other conflict do we look at that. And of course, you know, comic Dave Smith can invoke, you know, dead babies. And it's, it's, it's the equivalent of, you know, for sunshine and puppies, and why are you, you know, for murder and execution. I mean, you couldn't do that with any other topic. But it seems like it is a sort of human shield on an intellectual or moral ground that they actually practice, as you point out in the book, everyone from

• 30:32Brian Keating?

  Hananiah himself, who posed, I remember him posing with his wife in the hospital, almost gleefully celebrating the death of his grandchildren. And I just thought, what kind of, again, what kind of monster, remember that biblical quote that we began with, it said, so that you and your generations shall choose blessing. Now, of course, they don't believe in the Torah. And you don't have to believe in the Torah. You're not a Jew unless I'm mistaken, and you're like me, Keating and Murray, you know, are the

• 30:59Speaker 03

  We haven't found any Jewish ancestry in the Murray household.

• 31:04Brian Keating?

  Well, no, but

• 31:06Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up require compatibility and availability varies 18 plus.

• 31:30Brian Keating?

  He's perfect, Douglas. No, I'm just kidding. But this reasoning based on this is pervasive. And I actually, I don't fault the students, Douglas, I have to say. I don't condemn the students for having opinions. I had, you know, I wouldn't say immoral opinions necessarily, but I don't believe that they believe that it's immoral necessarily. Some of them are are truly evil. I mean, that do wish death upon, not only, I mean, they get granular, Doug. It goes down to, you know, we don't, we think police, you know, should be, should be treated evil, you know, like individual members of the community, of the campus should be treated awfully and violently, perhaps. Of course, there's some immoral reprehensible people. But the faculty, I do consider, because they have a They should have wisdom. I mean, we never conflate knowledge and wisdom on this podcast.

• 32:15Brian Keating?

  But but at some level, if you've managed to to get so far in in your career, although, again, it could be, you know, a useless genius instead of a useful idiot, this phenomenon. But but they come off and they'll cite the the statistics. And then I'll point out, you know, we walk on campus here, and there's a land acknowledgement on almost every border of this two-square-mile campus. There's a land acknowledgement to the Kumite and the and the other Indian native tribes. And that's what we did to the Native Americans was horrendous. That's true. I don't see my faculty colleagues resigning over this. They they don't. They don't want to give back the property. They want to acknowledge it. And it seems to me cheap grace to sort of say, well, Israel is uniquely bad, so I'm going to pile all my approbrium on them. And

• 32:57Speaker 03

  Well, yes, but as you know, right in the book, In Non-Democracy and Death Cults, I I posit a rather obvious explanation for why that is and why what you've just mentioned is in fact connected to it, which is that I think that much of things we have seen in the West outside of Israel in the last eighteen months is projection on a colossal scale. That is, that people have been told that they are guilty. They, in modern America, are guilty of colonialism, white supremacy, apartheid, genocide, ethnic cleansing.

• 33:33Brian Keating?

  Transphobia.

• 33:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, Hamas are enormously bothered by the transphobia, but they have a they have a pretty strict view on the whole LGBT thing. But but let's just park that for a moment. What is interesting about the lies that have been told about Israel, which I dismantle one by one in the book. But what is interesting about the lies that people have been telling about Israel is that they are exactly the things that I described in my last book, In the War on the West, that were being claimed about people being born in 21st century America. And I said in The War on the West, it is so dangerous to teach people that they, by dint of being born in the United States of America in 21st century, late 21st century,

• 34:19Speaker 03

  should be deemed to be guilty of crimes that occurred centuries before they were born. And I said, one of the reasons why this was dangerous was because, and I leaned on Hannah Arendt's thought for this point. It sets up a system which is unresolvable. Because if you have not done the thing, then there is, and, and no one is alive who has suffered the thing. Then you are being asked to feel a guilt that is unresolvable and permanent. And I said in The War on the West that we would see what happened if this wasn't unlocked, if we didn't stop telling people

• 35:00Speaker 03

  that an American living in California in the 21st century is living on stolen land. One of the consequences we've seen earlier than I thought, actually, when I wrote The War on the West. One of the things I thought, what has happened earlier than I thought has been that people have now, large numbers of people, particularly dolts on universities, and I, I don't think useless geniuses is a a suitable term for us, I think useless idiots is the

• 35:30Speaker 03

  but, but one of the things we've seen is that them projecting what they have been told that they're guilty of onto the state of Israel. So Israel is the country that they accuse of doing all of these things. And you cannot tell me that the vast, vast petrol that has, the diesel that has fueled this movement in the last 18 months has not insignificant part come from that fact that if you had this unresolvable guilt the last 18 months, you have a way to alleviate it. Finally, you can accuse a state you do not know or understand of precisely the sins that you have been told that you are guilty of.

• 36:10Speaker 03

  And then you can help expiate those sins by trying to bring down and destroy the country that you can accuse of being guilty of them in the here and now. And I have a lot of news for the people who've been living under that guise of psychological projection. The, the first is that they are wrong on everything, facts wise. The second thing is that they are wrong morally. In, in every way, what they are trying to do is morally, morally repugnant. But the other thing is, guess what? The Jewish state does not exist in order for you in the rest of the West to expiate your own psychological problems.

• 36:53Speaker 03

  If you have daddy issues, then don't take them out on the state of Israel or any other state. If you have mommy issues, don't take them out on the Jewish state. If you have deep psychological problems and you are very unhappy with your life and you're not being very well educated and you're getting heavily into debt to become more malevolent and stupid, then don't think you're going to get time off in order or because of your desire to attack Israel and lie about it and defame it. It's utterly preposterous and I think that the, as I've said for many years in different contexts, the absence of adults in the room has made this infinitely more appalling than it would have been already.

• 37:38Speaker 03

  So few adults on the faculties, on councils of various universities have actually even bothered to stand up and say, what the hell do you think you're doing? Or they did.

• 37:50Speaker 00

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• 38:14Brian Keating?

  They did, they're doing it too late. Yeah, I mean, what you're saying is so resonant. You may not know, or maybe you do, you're so erudite about all things, but in particular about things in Israel and things of Jewish relationship. But the holiest day on the calendar is of course Yom Kippur, and it's a day of atonement. But the atonement that day is to God, it's not to man. And the point is that because you can expiate your sins to God one day of the year, when he's receptive to it, I mean, we can get into Kabbalah some other time when we are in person again, but, but the, the point is, you could always confess your sins and vow not to do it again to your fellow man, he's right next to you. So the fact that you don't do it, that you don't resign, because we took the kumi ay

• 38:58Brian Keating?

  off of this land that I'm sitting on, you know, right now on campus, because you're not willing to do that, you're a fraud, and you're a charlatan, and it's a performative thing that really serves you, and that's the worst type of atonement, one that's done for self-assuagement, but not to really make anything better with your fellow man who you've wronged egregiously by your own admission. But I, I do, I do think that's so resonant and brilliant that you made that point, that it's sort of a transference, and, and along with the projections that you mentioned in the book, they accused Israel of committing a Holocaust, they accuse Israel of colonialism. These are the most colonial, these are the most genocidal, these are the most, you know, awful, I mean, Iran, it's incredible, the proxies that they have colonized to the destruction of these places.

• 39:40Brian Keating?

  I mean, I have good friends that grew up in Lebanon and, and elsewhere, but-

• 39:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, what they've done to that country is unbelievable.

• 39:46Brian Keating?

  And, and it had the promise, and so does Gaza, and so, you know, could have been, as, as many hoped, the Singapore, but I think, you know, but for the values, and, and I think, I do want to pivot, just because I know your time is, is short, I can't resist, you know, talking about science with you, but there is also, as you wrote about in The War in the West, you know, the, the, I always joke that the, the pinnacle of Western civilization is general relativity, but because, really, to describe, if I were to teach you general relativity, I mean, I know you probably already know it, but our mutual friend Eric Weinstein who's visiting, if, if we were to teach you, it would involve a lot of metaphors, analogies, history, and the, the culture that brought that to, to bear, it's not really a coincidence that it did happen to occur in the West, and that tradition is, of course, under attack.

• 40:31Brian Keating?

  But at the same time, I was always naive, and, and in a sense, that science would be free of this, you know, free of the dictating of ideology to dictate truth, and of course, you know, Lysenkoism and other things has happened, but it hasn't happened here. But, but even in your native country, with your native son, Isaac Newton, who Einstein said about Isaac Newton, and Einstein was an egomaniac, you know, par excellence, he said Isaac Newton contributed more, not just to math, physics, you know, alchemy and religion. By the way, do you know what Newton claimed his greatest feat was, Douglas?

• 41:06Speaker 03

  Was it theological works?

• 41:07Brian Keating?

  It was, well, his greatest accomplishment, he claimed, was that he died like his hero, Jesus Christ, a virgin. Because that was the only way he could emulate Jesus. And in fact, it was a form of imposter syndrome that he always had, that he couldn't live up to Isaac Newton. That was the only way he could. But Einstein had-

• 41:23Speaker 03

  He knew that he could live up to Jesus, yes.

• 41:25Brian Keating?

  Yes, so a few can, right? But Einstein said about Newton that he was the greatest, you know, force of good, not just in science, but in Western civilization. Can you talk about the inextricable linking between science progress and Western, and in general, human civilization? And what threat they may still be under to this very day?

• 41:49Speaker 03

  Well, it's very interesting, you know far more about this than me, but my observation has been that for some years, the cathedral of knowledge in a number of subjects started to decay and was then forcibly pushed down by relativists, opponents, competitors, and much more. And that this was done through a set of theories and sub-theories. But that STEM was expected to be immune from this. For instance, a critical theory would bother the English literature department,

• 42:31Speaker 03

  or the French literature departments, or the history departments, geography departments. But that it would leave STEM alone. And I think that, again, I charted some of this in The War on the West, and as well as in The Madness of Crowds, that to the great concern of people in STEM, as well as those of us not, the realization this could even go there was a pretty horrifying one. Because of course, many things in humanities are not provable in the same way that physics or math is provable. There is a different standard of test in the scientific method.

• 43:13Speaker 03

  And the interesting thing in recent years has been watching even that come under assault. So that we have things like other ways of knowing. Which is, I wrote about this in The War on the West. The absurdity of things like equitable math. Where it is pretended that there are other systems of knowing. And that the Western scientific method is just, just one of them. And of course, like a number of other things I read about in that book. I- i- it's an incredibly ignorant claim that, that, that, that is being made.

• 43:54Speaker 03

  But it's essentially is, again, another example of the politicizing of everything. The decision that, you know, racial politics or gay the sort of spawn of queer and gender theory should be applied everywhere, despite it not solving anything anywhere. But that it should also be applied to scientific methods and so on. And what it has ended up with is a number of things. One is ignoring of the fact that the reason why the scienti- the Western scientific method works. I- i- why it has been popular. Why it is still learned and taught around the world.

• 44:34Speaker 03

  Is not because it's Western, or it was come up with by white men, or, or that worst of all things, dead white men. It's, it's there and it's taught because it works. There is, as I, I said rather provocatively in that book, but there is a there is a reason why, you know, when somebody has cancer. When they say they're going for alternative medicine. You know it's very nearly the end.

• 45:03Brian Keating?

  Steve Jobs right now.

• 45:05Speaker 03

  Right, because Western medicine is the best chance you've got. Again, not because it's from the West, not because dead white men and dead white women were involved in creating it, but but that this is the best chance we've got at the moment. And everybody knows, at the moment, you say, I'm, I'm gonna do some Chinese holistic medicine. You know, got wings to lift.

• 45:30Speaker 03

  But, and we also know this because if we seek a vaccine, for instance.

• 45:37Speaker 03

  We go through the Western scientific method to find it. Nobody said, when the world was searching for a vaccine for the COVID-19 virus, nobody said, "Look, let's see what the..." I mean, again, this is going to offend some people, but it's just fact. Nobody said, "Let's go and see what the Aboriginals are doing with their medicine in Australia and see if there's something we can learn."

• 46:06Brian Keating?

  Or the converse being true, why don't they teach critical gender studies in the University of Lagos, which is a, which is a, you know, top university? And why do they teach 1 plus 1 equals 2 at the University of Lagos Mathematics Department? These are universal truths. So it seems to me if these critical theories were universally applicable, they would be taught in every country on earth, just like physics.

• 46:27Speaker 03

  And that is, everybody else is laughing at us for being so incredibly retarded.

• 46:32Brian Keating?

  That's right. I want to take a call back to the time that you and I've spent together in Florence, you know, not, not once, but twice. And, you know, we walked underneath Brnoleski's dome and wandered the halls of the Offizi and even dined in these sumptuous environments where-

• 46:49Speaker 03

  You make our life sound awfully nice.

• 46:52Brian Keating?

  Well, hopefully we'll be doing it more frequently coming up. But, but one, of course, very illiberal and anti-intellectual event happened not far from there. I didn't get a chance to take you there. That's, of course, Galileo's final resting place, which is in Archetri above the Arno, above Florence, right there. And his house, his, his final home is located there. And I've been there many times and had many great occasions. Of course, you bump your head, you're tall, and you'll bump your head in the doorways that are only five foot, four inches tall. But, but of course, he was confined. He wasn't tortured. I mean, it's a pretty sumptuous place. You know, Bernie Madoff or, or Sam Bankman-Fried would gladly trade, or Puff Daddy, trade their cells for, for Galileo's

• 47:33Brian Keating?

  olive orchard and so forth. But, but he was really kind of a dangerous individual that, that threatened the prevailing narrative, of course, all across parts of, of Western Europe. And so- He was saved in a sense. He published a dialogue and he was convicted of suspicion of heresy. Most people think he was convicted of heresy. No, no, it was only suspicion of heresy. And in fact, he was never really pardoned. Pope John Paul, who I love, he said that Galet was right, but they never really apologized to him. Are there such things as, you know, to steel man our adversaries, maybe intellectual adversaries? Are there types of suppression that are still going on? Perhaps it's for a good reason. I mean,

• 48:13Brian Keating?

  a pandemic, you know, is awfully a good reason to keep people safe. Will truth become punishable again? Will that, you know, possibly occur again as it did with COVID? You know, but I think we're still reckoning with that. What do you fear? And then I want to ask you another, you know, because I see you as the world's most optimistic pessimist or pessimistic optimist. I can't decide which one you are today. You're kind of the Schrodinger's cat of optimism. But tell me, after we get to this, you know, this first question I have, whether or not truth can become punishable, I do want to ask you what gives you hope. But first, do you fear for the scientific method as being weaponized, abused, probably used to control and hold people in contempt? Or is that a relic of the bad part of Western

• 48:58Brian Keating?

  culture, which is, you know, thankfully behind us in that sense?

• 49:00Speaker 03

  I don't believe in endless progress. I mean, I'd like to, I just don't observe that it's inevitable. I think there are too many cases around the world of countries and societies reverting to terrible, terrible things. The country of Iran is a very obvious example. I have many friends who grew up before the 1979 revolution who went backwards. So everything is possible. That's something I think people should just keep in mind a lot more. Progress is not the perpetual inevitable state of mankind. Yes, we can always repeat mistakes and our capacity as human beings to do so is awesome and made all the worse

• 49:43Speaker 03

  by the fact that you can make a mistake again, even under the guise of believing that you're avoiding that mistake. I believe it's perfectly possible we could be in a period where scientific methods, scientific progress are squelched. I think that one of the most deleterious aspects of the last five or six years has been the way in which during the pandemic, the

• 50:11Speaker 03

  The errors made by parts of the medical community and politicians and others meant that the last cathedral that had been pretty much unassailed was finally up for grabs as well. So for instance, you know, I think I may have said to you before in private, you know, if the politicians in 2020 had said to the citizenry of their countries, you've got to stay in your houses and not leave. The media wants you to. If the politicians had said you must, because all of us politicians want you to.

• 50:43Speaker 03

  If you said the professors insist you all remain housebound, we just said, ah, well, you know. If you say the science says, the scientists say, then that's persuasive. I think that the errors that were made then, which I by no means was on top of, is not my area. And I didn't want to opine on very much of it for that reason. But I think that watching the cathedral of science suffer the blow because of specific mistakes and the air of greater general skepticism coming up has meant that, yes, that we are in a potential boom time for conspiracy theories, for claims without evidence, for claims of expertise

• 51:25Speaker 03

  from people who have no expertise, because, well, who cares about experts? Because, you know, look how they got the pandemic wrong and so on. I think we're ripe for that, absolutely.

• 51:38Brian Keating?

  Do you think that there is, because there is sort of this supernatural, you know, expectation of science, though, that there is hope, there is rehabilitation, redemption is possible? Yeah. So how will that be manifested?

• 51:53Speaker 03

  It will not be done by government edict and it will not be done by bureaucratic insistence. It'll be done by extraordinary individuals, which is the history of science, as with all history. History is made by extraordinary men and women doing extraordinary things. That's it.

• 52:08Brian Keating?

  Let me ask.

• 52:10Speaker 00

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• 52:34Brian Keating?

  One final question. You started your book tour for this wonderful book. It's a difficult book. It's not, especially the audiobook, which you narrate so lovely. It's very difficult. I mean, it literally brings tears to one's eyes if one has a shred of sensitivity. And even Jew or not Jew, obviously, just humanity, a shred of humanity. When we look out, you know, kind of on the, on the broad future, will we ever have, you know, sort of an opportunity, as I said at the beginning, I felt there was an opportunity when I was there on September 7, 2023, but that was heavily biased by the fact I was meeting Israeli Arabs, Druze, you know, taxi drivers and, and having meals at, you know, Ethiopian

• 53:15Brian Keating?

  restaurants where, you know, half the workers in Jaffa were from, you know, or Arabs that were Israeli citizens, you know, full citizen. And I thought, oh, you know, they want peace, we want peace. And they're very different than me, but there was something, you know, positive to come. I, I feel like this is, you know, you're the astronomer royal of, of the UK, Lord Martin Rees, who I've had on many times. He's got the best job in the world. He gets to tell King Charles his horoscope every day. What Lord Martin said is, you know, falsifiability gets a little bit too much, you know, of a sway in science, you know, because we talk about that as the sine qua non of science, because he'll, he'll say things that are, you know, he could say very easily things that could be true or could be false easily. He would say the stock market will fluctuate, or there will

• 53:57Brian Keating?

  be turmoil in the Middle East. You know, it's kind of this perpetual motion machine. Do you see there ever being an opportunity, especially given what we've seen the last 18 months, that there could be a resolution, that we could be living amongst each other in peace, or the, the citizens of those, those countries could be living together in peace? Or is this one of these extremely intractable theories of everything that may never succumb to the human mind or, or human progress?

• 54:25Speaker 03

  Well, I don't think that anything much gets resolved if the Palestinians get another state. I think it'll be, I mean, even lifelong supporters of the Palestinian cause take this view now that at best, it'll be another failed state, most likely just another proxy state for the Iranian revolutionary government. I think that Hamas killed the two-state solution on October 7th, 2023. And there's nothing magical that will happen either for the Palestinian people or indeed for the wider region if Palestinians do get another state. I just, I, I think that the people who think that somehow every injustice on earth is going to unlock once that issue is dealt with are completely deluded and simply don't understand the region and don't understand the world.

• 55:07Speaker 03

  And the idea that anything else will get better outside the region or within with that being solved, I think is just now is, is, is a myth. It's a sort of form of magical thinking. It's a form of modern political alchemy. I think that's regrettable, but that's what it is. As it happens in the region, there are lots of things that are going well and there are lots of normalization agreements that have occurred in the last decade and will occur in the next few years. And that's great. There is still the issue of Palestinians in Gaza and in Judea and Samaria. And we'll see in Judea and Samaria, they basically have a state, they PA runs the Palestinian areas of the West Bank.

• 55:52Speaker 03

  And but no, I don't believe anything magical or, or very important happens. I, I think that the people who think it would, they should apply themselves to another international conflict and see if it would work out that way. I mean, you know, as I've said a lot in recent weeks, the government of Turkey that constantly accuses the Israelis of being occupiers, currently occupies the northern half of Cyprus and has done for half a century. The fact that half of an EU member state is occupied by a NATO member country is to me an extraordinary, appalling thing. But if people, if people with this magical thinking want to apply it elsewhere, let them do it there.

• 56:33Speaker 03

  Let them see if, if they holler and campaign and cry and attack and insult and chase people relating to the Turkish occupation of northern Cyprus, which is ongoing, where nobody seems to see any resolution to. They want to occupy themselves with that, apply their pressure to that and just see if you solve anything, if you solve anything. Because my suspicion is you'll solve exactly nothing, nothing at all.

• 57:03Speaker 03

  And you will learn in that process that the magical alchemy-like thinking you've been engaging in in relation to Israel is equally worthless and pointless, not just for the people of Israel, but for the Palestinians in the wider Arab world. I wish those people had any ability to be self-reflective, but I don't see it.

• 57:26Brian Keating?

  Douglas, with your forbearance, one final question. The podcast is named after a famous quote by your countrymen again, Sir Arthur C. Clarke, who said that "The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible." He said many things I like to drop on my colleagues from now on, then like, for every expert, there's an equal and opposite expert. I like to lay that on my department chair. I want to ask you, in the context of that statement, what would you tell, you know, a 20-year-old Douglas Murray, to give him the courage in a 20-second meetup that you might have with him, your 20-year-old self, what would you tell him to give him this incredibly beautiful, delicate gift that you so almost uniquely have, unfortunately,

• 58:10Brian Keating?

  it's very rare, of courage, to give him the courage to do as you've done, to go into the impossible?

• 58:15Speaker 03

  I advise him to do what I've tried to do, actually, which is, I've spent a lot of my life, perhaps unwittingly, surrounding myself with befriending, getting near to people I think are courageous. And I find that it's a good piece of advice for anyone young, let alone my younger self, is to say, just, you know, go towards courageous people, people you see as courageous, in whatever way. They might be academically courageous, they might be scientifically courageous, they might be explorers who are courageous, they might be-

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• 59:47Speaker 03

  ... who are courageous, for any imaginable number of disciplines, but orient yourself towards courageous people because you'll hope some of it rubs off. I think that I get enormous, I say this in this book, I say this on Democracies and Death Cults, that the encouragement that you can get yourself by being in the proximity of heroes, real heroes, deserving heroes, is tremendous. And it's been one of the great honors of my life. It's not been by accident, though. It's been by a form of design. And I urge young people to do that. Don't orient yourself towards the victim and how people who want to be the biggest loser and the biggest victim and someone. Don't do that. Don't waste your

• 1:00:32Speaker 03

  time with those people. Get past them. Get on to what you're meant to be doing.

• 1:00:35Brian Keating?

  Well, Douglas, until we meet again in Florence or elsewhere and enjoy a glass of grappa. It's been a pleasure. It's an honor to know you and consider you an influence on me. And I very much appreciate this book and all your writings and your work. And please, from strength to strength, as we say, kol ha'kavod, all the credit to you, Douglas.

• 1:00:53Speaker 03

  Thank you, Brian.