Why Do Western People Hate Themselves? - Douglas Murray

Douglas Murray is a journalist, author and associate editor of The Spectator. The last few years has seen a dramatic rise of anti-Westernism. But surprisingly, the sentiment hasn't come from overseas, the strongest anti-Western sentiment has come from the West itself. Whether it's demands for reparations, calls for the abolishment of white people, tearing down of statues or the rewriting of history, something is going on. Expect to learn why Dumbledore can't be gay in China, why BLM bought a 6 million dollar mansion, what Douglas thinks about Libs Of TikTok being doxxed, why anti-white racism sounds so disgusting when you change the wording, why there's more slaves alive now than at any time in history but no one cares, Douglas' personal philosophy around working hard and much more... Sponsors: Join the Modern Wisdom Community to connect with me & other listeners - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Get 30% discount on your at-home testosterone test at https://trylgc.com/modern (use code: MODERN30) Get 10% discount on your first month from BetterHelp at https://betterhelp.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and Free Shipping from Athletic Greens at https://athleticgreens.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Buy The War On The West - https://amzn.to/3xQw7Kg Follow Douglas on Twitter - https://twitter.com/DouglasKMurray Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #douglasmurray #thewaronthewest #westernism - 00:00 Intro 00:52 Dumbledore Can't Be Gay In China 07:21 Douglas' Gay Privilege Card 11:24 Libs of TikTok Doxxed 19:17 The War on the West 33:23 The Second Worst Book Ever 41:25 The History Of Slave Trades 47:22 Why Revise History? 52:38 Winston Churchill vs Karl Marx 1:02:17 The Root of Anti-Westernism 1:13:22 BLM’s 6-Million Dollar Mansion 1:21:22 White Supremacists 1:28:33 Trends Towards Conspiratorial Thinking 1:37:11 What Drives Douglas? 1:51:32 Trusting Your Instincts 1:55:44 Choose Your Regrets 2:10:39 Where to Find Douglas - Join the Modern Wisdom Community on Locals - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Listen to all episodes on audio: Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

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

• 0:00Douglas Murray?

  If you said, there is no good form of blackness, none, and don't ever try to stop being black because you can't, you can't get out of it, we'd go, wow, that's a racist. That's a big racist right there. Well, it's racist when they do it about white people as well.

• 0:18Chris Williamson?

  Douglas Murray, welcome to the show.

• 0:20Douglas Murray?

  Great to be with you and great to be with you in person for the first time.

• 0:23Chris Williamson?

  It's been too long since you've been on the show, but this is our first time in person.

• 0:27Douglas Murray?

  When was I last on?

• 0:28Chris Williamson?

  Two years ago-ish paperback of Madness of Crowds.

• 0:31Douglas Murray?

  That's right. And the world's only got better.

• 0:33Chris Williamson?

  Oh, it's so much better. So we've got a couple of hours today and hopefully we'll go through some stuff that maybe you haven't spoken about before at the end. But first, there is some more pressing news. As you are aware, Dumbledore is a proud member of the LGBT community, but as you may not be aware, he is not allowed to be his true self in China. Did you see this?

• 0:57Douglas Murray?

  No.

• 0:58Chris Williamson?

  Let me tell you about this.

• 1:00Douglas Murray?

  I mean, Dumbledore kept coming out. He came out more times than Sam Smith.

• 1:05Chris Williamson?

  So, "References to a gay relationship were edited out of Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore by Warner Brothers for the film's release in China. As a studio, we're committed to safeguarding the integrity of every film we release, and that extends to the circumstances that necessitate making nuanced cuts in order to respond sensitively to a variety of in-market factors," Warner Brothers said in a statement to Variety. "Our hope is to release the features worldwide as released by their creators, but historically, we have faced small edits made in local markets."

• 1:38Douglas Murray?

  How gay was Dumbledore?

• 1:40Chris Williamson?

  Six seconds of dialogue.

• 1:43Douglas Murray?

  What is it like? It's dialogue?

• 1:45Chris Williamson?

  It's dialogue.

• 1:46Douglas Murray?

  Oh, it's dialogue, not actual.

• 1:47Chris Williamson?

  It's not a full frontal scene. Come on, it's a film for children. But my point is that he said something to this guy about how I used to love you or something like that, and it's been cut.

• 1:58Douglas Murray?

  Wasn't it? Now, we saw Harry Potter on stage in New York with Jordan and Tammie Peterson only a couple of months ago. And if I remember rightly, there was some very slight allusion to gayness there.

• 2:12Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, the whole thing was homoerotic.

• 2:15Douglas Murray?

  I wouldn't agree with you there. I thought there were lots of it. It was just charming. But the, no, there was some reference to it. Didn't, because I mean, we don't, I know this is potterology, but I thought J K Rowling only said that Dumbledore was gay long after the whole franchise had been done.

• 2:33Chris Williamson?

  Two thousand and nine, she posthumously brought Dumbledore out.

• 2:36Douglas Murray?

  Posthumously out it.

• 2:39Douglas Murray?

  Yeah. So Richard Harry's, it died, of course, had no idea he was playing a gay character.

• 2:43Chris Williamson?

  Now, which would have probably influenced the role.

• 2:45Douglas Murray?

  Massively changed the.

• 2:46Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, the point just being that Hollywood, Hollywood to Florida is we say gay.

• 2:53Douglas Murray?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:54Chris Williamson?

  Hollywood to China is we'll say whatever you want. Please take our money.

• 2:58Douglas Murray?

  Beautiful, isn't it?

• 2:59Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:59Douglas Murray?

  Beautiful. Well, I mean, I just have unending contempt for these people, as you probably guessed. And the contempt is based on a lot of things, but one is the way in which these sorts of entertainment haunt shows and so on, always. They're just, their idea of bravery is poking at empty hornets' nests. And whenever they find a real hornet's nest, they just run a million miles. And that's why they're perfectly willing to weirdly melt down over Florida and DeSantis and Bill, which is totally reasonable in my view, to not like tell three year olds

• 3:39Douglas Murray?

  that they might wake up the next morning in a different sex. Like that's, I don't think there's anything wrong with not teaching kindergarteners crazy hundred gender two spirit ideology, which was come up with about yesterday and which they're still trying to work on to make, make any sense at all, which it never will. It's, it's just completely typical. The same people who have a meltdown about that happening and attack Florida will be totally silent when the Communist Party of China expects different roles. That's, that's one of the ways in which the 21st century could go, you know? There's, of course, of course, we don't want to take you, so.

• 4:19Chris Williamson?

  Did you see that a trans author wrote a horror novel in which J K Rowling is burned alive by a trans woman?

• 4:27Douglas Murray?

  I didn't.

• 4:27Chris Williamson?

  But you're missing out on everything.

• 4:29Douglas Murray?

  And I haven't even read that book. It sounds like nobody has.

• 4:32Chris Williamson?

  I don't know, I don't know anymore. I don't know if it's yet to come out. But what I do know is that The Secrets of Dumbledore had a $9.7 million first weekend in China, which meant that two out of every three people at the cinema was going to see that film in China. Just tighten this in a little bit for me.

• 4:51Douglas Murray?

  That's, that's, well.

• 4:56Douglas Murray?

  The rules are different there, aren't they? And the cynical corporations realize that. And none of it surprises me at all.

• 5:07Douglas Murray?

  This is how Hollywood and other companies operate. As I say, they, they, they pretend to be very, very brave. They give each other rewards for bravery. They, they meet up and slap each other on the back for bravery. They talk about human rights in Florida and lots of things like that. And then they, just of course they do this in China. It's like Ricky Gervais said in the Golden Globes the other, the other year, you know, is ISIS set up a streaming service, these people would run to it, you know? I mean, of course they would. It'd work for them if the cash came in. I mean, look at all these companies, Apple, they're all such damn cynics. They all know how to play this sort of virtue signaling thing in America and totally different rules abroad. It's always been like that. It's always been like that.

• 5:52Douglas Murray?

  But I, I am slightly amused still by this meltdown about the Texas thing. Did you see Jen Psaki the other day?

• 5:57Chris Williamson?

  She cried.

• 5:58Douglas Murray?

  She cried.

• 6:00Douglas Murray?

  She said, I'm just become very emotional about what's happening in Florida because people are mean. You go, well, I mean, I don't know. I mean, maybe she's just trying to make sure her job at MSNBC is secure. Because if you express that amount of sentimentality and stupidity, then you're almost certain to keep a job at MSNBC.

• 6:18Chris Williamson?

  She could have got a Golden Globe for the performance. It was very. Do you think she believes it?

• 6:22Douglas Murray?

  I don't know. I, I think if people wind themselves up about this stuff, they wind themselves up about issues that are, that are just not relevant, just.

• 6:31Chris Williamson?

  The line between persona, performance and identity kind of begins to get blurred.

• 6:36Douglas Murray?

  I mean, Psaki is obviously, White House Press Spokesperson is obviously, she's a smart woman.

• 6:43Douglas Murray?

  She must know that the Florida bill in question doesn't say what she's pretending it says, isn't going to do what she's pretending it'll do. She must know that. I mean, she's not stupid. Very stupid people who aren't informed might believe that actually Governor Ron DeSantis has decided that you're not allowed to say the word gay in Florida. But I don't believe that somebody who's well informed could think that. So they whip themselves up on things that don't hurt them, you know? Have you ever used your gay privilege card?

• 7:14Douglas Murray?

  Well, on other gay men, probably.

• 7:18Douglas Murray?

  I mean, I just. How much do you want to know?

• 7:22Douglas Murray?

  It's kind of an intrusive question. What do you mean? Is there not some sort of privilege? It's like a free extra shot at Starbucks or whatever. What do you get? Never, no, never that. I think I know what you're getting at, as it were. Are there things I'm able to say and do that a straight person wouldn't? Yes. No, that would be the case if I was very left wing or remotely left wing, for sure. But since I'm, I've not got the correct views. So you're basically straight? I'm an honorary straight, if not worse. I'm even worse than a heterosexual. It's

• 8:04Douglas Murray?

  that bad, Chris. It's that disgusting and reprehensible that my views have ungayed me and I don't have a minority card. That is actually the case. It honestly is. It's the same with women. Right wing women are not really women. They have their woman card taken away. Anyone who's right wing and gay isn't actually gay. They have their gay card taken away and so on. And I just, occasionally I hear people saying, oh, well, Douglass only gets away with saying, I don't know, if he's saying he's gay. And I think they don't really understand that's not the case. I say what I think and I defend it. Pretty vigorously, I think, usually.

• 8:45Douglas Murray?

  And I've never felt that I've had any extra leeway because I happen to be gay. Partly because it's something I don't talk about very much. Because I don't think it's very interesting. And I don't want to bang on about how interesting things. But but also because I just I don't believe in. I may have said this to you before in private and in public, but I don't believe in the speaking as a prefix. I mean, I just don't believe in that. And even before I could identify what I didn't like about it, I didn't like it. I didn't like the sort of person who stood up and say. So my parents were from Peru and Honduras and I am a bisexual. I don't care. Get to the point.

• 9:30Douglas Murray?

  You know, doesn't matter to me. Stop it. And people only ever did it if they had traits that they thought meant that they should grab the microphone.

• 9:42Chris Williamson?

  Is there not some validity to the experience that everybody has, which gives them a unique perspective on the world?

• 9:48Douglas Murray?

  Yeah, but that's endless. But everyone has that. Everyone's got a unique perspective. God damn it. I mean, every person in the world has a unique perspective. Identical twins each have unique perspectives from each other. That's not a very interesting observation. I mean, it's we all have a unique perspective now. Now, is a person who has been oppressed in some way, have they got a particularly interesting perspective? Well, on their oppression, sure, and on subjects relating to it, but not on anything else.

• 10:21Chris Williamson?

  So I shouldn't take your advice on accounting or macroeconomics or something?

• 10:26Douglas Murray?

  Definitely not. Whoa, run a million miles and I'm trying to give you financial advice.

• 10:31Chris Williamson?

  Speaking as a gay man.

• 10:32Douglas Murray?

  Yeah, speaking as a gay man, you need to invest in ISIS. I mean, no, it's it's just all that sort of ridiculous validity seeking. I'm not in favor of. But no, I suppose there are some people who think that I get away with saying certain of the things I do about highly contentious issues for some. They try to find some reason for it. But it's definitely not because of the fact I happen to be gay, because they say in my own experience, it's never been anything I've benefited from. Career wise, certainly hasn't. Occasionally, it's been something I've suffered for in a certain to a certain extent. Well, I don't really like to think in those terms. I certainly don't like to moan. Which makes me an unusual figure in this era, of course.

• 11:14Chris Williamson?

  Did you see that the libs of TikTok creator got doxxed by Taylor Lorenz?

• 11:19Douglas Murray?

  Oh, yeah, so disgusting. I loved libs of TikTok. I mean, we wouldn't know about these maniacs. I think otherwise, and I wouldn't sit on TikTok watching what a teacher from Minnesota was saying about, you know, their gender pronouns. Otherwise, there's not quite enough time in the day. And and so libs of TikTok did a great service.

• 11:40Douglas Murray?

  And yeah, Taylor Lorenz of the Washington Post, that's just such disgusting baby.

• 11:45Chris Williamson?

  Long article. Do you read it?

• 11:47Douglas Murray?

  No, I didn't read the whole article.

• 11:48Chris Williamson?

  Long article, serious.

• 11:50Douglas Murray?

  Yeah, I wish they'd have looked at Hunter Biden's laptop story at similar length.

• 11:56Douglas Murray?

  I mean, corruption in the first family would strike me as being a much more interesting subject than who runs libs of TikTok. But then, you know, Washington Post had its own priorities.

• 12:08Chris Williamson?

  But Taylor Lorenz is someone who broke down crying on MSNBC not long ago, talking about online harassment.

• 12:15Douglas Murray?

  Yeah, all these people are bullies who, whenever they've finished bullying people, pretend to be a victim. Whenever they get caught out, they cry.

• 12:27Douglas Murray?

  The Kathy Newman phenomenon, you know, bully somebody. And then, when you're caught out behaving badly, present yourself as a victim. Nice, nice turnaround there. Very, very common. So I think it was Julie Burch who coined the term crybullies for these people. Crybullies is a great term for our era.

• 12:46Chris Williamson?

  What do you mean by that?

• 12:47Douglas Murray?

  Crybullies are people who who go around bullying everyone. And then, when they're caught or in any way criticized, cry.

• 12:55Douglas Murray?

  Just immediately turn themselves into the victim. Everyone knows this from children. I mean, there's a certain type of child who does that. And they should be slapped or, you know, in a country, you're allowed to slap a child. Or, you know, otherwise, you know, disciplined to not behave like that.

• 13:11Douglas Murray?

  You know, these are sort of grown up Eric Cartmans, and maybe not even grown up. They're sort of Eric Cartman like figures. They're horrible bullies and nasty people who, when it's not going for them, go wah wah.

• 13:23Chris Williamson?

  What do you think is the problem with libs of TikTok as a as a channel? Is it because it's just bringing attention to things that the left would rather people not see?

• 13:31Douglas Murray?

  Well, it's not that it's just left and it's just, it's just, this is what. I mean, I don't look at TikTok. And by the way, I think it's a highly unstable platform and obviously it's Chinese Communist Party direct.

• 13:45Chris Williamson?

  Brainwashing us slowly, one video at a time, yeah.

• 13:47Douglas Murray?

  All those things. And so, so yeah, obviously, you know, these teachers and others who say these ridiculous outlandish, there was one who even said she was a witch. Did you see that one?

• 13:59Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 14:00Douglas Murray?

  There were some teachers like, you know, I'm a witch and I tell the students and they had questions and that was, that was fine, that's like, make it a bit harder for us. I mean, you know, to actually say, I also practice witchcraft or something, it's probably as being, no.

• 14:16Chris Williamson?

  It seems to me like it's a warning shot to any future potential people that would consider doing the same sort of thing.

• 14:23Douglas Murray?

  Yeah.

• 14:24Chris Williamson?

  Because, you know, someone posts something on TikTok, you're not not doing it to get attention.

• 14:28Douglas Murray?

  Yeah.

• 14:28Chris Williamson?

  Like, the, the whole reason that you're doing it is to get attention, but maybe not by six hundred thousand people on a Twitter account.

• 14:36Douglas Murray?

  Yeah, they don't, they want to be famous, they don't want to be infamous. And once something highlights it to a group they would never have got to otherwise, who don't see it favorably, it becomes a different thing, of course. I mean, it's a form of that, that thing in the era, the context collapse phenomenon that occurs with social media all the time, you know, context collapse being when an outgroup discovers an in-group's discussion and doesn't view it.

• 15:07Chris Williamson?

  What's an example of that?

• 15:08Douglas Murray?

  Oh, banter between friends on texts, for instance, where a group of guys banter about stuff and including bad taste stuff, joking about girls or whatever, somebody leaks it and an outgroup discovers it and thinks how disgusting the way these men talk about women.

• 15:30Chris Williamson?

  Durham University got popped for this a couple of years ago.

• 15:33Douglas Murray?

  Uh, for, there's, I mean, people are sort of wise up and happily, yeah, right, rugby teams quite often, you know, get done over for it. Uh, some, an outgroup discovers an in-group discussion and, you know, it's understandable that, that, that that happens in our era because everybody has access to the click of a few buttons to expose an in-group's discussion. And it's really hard sometimes to discover what the context would be of a particular discussion. So I mean, that is something that goes on all the time at the moment. But but libs of TikTok is simply exposing what an in group was hoping to be able to say to itself. And it's been discovered by an out group. But the out group really

• 16:15Douglas Murray?

  doesn't like it because it's teachers, you know, and things like that. It's like, if it's just we, I mean, there's that one person on libs of TikTok I've seen several times is totally deranged individual, a man who dresses as a woman and says he's trans and I had lipstick and like a hairy chest and like says, you know, he can't understand why people don't think he's a woman and call him sir and things, you know, I guess it's a fact you got a hairy chest and yeah, like a dude. That's the problem, I'd have thought, you know. And but this this particular guy, he's like comes back repeatedly, like on one of them, he's like, you will respect us. You will respect us. And you go, I don't

• 16:58Douglas Murray?

  want that person anywhere near members of the public. It's really interesting to discover those people. But but it's just but what the Washington Post did was was was basically a punishment beating on the woman who runs libs of TikTok. It's a punishment beating and a warning to others.

• 17:16Chris Williamson?

  Well, the editor said that it was completely in line with the journalistic standards at the Washington Post.

• 17:21Douglas Murray?

  Well, that's true.

• 17:22Chris Williamson?

  But they amended the article to remove her real estate license.

• 17:28Douglas Murray?

  Yes, that's right.

• 17:29Chris Williamson?

  Because that had doxxed her. Did you know that there's another online influencer with the same name as the person that founded libs of TikTok, who's that the fallout from this has been so hard that a person that isn't the person that runs it but has the same name has also been getting harassed online?

• 17:45Douglas Murray?

  Doesn't surprise me at all. It doesn't surprise me at all.

• 17:49Chris Williamson?

  Because Taylor Lorenz turned up at that lady's house.

• 17:50Douglas Murray?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 17:51Chris Williamson?

  There's a video, sorry, there's a photo of.

• 17:53Douglas Murray?

  Of her standing at the door.

• 17:54Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, through the sort of.

• 17:56Douglas Murray?

  She's just a really nasty piece of work.

• 17:58Chris Williamson?

  It seems like it's not the first thing that she's done. This is the first time I've been introduced to her.

• 18:02Douglas Murray?

  Lots of people in America in media knew about her, thought she was a kind of rogue, unpleasant, bad operator. And this has just proven that. I mean, I mean, of course, it's vile behavior. And as I say, I mean, there's so much that's important to write about in America, of all places. So many stories, such a rich environment for real investigative writing and journalism. And to be going and exposing the identities of citizens who are reposting things from TikTok would strike me as being a very strange journalistic priority. Um, but don't forget, truth dies in darkness.

• 18:44Douglas Murray?

  As the Washington Post tagline says, truth dies in darkness. So their view of themselves, the Washington Post, is that absolutely, our democracy would not run, the world might not be free unless they can dox Tik- lives of TikTok. So that's there.

• 19:04Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so new book.

• 19:06Douglas Murray?

  Indeed.

• 19:07Chris Williamson?

  War on the West, hiding a can of Diet Dr Pepper, who we both want to be sponsored by if there's a.

• 19:13Douglas Murray?

  If there's any chance of sponsoring Dr Pepper, Diet Dr Pepper, I would welcome it. It'll be my first sponsorship deal. I promise to carry it around all the time.

• 19:22Chris Williamson?

  We know that it's a legitimate love, but new book, very good. Congratulations. And you've put hard on it. How has the West been coaxed into hating itself?

• 19:35Douglas Murray?

  Oh, by all sorts of means. Um, but the first thing is just to have that it has, that. I call it the war on the West because it seems to me that that everything that's Western, everything that's of the West is in the process of being assaulted and insulted and demeaned and diminished. And the rest of the world does not put itself through this. Um, there are lots of forms of anti-Westernism which are foreign, you know, there's Russian anti-Western and there's Chinese anti-Westernism, Middle Eastern anti-Westernism. All of these are interesting, but the the most interesting one is um, Western anti-Westernism. And that's really what I'm writing about. The way in which the West has done itself over by demeaning and diminishing itself

• 20:20Douglas Murray?

  and attacking its own history, attacking its own heroes, bringing down its own heroes, destroying its own path, past, carrying out iconoclastic attacks on its heroes and founders.

• 20:32Douglas Murray?

  Um, insulting the majority population, the white population. So there is this strange war on white people in our day, which a lot of people even just hearing that phrase go, you know, worry, but it's absolutely the case. Racism in our day is rightly deemed to be totally impermissible in the public square with one exception, which is white people about whom you can say absolutely anything now. And people do, and I give remorseless number of examples in the book. I mean, if, if any group of people, if, if, if you took what is now said about white people in America, Britain and elsewhere, and said it about any other group, you would be regarded rightly as a racist. In

• 21:13Douglas Murray?

  several, a lot of countries, you'd be locked up for hate speech. But this is now not just normal rhetoric, but instilled and installed in every area of government, in countries, including Britain and the United States. It's instilled through the media, um, through academics, through the military, through absolutely every level of our societies. Uh, white people are seen as being a problem and a, and a problem for whom a remedy must be found. Now, of course, some of the maniacs who have been pushing this, like Robin D'Angelo, who herself is white and is, of course, the author of White Fragility, which sold about half a million copies after the death

• 21:56Douglas Murray?

  of George Floyd, um, says, there is no good form of being white. No good form of being white. And there's a rider. You also can't escape it. You can't escape it. So you can't like shift to another racial group. You can't identify as not being white if you're white. She doesn't know what it is. And I don't think anyone really does. It's a very weird category to even talk about people in these contexts, you know. But if you said that about any other group of people, if you said, there is no good form of blackness, none. And don't ever try to stop being black because you

• 22:41Douglas Murray?

  can't, you can't get out of it. We'd go, wow, that's a racist. That's a big racist right there.

• 22:50Douglas Murray?

  Well, it's racist when they do it about white people as well. Uh, the talk of white privilege has become a racist trope, quite clearly.

• 23:01Douglas Murray?

  Uh, the talk of white tears, white female tears, try that any other way, black tears, black female tears. Oh, she's just crying black tears. Oh, you'd say that's a, that's a racist. Uh, so it is when they say white tears. Well, that white rage, one of the ones that they've, um, in this attempt to pathologize being white, uh, they've come up with most recently, particularly in the wake of January the sixth, white rage. Uh, no less a figure than General Milley, the Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff in the US, testifying before Congress, uh, uh, addressed the issue of so-called white rage. Said, I want to learn about white rage. I want to find out what it is.

• 23:45Douglas Murray?

  Let's try the other way around one more time, black rage.

• 23:50Douglas Murray?

  Let's look into it. Oh, you'd say that doesn't sound like a very nice thing to do. Why don't we just talk about rage in general? White rage, black rage, only one of those is a permissible thing to talk about, only one of those you'd catch the Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff using before Congress.

• 24:07Chris Williamson?

  Where does this asymmetry come from then? Is it because white people are seen to, it's always punching up toward white people? Is it this current trend that we have toward anti-Westernism, colonialist, imperialists, reparations need to come from the past and that white people are, and that skin color is a representation of that as an ideology or as a, like the modern day, um, tip of the spear of, of that history?

• 24:39Douglas Murray?

  I think it's an attempt to, um, rectify a historic wrong and a wildly misguided attempt at it. So, I mean, I think we talked about this when we talked about the manners of crowds. We talked about the fact that there's, there's such a thing as an overcorrection in social issues, you know? Nobody denies that women historically were not able to make the same life choices as men were able to make. Didn't have as much freedom in, in general.

• 25:05Douglas Murray?

  They didn't. And so if you want to make up for that historic wrong, the obvious thing to do is just make everyone equal. A certain type of person says, no, we, we can make up for it faster by punishing men for a time.

• 25:19Douglas Murray?

  Nobody can deny that gay people historically were not treated equally as straight people. There's a type of person who says, let's attack the heterosexuals for a bit. Instead of saying, why don't we just have equality? In the same way, nobody with any sense would be able to deny that historically racism has existed in countries of the West, as it has in all countries. It's a very, very ugly human instinct, one of the worst. And it exists in, it existed particularly in American society, exists still, there is still pockets of racism in America, not legitimate or in any way mainstream, but there are some people who will hold racist views, but they're all on the margins.

• 26:03Douglas Murray?

  Nevertheless, you can't deny that historically, America has been a white-dominated country in which black people were oppressed for a very long time, until not that long ago. What do you want to do to make up for that? Again, you have the same options as you have women, other minority issues. You can decide to go for equality, or you can decide to overdo it for a bit, overcorrect. And the overcorrection in race is, let's beat up on the white people for a bit. So, one of the great race hustlers of our day in America is a man who calls himself Ibram X. Kendi, partly to give himself a sort of Malcolm X vibe. And he wrote a book called How to be an Anti-Racist, which is a very, very popular book in America.

• 26:47Douglas Murray?

  It's flooded everywhere. There's also a very slightly less grown-up version called Anti-Racist Baby, which explains among other things for two-year-olds, that you should talk to your two-year-olds about the fact that policy is not people are the problem. I don't know if you've ever met a two-year-old, but they very rarely talk policy issues, in my view, my experience. Anyhow, Ibram X. Kendi, as he calls himself, says completely openly in How to be an Anti-Racist, and I quoted in the book, he says, "The answer to past prejudice is present prejudice. The answer to past inequalities is present inequalities.

• 27:29Douglas Murray?

  You must, you must, you must rectify historic wrongs by committing wrongs in the present." Is, is, is his message.

• 27:37Chris Williamson?

  What's wrong with that? What's wrong with that message?

• 27:39Douglas Murray?

  Well, first of all, it's you punish people who look like people who did a bad thing in the past on behalf of people who look like people to whom a bad thing was done.

• 27:55Douglas Murray?

  You're not even dealing with victim and oppressor. You're dealing with people who look like perpetrators of the past and people who look like victims of the past. So that's the first thing. Second thing is it's not going to work.

• 28:12Douglas Murray?

  And I'll tell you one reason why it's not going to work in particular, which is that this would be very hard to do if you're dealing with a minority group. And I think if you said to any minority, you're really scummy and worthless and historically you're the only people who've ever done anything wrong and no one else has and so on. And you should think badly of yourself and you should be locked in this bad identity forever and never get out of it. I think if you did that to a minority group, it'd be unlikely you could persuade them into this mindset. Try doing that with a majority group. I think you're doomed to fail. I hope they're doomed to fail. I think they're pretty confident they're doomed to failure.

• 28:51Douglas Murray?

  I don't think it'll work.

• 28:52Chris Williamson?

  But it seems like it's being pretty widely accepted at the moment. There doesn't seem to be a massive amount of pushback.

• 28:58Douglas Murray?

  That's right.

• 28:59Chris Williamson?

  I certainly get, you know, when you were using examples earlier on of flipping the language round to talk about black rage or black tears or blackness that you can't get rid of, that makes me cringe inside in a way that whiteness doesn't. Because I feel like it's, I've just become so used to hearing that terminology used that I don't think twice about it.

• 29:25Douglas Murray?

  Yeah, well, I mean, in the early 2000s, the filmmaker Michael Moore wrote a book called Stupid White Men, which I reference in my book. I remember it very well. I remember thinking even then, 2000 or so, ooh, I'm not sure that Michael Moore could write a book called Stupid Black Man, where there's a chapter in his book called Blame Whitey. I wouldn't have thought you could do the opposite as a chapter if Mr. Moore, he says in that book, show me any problem in the world and I can point you to white people being behind it.

• 30:03Douglas Murray?

  Mr. Moore has not seen very much of the world, if he thinks that.

• 30:10Douglas Murray?

  But yeah, it's been prominent throughout our adult lives. It's been growing head of steam. It's, and it's now basically acceptable. And to hell with it. The time's got to be called on it. It's a vicious, vicious thing. And it's not just the fact, it's not the anti whiteness, which is just a very, very ugly prejudice. It's that it's being done as a way to attack people in the West and attack everything about the West. And that's why in the book, as you know, I go through the war on white people, the war on Western history, the war on Western religion, including philosophy, and the war on Western culture whereby the same remorseless attack, the same remorseless allegations of racism about everything

• 30:55Douglas Murray?

  run through absolutely everything in the culture.

• 30:58Chris Williamson?

  So explain to me how it is that that gets accepted, though. You know, you're talking about the fact that you have this majority. It's a critique made of the largest group of people within the community it is trying to critique. And yet it seems to have been, I mean, here's the thing, though. I think that it's been accepted perhaps by media organizations and by book publishers and by authors. But on an individual level, when you speak to most people, I think they would say, oh, this kind of feels a little bit icky. But I don't understand how that's been allowed to occur without pushback.

• 31:36Douglas Murray?

  Because there's enormous, everything I'm saying in this book and a lot of what I'm saying to you now, most people can't say it. And they would, they're just not in a position in their lives to say it.

• 31:50Chris Williamson?

  You can.

• 31:51Douglas Murray?

  I can, because I don't owe anyone anything. I'm a free person and.

• 31:57Douglas Murray?

  I can say what I see and what I think, and this is, this is a position of privilege. There's no doubt about that. But I know that most people can't say it, and there's a reason, which is that they will be called a racist. Now, I might be called a racist by some people, I'm certainly not a racist, but I, I will inevitably be called a racist by some people because I'm saying something that is true and unpopular. And the only, or the best tool that my opponents have is to accuse people of racism. And for me, that's, it's ugly, it's unpleasant, I dislike it, I dislike it partly, large part because it's untrue. It's reputationally damaging, as it would be if people called me a misogynist or a homophobe or anything else.

• 32:44Douglas Murray?

  But I, I think I can survive it, I hope I can survive it, touch wood. Most people can't, because most people going about their lives, getting on with their jobs, if they would, if they would have that allegation made against them, it could, it could very easily be over. So if you're just working in a company and you're told that you're going to do racial bias training, and you're told that you should read Robin De Angelio's work about, and think about your white privilege.

• 33:11Chris Williamson?

  Which John McWhorter called the second worst book he's ever read, read.

• 33:16Douglas Murray?

  Yes.

• 33:18Chris Williamson?

  The first worst book was, I wanted to say it's like a, some fan fiction book about something, like something completely catastrophic.

• 33:26Douglas Murray?

  Right, okay.

• 33:27Chris Williamson?

  But he said it was the second worst book, but would be useful to fix the leg of a wobbly.

• 33:32Douglas Murray?

  Yeah, yeah, I, I, I think it is up there as among the, the worst tomes I've ever had to delve through, I mean, every page. No, the, the, the, the autobiography of Rudolf Hesse, the camp commandant of Auschwitz, was also deeply, I mean, every page, because he, among, as well as being a war criminal, he couldn't write. Every page of his memoir is absolutely.

• 33:56Chris Williamson?

  Apart from being disgusting and brutal and gleeful, it was.

• 34:00Douglas Murray?

  It was also, it was also just like turgidly badly written. I remember when I read that, I thought, that's a terrible, that's a terrible book. And Robin De Angelio's book is probably for me the second worst.

• 34:11Chris Williamson?

  Impressive.

• 34:12Douglas Murray?

  After that. But yes, the point is, is if you're in a place in your life where you're told to do these things, you're told to talk about white privilege and, and contemplate that, and you said, I'm not doing that.

• 34:27Douglas Murray?

  Not doing that, don't have privilege. Uh, you're very likely to be in serious trouble. And there's lots of people who have been. There's a, there was a partner at the firm KPMG who lost his job just because he said that he thought implicit bias training was crap.

• 34:44Douglas Murray?

  He lost his job, he was a partner.

• 34:47Douglas Murray?

  A big firm, you know. Uh, so let alone if you're one of the poor underlings who has to be put through this rubbish. Um, so, so, yeah, and anyhow, it's time that this is stopped, is my view. And, um, uh, not enough people are willing to say it, and I am, but it is time to stop. I'm not willing to allow people to keep talking about white people as being innately privileged. Uh, they don't know a damn thing about most people. You cannot work out somebody's life, their experiences, their privileges, or their sufferings because of their skin color. It's a gross generalization, it would be against black people, it is against white people. And I think also we have to call time on this ridiculous notion that there are racial groupings

• 35:30Douglas Murray?

  who have something to apologize for, for historic reasons. Uh, you and I are both fro- uh, both brought, born and brought up in the United Kingdom. Uh, we are told now that we have some hereditary, um, responsibility for slavery and, I mean, Americans only have responsibility for slavery. You and I have responsibility not only for slavery, but colonialism. Well, Chris, neither you nor I did anything in the slave era. Neither you nor I did anything in the colonial era, long before our time. The British Navy policed the high seas two centuries before we were born, uh, in order to stop the slave trade, not just in Britain, but across the world. Uh, the colonies fell apart decades before we were born.

• 36:16Douglas Murray?

  So, no hereditary guilt from me. And I hope none from you, I hope none from anybody. There's no such thing, it's a vile idea. It's a vile idea that cert- uh, uh, it would be, it would be permissible in a way as an idea if you agreed that everybody bore some responsibility for things that their societies had done in the past that were bad. Do they not? But they don't. It's one directional. It's only a Western thing. And I explain in the book, I mean, like, other societies do not do this, and they just don't do this. What like? China is not currently trying to work out what it did historically wrong in the slave era. China did as much slaving as as anyone, still is, actually.

• 37:00Douglas Murray?

  We have effective, we have forty million slaves in the world today, which is more than there were in the nineteenth century. More slaves alive today. Than there were in the nineteenth century during the slave trade. Forty million, you said, alive today? Yeah. I've met slaves. I've met former slaves in Africa and elsewhere. People were born as slaves. They managed to escape it. This is not an abstract point I'm making. I think that us beating ourselves up over over a trade which our own country got rid of two centuries ago. And if any, we should be proud that we got rid of and and so on.

• 37:39Douglas Murray?

  There is a significant likelihood we are not dealing with, for instance, slavery today because we're so obsessed with going over again an issue that was closed two centuries ago. And, you know, it brings to mind a phrase of Nietzsche's in the Genealogy of Morals. These are people who, there's a type of person who who who tears at wounds long closed and then shrieks about the pain they feel. We're dealing with a lot of those people at the moment. They do not themselves feel pain from the slave trade. They not feel pain from colonialism. They have decided to rip at a long closed wound and then cry in order to win something.

• 38:22Douglas Murray?

  Whether it's pity or money or reparations or something, everybody would have their own view on it. But I I I refuse to go along with this idea that, as I say, if everybody decided to take upon themselves exactly the amount of, as I say, it's a horrible idea, hereditary sin, but exactly the proportion of hereditary sin that their own society was accorded, then that would be one thing. It's quite another thing when only one group of people, and that white Westerners, are expected to be responsible for everything that anyone who looked even remotely like them in the past did.

• 39:01Douglas Murray?

  And everybody else is not. I mean, the obvious example to give is is a point that Voltaire made in the 18th century, he says, said somewhere, the only thing, by the way, Voltaire now is one of the many figures who's been torn down, literally, in Paris. His statue has been now removed by the authorities in Paris. One of the great rationalist thinkers of French society, his statue was attacked so many times by people throwing red paint at it that it's now removed and you can't find it in Paris. Nobody knows quite where Voltaire is today. But now, part of the allegation is him that he profited through shares in some slave companies. They

• 39:40Douglas Murray?

  forget, by the way, that Voltaire also wrote in Conde, one of the great, great attacks on slavery. But Voltaire says in his own day, he says, well, the only thing, the only thing worse than what the Europeans have done to the Africans is what Africans have done to their fellow Africans, is what Africans have done to their brothers and sisters. We know from the few memoirs we had, have, of people who were slaves in this period, people like Equiano, Lauda Equiano, most amazing man who was, ended up some British and was baptized in Westminster, became a free man, had a most extraordinary life. Memoirs are well worth reading. We know from him, for

• 40:25Douglas Murray?

  instance, and many, many others, of course, that he was, he was stolen by his neighbors in Africa in the 1700s. They, a neighboring village, they came and they snatched them at night. That's what they were, people snatchers, they're called. And these Africans stole their neighbors and sold them. And now, what is the moral responsibility of the descendants of the people stealers? If white Westerners have taken some guilt, then I would like guilt from Africans as well. Uh. What do you do about African Americans who are descended both from slavers and slaves? Um. What's their guilt hereditary wise?

• 41:07Chris Williamson?

  They cash out at zero.

• 41:08Douglas Murray?

  They would, they would come out at, yes, exactly. The balance sheet, you end up there. Um. Uh. If you, uh, one, when I was researching the slavery section of this book, um, I got into the very interesting story of the other slave or the other major slave trade of the, of the time, whilst the transatlantic slave trade was going on, which was the Arab slave trade. And the Arabs had a huge slave trade that went on for much longer than the Western one, the transatlantic one. It's thought that maybe ten, eleven, uh, ten or eleven million people were transported across the Atlantic during the height of, during the whole of the period of this slave trade.

• 41:47Douglas Murray?

  It's an appalling thing. It was, it was a unbelievably horrible, uh, trade, which people at the time, most people at the time didn't think was wrong because people in the past thought differently from us. And almost, well, all civilizations sadly at that point, they'd all engaged in slavery. Everyone did slave labor. How are the pyramids built? You know, the, the pharaohs didn't do it themselves. They didn't pay a fair day's, uh, labor wages to the people who, who hold the stones for miles. Uh, the Acropolis in Athens was not built by stones dragged up there by al-Sabai.

• 42:24Chris Williamson?

  Willing employees, yeah. I went to a, uh, I went to a church in Florence that was nearly two thousand years old and it overlooks downtown Florence. And the tour guide was explaining to us, I'm like thinking, this building's nearly two thousand, and it's been built up over time, but still the foundations are two thousand years old and a lot of the, the frontage of it is over a thousand years old. And I said, well, how is it that people from so long ago were able to make a building which has stood the test of time? He said, well, you don't have the cost of labor.

• 42:56Douglas Murray?

  Yes, yes, that's right. That's right. Well, I'll come on to that in a second because that's a very important point. But just to finish that thought on the Arab slave trade, was about 50% more people in total during the same period. So if 10 to 11 million or so were taken across the Atlantic in the transatlantic slave trade, it's thought maybe as many as 18 million From where to where? Were taken from Africa to what we now call the Middle East Arab countries. By who? Arabia. By the Arabs. The Arabs traded, as the Europeans did, in slaves from Africa.

• 43:35Douglas Murray?

  Now, you may wonder, why therefore are there not more black people in the Middle East? And there's an answer, which was this was actually a genocide. They, the Arabs deliberately castrated every single male. So any African male they took to the Arab countries was castrated in order there would be no more black people. Now, does that have a legacy to date? Sure it does. If you go to Qatar versus Gulf states, you'll find that they basically have a slave labor class today. The Filipinos and others who are brought

• 44:18Douglas Murray?

  in and have effectively slave conditions, I've seen it myself. Dubai's the same. Dubai, nobody like FIFA cares about this, but this is the case today in Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries. The word for a black person, abid, plural abid, is slave. They still call black people slaves. My friend Ayaan, who was born in Somalia, spent a bit of time in Saudi Arabia when she was growing up, and they were black, because they were in Somalia, and they were certainly blacker than the people in Saudi Arabia, and they were always called abid slaves. So my point is not in any way to at all diminish what

• 45:02Douglas Murray?

  the European slave trade was, or what the transatlantic slave trade was, but it is very, very strange to live in an era where it is presumed that only the West was engaged in such a thing, and only we for the rest of time must repay a debt which it appears can never be paid down.

• 45:22Douglas Murray?

  And that brings me to what you were just saying about what was going on in countries like Britain at the time.

• 45:29Chris Williamson?

  Well, I mean, didn't you say that the life expectancy of a worker in Lancashire?

• 45:34Douglas Murray?

  Yeah.

• 45:35Chris Williamson?

  England was exactly half of that of a slave.

• 45:38Douglas Murray?

  Yeah.

• 45:39Chris Williamson?

  Working at the time.

• 45:39Douglas Murray?

  The average, the average man in the north of England, working in a mill, you know, a mine, they died in their late 30s.

• 45:50Douglas Murray?

  So, I'm sorry, but yes, this is different from being a slave.

• 45:58Douglas Murray?

  But it's not so wildly different that we are able to talk about those people in the north of England as benefiting from privilege. These were not privileged people. These were not privileged people. These, these people did not have very many life choices of themselves. And here's, here's one of the main points to make about all of this is the past was pretty much hell for pretty much everyone.

• 46:21Douglas Murray?

  I mean, even kings died and princes died of diseases which you'd now cure by a shot of penicillin.

• 46:33Douglas Murray?

  But the poor, who was almost everyone, they were not privileged people. And the idea that we have to recast all the ancestors of people who happened to be white as oppressors and the ancestors of everyone who happened to be black solely as oppressed

• 46:54Douglas Murray?

  is an incredibly simplistic game and it's unfair. And that's one of the main problems about it is it's just deeply unfair. And when you find an unfair game like that, you should ask yourself,

• 47:08Douglas Murray?

  why are we allowing this game to be played like this by people who literally declare themselves sheriff?

• 47:13Chris Williamson?

  Well, what's the goal of revising history? Why do it?

• 47:16Douglas Murray?

  Well. We revise history all the time, and we should. I'm not trying to stop anyone carrying out historical investigations, far from it. I say in the book, I'm not against historical revisionism. I think the revisionists need to be revised in turn, because I think they've had too fast and full a run. I'm not against understanding any of this in the round. What I'm against is trying to understand it through a very narrow ideological lens. And here's the thing, I mean, if we'd have been born like 50 years earlier than we were,

• 47:56Douglas Murray?

  we would almost certainly have had an education in the UK where there would have been a map on the schoolroom wall of the globe and the great pink of the British Empire. And we'd have been brought up to say, good God, what a great amount of the earth we own. Isn't that terrific? And we're a tiny country below now. Got all of that, that's just grand. And the teacher would have told us about these great heroic people who went out and made this possible. Now, that was not history in the round.

• 48:34Douglas Murray?

  That was a very narrow ideological view of empire. Well, unfortunately, it's also a narrow and highly ideological view of empire to do what we're currently doing, which is to say you must only look at empire by, for instance, equating it with the worst actions of the Third Reich, you know, you can only compare it with Nazism. You can't say, well, it's a complex thing. Some benefits for some countries, a lot of negatives for a lot of countries.

• 49:16Douglas Murray?

  And the only people who've tried to add any context and make any of the necessary corrections to the overreach have been just destroyed. People like Professor Nigel Biggar from Oxford University in the wake of the Cecil Rhodes affair at Oxford, when there was an attempt to pull down this statue of an undoubted colonialist, Cecil Rhodes, who also endowed his former college at Oxford, Oriole, has an attempt to pull down his statue. And this professor at Oxford, Regent's Professor at Oxford in Ethics, Nigel Biggar, a very fine man, objects to this and says, why don't we, since we're a university, we shouldn't allow these lies to be told about Cecil Rhodes, which is what people were doing. They were making up quotes of things he said, when what he'd said was quite bad enough.

• 50:01Douglas Murray?

  But they invented quotes and said he'd used the N-word in contexts he had and all this sort of thing. And Nigel Biggar, this professor, said, why don't we try to set up a course at Oxford where we study the ethics of empire in the round? You know, try to work out a moral calculus, as it were, of what it meant. Now, that would be a really good and reasonable project. He wasn't allowed to do it. Fellow academics by the hundreds denounced him. How can you even think of trying to put this into context, they all said. And one of the main arguments they used repeatedly was, you can't excuse empire because to excuse

• 50:42Douglas Murray?

  empire would be to excuse, for instance, the Amritsar massacre, which was the time when British troops opened fire on an unarmed crowd of protesters in Amritsar in India. Not to be confused with the time when Indira Gandhi ordered a massacre of far more Indians on the same spot. Those two things are not to be confused at all. But the time when the British opened fire, and Winston Churchill in the House of Commons denounces it as one of the greatest crimes of the era. He says, it's a great stain on the British Empire that such a thing should have happened. And it was.

• 51:23Douglas Murray?

  And the Colonel, Colonel Dyer, who ordered the soldiers to open fire on this unarmed crowd, he was put into retirement immediately. You might say worse should have happened to him, but that's what happened. And there was an incredible outcry now. So hundreds of people were killed at Amritsar.

• 51:48Douglas Murray?

  But again, is it is it impossible to work out what the benefits were for certain countries of British presence?

• 52:00Douglas Murray?

  Is it wrong to think that Hong Kong benefited from British presence? Or Singapore, where societies which have flourished, or did flourish in the case of Hong Kong until quite recently, is it wrong to try to work out why the places succeeded, succeeded, and why the places that failed, failed? And what went right and what went wrong? And whether you could find a ledger? That seems to me to be a very good, reasonable enterprise.

• 52:27Chris Williamson?

  Why is it that Winston Churchill has been seen as a racist, but Karl Marx has been seen as a hero?

• 52:33Douglas Murray?

  Yeah, I'm so glad you asked that, because that's one of my favourite bugbears.

• 52:39Douglas Murray?

  Yeah, well, here's my short answer. There is an attempt to take down all of our heroes, all of our heroes.

• 52:50Douglas Murray?

  Winston Churchill for the British is our hero, our national hero. Only 20 years ago, when we were allowed an opportunity to vote on who the greatest Britain was, BBC had this BBC documentary, 10 people were, when they ended up being shortlisted, I think, and people presented a programme on each. And the and the person who won hands down as the greatest Britain of all time was Winston Churchill, of course.

• 53:15Douglas Murray?

  Now, in 2022, even BBC, whenever it runs a piece about Winston Churchill, has to run like the case for the for the prosecution, like 10 terrible things Winston Churchill did. They've just, it's been decided to recast him in a different light, and again, a very unfair light. He's accused of a lot of things he didn't do, such as gassing Iraqis. In fact, he, and this is a known Chomsky lie, he actually used, not to get too much into the weeds, but Churchill ordered the use of what we have now called tear gas, not mustard gas. And Chomsky and others have pretended that he used mustard gas on the Iraqis. That that lie has gone round repeatedly. There are other, all sorts of other accusations against Churchill.

• 54:00Douglas Murray?

  But basically, it's because The British love and admire Winston Churchill still. Not everybody, there were some critics. But by and large, he is our biggest national hero. And, you know, when the film Finest Hour came out, you know, there were lots of stories of

• 54:22Douglas Murray?

  people in cinemas at the end getting to their feet and doing standing ovations.

• 54:30Douglas Murray?

  And, I mean, I don't know if you feel this, but I feel it very strongly that Churchill is, it's not just about him.

• 54:41Douglas Murray?

  In Britain, there's a view that, and I think is correct, that the world would certainly have

• 54:49Douglas Murray?

  allowed Nazism to flood across Europe and possibly to Britain if Churchill hadn't have been in place at that time.

• 54:57Chris Williamson?

  Who was it that said, "This is the one time I've seen the hand of God at work in the real world"?

• 55:02Douglas Murray?

  Yeah, Lord Hailsham said, "It's the one time I've seen the hand of God operate in politics." It felt like it just, Churchill being put into place at that moment was just a godsend. And it was. And the other thing is, of course, he, for all of our families in Britain, I mean, he was the rallying figure, along with the King and the Queen,

• 55:25Douglas Murray?

  who showed the British people the resilience necessary to sacrifice their sons a second time within a few decades.

• 55:34Chris Williamson?

  Because he'd done what, fought on six continents or something, or five continents? He'd put himself forward for World War One.

• 55:39Douglas Murray?

  He volunteered to fight in World War One.

• 55:42Chris Williamson?

  Great hat, fantastic hat, smoked a lot.

• 55:45Douglas Murray?

  Drank a lot. But he represented, and represents still for a lot of us in Britain, this sense of what our spirit is, which is difficult, belligerent, unbowed.

• 55:58Douglas Murray?

  Dogged, not self pitying, and much more. And so why have they come for Churchill? I explain the ways in which they've come for him. My answer as to why is because they know that it will demoralize us. Who's they? The people who hate the West in general, who hate Britain, who hate America. If you take down, they hate people like Churchill being admired. They can't bear it because they know that it's something so deep within us. Now, what is that deep thing for me?

• 56:38Douglas Murray?

  And I think for a lot of other British people, it is the sense that we're a good country, that we did something good, that France may have given in, that with the only shots fired being against French soldiers by French soldiers, but that's good, so cross over that. You know, the Dutch rolled over.

• 57:04Douglas Murray?

  A lot of other countries didn't have a choice and so on and so forth, but the British wouldn't. And this is because we were a good country and we faced up to bad people when we saw them.

• 57:14Douglas Murray?

  That is a very, very important feeling nationally. But if you want to stop the British feeling pride in themselves, you've got to take out Winston Churchill. In the same way, in America, if you hate America, you not only hate the fact the founding fathers are revered, and they've been, my God, as I say, say in the chapter on history, they've really come for the founding fathers in recent years. You might say, again, there's a historical revisionism that was needed. Sixty years ago, people in America who revered Jefferson say, didn't necessarily know he was a slave owner. We know today, it would be nice to know something other than the fact he was a slave owner.

• 57:53Douglas Murray?

  But the point is, if you attack the founding fathers, you attack an idea of America. If you take down Lincoln. The victor of the Civil War. And that's also happening. Literally, and I've seen the statues of Lincoln torn down in America. If you tear down Lincoln, you go in a similar way to attack the foundation of America. Because if you don't have Lincoln, you basically don't have America. And again, not just because he was a good man who won the Civil War and, and, and did this extraordinary thing. Not just because of that, but also because his whole story was a story of coming from nothing

• 58:38Douglas Murray?

  and becoming president. I mean, he grew up in absolute poverty, Lincoln. Probably had one year of formal education. Everything else, he was self-taught. He taught himself to read books. He was a remarkable man who imbued a spirit of America which many Americans still feel. But if you take down Lincoln, you've taken down the idea of America. Now, sorry, one other point, the quick point of that. Why don't they do it to Marx?

• 59:12Douglas Murray?

  Well, the same remorseless battle is, the same remorseless attack is made on every historical figure in the West, on every philosopher of the West, every cultural hero of the West. And it's always done the same way. They lived in a time of slavery and did something to endorse it or didn't work against it enough. They lived in a time of colonialism and didn't attack it enough or benefited from it in some way. They were racist by modern standards. This is done against everybody, everybody in American history and in British history and Western history, except for Karl Marx. What a coincidence is this? I, I took great delight in searching the book,

• 59:53Douglas Murray?

  finding out the many, many racist things that Karl Marx said in his private letters, private letters to Engels. He constantly uses the N-word, often linked to Jew, profoundly antisemitic, of course. Extraordinarily bad views on slavery, on colonialism, everything else. He said much more racist things than any of the people that we've discussed, discussed so far, including Churchill. And yet, weirdly, he doesn't get the same treatment. So if you take out every thinker. Other than Karl Marx, why would that be?

• 1:00:33Douglas Murray?

  Other than that you're not really just, you're not really carrying out a fair critique. You're carrying out a deliberately unfair critique in order to advance an existing cause. The existing cause in this case is anything but Westernism, and Marxism is one of the answers. And I'm afraid that anti-Westernism has always been whipped along by Marxism, ever since the benighted birth of Karl Marx. He, even in the post-colonial era, as I say in the books, but one of the great ironies of the post-colonial era is that anti-colonialists like Fanon, who I write about, all said, we've got to get rid of Western rule in Africa.

• 1:01:18Douglas Murray?

  Now, you could say, well, at this point, we must return Africa to a pre-colonial time, a kind of native tradition, which would have included all sorts of traditions, which would also not look very nice in the light of modern thought. The obare of Benin was not a liberal democrat, much more anyway. But the point is, you, they didn't say that. They, people like Fanon said, we must get the Europeans out of Africa and stop the European colonialism and capitalism in order that we can institute Western Marxism. Well, this is an oddity at the very least. But as I say, I think it's one of these things, the fact that people don't apply this standard to certain people and do to others is a demonstration that they are engaging in a

• 1:02:03Douglas Murray?

  bad faith argument.

• 1:02:04Chris Williamson?

  The thing that I keep coming back to is the why, right? What the end goal is of this. I don't deny that, you know, I was kind of shocked when we saw statues of people that I thought probably shouldn't have been torn down, like Winston Churchill seemed like a bit of a stupid idea to tear down. What was it? Abraham Lincoln setting free a slave that got torn down at one point? I was like, well, that kind of seems like symbolically kind of beautiful rather than racist or imperial or whatever to me. So I don't disagree that the things that you're bringing up seem to have happened. What I'm, the leap that I'm struggling to make is like, what's the agenda?

• 1:02:46Chris Williamson?

  Why is this, it's dissolving the West's love for itself? The attachment of whiteness with westernness because westernness had some baggage that came along from the past. And then by attaching the two, you make the, the personal part of the ideological part of the historical part of the. Why? Like, what's the end goal? Are you suggesting that this is a, a slow march of Marxism? Is that who's pushing this?

• 1:03:15Douglas Murray?

  I think one of the people is pushing it. First thing to say is that there is a totally, as I, as I tried to say, there is a totally reasonable genesis to it, which is there are things from our past we have not looked at enough.

• 1:03:30Douglas Murray?

  And perhaps we ought to understand more fully in the round. There is also a totally legitimate, understandable sense of, you know, were we always the good guys? That's a pretty good question to ask.

• 1:03:44Douglas Murray?

  And, and, and, you know, by the way, only the West engages in this sort of self criticism, but fine. It doesn't need to be something everyone does. So that, that's one thing is a perfectly reasonable attempt to get ourselves in the round.

• 1:04:01Douglas Murray?

  My own belief is, is that there is, there are several other things going on. And just to limit them to a couple. One is internationally, this is also pushed on us. Just the day before we're speaking, I saw that the China Daily News, which is one of the Communist Party of China's

• 1:04:25Douglas Murray?

  propaganda and organs, put out on Twitter a cartoon of Uncle Sam behind the Oval Office desk, surrounded by bodies and a sort of, you know, Uncle Sam. America's always, you know, been racist and so on. It said, you know, George Floyd and separation of families at the border is going on like this.

• 1:04:49Douglas Murray?

  I mean.

• 1:04:51Douglas Murray?

  Does anyone really think the Communist Party of China minds about separating families?

• 1:04:57Douglas Murray?

  Does it mind that with the Uighurs? Does it mind the fact it's carrying out currently, or the worst human rights abuse currently occurring anywhere on the globe, and that's saying something?

• 1:05:10Douglas Murray?

  Do you honestly think the Chinese care about the death of George Floyd? We don't know the names of the people killed in China. Of course, they don't care about it, but they push it on us because they know that we're, that a certain number of us are receptive to that. The same thing with Russia. Russia and others have, for years, encouraged this sense of self-loathing in the West because they have a different sense of themselves.

• 1:05:42Douglas Murray?

  So our foes and our competitors take advantage of this self-criticism because it is not something that they share. And they, and then we have this thing of total self-abnegation.

• 1:05:57Chris Williamson?

  What's that mean?

• 1:05:58Douglas Murray?

  Self-abnegation is the desire to rid yourself, basically, of everything that you have.

• 1:06:05Douglas Murray?

  For a culture to get rid of everything because it's all bad. And that's what I tried to write about in the culture chapter, is to show that, you know, we're even doing this throughout our culture. I mean, phrases like "dead white men" suddenly took, got currency in recent years. "Dead white men."

• 1:06:30Douglas Murray?

  And people could talk about people in these terms. I mean, it's, it's, again, "dead black men." Oh, that was just "dead black men." Who would say that? Who would say that? Oh, that's just the legacy of dead white men.

• 1:06:48Douglas Murray?

  This, this became a process of self scourging in recent years. And I'm afraid that a lot of it is done by bad actors, bad faith actors. And a lot of it is done by ignoramuses, I'm afraid. One of the easiest ways to make yourself look clever in the modern era is just to be anti-Western. It's a blame us for everything.

• 1:07:14Chris Williamson?

  You call it, was it reflexive anti-Westernism?

• 1:07:17Douglas Murray?

  Yes, I mean, but, but let's put it the other way around. I mean, that is a sort of easy way to put it like that. Let's put it the harder way.

• 1:07:27Douglas Murray?

  How easy is it today for anyone in, in the modern West to stand up in a public forum on television, say, and list the accomplishments of the West? Who would do it? Well, it's not like we don't have accomplishments we could talk about. Simply in the political arena, we could just mention the evolution of representative democracy.

• 1:07:55Douglas Murray?

  The concept of one man, one vote, one woman, one vote.

• 1:08:00Douglas Murray?

  A lot of the world's got nowhere near that. Concept of peaceful transfer of power. The maintaining of political order. The rule of law.

• 1:08:11Douglas Murray?

  Okay, this is a very small number of things, but everything I've just listed is pretty big.

• 1:08:19Douglas Murray?

  Most of Africa, historically, the Middle East, historically, the Far East, historically, does not have the peaceful transfer of power.

• 1:08:34Douglas Murray?

  It's one group oppressing another group and taking their stuff.

• 1:08:40Chris Williamson?

  I think Russia hasn't had a peaceful transfer of power through the actual appropriate mechanism, maybe ever.

• 1:08:50Douglas Murray?

  Yes, I mean, you could say that it's... Well, no, you... Well, it depends how you interpreted the Communist Party in the Cold War era transferring power from leader to leader, which was peaceful on their terms, under a system which people had no say in. I mean, you know, not at all.

• 1:09:09Chris Williamson?

  You had this quote, I think, that relates to what you were just mentioning there. When you are speaking into a great vacuum of ignorance, people with malign intent can run an awfully long way awfully fast.

• 1:09:20Douglas Murray?

  Yeah, yeah. It's absolutely true. They...

• 1:09:26Douglas Murray?

  If you are brought up to... And I was slightly in this when I was a student. You don't know the world. You don't know very much about the rest of the world. You've not been to much of the rest of the world yet. And when asked anything about it, you've only got this prism of where you come from. And if you're taught, well, it's us that's responsible for everything, then it's quite easy to just always look at everything through that lens. But it's not a correct lens. I mean, it's a lens. It's not a fair one. One of the people I critique in the book, Edward Said, who wrote the book Orientalism, which always all students still read, unfortunately, accuses Western scholars approaching the

• 1:10:10Douglas Murray?

  Middle East and looking at it through Orientalist eyes, looking at it with European eyes. And everyone since Said wrote this seems to think this is a brilliant insight. It's not a brilliant insight at all. I mean, what eyes were they meant to look at the Middle East through? Chinese eyes? Japanese eyes? Of course, they looked at it through the eyes of the place they came from and interpreted it as such, just in the same way as an Arab traveling to Europe in the 17th century would have looked at Europe through Arab eyes. There's nothing particularly surprising or racist about that. But in our era, we have been, I think, taught that a...

• 1:10:49Douglas Murray?

  A civilized, a person who wanted to sound clever, a person who wanted to be thought well of, and much more, would laugh, would scorn what I just said about, for instance, just some of the political gifts that the West has handed down. George Orwell, you remember, in that famous essay, the line, "The Unicorn," says that the average English intellectual, I think it was a particular example he uses, would rather die than stand up to the national anthem. You know, that's different in America, by the way, but there was always something in it.

• 1:11:31Douglas Murray?

  And that observation of Orwell's has often been used to sort of show, well, we have a more subtle form of patriotism, a more subtle form of national feeling, and so on and so forth. But there is a form of that that can be very, very easily adapted into shame only. Shame only. There is a version of it which can be pride only, and that's ridiculous as well, in a way, just to be, I mean, as you well know, I'm not a tub-thumping, flag-waving nationalist of any kind. I love my country, and I think it's been broadly a force of good in the world, certainly more of a force of good than it has for ill. I think the same thing of America.

• 1:12:12Douglas Murray?

  And I'm much more pleased that Britain and America had global dominance in the 20th century than, say, that China or Russia had. And, you know, I think that, for some reason, generationally, there's just been this rebellion against what's perceived to be sort of jingoistic and... What does that mean? What's that word? Being jingoistic, it were to be sort of nationalist and, you know, only us, you know, the rest, you don't see abroad, abroad is awful, you know. And there has been a sort of rebellion against that. That that perceived trend and and it's understandable. I would rebel against that if I saw it all the

• 1:12:56Douglas Murray?

  time all over the place, you know.

• 1:13:00Douglas Murray?

  But we don't see it all the time all over the place, quite the opposite. All of our cultural institutions are busy giving up our heritage, as far as I can see and as I lay out in the book. All of our cultural custodians seem to me to be doing everything but looking after the culture which they're meant to be looking after.

• 1:13:17Chris Williamson?

  Well, the fortunate thing for black people is that you have BLM and the virtuous use of donations that can keep everything on track. You don't need to worry. Daddy's in the hot seat.

• 1:13:30Douglas Murray?

  Absolutely. How many mansions does that girl who started that woman who started to have now?

• 1:13:34Chris Williamson?

  She's left now, right? The first lady that did it left.

• 1:13:37Douglas Murray?

  The one who's got the five mansions.

• 1:13:38Chris Williamson?

  Silent or very sort of quietly slipped away. I saw after the news story about the six million dollar mansion came out, do you see that there was an internal memo leaked?

• 1:13:50Douglas Murray?

  Oh.

• 1:13:50Chris Williamson?

  About this?

• 1:13:51Douglas Murray?

  Go on.

• 1:13:52Chris Williamson?

  So an internal memo got circulated in an effort to see how they could downplay the fact that the six million dollar mansion was there. They got caught lying about this is.

• 1:14:06Chris Williamson?

  They got caught lying about its purpose, apparently. So I think they called it, they called it like the center.

• 1:14:12Douglas Murray?

  Oh, I see.

• 1:14:12Chris Williamson?

  Or the hive.

• 1:14:13Douglas Murray?

  It's community center.

• 1:14:14Chris Williamson?

  Something like that. Yeah, six million dollar mansion. And then they had everybody sign NDAs and then they sent private investigators after the journalists that were looking into it. But when you have a lot of donations, you're allowed to. And one of the things that is interesting, this was reported, or one of the instigators for why this began becoming investigated was because of some of the local communities that were expecting support from BLM. Had found that they weren't getting support. So you had people who were struggling to make rent, who were living in these sort of impoverished communities and stuff like that.

• 1:14:52Chris Williamson?

  And meanwhile, yeah, the original director, CEO, somebody has slipped out, but still in her wake, there is a, an aftershock of a six million dollar mansion.

• 1:15:05Douglas Murray?

  She has still held on to five or so properties, hasn't she?

• 1:15:07Chris Williamson?

  Well, you need to.

• 1:15:08Douglas Murray?

  Yeah, I mean, you've got to go from one swimming pool to another. It's easy to get bored with one swimming pool. This is a, this is a hassle. I mean, if, if, if, if no one.

• 1:15:17Chris Williamson?

  Did you call it Black Lives Racket?

• 1:15:20Douglas Murray?

  Black Lives Racket, that's right. One of my roles, I write a weekly column for the New York Post and we, we ran a great front page on this benighted news emerged. I think Post, I think they tried to come for the Post actually on exposing this. Yeah, I think these people are, I mean, you ask about motives and things, and this is the easiest one, of course.

• 1:15:46Chris Williamson?

  Want another mansion?

• 1:15:46Douglas Murray?

  Another mansion. Black Lives Mansions was a front page we ran, only the Post. And the, yeah, the, the, the impetus for these people is so obvious, so damn clear. And it's, it's, it's just, it's such a, it's such a shame for so many reasons. You know, they, like a lot of sort of charity like things, they have to present a situation as being worse than it is in order to maximize profits. And all the gay rights groups do that now. I mean, I wish they'd all just shut up and shut down and go home. But they don't, they all, they all, they've all got pensions and interests, you know,

• 1:16:27Douglas Murray?

  invested interests, these are all vested interests. And they, they have to, all these groups, BLMs are classic stuff, have to make the situation appear worse than it is. They have to exaggerate the extent of racism in America, for instance, in order to maximize donations. They then have to mislead a load of perfectly, sometimes perfectly decent people, not always, into handing over money. They get corporations to hand over effectively ransom money. I mean, it's a sort of protection racket, you know, awfully nice business you've got there. Shame if anyone accused you of racism. And, and then you've got the, the, the people who, who were expecting to benefit and, and, and don't benefit because the whole thing was a hustle. Well, you know, in America, we have a very clear.

• 1:17:13Douglas Murray?

  Sense of, I say weeks we're sitting here, but of a certain type of pasta huckster. You know, I read about this in the Post the other week, you know, the sort of Tammy Faye Baker sort of figures who, who, you know, they still go on a bit, actually, there's one in Texas still. So, you know, they like take out huge TV commercials and they say, you know, you gotta hand over your, your money because I just gotta have a helicopter.

• 1:17:42Chris Williamson?

  I was in the car, I was in the car yesterday in an Uber and I've taken, since I've been here, I usually listen to Classic FM to wake up on a morning. What I've found is that when I first wake up, if I listen to music, I can't get the song out of my head. And sometimes with Classic FM, this can be really awkward because a lot of the music is done to the same pace that I walk at. And that means as I'm walking down the street, I'm, I'm creating the drumbeat to the song that I'm trying to get out of my own head. So out here, I've taken to listening to Keeping Him Close By, which is a local Houston Christian radio station. Anyway, I got in the car yesterday, my Uber driver had a different station on and they were doing a 60 second countdown,

• 1:18:23Chris Williamson?

  donation drive and saying, you know, if, if you feel moved to submit this money, then you can, you know, it's, it's going to help, it is there for a good reason. I don't know. And then it was if they got, if this particular station that must be part of a bigger network, got more money than the other stations that were in different areas of the country on the same network. I don't, maybe the presenters wanted a trip to somewhere, I don't know, but it just felt so icky to me. And that's, you know, that, that's being broadcast on the radio. This isn't, you know, the pasta huckster doing it to a small town.

• 1:19:04Chris Williamson?

  And that, that was that sort of commercializing of, of donations, you know, using a bunch of psychological tricks, a one-time offer, a countdown timer. This is ClickFunnels from 2006, you know, with a, oh, and here's an upsell for just another $5. You can get our free DVD course that you can, whatever, whatever.

• 1:19:24Douglas Murray?

  It's, it's a bit of a, bit of a tangent, I've got to say, I mean, there's no greater joy than for a British person to just sit down and watch adverts on American television. I once, some years ago, I was in Los Angeles and I was watching a television channel hopping and there was a, an advert from a local funeral home.

• 1:19:43Douglas Murray?

  A nine hundred ninety nine dollar ninety nine cent creation funeral all in. Uh, offer was only available for another month.

• 1:19:56Douglas Murray?

  What, what, what can you do with that? Granny, look, there's this amazing offer and I know you're not well. This offer is only on for another month.

• 1:20:06Chris Williamson?

  There is a long set of stairs.

• 1:20:08Douglas Murray?

  If you were gonna, if you were gonna live another five weeks, we wouldn't be able to take advantage of this magnificent offer. So, you know, anyhow, but the point is, is that, yes, we all know that type of huckster and, and, and, you know, tin rattling maniac who, who, who, who comes from a sort of certain type of.

• 1:20:26Chris Williamson?

  He's got a better Instagram page now.

• 1:20:27Douglas Murray?

  But BLM is, is one of those. I'm sad that it's taken this amount of time for it to, to people to wake up to it. I'm sorry that they did become that, you know, they could have been a civil rights campaigning organization. Campaigning for remaining legitimate complaints of black Americans, but they didn't do that. They just became another racket.

• 1:20:49Chris Williamson?

  Even supporters of them now or supporters of the movement have started to distance themselves by using two different terms. Right? People talk about Black Lives Matter to refer to the movement and they talk about BLM to refer to the organization. Uh, and as soon as you, as soon as I started to see that, I was like.

• 1:21:05Douglas Murray?

  Yeah, that won't work. That's a, that's a sign of, um.

• 1:21:07Chris Williamson?

  Internal dispute. Yeah. Are you concerned about white supremacists using the pro white narrative? That you've got with this to further some pretty nasty agendas that they might have.

• 1:21:25Douglas Murray?

  Uh, I don't have a pro white narrative in the book. By any means, I'm not pro white anymore than I'm pro black or anything. I'm just, I'm for people not being told that they're inherently bad because of racial characteristics.

• 1:21:43Chris Williamson?

  We've drawn a line between pro-Western and Western being associated with whiteness, though, so there is, you know, we're only a couple of steps away from.

• 1:21:51Douglas Murray?

  Well, because most people in, historically in the West have been white. So, yes, I mean, it's hard to attack the West without attacking white people, or to attack white people without attacking the West. I'm not making a pro-white argument, because I mean, it's like, any more than, any point in making a pro-black argument.

• 1:22:09Chris Williamson?

  Okay, but let's say it's a pro-West argument.

• 1:22:11Douglas Murray?

  Pro-West.

• 1:22:12Chris Williamson?

  And then that's then going to be perhaps co-opted by some slightly nasty groups.

• 1:22:17Douglas Murray?

  Well, the first thing is, is, as a, first thing, as a writer, you have responsibility for the words you write. And I've been a writer for 22 years now, all my adult life. You have responsibility for the words you write. Other people have responsibility for their actions and their words. I find the attempt sometimes to make writers responsible for their readers to be essentially unfair. I think you write as carefully as you can, I certainly do.

• 1:22:58Douglas Murray?

  And will, can I guarantee that nobody with unpleasant views will read the book? No, I can't. I have very large readership, which I'm very fortunate to have. I can't promise that, that, you know, everybody is going to be exactly of my mindset, or have exactly my tolerant views. I, I would hope they do. But I find this sort of attempt, I'm not saying you're doing it, but the attempt by a lot of people to sort of lie the difference between author and reader to be sort of unfair. I mean, obviously, Jordan gets quite a lot of that, the sort of, you know, you're read by young incels sort of thing.

• 1:23:40Douglas Murray?

  So it's not, it's not really fair, as well as not provable and not the case. And in any case, I mean, as far as I can tell, what actual racists and white supremacists still exist, and there's a little, little bit more of it in America than there is in the UK, I think, a little bit more, but these are tiny, tiny.

• 1:24:03Douglas Murray?

  Way out there, fringe figures.

• 1:24:07Douglas Murray?

  Wouldn't and don't like me anyway, because I won't speak in their terms or agree with what they think. What would be the differences? All sorts of things. I mean, for instance, I I don't tell people that being white is better than being black. So I don't think it is. I think that I think these things are morally neutral states.

• 1:24:27Douglas Murray?

  I think the very idea of saying to somebody that they should feel pride in their skin color is as absurd as all of the other claims that you should feel pride about innate characteristics. I mean, look, let's take being a man, like, if somebody said, actually, somebody did say this to me recently, a weird question. But if I said, Chris, are you proud of being a man? I'm like, I I'm not proud of being a man. I'm not unproud of, I'm not ashamed of being a man, certainly not ashamed of being a man. But I'm not proud of it, because I didn't do anything.

• 1:25:05Douglas Murray?

  I'm not ashamed of being white, and I'm not proud of being white, because I didn't do anything.

• 1:25:12Douglas Murray?

  That's one of the reasons why I've always hated the gay pride thing. So if you believe in pride, you believe in shame.

• 1:25:19Douglas Murray?

  Why would you be proud of being gay? Just just don't feel shame about being gay. It's fine. Just get on with your bloody life and shut up. But the the the the the the what I'm trying to get to is that a white supremacist would say, and does say, I have great pride in being white, and it makes me better than these other people. Well, I don't believe that. I don't feel I have any pride in being white, per se. And I don't think that being white makes me better than anyone else. But but here's the deal in that. I I I require no persuading that this is my belief, because it's been my belief throughout my life. I was born and brought up in very multicultural London in the nineteen eighties.

• 1:26:01Douglas Murray?

  And, you know, it's not like, it's not like I learned, you know, to be, to have my view. It's been what I've thought throughout my life. If you if you said, if if but but so the point I'm trying to come to is that

• 1:26:22Douglas Murray?

  I don't think I'm better than anyone else because of my skin color or my sex or anything. But I also don't think anyone else is better than me because of theirs.

• 1:26:33Douglas Murray?

  I don't think I'm better than a black person because I happen to be white. And I also don't think they're better than me because they happen to be black. But if some, but if somebody distorts that equation, and a white supremacist will distort that, that equation by saying, no, of course, the white person is better than the black person. I think that's racist and horrible and abhorrent. But I also think it's racist and horrible and abhorrent if a black person thinks that they are better than a white person by dint of being black. Now, the first of those two things is almost entirely societally condemned. The second of those, it's not clear that it is.

• 1:27:15Douglas Murray?

  And I think that many of us can feel that in public spaces where certain people, and everyone is always on the cusp of it. A white person in a debate with a black person is always vulnerable to the possibility that they will be accused of racism at some point. And if they are, that is disastrous. But that is because the black person on the stage effectively still holds this, at the moment, a certain unequal power in that regard. So it sometimes takes people a while to work out, but that in the current era we are in, that is the dynamic. In the same way that a man and a woman debating on the stage, it just requires a woman to say to the man, oh, thank you for mansplaining that.

• 1:27:56Douglas Murray?

  Now, the perception we still pretend is that the man is in a position of dominance on the stage. That isn't really the case in our era. Nor is it the case that a white person on stage has dominance over a black person on stage. Certainly not. And just to reiterate, I don't want them to have. I want people to be able to regard each other as equals, not better nor worse because of characteristics over which we have no say.

• 1:28:23Chris Williamson?

  Aside from the problems on the left, which we've been through, do you worry about the trends towards populists or the endorsements of conspiracy theories in some right-wing parties at the moment?

• 1:28:34Douglas Murray?

  Which ones?

• 1:28:35Chris Williamson?

  Well, I mean, the Covid conspiracy theories we've seen that were pushed, I mean, Marjorie Taylor Greene was in an interesting position.

• 1:28:44Douglas Murray?

  She's such an idiot.

• 1:28:45Chris Williamson?

  And is it Bolsonaro, I think, as well? Seems to be somebody that's...

• 1:28:51Douglas Murray?

  Yeah, Daniel Brazil. I don't follow very much about Brazilian politics, but yeah, he seems to be...

• 1:28:55Chris Williamson?

  Nasty piece of work. Are you concerned about that at the moment? You know, we've seen sort of Trumpist wing and claims of leaders like Bolsonaro.

• 1:29:03Douglas Murray?

  I never bought this idea that there was a populist surge in recent years, because I don't like the term populist, and without getting into definitions, by the actual definitions of populism, the most prominent and successful populist in the world is Emmanuel Macron. But in the current era, the idea has been that populism is only something of the right, which is really not correct. It's also a centrist phenomenon and a leftist phenomenon. So I've said there's a certain interpretation of politics in recent years, which I don't go along with. A lot of what is called populist is just popular, voted on by the people, and deemed by a certain type of person as being the wrong decision to have come to.

• 1:29:48Douglas Murray?

  Am I concerned with certain things on the left? Obviously, and I've spent a certain amount of my life critiquing that. Am I concerned with some things that are going on the right? On the right, for sure.

• 1:29:59Chris Williamson?

  What, like?

• 1:30:00Douglas Murray?

  For sure. I think several things have happened in recent, actually in recent months as well as recent years. I'm concerned about the complete, particularly in America, the complete breakdown in trust in any institutions, which is both legitimate and terrifying. I don't know if non-Americans watching will understand the extent to which this is the case, but in America, mainstream conservatives now...

• 1:30:31Douglas Murray?

  For very understandable reasons, do not trust any of the intelligence agencies of their own country, CIA, NSA, FBI. They believe the elections are rigged, or at least unreliable, the results are unreliable, that the courts are corrupt, therefore, and much more, that effectively the state is corrupted, totally corrupted. Here's a problem, I mean, they're not on to nothing. Then you've got the additional layers of the ability of big tech to, for instance, silence even the New York Post, America's oldest newspaper, we were talking

• 1:31:13Douglas Murray?

  about earlier. So the tech companies are corrupted. They've already got the media problem in America, where people don't trust the media because they see it as being a sort of extension of politics and not a reporting mechanism. All of these things are much more advanced in America than they are in the UK. And, you know, you have some, you have people who dislike the BBC, but the BBC is degraded in all sorts of ways, but it's not CNN. It's not seen as partisan, not in the same way. Exactly. People on left and right dislike it for different reasons, but it's still got some reporting credibility. And in the UK, there are people who dislike the intelligence

• 1:31:56Douglas Murray?

  services or, you know, suspicious of them and so on. And I'm not, I don't get in that, it makes, even talking about them sounds conspiratorial, but, but I don't think anyone, not very many people in Britain actively think that MI5, MI6 and GCHQ are not on the side of Britain. But you would say that some sections of the right- Whereas in America, significant sections of the right, as the left, have decided that effectively the state is against the state. And that worries you.

• 1:32:27Douglas Murray?

  If you don't have institutions that you trust, it's hard to see what conservatives are. I mean conservatism is innately tied up with trust in institutions.

• 1:32:42Douglas Murray?

  So I worry about that. A conspiratorial thinking is definitely, I mean, just washed up in, well, in all of our countries. And again, the problem is with some reason, I mean, look at the whiplash that occurred in most people in 2020. When we went from the most important thing is that you stay locked in your houses and don't see anyone else. To the most important thing is to get out on the street in a tightly packed environment and protest against racism. Like, when the narrative shifts like that and you're meant to just go along with it. I can see why people get conspiratorial when they're told that they're not allowed to say that the

• 1:33:26Douglas Murray?

  Wuhan lab might have been responsible for the, for the, for the leak and, and you're told you're a conspiracy theorist if you believe that. And then a year later, the story changes and you're meant to just go along with it. I can see why people are or have lost it to a great extent.

• 1:33:43Douglas Murray?

  And I'm, you know, I, I'm not the arbiter of that. I don't, I don't know. I mean, everyone makes their own judgments about whether other people have lost it or not, but it seems to me that that an awful lot of people have, they've gone down the line of conspiratorial thinking.

• 1:33:56Chris Williamson?

  Is that not the way that a lot of conspiracies work though, that there's a, maybe a kernel of truth that acts as a gateway drug? And then people start to tumble deeper and deeper into this sort of thinking and it's, that's not to say that there isn't problems similar to this on the left, but it does seem like the slope may be a little slippery.

• 1:34:16Douglas Murray?

  I think it's, I think it's gone, I think it's gone sharper and slippery faster on the right. We know the sort of left trajectory have done for a long time, but I mean, it's only like three years since Jordan and I sat down in London and talked about the, uh, the way in which the left goes wrong. Which is a very interesting conversation, still hasn't been properly addressed, but, but, but, you know, we discussed this in London, I remember. We said, you know, we're discussing this because nobody knows where the left goes wrong, but we all know where the right goes wrong. But three years later, you know, it's not clear to me anymore that everybody does agree where the right goes wrong. I mean, another example is look at elements of the right, particularly in America in relation to Russia and Ukraine.

• 1:35:02Douglas Murray?

  I mean, you know, there is a sort of inevitable internet-like meme of, you know, always go against whatever is the prevailing narrative. Reflexive heterodoxy. Right, exactly. Everyone seems to be praising this guy Zelensky. I don't want to praise this guy. Yeah, well, everyone's praising him because he could have done a runner and lived in the south of France the rest of his life, and instead he stayed, risked his life and the life of his family to stay and fight for his country and inspire his country to fight. Like, that's why people admire him. It's not that hard to discern.

• 1:35:43Douglas Murray?

  Let me give you another one that, I mean, just is amazing to me now. But there are people on the right, again, particularly in America and in Europe, it has to be said, not in Britain so much, which is a good thing, but certainly in Europe and certainly on the right in America. You have people who now say things only used to be said on the left, things like, who are we to say when we went into Iraq and killed X million people? Now, not getting in an argument about the Iraq War. First of all, we didn't kill X million people in Iraq. It made what turned out to be a very inept intervention in which local militias and others and other countries poured in and then were responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths. And it's not a small thing.

• 1:36:27Douglas Murray?

  But the "we went in and killed X million people and therefore we have no right to act" used to be a claim of the sort of Chomskyite left, and you now hear it on the right.

• 1:36:42Douglas Murray?

  That has surprised me. That's happened very fast. Who are we to condemn Russia when we invaded Afghanistan? Again, I'm very happy to have the right about that, but that used to be a left-wing thing. That did not used to be a right-wing thing. And it has become one.

• 1:37:01Chris Williamson?

  We spent a good bit of time together in New York, which have been some of my favorite memories from my trip so far around here.

• 1:37:08Douglas Murray?

  I mean, I thought they were all right.

• 1:37:10Chris Williamson?

  You introduced me to Manhattan Cocktails, which was fantastic.

• 1:37:14Douglas Murray?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 1:37:14Chris Williamson?

  We got into a row with a lady at a show, a Harry Potter show, and we had some really, really interesting discussions there that I kind of hadn't, a side of you that I hadn't really seen before. And one of the first things I asked was that you've got five columns a week that you write at the moment, that's correct?

• 1:37:32Douglas Murray?

  I write an average of four columns a week.

• 1:37:34Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 1:37:34Douglas Murray?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:35Chris Williamson?

  Well, plus media spots, plus writing a book, plus the other bits that you do, plus trying to have a life as well. What is it that drives you to work that hard?

• 1:37:50Douglas Murray?

  Gosh, that's a difficult question. I do work very hard.

• 1:37:56Chris Williamson?

  I got to see this firsthand, which is the reason I bring it up.

• 1:37:59Douglas Murray?

  Yeah. I, I think I might have mentioned you, and I sometimes have to register that with myself. A few weeks ago, I got back, maybe it was when you were in New York, I remember I got home one night at about 10:00 PM, and I remember having this terrible feeling of there must be something I've got to do. And I realized, oh no, there isn't. I can relax. And it was 10:00 PM at night, and that is not uncommon at all.

• 1:38:26Douglas Murray?

  I sort of say that one of the great benefits of the life I've been able to create has been that I'd work in industries, trades, whatever you want to call them, where I have to work all of the time, but at about 90 or 80%. So, most people work, well, let's pretend that most people work nine to five, 100%. And then they stop working, and they can do whatever they like the rest of the time.

• 1:39:01Douglas Murray?

  If you do what you love, well, first of all, if you're very busy in the sort of areas I'm in, you just can't do a nine to five job. I mean, it wouldn't work.

• 1:39:14Douglas Murray?

  And so, yeah, I work all the time.

• 1:39:18Douglas Murray?

  Every day I have something. I don't think there's ever a day when I don't. What drives that? Uh, a lot of things, I suppose. One is just being driven. Uh, and I don't know if anyone can explain for themselves why someone, why they're driven. I just, I just know I always have been. I always had a um, a horror of wasting time. I mean, I, I, I'm, I'm quite an irritable person. It's one of my um, traits. Don't smile.

• 1:39:52Chris Williamson?

  You were perfectly pleasant when that's.

• 1:39:54Douglas Murray?

  Okay, well, that's very kind. Um, but in general, I'm, I'm, I'm slightly irritable at times. Um, and it's generally because of um, a fear of wasting time. And um, this is very strong in, in, in me. Uh, I can't bear clothes shopping, for instance. I can't bear being in shops, actually, in general. Uh, I get very irritable because I, I just, I feel my life going. And I have that in certain films and all sorts of other things. I, I just have a very acute sense of

• 1:40:34Douglas Murray?

  life's brevity. Don't waste it. Uh, work hard. Do whatever it is you're meant to do. And I've got a pretty clear view of what I need to do. And so I don't like not using my time.

• 1:40:52Douglas Murray?

  Um, the, the other thing, I suppose, I'm, I'm motivated to be the best that I can be. And that includes being the best in my field. Um, I could always do less. I mean, it's one of those sort of things that your mother says, you know, couldn't you not, you know, can you do a bit less? You know, something you, well, I could, but then I wouldn't be as successful. And I want to be successful.

• 1:41:19Douglas Murray?

  I want to do well. You know, if I've, if I've got a book out, like, I don't want to not promote it. You know, because I feel like I've done the work. And you referred to my, the columns I write. It's one of the great, you know, great pleasures of my life. I, I get to write for and speak to millions and millions of people in different formats, in different countries, in tabloid newspapers and in broadsheet newspapers. And enter into and be in the big debates of my time. And, and I enjoy it. And, you know, people generally think I'm quite good at it.

• 1:42:03Douglas Murray?

  And ask me to do it. And, um, and I get a thrill from it. And, and, you know, I said a little while ago to a friend, you know, I wish I could have a couple of days off. And then I said, I said, I wish I could just like not have to write anything for a few weeks. And she said, no, you don't. You'd be like 48 hours and you'd be like, damn it, bored.

• 1:42:29Chris Williamson?

  You had a similar experience with meditation, I think.

• 1:42:33Douglas Murray?

  That's right. I'm very, very bad at meditating. Very, very bad at meditating. Uh, yeah, I think Sam Harris was trying to get me to meditate. I, I find that, I find that impossible. I'm told that there's a way to get through that, but I couldn't get through it. I, I, you know, all that thing, even when Sam said, um, it was in Australia a few years ago. You know, Sam was saying, like, empty your mind of all your thoughts. And I was just thinking, I'm so irritated.

• 1:43:02Douglas Murray?

  I, I wish I'd written a book. And I, I, I can't do it. And, um, Uh, uh, anyhow, that's my failing. I mean, Sam is terrific and he's brilliant at that. And he's helped millions of people to find a way to do things like meditation. I wish I could do that, but in a way I don't really, because I kind of don't want to turn my mind off. It's always racing. It's always looking for things and, you know, I read a lot, as you know, books and things and magazines and articles and all that, but I read books.

• 1:43:42Douglas Murray?

  And I read to relax as well, which is very important, if you do, I do. You know, you read to extend your knowledge, but you also read things that just take you out of work stuff into something else. But even then, I kind of read with a pencil in my hand, even the relaxing stuff is I have it slightly in the corner of my eye.

• 1:44:02Chris Williamson?

  I have a friend who referred to that before you have the pencil in your hand is low stakes consumption. So he talks about low stakes podcast listening, that if you're constantly embroiled in the culture wars and you're always listening, the newest whatever.

• 1:44:17Douglas Murray?

  Yes.

• 1:44:17Chris Williamson?

  At a hundred miles an hour, it's kind of nice to just hear about a murder mystery for a little while.

• 1:44:22Douglas Murray?

  Yeah, I agree.

• 1:44:23Chris Williamson?

  Low stakes listening. But this is something that I've been battling with so much. And we spoke about this with regards to productivity dysmorphia as well. This tension between the fact that you know that part of your drive comes from your ability to pay attention, your ability to constantly be on, to be able to look at the details in a way that other people don't. And that that can actually lead to almost a fear that you go, okay, well, hang on. If I tune this down, that is the fuel that's driving a lot of the achievements that I take so much pleasure in. And that there's this difficulty sometimes with seeing the amount of work that we've done. And I think maybe we almost don't want to see the amount of work that we've done.

• 1:45:08Chris Williamson?

  Because we think, well, maybe if I took more satisfaction in the work that I'd done, or if I felt, if I felt like I could take more of a break, then that might shortcut some of the things which is propelling me to continue to do this.

• 1:45:19Douglas Murray?

  Well, when you start off.

• 1:45:22Douglas Murray?

  You have to work so damn hard. I mean, I think that's something that is not expressed enough to people. When you start off your career, particularly a career like mine, you, you, you, you have to work so damn hard. In the beginning of my career, I didn't have a holiday for seven years. It was seven years until my family persuaded me to go away with a holiday. I just couldn't go on holiday. And one of the reasons was I, at the, at the beginning of my career, inevitably, if people called and asked me if I could write something, I had to do it. If I feared that if I said no, they wouldn't come back and ask again. Now, that's very common. The problem is there is a certain point in your life when you have that fear and it's no longer relevant.

• 1:46:06Douglas Murray?

  It's information that you're being told by yourself about an earlier version of yourself. And you have the right at a certain point, but it's very hard to make that decision professionally. To say, okay, no, I'm okay now. I can take time off. I can say no this time. I can turn that down. Well, you also need to. You need to. It's only in the last 10 years that I learned how to say no to things. Because I didn't know whether I'd be asked again. Um, but as for, as for whatever the drive is underneath that, if I could, well, it's self revealing, but I suppose there are a couple of things.

• 1:46:50Douglas Murray?

  One is that I've always sought freedom in my life. Um, as much freedom as I can have. And some years ago, I said to a set of friends and some family members around and we were talking about various things. I said, you know, my experience of life has been that, um, with every year, I get more and more free.

• 1:47:17Douglas Murray?

  And I just realised I felt terrible actually because I realised a younger guy who's there said, I don't feel that at all. He had exactly the opposite feeling and I felt sort of terrible that I said this. Um, but it is sort of been my feeling is that I've gone further and further in a way I've gone further and further away from home, you might say. Um, and, uh, but that I've wanted to be free and to pursue what I want to pursue and to have the ability to do that. To write about what I want to write about, to go where I want to go, to live where I want to live and to be with who I want to be with.

• 1:47:58Douglas Murray?

  And this is, this is something I always wanted and, and various other, there was a British journalist Suzanne Moore said something quite similar in a piece on her Substack recently and I said to her, I said, it rang such a bell. Uh, so that's the first thing. And I suppose the second thing I could probably point to is that, um,

• 1:48:19Douglas Murray?

  actually it's like, I once said to my late friend Clive James, I don't know if you knew, great Australian polymath. I said to him towards the very end of his life, he was born in 1939 and opening line of his memoirs, it says, you know, I was born in 1939, the other big event that year. Um, he was amazing, wonderful man and, but I remember saying to him once, you know, about what do you feel drives you? He lost his father in the war. He didn't die in the war. He lost, his father died on a plane back. The Americans like brought some of the Australian troops back home early and the plane crashed and he sort of, it was just Clive and his mum then, you know, and I remember

• 1:49:00Douglas Murray?

  I said to Clive once, asked him about his drive and he said, I felt like I owed it to the ruins of my family.

• 1:49:08Douglas Murray?

  Um, I do have a sort of sense, it's not to do with family necessarily, but I do have a sense of being born at a fortunate time and having had, I don't say luck, because I'm, for reasons I think you know, I'm worried about the term luck. But I feel I have a good fortune, which I shouldn't waste. And, you know, most of my predecessors, predecessors and my ancestors did not have very much freedom. Economic freedom, freedom to move around, freedom to find stuff out. I mean, I think of the lib, you know, the sort of the books that would be on a shelf, you know, on sort of grandparents' age

• 1:49:54Douglas Murray?

  relatives, you know, they would have very small numbers of books, because people, other than intellectuals or very rich people, people didn't have very many books, you know. And I always thought, if I can get the things that my predecessors couldn't, or go to places they couldn't, why would I waste that opportunity?

• 1:50:25Douglas Murray?

  Can you imagine how frustrated you'd be to have been born in the early 20th century or the late 90th century, not able to leave your village really even, and not knowing much about what even happened in town, you know, or not alone in the capital and, you know, and with every generation in a country like ours, we've had the ability to go further and further. It's happened in my own family. And

• 1:50:57Douglas Murray?

  so I feel like it's a responsibility not to waste that.

• 1:51:03Douglas Murray?

  But more importantly, I'm just driven by the desire not to waste time. You know, there's that line of Andrew Marvell. "Behind my back, I always hear a time's winged chariot hurrying near.

• 1:51:18Douglas Murray?

  I hear time's winged chariot awfully loud."

• 1:51:21Chris Williamson?

  You spoke to me about instinct. I can't remember who it was that gave you a piece of advice about how sometimes it's wrong, but at the time it's the only thing.

• 1:51:31Douglas Murray?

  That was Clive as well, who I just mentioned. Yeah, Clive had great success on television and other things. But he once wrote a

• 1:51:43Douglas Murray?

  he once wrote a verse play in rhyming couplets about Prince Charles and opened it in the West End in London. It didn't run for very long. I think it closed before opening night.

• 1:51:58Douglas Murray?

  I think it made it halfway through opening night. I think it stopped at the interval.

• 1:52:05Douglas Murray?

  No one left, including the cast.

• 1:52:09Douglas Murray?

  I remember he was devastated about it. Such a sort of career humiliation.

• 1:52:19Douglas Murray?

  But he wrote somewhere, I think, he said,

• 1:52:23Douglas Murray?

  he said, "Look, I followed my instincts on it. And your instincts don't always lead you right, but you've got to trust that they are the things that have led you to what have been your successes." And I've come to really follow that advice because I've written about quite a bewildering array of subjects in my life and in books about a lot of different subjects. And

• 1:52:51Douglas Murray?

  I sometimes used to think, how can I be sure that it's going to work? And the answer that comes back in my head is, you can't be sure.

• 1:53:04Douglas Murray?

  But you've been right before. So the odds of you being right again are quite good. It's like, I find this thing interesting. If, if, if, if you wrote about things you found interesting and there was no reception for it, that would be one thing. But if you say, I find this really quite interesting and you write about it and you get an audience and then you write about something totally different, but it, you find it interesting. Very often you find that's because other people do too. And that's a fantastic thing as a writer.

• 1:53:44Douglas Murray?

  That's one of the best things is, is, is to be able to, to do it not once, but quite a lot of times on different subjects. Because that means that, that you might have an ability to, and you obviously have this. I mean, you have the ability to put your finger on things that are interesting to other people as well. But that's, that's good news.

• 1:54:09Chris Williamson?

  Well, you said instinct may sometimes direct you wrong, but it's the only thing which has ever directed you right.

• 1:54:15Douglas Murray?

  Right.

• 1:54:15Chris Williamson?

  And that's a, a price that you need to pay for following your instinct. And you're right, you know, this will be episode nearly 500 or something of this podcast in four years, uh, which is a, a workload that is difficult to do on your own. And, um, I was, I was reflecting after our conversation about your seven years without a, without a holiday. I did 204 Saturdays in a row at the same club night without a break every single Saturday. And that was something similar. And there is something, uh, romantic, virtuous, heroic.

• 1:54:56Chris Williamson?

  Old and worldly, British, about being someone that does the work in that way. Perhaps it's perhaps it's a cope for my puritan work ethic.

• 1:55:05Douglas Murray?

  Yes, we've probably both got a bit of that.

• 1:55:07Chris Williamson?

  But I there's something about that that I like. I like the fact that I can look back, you know, in whatever years time when there's a producer that comes in and does everything. When there's a team that's looking after the editing or the scheduling with the guests. And I know that I did half a thousand or maybe a thousand of them. And it was all on my shoulders with with a video guy back in the UK. Right. And there's something beautiful about that. And the other thing that I really adored from when we spent time together in New York that you told me about was a story to do with regrets from Hitch. And this is a we're talking about trade offs here, right? And this has been, I wrote a newsletter about it, which I sent to you.

• 1:55:52Chris Williamson?

  And dude, it is, it is one of the best insights for ameliorating regrets, for understanding that they're an unavoidable part of our lives.

• 1:56:06Chris Williamson?

  You tell that story about what Hitch said to you about regrets?

• 1:56:09Douglas Murray?

  Yeah, it's Chris Richards, he said, I think he wrote it in his memoir as well. He said, he said, you have to choose your regrets.

• 1:56:22Douglas Murray?

  I mean, everyone is going to have regrets in their life.

• 1:56:28Douglas Murray?

  I know people who've achieved great things and achieved small things, all of whom have regrets.

• 1:56:39Douglas Murray?

  And yes, you have to know that you're going to have regrets. And the question is which ones you can bear and which ones you don't think you can bear.

• 1:56:51Douglas Murray?

  Um.

• 1:56:53Douglas Murray?

  Let me give you an obvious example. Let's say you had a dream always of starting a shop, you know. You've got two options in front of you, really. One is starting it and seeing if it works. And the other one is, is, is not because you fear that it won't work. You'll fall flat on your ass.

• 1:57:20Douglas Murray?

  Both, both choices have regrets. And the sort of person you are relies to a great extent on which one can I bear?

• 1:57:33Douglas Murray?

  Can I bear not having tried, but at least I didn't fail?

• 1:57:41Douglas Murray?

  More than I can bear, I tried and I might have failed.

• 1:57:48Douglas Murray?

  Either way, in this, this calculation, you're, you are risking a type of regret. So you have to make the decision.

• 1:57:57Douglas Murray?

  I have that all the time with writing.

• 1:58:02Douglas Murray?

  Quite a lot of times in my life, I've written things seriously against my own interests, you know.

• 1:58:10Douglas Murray?

  And I have this terrible tearing thing within, within me, which is, I gotta say the thing, I gotta say the thing, I just gotta say the thing. Don't say the thing, Douglas, don't say the thing. Everyone's gonna hate you. And I, I'm gonna say the thing. And

• 1:58:30Douglas Murray?

  I, I know that it's because I have two options in front of me. One is, one is, I haven't, I can't give all the details, but it happened not long ago with politicians.

• 1:58:42Douglas Murray?

  One is, oh, well, that's that, you know, I've broken that relationship.

• 1:58:49Douglas Murray?

  And I have that regret, not that it's a very big regret actually, but, but on the other hand, I would have had the regret of, I didn't say what I thought.

• 1:59:00Douglas Murray?

  So at least I don't have that regret.

• 1:59:03Douglas Murray?

  But it is, it is, it is a profound insight of Christopher's because.

• 1:59:08Douglas Murray?

  You know, even freedom, which I mentioned earlier, you know, is not an unloyed good. It's not like searching for freedom leads you only to a lack of regrets.

• 1:59:21Douglas Murray?

  Um, I mean,

• 1:59:25Douglas Murray?

  my experience of freedom for yourself can be very costly for others.

• 1:59:30Chris Williamson?

  The thing that it made me realize was, looking back, I'd always presumed that any regret that I had was due to a suboptimal decision that I'd made.

• 1:59:39Douglas Murray?

  Right.

• 1:59:39Chris Williamson?

  And that had I have been able to go back and make the right decision, I could have avoided regret entirely. I always thought that regret was a bug of my decision making, not a feature, an inbuilt feature of of being a human. And as soon as you realize the fact that, look, opportunity cost exists. By doing a thing, you're not doing another thing. And even if the thing that you chose to do was perfectly accurate, it was precisely the right thing. You're always going to have an open loop around what could have happened had I have done the other thing. So when you're given the choice between two things, the the a good way for anybody that's stuck with the decision is to think,

• 2:00:23Chris Williamson?

  which of these two choices could I not bear to live with the regret of?

• 2:00:27Douglas Murray?

  Absolutely.

• 2:00:28Chris Williamson?

  And that has clarified.

• 2:00:30Douglas Murray?

  Absolutely. That happens. I mean, I have that thought all the time. I mean, I'm in all the time. What what could I um? What could I not bear?

• 2:00:40Douglas Murray?

  Um, as I say, for me, a very strong one is speaking my mind, speaking the truth as I see it. I couldn't bear not doing it. I would, I find it very hard.

• 2:00:52Douglas Murray?

  Um, you know, on occasion, as I say, people say to me, you should be a little bit more diplomatic, you know, with this, or you should have been a bit easier on that person. An elderly friend of mine often phones me up and says, oh, that's another country you can't visit, Donald.

• 2:01:13Douglas Murray?

  So there's about one place you can live in the world. Move to North Korea. No, that's tough on them as well. Unfairly, you know.

• 2:01:28Douglas Murray?

  But, but, yeah, so, so, so you, you, you work out what you can't. What you can't, and you do realise, I mean.

• 2:01:40Douglas Murray?

  I think this is a bit self-aggrandising, but

• 2:01:44Douglas Murray?

  there is also a difference in people of the risk they're willing to take, which is, I don't want to over-emphasise myself because I'm a writer, I'm not a soldier,

• 2:01:55Douglas Murray?

  or a fireman, or a policeman.

• 2:01:59Douglas Murray?

  But I think there are

• 2:02:06Douglas Murray?

  there are prices you pay for throwing yourself against the world. And you have to decide whether you want to pay them or not.

• 2:02:17Douglas Murray?

  Most people go along with whatever they're meant to go along with, wherever they are.

• 2:02:24Douglas Murray?

  And a certain type of person doesn't.

• 2:02:28Douglas Murray?

  And

• 2:02:31Douglas Murray?

  generally speaking, I think I tend to be the sort of person who doesn't. And that comes with considerable benefits, in my case. Freedom, a certain degree of success and so on. But it comes with a certain cost. I mean, one of the costs is

• 2:02:49Douglas Murray?

  you always feel a certain sense of isolation, you know.

• 2:02:56Douglas Murray?

  Not to say loneliness, I don't feel like I'm not lonely in any personal or ideological sense, but, but it's inevitable that if you don't go along with the precepts, you're going to have a sort of isolation.

• 2:03:12Douglas Murray?

  But then even that, I mean, that you, and then you test that all the time. Can I bear that? And some of the time the answer will be, no, I can't. Other times it'll be, yeah, that's fine. And other times it'll be, I guess I have to.

• 2:03:30Chris Williamson?

  Alain de Botton says loneliness is a kind of tax we have to pay to atone for a certain complexity of mind.

• 2:03:37Douglas Murray?

  That's true. That's true. That's not bad for Allah. Um, uh, yeah, it is true. Um.

• 2:03:45Chris Williamson?

  But that's laid on top of, or there's a magnifying effect or a multiplier here, which is the complexity of mind plus the decision of whether or not to deploy this into the real world.

• 2:03:58Douglas Murray?

  Well, again, that depends on whether or not your first forays were received warmly or not.

• 2:04:04Chris Williamson?

  Seth Godin had this amazing insight where he said, a lot of the time we need support, but only the first time around. That when you start to get some positive reinforcement over time, you can be, you can become more boneheaded. You can become more singularly driven.

• 2:04:22Douglas Murray?

  Yes.

• 2:04:23Chris Williamson?

  But the first time can be more difficult to get through and.

• 2:04:28Douglas Murray?

  I think that's true. A more troubling one in a way is the one that the older you get. I'm now in my 40s, I'm 42 now, but um, I was speaking to a musician friend the other day, who just, one of his um, seniors had just died and uh, I know, um, what was on my mind was on his, which is, is the, the fact that as you, as you get older in your profession, your career, you, you notice the people who you looked to, who you obviously thought were always going to be there, go. Um, and then of course you have the inevitable thing of, oh hell, that's going to have to be the position that's filled by people of my generation. And um, there's a responsibility

• 2:05:12Douglas Murray?

  that comes from that. There's also a, um, there's also, when you're starting off, hopefully you will have, I certainly had, uh, great mentors and um, people I sought out, really. They didn't just get given to me. I sought them out to um, help me start off. And um, of course, they die off.

• 2:05:41Douglas Murray?

  But then they don't entirely because

• 2:05:47Douglas Murray?

  that which got you started is you, becomes you. Carries forward within you, yeah. And, and so

• 2:05:58Douglas Murray?

  it is a sort of eternal process of

• 2:06:03Douglas Murray?

  it's what Tom Stoppard in Arcadia describes, he says at one point, something like, he says, you know,

• 2:06:09Douglas Murray?

  the character, the student says, says to a tutor, something like, she says, how can you cope with the fact that all these plays were lost in the library at Alexandria, you know, this number by Aeschylus, this number by that. How can you cope with all these things that were lost? And he says, because nothing is lost. Nothing is lost to the march.

• 2:06:34Douglas Murray?

  He says the plays that were lost will come back in fragments or

• 2:06:41Douglas Murray?

  return again in another language.

• 2:06:45Douglas Murray?

  We shed as we pick up. Nothing is lost to the march, but all we have is the march. It's a constant process of loss and renewal and discovery and loss and rediscovery again. And almost every profession, I would have thought, is like that. Being a writer is particularly like that. Because you see the people who started you off as they start to fall away.

• 2:07:14Douglas Murray?

  You have and keep certain things they gave you. And there are, for me at any rate, there are connections I feel to people who I never met through people I did know. And now I feel quite often, walking through a library or a bookshop or something, I feel like almost the whole place is surrounded by friends somehow, you know. Oh, I, I think I knew him. Sometimes it is somebody I knew, but more often, I have a connection to that person. And so the whole thing is a sort of is a

• 2:07:55Douglas Murray?

  Is like a constant rediscovery. That's what, that's what T S Eliot saw it as.

• 2:08:04Douglas Murray?

  It's a, I'm sorry, I sound like I'm waffling, but I'm coming to a major point, I promise.

• 2:08:12Douglas Murray?

  There's a version of history and ideas that is common at the moment, which is endless progress.

• 2:08:23Douglas Murray?

  And I never really believed in that, just innately. I didn't think that things were always getting better. I always thought it was all up for grabs. I don't know why I always thought that, but I did. Even the people who believed in the sort of Fukuyama stuff, you had to have but about two world wars. Those are two quite big footnotes, you know, to a theory.

• 2:08:47Douglas Murray?

  But the theory of progress is, most people, including people I meet grownups all the time who believe in it. They think it's always just getting better, inevitably.

• 2:08:57Douglas Murray?

  And they think that art and other things goes along an inevitable path, getting better and better, bigger and bigger, clearer and clearer, more and more accomplished. But there's another way of seeing things, which is the one I've just been trying to outline, which is that it's actually cyclical, the whole thing. That things are lost and come around again.

• 2:09:18Douglas Murray?

  And that's, that's the case with ideas, for sure. I mean, whole libraries die every day in the heads of people.

• 2:09:29Douglas Murray?

  And they will hopefully be reborn in another head. The same day.

• 2:09:39Douglas Murray?

  Goethe says somewhere, in one of his poems, about the

• 2:09:45Douglas Murray?

  the need to recreate that which has been created.

• 2:09:50Douglas Murray?

  And I think that's one of the great noble enterprises, which is to recreate that which has been created, to rediscover that which has been, as Elliot would it, lost and found and lost again and again. And everything's like that. All the time wisdom is being lost. But hopefully it's being picked up again by someone else. You know, every time you lose, you lose somebody irreplaceable, and they're not replaced, but somebody else steps in. And that's the march.

• 2:10:28Chris Williamson?

  Douglas Murray, ladies and gentlemen. The War on the West will be linked in the show notes below. Where else should people go if they want to keep up to date with what you're doing?

• 2:10:36Douglas Murray?

  You can find me on Instagram a little bit, Twitter, Douglas K Murray. Find me in the New York Post, the Sun, the Spectator, and various other platforms.

• 2:10:50Chris Williamson?

  Douglas, I appreciate you. Thank you.

• 2:10:52Douglas Murray?

  It's a great pleasure.