Author and cultural critic Douglas Murray joins Rafael Mangual to talk about the growing challenges facing the West. They discuss the rise of anti-Semitism, the failures of socialism, and the erosion of free speech, especially in the U.K. Murray makes a clear case for defending Western values with courage, clarity, and action.

Audio Transcript

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Rafael Mangual: Hello and welcome to another episode of the City Journal Podcast. I'm your host Rafael Mangual, and I'm so thrilled to be joined by my colleague Douglas Murray. It is so nice to get to call you a colleague now.

Douglas Murray: Well, likewise.

Rafael Mangual: I have followed your work for such a long time. I've been such a fan and I think it's incredibly important, so I'm really excited to talk to you about that today. For those of you who've been watching the show that we spent the last few weeks of this show kind of doing this series called “Who We Are,” where we take deeper dives into the topics at the Manhattan Institute and that city Journal has been covering and today's conversation, I'd really like to focus on the broader defense of the West, we'll say. But before we get to the substance, I do want to just like to ask our guests how we ended up in this world. I think that's always interesting to people who read our work and think about what we do and think to themselves, well how does one end up as a public intellectual? And if I had to read your bio, which I won't do because the man who needs no introductions, I think the title that best fits you is Defender of the West. I think if I had to choose what to put on your tombstone, that's what I would put on it. And how does one end up there?

Douglas Murray: A lot of other things in life in a way, by accident. In a way, by surprise. Nothing I've written or said or studied in my public life is anything that strikes me as being very surprising. I suppose if I accept the title, you're willing to put, I hope many decades on, on my tombstone, if I was to accept that title, it would be with some amazement still that the west sort of needs defending or explaining or justifying or anything like that. But I suppose that they say that everybody thinks that the family and situation they grow up in is the same situation every other person grows up in the same sort of setup, same family. And of course then as you get into adulthood cognizance, you become aware that actually there are things that are unusual or things you took for granted you can't take for granted. And I think when I started to become politically aware, by which I don't mean by any means party politically active, just engaged in the world, engaged in politics and current affairs, I suppose one of the first things I noticed was the extent to which actually everything I did take for granted civilizationally, culturally, and much more was exactly what was under consistent attack, not least by people who might've been described as intellectuals. In fact, they seem to be the ones who are attacking it the most. And I discovered that the things I love, the things that I cherish, the things I don't take for granted, but are things which needed defending, shoring up, explaining and much more. So it's surprising to me, I'd much rather that the water we swim in was so obvious and so obviously desirable or albeit with some necessary improvements, but that it was so desirable that it wouldn't need a sort of constant defending against it's actually malevolent critics, which is I think really what it is that I've found in my life that dealing with is that we haven't really in the west been dealing with the sort of fair-minded, legitimate sort of critics who want to mend something in the car in order to improve it, rather people who want to take the whole vehicle apart and often replace it with something far, far less desirable.

Rafael Mangual: To reimagine, I think is the term that is in vogue nowadays.

Douglas Murray: Reimagine. That's a wonderful sort of sanitizing word, isn't it? It's a sweet bit of casuistry there. Yeah, we just have to reimagine.

Rafael Mangual: That's right, that's right. It's so simple. It's just a lack of imagination. Otherwise we'd be standing in utopia. I think you're exactly right. And I want to get into this issue of the critics of the West and their malevolence. And so I want you to bear with me, I want to set this up with a bit of a story, A very recent one last night I was giving a talk at a local Federalist Society chapter and the talk was about the new challenges on public safety posed by the Mamdani administration. And I kind of gave my spiel and during the Q and A member of the crowd asked, what is it that would unite people who seem to have such disparate interest to put someone like Zohran Mamdani in power? And before I could answer the question he elaborated and he said, there are people who are on paper just couldn't be more different from one another. I mean, and it got me thinking just the other day, Zohran Mamdani gave a speech in which he cited to Muslim scripture in opposition to the enforcement of immigration law here in the United States. And not long after that, he and his political allies began to rally around the LGBTQ-XYZ-123 movement because a rainbow flag had been removed from a monument by the National Park Service across from the Stonewall Inn. And that despite the fact that there's a well-documented lack of tolerance in the Muslim world for many of the sexual preferences that are celebrated by the LGBTQ movement, and at almost the same time there were people on the left celebrating a recently published essay in New York Magazine that was lamenting the whitening of so many Brooklyn neighborhoods like Bed-Stuy and Crown Heights. And in the essay, the author actually complains about being the only black parent at the local playground, which is something that you can never imagine being written in the opposite direction of course. And yet so many of the very white people that she was complaining about are cut from the exact same political cloth that informed the essay people like Zohran Mamdani’s housing czar, Cea Weaver, who has unironically railed against white ownership. And so the question I want to explore with you is what is it that unites people who have almost nothing in common in so many ways and whose particular interests are so obviously in tension?

Douglas Murray: I think what you mean, if I'm right, is what unites that particular movement.

Rafael Mangual: Sure.

Douglas Murray: Yeah. Because I mean there's lots in a society that can unite us. There's a lot, for instance in America that can unite Americans across any party or other lines, and that's stuff that's very important to hold onto that way. And I mean something I wrote about in The War on the West was that you've got to be intensely suspicious of the sort of people who for instance, want to actually take away all your unifying stories, all your unifying history, all your unifying documents and laws and much more. Those are people who are really talking as enemies of the society, not critics of it who want to improve it. So that's one thing. But yes, what you are asking me is what is it that's going on in that movement where I know Mamdani can, as he did in that speech, keep on talking about the founder of the religion he follows, Muhammad and keep citing a very carefully edited version of Muhammad’s own life and history and what would unite that with the sort of people who would get, would believe that the removal of one pride flag is a signal of the end of the Weimar Republic beginning of Nazism sort of thing.

And I think, again, this comes back to this thing that I mentioned that really first of all got me aware of my own politics on a lot of this, which is it's simply people who will grab at anything to assail the society that they're in. There's nothing coherent about a movement that, for instance, reveres anyone talking about Muhammad uncritically and also reveres the progress pride flag. I mean there's nothing coherent there. And some 25 years I've heard people make attempts at explaining that, but there really isn't anything coherent in it unless you just recognize that they're just against the thing. They're against everything else. If Mamdani were an evangelical Christian who had stood up and kept on talking about, I mean he kept on doing the “peace be upon him” stuff about the prophet, every time he said Muhammad's name or cited the prophet, the mayor of New Yorker, an evangelical Christian who kept on saying, “and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ as he said” then these same people who lament the taking down of one pride flag would be infuriated. They would say religion has no place like this in our politics.

This is a pattern we've seen across the west in recent years. It's really a sort of fetishizing, I mean it's a fetishizing of anything that is not seen to be ours historically. So if you believe that America, if you recognize that America was founded as a Christian nation or with the bases of Christianity there, the Judeo-Christian tradition including the tradition by then that had come up of the Enlightenment, if you recognize that that was at the heart of America's founding, then Islam is a sort of wonderfully exotic counterweight to, and that isn't to say that Islam can't find a place within a society that's pluralistic, it's just that this is a very weird way to go about it.

In the same way all social attitudes surveys show that American attitudes towards sexual difference, including sexual minorities, has consistently become more and more tolerant in recent decades. There's an interesting potential reversal of that which we might get into in a bit in recent years, which I think is really the result of an overreach, an overswing by the so-called LGBTQIA+ leaders, because it's not really a community, it's a sort of organized leadership, but at that very point, the tolerance has been reached. You get these people who become much, much more sort, strict about adhering to every single new shibboleth of that movement. And that again, it's not really trying to do what it's pretending to do, what it's really doing is using LGBTQIA+ rights to sort of batter norms. And so that's where those things that are otherwise irreconcilable and would fall apart under the weight of their own contradictions just have united for a very long time. They are able to portray themselves as opposed to the core culture, opposed to the founding culture and therefore they meet as bedfellows. There doesn't have to be any real coherence in it, it's just to be opposed to.

Rafael Mangual: One wonders whether if they ever experienced victory in their opposition, have they considered what will become of their bedfellows, whose interests are diametrically opposed to theirs in almost every way?

Douglas Murray: No, but I mean one of the things we have to realize is much of this is magical thinking, which I think how I described it in The Madness of Crowds, a lot of what is passing for criticism in these movements that we see is really a form of magical thinking including magical utopian thinking. You mentioned one of Mayor Amani's colleagues who as you say, has this atrocious track record. Home ownership is a problem.

Rafael Mangual: White ownership, specifically.

Douglas Murray: White ownership is particularly a problem and the private property should be seized. Now this, I mean I'm rather sad that this is even going on still among officials. I mean I wouldn't be surprised if it was happening at kindergarten, but I'm surprised and saddened that this has to still be pushed back against when it's coming from public officials because we know very well what results from the seizure of home ownership as it happens. I'm just in the middle of reading the memoirs of Chairman Mao's doctor, personal doctor, which is an absolutely remarkable book, came out some 30 or 40 years ago now, but is an extraordinary book. And he describes in that at one point they just got to what happens in the Great Leap Forward, as it was called in China, what happens when private home ownership stops, when properties are seized? Mao's own doctor has a family home and because there are some spare rooms, his mother has her house taken from her and she's allowed to be in the one room she lives in and she's allowed to have the family members who are also in the house to stay in a room and the other rooms are taken and she has no recourse for that and nobody cares about, for instance, her own sense of justice or any of her own appeal to fairness. The society’s death to, for instance, what it's like for an elderly woman on her own with a sense of pride to suddenly have everything taken from her. But that's just one example in history of what it looks like to have the seizure of private property. And so it's not like we haven't seen that before and what's disheartening about hearing people around Mamdani and sometimes he himself in his past before he tried to gloss it over a bit, but what's disheartening about it is we know so clearly where this leads, what this means, that the people advocating for such things must either be very wicked and want a replay of these terrible experiments of socialism and more, or they are very, very ignorant and have literally read nothing about history and you have to deal on a case by case basis, which it is.

Rafael Mangual: Can offer a potential third option, which is that they are incredibly hubristic and think that they are finally going to figure out the correct way to implement socialism without any of the downside and all of the upside.

Douglas Murray: Again, what's disappointing is that, and I'm not sure I allow the third category, is that we wouldn't give that excuse with other forms of totalitarian thinking.

Rafael Mangual: Correct. “Real fascism hasn't been tried yet,” is not a sentence that you'll ever hear uttered by an intelligent person.

Douglas Murray: Yeah, certainly not by an intelligent person. You might hear it in the furthest sort of swamps of the internet, but if there were people who were saying, yes, look fascism, it wasn't real fascism that we were doing in Hitler's Germany or Mussolini’s Italy or Franco’s Spain or we didn't get to go far enough and if you just give us one more go round the merry-go-round time, we'll get it right, then we would have no tolerance for that.

Rafael Mangual: Of course not.

Douglas Murray: We'd say, come on, what are you playing at? So I don't really want to allow your third category, much as I admire your effort to insert it into the list, because who can't know by now from the history of China in the 20th century or Russia in the 20th century or any number of other places? But for some reason with the left, there's always, with the far left, there's always this permission that it hasn't been tried enough, or it was done slightly wrong. And in the end with that, I'm afraid you always come back to the same thing, which is that the only explanation really for why it's still remotely permissible to say that on the radical left, whereas it wouldn't be on the radical right, is that there is still a presumption in the unlearned lessons of the 20th century, there is still some kind of presumption that the fascists did everything for evil intent and the communists did what they were doing with good intent.

Rafael Mangual: It was out of benevolence.

Douglas Murray: This is a major ongoing historical misunderstanding, but it is one which has seeped very deep into our culture at least since 1945 and actually long before then, when, as you know, early as the immediate aftermath of the revolution in Petrograd, we had American journalists and others who were sending back these bulletins to America saying that effectively we had arrived at the highest point of the human species.

Rafael Mangual: No, it's incredible. And you and I are sitting in New York City right now and it's a city that I called home for a very long time. It's a city that you call home, and as you were talking, yes, it's true that we have all of these examples of how the far left’s ideas have gone wrong throughout history, particularly in the middle of the 20th century. But we also have counter examples of what happens when we do the opposite, when we do everything that they're opposed to when we have a predictable and written rule of law that we adhere to, when we have relatively free markets, when we have relative personal freedom, you get this, you get what we're in the middle of an incredible metropolis that's economically dynamic, that is culturally dynamic, that is amazing in so many ways. And yet there's this sort of, not just lack of appreciation for it, but this casual desire to, as we said earlier, “reimagine” the greatest achievement in western civilization.

Douglas Murray: That's the old thing of Kant’s dove, that the dove flying in free air may make the mistake of thinking that if it weren't for the wind it would be able to fly faster. There is a misguided view of many people, including in cities like this one, countries like this one, in the west in general, that we're flying in free air somehow this wind is against us and if it weren't for the wind, it would be a lot better without rising. It's the wind that's keeping us up. And I think there's a lot of that. And I have to say that people on the right of the political spectrum do have to take their own share of blame for this because it's necessary clearly in each generation to reiterate basic principles. Indeed. For instance, you mentioned all the freedoms we have and freedom is a very complicated term to use. I say this having as I think I mentioned once before, publicly, a certain amount of PTSD because some decades ago now in the two thousands. I remember giving a talk in D.C. and in answer to a question, I used the word “freedom” as being one of the answers. And I happened afterwards to be a lunch, which Robert Bork among others was at. I had the honor of knowing him in little, and I remember he said over lunch, “you disappointed me Douglas.” And I said, “oh.”

Rafael Mangual: That must've hurt your feelings. I would've been…

Douglas Murray: Well, of course. I would say slightly, I was, slightly, but I was all ears I wanted, Justice Bork, I wanted to hear what he would say, and he said quite rightly, and this is the sort of thing you never forget, he said, “you use the term freedom as if freedom is an unalloyed good, but you've got to remember that it has caveats in it.” Now, bearing in mind that 20-year-old lesson for me, I do actually think that for instance, it's necessary for people on the right to stress, “yes, the right believes in freedom, but it also believes in order.” And that you don't get freedom without order. There is an occasional thing on the most radical parts of the left that of course that we've had this with… It's not like this didn't come a bit close to the mainstream in recent years, but we've had things like defund the police. The problem is that we've got too high in incarceration rate and that if people weren't in prison, everyone would be freer and so on, without really, and these are very extreme proposals.

Rafael Mangual: They're very mainstream ones as well.

Douglas Murray: Very mainstream. And it's not like it is just a specific thing of policing, which can always be improved or it's not a specific thing about incarceration or certain people who probably shouldn't be in prison or certain crimes that could be downgraded or up upgraded or whatever. It's that that policing itself is a problem. Prison itself is the problem. And of course if you didn't have policing or prisons, we wouldn't have freedom.

Rafael Mangual: Correct.

Douglas Murray: You and I would not have the freedom to walk down the street In relative safety in New York. And I think actually the right has been pretty bad at stressing its own fundamentals in all of this. Same thing with I think very bad, particularly since 2008 in explaining the virtues of the free market. It's only since 2008 really that we've had this upsurge of people saying, was Marx right after all? And the answer is still no. Marx is still wrong, but why are they doing that? Because the global financial system almost collapsed. The banks had to be bailed out. We've had almost 20 years of stagnation and no real increase in wages and people feel that. And so when people come along and say, there you go, the free market doesn't work, capitalism doesn't work. There are a lot of people who are going to choose or be tempted to this other thing. And I think that it's incumbent upon people on the right to explain their economic positions and other positions better than they currently do.

Rafael Mangual: I think that's exactly right. And as you were talking, I was thinking about two lessons that I learned back in law school my first year and in our constitutional law class, the very first day our professor handed us an excerpt from the Odyssey. He said, go home and read this and then we'll talk about it during the next class. And it was the part of the story where Odysseus and his crew are sailing past the island of the siren song and he wants to hear the song because he's curious, but he also knows that it would deviate them from his course. So he instructs his men to tie him to the mast and to fill their own ears with beeswax so that they don't hear the song and they can get home. And we came back and we talked about why on earth would a constitutional law professor give you this to read? And of course, it's an analogy, right? It's a metaphor for what order is supposed to do. We have determined that there is a path to get us home and we understand that there are all these potential deviations and we need restrictions. We need restraints on liberty in order to keep us on a course.

Douglas Murray: Yes, I wrote something on exactly that actually recently after reading Daniel Mendelsohn's new, fantastic new translation of the Odyssey, which came out last year. I actually wrote an essay partly on this because that famous episode with the sirens where of course if you remember among other things, Odysseus has to urge his men to tie him tighter to the mast.

Rafael Mangual: And to not listen to him no matter what he said.

Douglas Murray: Yes. But one of the things that fascinated me about this was the sirens’ song itself. It's not the case that the sirens are simply singing a very beautiful song. And it's not the case there, I don’t, like the Rhine maidens in the Ring of the Nibelung by Wagner. It's a very specific song they sing and it's only eight or nine lines. But if you remember the main thrust of the song after the sort of throat clearing of calls to him, and I think appeals about their own beauty, is that they say to Odysseus, we know what you went through at Troy. And I think there the poet is telling us something even deeper, which is the thing that could pull Odysseus off his course is the perpetual human desire to be heard, understood, sympathized with, appreciated and much more. It's a form of, enormously, it's an even more tempting cry the sirens have than I think we realized. And I think there's a lesson in that as well, which is this desire to be understood completely is itself something that can bring you onto the rocks. But it's a very deep desire that, and you might say it's one of the ultimate forms of the feminine, and what's more, with the feminization of politics and much more, and we talk a much more feminine language in politics for good and ill, but then you have to know what if the masculine elements of politics where they can go wrong, you have to know where the feminine elements can go wrong as well. And the sirens give us a very good example of where one of the feminine qualities can go wrong, which is this thing that you can be completely, go completely aground because somebody is promising to hear you utterly. And what do we see in many of the social movement? We hear things like, “I hear you.”

Rafael Mangual: “Your truth.”

Douglas Murray: “You are seen.” You hear that a lot.

Rafael Mangual: Yeah, I do.

Douglas Murray: “I see you.” “You are seen.” You are not... Now again, this has a good aspect to it, but it also has a very, very negative one. And the negative extreme, which Odysseus almost experiences, that he certainly hears, is I think the poet is telling us is an example of that feminine going very, very badly wrong.

Rafael Mangual: Yeah, no, I think that's a brilliant insight and I am sitting here and listening to our own conversation. Well, here we are talking about Odysseus and it just made me want to ask you because you are someone who is incredibly learned, very deeply thoughtful in how you approach your work, and yet your work can be found not just in leather bound volumes, in mahogany libraries, in these beautiful environments, but you write for publications like the New York Post for example. And I've always found your writing incredibly accessible, straightforward, which is not to say that you've ever dumbed anything down, but I think it'd be interesting for our audience to just hear a little bit about how you think about the way that you do your work and the audiences that you reach out to and the publications that you work with.

Douglas Murray: Well, I mean I think, I don’t know if this works for all writers, but for me it's always been a great pleasure in my life to be promiscuous as a writer, to write as widely and for as wide an audience as I can. And I've always wanted to do that and I suppose there's lots of reasons for that. But I remember at the very start of my career, a great friend of mine who's journalist said to me, you should never say no if a tabloid asks you to write for them.

Rafael Mangual: Interesting.

Douglas Murray: And the reason he said was, and I was starting out at this time, he said, you'll learn if you manage to do it, you'll learn the skill of never being able to waste a word. It's a really interesting thing for a writer because if I were writing for, if anyone were writing for certain publications, you might find yourself saying something like, “it is not to an inconsiderable to the extent to which we find ourselves in the position unpertaining to the blah blah.” And you're not saying anything.

Rafael Mangual: Correct, but it sounds good.

Douglas Murray: Yeah. I mean it reads horribly, but yeah, it can make people sound clever. And actually I think a much greater skill as a writer is to be able to write clearly, and that's what all of my heroes in the English speaking tradition have advocated most obviously Orwell in “Why I Write.” And that is to communicate an idea as clearly as possible. And that of course is the opposite of what a lot of academia has become, which is to take really quite banal or unimportant thoughts and make them sound incredibly complicated. I think much the hardest challenge that any of us have as writers is to take complicated ideas and try to distill them, and that's not just a duty, but a pleasure.

So I regard writing from the most mass circulation things, publications and others, in a way to be the most important task and the most challenging and the most enjoyable in a way. You sometimes meet people, journalists and others who look down on…

Rafael Mangual: I get a lot of that now. I'll post a piece of mine from the Post and someone will say, “oh, it's the Post.”

Douglas Murray: Which is ridiculous. What do they read? What do they think, what do they think is better? What do they think has been more reliable as a news source?

Rafael Mangual: Right. I usually tell, well, I've written for the Times too if that helps you.

Douglas Murray: Yeah, I mean that's fine. But I mean it's funny, there's a lot of snobbery in journalism, and usually from the people who would least imagine that they're snobs.

Rafael Mangual: People who capitalize “The People: in their tweets and who say they are for the everyman.

Douglas Murray: And by the, that goes back to my friend John O'Sullivan wrote, had published a book of essays some years ago, to which I wrote the foreword, and I mentioned there that one of the great things in John's career, which I admire in him and quite a number of other people, is there's always that thing about writers where it's thought to be a really good thing if you are described as being a champion of unpopular causes, it sort of gives you a little rebel sort of thing. I champion really unpopular causes. Oh, good for you. I said in my forward to this collection of John's essasy is that one of the things he's done in his career is to have the bravery to defend popular causes.

Rafael Mangual: Well, it's funny, I think about the work that I do. I write mostly about criminal justice and policing from a position where I defend these institutions, which is nationally and globally very popular. But here in New York City I'm very much in the minority going against, seriously. I kind of have the pleasure of being on both sides.

Douglas Murray: We're all defending popular courses. It's an oddity.

Rafael Mangual: But it's, in a way, it satisfies that rebellious streak in me because I do get to watch people's hair get set ablaze by me saying something that's incredibly uncontroversial in the rest of the country.

Douglas Murray: My tip on that is when people's hair is being set ablaze by what you write, that's exactly the moment to turn away and do something else.

Rafael Mangual: Yeah, it's a weird life that we live in a lot of ways, but it's incredibly fun and gratifying. So I want to take this back a little bit to the topic of the west more broadly. I mean, you call America home now, and as an American, I'd be tempted to think of America first every time I heard the phrase the West, but of course the West has a much deeper and longer tradition than America has ever existed, right? We're only entering our 250th year. And so Great Britain I think is very much sort of at the center of that story, at least in more modern history. And I can't help but notice that there has been this flurry of videos that have gotten lots of attention and commentary pieces that have gotten lots of attention, that seem to be focused on this idea that Great Britain is losing itself. People are blaming all sorts of things, immigration, mass immigration is one of those things. The sort of far left is another one of those. And I wonder if you could give us your sense of Britain's future as a sort of pillar of the West.

Douglas Murray: I think it's in trouble. I think it's in deep trouble and I think that's because Britain's leaders, by which I don't just mean political leaders, but thought leaders, church leaders, institutional leaders have really led the way in what the late Roger Scruton described as the culture of self-abnegation. That is the thing I was starting off with, which is everything is good as long as it's not ours and anything that is ours is not good. So Britain has really led the way in this process that America has joined in on and Canada and Australia and others certainly have, which is to war on ourselves and our history and our cultural achievements and our traditions.

I mean it is at this stage impossible to think of any institution in the UK which has not been riddled by this culture of self-abnegation. It affects everything from foreign policy. The British government is currently desperately trying to get rid of the Chagos Islands, which are ours and which are a very useful territorial foothold and American military base, Diego Garcia on one of them. The British government is desperately trying to get rid of these islands and it's not doing it to make money. It's not like selling the family silver, it's actually paying the Mauritians to take them off our hands, at which point they'll become a satellite of the Chinese Communist party's foothold in the region. So why is that? It's this sort of decolonizing mindset, the self-abnegating mindset which is affecting an issue of foreign policy, of statecraft.

It goes from everything to just earlier this month there was, sorry, there's the Department of Environment in the UK called DEFRA, had commissioned a report which found that, this is very hard to say with a straight face, British countryside was guilty of being racist.

Rafael Mangual: I saw this!

Douglas Murray: The hills and the fields.

Rafael Mangual: That's right.

Douglas Murray: Deeply, deeply racist. Now of course there's much that's absurd about this. Previously there have been non-governmental reports saying this sort of thing, what are the problems that they perceive? There aren't enough ethnic minorities in certain parts of the countryside. It was claimed a couple of years ago by the BBC that a Muslim, there aren't enough Muslim women walking groups in the peak district, I think. You won't find enough Muslim men in the local pubs in the village.

Rafael Mangual: Do they drink much?

Douglas Murray: It's hard to make an overhead on someone who's not drinking alcohol. But all of this is of course completely preposterous. But my point is to simply find anything in modern British public life that has not been found guilty in this sort of way. In fact, it all rather reminds me of, I don’t know if you got Blackadder when you were growing up, but in one of the episodes of Blackadder with Rowan Atkinson, the one set in the First World War, there's a great episode to do with the killing of a carrier pigeon, which we don't need to get into, in which Edmund Blackadder is put on trial for the murder of the pigeon and Steven Fry playing the judge says before he's heard any evidence he says, “pass me the black cap,” which is the cap you put when you’re ordering somebody to be hung or hanged and he says, “pass me the black cap. I'm going to be needing that,” before any evidence is heard. And that's effectively the situation everything in Britain is in. All of our cultural and other institutions have ordered the black cap to be passed to them in order that they can pass sentence really before hearing any evidence in our own defense as a country or as a culture. It's absolutely everywhere. The Church of England, which cannot fill the pews and which is shutting down some of our historic jewels of our parish churches, which cannot afford to keep some of these absolute gems of our civilization in good repair. The Church of England is in the process of trying to hand over I think a hundred million pounds as reparations for slavery, which stopped 200 years ago in the UK. We paid our…

Rafael Mangual: In large part because of the efforts of the UK itself.

Douglas Murray: Of the British Navy, which patrolled the high seas in order to stamp out that vile trade. I mean this is madness. Obviously this is complete madness, but as I say, until Britain can turn that corner of saying no, we are not some kind of international staging post, we are not going to endlessly have ourselves put down, dumbed down like this. We have this thing, it's ours, we love it and we'd like to keep it. Until that was to happen, it's very hard to see how Britain can turn any corner on that and it's not enough for parties and others in opposition to say that there's some tweak that needs to be done. It's a major, major rethink of what we're actually doing that needs to be in place.

Rafael Mangual: As I'm listening to you, you're telling a story that's basically about a self-inflicted gunshot wound. And I think that's exactly right. That's a huge part of it. This is a bit of a deviation, but there's a show that did well for a period here called The Newsroom. I don't know if you remember, it was on HBO, it's about this CNN type journalist. And the opening episode got a lot of acclaim and this one particular scene went viral to the extent things could go viral back then, sort of before Twitter. But during the scene he's on a panel at some university, during the Q and A young girl asks, what makes America so great? And the panelists kind of go on, one says freedom, someone else says, whatever, our history, I forget. And then he goes on this rant about why America is not actually great.

Douglas Murray: I remember that.

Rafael Mangual: And every just applauds we're sharing this and falling over themselves to say, yes, that's right. He's exactly right. America's not great. And there's one part of the speech where he says you're going to stand there with a straight face and say America is so star-spangled awesome because we have freedom. Every other country's got freedom, Britain's got freedom and Australia's got freedom. And I remember sharing that again a couple of years ago, quote tweeting a video of British police knocking on the door of a woman who was being placed under arrest for a social media post in which she expressed an opinion. And I thought to myself, I said, our founders were exactly right. The death of America, like the death of the West is not going to come from an invading army. It's going to come from our own abrogation of our duty to maintain what makes us us.

Douglas Murray: Absolutely. And that's why even sometimes people say, well, isn't X argument alarmist or isn't Y argument alarmist? I would say that even if even some arguments that are indeed alarming, warning people about what could happen, are nevertheless necessary because at the very least we should always be aware of how vulnerable what we have is. And we should keep our eyes open for tyranny. We should be alert to those things. It's very striking to me how it's the American government at the moment that is expressing the concern about free speech rights in the UK much more than the British government. It's the British government that's trampling on those rights and specifically the British police who will say that they do so at the behest of the government, of course. But isn't that interesting that American politicians are more worried about the state of freedom in the UK than British politicians? But that's because there's a sort of health and safety ideas I suppose, in among other things. And we have that thing that the worst thing to do is for somebody to be hurt emotionally really, but with the caveat that only specific people's emotions have to be protected. I've yet to experience any major push by the British police, or the British state, or the British government to defend or protect my own feelings. I have my feelings trampled upon every day British government policy and yet I'm still here. But as I say, the police never come to my door and say, “Were you offended by what DEFRA has just done, Mr. Murray? We feel that your feelings might've been hurt when DEFRA said that the English countryside was racist. Would you like us to put in a report somehow?” It's always one direction.

Rafael Mangual: That's exactly right. If you don't wear the right colors, if you're not wearing the right jersey, as they say, you don't get to enjoy any of the benefits of the people in power, which is actually really interesting because a lot of this is coming from the people in power and yet they continue insist and get away with using language that gives off the idea that they are the ones speaking truth to power as if they're not in the seat of power.

Douglas Murray: Oh, well that's something that George Walden explained very pithily some 20 or 30 years ago that we have an elite of anti-elite.

Rafael Mangual: Yeah, no, it's very strange. Alright, well you put your finger on something which is that the American government has actually been expressing quite a bit of dismay about the erosion of freedom, particularly to speech in Europe in particular, which I guess gets at the idea that to the extent that the U.S. is heading in the same direction, it's less far along. What do you attribute that to?

Douglas Murray: I think all the western nations, all the western democracies have similar challenges in the 21st century. And in the end there are lots of challenges. Obviously one of the ones that's galvanized me most, which I've written about most particularly in The Strange Death Of Europe, is we are definitely struggling and we do have to be better at addressing what I think is a really the big question which is population wise, those of us who are lucky enough to live in the western liberal democracies are a minority globally. But there's even the phrase now, which is never used sinisterly, but God, it is sinister, which is people now refer to people who are not white often as the global majority, which is very interesting. There's something threatening in that, but the West, people in the Western democracies are a minority, and yet we are always and everywhere the countries that people in the world most want to come to. Now I've said for many years that is telling us something because nobody tries to break into countries that are actually horrible and racist and xenophobic and bigoted and violent and rape cultures and everything else.

So I mean on its face, the accusations that we've all had to put up with in recent decades about our societies are obviously untrue, but nevertheless, we are going to have a problem in, we do have a problem in the era of mass communication and ease of movement with knowing what our boundaries and borders can be. And this is clearly something which is roiling every western democracy. And I think we are woefully unprepared for this, as I've said for many years, that there are two problems with the mass movement of people that we really haven't faced up to, which is that first of all, we all massively underestimate the number of people globally who want to come to countries like this one, like Britain. And the second thing is we massively overestimate our capability to integrate the people in question.

Rafael Mangual: I think that's exactly right.

Douglas Murray: Those twin problems are going to be with us for the foreseeable and all I've ever really wanted is to make sure that we face these questions head on because you just can't keep pushing them, or you can keep pushing them away, but at some point, it will all becomes academic if we're not careful.

Rafael Mangual: I think that's right. I mean one of the things that really troubles me about our society's unwillingness to have that conversation is that it leaves a vacuum for a really ugly segment, particularly of the right to come in and point a finger and say, well, all of the things that we are complaining about with respect to the west and its degradation, its slide back, whatever you want to call it, they're pointing the finger at mass immigration, they're pointing the finger at the global majority and the use of terms like that and acknowledging that there is a sort of threatening undertone there to make an argument that it's these outsiders, these culturally identifiable groups that are really the root of our problems. It has nothing to do with our own unwillingness to defend a coherent set of principles. And we're seeing this now here in America with the rise of the kind of groyper right, which is an interesting movement because you can't quite put your finger on exactly how big it is. It seemed bigger…

Douglas Murray: It’s not all in the real world, but it's big online. Yeah.

Rafael Mangual: It seems to cast a shadow that's much bigger than what it actually is

Douglas Murray: That’s because I mean there's a sort of understandable fear of what we started off by speaking about, which is the radical left not learning the lessons of the 20th century. Now you sort of see people on the radical right who clearly haven't learned their lessons of the 20th century. Yeah, that is big online, small in the real world, but could have the potential to have a real world effect of some point. Again, sorry, I sometimes sound like a broken record in this, but again, I saw this coming. I said it would happen. You would have a return to, if you don't sort out your borders in a reasonable way, if you don't have a reasonable migration policy, if you don't have any decent integration policy, if you believe in the hyphenation of everyone, among other things, you will force other people into a form of what Rusty Reno would call “the return of the strong gods.” My prediction a long time ago was that the radical right would start to get obsessed with IQ and that's already happened and we’re sort of onto the next stage,

Rafael Mangual: Although it IQ doesn't seem to be enough to spare one if they are not deemed qualified members of the society otherwise.

Douglas Murray: But what I mean is that it would be used, I said in The Madness of Crowds, I said it would be used as the nastiest referent to hit at minority groups.

Rafael Mangual: That's right.

One of the other culturally identifiable groups that has drawn the ire of the toxic right we'll call it is the Jews, which again, you see this kind of same pattern where they are being blamed as a group for everything that's wrong in their lives, whether it's unemployment, or offshoring jobs, and the weather. Apparently this very small group controls quite a bit of our life outcomes. And it's like I watched this from a distance and I can't help but see a glaring similarity to the left sort of victim culture and the same arguments that they make about “the man” and “the white man.” And it's like a sort of mad lib where you can just fill in the blank, but antisemitism is something that has been an issue that you've focused a lot on, particularly since October the seventh. And when that war broke out, literally within 24 hours, there was a march, not a mile from here essentially celebrating Hamas, which blew my mind, and didn't surprise me. Someone asked me the other day at the gym actually. We were in the sauna and there was a conversation in which this came up and it got…

Douglas Murray: Alway the place to do geopolitics.

Rafael Mangual: That’s right. It got pretty intense and I was trying to mind my business, but someone eventually asked me, well, you seem pretty quiet. And I said, well listen, I don't know if you want to hear my opinion because my earliest memory of Palestine was 9/11 when I was watching the coverage on Fox News and Brit Hume was at the desk and they broke to a foreign correspondent who was on the Gaza Strip and people were dancing in the street. And I just remember thinking I was 15, 16 years old, 15, thinking to myself, I've never met any of these people, literally had never even heard of that country.

Douglas Murray: And sweets on the streets of Ramallah

Rafael Mangual: 3000 people just died and they're celebrating. And I thought, well, I guess that's all I need to know that these are my enemies. And yet in recent years I've seen this sort of segment of the right kind of making common cause with these people.

Douglas Murray: Yeah, I mean I said everything I have to say about antisemitism for the time being in my most recent book in On Democracies and Death Cults.

Rafael Mangual: Which is incredible by the way.

Douglas Murray: Very kind you to say so. But I said a lot in On Democracies and Death Cults about exactly this. And since that book came out actually what you identify rightly as being a growing problem on this segment of the radical right in America, but I see it elsewhere as well. It's many things, but I mean one is it's really a demonstration of very low level thinking by low-intelligence people because unfortunately there is always a human propensity to see some patterns where they do not exist or exaggerate patterns where they do. And in my experience, I mean intelligent people can be very unintelligent, but unintelligent people can do one thing in particular, which is they want an explanation for complexity and they see patterns where there are no patterns and they invent or perceive plots and conspiracies where there are none. And unfortunately due to their tiny numbers, Jews are almost perfectly waiting there as a group for these people to point to and say it is these people who are responsible. And I've always said that I think that antisemitism is effectively a form of projection. People project their unhappiness and their poor life choices, poor outcomes in their lives. They pour them onto the Jewish people, Jews individually or collectively as being the reason for their unhappiness with things. But I mean it's such a perennial, it seems to me, that all you can do is try to keep it to the margins. You can never keep that out. But everywhere it's an expression of deep personal unhappiness and lack of fulfillment and stupidity. I'm trying not to be too sweeping on this, but the minute that somebody gets focused on the Jews, you know that they're on a trail of paranoia, among other things. I have this riff that I think I first heard from the late Martin Amos, but you can pretty much predict when someone's going to go antisemitic. And it's around the stages that they have paranoia and they see these patterns, they see these people, they start to, and it's very sad for them. But of course it's catastrophic for society if they get any kind of power or any kind of say. But it is very sad to see this, to say the least. It's very sad to see this reemerging. And I think part of it may be we're also seeing on the radical right. Part of it is the bit I understand which I hope to be able to address in part is I do think that people have to realize that this thing, that we are struggling, it comes back to this thing about with the big struggles we're facing, we are struggling to have a voice of the majority in the era in which all minorities are spoken about. And there seems to be on the part of the radical rights so far as I can see a particular animus against the Jews because they see them being talked about so much. And there's a tiny, tiny kernel of truth here where for instance, when it comes to admission policies at universities, you can see some people in the radical right of America saying, well, these Jewish groups get upset when Jews aren't allowed into over or they're issued to a quota system. But why aren't they annoyed when white people, for instance, who are not Jewish are similarly prejudiced against in this? Well, there are lots of ways to address that without deciding to go full blown antisemite. But I think there's things like that that seem to be nibbling away at a bit of the online right. But as I say, I mean I think it should be contested. It could be had out in the open. And I've done enough public debates and events in my life often against very crazy and unpleasant people to still believe that there's a virtue in tackling these things and not just trying to stamp them out or anything.

Rafael Mangual: I think that's one of the things that has always inspired me about you because I find myself often lacking the patience, just imagining myself how I think some of these conversations, particularly in a public setting, and I just find myself so grateful that there are people who are not just willing, but who can have those conversations with a level of sophistication and patience so that the conversations can live on and be watched.

Douglas Murray: Well, but I would just add one other thing that it's becoming increasingly hard in America to do that. Even when I was starting out, we had a good culture of public events and debates in which you met your opponents and you usually shook hands. And we had that on in large town hall style events in cities like New York events, big and small. And we had them on universities as well. And actually the number of university students and others and school students I speak to in America who don't have a debating society and I don't mourn that because I love somehow the jostle of it. I was never one of those sort of student debater types. But I do think we are actually suffering badly in society of being unable to speak to each other and have things out in public. And I wish dearly that that could come back.

Rafael Mangual: I think that's exactly right. I mean, I often do a lot of events for the Federalist Society on law school campuses, and I was my Federalist Society chapter president when I was in law school, and they take the chapter presidents down to Washington D.C. for a two day conference and they sort of teach you how to organize these events and they would just continuously beat it into our heads. We want debates, we want debates. Try not to do solo talks at almost all costs. Please find a professor if you're having trouble, let us know. We'll fly somebody else out. And I do a lot of them every year, maybe 10 or so a year on campuses around the country. And when I first started doing them, every event that I did was a debate. And in the last three years I can count on one hand how many I've had.

Douglas Murray: That’s all of our experience.

Rafael Mangual: And I do think it's a shame. It's significantly less fun and interesting for me.

Douglas Murray: Absolutely.

Rafael Mangual: So we've talked a lot about the troubles facing the West. My question to you that I want to close on is what is your advice to the other defenders of the West? What are we to do? How do we save ourselves?

Douglas Murray: Gosh. Well, a lot of things. One is to do it. I mean, I don't think that civilization, culture, is about merely talking about it. I think it's doing it. I think that if you want to live in a vibrant, thriving culture, you've got to do culture. There's no good bemoaning illiteracy and being rather illiterate yourself. I have this sort of fundamental premise that the purpose of politics is to make culture possible, by which I mean culture in its proper, full sense, or at least to make the conditions as good as possible. I think tactically there's lots of things. One is not to be beleaguered, one is to find good friends, good mentors living and dead, preferably living, to orient yourself towards the sort of people who you like and admire and learn things from them. And not to be afraid of saying things that are unpopular but true. And yes, I suppose going back to something we said earlier, not to be afraid of saying things that are popular but disdained by a tiny class of people whose good opinion you might not want anyway.

Rafael Mangual: Well, thank you so much for a wonderful conversation, Douglas. For those of you who are watching, I hope you enjoyed it. Please do not forget to like, comment, subscribe, do all the things, so that we can bring you more episodes of interesting conversations like this one. And if you haven't already, go out and buy this man's books. They are incredible. They are engrossing. And you will learn something and come away, I think, feeling like you two can be a defender of the West and we need more people in this fight. So thank you and thank you.

Douglas Murray: Thank you.

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