Douglas Murray’s FINAL Stand: “The West Is DOOMED!— Here’s What No One Dares Say”

0:00 Whatever criticisms I have of an era of American dominance, I know that it's a hell of a lot preferable to the era of Chinese Communist Party dominance. And therefore, I'm very very wary of those people who seem not to just have criticisms of us, but for instance, think that all problems in the world are made by us. And there's an inevitable reason that people do that, which is that it's first of all, it's the easiest one. It's so much easier if you just think that all problems are created by us. Because that would mean that you don't have to contend with the other ways of thinking that exists in the world, the other forms of governance, the other forms of philosophy, religion, and much more which undergur other societies and other groups. You don't

0:46 have to contend with that because you can just say, well, it must mean something we did. If Edward say had ever been right about orientalism, this would be the moment to accuse people of orientalism. literally looking around the rest of the world and seeing only our own reflection in a way. Not quite what say meant but is a variant of it. So I I don't like the anti-Americanism. I don't like the anti-westernism. I don't like that uh uh endless critique of that. Culture under siege. A world ablaze. Self-doubt. The ultimate weapon. Douglas Murray pulls back the curtain on a west sleepwalking toward collapse. From 9/11 missteps to the quagmire of endless wars. From woke universities to the death of free speech, no topic is off limits. Are we too open to defend what made us? Is self-criticism breaking

1:31 us? Buckle up. This is a reckoning. Welcome, Douglas. Very good to be back in the Unheard studios. So, before I dig into this book that we're mainly talking about, I thought it'd be really interesting to just get a bit of the history of how you got here because some people won't know. So, let's cast our minds back to before we even met. I think we probably met around 20 years ago or something. But even before that, you had written a book about Boosezie, the lover of Oscar Wild. You were studying literature. You seemed like you were on track at that early stage in your younger life to becoming a kind of literary artistic person. What happened since after that, I suppose? Well, I I I

2:17 when I was at Oxford, I um used to do something quite rare, which was I used to buy and read the newspapers and then took an interest in the world beyond the university. I wanted to write about politics and international affairs in particular. I was deeply gripped in the 1990s by the wars in the Balkans. And uh I I suppose I was lucky in having a number of friends who I'd gravitated towards mainly older uh from quite a wide variety of backgrounds including from parts of the Middle East and so on and I had my interest peaked by events there. So was there a point at which you kind of made the decision that it was going to be more politics? Well, I suppose several reasons. One is that I started to realize that everything I

3:03 love um culture, literature, uh art and much more is history is all reliant on politics. You know, you can't separate out the two particularly in a age like ours. Perhaps it was always the case. One of Leo Strauss's pupils once said that I think it was Harvey Mansfield said that to the extent that there was an overriding philosophy in Strauss, he wanted the world of politics to be organized in such a way that it made the world safe for philosophy. Murray's shift from literature to politics highlights that culture survival hinges on politics. Did appeasement of radical elements after 9/11 fuel further extremism? Only through vigilance can we defend our civilization? In 2023, global terror attacks numbered

3:51 6,736 with a 22% increase in fatalities signaling escalating threats. Are naive policies enabling those who seek to erase our history? What do you think? Want to see uh the world of politics arranged in such a way that we can do culture. In other words, that I'm interested, very interested obviously in the ups and downs, the twos and fros of politics. But I was never so interested in who was deputy under secretary of works and pensions as I was in questions of whether or not we were doing anything meaningful, doing anything good, finding things out, discovering things, creating things. And uh I suppose I started to notice that the conditions for that were were far from optimal. everything had

4:36 become or was becoming politicized. So there's a kind of connection. I think there's a very clear connection between the two and the people who I gravitated towards who I was interested in and who to a great extent sort of mentored me and uh encouraged me were people who also made that connection like Christopher Hitchens, Chris Hitchens, Roger Scrutin. Can we just spend a moment on them just before we So Christopher you you first met him in your early 20s then when when you had published that book? He reviewed that first book and indeed my second book. We became friends, I suppose, because he'd written nice things about me, which is often a good way to start a friendship. But yes, and then I was very fortunate in my first internship uh at a small media organization, much like Unheard was many years ago. It was a place

5:21 called Open Democracy, which I think still goes. It was a very unhappy place. It was a collection of well left-wing malc contents who had set up the idea that you that they would do a uh an online site where right and left politically and culturally engaged at their most honest and meaningful as opposed to the most shallow. Of course, it didn't work. It was a total bust. And not least because if anyone uh even remotely conservative as I then realized I was with a small C wrote anything, you immediately had thousands of leftwing attack pieces responding to it. But I was very fortunate that Sophie Scrutin worked there. Murray seeks a world where culture thrives, not just bureaucratic

6:07 squables. Today's politicization makes meaningful creation nearly impossible. He notes Hitchens and Scrutin saw this link unlike the malcontents at open democracy. Should diversity include actual diverse thought? Apparently, a small dose of conservatism triggered thousands of left-wing attacks. Sounds like today's cancel culture, doesn't it? Ironic considering the recent UK study revealing a 40% rise in self-censorship. And one day I saw in the office sitting there reading the occasional contributor to Unheard, Roger Scrutin, who very movingly noticed that we had similar interests and concerns and indeed loves uh we both had a deep love of our country, deep love of our history and our culture, of our buildings, of our

6:54 literature, of our music and much more. and he kind of spotted me as I was on my 50 a week uh salary to make coffee, occasionally venturing into writing uh political pieces. And Roger, I remember one day said to me, "You've probably worked out by now, Douglas, that this place consists of um about 50,000 leftists versus us." And then he went on in a very scrutiny way to say, "So, it's a fair fight." Um and uh and uh and he was a great great influence and encourager and uh so they're the two that you there were others as well the president of my college at Oxford Anthony Smith uh was an enormous encourager and he knew much of that leftist generation from the 60s who had

7:41 come up James Fenton and Martin Amos me and Mchuan he knew those people who sort of come up and I found very very interesting because they had let's say liberal uh views view on things but were also shifting in an interesting way particularly in the wake of 9/11 and so yes I mean there was a whole generations before me that I was very interested in and very fortunate to it's not just luck of course there's also that you orient yourself towards people that you admire and would like would like to be it's I think probably not that well understood about you that actually you have this sort of origin in in culture music poetry literature and the scrutin thing is interesting because the the politics kind of comes out of that that it's a it's a defense of those things is where

8:26 is the where it starts. I mean, are we allowed to swear on this program? Yes, please do. Okay. Scrutin sees Douglas Murray drowning in lefties and quips fair fight. One sane guy versus 50,000. Seriously, loving your country is a crime now. It seems some woke up after 9/11, but not today's universities. They're woke central. Free speech, please. 73% of profs clammed up in 2024 to avoid drama. Hilarious, right? What do you think about that? I don't like people all over my country. I don't like the thing I started to see in the early 2000s in particular, which was people, you know, defaming Britain, um, lambasting England in particular, they seemed to really hate this society. And I love it. And, uh, I wanted it to

9:15 go on. And I always thought that it was complete rubbish that uh the things that were being told about it not least because if we were such a horrible terrible country with so little going for us why was the world trying to come here as I've often said you know you don't have any very large in infusion of people from the west trying desperately to get into the freedoms of Pakistan uh or Bangladesh and and and largely that's because actually we people do know that our society works or at least worked and if if something works then you should try to make sure it keeps going as opposed to turning it over, blowing the whole thing up and um believing that you can start again on the other side of the detritus. So if we're going to try and get from there to the bur and today

10:00 there's a kind of middle section which I think we should just spend a moment on. You wrote a book in the mid200s neoconservatism why we need it period at the Henry Jackson Society. There was a sense that you were a neocon and that's always discussed. I've actually seen in some of the responses to your Joe Rogan appearance, even just a few days ago, it's the same thing. Oh, he's a neocon. He's, you know, he's he's there to push the neocon agenda. How do you now think about that? Do are you a neocon? Well, I don't think in the sense that people understand it. No, I mean, my book on it was mainly an explanation of what the neoconservative movement had been. And I wrote it in part because it was the other nword in the 2000s. And it's interesting that it's come back again now. Uh and now just as then people didn't really understand what it meant.

10:47 It increasingly became and I think it's become a sort of an unsalvageable term. So back in the early 2000s everyone's bashing Britain, right? Douglas Murray is like I actually like this place. Why trash something everyone's trying to get into? You don't see folks risking it all on refugee boats trying to get to Pakistan. Do you? Makes you wonder if Britain was so awful. Why the global stampede to get in, not out? Curious, isn't it? And principally, it was used as a kind of Jewish Warhawks thing. The best definition of neoconservatism was given by Irving Crystal. Irving famously described neoconservative as a a liberal who'd been mugged by reality. I remember Irving once said to me, um, "Did you spend any time on the political left, Douglas, like we did?" And I said,

11:33 "Possibly, but it was a matter of minutes." So I can't claim to have had that sort of long left-wing gestation. I guess what they would mean then is that you, you know, supported the Iraq back then. You know, I'm sure your views have evolved about that, but there's still the the core that remains is that you seem to object as strongly now to back then to a kind of relativism and moral relativism. You prefer what you describe as moral clarity. So saying, okay, these two sides are not the same. There is, it may not be a goodie and a baddy, but there is one that is preferable. Is that that thread? I mean, I think there's lots of problems. Liberalism obviously is a shape-shifting word. It's extremely difficult to pin down. It means different things when you go into different countries. You across the

12:19 border from America into Canada and uh well, you still can for the time being. And you you liberal means a different thing. Liberal party in the Netherlands is the Conservative Party. the Liberal Party in Australia is the Conservative Party and and so on. If we have the sort of old school classical definition of liberalism, it seems to me it's obviously always had a set of inbuilt time bombs. The liberal tendency of understanding of course is very important of openness very important but but there is a moment where you open yourself up so much whether it's uh in your own uh inter interior world or whether in the political world or in the world of borders there's a moment where you open yourself so up so much that you

13:06 you you will no longer be able to defend the thing that made you. Crystal said, "A neocon's just a liberal mugged by reality. So supporting Iraq back then makes you a neocon." Maybe. But Murray still hates moral relativism. He prefers moral clarity. Good side, bad side. You know, is that the thread? Or is liberalism itself the problem? It's a shape-shifting word. After all, openness is great until you're too open to defend what made you? And I think that's that's a problem which to be fair to them a lot of left-wing and liberal thinkers have tried to contend with. But it's an innate problem and it ends up with this sort of um who are we to say on the societal issue. I'd say the biggest problem comes in what I've described as the movement from very from one of our

13:53 best qualities as societies and I think the one of the best qualities we can have as people which is to be self-critical. But there's a moment in self-criticism both personally and uh nationally where um self-criticism turns into self- laceration turns into self-hate. I said this many years ago in a book I contributed to I think I said in that this was really one of the the questions we had to think about which was we'd spent already by then years in Britain saying who are we what are we but what does it mean to be British and I always thought that was a a really um unsatisfactory debate not least because it was shallow and ended up with shallow answers like you know to

14:40 be British is to queue or to be nice you know things This this is this is it's really pathetically shallow analysis and I used to say then that with nations as with people um I think you can make them have a nervous breakdown quite easily. I mean you have a sense of who you Freddy sayers are but if I said to you I mean maybe a poor sense and it's not at all the sense that all the rest of us have of you but maybe that you're living in wild blindness cognitive dissonance terrible embarrassing but you have a sense of yourself but if I wanted to to destroy that sense of self I think one way in which I could do it would be to ask you to lie on a psychiatrist's couch and ask you all hours of the day and night who are you what are you what

15:28 is the essence of Freddy's hairs what is but I don't understand you're not giving me the answer liberals try to deal with that innate problem but get stuck on who are we to say biggest issue he says is self-criticism morphing into self-hate Britain spent years asking what does it mean to be British shallow debate shallow answers queuing being nice pathetic he thinks nations like people can have nervous breakdowns could constant self-doubt actually break a nation and eventually I think you we're hoping to find the essence of Douglas Murray. Well, that's why I'm deflecting on Freddy S. This is a very it's a destabilizing destabilizing embassy self questioning. Yes. And I think that much of your sense of identity as a country and

16:14 as an and as an individual is in just doing you know you are what you do and what you have done. And so I think there's been this endless sort of demoralizing drilling down on ourselves has made us both forget who we actually are, lose sight of it and have a sort of existential crisis. And I uh I think to be blunt I mean um neoconservatism in the 2000s was I think it was my friend Peter Teal who first made this observation was sort of one of the few intellectually coherent ways in which a sense of reasonable responsible pride in our own achievements and in our own society could be defended

17:00 intellectually. So you don't disavow it. You don't reject the label. I reject it only because once a term becomes so polluted that everybody thinks it means something it doesn't. There's no point much in using it. I I describe myself as a small C conservative without any NEO in front of it. But if anyone wants to shove the NEO in front, they they will. If we fast forward to your conversation on Joe Rogan last week, the thread connecting back to those days is very much intact, isn't it? like the the reason Dave Smith and those people feel so strongly about questions like Israel, it very quickly goes back to Iraq, doesn't it? So, they will look back at what they consider to be the neocon catastrophe and they'll probably say

17:47 that people like you have sort of not learned the lesson adequately and not stared in the face of that those mistakes. Douglas Murray is saying we're losing our grip thanks to endless self-hate. We're forgetting who we are. He used to be a neocon defending our country, but now that label's trash. Rogan brings up Iraq and Dave Smith thinks it was a win for the neocons. Murray's staying strong, sticking to his guns. Someone has to, right? What a world. Those mistakes be rather presumptuous to say that because I don't think there's any mistake I've been involved in which I haven't stared in the face of. How do you now look back at that period? Well, I think that it was a moment there were two things that happened after 9/11. One was that America quite rightly wanted revenge on the people who' carried out 9/11.

18:33 And then secondly, America got caught in something which actually America does not want to do, which is remain in countries for a long time and govern them effectively. Afghanistan got dragged into that quite fast. Iraq did. Uh I at any rate among other many other things learned about the quicksand of war. Unless you saw some of that up close, unless you saw the debates about it up close as well as the wars, you it's quite hard to understand how that happened. And it's sort of inevitable that people would come in afterwards who'd seen relatively little of it or understood less who would understand how that sort of thing happened. Would you kind of look back at your younger self and warn him about some of that? Would you feel like you also,

19:21 you know, got too dragged into that vortex? I don't think it's a vortex, but I suffered from a type of youthful optimism, which I don't anymore, which included, you know, uh that that America was capable of nation building in a way that I don't think it is because it doesn't have the desire to stay involved. I mean, people may scoff at this. I know they will. But I always found one of the most moving things anyone said about America was Coen Powell who said at one point in the 2000s when people accusing America of becoming an empire when America has gone into countries to um to fight whatever the cause uh the only land they've asked for is the land to bury their dead. I think that one of the things of the breakdown of expertise that has uh started to bedevil us in recent years

20:08 uh is a breakdown caused by the loss of trust. After 9/11, America wanted revenge. Fair enough. Then America got stuck in the forever war trap which it hates. Afghanistan, Iraq, the whole thing became a mess. He learned about the quicksand of war. You have to see it up close to get it. He had youthful optimism that America could nation build. Turns out we don't want to stick around. Which is suitable on many occasions in institutions and in the idea of expertise. One of the issues for the Republican party in America in the last 15 years has been that nobody wanted to hear from the generation of foreign policy experts who were involved in Afghanistan and Iraq. What that meant

20:54 was you had a whole generation of expertise that was effectively sidelined because it's like well you were responsible for this and so you just keep out and and that's undoubtedly led to a darth of foreign policy expertise in America but you can understand it and in a way that's what your the Joe Rogan conversation ended up being about quite a lot is to what extent should there be a requirement for expertise or authority to have these conversations. Well, yes, and I'd add the other one, which is one that you were very on top of, which was the CO issue. And CO obviously scrambled a lot of people's minds in lots of ways because there we saw something in real time much faster fall apart, which was trust in expertise in science. And that one is has been I

21:43 think especially dangerous and demoralizing because all of us know nothing humanities types had always sort of held on to the hope that uh at least the scientists you know the medical experts knew what they were doing and then um when a lot of them showed that they didn't. I think the last area of true trust in expertise in our society essentially almost like evaporated but just consider it for a moment. I mean, I'd say two things. First of all, I don't actually think this is just about anti- Iraq, anti- Afghanistan. I think there's a movement on the right that now mirrors a movement on the left which is essentially anti- US. And that's what I mind. I don't at all doubt that our

22:28 societies need to improve. I don't at all doubt that our societies can do better. Murray says the Republicans sidelined foreign policy experts after the Iraq and Afghanistan blunders. Nobody wanted their expertise. So a whole generation got benched, leaving a hole. Then COVID scrambled brains. Trust in science went kaput. Even Murray lost hope when the experts failed. Now he thinks there's an anti-US movement mirroring the left. Wanting to improve is fine, but what's the endgame? And we have to do well. And I say that in part because I know what the rivals and competitors look like. And so whatever criticisms I have of an era of American dominance, I know that it's a

23:15 hell of a lot preferable to the era of Chinese Communist Party dominance. And therefore I'm very very wary of those people who seem not to just have criticisms of us but for instance think that all problems in the world are made by us. And there's an inevitable reason that people do that which is that it's first of all it's the easiest one. It's so much easier if you just think that all problems are created by us because that would mean that you don't have to contend with the other ways of thinking that exists in the world. other forms of governance, the other forms of philosophy, religion and much more which undergur other societies and other groups. You don't have to contend with that because you can just say well it must mean something we did. If Edward say had ever been right about

24:00 orientalism this would be the moment to accuse people of orientalism literally looking around the rest of the world and seeing only our own reflection in a way not quite what say meant but it's a variant of it. So I I don't like the anti-Americanism. I don't like the anti-westernism. I don't like that uh uh endless critique of that. But on the issue of expertise, I do think we have to find some kind of reasonable attitude towards this because we do recognize expertise in certain areas and we we certainly should be able to realize that there is there are varieties of knowledge. There's greater amounts of knowledge and lesser amounts of knowledge. Um, something that a friend of mine pointed out to me over the weekend is that although I mean Joe's a friend and

24:46 I was trying to be gentle with him about what I regard as being a a dangerous tilt that he and some other uh podcasters are encouraging. So, any thoughts on what Douglas Murray just discussed? Share them in the comments below. And don't forget to like, subscribe, and hit the notification bell so that you never miss any of our future debates.