The War on the West : Douglas Murray (FULL DOCUMENTARY)

0:00 hello i'm douglas murray and welcome to this fox nation special there is a war going on at the moment a war against all of the foundations and traditions of the west there's this massive lie of omission about world history most kids have no idea that the arab world enslaved 14 million africans they have no idea about the history of slavery in china and korea they hear the word slavery and it only with the west [Music] there's a war going on against the peoples of the west who are being remorselessly attacked but sins and crimes they have no connection to we have become so committed to this frenzied narrative of ubiquitous racism

0:48 that we turn our eyes away from the breakdown in the inner city and pretend that it's the police there's a war going on against everything in western history so that even our greatest heroes are being torn down sometimes quite literally if you take down winston churchill you've basically taken down britishness if you've taken down abraham lincoln and thomas jefferson you've basically taken down america finally there's a war going on against the cultural inheritance of the west so that some of the greatest achievements of humankind are being looked at through a remorseless and pious lens all you need to do today if you're the new york times or the washington post or

1:34 cnn to discredit an individual or an institution is put the adjective white you have to ask yourself you know why why is this happening well if your goal is to totally reform the morality of society how do you convince people that everything they believed was good is actually bad today i'm going to be joined to discuss this by some of america's leading thinkers on these areas this is the war on the west [Music] today i'm joined by heather mcdonald national best-selling author of the war on cops and the diversity delusion

2:19 coleman hughes writer and host of the podcast conversations with coleman and max eden research fellow at the american enterprise institute and author of the forthcoming book schoolhouse rot max let me start with you what i described in the war in the west is this system of ideas values claims that seems to have started off from somewhere and then just gone through everything in our culture in america and the wider west where does this all start from yeah um well one could argue that it starts from the very beginning one thing that you pointed out in your book which some intellectuals are a little bit too timid to do is you pointed to cultural marxism right which

3:06 is something that is called a conspiracy theory sometimes but you know what are they what are these ideas to answer that you need to know you know what really is marxism and the best definition i've ever heard from marxism is by a guy named whitaker chambers who knew it inside and out he was a communist agent turned you know american christian patriot and he defined marxism as the second oldest religion known to man founded when the serpent whispered to eve ye shall be as gods it's a profound human force a profound desire to believe that you know good and evil and then to seek to define good and evil for others one thing has started to come up recently has been that i ideas that seem to have come from the academy are now rife across among other things the

3:52 american schooling system everybody here at some point has written about this but where does this come into the schooling system in america the teachers unions teacher ed schools which have been a absolute transmission belt of anti-american victimology for decades now they are dedicated to everything but knowledge they see teaching as about community building or democracy or fighting oppression fighting racism and teachers come out not knowing anything you know the teaching class is the lowest of uh the on the scale of sats uh and they don't know math they don't know history but they sure know

4:37 their uh racial victimology and so that is now happening k through 12 that has been dedicated now to a an alternative narrative about the united states which is that its most profound and inerratical trait is one of white supremacy and and in this there's a real parroting between what's going on in the universities which max is right to point out and and what's going on throughout the education system and students are they've been pretty ignorant for a long time i mean america's been complaining about the failure of its schools for decades and rightly so we documented in

5:22 the 1980s a bunch of corporate ceos got together and had a nation at risk report because students didn't know american history that was in the 90s now they really don't know american history it's quite extraordinary but the one thing they do know is that there was slavery and we oppressed blacks and that was absolutely true i think that conservatives underestimate how much how how gratuitously nasty white americans were for for much after we concede that it was happening into the 70s in in the north but there's much more to american history than that and that never gets taught where does the critical race theory uh

6:08 the whole critical race theory fit into this because everybody's heard about this in the last couple of years it seems to have come up incredibly fast it originated in universities but now k through 12 everybody seems to know about crt yeah well you know i was writing about crt a few years ago before it was in the news and i would sometimes talk to people about it and get this sense that they think it's irrelevant and highly academic and i i feel somewhat vindicated by the fact that it's so mainstream now um not to say i was into it before it was cool to be into it but basically what happened is a group of scholars legal scholars like kimberly crenshaw derek bell and others were dissatisfied with the rhetoric of

6:53 the civil rights movement they didn't like how martin luther king talked they respected him but they didn't like how martin luther king spoke this language of christian common humanity and your race doesn't matter and we want to judge you as an individual they thought he didn't go far enough so they made a self-conscious departure from what they called the civil rights establishment and basically came up with an uh the academic face of what used to be the black power movement right right where what they want to say in essence is that the entire value structure on which western society american society is built uh individualism meritocracy and all the rest

7:38 all of these are not actually objectively good values what they are are white supremacist values in disguise right they are values that were that came from white europeans and are meant to enshrine forever white dominance and then you have to ask yourself you know why why is this happening uh well if your goal is to totally reform the morality of society it's a very hard thing to do how do you convince people that everything they believed was good is actually bad well you can tie it to the one thing that everybody senses a certain synonym right so there follows this kind of syllogism everything traditionally good is white

8:24 everything white is bad therefore everything traditionally good is bad and i can come in and define goodness for you anew and i can do it with children and i can do it guys in like in the wonderful language of cultural competence which is something that teachers are being trained in culturally responsive education cultural competence is the antithesis of colorblindness culturally responsive education is another name for critical race theory but teachers don't really know these things one of the things that fascinates me is what i describe as the misperception of america as it is today so um there have been have a you know the stats on this better than anyone but there have been polls that for instance uh in 2020 uh americans were polled about for instance how many unarmed black

9:10 americans they think are shot every year by the american police and i think people who described themselves as liberal said that the number was somewhere between thousand and ten thousand every year and people who said they were very liberal including people who thought it was over ten thousand people and the actual numbers somewhere around ten there seems to be a misperception by certainly a new generation of americans about what the situation in america is today it's quite extraordinary with regards to the policing this is obviously a you know conservatives just rail all the time about the media but i'm afraid i'm going to have to do it again because it really is true if the media covered police shootings of whites

9:58 with as much monomaniacal intensity and and fury as they do policing as blacks the country would think we're living through an epidemic of racially biased police shootings of whites the perception that people have is due exclusively to the fact that the media will only cover police shootings of blacks do we want there to be any shootings of any civilians no obviously ideally there would be none but given the violent crime rate in this in this country which is magnitudes higher than anything else in the modern west the fact of the matter is is that police officers in this country much more frequently encounter armed

10:44 violent resisting suspects but yes in in 2021 there were six allegedly unarmed blacks who were killed by the police i say allegedly because that comes from the washington post database which is very liberal and it's how it defines unarmed and the fact of the matter is the media does not give a damn about black lives they will not cover the real way that blacks get killed by homicide in this country which is at the hands of other blacks in these utterly insane drive-by shootings over ten thousand blacks killed in 2021 compared to six unarmed blacks shot by the police those ten thousand blacks were not shot by whites they were not shot by the cops they were shot

11:29 overwhelmingly uh by other blacks and yet we have become so committed to this frenzied narrative of ubiquitous racism that we turn our eyes away from the breakdown in the inner city and pretend that it's the police or or white corporations that are the fault and and that is hurting the very people that we purport to care about because the police have backed off crime is up and the law-abiding good hard-working members of high-crime neighborhoods are terrified because they can't go out without fear of getting shot don't go anywhere the war on the west will be right back

12:28 this seems to have happened in no seconds flat in 2020 when in in the aftermath of the killing of george floyd there is a outburst of iconoclasm across america of a kind that uh people from my country of origin great britain would have recognized in the 16th century statues being smashed with hammers statues being pulled down and i remember very early saying does anyone know where the breaks are on this thing because the first statues that started to come down were confederate statues for instance and there's a very contested uh issue here obviously but very few people across america want to stand up for a confederate statue but then then it moves inwards very very fast of

13:16 course it moves on to columbus dozens of statues of columbus have either been pulled down or in the process of being removed and sometimes of course it's not even that the crowd has to pull it down the authorities preemptively pull down the statue in case the people get to it i mean where were where were the breaks i think what's happening here is there's this massive lie of omission about world history it's not that kids are being told outright lies about the horrors of american slavery we can quibble over the details of how they are taught what is true is that they know almost nothing about slavery and the rest of the world right so this is a point the great writer and intellectual thomas sowell made when you hear the

14:02 word war what comes to your mind like any particular nation no like you understand that war has happened on every continent that people have been going to war since the dawn of humanity right war does not seem like a peculiarly western sin really if you know anything about the history of war and conquest but when you hear the word slavery in america in the west we think of one country essentially um or we think only of europeans in general right most kids have no idea that the arab world enslaved 14 million africans starting around the 8th century they have no idea about the history of serfdom in russia they have no idea about the history of slavery in china

14:49 and korea and the aztec empire and almost every other empire for the past 10 000 years right so they hear the word slavery and associate it only with the west as if you know slavery hasn't been the norm for ten thousand years rough one of the most interesting things i found when i was researching the war on the west was actually the scholarship on the slave trade going east from africa and what i think if if if you threw a stone in an american city and just selected a person at random not one in a million people in america know first of all that there was a slave trade going east or secondly that the reason why there are no descendants is because the arabs castrated all the men and made sure there would be no more descendants nor do they know that to

15:35 this day the colloquial word for black person in the arab world is abid which is the same as the word for slave exactly right so people people have no understanding of what the ethics and the attitude towards historical injustice in the rest of the world is like and one thing that i think was missed in the criticism of the 1619 project which was mostly based on the palpable falsehoods uh within which nicole hannah jones the architect you know critiqued the factual critique saying what are you doing i'm denying objectivity you're not even engaging in my project well what was her project she has said that the deepest ambition of this project was to get white americans to stop being white or to at least get them to recognize whiteness for what it is so it was intended explicitly to promote

16:23 this sense of sin without redemption that douglas has described you make a great point in the book related which is the reason people don't call this stuff out is bigotry or the way folks who talk this way defend their actions as not racist is that well i'm not talking i'm not denigrating white people per se i'm talking about whiteness right which is this abstraction but i mean obviously black people like we would not suffer anyone talking about blackness being horrible or anything right we would understand that any group would understand that as an attack on the individuals of that identity and many white people understand it that way as well and it's you know this

17:09 this relates as well to systemic racism right it's like the point of systemic racism allegedly when you read these books uh such as racism without racists which is a big crt book is that a system can be racist without any person in the system being a racist the racism is in the system it's not in the people well then how come the how come it always ends up in a witch hunt that targets and and fires and destroys individual people if it's got nothing to do with people somehow all these abstractions they end up in persecuting individuals and and not only individuals now but individuals from the past so for instance and the the absolute the greatest heroes of the western tradition i mean winston churchill is now under unbelievable

17:57 attack and his statue in london keeps getting attacked and had to be boxed up for a lengthy period so that people couldn't pull it down in in the u.s you see statues of abraham lincoln pulled down you see the attacks on abraham lincoln and and it seems to me that the same thing is going on and the oddity of it is why why are these attacks consistently happening effectively against the foundational heroes of the west you know if you take down winston churchill you've basically taken down britishness if you've taken down abraham lincoln and thomas jefferson everything else you've basically taken down america am i right yeah i mean all you need to do today if you're the new york times or the washington post or cnn

18:43 to discredit an individual or an institution is put the adjective white before that person's name or that institution so every every tradition in the west which by necessity by demographic necessity is going to be predominantly white because that was our demographics that's all you need to say classical ballet white uh classical music white therefore bad there's there's an addition to that of course isn't there which is the the super k dead white male deadweight dead white male is now the worst thing to be and and i can't everyone always focuses on the the the uh whiteness as being the attack and and the maleness but there

19:29 seems to be like an attack on people for being dead as if like who would do that i mean on top of all the other loser qualities they have they also died you know yeah yeah um but but it's hatred for a civilization deemed too wide and too male and the the desire to destroy is a profound one and you talk about it in the book as well it is it is there is an inebriation a dionysian uh frenzy that comes over being able to destroy statues being able to destroy the past literature and if you can't build something up you can sure as hell tear it down and that's what's going on the war on the west will continue right after this

20:28 this remorseless attack on the west has attacked western peoples it attacked western history it's also attacked western uh ideas the foundational ideas that we have every single foundational thinker in the west has now been assaulted through the dead white male lens uh aristotle was recently attacked in the washington post for being quote the grandfather of scientific racism he was also guilty of being named by the author charles murray as being his favorite philosopher so so you can you can now uh d-platform aristotle 3000 years later for being liked by a controversial uh philosopher in the 21st century again the idea that these people two and a half thousand years ago happened not to share all of our views is now used

21:14 against it's also some of the thinkers who we credit in the west as being the people who came up with the the concepts of rationalism of reason uh voltaire in france david hume in the united kingdom and many more what is it about this this complete clearing away of the intellectual terrain of the past yes in my experience the people who attack all of the dead white male philosophers you'd expect that they've really at the very least have read all of the prominent people of color uh authors but i find often that's not even true so for example have they read martin luther king's essay my pilgrimage to non-violence where he

22:00 lays out who he got his philosophy from and who does he name plato aristotle hobbes rousseau bentham mill big section on marks and why marx was wrong on some things big section on nietzsche um and he says i read all of these people and they were crucial to me forming my philosophies and it's almost as if they go through all of martin luther king's influence one by one and just are taking them off as dead white and male that's so interesting but but fatally also what they're doing is they're saying they're saying there are two traditions and they cannot meet martin luther king has no right to be a part of the western tradition he has no right to be in this cannon we have to put him

22:46 into some other cannon of blackness something like that isn't it which is certainly an idea he would have rejected yes very strongly it also sounds like a very racist idea yeah i mean it suggests that we can't read each other communicate across racial lines which which used to be a claim made only by racists so there are two ways to deal with martin luther king right one is to point out this hypocrisy that you're claiming him for one race that's how kind of we would argue against it i think the argument from the other side is actually he didn't really mean the words that he said and you will see this in the critical race theorists they will say yes he was making those arguments and appealing to those dead white men but it was a positional thing and he really was a marxist at heart and he was making the

23:32 arguments he needed to make then for us to get to where we are and i think that there really are that as you pointed out in the war on the west they're kind of there's one strand of philosophy that is does not come under criticism right and that is the marxist strand nobody's so glad you bring this up this is one of my favorite hobby horses nobody points out mark's statements which i i frankly cannot say on the air yes the treatment that is given to every dead white male philosopher other than marx well if you were to apply it to marx marx would have been cancelled long ago we are against all old dead white men but we give a pass to all old dead white marxists right now one of the things that absolutely fascinates me about the war on the west is the way in which this

24:18 system of thought that we've been discussing now runs across absolutely everything it's hard to imagine a realm of life today in which the critical race theorists cultural marxists and much more don't have some presence they have applied their ideology to literature uh to music to all of the arts to the visual arts and you have this in in even in classical music where the fact that the canon of classical music was mainly written by dead white males is now a reason effectively to tear it apart it seems to be happening absolutely everywhere nowhere safe am i right where is safe i i cannot stress

25:05 enough every institution is coming down if it comes out of the western tradition we don't say oh we're not going to study you know chinese nature paintings any longer because there's no black chinese nature painters from the 17th century only the west only the west it is an obsession this is an untried experiment in human history what happens when you raise children and give them nothing to be proud of and the perversity is that i would argue and you talk about this as well in your final chapter if we're gonna if we're going to talk about this okay let us have a provisional ledger of what western culture gave us

25:53 and everything in this room all the materials all the electricity the engineering it's a western product that came out of the beauty of the scientific revolution but yes classical music all gone beethoven bach simply because of the color of their skin they the preposterous idea that if symphony orchestras are not 13 black it has got to be because the conductors who are obsessed with quality the only thing they care about is are you going to blow the horn solo in that strauss symphony they generally audition people behind audition behind the screen so so we've we're supposed to believe that somehow the screen is racist and there was a new york times op-ed a couple years ago saying

26:39 actually we need to get rid of the screens right in no time they went from blind auditions are the solution to blind auditions a part of the problem and if you listen if you looked at the the greatest jazz bands in the country jazz big bands you're going to find an over-representation of black people because that's a culturally black art form there are reasons for all of these things it's never to denigrate a group it's simply to say that our expectation of equal outcomes is totally schizophrenic given the level of cultural difference but i i would say that and what we're shying away from that there are cultural pathologies that should be denigrated and as long as we cannot talk about that if we cannot talk about the fact that there were 50 black children

27:25 gunned down in drive-by shootings last year in their beds jumping on trampolines in their front yards in their backyards at barbecues if we can't talk about that we don't care about black lives the reason they're being gunned down by these black teenagers is because in the inner city there is a breakdown of culture white people are not the problem affecting blacks today they are not they were scourges and when you read richard wright or james baldwin you see that the gratuitous cruelty of whites lasted so long today though there's not a single institution that is not discriminating in favor of blacks and it

28:10 seems it seems that what we're doing one of the things that we're doing at the moment we should get on some solutions to this but one of the things we're doing is um what you're saying is correct heather is is that there are problems that are very big which nobody wants to address right and as a result we are addressing effectively non-problems i mean none of the children you describe being gunned down in their front yard are going to be saved if the new york philharmonic orchestra subtly changes the composition of its trombone section yeah i mean and to complement all of that i just dispute none of it there's just a very human question of disposition towards the world and there are kind of two polls that you can take as you look at the world and most good

28:56 people will go between the pole rationally based on stimuli and those are gratitude and indignation gratitude is far more difficult to cultivate it has to be practiced it has to be practiced from a young age and it's difficult because it requires recognition that there is something that is greater than you that you've been given and the proper disposition is to be thankful for it if we teach students to relentlessly critique the past that's how we grow up we cultivate indignation everywhere we don't let the muscle of gratitude be used frankly because to acknowledge that gratitude is proper means acknowledging that there are others who are kind of greater than us in various ways which is a very difficult thing uh to acknowledge if you start from an ideology that says you know basically that i and people who think like me have

29:42 the right to reshape the world according to our our ideas and our will we'll be right back with the war on the west [Music] i wanted to talk about what can be done about this i mean what we're discussing is such an overarching problem it is we're talking about an ideological view that goes everywhere from kindergarten right up to the the biggest companies in the united states that effectively pay their their ransom money to various organizations and through all

30:29 of the cultural institutions through our understanding of history we're talking about an incredibly deep and now comprehensive problem one of the only answers i've heard put forward in the american debate is well it'll be solved if we arrange a large cash transfer from one part of the population to another i.e reparations which every democrat contender for the uh presidency in 2020 talked about seriously and said that they were considering um first of all is racial harmony or any other kind of harmony going to occur if we arrange this cash transfer no my basic problem with reparations is is this

31:15 thomas soul spent 30 40 years studying the rise of ethnic groups from poverty to affluence all over the world in africa in southeast asia in europe in america and to my knowledge he nor anyone else has found a single group anywhere ever that rose from poverty to affluence by means of demanding reparations preferential policies that lower the standard for them while keeping the bar high for others the whole program has never worked anywhere for any group and we think we delude ourselves into thinking that it's going to work here for black people

32:01 so my basic problem is that it is a total distraction from the real solutions which involve basically a change of beliefs values and habits in the community parenting styles huge investment in tutoring and stricter parenting and and more close-knit better family structures all of the sort of obvious common sense ways in which groups have risen from poverty to affluence in other places and we are obsessed with this idea that reparations is the way to go and lowering standards it's just totally wrong-headed it's not going to work yeah we've been doing it already i mean we've had massive trillion dollar transfers in wealth so reparations is

32:47 just a different way of packaging it and it hasn't worked because i mean you did such extraordinary work on the consumption habits you know blacks to explain why there's help explain why there's differences in household wealth again this is the cardinal rule you may not talk about behavioral differences you may not it all has to be the systemic problems and the and the uh depredations of whites right so i was at dinner with some ghanaian and nigerian friends of mine once and we were discussing the slave trade in the history of slavery i was curious how they as people who grew up in west africa learned about slavery of course the fact you all know is that

33:32 you know europeans didn't go to africa and capture slaves like kunta kinte they were already slaves in africa enslaved by other african tribes and were sold by those african tribes for goods yes those africans got wealthy they got goods off of selling other africans into slavery yes i wanted to ask them how did you learn about this as a kid growing up in ghana growing up in nigeria did you learn about this with any sense that you were responsible or that your that this had any emotional or psychological relationship to you and what they said to me i'll never forget they said they looked at me like i was crazy oh of course not we learned it as a neutral fact right there's nothing you can do about it i thought to myself that is the default normal and acceptable human way to deal

34:19 with horrible things that were done by your ancestors hundreds of years ago yes and if we're going to deny that to white people uniquely we're going to have a very big problem on our hands don't go anywhere the war on the west will be right back as we as we start to wrap up two things i want to bring us to very briefly the first is how we turn around this culture of resentment this culture of ransacking through the past into what heather referred to and what i've described in the book as an attitude of gratitude towards the past not we we've inherited so many extraordinary things political liberty freedom uh um personal liberties

35:07 we've got the amazing cultural inheritance created by and given to us by people of an amazing array of backgrounds how do we instead of ransacking this say maybe we should have gratitude towards this and secondly how do we do that on a practical level schooling parenting how do we try to change around this war on the west against an appreciation of it yes very briefly i think it starts by the recognition that you know race is one card out of many that is being played in a war on the west that is being waged by intellectuals you had challenged me earlier to you know do intellectuals really have that much power and i would challenge you back is is any of this naturally what a parent would want for a child

35:52 and the answer is obviously no so the practical solution should come from well how do we get parents to help rear their children the way that they think is good and true and beautiful and part of the answer comes in my opinion from school choice because there's such systemic capture of public school institutions by this ideology that giving parents the opportunity to exit and also showing them a vision of the good you know education as a pursuit of the true the good the beautiful engaging in the greatest that has been thought and said that's something that i think parents desperately want first they need to recognize that there are reasons why they're not getting it and then policymakers need to give them the resources to pursue it for those some for themselves coleman i think people

36:38 i mean the the first step is always to model courage and having good conversations in your own life people feel powerless but you always have power over how you talk to the people around you and um i think you know that is always the place to begin try to have these conversations right go to your school board talk to people around you so just start there and i would echo max get beauty into your children's hedge early on read the great children's literature read wind in the willows so that they have they have they're inoculated against this dysfunctional we're gonna rub your nose in in ugliness and and dysfunction but i would just say don't be afraid of being called a racist speak the truth and and do not accept that white is an epithet

37:25 uh and and we have to start being more honest about the reasons for racial disparities in this country because i do think that that is the driver take that out and i think a lot of this goes away heather mcdonald coleman hughes max eden thank you very much i'm douglas murray this was war on the west you