Douglas Murray - Defending Western Civilization

and he's writing from New York Post and other places. Douglas, great to have you on, sir, Hey, great to be on. So I'm sure now people ask you this occasionally, or maybe I'm I'm making an assumption I shouldn't. But how's this whole counter movement against the War on the West going? You know what I mean? How is our counter strike against the War on the West at this stage? Well,

it's much more developed. One of my one of my self appointed tasks, I always say, is to head into mine fields and gleefully run across them in the hope that other people can traverse them more safely themselves afterwards. But I wrote about this a couple of books back, and my book The Madness of crowds that talked about all the social justice nonsense. I said that my self pointed task was to do this thing that a landmine

clearer does. I go into the areas of subjects that are really and everyone's saying, you can't talk about that, and I talk about it. I write about it, and I investigate it. And my hope always is that it means that other people are going to do it after that doesn't mean I'm by any means the only person

doing it. But for instance, all the stuff I wrote about in the Madness of Crowds, I'm delighted to see not least some for instance, the trans issue, it has just become really picked up by so many more people. When I wrote about this some years ago, people are like, why are you bothering about this like fringe thing, And it's very good to see that there's lots of energized people, including a lot of energized parents who are who are

understanding the significance of what's happening. The latest book, The War on the West, Yeah, is about this anti Western movement, specifically the sort of antihistory movement in the West. Again, I think that it took some people time to realize. It took me time to realize what was going on, that what we were seeing was a fundamental assault on everything in our past, you know, the good as well

as the bad. It's like nobody nobody contra you know, the abrahm x kendis and thing nobody actually wants to like not teach slavery or like not teach any child anything bad about the American past. The thing is that some of us were just like some of the good stuff to be taught as well. And and again, I mean I see, I see, particularly the last year, a

growing momentum of people realizing this. Everywhere I go across the United States, I find beliegued but but nevertheless correct Americans who desperately are looking for a way to defend the things we all knew until yesterday, and not to have to go along with the lies that are being told about our past, not going along with the indoctrination of the children. And I think that to that extent, the counter push, as you say, it's definitely underway. There's

no doubt about that. It's no longer lonely in the minefield. I can put it like that. Do you think you know you brought up the transisue and and it was just recently someone showed me that there was a planned drag Queen Story hour for you know, the argument. And

I've seen this with other things too. You've seen this with CRT, critical race theory, diversity, equity inclusion, in different manifestations where the initial the initial talking points you get from either side or along the lines of this isn't even happening. Why are you focused on this? Like? Why

why are you so obsessed with this? Right? That's a constant refrain, and because I think for a lot of people they think, well, okay, maybe I am too focused, And that of course serves a left's purpose because well, if just fewer if fifty percent of the people who were wondering about this story, all of a sudden thing, well I shouldn't care about this does not happened, that's a huge victory. Right, So they don't even have to defend it if they convince everybody that it's not really

happening or it's being exaggerated. But with the Drag Story Hour thing specifically, it has become clear to me that the same way that you said, you're a mind clearer now for conservatism or traditionalism, or however you know you would like to describe it. On the left, it feels like the drag queen story hour thing is supposed to be similar in my mind, similar but different, similar in so far as they're just try trying to see my

idea here, Douglas. If they can get more and more parents to think this is normal, they can get them to think anything as normal. Like if they can break you down so that you are bringing your four year old to clap in cheer for a thirty five year old or forty five year old man dressed as a woman shaking his butt in front of your child, they

can get you to believe anything. Yeah, by the way, I mean, I'm as well as it were quite well prepped for this because years ago I wrote a book on immigration and mass immigration, the illegal mass immigration movement into Europe, and it obviously resonated with American readers among others. But I was used to this rhetorical trick of the lefts from that book and from the years I wrote about and studied and traveled and followed the story of migration,

because the left always said the following things. They said, it's not happening. Then it is happening. You should like it. It is happening, and you should put up with it. And then finally it's revenge. So they would start out by just pretending that what I saw with my eyes across Europe was just not happening, and they would eventually end by saying, it is happening, and you deserve it. It's like a punishment for your past, a punishment of colonialism.

The Empire strikes back, they used to say, jokingly. So I've seen exactly the same things happen in every other issue, from the trans issue to the rewriting of America's past. On the trans issue, they say, it isn't happening. I'd like to see rt thing, same thing. It isn't happening, and it should be happening, and it should be happening everywhere. But it isn't happening anywhere, but it ought to be, right. I mean, I feel like this is the definition of

arguing and bad faith. Right, you're making the arguments defense of your position premised around there is no position to defend because it's not happening. But also if it were happening, it would be a good thing. It is the ultimate merry go round, completely circular logic. It's not really logic,

it's just circular um. But on the on the drag Queen storry, how you see it goes if by the way the drag Queen's story out was actually as sort of as it were, actually innocent thing, which I'm sure sometimes it has been akin to British panto, where there's a sort of absurd man dressed up in an absurd way reading a story. I don't have much problem with that.

And the thing that everyone is recognized as a problem is the stripper shaking the bat in front of the kids and being encouraged to put money into the throng. I was like, and again that comes up and the left says, that's not happening. And then you go, but I've just seen it on a video, and they go, well,

the videos from a right wing source, um. And then they say, and it should be happening because it's an ancient part of lgbtquia plus culture, which as we know, has been going on for millennia in exactly this format. And then row it onto the Americans story and you get the same dishonesty. Look at what Nicole Hannah Jones, who I had a spat with recently, the originator of the sixteen nineteen project of The New York Times. Look

at what people like her did. She and her editor at The New York Times said, we want to reframe the date of America's founding. Then when some of us said we don't like the sound of that, they said, we never said that. What they did was they took the words reframing of the American founding out of the original website and silently, in a stalinistic way, changed it so then they could go, ha, we never said that, you did say it. It's just that after the fact

he then edited it. And then they say, we don't actually want all children in America to be told that America's original sin is slavery, and at the same time have a project which says, that's precisely what we want to do. We want to totally rewrite the American story, to turn it from a story of heroism and success and courage into a story of iniquity and vice and evil. But then they pretend it's not happening, and also that

it should happen everywhere. You know. It's another thing that I think this is a little it's a little controversial. I love history. You love history, right. I'd read history books and have my entire life since I was a little kid for fun. I just think history books are a lot of fun. Most of the ones next to my War on the West, which everybody should get, by

the way, I've got I'm just looking across. We've got Coolidge, Andrew Jackson, Ethan Allen, Washington Grant, a big book on strategy, A History of m I Six Spies and Commissars by Roberts. I mean, anyway, point being, like, I go through those are mostly that was my biography shelf. But point being,

I love all that stuff. Right. One of the things you hear from the left, I think is always around the issue of focus, and they'll say, well, there's there's far too much focus on on sort of Eurocentric history or or you know, this the the Western it's really

more even the Western civilization path. You know, you start in you know, ancient Egypt, and then you get some stuff going on and what is Israel today, and then you move over, you know, you go to ancient Greece and ancient Rome, and then you find yourself in Europe. And oh, look at this we discover America that they object to this, But I always ask him and I say, look what what what what would an ap history course? And I say this, and honestly, what would an ap

history course in the literature of pre Colombian America? Particularly, Let's say, I don't know, you pick uh, you know, you pick a tribe in the American Southwest? What would that even look like? Like? How would you do this when you actually have a lot of societies And I know this somehow is a controversial thing to say that didn't have written language. So so how are you going to do an in depth history, you know, pre the years obviously of exploration everything else, How are you going

to do anything? Yes, you can do archaeological history, and they're certainly, And people say, but the Aztecs were such. By the way, the more people find out about Aztecs, the more they're like, oh, I don't know if this, I don't know if this whole harmony with other tribes in the environment is really the vibe we want to go for with the mass enslavement, human sacrifice, child sacrifice anyway, child sacrifice something going on with Democrats these days too,

in America. But uh yeah, do you see what I'm saying? Though, like like we never get to talk about this. I mean, Okay, you don't want to do ancient Greece. What do you want if you're studying something an eight hundred BC? Okay, there are some options to Maria and at least whatever, But what are you gonna what are you gonna study?

M This was a point by that Alan Bloom made forty years ago now and the closing of the American mind, when he said, if you're not going to have the Bible as the basis for your civilization and historical sort of religious social perspective, you ought to have a book of called seriousness and depth. And I liked this point because, of course it summons up the question, well, what would that be? And the answer is hard to think of another such book, to which you said precisely right now.

It's the same thing with Western history and Western philosophy and all the things that the Western culture, all the things that the Left is trying to destroy at the moment. You better, you better, if you want to do away with all that, you better have greater figures than the Founding Fathers for us to revere you better have smarter men than Thomas Jefferson in your back pocket. You better have greater music than Bachs, You better have greater architecture

than the cathedrals of Europe. And you ought to have better literature than Shakespeare, Dostoyevskia, much more. Now, if you've got such a thing, fine, very interested to hear it, have you? No? Oh? I see? Let me take the example of the one that's most terrifying, which I write around the war in the west of the way in which all this nonsense has gone into stem subjects. Ask

anyone what the other ways of knowing have produced? This is the idea that there is a western centric form of mathematics and others other science and hard sciences, and that they are so western Centric that they must be disrupted by quote other ways of knowing. Here is you just said you said a controversial thing. Let me throw

out a more controversial thing. When you need a vaccine for a global pandemic, do you go to a Native American tribe and say, we would like you to use your other ways of knowing to come up with a vaccine. Does anyone go to the Aboriginal tribes of Australia and say we need your mathematical formulae to get this plane off the ground. No, I'm afraid not. Now, this isn't This isn't a white supremacist talking point. It's not a

Western supremacist talking point. It's the observation that what we have is good, not because it's Western in itself, but because it works. Because the math works. Yeah, because being right siety works, and and and yeah, because being right is good and the truth is good. And these things are I believe central to what the left is trying to tear down. I want to I have to give a word to our sponsor. But but Douglas, just I want to put something out there. You can think about it,

come back to. I do think that on the right we have woken up quite a bit. There's that word woke. We have. We have come to the realization of how much the left is seeking to destroy. You mentioned the sixteen nineteen project and all this stuff, and I want to ask you about your tour of southern campuses in a moment. But I also think that there is an underestimation of how rapidly the left wants to old up or take over institutions and use them to rule effectively,

to be in charge to call the shots irrespective. You know, we could sit here and talk about history. I also think that there's a lack of understanding of So let me come back to that with you in a second. But I gotta tell everybody about the My Pillows, Douglas. We're gotta get you something if you don't have them already. Do you have some my pillows at home? We're gonna hook you up. We're gonna get you if you can,

If you can give me a complimentary my bill. Oh yes, sir, And Coulter was on here and she said she did not have them. We had them delivered right to the to Coulter manner to find out about it. Man, Yeah, okay, great, we got to hook you up. So Mike Lindell's invented the original my Pillow, but now twenty years later, the company's got this new technology if the My Pillow two point zero the patented adjustable fill of the same My Pillow, but has a brand new exclusive fabric made with temperature

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love them. So it's one hundred percent made in the USA. By the way, ten year warrantee, sixty day money back guarantee. But on my pillow dot com click on the radio listener special square buy one, get one free on my Pillow two point on when you use promo code buck promo code b uc k. All right, Douglas, we know they're trying to tear down Are we not on the right aware enough of what they're trying to build and the platforms and the heights of our society that they

have already seized. Yes, I think that's true. I think that it's come as an enormous shock to a lot of people in America as across the rest of the Western world. America is particularly in trouble. It seems to me in terms of institutional capture. I think that if we had been talking Buck maybe ten years ago even, we would have thought and other people on the American right would have thought, that we had institutions still on

our side, you know. I think we would have thought that the military, for instance, was obviously on our side. And that's not to deny that the common soldier, as it were, is, but the top ranks of the military or on our side. I'm not sure if people feel that so much anymore. The intelligence agencies. Ten years ago, I think we would have been talking about the CIA, FBI, NSA, and I think the most conservatives would have said, well, yeah, either our guy. Of course, they want to keep America safe.

You know, guy, I just want to jump in. I don't want to I don't want to interpret train of thought. Just to tell you though, that I was just talking to some CIA friends who are who have gotten out recently or are about to get out, and we all bemoaned how in the early days of the GAT I mean, Global War on Terror, it was how do we how do we help find and then you know, sending the seals it, how do we help find the bad guys? Find bin Laden. You know, how do we do this?

And that was the mission. We showed up every day. There was a mission, right I was in the counter terrorism center of the Central Intelligence Agency, and it really wasn't. And now they say, oh my gosh, you have no idea. It's politics all the time. It's diversity and inclusion training, it's why don't we have more transgender analysts, etc. But anyway, keeping absolutely no. I mean, it's um and it seeps through everywhere. I mean I wrote a bit of my

New York Post column about this last week. But look at this, this encounter between the two Russian fighter jets and an American drone over the Black Sea and what was international airspace, so they have no right to knock down the American drone. But um. The Biden administration and the Pentagon, in its response, criticize the Russians for downing the drone in a quote environmentally unsafe manner. I mean,

m yeah, that's one of the problems of war. Again, there may have been a sea or down below that got sprayed with some oil from the Yeah, it's very sad, very sad story. But not maybe the business of the world. Wildlife fun not the business of the Pentagon not at all.

And the fact that the fact that we just time and again seem you know, formally very serious institutions that we needed, and I would argue we need coming out with this kind of stuff on a routine basis is I think one of the most distressing things in our time. It happened obviously in the universities a long time ago. I cited Alan Bloom earlier. We've known this problem for forty years and more, and it's only got worse. You know, Conservatives have got better and better at diagnosing the problem,

and all the time the problem has got worse. You know, I want to tell you something I like to admit when I think it's important for self reflection, and you know, it sort of sharpens your ability to see things coming when you didn't see something coming that you should have. I had because I left the CIA in twenty eleven

and I friends inside, I'd known the intel community. He was just progressively getting First of all, I went through eight years of the Obama administration, but even beyond that, it just more of the whatever happens in the corporate world people need to understand is reflected very much in the Federal Guard. The federal government's basically a massive corporation. That's how it operates as an employer, so all the

same seminars and training. And actually it's probably worse at the government level because of a whole range of factors, the kind of people that want to do federal service. But anyway, again into that at length, the thing that surprised me was the and we saw this during COVID and a variety of factors, but the stalinism of the medical community caught me completely off guard, and the unwillingness of people to say this is madness. I am an MD, and I'm telling you guys, this is crazy, they would

tell me privately. Not very many. Yes, I think that's that's the last magisterium to have fallen is the medical community and medical science. I've written this before, but in my view, one of the last authorities I was willing to hear from, actually willing to hear from and follow through on their advice, was scientific our community, Yeah, your doctor and so on. And I think that a lot of us had a moment where we were actually, Okay, that one's gone as well. It was when the medical

journals started publishing BLM stuff. It was when two thousand health professionals signed that letter. I think in the lansid if I remember rightly after the death of George Floyd, having spent months telling us to stay inside our houses and not leave our houses, suddenly saying actually, racism is a bigger public health crisis, and therefore you should all come out on the streets and gather by the millions and mass march. For a lot of us, that was one of the moments where we go, you know, I

don't believe you guys anymore. I don't think you are are these non political a political actors. I think you've become highly political actors alike almost everyone else. And I think all of us saw something fall away in our trust in recent years, and that's not something I particularly celebrate. I think that conservatives should should be on the side

of building up trust in institutions. It's a very strange thing in our time that it's conservatives who have lost trust in institutions and are now wondering what we do. And the answer of what to do is not straightforward, but broadly speaking, it's the old thing that it gathers around either building new institutions or trying to rescue the ones that have fallen into the bad. Neither of these

are cheap or easy. And I think it also showed itself with we'd known, you know, the elon Mosque Twitter situation, where you finally got to look inside at the guts of what was going on there. You and I and many others had known for your but for people who weren't really operating on social media platforms as part of their profession, right, as part of their ability to you know,

this was a big deal. The President of the United States, when it was Donald Trump, for four years used Twitter as as among his most consistent and effective tools of communication, right. I mean, I still joke around about the one day I woke up and I think Trump had retweeted six of my tweets in a row, because my timeline was, you know, all of a sudden, the guy who was playing the hotdog vendor from Baywatch in nineteen ninety two was like cursing me out. I'm like, what's what's going

on here? Like it just was a crazy, you know, a crazy moment because it was such a mass communication mass communication platform at that time for Trump and for so many others, But I think it's good for everyone to see that the people that were operating these again pre pre elon and it's the same thing at Facebook. It's probably worse even at YouTube because YouTube always has Google above it and like alphabet, and they're basically telling

everybody we're the most powerful company in the world. Were a virtual printing press for money, what are you going to do to us? So they don't even care. At least, you know, Twitter wasn't running an effective business. Google YouTube there's still a printing press for money. But I think it's important for people to see that the most powerful tools of information dissemination and history were tools of straight up censorship and authoritarianism and partisanships. Yeah, and people saw

this one by one. And you know, I said during the COVID period with the BLM staff doting us going on the first the first rule of the period, if one had one, was a very simple one, which is don't go mad. Not everyone has followed this piece of advice on any side, but broadly speaking, you had to try to not go mad. Why were so many people going mad because they were being force fed things that weren't true and which they sensed to be untrue. But

they didn't know what was going on. Suddenly get you just get told all of these untrue things about things that, as I say, everyone new till yesterday. Or let me let me do it this way. Go back twenty years. Let's let's pretend we're at the beginning of the millennium where we've got the Internet. We've got this amazing tool for social discovery form into personal discovery of learning of almost every book is free online, all news pretty much.

You just feel like it's amazing. You can you can speak to anyone right on the other side of the world, like what good couldn't be done with this sort of technology. You fast forward to twenty twenty three, and we don't know what a woman is, and we don't know when America was founded. In other words, we've got stupider. The tools for mass communication and learning and the dissemination of ideas have made us dumber than we used to be.

And there's a societal cost to that. And my hope is that we're starting to see that cost rather clear. I'm thinking of things like the claps of SVB and signature and others now credits suits, Um, these were unthinkable collapses only a while ago, But you know they're not. It's not the only explanation for the claps. But look at what these these banks were doing. Look at it at Silicon Valley Banks loan promises. It's promised that it was going to loan more to minorities to get a

more equitable America. At the end of it, I mean, anyone recouires that from the two thousand and eight crisis, Um, the idea that that Silicon Valley Bank had only one member of its board who was competent in finance, and that the others were democratic donors and appointees. Um. You know, I joked in I think in the madness of crowds that some day the bridges will fall down, um, and that's when we'll realize we don't have time for this rubbish.

Since then, I've come to the belief that if the bridges do fall down, it'll be because of systemic racism. But the bridges are still up, but the banks are not. The banks are falling and turn out to be, among other things, falling because they haven't had their eye on the ball. They've been playing this stupid, unwinnable game of the era about diversity inclusion and equity and what's it

brought them? They pretended, like everyone else, Like everyone in the American education system, from Randy Weingarten down or Randy Weingarten up, whatever way you like to think of it, they've pretended the same thing, which is that if you do the diversity inclusion equity thing, the other side is even better. It's much better, infinitely better, richer, fairer, everything's better. Everywhere you try this, everything becomes worse. Yes, it does.

No one want to reflect on that. And can I tell you that one thing that I saw as a New Yorker, former New Yorker now Douglas so I got

to put the pressure on you their chief. But as a as a New Yorker, one thing that I saw that really was troubling, and it was it wasn't just COVID, it was that whole that whole series of events where it was COVID and then the you know, BLM riots in the streets, and then the rising crime and the decay and the problems that were happening in cities, name a major city had happened basically everywhere in the country, with actually exception of a few big cities in Florida,

maybe a few other places. And what I realized was that the the Democrat response to this wasn't oh my gosh, what have we done. We're crazy, We're tearing down what we have here is in the case of New York, I mean, San Francisco is like it should be paradise, right, I mean, you know Los Angeles, these are places that should just be and they have been in the past.

It's not like some theory. I mean, I talk about how he used to watch Full House and I wanted to live in a big house in San Francisco when I was a kid, like all that. I don't know if you know the show you're British, but you know Full House is a big show and it's like our Faulty Towers, but with kids instead of adult and so you know, now they've ruined these places. But the response, and I know, I'm kind of getting a going a roundabout way, but the response wasn't oh my god, we

got to fix this right away. It was from a lot of people, this is the price we pay. This is this a more equitable society requires this suffering and degradation. Yes, you can actually occasionally in private, get them to admit that that's their belief, is that there's a period of

pain before the arrival of Nirvana. So that for instance, I mean, there's a story I've been following quite closely here in New York about the migrant buses that arrive in New York, and the New York authorities don't know what to do with the migrants, and they put them up in hotels, and in the migrants do generally trash the hotels or at least make them into not so

luxurious places as they were before. And whenever you follow this story, and by the way, New York is struggling with a few thousand migrants, you know, I mean, now it's it's like forty thousand, right, something like that. Forty thousand, Yeah, that's that's only I mean, there's a number of days of arrival into Texas across the southern border. So you know, if New York can't cope with a few days of illegal movement into Texas or Arizona, then you know what,

then there must be a problem, mustn't there? Guys? You know? But but here's the thing about about that is that they they recognize it's a problem. They recognize that the problem is going to grow and grow, and they don't come to any conclusions about it, such as close the border or send people back when they come illegally. Um, it's the same with homelessness issue. The homelessness can get

worse and worse and worse. New York's bad, But as you say, Los Angeles, San Francisco, places like Portland, places like Seattle, these are once very beautiful and noble cities, and I've seen them in that guise not anymore. And again in private, you can you can sometimes get the advocates of this d I stuff to say, look, of course there's going to be this churn for a period, but it's worth it. And my argument is is my

repast is always as follows. Show me the one place this has worked, and let's be certain it worked for this reason before we roll out the same policy everywhere. You know, they can't point to it. I wish there was more more effort spent for people in this country to understand the recent history. You know, you talk about the Soviet Union, you talk about something which you know, I find the Soviet Union fascinating. I know you do the history of it, and how how could that have happened.

I mean, it's it's a remarkable intellectual, philosophical, political, and historical exercise to see how a place could fall into that kind of of of tyranny and spread around the world in so many ways. But with the case of Venezuela, especially again being down tore in South Florida, people need to understand that what really happened in Venezuela was social justice. Rabble Rousers took over the country promising that they were going to give a lot of stuff to people for free,

and they actually just enriched themselves. And this is what always Communists are always rich, right, meaning the top of the you know, the top of the socialist hierarchy, they're always fine, they always do great, and they impoverished and destroyed a beautiful country that was. And all the Venezuelans you meet here, all of them talk about this, and

it somehow knows doesn't get any you know. I would love to hear AOC explain how how taking the Venezuela approach to anything a city, of state, or even all of America would be a good idea. I would love to hear that explota his very quickly. I mean, it's sometimes regarded now as a cliche to quote George Orwell,

but it's also often impossible not to. It's a great story of George Orwell arguing with us Lanists in the forties in England, and George Orwell gets him to admit that, you know, there's been certain excesses and the stylist movement, and that maybe the famines in Ukraine, you know, weren't ideal, and eventually he considered the Communists. A Stalinist conceives this. He eventually conceives the show Trials of thirty seven, the mass ridiculous show trials which led to so many deaths

and murders, and the goolag. He gets this guy to admit to a lot of this, and eventually the Stalinist falls back on that worst defense of all. He says, you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs, and Orwell replied, where's the omelet? The same question is begging from Venezuela, from every country which has tried actual socialism, where's your omelet? At the end of this, because we only see a mass of bloody broken eggs among much else, that's all

we can see. Venezuela. To my Venezuelan friends can't return. Most of them, the ones who have left and settled elsewhere illegally, they can't return for sheer safety reasons to their country of birth. This happened in our lifetimes. This happened in our lifetimes, and it was the choice. This is the crucial thing. This was a choice of politicians who were put there by people who were badly, badly informed. To put it in its mildest, Venezuela has the same

energy reserves as Norway. Norway has one of the biggest sovereign wealth funds in the world. There is a reason why Norway is Norway and Venezuela is Venezuela. And it's because the Norwegians were more careful with their society. Yeah, and if we don't learn from that more for us, I want to ask you about your tour Douglas in Southern campuses to close us out in your second But first, a word from Talta Towers Foundation. Tunalta Towers Foundation honors

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Sounds like a lot of fun. Hopefully a lot of Clay and Buck radio fans down there, you know, carrying red solo with the floppy hair, loving the re sec football teams. So tell me how was it. What'd you see? Yeah, I wasn't the Carolinas and Virginia, and one of the highlights was speaking at the University of Virginia, in which I've never been to for the first time. It's because one of the great creations of Thomas Jefferson. I was

very struck by a number of things. One was the extent to which America is just so confused about its history and has been so badly misinformed about it. And sometimes perhaps it takes an ostentatious outsider to point some things out. But the way in which, for instance, at UVA met so many people who genuinely have been brought up to despise the founder of not only their country but the institution that they're learning in. The inability to get the past into a proper context, to get historical

figures into a proper context. The present is m that is everywhere in America. That if if people from the past happen not to share our particular views in twenty twenty three of them, we must stand as judge, jury, and executioner over them. This is wildly ahistorical, and it's also presumptuous. I think, but I found a lot of that was going on. And another thing I found was the disturbing timidity of a lot of students. There are so many. There's no shortage of smart students in America,

you know, far from it. But there is a timidity which has crept in because of the danger effectively of putting out there things which I use the phrase again, but things which we all knew until yesterday. If you were to deny the lived experience of a fellow student on campus, I hate these terms, like lived experience. They're more Marxist nonsense. I mean, what other type of experience

is there than a lived experience? I mean, I mean there are a manage, right, it's to give it that pseudo scientific Marxist you know, yeah, shine facade over it, your lived experience as opposed to your experience, Yes, exactly, you know, it's it's more of the sort of social justice bunkum. But but yeah, you know, if you were to deny the you know, or contradict the lived experience of a fellow student by doing something quite straightforward like saying, well,

you know, okay, we had slavery in America. Well everyone had slavery. I mean if you were to take that attitude, which is a perfect reasonable attitude to take, you'd have to be a sort of camacaze of a student to do such a thing to say, well, you know, the African states that were slaving at the same time as America was slaving didn't stop when America stopped. They kept slaving.

I was in Boston the other day and I went to the Boston Fine Arts Museum after speaking to some friends at Harvard and MIT, and there were some Benin bronzes, which have become one of those corners of histories, have become highly controversial. I joked to my friend, let's go and see the Benin bronzes whilst they're still here in Boston, because they'll probably be sent back at some point. There's

a big move for this sort of thing. And it was so funny because I said to this friend, it's so interesting that whatever institution you go to, whether it's in London or in Washington or in Boston, and you see these sort of historic exhibitions, they'll tell you all about the slavery of the American past. They will not tell you that Benin was still slaving at the time that the bronzes were being allegedly looted in the late

nineteen twentieth century. I think sort of things matter. Yeah, well, first, you know, you might have seen I was stuck on an airplane for like almost thirteen hours recently, um on my honeymoons. I mean, it wasn't like tough duty. But I had to find something to watch. So I watched The Woman The Woman King, which is about um, a tribe in Africa, UM that is actually notorious for being

a tribe that would enslave all these other tribes. And of course in the movie, they're fighting against the evil you know, white slavers and this other tribe that wants to do the slave but they're actually not. But the truth is they were actually doing the doing the enslaving. And you get no sense of that whatsoever from the movie. You get no sense that they were the most well known slave raiding African tribe of other African tribes is

who the movie is based on. And no one. Don't you long for art and movies and and things that actually trusts us to deal with complexity? You know, I mean I find it pretty hard to watch anything these days that's just been made because of the sheer sort of social indoctrination that's always going on. I just finished The Last of Us. I wasn't sorry to see it end.

But this sort of apocalyptic drama, of course, inevitably tells you that after a sort of apocalyptic virus in America, the residual sort of camps of gun toting Americans will be led mainly by women and mainly by women of color, who tell all the men what to do. And well, this is just sort of social indoctrination at this point, and that's the same in almost all entertainment. I would love to see a film that actually exposed the way in which people like that the o bar of Benin

slaved into the twentieth century. I'd love to see something on slavery in the world today. I've I've traveled enough around Africa and the Middle East to meet people who were born as slaves. It's an appalling thing. There are more slaves in the world today than there were at the height of the slave trade in the nineh sent tree. Um. I'd love to see something about that made by Netflix

or Hollywood. I'd love them to show the pre Colombian Americas as something other than this Edenic paradise, which was then ruined by the white European coming in. Yeah, but they seem to not be able to trust us with it. We've just got to get this endless sort of um indoctrination. That's essentially My problem with it is not just that it's untrue, but that it's boring. Yes, well you would find the woman king boring, by the way, very boring.

It is not it is not really worth and it's all about It's like I said, it's all about Dahomi tribe. And I think it's also interesting because there's there's the agoge are the female This is why it's so interesting to Hollywood, the female black warrior cast within the Dahomey tribe and and you're led to believe it these are basically like the female Spartans of West Africa. Well, they don't deal within the movie. Is that a basically a

minor lay on. I mean they tried to fight against I believe it was a French French colonial expansion and like a minor French expeditionary force just completely annihilated them off the battlefield. I mean, no surprise here, right, But this notion of this this truly elite. No, they were an elite force at the enslavement of fellow Africans, including women and children. That's what they were, actually, that's what

that's what they were elited doing. Actually dealing with other trained military was not you know, they are not the spartans. But again, the history you're not allowed to talk about the real history. Yeah, because because again of this stupid thing. You watch any entertainment now, and there's always got to be the strong woman narrative, because you've got to tell young girls an American I think can hold you down. You can be a tough gang leader if you want to be. You can even be a bank robber if

you want to be. There's always got to be the strong woman narrative. There's always got to be the overrepresentation of gaze, there's always got to be the the ethnic

politics a bit into the mix. And as I say, I mean there are a few things that have avoided this White Lotus maybe is one of the few, but most drama today you can predict from the get go who is going to live, who is going to die, who is going to be the leader, and who is going to be the loser, And you can tell it just by looking at frankly, what chromosomes you guess they have and what their skin color is. It's very boring,

you know. I long for not being able to guess so easily how the whole thing's going to pan out. You know, it's always interesting to see how many people will jump at you for saying things that go against this narrative without knowing the facts. But they just know that the emotional impulse is supposed to be a certain thing, right, So it doesn't matter if they know anything about the

subject matter. But so ill when I'll say that we fought our first foreign war because of the enslavement of white people buy brown Arabs, right, that is what happened. When I say we fought our first form war, people will you will see, especially if you stayed around you know, college college age radicals. Oh, that's such a lie, and it's not. It is one hundred percent true. So it is. It is as as true as anything that we can know in our history. But people don't like to hear it.

I'd ask you this, how many of the I mean, so were you giving speeches up on stage and taking Q and A basically at some of these campuses. Yeah, did you ever bring up I'm just wondering, did you ever bring up in the discussions about um, just giving a full picture of slavery and the history around it, and history that is just true. Slavery is evil? You agree?

I agree. Everybody agrees slavery is evil. Was there ever any mentioned though, or do you think they would even allow you to mention that there were freed blacks who owned slaves in the American South? Oh? Yeah, absolutely, It's a point point I try to bring up with some regularity. Um, it's very it's a very important detail, and it's not

a small one actually either. The numbers are pretty significant. Um. I'm deeply concerned about the counter story that is being told about America because I think it is making people racist about against white people, which is as evil as it would be if you invented a narrative that made racism easier to express against black people or anyone else.

I think that racism is evil every which way it's pointed, and I think that this particular form of racism is only white people can do bad, and therefore if the white people shut up or dial it down or do less in their lives, you know, hand over the microphone, all this sort of nonsense you hear, then you know that's that's that's where we'll get to the good. And here's here's my real worry about this. As a society. It is incredibly important that America remained dominant and competitive

in the twenty first century. We know that if it doesn't, there are others, mainly China, who will step into that role. China is obviously trying to do that on the international stage. At the moment it sees an opening and it's trying to seize it. It will try to do it on

every stage. Here's the thing. Most of us, I think, from right and left, if we take away the crassness of parts of both sides, pretty much agree that what we want is for America to be highly competitive, and for America to be highly competitive, Americans should be freed up to achieve whatever they can achieve in their lives and use their talents the best of their abilities. Now here's the thing. If we said except women, then first of all, you would say, well, that's kind of bigoted.

But secondly, you say, why would you want to hold back half of the population from achievings. That's madness. What if you said, we want to hold back Hispanics from doing stuff Hispanic Americans, why would you do that? These

would be bad ideas. The worst idea of all is to try to hold back your majority population from achieving whatever they can achieve by marking people down because they're white for university entry and other things, by telling them to shut up in their lives, by telling them that they've got to hand over the space the people of other ethnicities or other sexualities or sexual orientations or whatever.

If America is going to succeed in the twenty first century, and all freedom around the world relies on it, on this, all three societies around the world rely on America remaining dominant. The Americas to remain dominant, it has to be competitive in every field, and for that to happen, absolutely everybody has to have the best opportunities they can to fulfill their potential in this life. To demoralize the majority of

the population. To tell men that they are trash, to tell white people that they are guilty from birth by dint of being white. All of these things are profound evils. And what's more, they are going to diminish the ability of people in America to achieve what they should achieve. So it is a simple suicide. Note that the left is offering us, and I suggest very very strongly, as an interloper, that we don't accept their invitation. Dougas before

I let you go. I often get people who ask, after a conversation like this, well, give us something, give us some takeaways, and usually ed's give us some books. In the realm of big name historians. Right now, unfortunately, even in the biography side, as you know, there are not nearly enough to say they're conservatives I think is even going too far, but just just pure historians, and there are more and more revisionist, leftist, politicized histories being

written all the time. If we were to just give you, were to give a few names of people for whom you can read the history, and it's just damn good history, and it's not actually history well done for you. Who would be a few names that come to mind? Well, let me circumvent that. I'm a great advocate of book reading, but let me psycument by making it even tighter suggestion.

I recently did a series called Uncancelled History. It's available free on YouTube and on various other platforms, Spotify and so On Uncanceled History, you will see me interviewing ten leading historians on major historical figures who have been misrepresented in recent years, including the wonderful gene Yarborough on Thomas Jefferson, Alan Gelzo on Washington, FLIPI. Fernandez, A. Mesto on Columbus,

John Van Hoorn on Robert E. Lee and more. And each of them are roughly an hour, sometimes a little over, sometimes a little under. And I did it because I wanted to get whilst we still have them experts in the American past in particular who really know the subject, not studies within the sociological aspects of but the facts. I wanted to get all these people on camera, and it was. They were all absolutely fascinating conversations with top

rank historians. I can't recommend it highly enough. I learned a huge amount from it, and I really hope other people do too. I will check it out myself. Actually it is on camp. By the way, I'm gonna say, you stuck the landing on that answer, buddy. I wasn't expecting. I don't know where we were going, but bam, I'll get her. Nine point nine uncanceled history on YouTube. That's just what we have to look for. Yeah, uncanceled history

on YouTube. Everybody check that out and also get Douglas's latest book, The War on the West, which I have read and I highly highly recommend to all of you. Douglas appreciate you making the time. I hope you'll come back later this year. We'll have a lot to talk about. I'd love that much. Enjoyed it. Thanks all the best.