March 31, 2023 • 52 mins
Douglas Murray is an author and journalist.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everybody, Welcome to the Buck Sexton Show. In this episode,
we have Douglas Murray with us. He is an author,
a columnist. You see him pop it up on Fox
News on the regular. His latest book was The War
on the West, which is excellent to actually have it
here on my bookshelf, and he's writing for the New
York Post and other places. Douglas, great to have you answer, Hey,
(00:24):
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
(00:46):
of my one of my self appointed tasks, I always say,
is to head into minefields 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, in my book The Madness of Crowds
(01:06):
that talked about all the social justice nonsense. I said
that my self appointed tasks to do this thing that
a landmine clearer does. I go into the areas of
subjects that are really 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
(01:27):
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
(01:49):
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 Ladies book with
the War on the West, Yeah, is about this anti
Western movement, specifically the sort of antihistory movement in the West. Again,
(02:09):
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 Abram x kendis and thing nobody actually wants to
like not teach slavery or like not teach any child
(02:31):
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
(02:55):
Americans who 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,
(03:19):
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
(03:42):
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 are you
so obsessed with this? Right? That's a constant refrain, and
(04:04):
because I think for a lot of people they think, well, okay,
maybe I am too focused, And that of course serves
the 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 where it's being exaggerated.
(04:26):
But with the drag story hour thing specifically, it has
become clear to me that the same one 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
(04:47):
but different, similar in so far as they're just 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 is 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
(05:08):
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
(05:28):
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, but you should like it. It is happening,
(05:54):
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
(06:16):
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
(06:36):
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 in
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
(06:58):
the ultimate around, 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 Story Hour 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
(07:19):
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 farm.
I was like, and again that comes up, and the
left says, that's not happening. And then you go, but
(07:41):
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 LGBT quia plus culture, which as we know,
has been going on for millennium in exactly this format.
(08:03):
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
(08:24):
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 ha, we never said that.
You did say it. It's just that after the fact
(08:45):
he then edited it. And then they say, we don't
actually want all children in America to be told that
America's original sinist 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 Americans story, to turn
it from a story of heroism and success and courage
(09:06):
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 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
(09:27):
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
(09:49):
the issue of focus. And they'll say, well, there's there's
far too much focus on on sort of the Eurocentric
history or or you know this 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
(10:09):
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 in all honestly, what would an
ap history course in the literature of pre Colombian America, particularly,
(10:30):
Let's say I don't know, you pick 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
(10:50):
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, um,
(11:12):
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 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
(11:34):
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 equal seriousness and depth.
And I liked this point because, of course it summons
(11:57):
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
(12:17):
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,
(12:39):
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
(12:59):
stems 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.
(13:20):
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
(13:43):
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,
(14:04):
but because it works, because the math works. Yeah, because
being rightiety works, and 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
(14:26):
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 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
(14:46):
is an underestimation of how rapidly the left wants to
build 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
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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
(16:33):
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
back 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,
(16:58):
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
(17:18):
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 g WAT, I mean
Global War on Terror, it was how do we how
(17:40):
do we help find and then you know, sending the seals,
it said, 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, diversity and inclusion training,
(18:01):
it's why don't we have more transgender analysts, etc. But anyway,
keep 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 to
(18:22):
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, yeah,
that's one of the problems of war. Again, there may
(18:43):
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 Fund, not the business of the Pentagon, not at all.
And the fact that the fact that we just time
(19:03):
and again, see 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
(19:23):
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.
(19:44):
I had because I left the CIA in twenty eleven,
and I have friends inside. I'd known the intel community
was just progressively getting First of all, I went through
eight years of the Obama administration, but even beyond that,
it's just more of the whatever happens in the corporate
world people need to understand is reflected much in the
Federal Guard. The federal government is basically a massive corporation.
That's how it operates as an employer, so all the
(20:06):
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, I 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
(20:29):
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,
(20:52):
but in my view, one of the last authorities I
was willing to hear from, actually waiting to hear from
and follow through on their advice, was signed to 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
(21:13):
journals started publishing BLM stuff. It was when two thousand
health professionals signed that letter. I think in the LANDSID
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
(21:35):
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 you go, you know, I
don't believe you guys anymore. I don't think you are
these non political a political actors. I think you've become
highly political actors alike almost everyone else. And I think
(21:59):
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.
(22:20):
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,
(22:44):
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 years. 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 twitters
as among his most consistent and effective tools of communication, right.
(23:07):
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
(23:30):
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
(23:52):
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
(24:13):
this one by one, and you know, I said, during
the COVID period with the BLM staff, I don't think
that's going on that 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
(24:37):
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 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
(24:59):
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
(25:20):
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,
(25:42):
and there's a societal cost to that. And my hope
is that we're starting to see that cost rather clearer.
I'm thinking of things like the collapse of SVB and
signature and others now credits sweets. These were thinkable collapses
only a while ago, but you know they're not. It's
(26:03):
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
requires that from the two thousand and eight crisis, the
(26:24):
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 and that's
(26:48):
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 will be because of systemic racism.
But the bridge 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
(27:11):
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
(27:33):
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
(27:56):
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 uh, 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,
(28:18):
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
(28:40):
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 adults. And so
you know, now they've ruined these places. But the response,
and I know I'm kind of getting a going a
(29:02):
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. Um so that for instance,
(29:28):
I mean, there's a story I've been following quite closely
here in New York about the migrant buses that 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
(29:48):
follow the 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, if 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,
(30:12):
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
(30:33):
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
(30:55):
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
(31:18):
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?
(31:40):
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 town in South Florida. People need
to understand that what really happened in Venezuela was social justice.
(32:03):
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 her, all of them talk about this, and
(32:25):
it somehow knows you 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 expert Yea his very quickly. I
mean it's sometimes regarding how as a cliche to quote
George Orwell, but it's also often impossible not to. It's
(32:47):
a great story of George Orwell arguing with a Stalinist
in the forties in England, and George Orwell gets him
to admit that, you know, there's been certain excesses and
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,
(33:12):
the mass ridiculous show trials which led to so many
deaths and murders, and the goolagg 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,
(33:40):
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've left and settled elsewhere illegally,
they can't return for sheer safe reasons, to their country
(34:01):
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
(34:21):
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,
(34:42):
a word from Tunalta Towers Foundation. Tunalta Towers Foundation honors
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(35:03):
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the Tunnel to Towers nine eleven Institute. The foundation is
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(35:23):
darkest day. Joined Tunnel the Towers on its mission to
do good. Please help America to never forget its greatest heroes.
Join me in donating eleven dollars a month at Tunnel
to Towers. That's T twot dot org t the number
two T dot org. Douglas, you made a tour of
Southern campuses. Sounds like a lot of fun. Hopefully a
lot of Clay and Buck radio fans down there, you know,
(35:48):
carrying red solo cups with floppy hair, loving the re
SEC football teams. So tell me how was it. What'd
you see? Yeah, it was in the Carolinas and year
and one of the highlights was speaking at the University
of Virginia, in which I've never been to for the
first time. It suppose one of the great creations of
(36:08):
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
(36:31):
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,
(36:54):
to get historical figures into a proper context, the presentism
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
(37:16):
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
(37:36):
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 experiences
there than a lived experience? I mean, I mean there
(37:57):
are a manage, right, it's to give it that student
scientific Marxist you know, yeah, shine facade over 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 what contradictable lived experience of a fellow
(38:20):
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
(38:45):
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 I 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
(39:07):
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 sorts of historic exhibitions, they'll tell you all
(39:27):
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. Yeah, well, first,
you know, you might have seen I was stuck on
an airplane for like almost thirteen hours recently, um on
(39:51):
my honeymoons I mean, there wasn't like tough duty. But
I had to find something to watch, so I watched
The Woman The Woman King, which is about a 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
(40:13):
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 the most well known slave
raiding African tribe of other African tribes is who the
(40:33):
movie is based on, and no one for Don't you
long for art and movies and and things that actually
trust us to deal with complexity? You know? I mean
I find it pretty hard to watch anything these days
that's that's just been made because of the sheer sort
of social indoctrination that's always going on. I just finished
(40:56):
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,
(41:16):
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
(41:37):
on slavery in the world today. 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 they were at the
height of the slave trade in the nineteenth century. I'd
love to see something about that made by Netflix or Hollywood.
I'd love them to show the pre Colombian Americas as
(42:00):
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 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
(42:20):
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 the 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
(42:41):
like the female Spartans of West Africa. Well they don't
deal within the movie. Is that a basically a minor
later on? I mean they tried to fight against I
believe it was 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
(43:02):
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,
(43:24):
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 gays, there's always
(43:47):
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
(44:09):
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
(44:30):
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,
(44:53):
that is what happened. When I say we fought our
first foreign war, people will you will see, especially if
you stay it around you know, college college a ttraticals. 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 were so were you
giving speeches up on stage and taking Q and A
(45:14):
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
(45:35):
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. Um. And it's not
a small one actually either. The numbers are pretty significant. Um.
The I'm deeply concerned about the Countess story that is
(45:59):
being 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,
(46:24):
if the white people shut up or dial it down
or do less in their lives, you know, hand over
the microphon 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.
(46:47):
It is incredibly important that America remains dominant and competitive
in the twenty first century. We know that if it doesn't,
there are others, mainly China, who will step into into
that role. China is obviously trying to do that on
the national 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,
(47:09):
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.
(47:29):
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 achieving stuff? That's madness.
What if you said, we want to hold back Hispanics
(47:53):
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
(48:17):
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.
(48:41):
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
(49:03):
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
(49:27):
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, will give us something, give
us some takeaways, and usually it'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
(49:50):
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
(50:11):
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 circumvented 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
(50:34):
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, Felipe Fernandez, Armesto on Columbus, John
(51:00):
horn 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
(51:25):
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 uncamp
by the way, I'm gonna say, you stuck the landing
on that answer, buddy. I wasn't expecting. I don't know
(51:46):
where we were going, but bam, I'll get her nine
point nine uncanceled history on YouTube. That's just 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, and I hope you'll come back later this year.
(52:06):
We'll have a lot to talk about. I'd love that much.
Enjoyed it, Thanks all the best.
Hey, everybody, Welcome to the Buck Sexton Show. In this episode,
we have Douglas Murray with us. He is an author,
a columnist. You see him pop it up on Fox
News on the regular. His latest book was The War
on the West, which is excellent to actually have it
here on my bookshelf, and he's writing for the New
York Post and other places. Douglas, great to have you answer, Hey,
(00:24):
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
(00:46):
of my one of my self appointed tasks, I always say,
is to head into minefields 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, in my book The Madness of Crowds
(01:06):
that talked about all the social justice nonsense. I said
that my self appointed tasks to do this thing that
a landmine clearer does. I go into the areas of
subjects that are really 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
(01:27):
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
(01:49):
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 Ladies book with
the War on the West, Yeah, is about this anti
Western movement, specifically the sort of antihistory movement in the West. Again,
(02:09):
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 Abram x kendis and thing nobody actually wants to
like not teach slavery or like not teach any child
(02:31):
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
(02:55):
Americans who 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,
(03:19):
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
(03:42):
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 are you
so obsessed with this? Right? That's a constant refrain, and
(04:04):
because I think for a lot of people they think, well, okay,
maybe I am too focused, And that of course serves
the 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 where it's being exaggerated.
(04:26):
But with the drag story hour thing specifically, it has
become clear to me that the same one 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
(04:47):
but different, similar in so far as they're just 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 is 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
(05:08):
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
(05:28):
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, but you should like it. It is happening,
(05:54):
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
(06:16):
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
(06:36):
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 in
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
(06:58):
the ultimate around, 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 Story Hour 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
(07:19):
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 farm.
I was like, and again that comes up, and the
left says, that's not happening. And then you go, but
(07:41):
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 LGBT quia plus culture, which as we know,
has been going on for millennium in exactly this format.
(08:03):
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
(08:24):
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 ha, we never said that.
You did say it. It's just that after the fact
(08:45):
he then edited it. And then they say, we don't
actually want all children in America to be told that
America's original sinist 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 Americans story, to turn
it from a story of heroism and success and courage
(09:06):
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 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
(09:27):
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
(09:49):
the issue of focus. And they'll say, well, there's there's
far too much focus on on sort of the Eurocentric
history or or you know this 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
(10:09):
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 in all honestly, what would an
ap history course in the literature of pre Colombian America, particularly,
(10:30):
Let's say I don't know, you pick 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
(10:50):
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, um,
(11:12):
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 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
(11:34):
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 equal seriousness and depth.
And I liked this point because, of course it summons
(11:57):
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
(12:17):
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,
(12:39):
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
(12:59):
stems 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.
(13:20):
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
(13:43):
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,
(14:04):
but because it works, because the math works. Yeah, because
being rightiety works, and 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
(14:26):
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 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
(14:46):
is an underestimation of how rapidly the left wants to
build 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.
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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
(16:33):
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
back 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,
(16:58):
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
(17:18):
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 g WAT, I mean
Global War on Terror, it was how do we how
(17:40):
do we help find and then you know, sending the seals,
it said, 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, diversity and inclusion training,
(18:01):
it's why don't we have more transgender analysts, etc. But anyway,
keep 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 to
(18:22):
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, yeah,
that's one of the problems of war. Again, there may
(18:43):
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 Fund, not the business of the Pentagon, not at all.
And the fact that the fact that we just time
(19:03):
and again, see 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
(19:23):
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.
(19:44):
I had because I left the CIA in twenty eleven,
and I have friends inside. I'd known the intel community
was just progressively getting First of all, I went through
eight years of the Obama administration, but even beyond that,
it's just more of the whatever happens in the corporate
world people need to understand is reflected much in the
Federal Guard. The federal government is basically a massive corporation.
That's how it operates as an employer, so all the
(20:06):
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, I 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
(20:29):
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,
(20:52):
but in my view, one of the last authorities I
was willing to hear from, actually waiting to hear from
and follow through on their advice, was signed to 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
(21:13):
journals started publishing BLM stuff. It was when two thousand
health professionals signed that letter. I think in the LANDSID
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
(21:35):
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 you go, you know, I
don't believe you guys anymore. I don't think you are
these non political a political actors. I think you've become
highly political actors alike almost everyone else. And I think
(21:59):
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.
(22:20):
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,
(22:44):
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 years. 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 twitters
as among his most consistent and effective tools of communication, right.
(23:07):
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
(23:30):
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
(23:52):
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
(24:13):
this one by one, and you know, I said, during
the COVID period with the BLM staff, I don't think
that's going on that 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
(24:37):
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 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
(24:59):
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
(25:20):
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,
(25:42):
and there's a societal cost to that. And my hope
is that we're starting to see that cost rather clearer.
I'm thinking of things like the collapse of SVB and
signature and others now credits sweets. These were thinkable collapses
only a while ago, but you know they're not. It's
(26:03):
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
requires that from the two thousand and eight crisis, the
(26:24):
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 and that's
(26:48):
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 will be because of systemic racism.
But the bridge 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
(27:11):
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
(27:33):
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
(27:56):
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 uh, 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,
(28:18):
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
(28:40):
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 adults. And so
you know, now they've ruined these places. But the response,
and I know I'm kind of getting a going a
(29:02):
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. Um so that for instance,
(29:28):
I mean, there's a story I've been following quite closely
here in New York about the migrant buses that 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
(29:48):
follow the 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, if 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,
(30:12):
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
(30:33):
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
(30:55):
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
(31:18):
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?
(31:40):
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 town in South Florida. People need
to understand that what really happened in Venezuela was social justice.
(32:03):
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 her, all of them talk about this, and
(32:25):
it somehow knows you 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 expert Yea his very quickly. I
mean it's sometimes regarding how as a cliche to quote
George Orwell, but it's also often impossible not to. It's
(32:47):
a great story of George Orwell arguing with a Stalinist
in the forties in England, and George Orwell gets him
to admit that, you know, there's been certain excesses and
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,
(33:12):
the mass ridiculous show trials which led to so many
deaths and murders, and the goolagg 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,
(33:40):
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've left and settled elsewhere illegally,
they can't return for sheer safe reasons, to their country
(34:01):
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
(34:21):
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,
(34:42):
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(35:03):
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two T dot org. Douglas, you made a tour of
Southern campuses. Sounds like a lot of fun. Hopefully a
lot of Clay and Buck radio fans down there, you know,
(35:48):
carrying red solo cups with floppy hair, loving the re
SEC football teams. So tell me how was it. What'd
you see? Yeah, it was in the Carolinas and year
and one of the highlights was speaking at the University
of Virginia, in which I've never been to for the
first time. It suppose one of the great creations of
(36:08):
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
(36:31):
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,
(36:54):
to get historical figures into a proper context, the presentism
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
(37:16):
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
(37:36):
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 experiences
there than a lived experience? I mean, I mean there
(37:57):
are a manage, right, it's to give it that student
scientific Marxist you know, yeah, shine facade over 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 what contradictable lived experience of a fellow
(38:20):
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
(38:45):
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 I 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
(39:07):
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 sorts of historic exhibitions, they'll tell you all
(39:27):
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. Yeah, well, first,
you know, you might have seen I was stuck on
an airplane for like almost thirteen hours recently, um on
(39:51):
my honeymoons I mean, there wasn't like tough duty. But
I had to find something to watch, so I watched
The Woman The Woman King, which is about a 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
(40:13):
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 the most well known slave
raiding African tribe of other African tribes is who the
(40:33):
movie is based on, and no one for Don't you
long for art and movies and and things that actually
trust us to deal with complexity? You know? I mean
I find it pretty hard to watch anything these days
that's that's just been made because of the sheer sort
of social indoctrination that's always going on. I just finished
(40:56):
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,
(41:16):
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
(41:37):
on slavery in the world today. 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 they were at the
height of the slave trade in the nineteenth century. I'd
love to see something about that made by Netflix or Hollywood.
I'd love them to show the pre Colombian Americas as
(42:00):
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 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
(42:20):
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 the 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
(42:41):
like the female Spartans of West Africa. Well they don't
deal within the movie. Is that a basically a minor
later on? I mean they tried to fight against I
believe it was 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
(43:02):
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,
(43:24):
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 gays, there's always
(43:47):
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
(44:09):
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
(44:30):
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,
(44:53):
that is what happened. When I say we fought our
first foreign war, people will you will see, especially if
you stay it around you know, college college a ttraticals. 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 were so were you
giving speeches up on stage and taking Q and A
(45:14):
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
(45:35):
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. Um. And it's not
a small one actually either. The numbers are pretty significant. Um.
The I'm deeply concerned about the Countess story that is
(45:59):
being 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,
(46:24):
if the white people shut up or dial it down
or do less in their lives, you know, hand over
the microphon 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.
(46:47):
It is incredibly important that America remains dominant and competitive
in the twenty first century. We know that if it doesn't,
there are others, mainly China, who will step into into
that role. China is obviously trying to do that on
the national 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,
(47:09):
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.
(47:29):
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 achieving stuff? That's madness.
What if you said, we want to hold back Hispanics
(47:53):
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
(48:17):
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.
(48:41):
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
(49:03):
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
(49:27):
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, will give us something, give
us some takeaways, and usually it'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
(49:50):
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
(50:11):
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 circumvented 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
(50:34):
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, Felipe Fernandez, Armesto on Columbus, John
(51:00):
horn 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
(51:25):
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 uncamp
by the way, I'm gonna say, you stuck the landing
on that answer, buddy. I wasn't expecting. I don't know
(51:46):
where we were going, but bam, I'll get her nine
point nine uncanceled history on YouTube. That's just 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, and I hope you'll come back later this year.
(52:06):
We'll have a lot to talk about. I'd love that much.
Enjoyed it, Thanks all the best.
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Clay Travis
Buck Sexton
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