The Charlie Kirk Show - Escaping the Left's Postmodernist Wasteland with Douglas Murray

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00:00:08.000 Hey, everybody.

00:00:08.000 Today on the Charlie Kirk Show, I am thrilled to be with Douglas Murray, one of the most clever, wise people in the entire conservative movement, you could call it, or just the movement of people that are thinking critically about what's happening to our civilization.

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00:01:10.000 Douglas Murray is here.

00:01:11.000 Buckle up, everybody.

00:01:12.000 Here we go.

00:01:13.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.

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00:02:38.000 Hey, everybody.

00:02:38.000 Welcome to this episode of The Charlie Kirk Show.

00:02:40.000 I am super thrilled to be here today with Douglas Murray, who's associate editor at The Spectator and also the author of a phenomenal book, The Madness of Crowds.

00:02:52.000 He'll talk about that throughout the episode.

00:02:54.000 But I just want to first say Douglas is one of the wisest, most clever voices in the conservative movement.

00:03:00.000 Douglas, I heard you on Dennis Prager's fireside chat last week or two weeks ago.

00:03:06.000 And it just been a while since I had kind of listened to your content.

00:03:10.000 And you just made some phenomenal points.

00:03:12.000 I want to start with one point just right off the bat.

00:03:14.000 You said something, and I have been using it in a lot of my speeches, that it seems as if there's a supply and demand problem with fascists and racists in the West, that there's an incredible demand from the left to find them, but such a lack of supply.

00:03:28.000 I just love that.

00:03:29.000 Can we just start with Darren?

00:03:30.000 Can just build that out?

00:03:32.000 Sure, of course.

00:03:32.000 Well, first of all, it's a great pleasure to be with you.

00:03:36.000 Yes, I'm a great admirer of Dennis's as well.

00:03:39.000 And I mentioned this to him.

00:03:40.000 It's been something that's been on my mind a lot in recent years, what I call the supply and demand problem, where there's a huge demand for fascists, white supremacists, racists, and so on in the West, and a relatively small supply.

00:03:54.000 Thank goodness.

00:03:56.000 Anyone should be pleased about the fact that all opinion polls and much more show that indeed the experience and evidence of our everyday lives shows that where racism does exist in a society like the UK or America, it's pushed to the farthest margins, it's not tolerated, it's certainly not welcomed or in any way acceptable.

00:04:17.000 And yet we have people claiming that almost everybody is a white supremacist or racist or an extremist if they don't like them.

00:04:27.000 And I haven't actually been in the US for a couple of years, but I've been thinking about this a lot and thinking about it from a distance and noticing how much in your country, and I've been here touring around the country for the last month, how much this now applies to modern America.

00:04:41.000 You know, you have people being called these things who are just obviously, demonstrably, provably just not those things.

00:04:50.000 And there is a very dangerous game being played by all those who would apply such labels in order to win some short-term political game and use those labels and diminish those labels and in the end demean and make them pointless.

00:05:10.000 And, you know, because if everyone's a fascist, some point nobody is.

00:05:14.000 You know, if half of the country is fascist, then obviously they're not.

00:05:18.000 And in the end, you don't know how you can identify anybody who actually might be.

00:05:23.000 So there's a huge terminology problem, not to sound too sort of academic about it.

00:05:29.000 There's a huge terminology problem in American politics, which I've just noticed since the last time I was in this country and is rampant today.

00:05:38.000 I completely agree.

00:05:40.000 And even just basic terms such as what is racism, we're talking about two completely different things.

00:05:46.000 You and I would believe that racism is an individual person expressing prejudice against another person based on skin color, language, culture, any of those categories.

00:05:57.000 Whereas someone on the left, they would say racism is actually a power struggle between two groups, that a black person cannot be racist and a white person might be racist without you ever even knowing it and you can't even prevent it.

00:06:10.000 This is a very dangerous sequence of events that is taking place in the West.

00:06:16.000 And I love what you said, terminology problem.

00:06:18.000 I actually have said, I said this two weeks ago, where I said, we're talking about different things when they're interfacing sometimes with the other side.

00:06:26.000 And they're intentionally changing the terms, I think, to try and either, I think they're communicating to populations disgust for the terms while also using a different definition of the terms that actually making it perfectly clear.

00:06:41.000 A great example is they do not believe someone can be gay, can be black, or can be Hispanic if they're not also on the left.

00:06:51.000 You've experienced this in some way.

00:06:53.000 Can you talk about how they tie identity to leftism?

00:06:56.000 And if you aren't on the left, you're stripped of that, any sort of identity that might come with it.

00:07:02.000 That's right.

00:07:03.000 I describe this in The Madness of Crowds.

00:07:05.000 As you know, in each chapter, I do a different identity Grouping.

00:07:09.000 A lot of people look at the contents page of the madness of crowds and either shriek or think few because you can't help seeing the list.

00:07:18.000 You know, I think it's gay, women, race, trans, which makes a lot of people gulp.

00:07:24.000 But, you know, I just don't think these are all fascinating subjects.

00:07:26.000 We don't have them out honestly enough.

00:07:28.000 We don't really talk about what's interesting in them.

00:07:30.000 We just have this boring ideological weaponization of all of these terms.

00:07:35.000 I'm not much interested in that.

00:07:37.000 I am interested in things that are genuinely interesting.

00:07:40.000 Anyhow, yes, in each of these cases in The Madness of Crowds, I give an example of somebody who is of the identity group in question that the left would like to weaponize, who is said no longer to be in the identity group once they don't have left-wing politics.

00:07:57.000 So I give the example in the gay chapter of Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley technique, who is a gay man and who, when he comes out for President Trump, is said by The Advocate, which is the remaining pointless legacy gay publication in the U.S., is said by the advocate to be in any way gay.

00:08:19.000 They say he may, Peter Thiel may sleep with men, but in no way is he gay. 0.63

00:08:24.000 You would have thought that the sleeping with Membit was sort of central to the whole business.

00:08:27.000 But anyway, they say, no, no, no, he's not a leftist, therefore he isn't gay.

00:08:33.000 When Kanye West says he's not of the left, he says he's even going to vote Trump and all of that a few years ago, the same thing happens.

00:08:43.000 Tanahesy Coates, the most celebrated, I'd say over-celebrated writer of his generation in America, writes a piece in the Atlantic saying that Kanye is, to all intents and purposes, no longer black.

00:08:54.000 And we've seen this in other areas.

00:08:56.000 The most distinguished feminist of the late 20th century, Jermaine Greer, doesn't have 100% of today's lockstep views on the trans issue and is chucked out of the church of feminism a few years ago.

00:09:11.000 The new feminists say Jermaine Greer is no longer a feminist.

00:09:14.000 And as I say in The Madness of Crowds, if Peter Thiel isn't gay and Kanye West isn't black and Jermaine Greer isn't a feminist, then we're not really talking about the facts here.

00:09:24.000 What we're talking about is people who wish to use identity groupings as a political weapon.

00:09:30.000 And it's very, very dangerous.

00:09:34.000 I regard it, I mean, I happen to be gay, and I don't think it's a very important part of my political or other parts of my life.

00:09:42.000 But I deeply resent people who think that because you happen to be gay, just as if you happen to be black or anything else, ergo you must be not just of the left, but now, of course, they say in favor of, and let's do the list, dismantling capitalism, dismantling the patriarchy, dismantling the family, dismantling cis heteronormativity, and the whole boring, turgid list of other claims that they make.

00:10:10.000 No, no.

00:10:13.000 We should respect individuals.

00:10:15.000 We should respect individuals.

00:10:16.000 And individuals will fall out differently with different views.

00:10:19.000 And there is nothing wrong in that.

00:10:21.000 And there is something not just sinister but totalitarian in the idea that that is what we should do.

00:10:27.000 Hive off people into blocks and say, if you are this thing, then you must believe the following.

00:10:33.000 It's demeaning and not just demeaning of the individuals, but demeaning of all of us as human beings.

00:10:39.000 I couldn't agree more.

00:10:40.000 And the danger is that there will be a collision point when you start to hive people off into these different groups.

00:10:48.000 And the only way I can reconcile why they're doing this is they actually want that collision point.

00:10:53.000 I think they really do.

00:10:55.000 There is no way that you could try to, there's no way that your goal can be harmony and do what they are trying to do.

00:11:02.000 And what I mean they, the critical race theorists and the postmodernists and the people that you mentioned this list and it's so perfect.

00:11:09.000 Dismantle this and disintegrate that and destroy that.

00:11:13.000 They don't want to build anything.

00:11:15.000 They are not in, they're not in the game, if you will, of trying to build things around beauty or goodness.

00:11:24.000 Instead, it's what can we displace or destroy?

00:11:28.000 And by the way, on this visit to America that I've been involved in this month, I've seen all of this firsthand.

00:11:34.000 I saw it in Seattle and I saw it in Portland when I was there the other day.

00:11:39.000 These are places filled with people who believe this mad idea that America is this incredibly patriarchal, cis-heteronormative, racist society and all of that list.

00:11:51.000 They actually believe it and they believe in the name of that. 0.99

00:11:54.000 They must pull the whole damn thing down. 0.96

00:11:56.000 And here's the thing: we can already see the results of that. 0.98

00:11:59.000 We can already see the world you inhabit when you do that.

00:12:03.000 It is what these places are like.

00:12:05.000 And I don't know when the last time was you were in Seattle or Portland, but they are horrible, horrible places.

00:12:12.000 They are places where I was reminded of a friend who writes under the name Theodore Dalrenpol.

00:12:17.000 His real name is Anthony Daniels, a retired prison doctor in the UK, who said many years ago when he visited Cuba that watching the people of Cuba in the 1980s walking among these beautiful French colonial buildings, he was reminded of it was as if they were in a civilization they had found themselves in but could not sustain or in any way hold up.

00:12:38.000 And it's the same with people in Portland and in Seattle.

00:12:41.000 They find themselves among these buildings.

00:12:43.000 There are still federal buildings and courthouses and police stations and libraries and things, but they've all been graffited over.

00:12:50.000 They've all been molested.

00:12:51.000 They've all been shot at or hacked at or thrown things at.

00:12:58.000 They're all boarded up.

00:13:00.000 And so you just have these people who think that if they just pull down the one remaining statue, they will be free from their past and they'll be able to enjoy the urine-stenched wasteland that they deserve.

00:13:12.000 But that's the problem, is that's all they do inherit.

00:13:15.000 They can't even build buildings.

00:13:17.000 All they have are tents everywhere among the remnants of buildings that people better than them put up.

00:13:23.000 And this is a major problem.

00:13:24.000 It's a major problem for American society.

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00:14:26.000 So I want to ask you about something you also said to Dennis Prager.

00:14:32.000 I've heard you say it on some of your other recent interviews.

00:14:34.000 And I don't know if I agree with this, but it gives me hope.

00:14:37.000 Where you said you think that postmodernism is going to reach an apex of atonality and eventually people will want to go back to pursue beauty, truth, and goodness.

00:14:47.000 Can you build out that argument and also kind of go a little bit deeper about how you think that postmodernism actually might be hitting a ceiling?

00:14:55.000 Well, I do think that's the case.

00:14:57.000 I'm so glad you raise it because it's a major thing going on underneath all of our feet.

00:15:03.000 Throughout our lives, we've been living in the sort of wasteland created by the postmodernist movements.

00:15:10.000 These are lots of things, not to get too theoretical about it, but things like deconstruction and all of that.

00:15:17.000 And as I say in the Manners of Crowds, this came from universities, first of all, from departments that wanted to deconstruct everything apart from themselves.

00:15:27.000 And these departments at American universities played a sort of game.

00:15:32.000 And the game went out from beyond the control of the departments in question.

00:15:36.000 The game was things like pulling things apart, forgetting the big stories.

00:15:44.000 And I mean, many people have observed this.

00:15:46.000 Neil Ferguson some time ago said that his shorthand for this was: you know, whenever a colleague of his in the university retired, you know, who was an expert in, say, Russian history, they were always replaced by somebody who was a sort of field of study was infinitely narrow within an infinitely narrow field.

00:16:06.000 You know, the big studies, the big knowledge was being lost and always ended up going to these mean-minded and small-minded people.

00:16:16.000 Now, the thing I think has been happening recently has been that we have been able to see very clearly that postmodernism can deconstruct, but it can't construct, that it can't build.

00:16:28.000 Now, this is something, by the way, that all parents know.

00:16:31.000 It's the experience that happens when a child takes a bicycle apart and then can't put it back together, just doesn't know how.

00:16:39.000 Because this is a lesson we all learn.

00:16:42.000 We all learn this very early in life.

00:16:45.000 It's very easy as children to pull things down.

00:16:47.000 It's very hard to create.

00:16:49.000 Now, this is a central, we might say, Burkean insight of conservatism.

00:16:54.000 But here's the thing that I think is happening.

00:16:56.000 And there have been a number of cultural shifts in recent years that speak to this.

00:17:00.000 I think that people are starting to recognize that the deconstructed wasteland is not that enjoyable a place to live in.

00:17:07.000 That people do not want to live in the thing that is simply endlessly picking apart and pulling down.

00:17:16.000 We can see this in architecture.

00:17:18.000 We can see it in housing.

00:17:20.000 Offered a chance, people want to live in beautiful housing.

00:17:23.000 It was one of the great insights of the late Roger Scruton about this: that people do, if they can, if they have the means, want to live in beautiful surroundings.

00:17:34.000 The rich do live in beautiful surroundings because they have the opportunity to do so and they make their choice.

00:17:39.000 The less well-off have less of a choice, and government has tended to give them the ugliest imaginable buildings.

00:17:46.000 But if you grow up around this, if you see this and you see that there are alternatives to this, there is an alternative in the world.

00:17:52.000 There is a chance for us to live in harmony with our surroundings, not in a brutal surrounding.

00:17:58.000 And the point is that in recent years, I've noticed, I've noticed it with my own writing and audiences and others, and I've noticed it in some of my contemporaries and others like Jordan Peterson, that there is a very clear vacuum.

00:18:11.000 And the vacuum needs to be spoken to and is finally being spoken to.

00:18:15.000 The vacuum is that, as I say in the madness of crowds somewhere, we may be the first people in human history to live without any explanation of what we're meant to be doing here.

00:18:24.000 Now, the radical left has given people an explanation.

00:18:28.000 It has said you should spend your lives warring against the following things.

00:18:33.000 And I don't by any means say this isn't a purpose.

00:18:36.000 A lot of people clearly do find purpose in this, but there isn't that much purpose in it.

00:18:42.000 There isn't that much meaning.

00:18:43.000 However, and this is a crucial thing, the right has not spoken to this absence of meaning.

00:18:48.000 It's beginning to do so.

00:18:49.000 And when it does so properly, along with the elements of the left that can do the same, we will genuinely see the end of the deconstructionist postmodernist movement because it has nowhere else to go.

00:19:00.000 So, Douglas, I want to just challenge this a little bit.

00:19:04.000 You have presented a thesis, if you will, for lack of a better term, that when postmodernism and some of these deconstructionist ideas are fully implemented on the political, sociological, and cultural level, that eventually there's such a atonality to it, there's such a darkness, for lack of a better term, that eventually people will reject it and try to get back to at least a pursuit of truth or goodness.

00:19:31.000 I don't know if we're seeing that yet in the West.

00:19:33.000 We are seeing places like Portland and Seattle where they're taking down the statues, they're destroying any form of the Western tradition or ethic, and it's a miserable place.

00:19:44.000 What will that breaking point be?

00:19:46.000 Does it require those of us that actually believe in these sorts of ideas of pursuing truth and trying to say that there's better music than others to go into those vacuums of darkness?

00:19:57.000 Or what do you think that breaking point looks like?

00:20:00.000 It will be different for different people.

00:20:01.000 And by the way, it may well take a long time.

00:20:04.000 I mean, in historical terms, what we're going through is a nanosecond.

00:20:12.000 And this may well be the course, this may well take place over the course of a century or far more.

00:20:16.000 It may take four centuries.

00:20:18.000 There are several options.

00:20:20.000 For people in the wastelands that I describe, there are very easy ways out.

00:20:24.000 The obvious way out is to dope yourself out of existence, is to use narcotics to decide, as a lot of Americans have, and a lot of people in my own country, that basically they will get around the horror of the existence that they are in, often through no fault of their own, sometimes through fault of their own, and decide to sort of numb themselves in a way that Aldous Huxley and others predicted that modern man may indeed do.

00:20:48.000 Brave new world.

00:20:49.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:20:50.000 And so that's definitely an option.

00:20:53.000 Another option, however, is to say no to this and is to try to, among other things, find a harmony with what has gone before you and to find a place in it, to find indeed a place in the great stream of events, culture, and much more.

00:21:09.000 Now, I'm struck by this because, as I say, the right has basically given up on a lot of this discussion in recent years.

00:21:17.000 Very few figures on the right have been much interested, it's to their great detriment, have been much interested in things beyond the realm of the economy.

00:21:26.000 They have fought culture wars, but have primarily fought culture wars in order to push back the latest madness of the left.

00:21:34.000 They haven't then said what should replace that madness.

00:21:37.000 And I think this has been a great failing because a lot of people intuit, a lot of clever people intuit, a lot of people with, you know, you don't need a high IQ or something to intuit this, but just intuit that they do not want to live the life of endless struggle.

00:21:53.000 And struggle is the portrayal of meaning that the left is holding out.

00:21:57.000 Now, I know a lot of people on the decent liberal left who genuinely don't like that either.

00:22:02.000 They regard politics as being, like I do, a very important thing, but not the meaning of life.

00:22:08.000 And yet we have lost the explanations we used to have for what you do to lead a meaningful life.

00:22:15.000 We've even lost the terms for it.

00:22:18.000 I mean, when did you last hear anyone but me refer to, for instance, a life well-lived?

00:22:23.000 That was something that was a very common thing people used to talk about.

00:22:27.000 You know, what is a life well-lived?

00:22:29.000 And there was a phrase for it because there was an idea of it.

00:22:32.000 And if you don't have the phrase for it, if you don't have an interest in the phrase, it's partly because you don't have an idea of it.

00:22:39.000 Now, I do have an idea of it.

00:22:41.000 I think a lot of us do, but we're not very good or haven't been very good in explaining it.

00:22:46.000 And we will have to, because we will have to explain to people that the kind of nihilistic despair that a portion of the radical left is offering is not going to answer the deep needs of their souls.

00:22:58.000 I think this is the work of, as I say, generations.

00:23:02.000 But it can be done.

00:23:04.000 It's been done before.

00:23:06.000 There have been many times when civilization has been pulled back from a brink of nihilistic despair.

00:23:12.000 In fact, you might say that that brink is one of the things that keeps us limber and keeps us going, exactly the knowledge of where we could fall.

00:23:21.000 So one needn't despair about it.

00:23:24.000 And it is something which the good news of it, among other things, is that an individual can do it for themselves.

00:23:29.000 They do not need to find the optimum conditions in society to do it.

00:23:34.000 They can save themselves from that abyss today.

00:23:37.000 They can step away from it themselves.

00:23:40.000 They can stop having warring fights with their family and loved ones and with their past and their culture and their history.

00:23:47.000 And they can learn, as I say, among other things, to reconcile themselves with things in the world.

00:23:52.000 This is one way to start.

00:23:53.000 It's not the whole thing, but it's a start.

00:23:56.000 And I think one of the biggest difficulties, and something that you definitely agree with, that we have been struggling and battling is the universities do a phenomenal job of almost imparting an evangelistic nihilism upon young people.

00:24:10.000 That it's not enough that you believe in the nihilistic worldview.

00:24:16.000 You must go find new converts.

00:24:18.000 It's almost the Matthew 5 of the nihilistic worldview that you must go make not salt and light, but dark and death in the world.

00:24:27.000 And I find that this is their purpose.

00:24:29.000 And you're exactly right.

00:24:32.000 The purpose has its limitations. 0.96

00:24:34.000 But I have seen young people have not a fulfilling 20s, but a motivated 20s, you know, their 20s, trying to go forth in the world and convince people that all Western art, culture, poetry, literature is rubbish and garbage, and it must be destroyed at all costs.

00:24:52.000 And one of the things that we do so wrong in America, and we have done over the last couple of decades, we haven't realized it, is that we tell 16 and 17-year-olds not that, hey, there's some truth and goodness out there.

00:25:05.000 Let's tease you and maybe we can find it together.

00:25:07.000 Instead, we set the baseline when they're 16.

00:25:11.000 There is no truth.

00:25:11.000 There is no goodness.

00:25:12.000 We're going to teach you how to become a better complainer about all the stuff around you and the planet that exists.

00:25:20.000 I think the question for those of us, and I don't even like to use the word conservative, because who even knows what that means?

00:25:26.000 It's such a, you know, but conservative or someone that just believes in the West is how do we properly interface against a left, the left or the deconstructionists or the nihilists that are so motivated, they're so energized and they control so much terrain.

00:25:40.000 How do you think that we should best embark on that?

00:25:42.000 Well, one, I think, hope, which I suspect is a false hope, which a lot of people on the right have had, is that the left extremism would fall apart under its own contradictions.

00:25:55.000 It can fall apart in parts.

00:25:59.000 Bits of the left can fall away when they realize the contradictions, but a significant portion simply see the contradictions as further evidence that there are contradictions, which themselves must be embraced and will lead to further contradictions.

00:26:12.000 It's not inevitable also that when things fall apart, they fall apart and come back together again in the right's favor.

00:26:20.000 That's another myth on the right, you know, that if you allow a thing to hit rock bottom, people will magically realize that the right was right all along.

00:26:29.000 And I don't think this is the case.

00:26:30.000 History shows us that when things hit rock bottom, you discover a whole new inferno underneath it that you haven't considered yet.

00:26:38.000 And by the way, this is the case in America.

00:26:40.000 I notice it very much in my travels of recent weeks.

00:26:44.000 You know, I think sometimes I said it to a friend, I think, in Oregon somewhere, that, you know, I said, don't you sometimes you see some of the people protesting all the luckiest generation in human history.

00:26:56.000 You see some of them protesting like mad men and mad women and mad they suppose one must say outside of public federal buildings in America. 0.87

00:27:04.000 And I said, you just sometimes really want to just slap them. 0.98

00:27:08.000 And I said to this friend who I confessed this to, I said, the problem is that if you did slap them, they would immediately say, here is a white supremacist slapping me. 0.98

00:27:18.000 Here is a Nazi, and it is evidence of Nazism. 0.91

00:27:21.000 And off you'd go again. 0.83

00:27:22.000 You know, it's wrong to think that there will be this sort of moment of great awakening when it might just be ever, ever more maddening.

00:27:32.000 I think the crucial thing is how you save sensible and reasonable people from this. 0.98

00:27:36.000 The big problem you have in America is obviously that too many people in America go to university and become stupider.

00:27:43.000 And I don't know how you address that long term, other than encouraging people to go to the better colleges and to not get themselves indebted to study non-specialisms that just make them bitter. 0.88

00:27:55.000 But there must be a way for America through that.

00:27:58.000 And I do think you have a way.

00:27:59.000 I think there are very many reasonable Americans of the center, the center left and the center right, who do think, you know, there are problems in our past, but the fact that the past had problems doesn't mean that you should hate everyone in the past and make yourself the king in 2020.

00:28:17.000 You know, I think many people, it doesn't matter how educated or otherwise they are, do have a reasonable view of history.

00:28:26.000 And it isn't the strange, vindictive assault on the past that is being presented to them.

00:28:34.000 So I do have some faith in that.

00:28:35.000 And I think that those people need to be given help, arguments, information, facts, and much more that help to bolster them through the facts and the truths that they instinctively have.

00:28:51.000 And I think the false hope we have that when things begin to fall apart, they'll eventually come back to conservatism.

00:28:58.000 There's very little evidence of this.

00:29:00.000 Back when I was a sophomore in high school, we read a book by Chinua Echebe called Things Fall Apart.

00:29:07.000 I don't remember about this book.

00:29:09.000 Very well read in America and the West.

00:29:12.000 And I didn't realize this until the last couple of years.

00:29:14.000 But the underlying reason why they made us read this book was it frames Europeans as colonialists and all these, you know, all the same sort of colonial framing.

00:29:25.000 But more than anything else, the title is almost that things are going to fall apart, so why even try to keep them together?

00:29:32.000 It's almost this, and it's almost like the second law of thermodynamics.

00:29:35.000 Like this civilization is going to decay.

00:29:38.000 Why even put in the effort?

00:29:40.000 Can you comment on that?

00:29:41.000 Yes, by the way, that, I mean, these are very worrying signs that these are the messages being imparted to young people in America.

00:29:50.000 That is a very late empire thing to happen.

00:29:53.000 I mean, I've given you some hope, But here's some negativity.

00:29:57.000 I mean, that is a very late empire thing to happen.

00:30:00.000 It happened at the end of the Soviet regime when the people in charge no longer believed in the thing and decided just to have fun whilst it was still running.

00:30:11.000 That is one of the things that this speaks to.

00:30:14.000 It's all going down, so why not sort of vaguely enjoy yourself in the embers as long as they last?

00:30:21.000 It's a very worrying, very, very worrying thing.

00:30:24.000 It speaks also to an American naivety, if I may say so, which has come about because of the totally fallacious idea in America that whenever you shake out human society, it always comes out looking something like Boston in the 20th century, whereas most of the world comes out looking very, very different all the time.

00:30:45.000 You know, what you have in America in your own lifetime is totally exceptional in human history, and it doesn't require any jingoism to say that.

00:30:53.000 It's simply a statement of fact.

00:30:55.000 So we do have a great problem if this impulse, this, well, it's all falling apart, so why bother anyway, has indeed embedded itself because it's a very dark impulse that can lead nowhere.

00:31:11.000 In our fast-paced world, it's time to make reading a priority.

00:31:14.000 At least it used to be.

00:31:15.000 A new app called Thinker, you guys have heard me talk about it, thinker.org slash Charlie, T-H-I-N-K-R, has solved that problem by summarizing the key ideas from new and noteworthy fiction, giving you access to an entire library of great books in bite-sized form.

00:31:27.000 Reader listen to hundreds of titles in a matter of minutes, including old classics like Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People.

00:31:33.000 If you want to challenge your preconceptions, expand your horizons, and what?

00:31:36.000 Become a better thinker.

00:31:38.000 Go to thinker.org/slash Charlie.

00:31:40.000 That's T-H-I-N-K-R.org slash Charlie to start an extended free trial and put your mind in motion.

00:31:51.000 So, Douglas, I want to talk about how Europe is on almost a trajectory for perpetual decline.

00:31:58.000 We were given hope through the UK vote of Brexit, and almost the deep state of the European Union did everything they could to try and subvert the will of the people throughout that process.

00:32:08.000 And the European system is very much different than the American system.

00:32:12.000 The idea of states' rights does not exist in many European countries.

00:32:16.000 This idea of an electoral college or even having a sole executive elected outside of the legislative branch to use the equivalent of the United Kingdom is not something that the UK in particular quite has the same sort of system.

00:32:31.000 President Donald Trump, I think, is an outgrowth of a lot of the trends you've been talking about in response to them.

00:32:37.000 I think that some people feel something when they see President Trump with 50 different flags behind him, bashing political correctness, being different than the traditional political class, because he's almost a manifestation of the response and to the repulsion that people have to kind of the decay of the country around them.

00:32:56.000 Without getting too big into the political side of it, because I think it's more interesting to get into the philosophical, you know, kind of reasons why he is succeeding.

00:33:05.000 What is your analysis of President Trump in this moment as an outsider looking in this country and what his political opponents represent?

00:33:13.000 And also, this represent a hope for America or is this just kind of a last-gasp effort?

00:33:19.000 Well, we'll see.

00:33:21.000 I mean, all of this could go in any direction.

00:33:24.000 There are, for instance, on the sort of woke agenda, there are several ways of seeing it.

00:33:28.000 Some people see President Trump as being the great sort of anti-woke hero.

00:33:33.000 Others see him as actually having exacerbated the trend and made it harder to solve.

00:33:38.000 Because if you have this effect that I've described as the snowplow effect, where anyone who treads into the center of what used to be the reasonable part of the road of American politics suddenly sees this snowplower coming towards them that hurtles them.

00:33:53.000 Aha, you're a Trump supporter.

00:33:55.000 You must therefore think the following things.

00:33:58.000 Or you are a supporter of Bernie or whatever.

00:34:01.000 And this is a very, very dangerous game.

00:34:03.000 And it is one that Trump has himself exacerbated to some extent.

00:34:07.000 However, the thing that is most interesting to me about American politics in recent years is one thing in particular, which is mirrored in our experience in the UK.

00:34:15.000 I was a supporter of the Leave campaign in the vote.

00:34:18.000 I voted, like the majority of my countrymen, to leave the European Union because I didn't think that the arrangement suited us as a country.

00:34:23.000 I've always said if it suits the other countries very well and good, I wish them luck.

00:34:27.000 But it didn't suit us and we voted to leave.

00:34:30.000 However, as you say, not just the deep state of Europe, but in our own country and the political class in our country, we tried everything they could to stop us leaving the European Union.

00:34:40.000 They tried not to implement the will of the people.

00:34:42.000 We had an extraordinarily perilous few years in British politics where we had a parliament that was by majority in favor of remaining, meant to be implementing the will of the people to leave and not doing so.

00:34:57.000 We came to see one of the fissures in British society that we hadn't seen for 400 years since the Civil War start to emerge.

00:35:04.000 So this is a very dangerous time.

00:35:06.000 What I see in America is particularly one thing that is similar, which is the extraordinary opportunity costs of the American president's opponents in this period, because they have done exactly what the pro-EU people did in the UK.

00:35:22.000 They could have heard a lesson.

00:35:24.000 They could have listened and listened deeply.

00:35:27.000 In the case of my own country, they could have said, What was it about the EU that for decades hadn't been able to impress the British people enough to make them think that this fraternal organization that was also federalist was something for them?

00:35:44.000 What might have been wrong about the European project as it emerged?

00:35:47.000 Now, that would have been a useful set of questions.

00:35:50.000 None of them were asked by the people in favor of the EU.

00:35:53.000 And I see the same thing in the US.

00:35:56.000 You have people now, four years almost after Donald Trump's last election victory, not having learned a thing about his victory in 2016.

00:36:05.000 And to me, one of the most interesting things is everything about the character of Donald Trump is completely transparent and obvious to absolutely everybody.

00:36:14.000 It's one of the reasons why he isn't very interesting to write about, because you can't say anything that the reader hasn't thought themselves, for good and ill.

00:36:23.000 And so why did the opponents not decide after 2016, my gosh, this is a candidate who not only broke the GOP, but then defeated the Democrats?

00:36:37.000 And what are the plausible and legitimate reasons this could have happened?

00:36:42.000 And what might we listen to in it?

00:36:44.000 They didn't do it for a nanosecond.

00:36:46.000 They got onto all of the fake conspiracies and they wasted not just their time, but America's time for four years.

00:36:53.000 I think it's an extraordinary thing.

00:36:56.000 And we will see, obviously, with the election in nine days' time now what happens.

00:37:02.000 Maybe if he wins again, they will listen and think, okay, now we have to listen.

00:37:07.000 That's what's happened in my own country.

00:37:08.000 That's what's happened in the UK after the election victory for the Conservatives in December.

00:37:12.000 The people who tried to trick us to remain in the European Union had to finally accept, okay, we will get past all the stages of grief and finally accept that this has happened.

00:37:24.000 Now, what happens in November in this country will dictate whether or not that portion of the country that didn't accept reality in 2016 can accept it now.

00:37:33.000 Whether they do or not has every single implication for the future of the Republic.

00:37:38.000 I completely agree. 0.84

00:37:39.000 And the scary thing is that the wealthiest, richest, most powerful, and connected people are unanimously in the same sort of viewpoint that Donald Trump must be obliterated.

00:37:52.000 And they're not going to have any less financial or technological power post-election.

00:37:58.000 And so that's a scary thing to think about.

00:38:01.000 I was very struck.

00:38:02.000 I went to the rally of the presidents in Pensacola, Florida, the other day.

00:38:07.000 And I was very struck by not just the happiness and the decency of the crowd at the rally, but the fact that you had this, a couple of people I spoke to were those crucial people who said that they had never voted before in their lives, but voted for Donald Trump.

00:38:23.000 Now, this is the same thing as happened in the UK with Brexit.

00:38:26.000 And these people get the most condescension from the political class, but they are in some ways my heroes.

00:38:35.000 And I would say that really, however, they had voted.

00:38:38.000 I think there is something so beautiful in the UK about people who had never engaged in the political process, but had held on to a deep truth.

00:38:47.000 And that deep truth, they spoke once on the one occasion they were offered the chance to speak to it.

00:38:52.000 Now, in America, it is a different context, obviously.

00:38:55.000 But I think there is something profound about this, of people saying, I never felt I could send a meaningful message before.

00:39:02.000 I do now.

00:39:04.000 And I would just urge that people should listen to that message and not deride and dismiss people who have something very strong to say.

00:39:16.000 You know, if people have felt disenfranchised from the political process, whatever their background, they should be listened to.

00:39:24.000 And I think that that desire to double down and insult them again is the worst possible thing.

00:39:31.000 And we have it in America, sadly, from the media in spades, as well as the political class.

00:39:37.000 I find it absolutely reprehensible.

00:39:40.000 And if they keep going with that, whatever the results of the election, I think that the next thing they get will make them long for Donald Trump.

00:39:49.000 The last thing I want to ask you about, Douglas, and you do a lot on social media.

00:39:53.000 You do a lot of interviews with people with big followings.

00:39:56.000 You know, we have a pretty generous following.

00:40:00.000 These tech companies are now using the very agenda that you pick apart piece by piece in the madness of crowds almost as their playbook to enforce community standards.

00:40:12.000 Can you just talk about the rising centralization of power within these tech companies?

00:40:17.000 Because it also affects the United Kingdom.

00:40:20.000 But the madness of crowds has almost now been centralized into 10 or 15,000 social media oligarchs that have complete control over what we can and cannot say in Western civilization.

00:40:31.000 That's right.

00:40:32.000 I do a chapter on this, as you know, in The Madness of Crowds about the deranging effects of technology on our society, something which has caused us to have the treadmill underneath us running faster than we can catch up with.

00:40:45.000 And that's definitely a major effect.

00:40:47.000 But the most sinister development is the clarity now that we have on what the tech companies are really up to on some of this.

00:40:54.000 I was alert to this some years ago when I became aware of the term shadow banning, which you will know, many of your listeners will.

00:41:02.000 This was something that Twitter pretended it didn't do.

00:41:04.000 It was to muffle certain voices.

00:41:07.000 They used to do this with my own account on Twitter.

00:41:10.000 I've caught them at it a number of times.

00:41:12.000 They try to muffle certain voices, particularly on certain subjects.

00:41:16.000 Now, the obvious explanation for this is that so many of the people who lost at the ballot box went straight into Silicon Valley.

00:41:23.000 It happened in America with the Obama administration when, after 2016, all the people who thought they were going to get cushy jobs in the Clinton White House and other parts of her patronage system found themselves needing a job and swept into Silicon Valley.

00:41:38.000 It happened in my own country with the Liberal Democrats who lost in the 2017 election and went into Silicon Valley.

00:41:45.000 I mean, the head of the most appalling left-wing cynical politician in the UK went straight into Facebook after losing his seat in Britain.

00:41:54.000 Now, these people have used their position of privilege to muffle their opponents.

00:41:58.000 And now, as you know, in recent days, it's become truly sinister because we see a tech giant, two tech giants, in fact, Facebook and Twitter, trying to stop the New York Post from being able to be read.

00:42:14.000 And the New York Post, as I don't need to tell you, founded by Hamilton.

00:42:17.000 It's been running for 200 years.

00:42:20.000 Before, the tech people used to say, well, this is just some wacky alt-right nut job on Twitter that we can get and do all of those other defamations of individuals.

00:42:30.000 And nobody cared much because they didn't notice or they didn't have sympathy for the people it was being done to.

00:42:35.000 And when people were chucked off platforms, they were often reprehensible people who nobody wanted to stand up for.

00:42:41.000 And now we have the New York Post.

00:42:44.000 We have the New York Post in the same bucket.

00:42:47.000 So what should happen?

00:42:49.000 I suggest that after the election, whoever wins, the tech giants must finally be taken on.

00:42:56.000 In my own country, we had something called the Monopolies and Mergers Commission, which used to operate and stop people from being able to dominate a market unfairly.

00:43:05.000 At this stage, it is perfectly clear that some of the tech markets, tech companies have exactly that advantage.

00:43:12.000 The recent antitrust suit with Google proved much of this.

00:43:18.000 And I think that we have to get the tech companies in our sights.

00:43:21.000 And we have to say you cannot derange the societies and then try to reprogram them and not expect some pushback.

00:43:30.000 The pushback must be real.

00:43:32.000 It must be hard.

00:43:34.000 It must hit them in the only place the tech companies really care, which is at the bottom line.

00:43:40.000 And I, for one, can't wait for it to happen.

00:43:42.000 It's long overdue.

00:43:45.000 And what I think the president needs to do in addition to domestic pressure, the president should pressure every European nation to file similar antitrust monopolistic complaints through their own domestic laws.

00:43:58.000 Make these tech companies fight in 20 different courts at the same time across the planet.

00:44:04.000 That's the power of alliances, right?

00:44:07.000 That's why they tell us we need NATO and these European project constructs.

00:44:11.000 Why don't we start using them?

00:44:13.000 Have them defend their monopolistic practices in France, in Switzerland, because they have users all across the planet.

00:44:20.000 And if there's a Western democracy that has these tech companies, the United States and the UK could put that kind of pressure on.

00:44:26.000 Douglas, you've been amazing.

00:44:28.000 Madness of crowds.

00:44:29.000 Also, we didn't get a chance to talk about the strange death of Europe, but we'll get to that next time.

00:44:33.000 And you're crisscrossing the country.

00:44:35.000 This is one of my favorite interviews we've done.

00:44:36.000 Thanks so much for joining us.

00:44:38.000 Huge pleasure.

00:44:39.000 Speak soon, I hope.

00:44:40.000 All the best.

00:44:41.000 Thank you.

00:44:41.000 See you, Douglas.

00:44:45.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.

00:44:47.000 You guys can always email us your questions, freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:44:50.000 Get involved with TurningPointUSA at tpusa.com.

00:44:54.000 And if you want to help support this program, go to charliekirk.com/slash support.

00:44:59.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.

00:45:01.000 Talk to you soon.

00:45:02.000 God bless.

The Charlie Kirk Show - October 27, 2020

Escaping the Left's Postmodernist Wasteland with Douglas Murray

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