The War on the West author Douglas Murray joins Glenn Beck on the show to discuss his new book, "The War On the West: How To Prevail in the Age of Unreason," which details the ongoing assault on Western values.
00:04:31.020Kind of the tactic that the left likes to use.
00:04:34.100And then these spontaneous groups started appearing, all shouting nothing about rights, women's rights, but pack the court, which is, you know, once that happens in a society, you know, you lose it.
00:04:51.640And I think this is the beginning of a war on the streets with the left.
00:05:03.680I mean, one of the things, the observations I'd make is that it does accentuate something which has been growing in America, in particular in recent years, which is a total divide over the nature of institutions.
00:05:16.860I think this is deadly for a country, I have to say.
00:05:20.660The point of institutions is that they are something that you agree upon, you know, that people agree on the results of elections, agree on Supreme Court decisions.
00:05:32.000It might differ, but they recognize the authority of the Supreme Court.
00:05:37.800There was a time you might say that about almost every institution in American public life as in any other Western country.
00:05:43.840And now I just think that the almost nobody seems to have trust in the institutions and you can pick and choose on occasion.
00:05:53.620But essentially, you know, there's just it's very hard to think of an institution in American public life, whoever, which everyone agrees upon.
00:06:02.840Oh, I don't I don't think there is anymore.
00:06:04.820I've seen a huge I mean, a huge change even in me.
00:06:07.340I never thought I would question the Justice Department or the FBI.
00:06:13.340That's a really interesting development that I see on the American right.
00:06:16.300I mean, obviously, I was born in Britain and I live in America now.
00:06:19.320But the in Britain, if you said, you know, you don't you don't have trust in, say, MI5, MI6, GCHQ, any of the departments of government, the courts, the election processes, parliament, etc.
00:06:34.100If you went through all of that, then you would say, well, that that's not a conservative.
00:06:39.200You know, a conservative must have faith in some of these institutions.
00:06:41.720And I think actually the truth is, is that there is very good reason in America for people on the right as on the left to have be deeply suspicious of your institutions because they've politicized themselves, it seems to me, just one after another.
00:06:57.700You know, the minute you have intelligence officials speaking out on political matters, bang, of course, you're going to lose trust.
00:07:05.540That is the interesting thing about the Supreme Court decision, because it says it cannot make political decisions.
00:07:28.020Well, I mean, there are other decisions that the Supreme Court or the courts in this country have made that you might say would be in the hands of the people.
00:07:37.200I mean, that's one of the things that strikes me is that actually, although everyone's going to obsess about the specific thing of Roe v. Wade, the fact that the court has said it's not in our jurisdiction.
00:07:50.440So what the left is planning on doing, I guess, is to at least get rid of the filibuster to pass a a nationwide abortion policy, which the Supreme Court says can be done.
00:08:06.000But it would fall into what's called the Commerce Clause, which if you know anything about that at all, that was an FDR switch.
00:10:16.660Not because of abortion, per se, the way it is, but because I think you're going to see extremists on the left, you know, where they're they're talking about aborting babies 30 days after birth.
00:10:34.300You know, they're already talking about that in California, that they're using tax dollars to fly people in for an abortion industry.
00:10:41.800I think that's going to not sit well with a lot of people in in California and elsewhere.
00:10:48.620And if they push for packing the Supreme Court, if they look like they're going to get away with that, if they look like they're going to get rid of the filibuster, I think the lines are drawn.
00:11:02.300Might the country just sort of continue going the way it is where people move to the places where it's more in line with their values and you just see this red blue divide just I would hope, but I don't you think that's a positive?
00:11:22.440But it feels to me like the the few years before, I think, the Civil War, you know, Abraham Lincoln was said to, you know, he didn't care about the slaves.
00:11:36.600I mean, you know, John Quincy Adams, you know, taught him how to destroy slavery when he was in Congress and John Quincy Adams had been fighting in his whole life.
00:13:22.580I mean, we've been through very long years in the last few years.
00:13:26.840And I think they're going to get longer and noisier for sure.
00:13:30.980Well, so let's talk a little bit about the war, because I think there, you know, I've been trying to say to people lately, things have changed.
00:13:45.860And you you're not at a shooting war, thank God, but we are at war for the survival of the West.
00:16:02.500And and by this stage, something else has happened, which is a preemptive cleansing of American history.
00:16:10.620You know, this isn't just about mob sort of attacks on statues in weird, wacko places like Portland.
00:16:16.540It's, you know, it's a statue of Thomas Jefferson being wheeled, pulled down, crated up and wheeled out the back door of the city state chamber in New York.
00:16:27.500And one of the council members saying Thomas Jefferson doesn't represent our values.
00:16:33.600And, you know, when you have a when you have the New York Council taking Thomas Jefferson down, you don't need the mob anymore that they're doing that for the mob.
00:16:46.900And we've of course, we've seen that with statues of Abraham Lincoln.
00:16:49.320We've seen statues of Lincoln pulled down by mobs in this country, but we've also seen them taken away by officials, by the local authorities in Boston, trying to get ahead of the mob or what exactly?
00:17:04.060Agreeing on the new rewriting of Lincoln that the mob is doing?
00:17:09.060See, I think this is the thing that conservatives have seen that have caused us not to believe anymore, because we thought our institutions were safe havens, were solid, but it's been eaten by termites.
00:17:30.100It's just it had already been rotted from the inside out.
00:17:33.500Yeah, and what disturbs me about this as well is that, I mean, that could happen organically in a way, but this is pushed.
00:17:43.700I mean, there is a deliberate push to change the American story.
00:17:48.560You know, I was recently reading Paul Johnson's history of the American peoples, and I'm going to misquote this, but the opening line of this book was something like the history of the American people is the greatest story in human history.
00:18:19.260So getting to the gym to work out, great idea and all, but the problem is once you're there, I guess you're supposed to use those machines or something.
00:21:01.860But the people who started it and the people who are really running it, they know exactly what they're doing.
00:21:07.680I mean, I give an example in the War on the West of, look at the tactic that's been used on all of our heroes.
00:21:16.920Whether it's the founding fathers of America, whether it's Winston Churchill in the UK, whether it's all the thinkers of the Enlightenment.
00:21:26.660There's one tactic that's been used on all of them, which is you are guilty of living in history and not having the values that we have in 2022.
00:21:39.800You know, as I like to say, you know, the shorthand for this is they're guilty of being dead white men.
00:21:46.520The cardinal sins of not just being white and male, but also dead, it appears, because, of course, none of the critics think that's going to happen to them.
00:21:53.540But this sort of derisive, these are just dead white men.
00:21:57.880Well, they're dead white men who brought you everything you've got, so you could have a bit of damn gratitude to start with.
00:23:22.620So I had I had great joy in going through the private and public writings of Karl Marx.
00:23:32.880Karl Marx, by the standards of today and by the standards of his own day, was unbelievably racist.
00:23:40.340He repeatedly uses the N word in his private correspondence to Engels, usually hyphenated with Jew, because, of course, he's also very anti-Semitic.
00:23:47.700He has horrible views on slavery, horrible views on colonialism by the standards that the left has applied to every single one of our heroes.
00:24:21.800There is no other explanation as to why they have skipped over Karl Marx.
00:24:27.580And since the War on the West came out and the serializations and things and a number of people wrote about this, they didn't know about Marxism.
00:24:35.120I mean, one one one person wrote, say what Marx said and what Douglas says in his book, I can't repeat in this paper.
00:24:45.060But since that came out, some of the Marxists have come out and attacked me on this and they've said things like, well, there's two arguments they've been using.
00:25:25.440But I mean, she was right about women and women's reproductive rights.
00:25:30.440So it seems to me that a group of the people who are the anti-Westernists of our day, and I can't stress this enough, this is Western anti-Westernism.
00:25:39.520You know, there's Middle Eastern anti-Westernism, there's Chinese anti-Westernism.
00:25:42.980But the most crucial and serious one is Western anti-Westernism is, as you say, the termites eating out the whole structure around us.
00:25:50.160And one of those strands is definitely people who want to say, at the end of all this, only one Australian thought left standing.
00:25:58.580Some of the people I quote in the book, prominent figures actually say things like, the Enlightenment is the problem.
00:26:56.600Well, they don't mind that, by the way.
00:26:58.860I should tell you, there's a bit in here I write about the 1619 Project's bit on capitalism.
00:27:05.460Now, I don't know, there wasn't enough attention paid to this, but part of the critique of the 1619 Project was a critique of capitalism itself.
00:27:15.880Now, again, what do you think the accusations that they make against capitalism are?
00:27:21.960They are, unsurprisingly, that capitalism is derived from slavery, colonialism, and much more.
00:27:30.620And the claim that they make is that, as a result, capitalism itself is, from its origins, a racist thing.
00:28:11.760He says, this is a 1619 Project, a Pulitzer Prize-winning project of the New York Times.
00:28:17.440And he says that systems that were consisting of things that were tracked, recorded, and analyzed tie everyone sitting at their desk in modern America doing their work directly to the plantations.
00:28:31.360And he says, at one point, that there's a direct line from the slaveholders' spreadsheets into Microsoft Excel.
00:29:28.120They decide on their conclusions and then they work backwards.
00:29:31.360This idiot, actually, at one point, the only source he can find is one scholar who wrote a book that says the opposite of what he says she says.
00:29:42.420Okay, so my fear is that, like, most people don't have time for this crap.
00:29:51.160Like, we're trying to get on with our lives.
00:29:54.080People are trying to build their families.
00:29:57.640They're trying to put food on the table and much more.
00:30:00.380And when somebody comes at them, let alone, like, prominent figures and let alone prominent politicians who are meant to be safeguarding your legacy as a country,
00:30:09.680when they come at you and say, you know, when you sit down and do your work, you're actually basically part of the same thing as the plantations.
00:30:19.360I know most people don't know what to say.
00:31:09.140But we've been kind of submerged under this just slurry that has come flooding across everything that we were told, that we knew and that we loved.
00:31:20.600They've just polluted the whole darn thing.
00:31:22.720And I think we have to be able to take it back.
00:31:25.940We have to say, you won't do that to our heroes.
00:31:28.140You know, it's a very common thing in cultural revolutions for this to happen.
00:31:32.600When I was going around the States just before the election of 2020, I was visiting, I don't know, about 10 states or so.
00:31:38.040I was in Portland after they'd torn all the stuff down there and saw the riots.
00:31:41.180I saw what remained of the center of Seattle, which had been a beautiful city, I remember, only 15 years earlier when I was there.
00:31:48.980When I saw these things, I thought, you know, there is a risk that the American public square is going to become completely empty.
00:31:58.380You know, there's going to be no one left.
00:31:59.680And I think that's roughly very nearly where we are.
00:32:03.080But this is what cultural revolutionaries have done throughout history.
00:32:06.680You know, from the ancient world onwards, you go into the temples of your enemies, you tear down their statues, you urinate on their altars, you destroy the whole sanctuary and say, your gods are dead.
00:33:26.760One of their idiot presenters said Elon Musk, not only is he going to unleash the far right, but they also described him as not especially intelligent.
00:35:28.200You know, the person doing a normal job is able to survive saying something that is true.
00:35:35.260Until that's possible, you know, it's, it's, it's not enough, you know, it's not enough that I, I don't know, very successful authors like J.K. Rowling successfully survive the mob or the, you know, these figures I just mentioned do.
00:35:49.960It's, it's got to go all the way down the economy.
00:36:01.940And I found that before, before the lockdowns and everything started in recent years, when I was doing public events with various other people and, and, and sometimes just going to things and watching, I would often ask the young people in the audiences who are not by any means conservative.
00:36:18.380I'd ask them, you know, what brought you out this evening?
00:36:21.780And there are always two answers or variants of two answers.
00:36:25.140The first was, I want to, I'm fed up of just watching YouTube videos on my own sort of thing.
00:36:30.860I want to be with people who are thinking about the same things, which is different from an ideological movement other than it's an ideological movement of people who are interested.
00:36:40.880But the second thing you very often heard was, I want to be near people who are saying something I'd like to say at some point.
00:36:49.460Now, this is very important for this country.
00:36:54.980And I think we probably both know this in our personal lives.
00:36:57.340If there's something that's on the sort of, you know, the edge of your brain, you're thinking, I know, I mean, I, I can see that's true, but I'm, um, I don't want to be the first one.
00:37:41.940You know, um, whenever I refer to, you know, things like, uh, the, the Leah Thomas thing, I say, well, I mean, it's, it's possible you can be a guy and whenever you get in the water, you feel kind of feminine, like a mermaid of some kind.
00:38:37.680I mean, you know, I mentioned in the book and the second, cause I, I, I, I jump over some of the really, you know, hot button ones that we've had in recent times, you know, the issues of slavery, colonialism and racism.
00:38:50.500And, you know, one of the things I say is, you know, the remarkable thing about the West is not that we had slavery.
00:38:57.100Every civilization in history has slavery.
00:39:50.980Why would we be tearing ourselves about this now, other than if we fall into the story first that it was only us?
00:40:01.160And I don't think the one in a million Americans know, for instance, that some people say maybe up to 12 million slaves were taken across the Atlantic and the transatlantic slave trade.
00:40:10.32018 million were taken east to the Arab countries from Africa in the same time.
00:41:02.820In America, in Britain, the Royal Navy, after slavery was abolished in the United Kingdom, policed the high seas at significant costs of treasure and blood, boarding ships on their way to Brazil and storming the holds and freeing slaves.
00:41:16.440This, this, this, this, you know, so when somebody comes at you and says, and says, as we have had in America in particular in recent years, you know, this is your original sin, for instance.
00:41:26.740I want to say, okay, what's the original sin of the other countries?
00:41:31.120What's their, what, they must have them.
00:42:08.560And here, but here's a, here's a sort of follow on thing is assume there are things we do in our own day, which our successes are going to see as being nuts.
00:42:27.140They will say, how in America in the 2020s did they become obsessed again about slavery 300 years earlier and rewrite their whole story?
00:42:38.560And miss the fact that there were concentration camps in China going on in their own day, slavery going on around the world in their own day.
00:43:24.300Because I think I agree with you because you can have a worldview based entirely on what you haven't got, what other people have got at your expense.
00:43:34.340And by the way, this, this crosses all races, all cultures, all classes, all socioeconomic structures.
00:43:40.940Because we all know people who don't have very much at all in terms of money, who are the most grateful and kind and, and, you know, charitable people you could come across.
00:43:54.020And I'm sure we've all met people as well who seem very wealthy, who are just run through with bitterness and, and, and resentment, things that they, things that people did to them, things that, you know, they should have got and they didn't.
00:44:07.280So this is nothing to do with, with, with, with caution.
00:44:12.500And the problem with resentment once it brews is that there is no end to it because you go searching for it.
00:44:19.960You know, Nietzsche says at one point, there is a type of person who tears at wounds long since healed and then cries about the pain that they suffer.
00:45:14.840Now, the thing is, is that, and again, this is what Nietzsche says, is that these people have to have one answer that you can say back at them, which nobody wants to hear.
00:45:25.400The answer you can say back at them is, there is a person who's kept you back.
00:45:30.680There is a person who's destroyed your life.
00:47:15.760That's what the cultural revolutionaries know.
00:47:17.500But my point is, is that, is that everybody in their life could have the opportunity to be resentful.
00:47:24.660And America has always distinguished herself as a country by having the opposite attitude.
00:47:30.960You know, as I say, I come from a country where the sort of class structure thing is less than it used to be, but it still exists.
00:47:36.440And as you say, in Europe and other countries in the West, there is something which is uncommon compared to America, which is a sort of feeling of sometimes, you know, if that person has something, you know, they've got it through some ill means.
00:47:49.880And America, and I, I sense it myself as a fairly recent arrival.
00:51:08.420That's the only thing that's different.
00:51:09.720And we are seeing in America in particular an attempt to pull down all of the things that make that prosperity and the ladders possible.
00:51:20.580You know, that's that's a it's a very important thing to people for people to realize that when we've seen the row about, for instance, CRT in American schools in the last couple of years.
00:51:30.880But when we look at that, what does that result in in real terms?
00:51:36.540That whole project results in a claim that, for instance, timeliness is a white quality, that accuracy in maths is a white quality, that showing your workings is a white quality, that scientific accuracy is a white quality and on and on.
00:51:54.400And then the testing is a white thing.
00:51:56.060Isn't this, though, what you would do if you were preparing people to be slaves?
00:52:01.460Well, to be totally subjugated and demoralized, for sure.
00:52:08.440Again, why would why would, apart from this insane war on whiteness, which has come up in recent years, which is just I might get onto it, but is the most insane tactical misstep that the radical left could have made, in my view.
00:52:22.380That warring on white people and saying that white people specifically and uniquely across history have something to pay for is a big misstep.
00:52:45.820But again, when you, when, when, look, let me just finish one other point and come back to that.
00:52:51.460When you see people, again, like American teaching union head saying that standardized testing is the problem, what are they doing other than removing the ladders that exist for people of all ethnic backgrounds to get up?
00:53:09.420You know, what is your what is your best chance if you're a young black boy or girl in America hoping to get out of the situation you've been born into?
00:53:17.860If you've been born into a deprived background, it is to work hard at school.
00:53:34.460And it happens on the specific levels as well of taking out, you know, the programs for students of, you know, of distinction that's happened in New York and elsewhere.
00:53:46.280But just get back to this point about the war on whiteness.
00:53:49.820The insane thing about this is, and it's mainly, I have to say, white people who are doing it.
00:53:54.300I mean, it's like Robin DiAngelo, the biggest race huckster of our day, apart from Ibram X.
00:54:41.940Imagine if we took any minority group in modern day America, any minority group, Asians, Hispanics, anyone or smaller groups and said, we've got a message for you.
00:54:54.220We've got a set of books, a set of claims, all the major papers, the major networks and others are going to start making the following case against you.
00:55:04.180They're going to say there's nothing good about you.
00:55:07.840They're going to say you've never had anything good about you.
00:55:12.060They're going to say you're born guilty.
00:55:14.660They're going to say that you can't get out of your guilt.