The Megyn Kelly Show - Douglas Murray on Overcoming Tribalism, the Asymmetry of Wokeness, and the Rise of Victimhood ｜ Ep. 55

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00:01:01.320 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show.

00:01:03.240 Your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.

00:01:12.780 Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly.

00:01:14.500 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show.

00:01:16.240 So excited for today's guest.

00:01:19.180 So honored.

00:01:20.100 And I am delighted, truly delighted to be bringing this guy to you.

00:01:24.380 I know you may have heard of him and you may have heard him on other podcasts,

00:01:28.060 but you haven't heard him like this.

00:01:31.280 You're going to love Douglas Murray in just a couple of minutes.

00:01:34.660 He is the author of The Madness of Crowds, which you must read.

00:01:39.240 You have to read it.

00:01:40.420 Please, I beg of you, read that book.

00:01:43.300 He is associate editor of The Spectator.

00:01:47.260 And he is brilliant.

00:01:50.920 All right, so we're going to get to him in one second.

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00:03:12.560 And now it is truly my honor to present to you somebody who has real life advice, real

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00:03:27.840 My entire team and I are feeling really excited by the discussion we just had.

00:03:31.820 And so without further ado, Douglas Murray.

00:03:35.540 Thank you so much for being here.

00:03:37.240 It's great to have you.

00:03:38.440 It's a huge pleasure, Maven.

00:03:39.720 Thank you.

00:03:40.580 You are the most prescient man in the world.

00:03:45.660 You wrote the book Madness of Crowds in 2019.

00:03:49.200 It was published.

00:03:50.260 And I just want the audience to hear your opening paragraph.

00:03:54.480 I mean, think about this in light of everything that's gone on.

00:03:58.460 And I quote, we have been going through a great crowd derangement in public and in private,

00:04:06.020 both online and off.

00:04:08.100 People are behaving in ways that are increasingly irrational, feverish, herd like, and simply

00:04:14.260 unpleasant.

00:04:15.100 The daily news cycle is filled with the consequences.

00:04:18.440 Yet, while we see the symptoms everywhere, we do not see the causes.

00:04:24.220 And that's where you and your book come in, diagnosing the madness that we're seeing when

00:04:29.840 it comes to wokeism, not just in America, but increasingly in Great Britain and elsewhere.

00:04:34.760 And on the other side of the spectrum, the lunacy we saw by people who were literally willing

00:04:42.820 to die for President Trump on an election claim that had no merit and no chance.

00:04:49.780 And some did, you know, I mean, we saw at least one person, Ashley Babbitt, did die for

00:04:54.380 him.

00:04:55.380 So let's just start there, because I thought of you when I read the Madness of Crowds and

00:05:00.200 I told you privately, it's like my Dianetics.

00:05:01.980 I think it's like the smartest book I've ever read.

00:05:05.740 But when you saw the Capitol riot take place, I mean, you talk about madness of crowds, that

00:05:11.860 was it incarnate.

00:05:13.820 Yes.

00:05:15.560 I mean, I was shocked, but not surprised, as the saying goes.

00:05:22.820 As you say, I mean, there is something so fundamentally implausible.

00:05:27.360 If you'd said even a few years ago that anyone would be willing to give their life for Donald

00:05:32.980 Trump, you'd have wondered what world reality you lived in that could lead to that.

00:05:39.460 The reality is, of course, is people getting caught in positive feedback loops.

00:05:46.140 There are now two major positive feedback loops in the US, at least, the two major ones.

00:05:52.260 There is the one of the left, and there's the one of the right.

00:05:55.500 They both present a great danger.

00:05:58.620 We've seen in recent years very clearly, and I write about it in the Madness of Crowds,

00:06:02.220 the danger of the positive feedback loop which exists on the political left in America.

00:06:07.580 And we saw some of the extremes of the consequences of that throughout last summer.

00:06:12.380 And then we've seen recently the dangers of the positive feedback loop on the right, where

00:06:22.060 people are also whipped up into believing things that are not true or are based on partial

00:06:30.460 truths, partial interpretations of things, which they then run down and down and down until

00:06:37.860 they can see no other option out than behaving in ways which are morally completely reprehensible

00:06:44.840 and would, I think, have been seen to be morally reprehensible by them only a short while before

00:06:50.900 if they hadn't got stuck in these very, very dangerous loops of our time.

00:06:58.000 And by the way, if I can just say, the particular danger of it that I've identified in the American

00:07:03.040 context is that Americans no longer just disagree on opinions.

00:07:08.600 They disagree on what they've just seen.

00:07:10.920 They disagree on the thing in front of them.

00:07:13.700 And you know this very well from your own experience that there was a time, I think probably

00:07:19.360 at the start of both our careers, where things happened and the public agreed that they had

00:07:25.520 happened, but they might, or they always did, disagree and differ on their own interpretations

00:07:32.020 of the event.

00:07:33.000 That is so 20th century.

00:07:35.640 In the 21st century, we don't even agree on what we've just seen.

00:07:40.100 So you have now in America successive electoral cycles in which people don't agree that they've

00:07:46.440 lost, can't consider that they've lost.

00:07:49.000 And if you don't agree that you've lost, you can't get through the very, very important

00:07:52.860 rectification process, indeed the mourning process, that allows you to rebuild, allows you to change,

00:07:59.080 allows you to adapt, allows you to grow.

00:08:00.860 You just get stuck.

00:08:03.240 And that's where I see America being at the moment.

00:08:06.020 Two very, very different groups of people that are deeply, deeply stuck and need help.

00:08:13.120 Now, I can understand how it happened to these diehard Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol.

00:08:19.440 That I could explain to people.

00:08:21.100 I happen to think that the implosion of media has a huge role in it.

00:08:27.600 I also think that the pandemic shutdown has led people to be a bit out of their minds in a way

00:08:33.000 they wouldn't otherwise be.

00:08:34.100 But back to the media implosion, the complete sacrifice of credibility and trust that the

00:08:40.740 media has engaged in over the past 20 years, let's say, matters.

00:08:44.640 And it really is a post-truth world now, which is Donald Trump wanted, because people don't,

00:08:52.000 they don't have one news source or the evening news sources that they can go to for truth.

00:08:58.100 We used to sort of accept what was on the evening news was true.

00:09:01.200 And then we can spin it one way or the other.

00:09:03.360 And now no one knows where to go.

00:09:05.460 I think Roger Ailes was onto something, obviously, when he created Fox, because he detected a mainstream

00:09:10.500 bias.

00:09:11.520 But I don't know that it wound up being the force for good, he hoped, because, and I defend Fox

00:09:17.620 News.

00:09:17.840 I worked there for almost 14 years.

00:09:19.320 But I think what happened was they started saying that everything you're seeing in the

00:09:23.080 mainstream news is biased.

00:09:24.480 And here's another way of looking at it.

00:09:26.160 And then slowly but surely, cable news did get more biased, both, you know, for the left

00:09:31.380 and for the right, depending on the channel.

00:09:33.160 People went to their tribal instincts to get their worldviews affirmed.

00:09:37.020 Fact became much more a thing of the beholder.

00:09:39.600 And that's something we could all settle on.

00:09:41.680 And partisanship in news exploded as opposed to, you know, having been corrected.

00:09:47.900 And so I understand why Ashley Babbitt went to the Capitol and thought Trump actually won.

00:09:56.600 And she needed to fight for him.

00:09:58.020 That's what her echo chamber was telling her.

00:10:00.540 And this life circumstances had gotten her to the place where she was exploitable to take 0.95

00:10:04.740 extreme risks.

00:10:05.960 But I don't understand how people get sucked into the cult of wokeism.

00:10:11.000 That I can't explain by the media.

00:10:14.080 And that, I think, is what you're an expert in.

00:10:16.020 So can we just let's just talk first about my theory on what drove those people to storm

00:10:21.200 the Capitol, not the protesters, but the rioters.

00:10:23.260 And then I'd love to talk to you about your explanations for wokeism.

00:10:27.160 Firstly, yes, I think you're right.

00:10:29.380 I think there's an enormous danger in public life at the moment of the slipperiness of words.

00:10:37.980 At the current moment, there are people who hate Donald Trump and the people who support

00:10:42.200 him who would like to claim that he directly incited a riot and indeed storming of the Capitol.

00:10:49.960 My reading of his speech, and I've read it twice now, is that he was very, very loose,

00:10:57.960 careless with words.

00:10:59.120 He used fighting terms and added caveats that could get him out of real trouble.

00:11:05.040 So he said, we're going to do it peacefully.

00:11:07.320 But he also said, these people only understand strength.

00:11:11.820 And when you say things like that, and you've got a very large crowd in front of you, what

00:11:15.080 exactly do you expect them to do?

00:11:17.200 Or what exactly do you expect elements of them to do?

00:11:20.540 When you see that video, which I think some of our listeners might have seen, of the Trump

00:11:27.120 family watching the crowd moving onto the Capitol and seeing Kimberley Guilfoy rather, I mean,

00:11:36.220 it looked like sort of last days of Rome in the era of iPhones, dancing and saying then

00:11:44.620 to the camera, fight, fight.

00:11:47.960 What do they mean?

00:11:49.460 We've been using these terms very loosely in recent years.

00:11:52.420 When you say fight, what exactly do you mean?

00:11:55.600 What exactly do you think some people will take it to mean?

00:11:58.980 Well, that's been a looseness of language on all political sides.

00:12:04.740 You know, after the Trump administration came into office, prominent Democrats who said

00:12:10.060 publicly, you should go and confront and harass these people who work for this administration

00:12:15.860 wherever you find them.

00:12:17.340 Don't allow them to go out in public.

00:12:19.040 If you don't allow people to go out in public, if you can't share public space with people

00:12:22.540 who differ from you, then you're not going to be living in a democracy for very long.

00:12:26.720 We have to learn how to get along.

00:12:30.000 And there have been people from both sides who've been making that very, very hard in

00:12:35.460 recent years, harder than it needs to be, harder than it was already.

00:12:39.840 But yes, I think that in order to, I think all of us, by the way, are going to have a

00:12:46.060 big problem for the coming years on the specific narrative that Trump unloosed.

00:12:50.740 I've just written a column for The Spectator in the UK where I say that the people who believe

00:12:55.860 Trump lost the election, sorry, the people who believe Trump won the election, are going

00:12:59.960 to be, at the very least, to put it no stronger, a great nuisance and irritant for years to

00:13:04.760 come.

00:13:05.700 They're going to crop up endlessly in our feeds and our timelines.

00:13:09.180 They're going to spoil evenings.

00:13:11.020 And they're going to create an enormous opportunity cost for the political right in the US.

00:13:15.760 They're going to keep arguing this.

00:13:17.660 And if you analyze it, of course, it's very hard if you don't believe it, to believe it.

00:13:25.740 But you've got to believe the following if you're one of these people.

00:13:28.780 You've got to believe that you no longer live in a democracy in the US.

00:13:32.380 You've got to believe that every single, not just the media, but every single branch of

00:13:37.000 government is totally corrupted.

00:13:38.600 You've got to believe that Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, and many other Republicans

00:13:45.220 are just sellouts to the Democrat Party.

00:13:48.640 You've got to believe that the Supreme Court is a total sellout and that all other branches

00:13:55.920 of the judiciary in the US are a total sellout, that they're not on the side of the republic

00:14:02.060 anymore.

00:14:02.580 You've got to believe that only one man is honest, and that man is Donald J. Trump.

00:14:12.520 Now, to put it no stronger, what are the odds of that?

00:14:16.360 Right.

00:14:17.300 What are the odds that the only people with a little bit of spillover honesty happen to

00:14:21.320 be Don Trump Jr., his girlfriend, Eric Trump, and a few other immediate members of the Trump

00:14:26.420 family?

00:14:27.200 What exactly are the chances of that if we stood back and looked at that honestly?

00:14:32.580 And Rudy Giuliani.

00:14:34.120 And Rudy Giuliani and a few other holdout loyalists.

00:14:40.280 I think the chances are remote that this is a circumstance we live in.

00:14:45.520 And it's going to be very easy, a bit too easy, actually, to taunt and laugh at these people

00:14:50.140 who believe this in the coming years.

00:14:51.680 And I think the people of the right and the left should resist this and should simply try

00:14:55.280 to talk these people down from this precipice that they are currently balancing on, where

00:15:00.520 the only honest man in the world is Donald J.

00:15:02.820 Trump.

00:15:03.980 And I think we have to talk them down.

00:15:05.740 I think we have to be sympathetic.

00:15:07.180 We have to listen.

00:15:08.500 We have to avoid the temptation to simply demean them.

00:15:12.060 There has been no lack of sarcasm, scorn, hatred, vitriol, and demeaning of people in American

00:15:20.320 public life in recent years.

00:15:22.020 So I think we should try to avoid adding to it where we can.

00:15:27.240 But yes, I think it's going to be an enormous opportunity cost for the American right.

00:15:32.120 As to a great extent, I think the American left had a great opportunity cost from its

00:15:37.780 games after the 2016 election.

00:15:39.740 You know, I mean, you know this better than anyone, Megan, but if the Democrat Party had

00:15:45.960 decided to listen to what the public might have been saying in 2016, they could have done

00:15:51.760 an awful lot by now.

00:15:53.560 They could have done an awful lot.

00:15:55.540 Imagine if they had, instead of playing the Trump-Russia collusion conspiracy hacking then

00:16:02.840 merely bots game for years, they had tried to work out why the American public knew about

00:16:10.940 Donald Trump but voted for him anyway and why that was, why that was.

00:16:16.780 That would have been a really good thing to have worked out.

00:16:19.240 And it would be really good for the Republican side if they tried to work out why they lost,

00:16:25.580 why they lost everything in this cycle.

00:16:27.920 And my worry is that they will not do any of that work because they've got this distraction

00:16:34.820 game.

00:16:35.840 It's an enormous problem for them.

00:16:39.940 There isn't going to be any self-reflection.

00:16:41.800 We've seen that already, right?

00:16:43.260 I think one way of reaching, not quote unquote normal Trump voters, but you know, the one way

00:16:50.760 of reaching most Trump voters, even the ones who really, they would die on the hill of he

00:16:57.380 won and it was stolen from him, is let's say that's true.

00:17:01.520 What's smart politically now?

00:17:03.700 What is the best way of preserving his legacy and getting your goals, which are probably his

00:17:08.700 goals, accomplished, the continuation of his policies and so on?

00:17:12.300 Is it to keep re-litigating the election like we saw Hillary's people try to do or Stacey

00:17:17.120 Abrams try to do down in Georgia?

00:17:18.940 Or is it to focus on his successes, his actual successes that you can point to and tout as a

00:17:24.800 matter of policy?

00:17:26.100 And I think that's a rational way of pulling people out of a place that serves no one.

00:17:33.120 Well, here we get, yes, but here we get into the dishonesty of the current era, which is

00:17:37.660 that, for instance, I mean, I know this myself, occasionally in the last couple of years, an

00:17:42.100 editor has said to me at a paper, would you write a piece on this thing that Donald Trump

00:17:46.520 has done, which is good?

00:17:47.620 And I've occasionally said, yeah, of course, I mean, for instance, the peace deals in the

00:17:53.160 Middle East, an unalloyed good, to my mind. 1.00

00:17:56.900 I'm very, very, very glad and admiring the fact that Donald Trump and his administration

00:18:01.420 did it.

00:18:01.880 However, the moment you do that, you now, and every bad action of Trump reflects on this,

00:18:07.440 is that you're now simply a Trump supporter if you do that.

00:18:10.600 And this is the danger of what we're in.

00:18:13.160 And we're actually in a deliberately retributive cycle, so that something has entered the political

00:18:20.760 fight, which is always there, but has, I think, never been stronger.

00:18:25.400 And that is this, the desire to hurt your opponent.

00:18:30.320 Donald J. Trump was a very, very good tool for a hurt type of person.

00:18:35.520 Somebody said, you know, I'm used to voting or not voting.

00:18:38.840 I mean, I'm used to voting for Republicans who say these things, and they end up going

00:18:43.920 to Washington and doing deals and pork-barreling and much more.

00:18:49.440 And I just feel the left is getting away with the whole pile of stuff.

00:18:53.760 And then along comes this really low tool.

00:18:56.820 And I think that if anyone on the political right checks their own feelings honestly, they

00:19:03.220 will probably admit that at some point they've at least had a bit of this feeling.

00:19:07.560 Let's hit the left where it hurts.

00:19:10.240 Here's a guy who they absolutely hate. 0.99

00:19:12.880 He drives them mad. 0.96

00:19:14.460 They can't believe how awful he is.

00:19:17.060 And good, good. 0.89

00:19:20.260 We've got this tool, this dirty, low weapon, and we're going to use it.

00:19:25.580 Now, problem is, once you start doing that, once you give in to that ignoble instinct, then

00:19:31.480 you spark the opposite the other way around.

00:19:34.080 And that's what we're in now.

00:19:35.400 Now, that's why we have prominent presenters on CNN saying something they know not to be

00:19:41.160 true, which is that if you voted Republican in November of last year, you are with the

00:19:46.580 KKK.

00:19:47.720 You are with the Nazis. 0.88

00:19:49.560 Why are they saying that?

00:19:51.000 Do they honestly believe that half of the voters in the American Republic are Nazis are

00:19:56.280 actually KKK?

00:19:57.580 No.

00:19:58.140 What they're doing is they're hurting the other side as much as they can, hit them as low 0.84

00:20:03.460 as they can.

00:20:04.820 That's the game.

00:20:06.120 That's the cycle that the American public are caught in.

00:20:10.220 And the truth is, we've just all got to find a way out.

00:20:14.340 I mean, one of the things that bothers me is, and I know you've talked about seeing an enormous

00:20:21.040 hubris right now on the left, and I think there is an importance to being magnanimous

00:20:27.100 in one's victory.

00:20:28.100 I'm not saying they have to bend the knee to the Trump supporters.

00:20:32.160 Both sides are angry and wounded in their own ways right now.

00:20:35.840 But this rubbing the Trump voters' noses in what's happened over the past couple of weeks

00:20:44.320 as though they're all responsible for it, as though they all have blood on their hands,

00:20:48.460 is infuriating.

00:20:50.880 The smugness that we've seen from some of the news anchors as though everything they ever

00:20:54.900 said was right is stomach turning.

00:20:57.140 And it's very alienating and destructive of any hope of people coming back to them, people 1.00

00:21:05.180 listening to them, never mind people, quote unquote, unifying, which I don't think is a

00:21:09.840 realistic goal anyway.

00:21:11.680 Well, you know, try this exercise between us.

00:21:17.220 If at any point in either of our professional careers, we had reported on the rioting and

00:21:25.840 looting that broke out as a portion of the Black Lives Matter protests last summer, if either

00:21:33.100 of us had said, everybody who came out after the death of George Floyd is a looter or a rioter,

00:21:40.960 would either of us have ever been allowed to have done that by an editor?

00:21:44.540 I think not.

00:21:47.620 I know in my case, I would not have been allowed to do that.

00:21:50.940 My own view is that British journalism still has slightly more sluices down than American

00:21:57.920 journalism on some of this.

00:21:59.280 But I don't think either of us would have been allowed to do that, and quite rightly, because

00:22:02.580 the minute you tried to do that, if you wanted to do that, and it would have been reprehensible

00:22:06.880 to do it, the editor would have said, hang on a minute, there are lots of very good patriotic

00:22:13.260 Americans who just saw a video of the most appalling thing.

00:22:18.420 It looked absolutely horrific and was, and they came out in their thousands.

00:22:25.440 And you can't claim that all the people who were upset by the video of the death of George

00:22:29.220 Floyd then went and looted the local Nike store.

00:22:32.500 Rewrite that.

00:22:33.260 That's what would have happened, and quite rightly so. 0.99

00:22:39.320 So the problem is, what happens when there is an asymmetry, where it's not acceptable to

00:22:47.680 say that?

00:22:48.100 You can say, look, once the rioting kicks off, and you know that there's going to be rioting

00:22:52.220 every night, it's very unwise to go out another night and be part of that, and there is some

00:22:57.660 kind of, you can do all of that.

00:23:00.120 But when you get into the asymmetry, where that quite rightly isn't allowed, but you

00:23:06.080 are allowed, for instance, to say that every Trump voter is the KKK, then you get into this

00:23:12.180 trouble.

00:23:13.620 The asymmetry.

00:23:15.720 People don't like unfairness.

00:23:19.520 It's a really basic thing in our societies.

00:23:23.220 We don't like unfairness.

00:23:24.680 We hear a lot of talk about inequality and things like that.

00:23:27.760 We don't hear it talked about often enough, but fairness and unfairness are deeply guiding

00:23:33.800 ethics in our society.

00:23:36.340 It's one of the first things that children say, that's not fair.

00:23:41.140 It's a very deeply built-in instinct in our species.

00:23:45.960 And so visible, very visible unfairness is something that people pick up on.

00:23:53.020 And once they pick up on it, and once they see it rolling on and on and on, they will

00:23:58.260 look for other weapons.

00:24:00.040 More with Douglas Murray in just one second.

00:24:01.660 But first, let's talk about Valentine's Day and what you might want to get your spouse or

00:24:06.500 your significant other.

00:24:07.780 I have Valentine's Day and I have a little time thereafter because my wedding anniversary

00:24:11.960 is on March 1st.

00:24:13.020 And I have come up with a very fun and I think it's going to be a spruce up your house kind

00:24:19.800 of gift.

00:24:20.640 It is called paintyourlife.com and they will paint your favorite photo.

00:24:26.820 So I chose a photo of my three kids and they're going to paint it and I'm going to give it

00:24:30.720 to Doug.

00:24:31.300 Depends on when I get it back.

00:24:32.820 But for one of those holidays and we're going to go through this together.

00:24:35.500 So I'm going to tell you how I like it.

00:24:36.820 But so far, the ordering process has been super easy and the whole thing is very streamlined.

00:24:42.420 You basically just choose a photo.

00:24:44.040 You can get it back framed or unframed.

00:24:45.540 You can get oil painting or watercolor.

00:24:48.100 And it's a fun way of getting something that's meaningful to you on your walls.

00:24:52.840 You don't just want a million family photos, right?

00:24:54.680 What if you could have something that's actually a painting?

00:24:57.060 Something that's different and a little bit high class, right?

00:24:59.960 You'll get a professional hand-painted portrait.

00:25:02.840 They can do it from any photo and it's truly affordable.

00:25:05.800 This is not going to be some break the bank opportunity.

00:25:09.120 You can choose from a team of these world-class artists.

00:25:11.480 You work with them until the details are perfected.

00:25:14.280 And it'll be a custom-made hand-painted portrait.

00:25:17.120 In less than five minutes, you can do the order.

00:25:20.120 It's going to take them longer to actually paint it.

00:25:22.800 It's quick and it's easy.

00:25:24.360 And you get it in about three weeks.

00:25:25.840 So send in any picture.

00:25:27.060 It can be of you.

00:25:28.040 Although I have to say it's a little weird if you just get an oil painting of yourself.

00:25:32.600 Where are you going to hang that?

00:25:33.820 I don't know.

00:25:34.220 Maybe it's like nude.

00:25:35.080 You could give it to your spouse.

00:25:36.600 Wait, I'm rethinking my order.

00:25:37.960 No, not really.

00:25:40.380 No one wants to see that.

00:25:41.280 I've had three children, for God's sake.

00:25:42.960 But I digress.

00:25:44.180 So get a picture.

00:25:45.180 It could be your kids.

00:25:45.900 It could be your family.

00:25:46.580 It could be your nana.

00:25:48.100 Or you can combine photos into one painting.

00:25:50.560 It'll make the perfect gift.

00:25:52.660 Birthday, anniversary, Valentine's Day, you name it.

00:25:55.400 So at paintyourlife.com, that's where you're going to go to get this.

00:25:59.200 There's zero risk.

00:26:00.160 If you don't love the final painting, they will refund your money.

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00:26:20.640 Paint your life.

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00:26:24.800 Terms apply.

00:26:25.420 Available at paintyourlife.com slash terms.

00:26:27.860 Again, text MK to 64000.

00:26:35.300 I think one of the things that's so maddening about some of these wokeness pinnacles is the

00:26:43.500 asymmetry of it, is in pushing us to be, quote, anti-racist.

00:26:47.680 Of course, the language is incredibly racist.

00:26:50.520 The positions being taken are incredibly racist.

00:26:53.360 And in an attempt by some of the wokesters to fight for what they would say is equality

00:26:58.560 of women, they need to denigrate men and they need to elevate women. 1.00

00:27:04.620 It's not, as you've pointed out repeatedly, this movement isn't about equality for various

00:27:09.960 groups that have been targeted historically.

00:27:12.240 It's about better than.

00:27:14.060 It's about elevating them above.

00:27:15.980 And people can feel it.

00:27:19.320 And if you're in one of the targeted groups, maybe you like it if you're a wokester. 0.99

00:27:22.800 But I think most people understand this isn't about equality.

00:27:26.180 It's about subjugation of a new and different group.

00:27:29.920 And it feels unfair.

00:27:31.480 It feels wrong.

00:27:32.900 That's right.

00:27:33.760 Yes.

00:27:34.040 It's, I mean, to sort of steel man what's been happening, I think it's just worth saying

00:27:40.860 at the outset, you know, the whole ideology of wokery, I mean, starts from a reasonable

00:27:46.180 place.

00:27:47.480 And I always think it's worth crediting when an opponent or somebody you think has come

00:27:52.660 to reprehensible conclusions nevertheless has started with a serious question.

00:27:57.820 There has been in our societies historically racism.

00:28:00.840 There has in every society.

00:28:03.260 But American society has had a particular issue with racism in the past.

00:28:07.960 And so there is a legitimate argument that some of that may be lingering still in the

00:28:13.120 present day.

00:28:13.900 That's the thing to contend with.

00:28:15.800 It's true that women have been prejudiced against in career options, among other things,

00:28:22.480 in not that far off memory.

00:28:25.340 You know, it's not ancient history.

00:28:28.060 It's true that gay people, LGBT people, to use a term I don't like, have been prejudiced

00:28:36.400 against until, again, not that far ago.

00:28:41.420 I mean, we're only talking about the 60s and 70s.

00:28:44.860 Legalization occurs in countries like ours.

00:28:47.840 So these are serious things to contend with.

00:28:50.180 And an element of the left says, look, just because you've got full, equal legal rights

00:28:54.620 does not necessarily mean that the whole thing's been sorted out.

00:28:58.640 Sure, you know, people are equal under the law.

00:29:01.640 But there is still these inequalities and inequities that will be existing.

00:29:07.840 That's a serious point.

00:29:10.200 And it's worth considering.

00:29:11.580 The problem is that two things happen.

00:29:16.400 Firstly, people on the political right, broadly speaking, don't like to concede points the

00:29:24.140 political left are onto and have thought about a lot in case the political left then uses it

00:29:29.420 to push through their own agenda.

00:29:31.700 It's the same with people on the political left with the political right.

00:29:34.460 People on the political left don't like to concede that there are problems around, for

00:29:38.360 instance, immigration, because they fear that the political right has been thinking about

00:29:42.960 this.

00:29:43.240 And when the political left conceives that it's an issue, it's not just open borders

00:29:47.460 and, you know, kumbaya.

00:29:49.220 Once it conceives that it's an issue, then the political right will be playing some nasty

00:29:53.600 game and will smuggle in bad stuff.

00:29:56.340 So everyone's got this fear and it paralyzes real discussion.

00:30:01.380 But so as I say, let's concede the political left is on to something with this whole issue to

00:30:06.200 do with historic injustice that may have still been percolating down into the present day.

00:30:13.520 The problem is the political left has been answering this on its own, unaided, I think,

00:30:20.280 by any serious contestation by the political right, and has been making assertions that by

00:30:25.440 this stage, as I identify in the matters of crowds, by this stage are really at a stage of

00:30:31.680 overcorrection.

00:30:33.340 Whereas I say, it's not enough to say women are the equal of men, they've got to be better 0.98

00:30:39.220 for a bit.

00:30:40.720 We see this in the endlessly, weirdly, in the political realm with that, that, you know,

00:30:47.100 that one that comes up occasionally, why female leaders have done better in the era of COVID, 0.99

00:30:52.700 for instance.

00:30:53.220 This is a constant one, you know, because the Prime Minister of New Zealand is a woman, 1.00

00:31:01.780 and New Zealand has done rather well in the COVID era.

00:31:04.820 That's because New Zealand's led by a woman. 1.00

00:31:10.380 This sort of thing.

00:31:11.500 And of course, lots of people just don't notice it.

00:31:15.400 I think a lot of people notice it and just let it go by.

00:31:18.560 But the implication of it is that there's something better about women, that if we just 0.82

00:31:23.640 had more women in charge, there'd be a lot of things that were better dealt with, better 1.00

00:31:29.720 handled.

00:31:31.040 I think that people don't think you like that kind of chat.

00:31:33.860 You're either equal as men and women, or you're not.

00:31:37.840 It's possible as well, which is what I submit, that there might be different competencies around

00:31:42.960 the edges of different tendencies, different directions people go in, depending on their

00:31:50.000 gametes and chromosomes.

00:31:52.300 It seems to be the case.

00:31:54.580 But if you just assert that one sex is just better than the other, as well as being equal,

00:32:00.580 the position I say, equal and better, then people again notice there seems to be an unfairness.

00:32:06.260 You can play this in each of the identity groupings.

00:32:08.200 I mean, the only one I have a social crampon on is the gay one, and not that it's ever 1.00

00:32:12.860 done me any good, but it's only caused me pain. 0.94

00:32:20.560 But I mean, you know, I don't like it when I see some gay people talking about themselves

00:32:31.400 and being talked about by others as if they're magically better than the straights.

00:32:35.280 It's not as common as the men and women one, because it's much more of a minority issue.

00:32:42.060 We're not talking about a 50-50 thing here.

00:32:44.120 We're talking about a sort of 3% of the population issue.

00:32:46.740 But I don't like it when I hear, you know, gay people being talked about as if it's just

00:32:50.800 so much more fabulous and better than the boring straights. 0.97

00:32:55.220 There was a magazine in America the other day that ran a piece about the, you know, the

00:32:59.820 problems we all know about heterosexual partnerships.

00:33:04.380 You know, if you keep talking like that, it sounds like you want to do away with heterosexual 1.00

00:33:09.300 partnerships.

00:33:09.840 And if you do away with heterosexual partnerships, you'll do away with the human species quite 0.89

00:33:13.520 fast.

00:33:14.580 Right.

00:33:15.300 So I wouldn't go down.

00:33:16.900 Yeah, I wouldn't go down that route.

00:33:18.180 But I don't like that talk.

00:33:22.920 I don't think anyone else, I think they noticed there's an unfairness.

00:33:25.640 It was unfair when people talked about the gays as being less than straights.

00:33:29.640 And it's unfair if you talk about the straights being less than the gays.

00:33:32.760 And then you get to the worst one, which, of course, I jumped straight into in the Mans

00:33:36.460 of Crowds, which is what you do on the race one with this.

00:33:39.500 It is so despicable.

00:33:40.860 And I think we recognize, everyone in public life recognizes, it would be so despicable to 0.98

00:33:45.200 talk about anyone who was black. 0.78

00:33:48.180 Whether they were a public figure or a private figure, and just talk about them with contempt

00:33:54.880 because of this, what was it, happenstance of birth.

00:33:59.960 Some people are black, some people are white.

00:34:02.980 The idea that you would talk about someone in a derogatory manner simply because they were

00:34:07.740 black is so morally reprehensible that the people who do it, and there are some, are just 1.00

00:34:16.860 pushed to the farthest margins of public life. 0.91

00:34:19.680 And we don't want to be around them.

00:34:21.520 So how did we get to this position?

00:34:23.960 And why should we tolerate it?

00:34:25.820 That there are very, very prominent figures who seem eager not just to demean white people

00:34:32.100 because of the color of their skin, but to actually cause them hurt, to deliberately provoke

00:34:37.380 them, to say, we're actually not going to listen to your concerns.

00:34:40.980 And by the way, this isn't a fringe thing anymore.

00:34:44.260 That's why I write about it.

00:34:45.340 That's why I'm interested in it.

00:34:46.840 If it was just a few tenured academics at a few low-grade American universities whose

00:34:54.100 students, unfortunately for the students, have to listen to their professors trotting

00:34:58.980 out a load of divisive stuff like this, well, that would be bad.

00:35:02.860 But it's not the position we're in.

00:35:04.720 We're in the position where the now president of the United States, who has talked so importantly

00:35:10.340 thinking about trying to unify the country, a week before his inauguration, releases a

00:35:15.560 video saying, we are going to focus on those small business owners who suffered this year

00:35:21.360 because of the virus and of the shutdown.

00:35:23.740 We're going to focus on small business owners.

00:35:25.660 And we're going to have a special focus and prioritize black-owned businesses, Latino-owned

00:35:32.140 businesses, women-owned businesses, Native American-owned businesses.

00:35:36.180 And you look at this and you think, why can't you say we will, as a government of all of the

00:35:43.600 people in the United States, prioritize anyone whose business has suffered?

00:35:48.360 We will be looking after you all.

00:35:50.440 We'll be looking out for you all.

00:35:52.580 Why do this game of leaving out one group of people, white men?

00:35:59.160 Why do it?

00:36:00.440 Why say your concerns are secondary?

00:36:07.080 And that's what I say.

00:36:08.020 We're in this strange period because I think that the thing I diagnose is that we have been,

00:36:14.200 that some people, primarily on the left, have been going for an overcorrection on each of these issues.

00:36:21.800 And the problem with going for an overcorrection is you don't know when you've overcorrected too far.

00:36:28.520 You don't know when you've done it for long enough.

00:36:31.060 Who would you follow to tell you you've got to go back to equal?

00:36:35.820 I think that they won't.

00:36:37.460 I think the overcorrection will cause a swing the other way.

00:36:41.120 Because what man wants to be denigrated just because he's a man and be ignored?

00:36:46.320 When people say, look at male suicide rates, and prominent female voices and others say, 0.99

00:36:51.900 why are you talking about male suicide rates, you loser? 0.98

00:36:57.080 Why would you just put up with that endlessly? 0.99

00:37:00.940 Why would you put up endlessly, whatever your skin color, with being denigrated because of your skin color?

00:37:07.220 Why would anyone put up with, if they're heterosexual, being talked about as if they're some kind of second-class citizen?

00:37:13.820 So this just has to stop.

00:37:17.520 We have to find a way to get back to equal.

00:37:20.820 But I think it's going to require people of all sides to work really hard on this

00:37:25.760 and to try to resist very deep instincts that we all hold.

00:37:31.380 Well, I think you're right, because I've said in the context of the Me Too movement

00:37:37.220 and I think it applies to the Black Lives Matter thing, all of these identity politics issues.

00:37:43.000 If you really want advancement for a group that's been historically unequal in some cases,

00:37:49.780 you're going to have to have buy-in from the group that's in power.

00:37:53.300 Women who want to find themselves in more corporate board suites 1.00

00:37:57.380 aren't going to get there by just summarily ruining the career of men for one stupid comment in an elevator. 1.00

00:38:05.860 That's just going to make the men afraid of us. 1.00

00:38:08.500 And it's fine.

00:38:10.460 I can say that as a woman.

00:38:11.660 If I say that about Black people need white people's buy-in in order to achieve true equality, 1.00

00:38:18.300 it sounds racist.

00:38:19.440 But I believe it's true there, too.

00:38:21.420 I think the answer to remedying whatever disparities that are actually there because of systemic bias,

00:38:29.760 what have you, not this widespread, everything's biased and everything's systemically racist.

00:38:34.080 But whatever, if we want to take a hard, honest look at what systems could be improved

00:38:37.960 or where is bias still lingering in a way that's problematic,

00:38:41.440 then you need buy-in from both sides, right?

00:38:45.160 From the people in power and the people who aren't.

00:38:47.240 Instead of, what we're getting, as you point out in your book,

00:38:50.520 the pushing of classes at the University of Wisconsin in Madison,

00:38:56.500 you point out there's a course on, quote, the problem of whiteness.

00:39:01.640 And this group effort to demonize one group, I guess, in an attempt to elevate the other.

00:39:09.200 But all that does is demoralize and probably anger people who are now being judged

00:39:15.280 thanks to their own immutable characteristics and is utterly unhelpful.

00:39:20.480 And yet it's growing.

00:39:21.940 It's growing.

00:39:22.880 It's such a strange late empire thing to be doing.

00:39:26.460 That's one of the things I can't get out of my mind in all of this is it feels so late empire

00:39:32.460 to be doing things that are so self-destructive and divisive

00:39:39.360 at a time when we're in real trouble economically.

00:39:45.240 We're in real trouble financially.

00:39:48.580 You know, I mean, it's no longer some kind of weird sci-fi fear

00:39:54.440 that China will overtake America as a global power in our lifetimes, 0.94

00:40:00.780 certainly in the lifetimes of your children.

00:40:03.000 That's not some nightmarish, dystopian thing anymore.

00:40:09.900 And the country that is vying with America for global dominance

00:40:14.740 is one which currently has a million people in concentration camps

00:40:19.940 because of their religion and ethnicity.

00:40:22.600 It's one where Western companies outsource labor that is slave labor,

00:40:32.560 where prisoners unpaid who've done nothing wrong work for free at all hours

00:40:40.480 for companies that are subcontracted to major American companies

00:40:44.320 where all of the money and profits goes to a few people at the top.

00:40:48.600 Is this an acceptable moral situation?

00:40:50.940 Is it something we want to encourage?

00:40:54.680 Having seen what's happened in Hong Kong in the last year,

00:40:58.480 I mean, for the last many years, ever since the handover,

00:41:01.920 but in the last year in particular,

00:41:04.360 after seeing how the Chinese Communist Party cracks down on the people of Hong Kong,

00:41:08.560 is anyone happy about the idea of China overtaking America as a global power? 0.52

00:41:13.340 Does anybody think that China will be prevented from doing that

00:41:18.660 if America just completely nixes the whiteness studies courses 0.98

00:41:23.440 at certain low-grade or top-grade universities?

00:41:27.280 Does anyone think that the advance of the Chinese economy

00:41:31.580 and of their ability to snuff out human rights around the world using a checkbook

00:41:40.360 is going to be lessened if there are more performative feminist dance studies courses at Berkeley? 1.00

00:41:50.240 You know, what exactly do people think the end goal of all this is going to be?

00:41:55.740 That's why I say it feels so late empire.

00:41:58.100 It feels like a totally unwinnable and dangerous and unhelpful, nasty, retributive cycle

00:42:08.240 that an empire gets stuck in just before it becomes irrelevant.

00:42:13.980 When I listen to these protesters and what's happened on the college campuses in particular,

00:42:20.380 I'm mystified because they don't seem to see that bigger picture.

00:42:24.240 This is America. We're part of a global economy.

00:42:27.380 There are real problems happening around the globe that we can and should be focused on.

00:42:31.420 Perhaps our generation could help fix them.

00:42:34.100 They seem to really think they're in a revolution right now

00:42:38.820 to upend the patriarchy and fight for racial equality once and for all.

00:42:45.060 Social justice is what it's all about.

00:42:46.440 And the anger, the anger from folks who have grown up at the best possible time in American history

00:42:54.300 to have been a woman, to have been a person of color, like the best.

00:42:57.680 And yet we've got a couple of examples of this since I knew you were coming out

00:43:00.940 and we're going to talk about the madness of crowds.

00:43:02.580 And I know you've written about this and I've talked about it on the show,

00:43:05.160 but what happened to Brett Weinstein at Evergreen College up in Washington State

00:43:09.760 where all, just for background, for people who aren't familiar,

00:43:13.380 all Brett did was to students of color who had been doing sort of a voluntary sick out

00:43:19.320 once a year to make a point about what life would be like

00:43:22.640 without people of color on college campuses and their value and their contributions.

00:43:26.700 One year they came and said, now we want it to be reversed. 0.89

00:43:29.540 Now we want the white people to not show up.

00:43:31.800 And Brett Weinstein, a professor there, a very liberal guy, said, that's different.

00:43:35.760 And I think I'm going to object because I think one race telling another not to show up is problematic. 0.88

00:43:41.360 Well, you would have thought the guy showed up in a KKK hat, you know, wearing blackface underneath it.

00:43:47.640 And it was insane, the reaction to him.

00:43:51.840 And what I want you to listen to for the audience in this soundbite is the anger over that.

00:43:58.780 All right, so listen. 0.82

00:43:59.260 Hey, hey, ho, ho, these racist teachers have got to go. 1.00

00:44:03.620 Fuck you and fuck the police. 1.00

00:44:05.940 That's how white shit works. 1.00

00:44:07.640 Whiteness is the most violent fucking system to ever breathe. 1.00

00:44:10.980 While somebody's talking, you are not listening. 1.00

00:44:13.280 In your head, if you're thinking of a response, while somebody is talking, that is not listening. 0.86

00:44:18.240 It's not an accident that all of our administration is white. 0.99

00:44:21.280 The thing is that my ancestors were slaves and your ancestors were not.

00:44:27.680 Your ancestors came here of free choice and decided to bring along my people

00:44:32.460 of their own, not of their own free will to work and build this country.

00:44:37.620 Okay.

00:44:38.620 And so I'm just letting you know that slavery still has repercussions in society today.

00:44:44.820 And that is what we're here about.

00:44:47.300 Those repercussions.

00:44:48.760 It doesn't go away.

00:44:50.120 It's not over.

00:44:51.240 Thank you.

00:44:51.580 Thank you.

00:44:54.540 Yeah.

00:44:55.200 I mean, right?

00:44:56.400 How do you argue against that?

00:44:58.180 I think, I mean, what we saw at Evergreen, I got to know Brett and his wife, Heather,

00:45:04.500 in recent years, and they've become good friends.

00:45:07.100 I really admire them both.

00:45:09.160 They're just really extraordinary and kind and good human beings, as well as being extraordinarily

00:45:14.840 clever. 0.51

00:45:15.340 I thought that what happened at Evergreen was a sort of prelude to the main event of what

00:45:23.460 has happened subsequently in America, because it showed what happens when a mob crowd becomes

00:45:33.100 hysterical.

00:45:34.980 We've known that the title of The Mass of Crowds comes from the subtitle of a book from

00:45:41.760 the 1850s called Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by a Scottish journalist

00:45:48.040 who described this sort of thing.

00:45:50.820 It's why I use the title.

00:45:53.920 Crowd madnesses.

00:45:55.180 What happens when people get whipped up into believing that what they see is just impossible

00:46:01.380 to cope with, impossible to tolerate, and then they go off.

00:46:06.280 That was what happened at Evergreen.

00:46:07.860 And what also happened was basically the disappearance of the adults from the room.

00:46:15.640 You know, there's an important point to make here about the nature of political disagreement,

00:46:22.720 which is that historically, certainly for the last few hundred years, the left advances a

00:46:30.500 set of claims, propositions, and more, and conservatives temper them.

00:46:39.240 That's one analysis of the way in which, to use an old-fashioned term, the political dialectic works.

00:46:47.380 That the conservatives say, hang on a minute, because you've got to be careful when you stampede.

00:46:55.120 You've got to slow it down, at the very least.

00:46:58.620 Now, of course, saying slow it down, whoa, is a less sexy and appealing thing, particularly

00:47:06.140 for young people.

00:47:07.720 Because, as we all know, when you're young, it is a wonderful thing to also feel that you

00:47:13.940 are in a moment of great change.

00:47:15.960 Everybody wants to be in a moment of great change, when they're young, in particular, to

00:47:22.760 be in, what is it, the Wordsworth said, bliss it was in that dawn to be alive about the beginnings

00:47:28.680 of the revolution on the continent.

00:47:32.900 That's what it feels like when you're young, when you haven't seen the revolution, when you

00:47:38.620 haven't seen the blood on the streets, when you haven't seen what happens afterwards. 0.88

00:47:43.980 The desire to turn over the whole damn thing is an instinct of the young.

00:47:51.340 To say, things are so totally intolerable on my liberal arts college in Oregon that I'm 0.98

00:47:58.140 going to pull the whole damn thing down. 0.97

00:47:59.820 I'm going to burn down the whole building. 1.00

00:48:02.580 That's what happens when you're young and you've never seen the results.

00:48:06.700 And, unfortunately, it happens again and again throughout history.

00:48:12.040 We both know this.

00:48:12.940 We can think of examples in our own lives and careers.

00:48:15.380 And there are many cases from the past, you know.

00:48:19.940 And there were serious cases where this same truth held. 0.89

00:48:25.480 The French kings were pretty incompetent.

00:48:29.940 But once the post-revolutionary famines occurred, the French peoples learned that,

00:48:36.700 that there were new levels of incompetence that they had never dreamt of.

00:48:41.920 You know, the Shah of Iran had quite a lot of people in prison who were political opponents.

00:48:48.040 Some thousands of people were in prison who were political opponents of his.

00:48:52.100 And many people thought it just couldn't be worse until they met the Ayatollah in person.

00:48:58.500 And they realized that a few thousand people being in a prison system was nothing compared to a system which decided to just shoot people on sight and hang them arbitrarily in the street for reported offenses against the new regime.

00:49:14.400 I mean, these may sound like extreme examples, but they're not.

00:49:18.960 They are on a continuum.

00:49:20.940 When you say this thing is intolerable and the whole damn thing has to be pulled down, you are inviting people to join you in relearning a lesson that people in history have had to learn again and again.

00:49:35.400 And I simply suggest, as a small c conservative, that people are better at understanding the risks of very, very violent and sudden change. 0.67

00:49:46.400 That they step back from that impulse, that they weigh up the pros and cons of this, that they don't say, I mean, also, by the way, when you say what should one say to a person who says these things, I think this is what the adults say.

00:50:07.540 We can all do that.

00:50:09.780 We can all do that.

00:50:11.340 You know, I mean, I'm not denying for a moment that the history of American slavery was bad, but who exactly was the past Rosie for?

00:50:23.980 I mean, you could point to me, but I mean, I happen to be white.

00:50:27.760 I happen to have been born in the UK in the late 20th century.

00:50:31.240 I'm among the luckiest generation in history.

00:50:34.860 It would be possible for somebody like some of the people you just played that recording of, screaming, you know, you don't have my experiences because my ancestors suffered.

00:50:48.860 It could be perfectly possible for everyone to play that game.

00:50:52.200 Brett Weinstein, by the way, whose family happened to be Jewish, he never makes anything of this.

00:50:56.920 I bet the Weinsteins in history didn't have an entirely rosy time.

00:51:00.560 I'd have to work out exactly what, I know a little bit of their family history, but I would have thought that whenever they fled what's now Eastern Europe, they didn't do it in optimal circumstances.

00:51:16.400 I bet they met some pogroms on the way.

00:51:20.000 I bet they dodged Auschwitz only just. 0.98

00:51:23.880 So they could play that game.

00:51:26.660 Somebody could say to me, well, who are you?

00:51:29.060 You're a privileged white man.

00:51:30.500 And I could reply in kind. 0.95

00:51:31.980 I could say, you know, not a damn thing about me, my privilege or my past.

00:51:35.800 And you certainly don't know about my ancestors' past.

00:51:39.180 The past wasn't rosy for my ancestors either.

00:51:42.900 Most of my family spent their time eking out a living on a remote Scottish island where they stayed for centuries, never warm, never well fed.

00:51:52.660 And in the 20th century alone, my grandmother had to see her father die in the First World War when he went off to a foreign country he'd never been to before, and then lose her brother in the next war a few years later.

00:52:04.280 Was my grandmother's life privileged?

00:52:07.640 Was it lucky?

00:52:08.800 Do I or anyone else deserve to be talked to as if we are from some elite, lucky class, and there are some lucky, excellent, beneficiary, hereditary people who can win the Oppression Olympics and then talk down to the rest of us?

00:52:26.800 I don't think so.

00:52:28.360 I don't think they have that right.

00:52:30.460 I'm not willing to grant them that right.

00:52:32.540 And I don't think other people should either.

00:52:35.480 I think it requires adults to say, we can all do this.

00:52:40.700 And there are very good reasons why we haven't.

00:52:44.360 Because if we did, it would be endless and un-mendable.

00:52:49.140 Because there are so many resentments that we can all dig up.

00:52:54.480 But the answer to resentment is not more resentment.

00:52:58.160 The answer to resentment is gratitude and hope.

00:53:04.720 We're going to get back to Douglas in one second.

00:53:07.140 And I'm going to ask him, what should you actually do when the mob comes for you?

00:53:13.240 Or actually, when the mob comes for someone else?

00:53:18.040 Instead of just piling on to virtue signal, what is another option?

00:53:23.600 Practically, what could you do to support the person getting attacked?

00:53:28.160 Because people are afraid.

00:53:29.360 They're afraid to support, right?

00:53:30.600 To be an ally to that person as well.

00:53:31.940 Because then they're like, oh, you support what he did.

00:53:34.780 Not necessarily.

00:53:35.820 You may just be against cancel culture.

00:53:37.900 Anyway, you won't be surprised to hear he's got actual practical solutions for that.

00:53:41.980 And you know what?

00:53:42.560 So do I.

00:53:43.060 I have a couple for you too.

00:53:44.080 So we'll talk about that in one second.

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00:55:24.080 And before we get back to Douglas, we're going to do a feature here at the Megyn Kelly show

00:55:28.100 that we call Asked and Answered, where we try to get after a question that one of our listeners

00:55:32.800 had for us.

00:55:34.360 Steve Krakauer is our executive producer.

00:55:36.240 He's got the asked portion.

00:55:38.300 And what's the question today, Steve?

00:55:40.580 How's it going?

00:55:41.300 Going well, Megan.

00:55:41.960 We've got a lot of great questions that are coming to us at our email address, questions

00:55:45.740 at DevilMayCareMedia.com.

00:55:48.180 Also to our social accounts, you can ask questions there as well, at Megyn Kelly show on Twitter,

00:55:53.160 Facebook, Instagram, wherever you'd like to follow us.

00:55:56.000 This one really kind of fits with the show today.

00:55:58.160 It's from E. LaJoy.

00:55:59.980 And they want to know, you've often mentioned that most of your friends in New York City are

00:56:03.960 liberals.

00:56:04.380 Can you speak about how you cultivate friendships amidst ideological differences?

00:56:08.660 Do you feel like you're always on eggshells?

00:56:10.940 How do you handle a heated moment?

00:56:13.220 Okay, E. That's a good question.

00:56:15.480 I think most friendships are not based around politics.

00:56:19.420 Remember, there used to be like an old rule at dinner parties, not supposed to talk about

00:56:22.440 politics or religion.

00:56:24.480 I think that's a good rule.

00:56:26.160 And I realize Trump has changed everything.

00:56:28.540 He dominates everyone's, sadly, everyone's thought processes.

00:56:32.560 He's like, it's his dream.

00:56:34.240 We're all thinking about him all the time.

00:56:35.480 But that's one good thing about the president leaving office, right?

00:56:39.100 Like that, that wasn't healthy.

00:56:41.120 It's not healthy to be thinking about anybody like that.

00:56:43.340 I think the reason my friendships with my friends have worked so well, despite our political

00:56:47.380 differences, is we don't make politics front and center.

00:56:49.920 We rarely talk about it.

00:56:51.420 And when we go there, we don't go in depth.

00:56:53.400 You know, we'll talk about a couple of issues very respectfully.

00:56:55.860 And if there's a hint of tempers rising or somebody getting dug in and feeling like we

00:57:02.660 get right off of it, it's not worth it.

00:57:04.800 It's not worth compromising a friendship for like they have different political views than

00:57:09.040 I do.

00:57:09.760 I love them.

00:57:11.260 They are good, great people.

00:57:13.260 They're great moms. 1.00

00:57:14.080 I love their kids.

00:57:14.960 I love their spouses.

00:57:16.040 That's what's important to me.

00:57:17.560 I don't give a damn who they voted for.

00:57:19.180 I don't care that we may see whatever the Second Amendment differently or the solution

00:57:25.740 to our nation's problems.

00:57:27.240 I'm not looking to legislate with them.

00:57:30.100 I'm looking to spend time with them, to go to the movies with them.

00:57:32.800 I'll tell you, it's like so my friends, I'll just give you one example.

00:57:36.300 Really, we're not like minded politically, as I think I mentioned, except for sort of

00:57:39.820 one in my core group.

00:57:40.720 But when I did my my long sit down with Vladimir Putin, there was one that was super quick.

00:57:46.380 We did like 11 minutes together.

00:57:47.680 And then a year later, he gave me a real interview.

00:57:49.580 And that one NBC made a full hour special out of.

00:57:51.640 And it was great.

00:57:52.260 It was so exciting for me.

00:57:53.420 And I was at home with Doug and we were going to watch it.

00:57:56.980 It was on, you know, like a Sunday night.

00:57:59.000 I can't remember.

00:57:59.840 Maybe it's Friday night.

00:58:00.780 And can I tell you what?

00:58:02.360 All my friends just showed up in my house.

00:58:04.940 They're like, we're watching this with you.

00:58:06.200 Like, what are you doing here?

00:58:07.400 They're like, we're watching.

00:58:08.500 This is big.

00:58:09.780 You went to Russia.

00:58:10.760 You interviewed Vladimir Putin.

00:58:11.820 And we are watching this interview with you.

00:58:14.240 And that's a little political, right?

00:58:16.480 Like, whatever you depending on what you thought about Russiagate and the whole thing.

00:58:19.960 Didn't matter.

00:58:20.780 They were there for me.

00:58:21.600 They wanted to celebrate that moment.

00:58:23.440 And I just think, like, if you make the right deposits, go out to dinner, talk about your

00:58:27.280 kids, talk about your hopes, talk about your dreams, your aspirations.

00:58:30.560 I could absolutely talk about my work situation without getting political. 0.99

00:58:34.040 You know, there's always some asshole you can talk about at your workspace, except for 0.99

00:58:37.580 my team now. 0.99

00:58:38.420 They don't have that, sadly.

00:58:40.740 But anyway, there's always something you can commiserate with.

00:58:43.320 And you have to build that base of friendships in your life.

00:58:45.920 So try to steer clear of the politics.

00:58:48.540 Be open minded.

00:58:49.180 I think, you know, look, there are limits.

00:58:51.440 Like the hardcore wokesters, that's probably not going to work out, right? 1.00

00:58:55.280 I'm sort of fighting against everything they're fighting for.

00:58:58.180 Like, I don't I don't like cancel culture.

00:59:00.020 And I'm it's my mission to take it down.

00:59:02.600 I want to cancel cancel culture.

00:59:03.980 So that's a tough one.

00:59:06.280 But people who are within reasonable bounds, go for it.

00:59:09.120 Try to remember what's really important.

00:59:10.540 It's nine times out of 10.

00:59:11.640 It's not Trump.

00:59:12.640 It's not politics. 0.99

00:59:13.540 It's none of that bullshit. 0.66

00:59:14.760 It's like your loves and your desires and what's in your heart and your experience and 0.93

00:59:20.020 your joys and your pains and all that stuff.

00:59:21.920 You need friends to get you through all of it and to help you celebrate it, too.

00:59:24.660 I thought you, not surprisingly, said it best when you were on Joe Rogan in September.

00:59:33.040 And I loved the way you put it.

00:59:34.660 You said people are looking at the past as a savanna of grievances.

00:59:40.740 That's exactly right.

00:59:42.340 It's like life has become too good.

00:59:45.160 And now we have to look for ways in which someone at some point in our history has been

00:59:52.280 aggrieved and adopt it.

00:59:54.920 You know, it's like to simplify it, I say to my nine-year-old daughter, I have three kids

00:59:59.060 and a boy, a girl and a little boy.

01:00:01.920 And she's nine, my middle child.

01:00:04.360 I said, Yardley, life is going to deal you enough heartache and situations in which you've

01:00:13.140 actually been victimized.

01:00:15.020 You don't have to look for it.

01:00:16.840 You don't have to make it up.

01:00:18.400 You don't have to invent it, glom on to somebody else's.

01:00:21.220 You just wait for life to take care of it on its own.

01:00:24.940 And we'll deal with it when it happens.

01:00:26.440 But people are in a very different headspace.

01:00:28.780 Those people on the Evergreen College, the people on the Yale campus screaming down the

01:00:35.820 professor who defended his wife, who had the temerity to say, maybe we shouldn't be dictating

01:00:40.340 exactly what people wear on Halloween.

01:00:42.100 You know, they're at Yale.

01:00:43.300 They're smart.

01:00:44.420 And once again, you would have thought that husband and wife had the white hat on.

01:00:49.500 But the anger towards them, because people have now been programmed by a society, by their

01:00:55.160 families, by the media, to look in the mirror and figure out how they've been victimized,

01:01:01.500 even if it's someone else's hurt.

01:01:03.400 There's a lot of curious things about this.

01:01:05.500 But I am persuaded now that in part it's because it's something to do.

01:01:09.860 This is something to do.

01:01:13.500 Because if people aren't encouraged to do this, for instance, to roam across history and

01:01:18.520 find grievances, which they can then in the current day pretend to want to address when

01:01:22.520 in fact they don't address them, they certainly don't damn well solve them.

01:01:25.460 And they actually just aggravate the whole thing.

01:01:27.740 It's something to do.

01:01:29.160 Because what is the alternative?

01:01:30.600 The alternative, among other things, is you're going to have to work really, really hard

01:01:36.020 to sustain a lifestyle which you think you've been born with the right to have, which billions

01:01:43.920 of other people around the world do not have.

01:01:46.880 And you're going to have to pedal a lot harder in the years to come to sustain a lifestyle

01:01:51.540 which you take for granted.

01:01:53.020 If I was offered either of those two options, play the grievance game and make yourself a

01:01:59.340 victim, or realize you're going to have to work a lot harder against the competition

01:02:05.180 that's coming your way around the globe to even sustain the living standards of your

01:02:10.700 parents' generation, I might be tempted to play the first game.

01:02:16.020 You know, it's easier.

01:02:17.540 In that example I just gave you with me and my daughter,

01:02:21.000 I'm the adult in the room.

01:02:24.040 So I get to shape the way my daughter sees the world and herself.

01:02:28.760 And something you said earlier I want to go back to, which is the disappearance of the

01:02:33.020 adults in the room at Evergreen.

01:02:34.560 Because this isn't about Evergreen.

01:02:37.280 It's about what we're seeing over and over in corporate America on the football fields,

01:02:42.760 in these seminars that are being forced on people at universities, and even in K-12 schools

01:02:48.800 now on their white privilege and so on, there should be an adult in the room to say,

01:02:56.480 wait a minute, wait a minute, what are we doing?

01:02:59.440 You know, like, calm down.

01:03:03.400 Even look at the publishing world.

01:03:04.960 I know you point out in the book, you know, the editor of J.K.

01:03:08.060 Rowling's publishing company should have told all the people who said, oh my God, J.K.

01:03:11.560 Rowling, you don't have to work here.

01:03:13.520 We're going to have 200 jobs advertised tomorrow.

01:03:15.580 No problem.

01:03:16.320 But can you just talk for a minute, because the book is compelling on this, what did the

01:03:20.820 students at Evergreen do to the university president?

01:03:23.400 And how did he handle the mob?

01:03:26.860 Oh, yes, he did the worst thing you could do, which was that he tried to placate the mob.

01:03:32.200 And what happens in that situation is the mob demands more and more of you. 0.75

01:03:36.320 It makes you behave like a performing monkey.

01:03:38.600 It says, oh, good, we've made you denigrate yourself in the first way.

01:03:43.660 Now let's see what more we can do.

01:03:46.500 The mob ends up saying to him that he mustn't use his hands when he's speaking, because it's

01:03:52.840 threatening.

01:03:53.580 It seems to imply violence.

01:03:55.380 You've got to keep your hands by your sides, George, they say, to the college president.

01:04:01.220 No, George, we told you that.

01:04:03.460 They taunt him.

01:04:04.740 And he does it.

01:04:05.640 At one point, he begs to be allowed to go to the bathroom.

01:04:08.860 And they say, no, George, you're going to have to hold it in.

01:04:12.460 I mean, what is this?

01:04:14.180 This is the way in which people in the Khmer Rouge behaved.

01:04:18.820 This is discovering you've got a little bit of power and pushing and pushing and pushing.

01:04:26.020 And it requires, as I say, the adults to say, you don't get to speak to me like that.

01:04:31.160 By the way, it's not inevitable, by the way, in human history that young people are thought

01:04:38.140 to have some special brilliance and insight.

01:04:43.100 It's a very modern thing.

01:04:44.460 At times in the Middle Ages, if a girl who claimed to have had an extraordinary vision

01:04:51.480 said something, everyone would listen.

01:04:55.540 But she had to claim she'd, for instance, had a vision of the Virgin Mary descending from

01:05:00.020 the clouds.

01:05:01.480 So there have been times like that.

01:05:03.300 But only in the current era would you have, for instance, a schoolgirl who doesn't know

01:05:07.080 very much about anything very much, but has a deep passion for a subject.

01:05:11.760 I'm thinking, of course, of Greta Thunberg.

01:05:13.620 Go and lecture world leaders.

01:05:15.180 It's I'm giving it as an example, because actually our age does have a very strange belief that

01:05:22.520 the younger you are, the more sort of pure your insights.

01:05:27.860 And I don't agree with that.

01:05:29.720 I don't believe it.

01:05:31.020 I think the more you live, the more you learn, hopefully.

01:05:36.480 And therefore, the more you can encourage younger people to step away from mistakes you yourself

01:05:42.500 have made.

01:05:43.360 You know, as you communicate to your daughter, you know, life is long, hopefully.

01:05:50.900 And you've got plenty of time for real resentments to occur, which you're going to have to try

01:05:55.760 to keep to the margins of your life in order not to become an embittered person.

01:06:00.560 So don't try to take on grievances you don't even feel yet.

01:06:05.820 Don't get taught grievances you don't feel.

01:06:09.760 You know, because it's a stunted life.

01:06:12.320 I was just talking to somebody about this.

01:06:14.660 We were discussing the problem in K-12 education right now and the indoctrination going on there.

01:06:20.180 And I think this person made it made a point and I agreed with it.

01:06:23.340 But these schools, K-12 and college as well, they exploit, in particular, girls, little girls' natural empathy.

01:06:33.240 Their natural empathy to try to make them feel racist or bad or not, quote, like an ally unless they accept America's awful. 1.00

01:06:46.580 White people are bad. 1.00

01:06:48.240 Men are oppressors. 1.00

01:06:49.680 It's a patriot, right?

01:06:50.820 And if you if there's no one's even cuing a challenge to that in these little girls' minds. 1.00

01:06:56.560 They're just trying to indoctrinate them into activists on the left who fight oppression.

01:07:02.080 And these young girls are ripe for it. 0.87

01:07:04.440 Yeah, they are.

01:07:06.300 And by the way, part of that is because in America, there is a presumption, which is wrong, I think, that empathy is an unadulteratedly good thing.

01:07:17.400 In fact, empathy is not an unadulteratedly good thing.

01:07:22.820 Empathy has all sorts of problems associated with it.

01:07:25.780 It's not like I mean, you often hear this.

01:07:27.480 It's an American idea.

01:07:28.980 But you often hear this claim that the more empathy you can encourage people to have, the more justice there will be in the world.

01:07:38.080 Flat out wrong.

01:07:39.740 For instance, you can have a lot of empathy for a friend who has a drug problem.

01:07:47.120 Empathy alone will not help that person.

01:07:50.160 Some point, somebody will have to stand over their lives and say, stop.

01:07:58.320 Stop.

01:08:00.640 And in other words, the empathetic view, the view that empathy alone will get you out of problems is wrong in cases we all know in our lives.

01:08:12.400 If we have only empathy, we will make a lot of bad and wrong decisions.

01:08:18.440 Paul Bloom of Harvard or Yale, I can't remember which, wrote a book about this a few years ago called Against Empathy, precisely trying to balance out the overdoing of the empathy significance in American life.

01:08:32.840 But empathy being a trait, which, as it happens correctly, women are more associated with men, is seen as being.

01:08:41.760 I mean, it is an incredibly important instinct, obviously, but it's only an important instinct if it's counted and balanced by other instincts, too.

01:08:53.160 And if you decide that empathy must rule, I mean, we have this in the teaching of history, obviously, trying to understand how people in the past felt.

01:09:03.360 Well, that is an important thing, but it's not that much use if you don't know whether the French Revolution came after or before the Russian Revolution.

01:09:12.920 You know, it's not that useful if you don't know the most basic dates.

01:09:18.200 And I bet that if I have actually tried it on occasions and campuses and educational institutions in America and in Britain, if you are speaking to somebody who believes that they are just drowning in empathetic capability, if you ask them a very basic question, you know, what's the capital of Saudi Arabia?

01:09:40.280 And they can't answer, you know, the adult should say, you know, before you believe that you can solve the world by your magnificent, healing, empathetic capability, find out something about the world.

01:09:56.400 Find out something, you know, and this is, of course, a particular I'm not American myself, you know, but it's a particular problem in America and has been for a long time.

01:10:04.920 The idea that, I mean, I'm not being snotty about this, I hope, and I'm not being anti-American about it, but when you travel a lot, as I've done in my career, you learn an awful lot about everywhere you go, even the places where nothing seems to be happening.

01:10:25.440 You discover stuff about everything, you discover stuff about everything, you discover stuff about it, and you are cautious about making judgments about other people and places without knowing an awful lot, you know, and there's a humility about that which we should encourage.

01:10:41.140 And unfortunately, I think because of a lack of travel, a lack of a certain amount of curiosity, and certainly a paucity of decent education in the United States, there are just an awful lot of people who think they've got the whole thing sussed out, who just don't know very basic things about the rest of the world.

01:11:00.460 No, we're not allowed to learn them anymore.

01:11:01.880 And they're not allowed to learn them.

01:11:03.560 Yeah, I mean, I was telling this story not long ago, but there was a person at Smith College who got, they complained about her because her syllabus had, it wasn't just that it had some white men, white male authors on the list, it was that there were any.

01:11:20.580 So you can't offer historical books if written by white men, which is really tough when you look at who's been in charge of writing for the past couple hundred years, or you're, you know, you're going to get in trouble at the university. 0.77

01:11:34.920 So the opportunity is not even there.

01:11:36.340 They're focused, as you point out in your book.

01:11:38.680 The universities now aren't, they're not focused on academia, they're focused on activism.

01:11:43.180 So seeking out that education is really hard.

01:11:47.100 It's hard to educate oneself in the classics and things like this, if you, if you're going to be self-taught, right, which you have to be.

01:11:54.720 Yes.

01:11:55.100 Well, you know, the other, the other thing it cancels out is enthusiasm, because I'm, I'm, I'm sure like me, when you were going through school and education, what were the greatest moments?

01:12:12.360 The greatest moments, certainly for me, were when you read something and you, it felt like, it didn't matter who the author was, just a great author felt like a hand was reaching across centuries and greeting you and saying, I remember this, I was there too.

01:12:32.220 And you have that feeling, for instance, what, what's the most thrilling feeling as a reader?

01:12:39.260 It's, it's reading something and thinking, I didn't know anyone else had ever thought that.

01:12:44.480 I didn't know anyone else had ever felt that.

01:12:47.400 How amazing that this person who lived long before my time felt like this too.

01:12:53.340 And I've had that from read, from reading writers of so many different backgrounds, nationalities, and much more.

01:13:03.600 And it's just the greatest thrill as a reader you've encountered.

01:13:06.640 It's one of the great human, human thrills.

01:13:08.580 You will minimize the opportunity of having that joy if you decide that discovering great things is of secondary importance to discovering exactly, correctly diverse things.

01:13:25.920 Because in my view, at any rate, the canon, for instance, which is now such a disliked term, the canon is quite good at ameliorating difference.

01:13:38.380 And we can always work at making it more so, you know, allowing people into it, as it were, teaching people who have made the grade, as it were.

01:13:49.660 But you don't need to, as I always try to point out this, you don't need to do this along the categorization lines that our age is pushing.

01:13:59.820 You know, there are gay writers who have made it into the canon on their own merits.

01:14:05.160 Thank you very much.

01:14:07.320 No one, no one needs to say that you need to read Jane Austen because she's a female author. 1.00

01:14:15.440 Right.

01:14:15.960 Jane Austen made it on her own merits a very long time ago.

01:14:21.120 There was a Don at Oxford who memorably used to say, when somebody said, you don't read very many novels, do you?

01:14:26.420 He said, no, I read all six of them every year, referring to the works of Jane Austen.

01:14:31.960 I, you know, it's the same case.

01:14:36.880 I think it has taken a little bit too long, perhaps a lot too long.

01:14:40.640 But I think it's the case for the range of black authors too.

01:14:43.620 If somebody said to you, I'm, I think you should read this black author.

01:14:48.240 And you said, oh yeah, who's that?

01:14:49.560 And they said, James Baldwin.

01:14:51.400 I think by now, any discerning person would say, thank you very much.

01:14:55.980 But he doesn't require that crutch from you.

01:14:58.600 Exactly.

01:14:59.100 Exactly.

01:14:59.580 You'd be offended.

01:15:00.780 Yes.

01:15:01.060 Thank you very much.

01:15:01.980 James Baldwin belongs to everyone now.

01:15:04.220 So, but I think the problem, there's so many layers to it.

01:15:09.340 Yes, I do think empathy can be exploited and too much of it, even on one's own, can be problematic.

01:15:15.480 I also think, as you point out in the book, there is, there's too much of a weird courage happening by some people, some people like Ibram X. Kendi or Ta-Nehisi Coates, to exploit people who are in a vulnerable position.

01:15:34.880 You know, Robin DiAngelo, her, her book, their books are about shaming.

01:15:39.020 And I know you, you have an example of Kevin Williamson of National Review.

01:15:44.860 He got hired by the Atlantic.

01:15:46.480 Then some, some past comments had come out.

01:15:49.800 He was on the defensive.

01:15:51.240 And I think it was Coates who was there with him on a stage and sort of had the chance to help him, you know, to help him get through it.

01:15:59.720 It went a different way.

01:16:01.040 And I, I was so upset by the whole situation because it was just talk about needing empathy and not having it.

01:16:07.420 Yes.

01:16:08.580 And, and by the way, one of the things that is interesting in this is, is the power dynamic that existed there and exists, I think, an awful lot.

01:16:20.300 It's, it's, it's so common, but people don't call it out.

01:16:24.100 The person in the position of power there was Ta-Nehisi Coates, not Kevin Williamson.

01:16:28.640 But it was presented as if the power ran the other way around.

01:16:34.420 Can I give an example of something when I felt this in my own life?

01:16:37.640 A couple of years ago, I did a, a company in Australia asked me to come and do a tour of Australia and New Zealand.

01:16:43.640 And, and, uh, they wanted it to be a kind of best of enemies tour.

01:16:48.400 Um, you know, they're referring to the documentary about Corvidal and William F. Buckley and their famous, um, uh, contretemps around the time of the 1968 Democrat Republican conventions.

01:16:58.640 Um, uh, I said to the organizer, I said, that's not going to work.

01:17:03.280 Well, because if, if you find somebody who's an opposite of mine politically, and we start touring around Australia and New Zealand for six or eight nights, we're going to hate each other on night one.

01:17:13.940 And we're not going to be speaking on night two.

01:17:16.080 And by night three, it's going to be really horrible.

01:17:18.520 And so I said, how about we do something different?

01:17:22.860 You get somebody who I respect and who hopefully might respect me, who has a deep, we have deep political differences and let's see how we can talk and agree and disagree amiably.

01:17:37.400 Okay.

01:17:38.260 They actually, they came back and, uh, got, um, the agreement of, uh, Dr. Cornel West of Harvard.

01:17:43.760 And, uh, you know, Cornel West is a, by his own descriptions of revolutionary socialist.

01:17:51.740 Um, and I am not, uh, I was going to say, yeah, exactly.

01:17:57.060 And, uh, uh, we, we, we, we did, uh, um, I think six, six events together.

01:18:03.100 And it was for me, I think for him as well, it was just one.

01:18:07.040 And the reason it was wonderful was because we had both, first of all, we'd both drunk from the same well throughout our lives.

01:18:14.760 We had common, uh, cultural references, philosophical references, literary references.

01:18:21.380 And there were also different wells he had drunk from, which I had come, which I learned from speaking with him to respect more.

01:18:28.480 I mean, he went off on a magnificent riff.

01:18:30.380 It happened that Aretha Franklin died one night whilst we were on this tour.

01:18:33.240 And he went off on the most magnificent riff about Aretha Franklin.

01:18:36.940 And I, you know, and it was just such a gift to be there as he was speaking like that about such an artist.

01:18:46.040 So I learned from him about a whole range of things.

01:18:49.360 But here's, here's the key thing is that one of the things I was aware of throughout was that for some people in the audiences, they would interpret it as being me in the position of power.

01:19:02.640 And Dr. Cornell West of Harvard as being in some kind of unpowerful position.

01:19:09.300 What I was conscious about throughout was that exactly the opposite was the case.

01:19:14.440 As it happened, we got on very well.

01:19:16.180 I, I think we just had a wonderful time.

01:19:18.620 And, and I think our audiences did too.

01:19:21.740 But I was conscious of something throughout, which is there is a gun on the stage, which can be fired, which would destroy all of this.

01:19:31.760 And there's only one person who can fire it.

01:19:34.320 And that's him.

01:19:35.920 What I mean is, of course, the racism accusation.

01:19:40.240 That there was no, if we had a fallen out, there was only one person on the stage who had a very, very powerful weapon.

01:19:50.420 There was nothing of commensurate seriousness I could have lobbed his way.

01:19:57.880 And it made me register this.

01:19:59.980 And I knew that this was going on in the Kevin Williamson, Ta-Nehisi Coates situation.

01:20:04.620 And I know it's one of the causes of the asymmetry of our time, which is that the pretense has been going on for a while.

01:20:12.100 That, for instance, the white male is always and everywhere in the position of power.

01:20:17.280 And in fact, not all the time, but certainly in the most public arenas, the opposite is the truth.

01:20:26.440 Because particularly the white male can at any moment be almost completely taken out by another person making an accusation of racism.

01:20:37.820 And here, by the way, is the secondary problem from that.

01:20:41.940 My late philosopher friend Roger Scruton and I often used to talk about this.

01:20:46.520 There is something very curious in our age about the fact that the most damaging claims are unprovable and impossible to be defended against.

01:20:56.240 If you said to somebody, you are a racist, they actually, people say, well, if you're not, you should sue.

01:21:06.020 You want to bet?

01:21:07.880 You think you can prove in a court of law that you are not a racist?

01:21:11.820 So what this means is, and as I say, thank you, Dr. Cornel West is an extraordinarily gracious as well as learned person.

01:21:22.000 And this sort of fear, as it were, that I had lingering at some point never, never was, never occurred.

01:21:30.240 But if I'd been with somebody like Ibram X. Kendi or Ta-Nehisi Coates, I think it would have been fired on day one.

01:21:38.780 I think it would have been fired without any justification.

01:21:44.340 And I know I would have been seriously wounded.

01:21:47.720 I would have been holed beneath the waterline because a certain number of people would have said, oh, that's interesting.

01:21:54.660 The prominent, celebrated black figure on stage has made an accusation against the white author.

01:22:03.780 And the white author can't defend himself other than to say he's not racist. 0.74

01:22:08.780 And as we know from the works of Kendi, which I've been studying, if you say you are not racist, you are still a racist.

01:22:19.320 So there's no way out.

01:22:21.840 But here's my suggestion on this.

01:22:24.760 We've got to really work to find a way out.

01:22:27.500 We've got to find ways out of this.

01:22:30.100 Otherwise, for the foreseeable future in American public life in particular, there are going to be people who notice that a very powerful weapon appears to be hanging around, fully loaded.

01:22:44.240 And there is no charge for firing it, and there is no charge for firing it insincerely.

01:22:51.840 In fact, you can profit by firing it insincerely.

01:22:59.000 If you go around firing that insincerely, you will get better off.

01:23:06.720 You will be more respected.

01:23:08.720 Now, you and I might hope that the world is packed with sincere and honest people who would resist the temptation to go and pick up that loaded revolver.

01:23:17.280 But, you know, I hate to say it, but the history of human beings suggests that there might be some dishonest people in our time.

01:23:25.040 There might be some people who are willing to advance dishonestly.

01:23:29.640 I think that's what's happening.

01:23:31.420 And I think we have to be able to address this asymmetry.

01:23:34.360 Right.

01:23:36.740 If there's, I don't know if there, and the more it gets used unfairly, the more frightened people get.

01:23:45.820 And I think that's the other dynamic here is fear.

01:23:49.640 Yes.

01:23:50.220 And not just fear.

01:23:51.600 I mean, fear we know, right?

01:23:52.660 We've seen that people are afraid to say how they feel.

01:23:54.840 They're afraid they're going to get attacked as one of the ists. 1.00

01:23:57.560 But the belief when you're in that situation, I can speak to this personally, that your attackers are coming at you in good faith.

01:24:07.100 It's almost like the more open hearted you are, right?

01:24:12.980 The more you can be wounded in this kind of a situation.

01:24:16.340 Yes.

01:24:16.640 And I've been thinking a lot about you and what you wrote on this because I, and I say on my podcast all the time, Douglas Murray has the answer.

01:24:24.940 Douglas Murray has figured out the way forward.

01:24:27.600 And I, and I speak of, you know, the, the way you say people should handle when they get unfairly accused or when they try to get, somebody tries to shove, quote unquote, anti-racism down their throats, which is actually racism.

01:24:39.800 And it's to stand up.

01:24:41.180 It's to do, as you point out in the book, what Joan Rivers did, which is to say, how dare you? 0.71

01:24:44.840 How dare you diminish a word like racist by using it here where it's, it doesn't apply.

01:24:50.440 How dare you try to re-racialize my company, my country, myself?

01:24:54.720 Um, I will not speak in those terms.

01:24:57.560 I love the way you talk about it and I'm inspired by it.

01:25:00.680 I do think it's the answer, but then, okay, but then let's put it to practical application.

01:25:05.880 I think back to my own situation at NBC when I had said, you know, people used to wear blackface and it wasn't really a thing.

01:25:12.540 You know, it's like, it wasn't a big deal.

01:25:15.140 And, uh, talking about this woman who was trying to dress like Diana Ross on the Real Housewives, I said, you know, what, what she's trying to do there is honor somebody.

01:25:24.080 So how did we get to the point where this wasn't a thing to the point where now she's in hot water?

01:25:30.240 Okay.

01:25:30.440 So that was the end of my time at NBC and, and the, the blowback was so universal, Douglas.

01:25:38.540 I really felt like I was getting gas lit.

01:25:43.500 You know, I knew, I knew that people had worn blackface.

01:25:47.480 It was something I've never done many, many times in the past.

01:25:50.980 And over the course of my life, I'd seen it on television.

01:25:53.320 I'd seen it in the movies.

01:25:54.160 I'd seen it as recently as a couple of years earlier on NBC, multiple programs, as it turns out.

01:25:59.780 But what happened in that situation was everyone seemed to be looking at me saying bad, that was racist.

01:26:10.120 And you, I assumed good faith and said, oh my God, I stepped in a minefield.

01:26:16.620 I had a blind spot and I will do the honorable thing, which is to go out and acknowledge that and say, I'm sorry.

01:26:22.220 I did not mean to offend anybody.

01:26:25.080 And I deeply apologize if I did, or to those who, who, who were.

01:26:30.480 And now I think the biggest lesson I've learned since, since that day is that the vast majority of the people attacking me were not in good faith.

01:26:41.680 They weren't, they wanted to punish me for all sorts of different reasons.

01:26:47.240 And it's not that I want the day back and the apology back, but it's hard in the moment, right?

01:26:54.640 It's near impossible in the moment, especially if you don't have a sympathetic boss, right?

01:26:59.000 Somebody who's going to back you to, to turn around and say, you know, if I, if I could have done it over, would I have gone out the next day?

01:27:07.280 And I've said, let me prove to you that what I said is factually true.

01:27:11.960 Let me show you the examples and why I said it.

01:27:14.600 And can't we have a discussion about the point I was trying to make about this woman in modern day America who is trying to honor someone?

01:27:23.880 And how did we get from A to B?

01:27:25.020 Can't we talk like that?

01:27:26.620 I tried a bit, but anyway, that I wish I could have been more forceful and I wish I could have explained myself, but people weren't open to it.

01:27:34.620 They didn't want to hear it.

01:27:36.720 And because there wasn't good faith and I see that and I see that on Evergreen and I see that at Yale when they're screaming at the professor.

01:27:45.240 And I, I just, I don't know if we can, if we just need to disabuse ourselves of the notion that these attacks, racist, sexist, what have you, are usually in good faith.

01:27:57.540 If I can say that the problem for getting out of it is, I think, among other things, the problem that we have for getting out of this situation, you can correctly identify is, the obvious thing to say is, look, these accusations are hurled around so much and so insincerely that they've basically lost their power.

01:28:19.760 So there we are.

01:28:22.720 The reason why that's a dangerous thing to do would be that it would allow for the bad people, the nasty things lingering in the woodsheds of all our societies, to get a free pass.

01:28:38.420 That's, that's the fear I think a lot of us, if we're honest about it, legitimately have.

01:28:42.780 I would love to be able to just say, you know, the term racist doesn't mean anything anymore.

01:28:48.680 The problem is, I know that there will be some people who will benefit from that, who I wouldn't want to benefit from it.

01:28:55.120 It's the same with if, you know, the temptation to say, there's no sexism, what are you talking about? 0.97

01:29:02.300 There are nobody in our society is sexist, there are nobody in our society is homophobic, shut up and go away. 0.64

01:29:06.920 That's quite a strong temptation.

01:29:08.880 But I know that there are some people, not a large number, but a certain number of people who will benefit in an unpleasant way from that.

01:29:15.720 And simultaneously, we cannot all be held hostage by the fear of those people.

01:29:22.720 So, what I try to urge people to do is just in general, to try to hear other people's speech in the way they would like their own speech to be heard.

01:29:37.060 Which is not waiting, waiting tensed to spring, having found the erroneous word.

01:29:49.920 But listening in a spirit of generosity and interpreting people's words in a spirit of generosity.

01:29:57.440 Now, of course, this is really hard in the situation, as we started off with, where, among other things, people want their political opposites to suffer.

01:30:09.100 And I know, because, I mean, I've never had a case as serious and high profile as the one that you've just had, but you had and that you've just described.

01:30:19.260 But I've had a little bit of it, of knowing, for instance, that I am speaking in front of an audience that wants me to fail.

01:30:27.800 That wants me to slip up, that wants to catch me out, using some term, you know, term, and as you just described, in that situation, if, among other things, if you have co-workers who want you to fail.

01:30:47.760 Let alone, if you have co-workers who want you to fail, then you just, it's a horrible position to live in.

01:30:57.080 Because instead of regarding the world and words and ideas as this just wonderful opportunity to communicate and to swap ideas and to solve things.

01:31:08.880 I mean, remember that, solving things.

01:31:11.100 Instead of that, everything becomes mean and tight.

01:31:17.700 I feel it myself.

01:31:19.240 I'm sure you felt it as well.

01:31:21.080 When you go into a thing and instead of thinking, this is just going to be great.

01:31:26.000 I can't wait for this intellectual discussion.

01:31:28.920 Instead of that, you go in tense and fearful and having run through all the ways in which you could go wrong.

01:31:38.860 If you have that second thing, you just never get anywhere.

01:31:46.700 And we will not get anywhere.

01:31:49.260 I mean, what if we actually had, in American society, a serious attempt to address serious problems, like homelessness, which, by the way, as a visitor to America is just such a visible and awful problem in your major cities.

01:32:03.460 What if we had a serious attempt from left and right to address the really lingering question that's coming along, which is why it's so difficult for young people in an age with inflation, in the way it's been for such a long time, to accumulate capital and to begin their lives in a way that their parents began their lives.

01:32:30.160 What if we had an opportunity from left and right, from all positions, to try to address these questions and come to some solutions?

01:32:39.420 We just, we don't, and America doesn't have that.

01:32:41.940 America has lost that capability because nobody trusts the other side because they think they're going to do something funny.

01:32:50.920 And here's, here's the really nasty, bad thing that causes that.

01:32:55.760 The really nasty, bad thing that causes that is that the left in America no longer trusts the right, that the right isn't going to reopen Auschwitz.

01:33:04.920 I mean, it's as bad as that.

01:33:06.460 And the right doesn't trust the left not to start communism.

01:33:14.440 I would have thought it should be possible in a country of the size of America and with the gifts that America has to do better than that.

01:33:24.100 To have enough people who neither want the gulag nor the concentration camp, which I would have said was 99 point something percent of the American population.

01:33:36.460 To incarnate what a serious attempt to address serious challenges affecting the Republic actually looks like.

01:33:46.760 I think it can be done.

01:33:49.500 It simply requires enough people of goodwill, knowledge, humility, and daring to give it a go.

01:34:01.300 Daring.

01:34:02.580 That's it because conversation is being shut down and it's the, it's the tool we need most right now.

01:34:09.760 And out of, because of fear, uh, people are silent.

01:34:15.280 You know, you've written about the silent majority and, you know, I know you say they need to be silent no more, that they're, they're, they are a majority.

01:34:24.580 They want to have conversations.

01:34:25.860 They want to be able to say how they feel.

01:34:27.320 They want to push back against some of the nonsense we've been fed.

01:34:30.300 Like there's, there's no more gender. 0.96

01:34:32.600 You know, like there's no more boys or girls or, you know, people who menstruate. 0.64

01:34:37.260 You can't say women and all that stuff. 1.00

01:34:38.940 They want to push back.

01:34:39.860 But then they see other high profile people being attacked, being de-platformed, uh, kicked out of their publishing houses or trying.

01:34:46.920 And I would love to, to help stir them up to, to say the things I was just listing, which I got from you.

01:34:56.700 Um, well, yeah, but realistically, right.

01:35:00.680 Realistically.

01:35:01.080 I mean, let's like, I, I just wanted to ask this follow-up of you because look, I can do it now.

01:35:06.600 Now, now my own boss, um, I have, you know, I'm independent financially.

01:35:11.260 I can do it now, but most people, they're not there. 0.94

01:35:14.080 And I, I don't feel like I can look at them when they need that job with that weak need boss, that pathetic weak need boss. 0.92

01:35:21.980 Who's afraid of the mob and say, speak up. 0.94

01:35:25.680 You have to become part of the vocal majority.

01:35:28.820 So what, what do we tell those people?

01:35:31.060 It's funny.

01:35:31.820 I, I got an email again, just before joining you today from somebody asking me exactly this.

01:35:37.520 I won't give away the description, but I mean, I get these emails quite a lot.

01:35:40.460 I got an email just for speaking with you from somebody saying, you know, this is a job I'm in.

01:35:45.900 This is a conundrum I have.

01:35:48.100 What can I do?

01:35:48.780 What should I do?

01:35:49.660 And I, I also, I, I, I, um, I'm humble about this situation because like you, I'm in an unusual situation in that I, I, I'm, I'm not answerable to a boss.

01:36:03.580 I'm not answerable to my editors and the papers I write for.

01:36:06.400 Um, but, uh, my books and elsewhere and say what, what I like.

01:36:10.460 And, um, I, I love that opportunity, but it's not common.

01:36:14.900 It's not common.

01:36:15.640 Uh, most people, uh, you know, they, they have, um, loved ones, they have dependents, they might have a mortgage, um, if they're lucky and, or rent to pay.

01:36:27.400 And I don't say just go out and like be brave and, uh, risk everything because that, that's a heck of a lot to ask of anyone.

01:36:37.880 And the, the truth is, I think that there's only a couple of options.

01:36:42.660 I think some unusual people will become, um, um, like flare lights, um, it won't necessarily happen by design like with Brett Weinstein.

01:36:55.720 I mean, it, it, it, it wasn't by design that we all know who he is now.

01:37:00.100 It was an accident because the thing just came at him and he couldn't budge.

01:37:05.480 Uh, he wouldn't bend, he wouldn't, wouldn't genuflect in front of it.

01:37:11.540 And, and so unusual people like that will be thrown up by the era, but not everyone can or will do that.

01:37:20.920 Um, what I would urge such people to do is simply in whatever way they can, in whatever small ways they can, without jeopardizing everything in their lives, um, to make small steps towards truth.

01:37:36.780 Um, you know, Václav Havel's wonderful phrase, you know, live in, try to live in truth, um, is, is, is just so important.

01:37:47.900 It's, it's, it's the great, the great insight of philosophers across the ages has been the significance of trying to live in truth.

01:37:58.440 You know, Solzhenitsyn energy is the same thing.

01:38:01.260 And, and if, if, if you, it's not, it's not just by the way, because truth is an abstract good in itself.

01:38:08.280 Although I do believe that to be the case, it is that you will feel a freer and better person as a result of it.

01:38:17.900 Um, because as I think I said in Joe Rogan, it's very demoralizing to live your life with lies.

01:38:22.580 And I think the demoralization is a part of the whole thing.

01:38:26.200 The truth is that we are all capable in our personal and professional lives of doing extraordinary things.

01:38:36.200 Not all the time.

01:38:37.580 Nobody does all the time, but sometimes.

01:38:40.040 And some people's extraordinary things will be an extraordinary encounter with another person, a discussion they didn't think they could ever have, airing a thought they didn't think they could air.

01:38:51.760 And trying to see through the fog of lies around them, the fog of half truths and untruths that they're urged to say, seeing their way through that and feeling their way to the other side.

01:39:07.180 And as I say, for most people, that will not include some extraordinary sort of running through the hail of bullets, um, act of bravery.

01:39:18.700 For most people, it will just be conversations they will have with co-workers carefully, but honestly, and feeling your way in the circumstances you're in.

01:39:30.580 Having that conversation with people you know, um, your, your loved ones is obviously a very good place to start.

01:39:38.740 The opposite is, um, is, is we will, particularly in America, we will be caught in an, a retributive cycle.

01:39:47.720 I was speaking to a Russian friend the other day, um, who pointed out that apparently there was a child who, in America, who, who reported their parents for having been at the Capitol protests.

01:39:59.600 I hadn't, I hadn't, I hadn't seen this, that reported their own parents.

01:40:04.820 And of course, his Russian friend said, well, well, this is what we were taught in the Soviet Union.

01:40:10.220 You know, the boy, the famous boy who some people dispute whether he actually existed or not, who, who reports his parents, uh, to authorities, uh, and who was made into a sort of hero.

01:40:21.900 Um, we, we, we really, really don't want to enter societies like that.

01:40:27.880 We want to be in societies where we can have differences out quietly.

01:40:32.520 We can discuss with our loved ones.

01:40:35.120 We can talk with our coworkers.

01:40:37.520 We can have disputes with our bosses.

01:40:39.900 And we can do all of these things without fearing that at any moment the trap door opens underneath us and we go all the way to the bottom.

01:40:48.880 If we live in that society, then we will become timorous, we will become enfeebled, we will live not even half lives.

01:40:59.620 And I think we can all live better lives than that, but they start, they start from a position of knowing that the sort of life we should be living.

01:41:11.180 And we should be living a life in which we can solve problems, in which we can share ideas, in which we can talk across boundaries, read across continents,

01:41:22.640 and know that the world is an extraordinary amount of information and knowledge to acquire and not a set of traps waiting for us to fall, but an amazing set of opportunities that

01:41:42.460 offer us to offer us to offer us the opportunity to do things that are endless.

01:41:48.480 And we should be aiming for that.

01:41:50.540 America, in particular, should be aiming for that, to be solving things, to be doing things, to be growing things, to be showing a way, and to be inventing things that we've never dreamt of.

01:42:03.460 That's what Americans should be aiming for, not this embittered, trapdoor culture, which will get nobody anywhere, other than the people who are so happy to see America fail.

01:42:19.900 And to take rhetorical risks.

01:42:24.380 I mean, you have, you, I know you've, you've said this, but you, what is the goal to, to die in your bed years from now saying, no one ever criticized me.

01:42:37.740 I managed to make it through unscathed.

01:42:40.720 No one ever called me the names.

01:42:42.420 I never paid a price for speaking up or taking a stand.

01:42:47.760 I avoided all the slings and arrows, right?

01:42:51.940 I mean, who's, who's got that as a goal?

01:42:54.420 What, whatever happened to strive valiantly?

01:42:57.620 Exactly.

01:42:58.860 Strive valiantly, recognize you'll make mistakes.

01:43:04.140 You know, I mean, what life is, is only successes, you know, everyone has failures because everyone fails at times, you know.

01:43:16.360 And, and, and I, I do think that we, you know, we, by the way, if I may say so, one of the worst signs in all of this is that comedians are coming under such flack.

01:43:28.220 Comedians, comedians, like the court jester is so vital in a society because the comedian says things that are true, even if you don't want to admit they're true.

01:43:38.360 And, and I, and I hated seeing comedians being come for in recent years.

01:43:43.340 One of my, you know, the pythons in the United Kingdom were famous for being able to say things like in the life of Brian, which people couldn't say, but they knew to be true and knew to be funny.

01:43:57.880 And it was funny because it was true.

01:43:59.760 And if even the comedians can't, can't talk, then, then, then nobody can.

01:44:07.360 And I, I, I, I, yes, this, this, this crucial thing, what is the life you would like to live?

01:44:13.180 Um, is it this timorous life or is it something else?

01:44:18.220 And, you know, if I could just say, so there's a, I just found it.

01:44:20.920 I just got it up on my screen.

01:44:23.040 Um, one of my great heroes, I was starting off as a writer, as a journalist, is the late Oriana Falaci.

01:44:30.200 She was a, uh, uh, difficult one, as I'm sure you know, but possibly the, the greatest interviewer of the late 20th century.

01:44:38.960 Uh, in fact, she did herself out of a job by interviewing people so harshly that no one would submit to an interview from her.

01:44:46.280 And she, I don't know what that's like. 0.99

01:44:47.900 She, she, she, exactly.

01:44:50.320 But she became a novelist, uh, and a pretty good one.

01:44:53.260 Um, anyhow, but she wrote, she wrote a book about the Vietnam War, which she covered called Nothing and Amen.

01:44:59.660 And it's, it's a great, great book, one of the great books about war.

01:45:02.620 Um, and in Nothing and Amen, at the very beginning, uh, a niece of hers says to her, Oriana, it's a great opening to a book, says, Oriana, what is life?

01:45:14.760 And Oriana Falaci says, I went to Vietnam to find out.

01:45:19.560 And, uh, throughout this extraordinary book, she describes what she saw, the risks she took, and so on.

01:45:26.300 She described, among other things, a great love affair she was having at the time.

01:45:29.260 And at the very end of the book, she says something that's worth, worth quoting, because she says, she says she ends up, after she comes back, she says to the little girl, she says, um, life is something you've got to fill up well, without wasting any time, even if you break it, by filling it too full.

01:45:52.540 Now, that's, that's an aspiration.

01:45:55.940 That's an answer.

01:45:57.080 I'd rather people have that spirit in them than the cringing spirit of the age.

01:46:04.420 But if I can say so, it's, it's, it's not enough that one simply calls on people to behave well or something.

01:46:13.000 I think it's, I think it's necessary for people to demonstrate that.

01:46:18.140 This is why America has had four very bad years in many ways, because there has been a president who is, you know, better than anyone does, does not behave well, does not behave graciously.

01:46:30.460 I spoke with a friend some years ago, who said to me, an American friend said, look, I'm trying to bring up a, I'm trying to bring up children at the moment, Douglas.

01:46:38.840 And, you know, he said, my, my eldest is a bit big for his age, and I have to tell him things like, look, just because you're bigger than the other boys in the class, you know, you mustn't use that as an advantage over them, because it's, it's chance.

01:46:51.380 And you must make sure you don't throw your weight around, you know, and he said, Douglas, the problem is we have, we have a president who does exactly the opposite of what I'm trying to teach my son to do.

01:47:00.480 So that is a problem, but it's not a reason for everybody else in public life in America to also dispense with the hope that they can demonstrate how to behave well as well.

01:47:16.740 And I think incrementally, if different people with a platform demonstrate even one virtue, I mean, if I can say so, and I'm not, I wasn't primed to say this, and I don't want to embarrass you, but I think your own behavior in recent years demonstrated such grace under fire, that I think a lot of people will have learned from it.

01:47:43.080 I think they will have observed it. I don't know if they say it very often. But I think it will have impacted a lot of people. To know, for instance, that when you are assailed, you don't have to answer back by being worse than the people who assailed you, but by rising above it and by demonstrating grace and decency.

01:48:11.000 These things don't get noted very often. And people don't like to note it about themselves. And they even don't like to note it about other people. But I think they are noteworthy. And if it happens enough, and if it's accumulated often enough, something can change.

01:48:27.700 Well, thank you for saying that. I think about my kids, you know, and there's, you can learn so many lessons as you go through life with your children and try to steer them in the right direction.

01:48:38.240 And there was a situation with my now 11-year-old a few years ago where he felt uncomfortable because students in the lunchroom were chanting something. It was an innocuous word, but in their world, it was a derogatory world. I don't remember. It was something silly.

01:48:55.100 And it was directed at one kid. And my son did not want to participate in this, but was feeling the peer pressure and genuinely didn't know what to do. You know, he wasn't going to chant, but, you know, he also wasn't going to stand up and say, stop that right now, fellow third graders. 0.80

01:49:15.900 You know, so I felt for him. You know, he brought it up to me and asked what I thought he should have done. And we talked about how, yes, it would be wonderful if you could find the nerve to do that, right, to stand up and shut it down.

01:49:29.640 But realistically, there's another option. And there's another option for all of us when the group pylon takes place, when the bullying takes place, the social media, you know, just fire catches and someone's world is almost destroyed.

01:49:44.180 And that is to not pile on, to not chant, to do something interruptive, potentially, maybe your tray falls off the table, or at a minimum, maybe you get up and you go to the bathroom, you're not a participant. And then you could round back, I told my son, and ask, ask that boy, if he wants to come over for a play date that day, something to shore him up. It doesn't even have to be about the specific incident, just something to let him know he's loved.

01:50:12.820 That's right.

01:50:13.720 And we can all do that. That's something that doesn't require huge risk taking.

01:50:19.160 Yes, it just requires, yes, restraint. That's one of the only things it requires. It requires restraint.

01:50:24.800 And don't, there's such a good lesson. I mean, don't join the mob. Don't join the mob. By the way, why don't you join them?

01:50:32.920 I've said this a few times in years about not joining the mob. Perhaps I've never said why.

01:50:37.900 It's because you don't know what the mob's going to do. You can't predict what it's going to do, and you're going to get caught up with them.

01:50:46.360 If you join the mob, the mob might break into the capital, and then you're one of the people who is in that mob.

01:50:55.340 If you're in the online mob, and you join in, you gain nothing from joining in, but you could have made the person who's been piled in on just that little bit worse.

01:51:09.780 And, you know, I watched this the other day when some people who were at the capital protests that turned into a riot were being put on no-fly lists.

01:51:20.840 And there were people on the internet saying, ha-ha, somebody I know, I'm living for this at the moment.

01:51:27.920 A video of a man at an airport completely distraught saying, look what they're doing to us.

01:51:33.760 I had no idea of a specific situation in this man, but when a man is weeping in public at an airport, he's just at the end of his, he's at the end of his tether there.

01:51:45.900 That's the most humiliation you can have at this point, and he can't get home.

01:51:51.040 I don't know what involvement he had, but I wouldn't glory in that moment.

01:51:57.820 And I saw people glorying in, like, I saw somebody I met once who I don't know well, but who got a little bit caught up in the Me Too thing and was humiliated for a period.

01:52:08.400 And I saw him piling in on this, and I thought, I didn't say anything because I just decided not to.

01:52:12.960 But I thought, you know, I thought, wow, you know, a few years ago, when the mob was coming for you, you loathed it.

01:52:20.820 And yet here you are, here you are, just saying, you know, like, really happy to join the mob again.

01:52:27.940 And we all see it.

01:52:30.100 We all have the opportunity.

01:52:32.060 Every day there's a headline somewhere.

01:52:34.180 There's a comment somewhere someone's made that is today's thing you can pile on.

01:52:39.580 You can just not.

01:52:41.280 You can raise your eyes above the screen.

01:52:44.880 You can look out into the world.

01:52:46.600 You can spend time with a loved one.

01:52:48.460 You can read a book.

01:52:49.440 You can do absolutely anything.

01:52:51.500 You can think.

01:52:52.500 You can do nothing for a moment.

01:52:54.400 Anything is better than joining the mob because it's true that we are wired as human beings to get into an us and them situation all the time.

01:53:04.520 But the instinct to do that is so strong in the current era with social media and much more.

01:53:12.780 The instinct is so strong.

01:53:14.520 And the price we think we pay is so small.

01:53:18.300 That's the thing is that people think they pay a small price.

01:53:20.900 And they don't.

01:53:22.380 They pay a huge price in just the endless diminution of their character, the curdling of their own view of the world and other people, their misplaced sense of self-righteousness against the other.

01:53:38.140 And we see this with the COVID thing, people doing, you know, lockdown shaming on people.

01:53:43.060 You know, there's an account that finds people who were celebrating Christmas with people above the legal number and trying to out them for their place of work.

01:53:54.020 Oh, come on. 0.87

01:53:55.440 Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:53:56.500 And you want to say, you know, you just want to say, you just want to stop a moment and reflect on whether that's the person you want to be.

01:54:05.120 Right.

01:54:05.760 You just want to stop for a moment.

01:54:07.720 And so, yes, don't join the mob, not just because you can never tell where the mob is going to run.

01:54:13.920 And it can turn in a moment.

01:54:15.480 And I've seen that plenty in my life.

01:54:18.460 You don't want to join the mob for that reason.

01:54:20.720 But you also don't want to join it because you want to be a nobler individual.

01:54:25.660 And you can be.

01:54:27.440 Everyone can be.

01:54:29.260 Everyone can try to at least aspire to raise themselves above the crowd.

01:54:37.720 Because we're better than just membership of a crowd.

01:54:42.680 We're just so much better than that.

01:54:44.860 We have so much more capability than that.

01:54:48.160 And everybody can do that.

01:54:50.600 Everybody can manage that.

01:54:52.720 It's so well said, because I think so many people will join the mob in an attempt to virtue signal.

01:54:58.540 They want to tell everybody, I'm with you.

01:55:00.140 I'm with you.

01:55:00.460 I'm not racist.

01:55:01.120 I'm not sexist.

01:55:01.840 I'm not a me-tooer.

01:55:03.460 Whatever it is.

01:55:05.220 And that is madness because the crowd will turn on you.

01:55:09.260 There's no insurance.

01:55:11.200 You can't pay the ransom up front does actually not prevent you from becoming a victim down the line at all.

01:55:19.240 So joining the mob can be hurtful.

01:55:22.160 You don't know the full facts of anybody's situation.

01:55:24.880 So it can be hurtful to the person getting attacked.

01:55:28.560 And to your greater point, and really the ultimate point, I come back to this so often because it's true.

01:55:34.020 My therapist here in New York has a slight accent.

01:55:37.340 And he sums up pretty much every problem as follows.

01:55:40.760 People are complicated.

01:55:43.900 People are complicated.

01:55:45.180 Well, that's right.

01:55:46.480 That's true.

01:55:46.940 That's right.

01:55:47.640 That's right.

01:55:48.300 And, you know, if there was one thing that we could do with this age breaking down, it's the idea that there are good people and bad people.

01:55:57.380 You know, that we all have the capacity for good and evil.

01:56:02.840 And we don't just have it year by year or day to day, but all the time, down the center of us.

01:56:11.520 It's what makes human beings so fascinating, so extraordinary.

01:56:18.900 It's down the middle of all of us.

01:56:21.700 And if people could realize that, that, you know, I have a friend who's a doctor in the UK who said that he was a prison doctor for many years.

01:56:31.400 He said that one of the, he said, he said for years, people said to him, oh, I don't know.

01:56:37.400 I just, I just, I fell in with the wrong crowd.

01:56:41.560 And he said, in all the years that I was a doctor in prisons, he said, I met so many people who fell in with the wrong crowd, but I never met the crowd.

01:56:51.700 The point is, the crowd is not made up of people, people with evil on their forehead.

01:57:03.320 It's made up of people like us.

01:57:05.680 The crowd is you.

01:57:06.700 But all of us, the crowd is you.

01:57:09.200 Could be you.

01:57:11.060 Better hope it's not.

01:57:12.060 Well, I mean, that's about as thorough a discussion of the madness of crowds and what you mean by that as one could have hoped for.

01:57:21.020 I love the book.

01:57:22.960 I want the audience to read it because I do think, we didn't get to this day, but I do think you do answer the question of sort of how wokeness started and the Marxist origins and how it tracks Marxism, which is being pushed at the academic level.

01:57:36.840 And even in the K through 12 level now, it's scary, but I just thought this was the most thoughtful book that made me, it was a call to action in many ways.

01:57:47.180 And I've listened to so many podcasts that you've done.

01:57:50.340 I'm just, I feel like you're appointment listening.

01:57:53.200 So I'm honored to have had you here and have had the opportunity to ask you my own questions directly.

01:57:58.860 And I really hope, Douglas, is the first of many.

01:58:02.280 I really hope so, too.

01:58:03.160 I really enjoyed it, Megan.

01:58:04.360 It's a great honor for me.

01:58:05.400 So thank you.

01:58:06.840 How smart is he?

01:58:12.720 I know I keep saying it, but it's true. 0.99

01:58:15.240 Smart just in terms of how well read he is and how well informed, but also in the way he sees the world and translating it into usable information.

01:58:23.180 I don't know about you, but there are about six references in there that I had no idea what he was talking about.

01:58:27.620 But I'm going to look it up.

01:58:28.700 I'm going to get smarter myself.

01:58:30.800 And I don't know about you, but I would really like to be better read.

01:58:32.760 One of the things I want to do, I actually want to do, is get like a, you know how Dennis Prager has Prager University?

01:58:39.380 I want to have like Kelly College, where we get like the top three books from all of our guests that you need to read to be a better citizen, right?

01:58:50.600 To be like a smart, well-informed person.

01:58:52.560 I don't know about you, but like when I was at Syracuse, I was kind of, I drank.

01:58:57.820 I went out with my friends.

01:58:59.360 I hung out with my boyfriend.

01:59:01.040 I generally recall learning, but I didn't have the feelings that Douglas Murray was talking about.

01:59:05.420 And I would like to have the feelings.

01:59:06.820 I mean, I've read since then, but I kind of feel like I missed that amazing education that so many of our guests have had.

01:59:12.940 So I'm going to start, I'm doing it.

01:59:14.440 We're going to start Kelly College.

01:59:16.060 I'm going to start amassing our library.

01:59:17.840 We can read these books together in all our spare time.

01:59:20.020 Maybe we can find a little CliffsNotes version for like the Syracuse alum.

01:59:25.100 Okay, I want to tell you that today's episode was brought to you in part by PaintyourLife.com.

01:59:31.260 Hand-painted portraits with a 100% money-back guarantee.

01:59:34.780 That's great.

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01:59:39.860 Go to PaintyourLife.com now to learn more.

01:59:42.920 We can go through this together.

01:59:44.180 You can get your painting done as I get my painting done, and then we can compare notes.

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The Megyn Kelly Show - January 25, 2021

Douglas Murray on Overcoming Tribalism, the Asymmetry of Wokeness, and the Rise of Victimhood ｜ Ep. 55

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