Peter Robinson Interviews Douglas Murray ...

By An Old Friend
Thu, Dec 3, 2020 2:02 a.m.

Peter Robinson Interviews Douglas Murray ...

AOF: ... with the discussion focused on ideas from Murray's most recent book on The Madness of Crowds (which is apparently about the West's decay under the cancer of identity politics and its henchmen):

https://www.hoover.org/research/douglas-murray-and-his-continuing-fight-against-madness-crowds It’s 76 minutes, which is a lot. But it has many highlights, e.g., at around 21:00, he talks about reading the sludge put out by modern feminists and the like and says, “I found only assertions.”

At around 31:00, he says we’re caught up in wasting enormous mental energy fretting about things like lavatory arrangements suitable for “trans” people instead of reading Solzhenitsyn and Sharansky and so forth.

At around 34:00, he’s talking about the point of all the insanity being to get us all to say things everybody knows not to be true, with the goal of thereby demoralizing us (a point I’ve seen previously from Anthony Daniels, aka Theodore Dalrymple, writing about a core strategy of totalitarianism).

Late in the conversation, he mentions talking with a Portland police officer who’s black and who tells him about what police are going through nationwide, while subject to incessant criticism, and the cop wonders why we aren’t expecting virtue out of the citizenry.

Then there’s Murray's own point that saving Western civilization can’t be left to miracle politicians, e.g., the hoped-for combination of Churchill and FDR. Citizens have to do it.

I envy Murray's ability to – as I see it – take in copious amounts of information, some from his own reporting, and think deeply about it all, on the largest scales.