The Dangerous Dishonesty of the Modern Left
Best-selling author Douglas Murray discusses the revised edition of his latest book The Madness of Crowds and its critique of left-wing groupthink. Interview by Nick Cater.
Nick Cater: Douglas, you wrote in The Madness of Crowds last year: “We are going through a great crowd derangement. In public and in private, both online and off, people are behaving in ways that are increasingly irrational, feverish, herd-like and simply unpleasant.” In the light of everything that is happening now you must have a grim feeling of vindication.
Douglas Murray: Sadly, they have, yes. Earlier this year, when the COVID crisis hit, I had a moment, as I'm sure a lot of us did, where I thought, maybe the craziest bits of identity politics and more are going to take a backseat. Maybe now we've all got some serious issues to worry about. Maybe unserious issues will bother us and detain us a little less. I thought, now, at the very least, even if we all don't get ill and die, our living standard is going to decline and much more. And I thought, well, in that case, we'll all have real complaints and we won't have so much time for people with totally fraudulent and made-up complaints. In a time where actual aggression feels like it might be growing, micro-aggressions might take a backseat. And that was my view early on in the crisis, the COVID crisis. And then I just saw that whole thing blow right up.
And, in fact, what has been revealed in recent months is that what I describe in The Madness of Crowds seems to have just gone on steroids for the last three or four months. And it's both vindicating what I say in The Madness of Crowds and very worrying for me. Because, what I say in that book, as you know, is really in part a warning. It's an attempt to decontaminate a lot of areas of thought that have been willfully contaminated by dishonest and disingenuous actors. And, unfortunately, it seems that those dishonest and disingenuous actors in all of our countries have been having the time of their lives.
Nick Cater: You describe the increasing speed with which this movement rolls on to ever greater absurdities. Things that were perfectly okay five minutes ago are suddenly hanging offences. The COVID-19 crisis seems to have accelerated the madness even more.
Douglas Murray: Yes. Well, I wrote about this early on in the crisis that I was very worried immediately by the way in which there seemed to be a policing of the boundaries, not just of discussion, but of investigation that seemed to me very troubling. I was alarmed, for instance, that there were groups, including think thanks and investigatory bodies who were saying, “These are the things that should be looked into and these are the things that should not." There is a think thank that claims to study extremism in London, where I am, which immediately said that it is a conspiracy theory to claim that the virus may have come from a laboratory.
I always suspect that if you have the widest possible discussion, you got the largest chance of getting to the truth.
And I was just shocked, amazed at the way in which, so fast, on such a huge issue, there was the attempt we've seen on lots of other issues, but attempt on a brand issue, to just box in what should be looked at and should be said and should be thought about. And I am very, very, opposed to that on this issue as on any other. I'm always for the widest possible discussion because I always suspect that if you have the widest possible discussion, you got the largest chance of getting to the truth. And that if you allow people to box things off and say, "You can't say this. You can't think about that," you've got a disproportionate likelihood of unnecessarily hurtling yourself and your society into error. And I do think that's something that has been going on in this crisis as in the ones I write about in the book.
Nick Cater: Let's try to put The Madness of Crowds in context and try to understand where this cultural arrogance began. You set up your book with a pertinent observation by the late Ken Minogue about the progressive urge to slay dragons. They see themselves as St George, setting out to eradicate horrible evils, and turn the world into a better place. The interesting thing for me is that Ken wrote that in a book published almost 60 years ago.
Douglas Murray: Yes. I'm a great admirer of Ken Minogue and his thought. Of course, a very distinguished Australian-born philosopher and I was privileged to know him a bit in his later life. Just a wonderful man. Great, great guy to be with. And he and his book, The Liberal Imagination, I think it was, used this analogy. One of Ken's geniuses, it seemed to me always, was that he had that skill that we used to associate with philosophy and thought, which was the skill to take highly complex ideas and make them understandable. This, of course, is exactly the opposite of the current age where the idea of anyone involved in ideas is to take really quite straightforward ideas and concepts and make them sound completely unintelligible. Anyhow, Ken had that first skill in abundance. And in that book, he refers to St. George in retirement syndrome as being one of the risks that liberalism can end up in. And I credit this to him and I extend the metaphor.
What Minogue was saying was that liberalism had within in it this tendency to keep on searching for causes to fight in order to justify its existence so that it could end up like St. George in retirement. That is, that St. George got so much credit for slaying the dragon that he might be tempted to go around the land looking for other dragons to slay. And if there are a paucity of dragons, he might find himself swinging his sword at ever smaller creatures until eventually, one day, St. George might be found swinging his sword at thin air.
And I believe, I explain, I think that what Minogue said then, very prescient and accurate, is absolutely what has happened to the liberal mind in the last few decades and recent years. And the redux is something like this, and I see it very clearly in Australian society. I haven't been there for about, I think 18 months, but I follow events fairly closely there. I think in Australia as in Britain and America, what you have is a type of rampaging liberal who wants desperately to be the sort of person who gets the acclaim that say people did who were at the Stonewall Inn in 1968. Or were joining Martin Luther King in the March on Washington. Or were the Suffragettes.
And these may all be very good things to have been. And our society says how much we admire the people involved in these various liberal liberation causes. The thing is, of course, is that, today, the people who want to be deemed to have exactly that amount of virtue, to being exactly that good and involved in those good causes, are, at best, staggering around the land looking for chickens to machete. And, in actual fact, I think in most cases, swinging their sword at thin air. The gay press, such as it is in all of our countries is left trying desperately to find some regional politician who once said something on social media that wasn't totally in accord with 2020's views about gays.
The modern Left suffer from St George in retirement syndrome: a relentless quest for causes to fight in order to justify their existence.
They're desperate to find misogynists. Absolutely desperate for it. And then you have this, what I've always described as one of the oddest things of our age, which is the fact that the desire to find racism is in very disproportionate context to the actual extent to which we have racism in our societies. Thank goodness, our societies are not racist suddenly, and they're not tolerant of racism. And so we have, what I've always described as this supply and demand problem where the so-called anti-racists have a huge demand for racists. There's just not that much of a supply of them. And that's a problem for them because these enemies give their lives meaning and the vindication they feel if they can be claimed to be within the orbit of the great human rights protesters and causes, it gives their lives purpose. And I think this has become a perversity of modern liberalism, as Ken Minogue warned, that we have people swinging their swords at thin air.
The desire to find racism is in very disproportionate context to the actual extent to which we have racism in our societies.
Nick Cater: We should, of course, address the semantic confusion over the word “liberal”. In Australia, being a Liberal is to be on the side of sanity. You’re talking about liberals in the American sense.
Douglas Murray: It's a problem in all of our countries this way that this term shifts. It's one of several big terms in our day which shape shifts according to which continent you're on. But yes, indeed. By the way, I should stress, I've always thought of liberalism as a good thing to be in the classical sense. I approve of liberalism. I regard myself as a classical liberal. But yes, the form of liberalism I'm describing there is what we really end up having to call leftism, would perhaps be more accurate.
Nick Cater: I think if Martin Luther King Jnr was to make his famous, “I have a dream” speech today he would immediately be cancelled by Facebook for posting incorrect thoughts.
Douglas Murray: We have indeed. I say in The Madness of Crowds, it's taken half a century for Martin Luther King's disciples to completely invert his dream. We actually have figures like the deeply sinister, fraudulent, I think, figure, Robin DiAngelo, an American academic, who happens to be white, by the way. Who with her book, White Fragility, has actually gone around the country in America giving lectures saying that what matters most is the colour of your skin and that actually people who start talking about the content of character rather than skin colour, are, to use one of the terms of the jargon of the age, problematic. In exactly 50 years, we go from Martin Luther King to this crock fraud, Robin DiAngelo, hawking this idea that Martin Luther King is totally wrong and that what matters is skin colour, not the content of character.
And this is, of course, there is extraordinary perversity about this. Because as I see it, and as I've tried to warn people, you either have Martin Luther King's dream or you've got hell when it comes to race relations. And, if I can explain that, one of the reasons for that isn't just philosophical, it isn't just moral. It is, and I try to warn people about it, is deeply practical. In a country like my own, in Britain, let alone the United States, the white population is the majority. And I don't think that it is sustainable for a bullying, vociferous minority who happen to be Black or white or any other colour to go around telling majority populations that they are wicked and evil and have nothing good about themselves, and to do so, in the name of anti-racism. And to say that some people are better than them because of the colour of their skin, this is something which I have been deeply worried about seeing.
Modern anti-racists are completely perverting Martin Luther King’s call for people to be judged by the content of their character.
And I saw it, incidentally, when I was in Australia the summer before last. I did a tour around a number of Australian cities. And I noticed that there, as much as here, you have this idea for instance, of, certain things can be said by certain people by dint of their character traits or characteristics, and can not be said by other people. This is what I describe in The Madness of Crowds, is the problem of the speaker, not the speech. That we've become almost uninterested in what the content of somebody's speech is. Like we've become less interested in the content of their character. It's all about who the speaker is. It's why people say “Speaking as a…”, and then always give some trait they believe qualifies them to speak.
And this is just a small example of something Dr King was saying, no, it would be the content of your words just like it would the content of your character that would matter. It shouldn't be necessary for people to stand up and say, "Speaking as a..." in order to justify whether what they are about to say is of worth or not. And it's deeply, deeply mistaken as a long term strategy. Because, as I say, majority populations, I believe, will not tolerate being told basically, "Shut up." And so, I warn about this. But I feel like I warned about it without effect. Because, in the time since I first wrote this, people have just stampeded exactly down the dangerous, disastrous path that I'm trying to warn against.
Nick Cater: Martin Luther King Jnr insisted that black people should be good citizens. That civil rights could not be separated from civic responsibilities: to obey the law, to pay one’s taxes, to have a citizenly regard for the rights of others. Harvey Milk, the leader of the Stonewall movement, made similar arguments about the rights of gay citizens.
The Black Lives Matter movement is very different. It’s about burning and looting cities, ripping the social fabric apart rather than making it stronger.
Douglas Murray: Yes. Well, that, as I warn about... I think I may be the first writer to have pointed this out in my... As you know, my take of these identity issues, one by one. I do gay first because it's the one crampon I have on the wall of social justice theory. Not that I get any credit for it, of course, from my opponents. I say in the gay chapter, that opens the book, there was always a strand in gay liberation, gay rights, which presented being gay as not just something that, as I think of it as being, just something some people are and it's a really rather uninteresting characteristic. But actually, as a foundational thing from which a whole political project then emerges. So this is what I describe as the gay and queer divide. Gays just basically want to get on with their lives and do all the same things everyone else does. And queers believe that being gay is just the first step and then after that, you've got to bring down capitalism and introduce Marxism and a whole load of other stuff.
Most gay people are not on board for that project, but there was always a radical fringe who thought that was the point. And it's the same thing in the feminist area. I take on in the second chapter in The Madness of Crowds the races between the sexes. And I partly do it because I think it's totally impossible that we have this situation where men are not allowed ever to talk about women. I have this really old fashioned view that the sexes have got to get on. It's probably good for the future of our species if they do, or at least find some kind of compromise. And it can't be this dangerous cancelling for men and women to talk about relations between the sexes.
So this is what I describe as the gay and queer divide. Gays just basically want to get on with their lives and do all the same things everyone else does. And queers believe that being gay is just the first step and then after that, you've got to bring down capitalism and introduce Marxism and a whole load of other stuff.
And we have always had a problem, though, because just like in gay, there has always been a problem where some feminists have believed that it's not enough just for women to have equal rights. It's not enough for women to be able to pursue whatever it is that they wish to pursue in their lives, this very, very laudable aim. Almost all people agree with this. But there was always a strand in feminism that said, "No, the job of women is then to bring down a whole load of stuff. To bring down patriarchy and the family and capitalism and Marxism." And you get the drift. It's all part of the same pattern.
And there were always people who said this in equal rights on racial matters and other things. And I say, these people, in each of these realms should be regarded with very, very great suspicion and should have been pushed back against a lot more. In each of these cases, there are people and campaigns who have used the call for equality, whether it's LGBT equality, or equality of sexes, or racial equality, have used these traits in order to try to use them as a battering ground to smuggle in behind it a very clear and consistent political and social policy.
And I think that conservatives, in particular, in every country, have been very, very slow on the uptake of identifying that's what it is. It's been going on very clearly in recent months where Black Lives Matter have been using the totally laudable call for racial equality, equal racial rights, equal treatment under the law, and much more, and have been smuggling just behind the front phalanx of that, BLM's core desires, including the bringing down of capitalism, the introduction of Marxism and much more. And these are disastrous things to wind up alongside each other, of course. Because you can get majority populations in all of our properly liberal countries like Australia and Britain behind each of these rights claims. You can get majority populations behind each of them.
There are people who have used the call for equality in order to try to use them as a battering ground to smuggle in behind it a very clear and consistent political and social policy.
We do not live in deeply homophobic societies. We don't live in deeply anti-female societies, or misogynist societies. We do not live in deeply racist societies. And people know that and they have the decency and they want equality. But the minute that these things all get tied up with completely radical attempts to disorientate and then destroy the societies that we live in, you lose people. And that's why I call on anybody in these movements to get these things separated, to separate out the radicals, the Marxists, the anarchists from any legitimate rights claims.
Nick Cater: You see, as I do, a religious element in this movement. I hesitate to use the word religion, because for me it devalues the positive religious faith that is part of our foundation. But a sociologist would say it serves many of the same functions of religion in that it binds people with a common worldview and distinguishes them against non-believers.
Douglas Murray: Yes. To that extent, by the way, I've come to the conclusion that it would be better described as a cult. I agree the Durkheimian lens through which to understand it, is probably a useful one. But, by this stage, we're talking much more about cult-like behaviours than we are religious behaviours. The religious behaviours are not just the binding issues, but the fact that we have so many spillovers from organised religion that appear to be manifesting in the social justice movements. I'm thinking particularly of things like the desire to atone. The desire to alleviate guilt. The attempt to impose guilt and feelings of guilt on others. These are much more very recognisable, particularly recognisable from what one might call spilt Christianity, T.E. Hulme's famous description of Romanticism. This is really spilt Christianity we're dealing with in parts of the social justice movement.
And you see that sometimes, by the way, completely openly. There were scenes in American streets in June, July, where white people were actually flogging themselves in the street. And Black people were coming over and trying to stop them, saying, "We don't want this, brother. We don't want you to do this." And these white maniacs are bleeding and welted on their backs. And you think, "Wow". You can see that occasionally with Shia religious festivals. But I thought, "I wouldn't expect that from white Americans." And here we are with something, as I say, our societies really haven't seen since Middle Ages.
And, so those sorts of things say yes, there is obviously religious type of spilt religion here. The reason I say it's actually cult-like is because the further the social justice thing goes along, the more you can see cult-like traits. For instance, the call to separate from your family if your family do not have the right views. Increasingly, your grandparents are racist and if they do not get with the project, you must break off from your grandparents. By the way, these are wicked, wicked things to say. Wicked, wicked things to do to try to split up families like this. Can you imagine anything more upsetting for a grandparent than for their grandchild to come back from college and tell them, "You've got the wrong ideas, Grandma, Grandpa, and so we can't see you anymore." It's really disgusting on a human level what's being taught at the moment.
But these sorts of traits, the call for companies and others to pay tithes, give over a portion of your income to the approved group, this is cult-like behavior. We would recognise this in any other context. And I'm surprised it's taken us so long to recognise it with these people. But they should be called out for this by now.
Nick Cater: And yet it is repentance without forgiveness. Isn't it?There are many examples of people in your book who are hounded by the offence seekers on Twitter for incorrect thought, but no matter how much they grovel they can never redeem themselves. I’m thinking, for instance of poor old Benedict Cumberbatch who you mention in your book. He foolishly uses the term “coloured actors” if I remember correctly, when what he should have said was “actors of colour.”
Douglas Murray: Well, he had an advantage because poor old Benedict, there were two things. By the way, the thing he was attacked for was just fantastically ludicrous, even by the standards of our highly ludicrous age. He referred to “coloured people” when that month's thing was “people of colour” in America. It was acceptable to say “coloured people” still in Britain. And by the way, the NAACP, the National Association for Colored People in America, hasn't changed its name. So, a different standard was being applied, not for the first time, depending on the speaker.
But the other thing, of course, was that Benedict Cumberbatch did have an advantage. He had a big PR team around him as all mega famous, mega rich Hollywood actors do. Most people aren't in that situation. And if they misspeak by saying something that this week you're not meant to say, even if the NAACP still call the thing you're not meant to say, you most likely just find the whirlwind coming at you and you don't know what's hit you. And it's all over and you haven't got a PR team. And by the time you've scrambled to get any help, you're totally un-salvageable.
So yes, this is one of the most ridiculous trends of the age. And by the way, the one that can be pushed back at most. I've developed a serious lack of sympathy for prominent figures who complain about things they're not allowed to say because I honestly think that our generation is the luckiest generation in history. Every single thing our forebears did before us contained far more risk than anything any of us have to face in our lives. All we have to do is speak and speak the truth as we see it. And I'm just struck by the fact that the bullies... It's nothing more complex than that. The bullies in the social justice movement have persuaded adult after adult to shut up. Not to speak. And it's pathetic.
Benedict Cumberbatch was forced to apologise after mislabelling black actors “coloured”.
Now, I don't think we have to go along with it. I don't see any reason why we do. We could be more organised. We could be cleverer, definitely, in avoiding certain traps. There is no way, that adults in positions of power, and indeed people without any position in our societies, should be this fearful of using language and of discussing ideas. And that's why I say in The Madness of Crowds, I say, identify all these. We've got to be able to talk about LGBT. We've got to be able to talk about men and women. We've got to be able to talk about race. And we shouldn't have them feel like, every time any of us in our private or professionals lives goes on to any of these really interesting and important subjects, we are dealing with an imminent death scenario. It shouldn't be like that.
Nick Cater: Let’s talk about the lurch towards authoritarianism, which is a notable characteristic of Black Lives Matter and similar movements. You may have seen in the state of Victoria right now, we essentially have an authoritarian government ruled by the Chief Health Officer, who has the power to send the police in without a warrant and authorise to destroy their property, seize their property. And the police of course, have been using this with enormous enthusiasm. I mean, last week they arrested a pregnant woman in her pyjamas for a Facebook post. Is that part of the growing authoritarianism you warn about?
Douglas Murray: I think there is some overlap. I think the kind of thing is different in that every time the police in any of our countries get given extra powers, there are always people within them who will abuse them. We have that in the UK. Certainly early on in the COVID crisis, and I think it's still going on to some degree now, but the very beginning in the UK we had things like police telling people not to play in their own gardens. Actually, the public health advice of the government didn't say don't play in your own garden. But you get police who misinterpret or don't understand. And, of course, you get ones who want to overreach. There's always going to be a certain portion of people in the police force who are absolutely thrilled at new powers that come their way.
I'm never particularly thrilled at such powers because I think that always the police misuse them. I think of things like the manner in which counter terrorism legislation in my own country was used for totally other purposes. We had a case where a council once used counter terrorism legislation to fine people putting their bins out on the wrong night. And I say this, not because it's a ludicrous example, but because it's an absolutely typical example of what happens. Police overreach the use of powers once given for other purposes.
But you know a lot more about this than I do. But I've watched this case in Victoria and others there with considerable concern because I actually underestimated the extent to which, at the beginning of the COVID crisis, the public health overreach was going to occur. I thought that there would be a much more reasonable understanding of what the limits were. And I was wrong on that and I think that by now it's becoming clear that there are going to have to be much, much clearer strictures about police overreach than there are. We've had it in the UK. Police officers really overreacting on video with people caught not wearing a mask on a basically empty train carriage. And this sort of thing.
We are going to have to get these delineations right because for the immediate future, the health officials are working in effectively akin to the magisterium that the law existed in until quite recently. And indeed science. A totally unopposable system. This is the one you can't argue against now, public now. And we should be worried about that.
Nick Cater: Were surprised you surprised that scientific debate about something as serious as a pandemic became dragooned into a cultural war?
Douglas Murray: I don't think it happened that quickly. I think it's taken a little time to clarify so that now there is a clear political delineation. It seems that broadly speaking ... I think I'm right in saying this is the same in Australia. But certainly in America and Britain, broadly speaking, the left remains, for instance, very pro-mask and the right is a bit more sceptical of masks. And there is obviously a civil liberties angle to this. I think there are other things going on. And I think we probably can't ignore the extent to which there are spillovers of the specific cultural situation that America is in at the moment. One of the things that Black Lives Matter shows is a reminder that American culture war issues spill over into every other English-speaking country, in particular, with extraordinary force, very fast. The British police don't have the problems the American police do but we get the protests anyway.
And I think it's the same with the divisions over COVID, political divisions. In America, the political divisions are clear and they are clear and have been throughout. Whereas, again, in Britain, like Australia, there was a degree of political unanimity from the beginning. In America there was not at any stage political unanimity because America is in an election year. And a number of Democrats saw that this was a means to get Donald Trump out of office. And so, at this stage, everything, including the wearing of masks or the non-wearing of masks, is a deeply political issue, a politicised issue. And it's all down to what happens in November. I honestly believe that there are Democrats, for instance, who are actually content with continuing to crash the American economy because they believe it's the best means to get Donald Trump out of office in a few months' time.
And I think that versions of that argument, versions of that political divide, that right-left divide, have spilt out into all of our countries. But there is also, obviously, an underlying issue where people on the right, or a certain proportion of the right, libertarian right, you might say in particular, have always been sceptical of government and further government overreach because they believe they know where that always goes. But yes, it has politicised and I think these are two, at least, of the main reasons why.
Nick Cater: Talking of cancel, can you explain to us why Tony Abbott, our erstwhile former prime minister, with great accomplishments to his name in trade, became such a target of hate in the British media recently? All sorts of horrible and completely untrue things are being said. What's going on?
Douglas Murray: It's just the craziest thing that's happened in the last few days. Can I give a quick example? Before this happened, we live in a weird, weird culture for example of all this for some time in the UK. We had it with my late friend, Roger Scruton, 18 months ago or so, when the government here tried to appoint him to an unpaid advisory position on building commissions in the UK. And this unpaid advisory position was highly controversial when he was put into it. And the leftists just came for him and eventually they really tried to destroy him. And they called him all the names of the age. And, fortunately, his career was saved. But they tried everything. Threw everything at him. And I mention that because something very similar happened with Tony Abbott. And by the way, I said something very similar to what I said about the Scruton example with the Abbott example.
Former prime minister Tony Abbott became a target of hate in the British media recently.
Last week, the very lazy British broadcast media finally get on to discovering Tony Abbott because there was this rumour that he was going to be involved in British trade negotiations. By the way, I should stress, I admire Tony Abbott enormously. I think he is a remarkable politician. I've seen him up close a number of times in Australia and elsewhere. He is, of course, anyone who has become prime minister is by nature, this is to achieve the absolute top rank in politics. And to think that such a person would be willing to help Britain in trade negotiations, being so experienced as he has been in that in Australia, and so successful in Australia, is something this country, my country, Britain, should take as an enormous compliment. It's something that I personally have stressed. I think we should feel very proud and grateful for. Grateful. Remember that?
Anyhow, of course, the broadcast media doesn't operate like that. It operates on a gotcha paradigm. And a very ignorant journalist from Sky News in Britain, which is very different from Sky Australia... Sky News in Britain has become a deeply woke organisation, very unwatchable channel. It has a presenter called Kay Burley, who the other morning just started accusing Tony Abbott of being... And we could all sing the song in exactly the same order, so let's do it. He was accused of being a homophobe, of being a misogynist, of being wrong think. Oh, he is, of course, a climate change denier. I don't think she said he was a transphobe, but I'm sure she was gearing up for it.
And I watched this with just amazement at any journalist being able to embarrass themselves this much. But what was more worrying was that she was doing this to a British minister. In that case, a very weak Conservative, Matt Hancock who was just blustering his way in response. And instead of saying, "You're defaming a great friend of this country and a great man," sort of said, "Well, he knows about trade and I don't know about misogyny, homophobe and all these things. But obviously homophobia and misogyny is terrible and climate change denial is terrible." And this sort of thing. So these very weak conservative politicians did that for a couple of days and it caught on. The Guardian, our main left wing propaganda rag in the UK, although that does not sell very well. I should stress, by the way, The Spectator magazine outsells Guardian now.
We’re pleased with that figure, by the way. So the failing Guardian ran on its front page, "Questions over misogynist Abbott trade role". By the way, eventually, the British government did show that it had some balls and appointed Tony Abbott, quite rightly, to the post they wanted to. But there was clearly a wobble at some point on Thursday or Friday. I made an intervention at The Spectator saying how preposterous this was and saying, as I said with Scruton, by the way, if you can't appoint Tony Abbott, you can't appoint anyone. If a former prime minister of our closest ally isn't appointable, then no one is appointable. Who do you think is going to make the mark if Tony Abbott doesn't? And how low grade do you want to go? Do you want to find somebody who has never achieved anything in their life and never said anything and has a totally clean track record of exactly all of 2020 social beliefs and weirdly somebody who expressed 2020 social beliefs throughout their lives.
These are preposterous demands. And, of course, in the case of Tony Abbott, they were lies that were being spread about him. The broadcast media, particularly Kay Burley and Sky News, were just broadcasting lies about him. They didn't know anything about Tony Abbott. And here's the thing, and as I said in defence, not only is it the case that if you can't appoint Tony Abbott to such a role, you can't appoint anyone. Secondly, it's deeply ungrateful and dishonest of the British media to act in this way when somebody is doing Britain a favour and an honour to wish to serve and to help this country at a very important moment in our history.
But thirdly, I don't give a damn anymore. I am fed up with it like, I think, a lot of people. I was fed up of seeing my friend Roger Scruton gone over like this. I'm fed up with seeing Tony Abbott gone over like this. I don't care any more. As I said, for all I care, Tony Abbott could be a fire breathing Paisleyite on the issue of sodomy. He could have spent decades walking around with placards like Ian Paisley. I wouldn't care. He could still be the best trade ambassador. And particularly, I don't care when it's dishonest claims saying things like, he once said something about women in the late 1990s that Julia Gillard then, 12 years ago, in order to get herself out of a corner, claims means he doesn't like women.
I don't believe this anymore and we shouldn't believe it. And we shouldn't fall for it. But these are the spell words of our time and they chuck them out at everyone. They did it to Tony Abbott. Thank God it didn't work on this occasion. But they do it to everyone and it's high time that more adults stood up against this and said, "No. You don't get to use these rights claims as weapons to beat people with and win a war on dishonest terms." And I'm delighted this was resolved, but I am very angry still that it was possible for a Conservative government to wobble in the face of opposition like this. We have a 80-seat Conservative majority in the UK and sometimes you get the impression that we live under completely Labour Party control.
Nick Cater: Doug, there’s so many discussions that arise from your book, we’re clearly not going to get through all of them. Let's just encourage people to read the second edition which has been just been released.
But your mention of that fine journal The Spectator, which of course has an Australian edition, reminds me that I was recently censored on Facebook for posting a piece pointing to a Spectator Australia article. I should confess that the piece was by my wife, who had written about the great medical research, including here in Australia, that is finding promising new ways to treat COVID-19 without a vaccine. What’s offensive about that?
Douglas Murray: That's very interesting. You're not the first victim of anti-Spectator bias. Spectator phobia one might call it. It's rife in the social media companies, this particular phobia. I occasionally have readers who write to me and say they've been banned from Facebook for a time or suspended for sharing an article of mine. And it always makes me feel absolutely terrible, by the way, because I feel like somebody who has brought unhappiness into another home, brought a problem into somebody else's life. But, of course, it's not my fault and it's not the reader's fault. Just like it isn't your fault and it's not your wife's fault. It's the fault of the social media companies.
And as you know, in The Madness of Crowds, I write a chapter on tech because I spent a certain amount of time in Silicon Valley trying to work out what's been going on. Tech is doing a lot of things in our lives that we've underestimated. And one of the most striking is, of course, that at this stage, the tech companies are finding themselves doing something that I don't think they did anticipate. They should have anticipated it, but I don't think they did anticipate, which is, they ended up having to be, in their view, a sort of censor. Or, they had to end up behaving like publishers behave, decide what is acceptable in their publication. Now, by the way, this is a basically impossible task if you're Facebook because there's too much material. It's not like editing a magazine or a newspaper. Millions and millions of people are on the platform. And you just can't do it. And I think it's this fool's errand. My own view is that the social media companies can make sure that illegal things do not go on, i.e. you can't put bomb-making manuals on social media.
They desire to have a power and do have a power which is deeply, deeply disturbing because, in my opinion, absolutely nobody at Facebook or any of these companies is remotely qualified to decide what you or I or anyone watching can know.
But what they've done consistently is to go for everything a step below that and then a step below that. And there are several reasons for that, I should stress. The first is a very practical one. Silicon Valley is, and the people who are the content checkers are almost unanimously like everyone else in Silicon Valley from the political left and the political far left. This isn't just anecdotal. This has been demonstrated. The Obama administration, when the Democrats lost in America, all those people who worked for Obama went to Silicon Valley. Same in the UK. Liberal Democrat leader, Nick Clegg, former Deputy Prime Minister, failed as a politician in the UK, immediately gets hoovered up by Facebook and becomes one of their chief officers. And then brings in all of his failed, third and fourth rate, low grade, ruddy, Lib Dem MP and Lib Dem friends to come and work at Facebook.
So, the people who want to decide what you and I and everyone else can know and say and read are all of the political left. Without exception. There is even less right wingery in Silicon Valley than there is in academia these days. And so these decisions are all made by the left. And what's more, they're ignorant. They're wildly ignorant. They're kids. This is one of the amazing things. When you see censorship debates in Silicon Valley, I sometimes think these are people who have never read anything. They don't know that we've had all of these debates many times before in our history. We had them in England in the 17th century, we had them in England and elsewhere in the 19th and 18th centuries. We've had them in the 20th century repeatedly.
Facebook and others behave as if we've never had these debates about censorship. And they have actually taken upon themselves the decision to, for instance, decide what people can or can not say about COVID. That's how you get into this preposterous situation that you and your wife are in where the oldest running magazine in the English language, The Spectator, can run a piece. But Facebook, a relatively new, a real upstart by Spectator standards, upstart company of 20 years standing, thinks it can decide that Spectator's content isn't reproducible. Well, to hell with these people. We need to cause a much bigger fuss about it. It's outrageous that they think they can limit the remits of the debate. They know, in my experience, far less than the average member of the public on these matters. Their so-called experts are no such thing. They desire to limit debate. They desire to have a power and do have a power which is deeply, deeply disturbing because, in my opinion, absolutely nobody at Facebook or any of these companies is remotely qualified to decide what you or I or anyone watching can know. Absolutely none of them.
They're not qualified. They're not knowledgeable enough. They're not grown up enough. They're just out of short pants. And this has got to be a much, much bigger scandal because these people have too much power and it has to be taken away from them one way or the other.
Nick Cater: As you say, Douglas, to hell with them. Let’s celebrate the positive things about modern technology, like have conversations with people like you. It’s the next best thing to having you here. Let's hope we start lifting these border restrictions suit and get you back. Thanks very much for joining us.
Douglas Murray: Oh, it's a huge pleasure. And best to everyone there.