A Tribute to Douglas Murray
The richly deserved downfall of the self-appointed elites should not mean the elevation of the anti-experts. America is a nation hostile to arbitrary, artificial hierarchies. The rigid class structure that stifled Europe never took hold here. Voices of the European Enlightenment and American Revolutionary Founding Fathers referenced a natural aristocracy. It was based on merit, not birth. One did not inherit a superior status. One took advantage of opportunity and liberty to achieve. Neither contempt for the hoi polloi nor communist class warfare eliminated the emergence of the individual. Challenges were often considerable, but the culture accommodated itself to proven prospects for social mobility. A cluster of beliefs bolstered one’s chances. The Judeo-Christian heritage acknowledged the equality of souls in God’s creatures. A Constitutional Republic structured self-governance predicated on a belief in the intellectual and ethical capacity of each citizen while establishing equality before the law. Provisions for public and private education improved the likelihood that self-reliance, a work ethic, and fortitude would blaze the path to the American Dream. The likelihood of prosperity slowly edged out widespread poverty.
Americans are traditionally skeptical when it comes to believing or bowing to authority. There is an aversion to authoritarianism. An open frontier, whether manifested in manifest destiny, space, entrepreneurship, exploration, the arts, or leadership, fortified the inclination to question the powerful. Credentials were frequently less impressive than accomplishments. When confronted with arrogant elitists, enshrined experts, or sacred cows, Americans tended to listen to the boy who told the Emperor he wasn’t wearing any clothes. Americans who still relied on their hands to make, shape, fix, craft, or design were not put off by degrees, diplomas, plaques, and accolades. A coat of arms meant little. Achievement meant a lot.
The sorry examples of the COVID-19 cover-up, disastrous lockdown, and vaccine mandates that made a mockery of science, the empty claims of climate change, the absurd racism of cultural Marxism, and the insane intersectionality of inherited traits recalled the worst historical examples of arbitrary characteristics assigning one’s place in society. After decades of political correctness, cancel culture, diversity, and WOKE ideological inroads on freedom of speech, Americans returned to a skepticism verging on cynicism. They found little reason to believe the Fake News, which jettisoned credibility for politicization and weaponization of their platforms. Americans abruptly ended their multi-decade infatuation with higher education. Academia installed propagandists in the seats of professors. Unions, corporations, foundations, NGOs, Hollywood, sports, oligarchs, and ideologues insisted on a narrative that Americans concluded was false. Once again, Americans questioned mendacity and coercion. They discovered pervasive corruption that dismantled their trust in institutions. After years of willful blindness, Americans opened their eyes to jaw-dropping evidence of Democrat avarice and perfidy.
Ivy League schools coasted on decades of scholarship and inquiry past their shelf life. Resembling secular madrassas, universities awarded inflated grades and degrees upon ineligible applicants. Affirmative action quotas, diversity set-asides, and other attempts to purge white men from their ranks undermined the esteem they once enjoyed. DEI candidates for political office frequently revealed their utter lack of competence, adding insult to injury as they flaunted worthless degrees. The warm welcome communist, Islamist, and globalist “embeds” in Academia afforded to pro-Hamas pogroms and their indifference to discrimination against Jewish students made more Americans question the value of a college education. Trump’s government is currently defunding some recalcitrant institutions that refuse to dismantle DEI and pro-terrorist encampments. The value of expensive immersions in ideological, virtue-signaling centers of anti-Americanism is increasingly in question. What was once elite, in the wake of a radical LGBTQIA agenda attacking masculinity, seemed effete. People who were unable to define a man or a woman lost support. The average American had no difficulty distinguishing XX from XY. So much for Academia.
Americans have always recognized the ability of the untutored and the auto-didact to figure things out. Common sense plays an important role in the culture. Critical thinking skills support the unwillingness of many to accept something as the truth just because an expert says so. You might have more money, more years in school, and a more impressive resume, but that doesn’t necessarily make you right. Refusal to submit to the experts is one of the characteristics of a democratic people. The primacy of the individual conscience is paramount. Expertise does not ensure truth.
There are, however, concerning trends developing among the conspiratorial left and the conspiratorial right that elevate moral equivalence, treat all opinions as equally valid, and threaten rationality. Discourse is contaminated by the assertions of the ignorant that they know as much as the learned. This trend has been germinating for some decades. It erodes the standards, criteria, and methodology that lend substance to scholarly subjects. While anyone in a free society can opine on any subject, his opinion doesn’t necessarily convey experience, observation, experimentation, substantiation, replication, or sanity.
Because you have the right to say something doesn’t necessarily mean you should repeat it endlessly if the consequences are detrimental to the truth. The decibel level should not be mistaken for documentation, nor should it replace civil discourse. Recourse to ad hominem attacks, profanity, and violence prove the absence of rational argument and the absence of a commitment to sound reasoning. Thugs who shut down speakers on campus are not advocates of free speech. They are carrying out the street game for which Democrat Congresswomen are calling. They are marginalizing calls for assassination as appropriate birthday presents. When a Rutgers poll shows that 55% of “liberals” favor the assassination of Trump and a somewhat smaller number favor killing Musk, we have turned free speech into demonic incitement to violence. Disowning the poisonous fruits of one’s poisonous tree is not evading responsibility.
Decades ago, non-historians argued that oral history had the same significance as scholarly historical studies. Historiography imposes some demands. The purpose of academic standards in pursuit of a subject matter is not to restrict as much as it is to impose rigor. Oral history cannot replace traditional sources of empirical evidence or secondary source analyses. It is one more way to determine what happened. Unfortunately, in education and in many subject disciplines, an innovation is “doomed to success.” It quickly supplants other methods of ascertaining the truth. You might interview a person whose intentions are upstanding but whose memory is faulty. Simply reiterating unchecked facts or insights is a disservice. As the tale of “Rashomon” illustrates, each individual might reconstruct a significantly different version of what transpired.
In other fields, the scientific method imposes standards to develop and test theories and ascertain truth. The argument that truth can only be approached but never completely established does not logically eliminate the need for rigor. Literary explication, analysis of the arts, and considerations of creativity likewise demand definitions and criteria. The argument that a man on the street has just as much legitimacy as the scholar is patently absurd. A homeless schizophrenic may rail loudly against the control of the elite without enlightening his audience. A Nazi student providing his oral history assessment of Hitler does not necessarily evaluate the Nazi movement on a level worthy of consideration or commendation.
An untutored person might offer a singularly perceptive view of any issue. He is just as likely to offer an ignorant alloy of arrogance, amnesia, and warped conclusions. You needn’t have a degree to be educated. Many have degrees and aren’t educated. But the alternative is not to learn nothing, to study nothing, to scrutinize nothing. It is not to opine without responsibility. With each speech, Hitler deadened the culture against compassion. With each anti-Semitic diatribe emanating from the right as well as the left, the culture is contaminated. Arguments degenerate into assaults. America is polarized by partisans of both extremes who sound more like each other as they embrace conspiracies.
Conspiracies are fed by know-nothings who debunk those in the know without delving into the issues. They prefer speaking at length to engaging in debate. They fear confrontations with those who know more than they do. They evade challenges. They are harbingers of hubris who inflict unsubstantiated intellectual malaise on the unwary.
What is the source of extremist rejection of expertise? It is anti-intellectualism. Those who are less capable, covetous of the reputations of their opponents, less conscientious about doing their homework, and unwilling to surrender their egotistic echo chamber long enough to conduct some research are those most likely to succumb to anti-intellectualism. An embittered smile might reveal deep-seated antipathy, perhaps jealousy for a peer who outperformed him. At the other end of the injudicious pendulum swing to elitism is the swing to the equality of all viewpoints. If you ever asked someone for directions who proceeded to give you the wrong ones, you value those with the humility to say, “I don’t know.”
Too few people are willing to say I don’t know enough to have an opinion, or I don’t have enough corroboration to express my opinion, or I’m not comfortable conflating my opinion with the truth. A conclusion might be premature. Years of devotion to Holocaust denial do not compensate for anemic and highly selective “scholarship.” A career in ramping up the volume on conspiracies should not be a source of pride. Yet for a growing number of conservatives and libertarians behind the megaphone, it is. They pose as iconoclasts. They are ideologues. They pretend they are just asking questions. They act as though they have all the answers.
A perfect example of a man devoted to truth who has taken on the elites and the “know-nothings” is Douglas Murray. In his long podcast challenge to Dave Smith and Joe Rogan, he exemplifies the courage of a man willing and able to take on two men who speak with more certitude than their knowledge base justifies. Murray, a man possessed of great reserves of patience, manages to maintain his calm demeanor while squelching the absurd claims of his opponents. He never shrinks from what he knows or shirks his responsibility to counter absurdity. He holds himself and others accountable for their claims. He is tackling the conspiratorial anti-Semitic and anti-Israel positions of the libertarian, conservative, and communist-adjacent right.
Murray has a tradition of traveling, studying, and engaging in investigative journalism to develop and justify his political views. The other two are comfortable in the morass of Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens's virtue-signaling complacency. They are contaminating fields of thought with anti-Jewish conspiracies and Holocaust deniers. James Lindsay is another courageous man who has been taking on the libertarian lunatics and right-wingers who are indistinguishable from left-wingers in their hostility to America, Churchill, and Jews. What they have in common is a sharp turn to the “blame America first” crowd. Ben Shapiro and Dennis Prager, Dr. Jordan Peterson and Dr. Victor Davis Hanson are among those who can be counted on to call out the insane, the evil, the ignorant and the naïve. Too many others who presumably know better are silent. The exorcism of evil is more perilous when few have the temerity to conduct it.
I lack the ability, the background, and the knowledge to debate physics. I question Fauci when he says, “I am the science.” I can figure out when I don’t know enough to engage in meaningful discussion, and I know when I am being snookered. False experts undermine confidence in intellect. Boastful idiots should not be able to persuade the unwary of the existence of conspiracies that have a genocidal track record. Sometimes, the use of judgmental and emotionally explosive language is the tip-off that the conspiracy champion is showing his true colors. Rogan described the Israeli response to October 7, 2023, as “barbaric.” Independent reports proved the low rate of civilian casualties to combat deaths by Israeli forces was unmatched by other civilized or uncivilized nations.
Rogan reverted to a term that conjures up images of atrocity. He did not apply that term to the terrorists who inflicted barbaric tortures on 1,200 Israeli citizens on October 7. He did not go to first causes but concentrated on the response to genocide. He acted as though civilians were never the unavoidable and often intended victims of war, except when Israelis were engaged. He neglected to point out the text messages, leaflets, and other advanced notification of civilian populations the Israelis tried to evacuate from areas slated for bombings. Dresden and Cologne are examples of civilian centers targeted by the Allies. Why? Because Hitler invaded Poland, not because Churchill destroyed Western Civilization. The deification of Tucker Carlson led to the demonization of a great hero. Crushing the will of noncombatants to continue a war effort or continue support of a belligerent government is a necessary component of waging warfare.
When Tucker Carlson trumpeted his condemnation of the US for dropping two atomic bombs on Japan and claimed one bomb targeted Christian Japanese, he showed a stunning contempt for the facts. It took two bombs to persuade Japan to surrender. They were prepared to fight to the death; that would have meant another half million Americans. Tucker would do well to speak to the sons and grandsons of Americans who fought in the Pacific and survived the war, thanks in large measure to Truman’s decision. The emergence of the Soviet Union after World War II owes more to F.D.R.’s decision to side with Stalin rather than Churchill. FDR facilitated the communist replacement of Nazi control over Eastern Europe. Sympathy for Soviet war losses and residual anti-colonial sentiments do not justify FDR’s surrender to communism at Yalta.
When Dave Smith gave vent to his singular revision of history at Israel’s expense, he neglected to point out that Gaza was never Palestinian territory. It belonged to Egypt. Israel took it when it defeated Egypt in one of many wars waged by Arab neighbors. In 2005, it gave that territory, a “Palestinian state” if you will, to the inhabitants who elected Hamas. Civilians and Hamas henchmen destroyed the greenhouses Israeli settlers had left them. Rather than embrace entrepreneurship, they embraced their terrorist Charter. They smashed their chance at prosperity and built tunnels.
Smith is one of those Jews who prefer Jews as victims to Jews as victors. He denounced Israel for 60 years of oppressing Palestinians. He knows nothing about the intervening years, the Soviet/PLO creation of a Palestinian people after admitting they did not exist, and the use of the “Palestinian question” to prevent peace, stability, and prosperity from flourishing in the Middle East. He referred to himself several times as a Jew, as though that absolved him of self-loathing and ahistorical assertions. Rogan, clearly uncomfortable with Murray’s critique of providing his platform disproportionately to conspiratorial critics of Israel, sided with Smith and “corrected” Murray. Rogan was in over his head. Smith spoke a lot but said little. He did not understand Murray’s arguments, nor was he willing to make concessions to facts.
The “average American” has a good track record of taking on and taking down the pompous. Pedantic fools cluster in university faculty lounges. Presumptuous anchors demand unquestioning belief from their audiences; ratings show they are not getting it.
Envious podcast poseurs who profess an expertise they do not possess pedal their empty allegations, spreading slander and stereotypes. Sanctimonious smiles should not convince listeners that they are “cool” or qualified. What they are doing is dangerous. We’ve been here before. Fortunately, we have Douglas Murray . He has the wit to make fun of the clowns. He has the gravity to take the threat they pose seriously. He has the knowledge and acumen to counter their conspiracies. He has the courage to speak truth to those empowered on the left and on the right. We would do well to listen.