Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Can the West Survive? Douglas Murray [Ep. 491]

Episode Date: May 13, 2025

Please join my mailing list here 👉 https://briankeating.com/list to win a meteorite 💥 What happens when a civilization begins to doubt its own foundations, dismissing facts, evidence, and even reason for not being woke enough? In an age where biology, history, warfare, and even science are increasingly shaped by ideology, what does it mean to defend truth at all? Douglas Murray, one of the most influential public intellectuals worldwide, has spent his career warning us that the West is in trouble, not because of external threats, but because we ourselves have begun to question the values that built our ideals, our history, our culture, our civilization, and our sense of identity. His latest work, “On Democracies and Death Cults,” which we’ll discuss today, applies this warning to one of the most politically and morally charged conflicts of all time. It also leads us into the fundamental question of the very purpose of Western civilization. At its core, Douglas Murray’s work explores a universal issue: the battle over what counts as truth. From journalism to biology, we continue to return to the most profound question: how do we guard and protect our most sacred truths in a world that no longer agrees on what reality itself is? — Key Takeaways:  00:00 Intro 01:25 My trip to Israel and death cults  06:09 Judging a book by its cover 12:35 Academic institutions and political activism  28:27 The impact of projection and guilt 34:46 Science, progress, and Western civilization  48:39 The possibility of peace in the Middle East  53:31 How to find courage  55:41 Outro — Additional resources:  ➡️ Learn more about Douglas Murray: 📚 On Democracies and Death Cults: https://a.co/d/c7y845h 💻 Website: https://douglasmurray.net/ ➡️ Follow me on your fav platforms: ✖️ Twitter:⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating⁠⁠  🔔 YouTube:⁠⁠ https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1⁠⁠  📝 Join my mailing list:⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://briankeating.com/list⁠⁠  ✍️ Check out my blog:⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://briankeating.com/cosmic-musings/⁠⁠  🎙️ Follow my podcast:⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://briankeating.com/podcast⁠⁠  — Into the Impossible with Brian Keating is a podcast dedicated to all those who want to explore the universe within and beyond the known. Make sure to follow so you never miss an episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

USAA knows dynamic duos can save the day, like superheroes and sidekicks or auto and home insurance. With USAA, you can bundle your auto and home and save up to 10%. Tap the banner to learn more and get a quote at usaa.com slash bundle. Restrictions apply. What happens when a civilization begins to doubt its own foundations? It starts dismissing facts, evidence, and even reason itself for not being woke enough. In an age where biology, history, warfare, and even science are increasingly shaped by ideology, What does it mean to defend truth?

Douglas Murray has spent his whole career warning us that the West is in trouble, not because of enemies from without foreign threats, but because we ourselves have begun to question the values that built our ideals, our history, our culture, our civilization, our sense of identity. His latest work applies that warning to one of the most politically and morally charged conflicts of all times. He's an associate editor at The Spectator, a prolific columnist, and the author of several best-selling books, including The Madden. of crowds and its most recent book on democracies and death cults is currently the Sunday Times,

number one bestseller. He spent decades challenging ideological movements and going to the places in which he talks about. And he's an ardent defender of civilization and truth. Douglas, I want to start off this conversation first by welcoming you. It's so good to see you. I haven't seen you since we spent the sumptuous week in Florence together. That's right. It's very good to see you again in less auspicious surroundings. Douglas, you may not know it from my last name, but Keating is not a Jewish, last name, but I am in fact Jewish, both parents are Jewish. And I never had a bar mitzvah. My parents were divorced. I grew up in an Irish Catholic home. I loved it very much. I was an altar boy in the Catholic

church, had a wonderful experience there. Many people didn't know that I'm actually born Jewish. And so I never had a bar mitzv. I was actually an altar boy when I should have been preparing for my bar mitzv at age 12 and 13. So when I hit the age of four times 13, I decided I would go to Israel and this time bring my home family and do my bar mitzvah at the traditional location, the Western wall in Jerusalem. And my Bar Mitzvah portion, the Parcia, appears in Deuteronomy. And it starts like this. The parcia is called Netsavim. It says, I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day. I have put before you life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life. If you and your offspring would live. And at that time, Douglas, I read that. It was a month before October 7th. I felt peace was possible.

But I never could have imagined who would choose death? I mean, who in that phrase could possibly want to choose curse and death? But now it seems like many people have. You quote that passage quite often, and it's beautiful, and it brings tears to my eyes when I listen to it. I read it. But tell me, Douglas, what does that passage mean to you? And are there people that really do believe in choosing death? It's a very good place to start.

The answer is yes. Like a lot of things in scripture that all of us in the West, have grown up with, after all, the biblical tradition is one of the absolutely central foundations of the West. And as I often say, like fish in water, we sort of don't realize that some of the things that we presume are perfectly obvious are maybe obvious to us, but not only not obvious to everyone, but also some people, some groups, they have a totally different view, a totally different way of thinking about things. I'm often reminded of that new atheist critique of the Ten Commandments, you know, but these are all obvious. We didn't need to be told not to murder. We didn't need to be

told not to steal. And of course, the counter is, yes, actually people did at the time. Not murdering had to be told to the people because people were murdering. And they had to be told not to steal because people were stealing. Things that we, regard as wrong now, we're not always regarded as wrong. And in the same way, that passage from Deuteronomy that means so much to both of us, seems obvious and yet it is a civilizational fork. Do you choose life that you and your descendants might live, or do you choose another way? And again, most people in the West would think, well, who would choose another way?

surely we just haven't understood them or they had bad childhoods or there's some communication error. But no, what I describe as the death cults, Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Revolutionary Government, they really do believe in choosing death. Not all the time, but certainly on occasion, much of the time, the now late leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nazrallah, said repeatedly, in his unfortunate life, that he used to say, as the heads of Hamas do, as the Iranian Revolutionary Government and his other proxies do, they say things like the infidel.

They love life, and this is their great weakness, because we worship death. And we worship death more than they love life. And that's how we're going to win. And anyone who thought, that was abstract claim or a boast of some kind people didn't really mean, even if they'd ignored everything that had happened before, they should have been able to see on October the 7th what happens when that death cult does what they want. Because on October the 7th, 2023, when Hamas sent

4,000 odd terrorists into Israel to invade it, they worshipped death, they glorified it. They glorified death. They sought death for others and themselves. I explain some of the religious and political junctures that have led a group like Hamas to that place. But yes, it is a fork in the road civilization. And it's one that I think people ignore their great peril. Had past guests into the Impossible podcast, I always do like to take the opportunity to judge their books by the cover. because, you know, a lot of people may not be familiar with your work. I've asked my audience for some questions. You'll get those towards the end.

But I do like to do this because basically we have nothing else to go on sometimes. I mean, I'm familiar with your work and meeting you and knowing you and having an opportunity over years. But take us through the title, the choice of the title, the subtitle and the cover art, as I said, before we start recording, it's not so hard to understand. But please take us through these three major elements of the book. It's really a firsthand account as well as meditation on October 7th and this aftermath. I went to Israel as soon as I could after the 7th in order to see firsthand, speak to people firsthand, visit survivors and relatives of the 1,200 people murdered that day and the 250 taken hostage kidnapped from their homes and from the music festival of Nereim.

and I also give a first-hand account of what I saw in the war that Israel launched as a result of that invasion, in which it had two military objectives, the rescue of the 250 hostages who've been stolen, and the destruction or capture of all the leadership of Hamas. So secondly, it's a first-hand account of the war. But thirdly, it's really a meditation on what I see as being this civilizational divide that. just referred to, I believe that the war in the last 18 months, and particularly the world's reaction to it, has shown a very interesting and for me rather scary vision. Why would it be that on the evening of October 7th, there were jubilant crowds in London celebrating the massacres

that had been going on in Israel? Why the next day on the 8th of October, 2023 in Times Square, Was there a protest of people that I watched celebrating the massacre that was going on as they still hollered and demonstrated and celebrated? What was this? Who could get it so wrong? And as I say, and the purpose of the title is to just draw this line as clearly as possible. Obviously, there are lots of criticisms, any number of criticisms that people make of Israel, as you've make of any country because Israel is not perfect anymore than America is perfect or Britain perfect or Australia. But why when a fellow liberal democracy is attacked in this barbarous

fashion, why should so many people in our own societies side not with the democracy but the death cult, a group that literally worships death that sought to glory in death? And this has been something I've thought about for a long time, obviously, but it brought it into really very sharp relief in the post-October the 7th period. And that period is still going on, of course, because although there are still hostages, including American-born hostages, in captivity in Gaza, the world's attention as so often turned not onto the culprits, but onto the victims, not onto the people who perpetrated the massages, but on the soldiers and others responding to them. And so that's why the title on democracies and death cults is that's why I came to that

title. And the subtitle about Israel and the future of civilization is because I believe, and as I say, I won't give it all the way, but as I say, all the end of the book, you know, this, there's a big question that's always lingered over my mind, as I'm sure it has over many other people, which is we've always had this sort of question mark. If things were to get, very serious again, as they did for our forebears, particularly in Britain, Europe, and America from 1914 to 18 and then 1935, if things would get really serious, would we be able to defend our civilization? Would we be able to step up? And I think that's a good question always to ask yourself, is our generation fit for this? Would we raise ourselves up to the moment? That had

always been in my mind, but it had also always been in the mind of Israelis since the 67 and 73 wars. Don't forget that October 7, 2003, happened 15 years after the surprise attack of Israel's Arab neighbors in 1973. And this question that had been lingering over Israelis has been answered, which is that, yes, the young generation there have been willing to fight, kill and die, in order to protect their people and their country and their faith and their way of life. And I'm very struck by the fact that outside of Israel, the contemporaries of, for instance, the young people dancing the early mornings at the Nova Party found so much common cause, not with the young people raped and murdered and tortured and kidnapped,

but but with the people who did it and I ask why that is why in the wider west there should have been and there are lots of arguments of Palestinian self-determination and much more as a complicated area we can get into but there are arguments for that but even people who think that they would like to prioritize the Palestinian cause ought to realize that in justifying excusing, covering over or celebrating the actions of Hamas. They have put themselves not just against the people of Israel, but indeed actually against the Palestinian people themselves, because this is for them the worst possible thing that could happen to be represented by Hamas.

They voted them in, of course, in Gaza after these were withdrawal in 2005. And still have broad support. This is the worst possible thing for the Palestinian. the people as well. As a professor and scientist exploring the frontiers of the universe, both in the lab and here on The Into the Impossible podcast, I'm always seeking out independent and trustworthy sources of insight. One of my go-to resources beyond the peer-reviewed literature I peruse is the economist. Their journalism is rigorous, global, and refreshingly independent, exactly what curious minds need right now to navigate this complex world. Just this week, I was fascinated by their deep dive

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Douglas, I'm curious if you can dissuade me of this, you know, notion that I have as a member of at least two democratic institutions. One is, of course, the United States, but the other is academic governance as a professor at a top 20 university around the world, the University of California and San Diego. And we have a democratic leadership. You know, my department chair can't really tell me what to do. My chancellor can't really advocate that I take on some research purpose that I'm not willing to do, et cetera, et cetera. I do have academic freedom, although I think

in most cases academic freedom is kind of wasted because very few people actually take true chances. And those that do don't really need the freedom because they could get gainfully employed doing a myriad of other things. And the people that do need it, use it to weaponize typically anti-American, anti-Israel, and sort of anti-Western notions. But that's not my point. I'm kind of meandering here. My point is, I am in an academic institution. Is it a death cult? Because after October 7, we had the same thing. We had outside of our student center, we had the Hamas flag waived. We had students for justice in Palestine basically standing right behind academic senators, you know, or Asian American, many of them. I mean, our campus has a huge population of non-whites

as the dominant, you know, member of the institution as California is. And so, you know, that could be considered wonderful. But at the same time, this was being weaponized soon after October 7th. There was vigils for the martyrs. So, called martyrs, the Students for Justice in Palestine's Instagram account, had this over and over it get. And I'm curious, it wasn't just the students. We have a faculty for justice in Palestine as well, and they'll have protests. And they got arrested. Some of them got arrested. And the ultimate kind of irony for me is that they claim that the University of California, San Diego, is complicit in genocide. And yet, Douglas and yet, when it came to them getting their degrees

revoked and possibly getting suspended, they clamored that they clamored that they, this was somehow unfair. And I want to ask you, you know, if you were, you know, playing this kind of Godankan experiment of what would we do, if I was in 1937, you know, University of Berlin, and it was truly a Nazi institution, and I as a Jew was was mistreated and really appropriated my existence was sort of in question, I would not clamor for a degree from that same institution. And yet we see that at all these top institutions. Why is that? Are we just, you know, I like to say there's a lot of useful idiots. There's a lot of useless geniuses in academia.

What do you make of this whole phenomenon? Is it another form of death cult? It certainly rides side saddle with it. Several things. One is, of course, the deep corruption of much of academia by foreign funding, particularly funding from Qatar, a state that currently still practices, essentially a form of slavery,

which has pumped billions of dollars into a, American, including for American higher education. Qatar, of course, are also on the principal funders and backers of Hamas. And, of course, have hosted the Hamas leadership for many years. The idea that a terrorist supporting state should be free to intervene in American academic life seems to me to be rather extraordinary. But I find very little criticism year by year of this perverting of, American institutions by Qatari money. The second is, of course, that foreign funding groups. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're

built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. I have managed to seemingly persuade a certain number of people. There are a certain number of people who are simply big supporters of Hamas. They love Hamas. They love the KNAs. They love the KNAs. they love the raping, they love the everything. There are some of those, but I don't think they form the majority. I think the majority come along with them, because they make, of course, extraordinary claims, like the complete lie that Israel has been committing genocide, as I mentioned at one point in the book, between 2005 when every last Jew dead and alive was removed forcibly by the IDF from Gaza.

from 2005 these raised were first accused of having a genocide in Gaza to the 7th October 2023 the population of Gaza doubled it would be a strange form of genocide notice that there was no population boom in Bergen-Belsen in the 1940s so first of all it's totally erroneous claims that would be made provable lies that have been mainstreamed and then and this is where some of the actress groups have really got their mojo is the the completely false claim. I mean, it's wild when you think about it, isn't it, that an academic institution could be accused of being involved in genocide. Why have so few people asked, how? How? What does UCLA have to do with Middle East and wars?

Your computer science department works on networking and the CCTV that's used to track and monitor the border fence where a gauzin goes to and gets immediately machine gun to death. These are claims I've heard. And even boycotts of people that have worked in the Middle Eastern peace process have had their labs and offices boycotted, marched against, and so forth. I mean, first of all, of course, it's false on every occasion. I mean, the, but it is an extreme claim that is being made in order to bring proximate pressure as close as possible to home.

And that's all so that whether it's Columbia or you, CCLA or wherever, they can sort of, the students can pretend somehow that they are involved in at the forefront of a civil rights and human rights campaign in their time by claiming that, you know, crazy claims like the ones you just cited or quite often it's that, you know, somebody from the university went and did an exchange program in Israel, you know, I mean, this is, this is wild and tangential stuff. it's fueled a certain number of students and faculty into others into thinking that they have some role at the forefront of the history of their times.

There's lots of things that are odd about that. One is it wouldn't matter to the Israeli government, the idea for anyone else and or should it, what some faculty at UCLA think about Israel's war aims, you know. And I've always said that if any of those people were serious, I mean, really serious, then they would have by now have said, I don't like the way that the IDF is operating. Here are alternative operating procedures for fighting an extremely complicated war in a highly densely built-up civilian area in which Hamas, a terrorist group,

designated as a terrorist group in the United States of America, as in Britain and other Western countries, has had 18 years to booby-trap the place and build miles and miles of tunnels underneath it, in which they are still holding and torturing, unknapped civilians and continuing to fire rockets and still have arms dumps and much more. Here is my alternative strategy. Would have been what any halfway serious person would have done. But that isn't the case.

They simply think weirdly that they should or can dictate another country's war aims from the far away parts of an American campus, which could not be further removed from the reality. of this conflict and what has brought and started. But the other thing is, of course, is that essentially, and this is a point I made the other week when I launched this book at Columbia University, which is, of course, seen a very large number of protests. One of the things that I think academia should realize about this

is not just that it has been perverted and deliberately allowed to be students and faculty, to be misrepresenting facts and lying. It's also that the very act of protest that is being nurtured and encouraged on so many American campuses is in actual fact the very antithesis of the purposes of academia. I said to the students of Columbia, let me try this out on you, right, but what is a chant? What is a chant that you chant day after day, hour by hour, over and over again? Like, for instance, the chant of Intifada, globalize the Intifada.

Intifada, of course, is where I said, suffered two of them. They are bloody terrorist campaigns in which students sitting at a cafeteria in Jerusalem were blown up at their university whilst having a coffee break. That's what Interfada is. Interfada is a mother getting on a bus in Jerusalem and the bus being blown up by a terrorist. That's what Intifada is. But when people are chanting interfaida or globalize the interfaida or from the river to the sea or any of these other chants, what are they doing? Are they seeking to persuade?

Are they doing what in academia is meant to be the desirable thing, which is you swap ideas, you put forward your ideas, I put forward mine, we can test them, we can we can test which is better and come to some kind of syndicate. of our ideas in whatever area, whether it's humanities, STEM, whatever you like. What is the chanting? It is surely not an effort to persuade because nobody listens to a group saying into Fada, into Fada, and on the ninth time they chant it says, aha, now you've persuaded me. Your brilliant logic and use of wisdom. They say it like this because the attempt is not to persuade but to browbeat.

The attempt is to intimidate, not to persuade, but to intimidate. Now, this is surely the antithesis of what university education should be about. I testified to Congress in June of last year, and I said exactly that. Never once have I felt hatred towards any of my students. I have a lot of Muslim and students from the Middle East have even had Palestinian students. I serve on other committee. Never once have I thought to myself, well, the real thing that is much, most animating me as an academic is my political opinions, and therefore I must make it known,

or I refuse to work with them. It's deliberately politicizing with one of the most complicated and toxic international areas of conflict. It's deliberately toxifying a place which is meant to be non-political. They're leveraging, it seems to me, the unearned media, the promotion, the platform of the university that they attended, but never built up any shred of the credibility of that institution, yet they're trading and trafficking in that for their own political purposes. I would find it wrong if it was about, you know, if it were Jews doing it just the same. I mean, absolutely. It's illiberal, and it's anti-intellectual. I feel like we are we are regressing. Completely. And this is one of the things where I mind that. I mind these sort of secondary places

where this war is being fought, because of course the real war is being fought in the region. but this is why I mind the secondary theatre of conflict, as it were, which is that the deliberate aim of the Qatari and other funded groups to turn what I think of as pretty sacred places actually, academia, cultural institutions and others into places in which you litigate this conflict. And litigated, it has to be said, again, in an incredibly inept and ignorant way.

But the other thing I would say is, just try it with any other group. Look at the extraordinary way in which one of the organizers of the Columbia protests, a group that says that they want not just the destruction of the state of Israel, but the destruction of Western civilization. Imagine you travel to America, you get a visa or a green card, and you say, I'm going to spend all my time calling for the destruction of Israel and the destruction of the country I'm in.

Now, imagine then that one person who's been doing, that gets their green card revoked or whatever. They get all the due process that they wouldn't give to anyone else, but okay, fine. But then to make such people heroes, heroes of the revolution, all you've got to do is try it with any other group. Imagine if America had been unfortunate enough in recent years to bring in a large number of students who had not learned what America have learned, painstakingly over the years, as with the other people in the West, about the importance of tolerance toward minorities and in particular to racial minorities. And imagine it had been the curse of America in recent years to have imported

a large number of people and allowed funding from some crazy white supremacist groups. And people that come to American campuses and spent day after day calling for the lynching of our black brothers and sisters, friends, colleagues, family. neighbors. Their ID card would cease the function within minutes. Right. But imagine if they did for 18 months, they chased black students across campus. They said they should be hanged. They said that all of their people should be killed. That instead of Jewish students being screamed at Princeton and Yale and elsewhere, being told to go back to Poland, that some white supremacist thugs who had moved into America on visas went around saying that all black Americans should go back to Africa

or something equally vile. You think it would have taken 18 months? You think all these people would have been allowed to do it? You think black Americans or white Americans or anyone else would have put up with this crap? Why is it that a movement that is supporting a death cult that seeks by its own descriptions, the genocide of the Jewish people should be regarded with such equanimity and indeed support.

This is a question that the governments of universities across America should at some point be asked to answer because, my God, they've failed to date. You've spoken so eloquently about what I think is the true kind of misplaced empathy, perhaps. And that's, you know, I think you've called it the moral high ground of corpses. You know, the body count is what determines morality. And in no other conflict do we look at that. And of course, you know, comic Dave Smith can invoke, you know, dead babies. And it's the equivalent of, you know, for sunshine and puppies and why are you, you know, for murder and execution. I mean, you couldn't do that with any other topic.

But it seems like it is a sort of human shield on an intellectual or moral ground that they actually practice. as you pointed out on the book, everyone from Hania himself who posed, I remember him posing with his wife in the hospital, almost gleefully celebrating the death of his grandchildren. And I just thought what kind of, again, what kind of monster? Remember, that biblical quote that we began with. It said, so that you and your generations shall choose blessing. Now, of course, they don't believe in the Torah. And you don't have to believe in the Torah.

You're not a Jew unless I'm mistaken. And you're like me, Keating and Murray, you know, are the, of many other. We haven't found any Jewish ancestry in the Murray House. No one goes to Hank's for his spreadsheets. They go for a darn good pizza. Lately, though, the shop's been quiet. So Hank decides to bring back the $1 slice. He asks co-pilot in Microsoft Excel to look at his sales and costs

to help him see if he can afford it. Co-pilot shows Hank where the money's going and which little extras make the dollar slice work. Now, Hanks has a line out the door. Hank makes the pizza co-pilot. the spreadsheets. Learn more at M365 copilot.com slash work. He's perfect, Doug. No, I'm just kidding. But this reasoning based on this is pervasive. And I actually, I don't fault the students, Douglas. I have to say, I don't condemn the students for having opinions. I had, you know, I wouldn't say immoral opinions

necessarily, but I don't believe that they believe that it's immoral necessarily. Some of them are truly evil. I mean, that do wish death upon not only, I mean, they get granular, Doug. It goes down to, you know, we don't, we think police, you know, should be, should be treated evil, you know, like individual members of the community, of the campus should be treated awfully and violently, perhaps. Of course, there's some immoral, reprehensible people, but the faculty, I do consider, because they have a, they should have wisdom. I mean, we never conflate knowledge and wisdom on this podcast, but, but at some level, if you've managed to get so far in, in your career, Although, again, it could be a useless genius instead of a useful idiot, this phenomenon.

But they come off and they'll cite the statistics. And then I'll point out, you know, we walk on campus here and there's a land acknowledgement. On almost every border of this two-square mile on campus, there's a land acknowledgement to the Kumae and the other Indian native tribes. And that's great. What we did to the Native Americans was horrendous. That's true. I don't see my faculty colleagues resigning over this. They don't want to give back the property.

They want to acknowledge it. And it seems to me cheap grace to sort of say, well, Israel is uniquely bad, so I'm going to pile all my opprobrium on them. Well, yes, but as you know, Ryan, in the book, in non-democracies and death cults, I posit a rather obvious explanation for why that is, and why what you've just mentioned is, in fact, connected to it, which is that I think that much of things we have seen in the West outside of Israel in the last 18 months is projection on a colossal scale. That is that people have been told that they are guilty. They, in modern America, are guilty of colonialism, white supremacy, apartheid, genocide, ethnic cleansing. Transphobia. Yeah, I mean, Hamas aren't enormously bothered by the transphobia.

They have a pretty strict view on the whole LGBT thing. But let's just park that for a moment. What is interesting about the lies that have been told about Israel, which I dismantled one by one in the book, but what is interesting about the lies that people have been telling about Israel is that they are exactly the things that I described in my last book in the War on the West

that were being claimed about people being born in 21st century America. And I said in the War on the West, it is so dangerous to teach people that they, by didn't have been born from the United States of America, in 21st century, late 20th century, should be deemed to be guilty of crimes that occurred centuries before they were born. And I said one of the reasons why this was dangerous was because, and I leaned on Hannah Arendt's thought for this point, it sets up a system which is unresolvedable because if you have not done the thing, then there is, and no one is alive who has suffered the thing,

then you are being asked to feel a guilt that is unresolvable and permanent. And I said in the War on the West that we would see what happened if this wasn't unlocked, if we didn't stop telling people that an American living in California in the 21st century is living on stolen land. One of the consequences we've seen earlier than I thought, actually, when I wrote the War on the West, one of the things I thought what has happened, earlier than I thought has been But the people have now, large numbers of people, particularly adults on universities. I don't think useless geniuses is a suitable term for most.

I think useless idiots is certainly. But one of the things we've seen is them projecting what they have been told that they're guilty of onto the state of Israel. So Israel is the country that they accuse of doing all of these things. And you cannot tell me that the vast, vast petrol that, the diesel that has fueled this movement in the last 18 months has not in significant part come from that fact that if you had this unresolvable guilt, the last 18 months, you have a way to alleviate it. Finally, you can accuse a state you do not know or understand of precisely the sins that you have been told that you are guilty of. And then you can help expiate those sins by trying to

bring down and destroy the country that you can accuse of being guilty of them in here and now. And I have a lot of news to the people who've been living under that guise of psychological projection. The first is that they are wrong on everything, facts-wise. The second thing is that they are wrong morally. In every way, what they are trying to do is morally repugnant. But the other thing is, guess what? Jewish state does not exist in order for you in the rest of the West expiate your own psychological problems. You have daddy issues, then don't take them out on the state of Israel or any other state.

If you have mommy issues, don't take them out on the Jewish state. You have deep psychological problems and you are very unhappy with your life and you're not being very well educated and you're getting heavily into debt to become more malevolent and stupid, then don't think you're going to get time off in order or because of your desire to attack Israel and lie about it and defame it. It's utterly preposterous, and I think that the, as I've said for many years in different contexts, the absence of adults in the room has made this infinitely more appalling than it would have been already. So few adults on the faculties.

on councils of various universities have actually even bothered to stand up and say what the hell do you think you're doing? Or they did. You thought this was your run club era. Turns out it was more of a thinking about run club era. The good news? Someone's marathon training is about to start.

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They're doing it too late. Yeah, I mean, what you're saying is so resonant. You may not know, or maybe you do. You're so erudite about all things, but in particular about things in Israel and things of Jewish relationship. But the holiest day on the calendar is, of course, Yom Kippur. And it's a day of atonement. But the atonement that day is to God.

It's not to man. And the point is that because you can expiate your sins to God one day of the year when he's receptive to it. I mean, we can get into Kabbalah some other time when we are in person again. But the point is you could always confess your sins and bow not to do it again to your fellow man. He's right next to you. So the fact that you don't do it, that you don't resign because we took the Kumai off of this land that I'm sitting on right now on campus. Because you're not willing to do that, you're a fraud, and you're a charlatan. And it's a performative thing that really serves you.

And that's the worst type of atonement, one that's done for self-aswagement, but not to really make anything better with your fellow man who you've wronged egregiously by your own admission. But I do think that's so resonant and brilliant that you made that point, that it's sort of a transference. And along with the projections that you mentioned in the book, they accuse Israel of committing a Holocaust. They accuse Israel of colonialism. These are the most colonial. These are the most genocidal. These are the most awful. I mean, Iran, it's incredible, the proxies that they have colonized to the destruction of these places.

I mean, I have good friends that grew up in Lebanon and elsewhere. Yeah, what they've done to that country is unbelievable. And it had the promise. And so does Gaza. And so, you know, could have been as many hope, the Singapore, but I think, you know, but for the values. And I think I do want to pivot just because I know your time is short. I can't resist, you know, talking about science with you. But there is also, as you wrote about in the war in the West, you know, the, the, the,

I always joke that the pinnacle of Western civilization is general relativity. But because really to describe, if I were to teach you general relativity, I mean, I know you probably already know it, but our mutual friend Eric Weinstein is visiting, if we were to teach you, it would involve a lot of metaphors, analogies, history, and the culture that brought that to bear. It's not really a coincidence that it did happen to occur in the West. And that tradition is, of course, under attack. at the same time, I was always naive and in a sense that science would be free of this,

you know, free of the dictating of ideology to dictate truth. And of course, you know, Lysenkoism and other things has happened, but it hasn't happened here. But even in your native country with your native son, Isaac Newton, who Einstein said about Isaac Newton. And Einstein was an egomaniac, you know, par excellence. He said Isaac Newton contributed more not just to math, physics, you know alchemy and religion. By the way, do you know what Newton claimed his greatest feat was, Douglas? Was it the theological works? It was, well, his greatest accomplishment he claimed was that he died like as a hero, Jesus Christ, a virgin, because that was the only way he could emulate Jesus. And in fact, it was a form of imposter syndrome that he always had that he couldn't live up to Isaac Newton. That was the

only way he could. But Einstein had imposter... You mean that Newton would live up to Jesus, yes. Yes. So if you can, right? But Einstein, said about Newton that he was the greatest, you know, force of good, not just in science, but in Western civilization. Can you talk about the inextricable linking between science, progress, and Western and in general, human civilization, and what threat they may still be under to this very day? Well, it's very interesting. You know far more about this than me, but my observation has been that for some years, the cathedral of knowledge in a number of subjects started to, decay and was then forcibly pushed down by relativists, opponents, competitors and much more.

And that this was done through a set of theories and sub-theories. But that STEM was expected to be immune from this. For instance, a critical theory would, you know, both. the English literature department, the French literature departments, than the history departments, the geography departments, but that it would leave STEM alone. And I think that, again, I've charted some of this in the war on the West, as well as in the madness of crowds, that to the great concern of people in STEM, as well as those of us not, the realization this could even go there was a pretty horrifying one, because, of course, many things in humanities are not provable in the

same way that physics or math is provable. There is a different standard of tests in the scientific method. And the interesting thing in recent years has been watching even that come under assault so that we have things like other ways of knowing, which is, I wrote about this the war in the West, the absurdity of things like equitable math, where it is pretended that there are other systems of knowing and that the Western scientific method is just one of them. And of course, like a number of other things I read about in that book, it's an incredibly ignorant claim that is being made. But it's a number of other things. essentially is, again, another example of the politicizing of everything, the decision that, you know,

racial politics or gay, the sort of spawn of queer and gender theory should be applied everywhere, by it not solving anything anywhere, but that it should also be applied to scientific methods and so on. And what it has ended up with is a number of things. One is ignoring of the fact that the reason why the Western scientific method works, why it has been popular, why it is still learned and taught around the world, is not because it's Western, or it was come up with by white men or that worst of all things dead white men.

It's there and it's taught because it works. There is, as I said rather provocatively in that book, But there is a reason why, you know, when somebody has cancer, when they say they're going for alternative medicine, you know it's very nearly the end. Steve jobs right now. Right. Because Western medicine is the best chance you've got.

Again, not because it's from the West, not because dead white men and dead white women who involve in creating it. But this is the best chance we've got. at the moment. And everybody knows. At the moment, you say, I'm going to do some Chinese holistic medicine, you know, got walls to live. But, and we also know this because if we seek a vaccine, for instance, we go through the Western scientific method to find it. Nobody said when the world was searching for a vaccine for the COVID-19 virus, nobody said,

Look, let's see what the, I mean, again, this is going to offend some people, but it's just fact. Nobody said, let's go and see what the aboriginals are doing with their medicine in Australia and see if there's something we can learn. Or the converse being true. Why don't they teach critical gender studies in the University of Lagos, which is a top university? And why do they teach one plus one equals two at the University of Lagos mathematics department? These are universal truths. So it seems to me if these critical theories were universally applicable, they would be taught in every country on earth, just like physics. And as it is, everybody else is laughing at us for being so incredibly retarded. That's right. I want to take a call back to the time that you and I have spent together in Florence, you know, not once but twice.

And, you know, we walked underneath Bernalese's dome and wandered the halls of the Afizi and even dined and these sumptuous environments. You make our life sound awful. pretty nice. Well, hopefully we'll be doing it more frequently coming up. But one, of course, very illiberal and anti-intellectual event happened not far from there. I didn't get a chance to take you there. That's, of course, Galileo's final resting place, which is in Archetri above the Arno, above Florence, right there. And his house, his final home is located there. And I've been there many times and had many great occasions. Of course, you bump your head, you're tall, and you'll bump your head on the doorways that are only five.

foot four inches tall. But of course, he was confined. He wasn't tortured. I mean, it's pretty sumptuous place. You know, Bernie Madoff or Sam Bankman-Fried would gladly trade or Puff Daddy trade their cells for Galileo's olive orchard and so forth. But he was really kind of a dangerous individual that threatened the prevailing narrative, of course, all across parts of Western Europe. And so he was saved in a sense. He published a dialogue and he was convicted of suspicion of heresy. Most people think he was conspicted of heresy. No, no, it was only suspicion of heresy. And in fact, he was never really pardoned. Pope John Paul, who I love, he said that that Gallé was right, but they never really apologized to him. Are there such things

as, you know, to steal man our, you know, our adversaries, maybe intellectual adversaries, are there types of suppression that are still going on? Perhaps it's for a good reason. I mean, a pandemic, you know, is awfully a good reason to keep people safe. Will truth become punishable again, will that possibly occur again as it did with COVID? But I think we're still reckoning with that. What do you fear? And then I want to ask you another, you know, because I see you as the world's most optimistic pessimist or pessimistic optimist. I can't decide which one you are today. You're kind of the Schrodinger's cat of optimism. But tell me, after we get to this, you know, this first question I have, whether or not truth can become punishable, I do want to ask you

what gives you hope. But first, do you fear for the scientific method as being weaponized, abused, probably used to control and hold people in contempt? Or is that a relic of the bad part of Western culture, which is, you know, thankfully behind us in that sense? I don't believe in endless progress. I mean, I'd like to. I just don't observe that it's inevitable. I think there are too many cases around the world of countries and societies reverting to terrible, terrible things. The country of Iran is a very obvious example. I have many friends who grew up before the 1979 revolution that went backwards. So everything is possible. It's something I think people should just keep in mind a lot more. Progress is not the perpetual inevitable state of mankind. Yes, we can always

repeat mistakes and our capacity as human beings to do so is awesome and made all the worst by the fact that you can make a mistake again, even under the guise of believing that you're avoiding that mistake. I believe it's perfectly possible we could be in a period where scientific methods, scientific progress are squelched. I think that one of the most deleterious aspects of the last five or six years has been the way in which during the pandemic the errors made by parts of the medical community and politicians and others meant that the last cathedral that had been pretty much unassailed was finally up for grabs as well. So, for instance, I think I may have said to you before in private, you know, if the politicians in 2020 had said to the citizenry of their

countries, you've got to stay in your houses and not leave. The media wants you to. If the politicians have said, you must, because all of us politicians want you to, you know, probably, you're probably If you said the professors insist you all remain housebound. We just said, ah, well, we know. But we say the science says, the scientists say, then that's persuasive. I think that the errors that were made then, which I by no means was on top of, is not my area. And I didn't want to opine on very much of it for that reason. But I think that watching the Cathedral of Science suffer the blow because of specific mistakes,

an air of greater general skepticism coming up has meant that, yes, we are in a potential boom time for conspiracy theories, for claims without evidence, for claims of expertise from people who have no expertise, because, well, who cares about experts? Because, you know, look how they got the pandemic wrong and so on. I think we're ripe for that, absolutely. Do you think that there is, Because there is sort of this supernatural expectation of science, though, that there is hope, there is rehabilitation, redemption as possible. Yeah, so how will that be manifested? It will not be done by government edict and it will not be done by bureaucratic insistence. It will be done by extraordinary individuals, which is the history of science with all history.

History is made by extraordinary men and women doing extraordinary things. That's it. Let me ask you one final question. You started your book tour for this wonderful book. It's a difficult book. It's not, especially the audio book, which you narrate so lovely. It's very difficult. I mean, it literally brings tears to one's eyes if one has a shred of sensitivity. And even Jew or not Jew, obviously, just humanity, a shred of humanity. When we look out, you know, kind of on the broad future, will we ever have, you know, sort of an opportunity, as I said at the beginning, I felt there was an opportunity when I was there and September 7, 2003. But that was heavily biased by the fact that I was meeting Israeli Arabs, Drews, you know, taxi drivers and having meals at, you know, Ethiopian restaurants were, you know, half the workers in Jaffa were from, you know, or Arabs that were Israeli citizens, you know, full citizen. And I thought, oh, you know, they want peace, we want peace. They're very different than me, but there's something, you know, positive to come. I feel like this is, you know, You're the astronomer royal of the UK, Lord Martin Rees, who I've had on many times,

he's got the best job in the world. He gets to tell King Charles his horoscope every day. What Lord Martin said is, you know, falsifiability gets a little bit too much, you know, of a sway in science, you know, because we talk about that as the sine qua non of science. Because he'll say things that are, you know, he could say very easily things that could be true or could be false easily. He would say the stock market will fluctuate or there will be turmoil in the Middle East. You know, it's kind of this perpetual motion machine.

Do you see there ever being an opportunity, especially given what we've seen the last 18 months, that there could be a resolution, that we could be living amongst each other in peace, or the citizens of those countries could be living together in peace? Or is this one of these extremely intractable theories of everything that may never succumb to the human mind or human progress? Well, I don't think that anything much gets resolved if the Palestinians get another state. I think it will be an even lifelong supporters of the Palestinian cause, take this view now, that at best it will be another fatal state, most likely just another proxy state for the Iranian revolutionary government. I think that Hamas killed the two-state solution on October 7,

2023. And there's nothing magical that will happen either for the Palestinian people or indeed for the wider region if Palestinians do get another state. I think that the people who think that somehow every injustice on earth is going to unlock. once that issue is dealt with are completely diluted and simply don't understand the region and don't understand the world and the idea that anything else will get better outside the regional within with that being solved i think it's just now is is a myth it's a sort of form of magical thinking it's a form of modern political alchemy i think that's regrettable but that's what it is as it happens in the region there are lots of things that are going well and there are lots of normalization

agreements that have occurred in the last decade and will occur in the next few years. And that's great. There is still the issue of the Palestinians in Gaza and in Judeo de Someria. And we'll see in Judeo and Samaria, they basically have a state, the PA runs the Palestinian areas of the West Bank. But no, I don't believe anything magical or very important happens. I think that the people who think it would, they should apply themselves to another international conflict and see if it would work out that way. I mean, you know, as I've said a lot in recent weeks, the government of Turkey that constantly accuses the Israelis of being occupiers, currently occupies the northern half of the right person has done

for half a century. The fact that half of an EU member state is occupied by a NATO member country is to me an extraordinary appalling thing. But if people with this magical thinking want to apply it elsewhere, let them do it there. Let them see if they holler and campaign and cry and attack and insult and chase people relating to the Turkish occupation of northern Cyprus, which is ongoing, where nobody seems to see any resolution to it. They want to occupy themselves with that, apply their pressure to that, and just say,

see if you solve anything, if you solve anything. Because my suspicion is you'll solve exactly nothing, nothing at all. And you'll learn in that process that the magical alchemy-like thinking you've been engaging in in relation to Israel is equally worthless. And pointless, not just for the people of Israel, but for the Palestinians and the wider Arab world. I wish that those people had any ability to be self-reflective for that. Don't see it.

Douglas, with your forbearance, one final question. The podcast is named after a famous quote by your countryman again, Sir Arthur C. Clark, who said that the only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible. He said many things I like to drop on my colleagues from now and then like for every expert, there's an equal and opposite expert. I like to lay that on my department chair. I want to ask you in the context of that statement, what would you tell, you know, a 20-year-old Douglas, Murray, to give him the courage in a 20-second meetup that you might have with him, your 20-year-old self, what would you tell him to give him this incredibly beautiful, delicate gift that you so

almost uniquely have, unfortunately, is very rare of courage, to give him the courage, to do as you've done, to go into the impossible. I advise him to do what I've tried to do, actually, which is I've spent a lot of my life, perhaps unwittingly, surrounding myself with befriendingly. getting near to people I think are courageous. And I find that it's a good piece of advice for anyone young, let alone my younger self, is to say just, you know, go towards courageous people,

people you see as courageous in whatever way. They might be academically courageous. They might be scientifically courageous. They might be explorers who are courageous. They might be heretics who are courageous. For any imaginable number of discipline, but orient yourself towards courageous people because you'll hope some of it rubs off.

I think that I get enormous, I say that in this book, I say this on democracy's and death cults, that the encouragement that you can get yourself by being in the proximity of heroes, real heroes, deserving heroes, is tremendous. And it's been one of the great honors of my life. It's not been by accident, though. It's been by a form of design,

and I urge young people to do that. Don't orient yourself towards the, the victim and how the people who want to be the biggest loser and the biggest victim and and so on don't do that don't waste your time with those people get past them and get on to all the meant to be doing well douglas until we meet again in florence or elsewhere and enjoy a glass of grapa it's been a pleasure it's an honor to know you and consider you an influence on me and i very much appreciate this book and all your writings and your work and please from strength to strength as we say. Colhaka vote, all the credit to you, Douglas. Thank you, Brian.