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

Episode Date: January 25, 2021

Megyn Kelly is joined by Douglas Murray, author of "The Madness of Crowds" and associate editor of The Spectator, to talk about overcoming tribalism, our current political climate, the asymmetry of wokeness, COVID lockdowns and hypocrisy, the rise of victimhood, the way children are put on a pedestal in our current culture, the "loaded gun" of racism, our "trapdoor culture," how we can all work together to cancel "cancel culture," how to avoid the mob and more.Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms:Twitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShowFind out more information at:https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow

Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations. Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show. So excited for today's guest. So honored, and I am delighted, truly delighted to be bringing this guy to you. I know you may have heard of him and you may have heard him on other podcasts, but you haven't heard him like this. You're going to love Douglas Murray in just a couple of minutes. He is the author of The Madness of Crowds, which you must read. You have to read it. Please, I beg of you, read that book. He is associate editor of The Spectator. And he is brilliant. All right, so we're going to get to him in one second.

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My entire team and I are feeling really excited by the discussion we just had. And so without further ado, Douglas Murray. Thank you so much for being here. It's great to have you. It's a huge pleasure, Megan. Thank you. You are the most prescient man in the world. You wrote the book Madness of Crowds in 2019. It was published. And I just want the audience to hear your opening paragraph. I mean, think about this in light of everything that's gone on.

And I quote, We have been 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. The daily news cycle is filled with the consequences. Yet, while we see the symptoms everywhere, we do not see the causes. And that's where you and your book come in, diagnosing the madness that we're seeing when it comes to wokeism, not just in America, but increasingly in Great Britain and elsewhere. And on the other side of the spectrum, the lunacy we saw by people who were literally willing to die for President Trump on an election claim that had

no merit and no chance. And some did, you know, I mean, we saw at least one person, Ashley Babbitt did die for him. So let's just start there. Because I thought of you when I read The Madness of Krause. And I told you privately, it's like my Dianetics. I think it's like the smartest book I've ever read. But when you saw the Capitol riot take place, I mean, you talk about madness of crowds. That was it incarnate. Yes. I mean, I was shocked but not surprised, as the saying goes. As you say, I mean, there is something so fundamentally implausible, if you'd said even a few years ago that anyone would be willing to give their life for Donald Trump,

you'd have wondered what world reality you lived in that could lead to that. The reality is, of course, is people getting caught in positive feedback loops. There are now two major positive feedback loops in the US, at least, the two major ones. There is the one of the left and there's the one of the right. They both present a great danger. We've seen in recent years very clearly, and I write about it in The Bands of Crowds, the danger of the positive feedback loop

which exists on the political left in America. And we saw some of the extremes of the consequences of that throughout last summer. And then we sort of seen recently the dangers of the positive feedback loop on the right, where people are also whipped up into believing things that are not true or are based on partial truths, partial interpretations of things, which they then run down and down and down until they can see no other option out than behaving in ways which are morally completely reprehensible and would I think have been seen to be morally reprehensible by them only a short while before if they hadn't got stuck in these very very dangerous loops of our time and by the way if I can just say the particular danger of it that I've identified in the American context is that Americans no longer just disagree

on opinions. They disagree on what they've just seen. They disagree on the thing in front of them. And you know this very well from your own experience, that there was a time, I think probably it started both our careers, where things happened and the public agreed that they had happened but they might or they always did just disagree and differ on the on their own interpretations of the event that is so 20th century in the 21st century we don't even agree on what we've just seen so you have now in america successive electoral cycles in which people don't agree that they've lost, can't consider that they've lost. And if you don't agree that you've lost, you can't get through the very, very important rectification process, indeed the mourning process that allows you to rebuild,

allows you to change, allows you to adapt, allows you to grow. You just get stuck. And that's where I see America being at the moment. Two very, very different groups of people that are deeply, deeply stuck and need help. people. I happen to think that the implosion of media has a huge role in it. I also think that the pandemic shutdown has led people to be a bit out of their minds in a way they wouldn't otherwise be. But back to the media implosion, the complete sacrifice of credibility and trust that the media has engaged in over the past 20 years, let's say, matters. And it really is a post-truth world now, just Donald Trump wanted, because people don't, they don't have one news source or the evening news sources that they can go to for truth. We used to sort of accept what was on the evening news was true, and then we can spin it one way or the other. And now no one knows where to go.

I think Roger Ailes was onto something, obviously, when he created Fox because he detected a mainstream bias. But I don't know that it wound up being the force for good. He hoped because and I defend Fox News. I worked there for almost 14 years. But I think what happened was they started saying that the everything you're seeing in the mainstream news is biased. And here's another way of looking at it. And then slowly but surely, cable news did get more biased, both for the left and for the right, depending on the channel. People went to their tribal instincts to get their worldviews affirmed. Fact became much more a thing of the beholder.

And that's something we could all settle on. And partisanship in news exploded as opposed to, you know, having been corrected. And so I understand why Ashley Babbitt went to the Capitol and thought Trump actually won and she needed to fight for him. That's what her echo chamber was telling her. And this life circumstances had gotten her to the place where she was exploitable to take extreme risks. But I don't understand how people get sucked into the cult of wokeism.

That I can't explain by the media. And that, I think, is what you're an expert in. So let's just talk first about my theory on what drove those people to storm the Capitol, not the protesters, but the rioters. And then I'd love to talk to you about your explanations for wokeism. Firstly, yes, I think you're right. I think there's an enormous danger in public life at the moment of the slipperiness of words. At the current moment, there are people who hate Donald Trump and the people who support him, who would like to claim that he directly incited a riot

and indeed the storming of the Capitol. My reading of his speech, and I've read it twice now, is that he was very, very loose, careless with words. He used fighting terms and added caveats that could get him out of real trouble. So he said, we're going to do it peacefully. But he also said, these people only understand strength. And when you say things like that, and you've got a very large crowd in front of you, what exactly do you expect them to do? Or what exactly do you expect elements of them to do?

When you see that video, which I think some of our listeners might have seen, of the Trump family watching the crowd moving onto the Capitol and seeing Kimberly Guilfoy, rather, I mean, it looked like sort of last days of Rome in the era of iPhones, dancing and saying then to the camera, fight, fight. What do they mean? We've been using these terms very loosely in recent years. When you say fight, what exactly do you mean? What exactly do you think some people will take it to mean? Well, that's been a looseness of language on all political sides. After the Trump administration came into office, prominent Democrats who said publicly, you should go and confront and harass these people

who work for this administration wherever you find them. Don't allow them to go out in public. If you don't allow people to go out in public, if you can't share public space with people who differ from you, then you're not going to be living in a democracy for very long. We have to learn how to get along. And there have been people from both sides who've been making that very, very hard in recent years. Harder than it needs to be. Harder than it was already. But, yes, I think that in order to – I think all of us, by the way, are going to have a big problem for the coming years

on the specific narrative that Trump unloosed. I've just written a column for The Spectator in the UK where I say that the people who believe Trump lost the election, sorry, the people who believe Trump won the election, are going to be, at the very least, to put it no stronger, a great nuisance and irritant for years to come. They're going to crop up endlessly in our feeds and our timelines. They're going to spoil evenings. And they're

going to create an enormous opportunity cost for the political right in the US. They're going to keep arguing this. And if you analyze it, of course, it's very hard if you don't believe it to believe it. But you've got to believe the following. If you're one of these people, you've got to believe that you no longer live in a democracy in the U S you've got to believe that every single, not just the media, but every single branch of government is totally corrupted.

You've got to believe that Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, and many other Republicans are just sellouts to the Democrat Party. You've got to believe that the Supreme Court is a total sellout, and that all other branches of the judiciary in the US are a total sellout, that they're not on the side of the republic anymore. You've got to believe that only one man is honest. And that man is Donald J. Trump. Now, to put it no stronger, what are the odds of that? What are the odds that the only people with a little bit of spillover honesty happen to be Don Trump Jr., his girlfriend, Eric Trump, and a few other immediate members

of the Trump family. What exactly are the chances of that if we stood back and looked at that honestly? And Rudy Giuliani. And Rudy Giuliani, and a few other holdout loyalists. I think the chances are remote that this is a circumstance we live in. And it's going to be very easy, a bit too easy, actually, to taunt and laugh at these people who believe this in the coming years. And I think that people of the right and the left should resist this and should simply try to talk these people down from this precipice that they are currently balancing on, where the only honest man in the world is Donald J. Trump. And I think we have to talk them down. I think we have to be sympathetic. We have to listen. We have to avoid the temptation to simply demean them. There has been no lack of sarcasm, scorn, hatred, vitriol, and demeaning of people in American public life in recent years. So I think we should try to avoid adding to it where we can. But yes, I think it's going to be an enormous opportunity cost for the American right. As to a great extent, I think the American left had a great opportunity cost from its games after the 2016 election. You know, I mean,

you know this better than anyone, Megan, but if the Democrat Party had decided to listen to what the public might have been saying in 2016, they could have done an awful lot by now. They could have done an awful lot. Imagine if they had, instead of playing the Trump-Russia collusion, conspiracy, hacking, then merely bots game for years, they had tried to work out why the american public knew about donald trump but voted for him anyway and why that was why that was that would have been a really good thing to have worked out and it would be really good for the republican side if they tried to work out why they lost, why they lost everything in this cycle. And my worry is that they will not do any of that work because they've got this distraction game.

It's an enormous problem for them. There isn't going to be any self-reflection. We've seen that already, right? I think one way of reaching, not quote unquote normal Trump voters, but the one way of reaching most Trump voters, even the ones who really, they would die on the hill of he won and it was stolen from him, is let's say that's true. What's smart politically now? What is the best way of preserving his legacy and getting your goals, which are probably his goals, accomplished? The continuation of his policies and so on. Is it to keep re-litigating the election like we saw Hillary's people try to do or Stacey Abrams try to do down in Georgia? Or is it to focus on his successes, his actual successes

that you can point to and tout as a matter of policy. And I think that's a rational way of, would you write a piece on this thing that Donald Trump has done, which is good? And I've occasionally said, yeah, of course, I mean, for instance, the peace deals in the Middle East, an unalloyed good to my mind. I'm very, very, very glad and admiring the fact that Donald Trump and his administration did it. However, the moment you do that, you now, and every bad action of Trump reflects on this, is that you're now simply a Trump supporter if you do that. And this is the danger of what we're in. We're actually in a deliberately retributive cycle, so that something has entered the political fight, which is always there, but has, I think, never been stronger. And that is this, the desire to hurt your opponent. Donald J. Trump was a very, very good tool for a hurt type of

person. Somebody said, you know, I'm used to voting or not voting. I'm used to voting for Republicans who say these things and they end up going to Washington and doing deals and pork-bowling and much more. And I just feel the left is getting away with a whole pile of stuff. And then along comes this really low tool. And I think that if anyone on the political right checks their own feelings honestly, they will probably admit that at some point they've at least had a bit of this feeling. Let's hit the left where it hurts. Here's a guy who they absolutely hate. He drives them mad.

They can't believe how awful he is. And good, good. We've got this tool, this dirty low weapon, and we're going to use it. Now, the problem is, once you start doing that, once you give in to that ignoble instinct, then you spark the opposite the other way around. And that's what we're in now. That's why we have prominent presenters on CNN saying something they know not to be true, which is that if you voted Republican in November of last year, you are with the KKK, you are with Nazis. Why are they saying that? Do they honestly believe that half of the voters in the American public are Nazis, are actually KKK? No, what they're doing is they're hurting the other side as much as they can, hit them as low as they can. That's the game. That's the cycle that the

American public are caught in. And the truth is, we've just all got to find a way out. I mean, one of the things that bothers me is, and I know you've talked about seeing an enormous hubris right now on the left. And I think there is an importance to being magnanimous in one's victory. I'm not saying they have to bend the knee to the Trump supporters. Both sides are angry and wounded in their own ways right now. But this rubbing the Trump voters' noses in what's happened over the past couple of weeks, as though they're all responsible for it, as though they all have blood on their hands, is infuriating.

The smugness that we've seen from some of the news anchors as though everything they ever said was right is stomach-turning. And it's very alienating and destructive of any hope of people coming back to them, people listening to them, never mind people quote unquote unifying, which I don't think is a realistic goal anyway. Well, you know, try this exercise between us. If at any point in either of our professional careers,

we had reported on the rioting and looting that broke out as a portion of the Black Lives Matter protests last summer. If either of us had said, everybody who came out after the death of George Floyd is a looter or a rioter, would either of us have ever been allowed to have done that by an editor? I think not. I know in my case I would not have been allowed to do that. My own view is that British journalism still has slightly more sluices down than American journalism on some of this. But I don't think either of us would have been allowed to do that, and quite rightly. Because the minute you tried to do that, if you wanted to do that and it would have been reprehensible to do it the editor would have

said hang on a minute there are lots of very good patriotic americans who just saw a video of the most appalling thing uh uh it looked absolutely horrific and was and they came out in their thousands and you can't claim that all the people who were upset by the video of the death of George Floyd then went and looted the local Nike store. Rewrite that. That's what would have happened, and quite rightly so. So the problem is, what happens when there is an asymmetryetry where it's not acceptable to say, but you are allowed, for instance, to say that every Trump voter is the KKK, then you get into this trouble, the asymmetry. People don't like unfairness. It's a really basic thing in our societies. We don't like

unfairness. We hear a lot of talk about inequality and things like that. We don't like unfairness. We hear a lot of talk about inequality and things like that. We don't hear it talked about often enough that fairness and unfairness are deeply guiding ethics in our society. It's one of the first things that children say, that's not fair. It's a very deeply built in instinct in our species. And so visible, very visible unfairness is something that people pick up on. And once they pick up on it and once they see it rolling on and on and on, they will look for other weapons. More with Douglas Murray in just one second. But first, let's talk about Valentine's Day and what you might want to get your spouse or your significant other. I have Valentine's Day and I have a little time thereafter because my wedding anniversary is on March 1st. And I have come up with a very fun and I think

it's going to be a spruce up your house kind of gift. It is called paintyourlife.com and they will paint your favorite photo. So I chose a photo of my three kids and they're going to paint it and I'm going to give it to Doug. Depends on when I get it back. But for one of those holidays and we're going to go through this together. So I'm going to tell you how I like it. But so far, the ordering process has been super easy and the whole thing is very streamlined.

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get an oil painting of yourself. Where are you going to hang that? I don't know. Maybe it's like nude. You could give it to your spouse. Wait, I'm rethinking my order. No, not really. No one wants to see that. I've had three children for God's sake. But I digress. So get a picture. It could be your kids, could be your family, could be your Nana. Or you can combine photos into one painting. It'll make the perfect gift, birthday, anniversary, Valentine's day, you name it. So at paintyourlife.com, that's where you're going to go to get this. There's zero risk. If you don't love the final painting, they will refund your money. Guaranteed. And right now is a limited time offer. You can get

20% off your painting. That's right. 20% off and free shipping. So to get this special offer, text the word MK to 64,000. That's MK to 64,000. Text MK to 64,000. Paint your life. Celebrate the moments that matter most. Terms apply. Available at paintyourlife.com slash terms. Again, text MK to 64000. I think one of the things that's so maddening about some of these wokeness pinnacles is the asymmetry of it. Is in pushing us to be, anti-racist of course the language is incredibly racist the positions being taken are incredibly racist and in an attempt by some of the wokesters to fight for what they would say is equality of women that they need to denigrate

men and they need to elevate women it's's not, as you've pointed out repeatedly, this movement isn't about equality for various groups that have been targeted historically. It's about better than. It's about elevating them above and people can feel it. And if you're in one of the targeted groups, maybe you like it if you're a wokester. But I think most people understand this isn't about equality. It's about subjugation of a new and different group. And it feels unfair. It feels wrong. that you know the whole ideology of wokery i mean starts from a reasonable place and i always think it's worth crediting when when an opponent or somebody you you think has come to reprehensible conclusions nevertheless has started with a serious question there has been in our societies historically racism there has in every society but american society has had a particular issue with racism in the past and so there there is a legitimate argument that some of that may be lingering still in the present

day that's the thing to contend with it's true that women have been prejudiced against in career options among other things in not that far off memory. It's not ancient history. It's true that gay people, LGBT people, to use a term I don't like, have been prejudiced against until, again, not that far ago. I mean, we're only talking about the 60s and 70s, legalization occurs in countries like ours. So these are serious things to contend with. And an element of the left says, look, just because you've got full equal legal rights, that does not necessarily mean that the whole thing's been

sorted out. Sure, you know, people are equal under the law, but there is still these inequalities and inequities that will be existing. That's a serious point, and it's worth considering. The problem is that two things happen. Firstly, people on the political right, broadly speaking, don't like to concede points the political left are onto and have thought about a lot in case the political left then uses it to push through their own agenda. It's the same with people on the political left with the political right. People on the political left don't like to concede that there are problems around, for instance, immigration, because they fear that the political right has been thinking about this. and when the political left conceives that it's an issue it's not just open borders and you know kumbaya once it conceives that it's an

issue then the political right will be playing some nasty game and will smuggle in bad stuff so everyone's got this fear and it paralyzes real discussion but so as i say let's concede the political left is on to something with this whole issue to do with historic injustice that may have still been percolating down into the present day. serious contestation by the political right and has been making assertions that by this stage as I identify in the matters of crowds by this stage are really at a stage of overcorrection whereas I say it's not enough to say women are the equal of men they've got to be better for a bit um we see this in the endlessly weirdly in the political realm with that, you know, that one that comes up occasionally, why female leaders have done better in the era of COVID, for instance. This is a constant one, you know, because the prime minister of New Zealand is a woman and New Zealand has done rather well in the COVID era. That's because that's because

new zealand's led by a woman um this sort of thing and of course lots of people just don't notice it a lot of i think a lot of people notice it and just let it go by but the implication of it is that there's something better about women that if we just had more women in charge uh there'd be a lot of uh there'd be a lot of things that were better dealt with better handle um i think that people don't think you like that kind of chat you're either equal as men and women or you're not it's possible as well which is what i submit there might be different competencies around the edges of different tendencies, different directions people go in, depending on their gametes and chromosomes. It seems to be the case. But if you just assert that one sex is just better than the other, as well as being equal,

the position I say equal and better, then people again notice there seems to be an unfairness you can play this in each of the identity groupings I'm the only one I have a social crampon on is the gay one and not that it's ever done me any not that it's ever done me any good but it's only caused me pain but but I mean you know I don't like it when I see some gay people talking about themselves and being talked about by others as if they're magically better than the straights. It's not as common as the men and women one, because it's much more of a minority issue. We're not talking about a 50-50 thing here. We're talking about a 3% of the minority issue. We're not talking about a 50-50 thing here, we're talking about a 3% of the population issue. But I don't like it when I hear gay people being talked about as if they're just so much more fabulous and better than the boring straights. There was a magazine in America

the other day that ran a piece about the problems we all know about heterosexual partnerships. If you keep talking like that, it sounds like you want to do away with heterosexual partnerships. And if you do away with heterosexual partnerships, you'll do away with the human species quite fast. So I wouldn't go down that route. But I don't like that talk. I don't think anyone does. I think they notice there's an unfairness. It was unfair when people talked about the gays as being less than straights. And it's unfair if you talk about the straights being less than the gays. And then you get to the worst one, which, of course, I jumped straight into in the Mansa crowds, which is what you do on the race one. It is so despicable.

And I think we recognize everyone in public life recognizes it would be so despicable to talk about anyone who was black, whether they were a public figure or a private figure, and just talk about them with contempt because of this, what is it, happenstance of birth. Some people are black, some people are white. The idea that you would talk about someone in a derogatory manner simply because they were black is so morally reprehensible that the people who do it, and there are some, are just pushed to the farthest margins of public life, and we don't

want to be around them. So how did we get to this position? And why should we tolerate it? That there are very, very prominent figures who seem eager not just to demean white people because of the color of their skin, but to actually cause them hurt, to deliberately provoke them, to say, we're actually not going to listen to your concerns. And by the way, this isn't a fringe thing anymore. That's why I write about it. That's why I'm interested in it. If it was just a few tenured academics at a few low-grade American universities whose students, unfortunately for the students, have to listen to their professors trotting out a load of divisive stuff like this, well, that would be bad, but it's not the position we're in. We're in the position where the now president of the United States, who has talked so importantly about trying to unify the country, a week before his inauguration, releases a video saying we are going to focus on those small business owners who suffered this year because of the virus and the shutdown. We're gonna focus on small business owners and we're gonna have a special focus and prioritize black owned businesses,

Latino owned businesses, women owned business, Native American owned businesses. And you look at this and you think, why can't you say we will as a government of all of the people in the United States prioritize anyone whose business has suffered. We will be looking a government, of all of the people in the United States, prioritize anyone whose business has suffered. We will be looking after you all. We'll be looking out for you all.

Why do this game of leaving out one group of people, white men? Why do it? Why say your concerns are secondary? And that's what I say. We're in this strange period because I think that the thing I diagnose is that some people, primarily on the left, have been going for an overcorrection on each of these issues. And the problem with going for an overcorrection is you don't know when you've overcorrected too far. You don't know when you've done it for long enough. Who would you follow to tell you you've got to go back to equal? I think that they won't. I think the overcorrection

will cause a swing the other way. Because what man wants to be denigrated just because he's a man and be ignored when people say look at male suicide rates and prominent female voices and others say why are you talking about male suicide rates you loser what why would you just put up with that endlessly why would you put up endlessly whatever your skin color with being denigrated because of your skin color? Why would anyone put up with if they're heterosexual being talked about as if they're some kind of second class citizen? So so this just has to stop. We have to find a way on this and to try to resist very deep instincts that we all hold. Well, I think you're right, because I've said in the context of the Me Too movement, and I think it applies to the Black Lives Matter thing, all of these identity politics issues, if you really want advancement for a group that's

been historically unequal in some cases, you're going to have to have buy-in from the group that's in power. Women who want to find themselves in more corporate board suites aren't going to get there by just summarily ruining the career of men for one stupid comment in an elevator. That's just going to make the men afraid of us. And it's fine. I can say that as a woman. If I say that about black people need white people's buy-in in order to achieve true equality, it sounds racist. But I believe it's true there too. I think the answer to remedying whatever disparities that are actually there

because of systemic bias, what have you, not this widespread, everything's biased and everything's systemically racist, but whatever, if we want to take a hard, honest look at what systems could be improved or where is bias still lingering in a way that's problematic, then you need buy-in from both sides, right? So from the people in power and the people who aren't, instead of what we're getting, as you point out in your book, the pushing of classes at like the University of Wisconsin in Madison, you point out there's a course on, quote, the problem of whiteness. And this group effort to demonize one group, I guess in an attempt to elevate the other. But all that does is demoralize and probably anger

people who are now being judged thanks to their own immutable characteristics and is utterly unhelpful. And yet it's growing. It's growing. It's such a strange late empire thing to be doing. That's one of the things I just can't get out of my mind in all of this is it feels so late empire to be doing things that are so self-destructive

and divisive at a time when we're in real trouble economically. We're in real trouble economically. We're in real trouble financially. You know, I mean, it's no longer some kind of weird sci-fi fear that China will overtake America as a global power in our lifetimes, certainly in the lifetimes of your children. That's not some nightmarish, dystopian thing anymore. And the country that is vying with America for global dominance is one which currently has a million people in concentration camps

because of their religion and ethnicity. Right. It's one where Western companies outsource labor that is slave labor, where prisoners unpaid who've done nothing wrong work for free at all hours for companies that are subcontracted to major American companies where all of the money and profits goes to a few people at the top.

Is this an acceptable moral situation? Is it something we want to encourage? Having seen what's happened in Hong Kong in the last year, I mean, for the last many years, ever since the handover, but in the last year in particular, after seeing how the Chinese Communist Party cracks down on the people of Hong Kong, is anyone happy about the idea of China overtaking America as a global power?

Does anybody think that China will be prevented from doing that if America just completely nixes the whiteness studies courses at certain low-grade or top-grade universities. Does anyone think that the advance of the Chinese economy and of their ability to snuff out human rights around the world using a checkbook is going to be lessened if there are more performative feminist dance studies courses at Berkeley. You know, what exactly do people think the end goal of all this is going to be? That's why I say it feels so late empire. It feels like a totally unwinnable and dangerous and unhelpful, nasty, retributive cycle that an empire gets stuck in just before it becomes irrelevant. When I listen to these protesters and what's happened on the

college campuses in particular, I'm mystified because they don't seem to see that bigger picture. This is America. We're part of a global economy. There are real problems happening around the globe that we can and should be focused on. Perhaps our generation could help fix them. They seem to really think they're in a revolution right now to upend the patriarchy and fight for racial equality once and for all. Social justice is what it's all about. And the anger, the anger from folks who have grown up at the best possible time in American history

to have been a woman, to have been a person of color, like the best. And yet we've got a couple of examples of this since I knew you were coming on and we're going to talk about the madness of crowds. And I know you've written about this and I've talked about it on the show, but what happened to Brett Weinstein at Evergreen College up in Washington state where we're all just for background for people who aren't familiar. make a point about what life would be like without people of color on college campuses and their value and their contributions. One year they came and said, now we want it to be reversed. Now we

want the white people to not show up. And Brett Weinstein, a professor there, a very liberal guy, said, that's different. And I think I'm going to object because I think one race telling another not to show up is problematic. Well, you would have thought the guy showed up in a KKK hat, you know, wearing blackface underneath it. And it was insane, the reaction to him. And what I want you to listen to for the audience in this soundbite is the anger over that. All right. So listen. Hey, hey, ho, ho. These racist teachers have got to go. Fuck you and fuck the police.

That's how white shit works! Whiteness is the most violent fucking system to ever breathe! If somebody's talking, you are not listening! In your head, if you're thinking of a response, while somebody's talking, that is not listening! It's not an accident that all of our administration is white! The thing is that my ancestors were slaves, and your ancestors were not. Your ancestors came here of free choice and decided to bring along my people,

not of their own free will, to work and build this country. Okay? And so I'm just letting you know that slavery still has repercussions in society today. And that is what we're here about. Those repercussions. It doesn't go away. It's not over. Yeah. I mean, right?

How do you argue against that? I think, I mean, what we saw at Evergreen, I got to know Brett and his wife, Heather, in recent years. They've become good friends. I really admire them both. They're just really extraordinary and kind and good human beings, as well as being extraordinarily clever. I thought that What Happened at Evergreen was a sort of prelude

to the main event of what has happened subsequently in America. Because it showed what happens when a mob crowd becomes hysterical. We've known that the title of The Madness of Crowds comes from the subtitle of a book from the 1850s called Extraordininary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by a Scottish journalist who described this sort of thing. That's why I used the title. Crowd madnesses, what happens when people get whipped up into believing that what they see is just impossible to cope with, impossible to tolerate, and then they go off. That was what happened at Evergreen. And what also happened was basically the disappearance of the adults from the room.

You know, there's an important point to make here about the nature of political disagreement, which is that historically, certainly for the last few hundred years the left advances a set of claims propositions and more and conservatives um temper them that's one analysis of the way in which to use an old-fashioned term, the political dialectic works, that the Conservatives say, hang on a minute, because you've got to be careful when you stampede. You've got to slow it down at the very least. Now, of course, saying slow it down, whoa, is a less sexy and appealing thing, particularly for young people. Because as we all know, when you're young, it is a wonderful thing to also feel that you are in a moment of great change. Everybody wants to be in a moment of great change, when they're young in particular, to be in, what is it the words were said, bliss it was in that dawn to be alive,

about the beginnings of the revolution on the continent. That's what it feels like when you're young, when you haven't seen the revolution, when you haven't seen the blood on the streets, when you haven't seen what happens afterwards. The desire to turn over the whole damn thing is an instinct of the young. To say things are so totally intolerable

on my liberal arts college in Oregon that I'm going to pull the whole damn thing down. I'm going to burn down the whole building. That's what happens when you're young and you've never seen the results. And unfortunately, it happens again and again throughout history. We both know this. We can think of examples in our own lives and careers. And there are many cases from the past. And there were serious cases where this same truth held. The French kings were pretty incompetent.

But once the post-revolutionary famines occurred, the French peoples learned that there were new levels of incompetence that they had never dreamt of. You know, the Shah of Iran had quite a lot of people in prison who were political opponents some thousands of people were in prison who were political opponents of his and many people thought it just couldn't be worse until they met the ayatollah in person and they realized that a few thousand people being in a prison system was nothing compared to a system which decided to just shoot people on sight and hang them arbitrarily in the street for reported offences against the new regime. I mean, these may sound like extreme examples, but they're not.

They are on a continuum. When you say this thing is intolerable and the whole damn thing has to be pulled down, you are inviting people to join you in relearning a lesson that people in history have had to learn again and again. And I simply suggest as a small C conservative that people are better at understanding the risks of very, very violent and sudden change, that they step back from that impulse, that they weigh up the pros and cons of this, that they don't say, I mean, also, by the way, when you say what should one say to a person who says these things? I think this is what the adults say. We can all do that. We can all do that. You know, I mean, I'm not denying for a moment that the history of American slavery was bad. But who exactly was the past Rosie for? I mean, you could

point to me, but I mean, you could point to me, but I mean, I happen to be white. I happen to have been born in the UK in the late 20th century. I'm among the luckiest generation in history. It would be possible for somebody like some of the people you just played that recording of,

screaming, you know, you don't have my experiences because my ancestors suffered it could be perfectly possible for everyone to play that game brett weinstein by the way by the way whose family happened to be jewish he never makes anything of this i bet the weinsteins in history didn't have an entirely rosy time i'd have to i'd have to work out exactly what I know a little bit of their family history, but I would have thought that whenever they fled what's now Eastern Europe, they didn't do it in optimal circumstances. I bet they met some pogroms on the way. I bet they dodged Auschwitz

only just. So they could play that game. Somebody could say to me, well, who are you? You're a privileged white man. And I could reply in kind. I could say, you know, not a damn thing about me, my privilege or my past. And you certainly don't know about my ancestors' past. The past wasn't rosy for my ancestors either. Most of my family spent their time eking out a living on a remote Scottish island where they stayed for centuries, never warm, never well fed. And in the 20th century alone, my grandmother had to see her father die in the First World War when he went off to a foreign country he'd never been to before, and then lose her brother in the next war a few years later. Was my grandmother's life privileged? Was it lucky?

Do I or anyone else deserve to be talked to as if we are from some elite lucky class and there are some lucky, excellent, beneficiary, hereditary people who can win the oppression Olympics and then talk down to the rest of us. I don't think so. I don't think they have that right. I'm not willing to grant them that right. And I don't think other people should either. I think it requires adults to say, we can all do this. And there are very good reasons why we haven't. Because if we did, it would be endless and unamendable. Because there are so many resentments that we can all dig up.

But the answer to resentment is not more resentment. The answer to resentment is gratitude and hope. We're going to get back to Douglas in one second, and I'm going to ask him, what should you actually do when the mob comes for you or actually when the mob comes for someone else? Instead of just piling on to virtue signal, what's what is another option? Practically, what could you do to support the person getting attacked? Um, cause people are afraid, they're afraid to support, right? To be an ally to that person as well. Cause then they're like, Oh, you, you know, you, you support what he did.

Not necessarily. You may just be against cancel culture. Anyway, you won't be surprised to hear he's got actual practical solutions for that. And you know what? So do I, I have a couple for you too. So we'll talk about that in one second. But before we go there, I know it's going to make you happy getting your best credit score. You know, that's true. It's depressing when you have bad credit, isn't it? It's, it's genuinely like hangs on you. I've been there. Trust me. Uh, well, I wish this service had been around when I was in law school because I definitely would have gone to score master. The average American has 97 points that they can add to their credit score. There's no reason to be walking around with a coat hanger shoulders. 97 points you can get on your credit score, but most people have no idea how to do it.

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The Megyn Kelly Show that we call Asked and Answered, where we try to get after a question that one of our listeners had for us. Steve Krakauer is our executive producer. He's got the asked portion. And what's the question today, Steve? How's it going? Going well, Megyn. We've got a lot of great questions that are coming to us at our email address, questions at devilmaycaremedia.com. Also to our social accounts, you can ask questions there. Can you speak about how you cultivate friendships amidst ideological differences? Do you feel like you're always on eggshells? How do you handle a heated moment? Okay, E, that's a good question. I think most friendships are not based around politics. Remember, there used to be like an old rule at dinner parties, you're not supposed to talk about politics or religion. I think that's a good rule. And I realized Trump has changed everything. He dominates everyone's, sadly, everyone's thought

processes. He's like, it's his dream. We're all thinking about him all the time. But that's one good thing about the president leaving office, right? Like that, that wasn't healthy. It's not healthy to be thinking about anybody like that. I think the reason my friendships with my friends have worked so well, despite our political differences, is we don't make politics front and center. We rarely talk about it. And when we go there, we don't go in depth. You know, we'll talk about a couple of issues very respectfully. And if there's a hint of tempers rising or somebody getting dug in and feeling like we get right off of it, it's not worth it. It's not worth compromising a friendship for.

They have different political views than I do. I love them. They are good, great people. They're great moms. I love their kids. I love their spouses. That's what's important to me. I don't give a damn who they voted for.

I don't care that we may see whatever, the Second Amendment differently or the solution to our nation's problems i'm not looking to legislate with them i'm looking to spend time with them to go to the movies with them i'll tell you it's like um so my friends i'll just give one example um really we're not like-minded politically as i think i mentioned except for sort of one in my core group but when i did my my long sit down with vladimir Putin, there was one that was super quick. We did like 11 minutes together.

And then a year later, he gave me a real interview. And that one, NBC made a full hour special out of. And it was great. It was so exciting for me. And I was at home with Doug and we were going to watch it. It was on, you know, like a Sunday night. I can't remember. Maybe it's Friday night.

And can I tell you what? All my friends just showed up at my house. They were like, we're watching this with you. Like, what are you doing here? They're like, we're watching. This is big. You went to Russia. You interviewed Vladimir Putin and we are watching this interview with you. And that's a little political, right? Like whatever you, depending on what you thought about Russiagate and the whole thing didn't matter. They were there for me. They wanted to celebrate that moment. And I just think like, if you make the right deposits, go out to dinner, talk about your kids, talk about your hopes, talk about your dreams, your aspirations. I could absolutely talk about my work situation without getting political.

You know, there's always some asshole you can talk about at your workspace, except for my team now. They don't have that sadly. But anyway, there's always something you can commiserate with and you have to build that base of friendships in your life. So try to steer clear of the politics. Be open minded. I think, you know, look, there are limits like the hardcore wokesters. That's probably not going to work out. Right.

I'm sort of fighting against everything they're fighting for. Like, I don't I don't like cancel culture and I'm it's my mission to take it down. I want to cancel cancel culture. So that's a tough one. But people who are within reasonable bounds, go for it. Try to remember what's really important. It's nine times out of 10. It's not Trump. It's not politics. It's none of that bullshit. It's like your loves and your desires and what's in your heart and your experience and your joys and your pains and all that stuff. You need friends to get you through all of it and to help you celebrate it too. I thought you, not surprisingly, said it best when you were on Joe Rogan in September,

and I loved the way you put it. You said, people are looking at the past as a savannah of grievances. That's exactly right. It's like life has become too good. And now we have to look for ways in which someone at some point in our history has been aggrieved and adopt it. It's like, to simplify it, I say to my nine-year-old daughter, I have three kids and a boy, a girl, and a little boy. And she's nine, my middle child. I said, Yardley, life is going to deal you enough heartache and situations in which you've actually been victimized. You don't have to look for it. You don't have to make it up. You don't have to invent it, glom on to somebody else's. You just wait for life to take care of it on its own. And we'll deal with it when it happens.

But that but people are in a very different headspace. Those people on the Evergreen College, the people on the Yale campus, screaming down the professor who defended his wife who had the temerity to say, maybe we shouldn't be dictating exactly what people wear on Halloween. You know, they're they're at Yale, They're smart. And once again, you would have thought that husband and wife had the white hat on. But the anger towards them because people have now

been programmed by a society, by their families, by the media to look in the mirror and figure out how they've been victimized, even if it's someone else's hurt.

There's a lot of curious things about this, but I am persuaded now that in part it's because it's something to do. This is something to do. Because if people aren't encouraged to do this, for instance, to roam across history and find grievances, which they can then in the current day pretend to want to address when in fact they don't address them, they certainly don't damn well solve them, and they actually just aggravate the whole thing it's something to do because what is the alternative the alternative among other things is you're going to have to work really really hard

to sustain a lifestyle which you think you've been born with the right to have which billions of other people around the world do not have. And you're going to have to pedal a lot harder in the years to come to sustain a lifestyle which you take for granted. If I was offered either of those two options, play the grievance game and make yourself a victim, or realize you're going to have to work a lot harder against the competition that's coming your way around the globe to even sustain the living standards of your parents generation i might be tempted to play the first game you know you know in that example in that example i just gave you with me and my daughter

i'm the adult in the room so i get to shape the way my daughter sees the world and herself. And something you said earlier, I want to go back to, which is with the disappearance of the adults in the room at Evergreen, because this isn't about Evergreen. It's about what we're seeing over and over in corporate America on the football fields, in these seminars that are being forced on people at universities, and even in K through 12 schools now on their white privilege and so on, there should be an adult in the room to say, wait a minute, wait a minute, what are we doing? You know, like what, calm down, even look at the publishing world. I know you point out in the book, you know, the editor of JK Rowling's I know you point out in the book, you know,

the editor of J.K. Rowling's publishing company should have told all the people who said, oh, my God, J.K. Rowling, you don't have to work here. We're going to have 200 jobs advertised tomorrow. No problem. But can you just talk for a minute? Because the book is compelling on this. What did the students at Evergreen do to the university president? And how did he handle the mob? Oh, yes, he did the worst thing you could do, which was that he tried to placate the mob. And what happens in that situation is the mob demands more and more of you. It makes you behave like a performing monkey. It says, oh, good, we've made you denigrate yourself in the first way. Now let's see what more we can do. The mob ends up saying to him that he mustn't use his hands when he's speaking because it's threatening. It seems to imply violence.

You've got to keep your hands by your sides, George, they say to the college president. No, George, we told you that. They taunt him, and he does it. At one point, he begs to be allowed to go to the bathroom and they say no george you're going to have to hold it in i mean what is this this is this is the way in which people in the khmer rouge behaved this is this is deliberate this is discovering you've got a little bit of power and pushing and pushing and pushing. And it requires, as I say, the adults to say, you don't get to speak to me like that. By the way, it's not inevitable, by the way, in human history that young people are thought to have some special brilliance and insight.

It's a very modern thing. At times in the Middle Ages, if a girl who claimed to have had an extraordinary vision said something, everyone would listen. But she had to claim she'd, for instance, had a vision of the Virgin Mary descending from the clouds. So there have been times like that. But only in the current era would you have, for instance, a schoolgirl who doesn't know very much about anything very much but has a deep passion for a subject. I'm thinking, of course, of Greta Thunberg. Go and lecture world leaders. I'm giving it as an example because actually our age does have a very strange belief that the younger you are,

the more sort of pure your insights. And I don't agree with that. I don't believe it. I think the more you live, the more you learn, hopefully. And therefore, the more you can encourage younger people to step away from mistakes you yourself have made. You know, as you communicate to your daughter, life is long, hopefully, and you've got plenty of time for real resentments to occur, which you're going to have to try to keep to the margins of your life in order not to become an embittered person. So don't try to take on grievances you don't even feel yet.

Don't get taught grievances you don't feel. Because it's a stunted life. I was just talking to somebody about this. We were discussing the problem in K-12 education right now and the indoctrination going on there. And I think this person made a point and I agreed with it. These schools, K through 12 and college as well, they exploit in particular girls, little girls, natural empathy, their natural empathy to try to make them feel racist or bad or not quote like an ally unless they accept America's awful. White people are bad. Men are oppressors. It's a patriot, right? And if you, if there's, no one's even cuing a challenge to that in these little girls' minds. They're just trying to indoctrinate them into activists on the left who fight oppression. And these young girls are ripe for it.

Yeah, they are. And by the way, part of that is because in America, there is a presumption, which is wrong, I think, that empathy is an unadulteratedly good thing. In fact, empathy is not an unadulteratedly good thing. Empathy has all sorts of problems associated with it. It's not like, I mean, you often hear this, it's an American idea, but you often hear this claim that the more empathy you can encourage people to have, the more justice there will be in the world. Flat out wrong. For instance, you can have a lot of empathy for a friend who has a drug problem. Empathy alone will not help that person.

At some point, somebody will have to stand over their lives and say, stop. Stop. And in other words, the empathetic view, the view that empathy alone will get you out of problems is wrong in cases we all know in our lives. If we have only empathy, we will make a lot of bad and wrong decisions. of Harvard or Yale, I can't remember which, wrote a book about this a few years ago called Against Empathy, precisely trying to balance out the overdoing of the empathy significance in American life. But empathy being a trait which, as it happens, as you correctly, women are more associated with than men, is seen as being, I mean, it is an incredibly important

instinct, obviously, but it's only an important instinct if it's countered and balanced by other instincts too. And if you decide that empathy must rule, I mean, we have this in the teaching of history, obviously, trying to understand how people in the past felt. Well, that is an important thing, but it's not that much use if you don't know whether the French Revolution came after or before the Russian Revolution. You know, it's not that useful if you don't know the most basic dates. And I bet that if I have actually tried it on occasions

and campuses and educational institutions in America and in Britain if if you are speaking to somebody who believes that they are just drowning in empathetic capability if you ask them a very basic question you know um I don't know what's the capital of Saudi Arabia and they can't answer you um The adult should say, you know, before you believe that you can solve the world by your magnificent, healing, empathetic capability, find out something about the world.

Find out something. And this is, of course, a particular... I'm not American myself, you know, but it's a particular problem in America and has been for a long time. The idea that, I mean, I'm not being snotty about this, I hope, and I'm not being anti-American about it, but when you travel a lot, as I've done in my career,

you learn an awful lot about everywhere you go, even the places where nothing seems to be happening. You discover stuff about it. And you are cautious about making judgments about other people and places without knowing an awful lot, you know. And there's a humility about that which we should encourage. And unfortunately, I think because of a lack of travel, a lack of a certain amount of curiosity, and certainly a paucity of decent education in the United States, there are just an awful lot of people who think they've got the whole thing sussed out, who just don't know very

basic things about the rest of the world. We're not allowed to learn them anymore. And they're not allowed to learn them. Yeah. I mean, I was telling this story not long ago, but there was a person at Smith College who got, they complained about her

because her syllabus had, it wasn't just that it had some white men, white male authors on the list. It was that there were any. So you can't offer

historical books if written by white men, which is really tough when you look at who's been in charge of writing for the past couple hundred years. Or you're going to get in trouble at the university. So the opportunity is not even there. They're focused, as you point out in your book. The universities now, they're not focused on academia. They're focused on activism. So seeking out that education is really hard. It's hard to educate

oneself in the classics and things like this if you're going to be self-taught, right, which you have to be. Yes. Well, you know, the other thing it cancels out is enthusiasm because I'm sure, like me, when you were going through school and education, what were the greatest moments? The greatest moments, certainly for me, were when you read something and it felt like it didn't matter who the author was, just a great author felt like a hand was reaching across centuries and greeting you and saying i remember this i was there too and you have that feeling for instance what's the most thrilling feeling as a reader it's it's reading something and thinking i didn't know

anyone else had ever thought that i didn't know anyone else had ever thought that. I didn't know anyone else had ever felt that. How amazing that this person who lived long before my time felt like this too. And I've had that from reading writers of so many different backgrounds, nationalities, and much more. And it's just the greatest thrill as a reader you can encounter, it's one of the great human thrills. You will minimize the opportunity of having that joy if you decide that discovering great things is of secondary importance to discovering

exactly correctly diverse things. Because in my view at any rate, the canon for instance, which is now such a disliked term, the canon is quite good at ameliorating difference. And we can always work at making it more so. You know, allowing people into it as it were, teaching people who have made the grade, as it were. But you don't need to, as I always try to point out, you don't need to do this along the

categorization lines that our age is pushing. You know, there are gay writers who have made it into the canon on their own merits thank you very much no one no one needs to say that you need to read jane austen because she's a female author right jane austen made it on her own merits a very long time ago uh there was a don at oxford who memorably used to say when somebody said you you don't read very many novels, do you? He said, no, I read all six of them every year, referring to the works of Jane Austen. I mean, you know, it's it's the same case. I think it has taken a little bit too long, perhaps a lot too long. But I think it's the case for the range of black authors, too.

If somebody said to you, I'm I think you should read this black author. And you said, oh, yeah, who's that? And they said, James Baldwin. I think by now any discerning person would say, thank you very much. But he doesn't require that crutch from you. Exactly. Exactly. You'd be offended.

Yes. Thank you very much. James Baldwin belongs to everyone now. So but I think the problem, there's so many layers to it. Yes, I do think empathy can be exploited. And too much of it, even on one's own can be problematic. I also think, as you point out in the book, there is, there's too much of a weird courage happening by some people, some people like Ibram X. Kendi or Ta-Nehisi Coates to exploit people who are in a vulnerable position. You know, Robin DiAngelo, her book, their books are about shaming.

And I know you have an example of Kevin Williamson of National Review. He got hired by The Atlantic. Then some past comments had come out. He was on the defensive. And I think it was Coates who was there with him on a stage and sort of had the chance to help him, you know, to help him get through it. It went a different way. And I was so upset by the whole situation because it was just, talk about needing empathy and not having it. Yes.

And by the way, one of the things that is interesting in this is the power dynamic that existed there and exists, I think, an awful lot. It's so common, but people don't call it out. The person in the position of power there was Ta-Nehisi Coates, not Kevin Williamson. But it was presented as if the power ran the other way around. Can I give an example of something, when I felt this in my own life? A couple of years ago, I did a company in Australia asked me to come and do a tour of Australia and New Zealand.

And they wanted it to be a do a tour of Australia and New Zealand and they wanted it to be a kind of best of enemies tour um you know referring to the documentary about Gore Vidal and William F Buckley and their famous um contretemps around the time the 1968 democrat republican conventions um I said to the organizers I said that's not going to work because if if you find somebody who's an opposite of mine politically and we start touring around Australia and New Zealand for six or eight nights, we're going to hate each other on night one and we're not going to be speaking on night two.

And by night three, it's going to be really horrible. And so I said, how about we do something different? You get somebody who I respect and who hopefully might respect me, who has a deep, we have deep political differences. And let's see how we can talk and agree and disagree amiably. OK, they actually they came back and got the agreement of Dr. Cornel West of Harvard. And, you know, Cornel West is a, by his own descriptions, a revolutionary socialist. And I am not. I was going to say, perfect.

Yeah, exactly. And we did, I think, six events together. And it was, for me, I think of him as well. It was just wonderful. And the reason it was wonderful was because we had both, first of all, we'd both drunk from the same well throughout our lives. We had common cultural references, philosophical references, literary references.

And there were also different wells he had drunk from, which I learned from speaking with him to respect more i mean he went off on a magnificent riff it happened that aretha franklin died one night possibly on this tour and he went off on the most magnificent riff about aretha franklin and i you know and it was just such a gift to be there as he was speaking like that about such an artist. So I learned from him about a whole range of things. But here's the key thing, is that one of the things I was aware of throughout was that for some people in the audiences,

they would interpret it as being me in the position of power and Dr. Cornell West of Harvard as being in some kind of unpowerful position. What I was conscious about throughout was that exactly the opposite was the case. As it happened, we got on very well. I think we just had a wonderful time, and I think our audiences did too. But I was conscious of something throughout throughout which is there is a gun on the stage which can be fired which would destroy all of this and there's only one person who can fire it

and that's him what I mean is of course the racism accusation that there was no if we had have fallen out, there was only one person on the stage who had a very, very powerful weapon. There was nothing of commensurate seriousness I could have lobbed his way. And it made me register this. And I knew that this was going on in the Kevin Williamson, Ta-Nehisi Coates situation. And I know it's one of the causes of the asymmetry of our time, which is that the pretense has been going on for a while.

That, for instance, the white male is always and everywhere in the position of power. And in fact, not all the time, but certainly in the most public arenas, the opposite is the truth. Because particularly the white male can at any moment be almost completely taken out by another person making an accusation of racism. And here, by the way, is the secondary problem from that. My late philosopher friend Roger Scruton and I often used to talk about this. There is something very curious in our age about the fact that the most damaging claims are unprovable and impossible to be defended against. If you said to somebody, you are a racist, people say, well, if you're not, you should sue.

You want to bet? You think you can prove in a court of law that you are not a racist? So what this means is, and as I say, thank you, Dr. Cornel West is an extraordinarily gracious as well as learned person. And this sort of fear, as it were, that I had lingering at some point never occurred. But if I'd been with somebody like Ibram X. Kendi or Ta-Nehisi Coates, I think it would have been fired on day one. I think it would have been fired without any justification, And I know I would have been seriously wounded. I would have been holed beneath the waterline because a certain number of people would have said, oh, that's interesting. The prominent celebrated black figure on stage has made an accusation against the white

author. And the white author can't defend himself other than to say he's not racist. And as we know from the works of Kendi, which I've been studying, if you say you are not racist, you are still a racist. So there's no way out. Here's my suggestion on this. We've got to really work to find a way out. We've got to

find ways out of this. Otherwise, for the foreseeable future in American public life in particular, there are going to be people who notice that a very powerful weapon appears to be hanging around, fully loaded, and there is no charge for firing it, and there is no charge for firing it and there is no charge for firing it insincerely in fact you can profit by firing it insincerely if you go around firing that insincerely you will get better off off. You will be more respected. Now, you and I might hope that the world is packed with sincere and honest people who would resist the temptation to go and pick up that loaded revolver. But, you know, I hate to say it, but the history of human beings suggests that there might be some dishonest people in our time. There might be

some people who are willing to advance dishonestly. I think that's what's happening. And I think we have to be able to address this asymmetry. Right. If there's, I don't know if there, and the more it gets used unfairly, the more frightened people get. And I think that's the other dynamic here is fear. Um, and not just fear. I mean, fear, we know, right. We we've seen that people are afraid to say how they feel. They're afraid they're going to get attacked as one of the ists, but the belief when you're in that situation, I can speak to this personally, that your attackers are coming at you in good faith. It's almost like the more open-hearted you are, right? The more you can be wounded in this kind of a situation. And I've been thinking a lot about you and what you wrote

on this because I, and I say on my podcast all the time, Douglas Murray has the answer. Douglas Murray has figured out the way forward. And I speak of, you know, the way you say people should handle when they get unfairly accused or when they try to get somebody tries to shove, quote unquote, anti-racism down their throats, which is actually racism. And it's to stand up. It's to do, as you point out in the book, what Joan Rivers did, which is to say, how dare you? How dare you diminish a word like racist by using it here where it doesn't apply? How dare you try to re-racialize my company, my country, myself? I will not speak in those terms. I love the way you talk about it, and I'm inspired by it. I do think it's the answer. But then, okay, but then let's put it to practical application.

I think back to my own situation at NBC when I had said, you know, people used to wear blackface and it wasn't really a thing. It wasn't a big deal. And, uh, talking about this woman who was trying to dress like Diana Ross on the real housewives, I said, you know, what, what she's trying to do there is honor somebody. So how did we get to the point where this wasn't a thing to the point where now she's in hot water? Okay. So that was the end of my time at NBC and, and the, the blowback was so universal, Douglas. I really felt like I was getting

gas lit. You know, I knew, I knew that people had worn blackface. It was something I've never done many, many times in the past and over the course of my life. I'd seen it on television. I'd seen it in the movies. I'd seen it as recently as a couple of years earlier on NBC, on multiple programs as it turns out. But what happened in that situation was everyone seemed to be looking at me saying, bad, that was racist. And I assumed good faith and said, oh, my God, I stepped in a minefield. I had a blind spot and I will do the honorable thing, which is to go out and acknowledge that and say, I'm sorry.

I did not mean to offend anybody. And I deeply apologize if I did or to those who were. And now I think the biggest lesson I've learned since that day is that the vast majority of the people attacking me were not in good faith. They weren't. They wanted to punish me for all sorts of different reasons. And it's not that I want the day back and the apology back, but it's hard in the moment, right? It's near impossible in the moment, especially if you don't have a sympathetic boss, right? Somebody who's going to back you to turn around and say, you know, if I could have done it over, would I have gone out the next day and have said, let me prove to you that what I said is factually true.

Let me show you the examples and why I said it. And can't we have a discussion about the point I was trying to make about this woman in modern day America who is trying to honor someone? And how did we get from A to B? Can't we talk like that? I tried a bit, but anyway, that I wish I could have been more forceful and I wish I could have explained myself, but people weren't open to it. They didn't want to hear it. And because there wasn't good faith. And I see that. And I see that on Evergreen and I see that at Yale when they're

screaming at the professor. And I, I just, I don we can if we just need to disabuse ourselves of the notion that these attacks, racist, sexist, what have you, are usually in good faith. If I can say that the problem for getting out of it is, I think, among other things, the problem that we have for getting out of this situation, you can correctly identify is, the obvious thing to say is, look, these accusations are hurled around so much and so insincerely that they've basically lost their power. So there we are. The reason why that's a dangerous thing to do would be that it would allow for the bad people, the nasty things lingering in the woodsheds of all our societies, to get a free pass. That's the fear I think a lot of us, if we're honest about it, legitimately have. I would love to be able to just say, you know, the term racist doesn't

mean anything anymore. The problem is, I know that there will be some people who will benefit from that who I wouldn't want to benefit from it. It's the same with if, you know, the temptation to say, there's no sexism, what are you talking about? There are nobody in our society is sexist, or nobody in our society is homophobic. Shut up and go away. That's quite a strong temptation. But I know that there are some people, not a large number, but a certain number of people who will benefit in an unpleasant way from that. And simultaneously, we cannot all be held hostage by the fear of those people. So what I try to urge people to do is just in general to try to hear other people's speech in the way they would like

their own speech to be heard, which is not waiting, waiting tensed to spring, having found the erroneous word but listening in a spirit of generosity and interpreting people's words in a spirit of generosity now of course this is this is really hard in the situation as we started off with where among other things people want their political opposites to suffer and I know because I mean I've never had a case as serious and high profile as the one that you've just had but you had and that you just described but I've had a little bit of it of knowing for instance that I am speaking in front of an audience that wants me to fail that wants me to slip up that wants to catch me out using some term you know term and and

and as you and as you just described in that situation if among other things if you have co-workers who want you to fail let alone if you have bosses who want you to fail then you just it's a horrible position to live in because instead of regarding the world and words and ideas as this just wonderful opportunity to communicate and to swap ideas and to solve things. I mean, remember that, solving things. Instead of that, everything becomes mean and tight. I feel it myself. I'm sure you felt it as well. When you go into a thing and instead of thinking this is just going to be great. I can't wait for this intellectual discussion. Instead of that, you go in tense and fearful and having run through all the ways in which you could go wrong. If you have that second thing, you just never get anywhere.

And we will not get anywhere. I mean, what if we actually had in American society a serious attempt to address serious problems like homelessness, which, by the way, as a visitor to America, is just such a visible and awful problem in your major cities what if we had a serious attempt from left and right to address the really lingering question that's coming along which is why it's so difficult for young people in an age uh with inflation in the way it's been for such a long time to accumulate capital and to begin their lives in a way that their parents began their lives What if we had an opportunity from left and right? Tall positions to try to address these questions and come to some solutions we just we did we don't in America doesn't have that America has lost that capability because

Nobody trusts the other side, because they think they're going to do something funny. And here's the really nasty, bad thing that causes that. The really nasty, bad thing that causes that is that the left in America no longer trusts the right, that the right isn't going to reopen Auschwitz. I mean, it's as bad as that. And the right doesn't trust the left not to start communism. I would have thought it should be possible in a country of the size of America and with the gifts that America has to do better than that, to have enough people who neither want the gulag nor the concentration camp, which I would have said was 99 point something percent of the American population, to incarnate what a serious attempt to address serious challenges affecting the republic actually looks like.

I think it can be done. It simply requires enough people of goodwill, knowledge, humility, and daring to give it a go. Daring. That's it, Because conversation is being shut down. And it's the tool we need most right now. And because of fear, people are silent. You know,'re they're they are a majority they want to have conversations they want to be able to say how they feel they want to push back against some of the nonsense we've been fed like there's there's no more gender you know like there's no more boys or girls or you know people who menstruate you can't say women and all that stuff they want to push back but then they see other high profile people being attacked being deplatformed, kicked out of their publishing houses or trying. And I would love to help stir them up to say the things I was just listing, like I just wanted to ask this follow up of you because, look, I can do it now. Now my own boss. I have, you know, I'm independent financially. I can do it now.

But most people, they're not there. And I I don't feel like I can look at them when they need that job with that weak need boss, that pathetic weak need boss who's afraid of the mob and say, speak up. You have to become part of the vocal majority. So what do we tell those people? It's funny. I got an email again just before joining you today from somebody asking me exactly this. I won't give away the description, but I get these emails quite a lot. I got an email just before speaking with you from somebody saying, this is a job I'm in. This is a conundrum I have.

What can I do? What should I do? And I'm humble about this situation because, like you, I'm in an unusual situation in that I'm not answerable to a boss. I'm answerable to my editors and the papers I write for. But my books, now I can say what I like. And I love that opportunity, but it's not common. It's not common. Most people, you know, they have loved ones.

They have dependents. They might have a mortgage if they they're lucky and or rent to pay and i don't say just go out and like be brave and uh risk everything because that that's a heck of a lot to ask of anyone and the the truth is i think there's only a couple of options. I think some unusual people will become like flare lights. It won't necessarily happen by design, like with Brett Weinstein. I mean, it wasn't by design that we all know who he is now. It was an accident because the thing just came at him and he couldn't budge.

He wouldn't bend, he wouldn't genuflect in front of it. And so unusual people like that will be thrown up by the era. But not everyone can or will do that. And what I would urge such people to do is simply in whatever way they can, in whatever small ways they can, without jeopardizing everything in their lives, to make small steps towards truth. You know, Václav Havel's wonderful phrase, try to live in truth, is just so important. It's the great insight of philosophers across the ages has been the significance of trying to live in truth. Solzhenitsyn's energy is the same thing. And it's not just, by the way, because truth is an abstract good in itself, although I do believe that to be the case. It is that you will feel a freer and better person as a result of it.

Because, as I think I said on Joe Rogan, it's very demoralizing to live your life with lies. And I think the demoralization is a part of the whole thing. The truth is that we are all capable in our personal and professional lives of doing extraordinary things. Not all the time. Nobody does all the time, but sometimes. And some people's extraordinary things will be an extraordinary encounter with another person, a discussion they didn't think they could ever have, airing a thought they didn't think they could air, and trying to see through the fog of lies around them, the fog of half-truths and

untruths that they're urged to say, seeing their way through that and feeling their way to the other side. And as I say, for most people, that will not include some extraordinary sort of running through the hail of bullets act of bravery. For most people, it will just be conversations they will have with co- coworkers carefully, but honestly, and feeling your way in the circumstances you're in. Having that conversation with people you know, your loved ones, is obviously a very good place to start.

The opposite is we will, particularly in America, we will be caught in a retributive cycle. I was speaking to a Russian friend the other day who pointed out that apparently there was a child in America who reported their parents for having been at the Capitol protests. I hadn't seen this. Reported their own parents. And, of course, his Russian friend said, well, this is what we were taught in the Soviet Union.

You know, the famous boy who some people dispute whether he actually existed or not, who reports his parents to authorities and who was made into a sort of hero. We really, really don't want to enter societies like that. We want to be in societies where we can have differences out quietly. We can discuss with our loved ones. We can talk with our co-workers. We can have disputes with our bosses. And we can do all of these things without fearing that at any moment the trap door opens underneath us and we go all the way to the bottom. If we live in that society, then we will become timorous, we will become

enfeebled, we will live not even half lives. And I think we can all live better lives than that. But they start from a position of knowing the sort of life we should be living. And we should be living a life in which we can solve problems, in which we can share ideas, in which we can talk across boundaries, read across continents, and know that the world is an extraordinary amount of information and knowledge to acquire, and not a set of traps waiting for us to fall, but an amazing set of opportunities that offer us the opportunity to do things that are endless. And we should be aiming for that. America, in particular, should be aiming for that, to be solving things, to be doing things, to be growing things, to be showing a way, and to be inventing things that we've never dreamt of. That's what Americans should be aiming for. Not this embittered trapdoor culture, which will get nobody anywhere other than the people who are so happy to see America fail.

And to take rhetorical risks. I mean, you have, you, I know you've, you've said this, but you, what is the goal to, to die in your bed years from now saying, no one ever criticized me. I managed to make it through unscathed. No one ever called me the names. I never paid a price for speaking up or taking a stand. I avoided all the slings and arrows, right? Who's got that as a goal? Whatever happened to strive valiantly? Exactly. Strive valiantly, recognize you'll make mistakes. You know, I mean, what life is only success is, you know. Everyone has failures because everyone fails at times, you know. And I do think that we, you know, we, by the way, if I may say so, one of the worst signs in all of this is that comedians are coming under

such a flag like comedians comedians like the court jester is so vital in a society because the comedian says things that are true even if you don't want to admit they're true and i hated seeing comedians being come for in recent years that one of my yeah the pythons in the united kingdom uh were famous for being able to say things like in the life of brian which people couldn't say but they knew to be true and knew to be funny and it was funny because it was true and if even the comedians can't talk, then nobody can. And I, yes, this crucial thing, what is the life you would like to live? Is it this timorous life or is it something else?

And, you know, if I could just say so, I just found it. I just got it up on my screen. One of my great heroes, I was starting off as a writer, as a journalist, is the late Oriana Falaci. She was a difficult one,

as I'm sure you know, possibly the greatest interviewer of the late 20th century. In fact, she did herself out of a job by interviewing people so harshly that no one would submit to an interview from her. I don't know what that's like.

She became a novelist and a pretty good one. Anyhow, but she wrote a book about the Vietnam War, which she covered called Nothing and Our Men. It's a great, great book, one of the great books about war. And in Nothing and our men at the very beginning a niece of hers says to her audience it's a great opening to a book says ariana what is life and ariana falaci says i went to vietnam to find out and uh in throughout this extraordinary book she describes what she saw the risks she took and so on. She described, among other things, a great love affair she was having at the time. And at the very end of the book, she says something that's worth quoting because she says she ends up, after she comes back, she says to the little girl, she says,

Life is something you've got to fill up well without wasting any time, even if you break it by filling it too full. Now that's an aspiration. That's an answer. I'd rather people have that spirit in them than the cringing spirit of the age. But if I can say so, it's not enough that one simply calls on people to behave well or something. I think it's necessary for people to demonstrate that. This is why America has had four very bad years in many ways,

because there has been a president who is you know better than anyone does does not behave well does not behave graciously i spoke with a friend some years ago who said to me an american friend said look i'm trying to bring up a i'm trying to bring up children at the moment douglas and you know he said my eldest is a bit big for his age and i have to tell him things like look just because you're bigger than the other boys in the class, you mustn't use that as an advantage over them, because it's chance, and you must make sure you don't throw your weight around.

And he said, Douglas, the problem is we have a president who does exactly the opposite of what I'm trying to teach my son to do. So that is a problem. But it's not a reason for everybody else in public life in America to also dispense with the hope that they can demonstrate how to behave well as well. And I think incrementally, if different people with a platform demonstrate even one virtue. I mean, if I can say so, and I wasn't primed to say this, and I don't want to embarrass you,

but I think your own behavior in recent years demonstrated such grace under fire that I think a lot of people will have learned from it. I think they will have observed it. I don't know if they say it very often, but I think it will have impacted a lot of people to know, for instance, that when you are assailed, you don't have to answer back by being worse than the people who assailed you, but by rising above it and by demonstrating grace and decency. These things don't get noted very often, and people don't

like to note it about themselves, and they even don't like to note it about other people. But I think they are noteworthy. And if it happens enough, and if it's accumulated often enough, something can change. Well, thank you for saying that. I think about my kids, you know, and you can learn so many lessons as you go through life with your children he felt uncomfortable because students in the lunch room were chanting something it was an innocuous word but in their world it was a derogatory world I don't remember something silly

and it was directed at one kid and my son did not want to participate in this but was feeling the peer pressure and genuinely didn't know what to do. You know, he wasn't going to chant, but, you know, he also wasn't going to stand up and say, stop that right now, fellow third graders, you know, so I felt for him, you know, he brought

it up to me and asked what I thought he should have done. And we talked about how, yes, it would be wonderful if you could find the nerve to do that, right, to stand up and shut it down. But realistically, there's another option. And there's another option for all of us when the group pile on takes place, when the bullying takes place, the social media, you know, just fire catches and someone's world is almost destroyed. And that is to not pile on, to not chant, to do something interruptive, potentially, maybe your tray falls off the table, or at a minimum, maybe you get up and you go to the bathroom, you're not a participant. And then you could round back, I told my son, and ask that boy if he wants to come over for a play date that day, something to shore him up. It doesn't even have to be about the specific incident, just something to let him know he's loved.

That's right. And we can all do that. That's something that doesn't require huge risk taking. Yes. It just requires, yes, restraint. That's one of the only things it requires. It requires restraint. And don't, there's such a good lesson. I mean, don't join the mob. Don't join the mob. By the way,

why don't you join them? I've said this a few times in recent years about not joining the mob. Perhaps I've never said why. It's because you don't know what the mob's going to do. You can't predict what it's going to do and you're going to get caught up with them. If you join the mob, the mob might break into the capital and then you're one of the people who is in that mob. If you're in the online mob and you join in, you gain nothing from joining in, but you could have made the person who's been piled in on just that little bit worse. And, you know, I watched this the other day when some people who were at the Capitol protests that turned into a riot were being put on no-fly lists,

and there were people on the internet saying, ha ha, somebody I know wrote, I'm living for this at the moment. A video of a man at an airport completely distraught saying, look what they're doing to us. I had no idea of the specific situation of this man. But when a man is weeping in public at an airport, he's just at the end of his, he's at the end of his tether there. That's the most humiliation you can have at this point. And he can't get home. I don't know what involvement he had, but I wouldn't glory in that moment. And I saw people glorying in it.

Like I saw somebody I met once who I don't know well, but who got a little bit caught up in the me too thing and was humiliated for a period. And I saw him piling in on this. And I thought, I didn't say anything because I just decided not to, but I thought, you know, I thought, wow, you know, a few years ago when the mob was coming for you, you loathed it. And yet here you are, here you are just saying, you know, like really happy to join the mob again. And we all see it. We all have the opportunity.

Every day there's a headline somewhere. There's a comment somewhere someone's made that is today's thing you can pile on. You can just not. You can raise your eyes above the screen. You can look out into the world. You can spend time with a loved one. You can raise your eyes above the screen. You can look out into the world. You can spend time with a loved one. You can read a book. You can do absolutely anything. You can think. You can do nothing for a moment. Anything is better than joining the mob because it's true that we are wired as human beings to get into an us and them situation all the time. But the instinct to do that is so strong in the current era

with social media and much more. The instinct is so strong. And the price we think we pay is so small. That's the thing, is that people think they pay a small price, and they don't. They pay a huge price in just the endless diminution of their character, the curdling of their own view of the world and other people, their misplaced sense of self-righteousness against the other. lockdown shaming on people. There's an account that finds people who were celebrating Christmas with people above the legal number

and trying to out them for their place of work. Oh, come on. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And you just want to say, do you just want to stop a moment and reflect on whether that's the person you want to be? Right. You just want to stop for a moment. So yes whether that's the person you want to be right you just want to stop

for a moment so yes don't join the mob not just because you can never tell where the mob is going to run and it can turn in a moment and i've seen that plenty in my life um you you don't want to join the mob for that reason but you also don't want to join it because you want to be a nobler individual. And you can be. Everyone can be. Everyone can try to at least aspire to raise themselves above the crowd. Because we're better than just membership of a crowd. We're just so much better than that. We have so much more capability than that.

And everybody can do that. Everybody can manage that. It's so well said because I think so many people will join the mob in an attempt to virtue signal. They want to tell everybody, I'm with you. I'm with you. I'm not racist. I'm not sexist. I'm not a me too-er. I'm not whatever it is. And it's, that is madness because the crowd will turn on you. There's no insurance. You can't pay the paying the ransom upfront does actually not, uh, prevent you from becoming a victim down the line at all. So what, so joining the mob can be hurtful. You don't know the full facts of anybody's situation. So it can be hurtful to the person getting attacked. And to your greater point, and really the ultimate point, I come

back to this so often because it's true. My therapist here in New York has a slight accent, and he sums up pretty much every problem as follows. People are complicated. People are complicated. People are complicated. Well, that's right. That's true. That's right. And, you know, if there was one thing that we could do with this age breaking down, it's the idea that there are good people and bad people, you know. We all have the capacity for good and evil.

And we don't just have it year by year or day to day, but all the time down the center of us. It's what makes human beings so fascinating, so extraordinary. It's down the middle of all of us. And if people could realize that, that, you know, I have a friend who's a doctor in the uk who said that he was a prison doctor for many years he said that one of he said he said for years people said to him um oh i don't know i just i just i fell in with the wrong crowd and he said in all

the years that i was a doctor in prisons he said I met so many people who fell in with the wrong crowd, but I never met the crowd. The point is, the crowd is not made up of people with evil on their forehead. It's made up of people like us. The crowd is you. The crowd is you. The crowd is you. Could be you. Better hope it's not. Well, I mean, that's about as thorough a discussion of the madness of crowds and what you mean by that as one could have hoped for.

I love the book. I want the audience to read it because I do think we didn't get to this day, but I do think you do answer the question of sort of how wokeness started and the Marxist origins and how it tracks Marxism, which is being pushed at the academic level and even in the K through 12 level. thought this was the most thoughtful book that made me, it was a call to action in many ways. And I've listened to so many podcasts that you've done. I feel like you're appointment listening. So I'm honored to have had you here and have had the opportunity to ask you my own questions directly. And I really hope Douglas is the first of many. I really hope so too. I've really enjoyed it, Megan. It's a great honor for me. So thank you. How smart is he? I know I keep saying it, but it's true. He's smart just in terms of how well read he is and how well informed, but also in the way he sees the world and translating it into

usable information. I don't know about you, but there are about six references in there that I had no idea what he was talking about, but I'm going to look it up. I'm going to get smarter myself. And I don't know about you, but I would really like to be better read. One of the things I want to do, I actually want to do is get like a, you know how Dennis Prager has Prager University?

I want to have like Kelly College where we get like the top three books from all of our guests that you need to read to be a better citizen, right? To be like a smart, well-informed person. I don't know about you, but like when I was at Syracuse, I was kind of, I drank, I went out with my friends, I hung out with my boyfriend. I generally recall learning, but I didn't have the feelings that Douglas Murray was talking about. And I would like to have the feelings. I mean, I've read since then, but I kind of feel like I missed that amazing education that so many of our guests have had.

So I'm going to start. I'm doing it. We're going to start Kelly College. I'm going to start amassing our library. We can read these books together in all our spare time. Maybe we can find a little Cliff Notes version for like the Syracuse alum. Okay. I want to tell you that today's episode was brought to you in part by paintyourlife.com. Hand-painted portraits with a 100% money-back guarantee. That's great. That's very good. Just in case you don't like it,

but they're going to give you money back, but you're going to like it. Go to paintyourlife.com now to learn more. We can go through this together. You can get your painting done as I get my painting done and then we can compare notes. Um, Hey, subscribe to the show if you haven't already, because guess who's coming up next on our next episode. It's going to be Dave Portnoy and Erica Nardini of bars,

dual sports. They don't give that many interviews and, um, we worked for this one and I'm really excited. It's going to be a spicy fun dynamic discussion. Uh, so don't miss that many interviews and we worked for this one and I'm really excited. It's going to be a spicy, fun, dynamic discussion. So don't miss that. Go ahead and subscribe now so that you'll get it in your inbox and rate the show while you're there.

Five stars, please. Send me a review. That's how I hear from you. I read those reviews on Apple, but you can do it any place, including our social media. And we will speak to you on Wednesday. Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear. And we will speak to you on Wednesday.