This Is What Happens When We Worship Victims Instead Of Heroes | Douglas Murray

These are not academic questions. We are waging both economic and kinetic wars right now as we violently renegotiate the world order. How we decide to move forward will affect generations to come. And few people have thought more about these issues than Douglas Murray. As a war correspondent, best-selling author, and lauded public intellectual, he's been at the heart of many of these crucial debates and can help paint a way forward. And today, he's with us. So, without further ado, I bring you Douglas Murray. How do we make sense of the fact that we can't even agree on who the good guys are and the bad guys? Well, I I mean, that's a perennial problem, of course. It's It's It's been something that in any conflict, any any political situation is is is normal. I think that the There's been a change since the age of social media, which I've uh described before as being the move from the era about disagreeing um about our interpretation of events to not agreeing on what just happened. In other words, having a different opinion is very 20th century. In the 21st century, we have different facts. And I think that that is one of the things in our era which has proved uh especially divisive. Um has all sorts of uh positives, uh greater access to knowledge, greater access to a wider range of opinion. These are all good things. But, I think that the uh increasing inability to agree on what just happened is one thing that is massively dividing all of our societies. Is there a world on the other side of that, or do we have to somehow, some way, come to a shared understanding of facts, or this is just uh there is no way to reach common ground? Well, I I I mean, my hope is that there is is a way. We'll We'll never find common ground, but we can we can we can agree on certain principles, perhaps, or say what the ground is that we're standing on and whether it's desirable ground. I mean, I think that the era we're in I've occasionally described as what I call the second dark age. That is the first dark age was characterized by an inability to access knowledge or information. Literally, people didn't even have access to or knowledge of the one holy book. Um in our age, it's quite different. Our dark age is characterized not by an inability to access knowledge, but by a surfeit of knowledge, a surfeit of information and stories, details, and much more. So, that none of us can actually be on top of everything. But, there's an expectation that you're meant to have opinions about everything. Uh I've characterized this as the um the oddity that you you will have noticed as well online of the people who were are experts on tariffs this week were experts on Ukrainian mineral deposits last month. And before that, they were experts on how to withdraw from Afghanistan and also on pandemics. Some of these things are so important that we do have to have We We have certainly have the right to have Most sensible people would want to form opinions about them. But, even that is dictated increasingly by what is pushed your way uh by the confirmation bias that we're all have a tendency to already hardwired into us. But, the confirmation bias of the algorithms and much more. Um but, I my hope is is that we can push through this second dark age as we did the first as a species and that we will get a better knowledge. Maybe it'll come in our lifetimes, maybe afterwards. I hope in our lifetimes. Of where we can actually agree on what just happened and then get to the substance. All right, talk me off a ledge. Um, I have So, my whole thing in life is I'm not interested in being right, but I'm deeply interested in identifying the right answer. An answer that has high predictive validity that if I think in this way, make these base assumptions that I can both look backwards at history and go, "Yeah, that all makes sense based on what I believe." And then ideally, that means that looking forward, I'll have some sense. Too much complexity to get things perfectly right. Um, but I'm always trying to update my thinking. The way that I think about this moment is uh it's this profound renegotiation of everything in a time where we don't share facts and more importantly, in a time from where I'm sitting anyway, where we don't share morality. And so, we're we don't have an anchor by which we can navigate through these things. And so, when I think about what happened in the Cold War against Russia when it was US v. Russia, um they it was a Cold War, but they were fighting over whose ideology was better. And there was an actual winner. Like the USSR ran out of economic steam and they were no longer able to fight and if they wanted to have any sort of allies whatsoever, they had to tear the wall down, they had to give up their system. And you said uh when you were talking that we pushed through the Dark Ages. And when you said that, I thought, "Ooh, there there's a lot of uh lives lost in that very simple statement." And so, my concern is that this moment is going to be devastating in loss of life uh as the whole world sort of gets thrown up in the air, whether it's the economic warfare between America and China, whether it's the hot wars that you've been um reporting from on the lines of Russia-Ukraine, Israel-Gaza. Um do you think that that is too dark of a view and that we're going to be able to find a way out of this without fighting for supremacy of ideology? Or do we have to fight? Uh we'll see. I mean, I'm very fond of quoting uh something that C.S. Lewis said in a sermon in Oxford in 1939 when he pointed out that although the the age that his country, my country of birth was in was not in a propitious moment, uh nevertheless, he said he said human life was always lived on the edge of a precipice. That if you look back even times that seemed relatively uh uh peaceful, like Europe in the late 19th century, when you look back at it, they were also like our age, like C.S. Lewis's age, were filled with alarms and panics and crises and much more. The important point he makes, which is one that I've always tried to live by and which I uh always say, particularly when I have the opportunity to speak to university students uh or anyone young, is to say what C.S. Lewis went on to say, which is um that if mankind had put off the search for beauty, meaning, purpose until the conditions were right, the search would never have begun. And I take great comfort in that, that although you always live in the middle of the whirlwind, um know that that doesn't mean you should be distracted from doing what you should do. Uh Does this moment feel different to you, though? Like as somebody who grew up in the '80s, this moment feels distinctly different. It's extremely hard to say because uh everybody has the ability in the rearview mirror, everything looks clear. Um I'm very fond of a quote from the great Czech writer Milan Kundera who said in a book of his in the '90s, Testaments Betrayed, he said um mankind walks through life uh uh in a fog. Um we stumble along and we create a path as we walk it. That's not the interesting thing. The interesting thing as Kundera said is that if you look back, you see the man and you see the path, but you don't see the fog. Everything looks clear in hindsight. In hindsight, people of our generation might look back and view the 1980s as a a time of relative tranquility, but I have no doubt in my reading of the era, talking to people from the era, is that it felt very different from that at the time. Everyone now expected that the Soviet Empire would crumble, but in the 1980s, by no means everybody did. Same thing with the 1990s. Some people look at it and say, "Look at what a halcyon time it was." Uh the whole world was talking about a single blow job. Um but in fact, the '90s were filled with their own crises and alarms and uh and so on. So yes, it it always feels different and it always will feel like that and um sure there are certain things that characterize our own era and are particularly concerning, but I don't think that they're uniquely so and I don't think they're uh irrecoverably so. I certainly don't think we should be demoralized in the face of that. Mhm. I like that take. Uh let me give you why I think that um in my language there's higher predictive validity to see this moment as a different time. Certainly from uh my lifetime. I'm sure this is repeated in history a gazillion times, but uh there was what I'll call moral clarity in the '80s. America good, Russia bad. It was really simple. And so we uh I mean you're never going to get 100% of anything, but it really felt like everybody was prepared to fight for America. We had the confidence of our beliefs. We felt good about who we were, about our country. And one of the things that your book really does a phenomenal job of is holding up um a morally repugnant act and then following the chain of but there are a whole lot of people that don't think this is morally repugnant. Now, it may just be that with social media you can see all the people that thought the same thing back in the day. You just couldn't see them. But now I'm being confronted with whoa, I I don't see what the non-relevant relativistic moral ground is that I meant to stand on. And that makes this feel particularly strange because the internal fighting inside of my own country, certainly the UK has got its woes as well. And that makes And obviously I'm I'm very familiar with your work on The Strange Death of Europe. And so it's like that feels like the very thing that set the stage. And so that book and this book to me feel like there's some compendium nature to them. And it's like failing to get that common ground leads to the strange death of Europe. I agree. I'm I actually moved to America some years ago which um you might take as being telling in itself about my views of of the old continent. I haven't given up on it entirely, but one of the things that has concerned me in recent years is that what I charted in the the let's say the demoralization among other things of Europe in the last 80 years. A demoralization that starts from very obvious reasons. Um ends up with a sort of healthy societal self-criticism turning into a very unhealthy societal self-loathing and eventually self-destruction. Uh this is a very complicated process because of this as I've often said, Western self-criticism, the tradition of self-criticism is one of the great advantage points of the Western civilization. It's It's It's It's good to adapt when you're doing something that's wrong. You don't want to keep doing something that's wrong either technologically or morally or anything else. Uh but there is a some liminal moment when the self-criticism can be pushed upon you by people who want you to go further down that path because they want you to do it for a reason. I believe that America has undergone maybe resisting at the moment a bit more but has undergone a period of similar demoralization and self-laceration to the version that Europe has been through in recent decades. And what I mean by that really is where American self-criticism turns into the self-hatred which has been pushed on many young Americans in particular. Where instead of believing if there was a time when young Americans brought up to believe that America was uniquely good, they are very often brought up now to believe that America is uniquely bad. And if any group abroad or other system of governments may in the past have been portrayed as innately inferior, a generation is to a very great extent being brought up to today to believe that any other form of government or system of values is in any way superior to ours. I think that's where the problem comes for America. I analyzed that quite a bit in my last book, the war on the West. Where I was very interested in why America was engaging in this not healthy revisionism, but deeply unhealthy self-destruction. Uh whereby everything from the origins of America onwards were being seen in the most negative light. I regard that as being a civilizational turning point because I think it's perfectly natural for any group of people, wherever they're born in the world, to have a natural predisposition to feeling that their way of doing things is good. And that it's an unhealthy position for any society, uh let alone the world's foremost democracy, to get into the position of thinking that anything they do in the world or at home is uniquely bad. Uh and that's where that's where I start have started to worry in recent years about America following Europe's path. Yeah, so reading the most recent book on democracies and death cults, um you're really confronted with a stark reality of you don't mean this metaphorically. So, if if you don't mind, walk us through what is a death cult uh and why in the book, cuz the book is largely, I don't know if you'll like this uh encapsulation, but it seems so true to me. It's largely a um looking at October 7th and what happened in Israel with the Hamas attack through that lens. And so, it is this unrelenting um recantation of all the things that happened. And it was stark reading it. Like I've obviously been paying attention to it, but whoa. Like when you hear it one after another, like following that timeline, it's it's It's grave. And so, I walked away, and I don't know if you wanted me to, but I walked away feeling um coming to the conclusion that solving this problem is going to require a total victory on one side or the other. And we'll get into that cuz I have beliefs that I think YouTube at large takes deep exception with, and so we'll see if if you can beat it out of me or if we rile each other up. I don't I don't know how that'll play out, but um one, does that feel like a fair read of the book? And then two, what is a death cult very succinctly? Uh firstly, I don't mean the book to be unrelenting. I think I tried to relent a bit at various points. I certainly tried to finish by the end on a somewhat positive note, which I feel is not faked by any means. Mhm. On Democracies and Death Cults starts with the morning of October the 7th because for me um several things happened that I thought were enormously telling, and that's why I spent most of the last year and a half in uh the the area covering the war in Israel, Gaza, Lebanon, elsewhere. I've also been in Ukraine and so on, but it's largely about the Israel-Gaza war because uh when the news started to come out from Israel on the 7th, having reported from there and been there many times, I was first of all, of course, horrified by the the things that were coming out. I secondly knew that um this story of what had happened, the murder of 1,200 civilians, the kidnapping of 250 civilians from Israel by Hamas, was going to be um passed over quite swiftly because the world media for various reasons tends to like to talk about Israeli retaliation more than they do the thing that's caused Israel to retaliate. But I I I was aware from 24 hours after the massacre. Firstly, that I needed to go to Israel to get firsthand what had happened. But secondly, I became aware that there was going to be something going very badly wrong here at home in America and in other Western countries. And I knew that because I had a glimpse of it in Times Square on October the 8th, when the massacre was still going on. And I went down to Times Square because there was a protest of a pro-Hamas protest, an anti-Israel protest that was glorifying the massacres. And I thought, "Okay, get ready. This is going to get a heck of a lot worse because this is before any Israeli reaction to the atrocities had even started." You ask what a death cult is. I I mean, in a way I I put the the title on Democracies and Death Cults. I put it in clear um antithesis because I believe they are absolute opposites. We've seen many death cults in history. What unites them is they do not share what many people in America and the rest of the West assume is the natural predisposition of mankind. Ask your average college student, you know, "Do people in the world feel roughly the same everywhere and want the same things?" And they'll say, "Yes, of course. Everyone in the world basically wants the same thing." And my inclination, having traveled very widely in the world, is to say, "Whoa. Hang on. Many people want different things. And the more you travel in the world, the more you realize that." But the thing that I write about here is is something which many people, most people in in the world of peace, simply cannot comprehend. And that is there are some people who literally not only do not value life, but literally worship death. We have seen this many times before in history. In the 1930s in Spain, a great Spanish philosopher of the era, Miguel de Unamuno, who wrote the book The Tragic Sense of Life, gave a lecture at his university in which the Francoists, the fascist students who he was trying to pull back from the brink, resist his attempt to civilize them and end up chanting "Viva la muerte." Long live death. And Unamuno leaves and dies shortly afterwards, an extremely disappointed and disillusioned man, as he says this necrophilic chant, long live death. Well, Hamas, like Hezbollah, is a similar death cult. Its leaders, its members, literally have spent decades saying, "We worship death. We love death." They say, "We love death more than you love life." The now late leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, said for years, "The great weakness of the West is that they love life, whereas we do not. We love death." And the fact that that exists is an extremely troubling and difficult fact, and it's a particularly troubling and difficult fact for Israel because it happens to have neighbors who have this view. Really fast, is that definitionally born of Islam or is this just a an algorithm that can be tripped inside of the human mind? As I hope I showed by giving the example of 1930s Spain, it is something that can be created from many many different backgrounds. Many direct directions. It can come from the left, it can come from the political right, it can come from Uh, poor, the rich, uh, the advantage, the disadvantage that can come from absolutely anywhere. But, in the case of the death cults that Israel faces, Hamas and Hezbollah and their backers in the Iranian Revolutionary Government in Iran, it obviously has its origins in a very violent, the most violent, and most appalling version of the Islamic faith, uh, which is, uh, the Jihadist death cult that, yes, believes in martyrdom. That the highest value in life is to die in the cause. Mhm. And, indeed, to take other people with you, to kill and to die in the name of the cause. Some people may think I'm exaggerating this. I'm not at all. I mean, I give example in the book of the Hamas leader, uh, Ismail Haniyeh, who was living in a luxury apartment in in Qatar. Um, he gets the news that his three sons, who are also Hamas leaders, have been killed in an air strike in Gaza. And he's absolutely joyful that they have been. Uh, much of the Western mind cannot comprehend how any father could be joyful that his sons have all died. But he is, because he believes that they have died in this cause. And, uh, I I believe that this is very, very hard for the Western mind to comprehend. The people in the south of Israel who stared this in the face, literally, on October the 7th, they know what this is now. I don't think many other people in in the rest of the West, in Western Europe or America, North America, do understand. But, there is this follow-on question which I spend much of the book meditating on, which is, why are there so many people in our own midsts who want to excuse or to, uh, promote or to, uh, even admire the death cults. And I think this is a very, very important question for us to ask because we should have some ability, as we're saying earlier, to have the zones of agreement. And the zones of agreement should include not supporting the deliberate rape of women. Not Yeah, one one would hope. All right, I have a read on this. I'll be very curious to get your, I'm sure far more thoughtful take, but as a student of history, I look at that and I recognize in what's going on in Israel and Gaza, the revolutionary mindset. And framers of the Constitution here in the US understood very clearly the reason that what happened in France or anytime that you have a revolution it tends to lead to tyranny is because once you click over that algorithm, once it turns on in the human mind, everything becomes about revolution. It is a revolutionary frame of reference in which you can tear anything down. No one prizes stability. It's fighting for the sake of that idea, whatever that idea is. And once you have this thing is worth dying for, to actually manifest that in the world, you've got to share that idea. You've got to get that idea to take shape in the minds of everybody around you. And once you create that or I should say once that momentum gets going, it is extremely hard to stop. And so hearing Alexander Hamilton and George Washington both talk about like, hey, we've got to get these guys to chill because otherwise we're going to go from overthrowing the British government to a civil war that just tears us apart. We've got to get people outside of that mindset. And so if I always look at humans as a super organism and there's just so many patterns that we don't feel as individuals. We always just feel like we see the world the way that it actually is. And all these other idiots they're caught up in something. But if you instead go, oh, this is this is a thing inside the human mind that has a justification which is we um I have a thesis that humans as a superorganism abhor uh plateaus. And so, we have something in us that runs that says, "Oh, we're getting mired in something. We're getting stuck. We're being oppressed, whatever." Boom, that algorithm kicks in. The first person realizes they would rather die than sit still. We get thrilled by that. I mean, there are plenty of people in history where we're like, "Yo, they died for the cause. This is incredible." You talk about some people in your book that were like we revere them for their willingness to go try to save lives and to be willing to give over their life. We'll be back with the show in just a moment, but first, a brief history lesson. Throughout history, one pattern repeats with absolute certainty, economic instability. The Great Depression, the '70s stagflation, the 2008 crash, each time paper wealth evaporated overnight, and each time those who owned physical gold preserved their purchasing power. A tangible asset created by exploding stars that can't be printed away or deleted with a keystroke. American Alternative Assets makes protecting your wealth simple. They provide the white-glove concierge service that serious investors deserve. Their team guides you through every step of securing your financial future with precious metals. Don't wait for history to repeat itself while you're unprepared. Call 1-888-615-8047 or visit tomgetsgold.com. Again, that's 1-888-615-8047 or go to tomgetsgold.com. This is a paid advertisement. And now, let's get back to the show. For Israel, this is a dangerous moment where now they run the risk of becoming the death cult who's like, "Well, we now have our thing that we're willing to fight to the death for." Do you see that risk? There's always risks uh um and as I say, from every direction. Um I believe however that there is every difference in the world, morally and strategically, uh to fight uh for death and to fight for life. I believe there's all the difference in the world of um carrying out an unprovoked, unnecessary attack on peaceful people in their homes on a Saturday morning. And for instance, going in to a Hamas stronghold and trying to either kill the leaders of Hamas or get the hostages back. Uh I believe that although uh some people claim that there isn't no difference between these two things because if death is the result, it's it all comes out in the wash, I disagree with that. I think that uh somebody who goes into a firefight to save lives, as I give examples of in the book, many, and I could have given many, many more, going into a place of conflict to save lives is the exact opposite of going into a conflict with the express desire to take as much human life as possible. And Hamas's aim everywhere, always, like Hezbollah's, is to take as much human life as possible. And even, and this is one of the added perversions, even to to make your enemy take as many lives on your own side as possible. I believe that's a very, very different thing. Uh these two things stand as opposites. And uh I'm very happy to to argue through why uh uh that that exists, that difference. that would be helpful because one thing I want to know is what do you anchor your morality on? And the bad news for this conversation is I share your anchor or at least as I interpret you. Um but some people clearly they need they need an anchor and it seems like they're anchoring off of uh weak good strong bad. Very simplistic but it's an anchor and it's giving a lot of fervor to the people in the West. Um what what do you anchor the what is to you and I obvious that if you're fighting for life that's very different than if you're fighting for death? Well, one thing is that I'm uh unashamed to say that I'm on the side of my own civilization. Um I I'm I I'm on my own side as it were I I want uh my own uh societal side to win out against uh when it's challenged in a fight. I want it to win against other visions of how to organize human life. I'm on the side of the democracies winning against communism but that's a fight for previous generation. I'm obviously on the side of the democracies that fought against and destroyed Nazi fascism. I believe that in a conflict between your your friends your allies um against people who are not just their enemies but yours as well it isn't that hard to know which side to be on. That doesn't mean of course that you shouldn't be or can't be critical of your side's actions and certainly when your side does something which is wrong that should of course uh be criticized. But I think that one of the things that has caused a lot of disputation in the last 18 months since this war has been going on is that first of all I mean many people do not actually understand anything about the nature of war. I have yet to hear from any of my critics any scenario in which they know how you would rescue 250 people from a densely packed area in which they're being hidden up underground by a group that uses its own civilians as human shields and uses its tunnel networks to store its weaponry. But literally as a leader of Hamas said the other month when he was interviewed on Al Arabiya, the interviewer said to him in Arabic, "Why why don't you allow the Gaza civilians to shelter from any bombings from the air? Why don't you allow them to shelter in the extensive tunnel network which you spent 18 years building in the Gaza?" This Hamas leader said, "But the the tunnels are not for the citizens of Gaza. They're for our fighters and for our rockets." Um I have yet to hear a decent explanation from anyone, a military historian or an amateur or interested observer or anyone else. I've yet to hear anyone say how they in a situation like this would retrieve the hostages and destroy the leadership of the terrorist death cult that abducted them and killed 1,200 of their fellow countrymen. And just to put it in some perspective, I know your audience will be able to understand this but I know some audiences who haven't been able to understand the idea of extrapolation out from population size. Israel is a is a country of only 9 million people and obviously the United States is many times that size population-wise. But if you look if you do the extrapolation of numbers out what Israel suffered on the 7th of October is the equivalent of about 44,000 Americans being murdered on one day on the American homeland soil and about 10,000 Americans being abducted from their homes and held in a neighboring country. Nobody can persuade me that if 10,000 Americans were being held hostage and 44,000 had been massacred and raped much more. Nobody can persuade me that America wouldn't want to have a strategy to reverse that, to address it, to stop it from ever happening again. And if you do agree with that, what is your plan for retrieving the hostages and for killing the leaders who did this or bringing them to justice? The bad news is their reasoning their their going to have a [ __ ] answer. They'll give you one. They're going to say that's bad, you go in softer, you negotiate, you blah blah blah, all the things that will never be able to run the counterfactual. But I think that there is a moment earlier in what you were saying that you actually schism away from the people that you're trying to get that answer from. And I think I I am very much mind reading and so you're closer to the problem by all means um correct me if you see something wrong. But this is my mental math. Uh that they would say uh that's the price you pay. You are a colonial power. You have uh been occupying people. This is an act of resistance and yeah, you don't have the right full stop to come in and have a disproportionate response. So, I don't know what you want me to say. You don't get to. You need to negotiate. You need to find a way to free these hostages that's non-military. Like that's crazy. Well, um yes, Israel is accused of every single sin that the rest of the West is accused of. It's accused of colonialism just as America is accused of colonialism, just as Britain is accused of colonialism. By the way, in the case of Britain, it's a valid accusation, I have to concede. Um but uh um not for some centuries, I should stress. Um in the case of Israel, it's also accused of um genocide and and much more which it's not guilty of and which I lay out why that's obviously a a slur in the book. But America is accused of the same things. So just just run with me for a moment on this. If America is been accused of all the same things that Israel has been accused of, in what world would we say that the murder of thousands of Americans on American soil and the abducting of many thousands more is a reasonable response to historical injustices carried out by Americans who are long dead? Um you don't even have to do that with this country. You could do it with any even rival country or even a challenger country or even a country whose leadership professes itself to be an enemy of the United States like the revolutionary Islamic government in Iran. The revolutionary Islamic government in Iran that backs Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and others who are waging war on Israel and others. Um they they have had Iran in captivity that regime since 1979. And beleaguered and and much oppressed one of the great civilizations I think in the world, the Persian people. Um if however a group was to uh go into Iran, select peaceful people going about their lives, burn them alive in their homes, kidnap other Iranians and so on. I could make uh uh the argument that and I will will make it quickly now that Iran the Iranian revolutionary government today is literally a colonialist power. It is the most colonialist power in the region, perhaps in the world. In my own lifetime it obviously colonized Iran. The Ayatollahs went on to colonize Iraq after the vacuum left by America. It colonized Syria. It colonized and helped to destroy the formerly great country of Lebanon. And it has colonized Yemen. So, Iran in our own days literally guilty of the greatest amount of colonialism of anyone in the era. And yet, if on a Saturday morning, any group went in and started randomly slaughtering and raping Iranian women because of this colonialism and said, "Well, you're guilty by dint of being Iranian." I would like to think that everybody in my friendship circle and anyone I wanted to know would say, "It doesn't matter. That's still wrong." Um why has that ability to make a judicious judgment seem to evade so many people in the West? Why do so many people in elite institutions from UCLA to and Berkeley to Columbia and much more, why do they find it so hard to believe all women or not victim blame? Why do they want to make excuses for the most violent anti-Semitic, but also anti-Western terrorist groups of our time? It suggests a profound breakdown in our ability to be judicious. For sure, and it's one that should trouble us all. Do you have an answer for that? Like what what algorithm are they running that makes that so it's it's conflict-free in their mind. Like watching even I mean this is obviously much lighter than some of the things you just painted, but watching Claudine Gay try to tap dance, use legal language around the genocide Yeah, genocide it could does create a problem. I'm just going to say it. She just wasn't going to bring herself to do that. But I think and look I'm often accused of mind reading and I will admit I try to mind read as much as possible. I feel like I have a high predictive validity take on what she is doing. Mhm. Do you have a sense of the narrative that she tells herself or whatever that governs her morality? Yeah, absolutely. When those three university presidents sat before congressional committee I knew that they were reading out statements that they had been given by the university's legal team. They wanted to make sure they weren't opened up to class action lawsuits and much more. And since many Jewish students on their campuses and others have been racially attacked in the last 18 months. Just 2 days ago at Princeton University Jewish students had chance of being told to go back to their own homelands. Which is interesting of course because it seems the Jews can never do anything right. If they're in the Middle East, they should go back to Poland. If they're in Poland, they should go to Auschwitz. If they're in America, they should go back to somewhere. It's a very dark thing that, but the universities where that's happened on them happened across the country by the way would not be agreed on from anywhere else. They would not be agreed on from any other direction. If if black students on an American campus had right-wing maniacs screaming at them to go back to Africa, I would like to think not only that those students or the people doing it wouldn't get away with it, but all of us would join in the condemnation of that. We would all join in the condemnation of that. We wouldn't say what if or but you have to understand the context or anything else. But with Jewish students it's different. It's for some reason, well, for various reasons I outlined in the book, it's it's a it's been made into a different case, but but the interesting thing with Claudine Gay and the other university heads was that they were reading out lawyer-like statements clearly to cover their own backsides. And of course that didn't work. But when it happened I phoned a friend of mine who was teaching at one of these universities and I said to him what they were reading sounded to me like legalese. And he said really it sounded to me like ChatGPT. And so as I say in the book, we tried an interesting experiment which was to type the questions that Representative Stefanik and others put to them. Is it legitimate to call for genocide? Is it right? And so on. And um we put that into ChatGPT and ChatGPT was very clear. Um it said genocide is recognized as being wrong in all known moral systems. And as I say in the book, it just goes to show that sometimes ChatGPT can be more moral than the president of Harvard. Um the point is is that uh these uh university heads and others are basically trying to cover their own backsides against legal challenge uh and so on. But what they do in the process of it is to nod through the utterly reprehensible. Uh and I understand, I think, the uh place they're coming from. And I understand, I think, the place that the people that the the the students who are actually doing the aggressing are coming from. I think the students and others who are doing the aggressive actions and the intimidation and the thuggery, and much more, are under the belief that Israel is actually doing the things they're accusing Israel of. They believe themselves to be anti-colonialists, and they believe that Israel is a colonialist power. They believe they are anti-racist, and they believe that the world's one Jewish state is a racist power. They believe that they are anti-Nazi, and they believe that Israel is a Nazi country. So, some of them uh simply wicked, simply side with a death cult, simply pro-Hamas, and profoundly anti-Western in every way stated and otherwise. By the way, the Columbia students group who've got quite a lot of attention in the last year, in their objectives, they state that one of the things they want is the, quote, complete destruction of Western civilization. Fun. Complete destruction of Western civilization. Interesting. Interesting. At least they say it. At least they're open about it. Yeah. So, some of them, they simply want to turn over the whole darn table. They are the people that the founding fathers and others recognized in their time, and others have recognized throughout history. There are some people who just want to wade through blood, other people's blood or their own, and they think the spilling of blood gets you somewhere. It's a very dark and ugly uh um aspect of some human minds. But, others of those people who agree with them are simply massively, massively lied to. They actually believe the things that they're being chanted. They actually believe that if you make the Jews leave their historic homeland, and clear them out from, quote, the river to the sea, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean, something great will happen. Now, then they're never quite clear what, and I think uh to some extent we're in the realm here not of geopolitics or of the ethics of war, but in the realm of magic. A lot of people seem to imagine Well, most of my adult lifetime I've heard from politicians of the left and the right, conservative, Republican, Democrat, Labour, I've heard the claim that if the Palestinians have another state, and I say another state because in my view they already have two, well they had another chance most recently with Gaza. Um if they have another Palestinian state, the region would all be okay. It would be good in fact. The argument is that it's the key, if you solve the Israeli-Palestinian dispute it's key that unlocks every other problem in the region. I always thought that was rubbish. I always knew it was rubbish because in my observation even if there was another Palestinian state, it doesn't mean that the economy of the Yemen is going to blossom. Even if there was another Palestinian state, it doesn't mean that women in Iran are going to be given equal rights. And even if the Palestinians were given another state, it's not like the gay bars would open up in Riyadh. Uh um it's it's obviously uh nonsense. But the idea is now beyond the region because the intersectionalists and others believe that all oppression is interlocked, and to unlock one oppression is to start to unlock the others. Some of these people actually seem to believe that um if you address the issue of Palestinian statehood once and for all, um you also address women's rights, trans rights, gay rights, uh economic injustice, historical injustice, colonization, and so on. It's magical thinking uh of very familiar kind. If we just solve this one problem, the age of Aquarius will come. Do you think there is one umbrella problem that if you solve, that gets moving in the right direction or No. I think it's fantasy thinking and uh um and is one of the things that can cause fanaticism, of course, because if there was one thing that would, if addressed, solve all the world's problems, what wouldn't you do to get that one thing sorted? All right. By way of over uh simplifying this ridiculously, so um I do want to reveal my thinking on this, which is I the closest thing that there is, I think, to solving this problem long-term is you have to get everybody in the region to focus on uh making my child's life better in this life here on Earth uh better than mine and that their kids have an opportunity to make their lives better than their parents. Uh and so when I look at this, again, knowing this is over simplified, but believe that this is the thing that you can begin sort of pulling things apart until you don't have the revolutionary spirit and until people go, "I want my kids' life to be good here on Earth." Uh I I don't see a way out of this. But if you do solve that, now you at least have a North Star that forces you to ask, "Okay, what has done that around the world?" Uh and you end up even if you want to go to just the Chinese system, where it's still authoritarian, fine, but it's like, "Okay, we're going to turn um the economic engine on and off as we see fit, but like we get that that's how you get people out of poverty, you give them this goal-oriented mindset and and now things begin to work." That feels like, again, recognizing it is over simplified, but nonetheless is true. If they were running that algorithm, then you at least begin the very long slow process that has led the Western world over time to correct the wrongs. Uh I agree and I think it's unlikely. Um but yes, uh any system of uh thought that any system of morality that seeks the improvement of I'm trying to keep away from any theological or political language, but seeks the improvement of the lot of the next generation. Um would not indulge in what Hamas and others indulge in. Um I I I I think this is the same with I think that is one of the reasons why you can identify totalitarian mindsets and death cult mindsets is that they they simply have demands which are so unreasonable in the in the present, but are also highly undesirable in the long term. Um they uh believe in our view or nothing. They believe in death or nothing. And I say repeatedly and I say in the book that, you know, and by the way, this is I'm not the first the person to say this. Many other people, Golda Meir among them, have said this, but the moment in which there could be peace uh between the Israelis and the Palestinians would be the moment when the Palestinians realize that for their children to lead better lives, they should put their um energies into creating a state for their children, rather than trying to kill the children of the state next door. Um If they put If they had put their energies into building a state in Gaza, rather than trying to destroy the state next door, the history of the last 19 years would be very different. When you debate people at that moment, what what is their answer? Is it the open air prison, apartheid? Where do they go? Cuz that seems so self-evident. Yeah, they do they do all of those things. They throw lie after lie and misunderstanding upon misunderstanding. But, um I mean, there are plenty of Palestinians, Arabs, and others who've identified exactly the same problem in their own society. But, the you know, the onus of Palestinian leaders to actually accept their Jewish neighbors. Um That That's not where they feel that they That's not where they go. I mean, yes, Arafat famously terrorist though he was, I mean, he he had the opportunity again and again. Bill Clinton said this recently again. Had the opportunity at Camp David 25 years ago now to get 99% of what he had asked for all his life. And he walked away not actually because he wanted that one extra percent, but because he knew that if he made an agreement, he was over. He'd be over. They His own people would reject him. And this is a This is a very deep problem, and I think that it's one worth staring in the face. I'd love to see it solved. Uh I'd love to see I'd love to uh be able to dream the same dream that many of the people in the kibbutz, the communities in the south, and indeed the young people in the Nova party dancing in the early hours of the morning. I'd love to be able to dream the same dream that they dreamed that uh they always dreamed of living in peace with their neighbors. Many of them work, but they didn't get it. We'll get back to the show in a moment, but first, let's talk about something that stops most people from starting an online business, overwhelm. 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Now let's get back to the show. Given how much you're steered by moral clarity, uh when you look at this moment, what's the calculus that you run? Because um at the end of the day when you look back all through human history, you the only way that you're going to get peace is if you win a decisive military victory. Now that doesn't stop you from having insurgencies, that is for sure. Uh but that's just how these things have been settled all throughout human history. You just break the will of the other side to fight. And when I look at what's going on in Israel-Gaza, I think a lot about America. And so for people that don't know their own American history, and I'll give it to you in the world's tiniest nutshell, uh we run up on a country that already has people on it. Um we through disease and warfare um, knock out the first group. And then we get to uh, basically Mexico, but it's in the form of California, etc. And uh, President Polk is like, yep, I want that too. And uh, has his run of four years and literally um, displaces them and his own generals were like, this is a stain on America that will never be able to wash off. But hey, don't worry, people have very short-term memories. We've washed it off. And now we have a country and the crazy thing is when I say that, I'm like, uh, like that's so icky. And yet if um, if China rolled up on the California coast where I live, I would fight. So I'm like, okay, and I would fight and I would be screaming from the rooftops decisive military victory. Mhm. So when I look at Israel, I'm familiar enough, obviously people could drag me into the weeds and be like, I don't know. But uh, I'm familiar enough with the history to know that there's a very similar roll out that's like, hey, if we can get enough people here to this area for reasons that obviously make all the sense in the world post World War II, like we've got to go somewhere. They go and at first it's like, well, now we can be economically powerful, we can start being politically powerful. And you just get to the point where you've got enough people that you're the dominant culture at that point and then from that you end up building the state. And honestly, man, when I look at the UK, I'm like, guess what? Playbook is being run on you guys. It's that playbook. You've got a bunch of Muslim people coming in, they're not assimilating. And on a long enough timeline, like that just seems that's a question of demographics. Who's having more babies? Uh, and then what are they teaching their children? If they teach their children English values, great. If they don't, then whatever they teach them, if they become the dominant culture, then that's what that nation becomes. And so, man, I hate to have this super detached thing cuz these are human lives and I I don't want to diminish any of that, but when I look at this, the the thinking of, okay, we've got two issues. We've got real people are dying cuz bombs are going off, guns are being fired. And then we have the ideological battle of, but we also want to win international support. We don't want to end up getting isolated. That's going to matter. Um so, if you're advising Israel, how do you do that one-two step of, okay, there're going to be people that feel some kind of way about the formation of the state always and forever, just as people feel some kind of way about the way that America started. Um but you're here. So, now that you're here, it do they not need to pursue total military victory, full stop, period, end of story, regardless of what the international pressures are? Um not totally regardless, but um they need to do as any country does what they what is best in security and safety of their own people. And always with that remembrance, I mean, you mentioned people coming from Europe to Israel, but only 1/3 of Israelis are of European ancestry and descent. Most are in totally indigenous to the region. Um it's always interesting to hear people talking about indigenous peoples. They they don't talk about indigenous peoples in Britain, you notice, by the way. Um just to really make this difficult, and I hear you, and that's we we should come back to that. But to stare at the hardest parts of this, if Mexicans, and literally, I'm looking at Mexicans right now. If they came to California, not not came to get They've been here forever from an ancestral standpoint. If they were like, okay, we are not interested in assimilation anymore. We want to bring our family over. We want to de-Americanize this. We want now California, Arizona, New Mexico, we want that to go back to a Mexican state. We feel way more kinship with Mexico, I would fight against that. And I would say, "Hey, if you're coming to America, you've got to assimilate." But I'm not blind to the fact that we just won. So, we won a war, and now there's a trip that flips in my brain that says, "Hey, you've got something, you've built a country here, and now it's full steam ahead." And I'm married to a Cypriot whose family lost their land when Turkey invaded. I've actually marched in the streets of London saying, you know, "The Turkish troops need to get out of Cyprus." But the reality, my actual belief is like it's it's done. Move on. Like it to loop endlessly there makes no sense to me. You I'm very glad you went on that demonstration. I feel very passionate about the Cypriot cause, and I'm always startled by the fact that uh the fact that a NATO member state is still occupying half of an EU member state. Turkey is still occupying northern Cyprus. Seems to me a great injustice, and although you are about the first person I've ever spoken to in America who has uh marched for that cause, it stands out because uh you do not see American students or any massive movement on American streets saying uh nothing in the world will be sorted and righted until uh the Turks give up uh northern Cyprus. You There's nobody says that, but that's a real occupation. Uh that's real colonialism that the Turkish government is doing right there. Um the thing with wars is there's a misunderstanding in the modern age. The misunderstanding of one of many, but one of the most profound is that most wars finish with with a sort of compromise around the table. And that's just historically not true. As I say in the book, most wars end because one side's won, and one side has lost. There's an important follow-on point, which is that the side that's won needs to know it's won, and the side that loses needs to know needs to know it's lost. Um The only way in which uh we destroyed Nazi fascism was that it happened on the battlefield and on the realm of ideas. These two were as one. It was destroyed on the battlefield and destroyed as an idea. Never goes away completely, but is pretty much chased out. Communism was not destroyed as completely on the battlefield, but it was and it wasn't completely destroyed in the realm of ideas, not as much as some of us would like. Um but it was almost completely destroyed. Uh the Hamas death cult ideology must be destroyed to my view, not only on the battlefield, but in the realm of ideas. It must be made clear that any Palestinian who wants any kind of future for their people must accept the Jewish people as well. That they will not be able to continue to They will never thrive as a people so long as they want to annihilate their neighbor. And I really hope that after this last round of conflict, which I've often said is not must not be the the latest Gaza war, but the last Gaza war, not the third Lebanon war, but the last Lebanon war. My hope is that this uh death cult it can be destroyed on the battlefield and in the realm of ideas. But for that to happen the Palestinian people and anyone who supports them and is on their side abroad must encourage them to realize that the annihilation of their neighbors is deadly for their neighbors and deadly for them. Yeah, there's no doubt. Now, going back to um Cyprus, so I'm not sure if it came through in what I was saying. I marched in that, but I marched in that basically to show love to my in-laws. Uh and to be honest, I didn't even understand. It It was I I will say I felt very good about it. Um but the reality is now, as I get older and I um am trying to be morally consistent about how I think these things ought to go. Um I look at America, it took its land by force, and I love this country and I'm proud to be an American and just accept that this is the way of the world. Um and so, I look at Israel, same thing, and I go, "Hey, it's the way of the world." They were able to, even if you're just going to give them politically, they were able to politically come in and unify the land under their banner, and then when attacked, they were able to win those wars. And so, right, they've got it. And so, to be consistent with that, when I see Turkey's been there for 50 years, I'm like, "Kids, it's over. Like, it if you're either you got to fight back, which would be obviously a horrible loss of life, and I would not advise it cuz we're 50 years later, things have settled, people have moved on. Um but to continue to loop on that, like, that doesn't make sense to me. That's exactly from where I'm at, and you can tell me I'm crazy. I totally hear you on the death cult thing, it gives it a totally different energy. And if the Turks had death cult energy or the Greeks had death cult energy on Cyprus, that whole thing would be a different ballgame. But, uh my takeaway is you fight until you're not willing to fight, and then if you're saying, "All right, we're done. We're out of this." That uh to spend the rest of your life like in this killing each other a little bit here, a little bit there, a little bit here, a little bit there, like, there's It's just no way to live, man. I don't I I can't wrap my head around that. It it it isn't a a good way to live, but um in the case of Israel, this is it's 80 years since the reformation of the state, the reestablishment of the Jewish state and Jewish homeland, and if after 80 years, almost 80 years now, uh some people don't accept it in the West, in other parts of the West, and also in the region, that is to their great detriment. Um because there is State of Israel is not going anywhere. Agreed, and I think they should go ham. But my question directly to you is I see Israel in the way that I see Turkey in Cyprus, not the way that I see Greece. Do you see Israel as Greece or Turkey equivalent? Uh I I would I wouldn't say I see it as being either equivalent. Um for lots of reasons. First of all, uh Turkish expansionism is its own thing. Uh Turkey and the Ottoman Empire has historically been very good at expanding way beyond its borders and wishing to build up an empire. It is has been historically a very colonialist and expansionist power. Um although there are Turkish a red line for you. Ethically. Doesn't have to doesn't have to be I'm broadly against it, yes, but um I believe in nation states, but I also believe that nation states borders can change, but you as you say, you better be up for that. Um if you're going to do it, Israel's borders are are disputable in three arenas, have been disputed in three arenas principally, the Gaza, the Golan, and Judea and Samaria. Um I see all of that as stuff that can be sorted out. I The Golan is Israeli. Gaza is a mess. West Bank, negotiate. Um And again, we'll see. But, I do think that something which everybody has to realize about the region is is that first of all, it is the place it is the one place that um is the Jewish homeland. Um Muslims have many different homelands. Um like Christians have many different homelands. Uh the Jews have one homeland. Um They're in it. And as Golda Meir famously said to Joe Biden, they have a secret weapon, which is they have nowhere else to go. And the people who sometimes um uh fantasize about Israel's enemies winning a victory over Israel should realize that should should recognize that. I think it's just it's a very strange thing. I'm so I'm glad you brought up Cyprus. It's a very strange thing the world to fixate the amount that it does on this one particular territorial dispute, which is a real territorial dispute, but it's it's it's telling that it's the one that gets the world's attention. The Western Sahara question does not. Cyprus does not. There are many territorial disputes around the world. It is a very interesting one this one. And one of the reasons I think it is so important is because I think that the anti-Israel people have chosen their target well. They have realized correctly that the Jewish state, Judaism, foundational to the Judeo-Christian tradition, which is obviously, whether you like it or not foundational to the foundation of the West. They realize that if they take out Israel, they can take out something very fundamental to the West. I think they are right. Uh but I simply don't want them to succeed. Um do you think do you think of then um the Israel conflict as a flag bearer for the Western world and it's like, "Hey, you've got this in our region and so we're treating this like a splinter." Because literally until that sentence came out of your mouth, I would have said, certainly for my own sake, that this is about Jews and has nothing to do with Jews as representative of the West. Just because when I look back in history, I remember one of my first my earliest awakenings to patterns of history was my sister who was obsessed with uh Russian history was telling me about pogroms. And I'm like, "Why always the Jews?" Like I don't understand. So, and you confront that in your book. So, I suppose my my question is two parts. One, is what's going on in Israel from an international perspective them as harbinger of the West irrespective of being Jews or is what's going on over there uh Jews just represent something, man, that for a long time has wound people up. I think it's both. Um I I think since the West is based, as everyone knows, on Athens and Jerusalem, uh um you would not want to take out the legacy of Jerusalem any more than you'd want to take out the legacy of Athens. Um and but either would be devastating uh to to the Western tradition. Um and at the same time, Judaism, the Jewish people are their own thing. And uh they as you say throughout history have come in for disproportionate amount of hatred. And as I say in the book there are very very clear reasons for that. And I think among other things that the human desire to find a scapegoat which Rene Girard among others wrote about so eloquently is absolutely hardwired into us. The Jews are almost perfect as a scapegoat for absolutely anyone. They could be a scapegoat for the Christian world and they can be a scapegoat for the Islamic world. They can be a scapegoat for the rich and for the poor. For the for people of left and right politically. I go into the reasons for that and but I believe that the moments when societies become filled with this sort of noxious thing of anti-Semitism is a thing when you can tell the society itself is starting to go rotten. And they're looking for someone to blame? Looking for. It is as I say it's a mirror for the failings of anyone who indulges in it. As I quote Vasily Grossman, tell me what you accuse the Jews of and I'll tell you you what you're guilty of. You might be amused of course to know that that works for governments as well as for individuals. The Turkish government calling the Israelis occupiers is one that particularly amuses me because all it does is tell us about the Turkish government. Yeah, it's the whole idea of projection is very very interesting. Um Why this moment? What's going on right now that is resurfacing an unbelievable amount of anti-Semitism? It is as I say a demonstration of a failure in society and failings that are going on. I believe that the the anti-semitism we've seen the last 18 months it's not this isn't to say I should stress I always stress it isn't the case that any criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic. But treating Jews by double standards is. And I believe that much of what we've seen not all of it but much of what we've seen is anti-Semitic in in its origins and its nature. I think it tells us that our societies are febrile, more febrile than we might wish them to be and that when as again as Grossman said when systems in your own society go wrong you search for um other things to do. Um it's not just a scapegoat thing but it's it's it's it's it's startling historically to look at the way in which anti-Semitism is I mean for instance and we see it in America today. Jews can be hated for being rich and for being poor for being religious and for being secular. But most interestingly they can be hated for being absorbed and integrated into a society and for not being absorbed and integrated into a society. And that is a that is a sign of as I say you can anti-Semitism tells us it holds up a mirror to the person who who feels it. It holds up a mirror to the failings of the person or social structure that feels it. And it only tells us about them. It tells us never anything about the Jews. It's really interesting. I had a conversation with a guy that does a Jewish podcast. And we were talking about that and my hypothesis is really simple. Um one, you have a and the only sort of um stick in the spokes is that I had never thought about uh how they have been historically in Europe persecuted for being poor. But my thinking was always, okay, you have a really powerful strategy, which is that you help each other. That's that's unreasonably useful when I think about um what makes a nation work. You all work together against the rest of the world. What makes a family work? You all come together against everybody else. What makes a team work? Same thing. And so they have a tradition of really helping each other, but it's extremely hard to convert to their faith. It's not impossible, but it's very hard. So there's this sense of you're being kept out of a club and a club that historically has been very successful, so they can come into an area um fleeing the previous pogrom, have to rebuild from scratch, are able to do it. Uh I was talking to Jordan Peterson at one point and I was like, what do you think it is? And he was like, well, they um almost certainly have a standard deviation above the norm uh IQ. And he's like, look, that's controversial, but if you have uh an insular group that for better or worse is a standard deviation ahead of the average from an intelligence perspective and they're really good at helping each other. So now you drop them in and basically anywhere they go they're going to be successful. And if you just understand economies, you know you want to put yourself at the heartbeat of that. There's a reason Alexander Hamilton, who was not a Jew, understood, I want to be Secretary of Treasury. Like that's where I want to be. I'm essentially going to invent this country on the back of controlling how money works. And even saying that phrase, controlling how money works, sounds evil, but read Hamilton. You'll be like, oh damn, like thank you. I owe you a debt of gratitude. This is unbelievable. I live in this incredible society because you had these insights into how to balance it. Like, they didn't even have the word velocity of money, but he intuitively understood the need to address that. Oh my god. Anyway, brilliant. So, they find themselves at the heartbeat of a thing that people really care about. So, I look at that and I'm like, yeah, if your society is beginning to degrade, things are not going well, but you can see a group that sort of keeps you out. Um and they're doing well almost regardless of where we're at in society. It is like this perfect storm married with what you've been talking about about the death cult mentality that can through time for totally different reasons just absolutely take over the operating system of the human mind. Uh totally fascinating. My own people, the Scots, were also big bankers back in the day. And it was for reasons that the historian Niall Ferguson has written about. Scots and Jews were very similar in their organization in money. And one of the explanations for it has nothing to do with genetics or IQ. It's to do with high trust. It's to do with high trust. Right. Um you could be if you're a Scottish banker or Jewish banker, you were in a community where if you um if you were to cheat somebody, um it's not just you're cheating them out and they could legally get you. You're going to damage your own reputation in the the community of trust, and that's not worth it. Anyway, however, fortunately, from my point of view, the Scottish people are not currently being held responsible for all of the woes of the world. That is a nice switch. Yeah. Now, going um to put a bow on the book part of this conversation, um you end on an optimistic note. What do you want people to take away from what was really This really feels like the most honest word from my N of 1 experience. It was confrontational. Reading your book was confrontational. I realized how much I had pushed some of those early ideas of what was going on to the back of my mind and then I didn't want to think about them. And just carrying those through and hearing the stories one after another, it it really was like, "Oh, I'm being asked to look at evil." And to ask the question, does evil exist? If it does exist, can we come up with a universal definition? And then if we all agree, even if we can't agree there's a universal definition, if we do agree that evil exists and that almost biblical dialogue is the right way to understand what's going on, how do we get on the other side? Um people have to read the book to see what I think about that, obviously. I don't sum everything up, but um I do believe uh uh and have believed even more since my reporting coverage of the last 18 months, I do believe that a force exists in the world, can descend in the world, which you can only really use the theological term of evil to describe. I I I I I don't believe that there are just simply people who are misunderstood. And of course that's sometimes the case. I don't believe it's just people who have bad childhoods. Lots of people have bad childhoods. Uh I think there are forces in the world you should be able to use the dated but necessary language of evil about. Um it's unconquerable as a force in the world, but I suppose that I mean in you know, one of the ways in which people have always understood this problem is to recognize that it is something that runs through the center of every human heart and uh everyone must fight their own battle with internally as well as externally. When it comes to what I really want people to take away from this, it is quite a lot of things. Um not just a better understanding of the areas I'm writing about, the people I'm writing about, the problems I'm writing about. But I think of a problem which I think America in particular must address. Um I discussed that issue with the greatest generation and the way in which everybody who came after the generation of the 1940s weighs themselves against that generation. And we almost always presume that we will not rise to the task if in your example California were to be invaded or America were to be invaded or it sounds preposterous to say that of course cuz it's not something that's ever likely to happen by by sea. Uh Europe is in a different position now, particularly Eastern Europe. The further east you go in Europe, the more people are fearing that some kind of uh kinetic land war is possible. Nevertheless, um one of the things that I've taken away from my last last 18 months of war has been that uh the time of trial can come about and some people unexpectedly rise to the moment. And uh they do so for lots of reasons. One is events, but another is that they are well cultured well instructed you know, they don't have to be well educated. They have to be well created good human beings who orient themselves in a particular direction. And I say toward the end of the book that when I when I've been with the young men and women who older Israelis thought gone weak and were just wanting to party in Tel Aviv and beyond Instagram and TikTok, when this young generation stared real evil in the face and realized it had to defend its people, they have not only stepped up, they've been extraordinary. And I think constantly of their counterparts in America and Britain and elsewhere and they've been to a great extent, we have talked about this a bit earlier, they have been indoctrinated into a into a culture of victimhood where the greatest victim wins or where to be oppressed is almost the greatest good. And I believe I've always believed that this is a very a bad idea. I said this in The Strange Death of Europe, it was an undercurrent in The War on the West and in The Madness of Crowds. But I believe that there's an answer to this problem and it is literally to decide whether you want to orientate your society and yourself towards courage or whether you want to orientate it and yourself toward victimhood. And in my last book in The War on the West, I talked about the perils of the victimhood mentality. And in this book, what I finish on is the admirable nature of courage, of true human courage. And I hope that people take from the book remorseless though you describe it as being in parts, a courageous and optimistic ending. It's one of the most engaging books you've written and I'm pretty sure I've read all the books that you've put out. Uh Yeah, it it is it's unflinching in something that I resonate with, which is making me look at the truth of the human condition. All I care about is accurately mapping what this life is really like uh so that I can navigate it well for myself. Uh any larger structure that I'm a part of that I can do my little bit to nudge it in a direction that makes sense. Um yeah, it it is a message that I think this generation needs very badly. Now, this is where my lens maybe becomes a little bit more paranoid than the average person. Um I look at the world and I I really believe what I said in the intro. This is a period of renegotiation, the likes of which no one alive has seen before. I mean, this is really really everything is up in the air uh from what is morality, people can't decide on that. Uh who's the good guy, who's the bad guy, people can't decide on that. Uh how should war be played out, people don't agree on that. Um It it's just there's a lot of things all the way down to uh ought America let China simply quietly pass it economically and not uh ruffle feathers, avoid Thucydides' trap by accepting second place, or do we fight back? So, um man, there's going to be a lot happening right now. There was this incredible meme that was such a gut punch to me that your book is very much the antidote to, which is the meme was, "Oh, so you want to bring manufacturing back to the US?" And it shows these morbidly obese people moving really slowly, non-dextrously on these sewing machines. And you just see a bunch of people doing that. Clearly, they don't know what they're doing. They're like fumbling with, you you know, like screwdrivers and stuff. And then it's like, "Make America great again." And I was like, "Oh, man, that is a little too real uh in terms of we've just lost that the like fighter spirit, the people that came and were And I'm going to say the words that people are going to hate. The people that came here and literally conquered a completely wild land. And that sense of like adventure, of danger, of not being able to guarantee survival, but you had a shot that nobody was going to be able to stop you. You were going to be able to build what you could build. And if you were willing to fight for it, you could have it. And I felt that coursing through the veins of America until about maybe 10 years ago. And then it just you could feel it like flagging and you're like, wait a second, what's going on? Like you get such a different vibe from kids. So anyway, hearing your book talking about this young generation as um basically the punchline being every generation will realize what they're capable of when they're called. Um and uh I certainly hope nobody's ever called. I don't want that for people. I am certainly not pro-war, pro-violence. I don't want to see it. Pro-readiness, pro-love of whatever team you're on. I don't expect everyone to be on team America. I want them to be on their own team. Um but that like energy of innovation, of trying to like really do the extraordinary, it's just I don't feel it in the gas tank right now. We have been through a period of what I've described in my previous books as being deliberate innovation. Innovation, that is deliberate exhausting. We've been put through a period in the West of deliberate exhausting of our energies. To the most fundamental level. We've been having to spend years talking about the most fundamental thing that we knew as a species, boy or girl, man or woman. We pretended this was an impossible conundrum and that nobody could say. This is deliberately de-energizing. I would like to think that America is better than that and that this country, our society can be re-energized. Uh but for that to happen, a lot of crap's going to have to be pushed out of the way. And a lot of people are going to have to get going now with the thing they should do with their lives. Yeah, and we're going to see if there's something that can be put out into the culture that's going to spark that. Certainly Donald Trump is um the attempt at voting someone in that captures that energy. Do you think that populist figures like him and others around the world are going to um light that spark, or they a wrecking ball that's just going to make a mess of things? Um sitting awfully close to him currently in DC. Um we'll see. We'll see. Yeah, this is uh this is certainly a moment. Douglas, I can't thank you enough for your time, man. I cannot thank you enough for the books you write, for the wars that you cover, um and for your dogged tenacity. Now, I did promise a friend that I would ask a point-blank question of you. And that friend, I'll let him remain nameless, says, "What is your favorite thing about Michael Malice?" I just If you gave me all day, I couldn't think of a single thing. Yeah, I feel your pain. mind. He's a man without any qualities or attributes. It's It's very sad for him. And It's tough to watch. Many friends. It's tough to watch. All right, I'll pass it on. Brother, thank you, man. Uh hopefully this is the first of many, and I wish you the best on the rest of your book tour, and uh yeah, please let the people know where they can find you. Yes, uh you can find me on X @DouglasKMurray. You can find me uh my books all available at every place where books can still be bought. Uh Barnes & Noble in the US, Waterstones in the UK, and of course Amazon everywhere. I love it. Awesome. Guys, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. If you like this conversation, check out this episode to learn more. Sun Tzu famously said, "The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting." But in today's high-stakes tensions between America, China, and Russia, what if the ultimate battlefield isn't military, it's economic? Today's guest, Edward Fishman,