Douglas Murray, author and journalist. THOUGHT LEADERS
Notes From the Front Lines of the Culture War Race, decolonization, deception, and teaching the West to hate its own society
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f the Founding Fathers can be discarded,” Douglas Murray says, “and Abraham Lincoln can be discarded, and everyone else can be discarded from American history, what have you got left?”
JAN JEKIELEK: You start
DOUGLAS MURR AY: It’s
one of the tactics being used at the moment, even though the West has never been less racist. In the early 1960s in America, you might have said, “We’ve got intrinsic racism in our society,” and you would have been right. Is that the case in 2022? Obviously not. It’s an unfair attempt to misrepresent society. MR . JEKIELEK: Yet some-
how we’ve internalized this attitude. MR . MURR AY: That’s a
52 I N S I G H T May 27–June 2, 2022
very interesting tendency, isn’t it? Because it’s not natural. Most people want to think well of themselves, their history, their family, and their culture. You have to be taught to dislike it, unless it’s a completely dislikable culture. I think people in the West have been taught disproportionate criticism of their own society for more than a generation now.
nothing negative must be said about anyone else. This was a trope that came up in the post-colonial years. There are various scholars who were responsible for it. There was also a desire for revenge. People talked of justice, but they meant revenge.
MR . JEKIELEK: But how
works of some of the postcolonial thinkers such as Frantz Fanon are imbued with a desire for revenge against the West for the colonial era. And we can see this in the critical race theorists today, in the work of people such as Ibram X. Kendi in ‘How to Be an Antiracist.’
did that happen? MR . MURR AY: Through
a range of things. For example, we all live on campus now. These ideas spill out until everything the West did is looked on with disfavor. Anything can be said about the West, but
MR . JEKIELEK: So how do
these things connect? MR . MURR AY: Well, the ALL PHOTOS BY JACK WANG/THE EPOCH TIMES
In a recent episode of “American Thought Leaders,” host Jan Jekielek and author and journalist Douglas Murray discuss critical race theory, the ongoing assaults on U.S. history in our public square, and the importance of once again taking pride and finding value in Western achievements. Murray’s latest book is “The War on the West.”
off “The War on the West” with race and critical race theory. Is that the most important component of the attack on the West?
