Saving the west, one polemic at a time
On YouTube intellectual Douglas Murray
I’ve written a long profile of Douglas Murray for the latest edition of Prospect magazine. Murray has been around for ages but is one of the right’s digital crossover stars in terms of his ubiquity on YouTube and the podcast circuit. Depressingly, he seems to get a free pass among some people because of his English affectations. As in, he can’t possibly be the thuggish chauvinist the left makes him out to be because he wears a dinner jacket, speaks in a ritzy accent and is able to recite some of Byron’s sonnets from memory. Since October 7, 2023 he’s been cast in some quarters as a great friend of the Jews - despite his flippancy about expressions of antisemitism that don’t fit neatly into a binary division of the world along ‘civilisational’ lines.
Murray, who is 45, has been a fixture of what used to be called Fleet Street for a quarter of a century. He has been writing for the Spectator since 2000 and has been associate editor of the magazine since 2012. In recent years, he has successfully transitioned to the polemical cauldron of social media, a crossover star of the internet’s right-wing ecosystem. You can still find him archly castigating somebody in print, but nowadays he is as likely to feature on YouTube, preening contentedly in the admiring glow of like-minded fellow culture warriors such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Lionel Shriver…
His initial public persona was of a crusading neoconservative…Getting the war on terror catastrophically wrong is apparently no impediment to claiming a monopoly on insight into today’s world. If neoconservative attempts to reshape global society have foundered, then it is vital, according to Murray, for the west to preserve its superior moral values by pulling up the drawbridge against outsiders. If it fails in this, “Europe will not be Europe and the peoples of Europe will have lost the only place in the world we had to call home.” The Strange Death of Europe comes across as a one-note amalgam of victimhood, paranoia and resentment. Militant Islam is ascendant. Immigrants are turning inner cities into crime-infested sinks. These same migrants (Muslims in particular) are overrunning a culture that has lost belief in itself. Murray writes of the “prophetic foreboding” of Enoch Powell, whose notorious “rivers of blood” speech in 1968 claimed that the “black man” would have the “whip hand” over the “white man” in “15 or 20 years’ time”. Murray believes Powell got the fundamentals right even if he “gave too much cover to people way to his right.”
Anyway, you can read the full piece here.