Douglas Murray

Murray.

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“”America has a great demand for fascists but a very small supply

—What on Earth did Douglas Murray mean by this?

Douglas Kear Murray (16 July 1979–) is a British journalist and author born in Hammersmith, London. He is the associate editor for The Spectator (which has the same ownership as The Daily Telegraph) as well as The National Review. Bolstering his amazing credentials, he has published articles in The Daily Mail. Some of his books include The Strange Death of Europe (the term borrowed from a classic political book The Strange Death of Liberal England) and The Madness of Crowds. In a similar fashion to the common racist conspiracy theory The Great Replacement, Murray laments that mass immigration from Islam-majority countries will take advantage of Europe's falling birth rates while Europe has somehow lost its sense of heritage and identity.

Although Murray is openly gay, he has praised Roger Scruton, a known vehement homophobe, as an example of "the light of conservative philosophy burning in dark times".

Murray supports Brexit. On Britain's divide, he diplomatically argues that it's really the "ugly intolerant Left versus the rest of us."

Views

Immigration

“”In their efforts to avoid war, Europeans are once again choosing dishonour. They refuse to cut back their welfare budgets or significantly increase their defence spending, and they still refuse to enforce the measures required to cease or reverse the disastrous effects of mass immigration.

—Douglas Murray, from a speech in The Hague to the Pim Fortuyn Memorial Conference on Europe and Islam.

Murray is very worried about the large numbers of Muslims immigrating to Europe, those who want to join the "welfare-wagon", and that it's different from the scaremongering about Jews during the 19th and 20th century. He believes that time and time again, the Muslims demonstrated themselves to be a security threat to Europe. In condemning relativism as being a disease for allowing Islam to "infect the West", he cited Mark Steyn's characterization of radical Islam as "an opportunist infection, like AIDS". For an example, he says Europe has been tolerant of sexual minorities in the past decade, but most Muslims in Europe want gay marriage to be illegal. Unfortunately, this is a very disingenuous argument: the British Christian conservatives are the ones that had made gay marriage illegal in the first place and fought bitterly against tolerance of sexual minorities.

In his speech during a conference on Europe and Islam in March 2006, Murray argued that the threat and potential destruction of mass migration was as dangerous as, but bore no superficial similarities to, the threat to Europe back in the days of World War II. In that speech (in 2006), he also predicted that time was running out before the "demographic time-bomb" would cause European cities to fall to Muslim majorities, and so all immigration to Europe from Muslim countries needed to stop. He argued that while the enemy was often defeated on the battlefield, they would defeat "us" from "within" as if Muslim migrants were covert Al-Qaeda sympathizers for extremists and not more often victims trying to flee an unstable country or just people that find Europe to be an opportunity for better living. He realized this and argued that people who had fled from their countries should be persuaded to go back once the tyrannical government was removed and that if they condoned or assisted in violence against the West, they should be forcibly sent back. Also, their children should be sent back to their parents' or grandparents' country of birth for some reason.

Cancel culture

Murray really doesn't like cancel culture. He compared cancel culture as the beginnings of a new form of totalitarianism as well as calling those engaged "the jihadis of social media". This was made in response to how ITV made Alistair Stewart step down after some tweet, during a disagreement with Martin Shapland, that included a passage from Shakespeare (in Measure for Measure) that included "angry ape". He noted Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's observations from The Gulag Archipelago related to why people are so complacent about their rights being taken away. He also displayed some self-awareness that the comparisons between cancel culture and gulag atrocities are absurd, though there is little reason the "totalitarianism" or "it reminds me of the gulags" bit is required rather than to argue about the potential damaging and unforgiving influence of social media and crowd psychology (including the bystander effect) as well as the overwhelming power of bosses that forced Stewart off in the first place.

Climate change

Murray believes the "climate alarmists" educating children on the threat of climate change is child abuse due to children expressing valid anxieties of climate change after watching BBC "parrot untrue claims" by Extinction Rebellion. He likened Greta Thunberg's arguments to lies that are "preaching her gospel of imminent hellfire" and that her solutions would be to "destroy free-market capitalism". He also used George Monbiot's failed predictions (Monbiot is not a scientist) as well as pushed a denialist trope that back in 2004 the Pentagon apparently failed to predict that Britain will experience Siberian climate in 2020 (the actual report is to "imagine the unthinkable to push the boundaries of current research on climate change" and acknowledges that it is extreme and only at the boundaries of plausibility).

Right-wing populism

Murray had a tendency to play down the threat of right-wing populists in the USA and Western Europe. Also, despite his ostensible defense of free speech, Murray has personally met right-wing authoritarian Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, and Orban has endorsed Murray's book. In the aftermath of the 2020 U.S. election, Murray implied that since the left (according to him) has become the faction of political violence in the United States, there was no reason to fear violence from the right. He would be proven wrong when Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol two months later, after which he wrote an article disavowing Trump's actions post-election.

See also

• UnHerd
• Peter Thiel and Toby Young — Reportedly, Murray was involved with an academic "Thiel network" that went on to influence Young's "Free Speech Union".