Douglas Murray

Douglas Kear Murray (1979–) is a British journalist and author. 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 EuropeFile:Wikipedia's W.svg (the term borrowed from a classic political book The Strange Death of Liberal England) and The Madness of CrowdsFile:Wikipedia's W.svg. 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.

Parroting squawkbox
Pundits
And a dirty dozen more
v - t - e
Inventing "The Other"
Islamophobia
Fear And Loathing
v - t - e

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".[1]

Murray supports Brexit.[2] On Britain's divide, he diplomatically argues that it's really the "ugly intolerant Left versus the rest of us."[3]

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.[4]

Murray is very worried about the big numbers of Muslims immigrating to Europe, those that 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.[5] 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".[4] 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.[note 1]

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, 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 in 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 living. He realized this and argued that people that 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[6] as well as calling those engaged "the jihadis of social media".[7][note 2] This was made in response[8] 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".[9] 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.[10] He likened Greta Thunberg's arguments to lies that are "preaching her gospel of imminent hellfire" and that her solutions would be "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).

Notes
  1. A conservative demonizing Muslims for homophobia calls to mind this article from The Guardian.
  2. He also referred to New York Times handling coverage of Brexit as a "jihad".
gollark: It computes this in mere SECONDS.
gollark: You should use my computer algebra system instead. It's very good* and works**.
gollark: You should eigenlearn eigenlinear eigenalgebra.
gollark: Did you know? Eigendecomposition is a way to represent a matrix in terms of eigenvectors and eigenvalues.
gollark: Since the entire thing is horrible discrete approximations anyway.

References
  1. Murray, D. (January 13, 2020). "Roger Scruton kept the light of conservative philosophy burning in dark times. We owe it to him to follow his example ." The Telegraph. Retrieved February 2, 2020.
  2. Murray, D. (December 19, 2019). "Brexit, for Real This Time." National Review. Retrieved February 2, 2020.
  3. Murray, D. (December 14, 2019). "Britain's divide isn't North v South or red v blue. It's between the ugly intolerant Left and the rest of us.". The Daily Mail. Retrieved February 2, 2020.
  4. Murray, D. (March 3, 2006). "What are we to do about Islam? A speech to the Pim Fortuyn Memorial Conference on Europe and Islam". Wayback Machine. Retrieved February 3, 2020.
  5. All Things Considered. (June 27, 2017). "'The Strange Death Of Europe' Warns Against Impacts Of Immigration". NPR. Retrieved February 2, 2020.
  6. Murray, D. (January 31, 2020). "Will no one resist the new totalitarianism?". Unherd. Retrieved February 2, 2020.
  7. Murray, D. (January 29, 2020). "In defence of Alastair Stewart." The Spectator. Retrieved February 2, 2020.
  8. Murray, D. (February 2, 2020). "This needs to be the turning point when we all stand up to The Woke Totalitarians, says DOUGLAS MURRAY after Alistair Stewart's forced exit." The Daily Mail. Retrieved February 2, 2020.
  9. Blackall, M. (January 29, 2020). "Alastair Stewart quits as ITV presenter over 'errors of judgment'" The Guardian. Retrieved February 2, 2020.
  10. Murray, D. (January 18, 2020. "Terrifying our children with doom mongering propaganda on climate change is nothing less than abuse". The Daily Mail. Retrieved February 2, 2020.
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