Passing Thoughts On The Judgment of The Anointed
Douglas Murray, one of those “trending” fake intellectuals du jour who manifestly calculates his every angle and word with his fame-dazzled eyes focused on the many and the money, has garnered some headlines this week for (sarcasm alert) daring, while a guest on Joe Rogan’s podcast, to criticize the host’s approach to choosing guests, which sometimes causes him to lend his enormous platform to questionable characters.
From The Independent:
“Look, I just feel we should get it out straight away, I feel you’ve opened the door to quite a lot of people who now have got a big platform who have been throwing out counterhistorical stuff of a very dangerous kind,” Murray said on Thursday’s episode.
After Murray made specific mention of Rogan’s interview with a podcaster named Daryl Cooper, who offered some sort of alternative account of the Holocaust, and claimed that Winston Churchill was the “chief villain” of WWII, he summarized his point this way:
“If you throw a lot of s*** out there, there’s some point at which ‘I’m just raising questions’ is not a valid thing,” Murray said. “You’re not raising questions, you’re not asking questions, you’re telling people something.”
Full disclosure: I am not a fan of Rogan’s podcast, have never seen him interviewing any of the “controversial” guests Murray is alluding to, and indeed have probably seen less than an hour of clips from the podcast over its entire existence. Furthermore, as for the aforementioned Daryl Cooper, whom I have never heard, but whose claims about Churchill I vaguely remember hearing about somewhere a while back, I have no doubt he is a schmuck and an attention-seeker of no account — a less suave and less politically mainstream equivalent of Douglas Murray himself, if I may say so. In other words, I have no vested interest in defending Rogan or any of his more peculiar guests, and actually care not a whit about any of them.
Having said that, I cannot help observing that, just as Trump’s seventy million true believers were whipped up to a resounding election victory in 2024 largely on fear-mongering about how the Biden administration and the Democratic Party were weaponizing the justice department, politicizing law enforcement, curtailing free speech, and coercing corporations and the academy into ideological compliance, only to fall in line with perfect love and obedience as their idol immediately set about ramping up and boasting about those very same tyrannical and anti-constitutional abuses of power in the name of their preferred ideology, so I note that Douglas Murray, who seems to be building his fan base and bank account by pretending to stand up with his (sarcasm alert reminder) giant brain to protect all the little people in Conservative Land against the aggressive condescension of the progressive expert class, nevertheless has no qualms about using his own self-appointed expert status to pass judgment from on high about which opinions ought not to be permitted within the discourse of “the right.” Not to mention the typically arrogant assumption of this member of “the anointed,” to borrow Thomas Sowell’s term, that of course he can hear the opinions of someone like Daryl Cooper and immediately see their folly, whereas Rogan’s audience, being the mere unwashed and uneducated, would have no internal resources with which to defend themselves against untenable or nonsensical ideas, if Cooper’s be such.
The ease with which Murray simply brands past Rogan guests whose ideas he find disagreeable as “s***,” and declares — as his opening comment on Rogan’s show, for maximum sound-bite attention — that Rogan is in the wrong, and perhaps even disingenuous, in claiming that he invites such alternative voices merely because he wishes to “ask questions,” would immediately be recognizable for what it is, if he were speaking from the left. He is saying, in no uncertain terms, that he, as a (sarcasm alert again) highly educated and erudite intellectual, knows what is true and what is false, that his opinions and allegiances have the weight of established facts, that no further discussion on these topics — that is to say, no discussion which does not conform to the confines of the topic as defined by his opinions — ought to be given a hearing by anyone, and therefore that anyone who does express curiosity or interest in views alternative to the ones Murray identifies as established truths is taking a morally dubious position. The hallmarks of the pop intellectual are a complete lack of the rational doubt that tends to inspire better reasoning, and a complete dearth of the Socratic spirit of playfulness which leads one to engage fearlessly with anything with which one is confronted, rather than to reject the strange opinion’s right to be uttered.
In short, if Murray is so sure that certain of Rogan’s guests are spouting ideas that do not deserve a public forum — and there are indeed ideas that do not deserve a public forum — then have at it! Engage, argue, make the logical case against those men and their ideas. Certainly do better than personal insult, ad hominem, and the bald assertion that any interpretation of current events or history that does not comport with your own, or rather with mainstream opinion, is “counterhistorical,” not to mention being “s***” for which your host (who is currently granting you his giant platform for your views) ought to be publicly shamed and reprimanded by his betters, the anointed.
I conclude, for those inclined to insist that I am not giving Murray his due, with a link to his recent long form interview with another popular podcaster, Lex Fridman. (Watch it here.) If you choose to watch, I highly recommend bedtime. Murray’s feigned gravity, the monotone mock solemnity in his put-on gravelly voice, the slow-motion sentences that lead nowhere and say nothing, the tendency to self-quote as though the banality or dead metaphor he said last week in another interview were a world-renowned witticism for which he cannot help congratulating himself, the carefully calibrated fan-baiting of trying to say about any issue only the sorts of things that make internet political junkies think, “This guy is brilliant, he says exactly what I always say!” — well, to be honest a judicious fast forward through the main topics of the discussion was all I could take, and at the end of it I found myself feeling a certain fond craving for the counterhistorical crackpots and conspiracy theorists. At least they sometimes provide some fun.
Sorry, I like my thinkers thoughtful. I am looking forward to the new Thomas Sowell interview due to be released on April 15th. Even when I disagree with him, I respect and admire him. Sowell is real, he has actually thought through his ideas himself, and he is not only saying what everyone on “his side” expects him to say or regurgitating the talking points of the moment with the embarrassingly rehearsed intonation of the smarter-than-thou upper class twit of the year candidate.
