CLAY: We are joined now by Douglas Murray, associate editor of The Spectator and author of the new book, The War on the West, and, Douglas, we’ve been talking a lot about potential impacts of Elon Musk buying Twitter. But I’m curious in your analysis, when did this war on the West really start? Is there a moment in time when you can point to it and say, “This was the pivot point. This is when this idea sort of became ascendant that the West was more of a problem than it was something to be praised”?

MURRAY: Well, it’s great to be with you. I think there have been a number of moments, but one of them is just the postcolonial period, the period countries like Great Britain — where I was born myself — stopped having colonies and independence came to these countries. It started as a movement of postcolonialism that in large part sort of saw itself as a rejection of the West.

I know people in the West who took part in that themselves, the 1960s generation, the 1968 generation. Then the 1970s, you start to get American academics playing around with the things we now call CRT and the much more — and then this accelerates and accelerates. I say in my book, “You can sometimes overemphasize what happens on campuses,” so I like to say, “Well, what was happening in the wider culture as well?”

And think back 20 years ago or so when Michael Moore published his book Stupid White Men, and has a chapter saying that if you look at any problem in world history, it’s a white person that’s behind it, and this stuff starts to be normalized in the dialogue, starts to be normalized in the conversation. You have people starting slowly — to begin slowly and then fast — pulling down all of the heroes of countries like ours.

In Great Britain, Churchill turned from a national hero to a national demon, where his statue is unsafe to even have out in Parliament Square in Westminster because people assault it because he’s guilty of having lived in the nineteenth century and having nineteenth century thought. And then in America, the war begins not just on white people in America.

But specifically over single hero of the American republic, every one of the times Founding Fathers, and it speeds up and it speeds up and it’s not just the people in The South in the Civil War but the people in the North. Suddenly Abraham Lincoln, not the hero of American history but a great villain. You have the whole founding date of America moved by the New York Times, by the paper of record to 1619 so that everything in American history is seen in a negative, hostile light.

So this country of America — the greatest experiment on earth — is not a story of triumph that you want to aspire to but a story of racism, slavery, and just embarrassment and shame. That has been growing for decades, and in the last couple of years, it’s just gone on heat and it smashed through every single thing in the culture.

BUCK: Douglas, it’s Buck. You know, one of the things that you point out in the book I think is so interesting is there are these very rapidly evolving — and obviously very hypocritical — standards that they’re use for people in the past being judged by the leftist ideology of the moment, but they don’t do this to leftists in the past.

MURRAY: They don’t.

BUCK: You point out that Marxist, Karl Marxist, whose work is full of racial slurs and anti-Semitism, he gets a pass. The repression and virulent anti-gay actions of even someone like a Che Guevara, they don’t deal with that. So it feels like they just weaponize this new ideology or the fad — the political fad — of the moment against certain people in the past. Is to what end? What are they trying to do? What are they trying to achieve with all this?

MURRAY: Well, you’re quite right, Buck. I quote one of the great racist hucksters of our day, the man who calls himself Ibram X. Kendi. Kendi attacks Thomas Jefferson because of one excerpt from a letter of Thomas Jefferson that he totally misrepresents, and as a result of which labels Thomas Jefferson a racist. So, say, okay, you’ve decided that Thomas Jefferson is a racist, everybody in the past is a racist.

Well, why don’t you say this about Karl Marx? And since my book has come out, will be out today, there have been excerpts in recent weeks including this point about Karl Marx, I’ve had loads of Marxists come out of the woodwork and say, “Well, Karl Marxist was a man of his time.” Hmm. Like Thomas Jefferson?

BUCK: (laughing)

MURRAY: Then they say things like, “We don’t look at Marx for his amazing views on race. We actually look to Marx for his amazing views auto economic theory.” Of course everybody in America could only admire Thomas Jefferson only because of his attitudes on race. Of course not. We admire Thomas Jefferson and the Founding Fathers because they founded America.

So these people keep demonstrating the fact that they’ve rigged a game, they’ve rigged a game which is anti-Western, anti-white, anti-American in particular. And you ask why they do it. I’ll tell you why they do it. They talk of this as if it was about justice. It isn’t about justice. It’s about revenge. It’s revenge. The whole thing is revenge on America, revenge on white people, revenge on the West. It is a completely racist movement that has got hold in our time, and I wanted to arm people with the facts we need to push this movement out of our lives.

CLAY: Do you think we will win? I think this is a big question, right, because people look around, many of our listeners, and say, “I never would have believed that United States would be as crazy it is right now.”

MURRAY: Mmm-hmm.

CLAY: And “crazy” obviously is a broad category. But you look around on a day-to-day basis, and we really have it seems lost control of our faculties.

MURRAY: Yeah.

CLAY: So will we win this battle? And if so, how do we win this battle from your perspective?

MURRAY: Well, here is what white Americans and white people in the West are being told. We are being told that we are uniquely guilty. We’re guilty of things that happened centuries before we’re born. We are born into guilt. Everyone else is born into innocence. Nobody else has anything else to atone for except for us. We are told that everything in our history is rotten.

All of our heroes were scoundrels, we have nothing to be proud of. We never did anything good in the world; everything we did was bad. Our whole culture is rotten, racist, riven through with white supremacy and much more. So the best thing we can do is to be born, discover how guilty we are, and then die as soon as possible.

Now, here’s a proposal for you. I think if you tried to do this — if you tried to argue this and make people believe it — from a minority community, it wouldn’t work. Who would want to be told that for year upon year, for generation upon generation? I don’t think it would work with a minority. Here’s the thing: The race hucksters — many of whom are white themselves like Robin DiAngelo.

The race hucksters are trying to make a majority population believe this about themselves, a majority population in the United Kingdom, a majority population in the United States of America. And I do not believe, in the long term, that that can succeed. What majority population would put up with this for very long? You know?

I believe most American people like most other people in the West and indeed in the rest of the world want to think well of themselves, want to have justifiable pride in the things they’ve done well. They don’t want to hate their forebears. We’re only here because of our forebears! I quote Branch Rickey said once, “Luck is the residue of design.”

We in America are the luckiest damn country in the world, and we have evidence for it. It’s the country that most people in the world want to come to. Now, is that simply because of what we are now? No. It’s because of what we were. It’s because of the people who came before us. It’s because of the generations that came before us. It’s because of the Founding Fathers.

It’s because of Lincoln. It’s because of all of the heroes of America. So here’s the thing. I think they have no chance — no chance at all, these racists, these new racists — of persuading the American people and the Western publics as a whole of this horrible, horrible anti-white, anti-Western, anti-American stuff, unless they persuade us that their lies are true.

My self-appointed task — among other things — in The War on the West is to show people, to give people the ammunition to fight back against these people. Every parent in America knows what it’s like when their child comes home and has imbibed this racist pap from the classroom.

All of this stuff, they know what it’s like. They know what it’s like when their kids return from school, and they’re being told all these monstrous lies about American history. We need to be armed to respond to this — and I believe that if we are, there’s no way that the new race hucksters can win.

BUCK: The War on the West. That is the book by Douglas Murray. Douglas, great to have you with us. Thanks so much.

MURRAY: It’s a great pleasure.