Fireside Chat--Dennis Prager and Douglas Murray

This chat, about an hour long, took place on 10/15/2020, entitled "When Childish Views Take Over': Dennis Prager with Douglas Murrary." The Description: "An outstanding conversation with Douglas Murray. How the Left became so radical--the lack of debate, "anti-racism" training, corporate wokeness, critical race theory and infantile thinking. Plus sane, excellent advice for those afraid to speak their minds." Douglas Murray is author of "The Madness of Crowds". Dennis asked him how an independent thinker like him developed. Dennis adds that courage is the rarest virtue and Douglas has it. Dennis asks him why he is courageous. Douglas replied that courage in not being willing to put up with lies. Find and write about the big lies, deeper than whoppers told by politicians, lies that reveal medacity and hypocrisy in cultural values, a deeper level than politics. Murray labels courage as knowing what is worth defending. If one hates lies, then one is not willing to concede to the Progressive lie that Western values are hopelessly corrupt and discardable. Westerners do not appreciate what is so rare and precious, Western values. Murray defines two opponents of Western values. One is the hardcore Maoist or champion of a rival ideology. The second one, much more common, is anti-Western culture simply because that is the heritage, the backdrop to which they are rebelling in an unreflective, ignorant way. They do not realize how rare and precious America is. They do not know what evil is, no trag sense of life, so they do not know how good they have it here, and what they should fight to retain and preserve. The Europeans are more gloomy than Americans but our educator failure to teach children civic values, moral values and history has led children not to know abything bout the Communists and fascists. Leftists revise history to narrate that it is a vast savannah of grievances. The Left demands lots of fascists but they are tiny in number. The Leftist elite in the West love lies and how did that come about? They started with deconstructionism and critical race theory, and begin to tear down disciplines in university, then the whole country got infected with this grievance culture. Unbelievers are bullied, gaslighted, and intimidated to submit, and the Leftist rationale is so obscure (taking clear, simple ideas and making them abstruse and indecipherable). People go along and surrender so not regarded as stupid, backward or reactionary. Not enough people have stood up and opposed this cultural bullying. The Right reads the Left but not vice versa. Murray believes that postmodernism is waning, and Prager thought that was optimistic, and I worry that it may be premature optimism. They went over at length over the weird corporate wokeness going on with race-consciousness and anti-bias training being conducted at work across our two countries. Murray offered that these corporate boards trying to seem with-it as a cheap way to keep the grievance-mongers from coming after them. I agree, but insist that corporate cowardice is also a factor. Murray, a conservative gay, is labeled as a fake gay because he is not a woke gay. Identity politics are a way of attacking adults at work or through governmental agencies. Murray suggests that the silent majority must speak up and fight back to back off the noisy, bullying Leftist minority calling cultural shots right now. Dennis urges that conservatives not compromise on what they believe. They describe the CRT trainers that come to corporations, and whites, males, and conservatives are not even allowed to speak. They are to listen in silence, and be letured and corrected for their implicit bias and unconscious racism. This is outrageous nonsense and totalitarian bullying. Dennis offered that he has noticed that happy people do not vote Left, but resenters vote Left. He is spot on. Murray suggests the Right needs to do a much better job to provide the young and the public with an alternative to Leftism. Religion, values, liberty, Western culture, capitalism, prosperity and hope are some positive things for people to enjoy and work towards to find purpose in their lives. Excellent proposal, I thought--I offer Mavellonialism. They both agreed that grateful Westerners and Americans feel lucky to have been born in the West. Dennis suggests that grateful people are good people and are happy. He describes a happy black as a Republican. Dennis wisely counsels that people will only be happy if they also am aware of the presence of evil and suffering in life, that the tragic view of life makes happiness gained more meaningful, lasting, richer and deeper. Murray worries that Leftism, Prager's definition of it is the new religion, is used by millions of people to fill the nothingness, emptiness and meaninglessness that they are drowning it, now that Western faith in God and traditional values has receded so far. There were not any new revelations in this conversation but these two conservative celebrities tied nicely all together what the people of the West are up against as the cultural advancement of Progressivism is pushing all against the wall.