Douglas Murray, Charles Fain Lehman Douglas Murray on Political Violence, Immigration, and His Win in a Defamation Case VIDEO AND TRANSCRIPT
Charles Fain Lehman: Welcome back to the City Journal Podcast. I’m your host Charles Fain Lehman, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and senior editor of City Journal. This episode, we’re doing something a little bit different. We thought we’d do an experiment. And so I’m very pleased to be joined by my colleague Douglas Murray. Douglas is senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor of City Journal. He’s a journalist and the bestselling author of eight books. Now eight books, right? Yeah, I think that’s the total.
Douglas Murray: Right.
Charles Fain Lehman: Including The War on the West, The Madness of Crowds, and his most recent book On Democracies and Death Cults, which came out earlier this year. And we thought… We had the opportunity to pick Douglas’s brain. And so we thought we’d have a one-on-one conversation, talk about some of the issues that have come up on the show, the sort of core to what MI and CJ are interested in, but also that what you’re interested in. So thank you for taking the time.
Douglas Murray: It’s great to be with you.
Charles Fain Lehman: So I want to start us off by turning our attention to, I think, a story that drives to a number of themes. It’s been a big focus of ours at CJ, and I’m curious for your thoughts on. As you may be aware, last week, New Yorkers were shocked by a mass shooting at 345 Park Ave. It took the lives of four New Yorkers, including an NYPD officer, an off-duty NYPD officer, the perpetrator, guy named Shane Tamura, who killed himself during the act. It seems like based on the reporting that has come out since then, he was trying to target the NFL offices in the building. He believed himself to have a football-related injury and was trying to draw attention to that. At least that’s the theory of the case. New details have emerged since we last talked about this on the show, which indicate that he had a long history of mental illness, including two police visits back in Nevada where he’s from over fears he was armed and suicidal.
But part of what has drawn my attention to this story is the internet sort of in the immediate aftermath lit up in celebration of the murder of Wesley LePatner, one of Tamura’s victims, who’s a Blackstone executive who’s involved in their work on real estate. Social media users posted that she had been, I think the phrase is Luigied, evoking Luigi Mangione’s murder of Brian Thompson. So there are a bunch of different threads that I want to unpack here with you and get your thoughts on.
I think we can start with the story itself. I think there’s something really evocative. My colleague, sometime panelist Jesse Arm raised this to me the other day, which is like, this is a guy who was walking down the street in the middle of Manhattan carrying an assault rifle. Nobody stopped him. He walked into a building. He had a history of serious mental illness. You’ve written about urban disorder, urban dysfunction. You and I have talked about this before. I’m curious about what you see that incident as symbolizing, how you think about how we get to a point where a guy can basically a crazy guy can unchecked kill four people in the middle of Manhattan and this is in some sense is normal.
Douglas Murray: That’s right. I mean, it’s of course even for New York these days, it isn’t normal, but it’s not surprising. I think all New Yorkers have got used to occasional acts of extreme violence. I’m thinking of attacks on the subway in particular. And we sort of got used to occasional acts of really extreme violence, which as you say, in this case, to my mind, is most notable for three things. One is, as you mentioned, somebody carrying an assault rifle and not being stopped. It’s just an example of that breakdown of trust that can occur where nobody intervenes because they see the threat to them from intervening could mean threat comes from them and so on. The second is obviously the target.
And then the third is the way in which people wanted to interpret the target. I might add as well, I mean, you could throw in the system failures that would mean that somebody who had this number of flags could be walking around Manhattan. And sadly, again, all of us who live in New York are used to the fact that very ill people roam the streets and are completely missed by the system.
But that last one of the way in which people reacted to it is especially troubling because it’s not a new phenomenon, but it’s a replay of a phenomenon we’ve seen before. I think of the violence carried out by groups like the Red Brigades in the 1960s and on in Germany, similar sort of left-wing Marxist revolutionary groups in Italy would make a target of industrialists, people they saw as capitalists. There were years in that period in which the Italian, German and other European authorities had to deal with effectively a form of glamorized violence from the radical left that believed that kidnapping businessmen, killing capitalists was some kind of noble revolutionary act and that at the time also as today seeped into a form of the mainstream culture. was not at the center of the culture but it was this radical fringe that would always give a pass to the groups who did this, make excuses for them, say that it was a sort of noble endeavor and much more. So as I say, it’s not a new phenomenon, but it is a replay of something that has been seen sadly before.
Charles Fain Lehman: I’ve been thinking about that recently, the extent to which this is a new phenomenon versus old. Because one argument there is you look at the 1960s in the United States, there was clear defense of the Black Panthers or the Weather Underground. If you think about “Radical Chic,” the classic Tom Wolfe essay, a great essay about New York elites celebrating the Panthers and trying to free the Panthers on trial for murder in New Haven. It does seem like if you roll the clock back to the 1960s, that is more of an elite phenomenon than it is a sort of a mass cultural phenomenon, which is to say, the example I always like to give is that if you surveyed Americans about the Vietnam War, they were generally against the Vietnam War and they were really, really, really against the Vietnam War protesters. They’re really against the sort of vocal anti-war left by the end of the 1960s.
Whereas here, you know, there’s been this sort of association of the Luigi Mangione phenomenon with, you know, almost the everyman. It’s not obvious to me that it’s an elite phenomenon so much as something that happens across social media. You know, does that, do you think that distinction is coherent?
Douglas Murray: Yes, I think there’s something to it. think that in the cases you mentioned, particularly in the 60s and 70s, it’s true that the participants, the main participants came from a kind of elite class. That was the case in America and in Europe, disproportionately involving highly, highly privileged individuals who seemed to believe that they needed to, for whatever reason, exculpate their own feelings of inadequacy or guilt or whatever by involving themselves in proto-revolutionary politics. It’s true it never did quite catch on as a grassroots phenomenon.
The internet of course allows that to happen and it certainly allows the encouragement of a kind of, you might say that the meme culture encourages people to say things behind the guise of an avatar or whatever, which they probably wouldn’t say in their own voice with their own identity, which is to continue to make excuses or valorize this. And I said, actually, after the Mangione case began, that what you really saw with this was a test which was, are we as a society in any way going to allow a type of vigilantism to emerge, extreme vigilantism, whereby people decide that some people are fit to be killed in an extrajudicial manner and murdered? And if you do go down that path, watch out, because it’s just hell all the way down.
Charles Fain Lehman: But I was just going to add, it seems like there is at least, there’s a longer-term rise of exactly that kind of justification. You can look at Elizabeth Warren’s reactions to Luigi Mangione shooting or AOC’s reactions. But you do see it, I think, particular over the past decade. And there’s some of this on the right as well as the left, obviously. And there is that kind of like runaway equilibrium where one side does it so the other side does it. so you go back and forth and back and then it gets worse and worse and worse, you know, but to me, these are just like why? It does not strike me as hard to be unequivocal in condemnation of political violence and yet people do it.
Douglas Murray: Yes. Well, there’s also a reason for it, is that, I mean, you referenced Elizabeth Warren’s lamentable reaction. What people do, and this is the case with almost all terrorism, is there’s always a tendency when an act of political violence, terroristic violence occurs for people to try to use the act of violence as a way to justify their own existing prejudices so that they can say—and we saw this for instance in the most striking way after 9-11, people would claim that Osama bin Laden had acted because he was anti-capitalist. He’d hit the World Trade Centers because there was a problem with distribution of wealth in the US.
There are a lot of people always waiting to do that. Warren’s reaction to the Mangione case was to say, you can only push people so far. You can only push people so far, she said. That is a good example of somebody using a murderer as a megaphone for their own existing prejudices because many people have problems with healthcare. Many people have problems with getting on the housing ladder. Many people have problems with accruing capital. If a highly privileged individual can murder a health executive and the response of a politician is, well, you know, he was obviously pushed too far, then all they’re really doing is saying, if you don’t do what I want politically, we’re going to see more of this, and so you better watch out and do what I say. That also is a very familiar tactic in the history of violence. It’s for people to leap in and say effectively, if you don’t agree with me and do what I want, I can’t promise you that more people aren’t going to emerge and carry out acts of extreme violence. And that, that I think is a really lamentable place to be. And you’re right, it can happen and has happened on all political sides. But I think it is much to be avoided if an avowedly right-wing terrorist were to carry out an act of equivalent violence. I think, I’d like to think that most of the conservatives moved in the United States and elsewhere would simply condemn the act and would not try to use it to further their own cause.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, I mean, I you saw that, the attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband or there’s Cesar Sayoc, the who sent a number of pipe bombs to congressional Democrats. You know, that was not a big… He did that. People were not wearing sweaters with his face on them as they are for Luigi Mangione, which is we just ran a… I’m not sure if you saw this. Our colleague Chris Ruffo interviewed Taylor Lorenz, the journalist cum influencer. And in the relevant part, he asked her, you know, in essence, if, you know, if the murder of a healthcare executive could by some improbable series of events result in the single payer healthcare being implemented in the United States, would that be justified? And her answer was in essence, well, I don’t know, maybe, like that could be true. And so, you know, I think there is this sort of ideological fixation or these objects of ideological fixation, right?
You’re from the U.K. where they have a single payer system. I would assert that it has pros and cons. I don’t think it works great, but it’s not utopian by any measure. But it sort of becomes this cultural fixation of like, we need to solve the horrors of the capitalistic health care system by looking more like Canada, and that justifies murdering people. It’s a very odd way of seeing the world, very detached from reality to the social media angle.
Douglas Murray: Yeah, unfortunately it plays into a very basic, unfortunate human instinct that some people have, which is the desire to be at the center of revolutionary times. And they have no idea what they could unleash. They have no idea what has happened historically when you allow that particular part of society to be breached.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, you know, I think there’s, to ask about your work just a little bit, you know, one big question that always comes up here is how do you think about suppressing this kind of violence once it gets out of hand? As you alluded to, there are many historical examples. It got really bad in Italy at the height of the left- and right-wing murder squads. Italy was essentially ungoverned in the 60s and 70s.
Douglas Murray: Yes.
Charles Fain Lehman: So, you know, as we can identify the cultural trend, but I’m curious about how you think about dealing with and addressing the underlying cultural trend and what your study of terrorism has told you about how you address domestic terrorism as an issue.
Douglas Murray: Well, normally what you do is you take apart the networks, both ideologically and through good intelligence, good policing and so on. That was pretty much how the groups in the 60s and 70s in Europe and America were taken apart. But the bit about tackling the cultural bit of it that has gone wrong is really crucial. You mentioned “Radical Chic” earlier. And of course, recently the conservative activist David Horowitz died. I knew him a little and his journey politically really occurred because he was involved with the Panthers and others and after the murder of a colleague by them, started to realize that he had fallen in with a very, very wrong group of people. Sometimes that has been what happens is actually the radical groups in question imagine that their act of violence will bring everyone to their side, or significant number and what they don’t realize is that people, including those already ostensibly on their side, might well become so actively appalled by the acts of violence that they actually help to split the movement. But there’s one caveat to that, of course, which is that if this was to happen more in the U.S.,it seems to be a relatively standalone phenomenon for now, which in one way is good of course, because it means not organized, not able to cooperate and plan and plot. On the other hand of course is always more worrying, which is what if you come across effectively deranged self-starters? That is actually a very hard phenomenon to stop. One of the ways you do do it is you stop the valorization of the people who have committed such acts, and that should be a cultural baseline to my view.
Charles Fain Lehman: Right. Yeah. mean, That is, you know, both in the Park shooting where he seems like a sort of a lone crazy person, or the I don’t know if you followed the firebombing of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro’s home where…
Douglas Murray: Yes.
Charles Fain Lehman: Right, this individual was clearly seriously unwell but had also been convinced of, you know, his need to bomb the “Zionist” quote unquote governor of Pennsylvania, who I guess is responsible for the IDF because… You can fill in the blank as to why. But that, you know, obviously came from the cultural milieu in which he was operating.
Douglas Murray: Yeah, I mean, that’s a classic example of being careful about the lies you spread because the people who hear them may do more than you imagined.
Charles Fain Lehman: So I want to turn our attention to our other topic today. And I can peg this a little bit to the news. There have been a couple of new steps in immigration policy from the administration, the Trump administration. They opened a second major immigration detention facility. The first one was in Florida, Alligator Alcatraz. The second one is apparently going be in Indiana. It’s the Speedway Slammer.
The State Department wants to impose bonds on high visa overstate countries. There’s obviously been a great deal of litigation around immigration. This is in some senses the topic area that sort of grounded the administration’s mandate, the Trump administration’s mandate. This has also been the source of a great deal of controversy for them, not necessarily the most controversial thing. But so, I think your rise to prominence came in part in your commentary on Europe’s challenges for immigration and the U.K.’s challenges for immigration. In many senses, America and Europe are dealing with different sets of problems. I’m curious how, at the same time, they’ve both seen this right populist backlash that has been driven by fundamentally the median voter being fed up with the way in which governments are handling immigration policy. So I’m curious how you think about what’s going on in the United States now with immigration, how it analogizes to your experience, and what the disanalogies are, and how you’re viewing this evolving story.
Douglas Murray: Well, I’d answer that by saying, first of all, that what President Trump is doing is historic, not just for America, but actually for all of the developed world. There has been a fatalism in recent years, perhaps decades, in Western democracies. A fatalism that essentially the number of people wishing to come from the developed world, legally and illegally, is so vast, the pressure is so constant that there’s effectively very little you can do about it. You can occasionally run for office promising to slow the flow or to even stop the flow. But what nobody has been able to do is to say we’re going to actually reverse the issue. We’re going to actually undo what other politicians have allowed to happen on their watch. Trump is the first major politician in any Western democracy to come into power and actually try to demonstrate you can reverse the mistakes of your predecessors.
And if you compare him to somebody, for instance, in the U.K. who’s often compared to President Trump, is Nigel Farage, who now leads the Reform Party, if you compare President Trump’s attitude to Nigel Farage’s just a few months ago, where he was interviewed about the illegal and legal migration to the U.K. and asked if he would ever consider reversing it by returning people who had come illegally, his response was, it’s just not going to happen. There’s no way to do it. It’s just not going to happen. And that’s very striking. And Farage came in for a lot of criticism from his own political side and obviously particularly to his right for those comments. People said things like, you know, what’s the point of being a right-wing party to the right of the Tories, the Conservatives, if you don’t say you want to return people who’ve broken into the country? But Farage’s response was very interesting because it was effectively the response that European leaders and others have had for more than a generation. It’s too complicated. Nobody’s been able to do it. I’ve asked this of politicians in many European countries recent years. Most obviously some years ago I asked Matteo Salvini when he was interior minister and running for election again, and I said, know, you’ve got 1 million illegals in Italy by your own estimation, what are you going to do about it? And he said we’re going to return them, and then I tried to drill down on what the plan was, and I realized there just wasn’t a detailed plan, which means it’s not going to happen.
Trump has done something historic in this, which is not just for America, but for other Western countries. He’s shown no, actually, we can have an organized, publicly-backed movement with a political mandate that says if you have come into America, you’ve broken in illegally and then committed serious crimes in America, America does not want you and it will return you to your country of origin or the country you came from. That is going to have, if he succeeds in this, even succeeds for just a meaningful degree, doesn’t have to be able to get everyone out, but if he succeeds to any meaningful degree, he will not only succeed for America, but he will succeed for other countries in the West to show that the fatalism surrounding this is not inevitable.
Charles Fain Lehman: I mean, so I had not heard that analysis before. It is very interesting to me just because, you know, it mechanically makes sense that you should—there are measures of this. I think the ballpark is something like the illegal immigrant population in the states is declined by something like a million people in the first six months of the Trump Administration and the reason for this is twofold. One is that they are doing approximately the usual number of deportations and/or they’re processing people, they’re trying to scale that up, but they’ve just started doing that because they had to get the money. And the other one is just they stopped, people stopped arriving at the border because they knew that Trump would aggressively return them. And if you stop adding people to the queue and you keep processing the queue, then mechanically the queue will get shorter. That’s like, that is in fact introductory queuing theory, fun fact. That’s a little nerdy in the weeds, but the bigger point is, you know, it’s not an impossible problem to say we’re going to give you some due process and then we’re going to remove you from the country.
So, you know, where does that fatalism come from? And I want to ask a related question to this, which is, there’s been this repeated observation about European politics, which is that if left or moderate right parties would simply shift rights slightly on immigration, they would no longer have a far right problem. The obvious example of this is the Danish, where the Danish Social Democrats did moderate on immigration and they run the country. And the Danish right has no sway because people want that problem solved. So why don’t parties do that? What is the ideological or rational self-interest explanation for that fatalism? Because it seems crazy to me.
Douglas Murray: The main one was what, you know, Powell famously said in 1968, which was that the problem grows and it’s easier to say that you will put it off for your successor to deal with even though by then the problem would have grown. It’s simply regarded as, and this is now more than half a century of policy, that is basically predicated on the fact that it’s just too difficult. And if you look at the challenges that most Western liberal democracies, in fact all the Western liberal democracies have faced on what should be the easiest cases to adjudicate in terms of somebody not having a right to be in the country in question. If you look at how difficult it has been on the most extreme cases, you know, people involved in acts of violence, people involved in terrorism, people involved in sedition and so on. If you see how many appeals even these most extreme cases get to go through, the length of time, the cost, the expenditure to the taxpayer in paying the legal bills of people who have broken into the country, if you look at all of those things, you can you can see one of the reasons why they put this off. If Trump and Homan managed to deport on an average day, the number of people they have managed to deport on their best days, if they do that on their average days, they will have to spend the rest of this administration, the next three and half years keeping that up just to undo much of the Biden-era illegal migration. That is a very tough proposition.
And again, it’s much easier. It would be much easier for Trump, for anyone else, to do this for a bit, run out of political will and end up doing what many Republican voters are annoyed about Republicans repeatedly doing, which is calling for a tough border, seeing the border become far more porous, and then calling for an immigration amnesty.
Charles Fain Lehman: Right. I think in some senses, the Trump toughness shifts the equilibrium a little bit because the fight has always been about the left wants an amnesty and the right wants border enforcement, but nobody ever really talks about reducing the number. To your point I think, Trump has changed the game a little bit. It turns out that the number can be reduced without having to make a deal for amnesty, which is a remarkable thing. Part of my interest here is how you think about the sort of politics of immigration in the U.S. versus Europe.
One component of this is that I think there is a greater cultural distance between Europeans and the average arrival to Europe than there is between Americans and the average arrival to America. You can maybe not agree. Part of the concern which you’ve written about is the way in which many arrivals to Europe are driven sort of ideologically or ideologically hostile to Europe, or ideologically hostile to the individual polities that they come to. Do you, I mean, do you, you, when we’re talking about sort of the problem of immigration, right, that’s sort of a core political problem at the moment, we’re talking about the problem of immigration, where do you see that coming from? Why is immigration viewed as problematic by these publics? And do think that what is happening in Europe is the same thing that’s happening in America, or are they different problems?
Douglas Murray: They’re different, but I do caution American conservatives and others not to be too optimistic about the better position that some of them say America is in. I’ve heard all of this century, let’s say left-wing conservatives saying things like, well, we’re lucky because, you know, basically we mainly get Hispanics, whereas the Muslim migration to Europe causes a much bigger problem for Europe than the Hispanic migration to America. There is something in that. There is something in that. But not everything.
And if you consider that, for instance, when ICE was acting to deport illegal migrants who were also criminals in California recently, the protests that came up included, I mean, crowds waving what? Not the American flag, not the country that they had come into legally or illegally, but flying the Mexican flag and much more. And then you’ve got people celebrating that and saying, yes, you know, go girl, you know, show them how, you know, you’re not, you, you’re not losing your identity. This is a Mexican versus American thing. It’s, it’s, it’s by no means as mellifluous a process in America as some conservatives and others have liked to reassure themselves that it is. So yes, it’s different. Yes, it is mildly easier in terms of integration and so on, but it’s not easy.
Charles Fain Lehman: When it seems to me like assimilation gets harder the more you have to assimilate nonlinearly, right? So you get, you can get people to concentrate, but then you also get this, this, this you know, returns to the conversation from earlier. And I think this is a common theme is the sort of ideological justifications. Uh, the image that stuck in my head, I assume you followed the Glastonbury, you know, scandal, uh, the performer, Bob Vylan, who said, uh, he had a song about, he first he was getting people to chant “death to the IDF.” And then later there was a song in which…
Douglas Murray: “I heard you want your country back”
Charles Fain Lehman: Yes. What was interesting to me is that the people who were complaining about one set of lyrics were not always complaining about the other set of lyrics. And to me they seemed like very obviously connected. And indeed, you know, the people were out in the audience waving flags of sundry foreign countries, including the Palestinians. It was the same image as the LA riots. So, you know, I think there is this underlying what I might talk about as third world-ism in the sense of, you know, active hostility to the countries that you are trying to inhabit. That is a theme both in parts of the United States and particularly activist left and also in Europe.
Douglas Murray: Yeah, it’s what I’ve described in the past as simple anti-Westernism. What I’ve described in The War On The West as being Western anti-Westernism. It’s inculcated here, whereby anything is good as long as it’s not ours, and everything is bad if it is ours. And it’s one of the biggest divides of our time, whether or not you’ve fallen into that cult.
Charles Fain Lehman: So, you know, I think, and then I want to talk a little bit about you, this is, do you see this as related, tie, put a bow on everything, do you see this as related to the, you know, Luigiism phenomenon? Are these two concepts connected? Should we understand them as culturally interrelated? If so, how?
Douglas Murray: Yes, absolutely they are. They are, I think of it as being rather like loose collections of mercury on the radical sides of politics, which are always looking for a way to gather together into a larger understandable blob. And some of that has migrated towards Palestinianism in the last few years. Some of it has migrated. There’s always the baseline one of climate crisis, climate emergency activism, anti-capitalism, BLMism. It’s always looking for a way to finally coagulate and be explicable and then do something. It speaks to people in need of a cause. And unfortunately, and perhaps increasingly in our societies, there are such people hanging around who will literally pick up any banner they’re given.
Charles Fain Lehman: Fair. All right, before we go, I wanted to, our producer Isabella flagged for me this story and she said, you have to get, you have to get Douglas’s reaction. Because I don’t know if anyone else has asked you about this, but you won, you were recently sued for defamation and you won. Like this happened just very recently. I will admit I’ve, I, I’ve only learned a little bit about the story. So give our listeners who are not plugged in a little background on what happened and what the outcome was.
Douglas Murray: As I say in my Spectator column this week, I think that one of the aspects of being a columnist, journalist, writer, which people, readers often underappreciate is the extent to which one has to involve oneself with legal turmoil for saying things that are true. Because of U.K. defamation law, this is particularly the case there. Yes, three years ago now, I wrote a column for the Spectator called the downsides of diversity because there had been significant unrest in a town called Leicester in the north of England. There had been Hindu-Muslim unrest between the two groups. There is a person called Mohammed Hijab who is an online pugilist sort of Islamist sort of influencer, and he had gone up from London to Leicester and had whipped up crowds of really Muslim men in a very demagogic fashion. And I mentioned him in the piece. He had previously gone to Jewish areas in North London and intimidated, harassed Jews in the street on Shabbat. He had also attended a counter protest outside the Israeli embassy where he gave again a very demagogic speech to a crowd of masked men saying, you know, we have no fear of death and much more.
He, I, so described him as I think just a common street agitator. He sued for defamation and said that this harmed his character and indeed his good reputation. And what’s more then, started to claim that he had lost earnings as a result of the piece because the three Muslim groups who had been hoping to work with him as sponsors had withdrawn their sponsorship because they were such dedicated readers of my Spectator column. And we gave Hijab every opportunity to avoid going to court, but he was desperate to have his day. The trial was a few weeks ago in London at the High Court, and Hijab spent three days in the witness box. And the judgment came much earlier than we were expecting and it found that Hijab’s testimony was so full of lies that his evidence was in the words of the judge effectively worthless. It turned out that he had not just lied on every major matter that came up at the trial but had also appeared to have concocted his lost earnings for the purpose of the case. It’s one of the most damning judgments I’ve ever read, but it’s as well as being damning for Hijab, it’s I think vindicating not just for myself but for the Spectator Magazine who’s stuck by this column and fought alongside me in fending off this very unpleasant character.
And to my mind, the case is important because it demonstrates really that this sort of frivolous lawfare and these kind of intimidatory tactics which are very often used, they are used against us in American journalism, but far more so in journalism in Britain and other countries. It shows that this kind of lawfare will not succeed if people hold their ground and, it turned out that the truth defense, as it’s known in British law, can indeed still hold and has held in this case. In fact, the judge said, finally I’ll mention, said that Hijab had done far more damage to his own reputation by his own words and actions than I could ever do in an article.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, the… part of why the story is interesting to me, I mean, it is sort of at least surprising, possibly shocking, to American listeners to hear about this. You know, we had the luxury… I in my capacity as a journalist had the luxury of New York Times v. Sullivan that establishes extraordinarily high bar for defamation of a public figure. You know, a guy who’s going out and speaking the streets and is on YouTube is probably a public figure under American case law. I have to… Courts have to show actual malice or willful disregard of the truth. And I think this ties into this broader debate about free speech in Europe versus free speech in the United States. The vice president has been very critical of the European approach to free speech. How has this affected your views of American press freedoms, European press freedoms? In what direction would you like to… Has affected your views more broadly or has it reinforced them?
Douglas Murray: It’s reinforced my views broadly that the founding fathers were as great as I thought they were and that the framers of the Constitution were as great as I thought they were and that the First Amendment is one of the greatest gifts to America that the founders ever gave. A profound, insightful, vital foundation upon which all other liberties are built.
Charles Fain Lehman: Just to dovetail with the themes of the prior conversation, why, you know, this all seems obvious to Americans, right? Like the idea that it would be so, somebody could sue you for saying something that was true and just sort of an argument is crazy, I suspect, to most of our listeners. Why don’t people see that in the U.K.? Or do people see that? Is that another case of inaction?
Douglas Murray: I think a lot of people do see it. A lot of people simply aren’t aware of it. The extent to which, as I mentioned in my Spectator column this week, the extent to which a number of journalists I know spend more time dealing with their lawyers than with their editors these days. It’s not really understood, I think, by the general public, although in the era of social media it’s starting to be because of the attempts to police social media more aggressively.
I said some years ago in a column that if you notice the subjects that the British and other media avoid, they avoid issues that are highly litigious areas where vexatious litigants will come for you. And as I mentioned there at that time, this is some years ago, I said there are two things that editors are most desperate to avoid. One is anything to do with trans and the other thing is anything to do with jihadism. I said that’s a shame because they’re two of my favorite issues. And I was looking forward to the day when I could really cause my editor to have a breakdown by writing a column about a transsexual jihadist. Maybe at that point the whole vortex would explode, but until that day.
Charles Fain Lehman: Have you gotten to write that column? It must have happened.
Douglas Murray: Believe me, I have my eyes open for the case.
Charles Fain Lehman: Okay, you’ll find… I’m sure you could find that person on TikTok right now.
Douglas Murray: They’re probably currently gestating in Portland.
Charles Fain Lehman: So before we go, just want to ask about, you know, on the personal question is a little bit weird, but you know, what has been your response to the whole lawsuit? I mean, I assume you’re happy about the outcome. I assume you feel vindicated, but you know, has it caused you any stress or were you always sort of certain that justice would prevail?
Douglas Murray: You can never be sure, absolutely 100 percent. I was confident. I’m afraid it’s an unfortunate fact in my career and the things I write about that this sort of thing happens. But I’ve been vindicated before, I’ve been vindicated this time. I’ll be vindicated again.
Charles Fain Lehman: Well, I wish you best of luck. I think that’s about all the time we have. So thank you, Douglas, for taking the time for this conversation.
Douglas Murray: Good to be with you.
Charles Fain Lehman: Thank you as always to our producer, Isabella Redjai. Listeners, if you’ve enjoyed this episode, please don’t forget to like, subscribe, press all the buttons that you need to press in order to obtain further information about the City Journal Podcast on YouTube or any other platforms where you listen to us.
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