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Jan 12, 2025
Editor: TheFreePress provides political space for Douglas Murray on ‘Grooming Gangs’
The world has finally woken up this week to one of the biggest crimes in twenty-first century Britain: the organized gang rape of thousands of white working-class girls, mainly at the hands of Muslim men of Pakistani origin.
Even writing the sentence above would have got me into far more trouble 20 years ago than it will now. Sure, there are still plenty of people trying to police this story, to claim that race and religion have nothing to do with these crimes, or that it is wrong to bring them up. But the stories of the atrocities in towns like Rochdale, Rotherham, Telford, and Oxford are now out, and there is little likelihood that they will be reined back. Public anger is too great in the UK, and international attention is too focused, to allow that to happen.
Having written about these cases for many years now, I spent part of the last week being asked, “How did it happen? How could such a crime have gone on?” And the answer is: Because there are some terrible things that society wants to deal with, and there are some it refuses to deal with, and the things it refuses to deal with tend to be those crimes that go against some deep narrative of the age.
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Editor: Murray’s latest idée fixe in the pages of The Free Press is ‘The Rampant Dangers of Multiculturalism’
COMMENT
By George Kerevan
Headline: True danger from the right comes from likes of Douglas Murray
12th November 2023
https://www.thenational.scot/politics/23918618.true-danger-right-comes-likes-douglas-murray/
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More importantly, the alt-right needs to forge a new political and social narrative if it is to successfully destroy the old social democratic consensus or even kill off One-Nation Tory liberalism. And for this it needs a new breed of right-wing intellectuals with a sophisticated suite of ideas. These are the folk to worry about.
They include the suave, slightly manic Douglas Murray, who is London-born but whose mother hails from the Isle of Lewis and speaks Gaelic. Murray has emerged as perhaps the leading alt-right ideologue of the younger generation.
A prolific writer and commentator, he is now associate editor of The Spectator, the holy bible of the right. Last week Murray entered the Scottish political firmament with a virulent public attack on Humza Yousaf. Murray suggested the FM was an “infiltrator” (hint, hint) and “the first minister for Gaza”. Murray also reheated a doctored social media post (possibly not realising it was bogus) that implied Yousaf had made anti-white remarks.
Such public bile should not lead us to dismiss Murray as a typical populist ranter. He has a forensic mind and significant influence in Britain, Europe and particularly the United States. But it is a mind that sees “the West” being subverted and destroyed by a grand conspiracy of godless high-tech billionaires, the entire Islamic world and universities captured by cultural Marxists.
Traditional nation states and Christian civilisation and values have been replaced by a rapacious global (“cosmopolitan”) managerial elite which uses identity politics as a battering ram to exert control.
This puts Murray squarely in the conspiracy theory mould. But he is more intellectually effective than most in justifying his ideas. Populist, Trumpist racism may appeal to the lumpen elements but Murray supplies a more intellectually satisfying conspiracy menu for the middle classes.
Ostensibly, he deconstructs “fascist Islam” and the alleged infiltration of the elite universities – inevitably Murray is an Oxford graduate himself – by Marxist academics. Murray is also a bag of personal contradictions. He is gay and an atheist and even supports (in a convoluted way) same-sex marriage. Not that you might know it from some of his public renderings.
Part of me feels sorry for Murray. He is a bright young man marooned in a generation where rampant consumerism and unhinged individualism has destroyed social community, while the death of the socialist project has removed hope. Folk such as Murray end up as intellectual nihilists desperately trying to forge some impossible conservative Valhalla to find an anchor in life.
At least it begins that way, but it quickly slides towards an intellectual justification for outright fascism. The mass demonstrations in the UK and Europe protesting Israeli bombing of Gaza seem to have unhinged Murray.
I’ve seen a video of him circulating on social media in which he says the police in Britain “have lost control of the streets” (shades of Braverman) and that “we might need to send in the army”. What are the army supposed to do – shoot demonstrators?
Then, even more chillingly, Murray suggests sending in the army might not work – he actually wrote a book about the 1972 Bloody Sunday shootings in Derry and their aftermath. Instead, he muses that the “British public” might have to take matters into their own hands.
We can always dismiss Braverman as a maverick, over-ambitious politician who should be sacked. But Murray is busy constructing the intellectual architecture for a new, mass fascist movement. That is much more dangerous, especially for a UK where the alt-right has traditionally been kept in its cage by a fuzzy alliance between the establishment (which want a quiet life), the provincial middle classes (who also want a quiet life) and the Tory Party.
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Editor: Some selective quotation from George Kerevan’s essay:
Last month, 12,000 people turned up at the O2 arena in London and paid big bucks to hear Murray and Jordan Peterson, the other intellectual superstar of the global alt-right. This was billed as the launch of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, or ARC (get it!). They were joined by luminaries such as American social media guru Ben Shapiro.
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Quite the reverse unless you count ARC’s association with maverick US presidential hopeful, Vivek Ramaswamy.
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Murray and Peterson are trying to build a mass movement outside of the traditional right-wing parties. There is also a cultish, semi-religious tone to the project which promotes self-help rather than who to hate.
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Again, I need to stress that Murray and Peterson are a new, seductive breed of right-wing anti-politician.
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And Murray calling for the deportation of those he disagrees with. “Send them back” remains a ridiculous slogan for what was once the world’s biggest colonial empire.
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Both Murray’s Spectator magazine and its stablemate The Daily Telegraph, are up for sale. One likely bidder is Sir Paul Marshall, the hedge-fund billionaire who is bankrolling Murray’s ARC and who was an early investor in GB News. Behind the alt-right ideologues are always the billionaires with vested interests. Be warned.
Editor: The Reader confronting another manifestation of ‘The Rebellion Against The Elites’ needs to look at the many, and various iterations of the political actors, in this melodrama: Murray, Peterson, its organizational structure Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, Vivek Ramaswamy, The Spectator ,The Daily Telegraph as the watershed of Thatchers toxic Neo-Liberalism. Her inheritor in Britain was Tony Blairs ‘New Labour, and in America Bill Clinton, and his familier Hillary Clinton, who birthed the New Democrats: these toxic political actors traded on the Hayek/Mises/ Friedman Mythology, that collapsed in 2007-2008!
Murray trades in a Toxic Nostalgia , for an Empire run by ‘virtious White Males’ ; Peterson is a willful political Hysteric, Vivek Ramaswamy is a self-agrandising Capitalist: in sum he is Elon Musk lite!
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