Douglas Murray and Peter Boghossian - Pushing back against Woke ideology

Douglas Murray and Peter Boghossian discuss how to unite in opposition against Woke ideology and what people can do to push back.
This is part 5 of 5. I'll release the full conversation next.
This was filmed for my series, The Woke Reformation, and if you appreciate my work, please consider supporting me on Locals, as that allows me to keep making more content. Plus, you'll get exclusive content on Locals page like long form interviews, tips on how to deal with Woke ideology and more.
travisbrown.locals.com
Find more about Peter Boghossian through his website - peterboghossian.com
Find more about Douglas Murray through his website - douglasmurray.net

[@thesignalproductions]

Don't forget to subscribe! And if you like my work, please consider supporting me on Locals where you'll get more content - travisbrown.locals.com

[@josephmassaro]

Peter Boghossian: We're friends. Douglas Murray: We were until you called my island small. Outrageous.

[@arthurmorgan6703]

@Evan Hodge Cool

[@JhubeiFC]

The problem is a loss of Rationality amongst a great section of society. Rational discussion just like this is the cure. Thanks as always.

[@HostileTakeover555]

I have a more optimistic take. I think the vast majority are rational - the problem is its’s the extremes that have take control. That’s where the biggest issue is.

[@jane---489]

*_The "Pushback" ? Solution ? Crusade ..._*

[@Kirill-xp9jq]

I've been a lifelong Democrat, but this issue has made me veer into the depths of Conservatism.

[@gwenj5419]

It can be fear but also ignorance. Meaning parents don't realize what is being taught to their children. We tend to assume schools are the same as when we attended. That's where covid and zoom schooling opened a lot of parent's eyes to what was going on.

[@GypsysMom]

I am always interested in hearing what Douglas has to say. I have so enjoyed his books, especially the Strange Death of Europe. I simply loved that book. Found it fascinating.

[@prycelessly]

The "ideal" is what it is to be American. If you do not value the individual, above everything, then you are not American. Heart & soul we believe that individualism is paramount.

[@dimercamparini]

You know the best you can do to preserve your ideal? Go live ALONE on a mountain somewhere. Societies are called "SOCIETIES" because they try to BALANCE the need of the individual with the needs and problems of all the others around him. (extreme individualism is just as bad as "socialism"...)

[@shimmeringchimps3842]

Well said 👏

[@leonharrison800]

The individual is the problem. There can be no individual solutions to racism, sexism and lgbt hate when a society is toxic.

[@prycelessly]

@leonharrison800 The solution is to see the individual. It is key to understanding the value of that person. Collectivism is reductive and treats humans like chattle.

[@robr.5044]

Excellent! Thanks guys!

[@booneblocker3200]

Tips from Sowell: 1. Compared to what? 2. What’s your evidence? 3. At what cost?

[@talofaholbrook]

Such a good discussion!

[@meganbaker9116]

It’s a bad idea to cut yourself off from family because they disagree with you about politics. It’s a good idea to cut yourself off from family when they’re toxic to you and disagree that you’re a person worthy of love and respect.

[@thesignalproductions]

Agreed.

[@aidanbarrett9313]

We should all read Eric Hoffer's "The True Believer" (1951).

[@lnl3237]

Yes, Aidan. Yes. Watched Mr. Hoffer's interview with Eric Savareid. The Longshoreman Philosopher just bowled me over. My favorite quote of his: Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business and eventually degenerates into a racket.

[@Misitheus]

All of these "ism".....the only one that I relate to is alcoholism..... Peace!

[@gavinbrando8255]

Allow me to steal this because after all I certainly and proudly relate to it too!

[@designforlife704]

Fantastic stuff

[@toddmitchell9014]

When is Douglas Murray going to do audio recordings of Jane Austen’s novels?

[@talonr7818]

I can hear him reading the first line of Pride and Prejudice.

[@howardbabcom]

Two thinkers considering the real American dream.

[@randallfowler9348]

brilliant!

[@wiseonwords]

But I wonder what advice they'd give to a contract sessional university instructor who's desperate to get stable full-time employment and is asked to submit detailed diversity, inclusion, and equity statements every single time he or she applies for a position? With these DIE statement requirements, the universities are pretty much demanding fealty to woke dogma as the price of admission to the academic club. For a non-woke person, the only way out that I can see in these rigged circumstances is to simply give up on ever getting full-time employment in academia.

[@Doutsoldome]

Or, alternatively, say whatever is needed to get inside and then fight to change the rigged system from within. However, having to acquiesce to something you hold to be untrue is demoralizing and poses a threat to the person's own mental health and perhaps to his or her moral compass. Still, having the fortitude to bear this burden on the soul and helping to mount a resistence within the system can be a worthy contribution to a constructing a solution to the problem. In fact, if this path is not possible, then this means that the present universities are beyond salvation and should be allowed to implode and be replaced by other institutions - which might actually be Boghossian's position on the matter.

[@robr.5044]

@@Doutsoldome I hope that more people like you can get into those universities to help turn things around; otherwise our university system as it is now will not survive, which might be for the better.

[@Doutsoldome]

@@robr.5044 Oh, thanks. In fact, I already am a university professor - although in a non-English speaking country. Things are not yet as bad here, but I'm watching it all with apprehension.

[@andreavp463]

I'd say it's time to "grow a pair" and not concede one more inch on this battlefield. The only way is to collectively refuse, and those who will make great sacrifices will be heroes, those who collaborate consciously to a dangerous lie are cowards. The truth is harsh, but it is what it is

[@simonb4689]

New sub, great content

[@evan5604]

I’ve been arguing for several years with friends on the mainstream left (where until fairly recently I comfortably belonged) that citizenship is a great antidote to tribalism and patriotism is a great antidote to racism. Especially in the US, a country like few others (France comes to mind) based on citizenship nationalism, rather than blood ties or ethnicity. We all know it’s been a long road to making the rights and responsibilities of citizenship universal to all Americans regardless of lack of property ownership, race, sex, and (in terms of legal immigration) national origin or ethnicity) but we’ve made extraordinary progress in doing so. Tragically, and not by accident, we’ve denigrated and devalued citizenship, via elites both focusing their enmity on fellow citizens of different social classes and trying to marginalize them from society, and by expanding citizenship to literally anyone else from anywhere else who is able to pay to arrive here. Under this administration, government officials have begun referring to illegal immigrants as undocumented *citizens*. Meanwhile, the same elites who can and often do live anywhere they deign to have along with activists very cynically conflated nationalism with racism. Of course people can find affinity with members of the same faith or congregation, but we can’t assume most let alone all people around us, even in the same part of a city will share our religious beliefs or commitments. Some of us are fortunate to have large, close, supportive families. Many of us have by chance or misfortune scarcely any family at all. What we do have in common is a shared home, a shared experience - whatever our individual differences or even group-based commonalities to the extent they exist. We have a shared past, present and future, even if as Douglas Murray notes, one’s own family has only been in this country for a few years. We have shared symbols and myths. We have shared founding principles and values. We have a culture that’s been enriched by centuries of different ethnicities influencing each other, blending, and combining. We have a shared physical place, a home. I could be abroad among people who might share my complexion or even more of my ancestral ethnic heritage and yet be very much apart from those people. And I could see an American, with perhaps a very different skin color, hear him speak and think: yes, that’s *us*, that’s *home*. A positive, inclusive, citizenship-based nationalism is not fascism or racist colonialism. It’s an acknowledgement we’re a representative democratic polity in which citizens of all identities have a place and voice and standing in which to belong and participate. That does not imply hostility or inhumanity to other countries and their citizens. It implies membership based on the rights and responsibilities, the common care and commitment, of citizenship. A family makes decisions together in and for their own best interests first. No one thinks this means the inherent meaning and purpose of a family is to is engage in tribal conflict with other families. If a family is able they might try their best to help other families and the wider community. Some nonmembers can if invited become honorary or actual members of another family. But no one gets to assert and his or her own: I’ve made it to your front door - let me in and give me equal status and everything of yours I demand. I used to think the patriotism of my grandparent’s generation was corny, at worst maybe a little suffocating. We get it: America. But one sees the alternatives to abandoning country after so many have already abandoned traditional religion, after we had (happily) made so much progress in moving beyond bigoted, exclusionary, grossly discriminatory policies and mores re: race and ethnicity and sex and sexual orientation. We’re everywhere and nowhere and right back to the worst of tribal bigotry and zero-sum conflict, just with new caste systems and hierarchies proposed and pushed as a pseudo-religious form of “justice”.

[@lnl3237]

Evan, read every word of your post. Thankful for every word of your post.

[@evan5604]

@@lnl3237 thank you for wading through it! It does help though, doesn’t it, to know there are other decent, thoughtful people who sincerely want fair treatment for everyone and simply see this retreat to new forms of extreme tribalism deeply dehumanizing, destructive, even dangerous. We’re fallible, but we’re not crazy or unreasonable. We’ve learned some things from history and are trying to hew to consistent, humane values which recognize we all deserve equal dignity, standing, and opportunity as human beings and fellow citizens. Some of us are more left, some are more right, but we’re rooted in the same liberal Enlightenment values.

[@MarkoTrapani]

@@evan5604 As someone who lives in California and works for an openly woke company, it's quite difficult to not be pessimistic about how far gone we are. The craziest part is that I think *most* people are really just ignorant, and don't see all the terrible ills that come along with woke ideology. But simply deigning to even acknowledge that there *could* be a downside to these ideas immediately makes one suspect. It's a tight line to walk if you endeavour to enlighten some of the more open-minded folks. One wrong step... 💥

[@j.j.911]

As a mixed race person, I cannot affiliate along racial lines. Moreover, I reject all loose, reductive, limiting, illogical affiliations irrespective of immutable characteristics. You should too.

[@jkbrown5496]

Just as the German professors spent decades creating an “educated” strata steep in the ideals that eventually became know as Nazism, the professors in the Anglosphere have spent the last 70+ years since the Nazis were beaten to do the same on a wider scale. "For more than seventy years the German professors of political science, history, law, geography and philosophy eagerly imbued their disciples with a hysterical hatred of capitalism, and preached the war of “liberation” against the capitalistic West.” von Mises, Planned Chaos. The most heartening news of late is that enrollment in the universities is in rapid decline as the youth wake up to their debased state. You can get a better liberal arts education by reading than wasting years of your life on the live improv of some random professor that promises magic parchment if you please them with your submission.

[@johnq.random1496]

What Doug said at the end there. About having the ability to communicate and do whatever with anyone on any continent with a device in our pocket, yet we are now talking about race was telling and a very good point. However, at the same time, I do understand anyone's concern for their people's survival. We need to discuss race if we are going to discuss the survival of the native peoples of Europe, and the nations their forefathers built in the West.

[@jeffreywitty3088]

so... the age of post-reason, horrifying

[@jonah9861]

Woke Ideology = Scotland

[@rogermetzger7335]

There is a principle of which I had been aware before 1958 but that I had never tried to articulate until then. The context was a visit to our home by missionaries of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (aka Mormons). My mother’s first contact with them was when they offered to hold discussions with her about “the scriptures”. She set up an appointment when my dad would be home. One of my siblings and I sat in on the discussions. We were told that Joseph Smith found some golden plates on which was inscribed some of the history of the western hemisphere, that he translated the inscriptions into English and that much of what he translated was subsequently published in printed form as The Book of Mormon. We were offered copies of said book. I had read most of it before the missionaries returned a week later. I told the missionaries I had decided to subscribe to the principle of prior reference - the principle that anything purported to be special revelation should be evaluated and interpreted by older revelation. I explained that the missionaries seemed to be doing the opposite of that. Abraham Lincoln once won a case because the jury agreed with him that, if you call a tail a leg, the cow still has four legs. That was in stark contrast to a later president who stated under oath he wasn’t sure what “is” is. The Pentateuch/Torah isn’t necessarily a better source of information about the God of Moses simply because it is the oldest source extant but familiarity with the older or oldest sources tends to facilitate effective discussion on that subject. If the people involved in the discussion are also acquainted with the usage of the Hebrew words that have been translated into English, the effectiveness of the discussion is further enhanced. Based on the principle of prior reference, the word “antiracism” (or anti-racism) would seem to be the opposite of racism. The definition preferred by the high priests of the religion currently in vogue in the United States is new forms of discrimination based on the color of a person’s skin or assumptions about that person’s national origin. Based on the principle of prior reference, the word, “equity”, might be equated with equality of opportunity. The new definition is equality of outcome - the person who is often late to work and does shoddy work (or tries to do as little work as possible) should be paid the same as someone who is punctual and a diligent worker. Based on the principle of prior reference, “social justice”, might be assumed to be just a more specific aspect of justice. Advocates of the new religion define “social justice” as the use of coercion to transfer wealth from the haves to the have nots - what I call “the Robin Hood syndrome”. Middle class people fall for this ruse on the basis of the assumption that most of the wealth transfer is from people who have more than they do to people who have less than they do. In actual practice, it is the middle class who bear the burden because they are not acquainted with the myriad exemptions and deductions that are available for reducing a person’s “tax burden” - and the fact that many of those exemptions and deductions are simply not applicable to middle class people. Under the principle of prior reference, “microaggression”, might be assumed to mean a form of aggression that is minimal both in its intent to cause harm and the actual harm that is caused. The new definition has nothing whatsoever to do with aggression or with whether the aggression is hurtful or intended as hurtful. Instead, “microaggression” is defined as anything that is said or done that is perceived as hurtful, especially any words addressed to people who have been taught to believe they belong to any of several “oppressed” classes and that more “privileged” people have been conditioned to use language to maintain the oppression. People who are looking for ways to get off this vicious merry-go-round may be interested in something that happened in 2017. My wife had been examined by a medical doctor several times that year and the doctor had prescribed therapies for her. On the fourth or fifth visit, the doctor asked, “Do you identify as male or female?” Sally thinks of herself as slightly overweight so she replied, “I identify as transslender.” The doctor explained that she was required by the clinic where she worked to ask the question. My wife’s answer was intended as a way of saying she was not willing to play those games. Apparently the doctor didn’t like playing those games either because the next time my wife tried to make an appointment with that same doctor, she was told the doctor didn’t work at that clinic anymore.

[@AlistairHig]

Douglas reminds me so much of Nick Foulkes to the point I'd think they were related.

[@jakelee8538]

Fair enough.... Take your kids out of school for ideological disagreement? Shit isn't that easy man. I couldn't agree more, but life is expensive and fucking complicated. So who's reimbursing me for me 'trusting my instincts'?

[@SamStone1964]

Better the school stops pushing woke so that parents can keep their children in school.

[@SamStone1964]

Better the school stops pushing woke so that parents can keep their children in school.

[@lmg7503]

👍😁

[@antitheistvegan]

I disagree.. I think it’s of the utmost importance that we agree on the fundamental ideas about the core understandings of life and society in order for us to cooperate optimally. Otherwise “this” is what you get.. chaos, divisiveness and confusion.

[@katedunning9467]

I am not sure it’s about “thinking differently”. I think it’s about not sharing values. Even disagreeing with someone who prioritizes values differently is easy. It’s when we can’t even agree on the values themselves (equity vs equality for example) that differences become unbridgeable.

[@johnnyd1454]

What is the chief end of Man?

[@burtonlee22]

What else ?? READ the Classics, foundational works from Anthropology, Sociology, Ethnography

[@hemlock527]

Habermas's "constitutional patriotism"?

[@alexo2675]

Can Douglas Murray just sit still for one minute?

[@AB-pk3gn]

Love me douglas in jeans

[@beartrapperkc]

That intro was rather dramatic.

[@jakelee8538]

I love this convo. But what about the fact that at least the virtue signalling that we (I) hate is at least on the side of things moving toward something not terrible. I understand the danger. But if we have gratitude for so many things, as in the fact that we're comfortable enough to complain here about such petty bullshit compared to what our ancestors had to worry about then I guess we're ok. (yes I I know how Pinkerian that sounds)

[@jakelee8538]

Kinda lost the beat there, but I think you get it.

[@cbbcbb6803]

So, when you came to America, you decided to speak in English and not in *American* Samoan because ...?

[@everythingisupsidedown9593]

The individuals who dress exactly the same.