Douglas Murray: Pecs over principle

How my heroes failed the ultimate test

When my husband Terence died on the 28th November 2018, sleep evaded me like a tenant that wouldn’t pay rent. Consequently, I found myself, eyes wide in the dark, looking at my phone for signs that he might still be alive. I obsessively read everything about grief, from Nick Cave to C.S. Lewis. I found immense comfort in watching YouTube discussions with great thinkers like Roger Scruton and Douglas Murray. The consolation that there were people who believed in the pursuit of goodness, beauty and truth, was a huge relief at a time when the days and nights blurred into one.

I played one clip in particular over and over. It’s the interview below with the late Sir Roger Scruton. He’s smoking a cigar, auburn hair slightly mussed, calmly talking about his own personal relationship with God, the consolation that faith gives us, and the metaphysical reality of eternal life. The idea being that our 70 years or so is given to you. It’s yours. It’s there for ever, marked in time. I wish I could tell him in person just how much watching this night after night rescued me from drowning in a dark sea of meaninglessness.

I watched countless other clips, including On the Future of Conservatism, a discussion with Scruton, hosted by Douglas Murray for The Spectator. It gave me great hope that there were courageous men who would rise up to defend our inalienable rights, when the time came.

Sadly we lost Sir Roger Scruton to lung cancer on January 12th 2020. A gigantic loss to the public square. I felt enormous personal grief, because he had been there as a calm voice of faith in my own despair.

Then in March 2020, the world changed forever. My mother had just passed away after a long illness. My grief overload was almost unbearable by that point. I remember feeling relieved to be at home alone to have some peace. I drifted through the next few months in a sofa-clinging haze. I should really have bought shares in Deliveroo. By June, I’d switched off the news, and once again I delved into youtube and read everything I could. I realised something was very wrong with the narrative. Having lived in Soviet Russia, and knowing dissident Russians, I knew the uneasy, queasy feeling of cognitive dissonance propaganda gives you.

As my friends, and colleagues, socially distanced and masked up (alarm bells really should have rung when masks were introduced in the summer, when respiratory viruses are dormant), I lived my life as normally as I could. In June 2020, I tweeted my support for JK Rowling, who had defended the objective reality of biological sex, and my acting agent dropped me. I had never felt more alone. The only thing that stopped me from the feeling I was going mad, was seeing that there were voices out there who were prepared to challenge the narrative.

Particularly the COVID-19 narrative, which increasingly looked like dangerous nonsense.

As the year dragged on, we saw more removal of civil liberties in the form of absurd lockdowns. I hate the word lockdown, as it minimises what it is: the state entering your personal life, and home in the most pernicious way. In December 2020, the vaccine roll-out was announced. An experimental Emergency Use mRNA vaccine was miraculously here, and you were bloody well going to have it or you were a selfish citizen. In January 2021, across the world billions of people began to be injected, without their informed consent. In many countries the vaccinations then became mandatory, if you wanted to be included in society. The very definition of tyranny. Over 2021, the age group for vaccines quickly went from over 70s right down to pretty much zero. In Britain 5 year olds are being injected with a new serum, which is not out of its testing period until 2023.

Add to that children and the elderly have been forced to wear masks that prevent them breathing properly sometimes for 8 hours a day, teenagers and young adults have had the best time of their lives and their education destroyed, GPs and churches closed their doors, hospitals turned cancer patients and others with severe life-threatening illnesses away. Then there’s the scandal of the elderly being given Midazolam to hasten their deaths, because they were an inconvenience, and the criminal use of ventilators that caused the deaths of thousands, maybe more, because the only faith that mattered was COVID-19.

For 2 years I have looked for the condemnation by the once courageous voices I had found solace in during the desolate period after my husband’s death.

This was the test. Where the fuck were they?

Yesterday I watched/listened to The Joe Rogan Experience. His guest is one Douglas Murray. Murray has just written another book entitled: The War on the West: How to prevail in the age of unreason. During the first twenty minutes, Murray, dressed in a tight, navy Zelensky-esque t-shirt, revealing gym-honed, comic book hero pecs, complete with Grecian 2000 quiffed hair, giggling like a 16 year old girl on a first date, rails against the ridiculous COVID-19 lockdowns. He jokes that after the first one, when the British government allowed one hour of exercise a day, he fled to New York. Since then, he has studiously avoided joining the fierce condemnation of what many describe as the greatest crushing of our God-given liberties, via the use of medical tyranny, in our lifetimes. Tyranny by the West against its own citizens, using CCP policies.

His best-selling book, The Madness of Crowds, surely reflects precisely what has occurred, so where is the extra chapter entitled: How the worship of COVID-19 joined the Woke as another secular religion, and destroyed the moral and ethical fabric of humanity?

In the Rogan interview Murray makes a thinly disguised swipe at James Delingpole. And what, pray, is Delingpole guilty of? I’ll tell you. He’s guilty of using his exceptional journalistic skills to explore and expose deeply uncomfortable truths. He’s also guilty of being passionately angry at the grossest global crimes committed in plain sight, while his peers have had one eye on polishing their shiny gongs. He is justifiably furious. At a time when he needed his good, beautiful, true friends alongside him in the foxhole, they were nowhere to be seen. To say this was a betrayal, given the unconscionable crimes that are being committed against humanity, is an understatement.

In an interview on Joe Rogan in September 2020, Douglas Murray re-states something he has said many times: “It is so much better in your life to tell the truth. However you see it. It is so much better to just say what you see, than to shut up. Of all the regrets we could all have on our deathbeds, I reckon one of the biggest is … the regret that you just sidled through life. Kinda hoping people didn’t notice you and you just got by and did everything you were told to do, and just were a good boy … and then you sidle off.”

It’s April 24th 2022, and as the afternoon sun warms my desk, I find myself full of love and admiration for the thousands of men and women that I have had the privilege of speaking up with, both virtually and in person. A merry band of brothers and sisters, who refused to capitulate. These people will be remembered as principled human beings who didn’t sidle off, but roared, raged, marched, cried and fiercely stood up for the good, the beautiful and the true.

Here’s lookin’ at you, wherever you are.

We fight on, and we will win.

Be seeing you. X