The War on the West

by Douglas Murray

In recent years it has become clear that there is a war going on: a war on the West. This is not like earlier wars, where armies clash and victors are declared. It is a cultural war, and it is being waged remorselessly against all the roots of the Western tradition and against everything good that the Western tradition has produced.

In recent years it has become clear that there is a war going on: a war on the West. This is not like earlier wars, where armies clash and victors are declared. It is a cultural war, and it is being waged remorselessly against all the roots of the Western tradition and against everything good that the Western tradition has produced.

People began to talk of “equality,” but they did not seem to care about equal rights. They talked of “anti-racism,” but they sounded deeply racist. They spoke of “justice,” but they seemed to mean “revenge.”

Whether the migrants were fleeing war or (as in the majority of cases) economic deprivation, they were doing something that was very understandable. What I had a problem with was why the Europeans were allowing this to happen and why they were expected to abolish themselves in order to survive. People talked of Europe’s having a historic debt that legitimized this movement. But even those who argued this failed to address where the limit to this movement was.

Only the Western countries, spread across three continents, were told constantly that in order to have any legitimacy at all—to be even considered decent—they should swiftly and fundamentally alter their demographic makeup.

The vision of the twenty-first century appeared to be that China would be allowed to remain China, the various countries of the Far and Middle East and Africa should be allowed—indeed expected—to remain as they were, or even return to something they may have once been. But the countries identifiable as the countries of “The West” were expected to become something else or lose all legitimacy.

The War on the West is a book about what happens when one side in a cold war—the side of democracy, reason, rights, and universal principles—prematurely surrenders. Too often, we frame this fight all wrong. We allow it to be called temporary or on the fringe or merely dismiss it as a culture war. We misinterpret the aims of the participants or downplay the role it will have in the lives of future generations. Yet the stakes here are as high as any fight in the twentieth century, with many of the same principles

Despite the waning number of overtly racist laws and the power of overt racists in the United States, the disparate results between whites and blacks eroded very slowly. Academics began looking for hidden mechanisms of racism to account for this.

Critical race theory (CRT) emerged over decades in academic seminars, papers, and publications. From the 1970s onward, academics such as bell hooks (the pretentious lower cases are intended), Derrick Bell (at Harvard and Stanford), and Kimberlé Crenshaw (UCLA and Columbia) worked to create a movement of activists within academia who would interpret almost everything in the world through the lens of race.

The more places scholars could see invisible racism, the more popular they became.

Because one of the distinguishing marks of CRT was that its assertions were based not on evidence, as it might previously have been understood, but essentially on interpretations and attitudes.

While rarely announcing the fact, the rules of CRT had no need for normal standards of evidence. If a person’s “lived experience” could be attested to, then the question of “evidence” or “data” had to find a place further back in the queue, if at all.

Certainly, assertions about entire societies and groups of people should come with some evidence attached? Well, not now.

At its best, the shift from evidence to “me” allowed a stalemate: You have your views and reality. I have mine. At its worst, it left any exchange of ideas vulnerable to being taken over by bad-faith actors who simply insisted that things are as they say they are. And that is precisely what happened.

Unlike traditional civil rights, which embraces incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.”

But they failed to take into account Sowell’s follow-on observation that racism was now being kept alive “by politicians, race hustlers, and people who get a sense of superiority by denouncing others as ‘racists.’”7

It became DiAngelo’s contention not only that white people were all racist but that white people who disliked being told that they were racist, or objected to being called racist, were simply providing further evidence of their racism. This logical trap is the same one favored by witch-dunkers in the Middle Ages: if the woman drowns, she is innocent; if she floats, she is a witch and can be burned.

To say “all Chinese people think this” or “all black people behave like that” had been thought to be rude as well as ignorant. But Robin DiAngelo positively reveled in the naughtiness of doing it and getting away with doing it because she was doing it against white people.

One interpretation of this is that America became more racist over the two terms of its first black president. Another is that the media attention on certain incidents—whether justifiable or not—helped to alter America’s view of itself.

What made this worse was that a generation of students brought up with elements of CRT had been persuaded that race relations in their country were wildly worse than they were.

Advocates of this theory claimed that race was not just one lens through which to view society. They insisted that it was the most important, in fact, the only, lens through which to view society. And much of the venom and fury that exists today in America, and in the West as a whole, now comes down to this one specific problem: that people have been shown a version of their society that is exaggerated at best and wildly off at worst.

Actual public understanding of the issue turned out to be wildly, provably, out of sync with reality. For instance, when US citizens were polled and asked how many unarmed black Americans they believed had been shot by police in 2019, the numbers were off by several orders of magnitude. Twenty-two percent of people who identified as “very liberal” said they thought the police shot at least ten thousand unarmed black men in a year. Among self-identified liberals, fully 40 percent thought the figure was between one thousand and ten thousand. The actual figure was somewhere around ten.20

By proportion of the population, unarmed black Americans were slightly more likely to be shot by the police than unarmed white Americans. But as figures compiled by the Washington Post Police Shootings database confirm, in the years before the death of George Floyd, more police officers were killed by black Americans than unarmed black Americans were killed by the police.21

So it is worth pointing out a potentially unpopular but nevertheless crucial fact about this origin story. Which is that there is still no evidence that the killing of George Floyd was a racist murder. At the trial of Derek Chauvin, no evidence was produced to suggest that it was a racist murder. If there had been any such evidence—that Chauvin harbored deep animus against black Americans and set out that May morning hoping to murder a black person—then the prosecution chose to make no such evidence available at Chauvin’s trial.

The reason that I mention this is not to diminish what happened to Floyd, any more than it is to diminish what happened to Timpa. The reason is to point out that these two cases are very similar and that in neither case was a racial motive proved.

And it is not. What is proved is that by 2020 America was ready and primed for a certain interpretation of itself to burst out. That interpretation had been prepared in the academy. It had been popularized in the media. And in record time, it had been given into by corporate entities, civil society organizations, and nowhere so much as in the campuses of the United States. We know this because long before 2020, American campuses had been undergoing a set of moral panics that future historians will look on with deep puzzlement. American students had been primed for a white-supremacist, racist interpretation of their own society to grip them. How do we know? Because for a decade or more, they had been seeing ghouls and monsters that were not there.

The panic only subsided when it was discovered that the suspected member of the KKK was, in fact, a Dominican monk, wearing the traditional white robes of his order. The “whip” he was said to have been carrying in his hands turned out to be a rosary. Despite these facts becoming clear, not all of the students stood down graciously. “OK seriously,” asked one. “Why the fuck was a priest walking around campus at night?”24

queer black activist

A few months later, in October, it was the turn of Michigan State University to have a noose sighting. There a student claimed to have come out of her dorm room and been confronted by a hanging noose. Condemnations for this hate incident came swiftly from everyone on campus from fellow students all the way up to the university’s president. Their condemnations and commiserations continued until it transpired that the “noose” was one half of a pair of shoelaces that had been lost and hung up by the person who found them so that they could be reclaimed by their owner.28

In February 2017, the comedian Sarah Silverman went out for her morning coffee. She was shocked to find signs on the pavement of what looked like an S with a line through the middle. Silverman promptly snapped a photo of the pavement and sent it out to her many millions of Twitter followers. “Is this an attempt at swastikas?” she asked. “Do neo-Nazis not have Google?”30 But it turned out that illiterate neo-Nazis had not taken to the town’s pavements to ineptly try to paint swastikas overnight. The signs on the ground were chalk markings made by construction workers identifying the areas in which they needed to do their job.

In September 2019, the restaurant of a former NFL player, Edawn Louis Coughman, was vandalized with racist graffiti and swastikas. Coughman called his insurance company to report the incident, but the police were too quick, and when they caught up with him, they found him with the black paint that it turned out he had used to carry out the “racist attack” on himself.

Reaction from the highest quarters in the country was swift and credulous. Senator Kamala Harris, who turned out to know Smollett, was among those who described what had happened as “an attempted modern day lynching.”32 Smollett stuck to his story in the days afterward, occasionally adding extras. At a singing performance a week later, he told his sympathetic and supportive audience that he had fought back against his attackers and would not allow them to win because he, Jussie Smollett, stood for love. But as the story fell apart, so did much of the public support for him. Nothing about the story stood up.

police got the opportunity to catch up with the white supremacists who had carried out the attack.

It became apparent that Smollett believed that a successful claim of a hate crime against himself would give him leverage to negotiate a pay raise on the show Empire, in which he felt he was undervalued.

The question of what was, or was not, going through Smollett’s mind at this time is certainly interesting. But what is far more interesting is the eagerness with which his story was believed. It wasn’t just Harris but dozens and dozens of prominent Americans, from Nancy Pelosi to Stephen Colbert, who took Smollett’s story at face value.

Indeed, on his next evening show, Colbert invited a sandpaper-voiced actress called Ellen Page on to sermonize about the Smollett incident and what it meant. This was when some doubt had already been cast over Smollett’s story, and this was unforgivable in Page’s eyes. “We have a media that’s saying it’s a debate whether or not what just happened to Jussie Smollett is a hate crime,” she said. “It’s absurd,” she added, thumping one fist into the other for emphasis. “There [bleep] isn’t a debate.” At which the studio audience whooped and shouted, “Yeah!” “Sorry I’m like I’m like really fired up tonight,” she said, as if she was apologetic. “Not at all,” agreed Colbert: “You have to be fired up. You have to be fired up.” “It feels impossible to not feel this way right now,” Page added to more whoops and applause.33

They do not live in a country in which lynchings are a feature of everyday life. They actually live in one in which there is such a dearth of white supremacists that weight-lifting Nigerians occasionally need to be flown in to take on the role. What appears to have happened is that a picture of America has formed in the heads of certain Americans. A picture set and stuck at some time around the early part of the last century. An America in which the KKK roamed the land and Hollywood actresses deserved applause for daring to stand up to “attempted lynchings.”

The details are worth fighting over, bitterly if need be. Because if Michael Brown was shot with his hands in the air and posed no threat to the arresting officers, then that could well point to a very serious problem in a nation. But if he was not shot with his hands in the air and the riots that resulted from his death were whipped up for no reason, then some dishonest actors have a lot of accounting for their own actions to do.

Even in such a relatively genteel world as the world of books, this marked radicalization could be witnessed in the last decade. In the 2010s, during the Obama presidency, mainstream publishers started to pump out books that seemed intent on radicalizing people from the cradle upward. At the time, some of it seemed so preposterous as to be funny. Innosanto Nagara’s work A is for Activist (2012) was a children’s alphabet picture book intended to produce the next generation of activists. As well as being anticapitalist, it was also naturally on board with all the latest identity politics. L is for “LGBT,” and of course T is for “Trans” before it is for “Trains.” But the main point of the book is to tell children that they should grow up to protest and fight for “equality,” “diversity,” and more. Which is why X is for Malcolm X, I is for “indigenous” and “immigrant,” Y is for “Your truth,” and the A–Z finishes with Z is for Zapatista.

From the age they could begin to read, children were being taught through popular literature that the best way to live your life is as a revolutionary, manning the barricades to fight against capitalism, “cis-heteronormativity,” and of course racism. Whole industries seemed intent on reprogramming people to make them view the world through a completely clear lens in which there were obvious good guys and obvious bad guys. Intelligent adults began to speak in the same language. In 2019, Adam Rutherford (author of How to Argue with a Racist) finished a lecture to a room full of adults with the statement, “If you are a racist then you are my enemy.”34 As though lecture theaters are routinely filled with Klansmen.

So when your two-year-old knocks down his or her play blocks, you can ask if this is a metaphorical observation on the lived reality of racial violence.

As no less an authority than the Arizona Department of Education recently declared, babies are able to become racist by the age of three months old. And, according to the “equity toolkit” published by the department, which made this claim, it is white babies that are the problem. The toolkit claims that “expressions of racial prejudice often peak at ages 4 and 5” but that while “Black and Latinx children” at the age of five show “no preference towards their own groups,” “white children at this age remain strongly biased in favor of whiteness.”36 A reminder that from even before the moment they are able to speak or walk, it is white children who are the problem. And white children who must be worked on to achieve the change that everybody seems to have agreed is needed.

As it happens, Antiracist Baby is a children’s version of a slightly more grown-up book by Ibram X. Kendi. The author’s story is one of quite amazing success—a success that has mirrored that of another black American writer of the same generation—Ta-Nehisi Coates. Like Coates, Kendi appears to believe that his personal story, or a mix of his personal story plus extrapolation of its political meaning, should be a sufficient base from which to reframe race relations in America. Like Coates, he is full of anger. Yet, like Coates, his career has been not just golden but magnificently well oiled at every turn. Like Coates, he has had a youthful book of memoir published to near-unanimous acclaim and turned into a best seller. Like Coates, he has won a National Book Award. Like Coates, he was awarded a MacArthur “Genius Grant.” Unlike Coates, Kendi was (at the age of just thirty-eight) awarded the most prestigious tenured chair at Boston University. The only previous holder of the Andrew W. Mellon Professorship in the Humanities was the Holocaust survivor and Nobel Prize–winning author Elie Wiesel.

Kendi is not opposed to racism. He is opposed to certain forms of racism: specifically white on black racism. Other racisms can be, in his own definitions, a positive force. For instance, in his writing on discrimination and inequity, he cannot avoid one particular conclusion beckoning to him: “The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.”39

Much depends here on what he means by “racist” and what he means by “antiracist.” But any reading of his work makes it clear that by “racist” Kendi means things he does not like. Whereas “antiracist” means things he does like. There are no areas of neutral in Kendi’s color chart. There are only white supremacists and white nationalists and then white people who agree with him. Similarly, there are black people who agree with Kendi and black people who do not. Those black people who do not go along with everything proposed by him are also racists.

For instance, he makes it clear that it is racist to oppose reparations for slavery. It is also racist not to have any opinion on the matter. So you must either share Kendi’s specific view on the matter or you are—guess what?—a racist. Everywhere you turn, the other exits are blocked. For instance, referring to a “post-racial society” is also racist. Either you must accept Kendi’s definition of the society you live in or you are a racist. This neat trick works with almost everything. Kendi is opposed to voter ID laws. So, can anybody guess what people who support voter ID laws might be? That is right: they, too, are racists. Strangely it is also racist to not agree with what Kendi wants to do in regard to climate change.

Rather than taking race out of a discussion (the very concept of which Kendi also describes as racist), this worldview goes out of its way to impose race into every discussion. And to do so in the most stark and unforgiving terms.

It seemed as though anything could be published so long as it whipped along the same narrative that white people are oppressors and able to be insulted at every turn.

At the exact moment that racism had never been more discredited or more socially and politically unacceptable, it is portrayed as omnipresent and needing a great pushback.

Minute claims of “systemic racism,” “institutional whiteness,” and much more were ignored. But blown up on the projector system of American culture, they now show a picture that is monstrous. Which is why a middle-class adolescent from one of the luckiest generations in human history, living in one of the freest societies in human history, can be found outside a police facility at night, in a pink jumpsuit, screaming obscenities at any representative of the state.