I have been watching a considerable amount of the Rubin Report in my leisure, which I recommend highly. The hour-long discussions allow for an exchange of views, as opposed to a ritualized six-minute interchange on cable TV of talking points.
One of the heroes of truth is Douglas Murray, who has written The Strange Death of Europe. Asked by Rubin what words of encouragement he has for others, he responded: “It’s still legal to say what you think”.
I want to add my two cents’ worth to that observation. It is surprizing the degree to which, in the absence of any secret police, and with human rights commissions still occasionally defeated in public and embarrassing ways, that people feel so constrained to toe the line of political correctness.
Yet they do, and for good reason. There are innumerable enforcers out there, in almost any occasion in which polite society meets.
Last year I was talking to a lady at a cocktail gathering and had occasion to observe that North American Indians or blacks were overrepresented in our prisons – and no, I did bring up the topic but did not avoid it either. She asked me quite bluntly: “Was I racist?| I thought for a moment and said, “No. I merely observe statistical realities”. What I ought to have said, and wish I had said, “Are you a member of the thought police?”
Because there are many members of the thought police and they do not hesitate to comment on the slightest deviation – it is the slightest and not the greatest deviation they are sensitive to.
More than any other thing which lies behind the success of Trump is his capacity to talk ordinary language about difficult subjects: to talk like a real person and not in a series of carefully crafted talking points. What he has done is enlarge the capacity of ordinary people to react as normal people should to violations of common sense, good manners, and good public policy. The Emperor of PC has no clothes, which we have seen for some time. Yet it is the power to force people to say that His Majesty is splendidly clothed, to humiliate the general public by ceaseless participation in lies or doubtful propositions, that gives the guardians of PC their power.
To wit:
- mass immigration is good for all people of the receiving society
- free trade with China is actually free – that is, standards-based, law abiding – trade
- there is no link between Islam and jihad
- that different rates of criminal incarceration among different ethnicities is a sign of racism or other injustice
Alexander Solzhenitsyn once said that Communism would not survive the day if everyone spoke the truth. As I have said recently, we are living in the liberal version of Oceania, and we will not get out of it until we each decide to tell the truth.
So say something.
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For good measure, here is the interview with Douglas Murray.