WE ALL KNOW THE old rule about growing more conservative as you get older: mark off the days ‘til pension age and you find yourself jigging the ritual shamble to the right. But is it also possible that the fascier you become, the posher you sound? This was certainly true of Milo Yiannopoulos when he was doing his Ernst Röhm routine circa 2017. It is also true, I suspect, of the bargain-bin Powellite and twinky quisling Douglas Murray. Watching his performance over the last six months as he’s bravely gone in to bat for a state plausibly accused of several major international crimes, I swear Murray has become almost Spode-like in his plumminess. He always had a sprinkle of toff – what else does Eton teach you? – but lately as he’s reared back into his old persona his vowels have collapsed into a lazy pose of permanent sneer. The perfect and traditional tone of voice, then, for piggybacking an atrocity.

Last week Murray took a break from posting thirst traps in Soweto to inflict his presence on the residents of Jerusalem. At a fawning ceremony, Murray was presented with a bland and nameless block of wood by Israeli president Isaac “No Uninvolved Civilians” Herzog and “Combatting Antisemitism Minister” Amichai Chikli. (How’s that portfolio going, by the way? Fresh from sidekicking a famous internet dunce, here is Benny Morris in the New York Times, as the IDF locks and loads for Rafah: “Israel, certainly for the moment, can be considered the least safe place on earth for Jews.”) They told Murray it was an award, and he acted like it was, though I have my doubts as to whether he’d know a real honour if it strolled up to him on an empty train and playfully tweaked his nipples. The Jerusalem Post summarised Murray’s recent achievements: “His contributions include numerous articles, opinion pieces, social media posts, and extensive reporting, all advocating for Israel.” Really, Dougie dear? All of it? All of those posts?

One of the happy consolations of doing good work for its own sake: some people might even give you a prize for it, proof that your pursuit of greater understanding might aid in popularising or bolstering someone’s well-earned grievances. I was, a few years ago, the proud recipient of the Ben Bagdikian Award given by the Armenian National Committee of Australia – doubly gratifying for being in the name of a hard-nosed hack of the old school who helped Daniel Ellsberg reveal the full grotesquery of the War in Indochina (arrayed against power, this is the only reasonable attitude to nurture). My work on the Armenian Genocide sought no laurels, except perhaps slightly larger book sales than I ended up getting. In most of us, I hope, it would be a source of deep shame and embarrassment to be acknowledged officially as a propagandist – an unceasing, unflagging one at that. But if you embark on the project of journalistic linebacking, you accept awards like these as no more than your entitlement. The chief effect of Dougie’s half-year output, the reason he was garlanded by the Israeli state, has been public distortion and intellectual pollution.

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Since at least the Battle of Mosul in 2016, Dougie’s been having a rough time of it. In the absence of a sustained jihadi campaign in the headlines, he had to resort to his crusty roots. And to go on about immigration and ‘threats to the West’ in the mainstream press, he had to keep his fasciness at least a little obscured – just enough to plausibly deny it if asked. And there’s every chance he’d encounter in debate someone smarter, better spoken, funnier, and taller than he is; there was a chance, in other words, he’d lose. Just as the Israeli settlers greeted dead Jews as an opportunity, October 7th allowed Murray to default back to the modes and manners of the waning days of the War on Terror.

In the same way Christopher Hitchens wished to be the heir to Gore Vidal, so Dougie studied at the knee of late-period Hitchens, though all he seemed to learn from him was to pump and bloat his stuff with as many condemnatory clichés as will fit, working those rude adjectives like a veteran fluffer, often in denunciation of a group or figure who had no defenders to begin with. Murray operated, then as now, as if he were in a persecuted minority railing against an offensive culture and a tyrannical state – pinching from a radical tradition that is not his to claim or borrow from. We all knew ISIS were a sore bunch, that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and Bashar al-Assad were unpleasant sorts, and we knew this without resort to the high-chair leg-up offered by mouthpieces from the semi-hard right who would use abundant fear as leverage to pad cruel and unusual policies.

But then, perhaps this back-door smuggling was the point all along. Beware anyone who would demote Nazis crimes lower in the grim ranking of human cruelty, or make excuses for Nazis as more fragrant and humane than they really were. This is exactly what Dougie tried to do in November when he gave his fascist-friendly opinions in the pages of the Jewish Chronicle (of all places). That “some people are worse than the Nazis is not hyperbole,” Dougie wrote, hyperbolically. Because Hamas sickos let out a couple of Allahu Akbars as they went about slaughtering the kibbutzim, Dougie’s anti-Mohammedan radar starts twinkling like an ice cream van. In contrast to Hamas, Murray slithers on, “Average members of the SS and other killing units of Hitler’s were rarely proud of their average days’ work. Very few felt that shooting Jews in the back of the head all day and kicking their bodies into pits was where their own lives had meant to end up…. When the war ended, the Nazis tried to pretend that Treblinka and other death camps never existed.”

See, Dougie says, they weren’t all that bad. In fact, postwar Nazis didn’t trumpet their achievement because, at least for a short while, there was a real chance they might rightfully see the noose. And if they dodged that fate, they could still deny their involvement so as to take up a perky position in the American security state, or as an anti-communist politician worthy of being rehabilitated for Cold War purposes. And as The Zone of Interest most recently made clear, the camp Kommandant or Einsatzgruppen captain maybe wasn’t “proud” but still considered murder necessary so as to “end up” where they really wanted: as the foreman-lords of a depopulated Europe overseeing a class of Slav helots. Intent matters; ends matter. Though perhaps not if you’d like to do pro bono public relations for Israel as well as the Nazis.

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Smearing himself over the already grubby pages of the New York Post in December, Dougie recited the uncorroborated testimony of an unnamed IDF major (good journalistic ethics, that) and went through the usual routine of describing any criticism of the IDF’s methods as “libels” (i.e., blood libels). This was mere throat-clearing on his way to letting out the habitual whinge about how Hamas consistently uses human shields as a method of guerrilla warfare, delivering in the process the usual double-pronged defence offered by the genocidaire’s helpful assistant: war is hell, and the IDF is doing everything it can to avoid civilian casualties. Apparently not everything, as Yuval Abraham’s extraordinarily comprehensive reporting on Israeli targeting systems for +972 magazine makes clear. One machine – grotesquely called ‘Where’s Daddy?’ – is designed to alert IDF intelligence when a potential target is at their family home. The air force then drops their ordnance, flattening entire apartment blocks and everyone inside. Family annihilation is de-facto common policy. Bombing homes is easier, and the IDF does it routinely with little regard for the principle of proportionality apparently so treasured by those who offer themselves as human shields for Israel’s murderous means.

In his combat against common sense, truth, and humanity since October, nothing Dougie’s done has amounted to an argument from principle – and certainly not any principle that couldn’t instantly be turned the other way, as demonstrated by Tom Stevenson in the London Review of Books in February:

One might wonder what the response would be if the arguments deemed good enough to justify the attack on Gaza were inverted. Suppose national newspapers were to argue that because the government of Israel has ordered hideous atrocities, as it certainly has, Israeli officials should be killed at any cost, and if Tel Aviv must be destroyed to achieve this then so be it. If the bars of Rehavia must be turned into rubble, too bad – besides, look how close they are to the presidency on HaNasi Street. Has the Israeli state ‘diverted funds’ to the building of underground bunkers for its leadership? Is carpet bombing justified on the grounds that the government and the political parties that constitute it are ‘integrated into Israeli’ society’? Arguments as absurd as these acquire respectability in the service of killing Palestinians.

It is always worrying when the think-tankers start thinking tanks, though it seems Dougie has never thought of anything else. “Everyone who stands any chance of leading Israel knows,” he belched recently, “that the only way to stop the ‘cycle of violence’ is for Israel to win.” If this is what defeat looks like, after the withdrawal of several brigades from Khan Younis, one trembles at the coming stench of victory. But Murray’s point here – to thrust home the necessity of more bloodletting, more savagery, more dispossession, more immiseration – is less interesting and less important than what it reveals inadvertently: there is now no candidate in Israel who does not believe annihilatory violence is the only method remaining. Even the shameless cynicism of Netanyahu’s regnant strategy since at least 2009 of propping up Hamas so as to forestall a united Palestinian front looks comparatively rosy and optimistic. The corralling of opinion into the far corners of the hard-right and the semi-fascist, moreover, was only made possible by the unlimited Western support which Dougie relentlessly insists upon. Like a tyke caught bullying in the sandpit, someone else is always to blame. “It is Hamas that started this,” Murray cried in the Post. Yet as Frédéric Lordon recently said of ‘terrorism’ ex-nihilo, “Only those whose sole intellectual operation is condemnation were guaranteed not to see anything coming beforehand or understand anything afterwards.”

It is ironic, really, for someone so frightened of Muslims to have a face so moon-like, as if stuck on a course of prednisone for too long. No one should be jealous of that. But if I was the type more prone to despair, I would be tempted to admire Dougie’s method. How much simpler, how much sweeter it must be to not feel the pressure of being a principled person, to not feel the prideful pull of needing to triple-check whether your facts are correct. To experience no thoughts at all must be bliss; just let the sordid well of prejudice move and motivate, let the poison leech smoothly from your corroded cranium. Your only real task is to collect the seepage and file it to The Spectator.

A POSTSCRIPT: For a last word, it’s best to let the pigs scrap in their sty. Matthew Jamison was a co-founder of the Henry Jackson Society, which Dougie called home for a while. He got a good look up close at the Murray manner, and this is what he said in 2017 (spelling in the original):

It's Associate Director, the white supremacist, racist anti-Muslim bigot, Douglas Murray is the most ugly and offensive example of this vicious, racist anti-Muslim campaign. Mr. Murray is full of venom and hatred for Muslims. He seems to have a perverse and deranged obsession with all things Islam related. In a ghastly speech to the Dutch Parliament in 2006 Murray stated: “Conditions for Muslims in Europe must be made harder,” and “all immigration into Europe from Muslim countries must stop”…Murray has also decried the fact that: “Only 44.9 per cent of London residents are now white British.” There is the strong stench of fascism emanating from Douglas Murray who has associated with the likes of racists such as [Richard] Spencer (banned by the UK Home Office from entering Britain due to his status as a hate-preacher) and support for former English Defence League thug leader…Tommy Robinson. Indeed, Murray has become such a toxic political pariah that the Conservative Party frontbench had to cut off relations with him.

And what could be more humiliating than that?

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FLOURISHING THEIR MOISTEST HANKIES and renting their clothes, the slicktalkers and bagmen of Kissinger Associates announced on November 30th the death of their grotesque and goblinish boss. First came the laughter. Our laughter. The laughter of glee and righteousness and memory. We know what Henry Kissinger did, and we’ll take our victories as they come…

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FOR DEFECTOR, I REVIEWED Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Elon Musk: a very bad and baffling book, a 600-page blue streak of grovelling and excuse-making:

There is evidence that when Musk wants something badly enough—a new business opportunity, say, or a new wife—he is capable of being sweet, charming, enthusiastic, and smart. “He could flip a switch,”…

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Has the Committee come to order, mister Chairman? It has? Thank you. Would the witness care to identity themselves for the record? We haven’t time for statements, a name is enough. Good. Now, I have here before me a piece of writing which this Committee regards as a most dangerous and unnatural subversion to the law and common sense of this great land. Are you the author of the article entitled ‘Can a woke makeover win Barbie and Monopoly new fans?’ Mmhmm. Speak up a little. You are? No, no speeches. Remember: you’re under oath. Are you now or have you ever been a social justice warrior? Excuse me, the witness will answer the question. Order! This committee has heard evidence that you…no, allow me, please…are a consecrated footsoldier of – and here I quote – “a dominant religion that proselytises by force.” As my esteemed colleagues have revealed, this country is entirely at the mercy of a vast conspiracy which has penetrated and violated – here I quote again, if I may – “Hollywood, big tech, all major corporations, academia, the mainstream media, the United States government and the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.” No, no, the witness will keep quiet! Mister Chairman, please, the gavel…

OF ALL THE THINGS worth worrying about – the private strife, the public squalor, the heaped injustice of the present age – a special kind of scorn is reserved for those who believe all power in society has been seized by a demonic force called ‘woke’. This term and all of its catty-cornered, scrunched-up meanings have attained a magical quality in a lot of minds that thrive on a lack of proportion. It brings order to their world, gives backbone to their thoughts, excuses all prejudice and hierarchy, and provides convenient cover to knee-jerk opinions. For past generations, different words did the same work: ‘Freemasons’, ‘Illuminati’, Judeobolshevism’.

Combatants can be split into three separate, complimentary camps. There are the politicians – Viktor Orbán, Vladimir Putin, dare we add Suella Braverman? – for whom ‘social justice’ is a decadent perversion threatening the pure primordial soul of the nation and which, along with all mild dissent, must be interrogated and purged. Then there is the bathetic tragedy of the grotesquely rich who, given the chance to lead a life of pure hedonism, choose instead to push aside the yachts, the palaces, the trafficked women, the vast mountain ranges of cocaine, and stay up late stewing about ‘Cultural Marxism’ or the ‘woke mind virus’. Sliding further down the ladder we find those who reckon it their duty to take the blue-hairs very seriously. Though not rich, they are financially stable and firmly jammed in the upper ranks of the media. Their subservient role is to do the intellectual graft: to study and hypothesise and make arguments, to apply their training at elite universities to the task of preserving whatever’s left of the liberal tradition before it’s overcome by what Belize in Angels in America dreamily called “racial impurity and gender confusion.” They are the last noble weary garrison holding the citadel.

Andrew Doyle firmly belongs to this latter group, and he seems quite content with his lot: happy to grub along at the dull coalface of ideas, theories, and facts, perhaps jealously glancing up once in a while to admire the figures far above liberated from responsibility by power and lucre. Doyle recently published a book called The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World, which is supposed to present the kinder face of the culture war: the best case for opposition, put gently with much appeal to reason, solid research, and a firm empirical grounding. Because most debates about this kind of stuff usually take place online – or in abbreviated, mock-philosophical op-eds – it is a rare and useful thing to have the argument stated at length with at least some sources undergirding it. Only then can we properly judge whether they are living up to their claims of moderation and common sense.

As evidence for just how calm and rational Andrew Doyle’s output is, consider this: the quotes included in the modest lampoon at the top of this essay are taken directly from The New Puritans. Like many of his fellows, Doyle sincerely holds that all the world’s major institutions – as well as the helpless, hapless Sussexes - have been infiltrated and suborned by a “dominant religion.” The woke, Doyle insists, are “nebulous but somehow omnipresent,” and forcing on us a “combat” previously unseen, fought in “our homes, our schools, our places of work.” Lest we get too complacent, Doyle repeatedly warns that social justice is a “destructive force” posing a “threat” to “the ideals of a liberal democracy.”

A failed academic, a failed teacher, and a failed comedian, Doyle’s delicate grip on fame is owed to inventing the Titania McGrath personality, a pastiche of a hyperwoke university professor. Titania’s ‘jokes’ are about as predictable as they come: pithy nuggets about how we ought to support Terrence from Huddersfield because he wishes to identify as a carrot – you know the drill. Doyle deserves at least a little respect for his perseverance because this exhausted schtick ceased being even mildly amusing some time in 2018, and suffers the same problem which plagued satirists of Donald Trump for so many years: he will never be as bizarre, as creative, as ridiculous as the subject he’s trying to mock. Still, Doyle has spun his stunt into a moderately successful career. Recently, he became perhaps the fifth or sixth most charismatic bobble-head on the propaganda network GB News. Soaring heights, indeed.

I still can’t decide whether Doyle is deliberately trying to mimic the tone and timbre of Senator McCarthy, but references to mid-century anticommunism have another connection by way of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. Doyle’s great gimmick in The New Puritans – the very frame of his picture – is to measure the woke against the godly of New England who, in a fit of mania, sent several dozen innocents to the hanging tree for the crime of witchcraft in the early 1690s. From the complex circumstances of an isolated settler colony riven with religious fervour and sexual repression, labouring under poor harvests and a theocratic legal system, Doyle derives an analogy for modern ‘social justice activists’ who, not unlike Abigail Williams and Betty Parris, revelled in their authority to accuse, to scorn, to see others strung up on their own whims, and in their turn to be treated kindly for what they ‘endured’. The “spectral evidence” admitted in state courts, Doyle asserts, is exactly like the slogan “lived experience.” The point, when he gets around to it, is thus: we are all residents of a Salem writ large, firmly in the teeth of a deadly hysteria started by children.

This might seem a bit of a stretch, but Doyle has done more heavy lifting here than most Times or Telegraph columnists manage in their lifetimes. Then something strange happens. Having established this analogy as the basis of his book, Doyle completely and openly undercuts it. “The new puritans,” he reveals, “bear little resemblance to the puritans of old.” Well, if that’s the case we can all go home. And yet, like Sisyphus, he trudges on. By “puritan” he doesn’t mean the outraged insurgents of the Reformation, or the strictures of Calvinism, or the ecstatic radicals (Diggers, Levellers, Fifth Monarchists) of the English Revolution for whom social justice really was a goal. What Doyle actually means is ‘puritan’ in the common use - a scold, a prohibitionist, someone in favour of the most austere constraints on moral behaviour. He probably could have started with that and saved his breath.

The great Tobi Haslett once described the pundit playbook as “anecdotes and dazzling inanities draped over an individualist common sense,” but in this case Doyle’s prose – indeed his whole style and affect – might best be described as sub-Hitchensian. He clearly admires the late Christopher Hitchens, quotes him regularly, and in his more solemn moments alone probably imagines being him. Doyle holds that had he not been snuffed out by cancer, Hitchens likely would have joined Douglas Murray (among others) in making the slick transition from critic of Islam to scourge of the woke. The New Puritans, then, is a kind of wish fulfilment in which Doyle gets to don the fantasy costume of a spent public intellectual, hailed as a saviour in an hour of need. Which would be sad enough were it not for the obvious: Doyle is a floundering minnow to Hitchens’ baleen whale in both the capacity of his intellect and the ability of his writing. Here comes clunking, paragraph by paragraph, a great phalanx of howling clichés: “expletive-laden,” “white heat of political tribalism,” “marketplace of ideas,” “climate of fear,” “stark example,” “come from nowhere.” Be as unkind as you like about Hitchens’ bloodlust, his smugness, his fear of being an outsider, but you can never say he wrote anything as dire as all that. 

Having firmly established in the first dozen pages of The New Puritans that he is useless as a historian and even more dreadful as a polemicist, what on earth is Doyle going to do for the next two hundred? The book judders along, flubbing and hiccupping through his own personal grievances and gripes. And as for the ‘how’ of the subtitle, the book contains no solid explanation of the means by which social justice culture conquered the West – no exposé of the constellation of conditions which led to these particular people at this particular moment having these particular ideas. Far from drifting loftily above the battleground as a disinterested observer and analyst, in the end Andrew Doyle proves to be just as shamelessly, terminally online as everyone else, just as shackled to the grinding gears of the twittering machine.

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