#296 – Douglas Murray: Racism, Marxism, and the War on the West

The following is a conversation with Douglas Murray, author of the Madness of crowds, gender, race, and identity, and his most recent book, the war in the west, how to prevail in the age of Unreason. He is a brilliant, fearless, and often controversial thinker who points out and pushes back against what he sees as the madness of our modern world. I should note that the use of the word Marxism and the west in this conversation refers primarily to cultural Marxism and the cultural values of western civilization, respectively. This is in contrast to my previous conversation with Richard Wolfe, where we focused on Marxism as primarily a critique of capitalism and thus looking at it through the lens of economics and not culture. Nevertheless, these two episodes stand opposite of each other, with very different perspectives on how we build a flourishing civilization together. I leave it to you, the listener, to think and to decide which is the better way. 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It turned out when I went to the other side, the grass was still greener. So it's from one love to a bigger love. Overall, as a fan of technological innovation, and given all the history of Browser wars, it's just exciting and inspiring to see that a new browser comes along that really pushes all the other players to do better. I should also mention they have the brave search engine, which is great. Get it@brave.com lex and it might become your favorite browser too. This episode is also brought to you by betterhelp spelled help help. I almost struggle spelling help. I need help. Spelling help. They figure out what you need to match you with a licensed professional therapist in under 48 hours. Because, friends, it's not your fault. It's not your fault. It's not your fault. Will, if that doesn't at all ring a bell for you, that's from goodwill hunting. One of my favorite movies, one of my favorite sort of therapist patient relationship. That's not really an actual healthy therapist patient relationship, but more like a father son relationship. Yeah, and also just a human relationship. And that's what great therapy is all about to a degree. But actually just the first step of doing therapy, I think for a lot of people, is really helpful, or at least something worth trying. And that's why I should try betterhelp, because it's easy, private, affordable, and available worldwide. Check them out@betterhelp.com. Slash Lex and save when your first month the next sponsor is bioptimizers. They have a new magnesium supplement. When I fast or I'm doing keto or carnivore, sodium, potassium and magnesium are essential, and magnesium is a tricky one. You should listen to Andrew Huberman of the Huberman Lab podcast. Also a good friend of mine just texted me, actually, I need to respond to him and I should probably pause this ad read and respond to him, but instead I'm going to finish the ad read. And the ad read goes that there's a magnesium breakthrough from bioptimizer that you should check out. They solve this problem of magnesium because most supplements, this is the part of the ad read where we talk trash about the others. They only do one or two forms of magnesium, like glycinate and citrate, or perhaps that's pronounced citrate. The point is, the chemistry is still the same. In reality, there are at least seven that your body needs and benefits from, and you can get all of this with bioptimizers, their magnesium breakthrough, and plus a special discount. All@magbreakthrough.com lex this show is also brought to you by notion, a note taking and team collaboration tool, and combines notetaking, document sharing, wikis, project management and much more into one space that's simple, powerful, and beautifully designed. People love notion. Anyone I ask on the internets, on Reddit, Google around looking for reviews and stuff. When I ask friends and you're talking about taking apps like what is the cutting edge? It's certainly not the thing I've used for most of my life, which is emacs. Now, if you're legit, you will still use emacs or Vim for some things, but surely not for collaboration or for rigorous, organized notetaking. For that you need something like notion, which is what everybody loves. But they also want you to know that if you're in a startup, you can use notion for that as well. It's kind of like what they're calling a full on operating system for running your startup. You can get $1,000 off the team plan, which is almost one year free for a team of ten if you go to notion.com startups. This show is brought to you by ExprsVpN. I use them to protect my privacy on the Internet. You should know, friends, that the isps, the Internet service providers, can still track you even if you use basic protection like incognito mode on Chrome. They can still get your data and see all the shady websites you've been going to, which I know you've been going to because I've been watching you like the song from the police, which I wonder if that's a love song or a stalker song. Every breath you take, every move you make, probably a stalker song. Well, you could think of your isps as a kind of stalker. There you go. You can also change your location, watch your favorite shows. My favorite aspect is that it's just a VPN that works really well when you connect. It's really fast, which was what matters. It works on almost any device that I'm aware of. An operating system, including Linux, my favorite operating system. Anyway, you can sign up, download, install it if you go to expressvpn.com slash Lexpod for an extra three months free. This is the Lexregnet podcast to support it. Please check out our sponsors in the description. And now to your friends, here's Douglas Murray. You recently wrote the book titled the war on the west, which in part says that the values, ideas and history of western civilization are under attack. So let's start with the basics. Historically and today, what are the ideas that represent western civilization? The good, the bad, the ugly?