Douglas Murray’s Smugness Undermines His Argument

During his recent appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast, British political commentator Douglas Murray provided a master class on how to alienate an audience by coming off as arrogantly and condescendingly as possible.

Murray appeared on the nearly three-hour episode alongside comedian Dave Smith to discuss issues such as the attempt by some on the right to engage in historical revisionism on World War II, the war in Ukraine, and the war in Gaza. While Murray has been a stalwart defender of both Ukraine and Israel on the latter two subjects, Smith has questioned the United States’ role in propping up Ukraine and has criticized Israel’s prosecution of the war in Gaza. Rogan himself largely took on the role of a moderator in what became a debate between Murray and Smith, but most of his interjections did support Smith.

Not even two minutes into the episode, Murray starts making jabs at Rogan’s taste in podcast guests. Murray proffers the unnecessarily rhetorical question: “Since the war in Israel began and since the war in Ukraine began, you’ve had quite a lot of people who are very against both in different ways. Do you think you’ve had enough people on who are supportive of either war?”

Murray has already come to his own conclusion. Later on in the episode, he flat-out accuses Rogan of underrepresenting the pro-Israel/pro-Ukraine position on his podcast while overrepresenting the opposite position.

Murray then continues down an inquisitional line of questioning about how many pro-Israel guests or pro-Ukraine guests Rogan has had on and why Rogan thinks he has had on more guests who question the war in Ukraine and the war in Gaza.

“I’m interested in your selection of guests because you’re like the world’s No. 1 podcast,” Murray asks, seemingly in an attempt to use Rogan’s popularity to chastise him for platforming people Murray disagrees with. Murray seems to think that it’s Rogan’s responsibility to platform “respectable” opinions, or at least opinions Murray believes are acceptable, while Rogan counters that he chooses guests based on how interesting he thinks they are.

“There’s been a tilt in the conversation, in both conversations, in the last couple of years, and it’s largely to do with people who have appointed themselves experts who are not experts,” Murray asserted, beginning a drawn out conversation about what constitutes an expert (he certainly considers himself one) on a topic and whether non-experts should be allowed to speak on certain topics.

At one point, Murray becomes incensed at the claim that Hitler downplayed his antisemitism in the 1920s and ’30s and asserts that “no historian” would agree with that statement. There is, however, ample evidence that Hitler did indeed strategically downplay his antisemitism to court voters and that mainstream historians acknowledge this. So, his attempt to browbeat Rogan and Smith with an appeal to authority only reveals his own ignorance on the topic.

He initially makes a good point about people who make contentious claims but then fall back on the excuse that they’re “just asking questions” or that they’re not an expert, but he ultimately takes it too far and makes it seem like he thinks only experts should have a platform to talk about important issues.

Murray then accuses Smith of engaging in the “just asking questions” tactic: “Dave’s a comedian, but he’s now mainly talking about Israel. … That’s all I see you on the internet doing.” But then he undermines any sort of reasonable point he might have been trying to make by asking Smith in a very pompous way: “You’re not a geopolitics guy in general, are you?”

As the episode goes on, Murray more openly calls for full-on gatekeeping on the right: Now that the right has regained some power in society, we have to shut out certain voices and opinions lest they make us look bad and attract the wrong people. He sums it up with, “Let’s have a bit of hygiene on our own side.”

He also loves framing his opponents as “weird,” recalling Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s attack on J.D. Vance during last year’s election campaign. “I think it’s weird to mainstream very fringe views, constantly, and not give another side,” he says. “It’s a bit weird to be simultaneously saying, ‘I’m not an expert’ on a conflict and talking about it everywhere.”

This is essentially the exact same argument that leftist “misinformation” hall monitors have pushed for years as an excuse to silence dissident voices: If you mainstream “fringe views,” then dissatisfied people will begin latching onto them. Later in the episode, Smith calls out Murray’s attempts to accuse him of antisemitism and conspiracy-mongering as a common tactic used by the woke left.

Amazingly, further on in the episode, Murray says — with a completely straight face — that the solution is “to have more experts around.”

The right has been bludgeoned with the “trust the experts” line on election integrity, Covid, transgenderism, nation building in the Middle East, and a myriad of other issues. And all those “experts” turned out to be nothing more than cogs in the propaganda machine. His argument that we should just have more “experts” is totally delusional given the actions of the “expert class” to intentionally deceive the American public and silence the right. So, he only reveals himself as a censorious neocon who wants to judge what is and what isn’t “acceptable” discourse.

That just ensures that even his more reasonable points (and he makes a fair share over the course of the episode) will be rejected out of hand by a large portion of the right because they refuse to trust so-called “experts” or old school technocrats who champion them.

Once the episode evolves into a discussion about the wars in Gaza and Ukraine as well as America’s involvement in them, Murray perches himself on such a moral high horse that even Smith’s lackluster arguments look more appealing by comparison.

Murray has the gall to argue that Smith, and by extension any other opponents, shouldn’t comment on the war between Hamas and Israel if he hasn’t physically been to Gaza or Israel: “If you’re going to spend a year and a half talking about a place, you should at least do the courtesy of visiting it.”

Then Murray succeeds in making himself look like a total creep to any reasonable American listener by chiding Smith for taking America’s forever wars in the Middle East “personally,” despite all the blood and treasure this country has lost in those futile debacles.

On the war in Ukraine, Smith makes some very good counterpoints to Murray’s position, questioning whether NATO expansion is within America’s best interests: “The question, I think, isn’t necessarily like, do these countries wish to join NATO. … Most countries in the world would like the most powerful government in the history of the world to guarantee their defense and subsidize their defense. The question is, is that is in America’s interest.”

Later on, when Murray is trying to guilt-trip the West about supporting Ukraine, Smith retorts that the Ukrainian people certainly have the right to defend their country, but we also have the right to decide whether our government should be funding and arming their war.

This isn’t to say that Smith established a new paradigm for discussing Israel or Ukraine. In the early part of the episode, he relies on evasion tactics: “I can’t speak to that, I don’t know what he thinks, I’ve never made this claim, etc.,” or “that’s not the argument that I’m making.”

Smith is critical of Israel’s conduct of the war, but his primary argument against it relies on a kind of weaponized empathy that would, in practice, make any military operation unfeasible. But Murray is far more dangerous than Smith in the public discourse because he’s part of a larger apparatus of supposedly right-wing figures who are actively trying to police what is acceptable discourse on the right. When it comes to the true fringe of political thought, such policing might be warranted, but as we’ve seen with the fact-checking regime of the last few years, they rarely stop at just gatekeeping the “fringe.”

Murray largely relies on appeals to authority (usually his own), and he’s certainly knowledgeable about the countries he talks about. But his snobby preoccupation with how much more he knows about these places and conflicts than Rogan or Smith means he doesn’t engage with the central question: Is it in the West’s interest to support Israel or Ukraine in their respective conflicts? Murray believes it is and takes it for granted that people should defer to his judgment, so he neglects to make an actual argument. Instead, he manages to convince listeners that he’s a self-absorbed clown.

Hayden Daniel is a staff editor at The Federalist. He previously worked as an editor at The Daily Wire and as deputy editor/opinion editor at The Daily Caller. He received his B.A. in European History from Washington and Lee University with minors in Philosophy and Classics. Follow him on Twitter at @HaydenWDaniel