Watching - or trying to - the painful encounter between Douglas Murray and Dave Smith on the Joe Rogan show, I was reminded how much I dislike ‘debates’.
I explain why in a long-read piece I wrote a while back called ‘No I Don’t Want To Take Part In Your Stupid Debate.’
https://delingpole.substack.com/p/no-i-dont-want-to-take-part-in-your
It’s a good read. But if you haven’t time, the short version goes something like this…
Debates are the enemy of truth. They pretend that they are trying to get to the bottom of this or that important issue. But really all they tell you is which side is better at rhetorical trickery. Or which side the moderator is secretly rooting for. Or which side the audience is already biased towards. Or which side is prepared to play dirtiest. They are about as fair a way as achieving justice as trial by combat. I think debates stink.
Douglas Murray is a model debater. I certainly wouldn’t go up against him myself. But that’s because he plays to win not to make friends. To this end, he is more than happy to bring a knife to a fist fight, which is what he did on the Joe Rogan show.
Murray’s mission, it was evident from the off, was to crush - and crush utterly - his opponent, a stand-up comedian and libertarian political commentator called Dave Smith. He did so using a technique which students of rhetorical fallacy will know as ‘Argument from Indignation.’ That is, Murray’s tone throughout was a mix of lofty disdain and of but-barely-restrained righteous outrage.
Here, or something like it, was the message we got from Murray: “I cannot believe that I find myself having to engage with someone so inferior to me both morally and intellectually. But I shall endeavour - sigh - to be as polite as I possibly can under these extreme circumstances, and will do so by feigning to agree with my worm-like opponent on the occasional trivial point, in order to make him feel slightly less uncomfortable and to show everyone else how reasonable and amenable and magnanimous I am.”
Or, if you want to visualise his approach, imagine someone in a periwig, knee breeches and a gold-embroidered, Louise XIV-style silken coat stooping reluctantly to deal with a turd that his King Charles spaniel has inconsiderately left on his host’s lawn in the middle of a croquet match, there being no staff immediately available to remove it.
It’s a devastatingly effective technique because it puts your opponent instantly on the back foot. Rather than being treated as an equal addressing in good faith a different but valid point of view your opponent is represented as someone whose position is so ugly and reprehensible or so ignorant and incoherent - or both - that it barely deserves the courtesy of consideration. In this instance, rather than being given space to make his case, Dave Smith had to defend himself against the imputations that, first, as a mere comedian he simply wasn’t qualified to be talking about grown up subjects like history and politics and that second, he was dangerously close to being an anti-Semite, a Holocaust denier and a fan of Adolf Hitler/Vladimir Putin/Evil generally.
When you see someone whose opinions you dislike being given this brutal treatment it’s quite tempting to join the lynch mob and cheer on their destruction. But in this case, I felt that Dave Smith was making some perfectly reasonable points and that he deserved a more generous hearing.
I especially agreed with Smith on the subject of ‘experts.’ Murray’s argument appeared to be that we should defer to them on almost every occasion. For example, on the subject of Winston Churchill he declared that we should listen to professionals like ‘his current greatest living biographer’ Andrew Roberts and not to ‘guys [who] are not historians’ like Darryl Cooper. Also, in Murray’s view, we shouldn’t listen to ‘very, very discredited’ historians like David Irving.
But what if the people Murray is insisting are the go-to experts have got it wrong? What if Ukraine and Gaza expert Murray is wrong about Ukraine and Gaza? What if Churchill expert Andrew Roberts has got it wrong about Churchill? It has been known to happen before, experts getting stuff wrong - as eminent (and no doubt ‘expert’) historian Lord Dacre once famously demonstrated when he verified as genuine the fake Hitler diaries.
I’ve experienced this ‘experts being wrong’ phenomenon on one or two occasions myself. Climate change, for example. After spending about ten years looking into the subject, I came to the conclusion that all the award-winning expert climate scientists are a bunch of bullshitting liars, cheats and shills. It’s not that they are a teeny bit wrong about man-made climate change here and there. They are totally wrong about it in every last detail. The whole thing is a hoax - and a very expensive and destructive one at that. For more details, you can read the book I wrote on the subject, now available in an updated edition.
Then, of course, we had another handy example of the ‘experts being wrong’ phenomenon in the form of the Covid vaccine. Or, as I prefer fondly to call it, the Death Jab. I remember well the period when it came out, because all the ‘experts’ - from my doctor to the Chief Medical Officer on TV to the vaccine manufacturers - were telling me, quite persistently, that I had to take it. Apparently it was ‘safe and effective’. It offered a high degree of protection against this deadly disease doing the rounds called ‘Covid’. And not to take it was an act of selfishness which might endanger the life of every granny in the neighbourhood and which by rights ought to render me liable for incarceration in an isolation camp, or which at the very least ought to prevent me from being allowed to go on holiday - or shopping or anywhere else.
Bizarrely, despite my not being at all an expert in either epidemiology or vaccinology, I somehow knew enough to resist all these blandishments and decide that the ‘experts’ were all wrong. I refused to take the jab. So did one or two other ignorant chancers who, merely on the basis of stuff they’d read or heard on the internet from people who sometimes weren’t even doctors. You’ll never guess what happened to us. Yes, that’s right. We all contracted this novel, Chinese-bioweapons-lab-generated disease called Covid and died hideously shortly afterwards, blood bubbling out of our mouths as we gasped our last desperate words “If only I’d listened to the exp…arrggh”.
No, I jest. What actually happened is that, despite having pointedly ignored the experts, we all ended up not getting any of the following conditions: myocarditis; blood clots; turbo cancer; reproductive issues; heart attacks; sudden death. If only the same could be said of the people who trusted the experts and did take the jabs. Sadly that isn’t the case. Some developed conditions that more or less ruined their lives. Others simply dropped dead, suddenly and unexpectedly. And those who were lucky enough to have escaped apparently unscathed must now live with the possibility that this could change at any moment, for the long term consequences of these expert-approved, safe and effective jabs remain as yet unknown.
Some unkind souls have suggested that people who took the vaccine have only themselves to blame. I disagree. We are culturally programmed to trust the ‘experts’ whether it’s the gent in the tweed jacket on Antiques Roadshow evaluating that cracked vase great-great-great-Uncle Jack brought back from the Sack of the Summer Palace, or the diet guru on breakfast TV telling us how much kale we should eat or the doctor telling us how cancerous that lump is. It takes a real effort of will to resist our ingrained inclination to go along with whatever plausible-sounding prescription we’re being sold by the people we assume know better than us. Especially when, as during Covid, you’re simultaneously being subjected to all manner of psychological warfare techniques to nudge you in the right direction.
What the authorities did to us during Covid was so horrifying that I’m not sure many of us have yet really come to terms with it. Perhaps most of us never will because to do so would involve accepting the almost unimaginable: that governments in every country in the world participated in a co-ordinated experiment designed to weaken, impoverish, immiserate, divide, maim and kill their populace under the risibly inappropriate pretext of ‘public health.’ And the reason they got away with it, in large part, was because of the misplaced faith so many of us have in those experts to whom my old friend Douglas - against all evidence - insists we should continue to defer.
