Paris

“Having begun to view everything through the new lenses we have been provided with, everything is then weaponized, with consequences which are deranged as well as dementing. It is why The New York Times decides to run a piece by a black author with the title: ‘Can my Children be Friends with White People?’9 And why even a piece about cycling deaths in London written by a woman can be framed through the headline: ‘Roads Designed by Men are Killing Women’.10 Such rhetoric exacerbates any existing divisions and each time creates a number of new ones. And for what purpose? Rather than showing how we can all get along better, the lessons of the last decade appear to be exacerbating a sense that in fact we aren’t very good at living with each other.”
― Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity

“On Liberty, first published in 1859, John Stuart Mill famously laid out four reasons for why free speech was a necessity in a free society: the first and second being that a contrary opinion may be true, or true in part, and therefore may require to be heard in order to correct your own erroneous views; the third and fourth being that even if the contrary opinion is in error, the airing of it may help to remind people of a truth and prevent its slippage into an ignorant dogma which may in time – if unchallenged – itself become lost.2”
― Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity

“In June 2015 the then Conservative Education Secretary declared that homophobic views were evidence of potential ‘extremism’ in school pupils in Britain. Indeed as the BBC reported, Nicky Morgan said that ‘attacking core British values or being extremely intolerant of homosexuality were examples of behaviour that could raise the alarm’. They were evidence that a pupil might have been being ‘groomed’ by ‘extremists’, and a pupil who said they thought homosexuality ‘evil’ might need to be reported to the police.3 Of some interest is the fact that in May 2013 Morgan had voted against the law introducing gay marriage into the UK. One year later, in 2014, she said that she now supported gay marriage and would vote for it if it had not already become law. Another year later, in 2015, she was declaring views such as those she herself had held two years earlier as not merely evidence of ‘extremism’ but fundamentally un-British.”
― Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity

“The manner in which people and movements behave at the point of victory can be the most revealing thing about them. Do you allow arguments that worked for you to work for others? Are reciprocity and tolerance principles or fig-leaves? Do those who have been censored go on to censor others when the ability is in their own hands? Today the Vue cinema is on one side. A few decades ago they might have been on the other. And Pink News and others who celebrate their victory in chasing Voices of the Silenced a mile down the road one February night seem very ready to wield such power over a private event. In doing so they contradict the claims made by gay rights activists from the start of the battle for gay equality, which is that it should be no business of anyone else what consenting adults get up to in private. If that goes for the rights of gay groups then surely it ought to apply to the rights of Christian fundamentalists and other groups too.”
― Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity