That now famous debate on a recent Joe Rogan Experience podcast episode between comic Dave Smith and journalist/author Douglas Murray is worth discussing for several reasons, and the first reason is that it’s good that we on the right are actually having debates. It’s good that we’re confronting opposing ideas within our broadly defined movement – even when some of those ideas are bad. In fact, by definition, when you have a lot of different ideas, some of them are going to be bad. All the stuff about the marketplace of ideas leading to better outcomes is a cliché, but it’s also true, as most clichés are. Bickering beats the alternative, craven conformity. Look at the left. They can’t handle disagreement. They cry, call you a racist, and, if they can, throw you in jail.
We’re not like that. We’re stronger and better. It’s why we’re winning. This debate got a lot of attention specifically because it was confrontational. Americans are nice people. Except for New Yorkers, lawyers, and on Twitter, Americans tend to avoid confrontation. It was good for Joe Rogan to have Dave Smith and Douglas Murray facing off for three hours. Dave Smith calls himself a libertarian, and he is in that he adopts some of the positive aspects of libertarianism and a lot of the annoying ones. He vaguely identifies as anti-war, which is a terrible thing to identify as, but at least he didn’t talk about pot. Libertarians are the political version of your annoying sophomore roommate who, after smoking a few bowls, starts sharing the full benefit of his 19 years of life experience with you at 2:30 in the morning when you’re studying for your history final. But it’s good that he was on the show, even though Douglas Murray doesn’t think so.
Douglas Murray is an establishment guy. He is associated with the Bari Weiss/Free Press folks, who are all refugees from the regime media and retain a bit of the regime media attitude toward regular folk. They have done good work highlighting woke insanity, but they miss being part of the cool clique. Murray is also a posh Englishman, and he argues like one, with a lot of condescension and skipping around when confronted with bad facts. At one time, he might have been overseeing some district in the Punjab; now he makes most everyone mad at him.
A lot of the right-wing response to the Joe Rogan episode was irritation with Murray, and as a guy who spent 30 years arguing to Americans to convince them to find for my clients, I can see why. He must be very annoying to normal people who do not argue for a living. A guy like me, who did, doesn’t take it personally, but when the other guy is constantly telling you that you’re stupid – in so many words – yeah, a normal American would find that annoying. He really is smart, and his accent makes him seem smarter. But he comes off as thinking he’s smarter than everyone else because he thinks so; like I said, he’s a posh Englishman.
There were two big issues that came out of the debate. The first was procedural: Should Dave Smith and other sort-of right-wing guys without a lot of traditional credentials get platformed on big venues like the Joe Rogan Experience? Should we defer to alleged experts and let them tell us what to think, or can we go the autodidact route and figure it out for ourselves? Smith sides with the amateurs, and Murray sides with the experts. The second big issue was substantive: Should Israel be wiping out Hamas and whether it’s mean for doing so. Smith thinks Israel is the villain, and Murray thinks the seventh century savages who went on a rape and murder spree are.
Let’s talk about the issue of who gets to speak because that’s how the three-hour episode began. Murray came out of the gate basically telling Dave Smith that he was just a comic and that he really didn’t have much to add to the discussion, essentially stating that Smith shouldn’t be in the discussion at all. He also mentioned Darryl Cooper, aka MartyrMade, who has risen to prominence as an alternative amateur historian on the right saying provocative and deeply stupid things like that Winston Churchill was the greatest villain of World War II. Murray argued that these guys should shut up and listen to guys like him, though ironically, he is also self-taught – he doesn’t have a PhD in history or anything like that. Of course, why would anyone believe that a modern PhD in history gives you any expertise in history?
Murray is wrong. Everybody should be heard and judged on what they say. The rest of us should evaluate ideas based on all factors, including their plausibility, the supporting evidence, and yes, the qualifications of their advocates. But there will be no deferring to alleged experts. Our experience with failed experts demonstrates their proven track record of failure, while non-experts have been frequently proven right.
Dave Smith had much to say based on his personal research, and some of it on Israel and Ukraine was deeply wrong. His understanding of military things is distinctly limited – he actually cited General Wesley Clarke to support some point, which no one should ever do. But he should be heard. And so should Cooper, who I have fought with on Twitter and who I think holds ridiculous views. He deeply researches his stuff and often comes to terrible conclusions. There’s no good argument for deplatforming him, Smith, or anyone else. I’ll evaluate the arguments myself, thanks.
Clearly, there’s some professional jealousy on the part of Murray, a journalist who wants journalists to maintain their status as the people who provide information and analysis for society. All these outsiders, amateurs, and iconoclasts on podcasts and such are queering the deal, which was a pretty good deal until the journalists blew it by being, in many cases, political hacks and incompetents.
Murray used tiresome tactics as well. He would assert that something he had previously argued was not what he was arguing, and then immediately go back and argue it again. When talking about this procedural stuff, Murray sometimes doesn’t believe what he’s saying, and he won’t tell you what he really believes, which is that everybody but guys like him should shut up and defer. There’s probably some weird British class stuff going on beneath the surface, as he definitely did not think he should be sharing a podium with commoners like Dave Smith or Joe Rogan, for that matter. But deference is not in the cards. I don’t need Douglas Murray or anyone gatekeeping for me. Nor do you. So, advantage Dave Smith on the whole “who gets to argue” issue. The answer is everybody.
But Dave Smith was absolutely wrong on the substantive part. Murray was right that we should support Israel, and that Israel should fight to victory. Smith disagreed. I understand where Dave Smith is coming from. He’s seen 30 years of the foreign policy establishment lying and failing and our guys getting killed (he is also deeply concerned with foreigners; I prioritize our troops and citizens). He is right that after Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, it’s reasonable to be skeptical of anything our garbage foreign policy establishment says. That said, we still have enemies.
Dave Smith confuses us not fighting back against real enemies with peace. His antiwar ideology is a child-like, quasi-libertarian war-bad/not-war-good reflex that fails to recognize that there are evil people in the world, and it’s not America’s fault that these evil people want to hurt America. I, too, am skeptical of foreign entanglements (having been involved in a couple), but I’m not a pacifist. I am a Jacksonian. I believe that if we or our allies get attacked, we should utterly destroy the enemy. I am utterly indifferent to why they wish to hurt us, and to their real or imagined grievances. If you attack America or Americans, you must die. And I make no bones about it – all human lives are not equal. American lives are the most important, followed by Allied lives, followed by enemy lives. Nor do I feel any moral obligation to care more about the fate of enemies like the Palestinians than the Palestinians do about themselves, and I don’t.
Murray was absolutely correct here – the Palestinians started a war, and now they’re getting their butts kicked, and a lot of them are going to die, and that’s how it goes. The answer is to not start wars or, if you do, to release your hostages and ask for mercy. Dave Smith sees it as Israel “slaughtering” Palestinian civilians, though he backs off the loaded term slaughter when confronted. A slaughter is an intended act. Killing civilians while you’re killing the enemy combatants hiding among them is not a “slaughter.” Nor is it a reason not to defeat the enemy combat.
The Dave Rule – and I name it in honor of him because he created it and now demands we obey it – is that you can’t fight the enemy if you happen to kill some of their civilians in the process. He never tells you how many civilians you can kill before you have to stop fighting. I assume he would deny that that number is zero. Is it OK if you just kill one, or is there some other number that makes it not OK? If the number is zero, you can’t fight back at all. I guess if the number is 43, you have to stop before you hit 44.
It just doesn’t make sense, so it should come as no surprise that it has never been the rule in all of human history. No military ever had such a rule, and none does now. It’s not in the law of war – yes, you can kill civilians during military operations based on necessity. No country observes the Dave Rule – including the properly stateless Palestinians, whose elected Hamas government intentionally killed civilians as opposed to Israel killing them in the process of killing the cowardly scumbags hiding among them. Nor could any military observe it; to comply with the Dave Rule is to adopt pacifism, and we’re not about to do that, especially in the face of semi-human savages who actively seek to murder civilians.
Smith does the Murray two-step as well. He’ll concede things like, “Yeah, the Palestinians probably should not have raped and murdered all those people,” and then refuse to accept the conclusion that that concession implies. If mass rape and murder is bad, what do you do about it? I say you kill them until they beg you to surrender. Dave says you tell the victims not to be so mean.
Smith fared poorly here, but it could have been worse. While a good debater, Murray is not a lawyer and did not cross-examine Smith the way he should have about the lack of solid foundations undergirding his views. Listening, I kept coming up with questions that I would’ve hit him with if I had him on the stand, but Murray would often fall back on procedural objections rather than kicking the soft underbelly of Smith’s poorly developed substantive theories. Murray was quite clear that when you’re in a war, you have to win it. That’s the right answer. Advantage Murray.
Don’t let the fact that I have criticisms of Douglas Murray’s elitist view of who can debate and Dave Smith’s naïve and suicidal moral paradigm make you think this debate was a bad idea. Debate and disagreement within the broad right are good. We should have people, including stand-up comics, self-taught podcasters, and, yes, journalists, talk about things in a clear and clarifying manner. As much as I hate hack clichés, vigorous debate makes us stronger. Never be afraid of an argument, and never be afraid to tell somebody he’s wrong.
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