On Watering the Dark and the Dangerous

Some Thoughts on Douglas Murray, Dave Smith, Joe Rogan, and the Responsibilities We Choose to Shirk or Shoulder

There is a voracious and invasive weed that grows all over the south, and is very common now in my native South Carolina. It’s called kudzu, and you might be familiar with it as “the vine that ate the south.” If left to spread unchecked, kudzu subsumes and kills off natural vegetation, including forests of trees, by covering them so that no sunlight can reach them. I sometimes think of Woke Left ideology as the kudzu that tried to eat both the left, and the country as a whole. Blanketing the left, and then all of our institutions so that no sunlight could get in. Unfortunately, I see an emerging and very similar ideology gaining traction in online circles that consider themselves to be on the “right,” though it remains to be seen just how dark and dangerous this could grow to be, if left unchecked

Kudzu, “the vine that ate the south.”

I thought about kudzu when watching the recent Douglas Murray and Dave Smith “debate” on Joe Rogan’s podcast, because of Murray’s illuminating language about what we each choose to “water.” This podcast episode has shaped up to be something of an ink blot test. People are seeing something wildly different from one another, and I don’t mean just about who “won” the debate, but whether this was even a debate at all, or instead a serious message about personal responsibility delivered in the format that was offered. I joked that I hadn’t seen this much disagreement between people I respect since the “Barbie” movie, and that’s true, but this disagreement has much more important consequences.

If you haven’t seen the full episode, it is worth watching - especially the first 40 minutes. Here is where Murray delivers a very sober, “with great power comes great responsibility” message and “just asks questions,” hoping to prod some thought about what is now being watered in Rogan’s garden and in the new media garden at large. The end result was not a debate about Israel and Gaza, much to some people’s disappointment, but a necessary discussion about the responsibility with which we wield our freedom of choice and our influence (however small or large) in this world.

The best moment may have occurred within the first 20 minutes, when Murray and Smith actually AGREED on a rising “racialism” (Smith’s word) among those who claim to be on the right. That Smith could also acknowledge this online emergence was reassuring to me that he is not willfully blind to it:

This growing ideology on the “right” - primarily online, but I also now know people in real life who are being sucked into it - is marked by some ideas very similar to Woke Left ideology. What Smith refers to here as “racialism” is what some are now identifying a new kind of emerging Woke “Right” ideology. Like the Woke Left, it is collectivist rather than individualist. Like the Woke Left, it is authoritarian rather than libertarian. Like the Woke Left, it is identitarian and focuses on which identity groups are “oppressed” and which are “oppressors.” Like the Woke Left, it encourages resentment, entitlement and victimhood. Like the Woke Left, it is centered around a conquest for power, at any cost. Like the Woke Left it makes some identity groups into scapegoats and seeks to divide us along race and sex based lines.

I would like to have heard more from all three of these guys on how they might disagree about this growing “racialism.” I would assume they likely disagree on just how “dark and dangerous” (Murray’s words) they think it is. On how serious of a problem they think it is or could be, not just for the right, but for America as a whole. And they probably also disagree on whose responsibility it is not to over-water this “racialism.” It’s all of ours, in my opinion, if we don’t want to be consumed by a dangerous and destructive ideology, in the same way the left was.

Many people who watched this discussion have come away with the opinion that Murray was saying we must blindly trust experts. I don’t blindly trust experts and neither did I hear Murray saying we should. On the contrary, he brought up the justified erosion of trust in Covid “experts” in the first 40 minutes, referencing the wet-market establishment propaganda that was pushed while marginalizing the much more likely lab-leak origins:

Having studied something or not - and clearly Daryl Cooper has studied WW2, for example - does not solely determine what level of value I give your opinions. It’s one of many things weighed. If it DID solely determine how I evaluate opinions, then I would have blindly trusted the establishment-promoted, “educated” “experts” on Covid. Never did. Never wore the mask. Never got the vax. Vocally opposed the lockdowns and vax and mask mandates. If being “educated” and an “expert” was the sole thing I use to evaluate someone’s opinion then I also would have gone right along with brutal “gender affirming care” of kids. But I didn’t. I speak out against it often, including publicly, locally and in more delicate conversations with friends.

This was part of Murray’s entire point. If you’re going to blindly believe everything someone says because they are “educated” or they put out 30 hour podcasts, then you’re no better than the people who blindly trusted the Covid officials and gender doctors. His point was also: NEITHER is expertise and extensive study to be completely thrown out the window when when evaluating a claim. Saying it means nothing is equally as dumb as saying it means everything. It is one factor among many that we all use to evaluate one another.

I want doctors and plumbers and pilots, for example, with lots of expertise and hands on experience, who have demonstrated a reason for me to put my trust in them. I’m sure you do too. Otherwise why not just support woke DEI crap, which elevates based on race and gender rather than on merit? Because merit matters.

What Murray was saying is that with great power comes great responsibility. And if we start elevating primarily fringe theorists who are challenging established thought, without any standards of judgment other than that they have done hours of podcasts on the subject - then we run the risk of mainstreaming those fringe ideas. Like the Woke leftists did, by the way. They successfully pushed their fringe into the mainstream, to disastrous effect.

This point is so much bigger than Rogan or his podcast, and I’m very grateful Murray made it. It’s about what is happening in parts of the new media space, and the mainstreaming of fringe ideas. If we the people are now understandably struggling to know what is real after having been betrayed by our institutions and the expert class - it is irresponsible for us to just as blindly over-water a bunch of fringe declarations: "the earth is flat, dinosaur bones were put here to fool us, black people will never be American and they’re not even human, Gaza was like a concentration camp, Hitler wasn’t so bad and Churchill was the real villain, Fascism is the only solution to Communism" etc. These are each things I have seen influential "new media" people promote and their eager audiences regurgitate.

Does it mean you shouldn’t talk to people with fringe or “dangerous” ideas? No. That’s for you to decide on a case by case basis. We take on the burden of our OWN responsibility. At the very least we shouldn’t ignore it or ignore whether we are primarily watering something that may have very dark and dangerous consequences down the road. When Benny Johnson brought on Andrew Tate, for example, an unrepentant pornographer who attacks Biblical marriage and who is facing criminal charges of sex trafficking and sex with a minor, he didn’t do so as a journalist looking for truth. He did so as an entertainer looking to prop up and promote a vile predator to his Christian conservative audience. He didn’t bring Tate on to ask him about all of the video evidence of Tate beating women (one of whom was a minor) and bragging about trafficking women and scamming men out of their life savings. He brought on Alina Habba to fangirl over Tate and try to link him to Trump, thus trying to smear Trump.

When people rightly criticized this pampering and promotion of Tate, many entertainers/podcasters on the “right,” like Candace Owens (who herself has pushed objectively false propaganda about “the Jews” and 9/11) disingenuously screeched about “censorship.” Honey, criticizing you when we think you make a very irresponsible and foul judgment call - when we think you exercise your freedom of speech, your freedom of association, and your influence carelessly and with bad ends - is not censorship. It is MORE free speech. No one is saying you CAN’T say and water whatever you want. There is a difference between CAN and SHOULD, that every person should figure out on their own. And the length of that difference is bridged by how much personal responsibility you decide to either shoulder or shirk.

Let me ask you, do you think it was odd that Douglas Murray couldn’t get a one-on-one interview to talk about Israel, which he’d just written a book about, with the room to stretch out and make his arguments like Ian Carroll and Darryl Cooper got, without having someone there to argue against him? When the fringe theorists didn’t have to have that? Is that not unwitting watering in one direction? In the second clip above, Rogan spoke about audience-capture, when Murray asked why a fringe-merchant on the “right,” Jake Shields, has started pushing Holocaust-denial. Smith said he doesn’t know why. Rogan supposed that it might have something to do with audience-capture.

Might it be, that having Murray on to discuss Israel, the subject of his new book, at length in a one on one conversation would have been wildly unpopular with Rogan’s audience? Might it be that that could have influenced the choice to bring on Smith to argue against Murray the whole time?

No wonder, at least to me, why Murray seemingly decided instead to use the opportunity to deliver the “with great power comes great responsibility” warning and plea. At one point, as Smith called out old media and institutions who “have power,” Murray brought attention to what should be obvious: “Well maybe YOU have power.” You can watch this exchange in the second clip, above.

Why would we hold powerful influencers to a lesser standard than we try to hold the mainstream media and institutions? (Who failed SPECTACULARLY, btw, by platforming almost exclusively fringe theory leftists.) Now that new media has eclipsed mainstream media, shouldn’t we hold those with great power to influence to a standard similar to which we hold the old media and institutions? If the old media and institutions failed to meet that standard - and they DID - why then would we discard the standard entirely? Should we not at least consider what we are, perhaps unwittingly, watering and growing?

I shared, at the start of an essay, the clip of Murray and Smith agreeing about the growing “racialism” (Smith’s word) among figures and audiences who claim to be on the “right.” I think Murray was asking each one of us to think about whether that growing “racialism” is dark and dangerous or not, and if it is - are we watering it? As even Smith said, “When you take the red pill, you’re not supposed to take the whole bottle.”

The left watered their racialism and their fringe theorists and their extremists. They pampered them, elevated them, and made them powerful. They mainstreamed them and let their ideology grow unchecked like an invasive vine that consumed our country. And it almost destroyed us.