Douglas Murray | |
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![]() Murray in 2019 | |
Born | Douglas Kear Murray 16 July 1979 London, England |
Occupation |
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Education | St Benedict's School Eton College (6th form) |
Alma mater | Magdalen College, Oxford |
Period | 2000–present |
Subject |
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Notable works | |
Website | |
douglasmurray.net |
Douglas Murray (born 16 July 1979)[1] is a British author and conservative political commentator, cultural critic, and journalist. He founded the Centre for Social Cohesion in 2007, which became part of the Henry Jackson Society, where he was associate director from 2011 to 2018.
He is currently an associate editor of the conservative British political and cultural magazine The Spectator, and has been a regular contributor to The Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Sun, the Daily Mail, New York Post, National Review, The Free Press, and Unherd.[2][3][4][5][6][7]
Murray is known for his criticism of immigration and Islam. His books include Neoconservatism: Why We Need It (2005), The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam (2017), The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity (2019) and The War on the West (2022).
Murray has been praised by conservatives, but strongly criticised by many on the left.[8][9][10][11] Articles in the academic journals Ethnic and Racial Studies and National Identities associate his views with Islamophobia[12][13] and he has been linked to far-right political ideologies[14] and the promotion of far-right ideas such as the Eurabia, Great Replacement, and Cultural Marxism conspiracy theories.[15][16][17][18]
And from our Oxford studio, Douglas Murray, Associate Editor of The Spectator
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was invoked but never defined (see the help page).Important Islamophobic intellectuals are, among others, Melanie Phillips, Niall Ferguson, Oriana Fallaci (d. 2006), Diana West, Christopher Hitchens (d. 2011), Paul Berman, Frank Gaffney, Nick Cohen, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Douglas Murray (Kundnani 2012b, 2008; Carr 2006; Gardell 2010)
In the post‐Enoch Powell era, the UK has evolved a broad, cross‐party consensus that maintains that British citizenship and identity is not defined ethnically. The white nationalist right like Roger Scruton and Douglas Murray reject that.
Ye'Or's Eurabia: the Euro-Arab Axis (2005) is the canonical work of the genre (Bangstad 2013; Larsson 2012), but extemporizations on her basic theme can be found in the work of many conservative writers during the late 2000s and 2010s, such as Melanie Phillips, Mark Steyn, Bruce Bawer, Christopher Caldwell, Douglas Murray and, more recently, Alt-Right-linked figures such as Lauren Southern and Raheem Kassam. The conclusive differentiator between counter-jihadist and more mainstream conservative laments about Western decline is the former's decidedly conspiratorial framing...
It is not only far-right political parties and 'alt-right' blogs that are fueling the fire of xenophobia. In our century, be it the Financial Times columnist Christopher Caldwell's Reflections on a Revolution in Europe (2009) that recapitulates the idea of a slow-moving Muslim barbarian invasion, along with the Muslim 'disorder, penury and crime', or the works by Douglas Murray and Thilo Sarrazin ..., a number of European and American best sellers have supplied the emotional force to the Eurabia conspiracy in particular and the alt-right in general.
This Great Replacement motif articulated by Murray, Camus and other prominent conservative intellectuals has been weaponised as a rallying cry for white supremacists around the world, including Robert Bowers, who killed 11 worshippers at a Pittsburgh synagogue in October 2018 and Tarrant, the Christchurch attacker, whose own manifesto posted online is called 'The Great Replacement'.
Acclaim for Murray's thought has been widespread, and ranges from liberal French public intellectual Bernard Henri-Levy, who claimed him to be 'one of the most important public intellectuals today', to authoritarian anti-immigrant hardliners such as Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who went so far as to promote The Strange Death of Europe on his Facebook page in Spring 2018... Murray's book [The Madness of Crowds] remodels a much older theory of so-called 'cultural Marxism', which has long history in far-right thought.