The False Morality of Ideologues

On the latest episode of the Joe Rogan Experience, Douglas Murray’s moral posturing echoes the Woke Left he often critiques.

Dave Smith and Douglas Murray appear on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast.

FROM the onset of Rogan’s latest podcast episode with Douglas Murray and Dave Smith, you can get a good sense of how propagandists and ideological thinkers operate. As soon as Murray begins to speak, questioning Rogan on how his guests have leaned on the Israel-Palestine conflict, and why, it’s clear what his intentions are: to police speech that he views as “misinformation” or ideologically out of line. For Murray, the real battle isn’t about ideas — it’s about controlling who gets to speak. “If you’re going to interview historians of a conflict, or historians in general,” he scolded Rogan, “why would you get somebody like Ian Carroll?”

For one, Carroll has never claimed to be a historian. He’s always identified as an investigative citizen journalist, chasing conspiracies and breaking down his findings on everything from Epstein and GameStop to Diddy, the CIA, the Deep State, and the Israel-Palestine conflict. But since Murray isn’t concerned with accuracy, he’s more than happy to blur the lines for listeners and viewers.

Murray’s ideological playbook here mirrors the Trump administration’s Israel-first policies. Just in the past month, the administration has normalized crackdowns on pro-Palestine student protesters, labeling many as “pro-jihadist protesters,” “Hamas sympathizers,” and even “anti-American terrorists.” Some green card holders — like Mahmoud Khalil — have even been marked for deportation simply for challenging Israel’s human rights abuses.

AIPAC’s efforts to co-opt artificial intelligence, dismantle social media platforms like TikTok, and smear pro-Palestinian journalists, congressmen, and commentators also come to mind when assessing Murray’s tactics. Censorship — typically following a heavy barrage of propaganda — remains the weapon of choice against anyone too critical of Israel’s human rights abuses.

Murray constantly pulls at this lever in the opening segment of the debate, questioning why individuals critical of Israel are even given a platform on Rogan’s podcast. As if every guest must be screened first and foremost for their stance on Israel-Palestine — not for their work, expertise, or experience that has made them relevant to the public. But the real question we should be asking is simple: Who appointed Douglas Murray the arbiter of truth and discernment? What makes him the “expert,” and others mere amateurs?

The disgraced philosopher and Trump-deranged ideologue Sam Harris is infamous for also relying on appeals to authority in his so-called arguments against figures like Dave Smith and Joe Rogan. In the latest episode of Part of the Problem, Smith effortlessly dismantles Harris’ argumentative style, spending an hour rebutting his latest commentary, which bears a striking resemblance to Murray’s own argumentative tactics:

Sam Harris: “Joe [Rogan] is a genuinely good guy who wants good things for people. But he is honestly in over his head on so many topics of great consequence. When he brings someone on to just shoot the shit about how the Holocaust is not what you think it was, or maybe Churchill is the bad guy in World War II. Or he’s got Dave Smith being treated as an expert on Israeli and Palestine and the history of that conflict, and the moral emergency that came to the World’s attention on October 7th, and what is appropriate to think in the aftermath of all of that. The only reason why anyone knows what Dave Smith thinks about any of this is very likely because Joe had him on multiple times to talk about it. He’s a pure misinformation artist, on top of many others.”

“The thing about it is that, really, I don’t have to be the expert,” says Smith in response to Harris’ claims. “It’s really easy to poke holes in Sam Harris and other liars’ bullshit… I wasn’t a virologist but I could tell you that Sam Harris was full of shit the whole time about COVID. I could tell you that lockdowns were going to have way bigger costs than benefits, because you don’t really need to be an expert to do that.”

When Murray and Harris decry the platforming of “misinformation artists” and demand that “legitimate experts” be given a voice on shows like The Joe Rogan Experience, what they really mean is “experts” whose views align with their own. Credentials are secondary to them; what matters is conformity, achieved through censorship and coercion. As Harris argues in a 2023 interview, to combat dangerous events in society, we must trust our institutions — the experts — and accept the collateral damage necessary to achieve the greater good. In his own words:

“Can we fight a war, really fight a war that we may have to fight, like the next Nazis… can we fight that war when everyone with an iPhone is showing just how awful it is that little girls get blown up when we drop our bombs. Could we, as a society, do what we might have to do to actually get necessary things done when we’re living in this panopticon of just… everyone’s a journalist, everyone’s a scientist, everyone’s an expert, everyone’s got direct contact with the facts, or a semblance of the facts?”

We saw this play out during COVID, when virologists and scientists who challenged the official narrative were swiftly censored, deplatformed, canceled, or even threatened with losing their medical licenses. These were credentialed experts, but they were deemed guilty of “wrong-think” by the institutions tasked with upholding the official narrative.

Here’s the thing: ideologues, propagandists, and liars have a tell that exposes their fraudulence — they relentlessly seek ways to silence any viewpoint that challenges theirs. By suppressing dissent, they can craft their own version of truth, built entirely on lies legitimized by institutions of power. Murray reveals his hand within the first few minutes of the debate, dismissing investigative journalist Ian Carroll as a non-expert, labeling historian and podcaster Darryl Cooper’s views as “horrific,” and mocking comedian and political commentator Dave Smith as someone who’s actively partaking in a “schtick” and is not well versed in geopolitics to be weighing in on the Israel-Palestine conflict.

As Smith aptly points out in his podcast rebuttal to Sam Harris, Murray and Harris’ real issue is that others are simply having conversations, recording them, and sharing them for people to watch. If that’s such a problem for them, maybe it’s time they reconsider their stance on free speech.

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