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DOUGLAS MURRAY: Trump wasn't using Twitter, it was using him to make money You might think the most powerful man in the world is the President of the United States. But you would be wrong.
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By Douglas Murray That certainly seems to be the gist of Facebook’s very brief explanation yesterday: “a fact-checking label was wrongly applied”. But in the absence of a more detailed statement, it’s still worth exploring what the company would say if it ever did decide.

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In what turned out to be the last year of his life, Roger Scruton often mulled on the nature and techniques of twenty-first century denunciation. For Roger, like others who had seen totalitarian societies up close, knew what intimidation and officially-imposed forms of thinking were actually like.

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Which is not to say, of course, that modern Britain or America are totalitarian societies. Only that we have people among us who act with precisely the same techniques as those did in totalitarian societies. In modern Britain, as in communist Czechoslovakia and elsewhere, the habits are the same. A member of a profession comes into their workplace in the morning to find a letter of denunciation signed by all their colleagues. An organ of official opinion castigates someone for having fraternised with the wrong elements. Almost all of this is done by people who think they are doing good. As it happens I have spent the first part of the year reading Vasily Grossman, and this last notion has been particularly striking of late. Bad things are rarely done by people who think they are doing bad things. They are almost everywhere done by people who imagine that they are acting for the common good.

Which brings me to Laurence Fox, or rather the response to Laurence Fox in recent days.

The actor appeared on Question Time last week. And for social media – and some denizens of the real world – it was as though the space-time continuum had ripped. As it happens, actors are quite often asked onto Question Time, where they sprinkle star-dust and disappointment in equal measure. The disappointment comes from the fact that when actors speak in public with words that have not been written for them, they tend to demonstrate a number of mental deficiencies. One is their holding to the core fallacy, that some politicians such as Jess Phillips also tend to display, which is a belief that the problems of the world would be largely solved if other people were more like them. This belief extends to the idea that if only there were more ‘empathy’, ‘sympathy’ and general niceness in the world then questions like how to curb China’s exploitation in Africa would solve themselves.

Last week Laurence Fox did something unusual. He did not play the game that – cynically or sincerely – most actors and actresses play. He appeared, on live television, and appeared to think for himself.

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Naturally he was offered precisely the same traps as every other public figure is now offered in lieu of discussion. Lady (Shami) Chakrabarti, to Fox’s right, tried to play the game of ‘Let’s pretend that all men are misogynists unless they prostrate themselves to prove otherwise.’ On this occasion she tried this by pretending that Fox’s casual suggestion that Keir Starmer might be best placed to lead the Labour party was in some way anti-women. Fox dealt with this typically underhand little Chakrabarti-ism in a rather deft way, as well as politely.

Bloody hell. Laurence Fox obiliterares the Left’s identitarian nonsense here. #BBCQTpic.twitter.com/Bz2hsev4Dp

— Darren Grimes (@darrengrimes_) January 17, 2020

And then there was the audience member (who naturally turned out to be a low-grade academic) who decided to try to play the inevitable race card. Meghan Markle was leaving Britain, according to this person, because Britain is a racist country. Fox suggested very politely that we are really not a racist country. At which point the audience member accused him of ‘white privilege’. Fox, again perfectly reasonably, pointed out that he has had no more say than anyone else in choosing the colour of his skin and that in such circumstances the person who imagined she was being anti-racist was in fact being perfectly racist herself.

Naturally social media was immediately filled with people intent on doing good by making not just Fox’s name trend, but also making the name of his ex-wife trend. Because in the process of imagining you are doing good it is very important to use a divorced couple against each other and to make sure that their children are used as weapons in order to gain a social-justice triumph.

In the real world, the actor’s union Equity issued a Soviet-style denunciation of Fox. The union’s ‘minority ethnic members committee’ called on all fellow actors to ‘unequivocally denounce’ Fox and labelled him a ‘disgrace to our industry.’ This denunciation stayed up for a time before Equity – wisely – decided to take the official denunciation down. But other actors attacked Fox for his ‘rants’ rather than arguments (look what they did there) and Lily Allen demonstrated her characteristic self-awareness by issuing a condemnation of actors who talk about things they don’t know about. Doubtless the Allen denunciation would have been longer but for the background demands of the Syrian refugee family who Allen must surely by now be housing in her multi-million pound home.

So here was indeed something remarkable and noteworthy. Not just a member of the acting profession thinking for themselves and expressing themselves articulately. But someone willing and able to stand up and keep their head about them when the would-be totalitarians and censors of the age went about their nasty little business.

Since the imbroglio Fox has made a number of admirably unflapped interviews (notably in the Sunday Times and on Julia Hartley-Brewer’s show on TalkRadio). So I do not fear that all this stampeding is going to affect him or make him beg for mercy. But it is a telling and slightly terrifying parable of our times.

Nothing that Fox said on Question Time was at all controversial. He suggested that the Labour party leader might be selected on merit and he suggested that Britain is not a racist country. Both these sentiments are held by the majority of the public. Yet so dominant have the minority-opinion pushers become that many people are persuaded that it would not just be career-damaging but socially fatal to say anything to the contrary. Even when that thing is the truth.

Which is why we should watch the fall-out from situations like this carefully. What is important now is not the minority of bullies and would-be totalitarians. People are increasingly proving able to survive their onslaughts. What matters now is observing who stands up and survives the stampedes, so that we can replicate such successes until such a time as the new totalitarians go the way of the old ones.

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Nobody wants to talk about buggery. And why would they? The trouble is, leftists count on this proper squeamishness. They want us to think that “LGBT persons” are a cultural group, and one very much like ourselves—all golden retrievers, church on Sunday, and fathers-know-best. They avoid discussing the carnal act that gives the movement its identity. And yet, as they sweep the board of law and public policy, the essential sexual outlawry has begun to peek out from behind the white picket fences.

You can see this quite clearly in a new book by Douglas Murray, a well-regarded British commentator and self-proclaimed conservative, who gets downright poetical in his encomiums to sodomy in his otherwise terrific book The Madness of Crowds.

Murray says one of the plausible reasons for “homophobia” toward male homosexuals—not lesbians, mind—is that male homosexuality is seen as a fundamental attack on the social order. He says there is “something about the nature of male homosexuality that strikes at the root of everyone’s sexuality.” (The emphasis is mine)

Murray asserts there are mysteries in the relationship between male and female, which there certainly are. This mysteriousness is one of its delights, and the war between the sexes has been the topic of great literature from time immemorial. But then he goes on to assert that women want to know what men “might be feeling during the act of sex.” I don’t know if that’s the case, though I doubt it.

He then goes on to say that this question, and others like it, “are a staple of conversation between friends and a source of unbelievable private concern and angst at some stage (sometimes all) of most people’s lives from adolescence onwards.” He says heterosexual men obsess over what the “act of lovemaking is like” for women. “What does the other person feel? What do they get out of it? And how do the sexes fit together?” Does this sound like something heterosexual men obsess over? Ask the women in their lives.

It seems evident that Murray has a particularly homosexual view of what men think about women and sex. In my many years among men, from boyhood onward, I don’t believe we’ve ever discussed—let alone felt angst over—what the “act of lovemaking is like” for women. Yet this, according to Murray, is where the magical homosexual comes in. Before the arrival of transgenders, male homosexuals “have been the most disturbing travelers across the sexes.” Murray says it is not because of the “strongly feminine part of their nature” but because the magical homosexual knows “something about the secret that women hold in sex.”

And this is where things get more than a bit odd. In short, if men want to know what women feel during sex, they should ask a homosexual, because (pardon me) penetration. Sorry, gross. But this is what they make us talk about these days.

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Murray brings in a massively awarded writer and thinker named Daniel Mendelsohn to do the dirty work. In Mendelsohn’s 1999 The Elusive Embrace: Desire and the Riddle of Identity, he writes:

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All straight men who have engaged in the physical act of love know what it is like to penetrate a partner during intercourse, to be inside the other; all women who have had intercourse know what it is like to be penetrated, to have the other be inside oneself. But, the gay man, in the very moment that he is either penetrating his partner or being penetrated by him knows exactly what his partner is feeling and experiencing even as he himself has his own experience of exactly the opposite, the complimentary act.

Mendelsohn says gay men have an insight into the “total knowing” of the other that doesn’t happen in intercourse. Mendelsohn also reveals the essential narcissism of homosexuality. He says that, in intercourse, the woman is the man’s destination; while, in buggery, the gay man “falls through their partner back into themselves, over and over again.”

To his credit, Murray believes that homosexuality “is an unstable component on which to base an individual identity and a hideously unstable way to try and base any form of group identity.” But then he goes on to say that, through the act of buggery, gay men are in on the secret that women hold as wielders “of a kind of magic.”

It is significant that a conservative of Murray’s stature is writing about such a grotesque thing in such a glowing way. It’s an attempt to normalize for a conservative audience that which is abnormal. And he’s not the only conservative doing this. Last year, Fox News host Guy Benson announced his engagement to another man. The praise and congratulations from noted conservatives flowed in like the Mississippi in flood stage—particularly from conservatives, who should know better.

Just this week, the American Enterprise Institute hosted a talk by a man who goes by the name of Deirdre McCloskey; he wears dresses and has the voice of a three-pack-a-day truck driver. Afterward, I had the vertiginous experience of discussing his talk with a fellow conservative who kept referring to the speaker as “her” while I, quite naturally, referred to him as “him.”

Barbarism is not clamoring at the gates: it’s within the walls.

I know it’s hard to talk about these things. No one in their right mind has the slightest inclination to do so. However, we cannot ignore the situation at hand. We as Catholics have an especial obligation always to proclaim the truth. It’s now our role to be countercultural. It was ever thus and always will be. We must have the courage always to say that buggery is disgusting and bears no resemblance to the marital embrace, no matter the pedigree of the conservative making that case.

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Douglas Murray may be right on Brexit, or Islam, or any number of topical issues. But he sure does have some queer ideas about sex.