This is thinking in public, a program dedicated to intelligent conversation about frontline

theological and cultural issues with the people who are shaping them.

I'm Albert Moller, your host and president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.

Douglas Murray is a British author and journalist, having written five books in numerous articles for publication

such as the Wall Street Journal, The Times of London, The Sunday Times, The Evening Standard,

and the New Criterion.

Murray contributes regularly to National Review and has been a columnist for

Standpoint magazine since its founding in 2008. As a public intellectual

Douglas Murray has concentrated on the most current cultural affairs with an historical

perspective and a political acumen. His newest book, The Madness of Crowds

Gender, Race and Identity, examines the most divisive issues of the day and sets them within the context of intersectionality and identity politics.

I'm looking forward to this conversation today.

Douglas Murray, welcome to thinking in public.

Mr. Murray in your latest book, The Madness of Crowds, Gender, Race, and Identity.

You're clearly provoking an argument, especially by the use of the word madness in the title.

What kind of madness do you think right now is threatening Western civilization?

Well, I think there's a lot of madness is one could identify particularly I'm interested in crowd

madness where ideas take hold that haven't been properly interrogated there are a

lot of subjects I could have picked on that I could put in those categories, but the ones I was most interested in for the madness of crowds were issues to do with the attempts to divide society up along identity groupings.

That is, by gender, sex, gender orientation, sexual orientation, and racial issues in particular as well.

So that people were increasingly in recent years in my analysis wanting to divide a country like America, not by saying, you know, we are the American people, but by saying actually that identity won't do. We should look at you and you should look at yourselves based on your sex, whether you're a man or a woman, by your sexual orientation, whether you're straight or gay, and by your skin color, by your racial origin, is whether you're black or white or Hispanic and these became

these became to a great extent the the ways in which people are encouraged to see not only society but to see themselves.

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