Alfie Dogs

Douglas Murray, the eloquent polemicist and self-styled defender of Western civilization, has made recent rounds on both The Joe Rogan Experience and Real Time with Bill Maher. As ever, he speaks with rhetorical precision, a sense of erudition, and that signature British seriousness that gives the air of ancient authority. Yet, behind the polished cadence of his words lies a position increasingly out of step with the moral and epistemic landscape of our time. Murray insists that we must entrust the telling of our past only to “historians”—a priestly caste of credentialed chroniclers whom he seems to view as the only morally responsible stewards of our collective memory. The rest of us—journalists, activists, educators, artists, podcasters, TikTok creators, and everyday people with lived experience—ought, in his view, to stand reverently at the sidelines, lest we distort the sacred narrative. But here’s the thing: Douglas Murray is missing the point. The question isn’t whether historian...

There is something haunting—almost theatrical—about the courtroom. The silence. The ritual. The polished floors, the heavy doors, the flags draped like holy relics behind the bench. And then there’s the judge, robed in solemn black, perched above the rest like some modern-day oracle of law. Not elected by the people. Not checked by a council. Alone. And we call this democracy? No. What we call justice is, in truth, often a performance of power. A monologue dressed as a dialogue. A solitary voice rendering judgment in a system supposedly built on the consent of the governed. How did we get here? How did we become a society that chants the virtues of collective will in the voting booth, only to whisper our fate into the hands of one in the courtroom? Let’s not romanticize the robe. It does not sanctify. It obscures. Because beneath it is not a deity—but a person. A person with biases, beliefs, traumas, loyalties, blind spots. A person shaped by the same cultural tides that bend the rest ...