Douglas Murray Misses the Point — History Is No Longer a Private Club

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 historians matter—they do. The issue is Murray’s insistence that only those within traditional academic or institutional frameworks have the legitimacy to speak authoritatively about the past. This principle, once gospel in elite circles, no longer holds water. Not because society has grown ignorant, but because it has grown intolerant—intolerant of information bottlenecks, of imposed hierarchies of knowledge, and of narratives that serve power more than truth.

We now live in an information marketplace—a swirling agora where truths compete, where archives are democratized, and where the gatekeepers are no longer seated at the gates. They’ve been swept aside by a deluge of digital voices, community historians, diasporic memory keepers, subaltern storytellers, and yes, even meme-makers. Some of it is messy. Some of it is chaotic. But much of it is morally vital.

The traditional historian, after all, has not always been a neutral observer. For centuries, many were complicit in the silences of empire, in the legitimization of conquest, in the erasure of the oppressed. The academy was not built to amplify the voices of those who suffered at the margins—it was built to codify the narratives of those who stood at the center.

And let us not pretend that the collapse of these hierarchies is the result of some populist tantrum or anti-intellectual rebellion. It is, rather, the consequence of history itself catching up to the present. People now demand that history be not only accurate, but just. They are unwilling to wait for peer-reviewed permission slips before telling their truths. And they are right to do so.

What Murray misses—perhaps willfully—is that the internet did not kill historical credibility. It restructured it. It dispersed it. It made room for nuance, for complexity, for revision. It brought to light the hidden letters, the overlooked oral traditions, the unacknowledged trauma. It let history breathe outside the suffocating halls of elite consensus.

So when Murray laments the breakdown of authority, he is really mourning the loss of his kind of authority—a top-down, Oxbridge-flavored, morally self-congratulatory one that spoke at society rather than with it. The future of historical understanding belongs not to those who hoard legitimacy, but to those who can listen across differences, synthesize competing truths, and let the past speak through many voices.

Gatekeepers are gone, and they are not coming back. Not because history no longer matters, but because now, finally, it belongs to everyone.