#281: Western Culture Criticism and its Incompetents

Sam's guest in this episode, Douglas Murray, has the advantage of the erudite Oxford accent. It makes him sound like he is an oracle of intelligence. But a little pushback on his claims shows that they are actually quite poorly reasoned, and one is left scratching one's head in wonder that such a high-profile author could propose such incompetent fatuosity. Or that Sam didn't drill any deeper.

Consider Murray's most strident claim in this podcast: that the Hunter Biden Laptop story was squelched by partisan corrupt officials who should be fired in disgrace from their positions. He's ignoring several critical problems with that story, and I won't even dwell on the obvious one that Sam raised already: putting Trump back in office would have been disasterous.
1) The Republican operatives who had owned that story for months or probably years had been purposely holding onto it until the last second, as another "October Surprise." If the story were so damning and would hold up to scrutiny, why didn't they release it earlier?
2) Respectable newspapers--I do NOT include the New York Post in this category, and neither would you if you took the time to read a month's worth of their headlines--need more than the "few minutes" that Murray suggests it would have taken to vet the merits of a story. Especially a story broken by political operatives famous for wild and baseless conspiracies.
3) There was virtually no legal way for the sources of this story to get information from Biden's laptop, and so the operation began its very existence under a shroud of illegitimacy. It is laughable that Murray voice outrage about the integrity of careful, unbiased journalists--he isn't one, he is merely an editorial columnist--who refuse to trumpet the news immediately. It doesn't show their corruptness, it shows Murray's appalling lack of concern for journalistic integrity.
4) I predict that any real journalist who did/does vet the story fully has almost certainly found gross exaggerations or even fabrications. I'm going out on a limb here, but all the claims four years earlier about Hillary Clinton's criminal email negligence turned out to be charges that were--and you'll have to pardon this pun, but really, it's too perfect--completely trumped up.