Fox News Guest Who Said Accepting Refugees Was Cultural 'Suicide' Says 'Common Sense' Now a 'Hate Crime'

In an appearance on Fox News Thursday, British author and commentator Douglas Murray expanded on his belief that "common sense" has become a "hate crime" in modern society, though he did not provide a specific instance.

"What used to be common sense that's now a hate crime, in your opinion?" Fox & Friends host Ainsley Earhardt asked.

Murray, author of "The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam" and "The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Identity, Morality," didn't provide a direct answer, instead devising a metaphor involving a train station to claim that not only has equality already been achieved for racial minorities, women and LGBTQ people, but that the existence of ongoing "culture wars" demonstrates that we've collectively gone too far.

"Well, we've been through a period, in America and the rest of the West, in recent decades, where we've had amazing rights attainments, amazing set of things: racial equality, equality for women, equality for sexual minorities," Murray told Earhardt. "It's almost as if, in recent years, we haven't been able to cope with the idea of just getting to equality and we've raced back past that. I say, this is all like seeing a train pulling into its desired destination, then getting a head of steam and shooting off down the tracks, scattering people in its wake."

He followed with specifics—though none amounted to criminalizing common sense—taking issue with the BBC using "they" as a gender neutral pronoun and with progressive scorn for Trump supporters, claiming "we've seen many, many cases of black men and women who happen to be rightwing and are denounced as 'no longer black.'"

Murray has described grievances in columns, including a September piece for the British newspaper The Daily Mail in which he lamented that "women can be as sexual as they like," while men are expected not to sexually harass, touch, or objectify them.

In the column, Murray juxtaposed what he described as Harvey Weinstein's "fall from grace," with a joke Ellen DeGeneres made about Katy Perry's breasts on Twitter. More than 80 women have said the former movie producer sexually harassed, assaulted, or raped them, and he is awaiting trail for rape and sex abuse. But Murray sees evidence of a double standard in the difference between the treatment of Weinstein and the lack of backlash to DeGeneres' joke.

"This is just one of the contradictory situations in which we find ourselves," Murray writes.

Murray was particularly outraged by rapper Nicki Minaj who, despite "wiggling her bottom," "suggestively eating a banana" and "crawling on all fours," has the temerity to disallow a man from putting a hand on her body.

Despite describing society in his Fox News interview as having already arrived at equality—the "desired destination"—Murray made clear in another column that, particularly for transgender people, equality, or even dignifying their existence, is already a step too far in his opinion.

"Are we sure that it even exists as a category?" he wrote of trans people in a September column for The Daily Mail. "Nobody likes recalling the time when gay people were told 'it's just a phase,' but what if trans is (even on occasion) just a phase?"

While drawing recent attention for his cultural commentary, Murray is also a promoter of hard right politics, with columns defending extreme rightwing European political leaders, like Hungary's Viktor Orbán, France's Marine Le Pen and the Netherlands' Geert Wilders.

He shares in common a distaste for immigrants, particularly Muslims, lamenting in a 2018 book that "only 44.9 percent of London residents identified themselves as 'white British,'" while riding certain subway lines in Paris are like "taking an underground train in an African city." According to Murray, who hosted a video on the topic for conservative radio host Dennis Prager, Muslim immigration is "suicide, the self-annihilation of a culture."

While Murray uses his books and columns to argue for cultural and political retrenchment, he accuses trans people, Muslims and women of inflaming "culture wars," with their grievances in his latest Fox News interview.

"It's almost as if, at the point that it's never been better than this, we're portraying everything as if it's never been worse," Murray said. "And all of these identity issues are being weaponized, for, I think, purely political purposes."