Last Monday, Douglas received the Alexander Hamilton Award for his ‘unwavering defense of Western values.’ Watch and read his brilliant acceptance speech.
It’s my view that none of us comes into the world fully formed, by any means. I want to take a moment to mention the fact that there are many people in this room here tonight who’ve helped to form me. You all know who you are, and I’m not going to name names or hold anyone personally responsible. I’m also very deeply honored to receive this award because the list of previous honorees includes so many other people whom I credit with part of my intellectual evolution—not least, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, William F. Buckley, and Tom Wolfe. I’d also like to cite a fellow émigré writer to this city, who’s no longer with us but who made a huge impression on me. And I know Ayaan [Hirsi Ali] had the enormous honor of meeting the great Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci.
I mention her because she wrote a great book about the war in Vietnam called Nothing and Amen, which starts with one of the best lines that I know of in any book. It opens with her niece, a young child, asking her a question: “Life, what is it, Oriana?” And the next sentence is “The next morning, I went to Vietnam to find out.” Now, it seems to me that the nature of being a writer is to get to the essence of things, to get to the nature of things, to try to work out life in its totality, whether that is—as I’ve done recently—writing about the fentanyl epidemic in this country and all the monstrous things that come from it, or from the many war zones I’ve reported from. The purpose, I suppose, is to try to get to the truth.
Continue reading the entire piece here at The Free Press
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Douglas Murray is a Senior Fellow at National Review Institute.
