These truths to be self-evident, that all men are created as a member of Congress, I get to have a lot of really interesting people and the experts on what they're talking about. This is the podcast for insights into the issues. China, bioterrorism, Medicare for all in depth discussions, breaking it down into simple terms. We we hope we hold these truths. We hold these truths with Dan Crenshaw and Gloria Borger. All right, everybody, welcome back.

Got a great episode today with Ayaan Hirsi Ali. I've been following her for a while, which is a fascinating background, very accomplished scholar and really excited to have her on. How are you doing today? I'm doing great.

Thank you. Thank you for having me on.

So I'll just give a little bit of background. Um, you were born in Somalia. You eventually settled in the Netherlands where you became a member of Dutch parliament. When did you move to the US? I move to the US in 2006, OK? Yeah, and then from there, you you've been at AEI, the American Enterprise Institute. You were a fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School from twenty sixteen to twenty nineteen. So you were there when I was there and I didn't I didn't even know that I should have known that.

Yeah. Yeah. And neither did I. I'm very sorry about that too. Yeah I would have. I paid pretty close to maybe I did go to one of your talks actually because I mean I have been following for you, for you for a while, but you know, kind of where we ran into each other might have run together. But you were also at the Hoover or you're at the Hoover Institute right now. Another great place. You wrote a book called Infidel.

This is an autobiography, New York Times bestseller, and an additional book called Nomad and Heretic. And you currently have you're also the founder of the A H a foundation which is dedicated to protecting women's rights and dedicated to ending female genital mutilation, forced and child marriages and honour violence. So very accomplished. Really happy to have you on. I mean, you've written on a lot of things. It's not just your interesting background, but also what you call WOAK ism.

We'll get into that identity politics and all of the above. So but I want to I want to delve back into your background. So very, very curious to hear how did so how did you end up from in in the Netherlands, as were you a refugee out of Somalia or what's what's your background?

Well, I detail that in the book called Infidel, which was published in 2007. But basically I was born in Somalia in nineteen sixty nine, and that is about nine years after Somalia gained independence. And for the first eight or so years of my life, Somalia was in complete turmoil. My father was engaged in politics and it was the sort of politics of building or trying to build a nation that had become independent and was about seven, seven, eight years old.

And then in nineteen sixty nine, Mohamed Siad Barre, who was she had Marxist Leninist leanings, but he was a junior in the newly founded military Somali military. And he seized power and he started to kill people who were against him and throw some of them in prison. Luckily for us, he threw my father in prison and while my father was in prison, we were able to escape with my mother and my siblings. And we left for Saudi Arabia.

We lived there for one year. And then we were deported from there because they found out that my father, after he had escaped prison and while in Saudi Arabia, was actually engaged in politics when he was prohibited from doing that. And so they told us to get out and we did get out. And the only country that would accept us at that point was Ethiopia. And we stayed there for a year and a half. And then in nineteen eighty at that time, I was 10 years old.

My family moved to Kenya and I lived in Kenya until I was twenty two years old. In nineteen ninety two, my father, who had gone back to Ethiopia to fight for what he regarded as the true independence for Somalia, for the salvation of Somalia, and he came back in nineteen ninety two. And very quickly after that he found a husband for me, which is completely in line with our own traditions and customs. And I didn't like the mud that he found for me, and so and this man was a Canadian citizen, a Somali only by birth, eighth or ninth in line as a cousin of mine.

And I on my way to Canada and I was in Germany. I found myself in Germany in July of 1992. And instead of complying with family values, I decided to take a train from from Germany and go to the Netherlands and ask for asylum. So that's basically my story.

That's fascinating. And I mean, obviously, like I mentioned in the bio, you you're a huge advocate against these forced marriages.

So I'm curious, like, what's the relationship now with your family or your father and, you know, are they still alive? I mean, how and how how does that go after you? You you you asked for asylum in the Netherlands. So, of course, the family was upset, my father was very upset and he wrote me a letter disowning me. But in 1997, he was able to reconcile with me and my sister had also come to the Netherlands and he was getting on in age.

My sister got ill in the Netherlands and I was the only person who needed looking after her. And so he figured that maybe it was better. Instead of living in anger, he felt powerless to try and control me from Kenya while I lived in Holland. And we reconciled. He forgave me for running away from this man. But then in 2001. In 2001, 9/11 happened, and back then I was working for a think tank with the Labor Party.

This is in the Netherlands and all my colleagues were saying that 9/11 happened because of American foreign policy, Israeli foreign policy, colonialism. They had all sorts of reasons to explain away what I thought was the real thing. And the real thing is that these 19 men who attacked us were driven by their conviction, their religious conviction. When I explained to them that as a teenager, I actually was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and I used to subscribe to this doctrine.

And when what we were taught was, if you wanted to achieve doctrinal purity, especially if you were a young man, you subscribe to jihad and you try to fight a holy war against the infidels. And I also continued, aside from my analysis of what happened in 9/11, I was asked by the Labor Party to look into why communities, Muslim communities that had come to the Netherlands about three or four decades before myself were so poorly assimilated that they used the word integrated, not speaking the language under employed school dropouts, overrepresented in prisons and all that.

And so when I looked into it, I said, look, as long as you continue a Muslim, communities continue to subjugate their women and keep them locked up and force them into marriage as children with people they have never seen before, the problem of not integrating will continue. And my father, who was in London at that time, he left Kenya and he moved to London with his first wife. He was very, very upset again, and this is the second time that I'm upsetting him and at some point it came out, I had inadvertently said in a radio interview that actually I was no longer a Muslim.

And you can imagine how that how that was perceived by my father in the wider community. And now he was getting death threats because he was doing nothing about my misbehavior and misconduct, as they saw as blasphemy and infidelity. And so he tried to persuade me over the phone to drop everything, declare myself a Muslim again and beg for forgiveness. And I didn't do that. And so from then on, our relationship was really tense until in 2008, he he got ill, he got leukemia, and then he passed away.

But he did allow me to visit him at the hospital and he couldn't talk. He was on a ventilator, but he held my hand and he squeezed it. And I think and I've said this, this is the subject part of the subject of Nomad is that the love between a parent and a child is often stronger than any kind of doctrine. And my father proved that. He's proved it to me that it's great to hear.

That is a heartwarming story. There's I mean, your background is just incredible. How did you end up in the Dutch parliament? I mean, that's, you know, from from basically claiming asylum in Holland to to running for parliament. And what was what was that path like? So the first 10 years, you know, I went to the Netherlands and learned Dutch and did a few odd jobs here and there, whatever I could get, and then I.

I wanted to study political science. I really wanted to understand why the Netherlands and other Western countries were different from the countries I had lived in before. And when I sought admission to the University of London, luckily for me, they granted me that. And I got my master's degree in political science in the year 2000. And in 2001, I started to work for the Labor Party think-tank that I was just telling you about. And then I started to take these positions.

And what happened in 9/11 and immigration, the position of women, Islam in Europe and the Labor Party, which is centre left, was spooked by all of this. But the freedom, let's just call them this sort of free markets type of party, which was then in the opposition. They they offered to put me on the list. We have a list system in the Netherlands and they offered to put me on the list for parliaments where Neelie Kroes, who was a prominent woman back then and later became an EU commissioner.

And she she persuaded me and I think she persuaded her own party that it was useless to talk about these things in think tanks. Instead, these were practical things that needed to be done through the allocation of resources and through legislation. So that's how I found my way into the Dutch parliament.

And what you said earlier about the and I wanted to head on, he said a lot of things that I want to get to when 9/11 happened. And there was this tendency to always for Westerners to blame ourselves, you know, in the Dutch case, I guess, blame American foreign policy. I've lived around the world. I see that all the time. It's always it's always about that. But I see it on our campuses, too, constantly.

We're always asking what did we do wrong? And I point out to people, you know, if you're looking at Osama bin Laden in particular, there was no there was no moment that we wronged this person.

In fact, you know, it was US forces helping the Mujahideen in the Soviet against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s. It was it was the first Gulf War that we sent troops to defend his homeland of Saudi Arabia against invasion from Saddam Hussein. You cannot rationalize in a materialistic way why they why they do what they do and why they hate us so much. And this is this is so difficult for Westerners to comprehend, it seems. And this is especially true for for the left for for whatever reason, the liberal disposition finds always trying to find fault in ourselves instead of instead of the people who seek to do us harm.

Um, well, yeah, I mean, I've had just like you, I'm almost always. Amazed at the conclusions, the logical conclusions that some of the Western pundits reach when it comes to to analyzing and understanding the basic tenets of all of political Islam. Maajid Nawaz calls it Islamism. And Islamists really don't care about Western seeking atonement for their past misdeeds or the cynical professors in universities in the West who, for whatever reason, indoctrinating young people with ideas about what America is irredeemably racist and and terrible.

They don't care about any of that. Their mission is to Islamize the world as fast as they can through peaceful means, which they call DAFWA. That is the proselytizing and the organizing. And if that fails them through jihad and individuals like bin Laden and the organization, he created al-Qaida, that is what they are seeking. They don't care. And as we've seen often enough, when Westerners left in a very idealistic way, when they go and think that they can prove to them that they are the good ones, they have their heads cut off.

And, you know, we've seen this over and over and over again. It's the the. Inability of post Christian Western societies to understand the potent power of religion, right.

Does this get into the question of multiculturalism in this sort of this this kind of moral relativism that, like you said, I think it's a great phrase. You use the post Christian Western society because using the word post Christian, I think it's important because it implies that we've sort of done away with absolutes of right and wrong and therefore we don't even know what we're defending. Right. We don't even know what we're defending ourselves against because there is no right and wrong in a post Christian world.

There's just your opinion and there's sort of the political, you know, the political winds of the moment. And, you know, this gets into that conversation of multiculturalism. The other thing you mentioned about your experiences in Holland is they asked you to to help them with the integration. And I know that in Europe, this is there's there's constant tension with with with Muslim populations there in Europe. I don't know that we experience it that the same way in the United States.

I'd like to think that we don't I think that we integrate better. You know, I go and visit mosques here in my district. I enjoy it very much. I've I've traveled to Muslim countries. I have I I have an affinity for for the for for Muslim people. And I don't see that same tension boil up as much here. I'm curious what your thoughts on that are. And is Europe is Europe making strides towards that and towards that integration or what what else needs to be solved to fix that problem?

So I think first I'll start by saying I disagree with you on the post in the post, Christian. Let's Western societies, Europe, America and the others, it's not that there is no longer a distinction between right and wrong and that morality has disappeared. That's not the case. I think what you have the classical liberals who believe that the the issue of right and wrong is there, but what is wrong when it comes to harming others has been legislated and that we've developed norms and values so that people really know and understand what is wrong and they can distinguish between the two.

But then that situation is taken for granted. And then on the other side, again, secular, you have the postmodernists and the postmodernists are the ones who are upset with modernity. They're upset with the classical liberals. They obviously have abandoned Christianity as a moral compass. And they've reached these crazy conclusions that there is no objective truth, that the only structures and institutions we are left with structures and institutions of power, and that there is then this oppressor, the white heterosexual male, who is using these structures to continue to oppress everyone else.

And then the language, even the English language, the language that we speak itself is a tool of the oppressor. Now, all of this has been written down in great detail by Helen Lacross. She's editor in chief of Area magazine in the United Kingdom. And James Lindsay, who's a mathematician here. And this is it's very interesting to see these various postmodernists theories or strains of theories first started out in universities and on really the French side of universities.

No one ever took them seriously. Yeah, in my in the time that I was fighting for the emancipation of Muslim women, the integration of Muslim minority students to European societies, this was all background noise. And they would claim these are the postmodernists they would claim. Why do you want to impose a Eurocentric and colonialist values on these women? In other words, these women were just fine. You think they're oppressed, but they don't think of themselves as oppressed?

No, we're talking about children who are being forced into marriage. We're talking about female genital mutilation. We're talking about honour violence and honour killings. And yet they want instead of talking about universal human rights, the way classical liberal to do, you know, what is it? What is our common humanity, they would instead make everything into turn everything into groups, ethnic groups or Muslim groups and the and the Islamists living in Europe. They exploited the situation.

So for me was that background noise. I didn't have to fight council culture from the perspective of. You know, from the perspective that you you would have to you would have as a white man, you would have to do with council culture. For me, it was what they call Islamophobia. That was my big thing. And anyway, I didn't done I didn't really think that this thing would spread out of these universities and out of multiculturalism and you know what to do with the Aboriginals and Native Americans and Muslim immigrants.

I didn't think it would then spread. Far and wide to all of society, and that's where we are now. Yeah, and a lot of us a lot of us wondered that because for those of us following this for the last decade or so, we see this oil up on the campuses. And we wrongfully assumed that when these kids made it into the real world, that the real world would change them. But in reality, they've they've changed the real world.

They've they've changed the culture of corporations, which which have immense power, whether it's because of their market or because of their you know, it just general voice in the public sphere and Hollywood and the media. And it's hard to know what it's based on. Right. Like it gets back to this this this conversation about truth and what is true and what isn't, what is right and what is wrong and what our universal values and what aren't. And it's difficult to understand what it even stands for except for itself, you know, and it's difficult to understand what what is on the other side of this of this the sort of doctrine that they're perpetuating.

It's frightening, to say the least.

Well, and also you you said corporations and universities, you know, K to 12 education. Now, it's spread everywhere, but it's also seeped into the military, which makes it incredibly dangerous. And that is true. Yeah. I mean, I've seen statistics that 60 percent of students in the United States are too terrified to say to express their political opinions because they're afraid for their careers. And, you know, they'll be forever ostracized and I think the way to do it, the way to fight it, first of all, I think we should fight back as hard as we possibly can.

And the way to fight back is to expose the nihilism of their end goals. Mm hmm. So I can see people being emotionally manipulated when it comes to. Pointing out an obvious injustice, right? But when it's when you then. Start to really sift through their ideas and their goals, their stated political agenda. What you see is not that they want to fix that injustice. What they're saying is they want to dismantle the entire system. Right.

They want power for their own doctrine. They want power for their own doctrine, but then you have to go even one step further and ask yourself, what are they going to do with that power? Then when they get let's assume we give them that power. Let's assume we give power to Black Lives Matter as an organization, as a movement. What are they going to do with it? When you read what is on their website, they say that they're going to do with it.

I mean, it's really creepy. They just want to dismantle. They want to destroy. They want to pull down statues. They want to rename everything. And it's not clear to me what they want to replace it with.

Yeah, I say this a lot. Like if you're going to if you're going to protest the flag and the the basic idea of America, then I would think that there's something on the other side of that. But they do not they do not dictate what that is. And that in itself, I think, subverts the entire the entire movement to a degree, because the entire point of protesting something is this idea that you would stop protesting at a certain point were you to see a change.

But that's actually not the point. The point is just power. Yeah, it's it's more of a hostage crisis.

It's we're all being taken hostage. So if you start throwing around accusations like racism and white supremacy, I think the first step would be to define what racism is. They don't want to define what racism is, the old definition that we had. That led to actual changes for black people and other people of color, they rejected that out of hand. They say now racism is everywhere, right in between the cracks. It's under your bed every bit. Every white person is racist.

If every white person is racist, then. You would conclude that no one has become so promiscuous, it becomes meaningless, and that is the point, I think. I think they just want to render our language meaningless so that they can keep talking about these power structures and these power relations and annihilate the idea that human beings can relate to one another in more ways than one. Right. And in very complex ways. Right.

I agree. I think that is the point. So going back to your background, then, why did you decide to come to the United States? I mean, you clearly had a quite a career in Holland. So why come to the US? Well, it's also a little bit complicated. Two things happened first. I was while in parliament as a politician, I felt that I didn't want to have a second, I didn't want to run for office a second term, and my term was going to end in May of 2007.

I was living with the kind of security that. It's very difficult to describe. There was no quality of life for me being moved from safe house to safe house, really always surrounded by armed men.

Who is targeting you? Who's targeting you in Holland? Um, we had a group, relatively small group of very dedicated jihadis in Holland who had sworn to kill me, and they killed my friend Theo Van Gogh because he made a film with me called Submission, just really a ten minute. And you said you would even think of it as a thriller, plus one that describes described the why Islam in the Koran. And I only used Koranic verses, why women were seen as inferior and how they were subjugated and they were so offended, these jihadists, as to declare.

So you're a target myself, a target and others, they wanted to blow up the parliament, they wanted to blow up stuff like that. And when I say dedicated, I mean, they had these very clear plots to carry out murder. And and I accepted, you know, if you are a member of the Dutch parliament, it would be horrific if you then were killed in this way. And so the alternative was to have and live with this heavy, heavy, heavy security.

And the way that was handled, I didn't I didn't spend any time anywhere for more than two or three weeks, and finally I found a house that was that met the security requirements of the government. And my neighbors went to court and the district court, the lower court said that they had no right to kick me out so I could live there. But the appellate court said they had their human rights were violated. So I had to be kicked out.

And so I started looking for jobs in the United States. And I actually found a job with the American Enterprise Institute. But then in May of 2006, the Minister for Immigration and Integration, for political reasons, decided to take my Dutch citizenship away. And that accelerated things. And that's how I ended up in the in the United States. So that's fascinating. So does does that mean there is does that mean the the the the elements of the Dutch government or also working against you from your I mean, within your own party?

You are in a center left party and, you know, is it because of the left's tendencies to engage in this kind of multiculturalism? And, you know, these are what I would call formerly classical liberals that have become illiberal over time. And were they working against you as well? I mean, did you feel like you just had no friends over there at a certain point? I think the woman who took away my citizenship was acting really only on a personal level, to be honest with you.

I wish I could tell you some cosmic story about some injustice that was done to me in Holland. But the real injustice was. That this is more different from what we're seeing in other developed nations is self-imposed political correctness. Mm hmm. That, you know, minorities should be given license to violate our norms and rules and all the human rights of women and children, especially within Muslim communities. But this woman was not driven by any of that. I think she took it was really quite personal.

She had asked me I think she wanted to to divide the party and take her, you know, get a few people to go with her so that she could be the leader. And I refused to do that. And this was my punishment. And and she was swiftly punished for that. The entire party, almost the whole country came together to say, you have to give the citizenship back. And it was given back to me. But then that led to the collapse of the government in 2006.

Really? Wow, that is fascinating. It's like almost like a house of cards.

And also, you know, how in America we say we are polarized, we're polarized. Well, I know how polarized every every liberal Western countries that is. In 2006, things were in Holland, just as bad as they are in America, really. And in Holland. The Netherlands is a country that prides itself on consensus. And so there it's it's fascinating to watch these these developments.

How do you see the future of Europe in these culture wars that are occurring in Europe? Do you see it improving or falling apart? I mean, there really is this in Western civilization, the sort of self deprecating trend that is that is frightening, that we don't want to stand up for our own values. Do you see that in Europe? And how is that going to go? I think I would not use the phrase falling apart. What is happening in Europe is an erosion.

Of the Europe that we know that I came to in 1992, my next book is called Pray. And the subtitle is Islam, Immigration and the Rights of Women. Mm hmm. And what I'm seeing is that back in the 1990s and 2000s. When we talk about women whose rights were compromised, we were talking about immigrant women, mostly Muslim women. Today in two thousand and twenty, because of immigration, we're talking about the rights of all women, women in the public square.

So look at countries like Sweden, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, where they are targeted arbitrarily by men who come from countries where they're not used to respecting women, not used to seeing women on the streets, etc., and the institutions of law and order that are supposed to fix this, do something about it, are not doing about it because their hands are tied by this self-imposed political correctness. And so what you see then is an erosion of rights, it's the paint.

You know, some of my American friends describe Europe as a museum. Well, even if it's a museum, you need to it needs upkeep, right? It needs maintenance. And so sometimes you would think of Europe as a house where the paint is peeling off, things slowly rotting away. And at times it feels like no one is doing anything about it at other times. Just last week, the president of France declared war on Islamist separatism. And then, you know, you start to think, is he is he just being a cynical politician who just look, he's looking at 20, 22.

For his re-election or does he really mean it? We'll see. I've had those statements before, I've heard Angela Merkel and David Cameron declare multiculturalism is dead, it doesn't work. We're going to change things. And then I haven't seen a lot change. Brexit happened. All sorts of political parties, populist political parties, right wing political parties, far right wing political parties emerging in Europe, maybe maybe it is through these popular demands that the politicians will be forced to.

To reimagine and rethink their ways and at other times, you know, the erosion continues. I'm watching a country called Sweden very closely to see what they are going to do about the policies of the past 30 years.

Mm hmm. And in America, so you come to America, you you started here at a. Yes, I started at AEI, which for me was a fantastic place and welcomed me even before I had stepped down. I had decided to give up my seat in parliament in Holland, and I was able to publish anything I wanted to publish on any forum. And all I found was institutional encouragement from then President Bush and later president of Bush books. Even though I didn't work, I wasn't a very long while I was there.

Mm hmm. And I met I met great people who are friends to this day, very close friends to this day. So I just want to say my experience, my life as an individual here in America has been happier, more free. I couldn't I couldn't be happier, honestly. It's it's just been wonderful. But of course, I'm also looking at these other developments in our country. Yes, I decided to become an American citizen wholeheartedly, work on my English, make friends.

You know what you're supposed to do as an immigrant, as an immigrant, you choose, you know, you choose to come here. So you do your best to become a part of the fabric of society. And I haven't had I've had an easier time than most immigrants, I have to say.

What do you think about. So Representative Linamar, one of my my colleagues, similar background, came from a war torn Somalia and and became an asylum asylum recipient here in the US and, of course, ran for Congress like really lived the American dream, which takes a very different approach to Americanism and Western culture than than you do. You know, the question is, is is it because of her background that she takes that view or is it or is she really just perpetuating the sort of the Western leftism and that sort of cult of leftism that has occurred here?

I mean, which is that it would seem to me that it's more that she's that she's repeating the cult of leftism more so than than anything from her background.

It could be both. I have not met Ilan Omar. I hate diagnosing people from a distance. I've never sat down with her and never had a conversation with her. So the Illinois Omar I know is really the woman in, you know, through the publicity sources. And my guess would be, on the one hand, like I was, you know, when in my teens I was very much influenced by the Islamists, mainly those who came to influence us members of the Muslim Brotherhood.

And so we got a lot we got plenty of anti-Americanism, anti-Western propaganda to Lastarza. But if you then combine if you then come to America and you fall into the hands of the WOAK, that's pretty unfortunate. And so you could I could see why you can be blind or blinded to the good fortune of coming here and bringing your family here and raising your family here and being celebrated and being elected into the House of Representatives. And now you're in the position of actually legislating, allocating resources.

You celebrated and you're standing there and saying we must dismantle everything that it's Jerry. But I also hear during the conventions, Michelle Obama, who was first lady for eight years, say the same things. Right. I hear, you know, vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris saying, you know, our country is one of systemic racism. It is. It's fascinating to watch these things here. These people say these things. Oprah Winfrey, just her book, her pick of the book that America is a what did she call it?

It was the book is written by somebody whose name I can't appear, a player from Ghana. And whipping America is now a caste system. Mm hmm. And so it's with fascination that we watch these things and say, where did it come from? Is this is this for real or will I pinch myself and wake up? I think it was all a big joke.

Yeah. And it's like what we were talking about before. It's like, what's the point of it? You know, like where is the good in in describing America this way, our culture, our institutions as systemically oppressive. You know, if there's a point to it, because we have movements in this country where there was clearly a point to it, you know, ending the civil war, there was a clear point to that.

Right. There's clear there's clear and definable systemic injustice.

And so we fought a war to stop it. The civil rights movement was exactly the same. There was very clear and definable systemic injustice. And and that movement was was designed to stop that. There was something on the other side of it.

It's very concerning that we don't see anything on the other side of it, except except the the goal the goal itself seems to be resentment and bitterness and division. And I don't understand that goal. It's scary. Well, it is.

I thought of it. I describe it as Marxist and James Lindsay, whom I talked about earlier and say actually it's not Marxist because Marxism was material. This is not what they call it, neo Marxist. And it's the only goal seems to be the obliteration of the system. And there's no desire to replace it with anything. And I agree with you back in the day and this is again, what makes sport, in my view, makes America unique, is when this conversation starts to emerge about the immorality of slavery.

It doesn't just remain a conversation. Of course, at that point, slavery is systemic and structural, but we fight a war. And those who want to liberate fellow human beings, they win the war, they get to make the laws. It's the same with the civil rights movement when that is true and real segregation and you're black and you're not allowed here and you're not allowed that, you can't take the loans out, you can send your kids to schools and so on.

These things, we wish we had a big fight about it. And those who wanted civil rights, they won and we did away with all of that and we had to change. You can't change a society simply by changing the laws on the books. You have to change everything else along with the language, the values, the norms, etc. It has all happened. Is there still more injustice and racial inequality? Yes, it is pointed out. Let's use our founding principles to make those changes.

But they are saying the founding principles themselves are. And they're litigating people in the past. Using the moral framework of today, pulling down statues there, overlooking the fact they're calling us Nazis in in the United States of America when we actually fought Madison. And sacrificed blood and treasure to a magnitude they've never seen before to stop Nazism. And yet the country is being maligned and smeared as truly racist. Now, you can imagine the kind of when you have this kind of internal turmoil, you can imagine the kind of external attacks you invite.

Mm hmm. What is China going to do to us or Russia or the Islamists, you name it. We're just making it way too easy because we no longer have the moral high ground. We are proclaiming from our universities that we are irredeemably sinful and racist and. It's it's actually frightening. Yeah, yeah, we make it very easy on our adversaries if you're if you're in the information operations, you know, units of the Russians or the Chinese.

And, you know, I know I know a lot about this. I spent time in the intelligence community. So I understand these how these operations go. It's the easiest thing in the world to to to create divisions in a society like ours. When you when you when all you have to do is is just the smallest Facebook post.

I mean, the amount of resources they have to they have to use a very small to to create to just to just foment the kind of divisions that we have here. And and I love the article you wrote in The Wall Street Journal titled What What Islamists and Locusts Have in Common. And you defined WOAK ism as their ideology goes by. Many names cancel culture, social justice, critical race theory, intersectionality for simplicity. We will call it WOAK ism.

I like that. I think that about sums it up. And you really interesting argument on on comparing the two. They're obviously not exactly the same. And you see, you don't you were not about to quote, equate WOAK ism and Islamism. You say Islamism is a militant strain of an ancient faith, that its adherents have a coherent sense of what God wants them to achieve on Earth to earn rewards in the afterlife. Wokingham is in many ways a Marxist creed.

It offers no hereafter. Wokingham divide society into myriad identities, whereas Islamist segregation is simpler believers and unbelievers, men and women. And so this kind of goes into what we were talking about before this. It's problematic. At least we know what the Islamists want. We really have no idea what Wilkison wants. Yeah, that is true and also work ism is. To a certain degree, headiest, so we just talked about earlier about al-Qaida, where they had Osama bin Laden as their head.

You know, you go to ISIS. They had Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. With Watkis and. And I know a lot of people think a lot of my colleagues think what, Islam has no pope. So in many ways, it's also heartless. Mm hmm. But that's not true. Over the centuries, we've had all the deferral of the death of Mohammed. We've had all these various solutions. I think you pronounce it as CAYLUS. But Wilkerson has no clue.

Right. Could you point out who the leader is? No, no, there's no direction. Um, maybe, maybe some socialists in their 20s, but that's about it.

It's not about it's diffuse. And in that sense, it can be in some ways, it makes it easier to defeat. But in other ways, it also makes it harder because it's very difficult to pinpoint who the leadership is. And what if we were to say, let's sit down and negotiate with them or have a conversation with them? It's very difficult to pinpoint who exactly speaks for them. And the prominent individuals like Robin D'Angelo, they don't make any sense now.

And this guy from Kennedy, and he doesn't make any sense to me. But this woman, Kimberle Crenshaw. I hope you're not family.

No, no. I've written about her, though. It's it's kind of ironic since this is the seat she wrote about intersectionality.

Well, I can I can imagine. Last night I was watching her Ted talk and I thought, well, I can imagine sitting down with her and having a conversation with her and saying, what would you like to achieve that? He here's what we have achieved through our existing institutions and principles. What would you like to change right now? But what I see and I really encourage every one of you was listening to us to go to this TED talk and watch what she does.

She has this. She fires people up on an emotional level. Mm hmm. The emotions are given to you with no context, and she makes it look like the police are just going to go to women's homes like women's homes and shoot them. Right. But if let's be charitable and say, you know, Miss Crenshaw, just tell us, what should we do? How can we fix this? And then there are others, but usually it is.

What do they want when you achieve power? What I think we should always start from the from the back end. This is what I the question I used to get. You get you want Muslim women to be emancipated. What is it that you want for them that. And I'd have to be forced to say I want them to when they I want them to finish school. I want them to be allowed equal opportunity to go and find jobs and work, and I'd like them to keep the salaries that they make very concrete, not going to destroy the system.

I'm saying I want these women. I want the system. I'm criticizing the system because the system is not protecting these women. But what would it look like if they are protected? And I think we should hold the work to some of these concrete questions. What exactly would you like to achieve? Yeah, I think that's right.

The utopian is by nature. Right. And so, you know, and utopian in Greek means no place. It's an impossible achievement. And again, it's kind of the goal.

Right, because because if they were ever to achieve a a let's call it a manageable level of inequality, then, well, then they would have no reason to be vying for power anymore.

Right? They would they would have nothing to run on for their next election. And that's the entire point.

The problem would be solved. So what they what they're running on is the corrupting the language, the corrupting perception of power, the corrupting sense of what we perceive as knowledge and objective truth. And the more they do that, I got an article sent by a friend this weekend who said it's racist to teach black kids English because English is the language of the oppressor. So what exactly do you want to teach them then? And teach them in? And that we both said, well, that creates an underclass, permanent underclass, that you are then supposed to condescend to its vulnerability you violate and exploit.

And I think ultimately that's probably where we are. But we do have to expose it.

Right. It's the language of compassion, but it only results in control. And I think that that that is the point you shared. You shared that article on Twitter in August, which I don't know when this article came out. And if the click on it, the cancel culture checklist, six signs that show you're not being criticized, you're being canceled. This is such a great checklist because it's it is important because the right gets gets accused of council culture to the left, likes to use our own words against us sometimes.

But it's like, no, we're just criticizing like there's a difference between open and honest debate and making real objective arguments and just canceling. And I loved this checklist.

There's there's there's six things to look out for that really define what cancel culture is. Maybe I'll just go through them real quick and then let you kind of respond to it. One punitiveness. So are people denouncing you to your employer, your professional groups, your social connections are being blacklisted from jobs and social opportunities, et cetera? No to de platforming or de platforming or campaigner's, attempting to prevent you from publishing or giving speeches or attending meetings or just get you kicked off a Twitter number three organization.

Does criticism appear to be organized and targeted number for secondary boycotts? Is there is there explicit or implicit threats that people who support you will get the same punitive treatment that you're receiving? Five moral grandstanding is the tone of the discourse. Ad hominem, repetitive, ritualistic posturing, accusatory, outraged are people flattening distinctions, demonizing use, slinging inflammatory labels and engaging in moral one upmanship and ignoring what you're actually saying, more importantly, in six truthfulness, are the things even accurate or are they just lying or are they just hurling insults?

And I always say, if you have to insult me, it's a pretty good indication you don't have a very good argument to make. Yeah, I mean, that is it. And now you have to ask yourself, why are all these tools being deployed against homes? These are the tools of silencing. They have new names like these platforming and that sort of thing, truthiness. But human groups have relied on similar tools to pick on and silence others.

Yeah, and these are all tools of silencing of censorship, censorship upon censorship. And then you say, but why would like this is every single time I read about location, I just want to ask them, what would you like to achieve? Right. It keeps getting back to that, we don't seem to have a good answer for it. It's it's very troubling. We do have a good answer for it. Then Nigella's right. We have a good answer.

It's been answered. I mean, if if you've read philosophers such as Whoso and the way he inspired many, many people in his time and beyond, this is the way I like to think about it. We in the especially in the West, we like to think of ourselves as rational human beings. Mm hmm. And we think that reason dominates. But I also think that it's not just reason and a lot has been written on this. People at home and took their utopian.

The irrational.

Yeah. By nature. Yeah.

Yeah. I think about all these New Age religions. I think about the sprouting of cults. And most of most often these things happen when we are in a relatively good place. You know, people are living a little longer, making more. There are barely any outside threats and that's when people start to give in and give way to the most irrational civilization hating impulses. Yeah, it starts to fall in love with the so-called noble savage. And there was a friend of mine who just sandals from Australia and he called it romantic primitivism.

So that problem is going to remain with us as long as we are humans. It's just part of us. And I think this is a new surge of such romantic primitivism. They want to bring everything to them. Right.

I fully agree with that and tell people that this isn't really new. This movement we're seeing, it's not new. You know, you mentioned or so this was this was deeply embedded in his own philosophy in the French Revolution, this idea that everything must be torn down and started over. Like there's like there's no common knowledge that we've derived from thousands of years of history and culture passed down through generations. Like it's all nonsense. It's all oppressive because and they can always make the argument because any time you can anecdotally point out some kind of injustice and their argument is if there's any injustice, then it's it's an indicator that the entire system is corrupt from within.

And so you can always make this argument. And to your point, it's extremely intoxicating, especially for the young idealists. Right. The young, romanticized idealist who, you know, let's let's let's give them some credit and say they honestly feel compassion and hope and idealism. And they you know, but they're easily they're the easiest target for this sort of the sort of language easiest target.

And I thought in the West we would find ways out of that by giving them spots where they can go and play and be stars and cheer and so on. Or I thought we also gave them something else to be utopian about entertainment again, where they can Stijn and cheer. But all those institutions, both sports and entertainment, have been infiltrated by the weakest. Right. So you have Hollywood just too terrified to do anything. And these men I'm not I'm a woman and I'm not particularly a fan of any.

I mean, I think men playing sports is a good thing because it gets them out of my way. But these sports stars take the knee. And in this these kinds of things like what makes work is an. Sinister and insidious is that they have taken to not only taking down this screen, defund the police and taking statues down. But they've also looked into and decided to take over the institutions of entertainment. How do you keep young men, especially young women, too, but young men?

Occupied and preoccupied, how do they channel those energies that they have? I thought the West had an answer to that. But now even those institutions are being. Infiltrated, being politicized, politicized, what's the word, politicized? Yeah, no, if you want to just have some downtime when you want to watch baseball or American football or soccer, you can't do that anymore without being. Confronted with some kind of political. Black and white. Yeah, it's just it's extremely divisive, I mean, to your point, when we can't share our pop culture anymore, it's hard to know what we share when we've politicized everything.

And I don't have a whole lot more time. And I want to get back to, um, again, your other area of expertise outside of American WOAK ism, which is which is Islamism. You know, again, I've a lot of experience. I've worked with Muslims. I think some of the greatest heroes I know are Muslims who have defended our country and our ideals, the things that we stand for overseas. You know, I've watched them fight right alongside me.

You know, obviously, your typical Muslim American, I think, wants to embody the same American values that you and I hold hold dear. But you write about different strains of. And so it's important to distinguish what you mean by Islamism from from, I think, your your individual Muslim person of Muslim faith. And I know that you do. But you have you you you talk about three different strains. And in your book, Heretic Mecca Muslims, which are the majority who are tolerant and passive, which is probably the type of Muslim that I'm describing that I would know.

Then you talk about Medina, Muslims, jihadists, authoritarians and modifying Muslims, modernizing reformers.

So, I mean, the real question is, what does that what does that distinction look like in America and who's winning the overall battle for the future of Islam?

Wow. So that's, again, the subject of the book, the last book, which I think was published in 2015. I would say the majority of Muslims in America and elsewhere are the Mecca Muslims. They don't give any thought to their religious identity. They just, you know, the way you are Christian or people around me right now are Christians, but they are not all over the place talking about Christianity all the time, not proselytizing, not declaring that you choose between Christianity and infidelity and so on, which is what the second group is.

The second group is about not they are not just Muslims and they don't see Islam as their faith. They see Islam as a political tool to achieve power in the way that they have understood the faith, the after doctrinal purity. And then after we've been subjected, you know, for me, it started in a dramatic way on 9/11, 2001, and I think for most Americans it's the same case. But for many people in the Middle East and South Asia, they've had to live with Islamists, those who use Islam as a political tool for decades and decades, if not centuries.

And so the Medina Muslims have been annoying ordinary American Muslims for a long time. And out of that emerged group number three and group number three is forced to sit down and do what the Madina Muslims to do. That is starting to read scripture, to read the Koran, the Hadith, The Sera, the series, the biography of Muhammad. And they then come out saying some of these tenets are just they're unsustainable because it's not going to work. It's only going to lead to a bloodbath.

So let's just change them, modify or see them in a historical context. Now, in the case of America, I had a conversation with Daniel Pipes and later on he wrote that in his Wall Street Journal piece. He's published it, but he has seen some data where he says. About 100000 Muslim Americans leave the faith of Islam. And become something else. Some of them become atheists, some of them become Christians, some of them become beasts, but they leave the faith because they are so critical and so disillusioned, disappointed they get out.

But he also said. A fresh one hundred thousand people are converted to the faith. So the Madina the activism of the Madina Muslims is still quite potent in America, and and I can tell you from what I have seen, that the. They look for young, impressionable and vulnerable communities that they can easily convert to Islam. And I don't want to keep harping on Wilkison, but if you are disappointed in Wilkison, you would be a very easy target for the radical Islam Islamists to give you a more solid faith.

So that is our I would say this is what I would now say, a paramedic, right. And so it kind of all comes back together. It's all it's all part of a part of an interesting strain. And I think I think the common thread seems to be victimhood, ideology, that if you if you're if you're disillusioned, if you if you see disparities around you, then you seek an explanation for that. And there's political opportunists, whether they're there in the form of of the Islamists that you talk about or whether it's in the form of WOAK ism that seek to take advantage of that and then say, you know, all you have to do is give us power and all of the disparities, all of the injustices of the world go away.

I have seen booklets that were booklets that Islam is proselytizing in America and it almost always starts with America is actually a fine place to find a job, etc.. So the materialistic way, America will give you something. But after a certain point, America is morally bankrupt and they build on these narratives that we are racists and oppressors and they build on some of the social issues we have, you know, dependence on drugs and alcohol, the exploitation of women, human trafficking, that sort of thing.

And they say, you see, that is because of America's moral bankruptcy. And here is a moral framework that will set it. All right. All you have to say is a shadow. La la, la, la, la, la, la. I witnessed or I bear witness that there is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his prophet. And once they get you to that point, they haven't told you is if you then in turn become disillusioned.

With the faith that they've introduced you to and you get out or you try to get out, what the consequence of the. Right, and I guess that's where the darker side comes and, you know, you would think it maybe not in that extreme sense of Islamism, but you would think that we'd have a lot more in common as a Christian. I would believe we have a lot more in common with with Muslims in America, because the entire point is to establish a moral framework of of right and wrong.

And, you know, that's that's you know, our founders did say that they're like, you can't have this constitution is inadequate for anybody but a moral and religious people.

So we should be on the same page in many ways, wouldn't you think?

I think we should. But again, we can only be on the same page if we speak the same language, if we take the time to define what it is that we're seeing and talking about. And that entails a good faith. Right. And that you're not engaging in equivocation and ambiguity. And it also entails in the respect for each other's perspectives. Again, another source of good faith, it entails civility. You know, I've had a conversation with you, you see things differently.

I'm going to leave it at that. I'm not going to declare war on you a plot to take your job away or kick you out of your home or any of that. You know, I'm not going to believe. And again, that is if you carry on in this sense, I would say to me the philosophy that I find the most appealing is that of classical liberalism, where we think we've achieved that. And the only weakness of classical liberalism is that there is no promise of a utopia.

Right. There's no promise of something that transcends your reason. And you can get yourself lost in by going to the opera in a game or something else. But we there's nothing we're offering. We don't offer. What's the promise of Jesus Christ offers or the promise of, you know, once you've given your life to jihad, which you're going to find in the afterlife? That that void is there. I mean, I witnessed it, but I don't I don't have I don't have an answer, really.

Right. Ultimately, I would say you look at a society like America, even though most divided we're living at times still you see people regardless of their color, skin color, faith, whatever, coming out and helping one another, being there for one another. So we still have it, but we have to hang on to it. Right.

And we talk about it more in our in our political discussions and our pop culture. Because, you know, I do agree with you. I think at the ground level, people are not nearly as divided as the media would like them to be or at least tries to make them be. And agree with what you said about the classical liberalism. It feels like conservatives are the only ones defending true liberalism at this point.

Yeah, no, you know, these these basic universal principles, that is, as you said, it's not a utopia. It's not meant to be because utopia means no place. And it's a it's a it's a it's a sense of humility. I had a sense of humility with with what we can accomplish. It is an understanding that the best you can do for society is to is adherence to these universal principles that that have been discovered over time. There are a lot of hardship and and through a lot of deep thinking.

And that's kind of that's the entire point of Western civilization, is the discovery of these universal principles that can be applied universally. But it does not pretend that the hearts of men have changed. You know, we still have the same brains as the ancient Romans who were cheering as as as people's limbs were torn off by lions in the Coliseum, that our brains have not changed, but we have implemented as structures and in a series of incentives and universal principles that inhibit to the best of our ability those worst inclinations.

And when people still see those those, I guess, injustices play out, you know, again, it's this this despair that that and then they seek to erode the entire system. And it's a deeply unhealthy. Um, well, thank you so much. I know. I know. We're out of time. I Hirsi Ali, it was a fascinating conversation. Appreciate all the work. Appreciate your your story. It's it's really unbelievable and appreciate what you do for America.

And Dan, thank you so much for your service and sacrifice. Thank you again for having this conversation, for fighting this brand new fight.

Yeah, happy to do it. Great to have you. Thank you.