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March 28, 2021 - The Ben Shapiro Show

01:04:47

Ayaan Hirsi Ali | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 112

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	I don't think that radical Islamic doctrine or its agenda is capable of defeating Western society.
	It's just militarily, economically, not capable of doing that.
	But if the West implodes, that's going to come from the inside.
	In 1992, a 23-year-old named Ayaan fled Kenya, part of the Netherlands, after being forced into an unwanted marriage, and she took political asylum under her grandfather's last name, Hirsi Ali.
	Ayaan was born in Somalia, where at a young age, her father, who was a leading figure in the Somali revolution, was in prison, and her grandmother had a female genital mutilation procedure common in Islamic culture performed on her.
	Through childhood, Ayaan was a devout Muslim in a Muslim family.
	Her father escaped prison in 1977.
	Their family ran to Saudi Arabia, then Ethiopia, and then Kenya.
	After an escape of her own to the Netherlands, Ayaan furthered her education and even became a member of parliament there.
	Her citizenship in the Netherlands was then jeopardized, which brought her to U.S.
	shores.
	In 2001, Ayaan's Muslim faith fell when Osama Bin Laden justified the September 11th attacks with the Quran.
	In 2002, she renounced her faith in Islam and she wrote her first book, The Sun Factory, the first of many from Ayaan exposing the oppression of women among Muslims and the need for Islamic reformation.
	Her newest book is Prey, Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women's Rights.
	Her writing and convictions have made her the target of danger, death threats, hatred at levels not experienced by just about anyone else on planet Earth.
	They can kill me, but they can't kill you.
	The book exists.
	She tells us in today's episode about the most recent risks from radical Muslim men and how the West must respond to this clash with our own ideology.
	We'll also discuss what the left can learn about confronting extremism from the right, and if secularism is a viable principle in a free and just society.
	Thanks for watching.
	This is The Ben Shapiro Show, Sunday special.
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	And just a reminder, we'll be doing some bonus questions at the end with Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
	The only way to get access to that part of the conversation is to become a member.
	Head on over to dailywire.com.
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	You'll have access to all of the full conversations with every one of our awesome guests.
	Ayaan Hirsi Ali, thanks so much for joining the show.
	Ben, thank you very much for having me.
	So why don't we begin with the controversy of the day.
	So your book, Prey, has become quite controversial because you make what seems to me a relatively uncontroversial contention, which is that the failure of the West to face up to the threat of radical Islamism is leading to increase in crime, particularly predatory behavior toward women in Europe.
	Why is this such a particularly controversial contention?
	Everything about Islam and immigration and Muslim immigration to Europe is controversial, even without the subject of this book.
	It always has been like that.
	After the terrorist attacks, you know, from 9-11-2001 to this day, these topics are very, very controversial, very much contested.
	People who are critical of Or who make a link between the ideology of radical Islam and those who act on it.
	They're accused of Islamophobia, of bigotry of all kinds.
	So it's not something that started today.
	It's been around for a long time.
	So when it comes to radical Islam, a lot of us use that term.
	What do you think is sort of the breakdown in the Islamic world between people who believe moderate things, you know, reform Islam, people believe in the values of the West, or at least believe that Islam is compatible with the values of the West, individual freedom and liberty, tolerance and diversity with regard to religion, versus radical Islamic beliefs, intolerance of other religions, the need to dominate What do you think the breakdown there is?
	Because according to the press in the West, obviously, there are very, very few radical Muslims and there are many, many moderate Muslims.
	You lived in the Muslim world, obviously.
	You were brought up in the Muslim world.
	What do you think the actual breakdown worldwide looks like?
	I think in terms of breakdown, I use the distinction between Islam and Muslims.
	Islam as a set of ideas and the religion itself, but also the political aspects of that religion.
	And I say that there is one Islam.
	But there are different sets of Muslims.
	There are 1.5 billion Muslims in the world, and there's one set that when they invoke the Prophet Muhammad, the founder of Islam, and the Holy Quran, which is the holy scripture of Islam, they invoke events that took place in Mecca in the 7th century.
	And that is when the founder of Islam, Muhammad, was going from door to door preaching.
	He wasn't using force.
	So I regard those Muslims, that subset of Muslims, as Mecca Muslims.
	And then the Prophet goes to Medina and he starts to wage war and he starts to give people in Medina the choice.
	You either get rid of your gods and your beliefs and you come to Islam or you lose your head.
	And from Medina onwards, Islam really starts to expand very, very quickly.
	And there are Muslims to this day who invoke, or when they invoke the Prophet Muhammad, that's the time that they're referring to, when Islam becomes a political tool, a military tool, and an expansionist imperial power.
	And those Muslims, that subset of Muslims, I call them the Medina Muslims.
	And then you have now a small but growing group of people in the 21st century who are saying, let's reject the teachings of Medina.
	And I call them the modifiers.
	Some people call them the reformers.
	I don't know.
	I'm sure you've heard of Majid Nawaz.
	He is a part of that group of people who are trying to reform or reject Islam as a political tool.
	They face accusations of heresy.
	They're very often threatened and left unprotected.
	But as a development, it's interesting.
	And I think they're gaining some influence among the Mecca Muslims.
	So with regard to Islam in the West, and particularly Muslims living in westernized countries, what you talk about in Pray is the high levels of crime, particularly targeting of women, associated with Muslim refugees who are essentially unvetted coming into Europe.
	Which branch of Islam that you've mentioned are these folks coming from?
	What is their belief system?
	And why does it clash so strongly with the West?
	So, Ben, the first thing I do in the book is I really make it very clear that I'm not referring to all Muslims and all Muslim men as criminals or as sex offenders against women.
	But yes, there is a group of young men who come from countries like Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, you name it.
	And they do engage in sexual offenses against women in the public space.
	And it's now becoming something of an epidemic in some of these countries.
	And yeah, when they commit these offenses, and some of them are brought to trial, they speak of women with contempt.
	They don't necessarily invoke religion.
	But when some of the political leaders and media leaders in Europe go and see imams and other religious leaders and ask either for an explanation or for help with trying to mitigate this problem, some of these imams say, well, the women should be covered.
	They shouldn't be where they get into trouble.
	And, you know, you guys, you shouldn't be selling alcohol.
	And then that becomes sort of, that sets the tone for these young men who are committing the offenses, who think that it's not something that they are doing wrong, it's the environment that should adjust to them.
	Ayaan, in just one second I want to ask you about your own personal experience with Islam, which obviously there's a very Interesting history there for those who have not heard it.
	We'll get to that in just one second.
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	So Ayaan, I want to ask you, for those who have not heard your life story and your origin story, obviously you had dealings with a lot of people who believe the Medina version of Islam.
	So what is your personal experience of Islam and then leaving Islam as you move to the West?
	When 2001, 9-11, 2001, when those terrorist attacks occurred in New York and Washington, a lot of us were trying to figure out what exactly happened, what motivated these people, and I had taken the position that they were motivated by The Medina Islam, you know, they acted on their belief and not American foreign policy or the Israeli-Palestinian question.
	These guys were driven by the desire to do what is right according to their Islamic beliefs, according to the Quran, according to the Prophet Muhammad.
	That got me into trouble, number one.
	And obviously, having said that and written that, I had to reflect on my own religious beliefs.
	I was raised as a Muslim.
	And up until that time, I still identified as a Muslim.
	But I really started to have doubts about whether I believed in the moral system that was inherited from the Prophet Muhammad.
	And my conclusion for me was, I don't believe in that anymore.
	I don't believe that the Koran is the word of God.
	It's a document written by human beings, and obviously that's the greatest sin that you can commit as a Muslim.
	And it's not just that you're committing blasphemy, but you're leaving the religion.
	And in many Muslim countries, it's a capital offense.
	But aside from what a government may do, there are also individuals who are committed to the Medina message of Islam, who then started to threaten me and decided to take matters into their hands.
	I made a film with Theo van Gogh, who was one of the well-known publicists in the Netherlands and a filmmaker.
	And I had protection at the time, provided for by the government of the Netherlands.
	He did not.
	And he was shot, stabbed, beheaded, and they left this big note for me on his body.
	And again, the man who killed Theo van Gogh, still in prison, when he came to trial,
	He made it very clear that he was motivated by his Islamic faith, not discrimination against him, not Theo van Gogh's insulting him as a person, but he said he was motivated by his religion and the fact that making the film and comments that Theo van Gogh had made about the Prophet Muhammad were blasphemous and that that needed to be punished with death.
	So why is it, do you think, that the West seems so ripe for the picking when it comes to some of this stuff?
	The very fact that you make these points is very controversial in Western countries, mainly because there's a wide variety of people who have bought into a line of thought that says that to even talk about this stuff is in and of itself offensive, makes the situation worse, that the West is really the creator of the situation in the first place, that the West is the great oppressor in all of this.
	What is the mindset of the West that makes it uniquely vulnerable to These sorts of behaviors in the sense that it won't defend itself against cultures that obviously despise it.
	So radical Islam and terrorist attacks that take place or that are plotted are unfolding in a context within Western society where there is a great deal of moral relativism.
	We're in the midst of these culture wars where on one side identity politics prevails.
	And according to the dictates of identity politics, multiculturalism, moral relativism, The West is held responsible for past sins, from slavery to colonialism to the Holocaust.
	And the story of Western civilization is solved only from that perspective.
	Just, you know, a series of terrible things, heinous offenses against humanity that Western civilization committed.
	the other side of the story, all the good things that the West has done, that is not told or it is suppressed. And in that context, it becomes, you know, you open the door for exploitation, and the radical Islamists who are pushing their political agenda through peaceful means called da'wah or through violence called jihad, they exploit that opening.
	And by the way, it's not just the radical Islamists.
	Both China and Russia and other adversaries are happy to exploit that sort of thing.
	But again, Ben, you are absolutely right to pose that question because it's I don't think that radical Islamic doctrine or its agenda is capable of defeating Western society.
	It's just militarily, economically not capable of doing that.
	But if the West implodes, that's going to come from the inside.
	That does raise the question that I hear very often and is very often expressed, which is why is it that there seems to be almost a common cause between left-wing identitarians, people who consider themselves to be feminist and in favor of transgender rights or gay rights, and Radical Muslims.
	Why isn't there a rift in that particular coalition?
	The coalition makes no sense.
	You have people who consider themselves defenders of women's rights who will get extremely offended anytime statistics like the one you mentioned in your book are mentioned.
	You'll have defenders of gay rights who suggest that Muslim crimes that take place or crimes by radical Muslims in Western societies are the fault of the West, even if those crimes target women and gay people.
	So why is that coalition even not only durable, why is it ascendant?
	It's because we don't challenge where these two movements, these two ideologies, where they part ways.
	So they have a lot of things in common.
	The identitarians, these days we call them woke.
	So the woke despise anyone who disagrees with them.
	They're committed to their orthodoxy.
	They use that same playbook of smearing people's characters, committing character assassination and doing anything they can absolutely to shut down debate.
	And their political agenda in many ways is similar to that of the radical Islamists because they want to bring the house down.
	They complain that there is structural racism and structural injustice and the only way to correct those injustices is by bringing down the master's house.
	And that is a commitment that they share with the radical Islamists.
	So you can see where they come together and work together.
	But very few people have taken the opportunity to actually challenge them on those issues because radical Islamists, as you know, see women as inferior.
	Radical Islamists, I don't think they've even recognized that there's such a thing as transgender.
	In many Muslim countries and according to radical Islamists, homosexuals, LGBT people, actually, that's a capital offense and they should be killed or imprisoned.
	And so no one has really taken them, the Islamists and the identity politics people, and put them in a place that makes it very clear to them, those two groups, that there is some things they have in common, but there are some Pretty major things that they don't.
	I've seen a few incidents, for instance, in the United Kingdom, in some elementary or high school situations where sex education is recommended or demanded by these schools and then the Islamists come in and shut that down, or where they try to make a case for tolerance towards LGBT communities and the Islamists come and they shut that down.
	So I've seen incidents like that.
	And obviously, I think you're familiar with the history of Iran, where a leftist movement was very happy with overthrowing the Shah, but they didn't expect the Islamists to take control.
	And when the Islamists took control of government, they obviously suppressed and shut down the leftists, threw them in prison and executed them.
	And so for the moment, I think in that relationship or so-called alliance between the far left and the Islamists, So in a second, I want to ask you about how various governments have essentially been participating in a rather widespread cover-up of the extent of the problem when it comes to criminal activity by radical Muslims in their societies.
	We'll get to that in just a second.
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	Let's talk for a second about what governments have been doing in order to cover up the impact of some of the lack of assimilation that's been happening in Europe.
	Because it turns out that, as you report, Medina Muslims are having a lot of trouble assimilating into European values because there's a fundamental disconnect there.
	But governments seem to have an interest right now in covering up that fundamental disconnect.
	That's right.
	So most of these European governments are made up of coalitions usually.
	And what you find is that political parties on the center left and some of them even far left are convinced that any kind of Social-cultural criticism is going to exacerbate racism and stigmatize Muslim minorities, and so they want to steer clear of any social-cultural factors.
	That leaves the center-right parties With, again, the accusations that they are bigoted and racist and xenophobic and anti-immigrant.
	And so for decades, there's been that gridlock where almost nothing moves when it comes to things that the established parties should be doing.
	What I see in the subject of prey, for instance, this molestation of women and making the public space unsafe for women, That that is covered up using the exact same rulebook of, you know, if we talk about these things, if it comes to the open, these minorities are going to be stigmatized.
	But they are stigmatized anyway.
	Radical, populist, right-wing parties are growing very quickly and are becoming very powerful because voters have almost nowhere else to go.
	And the radical Islamists who are well established in some of these countries are also becoming stronger.
	And so this whole argument that we need to be politically correct and we need to cover up in order to avoid stigmatizing Muslim minorities is, it's just not working.
	It's been counterproductive.
	A lot of the statistics seem pretty hard to come by.
	What is the extent of the problem with regard to crime increases, and how does that correlate with the increase in populations of Medina Muslims, as you call them?
	So because of this cover-up, some of these governments will not tell you.
	They just, either they don't collect the data, or if they do, they don't make the data public.
	So countries like France, Germany, the UK, some of these larger countries, they just Say, you know, sexual violence is a universal thing.
	It happens everywhere.
	There's really nothing specific to some of these minority groups, especially Muslim communities.
	But there are countries who are different and who have started to collect data, at least by noting down the nationality or the immigration status of the individuals involved.
	One example is Denmark.
	Another example is Austria.
	And there you see really not just an explosion in terms of the offenses committed against women in the public space by people they don't know, but that in the case of Austria, for instance, Muslim immigrants are less than 1% or asylum seekers.
	I'm talking about the last wave of 2015.
	They're less than 1% of the population, but are responsible for, I think in the year 2017, it was 11% of offenses that in 2018 jumped up to nearly 55% of sexual offenses.
	that in 2018 jumped up to nearly 55% of sexual offenses.
	I mean, think about that.
	And similar stats in Denmark.
	And then it really becomes impossible to cover up.
	And so countries like Austria have spoken of a rape epidemic.
	they've become more open and they have developed programs of integrating or trying to assimilate these young men into society aside from, you know, prosecutions and convictions.
	Same thing in Denmark.
	And so what you see is the countries that bring these problems into the open and deal with it, Oh.
	There is more social cohesion, less antagonism towards immigrants, and there is a sense that voters can trust their governments because their governments are really dealing with the problem, as opposed to the other countries that try to mask it and sweep everything under the carpet.
	Even some of the situations that have become widely known are absolutely shocking.
	Obviously, the one that comes to mind is the situation in Rotherham in England, in which there was an actual grooming cell in which Medina Muslims were essentially grooming underage people for sexual activity, and that appears to have been covered up by the authorities.
	Absolutely, because the authorities were terrified that they would be called racists.
	But what these young men who were involved were of Pakistani origin, and yes, they had created sort of almost a family syndicate, criminal syndicate, to pray on underage girls, but they were choosing these underage girls based on their skin color.
	So that was a really racist act in itself.
	They wouldn't go after Muslim girls because there would be repercussions, of course.
	And most Muslim girls, most of them are kept inside and their movements are controlled.
	So it's way more difficult for them to go after immigrant girls.
	But they were going after these girls and committing some of the most atrocious crimes against them.
	And the British government allowed this to go on and on and on for years.
	And not just in Rotterdam, it happened in Telford, it happened in Oxford, it happened in all sorts of other places.
	These children were betrayed.
	The crimes continued.
	The men who were committing the crimes felt that they could get away with it, and there was this buzz that it's something you can do with no consequences.
	And the government, the British government, failed to protect these children for fear of being called racist.
	And the accusations of racism haven't abated, and they won't.
	One of the things that I think has been most amazing to watch, and it's happening now in the United States as well, which I want to get to in a second, is the, we've talked about briefly, the unwillingness of the authorities to defend the individual rights of their citizens in the face of the possibility they may actually be called racist.
	We saw this, you know, most obviously in the Charlie Hebdo killings.
	After the murder of a bunch of staffers at the French satirical magazine, there was this initial outburst of support from members of the left saying, we are all Charlie Hebdo.
	I wonder if that would happen today.
	I wonder if there were a massacre at a magazine targeted by radical Islamists who were doing so on the basis of having been offended by cartoons, whether they wouldn't instead be a stronger counter-movement.
	There was at the time too.
	Well, the movement to curtail free speech is alive and well, and it's been growing.
	And again, the Islamists have been exploiting it, bringing in the word Islamophobia and lobbying for all sorts of legislation against so-called hate crimes.
	And that's just an attempt to shut up.
	decent and serious debate on these issues.
	But if you look at the situation in France, so for decades we were told, don't talk about these issues because it's going to empower the far right.
	Well, the far right is empowered.
	Marie Le Pen's Front National party is now the second largest party.
	And according to the polls in the previous election, there was a chance that she could have won the presidency.
	And in the coming elections of next year, there is again an even bigger chance that she can win those elections and become the president of France.
	So the argument that the extreme right wing is going to grow is just false or only grows if you put a taboo on these issues.
	Aside from that, the current president, who is, I would say, squarely in the center, has said that we have a very big problem in France, where a large number of the population is separating itself from the rest of France, led by radical Islamists to reject all things French, the laws, the norms, the values.
	And a problem that in my view, you know, about 30 years ago was smallish and could have been prevented is now this entrenched issue where even though they are passing legislation to mitigate that separatism, Abolishing homeschooling, demanding all sorts of things to ensure that that separation, that these ghettos don't break away.
	It's still, in my view, too little too late.
	But it makes the argument that making things taboo and legislating hate speech is not going to take the problem away.
	So in a second, I want to ask you about your experiences in the United States, trying to speak on college campuses, trying to speak freely.
	We'll get to that in just one moment.
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	All right, so let's talk about your experience on American college campuses, because it does speak to something that is sort of broader that's been happening in the West.
	And it is not specifically governmental policy driven, because governmental policy is usually downstream of culture.
	We now seem to be a culture that values a sense of offense, that values victimization, that values the feelings of people more than it does the rights of individuals.
	And obviously this is applied to you.
	I remember when you were essentially barred from speaking at Brandeis University for the great crime of being an alleged Islamophobe. How prevalent do you think this ideology is on campus then how far do you think that that is spread into American society more broadly? I think it is very concerning maybe even alarming that in the United States and across Western society we have a growing group of
	people who subscribe to this ideology of they call it a critical justice theory or critical race theory.
	Again, I think the general public just calls it woke because that's what they call themselves.
	But in this ideology, yes, it's all about feelings.
	It's about subjectivity.
	There is no universal truth.
	And like we spoke about earlier, they do hate America and Western civilization, not just the terrible things that we did in the past, but even the good things.
	We're all racists, we're Islamophobes, we're transphobes, we're this phobic and that phobic, and there's a rejection by the people who subscribe to this ideology of having any kind of objective truth where we can agree on what exactly racism is so that we can all fight it or what exactly, you know, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, what these things are so that we can fight it.
	There is a corruption of language. There is a corruption of the curriculum of middle school, high school, colleges.
	And I don't think this is going to end well if we carry on this way, because in my view, that is how the closing of minds takes place.
	We're basically closing the minds of young people.
	People now in college, and the reason why they don't want me to come and speak in some of these colleges, or the reason why they don't want you to go and speak in these colleges, is because you're going to violate their safe spaces.
	We're accused of microaggressions.
	I've been doing this book promotion that is really about women's rights, and women's magazines won't have me because some of their employees might not feel safe.
	So it's getting pretty ridiculous.
	And I think four or five years ago, I used to laugh it off.
	And now watching people being canceled, people losing their livelihoods, people in academic life saying, you know, I wanted to do research on this topic, but I don't think I'm going to do it anymore because I don't want to deal with the trouble that that's going to cause me.
	So this is now getting not just into free speech, it's getting into academic freedom.
	It is a hostility to science.
	It's a hostility to the Constitution, which we all think is, in my view, the best document ever devised, the best political document ever devised.
	So I'm more than concerned.
	I think it's alarming.
	I hope that people now wake up and understand that it's not just something that you can let it just happen.
	It's a fad.
	It's going to blow.
	It won't.
	It's getting worse and worse.
	It does seem like it's getting worse and worse.
	And I think a lot of that has to do with just an insane amount of ingratitude by people who have grown up in this society.
	I think one of the great problems with growing up in a prosperous society where essentially you can expect that when you are born you're going to live 80 long years minimum, and that you're going to be able to go to a good school, that if you work hard you'll be able to go to college, you'll be able to get a job, you'll be able to live whatever sexual lifestyle you want, is that you tend to think that these things are the natural state of humankind.
	You tend to think that that is all natural, and that all the bad stuff, that's unique to your society.
	And so when something bad happens in society, you immediately look at society as the problem.
	It's our system that is the problem, whereas It seems to me that if you've had any sort of outside view of any country other than the United States, you can quickly see that actually all the wonderful things about the United States and about the West more generally are not the natural state of mankind.
	They're quite unnatural and they took a while to develop and stripping away the central premises of these societies is likely to lead to a complete collapse.
	Absolutely.
	And I think if young people growing up in America or in any other Western society, if they feel that their societies are unjust and terrible places to live in, I think the best program would be for them to spend some time in other countries where life is different.
	So some of the women who say, oh my gosh, it's terrible to be a woman in the United States, I would say, spend a few months in Afghanistan or in any country in the Middle East.
	try and take some time off and go to various parts of Africa and let's see what you come back with.
	Go find a place that's actually better than where you live, where the laws are better, the values are better, the norms are better, and then report back.
	And I think if it were an integrated part of the college curriculum or a gap year after you leave high school, I think people would come back really sober and appreciative of what they have.
	And definitely, Ben, you know, we've got to improve on.
	On the situation in America, we have inequality, we have injustices, we have racism, we have all of these problems.
	None of us are denying that.
	It's just that A, the answer is not to destroy the entire framework and the entire structure of American society.
	And B, there are ways of doing it within the system, there are ways of trying to achieve improvements within the system we have, rather than argue and advocate for the complete destruction of what we have.
	It does seem like it's an ideological revolution versus people who actually want to effectuate change.
	If you want to effectuate change and you see a problem, then I've said this many times throughout my career, if you name a problem with great specificity and you provide the data to back up that it is indeed a problem that is curable, then it's going to be very easy to mobilize people on the side of that cure as a general rule.
	What makes it very difficult is when people throw out these semantically overloaded terms, and these bizarre sort of sloganeering phrases, and then suggest that the solution is to overturn the entire system, and when you provide data to suggest that maybe the problem is not what they are saying the problem is, then you are castigated for obviously not being aware of your own internalized racism.
	At a certain point, this does reach cult levels, and these sort of anti-racist movements in the United States particularly seems to be, at this point, a cult, when you have people like Ibram Kendi saying things like, you denying that you are racist is proof that you are a racist.
	That is the same thing as witch-burning.
	Absolutely.
	And Ibram Kendi, Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility, they are absolutely not interested in debate.
	They're not interested in discussion.
	In my view, they're not even interested in ending racism because they refuse to define it.
	Ibram Kendi goes from refining it as something that affects people to, it's not about people, he said, it's about policies.
	And then you have this jump from one to the other.
	Again, this corruption of language, this circular reasoning, you are white, therefore you are racist.
	If you say I'm not, then you are suffering from white fragility.
	And so round and round we go.
	And that has a cult-like quality to it.
	And it also has a cult-like following to it.
	And if I look at some of the people who are animated by this, these are middle-class young white people, mostly young white people.
	It's not, there are not many Hispanics or African-Americans or other immigrants from other parts of the world who are drawn to this cult.
	and woke ideology. It's mainly white middle class people.
	Some, you know, I'm not an expert.
	I'm not a sociologist or a psychologist or a psychiatrist, but someone really needs to try and explain why this is the case.
	And again, I've tried to look at Black Lives Matter as an organization, as a movement.
	I've been on their website.
	Just curious, because in the summer we had the killing of George Floyd, a terrible incident.
	And I go on their website, and I don't find anything on that website and in their message that I would say would improve the lives of black people right now.
	There are things in there such as the abolition of the nuclear family.
	If you really care about the African American community, one thing you would not do would be to suggest that the nuclear family be abolished.
	Because one of the huge problems we have is these absent fathers, teenage pregnancies.
	There is that type of social blight where the first step would be actually to advocate for the nuclear family.
	They're advocating for reparations.
	This is so cosmic and abstract.
	It's not something that an African-American kid in Texas or in Chicago or in New York is going to feel like that changes my situation right now.
	They're against charter schools.
	They're against the police.
	They want to defund the police.
	So you have to ask yourself, why is this huge contradiction?
	It's really, if they really, really care about black people, then why are they advocating for all the things that would ruin black families and black communities?
	The answer is they're not interested in black communities.
	They're interested in getting to power by exploiting vulnerable communities like blacks, like transgender communities, like women, and so on and so forth.
	So these are not people, it's not an ideology or a cult that's interested in justice or bringing about justice.
	It's only for them to get power.
	And I think it really is about power dynamics.
	In a second, I want to ask you about the formation of what I think is really a new ruling class in the United States.
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	So, one of the things, Ayan, that I've been talking about a lot these days is the renormalization of America.
	There's this idea that if you have an intransigent minority that you can completely renormalize institutions from the inside.
	It's something that Nassim Nicholas Taleb has talked about.
	This idea that it only takes a small coterie of people to renormalize an entire institution.
	All you need is a bunch of people in the middle who are willing to say nothing and a small group of very intransigent people who are willing to push as hard as humanly possible When you do that, you can renormalize institutions and you can then institute a gatekeeping protocol whereby if people don't mirror your language, they're just not allowed to be part of the new ruling class.
	It seems to me that so much of what we are talking about right now is in fact about that.
	It's about people knowing what words to say.
	You go to college these days not to actually learn a skill set or to learn how to do a job.
	You learn to use the sort of language that you need to use in order to get ahead.
	And this means putting pronouns in your Twitter bio and it means using the term Latinx as opposed to Latino.
	And it means posting a black square on your Instagram page in the middle of the Black Lives Matter protests.
	And none of this is really about improving individual lives.
	A lot more of it has to do with claiming membership in a sort of non-secret society of people who are in the know about the evils of the American system.
	That's exactly why I use the word alarming and why I said in, you know, a few years ago we were all amused by it.
	And now it's not amusing, it's alarming.
	Yes, it's a small group, but it is intransigent.
	They're determined and they've frightened most other people into silence or acquiescence or just looking away and pretending there's nothing going on while they take control of institutions.
	And that is why I said it's alarming.
	That's precisely what we've seen In societies that were infiltrated by such tiny groups, such as radical Islamists.
	You know, when I talk to some of my Arab friends, they say, you know, things were more modern and more liberal and more relaxed and more tolerant in the 50s and 1960s and in the 70s than they are today.
	And that is because that small minority of Islamists Credibly determined, were able to get what they wanted and take over institutions because they were able to frighten the masses.
	They were able to frighten the middle classes.
	They were able to frighten corporations and leaders into either towing their line or staying silent and letting things happen.
	And that's exactly why I use the word alarming.
	Even though these woke people The language they use, the demands that they make are outrageous, they're ridiculous, and sometimes we think they're funny, but it's not funny.
	And I think it's time we actually wake up.
	So Ayaan, you've joined a new group called the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism.
	It has a wide variety of people from all sides of the political aisle.
	Mainly, they seem to be sort of from the classical liberal category.
	People who wouldn't consider themselves Republicans in American politics probably would vote Democrat overall if they were just aligning with a particular you know, governmental ideology, but who are rejecting the woke.
	It seems to me that this is the only possibility for saving the West is not on the right. The right believes what the right believes. And we on, you know, I consider myself obviously a conservative.
	We who are openly conservative have long held out against the sort of predations of the radical woke left and the multicultural ethos they've been pushing.
	But there are a lot of folks who are liberal in the sense that they are sort of for bigger government. They want nationalized health care. They want higher taxes, more redistributionism, but also used to be defenders of individual rights. And that group seems to be splitting almost directly down the middle.
	There are some people who are, who are liberal, who are.
	Are, you know, signing Harper's Weekly letters and joining the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism.
	And then there are other liberals who have decided to go along with the woke because the woke have many of the same political priorities they do.
	So that's exactly it.
	So I did join FAIR.
	And I think FAIR as an organization is deliberately made up of people of different political affiliations, left, right, center.
	Because all of us who really understand what the woke ideology is about also understand that they don't care.
	The woke do not care whether you are center left or center right.
	They want to bring the entire structure down.
	Now, it's also true that this woke ideology has come out of the left side of things.
	And so, number one, I think it's people on the left, you know, I call them the sane left or the liberal left.
	They have to wake up to the fact that the Democratic Party, but also other liberal institutions, have made themselves vulnerable toward this toxic ideology of wokeism.
	On the conservative side, I think that it's not enough to be, you know, to be apathetic and say, well, that's happening to them.
	It's not happening to me.
	It's happening to all of us.
	So it is an alliance we all have to form.
	I think for a long time, at least since 1945, We truly understand what white supremacy and far-right ideologies mean and what they can lead to.
	And it's a message that we need to continue to propagate, teach younger generations.
	Don't be lured.
	Don't be seduced.
	by the ideology of white supremacists and the far right.
	But we've paid very, very little attention to some of the, you know, far left ideology or ideologies that are cropping up there, because we've always thought that whatever comes of the left is something that can be excused or tolerated, or it's just a fringe.
	People will get over it.
	It's romantic.
	And it just isn't.
	And now we're being confronted with this 1984 type You know, Orwellian dystopia that they're chasing and that in some communities, it seems as if they've achieved those things.
	I mean, the social pressure is so bad.
	Barry Weiss, who I know we're both friendly with, printed a piece over the past few weeks in which she interviewed parents of students who are going to very highfalutin private schools in a place like Harvard Westlake in L.A., where I grew up, which was widely known as the best Private high school in that part of the country.
	And parents are scared to speak up.
	They're scared to tell their kids truths, hard truths, about individual responsibility because they're afraid they're going to be called out for it, lose their livelihoods this way.
	I wonder, Ayaan, if you think that society can actually hold this way?
	Is there going to be a breaking point here?
	It seems to me that there is no possibility that the woke in the end Actually win and maintain the country as it is.
	Because that would require actual tyranny.
	It would require actual top-down dominance.
	But that doesn't mean that the country will hold.
	Well, we need a million Barry Wises and Peter Boghossians and James Lindsays and Helen Blackroses and, you know, these individuals who themselves were seared by the consequences of this ideology.
	And Barry Wise herself actually lost her livelihood.
	She had her career in the New York Times and describes, and it's chilling to see what is going on inside that newsroom and how they're going to bring this thing down.
	If you look at the small subsets of places where the woke have taken over, that tyranny is omnipresent.
	People can't express themselves, they can't criticize, they can't weigh in on whatever the institution is doing that they don't agree with.
	Now we have anonymous letters, people writing letters saying, You know, I subscribed to this ideology.
	I thought I was a part of this movement.
	And now I regret that.
	And then they describe the internal workings of that tyranny, but they won't put their name on their work because they know the consequences are dire.
	And so seeing that now in a relatively small, you know, small institution, small places, why would we want that to take over the entire country?
	So in a second, I want to ask you about what's the best way to fight back against some of this stuff, because some of us are in the awareness raising business, but it seems like if there are no institutions that mirror the awareness and they're not moving to fight back against wokeism, that we may be sort of spitting into the wind a little bit.
	We'll get to that in just one second.
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	All right, so let's talk about how we fight back against this, because one of the things that I've found is that when I talk with people who are typically, you know, Democrat voters, fairly open-minded.
	If you talk to them about this, they will acknowledge that all of this is true behind closed doors.
	But then the minute that they step out from behind closed doors, they will immediately start mirroring the priorities of the woke.
	I mean, I know that you and I have actually both been in rooms where there are people who are saying things.
	Behind closed doors that you and I actually fairly strongly agree with, and then the minute that those doors open and suddenly the cameras are let in, they are just saying exactly what they know they're supposed to say in order to get ahead.
	How do you cure that?
	How do we fight back against this?
	So I think there is the awareness aspect, which we've covered.
	I think there is the legislation aspects.
	I think one of the last acts of the Trump administration was to say, we're not going to allow the spread of the critical theory, critical race, critical justice propaganda.
	In federal government, and we are not going to pay for that with taxpayer money.
	So there's that kind of big tool that you need.
	I think we also need to use tools such as litigation.
	America's after all a country where if we disagree, we take things to the courts and allow the courts to decide.
	I mean, some of the, for instance, Barry White has been called a Nazi by her colleagues.
	Why is that not workplace harassment?
	And if people are afraid of losing their livelihoods because they're being called racists or they're being forced to take unconscious bias classes, that is something that I think is, at this stage, ripe for litigation, if those who are making the accusation cannot prove the charges of racism and other bigotry.
	And these charges, as you've seen, With your friends and mine too, they do lead people to have all sorts of psychological and mental health problems.
	I wouldn't want to be accused of racism.
	It's terrible.
	And imagine your colleagues doing that and your colleagues ostracizing you and being demoted.
	I've heard of college students who say, this isn't the paper that I wanted to write.
	I wrote this paper with this content because if I write what I exactly feel about a certain topic, I'm going to get a C or a D or an F. If I want to get an A, then I have to produce a walk paper.
	Can you imagine that level of corruption?
	And so the pushback would be to use every peaceful tool possible that we have in our toolbox.
	And as the problem gets bigger and as more and more people become aware of it, I think those tools are going to be used.
	So it seems like right now, one of the things that's happening is that we have a battle on the right against people who are reactionary, reacting solely to the woke.
	They're more anti-left than they are in favor of necessarily individual rights.
	And that seems like at least a minority movement on the right.
	Then you have the woke on the left.
	And so I guess the broader question that I have for you, Ayan, is Is this just an inherent weakness of secular societies?
	Because classical liberalism, you know, the founding fathers of the United States originally assumed that classical liberalism and individual rights rested on a certain Judeo-Christian moral foundation.
	And that as that disintegrated, that eventually it would just become competition among individuals for power and who could grab the levers of power and then use those levers of power against one another.
	that if there was no social cohesion on any basis, other than a sort of waspish, atomistic libertarianism, that that would eventually come apart.
	Do you think that that's true?
	Do you think that a secular society can preserve itself in the face of what appear to be cult-like threats from the woke, which is essentially a religious threat from the woke or in the face of an intransigent, radical Islam in particular situations?
	Is secularism just bound to be torn apart by sort of more adamant and more radical ideologies?
	I think that the saying, you know, that if you want to preserve liberty, it's an eternal struggle.
	It is something that you have to be aware of all the time.
	That holds true to this day.
	And whether a society is secular or not, if a society is free, and if the fundamental principle of that society is based on freedom and liberty, then the assumption is that that eternal vigilance is warranted.
	I think bad ideas and bad ideologies are just part of being human.
	We were dealing with radical Islamic ideology and still are to a certain extent, and then up comes this woke ideology that is sort of recycled Marxism or neo-Marxism, which we're familiar with.
	Is it easier for these ideologies, especially the quasi-religious types of things, to emerge and find a foothold in secular societies?
	I think the answer to that is true.
	That if you have your own religion, Judaism or Christianity or whatever, you have your own belief community, it becomes difficult for other people to seduce you with ideologies.
	You know, you think, I've already got a religion.
	I don't need your religion.
	You also, if you, I think, come up, come out of a religious background, as I do, you recognize a religion when you see it.
	You know, A cult and that cultish characteristics of the woke.
	I think anybody who's grown up in any serious religion can see that this is a religious, a quasi-religious thing.
	But I'm very careful because I'm not an expert on this topic, but I do listen to both sides.
	I want to be very careful that I don't say, oh, the solution to the problem we're having right now is because we've drifted away from religion, we have to go back to religions.
	I think that's first of all not possible, but even if it were possible, I think wokeism and other bad ideologies will emerge anyway.
	And so I prefer to go back to that truth, truism, that if you want to preserve a liberal society, you do have to do it with constant vigilance.
	You just can't get complacent, unfortunately.
	Diane, I want to ask you also about the sort of institutions that have been cramming this down.
	We've talked a lot about various governments that have been cramming this down, universities.
	One of the gravest threats that we've touched on, but I want to get your take on it more broadly, is the corporate threat to freedom.
	That as we have more and more our rights available, made available through giant corporations, the social media companies, the Amazons of the world, that does make it very easy for a few people who are badly motivated or scared into doing bad things to simply hit a delete button And suddenly restrict our ability to use our rights.
	Is there a way to curb that?
	How big is the threat that we should be looking at when it comes to, for example, social media or Amazon digitally book burning Abigail Schreier's book or Ryan Anderson's book or things like that?
	So the big tech issue, big tech monopolies.
	I have a friend, Vivek Ramaswamy, who says back in the day when we talked about monopolies, it was price fixing that we had to worry about.
	And today in the 21st century, what we have to worry about is idea fixing.
	So, I mean, I'm not an economist, but superficially what we all know is that A monopoly is really bad for consumers.
	And aside from anti-trust laws, and again, I can't get into the ins and outs of that because I don't know very much about it, but I think having monopolies is a bad thing.
	What we need is market competition.
	And I'm very reluctant to have the government involved in coming in as the rescuer.
	Because as you and I know, what the government does, it already does terribly.
	And so giving them more powers, especially on issues of free speech, that worries me a bit.
	But I think what you and I also agree on is a private company can do whatever a private company wants to.
	If they want to ban a book, they can ban a book.
	The answer has to be in market competition.
	And I think that curtailing Of competition.
	That is the real problem.
	And that's something that has to be looked into.
	Because, again, my book is published by HarperCollins.
	But others have refused to do it.
	And the reasons that they gave me for that is, you know, they were afraid of Islamist threats.
	They were afraid of this, that and the other.
	But as long as you go, you can go somewhere else, you can go to another vendor, then There is no problem.
	But we have a problem now because we have these four or five big companies, and it's difficult for something else to come up.
	That is a problem.
	Do you think that the tide is going to turn here?
	Is there going to be a backlash?
	I mean, obviously, we've seen a sort of populist backlash in Europe, but I'm not sure that's the kind of backlash any of us are really looking for specifically.
	We have seen a backlash here.
	I think what led to the election of Donald Trump in 2016 was a backlash against, at the time, I don't remember, we used the word walkism, but the prevailing phrase was political correctness.
	So if, you know, free populations, if we feel like we can't speak, we can't say what we need to say, and we're called deplorables and looked down upon, then people Will vote with their feet they leave the parties that are calling them these names One thing that gives me hope
	Is the emergence of podcasts, Substack, you know, all of these market-driven ways of exchanging information that established organizations refuse to publish.
	So instead of me having to call the New York Times all the time, can you please publish this op-ed?
	Now we are starting our own podcasts, our own newsletters, we're blogging, we are communicating with one another using the market forces to communicate information and opinion.
	that is censored away from other places.
	I hope that that is the true backlash.
	And I've heard and read about people who are saying maybe podcasts should also be stopped or controlled or restrained or, you know, and again, let's be aware of that and let's push back against that.
	The only, when we say, you know, vigilance, freedom needs constant vigilance, It also needs the constant protection of the freedom of speech, the freedom to exchange ideas without fear.
	And here we are.
	I mean, we are not on any of the big, powerful broadcasting corporations.
	You've got your own thing.
	And I've started my own thing, and all the people we know, they've started their own thing.
	And I think their lies, at least in terms of increasing the awareness of problems, I think there we have a solution and a proper backlash.
	So I do want to ask you a few final questions, starting with, how do you deal with all the incoming?
	Because very few people in the West have experienced the kind of incoming that you've had to experience in terms of being targeted for violent threats, and then just the amount of flack you've taken.
	If you'd like to hear Ayaan Hirsi Ali's answers, however, you have to be a Daily Wire member, head on over to dailywire.com, click subscribe, you can hear the rest of our conversation over there.
	Ayaan Hirsi Ali, it's an honor and a pleasure to have you here on the Sunday special.
	Really appreciate your time.
	Ben, thank you very, very much for having me.
	That was wonderful.
	Everyone, make sure to go out and get a copy of Ayaan's new book, Pray, Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women's Rights.
	Ayaan, thank you so much for joining the show.
	It's been an honor and a pleasure.
	Thank you very much for having me.
	Thank you.
	Our guests are booked by Caitlin Maynard.
	Editing is by Jim Nickel.
	Audio is mixed by Mike Koromina.
	Hair and makeup is by Fabiola Cristina.
	Title graphics are by Cynthia Angulo.
	The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire production.

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