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May 12, 2024 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:08:27
Oppression to Empowerment | Ayaan Hirsi Ali
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Born in Mogadishu, Somalia in 1969, Ayaan Hirsi Ali's journey is a testament to the resilience of the human spirit.
Born into a devout Somali Muslim family, Ayaan received a strict Muslim education and, in 1992, was married, against her will, to a distant cousin.
Fleeing from this forced marriage, armed only with intellectual curiosity and unwavering determination, she sought refuge in the Netherlands.
It was here that she found her voice, her passion for women's rights, and her commitment to challenging the status quo.
As a member of the Dutch parliament, Ayaan Hirsi Ali became a prominent voice for reform within Islam and a fierce critic of the failures of multiculturalism.
Her collaboration on the film's submission with director Theo van Gogh, who was tragically murdered for his work, brought international attention to the plight of Muslim women and the need for cultural introspection within Western societies.
Since then, Ayaan Hirsi Ali has dedicated her life to advocating for the rights of women, minorities, and dissidents living under oppressive regimes.
Today, Ayaan's insights into the dangers of political Islamism, the need for reform within Muslim communities, and the defense of Western values are more relevant than ever.
In this special conversation, we have the privilege of delving into Ayaan's extraordinary life journey, her groundbreaking work in promoting freedom and equality, and her latest reflections on the state of the world.
From the rise of radical ideologies to the challenges facing liberal democracies, we'll explore the complexities of our modern age through the lens of one of its most fearless and insightful voices.
So join us for what promises to be a thought-provoking and enlightening discussion with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, here on the
Sunday Special.
Ayaan, thank you so much for taking the time.
It's wonderful to see you.
Folks, if you've not checked out Ayaan Hirsi Ali's Substack yet, you absolutely should.
So, Ayaan, I want to start with what may be the biggest crisis facing the West, and there are really two aspects of this.
One is a failure of the West to understand itself, and one is a failure of the West to understand other parts of the world.
There's this sort of peculiar arrogance and I don't know, centrality, self-centrality to the West view of itself that everybody thinks the way that we do, but obviously your story is a story about growing up in a place that is not the West and how you journeyed from there through the West through a series of various iterations.
What can you tell people who are born in the West about the way that large parts of the rest of the world think?
Well, let me start by the first part of your question, which is, what's the biggest challenge that's facing the West?
And in my view, the biggest challenge by far is the West's insecurity about its own legacy, about its own Judeo-Christian traditions, about the institutions it has built, about its own prosperity and the values that led to that prosperity.
At some point, the West has allowed itself to feel guilty, and that guilt was weaponized against it.
And we now face these, in my view again, formidable, or they've become formidable over time.
These three forces that we talk about all the time, the Chinese Communist Party, And it's ideology that is in some ways a resurgence of communism, and in other ways it's a sort of a warping of capitalism where they gain a lot of money to then desire to be the world's hegemon.
Authoritarian Putin, Russia, and of course the Islamist threat today projected by the Islamic Republic of Iran.
And you see this incredible obsession with the destruction of Israel.
Israel is the only democracy, the only Western society in the Middle East, and it's our ally in both the European powers and America.
We've promised over and over again that we will secure Israel's future, and that's been constantly challenged.
I don't know how broad I can go, but I think the key point is the West's insecurity about its own values, norms, institutions, its own legacy.
So why do you think that the West has lost its way?
There are a lot of people who posit that it's a loss of religious faith.
There are a lot of people who posit that in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, the West basically has no confidence in its own ability to shape the world.
Where do you place the blame for the West having lost its confidence?
It's both, but I think the loss of faith and the loss of faith in the Christian God and its own Judeo-Christian traditions, I think that is a very, very important point that was neglected and maybe so neglected to the point where we literally are on the brink of losing everything.
I woke up to this Not so long ago.
And I remember a few years ago saying, oh no, religion, just like Christopher Hitchens, you know, most religions are the same.
They are a source of irrationality and a source of oppression and subjugation and so on.
And that was a mistake.
I admit to my own stupidity.
And in this case, I just want to invite everyone to Do a rethink and to see where the values that are grounded in, yes, antiquity, the Greeks, what we inherited from the Romans, but through the Christian period to what we have now and what we stand to lose.
And I don't think we've had enough conversations about where that got us and how we've neglected those institutions, those ideas, and how we've allowed a warping of those ideas, especially the idea, the concept of justice, to be used as a weapon to destroy everything that the West stands for.
And to invite us into what?
That's always the question.
So you want justice in the name of Islam.
What exactly does that look like?
Does it look like today's Iran?
Does it look like Saudi Arabia?
Does it look like Nigeria?
You know, does it look like Afghanistan?
What exactly does it look like to live in the Islamic State?
We've got to ask that question and boldly make the comparison between these two different societies and the values that underpin these societies.
And I think a majority of humanity knows exactly.
This is one of the things that makes your story so fascinating is that, again, to get back to where I started, the West is really blind to the fact that not everybody thinks like Westerners.
And so you see this in the media coverage of various conflicts around the world.
Most obvious recently is the case of Israel, where the assumption is That Hamas must be some sort of rational actor.
Iran must be a rational actor.
They love their kids too, and they just want the same sorts of things that the Israelis want.
So why do they have to have this cycle of violence?
And if we just put enough pressure as the West on the Israelis to make concessions, eventually there will be a Palestinian state, and that will solve all of the problems, and everybody will just live happily ever after together.
But you obviously grew up in the Islamic world, and so you know something that Westerners don't, which is that people don't think the same way all across the world.
They think very differently.
What was it like growing up in the Islamic world?
They're rational, and it's a different rationale.
And it's, you know, you sing to a different tune.
So growing up as a Muslim, what it boils down to be a Muslim is to submit to the will of Allah.
And what that entails, that's documented in scripture, it is the Holy Quran, it's the Hadith, the legacy that's left by the Prophet Muhammad, and it's the Seerah, it's the biography of the Prophet Muhammad.
And if you take that together, along with 1400 years of culture and civilization, what you get is the Muslim majority countries that we have.
And it is an idea of a hierarchy where, of course, you submit to Allah, but who represents Allah?
Who represents God on earth?
So it's the ruler, and you have to agree to authoritarian rule without question, because, you know, the supreme ayatollah says that he speaks for Allah.
In other words, he puts himself on Allah's throne.
And then the wife obeys the husband without question.
It's just different forms of subjugation.
And as a child, I wasn't allowed to ask questions.
There's no freedom of conscience.
There's no freedom of speech.
When the Muslim Brotherhood, as a teenager, when they came to our neighbourhoods, I think of that as a classic exercise in subversion, because we identified as Muslims, all of us, my friends, my neighbours, all of us who are Muslim, we identified as Muslims.
But they brought a different flavour of Islam, where they said, the way you practice your faith is all wrong.
They came steeped in radicalization from Saudi Arabia and from Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood, some of them also came from Iran.
And from one day to the next, we were taught Instead of just believing, we had to practice.
And to practice meant to do things, not just to say things.
And one of the key components was to hate the unbeliever, invite the unbeliever to Islam.
And if they refuse, if they reject that invitation, that call to dawah, then they are your enemy.
So the concept of enemy was explained to us.
And take it one level further, antisemitism, what we call it, I've never heard of antisemitism before, but it was the hatred of the Jew, because the Jew was the corrupt of the land, corrupt of the word of God, the Jew was evil.
And so, before I had even met any Jewish person, or knew of the existence of Jewish people as human beings, I was programmed to think of Jews as monsters, as a synonym for the devil.
I've got a little anecdote here where, you know, just to tell you like how far-reaching it was, when as children you curse, I think in the Western world you use the F-word, you use the S-word, that was discouraged.
It was bad manners.
So what was the right way to say, ouch?
it was to say, La'anatiyahut,
Cursi Jew.
It was that far reaching, then it becomes really a part of you.
And so, when I look at what's going on today, this explosion of what looks like sudden anti-Semitism, it's not so sudden.
It's decades of indoctrination, using the mosque, using the madrasa, using the neighborhood, and as technology advanced, I remember the days these things were spread with the cassette tape.
Do you remember those cassette tapes?
And now we have AI.
So every new technology is used by the Islamists to advance a utopia that's going to take us back to the 7th century and On the way to that utopia, we are to be dedicated to destroying the state of Israel, the idea of Zionism, and Jews in general.
And to me, it's so important that every Muslim who grew up like I did, and who has emancipated themselves from this doctrine of hatred, should come forward today.
And speak about it, and be honest about it, and decry it, and come forward and defend the State of Israel.
So, you were in the Islamic world, obviously you then escaped to Europe, and you talk about this in your book, so I want you to explain to folks who may not know your story how that happened, and you move toward atheism, because, of course, if you grow up in a deeply repressive and subjugation-oriented culture, you are going to move away from religion, you see this in all religions, But particularly with an upbringing like yours.
And you didn't find what you were looking for in atheism, but that's getting ahead of the story.
So how exactly did you get to Europe and what was your experience as an open atheist in the West?
And why did you eventually end up finding that insufficient?
So I came to Europe in 1992.
I came to Europe because, again, according to the Islamic tradition within which I was growing up, my father had decided who I was going to marry.
That is perfectly common in our society.
There's nothing strange there, except I didn't agree with it.
And I saw an opportunity.
Instead, I was sent to Germany to work on the immigration papers with a relative of mine to send me to Canada.
And so in 1992, July, instead of leaving Germany to go to Canada, I went to the Netherlands and asked for asylum because a lot of Somalis were doing that.
And within six weeks, the Dutch government granted me what they call an A status or a refugee status.
And it is in the years in the Netherlands that I was really able to compare, you know, those first 22 years of my life And the society that I had come into, and that for me was the access point into Western civilization at large.
And it's a society, the first thing that struck me was women and their status.
Women were treated exactly like men.
And in some cases, they were even stronger.
They were the bosses all the time.
They dressed as they pleased.
There was no specific space that said, specific jobs just for women, others for men.
It was, everybody was doing their work.
And I thought, this is mind boggling how these women are assaulted and harassed and bullied
and driven out of the public space.
And they looked at me as if I was, you know, as if I had come from Mars.
And so in conversations with the local people, I just wanted to know more and more.
And I decided I was going to study political science and I majored in political theory.
I was much more interested in the underlying philosophy.
And it was then I was actually really optimistic because at that time, the Cold War was over.
Lots and lots of refugees like me, immigrants, asylum seekers, whatever label you want to pin on, it's just people who didn't like those societies and who are coming here.
I thought they would be just as wowed by Western society as I was.
And that Westerners, who were very generous with their welfare states, they were showering us with money, giving us shelter, medical care, all these material things.
I thought, I still think, That Westerners would say, you know how you get all these material things and all this prosperity and all this peace?
Here, the norms, the values, the structures copied from us.
And yeah, all that didn't happen.
That's not happening.
But yeah, that's my experience.
So you moved into, philosophically, away from religion and toward atheism.
As you mentioned, you sort of took the Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins view of religion, which is that all religion is irrational, all religion is a separation of human beings from their own reasoning faculty.
And can lead you down dark roads, which, of course, any religion taken to an extreme certainly can.
But one of the things that has been true of the West, as you mentioned up front, is that the West is living on the fumes of a Christian culture, of a biblical culture.
And Will Heberg, philosopher in the 1960s, he coined the term cut flower civilization.
He suggested that we're living in a cut flower civilization, that basically we've got a vase, the flowers are in the vase, they appear to be blooming, but they have no roots anymore.
And so they can live on for a little while in the water, but eventually They're going to die, and they're going to die sooner rather than later, because when you disconnect a culture from its roots, a civilization from its roots, it ceases to be able to draw on those roots.
It's no longer able to draw the nutrients from the soil.
And so when you have an atheistic West that has disconnected from its own roots. It's actually destroying the source of
its own strength and there is no strength to go up against other very rooted civilizations.
The civilizations may be wrong, the civilizations may have terrible ideas, but if they're
rooted, they have an innate strength and durability that a cut flower civilization does not. Yeah,
and to which I said to Oz, Mr. Oz, that we have seed packets.
Western civilization may have lost its roots, but the roots have gone dormant.
We have seed packets that we can spread.
No, I mean, I agree with you.
For me, 9-11, 2001, was the big shock, like it was to many people.
And before 9-11, the first 10 years, between 1992 and 2001, I was able to assimilate into Dutch society, learn the language, go to university, I mean, I lived and behaved and acted and earned like an average Dutch woman.
boyfriend. I mean, I lived and behaved and acted and earned like an average Dutch woman.
And then 9-11 happened. And I understood 9-11 to be exactly what those who perpetrated it said.
They said they did it out of religious conviction.
And then I started to have these controversial conversations with Westerners, many of them Atheists, who were saying, no, no, no, religious, that's nonsense.
They did what they did because of American foreign policy, because of economic disparities, because of Israel and the way Israel is treating the Palestinians.
I didn't buy any of those things.
But in having those conversations, I was forced then to look at myself in the mirror and ask myself, do I believe in God?
Do I really want to follow in the footsteps of Prophet Muhammad?
And that was something, it was a dissonance I couldn't live with.
And so it was either run or keep running away from it or confront it.
And in my confrontation, I concluded that there is no life after death, there is no God, and the philosophical position of atheism, there is no evidence of any of this, unless you can see it and either falsify it or verify it, that that attitude, that would be the right attitude to adopt.
And it worked for me for a while.
Until it didn't.
But I think I failed to grasp that as a human being, you need more than just material comfort.
Just like we have needs, you know, an intellectual need to answer questions, like, you know, we're driven by curiosity.
I think we also do have spiritual needs and those needs may be more serious and much deeper than many of the other needs and that's my personal conclusion and in this case I'm still
You know, my faith and my chosen faith, and I've decided I want to become a Christian, that is something I'm still exploring, reading the Bible and talking to theologians with whom I can read the Bible and actually ask these questions.
But the more, the deeper I dig into this, the more I think if a society is not rooted in faith and doesn't have that conviction, It is going to become a cut flower society.
It's going to become a cut flower civilization because you create a vacuum, which is exactly what we've done in the West in the last few decades.
And the spiritual vacuum that emerges is going to be filled in by other forces.
And there are forces that from the get-go are saying, you know, we want to destroy you, They just didn't have the military might to do it.
And you make it easier for them, actually, to come in through subversion.
That is, you know, my subset.
Restoration.
It's the reason why I call it restoration.
It's very clear now that we've been subverted and that that strategy is applied because right now there is no other society that is militarily or economically more powerful than we are.
So what you're seeing is alternative ways of weakening and subverting us, and it starts with the observation that the West has abandoned our Judeo-Christian foundational principles.
It's become a cut flower society.
When we are saying it, we are lamenting it, we are broadcasting it to the world, and so the world is obviously taking advantage of it.
We'll get to more on this in just a moment.
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One of the things I think that's been disturbing over the past multiple years, obviously, but really coming to a head over the past year, has been the obvious unity between the far left and radical Islam.
There had been these signs for decades that this alliance was going to eventually consummate itself, but you've seen really since October 7th that this alliance is quite open.
You see signs for, for example, queers for Palestine, which is inherently contradictory and insane.
There are zero queers in Palestine, and if there were, they would be immediately killed.
But the basic orientation is against exactly the culture that you're talking about.
So, on the one hand, you have a civilization that won't defend itself, and on the other hand, you have people within that civilization who do understand that disconnecting the civilization from its roots Is the only way that they can build something atop the scrap heap.
That they actually need to unify.
The only commonality between the far left and radical Islamists is their desire to tear down the civilization.
Yeah, so just one small correction.
Yes, you have one civilization that does want to defend itself, but is only using very expensive tools, military tools, surveillance tools, that are very difficult to sustain, but also that creates a backlash over and over again, whereas the others are using tactics and strategies that A long time.
It's a commitment of many decades, and that is to brainwash a generation, at least.
And I think in this case, we see the disconnection between Gen Z, the young generation that grew up with many of whom, as the most of them maybe, didn't grow up with faith and don't really know what Their roots are because they weren't taught not just faith, but also they weren't taught history properly.
And they've also been guilt-tripped.
They've been left to the wolves to pick on their minds and capture their minds, their hearts, their souls.
And that method of fighting is proving to be much more effective than the use of military tools alone.
Um, so I, I think it's now time that we, we sound the alarm.
Um, and that's, uh, we open these seed packets and we start, um, yeah, we start banding together.
Those of us who remember, um, what it was like.
And those of us who really understand what the differences are, those of us who understand what we what's at stake, what we're about to lose.
I think we should band together and fight this thing.
And it's a long-term commitment to go back and restore the ideas, restore the faith, restore the institutions that are broken or that are breaking.
So you mentioned three foreign challenges on the horizon for the West.
Russia, China, and Iran.
I want to go through those sort of in order and ask how you would deal with those.
So obviously, Russia is an aggressive foreign power.
Vladimir Putin is an authoritarian.
There's been an attempt on some parts of the weird right and some parts of the left to recast Vladimir Putin as, on the right, a sort of liberator of Christians, which is a strange take, and on the left, to treat him as though he's sort of the natural consequent of aggressive American foreign policy with regard to NATO.
How should the West be treating Vladimir Putin?
What should be the strategy the West uses to approach Putin, particularly in Ukraine where the conflict is ongoing?
I'd say the specific question of Ukraine It does.
I'll take you back to, you know, what do you do when you're confronted with an aggressor?
And in the West, you have those voices and usually they come across as the reasonable ones.
It is to appease the aggressor in order to avoid escalation.
And on the other side is, confront the aggressor, stop him.
And in the short term, you're going to have a disruption But that will buy you peace in the long term.
So either, you know, counter-offensive or this trajectory of appeasement.
Unfortunately, the Biden administration appeased Vladimir Putin early on.
And so now we find ourselves in this muddied water where should we go all in now and stop him?
I don't run the president.
I'm not the president of the United States.
But if I did, I would rally the world, those who are truly our allies, to stop Vladimir Putin, give back the territories that he has taken, and only then will peace prevail.
Having said all of this, this is armchair general.
I'm just telling you on a philosophical level, I think the more you appease an aggressor, we've seen this with Hitler.
Anyway, in all of the smaller wars that you see in the third world, appease an aggressor means embolden an aggressor.
Face an aggressor with bold strength, they back away.
It's the same for Iran.
Iran right now, we have only bad options on the table.
And again, the history that America alone has with Iran is one if you go back as President Carter's time to now, with every provocation, what do we do?
We appease.
We tell ourselves, let's contain it.
Let's not escalate.
It's doable.
And what has Iran done?
It's only emboldened and emboldened, has taken territory well.
Proxies, established its proxies that basically take control over in Iraq,
in Lebanon, in Yemen.
The whole of the Middle East is destabilized and it will remain destabilized.
Iran is an oppressor at home and aggressor abroad.
And it has maintained that stance because we allowed it.
Because we have applied the appeasement philosophy, which at this point, because we keep doing it, is not a philosophy anymore.
It's an appeasement theology.
And so we've got to stop with that.
And I think that sends the message to China, too.
Don't mess with us.
With all three of these different aggressions or aggressors.
Militarily, economically, we've got to be very forceful and very firm.
And then we have to recommit on the long term to restoring ideas of faith, the faith in our own foundational principles.
So, let's talk about how we do that in the West.
Because one of the biggest problems, obviously, is that the vast majority of major institutions in the West have been taken over by people who fundamentally do not like Christian values or Judeo-Christian values.
If you look at the university system, they've been completely lost.
You'll have an occasional university that is not that way, but you can literally name them on one hand.
It's like the University of Austin, Hillsdale College, Liberty University, maybe some aspects of the University of Florida.
That's kind of it.
The rest of the university systems have been taken over en masse by the left, and a left which really dislikes religion and sees religion as the root of all evil, the same way that Marx saw religion as the root of all evil.
When you look at social media, social media has been designed to suppress messages that are heterodox with regard to morality.
You must say the words, and if you don't say the words, then you will be cast into the outer darkness.
One of the big questions I think for people who are of traditionalist bent on these matters
is whether to engage, how much to engage, where to engage, or whether to sort of withdraw and build alternatives.
And that's sort of an open conversation on each of these institutions.
What do you think is the sort of tipping point as far as where you sign off
and take the Rod Dreher-Benedict option and say, okay, we're just gonna build our own thing over here
and we're gonna let you wither on the vine, and where is it worth fighting?
I'll say both.
Build new institutions if you can afford it.
My husband is involved with Jarlonsdale in Trying to do this in UATX.
I think it's a fantastic idea if there's a new institution that actually succeeds as a university in doing what a university is supposed to do.
That creates the opportunity and it shows that you know lots of students and faculty and even to a degree some administrators don't want to stay with the rotten faculties.
They'll move to the new thing and it maybe will encourage the building of even more institutions.
I also believe in Trying to recapture some of the institutions that we stand to lose.
It's like a cancer.
If it's stage four, the institution is literally dying, like the one in Oregon where Brent Weinstein left.
I think that institution is just gone.
Let it kill itself.
But a few of the others, especially some of the Ivy League, I think it's worth having a fight.
And that is, again, I want to go back to why I started this restoration.
Substack is many of us.
been identifying the problem.
We've diagnosed the problem.
I would say it's not a perfect diagnosis, but between all of us who see the problem that we've been calling wokeism, which is this resurgence of communism and socialist ideas, we now know exactly Who these people are, what their objectives are and how they work.
And so now it is let's get together and start pre-storing these institutions.
Bill Ackman confronted Harvard as that's his alma.
And, you know, that's an example to some of the people who really have the resources to make that kind of change, to come together.
and say this is not how I want my money to be spent but also I don't want this is not the direction that I want this institution to go in.
This is not the direction that I want my country to go in.
I think it's now the time for the grown-ups to come in and we stop fighting each other and fight our common enemies.
One of the other things that obviously we've seen on a societal level in the United States is as religion has declined, people have filled that hole in their hearts with really partisan politics.
And the politics very often are not even about principles.
What we're talking about here are broader philosophical principles, things worth fighting for.
It seems like people are just getting joy out of the fight right now on a lot of sides.
They're having a lot of fun punching each other on Twitter.
And when I say fun, I really don't mean that.
I think that most people are miserable.
On places like X or Twitter, spending all day punching one another, but it fills some sort of void temporarily with an endorphin rush if you get off a good line.
It seems to me that the only way to cure that is really, in some ways, to stop using a lot of the tools that are out there entirely.
So, obviously, I'm an Orthodox Jew.
That means that from Friday night to Saturday night, there is no electronics.
I mean, we're just not on electronic devices.
There's no phone.
There's no computer.
I think that there may not be a substitute in the human heart for church, not just because of the religion that it provided, but also because of the actual get out, touch grass, meet other human beings.
I agree with you on everything you've said just now.
And I think part of this futile punching at one another, it's denial.
by the right, and the right has neglected to do that in a pretty significant way.
I agree with you on everything you've said just now. And I think part of this
futile punching at one another, it is, it's denial. And it is a denial of these bigger
challenges that we face and maybe the fear that we have of, oh, how can we deal with this?
We don't want to go to war.
We don't want to, you know, the other day I was talking about why are people, you know, people's attitude towards Donald Trump.
You can be a rational person and say, you know, there are things about Donald Trump that I don't like.
There are things about Donald Trump and his policies that I do like.
But why can't we have a rational conversation about the next election and then have that transition of power peacefully?
No.
My Democrat friends say never.
No.
Under no circumstances are we going to permit this.
It's irrational.
It's crazy.
If you say things like that, you're talking about using tools of state to frustrate an upcoming election.
But the real question is, why are they doing that?
And it is a denial of these bigger problems about war and about having let down large segments of the population.
What are we going to do about our middle classes?
with challenges like immigration and automation.
These are bigger, more challenging problems.
So it's easier to go to Twitter and start quibbling about small things or saying we'll never have him again.
On the side of the right, I see people constantly quibbling about inventing conspiracy theories.
I understand that some of these things may look conspiratorial, And to a certain degree, there are conspiracies.
I mean, there's all sorts of disinformation strategies that China and Russia are applying, and so is Iran.
But I think, don't allow yourself to be carried away.
Don't allow yourself to waste your time having these fights that you think are fun because of the adrenaline that you are describing.
Let's fight The real fights that we have.
I say to some of my Jewish friends, even, stop fighting amongst yourselves.
I don't care if you hate Bibi Netanyahu or if you love Bibi Netanyahu.
Now you have this big enemy against you.
Let's fight that.
Let's tell the story of Israel, which is a beautiful story.
It's a story with insistence on life.
The enemy of Israel says we celebrate death.
Let's fight, first of all, the enemy that celebrates death.
And when we have time to breathe and we can, you know, we think we're in peace time, let's go and hate Bibi Netanyahu.
That's fine.
Right now, let's, you know, prioritize.
And it's the same with the other things.
I mean, China is on the verge of, or is constantly threatening to attack Taiwan.
All of these countries have infiltrated our institutions.
If you look at the presence of radical Islam, how it has deepened and broadened within Europe, We stand to lose Europe.
If they're playing the time game to one or two generations from today, Europe isn't Europe anymore.
And these are some of the most serious things that we have to think through.
And I think people are just in denial about it.
And they're projecting each other's problems on one another.
And that's a pity.
And that's also a symptom of decline.
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One of the things that you're talking about here, that reactionary cycle that you talk about from the left and the right, it is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
So what you have is a left that will say that Donald Trump is such a threat to the republic that he must be stopped by any means.
And any means means literally any means.
It means that you can use every legal and illegal method at your disposal in order to drag him
into court.
You can get rid of voter laws or change the voter laws because whatever has to be done to stop
Orange Hitler has to be done to stop Orange Hitler. And the right responds to that by
immediately saying, okay, well, everything is a conspiracy because some of it is a conspiracy.
You're literally out there in the open saying that you're going to conspiratorially stop Donald Trump.
And so the right reacts by saying, okay, everything I see is now a conspiracy.
And to stop a conspiracy requires us to use any means at our disposal in order to stop the conspiracy.
To which the left says, well, if you're willing to use any means, then you're really the bad guy.
And so we can actually orient ourselves towards stopping you.
And so what you end up with is the end of any sort of rational discourse.
It turns out that one of the best ways to bring about a true societal breakdown is by projecting a true societal breakdown.
And the most important thing for everybody to say at this point is actually this election is not going to be the last election.
There will be another election after that, believe it or not.
And yes, if the opposing party wins, that will in fact be terrible.
And I will in fact hate it.
I support Donald Trump.
I've contributed money to Donald Trump.
I've hosted an event for Donald Trump.
If Donald Trump loses, will there be another election in the United States?
Yes, of course there will be another election in the United States.
Will Joe Biden do a bunch of stuff that I hate and despise and think makes the country worse?
Absolutely.
But the whole point of having a democratic republic is that you can then take measures to militate against that.
You can then win the next election.
You can respond to that.
But as we move away from the idea that there are any rules whatsoever, You know, it used to be that when it came to politics, yes, it was a chess game.
But when you play chess, there are rules.
And now it's both sides threatening that if they lose, they're going to overturn the table.
And if the idea is that that you overturn the table, there will be no more chess.
Well, then you're playing a completely different game and things get very ugly very quickly.
And it takes also that opportunity to step back, because at some point, you know, sometimes I feel like, okay, I agree with someone on the left or I agree with someone on the right, but there's something that's going on that makes it extremely difficult for us to be rational about how we address these problems.
In the search for why is our society behaving this way?
Obviously, I was listening to people who were saying, part of it is the breaking down of faith and of norms
and of values.
And that is true.
And then partly, I also saw this during the Soviet era, there was that strategy that's very well described
by Yuri Besmenov, who was someone who defected from the KGB in the 1970s.
And he gives this lecture about how the Soviet Union actually
went to work about subverting society.
And he says, it isn't that you see the James Bond style, you know, breaking of bridges and things like that.
All of that may or may not happen.
But there is one that is much more boring, more long term, but much more consequential.
And that is this infecting of society with these ideas Get into the institutions and actually consciously create a situation where members of the society that you want to subvert don't talk to one another.
They distrust one another.
They're so hostile to one another.
And it's exactly what you're describing between those who support Trump and those who support Biden and those who support this and those who support that.
In our society right now, what he was describing in the 70s is materializing today.
So the big question, to avoid getting into conspiracy theories, the big question is, were those seeds that were planted in the 70s, are they materializing now?
Or is there some other force behind this?
What is going on?
These are the questions we need to answer.
And I think we should stop fighting one another.
But once you see this mirror that there is, like, People want us to fight.
These bad forces want us to fight.
If you're an Islamist, or if you're a member of the CCP party, or if you're Putin, You would love it if the West destroyed itself.
You would love it if their children all of a sudden all decided that they wanted to change their sex and their gender.
You would love it if they all ganged up on the State of Israel.
This is just to show you, look, we don't have to do anything.
We just have to stand back and watch them destroy each other.
And I think in that sense, given the number of enemies we have, how formidable they are, how effective they are, and where we are, it's time really to sober up And stop fighting each other.
I love my Democrat friends and I love my Republican friends and it's time that we stop.
Yeah, we are each other's friends.
You know what Jonathan Haidt has been writing about recently and what he says that society really full scale started to break down about the time of the iPhone, that as soon as you had that technology in your hand and you could constantly be updating the news and not just updating the news, but updating yourself and what other people thought of you, you created this perverse feedback loop where particularly for teenage girls, but it's true for everybody, I think.
That if you check your notifications on X, it's legitimately one of the worst things that you can do just as a human being.
Because all human beings are built to be ego machines.
We're all built to worry about what other people think of us.
Because when we were in the jungle, it really mattered a lot what other people thought of you.
If they thought poorly of you, then you starved.
So we're all built to care about what people around us think.
And so when you have a machine that's built to spec, That is designed to give you what quote-unquote other people think of you, even if those other people are bots in some other country, or even if that is a ginned up opposition to you.
You're going to respond to that echo chamber simply because it is the source of information that is at your disposal.
And so if you get cheered for quote-unquote changing your gender by a bunch of randos on TikTok, then you are in fact as a human being going to respond to that when that technology becomes so widespread, so available, so immediate.
And every time you refresh, you get an endorphin rush before the crushing morosity that hits the moment that you realize everybody hates you.
That is a way to make an entire civilization mentally ill.
And it seems to me that, you know, again, the best thing that most people can do, just as individuals, put aside the politics, the best thing most individuals can do is get off your phone.
Just get off your phone for five seconds a day and actually spend some time with other human beings.
When you say you have Democrat friends, you have Republican friends, that's true in real life.
It's not true online.
It really is not true online.
I've found myself that I have friends who are on the other side of the aisle, and I know them, I say hello to them, and none of them will ever say happy birthday to me on Twitter.
Because the minute they say happy birthday to me on Twitter, that would be acknowledged that I'm born of woman, and then they would be hit with a wave of hatred, a wave of disdain from their own side of the political aisle.
So they'll give me a call or they'll text me.
But the minute they do that in public, it's a real problem.
Now, we could be walking out, we could have dinner together in Miami where everybody disagrees about politics and it would be totally fine.
But the minute you do it online, the performative aspect comes in and it destroys everything.
So I really wonder if maybe the solution to this is just to disconnect a lot.
I think you have a point there, but I also am very, very cautious of blaming technology.
Technology has given us, yes, an amplification of bad ideas and the animosities and an inflation of the ego and all of the societal ills that were already there.
They may have found, yeah, an amplification in these bad things, but technology has also given us so many other wonderful things.
So let's get off the phone for five seconds approach and then go back to the quality, the things that give quality to human life, our faith, our family, our vocation, our community.
That is, I think, where we need to head.
And was it Jonathan Hyde that you cited just now?
I think interestingly, he found when he was looking at suicide ideation, I could be wrong.
I've got to look that up.
He was speaking at ARC in London, and he got to a point where he said he does see, for instance, among liberal teenage girls, this abuse of technology, of the smartphone, Instagram, and the unintended consequences of that, where anxiety, depression, suicide ideation is pretty high.
And then he looked at some of the conservatives slash Christians families.
And the problem, if it is there, is very small, if it's perhaps even non-existent.
And I remember he said that as an aside, but I remember just latching onto it and thinking, but wait a second, that's a big deal.
Because do you know what I see with my friends of faith, whether they're Jewish, Christian, or even Muslim?
And I have Muslim friends.
Technology is used as an instrument to help you in your daily life.
It doesn't It doesn't hijack your daily life, and it's not allowed to hijack your daily life.
And technology used as a useful, exactly what it says, as an instrument to enrich your life, is fine.
But technology to substitute your community, your friends, your faith, to keep you hooked, and to damage your brain, and to damage your relationships, and to disconnect you from everyone else in the name of connection, that's sick.
And yes, that has to be discouraged.
But it won't be unless we talk about the more fundamental things that we've put a taboo on.
Let me give you an example.
Everywhere I go, every Muslim who is an active Muslim is very proud about showing I'm a Muslim.
I pray five times a day.
headscarf or the burqa.
It really broadcast it to the world.
This is my identity.
I'm a Muslim.
I pray five times a day.
The Ramadan, you'll see in different parts of the Western world, these fights for rights
of how to expose Islam.
We look at Christianity, there's this sense of, let's not bother others, tear down the Christmas tree, you know, sanitize everything from the school books.
And if you're going to put the cross somewhere, then put all of the other.
This is, it's insane.
It is literally, it is an erasing of your history and the most important part of what makes this civilization tick.
And I think that is what we need to be talking about.
And technology and abuse of technology is a reflection of the departure from these foundational principles.
One of the things I wanted to ask you on a personal level is about your faith, because one of the things that even people like Richard Dawkins will now say, so Richard Dawkins is obviously one of the world's most famous atheists, and he recently called himself a cultural Christian, by which he meant that he likes a lot of the trappings of Christianity, that when he walks around Great Britain, he likes looking at the churches, and he likes hearing the Christmas carols, and all the rest of that.
And the point that I made on my show is, okay, well, if you like those things, then the churches can't be empty, otherwise it's just a building.
If you like Christmas carols, somebody has to believe in Christ in order to actually sing a Christmas carol.
And that's just the way that the culture works.
But there is a difference between understanding the cultural value of religion.
Even Voltaire recognized the cultural value of religion, the societal value of religion, and actually believing the thing.
So for you on a personal level, obviously as you've embraced Christianity, How did you make the shift between understanding the cultural necessity of Christianity in a world that is moving away from Christian values and actually believing the things?
I know that's a barrier for a lot of my own listeners.
I've encouraged people to go back to church and re-embrace their faith.
And what I get a lot is, sure, I'd love to do that, but I can't get there.
So how did you get there?
So on my own personal spiritual needs, I think I've just told you about them.
I'm actually working on a book where I describe step by step how I got there on the importance of religion for society.
It is just by being part of these debates and conversations where If I'm really honest with myself, and I don't become obsessive, I was saying to myself, I'm not obsessive.
My tribe is the atheist tribe, and therefore, within my atheist tribe, if we get things wrong, I'm just going to pretend it's right.
I had to say no.
Actually, if you're a proper atheist, and you say, I'm led by my curiosity, By evidence, the overwhelming evidence shows that communities that are religious don't seem to fall prey to all the deviances that we've just been talking about.
Whether it is crime, whether it's broken families, whether it's mental health issues, you see that within religious families, religious communities, there is more stability.
I'm not saying that these things don't occur within religious communities.
They do, but they're far less than when people have departed.
So religion has a function, number one.
And number two, the rootedness that we started with, Well, you know, just think about the Ten Commandments.
That prudentness, the church, the synagogue, the mosque, these institutions play a role in the day-to-day lives of human beings.
Even if you don't believe in scripture, even if you don't believe in any of the things that are hard to prove or that are impossible to prove, still, These institutions play a great role in our daily lives, and where they're allowed to play that role in a healthy way, these communities are healthy.
We'll get to more on this in a moment.
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So I do want to return to sort of your personal story, though, because I do think that it's important for a civilization not only to understand social utility of religion, which, of course, I agree with and I argue for, but also, you know, I get asked a lot why I believe in God, why I believe in the Torah, for example.
And so, you know, the answer that I very typically give is because it works.
Meaning that if the basic idea is that a series of rules is tested over time, and that series of rules proves itself durable, that's now a form of data.
And so, sure, there are miracle stories, and that requires a leap of faith, and every system requires a leap of faith, including militant atheism, because there's an is-ought gap.
Between material world and a set of values.
You can't get from one to the other despite the best attempts of people who I'm friends with, like Sam Harris, to do so.
You can't just look at the world and immediately get to, okay, here's why all of these things are immoral.
That's an impossible bridge to gap, a gap to bridge, as Hume pointed out.
But for me, the argument Thomas Sowell makes is that accepted wisdom of the past is in fact a form of data.
And so if a set of rules has worked over time, that's a pretty good indicator.
And if it has developed a civilization that you like, that's a good indicator there may be truth to the rules, which suggests there may be truth to the lawgiver.
That's the argument that I've used myself in a rationalist way.
Obviously, there's an emotional component to faith that can't be duplicated, but in a rationalist way, that is sort of my generalized defense of personal religiosity.
What is yours?
When people ask you why you're a person of faith, what's your answer?
Well, I give the same answer as you've just done, just not so eloquently and not at that pace.
You do say it very, very well and very, very fast.
But also I tell my personal story in the sense that I have sincerely tried to live without faith in a higher power.
Do things on my own.
Answer every question.
Look it up in a book.
See a doctor.
And when I started to grapple with questions of, you know, I don't know, existential questions, deal with my own anxieties, my own depression, and even why I have them at all or why I had them at all, I didn't turn to a higher power.
I turned to To things, to materials, to human beings, to alcohol.
And my problems just would not go away.
And I had gotten myself to a place where actually I didn't want to live anymore.
I didn't do anything.
I didn't do anything active to take my life.
But the way I was drinking, that was a form of... It was a slow form of suicide, basically.
And I had come to that crossroads of either just keep doing what you're doing and die this death that a lot of alcoholics die, or turn away from it, choose to live.
And that came with a therapist saying, you know, the problem with you is you are spiritually bankrupt.
And I thought that's a very It's a very harsh thing to say.
It hit a nerve.
It resonated with me.
Think of it as a slap that turned me in the right direction.
And as soon as I surrendered, I had no... I had tried everything.
Anything that a psychiatrist could prescribe, I had taken it all.
I had done it all.
I had nothing left.
To do what I did.
And for me, that was, you can think of it as a moment of revelation.
I prayed.
I begged God to let me live and to take this thing away from me.
And with this thing, I don't mean just the drinking.
I mean whatever was causing the drink.
Whatever the pain, the depression, the void.
And this was in January of 2023.
I haven't touched a drink since.
My life has never been better.
I feel literally reconnected with myself, with my family.
I'm alive.
I feel things.
I have sensations.
For a long time, I didn't have that.
And so that's my story.
Now, I've spoken to Richard Dawkins, and Richard is not... He respects all of that, but obviously he's not going to become... I don't think he thinks of himself as someone going on his knees and praying to God.
But he's a very sensible man.
He's a dear friend.
I love Richard.
I love Sam Harris.
These are very, very close friends, very dear friends.
They don't have to convert to any religion.
But if, I haven't spoken to Sam for a while, but if like Richard they say, but it is, Christianity is much more sensible and a better story for humanity, for us, those of us who choose to To cherish its legacy.
I'll take that.
I'll take that.
So, let's talk about what you're doing with your substack, with restoration.
What are your goals?
What are sort of the steps that you're hoping to take toward the restoration of a civilization that's worth defending?
So, first, it's my call to step away from this infighting that we're doing, the internal sin that's killing us.
I have posed the question.
When I post on Substack, I use the illustration of the blind men who are trying to figure out what an elephant is.
And that is you and me and all of us, we've been trying, like, what the heck is going on?
Why are we acting this way?
So I think that has brought me to follow towards, you know, the subversion line.
I'm 54 years old.
I lived again.
I told you about those neighborhoods that I lived in.
So I have an experience of what it was, what a society looked like before it was subverted and afterwards.
And I think I recognize these things and I want to be challenged.
But when I started looking into, um, The legacy of the Cold War, where we thought, we meaning the West, America, we won the war.
What do winners do?
Winners move on.
And we moved on and we had, you know, the 90s, what do you call them?
The end of history years.
It was all wonderful and technology and economy.
And, you know, we were just flourishing and we didn't have any enemies.
And we'd come up with these ideas that the rest of the world is going to be like us.
But what do losers do?
They plot their revenge.
And so I think we didn't reflect properly on the history of the Cold War.
We didn't take the heed of thinkers, very serious thinkers like Sam Huntington.
Professor Samuel Huntington was a pervert who bought the clash of civilizations, who didn't take part in the celebrations.
And so I think if you reflect on that history, and you think maybe some of those resin seeds that they planted back in the 70s or even earlier, These are now, you know, sowed the seeds, they're now flourishing, we now have what we call the woke, and it's a phenomenon that is, it has us all shocked and astounded, but we can't, we don't seem to be able to explain the pace at which these fringe communities, they were in universities, people who talked about gender all the time and gender studies and race studies and
And they fantasized about communist utopias.
They were on the fringe.
In 1995 to 2000, when I was in the University of Leiden, we didn't take them seriously.
They didn't watch themselves.
By the way, they were children of rich people, so they could afford to have those stupid utopias of theirs.
But now it's there everywhere, after the whole George Floyd thing.
I think, I just sat down and thought, maybe there's something to You know, a serious reflection on the Cold War, what went on, the fact that we didn't really deal with it properly, and that we are now reaping what they have sowed.
There's also all the conversations, Ben, that you follow about current disinformation, which is tech-centered.
And I think it's important to talk about that subversion as well.
There is the one that I'm much more familiar with, which is the Islamist subversion, which has a name.
It's called da'wah.
And if you look at the theologians and the thinkers, the serious Islamist thinkers, they agree on the objectives, but they've always disagreed on the means to the objective.
The objective is we want to establish a society based on Allah's law, Sharia law.
Whether that is In my village, in my town, in my city, in my country, my region, or the whole world, the objective is the same.
But the means to get there, they differ, these theologians.
Well, some theologians play the long-term game, and they call it gradualism, through entries of different institutions, through demographics, through immigration, through soft power.
And the other group would say, no, it's through hard power, through jihad.
Now we've seen those ones come and go.
Al-Qaeda.
Don't know if they entirely are gone, but we've seen those attempts at, you know, shock and awe, jihad, with the Islamic State of Syria, of Iraq and Syria, ISIS, Hamas.
Hamas is, of course, the daughter, the child of the Muslim Brotherhood.
And it's been going on, I mean, using hardcore jihad for a long time.
And I think that the theologians of Dawah, those who say, you win these societies, you take them over to long term subversion.
that they are onto something.
Because if you look at European societies, all you can say is just, I was there 30 years ago, when people said, oh, it's a slippery slope, stupid arguments to think in those terms.
And now here I am, and the mayor of Brussels has just cancelled NatCon, an international conservative, you know, conference where people who are there are Trying to exchange their views openly, transparently, not harming anyone.
But the mayor of Brussels has cancelled it.
This is 2024.
How is that possible?
The first minister of Scotland has given money from the taxpayer, from the public purse, to Hamas and has gotten away with it.
How is that possible?
You know, there are so many things that are happening that just don't make sense.
And I think that following the story of subversion gives us also normal citizens.
I'm not in the military.
I'm not in the government.
I don't represent anyone.
Just as a normal average citizen, I just want to know what's going on within my own institution.
What's going on on the campus of Stanford University?
What can I do to understand what's going on?
What can I do to help?
And my boss, Fundalisa Rice at the Hoover Institution, she's generous enough to allow me to do what I'm doing.
So I guess the question is, what can average, everyday people do about restoring the West, preserving our own communities?
I went on this platform, Substack, that's giving the opportunity for freethinkers to come together.
Mine is called Restoration.
I invite you all to subscribe.
I invite you to debate with me.
I invite you to give me feedback.
That's what I'm doing.
I'm not in office.
But if you are, whatever you do, just engage in trying to understand and restore.
Start with restoring the connection to your higher power and then start the connections with the people around you, with your community, with, yeah, with If you store the connections between you and your family and your community, and I think that's already something.
Ayan, thank you so much for coming by and spending the time.
Really appreciate it.
Okay.
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