Dec. 24, 2015 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| The end of the year is upon us, so we're going to be doing a little progress report here. | ||
| I hope you guys had a chance to check out my interview from last week with Peter Boghossian. | ||
| For those of you that might have missed it, my intention with Peter was to focus on atheism as well as critical thinking. | ||
| These are ideas that Peter wrote his book about, spends most of his time talking about, and are obviously topics That I'm interested in. | ||
| I think I had about 13 questions prepared for Peter, but like many of my interviews, the conversation pretty much just took a life of its own. | ||
| In last week's case though, something particularly interesting happened. | ||
| No matter how far I tried to steer the conversation away from the regressive left, and I tried many times, all roads kept leading back to them. | ||
| I've mentioned to you guys a couple times now how I want to talk about all kinds of things on this show, from science to politics to spirituality and much more. | ||
| I've also mentioned to you guys how I don't want to solely focus on the regressive left, primarily because it doesn't necessarily solve anything. | ||
| Still, I find myself incredibly torn about this topic. | ||
| On one hand, until the last couple months, we hadn't even diagnosed the problem of the regressive left, right? | ||
| Clearly huge numbers of those of you on the left were upset about how your team was being hijacked, but there wasn't a place to come together and talk about it, much less a whole group of like-minded people willing to share their experiences and tell their stories. | ||
| For that reason, I've wanted to keep this conversation going. | ||
| It's important to realize how many of us are actually out there. | ||
| There are a lot. | ||
| We want to fix the left, but I don't think we can without getting to critical mass on the issue. | ||
| On the other hand, I don't sense that we can actually change these regressives. | ||
| As I've also mentioned before, since we've started doing the show, I've seen these guys continue to lie and smear opponents, only to be caught and then doubled down or even more. | ||
| Some people are fighting back against these lies with facts and logic. | ||
| Fortunately, I've had several of these people on the show, like Majid Nawaz, Sarah Hader, and Gad Saad. | ||
| Others I know only from the online space, such as my guest this week, Ali Rizvi. | ||
| Ali's an atheist Muslim who's constantly writing about and fighting against regressive ideology. | ||
| Growing up mainly in Saudi Arabia and ultimately leaving religion for secularism, he should be a natural hero of the left. | ||
| Sadly, he's not. | ||
| That's one of the many things that we're going to talk about. | ||
| I go back and forth between thinking that fighting the regressives by putting time and energy into discussing them is what will ultimately do the most to change the landscape of the left, and then just thinking that if we ignore them, maybe they'll go away. | ||
| I tend to think that most of you will tell me that we have to keep amplifying real liberal voices and that by ignoring them we'll only let their influence grow. | ||
| That's pretty much what I think too. | ||
| I must say that I'm incredibly inspired by the fact that half the time when I see anything that they write, tweet, or whatever, there's an army of people ready to combat their bullshit. | ||
| A few people have mentioned to me that they believe that this whole regressive situation and the fuel that it gives to the right is only going to get worse before it gets better. | ||
| Unfortunately, I think these people are probably correct. | ||
| Until the real, legitimate, true voices of liberalism can come back to the forefront, this conversation is always going to be stuck between the regressives and the Trumps. | ||
| It looks like we've got our work cut out for us for 2016. | ||
| My guest this week is Ali Rizvi. | ||
| Ali writes for the Huffington Post and his first book, The Atheist Muslim, Losing My Religion But Not My Identity, is being published in 2016. | ||
| He's a strong advocate for the advancement of secularism and science, particularly in the Muslim world. | ||
| Ali, welcome to the show. | ||
| Hey Dave, glad to be on. | ||
| So we've been doing this, as I start almost all my shows, by saying to the guests, we've been doing this on Twitter for a while, and you are another one of these anti-regressive warriors, so I'm happy that you're joining me this week. | ||
| Yeah, you can't help but be. | ||
| I mean, it's just, doing anything like this, it's almost synonymous. | ||
| Yeah, it absolutely is. | ||
| So, alright, we're going to talk a little bit about the regressives, of course, but let's talk about you first. | ||
| I want people to understand sort of who you are, where you come from. | ||
| You spent most of your youth, up until your early teens, in Saudi Arabia, is that right? | ||
| Right, I did. | ||
| So I pretty much grew up there. | ||
| I was born in Pakistan, and then after that we moved to Tripoli in Libya, lived there for several years. | ||
| And then I went to Saudi Arabia, where I was actually until high school. | ||
| And then after that I went back to Pakistan again for university, and then I came to Canada. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Why were you bouncing around so much? | ||
| My parents are professors and they liked going to different places and they, you know, they got really good job offers. | ||
| They're both very, very confident. | ||
| And so they traveled all over the place. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
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So, I mean, those are just the countries we lived in and we used to visit all over the place. | |
| So just generally when it comes to North Africa and the Middle East and South Asia. | ||
| I've seen a lot of places growing up. | ||
| Well, interestingly, all three of those, particularly Pakistan and Libya, are probably extremely different now than they were when you were there. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Libya, I don't have too many. | ||
| I mean, when we lived there, when I lived there, I was a kid, so I do have strong memories of it, but they're probably not representative at all of the way it is right now. | ||
| And Pakistan's also very different than it used to be, and I haven't been there for a while. | ||
| Now I can't go there, unfortunately. | ||
| Right, so we'll talk about why you can't go there in a little bit, but let's talk about Saudi Arabia for a bit, because it's such an important player in world politics and its relationship to the United States, and I feel like people actually know very little about Saudi Arabia, the nature of our relationship. | ||
| What was it like growing up there? | ||
| Your parents as professors obviously came from the, I'm assuming that was middle class, sort of educated middle class. | ||
| How did that relate to religion and secularism and all that? | ||
| It was complicated. | ||
| So, like, you know, the way I describe it is that my own nuclear family, like my parents and my siblings, are sort of a liberal, progressive type of Shia Muslim family. | ||
| And so we had that. | ||
| And then outside that, I was in a private American school, the American International School in Riyadh at the time. | ||
| So the school was-- | ||
| obviously, it was American. | ||
| So we had American textbooks. | ||
| We used to listen to American music. | ||
| And it was an American school that had people from about 80 different nationalities there. | ||
| So it was a truly international school. | ||
| And then outside of that, when we stepped out of that, it was cover your hair, women can't drive, | ||
| five times prayer. | ||
| And if you're outside during the prayer, you'll get caught by one of the matawas, | ||
| they call them, which is the religious police. | ||
| So, it was strange seeing, you know, all of these three things, but when, you know, when you're growing up with something as a kid, that is normal for you. | ||
| That's what you think everything's like. | ||
| So, I actually think that it was a good thing to be exposed to all of those worlds at the same time. | ||
| So I was, you know, when, for instance, when 9-11 happened, I could, you know, this is Saudis coming in from there, and I remember the mentality that there was there. | ||
| One thing I described in my book is when I was in fifth grade at the American school, we'd made paper snowflakes out of, you know, when you fold up a piece of paper, you cut snowflakes and stuff. | ||
| And, you know, we decorated them with glue and glitter and our names. | ||
| We were happy. | ||
| I was about 10 years old. | ||
| And it was, even though it was an American school, the Saudi Ministry of Education used to send an inspector once in a while to make sure everything's okay, everything's going according to the rules. | ||
| And he came in and he actually cut one of the tips off of each of the snowflakes. | ||
| He was very angry. | ||
| He cut them off. | ||
| And we asked our teacher, what was going on. It's like, you know, what is this? And | ||
| then she told us about the Star of David and why we can't have anything that has six points that | ||
| sort of symbolizes that. And that was our, this is a whole class of 10 year olds. That was our | ||
| introduction, at least my introduction to the Jews. Wow. Right. So, and this was just a spot check | ||
| from an inspector. | ||
| But there are kids in Saudi Arabia who go to the Saudi schools. | ||
| They have the stuff in their textbooks. | ||
| The guy who did that spot check for us was actually, he actually writes the curriculum for the rest of them. | ||
| So when 9-11 happened, I saw that kind of culture, those people coming in from there. | ||
| And then the people in my school, like the Americans, They're the ones being attacked over here. | ||
| It was really strange seeing it because I've kind of grown up with both sides in parallel. | ||
| You know, all my teachers were American, a lot of my friends were from the U.S. | ||
| and Canada. | ||
| On the other hand, the country I was living in was a place where all the hijackers came from. | ||
| So at 5th grade, so you're probably, I guess that's about 11 years old or so, was that sort of where your secular awakening was happening? | ||
| Is that the time of that? | ||
| Or how religious actually was your family? | ||
| Were you guys away from it already? | ||
| Break that down for me. | ||
| Well, my family was, my family was sort of liberal religious. | ||
| I mean, they were Muslim. | ||
| They were believing Muslims. | ||
| We used to go through the, you know, we did the Ramadan thing. | ||
| We used to do, we were Shia, so we used to do the Muharram morning. | ||
| My parents used to pray, you know, on and off, but usually they made it to like two or three times a day, you know, on average. | ||
| So, you know, there were... There must be an interesting diagram of people praying and then the sort of drop off as it gets later in the day, right? | ||
| There is, I don't know a lot of Muslims who actually fully pray five times a day. | ||
| Every time I watch TV and it's, you know, this is a slight tangent, but every time, you know, you Google North American Muslim or American Muslim, you'll get a whole picture of people with head scarves and, you know, people in mosques and so on. | ||
| But they're just as misrepresentative of U.S. | ||
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Muslims as, you know, any militant group. | |
| Right, right. | ||
| It's not what care and Islam are not. | ||
| Which is exactly why we should all be talking to people like you more because I have no faith that the media is giving us examples of any, forget religion, ethnicity, whatever it is, the media gives us such bad examples of everybody that that's why we have to talk to the outliers, right? | ||
| You understand it in a way, and I'm sorry we're going away from your original question. | ||
| That's fine, that's fine. | ||
| Yeah, I understand it in a way because, you know, for instance, if there's something, some story relating to Christianity, you're not exactly, you're usually going to call in a pastor or, you know, somebody who's a priest or something like that, who's an expert in Christianity. | ||
| But the thing with Muslims is it's different. | ||
| When you think Jerry Seinfeld or David Letterman, you don't think Jew, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, I don't think Letterman's Jewish, but either way. | ||
| I thought he was. | ||
| He's a comedian, so it's close enough. | ||
| Comedian is a whole different, that's a separate thing, I think. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's another thing. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But, you know, when you, when it comes to Muslims, I mean, Dave Chappelle, Dr. Oz, Shaq O'Neal, like all of these guys, I mean, these are people who are Muslims, but that's not, That's not the representation, even though they're right here in front of our faces. | ||
| When you see it on TV, it's always the one with the headscarf. | ||
| Almost every non-Muslim I know who works for the Muslim Network has gone for a beer with them afterwards. | ||
| A lot of people have dated Muslim girls, and very few of them actually wear the headscarf. | ||
| I'm pretty sure if Shaq was the main representative for Muslims, things would be extremely different right now. | ||
| Yep, wouldn't they? | ||
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Yeah. | |
| Probably for the better. | ||
| So wait, so tell me a little more. | ||
| So you're family, so you guys were sort of religious, but not that religious. | ||
| You were getting some of this at the school, but that was obviously Americanized. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| Keep going. | ||
| So, I mean, my main, the first time I was truly skeptical of religion and God was when I was five years old and I actually had a cousin and she was three and this is, she lived in London and she had childhood leukemia. | ||
| So, you know, she was close to my age. | ||
| I was five, she was three, you know, we were playmates and When she was dying, everybody came into the room. | ||
| So this is like in the culture, you know, last moments. | ||
| Everyone walks in and some kids were there. | ||
| And it's, if you know what a child's death is, especially from cancer, it's absolutely horrific. | ||
| You know, so cancer doesn't discriminate. | ||
| Same amount of pain an adult feels is what a three-year-old child would feel. | ||
| So, and at that time there wasn't really any good cure for childhood acute lymphoblastic leukemia either. | ||
| So, at that point my mother and my aunt were praying and crying and I was standing there with my father and I asked my father, I'm like, you know, what's going on? | ||
| I was watching her in pain and he said that God's taking her back. | ||
| God's taking her to a better place and keeping her with him. | ||
| So I'm thinking, okay, that's not such a bad thing. | ||
| So why are they crying and why are they praying so hard? | ||
| And they're like, they're begging God not to take her away. | ||
| They want him to, you know, like stop the pain or not take her away. | ||
| And to me, like in my mind, we used to play tug of war in school. | ||
| So I was thinking of the tug of war game where there's this God who's all powerful, apparently, and we're on the other end and we're playing. | ||
| And it just seemed like a very sadistic thing to do. | ||
| Yeah, it also sounds like such a losing proposition if you're the believer. | ||
| So if in this case you're your father, assuming he was a believer or that maybe he was just playing the role as a father, but it's a losing proposition if you pretty much know medically that the child is not going to make it and yet you have these people praying and you know the outcome is pretty much in front. | ||
| What are you actually saying about prayer is also an interesting angle. | ||
| I mean that's the other thing and I'm thinking if God is like all-powerful and there's a three-year-old kid in pain you don't and fine I understand you know you have to take the kid back but don't like don't draw it out don't draw out the agony because cancer deaths are terrible so we you know at that point the clarity of a five-year-old mind I obviously that I remember this very clearly it's one of my earliest strongest memories just because the intensity of it And after that, I thought, I was like, OK, nobody's really going to be happy with this God character anymore. | ||
| But the next week, every ritual, everything, God, he was a hero. | ||
| You know, everyone just continued praying to him. | ||
| So it didn't make a lot of sense to me. | ||
| And then after that, I thought, I was like, maybe, well, all these guys, you know, all the adults, grownups, think it makes sense. | ||
| Or maybe I'm the one who's crazy. | ||
| But then I'd see, I'd watch TV, and there'd be a disaster, a natural disaster, a tornado, or a flood, or something. | ||
| The lone survivor or two would say, you know, I'm, God bless, you know, God save me. | ||
| I'm so thankful to God. | ||
| And I was, I'd always think, you know, what did the other people do? | ||
| So as a kid, it was always there. | ||
| And then I dabbled in and out of being religious to some extent, like whenever I had exams, finals. | ||
| That's when the prayer would kick in? | ||
| Yeah, so it was like my cousin used to call it bribing God. | ||
| He was like, you're bribing God. | ||
| He was a very religious guy. | ||
| God probably took your bribes. | ||
| I'm guessing you were a pretty good student. | ||
| Yeah, it turned out that I was fairly... Yeah, I did well in school. | ||
| It turned out whether I prayed or not, God somehow was okay with me, but all those kids with HIV in Africa... Somehow. | ||
| Yeah, just somehow my grades were okay, but HIV... | ||
| For the kids in Africa, not so much. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Alright, so you have this awakening and it's happening. | ||
| Where was the full sort of more adult version of your awakening? | ||
| Were you still in Saudi Arabia or was that when you had left already? | ||
| I had left. | ||
| I'd gone to medical school at that point in Pakistan. | ||
| I'd finished. | ||
| I'd completed it. | ||
| And towards the end of it, I had actually really started reading. | ||
| Well, I'd started reading the scripture and everything, the Quran, when I was much younger. | ||
| But I think when the internet came around and I wanted to do more research, I was able to find more things. | ||
| So this was around 99 or something. | ||
| I was already in my 20s. | ||
| I'm a little up there. | ||
| So I started, you know, when I actually started reading it, and when people got more and more defensive about it, the more I talked, especially in Pakistan, when you talk to people, they give you all of these responses, like, you know, those aren't true Muslims, or, you know, this isn't a religion of peace, or, you know, that thing that you're quoting from the Qur'an that's mistranslated. | ||
| Misinterpreted or it's a metaphor, you know, whatever the excuse was and eventually I started seeing through it And then I I think it was actually one day when it hit me I'm like this I shouldn't even be considering this. | ||
| I mean, this is a guy lived inside of fish, you know, there's It says in it I'd hear that, you know the in the Quran for me it was a Quran for a lot of people it's a Bible and everything but And by the way, we should note that they're all equally crazy. | ||
| There's plenty of evil stuff in all of them. | ||
| You know, we want to be good liberals here, so let's not pile on one, right? | ||
| There is plenty of awful stuff in the Old Testament. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| They always say that if Moses hadn't hallucinated up the Old Testament, then, you know, Mohammed couldn't have plagiarized it. | ||
| It is, and there's a lot of similarities. | ||
| There's no pork, there's no foreskin for Myles, there's Shalom and Salam, and then both of their nicknames are Mo. | ||
| In a way, there are a lot of similarities, especially between Judaism and Islam, and the violence in the books is absolutely, I mean, that's an obvious thing. | ||
| But I used to think, I'm like, what are you doing? | ||
| Quote verse 434, which says that you can beat your wife if you fear disobedience as a last resort. | ||
| And they justify it. | ||
| You know, like, well, no, it actually means this, or it's only as a last resort. | ||
| And I used to think, I'm like, if I had written this in my book, and the book came out last week, You guys would be killing me for this. | ||
| I mean, you wouldn't be looking for context. | ||
| You wouldn't be looking at alternative interpretations. | ||
| That's a luxury that we only afford to holy books. | ||
| I mean, we don't read Alice in Wonderland that way. | ||
| And that, you know, people like, for example, Raza Aslan and so on, would be like, this is, we should not read this literally. | ||
| Like, and the worst thing is the people who read it literally. | ||
| I was actually on a show, I was on The Agenda with Steve Pakin here in Toronto, and I was sitting next to Shabir Ali, who's an Islamic scholar, and at one point he actually said, he's like, look, people misquote the Qur'an by quoting it literally. | ||
| And I was just thinking that was one of the most amazing sentences. | ||
| That's a great quote right there. | ||
| Yeah, he's a great guy. | ||
| And I used to think, I'm like, I understand why they're so terrified of people quoting it literally. | ||
| Any scripture literally. | ||
| Because it's terrifying if you quote those words exactly the way that they're written or exactly the way they were said by God, apparently. | ||
| Then, it's a terrifying thing. | ||
| You know, so they say, well, you have to look at the interpreters and the scholars, and then you listen to the scholars, and they're saying these human beings, their explanations of what God's Word is, actually means more than what God's Word is itself. | ||
| Which, again, doesn't make any sense. | ||
| And ISIS, and Al-Qaeda, and the Taliban, these people, they're not quoting scholars. | ||
| I mean, they're quoting the scripture. | ||
| They're quoting the hadith. | ||
| Yeah, you know, after the Paris attacks, I got into it on Twitter with one of my friends on the left, who immediately was, you know, within, while the thing, I think while the event was still happening, so literally they hadn't caught anybody yet, I mean, there were bodies still on the floor at the theater, he immediately went to the American foreign policy stuff, And then a few minutes after that, they released, the guys who did it, ISIS actually released the statement and there was a ton of scripture in there. | ||
| And I said, well, what do you think about this? | ||
| And then the conversation sort of dwindled off into nothing. | ||
| And I think that's part of what this whole schism here on the left that we've been talking so much about is related to, you know, like it's scripture, it's written word that somebody is believing and taking into action. | ||
| And then also there's a lot of messed up foreign policy stuff by every country in the world. | ||
| I always find it interesting that whenever I'm debating or I'm having a discussion with anybody, usually if it's someone who's moderate or an academic or... | ||
| Someone else in Islamic Studies, for instance, they don't want to talk about the scripture. | ||
| They're like, well, come on, let's not talk about the scripture, as if it's sort of beneath them. | ||
| It's like, you know, we're going to talk about the sociological implications of this, you know, how does religion work, how does identity formation and all of these other things, economics and so on. | ||
| But whenever I talk to a guy with a beard, you know, someone who's more of a fundamentalist, and I, like at times I'll say, and I said this on the show to Shabir Ali too, I was like, oh, let's not get into the whole scripture thing. | ||
| But they almost always turn around and say, no, that's what's important. | ||
| That's what the religion is. | ||
| So the people who are actually believing it and going along with the tenets of it. | ||
| And actually following the example of the Prophet and so on. | ||
| These are people who actually take Scripture very, very seriously. | ||
| The rest of the people don't, and I think it's because there is an element of rationality in them. | ||
| They just can't believe. | ||
|
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They're like, okay, this is a book, but nobody really believes this. | |
| Yeah, so last week my guest was Peter Boghossian, who you're probably familiar with, and he wrote a book called A Manual for Creating Atheists, and one of the things that I thought was most interesting about it was that he basically said, you know, because these beliefs are not based in critical thinking or rationality, And that people have to take this leap of faith, that actually if you can really sit someone down and you do it sort of with the right intent and a clear mind, you can start pulling the underpinnings away in an effective way and you can actually convert people into free thinkers. | ||
| I'm going to guess that you've done quite a bit of that yourself. | ||
| The only reason I do what I do, Dave, is because of that. | ||
| Anytime somebody tells me, it's like, you know, the way that you talk to people, it's not going to work. | ||
| People aren't going to change their mind. | ||
| That is absolutely not true. | ||
| And I've got, you know, if you look at my inbox, like my email inbox, almost on a daily basis, You know, I get messages. | ||
| I mean, the most recent one was... I don't know if you read that post that went viral. | ||
| It was by a friend of mine, Simi Rahman. | ||
| She wrote about the telling difference between a moderate and a radical. | ||
| She lives in California. | ||
| She's a pediatrician. | ||
| I'll send it to you. | ||
| Yeah, please do. | ||
| Yeah, and she... So, it went viral, got thousands and thousands of shares and so on. | ||
| And she got a message just a few days ago. | ||
| And there was this woman who actually wore the niqab. | ||
| It was a very conservative family, and she'd read it. | ||
| And now she's seriously thinking about taking it off. | ||
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Wow. | |
| It's completely shaken the way that she used to think about things, the way that she grew up. | ||
| And these are stories that I hear every day. | ||
| And I hear them more than ever in Muslim-majority countries. | ||
| And this is what's so interesting is that in North America generally, the Muslims, because they're used to the free speech and the open discourse and everything, they like to have a respectful approach. | ||
| They're like, OK, criticize religion, but at least be respectful of us. | ||
| They don't like the tone that somebody like, for example, like Richard Dawkins or Bill Maher takes. | ||
| Right. | ||
| However, in these Muslim majority countries, Well, they're living under these sort of theocratic dictatorships, even though they're not officially theocratic dictatorships, almost all of them are. | ||
| For them, that really resonates with them, the more aggressive tone, because they're oppressed by it, they can't speak, so they're angry, they're frustrated. | ||
| The last person that they heard who spoke went out and he got hacked to death in Dhaka. | ||
| So, you know, they are, they're angry and they're frustrated and they want that kind of tone. | ||
| They feel like the respectful discourse is the luxury of the privileged people who are able to, who have values like freedom of speech and who can take that, who take that for granted. | ||
| That, I mean, that's really fascinating because, you know, I've talked a lot about how people, you know, it's Dawkins and Maher, the two, that have sort of become, you know, the most outspoken on atheism, really, and talking about the doctrine of Islam. | ||
| I think they're both pretty clear. | ||
| It's out there in the Muslim-majority countries. | ||
| Yeah, but what I think is interesting here is that I hear from atheists will say, well Dawkins and Meagher, they're too offensive, they're putting out too much and they're not speaking in a friendly way. | ||
| So atheists are angry at them for being atheists. | ||
| But interestingly, you're saying that in foreign places, in foreign countries, they need to hear it in that light. | ||
| And that's incredible. | ||
| Yeah, because they actually want to say it that way. | ||
| I mean, the most sort of aggressive-sounding atheists that you'll meet from the Muslim world are the ones who actually grew up there. | ||
| The ones with the accents are the ones who made it here after living there, who think that all Americans kind of take freedom of speech and polite discourse and so on for granted. | ||
| So they are angry. | ||
| They want a more angry sort of expression of it. | ||
| But, I mean, there is a point. | ||
| I do understand why people at the different things work on different people i was give | ||
| the example of civil rights movement how you know rosa parks | ||
| acted in silence you know she was sitting on that on the bus and she said i'm not move back | ||
| on the other hand martin luther king was the diplomat you know so he was uh... | ||
| he was he was sort of more political he was conciliatory used to try to make | ||
| reasoned arguments and talk to the other side On the other hand, you had Malcolm X, who was more militant. | ||
| And all of those approaches had a role, a very key role, and they work on different people. | ||
| My approach is probably more sort of... I try to be reasonable. | ||
| I have my reasonable arguments. | ||
| I try to do that at least. | ||
| But I do appreciate people who do the kind of thing that Bill Maher and Richard Dawkins do because I know that it resonates. | ||
| I know that it's It's very satisfying to a lot of people growing up there, and I remember when I was growing up there, whenever I would hear people say things like that, and it was George Carlin at the time. | ||
| I remember seeing little things that George Carlin had done. | ||
| And the way that he talked about religion it was just so in your face and so like nakedly open. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Some of it that it was extremely satisfying to watch but that's something that you could not see and you'd show it to your friends it was on a VHS tape and show it to your friends and then you know clip where you said it and you see the shock on their faces | ||
| and it was There was just something really satisfying about it. Yeah. | ||
| Well, I I tell my friend kelly carlin who's been on the show | ||
| Who's george's daughter? I I tell kelly literally once a week i'll call her or text her and say god | ||
| God, ironically. | ||
| I'll say, gosh, you know, I really wish that your dad was around now, because we're so trapped, and I think this will get us to the next portion of this conversation, but we're so trapped in this PC world right now, and we're so afraid of language, and we're so afraid of offending everybody, and already, as you've said, sometimes you have to offend people to actually break through. | ||
| It's not your style, clearly, right? | ||
| Like, you're not looking to offend everybody, but... Yeah, I end up doing it anyway. | ||
| I think that the nature of the topic is... | ||
| But you know, the thing is, I hear this a lot. | ||
| I hear a lot of people say this, especially a lot of my Muslim friends, here living in the U.S. | ||
| and in Canada, is that the freedom of speech does not mean the freedom to offend. | ||
| And I always say to them, I'm like, there's no such thing as freedom of speech without the freedom to offend. | ||
| There is absolutely no major revolutionary change that has ever happened in history that did not piss off a lot of people. | ||
| So, let's talk a little bit about our friends on the left, because I think they've failed us, but particularly you and your friends and family, probably, in this regard. | ||
| They have somehow aligned themselves with forces that don't want you to speak up against doctrine, and that's really incredible. | ||
| It's the reverse of liberalism, and I'll let you take it from there. | ||
| Well, I mean, that's what I think. | ||
| I think if you're against bad ideas, you should be against bad ideas anywhere. | ||
| If you oppose homophobia and you think homophobia is a terrible thing, it should be a bad thing. | ||
| And, you know, you point it out every time someone quotes the Bible or every time it's in a Donald Trump speech. | ||
| You know or a Ted Cruz speech or whatever it is then it that same idea is also a bad idea when it's in the Quran and if it's being said by Muslims including a lot of liberal Muslims I mean that is something that even a lot of liberal Muslims in North America haven't warmed up to yet. | ||
| So these I understand like there's the I think there's a Instinct to try and protect the minority. | ||
| But the ideology that the minority here subscribes to, just coincidentally, and I'm not saying that they follow it the same way that they do in other more violent parts of the world, but that same ideology, the same book, is being used to kill people, right? | ||
| And to throw gay people off rooftops in other parts of the world. | ||
| So I think it is very confusing for everybody because, you know, The way that it happens is, you know, people see here, especially non-Muslims, they see on TV, they see a group called the Islamic State quoting the Qur'an accurately and actually saying, quoting verses that say, fight the disbelievers and charge them, you know, the non-Muslim tax and, you know, God will destroy them and so on. | ||
| So, they're quoting these verses, they're saying Allahu Akbar, right? | ||
| So, they're obviously professing their faith and then they're chopping someone's heads off or throwing somebody off a rooftop. | ||
| And the reaction over here, often when they see that, is that they immediately jump to defending the faith, that this isn't the real faith. | ||
| And the moment they say that, you know, you bring the Scripture to them. | ||
| You're like, well, what about this verse they quoted, just like you did with your friend? | ||
| You know, what about this verse that they quoted? | ||
| This says exactly the words that they said here match the action. | ||
| And then they start defending the verses and the book. | ||
| You know, misinterpretation and out of context and so on. | ||
| All the, you know, that's sort of the excuses that you hear. | ||
| And so now what you have is you have moderate Muslims here defending the same book. | ||
| That the fundamentalists over there are quoting and citing to kill non-Muslims over there, that the non-Muslims are looking at from this side of the world. | ||
| And that is toxic, because it actually makes, that gives the impression that the modern Muslims over here are pretty much, they subscribe to the same ideology, they're just not acting on it. | ||
| Which is not true, but that's the impression it gives. | ||
| Not only is it not true, but it seems to me that people like you, people like Maajid Nawaz, Sarah Hader, great people in my estimation, who I think are fighting for the right things, who are applying the same principles across the board. | ||
| They're not looking at your faith or your race or your nationality. | ||
| They're saying here are humanistic principles, right, that I want to apply to everyone. | ||
| The left is the one attacking them. | ||
| Did you ever expect that that was going to be the pushback for you? | ||
| For me? | ||
| No, I didn't. | ||
| I knew that there were a lot of sort of moderate Muslims that would have problems with it. | ||
| I just didn't think that the sort of the C.J. | ||
| Whirlmans and the, you know, I guess, you know, whatever you call the regressive left, I can't keep track of all of them. | ||
| This is just the one from most recent memory. | ||
| You don't keep a list on the side of your bed? | ||
| I have a chalkboard and I'm just always adding to the list. | ||
| You don't have that? | ||
| I have better things to do. | ||
| I don't have enough time or crayons to explain the regressive left. | ||
| I am spending a fortune in chalk. | ||
| It's ridiculous. | ||
| No, but the thing with the regressive left, on a serious note, is they're reacting to, you know, the pushback that we're getting is a reaction. | ||
| And for them, I just look at that entire thing as a very, very reactionary thing. | ||
| Their only argument, the only argument they have to anything is bigot, Islamophobe, house Muslim, or, you know, the brown-skinned white, I don't know what it was. | ||
| Yeah, it's a lot of that. | ||
| That's the only argument that they have, and I'm actually encouraged. | ||
| I'm optimistic about it. | ||
| I mean, if you looked at, in the past, every time one of these attacks happened and there was some conversation taking place on TV, on CNN or MSNBC or Fox or anything, it would always be Reza Aslan who'd come on, or they'd call the comedian guy on CNN. | ||
| Dean Obeidallah. | ||
| So that's what they would do, but now I'm not seeing that. | ||
| Since these new attacks and now that everything is getting even more serious, I'm seeing more of Majid on TV, I'm seeing more of Astro Nomani on TV, I'm seeing voices like this, I'm seeing Ayaan Hirsi Ali being called on to talk about things. | ||
| So I think that most of the That even the so-called mainstream media is seeing through it. | ||
| Bill Maher actually said on the last show that he was on, or the one with Aswan Amani, when he interviewed her, he actually said that more and more liberals are coming up to him and agreeing with him. | ||
| That he used to get a lot of crap from them before, but he doesn't anymore. | ||
| And I think that that's changing. | ||
| And I think that this whole, what we call the regressive left, Well, I gotta tell you, I mean, that sounds incredibly uplifting because, you know, I'm so in this and having these conversations. | ||
| And as I said at the top of the show, I find a lot of it exhausting and I battle sort of between back and forth of like, can I move on from this topic? | ||
| And every time I move on, I feel like I get sucked back in and, you know, I'll put it away. | ||
| And then I'll suddenly see your Twitter fight with someone or I'll see, you know, Greenwald attacking Sam or whatever it is. | ||
| But I think you gave me a little something to go with there. | ||
| Because the idea that they are acting out more. | ||
| It's getting more like a child having a tantrum. | ||
| And maybe it's just because they realize this is the last vestige of an ideology that's just not going to work because we've woke up, right? | ||
| Yeah, I think that they're prodding, basically, for a response. | ||
| And we give it to them. | ||
| Honestly, a lot of times, I'll ignore it for a while. | ||
| I'll ignore it for a very long time, but if I do decide to respond, I decide to respond strong. | ||
| And usually the response is not for the person making it, it's for the rest of the audience. | ||
| For everybody else who's watching the conversation. | ||
| I'm under no illusions that I can change the minds of You know, a lot of these sort of hacks on that, that are a lot of the trolls that actually try to, you know, dissuade us and try to deflect everything. | ||
| But I think that for the wider audience who's seeing the conversations, it's good for them to see what they're, what they're dealing with, to see both sides of it and to see that play out, you know, on whether on social media or in books or in articles and so on. | ||
| So I think that, you know, the, you know, I'll give you, I think that they're reacting to, for instance, with Sam | ||
| Harris. | ||
| Sam Harris has a lot of great ideas. | ||
| He started a lot of really good conversations. | ||
| In fact, everything that we're seeing right now with the rise of Donald Trump and the | ||
| hijacking of this conversation by the xenophobic, paranoid side, and now them gaining ground | ||
| and capitalizing on the fear and the concern and the confusion that everybody's feeling, | ||
| something that the left should have done, but they didn't do. | ||
| And they should have done it from a sort of moral, honest position, and now it's being done by the right from a xenophobic, bigoted position. | ||
| This is something that Sam predicted a long time ago, that he wrote about it, and now I think, you know, what's happening is that, you know, there's all of these spats back and forth with the Greenwalds and the Whirlmans and, you know, all these other sort of characters, and they're deflecting from what was initially The actual thing that was causing this response in the first place. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Go ahead, sorry. | ||
| No, no, I was just saying we should continue. | ||
| Exactly what we were doing before is what we should be doing. | ||
| We should just be talking about the ideas, sticking to the big picture. | ||
| I mean, I came from, when I came here to Canada and to the U.S. | ||
| after living for, you know, 24 years in most of the majority countries, I wanted to talk about big ideas. | ||
| I wasn't really concerned about microaggressions or progressive left or all of these other issues. | ||
| I actually wanted to talk about the big ideas. | ||
| I've noticed that a lot of us over here, there are people who try to pull us into these more petty Jerry Springer-like conversations. | ||
| I think it would serve us best to just ignore it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, listen, I'm doing my best to do that. | ||
| I know I'm saying that, especially after what happened last week. | ||
| So with me as well, once in a while. | ||
| Well, once in a while I think you have to do it and you have to have, look, had all of this terrible stuff and all of the slandering and all this stuff not happened, then I think the awakening, you know, let's say you were awake probably before I was, I mean my real awakening to this literally was that night watching real time with that Affleck thing. | ||
| Had it not happened, I may have been slumbering through the left, going further and further to the left. | ||
| So in a weird way, it is actually very empowering. | ||
| But that's actually a perfect segue to what I want to talk about next, which you're touching upon, which is that by not dealing with this in an honest fashion, By not really allowing the people to speak about it, the liberals to speak about it in a fair way, you're handing this to Trump, and we're seeing this. | ||
| We're seeing this right now in America, we're seeing this in Europe, where for the first time ever, in places like Sweden and Denmark, far-right parties are running on anti-immigration because it's all wrapped up in, well, we're afraid to be called racist. | ||
| So it's crazy, right? | ||
| Yeah, everybody's Islamophobia-phobic. | ||
| The fear of being called Islamophobic. | ||
| And yeah, I think you're absolutely right. | ||
| We did, in a way, hand this to Trump. | ||
| The problem over here is that Trump is not actually responsible for all of this anti-Muslim hate and all this anti-Muslim sentiment that's happening. | ||
| So let's be clear on that. | ||
| The party that's responsible for that is the attackers. | ||
| The ISIS, the people who attacked Paris, the people who are making all these videos of beheadings of journalists and so on. | ||
| I mean, these are the people that the Americans and Westerners in general are reacting to. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| But wait, let me stop you there, because what would you say to my friends on the left who would say, well, it's America that created ISIS? | ||
| Well, America, it's obviously a complicated thing. | ||
| You know, U.S. | ||
| foreign policy, there's U.S. | ||
| foreign policy, there's nationalism, there's greed, there's power, there's, you know, corporatocracy and all these other characters that people talk about, racism and misogyny. | ||
| And people tell me, like, you know, why do you always pick on religion when you have all of these factors? | ||
| And I always turn around and I tell them, I'm like, I agree with you. | ||
| Religion belongs right up there in the same category with racism and greed and misogyny and, you know, terrible things that everybody else is doing. So I do think | ||
| that US foreign policy is a factor and the argument has never been that | ||
| religion is the only cause or religious sentiments the only cause that we're not asking people to | ||
| Recognize or to think that it's not everything else. It's religion | ||
| We're just saying the only thing that we're going against is the idea that it's everything but | ||
| religion To ignore the religious aspect of it, or the fact that beliefs actually have consequences. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because we want to respect it. | ||
| So what I was saying earlier is that what Donald Trump is doing is that there is a lot of confusion, there's a lot of fear that a lot of people have right now, legitimately. | ||
| The way that you channel that, the way that leaders channel that is what makes all the difference. | ||
| So Donald Trump has basically fed off of it, he's drummed it up more for his own opportunistic purposes, | ||
| and he's turned it into "let's ban all Muslims." | ||
| If there was another reasonable voice on the left, and they had channeled that, | ||
| and they had kind of responsibly dealt with it in an honest way, then we may see a different outcome. | ||
| When people are confused, that's when leadership matters, and that's where the liberals, I think, failed. | ||
| So that's interesting. | ||
| Naturally, I agree with that premise, but I think you could really take it to the candidates themselves. | ||
| So, for example, Bernie Sanders, who I like a lot, obviously, and Hillary, when you take the candidates that are on the left, that are the Democrats, when they won't say Islamic extremism or they won't say violent jihad or whatever the term you want, you know, everyone gets so caught up in terms that I hate even using words at this point, but when they won't even say the terms and they'll just say religious extremism or something, I think that they also then hand it to Trump, because Trump's just giving you, he's just giving you the wide, you know, the wide net to go with, and they're still playing the games of political correctness. | ||
| No, but that's exactly, I completely agree with that. | ||
| That is kind of what I was trying to say, is that they do it. | ||
| So there are two things that have to be done right now. | ||
| One is that the rights of Muslims have to be protected, and number two, Islamic doctrine has to be challenged and criticized. | ||
| Both of those things have to be done. | ||
| What Hillary Clinton, the Bernie Sanders side is doing is they're trying to protect all the rights of Muslims | ||
| without actually challenging the ideology. | ||
| And what Donald Trump on the right, all these people are doing is that they're | ||
| challenging the ideology without protecting the rights of the people. | ||
| Yeah. - Yeah. | ||
| So, and it's not an, People think that that's contradictory. | ||
| It's not contradictory at all. | ||
| I think it was Voltaire who said, I may despise what you say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say. | ||
| It's the same principle. | ||
| And it's not that difficult to do. | ||
| If we have a responsible leader who actually does that, I think that that is something that a lot of people would relate to and they would understand. | ||
| That, okay, we will challenge doctrine. | ||
| A lot of Muslims, they'll get hurt. | ||
| Like, you know, you're challenging my religion. | ||
| This is my identity. | ||
| People incorporate their beliefs into their identity. | ||
| And the dialogue would be, well, yes, you're a person. | ||
| We respect your right to believe what you believe, but You know, these are ideas. | ||
| Ideas are different. | ||
| We're talking about the ideas. | ||
| We're not talking about you as a person. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So that if there was a political party that was running, you know, that said, we're going to throw gays off roofs and we're going to stone women and kill apostates, you'd probably be against that political party. | ||
| But as a religion, as a religious doctrine, it gets a little extra credit or something. | ||
| That's the thing. | ||
| There's a lot of completely strange things that we do. | ||
| For example, neonatal circumcision. | ||
| Infant circumcision is one of those things where my parents did it, my siblings have done it, to their nephews and so on. | ||
| It's legal, everybody does it. | ||
| But when you really think about it, If there was no religion behind it, or as I like to say, if Abraham wasn't so fond of dickheads, this would be child abuse. | ||
| You'd have pediatricians getting sued for this. | ||
| All right, so I want to circle back a little bit to the beginning of the conversation and your history and your story for a second, because you identify as an atheist Muslim, is that correct? | ||
| Well, Atheist Muslim is the title of my book. | ||
| Doctrinally, it can't be an Atheist Muslim, but the whole point of the book is to talk about the incorporation of religion into identity. | ||
| So there are a lot of, I mean, so I'll explain it this way. | ||
| When I first came here, two years after I permanently moved to Canada, is when the 9-11 attacks happened. | ||
| And when that happened, you know, I had this whole conversation in my head. | ||
| You know, I was part of a Muslim family. | ||
| I grew up with Muslim people. | ||
| I was in all the Muslim traditions. | ||
| Ramadan, you know, a lot of things are cultural. | ||
| They're reasonably cultural, but there's some sort of Muslim things like Eid and Ramadan and so on. | ||
| So that was all a part of me, but at the same time, I wasn't a huge fan of the ideology. | ||
| So when I came here and the 9-11 attacks happened, this whole conversation that had been going on in my head for a very long time suddenly exploded. | ||
| It was all on TV, it was on the radios, everywhere. | ||
| And there were two sides to it. | ||
| There was sort of the liberal side, and they said that Muslims must be protected as a minority, so any criticism of Islam is bigotry. | ||
| And on the right, it was that, and this is sort of the Fox News narrative, was that Islam is a violent religion, so Muslims, we need to profile everybody, we need to clamp down on immigration, and all of those things. | ||
| And there was one mistake both of them were doing, is they were conflating the ideology with the people. | ||
| They were conflating the ideology with the identity. | ||
| This, and this is where I wish for actually a middle ground. | ||
| And I think what we're seeing, we're seeing the same thing with the regressive left on one side and, you know, the Donald Trump phenomenon on the other is the same thing. | ||
| It's a conflation of this sort of ideology and people thing. | ||
| And by people, I mean people who are Muslim just because it's as a birth identity, because most people are Muslim because it's just a birth identity. | ||
| Right, so for you personally, while you're obviously an atheist, so you're a non-believer, are you culturally Muslim? | ||
| What does that actually mean to you at this point? | ||
| I assume your family probably does some holiday stuff, maybe you don't believe in it, but do you culturally identify that way? | ||
| Me, for example, I'm an atheist, I'm not a believer, but there are Jewish traditions that my family, that my grandparents did, that their grandparents did, that their grandparents did, That my family does, so I can do that and it doesn't have a religious connotation, it has a cultural connotation to me. | ||
| That's exactly what it is. | ||
| I mean, I enjoy the feast of Ramadan. | ||
| Ramadan's a great time. | ||
| I mean, you have people fasting. | ||
| I don't necessarily fast, but I'm there for the... That's a bit much, the fasting. | ||
| And I like to eat celebrations. | ||
| I have little nieces and nephews, and they all dress up, and I get them gifts. | ||
| And so I enjoy that as much as anybody. | ||
| I'm very close to my family, my nuclear family and my extended family, and a lot of them are believing Muslims. | ||
| So I do take part in that. | ||
| But there's also another place where it affects you. | ||
| For instance, I read a story about this kid who was called, who was beat up at school. | ||
| And because, and they said that, you know, she was an ISIS baby or ISIS kid. | ||
| And that's on my niece. | ||
| And I don't want my niece to go through that. | ||
| I did like this whole thing that's happening in the US right now. | ||
| You know, I don't want my, and I've got nieces and nephews in the U.S. | ||
| too, and so I don't want them to go through that. | ||
| It would be completely heartbreak. | ||
| I'd be devastated if I heard that my own niece went through something like that just because she has a Muslim name, you know, a Muslim sounding name. | ||
| She looks a certain way. | ||
| So it affects you at that level too. | ||
| So when things like that happen, or you know, I recently, I recently posted about this. | ||
| I have a friend who's a physician. | ||
| Uh, he's, and he actually, he's in California and he went to a party recently and there was a woman who came up to him and said, you know, you, uh, she called him a Taliban terrorist and so on. | ||
| And she was a little drunk. | ||
| Uh, and fortunately the people that he was around, uh, jumped in and, You know, they defended him and they called her out on it. | ||
| But these are things that are... And he's also an atheist, by the way. | ||
| So he's from a Muslim background. | ||
| And, you know, so when things like this happen, this is something that could happen to me as well. | ||
| It could happen to my own family. | ||
| So on that level, I do identify with the sort of, you know, what a lot of Muslims are going through. | ||
| On the other hand, I also get prejudice. | ||
| I mean, I guess apostates get it from not only the people who target Muslims, but the Muslims who target apostates. | ||
| So it's a bit of a double whammy there. | ||
| So you do relate to it, and it's a very complicated thing when you have that mixture of ideology and identity. | ||
| It's a very complicated thing to navigate, and it's not as binary and as simple as what you hear when you hear someone like Glenn Greenwald talk about it, or someone like Donald Trump talk about it, who I think are sort of very similar. | ||
| Yeah, well that's why I phrased the question the way I did, because I don't see an inherent contradiction there. | ||
| I think that everything that you've described sounds completely feasible to me, and if anything, it's not just feasible, it sounds preferable to me, because you're taking the logical And the secular side of your existence and fully acknowledging that. | ||
| And then also acknowledging your history and your family and all that. | ||
| So that to me makes full sense and more people should be trying to do that. | ||
| Yeah, I think there is a, Philip Zuckerman is this, he's this writer who wrote a book called, I think it's called Living the Secular Life. | ||
| Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's what it's called. | ||
| And he actually talks about secularizing religion himself. | ||
| And he also did an interview with Sam Harris. | ||
| Sam Harris interviewed him for his blog. | ||
| And he talks about that as a very sort of seminal step in moving towards secularism, is that, you know, you take the holidays, you take the rituals, you take the community aspect of it. | ||
| They have Sunday assemblies and everything. | ||
| So those are examples of things that people can do and how, you know, religions actually move toward secularism. | ||
| And he talked about Reform Judaism. | ||
| Which was, which is interesting because, you know, Judaism and Islam, again, very similar, you know, how God revealed the Quran directly to Muhammad in the same way God supposedly revealed the Torah to Moses at the tabernacle in Mount Sinai and so on. | ||
| And it was considered the literal word of God. | ||
| It was actually considered the blueprint for creation in Genesis at one point. | ||
| So it was meant to even predate creation. | ||
| And that's how it was thought of at a time. | ||
| And then in the late 18th, I think it was the 19th century, early 19th century, When the Reform Judaism movement really took hold and it got demoted from literal word of God to divinely inspired. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So suddenly something was written by the hands of human beings and revelation became a progressive thing. | ||
| There was equality, they adopted a lot of secular values and so on and it changed. | ||
| So when people say, well the Quran is infallible, how are you going to change it? | ||
| And I always think that the Qur'an, there's precedent for that. | ||
| There's actually precedent for that with Judaism, with Catholicism, for instance. | ||
| I mean, there's a lot of Catholics who are pro-choice, a lot of them practice birth control. | ||
| Many of them, they fornicate to their heart's content. | ||
| But, you know, they still go and they observe Lent, and they celebrate Christmas and Easter, and nobody kicks them out of the church saying, you know, you're not a Catholic. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, for the record, I told this to Peter last week, but I actually went to Mount Sinai in 1997. | ||
| I went to Egypt. | ||
| I went to Sinai. | ||
| I hiked the mountain and literally nothing happened. | ||
| I asked. | ||
| I mean, I really did. | ||
| I was at that place in life, you know, 20 or 21 or so or 19. | ||
| And I went there trying to have something and talk to somebody and nobody, nobody talked back. | ||
| Bad experience the first time. | ||
| You don't want to repeat it again. | ||
| You don't? | ||
| Alright, so I want to end with this because you have brought up a phrase that I think you've hashtagged and I want to make sure that when this thing takes off that you're fully credited for it and hopefully I'll have a little something to do with it. | ||
| But you've talked about the new center and I think it's the right phrase for what we've been looking for. | ||
| I think it fits. | ||
| It fits because we have this left-right paradigm but it also fits The center of this liberal split between the regressives and the, say, classic liberals. | ||
| So can you just tell me a little bit more about what you think the new center is and what we can all do to get people there? | ||
| Well, it's basically what I described here. | ||
| When it comes to purely this aspect of Islamism and Jihadism and sort of religious extremism, even though that's a misnomer, it's about separating ideology from identity. | ||
| It's about being able to stand up for the rights of people, but at the same time challenge ideas. | ||
| When you attack and challenge ideas, that's how societies move forward. | ||
| uh... if you attack and debase people that's what splits people up that's what actually rips us | ||
| apart so uh... being able to do | ||
| uh... to make that distinction is very important i don't think either side is | ||
| doing it i think that the center is more rational | ||
| and on a broader level too, i've always found it bizarre that | ||
| you know if you're fiscally conservative and then you know you suddenly you have to be pro-life | ||
| Right. | ||
| Why does all of that go together? | ||
| I think it's absolutely ridiculous. | ||
| People should be able to, you know, have different, you know, I should be able to think that, okay, I believe in these fiscally conservative principles. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| It's time I'm socially liberal, or I could have libertarian principles. | ||
| I mean, there's no rational, I don't think you can be a rationally thinking person and be aligned With one side or the other. | ||
| Well, that's a whole other topic, figuring out how the politicians figured out to make everything a wedge issue. | ||
| So somehow gay rights, if you were for gay rights, you were also for, you know, low taxes. | ||
| Like, it just doesn't make any sense. | ||
| Do you think there's any chance for a political movement with that? | ||
| Because when I saw it, you did hashtag New Center, and I thought maybe there's politics there, not just Not just this sort of internal discussion that we'll all have and hopefully get it out there more, but actually this could maybe be a political movement. | ||
| I would like that. | ||
| That's why I brought up the whole fiscally conservative, socially liberal thing is because, you know, when I grew up, you know, on TV, you had the six o'clock news and the 11 o'clock news. | ||
| And, you know, you saw everybody watch that, whether you were liberal or conservative. | ||
| I mean, 1984, when Ronald Reagan won, I mean, he won California. | ||
| He won 49 states out of 50. | ||
| I'm not endorsing Ronald Reagan or saying anything against him either. | ||
| But what I'm saying is that things weren't as polarized. | ||
| And then later on, you had 24-hour cable news, so you had Fox News on one side and MSNBC on the other, and everybody just watched what their own echo chamber was. | ||
| I mean, every channel had its own echo chamber. | ||
| With the blogosphere and with the internet, that became even more pronounced. | ||
| So there's a lot of polarization, and I think it's getting to a point, and we're seeing this with the regressive left and the Trumpian right. | ||
| You know, I think that there is that kind of polarization is something that a lot of reasonable, rational people are not feeling. | ||
| It's not working for them. | ||
| They're actually frustrated by it. | ||
| And I really hope that they do. | ||
| They're okay to let go of the traditional left and right labels because they're practically meaningless right now. | ||
| I don't think they mean anything. | ||
|
unidentified
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And just be human beings, thinking human beings. | |
| I love that. | ||
| A perfect ending and I love the fact that we've connected and you'll always have an ally over here so next time hopefully we can do this in person when you make it out to Los Angeles. | ||
| So I want to thank Ali Rizvi. | ||
| His book comes out next year but in the meantime you can follow his regressive smackdowns on Twitter. |
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