Dave Rubin hosts Faisal Saeed Al Mutar and Melissa Chen to critique the American left's drift toward authoritarianism, comparing it to Singapore's "benevolent dictatorship" and Iraq under Saddam Hussein. They challenge the "horseshoe theory," arguing that progressive identity policing mirrors far-right coercion, while condemning cultural relativism and critical race theory for eroding individual merit. The discussion highlights how modern moral frameworks unfairly judge historical figures like Jefferson and MLK, and exposes internal left-wing hypocrisy through attacks on John Lewis. Ultimately, the guests warn that abandoning free speech and universal human rights in favor of group identity undermines democracy globally. [Automatically generated summary]
During the direct message last week, I mentioned how people from all over the world watching and listening to the Rubin Report are connecting through the power of ideas.
Immediately after we posted the video online, the comments section lit up with people chiming in from around the globe.
For those of you keeping score, here are the countries I heard from.
In no particular order.
Macedonia, Hungary, Poland, Lebanon, Denmark, Ukraine, United Kingdom, Finland, United States, Canada, Italy, Iraq, Slovakia, Israel, Greece, Taiwan, Germany, Russia, Switzerland, Argentina, Ireland, Belgium, Georgia, Netherlands, Bangladesh, South Africa, India, New Zealand, Norway, Brazil, Australia, Portugal, Spain, and even North freaking Korea.
By my count, that's 35 countries, and that's just from the people who happen to comment on the video or tweet to me.
Wherever you are, you are a living, breathing example of why ideas about secular values and free speech matter.
From my interviews to you guys furthering the conversations on social media, we're igniting ideas in people all over the world who share in the same ideals.
As the civil rights activist Medgar Evers said, you can kill a man, but you can't kill an idea.
So whether you're listening to this in the comforts of your vacation home on the Italian coast, while on a bus in India, or in an apartment complex in war-torn Iraq, you are a piece of the puzzle of reclaiming liberalism and having honest conversations even with those whom we disagree.
Ideas have brought us together, but I think we're just at the precipice of what this conversation about free speech and liberalism could become.
So now, I want you guys to be part of the show more than ever before.
I think we can do something bigger than just emailing, tweeting, and Facebooking.
I want to talk directly to you.
Consider this my official request to have you, yeah you, on The Rubin Report.
We're going to take a group of 5 viewers from 5 different countries and I will interview you via Skype for 10 minutes, posting them all as one complete episode.
I want to know who you are, what you do, why you think the conversations we've been having here are important.
Yeah, you got it.
and how you came to think the way you do.
Together, I think we can amplify our message of conversation,
human rights, and secular values in an exponential way.
I don't care if you're religious, atheist, Republican, Democrat, black, white, gay, or straight.
What I care about is, yeah, you got it, your ideas.
With this in mind, joining me this week are my friend and former guest, Faisal Saeed Al Mutar,
and first time guest, Melissa Chen.
Faisal was born in Iraq and now lives in New York, where he works with Movements.org, an organization dedicated to helping people escape closed societies.
Melissa is from Singapore, got her PhD at MIT, and is the manager of the Global Secular Humanist Movement.
These are two people who are using their voices to help those who need it most.
And now it's time to make your voice heard, too.
Go to aura.tv slash RubinReport or click the link in the description right down below and let us know why you want to be on The Rubin Report.
Oh, and complimenting the host probably won't hurt your chances.
My guests this week are Faisal Saeed Al Matar and Melissa Chen.
They work together at the Global Secular Humanist Movement, a platform committed to the use of critical reason, factual evidence, and scientific methods of inquiry, rather than faith and mysticism in seeking solutions to human problems and answers to important human questions.
That was a serious intro.
You guys write a nice boilerplate there, I gotta tell ya.
Especially, as you know, with some of the folks we consider our allies, but they have their mind on Christianity, but on other stuff they change their minds.
So, the word committed here, I think, is the most important one.
Worked and then, you know, went to grad school and continue working.
I love it and I, you know, I got sold the American dream and the American ideals.
I think, you know, in part, It's the same thing that drew both of us here.
You know, we couldn't have more different backgrounds.
Faisal grew up under a dictatorship in Baghdad, and he has only known war and strife his whole life, but I've had an interesting, parallel childhood in Singapore, where it's a benevolent dictatorship.
So, you know, he grew up under those circumstances, but it was a safe and very prosperous, you know, city.
Yeah, so I think that people, at least in America, I'm trying to expand some worldly knowledge on people, but I feel like people don't really know anything about Singapore.
So when you say a benevolent dictatorship, what does that even mean?
It is a neoliberal contradiction in that regard, because it's extremely fiscally austere.
Low taxes, free trade, deregulation.
It's all the buzzwords that the right-wing economists love.
But on the other hand, you know, I think it's sort of throwing a wrench into Milton Friedman's capitalism and freedomist theory about, he said that economic freedom was a necessary precondition to political freedom and civil freedoms.
Well, I mean, I was born in Iraq, and I was born in Babylon, and raised in Baghdad.
My first years was under Saddam Hussein dictatorship, and then, afterwards, the U.S.
invasion of Iraq happened, and continuous civil war.
I mean, my spark for activism was Kind of a mix, because after the U.S.
intervention, we had the first Iraqi elections, and I saw the rise of sectarian politics.
And since I was a young boy back then, I was advocating for secular values, and just to prevent the rise of terrorist groups like what we have right now, because I was afraid that if one group takes over the other.
And that did not, obviously, go how it ought to be.
Within, like, the Civil War was rising.
I lost members of my family, lost my brother, lost my cousin.
I was also—I lost some friends.
And I had to leave Iraq in 2009.
And, actually, a year afterwards, I started, like, the page of the Global Security Human Rights Movement that eventually became one of the largest in the world.
And I left Iraq and went to a country close to Singapore, Malaysia, and I applied for asylum through the NHCR, the United Nations Committee for Refugees, and I got accepted to come to America.
Yeah, so that's why I wanted to have you both on together because I think it's really interesting, people that come from different places and as I say on the show all the time, the ideas we talk about here transcend borders and they transcend ethnicity and nationality and all of those things.
So when you were there and when you were growing up there, did you have a political awakening while you were there?
Did you realize that you couldn't say some of the things that you wanted to say and that kind of stuff?
And it's been largely, you know, you have Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims living very harmoniously together.
We've not had any incidents.
There is something to be said about the methods of top-down institutionalization of social harmony.
The problem is that it manifests itself in sedition laws, blasphemy laws, and as recently as last year, it was used to throw a 17-year-old blogger into jail for wounding the feelings of religious people.
All he did was say some stuff about Jesus Christ, And at least 20 grown-up adults in Singapore felt offended enough to file a police report.
Yeah, I mean, they—I mean, everyone knows, like, whenever one of these—one of these folks get killed or, like, what happened in Bangladesh, or Raif Badawi in Saudi Arabia get jailed, we know that these guys are the solution.
We know that they stand for the same values that we stand for, and we know that they are the best counter—they create the best counter-narrative.
Two extremists.
Like, Raif Badawi, he's the Sam Harris of Saudi Arabia.
He's an intellectual who has advocated for great values that, in a country that is as extreme as Saudi Arabia, they would have changed the world.
Saudi Arabia, that is one of the main exporters of Wahhabi ideology, that killed the Bengali bloggers, that created the Taliban, a country that has nuclear weapons.
So, yeah, I mean, we have to—they are our best resource that we should always continue to help them as much as we can and whenever we can.
Yeah, so when you were there and you saw this sort of authoritarianism, when did you realize, all right, if I'm going to express what's in me, I may have to leave?
I sort of realized that in high school, in Singapore, many of the best schools, like the top, you know, in academia, they were religious schools.
You know, it's just like a sort of a vestige of the colonial era, when like the British came, it was a British colony, and you had all the missionaries from France, from Europe, they came to set up schools to educate the locals.
And so this became associated with high academic standards.
So I ended up going to Methodist schools, which were associated with very high academic standards.
So the religious schools are quite a force to reckon with in Singapore in producing graduates.
I guess I realized that, I mean, this is a country that is very self-enforcing in terms of political correctness.
If you can't, you know, there's all sorts of rules.
The reason people don't do something or don't litter is because there's a fine waiting to happen.
Yeah.
So, the motivation to do something or to not do something is completely extrinsic.
So, we're all self-policing each other.
And I sort of, you know, bought into the sort of ideal of the United States, the First Amendment, you know, the freedom of expression or freedom of speech.
Because I was always that rebellious, you know, skeptic in my circle, in my religious circle, and school, which has pretty much overlapped at that point.
And that's when I realized I need to get out.
I really need to get out if I wanted to broaden my mind and fulfill that.
Yeah, I'm curious, when you hear the phrase self-policing in a place like Singapore, and they're self-policing because of fines and sort of this authoritarian thing, one of the things I've been saying on the show all the time is that we are now self-policing ourselves in America.
So it's not coming, you know, we always used to fear the idea that the government is what's going to come in and take away our free speech.
But now we're doing it to ourselves and what's happening in academia, which I want to talk to you guys about in a little bit.
But when you hear that, does that make you crazy, knowing from where you came?
To be honest, before I came to the United States, I had a very good image of what, like, when I came to America, especially the people who believe in the same values as I am, the secular liberals of the West, would just give— But did they at first?
I mean, it was—I mean, it was welcoming, but I thought it would be more welcoming.
I didn't know that there was just a huge split, the fact that if I can—if anybody can be advocating for same-sex marriage in a Western country, it's totally OK.
But the moment you talk about it in an Islam country, it becomes— Yeah, you're racist.
And I didn't know about these dynamics, that when you talk about the same values that the American liberals advocate for, when you move it to a universal or another country, you would immediately be called a racist.
And so, when I got into that, I started getting attacked left or right over what I'm saying, is that I support same-sex marriage.
And they're like, oh, well, that is a form of colonialism.
And I'm like, are you fucking kidding me?
Because you're saying the same thing for, like, the United States.
And I just said that I believe that gays are humans, even in Iraq.
Like, I think they are humans.
They breathe and they have the same DNA of a human being.
So, like, I don't really think of myself as a radical person.
Like, I think that I'm advocating as—by the moment you just shift it to a different culture, quote-unquote, because what I find very difficult here is that because we're minorities—I come from the majority.
Even though I'm an atheist, I'm a minority all the time.
But when it comes to color of my skin, I'm the majority.
So, here in America, there is this concept of the authentic voice when it comes to minorities,
is that there are these stereotypes, whether it's from the right or the left, like, if
you are from this specific race, these are the issues that you should care about the
Like, if you are a Mexican, you should care about immigration and so on.
And if you are Arab, they expect this image about, OK, he's a young Arab man, so he must
hate the West.
And he must be very angry against the United States about what they're doing.
Bush did to Iraq, and he must hate capitalism, and he must—all this stuff.
So, if you don't fit into that narrative, you're immediately going to be, like, attacked as some sort of, like, Uncle Tom or traitor, which is itself racist without them noticing it.
Yeah, Martin Luther King is, like, rolling in his grave right now, because it's, like, the—so, that's actually one of the most difficult things I found over here, is that, how come you don't subscribe to my already—my notions of who you should be?
Like, I'm like, I'm an individual as you are, and now, like, we can see it in the U.S.
elections, in which I've seen many people on both sides, I would say, especially, I would say, on the far left, who are like, how can you, as a black, not support Bernie, or something like that?
Well, black people, they have agency, and they may rationally think of supporting one person over the other.
Like, you can disagree with them, and that's completely fine, but to say, like, why is he as a black person?
So it's like a critical race theory from, like, White Guild University in California, and they are suddenly now experts of race relations and what the dynamics of the Middle East are, and they just, like, project themselves as being the intellectuals.
That's really interesting, and because we talk so much about the Middle East and we talk about extremism and Islam and whatever, I see a very specific reason why you get something like that.
I'm curious, having left Singapore, believing in secular values and atheism and all that, do you find some of that soft bigotry of low expectations that we talk about?
In fact, I'm probably a beneficiary of high expectations, right?
I mean, that joke that Chris Rock made at the Oscars with the little kids, with the little accountants, and for some reason the Asian community was really up in arms about that stereotype.
Okay, so I did get into some online fights about this because, again, as Faisal says, because of your race, you know, like, seemingly Asian person, you should be finding this thing offensive.
Right.
You shouldn't laugh at it.
You should, you know, assail and rally against and sort of deny stereotypes.
Forgetting that this is in the context of humor, and the same thing with what Sacha Baron Cohen said about the little minions, like, that really blew—like, even Jeremy Lin, the basketball player, got into that.
And I think it's just—you know, I was asking people rhetorically, like, what happens to comedy if you just take all stereotypes out of it?
You have to be angry at South Park.
You have to be angry at, I don't know, SNL, everybody.
Right, so there's a particularly interesting notion with what you're saying because the stereotype, so when Chris Rock brought out the three, or was it three little kids?
So just for people that didn't see it, so they brought out three Asian kids, one of them had a Jewish name, and they were supposed to all be like accountants.
So, they don't like the perpetuating of the model minority, and they think that that sets up a standard where now every Asian has to live up to that.
I think they're reading too much into it, you know?
It's just a reflection of stereotypes that have a grain of truth.
In the case of Ali G, who made that joke about—he said, well, you know, this Oscars is all about diversity, but what about them little yellow guys, you know, who have the little dongs?
Well, I mean, there is, I think, a domestic, because now it's coming to our lands here, and it's happening over there.
And when it comes to what's happening over there, I mean, I think the best solution is to support The values that I think—to be on the right side of history on this battle between authoritarianism—and I would include theocratic fascism in the umbrella—and the values of John Stuart Mill and Teverson and the values of the free man.
And one of the things that I like, because it's a dogma, and you can actually know someone's position from abortion and gun control by asking them one question.
Because then, like, what do you think about abortion?
And then you can actually know their position on gun control.
Because it's like—now it's like this polarization of, like, dogmatism of the Ten Commandments of the left and the Ten Commandments of the right.
And so, I think that both sides have kind of lost principles.
I mean, even the, quote-unquote, the right.
I mean, they are supposedly about the free market, but they want to police people's vagina.
They're not as free as they claim to be.
I mean, they want to police marriage.
They are against marriage equality.
They want to police women's reproductive rights and stuff.
And the left, supposedly, the guys of free speech, want to have a police system.
So that is the sad part here, if we're jumping onto the political side of this, that the one guy who wanted smaller government, the one guy who wanted... Yes, Rand Paul.
Rand Paul, who wanted, you know, who's as close to a libertarian that we're going to get in the mainstream parties.
Now, I had Gary Johnson on here a couple weeks ago, who's running under the libertarian ticket.
Unfortunately... Good luck.
Yeah, good luck for that.
Unfortunately, we still don't have a legitimate A truly legitimate third party yet, but I think that after the craziness of this year, I actually think it's possible for 2020.
But is that the real fault?
So we focus on the left, but there was a moment that the right could have said, all right, maybe this is the guy that we should listen to because he's got some of our principles.
And then they kicked him out after one bad caucus.
I think it was actually Islamic extremism, what was going on in the Middle East that really did Rand Paul's campaign, and the rise of ISIS and, you know, the havoc that was wrecking the refugees.
It sort of implicated that the United States couldn't be as isolationist, and the libertarian position is to just, you know, hold back.
So I think that's what kind of killed Rand Paul's campaign.
Yeah, it was interesting, because when I had Gary Johnson on, I didn't know what his policy was on—because a libertarian, really, you can—you don't have to be so, like, just like this and so narrow and everything.
So, when I asked him about some Middle East stuff and some foreign policy stuff, he actually did feel that there is still a role for the United States, but didn't really lay out exactly what it was.
Even though we have the same weather between Vegas and Iraq, but there is one thing that doesn't stay over there.
Yeah.
And that's one thing, is Islamic extremism.
I mean, because one of the good things about Islam, and I always admit it, is that it is the least racist religion.
And it is very universal, and it always talks about universal values.
I mean, one of the famous quotes of Prophet Muhammad, in which he said, there is no difference between Arab and non-Arab, except by, I think, how much faithful he is.
So, what affects, what's happening in the Middle East can affect, like, many people who are recruiters for ISIS are in the Middle East, but they're recruiting on the Internet for people living in the West.
Many of the isolationists believe that if we can just secure the borders, if you can ban everybody from entering or whatever, maybe the libertarians are contradictory because they believe in open borders at the same time.
Because they're reducing the welfare state, so, in that way, we can accept more immigrants.
So, yeah, how are we going to deal with that?
Like, with the Islamic extremism rising up, with the refugees coming in, with people from the West getting recruited to join terrorist groups that may actually make attacks here in the West, like Paris attacks and Charlie Hebdo.
And even, like, now some—like, my friend just recently came from Germany.
She's a woman from Afghanistan.
And she said, like, in some hotels, they are telling women not to go out at night.
I tweeted this morning, I saw an article in Germany that at one of the public pools where a lot of the migrants are going to, that there were a lot of men that were attacking women and children, so now their resolution is that they're going to segregate by sex.
So, in a weird way, now the government came in and did the most, sort of, the thing that religion would want the most.
separate men and women.
And guess what?
When people aren't having sex, as Bill Maher would say, that's sort of fertile ground—
And I mean, I think the horseshoe theory is like one of the best ways to explain things.
It's like—also, the horseshoe theory is like how much they feed into each other, is
that the more people say that there is no problem with Islam, the more people on the
far right will be getting more powerful, because whenever—because there is a correlation
between rise of terrorist attacks and rise of far-right groups.
And not necessarily rise of far-right groups, but the need for them to get mobilized.
And, like, people like Trump or people like the EDL, English Defense League, or Marine Le Pen in France, that when the terrorist attacks happen, the moment is like, let's get mobilized!
Let's—we're losing our way of life and stuff.
I mean, this is one of, kind of, like, the biggest issues—I mean, we were talking about it a few days ago—is that, with the rise of the far right, when they start, quote-unquote, killing Muslims or want to attack Muslims and all of that, they're not only—they're attacking people who look Muslim, as well.
I mean, I don't have a— Right.
A hashtag on my face saying I'm not a Muslim, but even I'm not going to advocate for attacking Muslims, either.
I mean, my parents are Muslims.
I grew up with Muslims.
I love many of them, but I don't want—so what's happening is that when people do not acknowledge the problem, there's—these guys are going to be—and they're going to be attacking Sikhs, and they're going to be attacking anybody who looks brown.
So that's the problem, is that there absolutely are true racists, right?
There absolutely are true bigots.
By the way, that's why I had Tommy Robinson on my show.
I don't agree with everything he says, and I don't fully understand everything about what's going on in the UK and Europe, but I'm trying to learn.
And I know he had tried to, at least from what I understand, separated himself from some of the more racist elements of the EDL and some of those organizations.
So I thought it was worthy of a conversation.
But I think this is a good segue to something you said earlier.
So in Singapore, a certain amount of authoritarianism, it sounds like it made people coexist.
And is that sort of— On the surface.
On the surface.
So is that sort of a—it's a very, like, you've got to thread that needle really carefully, right?
The sedition and blasphemy laws essentially protect also the criticism of religion, religious institutions, from often very necessary criticism, right?
It's like you can't even go there, you can't critique.
And it creates that climate where people just don't question, because they're afraid.
And they don't talk about—they're just like safe spaces, right?
Now, let's not go talking about—let's not go talking about religion.
We can discuss racism very well in Singapore.
Like, it's a very sensitive "let's not talk about it."
So people tread on eggshells.
And I mean, it's funny, because I feel like I sort of escaped that scenario, like the,
you know, right sort of top-down, government-instituted curtailing of the freedom of speech, come to
the U.S. and slowly on campuses, what starts happening is now the left asking for the same thing.
The students are asking for safe spaces.
What you said about the segregation in Germany, right?
Essentially, that's what religion's doing.
It's creating a safe space between men and women.
So, like what Faisal said, the horseshoe theory, it does come together, you know, the left and the right, the extreme left effectively are kind of achieving the same result.
Did you see, I'm sorry to interrupt, but did you see this meme about, there was about 30 women from different countries, you saw this, 30 women or 50 women maybe, from different countries, mostly Arab countries or at least Muslim majority countries, showing what their actual dress, the indigenous dress of women is supposed to be, and it's all vibrant and they're free in their clothes, and it says it's not supposed to be this, and then they show women.
Yeah, and one of the things that, like, The ideology of Wahhabism, and, I mean, Wahhabism, what used to be called himself, Hamad Abdel Wabi used to call himself a Muslim reformer, that he wanted to make all the Muslim world homogeneous.
And that's part of some of his success, because they're appealing to this concept that, oh, we all have different humans and, sorry, different cultures and stuff, but here am I, bringing all of you under one caliphate, or under one ideology.
All women need to wear the same dress, and it's appealing to some people, and not appealing to those who are cultured.
But that's one of the reasons it has been, to some extent, successful, because it appeals to the people who want to have the collective mindset, who want to be part of one umbrella, and one leadership.
In Arabic, it's called ummah.
That's where the word ummah, the Islamic ummah, or the Arabic ummah come from, is this concept of one leadership, and one community, and all of that.
So I really, like, what really interested me about sort of joining forces with Faisal,
especially right now with the shift that he's doing with human rights.
He's focusing, you know, not just on the atheist movement or the secular movement.
Well, what can we do about it?
So he's now working in human rights.
And the reason I'm so supportive of that and want to be involved in that is because...
For me, you know, I grew up in a country where I think one of the—the founding father of Singapore, Mr. Lee Kuan Yew, who recently passed away, one of the most dangerous legacies—he's probably one of the greatest statesmen, modern statesmen, you know.
ever. And he's built a country that went from third world to first world in just three decades.
It's a feat that—I mean, it's amazing what he's done for the country. But on the other
hand, he sort of legitimized this term, which kind of bothers me. He says that it's called
Asian values, that because Asia—because of Asia's history and culture, the Western
Yeah, and part of that, again, goes to the way we see Europe having so many problems right now, and we don't see those problems in Russia, right?
I mean, certainly the immigration stuff, we don't see that in Russia, and because of that, then it makes, probably to the average European, it makes Putin look kind of good, even if they don't like what he's doing.
I mean, as somebody who is a refugee himself, Russia is— You wanted to go somewhere warm.
Yeah, not necessarily warm, but I wanted to have a country that is probably different than where I come from in terms of authoritarianism, is that, I mean, Europe, I mean, obviously is much better economically and much better socially, that makes less people.
But, yeah, I mean, when you have an open border policy that's—I think Germany probably have it—and not a very strong vetting system, you're going to Because, as I said, there is a rise of far-right and Islamic terrorist attacks.
And if we are not going to support the reformers and the liberals who are trying to change the things in these societies—because, I mean, I wrote an article about the Syrian refugee crisis, and one of the main issues is that if there is no solution to Syria, these refugees are going to keep coming.
That's the way to sort of what you guys do, because, you know, what you do with movements and what you guys are doing together, we have to empower these voices.
So just a few weeks ago, I had someone on the show from Iraq.
Well, I guess we can give her first name, at least for now.
So we had Lubna on the show, and she's a secularist and an atheist, all the things that we all stand up for.
She's a minority within a minority.
We can't get into the major details of what's going on with her right now, but suffice to
say that you're helping facilitate some of this stuff.
And actually, I want to raise this point, which I think is very important.
The Muslim Brotherhood is actually much more dangerous than the ideology of Wahhabism is, because they are able to work on the grassroots level, and also they have double faces.
And what's happening is that they—I wouldn't say infiltrated the U.S.
government, because that may sound like a fucking lunatic, but they have— A lot of people say it, though!
But they have been in places, in think tanks, on the shows, everywhere, that He told the Western world that these other guys, the secularists and stuff, are traitors, and they're not the good guys, and we should help us.
And so they kind of have a block for channels like Al Jazeera, and they have kind of blocked this concept of secular Arab.
It's like they wanted to push this image of the authentic Arab, of the person who—so this is—we are Islamists, and we have to settle with it.
Well, in fact, my policy that I want to change is that we should change what we're asking God to settle with.
We should not settle with Islamists.
We should not settle with jihadists.
We have to support those who agree with our values.
I think it's sort of extremely symptomatic of sort of criticism now that that's happening in the left.
And I guess, you know, The problem with that also is that it's created like a vacuum where you have people like Trump who's coming in and inciting so much hate against these people and blanketing all Muslims and that's just feeding the problem.
No, actually it's more coming from the students, for sure.
I would say that on campus at MIT, we haven't had that much incidence.
But over the, you know, the tea stuff at Harvard, they've had way more incidents.
Like, recently, the law school had to change—I think they're voting to change their crest, because it features three bushels of wheat.
And they're also like house masters now at the dorms.
They've lost their titles.
They're called Dean Faculty Assistants or something.
So, you know, the question becomes what happens to your master's degree or like master of the universe.
Like, you know, just words like that.
You know, I posted something recently about, like, in chemistry, you know, one of the greatest achievements in the last couple months was that they actually created a new synthetic element that's stable.
So we added, we completed the seventh row of the periodic table.
And in the article, they called it a man-made element, right?
Yeah, and the entomology is, you know, I mean, people take offense first,
and that's the first reaction.
So, I was telling Faisal this many times, like, the problem with what's happening, you know, in the regressive left movement is this desire to see the worst in everybody.
For example, Matt Taylor, the Rosetta scientist, right, who landed the comet, the probe on a comet.
He wore a shirt, you know.
Inappropriate for an interview.
But the first instinct is to assume... Wait, can you tell people what the shirt was?
The shirt had... It was like a tessellation of... Like pin-up girls.
With guns or something.
It was a cartoon.
It was actually a gift from a female artist friend.
And he wore that, you know, announcing the triumphant achievement of his team.
And immediately, just the outcry online forced him into tears, you know, when he had apologized.
And I don't know how you make the leap from guy wearing shirt to just infer.
I mean, I feel like a big part of this is Wanting to see this racist, sexist, whatever it is, intent.
The moment you catch something that maybe, you know, can be interpreted that way, they interpret it in the most extreme way.
And then the reaction starts there, and then the whole outrage industrial complex begins online.
Yeah.
And then after that, it's a cycle, right?
Like, there's that little thing, you find it, and then blow up, and then the people will criticize the—then there are people who are bitching about the bitching.
One of the things that makes me sad, because like, this outrage requires energy, right?
So, I wish that some of... I mean, I'm not trying to trivialize their experience or whatever they may think of me, but I wish some of that outrage and all these hashtags would be used to advocate for people like Lubna, for people like Raif, for people who are... Like, I wish that energy of so much out... I mean, if they get offended by a t-shirt... Of Halloween costumes, yeah.
Or a Halloween costume.
I wish they get offended by women getting acid thrown in their faces by the Taliban in Pakistan.
I wish they are offended by bloggers getting beheaded in Bangladesh.
Like, I wish that some of that energy—I'm not trying to, like, tell them not to talk about this stuff, but I wish, like, some of that energy, at least, like, maybe just 10 percent.
And I'm not really asking for much.
Like, 10 percent is pretty good.
unidentified
It's lower than what the taxes of Trump is asking.
And 10%, if they just use some of that outrage, some of that energy, and create a movement, at least of solidarity—I don't want them to donate a million dollars or a billion dollars—just a movement of solidarity to show that we people in free societies side with the values that he side with.
And that, I mean, for me, when I was living there, it meant a lot to me when people told
me that.
I want to replicate that to help the folks over there who need that sense of solidarity
other than getting bothered by a freaking T-shirt.
So that also seems to be a bit of the— Yeah, and that is—I mean, if you look at, like, many of their—I mean, one definition of racism is power plus privilege, right?
And that has been—actually, like, there was this case, I think it was in Goldsmith University, in which one of the students was talking about white genocide.
She created this hashtag, white genocide.
And then she said, this is my way to suppress my grievances.
Yeah, because there's no other way except for talking about genocide.
You cannot get more creative than—and then she said, this is not actually racist, what I was talking about, because I am from—except the fact that she lives in frickin' London, she's unprivileged, and she's trying to suppress her grievances against the people from the upper class.
I mean, I did not watch the debate, because I was out, but I saw these quotes being circled.
Yeah, and because they will say, well, I mean, some of the concept—I mean, I agree with some of the concept of what is called intersectionality.
Except the fact that many people who say it are crazy, not jobs.
Yeah, and it's extremely dangerous, I think.
But it has a good concept, is that the people who are, for example, black, are less likely to get jobs because of their names.
So it is difficult if you are black to rise to middle class than if you are white to rise to middle class.
So there is some truth to this, but what is happening is that it is Mixed up with so much baggage of bullshit that it doesn't make sense anymore.
Just like when the far right talk about we should be fearful of all of these things, except the fact that some of, like, infiltration of the Muslim Brotherhood, all these things.
Like, because they're so insane about so many other things that, like, whenever there's a shooting, Obama's trying to take our guns.
No, you don't take them anywhere seriously, whatever they say.
So, what's happening with intersectionality and the people on the far left, some of what they say has truth to it, is that there are people who are, because of their race—I mean, there are studies done even, like, based upon the name.
Like, if people who have, like, different names, if they sound foreign or whatever, they are less likely to get employment.
So, yes, there is A sense of, but when somebody's trying to bullshit us... Well then they extrapolate it into gays for Hamas.
Yeah, yeah, which is very... So that is where, like, a huge bag of bullshit is there.
It's like when all of these, like, intersectionality and critical race theory... You literally start defending people that would have you killed.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, because under the name they're a minority and all of these... So it eventually gets, like, it's destructive when all this stuff mixed together.
All right, so as three people here sitting here that all came at different points in our lives, so I'm a third-generation American, you guys are first-generation, but different skin colors and all of that stuff, we're putting it out there, we're not fooling anybody.
You sort of touched on this earlier, but American exceptionalism.
Yeah, I mean, I live in New York City, and I can see people from tons of countries living together, for the most part, peacefully, and trying—living under one system, one umbrella, Yes, I mean, I think it's a wonderful idea.
I think America itself is a wonderful idea, is that, despite the fact that, obviously, the history of it was not as peaceful as I wish it to be, but, I mean, Jefferson, who was one of my heroes, called America the kind of experiment, is that let's put these values and let's see how they work together.
For the most part, it's a great experiment, that this concept of the new world, of the American Constitution, is that one of the first documents I was translating when I was in Iraq, and trying to spread the flyers around, was the Bill of Rights of the United States.
For me, it's like my Bible.
like one of the most important—and considering the time that it came from, obviously.
I mean, now we take it for granted.
People say, like, freedom of speech is a human right.
But before, this concept of separation of powers and separation of charge of state,
which are, for me, like the most important things about the American Constitution, these
are—used to be radical ideas back at the time, and established this nation from people
all over the world, and here we are.
I don't think this can happen in many countries around the planet.
It was— Right now.
Right now.
People all over the world have a different culture or background, can come together to
Yeah, and also, like, when we talk about history, I mean, there also needs to look at the context and the timing.
I mean, if Jefferson wanted slavery to be part of the United States, he would have written it in the Constitution.
So, obviously, I mean, the guy was sophisticated enough that it takes time to understand what Jefferson—but, yeah, when it comes to mind-reading, they seem like they are pretty good over there.
When you're talking, and now we're bringing the conversation global, is that, for example, as I work in the human rights field, I mean, I would be honest, like, for a start, in Saudi Arabia, I'm not going to advocate for same-sex marriage, but I would at least advocate the concept that gays are human beings' equal rights.
And then you can build a foundation that, over time—because, I mean, I assume, like, based upon many of Jefferson's readings, and back to the eating itself, is, like, there was this congressman—he also was a civil rights icon, Lewis—his last name is Lewis, I forgot—who endorsed Hillary Clinton.
So, I mean, I cannot vote this election, so I can bash any candidate I want.
So, what happened when he endorsed Hillary—whether somebody I agree with or don't, that's irrelevant—the amount of attacks that he got from The far left was pretty impressive about how they are anti-racist.
And also, there is the Islamophobia phobia, of the fear of being perceived as Islamophobic is now—so, like, they're afraid of being perceived as Islamophobic and advocate for Islamophobia, as well.
So what Faisal was saying about the outrage—he wishes to divert the outrage manufactured by these small little incursions into global issues.
I think that's actually something that he's working on, on movements.
And it's a very worthwhile cause, because with that, we can engage people who do live in Western democracies to be more active and to be more aware of the perspective of what's going on, the persecution that's going on, you know, in close societies.