March 11, 2016 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
01:03:41
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| 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. | ||
| Well, I tried my best. | ||
| You gave me all, those are all the buzzwords that we talk about all the time, right? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Yeah, and the word committed is the most important one. | ||
| Committed? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| To these principles, because it's very hard to be consistent these days. | ||
| It is hard to be consistent. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right, so you're itching to get right into it. | ||
|
unidentified
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I want to get into a fight, but as far as I flew all the way from New York, but yeah. | |
| All right, so we're going to talk about our friend. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Faisal, you've been on the show before. | ||
| I have, yeah. | ||
| Thank you for inviting me again. | ||
| Yeah, my pleasure. | ||
| So you guys work together and I want to do a little bit just on your histories first. | ||
| So since we've had Faisal here, let's start with you, Melissa. | ||
| So you are originally from Singapore. | ||
| Yes, I was born here. | ||
| I moved here in 2004 for college. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And life there is stable. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Well, it's been a single-party state since 1965. | ||
| One party has ruled the country since that time, ever since it's gained independence. | ||
| Economic freedoms are extremely well-developed in Singapore. | ||
| I think Heritage Foundation listed us 2 out of 180 on their Economic Freedom Index. | ||
| But if you look at political freedom, freedom of expression, freedom of the press, it's virtually non-existent. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So basically there's freedom to sort of pursue the work that you want, but not necessarily say the things that you want to say. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And that's not really happening. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| So that's really interesting. | ||
| So Singapore sort of got half of it right. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| The economic part, but not the social part and the political part. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Now, of course, you come from Iraq. | ||
| Both of them are wrong in my country. | ||
| We got everything wrong over there. | ||
| So she got one for two and you got over two. | ||
| But a little bit has to do with some of the things that we did here in America. | ||
| So for the people that don't know your story, give me like a two minute recap of growing up in Iraq and catch us up on that. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| So, um, Singapore, like, you know, when you first introduce, like, when somebody learns that I am from this country, they will say one or two things. | ||
| The first one is, I heard chewing gum is banned. | ||
| I heard you can't bring bubble gum into the... Is that true? | ||
| Yes, it is true. | ||
| You can't bring chewing gum into Singapore? | ||
| It used to be that. | ||
| They've relaxed it a little, so you can't purchase it now. | ||
| You can't purchase chewing gum there, and it's for a very kind of silly reason. | ||
| Yeah, what could possibly— Back in the 1980s, you know, Singapore was developing economically, right? | ||
| But you can develop really fast economically, but the people's mindsets and civility and tragedy of the common sort of mindset had not developed. | ||
| They would litter. | ||
| You know, you stick your chewing gum on the doors of the trains and then they get stuck. | ||
| And so the government was like, we're not going to spend tax dollars cleaning this up. | ||
| So you can't handle the chewing gum. | ||
| We're going to take it away. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So that, talk about an authoritarian, really at a very micro level, like how authoritarian the government. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that's, that's a good example. | ||
| The second one is, you know, if one of the sort of the best gifts you can get in Singapore for like a | ||
| tourist to bring home that people usually get is a t-shirt that says Singapore is a fine city | ||
| and on it there are all the different fines that you can get like you cannot eat on the | ||
| on the public you know the public train systems and it's just a country with very strong rule | ||
| of law and and all sorts of all sorts of rules that you can't do this and you can't do that and | ||
| everything under the guise of maintaining social harmony. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Now, I assume at some level that probably works, right? | ||
| At some level the social harmony... We have not had, you know, radicalization of our Sunni Muslim population. | ||
| Not as much as any other country, actually, I would say. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And they threw a 17-year-old into jail. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| So we've talked a little bit about what they've done to bloggers in Bangladesh and Singapore. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes. | |
| And you've connected me with a Bangladeshi blogger who I'm going to have on soon. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| These are the people that we need to be caring about more, right? | ||
| Because these are the people that you guys could have been had you not Left. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Did you grow up Methodist? | ||
| Yes, and I did, and I did. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| I mean, it's 1984, but people-wise. | ||
| Right, it's backwards somehow. | ||
| It's backwards of 1984, yeah. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Because the movement has changed, right? | ||
| Something on the left has changed over the last couple of years. | ||
| So when you moved here, I'm guessing maybe it was a little more welcoming? | ||
| 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 they are human beings. | ||
| Really out there stuff. | ||
| 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 | ||
| most. | ||
| In this specific order. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That's what I keep saying. | ||
| They're actually using real racism, because they're not judging you by what's in your mind, they're judging you by what they think of you. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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? | ||
| You don't say that about a white person. | ||
| You don't say, like, maybe they'll support Trump. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And this is coming, again, from white people on the left. | ||
| 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? | ||
| No, I don't. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Even though it's a positive stereotype. | ||
| It's a positive stereotype. | ||
| So what did you feel when you heard that? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, this whole season. | ||
| Did you guys watch South Park this season? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, it was. | |
| I mean, this whole season, I think it might have been the best season ever. | ||
| I know, I know. | ||
| They literally, the entire season was dedicated. | ||
| You made me watch it. | ||
| Well, there you go. | ||
| So the whole season was dedicated to fighting these exact ideas. | ||
| Right, exactly. | ||
| And the thing about taking offense is, you know, I always ask people, like, Who creates the offense? | ||
| The offense, the person who offended, or the person who feels the offense? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Who's the one that actually created it? | ||
| Because does it happen in a vacuum? | ||
| 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? | ||
| Yeah, three little kids. | ||
| Well, one of them actually had a Jewish name. | ||
| Yeah, oh right. | ||
| But the Jewish people weren't angry. | ||
| Right. | ||
| At all. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, from Pricewaterhouse. | ||
| Yeah, so they were all supposed to be really bright accountants, blah blah blah. | ||
| So the stereotype that they're using is a positive stereotype. | ||
| It's actually a positive stereotype. | ||
| The implication is, oh, these are educated kids that are going to go on and be successful. | ||
| Asians tend to be very good at math, and they excel academically. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| So, when people were upset with you, or when you said, I'm OK with the humor in that, the people that were upset, what were they saying? | ||
| Like, did they feel that that's causing some sort of backlash on them? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then he paused. | ||
| Everybody laughed, right? | ||
| So everybody assumed that he was talking about Asians. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then he said, "Oh, you know, the minions." | ||
| So the joke was actually on you, because you were the ones who did the stereotyping. | ||
| And I don't think people, they just reacted to that. | ||
| They were like, "Oh, Ali G's saying, you know, that Asians have small dongs." | ||
| And I was just like, "Well, actually, this is the anatomy of humor, | ||
| and if you don't know Ali G as a character, and how he's playing off his humor, | ||
| he's actually saying you're the one who's stereotyping." | ||
| So just to be clear, he did something really clever there, because he took you one way, made you laugh, | ||
| and then immediately takes you to the other place. | ||
| So you're right, it's on you. | ||
| It's on you. | ||
| You're the one who stereotyped. | ||
| You laughed, and you thought that he meant Asian people. | ||
| I think all of this is directly linked to the authoritarianism stuff, right? | ||
| So you came from an authoritarian government. | ||
| You were not allowed to say, you know, I'm a free thinker and a secularist. | ||
| You've laid out why you can't, you know, lived under an authoritarian rule. | ||
| And now we see this happening here. | ||
| And I'm firmly, I firmly believe that we are in like some really murky waters in America right now and in the West in general. | ||
| So what do we do to fight this? | ||
| 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. | ||
| But do you think—do you guys think that those are values of the left anymore, when you think of John Stewart Mill or—classically? | ||
| Rosamund, it seems to me that that's not even a value that really is understood by the left. | ||
| Yeah, because the left—I mean, the left has shifted, and the right has shifted. | ||
| Like, now we live in a—I mean, you can look at the elections, and you can see for yourself, like, we live in a very polarized world. | ||
| I mean, there's polar discussion about everything. | ||
| Like, you can start, whether it's Islam or abortion or gun control. | ||
| Or a glass of water. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, that's totally the case. | ||
| But I think that that's kind of really interesting. | ||
| I mean, with the Libertarian Party, I've seen, as Melissa mentioned, is this concept isolationism, which is very strong in the... | ||
| But the thing is, like, if you're not interested in the Middle East, the Middle East is interested in you. | ||
| But what happens in the Middle East, it's not Las Vegas. | ||
| Like, what happens in Iraq doesn't stay in Iraq. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| 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. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, that's universal, except he was saying, you have to convert. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's religion. | ||
| But the values transcend borders. | ||
| It's that you can be, like, the values of Islam can transcend borders. | ||
| Not like a tribal religion, let's say, like Judaism is. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like, with Islam. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right, but I'm failing to see how you see this as a positive thing, because isn't that showing why it's spreading? | ||
| No, I mean, it's a double-edged sword. | ||
| It's a good thing that it's not racist, but it's a bad thing that it's universal. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's a bad idea. | ||
| I would skew that as a little more bad than good, but all right. | ||
| Back to the isolationists. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Out of fear of being harassed by the newcomers. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Which then ultimately just strengthens the far right. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| 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— | ||
| For extremism. | ||
| —for extremism. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| 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? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, it—ultimately, it's a political philosophy question also. | ||
| What is the purpose of government, right? | ||
| Is it to maintain the most stable society? | ||
| Is it to raise the standard of living of most people? | ||
| And do the ends ultimately justify the means? | ||
| Because to get there, you know, for example, in 2007 we've had, if you make racist comments on your blog, you can be jailed. | ||
| So you're not free to make these comments. | ||
| And how else does that manifest, right? | ||
| So in the United States, anybody can say any racist thing they want. | ||
| You'll never be thrown into jail for that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Not yet, anyway. | ||
| You might be booted off Twitter. | ||
| But also, I mean, the word racist, I mean, what could be perceived as racist can get you in jail. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| Not necessarily what we probably all know what racism is. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It could be something that you say like, oh, Arabs are good people, could be something that's racist. | ||
| No, absolutely. | ||
| I mean, it's a good racism for me, but yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| But also, like, worth mentioning about, like, Singapore or even, like, can you believe I'm actually from Asia? | ||
| I'm actually from the same continent. | ||
| And the thing about Asia... I'll try to keep that in mind. | ||
| I'm judging you for now. | ||
| ...is that within Eastern cultures, there is a lot of sense of collectivism. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And the concept of tribalism that makes it easier for leaders to tell them... I mean, the philosophy of Buddhism and Confucius... | ||
| Confucianism, especially. | ||
| Yeah, Confucianism, that there's always respect to the leader. | ||
| So it's generally like a culture itself. | ||
| Even China is like a—so, what's happening is that so many people, like when they talk | ||
| about change in the Middle East and things of that sort, and generally in Eastern culture, | ||
| you will see that you don't need to create a critical mass, because you don't need to | ||
| change most of the individuals, because it's a collective culture. | ||
| If you change the leader, and the leader telling people to—I mean, look at Iraq, for example. | ||
| If you look at the history of Iraq within the last 50 years, you'll see, 50 years ago, women were free, and some places are in Europe, you know? | ||
| And the moment that the leadership changed, they killed some civil society activists and stuff, the moment everybody starts worshiping. | ||
| And so on. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| 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. | ||
| The three of us sitting here, three secular people, atheists, right? | ||
| So you grew up Methodist, I didn't even know that until we sat down just now. | ||
| You grew up Muslim, right? | ||
| To some extent. | ||
| My parents are liberal, but yeah. | ||
| I grew up in a Muslim culture. | ||
| Certainly in a Muslim culture. | ||
| I grew up Jewish, I still consider myself Jewish, but I'm not a believer in a magical You don't believe in a talking donkey? | ||
| I don't believe in the talking donkey or the fire that talks and all that stuff. | ||
| But it's ideas that brought us all here and that's why I wanted to have you two on together because I think that that's really interesting. | ||
| It shows that these concepts are, you know, these concepts transcend borders and all that stuff. | ||
| So it's pretty good. | ||
| 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 | ||
| ideas of liberal democracy cannot apply, and it doesn't fit well within the culture. | ||
| And he uses Confucianism as a bulwark against that, like what he was saying about collectivism. | ||
| And so it sort of pits, you know, the West, Western ideas, and it says, oh, it's invalid here, it can't work here. | ||
| And to me, that is cultural relativism, you know? | ||
| It violates human rights. | ||
| Like, it's not consistent with this concept. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So he's saying sort of be free, but not that free, because that's sort of what will undermine | ||
| what we've built. | ||
| Well, they legitimize, they're able to legitimize repressive policies under the guise of Asian | ||
| values. | ||
| It's almost like exceptionalism. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, you know, we prioritize social harmony and prosperity over individual freedom. | ||
| And this is our culture. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So our policies fit that. | ||
| And I think, for me, that was what was very dangerous about that idea. | ||
| And you start seeing it being replicated in Russia, like Putin's doing that, by Xi Jinping in China. | ||
| And they're taking the leaf out of his book now and creating an almost like parallel alternative to Western democracy. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Trump loves Putin. | ||
|
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Or Trump, yeah. | |
| But also it's worth mentioning that Russia is not a country worth immigrating to. | ||
| Except for Snowden. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, if we're not going to find a solution over there, then this issue is going to continue all the time. | ||
| So, and not only Syria. | ||
| And, obviously, Libya is also having a problem. | ||
| Ethiopia and all of the other countries in the region. | ||
| And, obviously, Iraq, since kind of a long time. | ||
| But if we're not going to find solutions over there, so, other than just like focus on domestic | ||
| issues, that's where, like, libertarianism fails, because it always deals with the refugees | ||
| are coming in. | ||
| But how can we reduce the amount of refugees that are coming in from that region? | ||
| That's by not necessarily military intervention, but at least being on the right side of history | ||
| and being with the people who support the values that reduce the amount of refugees. | ||
| I suspect that most libertarians would say, somebody like Rand Paul would say, well, I wasn't for the Iraq War, so I didn't add to the chaos. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's irrelevant now, because here we are now. | ||
| But that is not enough. | ||
| I mean, this concept of like, well, but I'm not a racist, is not enough to... Because there's things in motion. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I mean, people talk about the numbers and stuff. | ||
| I mean, Saddam Hussein killed hundreds of thousands of people. | ||
| If the U.S. | ||
| did not intervene, there will also be hundreds of thousands of people killed. | ||
| So, just because saying, oh, I'm against the Iraq war, doesn't somebody make him a good person? | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| I mean, I'm talking about practical solutions for—I mean, the war happened, and we have to deal with it. | ||
| Yeah, so that's a great segue. | ||
| 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. | ||
| But these people are completely ignored. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And they're ignored by the people that should care about them the most. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And the fact that this has not, I mean, it's been like, what, 15 years since 9/11 happened. | ||
| And it's been the same mantra over and over again, that there is no policy change over who exactly the people we should side with. | ||
| And we have a country like Saudi Arabia as our ally, and we have Qatar that I recently discovered funds the Muslim Brotherhood. | ||
| Which is using slave labor, by the way, to build World Cup stadiums. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Does all of that ring as true to you as it does to me in terms of that we're skipping a step here? | ||
| We're skipping caring about the right people for all the wrong reasons, right? | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right, and you come from the academic world. | ||
| I mean, as I mentioned at the top of the show, you got your PhD at MIT. | ||
| Not yet. | ||
| Oh, you're on your way to your PhD at MIT. | ||
| In genetics, right? | ||
| So you know your stuff, you're in the academic world. | ||
| Do you see this, I think one of the things people struggle with, is this coming more from the students or the academics? | ||
| Or is it both? | ||
| 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? | ||
| Oh Lord, I can see where this is going. | ||
| So they had to change the word man-made because people took a lot of offense at the word. | ||
| They said, oh, you know, this is, it's excluding women. | ||
| It implies, you know, it implies that it's the patriarchy who's involved in this, but you know, in Latin, | ||
| the word manus is hand, and man-made doesn't really come from man. | ||
| So the entomology-- | ||
| Comes from human. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It was just a silly shirt. | ||
| It was a silly shirt. | ||
| It wasn't very graphic at all. | ||
| I mean, I wouldn't wear it. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And then, you know, it's just a cycle. | ||
| Yeah, so what do you guys make of that mind-reading portion of this? | ||
| Psychoanalysis PhDs are being thrown around everywhere. | ||
| Well, because the first episode of the show, as you guys know, when I had Sam Harris on, he said something about the mind-reading. | ||
| They want to just find something in you, which is exactly what you just said. | ||
| And once they can find the grain of something, now they can extrapolate it into every which way that they want to judge you. | ||
| Which is so the reverse, I think, of how rational people actually operate and how evidence-based people and people of science actually operate. | ||
| Well, and also just compassion that is supposedly part of liberalism, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It should be one of the things that we aspire to, is to actually see the best in people. | ||
| I don't know, that's just me. | ||
| Yeah, I don't think it's just him. | ||
| 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
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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. | ||
| Doesn't it show a certain level of narcissism, too? | ||
| Because it seems to me that when they do this, they're just saying, "Well, I can't blame | ||
| everything on myself, and now that's a problem." | ||
| They want—you know what I mean? | ||
| If they can't link America to something, it's not even a problem. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| 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? | ||
| Oh, my God, yeah. | ||
| Is it—am I getting it right? | ||
| Yeah, power plus privilege. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Or sexism, also. | ||
| Same thing. | ||
| Any-ism, now. | ||
| The new definition. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because they look, so for example, racism. | ||
| They redefined racism. | ||
| So racism is no longer about people hating people of other race, but rather it is who are the people on the privileged side. | ||
| So at the top of the pyramid, like we talked about last time, there is a cisgender white male. | ||
| He's worse than ISIS. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And so then there's probably ISIS, because they're brown males, at least some of them, except probably the social media guys are mostly white. | ||
| But the other side is like a pyramid, and the top of the pyramid is a white male, and they think he is the biggest problem of the universe. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So, ironically, what they're saying, actually, is that you, as an Arab brown-skinned man, you could not be racist. | ||
| Against you. | ||
|
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Against me, even if— Maybe he could be racist against me, but maybe not you. | |
| I suspect that someone of, that an Asian person is probably lined up, it's very sort of right next to white privilege. | ||
| But that you, even if you were endorsing white genocide, it wouldn't be viewed as racism because you're being oppressed. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
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Right, right. | |
| 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. | ||
| So, last night in the debate, didn't Bernie say something about how white people don't know what it's like to be poor? | ||
| Yeah, something of that effect. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Do you believe in American exceptionalism? | ||
| I do, actually. | ||
| All right, I do, too, but please tell me why. | ||
| I like this quote by Bill Clinton. | ||
| He said, whatever's wrong in America can be fixed by what's right in America. | ||
| And as it stands now, before the elections, I can say that. | ||
| I can say that with a straight face. | ||
| Yeah, we shall see. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I've always been a free speech absolutist. | ||
| And I think it's something that's just, if human dignity is to be upheld, we should be free to express ourselves. | ||
| That's just almost a basic human right. | ||
| There's no other country other than the United States that upholds that as resolutely. | ||
| So doesn't that directly correlate to everything you do as a secularist and as a humanist? | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| As an activist, yeah. | ||
| Because you know what it was like to not be able to express all those freedoms. | ||
| And the reason I prefaced it by saying that we're all different races and all that is that we all have the same opportunity here. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| But people on the left don't like it if you say American. | ||
| Do you believe in American exceptionalism? | ||
| That's a good question, actually. | ||
| I haven't thought about it that much. | ||
| I'm putting you on the spot here. | ||
| Now I'm going to get the left to hate you even more. | ||
| Yeah, well, I think I already did a good job in the previous interview, but I think I do. | ||
| I mean, it really depends on what you mean by it. | ||
| Well, there are people from all over the world. | ||
| 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 | ||
| have a discussion about ideas. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And that's the power of ideas. | ||
| And I love that you brought up Thomas Jefferson in this, because about a year ago I was at | ||
| Monticello, which was his home in Virginia. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah, it's a great place. | ||
| It's a great place, and they tell his story, and it's really interesting because progress takes time. | ||
| Look, this is a man who owned slaves. | ||
| Not only did he own slaves, he had relations with at least one, I think several, of the women. | ||
| So he was, in effect, having sex with his slaves. | ||
| So obviously, that's not right in terms of slavery and in terms of women. | ||
| of women's rights and a zillion different reasons. | ||
| But at the same time, he was doing so much good for the country, and so many of the ideas | ||
| he had led to goodness. | ||
| So it shows that not everything is through that kernel of evil. | ||
| You want to find the goodness in people. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| But there is a trend nowadays to apply modern moral framework to look at the past. | ||
| And you're starting to see that with Oxford's Roads Must Fall campaign and things like | ||
| We're looking back into the past and now faulting, you know, leaders in history for views they had. | ||
| How dangerous do you think that is, as someone sort of in the academic world? | ||
| I mean, I find that to be incredibly dangerous. | ||
| We're going to look back on everybody one day as culture changes. | ||
| We're going to look back on everybody and go, well, see, he was racist. | ||
| Martin Luther King was a homophobe. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Although I think he actually said something about that case, you should be able to get married or something to that effect. | ||
|
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But yes, you will be able to do that to everybody. | |
| It's starting on campus, right? | ||
| So Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University. | ||
| They're debating removing his name. | ||
| The question is, again, it ultimately comes down to Why do you feel like that helps? | ||
| Is it something that's personal? | ||
| Does it feel like a personal attack? | ||
| And if we weigh out every single person with that kind of moral calculus, You're really not going to find any ideal person in the past. | ||
| Right. | ||
| There's literally nobody. | ||
| And that's why I keep saying the left just eats itself. | ||
| I've seen this over and over. | ||
| Look, we can see the way sometimes, even with Bernie, they've turned on Bernie a little bit with some of the race issues with Black Lives Matter. | ||
| And it's like, here's a guy who was arrested in the 60s for standing up against segregation and things like that. | ||
| So it's like, you have to have a better set of principles than something that'll just come around and get you one day. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, it also shows, I guess, that we have personal shortfalls, that you can somehow, maybe in the public, be better than you are personally, right? | ||
| So he's writing all of these things about equality for man, and clearly led the groundwork to free the slaves, right? | ||
| And yet, at the same time, at the personal level, he didn't. | ||
| So, yeah, it's extremely complex. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Oh, John Lewis. | ||
| John Lewis, yes. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Like, they were calling him pretty racist terms. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Uncle Tom, and N-word, and all of that, because he endorsed a candidate they didn't like. | ||
| This is itself, the left eating itself, because they supposedly be anti-racist, but they're using— It's still on their side of the ticket. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| There was a quote from FDR that I really like. | ||
| It was—he asked him, why do you support the fascists in Nicaragua? | ||
| They said, he's a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch. | ||
| So, if Mr. Lewis enjoys the candidate they like, then he's OK. | ||
| Then that is what the black person should vote for. | ||
| But if not, then he is— Everything. | ||
| So, talk about—they claim to be—I mean, there is a new term called the anti-racist racists, which is kind of interesting. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
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I know it has double negative, but—and also— We have to work this through at home. | |
| 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. | ||
| There's no doubt that that one's real. | ||
| All right, we have to wrap up here, so I'm going to give you the last word. | ||
| What can we do? | ||
| What is the No. | ||
| 1 thing we can do to help these ideas spread? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So that's, for me, a very key thing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And while we have our power of freedom, we may as well use it, right? | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| I have a feeling we're going to continue this in the green room, because we barely... I didn't even pick this thing up. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Well, for more of the work that Faisal and Melissa do, check out the global secular humanist movement on Facebook. | ||
| Go to movements.org. | ||
| And thank you guys for watching. |
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