April 19, 2018 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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unidentified
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All right. | |
| Hello, everyone. | ||
| Take your seats, please. | ||
| Thank you for taking the time out of your busy schedules and joining us here today. | ||
| Here at the Dartmouth Open Campus Coalition, we believe that free speech and viewpoint diversity are fundamental to our success, not only as citizens, but as future leaders. | ||
| It is with my special excitement that I'm pleased to announce the Ayn Rand Institute's panel on free speech on our campus. | ||
| We'd like to thank the Ayn Rand Institute for bringing these three incredible people to Dartmouth. | ||
| Without them, this event wouldn't be possible. | ||
| We appreciate the work of Dartmouth's Classroom Technology Services and Media Production Services for helping make this event viewable to a worldwide audience. | ||
| We'd also like to thank conferences and events, especially Jim Alberghini, Naila Waddell, and Ana Hall for their time and effort in helping coordinate and plan logistics. | ||
| These three were invaluable to the success of the event. | ||
| Lastly, and most importantly, we would not be here today if Rachna Shah did not work as tirelessly as she has to build the DOCC and to initiate events like this one. | ||
| Thank you so much, Rachna. | ||
| Today, we have three outstanding people joining us to start a conversation on some very important issues facing society, especially on college campuses. | ||
| Ankar Ghatte is a senior fellow and chief content officer at the Ayn Rand Institute. | ||
| He is the Institute's resident expert on objectivism and serves as its senior trainer and editor. | ||
| He has taught philosophy for over 10 years at the Institute's Objective Academic Center. | ||
| Dr. Ghatte is a contributing author to a number of books on Rand's fiction and philosophy, including essays on Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, essays on Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, Why Businessmen Need Philosophy, The Capitalist's Guide to the Ideas Behind Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, Concepts and the Role in Knowledge, Reflections on Objectivist Epistemology, and A Companion to Ayn Rand. | ||
| Yasmin Mohammed is an Arab-Canadian college instructor, activist, podcaster, and author who has written a memoir entitled From Al-Qaeda to Atheism. | ||
| In it, she describes how, even though she was born and raised in North America, She endured the same traumas that are familiar to Muslims across the planet. | ||
| As a child, she was beaten for not memorizing the Quran. | ||
| As a teenager, she was forced into a marriage to a member of Al-Qaeda after he was bailed out of prison by Osama bin Laden. | ||
| And as an adult, she wore niqab and lived in a home-slash-prison with paper covering all the walls... windows. | ||
| Yasmin is a member of the prestigious Center for Inquiry Speakers Bureau. | ||
| She's also on the board of advisors for the Brighter Brains Institute, an organization that builds secular schools. | ||
| As well, she is a co-host on the popular Secular Jihadist podcast. | ||
| Dave Rubin is a talk show host, comedian, and TV personality. | ||
| The host of the popular YouTube talk show, The Rubin Report, Dave regularly addresses big ideas such as free speech, political correctness, and religion. | ||
| Among many other high-profile guests on his show, Dave has interviewed Sam Harris, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Larry Elder. | ||
| The Ayn Rand Institute fosters a growing awareness, understanding, and acceptance of Ayn Rand's philosophy, Objectivism, in order to create a culture whose guiding principles are reason, rational self-interest, individualism, and laissez-faire Catholicism. | ||
| Student programs are a major focus of the Institute and include annual essay contests that award nearly 100,000 in prizes, student conferences, student club support, seasonal internships, and campus events, like this one. | ||
| Visit einrand.org to learn more. | ||
| Conflicts over free speech are becoming more and more common. | ||
| This year has seen riots at UC Berkeley, an attack on speakers at Middlebury College, protesters blocking a talk at Claremont McKenna College, students taking over Evergreen State College, and protests of Professor Jordan Peterson, Over his refusal to use gender-neutral pronouns. | ||
| Off-campus, we have seen violent clashes at political gatherings and protests by white supremacists over the removal of Confederate statues. | ||
| What is the cause of these incidents? | ||
| What can we do to address them and to protect freedom of speech and the free society that depends on it? | ||
| Our panel is going to be discussing these questions for us today and many more. | ||
| So without further ado, please join me in welcoming Ankar Ghatse, Yasmin Mohamed, and Dave Rubin. | ||
| All right, thank you guys. | ||
| We are live streaming on my channel right now. | ||
| So first off, can you make some noise for the people that are watching this at home with a porn tab open right next to them? | ||
| Can you make some noise? | ||
| All right. | ||
| I always just assume people are watching my show and if it ever gets boring, they just click over to Pornhub. | ||
| That's just my thoughts on it. | ||
| All right. | ||
| We are very excited to be here. | ||
| I was at Berkeley two days ago, and I survived that. | ||
| So if I survive Berkeley, I sense I can probably survive Dartmouth. | ||
| You guys look nice. | ||
| Everyone's smiling. | ||
| Look at you. | ||
| All very respectable and smiley. | ||
| You're all well-dressed. | ||
|
unidentified
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All right. | |
| I think we're going to have fun here. | ||
| You know, it's funny. | ||
| I flew in from L.A. | ||
| last night, and I flew to the Boston Logan Airport, and I was supposed to take one of these tiny little Cessna, like, four-person planes, and I was not happy, but I was going to do it. | ||
| Yasmin actually did do it. | ||
| She's still in a state of shock, as you can see. | ||
| But my flight got delayed, so I ended up taking a car, and I took an Uber for about a two-hour drive to get here. | ||
| And right when we passed into New Hampshire, there's the sign, Live Free or Die. | ||
| And I live in L.A. | ||
| where the California state motto is pay taxes and be quiet. | ||
| So I'm excited to be here. | ||
| Live free or die. | ||
| We were all talking about what a great phrase that is. | ||
| What a great place this is and you guys are at a great school. | ||
| So we're going to talk about free speech. | ||
| We're going to do about an hour of that and then we're going to do about an hour of Q&A with you guys. | ||
| I thought first, just for people, you've been on my show. | ||
| We've been trying to get you, Ankar, but your agent is very difficult to work with. | ||
| So for people that don't know each of you, I thought maybe we could just do a quick little bio each. | ||
| Yasmin, I'll let you go first. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Well, Jacob did a good job of giving a bit of background. | ||
| So, born and raised in Canada, but in a very conservative, fundamentalist, orthodox Islamic home. | ||
| So, kind of in a bubble, living in Canada, but not really. | ||
| You know, in my own home life was very conservative, and I went to Islamic schools, and like Jacob mentioned, I ended up getting Pushed into a marriage with a man who I discovered was a member of Al-Qaeda. | ||
| And when I was married to him, I was wearing niqab, which is the full black everything, gloves and socks, and had a daughter with him, and then eventually got away and went to university. | ||
| And when I was there, I just took a course called History of Religions. | ||
| Because it was going to be focusing on the three Abrahamic monotheistic religions, and I thought, well, I'll have one third of that content down for sure. | ||
| So I just took it to be like an easy course, not knowing that it was going to completely change the trajectory of my life. | ||
| when I took that course is when I discovered that a lot of what I had been told about the Quran | ||
| being completely different from all of the religions and it's so divine and it's the literal word of God | ||
| and there's nothing like it on this planet. | ||
| I discovered that actually it was just plagiarized. | ||
| A lot of the stories come from Judaism and Christianity and pagan stories before that. | ||
| And so it just took away all the divinity. | ||
| And that led me down my path to the heathen that I am today. | ||
| The non-believer. | ||
| And yeah, so then I started writing a memoir after the famous Sam Harris and Ben Affleck I started to write a memoir, and then I had people contacting me from all over the Islamic world telling me how much they related to my story. | ||
| And so then I kind of fell into speaking out more, mostly because people in those countries cannot speak out. | ||
| And so I felt compelled to, considering I'm in a free country, That I should, you know, I should at least do that. | ||
| And so that's why I'm here today. | ||
| Yeah, well, I'm glad you're here, and it's nice that you're not in a macabre. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes, it is. | |
| And people get to see your beautiful hair. | ||
| Ankar. | ||
| So I'm a philosopher. | ||
| I'm going to just give you my background, sort of, as it relates to free speech and why I'm very interested and passionate about the issue. | ||
| And I was a graduate student during the Salman Rushdie affair, when there was a fatwa put on his head. | ||
| And that and the West's response to that fatwa was incredibly pathetic. | ||
| And it really showcased for me that very few people understand what free speech is and are willing to defend it. | ||
| And that is when I started getting really interested in the issue of free speech because I thought it's very precarious in the West now. | ||
| And then 9-11, I was already working at the Ayn Rand Institute. | ||
| And that, and again, I mean obviously it was a momentous event, but the response to it and the inability to even think that it might have something to do with Islam and that we're facing a movement that I would term as Islamic totalitarianism. | ||
| The whitewashing of that, and the inability for people to speak on this, that they were shouted down, and we were, at the Institute, shouted down. | ||
| We did a lot of events and so on after 9-11. | ||
| That further concretized for me that this is the issue for the new millennia. | ||
| That if free speech goes, we're finished. | ||
| And the Danish cartoons, which came five years after 9-11, and still people can't Face the issue. | ||
| And you've got newspaper editors and so on in hiding in fear for their lives. | ||
| And nobody in the West, no government, really will stand up and defend them. | ||
| And again, the Institute did a lot around that. | ||
| So this is an ongoing issue. | ||
| And maybe we'll talk about some of these events in more detail. | ||
| That this is a right that the West fought a tremendous amount to secure, the right to freedom of speech. | ||
| And it's in jeopardy. | ||
| It's in jeopardy today. | ||
| And if that goes, if you can't speak, you can't change the culture for the better. | ||
| Yeah, and you know, for the record, we've been talking about this stuff over dinner and throughout the day. | ||
| And we have some differences, and we're going to get into our differences of opinion. | ||
| And hopefully when we do the Q&A, you guys will challenge us on some of the differences that you might have with us. | ||
| But the free speech on college campus, since we're on a college campus, I thought that would be the right way to start. | ||
| I view this basically as the single most important issue of the day. | ||
| I mean, I've been bouncing around college campuses now. | ||
| For the last year, and I think the number one question that I get from you guys is that you are afraid often to speak, not only within your peer group, because you don't want people to call you a bigot or a racist because you may believe in small government or low taxes or something like that, but that with your own professors, you're afraid to challenge them because of what the blowback might be. | ||
| Do any of you, just quickly by a show of hands or applause, do any of you have that fear here? | ||
| I'm wondering how much. | ||
| Wow, that's about half of you right there. | ||
| So that's kind of interesting to me, that that on college campuses. | ||
| I mean, this is the place. | ||
| This is the place where not only are you supposed to learn history, you're supposed to learn how to think and how to critically think and all that, but you're also supposed to be challenged and you're supposed to challenge people too. | ||
| And I find it so amazing, consistently, that so many professors these days apparently seem to be afraid to be challenged when that's exactly what they should be trying to do with you guys. | ||
| You are a teacher. | ||
| What do you make of this phenomenon? | ||
| I think it's really sad. | ||
| It's like you said, as a college instructor, it's not telling students what to think. | ||
| It's teaching them how to think. | ||
| And there's this big controversy about safe spaces these days and things that you shouldn't talk about because you're going to trigger students. | ||
| I think that the entire university campus is a place, you know, it shouldn't be a safe space. | ||
| You know, this is the place to criticize and to argue and to question, and that's the only way that we can learn. | ||
| It's the only way we can expand our minds. | ||
| I mean, I grew up being told that questioning something is the devil whispering in my ear. | ||
| That if I don't just do what I'm told and accept what I'm being taught, then that's evil, right? | ||
| And so what's happening these days is really, well, it's triggering to me. | ||
| So one of the things we talked about this afternoon was that you are shocked as someone that has lived through what totalitarianism and what authoritarianism actually does, what you lived through it, and what clothes you could wear, and what thoughts you could have, and what people you could be friends with, et cetera, et cetera. | ||
| I don't want to say depressed, but you find the fact that so many of these people on college campus are so against so many of these freedoms now, you find it shocking. | ||
| Is that even the right adjective? | ||
| It's depressing because I feel like, what is the end goal? | ||
| What are you aiming for? | ||
| When you hear people talking about shutting down speech and burning books, it's like, what are you looking for? | ||
| Are you looking for Sharia law? | ||
| Where is this going to lead? | ||
| But I don't think that they think that far ahead. | ||
| They're just, you know, I don't know. | ||
| So it seems to me that I try not to impugn people's motives. | ||
| It's one of the things I talk about on the show a lot. | ||
| I don't believe that all the people of the left are evil. | ||
| I think that the ideology is bad. | ||
| I think the leaders often are bad or corrupt or have ideas that I think are wrong. | ||
| But I don't think that the average person or the average student that's on a college campus that has those ideas is evil. | ||
| What's the best way, do you think, to counter some of those ideas? | ||
| Or wake up people who may not be evil but are just mistaken? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of it is, it's a product of the education that you're receiving, and it's very one-sided, and particularly in the humanities. | ||
| So all the sciences, history, economics, that deal with man. | ||
| If you look at the history of the 20th century, It's dominated by Marxists, Socialists, and the Progressives in the late 19th, early 20th century. | ||
| put as the progressives that were in the late 19th, early 20th century. | ||
| And it's one line of thought. | ||
| It does not anywhere come close to all the views you should be thinking about, entertaining, | ||
| discussing, arguing about. | ||
| I mean, part of the reason I went into philosophy, I was already interested in Ayn Rand and in objectivism. | ||
| But the idea that that's all I would read and that's all I would hear, I went to a university where It's a crime against you guys. | ||
| of different viewpoints in philosophy and I want to hear all the theories, all the viewpoints. | ||
| And there's very little of that now that happens in colleges. | ||
| And it's a crime against you guys. | ||
| It's a crime against students to do this to students. | ||
| I would never just teach objectivism, even though I think it's right, to students. | ||
| And, no, don't hear about Plato, don't hear about Marx. | ||
| I mean, we read Marx in my classes. | ||
| I don't think he's right about anything, basically. | ||
| But you have to know some of the arguments, and if you're going to have a view of your own, you have to be able to counter the other arguments. | ||
| And if you never hear them, and if it's somehow taboo, and you're going to shout them down as they're racists or bigots just because they disagree, there's something really has gone wrong with education. | ||
| Yeah, it's also interesting to me how so many words have flipped the meaning. | ||
| I mean, if I was to look at you guys and I can see people that are white and I can see people that are brown and I can see girls and guys and people of different ages and all that, And if we were to look at you only based on those ideas, that actually, as I always say, this is prejudice. | ||
| That is prejudging. | ||
| I don't expect, because I look at you, that I know what any of your political thoughts are or ideas are, and yet we're sold this idea of diversity constantly as if this is how we should be looking at each other. | ||
| That, oh, here we have black people here, they should think a certain way. | ||
| Muslim people should think a certain way, white people should think a certain way, whatever it is. | ||
| This is actually, it's the antithesis of the American project. | ||
| It's completely the reverse of Martin Luther King Jr.' 's most famous phrase about his children being judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. | ||
| And yet somehow this is like actually caught fire with a certain set of people. | ||
| Yeah, identity politics is racism, basically. | ||
| It's the new racism. | ||
| Yeah, it's unfortunate, and it's really insulting, too, because people... Ayaan Hirsi Ali, when she did her interview with you, actually, was talking about how people look at her, and she's a black woman, immigrant, and the progressives will look at her and assume right away | ||
| that she's a victim and that she is being oppressed by this horrible American | ||
| society, etc., etc. | ||
| And of course, she is not. | ||
| She is an amazing woman. | ||
| She's a survivor. | ||
| She doesn't want those kinds of... | ||
| She doesn't want anybody's pity. | ||
| So she gets to define who she is. | ||
| Other people don't get to define it for her. | ||
| But people are just looking at diversity of identity versus diversity of opinion. | ||
| Agar, how do you think victimhood got so sexy to people? | ||
| The idea that victimhood is virtue or the idea that because you were born a certain color or a certain sexuality or whatever that's outside of the mainstream that somehow that gives you extra authority. | ||
| I mean, I think that's a philosophical viewpoint, and a lot of it comes from religion, that religion plays up victimhood. | ||
| And if you just think in Christianity, think of Jesus in the Sermon in the Mount. | ||
| It's the meek and the poor, and not even the poor materially, the poor in spirit. | ||
| I mean, we would call it now losers. | ||
| That's who's going to inherit the earth. | ||
| And that sets it up that if you don't have something, if you don't have intelligence, if you don't have wealth, if you don't have a real soul, you're poor in spirit, that's what gives you claims to things. | ||
| Well, claims against whom? | ||
| The people who've made something of their spirit, the people who are strong in various kinds of ways, intelligence and so on. | ||
| And there's a real packaging of the victimhood is, you can think of victims in two kinds of ways. | ||
| You're a victim of injustice, Or you're a victim just because you are in need or you're suffering and so on. | ||
| And those are two very different things. | ||
| And religion packaged those together. | ||
| So there's a tendency to think if someone's a victim, they must have suffered an injustice. | ||
| That's not true. | ||
| You can be a loser. | ||
| And you deserve to be at the bottom because you're not a nice person, you're not honest, you're not just, and so you're at the bottom and should be at the bottom. | ||
| You're a criminal, and you're in prison. | ||
| But to elevate the mere fact that you're losing as that indicates something is wrong, that's not true. | ||
| But religion really pushed that idea, and then it became secularized. | ||
| I mean, Marxism is from each according to his need. | ||
| So it's interesting to me because the more that I've had these conversations and the more that I bring people on my show that are experts in this and that spend their lives trying to dissect what's going on here, to me it just comes down to absolute lazy thinking. | ||
| You don't have to think. | ||
| If at the end of the day you view not only your victimhood as virtue, but you view the whole system against you, or that everyone else has been entitled to something and you haven't, it's actually pretty depressing. | ||
| It's just negativity. | ||
| It's just a circular negativity. | ||
| There's nothing positive. | ||
| There's nowhere to go from there. | ||
| Like, and then what? | ||
| Okay, so you're oppressed. | ||
| The whole world is against you. | ||
| It's all because of your skin color. | ||
| There's, you know, there's nothing you can do about it. | ||
| You're just, everybody around you is gonna be inherently racist. | ||
| And then what? | ||
| Can you briefly tell people what, when you finally woke up, and you mentioned your wake-up moment before, but just like, what did it take in you? | ||
| Because I think a lot of people have that. | ||
| I know, I'm sure there's people here who are sort of quiet about what their private beliefs are, but wish they had a little more of that bravery or that mojo or moxie to get out there and say what they think. | ||
| Well, for me it was, you know, I'm speaking to people who, like in Pakistan right now, the government is shutting down, they're finding people on social media that are speaking out against the religion and they're abducting them. | ||
| Basically, you know, and some of them are getting imprisoned, they're being tortured in prison, and then they're being let go again so that they can tell their other liberal friends what happens if you speak up. | ||
| You know, in Bangladesh there are bloggers, you know, that are hacked to death in the street. | ||
| Raif Badawi in Saudi Arabia has been doing 10 years, again, for just blogging about humanism. | ||
| So, when I'm speaking to People that are in those kinds of situations, how can I not speak out? | ||
| Of course it's dangerous. | ||
| Of course it's uncomfortable. | ||
| I've been called a Nazi sympathizer. | ||
| I've been called an Islamophobe. | ||
| I've been called racist. | ||
| I mean, things that don't even make any sense, I get called. | ||
| At some point, do they just become meaningless? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Like, being called a Nazi sympathizer, I was like, okay. | ||
| Good luck. | ||
| You know? | ||
| But they just, it's the same. | ||
| They have their standard Things that they throw out, right? | ||
| Oh, bigot, islamophobe, racist. | ||
| And it used to happen, this is part of, when I was anonymous, before I had my face and my name out there, I used to get that stuff a lot more. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And if I, they'd be like, shut up, you're just a white woman. | ||
| What do you know? | ||
| And I'd be like, actually, I'm Arab. | ||
| You don't know anything about Islam. | ||
| Actually, I was Muslim for a large part of my life. | ||
| And so, you know, this part of the reason why coming out and my having my face out there and he hasn't Mohammed's was obvious that I come from a Islamic background has has tempered a lot of that | ||
| Criticism, but they'll just go to other things, right? | ||
| but I feel like as as much as as Annoying as that is to deal with with people just throwing | ||
| obscenities at me It's not the same as being | ||
| Imprisoned or you know being lashed in the streets like what happens in Saudi Arabia? | ||
| so You know I just read this article yesterday where they're | ||
| saying that atheists or whatever liberal free thinkers in those | ||
| countries cannot speak out. So we in the West have a duty to speak out. And I think that's | ||
| what America is. America is all about that, right? You know, be true to your, to who | ||
| you are, say the truth, live free or die, you know, like that's, that's true | ||
| enlightenment values. And that's what for some reason, I don't, I, everybody's gone soft. I don't | ||
|
unidentified
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know. | |
| Yeah. So, I mean, this is one of the major things for those of you that watch my show. | ||
| I mean, you know, I talk about this all the time, that what has the left done to its diverse | ||
| What has it done to the people who are actually liberal, who care about the individual, who want to live and let live? | ||
| I mean, they've basically purged all of these people, and it's sort of becoming a smaller and smaller, I would argue, more radical group, because if you just keep purging everyone who thinks differently... | ||
| Be it half of the people that I've had on my show from someone like you or Brett Weinstein, the professor up at Evergreen State in Washington, or Lindsey Shepard from Wilfrid Laurier, or plenty of other people that just say one little thing that's a little different. | ||
| And that's why it's so interesting to me. | ||
| People will say to me, well, Dave, you don't give the right enough shit, basically. | ||
| And I always say, well, there's actually a lot more diversity of thought there. | ||
| I go to events and I talk about why I'm pro-choice and I'm gay married and I'm They applaud me for it. | ||
| Do you think that's kind of new on the right? | ||
| That they're sort of now being viewed as perhaps the more tolerant side? | ||
| And the side more interested in ideas. | ||
| I think that's, particularly in America, that's been a big shift. | ||
| And even, so when I was still undergrad in the 80s, late 80s, it's, I would think of, it's still the left, even though I would disagree with them and my professors and so on. | ||
| They're much more intellectual than anyone I hear who would be labeled on the right or as conservatives. | ||
| And now, fast forward 25 years or whatever, it's not like that anymore. | ||
| You're much more interesting, like just interesting as a thinker that you can see there's an intellect there to listen to a Ben Shapiro than to listen to an average college professor in history or Race studies. | ||
| I mean, there's all kinds of things. | ||
| Where I listen to something, I read something, and I think they don't really know anything. | ||
| They've heard their little viewpoint. | ||
| They're a tribe. | ||
| They've heard their little viewpoint. | ||
| Can't engage with anything outside of it, and therefore just turn on anyone who asks any kinds of questions and so on. | ||
| And that is a new... I mean, you could see that growing from, I think, from the 50s onward. | ||
| But it's come to the point, yeah, I think there's more thinkers. | ||
| Yeah, this is what my friend Peter Boghossian calls a secular religion, and that basically there's no redemption narrative, that if you were born the wrong way, in this case a cisgendered, heterosexual, white male, that you better bow forever, because the second you don't bow, they have to kick you out. | ||
| The original sin. | ||
| Yeah, you are, I mean truly, you were born with original sin. | ||
| I thought we'd shift to a couple things that, away from the college campus for just a second, and some things that I know we have a little bit of disagreement on. | ||
| So one of the big issues right now is every week there's another story about this monument being taken down, or many of you probably saw it at George Washington's church in Alexandria, Old Town Alexandria, Virginia. | ||
| It was the same church that Robert E. Lee went to, so they wanted to take down the Robert | ||
| E. Lee plaque, which they did, and then they decided it wasn't fair just to take his down | ||
| because George Washington was also a slave owner, so then they took George Washington's | ||
| down as well. | ||
| Now, George Washington, as I said, he was a slave owner. | ||
| When he died, half of his – his half of the slaves – I think it was about half – were | ||
| freed, and Martha's half did stay. | ||
| You can go to his house outside of D.C., and they do a wonderful, very forthright, honest talk about it. | ||
| But it brings me to the monument issue, because I'm a believer right now that none of these monuments should be taken down. | ||
| To me, they are historical events. | ||
| Whether you like them or not, it's part of the fabric of what brought us here. | ||
| And what I would do is put perhaps a counter. | ||
| You can either have a counter monument or you could add a plaque that explains a little bit more about why you shouldn't be worshipping at the altar of Robert E. Lee. | ||
| Not that I think that that's really what people are doing. | ||
| But that you would, I would want to educate more rather than remove things. | ||
| There seems to be a huge movement on the left, unfortunately, to remove things. | ||
| And to me it's like, all right, if we allow them to remove Robert E. Lee. | ||
| Well, now they're taking down George Washington, and eventually they'll come for my favorite founder, Thomas Jefferson. | ||
| They're going to come for his house at Monticello, where, by the way, they give an incredible explanation of how he owned slaves, yet he was writing the laws that were eventually going to free the slaves. | ||
| So my feeling is that you can't give an inch on this, because they will never stop. | ||
| But, Ankar, I know you have a slightly different take on that. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I think both sides are wrong. | ||
| And it's, you have to make that argument. | ||
| So if I don't think, I think many of these statutes should be taken down, but not for the reasons that are being advanced by so many of the activists. | ||
| And I do think it is, they view it as This is the start. | ||
| So we'll first take down Robert E. Lee and then Washington and then Jefferson. | ||
| And I think you have to make a distinction between those. | ||
| The Confederacy I view as an abomination. | ||
| And when most of these statues were put up late 19th century in a movement and by people trying to resurrect The prestige of the Confederacy. | ||
| And I'm from Canada. | ||
| I found it very weird to come to America. | ||
| In Virginia, you go to Old Town, Alexandria, and there's a statue to the Confederacy. | ||
| These people are literally traitors. | ||
| Who killed Americans? | ||
| I view them the same as the people who flew planes into the buildings in 9-11. | ||
| Is that a little bit of a slippery slope, though, because we're all just people of our time? | ||
| So, you know, the founders that owned slaves, again, some of them were writing the laws to free slaves. | ||
| But we don't celebrate Jefferson or Washington because they owned slaves. | ||
| But for the Confederacy, you're celebrating them because they defended the institution of slavery. | ||
| And to me, if Robert E. Lee had some kind of distinction other than being leader of the Confederacy, and that's what we were celebrating, that's one kind of thing. | ||
| But we're celebrating him because he was the leader. | ||
| And for Robert E. Lee, he had the choice. | ||
| He was offered the Union Army and turned it down, and then sided with the Confederacy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Do you think in a modern sense, though, that a lot of people are actually going there to celebrate? | ||
| I know Robert E. Lee's house is there. | ||
| No. | ||
| I mean, I think there's an element, but it's – I would find it weird if I – I'm half German – if I went to Germany and there's all kinds of statues to the Nazis. | ||
| The – when they – when the wall fell for communism, they toppled all these statues of Lenin, and I think they were right to do so. | ||
| I would put these in a museum, and I would teach the history and teach that this was celebrated, and we put up statues. | ||
| For these people after the Civil War. | ||
| And so I wouldn't like try to erase it from history. | ||
| But nor do I think it should be in the... I mean, a public monument celebrates. | ||
| And I think you can make a distinction. | ||
| And I agree with you for sure that the people advocating to take these down don't want to make this distinction. | ||
| And they will want to take down all our things to Jefferson and to Washington. | ||
| But I think you have to say, No. | ||
| I mean, I'm drawing a distinction between these two. | ||
| And I think the side that's just defending the statues because these other people irrationally want to take them down, they're wrong. | ||
| And the people who irrationally want to take them down, they're wrong. | ||
| And there's a third way. | ||
| Yeah, it's funny. | ||
| I mean, we've discussed this before. | ||
| I don't like taking the position of I'm not going to do something because I don't like the people I'm negotiating with. | ||
| That's a pretty shitty place to be, sort of. | ||
| And we see this in politics all the time. | ||
| No one will negotiate because they know the guys on the other side, or they think the guys on the other side won't play fair, so then they stop playing fair. | ||
| And that's what kind of gets us to the gridlock that we're at right now. | ||
| Do you have a feeling on this one way or another? | ||
| Well, listening to you gentlemen speak right now, I'm thinking maybe the The middle line would be what you mentioned before, which is having a plaque there explaining the history. | ||
| So not removing it and putting it in a museum and explaining it, but leaving it where it is and having some sort of description that explains it. | ||
| So that way you don't start down the slippery slope, because once you remove it, put it in a museum, they're going to insist that you remove everything eventually. | ||
| And put it in a museum. | ||
| So maybe that's the middle ground? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you think there's another piece of this that goes to sort of what progressivism has become? | ||
| So it sounds good, right? | ||
| You're for progress. | ||
| Everyone's for progress. | ||
| That inherently sounds good. | ||
| I would argue that what progress would be would be equality of opportunity, that we should have laws that protect everyone equally, regardless of your race or skin color or any of that stuff. | ||
| And that really is what we have on the books now. | ||
| But it seems to me that what this goes to is that Part of what progressivism has become is that there is a need to actually erase history because they want to apply our 2018 values to history. | ||
| And I guess that's another piece of why I'm so concerned about this. | ||
| Just authoritarian, really. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I think they want to rewrite history, but I think it's, and I think this is part of what you're responding to, they're anti-American. | ||
| They don't like this country. | ||
| And so to take down monuments, this is why I won't stop it. | ||
| They want to take down all our monuments. | ||
| They want to take anything that they think is about celebrating Americans. | ||
| We're an evil country from their perspective. | ||
| You were asking about identity politics. | ||
| I think when I was in college, you could see this coming in, and there were two doctrines. | ||
| Multiculturalism and ethnicity. | ||
| But if you just take multiculturalism in this way, because I think multiculturalism is a code word for anti-Americanism. | ||
| It's all cultures are not equal. | ||
| And that you can study other cultures and you can learn from other cultures and so on. | ||
| But, I mean, I'm half German, half Indian. | ||
| There's all kinds of things about both of my cultures that I think are really bad. | ||
| And the idea that that's, like, I should be thinking, That's where I draw my inspiration to, because these happen to be my ancestry. | ||
| I'm interested in what's true and what's good. | ||
| And if it happens to be that an Indian contributed to that or a German did, okay. | ||
| And if they didn't, like Hitler, I'm not interested in it. | ||
| But it was pushed that you should think of yourself based on your culture and that they're all equal. | ||
| But that just elevates the bad and denigrates the good. | ||
| You know, it's interesting. | ||
| I'm wondering, how many of you guys saw this whole thing about the documentary about Apu, The Problem with Apu, from The Simpsons? | ||
| Did you guys catch this? | ||
| Just in the last... Okay, so I saw some hands. | ||
| So, basically, a documentarian made a movie saying that the idea of Apu, in effect, was a racist idea that he was played by a white actor, Hank Azaria, who's one, probably the greatest voiceover actor of all time. | ||
| You know, the character of Apu, he was, they did a whole episode on immigration that he showed Homer why immigration is good. | ||
| He's a vegan. | ||
| They've talked about, you know, they've shown a lot about Indian culture and he got married in an Indian wedding and plenty of other things. | ||
| I would argue he's a beloved character and probably the best Maybe the best comedy of all time, certainly the first 10 years of it. | ||
| And yet, and at the same time, the Indian community in America is hugely successful by every way we measure success, socioeconomically, educationally, every which way. | ||
| And yet I saw all these people online, and I got into it with a blue check guy who happened to be Indian on Twitter. | ||
| Really wanting to play up victimhood. | ||
| And I thought, what power this thing has. | ||
| And he said, well, you know, when I was a kid, and I heard this from several people, when I was a kid, you know, I'd be bullied and they'd call me Apu. | ||
| Now, no one wants to be bullied. | ||
| But the idea that that then should throw away all the success that, as a community, Indian Americans have had is crazy. | ||
| I suspect you mostly at least agree with me on this. | ||
| And the multiculturalism celebrates the cultures that don't assimilate. | ||
| And assimilate doesn't mean losing everything. | ||
| It means, this is what the melting pot in America meant. | ||
| You take stuff from different cultures, you put it in the pot, and you keep the stuff that's good, and you toss out the stuff that's bad. | ||
| And the cultures that do this are the ones that are more successful. | ||
| They adopt to American values or Western values. | ||
| They don't lose everything about their culture. | ||
| They keep what's good about it. | ||
| Like Indians, for instance, really do value education. | ||
| And they kept that element. | ||
| It's partly why they're successful. | ||
| And what multiculturalism elevates is their sellouts. | ||
| Because they haven't kept all their backward things. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And they're arranged marriages and this kind of thing. | ||
| And if that's what you're celebrating, you're just celebrating something that's bad | ||
| and saying it's as good as everything else. | ||
| And that's just, Sarah's down the road. | ||
| So this is sort of like when you hear that, oh well, this is an odd analogy for this week, | ||
| but Starbucks is coming to Harlem and then, you know, I know that's not a great analogy for this week, | ||
| but something like that, they're coming to Harlem and then Al Sharpton will say, | ||
| see they're gentrifying our neighborhoods, they're kicking us out, even though what ultimately happens, | ||
| and they've done many studies on this, where Starbucks goes, suddenly there is more economic | ||
| success But to Ankar's point about multiculturalism, as someone that was born Muslim, but you consider yourself ex-Muslim now, | ||
| How are you able to, or not able to, integrate any sort of those things that went into the melting pot for Indians and for every other minority that is here in America? | ||
| Yeah, well, I did exactly that, but it was a very slow process because I had to do it myself, brick by brick, just figure out, you know, rebuild myself and figure out what are my values, you know, what parts do I want to keep and what parts do I want to throw out. | ||
| And a lot of the parts that I wanted to throw out, like taking off the hijab was one of the first things I did before I denounced the religion even. | ||
| I was just very glad to be able to just wear what I wanted to wear, not what I was being forced to wear. | ||
| Which seems like it would be a lefty, pretty high up there, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So Ana and I got rid of that. | ||
| And so it's just really weird now to see people, the progressive People from liberal thinkers now celebrating a backwards, misogynistic, you know, modesty culture. | ||
| So, yeah, it comes back to what you were saying about, you know, multiculturalism, taking all cultures and viewing them all as equal and basically not throwing anything out. | ||
| Because if you throw something out, that means you're a sellout, you know. | ||
| But there are a lot of things that need to be thrown out. | ||
| This is human progress. | ||
| We're talking about slavery. | ||
| We threw that out, right? | ||
| Like, that's a good thing, throwing out things. | ||
| So it should be viewed... Progressives should be all about that. | ||
| Through the word progressive, right? | ||
| So it's interesting. | ||
| Obviously, we've focused so far mostly on problems that we see with the left. | ||
| But let's try to give the right something. | ||
| You know, when I do these events with ARI, with the Ayn Rand Institute, people say, ah, you see Ruben's in it with those far-right maniacs. | ||
| That's what they think you're a maniac on. | ||
| I know. | ||
| You can see this guy's a real extremist over here. | ||
| Now, obviously, I've focused more on the left because I came from the left. | ||
| And for a certain set of years, I was really trying to reform the left. | ||
| I think now, to be totally honest, and I I consistently say this on my show, I'm doing this a little more on the outside. | ||
| I don't think that liberalism, at least in the classical sense, has anything to do with the modern left. | ||
| Where that puts me, I'm not exactly sure. | ||
| But let's talk about the right a little bit. | ||
| And people say, well, you don't criticize the right enough. | ||
| And to me, is there some element of the right that is racist, or that wants some sort of ethnostate, or that the KKK is involved in, or the Richard Spencers of the world, or any of that? | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Those things are completely antithetical to American values, to freedom, to our Constitution, all of those things. | ||
| But to me, I don't focus on them because those things have no institutional power. | ||
| I don't think anyone here is being taught by a white supremacist. | ||
| Is anyone here possibly being? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, it just doesn't happen at the college level, where we know they're being indoctrinated with leftist ideas at the college level. | ||
| We don't see this even in politics. | ||
| I don't think that Donald Trump is a white supremacist. | ||
| Do you think that's a fair take of What's happening on the right that acknowledging, yeah, there's something wrong with the fringe of it, but it hasn't sort of ensconced the whole thing. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, we were talking a bit about this. | ||
| I don't think of it exactly in terms of the right, but I do think, so if you look at the Trump and the Trump phenomenon, it has energized what you're calling the fringe. | ||
| It's given them more confidence, more power, more of a platform. | ||
| And that's a threat, though I agree with you, it's much less, just their numbers and particularly, as you said, the institutionalization of it is much less. | ||
| But if you think of other elements that are thought of as this belongs with the conservatives and the right, religion belongs there. | ||
| And I think you can't understand America's inability to deal with the threat from Islamic totalitarianism and just to be able to think about it without understanding that America, it's been pushed and pushed, and this comes way more from the conservatives, that religion is a force for the good. | ||
| And so, what does it mean that you've got people flying planes into buildings in the name of a religion? | ||
| It has to be they hijacked it, they perverted it, they corrupted it. | ||
| And yet, if you look at the history of religion, this is not some unusual act. | ||
| Suicide bombing and this kind of... It's not... When you look at the wars between the Catholics and the Protestants, and the amount of killing and the torture and so on, It's not this all this is some weird thing that we've never seen before, but they're not willing to go there and ask those questions and really drive home. | ||
| Could this have something to do with religion or not? | ||
| And I think that is coming way more from the right. | ||
| All right, well, we're sitting next to someone that doesn't have a problem talking about that, and you were doing a lot of nodding there. | ||
| We see this get obfuscated constantly, that it's about geopolitics, or it's about economics, or it's about education. | ||
| I think there might be some element of truth to any one of those, and of course we have to judge these people on their individual motives and actions. | ||
| But you were nodding to a lot of that, and you've lived through a lot of it, so can you Yeah, I was nodding through a lot of that because I do agree that that is a criticism of people that are on the right because they are generally conservative religious people as well. | ||
| And so I was in an interview with Gad Saad who was saying, look at all of the hate and violence in the Quran, why can't this be considered hate speech? | ||
| And I said, because then the Bible would have to be too. | ||
| And so nobody wants to go there. | ||
| And so then they talk about other things. | ||
| They say, no, it's because of unemployment. | ||
| It's because of education. | ||
| It's because they've hijacked the religion. | ||
| It's because, let's think of any other reason other than acknowledging the truth, which is that they're That the religion teaches this. | ||
| You've got 1.6 billion Muslims and the one book that they read tells them hundreds and hundreds of times that the most valued person amongst them would be the person that gives their life for Allah. | ||
| The person that gives their life in jihad. | ||
| Killing the non-believers. | ||
| That's what this book teaches. | ||
| And so a certain percentage of the people that are hearing this, it's going to resonate with them, and they're going to respond to it, and they're going to do what they're told. | ||
| Now, you know, humans are, I think, innately good, right? | ||
| None of us, we don't, we're not going around murdering each other. | ||
| So you would, it would be You know, it's gonna be a small percentage, of course, of people that would actually act on this. | ||
| But any percentage of 1.6 billion is just bad odds, right? | ||
| So is the odd dichotomy there with religion, and we discussed this a little bit earlier, but we live in a Christian nation. | ||
| I mean, it's founded on Judeo-Christian principles, basically, but we live in a predominantly Christian country. | ||
| Here we have an ex-Muslim, we have... You weren't born into any religion, but you come from a half-Indian, half-German family, into America. | ||
| I'm a gay Jew. | ||
| I mean, I said to you earlier, thank God. | ||
| You know, I was being slightly facetious, but thank God we live in America because this is the place that allows us to do this. | ||
| What does that say, actually, about perhaps a reformation that Christianity has had that maybe people like you are trying to get Islam to do, although I know that's not really what your particular goal is. | ||
| But Christianity has changed a lot, right? | ||
| And I think we have to acknowledge that. | ||
| I don't think of America as a Judeo-Christian nation. | ||
| I think of it as it's a nation of the Enlightenment. | ||
| And I think it's wrong to think of it as reforming religion, though I can understand why people describe it like that. | ||
| I think what happened with Christianity is it became marginalized and defanged. | ||
| So you had, from the Renaissance onward, people taking much more seriously that we have to think for ourselves, that we can think for ourselves, that we can reason, we can arrive at knowledge. | ||
| You had the scientific revolution. | ||
| And then we need a political system that enables us to do that. | ||
| And then you get Locke and others thinking about that. | ||
| And it culminates with the United States of America, which is, it's not an accident that freedom of speech is in the First Amendment. | ||
| It's crucial, crucial, and it's an aspect of freedom of thought. | ||
| And what happened then with Christianity is, it either would go away completely, or it sort of has to make peace with science, and peace with, now we've got the idea that people should be free. | ||
| And then that's the way in which it's sort of pushed to the side. | ||
| It's marginalized, and it's defanged. | ||
| So separation of church and state is, you can't wield political power. | ||
| You have for centuries, but religion can no longer wield political power. | ||
| And that's the sense of defanging it. | ||
| And that's what has to happen in the Muslim world, I think. | ||
| Something positive has to replace Islam. | ||
| And then it will be pushed. | ||
| It won't go away completely. | ||
| But it will be pushed to the side. | ||
| And crucial is that there has to be separation of state and mosque. | ||
| You can't wield political power. | ||
| Religion cannot wield political power. | ||
| So, again, you're nodding a lot. | ||
| I mean, I know there's a split right now in the Muslim world, basically, between ex-Muslims and the reformers. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You're sort of of the mind that this cannot be reformed, that this should be... Well, I am an atheist, so I'm going to, you know, if somebody asks me what my opinion is, then I'll go to what my truth is. | ||
| But I don't have any I support people that are trying to reform their religion. | ||
| I'm not a Muslim, so I'm not going to try and reform that religion. | ||
| It's not my place to do that. | ||
| I'm not interested in doing that. | ||
| But I'll support people who are trying to do it because the path that they want to get to is secularism, is humanism, is the liberal values that I hold dear. | ||
| So, yeah, I'll link hands with a Buddhist and a Christian and a, you know, a Hindu and a whoever. | ||
| It doesn't matter. | ||
| A Zoroastrian. | ||
| Yay, let's go! | ||
| But we all agree on the same goal. | ||
| So, yeah, it doesn't matter to me. | ||
| But I think in the Muslim world, it's an exact opposite. | ||
| of what it is here. | ||
| So you were talking about Christianity being defamed. | ||
| I mean, yeah, sure, there's a Bible belt of people that are super conservative and that maybe do want religion in the public sphere, but they're a minority here. | ||
| But in the Islamic world, you flip that around, it's the majority of people who want Islam in the public sphere, who want it to be filling, who want 100% Islamic societies. | ||
| They want to get rid of all non-Muslims. | ||
| And there are quite a few countries that are already have succeeded in that, you know. | ||
| We were speaking earlier about Egypt who, you know, Egypt was successfully got rid of almost all its Jewish people. | ||
| I think there's like five women left or something. | ||
| There was one Jewish man left and he had to leave because obviously his, you know, he was not safe. | ||
| And Christians are, they're working on them, right? | ||
| Like now there's like 10% of Christians there. | ||
| And look around the whole area. | ||
| Look at the Christians in Iraq. | ||
| Look at the Christians in Somalia. | ||
| Look at the Christians in Syria. | ||
| Anywhere. | ||
| You know, this is... They're being... They want to get rid of all other ideas and narratives and thoughts. | ||
| You were talking about teaching one book. | ||
| I mean, that's a slam. | ||
| You read this one book. | ||
| You do not read any other books. | ||
| It's a waste of time. | ||
| You focus on memorizing this book, not just not reading it and understanding it and debating it and having conversations. | ||
| No, memorizing it. | ||
| That's where the value is, is regurgitation. | ||
| So, yeah. | ||
| And notice just for that last point, that that's what the Christian world was like before the Renaissance or before the discovery of Greek philosophy. | ||
| They used to preach and teach in Latin that nobody understood. | ||
| But it was good enough because you're indoctrinating. | ||
| It's not about understanding or knowledge. | ||
| It's about indoctrination. | ||
| And Christianity doesn't look like that anymore, or nearly as much. | ||
| But that's the Enlightenment that did that. | ||
| How much worse do you think this is all going to get as we're watching the rise of Parties in Western Europe that are genuinely xenophobic, that want to change the nature of their countries, just as parties on the left want to change it, and they've got all these immigration problems and all this. | ||
| I'm a believer that this can get better. | ||
| I'm an optimist by nature. | ||
| But it seems to me that in America, in Western Europe especially, it's going to get a lot worse before it gets better. | ||
| Do you think that's a fair estimation? | ||
| Yeah, I think unfortunately you're right. | ||
| I mean, sometimes I read about things that are happening in Europe Or, you know, we're in the UK and I think, like, I feel like a civil war is brewing in some of these countries. | ||
| People are really, really angry, you know, and I think it will have to get worse before it gets better. | ||
| Something's going to have to blow. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's interesting that this is happening worldwide, right? | ||
| I mean, the amount of email I get from other countries where people in Australia and Japan and Brazil are talking about the exact same things that we're talking about in Canada and America. | ||
| Yeah, and the whole rise of Islam in the last 75 years in the Middle East, I mean, it's had repercussions worldwide. | ||
| And then with the immigration, it's a problem in all kinds of places. | ||
| And part of, I think, the reason we do these kinds of events and what we're trying to do, if you only allow the Islamists and the people who... There is an element of racism and bigotry. | ||
| If you only allow those two to talk about this issue, you're finished. | ||
| If we can't have an honest conversation about it, then we're going to have dishonest conversations. | ||
| This is a conflict. | ||
| And it's either going to be resolved by people who are actually thinking and trying to do the right thing, Or it's going to be resolved. | ||
| And this is why it feels like a civil war is coming. | ||
| Because if the people who could... It's not that every Muslim should be tossed out or something like that. | ||
| But there's a problem with Islamic totalitarianism and a real fundamentalism in the religion that we've seen with other religions. | ||
| And we have to address it and deal with it. | ||
| And if rational people don't, irrational people are going to. | ||
| So are you hopeful then for this alignment? | ||
| Because look, I see what's happening with my show and the things that I'm doing and the amount of people that are coming for those conversations and I go, wow, there's actually something very cool happening. | ||
| On the other hand, if you just look on Twitter all day long or you're just following social media or Facebook or whatever, You only hear crazy people screaming all day long. | ||
| Or if you watch CNN all day long, it's hysteria. | ||
| Or if you watch MSNBC or FOX, I would recommend not watching none of them. | ||
| But we're sort of caught in these two things of hysteria. | ||
| But the real question is how many of us, maybe don't have all, certainly none of us have all the answers, but are at least willing to ask some questions. | ||
| I think it's way more people than we are led to believe. | ||
| I don't think that these two groups are on opposite sides of the spectrum. | ||
| I think that both those groups are on the same side of the spectrum. | ||
| Like you were talking about illiberal versus liberal or authoritative. | ||
| Yeah, so that's the thing that gets to me. | ||
| People talk about it like two opposite things. | ||
| Like if you speak out against Islamism, then that makes you a racist. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Even though if there was a political party that was anti-woman and anti-gay, etc., etc., the left would love that political party, right? | ||
| Or they would hate them. | ||
| But in this case, all of the things that they purport to love are the things that they're allying with. | ||
| So confusing. | ||
| What do you make of that? | ||
| Brown skin. | ||
| So it really is that simple. | ||
| They just don't want to be racist so they can't speak out against this ideology. | ||
| They will speak out about Christianity till the cows come home, right? | ||
| Even though, like you were saying, it's been defanged. | ||
| Why are we still talking about it? | ||
| Sure, there are aspects that need to be criticized, but it really is low-hanging fruit. | ||
| It's the molehill, and they're ignoring the mountain, right? | ||
| So, yeah, I just think it's... | ||
| Because we've been trained that all cultures are equal and you cannot speak about other people because that means that you think that you are somehow better and it makes you a white supremacist so you have to bite your tongue and not speak out against bad ideas. | ||
| Even FGM! | ||
| Female genital mutilation is okay, too. | ||
| In Canada, in the UK, there's issues with our actual leaders that will not... So our leader in Canada, Justin Trudeau, was saying you cannot call female genital mutilation barbaric. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, he should say that to our friend Ayaan Hirsi Ali's face. | ||
| So what is barbaric? | ||
| If holding down a young girl and cutting out her clitoris isn't barbaric, then when would we use that word? | ||
| You know? | ||
| And you had the same thing with Corbin in the UK. | ||
| They are so... | ||
| afraid of being racist, that they will actually support horrible ideas as long as it's a brown person that's holding those ideas. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And it's part of the anti-Americanism and anti-Western. | ||
| So I don't, as I said, I don't think of America as a Judeo-Christian country, but many people do, including many people, the leaders of the progressives, who are actually regressives. | ||
| And authoritarians, they think of it like that. | ||
| So they're happy to attack Christianity and Judaism because they see it as part of the attack on America and the West. | ||
| And they're happy to prop up Islam and whitewash it because it helps tear down the West. | ||
| And unfortunately, again, I agree completely with what you said. | ||
| Many of the followers, students who bought into this, this is all they've been taught. | ||
| So I have a very different view. | ||
| But the leaders are, there's a very corrupt motivation there, I think. | ||
| Yeah, so we've been speaking for maybe a half hour or so, or maybe even more than that. | ||
| I don't think we've said Trump once, which is... I thought that would be worthy of applause, but... We haven't said Trump once, but of course, if we're talking about free speech, we should talk about Trump a little bit, because I think that there's an idea out there that he is the biggest threat to free speech. | ||
| Now, for me personally, I think the bigger threat to free speech is ourselves. | ||
| I'm far more worried about self-censorship at the moment than the government Telling you not to say something. | ||
| Actually, I don't see the government really coming for anybody. | ||
| Do I have all sorts of problems with his tweets and all that stuff? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| But even if you look at what happened with Colin Kaepernick and kneeling for the anthem, everyone was screaming as if this was the end of American civilization. | ||
| And ironically, actually everything worked the way it was supposed to. | ||
| The president, you may not like his opinion, but he's allowed to say what he thinks about a player kneeling. | ||
| The player is allowed to kneel or not kneel. | ||
| The owners of the team are allowed to either bring these players on or suspend them if they so see it fit. | ||
| And the audience, you guys, are allowed to buy tickets or not buy tickets and buy jerseys or not buy jerseys. | ||
| Like, actually everything worked. | ||
| No one was put in jail. | ||
| People were upset. | ||
| People were angry. | ||
| That's exactly what is supposed to happen. | ||
| But if you listen to the narrative that the media was pushing the entire time, it was this idea that somehow Totalitarianism or some evil force was actually at work and yet within the confines of free speech and how freedom is supposed to work, it all worked. | ||
| Why is that idea not taking root? | ||
| We should all pat ourselves on the back, honestly. | ||
| We're very, very lucky to be living in a country where so much blood has shed for this to work. | ||
| I'm very grateful. | ||
| I lived on the other side of the world. | ||
| Ayaan was saying this to you too. | ||
| She's seen the other side of the coin. | ||
| I see these kinds of things and I feel just joy and happiness and grateful that this can happen. | ||
| So is it partly a media thing, then, that they just want to keep you watching, keep you clicking, keep you upset? | ||
| I think we also disagree a bit. | ||
| I don't think everything worked exactly. | ||
| Though I think it's true that, in essence, there's still respect in America for free speech. | ||
| A lot of things worked here. | ||
| But there's something very problematic and very dangerous, I think. | ||
| You say a president can have opinions. | ||
| I think, yeah. | ||
| But when the government has so much control over industry, It's, is he expressing an opinion or is it a veiled threat towards the NFL if you don't toe the line? | ||
| And if, for Trump, but he's not, it's not unique in this regard. | ||
| Clinton did this too and it was very scary, I thought. | ||
| Trump with Amazon, and with the Washington Post, and with some of the stories about antitrust and mergers, that he doesn't like the company, so we're going to make it hard for you to merge. | ||
| You can say he's expressing an opinion about Amazon, but there's threats there as well, and I think it's very dangerous. | ||
| But Hillary Clinton did this with Exxon and so on, about you can't talk like this about climate change, because I don't like what you say. | ||
| She didn't say that. | ||
| But that's the threat, and it's a dangerous thing. | ||
| Yeah, and I completely hear you on that, and I'm certainly going to be the last one to sit up here and defend big government. | ||
| But I think just in the part that we can look at from our lens right now, everything worked. | ||
| Is it a threat? | ||
| Is Trump behind the scenes? | ||
| Were they talking to the NFL people about losing some of their tax benefits and some other things, and that they were potentially going to lose them? | ||
| Perhaps. | ||
| and then you're using government coercion to affect it. | ||
| That would be different. | ||
| But I think in this case, it basically all worked. | ||
| It's funny, because when you talk about this, I really can sense your sort of exhaustion | ||
| with just people that don't accept the goodness here. | ||
| Yeah, because I feel like I'm really, I feel like I worked so hard | ||
| to pull myself out of the darkness and to pull my daughter out of the darkness | ||
| and to come out into the light. | ||
| And so to see people that were born and raised in the light, who luckily didn't have to experience the darkness, are actually kind of fetishizing it. | ||
| That's where they want to go, but they're not... I really think that they just... | ||
| Don't understand what they're doing. | ||
| You know, I think that a lot of people on the left really do come, it's coming from a good place. | ||
| They do not want to be racist and they do not want to be homophobic and sexist and all that other stuff. | ||
| So they're overcompensating but they're not realizing that through this overcompensating they're actually becoming totalitarian in what they're doing. | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I hate to ask this question, but I'll reference something that you said a little while ago. | ||
| You said the phrase civil war. | ||
| I get this question a lot now. | ||
| I'm seeing this a lot in my inbox. | ||
| Are we at this thing where now we have two forces working at each other that one has to win, but we don't win in the battle of ideas anymore. | ||
| We may have to battle it out in some other way. | ||
| I would be completely against it. | ||
| It would be the ending of the American experiment, I think, in effect. | ||
| But do you see that as a truly possible outcome of this? | ||
| I see it down the road as a possibility, this kind of breakup. | ||
| You've seen it in the past in Europe. | ||
| You've seen it. | ||
| People didn't expect that World War I could happen. | ||
| And if you read some of the popular newspapers and magazines of pre-World War I, it's going to be progress forever. | ||
| And the idea that you could have World War I, which was this senseless war of enormous death and destruction. | ||
| And then you get World War II, partly a result of it. | ||
| That people, if you said in the late 19th century, you're going to, in the next 50 years, have two world wars where everybody's trying to kill each other, they would have thought you're crazy. | ||
| And yet it happened. | ||
| So there's a possibility. | ||
| I wouldn't bet on it still, but nor should one think, no, that's impossible that that could happen. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I think you guys know that my answer to this is, of course, and I know that you guys agree with this, is that the only way we can solve these problems is by judging each other as individuals. | ||
| And that's it. | ||
| That is literally the antidote to prejudice, to racism, to all of |
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