Feb. 14, 2021 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
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| I spoke to many of these Muslim, former Muslim, agnostic Muslim, moderate Muslim, whatever | ||
| you want to call them, guys saying, if we don't take the lead in breaking this thing | ||
| open, the countries that we have fled to are going to look like the countries we fled from. | ||
| I'm Dave Rubin and joining me today is a human rights activist, a fellow at Stanford University's | ||
| Hoover Institute, a bestselling author whose new book, "Pray Immigration Islam and the | ||
| Erosion of Women's Rights" is out right now. | ||
| Ayaan Hirsi Ali, welcome back to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Thank you so much, David. | ||
| Thank you for having me on. | ||
| Well, I'm thrilled to have you on. | ||
| We were just discussing right before we started. | ||
| We've done this a couple of times. | ||
| We'd prefer to do it in person, but we are left to the wires of Skype. | ||
| So I wanna talk about the book, obviously, and that's what we're mostly gonna do today. | ||
| But since I haven't chatted with you, at least publicly, in about a year, how's the year been for you? | ||
| How you doing? | ||
| What do you make of the state of the world, my friend? | ||
| Well, it's... | ||
| It's different, isn't it? | ||
| And that's obviously an understatement. | ||
| I belong to the category of people for whom COVID has actually been a good thing. | ||
| In the sense that I can be very close to my family and I have never been more productive in my life. | ||
| Because we've killed the commute time, right? | ||
| We are not going to the office, we are not commuting to The places where I speak, you know, it would take me at least three days to give one single speech. | ||
| And now it's Zoom calls back to back. | ||
| That's the nature of our life. | ||
| But again, having said that, I know that there are millions and millions of people whose livelihoods are compromised. | ||
| That's really sad. | ||
| A lot of societies have cracked their economies. | ||
| People are going through all sorts of mental health issues. | ||
| Domestic violence has gone up. | ||
| And I couldn't wait for this thing to end. | ||
| I hate COVID. | ||
| Are you shocked even though it's been okay for you? | ||
| And truth be told, in terms of my life and my businesses, it's been okay for me, but obviously there's all sorts of horrific stuff happening as you're addressing. | ||
| Are you shocked, though, how quickly, as someone that comes from a not very free place, and I think most of my audience is familiar with your story, are you shocked how quickly we in the West are willing to give up our rights and freedoms? | ||
| I don't know if the word to use is shock. | ||
| I think the word that I would use now, it's in the beginning, we didn't know what was going on. | ||
| This could have been the Spanish flu. | ||
| It could have been Smallpox, it could have been tuberculosis. | ||
| And again, because I do come from Africa, I do come from societies where large numbers of people are killed by pandemics, many of them children and the young. | ||
| Obviously, in the beginning, I was really, really frightened, like everybody else. | ||
| But then the more we find out about the disease, the more I think our response at times is politicized, it's overwrought, in some ways it's exaggerated. | ||
| But what really bothers me the most is that we can't even have these conversations. | ||
| That if you say maybe, like my colleague at the Hoover Institution, Scott Atlas, who's a scientist, and if he comes out and he says, and along with him many others who say, wait a second, let's reflect on these trade-offs. | ||
| That these people are demonized. | ||
| And that's what bothers me the most. | ||
| Because I don't think that the virus cares if you're black or white, rich or poor, religious or not. | ||
| The virus doesn't care about your politics. | ||
| And so I think maybe to use the word shocking is that I thought liberal societies were rational societies guided by reason. | ||
| And right now we're going through a time when reason is not the prevailing characteristic and that is unfortunate. | ||
| That's exactly what I wanted to ask you next, actually, because you were gracious enough to give me a quote on classical liberalism for my book. | ||
| And I think you've been one of the great defenders of classical liberalism, not only intellectually, but also just by extension of your life. | ||
| But what I'm seeing right now, and I think this is what you're hitting on, it seems to me we're almost at the end of Western liberalism. | ||
| That sort of the woke-ism and the giant government stuff has basically enveloped liberalism. | ||
| And in essence, the good few remaining liberals are sort of modern conservatives. | ||
| That's actually what I consider myself. | ||
| I would have never said that three years ago. | ||
| Do you think that's a fair summary? | ||
| I think that if you go to a place where you're saying, you know, there is no hope, we're going to self-destruct, Then I would caution you on that and say we have had times when we were just this divided and really irrational. | ||
| So again, with people like Steve Pinker on, actually things haven't been better for humanity if you take that long, long, long trajectory. | ||
| from when we stopped walking on all fours and started walking upright. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Well, I know that, of course, things are better. | ||
| I've read the book. | ||
| I think I've got it back here. | ||
| Pinker's book, Enlightenment Now. | ||
| So I know things actually aren't that bad, although we've got a certain set of problems, but I do sense that liberalism itself seems to be being destroyed right now. | ||
| That wokeism has destroyed at the academic level, what you're seeing at all of the institutions, that liberalism is in a particularly tough spot. | ||
| You are absolutely right. | ||
| Liberalism, by the way, I would say it's probably one of the youngest of philosophies. | ||
| Classical liberalism. | ||
| And from the time that the Enlightenment and classical liberalism emerged, it has always been under threat. | ||
| And there's this beautiful golden age time when it triumphed. | ||
| But that triumph was, it was like a back and forth. | ||
| You know, we only had the first and second world wars. | ||
| in the 20th century, right in that century when people seemed to be attracted to reason. | ||
| And I think this is not going to stop. | ||
| Liberalism is, once again, challenged. | ||
| Now, obviously, I was really very much engaged, as you know from my background, with the challenges that political Islam presents. | ||
| The narrative of political Islam is liberalism is wrong. | ||
| Individualism is wrong, universalism is wrong and only the way they see and the utopia of their goals is the right way and that the way you achieve that is through violence, sacrifice, through misogyny and through all sorts of other affronts to the idea and philosophy of liberalism. | ||
| Now what's interesting with the woke ideology is that it is actually a by-product Yes. | ||
| I have it. | ||
| that it is a disappointment with the world. | ||
| And so if you read that book, I sent it to everybody, | ||
| I could send it to cynical theories. | ||
| I have it, I have it, I've had James on, yeah. | ||
| I too, I would say modern day liberals, Helen Blackrose and James Lindsay, | ||
| what they're trying to show us is that if you dig deep, and that's what they've done, | ||
| dig deep into the philosophies that inform what we now call Wokism, cancel culture, | ||
| critical theory, critical race theory, it goes by many names. | ||
|
unidentified
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Well. | |
| But that is an unintended consequence of liberalism. | ||
| It's a disappointment with modernity. | ||
| It's a disappointment with civilization. | ||
| It's a yearning for some kind of utopia. | ||
| It does use secular arguments and underpinnings, but it does have a religious quality to it. | ||
| I've compared it with radical Islam. | ||
| You know, they want to shut down free inquiry. | ||
| You have those who are in and those who are out. | ||
| They don't want to have a conversation with you. | ||
| They want to destroy you. | ||
| They divide society into subsets of groups. | ||
| They deny objective truth. | ||
| They're hostile to science. | ||
| Hey, by the way, they say they are standing up for women and gays and transgender people and so on, but if you look at what they're saying, they're actually the most racist, misogynistic, People in the world. | ||
| And so in that sense, I would say here's a new challenge to liberalism. | ||
| It shouldn't surprise us. | ||
| If you're a true classical liberal, you know that the challenges, ideological, philosophical challenges to liberal artists, their commonplace, they'll stay with us because that's what human nature demands. | ||
| And so that's why I don't want to go to a place where we are saying, This is the end of liberalism or the end of free society. | ||
| I think we should just, um, how else? | ||
| It's, it's like aging. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Liberalism will forever be challenged. | ||
| We just have to be aware and conscious of that. | ||
| And even after radical Islam is defeated, walkism is defeated. | ||
| Like national socialism was defeated and all sorts of other fascistic ideas, but it's not going to go away. | ||
| Something is gonna come in a new disguise that will be new to the people who will be living through that time. | ||
| Yeah, you know, it's interesting when I talk about sort of the end of the road for liberalism, what it means to me is that now I feel that I can do much more work helping to liberalize or even use some libertarian principles with my conservative friends. | ||
| That seems like a smart place to put energy for me, as opposed to trying to fix the woke part of this thing. | ||
| But I think this is the challenge for all of the liberals at the moment, is sort of which way do you go? | ||
| Which way do you go? | ||
| Well, what I'm seeing is, yes, you have to find allies and alliances. | ||
| And if you, so first of all, we have to go back to, you know, the American, Americans, People call classical liberalism, they call it conservatism. | ||
| And the Europeans just call it liberalism. | ||
| That's where it all emerged. | ||
| In any case, I think the most important thing for all of us to do right now is find that center ground. | ||
| Talk to people who are on the center left or on the center right. | ||
| And make this attempt once again to marginalize the fringes and the extremists. | ||
| In that sense, I share your concern that the center's kind of sagging right now. | ||
| And we have to make these huge efforts to go back there, go back to sanity. | ||
| Our work is cut out for us, my friend. | ||
| Sorry, we're gonna cut out first. | ||
| All right, so I wanna talk, obviously, about the book, and two things before we get into the sort of fill, the full part of it, but on the opener of the book, on the very first page, you issue a trigger warning, and I thought that that was quite interesting. | ||
| It says, this is a trigger warning for the entry book. | ||
|
unidentified
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Reading it, you should be triggered. | |
| Now, a lot of my audience is gonna say, wait a minute, we don't like trigger warnings on these things. | ||
| Why put a trigger warning on such a book? | ||
| Well, it's a proclamation to take on the woke and some of the people who actually don't even know that they are woke or that they've subscribed to this ideology. | ||
| And it's also my way of saying that if we want to go back to the center, in other words, if we want to address some of the most Confounding issues of our day that you have to go back to that table and in good faith and say and be open and honest. | ||
| These are the problems we are having now what we've seen. | ||
| I work, you know, I'm an academic. | ||
| I'm in the academic space and we are constantly bombarded with You know, you have to be mindful of and sensitive to students feeling unsafe about this and unsafe about that and microaggressions. | ||
| So the woke ideology that used to be fringe has now become mainstream. | ||
| To the point where at Stanford you just get all these emails that are telling you what you can and can't do, what you can and can't say, There's more political and philosophical activism in a way that I have never seen before. | ||
| And so I think you then start with, I'm actually taking this on. | ||
| I want to trigger you. | ||
| I think you go to school, you go to university to learn how to think, to address, you know, when you're admitted to university, there is an assumption that you're a grownup. | ||
| Ready to take on the world and take on all sorts of challenges that come your way. | ||
| If you are demanding a safe space, it was amusing a few years ago. | ||
|
unidentified
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Mildly, yeah. | |
| Mildly, right? | ||
| Now it's just downright creepy. | ||
| Yeah, and it's sort of taking over everything. | ||
| So one of the things that I really liked that you did with the book, and this will get us to some of the topics, is that I know from writing a book now that organizing a book in and of itself is sort of a tough task. | ||
| Just figuring out what goes where, and that's obviously where editors help and everything. | ||
| But you basically lay out the book in four parts. | ||
| And I thought we could just go through each one and cover a little bit from each one. | ||
| So part one is the unsafe streets. | ||
| Oh, you know what? | ||
| And before we actually get to that, another thing that you mentioned in the beginning of the book is that because of COVID, it did delay The publication for about eight months or so, so that some of the numbers actually may be slightly changing. | ||
| Some of the behaviors, which is more interesting, related to immigration. | ||
| Do you want to just address that at all? | ||
| Just because a lot has changed in terms of borders and allowing people in because of COVID, not necessarily because of what the strict European or unstrict European regulations were. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely right. | ||
| So the first thing that you will notice with the manuscript is it was supposed to be released in June of last year and then it didn't. | ||
| COVID and we got all of this other stuff. | ||
| Some stuff was happening. | ||
| I think the first thing that happened is the data is moving or the process of data gathering. | ||
| So When the book goes to press, we have official statistics for the countries and the societies that actually do collect the data. | ||
| And that stuff changes. | ||
| So by the time, you know, we're releasing the book now in February, things have changed. | ||
| People have been confined to their homes. | ||
| And, you know, anybody who's an opponent of airing this particular problem will say, What are you talking about? | ||
| There are no issues to talk about. | ||
| But why? | ||
| There are no women on the streets. | ||
| There are no men on the streets. | ||
| There's nothing on the streets. | ||
| It's a huge lockdown. | ||
| Stuff like that. | ||
| So the first thing is the challenge of updating that data. | ||
| By the way, very, very difficult to gather to begin with. | ||
| And the other one point I make, there are lots of points, but the one point I really want, and that has struck me in the age of the pandemic, is how Governments were dragging their feet about this issue, the issues of Islam and immigration and the integration or the attempts to try and develop programs to assimilate Muslim minorities into European societies and, you know, a lot of it was... They had come to the conclusion, we can't do anything about it because any attempt to address these issues would either empower the far-right or | ||
| it would compromise our liberties. | ||
| And then the pandemic comes along, and our liberties are completely compromised, and we're going along with it. | ||
| Right, and you also make the argument in the book that the more that we don't talk about those things, that you actually empower the far right at that point, because if they go, oh, well, if no one in a civil, liberal society will deal with these honest challenges that we have, well, then congratulations, you're just gonna hand it all to the far right. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So when we talk about the pandemic, the conversations we have, most of it is, these governments have screwed it all up. | ||
| And then we get into how things were screwed up. | ||
| But this is within the time space of just 12 months, even less than 12 months. | ||
| And then you look at how things were screwed up when it comes to immigration, Islam, integration. | ||
| And the parallels are fascinating. | ||
| So in an odd sense, did the last year, because of the way countries are dealing with their borders, did it slow down some of this stuff in some of these countries? | ||
| Because borders were paid attention to, maybe a little bit more carefully, just because of COVID, not because of immigration specifically? | ||
| If in the past you talked about borders and immigration, you would be, Designated the status of a xenophobe and racist, and you know the labels. | ||
| And so if you raise the question of, hey, Germans, French, UK, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, why don't we first talk about assimilating the people we already have within our borders Before we let in new groups and then at that point you're having a conversation about borders and the knee-jerk conventional response would be, borders? | ||
| What are you talking about? | ||
| And then we'll follow. | ||
| Then along comes COVID and everybody's closing their borders. | ||
| Not only that, If I were to fly from where I am now to any of those European countries, I would be forced to quarantine for 14 days in my hotel or home or what have you. | ||
| And there you have a just face violation of your freedom of movement and your freedom of association. | ||
| And even in some discussions about COVID, your freedom of speech. | ||
| And then you say, but if you're not willing, so we would say, we couldn't close borders. | ||
| We couldn't talk about borders, but now all we talk about is, come on. | ||
| So in an odd sense, that's the silver lining to this, right? | ||
| I mean, that's your argument basically, is that maybe we will be able to have these conversations because we realize we can do some things at borders and it doesn't necessarily make you racist. | ||
| It doesn't make you racist to say as elected officials in government, Um, who have been, um, honored with the responsibility of allocating the resources that taxpayers and pay and, you know, the legislative process to say, and most of us, you have, I have all of us, we've all complied with what we've been told by those people that we elected. | ||
| Stay in your homes, wear your masks, keep the six feet distance. | ||
| Use the hand sanitizer. | ||
| And we're all willing to do that, and we're very rational about it. | ||
| I know there are a lot of people who are irrational about it. | ||
| Most people are rational about it. | ||
| If you bring that same rational thinking, or at least the good faith, let's talk about Islam. | ||
| Let's talk about immigration. | ||
| Let's talk about assimilation. | ||
| Let's talk about the impact that stuff is having on women. | ||
| Immigrant women, Muslim women, women in general, which is the subject of the book, I think Then you would say, that's an optimistic, then we've learned our lessons as societies. | ||
| The opposite way of doing that, putting taboos on things, that will empower the radical Islamists, Russian trolls. | ||
| It'll empower the extreme right wing. | ||
| It will open the door to authoritarianism. | ||
| Let me give you an example. | ||
|
unidentified
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Look at the government of China. | |
| When they are confronted with radical Islamic terrorism, their way of doing things is interning the entire Muslim community. | ||
| Like that's 10 million strong in China. | ||
| Brainwashing them, committing genocide, forcibly sterilizing the women. | ||
| We don't want to go there. | ||
| We don't want that. | ||
| Literally happening right now, what you're talking about. | ||
| Literally happening right now. | ||
| That's what happens when you refuse to talk about things. | ||
| Then you open the door for authoritarianism. | ||
| What I'm proposing in the book is not authoritarianism. | ||
| It is like, let's develop programs that introduce to young men from societies that are misogynistic, and homophobic, and where male aggression is either encouraged or people are just powerless to do anything about it. | ||
| When these young men come into our societies, let's socialize them into freedom, equality, human rights. | ||
| Let's respect their dignity, their human rights, and teach them to respect that of others. | ||
| We have the time to do that. | ||
| We can do it. | ||
| That's what COVID has shown us. | ||
| If we wanted to get the resources out there, develop the programs, and incentivize people to to adopt these values and change their behaviors, we can do it. | ||
| Do you think this is something that Europe has just failed at in a way that the United States hasn't, and maybe the United States is starting to fail at it a little bit in terms of what wokeism is doing? | ||
| Meaning that the idea of multiculturalism in Europe, which is sort of, oh, you can sort of live separately in these countries, that's very different than the United States, which was the melting pot. | ||
| And is the melting pot still? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I think what saves the United States from perhaps going down the path of Europe is that there is this concept and lived experience of the melting pot. | ||
| Again, that's challenged now by Not just the Islamists and all sorts of external adversaries, but also by this homegrown woke, wokeism, cancel culture ideology. | ||
| So in America, I think at least we have the experience. | ||
| We know what it is to have a melting point, a melting pot. | ||
| And we also reaped the benefits of that. | ||
| I would say the average American is actually quite has a quite a positive attitude toward immigration and trying other cultures and so on. | ||
| In Europe, the story is different. | ||
| And not all European countries are equal in their Incompetence or lack of doing something. | ||
| So I think Denmark is doing a good job now of acknowledging, OK, we have a problem. | ||
| We're going to set these problems up. | ||
| And they're having those debates. | ||
| They don't agree. | ||
| But think about this. | ||
| The Social Democratic Party, which is center-left, is actually in Denmark implementing the most far-reaching assimilation programs in Europe. | ||
| Same goes for Austria. | ||
| We're seeing the president of France, Macron, saying, you know what? | ||
| These parallel societies, these Islamist separatists, ghettos, we can't have that. | ||
| We're going to have to do something about it. | ||
| And he's willing to put his political life on the line for that. | ||
| So I'm seeing changes. | ||
| I'm seeing differences in different countries. | ||
| Some countries like Sweden, that's a total basket case. | ||
| But in Germany, again, I think Germans are now truly frightened by the emergence of these far-right groups and are actually beginning to deal with the issue. | ||
| So, the United Kingdom, again, you know, I'm seeing changes, silver linings, if you want to put it that way, but still, Not of the magnitude. | ||
| The situation hasn't been prioritized to the extent, say, that the pandemic was. | ||
| Yeah, it's just so interesting to me how you can link this to wokeism and cancel culture and everything else, because when I was in Sweden, when I was on tour with Jordan Peterson a couple of years ago, We were supposed to do one show. | ||
| It sold out literally in two minutes. | ||
| So we added another show and I chatted with people actually during the show and then after saying, well, what's going on here? | ||
| That Jordan's message about the individual and liberalism. | ||
| Why is it so important? | ||
| And everyone said, because political correctness had gotten so out of control that they couldn't talk about immigration. | ||
| They couldn't talk about gender. | ||
| Or any of the other things that you're talking about here. | ||
| And it's like, well, that's exactly the purpose of the book. | ||
| So you lay it out in four parts that I really like. | ||
| So first, you talk about the unsafe streets. | ||
| I think this is the part when people see videos from Germany and France and some other place, I think this is the part that's probably the easiest to identify with. | ||
| But can you talk about that a little bit? | ||
| Yeah, so that part has to do with, it became incredibly difficult to find the data, to just call these Um, offices and say, can you just give me the statistics of sexual violence in your country? | ||
| And then you get into all sorts of, Oh yeah, right. | ||
| I'll call you back tomorrow. | ||
| Um, the dragging of the feet and then they give you studies that tell you nothing. | ||
| And sometimes people will say, I will share with you the data, but you know what? | ||
|
unidentified
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I don't want my name or my occupation anywhere. | |
| I don't want my fingerprints on it. | ||
| And so it was, okay, you know what, the book has, everything is in there that I could find. | ||
| Then the next thing is, well, how can I illustrate the problem without only leaning on just anecdotes? | ||
| And now you go to the neighborhoods, and some of the women will just really take you, David, to parts of Sweden, parts of France, parts of Belgium, Scandinavia, anywhere. | ||
| And they'll say, look around. | ||
| What do you miss? | ||
| What are you not seeing here? | ||
| There's a Swedish, I think he was a prime minister, but a senior politician in Sweden who was taken to some of these neighborhoods and he was asked the same question, like, what's missing here? | ||
| And he couldn't come up with an answer. | ||
| He looked around and said, what the hell is missing here? | ||
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unidentified
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Women. | |
| And why is that? | ||
| Because the sexual violence and the sexual misconduct, the harassment, the lewd catcalls, the obscenities, that feeling that you're not safe where you are, and that the rule of law, so the people who are actually supposed to do something about this are not doing anything about it. | ||
| Anyway, a victim of sexual violence is less likely to go and report. | ||
| So it is, in terms of the different sorts of crime, it's the least reported crime. | ||
| So a lot of these women have made up their minds and they're behaving like the women from the countries of origin of the men who are responsible for most of these violent acts. | ||
| They're deleting themselves, they're erasing themselves out of some of these neighborhoods. | ||
| And the funny, I mean, I don't think it's funny, but I think it's sad. | ||
| The sad thing is, that's not shrinking, it's expanding. | ||
| So there are more spaces that are becoming women-free. | ||
| And then it also sort of leaks into all sorts of other crimes, right, too? | ||
| I mean, it's not just that so women are basically staying at home or staying afraid or not going out, but then it's all the other crimes that seem to exist, and when they send police officers in, it usually doesn't go that well. | ||
| It doesn't go around. | ||
| So it's not only women who are erasing themselves out of these spaces. | ||
| It's, for instance, Jewish minorities erasing themselves out of this. | ||
|
unidentified
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Gay men and women, they're adapting. | |
| And when I say adapting, so that's where integration is going the wrong way. | ||
| And when I lived in the Netherlands, you say, oh, integration has to go both ways. | ||
| And some of these places you see where it's going, right? | ||
| And, and I've heard in, you know, during the course of doing the research for this book, some of the And there's also this terrible reality that you arrest these young men for sexual misconduct, they go into prison as rapists, they come out as terrorists. | ||
| The prison system is just horrific. | ||
| And because of that, let them just, I'd rather that they're raping women than they're terrorizing. | ||
| It's like the craziest trade-offs you've ever heard. | ||
| Yeah, it's extraordinary. | ||
| So part two, which we've sort of hit on a little bit, but the European establishment abrogates responsibility for women's safety. | ||
| Now we thought that these liberal societies were supposed to stand up for their women, but we're not seeing this. | ||
| I mean, everyone knows what happened in Germany a couple of years ago on New Year's. | ||
| There's a lot of examples of, in essence, these countries throwing women under the bus in the name of diversity or something like that. | ||
| So about 10 years ago, maybe a little more, maybe a little less, I had a discussion with my friend, Christopher Caldwell, who wrote a lot about immigration in Europe and the consequences, intended, unintended, positive and negative, And I said to him, we were talking about European values. | ||
| And I said to him, you know, one day the Europeans, they probably won't stand up for freedom of speech. | ||
| They won't stand up for this value. | ||
| They won't stand up for that value. | ||
| But you know what? | ||
| When their women are threatened, they'll stand up for women's rights. | ||
| And he just took on that expression of, you know, the wise old man, and he said, You're so optimistic. | ||
| I don't know if he would stand up for anything. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And I'm terrified to say that he was right and I was wrong. | ||
| Do you think that was just naivete on your part? | ||
| I mean, you come from a place where you knew about these things. | ||
| I mean, do you think that was just sort of an optimist way of looking at the world that, oh, when it really starts affecting these people, they will do something? | ||
| Or do you view human nature a little differently after a couple of years? | ||
| I think the first thing I'll say is because I was surrounded by European women who were strong and who had fought for all of this stuff and gained it and took it for granted, I thought they would be first in line to say this is unacceptable. | ||
| So I think that maybe it blew me, let me see, I don't know, it misdirected me into thinking There were all sorts of confrontations happening, but when you come for the little girls and you come for the women, society is going to say, that's a red line. | ||
| I have to confess that I got that wrong. | ||
| I think I also got wrong the class element. | ||
| Wealthy, middle class women with university degrees, They're organizing around causes such as the glass ceiling, they want to be CEOs, they want to be on board leaderships and stuff like that. | ||
| They want to be chancellors and prime ministers and that's what excites them and there was a lot of conversation about childcare so that you could have 50% of parliament be female. | ||
| And that's what middle class women are preoccupied with. | ||
| And I didn't realize that there was that disconnect between working-class women and middle-class wealthier women, and that's what I'm seeing now. | ||
| And maybe that's why in the beginning when we were just talking about immigrant women, Muslim women, you know, stuff that they're subjected to, most people were looking away because it was, you know, not just foreign and they didn't understand it, but it was also You know, it wasn't their problem. | ||
| Right, so that's what's so fascinating about it, because when it was just sort of their problem in their own ghettos, sort of separate, okay, that's one thing. | ||
| But then when you add this element of cultural relativism, where you're no longer allowed to say, I mean, this is what we've seen. | ||
| We see women get raped on the streets. | ||
| We read about grooming gangs, although you don't really hear anything in mainstream media here. | ||
| But if you read those things, and well, you can't say, You can't, you're not allowed to say that those people, those specific people who hold those specific views, that those views are worse than our views. | ||
| Everything's equal. | ||
| Everything's equal. | ||
| And they've been saying that for a very long time. | ||
| David, I spoke to Tino Senandaji, who is a Swedish economist. | ||
| I had him on a long time ago. | ||
| I should have him on again. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| He told me, he was on my podcast. | ||
| I interviewed him for the book. | ||
| He said to me, That there is an interesting development. | ||
| That the people who are actually coming out now and talking about these things are immigrant men and women. | ||
| And I asked him, do you think that there is a possibility that working class women, local native white women, could actually ally with immigrant women and immigrant families who've had enough of the crime? | ||
| who've had enough of the disruption. | ||
| You know, remember they fled their campings in search of a better life, in search of stability and predictability. | ||
| And they're now being confronted with this mess. | ||
| What is the likelihood that working class families, men and women, but especially women and immigrant women could actually form an alliance and fight this thing? | ||
| He's optimistic on that. | ||
| He said in Sweden, You know, they're the ones at the forefront of people who are trying to break open the taboos are immigrant women. | ||
| So, immigrant women, immigrant men, immigrants. | ||
| I spoke to Mustafa Tanshiri. | ||
| I spoke to Hamad Abdul Samad in Germany. | ||
| I spoke to many of these Muslim, former Muslim, agnostic Muslim, moderate Muslim, whatever you want to call them, guys saying, If we don't take the lead in breaking this thing open, the countries that we have fled to are going to look like the countries we fled from. | ||
| Yeah, and then of course, as you know, our friend, Majid Nawaz, who started Quilliam in the UK, who hates him? | ||
| It's the lefties. | ||
| It's the lefties that hate him, right? | ||
| I mean, who's always trying to cancel him? | ||
| Even right now, trying to get his radio show off LBC. | ||
| It's the lefties because they're now trying to frame him, a Muslim man from Egypt, as a racist. | ||
| I mean, you know a little something about this from your own story. | ||
| He went to Egypt when he was radicalized, but I think his heritage probably lies somewhere in Pakistan. | ||
| But it's exactly, it's exactly, it's exactly the demonization of anybody who wants to break this open. | ||
| And I think that they are becoming less and less successful because you now see the rise of the far right. | ||
| You see the rise of populist parties. | ||
| You see this despair. | ||
| Again, I want to go as an example to the President of France, who has to, you know, he has to defend his presidency from Marie Le Pen or from National. | ||
| Developments like that, the far left will continue to try and silence everyone. | ||
| But they're not succeeding because people are suffering. | ||
| What the book tries to do is, some of the anecdotes, that's a description of real human pain. | ||
| And so the more you say, I told you some of the victims, they say, I'm not far right. | ||
| I'm for immigration. | ||
| I vote for left-wing parties, but I've been raped. | ||
| I've been subjected to this type of You know, sexual violence, and I don't want that. | ||
| Right, of course. | ||
| Well, you don't want everyone to have to be raped in essence to wake up, right? | ||
| Like that's what we're trying to stop here. | ||
| That's what we're trying to stop. | ||
| We're trying to stop the crimes. | ||
| And so I think there's, we are maybe at a moment in some European countries more than others. | ||
| I think that's where Denmark got to. | ||
| It's a smaller population. | ||
| Austria, they were talking about a rape epidemic. | ||
| I mean, just think about that. | ||
| Before the pandemic, they were talking about a rape epidemic. | ||
| And that's what forced the authorities to do something about these things. | ||
| And so, these attempts at silencing people, by labeling them, taking away, as you described, magic podcasts and platforms and things like that, it's not gonna work. | ||
| It's not going to work. | ||
| And I'm old enough, let me tell you this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, I love the internet. | |
| I'm a proponent of the internet. | ||
| I think it's one of the best things that happened in my lifetime. | ||
| But I'm old enough To know when there was no internet, when there were cell phones, when very few people had landlines. | ||
| And yet we communicated. | ||
| So you can, you know, the tech giants can say, I'm going to take your platform away. | ||
| Good luck with that. | ||
| But people will find ways to communicate. | ||
| But the sad story is, if you say we are going to marginalize and silence certain views, You then have to deal with the unintended consequences of censorship, and censorship never works. | ||
| Never worked. | ||
| Yeah, we know they're going to find a way to communicate, no matter what. | ||
| A way to communicate, yeah. | ||
| Remember Martin Luther? | ||
| Right. | ||
| They're going to figure it out. | ||
| If they have to nail a piece of paper on a door, they're going to figure it out. | ||
| You've mentioned Germany a couple of times. | ||
| This is sort of a little bit, part three is Clashing Civilizations Revisited. | ||
| Germany is sort of a unique case because they obviously are only, you know, 70 years off, or no, about 90 years now off the Holocaust. | ||
| They have a very strange situation where there's a lot of guilt, in some cases, very unearned guilt for young people that just happened to grow up German. | ||
| But now, because of the immigration situation, there does seem to be a new right growing there, a new far right, let's say. | ||
| What could you tell us about what's going on in Germany? | ||
| Well, a number of things are going on in Germany. | ||
| And this is, here's like the great paradox of our day, because like you said, just about, 90 or so years ago, they were trying to occupy the rest of Europe. | ||
| They were obviously, and they have a lot to atone for, but carrying out the Holocaust and trying to gas and eliminate different types of minorities. | ||
| And the paradox today is that they are leading in this European unification project. | ||
| So, on the one hand, that project is just so time-consuming, resource-consuming, and they want to get the buy-in of all of these other European countries and their populations, but on the other hand, they have to atone for all of that stuff. | ||
| that they did in the past. | ||
| And their past is way more raw and way more recent than, let's say, the other European countries. | ||
| And so they want to demonstrate that they are, in fact, no longer racist, that they have given up on their national identity. | ||
| For a lot of people, Germany just means occupation, invasion, holocaust. | ||
| Crime, crime, crime against human beings. | ||
| So they're atoning for that. | ||
| And so they want to illustrate, yeah, look, we're welcoming immigrants. | ||
| We are different. | ||
| They want to show that they have changed. | ||
| David, you can't fix the problems of today by trying to fix what you didn't do in the past. | ||
| And that black spots on the German past will always be there, just like in America. | ||
| You know, we did engage in slavery and in segregation, and we denied fellow human beings their civil rights. | ||
| That will never go away. | ||
| That will be part of our history. | ||
| The Holocaust will be part of Germany's history. | ||
| But you can't fix that by saying, we're going to throw women to the wolves now. | ||
| Do you think Merkel, it's too late for her? | ||
| Because she at first was one of the big proponents of opening borders and let as many people in as possible and give. | ||
| I mean, there was a huge problem a couple of years ago where they were giving so many social services to all of these new immigrants that new immigrants or people that had been there for 10 years started getting upset. | ||
| But now she's kind of backtracked on that and has gone a little more hard line. | ||
| But do you think it's kind of too late? | ||
| Well, she's leaving anyway. | ||
| There'll be someone else. | ||
| And then they'll have to choose a party leader and then we'll have elections. | ||
| And I hope they'll end up with figures from the center, whether it's center left or center right. | ||
| I think early on in her leadership, Angela Merkel was a fresh voice, a fresh face. | ||
| But then as time went on, you know, you get that whole thing about power corrupts. | ||
| And I don't think she's a corrupt person. | ||
| I just think Maybe power makes people tone deaf. | ||
| And she was tone deaf to the failure of the integration process. | ||
| And so flinging the doors open when the integration process had failed so miserably. | ||
| I think that was a failure of leadership. | ||
| Now, that is a very harsh judgment coming from me. | ||
| And I don't know what I would have done in her position. | ||
| But when I spoke to some of the German Senior people there, they were saying that it was done, that's 2015. | ||
| Okay, let's, the Willkommenkultur, let's just open the doors, let's let everyone in. | ||
| They said there was no, there was no thought, it was thoughtless. | ||
| And that didn't only cause problems in Germany, it caused problems all across Europe. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, in many ways, at least partly, that was what fueled Brexit. | ||
| that they were spending so much time and energy on. | ||
| And that's how the people talk that I've spoken to in Germany. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, in many ways, at least partly, that was what fueled Brexit. | ||
| I mean, it was mostly an economic thing, but it obviously had to do with borders | ||
| and immigration as well. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And, you know, we talk about buy-in, right? | ||
| Buy-in, trying to persuade leaders of different countries that have different cultures and different languages and trying to persuade their populations to subscribe to the European project. | ||
| And then you do something like this, you know, you just say, OK, I don't really care. | ||
| That's the message, the unintended message maybe that you are conveying. | ||
| And yeah, I would say a lot had to do with When it comes to Brexit, a lot had to do with that tone-deaf attitude to Islam, immigration, the clash of values. | ||
| Same with countries like Hungary, Europe, sorry, Poland, some of these Eastern European countries that have taken on a harder line toward immigration. | ||
| I think a lot of it has to do with I think it depends on whether they feel that they're being listened to and that they're not being condescended to. | ||
| I'm just not listening to them. | ||
| So do you-- - That they're full of-- | ||
| Yeah, do you think that places like Poland and Hungary are just much better suited at this point | ||
| to survive all of this because of that? | ||
| I think it depends on whether they feel that they're being listened to | ||
| and that they're not being condescended to. | ||
| It's the same experience we had here in America where a lot of people voted for Donald Trump | ||
| because they felt that they were being condescended to. | ||
| [BLANK_AUDIO] | ||
| That the establishment had contempt for them, and only contempt. | ||
| And there are a lot of people in Europe, some small countries, some bigger countries, who are saying, you know, these people in Brussels, they don't see us as fellow human beings. | ||
| They call us racist and xenophobic, they don't see our problems. | ||
| They're full of contempt for us, and that obviously leads If you're a democracy, at the end of the day, you're going to have to rely on the buy-in, the votes, electoral victory. | ||
| then you better listen to the people that you want to give you power. | ||
| So that's actually a perfect segue to part four, which is solutions, fake and real. | ||
| So what are some of the fake solutions? | ||
| Cause I feel like those are the ones that'll probably end up being used at least for a while. | ||
| One fake solution is that this, web, a very complex web of legislation, rules, agencies, that governs immigration in Europe, that that is to be maintained going forward. | ||
| That's a fake solution. | ||
| It has failed. | ||
| The asylum and refugee system, the immigration system that these countries have in place are too complex, full of too many loopholes, too many special interests. | ||
| And when I talk about special interests, I'm not only talking about the the legitimate special interests that lobby these governments, I'm also talking about people smugglers and human traffickers. | ||
| So there are just too many. | ||
| It's too complex. | ||
| And so we have to go and review and revisit that. | ||
| That's a fake. | ||
| So to carry on saying, why don't we Make a distinction between those who qualify for asylum and those who don't qualify for asylum. | ||
| I think that that is totally... That has failed. | ||
| People who keep pushing that are actually really pushing their special interests. | ||
| I think the second fake approach would be to say, you know, you take a bunch of people in your country now, take a bunch of people and so on. | ||
| The reason why that is fake is how many people could a country like Denmark take? | ||
| Or even Germany, even the bigger countries. | ||
| That would be like a drop in the ocean when it comes to the displaced peoples in the world. | ||
| In fact, I was reading a UN report yesterday that said 70% of the people who end up on the shores of Europe seeking asylum will not be granted asylum. | ||
| They don't. 70%. | ||
| And you know what? | ||
| The pandemic is going to cause food shortages. | ||
| Because of food shortages, there'll be more conflict. | ||
| Because of conflict, there'll be more displaced people. | ||
| So the trend of the millions of people who are trying to get into Europe, that's not going to go down. | ||
| That's only going to go up, up, up. | ||
| So what then would be the real solution? | ||
| And that would be to have a serious conversation about push and pull factors. | ||
| And you look at the push factors, and the only way to really deal seriously with that is through a collaboration of these various countries. | ||
| And that would have to be, let's break down the silos between the Foreign Affairs Department, the Defense Department, the Development Aid Department, the Economic Affairs Department. | ||
| We break all that down, and you have to then figure out a more, sort of, I would say, I'm getting tired now, but it's like a big picture approach in sort of in ways equal to what we are doing about the pandemic now. | ||
| You know, we are forcing a lot of countries to collaborate on compromising their economies or sacrificing the freedoms of their populations to say, let's get this thing under control. | ||
| And I think that kind of approach would be appropriate for the immigration. | ||
| And it's not immigration. | ||
| Immigration is a wrong word to use here. | ||
| For this mass movement of people. | ||
| So one more for you, which I think will sum up everything. | ||
| Are you hopeful? | ||
| Are you hopeful for the world at the moment? | ||
| I think a lot of people are very fearful, and I've been trying on my show every day to show them that you can't just be dominated by fear, you have to be dominated by hope. | ||
| Your life story is a story of hope. | ||
| Are you hopeful that we can solve not only what we're talking about here, but just sort of all of the giant issues that seem to be confronting us right now? | ||
| And you know, when you say giants, you know, think back about this. | ||
| It's not even so giant right now. | ||
| Remember when America was about to break up because there were people who had slaves and people who wanted to go to war or to end it? | ||
| That was a giant issue. | ||
| The slave trade all across the world back then was one of the most profitable enterprises. | ||
| And we were able to end it. | ||
| We fought two world wars and human beings were able to recover. | ||
| There are all sorts of places in the world where all sorts of conflicts are going on at the moment and people are able to get out of it, recover and leave something better for the next generation. | ||
| So, I am hopeful now that we're really in a place where science, technology, money, we have so much money, I think if we put all of those resources, we have the largest number of educated people. | ||
| When I say educated, I mean literate. | ||
| People who can read and write. | ||
|
unidentified
|
My grandmother and my mother could not read or write. | |
| So in the modern world, we have just so much to work with to make things better. | ||
| But do we want to do it? | ||
| It's the political will. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And that we, people like you and me, we just have to keep harping on it. | |
| I have nothing better to do, do you? | ||
| No. | ||
| So between fighting radical Islam and walkism. | ||
| All right, we got our work cut out for us, I guess. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We good, I think. | |
| Well, the book is Prey. | ||
| The link is right down below. | ||
| And it's just great to see you as always. | ||
| And hopefully in person next time, my friend. | ||
| In person next time. | ||
| Thank you so much again for everything that you do. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about international issues instead of nonstop yelling, check out our international playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, check out our full episode playlist. | ||
| They're all right over here. |
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