The Joe Rogan Experience - #1613 - Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Episode Date: March 2, 2021

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a human rights activist and author of the new book "Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women's Rights."

The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. So first of all, thanks for doing this. I really appreciate it. Thanks for being here. Yeah, thank you so much. So you were saying that you're having a hard time getting people to talk to you. Not exactly. I'm saying that when I had other books published,

my publisher would say, here's a list of places you're going to promote the book. And it was quite striking that this year it wasn't. to promote the book. And it was quite striking that this year it wasn't. I published my last book in 2015. It's called Heretic. And I was sent to, you know, MSNBC,

all of the mainstream media agencies, CNN. It was all over the place. They said, we want you to go there. And I went there. And this year, I just have to do podcasts, it looks like. So what has been the response from these mainstream sources, whether it's MSNBC or CNN or any of these places, they just aren't interested? I don't know exactly what the communication is between them and harper collins and harper collins is my publisher

but we i had one invitation from a magazine called bust b-u-s-t it's for girls and women about breasts bust as in breasts i i don't Is that what it means? I don't know. Okay. I've been told it's a magazine for very young people, and it's widely distributed. So it's something that's popular. And if you come out with a book about women, well, busts would be a good place to go to. And then I was told, so they had a journalist

lined up and a photographer. It was going to be a big deal. And then we got a story saying, sorry, it's not going to happen after all. Because Ayaan supported J.K. Rowling, the author of Harry Potter.

When, in my view, J.K. Rowling, the author of Harry Potter, when, in my view, JK Rowling came out in support of women. But I'm told that I make the people who read that particular magazine unsafe, or that there's a potential that I could make them unsafe. Yeah, that's the phrase that gets used, make them unsafe or make them feel unsafe or put them in danger. And I, first of all, JK Rowling statements, they were not nearly as controversial as people made them out to be for whatever reason. Do you remember exactly what she said? Do you remember exactly what she said? She said a number of things. I think she challenged people like she and myself being called people who menstruate. Yes. And she did do it, you know, with that British sense of humor. So what are we called these days?

And she had woman spelled in different ways. Yeah. I'm not quite sure how to pronounce it because I only saw the spelling. I like when they put the X. Yes. Wim Exen. Yeah, Wim Exen or whatever. Aren't you even allowed to have a name?

People who menstruate, I'm sure there used to be a word for these people. Someone help me out. Wambin, wampund, wumud. Wumud. Opinion, creating a more equal post-covid-19 world for people who menstruate yeah that is the yeah well her along with martina navratilova which is an another person who got attacked by the woke mob where you just go wow how far is this gone where a a prominent lesbian woman who was one of the first out athletes ever one of the greatest tennis players of all time who says it's not fair for biological males to compete

against women in in these sports and she gets labeled like the most vicious bigot alt-right person you could imagine you know like How far has this stuff gone? It's gone too far. And for women like me, it's gone way too far. I mean, where I come from, most women are actually fighting for the most basic rights, rights to be safe, not to be killed. Where I come from, people, women, are subjected to femicide. They don't like you, they kill you. You violate the honor, they kill you.

They take away your genitals. So there's a very basic set of rights that we don't even have that we are fighting for. And so to get to a place where in the advanced world we are told you can't even be called by your own name you know we've got to figure people who menstruate when i read that i i just first i thought it was a joke and i thought i could laugh it off and then i came around and i thought this is not a laughing matter we are going to have to stand up for at least what we've achieved in the West and hope to drag people in the developing world to come to where we are. But our name as woman, plural women, is not going to be taken away.

And I admire J.K. Rowling for taking that fight on. Well, I mean, she just made a joke. I mean, that's all it was. It was just, like you said, in British humor, you know. Humor is gone now in these discussions. I want to make it very clear that I think that people who identify as trans, transgender, whatever they want to call themselves, I'm a proponent of them getting, you know, their dignity, their freedom, live as they please. I can do, anything you can do. Surely we must do that.

But it must not be zero-sum. At the expense of biological women. It can't be zero-sum. It can't be that transgender people can only thrive and flourish only if they put down women. I don't even think they think of it that way. I think they just think that you're going to alienate the people that aren't biologically women or alienate the people, in this case, the J.K. Rowling thing, people who are biologically women but who identify as male. as male it's it's just gotten so complicated and i don't think that they think they're doing a bad thing i think they think they're standing up for trans people but by saying you know women who menstruate for the vast majority of human beings you're talking about women or excuse me

by saying people who menstruate you're talking about women and to deny that and say no we're just going to call it people who menstruate for the very small amount of people who aren't biologically women or don't think of themselves as biologically women they think of themselves as trans it's just it's so strange that this is this can get someone in trouble it's very strange that it can it can get someone in trouble half the human population are female yeah women girls so is there is i think a way of lifting up people who are transgender to come out as they are and be who they are and feel comfortable in their skins and for the rest of us to accept that without diminishing women. But the way to do it for us as women is to insist,

yes, we are women. I'm not going to be called all the names that they try to call me, radical, terrorful. They have all sorts of labels that they've produced these days. But I'm not going to accept that. I'm not going to accept being diminished or diminishing my thoughts. But at the same time say, you guys, you can move forward. Maybe in some ways we could actually work together. But the way to do that is to have

parameters around which you can work. There has to be common truth. There has to be objective truth. I'm one of the people who let them persuade me, but right now I think they're just two genders, male and female. And from a biological perspective, that's all we have. Should we talk about that? Yes. If there are people who feel that they're born in the wrong body and that they want to transition and they're grown-ups, please, by all means go ahead and do that but i think it is dangerous to adapt fact and reality to the emotions and and ideologies of the day. It just won't work.

It's going to cause even more chaos, even more confrontations and conflict. And the only way to get us out of this is to have honest, proper conversations informed by science, informed by objectivity. There is an objective truth. There is something that is real and factual. There's a conformity that is being enforced with this kind of language. And that's part of what we're dealing with in our current woke dilemma,

is that people are being enforced to behave and communicate in a way that fits in with this ideology, despite whether or not it's backed by biological science and that you know like if someone has had uh sex with a woman and and fathered children multiple children and then decides that they are now a woman themselves people will say well they've always been a woman well that doesn't even make sense like it maybe they felt they've always been a woman. Well, that doesn't even make sense. Like, maybe they felt they should have been a woman. Maybe they feel like they're in the wrong body.

But you can't say they've always been a woman. But that is the conformity. This is the, when you're applying the rules of the ideology, that's what you're supposed to say. She's always been a woman.'re like okay well we're in a weird place so how did she get a woman pregnant like what kind of magic are we talking about like now we're not talking about science anymore now we're not talking about biology yeah we're forcing but we're forcing our ideology this ideology is forcing biological science to conform to it rather than just looking at it in terms of these objective realities. That's right. And so it is up to the wider population to object to that.

You just mentioned somebody who fathered children. fathered children. In order to have an objective analysis of that, we look at paternity issues. If a woman claims that you fathered her child and you didn't, there's a way of, through science, we have a way of finding out whether you're the father or not. And so there is universal agreement on what that test yields, that science. Before you got me into your studio, you had me get tested for COVID as you did for others. That's objective truth. We have to get tested so that you and I both feel safe and we're here. So when it comes to science, we can't pick and choose and say,

you know, when it comes to certain things that suit me, I agree to objective truth in science. But then when the other things that don't suit me, Well, the other things that don't suit me, when I want to pretend that there are 10 or 12 or 1,400 gender differences, in that case, science is racist. Science is wrong, and there is no science. It's all about subjectivity. And I think it's for the wider population to come out and say,

you can't pick and choose. And I would say, in many ways, that's the basis of science, is that it's not in anyone's favor. Science doesn't understand ideology. This virus, whatever it is, the Wuhan virus, I don't care what name you give it, but whether it infects you or it infects me, it doesn't care. And the science who are after trying to figure out what is it, and then go from there, once you understand, once you have a name for it, and you understand what the problem is then you start trying to figure out and how to deal with it that's what science offers us and

i think it is very very important that we come out as a nation as a people uh any anyone who values objective truth and science to say that's something I'm not willing to let go. I am compassionate. I feel a lot of empathy for people who want to transition from one gender to the other, who think that they are born in the wrong body and wants to do everything they can to get in a body that makes them comfortable and happy, but not at the cost of science. in a body that makes them comfortable and happy, but not at the cost of science. Is this particularly offensive to you? I mean, it must be because of your background.

You briefly talked about that, but for people who don't know you, I would like you to explain your upbringing, where you came from, and how you had to literally risk your life to escape that. So I was born in Somalia in 1969. And growing up in the 70s, my family went to Saudi Arabia. We went to Ethiopia. We went to Kenya. That's where I learned English.

And then finally, in 1992, I ended up in the Netherlands. But if you ask me in the context of science to tell you about those years between you know when I could walk and talk and understand what was going around me until about 1992 when I left I come from territories where superstition is the thing to do. You know, my father left us in 1982. He left us in Kenya. He went back to Ethiopia to fight for what he felt was his calling, democracy and a just system for the Somali people.

But in Kenya, my mother, who was with my grandmother, her mother's mother, they felt abandoned in a strange country, and they didn't understand what was going on. And they had the three of us, the three of us, that is my older brother, and my younger sister. And as children go, we were terrible. And I remember my mother going off to see witch doctors and ask them, how do I deal with my daily life? And those witch doctors would want one thing, which was whatever money she could give them. And if she couldn't give money, then it would be her goat or it would be something that they treasured. And in Kenya, I'm 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 years old, and all the time when she goes to these people,

all I want to say to her is, this is superstition. You're wasting your money. You're wasting your time. Leave them alone. my mother couldn't read all right so i didn't know a way of expressing that and then soon after in 1985 i was 15 years old when members of the muslim brotherhood came along and they finally convinced my mother and grandmother and all the women in our neighborhoods, do not reach out to the superstitious. Don't go to the witch doctors. Come to God, the one and only. Read the Quran.

They can't read the Quran, so they have to trust in what he tells them, the Hadith, Mohammed's way of doing things and in a way I felt I felt grateful to the people who had shepherded the women of the grown-up women of my life away from these superstitious people to the one and to an only God. It just happened to be another superstition, better organized, more slick. But at the time you didn't think so? At the time I didn't think so. Of course, at the time I completely believed in it. Why did you know that the witch doctors were just superstitious and that it was nonsense

at such an early age i'm in fourth grade i had the fortune to actually go to school and be taught such things as science to the science class biology cause and effect the way things happen one of the things that ravaged us was malaria. I got malaria. Everybody I know got malaria. Most people had families where people died. People got sick, really very sick, and then died. And the witch doctors were supposed to make these people well, supposed to make these people well and they were at any rate supposed to stop them from dying so going to the biology class when we were told they literally to look at an insect called the mosquito and dissect it and look at its behavior and how it sees still water, lays its eggs,

and what happens when that mosquito comes and injects its, what do you call it, that little piece of itself into you, draws your blood, and leaves something in you, which is the parasite. Once you understand that, and this is, I'm in fourth grade, fifth grade. Once they teach that and they show how it works, you go home and you say, don't give any more money to the witch doctor. Actually, what we should do is go around to all the little puddles and pools of water around us. Let's drain those, dry those, keep our windows shut. We had this big can of pesticide called Doom. And I would say, let's spray those after we had done all of that. And we won't have malaria,

and all of that, and we wouldn't have malaria because that's how it is. So I found myself, even at that age, confronting grown-ups who were established, who were well-respected, and who were taking money from my poor mother because they would cure malaria. And I come in, I mean, with the most superficial level of education you can think but objective education to say I actually get what's happening and that I can't explain to an American audience the confrontation the just the boundaries that you're crossing and and the people you're making angry the toes you're stepping on when you you know you breeze into the house and say and now i know how it works so you as a as a young woman were going to be forced into an arranged marriage.

And this is what made you flee and head to Europe and wind up in Holland, correct? That's correct, yeah. Can you explain how that was going down? So this is 1992, and by then I'm 22 years old. So we've been in Kenya from 1980 to, in my case, 1992. My father left us in 1982. And I was about 12 years old. And all this time he was gone.

He was gone for 10 years. And he comes back and he says, it's time for you to get married. You hadn't seen him in 10 years? I hadn't seen him in 10 years? I hadn't seen him in 10 years. Had you communicated with him at all? He used to write letters, and after a while, the letters stopped. But the point in terms of him taking the duty upon himself, it's his duty. So the way it works in Somali culture in many parts of the world,

that culture is the father's responsible for who, he's your guardian. He's your male guardian. He's responsible for who he's going to pass you on to. That's finding the right husband. But because he was gone from 82 to 1992, A, I was able to get on with age and get stronger and wiser, but also see some of my classmates and my friends

who were forced into these arranged marriages. And my takeaway from looking at their lives was, I don't want my life to unfold that way, because it was really a replication of my own mother's life and my mother's life was miserable every country we went to my mom didn't speak the language she didn't want to learn the language but she felt betrayed she felt out of depth she was angry she was full of resentment and she took it all out on us. So watching what was happening to these young women, I thought, surely life must offer more than that.

And I, to this day, say I am grateful that my father left us when he did and came back when he did. Because had he been with us earlier he might have taken this initiative to force me into marriage at the age of 15 16 17 and at that age i'm not sure i would have accomplished what i did at 22. and when he was gone i missed missed him, and I was miserable. I wanted him to come back and be with us. But then again, everything is about hindsight. In hindsight, I think, what if he had married me off at 15 or 16 or 17 or 18?

What kind of future would I have had? you know, what kind of future would I have had? The environment that you lived in, you felt like women were second-class citizens, and you felt like they were the property of men, and they were at the beck and call of men, and they weren't allowed to speak up. They weren't allowed to do many things that men were allowed to do.

And they had to know their place. Yes. How frustrating was that? It was hugely frustrating. Also, I'm not trying to defend where I come from. But, Joe, when I listen to you talk like that what I want to say is I know you've got an American Western attitude so you're observing them through that prism through the lens of all these women oppressed and they aren't allowed to do anything. And it's objectively true.

I wholeheartedly agree with you, and there's so many women in those positions who agree with you. But being on the inside, being raised within that culture, when you complain about the absolute obedience that you have to show to your father and other male relatives, when you talk, when you object to the fact that you're not supposed to have a will of your own, or desires of your own, or things you want to do, the put-down was always that you are the rebel. You're sinning.

You're breaking the rules and the laws and the norms and the customs. So you are wrong. And there would be conversations between my mother and her relatives on how can we bring her back into the straight path, if you will, the religious edicts, the tribal and clan edicts. And that's where things, when things get out of hand, because from one day you are the insider, they try to mold you into the insider's beliefs and norms, you fail to do that. And if you're not careful, you'll be made the outsider. Were you unique amongst your friends and the people in your family in your beliefs that this was wrong?

No, I was not alone. There were girls and women around me whom I really consider them to be so much smarter, stronger, more informed, in many ways wiser, who I would look up to. They might be two or three years older than me, and I would say, well, I'm really having a hard time right now with my mother and sticking to the rules how do you do it how have you done it and the answers I would get most often would be you're young you will learn there's no way out of here so what you need to do is show willpower show strength show commitment Everybody goes through this. For some, it will be harder than others. But the thing I was told constantly is, it's as hard as you make it. In other words, the sooner you submit, the sooner all these hardships go away. And then you're just one

of us and you're doing what you're supposed to do what you were created to do by God you're taking your place the more you say I'm not going to do this I'm going to read this novel it's not my turn to do the dishes it's someone else's turn you start fantasizing about where you think you could be, then you are stepping on so many toes at that point. And you know there's nobody who's going to be on your side, so you can make the pain as long as you want it to be. What did you know about the rest of the world outside of the community that you lived in?

What did you know about the way women were treated in Europe or in the United States or anywhere else in the world? I knew what I got out of literature, out of reading books. I knew what I got out of movies, out of music. I want you to, I don't know how old you are, but the 1980s. I'm in Nairobi and kids my age, I'm in my teens, we're listening to Michael Jackson, we're doing breakdance, we're watching very trashy, what I've now come to call trashy movies. Like what trashy movies like what trashy movies uh gosh many trashy movies you there were these movies at some point where the two guys would come at the cars one from the other side and then they

would miss what was that game called that's that's chicken chicken yeah a game of chicken that's the stuff we used to watch um but we think of trashy differently you think that was not no it was terrible for sure but we i don't think we would call it trashy i think trashy jamie you think trashy would be like sexual like what would trashy be i guess yeah yeah yeah trashy would be like uh i guess it's a weird phrase trashy is a is a weird phrase. Like you say trashy to people, they know it's not good. Yeah. But they're like, what does that mean? Well, it's stupid movies.

You go to a lot of trouble to get out of the house and lay down this whole, you know, this friend is going to be on the lookout for you. This person is going to tell a lie on your behalf. We're going to tell my mom she went to the mosque everybody's going to stick to that story and then you go to the movies and you watch a fish called wander so you what did it seem like to you to watch a movie like that though to see this completely different world in these films. We were, I mean, my sister and I and all the young women, we were sitting in a cinema

and we were mesmerized. Absolutely mesmerized. We just couldn't believe that these were actual human beings who lived like that. Again, talking of trashy, we read John Collins, we read Robert Ludlam, we read all of those spy stuff. So if you're really in a book, into any of these thrillers, you imagine yourself to be the hero of the book.

After you've solved one of the most complex mysteries, confrontations between the Soviets and the Americans, you close the book and you look around you and everything says you need to do these dishes before your mom comes here and whacks reality on the ground, which is not what I would call... I'm just trying to see how I... Because I don't want to diminish that, but I also want to explain to an American audience, it's not easy, girls and guys. And for us, reading that type of literature, going to these movies, listening to Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie and doing breakdance, those were the escapes. Those were our drugs.

We didn't have boys because boys could get away and go find hide somewhere. I'm sure they were exposed to some sort of drug. But as a girl in my teenage years, I don't remember anything that was mind altering except that stuff. And you know, the neighbors, a girlfriend, a best friend, they would have tv and then later on the video the vhs stuff came along and you could come and watch movies in the house and those were the escapes the escapades and as you do that you're telling your mother you know what mom i'm heading to the mosque but you're not heading to the mosque you're watching this this stuff and why do i call trash rubbish i don't know what no they're definitely rubbish yeah yeah but in what way have they helped me um i don't know i've actually forgotten most of the stories was there any that

particularly stood out? Obviously, the cultural differences were probably very mesmerizing, but were any of the movies did they reach out to you and give you hope that there was something better somewhere else? Sometimes,

yeah. There were some really if movies were made for teenagers I'm not sure they gave me that sense but then you know people in the military dying dying for something, that could leave you with a sense of, yeah, there's stuff worth fighting for. Here I'm like 15 or 16 years old. I'm a teenager in Kenya. We have death all around us. We have civil wars all around us. We to go to a screen would be to just escape that stuff. I heard Nancy Drews and, you know, be on a journey with her trying to figure out who the bad guys are. It was fun. It was interesting. It plays on your intelligence because you're trying to help her solve the mystery. But then you are her. And so you imagine a world where women can go around solving mysteries. There's stuff like that.

But we always understood, like I said, as soon as that thing goes off, you go back straight to your reality. And so your father returns you're 22 how long had he returned for before he was trying to force you into an arranged marriage so he left in 82 and came back in 1992 i would say a decade 10 years right and when he comes back he his attitude is taking it up from where he left it off so immediately immediately but my mom doesn't respond that way to him she responds to him you left and i don't want you back he is a man with a name. He has a reputation. He's obviously never been told, at least by a wife, you know, I don't want to see you again.

I don't want to have you around me. And so the three of us, again, my brother is a year and a half older. He's one year older than me. My sister is a year and a half younger than me. So as three siblings, we are going, okay, are you with dad or are you with mom? Again, my brother is one year older than me. My sister is a year and a half younger than me. So as three siblings, we are going, okay, are you with dad or are you with mom? Or are you in between? And I'm in between.

I'm also the in-between child. I can see things from mom's position. But you know what? I love dad. I want him to come back and pick things up from where he left off. And my sister has already gone into the hump of, I don't want to speak to him. He left us. Who the hell does he think he is? And my brother just disappears. He goes with his Kenyan friends. How do I explain Kenyan friends? We're Somali minority. We just hang out with other Somalis.

My brother would hang out with Kenyans. And my mother had a derogatory name for Kenyans. And so she would say he went to, quote unquote, the derogatory name that she had for Kenyans. So that went on for a while. And at some point, my mother made it very clear to my father. He just wasn't welcome. We did the routine things you're supposed to do. When he woke up early in the morning, he told us it's time to pray. We got up, we prayed. I started cooking breakfast. He ate of that breakfast, but she put him in a teeny tiny closet and he wasn't allowed to come into the bedroom.

So that was all very awkward and weird. And at that time, there was a civil war in Somalia. So it wasn't just us, the family. There were lots of people staying in our house who could all feel the vibes of what's going on. There was a lot of whispering. And at some point my father said, I think I'm going to leave. To which my sister said, oh, what's new? And he left.

He found a place about like a 30-minute drive with no traffic, maybe an hour and a half with traffic with his first wife. He remarried his first wife who treated him differently. And so that is the setup. Day in, day out, you know, we go and visit him. He comes and visits us sometimes. And then one day he comes and he says, I've been to the mosque and with Allah's blessing, I think I found you the right man.

And it's just like that. You don't meet this man? He says you'll meet him. Exactly. It's like, when am I going to meet this man? And he says, you will meet him. I will bring him over. And he brings him over.

And I meet him. And he brings him over, and I meet him. And there's the get-to-know-one-another piece of the deal where my mother is sitting on the end. It's a room. I don't want to call it a sitting room. I think ideally it was intended to be a sitting room, but at that point there are 10 or 12 refugees sleeping there, so there are mattresses on the ground and there's a bed, and she's sitting on the edge of that bed.

And there are two chairs pulled up, and my father's sitting on one, and the man I'm supposed to be married to is sitting on the other end. We are supposed to start to get to know one another with my parents there. And I ask him about, and my sister was there too, asked him about what novels he reads and what movies he watches and what games he likes to play. And all his answers are,

and please forgive me, I'm 22 at the time, but in my head I'm using, yeah, that's, you know, shit. I'm not going to go with this. I'm not going anywhere with this man. He likes terrible movies and bad books. He didn't know of any movies.

We thought, how could you be in Canada all this time and not speak? Like, we lived in in Kenya I spoke better English than he did but he's a Canadian citizen and so my sister and I are like it's really mean and what we were doing was not nice but I'm coming to the conclusion no I don't want to marry you and my father is I've just found you the perfect human being and so by what metric did've just found you the perfect human being. By what metric did he decide this man was a perfect human being? Because he was religious?

He's a member of our extended family. He had a job. He was going to materially support me, and my father never, ever had to worry about any kind of mistreatment, physical mistreatment, because he's a member of the extended family. And the guy said to me, Osman is his name, he said to me, you look wonderful, you're properly covered up. I was wearing the headscarf and long sleeves.

wonderful, you're properly covered up. I was wearing the headscarf and long sleeves. Your attire is modest. And you are going to have six boys for me. Because I only want to have sons. This is 1992. And my brain is going... I got to get out of here. I need to get out of here.

So how did you manage to get out of here I need to get out of here so how did you manage to get out so he's a Canadian citizen with a job and he had to go back he came for two things he came to look for members of his family who were fleeing out of Somalia again 1991-1992 beginning of the civil war in Somalia people are fleeing and people all over the world Somalis all over the world are coming to Kenya and other places to look for their family members. So that was his main objective. Second objective was to find a wife, which he then at that moment has. And he goes back and my father says to him, don't worry about high immigration papers. I will take care of those. And my father reaches out to another extended member of our family living in Germany. And he says, that's, Morosal is going to help us with the paperwork. And a few days later, well, that's February when

he leaves. So it's now in July of 1992, the travel document issued by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees is ready. And it has a visa on it. And I'm to travel on that travel document that's in my name. So I can travel from Nairobi, Kenya. Kenia, I go to Ethiopia, Addis Ababa, and spend a weekend with my father's third wife and my half sister for a couple of days. Then I fly from Addis Ababa to Dusseldorf, from Frankfurt to Dusseldorf. And I'm in Dusseldorf with my relatives. The uncle whom I was supposed to be with, who's supposed to take off my papers, sent one of the people who work for him, who's another distant cousin. And he says, I'm here to take care of you. Of course, I'm thankful. And he takes me to a family, a Somali

family of our clan who live in Bonn. So I spend one night in Dusseldorf and then go to Bonn. And in the period that I'm in Bonn with that family, I get to know the 14-year-old son. It's July, so schools are closed. And I start to ask him about how I can go to the UK. I speak English. I grew up from age 10. I was in Kenya. I can speak English. I think I can find my way in England. He looks at my travel document and he says, it doesn't give you access to the UK, but it gives you access to four other countries besides

Germany. And that's the Netherlands, it's Belgium, it's Luxembourg, and I suppose it's France. And you choose. And he starts to talk to me about, we're talking about flights and how do you get there? And he says, you can take the train. And I persuade him to help me take the train the next day from Bonn to Amsterdam. Wow. That's July 24, 1992. You know no one in Amsterdam. You don't speak Dutch.

You take this train and does he keep his mouth shut or does he tell anybody that you escaped on the train i didn't tell him i was escaping i said i was going to visit an another extended family a woman who when she fled somali had stayed in our house who was in the netherlands her name is fathuma i had her telephone number and i told him i'm just going to go visit those relatives of ours before I go off to Canada and he helps me with the whole process so he doesn't know what your plan is no he's 14 okay I don't tell him anything I just want I just want to know how do you go from here to there and the UK plan was frustrated so now it it becomes the Netherlands. And I called that woman, Fathomo, who's somewhere in the interior of the country, in an asylum seeker center, because she had asked for asylum.

And when I'm in the train, she says, this is what you do. Don't come to me first. Go to that other cousin of ours who lives in a place called Volendam. cousin of ours who lives in a place called Volendam, Folendam. And so when at 11.30 p.m. the train arrives, she had instructed me how to get off the train, cross the street, go to where the buses are, take the bus to Folendam, and then call this cousin. And the cousin sent her husband, who, by the way, is white. That cousin of mine married a white man

and had been shunned herself by the family. And so this guy picks me up from Volendam, which is, it felt like an age, it felt like an eternity to go from Amsterdam to Falun Damm. But I think it was all of an hour and a half. And he picks me up and he takes me to her. And from there, she starts explaining to me how things work. How so? In what way?

Well, if you ask for asylum. So first I said, I just want to get a job. I don't want to ask for asylum. And then she says, you can't. You have a visa on your passport. And when that visa expires, you have to get out of the country. So you have a very short window of time to make up your mind what you want to do. And she urged me to ask for asylum.

And she said, if you ask for asylum, then you get into the process. They forget about that document, and it's all about what's happening to you. And when I do that, I go to Svala, the place she said would be the best place for me to ask for asylum. She says it's the best place because that's where the other woman whom I'm on my way to has. And that's where, for the first time in my life, someone comes in uniform, what looks to me like police uniform or military uniform. And I think it's over. I think he's telling me, you're going to get out of the

country. You'll be shot. Something bad is going to happen to you. And he comes over and he says, would you like a cup of tea or coffee? And I can't believe my senses that there is a place in the world where people in uniform ask you if you want tea or coffee. Because where I came from, Kenya, Ethiopia, Somalia, Saudi Saudi Arabia that's not what police do so was it a feeling of relief was it a feeling of just complete disbelief like it was disbelief combined with or is it is this all for real? Am I dreaming it? And the guy actually arrives with the beverage. I mean, yeah.

And so it's things like that, small things like that, that I try and tell my European friends and my American friends. You know, when you guys, you just say rule of law, rule of law. It's not like some kind of poem by your grandfather. It's real. And the person in uniform who later on I discovered wasn't even a policeman, but he was in uniform. He was one of the security people at the center.

He directs me to the reception area and he says, talk to these people. And I do, and they say, there's something called a strippen card. It's like a bus card that you put in your hands and you say, you have to take this bus and it will take you to the next place. Little haste and they'll take care of your paperwork. And I do that and then they send me somewhere else. And after crisscrossing the country in buses that the Dutch paid for, with the help of people in uniform who guide you from A to B, they grant me asylum.

I become a refugee. And so I don't need that piece of paper that I came in with which I had shred are you in any way concerned that someone from your this whether it's your father's side or this man who you're supposed to be married to that they're going to come and get you yes so how do you how do you prevent that or what there's no preventing it's the only the way i think of it is i when i go to the authorities and say we're going to put down your name and your date of birth i say to them instead of telling them my name is ayan hershey magan i tell them my name is ayanan Hirsi Ali. I keep to my date of birth, November 13, but instead of 69, I tell them 67. So with Ali and 67, I hope not to be found, which was naive and stupid.

Because in the end, they do find me because the way it works with Somalis is no one is looking for your name or your date of birth. They are looking for this girl who looks like that, talks like that, and so on. And so it goes through the clan. It's the clan way of finding things. Again, very difficult to explain. I understand. So and so, no, so and so, and so and so, no, so and so. And so they say, oh, yes, I think I've seen this girl somewhere.

I think she was with Father Moore. No, then she left Father Moore. Then she went to Marin. Oh, yeah, I think that's where she is. So somehow they found me after four months. Four months. So during that four months, what had you been doing? I was, after the initial paperwork,

I was sent to a place called Luntren in the middle of the country. And there I was for 11 months, but they asked you to, you know, you have, they gave me a refugee status, which is the best you can have in the world. Meaning you're now part of this society. You can go to language class. You can work.

You can do whatever you want. And that's exactly what I started doing. I started learning the language. But they don't have any housing for me yet. It's also a place where the government arranges the housing for you. So I was on a waiting list for an apartment. And I was there for four months when this guy arrives through that system of looking. He comes to my caravan.

We lived in what Americans would call a trailer park. But we were told to call it caravans. It's homes with wheels underneath. And it's in the middle of the afternoon, and I hear this knock. I open the door, and there's the man I was married off to with three other men. and I was married off to with three other men. And my system freezes, and all I can do is say, come in, and they come in,

and then take them to the little living space, where the seating space is, and have them sit down. And then I say, would you like tea or coffee? And they go, tea. And I pick up the thermos can. Every caravan has one or two thermos cans assigned to them. And I walk out, and I walk all the way back to where the people who work at the Asylum Seeker Center, the social workers. And I talk to one of the service providers Sylvia and I explained to her and I say I'm busted I told you guys I ran away from the civil war in Somalia I didn't I ran away from

a forced marriage and the guy I was married to is in my caravan and he's with three other guys and basically I've come to say goodbye. And she says, but you don't want to go with him. I said, no, I don't want to go with him. That's why I came here. That's why I was hiding all this time. And she says, but you don't have to. And I tell her, but you know,

your government is going to figure out I lied in my asylum. They're going to figure out the whole story. They'll kick me out anyway. She says, you don't have to. And I say, what do you mean? And she says, I can call the police now. And if you're 100% sure you don't want to go with him, you don't have to. You just talk to the policeman and you'll go with the policeman.

And I say to her, call the policeman call the police and when they arrive they they sit me down and they go through it are you sure this is what you want to do and I keep nodding I am sure this is what I want to do and And they go back and talk to him, and he gets very mad. And that's one of the confrontations that I wish was somewhere on the record because he's coming from his culture and his truth and the way he looks at the world, and he's telling them, who the hell do you think you are? You can't interfere in this. This woman was given to me by her father.

And they don't recognize that. And there's this confrontation, which Sylvia keeps me out of. And she says, if you want to go with him, you can. But if you don't want to, we're not going to make it happen and that's another i mean i i would give that woman and that policeman anything anything imagine if that woman wasn't there when you went to talk to her imagine if there was no one there. Then I would have gone with him. Yeah.

So he leaves. He leaves and he says, I'm going to be back with lawyers. Lawyers? Yeah. And he comes back with lawyers. and Sylvia explains to me he won't be able to find a lawyer who is going to help him take a human being

over the age of 18 years with the argument her father gave her to me. It just doesn't work like that. But you're still incredulous. You still think that it's possible that he's going to drag you away. I am incredulous. You still think that it's possible that he's going to drag you away. I am incredulous, but she's trying to literally get it into my skull.

It doesn't work like that. And it did help that I was there for four months, that I had in fact seen things working differently. So it wasn't, I think if it had happened on the day of my arrival it would probably have been over but having been there all these months and seeing so many things that were so different from what I was used to I thought that was credible like for example what kind of things did you see that were so different well all these women who were working and And you have to imagine an asylum seeker center back then was this big compound, like a military compound. It does have barbed wire around it,

but where we were, all the homes are these trailers. And then at the entrance of the compound, you have a little building where security people in uniform are sitting. And then there are all these little houses. So the people who take shifts in running the day-to-day of the center. And then there are the people who deal with health care. there's the people who deal with healthcare there are people who deal with

anything food, anything that you that you know putting 300, 400, 500 people in a compound all the logistics of that, the people who run that stuff are all in little houses there

and I mean little houses sort of makeshift, two, three-room houses where there are offices. So I've seen it. I saw that those places were occupied by women who were very often telling the men what to do. And I would ask, so is this man your boss no he's not my boss i'm his boss that's what the dutch women say and they explain these hierarchies

i arrived in 1992 in july it's the summer months women are dressed in shorts tank tops t-shirts is that crazy to you it looked it looked otherworldly to me and so are the men and no one was harassing anyone no one was they just seemed to be oblivious to all of this and the men would talk to me like a real person wow and that was to me it was wow it's not wow anymore i know it now but back then it was wow but it's important for people to listen to this to try to understand where you're coming from and why you find a lot of what we discussed earlier so offensive because you've dealt with real suppression and to just try to imagine what it was like to be you to see women in shorts and women telling men what to do the women who are the boss women who could do whatever the park whatever they wanted to yeah and they were on bicycles they

were roller skating this is is crazy. Yeah. They had their hair out in the open, up, down. It didn't matter. They were just... Did you keep a journal during this time? I wish I did. I didn't keep a journal, but I had... It would be like someone visiting another planet.

Yeah, and like... I don't know, again, how old you are, but we used to have... We were talking about it. I'm two years older than you. Remember? Yeah, but for used to have... We already talked about it. I'm two years older than you. Remember? Yeah. But for us to call home was

four guilders and 99 cents. That's five guilders. So that's almost the equivalent back then was five dollars to call home for one minute. So whatever you said in one minute

cost five dollars. so i would call my sister sometimes and sometimes i rant about oh my god it's raining it's raining and she's like cursing and saying i don't care to hear about the rain have you got anything else to say and it's like okay the women here they're running around in like half naked. And the men too. And it's different here. Things are crazy here. And then your money would run out.

I wish I kept a journal. I wish you did too. Yeah. But then there were the other Somalis who came from Somalia and there were people who came from Iraq. They came from Afghanistan. They came from Iran. They came from every which way. And we would huddle together in the dining room and say the exact same things.

And as women, men from those parts of the world would actually start harassing us and treating us badly. And I would constantly go to, we call the tables, because the people say, like, that's the white table. The white table means white people are sitting around the table. So I'd go to the white table and tell them, this is how the men are treating us. And your men are treating you differently. Like, can you talk to them? Wow. And there were things like that.

And they would say, but why do they do that? Where do you guys come from? Is that normal? And in that, I don't know what you would call it. You could even call it like a human lab because you've thrown these people from all over the world at one another in a small place. And there are expectations and our expectations are not being met. There are things that surprise us.

There are things that we go, oh, I didn't think that things were done that way. And it's all there. Things were done that way. And it's all there. And I don't want to say it was a good memory in the sense that it was pleasant. But in terms of teaching moments, best time, best teaching moments in my life. Because it's a complete paradigm shift. Complete paradigm shift. All these human...

There was a man from Iran who kept looking at my skin and staring at it. And he would stare at someone else's skin and he'd say, Does it really get that dark? And you think, but you're from Iran. People in Iran at that point, what this man was telling me, some of them were shut out of everything that they had no idea that they were actually black people alive this is in 19 1993 1992 1993 so there were people arriving. I met people from... Never experienced black people. Never experienced.

I walk out of, you know, where you have to go turn your laundry in and get the fresh laundry. And I would meet someone and say, where do you come from? And she says, Azerbaijan. And I think, hmm, is that a place? That's how we were. Wow. We didn't know. I knew reality where i came from i knew a little bit about europe i knew a little bit about america but there were so many places that we didn't know

anything about some of my as well you know in the camp mates, they came from, so I knew there was a country called Yugoslavia. But when you meet these people, they never said they came from Yugoslavia. They said, I'm from Croatia or Bosnia or Serbia. And you say, are those countries? They weren't at that time. They weren't countries. But that's how these people saw, that's how they identified. You shouldn't mistake a Serb for a Bosnian or the other way around,

or you'll be in big trouble. So it's stuff like that. And I was there for 11 months. And I wish I was an anthropologist. I wish I had a book with me. I wish we were just recording the whole deal. There were Somalis who were just having, right in the middle of civil war, slashing each other's throats, put in the same asylum seeker center, in the same compound. And the Dutch people who were in charge of the center, they would come out and they'd say, another fight broke out.

What are they fighting about? And we would just go like, oh my gosh, don't you know? How would they know? Especially before the internet. How would they know? How would they know? It was before the internet.

And this is a country that's trying to be generous and welcoming. They want everybody to be well fed and get rid of their traumas and leave their traumas behind them. But if you find yourself in these caravans or trailer park cars, they're very small. They're probably, I would say say the interior of this studio maybe some of them even a little smaller but divided into a sitting area bedroom bedroom bedroom and into three bedrooms and if you meet your arch enemy right there you're placed in the same caravan how do you respond wow so that's some of the things that some of the

things that were going on were crazy and what universal language were you suppose the english were speaking with the people from croatia and bosnia english english yeah almost everyone spoke english attempted at speaking english and I did a lot of translation, translating from Somali to English, English to Somali. I volunteered to do that. Again, a huge source of education for me because then I learned how those people that we just call white, how they were thinking, what was going through.

They say, you've got to fill this form again, you've got to fill that form again, you've got to fill another form. And so the Somalis were saying, there must be a conspiracy. Why do they want all these forms filled out? Because where we come from, when a government asks you to give personal information to the government, that means you're going to disappear. You'll be disappeared or you'll be betraying a family member. So when they ask for information, we're all going, ouch.

And so you have to get over that. They have to come in and explain, nope, it's only for you. We're the only ones who are seeing. No one else, no part of the government will see this. And very often people are struggling to just take them at their word so when you're when this husband person this person was supposed to be your husband when he comes back with lawyers how how does that confrontation go down what kind of lawyers is he bringing lawyers from holland or where are the lawyers from he threatened to go and get lawyers and here i'm guessing because he didn't tell me and my guess is he probably went to get lawyers and the lawyer said what's the case

so you try to get lawyers in holl In Holland, yeah. And my guess is, and now I'm confident that my guess is right, that there is no lawyer probably who would take that case. It's not like America. You don't litigate for the sake of litigating. If you lose a case, you pay for the entire litigation, all the costs that the litigation cost and

so if he were a lawyer would say there must have it must be some kind of law that I can use to defend you and if you don't have a case you don't have a case but if you take this to court then you're wasting everyone's time and you are going to pay for that and so i'm sure he backed away but what he then did was come back with more relatives from that he and i both share how many times did he come back that was so he came back the second time and the second time there was this big in one of the caravans this big gathering and he said he came back with the king of our clan who's a descendant of someone who was a king and that he is going to be the mediator because that's what

my father advises and so I had to go and sit in that caravan with all of these members of my clan elderly wise just the people whom you have at hand who are the highest levels of the clan power hierarchy. And how many months had you been in the country when this happened? Four. Still four. So he came back relatively quickly. He came like quickly, a week or two later, maybe even within the week. He came back very quickly. Had you developed any confidence that you were going to be able to stay by then? Yeah, this woman I'm telling you about, Sylvia, she had the police ready and I wasn't going to do anything. I wasn't going to go into the den.

I wasn't going to go into that space without having the backing of the police. So were the police in the caravan as well or were they outside waiting? They were not in the caravan, but she said, you are out there and nobody is going to come. They know. First of all, we're on a compound. The compound has barbed wire around it. There is security. And then there is the police waiting for whatever is going to unfold.

So they can't drag you out of there? They can't drag me out. It could cause me physical harm, but they didn't, thank God. And he said he wasn't like that and i i knew that he wasn't like that he just wanted to have the last word on honor and he had he really wanted to be seen as i'm this honorable guy. I've done everything I can. And look, I'm the one who's been lied to and cheated and mistreated and all of that. They all came around and each one of them gave me the longest lecture you can possibly think of. You know, telling me story after story of how this could end. Now you're in arms of your family and you're about to walk out that door and you're saying,

I don't want to have anything to do with the family. You're all on your own. This could end really badly for you. So I would get that and one, every single person participating in that gathering would tell me a story, each one more horrifying than the previous one. And all I had to do was just sit and be quiet. Just don't say a word. Just sit right through it. When they were talking about horrible stories, like what kind of horrible stories?

Well, horrible stories is you're sitting and it is like, okay, here we are today. Your father has found this amazing man for you. So there'll be a lot of flattery to him, a lot of flattery to my father, and then a fantasy of what this union could be and could become like. And now it's not because of you. You, Ayaan. It's up to you. And you walk out that door and the consequences are, and they would like sort of spell it out.

are and they would like sort of spell it out. There'll be no one for you. You could end up being a prostitute. You will be sold into slavery. There's no one who cares about you. You make your choice. You walk out that door that all that bad stuff happens to you. You stay here. You go to your husband. You say forgive me me he forgives you and you're within the family fold and then the next person would do that and the next one are 12 of them and I just listen to that again it's it's and it follows that same procedure flattery to him flattery to my father look what you're throwing away. Have you lost your mind? So after all that, what, emotional blackmail,

you know, rational, you're not going to be one of us. You will not be a mugger anymore, blah, blah, blah. All of it. At the end of it, I'm just sitting just quietly. That's what you're supposed to do. I was raised to do that. Don't speak back. Don't talk back. Don't interrupt. Just shut up, be quiet and listen. And then it goes to the judge. So the guy that he, the guy was married to the guy he picked as the ultimate judge is sitting in the room. And he's the one who's going to make the call after I've made my case.

And there's no one on my case. Did you make a case personally for yourself? I just said, I don't want to be with him. I've made up my mind. And what does the judge say? He asked me again and again. And I said, I made up my mind. And very, in the most meekest voice, most apologetic voice. And then he called it off, and he said,

we are going to take this up with your father. And I was allowed to leave, and that's the last I saw of them. Wow. Yeah. Did you keep worrying that's the last I saw of them. Wow. Yeah. Did you keep worrying that they were going to return? No. You thought that was it? No.

I think the one thing I worried about was, well, now I've put myself out there. Everything they said about me being alone and kicked out, that was true. There's no way back after that. I didn't give myself away knocking on the door and saying, can you take me back to my father or my mother after taking them through something like that. Wow. So is this a fearful moment for you?

Do you have anticipation about the future? Do you feel positive about it? How did you feel do you feel positive about it like how did you feel i feel like i had to walk my ass off to learn dutch language yeah and get a job that had nothing to do with the things that they were frightening me about right yeah being sold into this and sold into that and, you know, get on with it. And in two and a half years from that moment, so 1994, I was enrolled into a vocation school. 1995, September, I was enrolled into the University of Leiden.

And that's, it was, I was literally terrified into it terrified into learning dutch and joining a university and going to university and making some you said i said i was going to make something of myself well then you better do it and the alternatives you know the cleaning jobs the translation jobs the stacking off i worked in I don't know if we still have those I think maybe now machines do that sort of thing, but the packing industry where all these items come at you in a factory and you just put them in a box very quickly, as fast as you can. And they pay you a minimum wage and

obviously I didn't like that. And so if you combine all of that, I thought I have actually no choice but to get on with it. So how quickly did you learn the language? In August of 1992, I didn't speak any Dutch, zero. And in April, May, June, July of 1994, I was translating in Dutch.

Wow. Yeah. So if you want it, you can do it. If you're worried about being sold away to slavery and prostitution. Yeah. That's incredible. And I i was embraced so it's an incredible story in the sense if you i i just want to caution people it wasn't just me doing this for me there were also the friends i made like sylvia the woman i told you about all of those people who who are a witness to this story, who are cheering for me and helping.

And I went out of a network and I went straight into a different network. And those people really embraced me and I'm really grateful to them. And so you enrolled in this university. What did you study? I studied political science. My professor used to say, never call political science political science because it's not a science. So it's the school of government. It's politics. So politics in Holland.

In Holland. It's much different than politics in America, right? The theory part. So what you learn in university is different because it's well organized and well ordered and it always has a happy ending but when you get into politics the day-to-day stuff that's a different story altogether and political science helped me understand oh yeah so we have these different institutions you you know, House of Commons. Let me just put it that way because it's the English speaking world, but the lower house, the upper house.

And you have the electorate, you have all the different institutions, you have the different layers of, you know, from the city to the province to we didn't have a federal, but the nation. the city to the province to we didn't have a federal but the nation you understand that stuff where it came from the history appreciated all of that but when you're practicing politics day to day it's completely different yeah did you consider staying in holland yes what made you leave the Holland? Yes. What made you leave? By the time, so there's one gap we left out when we were talking about my life story which was what happened after 9-11 2001 when I started to engage in the debate on what is it that caused it. And then that's how I end up in politics. And I get sworn in in 2003 with, and I'm heavily guided by bodyguards who are heavily armed.

And from the second half of maybe 2003, they're moving me from place to place. You get sworn in to what? Parliament. Parliament. Yeah, it's what we call Congress in America, the lower house. So by the time that happens, I'm already surrounded by people carrying weapons. They're guards. They belong there from the government and they're guards they belong they're from the government and and they're protecting me

and this goes on for a while but i get to a place where the threat is considered to be so intense that i had to be moved from address to address from address to address is this because of your analysis of what happened september 11 2001 like Like, what is the threat coming from? It's the analysis of what happened where I said, yes, those men acted because of their convictions, not because of any particular policy. I had unfortunately made it public that I wasn't a Muslim anymore.

And the think tank that I was working for, they had put me on integration. I had said, if we want the integration to speed up, we have to emancipate Muslim women. And the three things taken together had, my family was already hostile to me. Then you had the wider community and now Muslims of all nationalities

and ethnicities and colors. I pissed off everyone, pretty much. So this is 2003, which is crazy. You're talking about 10 years after you arrived in Holland, roughly. It started in 2002. 2002, I had to leave the Netherlands to come and hide in Santa Monica and that that was in October and when I went back in November that's when I accepted the idea of getting into Parliament and started contending for Parliament got

into Parliament I still have all these men around me and the security parameters which I'm never allowed to talk about. Anybody who's been in it will never talk about it because you just don't. But it is, it's stifling. And it was then that I had decided I'm going to do one term. And if the cabinet were to sit through its term, it would be four years. So it would begin in 2004 and end in 2007. But instead, the cabinet fell again because of me in 2006. And I left and I went to Washington, D.C. It fell because of you? What do you mean?

It fell because of me because the Minister for Immigration and Integration decided to take away my citizenship. If you're not a citizen, you can't be a member of parliament. Why did they do that? She did that because she said, when you first asked for asylum, you lied about your name and your date of birth. And that was true. But I had told the seniors of my party that I had lied about that way back in 2002. So it was a well-known, open information. It wasn't a secret.

But there was a left-wing documentary company that said they were going to make a profile of me. And they took, literally literally i'm not kidding they took a book full of essays and interviews that i had given and based on that they decided to trace my life back to kenya and then brought the information that was in the book published by the dutch publisher where i say my name is actually not Ayaan Hirsi Ali, it's Hirsi Magan. I wasn't born in 67. I was born in 69. And they make this big news item. And the context was that particular minister of immigration integration was playing the I am tough card. If you lie about your asylum, if you lie about your asylum if you lie about your personality we're gonna take you out and people were already saying even before

she did it well I am lied about her life why is she still in Parliament so she came around and said well take away her citizenship and that was ridiculous or at least the rest of the party the rest of politics thought that was ridiculous or at least the rest of the party the rest of politics thought that was ridiculous so they started to demand after she took away my citizenship that she resign and she refused to resign and the small coalition party d66 said as long as she's in the cabinet we're not going to be in the coalition so either she's out or we are out. And she said, I'm not going out. And they went out and the cabinet collapsed. Wow. And then I came here.

Wow. So when you came to America, were there still threats on your life? Yeah. Those threats are not going away. Is this a regular thing for you on a daily basis? away. Is this a regular thing for you on a daily basis? I don't let it interfere with my daily life anymore. It's been too long. But it's just, you know, being on the most wanted of the Al-Qaeda list, things like that, aware of it. And so I do live with security there are the people around me who have guns and who protect me but I don't on a personal

level I don't let that get under my skin the way it doesn't bother me the way it used to bother me and all this is just from leaving the religion and saying that you're an atheist now. And saying that 9-11 perpetrators were driven by religion and all the other perpetrators since then who invoked Islam. You go out there and you kill someone and you leave the reason why you do it for all of us to see who are we to say, well, you got all confused. You actually meant something else. Maybe it's your income status or it's you feel disenfranchised or you feel this is this is what we've been doing for radical Islamist terror attacks. A lot of people are saying that's what they say. This guy who's shouting Allahu Akbar, this guy who's saying I'm doing it because of my religion, he's totally confused. That's not why he's doing it.

He's doing it because people are poor. It just doesn't make sense. Why do you think that is? It just it doesn't make sense. Why do you think that is like particularly in the United States? Why do you think there's a reluctance to accept that there is an ideological aspect for a lot of these actions? That they're being driven by What they believe is the the will of their religion? The reluctance I am told has to do with we don't want the general American public becoming hostile to Muslims immigrants foreigners I'm told we don't want the general American public stigmatizing people who are innocent.

They happen to be Muslim, but they have no intentions of perpetrating terrorist attacks, and we don't want those people to get hurt. So we don't want to say that this person was driven by what he says he is driven by. I get arguments like that. I've also, obviously, having been a politician, also had reasons of, well, if you say to them, yes, this individual is driven by Islam, then he gets to own what Islam is. And Islam is a contested concept.

And because it's so contested, we Americans and Westerners, we should give it to the peace-loving, good Muslims. They should own that concept. The radicals, the terrorists, they should not own. We should declare and say they are unbelievers. I mean, you can take that reasoning up to a point, but in this case, I'm still of the opinion that you can't do that because It's a set of beliefs. It has an internal logic to it. And if you say it just means what I want it to mean and it's a good thing

and I'm only going to give it to the good Muslims, you're approaching it as a thing. And it's not. It's an idea. It's an ideology. And what the people we think of as bad are saying is, I'm really living up to the requirements of my religion. If you don't understand that logic,

you will never be able to fight Islamist terrorism, political Islam. You won't be able to fight it because then you don't understand it. You can't fight an ideology by pretending it doesn't exist or it's a good thing. What do you say to the people that talk about all of the Muslims that have no desire to commit terrorist acts, live their life peacefully, and just abide by the tenets of the religion, and they believe that Islam is a religion of peace yeah i see that uh i agree with them that's the case i would say most people who identify as muslim just want to lead peaceful lives go about their own business and they don't want to harm anyone that's absolutely true and so not this book but the previous book, Heretic, my analysis is there is one Islam, but there are three sets of Muslims. There's one Islam, and that's the Islam that's in the Quran, the Islam that was founded by the Prophet Muhammad.

But then the Prophet Muhammad had two careers, one in Mecca and one in Medina. When he first established the religion in Mecca, he went around the city asking people to give up their gods and come to his one God. And he did it by asking. He did it by persuading, talking to people and preaching charity and goodness. preaching charity and goodness. And then 10 years later, he moves to Medina and he establishes a militia. And then things change. He starts to give people a choice. You either come to my one God and you give up your God or you die by the sword. And any time from Medina, the religion becomes incredibly successful. And he goes beyond Arabia into the rest of the world. And so if you're a Muslim in the 21st century, and there are 1.6 billion Muslims in the world, if you're a Muslim, and you say,

I'm a peace loving Muslim, I don't want to impose my religion on anyone else. You're invoking Muhammad in Medina. If you say, well, I think jihad means that we must take our religion seriously and convert other people. And if they refuse to convert, then we'll use violence. Then you're invoking Muhammad in Medina. You said Medina twice. You said Medina the first time as well. Okay, I'm sorry.

The peaceful Muhammad is not Medina. The peaceful Muhammad is Mecca. Mecca. So Mecca is where he first came out. And so if he says, if a Muslim today says unto you your religion unto me mine I'm tolerant all of that you are invoking Mecca if you're invoking jihad you know the Islamic state of Iraq and Syria Isis al Qaeda and some who are sometimes violent but not all the, the Muslim Brotherhood and other organizations and movements, they're invoking Muhammad in Medina.

Because in Medina, Muhammad made it very clear, you spread the religion by word of mouth, by example, but also by the sword, by violence. That's Medina Islam. So I think it would be more accurate to say there's just one Islam at this point that's unreformed, and there's a third group that I describe in Heretic, which is the people like Majid Nawaz who are actually trying to bring about a different Islam, to shed Medina, bring some stuff out of Mecca,

adapt it to our times. They want to modify stuff. They want to reform. So there is that group too who are actively trying to change things for the better, but they're a minority. I think the majority are Mecca Muslims, the people who are just Muslim.

They go about their daily business they don't harm anyone but then they have to deal with these jihadists who challenge them and who say to them you can't possibly be a true Muslim if you only adhere to Mecca because the Prophet said, what happened in Medina abrogates or voids what happened in Mecca. What is stopping particularly people from the left, including intellectuals, from recognizing the differences, that there are differences in people that follow the peaceful version of the religion and then people that follow the more radical version of the religion that wants to convert people?

What is stopping them from recognizing that this is an issue? Because it's almost like an agreed-up upon reluctance to discuss it, to acknowledge it, and to automatically classify any discussion of it as Islamophobic. And I've seen this label put on you, that you are Islamophobic. Yeah. that you are Islamophobic. Yeah. So the term Islamophobia is obviously very much a Western term.

It's an opportunistic term. The West has gone woke, and they feel an intense regret for some of the things that were done by their ancestors. And so you have names like homophobia, sexism, and so on. And Islamophobia is, I would say, a term that is put right in there to exploit that situation. It's a, in my, the way I see it, it's an artificial term. But let's set that aside and let's see why it is that Western leaders go along with the assertion that Islam is a religion of peace. There's nothing to see here.

It's just a small group of people who have lost their way, and they would have been violent anyway. But in general, Islam is a religion of peace. Number one, a lot of leaders, contemporary Western leaders, they don't know much about religion, even their own, and they don't want to. I mean, you could find out.

You could be ignorant of something, pick up a few books and just find out. I think, number two, there is a sense that because the West is really powerful where it matters, economically powerful, more powerful than any Islamic country, militarily more powerful, diplomatically more powerful,

there is almost that parent-child relationship where it is, we'll just let them come along. They'll grow up. They'll come to our way of seeing things. If they want to believe that Islam is a religion of peace, let's say it along. Let's do it along with them. With some people, I think that is the case. And then along came ISIS.

And they saw that you couldn't do that. And you are now dealing with people who truly believe. couldn't do that and you are now dealing with people who truly believe and i think it was a matter of time before people in washington and berlin and london and so on thought wait a second it's not only that they believe it it is in the quran it's in the hadith it's in the history of islam we better do something about that that's when you start to see a shift in how the confrontation or the the clash of values is approached the latest example if you let me is the president of France in France for the last 20 30 30, 40 years, they were saying there's nothing to see here. Islam has evolved.

It's just like Christianity. It's either a religion of peace or it's irrelevant altogether. All religions are going to go away. We're now living in the post-religion age. In 2021, there is a law right now that has gone through the law house of France, and it is being debated in the Senate where they're talking about if that law gets passed, then Muslims who are accused of trying to separate their communities from the rest of France

along religious lines are going to be stopped by that law. There will be no more homeschooling. They will be told the values of the republic prevail. Anywhere that there's a clash between Islamic values and values of the republic, the values of the republic prevail. And he is saying if that law passes, that's all going to be enforced. Think about that.

How would they possibly enforce that? Look, I'm just as curious as you are. They've also banned hijabs on the beach too, right? Haven't they done that? I get a mixed story about is it the hijab or the burqa? So there are attires where you can take a scarf and cover your head. I guess that's not banned anywhere. There's no debate about that.

But there's something about the thing that covers your face, and there's been a lot of debate in Europe about that. And some of the participants of that debate are saying, we're not talking about religion here. It's all about security. We need to see everybody's face. Well, now everyone wears a mask. Yeah.

It's all out the window because of COVID. Because of COVID. And there are other things that are out of the window because of COVID. Because of COVID. And there are other things that are out of the window because of COVID. Because you just asked me, how are they going to enforce those rules of stopping Muslims from separating themselves from the rest of society through their associations, through their schools, through everything that they do that make them say, we don't want to have anything to do with France, even though physically they're in France. I think they're going to use some of the measures that they applied or some of the laws that they applied during COVID. They're going to assume powers that all of us thought

a liberal society would be very careful with, and now they're not. So I guess that's what they're going to apply. They'll be breaking into people's homes, mosques, associations, whatever, looking for Islamist materials of dawah. Dawa means the proselytizing, and they will try and put a stop to that. They'll try and police literally what goes into people's minds

and comes out of their mouths. Wow. That seems very dangerous to me. And COVID made it possible. Because with COVID, there was a sense, there's this big bad thing from the outside, this virus that's coming to get all of us. We didn't know a lot about the virus, but the more we find out, the more we adapt, the more you would think that

some of these intrusions into our privacy, into our liberty, that would, you know, it would stop and we would be able to be free. And in some countries, even in some states here, people are still insisting that the government has those powers. The government still has control over, my husband is from the UK, and I just asked, you know, who has been to see your mother? We call her granny. Who has been to see granny? Well, daughter and boyfriend, but they were sitting outside.

Why can't they sit inside? And he says, well, the rules haven't changed yet. But there's something in me that asks myself, who's enforcing those rules? Yeah. And why, in the age of testing, are those rules applicable? Why, when you can find out if someone's negative for the virus, why can you keep them from them? Well, the fact, so why initially, I think we were all in agreement, it was to curtail the virus. all in agreement. It was to curtail the virus, but why the rules are still in place when the threat is gone? That's a very good question. Well, why wouldn't we understand what the virus is now? The rules were put in place when we thought it was the Black Plague. I mean, we thought it was

going to be like the Spanish flu and kill a vast majority or a large percentage, rather, of the population. It's not the same thing. It's still terrible for the people that get it and die and the people that have poor health and the people that have underlying conditions and comorbidities. But it's not what we thought it was going to be. But we're still treating it like we treated it a year ago. We're looking at it the same way we looked at it in March of last year. I think what bothers me, you're absolutely right, but what bothers me now is that it's not even possible to have a debate about that. Right.

And that's, so anytime people say you should be suspicious of government, don't give government any powers because once they have that power, they won't give it back. Yes. I think those people are being vindicated in the sense that, and I would say in the past, no, of course not. If there's no need for government to have that power, they'll give it back. But now this government wants to just skip the power, even though the threat is gone. It's just human nature.

You know, there's a tremendous drop in cases in Los Angeles, and yet you still can't go to the gym. You have to eat outside, and they just opened up eating outside two weeks ago yeah we never understood that it doesn't spread outside well it doesn't make sense for for a fact I know that they did it for optics because I know someone who works with the government who literally had this conversation with someone saying why are we doing this when there's no

evidence whatsoever that it spreads outside and they said it's for optics so they're closing businesses down and they're denying people living for optics but what they're doing is they're using power they have power and these are just individuals or human beings and they're subject to human nature it's human nature to exercise power. You see that with bosses over employees. You see that in the Stanford prison experiments. You see, it's just things that people do. You give people power over people and they use it. But in this case, when you say optics, what will they use that power for then? Because the optics is that they're doing power for them because the optics they will be

voted out of power if they carry on like this i don't know if they will i don't know if they will because there's so many people that are so their cursory understanding of human nature and their lack of real inquisition, the lack of real questioning of the government's motives, and also this terrible fear of the virus, the terrible fear of what it actually is. If you go to Los Angeles today, and when I talk to my friends, they have a totally different idea of what the virus is than if you're here in Texas. It's one of the things that I noticed immediately once I came here. It's one of the reasons why I moved here.

People, they treat it like it's a bad cold, which is what it is. It kills people, but so does the flu. But we never closed down schools for the flu. The flu actually kills kids. This kills very few children. A tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny percentage. My kids both got it. And it was nothing.

It was like a headache. It was gone in a day. This is what we're seeing with human nature. When people have the ability to tell people, you can't work. That's very dangerous. Or to tell someone, your business is not essential, but Target is. Well, maybe you have a small store that sells goods.

Well, you can't open. But this big store, this big chain, why? Well, they're part of special interest groups. They contribute to the politicians. There's unions that are involved. Like that woman that we were talking about before the show who had a restaurant in Los Angeles and she had outside dining that she paid thousands of dollars

that she probably didn't even have to set this up so she can keep her business afloat. And then they told her you have to close down outdoor dining. And across the parking lot, the television and movie studios were to close down outdoor dining and across the parking lot the television and movie studios were allowed to have outdoor dining yeah like literally she could walk 10 steps and she could be in their outdoor dining and her business was being forced to shut down it doesn't make any sense because it doesn't have to because it's optics they're just giving the optics that

they're doing something the cases rise because here's the thing about lockdowns that have been pretty clearly established. One of the things, first of all, they don't work. They don't really curtail the virus. But what they do do is they force people inside. When you force people inside and you force people to congregate, it spreads easier. Absolutely.

And that's part of the problem. It spreads easier inside than it does outside. Yes. There's no evidence, no real evidence that it does spread outside. Yeah. But it does spread inside and so you force people inside, you tell people they can't work and they're all congregated together. Inside.

Yes, inside. And they're more fearful, they're not getting vitamin D, they're not getting sun, they're not getting exercise. You have more domestic violence. Yes yes and more mental health issues more suicide and all that stuff's through the roof and more drug addictions and more drug overdoses and all those problems that they don't get calculated in in the risk assessment when you're talking about the risk of the virus there's a lot of other risks there's a lot of other problems yeah and the government doesn't give a shit about that they

they keep getting paid no matter what when they close down these businesses i think the government i think the state i think the the governor and i think the the mayor they should be paid proportionately with the amount of money that's generated by the businesses particularly the businesses that are forced to close you see how fucking quick everything opens up it would open up like that yeah see how quick everything opens up if you give people the freedom to go places you don't have to go to these restaurants if you're worried about catching covet you don't have to go to the gym if you're worried about catching it you can stay home you can social distance you can wear masks you can exercise in the park out in nature but you can't

because the park's shut because they're worried about covet like these are some of the rules that people have had to deal with over this past year nonsensical rules like you can't go to the park you got you can't go to the beach it's nonsense and everybody knows it's nonsense and it's not science-based when they say follow the well, you're not following the science. Because if you did follow the science, you'd let people do anything they wanted outside. Because the science clearly shows it doesn't spread outside. Well, if you follow the science, you would say, let us have a debate. And you would have an open debate where you let both sides speak out.

Yes. an open debate where you let both sides speak out. Yes. What we are now seeing and it is absolutely horrifying is that you let one side decide that speaking for lockdown invoke science and say the science says lockdown but the other scientists who are saying no not so fast and those ones are not allowed to speak. I have a colleague Scott Atlas at the Hoover Institution, and he's made a few points about why some of the things that we're being told to do are not actually supported by science.

But people like him can't get their voices out because they're demonized. Demonized, shut out, kicked out of the whole debate. And I think we can't go on like this no no we can't and it's it's it's forcing a massive divide in our country and it's it's terrifying to get back to what's happening in Europe how popular is this idea in France and do you think that that's actually going to pass? The Islamic separatists? Yes. I think it is popular with the population, with the voters. And the reason why I say that is they had a general election about four years ago. And

Front National, that's the populist far right party led by by Marie Le Pen came in second. And next year they have elections and the polls are suggesting that she is going to be either second and in some polls perhaps even first. So President Macron is being forced to do something about this issue. And that answers your question, you know, how serious are people about it? The voters are serious about it. And it's the kind of issue that seems never to go away. If it was number one during the last election and it's still number one this election,

then voters want something done. And if they look at Macron and say, you promised, we gave you that chance last time and you did nothing, they'll probably go with Marine Le Pen. So I think right now he needs something concrete, something solid to get through both houses and say, look, I'm not just talking about stopping the radicalization or Islamist separatism, as he calls it. I am passing a law that stops money coming from outside countries or regulates it, that I am going to stop the

so-called homeschooling where young people are taken out of the normal schools and indoctrinated and radicalized at home. I'm going to establish some form of control over what these preachers, the ones that are anointed by the government, what they say or don't say. He's going to take steps to show that this time he means it. And if he't do that there'll be another election but i think it's really serious would you explain to people who don't understand what's happening in france what what the issue is if you go to france today and you start talking about islam and muslim minorities and you just listen to the people. Don't go in with your own opinions.

Just listen to them. A lot of them will start talking about civil war. A few months, I think it was in October, or probably October, when a school teacher was beheaded because he was showing cartoons. And this was done by a Muslim man, but then there was a whole circle of people around him.

And back then they were thinking, okay, the civil war is on. And the terrorist attack before that, a lot of French people would say, we think the civil war has begun. Maybe the civil war was going on for a long time. Civil war between who? They say between the Muslim minorities, not all of them, but that small minority that is committing terrorist attacks and pushing members of their group to commit terrorist attacks, and the rest of France. And why is that? Why is it that it seems as if France doesn't have this problem under control?

Well, France has a relationship with Algeria. Algeria used to be a former colony, so there are lots of people who came from Algeria and settled in France. But aside from Algeria, also from other parts of North Africa and other French-speaking African countries. But what France has done is also allowed radical Islamists to come into France and set up da'wah agencies, that is proselytizing agencies, places from which they can proselytize, propagate, indoctrinate people. So there's a huge swath of French Muslim peoples who physically live in France, but live and abide by Sharia law. And they've become violent and they've become virulent.

And the population is faced with terrorist attack after terrorist attack, attempts at terrorism that are foiled. Women who can't walk on the streets because so many of these streets and neighbors have been claimed for the men. So I'm not saying only Muslim women. I'm talking about any kind of women will be able to walk on those streets. I'm not saying only Muslim women. I'm talking about any kind of women will be able to walk on those streets. And so because things have evolved to a place where there is right now a confrontation between these two value systems and the civilizations they represent, it's either France wins or there is a civil war.

So this is kind of their last chance. So the issue is that these people that have immigrated into France are turning France into where they came from. They're turning it into where they fled. Pretty much. Again, I insist, not all of them. There are a lot of people from Algeria and other parts of North Africa who have embraced French values and have become completely French, but those are not the ones we are talking about. The subject of this conversation deals only with those who refuse, who know of French values, who live in France, but have refused to abide by French laws, customs and norms.

And this is happening in other places in Europe as well, right? This is happening in Germany, it's happening in Holland, it's happening in parts of Scandinavia, it's happening in the United Kingdom. Yes, every country that has taken in a considerable number of Muslims is facing similar problems. Refugees. Some of them are refugees. Some of them came as guest workers. Some of them came as economic migrants.

It's a mix. And Germany, apparently what I've read, has a particular problem in shifting their perceptions because obviously of their, of the Nazis and Nazi Germany, and they resist any inclination whatsoever of prejudice. That's what they say, which I think it's very difficult to measure prejudice. But when I was doing the research for this book, the book that I'm promoting now, I would want to go and see cases. So the book is dealing with sexual violence against women perpetrated by immigrants. So if I go to a country like Germany and I say, can you just give me the data? How many sexually violent attacks have taken place in Germany in the last 10 years, and how many of those have been perpetrated by immigrants?

Easy question, right? You expect to just get the answer. Here it is. Here are the numbers. That's not what you get. What you're told is we actually don't collect data along ethnic, nationality, or religious lines. Oh, so we'll never be able to answer that question. And they say, not really. I used to know a way of getting around that, which I have applied to other countries,

which is the government agencies that are paid to collect the data, that kind of data, they won't do it. government agencies that are paid to collect the data, that kind of data, they won't do it. One way of finding out is just go to the courts because every single court case is open. If you want to go right here in America, you want to go see what's happening in the criminal court right here, you just register and you say, I'd like to watch this case and you fill a little bit of paperwork and you go in. Not in Germany. In Germany, they say, because of the Second World War and what we did, it's very, very difficult to get in those so-called public courtrooms. And so a big part of the book is about just trying to get the data. Well, if there's no data, if the data is not publicly available, what leads you to suspect

that there is an abundance of sexual attacks by these immigrants? It is a collection of the anecdotes, interviews, so talking to people who are supposed to gather the data. And when you say, come on, you don't want to gather the data and when you say come on you don't want to gather the data on nationality ethnicity i understand but what are you seeing and they will say please don't say my name and then they'll tell you what they're seeing is this you personally have talked to these people that are telling you this i have personally talked to them and i've also worked with researchers where I personally could not go. But we also walked the neighborhoods. We interviewed a number of the victims whose testimonies I have in the book. And then we went, I went to see some of the politicians, just talk to them. Some of them

will say, please don't put my name in the book, don't quote me. But they explain and the explanations are familiar to me because I've seen this in Holland. Please don't say my name in the book, don't quote me. But they explain, and the explanations are familiar to me because I've seen this in Holland. Please don't say, I'm the one who's telling you this, but yes, we do have a problem, and this is what it looks like. And then, of course, I would do what you would do right now, which is then, you know, just put it out there, because I think if we were to have the precise data

of who is exactly perpetrating what kind of crime, we would be able to develop programs to help the perpetrators, not just the victims, but the perpetrators and where they come from, so that we can prepare them for assimilation into our society do you think that's possible to i mean when someone's indoctrinated into a specific way of thinking about women yeah that you could immigrate to a place and abandon your preconceived notions The Danes and the Austrians, they're attempting it. And they have decided that they're not going to shroud things, that they're not going to obfuscate,

that they're going to gather the data as the data presents itself. If there is a violent act committed against a woman and it's a white Danish man, then it's white Danish man. If not, all the other skin colors, nationalities, all the other data points that are now being hidden, the Danes have decided they're not going to hide it. And yes, they have actually developed programs where they think they can get to these men.

I have looked at a program developed by a man originally from Eritrea. He describes his attitude to women before he came to Sweden. And he says, it's just a fact that men from certain places of the world, they haven't been taught. And they don't, they're not familiar with how European men and women treat each other. And some of them are open to and willing to learn.

Those who don't want to, those who don't want to learn, and those who want to carry on assaulting women, I think they should get out. The argument against this, this idea that there's a big problem with women being assaulted by these immigrants, is that most sexual assaults that women experience are from people they know. Yes. And that this is always going to be the biggest problem. Yes. But my book is not about that. And I say it in the book. There have been several books and studies

and so much work that is devoted to what we call intimate partner violence. So sexual violence against women committed by acquaintances and intimate partners. It's very well known, that's well documented. And in some countries, policies are in place that are effective in the sense that they reduce those crimes. And in some places, those policies have not been adopted or put in place. But it's a fact. But what this book describes, pray, is the public space. So somebody whom you don't know, never seen before, just comes and assaults you. And it's not always an individual. Sometimes it's in groups of two, three, four.

They're young people. They're new to the country. They don't even discriminate about whether it is this woman or that woman. I've seen 11-year, talked to 11-year-old kids who've been assaulted all the way to women in their 70s and 80s. Some of the women may be covered from head to toe. Some of them may be just in, you know, shorts and t-shirts. It really doesn't matter to the men who are doing the assaulting. They look at these women and they see them through a certain prism, and that is these women are immodest.

They're out and about. They're uncovered. They have no male guardians with them. Therefore, they're for the taking, their prey. And in their heads, there are women, the good women, the modest women. You don't see those ones on the street. And if you do, they adhere to certain codes. They're not alone.

They're not out after dark. They're covered from head to toe. They're with their guardians. So what we're seeing right now is large numbers of men come from countries and societies where the modesty doctrine that governs the relationship between men and women yeah that's that's the law of the land or the norm of the land. And when they come to Europe, they can't help themselves. And the question is, does Europe adapt to them or do they adapt to Europe? Why do you think in this culture today where there's so much emphasis on stopping sexual assault,

why do you think there's a reluctance to communicate with you about this because it's clearly if you received so many invitations on these different shows to talk about heretic but then prey comes along and there's no one who wants to talk about it yeah fox news all the various stations of fox News do lots of podcasts, lots of talk radio. But my publisher could not find it was reviewed in The New York Times. I didn't like the review, but it was reviewed. Nonetheless, it was reviewed in The Wall Street Journal. The New York Post had something.

But I know what you're saying. I know what you're saying. Why are, you know, the previous books I was on, CNN and MSNBC and... There's a reluctance to discuss this issue. There's a reluctance. And then the women's magazines. So there were a number of women's magazines who wouldn't even return the emails. Why is it? Why is it?

Why is it? Because the perpetrators are not white heterosexual men. If the perpetrators were white heterosexual men and they were committing acts of violence on this magnitude, trust me, I wouldn't be the one sitting here. Do you think that they're, do you think they're fearful of these discussions? Do you think they're worried about being labeled? Do you think they're worried about retribution? What do you think they're worried about?

What would the retribution be? Who would the retribution come from? There would be no retribution except it would come from the woke. And we now live in this age of cancel culture, where people who call themselves woke are saying, our society is divided into those who oppress and those who are oppressed. And the fact that black men, brown men, men of color are oppressing and raping women and groping them and subjecting them to humiliation, that doesn't fit into their matrix of those who are oppressors and those who are victims. Because the black man is supposed to be the victim, right?

The immigrant, the asylum seeker, the refugee, he is supposed to be the victim. They don't have an ideological, in their ideological framework, they don't have a way of dealing with the subject of prey. They don't have a way of dealing with a man who has escaped violence and civil strife in Syria, who then comes to Germany and rapes an 11-year-old. In their ideological frame, they haven't worked that out. So their ideological framework is so rigid that they just ignore it. They're just like, I can't even talk about this. And not only that they can't talk about it, but even silence others who will talk about it.

You know, all the airwaves all day long will be about Governor Andrew Cuomo and somebody he solicited. But it's not going to be about any of this, about the girls who are raped, who are gang raped. Some of them have been killed. Others have abandoned their neighborhoods and their streets. Others, when they get out of their houses, they have to cover their

ears so that they can't hear the sexual assault that is thrown at them, the obscenities that are thrown at them verbally. They have to walk with people. They have completely adapted their ways. And this is in Berlin. It's in Stockholm. It's in Amsterdam. It's in Paris. It's in all of these places. There's no coverage of that. But we are going to have columns and columns and columns about some governor in New York, who I'm not trying to diminish what he did, which is wrong, if it's true. But compared to what I'm writing about, come on. Well, there's, there's easy stories, right? Like another easy story that has nothing to do with sexual assault is Ted Cruz going to Cancun.

They talked constantly about Ted Cruz going to Cancun. They talked so little about Biden bombing Syria. There was so little discussion of it. It went in and went out. It was in and out like that. And then you're still seeing stories about Ted Cruz. And I think if we carry on like this, with our mainstream media selecting stories like this, reporting on things that are trivial, not reporting on things that are really big, big like the bombing of Syria they shouldn't be surprised if in 2024 um we get another surprise

they should not be surprised 2016 people were surprised oh my god how could it happen why well because you ignored most of what was happening the trust in mainstream media i don't know if you ever paid attention to the polls but it's shocking it's not there what people used to do people used to have very high trust in places like cnn or the new york times or yeah and now you look at recent polls and it's like i think it's in like the 30 the high 30 low 40 percent range and that's tragic it's crazy it's crazy it's tragic because if we don't believe the mainstream media in an age of misinformation and disinformation if the average citizen just looks at these things and say well they're all lying right then where are we going to get our information from? And who's telling the... We set ourselves up for problems,

especially in relationship with adversaries, if we carry on like this. But yeah, that's the answer to your question, is it doesn't fit into the ideology. Yeah, if you wanted to have some grand scheme to have democracy fall apart, one of the best ways is to not be able to take any information from

once trusted institutions you don't know and trust them anymore I mean that's that alone leaves us where are we now then you've got people believing QAnon and all this and they don't know who's who's telling the truth or who's not and they say well I've read on CNN like fucking CNN nobody believes CNN like well you don't believe CNN. Well, if we can't believe CNN, who can we believe? Well, then you'll say you can't believe CNN and you don't believe CNN because CNN behaved, over the course of many years, they behaved really badly, partisan. And they dropped their responsibility to inform and instead went into advocacy.

I read a whole analysis written on New York Times that they deliberately decided not to do journalism and go post-journalistic. So they're now doing post-journalism. When you do that, you leave a void. And that void is going to be filled. that you leave a void yeah and that void is going to be filled and it shouldn't take you by surprise that it's going to be filled by people who disinform and misinform whether they are domestic or external foreign it's going to happen and I think it's hopefully know, sometimes I think maybe it's these podcasts and, you know, citizens saying figure out what's going on, and not rely on the institutions that we used to think we relied on. But our free press degenerating the way it has in the last decade, all I can say is it's tragic, and I feel that sadness.

It's terrible. There's a tangible lack of real journalism, and it's been replaced by tribalism masquerading as journalism. And tribalism is what we've been talking about this entire conversation. The problem is people that subject themselves and everyone around them to these rigid ideologies, whether these rigid ideologies are religious or whether these rigid ideologies are just political. It's the same kind of thing. You are forced to comply. There's a forced compliance. compliance, all the things we talked about, all these woke issues where you're attacked if you deviate from these very strict narratives that you're supposed to follow along with.

And this is the problem we're seeing with the far left. It's the same problem we're seeing with the far right. It's rigid ideologies, and it's this lack of objectivity, and it's this lack of objectivity and it's a lack of any one unbiased objective source of information that we can get where we can find out and decide for ourselves. What is the interpretation of these things? When you deny people the information, the objective information, because you don't want that to empower the side that you're opposed to. You're no longer a journalist. You're an activist. And if you think that's okay to be an activist journalist, journalism is supposed to be about getting people information. It's supposed to be about unbiased information. It's supposed to be about the purest, most objective version of the truth that you could possibly get to the people. And there's a great value in that. But that great

value has been cast out in favor of things that get more ratings and more clicks and in favor of these clickbait articles and trying to get as many advertisers squeezed into your page as you can. and trying to get as many advertisers squeezed into your page as you can. I mean, this is what it's come to. And it's very dangerous for people trying to figure out the truth, especially people that work all day. Maybe they have some job that's incredibly detail-oriented, and they have to focus on it.

And then they have children, and they have families, and they don't have time to sit down and analyze what's happening in in in yemen they don't have time they don't have time to figure out well why why aren't we getting these stimulus checks right what the fuck is going on they don't have time they don't have time for all these things they don't have time for all these things they've been promised they don't have time to understand what's happening they just they get narratives and they they belong to a tribe and then they they don't want to be chastised by their neighbors they don't want to be anybody to be mad at them so they just stick with whatever it is whether they're right-wing or whether they're woke whatever it is they just it's easier to just go along with the narrative. But there's no one in charge, and there's no wisdom involved in crafting these narratives. Right.

And so exactly what you describe is this complete lack of leadership. So political leadership is lacking. It's of such low quality. It's astonishing. And then leadership in journalism is not even there anymore precisely as you describe it it's the clickbaits the bottom line and then and and then the father you go you know leadership in education and leadership elsewhere and these things feed off of one another. And when you talk about tribalism, I can tell you it's not an attractive thing.

I know Americans love to cheer for this group against that. But if you come from a tribal society, if you go now to a tribal society, what you see is not attractive. It's always zero sum. What you want to have, the other tribe has, and there's no way both of you can have it. So you go to great lengths to get it for your tribe. And very often, a lot of blood is shed to get that to happen. There is a little bit of everything, not enough. And I'm always asking myself, why do Americans think that dividing our society up into collectives, into groups, and I don't care what that particular group, what they have in common.

But to sit in a group and think we have something in common that they don't have, and we're going to take a hostile attitude to the other side. And you do that, and you have to ask yourself, where is that going to end? I don't think Americans have seen the real ramifications of that, and that's why they're adhering to these tribal lines. When you see the right going against the left or the left going against the right, I don't think they understand where this ends. And I think what we saw on January 6th, that's just the beginning of it. That's a tiny little rumble. That's what I think.

On the other hand, when I travel around the country and I tend to talk to people, I seek them out and I will talk to the people actually I'm not supposed to talk to. And I find wonderful people. They're polite. When you say the people you're not supposed to talk to, who do you mean? Well, the people who have been called deplorables and all sorts of names. And they'd be wearing MAGA hats. I just, you know, start up a conversation. And I've not come across people wherever I go who I find display hostility, even though it's clear, it's written all over me that I'm not one of them, that I'm different,

I'm an outsider, I have an accent. Still, I find that people treat me in America with a great deal of hospitality. So there's so much that's not lost. And I say this when I go to, I don't know, I go to different places. There are people who probably have never, I might be the first outsider they've ever seen. I don't know. I'm just saying.

And the way people respond, you know, the please, thank you, just the civility, the kindness. And if I chat on and ask them about where they think the country is going, they don't seem at all disturbed. They think, oh, you know, it's all good. Some of them say, we don't like all these divisions. They don't like the polarization as far as they're informed about the polarization. But sometimes it looks like the general public, to them, this is all noise. This is all just something that's happening somewhere outside of their realm of daily existence. Am I wrong? I think there's that. But I think it's also what we're talking about earlier,

that there's just too much to pay attention to. And so people, they form convenient narratives, and they stick with them. I think one of the things you're talking about is one-on-one communication, which is really how people are supposed to talk to each other. And most things can be worked out when you really do just have one-on-one communication with people, especially if you both have – most people have – your end desire is harmony most people's end desire is you you want food for your family you want to live in a safe community you want to be able to do what you want to do for a living that's most people right and the idea that

this person or this group is going to stop you from doing that is one of the narratives that's a real problem in this country. And a big problem we're experiencing right now is censorship in tech. And the fact that big tech is essentially, it's not just on the right, but it's disproportionately on the right. The people on the right are being censored. People on the left are being censored people on the left being censored as well but it's usually anti-establishment people on the left that are being censored and they're now starting to understand like oh this is a real problem like people that were cheering on censorship are now being censored and they're recognizing like The internet is supposed to be a place where information can be freely distributed. But then you go, well, these people are giving out bad information. We have to stop them.

Well, bad information, but can't you stop them by giving out good information? No, no, no. We just have to silence them. Well, then they're going to go to this other place. We're going to close that place down, too. Well, then you're going to have a civil war. Because now you only have one side being represented disproportionately. And these people are going to be furious. And they still can vote. If you can't stop those people from voting, that's how you get Donald Trump.

Because Donald Trump comes around and he says, hey, these people don't like you. They hate America. I love America. And they go, well, I love America too. And they fucking killed Parler. And then they're voting. They're voting for him again in 2024. And that's a real probability. Yeah. I've been asked many times, what would you censor?

And I would say I wouldn't censor anything. Look, screaming fire in a theater full of people that's locked up, I think in that sense you can say we have almost 100% consensus that that's a bad thing. You shouldn't be doing that. But any kind of information, any kind of speech that doesn't hurt anyone physically. Right. You're not calling for someone's death or doxing someone. You're not inciting. You're not doxing. You're not doing any of that.

But you are shouting your political beliefs from the rooftops, even if I hate them, I think you still should be able to do that. That is how I understand the First Amendment. That's how I understand free speech. Now, when I have conversations with people from big tech, they say, but that relationship is between the government and those who are governed. It has nothing, you know, private companies can do whatever they want. That's true. Private companies can do, they can choose what kind of speech they're going to promote and what

kind of speech they're not going to promote, depending on the business objectives and the bottom line. I totally agree with that. But what you said earlier, if those big tech companies are seen as monopolies or oligarchies, then they proceed to empower one side and silence the other, it should be a matter of time before government starts to interfere. It should be. It is a matter of time before government is good. I'm against government intervening in business. I would let the market be the market. I would rather have competition against these large companies

than for them to be shut down or broken up. But if they continue to behave this way, I think, you know, they're basically asking for it. It's not what you and I think. It's what's going to end up happening because of the power that they amass and the power that they're seen to be amassing, in which case they're seen that one political party

is outsourcing censorship that they can't do, the party can't do it because of the constitution, but it's outsourcing it to these companies to do it for them. That's how things are seen at this point. The Democratic Party cannot censor because of the First Amendment, but they can get Google, Amazon, Facebook, YouTube to do it for them. It's also the argument that they're a private company. They are a private company, but we've never had a private company that's the main town hall for distributing any information before. We've never had anything like that before.

We need some kind of new rules. We need some kind of new amendments that deal with what the internet is. If you have a portal that has literally billions of people like Facebook has, you can't just say you're a private company. Look at, you know, if you've seen any of these documentaries on social media, and you've talked to people that understand how Facebook affects politics in foreign countries, especially when you buy phones and Facebook comes pre-installed on the phone, and it's the only way these people communicate with each other. And they're using these things to spread lies about opposing parties they're using them to cause civil wars there you it's not just

simply a private company so are they a utility or are they publishers because if they're publishers they're responsible for every single thing that gets put on yes liability including all the civil wars including all the lies including murder including all the different things that have been perpetrated because of their platform yeah they're responsible for that well then they're not responsible for it well then it's an open speech platform is it an open speech platform everyone it should be open to everyone it should be a like a public utility like you have a right to express yourself just like you have a right to water yeah just like you have a right to electricity you have a right to utilities yeah just like you have a right to electricity you have

a right to utilities yeah you only can say i don't like the way you think about this you can't have electricity they can't have that right that's not legal like even the kkk can have electricity yeah right well that's how it should be with the internet and it's it's a messy, ugly, disgusting thing to hear horrible opinions and evil opinions. But the only way I think to combat those is to have much better thought out, much better expressed good opinions. And so over time, people see that this is logical and clear and true and this other stuff is bullshit. You're saying let the audience decide for themselves, which is what I agree with. But I think, look, we're watching in real time. large companies to carry on writing this on this lane where they avoid liability but they have the privileges of being publishers it's a matter of time before

something happens I just hope that the right thing happens and that's the wrong thing it is a matter yeah I, Brett Weinstein's, his idea, what was it called? Unity... Theory of Everything? No, no, no, that's Eric. He was trying to bring sensible people from the right and sensible people from the left together.

And it was a Unity project. And he had a Twitter page. They cancelled his page. They just, they killed his page. Unity 2020. Unity 2020. So it was this, And he had a Twitter page. They canceled his page. They just killed his page. Unity 2020. Unity 2020. Yeah. So he had this idea of bringing sensible people and trying to create a third-party option other than the left and the right. And they just killed his page for no reason.

That's really painful. It makes me feel the way, you know, when Amazon stopped selling when Harry turned Sally, Harry turned into Sally, you know, a book like that. Why would Amazon do that? They have decided they are going to stop selling any book that they believe promotes hate. Now, this is the thing that the book expressed in many different places, love and respect and a call for fair treatment of transgender people. They were just dealing with the issue of trans people. The same as Abigail Schreier's book. Abigail Schreier's book, yeah. Yes, Irreversible.

Irreversible Damage. Irreversible Damage, yeah. Which I think everybody should buy. It's this, why is this subject so important to you? This seems to be, is this something like an attack vector where people have come after you about your opinions about this? Oh, you mean the transgender issue? It has to do with women, doesn't it? I mean, I think, we talked about it earlier and so has abigail

everyone we want to promote uh transgender rights uh privileges transgender dignity i think that's a good thing but not at the expense of women yeah and what i don't understand is why it has to be lose-lose. Why can't we promote transgender dignity, freedom, rights, without taking anything away from women? Why do we have to do it that way? That's for me the puzzle. Some of the transgender activists seem to think that the only way that they can move forward as a group is by diminishing

women. And I know some of the examples that are discussed are, you know, what happens in prison when men, heterosexual men, pretend to be trans and they rape women. Another good example is in the sports arena where, you know, young women train. They also want scholarships, but they think they're training against other women. And somebody who was born a boy and later becomes a man, I mean, competing with a woman. I can tell you, you guys have bigger lungs and a bigger heart. It's just, he's going to win. There's all of that. And then there's a subject that Abigail touches on where there's there's all of that and then there's a subject that uh abigail touches on where there's

contagion young girls hating their bodies that's not new we've known that for ages and ages as long as there were young girls there were always some who just didn't like their bodies and if some of them uh remember in the day bulimia an, anorexia, that stuff. Cutting. Cutting. It still happens. And I think the trend today is for some young women to think, well, I don't even want to be a girl to begin with. I'm going to be a guy.

And then under pressure from other teenagers, they go to great lengths to make some of these changes that are irreversible and harmful and for all time. And I'm not even so much upset with the transgender lobby. I'm more upset with the adults in the room, like the doctors, the people who took the oath to make other people better and to heal and to cure. They're the ones who are doing things behind the parents' backs to give kids some of these, I would say, really dramatic drugs and surgeries without the parents knowing.

I mean, there's so much wrong with transgender activism right now that I think now is the time to speak about that. I don't understand why that is called hate speech. I don't see anything hateful about it. None of us are hating anyone. Again, we repeat wholeheartedly, transgender people should have the same rights, freedoms, dignities we have. But if there are unintended consequences, if there are things happening that they don't want to girls, children, and young women, why would talking about that and dealing with that issue be hate and hateful? Yeah, it's a forced compliance thing.

It's a forced compliance with the ideology. And it's not just young girls. It's young forced compliance thing. It's a forced compliance with the ideology. And it's not just young girls. It's young boys as well. I don't know if you saw the conversation that Rand Paul had with the transgender woman who is being appointed by the Biden administration. Did you see that? I didn't see that. I'm sorry I missed it. He was talking about this very thing.

He was talking about this very thing. And the person who was appointed by the Biden administration gave the same answers over and over again. Transgender medicine is very complex and robust. And if I was appointed, you know, I'd be happy to have you come into my office and talk about this. And so then he goes on again. You're avoiding my question. I'm asking you about children. Then he goes on again. You're avoiding my question.

I'm asking you about children. You know, you can't even go to the ER to have a cut sewn up without a doctor if you're a child. Now you're allowing children without their parents' permission to go and have these incredibly complex procedures and all this. And this person gives the exact same answer. Senator, transgender medicine is a very complex and robust study with rigorous, like, it's like a robot. And he's like a robot. He's talking like a robot, yeah. No, I think it just, when I became, I wasn't aware of any of this. I became aware of it through Abigail Habuk and others.

And I thought, but this is just like female genital mutilation. It's children being cut and others. And I thought, but this is just like female genital mutilation. It's children being cut and harmed. And you can't reverse this. And there are now also the people who are now old enough to say, I didn't want this to happen to me. A lot of people. A lot of people. And I think once we should be listening, don't listen to me.

Listen to those people. lot of people and i think once we should be listened don't listen to me listen to those people but we got into this subject because of the you know what's called hate speech what is hate what is hate to you maybe love to me i don't know you know it's how can you even define hate speech what is hate speech the more if you try and think really deep about freedom of speech, the First Amendment, why it came about, it's the speech that offends, the speech that hurts, the speech that people hate. That's the speech that's protected. Why would you protect good manners? And that's good manners. That's politeness. That that's politeness that's all protect it's all fine but the speech that is that needs constitutional protection is the speech that hurts well this is

a to me it's emblematic of this confusion in our culture now and also this newfound ability to communicate with massive amounts of people and the influence that goes along with that because if you do say anything that could be attributed by some people that you could categorize it as hate speech which is very it's very flippant the way they use this like if you discuss like abigail schreier who says over and over again on the podcast that i did with her we opened up the podcast by saying let's just talk about let's talk before we get into this let's say you know i have nothing but respect for people that are trans we're not even talking about grown adults we're not talking about people that i believe they are born in the wrong body i think that's a real thing but the thing is is, like, how do you know?

This is not like a binary thing. It's not a one or a zero. It's hard to figure out. So how do you know when you're a young person whether or not that's the case with you? Well, you've got to let them become an adult and have their own mind. A person's frontal lobe isn't even fully formed until they're 25 years old. To tell a three-year-old child yeah you know that you're supposed to be a boy you know you're supposed to be a girl

that's and start medication at that age i think that is insane it's insane but the and bring in yeah bring in the parents bring in the bring in the community you know if if i don't know the resistance to saying it's insane it is insane yes yes that and you're attacked you're attacked and you're attacked by people that there's certain people that just don't want you to in any way question what they think should be done and they think that there's a lot of people out there that are trans that are they're stopped from being able to express that at an early age and they might be right but the thing is we don't know when someone's a child children are malleable and one of the things that Rand Paul talks about is how many

children that if they that there was a study that he brings up in this conversation if they weren't turn if they didn't go trans they would just become gay or they would just yeah they would keep their genitals intact they would just accept whoever they are without having to go through some medical transition it's a complex really fascinating subject and a strange moment in our culture that this is moved to the forefront and it's forcing us to look at what it is to be trans yeah but it's also forcing us to look at like what decisions that we're making because we don't want to hurt anybody's feelings we don't we don't we don't want people to think that we're making because we don't want to hurt anybody's feelings. We don't want people to think that we're assholes. We don't want people to think that we're discriminatory

and that you're allowing children to be pushed in one direction or the other. We know children are easily manipulated. We know people are very malleable. People are very easily influenced. And if we don't acknowledge just actual human nature when making these decisions for children. Especially teenage girls. Teenage girls, among other teenage girls,

are easily influenced. Easily. And if today the new contagion, let's call it the madness of the day, is transitioning from whatever sex you were born into. I don't know what the next generation will bring, but this is something we're familiar with. I want to go back to the question when you asked me,

why are you interested in this subject? I think my interest is always sparked when I find a lot of activity around people trying to create a taboo where there shouldn't be a taboo. Like we can have a common sense conversation about transgender issues in 2021, can't we? Can't we? We can have perfectly rational conversations about any subject. Tell me, you name it and I'll tell you. Like, you know, hit me with anything. I'll have the conversation with you. But then it becomes a problem when people say we can't have that conversation. What you say and what you do to me, that is hate. And I'm going to take action. I'm going to convince the tech companies to scrub you out. I'm going to convince

the government to adopt hate legislation. I'm going to try and get you canceled from your job or try to get you never to be invited to this or that place. That's the sort of stuff that I would say sparks my interest in why would you do that? Well, the Biden administration has already caved into this. They've already allowed people to compete in the sport in high school, whatever gender they identify with. Yeah. That is such an open-ended thing because that's not requiring any change whatsoever, hormonal, surgical, anything. So you can just say you're a girl and come

i'm competing my i can wrestle with you yeah right yeah and that's happening that's just gonna fall apart it's madness it is madness it's madness you know someone pointed out uh heather haying had a thread about this and she was talking about the as a biologist talking about the biological differences between men and women because the aclu had pointed some they made some nonsense thread on twitter where it was like fact myth you know like myth there's uh there's men have a biological trans women have a biological advantage over biological women or have a physical advantage over biological men women myth like that's not a myth and so they so heather haying had this like like very detailed twitter thread that she

put on it and in it one of the people put about forence griffith joiners world record that like most kids in high school boys break that like the top boys in high school, boys break that. Like the top boys in high school all break her world record. High school. Yeah. High school. Like there's a giant difference in physical sports. Yeah.

And the idea that you're somehow or another discriminating because you don't want a trans woman who is a biological male to compete against biological females who have inherent physical disadvantages and this is why we don't allow men to compete against women in women's sports it's it's very clear how as a woman i would feel threatened by a development like that i do and girls and yes it's not like we're being asked to work harder which probably we are as women but we are asked to compete with others that we can't we are being asked to compete with guys and we can't it's also crazy that a small minority of people because that's what this is in terms of the people that believe this is fair yeah and it's belief yeah believe exactly not only is it not not only is there no science

there's science that points to the opposite right there's world records being broken left and right by trans women and that that's a fact you could go into cycling or power lifting and in fact the olympic powerlifting team has now stopped allowing trans women to was it the world what is it the what olympic powerlifting federation has stopped allowing trans women to compete as as women because they're just breaking records so would i be too dumb if i said what if we have men competing against men women competing against women and trans people competing against the problem with that depending on what they transitioned from they want you to think that a trans person is whatever sex they identify with period like i said about a man

who has sex with women and has fathers a bunch of children then decides that he's a woman he's always been a woman and this is this is this crazy ideological thing that we're dealing with, this tribal, almost religious belief. It is religious, yeah. It is very similar. And people that have been in cults, people that have been in very strict ideological religions, they understand this and they reject it.

The thing is, most Americans don't agree with this, but yet the president made this a law like this is the they're not going to get state they're not going to get federal funding unless they comply with this this is what's madness this is madness and people are freaking out and women and biological females who have worked to get these scholarships in athletics they're not going to be able to what is it the olympic power lifting federation yeah they won't get it no yeah they it's that is so by far the biggest example because it's a belief system it's it's religious so there's no middle ground so It is like religion. Because I remember

it was a few years ago when the bathroom walls broke out. And you know, it's just, it's, I'm hearing about it, like, what are these bathroom walls about? And my first response was, why don't we just give them their own bathrooms? Right. What is wrong with that? Because they want to be a woman or they want to be a man. They want to be a man or they want to be a woman. They want to be recognized as a 100% woman or a 100% man and there's even a school of thought that if you're a biological man and you won't date a trans woman that you're a bigot that you're transphobic that you don't want to date a biological male who's transitioned because you're a bigot that you're transphobic that you don't want to date a biological male who's transitioned because you're a bigot that would be blackmailing someone into dating which is well it's just crazy

it's just crazy it is one of the most yeah human entanglements in terms of like the way people are twisting language and and utilizing ideology to force people into compliance. And then making it into something that government has to execute. Because what you're telling me about what then the administration does is ratify that. So tomorrow, if someone else comes, a new craziness, they'll have to ratify that too. I had no opinion about this. I was live and let live, do whatever you want, until there was a woman who was a biological man for 30 years and then started competing in mixed martial arts as a woman without telling her opponents that she was a man for 30 years.

She transitioned for two years. So two years later, she starts fighting women and didn't let them know, beating the shit out of them. Of course. Yeah, but it's rough to watch when you watch it looks like a man beating up women yeah and i was like this is fucking crazy and and people like you're a bigot and i'm like what what is happening here like this is like five years ago yeah i was like what happened yeah like i'm waking up going, did I miss something? This is crazy. Any woman's activist will say that is crazy.

Not bigoted, it's crazy. Crazy. And it shouldn't happen. And I think this is another challenge for feminism, at least the feminists who are with it, to say this is a development. We want all things good for the transgender people but no way are you going to do this to women well also i was not opposed to a transgender woman fighting a female if the female knew the thing is she held it back from the first two opponents by saying that it was a medical issue and she didn't have to disclose it i'm like that is fucking crazy talk yeah that's crazy and she knows it everybody knows but that was where the ideological battleground started yeah and I was like this is crazy this is

really crazy the thing that's going to happen is they'll be will withdraw retreat into our own little tribal so women in associations from now onwards will be looking out to see if there's someone who looks different from them and won't let them in and just think about the tragedy of that and the same thing is going to happen with men who feel like they've been hounded by the me too people they'll just stay away from girls and you're going to see the top echelons of organizations and corporations become male only because women, you know, it's just too confusing to be around them.

So all of these things that they say that they're pushing for, the rights of the people they're fighting for, those people will suffer. The vulnerable will suffer. Because just listening to the story you told me, you can just about imagine all wrestlers thinking, women wrestlers, thinking, wait a second, let me just figure out who's wrestling with me. You have a bunch of people isolated.

It's just sad. It's tragic. Whereas if we just talked openly about these things, we could figure it out. In Texas, it's actually gone the other way which is awful as well there was a high school girl who was transitioning to be a boy and taking testosterone and they forced her to compete against women she wanted to compete against boys and they wouldn't let her or him they wouldn't let him he's she's transitioning to be a boy. They said, no, you're a biological female. You have to compete against females.

So she's cheating because she's taking testosterone. So she's far stronger than these other women. Yeah, because she's on this hormone. It's weird. Always the women are supposed to. The women. Yeah. Well, that's the thing.

It's like biological women in all these situations are the ones that are losing out. Yeah. Over and over and over again. Yeah. in all these situations are the ones that are losing out. Yeah. Over and over and over again. Yeah.

And I think many of us, we're embracing, we're happy, we're open. We want to change. We want things to change for the better and for good. But if you then cut off the possibility to talk about, and what do women do? They talk. Yeah. We like to talk a lot. If you cut that avenue off and you start calling

everything hate speech, then you get to a place of really nastiness and suspicion. It became a big issue with... And real bigotry. Yeah, with real bigotry. It's just so confusing. It's so confusing. And they say, the argument was like, well well it's not yours to discuss but where we're human beings everything is ours to discuss and if there's something that the vast majority of the population disagree with because of science like especially when you talk about sports you're talking about science the vast majority of the population do not think it's fair that biological males who transition to become women compete against biological females who have never had testosterone flowing through their body.

They haven't gone through puberty. They haven't gone through this 30 years of being a male and the tendon strength and the difference in the bone structure and the difference in the way the mind works. All of it's different. difference in the bone structure, the difference in the way the mind works. All of it's different. So, Joe, is there any one scientist, a real scientist,

who will come on your show and tell you that there are more than two sexes? I don't know. I've never had someone offer that. I'm sure there's real scientists that are also woke. You know, that sort of... Like, there's real scientists that are super religious, right? There's real scientists that are fundamentalist Christians. Yeah, the creationists, but the creationists will say

they just want to separate what they believe from the science that they practice. But I'm wondering on this issue, if you will actually find a scientist, peer-reviewed scientist to come and sit here and say there's more than just male and female, that there's something else, a third or a fourth or a fifth or a hundredth. I think people will say that there's certainly a spectrum in the way the genders are expressed. Like there's very feminine men and very masculine women but you know i had to argue with a professor about this on the podcast once and it was the

most nonsense argument i've ever had he's like well what's the difference there is no male there is no female i go if you get a puppy and the puppy's got a penis but you wanted a girl puppy do you go hey man what the fuck's going on like what do you do and that that was where the rubber hit the road because like when you're talking about animals we we agree there's there's a difference and there's clearly there's something going on where a man identifies as a woman and he feels much better being a woman. And I think you should be 100% allowed to do that. And we should accept it and we should love you and we should treat you as

equal. And yeah, but that's not what we're talking about. That's not what we're talking about. And the other way around, if a woman feels like she needs to transit, that's not what we're talking about, but what we're talking,

because I think this conversation is going to be only people can you push the microphone up so it's only going to be about people who agree with one another um on either side so people who agree on that side will sit that side and they'll then they'll talk to the echo chamber and we'll have our own echo chamber and so on but if you wanted to start the conversation somewhere we might have to start talking about how many genders are there. And if all scientists agree, there are just two, and then we take it from there. And then you have all the gender traits. And then I think you can get, maybe I'm just being too naive, maybe too faithful, have too much faith in human beings. But if we start with what we know and what is, then we can negotiate the rest. My concern is that we're moving towards a genderless species that only reproduces through some sort of experiment.

that only reproduces through some sort of experiment. I really wonder, like, when you see the future of human beings, like, if science continues to move technology into, like, genetic technology into some crazy new direction, like, we could move to some sort of a genderless species a thousand years from now. This might be the first sort of expressions of that it's not it's not when you see aliens right i know this is a stupid thing to talk about but indulge me for a moment they're all genderless they have these big heads and these little tiny bodies and they're genderless if you compare us to primates like

chimpanzees or gorillas they're much more muscular and hairy and they have very clear genitals, especially chimps. We might be moving in that direction. This might be the first sort of first gasps of this that we might recognize that there's a real problem. We were talking about rape earlier. We were talking about sexual harassment of women and attacking of women. These are male versus female issues right maybe the solution to that permanently is to eliminate gender altogether and reproduce through some newfound method it sounds crazy i know it sounds crazy

but i wonder what this is i wonder you, there's many people that have been trying to study and figure out why we have this obsession with gender, why we have this obsession with what we're currently grasping now, and this gender fluidity notion that people can bounce back and forth between those genders. But we don't i think a majority of humanity don't there is a very small group of people who happen to be very loud yes who are obsessed with this and you said a thousand years from now i'm thinking what's going to happen a thousand days from now and in in the meantime if there's going to be all this suffering of young girls and young boys, if we could agree on some objective truth to which, you know, right now I was thinking when we were talking about objectivity and science about Helen Placroze, Peter Boghossian, I don't know if you've heard of them, James Lindsay. Peter Boghossian, I don't know if you've heard of them, James Lindsay.

They're trying to fight this ideology, critical race theory, critical justice. It goes by so many different names. One of the things that these critical justice theory people hold is there is no scientific truth. So there's no objectivity. Everything is subjective. So if you want to believe that there are a thousand genders, then there are a thousand genders. If you want to believe there is one, there is one. Who are you and who are we to judge?

And so one way of pushing back against those people is by refusing that claim, by saying there is indeed science, there is objective there are objective standards objective criteria and right now not thousand years from now but right now we just have two genders it's male or female totally accept that you can transition this way or the other but just as a given as a a biological, scientific, objective truth given, they're just two genders. Well, Brett Weinstein was on Clubhouse, and they were screaming at him, calling him a transphobe, because he won't recognize they, them.

Yeah, exactly. The pronouns. It's like it's not necessary. We have sufficient pronouns. We can just say she. Caitlyn Jenner is a she. Let's say that. Yeah.

Yeah. we can just say she she caitlyn jenner is a she let's say that yeah yeah so then what we're then doing is we are slowly because they demand and when i say they i'm not talking about the transgender community i'm just talking about the woke community in its entirety people who who believe in that ideology that everything is subjective is if we adopt their language, they see language as a tool. As a tool for them to get power and establish themselves as the powerful. And to force compliance. And the force compliance, and I think one of the ways of resisting that is by objecting to that and saying I'm just not going to use a pronoun for a singular person you know he she that's as far as I go they if there are multiple people we if there

are multiple people and whatever else that they they come I'll use the word equality to mean what it means and not sneak in equity to mean something else equality which i think of as equality of opportunity at least when we're talking in terms of justice that's what i'm thinking when they bring in the word equity they're talking about equality of outcomes yes which is a completely different agenda. But I mean, if we constantly stop them right there and say, first of all, before we carry on the conversation, let's see if we're talking about the same thing. What I've noticed in conversation with those people is they hate definitions. They just hate, they don't want to talk about the meaning of

words. They just want to impose what the word is supposed to mean on you like you were describing uh weinstein in the clubhouse scene where they're saying you know saying he should use they instead don't even go that far it's like what are we talking about and then they really then they despise you at least they despise me when i do that and i can always hide behind the fact that because english is not my first language i really just want to understand what you're saying right yeah you have a an out clause there yeah yeah and so do you though everyone has and has clothes. Right. But the thing is, they want to stop those things and immediately label you as an oppressor, as a bigot, as a this, as a that. You're a transphobe. You're homophobic.

You're racist. Whatever it is that they can shove at you to stop the conversation dead in its tracks and stop analyzing what you're actually saying yeah yeah and a lot of them don't want to debate so in many debate forums i've been asked to come and debate with the woke and i would say okay bring them on they won't come they just won't come well who would be representing the woke who's's like a... Well, like if you take the most famous of them, Ibram X. Kendi, Robin DiAngelo. Robin DiAngelo is the woman who wrote White Fragility. White Fragility, yeah.

So I'm happy to debate with her in a civilized way. I wouldn't be upset. I wouldn't scream and shout. I wouldn't be rude. But I will have to ask for what do words mean? Like what are we talking about right but you i'm not going to go into any debate without knowing what the proposition is what am i opposing or proposing yeah and that takes us to words and what they mean and that then creates i would say a very uncomfortable situation for them

it's i don't know if it's that simple i know what you're saying but i don't know if it's that simple I would say, a very uncomfortable situation for them. I don't know if it's that simple. I know what you're saying, but I don't know if it's that simple. I think there's an agreed upon, on at least the woke side, the rigid nature of the ideology you're supposed to subscribe to. They subscribe to it and then they surround themselves with all sorts of other people that agree with what they're saying.

And then they don't understand when everybody freaks out about how crazy their definitions are and they just call everybody racist or they call everybody homophobic or they just figure out some sort of a label to dismiss in its tracks. If you could have a conversation with those people without any labels or name calling,

that would be very fascinating. If you're, okay, you're not allowed to call someone a colonist. You're not allowed to call someone a racist. You're not allowed to do any of those things. Just explain through words what you mean. By colonists. Yeah, what do you mean by all these things that you're discussing?

Yeah. What are the definitions? And the context would be, it's okay for them to bring their cheerleaders, that's fine. But the audience has to be made up also of some people who are objective. Yeah, that's hard to describe.

I mean, how do you make them fill out a form? You gotta take a test, you know? No, I'm confident that most people would like. I think most people are actually not woke. Most people, I agree. Most people are not. But they're scared. Yes.

And they don't want to be seen as not compassionate so most people want to be compassionate most people want to be polite they want to be generous they want to be seen as reasonable right and so for so many and and and even more some of them actually start to believe when when they're accused of racism they kind of believe it right and when they're told you're privileged they look around and they think yeah i am and they feel bad about having that privilege but i think most people don't really agree with the thesis or the reasons that's the work people hand them as, you're a racist, therefore you should do X, Y, Z.

They don't agree with it. Most people, I think, that didn't grow up with it. I think the problem with this woke shit is the same problem with any religion that you grow up with. When you were talking about growing up and believing in the religion that had been taught to you like when you were a child when you were learning that and that's how you grew up you thought that's how the world worked yeah that is what happens when people go to college and they learn all this woke shit

they just this is that that's their religion. It becomes how they view the world. It becomes the, these definitions are very clearly defined by their peers. Everyone agrees to it. If you deviate, there's punishments. There's social punishments. You're chastised. You're ostracised from the community and you don't want that so by completely it's like a cult yeah it's it's like a lot of crazy belief systems

yeah there's a lot of crazy belief systems that people join and they agree to and when you agree and they know you're agreeing they can guarantee guarantee that you're going to accept a certain pattern of behavior. And then they can predict what you're thinking and doing, and they know where you're going. It's easy. They got you boxed in. You're a fundamentalist Christian, so you believe X. You're a Mormon, so you believe Y. It's no different with wokeness.

With wokeness, yeah. It's become a religion. Yeah, and that's the problem. It's no different with wokeness. With wokeness, yeah. It's become a religion. Yeah. And that's the problem. The problem is a lot of people are going to learn. It's no less preposterous than any really crazy religion. And no less accepted. And the problem, the difference is it's actually being taught in schools.

Yeah. That's the difference. And I think you and i are older yes and we are not involved in the system as children that is developing these kids that are going to grow up and think that this is the way to live and this is no different than someone who grows up in a perpetual religious environment where the same things are being taught to the generation after generation like you were talking about as you grew up yeah that you're you were supposed to comply yes and you were supposed to and even if you don't agree with it you'll learn to agree with it you'll learn to comply

i think that same shit is happening right now with wokeness that is scary it is scary yeah well i was listening to that clubhouse conversation with Brett Weinstein that everybody's freaking out about. I was like, holy shit. Yeah. This is how young kids are treating this guy. This is how young kids, they think this is the right way to communicate with people, that this is normal stuff. And they are getting to teacher training colleges and teachers. Yes. So if you indoctrinate the teacher trainers and then let them lose into the schools and they train,

it's pretty scary stuff. It is scary. What's scary is that this has made its way into United States government policy in terms of how children are being with sports and schools yeah this is the biden administration has accepted this because they they licked their finger they saw where the wind's blowing and they go yeah the woke want this and so they think that this is the vast majority of the population but most people who are grown up don't have jobs and yeah they don't

believe that they don't believe that. They don't think that's fair. But a lot of woke people do, and a lot more people than I think we believe. And I think it is just like you were talking about, fill in the blank, whatever fundamentalist religion. Religion, yeah. That's what it is. Yeah, the blasphemy. So if you blaspheme, exactly, if you stray away from the orthodoxy you get punished exactly

yeah exactly oh gosh i wanted us to end on a happy note but don't you think that's probably the case no i think from what i have seen so i'm talking about adults uh whom i have to deal with, they do come across as believers. They don't come across as arguing a point, exactly, as thinkers. They come across as believers. They get upset. Yeah. And that's why they call people labels. Yes.

You know, the word blasphemy, you're a blasphemer. That's supposed, if you're a believing Muslim and I called you a blasphemy you're a blasphemer that's supposed if you're a if you're a believing muslim and i called you a blasphemer you would be beyond hurt same as christian because it's you know there's a capital punishment on that by the way so it's you've done something awful and sinful and horrible and that's how they react to being called out that's also why they want to cancel people it's their version of how you would treat an apostate yeah their version have you you would treat someone who's a blasphemer I picked up Candy's book and started reading through it and you know my first reaction to it is this is this this stuff is published is weird which which book um the one um

gosh what is it called the the latest one whose book who's i abram x candy oh i don't know the title and so it's black uh how to be an anti-racist how to be an anti-racist yeah and so when you you go through the introduction you go to chapter one it says definition it has the word racist and then it uses the word racist in a sentence to define racist and then how to be anti-racist so the word is in bold letters and the same word is used to define what it's supposed to be defining. You couldn't get away with this in, what, sixth grade, seventh grade? You'd be told that's not how it works. The word that you are defining is in bold,

and then you use other words to explain what it means. So we are on that level where even it's almost like a prayer book and there's a little bit of autobiography here and a bit of scholarship there but not scholarship the way i recognize scholarship none of it is there i mean i wrote an autobiography but autobiography was an autobiography. This is my story. It's as subjective as it gets. I'm not writing a book for, I'm not writing a manual for how people should look at Somalia or Holland or anywhere I've been or come to any way of thinking.

This is just a story of who I am and how I came to be where I am. But the book he's writing is like a manual for all of us on how to think about race, racism, non-racist, anti-racist. And the whole thing, it's just weird. There was years ago where people were recognizing this trend in college

and everyone was saying, oh, just relax. It's a few people in some liberal arts schools. It's not that big a deal. But now they're seeing that this is moving into the tech space. This is moving into government now. This is affecting policy. The chickens are coming home to roost. It's actually becoming something that, like when you saw Evergreen College, what happened with Brett Weinstein up there.

And people were like, why are you focusing on this? Why is this a big deal? I'm like, these people are going to leave that college, and they're going to get jobs. They're going to enter the workforce, and they believe they're right. And they are religious practitioners yes of woke yes yes and they're in nuclear plants and they're in all sorts of spaces where someone was telling me last night it took him he's in the aerospace space and he said it took him eight months to find someone to hire because HR insists that he finds someone from a diverse group. They're all kidding themselves because they all know that teeny tiny group of engineers who do that sort of work are not diverse.

So basically he was forced to find someone who doesn't exist for eight months. It's not a meritocracy. But if we carry on doing that, this guy was patient for eight months. And the company really wanted to go with it and again i think if you want a diversification of through gender race put your money where your mouth is invest in it see to it that a generation from now american boardrooms look different because you invested money and time and effort in that but to come around in 2021 and say give me me diversity like that, you're not going to get it. Be honest about it. But you can't because you're saying the people who graduated from colleges

like Evergreen are now in the workforce and they want diversity now because for them it's an article of faith. It's not about improving society. Well, it's an article of faith it's not about improving society well it's also why they're so adamant about adherence to their policies and rules it's the same way very religious people are they they'll scream at you and yell at you and force violence on you because they want you to comply right Right. They can't debate it. It's not logical. What they're saying is not logical. It doesn't make sense.

So they have to scream at you. They have to try to chastise you. They try to have to figure out how to box you into some horrible definition so that you'll comply. It's about power. And that's what this is. It is about power. it's about power and that's what this is it is about power and i think there's only one way to to to stop it because ideally what we want is to stop it and that is to make sure that they don't get anywhere near power and that we are more powerful by speaking out, explaining, making things explicit,

especially by mocking them. One thing that I find effective is to show them how ridiculous they are and how ridiculous they come across. And in the beginning, honestly, people around me and myself, we just laughed at this stuff. You hear yet another story about microaggressions and safe spaces and you name it it's it is now a whole vocabulary of what they say what they do what they want and how they want to get to power and we used to mock them that shit's real now now it's real. Yeah.

But with all the, you know, using all the means, peaceful means, not vile. I don't believe in violence. All the useful means that we use, I think mocking them. Humor has to come back. They have to be made fun of. Okay. I'll talk to my people. Thank you, Ayaan.

That was a really very fun and interesting conversation and very enlightening thank you joe thank you so much for having me and thank you for telling everyone your story because it's it's pretty wild and you're a brave human being i appreciate you thank you thank you so much for having me my pleasure yeah and uh your book is pray it's out now p-r-e-y it's out now yes pray do you have an audio version of as well yes there's an audio version you read it And your book is Prey. It's out now. P-R-E-Y. It's out now. Yes. Prey. Do you have an audio version of it as well? Yes, there's an audio version. Do you read it?

I'm reading it. Okay. Excellent. So Prey, I'm reading it. P-R-E-Y. And I have a podcast. You are a great example. So I've started podcasting as well.

And I have a website. What is your podcast called? It's Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Okay. Yeah. And called? It's Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Okay. Yeah, and the website is also Ayaan Hirsi Ali. All right. Thank you very much. Thank you very much.

Bye for now.