The Megyn Kelly Show - Ayaan Hirsi Ali on Islamic Terrorism, Critical Race Theory and America | Ep. 26

Episode Date: November 18, 2020

Megyn Kelly is joined by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, research fellow at the Hoover Institution and Founder of the AHA Foundation, to talk about Islamic terrorism and recent attacks in France, the way the "woke" left and Islamic extremists intersect and overlap, her life story and journey to America, Critical Race Theory, Black Lives Matter, the MeToo movement, schools and colleges and more.Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms:Twitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShowFind out more information at:https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow

Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations. Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly and welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show. Today, we've got Ayaan Hirsi Ali. I first had her on The Kelly File years ago. This woman has, she gives new definition to the word bravery. She has had a fatwa put on her, a death order, death threat by Al Qaeda. She has fought a battle to protect women who are being subjected to the worst of radical Islam. She gets attacked rhetorically and threatened physically, regularly, but doesn't silence herself. I think I got problems because NBC was mean to me. Wrong,

wrong. Ayaan Hirsi Ali has really been fighting battles and she's been an inspiration to me. And now she's taking on wokeism, among other things. And she'll be here to tell us about it all. She's a, she's a research fellow at the Hoover institution, and she's the founder of the Ayaan Hirsi Ali Foundation, the AHA Foundation, which, which tries to help women as well. She's also got a new book coming out in February called Prey, P-R-E-Y. And if you want to know more about it, you can follow her on Twitter at Ayaan, A, A-Y-A-N for updates. She's fascinating. Before we get to her, though, listen, we're gearing up for the holidays. I haven't done any of my Christmas shopping.

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floored all of us. Very open about your past, about why you feel the way you do, about Islamists, radical Islam, and very brave because unlike these, you know, people who feel they've been placed in danger by Trump's tweets, right, because he's called them a name or they've come after him or he's come after them, you actually have had a death threat put on you and you've been laboring under it for years and years. We'll get to that in a second. Let me just start, Ayaan, with Trump, because he's in the news dominating it as always. And I'm wondering what you think about his challenges right now to the electoral results. I would say I first developed an interest for Donald Trump back in 2015 when he became the nominee for the Republican Party.

And back then, what I was reading about him was that we're going to have the next Hitler. And I remember reading about him, listening to his interviews, listening to his rallies, and thinking, hmm, you know, any self-respecting despot will need some measure of impulse control. And I think that Donald Trump lacks that. To some people, Donald Trump is the devil. And to others, he is just the perfect person at the perfect time to challenge Washington, D.C. I think it is regrettable that he's not conceding the election.

But again, he won the election in 2016, and the media and the Democrats refused to concede and subjected him to these fictions of Russia collusion, relentless impeachment, and criticism. So in a way, I would say it is almost a tit for tat what's happening now, but it's not good for our country. It's not, it would be great if Donald Trump were to say, look, here's my legacy. Look at all the things that I've achieved. Look at the turnout of 2020. So many people who were never interested in politics actually came out to vote and in a democracy, that's a good thing. Look at his economic achievements. You know, take all that and then leave gracefully. But I'm afraid we are in a place today in our democracy that the loser just refuses to go. And that's not a good thing. Well, and it's, you know, the electoral challenge will play out. We'll see what happens in these court proceedings. I know you've been a supporter

of his. You've defended him from time to time as some of those things you just ticked off happened. And our faith in systems has collectively been eroded over the Trump presidency. Yes, in part because of his rhetoric and the things he says and does, but also in large part because they deserved it. They behaved in a way, things like the media, big tech, even corporate America in a way that justified our change of feelings about them, right? Right. I mean, I think there are lots of people, and I listen and listen carefully and intently,

who say our institutions and everything has been eroded since Donald Trump came along. I don't think they've been eroded. I think they've been eroded. I think they've been tested. The institutions of checks and balances have been tested. Donald Trump is going to go. You know that and I do. But we will still have our system and our institutions and the outcome of this election actually suggests how strong these institutions are and again I just keep repeating what a genius those founding fathers were. You get an election outcome like this one and it says on the one hand you know this president who's in your face who doesn't act presidential with this you know his administration and the relentless chaos you can say okay the voters have said we don't want that anymore but they also don't want with this administration and the relentless chaos,

you can say, okay, the voters have said, we don't want that anymore. But they also don't want this crazy hard left agenda of adding two states to the union and abolishing the filibuster and packing the courts and this crazy, crazy stuff that they say, like defund the police, defund ISIL. So I think there's a check and our system allows for that. And so I think it's being tested and it's withstanding the test.

I feel like you're the perfect person to talk to in today's day and age, because as we're going to get into, you've already lived in a society that punishes free expression, or anyone who deviates from accepted thought, right, in the name of something more important, a higher value. And you, at a very young age, stood up to it and said, No. And now you wind up in the United States, where it's happening again, in a different way, you've been the one calling attention to what's happening in our country and how it's disturbingly similar to some of the battles you've already fought against radical Islam. I want to just get the listeners up to speed on your background,

what we're talking about. You were born in Somalia. You were raised an Islamist. Taught what about Jewish people? About the infidel in general, Jewish people in particular. So I actually wasn't raised an Islamist, but I was attracted to Islamism as a teenager when members of the Muslim Brotherhood, they set up shop in Nairobi where I was growing up at that time and I was in school and I found their message compelling and I voluntarily joined them.

And some of the things I learned was that, you know, as a Muslim, as a true Muslim, as opposed to fake Muslims, you should hate the infidel with everything in you, and the Jews in particular, because they control the world. And so I was introduced to a lexicon of anti-Semitism that I embraced. But then later on, a decade later, when I was in the Netherlands, and I actually found out that things don't work that way, I came to understand the true story and rejected it. They attempted prior to that point to imprint upon you a hatred that was in the name of religion, right?

Yeah, my religion. Right, and your religion. And so, wait, can you just explain on that? So you weren't raised in Islam. So when you were in your family of origin, before you joined the Muslim Brotherhood or started talking to them, what's the distinction between how you were raised in that phase? We identified as Muslim. We were very passive about it.

We, you know, sometimes we prayed and we fasted during the month of Ramadan. But it was more of a religious, what we describe in America as being religious, as worshipping God. It wasn't political. My mother didn't have, my father was away most of the time, but my mother didn't have any kind of political agenda. She didn't use Islam as a tool, neither did my neighbors and other members of my community. But what made the Muslim Brotherhood very different and the Islam that they were perpetuating was Islam is political. You can't separate it from religion. And if you say, I'm only going to be religious, then you're a fake Muslim. That's what they would call us. So to be a true Muslim, you had to embrace the political agenda of jihad,

of subjugating women, of covering yourself from head to toe, of preparing yourself for a life after death. And that was an indoctrination in the sense that if you asked questions, you were punished. So you've been very open about, sadly, having been forced to undergo genital mutilation when you were only five years old. And that, I understand, was your grandmother's decision? It was my grandmother's decision. She did say it was an Islamic requirement, but I want to remind listeners that my grandmother actually couldn't read all right. So Islam came to her not through her own curiosity, but because she was simply born into a Muslim family. Now, later on, when I started doing some research to see if there's a link between female genital mutilation and Islam, I found one.

I found some hadiths or supposedly comments, decrees made by the Prophet, and that there are indeed many Muslim countries. In fact, it is most Muslim countries that practice this terrible ritual, and they justify it in the name of Islam. But female genital mutilation also predated Islam. So it's a yes and no, and that is what makes it very hard to fight it because when you say it's done in the name of religion, the people who are attached to the religion will say it's not, but it carries on anyway. And so this is not only the most radical factions of Islam.

This is, you know, even a just religious version of Islam, as you describe your family. It's not uncommon at all to force a young girl to undergo this barbarity. Absolutely. It's done in the name of religion. It's done in the name of custom and ritual. And it's still ongoing. 150 million, as far as the last time I saw accounts, according to the United Nations and World Health Organization, have seen their genitals cut. What is the goal of it? What are they hoping to accomplish with that? A number of things. Number one, they obviously want to limit what they call the libido of the woman, the female, so that when you develop from being a little girl to a teenager,

you are less inclined to want to have sex with boys. So that's number one. And number two, it is on the wedding night, you're supposed to be a virgin until you get married. And for, you know, in countries like Somalia, Egypt, Sudan, it's the only test they have to confirm that you haven't been having sex before marriage. And so that those are the two practical reasons that are given for inflicting this on girls and women. You were five years old at the time. It's hard to believe that's a baby. That's basically a babe. Do you remember it, Ayaan? Was there any attempt to anesthetize you or save you from the pain of it? No. Where we lived, and back then I was in Somalia, we didn't have anesthesia.

I think they do it to children as young as five because probably they're easier to hold down than a flailing 16-year-old. But there are also some cases where teenagers are subjected to it. I've written in great detail about this in my book, Infidel, my autobiography. And I did it because I think I was, I felt inspired by people who had, there's this woman called Waris Diria, who is a model. She's also originally from Somalia. And we understood that if you don't tell these stories, if you don't talk about it, then the practice never stops.

So in order to urge change, you have to tell your story. Well, I also think it just puts into perspective some of your relationship with a religion and some of its practices that you grew to have a very different view of. And I always get mad when people try to silence you because they, nine times out of 10, it's not a religious person at all, have a problem with something you're saying about Islam. And it's like, why don't you take a take a walk in Ayaan's shoes? And then then you ask yourself whether you feel you have a right to offer some criticisms of the religion with which you were raised. Well, we'll get to that one second. Let me ask you. So then you get a little older and your parents tried to arrange a marriage for you to a, to a distant cousin. And you wrote an infidel. You, you resolved, no, I'm not doing this. And you wrote, I did not want

the hell of never feeling love of never choosing mate, of spending my life with a man who controlled my every freedom, a man who could take my body without permission at any time. So how did you get from the point of joining the Muslim Brotherhood, being with them, to this person who can see so clearly what an alternative life might look like. So with the Muslim Brotherhood, I think what was in the gratification I got from joining them was the gratification you would get from, you know, belonging to a group and this feeling that you're all as a group engaged in a purposeful life. But in reality, when I wasn't immersed in the group and the ideology of the group, and I was at home and I watched my mother and all the other women fuck around me, I felt, gosh, this is just, it is suffering. My mother gave her life to my father

and she could do nothing because they denied her education. She couldn't find a job. She had no control over her circumstances. And I felt, and I saw it and I thought, I don't want that. And I was conflicted. For a long time, I was in a deep state of cognitive dissonance because I wanted to be a really good Muslim, but I couldn't be because I didn't want these things happening to me and I wasn't allowed to ask questions. And I think in my individual life experience, it just erupted in this rebellion against it all. And of course, the rebellion would dramatically change your life, your future, would bring you here, would bring you to me, would bring you to us.

Thank God. Thank somebody. Thank God. Thank somebody. Thank you. And Megan, you said that people object to what I say in my public writings. There are two sets of people who do that. One set is what the people we now call woke here in America, and we have different names for them in Europe, you know, multiculturalists, moral relativists. And the other set are the Muslims who feel offended because they feel that it's their religion that I am tainting and that it's the tribal effect of you shouldn't be talking

about the stuff that's on the inside that's bad. You shouldn't be talking to strangers about it. So those are the two groups who don't like what I say, but they also don't like what you say. That's right. And I know you've made a point of saying, I don't hate Muslims. What I hate is the submission of free will. And that's what you felt. That's what got you out of there. I know I read in your book, you wrote, I had imagination on my side. And I realized that the thrill of drinking wine and wearing pants, which you clearly were not allowed to do before, had nothing on reading the history of ideas, the history of ideas. And that's what you're engaged in now, the idea. You're in the business of ideas at the Hoover Institute and Stanford and a research fellow out there and studying and writing and thinking for a living. But the root there was your troubles were not over. You fled to the Netherlands. You became a congresswoman, which is amazing and a story in and of itself. And then you hooked

up with Theo van Gogh, a filmmaker, um, who, who you helped make a movie called submission back to that, that statement. I detest the submission of free will. So he makes this movie and it's critical of Islam. He'd been critical of religion in general, including Islam in this movie. And he, there was a death threat issued on him and you, but he didn't think it was real, right? He didn't get protection. And then what happened? I think he thought it was real, but he said that he thought that if the mayor of Amsterdam had provided him with protection, that would be just pure incompetence. He was actually, he had plans to move with his then wife, I believe, or his partner to move to the United States. He had come to explore life in America. And then this fanatic, Muhammad Biyeri, Islamic fanatic, you know, followed him for a number of days.

And I think it wasn't just him. I think there was a group of people, but there's only one person who went to jail for it. And Mohamed Bieri, one morning, Tuesday morning, November the 2nd, followed him on his bicycle. Theo used to go to work every single morning from his house to his office, same, you know, followed the same route. And this guy followed him, shot him. Theo fell off his bicycle. He followed him to the other side of, and ran to the other side of the street. This guy followed him, shot him again, stabbed him, beheaded him, and then left two notes, a short poem encouraging other Muslims to do the exact same thing

so that they could be rewarded with a good place in heaven. On a very long, rambling note, for me, that was pretty much a fatwa of, here, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, here are all the things that you've done wrong against Islam, and here's the death penalty. This is the penalty for it. I'll never forget that. 2nd of November 2004. Oh my God.

Fiyo had to pay for. And what did Fiyo do? He made a film called Submission where he was trying to draw attention to the subjugation of women that is justified in the name of the religion of Islam. We had taken verses from the Quran, and we had shown what in many Muslim countries is the law, women being stoned, being forced into marriage, when they suffer incest. There was one case where a young

woman is raped by her uncle, but then the family, instead of denouncing the uncle, they denounce her. And this to this day continues to happen to large numbers of women. And because he did that, Theo van Gogh was murdered. But on top of that, after the murder, a number of elites in the Dutch society reacted by condemning him, almost blaming him for the fact that he's murdered. Because had he not provoked them, right, he would still be alive. And that was then a lesson for others not to do or not to act the way Theo van Gogh acted. And that's the point. That's the point, yeah.

16 years later, look at what's happening in France, in Germany, in Austria, appeasing them and trying not to provoke radical ideologues only emboldens them. More with Ayaan in one second. But first, I shared a hot story a couple of weeks ago and it nearly crashed the Scoramaster website. Doug said to me, is that true? Only emboldens them. no idea how to get it. Don't you wish you had known about this before you applied for the last loan you got? Scoremaster credit scientists discovered an algorithm that super boosts credit scores, not just a few points, but 97 points fast. Imagine that almost a hundred points on top of your existing credit score. This is huge. If you're refinancing your home, if you're

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up to the presidential election. And I just thought, okay, perhaps people are focused on something else. But this is still an issue for the United States. You know, the threat of radical Islam, the possibility of domestic terrorist attacks, which we were, we were experiencing fairly regularly, not too long ago. And so folks haven't been paying attention. There was one on October 16th where a French teacher who had showed two cartoons of Muhammad in a lesson about free speech was beheaded. He was beheaded with a knife on his walk home by an 18 year old Chechen who, um, was yelling Alu Akbar. And then on October 29th, there were church stabbings in Nice, France, where a terrorist entered a cathedral and stabbed three people to death. Um, and like one right

after the other ion and France has been going through it in general with a community of Islamists who have no wish to assimilate, none, to French culture. I mean, what are your thoughts on what we're seeing over there? Well, what we are seeing is what I've been writing about and speaking about and trying to tell not just Dutch government and Dutch society, but all European, all Western societies. I've crisscrossed Europe, Australia, here in the United States of America. I would say there are these three circles of Muslims. There is that inner circle of fanatics who are actually carrying out the attacks. And then there is a circle around them that aids and abets, that helps them with their plotting, that does all the indoctrination. They claim free speech.

They make claims to freedom of association. They make claims to freedom of religion. But they use these freedoms to erode those very same freedoms from the inside. And then there is a wider community that is not violent. They're Muslim, they're not violent, but they also denounce the values of the countries that they have chosen to come and live in. And so with that, and I think that's when the French president talks about Islamist separatism and parallel societies, that's what he's referring to, that there is a large community within French society, and it's in the millions now, who are physically in France, but virtually in terms of their values and their conduct and their loyalty to the nation, or they're actually in their own countries of origin,

or they're obeying Sharia law, Islamic law. And it used to be a somewhat small problem, and it got a little bit bigger. And right around 2001, when we had the attacks here in New York and Washington, D.C., I think a lot of people in Europe became aware of it and were saying, let's do something about it. But the moral relativists, the politically correct forces prevailed, and they said, we are going to do nothing about it because to impose, say, French values on Muslim residents is to be racist. It's to be xenophobic. It is colonialist. Let them live the way they want to and let them raise the children who are born in France and in other parts of Europe with the norms and values that are alien

to those countries and that are Islamist. And now we're paying the price. Yeah, because Macron is sounding a very different note now. I know. I mean, if he had said this stuff, if the French had said this stuff 20 years ago, it all would have been denounced as bigotry. But now he's saying that, for example, the teacher who was beheaded, he said he became the face of our will to shatter terrorists, to do away with Islamists, to live like a community of free citizens. And then after the three people were stabbed in the church, he said he promised a law on Islamist separatism. He said, we need to restrict the homeschooling of Muslims. We need to demand that

these Islamic groups sign a secular charter. And there's a real question now about how far France and other countries should go in demanding assimilation for foreign nationals or people seeking to emigrate who claim they want to naturalize to a new country, but aren't willing to let go of any of the traditions or ways of living that are really foreign to a place like France, for example? Absolutely. I think now the hard reality has set in, and this has now to do with it's the scale of the problem. Again, like I said, it used to be that government officials were able to ignore or pretend that the problem didn't exist. But now a country like France is waking up to the reality because of the scale of the problem, that they can't ignore it any longer, that to wait for another generation of young

French people to be indoctrinated into radical Islam is political, cultural, it's suicide. They know that, so he has to do something about it. You also have in Europe extremists, very far-right groups that are saying to the populations, these establishment officials, they can't solve the problem. We can. And so France is torn between, on the one hand, they have got to really do something about the problem, that is devote resources to it, and or be overtaken by the far right. How do we deal with it? I think we have to give, first of all, we have to revisit such values as citizenship,

the nation state, what does that mean? What are our loyalties to one another in the public sphere? How can we live with one another? And then who prevails? Is it French norms or Islamist norms? And those who say Islamist norms, I think they should be given the choice to either change their minds and adapt or leave the country. When you come into France, you land at the airport, you do that drive down into Paris, you pass through, it looks like low income housing, you know, before you get to the city center, and it is mostly Muslim, and it is a community unto itself. Right. And I think about this desire, this newfound sort of pronouncement by Macron to try to force assimilation.

And I just wonder whether he can. It year, so many countries have been forced to lockdown. Millions of citizens have been told they cannot go out of their houses under certain conditions. They can only associate under certain conditions. It can be done. It's just that there never has been a political will to do it. France has a history of assimilating large swathes of people in Africa, teaching them French and introducing them to modernity. And so has Britain and so has Spain. And Portugal has done the same thing. It can be done, but there has never been a political will to do it because the threat wasn't just as palpable as it is today.

And it is palpable in France. Where would you put the risk in America today for, I don't know, I mean, I don't think we've had anything quite as drastic as the French problem, where it just seems like a second society that's large and growing has emerged. But we certainly have had a problem here with Islamic terror, although it's been relatively quiet over the past few years. Why do you think that is? And where do you think we are? Again, I think so a number of things. We've had it here in the United States. We have communities of radical Muslims here in the United States that cocoon themselves and their children from the rest of society.

But being such a large country right now, I think a lot of it is not visible. We've also had to fight these wars in Afghanistan, in Iraq, we've had to fight ISIS. And I think a lot of the work that was invested in developing intelligence tools and intelligence capabilities so that we know who is about to, you know, plot the next terrorist attack. We've learned a lot. We've had a lot of terrorist attacks.

I don't think the problem is over. I think the Islamists we have in the United States are a touch more sophisticated than the ones in Europe. And right now, the Muslim Brotherhood and other organized Islamists are playing along, trying to work their way through the establishment and are quiet for the moment. But I would not be so complacent as to say this is a European problem and we have no problem in America. That would be really, really naive. Yeah, we shouldn't be heaving a sigh of relief right now. I mean, you know, as we get farther and farther from 9-11, I was talking about this with Glenn Greenwald, we start to, the scales of justice, if you will, start to balance more in favor of

civil liberties and less in favor of government power to spy on us and do whatever's necessary to keep the country safe. And while that seems appropriate, it's also slightly scary because we're not safe. And it's the United States of America, people always want to get us. And this is a problem. It's a growing problem worldwide as, as what we've been talking about evidences. Yeah. And it just, it makes me feel a little, not nervous, but just on edge. What makes me a little nervous is during the Trump administration, we focused so much more on the ins and outs of the petty politics of Washington, D.C., and that the intelligence community also became politicized. The DOJ became politicized.

Now, that is the kind of distraction that groups like Al-Qaeda, the remnants of al-Qaeda and the remnants of ISIS could exploit. Yeah. And, you know, it's Trump. He needed to pull down the veil of politics on these guys. You know, I mean, James Comey and others at the FBI clearly were behaving in a political manner. And yet the agency has been damaged. I mean, it's almost like, did they damage themselves? Did he damage them? I think they damaged themselves and he called attention to it. Now we need to rebuild though. I'm not quite sure what they're doing to rehabilitate those problems. You know, it's, I don't know how much soul searching there's been or, you know, will be. Will be. Yeah. I like the outcome of this election because I think it forces them to see

that the nation is not politicized. The nation is at the center, center right or center left, but really at the center. And so this whole hyping up of differences that in my view are trivial is, they might have to go back and sit around their desk and say,

let's get serious about the serious stuff right that would be nice instead of focusing on tweets that would be one advantage to to the end of this living yeah i'm going to do something else right we'll be back to ion in one second we're going to take up wokeism black lives matter and she's got some strong thoughts on the me too movement and where it is today. So don't miss that. But first, let's talk about Black Rifle Coffee. The CEO of this company and its founder, Evan Hafer, started the company over 20 years ago. He was in the U.S. Army as an infantryman, special forces soldier, and a CIA contractor. And the man was tired. He was tired and he needed a

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as well as 20% off your first month of the coffee club. Okay. Back to ion in one second, but first we want to bring you this feature that we call sound up. Uh, this is basically some key sound, a key soundbite that, uh, we really think you should hear. So today it's about Bill Maher, HBO's Bill Maher. It's funny, he and I have, he's attacked me, I've attacked him, but I have like a love-hate situation going on there because I love some of the stuff he says so much and I admire his bravery and standing up to the wokesters and I don't know, just folks on his side of the aisle. But then he says something really offensive about Republicans writ large and I get angry again. But anyway, he hit the nail on

the head on Friday night, closing out his show with a monologue about the failures of the down ballot Democrats in this election that we just saw. Take a listen to it, but also listen for how his audience of liberals reacts. Liberals can either write off half the country as irredeemable or they can ask, what is it about a D next to a candidate's name that makes it so toxic? Let's ask Ruben Gallego. He's a congressman from Arizona. He was asked how his Democrats could do a better job connecting to Latinos. He said, first, start by not using the term Latinx, which the vast majority of Latinos have never heard of, and when they do, don't like it.

Who likes it? Pandering white politicians who mistake Twitter for real people. And don't get it, that Latinx is like fetch. You can try to make it happen, but it's never gonna. It's so true. I hate that word, Latinx, and also thunder will not fetch,

so I really don't know all fronts. So after years of all this nonsense during the Trump era, the cancellations of anyone who doesn't perfectly subscribe, you know, to what the far left says you have to do to be a good person, we've seen the results. Democrats lost seats in the House. They thought they were going to gain them. They're unlikely to take the Senate. That appears like a futile effort, even as Biden may have squeaked out a victory.

Listen to this. Democrats already lost seats for going after what Brett Kavanaugh did in high school. Common sense. Last year, I read about how NBC held an emergency meeting to determine if Mario Lopez should be fired from his job at Access Hollywood. I thought, holy shit, did he sexually assault somebody? No. He went on a podcast, and when the host brought up the trend of liberal parents letting toddlers pick their gender identity, he said, my God, if you're three years old and you're saying you think you're a boy or a girl, I just think it's dangerous as a parent to make that determination.

Cue the groveling apology, followed by America saying, yeah, I think Mario's right. Maybe kids shouldn't make big life decisions while you still need to make choo-choo noises to get the food in their mouth. The audience really didn't know what to do in response to all this. But of course, he's totally right. Everyone knows this. Every sane person knows this. At the end of the monologue, he decided to turn his attention to his own side. Listen. Democrats kept saying in the campaign, you can't possibly think Trump is preferable to what we're selling. And many voters keep saying, yes, we can. In fact, our primary reason voting for him is to create a bulwark against you

because your side thinks silence is violence and looting is not. Because you're the party of chasing speakers off college campuses and making everyone walk on eggshells and replacing let's not see color with let's see it always and everywhere. Formerly the position of the Ku Klux Klan. It would be so easy to win elections if we would just drop this shit. Well, so good. Some of his monologues are just so killer. They're brilliant. He did one, I think it was on Roxanna Arquette, who is tweeting out how hard it is

to be a white woman of privilege and like how she was just feeling so guilty and awful that she was a white woman of privilege. And he did this great piece going, yes, let's never forget who the real victims are. You think it's hard to be a black man in America? Try being a guilty, privileged white woman. He's got the gift of just finding the right seam in society. And he certainly did there. And

that, members of our audience, was what we call Sound Up. Back to Ayaan. You wrote an article recently, I think it was in the Wall Street Journal, talking about what we're seeing right now in the United States and equating, not exactly equating radical Islam with wokeism, but seeing some parallels between the way you grew up and the lessons you were taught and what's now happening in the country that you now live in. And sort of pointing out that these wokesters, they're dangerous. They're dangerous. And they're putting freedom of expression under increasing pressure that is deeply problematic. Why? How do you see the similarities?

Oh, my goodness. And I, you know, please post that Wall Street Journal article, if you will. So one set of similarities is sort of the absolutism. It's only their truth that counts. No one else is allowed to ask any questions or criticize. Another set of similarity is the hatred. First of all, the dividing of a society into groups. Muslims say believers and unbelievers on the work have us all divided into racial groups, gender groups, whatever they come up with the next day. There's this more dynamic every day you see a new group and you think, oh. A third set of similarities would be the hatred for America and hatred for Israel and the Jews. They need to hate someone else in order to keep their groups, their people together. In that sense, they're tribal, tribalistic, or whatever you call it.

But they also hate science and objectivity. So now we are being told by the woke that things like, you know, mathematics is racist, physics is racist, science is racist, two plus two is five. This type of thing is, first of all, Megan, you think, who on earth believes in these absurdities? And then you see the people who are cancelled. You look at what this movement called Black Lives Matter is saying and doing.

And then you think, yeah, this is really, this is something that could break up our society. Black lives do not matter to the Black Lives Movement, because if it did, they would not say defund the police. When you look at every poll, ordinary, average Black Americans will say they want their police. And you want to lift people out of poverty. I would say it's not just racism that causes that. It's a complex set of things that do that. But then when you say let's invest in education and the things that really matter, social capital, they say, well, that's whiteness. Right. You had a line that said Black Lives Matter, that you said they're hardcore Marxists. And you said their political agenda is not to lift poor black people out of poverty. It is to advance a radical Marxist agenda that tolerates no criticism whatsoever. And this is one of my problems with capital BLM, right?

Not the lowercase concept of Black Lives Mattering. It's the group BLM, which is, it doesn't seem devoted to actually saving Black lives at all. If they were devoted to that, they'd be focused on what's happening to the children in cities like Chicago, Detroit, Baltimore, and elsewhere. They would be supporting charter schools, but then that's not, they're bringing down statues that no one has ever heard of. And when you say what are the parallels between Islamists and Waukees, they hate statues. They're iconoclasts.

They hate history. They hate America. They talk about social justice, but it's only their understanding of social justice that we are supposed to accept. And they really are about indoctrinating people and closing the minds of people. And if you don't do as they say, you're a target. And in that sense, yes, there are parallels. The only thing is that the Islamist movement is coming from outside.

The woke movement is homegrown. Homegrown, you know, first inspired by these French so-called idiot thinkers, and then it started to expand here in America. And names like Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi and, you know, these gurus of wokeism, they now have platforms and they've infiltrated the Democratic Party, they've infiltrated governments. One of the things that I think Donald Trump should be praised for is when he said he was going to make sure that CRT, that is critical race theory, that is taught within the federal government agencies that he was going to nix it.

I wonder what Biden and Harris will do when they start to take their time. Well, he's already said he's bringing it back. He's already promised. That's going to be one of his first executive orders. This is where we have you and I and others have to really work hard at trying to have people like Biden and Harris see that this is not anti-racism, that CRT is actually racist. Explain that. Why? The system we have, Megan, says that we are all individual human beings and it's our individual humanity that makes us whole. Yes, we have our differences and we have to respect that kind of diversity,

but first and foremost, as an individual, you are a human being. CRT doesn't see you first and foremost as a human being. It sees you as a member of a collective and it's your skin color, right? Your skin color that matters more than anything else. And all these collectives, whether they divide us along racial, gender, or other distinctions, they see our relationship only as one of power. And that power is zero sum. So the white male is at the top of a pyramid that they've established.

He is the oppressor. And then there's the white female oppressed by the white male. And then the white female is oppressing the black male. And on and on it goes. And none of us can ever get to a happy place where there's harmony unless you take power and privilege away from some groups only because of their skin color and their gender and give it to others. This is just insane.

It's racist. It's collectivist. It's sexist. It's destructive. And I think it's our job to understand what it is and to try and be able to communicate toaggressions that white people may have toward black people without even being aware of them to inherent bias they may these things and lead to better race relations. And what they're really trying to do with these lessons is to even out, try to even out an unequal scale in which Black people were on the wrong end. And they're just trying to get it a little bit more even, not to make one race above another. That is really an exercise in sticking your head in the sand. It's an exercise in complacency. It's an exercise in saying, okay, this problem is too complex for me. I'm not going to get, I'll pretend it will just go away and it will not go away. If we accept, you know, we have a value system that we say is based in the real world, in science, in objectivity, then in that case, we have to agree on some definition of racism. And we did have a definition for racism. We recognized it when it happened and we fought against it. People like Ibram X. Kendi are coming in, they're not really, and D'Angelo, they're not really

defining what racism is. They're saying everybody, every white person is racist. Everyone. When you go, when you use that kind of language and you say everyone is racist. And the way D'Angelo goes about it is then she says you're either a conscious racist or an unconscious racist. And so CRT is about trying to make you become conscious of your racism. So now we have subjective criteria and therefore arbitrary. And it's on a social civic level, you don't know exactly what it is that you're supposed to be fighting. But on an objective legal level, it is then supposed, the presumption is that you are guilty and you can never prove your innocence. Well, I know that you've been called a racist, of course, because you lean right.

And they don't like what you're saying. I mean, I was just talking about this with Coleman Hughes and Professor Glenn Lowry, that if you're on the right half of the country, you've probably been called a racist. And it's a tool that is used to silence you. And you've gotten it from many ends from, they call you an Islamophobe, they call you a racist. Does it, does it bother you at all? Do you, what's your advice to others out there who are afraid to speak out against things like critical race theory? Because they do not want to be called that word. And I understand it. I mean, it really is shocking and it's crude and it's hurtful. And

you have to ask yourself, why am I putting myself in a position where I'm being called these terrible names? But look, for us to live together and continue to live together in peace. And again, and I still think America is one of the greatest places to be, you can't just sit back and hope that someone else fights for you. These throwing around of words like race, once upon a time, it was a very sharp weapon that hurt, but now it's blunted. If everybody is a racist, then no one is. No one even understands what it is anymore. And I think the more people stand up to these bullies, the more of a chance we have that this thing goes away. And I think it has to start within the education system.

It is K-12, it's colleges, it's where these radical professors have the opportunity to indoctrinate our children with this stuff. That's where I think we need to get where the attention needs to go. They're teaching racism. That's what's happening right now. They're teaching racism and their messaging is racist. And I think that the more young people, college educated people, I don't know that this is going to happen any, any earlier than the high school years for most people can stand up and say, I reject your racist lesson. I reject your attempt to racialize me and my surroundings. That's what's happening. You know, people know it on an inherent level, but they're afraid to say it because you know,

Ayaan, that the premise is blacks cannot be racist against whites because you can't, you have to be the group that's in power in order for racism to be an appropriate word. Yeah. Yeah. So if you take a trip to South Africa for a couple of months or Zimbabwe to see that actually Black racism also exists and Hispanic racism exists. And maybe human beings are just racist to begin with because they try to favor their tribe and their extended family over other people. But what's unique about America and other Western societies is they've recognized this,

they've grappled with it, and they've tried to eradicate it. It still exists in America, but it's not as prevalent as it used to be and as it is in other countries. Well, that's number one. And then number two, there's something called critical thinking, which I think is the primary role of universities to teach. Teach kids logic. Teach them how to think, not what to think. If you teach them how to think, they'll overcome it. They'll figure it out for themselves. They know that the ideology of Ibram X. Kendi and Robin D'Angelo is rotten to the core. They'll recognize the logical fallacies embedded in these theories and ideologies. But critical theory has to prevail over critical race and critical justice theories. Well, you know what's happening right now is there's a brainwashing happening in elementary

school, on up in academia, and then sadly now out of academia. And I used to think that it was just academia, but no, now these kids are graduating and they're taking over corporate America and the NFL and ESPN and all. It's like it's spreading. And it's it's like the zombification of America where it's like, yes, I am a racist. Yes. If you are white, you are racist. And then black people who were doing just fine saying, yes, I'm oppressed. I'm oppressed. The police are all out to get me. I mean, the messaging is sinking in despite its lack of foundation. It's scary to me. And I wonder, even though you and I would like to stop it and have been doing our part,

how do we make it happen? And where on the continuum are we? Are we like at the halfway point to people getting their critical thinking cap back on? Or where do you think we are? I think I'll have to take you back to early on in our conversation where I said I was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and I loved the fact that belonging to a group and a sense of purpose and meaning that that gave me.

But then the reality on the ground where, you know, my mother and the women around me, that was really, there was that dissonance. I think we need to create that dissonance. I think we need to create that dissonance. Sorry, the word create is not the right word. It's that we have to make people aware of this dissonance. If you're a corporation or a company, you've hired people to do a job and they're not doing it, then it's going to show in your bottom line. And when that happens, that's when the dissonance hits. And when the dissonance hits, unfortunately,

and this is why I think these critical race theorists, people are terrible, is the people who are going to suffer are the minorities, people of color, women, et cetera, because you then want to go straight back to, in competition with other companies, to making a profit and a good profit. And the people who get punished are the people who talk about something other than the work they were hired to do. The same with universities. If you

are saddled with a degree that costs about $70,000 and you have nothing to show for it. You can't find a job. No one wants to hire you because all you've done is activism. And all you do is racialize everything and either see yourself as a victim or suffer from white guilt. That doesn't get you anywhere. The dissonance is going to set in. And I think the job of people like you and me is to make people aware of that, to say, what exactly are you paying for? You've hired these people. They're not coming to work. They're collectively having sit-ins and what do you call them? I don't know what they were doing at Google.

But that's unsustainable. At some point, the company actually has to make money. Well, I think people need to be practical about this. I worried about this when the Me Too movement first got going, which is, you know, I don't endorse the current version of the Me Too movement. I think it started with noble ideas and we got rid of some genuinely bad guys from their corporate roles. But it's been politicized now and it's, it's turned witch hunty. Um, but I did worry about it when it was still in its beginnings. And I think doing some good, getting rid of people like less moonves, um, that it was going to wind up or it could potentially wind up in a place where,

where no male boss in corporate America wanted to put a woman at the C-suite level, you know, that they'd say, yes, me too. Got it right on sister. Thumbs up. I get it. I'm with you. And then behind closed doors, like, holy shit, we don't want a woman in here. Oh my God. You know, she's going to make one allegation. She's going to ruin my career. Cause you know, now at that time, that time before we had Kavanaugh, the Democrats were saying, believe all women, believe all women. And so I think a lot of corporate America was like, oh my God, keep me away from the women. Cause God only knows what they're going to say. But I think I worry about the same thing happening now where a lot of folks are saying, yes, Black Lives Matter, thumbs up, right on. But at the corporate level, they're going to say, I'm afraid I'm afraid to promote somebody who's a minority or in a group, a protected class, because one allegation and I'm dead. And it's very cynical. Or they're just going to say it's a distraction. You know, they probably won't hire black people because they don't want to be sued.

They don't want somebody starting some kind of activism within the corporate. I've seen this in Europe. It happens all the time. And you're absolutely right. The Me Too movement started with legitimate and I would say noble ideas and it achieved quite something. But then it morphed into this monster. And the example you gave Moonves versus Kavanaugh.

So you get someone like Brett Kavanaugh who's subjected to a litany of accusations only to keep him from that position. And the people who wanted to do that weren't using arguments where they say, we don't like his record. But instead of arguing his record, they wanted to destroy his career. And this is the word again, Megan, which this is what hits us all.

And this is the sense of raw injustice is, it's just trying to destroy a human being, destroy him. That's what we saw. That's why it was such a terrible moment in American history, because I feel like those people who wore the believe all women T-shirts to those hearings killed the Me Too movement. They killed it because they politicized it.

And the lie was put to their dishonest T-shirts when Tara Reid came forward, you know, somebody accusing Joe Biden, a Democrat. And suddenly it was no longer believe all women. It know, somebody accusing Joe Biden, a Democrat, and suddenly it was no longer believe all women. It was, well, investigate. You know, it's to believe some women. Yeah, exactly. Or there was the woman who wrote in the New York Times, I believe her, but it's okay. Right, right. Exactly. Which frankly is a much more honest take, right? Like, okay, at least we're getting more honest now. At least, yeah, we're taking it somewhere we don't have. Yeah, right. But, you know, they're going to be back to believe all women just as soon as it's a Republican of prominence who's accused again.

You know, we don't believe you anymore. And I, as somebody who has fought for women and you, God, you've spent your life fighting for women, got really angered by what they did during the Kavanaugh hearings. Because when you put a Julie Swetnick out there with base, obviously baseless allegations, and Christine Blasey Ford went to Democratic operatives to out her story and had a lot of problems with it along the way, not to mention all the other bogus allegations that came out against him. You do that. It's the end. It's the end of people believing all women. Ironically, you killed that theory. Exactly. Exactly. So it hurts women, but it also conveys a message to women in happy marriages, women who have sons, women who have fathers, women who have male friends, women across the country who don't see any problems with their relationships with the various men in their lives, look at this and be horrified, horrified. And that doesn't help.

It doesn't help the cause. Well, you don't want women who were, who were happy and well, either starting to, for, for zero reason, just because somebody saying you're a victim, you're a victim, you're a victim, start saying, am I a victim? Maybe I'm a victim. Maybe I'm going to start acting like a victim. Maybe men are bad, right? It's like, that doesn't do anybody any good. It doesn't, but now it's become a way of getting something, something material. You, you hung out and you pretend to be the victim, and you get something. So it does pay. It blinds us to the real victims.

Megan, the next book I'm coming up with is called Prey, Immigration from Muslim Majority Countries and Countries Where People Don't Respect Women's Rights. And you're seeing masses and masses of women out in the public when they're taking, you know, they leave their house to go to work, to jog, to take the train, to whatever, and they get harassed and assaulted. And that problem is receiving zero attention. Right. That's an actual women's rights issue. That's an actual women's rights issue. And what I didn't like about the Me Too is, we Me Too started with something great

and then morphed into something else that now blinds us to the actual misogyny on the streets. And it's a class thing too. When women in poor neighborhoods, low-income women, when they find themselves in terrible situations, very few people talk about it. Me Too also ended up becoming, you know, it's a rich white woman's thing. It's true. No, and I always thought in looking at it,

the number one thing you need to be careful of in pushing this thing is not unfairly demonizing the people who are in power, because like it or not, men do still control corporate America. And if they just look at us and feel afraid, we're not going to get any more powerful. We're not going to get ahead. We need them to be our allies, not the jerks, but the open-minded guys. We don't need the open-minded good guys to be terrified of us. And I think this is a way in which a group like Black Lives Matter is overstepping to you. You don't need to demonize every person who has white skin, Robin DiAngelo. And why is it always white women who are far left liberals? Robin, if you read, I don't know if you read her book, but when you read her book,

you're going to walk away thinking she is a racist she is dealing with her own personal demons and then she's projecting it on the rest of society that when i when i read that book i thought my god this woman is disturbed it's right there's something there's something wrong with her and she wants to she wants to say it's from everybody else is just as mad as she is. But she is the one when she says she walks into a room, there's a reception and people are standing around in circles. And when she looks at the black people, she freezes. Really? Is that what you do, Megan? Exactly. I'm not working out any white guilt. I'm good. I'm good. I just want to close it out with something about you personally, because how are you now? I look at you, you're incredibly successful. You have a

beautiful husband, beautiful baby, and you have influence. You're a prolific author. You're at the Hoover Institute writing amazing pieces that are really helpful to the rest of us civilians, I would say, you know, who don't understand the issues as well as you do. And I don't know, I was at your 50th birthday party last, well, in within the last year. And I wondered last year now, this time. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Right. So now how is the 50 year old Ayan doing living in California. How is life now? It's exactly as you described. On a personal level, it's absolutely great. Again, married to this amazing man, my kids, my life. I mean, I can just shut up, go to the spa on a daily basis,

work on my skiing, read novels I never had, watch movies I never watched before, and say goodbye to public life. And to be honest with you, there's a bit of me that wants that. But there's also a bit of me that has this thing of, you know, you've got to give back. And when we, when I know a lot of us talk about, you've got to give back, you've got to give something back. And some people think, well, it's writing a check or it's volunteering. And I do some of those things, but I think my way of giving back is to say, you know, when I recognize a terrible totalitarian ideology, like wokeism,

I'm going to spend my time, effort, and passion fighting it. I will keep the radical Islamic ideology on the agenda as long as it is a threat. If it's no longer a threat, we can move on. Have conversations about the country I've adopted, that I live in, that has given me so, so much that I appreciate. I mean, it's being 50, you know, sometimes it's shocking. I stand 51 and it's like, oh my gosh, that's half a century.

That's a lot. And I'm old and I'm aging, but I think it's actually in some ways you become more self-confident, more mature, more patient and tolerant. Yeah, that's what I am now, more patient and tolerant. I think it's just lovely to enter the next half century feeling, in my case, feeling really fulfilled and happy. And also ready to fight. I'm right there with you. Yeah, ready to fight, but with patience and with kindness. When people get into these, they get into, and it causes a stushy, but they sort of get into a fervor about condemning someone. I think, that's too much. Let's lower the volume. The best example is obviously Donald Trump. And

one of the things I'm hearing from my Democratic friends is, oh, and when he leaves office, we're going to, there are all these lawsuits and we're going to prosecute him. And it's just like, oh, for heaven's sake, calm down. Calm down. You know, that's when they say when they say unity, unity and we're healed. It's like, well, if you're going to put Donald Trump in jail, I'm thinking his 71 million supporters aren't going to like that. You know, you can do what you want, I guess. That's not healing.

Give him a library. Maybe Donald Trump will finally start reading books. I don't think it's going Give him a library. Maybe Donald Trump will finally start reading books. I don't think it's going to be a library. It's just going to be one long, long television documentary. It's just like a long, long reality TV show. I'm still waiting, actually, for Donald Trump to declare this whole thing has been a reality TV show. And we're all fired. Yeah, exactly.

Ayaan, thank you so much. It's so lovely to talk to you. And I can't wait to see you. Likewise. Allyaan, thank you so much. So lovely to talk to you. And I can't wait to see you. Likewise. All the best. See you soon. Our thanks again to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, bravest woman in America. And want to tell you before we go that today's episode was brought to you

in part by Scoremaster. See how many points Scoremaster can add to your credit score today. Visit scoremaster.com slash MK now. Later this week, we're going to be joined by Chris Christie and James Carville. Couple of hotheads in the best sense. Like me. I can relate to them.

We're going to talk about what's going on with this crazy post-election world and where it's all going to end. And if we do, in fact, wind up with a Biden administration, what does that mean for the rest of us? We're going to find out. Stay tuned later this week. Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear. The Megyn Kelly Show is a Devil May Care media production in collaboration with Red Seat Ventures.