The Ricochet Podcast - Finding the Way Back

Episode Date: January 6, 2024

The trio is back for 2024! The reunited gang is happy to welcome back Ayaan Hirsi Ali to discuss the West's crisis of confidence and its fumbling attempt at post-Judeo-Christianity. Plus James, Rob and Peter have a few thoughts about Claudine Gay's resignation, and they divulge their philosophies on new year's resolutions.This week’s opening sound: Mara Gay of the NYT Editorial Board on the resignation of Harvard’s president (Morning Joe on MSNBC)

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Visit drinkaware.ie Is that a euphemism? Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson again and Rob Long again. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson again and Rob Long again. I'm James Lilacs. Today we're all going to talk to Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

So let's have ourselves a podcast. This is an attack on diversity. This is an attack on multiculturalism. And on many of the values that a lot of us hold dear. The fact that she's a black woman and the first person who is a black American to lead Harvard only added to their thirst to dethrone her. America is a nation that can be defined in a single word. Welcome, everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast, number 673. I'm James Lonex in Minneapolis, joined again finally after this fortnight of their absence by Peter Robinson and Rob Long.

Guys, welcome. Happy New Year. Happy New Year. Delighted to be together again. It's Christmas week, you know. What are you going to do? Right. You know, somebody showed up and did a Ricochet Podcast there for a couple of weeks. I'll say that. Nice of you, by the way. Those are very good. I'm worried

that those are more popular. Well, it has encouraged me to bring back the solo podcasts previously known as The Ramble, but now I'm branding it as The Diner, which has been my podcast name for many years. Broadcasting live from The Diner every week on Thursday, probably released on Friday, Saturday, Sunday,

Monday. I don't know, something like that. We're still working it out. But another addition to the Ricochet Audio Network. So did you guys leave? Did you go away? Did you find yourself on some sunny shore? Or did you just spend the holidays with your family? Of course, everybody's dying. The one thing we all know about the beginning of January is everyone's really eager to hear all the recaps of the holiday season. No, it's gone. We're all looking ahead. But I hope you had a good time.

So let's look ahead. Let us look ahead. Any resolutions? Another tiresome topic for the year to come? Peter? I groan to admit it. I groan to admit it because it's the same resolution as always, except that this time I'm putting money behind it. I just spent

a hundred bucks on a smart scale and devoted an hour and a half to trying to make my way through the absolutely mystifying, excuse me, I'm totally recovered from a bad cold, but my throat is lagging behind. Totally mystifying things. You have to touch this button, do this, do that on the computer to sync it up so that the weight automatically shows. Anyway, after all of that, I have to lose weight this year. Okay. Well, it's sort of funny that you have to get a scale that syncs with your computer. Is that necessary because why?

Because your computer then talks to your phone and tells you to put down the Hershey's chocolate bar? Because it cost a hundred bucks. And I now have, Rob understands this immediately. Not that Rob isn't already as felt as any man could be, but Rob is the one who's famous for using the phrase, skin in the game. And now I have skin in the game of my own skin, so to speak. And you'll have saggy skin. I did it because it cost 100 bucks. Right. Okay, good. Well, how are you going to achieve that? Now that you have the means by which to measure it, how are you going to achieve this loss of weight?

You actually want me to go into this? Actually, I have given it thought. Have you really? Intermittent fasting. Yes, I have. Oh, okay. You're doing that. Intermittent fasting. I'm going to do that, and then I'm doing the Maffetone method of working out, which is working out according to your heart rate, and you actually keep your heart rate almost frustratingly low. And only one day a week do you permit your heart rate to go above a certain level. Apparently, I didn't know this science, apparently, if your heart rate is above a certain level, it's burning all the glycogen or sugars in your body and it will make you ravenous afterwards.

But if you keep your heart rate down to a certain level, your body kicks into fat burning. And this is a way of making sure that you're burning fat. It builds up some sort of oxygen capacity in your lungs that I don't understand yet, although I've read it three times in a row already. And this will interest you, gentlemen, because we are all of a certain age. You're much less likely to overtrain. If you follow Maffetone say you're much less likely to over train if you follow mafetone you're just not going to overdo it what does over train mean exactly i'm never in that danger zone i have let you know i am never no one ever said yeah you know what rob you gotta gotta stop training you gotta you're gonna hurt That never occurred, has ever occurred in my life.

Well, the way my life works, I go to a Stanford gym, and some 20-year-old giant finishes working out with his weights. And I go over and figure, it's just too much trouble to change the weights. Right. And I try to pick them up, and my back goes out just like that. And the humiliating old man, as I hobble out of the gym and drag myself home, that has happened to me. I have three sons who I try to keep up with them, terrible mistake. I'm surrounded by Stanford students trying to keep up with them, horrible mistake. So, I get this idea of slow and steady old man, just calm down. Don't hurt yourself. Interesting. Well, as somebody who did the weight loss gym thing last year, I have some advice. We can perhaps take that off the show, but I mean, I go to the gym every day and my objective this

year is to increase all of my weights even more and more and more so that I can come in behind that 25 year old and sort of smile to myself, take the pin from the weights and move them down 50 pounds. Take that. You have never been overweight a day in your life, have you, James? That's just not a problem for you. No, I was a fat kid. I was a fat kid who got teased for it. I hated gym class and all the rest of it. And the psychological trauma from that has driven me for 40, 50 years now. So it's a good thing. I'd like to go back and

thank all of those bullies who made fun of me in the, in the, in the locker room because, uh, now, uh, you know, I've got my final revenge and it's of course noticeable to nobody because it's not like I'm a swimsuit model or anything, but, uh, yeah. So anyway, that is that. So good luck. Good luck with that. Rob, are you similarly looking forward to the new year with something new to do? I assume that you're going to probably want to go back and run a computer algorithm on every single script that you ever wrote to make sure that you didn't lift the joke from somebody else. No, I don't have any resolutions, James. I feel that I'm done. I'm'm perfect as you are i'm in i'm that i'm the thing that i'm gonna be and i'm not gonna just have to learn to convince everyone

else that of my own confidence in the fact that i'm about as perfect as a person can be yeah well you'll get no argument here yeah you know uh i uh no i uh it is funny though the the the the since you you mentioned the plagiarism thing you know robin williams used to go um to comedy clubs a lot and uh and then he would just absorb the jokes and then when he was in one of his improvisational you know the fugue states on Carson or something. Sometimes he would steal them. And people get really mad. And you're allowed to do it.

I mean, you're not allowed to do it. It's not cool to do it. But I mean, they can't put you in jail. But Robin Williams was a stand-up guy. He said, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to do that. Here's $50,000. He was very successful at the time. So if he stole a joke from you, he would give you lots of money. And I don't think there's any comedian alive, especially at that point, who was like working in the comedy clubs at the comedy stores, the improv in LA, who begrudged Robin Williams the theft because he eventually made good. But, you know, there are, I mean, I've been called up. I mean, I have friends

who send me texts or something and say, did you see this? And they'll give me a little clip of something or they'll point me to something or some movie or some show like this person stole your line or your joke or your character. I mean, that's happened in a couple movies

where it's like, well, wait a minute. I know that happens that that happens a lot right so and you have your choice you can either you know moan and complain about it or you can um you know move on i mean it's it's show business what it is um because we don't have an elaborate system of citation and scholarly um uh ethics to guide us in show business. Doesn't the Writers Guild have rules of some kind? Aren't there some protections offered? Yeah, there's some. Obviously, you can't lift something directly.

But, you know, you look at a scene, you're like, I know you guys saw my thing, or you read my book, or come on now. I mean, like, there have been more than a... I can't even tell you how many times that's happened um i actually had to go back once and just to because i thought i had an insight uh into a politics at that someone else was claiming is their insight and i was like, wow, wait a minute. Am I insane? I think that's mine. Wait a minute. And I had to go back and Google it and find it.

And Googling it was hard because it had been missed whatever. I don't know. And this is so long ago that in the archives it had been sort of like. So when I found it, I realized, oh, wait a minute. No, I'm right. I was the first with this one uh and then i had a little private satisfactory moment but um but although occasionally i've been cited it's nice to be cited i was cited in a couple books really like it's always kind of yeah it's kind of like cool thing but did you turn up in any of claudine gay's work by any chance i don't know i don't i haven't i haven't gone through it i don't think so i write mostly intentional comedy and her work was mostly unintentional comedy i mean

that was the weird thing about the claudine gay stuff was that i actually decided just to read a little bit of it just so i knew what you know i was not surprised at the subject obviously the subject was exactly what you'd expect Professor Claudia Gay to be writing about. But I did try to read some of it, and it's absolutely impenetrable. I mean, the idea that she stole those words without translating them into English first is another thing you can say is wrong with academia. it is impenetrable and it doesn't

have any meaning and it doesn't have any impact and it doesn't move any needles anywhere it's just simply the academics talking amongst themselves about things whose condition whose outcome is predetermined but she's fighting back of course in a new york times editorial that she that she wrote she was called what just happened at Happened at Harvard Is Bigger Than Me, because we all should be worried. Of the many lines that you can pull, she wrote, quote, This was merely a single skirmish in a broader war

to unravel public faith in pillars of American society. Wow. Well, you know, I think the auto-unraveling has been manifest for some time. She goes on, Campaigns of this kind

often start with attacks on education and expertise, because these are the tools that best equip communities to see through propaganda. Well, I'm not sure that education or expertise is necessarily manifest in the works that she was doing. I mean, of a certain sense, yes, in the sense that people at that level will write these esoteric, toleated works that mean nothing and don't have any impact whatsoever, and that their expertise is simultaneously sort of useless and not applicable to anything in particular, except maybe reading or judging one of these other papers. But no, nobody's attacking education and expertise.

What we are attacking and concerned about is what the educators are teaching the kids and how their claims of expertise actually are supposed to shield them from criticism. Who are you to tell the elementary school teachers what they can do? They have a degree in education. Well, you know, I'm sorry. The lack of faith in the credentialed class has been self-inflicted, not by some people who are, you know, knuckle-dragging yahoos or saying, don't trust those folks with their smart book learning, but because they seem disconnected from society, and they don't seem to be particularly smart to begin with, reciting an endless series of cliches and tropes about, which coincidentally all happen to be from progressive modes of thought. So, yeah. So it bears repeating that the or noting that the right, the conservatives didn't fire Claudine Gay. They didn't have any power to do so. She was fired by the Harvard trustees.

So that Harvard leadership fired her. At no point did anybody have any... And the last time this happened in an American university was at Stanford, where the Stanford president was found to be plagiarizing or academic ethical violations of

academic standards, and he was fired. I mean, the idea that there's anything going on here look if you if you've written 11 papers and you and you've plagiarized 50 times keep your head down when they when the lady asks you uh hey what do you think about uh genocide say i don't like it that's what you have to do right the the alternate side of it is the um the idea that okay well now you know that i saw this yesterday. People kept saying, threatening, we're going to go after right-wing academics and right-wing university presidents.

See what happens then. It's like, well, have at it. I mean, what are you going to do? If you can find any, send me a postcard. It's Ben Sass and Larry Arnn. That's it. You got it. That's it. That's all you got. That's it. It's Ben Sass and... And that's it. Larry Arnn. That's it. You got it.

That's it. That's all you got. That's it. Good luck getting those guys. Those guys are pretty smart. And good luck, by the way, trying to get your stuff sold on the internet. It's hard. It's a nightmare.

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Let's step back a little bit and set the stage for some people who are coming to this, perhaps not with the knowledge that we have. You emigrated to Europe a little over 30 years ago. A lot has happened since 1992, but for the people who don't know your story, just remind us briefly why you left your home and how you decided that the West was your destination because the West was different, was special. Well, okay, thank you. That's a lot and I'll try and squeeze into the shorter time we have.

So the first time I left my home, I was a child under 10 years of age, maybe eight or nine years, and I was born in Mogadishu, Somalia. We left because our country was seized by a member of the military to establish a dictatorship. So there you have that phenomenon that was very common in Africa at the time. And in later decades, someone comes out of the blue and says, I'm your president and establishes a dictatorship. And then my family went to Saudi Arabia, which was a theocracy. And for the first time, I actually thought I was oppressed as a girl when I was in Somalia until I went to Saudi Arabia and thought, oh, no, we're not oppressed. This is real oppression.

Women were covered from head to toe, separated from men. It was just something very, very bizarre, even for someone like me who grew up a Muslim. And I was fortunate enough for my family to be deported from Saudi Arabia. And we landed in Ethiopia. Ethiopia was another dictatorship run by Mengistu Hailemariam. We were there for 18 months, and my mother had had enough, she said, because Somalia and Ethiopia were at war with one another. And my mom was extremely prejudiced against the Ethiopians

because she wasn't going to live in their country. So we had to find a place to go, and my father found Kenya for us. So I was about 10 years old when we landed in Nairobi, Kenya. It was a one party state. They held elections, but the same party won all the time. I went to school in Kenya. That's where I learned English. It was a former British colony. So the British had left a system of schooling. And again, I was fortunate enough for my father to send me to school and argue with my mother that I should stay in school. It was a poor country, but compared to the others, we had relatively a little bit more freedom.

My father left us in 1981 to go back to Ethiopia. He was part of a movement that had a militia and their mission was to throw out the Somali dictator who had taken hold of Somalia in 1969. So I was there with my mother. I know the experience of growing up with a single mother and with my brother and my sister going to school in Nairobi. My father is gone and I go to my secondary school or what you call high school in America. I was 15, 16, 17 and I remember my classmates being removed from school and being married off to men they had never met, so they never finished school. Now, you were still in a Muslim environment, is that right? Kenya, as I recall, is about half Christian and half Muslim. Yes, Kenya, when we were there, was actually officially a Christian country, but now,

as you say, maybe it could be half-half. But my mother ensured that we, my sister and I, went to the Muslim girls' secondary school. I see. All right. Which I started school there in 1984. In 84, 85, it was Muslim light. But after 85, it started to be Islamized. We had these Muslim Brotherhood missions coming from Egypt, and there was more missionary work coming from Iran. So it went from being Muslim-lite to real Islamist outposts. But I remember my classmates, 15 years old, 14 years old,

16 years old, being married off. And I understood that the reason why i wasn't married off was because my father was gone and my father was gone from our house until 1991 is when he came back civil war had occurred in somalia and most of us come from somalia they came to kenya so that is when my father got the opportunity to come home to us, even though he was gone for a decade, and decide, I'm now the master of this household. And oh, my goodness, my daughter is, you know, 22 and time to find a husband. And then I got married off. And of course, by then I had matured. You know, at the age of 22, my 22, I was immature in ways that I think Western girls are very mature. But I was mature in ways that Western girls are not mature.

I understood fully what the future held for me if I went with this man that my father married me off to and from the time it happened until I was able to escape I worked on trying to find a window of opportunity that I could crawl out of. I don't want to jump the timeline a little bit but and I don't expect you to remember this but you and I met now almost 20 years ago in an event in Los Angeles, and it was a conversation about Islam. And it was between you and Reza Aslan, who's a wonderful writer, nice guy,

but had written a book in which he sort of, what he was trying to do, he has a very academic attitude. And you were very polite as he explained it. No, no, no, you don't understand, you people here in the West. The Koran is a text, and the text has its own meaning and its own undermeaning. And really, we shouldn't be frightened of the Koran.

We shouldn't be frightened of Islam. It's really, it's a text. It's a text. And you kind of looked at him and said, well, that is true. Although I have bodyguards and they're not protecting me from words. And always struck me as like, that was incredibly brave. Because you were young then. I mean, you're still young. And so I guess my question is twofold. One is

how's that going? Because I know that you were under threat for a long time. And then on a sort of larger perspective, how is it all going in what we thought then was going to be a cataclysmic struggle between the forces of radical fundamentalist sort of backward Islam and the 21st century. Where are we in that war? So in terms of, you know, the personal threats, I'm of the mindset these people don't forget. They don't forgive

what happened to Salman Rushdie he let his guard down and in August of 22 he was he was attacked fortunate that he survived so I never let my

guard down, the bodyguards are still there. The framework of freedom constraining security is still there. But the wider question, the confrontation between radical Islam on the one hand and the West, where is that at? It's ongoing. I see scenarios where maybe there is lights at the end of the tunnel. I thought that moment when the Abraham Accords were reached, when some of the, you know, important Arab countries like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the UAE, were willing to recognize Israel to modernize, to move on, to diversify their economies from oil to and join the wider economy, free their women. I thought, well, there is maybe a coming together. It's going to take a long, long time, but eventually I could see a scenario where the West and these Arab leaders

could work together to fight against the radical Islamist elements that they had spawned and funded in the past. But now I see a setback, which I think the 7th of October, Hamas attacks on Israel and the absolutely gruesome and heinous attacks on women and children and babies and gang rapes and burning of people. That I think has taken us back to the reality of the face of the evil we are fighting, what radical Islamism is. And for now, it looks like that process of coming together has paused. The question is, is it a pause, or is it permanent? Maybe I'm just a Pollyanna here. Does this give you any hope at all, the idea that the most deadly and the most shocking attack on Israel before this, before October 7th, led to a regional war.

And this has not. To date, it has not. It does look like as fragile as the past 20 years have been, 30 years have been in larger Middle East peace. It's holding. Is that fair or not? I just want to do one step back and think, you know, in terms of, you know, the confrontation between radical Islamism and the West. I think radical Islam as a force is a force to be reckoned with and should not be underestimated ever. But the problem we are seeing now is that within the West, our value system, our foundational

principles, these things are being undermined from within. And that makes it easy for forces like radical Islam and other external enemies. I'm thinking of China, I'm thinking of Putin. It makes it easier to penetrate the West, to divide and weaken us. And so in that sense, I'm absolutely more worried about what we are doing to ourselves to weaken our own structures and our own power, then what an external enemy might do to us, they'll take advantage of that. They'll exploit that. But right now, I think we are our own worst enemy. How are we doing that?

What's the worst thing we're doing to ourselves right now? We have abandoned the value system that these Judeo-Christian principles that led to these fine institutions

that are envied and were envied by the outside. The concept of democracy, the concept of free speech, freedom of religion, the separation of religion from politics, the due process, fairness, equality, all of which are incompatible with identity politics. Exactly. And so we've invented identity politics. We have let it run amok in our universities and now in our schools and everywhere else. And we're now dealing with a generation, a young generation, that has been somewhat cut off from these grounding principles and their institutions. They have been made to believe that America and the rest of the West is all about exploitation.

And our history is just really only bad slavery segregation exploitation colonialism this is what they are taught in the finest institutions at Harvard at Stanford at Yale everywhere else have come to believe this about themselves and about and there's this sense I think that they don't think that there's anything to fight for. And there's this stance of, you know, if you look at diversity, equity, and inclusion, this, I call it a menace. But it is a program that is supposed to advance

a bureaucracy to take root within all of our institutions to bring down the standards of marriage, to basically to implement this idea that we have to tear everything down and replace it, and what we are replacing it with is just terrible. Aion, Peter here. Forgive me, my voice is very rough. I'm getting over a cold. I actually feel fine, but my voice doesn't know it yet. You put up a post a few weeks ago that got the

attention of the whole world, and you said that you have become a Christian. Now, I know that you're writing a book on this subject, and I can't wait for the book because I would like a thorough explanation. And I also know that it can be tricky to talk about something when at the same time you're writing about it. So, if I ask a question that you just don't want to deal with right now because you're going to be writing about it later this evening, go ahead and say so. But here's the way I think Christopher Hitchens, our old friend Christopher Hitchens, would have looked at your progress, and he would have seen it as progress. You were raised in the Muslim world, you withdrew from it, you escaped it, you land in Europe, and of course you become an atheist because you see that Europe itself has been through something like what you hope the Muslim

world will eventually go through. That is, it has emerged from ancient superstitions to embrace a purely rational view of the world, embracing the scientific method. We only permit ourselves to believe in what we can demonstrate to be true by all kinds of rigorous analysis. And this is the way the West itself is going. Christopher Hitchens, of course, viewed it as a kind of triumph of the human spirit and the human intellect. And here goes Ion and says, no, Christopher, I have decided to become a Christian. Now, why are you not engaging in a kind of staggeringly retrograde action here? Why does that strike you as progress of any kind, instead of a rejection of the Enlightenment?

Because I'm working on a book, and it's a long answer to the question that you just posed, where there's my personal evolution from being a Muslim and at one point I was a radical Islamist and then coming to Holland and then gradually adopting the lifestyle at first of you know of my surroundings and then after the 11th of September 2001, having to be confronted with, am I really a Muslim if I'm so critical of what those who say they are true to the faith in its most pure form, if I oppose that, how could I possibly be a Muslim? And so I left Islam and I didn't leave Islam for another religion. I left Islam for atheism. And you're absolutely right. My perception back then was it's a burden,

a load that has lifted off my shoulders that I don't have to deal with superstition. And to enter the realm of enlightenment and reason I'm going to be surrounded with just people anybody who lives religion almost immediately becomes rational and and is enlightened yes and of course we've seen people who are older than me more mature than I am who lived you lived even as far back as the 19th century, 18th century, 19th century, understood that that's not necessarily the case. And I think we're now living through a period where people have left religion.

And when they leave religion, they find themselves in this void. And the void is filled by different kinds of superstition, and some of them very, very superficial. And so I've come to rethink, even rethink the sources of the Enlightenment. And I'm today more persuaded that the Enlightenment was really stalled on its Judeo-Christian premises than, you know, something that is completely separate and opposed to Christianity. I don't believe that anymore. But again, like I said, I'm— Details to follow. Right.

Details to follow. And one thing I'd like to say, it's hard to speak for the dead, but I really think that if Christopher Hitchens had lived today and he was able to see what you and I see, I think he might have come to a different conclusion. I think he might have reflected on his writings. And at least I know he was intellectually honest enough. Yes, he was. Yeah, that he may have been wrong about some things. If he'd converted and gone into the pastorship, he would have packed the pews every Sunday, I would go to hear Christopher Hitchens. Europe has left religion behind and has filled the void with notions of transnational equity

and global warming and the rest of it. We see where that's heading for them. America, less so, but we are becoming less religious. All of those things that you mentioned that characterize the that characterizes the general population of the United States? In other words, can everybody be sort of just agnostic and maybe only go to church once or twice a year, and we can still have the same faith and power of these institutions, or do you believe that there's a necessary connection between a a religious population and those ideas that permitted us to flower and prosper i think that there is a clear

connection between again judeo-christian with the emphasis on that on those values and the outcome of that which is the civilization that we have western civilization the farther we move away from these foundations the more we weaken ourselves and then become something else i'd like to point out if you look at uh right now almost all conversations uh in 2023 2024 are about the mental health crisis um underway and some people say well there was always the mental health crisis underway. And some people say, well, there was always a mental health crisis, but because of social media and internet, we know more about it. I disagree with that.

I think it's different. And why is it different? Because I am looking at communities that are still church going and faith based, and those communities are functioning very well. And mental health, especially among girls, is very, very low compared to those that have drifted off and cut everything off. And these are some of the questions that our organizations, Stanford, Harvard, MIT, all of these social science departments in these schools should be asking and answering these questions. But they're not asking these questions.

They're not answering it, again, because of the issue we talked about. But these are some of the things that I'm seeing, and these are very, very, very important observations. So you went from Somalia to Saudi Arabia, and then you discovered what? In fact, you thought, good lord, I didn't realize I had

it so well. Isn't that, I mean, is there a way of describing, let me, these are my priors, is there a way of describing the way things are now? It always seems to me that, I mean, the word decadent isn't quite right, but there's something about the West. We're so rich. Yeah. Astonishing amount of,

I mean, from Reagan's second year, third year, 83, 84, to today, that's 40 years. Astonishing amount of wealth in the world. I mean, good for the world. In the West. In the West. But I mean, even the emerging world.

I mean, if you're, you know, more people out of poverty in India, more people out of poverty in China. Have we lost our problems today that we just forgot how, first of all, how good we have it, how fragile that is,

and that we still have to work at it? I think we've reached that generation. If you think of a nation state, the way you would think of an organization, I love to make this comparison of, you know, these family businesses that were built, you know, the pioneers, they were very poor.

They built it out of nothing. And then two or three generations follow that expand and create this enormous wealth but sooner or later you get to a generation that just inherits it and has nothing to do for it with it and just spends and wonders and i think that we have reached in the west that place where we've inherited all these amazing institutions and and we are we're spending it um and when i came to the netherlands in 1992 i think there was still a sense that we had to do something uh to keep it going but over time i think we've lost it. And this has become clearer to me ever since I came to America. I came to America, I moved to America in 2006 and started work for the American Enterprise Institute. And my colleagues in Washington, D.C., when we talked about the concept of multiculturalism, moral relativism, the sorts of decadence that was ongoing in Europe.

My American colleagues would say that's not going to happen in America. We have faith. We are a much younger country. We, as you know, the remaining hegemony, we are constantly aware of these external enemies that want us down. So Americans in general compared to Europeans are way more patriotic. They were comparing Europe to an open air museum. And so it's hard now nearly 20 years on to look at my American colleagues in the face and say, so what do you think? Are we really that much better than Europe? So does that...

I'm trying to maneuver this conversation so you say something optimistic. That's how I roll here. You know, Churchill said that America always does the right thing after exhausting all the other things, right? Always chooses the right option after exhausting all the others. Are there any green shoots of hope here? I mean, I see some in American culture. I see some in European culture, actually. But I see a lot of, obviously a lot of challenges, but something, there's something refreshing about having the challenges out in the open in just my own personal experience um uh i remember going to silicon valley um in the i know early 2000s and um early part of this of the century and it was universally thought that all of this technology was going to make the world great.

It's just, how could it not be? How could this interconnected Facebook not make everybody happy and free and the flourishing of ideas? And we look back on that now, and these are very smart people, and just think, oh, I can't believe you believe that nonsense. Of course not. Are we waking up now or are we still asleep? I guess my quick question. I think we are waking up and I think I am optimistic. I mean, it's our job at the

Hoover Institution to talk about and reflect and meditate on what's wrong and figure out ways of making propositions for change. But I am optimistic, and that's also why I do what I do. Number one, I don't think that technology, generally speaking, was net negative. I think it's net positive. And remember, technology, like like all tools it's just a tool it is what you use it for um so i think technology has given us a great deal of abundance and you just talked about how a lot of people were lifted out of poverty and technology contributed

a great deal to that uh in many ways democratization of wealth. Still knowing full well that the gap between the haves and the have-nots is still quite wide, too wide, in my view. Technology, you know, net effect is good. What makes me optimistic, especially in America, maybe to build on the Churchill quote, is that for a while, we experimented with terrible ideas. We let these things get out of control. But now I think there is an awakening. Look at what's going on after that congressional hearing with the three universities. And I think that did, just a moment like that,

it brought into the open my husband Neil and I and a lot of people at Hoover and other places. We were trying to sound the alarm about the things that were going on inside academia, inside universities that had then also spread K-12. And there were moments when I thought nobody's going to hear, we just have to give up. And then a moment comes like that, that congressional hearing, that confrontation, and the presidents of the three leading universities can't give an answer. And that has then put us in this place in America where everywhere you go, every boardroom,

every classroom, every birthday party I go to, everyone is talking about what is wrong, how deep is the hurt, how wide, what are we going to do about it? And I think the next bit is, you know, stay awake. Let's stay awake and let's stay focused. Ayaan, I have a closing question for you, and it concerns a very old friend of mine who happens to be listening right now, and his name is Rob Long. And Rob has decided, I don't think I'm breaking

any confidence here, I think it's at least semi-public. Rob has decided that he may very well, in the next year or two, attend divinity school. Now, as he first began talking about this, it had the feel to me as a kind of ornament on his career, an interesting thing to do at this time in his life. Great ornament on a Hollywood career, yeah. But in more recent conversations, it seems to me that he's actually becoming quite serious about it. I would like to ask Ayaan Hirsi Ali to give advice to Rob Long and to tell him Tell him what are the questions to which he must find answers in divinity school.

What questions should he ask? Oh my goodness, you're putting me on the spot. He's good at that. When I left Islam, the question for me was, is there a God or is there no God? And now that I've evolved, I think that's actually the wrong question. And the right question now is, how do we make amends to God who has given us all these gifts?

You know, how do we find our way back and anchor? And here's, I think, where it starts to get tricky. There are all kinds of people and groups of peoples who make claims to divinity and the divine and use that as a tool for oppression and for doing really bad things. tightrope of, on the one hand, finding God, the real God, understanding Him and His promise, and at the same time avoiding these pitfalls. I'm not sure I've given you the right question at Divinity to ask, but… Oh no, I think that would keep Rob busy. Let me think more about it well i think that's a good question i mean not that i would want to paraphrase that but i you

know the how to find your way back yeah um not to back where you came from obviously because you don't need we don't want to go, but how do you find your way back to what home meant in the larger sense without regressing and turning back the clock, but saving the, you know, keeping the tablets, I guess is one of the phrases people use. I mean, that's definitely a political question people have, right? I mean, you know.

It's reason, without abandoning reason, but also acknowledging the spiritual hunger and the spiritual need and the fact that you can be spiritual and religious, but not irrational. Sounds good to me. It's a good question for the eve of of epiphany that's for sure the good news is we don't have to invent the wheel ourselves that is good i wouldn't know how to do it that's that's very true that is very true yes well you know rob you if you do go to divinity school and you get a degree out of this this will mean you have expertise so what you say then about the existence of god and the nest you know the elements of such will will have more authority

than anyone else so i will come to you with some of the searching questions that i have after you've completed this since you have that i I am, of course, kidding. No, I mean, we'll have talks about it, but you're not going to be able to pull out the degree. Well, you know, I went to school. Verily I say unto you. Verily I say unto you. Right. Rob Long is greater than that which can be conceived.

Ms. Ali, thank you so much for joining us today. We would like to talk to you again when your book comes out, which will be a fascinating account. And we thank you for the time that you've spent with us today and for all the contributions that you've made. Thanks, and I hope to speak to you again. Thank you. Thank you very much, and Happy New Year. Ayaan, Merry Christmas, Happy New Year. Our best to your boys, including Neil. Thank you. Thank you very much. happy new year ayan happy new year merry christmas happy new year our best to your

boys including neil thank you thank you very much bye-bye that is going to be a great book i gotta say and well why don't you tell people what it's about because we didn't really talk about it i i not not because well we just didn't because it wasn't the subject of the interview but it is about oh well it's about her conversion to Christianity. So I think it's really a sort of larger story, but I think it begins, I mean, she had a sort of a political consciousness journey, which she's talked about and written about, and I think this is more of a spiritual consciousness journey,

which I think is going to be fantastic. She's a really, really brilliant, thoughtful thinker. And it was, I know I started, I mentioned this anecdote, but it was one of those things you rarely see actually take place in real life in front of you, which is a person quietly and utterly without rancor demolishing someone else's argument someone else's long verbal verbose complicated sophisticated intellectual argument was utterly demolished in about 11 words and the silence that overcame a very loud group of arrogant mostly liberal mostly progressive hollywood insiders was um i could still hear it i could still hear that silence is silence born of of um

a uh epiphany or silence born of seething rage that they actually couldn't construct their proper comeback that they had been shown something they didn't want to believe that they couldn't believe that something like this was coming from somebody whose presence on the intersectional pyramid would determine otherwise i know i think yes i i don't know if it's rage so much as i think sometimes when you present an argument that is so in so um inarguable to people and it but it's foundationally revolutionary for that meaning that if they accepted it they would a lot of other things would have to change their responses either to scream and shout and plug their ears and sing like we see people do that on the left and the right um or to disappear it yeah and i think that's mostly what the,

that's kind of the technique of the left, because they have the ability and the levers to do that, just to make it go away. Make it go away, yeah. Right. So what she was saying in that argument, what she was saying is that, no, actually, it is dangerous. It isn't something that we can, radical Islam and the Islamicist movement

isn't something that we can, radical Islam and the Islamicist movement isn't something that we can just kind of like negotiate away or redefine in some way that makes it sound pretty. We can't put lipstick on it. It's dangerous and it's going to kill us and as my evidence

is they're trying to kill me right now. And that is they're trying to kill me right now. Right. Right. And, um, that, that, that was that, that kind of quiet moral voice was really important.

I mean, I, and I don't know if, I don't think anyone left the, drove home in their BMWs and thought, well, you know, I got to re I got to rethink my,

my belief in the basic multiculturalism and my anger at the, the, whatever, you know, the, the Islamophobia that swept the nation, which didn't really happen after 9-11. They just didn't have anything to say. I don't know.

That's my memory of it, and that's why I think people like her are so powerful, because for she's not writing. Right, but eventually they replaced this with a certainty that there are christian nationalists out there hundreds of thousands of them who are training in their wood backwards cabins who pose most more of a threat than anything else and that will enable them to go on with the rest of the progressive mindset which says that uh you know hamas what do you gotta say you gotta hand it to them you know that was a pretty effective and they didn't do any of the bad things these Israelis are saying, and they were living in an open-air prison, and now they're being genocided,

and ergo, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, because that's just plainly what the whole power dynamic over there says, right? All they have to do is look at the oppressor and who's the oppressed, and they got it figured out i mean it's that curious mixture of of intelligence and and yet astonishing stupidity um that they've they've they've just offshored they're thinking about so many things to an ideology that explains every of course you know just not exactly new or novel but it's been the case for hundreds of years, and we do it on our side, too. But it's just the way that anti-Semitism, pro-Hamas, pro-Palestinian, pro-narratives have flourished, especially amongst the youth, who you would think ought to know better. Why would I say something as stupid as that? Well, Peter, we've got a couple of minutes here before we go.

Anything to add? Do we head out and i i again for those who remember the top of the show we're really rooting for you to get this uh scale working i think it is working it's just that i kept standing getting on it and getting off and getting out i felt like the the joke about oh no i'm good wandering into territory here but the the um definition of a certain kind of person a certain gender is that uh that is the kind of person who keeps asking a question until you give her the answer she wants and i kept getting on the scale wanting to see numbers that were lower than it insisted on giving me i'm sure it's working it It'll work fine. Just remember, cut out all carbs and eliminate all processed sugar from your diet.

Move around a little bit more and it'll fall off. Have eggs and sausage for breakfast. Have a big, thick steak. Not many potatoes, but skip the French fry. Just carbs. Forget bread. Forget cereal. All that stuff.

It's gone. It's off the table. And then I... Eventually, you will come... You cut me to the quick, man. I know. I know. But eventually you will come back to it. And one morning you will have yourself an English muffin that will be covered with cream cheese and jam.

And it will be like a combination of heroin and bourbon and every great intoxicant. Wow. Heroin and bourbon. That's like. Yeah. Well, you know. Not exactly. Speaking from experience here,

but all I know is when I finally allowed myself some of these things after losing the amount of weight that I wanted, it was great. And you can go back to them. You just can't sort of live on bread like we used to before. Staff of life and all that, I know, but there you go. And I don't want to twist this into a right-wing argument, another right-wing talking point, this, twist this into a right wing argument. You know, another right wing talking point. But

this is not new. The idea that you should cut down on the carbs and starch in order to lose weight. In 1911 I make myself a little vulnerable. I tell the truth about what's happening in my life.

In 1911 or 1909 or something, the U.S. Navy, like after the Spanish-American War, when American warships were going to the South Pacific, and they issued these dietary guidelines for U.S. Navy personnel. This was in the beginning of the

20th century. And they said avoid all that starch. Don't eat that poi. Don't eat that taro root. These people eat a lot of starch. Don't do it. You'll get fat. Stick to meat and fish. And

the U.S. government then decided, no, no, no, no, no. We'll create a food pyramid. We know what you should be eating. And you should be eating more bread and pasta. And not as much meat. And everybody just got fat. That's what happened.

Our generation was raised on that food pyramid, and it was a lie. Or at least it was totally a fake. Yes, it was. It was a fake. You know, one of the – That was fake news. It was one of the – we're trying to do this long-form podcast, That was fake news. We're trying to do this long-form podcast,

and one of the ones I've been kicking around, I haven't told Peter, this is my co-founder, director of this. I shouldn't be pitching you podcast ideas right here, right now. But one of the things, I had dinner with an old friend of mine. He's kind of a nerd genius. And he and his family, his dad and his partner, his business partner, have had family business for a long time. They're nuclear scientists. They're nuclear physicists.

They make measurement equipment, and they have a lab, and he does work. And he remembers, as a young man, the cops coming to his door, knocking on there, and saying, we need you. It was an emergency in New York State, Three Mile Island. And they went to Three Mile Island. And he says, do you understand what happened at Three Mile Island?

Yeah. It was like the core or something. And there was a leak and blah, blah, blah. Because nothing happened in Three Mile Island. Nothing. We went, we tested it. It was fine. There was no leak. There was no

discharge. There was no radioactivity. It was fine. But it has been twisted and turned into the symbol of the disaster of nuclear power that has led us directly to our our absolute energy dependence for the next 30 years and um you know you can make you could draw a direct line between that and our our economic necessity of our looking the

other way as uh certain kingdoms in middle east who supply us with oil uh support um radical wahhabi you know terrorism it was a lot we didn't trust the science there was no trusting the science even today if you look over the new york times they're not going to say by the way free my island nothing happened i don't know so the podcast what he was trusting the science and now i thought of it i just thought of this new one. I need eight episodes or so. The Food Pyramid. Anyway, rant over. That's all.

Rant over. That's absolutely fascinating. Oh, no. No, it's, believe me, Jane Fonda is responsible for more of the problems of Western society than anybody else. You know, but that stupid movie that she made with Michael Douglas as her cameraman saying, yes, when I think it was Jack Lemmon who said there was a conspiracy or maybe it was Wilford Brimley. I don't know. All I know is that post Watergate conspiracy, science, technology, fear, all of those things combined to make people all shuddery about it.

Then, of course, you had the no nukes concerts of the 80s and the rest of it because nuclear warheads and nuclear power somehow were lumped all in the same basket as one of the things Ronald Reagan wanted to use to destroy the world. The idiocy, just the monumental idiocy that I've lived through in my life and probably assisted in some way or the other. But I do know that I'm late and we've got to go. Gentlemen, it's been fun. We'll see everyone in the comments. Not at Ricochet 5.0.

That's coming and it's going to be great. But we'll see you in the comments at Ricochet 4.0. Gentlemen, next week. Next week, fellas. Happy New Year, boys. Happy New Year.