Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a British Muslim of Pakistani origin who is a writer, activist, journalist, and author. He is also the founder of Quilliam, a counter-extremism organization that has successfully sued the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) for falsely listing him as an anti-Muslim extremist. The SPLC has since removed the entire list, but not without paying damages to Ayaan and his supporters. In this episode of the podcast, we talk to him about why he believes he should have been listed as an extremist, and why he thinks it's a good thing that he was listed at all. We also talk about his new book, The Dark Side of Islam, which is out now, and how he got his name on the terror watchlist. And he explains why he's suing the SPLC for the false list and why it doesn't make any sense. This is an [Expert] level episode, which means some parts of the conversation may not make sense unless you ve actually read the book. So if you haven't read it, don t listen to it. If you haven t read it yet, then you're not listening to this episode, you're in for a real treat. And if you have not yet, you won't want to miss it! it's going to be a good one. You can get a copy of the book on Amazon Prime or wherever else you re listening to the podcast. It's free to buy it, so you can read it on your favourite streaming platform. You won't have to watch it on any other platform where you re not allowed to do so. It's also get access to the full version of the full book on amazon or watch it anywhere else. Just pay the ad-free version of it, and it'll cost less than $99.99, and you'll get 20% off your first month, plus free shipping, plus shipping is included in the price of the ad is free, plus a 20% discount, plus I'll be getting a free copy of The Dark Lord's ad on Audible and Vayner, too. plus shipping + shipping is also gets you an extra $99, plus they'll get a discount on the ad on Prime Minister's book, plus an additional $5, plus she'll get an ad on the next week's shipping discount, and I'll send you an ad and a free shipping address.
00:00:54.000I, in fact, have an update for everybody, because, you know, we crowdfunded a lot of the early costs for the case against the Southern Party.
00:01:05.000Once upon a time, yours truly, a British Muslim of Pakistani origin.
00:01:11.000Was listed in the United Kingdom on the Thomson Reuters World Check database under a category red terrorism designation, while at the same time being listed across the Atlantic in the United States by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an anti-Muslim extremist.
00:01:31.000So I was both a Muslim terrorist and an anti-Muslim extremist.
00:01:37.000And of course, that speaks to some of the polarization in our times in how irrational this conversation around extremism, Islam, integration, Muslims in the West has become.
00:01:46.000I sued Thomson Reuters World Check, the database.
00:01:51.000It's like HSBC and many, many other banks use this database for background checks on whether clients can have a bank account with them.
00:01:59.000So as a result of, for example, Thomson Reuters and their database, Quilliam, which is a counter-extremism organization I founded 10 years ago, had its bank account shut down in the United States because of the Thomson Reuters World Check database system that HSBC subscribes to.
00:02:15.000Anyway, we sued them, they paid damages, they issued an apology, and they took my name off this terrorism designation list they have on their World Check database.
00:02:26.000Maja, I think maybe you should back up further and just give your short form bio in terms of why would you ever be on a terrorist watch list?
00:02:46.000I've just held a law firm on retainer, Claire Lock, and they were the ones that sued the Rolling Stone magazine for that college rape scandal.
00:03:04.000They are writing to the Southern Poverty Law Centre as we speak.
00:03:08.000I think they've got wind of it, the Southern Poverty Law Centre, as of I think either yesterday or the day before.
00:03:13.000They've removed the entire list that's been up there for two years.
00:03:17.000They've removed the entire list, which also had Ayaan Hirsi Ali on it, and it's no longer available on their website.
00:03:23.000Now, is there logic that if you're a critic of Islam, of radical fundamentalist Islam, that you are somehow or another a racist extremist?
00:03:34.000So that's pretty much what they've said.
00:03:36.000If you criticize Islam, Ayaan, myself, who have come from within the community, who have had that experience, that somehow that makes us anti-Muslim.
00:03:45.000There are a number of logical errors involved in that logical leap.
00:04:27.000It was one of the three main reasons they originally listed and another one was again false.
00:04:33.000They claimed that I had called for the criminalization of the face veil for Muslim women in the West, which wasn't true.
00:04:40.000I had called for a policy to be adopted where in banks and airports where you are not allowed to wear a motorcycle helmet, you also shouldn't be allowed to cover your face in the name of religion.
00:04:50.000Which is very different to calling for the criminalization, per se, of the face veil.
00:04:54.000That's like saying, you're not allowed to wear a motorcycle helmet in a bank, so I believe in the criminalization of motorcycle helmets.
00:05:45.000And their concern, obviously, about extremist hate groups in the U.S. was totally valid.
00:05:53.000And, I mean, it became, I mean, now that we see how morally confused they are, people have been shining a light on them, and they're this bloated organization that's been taking in way too much money, and it suffers from other signs of corruption or conflicts of interest.
00:06:11.000Back in the day, you know, Morris Dees was, you know, bringing the KKK to court and bankrupting their various chapters, and that looked fantastic.
00:06:19.000And now the social justice warrior, moral panic, moral stupidity virus has gotten into their brains, and they can't differentiate someone like Majid from a right-wing Christian neo-Nazi hater of Islam,
00:06:38.000right, or hater of, you know, people from the Middle East.
00:06:48.000I think I'm on it in a far more transitory way.
00:06:50.000But the article that was written about my podcast with Charles Murray by Vox hit the Southern Poverty Law Center Hate Watch page.
00:06:58.000And so there you had articles about neo-Nazi groups, articles about the Austin bomber, and then me and my podcast with Charles Murray.
00:07:07.000I definitely want to talk about that, but I want to give people your background first.
00:07:12.000The reason why you were on the list in the UK in the first place had to do with your actual background.
00:07:18.000So I was born and raised in Essex in the United Kingdom, and I came of age in what I now refer to as the bad old days of racism in the United Kingdom.
00:07:27.000Much has changed since then for the good.
00:07:29.000But in those days, there were serious cases of violent racism that I faced.
00:07:36.000Hammer attacks, machete attacks by actual neo-Nazis.
00:07:40.000This is the irony of this Southern Poverty Law Center listing.
00:07:43.000I've grown up fighting neo-Nazis on the streets and they've been attacking me with hammers and machetes because of the color of my skin.
00:07:49.000And you've got a bunch of white guys in Alabama designating me in the same breath as they would designate these neo-Nazis.
00:07:56.000But that, when I grew up and having that experience, being falsely arrested by Essex police on a number of occasions, profiled while the genocide in Bosnia was unfolding against Muslims in Bosnia, I often say to an American audience when I'm speaking about this, we are now here with you on the West Coast in this beautiful new studio you have.
00:08:16.000And imagine a genocide was unfolding on the East Coast against a group of people with whom you identified.
00:08:22.000And even if it's just on a human level, human beings, but, you know, even within that, a community identification would impact you in a way, for example, if you defined yourself as Jewish and there was a genocide, Against Jews on the other side of this very continent, of this very country, how it would impact you on the West Coast.
00:08:40.000Well, Sarajeva from London, it takes us less time to fly from London to Bosnia than it does from New York to LA. And so it really had a profound impact on Muslims across Europe when that genocide was unfolding, and things were never the same again.
00:08:55.000Of course, ideology had a lot to do with that, but the anger originally came from The genocide.
00:09:00.000So at the age of 16, what with the domestic racism and the situation in Bosnia unfolding as it did, I joined Hezbo Tahrir, which is a non-terrorist, still legal in America and in Britain and across Europe,
00:09:17.000It was the first of the global Islamist organizations that aspired to resurrect the notion of a caliphate, which we've subsequently seen to great damaging effect in the form of ISIS caliphate.
00:09:53.000And that's what they're very, very serious and intent on bringing about.
00:09:56.000And now people, when I say that, believe me, because they've seen the ISIS experiment unfold.
00:10:02.000But I joined a group that sought to do that through non-terroristic means at the age of 16. I ended up on the leadership of that organization in the UK, ended up co-founding that group in Pakistan in 1999, where I left the UK,
00:10:17.000went to Pakistan, was among the first, the vanguard of British Pakistani members that went out there to set the group up.
00:10:24.000There have been about three or four coup plots in Pakistan since, and army officers have been arrested for being members of this group, and many of them still in jail.
00:10:33.000I spent a year in Pakistan, went back While studying for my degree in the University of London, I would fly on Saturdays and Sundays to Copenhagen in Denmark.
00:10:42.000I co-founded the Danish-Pakistani chapter of this group.
00:10:46.000And then the third year of my degree, because I was doing law and Arabic, resulted in me having to go to an Arab country for the language year.
00:10:54.000And so I chose Egypt, and a day before the 9-11 attacks in 2001, I ended up in Egypt.
00:11:00.000I went to Alexandria, enrolled in the University of Alexandria to study for the year of Arabic language, which was the third year of my degree.
00:11:08.000Of course, 9-11 happened, and the climate changed, the security climate changed all over the world, something we didn't know about nor predicted.
00:11:16.000And on the 1st of April 2002, my house in Alexandria was raided by the Egyptian state security.
00:11:27.000I was then driven through the desert into Cairo to the dungeon of the state security headquarters in a building known as Al-Jihaz, which was the main headquarters of Amin al-Dola, the internal state security.
00:11:40.000We were held in the dungeons there for four days and they electrocuted most of the prisoners that they had there, tortured them, interrogated them.
00:11:48.000On the fourth day, I was taken to a prison known as Masra Atora in Cairo, put into solitary confinement for about three and a half months, then charged, eventually sentenced to five years as a political prisoner under the Egyptian emergency law and served my full sentence there in Egypt.
00:12:08.000I eventually left prison in 2006 and returned to the UK. So did Amnesty International get you out at all?
00:12:17.000No, they only took an interest in you.
00:12:21.000Nobody got me out because I had to finish my full prison sentence.
00:12:24.000But what changed me and led me to be the man that sits before you today is, you're right Sam, Amnesty's adoption of me and a few others in the case as prisoners of conscience Amnesty comes along and says,
00:13:03.000So Amnesty adopted us as prisoners of conscience.
00:13:05.000And I was 24 years old at the time, by the way.
00:13:08.000So everything I've just described to you happened to me up until the age of 24 when I was imprisoned.
00:13:11.000And it was the first time in my relatively young life.
00:13:17.000And I had never been defended by any mainstream Pillar of mainstream society in that way before nobody had spoken out for me and that had a real huge kind of emotional impact on my psyche I've said in my autobiography that where the Heart leads the mind can follow and so I was now willing to consider alternatives because of amnesty's work campaigning for me and so I spent the next four years in prison reading I'm re-reading Orwell,
00:13:46.000every one of his books, reading Tolkien, reading classic English literature, studying Islamic theology, really trying to understand the world around me.
00:13:56.000And I spent four years debating and discussing with Pretty much the founders of Egypt's main jihadist organizations who were in jail with me in this same prison, including the assassins of the former president, Anwar Sadat, who had been killed in 1981 because of his peace deal with Israel, and his assassins were in jail with me,
00:14:13.000and they'd been in prison longer than I'd been alive.
00:14:15.000And so they had some collective years of wisdom between them, and most of those jihadist prisoners I was in jail with had, over the course of those years, two decades and more, Change their views and reformed.
00:14:26.000They were still conservative religious Muslims, something which I'm not, and I don't claim to be in my work at the moment.
00:14:33.000But they were still religious Muslims, but they were no longer extremists, and they were no longer what I call Islamists, people that sought to implement their version of Islam over society.
00:14:43.000And so they, in four years of constant debate and discussion with them, people that I knew had more wisdom than me, they've been in jail for longer than I've been alive, My views began slowly changing.
00:14:56.000I read a lot of the books they wrote about changing their own views and why they changed.
00:15:00.000And upon my release, I eventually, a good few months after my release, I had to leave the organization because I no longer believed in an ideology that I was once prepared to die for.
00:15:10.000That is fascinating that the shift came about in jail speaking with assassins.
00:15:18.000You would think that most people think that when someone goes to jail, usually whatever criminality that they have in them is cemented and hardened.
00:15:27.000I don't know why mine is an exceptional case because most people, you're right.
00:15:31.000Whether you look at Said Qutb, who's known as the founding father of modern-day jihadism, He started off like me, a non-terrorist Islamist, but in Egypt's jails.
00:15:40.000In fact, the very jail I was held in, he was tortured, and he ended up becoming the godfather of modern-day terrorism through his book, Milestones, or Ma'alim Fattariq in Arabic.
00:15:50.000And yet, in my case, for whatever reason, I kind of went that bit further to question everything I believed in.
00:16:00.000In most cases, when you torture people in jail, it ends up hardening and ossifying that ideology and people become as angry as, you know, they become the monster that they were seeking to defeat.
00:16:13.000So I left the group in 2007, and by 2008, in January, so I finished my degree.
00:16:18.000I had one year left of my undergraduate degree.
00:16:20.000I graduated, I did my master's at the London School of Economics in Political Theory, and while doing the master's, set up Quilliam.
00:16:28.000And Quilliam, we bill as the world's first counter-extremism organization.
00:16:33.000It was meant to be, we believe it is, bringing us back to the SPLC's allegation, a Muslim response to extremism from people that have lived it, been through it, My co-founders were Islamists themselves who changed like me.
00:16:47.000Muslims, born and raised, come from the community to have a community-based response, a Muslim response to this growing problem of extremism.
00:16:58.000Of course, ISIS emerged since then, only demonstrating why this kind of response was needed.
00:17:02.000And so for the Southern Poverty Law Center to designate somebody with my background, with that trajectory, with somebody who was prepared to die for this cause, and somebody who wanted to Address these problems as a muslim to call for reform for the good of my communities as opposed to against them You know at the end of the day it can only benefit muslim communities if extremism is put back in its box For them to then list someone like me as an anti-muslim extremist It just really does I think shine a light on the true absurdity of the situation we find
00:17:32.000ourselves in absurdity and the lack of Real investigation or backing up their claims with actual facts and information.
00:17:43.000And that brings me to your story with Charles Murray and Vox and Ezra Klein.
00:17:49.000It's the same problem, but not only is it a lack of investigation, but when it gets pointed out, and I forgot the guy's name at the SPLC who was quarterback in this, but...
00:17:58.000It wasn't Morris Dees, but it was someone high up.
00:18:50.000They'll sacrifice any number of individuals to make the political case they want to make.
00:18:57.000They're completely unrepentant when they're shown to get it wrong.
00:19:01.000In your case and in Ayan's case, It's just such a grievous moral lapse because not only is the attack on you illegitimate, it actually raises your security concerns.
00:19:14.000And it becomes a reference point for journalists who are confused.
00:19:23.000It makes you radioactive from the point of view of mainstream journalists because they go to the Southern Poverty Law Center site to figure out who's worth talking to and they see a page where you're listed as an anti-Muslim extremist along with people who bear very little resemblance to you ideologically because there are probably a few people on there who I think we're good to go.
00:20:01.000You know, anyone who would rival your voice on this topic.
00:20:11.000So it's very difficult because I can't fully explain to anybody what it feels like to have lived an entire life from roughly the age of 14 being consumed by this issue of Muslims in the West and this question and originally getting it,
00:20:28.000And then still being consumed by the topic, answering it in a different way, as I now do.
00:20:33.000I can't describe to anybody how much emotionally the toll that it takes to have your whole life, have defined your whole life by trying to answer this question.
00:20:45.000And because you care for it, because this is a question that concerns you.
00:20:50.000When I joined the Islamist group I did, I was wrong and adopted some really nefarious ideas, but did so because I gave a damn and cared for a genocide that I saw unfolding and desperately wanted a solution.
00:21:01.000So even when I became an Islamist, I did so out of care and love and concern for what I believed was my community under attack.
00:21:09.000So to have a bunch of people come along And say that I am anti the very community that I believe, I have fought for all my life, you know, and my life has been consumed and defined by this.
00:21:22.000It really is taking the one thing away from somebody that they have...
00:21:28.000I mean, I went to jail for this thing.
00:21:31.000People have died in front of my eyes from their torture wounds in prison because of this thing.
00:21:35.000To have someone completely ignorant in that way, to bribe me Of being able to claim that I have stood for my community, but by instead saying that I'm anti that community.
00:21:47.000It really does kind of make you feel like crap, Joe.
00:21:53.000The moral panic that you've constantly discussed and the flippant sort of accusations without real...
00:22:01.000Any real, solid, objective reasoning behind calling someone like you or Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who's the victim of female genital mutilation, to say that she's an anti-Muslim, that she's Islamophobic?
00:22:14.000It seems to me, it's almost insane, but it seems to me to be prevalent.
00:22:20.000This is something that is a common sentiment today that I don't recall ever seeing anything like this one or two decades ago.
00:22:30.000You might have a better sense than I do, but it's become increasingly salient to me just because I've been doing this work for better or worse and colliding with these people more and more.
00:27:11.000And I didn't know it at the time, but he felt unnaturally constrained by the format of the debate.
00:27:15.000He had to argue that Islam is a religion of peace.
00:27:18.000And some of the moves he made there I thought were dishonest.
00:27:21.000And so I said, Majid, I remember this more or less verbatim because we talked about it and we've since transcribed it into a book.
00:27:33.000I said, Majid, you know, everyone in this room recognizes that you have the hardest job in the world, and we're all very glad that you're doing it.
00:27:41.000You have to somehow convince the next generation of Muslims that Islam really is a religion of peace, and that jihad is just an inner spiritual struggle, and that martyrs don't get 72 virgins in paradise and all the rest.
00:27:56.000And so my question for you is, is this...
00:27:59.000Do you really believe that this is the case now?
00:28:03.000Or do you think that pretending that it is the case is the method by which you'll make it the case?
00:28:09.000If you just pretend long enough and hard enough, it'll become so.
00:28:13.000And the actual line here was, and can you just be honest with us in the privacy of this room?
00:28:17.000My final sentence was, we're not televised now.
00:29:09.000The reason I bring this up is that I was one of those guys that didn't want to entertain a conversation with Sam based upon the defensiveness when it came to this topic and and I think that actually it's important to say that to people that because you asked him a question about the Charles Murray situation a lot of people rather than actually wanting to engage with someone on the substance of their ideas I think in the climate we're in today,
00:29:33.000they're engaging with people based upon their feelings.
00:29:36.000And those feelings are valid, of course.
00:29:38.000Everyone has the right to their feelings.
00:29:39.000But we've got to try as hard as we can to detach those feelings.
00:29:43.000Because that's clearly not what the principle of charity means.
00:29:46.000You lend the person that you're speaking to the best possible interpretation of what they're saying and allow them to clarify what they mean as opposed to you putting into their mouths what they mean and telling them what they mean.
00:29:58.000I learned that, you know, because then two years later, he reaches out to me and he says, I think we can try again.
00:30:04.000You know, are you willing to have a conversation with me?
00:30:06.000And I hadn't originally remembered it was the same guy.
00:30:22.000Published by Harvard University Press.
00:30:23.000We had this conversation that became a book that's been made into a film, which I think any couple of weeks now we hear some news on that.
00:30:29.000Yeah, I don't know when that's coming up.
00:30:30.000So we did a lecture tour of Australia, and the people who organized that made a documentary that we...
00:30:37.000But therein lies this lesson to your question, and that is that I am somebody that didn't engage with him on the substance of his question, but actually...
00:30:46.000Fired a misfire, an emotional misfire on what was really questioning his motives for asking the question rather than actually addressing the points he was making.
00:30:57.000And I think that because I didn't remember who he was, I then started the conversation anew.
00:31:04.000Without the memory of my original judgment on him.
00:31:06.000And the conversation went really well.
00:31:08.000So we've got to somehow be able to divorce ourselves from that background.
00:31:23.000Unfortunately, this example of a kind of a signal success has caused me to, in the end, kind of misspend a lot of energy just assuming that I can do this again.
00:31:45.000No, I'm still on Twitter, but I will, based on this recent episode, I will use it differently.
00:31:50.000I am fascinated by people and their struggles with social media, with like detaching from it, reattaching from it, getting addicted to it.
00:32:00.000I mean, I know so many people that will look at their Twitter at like one o'clock in the morning before they go to bed and something pisses them off and then they can't sleep.
00:33:55.000Yeah, well, the truth is I can't even see what – I didn't look at what Greenwald had done.
00:34:00.000He was circulating somebody's video about me, how I'm – I think I'm a racist in that video.
00:34:07.000Rez Aslan blocks me, so I can't even see what – he attacks me by name, but he blocks me, so I can't even see his export.
00:34:13.000But I just saw the aftermath of that, you know, lots of notifications coming to me with both of us tagged.
00:34:21.000And then Ezra published this – I suppose I should back up however painfully to describe what happened here.
00:34:28.000But so I had Charles Murray on my podcast a year ago.
00:34:31.000And Charles Murray is this social scientist who published The Bell Curve back in the 90s, which it was a book about IQ and success in Western societies like our own.
00:35:11.000But now you can start a hedge fund or you can start a software company and we're seeing this real shocking disparity in good fortune, really.
00:35:36.000And the claim about the source of those disparities was by even the standards of the time, but certainly the standards of today, Incredibly tepid, mealy-mouthed, just hand-waving.
00:35:50.000It was not this, you know, here comes the Third Reich declaration of white supremacy.
00:35:56.000It was undoubtedly there are environmental and genetic reasons for this, and we don't understand them.
00:36:04.000It was just like – to think that it's one or the other, we're not in a position to know what the mix is of influences now.
00:36:13.000And that is virtually any honest scientist's take on the matter and certainly today.
00:37:54.000And this idea that you cannot look at statistics, you cannot look at facts.
00:37:58.000And in your conversation with Ezra Klein, that's what I got, is that this is an ideological issue, and that you...
00:38:07.000It's almost like an impossible subject to breach.
00:38:11.000You can't even discuss the fact that certain races demonstrate low IQ and then let's look at what could be the cause of those.
00:38:20.000Even discussing that somehow or another is so inherently racist that it must be ignored or must be silenced and that you must first concentrate on all the various injustices that have been done to those people who have this lower IQ. Yeah.
00:38:33.000Well, let me just take a couple of minutes to close the various doors to hell that are now ajar based on what we've just said.
00:38:40.000So you were on your holiday and you get all these notes.
00:38:43.000So we'll just take a little more context.
00:38:45.000So, yeah, as you said, Charles Murray went to Middlebury College and was deplatformed.
00:38:48.000And he was not only deplatformed, so the usual deplatforming with the students turning their back to the speaker and shouting and not letting anything happen.
00:39:21.000And they're driving out in an SUV that gets – I mean, someone pulls a stop sign out of the sidewalk and it's still got the concrete ball on the end of it and this SUV gets smashed with this concrete-laden stop sign.
00:39:33.000I mean, this is happening at one of the most liberal, privileged colleges on earth.
00:40:03.000And then I saw this and I thought, okay, well, maybe he's the canary in the coal mine or certainly one of the canaries in the coal mine that I had ignored where, as you say, certain topics are considered so...
00:40:14.000Politically fraught that you cannot discuss them no matter what is true.
00:40:18.000There has to be a firewall between your conversation about reality and these sorts of facts.
00:40:28.000So he's been suffering from having transgressed that boundary.
00:40:34.000So I had him on the podcast Being fairly agnostic about his actual social policy commitments and his political concerns and just wanting to talk about the facts insofar as we touched them lightly.
00:40:52.000I mean, I had zero interest in intelligence as measured by IQ, although it's an interesting subject, but I hadn't spent much time focused on that.
00:41:02.000And I had truly zero interest in establishing differences between populations with respect to intelligence or anything else.
00:41:13.000I see the fact that the more we understand ourselves, genetically and environmentally, If we go looking, or even if we're not looking, we will discover differences between groups.
00:41:24.000And the endgame for us as a species is not to deny that those differences exist or could possibly exist.
00:41:58.000And whatever diversity of talents there is statistically in various populations, we want societies that simply don't care politically about that.
00:42:11.000I mean, it's just not what – it's – Our political tolerance of one another and support of one another is not predicated on denying individual differences or even statistical differences across groups.
00:42:27.000It can't be because we know that there are people walking around like...
00:42:32.000You know, Elon Musk, who gets out of bed every morning and does the work of like 4,000 people, right?
00:42:38.000And people who just are struggling to work at Starbucks and hold down a job.
00:42:43.000And our political system, I mean, we don't say one person is more valuable politically.
00:42:51.000And socially than another, even though one person is capable of doing massive things that most other people aren't.
00:42:59.000It's, you know, when it comes time to write laws and create institutions that support human flourishing, we have to engineer tides that raise all the boats.
00:43:11.000And so, you know, they're legitimate Debates about the social policies that will do that.
00:43:17.000And there are legitimate debates about facts.
00:43:19.000So we can debate scientific fact and the results of psychometric testing or behavioral genetics that are relevant to this question of intelligence.
00:43:31.000And we can have a good faith debate about the data.
00:43:33.000And then we can have a good faith debate about social policy that should follow from the data.
00:43:37.000But what's happening on the left now is at either of those Tiers of conversation.
00:43:45.000There are just straight up allegations of racism that hit you the moment you touch certain facts.
00:43:53.000Can I say that what he's just summarized there, what I've heard, sounds to me as being more humane than the implications of the argument that the left who are opposing what Sam has just said are.
00:44:07.000Because if you think about it, the implications of their argument would be they want to deny the facts because they're scared that those facts would, from which there would be derived a policy that would reflect those facts.
00:44:22.000In other words, in their minds, they are marrying those two.
00:44:25.000They are marrying the notion that if in statistical observance there are variances in IQs between groups, in their minds that means the policy should follow from that.
00:44:36.000So, it's why they're resisting what he's saying, whereas what he's saying is there is no connection between what the policy should be and what the facts may be, because the kind of world we want to live in should aspire to equality, regardless of what the science is saying, because one is policy and one is science.
00:44:52.000I freely agree with you on that, but I don't think that's necessarily exactly what they're saying.
00:44:56.000I think what they're saying and what they're doing is they almost feel so guilty that any discussion whatsoever about race can't be held unless you repeatedly bring up all the instances of racism and suppression and discrimination that that group has suffered from.
00:45:13.000It doesn't exist as a statistic island.
00:45:17.000You have to bring everything in together.
00:45:20.000If you don't do that, that's where their protest comes from.
00:45:23.000And I think that was one of the things that I got from your conversation with Ezra Klein.
00:45:26.000He wasn't willing to just discuss what's the implication of these issues and completely dismiss this fact that Asian people score far better.
00:45:36.000It's almost as if they fear that by conceding on the data, It's almost as if they fear that the implication must necessarily follow that the policy will also be supremacist in that way.
00:45:49.000I honestly think that what we talked about before is a big part of it.
00:45:52.000It's ideological idea sport and that they're just volleying back.
00:45:56.000I don't think they're willing to take...
00:45:58.000I think one of the real strengths of character that you...
00:46:01.000Demonstrate in a debate or any discussion of facts is when uncomfortable truths rear their ugly head that are counter to your personal position.
00:46:10.000You have to be able to go, you got a really good point.
00:46:31.000I got this rallying back and forth of ideas rather than two human beings not digging their heels into the sand just trying to look at the ideas and look at the statistics and look at these studies for what they are.
00:46:45.000And look at Charles Murray and what he's gone through.
00:46:48.000Should we be able to examine these statistical anomalies?
00:46:51.000Should we be able to examine athletic superiority?
00:46:54.000Should we be able to examine superiority that Asians show in mathematics and a lot of the sciences?
00:47:11.000I certainly understand people's fear that anyone who would go looking for racial difference is very likely motivated by something unethical or unsavory.
00:47:22.000So you could imagine white supremacists being...
00:47:28.000We're super enamored of the possibility that these data exist.
00:48:15.000There's this massive bias that basically we're all working with a blank slate genetically, and therefore any difference you see among people is a matter of environment.
00:48:29.000And so then you have people who have privileged environments and people who have environments where they're massively under-resourced, And so therefore, any different representation at the higher echelons of success and achievement and power in our society,
00:48:51.000if there's 13% African Americans in the U.S., if you look at the top doctors in hospitals or the top academics or the...
00:49:01.000You know, the Oscar winners or wherever you want to look for achievement.
00:49:06.000If there are less than 13% African Americans in any one of those bins, that has to be the result of racism or systemic racism.
00:49:17.000That is the leftward bias at this moment.
00:49:20.000And so it is with Jews for anti-Semitism.
00:49:24.000There should be an equal representation of women, computer software engineers at Google.
00:49:32.000And any lack, any disparity there must be the result of either just inequitable resources for, you know, kids in schools or somewhere along the way, or kind of a selection pressure from the top that,
00:49:49.000you know, we don't like women at Google or blacks at the Oscars.
00:49:55.000And so that's the—so Murray's concern is if you believe that— And, you know, this is not exactly what he said, but this is what I believe he thinks, but I could be putting some words into his mouth here.
00:50:08.000But this is certainly what many other people on his side of the debate think.
00:50:11.000If you believe that, you will consistently find racial bias and anti-Semitism and misogyny where it doesn't exist, right?
00:50:20.000So, like, if you go to a hospital, and this is a real problem, like, you know, the academic departments in the medical schools, the best medical schools, are under massive pressure To find real diversity in representation at the highest level.
00:50:36.000You need to find a head of cardiology who's black, right?
00:50:41.000And the fact that you haven't done that is a sign that there's a problem with you and your organization and your process of hiring.
00:50:51.000Now, if it's just the case, for whatever reason, that there are not many candidates, likely of less than 13% for that field, or to take the James DeBoer memo at Google, right?
00:51:03.000If it just is the case that women, forget about this, this is beyond aptitude.
00:51:08.000If it's the case that women, for whatever reason, genetic or environmental, are less interested in being software engineers, on average, than men are, Then having 20% women coding software at Google is not Google's problem.
00:51:26.000It's just the fact that this is what the population interests are.
00:51:55.000That would be a miracle if that were the case.
00:51:56.000So at this stage, allow me to remind everybody, that was Sam summarizing what he thinks Charles Murray was saying as opposed to Sam summarizing his...
00:52:04.000No, but that final point is just a true point.
00:52:07.000There are genes, almost everything we care about.
00:52:21.000It's your summary of his position in relationship to this fight against it.
00:52:28.000The thing that I would add and the thing where there's some daylight between the two of me and him on my podcast is This is so toxic to be trafficking in population differences with respect to IQ. And it's not absolutely clear what social policies turn on really nailing down these differences.
00:52:55.000So you could go to take an even more toxic example perhaps.
00:52:59.000It's like you could decide the Roma in Europe, the gypsies.
00:53:04.000This is like a very isolated, beleaguered community.
00:54:24.000There's this sense that the only way to move forward toward equality is to lie about what is scientifically plausible and demonize anyone who won't lie with you.
00:54:42.000I mean, relatively speaking, this hard-nosed stance from the left of the equality of outcome and the only reason why there wouldn't be 50% women or 50% black or 50% any—you just pick any marginalized group.
00:54:55.000The only reason why it wouldn't be even across the board with all other races is because of discrimination.
00:55:02.000There were moments that were fairly well publicized.
00:55:05.000I forget when Larry Summers got fired from Harvard.
00:55:08.000Larry Summers was the president of Harvard and he's a famous economist.
00:55:13.000And he gave a speech for which he was fired.
00:55:16.000There might be a little more color as to why he was fired.
00:55:19.000I mean, he was more fired because once the wheels started to come off, he had alienated enough people that he didn't have friends to kind of prop him up.
00:55:27.000But the thing that pulled the wheels off was that he gave a speech and he said, we know there are differences in the bell curves that describe mathematical aptitude between men and women.
00:55:41.000And this explains why there are many more top-flight male mathematicians and engineers than women.
00:57:07.000And this was like, I want to say it was in the late 70s or the 80s.
00:57:11.000And other than that, there's been a few women that have done well in tournaments, but when they come to major league professional pool tournaments, they're almost always won by men.
00:57:20.000And when I say almost, I mean like 99.9%.
00:57:25.000Commonwealth Games have been happening just over the last couple of weeks, and there was a male to female transgendered athlete in the weightlifting category who participated in the women's competition.
00:57:39.000And the Commonwealth Games, at the time of her joining, hadn't yet put down a rule as to testosterone levels in the females competing.
00:57:49.000And so this male to female transgendered person qualified in the female games and was, as you'd expect, winning in all of the games and was the frontrunner and destined to win the competition as a male to female transgendered person.
00:58:05.000And the only reason, and it would have led to a huge crisis in the Commonwealth Games because...
00:58:10.000There was some resistance to this notion.
00:58:13.000And of course, the questions that arise, is this fair?
00:58:15.000Men are born naturally with higher levels of testosterone, for example.
00:58:19.000The only reason it didn't lead to crunch time, and that was the huge scandal of her winning, is that she injured herself in the competition.
00:58:27.000And by sheer accident, Yeah, I saw that.
00:58:29.000Well, I can expand on that a little bit because I've actually gone through this extensively because there was a woman who used to be a man who was competing in mixed martial arts against women and just beating the shit out of them.
00:58:40.000And I was saying that this is a mistake.
00:58:43.000And that you're looking at whether someone should be legally able to identify as a woman, portray themselves as a woman.
00:59:07.000I understand there's a giant difference between the amount of power that a man and a woman can generate.
00:59:12.000And if you're telling me that a guy living 30 years of his life as a man, that's essentially like a woman being on steroids for 30 years, then getting off and then having regular women being forced to compete with her and trying to pretend this is a level playing field.
00:59:48.000Came down on me harder than anything that I've ever stood up for in my life.
00:59:52.000Never in my life did I think there was going to be a situation where I said, hey, I don't think a guy should be able to get his penis removed and beat the shit out of women.
00:59:58.000And then people are like, you're out of line.
01:01:13.000Beat the fuck out of the other person in front of you.
01:01:15.000So anything that would give you an advantage in beating the fuck out of that person should be really looked at very carefully and not thrown through the lens of this progressive ideological filter that we're going through right now.
01:01:57.000Like, what in the fuck are we doing here?
01:01:59.000So, I think, as you said earlier, she is a woman, but for the purposes of competition against other women, you know, legally she's a woman at that stage, if she goes through that identity transition.
01:02:10.000But I think we have to recognize, and I think even many traditional feminists are making this point, much to the anger of The trans community they're saying hold on you what you're doing in this way is actually we fought so hard and so long For these female spaces where we have a space of our own and now people that used to be men are coming into those spaces is actually quite literally Beating the crap out of us.
01:03:03.000Big mixed martial arts publications, Ramona Krutzek, I believe is her name.
01:03:07.000She's saying, not only does it, it actually, doing this transition, like from male to female, you're putting estrogen into the system.
01:03:18.000So the bone density change that would ordinarily take place if you remove someone's testicles and stop the production of testosterone, Estrogen preserves bone density.
01:03:28.000So you're actually retaining the male bone density.
01:03:38.000The Olympics are very ideologically based.
01:03:40.000There's not a whole lot of science to this transition thing of allowing male to female athletes to compete in the Olympics.
01:03:48.000There's an extreme amount of corruption in the Olympics as it is with the IOC being in bed with WADA, the World Anti-Doping Agency, and the way they handle this Russian scandal.
01:03:58.000I mean, this Russian scandal that was highlighted in that fantastic documentary, Icarus.
01:04:47.000I mean, it was just so many, not only that, they took my words out of context, they quoted all these different gender transition doctors saying that there's no science behind this and the science behind it being totally fair and totally equal.
01:06:08.000That way around, if it's female to male transition, somebody that used to be a woman That transitions to a man and wants to compete with the men, they don't have an advantage, do they?
01:06:34.000There's also a woman named Germaine Durandamy, who's a world-class mixed martial artist, who's a multiple-time world Muay Thai champion, who fought a man and knocked him out.
01:06:43.000She fought a real man and KO'd him with a straight right.
01:06:46.000It is possible for them to win if their skill level is so far superior that it overcomes the inherent strength advantages.
01:06:54.000But a woman-to-male transition would be at a severe disadvantage against a natural male.
01:06:59.000So in that Texas case, they clearly have it wrong.
01:07:03.000They should allow him to compete with the men.
01:07:06.000And would you be, whereas I can, I think all three of us probably instinctively would resist the notion that a male to female athlete competes with other females because they'd have an advantage.
01:07:59.000The difference lies in just massive advantages.
01:08:03.000There's a massive advantage in transitioning from male to female.
01:08:06.000Female to male, here's the other problem.
01:08:08.000Female to male, you have to take testosterone.
01:08:10.000You can't legally take testosterone and compete.
01:08:13.000It's been a giant issue in mixed martial arts because for the longest time there was a loophole.
01:08:18.000And the loophole was testosterone therapy.
01:08:20.000And they were allowing testosterone replacement therapy for male athletes that were either older or it was a...
01:08:29.000A symptom of having pituitary gland damage, which comes from head trauma, which means really essentially your career should be over.
01:08:37.000Your body's not producing hormones correctly.
01:08:39.000And that's a very common issue with people that have been in war, people that have been blown up by IEDs, people that have been hit a lot, even soccer players a lot of times show diminished levels of testosterone and growth hormone because of pituitary gland damage.
01:09:47.000But it's, I mean, it's not, I mean, to say it, to describe it that way, putting it on your social face, it actually changes your psychology.
01:09:53.000I mean, like, if you have to drop your problem in order to be a normal, sane person with people you don't know all that well, you're actually a happier, more normal person.
01:10:01.000If it had just been me and my wife at dinner while I'm dealing with this blow-up, it just, you know, it just never would have, the cloud wouldn't have left.
01:10:07.000So, anyway, I... So I was trying not to engage, and so I didn't want to have to write anything new to deal with this – what I viewed as just an egregious attack on my intellectual and moral integrity.
01:10:25.000And so when I saw this article from Klein – I realized I had this email exchange with him at the end of which I said, listen, if you continue to slander me, this had been like a year previously.
01:10:42.000So I said at the end of this exchange, if you continue to slander me and if you misrepresent the reasons why we didn't do a podcast because we had talked publicly about… I think?
01:11:17.000He had declined to publish a far more mainstream opinion defending me and Murray in Vox.
01:11:23.000It was truly slanderous and misleading, everything he's published on this topic.
01:11:29.000And he has a huge platform by which to do it.
01:11:38.000But once you see how the sausage gets made on many of these things, once you're the news item, you can see that there's very little journalistic scruple in the background there.
01:11:50.000I mean, I didn't want to have to spend my time on vacation writing a retort to this thing, but I felt like I had to respond.
01:12:19.000And of course, the rest of the world didn't know you're actually meant to be on vacation right now.
01:12:23.000And so there's no context to them as to why you made this decision or that decision.
01:12:27.000But worse still, I massively underestimated the amount of work even my own fans would have to do to understand why I was so angry in that email exchange.
01:12:37.000So I came off like the angry bastard in the email exchange.
01:13:09.000So I published this thing not realizing...
01:13:12.000I mean it was definitely a mistake to publish the email exchange just pragmatically.
01:13:17.000I don't think it was unethical because I told him I was going to do it in advance if he kept it up.
01:13:25.000It was just – it was totally counterproductive because it was – Because he was far more reasonable in the email exchange than the original article.
01:13:33.000Well, it seems like you've got to do a lot of work to understand.
01:13:53.000It was basically as bad as I was expecting, and I feel that I met the person who I thought I was dealing with in the email exchange.
01:14:02.000And he was fundamentally unresponsive to any of my points.
01:14:06.000And as you say, Joe, just trying to score political points toward his audience.
01:14:13.000And the thing is, there are many asymmetries here.
01:14:18.000One crucial one is that he has an audience that doesn't care about whether or not he's responsive to the thing that his opponent or interlocutor just said.
01:14:31.000They're not tracking it by that metric.
01:14:33.000They're tracking it by, are you making the political points that are massaging that outraged part of our brains?
01:14:41.000Like, do you have your hands on our amygdala, and are you pushing the right buttons?
01:14:47.000And so he's talking about racism and just white privilege.
01:15:11.000That cares massively about following the logic of a conversation.
01:15:16.000If somebody makes a point that is even close to being good in response to me, my audience is like, okay, Sam, what the fuck are you going to say to that?
01:15:26.000And if I drop that ball, I lose massive points, right?
01:15:30.000Whereas I'm often finding myself in conversation with people Who don't have to care about those kinds of audiences.
01:15:35.000I mean, that was the one I had with this Omar Aziz, titled The Best Podcast Ever.
01:15:41.000I mean, he knows his audience does not care about him honestly representing, in this case, the doctrine of Islam.
01:16:16.000But listen, Joe, I could see this is why it's so frustrating because I have pretty much memorized inside out, back to front, the Islamist ideological narrative.
01:16:24.000And I could sit here right now and play that game with you, that game of ping pong, without conceding anything.
01:16:32.000I feel our conversation went really well because it was stripped away from all of that bullshit and we had a genuine conversation.
01:16:39.000It's still to this day very easy for me to play the tune of The Islamist and score those points, especially because some of what I've been through.
01:16:50.000And score those points and just get locked in a...
01:16:53.000Essentially it's ego, but it's not an intellectual conversation.
01:16:57.000It's a game of, you know, who is basically checking the right boxes in their own little confirmation bias to their own audience.
01:17:06.000That doesn't interest me, but it's frustrating.
01:17:09.000You're also the best person on the other side of that conversation now.
01:17:12.000So there's a series of videos on YouTube.
01:17:15.000I think it's called Merry Christmas, Mr. Islamist.
01:17:20.000Him pitted against people who are playing this game, Islamists and jihadists of various sorts.
01:17:28.000Majid is meeting them on interview shows, mostly in the UK, where they're pretending to be more benign than they are, and Majid is finding the question that sort of pulls back the mask on the theocrat, and it's hilarious.
01:17:43.000That one video that you published on your blog, I've sent to dozens of my friends.
01:17:49.000That one video where there's this guy and he's addressing this enormous group of people and he's talking about, is this radical Islam or is this Islam?
01:17:56.000That was, I think, a conference in Norway that was just, I mean, these are just straight up Islamists and jihadists addressing a crowd of...
01:18:05.000Seemingly mainstream Muslims in Norway, but by a show of hands, are we extremists if we think apostates should be killed?
01:18:22.000Is this Islam or is this radical Islam?
01:18:25.000Talking of ideology blinkering statistical data on the subject of homosexuality, so in the United Kingdom a poll was done last year asking, so there have been two polls gauging public Muslim attitudes towards gays.
01:18:39.000The first asked how many Muslims in the UK find homosexuality morally acceptable.
01:18:45.000And zero percent, this is by the way by a professional polling company, it's not just some student that's devised a poll on Twitter.
01:18:53.000A professional polling company found that zero percent of British Muslims responded to a poll saying that they found homosexuality morally acceptable.
01:19:01.000And then a year later, which is now last year, another poll was conducted.
01:19:06.000And that was an ICM poll asking how many British Muslims believe that homosexuality should be criminalised or remain legal.
01:19:17.000And I think it was roughly 52%, if my memory serves incorrectly, of British Muslims said that they would wish for homosexuality to be criminalised.
01:19:26.000And of course, what does criminalisation of homosexuality mean under Sharia and traditional Islamic jurisprudence?
01:19:49.000Unfortunately, in my dialogue with Sam, we talk about this, that there are the Islamists who actively want to take over a country and enforce their version of Islam.
01:19:57.000Then there's, underneath that, there's a A softer landing of very very conservative stroke fundamentalist attitudes that unfortunately have become widespread and here is an example of it that is being gauged by scientific polling methodology that tells us there's a problem and unfortunately if one were to speak in this way Especially in Europe.
01:20:18.000One is received by my own political tribe, and that's liberals, center-left and further.
01:20:25.000One is met with denial and called a bigot simply for relaying these facts.
01:20:32.000A quarter of British Muslims, when asked about the massacre at the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris, a quarter of So this is what led you?
01:20:50.000To be put on the southern poverty laws.
01:20:56.000And what it does for me is to say, this is why it's so important to address these issues, to have these conversations, to try and empower those Muslim voices that are seeking to challenge these sorts of attitudes and carve out a space.
01:21:11.000If one can do that with Catholicism in Europe and go through a Reformation and end up with an Enlightenment and end up with secularism in the West, what I often say is American liberals are very happy challenging their own Bible Belt and yet we have a Quran Belt within our communities and if I'm attempting to replicate The equivalent of challenging the Bible Belt within Muslim communities,
01:22:46.000And that should tell you something that we've got the worst terrorist group educated.
01:22:50.000I mean, the thing is university graduate like every variable that the far left wants to marshal to explain this phenomenon.
01:22:57.000Lack of educational opportunity, lack of economic opportunity, lack of social integration, mental illness.
01:23:03.000You can find people who had massive opportunity.
01:23:08.000You weren't a jihadist, but you were an Islamist.
01:23:11.000You're a person who can basically play any game he wants.
01:23:16.000He's somebody who can run for political office.
01:23:20.000He hasn't been elected yet, but he should be.
01:23:24.000The quarterback of the football team in this context is a candidate for recruitment to ISIS. Think of it this way.
01:23:33.000We've got the worst terrorist group in our lifetime, one can reasonably say, is ISIS. The worst terrorist group, at least in living memory, is ISIS. And the worst cell in ISIS, the execution cell, came from a fully developed I think we're
01:25:05.000So as I'm looking at you now, imagine she's the interviewer and she's asking me questions and I'm looking in this direction, in your direction.
01:25:15.000It was bad NLP. Yeah, it's so intense.
01:25:23.000It's such a, like, as you say, radioactive subject, too.
01:25:27.000It's just fascinating to watch white liberal progressives just scamper away from this.
01:25:33.000Well, but the flip side of the ISIS thing has been the refugee crisis, which has made, which has really empowered both extremes, frankly, the far left and the far right.
01:25:47.000Obviously, with the wind in their sails, worrying about this influx of people from the Middle East and beyond North Africa and just the change of culture in their societies.
01:26:00.000And a lot of these concerns are plausible, but because only the far right and a few other decent people like Douglas Murray will talk about the plausible concerns.
01:26:13.000So you just have the far-right populist politics being enabled, and then you have this delusional open borders left that won't talk about the dynamics of the problem.
01:26:25.000I told Sam about this, but it bears repeating.
01:26:28.000I was having a conversation with someone as an executive at YouTube and I asked them why.
01:26:32.000Someone got a community guideline strike on their account because they posted up a video on their playlist that they enjoyed of Sam Harris and Douglas Murray engaged in a conversation.
01:26:43.000I go, why would that get you a community guideline strike?
01:26:46.000And this woman said, because it's hate speech.
01:26:49.000I got a problem with the last name Murray apparently.
01:26:51.000Charles Murray and Douglas Murray causing me problems.
01:26:53.000Is this somebody who worked at YouTube?
01:26:54.000Yes, she was a big executive at YouTube.
01:27:44.000Because social media is essentially a Californian invention, right?
01:27:49.000And we're in the home state of where most of this came from.
01:27:52.000It's got a very Californian-based worldview, which cares a lot about white supremacy and doesn't care about many other forms of bigotry that exist out there in the rest of the world, which, by the way, is the majority of the world.
01:28:03.000So on Twitter right now, of course, there's Milo Yiannopoulos has been banned.
01:28:09.000Tommy Robinson has been banned, as in taken off.
01:28:30.000Well, so, Twitter is a private company.
01:28:32.000It can choose to remove whoever it wants for whatever reason, and we will judge it for its inconsistencies.
01:28:35.000But he was ostensibly removed for hate speech, as was Milo Yiannopoulos.
01:28:39.000Now, the point being that still, till this day, and before people misquote me and completely say that I'm now defending hate speech and their right to speak with hateful views on Twitter, this is my actual point, that till this day,
01:28:56.000Did you know that Hezbollah, which is a known and recognized terrorist organization, so forget hate speech for a moment, a terrorist organization that believes in actually killing civilians, and Hamas, a known and recognized terrorist organization that believes in bombing babies on buses as a form of resistance,
01:29:28.000The dude sitting in California, in wherever, who is monitoring this stuff, and it's probably more than one person, they don't give a shit that there's some brown person In the Gaza Strip that believes it's okay to kill Jewish babies.
01:29:42.000They don't give a shit because it's a brown person saying it in the name of Islam.
01:29:47.000What they care about is a non-violent yet says stupid things guy, because he's white, called Tommy Robinson in England or Milo Yiannapolis.
01:29:55.000Saying stuff that they, obviously that touches their sensitivities.
01:29:59.000And it's so intellectually lazy to flag that immediately and to bar it from social media because you're comfortable with it.
01:30:06.000It doesn't take any effort to recognize it.
01:30:08.000You don't have to invest in studying this stuff to know what white supremacy is.
01:30:12.000It takes a bit of effort to study brown people's ideas that you're unfamiliar with and recognize here's a terrorist organization that's freely operating on social media.
01:30:23.000I've actually pulled up their handles.
01:30:25.000I think one of the concerns that Twitter has, and I think this is a valid concern, is that when you have people that are saying hateful things and you have people that are saying whether it's white supremacy or whatever, even if it's stupid, the problem is there's a rallying cry of trolls that follow behind them and it builds up momentum and it gets pretty stunning.
01:30:44.000And that was what was happening with Milo.
01:30:46.000And by silencing Milo off Twitter, they have essentially removed him from the public discourse.
01:31:00.000Everything you've just said, by the way, I agree with.
01:31:02.000And multiply that for groups that have infrastructure in multiple countries with actual organizational hierarchies and planned means of distributing their ideas across entire populations, physically fighting in wars right now, such as Hezbollah in Syria,
01:31:18.000killing Sunni Muslim rebels, you know?
01:31:20.000And so imagine that and the way you're able to rally a mob in Pakistan on blasphemy, as an example.
01:31:26.000All it takes for some person on social media to accuse another person of blasphemy, and they're probably going to get killed the very next day.
01:31:33.000But because these Californian-based social media companies are unaware of the cultural implications of those sorts of organizations and groups, and listed terrorist groups, mind you, there's completely no barring on any of their activity.
01:31:47.000There's also the same thing that you have with YouTube and with a lot of these other social media organizations and companies, is they don't have to respond or give you any reasons.
01:31:58.000They can say it violates our terms, but what are those terms?
01:32:46.000Look, I mean, these are private companies.
01:32:48.000They've got the right to choose whatever policy...
01:32:50.000The only thing I would expect from a private company is show a consistent policy towards these things.
01:32:55.000If you don't like hate speech, then ban brown people who are also advocating more than just the hate speech, but actually preaching violent terrorism.
01:33:12.000You can get ideas out so quickly, but these hubs of information, like where the information gets distributed, are...
01:33:21.000They're controlled by people that I don't think ever knew that they were going to have this sort of responsibility.
01:33:27.000I think you're seeing that with Zuckerberg and these trials or the speeches that he's given in front of Congress.
01:33:33.000When you see him on television talking about it, you get the sense that this is a guy that never prepared for this, had no idea this was going to happen, and then all of a sudden, from this simple social media platform that was supposed to be friends sharing photos and just talking about Girls.
01:34:15.000It was a weird way of talking and then people started just writing what they thought and it just became and then became ideology and then it became sharing links and interesting articles is a big part of it.
01:34:29.000To me that's the only good part of it now.
01:34:34.000I've just discovered that And that's most of my attachment to it.
01:34:39.000I genuinely use it as a curated newsfeed because I follow interesting people.
01:34:45.000They tweet interesting stuff and I consume it that way.
01:34:49.000But noticing what's coming back at me in the at mentions, I put something out, you know, a podcast.
01:34:55.000And then I look to see how it's being received on Twitter.
01:34:58.000And I don't tend to do that in other forums.
01:35:01.000I don't really look at Facebook comments much.
01:35:20.000But one thing I found, you can change your settings in Twitter where you screen out people who just have Twitter egg photos, they don't have a real photo.
01:35:31.000You can screen out people who haven't had their email confirmed.
01:35:35.000And I think I just did those two things.
01:36:18.000Well, I just think that, especially now in hindsight, where there are no casualties involved at all, there are only three injuries, I think we had to take a stance that...
01:36:29.000I succeeded where Obama failed in making sure that red line was maintained, that the use of chemical weapons cannot be tolerated, even if it was symbolic, even if it was highly symbolic.
01:36:37.000I think sometimes symbolism is important.
01:36:39.000So I took that stance and it was- Got a lot of love on Twitter?
01:36:44.000Well, yeah, of course, because actually that's against the grain.
01:36:46.000Public opinion at the moment was against the strikes, and I fully acknowledged that when I took the stance.
01:36:50.000But I argued a case, and I set the case out, and both on my Sky News show, I have a show, a co-host on The Pledge, and also on my radio show on LBC, I repeatedly argued for why I think it's important that we don't allow for chemical weapons that they use to become normalized in our world.
01:37:04.000And so it was interesting because I posted the Sky News clip of me sort of talking to camera about my reasons for this.
01:37:11.000And I have this screen grab of the reaction.
01:38:02.000They're actually, no, this is, is that on your, I don't know if that captures that, but they're arguing with each other over whether I'm in their, his camp or his camp.
01:38:31.000The extremes are equally irrational, and the fact that you could be at the epicenter of both of their problems, that you're a covert jihadist and you're an anti-Muslim bigot,
01:38:48.000It seems like there's more conspiracy theories in terms of what's someone's actual motivation for what they're saying now than ever before, too, because it's so easy to express them.
01:38:57.000So someone could say, no, he's far right, or no, you're just trying to support ISIS. This ability to find some nefarious reason for your actions.
01:39:08.000Well, again, it's reducing one's opinion to the lowest base, you know, dodgy motive as opposed to applying the principle of charity.
01:39:17.000Now, I can either sit here and actually think, no, I don't trust this guy, I don't respect him, and therefore I'm going to reduce his opinion to the worst possible interpretation that he could possibly mean and then use that against him.
01:39:30.000What you mean by that because I'm assuming you're a good decent human being in origin and perhaps you mean something that I haven't yet quite grasped and then ask you to clarify your own opinion in your own words and I think it's unfortunate that many of our conversations today in the far left is as guilty of it as the far right and they like to think they're not which is part of that righteousness that blinds them from actually committing this very same injustice they accuse the far right of committing and that is a it's the same bigotry in a mirror image I call it the bigotry of low expectations The low expectations they have that Muslims
01:40:00.000are somehow unable to adhere to common, decent, liberal, secular, democratic values.
01:40:04.000And so it's actually plaguing our conversations today.
01:40:08.000If only we were able to strip away our ideological baggage in entering conversations and allow for, you know, that honest, honest conversation.
01:40:16.000But, of course, we say that and then you try to replicate our success on a number of occasions and found yourself incredibly frustrated.
01:40:38.000I mean, this is the most fantastic time for the distribution of information.
01:40:42.000There's never been a time where it's so easy to distribute information in human history.
01:40:46.000It's really crazy, but I don't think we know what to do with it.
01:40:48.000And I think that when you deal with people who have such rigid ideologies and they find this incredibly easy ability to express these ideologies, there's just so much clashing.
01:40:58.000There's just so much noise and nonsense.
01:41:01.000And when someone says something that they know that they don't have to back up with facts because they know that their people who are on their position will support it.
01:41:10.000You say the right keywords, you know, right privilege, whatever you want to say, and then boom...
01:41:15.000You're gonna get a whole slew of people like those two people in your mentions battling it out with each other.
01:41:21.000You're just like kind of picking fights and starting these little fires and letting other people go to war.
01:41:26.000You know what I think we've done and it's again the advent of social media is that we I was speaking with my friend Mark about this and we've democratized truth and when you democratize truth in that way the earlier The thing you mentioned about sports, combat sports and your expertise in that field.
01:41:42.000If I had come back at you and spoke at you with as much authority as you claim in your expertise with having absolutely no history in that expertise whatsoever and assumed that I have as equal right to An unresearched claim to truth,
01:41:59.000in my opinion, as you do, and who has a lifetime of experience in that field.
01:42:05.000Therein lies a problem, that I am arrogating to myself this notion, this kind of belief that my opinion, though of course I have an equally legal right to express it, but it doesn't mean it carries the same weight as your opinion when it comes to combat sports, and it shouldn't.
01:42:19.000Unfortunately, I think what's happened with the advent of...
01:42:22.000And worse still, you could add, you're expressing that opinion as a person of color, as a Pakistani.
01:42:37.000And so the problem with that is when you relativize truth in that way, then I can speak to you on an equal footing about combat sports, which only a mad person who hasn't had that history in combat sport would think, would arrogate to themselves the right to do so.
01:42:49.000But social media, I think, has allowed for that to happen.
01:42:52.000I gave a TED Talk in about, I think it was roughly 2011, about the dangers of this happening and social media dividing us all.
01:42:59.000But I'd say now that if I were to pitch that TED Talk today, I did it at TED Global.
01:43:05.000If I were to pitch that TED Talk today, it wouldn't be accepted because it's not something new now.
01:43:10.000It's now people know how social media has divided us.
01:43:14.000It was new and innovative enough as an idea for TED Global to say, we want you to speak about this, and it's still up online.
01:43:20.000But if people watched it today, they think, how on earth did that become a TED Talk?
01:43:23.000Because there was this heady day back in, you know, five, six, seven years ago, this kind of hope-filled moment where everyone thought Google, Facebook, and Twitter, and generally social media and also tech companies were like the good guys, that these companies weren't actually companies,
01:43:40.000that they were on our side against the corporate world.
01:43:43.000And it turns out, I think we've just hit this moment.
01:43:46.000I think we've culturally come to this moment now where, you know, I think symbolized by his testimony at Congress, that that honeymoon period is over.
01:43:54.000People now view him, I think, quite firmly and squarely as a CEO of a very rich company, as opposed to A guy in my club that I'm friends with who's on my side against the world.
01:44:07.000Google used to have that slogan, don't do evil.
01:44:14.000The problem is the incentives are all wrong.
01:44:17.000Actually, I was just at TED. To give you a sense of how far the rot has spread here, I found myself at a dinner sitting next to a neuroscientist Who thought that, and this Ezra Klein thing followed me around to TED,
01:44:32.000because many people have listened to the podcast, and He thought Charles Murray should have been physically attacked at Middlebury.
01:44:40.000This is a neuroscientist, academic, impeccable person otherwise.
01:44:47.000I think he was, after we wound up having a fight at dinner over it, I think he was somewhat chagrined by having expressed that opinion.
01:44:54.000But, I mean, that's how emotionally hijacked people are by this issue.
01:45:24.000Those are two things that have been sort of stopped.
01:45:27.000That free speech is fine as long as you're not saying speech that I disagree with.
01:45:31.000And non-violence, sure, unless we need to use violence.
01:45:35.000Which is like, and the people that are saying it, like if you watch these Antifa people, like Jesus Christ, the most incompetent, violent people you've ever seen in your life.
01:45:44.000It offends your sensibilities as an MMA guy.
01:45:47.000For a person who's an expert in violence, this is fucking, you guys are terrible at it.
01:45:51.000There's videos of these guys practicing.
01:46:26.000There's a guy who went to my old university.
01:46:28.000I graduated from SOAS before I did my masters at the LSE. SOAS has been embroiled in a strike at the moment.
01:46:33.000The Students' Union has been supporting professors who are on strike and it's over pension and pension rights and a government refusing to raise their pension rights and whatever.
01:46:42.000And some of the students came out in strike, far left students, defending the professors.
01:46:46.000And they put forward a ring preventing students from attending their classes.
01:46:51.000And a female black lecturer wanted to cross the strike lines to go in to teach her students.
01:49:07.000So I would say to all these publishing houses, I can assure you 100% this problem not only has not been solved, is going to come back around in a far worse way than you can ever have imagined.
01:49:23.000My book eventually got published by some very small publishing house in the US and has done quite well for them.
01:49:29.000But the point of the story was this ISIS came around and people were suddenly like, oh my God, where did this come from?
01:49:35.000Of course, those of us who had been monitoring the situation knew this was going to come back around very, very heavy.
01:49:41.000Now that ISIS has been pushed back, and this is where this story is sort of the point of the story is, We've got to resist the temptation to believe the problem has been solved, because the organization known as ISIS, which is a bureaucracy, has been fought back.
01:49:55.000But the ideology upon which that organization was built is still very much alive and it's still strong.
01:50:03.000What Al-Qaeda did, while the whole world was focused on ISIS, was exploit that opportunity to rebuild and regroup.
01:50:10.000And they've been rebuilding in Syria, Now they are stronger than they have ever been, even under Bin Laden, because for the first time in the history of that organization, they are firmly embedded within the Syrian population as a genuinely kind of viewed by the people that they were fighting on behalf of.
01:50:28.000As a grassroots resistance organization, whereas before that they were seen as a terrorist group that was like a, you know, just like a vanguard.
01:50:35.000They've embedded themselves in the Syrian population, in the Yemeni civil war.
01:50:39.000They've embedded themselves in North Africa, East Africa, and in Pakistan.
01:50:43.000And they are resurgent and they are grooming Hamza bin Laden, who is bin Laden's son, and they're grooming him for leadership.
01:50:50.000And a time will come, maybe in a couple of months, maybe in a couple of years, where they announce Hamza bin Laden as a new leader We've got to remember that we never expected ISIS to emerge.
01:51:19.000Al Qaeda will come back with a vengeance.
01:52:43.000The problem is the ideology and it will not be dealt with until we deal with this ideology.
01:52:49.000And it's why it's so dangerous to, you know, there was this awful term that I railed against.
01:52:54.000It was so frustrating to see under Obama's presidency.
01:52:57.000The US State Department officially adopted as their name for challenging this problem.
01:53:02.000They adopted the term Al-Qaeda inspired extremism.
01:53:07.000Of course it isn't, it isn't Al-Qaeda that inspired extremism, it's extremism that inspired Al-Qaeda.
01:53:13.000And it's, for the purposes of political correctness, you adopt this term in the State Department, officially, that we're fighting, across the world, we are fighting Al-Qaeda-inspired extremism.
01:53:23.000My former organisation, Hizb al-Tahrir, a caliphate-espousing organization that believes in their ideal caliphate that gay should be killed, adulteresses should be stoned to death.
01:54:06.000Bin Laden doesn't represent my brand of Islam, but these are still people who will say that homosexuals should be killed.
01:54:17.000Apparent allies against, quote, extremism can still be people with religiously mandated social attitudes that just cannot be assimilated in cosmopolitan societies.
01:54:29.000So, people who are – worse than Al-Qaeda-inspired extremism, there's just this notion that on the left – and this came out of Obama's mouth and it came out of Clinton's mouth and it's largely why she wasn't president – It's just generic extremism,
01:54:51.000So that like in the same sentence that you have to worry about the caliphate, you have to talk about abortion doctors being killed in the US once every 15 years.
01:55:01.000So, of course, you remember because President Obama refused to use the word Islamist extremism.
01:55:05.000Of course, Trump has the other problem.
01:55:06.000He thinks that by like Rumpelstiltskin, by repeating it enough, you've solved the problem.
01:55:10.000But actually, one of the elements in which he was correctly critical of Obama Was, and I was at the time, vocally critical of Obama's reluctance to use the word Islamist extremism.
01:55:47.000So we're still giving a bit of a leeway there for everybody else, all the other Muslims.
01:55:51.000But to call it Islamist extremism is to recognize that it's an offshoot of Islam.
01:55:55.000It's a manifestation, extreme or otherwise, of Islam.
01:55:58.000And thereby, we are acknowledging that its justifications are in Islamic scripture, as well as, of course, a multiplicity of other causes, grievances and what have you.
01:56:06.000But we cannot ignore that it also rests On justifications that are derived from the Islamic scripture.
01:56:12.000I mean, I can cite for the Arabic that tells you in the Quran itself to cut the hand of the thief or to lash the adulterer.
01:56:19.000You know, these are, or I quote the hadith or the saying of the prophet that says, kill the person that changes their religion.
01:56:26.000And so, of course, there are other factors involved as well.
01:56:28.000But one of the factors that gives rise to this is the unreformed scripture that these extremists cite.
01:56:35.000And so we have to acknowledge that Islam has a role to play I often say that, you know, because again under the Obama presidency, it was frustrating that the common refrain was to say that Islam, this has nothing to do with Islam.
01:56:47.000It's as absurd as arguing that the Spanish Inquisition had nothing to do with Catholicism.