In this episode, I sit down with writer, activist, and feminist icon Ayaan Patel to discuss her new book, "People Who Menstruate," and why she thinks J.K. Rowling's recent comments about women who menstruate should be taken as a joke, and why we should stand up for women who don't have their own names. I also talk about why women should be allowed to call themselves by their first names, and what it means to be a feminist in a world where women are not allowed to use their own name. We also discuss why women need to be able to stand up and fight for their own rights, and how we need to fight for the basic human rights that we should all be fighting for. I hope you enjoy this episode and that it makes you think about how important it is to have your own name as a woman in the 21st century, and that we can all stand up to the wokeness that s been created by the woke mob. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Thick & Thin, and I hope that you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed making it! thank you for supporting the podcast, and for sharing it with your friends and family and friends! and for supporting it with us in any amount you can manage to find it on your social media platforms, and share it with a loved one who needs it. . I really appreciate it. Thank you for being here. xoxo, Caitlyn and Rachael. - Caitlyn. Caitlyn Caitlin's book: "Heretic" is out there! - Her book: Heretic: A Girl, Me, My Name, My Words, My Truth, My Story, My Thoughts, My Life, My Mind, My Voice, My Opinion, My Country, My Sexuality, My Rights, My Dreams, My Journey, My Feminism, My Soul, My Dream, My Vagina, and My Thoughts on It's My Thoughts On It? - by Caitlyn's Book: The Real Life, Her Words, Her Story, Her Thoughts on the Real Life Experience, Her Book, Her Podcast: and More! , Her Book: My Words and Words, and Her Words and Thoughts, Her Voice, Her Opinion, Her Truth, Her Word, Her Stories, Her Journey, Her Meme, Her Imagination, Her Soul, Her Life, and More.
00:02:11.000And then we got a story saying, sorry, it's not going to happen after all.
00:02:17.000Because Ayan supported J.K. Rowling, the author of Harry Potter...
00:02:25.000When, in my view, JK Rowling came out in support of women, but I'm told that I make the people who read that particular magazine unsafe or that there's a potential that I could make them unsafe.
00:02:41.000Yeah, that's the phrase that gets used.
00:02:44.000Make them unsafe, or make them feel unsafe, or put them in danger.
00:02:49.000First of all, JK Rowling's statements, they were not nearly as controversial as people made them out to be, for whatever reason.
00:03:00.000Do you remember exactly what she said?
00:03:52.000Well, her along with Martina Navatrolova, which is another person who got attacked by the woke mob, where you just go, wow, how far is this gone?
00:04:01.000Where a prominent lesbian woman, who was one of the first out athletes ever, one of the greatest tennis players of all time, who says it's not fair for biological males to compete against women in these sports.
00:04:16.000And she gets labeled like the most vicious bigot alt-right person you could imagine.
00:04:22.000You're like, how far has this stuff gone?
00:05:18.000And then I came around and I thought, this is not a laughing matter.
00:05:24.000We are going to have to stand up for at least what we've achieved in the West and hope to drag people in the developing world to come to where we are.
00:05:32.000But our name as woman, plural women, is not going to be taken away.
00:05:39.000And I admire J.K. Rowling for taking that fight on.
00:05:47.000It was just, like you said, in British humor, you know?
00:05:52.000Humor is gone now in these discussions.
00:05:56.000I want to make it very clear that I think that people who identify as trans, transgender, whatever they want to call themselves, I'm a proponent of Them getting,
00:06:12.000you know, their dignity, their freedom, live as they please.
00:06:18.000And if there's anything I can do, anything you can do, surely we must do that.
00:07:04.000And I don't think that they think they're doing a bad thing.
00:07:08.000I think they think they're standing up for trans people.
00:07:11.000But by saying, you know, women who menstruate, for the vast majority of human beings, you're talking about women.
00:07:18.000Or, excuse me, by saying people who menstruate, you're talking about women.
00:07:22.000And to deny that and say, no, we're just going to call it people who menstruate, for the very small amount of people who aren't Biologically women.
00:07:34.000Or don't think of themselves as biologically women.
00:07:54.000So there is, I think, a way of lifting up people who are transgender...
00:08:00.000To come out as they are and be who they are and feel comfortable in their skins and for the rest of us to accept that without diminishing women.
00:08:10.000But the way to do it for us as women is to insist.
00:09:17.000If there are people who feel that they're born in the wrong body and that they want to transition and they're grown-ups, please, by all means, go ahead and do that.
00:09:28.000But I think it is dangerous to adapt fact and reality to the emotions and And ideologies of the day.
00:10:13.000There is something that is real and factual.
00:10:18.000There's a conformity that is being enforced with this kind of language and that's part of what we're dealing with in our current woke dilemma is that people are being enforced to behave and communicate in a way that fits in with this ideology despite Whether or not it's backed by biological science.
00:10:46.000If someone has had sex with a woman and fathered children, multiple children, and then decides that they are now a woman themselves, people will say, well, they've always been a woman.
00:11:52.000And so it is up to the wider population to object to that.
00:11:57.000You just mentioned somebody who fathered children.
00:12:01.000In order to have an objective analysis of that, we look at paternity issues.
00:12:10.000If you If a woman claims that you fathered her child and you didn't, there's a way of, through science, we have a way of finding out whether you're the father or not.
00:12:23.000And so there's universal agreement on what that test yields.
00:12:43.000We have to get tested so that you and I both feel safe and we're here.
00:12:48.000So when it comes to science, we can't pick and choose and say, you know, when it comes to certain things that suit me, I agree to objective truth and science.
00:12:59.000But then with the other things that don't suit me, when I wanted to pretend that there are 10 or 12 or 1400 gender differences, in that case, science is racist,
00:13:15.000and science is wrong, and there is no science.
00:13:41.000This virus, whatever it is, the Wuhan virus, I don't care what name you give it, but whether it infects you or it infects me, it doesn't care.
00:13:52.000And the scientists who are after, trying to figure out what is it.
00:13:58.000And then go from there, once you understand, once you have a name for it, and you understand what the problem is, then you start trying to figure out how to deal with it.
00:14:08.000That's what science offers us, and I think it is very, very important that we come out as a nation, as a people, anyone who values objective truth and science to say, that's something I'm not willing to let go.
00:14:28.000I feel a lot of empathy for people who want to transition from one gender to the other, who think that they are born in the wrong body and want to do everything they can to get in a body that makes them comfortable and happy, but not at the cost of science.
00:14:45.000Is this particularly offensive to you?
00:14:47.000I mean, it must be because of your background.
00:14:50.000You briefly talked about that, but for people who don't know you, I would like you to explain your upbringing, where you came from, and how you had to literally risk your life to escape that.
00:15:06.000So I was born in Somalia in 1969 and growing up in the 70s my family went to Saudi Arabia, we went to Ethiopia, we went to Kenya, that's where I learned English, and then finally in 1992 I ended up in the Netherlands.
00:15:24.000But if you ask me in the context of science to tell you about those years between, you know, when I could walk and talk and understand what was going around me until about 1992 when I left, I come from territories where superstition is the thing to do,
00:15:46.000My father left us in 1982. He left us in Kenya.
00:15:51.000He went back to Ethiopia to fight for what he felt was his calling.
00:15:59.000Democracy and a just system for the Somali people.
00:16:02.000But in Kenya, my mother, who was with my grandmother, her mother's mother, And they felt abandoned in a strange country and they didn't understand what was going on and they had the three of us.
00:16:13.000The three of us, that is my older brother and my younger sister.
00:16:21.000And I remember my mother going off to see witch doctors and ask them, How do I deal with my daily life?
00:16:35.000And those witch doctors would want one thing, which was whatever money she could give them.
00:16:41.000And if she couldn't give money, then it would be her goat, or it would be something that they treasured.
00:16:47.000And in Kenya, I'm 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 years old, and all the time when she goes to these people, all I want to say to her is, This is superstition.
00:17:35.000They can't read the Quran, so they have to trust in what he tells them.
00:17:39.000The Hadith, Mohammed's way of doing things.
00:17:43.000And in a way, I felt grateful to the people who had shepherded the grown-up women of my life away from these superstitious people to the one and true and only God.
00:18:05.000It just happened to be another superstition, better organized, more slick.
00:18:33.000I had the fortune to actually go to school and be taught such things as science, the science class, biology, cause and effects, the way things happen.
00:18:43.000One of the things that ravaged us was malaria.
00:18:49.000Most people had families where people died.
00:18:54.000People got sick, really very sick, and then died.
00:18:58.000And the witch doctors were supposed to make these people well, and they were at any rate supposed to stop them from dying.
00:19:07.000So going to the biology class, when we were told, literally, to look at...
00:19:16.000An insect called a mosquito and dissect it and look at its behavior and how it sees still water, lays its eggs, and what happens when that mosquito comes and injects its What do you call it?
00:19:37.000That little piece of itself into you, draws your blood and leaves something in you, which is the parasite.
00:19:47.000Once you understand that, and this is, I'm in fourth grade, fifth grade.
00:19:51.000Once they teach that and they show how it works, you go home and you say, don't give any more money to the witch doctor.
00:19:59.000Actually, what we should do is go around to all the little puddles and pools of water around us.
00:20:05.000Let's drain those, dry those, keep our windows shut.
00:20:10.000We have this big can of pesticide called Doom and I would say let's spray those after we had done all of that and we won't have malaria because that's how it is.
00:20:24.000So I found myself even at that age confronting grown-ups who were established who are well respected and who were taking money from my poor mother because they would cure malaria and I come in I mean with the most superficial level of education you can think but objective education to say I actually get what's happening and that I
00:20:55.000can't explain to an American audience the confrontation the just the boundaries that you're crossing and and the people you're making angry the toes you're stepping on When you, you know,
00:21:11.000you breeze into the house and say, and now I know how it works.
00:21:16.000So, you, as a young woman, were going to be forced into an arranged marriage.
00:21:26.000And this is what made you flee and head to Europe and wind up in Holland, correct?
00:22:39.000But because he was gone from 82 to 1992, I was able to get on with age and get stronger and wiser, but also see some of my classmates and my friends who were forced into these arranged marriages.
00:22:58.000And my takeaway from looking at their lives was, I don't want my life to unfold that way.
00:23:05.000Because it was really a replication of my own mother's life.
00:23:24.000So, watching what was happening to these young women, I thought, surely life must offer more than that.
00:23:34.000I to this day say I am grateful that my father left us when he did and came back when he did.
00:23:42.000Because had he been with us earlier, he might have taken this initiative to force me into marriage at the age of 15, 16, 17. And at that age, I'm not sure I would have accomplished what I did at 22. And when he was gone,
00:24:05.000I wanted him to come back and be with us.
00:24:08.000But then again, everything is about hindsight.
00:24:11.000In hindsight, I think, what if he had married me off at 15 or 16 or 17 or 18?
00:24:20.000You know, what kind of future would I have had?
00:24:25.000The environment that you lived in, you felt like women were second-class citizens and you felt like they were the property of men and they were at the beck and call of men and they weren't allowed to speak up.
00:24:41.000They weren't allowed to do many things that men were allowed to do and they had to know their place.
00:24:55.000Also, I'm not trying to defend where I come from, but Jo, when I listen to you talk like that, what I want to say is I know you've got an American-Western So you're observing them through that prism,
00:25:17.000through the lens of, oh, these women are oppressed.
00:25:29.000And there's so many women in those positions who agree with you.
00:25:33.000But being on the inside, being raised within that culture, when you complain about the absolute obedience that you have to show to your father and other male relatives, When you talk,
00:25:52.000when you object to the fact that you're not supposed to have a will of your own, or desires of your own, or things you want to do, the put down was always that you are the rebel.
00:27:00.000There were girls and women around me whom I really consider them to be so much smarter, stronger, more informed, in many ways wiser.
00:27:14.000Who I would look up to they might be two or three years older than me and I would say well I'm really having a hard time right now with My mother and sticking to the rules.
00:27:46.000For some it will be harder than others.
00:27:48.000But the thing I was told constantly is it's as hard as you make it.
00:27:55.000In other words, the sooner you submit, the sooner all these hardships go away and then you're just one of us and you're doing what you're supposed to do, what you were created to do by God.
00:28:19.000You start fantasizing about where you think you could be.
00:28:23.000Then you are stepping on so many toes at that point.
00:28:28.000And you know there's nobody who's going to be on your side.
00:28:32.000So you can make the pain as long as you want it to be.
00:28:36.000What did you know about the rest of the world outside of the community that you lived in?
00:28:41.000What did you know about the way women were treated in Europe or in the United States or anywhere else in the world?
00:28:49.000I knew what I got out of literature, out of reading books.
00:28:53.000I knew what I got out of movies, out of music.
00:29:01.000I want you to, I don't know how old you are, but the 1980s, I'm in Nairobi and kids my age, I'm in my teens, we're listening to Michael Jackson, we're doing breakdance, we're watching very trashy,
00:29:18.000what I've now come to call trashy movies.
00:29:26.000There were these movies at some point where the two guys would come at the cars, one from the other side, and then they would miss, what was that game called?
00:30:54.000We just couldn't believe that these were actual human beings who lived like that.
00:31:00.000Again, talking of Trashy, we read John Collins, we read Robert Ludlam, we read all of those spy stuff.
00:31:09.000So if you're really in a book into any of these thrillers, you imagine yourself to be the hero of the book.
00:31:18.000And then after you've solved one of the most complex mysteries, There are confrontations between the Soviets and the Americans.
00:31:29.000You close the book and you look around you and everything says you need to do these dishes before your mom comes here and whacks you on the head.
00:31:41.000So there's the reality on the ground which is not what I would call I'm just trying to see how, because I don't want to diminish that, but I also want to explain to an American audience,
00:32:03.000And for us, reading that type of literature, going to these movies, listening to Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie and doing breakdance, those were the escapes that...
00:32:17.000We didn't have boys because boys could get away and go find hide somewhere.
00:32:23.000I'm sure they were exposed to some sort of drug.
00:32:27.000But as a girl in my teenage years, I don't remember anything that was mind altering except that stuff.
00:32:37.000The neighbors, a girlfriend, a best friend, they would have TV and then later on the video, the VHS stuff came along and you could come and watch movies in their house.
00:32:52.000And those were the escapes, the escapades.
00:32:55.000And as you do that, you're telling your mother, you know what, mom, I'm heading to the mosque.
00:33:19.000I've actually forgotten most of the stories.
00:33:22.000Was there any that particularly stood out?
00:33:25.000I mean, obviously, just the cultural differences were probably very mesmerizing, but were there any of the movies, did they reach out to you and give you hope that there was something better somewhere else?
00:36:39.000We're a Somali minority, we just hang out with other Somalis.
00:36:43.000My brother would hang out with Kenyans and my mother had a derogatory name for Kenyans and so she would say he went to quote-unquote, the derogatory name that she had for Kenyans.
00:38:56.000I don't want to call it a sitting room.
00:38:58.000I think ideally it was intended to be a sitting room, but at that point there are 10 or 12 refugees sleeping there.
00:39:04.000So there are mattresses on the ground and there's a bed and she's sitting on the edge of that bed.
00:39:08.000And there are two chairs pulled up, and my father is sitting on one, and the man I'm supposed to be married to is sitting on the other, and we are supposed to start to get to know one another with my parents there.
00:39:22.000And I asked him about, and my sister was there too, asked him about what novels he reads and what movies he watches and what games he likes to play.
00:39:31.000And all his answers are And please forgive me, I'm 22 at the time.
00:39:39.000But in my head, I'm using, yeah, that's, you know, shit.
00:41:33.000He came to look for members of his family who were fleeing out of Somalia.
00:41:37.000Again, 1991-1992, beginning of the civil war in Somalia.
00:41:41.000People are fleeing and people all over the world, Somalis all over the world, are coming to Kenya and other places to look for their family members.
00:42:40.000I go to Ethiopia, Addis Ababa, and spend a weekend with my father's third wife and my half-sister for a couple of days.
00:42:51.000Then I fly from Addis Ababa to Frankfurt to Dusseldorf.
00:42:59.000And I'm in Dusseldorf with my relatives.
00:43:04.000The uncle whom I was supposed to be with, who's supposed to take care of my papers, sent one of the people who work for him, who's another distant cousin, and he says, I'm here to take care of you.
00:43:53.000He looks at my travel document and he says, it doesn't give you access to the UK, but it gives you access to four other countries besides Germany.
00:44:02.000And that's the Netherlands, it's Belgium, it's Luxembourg, and I suppose it's France.
00:44:48.000I said I was going to visit another extended family, a woman who, when she fled Somali, had stayed in our house, who was in the Netherlands.
00:45:39.000Go to that other cousin of ours who lives in a place called Folendam.
00:45:45.000And so when at 11.30pm the train arrives, she had instructed me how to get off the train, cross the street, go to where the buses are, take the bus to Folendam.
00:45:59.000And then called this cousin and the cousin sent her husband, who by the way is white.
00:46:09.000That cousin of mine married a white man and had been shunned herself by the family.
00:46:14.000And so this guy picks me up from Follendam, which is, it felt like an age.
00:46:21.000It felt like an eternity to go from Amsterdam to Follendam, but I think it was all of an hour and a half.
00:46:29.000And he picks me up and he takes me to her and from there she starts explaining to me how things work.
00:47:07.000And it's all about what's happening to you.
00:47:10.000And when I do that, I go to Zvola, the place she said would be the best place for me to ask for asylum.
00:47:18.000She says it's the best place because that's where the other woman whom I'm on my way to has.
00:47:25.000And that's where for the first time in my life someone comes in uniform, what looks to me like police uniform or military uniform, and I think it's over.
00:47:37.000I think he's telling me you're going to get out of the country, you'll be shot, something bad is going to happen to you.
00:47:43.000And he comes over and he says, would you like a cup of tea?
00:48:33.000And so it's things like that, small things like that, that I try and tell my European friends and my American friends is, you know, when you guys, you just say rule of law, rule of law, it's not like some kind of poem by your grandfather.
00:48:50.000And the person in uniform who later on I discovered wasn't even a policeman, but he was in uniform.
00:48:56.000He was one of the security people at the center.
00:48:59.000He directs me to the reception area and he says, talk to these people.
00:49:03.000And I do and they say, there's something called a stripping card.
00:49:08.000It's like a bus card that they put in your hands and you say, you have to take this bus and it will take you to the next place.
00:49:16.000Little haste and they'll take care of your paperwork.
00:49:20.000And I do that, and then they send me somewhere else.
00:49:24.000And after criss-crossing the country in buses that the Dutch paid for, with the help of people in uniform who guide you from A to B, they grant me asylum.
00:49:41.000And so I don't need that piece of paper that I came in with, which I had shared.
00:49:47.000Are you in any way concerned that someone from your, whether it's your father's side or this man who you're supposed to be married to, that they're gonna come and get you?
00:50:08.000The way I think of it is, when I go to the authorities and say, we're going to put down your name and your date of birth, I say to them, instead of telling them my name is Ayan Hirsi Magan, I tell them my name is Ayan Hirsi Ali.
00:50:23.000I keep to my date of birth, November 13, but instead of 69, I tell them 67. So with Ali and 67, I hope not to be found.
00:51:24.000So during that four months, what had you been doing?
00:51:26.000I was, after the initial paperwork, I was sent to a place called Luntren in the middle of the country.
00:51:35.000And there, I was for 11 months, but they asked you to, you know, They gave me a refugee status which is the best you can have in the world, meaning you're now part of this society.
00:51:52.000You can go to language class, you can work, you can do whatever you want.
00:51:57.000And that's exactly what I start doing.
00:51:59.000I start learning the language, but they don't have any housing for me yet.
00:52:03.000It's also a place where the government arranges the housing for you.
00:52:09.000So I was on a wasting list for an apartment.
00:52:14.000And I was there for four months when this guy arrives through that system of looking.
00:52:32.000And it's in the middle of the afternoon and I hear this knock.
00:52:36.000I open the door and there's the man I was married off to with three other men.
00:52:43.000And my system freezes and all I can do is say, come in and they come in and then take them to the little living space where the seating space is and have them sit down.
00:52:59.000And then I say, would you like tea or coffee?
00:53:34.000I ran away from a forced marriage and the guy I was married to is in my caravan and he's with three other guys and basically I've come to say goodbye.
00:53:47.000And she says, but you don't want to go with him.
00:53:49.000I said, no, I don't want to go with him.
00:54:49.000That's one of the confrontations that I wish was somewhere on the record because he's coming from his culture and his truth and the way he looks at the world and he's telling them, who the hell do you think you are?
00:56:01.000And Sylvia explains to me, he won't be able to find a lawyer who is going to help him Take a human being over the age of 18 years with the argument her father gave her to me.
00:56:33.000And it did help that I was there for four months, that I had in fact seen things working differently.
00:56:40.000So it wasn't, I think if it had happened on the day of my arrival, it would probably have been over.
00:56:46.000But having been there all these months and seeing so many things that were so different from what I was used to, I thought that was credible.
00:56:58.000Like for example, what kind of things did you see that were so different?
00:57:01.000Well, all these women who were working.
00:57:04.000You have to imagine an asylum seeker center back then was this big compound, like a military compound.
00:57:11.000It does have barbed wire around it, but where we were, all the homes are these trailers.
00:57:18.000And then at the entrance of the compound, you have a little building where security people in uniform are sitting, and then there are all these little houses.
00:57:29.000So the people who take shifts in running the day-to-day of the center, and then there are the people who deal with health care,
00:57:45.000there are people who deal with Anything, food, anything that you, you know, putting 300, 400, 500 people in a compound, all the logistics of that, the people who run that stuff are all in little houses there.
00:58:03.000And I mean little houses, sort of makeshift.
00:58:08.000Two, three room houses where there are offices.
00:59:09.000But it's important for people to listen to this.
00:59:12.000To try to understand where you're coming from and why you find a lot of what we discussed earlier so offensive.
00:59:22.000Because you've dealt with real suppression.
00:59:27.000And to just try to imagine what it was like to be you to see women in shorts, and women telling men what to do, the women who were the boss, women who could do whatever they wanted to.
01:01:03.000But then there were the other Somalis who came from Somalia, and there were people who came from Iraq, they came from Afghanistan, they came from Iran, they came from everywhere.
01:01:12.000And we would huddle together in the dining room and say the exact same things.
01:01:18.000And as women, men from those parts of the world would actually start harassing us and treating us badly.
01:01:26.000And I would constantly go to, we call the tables, because the people say, like, that's the white table.
01:01:34.000The white table means white people are sitting around the table.
01:01:37.000So I'd go to the white table and tell them, this is how the men are treating us.
01:01:43.000And your men are treating you differently.
01:01:45.000Like, can you talk to them differently?
01:02:28.000I don't want to say it was a good memory in the sense that it was pleasant, but in terms of teaching moments, best teaching moments in my life.
01:02:39.000Because it's a complete paradigm shift.
01:04:43.000I wish we were just recording the whole deal.
01:04:46.000There were Somalis who were just having, right in the middle of civil war, slashing each other's throats, put in the same asylum seeker center, in the same compound.
01:04:58.000And the Dutch people who were in charge of the center, they would come out and they said, another fight broke out.
01:06:30.000Again, a huge source of education for me.
01:06:35.000Because then I learned how those people that we just call white, how they were thinking, what was going through.
01:06:43.000They say, you've got to fill this form again, you've got to fill that form again, you've got to fill another form.
01:06:48.000And so the Somalis were saying, there must be a conspiracy.
01:06:51.000Why do they want all these forms filled out?
01:06:54.000Because where we come from, when a government asks you to give personal information to the government, that means you're going to disappear.
01:07:02.000You'll be disappeared, or you're betraying a family member.
01:07:05.000So when they ask for information, we're all going, ouch.
01:07:18.000No one else, no part of the government will see us.
01:07:21.000And very often people are struggling to just take them at their word.
01:07:27.000So when this husband person, this person who's supposed to be your husband, when he comes back with lawyers, how does that confrontation go down?
01:10:43.000And look, I'm the one who's been lied to and cheated and mistreated and all of that.
01:10:51.000They all came around and each one of them gave me the longest lecture you can possibly think of, you know, telling me story after story of how this could end.
01:11:01.000Now you're in arms of your family and you're about to walk out that door and you're saying, I don't want to have anything to do with the family.
01:11:12.000So I would get that and every single person participating in that gathering would tell me a story, each one more horrifying than the previous one.
01:11:22.000And all I had to do was just sit and be quiet.
01:11:25.000Just don't say a word, just sit right through it.
01:11:28.000When they were talking about horrible stories, like what kind of horrible stories?
01:11:32.000Well, horrible stories is you're sitting and it's like, okay, here we are today.
01:11:36.000Your father has found this amazing man for you.
01:11:38.000So there'd be a lot of flattery to him, a lot of flattery to my father, and then a fantasy of what this union could be and could become like.
01:14:23.000I didn't give myself a way of knocking on the door and saying, can you take me back to my father or my mother after taking them through something like that.
01:16:54.000There were also the friends I made, like Sylvia, the woman I told you about.
01:16:58.000All of those people who then were a witness to this story who were cheering for me and helping and I went out of a network and I went straight into a different network and those people really embraced me and I'm really grateful to them.
01:17:19.000And so you enrolled in this university.
01:17:37.000It's much different than politics in America, right?
01:17:40.000The theory part, so what you learn in university is different because it's well-organized and well-ordered and it always has a happy ending.
01:17:52.000But when you get into politics, the day-to-day stuff, that's a different story altogether.
01:17:59.000And political science helped me understand, oh yeah, so we have these different institutions, you know, House of Commons, let me just put it that way because it's the English-speaking word, but the lower house, the upper house.
01:18:12.000And you have the electorate, you have all the different institutions, you have the different layers of, you know, from the city to the province to, we didn't have a federal, but the nation.
01:18:26.000You understand that stuff, where it came from.
01:18:48.000So there's one gap we left out when we were talking about my life story, which was what happened after 9-11-2001, when I started to engage in the debate on what is it that caused it,
01:19:05.000and then that's how I end up in politics.
01:19:08.000And I get sworn in in 2003 with, and I'm heavily guided by bodyguards who are heavily armed.
01:19:19.000And from the second half of maybe 2003, they're moving me from place to place.
01:19:42.000They're from the government and they're protecting me.
01:19:45.000And this goes on for a while, but I get to a place where the threat is considered to be so intense that I had to be moved from address to address, from address to address.
01:19:57.000Is this because of your analysis of what happened September 11, 2001?
01:21:35.000And it was then that I had decided I'm going to do one term, and if the cabinet were to sit through its term, it would be four years.
01:21:44.000So it would begin in 2004 and end in 2007. But instead, the cabinet fell again because of me in 2006, and I left and I went to Washington, D.C. It fell because of you?
01:22:34.000But there was a left-wing documentary company that said they were going to make a profile of me.
01:22:44.000And they took, literally, I'm not kidding, they took a book full of essays and interviews that I had given and based on that, they decided to trace my life back to Kenya and then brought the information that was in the book published by the Dutch publisher.
01:23:04.000Where I say, my name is actually not Ayaan Hirsi Ali, it's Hirsi Magan.
01:23:07.000I wasn't born in 67, I was born in 69. And they make this big news item.
01:23:13.000And the context was that particular Minister of Immigration and Integration was playing the I am tough card.
01:23:23.000If you lie about your asylum, if you lie about your personality, we're going to take you out.
01:23:29.000And people were already saying, even before she did it, well, Ayaan lied about her life while she's still in parliament.
01:23:37.000So she came round and said, well, take away her citizenship.
01:23:41.000And that was ridiculous, or at least the rest of the party, the rest of politics thought that was ridiculous.
01:23:46.000So they started to demand, after she took away my citizenship, that she resign.
01:24:33.000But it's just, you know, being on the most wanted of the Al-Qaeda list, things like that.
01:24:41.000I'm aware of it, and so I do live with security.
01:24:45.000There are people around me who have guns and who protect me, but I don't, on a personal level, I don't let that get under my skin.
01:24:56.000It doesn't bother me the way it used to bother me.
01:25:00.000And all this is just from leaving the religion and saying that you're an atheist now?
01:25:07.000And saying that 9-11 perpetrators were driven by religion and all the other perpetrators since then who invoked Islam.
01:25:19.000Look, if you go out there and you kill someone And you leave the reason why you do it for all of us to see who are we to say, well, you got all confused.
01:26:04.000Particularly in the United States, why do you think there's a reluctance to accept that there is an ideological aspect for a lot of these actions?
01:26:13.000That they're being driven by what they believe is the will of their religion.
01:26:22.000The reluctance, I am told, has to do with We don't want the general American public becoming hostile to Muslims, immigrants, foreigners.
01:26:39.000I'm told we don't want the general American public stigmatizing people who are innocent.
01:26:46.000They happen to be Muslim, but they have no intentions of We're perpetrating terrorist attacks and we don't want those people to get hurt.
01:26:55.000So we don't want to say that this person was driven by what he says he is driven by.
01:27:08.000I've also, obviously, having been a politician, also had reasons of, well, if you say to them, yes, this individual is driven by Islam, Then he gets to own what Islam is.
01:27:37.000The radicals, the terrorists, they should not own.
01:27:41.000We should declare and say they are unbelievers.
01:27:44.000You can take that reasoning up to a point, but in this case, I'm still of the opinion that you can't do that because Islam is a set of, it's a thesis, it's a set of beliefs,
01:28:02.000it has an internal logic to it, and If you say it just means what I want it to mean and it's a good thing and I'm only going to give it to the good Muslims,
01:28:29.000And what the people we think of as bad are saying is, I'm really living up to the requirements of my religion.
01:28:39.000If you don't understand that logic, you will never be able to fight Islamist terrorism, political Islam.
01:28:51.000You won't be able to fight it because then you don't understand it.
01:28:54.000You can't fight an ideology by pretending it doesn't exist or it's a good thing.
01:29:01.000What do you say to the people that talk about all of the Muslims that have no desire to commit terrorist acts, live their life peacefully, and just abide by the tenets of the religion, and they believe that Islam is a religion of peace?
01:29:26.000I would say most people who identify as Muslim just want to lead peaceful lives, go about their own business, and they don't want to harm anyone.
01:30:35.000You either come to my one God and you give up your gods or you die by the sword.
01:30:42.000And anytime from Medina, the religion becomes incredibly successful and he goes beyond Arabia into the rest of the world.
01:30:52.000And so if you're a Muslim in the 21st century and there are 1.6 billion Muslims in the world, if you're a Muslim and you say, I'm a peace-loving Muslim, I don't want to impose my religion on anyone else, you're invoking Muhammad in Medina.
01:31:09.000If you say, well, I think jihad means that we must take our religion seriously and convert other people, and if they refuse to convert, then we'll use violence, then you're invoking Mohammed in Medina.
01:31:40.000And so if he says, if a Muslim today says, unto you your religion, unto me mine, I'm tolerant, all of that, you are invoking Mecca.
01:31:51.000If you're invoking jihad, you know, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, ISIS, Al-Qaeda, and some who are sometimes violent, but not all the time, the Muslim Brotherhood and other organizations and movements,
01:32:26.000So I think it would be more accurate to say there's just one Islam at this point that's unreformed, and there's a third group that I describe in Heretic, which is the people like Majid Nawaz who are actually trying to bring about a different Islam.
01:32:44.000To shed Medina, bring some stuff out of Mecca, adapt it to our times.
01:33:07.000But then they have to deal with these...
01:33:12.000Jihadists who challenge them and who say to them you can't possibly be a true Muslim if you only adhere to Mecca because the Prophet said what happened in Medina abrogates or voids what happened in Mecca.
01:33:27.000What is stopping particularly people from the left, including intellectuals, from recognizing the differences, that there are differences in people that follow the peaceful version of the religion and then people that follow the more radical version of the religion that wants to convert people?
01:33:52.000Like, what is stopping them from recognizing that this is an issue?
01:33:57.000Because it's almost like an agreed upon reluctance to discuss it, to acknowledge it, and to automatically classify any discussion of it as Islamophobic.
01:34:14.000And I've seen this labeled, this label put on you.
01:35:52.000You could be ignorant of something, pick up a few books and just find out.
01:35:56.000I think, number two, there is a sense that because the West is really powerful where it matters, economically powerful, more powerful than any Islamic country, militarily more powerful, diplomatically more powerful, There is almost that parent-child relationship where we'll just let them come along.
01:37:36.000We're now living in the post-religion age.
01:37:41.000In 2021, there is a law right now that has gone through the law house of France and it is being debated in the Senate where they're talking about if that law gets passed, then Muslims who are accused of trying to separate their communities from the rest of France along religious lines are going to be stopped by that law.
01:39:21.000It's all out the window because of COVID. Because of COVID. And there are other things that are out of the window because of COVID. Because you just asked me, how are they going to enforce those rules of stopping Muslims from separating themselves from the rest of society through their associations,
01:39:38.000through their schools, through everything that they do that make them say, we don't want to have anything to do with France, even though physically they're in France.
01:39:47.000I think they're going to use some of the measures that they applied or some of the laws that they applied during COVID. They're going to assume powers that all of us thought a liberal society would be very careful with,
01:40:35.000Because with COVID, there was a sense, there's this big bad thing from the outside, this virus that's coming to get all of us.
01:40:45.000We didn't know a lot about the virus, but the more we find out, the more we adapt, the more you would think that some of these intrusions into our privacy, into our liberty, that would...
01:41:02.000You know, it would stop and we would be able to be free.
01:41:08.000And in some countries and even in some states here, people are still insisting that the government has those powers.
01:41:15.000The government still has control over...
01:41:19.000My husband is from the UK and I just asked, you know...
01:41:47.000And why, in the age of testing, are those rules applicable?
01:41:51.000Why, when you can find out if someone's negative for the virus, why can you keep them from them?
01:41:57.000So why initially, I think we were all in agreement, it was to curtail the virus, but why the rules are still in place when the threat is gone?
01:42:26.000It's still terrible for the people that get it and die, and the people that have poor health, and the people that have underlying conditions and comorbidities.
01:42:34.000But it's not what we thought it was going to be.
01:42:36.000But we're still treating it like we treated it a year ago.
01:42:40.000We're looking at it the same way we looked at it in March of last year.
01:42:43.000I think what bothers me, you're absolutely right, but what bothers me now is that it's not even possible to have a debate about that.
01:42:52.000So anytime people say you should be suspicious of government, don't give government any powers because once they have that power, they won't give it back.
01:43:00.000I think those people are being vindicated in the sense that, and I would say in the past, no, of course not.
01:43:07.000If there's no need for government to have that power, they'll give it back.
01:43:10.000But now the government wants to just skip the power, even though the threat is gone.
01:44:31.000I don't know if they will because there's so many people that are so...
01:44:36.000their cursory understanding of human nature and their lack of real inquisition, the lack of real questioning of the government's motives, and also this terrible fear of the virus.
01:44:53.000The terrible fear of what it actually is.
01:44:56.000If you go to Los Angeles today, when I talk to my friends, they have a totally different idea of what the virus is than if you're here in Texas.
01:45:05.000It's one of the things that I noticed immediately once I came here.
01:45:07.000It's one of the reasons why I moved here.
01:45:08.000People treat it like it's a bad cold, which is what it is.
01:46:05.000Like that woman that we were talking about before the show who had a restaurant in Los Angeles and she had outside dining that she paid thousands of dollars that she...
01:46:15.000Probably didn't even have to set this up so she can keep her business afloat.
01:46:19.000And then they told her you have to close down outdoor dining.
01:46:22.000And across the parking lot, the television and movie studios were allowed to have outdoor dining.
01:46:29.000Like literally she could walk 10 steps and she could be in their outdoor dining and her business was being forced to shut down.
01:47:47.000And the government doesn't give a shit about that.
01:47:49.000They keep getting paid no matter what.
01:47:52.000When they close down these businesses, I think the government, I think the state, I think the governor and I think the mayor, they should be paid proportionately with the amount of money that's generated by the businesses, particularly the businesses that are forced to close.
01:48:08.000See how fucking quick everything opens up?
01:48:12.000See how quick everything opens up if you give people the freedom to go places.
01:48:15.000You don't have to go to these restaurants if you're worried about catching COVID. You don't have to go to the gym if you're worried about catching it.
01:48:26.000You can exercise in the park, out in nature, but you can't because the park's shut because they're worried about COVID. These are some of the rules that people have had to deal with over this past year.
01:48:36.000Nonsensical rules like you can't go to the park.
01:49:04.000What we are now seeing, and it is absolutely horrifying, is that you let one side, the side that's speaking for lockdown...
01:49:13.000Invoke science and say the science says lockdown.
01:49:16.000But there are other scientists who are saying, no, not so fast, and those ones are not allowed to speak.
01:49:21.000I have a colleague, Scott Atlas, at the Hoover Institution, and he's made a few points about why some of the things that we're being told to do are not actually supported by science.
01:49:32.000People like him can't get their voices out because they're demonized.
01:49:37.000Demonized, shut out, kicked out of the whole debate.
01:50:07.000I think it is popular with the population, with the voters.
01:50:10.000And the reason why I say that is they had a general election about four years ago and Front National, that's the populist far-right party led by Marie Le Pen, came in second.
01:50:26.000And next year they have elections and the polls are suggesting That she is going to be either second in some polls, perhaps even first.
01:50:36.000So President Macron is being forced to do something about this issue.
01:50:42.000And that answers your question, you know, how serious are people about it?
01:50:48.000And it's the kind of issue that seems never to go away.
01:50:51.000If it was number one during the last election, and it's still number one this election, then voters want something done.
01:50:59.000And if they look at Macron and say, you promised, we gave you that chance last time, and you did nothing, they'll probably go with Marie Le Pen.
01:51:07.000So I think right now he needs something concrete, something solid to get through both houses and say, look, I'm not just talking about stopping the radicalization or Islamist separatism,
01:51:26.000I am passing a law that stops money coming from outside countries or regulates it, that I am going to stop the so-called homeschooling where young people are taken out of the normal schools and indoctrinated and radicalized at home.
01:51:43.000I'm going to establish some form of control over what these preachers, the ones that are Would you explain to people who don't understand what's happening in France?
01:52:17.000If you go to France today and you start talking about Islam and Muslim minorities, and you just listen to the people, don't go in with your own opinions, just listen to them.
01:52:29.000A lot of them will start talking about civil war.
01:52:34.000Every few months, I think it was in October or probably October when a school teacher was beheaded because he was showing cartoons.
01:52:43.000And this was done by a Muslim man but then there was a whole circle of people around him.
01:52:50.000And back then they were thinking, okay, the civil war is on.
01:52:53.000And the terrorist attack before that, a lot of French people would say, we think the civil war has begun.
01:53:00.000Maybe the civil war was going on for a long time.
01:53:06.000They say between the Muslim minorities, not all of them.
01:53:10.000But that small minority that is committing terrorist attacks and pushing members of their group to commit terrorist attacks and the rest of France.
01:53:23.000Why is it that it seems as if France doesn't have this problem under control?
01:53:28.000Well, France has a relationship with Algeria.
01:53:33.000Algeria used to be a former colony, so there are lots of people who came from Algeria and settled in France.
01:53:39.000But aside from Algeria, also from other parts of North Africa and other French-speaking African countries.
01:53:47.000But what France has done is also allowed radical Islamists to come into France and set up Dawah agencies, that is proselytizing agencies, places from which they can proselytize,
01:54:41.000I'm talking about any kind of women who will be able to walk on those streets.
01:54:45.000And so because things have evolved to a place where there is right now a confrontation between these two value systems and the civilizations they represent, it's either France wins or there is a civil war.
01:55:31.000The subject of this conversation deals only with those who refuse, who know of French values, who live in France, but have refused to abide by French laws, customs and norms.
01:55:47.000And this is happening in other places in Europe as well, right?
01:56:11.000And Germany, apparently what I've read, has a particular problem in shifting their perceptions because, obviously, of their history, of the Nazis and Nazi Germany, and they resist any inclination whatsoever of prejudice.
01:56:32.000That's what they say, which I think it's very difficult to measure prejudice.
01:56:37.000But when I was doing the research for this book, the book that I'm promoting now, I would want to go and see cases.
01:56:47.000So the book is dealing with sexual violence against women perpetrated by immigrants.
01:56:54.000So if I go to a country like Germany and I say, can you just give me the data, how many sexually violent attacks have taken place in Germany in the last 10 years and how many of those have been perpetrated by immigrants?
01:57:34.000I used to know a way of getting around that, which I've applied to other countries, which is the government agencies that are paid to collect the data, that kind of data, they won't do it.
01:57:44.000One way of finding out is just go to the courts, because every single court case is open.
01:57:50.000If you want to go right here in America, you want to go see what's happening in the criminal court right here, you just register and you say, I'd like to watch this case, and you fill a little bit of paperwork and you go in.
01:58:04.000In Germany, they say, because of the Second World War and what we did...
01:58:10.000It's very, very difficult to get in those so-called public courtrooms.
01:58:16.000And so a big part of the book is about just trying to get the data.
01:58:20.000Well, if there's no data, if the data is not publicly available, what leads you to suspect that there is an abundance of sexual attacks by these immigrants?
01:58:33.000It is a collection of the anecdotes, interviews, so talking to people who are supposed to gather the data, and when you say, come on, you don't want to gather the data on nationality, ethnicity,
01:58:48.000I understand, but what are you seeing?
01:58:51.000And they will say, please don't say my name, and then they'll tell you what they're seeing.
01:58:55.000Is this you personally have talked to these people that are telling you this?
01:58:58.000I've personally talked to them and I've also worked with researchers where I personally could not go.
01:59:22.000But they explain, and the explanations are familiar to me because I've seen this in Holland.
01:59:28.000Please don't say, I'm the one who's telling you this.
01:59:31.000But yes, we do have a problem, and this is what it looks like.
01:59:36.000And then, of course, I would do what you would do right now, which is then, you know, just put it out there.
01:59:43.000Because I think if we were to have the precise data of who is exactly perpetrating what kind of crime, we would be able to develop programs to help the perpetrators.
01:59:58.000Not just the victims, but the perpetrators and where they come from, so that we can prepare them for assimilation into our society.
02:00:08.000I mean, when someone's indoctrinated into a specific way of thinking about women, that you could immigrate to a place and abandon your preconceived notions?
02:00:19.000The Danes and the Austrians, they're attempting it.
02:00:26.000And they have decided that they're not going to shroud things, that they're not going to obfuscate, that they're going to Gather the data as the data presents itself.
02:00:43.000If there is a violent act committed against a woman and it's a white Danish man, then it's white Danish man.
02:00:51.000If not, all the other skin colors, nationalities, all the other data points that are now being hidden, the Danes have decided they're not going to hide it.
02:01:02.000And yes, they have actually developed programs where they think they can get to these men.
02:01:07.000I have looked at a program developed by a man originally from Eritrea.
02:01:12.000He describes his attitude to women before he came to Sweden, and he says it's just a fact that men from Certain places of the world, they haven't been taught.
02:01:29.000They're not familiar with how European men and women treat each other, and some of them are open to and willing to learn.
02:01:40.000Those who don't want to, those who don't want to learn, and those who want to carry on assaulting women, I think they should get out.
02:01:48.000The argument against this, this idea that there's a big problem with women being assaulted by these immigrants is that most sexual assaults that women experience are from people they know.
02:04:02.000What we're seeing right now is large numbers of men come from countries and societies where the modesty doctrine that governs the relationship between men and women Yeah,
02:04:20.000that's the law of the land or the norm of the land.
02:04:24.000And when they come to Europe, they can't help themselves.
02:04:27.000And the question is, does Europe adapt to them or do they adapt to Europe?
02:04:35.000Why do you think in this culture today where there's so much emphasis on stopping sexual assault, why do you think there's a reluctance to communicate with you about this?
02:04:49.000Because clearly, if you received so many invitations on these different shows to talk about Heretic, but then Prey comes along.
02:04:57.000And there's no one who wants to talk about it, yeah.
02:05:00.000Fox News, all the various stations of Fox News do.
02:05:04.000Lots of podcasts, lots of talk radio, but my publisher could not find it.
02:05:10.000It was reviewed in the New York Times.
02:05:12.000I didn't like the review, but it was reviewed nonetheless.
02:05:15.000It was reviewed in the Wall Street Journal.
02:05:17.000The New York Post had something, but I know what you're saying.
02:05:22.000The previous books I was on, CNN and MSNBC and...
02:05:30.000There's a reluctance to discuss this issue.
02:05:43.000Because the perpetrators are not white heterosexual men.
02:05:48.000If the perpetrators were white heterosexual and they were committing acts of violence on this magnitude, trust me, I wouldn't be the one sitting here.
02:05:58.000Do you think they're fearful of these discussions?
02:06:05.000Do you think they're worried about being labeled?
02:06:08.000Do you think they're worried about retribution?
02:06:10.000What do you think they're worried about?
02:06:17.000There would be no retribution except it would come from the woke.
02:06:21.000And we now live in this age of cancel culture where people who call themselves woke Our society is divided into those who oppress and those who are oppressed.
02:06:35.000And the fact that black men, brown men, men of color are oppressing and raping women and groping them and subjecting them to humiliation That doesn't fit into the matrix of those who are oppressors and those who are victims,
02:06:51.000because the black man is supposed to be the victim, right?
02:06:55.000The immigrant, the asylum seeker, the refugee, he is supposed to be the victim.
02:07:00.000They don't have an ideological, in their ideological framework, they don't have a way of dealing with the subject of prey.
02:07:10.000They don't have a way of dealing with a man who has escaped violence and civil strife in Syria, who then comes to Germany and rapes an 11 year old.
02:07:23.000In their ideological framework, they haven't worked that out.
02:07:28.000So their ideological framework is so rigid that they just ignore it.
02:07:34.000They're just like, I can't even talk about this.
02:07:36.000And not only that they can't talk about it, but even silence others who will talk about it.
02:07:42.000You know, all the airwaves all day long will be about Governor Andrew Cuomo and somebody he solicited.
02:07:49.000But it's not going to be about any of this.
02:07:51.000About the girls who are raped, who are gang raped.
02:07:57.000Others have abandoned their neighborhoods and their streets.
02:08:01.000Others when they get out of their houses, they have to cover their ears so that they can't hear the sexual assault that is thrown at them, the obscenities that are thrown at them verbally.
02:09:04.000And then you're still seeing stories about Ted Cruz.
02:09:08.000And I think if we carry on like this, with our mainstream media selecting stories like this, reporting on things that are trivial, not reporting on things that are really big, like the bombing of Syria, they shouldn't be surprised if in 2024 we get another surprise.
02:10:06.000It's tragic because if we don't believe the mainstream media in an age of misinformation and disinformation, if the average citizen just looks at these things and says, well, they're all lying, then where are we going to get our information from?
02:10:36.000Yeah, if you wanted to have some grand scheme to have democracy fall apart, one of the best ways is to not be able to take any information from once-trusted institutions.
02:10:57.000And they don't know who's telling the truth or who's not.
02:10:59.000And they say, well, I read on CNN. Like, fucking CNN. Nobody believes CNN. You don't believe CNN. Well, if we can't believe CNN, who can we believe?
02:11:08.000Well, then you'll say you can't believe CNN and you don't believe CNN because CNN behaved, over the course of many years, they behaved really badly.
02:11:44.000And it shouldn't take you by surprise that it's going to be filled by people who disinform and misinform, whether they are domestic or external, foreign.
02:12:01.000Hopefully, you know, sometimes I think maybe it's this podcast and, you know, citizens saying, I'm not going to wait around until somebody does something right.
02:12:14.000I'm going to start something myself, like you've done, and others.
02:12:19.000You know, talk to my fellow citizens, figure out what's going on.
02:12:25.000And not rely on the institutions that we used to think we relied on.
02:12:32.000But our free press degenerating the way it has in the last decade, all I can say is it's tragic and I feel that sadness.
02:13:48.000Unbiased, objective source of information that we can get, where we can find out and decide for ourselves.
02:13:55.000What is the interpretation of these things?
02:13:57.000When you deny people the information, the objective information, because you don't want that to empower the side that you're opposed to, you're no longer a journalist.
02:14:09.000And if you think that's okay, to be an activist journalist, Journalism is supposed to be about getting people information.
02:14:18.000It's supposed to be about unbiased information.
02:14:21.000It's supposed to be about the purest, most Most objective version of the truth that you could possibly get to the people, and there's a great value in that.
02:14:30.000But that great value has been cast out in favor of things that get more ratings and more clicks, and in favor of these clickbait articles and trying to get as many advertisers squeezed into your page as you can.
02:16:01.000And then leadership in journalism is not even there anymore.
02:16:07.000Precisely as you describe it, it's the clickbaits, the bottom line.
02:16:13.000And then the farther you go, you know, leadership in education and leadership elsewhere.
02:16:19.000And these things feed off of one another.
02:16:22.000And when you talk about tribalism, I can tell you it's not an attractive thing.
02:16:29.000I know Americans love to cheer for this group against that, but if you come from a tribal society, if you go now to a tribal society, what you see is not attractive.
02:16:48.000What you want to have, the other tribe has, and there's no way both of you can have it.
02:16:55.000So you go to great lengths to get it for your tribe.
02:17:00.000And very often, a lot of blood is shed to get that to happen.
02:17:07.000There is a little bit of everything, not enough.
02:17:13.000And I'm always asking myself, why do Americans think that dividing our society up into collectives, into groups, and I don't care what that particular group, what they have in common,
02:17:29.000but to sit in a group and think we have something in common that they don't have, and we're going to take a hostile attitude to the other side, and you do that, and you have to ask yourself, where is that going to end?
02:17:43.000I don't think Americans have seen the real ramifications of that.
02:17:47.000And that's why they're adhering to these tribal lines.
02:17:50.000When you see the right going against the left or the left going against the right, I don't think they understand where this ends.
02:17:56.000And I think what we saw on January 6th, that's just the beginning of it.
02:18:06.000On the other hand, when I travel around the country and I tend to talk to people, I seek them out and I will talk to the people actually I'm not supposed to talk to.
02:20:37.000And the idea that this person or this group is going to stop you from doing that is one of the narratives that's a real problem in this country.
02:21:42.000Well, then they're going to go to this other place.
02:21:44.000We're going to close that place down, too.
02:21:46.000Well, then you're going to have a civil war, because now you only have one side being represented disproportionately, and these people are going to be furious, and they still can vote.
02:21:54.000If you can't stop those people from voting, that's how you get Donald Trump, because Donald Trump comes around and he says, hey, these people don't like you.
02:22:16.000I've been asked many times, what would you censor?
02:22:18.000And I would say I wouldn't censor anything.
02:22:21.000Look, screaming fire in a theater full of people that's locked up, I think in that sense you can say we have almost 100% consensus that that's a bad thing.
02:23:16.000Now, when I have conversations with people from big tech, they say, but that relationship is between the government and those who are governed.
02:23:29.000Private companies can do whatever they want.
02:23:34.000Private companies can choose what kind of speech they're going to promote and what kind of speech they're not going to promote, depending on their business objectives and their bottom line.
02:23:48.000But what you said earlier, if those big tech companies are seen as monopolies or oligarchies, then they proceed to empower one side and silence the other.
02:24:08.000It should be a matter of time before government starts to interfere.
02:24:41.000It's what's going to end up happening.
02:24:45.000Because of the power that they amass and the power that they're seen to be amassing, In which case they're seeing that one political party is outsourcing censorship that they can't do,
02:25:01.000the party can't do it because of the constitution, but it's outsourcing it to these companies to do it for them.
02:25:08.000That's how things are seen at this point.
02:25:43.000We need some kind of new amendments that deal with what the internet is.
02:25:48.000If you have a portal that has literally billions of people like Facebook has, you can't just say you're a private company.
02:25:58.000Because when you look at, you know, if you've...
02:26:02.000If you've seen any of these documentaries on social media, and you've talked to people that understand how Facebook affects politics in foreign countries, especially when you buy phones and Facebook comes pre-installed on the phone,
02:26:18.000and it's the only way these people communicate with each other.
02:26:20.000And they're using these things to spread lies about opposing parties.
02:26:26.000They're using them to cause civil wars.
02:26:28.000It's not just simply a private company.
02:26:31.000So are they a utility or are they publishers?
02:26:36.000Because if they're publishers, they're responsible for every single thing that gets put on.
02:26:40.000Including all the civil wars, including all the lies, including murder, including all the different things that have been perpetrated because of their platform.
02:27:18.000Well, that's how it should be with the internet.
02:27:20.000And it's a messy, ugly, disgusting thing to hear horrible opinions and evil opinions.
02:27:29.000But the only way, I think, to combat those is to have much better thought out, much better expressed good opinions.
02:27:40.000And so, over time, people see that this is logical and clear and true, and this other stuff is bullshit.
02:27:49.000You're saying let the audience decide for themselves, which is what I agree with.
02:27:52.000But I think, look, we're watching in real time.
02:27:56.000I don't think that it's sustainable for these large companies to carry on Writing this on this lane where they avoid liability, but they have the privileges of being publishers,
02:28:15.000it's a matter of time before something happens.
02:28:17.000I just hope that the right thing happens and not the wrong thing.
02:29:00.000It makes me feel the way, you know, when Amazon stopped selling, when Harry turned Sally, Harry turned into Sally, you know, a book like that.
02:31:56.000And then under pressure from other teenagers, they go to great lengths to make some of these changes that are irreversible and harmful and for all time.
02:32:06.000And I'm not even so much upset with the transgender lobby.
02:32:11.000I'm more upset with the adults in the room, like the doctors, the people who took the oath to make other people better and to heal and to cure.
02:32:22.000They're the ones who are doing things behind the parents' backs to give kids some of these I would say really dramatic drugs and surgeries without the parents knowing.
02:32:37.000I mean there's so much wrong with transgender activism right now that I think now is the time to speak about that.
02:32:46.000I don't understand why that is called hate speech.
02:32:49.000I don't see anything hateful about it.
02:32:53.000Again, we repeat wholeheartedly, transgender people should have the same rights, freedoms, and dignities we have.
02:33:01.000But if there are unintended consequences, if there are things happening that they don't want to girls, children, and young women, why would talking about that and dealing with that issue be hate?
02:33:39.000He was talking about this very thing, and the person who was appointed by the Biden administration gave the same answers over and over again.
02:33:50.000Transgender medicine is very complex and robust, and if I was appointed, I'd be happy to have you come into my office.
02:34:32.000No, I think it just, when I became, I wasn't aware of any of this, I became aware of it through Abigail, her book, and others, and I thought, but this is just like female genital mutilation.
02:35:23.000If you try and think really deep about freedom of speech, the First Amendment, why it came about, it's the speech that offends, the speech that hurts, the speech that people hate.
02:35:46.000That's all fine, but the speech that needs constitutional protection is the speech that hurts.
02:35:54.000To me, it's emblematic of this confusion in our culture now and also this newfound ability to communicate with massive amounts of people and the influence that goes along with that because If you do say anything that could be attributed by some people,
02:36:13.000you could categorize it as hate speech, which is very flippant the way they use this.
02:36:19.000Like if you discuss like Abigail Schreier, who says over and over again on the podcast that I did with her, we opened up the podcast by saying, let's just before we get into this, let's say I have nothing but respect for people that are trans.
02:36:35.000We're not even talking about grown adults.
02:36:38.000We're not talking about people that I believe they are born in the wrong body.
02:37:54.000And one of the things that Rand Paul talks about is how many children that if there was a study that he brings up in this conversation, if they didn't go trans, they would just...
02:38:20.000It's a complex, really fascinating story.
02:38:29.000It's a strange moment in our culture that this has moved to the forefront and it's forcing us to look at what it is to be trans.
02:38:37.000But it's also forcing us to look at what decisions that we're making because we don't want to hurt anybody's feelings.
02:38:43.000We don't want people to think that we're assholes.
02:38:46.000We don't want people to think that we're discriminatory and that you're allowing children To be pushed in one direction or the other.
02:38:54.000We know children are easily manipulated.
02:39:17.000And if today the new contagion, let's call it the madness of the day, is transitioning from whatever sex you were born into, I don't know what the next generation will bring, but this is something we're familiar with.
02:39:34.000I want to go back to the question when you asked me, why are you interested in this subject?
02:39:39.000I think my interest is always sparked when I find a lot of activity around people trying to create a taboo where there shouldn't be a taboo.
02:39:52.000Like, we can have a common-sense conversation about transgender issues in 2021, can't we?
02:40:01.000We can have perfectly rational conversations about any subject.
02:40:10.000Tell me, you name it, and I'll tell you.
02:41:37.000You know, someone pointed out, Heather Hying had a thread about this, and she was talking about the, as a biologist, talking about the biological differences between men and women, because the ACLU had pointed some, they made some nonsense thread on Twitter, where it was like, fact!
02:42:31.000There's a giant difference in physical sports.
02:42:35.000And the idea that you're somehow discriminating because you don't want a trans woman who is a biological male to compete in Against biological females who have inherent physical disadvantages.
02:42:47.000This is why we don't allow men to compete against women in women's sports.
02:43:33.000There's world records being broken left and right by trans women, and that's a fact.
02:43:39.000You could go into cycling or powerlifting.
02:43:42.000In fact, the Olympic powerlifting team has now stopped allowing trans women...
02:43:47.000What Olympic powerlifting federation has stopped allowing trans women to compete as women?
02:43:56.000Because they're just breaking records.
02:43:58.000So would I be too dumb if I said, what if we have men competing against men, women competing against women, and trans people competing against trans people depending on what they transition from?
02:44:10.000They want you to think that a trans person is whatever sex they identify with, period.
02:44:16.000Like I said about a man who has sex with women and fathers a bunch of children and then decides that he's a woman.
02:45:41.000Because they want to be a woman or they want to be a man.
02:45:44.000They want to be a man or they want to be a woman.
02:45:45.000They want to be recognized as a 100% woman or a 100% man.
02:45:53.000And there's even a school of thought that if you're a biological man and you won't date a trans woman, that you're a bigot, that you're transphobic, that you don't want to date a biological male who's transitioned because you're a bigot.
02:46:09.000That would be blackmailing someone into dating, which is...
02:46:14.000It is one of the most human entanglements in terms of the way people are twisting language and utilizing ideology to force people into compliance.
02:46:26.000And then making it into something that government has to execute because what you're telling me about what then the administration does is ratify that.
02:46:35.000So tomorrow if someone else comes a new craziness they'll have to ratify that too.
02:46:42.000I was live and let live do whatever you want until there was a woman who was a biological man for 30 years and then started competing in mixed martial arts as a woman.
02:46:54.000Without telling her opponents that she was a man for 30 years.
02:48:13.000The thing that's going to happen is, we'll withdraw, retreat into our own little tribal, so women in associations from now onwards will be looking out to see if there's someone who looks different from them and won't let them in.
02:48:29.000And just think about the tragedy of that.
02:48:31.000And the same thing is going to happen with men who feel like they've been hounded by the MeToo people.
02:48:37.000They'll just stay away from girls and you're going to see the top echelons of Organizations and corporations become male only because women, you know, it's just too confusing to be around them.
02:48:53.000So all of these things that they say that they're pushing for, the rights of the people they're fighting for, those people will suffer.
02:50:50.000And if there's something that the vast majority of the population disagree with because of science, especially when you talk about sports, you're talking about science.
02:50:59.000The vast majority of the population do not think it's fair that biological males who transition to become women compete against biological females.
02:51:10.000Who've never had testosterone flowing through their body.
02:51:14.000They haven't gone through this, you know, 30 years of being a male and the tendon strength and the difference in the bone structure and the difference in the way the mind works.
02:51:38.000I'm sure there's real scientists that are also woke.
02:51:43.000There's real scientists that are super religious, right?
02:51:47.000There's real scientists that are fundamentalist Christians.
02:51:51.000Yeah, those are the creationists, but the creationists will say they just want to separate what they believe from the science that they practice.
02:51:59.000But I'm wondering on this issue, if you will actually find a scientist, peer-reviewed scientist, to come and sit here and say there's more than just male and female, but there's something else, a third or a fourth or a fifth or a hundredth.
02:52:15.000I think people will say that there's certainly a spectrum in the way the genders are expressed.
02:52:23.000Like, there's very feminine men and very masculine women.
02:52:27.000But, you know, I had an argument with a professor about this on the podcast once, and it was the most nonsense argument I've ever had.
02:52:34.000He's like, well, what's the difference?
02:52:35.000There is no male and there is no female.
02:54:06.000But if we start with what we know and what is, then we can negotiate the rest.
02:54:14.000My concern is that we're moving towards a genderless species that only...
02:54:20.000That only reproduces through some sort of experiment.
02:54:23.000I really wonder, when you see the future of human beings, if science continues to move genetic technology into some crazy new direction, we could move to some sort of a genderless species a thousand years from now.
02:54:43.000This might be the first sort of expressions of that.
02:54:56.000They have these big heads and these little tiny bodies, and they're genderless.
02:54:59.000If you compare us to primates, like chimpanzees or gorillas, they're much more muscular and hairy, and they have very clear genitals, especially chimps.
02:55:37.000I know it sounds crazy, but I wonder what this is.
02:55:42.000There's many people that have been trying to study and figure out why we have this obsession with gender, why we have this obsession with what we're currently grasping now, and this gender fluidity notion that people can bounce back and forth between those genders.
02:56:07.000There is a very small group of people who happen to be very loud, who are obsessed with this.
02:56:14.000And you said a thousand years from now.
02:56:16.000I'm thinking, what's going to happen a thousand days from now?
02:56:20.000And in the meantime, if there's going to be all this suffering of young girls and young boys, if we could agree on some objective truth to which, you know, Right now I was thinking when we were talking about objectivity and science,
02:56:37.000about Helen Placrose, Peter Boghossian, I don't know if you've heard of them, James Lindsay.
02:56:43.000They're trying to fight this ideology, critical race theory, critical justice.
02:57:13.000And so one way of pushing back against those people is by refusing That claim by saying there is indeed science, there is objective truth, there are objective standards, objective criteria.
02:57:30.000And right now, not a thousand years from now, but right now we just have two genders.
02:57:38.000Totally accept that you can transition this way or the other, but just as a given, as a biological, scientific, objective truth given, there are just two genders.
02:57:48.000Well, Bret Weinstein was on Clubhouse and they were screaming at him, calling him a transphobe because he won't recognize they, them.
02:58:39.000And the force compliance, and I think one of the ways of resisting that is by objecting to that and saying, I'm just not going to use a pronoun for a singular person.
02:58:55.000They, if there are multiple people, we, if there are multiple people, and whatever else that they come, I'll use the word equality to mean what it means and not sneak in equity to mean something else.
02:59:09.000Equality, which I think of as equality of opportunity, at least when we're talking in terms of justice.
03:03:35.000And so for so many, and even more, some of them actually start to believe when they're accused of racism, they kind of believe it.
03:03:45.000And when that's all your privilege, they look around and they think, yeah, I am.
03:03:50.000And they feel bad about having that privilege.
03:03:54.000But I think most people don't really agree with the thesis or the reasons that the woke people hand them as, you're a racist, therefore you should do XYZ. They don't agree with it.
03:04:10.000Most people I think that didn't grow up with it.
03:04:12.000I think the problem with this woke shit is the same problem with any religion that you grow up with.
03:04:19.000When you were talking about growing up and believing in the religion that had been taught to you, like when you were a child, When you were learning that and that's how you grew up,
03:04:35.000you thought that's how the world worked.
03:05:09.000Yeah, it's like a lot of crazy belief systems.
03:05:13.000There's a lot of crazy belief systems that people join and they agree to, and when you agree and they know you're agreeing, they can guarantee that you're going to Accept a certain pattern of behavior, and then they can predict what you're thinking and doing,
03:06:06.000And we are not involved in the system as children that is developing these kids that are going to grow up and think that this is the way to live.
03:06:16.000And this is no different than someone who grows up in a perpetual religious environment where the same things are being taught generation after generation like you were talking about as you grew up.
03:10:20.000And the same word is used to define what it's supposed to be defining.
03:10:26.000You couldn't get away with this in, what, sixth grade, seventh grade?
03:10:32.000You'd be told that's not how it works.
03:10:35.000The word that you are defining is in bold and then you use other words to explain what it means.
03:10:42.000So we are on that level where even it's almost like a prayer book and there's a little bit of autobiography here and a bit of scholarship there, but not scholarship the way I recognize scholarship.
03:12:02.000The chickens are coming home to roost.
03:12:04.000It's actually becoming something that, like when you saw Evergreen College, what happened with Brett Weinstein up there, and people were like, why are you focusing on this?
03:12:14.000I'm like, these people are going to leave that college, and they're going to get jobs.
03:12:19.000They're going to enter the workforce, and they believe they're right.
03:12:22.000And they are religious practitioners of woke.
03:12:26.000Yes, and they're in nuclear plants and they're in all sorts of spaces where someone was telling me last night it took him, he's in the aerospace space, and he said it took him eight months to find someone to hire because HR insists that he finds someone from a diverse group.
03:12:51.000They're all kidding themselves because they all know that teeny tiny group of engineers who do that sort of work are not diverse.
03:12:59.000So basically he was forced to find someone who doesn't exist for eight months.
03:13:49.000But you can't because you're saying the people...
03:13:53.000People who graduated from colleges like Evergreen are now in the workforce and they want diversity now because for them it's an article of faith.
03:14:45.000And I think there's only one way to...
03:14:50.000To stop it, because ideally what we want is to stop it, and that is to make sure that they don't get anywhere near power, and that we are more powerful by speaking out, explaining, making things explicit,
03:15:44.000But using all the means, peaceful means, I don't believe in violence, all the useful means that we use, I think mocking them, humor has to come back.