Born in Somalia in 1969, Ayaan Hirsi Ali s journey is a testament to the resilience of the human spirit. Born into a devout Somali Muslim family, she received a strict Muslim education and, in 1992, was married, against her will, to a distant cousin. Fleeing from this forced marriage, armed only with intellectual curiosity and unwavering determination, she sought refuge in the Netherlands. It was here that she found her voice, her passion for women s rights, and her commitment to challenging the status quo. As a member of the Dutch parliament, she became a prominent voice for reform within Islam and a fierce critic of the failures of multiculturalism. Her collaboration on the film Submission with director Theo van Gogh, who was tragically murdered for his work, brought international attention to the plight of Muslim women and the need for cultural introspection within Western societies. Since then, she has dedicated her life to advocating for the rights of women, minorities, and dissidents living under oppressive regimes. Join us for what promises to be a thought-provoking and enlightening discussion about the complexities of our modern age through the lens of one of the world s most fearless and insightful voices. Join us in this special, thought provoking discussion with Ayaans Hirsi Ali, here on the Sunday Special. featuring special guest, author, activist, and human rights advocate, Dr. Maajid Chaudhuri, who joins us to discuss her life, her work, and the challenges facing the modern world. . In this episode, we ll explore the challenges faced by liberal democracies in the 21st century, and what it means to live up to the ideals of Western liberal democracy. in a world where we can be free, free, and free in the face of our best selves. We ll explore what it really means to be free. and what it s really means and why it s so important to live in a democracy and how we should be free in the first place in this episode of The Sunday Special, hosted by the Sunday Serial. featuring the fearless and thoughtful, thoughtful, courageous, insightful, and courageous, and brave, and funny, and fearless, Ayan Hirsi . featuring author, journalist, and brilliant, Ayesha Hirsi-Ali. Thank you for taking the time to take the time! for being a voice for the voiceless, and for standing up for what matters.
00:00:01.000Born in Mogadishu, Somalia in 1969, Ayaan Hirsi Ali's journey is a testament to the resilience of the human spirit.
00:00:07.000Born into a devout Somali Muslim family, Ayaan received a strict Muslim education and, in 1992, was married, against her will, to a distant cousin.
00:00:16.000Fleeing from this forced marriage, armed only with intellectual curiosity and unwavering determination, she sought refuge in the Netherlands.
00:00:22.000It was here that she found her voice, her passion for women's rights, and her commitment to challenging the status quo.
00:00:27.000As a member of the Dutch parliament, Ayaan Hirsi Ali became a prominent voice for reform within Islam and a fierce critic of the failures of multiculturalism.
00:00:35.000Her collaboration on the film's submission with director Theo van Gogh, who was tragically murdered for his work, brought international attention to the plight of Muslim women and the need for cultural introspection within Western societies.
00:00:45.000Since then, Ayaan Hirsi Ali has dedicated her life to advocating for the rights of women, minorities, and dissidents living under oppressive regimes.
00:00:52.000Today, Ayaan's insights into the dangers of political Islamism, the need for reform within Muslim communities, and the defense of Western values are more relevant than ever.
00:00:59.000In this special conversation, we have the privilege of delving into Ayaan's extraordinary life journey, her groundbreaking work in promoting freedom and equality, and her latest reflections on the state of the world.
00:01:08.000From the rise of radical ideologies to the challenges facing liberal democracies, we'll explore the complexities of our modern age through the lens of one of its most fearless and insightful voices.
00:01:17.000So join us for what promises to be a thought-provoking and enlightening discussion with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, here on the
00:01:36.000Folks, if you've not checked out Ayaan Hirsi Ali's Substack yet, you absolutely should.
00:01:40.000So, Ayaan, I want to start with what may be the biggest crisis facing the West, and there are really two aspects of this.
00:01:48.000One is a failure of the West to understand itself, and one is a failure of the West to understand other parts of the world.
00:01:54.000There's this sort of peculiar arrogance and I don't know, centrality, self-centrality to the West view of itself that everybody thinks the way that we do, but obviously your story is a story about growing up in a place that is not the West and how you journeyed from there through the West through a series of various iterations.
00:02:15.000What can you tell people who are born in the West about the way that large parts of the rest of the world think?
00:02:21.000Well, let me start by the first part of your question, which is, what's the biggest challenge that's facing the West?
00:02:27.000And in my view, the biggest challenge by far is the West's insecurity about its own legacy, about its own Judeo-Christian traditions, about the institutions it has built, about its own prosperity and the values that led to that prosperity.
00:02:45.000At some point, the West has allowed itself to feel guilty, and that guilt was weaponized against it.
00:02:53.000And we now face these, in my view again, formidable, or they've become formidable over time.
00:03:00.000These three forces that we talk about all the time, the Chinese Communist Party, And it's ideology that is in some ways a resurgence of communism, and in other ways it's a sort of a warping of capitalism where they gain a lot of money to then desire to be the world's hegemon.
00:03:20.000Authoritarian Putin, Russia, and of course the Islamist threat today projected by the Islamic Republic of Iran.
00:03:29.000And you see this incredible obsession with the destruction of Israel.
00:03:34.000Israel is the only democracy, the only Western society in the Middle East, and it's our ally in both the European powers and America.
00:03:43.000We've promised over and over again that we will secure Israel's future, and that's been constantly challenged.
00:03:51.000I don't know how broad I can go, but I think the key point is the West's insecurity about its own values, norms, institutions, its own legacy.
00:04:03.000So why do you think that the West has lost its way?
00:04:05.000There are a lot of people who posit that it's a loss of religious faith.
00:04:08.000There are a lot of people who posit that in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, the West basically has no confidence in its own ability to shape the world.
00:04:15.000Where do you place the blame for the West having lost its confidence?
00:04:18.000It's both, but I think the loss of faith and the loss of faith in the Christian God and its own Judeo-Christian traditions, I think that is a very, very important point that was neglected and maybe so neglected to the point where we literally are on the brink of losing everything.
00:05:04.000And in this case, I just want to invite everyone to Do a rethink and to see where the values that are grounded in, yes, antiquity, the Greeks, what we inherited from the Romans, but through the Christian period to what we have now and what we stand to lose.
00:05:24.000And I don't think we've had enough conversations about where that got us and how we've neglected those institutions, those ideas, and how we've allowed a warping of those ideas, especially the idea, the concept of justice, to be used as a weapon to destroy everything that the West stands for.
00:06:01.000You know, does it look like Afghanistan?
00:06:04.000What exactly does it look like to live in the Islamic State?
00:06:07.000We've got to ask that question and boldly make the comparison between these two different societies and the values that underpin these societies.
00:06:16.000And I think a majority of humanity knows exactly.
00:06:23.000This is one of the things that makes your story so fascinating is that, again, to get back to where I started, the West is really blind to the fact that not everybody thinks like Westerners.
00:06:41.000And so you see this in the media coverage of various conflicts around the world.
00:06:44.000Most obvious recently is the case of Israel, where the assumption is That Hamas must be some sort of rational actor.
00:06:53.000They love their kids too, and they just want the same sorts of things that the Israelis want.
00:06:57.000So why do they have to have this cycle of violence?
00:06:59.000And if we just put enough pressure as the West on the Israelis to make concessions, eventually there will be a Palestinian state, and that will solve all of the problems, and everybody will just live happily ever after together.
00:07:08.000But you obviously grew up in the Islamic world, and so you know something that Westerners don't, which is that people don't think the same way all across the world.
00:07:16.000What was it like growing up in the Islamic world?
00:07:18.000They're rational, and it's a different rationale.
00:07:21.000And it's, you know, you sing to a different tune.
00:07:24.000So growing up as a Muslim, what it boils down to be a Muslim is to submit to the will of Allah.
00:07:31.000And what that entails, that's documented in scripture, it is the Holy Quran, it's the Hadith, the legacy that's left by the Prophet Muhammad, and it's the Seerah, it's the biography of the Prophet Muhammad.
00:07:42.000And if you take that together, along with 1400 years of culture and civilization, what you get is the Muslim majority countries that we have.
00:07:53.000And it is an idea of a hierarchy where, of course, you submit to Allah, but who represents Allah?
00:08:04.000So it's the ruler, and you have to agree to authoritarian rule without question, because, you know, the supreme ayatollah says that he speaks for Allah.
00:08:15.000In other words, he puts himself on Allah's throne.
00:08:19.000And then the wife obeys the husband without question.
00:08:25.000It's just different forms of subjugation.
00:08:28.000And as a child, I wasn't allowed to ask questions.
00:08:36.000When the Muslim Brotherhood, as a teenager, when they came to our neighbourhoods, I think of that as a classic exercise in subversion, because we identified as Muslims, all of us, my friends, my neighbours, all of us who are Muslim, we identified as Muslims.
00:08:53.000But they brought a different flavour of Islam, where they said, the way you practice your faith is all wrong.
00:08:59.000They came steeped in radicalization from Saudi Arabia and from Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood, some of them also came from Iran.
00:09:08.000And from one day to the next, we were taught Instead of just believing, we had to practice.
00:09:14.000And to practice meant to do things, not just to say things.
00:09:18.000And one of the key components was to hate the unbeliever, invite the unbeliever to Islam.
00:09:25.000And if they refuse, if they reject that invitation, that call to dawah, then they are your enemy.
00:09:30.000So the concept of enemy was explained to us.
00:09:34.000And take it one level further, antisemitism, what we call it, I've never heard of antisemitism before, but it was the hatred of the Jew, because the Jew was the corrupt of the land, corrupt of the word of God, the Jew was evil.
00:09:48.000And so, before I had even met any Jewish person, or knew of the existence of Jewish people as human beings, I was programmed to think of Jews as monsters, as a synonym for the devil.
00:10:04.000I've got a little anecdote here where, you know, just to tell you like how far-reaching it was, when as children you curse, I think in the Western world you use the F-word, you use the S-word, that was discouraged.
00:10:31.000It was that far reaching, then it becomes really a part of you.
00:10:35.000And so, when I look at what's going on today, this explosion of what looks like sudden anti-Semitism, it's not so sudden.
00:10:44.000It's decades of indoctrination, using the mosque, using the madrasa, using the neighborhood, and as technology advanced, I remember the days these things were spread with the cassette tape.
00:11:01.000So every new technology is used by the Islamists to advance a utopia that's going to take us back to the 7th century and On the way to that utopia, we are to be dedicated to destroying the state of Israel, the idea of Zionism, and Jews in general.
00:11:21.000And to me, it's so important that every Muslim who grew up like I did, and who has emancipated themselves from this doctrine of hatred, should come forward today.
00:11:34.000And speak about it, and be honest about it, and decry it, and come forward and defend the State of Israel.
00:11:44.000So, you were in the Islamic world, obviously you then escaped to Europe, and you talk about this in your book, so I want you to explain to folks who may not know your story how that happened, and you move toward atheism, because, of course, if you grow up in a deeply repressive and subjugation-oriented culture, you are going to move away from religion, you see this in all religions, But particularly with an upbringing like yours.
00:12:07.000And you didn't find what you were looking for in atheism, but that's getting ahead of the story.
00:12:10.000So how exactly did you get to Europe and what was your experience as an open atheist in the West?
00:12:16.000And why did you eventually end up finding that insufficient?
00:12:23.000I came to Europe because, again, according to the Islamic tradition within which I was growing up, my father had decided who I was going to marry.
00:12:32.000That is perfectly common in our society.
00:12:35.000There's nothing strange there, except I didn't agree with it.
00:12:39.000Instead, I was sent to Germany to work on the immigration papers with a relative of mine to send me to Canada.
00:12:46.000And so in 1992, July, instead of leaving Germany to go to Canada, I went to the Netherlands and asked for asylum because a lot of Somalis were doing that.
00:12:57.000And within six weeks, the Dutch government granted me what they call an A status or a refugee status.
00:13:05.000And it is in the years in the Netherlands that I was really able to compare, you know, those first 22 years of my life And the society that I had come into, and that for me was the access point into Western civilization at large.
00:13:21.000And it's a society, the first thing that struck me was women and their status.
00:13:59.000And they looked at me as if I was, you know, as if I had come from Mars.
00:14:03.000And so in conversations with the local people, I just wanted to know more and more.
00:14:09.000And I decided I was going to study political science and I majored in political theory.
00:14:15.000I was much more interested in the underlying philosophy.
00:14:20.000And it was then I was actually really optimistic because at that time, the Cold War was over.
00:14:26.000Lots and lots of refugees like me, immigrants, asylum seekers, whatever label you want to pin on, it's just people who didn't like those societies and who are coming here.
00:14:35.000I thought they would be just as wowed by Western society as I was.
00:14:41.000And that Westerners, who were very generous with their welfare states, they were showering us with money, giving us shelter, medical care, all these material things.
00:14:51.000I thought, I still think, That Westerners would say, you know how you get all these material things and all this prosperity and all this peace?
00:15:00.000Here, the norms, the values, the structures copied from us.
00:15:12.000So you moved into, philosophically, away from religion and toward atheism.
00:15:17.000As you mentioned, you sort of took the Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins view of religion, which is that all religion is irrational, all religion is a separation of human beings from their own reasoning faculty.
00:15:28.000And can lead you down dark roads, which, of course, any religion taken to an extreme certainly can.
00:15:33.000But one of the things that has been true of the West, as you mentioned up front, is that the West is living on the fumes of a Christian culture, of a biblical culture.
00:15:43.000And Will Heberg, philosopher in the 1960s, he coined the term cut flower civilization.
00:15:48.000He suggested that we're living in a cut flower civilization, that basically we've got a vase, the flowers are in the vase, they appear to be blooming, but they have no roots anymore.
00:15:55.000And so they can live on for a little while in the water, but eventually They're going to die, and they're going to die sooner rather than later, because when you disconnect a culture from its roots, a civilization from its roots, it ceases to be able to draw on those roots.
00:16:06.000It's no longer able to draw the nutrients from the soil.
00:16:10.000And so when you have an atheistic West that has disconnected from its own roots. It's actually destroying the source of
00:16:17.000its own strength and there is no strength to go up against other very rooted civilizations.
00:16:21.000The civilizations may be wrong, the civilizations may have terrible ideas, but if they're
00:16:24.000rooted, they have an innate strength and durability that a cut flower civilization does not. Yeah,
00:16:30.000and to which I said to Oz, Mr. Oz, that we have seed packets.
00:16:39.000Western civilization may have lost its roots, but the roots have gone dormant.
00:16:44.000We have seed packets that we can spread.
00:16:49.000For me, 9-11, 2001, was the big shock, like it was to many people.
00:16:54.000And before 9-11, the first 10 years, between 1992 and 2001, I was able to assimilate into Dutch society, learn the language, go to university, I mean, I lived and behaved and acted and earned like an average Dutch woman.
00:17:07.000boyfriend. I mean, I lived and behaved and acted and earned like an average Dutch woman.
00:17:15.000And then 9-11 happened. And I understood 9-11 to be exactly what those who perpetrated it said.
00:17:25.000They said they did it out of religious conviction.
00:17:28.000And then I started to have these controversial conversations with Westerners, many of them Atheists, who were saying, no, no, no, religious, that's nonsense.
00:17:37.000They did what they did because of American foreign policy, because of economic disparities, because of Israel and the way Israel is treating the Palestinians.
00:17:49.000But in having those conversations, I was forced then to look at myself in the mirror and ask myself, do I believe in God?
00:17:58.000Do I really want to follow in the footsteps of Prophet Muhammad?
00:18:02.000And that was something, it was a dissonance I couldn't live with.
00:18:06.000And so it was either run or keep running away from it or confront it.
00:18:10.000And in my confrontation, I concluded that there is no life after death, there is no God, and the philosophical position of atheism, there is no evidence of any of this, unless you can see it and either falsify it or verify it, that that attitude, that would be the right attitude to adopt.
00:18:46.000But I think I failed to grasp that as a human being, you need more than just material comfort.
00:18:57.000Just like we have needs, you know, an intellectual need to answer questions, like, you know, we're driven by curiosity.
00:19:03.000I think we also do have spiritual needs and those needs may be more serious and much deeper than many of the other needs and that's my personal conclusion and in this case I'm still
00:19:19.000You know, my faith and my chosen faith, and I've decided I want to become a Christian, that is something I'm still exploring, reading the Bible and talking to theologians with whom I can read the Bible and actually ask these questions.
00:19:35.000But the more, the deeper I dig into this, the more I think if a society is not rooted in faith and doesn't have that conviction, It is going to become a cut flower society.
00:19:53.000It's going to become a cut flower civilization because you create a vacuum, which is exactly what we've done in the West in the last few decades.
00:20:04.000And the spiritual vacuum that emerges is going to be filled in by other forces.
00:20:11.000And there are forces that from the get-go are saying, you know, we want to destroy you, They just didn't have the military might to do it.
00:20:21.000And you make it easier for them, actually, to come in through subversion.
00:20:28.000It's the reason why I call it restoration.
00:20:31.000It's very clear now that we've been subverted and that that strategy is applied because right now there is no other society that is militarily or economically more powerful than we are.
00:20:45.000So what you're seeing is alternative ways of weakening and subverting us, and it starts with the observation that the West has abandoned our Judeo-Christian foundational principles.
00:21:23.000In the late 90s, early 2000s, when the telecom industry faced a downturn, WorldCom's financial instability was exposed.
00:21:29.000The company had not diversified its investments, Well, don't be like Bernie.
00:21:36.000During times of economic uncertainty or market volatility, investors tend to flock to gold as a safe haven asset.
00:21:41.000Its value tends to increase during turbulent times, providing a buffer against market downturns, which is why people are turning to gold right now, and why Birchgold is busier than ever.
00:21:50.000Birchgold understands that navigating financial decisions can be daunting.
00:21:53.000That's why their dedicated in-house IRA department is there to guide you every step of the way.
00:21:57.000Birchgold is committed to addressing your questions and concerns promptly.
00:22:01.000Their team is always ready to provide answers and clarity.
00:22:03.000Whether it's about fees, taxes on rollovers, or the timing of the process, they're here to ensure you feel valued and well-informed.
00:22:09.000Text Ben to 989898 to talk to one of Birchgold's experts to claim your free info kit on gold.
00:22:14.000You'll learn how to convert an existing IRA or 401k into a tax-sheltered IRA in gold.
00:22:18.000The best part is, it doesn't cost you a penny out of pocket.
00:22:25.000One of the things I think that's been disturbing over the past multiple years, obviously, but really coming to a head over the past year, has been the obvious unity between the far left and radical Islam.
00:22:38.000There had been these signs for decades that this alliance was going to eventually consummate itself, but you've seen really since October 7th that this alliance is quite open.
00:22:48.000You see signs for, for example, queers for Palestine, which is inherently contradictory and insane.
00:22:53.000There are zero queers in Palestine, and if there were, they would be immediately killed.
00:22:57.000But the basic orientation is against exactly the culture that you're talking about.
00:23:02.000So, on the one hand, you have a civilization that won't defend itself, and on the other hand, you have people within that civilization who do understand that disconnecting the civilization from its roots Is the only way that they can build something atop the scrap heap.
00:23:27.000Yes, you have one civilization that does want to defend itself, but is only using very expensive tools, military tools, surveillance tools, that are very difficult to sustain, but also that creates a backlash over and over again, whereas the others are using tactics and strategies that A long time.
00:23:52.000It's a commitment of many decades, and that is to brainwash a generation, at least.
00:23:59.000And I think in this case, we see the disconnection between Gen Z, the young generation that grew up with many of whom, as the most of them maybe, didn't grow up with faith and don't really know what Their roots are because they weren't taught not just faith, but also they weren't taught history properly.
00:24:27.000They've been left to the wolves to pick on their minds and capture their minds, their hearts, their souls.
00:24:35.000And that method of fighting is proving to be much more effective than the use of military tools alone.
00:24:44.000Um, so I, I think it's now time that we, we sound the alarm.
00:24:52.000Um, and that's, uh, we open these seed packets and we start, um, yeah, we start banding together.
00:24:59.000Those of us who remember, um, what it was like.
00:25:05.000And those of us who really understand what the differences are, those of us who understand what we what's at stake, what we're about to lose.
00:25:14.000I think we should band together and fight this thing.
00:25:17.000And it's a long-term commitment to go back and restore the ideas, restore the faith, restore the institutions that are broken or that are breaking.
00:25:29.000So you mentioned three foreign challenges on the horizon for the West.
00:25:45.000There's been an attempt on some parts of the weird right and some parts of the left to recast Vladimir Putin as, on the right, a sort of liberator of Christians, which is a strange take, and on the left, to treat him as though he's sort of the natural consequent of aggressive American foreign policy with regard to NATO.
00:26:00.000How should the West be treating Vladimir Putin?
00:26:02.000What should be the strategy the West uses to approach Putin, particularly in Ukraine where the conflict is ongoing?
00:26:09.000I'd say the specific question of Ukraine It does.
00:26:18.000I'll take you back to, you know, what do you do when you're confronted with an aggressor?
00:26:24.000And in the West, you have those voices and usually they come across as the reasonable ones.
00:26:31.000It is to appease the aggressor in order to avoid escalation.
00:26:37.000And on the other side is, confront the aggressor, stop him.
00:26:43.000And in the short term, you're going to have a disruption But that will buy you peace in the long term.
00:26:50.000So either, you know, counter-offensive or this trajectory of appeasement.
00:26:56.000Unfortunately, the Biden administration appeased Vladimir Putin early on.
00:27:03.000And so now we find ourselves in this muddied water where should we go all in now and stop him?
00:27:15.000I'm not the president of the United States.
00:27:17.000But if I did, I would rally the world, those who are truly our allies, to stop Vladimir Putin, give back the territories that he has taken, and only then will peace prevail.
00:27:33.000Having said all of this, this is armchair general.
00:27:38.000I'm just telling you on a philosophical level, I think the more you appease an aggressor, we've seen this with Hitler.
00:27:45.000Anyway, in all of the smaller wars that you see in the third world, appease an aggressor means embolden an aggressor.
00:27:54.000Face an aggressor with bold strength, they back away.
00:28:00.000Iran right now, we have only bad options on the table.
00:28:05.000And again, the history that America alone has with Iran is one if you go back as President Carter's time to now, with every provocation, what do we do?
00:29:13.000With all three of these different aggressions or aggressors.
00:29:22.000Militarily, economically, we've got to be very forceful and very firm.
00:29:26.000And then we have to recommit on the long term to restoring ideas of faith, the faith in our own foundational principles.
00:29:40.000So, let's talk about how we do that in the West.
00:29:43.000Because one of the biggest problems, obviously, is that the vast majority of major institutions in the West have been taken over by people who fundamentally do not like Christian values or Judeo-Christian values.
00:29:54.000If you look at the university system, they've been completely lost.
00:29:57.000You'll have an occasional university that is not that way, but you can literally name them on one hand.
00:30:02.000It's like the University of Austin, Hillsdale College, Liberty University, maybe some aspects of the University of Florida.
00:30:09.000The rest of the university systems have been taken over en masse by the left, and a left which really dislikes religion and sees religion as the root of all evil, the same way that Marx saw religion as the root of all evil.
00:30:20.000When you look at social media, social media has been designed to suppress messages that are heterodox with regard to morality.
00:30:28.000You must say the words, and if you don't say the words, then you will be cast into the outer darkness.
00:30:33.000One of the big questions I think for people who are of traditionalist bent on these matters
00:30:38.000is whether to engage, how much to engage, where to engage, or whether to sort of withdraw and build alternatives.
00:30:45.000And that's sort of an open conversation on each of these institutions.
00:30:48.000What do you think is the sort of tipping point as far as where you sign off
00:30:53.000and take the Rod Dreher-Benedict option and say, okay, we're just gonna build our own thing over here
00:30:57.000and we're gonna let you wither on the vine, and where is it worth fighting?
00:31:04.000Build new institutions if you can afford it.
00:31:07.000My husband is involved with Jarlonsdale in Trying to do this in UATX.
00:31:12.000I think it's a fantastic idea if there's a new institution that actually succeeds as a university in doing what a university is supposed to do.
00:31:20.000That creates the opportunity and it shows that you know lots of students and faculty and even to a degree some administrators don't want to stay with the rotten faculties.
00:31:32.000They'll move to the new thing and it maybe will encourage the building of even more institutions.
00:31:38.000I also believe in Trying to recapture some of the institutions that we stand to lose.
00:32:17.000I would say it's not a perfect diagnosis, but between all of us who see the problem that we've been calling wokeism, which is this resurgence of communism and socialist ideas, we now know exactly Who these people are, what their objectives are and how they work.
00:32:36.000And so now it is let's get together and start pre-storing these institutions.
00:32:43.000Bill Ackman confronted Harvard as that's his alma.
00:32:49.000And, you know, that's an example to some of the people who really have the resources to make that kind of change, to come together.
00:32:58.000and say this is not how I want my money to be spent but also I don't want this is not the direction that I want this institution to go in.
00:33:06.000This is not the direction that I want my country to go in.
00:33:09.000I think it's now the time for the grown-ups to come in and we stop fighting each other and fight our common enemies.
00:33:17.000One of the other things that obviously we've seen on a societal level in the United States is as religion has declined, people have filled that hole in their hearts with really partisan politics.
00:33:26.000And the politics very often are not even about principles.
00:33:30.000What we're talking about here are broader philosophical principles, things worth fighting for.
00:33:33.000It seems like people are just getting joy out of the fight right now on a lot of sides.
00:33:38.000They're having a lot of fun punching each other on Twitter.
00:33:40.000And when I say fun, I really don't mean that.
00:33:42.000I think that most people are miserable.
00:33:44.000On places like X or Twitter, spending all day punching one another, but it fills some sort of void temporarily with an endorphin rush if you get off a good line.
00:33:52.000It seems to me that the only way to cure that is really, in some ways, to stop using a lot of the tools that are out there entirely.
00:34:06.000I think that there may not be a substitute in the human heart for church, not just because of the religion that it provided, but also because of the actual get out, touch grass, meet other human beings.
00:34:16.000I agree with you on everything you've said just now.
00:34:19.000And I think part of this futile punching at one another, it's denial.
00:34:22.000by the right, and the right has neglected to do that in a pretty significant way.
00:34:25.000I agree with you on everything you've said just now. And I think part of this
00:34:31.000futile punching at one another, it is, it's denial. And it is a denial of these bigger
00:34:39.000challenges that we face and maybe the fear that we have of, oh, how can we deal with this?
00:39:09.000One of the things that you're talking about here, that reactionary cycle that you talk about from the left and the right, it is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
00:39:15.000So what you have is a left that will say that Donald Trump is such a threat to the republic that he must be stopped by any means.
00:39:21.000And any means means literally any means.
00:39:23.000It means that you can use every legal and illegal method at your disposal in order to drag him
00:40:49.000But as we move away from the idea that there are any rules whatsoever, You know, it used to be that when it came to politics, yes, it was a chess game.
00:40:57.000But when you play chess, there are rules.
00:40:59.000And now it's both sides threatening that if they lose, they're going to overturn the table.
00:41:03.000And if the idea is that that you overturn the table, there will be no more chess.
00:41:06.000Well, then you're playing a completely different game and things get very ugly very quickly.
00:41:10.000And it takes also that opportunity to step back, because at some point, you know, sometimes I feel like, okay, I agree with someone on the left or I agree with someone on the right, but there's something that's going on that makes it extremely difficult for us to be rational about how we address these problems.
00:41:28.000In the search for why is our society behaving this way?
00:41:32.000Obviously, I was listening to people who were saying, part of it is the breaking down of faith and of norms
00:42:15.000But there is one that is much more boring, more long term, but much more consequential.
00:42:21.000And that is this infecting of society with these ideas Get into the institutions and actually consciously create a situation where members of the society that you want to subvert don't talk to one another.
00:42:44.000And it's exactly what you're describing between those who support Trump and those who support Biden and those who support this and those who support that.
00:42:51.000In our society right now, what he was describing in the 70s is materializing today.
00:42:56.000So the big question, to avoid getting into conspiracy theories, the big question is, were those seeds that were planted in the 70s, are they materializing now?
00:43:08.000Or is there some other force behind this?
00:43:26.000If you're an Islamist, or if you're a member of the CCP party, or if you're Putin, You would love it if the West destroyed itself.
00:43:35.000You would love it if their children all of a sudden all decided that they wanted to change their sex and their gender.
00:43:41.000You would love it if they all ganged up on the State of Israel.
00:43:45.000This is just to show you, look, we don't have to do anything.
00:43:49.000We just have to stand back and watch them destroy each other.
00:43:53.000And I think in that sense, given the number of enemies we have, how formidable they are, how effective they are, and where we are, it's time really to sober up And stop fighting each other.
00:44:04.000I love my Democrat friends and I love my Republican friends and it's time that we stop.
00:44:12.000You know what Jonathan Haidt has been writing about recently and what he says that society really full scale started to break down about the time of the iPhone, that as soon as you had that technology in your hand and you could constantly be updating the news and not just updating the news, but updating yourself and what other people thought of you, you created this perverse feedback loop where particularly for teenage girls, but it's true for everybody, I think.
00:44:33.000That if you check your notifications on X, it's legitimately one of the worst things that you can do just as a human being.
00:44:39.000Because all human beings are built to be ego machines.
00:44:41.000We're all built to worry about what other people think of us.
00:44:44.000Because when we were in the jungle, it really mattered a lot what other people thought of you.
00:44:46.000If they thought poorly of you, then you starved.
00:44:48.000So we're all built to care about what people around us think.
00:44:52.000And so when you have a machine that's built to spec, That is designed to give you what quote-unquote other people think of you, even if those other people are bots in some other country, or even if that is a ginned up opposition to you.
00:45:03.000You're going to respond to that echo chamber simply because it is the source of information that is at your disposal.
00:45:08.000And so if you get cheered for quote-unquote changing your gender by a bunch of randos on TikTok, then you are in fact as a human being going to respond to that when that technology becomes so widespread, so available, so immediate.
00:45:20.000And every time you refresh, you get an endorphin rush before the crushing morosity that hits the moment that you realize everybody hates you.
00:45:26.000That is a way to make an entire civilization mentally ill.
00:45:31.000And it seems to me that, you know, again, the best thing that most people can do, just as individuals, put aside the politics, the best thing most individuals can do is get off your phone.
00:45:41.000Just get off your phone for five seconds a day and actually spend some time with other human beings.
00:45:45.000When you say you have Democrat friends, you have Republican friends, that's true in real life.
00:45:51.000I've found myself that I have friends who are on the other side of the aisle, and I know them, I say hello to them, and none of them will ever say happy birthday to me on Twitter.
00:45:59.000Because the minute they say happy birthday to me on Twitter, that would be acknowledged that I'm born of woman, and then they would be hit with a wave of hatred, a wave of disdain from their own side of the political aisle.
00:46:08.000So they'll give me a call or they'll text me.
00:46:09.000But the minute they do that in public, it's a real problem.
00:46:11.000Now, we could be walking out, we could have dinner together in Miami where everybody disagrees about politics and it would be totally fine.
00:46:17.000But the minute you do it online, the performative aspect comes in and it destroys everything.
00:46:21.000So I really wonder if maybe the solution to this is just to disconnect a lot.
00:46:25.000I think you have a point there, but I also am very, very cautious of blaming technology.
00:46:30.000Technology has given us, yes, an amplification of bad ideas and the animosities and an inflation of the ego and all of the societal ills that were already there.
00:46:41.000They may have found, yeah, an amplification in these bad things, but technology has also given us so many other wonderful things.
00:46:48.000So let's get off the phone for five seconds approach and then go back to the quality, the things that give quality to human life, our faith, our family, our vocation, our community.
00:47:03.000That is, I think, where we need to head.
00:47:06.000And was it Jonathan Hyde that you cited just now?
00:47:10.000I think interestingly, he found when he was looking at suicide ideation, I could be wrong.
00:47:20.000He was speaking at ARC in London, and he got to a point where he said he does see, for instance, among liberal teenage girls, this abuse of technology, of the smartphone, Instagram, and the unintended consequences of that, where anxiety, depression, suicide ideation is pretty high.
00:47:42.000And then he looked at some of the conservatives slash Christians families.
00:47:49.000And the problem, if it is there, is very small, if it's perhaps even non-existent.
00:47:55.000And I remember he said that as an aside, but I remember just latching onto it and thinking, but wait a second, that's a big deal.
00:48:03.000Because do you know what I see with my friends of faith, whether they're Jewish, Christian, or even Muslim?
00:48:12.000Technology is used as an instrument to help you in your daily life.
00:48:17.000It doesn't It doesn't hijack your daily life, and it's not allowed to hijack your daily life.
00:48:24.000And technology used as a useful, exactly what it says, as an instrument to enrich your life, is fine.
00:48:32.000But technology to substitute your community, your friends, your faith, to keep you hooked, and to damage your brain, and to damage your relationships, and to disconnect you from everyone else in the name of connection, that's sick.
00:49:25.000We look at Christianity, there's this sense of, let's not bother others, tear down the Christmas tree, you know, sanitize everything from the school books.
00:49:37.000And if you're going to put the cross somewhere, then put all of the other.
00:49:44.000It is literally, it is an erasing of your history and the most important part of what makes this civilization tick.
00:49:53.000And I think that is what we need to be talking about.
00:49:56.000And technology and abuse of technology is a reflection of the departure from these foundational principles.
00:50:06.000One of the things I wanted to ask you on a personal level is about your faith, because one of the things that even people like Richard Dawkins will now say, so Richard Dawkins is obviously one of the world's most famous atheists, and he recently called himself a cultural Christian, by which he meant that he likes a lot of the trappings of Christianity, that when he walks around Great Britain, he likes looking at the churches, and he likes hearing the Christmas carols, and all the rest of that.
00:50:25.000And the point that I made on my show is, okay, well, if you like those things, then the churches can't be empty, otherwise it's just a building.
00:50:31.000If you like Christmas carols, somebody has to believe in Christ in order to actually sing a Christmas carol.
00:50:35.000And that's just the way that the culture works.
00:50:38.000But there is a difference between understanding the cultural value of religion.
00:50:43.000Even Voltaire recognized the cultural value of religion, the societal value of religion, and actually believing the thing.
00:50:48.000So for you on a personal level, obviously as you've embraced Christianity, How did you make the shift between understanding the cultural necessity of Christianity in a world that is moving away from Christian values and actually believing the things?
00:51:01.000I know that's a barrier for a lot of my own listeners.
00:51:03.000I've encouraged people to go back to church and re-embrace their faith.
00:51:06.000And what I get a lot is, sure, I'd love to do that, but I can't get there.
00:51:12.000So on my own personal spiritual needs, I think I've just told you about them.
00:51:18.000I'm actually working on a book where I describe step by step how I got there on the importance of religion for society.
00:51:30.000It is just by being part of these debates and conversations where If I'm really honest with myself, and I don't become obsessive, I was saying to myself, I'm not obsessive.
00:51:44.000My tribe is the atheist tribe, and therefore, within my atheist tribe, if we get things wrong, I'm just going to pretend it's right.
00:52:00.000Actually, if you're a proper atheist, and you say, I'm led by my curiosity, By evidence, the overwhelming evidence shows that communities that are religious don't seem to fall prey to all the deviances that we've just been talking about.
00:52:22.000Whether it is crime, whether it's broken families, whether it's mental health issues, you see that within religious families, religious communities, there is more stability.
00:52:35.000I'm not saying that these things don't occur within religious communities.
00:52:39.000They do, but they're far less than when people have departed.
00:52:44.000So religion has a function, number one.
00:52:47.000And number two, the rootedness that we started with, Well, you know, just think about the Ten Commandments.
00:52:55.000That prudentness, the church, the synagogue, the mosque, these institutions play a role in the day-to-day lives of human beings.
00:53:07.000Even if you don't believe in scripture, even if you don't believe in any of the things that are hard to prove or that are impossible to prove, still, These institutions play a great role in our daily lives, and where they're allowed to play that role in a healthy way, these communities are healthy.
00:53:31.000We'll get to more on this in a moment.
00:54:32.000So I do want to return to sort of your personal story, though, because I do think that it's important for a civilization not only to understand social utility of religion, which, of course, I agree with and I argue for, but also, you know, I get asked a lot why I believe in God, why I believe in the Torah, for example.
00:54:48.000And so, you know, the answer that I very typically give is because it works.
00:54:52.000Meaning that if the basic idea is that a series of rules is tested over time, and that series of rules proves itself durable, that's now a form of data.
00:55:02.000And so, sure, there are miracle stories, and that requires a leap of faith, and every system requires a leap of faith, including militant atheism, because there's an is-ought gap.
00:55:10.000Between material world and a set of values.
00:55:13.000You can't get from one to the other despite the best attempts of people who I'm friends with, like Sam Harris, to do so.
00:55:17.000You can't just look at the world and immediately get to, okay, here's why all of these things are immoral.
00:55:22.000That's an impossible bridge to gap, a gap to bridge, as Hume pointed out.
00:55:28.000But for me, the argument Thomas Sowell makes is that accepted wisdom of the past is in fact a form of data.
00:55:33.000And so if a set of rules has worked over time, that's a pretty good indicator.
00:55:38.000And if it has developed a civilization that you like, that's a good indicator there may be truth to the rules, which suggests there may be truth to the lawgiver.
00:55:44.000That's the argument that I've used myself in a rationalist way.
00:55:48.000Obviously, there's an emotional component to faith that can't be duplicated, but in a rationalist way, that is sort of my generalized defense of personal religiosity.
00:56:32.000And when I started to grapple with questions of, you know, I don't know, existential questions, deal with my own anxieties, my own depression, and even why I have them at all or why I had them at all, I didn't turn to a higher power.
00:56:51.000I turned to To things, to materials, to human beings, to alcohol.
00:56:59.000And my problems just would not go away.
00:57:03.000And I had gotten myself to a place where actually I didn't want to live anymore.
00:57:08.000I didn't do anything active to take my life.
00:57:10.000But the way I was drinking, that was a form of... It was a slow form of suicide, basically.
00:57:19.000And I had come to that crossroads of either just keep doing what you're doing and die this death that a lot of alcoholics die, or turn away from it, choose to live.
00:57:35.000And that came with a therapist saying, you know, the problem with you is you are spiritually bankrupt.
00:57:43.000And I thought that's a very It's a very harsh thing to say.
00:59:03.000Now, I've spoken to Richard Dawkins, and Richard is not... He respects all of that, but obviously he's not going to become... I don't think he thinks of himself as someone going on his knees and praying to God.
00:59:29.000These are very, very close friends, very dear friends.
00:59:33.000They don't have to convert to any religion.
00:59:37.000But if, I haven't spoken to Sam for a while, but if like Richard they say, but it is, Christianity is much more sensible and a better story for humanity, for us, those of us who choose to To cherish its legacy.
01:01:42.000And so I think we didn't reflect properly on the history of the Cold War.
01:01:48.000We didn't take the heed of thinkers, very serious thinkers like Sam Huntington.
01:01:53.000Professor Samuel Huntington was a pervert who bought the clash of civilizations, who didn't take part in the celebrations.
01:02:03.000And so I think if you reflect on that history, and you think maybe some of those resin seeds that they planted back in the 70s or even earlier, These are now, you know, sowed the seeds, they're now flourishing, we now have what we call the woke, and it's a phenomenon that is, it has us all shocked and astounded, but we can't, we don't seem to be able to explain the pace at which these fringe communities, they were in universities, people who talked about gender all the time and gender studies and race studies and
01:02:42.000And they fantasized about communist utopias.
01:02:53.000By the way, they were children of rich people, so they could afford to have those stupid utopias of theirs.
01:02:59.000But now it's there everywhere, after the whole George Floyd thing.
01:03:04.000I think, I just sat down and thought, maybe there's something to You know, a serious reflection on the Cold War, what went on, the fact that we didn't really deal with it properly, and that we are now reaping what they have sowed.
01:03:22.000There's also all the conversations, Ben, that you follow about current disinformation, which is tech-centered.
01:03:29.000And I think it's important to talk about that subversion as well.
01:03:34.000There is the one that I'm much more familiar with, which is the Islamist subversion, which has a name.
01:03:42.000And if you look at the theologians and the thinkers, the serious Islamist thinkers, they agree on the objectives, but they've always disagreed on the means to the objective.
01:03:53.000The objective is we want to establish a society based on Allah's law, Sharia law.
01:03:59.000Whether that is In my village, in my town, in my city, in my country, my region, or the whole world, the objective is the same.
01:04:09.000But the means to get there, they differ, these theologians.
01:04:13.000Well, some theologians play the long-term game, and they call it gradualism, through entries of different institutions, through demographics, through immigration, through soft power.
01:04:27.000And the other group would say, no, it's through hard power, through jihad.
01:04:30.000Now we've seen those ones come and go.
01:04:34.000Don't know if they entirely are gone, but we've seen those attempts at, you know, shock and awe, jihad, with the Islamic State of Syria, of Iraq and Syria, ISIS, Hamas.
01:04:52.000Hamas is, of course, the daughter, the child of the Muslim Brotherhood.
01:04:58.000And it's been going on, I mean, using hardcore jihad for a long time.
01:05:03.000And I think that the theologians of Dawah, those who say, you win these societies, you take them over to long term subversion.
01:05:16.000Because if you look at European societies, all you can say is just, I was there 30 years ago, when people said, oh, it's a slippery slope, stupid arguments to think in those terms.
01:05:28.000And now here I am, and the mayor of Brussels has just cancelled NatCon, an international conservative, you know, conference where people who are there are Trying to exchange their views openly, transparently, not harming anyone.
01:05:47.000But the mayor of Brussels has cancelled it.
01:07:19.000But if you are, whatever you do, just engage in trying to understand and restore.
01:07:25.000Start with restoring the connection to your higher power and then start the connections with the people around you, with your community, with, yeah, with If you store the connections between you and your family and your community, and I think that's already something.
01:07:47.000Ayan, thank you so much for coming by and spending the time.