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

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00:01:01.260 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show.

00:01:03.240 Your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.

00:01:12.160 Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly and welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show.

00:01:15.500 Today we've got Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

00:01:17.880 I first had her on The Kelly File years ago.

00:01:21.560 This woman has, she gives new definition to the word bravery.

00:01:28.260 She has had a fatwa put on her, a death order, death threat by Al-Qaeda.

00:01:35.280 She has fought a battle to protect women who are being subjected to the worst of radical Islam.

00:01:42.700 She gets attacked rhetorically and threatened physically, regularly, but doesn't silence herself.

00:01:52.020 I think I got problems because NBC was mean to me.

00:01:54.260 Wrong.

00:01:54.980 Wrong.

00:01:55.500 Ayaan Hirsi Ali has really been fighting battles and she's been an inspiration to me.

00:02:01.500 And now she's taking on wokeism, among other things, and she'll be here to tell us about it all.

00:02:06.560 She's a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and she's the founder of the Ayaan Hirsi Ali Foundation, the AHA Foundation, which tries to help women as well.

00:02:16.780 She's also got a new book coming out in February called Prey, P-R-E-Y.

00:02:20.940 And if you want to know more about it, you can follow her on Twitter at Ayaan, A-Y-A-A-N, for updates.

00:02:25.540 She's fascinating.

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00:03:55.600 And now, without further ado, Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

00:03:58.560 Ayaan Hirsi Ali, thank you so much for being here.

00:04:04.640 Megan, thank you so much for having me.

00:04:06.600 My pleasure.

00:04:07.480 So Ayaan and I first met years ago when I was at Fox and I had her on the show and she floored all of us.

00:04:14.880 Very open about your past, about why you feel the way you do about Islamists, radical Islam, and very brave.

00:04:24.020 Because unlike these, you know, people who feel they've been placed in danger by Trump's tweets, right?

00:04:33.420 Because he's called them a name or they've come after him or he's come after them.

00:04:38.600 You actually have had a death threat put on you and you've been laboring under it for years and years.

00:04:45.700 We'll get to that in a second.

00:04:47.400 Let me just start, Ayaan, with Trump because he's in the news dominating it as always.

00:04:52.640 And I'm wondering what you think about his challenges right now to the electoral results.

00:04:59.400 I would say I first developed an interest for Donald Trump back in 2015 when he became the nominee for the Republican Party.

00:05:09.100 And back then what I was reading about him was that we're going to have the next Hitler. 0.95

00:05:12.780 And I remember reading about him, listening to his interviews, listening to his rallies and thinking, hmm, you know, any self-respecting despot will need some measure of impulse control.

00:05:28.600 And I think that Donald Trump lacks that.

00:05:30.680 To some people, Donald Trump is the devil and to others, he is just the perfect person at the perfect time to challenge Washington, D.C.

00:05:42.400 I think it is regrettable that he's not conceding the election.

00:05:47.080 But again, he won the election in 2016 and the media and the Democrats refused to concede and subjected him to these fictions of Russia collusion, relentless impeachment and criticism.

00:06:03.600 So, in a way, I would say it is almost a tit-for-tat what's happening now, but it's not good for our country.

00:06:11.600 It's not, it would be great if Donald Trump were to say, look, here's my legacy, look at all the things that I've achieved, look at the turnout of 2020.

00:06:21.000 So many people who were never interested in politics actually came out to vote, and in a democracy, that's a good thing.

00:06:27.100 Look at his economic achievements.

00:06:28.900 You know, take all that and then leave gracefully.

00:06:32.900 But I'm afraid we are in a place today in our democracy that the loser just refuses to go, and that's not a good thing.

00:06:44.140 Well, and it's, you know, the electoral challenge will play out.

00:06:47.160 We'll see what happens in these court proceedings.

00:06:49.540 I know you've been a supporter of his.

00:06:52.260 You've defended him from time to time as some of those things you just ticked off happened.

00:06:57.960 And our faith in systems has collectively been eroded over the Trump presidency.

00:07:04.600 Yes, in part because of his rhetoric and the things he says and does, but also in large part because they deserved it.

00:07:12.500 They behaved in a way, things like the media, big tech, even corporate America in a way that justified our change of feelings about them, right?

00:07:26.700 I mean, I think there are a lot of people, and I listen and listen carefully and intently, who say our institutions and everything has been eroded since Donald Trump came along.

00:07:40.620 I don't think they've been eroded.

00:07:44.720 I think they've been tested.

00:07:47.300 The institutions of checks and balances have been tested.

00:07:53.280 Donald Trump is going to go.

00:07:55.480 You know that, and I do.

00:07:56.640 But we will still have our system and our institutions, and the outcome of this election actually suggests how strong these institutions are.

00:08:08.520 And again, I just keep repeating what a genius those founding fathers were.

00:08:12.580 You get an election outcome like this one, and it says, on the one hand, you know, this president who's in your face, who doesn't act presidential,

00:08:20.920 with this, you know, this administration and the relentless chaos, you can say, okay, the voters have said, we don't want that anymore.

00:08:29.560 But they also don't want this crazy hard left agenda of, you know, adding two states to the union and abolishing the filibuster and packing the courts

00:08:41.040 and this crazy, crazy stuff that they say, like defund the police, defund ISIL.

00:08:46.280 So I think there's a check, and our system allows for that.

00:08:49.840 And so I think it's been tested, and it's withstanding the test.

00:08:54.660 I feel like you're the perfect person to talk to in today's day and age because, as we're going to get into,

00:09:00.280 you've already lived in a society that punishes free expression or anyone who deviates from accepted thought, right,

00:09:09.140 in the name of something more important, a higher value.

00:09:12.540 And you, at a very young age, stood up to it and said, no.

00:09:17.100 So, and now you wind up in the United States where it's happening again in a different way.

00:09:24.280 You've been the one calling attention to what's happening in our country and how it's disturbingly similar to some of the battles you've already fought against radical Islam. 1.00

00:09:33.540 And I want to just get the listeners up to speed on your background and what we're talking about.

00:09:38.840 You were born in Somalia.

00:09:40.780 You were raised an Islamist. 0.99

00:09:43.840 Taught what about Jewish people? 0.99

00:09:46.520 About the infidel in general, Jewish people in particular.

00:09:50.240 So, I actually wasn't raised an Islamist, but I was attracted to Islamism as a teenager when members of the Muslim Brotherhood,

00:10:01.180 they set up shop in Nairobi where I was growing up at that time and I was in school and I found their message compelling and I voluntarily joined them.

00:10:12.060 And some of the things I learned was that, you know, as a Muslim, as a true Muslim, as opposed to fake Muslims, 0.94

00:10:23.120 you should hate the infidel with everything in you and the Jews in particular because they control the world. 1.00

00:10:29.420 And so, I was introduced to a lexicon of anti-Semitism that I embraced, but then later on, a decade later when I was in the Netherlands, 0.80

00:10:41.220 and I actually found out that things don't work that way, I came to understand the true story and rejected it.

00:10:49.400 They attempted, prior to that point, to imprint upon you a hatred that was in the name of religion, right? 0.55

00:10:57.680 Yeah, my religion.

00:10:59.480 Right, and your religion.

00:11:00.500 And so, wait, can you just explain on that?

00:11:02.640 So, you weren't raised an Islamist.

00:11:04.580 So, when you were in your family of origin, before you joined the Muslim Brotherhood or started talking to them,

00:11:11.000 what's the distinction between how you were raised in that phase?

00:11:14.500 Well, we identified as Muslim.

00:11:16.940 We were very passive about it.

00:11:19.780 We, you know, sometimes we prayed and we fasted during the month of Ramadan.

00:11:24.600 But it wasn't, it was more of a religious, what we describe in America as being religious, as worshipping God.

00:11:36.100 It wasn't political.

00:11:38.180 My mother didn't have, my father was away most of the time, but my mother didn't have any kind of political agenda. 1.00

00:11:44.600 She didn't use Islam as a tool. 0.72

00:11:47.360 Neither did my neighbors and other members of my community.

00:11:51.140 But what made the Muslim Brotherhood very different and the Islam that they were perpetuating was Islam is political. 0.83

00:11:59.920 You can't separate it from religion. 0.97

00:12:01.700 And if you say, I'm only going to be religious, then you're a fake Muslim. 0.99

00:12:05.480 That's what they would call us. 0.96

00:12:06.480 So to be a true Muslim, you had to embrace the political agenda of jihad, of subjugating women, of covering yourself from head to toe, of preparing yourself for a life after death. 1.00

00:12:20.020 And that was an indoctrination in the sense that if you asked questions, you were punished.

00:12:25.800 So you've been very open about, sadly, having been forced to undergo genital mutilation when you were only five years old.

00:12:37.300 And that, I understand, was your grandmother's decision?

00:12:41.540 It was my grandmother's decision.

00:12:45.240 She did say it was an Islamic requirement.

00:12:48.420 But I want to remind listeners that my grandmother actually couldn't read or write.

00:12:52.980 So Islam came to her not through her own curiosity, but because she was simply born into a Muslim family.

00:13:00.400 Now, later on, when I started doing some research to see if there's a link between female genital mutilation and Islam, I found one.

00:13:09.900 I found some hadiths or supposedly comments, decrees made by the prophet.

00:13:17.020 And that there are indeed many Muslim countries.

00:13:20.000 In fact, it is most Muslim countries that practice this terrible, terrible ritual. 1.00

00:13:26.100 And they justify it in the name of Islam. 0.99

00:13:28.140 But female genital mutilation also predated Islam.

00:13:32.720 So it's a yes and no. 0.52

00:13:34.380 And that is what makes it very hard to fight it.

00:13:37.980 Because when you say it's done in the name of religion, the people who are attached to the religion will say it's not.

00:13:45.540 But it carries on anyway.

00:13:47.980 And so this is not only the most radical factions of Islam.

00:13:52.080 This is, you know, even a just religious version of Islam, as you describe your family.

00:13:58.140 It's not uncommon at all to force a young girl to undergo this barbarity.

00:14:03.720 Absolutely.

00:14:04.580 It's done in the name of religion. 0.96

00:14:06.280 It's done in the name of custom and ritual.

00:14:09.100 And it's still ongoing.

00:14:10.840 150 million, as far as the last time I saw a count, according to the United Nations and World Health Organization, have been, have seen their genitals cut.

00:14:22.620 What is the goal of it?

00:14:25.300 What are they hoping to accomplish with that?

00:14:29.040 A number of things. 0.72

00:14:30.620 Number one, they obviously want to limit what they call the libido of the woman, the female, so that when you develop from being a little girl to a teenager, you are less inclined to want to have sex with boys.

00:14:44.100 So that's number one.

00:14:44.960 And number two, it is on the wedding night.

00:14:47.820 You're supposed to be a virgin until you get married.

00:14:50.600 And for, you know, in countries like Somalia, Egypt, Sudan, it's the only test they have to confirm that you haven't been having sex before marriage.

00:15:02.040 And so that those are the two practical reasons that are given for inflicting this on girls and women. 0.83

00:15:12.400 You were, you were five years old at the time.

00:15:15.880 And it's hard to believe that's a baby.

00:15:17.880 That's basically a babe. 1.00

00:15:20.160 Do you remember it, Ayaan?

00:15:21.620 Was there any attempt to anesthetize you or save you from the pain of it?

00:15:26.760 No, where we lived, and back then I was in Somalia, we didn't have anesthesia.

00:15:32.140 I think they do it to children as young as five because probably they're easier to hold down than, you know, a flailing 16-year-old.

00:15:40.960 But there are also some cases where teenagers are subjected to it.

00:15:48.000 I've written in great detail about this in my book, Infidel, my autobiography.

00:15:55.280 And I did it because I think I was, I felt inspired by people who had, there's this woman called Varis Diria, who is a model.

00:16:10.080 She's also originally from Somalia.

00:16:13.360 And we understood that if you don't tell these stories, if you don't talk about it, then the practice never stops.

00:16:20.980 So in order to urge change, you have to tell your story.

00:16:27.460 Well, I also think it just puts into perspective some of your relationship with a religion and some of its practices that you grew to have a very different view of.

00:16:38.280 And I always get mad when people try to silence you because they, nine times out of ten, it's not a religious person at all, have a problem with something you're saying about Islam.

00:16:50.640 And it's like, why don't you take a walk in Ayan's shoes? 0.98

00:16:54.100 And then you ask yourself whether you feel you have a right to offer some criticisms of the religion with which you were raised.

00:17:03.080 Well, we'll get to that one second.

00:17:04.920 Let me ask you.

00:17:05.500 So then you get a little older and your parents tried to arrange a marriage for you to a distant cousin.

00:17:13.440 And you wrote an infidel, you resolved, no, I'm not doing this.

00:17:18.860 And you wrote, I did not want the hell of never feeling love, of never choosing my mate, of spending my life with a man who controlled my every freedom, a man who could take my body without permission at any time.

00:17:32.240 So how did you get from the point of joining the Muslim Brotherhood, being with them, to this person who can see so clearly what an alternative life might look like? 0.97

00:17:43.740 So with the Muslim Brotherhood, I think what was in the gratification I got from joining them was the gratification you would get from belonging to a group and this feeling that you're all as a group engaged in a purposeful life.

00:18:08.680 But in reality, when I wasn't immersed in the group and the ideology of the group and I was at home and I watched my mother and all the other women folk around me, I felt, gosh, this is just, it is suffering.

00:18:27.540 My mother gave her life to my father and she could do nothing because they denied her education.

00:18:34.320 She couldn't find a job.

00:18:35.580 She had no control over her circumstances.

00:18:38.680 And that, and I felt, and I saw it and I thought, I don't want that.

00:18:45.740 And I was conflicted.

00:18:47.400 I, for a long time, I was in a, you know, deep state of cognitive dissonance because I wanted to be a really good Muslim, but I couldn't be because I didn't want these things happening to me.

00:19:02.720 And I wasn't allowed to ask questions.

00:19:04.580 And I think in my individual life experience, it just erupted in this rebellion against it all.

00:19:11.920 And, of course, the rebellion would dramatically change your life, your future, would bring you here, would bring you to me, would bring you to us.

00:19:21.560 Thank God.

00:19:23.520 Thank, thank, thank somebody.

00:19:25.340 Thank you.

00:19:26.420 And Megan, Megan, you said that people object to what I say in my public writings.

00:19:32.060 There are two sets of people who do that.

00:19:34.520 One set is what the people we now call woke here in America.

00:19:38.880 And we have different names for them in Europe, you know, multiculturalists, moral relativists. 0.78

00:19:43.660 And the other set are the Muslims who feel offended because they feel that it's their religion that I am tainting. 0.77

00:19:53.400 And that, you know, it's the tribal effect of you shouldn't be, you shouldn't be talking about the stuff that's on the inside that's bad.

00:20:04.780 You shouldn't be talking to strangers about it.

00:20:06.460 So those are the two groups who don't like what I say, but they also don't like what you say.

00:20:13.700 That's right.

00:20:14.520 And I know you've made a point of saying, I don't hate Muslims.

00:20:18.660 What I hate is the submission of free will.

00:20:21.300 And that's what you felt.

00:20:23.480 That's what got you out of there.

00:20:24.880 I know I read in your book you wrote, I had imagination on my side.

00:20:29.260 And I realized that the thrill of drinking wine and wearing pants, which you clearly were not allowed to do before, had nothing on reading the history of ideas.

00:20:39.700 The history of ideas.

00:20:41.060 And that's what you're engaged in now.

00:20:42.900 The idea.

00:20:44.000 You're in the business of ideas at the Hoover Institute in Stanford.

00:20:47.580 Harvard and, you know, a research fellow out there and studying and writing and thinking for a living.

00:20:55.040 But the root there, the root there was, you know, your troubles were not over.

00:20:59.820 You fled to the Netherlands.

00:21:01.440 You became a congresswoman, which is amazing and a story in and of itself.

00:21:06.020 And then you hooked up with Theo Van Gogh, a filmmaker, who who you helped make a movie called Submission.

00:21:14.560 Back to that that statement, I detest the submission of free will.

00:21:18.160 So he makes this movie and it's critical of Islam.

00:21:21.200 He'd been critical of religion in general, including Islam in this movie.

00:21:26.500 And he there was a death threat issued on him and you, but he didn't think it was real.

00:21:34.040 Right.

00:21:34.440 He didn't get protection.

00:21:36.060 And then what happened?

00:21:38.660 I think he thought it was real, but he said that he thought that if the mayor of Amsterdam had provided him with protection, that would be just pure incompetence.

00:21:51.080 He was actually he had plans to move with his then wife, I believe, or his partner to move to the United States.

00:22:01.020 He had come to explore life in America.

00:22:04.440 And then this fanatic, Mohammed Biyeri, Islamic fanatic, you know, followed him for a number of days. 0.56

00:22:18.760 And I think it wasn't just him.

00:22:20.460 I think there was a group of people, but there's only one person who went to jail for it.

00:22:23.760 And Mohammed Biyeri, one morning, Tuesday morning, November the 2nd, followed him on his bicycle.

00:22:34.640 Theo used to go to work every single morning from his house to his office, same, you know, followed the same route.

00:22:41.540 And this guy followed him, shot him, he fell off his bicycle, he followed him to the other side of and ran to the other side of the streets.

00:22:51.680 This guy followed him, shot him again, stabbed him, beheaded him, and then left two notes, a short poem encouraging other Muslims to do the exact same thing so that they could be rewarded with a good place in heaven.

00:23:09.840 And on a very long, rambling note, for me, that was pretty much a fatwa of, here, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, here are all the things that you've done wrong against Islam. 0.96

00:23:19.820 And here's the death penalty. 0.84

00:23:22.920 This is the penalty for it.

00:23:24.240 And I'll never forget that 2nd of November, 2004.

00:23:30.240 Oh, my God.

00:23:31.120 Theo had to pay for.

00:23:32.540 And what did Theo do?

00:23:33.580 He made a film called Submission, where he was trying to draw attention to the subjugation of women that is justified in the name of the religion of Islam. 0.99

00:23:47.420 We had taken verses from the Quran, and we had shown what in many Muslim countries is the law, women being stoned, being forced into marriage, when they suffer incest.

00:24:01.540 There was one case where a young woman is raped by her uncle, but then the family, instead of denouncing the uncle, they denounce her.

00:24:10.320 And this, to this day, continues to happen to large numbers of women. 0.92

00:24:15.460 And because he did that, Theo van Gogh was murdered.

00:24:19.540 But on top of that, after the murder, a number of elites in the Dutch society reacted by condemning him, almost blaming him for the fact that he's murdered.

00:24:32.880 Because had he not provoked them, right, he would still be alive.

00:24:37.240 And that was then a lesson for others not to do, or not to act the way Theo van Gogh acted.

00:24:46.340 And that's the point.

00:24:47.660 That's the point, yeah.

00:24:48.860 16 years later, look at what's happening in France, in Germany, in Austria.

00:24:53.920 More with Ayan in one second. 0.99

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00:26:26.960 Nayan, I know you've spent a lifetime now with security and have to take it very, very seriously.

00:26:37.680 But it hasn't silenced you.

00:26:39.740 It hasn't silenced you.

00:26:41.860 And when we saw those attacks in France last month, there was one on October 16th, one on October 29th.

00:26:46.560 I couldn't believe how little coverage it got here.

00:26:48.880 It was the lead up to the presidential election.

00:26:50.960 And I just thought, OK, perhaps people are focused on something else.

00:26:54.800 But this is this is still an issue for the United States.

00:26:58.400 You know, the threat of radical radical Islam, the possibility of domestic terrorist attacks, which we were we were experiencing fairly regularly not too long ago.

00:27:07.480 And so folks haven't been paying attention.

00:27:09.880 There was one on October 16th where a French teacher who had showed two cartoons of Mohammed in a lesson about free speech was beheaded.

00:27:20.620 He was beheaded with a knife on his walk home by an 18 year old Chechen who was yelling Alou Akbar.

00:27:29.280 And then on October 29th, there were church stabbings in Nice, France, where a terrorist entered a cathedral and stabbed three people to death.

00:27:39.660 And like one right after the other, Ayaan, and France has been going through it in general with a community of Islamists who have no wish to assimilate none to French culture. 0.97

00:27:52.580 And what are your thoughts on what we're seeing over there?

00:27:54.280 Well, what we are seeing is what I have been writing about and speaking about and trying to tell not just Dutch government and Dutch society, but all European, all Western societies.

00:28:07.460 I've crisscrossed Europe, Australia, here in the United States of America.

00:28:13.340 I would say there are these three circles of Muslims.

00:28:16.800 There is that inner circle of fanatics who are actually carrying out the attacks.

00:28:22.660 And then there is a circle around them that aids and abets, that helps them with their plotting, that does all the indoctrination.

00:28:35.400 They claim free speech.

00:28:37.320 They make claims to freedom of association.

00:28:39.560 They make claims to freedom of religion.

00:28:41.360 But they use these freedoms to erode those very same freedoms from the inside.

00:28:49.900 And then there is a wider community that is not violent.

00:28:54.320 They are Muslim.

00:28:55.020 They are not violent.

00:28:56.200 But they also denounce the values of the countries that they have chosen to come and live in.

00:29:04.760 And so with that, and I think that's when the French president talks about Islamist separatism and parallel societies, that's what he's referring to.

00:29:15.940 That there is a large community within French society, and it's in the millions now, who are physically in France, but virtually in terms of their values and their conduct and their loyalty to the nation.

00:29:31.360 And they're actually in their own countries of origin, or they're obeying Sharia law, Islamic law.

00:29:37.400 And it used to be a somewhat small problem, and it got a little bit bigger.

00:29:43.300 And, you know, right around 2001, when we had the attacks here in New York and Washington, D.C., I think a lot of people in Europe became aware of it and were saying, let's do something about it.

00:29:55.360 But the moral relativists, the politically correct forces prevailed, and they said, we are going to do nothing about it, because to impose, say, French values on Muslim residents is to be racist, it's to be xenophobic, it is colonialist.

00:30:15.900 Let them live the way they want to, and let them raise the children who are born in France and in other parts of Europe with the norms and values that are alien to those countries and that are Islamist. 0.99

00:30:28.980 And now we're paying the price.

00:30:31.520 Yeah, because Macron is sounding a very different note now.

00:30:35.580 I know, I mean, if he had said this stuff, if the French had said this stuff 20 years ago, it all would have been denounced as bigotry.

00:30:41.860 But now he's saying that, for example, the teacher who was beheaded, he said he became the face of our will to shatter terrorists, to do away with Islamists, to live like a community of free citizens.

00:30:55.460 And then after the three people were stabbed in the church, he said he promised a law on Islamist separatism.

00:31:01.960 He said we need to restrict the homeschooling of Muslims. 1.00

00:31:04.960 We need to demand that these Islamic groups sign a secular charter.

00:31:08.780 And there's a real question now about how far France and other countries should go in demanding assimilation for foreign nationals or people seeking to emigrate who claim they want to naturalize to a new country but aren't willing to let go of any of the traditions or ways of living that are really foreign to a place like France, for example.

00:31:32.920 Absolutely. I think now the hard reality has set in and this has now to do with the scale of the problem.

00:31:41.680 Again, like I said, it used to be that government officials were able to ignore or pretend that the problem didn't exist.

00:31:52.140 But now a country like France is waking up to the reality because of the scale of the problem, that they can't ignore it any longer, that to wait for another generation of young French people to be indoctrinated into radical Islam is political, cultural, it's suicide. 0.56

00:32:16.880 They know that, they know that, so he has to do something about it.

00:32:19.880 You also have in Europe extremists, very far-right groups that are saying to the populations, these establishment officials, they can't solve the problem.

00:32:32.400 We can.

00:32:33.020 And so France is torn between, on the one hand, they have got to really do something about the problem, that is devote resources to it, and or be overtaken by the far-right.

00:32:49.540 What is, how do we deal with it?

00:32:51.660 I think we have to give, first of all, we have to revisit such values as citizenship, the nation-state.

00:32:59.920 What does that mean?

00:33:01.880 What are our loyalties to one another in the public sphere?

00:33:07.160 How can we live with one another?

00:33:08.920 And then who prevails?

00:33:10.120 Is it French norms or Islamist norms? 0.86

00:33:13.400 And those who say Islamist norms, I think they should be given the choice to either change their minds and adapt or leave the country.

00:33:20.640 When you come into France, you land at the airport, you do that drive down into Paris, you pass through, it looks like low-income housing, you know, before you get to the city center.

00:33:34.740 And it is mostly Muslim, and it is a community unto itself.

00:33:38.880 And I think about this desire, this newfound sort of pronouncement by Macron to try to force assimilation, and I just wonder whether he can.

00:33:51.220 It seems like so many are separated physically, they're separated philosophically.

00:33:57.820 How do you force it?

00:33:59.720 He can.

00:34:00.180 Just look at what's going on since at least March of last year.

00:34:05.460 So many countries have been forced to lock down.

00:34:09.380 Millions of citizens have been told they cannot go out of their houses under certain conditions.

00:34:16.960 They can only associate under certain conditions.

00:34:19.840 It can be done.

00:34:21.620 It's just that there never has been a political will to do it.

00:34:25.880 But France has a history of assimilating large swathes of people in Africa, teaching them French, and introducing them to modernity.

00:34:38.880 And so has Britain, and so has Spain, and Portugal has done the same thing.

00:34:44.120 It can be done, but there has never been a political will to do it, because the threat wasn't just as palpable as it is today.

00:34:51.620 And it is palpable in France.

00:34:53.680 Where would you put the risk in America today for, I don't know, I mean, I don't think we've had anything quite as drastic as the French problem, 1.00

00:35:06.440 where it just seems like a second society that's large and growing has emerged.

00:35:12.680 But we certainly have had a problem here with Islamic terror, although it's been relatively quiet over the past few years.

00:35:19.220 Why do you think that is, and where do you think we are?

00:35:21.860 Again, I think, so a number of things.

00:35:25.580 We've had it here in the United States.

00:35:27.660 We have communities of radical Muslims here in the United States that cocoon themselves and their children from the rest of society. 1.00

00:35:36.660 But being such a large country, right now I think a lot of it is not visible.

00:35:41.700 We've also had to fight these wars in Afghanistan, in Iraq.

00:35:46.840 We've had to fight ISIS.

00:35:48.140 And I think a lot of the work that was invested in developing intelligence tools and intelligence capabilities so that we know who is about to, you know, plot the next terrorist attack.

00:36:11.740 We've learned a lot.

00:36:13.260 We've had a lot of terrorist attacks.

00:36:15.220 I don't think the problem is over.

00:36:18.120 I think the Islamists we have in the United States are a touch more sophisticated than the ones in Europe. 0.98

00:36:27.060 And right now, the Muslim Brotherhood and other organized Islamists are playing along, trying to work their way through the establishment and are quiet for the moment.

00:36:40.120 But I would not be so complacent as to say this is a European problem and we have no problem in America. 0.86

00:36:49.180 That would be really, really naive.

00:36:51.440 Yeah, we shouldn't be heaving a sigh of relief right now.

00:36:56.780 I mean, you know, as we get farther and farther from 9-11, I was talking about this with Glenn Greenwald.

00:37:02.080 We start to, the scales of justice, if you will, start to balance more in favor of civil liberties and less in favor of government power to spy on us and, you know, do whatever's necessary to keep the country safe.

00:37:14.040 And while that seems appropriate, it's also slightly scary because we're not safe.

00:37:21.520 And it's the United States of America.

00:37:23.540 People always want to get us.

00:37:24.960 And this is a problem.

00:37:26.040 It's a growing problem worldwide as what we've been talking about evidences.

00:37:30.880 Yeah.

00:37:31.060 And it just, it makes me feel a little, not nervous, but just on edge.

00:37:36.760 What makes me a little nervous is during the Trump administration, we focused so much more on, you know, the ins and outs of the petty politics of Washington, D.C.

00:37:50.320 And that the intelligence community also became politicized.

00:37:55.780 The justice, the DOJ became politicized.

00:37:58.760 Now, that is the kind of distraction that groups like Al-Qaeda, the remnants of Al-Qaeda and the remnants of ISIS could exploit.

00:38:09.460 Yeah.

00:38:10.380 And, you know, it's Trump, he needed to pull down the veil of politics on these guys.

00:38:18.320 You know, I mean, James Comey and others at the FBI clearly were behaving in a political manner.

00:38:22.880 And yet the agency has been damaged.

00:38:25.400 I mean, it's almost like, did they damage themselves?

00:38:27.820 Did he damage them?

00:38:28.560 I think they damaged themselves and he called attention to it.

00:38:30.840 Now we need to rebuild, though.

00:38:32.640 I'm not quite sure what they're doing to rehabilitate those problems.

00:38:37.120 You know, it's, I don't know how much soul searching there's been or, you know, will be.

00:38:42.220 Or will be, yeah.

00:38:43.340 I like the outcome of this election because I think it forces them to see that the nation is not politicized.

00:38:49.420 The nation is at the center, center right or center left, but really at the center.

00:38:53.280 And so this whole hyping up of differences that, in my view, are trivial is, yes, they might have to go back and sit around their desk and say, let's get serious about the serious stuff.

00:39:07.400 Right.

00:39:08.480 That would be nice.

00:39:09.340 Instead of focusing on tweets, that would be one advantage to the end of this term.

00:39:13.900 To a Trump leaving, yeah, and going to do something else.

00:39:16.280 Right.

00:39:16.860 We'll be back to Ayaan in one second.

00:39:18.520 We're going to take up wokeism, Black Lives Matter, and she's got some strong thoughts on the Me Too movement and where it is today.

00:39:25.480 So don't miss that.

00:39:26.720 But first, let's talk about Black Rifle Coffee.

00:39:30.440 The CEO of this company and its founder, Evan Hafer, started the company over 20 years ago.

00:39:35.560 He was in the U.S. Army as an infantryman, special forces soldier, and a CIA contractor.

00:39:40.500 And the man was tired.

00:39:41.940 He was tired and he needed a little help with caffeine.

00:39:44.420 But let me tell you, when you're over there and you're fighting for the country in Iraq, it's not that easy to get it.

00:39:48.780 And so Evan found a way.

00:39:50.920 He founded Black Rifle Coffee Company in 2014, along with his bud, Army Ranger Matt Best, as the combination of two of his passions, developing premium fresh roasted coffee and honoring and supporting those who serve in the front lines.

00:40:04.620 So far, Black Rifle Coffee Company has donated just in 2020 alone, OK, just in 2020, over 45,000 pounds of coffee, over one million cups of coffee, that is, to soldiers who are overseas, to law enforcement officers, wildland firefighters on the West Coast.

00:40:19.340 And COVID-19 medical workers.

00:40:22.180 For every coffee purchase you make throughout the month of November, Black Rifle Coffee is going to send a bag of its limited edition holiday roast to a service member currently deployed overseas.

00:40:32.180 Who else is doing that?

00:40:33.480 You're not getting that from Maxwell House.

00:40:35.140 You got to go to Black Rifle Coffee for your coffee this holiday season and help our troops, too.

00:40:39.180 Being founded and operated by veterans, the team at BRCC knows what a quality cup of coffee means to active duty troops spending the holidays away from home.

00:40:46.780 And they will get it to them by Christmas morning.

00:40:49.440 Want to support the cause?

00:40:50.340 Just go to BlackRifleCoffee.com slash MK today.

00:40:52.980 Check out the freshest coffee in America.

00:40:55.040 The team has spent thousands of hours tasting, sourcing and perfecting coffee from all over the world.

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00:41:11.620 Okay, back to Aion in one second.

00:41:13.780 But first, we want to bring you this feature that we call Sound Up.

00:41:18.140 This is basically some key sound, a key soundbite that we really think you should hear.

00:41:22.560 So today it's about Bill Maher.

00:41:24.540 HBO's Bill Maher.

00:41:25.760 It's funny.

00:41:26.100 He and I have, he's attacked me.

00:41:27.860 I've attacked him.

00:41:29.080 But I have like a love-hate situation going on there because I love some of the stuff he says so much.

00:41:33.620 And I admire his bravery and standing up to the wokesters and, I don't know, just folks on his side of the aisle. 1.00

00:41:39.680 But then he says something really offensive about Republicans writ large and I get angry again.

00:41:44.080 But anyway, he hit the nail on the head on Friday night, closing out his show with a monologue about the failures of the down-ballot Democrats in this election that we just saw.

00:41:52.820 Take a listen to it, but also listen for how his audience of liberals reacts.

00:41:57.280 Liberals can either write off half the country as irredeemable or they can ask, what is it about a D next to a candidate's name that makes it so toxic?

00:42:06.760 Let's ask Ruben Gallego.

00:42:08.880 He's a congressman from Arizona.

00:42:10.660 He was asked how his Democrats could do a better job connecting to Latinos.

00:42:15.180 He said, first, start by not using the term Latinx, which the vast majority of Latinos have never heard of and when they do, don't like it.

00:42:25.500 Who likes it?

00:42:27.040 Pandering white politicians who mistake Twitter for real people.

00:42:31.060 And don't get it that Latinx is like fetch.

00:42:34.860 You can try to make it happen, but it's never gonna.

00:42:39.980 It's so true. 0.84

00:42:41.120 I hate that word Latinx and also thunder will not fetch.

00:42:44.620 So I really don't know all fronts.

00:42:46.180 So after years of all this nonsense during the Trump era, the cancellations of anyone who doesn't perfectly subscribe, you know, to what the far left says you have to do to be a good person.

00:42:56.620 We've seen the results.

00:42:57.780 Democrats lost seats in the House.

00:42:59.020 They were they thought they were going to gain them.

00:43:00.960 They're unlikely to take the Senate.

00:43:02.700 That appears like a futile effort, even as Biden may have squeaked out a victory.

00:43:08.520 Listen to this.

00:43:09.020 Democrats already lost seats for going after what Brett Kavanaugh did in high school.

00:43:13.980 Common sense.

00:43:16.680 Last year, I read about how NBC held an emergency meeting to determine if Mario Lopez should be fired from his job at Access Hollywood. 1.00

00:43:24.720 I thought, holy shit, did he sexually assault somebody? 0.99

00:43:28.700 No. 1.00

00:43:29.320 He went on a podcast.

00:43:30.320 And when the host brought up the trend of liberal parents letting toddlers pick their gender identity, he said, my God, if you're three years old and you're saying you think you're a boy or a girl, I just think it's a dangerous as a parent to make that determination.

00:43:46.560 Cue the groveling apology, followed by America saying, yeah, I think Mario's right.

00:43:53.480 Maybe kids shouldn't make big life decisions while you still need to make choo choo noises to get the food in their mouth.

00:44:00.320 The audience really didn't know what to do in response to all this.

00:44:07.460 But of course, he's totally right.

00:44:09.260 Everyone knows this.

00:44:10.500 Every sane person knows this.

00:44:12.880 At the end of the monologue, he decided to turn his attention to his own side.

00:44:16.960 Listen.

00:44:17.280 Democrats kept saying in the campaign, you can't possibly think Trump is preferable to what we're selling.

00:44:22.860 And many voters keep saying, yes, we can.

00:44:27.380 In fact, our primary reason voting for him is to create a bulwark against you because your side thinks silence is violence and looting is not.

00:44:38.260 Because you're the party of chasing speakers off college campuses and making everyone walk on eggshells and replacing let's not see color with let's see it always and everywhere, formerly the position of the Ku Klux Klan. 1.00

00:44:52.900 It would be so easy to win elections if we would just drop this shit. 1.00

00:44:58.580 Well, so good. 1.00

00:45:00.660 Some of his monologues are just so killer.

00:45:03.320 They're brilliant.

00:45:04.200 He did one.

00:45:04.800 I think it was on Roxanna Arquette, who is tweeting out how hard it is to be a white woman of privilege and like how she was just feeling so guilty and awful that she was a white woman of privilege.

00:45:15.720 And he did this great piece going, yes, let's never forget who the real victims are.

00:45:21.520 You think it's hard to be a black man in America? 0.94

00:45:23.460 Try being a guilty, privileged white woman. 1.00

00:45:28.300 He's got the gift of just finding the right seam in society.

00:45:31.180 And he certainly did there.

00:45:33.680 And that, members of our audience, was what we call Sound Up.

00:45:37.800 Back to Ayan. 1.00

00:45:38.480 You wrote an article recently, I think it was in the Wall Street Journal, talking about what we're seeing right now in the United States and equating, not exactly equating radical Islam with wokeism,

00:45:56.880 but seeing some parallels between the way you grew up and the lessons you were taught and what's now happening in the country that you now live in and sort of pointing out that these wokesters, they're dangerous. 0.99

00:46:12.880 They're dangerous.

00:46:13.700 And they're putting freedom of expression under increasing pressure that is deeply problematic.

00:46:22.320 Why?

00:46:22.780 How do you see the similarities?

00:46:24.700 Oh, my goodness.

00:46:25.240 And I, you know, please post that Wall Street Journal article, if you will.

00:46:31.080 I will.

00:46:31.360 So one set of similarities is sort of the absolutism.

00:46:35.880 It's only their truth that counts.

00:46:37.940 No one else is allowed to ask any questions or criticize.

00:46:42.400 Another set of similarity is the hatred.

00:46:48.040 First of all, the dividing of a society into groups.

00:46:50.900 Muslims say believers and unbelievers on the woke have is all divided into racial groups, gender groups, whatever they come up with the next day.

00:47:00.100 There's this small dynamic.

00:47:01.360 Every day you see a new group and you think, oh.

00:47:03.460 A third set of similarities would be the hatred for America and hatred for Israel and the Jews.

00:47:13.380 They need to hate someone else in order to keep their groups, their people together.

00:47:18.040 In that sense, they're, you know, tribal, tribalistic or whatever you call it.

00:47:24.120 But they also hate science and objectivity.

00:47:27.500 So now we are being told by the woke that things like, you know, mathematics is racist, physics is racist, science is racist.

00:47:37.800 Two plus two is five.

00:47:42.380 This type of thing is, first of all, Megan, you think, who on earth believes in these absurdities?

00:47:50.480 And then you see the people who are canceled, you look at what this movement called Black Lives Matter is saying and doing.

00:48:01.140 And then you think, yeah, this is really, this is something that could break up our society.

00:48:07.120 Black lives do not matter to the Black Lives Movement because if it did, they would not say defund the police. 0.93

00:48:13.260 When you look at every poll, ordinary, average Black Americans will say they want their police. 0.97

00:48:21.180 And you want to lift people out of poverty.

00:48:27.980 I would say it's not just racism that causes that.

00:48:31.680 It's a complex set of things that do that.

00:48:34.620 But then when you say let's invest in education and the things that really matter, social capital, they say, well, that's whiteness. 0.54

00:48:42.380 Right.

00:48:42.540 You had a line that said Black Lives Matter, that you said they're hardcore Marxists.

00:48:48.000 And you said their political agenda is not to lift poor Black people out of poverty.

00:48:52.440 It is to advance a radical Marxist agenda that tolerates no criticism whatsoever.

00:48:58.760 And this is one of my problems with capital BLM, right? 0.51

00:49:01.960 Not the lowercase concept of Black Lives Mattering. 0.74

00:49:04.700 It's the group BLM, which is it doesn't seem devoted to actually saving Black lives at all.

00:49:10.000 If they were devoted to that, they'd be focused on what's happening to the children in cities like Chicago, Detroit, Baltimore and elsewhere.

00:49:17.460 They would be supporting charter schools.

00:49:19.820 But then that's not they're throwing.

00:49:21.220 They're bringing down statues that no one has ever heard of.

00:49:25.600 And when you say what are the parallels between Islamists and walkies, they hate statues. 1.00

00:49:31.660 They're iconoclasts.

00:49:32.620 They hate history.

00:49:33.360 They hate America.

00:49:34.000 They talk about social justice, but it's only their understanding of social justice that we are supposed to accept.

00:49:41.880 And they really are about indoctrinating people and closing the minds of people.

00:49:47.360 And if you don't do as they say, you're a target.

00:49:51.420 And in that sense, yes, there are parallels.

00:49:54.900 The only thing is that the Islamist movement is coming from outside.

00:50:00.780 The woke movement is homegrown. 1.00

00:50:03.440 Homegrown, you know, first inspired by these French so-called idiot thinkers. 1.00

00:50:09.240 And then it started to expand here in America. 0.99

00:50:12.340 And names like Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X.

00:50:16.860 Kendi and, you know, these gurus of wokeism, they now have platforms and they've infiltrated the Democratic Party.

00:50:31.160 They've infiltrated governments.

00:50:33.060 One of the things that I think Donald Trump should be praised for is when he said he was going to make sure that CRT, that is critical race theory, that is taught within, you know, the federal government agencies, that he was going to nix it.

00:50:51.980 I wonder what Biden and Harris will do when they start to take their time.

00:50:57.660 Well, he's already said he's bringing it back.

00:50:59.940 He's already promised he's like, that's going to be one of his first executive orders.

00:51:04.020 So this is where we have you and I and others have to really work hard at trying to have people like Biden and Harris see that this is not anti-racism, that CRT is actually racist.

00:51:17.940 It's actually tribal.

00:51:19.160 Explain that. Why?

00:51:19.620 The system we have, Megan, says that we are all individual human beings and it's our individual humanity that makes us whole.

00:51:29.560 Yes, we have our differences and we have to respect that kind of diversity.

00:51:34.020 But first and foremost, as an individual, you are a human being.

00:51:37.780 CRT doesn't see you first and foremost as a human being.

00:51:41.020 It sees you as a member of a collective and it's your skin color, right? 0.94

00:51:46.160 Your skin color that matters more than anything else. 0.88

00:51:48.800 And all these collectives, whether they divide us along racial, gender or other distinctions, they see our relationship only as one of power.

00:52:00.940 And that power is zero sum.

00:52:04.260 So the white male is at the top of a pyramid that they've established.

00:52:08.680 He is the oppressor. 0.67

00:52:10.020 And then there's the white female oppressed by the white male. 0.98

00:52:13.860 And then the white female is oppressing the black male. 0.98

00:52:16.640 And on and on it goes.

00:52:18.680 And none of us can ever get to a happy place where there is harmony unless you take a power and privilege away from some groups only because of their power.

00:52:30.940 They're their skin color and their gender and give it to others. 0.99

00:52:35.560 This is just insane. 0.98

00:52:39.180 It's racist. 0.94

00:52:40.220 It's collectivist.

00:52:41.320 It's sexist.

00:52:42.940 It's destructive.

00:52:44.540 And I think it's our job to understand what it is and to try and be able to communicate to the people we've elected to reject this critical race theory.

00:52:57.860 What about the argument that no, what they're trying to do is call attention to small microaggressions that white people may have toward black people without even being aware of them, to inherent bias they may have in interrupting a black person more that they're not even aware of.

00:53:18.880 And by calling these things to the forefront of one's mind, it will lead them to be more conscious of these things and lead to better race relations.

00:53:25.980 And what they're really trying to do with these with these lessons is to even out, try to even out an unequal scale in which black people were on the wrong end.

00:53:36.460 And they're just trying to get it a little bit more even, not not to make one race above another.

00:53:41.720 That is really an exercise in sticking your head in the sand.

00:53:47.400 It's an exercise in complacency.

00:53:49.640 It's an exercise in saying, OK, this problem is too complex for me.

00:53:54.000 I'm not going to get I'll pretend it will just go away and it will not go away.

00:53:59.340 If you if we accept, you know, we have we have a value system that we say is based in the real world, in science, in objectivity.

00:54:13.560 Then in that case, we have to agree on some definition of racism.

00:54:20.300 And we did have a definition for racism.

00:54:24.100 We recognized it when it happened and we fought against it.

00:54:28.400 There now people like Ibram X. Kendi are coming in.

00:54:30.860 They're not really and D'Angelo.

00:54:32.220 They're not really defining what racism is.

00:54:35.000 They're saying everybody, every white person is racist.

00:54:40.740 Everyone.

00:54:41.120 When you go, when you use that kind of language and you say everyone is racist.

00:54:48.340 And the way D'Angelo goes about it is then she says you're either a conscious racist.

00:54:54.140 Or an unconscious racist.

00:54:58.160 And so CRT is about trying to make you become conscious of your racism.

00:55:02.860 So now we have subjective criteria and therefore arbitrary.

00:55:07.320 And it's on a social civic level.

00:55:10.400 You don't know exactly what it is that you're supposed to be fighting.

00:55:13.780 But on an objective legal level, it is then supposed the presumption is that you are guilty and you can never prove your innocence.

00:55:22.880 Well, I know that you've been called a racist, of course, because you lean right and they don't like what you're saying.

00:55:33.240 I mean, I was just talking about this with Coleman Hughes and Professor Glenn Lowry, that, you know, that if you're on the right half of the country, you've probably been called a racist.

00:55:42.060 And it's a tool that is used to silence you.

00:55:46.480 And you've gotten it from many.

00:55:48.420 They call you an Islamophobe. 0.73

00:55:51.140 They call you a racist.

00:55:53.320 Does it bother you at all?

00:55:56.500 What's your advice to others out there who are afraid to speak out against things like critical race theory?

00:56:02.660 Because they do not want to be called that word.

00:56:04.340 And I understand it.

00:56:05.820 I mean, it really is shocking and it's crude and it's hurtful.

00:56:10.460 And you have to ask yourself, why am I putting myself in a position where I'm being called these terrible names?

00:56:16.460 But look, for us to live together and continue to live together in peace.

00:56:22.460 And again, I still think America is one of the greatest places to be.

00:56:26.480 You can't just sit back and hope that someone else fights for you.

00:56:30.260 But this throwing around of words like race, once upon a time, it was a very sharp weapon that hurt.

00:56:38.180 But now it's blunted.

00:56:39.800 If everybody is a racist, then no one is.

00:56:43.420 No one even understands what it is anymore.

00:56:46.100 And I think the more people stand up to these bullies, the more of a chance we have that this thing goes away.

00:56:58.100 And I think it has to start within the education system.

00:57:02.160 It is K to 12.

00:57:03.880 It's colleges.

00:57:05.060 It's where these radical professors have the opportunity to indoctrinate our children with this stuff. 0.99

00:57:16.460 You know, that's where I think we need to get where the attention needs to go.

00:57:21.800 And it's...

00:57:22.280 Well, that's...

00:57:22.660 I mean, they're teaching.

00:57:23.760 They're teaching racism.

00:57:25.540 That's what's happening right now.

00:57:26.600 They're teaching racism.

00:57:28.160 And their messaging is racist.

00:57:30.520 And I think that the more young people, college-educated people...

00:57:34.200 I don't know that this is going to happen any earlier than the high school years for most people...

00:57:38.160 Can stand up and say, I reject your racist lesson.

00:57:42.480 I reject your attempt to racialize me and my surroundings.

00:57:46.340 That's what's happening.

00:57:47.600 You know, people know it on an inherent level, but they're afraid to say it.

00:57:50.400 Because you know, Ayaan, that the premise is blacks cannot be racist against whites.

00:57:55.680 Because you can't...

00:57:56.720 You have to be the group that's in power in order for racism to be an appropriate word.

00:58:03.380 Yeah.

00:58:03.560 So if you take a trip to South Africa for a couple of months or Zimbabwe to see that actually black racism also exists and Hispanic racism exists. 0.97

00:58:14.960 And maybe human beings are just racist to begin with because they try to favor their tribe and their extended family of other people.

00:58:24.160 But what's unique about America and other Western societies is they've recognized this, they've grappled with it, and they've tried to eradicate it.

00:58:33.180 It still exists in America, but it's not as prevalent as it used to be and as it is in other countries.

00:58:40.160 Well, that, number one.

00:58:41.240 And then number two, there's something called critical thinking, which I think is the primary role of universities to teach.

00:58:52.520 Teach kids logic.

00:58:54.940 Teach them how to think, not what to think.

00:58:58.140 If you teach them how to think, they'll overcome it.

00:59:01.380 They'll figure it out for themselves.

00:59:04.460 They know that the ideology of Ibram X.

00:59:07.360 Kendi and Robin DiAngelo is rotten to the core.

00:59:11.100 They'll recognize.

00:59:11.980 They'll recognize the logical fallacies embedded in these theories and ideologies.

00:59:18.160 But critical theory has to prevail over critical race and critical justice theories.

00:59:26.780 Well, you know what's happening right now is there's a brainwashing happening in elementary school, on up, in academia, and then sadly now out of academia.

00:59:37.500 And I used to think that it was just academia, but no, now these kids are graduating and they're taking over corporate America and the NFL and ESPN and all.

00:59:45.220 It's like it's spreading.

00:59:46.920 And it's like the zombification of America where it's like, yes, I am a racist. 0.99

00:59:52.000 Yes, if you are white, you are racist. 0.96

00:59:53.860 And then black people who were doing just fine saying, yes, I'm oppressed. 1.00

00:59:57.460 I'm oppressed. 0.85

00:59:58.380 The police are all out to get me.

01:00:00.660 I mean, the messaging is sinking in despite its lack of foundation.

01:00:05.040 It's scary to me.

01:00:06.720 And I wonder, even though you and I would like to stop it and have been doing our part, how do we make it happen?

01:00:12.760 And where on the continuum are we?

01:00:15.260 Are we like at the halfway point to people getting their critical thinking cap back on?

01:00:21.120 Or where do you think we are?

01:00:22.140 I think I'll have to take you back to early on in our conversation where I said I was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and I loved the fact that belonging to a group and a sense of purpose and meaning that that gave me.

01:00:37.440 But then the reality on the ground where, you know, my mother and the women around me, that that was really there was that dissonance.

01:00:44.020 I think we need to create that dissonance.

01:00:47.660 Sorry, not the word create is not the right word.

01:00:50.860 It's that we have to make people aware of this dissonance.

01:00:54.420 If you're a corporation or a company, you've hired people to do a job and they're not doing it, then it's going to show in your bottom line.

01:01:04.260 And when that happens, that's when the dissonance hits.

01:01:07.320 And when the dissonance hits, unfortunately, and this is why I think these critical race theorists, people are terrible, is the people who are going to suffer are the minorities, people of color, women, et cetera.

01:01:20.200 Because you then want to go straight back to, in competition with other companies to making a profit and a good profit.

01:01:28.520 And the people who get punished are the people who talk about something other than the work they were hired to do.

01:01:34.120 The same with universities.

01:01:35.680 If you are saddled with a degree that costs about $70,000 and you have nothing to show for it, you can't find a job, no one wants to hire you because all you've done is activism.

01:01:50.480 And all you do is racialize everything and either see yourself as a victim or suffer from white guilt.

01:01:58.840 That doesn't get you anywhere.

01:02:00.660 The dissonance is going to set in.

01:02:02.680 And I think the job of people like you and me is to make people aware of that, to say, what exactly are you paying for?

01:02:10.920 You've hired these people.

01:02:12.360 They're not coming to work.

01:02:13.520 They're collectively having sit-ins and what do you call them and what they were doing at Google.

01:02:19.360 But that's unsustainable.

01:02:20.820 At some point, the company actually has to make money.

01:02:24.340 Well, I think people need to be practical about this.

01:02:27.380 I worried about this when the Me Too movement first got going, which is, you know, I don't endorse the current version of the Me Too movement.

01:02:35.240 I think it started with noble ideas and we got rid of some genuinely bad guys from their corporate roles.

01:02:41.120 But it's been politicized now and it's turned witch-hunty.

01:02:45.400 But I did worry about it when it was still in its beginnings and I think doing some good, getting rid of people like Les Moonves, that it was going to wind up or it could potentially wind up in a place where no male boss in corporate America wanted to put a woman at the C-suite level.

01:03:01.000 You know, that they'd say, yes, me too.

01:03:03.280 Got it.

01:03:03.780 Right on, sister.

01:03:04.900 Thumbs up.

01:03:05.480 I get it.

01:03:06.000 I'm with you. 1.00

01:03:06.480 And then behind closed doors, like, holy shit, we don't want a woman in here. 1.00

01:03:10.540 Oh, my God. 0.99

01:03:11.160 You know, she's going to make one allegation. 1.00

01:03:12.460 She's going to ruin my career. 1.00

01:03:13.580 Because, you know, now at that time, that time before we had Kavanaugh, the Democrats were saying, believe all women, believe all women.

01:03:19.660 And so I think a lot of corporate America was like, oh, my God, keep me away from the women because God only knows what they're going to say. 1.00

01:03:24.820 But I think I worry about the same thing happening now where a lot of folks are saying, yes, Black Lives Matter, thumbs up, right on. 0.64

01:03:32.320 But at the corporate level, they're going to say, I'm afraid, I'm afraid to promote somebody who's a minority or in a group, a protected class, because one allegation and I'm dead.

01:03:43.040 And it's very cynical.

01:03:43.940 Or they're just going to say it's a distraction. 0.96

01:03:47.200 You know, they probably won't hire black people because they don't want to be sued.

01:03:51.240 They don't want somebody starting some kind of activism within the corporate. 0.61

01:03:56.380 I've seen this in Europe.

01:03:57.640 It happens all the time.

01:03:59.660 And you're absolutely right.

01:04:01.540 The Me Too movement started with legitimate and I would say noble ideas.

01:04:08.380 And it achieved quite something.

01:04:10.480 But then it morphed into this monster.

01:04:14.120 And the example you gave, Moonves versus Kavanaugh.

01:04:17.640 So you get someone like a Brett Kavanaugh who's subjected to a litany of accusations only to keep him from that position.

01:04:27.060 And the people who wanted to do that weren't using arguments where they say we don't like his record.

01:04:35.160 But instead of arguing his record, they wanted to destroy his career.

01:04:45.480 And this is the one, again, Megan, which this is what hits us all.

01:04:49.480 And this is the sense of raw injustice is it's just trying to destroy a human being, destroy him.

01:04:58.760 And that's what we saw.

01:05:00.940 That's why it was such a terrible moment in American history, because I feel like those people who wore the Believe All Women t-shirts to those hearings killed the Me Too movement.

01:05:13.400 They killed it because they politicized it.

01:05:15.840 And the lie was put to their dishonest t-shirts when Tara Reade came forward. 0.98

01:05:21.820 You know, somebody accusing Joe Biden, a Democrat, and suddenly it was no longer Believe All Women.

01:05:28.080 It was, well, investigate.

01:05:30.020 You know, it's to believe some women. 1.00

01:05:31.740 Yeah, exactly.

01:05:32.880 Or there was the woman who wrote in The New York Times.

01:05:34.840 I believe her, but it's OK.

01:05:37.220 Right, right.

01:05:38.100 Exactly.

01:05:38.820 Which, frankly, is a much more honest take, right?

01:05:41.500 Like, OK, at least we're getting more honest now.

01:05:44.860 At least, yeah, we're taking it somewhere.

01:05:46.540 We don't have.

01:05:47.180 Yeah, right.

01:05:47.600 But you know they're going to be back to Believe All Women just as soon as it's a Republican of prominence who's accused again.

01:05:54.120 You know, it's like we don't believe you anymore.

01:05:56.500 And I, as somebody who has fought for women, and you, God, you've spent your life fighting for women, got really angered by what they did during the Kavanaugh hearings.

01:06:05.540 Because when you put a Julie Swetnick out there with base, obviously baseless allegations, and Christine Blasey Ford went to Democratic operatives to out her story and had a lot of problems with it along the way, not to mention all the other bogus allegations that came out against him.

01:06:21.380 You do that.

01:06:22.440 It's the end.

01:06:23.280 It's the end of people believing all women. 0.94

01:06:25.380 Ironically.

01:06:25.820 You killed that theory.

01:06:26.940 It's the end of, it's ironic.

01:06:28.180 Exactly, exactly.

01:06:29.480 So it hurts women, but it also conveys a message to women in happy marriages, women who have sons, women who have fathers, women who have male friends, women across the country who don't see any problems with their relationships with the various men in their lives.

01:06:51.600 But look at this and be horrified, horrified.

01:06:56.740 And that doesn't help.

01:07:00.240 It doesn't help the cause.

01:07:03.100 Well, you don't want women who are happy and well, either, starting to, for zero reason, just because somebody's saying, you're a victim, you're a victim, you're a victim, start saying, am I a victim?

01:07:14.840 Maybe I'm a victim.

01:07:15.700 Maybe I'm going to start acting like a victim.

01:07:17.220 Maybe men are bad, right?

01:07:18.700 It's like, that doesn't do anybody any good.

01:07:20.640 It doesn't, but now it's become a way of getting something, something material.

01:07:25.500 You hang out, you pretend to be the victim, and you get something, so it does pay.

01:07:30.260 It blinds us to the real victims.

01:07:32.320 Megan, the next book I'm coming up with is called Prey, Immigration from Muslim-majority countries and countries where people don't respect women's rights.

01:07:41.520 And you're seeing masses and masses of women out in the public when they're taking, you know, they leave their house to go to work, to jog, to take the train, to whatever, and they get harassed and assaulted. 0.52

01:07:53.280 And that problem is receiving zero attention.

01:07:57.840 Right.

01:07:58.320 That's an actual women's rights issue. 1.00

01:08:00.520 That's an actual women's rights issue. 1.00

01:08:02.480 And what I didn't like about the Me Too is, Me Too started with something great and then morphed into something else that now blinds us to the actual misogyny on the streets.

01:08:14.000 And it's a class thing, too, when women in poor neighborhoods, low-income women, when they find themselves in terrible situations, very few people talk about it.

01:08:26.420 Me Too also ended up becoming, you know, it's a rich white woman's thing. 1.00

01:08:30.500 Mm-hmm.

01:08:32.120 It's true.

01:08:33.020 No, and I always thought in looking at it, the number one thing you need to be careful of in pushing this thing is not unfairly demonizing the people who are in power because, like it or not, men do still control corporate America.

01:08:48.840 And if they just look at us and feel afraid, we're not going to get any more powerful.

01:08:54.140 We're not going to get ahead. 0.99

01:08:55.000 We need them to be our allies, not the jerks, but the open-minded guys. 0.98

01:08:59.760 We don't need the open-minded good guys to be terrified of us. 0.98

01:09:03.120 And I think this is a way in which a group like Black Lives Matter is overstepping, too.

01:09:08.320 You don't need to demonize every person who has white skin, Robin DiAngelo.

01:09:14.780 And why is it always white women who are far-left liberals? 1.00

01:09:18.420 Robin, if you read, I don't know if you read her book, but when you read her book, you're going to walk away thinking, she is a racist.

01:09:25.160 She is dealing with her own personal demons.

01:09:28.440 And then she's projecting it on the rest of society.

01:09:32.120 When I read that book, I thought, my God, this woman is disturbed. 1.00

01:09:36.440 It's her own problems. 0.76

01:09:38.140 There's something wrong with her.

01:09:39.440 That's what Mattaymi was saying.

01:09:39.940 And she wants to say everybody else is just as mad as she is.

01:09:46.380 But she is the one. 0.94

01:09:47.320 When she says she walks into a room, there's a reception, and people are standing around in circles, and when she looks at the Black people, she freezes. 0.53

01:09:55.660 Really? Is that what you do, Megan?

01:09:58.660 Right, exactly.

01:10:00.000 Who does that?

01:10:00.580 I'm not working out any white guilt.

01:10:02.320 I'm good.

01:10:03.080 I'm good.

01:10:04.400 I just want to close it out with something about you personally, because how are you now?

01:10:09.580 I look at you.

01:10:10.920 You're incredibly successful.

01:10:12.420 You have a beautiful husband, beautiful baby.

01:10:14.840 And you have influence.

01:10:18.080 You're a prolific author.

01:10:20.580 You're at the Hoover Institute writing amazing pieces that are really helpful to the rest of us civilians, I would say, who don't understand the issues as well as you do.

01:10:30.560 And I don't know.

01:10:31.520 I was at your 50th birthday party within the last year, and I wondered.

01:10:36.140 Last year.

01:10:36.760 Yeah, this time.

01:10:37.540 Yeah, exactly, right?

01:10:39.360 So now, how is the 50-year-old Ayan doing, living in California?

01:10:45.360 How is life now?

01:10:46.820 It's exactly as you described.

01:10:48.080 On a personal level, it's absolutely great.

01:10:51.680 Again, married to this amazing man, my kids, my life.

01:10:55.240 I mean, I can just shut up, go to the spa on a daily basis, work on my skiing, read novels I never read, watch movies I never watched before, and say goodbye to public life.

01:11:11.500 And to be honest with you, there's a bit of me that wants that.

01:11:15.500 But there's also a bit of me that has this thing of, you know, you've got to give back.

01:11:19.920 And when we, I know a lot of us talk about, you've got to give back, you've got to give something back.

01:11:27.060 And some people think, well, it's writing a check, or it's volunteering.

01:11:32.200 And I do some of those things.

01:11:34.860 But I think my way of giving back is to say, you know, when I recognize a terrible totalitarian ideology like workism, I'm going to spend my time, effort, and passion fighting it.

01:11:46.240 And I will keep the radical Islamic agenda on, the radical Islamic ideology on the agenda, as long as it is a threat. 1.00

01:11:56.520 If it's no longer a threat, we can move on.

01:12:00.020 Have conversations about the country I've adopted that I live in that has given me so, so much that I appreciate.

01:12:07.780 I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's being 50, you know, sometimes it's shocking.

01:12:15.740 I stand 51 and it's like, oh my gosh, that's half a century.

01:12:20.200 That's a lot.

01:12:21.360 And I'm old and I'm aging, but I think it's, it's actually in some ways you become more self-confident, more mature, more patient and tolerant.

01:12:33.360 Yeah, that's what I am now, more patient and tolerant.

01:12:35.580 I think it's just lovely to enter the next half century feeling, in my case, feeling really fulfilled and happy.

01:12:47.860 And also ready to fight.

01:12:51.440 I'm right there with you.

01:12:52.700 Yeah, ready to fight, but with patience and with, you know, with kindness.

01:12:56.740 When, when people get into these, they get into, and it causes a stushy, but they sort of get into a fervor about condemning someone.

01:13:06.740 I think, hmm, that's too much.

01:13:08.760 Let's lower the volume.

01:13:10.540 The best example is obviously Donald Trump.

01:13:12.720 And one of the things I'm hearing from my Democratic friends is, oh, and when he leaves office, we are going to, there are all these lawsuits and we're going to prosecute him.

01:13:22.440 And it's just like, oh, for heaven's sake, calm down.

01:13:25.960 Calm down.

01:13:27.120 You know, that's a former president of the United States.

01:13:28.640 That's why I laugh when they say, when they say unity, unity, and we're healed.

01:13:31.920 It's like, well, if you're going to put Donald Trump in jail, I'm thinking his 71 million supporters aren't going to like that.

01:13:37.800 But, you know, you can do what you want, I guess.

01:13:40.740 That's not healing.

01:13:41.480 Give him a library.

01:13:43.480 Maybe Donald Trump will finally start reading books.

01:13:46.900 I don't think it's going to be a library.

01:13:48.320 It's just going to be one long, long television documentary.

01:13:51.820 It's just like a long, long reality TV show.

01:13:54.080 I'm still waiting, actually, for Donald Trump to declare this whole thing has been a reality TV show and we're all fired.

01:14:00.220 Yeah, we are.

01:14:01.240 Exactly.

01:14:03.780 Ayan, thank you so much.

01:14:05.420 It's so lovely to talk to you.

01:14:06.580 And I can't wait to see you.

01:14:08.040 Likewise.

01:14:08.620 All the best.

01:14:09.140 See you soon.

01:14:11.560 Our thanks again to Ayan Hirsi Ali, bravest woman in America.

01:14:15.640 And I want to tell you before we go that today's episode was brought to you in part by Scoremaster.

01:14:20.380 See how many points Scoremaster can add to your credit score today.

01:14:24.460 Visit scoremaster.com slash MK now.

01:14:27.780 Later this week, we're going to be joined by Chris Christie and James Carville.

01:14:32.060 A couple of hotheads in the best sense.

01:14:34.300 Like me.

01:14:35.220 I can relate to them.

01:14:36.580 We're going to talk about what's going on with this crazy post-election world and where it's all going to end.

01:14:42.000 And if we do, in fact, wind up with a Biden administration, what does that mean for the rest of us?

01:14:47.140 We're going to find out.

01:14:48.540 Stay tuned later this week.

01:14:49.520 Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. 0.94

01:14:51.940 No BS, no agenda, and no fear.

01:14:55.940 The Megyn Kelly Show is a Devil May Care media production in collaboration with Red Seat Ventures.

01:15:00.300 We'll see you next time you move on.

01:15:00.620 We'll see you next time.

01:15:00.940 Bye-bye.

01:15:02.300 See you next time.

01:15:03.120 Run with the go-toon Twitter.

01:15:06.760 See you next week.

The Megyn Kelly Show - November 18, 2020

Ayaan Hirsi Ali on Islamic Terrorism, Critical Race Theory and America ｜ Ep. 26

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