Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and the founder of the AHA Foundation. She s also the author of the new book, Woke, P.R.E.Y., which is out in February.
00:01:55.500Ayaan Hirsi Ali has really been fighting battles and she's been an inspiration to me.
00:02:01.500And now she's taking on wokeism, among other things, and she'll be here to tell us about it all.
00:02:06.560She'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.
00:02:16.780She's also got a new book coming out in February called Prey, P-R-E-Y.
00:02:20.940And if you want to know more about it, you can follow her on Twitter at Ayaan, A-Y-A-A-N, for updates.
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00:04:47.400Let me just start, Ayaan, with Trump because he's in the news dominating it as always.
00:04:52.640And I'm wondering what you think about his challenges right now to the electoral results.
00:04:59.400I would say I first developed an interest for Donald Trump back in 2015 when he became the nominee for the Republican Party.
00:05:09.100And back then what I was reading about him was that we're going to have the next Hitler.
00:05:12.780And 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.
00:05:28.600And I think that Donald Trump lacks that.
00:05:30.680To 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.
00:05:42.400I think it is regrettable that he's not conceding the election.
00:05:47.080But 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.
00:06:03.600So, 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.
00:06:11.600It'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.
00:06:21.000So many people who were never interested in politics actually came out to vote, and in a democracy, that's a good thing.
00:06:28.900You know, take all that and then leave gracefully.
00:06:32.900But 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.
00:06:44.140Well, and it's, you know, the electoral challenge will play out.
00:06:47.160We'll see what happens in these court proceedings.
00:06:49.540I know you've been a supporter of his.
00:06:52.260You've defended him from time to time as some of those things you just ticked off happened.
00:06:57.960And our faith in systems has collectively been eroded over the Trump presidency.
00:07:04.600Yes, in part because of his rhetoric and the things he says and does, but also in large part because they deserved it.
00:07:12.500They 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?
00:07:26.700I 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.
00:07:56.640But we will still have our system and our institutions, and the outcome of this election actually suggests how strong these institutions are.
00:08:08.520And again, I just keep repeating what a genius those founding fathers were.
00:08:12.580You 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,
00:08:20.920with this, you know, this administration and the relentless chaos, you can say, okay, the voters have said, we don't want that anymore.
00:08:29.560But 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
00:08:41.040and this crazy, crazy stuff that they say, like defund the police, defund ISIL.
00:08:46.280So I think there's a check, and our system allows for that.
00:08:49.840And so I think it's been tested, and it's withstanding the test.
00:08:54.660I feel like you're the perfect person to talk to in today's day and age because, as we're going to get into,
00:09:00.280you've already lived in a society that punishes free expression or anyone who deviates from accepted thought, right,
00:09:09.140in the name of something more important, a higher value.
00:09:12.540And you, at a very young age, stood up to it and said, no.
00:09:17.100So, and now you wind up in the United States where it's happening again in a different way.
00:09:24.280You'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.
00:09:33.540And I want to just get the listeners up to speed on your background and what we're talking about.
00:09:46.520About the infidel in general, Jewish people in particular.
00:09:50.240So, I actually wasn't raised an Islamist, but I was attracted to Islamism as a teenager when members of the Muslim Brotherhood,
00:10:01.180they 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.
00:10:12.060And some of the things I learned was that, you know, as a Muslim, as a true Muslim, as opposed to fake Muslims,
00:10:23.120you should hate the infidel with everything in you and the Jews in particular because they control the world.
00:10:29.420And 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,
00:10:41.220and I actually found out that things don't work that way, I came to understand the true story and rejected it.
00:10:49.400They attempted, prior to that point, to imprint upon you a hatred that was in the name of religion, right?
00:12:06.480So 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.
00:12:20.020And that was an indoctrination in the sense that if you asked questions, you were punished.
00:12:25.800So you've been very open about, sadly, having been forced to undergo genital mutilation when you were only five years old.
00:12:37.300And that, I understand, was your grandmother's decision?
00:14:10.840150 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.
00:14:30.620Number 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.
00:14:44.960And number two, it is on the wedding night.
00:14:47.820You're supposed to be a virgin until you get married.
00:14:50.600And 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.
00:15:02.040And so that those are the two practical reasons that are given for inflicting this on girls and women.
00:15:12.400You were, you were five years old at the time.
00:15:15.880And it's hard to believe that's a baby.
00:16:13.360And we understood that if you don't tell these stories, if you don't talk about it, then the practice never stops.
00:16:20.980So in order to urge change, you have to tell your story.
00:16:27.460Well, 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.
00:16:38.280And 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.
00:16:50.640And it's like, why don't you take a walk in Ayan's shoes?
00:16:54.100And then you ask yourself whether you feel you have a right to offer some criticisms of the religion with which you were raised.
00:17:05.500So then you get a little older and your parents tried to arrange a marriage for you to a distant cousin.
00:17:13.440And you wrote an infidel, you resolved, no, I'm not doing this.
00:17:18.860And 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.
00:17:32.240So 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?
00:17:43.740So 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.
00:18:08.680But 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.
00:18:27.540My mother gave her life to my father and she could do nothing because they denied her education.
00:18:47.400I, 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.
00:19:02.720And I wasn't allowed to ask questions.
00:19:04.580And I think in my individual life experience, it just erupted in this rebellion against it all.
00:19:11.920And, 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.
00:20:24.880I know I read in your book you wrote, I had imagination on my side.
00:20:29.260And 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.
00:21:38.660I 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.
00:21:51.080He was actually he had plans to move with his then wife, I believe, or his partner to move to the United States.
00:22:01.020He had come to explore life in America.
00:22:04.440And then this fanatic, Mohammed Biyeri, Islamic fanatic, you know, followed him for a number of days.
00:22:20.460I think there was a group of people, but there's only one person who went to jail for it.
00:22:23.760And Mohammed Biyeri, one morning, Tuesday morning, November the 2nd, followed him on his bicycle.
00:22:34.640Theo used to go to work every single morning from his house to his office, same, you know, followed the same route.
00:22:41.540And 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.
00:22:51.680This 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.
00:23:09.840And 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.
00:23:33.580He 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.
00:23:47.420We 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.
00:24:01.540There was one case where a young woman is raped by her uncle, but then the family, instead of denouncing the uncle, they denounce her.
00:24:10.320And this, to this day, continues to happen to large numbers of women.
00:24:15.460And because he did that, Theo van Gogh was murdered.
00:24:19.540But 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.
00:24:32.880Because had he not provoked them, right, he would still be alive.
00:24:37.240And that was then a lesson for others not to do, or not to act the way Theo van Gogh acted.
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00:26:41.860And when we saw those attacks in France last month, there was one on October 16th, one on October 29th.
00:26:46.560I couldn't believe how little coverage it got here.
00:26:48.880It was the lead up to the presidential election.
00:26:50.960And I just thought, OK, perhaps people are focused on something else.
00:26:54.800But this is this is still an issue for the United States.
00:26:58.400You 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.
00:27:07.480And so folks haven't been paying attention.
00:27:09.880There was one on October 16th where a French teacher who had showed two cartoons of Mohammed in a lesson about free speech was beheaded.
00:27:20.620He was beheaded with a knife on his walk home by an 18 year old Chechen who was yelling Alou Akbar.
00:27:29.280And then on October 29th, there were church stabbings in Nice, France, where a terrorist entered a cathedral and stabbed three people to death.
00:27:39.660And 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.
00:27:52.580And what are your thoughts on what we're seeing over there?
00:27:54.280Well, 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.
00:28:07.460I've crisscrossed Europe, Australia, here in the United States of America.
00:28:13.340I would say there are these three circles of Muslims.
00:28:16.800There is that inner circle of fanatics who are actually carrying out the attacks.
00:28:22.660And then there is a circle around them that aids and abets, that helps them with their plotting, that does all the indoctrination.
00:28:56.200But they also denounce the values of the countries that they have chosen to come and live in.
00:29:04.760And 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.
00:29:15.940That 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.
00:29:31.360And they're actually in their own countries of origin, or they're obeying Sharia law, Islamic law.
00:29:37.400And it used to be a somewhat small problem, and it got a little bit bigger.
00:29:43.300And, 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.
00:29:55.360But 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.
00:30:15.900Let 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.
00:30:31.520Yeah, because Macron is sounding a very different note now.
00:30:35.580I 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.
00:30:41.860But 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.
00:30:55.460And then after the three people were stabbed in the church, he said he promised a law on Islamist separatism.
00:31:01.960He said we need to restrict the homeschooling of Muslims.
00:31:04.960We need to demand that these Islamic groups sign a secular charter.
00:31:08.780And 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.
00:31:32.920Absolutely. I think now the hard reality has set in and this has now to do with the scale of the problem.
00:31:41.680Again, like I said, it used to be that government officials were able to ignore or pretend that the problem didn't exist.
00:31:52.140But 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.
00:32:16.880They know that, they know that, so he has to do something about it.
00:32:19.880You also have in Europe extremists, very far-right groups that are saying to the populations, these establishment officials, they can't solve the problem.
00:32:33.020And 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.
00:33:13.400And those who say Islamist norms, I think they should be given the choice to either change their minds and adapt or leave the country.
00:33:20.640When 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.
00:33:34.740And it is mostly Muslim, and it is a community unto itself.
00:33:38.880And I think about this desire, this newfound sort of pronouncement by Macron to try to force assimilation, and I just wonder whether he can.
00:33:51.220It seems like so many are separated physically, they're separated philosophically.
00:34:53.680Where 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,
00:35:06.440where it just seems like a second society that's large and growing has emerged.
00:35:12.680But we certainly have had a problem here with Islamic terror, although it's been relatively quiet over the past few years.
00:35:19.220Why do you think that is, and where do you think we are?
00:35:21.860Again, I think, so a number of things.
00:35:25.580We've had it here in the United States.
00:35:27.660We have communities of radical Muslims here in the United States that cocoon themselves and their children from the rest of society.
00:35:36.660But being such a large country, right now I think a lot of it is not visible.
00:35:41.700We've also had to fight these wars in Afghanistan, in Iraq.
00:35:48.140And 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.
00:36:18.120I think the Islamists we have in the United States are a touch more sophisticated than the ones in Europe.
00:36:27.060And 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.
00:36:40.120But I would not be so complacent as to say this is a European problem and we have no problem in America.
00:36:51.440Yeah, we shouldn't be heaving a sigh of relief right now.
00:36:56.780I mean, you know, as we get farther and farther from 9-11, I was talking about this with Glenn Greenwald.
00:37:02.080We 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.
00:37:14.040And while that seems appropriate, it's also slightly scary because we're not safe.
00:37:21.520And it's the United States of America.
00:37:31.060And it just, it makes me feel a little, not nervous, but just on edge.
00:37:36.760What 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.
00:37:50.320And that the intelligence community also became politicized.
00:37:55.780The justice, the DOJ became politicized.
00:37:58.760Now, that is the kind of distraction that groups like Al-Qaeda, the remnants of Al-Qaeda and the remnants of ISIS could exploit.
00:38:43.340I like the outcome of this election because I think it forces them to see that the nation is not politicized.
00:38:49.420The nation is at the center, center right or center left, but really at the center.
00:38:53.280And 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.
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00:41:29.080But I have like a love-hate situation going on there because I love some of the stuff he says so much.
00:41:33.620And I admire his bravery and standing up to the wokesters and, I don't know, just folks on his side of the aisle.
00:41:39.680But then he says something really offensive about Republicans writ large and I get angry again.
00:41:44.080But 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.
00:41:52.820Take a listen to it, but also listen for how his audience of liberals reacts.
00:41:57.280Liberals 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?
00:42:10.660He was asked how his Democrats could do a better job connecting to Latinos.
00:42:15.180He 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.
00:42:46.180So 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.
00:43:30.320And 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.
00:43:46.560Cue the groveling apology, followed by America saying, yeah, I think Mario's right.
00:43:53.480Maybe kids shouldn't make big life decisions while you still need to make choo choo noises to get the food in their mouth.
00:44:00.320The audience really didn't know what to do in response to all this.
00:44:17.280Democrats kept saying in the campaign, you can't possibly think Trump is preferable to what we're selling.
00:44:22.860And many voters keep saying, yes, we can.
00:44:27.380In 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.
00:44:38.260Because 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.
00:44:52.900It would be so easy to win elections if we would just drop this shit.
00:45:04.800I 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.
00:45:15.720And he did this great piece going, yes, let's never forget who the real victims are.
00:45:21.520You think it's hard to be a black man in America?
00:45:23.460Try being a guilty, privileged white woman.
00:45:28.300He's got the gift of just finding the right seam in society.
00:45:38.480You 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,
00:45:56.880but 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.
00:46:37.940No one else is allowed to ask any questions or criticize.
00:46:42.400Another set of similarity is the hatred.
00:46:48.040First of all, the dividing of a society into groups.
00:46:50.900Muslims say believers and unbelievers on the woke have is all divided into racial groups, gender groups, whatever they come up with the next day.
00:48:42.540You had a line that said Black Lives Matter, that you said they're hardcore Marxists.
00:48:48.000And you said their political agenda is not to lift poor Black people out of poverty.
00:48:52.440It is to advance a radical Marxist agenda that tolerates no criticism whatsoever.
00:48:58.760And this is one of my problems with capital BLM, right?
00:49:01.960Not the lowercase concept of Black Lives Mattering.
00:49:04.700It's the group BLM, which is it doesn't seem devoted to actually saving Black lives at all.
00:49:10.000If they were devoted to that, they'd be focused on what's happening to the children in cities like Chicago, Detroit, Baltimore and elsewhere.
00:49:17.460They would be supporting charter schools.
00:50:33.060One 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.
00:50:51.980I wonder what Biden and Harris will do when they start to take their time.
00:50:57.660Well, he's already said he's bringing it back.
00:50:59.940He's already promised he's like, that's going to be one of his first executive orders.
00:51:04.020So 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.
00:51:19.620The system we have, Megan, says that we are all individual human beings and it's our individual humanity that makes us whole.
00:51:29.560Yes, we have our differences and we have to respect that kind of diversity.
00:51:34.020But first and foremost, as an individual, you are a human being.
00:51:37.780CRT doesn't see you first and foremost as a human being.
00:51:41.020It sees you as a member of a collective and it's your skin color, right?
00:51:46.160Your skin color that matters more than anything else.
00:51:48.800And all these collectives, whether they divide us along racial, gender or other distinctions, they see our relationship only as one of power.
00:52:18.680And 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.
00:52:30.940They're their skin color and their gender and give it to others.
00:52:44.540And 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.
00:52:57.860What 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.
00:53:18.880And 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.
00:53:25.980And 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.
00:53:36.460And they're just trying to get it a little bit more even, not not to make one race above another.
00:53:41.720That is really an exercise in sticking your head in the sand.
00:55:10.400You don't know exactly what it is that you're supposed to be fighting.
00:55:13.780But on an objective legal level, it is then supposed the presumption is that you are guilty and you can never prove your innocence.
00:55:22.880Well, I know that you've been called a racist, of course, because you lean right and they don't like what you're saying.
00:55:33.240I 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.
00:55:42.060And it's a tool that is used to silence you.
00:58:03.560So 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.
00:58:14.960And maybe human beings are just racist to begin with because they try to favor their tribe and their extended family of other people.
00:58:24.160But 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.
00:58:33.180It still exists in America, but it's not as prevalent as it used to be and as it is in other countries.
00:59:11.980They'll recognize the logical fallacies embedded in these theories and ideologies.
00:59:18.160But critical theory has to prevail over critical race and critical justice theories.
00:59:26.780Well, 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.
00:59:37.500And 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.
01:00:22.140I 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.
01:00:37.440But then the reality on the ground where, you know, my mother and the women around me, that that was really there was that dissonance.
01:00:44.020I think we need to create that dissonance.
01:00:47.660Sorry, not the word create is not the right word.
01:00:50.860It's that we have to make people aware of this dissonance.
01:00:54.420If 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.
01:01:04.260And when that happens, that's when the dissonance hits.
01:01:07.320And 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.
01:01:20.200Because you then want to go straight back to, in competition with other companies to making a profit and a good profit.
01:01:28.520And the people who get punished are the people who talk about something other than the work they were hired to do.
01:01:35.680If 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.
01:01:50.480And all you do is racialize everything and either see yourself as a victim or suffer from white guilt.
01:02:20.820At some point, the company actually has to make money.
01:02:24.340Well, I think people need to be practical about this.
01:02:27.380I 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.
01:02:35.240I think it started with noble ideas and we got rid of some genuinely bad guys from their corporate roles.
01:02:41.120But it's been politicized now and it's turned witch-hunty.
01:02:45.400But 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.
01:03:01.000You know, that they'd say, yes, me too.
01:03:13.580Because, you know, now at that time, that time before we had Kavanaugh, the Democrats were saying, believe all women, believe all women.
01:03:19.660And 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.
01:03:24.820But 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.
01:03:32.320But 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.
01:05:00.940That'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.
01:05:13.400They killed it because they politicized it.
01:05:15.840And the lie was put to their dishonest t-shirts when Tara Reade came forward.
01:05:21.820You know, somebody accusing Joe Biden, a Democrat, and suddenly it was no longer Believe All Women.
01:05:47.600But 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.
01:05:54.120You know, it's like we don't believe you anymore.
01:05:56.500And 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.
01:06:05.540Because 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.
01:06:29.480So 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.
01:06:51.600But look at this and be horrified, horrified.
01:07:03.100Well, 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?
01:07:32.320Megan, 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.
01:07:41.520And 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.
01:07:53.280And that problem is receiving zero attention.
01:07:58.320That's an actual women's rights issue.
01:08:00.520That's an actual women's rights issue.
01:08:02.480And 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.
01:08:14.000And 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.
01:08:26.420Me Too also ended up becoming, you know, it's a rich white woman's thing.
01:08:33.020No, 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.
01:08:48.840And if they just look at us and feel afraid, we're not going to get any more powerful.
01:09:47.320When 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.
01:10:20.580You'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.
01:10:48.080On a personal level, it's absolutely great.
01:10:51.680Again, married to this amazing man, my kids, my life.
01:10:55.240I 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.
01:11:11.500And to be honest with you, there's a bit of me that wants that.
01:11:15.500But there's also a bit of me that has this thing of, you know, you've got to give back.
01:11:19.920And when we, I know a lot of us talk about, you've got to give back, you've got to give something back.
01:11:27.060And some people think, well, it's writing a check, or it's volunteering.
01:11:34.860But 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.
01:11:46.240And I will keep the radical Islamic agenda on, the radical Islamic ideology on the agenda, as long as it is a threat.
01:11:56.520If it's no longer a threat, we can move on.
01:12:00.020Have conversations about the country I've adopted that I live in that has given me so, so much that I appreciate.
01:12:07.780I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's being 50, you know, sometimes it's shocking.
01:12:15.740I stand 51 and it's like, oh my gosh, that's half a century.
01:12:21.360And 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.
01:12:33.360Yeah, that's what I am now, more patient and tolerant.
01:12:35.580I think it's just lovely to enter the next half century feeling, in my case, feeling really fulfilled and happy.
01:13:10.540The best example is obviously Donald Trump.
01:13:12.720And 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.
01:13:22.440And it's just like, oh, for heaven's sake, calm down.