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So to Speak: The Free Speech Podcast
Ep. 229: Ayaan Hirsi Ali will not submit
00:45:10
Ayaan Hirsi Ali grew up in a culture of conformity. She was beaten and mutilated. She was told who she must marry. Eventually, she rebelled. “You don’t speak up at first,” she told us. “First you leave and you find a place of safety. It’s...
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- [00:00]
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
So it hasn't been easy. It was absolutely awful, actually, after Salman Rushdie was attacked, when it really did get under my skin. And I was terrified. And, and I can say, looking back, you know, just as you are describing, when Theo van Gogh was being shot, as the event itself was unfolding, as he fired the fast shot and, you know, he got. He was on his bicycle and the killer followed him. Theo was saying, can we talk about this? And there was a lot of commentary right after Theo was killed in Holland, where. In the Netherlands, where that's exactly how the Dutch approach life and conflict. Can we talk about it? Why can't we talk about it? Do we really have to shoot one another? And I think, again, it's the same. It has become increasingly the same in America, where sometimes we are faced with these implacable, relentless threats, people who want to take your life or take your country. And we sit back and we say, can't we talk about it somewhere? I read of the freedom of speech.
- [01:26]
Nico Perino
You're listening to so to Speak, the Free Speech podcast brought to you by fire, the foundation for individual rights and expression. Welcome back to so to Speak, the Free Speech Podcast, where every other week we take an uncensored look at the world of free expression through personal stories and candid conversations. I am your host, Nico Perino. Today we are speaking with Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Ion is a human rights activist, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, the founder of the AHA foundation, and the host of the Ion Hersea Lee podcast, which features guests who have a passion for free inquiry and speech, something I think our shows definitely have in common. Ion is also the best selling author of a number of books including Infidel, Nomad, Heretic and Prey. I've been listening to Infidel recently on Audible and I love that you do the recording and reading there. Ayaan, I've been looking forward to having this conversation. Obviously, Ayaan, you and I have a shared interest in free inquiry and speech. But you're also someone who has paid the price for defending those values. You left the Islamic faith and since then have been one of Islam's most prominent critics, costing you dearly, as people and listeners who are familiar with this show will know, or with your story, I should say. One of your colleagues was murdered. You've lived with death threats for decades and you lost relationships with families and friends. And it's comparatively easy for someone like me to defend free speech and open inquiry when I don't have to face those. Those stark realities Every day. So you have the courage of your convictions and that's why I'm so pleased to speak with you today. Ayaan, welcome on to so to Speak.
- [03:09]
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Nico, thank you very much for having me. And thank you for that very warm and lengthy introduct. I just wanted to add that I've also. It's November now, literally Wednesday, the day after the election in America. But in October, I launched Courage Media, which is to encourage people in different, in various institutions to take part, to speak up and to allow themselves the courage not to conform.
- [03:46]
Nico Perino
And what sort of institutions will. Will you be working in?
- [03:51]
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
So my focus is on universities, but not just universities. It's schools, it's media, it's corporations, it's, you know, any kind of place where there is groupthink and where we know that there are individuals within. So over many years, I've been hearing a lot of groups complaining. This is what goes on where I work and I would like to do something about it or say something about it. And people generally settling for, let someone else do it, you know.
- [04:23]
Nico Perino
Yes.
- [04:23]
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Yeah. And so this is a platform. If you want to be a heretic, if you don't want to conform, if you, you can, you can. Yeah, you, you, you have Carriage Media and.
- [04:36]
Nico Perino
Well, let's talk, let's talk a little bit about your story and why this concern about conformity is particularly important to you. You grew up a Muslim in a culture that forced you to conform sometimes on pain of punishment and death and torture, right?
- [04:57]
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Yes. You conform and you become a slave. I mean, your mind and your mentality is enslaved. You're oppressed, you're humiliated. You feel it and you know it and you keep up the lie and you really, truly see yourself as a victim and you're victimized. So there is very little. I don't know how to explain this. If you were to stand up, it begins with standing up to family members and saying, you know what? I don't believe in what you're telling me to do. I believe in something else. Or I really think I see things differently when in the, in the household that I was growing up in, the punishment would be physical and it would be swift. And that just shuts down everything. And so there is this sense of, you have all these grownups that are physically bigger than me and they're going to hurt me really badly. I watch them hurt my sister and my brother and others who, who rebel. And so over time, you not only conform, but you become so apathetic, you become almost robotic and so when I first came to the Netherlands and people were saying, stand up for yourself, you know, you as an individual, tell us what you think. I thought that was very, very strange. And I thought, how on earth are they able to have any kind of social cohesion if everybody can individually say what they think and believe without any fear? And yet, paradoxically, it is a society that allows free thought and freedom of conscience that's more stable, more real, more truthful, and a lot happier.
- [06:47]
Nico Perino
So growing up in a culture of conformity like the one that you did in Somalia, and then you moved kind of all over, you were in Saudi Arabia and Kenya. Do people fully appreciate the level of conformity that that was in those cultures? Or was it like a fish and water? Right. If you tell a fish about water, they might not know what you're talking about because it's just what. It's just the world they grown up in, they don't know anything different. Did you know that there was something different out there growing up? And did you yearn for it?
- [07:19]
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
It's largely a fish in water, but because we are human beings, we tend to rebel and we tend to disagree. And so I think one way of not conforming was by sneaking things, by telling lies, by doing what you wanted to do. But you, as long as you are not caught, that was great. But then that puts you in a state of terror because you could, you know, what if you were caught? So there were all these, all these secrets and lies that was going on. So that was one way of not conforming. If you openly rebelled again, like I said, that was swiftly put down. But there's also a hierarchy of power. And, and another way I think, of not conforming was to become an. An enforcer yourself. So you would very loudly pretend that, you know, you are more righteous than anyone else, and then you become a source of. Of fear. You know, people are afraid of you. And this is mostly, you see it amongst men and real physical aggression. If you're bigger and stronger than your brothers and your cousins and the rest of the clan, you can then impose your will on them. And so that's another way of rebelling is through tyranny. And so everything I'm telling you about that society is just not conducive to honesty, to stability, to trust. And so people are afraid of one another. They don't trust one another, and therefore they're not productive. They don't collaborate effectively to realize what should be their common goal.
- [09:03]
Nico Perino
And was this unique just to the situation and culture and countries that you were raised on, or is there a tradition, any tradition in Islam that privileges or respects free speech and open inquiry?
- [09:20]
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
So I'm going to turn that question around and say the situation I grew up in is much more universal than the one you grew up in. And so it is the west that's different. Okay? It's not China, it's not India before the British went there. It's not the Arab Islamic world. It's not even the Western world before the evolution of Christianity and where things are. So you are the odd ones out. That's what you don't realize.
- [09:51]
Nico Perino
Well, was it even Christianity pre Enlightenment, to a certain respect, you have the Inquisitions, right?
- [09:59]
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
I am now discovering that it is rooted in Christianity and that the Enlightenment is a child of Christianity and in particular the teachings of Jesus Christ and all the sorts of fights within these different churches that took place over centuries as to what exactly does it mean to believe and to be a true believer and then constantly edging towards pure conscience. If you want pure and truthful and honest conscience, then you have to remove the factor of fear. And so if you're not afraid of being killed or harassed or losing on something and you can truly express your conscience, then you are honest. And then I think people proceeded in the west to protecting that conscience and then to building institutions that protect that conscience. And so growing up, when I started to speak my mind and to think I have a mind of my own, I'm going to demand this or I'm going to express myself this way or that way, I was instantly accused of behaving like white people. So we didn't, we didn't really use the word Westerner. We used the word infidel when we were referring to things that were un Islamic and alien behavior that was, that didn't immediately inspire religious opposition. Then we would say it's. It's white people. You know, you're behaving like a white woman when you say you don't want to be treated this way or that way. So feminism was, you know, pretending to be a wise woman, which is to say we are not white. They're decadent, they're this, they're that, and all sorts of bad names would be said about them. But it was demands to think freely, to be an individual, to have freedom of conscience, were alien and infidel.
- [12:02]
Nico Perino
And were they alien and infidel because of the doctrine of Islam or rather how some interpreted it?
- [12:12]
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Well, it is, first of all, you would be told it's selfish. So it is against the family and the clan. What's not in the interests of the collective, what does not advance the collective agenda is seen as not just antisocial behavior, but it's also seen as damaging and traitorous. So again, that's why the punishment is so severe. And so the individual is there to serve the collective interest. And no individual interest or comfort or pursuits or creativity can be tolerated if it's seen as a threat to the collective. And if you're a girl and you don't behave according to the role prescribed by the clan and by the tribe and by God as a Muslim, then you run the risk of other girls also making demands and the whole thing then falls apart. So it's. Everybody lives within their lane. There are expectations of boys, there are expectations of girls, there are expectations of different age groups. And then all of these expectations are enforced using, using religion, using Islam. In, in my family, if I, if I wanted to compete for attention with my brother, if I said, why is he allowed to have friends and go out of the house and be a. Why is he not chaperoned? But why am I chaperoned? Then my mother and grandmother would say, that is God's will. And you don't. You don't debate God, you obey God.
- [14:05]
Nico Perino
So do you even need a state apparatus to enforce this code of conduct? One of the more prominent stories that's went around the past week or so was the story of this Iranian woman who refused to wear a hijab in public, which my understanding is mandatory in Iran. So she stripped to her underwear at Tehran's Islamic Azad University, and a group of men surrounded her, throw her in the car and drive away. Now, of course, the university's public relations director said this woman was suffering from a mental health crisis. I think that's a little bit hard to believe looking at some of the footage. But you have these state morality police in places like Iran, and their justification is, is Islam. And there's this connection between the state and the religion that you don't often see in Western countries.
- [15:07]
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
That's exactly right. Islam is the state. So Islam, as you see, it's a comprehensive rule book and it dictates, you know, theory of government and government institutions and laws and, and the manner in which to enforce it and the administrative state, part of it. And it's total, it's completely totalitarian. So it's family law. It's the way neighbors interact with one another and it's also vertical, top down. So Iran, Islamist regime of Iran is using the modern means of the nation state with, you know, a state with military means and with a bureaucracy and with police to enforce Islamic law on a population at this point that doesn't want that. And that's a majority of the Iranian public. And this young woman, like many, many other brave women in Iran, supported by their men, periodically come out in different forms and stand up for their rights. And they're constantly met with this form of obscene violence meted out by the states, the arrest, and now she's taken away, and heaven knows what they're going to do to her. But that sends the message to other women in Iran, don't you dare.
- [16:39]
Nico Perino
In recent years, we've seen a lot of immigration to Western countries from Islamic countries. And you've argued that it's not the responsibilities of those in the west to accommodate accommodate Muslims beliefs and sensitivities. Rather, it's the Muslims who must learn to live with our commitment to free speech. One of the things that I've heard argued is that Islam will weaponize freedom of speech, association, religion, to conquer Western countries. So the very freedoms that we take for granted or that we celebrate or that make us Western are also the freedoms that can be weaponized by those who want to destroy those freedoms. What do you make of that?
- [17:26]
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Muslims as individuals are different, but Islam is one religion and it's an expansive religion. If you're a true Muslim, you are required to not just practice Islam yourself, but to enforce the practice of Islam within your family, your society, and so on, and then to expand it, to bring it to others. So organizations and movements like the Muslim Brotherhood seek to practice Islam using that interpretation of Islam, which is the political and military interpretation of Islam. When they come to the west and they start establishing organizations and chapters, Islamic centers, universities, mosques, what they seek to do is to Islamize the society that they have come to because they see that as a religious obligation. Now, the west is not familiar with Islam in that way. I mean, the west obviously had wars with Islam and they studied Islam. But to have large minorities of Muslims come and settle in the west, that's a very recent phenomenon. And so I think there is this literally a clash of civilizations where Westerners are saying, you have freedom of religion here and freedom of association. Why don't you enjoy it and become just like us? And they are saying, well, hang on a minute, you have become secular and sometimes you've become anti religious. And we have the good news for you. Why don't you become Muslim? We want to Islamize you. Now you're talking past one Another at this stage. And I think that if you have Western nation states that as today experiencing this, I mean, sometimes the word post nation state is used. I don't want to use it after this election because I think there's plenty of healthy national identities still alive. But there are, I mean, globalization is a fact. And, and there are non Islamic, very Western forces that think that they benefit from globalization. And then there is, you have these pseudo communists who are coming back who think that Western nation states should be punished for things they did in the past and for all sorts of inequalities. And then alongside that, you have the Islamists who wants to destroy the Western nation state and replace it with Sharia law. And I think that cocktail produces a threat to the corporate core of Western nation states.
- [20:23]
Nico Perino
Well, then the question becomes, what do you do about it? Right? You could approach it in two or more ways. You could allow those who want to destroy the Western nation state from within to speak freely, or you can censor them. You could allow them into the country and then censor them. Or you could pursue a drastically more restrictive immigration program. Do you have thoughts on that?
- [20:49]
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
I think you start by the question, you know, what sort of society do, do we want to live in? And, and then you answer that question with, so what sorts of incentives do we want to encourage? And you know, what sorts of forces do we want to bring to the surface? We want political freedom, we want economic prosperity. We want our Constitution. And again, we started with this freedom of conscience which you protect the First Amendment in America, we also have the Second Amendment and we have a whole slew of rules and regulations, of rules. Actually principles is more, not rules, more like principles that our countries are founded on. And you want to protect those. So if, if that's what we want, then I think it's also just as important to identify what the threats are. And if we agree on what the threat is, then we should use the means that are open to open societies to, to suppress these threats. Importing large numbers of people who threaten the social cohesion of the host society who openly say that they want to bring in Sharia law. I think that's a mistake, and I think that we shouldn't do that. But that's, at this point it's probably a minority view. There are very few people like me who hold this view, or maybe not. Again, yesterday's election in America was very much about immigration. The economy was the most important item, and then immigration was the second most important item in Europe. It's the number one Item of many elections. So maybe it's not a minority view anymore.
- [22:57]
Nico Perino
Well, theoretically, when you become a United States citizen, you take an oath to the United States Constitution. And to the extent Sharia and the desire to implement Sharia through the state runs contrary to that Constitution and these folks become citizens, are they just lying when they take the oath, or would the Islamic tradition say that you can't lie about something like that? I mean, I guess what I'm asking is the oath to the Constitution not enough of a bulwark to prevent that sort of thing from happening?
- [23:37]
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Because we've degraded the process towards citizenship to mean just the material. You know, you get the. You get a driver's license and you get a passport to travel with, and you get, all of you get the right to vote. You get the right to do this, you get the right to do that. But we hardly ever tell anyone what the obligations are. I think most, not just Muslims, but most people will say, will be bewildered if you suddenly say, you can't do this or you can't do that, when all of these years you allowed them to build mosques and madrasas and to proselytize and to shout over the rooftops that they want to establish Sharia. You've allowed in the United States for Qatar and other countries to bring in a lot of money and to engage in this Islamization process. And then from one day to the next, you turn around and you say, hey, you've taken an oath. What you're doing is suddenly, you know, uncitizen or contrary to the oath of citizenship. So I think this isn't the point is not to blame them so much as to reflect on. On the way we've been as a nation. We've been really negligent in the last few decades about the existence of subversive efforts from outside and from within and how to deal with that. And I think now, because this problem is big enough to warrant attention, I think the way we answer these questions is really important. What sort of society do we want to live in? What sort of society do we want to leave for our children? And can we have a subversive effort from a large growing demographic representing or saying to represent, claiming to represent one fifth of humanity, establish itself here and promise to settle us and to transform our society? Do we even ask ourselves these questions and what that means? And I think you won't understand what I'm talking about until you go to Europe and travel in some of these countries and see what actual transformation looks like.
- [26:04]
Nico Perino
Speaking of transformation, Our college campuses for the past decade and a half or so have been transformed, and trust in higher education in the United States has plummeted. I would argue that that's due in no small part to the censorship that has become pervasive on those college campuses. And that wave of censorship we at Fire have pegged toward kind of the end of 2013, also 2014, when you started seeing demands for trigger warnings, microaggression policies, releasing campus disinvitations. And you, Ayaan, were the subject of one of those disinvitations. In 2014, when Brandeis University rescinded its offer of an honorary degree to you, protests erupted over your criticisms of Islam. There was a Change.org petition that characterized your views as extreme and that said that the decision to award you this degree was a blatant and callous disregard by the administration of not only the Muslim state, but of any student who has experienced pure hate speech. Not sure what pure hate speech is versus just regular hate speech, but I'd be curious for your perspective, Ion, as being someone who probably confronted this and recognized this earlier than most, what you make of the decade since then. Have things gotten better or have they gotten worse, or are they just about the same?
- [27:34]
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
No, they have gotten worse. They've gotten a lot worse. And you know, in hindsight, I think we were all too apathetic. We should have reacted to it in 2014, maybe even earlier. There are some people who are older than me who say this has been going on since the 1960s. You know, this postmodernist, Marxist, Maoist ideological virus that's in American universities. It has, it's. It's an anti American force. It hates everything about America, accuses America of being racist and slaveholders and, you know, misogynist, and it's homegrown. And what happened to me in 2014 was that the Muslim Student association in Brandeis that organized this, this cancellation attempt that succeeded, they worked together with the leftist organizations, the ones that were. It was just around that time, you're right about the demands for trigger warnings. And before that, there were demands to decolonize the curriculum and to decolonize the classics especially. Some people take this story as far back as when Jesse Jackson was shouting his slogan that Western civilization had to go, yo ho ho, Western civilization must go, some similar slogan. These things were not taken seriously. And now you have this unholy alliance between these woke people. And then you have the Islamists. And together they're saying it started with individuals like me. I mean, when I, when, if you look at the complaint they had against me, it was that my very presence on the grounds of Brandeis campus would distress young students there so much that the university shouldn't do that. If you read a demand like that and you think, and in 2014, I genuinely thought, it is so silly and so unserious that no one is going to indulge this. And then it was indulged. And initially all the anger was directed at the president of the university. But that particular incident was defined as, here's a small minority, they're Muslim, they're going through a lot. It was the years after 9, 11, there were terrorist activities and they were complaining about Islamophobia. So there was this tendency of let's tolerate that. I think what we missed was that this was riding on a wave of this Wokist intolerance. And now the two of them combined, the unholy red Green alliance has generated, I think, the ruining of the hearts and minds of at least one generation. You saw what happened in the spring of this year in Colombia, at Penn University, at Harvard, where masses and masses of students came out in protests against Israel's war on Hamas. And they sided with Hamas. They were waving Palestinian flags, they were shouting from the river to the sea and Intifada, Intifada. A lot of these slogans they were shouting were genocidal against. They were calling for the elimination of Israel, but also for the elimination of all Jewish people. And that's where we are now. And how do we recapture those institutions? What do we do about these students who have been brainwashed to hate their own country and to hate themselves? And what do we do about the growing and entrenched force of Islamists that are advancing steadily and not so slowly anymore? I mean, I remember again in the spring in Michigan that a man felt an Islamist, felt confident enough to, I don't know if he was on a balcony out of a window, but to shout, death to America. Death to America. And he was overlooking a mass of people waving these flags and shouting these slogans. And so that's where we are now. And the question we have to ask ourselves is how is it that our education system From K to 12, and especially our universities, have become so rotten and where are the grown ups? And who, who was overseeing this? Who should we hold responsible? And can we turn this back?
- [32:54]
Nico Perino
I mentioned at the top that it's comparably easy for someone like me to defend free speech when I haven't had to face the death threats or the loss of relationships with friends. Or family or colleagues who are murdered. And I would be remiss if I didn't ask you about those challenges. Theo van Gogh, who was your colleague who worked with you on the film Submission, was shot eight times, first from a distance and at short range. And the killer left a note that said, ayaan's next. That's you, right? And then you see what happened with Salman Rushdie in the fatwa in 1989. He. He thought he was safe, right? He would get into New York City taxicabs with Muslim drivers, and went about his life. And then he shows up at an arts festival to speak, and someone comes out of the audience and stabs him. Fleming rose with the Mohammed cartoons. The Gillens poston controversy from 2005, Charlie Hebdo, where you have a whole newsroom essentially murdered. This is the cost that some people pay for criticizing Islam. What does that mean to you personally? How can you find and maintain your voice in such an environment?
- [34:21]
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
So it hasn't been easy. It was absolutely awful, actually, after Salman Rushdie was attacked, when it really did get under my skin. And I was terrified. And I can say, looking back, you know, just as you are describing, when Theo van Gogh was being shot, as the event itself was unfolding, as he fired the first shot and, you know, he got. He was on his bicycle and the killer followed him. Theo was saying, can we talk about this? And there was a lot of commentary right after Theo was killed in Holland, where. In the Netherlands, where that's exactly how the Dutch approach life and conflict. Can we talk about it? Why can't we talk about it? Do we really have to shoot one another? And I think, again, it's the same, or it has become increasingly the same in America, where sometimes we are faced with these implacable, relentless threats, people who want to take your life or take your country. And we sit back and we say, can't we talk about it? And so I think the way to cope with it and having done this for a number of years, is number one, to avoid what I did, which was I lived in denial and thought it doesn't affect me, when in fact it affected me very, very much. And so you have to try and remain mentally sane. For me, what has worked now is faith. I think I've announced not so long ago that I've become a Christian, and I find a great deal of comfort and safety in that. So I'm not constantly thinking about the threat, and I don't feel sort of guilt, the whole burden of guilt that I felt Towards Theo's death, I feel much better about those sorts of things. But it is. It's a huge toll on your mental health, if I can put it that way. And then what I also find empowering is not to give in or to give up and to just continue to speak out and speak up as long as the threat is there. There's something. There's something even calming about that, that, you know, they can't frighten you into silence and that, you know, as long. As long as I'm alive and I'm speaking about it, I hope I'm giving others reason and courage to do exactly the same.
- [37:26]
Nico Perino
By way of closing, what allowed you to find your voice in those first years that you started speaking out? You mentioned you grew up in a culture of conformity. We're speaking out wasn't allowed. And there was violence or even the threat of violence when you did so. And you didn't start becoming an outspoken critic until, if I'm understanding the chronology right, until after Salman Rushdie's fatwa. Right.
- [37:55]
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
And, oh, I didn't become an outspoken critic until 2001. 9, 11, 2001. That's the event that propelled me into speaking out.
- [38:05]
Nico Perino
So. So a decade. So over a decade later. So, yeah, you grow up in this culture of conformity, especially so for women. How does one find their voice growing up in. In that sort of environment? I mean, what was the moment where you decided I needed to speak up?
- [38:25]
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Yeah. So the real speaking up and, and speaking out against these things, for me happened only after 9, 11, 2001. And I had graduated from university in the Netherlands. I had actually lived in the Netherlands for a little over 10 years. And I had. I had learned the vocabulary of speaking out. And I had developed some confidence that what I had to say as an individual might mattered. So that was the speaking out bit. But before the speaking out was the rebellion. It was me running away. It was my father deciding, this is the man you're going to marry. And after that decision, sending me off to join him in Canada. And me constantly thinking about, also, I'm going to live like my mother. I'm going to lead the life of my mother. And not just my mother, but all these other women who are. Whose suffering I saw, you know, up close and personal. And that, could there be a different way? Just pop that question popping into my head and me thinking, yes, I could, you know, I could run away. And I ran away. And that, I think was the fast was it's you don't speak up fast Fast you. You leave and you find a place of safety. And it's only after that experience and in the years that I was in the Netherlands, before I even spoke up or it occurred to me to speak up about anything, by the way, I thought my life in Holland was so idyllic, there was nothing to speak up about. I was a translator interpreter, so I was translating for women who have been commandeered by. By their men who still lived in these households where they had to conform and they were completely helpless. And, you know, they were subjected to honor violence. That is being told, cover yourself up. You can't do this. Being forced into marriage, being circumcised, as they call it. But it's really genital mutilation and all of that that made me think. It's, it's. This is injustice that's happening in the countries where these families fled to, from the repression and from the poverty and from the arbitrariness of violence in those places. And now here they are, they're in Holland, and they have all of this stuff, and they continue to oppress girls. And it's part of me that felt an obligation that I should say something to the Dutch and tell them this is how girls and women are treated. And at that time, Dutch society was very keen to encourage the assimilation of their Muslim minorities. And they found me highly assimilated. So they said, can you help us? And the first thing I said was, emancipate these girls and women, because if they are emancipated and they're free to choose who they want to marry and they're free to finish their education and free to become individuals, they'll be assimilated and they'll be just like everyone else. And I didn't realize that even that was controversial at that time. It just seemed like common sense.
- [41:48]
Nico Perino
Are you hopeful for the values of free and open inquiry and free speech and the broader Western values that you advocated for?
- [41:56]
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
I am. And really, it's because of many reasons, but the most important is this election. We've just had an election. Today is the 6th of November, 2024. America has spoken. And America has made me feel optimistic because this is a choice for the First Amendment. First and foremost, I think you should look for this little video that was running around last night on Twitter where, you know, the news media, they go and they say, this is the end of democracy. This is the end of democracy. So someone taped through AI the word bureaucracy to cover democracy. It's very funny. You should look for it and run it.
- [42:48]
Nico Perino
If the Democrats fail, it might be.
- [42:50]
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
The end of American bureaucracy.
- [42:52]
Nico Perino
Our bureaucracy really is in fundamental peril.
- [42:55]
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
The foundation of American bureaucracy under attack.
- [42:58]
Nico Perino
They want to destroy our bureaucracy. We are a bureaucracy in danger.
- [43:02]
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
We're watching an election where people are.
- [43:04]
Nico Perino
On the ballot openly advocating the end of bureaucracy. People are very creative. People are very creative.
- [43:11]
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Yeah, people are really creative. So I think what this election means is that the general public, made up of older people and younger people, people in rural areas and people in urban areas, blacks, Hispanic, Hispanics, whites, men, women, there's a huge majority that's formed a coalition to say we want to go back to common sense. We want to preserve the First Amendment, we want economic prosperity, we want these wars to end. And so in that sense, I'm highly, highly optimistic. We need to reclaim our institutions of meaning making, of education, of information and of culture. And I hope that now the real fight begins to reclaim those institutions.
- [43:59]
Nico Perino
Well, Ayaan, I appreciate everything that you've done to preserve the First Amendment and the broader principles of free speech and open inquiry. And thank you for coming on, so to speak.
- [44:10]
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Thank you, Nico. Thank you very much for having me and for doing this.
- [44:14]
Nico Perino
That was Ayaan Hirsi Ali and her new project is Courage Media, which you can learn more about by going to Courage. I am Nico Perino and this podcast is recorded and edited by a rotating roster of my FIRE colleagues including Aaron Reese and Chris Maltby. The podcast is co produced by my colleague Sam Lee. To learn more about so to Speak, you can subscribe to our YouTube channel or substack page, both of which feature video versions of this conversation. You can also follow us on X by searching for the handle Free Speech Talk and you can find us on Facebook. Feedback is if you have it can be sent to sotospeakatthefire.org again that is sotospeakatthefire.org and if you enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Reviews on those two platforms in particular help us attract new listeners to the show. And until next time, thanks again for listening.