Is not a euphemism. Ask not what your country can do for you,
ask what you can do for your country. Mister garbachof tear down this wall.
It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson again and Rob Long again. I'm
James Lylx. Today we're all going to talk to Ion here'ci ali, so
let's have ourselves a podcast. This is an attack on diversity. This is
an attack on multiculturalism and on many of the values that a lot of us
will dear. The fact that she's a black woman and the first person who
is a Black American to lead Harvard only added to their thirst to dethrone her.
America is a nation that can be defined in a single word. How's
the foot him? Excuse musical? Welcome everybody, It's the Ricochet Podcast number
six hundred and seventy three. I'm James Lylyx in Minneapolis, joined again finally
after this fortnight of their absence by Peter Robinson or Rob Long. Guys.
Welcome, Happy New Year, Happy New Year to night. I mean it's
a together Christmas week. You know, see, what are you gonna do?
Right? Yeah? Well, you know somebody showed up and did a
Ricochet podcast there for a couple of weeks, and I'll say that nice to
you. By the way, those are very good. I'm worried that those
are more popular. Well. It has encouraged me to bring back the solo
podcasts, previously known as The Ramble, but now I'm branding it as The
Diner, which has been my podcast name for many years, broadcasting live from
the Diner every week on Thursday. Probably released on Friday, Saturday, Sunday,
Monday, I don't know. Something like that was still working it out,
but another addition to the Ricochet Audio network. So did you guys leave?
Did you go away? Did you find yourself on some sunny shore or
did you just spend the holidays with your family? Of course, everybody's dying.
The one thing we all know about the beginning of January is everyone's really
eager to hear all the recaps of the holiday season. You no, it's
gone. We're all looking ahead. But I hope you had a good time.
So let's look ahead. Let us look ahead. Any resolutions another tiresome
topic for the year to come, Peter. I've grown to admit it.
I ground to admit it because it's the same resolution as always, except that
this time I'm putting money behind it. I's just spent one hundred bucks on
a smart scale and devoted an hour and a half to trying to make my
way through the absolutely mystifying. Excuse me, I'm totally recovered from a bad
cold, but my throat is lagging behind totally mystifying things. You have to
touch this button, do this, do that on the computer to sync it
up so that the weight automatically showed. Anyway, after all of that,
I have to lose weight this year. Okay, well, it's sort of
funny that you have to get a scale that sinks through your computer. Is
that necessary? Because why? Because your computer then talks to your phone and
tells you to put down the Hershey's chocolate barn because it costs one hundred bucks.
And I now have Rob understands this immediately. Not that, not that
Rob isn't already as felt as any man could be. But Rob is the
one who's famous for using the phrase skin in the game. And now I
have skin in the game of my own skin, so to speak. And
you'll because it costs one hundred bucks, right, okay, good? Well,
how are you going to achieve it. Now that you have the means
by which to measure it, how are you going to achieve this loss of
weight? You actually want me to go into this, I've actually I have
given it thought you. Intermittent fasting, Yes, I have doing that fasting.
I'm going to do that, and then I'm doing the mathetone method of
working out, which is working out according to your heart rate. And you
actually keep your heart rate almost frustratingly low, and only one day a week
do you permit your heart rate to go above a certain level. Apparently I
didn't know this science. Apparently, if your heart rate is a above a
certain level, it's burning all the glycogen or sugars in your body, and
it will make you ravenous afterwards. But if you keep your heart rate down
to a certain level, your body kicks into fat burning. And this is
a way of making sure that you're burning fat. It builds up some sort
of oxygen capacity in your lungs that I don't understand it, although I've read
it three times in a row already. And this will interest you, gentlemen,
because we are all of a certain age, it's a much say,
you are much less likely to overtrain. If you follow Maphatoon, you're just
not going to overdo it. Over mean, I'm never in that danger zone.
I let you know. I am never. No one ever said,
yeah, you know what, Rob, you gotta get to stop training.
You got you're going to hurt yourself. That never occurred, has ever occurred
in my life? Interesting, well, the way my life works. I
go to a Stanford gym and some twenty year old giant finishes working out with
his weights, and I go over and figure out it's just too much trouble
to change the weights right, and I try to pick them up and my
back goes out just like that. And the humiliating old man as I hobble
out of the gym and drag myself home. That has happened to me.
I'm surrounding I have three sons who are I try to keep up with them.
Terrible mistake. I'm surrounded by Stanford students trying to keep up with them.
Horrible mistake. So I get this idea of slow and steady old man,
just calm down, don't hurt yourself. Interesting well, as somebody who
did the weight loss gym thing last year, I have some advice we can
perhaps take that off the show. But I mean I go to the gym
every day, and my objective this year is to increase all of my weights
even more and more and more so that I can come in behind that twenty
five year old and sort of smile to myself, take the pin from the
weights and moved them down fifty pounds. Ah, take that. You have
never been overweight a day in your life, have you, James? That's
just not a problem for you. No, I was a fat kid.
I was a fat kid who got teased for it. I hated gym class
and all the rest of it, and the psychological trauma from that has driven
me for forty to fifty years now. So it's a good thing. I'd
like to go back and thank all of those bullies who made fun of me
in the in the locker room, because now you know, I've got my
final revenge. It's of course noticeable to nobody because it's not like I'm a
swimsuit model or anything. But yeah, so anyway, that is that.
So good luck, Good luck with that, Rob Luck. Are you similarly
looking forward to the new year with something new to do? You're going to
I assume that You're going to probably want to go back and run a computer
algorithm on every single script that you ever wrote to make sure that you didn't
lift from somebody else. No, I don't have any resolutions, James.
I feel that I'm I'm done. I'm perfect as you are. I'm in
I'm the thing that I'm going to be, and I'm not going to just
have to learn to convince everyone else of my own confidence in the fact that
I'm about as perfect as a person can be. Yeah, well, you'll
get no argument here. Yeah, you know, I know. I It
is funny though, the since you mentioned the plagiarism thing. You know,
Robin Williams used to go to comedy clubs a lot, and and then he
would just absorb the jokes. And then when he was in one of his
improvisational you know, the fugue states on the car Center or something, they
sometimes he would steal them and and people get really mad and and you know,
you don't. I mean, it's what you're allowed to do it.
I mean you're not allowed to do it's not cool to do it, but
I mean they can't you in jail. But Robin Williams was a stand up
guy. He said, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to do that.
Here's fifty thousand dollars. He was very successful at the time, so he
would you know, if if he stole a joke from you, he would
give you lots of money. And I don't think there's any comedian alive,
especially at that point, who was like working in the comedy clubs, at
the comedy stores, the improv in la who who begrudged Robin Williams the theft
because he eventually made good. But you know there are I mean, I've
been called up. I mean I have friends who are friends semi text or
something and said, did you see this? And they'll give me a little
clip of something, or they'll they'll point me to something or some movie or
some show like this person stole your line or your joke or your or your
character. I mean, that's happened in a couple of movies where it's like,
well wait a minute, I know that that that happens a lot,
right, So and you have your choice. You can either you know,
moan and complain about it, or you can, you know, move on.
I mean, it's it's show business, is what it is. Because
we don't have an elaborate system of citation and scholarly ethics to guide us in
show business? Doesn't the skill have rules of kind? Aren't Aren't there?
Some offered, Yeah, there's something, there's something. Obviously you can't lift
something directly, but you know, you you look at a scene, you're
like, I know you guys saw my thing, or you read my book
or come on now, I mean like there is more than a I can't
even tell you how many times that's happened. I actually had to go back
once and just to because I thought I had an insight uh into politics at
that someone else was claiming as their insight, and I was like, wow,
wait a minute, am I insane? I think that's mine? Wait
a minute? And I had to go back and google it and find it
and googling it was hard because it had been missed whatever I don't know,
and it's this is so long ago that the archives that had been sort of
like so, but I found it and I realized, oh, wait a
minute, no, I'm I'm right. I was. I was the first
with this one. Uh. And then I had a little private, satisfactory
moment. But but although occasionally I've been cited it's nice to be cited.
I was cited in a couple of books. It was almost like, so
it's kind of yeah, it's kind of like cool thing and excited. Well,
did you turn up on any of Claudine Gay's work by NHL? I
don't know. I don't. I haven't. I haven't gone through it.
I don't think so. I write mostly intentional comedy, and her work was
mostly unintentional comedy. I mean, that was the weird thing about Claudine Gay
stuff was that I actually decided just to read a little bit of it,
just so I knew what you know. I was not surprised at the subject.
Obviously, the subject was exactly what you'd expect Professor Claudie Gay to be
writing about. But I did try to read some of it, and it's
absolutely impenetrable. I mean, the idea that she stole those words without translating
them into English first is another thing you can say is wrong with academia,
right. It is impenetrable, and it doesn't have any meaning, and it
doesn't have any impact, and it doesn't move any needles anywhere. It's just
simply the academics talking amongst themselves about things who can do whose whose outcome is
predetermined? But she's fighting back, of course. In a New York Times
editorial that she that she wrote, she was called what just happened to Harvard
is bigger than me, because we all should be worried of the many lines
that you can pull this, she wrote, quote, this was merely a
single skirmish in a broader war to unravel public faith in pillars of American society.
Wow, well, you know, I think the auto unraveling has been
manifest for some time. She goes on. Campaigns of this kind often start
with a tax on education and expertise, because these are the tools that best
equipped communities to see through propaganda. Well, I'm not sure that. I'm
not sure that education or expertise is necessarily manifest in the works that she was
doing. I mean of a certain sense, yes, in the sense that
educate, that that that people at that level will write these these esoteric,
utiliated works that mean nothing and don't have any impact whatsoever, and that their
expertise is simultaneously sort of useless and not applicable to anything in particular except maybe
reading or judging one of these other papers. But no, nobody's attacking education
and expertise. What we are attacking and concerned about is what the educators are
teaching the kids and how they're Their claims of expertise actually are supposed to shield
them from criticism. Who are you to tell the you know, the elementary
school teachers what they can do, what they can do. They they got
they have a degree in education. Well, you know, I'm sorry.
The the the lack of faith in the credentialed class has been self inflicted,
not by some people who are you know, knuckle dragon yahoos or saying don't
trust these folks who are smart book learning, but because they seem disconnected from
society and they don't seem to be particularly smart to begin with, reciting an
endless series of cliches and and and tropes about which coincidentally all happen to be
from progressive modes of thought. So yeah, so like bears repeating that the
or noting that the the right, the conservatives didn't fire Claudie Gay, they
didn't have any power to do so that she was fired by the Harvard trustees.
So that Harvard leadership fired her. And at no point did anybody have
any any any and the last time this happened in an American university was at
Stanford, where the Stanford president was found to be plagiarizing in or academic ethical
violations of academic standards, and he was fired. I mean, the idea
that there's anything going on here. Look, if you if you've written eleven
papers, and you've and you've plagiarized fifty times, keep your head down when
they when the lady asked you, hey, what do you think about genocide?
Say I don't like it. That's what you have to do, right.
The alternate side of it is the the idea that, okay, well
now you know that I saw this yesterday, people come saying, good threatening,
We're going to go after right wing academics, right wing university presidents.
See what happens. Then it's like we have at it. I mean,
you can find that. Send me a postcard. It's Ben sass and and
uh and that's it. Larry Arn, that's it, you got, that's
it's all. You got it. Good luck getting those guys. Those guys
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Iron Heresy, Ali activist, author of Prey, Immigration, Islam,
and the Erosion of Women's Rights, and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution.
So happy to have you here today. Let's step back a little bit
and set the stage for some people who are coming to this, perhaps not
with the knowledge that we have. You emigrated to Europe a little over thirty
years ago. A lot has happened since nineteen ninety two. But for the
people who don't know your story, just remind us briefly why you left your
home and how you decided that the West was your destination because the West was
different, was special. Well, okay, thank you. That's a lot,
and I'll try and squeeze into the shots of time we have, so
the fast time I left my home I was a child under ten years of
age, maybe eight or nine years and I was born in Mogadishu, Somalia.
We left because our country was seized by a member of the military to
establish a dictatorship. So there you have us that phenomenon that was very common
in Africa at the time and in later decades, someone comes out of the
blue and says, am, your president and establishes a dictatorship. And then
my family went to Saudi Arabia, which was a theocracy. And for the
first time, I actually thought I was oppressed as a girl when I was
in Somali, until I went to Saudi Arabia and thought, oh no,
we're not oppressed. This is real oppression. Women were covered from head to
toe, separated from men. It was just something very very bizarre, even
for someone like me who grew up a Muslim. And I was fortunate enough
for my family to be departed from Saudi Arabia and we landed in Ethiopia.
Ethiopia was another dictatorship from by Mengistu Hailo Mariam. We were there for eighteen
months and my mother had had enough. She said because we were Somali and
Ethiopia were at war with one another, and my mom was extremely prejudiced against
the Ethiopian since she wasn't going to live in their country. So we had
to find a place to go, and my father found Kenya for us.
So I was about ten years old when we landed in Nairobi, Kenya.
It was a one party state. They held elections the same party one all
the time. I went to school in Kenya. That's where I learned English.
It was a former British colony, so the British had left a system
of schooling. And again I was fortunate enough for my father to send me
to school and argue with my mother that I should stay in school. It
was a poor country, but compared to the others, we had relatively a
little bit more freedom. My father left us in nineteen eighty one to go
back to Ethiopia. He was part of a movement that had a militia and
there the mission was to throw out the Somali dictator who had taken hold of
Somali in nineteen sixty nine. So I was there with my mother. I
know the experience of growing up with a single mother and with my brother and
my sister going to school in Nairobie. My father is gone and I go
my secondary school or what you call high school in America. I was fifteen,
sixteen seventeen, and I remember my classmates being removed from school and being
married off to men they had never met, so they never finished school.
Now you were still in a Muslim environment, is that right Kenya as I
recalls about half Christian and half Muslim. Yes, Kenya when we were there
was actually officially a Christian country. But now, as you say, maybe
it could be half half. But my mother ensured that my sister and I
went to the Muslim girls secondary schoo all right, which I started school there
in nineteen eighty four and eighty four eighty five. It was Muslim light,
but after eighty five it started to be Islamized. We had these Muslim Brotherhood
missions coming from Egypt and there was more missionary work coming from Iran. So
it was it went from being Muslim light to real Islamists outposts. But I
remember my classmates fifteen years old, fourteen years old, sixteen years old being
married off, and I understood that the reason why I wasn't married off was
because my father was gone, and my father was gone from our house until
nineteen ninety one is when he came back. A civil war had occurred in
Somali, and come from Somali, they came to Kenya. So that is
when my father got the opportunity to come home to us, even though he
was gone for a decade, and decided, I'm now the mass of this
household, and oh, my goodness, my daughter is you know, twenty
two and time to find a husband. And then I got married off,
and of course by then I had matured, you know, at the age
of twenty two, my twenty two. I was immature in ways that I
think Western gals are very mature, but I was mature in ways that Western
girls are not mature. I understood fully what the future held for me if
I went with this man that my father married me off too. And from
the time it happened until I was able to escape, I worked on trying
to find a window of opportunity that I could call out. I don't want
to jump the timeline a little bit, but and I don't expect you to
remember this, but you and I met now almost twenty years ago in an
event in Los Angeles, and it was a conversation about Islam, and it
was between you and Reza Aslam, who was a wonderful writer, a nice
guy, but had written a book in which he's sort of what he was
trying to do. He is a very academic attitude, and you were very
polite as he explained that no, no, no, you don't understand you
people here in the West. The Quran is a text, and a text
tests its own meaning, and it's on undermeaning and really we shouldn't be frightened
of the Koran. We shouldn't be frightened of Islam. It's really it's a
it's a text. It's a text. And you kind of looked at him
and and said, well, that could be that that is true, although
I I have bodyguards and they're not protecting me from words and always struck me.
Is like, that was incredibly brave that you because you were you were
young then I mean you're still and so I guess my question is twoful One
is how's that going? Because I know that you were under threat for a
long time, And then at a larger perspective, how is it all going?
In the what we thought then was going to be a cataclysmic struggle between
the forces of radical fundamentalists, sort of backward Islam and the twenty first century.
Where are we in that war? So in terms of you know,
the personal threats, I I'm of the mindset these people don't forget, they
don't forgive. What happened to Solomon tush D He lets his gout down and
in August of twenty two he was he was attached. Yeah, fortunate that
he survived. So I never let my guard down. The bodyguards are still
there, the framework of freedom constraining security is still there, right. But
the wider question, the confrontation between radical Islam on the one hand and the
West, where is that it's ongoing. I see scenarios where maybe there is
a lights at the end of the tunnel. I thought that moment when the
Abraham Accords were reached, when some of the you know, the important Arab
countries like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the UAE were willing to recognize Israel,
to modernize, to move on, to diversify their economies from oil to and
join the wider economy, free their women. I thought, well, there
is maybe a coming together. It's going to take a long long time,
but eventually I could see a scenario where the West and these Arab leaders could
work together to fight against the radical is elements that they had spawned and funded
in the past. But now I see a setback which I think the seventh
of October Hamas attacks on Israel and absolutely gruesome and heinous attacks on women and
children and babies and gang grapes and branning of people that I think has taken
us back to the reality of the face of the evil we are fighting what
radical Islamism is, and for now it looks like those that process of coming
together has paused. Question is is it a pause or is it permanent?
Is there any are you? Are you maybe I'm just a Polian? Here
are you hope? Does this give you any hope at all? The idea
that this the most I mean, the most deadly and the most shocking attack
on Israel before this, before our coverer seventh led to a regional war and
this is not. To date, it has not. It does look like
as fragile as the past twenty years have been, thirty years have been in
larger Middle East peace it's holding it is fair or not? I just want
to do one step back and think, you know, in terms of,
you know, the confrontation between radical Islamism in the West. I think radical
Islam as a force is a force to be reckoned with and should not be
underestimated. Ever, But the problem we are seeing now is that within the
West, our value system, our foundational principles, these things are being undermined
from within, and that makes it easy for forces like radical Islam and other
external enemies. I'm thinking of China, I'm thinking of putting. It makes
it easy to penetrate the West, to divide and weaken us. And so
in that sense, I'm absolutely more worried about what we are doing to ourselves
to weaken our own structures and our own power than what an external enemy might
to do to us. They'll take advantage of that, they'll exploit that.
But right now I think we're our own worst enemy. How are we doing
that? What? What? What? What's the worst thing we're doing to
ourselves right now? We have abandoned the value system that and this Judeo Christian
principles that led to these fine institutions that are envied and were envied by the
outside. The concept of democracy, the concept of free speech, freedom of
religion, the separation of religion, from politics, the you know, due
process, fairness, equality, all of which all of which are incompatible with
identity politics exactly. And so we've invented identity politics. We have we have
learned, we have let it run amock in our vest and now in our
schools and everywhere else. And we're now dealing with a generation, a young
generation that has been somewhat cut off from these grounding principles and their institutions.
They have been made to believe that America and the rest of the worst is
all about exploitation, and our history is just really only bad slavery, segregation,
exploitation, colonialism. This is what they are caught in the finest institutions
at Harvard, at Stanford, at Yale, everywhere else, if come to
believe this about themselves. And there's this sense, I think that they don't
think that there is anything to fight for, and there's this stance of you
know, if you look at diversity, equity and inclusion, this I call
it a menace, but it is a program that is supposed to advance a
bureaucracy to take root within all of our institutions, to bring down the standards
of merriage, to basically to implement this idea that we have to tear everything
down and replace it, and what we are replacing it with just terrible ion.
Peter here, forgive me, my voice is very rough. I'm getting
over a cold. I actually feel fine, but my voice doesn't know it
yet. You put up a post a few weeks ago that got the attention
of the whole world, and you said that you have become a Christian.
Now I know that you're writing a book on this subject, and I can't
wait for the book because I would like a thorough explanation. And I also
know that it can be tricky to talk about something when at the same time
you're writing about it. So if I ask a question that you just don't
want to deal with right now because you're going to be writing about it later
this evening, go ahead and say so. But here's the way. Here's
the way. I think Christopher Hitchins, our old friend, Christopher Hitchins,
would have looked at your progress, and he would have seen it as progress.
You were raised in the Muslim world, you withdrew from it, you
escaped it, you land in Europe, and of course become you become an
atheist because you see that Europe itself has been through something like what you hope
the Muslim world will eventually go through. That is, it has emerged from
ancient superstitions to embrace a purely rational view of the world, embracing the scientific
method. We only permit ourselves to believe in what we can demonstrate to be
true by all kinds of rigorous analysis. And this is the way the West
itself is going. Christopher Hitchens, of course, viewed it as a kind
of triumph of the human spirit and the human intellect. And here goes Ion
and says, no, Christopher, I have decided to become a Christian.
Now, why are you not engaging in a kind of staggeringly retrograde action here?
Why does that strike you as progress of any kind instead of a rejection
of the Enlightenment? Because I'm working on a book and it's a long answer
to the question that you've just posed, where there's my personal evolution from being
a Muslim, and at one point I was a radical Islamist, and then
coming to Holland and then gradually adopting the lifestyle at first of you know,
of my surroundings, and then after the eleventh of September two thousand and one,
having to be confronted with am I really a Muslim? Ifore, I'm
so critical of what those who are who say they are true to the faith
in its most peole form. If I oppose that, how could I possibly
be a Muslim? And so I left Islam. And I didn't leave Islam
for another religion. I left Islam for atheism, And you're absolutely right.
Back then was it's a burden, a load that has lifted off my shoulders
that I don't have to deal with superstition and to enter the realm of enlightenment
in reason, I'm going to be surrounded with just people. Anybody who lives
religion almost immediately becomes rational and is enlightened. And of course we've seen people
who are older than me, more but sure than I am, who have
lived, you know, even as far back as the nineteenth century, eighteenth
century, nineteenth century understood that's not necessarily the case. And I think we're
now living through a period where people have left religion, and when they leave
religion, they find themselves in this void, and the void is filled by
different kinds of superstition, and some of them very very superficial, and so
I've come to think, even rethink the sources of the Enlightenment, and I'm
today more persuaded that the Enlightenment was really still on its judaeo Christian premises.
Then you know something that is completely separate and opposed to Christianity. I don't
believe that anymore. But again, like I said, I'm details to follow,
right, details to follow. And one thing I'd like to say.
It's hard to speak for the dead, but I really think that if Christopher
Hutchins had lived today and he was able to see what you and I see,
I think he might have come to a different conclusion. I think he
might have reflected on his writings, and at least I know he was intellectually
honest enough to as he was, Yeah that he probably he may have been
wrong about something. If he'd converted and gone into the pastorship, he would
have packed the pews every Sunday. I would go to hear Christian religions.
Europe has left religion behind and has filled the void with notions of transnational equity
and global warming and the rest of it. We see where that's heading for
them. America less so, but we are becoming less religious all of those
things that you mentioned that characterized the West as having derived from Judeo Christian ethics.
Do you think it's possible for those things to maintain without a Christian community
that characterizes the general population of the United States? In other words, can
everybody be sort of just diagnostic and maybe only go to church once or twice
a year and we can still have the same faith and power of these institutions
or is Do you believe that there's a necessary connection between a religious population and
those ideas that permitted us to flower and prosper I think that there is a
clear connection between again Judeo Christian with the emphasis on that, on those values,
and the outcome of that, which is the civilization that we have Western
civilization. The father we move away from these foundations, the more we weaken
ourselves and then become something else. I'd like to point out, if you
look at right now, almost all conversations into twenty twenty three twenty twenty four
are about the mental health crisis underway. And some people say, oh,
there was always a mental health crisis, but because of social media and internet,
we know more about it. I disagree with that. I think it's
different. And why is it different? Because I am looking at communities that
are still charged, going and faith based, and those communities are functioning very
well. And mental health, especially among gods, is very very law compared
to those that have drifted off and cut everything off. And this is this
is some of the questions that our organizations Standford, Harvard, m I T.
You know, all of these social science departments in these schools should be
asking and answering these questions. But they're not asking these questions and not answering
it again because of the issue we talked about. But this are some of
the things that I'm seeing, and these are very very, very important observations.
So you went from Somalia to Saudi Arabia and then you discovered what ack,
my good lord, I didn't realize I had it so well. Isn't
that I mean? Is there is there a way of describing this is my
these are my priors, is a way of describing the way things are now.
It always seems to me that, I mean, the word decadent isn't
quite right, but it's the there's something about the West. We're so rich
an astonishing amount of I mean from from reagan s second year, third year
eighty three, eighty four to today. That's forty years. Astonishing amount of
wealth in the world. I mean, good for the world in the West,
in the West, but I mean even even the emerging way. I
mean, if you're you know, more people out of poverty in India,
more people out of poverty in China. Have we lost our problems today that
we just forgot how first of all, how good we have it, how
fragile that is, and that we still have to work at it. I
think we've reached that generation. If you think of a nation state the way
you would think of an organized I love to make this comparison of you know,
these family businesses that were built, you know, the pioneers, they
were very poorly built it out nothing, and then two or three generations follow
that expand and create this enormous wealth. But sooner or later you get to
a generation that just inherits it and has nothing to do for it with it,
and just spend and wonders. And I think that we have reached in
the West that place where we've inherited all these amazing institutions and we're spending it.
And when I came to the Netherlands in nineteen ninety two. I think
there was still as sense that we had to do something to keep it going.
But over time I think we've lost it, and this has become clearer
to me ever since I came to America. I came to America. I
moved to American in two thousand and six and started work for the American Enterprise
Institute, and my colleagues in Washington, d C. When we talked about
the concept of multiculturalism, moral relativism, the sorts of decadence that was ongoing
in Europe, my American colleagues would say, that's not going to happen in
America. We have faith, we are a much younger country. We as
you know the remaining here Germany. We are constantly aware of these external enemies
that want us down. So Americans in general, compared to Europeans, are
way more patriotically were comparing Europe to an open air museum. And so it's
hard now nearly twenty years on, to look at my American colleagues in the
face and say, so, what do you think, are we really that
much better than Europe? Is that I'm trying to maneuver this conversation. So
you say something optimistic. That's how That's how I roll here, you know
Churchill. Churchill said that America always does the right thing after exhausting all the
other things. Right, I always chooses the right option after exhausting all the
others. Are there any green shoots of hope here? I mean I see
some in American culture. I see some in European culture actually, but I
see a lot of obviously a lot of challenges, but something there's something refreshing
about having the challenges out in the open. In just my own personal experience,
I remember going to Silicon Valley in the early two thousands or early part
of this of the century, and it was universally thought that all of this
technology was going to make the world great. It's just how could it not
be? How could this interconnected Facebook not make everybody happy and free and the
flourishing of ideas. And we look back on that now, and these are
very smart people and just think, oh, I can't believe you believe that
nonsense? Of course not. Are we waking up now? Are we still
sleep? I guess my quick question. I think we are waking up,
and I think I am optimistic. I mean, it's our job at the
HOOVA Institution to talk about and reflect and meditate on what's wrong and figure out
ways of making propositions for change. But I am optimistic and that's also why
I do what I do. Number One, I don't think that technology,
generally speaking, was net negative. I think it's net positive. And remember
technology, like old tools, it's just a tool. It is what you
use it for. So I think technology has given us a great deal of
abundance. And you just talked about how a lot of people were lifted out
of poverty and technology contributed a great deal to that in many ways, democratization
of wealth, still knowing full well that the gap between the haves and the
have nots is still quite wide, too wide, in my view, technology,
you know, net effect is good. What makes me optimistic, especially
in America, maybe to build on the Church quote, is that for a
while we experimented with terrible ideas. We let these things get out of control.
But now I think there is an awakening. Look at what's going on
after that congressional hearing with the three universitys and I think what that is just
a moment like that, it's brought into the open my husband, Neil,
and I and a lot of people at Hoover and other places. We were
trying to sound the alarm about the things that were going on inside academia,
inside universities that had then also spread K to twelve. And there were moments
when I thought, nobody is going to hear. We just have to give
up. And then a moment comes like that, that congressional hearing, that
confrontation, and the presidents of the three leading university haven't give an answer,
and that has then put us in this place in America where everywhere you go,
every boardroom, every classroom, every birthday party I go to, everyone
is talking about what is wrong, how divis a hurt are wide? What
are we going to do about it? And I think the next bit is,
you know, stay awake, Let's stay awake, and let's stay focused.
Ion. I have a closing question for you, and it concerns a
very old friend of mine who happens to be listening right now, and his
name is Rob Long. And Rob has decided, I don't think I'm breaking
any confidence here. I think it's at least semi public. Rob has decided
that he may very well in the next year or two attend Divinity School.
Now, as he first began talking about this, it has had the feel
to me as a kind of ornament on his career, an interesting thing to
do with this dornumental life. But in more recent conversations it seems to me
that he's actually becoming quite serious about it. I would like to ask Ayan
here's cli to give advice to Rob Long and to tell him what are the
questions to which he should he must find answers in Divinity School? What qu
questions should he ask? Oh, my goodness, you're putting me on the
spot. When I left Islam, and the question for me was is there
a God? Or is there no God? And now that I've evolved,
I think that's actually the wrong question. And the right question now is how
do we make amends to God who has given us all these gifts? You
know? How do we find our way back and anchor? And he is
I think where it starts to get tricky. There are all kinds of people
and groups of people who make claims to divinity and the divine and use that
as a tool for oppression and for doing really bad things. And how do
we walk this walk, this tightrope of on the one hand, finding God,
the real God, having understanding him and his promise, and at the
same time avoiding these pitfalls. I'm not sure I've given you the right question.
I difinity to ask. But oh no, I think that you are
busy. Let me think more about it. Well, I think that's a
good question. I mean, not that I would want to paraphrase that,
but I you know, how to find your way back? Yeah, not
to back where you came from, obviously, because you don't need we don't
want god to go back. But how do you find your way back to
the to what home? Meant? Yeah, in the larger sense without you're
regressing and turning back the clock, but saving the you know, keeping the
tablets. I guess it's the one of the phrases people use. I mean,
that's a big that's the question. That's definitely a political question people have,
right, I mean, you know the reason you don't without abandoning reason,
but also acknowledging the spiritual hunger and the spiritual need and the fact that
you can be spiritual and religious but not irrational. Sounds good to me.
It's a very It's a good question for the eve of Epiphany, that's for
sure. The good news is we don't have to invent the wheel ourselves.
That is good. I would know how to do it. That's pretty true.
That is very true. Yes, well, you know, Rob,
you if you do go to divinity school and you get a degree out of
this, this will mean you have expertise. So what you say then about
the existence of God and you know the elements of such, well, well
we'll have more authority than than anyone else. So I will come to you
with some of the searching questions that I have after you've completed this. Since
you have that, I am, of course kidding, but no, I
mean, we'll have talks about it. But you know you're not going to
be able to pull out the degree. Well you know I went to I
say unto you fairly, I say unto you right, Rob Longer James is
greater than that which can be conceived. Mizzoli, thank you so much for
joining us today. We would like to talk to you again when your book
comes out, which will be a fascinating account, and and we thank you
for the time that you've spent with us today and for all the contributions that
you've made thanks and hope to speak to you again. Thank you, thank
you very much, and happy New Year. I am Happy New Year,
Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, our best to your boys, including Neil.
Thank you, thank you very much. Bye bye. That is going
to be a great book, I got to say, And well, why
don't you tell people what it's about, because we didn't really talk about it,
not because well we just didn't because it wasn't the subject of the interview.
But it is about well, it's about her conversion to Christianity, so
it's I think it's really a sort of larger story, but I think it
begins. I mean, she had a sort of a political consciousness journey,
which she's talked about and written about it, and I think this is more
of a spiritual consciousness journey, which I think is going to be fantastic.
She's a really really brilliant, thoughtful thinker. And it was I know I
started I mentioned this anecdote, but it was one of those things you rarely
see actually take place in real life in front of you, which is a
person quietly and utterly without rancor demolishing someone else's argument, someone else's long verbal
verboth complicated sophisticated, intellectual argument was utterly demolished in about eleven words, and
the silence that overcame a very loud group of arrogant, mostly liberal, mostly
progressive Hollywood insiders was I could still hear it. I could still hear that
silence. It was silence born of a epiphany, or silence born of seething
rage that they actually couldn't construct their proper comeback that they had been I think
it's shown something they didn't want to believe, that they couldn't believe that something
like this was coming from somebody whose presence on the intersexual pyramid would determine otherwise,
I know, I think yes. I don't know if it's raged so
much as I think sometimes when you present an argument that is so inarguable to
people, but it's foundationally revolutionary for that meaning that if they accepted it,
they a lot of other things that have to change. Their response is either
to scream and shout and plug their ears and sing. Right, we see
people do that on the left end the right, or to disappear it,
and I think that's mostly what the that's kind of the technique of the left
because they have they have the ability and the levers to do that to just
to make it go away, and so you go, right, So what
she was what she was saying in that argument, what you're saying is that
no, actually it is dangerous. It isn't something that we can iradical Islam,
and in the Islamisist movement, isn't something that we can just kind of
like negotiate away or redefine in some way that makes it makes it sound pretty.
We can't put lipstick on it. It's dangerous and it's going to kill
us. And as my evidence is, they're trying to kill me right now,
right, And that that was that that kind of quiet moral voice was
really important. I mean, and I don't know if I don't think anyone
left the drove home in their BMW's had thought, well, you know,
I got to I got to rethink my my belief in the basic multiculturalism and
my anger at the whatever, you know, the the Islamophobia that swept the
nation, which didn't really happen after nine to eleven. They didn't, They
just they just didn't have anything to say. I don't know that that's my
memory of it, and that's why I think people like her. But so
so powerful because but eventually, eventually, right, right, but eventually they
replaced this with a certainty that there are Christian nationalists out there, hundreds of
thousands of them who are training in their would backwards cabins, who pose most
more of a threat than anything else, and that will enable them to go
on with the rest of the progressive mindset, which says that you know,
Hamas what you gotta say. You got to hand it to him. You
know, that was pretty effective, and I didn't do any of the bad
things these Israelias are saying, and they were living in an open air prison
and now they're being genocided, and ergo, it's oddtcetera, etcetera, because
that's just plainly what the whole power dynamic over there says, right we all
they have to do is look at a presser and who's the oppressed and they
got to figure it out. I mean, it's that curious mixture of intelligence
and yet astonishing stupidity that they've they've they've just offshore. They're thinking about so
many things to an ideology that explains every of course, you know, just
not exactly newer novel, but it's been the case for hundreds of years when
we do it on our side too. But it's just the way that anti
Semitism, prohomous profile Palestinian pro narratives have flourished, especially amongst the youth,
who you would think I dot to know better. Why would I say this
something that stupid? Is that? Well, Peter, we got a couple
of minutes here before we go anything to add do? We head out,
and again, for those who remember the top of the show, we're really
rooting for you to get this scale working. I think it is working.
It's just that I kept standing getting on it and getting off and getting on.
I felt like the joke about oh no, I'm wandering into territory here.
The definition of a certain kind of person, a certain gender is that
that is the kind of person who keeps asking a question until you give her
the answer she wants. And I kept getting on the scale, wanting to
see numbers that were lower than it insisted on giving me. I'm sure it's
working, it'll work fine. Just remember cut out all carbs and eliminate all
processed sugar from your diet. Move around a little bit more and it'll fall
off. Have eggs and sausage for breakfast, have a big thick steak,
not many potatoes, but skip the French fry. Just carbs, forget bread,
forget cereal, all that stuff, no gone, It's off the table.
And then I eventually to the quick mass. I know, I know,
but eventually we'll come back to it. And one morning you will have
yourself in English muff that will be covered with cream, cheese and jam,
and it will it will be like a combination of heroin and and bourbon and
every great and toxic dam hero that's like, you know, not exactly speaking
from experience here, but all I know is when I finally love myself some
of these things after losing the amount of weight that I wanted, it was.
It was great, and you can go back to them. You just
can't sort of live on bread like we used to before. Staff a life
and all that. I know, But there you go, you know,
And I don't want to turn this, twist this into a right wing argument,
you know, another right wing talking point. But this is not new,
the idea that you should cut down on the carbs and starch in order
to lose weight. I start, I make myself a little vulnerable. I
tell them truth, what's happening. I'm telling you you jumped down eleven or
nineteen oh nine or something. The US Navy, like after the Spanish American
War, when American warships are going to south the Pacivic and they issued these
dietary guidelines for US Navy personnel. This is in the beginning of the twentieth
century, and they said, avoid all that starchs, don't eat that TOI,
don't eat that tire tarot route. These people eat a lot of stars.
Don't do it. You'll get fat, stick to meat and fish yep.
And the US government then decided no, no, no, no,
no, no, well, credit, We'll create a food pyramid. We
know what you should be eating, and you should eating more bread and pasta
and not as much meat. And everybody just got fat. That's what happened.
And our generation was raised on that food pyramid. And it was a
lie or was yes, it was it was fakes. I was, you
know, one of the one of the main you know, I know you
run well, it was one of the uh you know we're doing we're trying
to do this long form podcasts. And one of the ones I had been
brew and kick around. I haven't called Peter this is my you know,
co founder director of this. I should probably be I shouldn't be pitching you
podcast ideas right here, right now. But one of the things that I
had dinner with an old friend of mine was a kind of a nerd genius.
Uh. And he and his family, his dad and his partner and
business partner have had family business for a long time, which is they're nuclear
scientists. They're nuclear physicists. They make measurement equipment and they have a lab
and he does work. And he remembers as a young man the cops coming
to his door, knocking on there and saying, we need you. It
was an emergency in New York State, three Mile Island, and they went
to three Mile Island, and he says, do you understand what happened at
three Mile Islands? Yeah? I think it was like the core or something
and there's leak and the blah blah blah. Because nothing happened a three Mile
Island nothing. We went, we tested it. It was fine. There
was no leak, there was no discharge, there was no radioactivity. It
was fine. But it has been twisted and turned into the symbol of the
disaster of nuclear power that has led us directly to our absolute energy dependence for
the next thirty years. And you know, you can make you could draw
a direct line between that and the economic necessity of our looking the other way,
as certain kingdoms in Middle East who supply US with oil, support radical
Wahabi, you know, terrorism. It was a lot. We didn't trust
the science. There was no trusting the science. Even today, if you
look over to the New York Times, they're not going to say, by
the way, three my island, nothing happened. I don't know. So
the podcast word he was trusting the science. And now I thought of it.
I just thought of this new one. I need eight episodes or so.
The food Pyramid anyway, rant over, that's all ran. That's absolutely
fascinating. Oh no, no, it's it's believe me. Jane Fonda is
responsible for more of the problems of Western society than anybody else. You know,
But that stupid movie that she made with Michael Douglas as a cameraman saying
yes when I think it was Jack Lemon who said there was a conspiracy,
or maybe it was Wilfred Brimley. I don't know. All I know is
that post Watergate conspiracy. Science, technology, fear. All of those things
combined to make people all shuddery about it. Then, of course you had
the no Nukes concerts of the eighties and the rest of it, because nuclear
warheads and nuclear power somehow were lumped all in the same basket as one of
the things Ronald even wanted to use to destroy the world. The idiocy,
just the monumental idiocy that I've lived through in my life and probably assisted at
some point or the other. But I do know that I'm late, and
we got to go. Gentlemen. It's been fun. We'll see every one
in the comments. Not at Ricochet five point oh. That's coming and it's
going to be great. But we'll see you in the comments at Ricochet four
point oh, gentlemen next week. Next week Tapping New Year Boys, Tappy
New Year.