Ep 118 | Fake Feminists Ignore Islam's Jihad Against Women | Ayaan Hirsi Ali | The Glenn Beck Podcast

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It isn't very often I can say to you,

I am going to sit down and talk with

one of my heroes,

one of the world's heroes, somebody who I think is

should be listened to more.

I'm excited for you to take this journey with me.

Everybody, everybody goes through hardship in life.

Everybody.

Some suffer more than others, and

some suffer unimaginable pain, but it's what you do with that

that makes all the difference.

Today's guest fits into the last category of unbelievable hardship and pain.

Her life has been marked with pain that you and I can't understand.

forced genital mutilation when she was five years old.

She was promised to be a bride.

She escaped from her family.

I mean,

her story is amazing.

But what she did with all of this

is remarkable.

She has channeled it into political, social, cultural, and academic change.

She committed the sin of criticizing Islam and defending women's rights and exposing the excesses of mass migration over in Europe when she was a minister of parliament.

She was a refugee who got off an airplane, changed her clothes, and didn't take the next flight where she was going to be married off to some man she didn't know.

And then she found herself studying, learning the language, and becoming a member of parliament.

It doesn't matter.

that she has direct experience with Islam.

It doesn't matter that she was born in Somalia, grew up in Saudi Arabia.

It doesn't seem to matter that she has first-hand experience and she's a refugee herself who believes in taking in refugees.

Doesn't matter that

she's experienced horrific sexual violence as a woman.

Doesn't matter that she was a member of Dutch parliament.

She's,

I don't know, an infidel.

a heretic, an enemy of Islam, an enemy of freedom, an enemy of mankind, an enemy of peace, love, joy, little puppy dogs, and butterflies.

According to the left and its powerful institutions, she's a bigot, which is strange because she's literally a woman who has won a slew of prizes by liberal groups, including the Tolerance Prize and the Freedom Prize.

Well, she spent some time writing a new book called Pray, not with an A, with an E, P-R-E-Y,

Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women's Rights.

It's a very timely book right now.

It reveals the threat that Islam poses to women's rights and liberal democracy.

And I think we have to start with a little bit of what's going on in Afghanistan.

Today, I am thrilled to say our guest, Ayan Hersiali.

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Ian, I don't know if

you know this, but you are one of my heroes.

You are

one of the most remarkable women living today

for

your bravery.

I mean,

I remember you when I first interviewed you about 2006.

I was at CNN, and I think you may have just been visiting America at the time.

Do I have that right?

I think you have that right, yes.

I think it was right about that time, and you are still with CNN.

Yeah.

And Glenn, by the way, the admiration is mutual.

Thank you very much for having me.

Oh my gosh, you bet.

It is

an interesting time for you to be publishing this book called Pray.

And that's not with an A, that's with an E.

And I want to start instead of in Afghanistan,

I want to start with something because we're right now engaged in

trying to save people in Afghanistan, women and children and Christians and homosexuals and everyone.

And we can't seem to get anybody from the National Organization of Women, from GLAAD, or anything.

They will talk about birthday cakes and wedding cakes all day long.

But when it comes to actual life and death, they don't seem to care.

It is unfortunate because I think some of these organizations of civil activism

have succumbed to identity politics.

If GLAAD understands

what they see as the threat to homosexual life, to the LGBT community, then they will tackle that.

But tackling homophobia homophobia that is practiced and enshrined in law sharia law in islam they won't touch that but uh so but i don't understand i really and this is an honest question i really don't understand i can't assign anything but ill feelings to this i've met with glad

in New York about five years ago when they were throwing homosexuals off the rooftops in Iran.

And I said, look, we have so many things we disagree with, but we have got to set an example that people who disagree with each other can stand together on basic life and death issues.

And yet I'm called a bigot, they're the hero, and they didn't do anything about it, nor would they stand with anyone to do anything about it.

And I think that's how identity politics poisons everything.

You can no longer in this country, and it's not not everyone, it's just within those civil rights organizations, corporations, our news media, our politics.

The people in these leadership positions are so divided on everything that they can't agree on minimal morale, life and death, as you say.

And if you are Glenn Beck, you are seen to be right-wing, you are labeled extreme right-wing, you are labeled white supremacist.

And now that you've been put in this corner, it doesn't matter if you come out and say, I'm actually doing what you guys say you stand for, trying to rescue women, trying to rescue homosexuals, trying to show what it is to be a true American.

That when

the call of help comes and the call of need comes, we respond and we should put our divisions aside.

That's not a part of the identity politics narrative.

You never put those divisions aside.

That's why it's so poisonous.

You know, I feel bad for the soldiers over in Afghanistan because they feel like,

you know, was this for nothing?

And

I've thought about this a lot, and I don't think it was for nothing, just for this fact.

For 20 years, girls who now are 20 grew up in a time where they saw what life was supposed to be like and the potential and all of that.

Can you put yourself and take Americans who have never experienced something like this?

Is it possible for you to put yourself in the role of one, a girl that would be living in Afghanistan and what life was like in the last 20 years and what they're now facing, what she might be thinking, and what's coming her way?

Obviously, I don't come from Afghanistan.

I have not been to Afghanistan, but I do come from a culture with a a

similar moral framework.

And first of all, I have to contend with the fact that in November, sorry, in September 11 of 2001, America was attacked from Afghanistan.

And in response, if I was a young woman living in the country from which the attack came,

I would fear and dread that we would be completely destroyed.

That's not how America responded.

America obviously went after those who plotted the terrorist attacks, but then also came with an agenda of what is it that we can do for the people of Afghanistan?

What is it that we can do for the women of Afghanistan?

And then that agenda, with a great deal of difficulty and adversity and obstacles, they tried to implement that administration after administration.

And that, I think, is the story of America.

So, for a young woman, whether she lives in Afghanistan or elsewhere, she is going to see this

truly as it is.

And if you're a young woman who benefited from American presence, you got the opportunity to go to school, you got the opportunity to find a job, you got the opportunity to think of yourself as a human being

with individual agency.

That is the idea that America was trying to promote.

Did it completely succeed?

No.

But was life in Afghanistan better for women in 2021 before this crazy withdrawal than

before 9-11, 2001,

I would tell you, every Afghan woman who has benefited will say it was much better with the Americans.

There are Afghan girls who are studying technology, there are Afghan women who have become doctors, and teachers, and politicians, and women who have in Afghanistan and outside of Afghanistan who identify as Afghans

with the help of the American government, American businesses, American

citizens who have realized a life, you know, with that window of hope that they could actually be something and get to something and see their society form.

And then, yeah, at a very embryonic stage,

an administration came along, very impatient and very inept, and decided to withdraw in this fashion.

And that's horrifying because I don't know how to explain that.

Is there

when

you grew up in that situation and

you were mutilated when you were five, you were promised to be a bride to somebody, and that was the culture.

Is there a difference between knowing internally, I don't want that, that doesn't feel right to me, and

knowing

because you've grown up in that society and then having it taken away and forced into you?

Is there a difference between

those two situations?

Do you understand what I'm saying?

I understand exactly what you're saying.

When you're in that situation, you're born into it, it's the culture, it's the tradition, it's the religion, and it's enforced by everyone around you, or almost everyone around you.

You know that there is something different.

You know that you don't want this constant subjugation and humiliation, but you feel powerless.

And then, as in the case of Afghanistan, when a superpower comes along and promises something different, then you have that

little flame of hope and you feel empowered, and then you do your thing.

Now, there are always women and other victims within the old situation, or the situation that's enforcing the subjugation of women, girls, children, homosexuals, Christians, you name it.

There are always people who think, well,

this is

the devil we know, and we've learned how to cope, and we don't want things to change, who are just terrified of change.

And I think

up to a certain degree, today in Afghanistan, those people will say, the devil of the Taliban, the one that we know, that has prevailed, I told you so.

Americans weren't going to stay.

That promise and all that.

It was all fake.

So all the narratives that you've ever had of America, that's now,

you know, I don't know how to push back against that, but that's right now what's being peddled and not just in Afghanistan.

That is so frightening.

I don't understand

religion that can

promise you a child bride,

you know, basically pedophilia.

You know, you even have the

Afghani Olympic soccer team has been promised.

Each one of those girls has been promised to one of the leaders of

the Taliban.

I don't understand the thinking.

Is it just man covering and going,

no, God tells me I can do this, but

they know it's wrong, but we can do it.

Or do they actually believe God says, oh no, I can rape this girl all I want and it's fine?

I think

it's very difficult to get into people's minds and speculate.

But knowing the religion, because I grew up within that religion, there is no concept of a childhood beyond menstruation.

If as soon as a girl menstruates, she's declared a woman.

As soon as a boy transitions into puberty, he's declared a man.

And then these roles

are pretty much regulated through the creed of Sharia.

And yes, these people actually believe and practice that the right thing to do is

and they see it as God's will that

the way

to sustain

an orderly and righteous society is to marry the girls off as quickly as possible so that they don't get a chance to commit

the sins of fornication and adultery, and

those things are seen as precursors to the breakdown of society.

And that's the thinking behind the pedophilia that is enshrined in law.

So, in your book,

I love the fact that it is riddled with facts.

I mean, it is stats and facts all the way through it.

It's clearly not opinion, and yet you are labeled a bigot.

And

someplace I have one of the New York Times reviews.

Here it is.

It's Hersey Alley, though,

who exactly does this.

She finds stories of individual Muslim immigrants who commit heinous crimes, and by suggesting those stories are broadly representative, uses them to justify curtailing the opportunities afforded to the whole group.

This is not, as she suggests, a feminism of standing up for the rights of women.

It is feminism of reaction and one that would undermine the very liberal values Hersi Alley begs feminists to protect.

How do you respond to that?

I think we've gotten to a point, you know, 2006 when you and I met, it was, okay, I'm going to respond by trying to show the empirics, the data, the facts.

You know, I think her name is Filipovich or something like that.

I would say, Ms.

Filipovich, don't look away from this.

This is really important.

Now it's, you know,

you think someone is so steeped in that ideology of identity politics and far-left notions of social justice that you simply don't respond.

And that is in fact not good for our society because then we're no longer talking to each other, we're no longer trying to show one another

what our perspectives are like and we're watching the same reality unfold.

People, young men, this is the story of the book, are coming from Muslim-majority countries where their relationship and their attitude towards women is radically different from what you find in Europe.

That's causing problems for women in Europe.

Immigrant women, working class women, all women.

That's the new reality.

Let's talk about it.

But then you get something like this that is dismissive, it's insulting, it's intended to confirm and affirm her own ideological narrative that she is

committed to.

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So let's get into Prey here and let's look at what's happened to Europe.

Describe what's happening there and what life is like.

So life in Europe, I mean, I've only just come from Europe.

It's still, these are still wealthy, welfare nations.

Their governments are still intact.

They are incredibly stable.

But they do face a challenge of what just everything I describe now, the stability, the governments that are intact, the welfare states, these are what they call pull factors.

There are millions and millions of people in the world who don't have those things and who want to come to Europe to take a part of that.

And yes, a great deal of it is opportunity and it is opportunity for a lot of the people who come.

But there's a subset of people who do come from these broken-down countries, many of them men,

who do have attitudes to women that are very different from those in Europe and then who engage in violent and demeaning behavior towards women.

And it's now becoming a big problem.

Countries like Austria, Denmark, Sweden, France, Great Britain, they're faced with this conundrum.

But we are also living in this philosophical age where only white heterosexual men are capable of being held accountable for what they not wrong now, but what they did wrong in the past.

But we are not holding anyone else accountable.

So, if you're a man from Senegal or Eritrea or Afghanistan or Iraq or Kuwait and you engage in

violent behavior against women, it's something we're just going to try and hide away from.

We're not going to address it.

We can't talk about your religion in case you turn into a terrorist.

We can't talk about your culture in case you accuse us of colonialism.

We're not going to do any of that.

We're just going to pretend none of this is happening.

And it's so bad.

I was in Sweden a couple of of years ago, and

it is a separate society.

That doesn't mean everyone, but there is a separate and distinct society that does not want to become Swedish.

And Swedes, they're open to immigrants.

They're open to refugees.

That's their culture.

And so they're really struggling because these people are coming in and they don't want to be Swedes.

And in fact, they prey on the Swedes and these these women are being raped, killed

and no one says anything about it and everyone knows what the problem is.

Well people are saying things but it's all you know they're grumbling.

They again they are really trying to balance this attitude of wanting to be welcoming and warm and sharing.

They understand the privileges that they have in Sweden and they want to share.

So the Swedish population is very open to immigrants and providing them with opportunities.

But the Swedish leadership, and when I talk about leadership, this is politics, it's media, it's academia.

They have created this

sort of

belt around what you can and can't say, what you are allowed to experience, and what you're not allowed to experience.

And right now, the prevailing notion is

to come out

against some of the behaviors, the criminal behaviors, the rapes, the violence towards women,

the robberies.

There's a lot of crime that goes on in Sweden, perpetrated by immigrants, and the local Swedes no longer understand what's going on.

But their leadership is telling them: if you ask

the question, if you say, why is this happening?

Why is it not being stopped?

That is the definition of xenophobia, racism, and rejectionism.

And that no

society, no civilization survives that.

Well, so then as I describe in the book, the leadership not only in Sweden, but broadly across Europe, all over will say

talking about these things will empower the genuine white supremacists, the far rights, the populists.

In effect, that's exactly what happens.

It's when you don't talk about it that these fringe groups are, in fact, empowered and emboldened.

And so the only groups in Europe who are addressing these issues in a very serious way are the groups that the establishment leaders are telling us don't listen to.

Yeah.

And so then we're now in this cycle.

It was probably 2004 or 5.

I went to

Special Forces Command and I spent the day with them and we talked about different things.

And I said, What is the thing that you're worried about?

And they said, The Bubba effect.

Now, I had never heard of that, but that is the theory that this is 2005, that at some point the governments of the world will have made so many mistakes and they will have made

their own bed as the people will see it.

And there's a terrorist attack, and Bubba, who doesn't know a Muslim from a Sikh, and a guy with a turban walks in after this big attack, and he shoots them.

And everybody knows it's wrong.

Everybody in the town knows it's wrong.

But the FBI comes in, and they're saying, we're here for Bubba.

And the town rallies around Bubba and says, we'll take care of Bubba.

You are part of the problem.

Get out.

And that's what they were afraid of.

And I'm seeing that everywhere in the world.

And

you're seeing these people who

are

part of this populist movement, which is both really good

and really dangerous at the same time.

And it is the elites that are pushing

everybody kind of into that because they won't address the problem and they won't say what everybody knows is true.

Right.

So, this is when I came to the West, and if you asked me in 2006, what do you think is the defining feature of Western societies?

And people would, some of them would say freedom because that's what they value the most, others will say

because that's what they value the most, capitalism, and so on.

I would say the West had achieved a level of responsive government.

Governments and elites that respond to and do their best to listen to what it is that the populations that they govern want.

Representative government.

That is what has,

you know,

all other societies would like to achieve something like that.

And somehow they haven't.

We've all seen this as a journey.

They call it a development.

There is the developed world, which is mostly the West, and the developing world, which would like to achieve that.

What we are seeing now, this bubble effect that you're describing, is that the responsive governments are becoming irresponsive.

Yes.

And I will not be surprised then if the populations of the West start to respond to problems like the populations of everywhere else.

Factionalism, fragmentation, tribalism, religious fanaticism, xenophobia, all of these things.

We're now seeing bits and pieces of that all simmering through the surface.

But that is in the end where you're going to drive these unrepresented populations to.

So

how do we deal with this?

Because

I saw Brexit, and I think I saw it different than so many of the elites and so many of the commentators.

I saw Brexit as, look, I love Europe.

It's kind of, I live in Texas now and Texans, you know, get a big name of, you know, well, it ain't Texas, but they don't follow it up with what Texans usually say.

It's not Texas, but I'm sure it's a great state.

It's got lovely things about it.

You know what I mean?

But it ain't Texas.

They don't hate something else.

The people at Brexit, they didn't hate Europe.

They wanted to be them.

And they wanted to be proud of what they have.

And I don't know how

because you're going to have uber nationalists, you will have racism, you will have bad, ill-intent people who will start saying things that are true and leaving out the things that is their real intent,

and you will have populations lost.

How do we navigate this area where we can speak the truth

and yet

warn people don't fall into the trap of who you might be standing next to because they may not believe the same things you do.

Well, I'm glad you brought up Brexit.

And remember, the slogan of Brexit in 2016 was take back control.

The people in the UK who wanted Brexit and voted for Brexit felt that they had ceded control to something,

an entity, the EU, Brussels, some foreign place, technocrats, they had a list of names.

So, who could that be?

But they had ceded control to institutions that they want holding accountable or couldn't hold accountable.

And if you then take this to its logical conclusion, if many of these populations get to a point where they think I can't hold my local government or my provincial or regional government or my national government accountable for any of this stuff that's happening to me, then I'm going to take back control.

And really, for most of history, human beings, when they wanted to do that sort of thing, they went back to their kinship, their families, their clans, their tribes.

And it's from there that the fragmentation, I think, will come.

It is, you're going to find people who are saying, our interests are no longer aligned because this thing thing that we call nation state, it doesn't represent me.

It represents you more than it represents me.

I live in California.

And in California, our governor just survived a recall.

But if you listen to what the people are complaining about, the hopelessness, the drugs, the crime, all of the things that he has ignored all of these years,

And then the response of when he survived the recall, he says, oh, but then the population really likes my policies.

That is turning turning a deaf ear to all of those people who wanted to recall him.

That's not representative government.

That is the path to hell.

So in your book, you do talk about solutions, but you talk about bogus solutions as well.

How do we, I mean, I just don't see good things because I'm a student of history.

It usually doesn't end well when you get to this point, and it's happening all over the world

how do we what what are some solutions

bogus solutions are

intended to make you feel good maybe they make the people who come up with these bogus solutions feel good but

they express contempt for the people whose problems these bogus solutions are intended to solve.

Take the examples of so women are raped, they can't go to concerts in Europe, and then they come up with where these bracelets that says

you're vaccinated.

But

in the case of violence against women, telling women to wear certain bracelets or avoid certain places or it's not looking for, right?

You first of all frighten the whole world

into thinking about climate change, accept the premise that climate change is real, and then tell them don't eat meat or we're going to close your source of economic income, then these are bogus solutions, they don't resolve anything and they just have the function of the people who are already retreating from the public space, they'll retreat more into their cocoons.

The ones who, I'll give you a good example.

We talk about gun control in the U.S.

endlessly.

Ever since I came here, even before I came here, this whole gun control debate never ends.

I love hearing that from somebody who just got into it 20 years ago.

It's so great to hear.

Oh, gosh, there they go again.

But there are countries who have the kind of gun control a radical Democrat can only fantasize about.

countries like Sweden.

But because the crime in Sweden has gone up and there's no rule of law, law enforcement has been hamstrung and told, no, you can't go after these criminals, people in Sweden are buying more guns

per capita than Americans are.

Wow.

That's crazy.

That is creepy.

That should tell every politician in Sweden and beyond that's not a good development.

And that's because if you, if I pay my taxes, the government protects me in exchange for that.

Remember the tasks of the government.

The government is not protecting me.

I'll protect my family.

So I'll arm.

That's the kind of thinking that is behind all of this.

And if governments continue to ignore their populations, then they're inviting this kind of behavior.

It is therefore superficial to talk about gun rules and gun sizes and magazine sizes, etc.

The real question here is: is the government

delivering on the promise and on the contract

of

the rule of law?

Correct.

Law enforcement.

Law and order.

And if the government doesn't deliver on that, people will take the law into their hands.

That's taking of the law into your hands, that's not a good thing.

No.

So again, I go back to the solution.

How do you deprogram that?

How do you, if the, because I'm convinced the governments

either are so blind, which I don't believe, are so blind to this that they're just going to keep going, or they have a different outcome.

I mean, I really truly believe we are seeing a controlled collapse of the West, in particular, America.

We are being dismantled from the inside.

So.

You know, I'm just,

my fear here is, is that people feel the problems.

They may not know exactly what it is, but they know it's not good.

They know they're not being listened to.

They know their rights are being diminished while other people get away with murder.

That's not a good recipe.

So, what is there a solution?

Is there a Martin Luther King kind of idea?

Is there anything that you've come across that you went, if people just can do this, we can turn the corner.

I think

if you say people can do only this,

then you get into the realm of populists who

spout all sorts of things that people can do that don't work.

But in democratic, peaceful societies, I think if populations become less complacent and more involved, if you start worrying about what is it that my child is being taught at school, you become active in the school boards.

Who puts these curriculums together?

How can I get involved?

From the bottom up, more civil society, more civil action from the people whose lives are affected.

And then elect

actually really responsible and responsive representatives.

Instead of saying, okay, you know, let these political parties deal with it for us.

We're just going to pay our contributions and we'll see what they come.

And I think that is what

maybe and this is maybe an effect of affluence and freedom I would rather smile children and do what I please and use my freedom in a way that just gives me and my community

pleasure and the things that we like to do than be involved in politics I don't think of politics as a pleasurable activity but

it's a necessary evil and so I would say to people get involved get off your couch and figure out who are these people who are running the show, what are the institutions that they, how much money do you pay in taxes at any given level and what do you want in return?

Who you like to associate with?

And that kind of activism,

bottom-up, mother-to-mother, you know, neighbor to neighbor,

define who the people are, who's the community that you belong to that is going to be negatively affected by all of these policies that are being pushed down our throats and then act accordingly.

It's not pleasant, but someone has to do the dishes.

Think of politics that kind of a chore.

It is.

It is.

You talk about the loss of rights for women,

and I want you to get into this a bit because I hear from the left, what rights have you lost?

I hear that all the time.

And I mean, I can't give you an amendment to the Constitution, at least in the top 10, that isn't being violated every day by the federal government.

Talk about the loss of rights for women.

Well, you don't

know

that you lost something until you don't have it anymore.

And so let's go back to the time you and I met when I was talking to European women about something that most European women back then took for granted and still in some spaces do, which was walking around in public.

Dressed as you please, you can drive, you can take the train, or that's the public transport, whatever, with no fear of any kind of violence.

Now the situation has changed for many women, mostly working-class women, because it's working-class neighborhoods that bear the burden of the negative consequences of globalism and globalization and immigration.

And now, some of these women are really feeling and seeing what we've lost.

And then they're also asking, because in Europe,

you go to the government to help you with your problems.

They're also confronted with governments that are deaf to their problems and their wishes.

And so,

you know, we go back to where we started the conversation.

The federal government

violating the constitutions, amendments to the constitution laws, either through neglect, through ineptitude, and incompetence, or at times

also deliberately.

So, what should the people do in response to that?

That's the question of our time.

And how can we keep, how stay united as a people?

Can I stand?

Can I ask you to bring,

correct me if I'm wrong or

bring some enlightenment to this?

You know, in where you grew up,

there was genital mutilation for girls.

I think we are just experiencing that in a different way with transgenderism with the youth.

I think we are,

we are in some ways,

when we inject hormones or stop the progression, a natural progression of a body

at a young person's age, and it cannot be reversed,

isn't that a form of

a progressive or a

just a crazy religion that is saying, No, you can do this, we should do this.

So when I was growing up, I lived and I was born in Somalia, and female genital mutilation was

something

that was like

celebrating Christmas.

It was just so commonplace.

Girls who were not mutilated were seen as filthy or children of the very poor who couldn't afford to have the procedure done.

And that is is in so many countries the case.

And so, for female genital mutilation, a tradition that's thousands of years old, the activism is: how can we stop this?

How can we make adults, grown-ups who take care of these children see that this practice is wrong?

The transgender lobby in the West, and particularly in America, is trying

to impose something

that now heavily affects girls more than little boys, trying to impose something that didn't exist on everyone else.

And it's very important in this debate to make a distinction between people who are transgender, who want to have these procedures done.

They are grown-ups, and we should give them every liberty, every respect that we accord everyone else within our society.

And these transgender activists who are preying on children

and who have frightened the healthcare system into saying if a child of eight or nine or ten years old comes and asks for a transition from one sex to the other, we should

give it to that child without consulting with the parents, without proper mental health care.

And I think that actually is, it is so wrong so dystopian it's very hard for me to understand people who have who've looked into this like Abigail Schreier please read her book I recommend it to

who has really looked into what is going on in America it is really amazing to witness this and this when I finished that book horrified I thought this is really a wake-up call

for parents, not just for activists, but for parents.

And we need a counteractivism against these really radical transgender activists.

They pretend to fight for the rights of transgender people, but that is not their agenda.

Their agenda is really to destroy our children.

Is

you know, you have studied religion, you've looked at it,

you've been a part of it, you've been outside of it.

Isn't

what America is going through from many

on the far left,

isn't this just a religion?

I mean,

the facts don't always.

I mean, the facts sometimes are not there.

Sometimes they say, don't believe that.

Don't believe what your eyes are telling you.

It's got dogma, doctrine, and punishments

if you stray from that.

Isn't this just a really

dangerous religion?

Wokeism, I don't know, they call it critical race theory, critical justice theory.

We need to find a name for it that everybody really understands.

The woke,

yes, they do have the traits of

radical religion, fanatical religion, in fact.

And in some ways, they're quasi-religious, but they always invoke science here.

And sometimes they'll present you with footnotes, and that just makes you go, oh, really?

But they are,

as you say, yeah, quasi-religious.

And I don't know how many of them

really understand exactly what it is that they believe in and how many are useful idiots.

But it is a phenomenon and it may have to do with the breakdown of the meaning-making institutions of our society.

The family, the community, the church, faith organizations, all of that are going through some form of crisis.

And people are then easily, young people especially, young and impressionable people, want to belong.

And here's what's on offer.

And that's really unfortunate.

Yeah.

I want to talk to you about immigration and assimilation.

I'm so sick of being called a xenophobe.

because

somehow or another I'm against illegal immigration or just opening up the doors and saying, oh, here's somebody with five child brides.

Come on in.

I have no problem.

I want immigrants to come to the United States.

They renew us because we get sleepy and fat and lazy.

And immigrants who really understand

what America has or what the West has, I want them here.

I just don't.

And I want them to bring their own traits and their personalities and everything else, but just bring it and assimilate, bring it and put it into our soup, if you will.

Talk to me about immigration and assimilation.

So assimilation, I think the phrase used to be the melting pot, and that's what made America very, very different from other immigration societies and other societies that are homogeneous and don't really have much immigration.

But I think, first of all, what everyone tries to make us forget is that American immigration was always selective.

And the selection was yes, it was based on could you become a part of that melting pot eventually or not.

And what we are being told now is that the melting pot is bad.

The structures that brought about this melting pot

are systemically racist.

And so we actually have nothing.

America is not exceptional.

America has nothing to offer the immigrant.

The immigrant has something to offer America.

And then we're distracted with stories of the past, things that Americans did wrong in the past.

But we are not told the whole truth.

Yes, there was slavery.

in America as there was slavery everywhere else in the world, but Americans fought a civil war to end it.

Americans had a civil rights movement to end the Jim Crow.

Americans changed their laws and their culture and their norms based on its foundational documents.

That's the bit that we're not told.

So if you want to come here and you know

anything about America and what you're seeking is what's enshrined in the Bill of Rights and the Constitution, then you will hop into that melting pot.

Talk to me about

even to offer it to them is racist and it's criminal.

You are not a criminal, Glenn.

I know you're not.

I know you're a compassionate man.

I know the fact that you are white doesn't make you a white supremacist.

And what I really love about the work you do is that you push back and you don't stand for that.

And I think that's it for me.

Everybody should stand up to these people.

It's a small,

loud minority.

They have to be told.

They've really got to be put in their place.

Could you talk to me?

You

went to Europe.

You became a member of parliament in Europe.

You

married an Englishman.

But you...

Englishman.

He's very tribal about his roots.

He's a Scotsman.

I'm sorry.

I work with a Scotsman.

I'm sorry.

I know.

I know the difference.

I don't want to cause a war here.

But

and you both live now in America.

Tell me what you thought of America from the outside and who we are now from the inside, good and bad.

So from the outside, before I came to America, I would say when I lived in Africa, I was a teenager in Kenya, Nairobi, Kenya, and I used to be an admirer of America because as a child living in Somalia,

we were treated to communism.

Remember, the world was the Soviet Union and the United States.

Somalia, under the dictatorship of Mohammed Siyad Barre had decided to go with communism.

And we fled communism.

My father fled communism.

And we ended up in Kenya, which was closer,

you would call back then maybe under the sphere of America, and that was much better.

And my impression,

my prejudice, my image of America was it's a great country.

It's a great place.

I have never been there.

Then I came to the Netherlands, and while I lived there, especially when I joined politics, the image of America was they're buffoons, they're fat, they carry guns, they kill people, they like to invade countries, and so on.

And then I came here in 2002 was my first time

and my experience was very different.

In fact, I always joke, I don't think I've ever seen so many thin people in my life.

I was in Santa Monica, LA.

Yeah, well that's different.

Come to Texas.

But anyway, so all Americans have been welcoming.

They have opened their homes and their businesses and their pocketbooks to me and all of these people who are trying to come here and make a better living.

So my image of America now is obviously radically different from the one that I developed in

the Netherlands.

I love America.

I love Americans.

I'm just like you worried about our politics.

I'm worried about our universities and what goes on there and what our kids are taught.

I'm worried about our education system.

especially worried about our media.

And they have taken to

they've abandoned journalism mostly.

There are still few left who believe in the institution of journalism, but most of it is

been compromised.

So I'm alarmed about that.

I care about what goes on, but my image of America is one that it's still the greatest nation in the world and we can rescue it even with all the adversaries that are now surrounding us.

Think about the bigger ones like China, Putin,

what we've just done, withdrawing from Afghanistan, the way we did, that empowers those adversaries.

And I worry about such things.

But I think America is a great country, and for people to go around saying it's systemically racist is just BS.

Are we ahead of Europe or behind Europe in the self-destruction kind of road?

Yeah,

it really depends on, you know,

things can change.

very quickly.

And I think that in America, we have enough potential, enough potential to do things right to correct course

in europe some countries are doing great things i i i was in denmark uh

as you've read in the book reporting on austria

even now the uk post-brexit i think they do have a fighting chance but some countries seem to be too far gone in this you know moral relativism not having children

all of these crazy things not really having a serious serious discussion about immigration and its implications for the continent.

So in many ways, I would say America does have a fighting chance still.

But we do have to fight though.

We do have to stand up against these people.

The difference between immigration in Europe and immigration here in America, we're both having immigration problems.

Is there a difference?

Yeah.

What is it?

Oh, yes.

It goes back to the concept of the melting pot.

America is an idea and people want to melt into it if they understand the value of that idea.

Europe and European countries are still homogeneous nations.

Basically, they're a bunch of tribes and they have

not a proper history with immigration and the only immigration that they've been getting since the 1990s is not really selective.

And it's only if there was any kind of selection, it was selected on who is the poorest, the neediest, and so on.

And then they were put on welfare.

So the immigrants that they have selected are not immigrants that fuel the economy in the way that America's

the conversations about or debates about in America about immigration are radically different.

And so I still think,

even though we are seeing now, I know the border,

all of that,

I know that that is really, really worrying, but it is nowhere, the debates we have here are nowhere near as bad as in Europe.

If there was,

I mean, I'm just thinking, there are very few tables that I could sit at where I would be thrilled not to say anything, just to listen to the conversation.

The dinner table between you and your husband,

it must be fascinating to listen to.

You're both people I have so much respect for your intellect and your courage to say the things that you actually mean and not to bow a knee to lies.

I hate to disillusion you, but because we also have small children, we do a lot of toddler talk at the dinner table.

I know that.

I know that.

Please talk to me.

I haven't talked to an adult in a long time.

I know that feeling.

Ayan, thank you so much for all that you do, and I hope we can talk again.

God bless.

Wonderful.

Thank you.

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