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"Multiculturalism is a rotten ideology" - Ayaan Hirsi Ali
2.9k Plays2 months ago
As Western values continue to come under assault, it is hard not to feel like there is a courage deficit in society today. We are often too afraid too question and confront dangerous ideologies, and often too complacent to defend the history and the culture upon which the Western world was built.
Someone who has never been accused of lacking for courage is Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Ayaan is a human rights activist, author, and, as of recently, the founder of Courage Media, a platform committed to challenging the dominant narratives that suppress truth and intellectual debate.
Follow Will Kingston and Fire at Will on social media here.
Read The Spectator Australia here.
Visit Courage.Media here.
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Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Platforms
00:00:19
Speaker
G'day and welcome to Far At Will, a safe space for dangerous conversations. I'm Will Kingston. If for some reason you're not already following the show, you can find us everywhere from Spotify to Apple Podcasts to YouTube. If you like what you hear here, please consider giving us a glowing five star review. If you don't like what you hear here, forget I said anything.
Courage Deficit and Ayaan Hirsi Ali
00:00:41
Speaker
In a previous episode, I spoke to former Australian deputy prime minister, John Anderson. He said something which has stuck with me. The only cure for cancel culture is courage culture. As Western values continue to come under assault, it is hard not to feel like there is a courage deficit in society today. We are often too afraid to question and confront dangerous ideologies.
00:01:08
Speaker
and often too complacent to defend the history and culture upon which the Western world was built.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali's Mission with Courage Media
00:01:15
Speaker
Someone who has never been accused of lacking for courage is Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Ayaan is a human rights activist, author, and as of recently, the founder of Courage Media, a platform committed to challenging the dominant narratives that suppress truth and intellectual debate. Ayaan, welcome to Fire at Will. Thank you very much. Lovely to meet you, Will, and thank you for having me.
00:01:38
Speaker
Of course, it's lovely to have you on. Let's start with the mission of Courage
Global Trend Away from Free Speech
00:01:43
Speaker
Media. So the statement starts with, our mission is to create a platform for free and open discussion, challenging dominant narratives that suppress truth and intellectual debate. Now we'll get to some of those dominant narratives that you you're looking at a bit later, but I want to start with the concept of free and open debate itself.
00:02:03
Speaker
So it feels like there is a global trend away from free speech. The Australian government is trying to push through a misinformation bill as we speak. There are journalists in the UK that are being investigated for tweets. There are even more people in the US who seem to be questioning the merits of the First Amendment. Are we as a Western society less committed to free speech than we once were? And if so, why do you think that's the case?
00:02:29
Speaker
I think we are less committed to free speech than when I first came to the West.
Personal Experiences with Free Speech in the Netherlands
00:02:34
Speaker
I came in 1992, so let's say about 30 years ago. I lived in the Netherlands, and the concept of free speech was introduced to me there in the Netherlands.
00:02:47
Speaker
that you had freak you know freedom of conscience and that you could speak. And in this, the context was really about speaking truth to power. I had arrived there as an asylum seeker, along with what seemed like almost half the developing world. And every single interview that all of those asylum seekers did with the Dutch immigration and ah immigration agency was In their countries of origin, they lacked freedom and not just freedom, but they also lacked the freedom to complain, to discuss all of these issues that were bothering them. And I took up political science and that's when I was introduced to the genesis of
00:03:35
Speaker
free speech and it was introduced as a principle that was foundational for the way we define the West.
Debates on Free Speech and Minority Protections
00:03:43
Speaker
and Over time, I saw this you know very gradual rise of subversive ideas that focused on limitations to free speech. The first one for me was Islam.
00:04:01
Speaker
More and more Muslims were complaining about things that had been settled in the West, for instance, blasphemy. So in the late 1990s, early 2000s, I'll give you one incident even before 9-11, and it was a beauty pageant in Nigeria. And I think this was in 2002, so it was after 2001.
00:04:28
Speaker
But there was a report that a young Nigerian woman was hunted down and was in hiding because at the end of her report, and the report was about how the Muslims in Nigeria were objecting to the beauty pageant, and they kept shouting, what would the Prophet Muhammad say about this?
00:04:47
Speaker
And the Nigerian reporter concluded her report by saying, but what would the Prophet Muhammad say? But he'd probably take one of them for his wife. And that was enough to have this woman hunted down, almost killed, and in hiding. We were having this outrageous discussion in the UK where I think the woman who organized it said it was unfortunate that this reporter had ruined the event. And I remember thinking, hang on a minute,
00:05:17
Speaker
you're in Britain and this is in Britain, she has every right to say that. Why can she as a Nigerian not say that in Nigeria? The answer was obvious to me, but it was those discussions that I was also a part of. I was living through them and you know it was being explained to Muslims coming to Europe, hey, it's different here.
00:05:39
Speaker
Now what I didn't know was in 1989 Salman Rushdie had been issued a fatwa by Ayatollah Khomeini. I lived in Nairobi then and I had actually taken part in some of the book burnings and disgraceful activities against Salman Rushdie. But the British and other Europeans had been introduced to the idea of, or re-introduced to the idea of blasphemy.
00:06:05
Speaker
So that is for me where these major debates on free speech, what is the right to offend, where do the limitations lie.
Union of Islamic Minorities and Western Progressives
00:06:15
Speaker
And at the time in the early 2000s, I think there was near unanimity on the fact that free speech should always prevail and these minority Muslim communities should be gradually persuaded to accept that free speech is the cornerstone of Western societies. And then to my shock and horror, 10 years on, things started to change. Other groups started to appear.
00:06:47
Speaker
claiming that they wanted exemptions from the obligations, the rights, they wanted special protections, and all of this was being paraded around in the name of multiculturalism.
Multiculturalism vs. National Identity
00:07:01
Speaker
That's a really good summary. It's interesting that That period around 10 years ago that you just mentioned saw that there was almost this union of Islamic minority groups in the West with Western liberal progressives. It's a very, very strange union because so many of the other identity politics issues that those progressives
00:07:26
Speaker
stand behind would appear to be in conflict with many of the underlying fundamental beliefs of Islam. Of course, now we see that this union in very, very obvious terms in the aftermath of October 7th, how do you reflect on this this strange relationship that has developed between Western liberal progressives and effectively radical Islamic fundamentalism?
00:07:54
Speaker
Western liberal progressives a few decades ago started to embrace this concept of multiculturalism. And what it boils down to is you have a national identity, so I'm more familiar with the American context.
00:08:10
Speaker
The American national identity up until the Second World War was one of you know but what they called the melting pot. Sure, we have people of different ethnicities and religions in America, but we are all Americans.
00:08:25
Speaker
And it's the Constitution, the flag, the Bill of Rights, that's paramount. That's really what matters. And everyone would cite Martin Luther King. It's not the color of your skin, but the content of your character that matters. So there seem to be unanimity around that concept of we are different, but we are united as one nation.
00:08:50
Speaker
And then
Diversity and National Unity
00:08:51
Speaker
these ideas started to come up of it is much more important to emphasize diversity. Slogans like diversity is our strength and different ethnic groups could have their own and and make it prevail and make it even more important than the national identity, the ethnic identity or the religious identity. And this was seen as enriching at the time, it was seen as emancipatory. was They thought maybe ah defending the rights of African Americans, as you know the history of America, African Americans came there as slaves and they like later on they were subject to segregation. But the concept of multiculturalism wasn't just applied to African Americans, it was applied to Native Americans, to Jewish people,
00:09:46
Speaker
And then later on, every kind of you know ethnic community that came from the third world came into a context where the melting pot was less and less important.
Dangers of Multiculturalism and Identity Politics
00:09:59
Speaker
And in fact, in some ways, it was seen as negative and it was all about the salad bowl.
00:10:06
Speaker
I think I don't know if this is intended or not intended, but pretty quickly, people started to have to want these exemptions and accommodations that were made for some groups. Obviously, everyone wants to have these exemptions. Now, if you give everyone exemptions, what's the whole point of having a nation state?
00:10:27
Speaker
To me, that was very strange growing up in Africa because in Africa, nation states were falling apart. Nation states are made up of different tribes that the former colonizers had put together as they were leaving. And so I grew up in Kenya, for instance, and and Kenya is made up of something like 40 tribes. And to make these 40 tribes feel united under the nation of Kenya,
00:10:49
Speaker
It was this narrative that was constantly emphasized your Kenyan first before you identify with your peculiar tribe or your particular tribe. And it was very strange to see the West doing the opposites. You had this well-established democracies that had a fully developed idea of what a nation state is, what national unity is, now embarking on this path of what they call div diversity and not realizing what the dangers were so the question in hindsight now is did they not realize that it was dangerous did they not realize that that would be divisive and disruptive.
00:11:28
Speaker
Or was there a subversive ideology all along? And some of these socialist narratives, some of these postmodernist Marxist narratives seem to be intent on dividing and and and being divisive. And so that's the question now is, was it but was it well intentioned? Maybe it was well intentioned for some people, but then for others, it was really a subversive way of bringing down the structures of Western civilization because they accused it of being supremacist, built on white supremacy. And so this is all coming to the surface now, but regardless of whether it was well-intentioned or ill-intentioned, the outcome is the same. It leads to a fragmentation of society along lines of identity, along lines of zero sum, and people feeling suspicious of one another along lines, but along group lines.
00:12:24
Speaker
And there is a forgetting of the
Identity Politics as Modern Racism
00:12:26
Speaker
individual. If you look at all of these Western constitutions, they're about protecting the rights of the individual, your freedom of conscience so as an individual, your freedom of expression as an individual, your rights, your bodily integrity as a a man, as a woman. And all of that is to be abandoned because now we're talking about groups. And you see, when you talk about groups, that gets to be abstract. And what's done within a group to individuals We turn away from that. I remember these discussions, for instance, on Muslim women being subjected to female genital mutilation, being subjected to honor killings, being forced into marriages, and the wider society would look away from this minority because it was all about protecting the cultural and religious sensibilities of the minority and what happened to individuals within the minority.
00:13:19
Speaker
you know we We looked away from that. And for me, that was multiculturalism or the beginnings of multiculturalism. And the more I find out about multiculturalism, the more I think it's a Russian ideology to the core. Identity politics is wrong. It's wrong in Africa. It's wrong in Australia. It's wrong in America. We really need to move away from that. It's just a new way of being racist. And right now the prevailing racism is against white people, especially white men.
Hope for Reversing Multicultural Policies
00:13:48
Speaker
We do need to move away from it, but nonetheless, the countries that you just mentioned are still clinging on to multicultural policies. If you look at the UK, there's a policy of mass migration. There seems to be the deliberately turning a blind eye to illegal migration, as well as just having a very laissez-faire legal migration policy. We're seeing problems around social cohesion. We saw the riots in the UK recently. We're seeing grooming gangs, which thankfully some people in the media are speaking more about now. How hopeful are you that we can actually see a reversal of some of these multicultural policies in countries like Australia, the UK and the US? s
00:14:28
Speaker
So the US, we've just had we've had the election on November 5, November 6, and I'm much more hopeful about the US than the other countries. But I'm also more hopeful about the other countries because some of these bad ideas really did come from the United States.
00:14:51
Speaker
If the United States changes course, then hopefully that will have an impact on the yeah UK, Australia, Canada, the others. It's really especially the Anglo world. I was one of the people on say November 3 and November 4 who thought if Kamala Harris were to win the election and power was given back to the democratic left-wing machine,
00:15:20
Speaker
that all would be lost, that they would speed up the process of censorship. They would speed up the process of bringing in large numbers of people from different parts of the world into America. And that is a direct challenge to the social cohesion of America. People speaking different languages of ethnic ethnic differences, all rejecting the idea that America is built on.
00:15:50
Speaker
I thought that you know with the economy going the way it was going, friction between all of those different groups, especially those on the lower income subsets, that that would rise, and that we were cruising towards societal collapse overseen by this democratic left-wing machine that then would introduce authoritarianism to say they are dealing with the problem.
00:16:15
Speaker
And then like many, many Americans just praying that the that that would be averted. And that I hope is what's going to happen now that the Republicans have won the election with the leadership of Donald Trump and with the involvement of Elon Musk. Now, the figure of Elon Musk is very important here because a few years ago,
00:16:41
Speaker
When in 2020 Donald Trump's Twitter account was shut down, Elon bought Twitter, turned it into X, and made, I think he he just made it his cause that he was going to restore free speech.
00:17:00
Speaker
And he did that. so ah He gave all of those people, who maybe not all of them, but many of them, ah the people whose Twitter accounts were closed down, he gave them the accounts back and he empowered the people who wanted to discuss the censorship attempts that the American government was making.
00:17:22
Speaker
the suppressing of the Hunter Biden laptop, this trying to subvert the First Amendment through what they were calling misinformation and disinformation, but bullying social media companies to adopt democratic policies of censorship. All of that was exposed.
00:17:45
Speaker
Another, I think, in my view, wonderful development is this rise of podcasts as alternative media ecosystem where citizens get together and get to complain and get to compare notes. And that was, and and that by the way, has it has spilled over into the UK, US and other parts of the world.
00:18:13
Speaker
There are of course individuals who have been canceled. I, I'm one of those people who has been canceled, but it hasn't had the effect that they hoped for to silence all of these debates. In fact, it has had the opposite effect. COVID I think to a certain extent made it palpable to a lot of people in the free world, what it is to have your freedoms taken from one day to the next and what life like.
00:18:40
Speaker
And so there was there was a lot of discontent with covid still goes on. People in the UK still talk about it incessantly. And if you add all of these things together, I think what's emerging is a picture where more and more people are saying hang on festival. What's going on?
00:19:00
Speaker
who's behind these subversive efforts to shut conversation down to open borders, to introduce all sorts of ideas, think about the whole transgender lobby.
00:19:15
Speaker
Think about what's called ESG, environmental and social governance, and all the bad stuff that's hiding behind that. What are these things? Who are these people? What do they want? We can have these conversations now. And sometimes we may reach the the wrong conclusions, but we can have them now without being shut down.
00:19:35
Speaker
And so we'll see how the effect of what happened in America on the other countries in the UK, they have a labor government that is clamping down on speech really fast and is making itself highly unpopular. It's going to do a great deal of damage.
00:19:53
Speaker
The question is, four years from now, when another government is elected, is that damage reversible? The same thing with Canada, the damage that Trudeau has done there, is that reversible? The damage that Jacinta Arden did to New Zealand, is that reversible? In Australia, you just told me that they are in the process of passing censorship laws. Is that reversible?
00:20:19
Speaker
I think what happened in America is going to encourage a lot of people in the English-speaking world to stand up, to unite, to speak out, to become really creative in fighting for their individual
Media Bias and Rise of Podcasts
00:20:33
Speaker
rights. And what's what I really like about what happened in America is It isn't just white people in America who decided that we want to fight back for what our national identity is. It's across the board. 62% of Native Americans voted for Trump. A huge number of African American men and some women voted for for Donald Trump. Hispanics, I mean, that stunned everyone.
00:21:00
Speaker
And if you look at what it is that unites all of these different ethnicities and creeds, why did they vote for Donald Trump? Obviously, fast people will mention the economy and inflation, all of them. But for the Hispanics, for instance, it was the border. It was also the concept of wanting an intact family.
00:21:19
Speaker
and and abhor a rejection of the whole transgender and the gender identity lobby, that you know imposing ideas that are just totally unreal.
00:21:33
Speaker
but like there are more genders than two or more sexes than two. People are rejecting that of every creed, every ethnic community, even every religious community. So I'm very hopeful today than I was on November 3, let's say.
00:21:54
Speaker
So am I. Some of those forces that you mentioned, the rise of podcasts and then of course Musk's role at Twitter, they are responses to failures of the mainstream media over the last 10 to 20 years. Obviously by building a media platform, that is your way of saying that you don't think that the media has done done its job potentially.
00:22:16
Speaker
How do you reflect on the mainstream media and do you think that the rise of Trump and this failure of activist journalists to be able to effectively prop up a very weak candidate in Harris will be a lesson for them to maybe go back to the traditional role of journalists, which I think you so nicely said earlier was holding powerful people to account.
00:22:40
Speaker
Yeah. So the main, what we used to call the mainstream media, which is not mainstream anymore. was always, always biased toward the left. But what happened after Barack Obama was elected and maybe in the lead up to the election of Barack Obama was simply, you know, the pretense of impartiality was gone. I mean, if you reflect back on the eight years that Obama was president, he was hardly criticized. Now, compare the way he was treated to the way President George Bush was treated.
00:23:17
Speaker
And then compare all of that to the way during the primaries between Hillary and Barack Obama, the way Hillary Clinton was treated, and then compare that to the way Trump was treated after he became the nominee. I mean, it's incredible. And then after 2016, I think the media was blamed for, quote unquote, legitimizing Donald Trump.
00:23:39
Speaker
And from then on, they gave themselves permission to say, we're just not going to record or report impartially on what goes on in Washington between the two parties. We're simply going to roll out this crusade to bring down Donald Trump and delegitimize his presidency. And I don't know if they realized that it wasn't just about the man, that half the population elected this man and they elected him for a reason.
00:24:09
Speaker
and the role of the media was supposed to be work out why they elected him. What were the conditions that led to his election? And instead they decided they were going to focus on the man and they've tried everything under the sun. And I think during 2020, the American electorate decided to fall for the proposition that we need to bring back normality to politics. And that was the platform on which Joe Biden ran.
00:24:40
Speaker
I am the old statesman, the familiar face, a man of the middle, a moderate, elect me, and all of this chaos is going to stop." And he was elected, and then he picked Kamala Harris saying, I am picking a woman and a black woman, just really doubling down on identity politics. And then from there, embarking on policies that were very divisive.
00:25:05
Speaker
And so all the promise of bringing down chaos and so on, that didn't happen at all. And then in 2022, he gave that speech where he called i mean he he he spoke of the MAGA as a threat to democracy. And then they developed the media developed this whole narrative about half the nation being a threat to democracy and that the American democracy was under threat, and they, the media and the Democratic democratic Party, were doing things that were actually a threat to democracy, like using the justice system to go after their political opponent to demonize Donald Trump and demonize the people who vote for Donald Trump.
00:25:49
Speaker
and in those four years that they were in office people in america felt like they were walking on eggshells you couldn't express yourself you couldn't express and you couldn't in any way shape or form criticize the sitting government.
00:26:06
Speaker
Because if you did that, you were a threat to democracy. And this suffocation of speech, I think erupted in, and then they had that whole process of not just demonizing Donald Trump, but criminalizing.
00:26:22
Speaker
Donald Trump making all of this, he they they brought 34 charges against him, and then he was found guilty on all 34 of them. I mean, this was getting beyond parody. And I think that's made a lot of people in America come to the conclusion. The Democratic Party, along with the media,
00:26:42
Speaker
they are the problem. And so the media is not mainstream media anymore. It's not seen as mainstream media anymore. Platforms are like Joe Rogan's trusted more and then you get, I mean, proliferation of podcasts. Citizens having discussions and take these long form discussions that take an hour, an hour and a half, two hours, three hours long.
00:27:06
Speaker
to dig into any given topic all across the country. And all of that information is shared online. And so that I think saved America from, and if you think about it, that is the marketplace, isn't it? If the dominant media that have a monopoly on these big stations, cable stations and newspapers, if they're not delivering the truth, then people go and look for it elsewhere. And then here in response,
00:27:35
Speaker
the so-called mainstream media kept on demanding that the other media be shut down and cancelled. And I mean, as late as October or November, John Kerry and Hillary Clinton were saying that Elon Musk should be ah punished in some form or the other.
00:27:56
Speaker
And the mainstream media was making all these noises about shutting down X, arresting Elon Musk and others. it was getting It was really getting out of control. And now they've been forced to go back to the drawing room. And I think there's some hope because the owner of the Washington Post Jeff Bezos refused to endorse a presidential candidate. I think the owners of the Los Angeles Times did the same. Right now, the Comcast, the the owner of and MSNBC and others is
00:28:30
Speaker
I think that recalibrating, they're thinking you know what went wrong, but the left itself is really divided. Within the left are the moderates who want to learn from what happened in the past few years, who want to move back to the center, but they have this radical ideological left, who are pushing them to the far left, and and who are very destructive, and we'll see where this fight goes. My proposition is that the brand, the Democratic Party, that's a major party in in America, we have only two parties, that the people in the center, they have the ideas, they have the money, they have the numbers, and they are they're much more attractive than these radicals. They simply think that they should cut the cord, they should divorce them, imaginalize them, and then move, and that would save
Reforming Institutions vs. Creating New Ones
00:29:25
Speaker
the country. That would draw the country back to the center.
00:29:28
Speaker
Yeah, I think that existential struggle on the left between going back to their roots of supporting the working class, or sticking with this identity politics fringe will be really interesting. And I think some people are coming to the realization on the left that pandering to the 10% looniest 10% of the population is just particularly good electoral maths, if nothing else.
00:29:56
Speaker
It's not, I think, and I'm sure we're going to have this conversation with you now, but it is. So we have an election victory and I'm sure some things will be corrected.
00:30:07
Speaker
But the problems are much deeper. It's cultural. It's the schools that have been ruined, the universities that have been ruined, the storytelling institutions like Hollywood, they've been ruined. It's not just the media, even the healthcare systems, they have been ruined. So there's a lot of work to do. There has to be a lot of what you call the 10%.
00:30:31
Speaker
and they may even be less than 10% have had decades to work from the ground up and force to their ideas through and then enforce them through the administrative systems, through diversity, equity and inclusion schemes.
00:30:51
Speaker
and other tricks, they you know they produce guidelines and directives and all of these ways of pushing through ideas that would never, ever pass, ever get a majority if they were brought to Parliament or Congress.
00:31:07
Speaker
The corruption of the institutions that you've just mentioned, I think raises a really interesting question because there's almost two ways that you can respond to that corruption. You can either seek to reform the institutions, so you can go into universities and try and strip out DEI departments, for example, or alternatively,
00:31:30
Speaker
You can build rival institutions and in effect acknowledge that the existing institutions are too far gone. So your husband, Neil Ferguson, has is it a very important player in the University of Austin, which is is trying to create a new institution based on the values of free speech and but the and and promoting Western civilization.
00:31:53
Speaker
ah If you look at, say, entertainment, which you mentioned, someone, an organization like The Daily Wire is effectively trying to create different cultural artifacts that stand in opposition to, say, leftist Hollywood entertainment. So where do you fall on this? Do you think that the way that we should think about this challenge is reforming existing institutions or building afresh?
00:32:19
Speaker
I think it's both, and it's attractive. just We just talked about podcasts. you know when What was the main mainstream media? When that failed, people then just came up with their own media. they started to you know and and All of this is very embryonic, but it's evolving. It's much harder with universities.
00:32:41
Speaker
But what Neely is doing now with Jelonsdale and others, it's a lot of people who are involved in getting that from the ground up. The University of Austin it is now accredited, it has students, and if Ova and I are very hopeful ah you know in a few years, it's going to turn out graduates and we're going to see the quality of those graduates. It's going to shame existing institutions.
00:33:08
Speaker
into changing, not all of them, some of them are so far gone that I don't think reform is possible at all. And with some of the existing universities, there are departments that are also too far gone and should just be shut down, while others, you know, maybe be the STEM side of things you could, you could resuscitate or you could reform.
00:33:29
Speaker
or you could salvage somehow.
Challenges in Reforming Education
00:33:32
Speaker
But what I worry about really is the schools. We call them K-12 in the US, which is anything from kindergarten onwards and anything before, ah because that's where the problem, the ideological proselytizing and indoctrinating has gone to the primary and secondary schools.
00:33:58
Speaker
and not just there, but also the teacher training colleges. And what that does is it makes the problem structural. You now have a generation of people who are completely indoctrinated. And even if they are not completely indoctrinated, what's been omitted from their education makes them into, you know, you have kids graduating from high school who are barely educated and and that leaves society with a massive problem because we have to do catch up. And technology is providing going to go back to Elon Musk he's saying well ai is going to provide these teachers.
00:34:40
Speaker
who are much, much more talented, more patient, and who will teach very, you know, the highest quality ah education. But that's not here yet. These are systems that are being developed as we speak. I know he has this program called Synthesis and a lot of parents tune into that, but it's not a complete form of education. It's not yet a proper replacement for the educational system.
00:35:09
Speaker
So there is this time gap. And what do you do then with that generation that is going to miss out? And a lot has been missed out. Remember also the effect that COVID had on young people. So I i fear ah more for the, you know, how are we going to grapple with this very structural, very real problem?
00:35:31
Speaker
I've heard people like Peter Thiel say, what's the point of university? Anyway, if it's now become this place where young people are indoctrinated, we might as well just go back to you know developing skill sets that are necessary, but also that develop that are more of a character development.
00:35:52
Speaker
And then there's homeschooling. There's the starting of new schools. There are parents who are putting together resources and going around, you know, going around that in that way. I was told the enrollment for Christian schools in the US, it has never been bigger. So the population is responding.
00:36:12
Speaker
to this crisis in education, which is a good thing.
Ayaan's Conversion to Christianity
00:36:18
Speaker
ah But it's a challenge. it's an upward It's an upward battle. And I really want to put out there, we should have a lot of compassion for the young people.
00:36:29
Speaker
who were deprived of proper education and who are now exhibiting ideas and behaviors that that are baffling, that are even annoying. you know Right after the election, there was this whole cohort of women who were cutting off their hair and and saying things that come across as crazy and are actually crazy. But I think those are the young people who were failed.
00:36:57
Speaker
It's very well said and I really like the way that you framed that around taking the problem of identity politics and making it a structural problem. I'm sometimes asked, do you think we're past peak woke? And it is precisely because the and educational institutions have been structurally changed is why I think to your point, we will have to be fighting this for some time to come.
00:37:20
Speaker
You mentioned ah Christian schools there. You have undergone a now well-publicised conversion to Christianity. Tell me a bit about that and then tell me how much of that decision that you made is a response to some of the cultural challenges that we've been talking about in this conversation.
00:37:39
Speaker
So my conversion to Christianity is really personal and spiritual. And I think like many, many people, I was grappling with this emptiness and this crisis of existence and the inability to deal with some of the suffering that I was going through and a therapist saying to me after she listened to me, i don't as she said, I think you have a spiritual crisis. What did she call it? Your spiritually bankrupt is what she told me. And the way out of it is prayer.
00:38:19
Speaker
And then of course I had to grapple with Pray to Home then because I had decided a long time ago that I wasn't a Muslim and that the whole concept of religion was very frightening. I grew up with a very scary idea of what it is to have a faith, a God, the God of Islam who is punitive and and and As a child, you know Islam for me was fear-based. And at the time, when this woman is telling me that I i am spiritually bankrupt, I'm thinking, well, why not you know anybody who grew up with the God I grew up with spiritually bankrupt. But of course the point was,
00:39:05
Speaker
She had me really sit down and write down the characteristics of a God if God existed and if that God was good. And as I was going through that exercise, I realized and I thought that that really is is Christ. It's the Christian God. And I knew very little about that.
00:39:24
Speaker
And I carried on doing what I was doing. I carried on, she said, pray. And I thought, I'm going to pray and I'm going to pray to Christ. There's this ask and you shall, you shall find and it's thought I'm going to test that. And I did pray desperately. This is back in 2002 and I felt that my prayers were answered because a lot of the troubles that were going on in my head felt lifted and I found the what what I felt and it's more freely of unknowing that the sense of relief that I felt for me was was enough to put me on the path towards developing my faith in Christ and the more I find out about Christ but also the more of a personal relationship I developed with him
00:40:18
Speaker
the better my life is, I find my myself in a much better place, more connected, more at peace with the world. my My life is really meaningful now and very much enriched. So it was a personal evolution. The question of Christianity and the place of Christianity, the teachings of Christ, the morality, the moral ethics of Christianity,
00:40:48
Speaker
In society, I think you can say now where it's abandoned, problems emerge and these mad ideologies take hold. And if Christianity were as strong as it was in the 1950s, I think the ideologues would have a much harder time.
00:41:11
Speaker
finding converts to their pseudo-religions. Wokism has been described many times as a pseudo-religion, but there's also the emergence of Islamism. The Islamists are proselytizing with a great deal of energy and finding, they're finding takers, they're finding people who are spiritually confused and who are spiritually in need, and they think they have the answer. they A lot of women actually are turning to Islam, amazingly.
00:41:41
Speaker
And so I think that Christianity as a civilizational, moral, ethical foundation is extremely important and people are waking up to it. I want to give a shout out to someone like Jordan Peterson.
00:41:59
Speaker
who he's a teacher, he's a professor, and he's able to reach millions of people, especially young men, and turn them towards what really is their legacy, reorient them towards the story of Christianity and Judaism, Judeo-Christian tradition, 3,000 years of wisdom, which they inherited. And it's it's having an impact. it's It's effective. I don't know if you know about Arc,
00:42:28
Speaker
I do. We've spoken with John Anderson quite a lot about Arkana. He's intimately involved. It's a very important movement. John's work is fantastic within that community of Ark. Philippus Stroud has become a personal friend now. Winston Marshall and his father Paul Marshall. There are a lot of people who are involved and who see that we have to rebuild our culture from the ground up and that Christianity is a key part.
Courage Media and Cultural Restoration
00:43:01
Speaker
It's the key to reopening and and recapturing our cultural institutions and remoralizing our societies. That really is what it is about because I had written this piece where I invoke Yuri Bezmonov
00:43:19
Speaker
the Russian former KGB agent who was a dissident, and he explained how the Soviet Union uses subversion in open societies. And he he has these four the stages that he describes, demoralization, destabilization, crisis, normalization. And the demoralization process is really the, he says, it takes about 20 years. It's about the time that it takes to form the minds of gen of a generation.
00:43:51
Speaker
and That's what had happened to the West. There's a whole generation that was demoralized. and Could it be Soviet forces? It's in any case leftist forces, you know these postmodernist, socialist, Marxist, wokeist forces. and They had quite succeeded, in in my view, in demoralizing and in some cases even creating a state of crisis. and What we are doing now with ARC, what you're doing with these podcasts, the retaking of the media institutions, the attempts to retake the institutions of education. All of these are activities to remoralize our society, and Christianity is key. I feel like we've barely scratched the surface of of that particular conversation, but I will have to wait till ah till our next chat, Ayaan. Where can people engage with courage media? How can they get involved?
00:44:44
Speaker
Well, it's courage.media and we've, I've got people writing for me. Sometimes I write myself. I've started podcasting as well. So if you have anything to say and you think you are a whistleblower, you want to report something, you think.
00:45:01
Speaker
It takes courage to say what you want to say. Write to us, write for us, come and talk to us on our podcasts. That's what the platform is for. Again, it's part of this, what should I say, where I'd call it seed packets. I don't know if you remember, I had done an interview with, well, I was with us Guinness.
00:45:23
Speaker
The interview was conducted, I think, by Jordan Peterson. And Oskiness was saying, he was worried that our civilization had become a cut flower civilization. And I thought, but we have seed packets and carriage is one of those seed packets of trying to bring back, you know, to restore us back to what we were.
Conclusion and Subscription Offer
00:45:45
Speaker
So engage with us, carriage.media.
00:45:48
Speaker
It's an absolutely wonderful sentiment to end on. A link is in the show notes for everyone who wants to get involved and and ah engage with the content. Ayaan, this has been a pleasure. Thank you for coming on Fire at Will. Well, thank you very much. Thank you for having me and thank you for being a part of the Fightback. Thanks for listening to this episode of Fire at Will. If you enjoyed the show, why not consider a subscription to The Spectator Australia? The magazine is home to wonderful writing,
00:46:16
Speaker
insightful analysis and unrivalled books and arts reviews. A subscription gets you all of the content from the British edition of the magazine, as well as the best Australian political commentary. Subscribe today for just $2 a week for a year. No, I'm not joking. $2 a week for an entire year. A link is in the show notes. so