God, Marxism, and the Fall of the West | Ayaan Hirsi Ali | EP 457

Coming up after the process of dentification what follows is another Reckoning why would a society as advanced as Germany fall victim to ideas that later on we all understood to be so [Music] Intro destructive hello everybody I had the privileged today to speak with aan hery Ali who I don't know if you took the 10 bravest people in the world she'd be one of them as far as I can tell and she made a remarkable Splash years ago with her first book Infidel which talked about her experience about moving from Somalia to the Netherlands which is like the Center of Western civilization and so that was a great book and aan has had a very storied political career to say the least and uh a threatened life in many way standing up against the Islamic fundamentalists she's recently converted to Christianity which is also a stunningly Brave move for someone in her situation and and she's launched a new Enterprise called restoration which is a a substack media Enterprise designed to make a case for the necessary Primacy and uh what would you say uh Bedrock foundational necessity of the presumptions of Western Civilization um and so we had a chance to talk about all that and so I would say it'll be 90 minutes well worth your while with the additional conversation that I had with her as well on the daily wire side so um welcome everybody uh listen and Diane that's always worthwhile she's she's a real force of Nature and so uh as I said it was a privilege to talk to her again all right so you've recently announced a new writing and media Restoration Bulletin Endeavor and I've been following that quite avidly particularly on Twitter and so called restoration and so do you want to tell us how that came to be and what it is and what you're hoping to accomplish with it well restoration I think the word says it it is my mission is to restore um the our institutions that you and I love to their original missions um ideas um our culture uh the origins and history of our culture um institutions like the family schools the university um Democratic institutions uh what political parties are supposed to do what our governments are supposed to do what they're not supposed to do um and then uh discourse a lot of us have been t talking quite a bit about freedom of speech and uh the the institutions that protect freedom of speech um the Free Press uh all of these have been um in my view they've been subverted there's been an an effort to subvert our institutions and we're in a place now where uh we we cannot uh communicate with people we disagree with or we have a different perspective from without immediately seeing an enemy status in them and I think the the the first and most important thing to do is to to bring back that Civic discourse when I came to Europe in 1992 and and over the course of the first 10 years of uh my residence there uh conversations between people who disagree with one another were seen as What defined Europe and what defined the west and what made it different from other places and now look at where we are and so restoration is U an attempt to awaken people to uh recognize what's at stake and and then to restore um yeah in one word to restore sanity okay so so you you brought up a lot of points there which and I want to delve into them one by one you I guess The subversion of the West: “we all feel that something is off” I'll start with a an overarching question and then drill in a little bit um do you find yourself surprised to have developed the beliefs that you have developed I mean in your description of your project you pointed to the you know the dissolution of Civic discourse the threat to democratic institutions the threat to our culture the collapse of freedom of speech and those are all all of those are serious charges right especially let's say the observation of subversion and it's difficult to it's easy for let's see it's easy for the apprehension of something like subversion to be tossed into the conspiracy theorist bin let's say that I meaning the things that you've been writing about in restoration and pointing to they're they're quite dramatic and so let's do two things the first is why don't you talk a bit more about what you mean by subversion where that might be stemming from right because that's well that's a mysterious question and then also address the issue of whether or not you find yourself surprised to be in the position that you're in having to say the sorts of things let's say that you're saying to be now so let's start with subversion I the opening essay in subversion the bulletin so my platform on substack has to do with I I start by describing the fact that many of us feel that something is off and that uh like in the parable of the Buddhists we're all trying to figure out what is it that is off so we're all these blind people we're touching different parts of the elephant and we we're trying to figure out what this hole is um when I look at these uh you know take any list uh I'm in the academic wall and I see what has happened to Academia from the time I came as a student in 1995 in the University of Leiden to my present role uh at Stanford and there is just this um Channing out of very expensive useless degrees in gender and race and you name it that's the universities K22 there is this crisis that I see because I'm a parent uh parents around me homeschooling their children um going from a to be just completely confused about what is it that's going on with our education systems they're on the brink of collapse there are these statements that are contrary to reality that there is an endless number of genders there's this whole uh what seemed like in you know 10 15 years ago when I first heard about terms like intersectionality and oppressor and oppressed and all the rest of it it just seemed like to me juvenile intellectual mishmash nonsensical the sort of things that fast year freshman is uh students uh dapple in and then they grow up and they grow out of it and then Along Comes 2020 and we have that incident with George Floyd in the United States of America and what then happens is what I only see can describe as a revolution because we went full on with the defund the police um let's abolish SATs and other standardized tests mathematics uh is racist everything is racist and and this demolition clearly demolition of ideas and institutions of like the family education and uh I'm I'm looking at this and I'm thinking this is familiar um and let's pay attention to the people who are leading the charge in these projects to destroy the structures that and the institutions that have served us so well and on the one hand you have these identity politics cultural marxists that have developed these elaborate Theory theories that they call critical theory critical theories and it's not a conspiracy Theory Jordan they stated as clearly as possible that they want to bring down they they point to all of these injustices and they say the answer to all of this is to bring down these structures and Destroy them and then on the other hand I see the islamists and the islamists have never really been dishonest it was always in your face but they fast tried many years to bring down our system through Terror and terrorist flots and Relentless terrorist attempts and they failed at that uh we are militarily and economically and technologically Superior to them and so obviously they went down the path of Da which is a religious subversion which is uh uh it has a much longer timeline and then of course you look at the CCP and Putin and these are external adversaries and they're looking at what's going on on our soil domestically and they would be St stupid not to take advantage of that um so as I try to uh look into and analyze again think of me as one of the blind men touching the elephant is to say where have we seen this before now communist attempts at subverting the West are as old as as communism they're as old as um you know the times of the Bolsheviks and Lenin and all various marxists and when the Soviet Union was established they had programs to subvert us and it was Mutual we had programs to subvert them um so when you listen I quote Yuri basmanov at length where he describes U their length um I I you just listen to him and the institutions that he describes and the intended effects of that kind of subversion and it's right before your eyes you don't really need a conspiracy a theorist for that the islamist it's the same thing what's interesting about all of this is to see this collusion between the islamists and Collusion between Islamists and Neo-Marxists and the Neo marxists or cultural marxists uh what is called the Unholy green red Alliance some people describe it as the watermelon and you think okay where is this going qu for Palestine looks nice in Colombia on a um these things that on a plaque that students hold up but what would queers look like if they were actually in Gaza or the West Bank we know what they look we know what happens um but that aside uh the question of is there subversion and is has it been effective uh are we on the brink to all of that the answer is yes and my remedy for that is restoration recognize the institution the ideas you know it's our Elites um and and then we have to come together and and restore this and so not together in in this empty sort of platitudinous ways but to say we used to what made us different as Western societies is that we used to disagree and actually we used to think it was fun to disagree the other day I had a debate with but I didn't think of it as a debate I thought it was a lovely conversation with Richard Dawkins where I mean we live in a world where a lot of people who watched that discussion their takeaway was not oh how interesting um this one has to say that and you know what are the arguments that they're making Etc no it was um you know there was suddenly this enemy friend thing U yeah and and I think the for me the the the greatest takeaway from that whole thing was the hug at the beginning and hug at the end that it is possible to disagree on fundamental issues and continue to have that affection for one another and and if you don't want to have affection for one another still you know peaceful handshake and and then well with with Dawkins in particular like I've met him Good dialogue and cultural Christianity a couple of times and I've read his books and I learned a lot from his books and one of the things that I've thought about Dawkins all along and I think this is reflected in the fact that he described himself as a cultural Christian recently is that he is a good scientist and a good scientist is someone who strives to seek the truth and I think that truth seeking is a religious Enterprise and so a true scientist is embedded in a religious Enterprise and I think that's why Richard Dawkins understands that he's a cultural Christian but it's very there's many things that Dr Dawkins and I don't see eye to eye about but some of that is because we don't understand each other like a fair bit of it and some of it is that the issue at hand is insanely complex and difficult to figure out and neither of us should be presuming that we've got the right answer and then the discourse that you're describing which is competitive discourse should be conducted in a manner that enables both of the participants to further seek the truth and then you actually want that enmity so to speak you want the person you're talking to to come at you with ideas that you haven't heard and positions that you haven't thought through because in principle they move you closer to the truth and so in hypothetically Dr Dawkins and I will be speaking at some time in the in the next few months we're trying to arrange that now and I'm looking forward to it because I think that we can talk because I think that he's trying to pursue the truth and I found the same thing with Sam Harris and I recently spoke to Dan danet which went very well I managed to speak to him in in a few short weeks before his demise and we had a very productive conversation and you want conversations between people who don't hold the same Viewpoint if they're reliable people because that's where the real thinking takes place and so for me what you just The rise of tribalism in the West, metastasizing Marxism described was the defining feature of Western Civilization I came from I was born in Somalia and I lived in Saudi Arabia and I lived in Kenya and I lived in Ethiopia and then I landed in the Netherlands in 1992 and there was so many differences between the world uh the non-western world I grew up in and the Western world that I came to but the one thing that I would say was really different and was this that you can't really have these radically different views you can be religious you can be atheist you can be pro market you can be anti-market you can in fact in the streets of America shout the most anti-American things even burn the American flag and that that is protected that for me was wow and when I say let's talk about restoration I'm now seeing a breakdown of that a near collapse of that on the political level on the academic level on the Civic level on the journalism level we are breaking up into tribes like the world where I came from where you have not the pursuit of the truth but ownership of the truth My Truth Versus your truth and that kind of nonsense is now a serious serious Dee rooted problem in the west and that I think is an outcome of subversion well okay so so let's let's take that apart further so you talk about a uh relapse into a kind of tribalism of idea ownership so there's a disintegration of something that was unified into a more plur ralistic tribal landscape okay so that's one of the things let's Identify some of the other characteristics of the collapse so we could talk about purposeful and accidental subversion so let's start with the marxists with regard to purposeful subversion okay so KL Marx split the world into oppressor and oppressed in an envious manner presuming that all the moral virtue was with the oppressed and all the evil was with the oppressor and that that all could be understood from within the framework of Economics so the primary axis of Oppression and oppressed for Marx was the economic axis and he presumed that the reason that that inequality between oppressor and oppressed exist was because of the structure of capitalism at least that's what he claimed now whether or not he believed that is a whole different issue okay so now I want to take that in two directions I want to point to how that's metastasized into what I think is less than ideally conceptualized as cultural Marxism and I want to also discuss its precursors its archetypal precursors okay so what seems to me to have happened and I want your thoughts on this is that Marx established the framework for an elaborated victim victimizer narrative but he basically stuck to the economic realm when he made that case now as the revolution unfolded what we found out was that the subversion of the capitalist order in favor of the oppressed only produced the universalization of poverty and produced no viable redistribution of equity or income and so by the 1970s the holess of the economic approach to the victim victimizer had been demonstrated so thoroughly that even idiot marxists in France were forced to accept it and so you know the proof is compelling when a French intellectual is forced to swallow it and so then what happened as far as I could tell is the postmodernists who were all Marxist at their core decided that there was no utility in beating the economic inequality drum anymore but that they could fragment the victim victimizer narrative into a metastasis and say well the basic idea that it was a power Dynamic that ruled everything was correct but we underestimated the seriousness of the power dynamic because it shows up in the relationship between men and women and it shows up in the patriarchal structure of the family and it shows up in the dynamic of sex and then the dynamic of gender and race and ethnicity so all of a sudden you had victim between countries sure sure between races between tribes you can understand the postmodern claim was you could was that even though they purported to dispense with the idea of a superordinate meta narrative they smuggled in the power narrative as the fundamental exploratory concept and then metastasized it to account for to explain the relations between human beings regardless of how they categorized themselves so that every group categorization became a locus of power and exploitation right and so now we have a metastic Marxism Okay so bringing it forward now I want to bring it backward and you tell me what you think about this because I think Marxism itself is a variant of something more deeper much deeper so there's a there's a Marxist likee spirit that inverts the French Revolution soon after it occurs and so and that was well before Marx and and I I've been thinking more archetypally let's say in in Rel relationship to fundamental stories that Marxism is a variant Marxism versus capitalism let's say as a variant of the story of Cain and Abel right because Cain and Abel is really the first victim victimizer narrative and it basically presents the human moral landscape because it's the first story about human beings in history right cuz Adam and Eve were in the Garden of Eden let's say Cain and Abel are the first two human beings that are born in the world of history and they develop modes of being that are antithetical to one another with Cain being the oppressed angry bitter malevolent murderous and then genocidal victim and Abel being the successful right the successful individual who strives forward aims up and makes the proper sacrifices now that's presented in the biblical Corpus as the fundamental spiritual Division and Cain's failure to make the proper offering and then his Rebellion against God like there's a luciferian touch to that and it's definitely something that attracted Marx because Marx was a admirer of mephistophiles of girth is mephistophiles and mephistophiles was the variant of the usur ing Spirit whose motivation was nothing but destruction you know you talked about the attack on all the levels of subsidiary Society simultaneously right I mean the marxists definitely planned that we can't have marriage because men and women are in a power battle we can't have families because the family is a patriarchal oppressive institution we can't have communities because all po should be deeded to the state seeded to the state Etc but it seems to me that all of that has that roots in that fundamental antagonism that's laid out initially in the story of Cain and Abel and what we are seeing is we're seeing variant of that story play out and also at an accelerated rate because of the rate of technological change so well so I've been thinking about those things a lot that's what I've been lecturing about on this last tour and in part that's what my new book is about so curious about your reaction first of all to the idea of a metastasizing Marxism and then to the idea that Marxism itself is a variant of a it's a retelling of a more fundamental story um so fascinating and I'm glad you're doing this okay so my two reactions then or just as I was listening to you um one um thing that has occurred to me is marks and his work and his legacy and what we've done with it so um you know this history better than I do but the reaction he was hoping for he had created a new NE religion Marxism it failed because instead of people sticking his followers his own disciples sticking with his Revolution goals what sprung up is the reformists basically what I'm getting at I'm schooled in political science you're psychologist but it was you know the left and the right the left divided up into these two branches and one branch is fully Marxist and revolutionary and committed to the Revolution and the other one becomes reformist and I think that is the first defeat of the Marxist idea that instead of over Hing the capitalist system you work within the capitalist system and through incremental means everybody's life gets better so that was the first defeat up until 1989 the that whole economic argument of take from the rich give to the poor uh falls apart when it becomes I think obvious if you if you stick with the material economic uh the economic top topic that the Soviet Union collapses and not only is that does the Soviet Union all have satellites everywhere that's these five-year plans touch you have Devastation you have masses of deaths you have uh concentration camps you have starvation um and then you look at the west and there's growth and and so on so in 1989 I think there is this sense the winners the Victoria those who are victorious maybe you want to say you were comparing Kan and Abel you can say those who are victorious make one big mistake in my view after 1989 which is they forget about it they think we've won this right history is over history is over let's move on the loser for the loser history is never over for the loser history begins when he loses he has to shake off all of this and come up and come back and they come back now with this idea of identity groups of culture the person who can tell this way better than I can is James Lindsay who has been through all of their Creeds and Creeds and is really eloquent in the way he tells this right right but they divert towards the culture thing but my takeaway as as a relatively new Westerner is I come into this world of ideas good ideas bad ideas I'm 22 years old I'm trying to find an explanation for why are these rich countries rich and Powerful why are poor countries poor uh I was a Muslim so it's like if we have the as a Muslim if I have God's last prophet God's last book God is on my side then why are we poor and miserable and and so on and so in that world of ideas um in the 1990s when I'm going to University I'm acquainted with the idea of national socialism that nearly destroyed European society and Western society and what follows after the defeat listen to this Jordan after the defeat of national socialism what happens is a an intense process of denazification in fact using some of the tools of subversion that bov speaks about and after the process of deification what follows is another Reckoning of what was national socialism and why would a society as advanced as Germany fall victim to ideas that later on we all understood to be so destructive this is in in my classrooms okay this is what's happening I I I come into the West just as it's going through that Reckoning of the idea and the idea is um forensically scrutinized and it it it becomes after we fully understand what Hitler's uh ideas were that this is something that would never and should never happen again now this is something we did not do to Communism right right right definitely not yeah after the fall of the Soviet Union there was no campaign of decommunization or Demar ification of of everything and anything there was no Reckoning so up until I think 2002 2003 we were still finding individuals who had been found to be active or sympathizers with Hitler we were trying them still we were still trying to go after them and put them in jail but we never did anything of the sort with Marxism so the first thing I noticed the big thing is of course this this terrible idea keeps recurring and it's tzes and it manifests itself in different ways because for the young Generations it never really has been here this is what Marxism L to the the death toll I mean we all have been schooled in how many people actually died but more interesting I think more fascinating is the the nazzi psyche do you know we we explored it to the point that right now there are conversations we can't have have without everyone referencing Nazism in fact I think one of the reasons why Europe is completely paralyzed when it comes to the issue of immigration is because that there is this Terror this fear that they might fall again into that nasty Collective Madness of putting putting people in concentration clamps we haven't done that to to to Marks we haven't in ideas of Marx and communism and I think it's a bit we are a bit on the latest de side but we should do it have you ever heard of a data broker they're the middlemen collecting and selling all those digital Footprints you leave online they can stitch together detailed profiles that include your browsing history online searches and location data they'll then sell your profile off to a company who uses it to deliver targeted ads no biggie right well you might be surprised to learn that these same data Brokers are also selling your information to the Department of Homeland Security and the IRS I for one don't want the tax Band showing up at my door because 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that we assumed too prematurely after 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union that the spirit of Communism was dead and buried right now if that spirit is a reflection of something far deeper say like the Eternal antagonism between Cain and Abel then it's not going to be dead and buried or at least it's not going to stay buried without a lot of work and your point is well we didn't do that work now we might have thought that the object lesson of the collapse of the Soviet Union Plus the capitalist transformation of China and the Triumph of the democracies was enough evidence that the West had something right but apparently no the house cleaning wasn't deep enough well then you point out though that there there's an additional problem which is that we're not exactly sure how to handle interesing conflicts at a deep ideological level without falling preyed is something like the worst excesses of the Nazi regime it's like well let's imagine for example that we did do something like a Demar ification of the institutions I've been thinking about this in relationship to universities so you know when when musk took over Twitter and Demar ified it he fired like 80% of the people now I do not believe for a moment that an institution like Harvard can be reconstituted or restored when all of the same players are still in place and they're doing the same thing with different words now you know I just met a couple of Harvard professors last week when I was in Boston who are at the Forefront of the genuinely active Free Speech movement at Harvard they have I think 140 professors that my number may be wrong but it's a substantial number of professors who are pushing the administration hard and have and Harvard has claimed proclaimed in the last couple of weeks like Stanford I believe they've adopted an official position of institutional neutrality at least with regard to their public utterances but there's all sorts of machinations still going on behind the scenes okay so what's my point well if 80% of the institutions are corrupt and that's the accusation from the conservatives well first of all that risks falling into the hands of the radical leftists who say while the institutions are corrupt we told you so and so that's a big problem but even worse it's like if the corruption is as pervasive as you indicate and I have every reason to agree with you then how is it even possible that these institutions can be restored and reconstituted and how is that possible without us falling into something like ideological persecution you know like I watch Chris rufo in Florida and I I think Chris is aiming up and I like Ron DeSantis and think he's got a good moral kill but I could easily see that their attempts to exert legislative control from the top over the universities could easily devolve into a counterproductive Witch Hunt and so okay so now what we're doing about what I'm doing about that for example is we're launching Peterson Academy at the end of June and I'm involved with Ralston College in in in Georgia trying to generate institutions that offer an alternative but I don't have any idea at all how the institutions that are already in place can be Dem marifi so you're you have your restoration Enterprise and that's devoted to the same thing but that doesn't help us with the nitty-gritty here it's like the K through2 education system is completely dominated by the worst possible students of the worst faculty at the university the faculties of Education that's been going on for four generations and it's completely corrupt at every possible level okay what the hell do you do about that in a manner that you know doesn't become oppressive and tyrannical in and of itself so have add her what are your thoughts about that what I found uh wonderful about bezmenov's um layout is that it allows you every time to take a step back so that you don't become part of the subversion process yourself with what you're doing um and I think that's what you're worried about is uh we don't want uh Christopher rufo who I think is doing admirable work by exposing the corruption and by showing uh he he's he he I just love his grit um that how do we stop where do we where do we stop you know how do we not become part of I mean he he right how do we not go too far how do we not go too far so I think if we just have if we step back from that table that that basov lays out and you say Okay um we are an open Society he makes a distinction between open societies and closed societies and we we know that the characteristics of an open Society is that um it's easier for the for es of subversion to access our institutions and not only to access those institutions but actually to use uh the laws and the conventions of open societies to establish themselves within universities k212 and all the various just within our society and so we don't want to become closed societies we have to pay the price of being an open society and remaining an open society and one of those prices is this permanent vigilance where we can never forget what these ideological threats are but also we must not allow ourselves to fall into this stap of everything is gone because I think if you say all of these institutions are corrupt Beyond repair uh in a way you do sort of um Propel the subversion further and you validate it and and I think um we have to look at what are strengths are and let's not forget we we have uh enormous resources for instance the market so when the Meltdown of our mainstream media which is really a meltdown uh our our the open Society what we responded is this Independent Media which obviously Elon Musk is this giant who stood up to not uh just by establishing Twitter but using his power and his leadership to say this is what I stand for so that his millions of followers know what his morals are and what his principles are so for me Elon Musk is the definition of courage standing up to all these different forces putting his own um almost his life at stake and his his life's earnings and Elon Musk is this big visible guy but there's so many people like that and and I come across them every day so we have all of all of these resources and starting new things like new universities New Media and I think that's a good thing if only even to catch uh some of those people who despair of of the existing institutions the brand Harvard is now now tainted I think in many ways the brand Harvard is ruined but I don't think we should throw the baby with the bath water we should not throw the baby out with the bath water we should not declare that um the IV league and all of the universities that we have in America and and Beyond in Western societies are Beyond repair I think some of them are terminal and have stage four cancer and it'll probably cost more to try and rescue them than to just let them die but I think there are many that can be rescued Ben SAS has made this very clear in Florida um you just have to change the leadership in some of these places in other places you have to go much deeper and you know and and and turn around the demoralization process the places that are actually on the level of destabilization try to turn those things around but all of that starts with leadership and we've got to find have you talked to have you talked to John schmers by any chance um I don't think I have okay well De-Radicalization: Germany and Gaza he's a military strategist at West Point yeah right and he we just had a very interesting discussion which you might want to check out about how see it's very much related for example to this idea of densification that you described so in his analysis of the history of military endeavor he's also thought through from a strategic perspective some of what's necessary in the transformation of Institutions because certainly it was the case that after Nazi Germany most of the Germans it wasn't like all the Germans who participated in some ways in the Nazi regime were all tried and executed or confined to predition most of them except for a few leaders were regarded as redeemable and the leadership transition happened at the top and chers told me you know I asked him what he thought about the situation in Gaza because so many of the Palestinians purport to support the Hamas regime and its aims and so a pessimist might say well that has to be dealt with in the most severe possible Manner and Optimist and hopefully a realist would say well no if you're careful in analysis of the key people you can produce a leadership change and then a transformation of spirit let's say that redeems people who've been possessed by these pathological ideas and then like Germany or like Japan which are Stellar examples of this obviously and and and uh well South Korea for that matter at least in in terms of economic transformation that great things are still possible without institutional Devastation so that is a good vision of that is a good vision of optimism if you can I and I suppose rufo did that to some degree by focusing his attention for example on Claudine gay which was an object lesson that perhaps many institutions took to heart and it's also that is why the trajectory of restoration is I hope is one that is going to be fruitful um and it's I think we are in a place where Jordan I've never been more optimistic um and and the reason is because people are waking up and they're waking people who are I mean busy with their Industries and busy with their art with their music with whatever it is that they were doing this subversion virus is touch on everyone's lives um there are people who are happy to ignore these things because they hate trouble they don't like politics they don't want to be involved in other FS I'd say the general public in the west is is just loves going about their lives and by the way that is you know when we talk about Freedom most of us really think about that is you know we we elect people who represent us and we pay taxes and I just want to go get on with my life and that's no longer possible people are feeling affected in every way shape and form October 7 opened the eyes of many people our friend Barry Wise I remember she said everyone went to bed on October 7 and was what did she say uh went to bed as a liberal and work up as a conservative or yeah you can well we'll see you can put it fun like I well I wrote an article The victim/victimizer narrative is a major problem for Jews which I'm going to read on my on my YouTube channel and publish on my blog I wrote an article I'll just lay it out for you very quickly because I guess it's a bit of a push back against your optimism although I share that optimism in a fundamental way um I don't want to get optimistic too early so here's the basic outline of the argument so um and I sent it to the National Post in Canada which always publishes what I wrote and they took it and then rejected it and then I sent it to the telegraph which also always publishes what I send them and they took it and edited it and then rejected so this is what I said you know it's a very contentious piece so I pointed to the fact that in the United States something approximating 75% of the Jewish population supports the Democrats now the problem with with that is the Democrats have allowed themselves to be infiltrated by the radicals who they will not attend to and whose existence they deny and I know this full well having worked on this issue for like five years and talked to hordes of moderate Democrats oh they don't really exist oh they don't really mean that it's like yeah they mean exactly what they're saying the the radicals have adopted the victim victimizer narrative now the problem with that for the Jews is that if we're going to play victim victimizer and the victims are the people who or the victimizers are the people who are successful then the Jews are first on the firing line like they always have been since the time of Exodus because the Jews are the perpetually successful minority and I think that's why they're the canary in the coal mine is that when a society flips and the successful become the criminals let's say in the eyes of the ideologues the first criminals identified are the Jews because they they are over represented in positions of success and so part of what I suggested and this is what Barry Weiss has realized let's say is that um the worst possible game for the Jewish Community to play is any game that has anything to do with a victim victimizer narrative now there's something also very interesting about that like I've spent a lot of time looking at the Old Testament in recent years and there's something very interesting about the Israelites at least in so far as they maintain their alliance with the prophetic tradition and the laws is that every time something untoward happens to Israel the prophets call upon the Jews to take personal responsibility for that and not to regard themselves as victims no matter what to reestablish their Covenant so that would be this restoration and to proceed with cleaning up the what would you say the cancer in their own Souls first and that always works and so well now you said that you know things shift dramatically after October 7th but I'm wondering like do and this is with regards to your ISM after October 7th we saw the universities go so absolutely out of their mind that kman himself the president of Iran congratulated them on their efforts on his behalf and suggested that they started reading the start reading the Quran we saw these encampments and occupations everywhere and that man I was just in DC this week and there were huge Pro Palestine Pro Iran demonstrations everywhere so okay so with all of that what why is it do you think that you're still optimistic because it's outrageous like that the supreme leader of Iran who shouts and compels his population to shout death with America for years and who's been trying to achieve exactly that and been trying to achieve the destruction and annihilation of the state of Israel finding Waters in our Ivy Leagues and on our streets it's exactly these outrages that force uh the left in general and in How Europe failed at integration: “we are becoming like them” particular the Democratic party to face the reality that you have been trying to draw their attention to and that we've all been trying to draw the there is there are two branches of the left the revolutionaries and there are the reformists and the revolutionaries now seem to be on top because this what you call them moderates um I think in academic jargon they're the ones who are for reform they they wouldn't say defund the police they would say let's see what's wrong with the police and let's tweak with the institution not bring the institution down so those moderates most moderate lefts Mo moderate Democrats those who are for reform I think they're having reality rubbed in their noses now and it's happening not because of what you and I see but because of what these outrages that we're witnessing these so-called Pro Palestine protests they are not pro Palestine protests they're Pro Hamas protests and they're seeing this for themselves the slogans things that these people are shouting and not only just what they shout but I think even the tiniest amount of curiosity will take you to go and take a Peak at this syllabi the syllabuses that are uh taught in these universities what is it that these kids are learning and you go through these books courses images that they taught and you see immediately left or right that there's something there that shouldn't be there and so I see this Awakening I see these Mega doners who are giving billions and billions to what they thought was social justice coming around and seeing hang on a minute and many of them are Jewish and looking at this and thinking hang on a minute this is not what my philanthropy was about so I think there is a long awaited audit um that that is about to happen that is happening and so in order to get to this point of restoration we have to do the audit first and we have to do it together that is uh the moderate left the moderate Democrats the moderate Republicans and conservatives it is those people on either side of whatever the argument is of the moment to actually freeze for a moment some of these issues and say hang on how do we cope with this enemy that really wants to rip things apart this these revolutionary uh groups and so and and I and I see more and more people asking these questions and what I find delightful is that every time one of the people who wasn't aware of these things who wakes up he says I'm the fasion to see it or and it doesn't matter it's great it's great because they think why didn't I see it in the past I was having conversations in 2005 2006 that if the islamist driven anti-Semitism continues unchecks in that infrastructure of Da where they building mosques and madrasas and preaching and and then it went online if that goes unchecked all you have to do is Compare the numbers the number of Jewish people in the west versus the number the increasing number of Muslims that are being radicalized through these daa efforts and people who are converted into Islam and down the road you are going to have a huge problem and uh some of the people I was talking we have it now already we have but I was saying this in 2004 2005 oh yes oh yes yes of course so and and the reason for having those conversations was they were making demands the political islamists were making demands that the Holocaust cannot be taught in school they're not talking about Muslim Schools they're talking about public schools public schools in the Netherlands in France in Germany Etc and the leaders of that time were through consensus trying to be nice and accommodating why saying all right then um we we'll we'll just not teach that that is 2004 2005 they were shouting Hamas Hamas Jews to the gas they were disrupting um um the commemorations to the death of the people who died during the second world war and all of that was at that time 15 20 years ago it was seen as it's going to pass the longer they live here the more they will integrate and assimilate they will become like us now 20 years on no we are becoming like them and people who are well the same thing's true of China oh yes right we assumed that if we brought China into the West that China would become Western and what's happening instead is that at the first hint of serious trouble let's say the pandemic the so-called pandemic we became China and so and it's not obvious at all that the CPCC is budging and it is absolutely obvious that they're building the eye of soron and would like to produce a totalitarian state so absolute that we can hardly even comp comprehend it and they're a long way ahead with doing that sleep is a foundation for our mental and physical health in other words you've got to have a consistent 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get up to 40% off for a limited time when you go to shop beam.com Peterson and use code Peterson checkout that's shop beam.com Peterson and use code Peterson for up to 40% off okay so let me let me to ask you let's turn a bit here we've done a bit Recognizing that we are lost: spiritual bankruptcy of diagnosis we've talked about the pervasiveness of the problem we've talked talked about your hypothesis that we have to do a very careful consideration of the current circumstance and identification of the leaders let's say um we have to confront face Toof face the pervasive subversion of our institutions we have to separate the wheat from the chaff and reestablish them and we have to move towards restoration you can see in that sort of a confession what would you say a confession a um and a move towards atonement and so on the restoration side so let's delve into that now the first question might be well what exactly are we restoring and I've been talking to some of the principles at the alliance for responsible citizenship about exactly this in the last weeks trying to plot our way forward and so in the alliance for responsible citizenship we off we we identified six or seven key domains right restoration of the nuclear family Unapologetic support for the idea that the nuclear family is the minimal viable social unit right the we support for the notion that energy should made be made as lowc cost and freely accessible and what easily accessible to people within a market framework as possible so that we can work towards eradicating absolute poverty environmentalism as stewardship and not as what would you say apocalyptic fear-mongering in the service of the tyrants concern about globalization and Regulatory capture and fascist corporate capitalist collusion um the telling of a better story and we've more recently agreed that all of that is integrated into something approximating let's say your vision of restoration is that we're trying to put the underpinnings of Western Civilization back in place and trying to make a very strong case including to people like Richard Dawkins and Douglas Murray well and and even you in some ways until recently let's say that there is a relationship between the foundations of Western culture and something that's even deeper that's not political and so that's the next thing I wanted to talk to you about so and maybe we could approach that you I guess we could approach that personally now for a long while in my understanding after you moved to the west and you became more acutely aware of the advantages of free discourse and of the tyrannical aspect of the philosophical milu that you'd been raised in you were an admirer admirer of the west but also attracted towards the more atheistic philosophy let's say that was put forth by Dawkins and Harris and Hitchens and the the horsemen of the atheist movement and and so do you want to walk us through that a little bit if you would before that I had read Jonathan Israel um yeah I mean we don't have much time so and I don't want to make a caricature of this uh of of what I believe is a very important if not the most important aspect of of the restoration is uh the roots to seek The Roots I say Christians sometimes we say Jude or Christian Roots of what has made you know the foundations on which these societies are built yeah well we'll take the time I'm not going to rush you for sure I'd like to let this unfold because it's crucially important yeah on the personal side as I have told it a few times and it's very very personal um I have had uh my own Awakening that has to do with um mental uh breakdown um depression anxiety all of these things the meaning and purpose of life and not finding I just couldn't find it I didn't find it in the material world and I to to give you an example if you think of someone like me who comes from um you know I grew up in a childhood where there was very little um little of everything little food little water no water I mean we we didn't have running water um um scarcity uh not there were people who were poorer than us but we were poor uh I remember books I I loved books and they weren't books so you know sometimes I would finish uh a book that I borrowed or that we borrowed from the library and the last few pages which is where the resolution of the story is uh would have fallen out of that book and I would go to a Bookshop pretend I was buying the book actually read the last pages in the book shop and then leave until our Indian uh book sellers noticed what we were doing and chased us out of the so that level of yeah of poverty and so then I come where there's plenty and I find myself in my 40s and 50s um surrounded by absolutely every materially completely satiated uh happily married two children everything that you would describe would give meaning and purpose and yet there I was completely uh yeah depressed and unhappy and terrified and all the rest of it and uh and I was self-medicating I was self-medicating with with with wine with alcohol and and that was where my my goto was that actually brought itself brought me on the brink of Destruction and I I sought help and the help went from obviously with my me focusing on uh the material again uh scientific help I'm going to see people who I trust to be the professionals who will fix me and fix this need and and that didn't happen uh they were good people I learned a lot I learned a lot about the human brain the human psyche I respect and and I'm still a huge admirer of some of the people that I saw but the one person who made a change was you're looking in the wrong places uh hard diagnosis was what you're going through is uh it's spiritual bankruptcy MH and once I in my uh sort of last moment of Despair when I allowed that to come in and to to register um and I I surrendered to that uh it's only after that uh literally on my knees in prayer that things started to change and so on a personal level and this is extremely subjective I'm not imposing it on anyone else um I have undergone this change that has transformed My Life um if you allow me to go a little bit beyond it is when I look around and talk to the same people who were in the same boats as I am or as I was um the stories we share are stories of this abiding success over many years and it's the people who who went down the path of spirituality to fix what it was that bottomless void the Cravings the endless thoughts that colonize your head and never go away so again this isn't a statistical empirical study this is purely anecdotal I see people who keep on failing I see people I think have some success and I look at them and it's the ones who went down that spiritual path and when I say that when I say spiritual path I'm not saying it's Christianity or any other Faith or organized Faith it's just for some people it's it's Buddhism for some people it's mindfulness and and like Harris for example yeah yeah and I and I don't think I don't know I mean I haven't really talked to Sam Harris about his spiritual welfare but I've talked to him a bunch about it you know and it's clear that Sam you know Sam has found in the realm of something approx ating an ineffable and non articulate Buddhism the spiritual sakur that that materialist atheism lacks and I think the reason that Sam was attracted to the more abstract religious domains of experience the ones that aren't articulated into a Creed which is something he really still rejects is because Sam knows perfectly well that if the Transcendent that he's making contact with through his meditative practice was transformed into a Creed that his ravenous luciferian intellect would just shred it in a moment and he'd be right back where he started this is also why I think I am like if you look on the Christian Revival side of things that the Christian denominations that are growing most rapidly aren't the more explicit Protestant formulations they're the really conservative branches like Orthodox Christianity and even Latin Mass Catholicism because those religious practices are so densely embedded in the ritual and the ceremonial that they're almost impervious to rational critique right because how do you you can't criticize A Hymn you can't criticize a beautiful building like they speak for themselves and so and so so let me ask you a personal question if you're you're I want to comment on on on Sam and see I think I think Sam is he's he's just got this commitment to The Pursuit Of Truth and so I haven't spoken to him since my conversion and I'm going to make the I've been very busy I know he's I know he's also very very busy but I would be really fascinated to have a conversation with him about it because um yes that's necessary he is just so so committed to and so when when we talk about these different levels of consciousness and different levels and ples of perception I am so curious to know what he thinks of that what he would say about that I've spoken to Richard Richard is also another pursuer of Truth and I think in many ways that's why Richard has come to the conclusion that he is a cultural Christian and that Christianity has has a a value in that sense but again I really do want to separate these uh two things where I'm still at heart a classical liberal in the sense I really do want to respect people's conscience and people's um um people's perceptions and the way people live and so in no way imposing anything saying oh you know I've gone through this uh a terrible experience and I've come out of it and now Heavens everybody has to come to Christianity that is not that's not what I'm saying um I'm saying in my work in the realm of ideas and in in this quest to understand subversion who is subverting us and all of this Christianity um is one of probably the most important idea for us to grasp even if I were an atheist I would say that the most important ideas to grasp because it takes us to the roots of of our civilization and if you want to reject parts of it that's okay but I think the wholesale rejection of Christianity and it is legacy is precisely what brought us where we are that's that's why we're in the sorts of trouble we are in are you or someone you know fighting the battle against cancer for the last 25 years invita medical centers have been pioneering personalized cuttingedge treatment programs for patients all over the world invita has been the leader for patients looking for advanced immunotherapy and genetically targeted therapies all while focusing on fewer side effects and better patient outcomes as a global leader in oncology care invita is committed to healthcare freedom for all they've spearheaded a revolution in employer health insurance options empowering companies to provide their employees with access to not only Top Doctors Hospitals and Technologies but also the firstof its kind Nationwide personalized medicine coverage invita is doing all of this plus offering significant tax and 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Constantine's mother and I didn't know that it was really the First Christian Church and and it's on the site it purports to be on the site of the crucifixion okay so when I was there a bunch of images so I was in the church and then I was in the center of the church and then I was in a small room at the very center of the church that contained a cross very elaborate cross and so I was in the center of the center of the center of the center let's say and a bunch of things fell into place realizations fell into place so the first thing I understood was that European towns were based on the model that was if not established at least substantively elaborated upon by Constantine's mother we have a ceremonial building in the shape of a cross at the center of the town and so it's the staff in the ground around which the town is organized and in the center of the church we have an altar that's the center and on that there's a ritual of sacrifice being conducted and so what we're acting out is the proposition that SA sacrifice is the core of the community and so now I've been thinking about that biologically because I'm an evolutionary psychologist let's say at least in part and what I've come to understand is that there's no difference between the process of true cortical maturation and the process of self-sacrifice they're the same thing because to be in a community you have to give up what's you have to offer up what's narrowly individual right so when you socialize a toddler you help the toddler integrate his or her primordial biological urges their intrinsic Hedonism you help them integrate that into a framework that enables them to understand that they have a future and can't act to destroy that and understand that they have to exist in relationship to other people and so that's a kind of Harmony it's a sacrificial Harmony and so what that means if that's true and I can't see how it can be not true is that Society itself is based on the principle of sacrifice work is sacrifice because you sacrifice the pleas pleasures of the moment to the community and the future right and the community itself is a form of sacrificial organization so then if you accept that and I can't see how you can formulate an argument to the contrary if you accept that the the next question that emerges is well what's the ultimate or ideal form of sacrifice and the Christian passion is a portrayal of something approximating the final sacrifice right it's a union of sacrifice of child and self so those are the two most brutal forms of sacrifice it's an rejection of power in relationship to that sacrifice so there's no indication whatsoever that the fundamental uniting principle of Christian the Christian world is power quite the contrary because Christ never resorts to power regardless of the provocation and so what we have at the core of our culture is the recognition that sacrifice is Central and then the elaboration of a pattern of ultimate sacrifice that involves it's it involves something like exposing yourself to the full force of mortal vulnerability and the full reality of evil that's the harrowing of hell and as far as I can tell I've written all this out in great detail in this new book of Mine by the way as far as I can tell I can't see anything about that that's not in keeping with what we know at the deepest levels in the world of evolutionary psychology and I can't see anything about it that's erroneous on the conceptual side cuz how could community be anything other than the result of of the sacrificial gesture on the part of the individual I mean if you're a wife you sacrifice your whims to the marriage yeah if you're a mother you sacrifice your narrow self-interest to your children if you're a family in relationship to other families you sacrifice the narrow interest of your family to the harmony of the community and so on all the way up the subsidiary hierarchy and you know at the end of TL's confessions I don't know if you Tolstoy’s Confessions: the golden chord and the abyss of despair ever read that but it's it details something very much like what you described happening to you so Tolstoy became suicidally desperate at the height of his Fame and Earthly material success he was an unbelievably rich man he was known all over the world he was a great literary figure people compared him to Shakespeare he had a wife and a flourishing family like on the purely material front Tolstoy had it nailed and he was so suicidal that he was afraid to walk alone around his Estates and he had a dream and this is how confessions end he dreamt that he he was suspended in an immense space and he was looking down into the abysmal bottomless pit of despair let's say but he was suspended and he turned around and looked up and realized that there was a cord around his waist made of gold and the cord extended upward into the sky past where he could see and so he was suspended over the abyss of Despair by a relationship with what was Transcendent and highest right it's like an image of Jacob's Ladder it's that extends up into the ineffable stratospheres that that is our Ally you might say is our Ally against what the terror of mortality and and malevolence and as far as I can tell too that that's that's not some ignorant Superstition that's a foolish way of considering it it's it's actually the way the proper order of the cosmos is constituted and okay now you talk to In conversation with Dr. Richard Dawkins Dawkins right publicly in New York and you are friends I believe and I presume still are and so yeah yeah yeah so so tell me about that conversation and how it went and what you concluded and it's such a fascinating thing to have happen I'd love to see you talk to Sam Harris but what I concluded is what I started off with when we when we started this conversation which is that um I think it is always a wonderful experience uh to have to come at uh a subject from these radically different viewpoints um and hold your viewpoints and argue for your viewpoints and maintain the level of mutual affection and respect and friendship and so for me that was really it was very very important that that Richard and I demonstrated that and uh again that's what we're trying to restore uh what else um Richard ended with uh a sentence if to watch that where he says okay so he he's he's not convinced he thinks of course it's a heap of nonsense but still he says uh uh he does recognize the difference between Islam and Christianity he does recognize the threat of political Islam and his conclusion was maybe we should take something small to inoculate us against the larger virus now different people may here that differently but I think that's coming from like a wafer something small like a wafer like that small you mean that's yeah well that's but that's exactly the symbol that's the mustard seed that Christ talks about right that's something small it's like it's small all right but it's alive and don't underestimate its power and so so see the the thing that I I see as telling about Dawkins I wouldn't say admission but realizing Iz ation right that he's a cultural Christian it's like okay when you're pushed against the wall would it be the Christians or the Islamic fundamentalists that you choose and Dawkins looks at that and he thinks well I can't even talk about the Islamic fundamentalists and at least I can criticize the Christians so there's something they're doing right it's like okay there's something they're doing right yeah okay that means there's a right there that isn't in the other domain the domain of fundamentalist power let say well what is that that lein that that small thing that makes Christianity in its Western form preferable to fundamentalist tyranny well it's not something little it's something absolutely fundamental and vital right and so it seems to me that it's incumbent on Dawkins to really understand just exactly why when push comes to shove that he's a cultural Christian and so well I'll leave that well yeah and and I think also so my other takeaway was that he we were uh coming at it from I had AC I was an atheist just like him and then and I didn't when I was an atheist did not accept the existence of these different planes of Consciousness or perception or um what have you didn't have the language for it and by the way I was also in a state of rebellion h i i i was and I I didn't want that and and so the statements all religions are the same uh were ones that I sort of lazily accepted um and and I think Richard now recognizes no not all religions are the same A and B I hope I hope that he also recognizes I don't know we didn't get anywhere with that but I think the conversation started with there are different ways of appreciating reality and uh you know we cannot have uh an experiment that will measure as accurately as possible the impact of Music on on on your psyche on on your perception or the appreciation of works of art so there are so many ways of appreciating reality that is not you know the purely reducible naturalistic yeah uh empirical science uh the falsifiable and the verifiable uh this that whole story of what if we rewind the tape uh would things look the same or not we can't do that and so it's also we've got to be very careful because um I think we are The surge of presentism and the need to protect the classics having discussions about uh religion and history and so on and and then we're using the standards of today this is one of the things that I think is Despicable about the woke is they haul people from the past and judge them by the merits and by the standards and by the the insights of today yes well and the do people doing that comparison always come out ahead on the personal side which is you know a little bit on the suspicious you might regard that as a rather suspicious Endeavor if you're playing a game you always win you might ask yourself whether or not you're just playing it so that you always win rather than to get it the truth I mean it's pretty fun for an undergraduate to presume that they're the moral Superior of George Washington let's say or Winston Church Hill I mean what a deal you're 18 you have an idiot Professor who talks to you for 10 minutes and your first revelation is that you're better than the best men of the past now that's a little bit too attractive for my liking I would say yeah so so I don't know how we veed from this but I think what you said also goes to the classics in general the ditching of the classics where we said oh well okay uh look at the list of books that students are to read and it is my Angelo Shakespeare my Angelo Shakespeare Shakespeare out let's read my Angela and right right same thing that's part of the death of God yeah yeah yeah I don't want to say anything I'm not saying there's anything wrong with my Angelo I think she's done a fantastic work but she's no Shakespeare and you know we should be able to have the courage to say we are not going to remove Shakespeare Dante well right well that's part of the undermining of the fundamental Traditions that's part and parcel of this decimation of the institutions at every level it's part of total Revolution the total Revolution Marx called for and the upending even of the Norms of sex identity by the queer activist let's say it's complete chaotic Revolution yeah and it's got to stop so let me ask you another difficult question if you don't mind maybe we'll close with this one I I was Ill during the time the Abraham Accords were The miracle of the Abraham Accords and the modern Pharisees established and when I kind of woke up and was healthy again and saw what had happened I thought it was something approximating a miracle and I was amazed that it wasn't front page headline news in every country in the world because I think what the people who formulated the Abraham Accords achieved was the closest thing to a foreign policy miracle that I've seen in like 70 years and so so now and then and then part of the reason I'm optimistic at the moment like you are is that despite October 7th the Abraham Accords have held and I've heard from behind the scenes that the Saudis are still quite willing to contemplate signing it even under the present conditions there's political issues that have to be sorted out but they're still on board okay now I'm going to add to that one other thing one of the connection points between Islam and Christianity is the figure of Jesus is the figure of Christ and so what I see happening on the optimistic side in the Islamic world is that there are actors like the leaders let's say of the UAE and and and some of the other ISL is Islamic States who appear to want to establish something like an anant and a dialogue and that it might be possible that there could be at least the exploration of cooperation or a competition of invitations between Islam and Christianity instead of this allout drag down knock him de dead fundamentalism it it seems to me as well that the cluster B psychopath types are very good at weaponizing Islam and that we need to separate out the psychopathic types who are basically Pharisees who claim religious motivation while pursuing nothing but their own aims we need to separate that out on the Islamic side too and see maybe see if because there is such admiration in the Islamic world for the figure of Christ if there's something there that would enable us to establish the beginnings of a deep abrahamic dialogue and so I'm wondering this is a world you're more familiar with in many ways than me although also more more hurt by than than me I mean what do you think of the abrahamic cords and do you have any optimism on the side of on taant let's say between Islam and Christianity or between Islam Christianity and Judaism to broaden the net appropriately so what do I think of the abrahamic Accords I think if we lived in a fairwell the people who brought about the abrahamic Accords would get the Nobel Peace PR but we don't live in our yes um and what I find uh I really admire Jared Kushner in the sense that he tried something new he and this is why sometimes it's good to have people come in from the outside and break open something so our state department has been doing the same thing over and over again for what the last 50 years if not the last 20 years and this man whose politics is not his thing comes into this realm and says let's try something new and that's Again part of the American Spirit by the way let's try something new yes definitely definitely definitely and there something new yields um the abrahamic Accords and yeah the people who didn't get anywhere all those years obviously they don't take kindly to that which is unfortunate because it shouldn't have been that's for sure yeah it should shouldn't have been condemned as oh we hate Trump anything that Trump does we deplore it should have been claimed as an American victory it didn't that's right that's an opportunity Biden had I think he could have given Trump a medal and a ceremony and he might have ridden off into the sunset you know because Trump deserved an award for that he deserved the Nobel Prize for the Abraham Accords absolutely and so uh and and the figure of Jared uh I think um yeah yep definitely so we we go from there to uh you know is there what what in Christian Theology and Islamic theology can we find points and things that we have in common um you know I remember Bernard Lewis uh who I think died at the age of3 and one of the uh I would say best Scholars of um all three of the abrahamic but he was a historian and he had really spent a good long time studying the Middle East and spent years and years there and he kept saying we have more in common than me the ey um and especially with AIA so there's a lot we have in common from a theological perspective the people you know these you call them what if you call them cluster B bombs or whatever these these radical groups um have done something that if you did it to Christianity you would say this is what Martin Luther did during the Reformation he say let's go back to scripture we don't want the church and interceptors between us so when someone who identifies as Christian goes back to scripture pure and simple what they find there is radically different from what you know an average Muslim when he's told go back to scripture and let's go back to the beginnings of Muhammad let's go back to the time of Medina let's go back to the time of the conquests uh what they find there is is a different message and so I think for leaders like the leaders of the UAE of Saudi Arabia uh for them they realized after the Arab Spring with the rise of Isis but even before the rise of Isis um when Bin Laden was in Afghanistan and and they supported him and they they knew you know these radical elements kept coming and they would just bash them or export them elsewhere or accommodate them um that over time they actually came for their own seats of power and for their own families and their response was we Define Islam so it is the Crown Prince right now of Saudi Arabia uh who defines what Islam is for the Saudis and the world Beyond and living in the society they live in they round up the savat and the insurgents who operate in the name of wahhabism and salafism and the various flavors of political Islam and they domesticate them they can do that and the same with the UAE and they then the Crown Prince and the sultan and the king and and the leader of the day they decide um in their definition of what Islam is that we want to recognize the state of Israel and we now want we think we have more in common with our Jewish neighbors and brothers and our Christian neighbors and brothers uh then you de Us in the world that you're leading us to towards the the path of Hamas of al-Qaeda of Isis of the Muslim Brotherhood that is a path of destruction and they've given us a taste of it when the Islamic State was established in Iraq and Syria so we know where that goes and they reject it that doesn't mean that they've yeah that doesn't mean they've accepted liberal democracy or that they've become like us right right right no no I no right their conclusion for their own Survival has led them to accept the Abraham Accords and to say we can we can recognize and we can we can make our societies recognize now I think Jordan We must offer a better invitation the next thing that has to happen and maybe is happening is there has to be not just on the political level that we want to establish the Abram Accords and sign peace and trade deals I think the next level is to deify Muslim societies the propaganda that Muslim societies were fed about the Jews and about the Christians and about modernity in the last 70 or so years it has to be undone and so there has to be a new information and knowledge uh uh Warfare uh not propaganda but counter propaganda yeah yeah yeah that emphasiz es for people in the Middle East for Muslims a life a narrative and a story and a theology that emphasizes a life of death better well yeah well that's what we've been trying to do with this Arc Enterprise in London right is to formulate so you know you talked about it in terms of counter propaganda but I but I think it it's more appropriately formulated uh pardon my objection as a what would you say a far more attractive invitation you know like if so my students used to ask me about what I was teaching at Harvard and at the UFT they'd ask me well why isn't this just another form of the ideology that you reject and you know that's a very good question it's the post-modern question fundamentally why isn't this just another power game let's say well I think well I think I figured that out Ian so I think the spirit of play is the antithesis of the spirit of tyranny and play can only occur if the players are playing voluntarily and with their full ascent and so you can tell an ideology from an invitation because an in ideology manipulates and compels but an invitation offers the possibility of joint Mutual voluntary play and so you know what we what we've been struggling with at ARC and what I'm trying to do in my lectures is to formulate an invitation right a story that's attractive and believable enough so that all other competing ideology ideological stories are revealed as corrupt inadequate and what would you say anxiety-provoking and hopeless yeah and so right and so I think we could in this restoration project let's say because I think we share the same vision on that front it's very useful to understand that the best form of counter propaganda is a much better invitation that's actually real and believable you know for example well why who would oppose if they had any sense the idea that we should drive energy costs down so that we could eradicate absolute poverty like what you might say well that's not practical and fair enough we could have that discussion but I think it is highly practical and also completely possible and so I can't see why left and right alike can't get on board with that it's not like right-wingers who have any sense like the fact that they're a poor people you know they might be inclined to deserve to to presume that some of the poor deserve to be poor because they're really not putting their best foot forward but by the same token most conservative types are perfectly cognizant of the fact that to some degree economic fa is arbitrarily distributed and we should do some work to try to ensure that the poor Thrive and so the restoration should be an invitation right this is a better way yeah here's the better way I think the best way the the first step of restoration is to bring these people together in the same room I think for me the assumption is the moderates on either side they have more in common than some some of these problems imagine we're not talking about uh you know Harry Truman had to consider whether or not to throw the bomb um Roosevelt had to consider whether he wanted to enter the war or not um when St Churchill had to consider whether to declare war or not because Chamberlain was there saying let's accommodate and a peas and so on the Soviet Union pigs of bay remember the leaders in the Oval Office some of the considerations that they had to make we're not there our our problems compared to that of previous generation is so it is these things are so easy to address the problem is I don't know part of it is subversion and part of it is this ret tribalization of Western Society is that we hate the other one so much that is is we're willing to destroy it's not even about the issue anymore it's about the person and so I think the first step is to restore the humanity of the person on the other side yeah well that's a turn the other cheek that's a turn the other cheek ethos right is that what you want to work for if you can if you have any sense is the not the eradication of your so-called enemy but what would you say his redemption in a manner that allows you both to cooperate and compete peacefully and productively that's a much better better that's a much better aim and your point is well we're not so much at each other's throats that there's blood in the streets and so we could still have the conversations the difficult conversations and the negotiations and what extend the Accords across the Waring tribes and I do I do think that's possible absolutely but look at look at our like where we are with our technology and where we are with economy and where we are with we we just have for me I think we just have an overflow of resources and even human resources the smartest people in the world and still again look at the whole world still wants to come here regardless of um of the problems we have so I mean it is like we've got it's easy I think right now to come back from these stages of demoralization and into some degree destabilization that's that's a very good place to end I would say this discussion at least for everybody watching and listening I'm going to continue talking to aan on the daily wire side um we'll Del delve into what's more autobiographical and continue to elaborate the ideas that we're discussing here so if you're inclined to join us behind the daily wire pay wall well that would be potentially useful to you and also uh what would you say welcome from our perspective the daily wire in their collaborations with me have certainly extended my ability to have conversations like this and to make them freely available and have been really good and forthright partners in that endeavor so anyways Ian will thank you very much for talking to me today it's a pleasure to see you um and uh it was really good to hear what you had to say and to delve into these things more deeply and uh well I'm looking forward to the next half an hour of our conversation and also to seeing you again in the future and to everybody who's watching and listening and to the film crew here in Fairview Alberta which is my small Hometown in the middle of nowhere up on The Frigid ples of the Northwest um thank you guys for coming in from Saskatoon and doing this and thank you again Ian much appreciated Jordan you're welcome thank you very much [Music]