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

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 destructive?

Hello everybody. I had the privilege today to speak with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who I don't know if you took the ten bravest people in the world; she'd be one of them, as far as I can tell. She made a remarkable splash years ago with her first book, "Infidel," which talked about her experience moving from Somalia to the Netherlands, which is like the center of Western civilization. That was a great book, and Ayaan has had a very storied political career, to say the least, and a threatened life in many ways 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 she's launched a new enterprise called "Restoration," which is a Substack media enterprise designed to make a case for the necessary primacy and, uh, what would you say, bedrock foundational necessity of the presumptions of Western civilization.

We had a chance to talk about all that, and 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, welcome everybody. Listen to Ayaan; that's always worthwhile. She's a real force of nature, and as I said, it was a privilege to talk to her again.

All right, so you've recently announced a new writing and media endeavor, and I've been following that quite avidly, particularly on Twitter. It's called "Restoration." 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: my mission is to restore our institutions that you and I love to their original missions, ideas, our culture, the origins and history of our culture, institutions like the family, schools, the university, democratic institutions, what political parties are supposed to do, what our governments are supposed to do, what they're not supposed to do. Then discourse— a lot of us have been talking quite a bit about freedom of speech and the institutions that protect freedom of speech. The free press—all of these have been, in my view, they’ve been subverted. There's been an effort to subvert our institutions, and we're in a place now where we cannot communicate with people we disagree with or have a different perspective from without immediately seeing an enemy status in them.

I think the first and most important thing to do is to bring back that civic discourse. When I came to Europe in 1992, over the course of the first ten years of my residence there, 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. Restoration is an attempt to awaken people to recognize what's at stake and then to restore, yeah, in one word, to restore sanity.

Okay, so you brought up a lot of points there, which I want to delve into one by one. I guess I'll start with an overarching question and then drill in a little bit. 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 dissolution of civic discourse, the threat to democratic institutions, the threat to our culture, the collapse of freedom of speech, and those are all serious charges, right? Especially, let’s say, the observation of subversion. It’s difficult for—let's say, it’s easy for the apprehension of something like subversion to be tossed into the conspiracy theorist bin, let’s say.

The things that you've been writing about in restoration and pointing to—they're quite dramatic. So let’s do two things. 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 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 that you are saying now.

So let's start with subversion. The opening essay in subversion, the bulletin—my platform on Substack—has to do with I start by describing the fact that many of us feel that something is off and that, 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’re trying to figure out what this whole is. When I look at these, you know, take any list, I'm in the academic world, and I see what has happened to academia from the time I came as a student in 1995 at the University of Leiden to my present role at Stanford. And there is just this churning out of very expensive, useless degrees in gender and race and you name it— that's the universities' K-12. There is this crisis that I see because I'm a parent. Parents around me are homeschooling their children, going from A to B just completely confused about what is going on with our education systems. They’re on the brink of collapse.

There are these statements that are contrary to reality—that there are an endless number of genders. There’s this whole what seemed like, you know, ten, fifteen years ago, when I first heard about terms like intersectionality and oppressor and oppressed and all the rest of it. It just seemed to me a juvenile intellectual mishmash, nonsensical—the sort of things that first-year freshman students dabble in, and then they grow up and they grow out of it. Along comes 2020, and we have that incident with George Floyd in the United States of America. What then happens is what I can only see can describe as a revolution because we went full on with the 'defund the police', let's abolish SATs and other standardized tests. Mathematics is racist; everything is racist.

This demolition—clearly demolition—of ideas and institutions like the family, education. And I'm looking at this, and I'm thinking this is familiar. Let’s pay attention to the people who are leading the charge in these projects to destroy the structures and the institutions that have served us so well. On one hand, you have these identity politics cultural Marxists that have developed these elaborate theories that they call critical theory. It’s not a conspiracy theory, Jordan. They stated as clearly as possible that they want to bring down these structures and destroy them.

On the other hand, I see the Islamists. The Islamists have never really been dishonest; it was always in your face, but they fast-tracked many years to bring down our system through terror and terrorist plots and relentless terrorist attempts, and they failed at that. We are militarily, economically, and technologically superior to them. So obviously they went down the path of Da'wa, which is a religious subversion, which has a much longer timeline. Then, of course, you look at the CCP and Putin, and these are external adversaries; they’re looking at what’s going on on our soil domestically, and they would be stupid not to take advantage of that.

As I try to look into and analyze, think of me as one of the blind men touching the elephant. Where have we seen this before? Now, communist attempts at subverting the West are as old as communism itself. They're as old as, you know, the times of the Bolsheviks and Lenin and all various Marxists. When the Soviet Union was established, they had programs to subvert us, and it was mutual; we had programs to subvert them.

So when you listen, I quote Yuri Bezmenov at length, where he describes their length, and you just listen to him and the institutions that he describes and the intended effects of that kind of subversion—it's right before your eyes. You don’t really need a conspiracy theorist for that. The Islamists—it's the same thing.

What’s interesting about all of this is to see this collusion between the Islamists and the neo-Marxists or cultural Marxists—what is called the unholy green-red alliance. Some people describe it as the watermelon. Think, okay, where is this going? Queer Palestine looks nice in Colombia 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.

But that aside, the question of is there subversion and is it effective? Are we on the brink of all that? The answer is yes. My remedy for that is restoration: recognize the institutions, the ideas. You know, it’s our elites, and then we have to come together and restore this—not together in an empty sort of platitudinous way, but to say we used to—what made us different as Western societies is that we used to disagree, and we actually thought it was fun to disagree.

The other day, I had a debate with—and 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 this one has to say,” and, you know, “What are the arguments they’re making?” etc. No, it was, you know, there was suddenly this enemy-friend thing.

I think for me, 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 if you don’t want to have affection for one another, still, you know, a peaceful handshake. With Dawkins in particular, like I’ve met him a couple of times, and I’ve read his books, and I learned a lot from his books. 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. A good scientist is someone who strives to seek the truth, and I think that truth-seeking is a religious enterprise.

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 there are 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 a fair bit of it. 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.

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. 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.

So hypothetically, Dr. Dawkins and I will be speaking at some time 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. I found the same thing with Sam Harris, and I recently spoke to Daniel Dennett, which went very well. I managed to speak to him a few short weeks before his demise, and we had a very productive conversation.

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. For me, what you just 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.

There were so many differences between 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 was this: 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 is protected. That, for me, was wow.

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. That kind of nonsense is now a serious, serious, deep-rooted problem in the West, and I think that’s an outcome of subversion.

Well, okay, so let’s take that apart further. You talk about a relapse into a kind of tribalism of idea ownership, so there’s a disintegration of something that was unified into a more pluralistic 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 Karl 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 all could be understood from within the framework of economics. So the primary axis of oppressor and oppressed for Marx was the economic axis, and he presumed that the reason that inequality between oppressor and oppressed exists 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.

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.

By the 1970s, the holless 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 the proof is compelling when a French intellectual is forced to swallow it. 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 victims between countries, sure, sure, between races, between tribes. You can understand the postmodern claim 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 now we have a metastatic 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 much deeper. So there’s a Marxist-like spirit that inverts the French Revolution soon after it occurs. And that was well before Marx. I’ve been thinking more archetypally, let’s say, in relation 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. Because 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—there’s a Luciferian touch to that, and it’s definitely something that attracted Marx, because Marx was an admirer of Mephistopheles. Mephistopheles was the variant of the usurping spirit whose motivation was nothing but destruction. You talked about the attack at 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 power should be deeded to the state, ceded to the state, etc.

But it seems to me that all of that has its 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 a variant of that story play out, and also at an accelerated rate because of the rate of technological change.

Well, 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 I’m 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.

So, fascinating, and I’m glad you’re doing this. Okay, so my two reactions, then, or just as I was listening to you: one thing that has occurred to me is Marx and his work and his legacy and what we’ve done with it. You know this history better than I do, but the reaction he was hoping for, he created a new religion, Marxism; it failed because instead of people sticking—his followers, his own disciples sticking with his revolutionary goals—what sprung up is the reformists.

Basically, what I’m getting at is I’m schooled in political science; you’re a 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. I think that is the first defeat of the Marxist idea that instead of overthrowing 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, that whole economic argument of “take from the rich, give to the poor” falls apart when it becomes, I think, obvious if you stick with the material economic topic that the Soviet Union collapses. And not only does the Soviet Union have satellites everywhere, these five-year plans touch you; you have devastation, you have masses of deaths, you have concentration camps, you have starvation.

And then you look at the West, and there’s growth and so on. So in 1989, I think there is this sense—the winners, those who are victorious, maybe you want to say, you were comparing Cain 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; 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 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 is really eloquent in the way he tells this, right?

Right, but they divert towards the culture thing. But my takeaway, 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? 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 so on. In that world of ideas, 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. What follows after the defeat—listen to this, Jordan—after the defeat of national socialism, what happens is an intense process of denazification.

In fact, using some of the tools of subversion that Bezmenov speaks about—and after the process of denazification, 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 my classrooms. This is what’s happening. I come into the West just as it’s going through that reckoning of the idea, and the idea is forensically scrutinized.

It becomes, after we fully understand what Hitler’s 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? Definitely not, yeah. After the fall of the Soviet Union, there was no campaign of decommunization or demarxification of everything and anything. There was no reckoning.

Up until, I think, 2002, 2003, we were still finding individuals who had been found to be active 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 terrible idea keeps recurring, and it manifests itself in different ways. Because for the young generations, it never really has been here. This is what Marxism led to, the death toll. I mean, we’ve all been schooled in how many people actually died. But more interesting, I think, more fascinating, is the Nazi psyche.

Do you know we explored it to the point that right now there are conversations we can’t 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 that there is this terror, this fear that they might fall again into that nasty collective madness of putting people in concentration camps.

We haven’t done that to Marx, we haven’t done anything to the ideas of Marx and communism, and I think we are a bit on the late side, but we should do it.

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Well, okay, so you've got two issues there that run in parallel because, okay, three. So the first is your observation that we assumed too prematurely, after 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union, that the spirit of communism was dead and buried. 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. 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’s an additional problem, which is that we’re not exactly sure how to handle interesting conflicts at a deep ideological level without falling prey to something like the worst excesses of the Nazi regime. It’s like, let’s imagine, for example, that we did do something like a demarxification of the institutions. I’ve been thinking about this in relation to universities.

So, you know, when Musk took over Twitter and demarxified 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.

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 it’s 140 professors, my number may be wrong, but it’s a substantial number of professors who are pushing the administration hard. Harvard has claimed 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, “Well, 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 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.

So, okay, so now what we’re doing about—for example—is we’re launching Peterson Academy at the end of June, and I’m involved with Ralston College 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 demarxified.

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-12 education system is completely dominated by the worst possible students of the worst faculty at the universities—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, Ayaan, what are your thoughts about that?

What I found wonderful about Bezmenov’s 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. I think that’s what you’re worried about: “We don’t want Chris Rufo, who I think is doing admirable work by exposing the corruption and by showing he’s really—I just love his grit—how do we stop? Where do we stop?”

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 Bezmenov lays out and you say, “Okay, we are an open society.” He makes a distinction between open societies and closed societies.

We know that the characteristics of an open society is that it’s easier for the forces of subversion to access our institutions. Not only to access those institutions, but actually to use the laws and the conventions of open societies to establish themselves within universities, K-12, and all the various just within our society.

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. 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 trap of everything is gone. Because I think if you say all of these institutions are corrupt beyond repair, in a way, you do sort of propel the subversion further, and you validate it.

And I think we have to look at what our strengths are, and let’s not forget, we have enormous resources. For instance, the market—when the meltdown of our mainstream media, which is really a meltdown—our open society, what we responded is this independent media.

Obviously, Elon Musk is this giant who stood up to—not just by establishing Twitter, but by 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. For me, Elon Musk is the definition of courage, standing up to all these different forces, putting his own—almost his life at stake and his life’s earnings.

Elon Musk is this big visible guy, but there are so many people like that; I come across them every day. We have all these resources, starting new things like new universities, new media, and I think that’s a good thing. If only to catch some of those people who despair of the existing institutions—the brand Harvard is now tainted, I think, in many ways. The brand Harvard is ruined, but I don’t think we should throw the baby out with the bathwater.

We should not declare that the Ivy League and all of the universities that we have in America 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 Sasse has made this very clear in Florida. You just have to change the leadership in some of these places. In other places, you have to go much deeper and, you know, 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.

Have you talked to John Schmers by any chance?

I don’t think I have.

Okay, well, he’s a military strategist at West Point, and 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 demarxification that you described.

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 prison.

Most of them, except for a few leaders, were regarded as redeemable, and the leadership transition happened at the top. Schmers 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.

A pessimist might say, “Well, that has to be dealt with in the most severe possible manner,” and an optimist—and hopefully a realist—would say, “No, if you’re careful in analyzing 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 South Korea for that matter, at least in terms of economic transformation, great things are still possible without institutional devastation.

So that is a good vision of optimism, if you can—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. That is why the trajectory of restoration is, I hope, is one that is going to be fruitful.

I think we are in a place where, Jordan, I’ve never been more optimistic. The reason is because people are waking up. They’re waking—people who are, I mean, busy with their industries, busy with their art, with their music, with whatever it is that they were doing, this subversion virus has touched on everyone’s lives.

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 others’ affairs. I’d say the general public in the West 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 elect people who represent us, and we pay taxes, and I just want to go get on with my life.

That’s no longer possible; people are feeling affected in every way, shape, and form. October seventh opened the eyes of many people. Our friend Barry Weiss, I remember she said everyone went to bed on October seventh and was—what did she say?—“went to bed as a liberal and woke up as a conservative,” or yeah, you can put it fun—like I, well, I wrote an article which I’m going to read 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 pushback against your optimism, although I share that optimism in a fundamental way. I don’t want to get optimistic too early. So here’s the basic outline of the argument: I sent it to the National Post in Canada, which always publishes what I wrote, and they took it and then rejected it. I sent it to the Telegraph, which also always publishes what I send them, and they took it and edited it and then rejected it.

So this is what I said—you know, it’s a very contentious piece. I pointed to the fact that in the United States, something approximating 75% of the Jewish population supports the Democrats. Now the problem 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.

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 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.

I think that’s why they’re the canary in the coal mine; 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 are overrepresented in positions of success.

So part of what I suggested—and this is what Barry Weiss has realized, let’s say—is that 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. 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 things shifted dramatically after October 7th. But I’m wondering, like do—and this is with regards to your statement—after October 7th, we saw the universities go so absolutely out of their mind that Khamenei himself, the president of Iran, congratulated them on their efforts on his behalf and suggested that they start reading the Quran.

We saw these encampments and occupations everywhere, and that man, I was just in D.C. 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 the supreme leader of Iran, who shouts and compels his population to shout “Death to 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 warm waters in our Ivy Leagues and on our streets.

It’s exactly these outrages that force the left in general and in 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 there. 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—I think in academic jargon they’re the ones who are for reform.

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, moderate Democrats, those who are for reform, I think they’re having reality rubbed in their noses now.

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. They’re seeing this for themselves— the slogans, things that these people are shouting.

Not only just what they shout, but I think even the tiniest amount of curiosity will take you to go and take a peek at the syllabuses that are taught in these universities. What is it that these kids are learning? 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.

I see this awakening. I see these mega-donors who are giving billions and billions to what they thought was social justice, coming around and seeing, “Hang on a minute; this is not what my philanthropy was about.”

So I think there is a long-awaited audit that is about to happen—that is happening. 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 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 groups?” So, and I see more and more people asking these questions.

What I find delightful is that every time one of the people who wasn’t aware of these things wakes up, he says, “I’m the fashion to see it,” or—and it doesn’t matter; 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 unchecked in that infrastructure of Da’wa, where they build mosques and madrasas and preach, 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 Da’wa efforts and people who are converted into Islam, and down the road, you are going to have a huge problem.

Some of the people I was talking—we have it now already.

We have it, but I was saying this in 2004, 2005, “Oh yes, oh yes, yes, of course.” So 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 schools.

They weren’t talking about Muslim schools; they were 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, saying, “All right then, we’ll just not teach that.”

That is 2004, 2005; they were shouting, “Hamas, Hamas; Jews to the gas!” They were disrupting the commemorations of the death of the people who died during the Second World War, and all of that was at that time, 15, 20 years ago, 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—that 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. So, and it’s not obvious at all that the CCP is budging, and it is absolutely obvious that they’re building the Eye of Sauron and would like to produce a totalitarian state so absolute that we can hardly even comprehend it, and they’re a long way ahead with doing that.

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Okay, so let me ask you—let’s turn a bit here. We’ve done a bit of diagnosis; we’ve talked about the pervasiveness of the problem. We’ve 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. We have to confront face-to-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 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? 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.

In the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, 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? We support for the notion that energy should be made as low-cost and freely accessible—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—the telling of a better story.

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 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, maybe 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 milieu that you’d been raised in, you were an 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 horsemen of the atheist movement.

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. Of what I believe is a very important, if not the most important, aspect of the restoration is to seek the roots. As Christians, sometimes we say Judeo-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.

On the personal side, as I have told it a few times and it’s very, very personal, I have had my own awakening that has to do with mental breakdown, 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.

To give you an example, if you think of someone like me who comes from, you know, I grew up in a childhood where there was very little—little of everything—little food, little water, no water. I mean, we didn’t have running water. There was scarcity; not there were people who were poorer than us, but we were poor. I remember books; I loved books and there weren’t books. So, sometimes I would finish 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, would have fallen out of that book.

I would go to a bookshop, pretend I was buying the book, actually read the last pages in the bookshop and then leave, until our Indian booksellers noticed what we were doing and chased us out of the shop.

So that level of, yeah, poverty. And so then I come where there’s plenty, and I find myself in my 40s and 50s, surrounded by absolutely every materially, completely satiated, happily married, two children, everything that you would describe would give meaning and purpose, and yet there I was completely, yeah, depressed and unhappy and terrified and all the rest of it.

I was self-medicating; I was self-medicating with wine, with alcohol, and that was where my go-to was that actually brought me on the brink of destruction. I sought help, and the help went from, obviously, with me focusing on the material again, scientific help, I’m going to see people who I trust to be the professionals who will fix me and fix this need, and that didn’t happen.

They were good people; I learned a lot—I learned a lot about the human brain, the human psyche. I respect, 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. A hard diagnosis was, “What you're going through is spiritual bankruptcy.”

Once I, in my sort of last moment of despair, when I allowed that to come in and to register, and I surrendered to that, it’s only after that—literally on my knees in prayer—that things started to change.

On a personal level, and this is extremely subjective, I’m not imposing it on anyone else—I have undergone this change that has transformed my life. If you allow me to go a little bit beyond it, 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, the stories we share are stories of this abiding success over many years. And it’s the people 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. 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 Buddhism, for some people it’s mindfulness.

And like Harris, for example, yeah, yeah. 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 has found in the realm of something approximating an ineffable and non-articulate Buddhism the spiritual sakur that materialist atheism lacks.

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 mean, 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; they speak for themselves. So, let me ask you a personal question—if you’re—you know, I want to comment on Sam and see. I think Sam is just got this commitment to the pursuit of truth, and so I haven’t spoken to him since my conversion.

I’m going to make the—I’ve been very busy; I know he’s very, very busy. But I would be really fascinated to have a conversation with him about it because, yes, that’s necessary. He is just so committed to.

When we talk about these different levels of consciousness and different levels and planes 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.

I think in many ways that’s why Richard has come to the conclusion that he’s a cultural Christian, and that Christianity has a value in that sense. But again, I really do want to separate these two things. I’m still at heart a classical liberal in the sense that I really do want to respect people’s conscience and people’s perceptions and the way people live.

So in no way imposing anything, saying, “Oh, you know, I’ve gone through this 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. I’m saying in my work in the realm of ideas and in this quest to understand subversion, who is subverting us and all of this—Christianity is one of probably the most important ideas 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 our civilization. If you want to reject parts of it, that’s okay, but I think the wholesale rejection of Christianity and its legacy is precisely what brought us where we are.

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One of the things that I’ve come to realize—tell me what you think about this. This took a lot of thought to conjure up. I guess it was brought home to me with particular force. I did a documentary with Jonathan Pease in Jerusalem, and we walked the Stations of the Cross.

Then we ended up in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. I learned some things about that church that I didn’t know historically. So I didn’t know that it was founded by Constantine’s mother, and I didn’t know that it was really the first Christian church, 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 came to mind. 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—a very elaborate cross. I was in the center of the center of the center of the center, let’s say.

A bunch of things fell into place—realizations fell into place. The first thing I understood was that European towns were based on a 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.

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. What we’re acting out is the proposition that sacrifice is the core of the community.

Now, I’ve been thinking about that biologically because I’m an evolutionary psychologist, let’s say, at least in part. 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—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 a 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 cannot be true—is that society itself is based on the principle of sacrifice. Work is sacrifice because you sacrifice the 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 anything about that that’s not in keeping with what we know at the deepest levels in the world of evolutionary psychology. I can’t see anything about it that’s erroneous on the conceptual side because how could community be anything other than the result 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 Tolstoy's Confessions—I don't know if you ever read that, but 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. He had a dream, and this is how Confessions end. He dreamt that 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. So he was suspended over the abyss of despair by a relationship with what was transcendent and highest.

It’s like an image of Jacob’s Ladder that extends up into the ineffable stratosphere—that is our ally, you might say, against what? The terror of mortality and malevolence. And as far as I can tell, too, that’s not some ignorant superstition; that’s a foolish way of considering it.

It’s actually the way the proper order of the cosmos is constituted. And okay, now you talked to Dawkins, right, publicly in New York, and you are friends, I believe, and I presume still are.

And so, yeah, so tell me about that conversation and how it went and what you concluded. 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 started this conversation, which is that I think it is always a wonderful experience to have— to come at a subject from these radically different viewpoints and hold your viewpoints and argue for your viewpoints and maintain the level of mutual affection and respect and friendship.

So for me, that was really— it was very, very important that Richard and I demonstrated that. Again, that’s what we’re trying to restore. What else? Richard ended with a sentence, if you watched that, where he says, “Okay, so he’s not convinced he thinks—or, of course, it's a heap of nonsense.” But still, he recognizes 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 hear that differently, but I think that’s coming from like a wafer—something small? Like a wafer, like that?

That small, you mean? That small; 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.

So, well, I’ll leave that—well, yeah, and I think also—so my other takeaway was that we were coming at it from, I had, I was an atheist just like him, and then, and I didn’t when I was an atheist—not accept—did not accept the existence of these different planes of consciousness or perception, or what have you, didn’t have the language for it.

And by the way, I was also in a state of rebellion. I was, and I didn’t want that. And so the statements “all religions are the same” were ones that I sort of lazily accepted.

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 you know, we cannot have an experiment that will measure as accurately as possible the impact of music on your psyche, on your perception, or the appreciation of works of art.

There are so many ways of appreciating reality that are not, you know, the purely reducible naturalistic empirical science; the falsifiable and the verifiable, this— that whole story of “What if we rewind the tape? Would things look the same or not?”

We can’t do that. And so we’ve got to be very careful because I think we are having discussions about religion and history and so on, and then we’re using the standards of today. This is one of the things that I think is despicable about the woke; they haul people from the past and judge them by the merits and by the standards and by the insights of today.

Yes, well—and the people doing that comparison always come out ahead on the personal side, which is—you know, a little bit 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 at 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 Churchill. I mean, what a deal—you’re 18; you have an idiot professor who talks to you for ten 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 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, look at the list of books that students are to read.”

It is Maya Angelou, Shakespeare, Maya Angelou, Shakespeare, Shakespeare out, let’s read Maya Angelou. Right, right! Same thing—that’s part of the death of God.

Yeah, yeah. I don’t want to say anything. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with Maya Angelou; I think she’s done 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 was ill during the time the Abraham Accords were 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.

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’d seen in like 70 years.

So now, 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 are 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 some of the other Islamic states, who appear to want to establish something like an an ant 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 all-out, drag-down, knock-em-dead fundamentalism.

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, you know, 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 hurt by than I am. I mean, what do you think of the Abrahamic Accords, and do you have any optimism on the side of 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 fair world, the people who brought about the Abrahamic Accords would get the Nobel Peace Prize, but we don’t live in ours. Yes, and what I find—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. 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.

This man, whose politics is not his thing, comes into this realm and says, “Let’s try something new.” That’s, again, part of the American spirit, by the way: “Let’s try something new.” Yes, definitely, definitely, definitely!

There’s something new that yields the Abrahamic Accords. The people who didn’t get anywhere all those years obviously don’t take kindly to that, which is unfortunate because it should have been— that’s for sure! It 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 Abrahamic Accords, absolutely.

And so—and the figure of Jared—I think, yep, definitely. So we go from there to, you know, what in Christian theology and Islamic theology can we find points and things that we have in common? You know, I remember Bernard Lewis, who I think died at the age of 96, and was one of the, I would say, best scholars of 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 meets the eye.

Especially with Islam. 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 radical groups have done something that if you did it to Christianity, you would say this is what Martin Luther did during the Reformation. He said, “Let’s go back to scripture.”

We don’t want the church as 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, what they find there is a different message.

And so I think for leaders like the leaders of the UAE and of Saudi Arabia, for them, they realized after the Arab Spring with the rise of ISIS, but even before the rise of ISIS, when Bin Laden was in Afghanistan and they supported him, they knew, you know, these radical elements kept coming, and they would just bash them or export them elsewhere or accommodate them.

Over time, they actually came for their own seats of power and for their own families. Their response was, “We define Islam.” So it is the crown prince right now of Saudi Arabia who defines what Islam is for the Saudis and the world beyond.

In living in the society they live in, they round up the saboteurs 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—the crown prince and the sultan and the king and the leader of the day—they decide 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 than you do in the world that you’re leading us towards—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?

Their conclusion for their own survival has led them to accept the Abraham Accords and to say we can recognize and we can make our societies recognize.

Now I think, Jordan, 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 Abraham 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 warfare—not propaganda, but counter-propaganda.

Yeah, yeah. That emphasizes for people in the Middle East, for Muslims, a life, a narrative, and a story and a theology that emphasizes a life of peace.

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 think it’s more appropriately formulated, 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 postmodern 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. Play can only occur if the players are playing voluntarily and with their full assent.

So you can tell an ideology from an invitation because an ideology manipulates and compels, but an invitation offers the possibility of joint, mutual, voluntary play. And so, you know, 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 ideological stories are revealed as corrupt, inadequate, and what would you say? Anxiety-provoking and hopeless.

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 poor people.

You know, they might be inclined 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 fate is arbitrarily distributed, and we should do some work to try to ensure that the poor thrive.

And