Ayaan Hirsi Ali is the author of several books—including the 2006 autobiography Infidel—as well as a fellow at the Hoover Institution She runs a foundation focused on human rights and, yes, she has a Substack. But Ayaan comes from a very different world from most of the people who inhabit our think tanks and ivory towers. Unlike those of us in the West who grew up with everything, Ayaan grew up in Somalia with. . . nothing.
No liberty, no rule of law, no system of representative government, no pluralism, and no toleration for difference.
Ayaan knows what it is like to live without those ideals, which is why she also has a particular instinct for when they are under attack. And that is exactly what she sees happening—all over the West.
Today, you’ll hear Ayaan read the epochal essay she published this morning in The Free Press. She explains how subversion—the act of undermining a country from within—works gradually and sometimes invisibly, but can ultimately explode and destroy a society. And she argues that what’s at stake in our inability to see the threat plainly is nothing less than the preservation of our way of life.
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Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a true heroine of our time. If only we had more like her. I urge every thinker to read her books.
I just finished Cathy Young's article in Bulwark. First I think very highly of Young; she is an erudite philosopher of the highest magnitude and I think much of her criticism is accurate. There is no grand unifying theory of subversion taking place in American culture. But I also think Young, as an authentic freedom of speech libertarian, does not want to recognize the power that the money spent by many Arab nations in alliance with Russia and the CCP has on American Universities and by extension on American schools of education. Kindergartners are indeed being taught the propaganda their elementary school teachers have learned in colleges of education that have been subsidized by countries like QATAR. Arab/Islamist money in sufficient quantity to subvert academic journals and pay for professorships is not speech that should be protected. Money buys propaganda, and the propaganda of one's enemy is not to be confused with Speech. Freedom of speech is only possible when both sides are in fact fairly represented. That is no longer the case in American universities! Censorship is DE RIGUEUR in many academic programs. All PhD students know they must to some degree ape their professors. If a PhD student in any of the humanities or social sciences dares to oppose "wokeism" that student will be cast out of the program, a pariah to the cause of so-called Social Change, and may incur extraordinary debt for the unfinished doctorate. It may destroy that budding intellectuals life in fact. That is not the freedom of libertarians in the least.