Latest / Yaron Brook Show / 9/11—25 Years Later: Objectivism, Islamic Totalitarianism, and America’s Crisis of Ideas

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9/11—25 Years Later: Objectivism, Islamic Totalitarianism, and America’s Crisis of Ideas · Yaron Brook Show

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: Fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest, and individual rights.
• 0:13
  Speaker 2: This is the Yaron Brook Show.
• 0:15
  Speaker 3: All right, everybody. Welcome to the Yaron Brook Show on
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  Speaker 3: this Wednesday, September 2nd. There's a big echo. Look at
• 0:30
  Speaker 3: that there.
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  Speaker 2: All right.
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  Speaker 3: Welcome to Your Own Book Show. I've been gone for
• 0:37
  Speaker 3: a week, so I know some of you are going
• 0:39
  Speaker 3: through withdrawal syndrome, but we are back. And today we're
• 0:44
  Speaker 3: going to be talking about 9-11, which is in a
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  Speaker 3: week we will be commemorating, or 10 days we'll be
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  Speaker 3: commemorating the 25th, 25 years since it happened. I still
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  Speaker 3: vividly remember parts of that morning. I can't say I
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  Speaker 3: remember the whole day, but I certainly remember the morning hours.
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  Speaker 3: I'm joined today by Ilan Jono and Ankar Ghatse from
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  Speaker 3: the Ayn Rand Institute. We're also streaming this live on
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  Speaker 3: the Ayn Rand Institute YouTube channel as well. So you're
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  Speaker 3: getting this on my various channels and Ayn Rand Institute's
• 1:25
  Speaker 3: various channels. You can ask questions on Well, on one
• 1:29
  Speaker 3: of the two YouTube channels that you're watching, but it
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  Speaker 3: is also streaming on X and on Facebook.
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  Speaker 1: All right.
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  Speaker 2: So a.
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  Speaker 3: Lot of you guys, I think, listening, I know the
• 1:43
  Speaker 3: kind of the age profile of the majority of people
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  Speaker 3: who listen to the show. You were pretty young when
• 1:49
  Speaker 3: 9-11 happened. Some of you, this is 25 years already past.
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  Speaker 3: So some of you might have been in your teenage years.
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  Speaker 3: Many of you were even younger than that. So I
• 2:00
  Speaker 3: thought we'd really start with a kind of a background.
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  Speaker 3: What actually, what happened, what led up to what happened?
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  Speaker 3: And maybe I'll start with you, Ilan, since you've really
• 2:12
  Speaker 3: studied this and looked at the history of it. So
• 2:15
  Speaker 3: tell us a little bit about kind of the lead
• 2:18
  Speaker 3: up to 9-11, and then we can talk about what
• 2:20
  Speaker 3: happened on 9-11.
• 2:23
  Speaker 4: The lead up to 9-11 is a story of compounding, evasion,
• 2:29
  Speaker 4: and failure to understand what was going on in the
• 2:31
  Speaker 4: Middle East. So it depends on how far back you
• 2:33
  Speaker 4: want to go. The story is of Islamist movement rising
• 2:41
  Speaker 4: through the 20th century. They're really just not a factor
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  Speaker 4: through the early decades of the 20th century.
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  Speaker 5: They pick up steam in sort of the late 70s.
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  Speaker 4: And the pivotal point we've talked a lot about, and
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  Speaker 4: I'm sure you're on your show and you've written about this,
• 2:59
  Speaker 4: the pivotal point in the Middle East is the Iranian
• 3:01
  Speaker 4: Revolution of 1979. And around that time, that's when people
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  Speaker 4: take notice and say, all those people giving out pamphlets
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  Speaker 4: and hectoring us and telling us about the way to
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  Speaker 4: get Islamic dominance and.
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  Speaker 5: Revive our culture, is through piety. Well, look at what
• 3:19
  Speaker 5: they did in Iran.
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  Speaker 4: They created a new society completely defined by this. That's
• 3:24
  Speaker 4: the path to get out of our humiliation because a
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  Speaker 4: big part of the story of the Middle East is
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  Speaker 4: the Muslim people's view themselves, for good reason, I think,
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  Speaker 4: as a society in decline, fundamental decline. And they see
• 3:37
  Speaker 4: themselves as the chosen by God people who deserve to
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  Speaker 4: be on top. And that isn't true. So the Iranian revolution...
• 3:45
  Speaker 4: changes all that. The other thing was worth just mentioning
• 3:48
  Speaker 4: in passing. There's an incident in Saudi Arabia that is
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  Speaker 4: often pointed to as this is the point at which
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  Speaker 4: the Saudis realize, wow, we really take seriously embracing Islam
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  Speaker 4: as part of what we do more than just as
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  Speaker 4: a part of the religion.
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  Speaker 5: Then what you see is a continuing.
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  Speaker 4: Attempt to test what can we get away with against
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  Speaker 4: this great Satan in America and the West more generally.
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  Speaker 4: The one major incident that we pointed to and Iran
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  Speaker 4: commented on at the time was the seizure of the
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  Speaker 4: American embassy in Tehran in 1979.
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  Speaker 5: Which was a humiliation for America.
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  Speaker 4: If you think the Iran war today under Trump, six
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  Speaker 4: months in, two weeks, it was supposed to be.
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  Speaker 5: A two week war, six months in. I think that's
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  Speaker 5: a humiliation.
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  Speaker 4: Think about what the taking of American hostages, parading them
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  Speaker 4: on TV for over a year and, uh, really rubbing
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  Speaker 4: America's nose in it so there you have that and
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  Speaker 4: there's a cycle of continuing attacks so the Iranians get
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  Speaker 4: away with it they decide we can do whatever we
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  Speaker 4: want America's not going to do a damn thing then
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  Speaker 4: you get a cycle of attacks of increasing ferocity in
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  Speaker 4: different places through different actors but united by the same
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  Speaker 4: ideological vision the idea of advancing Islamic totalitarianism that's the
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  Speaker 4: term we've been using for a long time I think
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  Speaker 4: it's the apt term here There are attacks on American
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  Speaker 4: interests in Lebanon. There are attacks in America, in Saudi Arabia.
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  Speaker 4: There are attacks in Yemen. The Yemen attack happens about
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  Speaker 4: a year before 9-11.
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  Speaker 5: But what is often forgotten is that there.
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  Speaker 4: Was also an attempted attack on the World Trade.
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  Speaker 5: Center in New York in the 90s, late 90s, right before.
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  Speaker 5: And it didn't work.
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  Speaker 4: The U-Haul truck, whatever it was that was supposed to
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  Speaker 4: blow up, didn't blow up. And people involved got captured.
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  Speaker 4: But that was a dry run in a certain sense.
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  Speaker 4: So that brings you to a point at which there's
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  Speaker 4: a growing menace in the Middle East. It's led by
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  Speaker 4: regimes like Iran, Saudi Arabia, some others. It's growing in confidence.
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  Speaker 4: The American policy response is a study of pragmatism, short-term,
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  Speaker 4: and evasion. And that just blows up in our faces
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  Speaker 4: in 9-11. And there's a lot to unpack there, but
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  Speaker 4: that's just the big thread. If you're trying to understand
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  Speaker 4: what led up to it, it is not that America
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  Speaker 4: deserved it, but America certainly is responsible for not addressing
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  Speaker 4: the problem in the years before. So it was certainly, uh,
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  Speaker 4: defeatable long before it got so, so serious and dangerous.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah.
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  Speaker 3: I mean, American intelligence agencies had identified bin Laden as
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  Speaker 3: a threat to the United States and plotting against the
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  Speaker 3: United States, uh, in the 1990s, and the response of
• 6:45
  Speaker 3: the Clinton administration and then the early Bush administration was nothing.
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  Speaker 3: I mean, a few bombs lobbed into Afghanistan, to camps
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  Speaker 3: where they knew nobody would actually get hurt, and appeasing,
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  Speaker 3: continued appeasement of the Iranian regime.
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  Speaker 5: Uncle, leading up... Just one more thing, Yaron.
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  Speaker 4: I think it's relevant to say as well for people
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  Speaker 4: just trying to reactivate what was going on.
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  Speaker 5: Bin Laden was writing open letters to America from the
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  Speaker 5: 1990s on.
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  Speaker 4: Now, you could ignore it and say, oh, this crazy
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  Speaker 4: guy living in Afghanistan. Who cares what he's saying? But
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  Speaker 4: he was telling people, you failed in Lebanon. You guys
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  Speaker 4: are a paper tiger. The holy warriors are going to
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  Speaker 4: have their say. And here are all the ways in
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  Speaker 4: which we're right and we're wrong. And it's not one letter.
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  Speaker 4: It's a series of these statements declaring war on America.
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  Speaker 4: When people tell you that, you need to take it seriously,
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  Speaker 4: given who they are.
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  Speaker 5: Sorry, let me hand it back to you, Uncle.
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  Speaker 3: Yeah, I was going to ask, Uncle, what explains this,
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  Speaker 3: you know, constant appeasement and evasion of these threats that,
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  Speaker 3: you know, goes back to to Jimmy Carter's days and
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  Speaker 3: maybe even before that in American foreign policy?
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  Speaker 1: I think there's two elements.
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  Speaker 2: I would single out two elements.
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  Speaker 1: One is no confidence and no self-esteem about your actual
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  Speaker 1: nation or country, what the U.S. represents and what it
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  Speaker 1: represents at its best is good, and the willingness, one,
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  Speaker 1: to say that, and two, to uphold that in action.
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  Speaker 1: This is part of why the takeover of the embassy
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  Speaker 1: in 1979, that in any normal reading, that's an act
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  Speaker 1: of war.
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  Speaker 2: Your embassy is your territory on foreign soil. It's taken
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  Speaker 2: over like this.
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  Speaker 1: And then for months and months and months, and the
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  Speaker 1: hostages are paraded on the television screen, I was, this
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  Speaker 1: is when I started sort of following news. This was the,
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  Speaker 1: I was nine or 10 when this is unfolding on TV.
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  Speaker 1: And it was literally every night this was on TV,
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  Speaker 1: them defying the American.
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  Speaker 2: Country and regime.
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  Speaker 1: And just if you had more self-esteem, it's like daily
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  Speaker 1: they're slapping.
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  Speaker 2: You in the face.
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  Speaker 1: There would be a point of that, no, I'm not
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  Speaker 1: standing for this anymore, and we're marching into Tehran.
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  Speaker 2: That never happened.
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  Speaker 1: At most, what happened is, I forget how many months
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  Speaker 1: into the seizure of the embassy, Carter sent a kind
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  Speaker 1: of rescue squad. The helicopters crashed, or at least one
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  Speaker 1: crashed in the desert, and it was pulled back.
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  Speaker 2: But it was not....
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  Speaker 1: You've declared war on us, we're declaring war on you,
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  Speaker 1: and we're going to put an end to you. There
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  Speaker 1: was nothing resembling that. And that, you need a self-esteem,
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  Speaker 1: but to do that, and particularly to take up arms
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  Speaker 1: and start killing people, you have to have a morality
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  Speaker 1: that sanctions that, that says, yeah, you have a right
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  Speaker 1: to your self-defense.
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  Speaker 2: You've been attacked. And you've been attacked once.
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  Speaker 1: They're regularly parading the fact that they control you, could
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  Speaker 1: kill you if they wanted. And you have a right
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  Speaker 1: in that context to self-defense and to fight back.
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  Speaker 2: And not only a right, you have a moral requirement
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  Speaker 2: to do it.
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  Speaker 1: If you actually value your life and your country, you
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  Speaker 1: will now fight back.
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  Speaker 2: But it's been pounded into our heads. No, the height
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  Speaker 2: of morality.
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  Speaker 1: Is not selfish. It's not to exert your self-interest. Your
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  Speaker 1: rational self-interest is not to pursue it. It's to give up,
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  Speaker 1: to sacrifice, and particularly when you can paint the other
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  Speaker 1: side as their lowly, primitive, suffering, their need.
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  Speaker 2: Then your whole attitude has to be, we've.
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  Speaker 1: Got no say, they get to dictate everything because they
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  Speaker 1: hold the moral card that you're supposed to minister to.
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  Speaker 2: Those in need. We have the ability, they have the need,
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  Speaker 2: therefore we're their servant. And in that context, you can't.
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  Speaker 1: Have a moral view that says, yeah, we should and
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  Speaker 1: we have an obligation as leaders of the nation to
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  Speaker 1: pursue the nation's self-interest.
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  Speaker 3: And a big deal, particularly with Iran, has been made
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  Speaker 3: of American intervention over there and support for the Shah.
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  Speaker 3: And this idea that somehow, you know, it's our fault,
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  Speaker 3: whatever negatives exist in Tehran, kind of further undermining the
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  Speaker 3: self-confidence and self-esteem of the American nation. Every problem in
• 11:53
  Speaker 3: the world is our fault somehow. And that's been pervasive,
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  Speaker 3: I think, in the way history has been taught. in
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  Speaker 3: the last few decades. So, yeah, I mean, 9-11 happens,
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  Speaker 3: you know, we don't have to go through the horrors
• 12:13
  Speaker 3: of the day, but it was, I mean, I think
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  Speaker 3: everybody has seen the images, at least those of us
• 12:20
  Speaker 3: who've lived through them. It was, while not surprising that
• 12:25
  Speaker 3: something happened, the way it happened was shocking and dramatic. And,
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  Speaker 3: And in many respects, bin Laden succeeded because he got
• 12:35
  Speaker 3: this massive effect of the actual attacks, the shock value
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  Speaker 3: of them, the falling of the towers, the horror of
• 12:49
  Speaker 3: people jumping and just a number of deaths involved. And
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  Speaker 3: it seemed there for a moment that Americans were waking
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  Speaker 3: up And we're going to find their self-esteem and find
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  Speaker 3: a certain confidence to do something about this threat that
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  Speaker 3: was now imminent.
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  Speaker 2: Can I say something about the shock?
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  Speaker 1: Because I think it's important to sort of capture that
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  Speaker 1: moment in time.
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  Speaker 2: And this is not history for history's sake.
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  Speaker 1: I don't think you can understand the 21st century unless
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  Speaker 1: you understand this as the event that ushers in the
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: 21st century and the dramatic changes we've had politically and culturally,
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  Speaker 1: I think, trace back to this episode. And in that sense,
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  Speaker 1: I find this a very somber occasion as a lead
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  Speaker 1: up to the 25th anniversary of the attacks.
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  Speaker 2: And in part because there's a real way in which
• 13:55
  Speaker 2: they won.
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  Speaker 1: Like if what terrorism is, is about using force to
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: create political change that you couldn't create by other means,
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  Speaker 1: it has led to dramatic political changes in the United States. Now,
• 14:10
  Speaker 1: not all, it's essentially all our fault. We've done things wrong.
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  Speaker 1: So it's not like they have this tremendous power, but
• 14:19
  Speaker 1: they initiated an event that cascaded to what we have
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: in the present day.
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  Speaker 2: And part of the shock.
• 14:26
  Speaker 1: Is, I think I put two elements to really capture
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  Speaker 1: And I remember my scene when it was confirmed that
• 14:33
  Speaker 1: this wasn't an accident, when the second plane flew into
• 14:36
  Speaker 1: the tower.
• 14:36
  Speaker 2: This is clearly we're under attack. It's the U.S.
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: Is coming out and the Western War is coming out
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: of the Cold War.
• 14:44
  Speaker 2: And we've won the Cold War. We don't think this.
• 14:48
  Speaker 1: Is this is sort of the story. It's now we're
• 14:51
  Speaker 1: going to have an age of prosperity. And in the
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: late 90s, I mean, if you can fathom this, we
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: actually had balanced budgets compared to what we have now.
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: And that was partly was put as this is a
• 15:03
  Speaker 1: peace dividend. We don't have to spend so much on
• 15:05
  Speaker 1: the military. And so we can balance our budget and
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: have some kind of fiscal responsibility.
• 15:11
  Speaker 2: A golden age awaits. If you take Fukuyama, it's the
• 15:15
  Speaker 2: end of history. It's we've won. The fall of the
• 15:19
  Speaker 2: Berlin Wall is in the 90s.
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: And then you have, in less than a decade, an
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: attack on the U.S. And I think here what's important,
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: it's an attack on the heart of the U.S.
• 15:32
  Speaker 2: The U.S.
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: Has rightly viewed itself as we're separated from the rest
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: of the world who doesn't really know what they're doing.
• 15:38
  Speaker 1: And they're always involved in conflict. But we have ocean
• 15:41
  Speaker 1: on each side that separates us. And Canada is not
• 15:45
  Speaker 1: going to attack us.
• 15:46
  Speaker 2: Mexico is not. We enjoy this kind of peaceful existence.
• 15:50
  Speaker 3: I mean, even the Japanese enjoy.
• 15:53
  Speaker 1: And even something like Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. It's thousands of
• 15:57
  Speaker 1: miles away. And now you have attacked on the heart
• 16:01
  Speaker 1: of the U.S., its financial system in New York and
• 16:04
  Speaker 1: the attempt on its political center of power in Washington.
• 16:08
  Speaker 1: Like it's sometimes put now, it's like New York and Virginia.
• 16:12
  Speaker 1: Virginia is an accident. They were going after Washington, D.C.
• 16:16
  Speaker 1: and New York, the heart of America. And the fact
• 16:18
  Speaker 1: that that could happen and it could succeed shocked people
• 16:23
  Speaker 1: in a way that it's hard, I think, to get
• 16:26
  Speaker 1: back to that context of thinking of the U.S.
• 16:29
  Speaker 2: As sort of, it's invulnerable, it's immune to this? Yes.
• 16:33
  Speaker 3: I mean, I think, you know, here's a superpower, the
• 16:37
  Speaker 3: mightiest military force in human history, and, you know, people
• 16:42
  Speaker 3: can do this. And it shatters everything. I mean, if
• 16:47
  Speaker 3: in those days, people don't remember this, but you could
• 16:50
  Speaker 3: walk you know, you could walk to a gate, you could,
• 16:53
  Speaker 3: you could enter an airport and walk all the way
• 16:55
  Speaker 3: to a gate. Uh, the whole idea of, of being
• 16:58
  Speaker 3: secure in your home, the whole idea of being secure
• 17:01
  Speaker 3: in an airplane, all of that is shattered in one instance.
• 17:05
  Speaker 3: And the idea of the using an airplane as a weapon, um, yeah,
• 17:10
  Speaker 3: I mean, given how much flying people do in America,
• 17:13
  Speaker 3: this is something that everybody does all the time was so, uh,
• 17:18
  Speaker 3: you know, it was truly horrific. Uh, Ilan, do you? Yeah,
• 17:22
  Speaker 3: go ahead.
• 17:23
  Speaker 4: So Ankar was painting out broad pictures, I think is
• 17:26
  Speaker 4: really helpful about where we were with the fall of communism.
• 17:32
  Speaker 5: I think there was a real.
• 17:34
  Speaker 4: Optimism about what would happen in the former Soviet Union.
• 17:38
  Speaker 5: There was optimism about Europe, the fall of the wall.
• 17:41
  Speaker 5: And I think just to give you one more.
• 17:45
  Speaker 4: Aspect of this context, During the Cold War, people in
• 17:52
  Speaker 4: studying this would describe the world as bipolar in the
• 17:55
  Speaker 4: sense that there's two major powers. That's all you ever
• 17:58
  Speaker 4: need to understand. Everything else falls into this framework. And
• 18:02
  Speaker 4: after the Cold War, America is now the only power.
• 18:06
  Speaker 4: It's what they call the unipolar moment. Charles Krauthammer, some
• 18:09
  Speaker 4: people might remember him as a columnist and TV commentator.
• 18:13
  Speaker 5: Has an article that people often talk about. It's Unipolimon.
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  Speaker 2: What do we do?
• 18:17
  Speaker 5: Nobody can challenge us in this idea of the end
• 18:20
  Speaker 5: of history.
• 18:20
  Speaker 4: We don't have to get to the analysis of the
• 18:22
  Speaker 4: end of history, but the way that's now remembered is
• 18:25
  Speaker 4: what's left? Like liberal democracy and that sort of conventional
• 18:29
  Speaker 4: understanding of it, that's the only game in town.
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  Speaker 5: Okay, what's next?
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  Speaker 4: To say that it was a surprise or a slap
• 18:40
  Speaker 4: in the face it doesn't come close to capturing what
• 18:44
  Speaker 4: I think Ankara is trying to dramatize here in terms
• 18:46
  Speaker 4: of the feeling of vulnerability after hearing for a decade,
• 18:52
  Speaker 4: communism is dead.
• 18:53
  Speaker 5: There are no other threats around us.
• 18:55
  Speaker 4: And I would say just the flip side of this,
• 18:58
  Speaker 4: there was a real sense of buoyancy and excitement about
• 19:02
  Speaker 4: where we were. You mentioned the economic stage. Things were
• 19:04
  Speaker 4: heating up with globalized trade. The internet was on the
• 19:09
  Speaker 4: cusp of becoming mainstream. If you think about where we
• 19:12
  Speaker 4: were technologically, mobile phones were starting to become affordable. Everyone
• 19:16
  Speaker 4: was moving towards... The world was changing fundamentally. Wow, this
• 19:20
  Speaker 4: is really, really impressive.
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  Speaker 5: And I just want to bring... one aspect of this
• 19:26
  Speaker 5: onto the table, we can explore it whenever you think
• 19:28
  Speaker 5: would be good, you're on.
• 19:32
  Speaker 4: The people who are talking about the Unipol moment versus
• 19:35
  Speaker 4: the Polar, those are people in international relations.
• 19:37
  Speaker 5: The people studying the Middle East, we're not talking about that.
• 19:40
  Speaker 4: We're talking about the sort of things you're raising here,
• 19:43
  Speaker 4: which is what happened in 1953 in Iran? How is
• 19:46
  Speaker 4: America the problem in the Middle East? America is the
• 19:49
  Speaker 4: ogre that's closed all these trouble. There's a book that
• 19:54
  Speaker 4: studies the trajectory of Middle East studies as a field
• 19:58
  Speaker 4: in the lead up to 9-11. The thread in that field,
• 20:03
  Speaker 4: if you take this account to be credible, I think
• 20:05
  Speaker 4: it is.
• 20:06
  Speaker 5: The idea that Islamic.
• 20:10
  Speaker 4: Totalitarianism was a problem, let alone a significant problem.
• 20:14
  Speaker 5: That was just poo-poo. That's ridiculous. These people are just
• 20:18
  Speaker 5: hot air.
• 20:19
  Speaker 4: What you really need to think about is the legacy
• 20:20
  Speaker 4: of colonialism, the legacy of capitalism in the Middle East,
• 20:24
  Speaker 4: how we harmed all these people. The broader category that
• 20:29
  Speaker 4: I think is important to put on the table is here.
• 20:32
  Speaker 4: Often people talk about this as a policy failure, and
• 20:35
  Speaker 4: it is a foreign policy failure. But upstream from that
• 20:38
  Speaker 4: is sort of a failure of intellectuals more broadly, both
• 20:41
  Speaker 4: in terms of understanding where we were intellectually, politically, culturally,
• 20:45
  Speaker 4: and then within the area where people should be understanding
• 20:49
  Speaker 4: the Islamic phenomenon, they weren't even interested.
• 20:53
  Speaker 2: In that, most of them.
• 20:54
  Speaker 5: I mean, there were better people for sure.
• 20:57
  Speaker 4: That is part of the story that we brought in
• 21:00
  Speaker 4: to our analysis of 9-11. It was central to our analysis.
• 21:03
  Speaker 4: The failure of intellectuals to explain and direct America.
• 21:07
  Speaker 5: I just want to put that as a topic for
• 21:10
  Speaker 5: us to explore.
• 21:11
  Speaker 3: Sure. Look, the most important book published by a Middle
• 21:15
  Speaker 3: East scholar in the decades before 9-11 was Orientalism by
• 21:22
  Speaker 3: Edward Said, which basically blamed all the problems in the
• 21:26
  Speaker 3: Middle East and any concerns in the Middle East on
• 21:29
  Speaker 3: the West, on colonialism. And this is where today, if people,
• 21:35
  Speaker 3: you know, the discussions around woke, about post-colonialism and so on,
• 21:39
  Speaker 3: all of those go back to Edward Said and his book, Orientalism.
• 21:44
  Speaker 3: And this came to dominate the thinking among Middle East scholars.
• 21:49
  Speaker 3: It was all about studying the ways in which the
• 21:52
  Speaker 3: West had developed you know, oppressed and oppressed the Arab countries,
• 22:00
  Speaker 3: the Muslim countries. And that was the frame in which
• 22:03
  Speaker 3: everybody thought about it. Indeed, many on the left, many
• 22:07
  Speaker 3: leftist intellectuals actually celebrated the 1979 revolution in Iran as
• 22:13
  Speaker 3: an opportunity for the Iranians finally to overthrow a colonial
• 22:17
  Speaker 3: regime and to manifest their own destiny. So it was
• 22:21
  Speaker 3: actually a phenomenon that was celebrated. And again, still is.
• 22:25
  Speaker 3: It still resonates to this day. Edward Said is still
• 22:30
  Speaker 3: hugely influential in academia today, as is the whole post-colonialism
• 22:35
  Speaker 3: way of thinking about the world. Ankar?
• 22:41
  Speaker 2: And you have to see in that the influence and
• 22:45
  Speaker 2: impact of altruism.
• 22:47
  Speaker 1: So Ayn Rand said that this is the corrosiveness poison
• 22:52
  Speaker 1: in the blood of Western civilization.
• 22:55
  Speaker 2: And she meant it.
• 22:56
  Speaker 1: And you see it in this whole area that part
• 23:02
  Speaker 1: of what altruism teaches is that if you have power ability,
• 23:08
  Speaker 1: you're in the wrong. It doesn't matter how you've acquired
• 23:11
  Speaker 1: this power, what you've done with this ability. If you
• 23:15
  Speaker 1: take Marx's slogan as one of the ones that gives
• 23:18
  Speaker 1: voice to altruism, from each according to his ability to
• 23:22
  Speaker 1: each according to his need. There's no interest in the
• 23:26
  Speaker 1: issue of where did your ability come from?
• 23:28
  Speaker 2: Is it through your own work? Is it through your
• 23:30
  Speaker 2: own virtue, through your own choices?
• 23:31
  Speaker 1: There's no interest in that. If you have ability, you're
• 23:34
  Speaker 1: to give it up for people in need. And why
• 23:36
  Speaker 1: are they in need? You're not supposed to investigate that,
• 23:40
  Speaker 1: ask that, is it through some fault of their own?
• 23:42
  Speaker 1: Is it through their irrationality? Is it through their evil?
• 23:45
  Speaker 1: You're not supposed, if they're in need, then you owe them.
• 23:49
  Speaker 1: And you have ability or you've created something, you've produced something.
• 23:52
  Speaker 1: You owe them. And this is what Ayn Rand exposed
• 23:57
  Speaker 1: in Atlas Shrugged, that this is the meaning.
• 24:00
  Speaker 2: Of the moral doctrine.
• 24:01
  Speaker 1: People always try to say she's going too far.
• 24:06
  Speaker 2: This is not really what it means, but it is
• 24:09
  Speaker 2: what it means.
• 24:09
  Speaker 1: And you see it most starkly, I think, in foreign
• 24:13
  Speaker 1: policy and foreign affairs.
• 24:16
  Speaker 2: It's that you celebrate.
• 24:20
  Speaker 1: The rise of Islamic totalitarians in 1979, you don't actually
• 24:25
  Speaker 1: care about the people in Iran who are now going
• 24:28
  Speaker 1: to be terrorized, victimized, kept down for decades and decades
• 24:33
  Speaker 1: and decades, which is what happened. What you care about
• 24:36
  Speaker 1: is the people.
• 24:37
  Speaker 2: Who have ability or power. They're losing. Like, America's losing.
• 24:40
  Speaker 2: The West is losing. We're tearing that down. We don't care...
• 24:45
  Speaker 2: and we're not concerned.
• 24:46
  Speaker 1: Really with the people in need. And that's what this
• 24:50
  Speaker 1: whole movement was. I remember I was an undergraduate student
• 24:54
  Speaker 1: and I had a professor. It was one of the
• 24:57
  Speaker 1: few professors who I think was honest in this regard.
• 25:00
  Speaker 2: So he came of age in the 60s.
• 25:04
  Speaker 1: He advocated for all these things of the whole, what
• 25:09
  Speaker 1: they'll put as now the decolonization, in Africa and Asia
• 25:13
  Speaker 1: and the Middle East of we got to get out
• 25:16
  Speaker 1: the European powers and sometimes America. And he said, yeah,
• 25:22
  Speaker 1: and we didn't really think it might become even worse
• 25:25
  Speaker 1: than what it was. But he was like, his eyes
• 25:28
  Speaker 1: were open enough to, yeah, they're now even worse off
• 25:31
  Speaker 1: than they were before. And he regarded that as a tragedy.
• 25:33
  Speaker 1: Like that's not, well, who cares because we kicked out.
• 25:36
  Speaker 1: But there's many people for whom, who cares because we
• 25:38
  Speaker 1: kicked out. And that is, altruism sanction or gives cover
• 25:44
  Speaker 1: to that corrupt motivation that it is, yeah, but look,
• 25:48
  Speaker 1: I'm giving, we're taking from the people.
• 25:49
  Speaker 2: Of inability and giving to people in need. So how
• 25:52
  Speaker 2: can you say what we're doing isn't right?
• 25:54
  Speaker 1: It's, it's vicious and it's led to enormous destruction, both
• 26:00
  Speaker 1: in Africa and the Middle East.
• 26:03
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 26:03
  Speaker 3: I mean, the, the, the, the, I haven't seen a
• 26:07
  Speaker 3: good history of colonialism, particularly of the post-colonial era and
• 26:12
  Speaker 3: its ultimate consequences. Somebody needs to write that. So, you know,
• 26:19
  Speaker 3: the other part of this, which I think Ilan suggested,
• 26:22
  Speaker 3: is there was a sense of, in the 80s and 90s,
• 26:26
  Speaker 3: there was a shallow, given a shallow sense of American revivals.
• 26:33
  Speaker 3: coming out of Reagan, the economy was doing better. People
• 26:36
  Speaker 3: generally had a positive.
• 26:37
  Speaker 2: View of the world.
• 26:39
  Speaker 3: Technology was changing everything. Computer revolution in the 80s, the
• 26:43
  Speaker 3: internet in the 90s. We were heading into the 21st
• 26:47
  Speaker 3: century with a balanced budget. In 2000, the year of
• 26:52
  Speaker 3: the election was actually a small surplus in the federal government.
• 26:59
  Speaker 3: And there was just a certain energy and a positivity
• 27:04
  Speaker 3: in the culture. And I mean, people today look back
• 27:07
  Speaker 3: at that. And I think there's a lot of nostalgia
• 27:10
  Speaker 3: for the 90s, which is pretty pathetic because it wasn't
• 27:13
  Speaker 3: that great. But it was so much better than the
• 27:16
  Speaker 3: 70s and the 60s had been. It seemed to have
• 27:19
  Speaker 3: turned a corner in the 80s. And there seemed to
• 27:22
  Speaker 3: be an energy and a forward momentum. And this just, 9-11,
• 27:26
  Speaker 3: I think, just killed that. It just destroyed it. whatever
• 27:29
  Speaker 3: sense of confidence Americans had. And then, of course, the
• 27:35
  Speaker 3: response to 9-11 is what was the nail in the coffin.
• 27:41
  Speaker 3: I mean, it's really, even more than 9-11 itself, the
• 27:45
  Speaker 3: response to 9-11 is what has led us to where
• 27:48
  Speaker 3: we are today. So maybe we can talk about that,
• 27:51
  Speaker 3: about how our leaders, both our intellectual and our political leaders,
• 27:57
  Speaker 3: responded to this. So, Ilan, maybe you can take us
• 28:01
  Speaker 3: through kind of the response and the immediate aftermath of 9-11.
• 28:07
  Speaker 3: I do.
• 28:07
  Speaker 5: I can do that.
• 28:08
  Speaker 4: I want to just make a reference to a book
• 28:11
  Speaker 4: that we brought out this month, Failing to Confront Islam
• 28:14
  Speaker 4: and Totalitarianism, What Went Wrong After 9-11, third edition.
• 28:18
  Speaker 5: So we brought the book out. Yeah, there you go.
• 28:21
  Speaker 4: 2016, it was 15 years, we brought out 2021 and
• 28:25
  Speaker 4: 20 years, and.
• 28:26
  Speaker 5: We brought out a new expanded edition this year.
• 28:29
  Speaker 4: It's somewhere around 400 plus pages, and it doesn't include
• 28:33
  Speaker 4: everything we wrote or said around 9-1-1. So I mentioned that, one,
• 28:38
  Speaker 4: because everyone watching, if you register at fineland.org slash 9-1-1, you.
• 28:43
  Speaker 5: Can get a free digital copy.
• 28:46
  Speaker 4: And two, we're doing a live stream on 9-11 itself
• 28:49
  Speaker 4: from our conference, in Austin, Texas, Onkar and I will.
• 28:51
  Speaker 5: Be speaking around the issue of 9-11.
• 28:54
  Speaker 4: You'll hear more about what we've done over the years,
• 28:56
  Speaker 4: but if you want to get a full picture, a
• 28:59
  Speaker 4: fuller picture of what the Institute said since 9-11 through
• 29:02
  Speaker 4: our whole analysis.
• 29:04
  Speaker 5: You're welcome to take a look at that book.
• 29:06
  Speaker 4: It contains a lot of valuable material by me, by Onkar,
• 29:09
  Speaker 4: by Yaron, by many others.
• 29:10
  Speaker 2: Dr.
• 29:10
  Speaker 4: Picoff's essay, which we will probably talk about in the brief,
• 29:14
  Speaker 4: published as an open advertisement op-ed in the New York
• 29:19
  Speaker 4: Times and Washington Post.
• 29:21
  Speaker 5: To answer your question, what was happening?
• 29:24
  Speaker 4: What was the reaction? Today we have a term, gaslighting.
• 29:31
  Speaker 4: I'm not convinced it's that useful a term, but there's
• 29:34
  Speaker 4: something to it. It's like you're being told something that
• 29:37
  Speaker 4: isn't true and made to feel you're crazy.
• 29:39
  Speaker 5: If you question it.
• 29:40
  Speaker 1: It.
• 29:41
  Speaker 4: That's one way to capture what happened after 9-11. The
• 29:47
  Speaker 4: people who flew the planes into the building in New
• 29:50
  Speaker 4: York and in the Pentagon, and presumably it's another target
• 29:54
  Speaker 4: in Washington, but they were downed in Pennsylvania. They were
• 30:00
  Speaker 4: committed to Islam. They were committed Islamic totalitarians. They were
• 30:03
  Speaker 4: followers of bin Laden. Bin Laden was a follower of
• 30:06
  Speaker 4: this movement, of which there are many factions. But what
• 30:08
  Speaker 4: unites them is this vision. And it's pretty blunt and
• 30:12
  Speaker 4: clear what they want. They showed us in Afghanistan. They
• 30:15
  Speaker 4: showed us in Iran. This suicide letter by the lead hijacker,
• 30:19
  Speaker 4: Mohammed Atta, I can read you passages from.
• 30:22
  Speaker 5: It's pretty open.
• 30:23
  Speaker 4: This is all about doing what God loves, and we're
• 30:25
  Speaker 4: going to kill the Satan.
• 30:27
  Speaker 5: Don't be afraid. You're going to be in heaven in
• 30:30
  Speaker 5: a moment, and you'll be married.
• 30:32
  Speaker 4: To, you know, you'll get your 72 virgins in heaven.
• 30:38
  Speaker 4: Bin Laden tells you what he's about. The Iranians tell
• 30:41
  Speaker 4: you what they're about. Everyone in this movement tells you
• 30:44
  Speaker 4: openly what they're about. And yet, here we are, days
• 30:48
  Speaker 4: after 9-11, So I'm just going to read you just
• 30:51
  Speaker 4: a few nuggets.
• 30:52
  Speaker 5: This is George W.
• 30:53
  Speaker 4: Bush, September 17th. Quote, the face of terror is not
• 30:58
  Speaker 4: the true faith of Islam. That's not what Islam is
• 31:02
  Speaker 4: all about. Islam is peace. September 20th. We respect your faith.
• 31:09
  Speaker 4: Its teachings are good and peaceful. The people who commit
• 31:13
  Speaker 4: these evil acts in the name of Allah, bless being
• 31:15
  Speaker 4: the name of Allah.
• 31:16
  Speaker 5: So here you have, this is George Bush, three days later.
• 31:19
  Speaker 4: Just one more, just so people get the sense that
• 31:21
  Speaker 4: this wasn't a one-off. This was a theme that constantly
• 31:24
  Speaker 4: came out of the Bush administration. September 28th. Our war
• 31:29
  Speaker 4: is against evil, not against Islam. I know that the Muslim.
• 31:34
  Speaker 5: Faith is based upon peace and love and compassion. And again,
• 31:37
  Speaker 5: this goes on.
• 31:38
  Speaker 4: There's quotations you can find from 2002, 2003, and it's
• 31:40
  Speaker 4: on and on and on.
• 31:41
  Speaker 2: George W. Bush....
• 31:46
  Speaker 5: Positioned himself as an authority on how to interpret Islam
• 31:50
  Speaker 5: and took a stand that there is no possible way
• 31:54
  Speaker 5: that any of the people who.
• 31:55
  Speaker 4: Carried out these attacks that murdered more than 3,000 Americans
• 31:59
  Speaker 4: could have possibly been involved or even committed to Islam.
• 32:04
  Speaker 5: And that is just beyond fantastical. It really is. It's
• 32:10
  Speaker 5: a lie. It's an evasion. It's grotesque.
• 32:13
  Speaker 4: And to tie it to what we're living through today,
• 32:15
  Speaker 4: 25 years, Bush was not the only person who had
• 32:18
  Speaker 4: this view. This was just the view, including from people,
• 32:22
  Speaker 4: intellectuals on the left. It morphed into the fear that
• 32:26
  Speaker 4: the biggest problem we have in 9-11 is that people
• 32:29
  Speaker 4: who believe in Islam will feel persecuted.
• 32:32
  Speaker 5: I don't think that was a big problem.
• 32:33
  Speaker 4: I think there were some people who were persecuted because
• 32:35
  Speaker 4: they believed in Islam, but that's.
• 32:39
  Speaker 5: You can't stop.
• 32:40
  Speaker 4: There's going to be some racism, for sure.
• 32:42
  Speaker 5: But I don't think that was the big problem.
• 32:44
  Speaker 4: But then you get this phenomenon of using Islamophobia as
• 32:48
  Speaker 4: a way to shut down this topic. And it became
• 32:50
  Speaker 4: a real free speech issue on campuses. I faced it,
• 32:53
  Speaker 4: Ankur faced it, you faced it.
• 32:55
  Speaker 5: It's a real problem.
• 32:57
  Speaker 4: And then you get this mounting issue of, but the
• 32:59
  Speaker 4: government's lying to us.
• 33:01
  Speaker 5: It's pretty obvious these people are fanatical Muslims. Look at
• 33:04
  Speaker 5: what they say.
• 33:04
  Speaker 4: And I think that erosion of trust year after year,
• 33:09
  Speaker 4: and then you get it from Obama.
• 33:11
  Speaker 5: It's not like he was telling us the truth on
• 33:13
  Speaker 5: this issue.
• 33:14
  Speaker 4: Just this one thread, it's a central issue, but it's
• 33:17
  Speaker 4: one thread that you get year after year pounding into you.
• 33:21
  Speaker 4: It is not surprising that we have a society today
• 33:25
  Speaker 4: where people, they have no trust in institutions.
• 33:30
  Speaker 5: The government, media, the military.
• 33:33
  Speaker 4: I think there's a lot to say about the way
• 33:34
  Speaker 4: the military covered up its own belief in how bad
• 33:38
  Speaker 4: the wars were going.
• 33:38
  Speaker 5: I can say something more about that in Afghanistan.
• 33:42
  Speaker 4: And even academia, because the academics were definitely pushing this line.
• 33:46
  Speaker 5: And to me, this is, if there's one.
• 33:50
  Speaker 4: Original saying, it's that we did not face the facts
• 33:53
  Speaker 4: after 9-11.
• 33:54
  Speaker 5: The Bush administration refused to do that.
• 33:58
  Speaker 4: And our argument at the time, and it's still true
• 34:01
  Speaker 4: and it can be borne out, unless you really understand
• 34:05
  Speaker 4: what you're facing, you can't defeat it.
• 34:06
  Speaker 5: And this is the tragedy.
• 34:07
  Speaker 4: America could and still can easily defeat this enemy. But
• 34:12
  Speaker 4: it chose not to because it chose to pander to
• 34:17
  Speaker 4: this fear that you can't go after religion, you can't
• 34:20
  Speaker 4: go after Islam. They're low, they're weak, they're the underdog
• 34:23
  Speaker 4: in some weird sense.
• 34:25
  Speaker 5: And who are we to say anything? So this goes
• 34:27
  Speaker 5: back to the point I was reading about how.
• 34:29
  Speaker 4: Altruism is this toxic poison that goes through the veins
• 34:32
  Speaker 4: of Western civilization and enervating us.
• 34:35
  Speaker 5: It was a.
• 34:35
  Speaker 4: Let me just give you one other piece of evidence
• 34:41
  Speaker 4: for this. In the weeks after 9-11, you could not
• 34:46
  Speaker 4: go anywhere without seeing American flags.
• 34:48
  Speaker 5: People who would never in their lives put an American
• 34:51
  Speaker 5: flag outside their house.
• 34:52
  Speaker 1: Everywhere.
• 34:52
  Speaker 5: Cars, buildings, trucks.
• 34:54
  Speaker 3: Mm-hmm.
• 34:56
  Speaker 4: There was a real sense of, we need to do
• 34:57
  Speaker 4: something about this, and we need to punch back.
• 35:02
  Speaker 5: And I think this is a point you may be wrong.
• 35:05
  Speaker 5: They were betrayed by our.
• 35:06
  Speaker 4: Leadership, because what America actually did was not what was
• 35:10
  Speaker 4: even close to necessary. It was a half measure, less
• 35:14
  Speaker 4: than a half measure, and those never really accomplished what
• 35:16
  Speaker 4: you want.
• 35:17
  Speaker 3: And they were betrayed, and they were lied to, and
• 35:19
  Speaker 3: they were deceived, and they, to this day, don't really
• 35:24
  Speaker 3: know what happened. And you can kind of understand why
• 35:27
  Speaker 3: people revert to conspiracy theories, given what happened. I mean,
• 35:32
  Speaker 3: it certainly seemed like there was a conspiracy to basically
• 35:40
  Speaker 3: ignore Islam as the cause of the attacks, to kind
• 35:46
  Speaker 3: of hide the connection between Islam and the attacks. So
• 35:51
  Speaker 3: what is it, Ankar, that.
• 35:54
  Speaker 1: Led.
• 35:56
  Speaker 3: the administration at the time, but also almost all the
• 35:59
  Speaker 3: intellectuals left, and mostly on the right. There were some
• 36:02
  Speaker 3: better intellectuals on the right then. Many of them have
• 36:06
  Speaker 3: not survived, but at the time there were still some
• 36:08
  Speaker 3: better intellectuals on the right. But what is it that
• 36:10
  Speaker 3: caused them to completely evade the issue of Islam?
• 36:14
  Speaker 1: My view of it is there were two major things
• 36:19
  Speaker 1: going on, and they, in this case, coincided with we're
• 36:25
  Speaker 1: both going to, and not just evade, we're going to
• 36:30
  Speaker 1: whitewash the ideology of the people attacking us. So we're
• 36:37
  Speaker 1: not even going to say that, oh, well, they're not
• 36:40
  Speaker 1: really of an ideology. It's they whitewashed what it is
• 36:45
  Speaker 1: that they were actually pursuing.
• 36:48
  Speaker 2: So take Bush first. Alon quoted a number of things
• 36:53
  Speaker 2: that Bush said in the immediate aftermath. Does anybody think.
• 36:58
  Speaker 1: That Bush knew anything about Islam when he's making these statements?
• 37:05
  Speaker 1: And again, this is part of the context and how
• 37:09
  Speaker 1: degraded we are now compared.
• 37:11
  Speaker 2: To 25 years ago. It was a real issue that.
• 37:17
  Speaker 1: Bush didn't seem very educated. He's a C student at Yale.
• 37:22
  Speaker 2: He doesn't seem to know too much.
• 37:24
  Speaker 1: He said in the aftermath of the Afghanistan and.
• 37:28
  Speaker 2: Iraq, it was like I didn't run on foreign policy.
• 37:33
  Speaker 1: I talked about it was compassionate conservatism and it was
• 37:36
  Speaker 1: a domestic.
• 37:37
  Speaker 2: I didn't know. I didn't know what I was doing.
• 37:39
  Speaker 2: I had to learn. So there's.
• 37:41
  Speaker 1: There was no reason at the time, there's no reason after,
• 37:45
  Speaker 1: looking in retrospect, to think Bush knew anything about Islam,
• 37:49
  Speaker 1: to say, oh, no, they're really distorting the doctrines. So
• 37:53
  Speaker 1: when he was saying that, what it really meant was
• 37:57
  Speaker 1: religion is peaceful. We don't dare criticize religion. And here's
• 38:03
  Speaker 1: a major world religion like Christianity. So it's like on
• 38:06
  Speaker 1: the same par as Christianity.
• 38:08
  Speaker 2: It's good. It's a force for good. It's a force
• 38:10
  Speaker 2: for peace.
• 38:11
  Speaker 1: And that's given how religious he was, and given that
• 38:16
  Speaker 1: religion is coming more and more into the Republican Party,
• 38:21
  Speaker 1: into the right in America. If we start saying Islam
• 38:27
  Speaker 1: is a problem, what's the difference really between Christianity and Islam?
• 38:34
  Speaker 2: And there isn't in the end. And they share some
• 38:36
  Speaker 2: of the prophets and some of the... So I think
• 38:38
  Speaker 2: there was.
• 38:40
  Speaker 1: sort of a visceral understanding that if we said religion
• 38:45
  Speaker 1: is a problem that then we have to explain ourselves
• 38:49
  Speaker 1: if we say no it's not a problem this.
• 38:51
  Speaker 2: Is hijacked there was never any explanation what does.
• 38:53
  Speaker 1: It mean that it's hijacked you're destroying the great really
• 38:56
  Speaker 1: like what there was.
• 38:57
  Speaker 2: Never any explanation that's the sense.
• 38:59
  Speaker 1: In which it was and felt very much like just
• 39:01
  Speaker 1: a complete whitewashing and don't you dare ask questions about
• 39:05
  Speaker 1: it and it's People started to, as Alon said, you'd
• 39:08
  Speaker 1: be branded an Islamophobe.
• 39:10
  Speaker 2: So that's one axis.
• 39:14
  Speaker 1: I think it was the religiosity of this ideology and
• 39:19
  Speaker 1: of the people embracing it and launching attacks.
• 39:24
  Speaker 2: They dared not touch and indeed had to whitewash. And
• 39:28
  Speaker 2: the second is, and this is more.
• 39:30
  Speaker 1: the universities, the more secular people, the left, they embrace
• 39:37
  Speaker 1: people who are suffering, primitive, in need, who they can
• 39:43
  Speaker 1: paint as victims of people of ability, producers, and so on,
• 39:47
  Speaker 1: that they can try to paint these people as the
• 39:50
  Speaker 1: victims of America. They are not victims of America, but
• 39:54
  Speaker 1: if you can paint it like that, then you can
• 39:56
  Speaker 1: use them to attack America. And so it came out
• 40:02
  Speaker 1: simultaneously with this, that it, oh, don't you dare say
• 40:06
  Speaker 1: anything bad about Islam, which meant about religion. there came
• 40:10
  Speaker 1: out this another line of which America's to blame. It's
• 40:15
  Speaker 1: responsible for this. It's getting what it deserved. And this
• 40:19
  Speaker 1: is like, I was more around academics and people who
• 40:25
  Speaker 1: coming out of the universities that I am and people
• 40:27
  Speaker 1: coming out of church, like the evangelicals and the Bush.
• 40:30
  Speaker 1: This is what you heard immediately after 9-11. And so
• 40:33
  Speaker 1: they were using it as a way to attack America
• 40:40
  Speaker 1: and the West. And the more you look into, yeah,
• 40:43
  Speaker 1: but aren't these people vicious and evil? The less you're
• 40:50
  Speaker 1: to say, oh, yeah, we deserve their attacks. So there
• 40:53
  Speaker 1: was a whitewashing of them from that perspective. So it
• 40:57
  Speaker 1: coincided that they both had an interest, given their false
• 41:03
  Speaker 1: and irrational views, to whitewash the role of Islam in
• 41:08
  Speaker 1: the attack.
• 41:09
  Speaker 3: And it was really interesting that it was not just
• 41:12
  Speaker 3: the left that blamed America, but it was the libertarians.
• 41:17
  Speaker 3: I remember Ron Paul and, you know, a vast number,
• 41:22
  Speaker 3: the Cato Institute and others who came out and basically
• 41:26
  Speaker 3: in various degrees of aggression, you know, to blame America.
• 41:31
  Speaker 3: This is our fault. We shouldn't have been in the
• 41:33
  Speaker 3: Middle East. We intervened in the Middle East. You know,
• 41:35
  Speaker 3: 1953 in Iran always comes up. And I think this
• 41:41
  Speaker 3: was the first time I saw nakedly kind of how
• 41:45
  Speaker 3: anti-American some of these libertarians can be and are. And
• 41:53
  Speaker 3: it was really shocking. It was really shocking, particularly for,
• 41:57
  Speaker 3: you know, it should be a wake-up call for all
• 41:59
  Speaker 3: of those who think we're all on the same team
• 42:02
  Speaker 3: and we're all heading in the same direction. The analysis
• 42:06
  Speaker 3: was it was America's fault. And I think what that made,
• 42:11
  Speaker 3: what we did, uh, at the Institute in the days
• 42:16
  Speaker 3: and months and really years and decades since that stand
• 42:20
  Speaker 3: out so much more. I mean, we took a firmly
• 42:23
  Speaker 3: pro-American position, but not pro-American as pro any particular administration,
• 42:28
  Speaker 3: but pro the ideas and the principles identified the enemy
• 42:33
  Speaker 3: from day one, uh, or as soon as it was
• 42:35
  Speaker 3: clear it was being flooded. And, um, and, and, went
• 42:39
  Speaker 3: after the administration and everybody else for not being willing
• 42:43
  Speaker 3: to name the enemy, and then took a firm moral stance.
• 42:46
  Speaker 3: I remember Stanley Fish, who was at the time a
• 42:50
  Speaker 3: prominent intellectual on the left. I think he was a philosopher.
• 42:57
  Speaker 3: But coming out with an op-ed, you know, their heroes,
• 43:04
  Speaker 3: you know, from Islam's perspective, the hijacker, the terrorists of
• 43:08
  Speaker 3: 9-11 were heroes. From our perspective, they're villains. Who's to
• 43:12
  Speaker 3: tell who the good guys are and who the bad
• 43:14
  Speaker 3: guys are? It's all contextual. It all depends on your
• 43:18
  Speaker 3: social context. So there was nobody who took a firm
• 43:23
  Speaker 3: moral stand, not just against the act itself, but against
• 43:27
  Speaker 3: the ideology that stood behind it. So, Ilan, maybe a
• 43:32
  Speaker 3: little bit about kind of what we did in the post-9-11.
• 43:34
  Speaker 3: I know you're going to talk about this much more
• 43:40
  Speaker 3: on the other podcast. Maybe a little bit about that.
• 43:43
  Speaker 3: And then what I'd really like to get to spend
• 43:46
  Speaker 3: the rest of the time is talking about how what
• 43:48
  Speaker 3: happened then has affected the world as we see it today,
• 43:54
  Speaker 3: as we live it today.
• 43:56
  Speaker 5: I'll mention a few major highlights in the interview.
• 44:00
  Speaker 4: You are needing to know how much more sentences, definitely
• 44:02
  Speaker 4: add things if I'm overlooking them. I would pick out
• 44:06
  Speaker 4: the first major thing that I recall was an.
• 44:13
  Speaker 5: Article written by Dr.
• 44:14
  Speaker 4: Leonard Peekoff and sponsored by some of our donors to
• 44:19
  Speaker 4: be placed in, first it was the Washington Post, it
• 44:24
  Speaker 4: was a full page, you have to remember back in
• 44:26
  Speaker 4: the day when newspapers were a thing, physical newspapers were
• 44:28
  Speaker 4: a thing, putting a full-page ad was like a billboard
• 44:32
  Speaker 4: in Times Square.
• 44:33
  Speaker 5: It was a big deal.
• 44:34
  Speaker 4: It was a big deal for us as an organization.
• 44:36
  Speaker 4: I think it was pretty small financially. It was a
• 44:39
  Speaker 4: huge statement.
• 44:39
  Speaker 5: It got attention.
• 44:40
  Speaker 4: Then we put the same ad in the New York Times,
• 44:44
  Speaker 4: I think it was October 2nd. So this was all
• 44:46
  Speaker 4: moving very quickly.
• 44:47
  Speaker 3: And I don't know if many people know, but we
• 44:52
  Speaker 3: initially wanted to publish it in the Wall Street Journal.
• 44:55
  Speaker 3: And we approached the Wall Street Journal and tried to
• 44:57
  Speaker 3: get them to do a full-page ad. And they turned
• 45:00
  Speaker 3: it down because it was too controversial. And this is
• 45:05
  Speaker 3: the Wall Street Journal. The Washington Post and the New
• 45:07
  Speaker 3: York Times accepted it. And by the time the Wall
• 45:10
  Speaker 3: Street Journal came back and said, I think the editorial board,
• 45:13
  Speaker 3: which is far more conservative, came back and said, oh, yeah, no,
• 45:17
  Speaker 3: we'll publish it. By that point, we'd already decided to
• 45:19
  Speaker 3: go to the New York Times and Washington Post and
• 45:21
  Speaker 3: turn them down. But, you know, if you go back
• 45:24
  Speaker 3: and read it and see how– what's the term, you know,
• 45:29
  Speaker 3: how it foresaw the future and how accurate it was
• 45:33
  Speaker 3: and how non-controversial it should be if you read it,
• 45:38
  Speaker 3: particularly today. At the time, this was really controversial.
• 45:42
  Speaker 5: This was an.
• 45:43
  Speaker 4: Article, the title of it is borrowed, it's a quotation
• 45:46
  Speaker 4: from one of the foreign policy leaders at the time,
• 45:49
  Speaker 4: I think it was.
• 45:50
  Speaker 5: Wolfowitz, I forget exactly who it was.
• 45:51
  Speaker 2: Yeah, Wolfowitz.
• 45:52
  Speaker 5: Yeah, the title was End States Who Sponsor Terrorism.
• 45:56
  Speaker 4: And Dr. Peikoff argues that 50 years of American appeasement
• 45:59
  Speaker 4: in the Middle East led to 9-11, and here's how
• 46:02
  Speaker 4: the ideas that.
• 46:03
  Speaker 5: Are dominant in America today.
• 46:05
  Speaker 4: Are going to be handicapped unless we challenge them and
• 46:08
  Speaker 4: adopt better ideas. That's just a very quick summary of
• 46:12
  Speaker 4: the piece. It's the first item in the book, Failing
• 46:14
  Speaker 4: to Confront Islamic Totalitarianism, which I mentioned earlier, which people
• 46:17
  Speaker 4: watching are welcome to get a free copy of.
• 46:21
  Speaker 5: By following the link in the chat.
• 46:23
  Speaker 4: So that was a centerpiece that kind of set the
• 46:25
  Speaker 4: keynote for a lot of what we did following that.
• 46:29
  Speaker 4: I would say in every channel that was prominent at
• 46:32
  Speaker 4: the time, so television, radio, internet, campuses, public speeches, you
• 46:39
  Speaker 4: and Ankar were everywhere. We had a speakers bureau at
• 46:44
  Speaker 4: the time. We were publishing op-eds. I don't remember how
• 46:48
  Speaker 4: many we did. I was involved in some of that.
• 46:50
  Speaker 4: We were writing, and I remember that the Institute's profile
• 46:55
  Speaker 4: on just mainstream media, the reading was only mainstream media
• 46:59
  Speaker 4: at the time. This is important just to keep in mind.
• 47:01
  Speaker 4: There's no Twitter, there's no Facebook, there's no YouTube. So
• 47:04
  Speaker 4: all there was.
• 47:05
  Speaker 5: Broadcast channels and cable TV.
• 47:07
  Speaker 4: And the internet and the burgeoning space of blogging, but
• 47:11
  Speaker 4: it was still not a big financially significant thing. So
• 47:14
  Speaker 4: on every important channel, the Institute was in demand. You
• 47:19
  Speaker 4: were on Fox, on basically every channel that I think, Dr.
• 47:22
  Speaker 4: Peacock was on TV, Uncle was on TV. I remember
• 47:26
  Speaker 4: I wasn't very experienced or skilled and I was getting
• 47:28
  Speaker 4: the leftover radio interviews because you had so much demand.
• 47:32
  Speaker 5: I was handling them.
• 47:34
  Speaker 3: I just give a sense. I did, there were two
• 47:38
  Speaker 3: or three years there where I was doing, I think,
• 47:40
  Speaker 3: well over a hundred radio interviews a year. That's just radio,
• 47:44
  Speaker 3: not including television.
• 47:46
  Speaker 2: So, yeah.
• 47:47
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I was looking through.
• 47:49
  Speaker 4: Our old publication for donors about a year ago when
• 47:53
  Speaker 4: we had our 40th anniversary since the founding of the Institute.
• 47:56
  Speaker 4: I was looking at the publication, just the reporting about.
• 48:00
  Speaker 5: Four TV interviews. No, eight TV interviews. The Institute's even
• 48:03
  Speaker 5: bigger on this channel.
• 48:05
  Speaker 4: So I would say the takeaway from this is the
• 48:08
  Speaker 4: activity that arose from the Institute commenting and just having
• 48:13
  Speaker 4: our say on this issue, getting our radical message out philosophically,
• 48:18
  Speaker 4: radical message, I think it was effective.
• 48:20
  Speaker 5: I think it.
• 48:20
  Speaker 4: Certainly brought more attention to the Institute, elevated the profile
• 48:23
  Speaker 4: of the Institute. And I know people noticed. So there
• 48:26
  Speaker 4: were people who were upset. We definitely had criticism. But
• 48:29
  Speaker 4: I think it also, it demonstrated for people something that
• 48:33
  Speaker 4: I think is true of what we do and that
• 48:35
  Speaker 4: was true of all the commentaries, that we take ideas
• 48:39
  Speaker 4: deadly seriously. And this was such an important cultural event.
• 48:44
  Speaker 4: I want to hand this off to you in a minute, Honkar,
• 48:46
  Speaker 4: to talk a bit more about how you thought of
• 48:48
  Speaker 4: it at the time.
• 48:49
  Speaker 2: It was important.
• 48:51
  Speaker 4: We had something crucial to say. There was an opening
• 48:54
  Speaker 4: to have some influence. But fundamentally, this, as you said,
• 48:58
  Speaker 4: I think you already foreshadowed this, Honkar, that this was
• 49:01
  Speaker 4: an area where you could see the impact of ideas
• 49:05
  Speaker 4: in stark terms.
• 49:06
  Speaker 5: The role of philosophy in human life starkly illustrated.
• 49:10
  Speaker 4: Both in the negative, what happened, why America let it happen,
• 49:14
  Speaker 4: the evil ideas that were animating the attackers, but also
• 49:18
  Speaker 4: the opportunity that there is to move in a better direction.
• 49:22
  Speaker 5: So that's just a big sweep of what we did.
• 49:25
  Speaker 4: And I would say that the other kind of milestones
• 49:28
  Speaker 4: that you can point to are, so.
• 49:30
  Speaker 5: There was the initial article by Dr.
• 49:31
  Speaker 4: Pigoff, the wave, sort of tidal wave of media attention
• 49:36
  Speaker 4: that you've got.
• 49:37
  Speaker 5: People attacking us.
• 49:38
  Speaker 4: I remember there was a Washington Post columnist, who was
• 49:40
  Speaker 4: constantly attacking you for a couple of weeks because of
• 49:43
  Speaker 4: what you were saying. And if you think about campuses,
• 49:46
  Speaker 4: this is something else that's no longer as significant. I
• 49:49
  Speaker 4: don't think campus clubs across the nation are as a
• 49:53
  Speaker 4: focal point as they used to be pre-internet.
• 49:55
  Speaker 5: But when they.
• 49:57
  Speaker 4: Were significant in the early 2000s, we were doing campus
• 50:01
  Speaker 4: club events all over the country, through a network that
• 50:04
  Speaker 4: we built.
• 50:05
  Speaker 5: And that was having an impact.
• 50:06
  Speaker 4: I mean, reaching young minds, I think that was really
• 50:09
  Speaker 4: important to what we did. The final thing I would
• 50:12
  Speaker 4: say is that in 2009, we collected some of the
• 50:15
  Speaker 4: more substantive articles that we published in those years, which
• 50:19
  Speaker 4: by that point was analyzing Afghanistan, Iraq, the sort of
• 50:23
  Speaker 4: fundamental ideas shaping American policy and why they were undercut
• 50:27
  Speaker 4: in a book called Winning the Unwinnable War.
• 50:30
  Speaker 5: And that's a reference to George W. Bush saying, yeah,
• 50:33
  Speaker 5: I don't think it's winnable. And we said, well, you
• 50:36
  Speaker 5: could win it. And here's the book.
• 50:37
  Speaker 4: And there are still more things after that. But that's
• 50:40
  Speaker 4: the first decade or so since we get to Obama.
• 50:42
  Speaker 4: There's still more to say, but I'll leave it there.
• 50:45
  Speaker 3: Okay.
• 50:48
  Speaker 2: Yeah, let me say a couple of things. One sort
• 50:51
  Speaker 2: of brought about. why we saw this as significant.
• 50:56
  Speaker 1: So it wasn't, oh, here's an opportunity to get on
• 50:59
  Speaker 1: radio and.
• 51:00
  Speaker 2: TV, so let's take advantage of it.
• 51:02
  Speaker 1: It was rather, this is a pivotal moment for our country.
• 51:07
  Speaker 1: And if you value our country, and if you understand
• 51:10
  Speaker 1: what's going on, you have to speak up. I think
• 51:13
  Speaker 1: that's what was motivating us broadly.
• 51:16
  Speaker 2: And it.
• 51:19
  Speaker 1: Was, so in the immediate aftermath of 9-11, after the
• 51:25
  Speaker 1: shock of the day or day and a half or
• 51:28
  Speaker 1: something like that, there was increasingly on the side of
• 51:33
  Speaker 1: Americans that we need to do something about this and
• 51:37
  Speaker 1: not just talk about it.
• 51:38
  Speaker 2: We need to do something about this.
• 51:40
  Speaker 1: Ilan, I think you're on set about the American flag spine,
• 51:44
  Speaker 1: including people who would never fly a flag.
• 51:47
  Speaker 2: You saw it all over the place. There was a
• 51:50
  Speaker 2: kind of.
• 51:53
  Speaker 1: A shared response that something has gone really wrong.
• 51:58
  Speaker 2: We need to understand that something and reverse course. Like
• 52:01
  Speaker 2: we can't, we can't now.
• 52:03
  Speaker 1: So part of this was a shock, putting that in
• 52:07
  Speaker 1: a little more philosophical terms. Reality that we had been
• 52:10
  Speaker 1: evading came back to punch.
• 52:13
  Speaker 2: Us in the face. And then why that's such a
• 52:16
  Speaker 2: pivotal moment.
• 52:17
  Speaker 1: You can say to yourself or the nation can say
• 52:21
  Speaker 1: to itself, We've been evading this, and we need to
• 52:24
  Speaker 1: rethink this, and we need to act very differently.
• 52:29
  Speaker 2: Or you can double down on the evasion.
• 52:31
  Speaker 1: And if you double down on it, it's going to
• 52:34
  Speaker 1: be a disaster. And we knew like there's a real
• 52:38
  Speaker 1: possibility that we're going to double down on the invasion.
• 52:40
  Speaker 1: And then what immediately started coming out about, oh, well,
• 52:44
  Speaker 1: they had nothing to do with the religion and Islam.
• 52:46
  Speaker 1: It was like, we have to speak out because we
• 52:49
  Speaker 1: understand the issues. And it's so important in terms of
• 52:53
  Speaker 1: the nation of, are we going to stop evading or
• 52:56
  Speaker 1: are we going to pile on further evasions to try
• 52:59
  Speaker 1: to wash this away, this attack on our own soil? That's,
• 53:05
  Speaker 1: but I also think there was a kind of more
• 53:09
  Speaker 1: personal motivation. I had this, I'm pretty sure, Iran, you
• 53:12
  Speaker 1: had this too.
• 53:13
  Speaker 2: You've been a soldier. There were many young Americans who
• 53:18
  Speaker 2: were not being drafted. They were volunteering to fight for
• 53:21
  Speaker 2: the country.
• 53:24
  Speaker 1: And we knew, I mean, it's still, I mean, this
• 53:27
  Speaker 1: is the worst part of 9-11 for me, is we
• 53:29
  Speaker 1: knew they'd be sacrificed.
• 53:32
  Speaker 2: And They're fighting on your behalf. And if you don't
• 53:36
  Speaker 2: speak out for them.
• 53:37
  Speaker 3: I mean, absolutely. The idea that we were sending troops
• 53:46
  Speaker 3: into war in Iraq and Afghanistan and all kinds of places.
• 53:50
  Speaker 3: I mean, they send them all over the world without
• 53:53
  Speaker 3: the tools, without the confidence, without the backing to actually
• 53:58
  Speaker 3: win and to protect their own lives. To protect their
• 54:01
  Speaker 3: own lives. I mean, I don't know what the numbers are. 5,000
• 54:03
  Speaker 3: American kids died in Afghanistan and Iraq. For what? I mean,
• 54:08
  Speaker 3: literally for nothing. They were sacrificed. They were sacrificed for
• 54:14
  Speaker 3: altruistic cause. They were sacrificed in the name of not
• 54:19
  Speaker 3: hurting civilians on the other side. And not winning. Not winning.
• 54:24
  Speaker 3: I mean, the whole... And when you read what actually
• 54:27
  Speaker 3: happened in Afghanistan... for 20 frigging years, for 20 years,
• 54:32
  Speaker 3: the amount of sacrificing, the amount of appeasement, the amount
• 54:37
  Speaker 3: of giving up the lives of young guys for Afghan
• 54:44
  Speaker 3: villages and for tribal leaders, and to achieve what? The
• 54:49
  Speaker 3: Taliban coming back to power 20 years later. It's just
• 54:54
  Speaker 3: so disgusting. And The reality is, and I think you
• 54:58
  Speaker 3: were referring to this, Ilan, earlier, the generals all knew it.
• 55:03
  Speaker 3: The people in charge all knew it. They knew exactly
• 55:05
  Speaker 3: what was going on. They knew exactly the extent to
• 55:09
  Speaker 3: which they were failing and were inevitably going to fail.
• 55:12
  Speaker 3: And they continued. And it wasn't their kids, but it
• 55:18
  Speaker 3: was kids. And it was somebody's kids. Somebody's children were dying.
• 55:22
  Speaker 1: And at.
• 55:25
  Speaker 3: You know, there was a Washington Post book that came out,
• 55:28
  Speaker 3: I don't know, four or five, maybe just before COVID
• 55:30
  Speaker 3: or just after COVID, I can't remember, and that detailed
• 55:34
  Speaker 3: all of this. And I thought, okay, surely now, 20
• 55:38
  Speaker 3: years later, people would, this would resonate and it would
• 55:43
  Speaker 3: cause people to really be upset and really get angry
• 55:46
  Speaker 3: and really get mad. And nothing, nothing happened. They put
• 55:50
  Speaker 3: it on a series of articles in Washington Post. And
• 55:52
  Speaker 3: then they put it on the book. I don't think
• 55:54
  Speaker 3: it's sold that much. Nobody, to this day, nobody cares
• 55:58
  Speaker 3: about the kids and nobody cares, you know, just the
• 56:04
  Speaker 3: horrors of it. And, of course, all we're doing is
• 56:07
  Speaker 3: doubling up because that sacrifice will lead to the sacrifice
• 56:11
  Speaker 3: now in Iran, which will lead to future sacrifices. This
• 56:16
  Speaker 3: only gets worse. It does not get better.
• 56:18
  Speaker 2: Ilan, you were?
• 56:19
  Speaker 5: I want to say two quick things.
• 56:21
  Speaker 4: The name of the book you're referring to is the
• 56:22
  Speaker 4: Afghanistan Papers, which is itself a reference to the Vietnam era.
• 56:29
  Speaker 3: The Watergate Papers. Yeah, the Pentagon Papers.
• 56:34
  Speaker 4: I've read most of those articles in the Washington Post
• 56:38
  Speaker 4: and I've got the book and it is harrowing to
• 56:40
  Speaker 4: read how much is known and how much was hidden.
• 56:44
  Speaker 5: That goes to the theme that I brought up at
• 56:46
  Speaker 5: the beginning of This was happening.
• 56:50
  Speaker 4: And you can understand people not trusting the government anymore,
• 56:53
  Speaker 4: not trusting the military when they are blatantly, brazenly lying
• 56:57
  Speaker 4: to you. I want to say one other thing connected
• 57:01
  Speaker 4: to Ankur's comment about what we saw coming and what
• 57:07
  Speaker 4: we knew would be the risk or the likely outcome.
• 57:11
  Speaker 4: Because it wasn't that we sort of got the probabilities right,
• 57:16
  Speaker 4: and oh yeah, we sort.
• 57:18
  Speaker 5: Of got lucky.
• 57:19
  Speaker 4: I think this is a testament to, we were bringing
• 57:22
  Speaker 4: to bear a philosophical framework that is incredibly powerful for
• 57:25
  Speaker 4: understanding the world. And it was borne out, not in
• 57:29
  Speaker 4: a good way, I certainly don't take any relish in this,
• 57:32
  Speaker 4: but it was borne out in the sense that it
• 57:33
  Speaker 4: gave us understanding, and the understanding was proven correct over time.
• 57:37
  Speaker 4: So I'm just going to give a few examples, because
• 57:39
  Speaker 4: you went over this very quickly, and I'm going to
• 57:41
  Speaker 4: fault you for that, because we need to just punctuate
• 57:44
  Speaker 4: some of these because these were really pivotal things and
• 57:48
  Speaker 4: i don't think people remember them and if they do
• 57:51
  Speaker 4: they don't think they give them enough weight so let
• 57:53
  Speaker 4: me just give a couple of things.
• 57:57
  Speaker 5: This is all under the heading of what on car
• 57:58
  Speaker 5: says like.
• 57:59
  Speaker 4: This is we foresaw that this would be a self-sacrificial
• 58:01
  Speaker 4: war it would be the the cutting down of america's
• 58:05
  Speaker 4: youth needlessly So point one is the Bush administration's signature policy.
• 58:10
  Speaker 4: Once you get past the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq,
• 58:13
  Speaker 4: they were in the hands of al-Qaeda, Saddam Hussein al-Qaeda,
• 58:17
  Speaker 4: all that was BS and kind of faded away. What
• 58:19
  Speaker 4: really became the central governing direction for the war in
• 58:24
  Speaker 4: Iraq and also in Afghanistan was this is a democracy crusade.
• 58:28
  Speaker 5: That's our term for it.
• 58:29
  Speaker 4: It was officially known as the forward strategy of freedom,
• 58:32
  Speaker 4: which I think is a blatantly dishonest statement.
• 58:36
  Speaker 2: What it really.
• 58:37
  Speaker 4: Meant was sending Americans to fight long enough to create
• 58:41
  Speaker 4: room for elections so that in the end, what we
• 58:44
  Speaker 4: predicted is Islamists would gain more power. And sometimes they
• 58:48
  Speaker 4: took power, not just got more powerful. They actually seized
• 58:51
  Speaker 4: the reins of government. In Iraq and Afghanistan, the new constitution,
• 58:57
  Speaker 4: which were written with Americans... directing experts. I met someone
• 59:02
  Speaker 4: who was involved in this. American scholars of the Constitution
• 59:06
  Speaker 4: went to those countries to help them draft these centrally
• 59:10
  Speaker 4: each of those constitutions is the fundamental role of Sharia Islam.
• 59:15
  Speaker 4: And it is an embarrassment that that happened. So we
• 59:19
  Speaker 4: argue from the very beginning, these are not countries where
• 59:24
  Speaker 4: if you had elections, you would have better leaders, because
• 59:27
  Speaker 4: there aren't better leaders yet. There isn't a valuing of freedom.
• 59:30
  Speaker 4: Freedom presupposes a whole cultural, civilizational perspective on the value
• 59:35
  Speaker 4: of the individual, the institutions of government, all of which
• 59:39
  Speaker 4: are innovations and achievements that we see in the Western
• 59:43
  Speaker 4: world that did not always exist in.
• 59:45
  Speaker 2: The Western world.
• 59:45
  Speaker 5: It's something that had to be discovered and implemented.
• 59:49
  Speaker 4: The climax of this is, if you think about the
• 59:51
  Speaker 4: trajectory from Locke through the American Revolution and the founding
• 59:54
  Speaker 4: of America and the.
• 59:55
  Speaker 5: Improvements, That is a huge achievement. None of that exists
• 59:59
  Speaker 5: in the Middle East.
• 1:00:01
  Speaker 4: Therefore, we argue, if you bring elections to places where Islam,
• 1:00:05
  Speaker 4: Islamist terrorism is popular, that's what people will vote for.
• 1:00:10
  Speaker 5: That's what they actually did.
• 1:00:11
  Speaker 4: That was true in Iraq. That was true in Lebanon.
• 1:00:14
  Speaker 4: That was true in Egypt. Egypt is one I'll just
• 1:00:16
  Speaker 4: mention with a bit more texture. So Egypt's moment is
• 1:00:22
  Speaker 4: sometimes thought of as It's the Arab Spring. But before
• 1:00:25
  Speaker 4: the Arab Spring, there was a foreshadowing of what would happen.
• 1:00:28
  Speaker 4: So let me just play out the two elements of it.
• 1:00:31
  Speaker 4: So in 2005, at the peak of the forward strategy
• 1:00:33
  Speaker 4: of freedom, the Bush administration prevailed on the Egyptian military
• 1:00:40
  Speaker 4: dictator to have elections. They had elections with not free
• 1:00:45
  Speaker 4: and not fair elections, and yet the Muslim Brotherhood, which
• 1:00:48
  Speaker 4: is the grandfather of Islamic totalitarianism founded in Egypt, they
• 1:00:53
  Speaker 4: won a staggering number of seats. This is despite people
• 1:00:57
  Speaker 4: being beaten up at the polls. So just think about that.
• 1:01:00
  Speaker 4: And at that moment, the Bush administration backs away.
• 1:01:03
  Speaker 5: It's like, oh, we're not going to insist on anything
• 1:01:04
  Speaker 5: more in Egypt. Let's just leave that alone.
• 1:01:07
  Speaker 4: And then you fast forward to the so-called Arab Spring, 2011,
• 1:01:09
  Speaker 4: 2012 and onward in Egypt. There are mass demonstrations for
• 1:01:13
  Speaker 4: people who are fed up with the dictatorial government. And
• 1:01:18
  Speaker 4: there were Islamists in the crowds in Tahrir Square.
• 1:01:21
  Speaker 5: People remember that. I'll look it up on.
• 1:01:23
  Speaker 4: So it wasn't clearly a pro-freedom movement, but there were
• 1:01:26
  Speaker 4: people who wanted something better, at least.
• 1:01:28
  Speaker 5: You could say that. I think that's defensible.
• 1:01:30
  Speaker 4: What actually happens when Egypt has elections is the Muslim
• 1:01:33
  Speaker 4: Brotherhood doesn't just gain seats. It comes to power. They
• 1:01:38
  Speaker 4: elect the new leader. He's in power for a while,
• 1:01:41
  Speaker 4: and he starts doing what you expect him to do.
• 1:01:43
  Speaker 4: This is exactly what we predicted, and it's exactly what
• 1:01:46
  Speaker 4: would happen until the military reasserts itself and brings him
• 1:01:49
  Speaker 4: down in a coup.
• 1:01:50
  Speaker 3: And there's one other example that's important to note from 2005,
• 1:01:54
  Speaker 3: and that is the Bush administration's insistence that the Israelis
• 1:02:00
  Speaker 3: include Hamas in the Palestinian elections. First, that they have
• 1:02:03
  Speaker 3: to hold elections. Democracy, bring a forward strategy for freedom.
• 1:02:08
  Speaker 3: And that Hamas has to be part of that election.
• 1:02:12
  Speaker 3: Of course, Hamas wins that election. To not our surprise,
• 1:02:16
  Speaker 3: we were not surprised, And if you track what happens
• 1:02:20
  Speaker 3: in Gaza since Israel left in 2005 to today, that
• 1:02:26
  Speaker 3: election is pivotal to Hamas establishing its control over Gaza
• 1:02:30
  Speaker 3: and ultimately leads us directly to October 7th.
• 1:02:33
  Speaker 4: That's where I'm heading to, which is that when you
• 1:02:38
  Speaker 4: think about where we are today, where we saw October 7th,
• 1:02:42
  Speaker 4: so the reaction to October 7th, we're seeing the Iran
• 1:02:44
  Speaker 4: war today. You can't understand any of those, or just
• 1:02:49
  Speaker 4: even Afghanistan. You mentioned where we are today. The Taliban
• 1:02:52
  Speaker 4: are back. Every signature policy that they had in the
• 1:02:56
  Speaker 4: 1990s that was horrifying people, they're basically back to where
• 1:03:00
  Speaker 4: they were in 1999 and 2001 before the American war.
• 1:03:06
  Speaker 4: You can't understand any of those without understanding American failure.
• 1:03:09
  Speaker 4: This is the sense in which I think bringing objectivism
• 1:03:12
  Speaker 4: to bear as part of our analytical framework enables us
• 1:03:15
  Speaker 4: to see this to project that, okay, these are the
• 1:03:19
  Speaker 4: kind of consequences you'll see.
• 1:03:20
  Speaker 5: The consequences are borne out. And this is where we
• 1:03:24
  Speaker 5: are today. We are in a war.
• 1:03:25
  Speaker 4: I mentioned Iran earlier, where it's supposed to be a
• 1:03:29
  Speaker 4: couple of days, maybe a couple of weeks, and it
• 1:03:31
  Speaker 4: will be done.
• 1:03:32
  Speaker 5: Unconditional surrender, all that BS. It's six months in.
• 1:03:36
  Speaker 4: And I don't think anyone in the administration thinks they're
• 1:03:39
  Speaker 4: going to succeed. We can talk about some of those things,
• 1:03:43
  Speaker 4: but the conditioning context... just is the last 25 years
• 1:03:48
  Speaker 4: of failing to understand what is Islamic totalitarianism? How would
• 1:03:52
  Speaker 4: you defeat it? And then the lack of self-esteem, the
• 1:03:55
  Speaker 4: lack of self-confidence, both in the U.S.
• 1:03:57
  Speaker 2: And in Israel.
• 1:03:58
  Speaker 4: I think the Israelis are complicit. They have to take
• 1:04:01
  Speaker 4: responsibility for bowing to the American pressure and allowing.
• 1:04:05
  Speaker 5: They knew that Hamas was winning. They knew. And they
• 1:04:08
  Speaker 5: allowed themselves to be pushed into that.
• 1:04:11
  Speaker 4: You can't understand all of these things without understanding these
• 1:04:14
  Speaker 4: compounding failures over time.
• 1:04:15
  Speaker 3: Yeah. Uncle?
• 1:04:20
  Speaker 2: No, you're muted.
• 1:04:21
  Speaker 1: Yeah, on the issue of our self-esteem or lack thereof,
• 1:04:29
  Speaker 1: the episode for me that cemented that we're in a
• 1:04:36
  Speaker 1: much worse state than I thought we were, and this
• 1:04:39
  Speaker 1: is after many, many failures after 9-11, but what the
• 1:04:46
  Speaker 1: Danish cartoon crisis was, I'm one proud of what ARI
• 1:04:52
  Speaker 1: did in response to this, but just first thinking about
• 1:04:56
  Speaker 1: that episode, here was a newspaper, okay, not militants, not
• 1:05:03
  Speaker 1: people who you might worry are terrorists or something.
• 1:05:06
  Speaker 2: They'd be branded like right-wing terrorists. This was a newspaper.
• 1:05:09
  Speaker 2: It was actually probably left to center leaning in Denmark.
• 1:05:14
  Speaker 1: Hearing stories about writers and illustrators and so on who
• 1:05:19
  Speaker 1: are afraid to discuss Islam.
• 1:05:23
  Speaker 2: Not because they'll get criticism. They'll get death.
• 1:05:27
  Speaker 1: Threats, intimidation, and they're worried they're going to be killed.
• 1:05:30
  Speaker 1: That there's this atmosphere in Europe that people aren't talking about.
• 1:05:34
  Speaker 1: And this is not just America who's at war. All
• 1:05:38
  Speaker 1: of America's allies are participating in one way or another.
• 1:05:41
  Speaker 1: So Europeans are participating in this. So they're at war
• 1:05:45
  Speaker 1: in the Middle East.
• 1:05:46
  Speaker 2: And there's a worry.
• 1:05:47
  Speaker 1: That people in our own countries are scared of talking
• 1:05:52
  Speaker 1: about The ideology of the enemies for fear that they're
• 1:05:57
  Speaker 1: going to be intimidated and killed. This would be like
• 1:06:01
  Speaker 1: your fear about talking about the Nazis in World War
• 1:06:04
  Speaker 1: II or the Japanese because someone's going to come and
• 1:06:07
  Speaker 1: attack you and kill you.
• 1:06:08
  Speaker 2: That's the meaning of the episode.
• 1:06:14
  Speaker 1: So they have a kind of contest where they're getting
• 1:06:18
  Speaker 1: people Like, what do you think? Is there some kind
• 1:06:21
  Speaker 1: of self-censorship going on? Would you dare depict the Prophet Muhammad?
• 1:06:26
  Speaker 1: And they have a contest. They're running a contest.
• 1:06:29
  Speaker 2: They're trying to figure out. So you can think of it.
• 1:06:32
  Speaker 1: As sort of investigative reporting. Like, how widespread is this?
• 1:06:37
  Speaker 1: A number of people turn them down. They get some
• 1:06:40
  Speaker 1: people who submit. Some people, their cartoon, in effect, is
• 1:06:44
  Speaker 1: criticizing the newspaper for even having this contest. Some seem
• 1:06:48
  Speaker 1: like they're critical of Islam. Some are just sort of
• 1:06:52
  Speaker 1: neither here nor there. They publish this, and then the
• 1:06:57
  Speaker 1: publishing of it would confirm your worst nightmare of that
• 1:07:02
  Speaker 1: they get enormous death threats. There's rioting and manufactured rioting
• 1:07:07
  Speaker 1: across the Middle East of how dare a Western newspaper
• 1:07:12
  Speaker 1: publish this and depict the Prophet Muhammad. And I mean,
• 1:07:19
  Speaker 1: we've come to know the editor, Fleming Rose, who was
• 1:07:22
  Speaker 1: part of this.
• 1:07:23
  Speaker 2: He's a mild mannered, decent man.
• 1:07:26
  Speaker 1: The idea that this is some villain that now has
• 1:07:29
  Speaker 1: to go into hiding and have security around.
• 1:07:33
  Speaker 2: And it's not just that that happened. Basically, the Western
• 1:07:38
  Speaker 2: world sided with.
• 1:07:40
  Speaker 1: The rioters in the Middle East and against this newspaper,
• 1:07:44
  Speaker 1: including the American government of like, why do you have
• 1:07:46
  Speaker 1: to publish such provocative things? But including the intellectuals, and
• 1:07:50
  Speaker 1: that's not just like the left-leaning intellectuals.
• 1:07:53
  Speaker 2: At the universities.
• 1:07:55
  Speaker 1: Most newspapers across the Western world would not republish the cartoons.
• 1:08:00
  Speaker 1: even though it was crucial news. Like, what is the
• 1:08:04
  Speaker 1: content of these that could set off riots and death threats.
• 1:08:07
  Speaker 2: And so on?
• 1:08:07
  Speaker 1: Nobody could see the cartoons and make an opinion and
• 1:08:11
  Speaker 1: form an opinion for themselves.
• 1:08:13
  Speaker 2: And so the abject sort of apologetic.
• 1:08:20
  Speaker 1: Treat, and apologetic is way too weak for what happened,
• 1:08:25
  Speaker 1: viewing ourselves as like, if we would just be a
• 1:08:27
  Speaker 1: little more reasonable, maybe they wouldn't be.
• 1:08:29
  Speaker 2: Outraged about us.
• 1:08:30
  Speaker 1: How dare we talk about religion in any critical way?
• 1:08:35
  Speaker 1: That whole atmosphere of what happened in that episode. We
• 1:08:40
  Speaker 1: were one of the few people who republished the cartoons,
• 1:08:43
  Speaker 1: and not because we agree with all of them, but
• 1:08:45
  Speaker 1: the idea that there could be this level of censorship
• 1:08:48
  Speaker 1: and that everybody would be on the side of the killers.
• 1:08:54
  Speaker 2: That, I mean.
• 1:08:55
  Speaker 1: It had to raise the question, do we even deserve
• 1:08:57
  Speaker 1: to survive this if that.
• 1:09:00
  Speaker 2: Is our response?
• 1:09:02
  Speaker 3: And I think the consequences, you're feeling them now in Europe,
• 1:09:05
  Speaker 3: where the Islamists are incredibly bold in asserting that they
• 1:09:10
  Speaker 3: want to bring Sharia to Europe and that they want
• 1:09:12
  Speaker 3: to take over the continent. And, you know, most people
• 1:09:19
  Speaker 3: you know, what are they going to do about it, right?
• 1:09:22
  Speaker 3: For years and years and years, they've appeased them and
• 1:09:25
  Speaker 3: silenced themselves, and criticism of Islam has been almost outlawed.
• 1:09:31
  Speaker 3: All that does is embolden the worst elements within Islam,
• 1:09:34
  Speaker 3: and we're seeing that become a reality all across Europe.
• 1:09:40
  Speaker 3: The problem in Europe is not immigration. The problem in
• 1:09:43
  Speaker 3: Europe is this moral cowardice, this unwillingness to stand up
• 1:09:50
  Speaker 3: for Western values and allow them to be trodden over
• 1:09:54
  Speaker 3: by barbarians. So maybe I want to bring up kind
• 1:10:00
  Speaker 3: of where we are today, and not just in terms
• 1:10:03
  Speaker 3: of Middle East, but just the entire culture and how
• 1:10:05
  Speaker 3: this has affected the culture. And it strikes me that
• 1:10:09
  Speaker 3: the very existence of a president like Donald Trump is
• 1:10:16
  Speaker 3: a direct consequence of kind of what happened in 9-11.
• 1:10:20
  Speaker 3: I think 2008 financial crisis kind of doubled up on
• 1:10:24
  Speaker 3: the lack of confidence and the lying and the conspiracies
• 1:10:28
  Speaker 3: and the deception. But really, it started with 9-11. So maybe, Ankar,
• 1:10:31
  Speaker 3: you can walk us through how do we get, you know,
• 1:10:35
  Speaker 3: Donald Trump? What is it that brings about the phenomena
• 1:10:39
  Speaker 3: of Donald Trump? And how is that linked to 9-11?
• 1:10:44
  Speaker 1: Yeah, one aspect that Alon talked some about, which I
• 1:10:49
  Speaker 1: think is you have to see it, and you have
• 1:10:51
  Speaker 1: to see it as starting with 9-11, as Alon was
• 1:10:54
  Speaker 1: talking about. The utter contempt that more and more Americans,
• 1:11:00
  Speaker 1: but it's relevant that this is not restricted to America,
• 1:11:03
  Speaker 1: and 9-11 was not restricted to America. As I said,
• 1:11:07
  Speaker 1: it involved the whole Western world. I mean, you can
• 1:11:11
  Speaker 1: think of it as Bush and Blair, so the UK
• 1:11:14
  Speaker 1: and the US as two of the big architects of
• 1:11:16
  Speaker 1: the foreign strategy of freedom and doing that. So it's
• 1:11:20
  Speaker 1: not just a US thing. It was a worldwide and
• 1:11:22
  Speaker 1: particularly Western worldwide issue. And it was the combination of evasion, whitewashing,
• 1:11:33
  Speaker 1: and seeming incompetence.
• 1:11:37
  Speaker 2: Alon, you said, Bush said this is an unwinnable war,
• 1:11:40
  Speaker 2: but before that he had declared victory.
• 1:11:44
  Speaker 1: There's a famous thing, I forget which American destroyer he's
• 1:11:48
  Speaker 1: on or aircraft carrier, but he declares victory. And then
• 1:11:50
  Speaker 1: it's like we've got fighting for years after, and then
• 1:11:53
  Speaker 1: it's all, well, maybe.
• 1:11:54
  Speaker 2: This is unwinnable.
• 1:11:56
  Speaker 1: But so the combination of evasion, whitewashing, and seeming incompetence
• 1:12:04
  Speaker 1: particularly for the political leadership, that had to create more
• 1:12:10
  Speaker 1: and more distrust of government as such.
• 1:12:14
  Speaker 2: And notice like Bush will be put as right wing.
• 1:12:17
  Speaker 1: Blair was a labor leader in the UK. So it's
• 1:12:19
  Speaker 1: not like, oh, it's the right wing versus the left.
• 1:12:22
  Speaker 1: There's something wrong with our establishment.
• 1:12:26
  Speaker 2: And the elites. And then the two things that.
• 1:12:31
  Speaker 1: Really drive that home are the financial crisis which again,
• 1:12:35
  Speaker 1: if you were.
• 1:12:36
  Speaker 2: Around during the crisis, that the elites.
• 1:12:40
  Speaker 1: Simultaneously demanded more and more power, and proclaiming we have
• 1:12:46
  Speaker 1: no idea what we're doing. We've got to try something,
• 1:12:48
  Speaker 1: we've got to try, and give us wider powers, and
• 1:12:51
  Speaker 1: we'll try it. We couldn't forecast this, and it's not
• 1:12:55
  Speaker 1: just the political, it's the whole university's economics profession but
• 1:13:01
  Speaker 1: why like everybody's taking by how could the financial.
• 1:13:04
  Speaker 2: Crisis happen so but we should be running the fed
• 1:13:08
  Speaker 2: and we should be running everything so.
• 1:13:09
  Speaker 1: Like that if you're thinking of it from the eyes
• 1:13:12
  Speaker 1: of somebody who's not in these circles like how do
• 1:13:16
  Speaker 1: you put these two together that you should be running
• 1:13:19
  Speaker 1: more and more things and have more and more power.
• 1:13:20
  Speaker 6: And you have no idea what you're doing and you
• 1:13:22
  Speaker 6: pretty much say that you have no idea what you're
• 1:13:24
  Speaker 6: doing And then if you put COVID on that, which
• 1:13:28
  Speaker 6: has a similar atmosphere to it, that you have this, that.
• 1:13:32
  Speaker 1: There's got to be something better than the elites trying
• 1:13:35
  Speaker 1: to run everything. And the rise of populism in the West,
• 1:13:39
  Speaker 1: I don't think you can understand it without understanding this
• 1:13:44
  Speaker 1: is the atmosphere and sort of the content that it's
• 1:13:48
  Speaker 1: playing on. It's easy to give as an explanation, just.
• 1:13:52
  Speaker 2: Give us non-elites, non-educated, and Trump is that. He's not non-elite.
• 1:13:58
  Speaker 2: I always found that very strange, though, that he's part
• 1:14:02
  Speaker 2: of the swamp. He's not the kind of trans swamp.
• 1:14:04
  Speaker 1: But he is a commoner in the sense that he
• 1:14:09
  Speaker 1: doesn't know things, he doesn't want to know things.
• 1:14:13
  Speaker 2: I don't think this is actually true of a common
• 1:14:15
  Speaker 2: American person, but.
• 1:14:16
  Speaker 1: The kind of resentful towards elites, he has that element
• 1:14:21
  Speaker 1: to him, he plays that element up, and it is,
• 1:14:25
  Speaker 1: but I think populists around the world are doing that,
• 1:14:28
  Speaker 1: and that's part of the atmosphere, but I mean, it's
• 1:14:33
  Speaker 1: an atmosphere that it should be intelligible why that atmosphere
• 1:14:37
  Speaker 1: exists that has led to the sort of some of
• 1:14:41
  Speaker 1: the political upheavals.
• 1:14:42
  Speaker 3: That we've seen.
• 1:14:43
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:14:43
  Speaker 3: And there's a sense in which, I mean, falsely they
• 1:14:47
  Speaker 3: view him as a rejection of altruism and he's somehow
• 1:14:50
  Speaker 3: a straight shudo, though he lies like, you know, like
• 1:14:53
  Speaker 3: nobody else ever has, but he says what he thinks
• 1:14:57
  Speaker 3: in the moment. And that counts for something. I guess
• 1:14:59
  Speaker 3: that's a, that's a pseudo honesty thing. from people's perspective
• 1:15:03
  Speaker 3: and really has led to this. Ilan, you've talked a
• 1:15:07
  Speaker 3: little bit about how this has affected the Iran war.
• 1:15:12
  Speaker 3: In terms of other issues around policy and foreign policy,
• 1:15:14
  Speaker 3: how has the last 25 years, in a sense, dictated
• 1:15:22
  Speaker 3: where we are today?
• 1:15:25
  Speaker 5: You mentioned Gaza.
• 1:15:27
  Speaker 4: And I think that's an important thread to pull on
• 1:15:30
  Speaker 4: for a bit.
• 1:15:31
  Speaker 5: I think the most important.
• 1:15:33
  Speaker 4: Thing for people to know, which is forgotten, is, as
• 1:15:36
  Speaker 4: you put it, that the U.S. prevailed in Israel to
• 1:15:39
  Speaker 4: allow Hamas to join these elections, Hamas won. And Hamas
• 1:15:43
  Speaker 4: then executed and ejected all the people who were against
• 1:15:47
  Speaker 4: it in the Gaza Strip, which meant the rival factions,
• 1:15:51
  Speaker 4: and took over and created, so in effect, the Bush
• 1:15:53
  Speaker 4: administration policy in the war against terror, quote unquote, led
• 1:15:58
  Speaker 4: to the creation of a new terror state. And that
• 1:16:01
  Speaker 4: terror state became the source of continual attacks on Israel. Now,
• 1:16:06
  Speaker 4: one of the threads that I think is interesting to
• 1:16:09
  Speaker 4: connect to.
• 1:16:10
  Speaker 2: Is the.
• 1:16:13
  Speaker 4: anti-Americanism that we mentioned earlier after 9-11. There was certainly
• 1:16:18
  Speaker 4: an anti-Americanism that reared its head. It was a little bashful.
• 1:16:22
  Speaker 4: I mean, the academics who have this were not as
• 1:16:25
  Speaker 4: brazen as they were, but it was there. I mean,
• 1:16:28
  Speaker 4: I think some famous, I forget her name, but there's
• 1:16:30
  Speaker 4: a famous intellectual, a famous intellectual who wrote a piece about, yeah,
• 1:16:33
  Speaker 4: we kind of had it coming, and it wasn't just
• 1:16:35
  Speaker 4: libertarians on the fringe, it was mainstream people.
• 1:16:39
  Speaker 5: But what I think we've.
• 1:16:42
  Speaker 4: Seen in the last 25 years is that become more
• 1:16:45
  Speaker 4: and more normalized. And in the reactions to October 7th,
• 1:16:50
  Speaker 4: what I'm interested in right now, what I'm working on
• 1:16:53
  Speaker 4: is just not what happened on October 7th.
• 1:16:55
  Speaker 5: That I think is well understood.
• 1:16:57
  Speaker 4: There's not a lot that I'm interested in saying about
• 1:17:00
  Speaker 4: the day itself.
• 1:17:01
  Speaker 5: The most interesting thing to me is the reactions to it.
• 1:17:04
  Speaker 4: And I think of it from October 7th to today
• 1:17:07
  Speaker 4: because I don't think it's it. And in order to
• 1:17:09
  Speaker 4: understand that, there's a few points of contact. One is
• 1:17:12
  Speaker 4: this anti-Americanism which I mentioned. Maybe anti-Americanism is to Because
• 1:17:18
  Speaker 4: it isn't just, oh, we think there are problems with America,
• 1:17:21
  Speaker 4: so we're against it, we're critical.
• 1:17:23
  Speaker 5: It is something deeper.
• 1:17:25
  Speaker 4: It's what I think Ayn Rand was referring to when
• 1:17:27
  Speaker 4: she talked about the hatred of the good.
• 1:17:30
  Speaker 5: For being the good.
• 1:17:31
  Speaker 4: It's a resentment of success because it has achieved something. Now, this,
• 1:17:37
  Speaker 4: I think, is the hallmark of what you see flowering
• 1:17:40
  Speaker 4: off 9-11 in some of it. Think about the protests
• 1:17:44
  Speaker 4: at the Occupy Wall Street protests. This is the same spirit,
• 1:17:49
  Speaker 4: I think, you see. You get this on campus with,
• 1:17:52
  Speaker 4: how dare you talk about Islam? Who are you to
• 1:17:55
  Speaker 4: talk about Islam? There's sort of an awakening of this,
• 1:17:59
  Speaker 4: an emboldening of this. And the climax so far in
• 1:18:05
  Speaker 4: this development is the reactions to October 7th. Just to
• 1:18:09
  Speaker 4: remind people, if this is not a live issue in
• 1:18:12
  Speaker 4: your memory still, the number of professors who went not
• 1:18:16
  Speaker 4: in little... tiny coffee meetups on campus and said, oh yeah,
• 1:18:21
  Speaker 4: that was a good thing. Openly on campus in front
• 1:18:24
  Speaker 4: of students saying, I'm exhilarated. And I think this is
• 1:18:27
  Speaker 4: a good thing. And I'm going on social media.
• 1:18:29
  Speaker 5: And saying, this is a good thing. They're breaking out.
• 1:18:30
  Speaker 5: They're doing the right thing. And good that they're smashing Israel.
• 1:18:34
  Speaker 5: The invulnerability of Israel is destroyed.
• 1:18:36
  Speaker 4: This just becomes a chorus, not of some marginal figures,
• 1:18:42
  Speaker 4: but leading intellectuals who you otherwise might take seriously. And
• 1:18:47
  Speaker 4: I think that you see it isn't located only in
• 1:18:50
  Speaker 4: the US you see it in the UK you see
• 1:18:53
  Speaker 4: it in other parts of Europe you see it in
• 1:18:54
  Speaker 4: Australia and sort of anglophone world war generally.
• 1:19:00
  Speaker 5: Just to emphasize this so.
• 1:19:03
  Speaker 4: The part of what I think is horrifying and part
• 1:19:06
  Speaker 4: of why this connects with the hatred of the good
• 1:19:08
  Speaker 4: is you've just heard the news that some 1200 people
• 1:19:13
  Speaker 4: have been murdered and 200 plus people have been in
• 1:19:16
  Speaker 4: hostage and murdered in most barbaric, brutal ways you can imagine.
• 1:19:22
  Speaker 4: And your first thought is, let's go in the streets
• 1:19:26
  Speaker 4: and tell the people who, and.
• 1:19:29
  Speaker 5: Say, yeah, keep smashing.
• 1:19:31
  Speaker 4: This is down with the Israelis, down with the West,
• 1:19:35
  Speaker 4: which I think Israel is in this context, a proxy
• 1:19:37
  Speaker 4: for freedom and achievement and progress. That's what thousands and
• 1:19:42
  Speaker 4: tens of thousands of people did in Europe and.
• 1:19:47
  Speaker 5: In the United States.
• 1:19:48
  Speaker 4: And then you get this whole development of campus protests
• 1:19:51
  Speaker 4: on American elite universities. When was the last time you
• 1:19:55
  Speaker 4: remember a campus protest movement that developed, that pervasive, and
• 1:20:01
  Speaker 4: with so many people involved? It was a significant phenomenon.
• 1:20:05
  Speaker 4: My contention is that you don't get that without this
• 1:20:10
  Speaker 4: normalizing and emboldening of the spirit of let's tear it down.
• 1:20:15
  Speaker 5: Let's see things burn. We don't care what happens.
• 1:20:17
  Speaker 4: So the epitome of this is the.
• 1:20:21
  Speaker 5: Slogan free Palestine.
• 1:20:25
  Speaker 4: No one who really cares about the future of individual
• 1:20:28
  Speaker 4: Palestinians could imagine that their future is going to be
• 1:20:33
  Speaker 4: better if Hamas wins than if it's destroyed. There's no
• 1:20:37
  Speaker 4: conceivable way. You have to be blind to yourself. And
• 1:20:40
  Speaker 4: that's exactly what they were saying. They don't care what happens.
• 1:20:43
  Speaker 4: They don't care that Hamas wins. They just want to
• 1:20:45
  Speaker 4: see Israel destroyed. They don't want to see the West
• 1:20:48
  Speaker 4: torn down. And the narrative, sort of the theoretical, intellectual
• 1:20:52
  Speaker 4: narrative around all this is the settler colonial framework, which becomes,
• 1:20:56
  Speaker 4: it's now very, very salient to people they've heard about,
• 1:20:59
  Speaker 4: which in my assessment is just a dressed up way
• 1:21:03
  Speaker 4: of saying, F the West, F freedom, we don't want
• 1:21:08
  Speaker 4: to see any of this. We're going to point to
• 1:21:10
  Speaker 4: all the tribal epistemology, tribal culture, tribal indigenous people. That's
• 1:21:17
  Speaker 4: what matters in the world, which is basically saying, we
• 1:21:19
  Speaker 4: don't want to see value. We want to see the
• 1:21:22
  Speaker 4: absence of value. And that's what really matters in the world.
• 1:21:25
  Speaker 4: And that is just another way of saying, we hate
• 1:21:28
  Speaker 4: the good because it creates.
• 1:21:30
  Speaker 5: Values for human life.
• 1:21:32
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:21:32
  Speaker 3: And I think 9-11, And part of the consequences is
• 1:21:36
  Speaker 3: a significant rise in nihilism in the culture, both on
• 1:21:40
  Speaker 3: the left and on the right, just a hatred of
• 1:21:42
  Speaker 3: all values. Because of, I think, what Ankar described as
• 1:21:49
  Speaker 3: just a betrayal of the elites, a betrayal of anybody
• 1:21:54
  Speaker 3: with authority or anybody who was supposed to know stuff,
• 1:21:57
  Speaker 3: in terms of didn't know. So what's the point? Nobody
• 1:21:59
  Speaker 3: knows anything. And nothing is worth pursuing.
• 1:22:04
  Speaker 2: Yeah, Ankar.
• 1:22:05
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and I put it, and what it reveals to
• 1:22:08
  Speaker 1: the worst people is that the door is wide open.
• 1:22:12
  Speaker 2: So why not go through it?
• 1:22:14
  Speaker 1: So, because it's important, what Elan said, and this was
• 1:22:18
  Speaker 1: my experience, immediately after 9-11, it's not like the anti-American
• 1:22:25
  Speaker 1: hatred of.
• 1:22:26
  Speaker 2: Its success and its productivity. It's not like it didn't exist.
• 1:22:30
  Speaker 2: It's not like it went away as a result of this.
• 1:22:33
  Speaker 2: But it was.
• 1:22:35
  Speaker 1: marginalized in the sense they were scared of saying what
• 1:22:39
  Speaker 1: they actually thought, because they thought a majority of the
• 1:22:43
  Speaker 1: people would descend on them and not send them physically,
• 1:22:48
  Speaker 1: but say, like.
• 1:22:50
  Speaker 2: Your view is monstrous.
• 1:22:53
  Speaker 1: When it became Oh, but they're not saying their view
• 1:22:57
  Speaker 1: is monstrous.
• 1:22:58
  Speaker 2: They're saying it has nothing to do with their views.
• 1:23:00
  Speaker 2: And they hijack this.
• 1:23:03
  Speaker 1: As if everything was whitewashing and apology.
• 1:23:08
  Speaker 2: And then with the... This is partly why the Danish
• 1:23:10
  Speaker 2: cartoons are.
• 1:23:12
  Speaker 1: You can threaten cartoonists with death and so on, and
• 1:23:15
  Speaker 1: they still won't be outraged. We were scared to voice
• 1:23:19
  Speaker 1: our anti-Americans, but why were we so scared? There's no
• 1:23:24
  Speaker 1: real opposition there. And they're right about that, unfortunately. And
• 1:23:32
  Speaker 1: it just made it more, we can actually say and
• 1:23:37
  Speaker 1: do what we think with more and more impunity.
• 1:23:41
  Speaker 2: Cultural impunity.
• 1:23:42
  Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think that's the state of the world
• 1:23:46
  Speaker 3: in which we live and where the bad guys have
• 1:23:48
  Speaker 3: been unleashed and people are so cynical and skeptical is
• 1:23:54
  Speaker 3: that they're rallying around them. There's no values, there are
• 1:23:59
  Speaker 3: no American values guiding people's responses to this.
• 1:24:04
  Speaker 7: And just in terms of college campuses and If you
• 1:24:11
  Speaker 7: haven't been on North American college campuses and seen this
• 1:24:16
  Speaker 7: kind of thing, it's hard.
• 1:24:17
  Speaker 1: It's not all the students, not even a majority of students,
• 1:24:20
  Speaker 1: but it's a vocal minority that has a lot of
• 1:24:24
  Speaker 1: support from the administrations and faculty. That's part of what
• 1:24:29
  Speaker 1: came out after October 7th of how mealy-mouthed and worse
• 1:24:34
  Speaker 1: the administrations are in.
• 1:24:36
  Speaker 2: Regards to this. But you could have some real sympathy
• 1:24:41
  Speaker 2: and solidarity.
• 1:24:42
  Speaker 1: If they were protesting, even if they were protesting what
• 1:24:45
  Speaker 1: was happening in Syria, and look at the tens of
• 1:24:50
  Speaker 1: thousands of people being murdered and so on. We stand
• 1:24:54
  Speaker 1: with these people. We stand against Assad. Or if they
• 1:24:57
  Speaker 1: come out in support of the Iranian protesters and the
• 1:25:01
  Speaker 1: women's movement and so on. That doesn't garner the kind
• 1:25:05
  Speaker 1: of thing that you saw after October 7th. But Hamas
• 1:25:10
  Speaker 1: will gain your sympathy for the butchering that they did.
• 1:25:15
  Speaker 1: That's what brings you out to protest. That tells you
• 1:25:18
  Speaker 1: something really corrupt about their motivation.
• 1:25:21
  Speaker 3: Yeah, and it reveals that what really motivates them is hatred,
• 1:25:24
  Speaker 3: and what really motivates them is hatred of the West,
• 1:25:27
  Speaker 3: of hatred of civilization, what they're really promoting. See, in
• 1:25:32
  Speaker 3: the Assyrian conflict, both sides are barbarians. There's nobody to
• 1:25:37
  Speaker 3: root for. Right now in Sudan and Somalia, horrible things
• 1:25:41
  Speaker 3: are happening. But it's people, you know, there's no oppressor oppressed.
• 1:25:46
  Speaker 3: There's no colonizer. There's no Western. But whenever Western power
• 1:25:51
  Speaker 3: is involved, that's when they completely freak out because it's
• 1:25:56
  Speaker 3: the hatred. They despise civilization. They despise everything civilization stands for.
• 1:26:03
  Speaker 3: And it makes it so evil. It makes it so evil.
• 1:26:07
  Speaker 4: Yaron, you were asking about how the last 25 years
• 1:26:10
  Speaker 4: shaped the present. I want to just put briefly an
• 1:26:13
  Speaker 4: example that I mentioned earlier. The Trump administration's war against
• 1:26:21
  Speaker 4: Iran started, in some sense, it started in 25 with
• 1:26:25
  Speaker 4: the bombing of some facilities, and then it started in
• 1:26:27
  Speaker 4: February 26, 2026, with the joint effort by the US
• 1:26:29
  Speaker 4: and Israel. I don't think, I mean, I've heard you
• 1:26:38
  Speaker 4: say in another setting, I don't think Americans know why
• 1:26:41
  Speaker 4: there is a war. I don't think, and I think
• 1:26:43
  Speaker 4: that part of the one point of contact is, I
• 1:26:47
  Speaker 4: don't think the Trump administration thinks it owes anyone an
• 1:26:50
  Speaker 4: explanation of why it's doing this. It has real contempt
• 1:26:53
  Speaker 4: for Americans that, well, yeah, we're going to fight this
• 1:26:56
  Speaker 4: war in the Middle East.
• 1:26:57
  Speaker 5: We told you we're not going to do any wars,
• 1:26:58
  Speaker 5: but we're going to do this war. We don't care
• 1:27:00
  Speaker 5: what we think.
• 1:27:00
  Speaker 4: And there's one telling that, statement, one of the many
• 1:27:04
  Speaker 4: statements that I quote in the preface to failing to
• 1:27:08
  Speaker 4: confront Islamic totalitarianism, the new one that was just brought out,
• 1:27:12
  Speaker 4: about Trump saying they totally don't say the word war
• 1:27:17
  Speaker 4: because if you say the word war, you sort of
• 1:27:19
  Speaker 4: have to go to Congress.
• 1:27:20
  Speaker 2: I don't want to do that.
• 1:27:21
  Speaker 5: And it just makes people uncomfortable. So I'm not going
• 1:27:23
  Speaker 5: to say the war is like military operations, but it
• 1:27:25
  Speaker 5: is really a war. I'm not going to say that.
• 1:27:27
  Speaker 4: Obviously, that's a paraphrase, but it's pretty close to the
• 1:27:30
  Speaker 4: same thing. And so they don't go to Congress and
• 1:27:34
  Speaker 4: they don't seek authorization because they don't feel any need
• 1:27:39
  Speaker 4: to do that because they don't respect the American people's judgment.
• 1:27:43
  Speaker 4: And then just to compound where we were, to tie
• 1:27:45
  Speaker 4: this to the issue of free speech, then you have
• 1:27:49
  Speaker 4: the FCC commissioner or chairman, I forget what his actual
• 1:27:53
  Speaker 4: title is, Brendan Carr, threatening people who criticize the war.
• 1:27:57
  Speaker 4: Criticized Iraq.
• 1:27:58
  Speaker 5: And this is early. This is in the.
• 1:28:00
  Speaker 4: First month or two before it became so obviously a
• 1:28:03
  Speaker 4: war that Trump doesn't know what to do with. Threatening
• 1:28:07
  Speaker 4: them with, well, how dare you criticize this war? This
• 1:28:10
  Speaker 4: is America where we have the First Amendment and you
• 1:28:12
  Speaker 4: have the FCC chairman under Trump and presumably to seek
• 1:28:18
  Speaker 4: curry favor with Trump. Telling people to shut up because
• 1:28:21
  Speaker 4: how dare you question what the great leader is doing.
• 1:28:24
  Speaker 4: I don't think you can get here Absent the last
• 1:28:28
  Speaker 4: 25 years of cultural intellectual decay where they.
• 1:28:33
  Speaker 5: Don't care what you think and they don't really know
• 1:28:35
  Speaker 5: what they're doing, but they'll tell you to shut up.
• 1:28:38
  Speaker 3: And they get away with it. I mean, that's the
• 1:28:41
  Speaker 3: important aspect of it. They get away with it, right?
• 1:28:42
  Speaker 3: There's no uprising against it. There's no, you know, there's no,
• 1:28:47
  Speaker 3: nobody's upset. I mean, they're upset about the war, but
• 1:28:49
  Speaker 3: they're not really upset about Trump and in a sense
• 1:28:53
  Speaker 3: of the way he's handling it. Yes, I mean, Trump
• 1:28:58
  Speaker 3: came to power saying, Trust me. That's all you have
• 1:29:02
  Speaker 3: to do is trust me. So he believes that he
• 1:29:06
  Speaker 3: should be able to do whatever he wants to do
• 1:29:08
  Speaker 3: as president. He doesn't need anybody's... He doesn't have to
• 1:29:11
  Speaker 3: explain it. He doesn't have to give permission, get permission
• 1:29:14
  Speaker 3: from Congress or anything like that. This is the slippery
• 1:29:17
  Speaker 3: slope into authoritarianism that we are unfortunately on. And again,
• 1:29:23
  Speaker 3: I think it starts on 9-11. It starts with.
• 1:29:30
  Speaker 3: With the way they treated the American people after that
• 1:29:33
  Speaker 3: and the powers they took on for themselves, Patriot Act
• 1:29:35
  Speaker 3: and all of that stuff, again, without any real, without
• 1:29:40
  Speaker 3: being honest with the American people about what it all entailed.
• 1:29:45
  Speaker 3: All right. So, Elon, maybe just tell us about the
• 1:29:49
  Speaker 3: new book and where people can get it. I think
• 1:29:52
  Speaker 3: it's being offered as a free PDF online, so maybe
• 1:29:55
  Speaker 3: let everybody know about it.
• 1:29:58
  Speaker 4: Yeah, for anyone watching, you're welcome to get a free
• 1:30:03
  Speaker 4: digital copy. Go to einran.org slash 911. Or if you
• 1:30:09
  Speaker 4: want to buy it, we've reduced the price to the
• 1:30:11
  Speaker 4: lowest possible price on Amazon, so you can get it
• 1:30:14
  Speaker 4: at Kindle and paperback, and soon I think on audiobook.
• 1:30:18
  Speaker 4: I would say that what this book offers is a
• 1:30:23
  Speaker 4: panoramic view of ARI's commentary on 9-11 and the aftermath
• 1:30:30
  Speaker 4: over the last 25 years. So what we've added to
• 1:30:32
  Speaker 4: this edition since five years ago are some pieces on
• 1:30:37
  Speaker 4: the withdrawal from Afghanistan, which we didn't really touch on,
• 1:30:40
  Speaker 4: but I think that also colors the Iran war.
• 1:30:45
  Speaker 5: Onkar mentioned the women's protest.
• 1:30:47
  Speaker 4: Movement in Iran and what they needed but didn't get
• 1:30:50
  Speaker 4: from the West, which was moral encouragement and more probably.
• 1:30:54
  Speaker 5: And the aftermath of October 7th.
• 1:30:55
  Speaker 4: And then we have one piece, which I may be
• 1:30:59
  Speaker 4: forgetting one or two pieces, but the book ending of
• 1:31:01
  Speaker 4: the book is a piece on the Iran war and
• 1:31:07
  Speaker 4: just foreshadowing the way, one fundamental way, which the Trump
• 1:31:11
  Speaker 4: administration grossly underestimated the problem because they don't understand the.
• 1:31:16
  Speaker 5: Nature of the Iranian regime. If you think Iran is
• 1:31:18
  Speaker 5: like Venezuela, you're going to... you're going to fail. And
• 1:31:21
  Speaker 5: I think the central issue is they don't understand Iran's
• 1:31:25
  Speaker 5: Islamic character. So the book covers all that.
• 1:31:28
  Speaker 4: And I would say it echoes the theme of winning
• 1:31:32
  Speaker 4: the unwinnable war. And that's the theme that we've been
• 1:31:36
  Speaker 4: talking about, which is that America is supremely militarily powerful,
• 1:31:42
  Speaker 4: but what has undercut us are the ideas Americans choose
• 1:31:47
  Speaker 4: to accept in morality, which are perverse ideas, ideas fundamentally
• 1:31:50
  Speaker 4: of altruism that cripple the military, that cripple the.
• 1:31:55
  Speaker 5: Thinking of our leadership.
• 1:31:57
  Speaker 4: And that is interwoven with pragmatism, which is fostered by altruism.
• 1:32:01
  Speaker 5: It's interplayed with altruism.
• 1:32:03
  Speaker 4: It undercuts one's belief that principles are practical and necessary.
• 1:32:07
  Speaker 5: In human life. The difference between the two books, I
• 1:32:11
  Speaker 5: encourage people to get both.
• 1:32:13
  Speaker 4: The Winning the Unwinnable War is more extended essays, and
• 1:32:17
  Speaker 4: it ends in 2809, so it has a time cap.
• 1:32:22
  Speaker 4: By contrast, The Failure to Confront Islamist Alternism includes a
• 1:32:26
  Speaker 4: number of very substantive pieces, which I'm really proud of,
• 1:32:29
  Speaker 4: but a lot of shorter pieces on a whole range
• 1:32:32
  Speaker 4: of issues that we didn't cover in the previous one,
• 1:32:34
  Speaker 4: such as the Danish cartoons crisis, the Gaza elections, many
• 1:32:41
  Speaker 4: aspects of Obama's administration that we didn't cover in the
• 1:32:44
  Speaker 4: 2009 book. So I encourage people to take a look
• 1:32:47
  Speaker 4: at it. It is something that I think it concretizes
• 1:32:53
  Speaker 4: the thrust of today's conversation, which is I'm very proud
• 1:32:56
  Speaker 4: to be part of ARI, in part because of what
• 1:32:59
  Speaker 4: we did in the year after 9-11.
• 1:33:00
  Speaker 5: I think it was really important to speak up. And
• 1:33:03
  Speaker 5: we did it in the name, in our own name,
• 1:33:05
  Speaker 5: but in the name of the donors who made our
• 1:33:06
  Speaker 5: work possible.
• 1:33:08
  Speaker 4: So that's just something I think, in a certain way,
• 1:33:11
  Speaker 4: it's a thank you to our donors for them to
• 1:33:13
  Speaker 4: see the work that they enabled that had impact on others.
• 1:33:18
  Speaker 2: Good.
• 1:33:18
  Speaker 3: Yeah, guys, go get the book.
• 1:33:21
  Speaker 2: Read it.
• 1:33:21
  Speaker 3: I think it's really important that this generation also understands
• 1:33:29
  Speaker 3: what happened 25 years ago and that we learn from it.
• 1:33:33
  Speaker 3: And it helped guide kind of our commentary and our
• 1:33:37
  Speaker 3: debates moving forward. All right, let's see. We've got some questions.
• 1:33:41
  Speaker 3: So let's see how relevant all of them are. All right,
• 1:33:46
  Speaker 3: this is from Ryan. Ryan says, when a group is
• 1:33:52
  Speaker 3: cast as victims, murdering civilians, it seems, is justified. When
• 1:33:57
  Speaker 3: a group murders civilians in self-defense, it is an atrocity
• 1:34:01
  Speaker 3: or genocide. We need an objective morality in the West.
• 1:34:05
  Speaker 3: Thank you, guys. Do you guys want to comment on that?
• 1:34:09
  Speaker 8: Yeah, he's basically saying Hamas is portrayed as being justified
• 1:34:22
  Speaker 8: because they're the victims, so they can kill anybody.
• 1:34:25
  Speaker 3: But when Israel or the United States kills civilians in self-defense,
• 1:34:29
  Speaker 3: I wouldn't use the term murdered there. But then that's
• 1:34:32
  Speaker 3: condemned because we have an upside down morality.
• 1:34:36
  Speaker 5: Yeah, there's certainly lots of ways in which.
• 1:34:41
  Speaker 4: The principles of altruism, and these are encoded in the
• 1:34:44
  Speaker 4: laws of war, which is influenced by this tradition called
• 1:34:47
  Speaker 4: just war theory that we've commented on in various ways.
• 1:34:53
  Speaker 4: If you wanted to design a way to make good
• 1:34:56
  Speaker 4: weaker in defending itself, this is what you would do.
• 1:34:59
  Speaker 5: It's almost like a handbook for the enemy.
• 1:35:01
  Speaker 4: Because it gives them such an advantage in the military space,
• 1:35:06
  Speaker 4: because the enemy's not going to follow these rules, but
• 1:35:09
  Speaker 4: the rules handicap the good at every step.
• 1:35:11
  Speaker 5: So certainly at the.
• 1:35:13
  Speaker 4: Operational level, and just in terms of how people view
• 1:35:16
  Speaker 4: it from the outside, the idea that your attention has
• 1:35:21
  Speaker 4: to be focused on the weak, regardless of why they're weak,
• 1:35:24
  Speaker 4: and the poor, regardless of why they're poor, And the
• 1:35:26
  Speaker 4: suffering with God is what is certain. There are people
• 1:35:28
  Speaker 4: who suffer because of their own faults and their own
• 1:35:31
  Speaker 4: evil ideas.
• 1:35:31
  Speaker 2: And they should suffer.
• 1:35:33
  Speaker 4: And they need to be recognized. And so just being...
• 1:35:37
  Speaker 4: This is part.
• 1:35:38
  Speaker 5: Of what Ayn Rand's genius is in her analysis of altruism.
• 1:35:42
  Speaker 4: Altruism operates so much of its power.
• 1:35:45
  Speaker 5: Is through these package deals of the poor, the weak,
• 1:35:48
  Speaker 5: the suffering.
• 1:35:49
  Speaker 2: What do you mean?
• 1:35:50
  Speaker 5: Why are they in that condition? What is the causality
• 1:35:52
  Speaker 5: for that? And what is their responsibility? All those questions.
• 1:35:55
  Speaker 4: are wiped out when you are dealing with these broad
• 1:35:59
  Speaker 4: package deal type anti-concept terms. And the same goes in
• 1:36:02
  Speaker 4: the opposite direction. The rich, the wealthy, well, why are
• 1:36:04
  Speaker 4: they rich? Did they earn it or did they steal it?
• 1:36:06
  Speaker 4: Did they pull a pedal or did they actually create something?
• 1:36:09
  Speaker 4: You can't think that way. And that's exactly what altruism does.
• 1:36:13
  Speaker 4: It leads you to operate on an essentially emotional level.
• 1:36:17
  Speaker 5: Oh, these people suffer.
• 1:36:18
  Speaker 4: My heart bleeds. I'm going to do something. I'm going
• 1:36:21
  Speaker 4: to hate the people who are making them feel bad.
• 1:36:24
  Speaker 4: that's not thinking and that's not a guide to life.
• 1:36:26
  Speaker 2: Okay. Yeah. Say something about the laws of war.
• 1:36:35
  Speaker 1: That is to think of it in those terms is
• 1:36:40
  Speaker 1: as Alon was suggesting is to empower evil and to
• 1:36:44
  Speaker 1: disempower the good. So From a certain perspective, law is
• 1:36:50
  Speaker 1: the opposite of war. When you think of law and
• 1:36:55
  Speaker 1: you have respect for law, you're thinking of it in
• 1:36:58
  Speaker 1: the US or the UK or Germany, where if.
• 1:37:02
  Speaker 2: You have a dispute with your neighbor, you don't come
• 1:37:04
  Speaker 2: to blows.
• 1:37:05
  Speaker 1: You go to court and it's adjudicated with rational.
• 1:37:09
  Speaker 2: Rules and so on.
• 1:37:12
  Speaker 1: You impose laws so that you're putting the use of
• 1:37:16
  Speaker 1: force under rational and good control, so you don't have
• 1:37:19
  Speaker 1: everybody fighting everybody. When it comes to the terms that
• 1:37:24
  Speaker 1: you are now fighting someone, law is out the window.
• 1:37:28
  Speaker 2: If they would follow laws, you wouldn't be at war
• 1:37:31
  Speaker 2: with them. So what is actually happening is it's a
• 1:37:36
  Speaker 2: kind of equivocation.
• 1:37:37
  Speaker 1: There are principles of war, but there's not laws that, oh,
• 1:37:41
  Speaker 1: the other side and us, we both have to follow
• 1:37:44
  Speaker 1: and obey. If that was what was going on, you
• 1:37:46
  Speaker 1: would have peace, not war. So it's true that there
• 1:37:49
  Speaker 1: are principles that should govern our or a free nation's
• 1:37:53
  Speaker 1: conduct of the war, including, like, if you think of
• 1:37:55
  Speaker 1: the U.S., which is a major principle, that the military
• 1:37:58
  Speaker 1: is under civilian control. It's not a law that, oh,
• 1:38:01
  Speaker 1: the other side follows, so we have to follow.
• 1:38:04
  Speaker 2: And so on.
• 1:38:04
  Speaker 1: And there are principles in terms of how soldiers on
• 1:38:08
  Speaker 1: the field should be conducting themselves, but not where it's, oh, well,
• 1:38:13
  Speaker 1: there's laws that we and the other side are supposed
• 1:38:16
  Speaker 1: to follow, and how dare we break them, and we're
• 1:38:18
  Speaker 1: going to be called to court. All that is just
• 1:38:22
  Speaker 1: crippling your self-defense. And this is like the cry against Israel,
• 1:38:28
  Speaker 1: let's get them before the ICC and look at how
• 1:38:31
  Speaker 1: they're violating international law. Those kinds of laws are just
• 1:38:35
  Speaker 1: and by design in the end to empower the evil and.
• 1:38:39
  Speaker 3: Disempower the good. Absolutely. All right. Michael says more statement
• 1:38:44
  Speaker 3: than anything. The main problem is not distinguishing between good
• 1:38:50
  Speaker 3: and evil, but that many choose evil?
• 1:38:57
  Speaker 5: I think it's both.
• 1:38:58
  Speaker 4: I don't think that exhausts what's going wrong either.
• 1:39:03
  Speaker 5: I mean, there's certainly people who choose evil. That defines
• 1:39:06
  Speaker 5: the Islamist movement.
• 1:39:07
  Speaker 4: It defines people who rail against the good. But there's
• 1:39:11
  Speaker 4: also the problem of not really wanting to think about
• 1:39:13
  Speaker 4: what is good and evil and being hampered in your
• 1:39:16
  Speaker 4: ability to do that.
• 1:39:17
  Speaker 5: Altruism doesn't help you think about good and.
• 1:39:19
  Speaker 4: Evil because it tells you that the good is to
• 1:39:22
  Speaker 4: deny yourself and efface yourself and sacrifice. That's not pro-human life.
• 1:39:27
  Speaker 4: And it tells you that the evil is the person
• 1:39:30
  Speaker 4: who pursues their own interests. Well, that's also false. There's
• 1:39:35
  Speaker 4: ways in which it corrupts your ability to make a
• 1:39:39
  Speaker 4: distinction between good and evil. And there's actually, for people
• 1:39:42
  Speaker 4: who haven't watched this, there's a podcast that Ankur and
• 1:39:45
  Speaker 4: I did some months back about the Iran war and
• 1:39:50
  Speaker 4: the false view that evil is powerful, which I think
• 1:39:52
  Speaker 4: altruism helps to feed, which is really a profound point
• 1:39:56
  Speaker 4: coming out of Iran's analysis of the nature of evil
• 1:39:58
  Speaker 4: and the nature of good.
• 1:40:00
  Speaker 5: So I hope that's helpful, but you want to add
• 1:40:03
  Speaker 5: to that, Ankur?
• 1:40:04
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that.
• 1:40:06
  Speaker 1: There's a certain truth to what's been said, but it's
• 1:40:08
  Speaker 1: dropping a lot of context. So it's true in the
• 1:40:12
  Speaker 1: end people choose evil. If it really is something evil,
• 1:40:15
  Speaker 1: it's something chosen.
• 1:40:16
  Speaker 2: It didn't happen to them.
• 1:40:17
  Speaker 1: They weren't determined to do it. If it's in that
• 1:40:21
  Speaker 1: kind of category, then it's not an issue of good
• 1:40:23
  Speaker 1: and evil.
• 1:40:23
  Speaker 2: So it's chosen.
• 1:40:25
  Speaker 1: But the kind of implication of the comment seems to be....
• 1:40:30
  Speaker 2: It's not really relevant to talk about good and.
• 1:40:32
  Speaker 1: Evil because, well, people are going to choose evil and
• 1:40:35
  Speaker 1: they're going to choose evil, but.
• 1:40:37
  Speaker 2: They choose in a certain context.
• 1:40:40
  Speaker 1: And you have to think of here, we're talking about
• 1:40:42
  Speaker 1: society wide when you get a culture that is seeking
• 1:40:45
  Speaker 1: to eradicate the United States as a great Satan and
• 1:40:49
  Speaker 1: more broadly the West, which is also why they hate Israel.
• 1:40:51
  Speaker 1: Like every exponent of success and productivity and rationality.
• 1:40:56
  Speaker 2: Is their enemy.
• 1:40:57
  Speaker 1: It's, People are choosing in the context of a whole culture.
• 1:41:02
  Speaker 1: And it matters if someone like Arafat is viewed as
• 1:41:07
  Speaker 1: a monster or we give him the Nobel Prize. then
• 1:41:11
  Speaker 1: that's a license to choose evil under the cover of,
• 1:41:15
  Speaker 1: how dare you say it's evil?
• 1:41:16
  Speaker 2: I'm just doing like what Arafat did. He got a
• 1:41:18
  Speaker 2: Nobel Prize. I'm doing what's good, not evil.
• 1:41:21
  Speaker 1: And they can fool themselves, but more broadly, they can
• 1:41:23
  Speaker 1: fool the people around them who should be denouncing that.
• 1:41:26
  Speaker 1: And the more evil was denounced, that is the higher
• 1:41:31
  Speaker 1: the consequences for choosing, negative consequences are for choosing evil.
• 1:41:36
  Speaker 2: People at the margin- or less likely.
• 1:41:39
  Speaker 1: To choose it, because they know that in choosing that,
• 1:41:42
  Speaker 1: I'm making myself a pariah, and I'm going to be
• 1:41:44
  Speaker 1: hated by good people, and they're not going to apologize,
• 1:41:47
  Speaker 1: they're going to say that what you're doing is evil.
• 1:41:50
  Speaker 1: In that context, you get less evil. So it's true
• 1:41:54
  Speaker 1: in the end that it's chosen, but that doesn't mean
• 1:41:57
  Speaker 1: that the context of a society and a culture that
• 1:42:03
  Speaker 1: really has a clear, articulated view of what's good.
• 1:42:06
  Speaker 2: And the right about that, and of what's evil and
• 1:42:08
  Speaker 2: the right about that. It doesn't matter. It matters, like, incredibly.
• 1:42:14
  Speaker 3: Yeah, and, you know, one of Rand's real original ideas
• 1:42:21
  Speaker 3: is that the main problem is not evil, but the
• 1:42:24
  Speaker 3: sanction of evil. That is the fact that the good
• 1:42:26
  Speaker 3: sanctions evil, that evil is, I think Elon implied, impotence.
• 1:42:30
  Speaker 3: And it's only through the sanction of the good that
• 1:42:33
  Speaker 3: evil gains any power. I mean, think if we had
• 1:42:36
  Speaker 3: the right attitude towards Arafat, he would be a nothing.
• 1:42:38
  Speaker 3: He would be a nobody. He would be dead. If
• 1:42:40
  Speaker 3: we had the right attitude towards any evil regime, they
• 1:42:43
  Speaker 3: would be gone. They would disappear very quickly. Evil has
• 1:42:46
  Speaker 3: no power to stand on itself. It's the good that
• 1:42:50
  Speaker 3: gives it that power. Andrew, what do you think was
• 1:42:55
  Speaker 3: the core of the basis for the evasive failure of
• 1:43:00
  Speaker 3: to confront Saudi Arabia and Iran for being culpable for
• 1:43:03
  Speaker 3: 9-11 in favor of confronting Iraq and Afghanistan? I'd say
• 1:43:13
  Speaker 3: that it starts with the unwillingness to name the enemy.
• 1:43:19
  Speaker 3: I think there was an op-ed out there or an
• 1:43:22
  Speaker 3: article that we wrote saying, if you can't name the enemy,
• 1:43:28
  Speaker 3: you can't fight a war because you don't know who
• 1:43:30
  Speaker 3: you're fighting against. So if you name the enemy Islamic totalitarianism,
• 1:43:35
  Speaker 3: and then you say, okay, which countries, which organizations abide
• 1:43:39
  Speaker 3: by Islamic totalitarianism, then the enemy list is clear. And
• 1:43:42
  Speaker 3: Iran and Saudi Arabia would be very high on the list.
• 1:43:45
  Speaker 3: But if you don't name the enemy, then you go, huh,
• 1:43:48
  Speaker 3: it originated in Afghanistan. So Afghanistan must be the enemy.
• 1:43:52
  Speaker 3: So we'll go to Afghanistan, no matter what, you know, what,
• 1:43:56
  Speaker 3: what influence that regime has or doesn't have. And then
• 1:44:00
  Speaker 3: Iraq was, we have to do something about the Middle East.
• 1:44:05
  Speaker 3: It's not, it's not a, it's just the Middle East
• 1:44:07
  Speaker 3: is where the problem is. We have to do something.
• 1:44:09
  Speaker 3: If we bring democracy to Iraq, then the Middle East
• 1:44:13
  Speaker 3: will become free. I mean, there was this fantasy going around.
• 1:44:16
  Speaker 3: So it's, it's the, it's the, it's the inability on,
• 1:44:19
  Speaker 3: not inability, unwillingness to name the enemy, which I think
• 1:44:22
  Speaker 3: is at the core of, of not identifying Saudi Arabia
• 1:44:26
  Speaker 3: and Iran.
• 1:44:28
  Speaker 4: I think one other piece of this that's worth noting,
• 1:44:33
  Speaker 4: Afghanistan did not have a national government.
• 1:44:36
  Speaker 2: To speak of.
• 1:44:37
  Speaker 5: The Taliban controlled most of Afghanistan.
• 1:44:41
  Speaker 4: So if you get rid of them, it's not like
• 1:44:44
  Speaker 4: Afghanistan is a state sponsor in the sense of, okay, well,
• 1:44:48
  Speaker 4: Iran is a state sponsor of terrorism. So there's a
• 1:44:51
  Speaker 4: sense in which you can minimize the role of religion
• 1:44:53
  Speaker 4: in that context. That times 100 is what you see
• 1:44:56
  Speaker 4: in Iraq. So Saddam Hussein used Islam, and I'm sure
• 1:45:01
  Speaker 4: he would have told people he's a Muslim, but he
• 1:45:02
  Speaker 4: was not a religious leader.
• 1:45:05
  Speaker 5: It was a way.
• 1:45:07
  Speaker 4: Of exploiting Islam very nakedly for his dictatorial regime. It
• 1:45:11
  Speaker 4: was nothing like Iran, nothing like Saudi Arabia. And the
• 1:45:15
  Speaker 4: contrast is so stark. I mean, Saudi Arabia just is
• 1:45:20
  Speaker 4: a religious country in a way that people can't fathom,
• 1:45:23
  Speaker 4: even today.
• 1:45:24
  Speaker 5: And Iran is a religious country in the way people
• 1:45:26
  Speaker 5: come out.
• 1:45:27
  Speaker 4: And I think it's more comfortable to this point about
• 1:45:30
  Speaker 4: what was within the realm of conceivable that we could do.
• 1:45:35
  Speaker 4: If we pointed out that it's Iran, well, we're uncomfortable
• 1:45:41
  Speaker 4: with that.
• 1:45:41
  Speaker 5: They're religious. They've got to be good in some decent sense.
• 1:45:45
  Speaker 5: It gives comfort to people. That's one of the things
• 1:45:47
  Speaker 5: Bush said about Islam. It gives comfort to billions of
• 1:45:49
  Speaker 5: people around the world.
• 1:45:51
  Speaker 4: Whereas Iraq is easier. because it's less religious. I think that's,
• 1:45:54
  Speaker 4: I'm not saying that's the full explanation. I think it's
• 1:45:57
  Speaker 4: an important factor that has to be integrated to seeing
• 1:46:00
  Speaker 4: what happened there.
• 1:46:01
  Speaker 5: And it was, yeah.
• 1:46:05
  Speaker 4: I mean, we had the optimistic view for, I don't know,
• 1:46:09
  Speaker 4: a couple of weeks that Iraq could be a.
• 1:46:12
  Speaker 5: Step towards doing something bigger that was necessary.
• 1:46:16
  Speaker 4: And that would have been defensible, like as a stepping
• 1:46:18
  Speaker 4: stone to going after Iran.
• 1:46:20
  Speaker 5: That was not possible. on the cause.
• 1:46:21
  Speaker 4: That was not what was happening. It turned out that
• 1:46:24
  Speaker 4: Iraq was going to be the thing. This was going
• 1:46:27
  Speaker 4: to be the start of a wave of democracy, as
• 1:46:29
  Speaker 4: he put it.
• 1:46:29
  Speaker 3: All right. Let's see. Andrew again. How do you respond
• 1:46:39
  Speaker 3: to the position that American interventionism is to blame for 9-11?
• 1:46:44
  Speaker 3: Assuming you disagree, what are the philosophical defects in that position?
• 1:46:52
  Speaker 4: I don't think American intervention presumably means America has gone
• 1:46:56
  Speaker 4: to the Middle East and meddled in people's regimes and countries.
• 1:47:01
  Speaker 5: America has done a lot of stupid and irrational.
• 1:47:03
  Speaker 4: And self-destructive things in the Middle East. I'm not going
• 1:47:07
  Speaker 4: to defend every single thing that America has done.
• 1:47:09
  Speaker 5: That's not my view. I don't think that can explain
• 1:47:12
  Speaker 5: the rise of a militant.
• 1:47:17
  Speaker 4: Movement sponsored by countries that is ideologically driven and it's
• 1:47:22
  Speaker 4: not as if Iran had not had this coup with
• 1:47:27
  Speaker 4: whatever the guy Mossadegh it's not as if the people
• 1:47:30
  Speaker 4: who now run Iran would be happy they wouldn't they
• 1:47:34
  Speaker 4: would want to get him out of the way as
• 1:47:35
  Speaker 4: well because what they want is a religious state and
• 1:47:38
  Speaker 4: the same is true in Afghanistan it's not as if
• 1:47:41
  Speaker 4: only America had not given us weapons to fight the
• 1:47:43
  Speaker 4: Soviets obviously they benefited from that it just doesn't integrate
• 1:47:48
  Speaker 4: with what actually animates them. They are not there, oh,
• 1:47:52
  Speaker 4: if only you stayed out of our garden, we'd be happy. No,
• 1:47:55
  Speaker 4: they don't think there's any American policy that would be satisfactory.
• 1:48:00
  Speaker 4: The only policy that is satisfactory is for America to collapse.
• 1:48:04
  Speaker 4: Because it's not religious, it's not pious, it defies Allah's will.
• 1:48:09
  Speaker 5: That's the fundamental.
• 1:48:10
  Speaker 4: There are other things to say about America's policy, but
• 1:48:13
  Speaker 4: they don't explain what happened.
• 1:48:17
  Speaker 3: Do you want to add anything, Uncle?
• 1:48:19
  Speaker 2: Um.
• 1:48:20
  Speaker 1: If you put this outside the context of foreign policy
• 1:48:25
  Speaker 1: to domestic policy, it depends what you.
• 1:48:28
  Speaker 2: Mean by explain. If the police.
• 1:48:32
  Speaker 1: Force is not very good is pursuing some bad kind
• 1:48:37
  Speaker 1: of policies. We passed some laws that deflect the police
• 1:48:41
  Speaker 1: from going after real criminals to going after people like
• 1:48:44
  Speaker 1: for victimless crimes of taking drug use or something like that.
• 1:48:49
  Speaker 2: You could say, Like.
• 1:48:51
  Speaker 1: This is helping give rise to a criminal underworld. Yeah,
• 1:48:55
  Speaker 1: there's a sense in which that's true, but not in
• 1:48:57
  Speaker 1: the sense that absolves the criminals.
• 1:49:00
  Speaker 2: Not in the sense, it's they're choosing evil.
• 1:49:03
  Speaker 1: And yeah, it's in a kind of vacuum that makes
• 1:49:07
  Speaker 1: it easier to pursue the evil that they're choosing.
• 1:49:11
  Speaker 2: But it doesn't explain.
• 1:49:12
  Speaker 1: It as though, like all the blame on the police
• 1:49:15
  Speaker 1: and the criminals that you give them a free card.
• 1:49:20
  Speaker 1: So America's foreign policy has been irrational for basically the
• 1:49:26
  Speaker 1: whole 20th century. Ayn Rand's view was that our participation
• 1:49:31
  Speaker 1: in World War II helped bring communism to about a
• 1:49:35
  Speaker 1: third of the globe. And you can say that that's
• 1:49:38
  Speaker 1: our failure, but we're not responsible for the evils of
• 1:49:41
  Speaker 1: communism because we failed to uphold freedom. It's bad for
• 1:49:45
  Speaker 1: us and it's bad for all the people we've betrayed,
• 1:49:47
  Speaker 1: such as people.
• 1:49:49
  Speaker 2: In China with the rise of Mao. that we didn't
• 1:49:54
  Speaker 2: really uphold freedom.
• 1:49:55
  Speaker 1: We didn't uphold our interests, and therefore the interests of
• 1:49:58
  Speaker 1: many people who actually wanted freedom around the world. That's
• 1:50:02
  Speaker 1: a failure on our part, and it's a real failure.
• 1:50:05
  Speaker 1: But it doesn't now give evil, oh, well, you can
• 1:50:08
  Speaker 1: do whatever you want because the good wasn't good enough.
• 1:50:11
  Speaker 1: And that's, like, when you start saying, well, it justifies
• 1:50:16
  Speaker 1: bin Laden, who, like, hates everything or justifies Hamas, that.
• 1:50:21
  Speaker 2: you're, you're so far.
• 1:50:23
  Speaker 1: Beyond anything that's morally respectable when you're at that level.
• 1:50:30
  Speaker 3: And, and, and if you read, if you actually read the,
• 1:50:34
  Speaker 3: these people, they tell you what, what motivates them. And
• 1:50:37
  Speaker 3: it's not any action American took. I mean, they, they,
• 1:50:41
  Speaker 3: they include that for cover and because they know Americans will,
• 1:50:46
  Speaker 3: it will resonate with Americans, but they, you know, they
• 1:50:49
  Speaker 3: take seriously the idea of a, Islamic caliphate that controls
• 1:50:53
  Speaker 3: the world and Sharia law and the evil of America
• 1:50:57
  Speaker 3: as a secular state and its success as a slap
• 1:50:59
  Speaker 3: in their face. They write this. They tell you exactly
• 1:51:02
  Speaker 3: what they're doing. It's not like they're hiding it. And then,
• 1:51:05
  Speaker 3: of course, the idea that American interventionism, I mean, the
• 1:51:09
  Speaker 3: problem is that American interventionism was too weak. So our view,
• 1:51:14
  Speaker 3: our criticism of American interventionism for the most part is
• 1:51:17
  Speaker 3: the exact opposite. of the criticism of American interventionism that
• 1:51:22
  Speaker 3: these people who blame 9-11 for. You know, America didn't
• 1:51:25
  Speaker 3: stand up to these countries when their oil was taken
• 1:51:29
  Speaker 3: from them. America didn't stand up to them when, you know,
• 1:51:33
  Speaker 3: American rights were violated. So, right. Val says, Islam isn't peaceful,
• 1:51:42
  Speaker 3: but the Ahmad Muslims, only 1% of Islam, have enlightenment.
• 1:51:49
  Speaker 3: Enlightenment-like principles. Religious tolerance. Women choosing whether to veil in
• 1:51:54
  Speaker 3: teens and are free to initiate divorce. More progressive. Do
• 1:51:59
  Speaker 3: you agree? Do you know anything about the Ahmad Muslims?
• 1:52:04
  Speaker 4: I have some vague awareness of it. I met someone
• 1:52:06
  Speaker 4: who is a, I think it's a Mahdi sect.
• 1:52:10
  Speaker 2: He.
• 1:52:11
  Speaker 5: We were at a panel and he was hated more.
• 1:52:13
  Speaker 4: Than I was by the students because he was pretty
• 1:52:16
  Speaker 4: laid back about religions, but I don't have a deep
• 1:52:19
  Speaker 4: knowledge of what they believe. Maybe part of the question
• 1:52:24
  Speaker 4: behind the question is, is there a form of Islam
• 1:52:28
  Speaker 4: or other forms of Islam that are compatible with free society.
• 1:52:32
  Speaker 5: And Western civilization?
• 1:52:33
  Speaker 4: My answer to that is, the less it's religious, the
• 1:52:37
  Speaker 4: more it absorbs from the best elements of Western society.
• 1:52:41
  Speaker 5: Yeah, it is. That's what happened to Christianity.
• 1:52:43
  Speaker 4: It got defanged and declawed and put in a cage
• 1:52:47
  Speaker 4: in a certain important political sense.
• 1:52:50
  Speaker 5: And that's the sense in which we.
• 1:52:51
  Speaker 4: Can have Christians today who are not crusading and slaughtering
• 1:52:54
  Speaker 4: infidels in the streets the way they did several hundred
• 1:52:57
  Speaker 4: years ago. You can imagine that being true for Islam
• 1:53:01
  Speaker 4: and given the low point of Islam, which is slaughtering
• 1:53:05
  Speaker 4: people in the streets and decrying heretics and trying to
• 1:53:10
  Speaker 4: intimidate everybody, that can happen for sure. Maybe there are
• 1:53:13
  Speaker 4: sects today that are much better than that. And I
• 1:53:15
  Speaker 4: think the other piece of this is it should go
• 1:53:20
  Speaker 4: without saying, but it's important in today's tribal society to
• 1:53:24
  Speaker 4: talk about there's a religion And there are individuals that
• 1:53:28
  Speaker 4: you meet who say they believe in a certain religion.
• 1:53:30
  Speaker 5: And the question is, what do they believe? And how
• 1:53:32
  Speaker 5: much do they believe?
• 1:53:33
  Speaker 4: And are there good people who identify as Muslims? Yeah,
• 1:53:37
  Speaker 4: there's no question in my mind. Does that mean that
• 1:53:39
  Speaker 4: Islam stands in their mind the way it does from
• 1:53:42
  Speaker 4: Osama bin Laden?
• 1:53:42
  Speaker 2: No, it doesn't.
• 1:53:43
  Speaker 5: It can't possibly because they're good people.
• 1:53:45
  Speaker 4: So there's a way in which they found a compartmentalized.
• 1:53:49
  Speaker 5: Approach to religion.
• 1:53:50
  Speaker 4: In the way that you meet Christians who are good
• 1:53:52
  Speaker 4: people in most areas of their lives, except they believe
• 1:53:55
  Speaker 4: in fantasies and irrational doctrines. So we talk about Islam
• 1:54:03
  Speaker 4: as a political cultural movement, as a religion, and the
• 1:54:05
  Speaker 4: people who are committed to it as a political endeavor.
• 1:54:09
  Speaker 4: This doesn't translate into every Muslim you meet is the enemy.
• 1:54:13
  Speaker 5: That's not what it means. That can't be what it is.
• 1:54:16
  Speaker 4: Because you don't understand how people operate and what ideas,
• 1:54:19
  Speaker 4: how they function in people's mind.
• 1:54:22
  Speaker 5: Don't fall into the collectivized trap. There are important things
• 1:54:25
  Speaker 5: to say about Islam as a cultural force in different
• 1:54:28
  Speaker 5: countries and the way countries operate. But that's important. I
• 1:54:33
  Speaker 5: hope that.
• 1:54:36
  Speaker 4: Is useful to the question. Kirsten, do you have any
• 1:54:40
  Speaker 4: further thoughts on this? I'm particularly sensitive because I've been
• 1:54:43
  Speaker 4: on college campuses enough. I've been called very bad names.
• 1:54:46
  Speaker 4: I've been vilified for being an example.
• 1:54:49
  Speaker 5: It's not even true.
• 1:54:51
  Speaker 4: But part of it is it's hard for people to
• 1:54:53
  Speaker 4: process what you're talking about when you're talking about an
• 1:54:56
  Speaker 4: ideological movement.
• 1:54:58
  Speaker 5: And they think of it as, hey, you're just talking
• 1:54:59
  Speaker 5: about all Muslims. You're hating black people.
• 1:55:01
  Speaker 3: Well, that's the tribalism in our culture. They can't differentiate.
• 1:55:09
  Speaker 2: But there's also.
• 1:55:12
  Speaker 1: not a real understanding of what happened in the West
• 1:55:16
  Speaker 1: with Christianity. So I would not describe it as Christianity
• 1:55:22
  Speaker 1: went through an enlightenment. That's not what happens with the
• 1:55:28
  Speaker 1: religion when there's rational forces on the rise. When reason
• 1:55:34
  Speaker 1: is on the rise culturally, a faith-based mentality And they
• 1:55:43
  Speaker 1: really feel this.
• 1:55:44
  Speaker 2: We're being more and more marginalized.
• 1:55:47
  Speaker 1: Ridiculed, sidelined, because they've got reason, math, science.
• 1:55:53
  Speaker 2: They're making all these advances.
• 1:55:55
  Speaker 1: And What do we got? We're doing the same, reading
• 1:55:59
  Speaker 1: the same passages from 2,000 years ago. There's no argument.
• 1:56:03
  Speaker 1: We give five different interpretations to it. And in the end,
• 1:56:07
  Speaker 1: what we say is, yeah, it doesn't make sense, but
• 1:56:09
  Speaker 1: just have faith. That, as a way of functioning, is
• 1:56:13
  Speaker 1: being viewed as, like, that's more and more disreputable to,
• 1:56:19
  Speaker 1: it's crazy.
• 1:56:19
  Speaker 2: Like, some people are starting to think, this is a
• 1:56:21
  Speaker 2: crazy way of functioning.
• 1:56:23
  Speaker 1: And either what happens is, And I think the best
• 1:56:27
  Speaker 1: people is they give up the religion.
• 1:56:30
  Speaker 2: This reason in science says this is better.
• 1:56:32
  Speaker 1: I'm going moving over to that side. The people who
• 1:56:36
  Speaker 1: want to cling to the religion have to start describing
• 1:56:41
  Speaker 1: it in ways that seem more compatible with reason. And
• 1:56:45
  Speaker 1: so what happens is they water it down. And they
• 1:56:47
  Speaker 1: try to expunge more and more of what seems overtly irrational,
• 1:56:52
  Speaker 1: contrary to reason.
• 1:56:53
  Speaker 2: Okay, we'll get rid of that. And that's not enlightenment.
• 1:56:59
  Speaker 1: That's a sort of accommodation so that they don't have
• 1:57:03
  Speaker 1: to make the choice. It's like I can cling to both.
• 1:57:07
  Speaker 1: But culturally, what's important is reasons on the ascendancy. And
• 1:57:13
  Speaker 1: that's what dictating all the terms and our laws are
• 1:57:16
  Speaker 1: based on this. And that's the reason the constitution doesn't
• 1:57:19
  Speaker 1: have reference to God or Christianity. And so it's not
• 1:57:23
  Speaker 1: that some weren't still believe in God, but reason was like.
• 1:57:27
  Speaker 2: This is what you dictate. And we're created a new nation.
• 1:57:30
  Speaker 1: This is what should rule, not the centuries of Christianity
• 1:57:33
  Speaker 1: that we had before. And it was all wars. And
• 1:57:36
  Speaker 1: so that's not what we want. But it didn't get
• 1:57:39
  Speaker 1: rid of all the people. But it's also not that
• 1:57:42
  Speaker 1: you've got an enlightened religion. You've got a marginalized religion.
• 1:57:46
  Speaker 3: I was just going.
• 1:57:52
  Speaker 1: To say, the problem in the Islamic world is that
• 1:57:55
  Speaker 1: Islam is not marginalized. And that's why you can have
• 1:57:59
  Speaker 1: totalitarians in the way that you don't have it with,
• 1:58:03
  Speaker 1: you have it ascendancy with Christians, but you don't have
• 1:58:05
  Speaker 1: it that in the West because still nobody will really think, yeah,
• 1:58:09
  Speaker 1: like we should get down with all the enlightenment things
• 1:58:13
  Speaker 1: and we should have the rule of Christianity across the board,
• 1:58:17
  Speaker 1: which is what the Islamic preachers.
• 1:58:23
  Speaker 3: Shazbat says, why was the reaction to Paul Harbour so
• 1:58:26
  Speaker 3: different than 9-11? I think at the core, it was
• 1:58:37
  Speaker 3: a better culture and better leadership. And it was, it
• 1:58:42
  Speaker 3: was a, it was a realization that the war was,
• 1:58:49
  Speaker 3: who the enemy was, was also easier. It was a state.
• 1:58:53
  Speaker 3: It was more, you know, it was more direct. It
• 1:58:56
  Speaker 3: didn't threaten anything. Like 9-11, you had to identify religion.
• 1:59:00
  Speaker 3: Religion was a threat to the George Bushes and the
• 1:59:03
  Speaker 3: religious factions in there. in the administration. When it was
• 1:59:07
  Speaker 3: Japan or Germany, it didn't threaten anybody. There weren't Nazis
• 1:59:11
  Speaker 3: and imperialists. I mean, there were some, but there were
• 1:59:13
  Speaker 3: very few in these administrations. And indeed, particularly Roosevelt was
• 1:59:19
  Speaker 3: eager to get into the war. That is, he had
• 1:59:21
  Speaker 3: been eager to get into the war from the beginning
• 1:59:24
  Speaker 3: of the war. So he was, in a sense, prepared
• 1:59:28
  Speaker 3: for what was to follow. But there was nothing to threaten.
• 1:59:32
  Speaker 3: There was also.
• 1:59:35
  Speaker 3: It was a different America. There was a different sense
• 1:59:37
  Speaker 3: of life. There was these kind of ideas about rules
• 1:59:42
  Speaker 3: of war and the integration of altruism into the culture
• 1:59:48
  Speaker 3: was not quite as extensive as it became much later.
• 1:59:52
  Speaker 3: So that, you know, once you declared war, you were
• 1:59:55
  Speaker 3: going to win. And you were going to go and,
• 1:59:57
  Speaker 3: I mean, win in the context of the particular battles.
• 2:00:03
  Speaker 3: which doesn't exist anymore. Taking the actions to win is
• 2:00:07
  Speaker 3: viewed as way too self-interested and rejected. Anka?
• 2:00:12
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I agree with that.
• 2:00:14
  Speaker 1: And I would put it that they could identify the
• 2:00:22
  Speaker 1: Japanese and Nazis, so the fascists, if you put it,
• 2:00:26
  Speaker 1: as there's something really evil here. to say that the
• 2:00:30
  Speaker 1: world war two was this great thing is not true.
• 2:00:34
  Speaker 1: And the, what helps one see that is they could
• 2:00:37
  Speaker 1: not do that with the communists. Um, and so, and
• 2:00:41
  Speaker 1: that's part of the reason that so much of the
• 2:00:43
  Speaker 1: world fell into communist hands and to Stalin, uh, into
• 2:00:48
  Speaker 1: Stalin's hands.
• 2:00:49
  Speaker 2: After world war two.
• 2:00:51
  Speaker 1: And so that world war two is, um, you see
• 2:00:57
  Speaker 1: what it looks like if you identify the enemy attacking
• 2:00:59
  Speaker 1: you as evil and what it looks like if you
• 2:01:01
  Speaker 1: can't identify evil as evil. And 9-11 is, you don't
• 2:01:06
  Speaker 1: have the former, you just have the latter. You're being
• 2:01:09
  Speaker 1: attacked by an abysmal evil of which the communists were.
• 2:01:13
  Speaker 1: And you can't name that and even try to enter
• 2:01:18
  Speaker 1: into alliances with it.
• 2:01:19
  Speaker 2: I don't know if you remember this episode that we.
• 2:01:22
  Speaker 1: Were going to have a coalition against I forget if
• 2:01:26
  Speaker 1: it was put as terrorism, and we invited Iran.
• 2:01:30
  Speaker 2: We invited them.
• 2:01:32
  Speaker 1: That's the same way in which we dealt in favorable
• 2:01:34
  Speaker 1: terms with the communists and Stalin in World War II.
• 2:01:38
  Speaker 1: And that's the issue. Can you identify the evil as
• 2:01:43
  Speaker 1: evil and follow through in action?
• 2:01:48
  Speaker 3: Mary Alitza's Should we have not had an embassy in
• 2:01:52
  Speaker 3: Iran in 1979? Was Iran evil already? Was Iran's evil
• 2:01:57
  Speaker 3: already clear? I mean, yeah, I.
• 2:02:03
  Speaker 4: Don't think it, I mean, it was a authoritarian secular
• 2:02:07
  Speaker 4: state by the Shah. And I don't think I would
• 2:02:10
  Speaker 4: characterize it as evil in the same way that the
• 2:02:13
  Speaker 4: regime that followed it was evil.
• 2:02:15
  Speaker 2: It was bad.
• 2:02:16
  Speaker 3: It wasn't a threat to the United States.
• 2:02:19
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 2:02:20
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 2:02:20
  Speaker 4: And I don't think it was particularly hostile in any sense.
• 2:02:25
  Speaker 5: It was actually trying to be friendly with various countries.
• 2:02:29
  Speaker 4: So 1979 was a very complicated process of what happened
• 2:02:36
  Speaker 4: in Iran. So it wasn't like instantaneous that the Islamic
• 2:02:39
  Speaker 4: regime came up. And even the hostage shaking, it was
• 2:02:43
  Speaker 4: basically done under the auspices and with the support of
• 2:02:47
  Speaker 4: the incoming Khomeini regime. But there was a lot of
• 2:02:52
  Speaker 4: chaos in 1979. So it's not like, oh, yeah, we
• 2:02:54
  Speaker 4: knew exactly what was happening. But there were certainly things
• 2:02:58
  Speaker 4: we could have done around the hostage shaking in the embassy.
• 2:03:01
  Speaker 4: So I don't think it's quite like Iran was in
• 2:03:03
  Speaker 4: place and we should have withdrawn instantly.
• 2:03:06
  Speaker 5: It was like, yeah, maybe we should have.
• 2:03:08
  Speaker 4: Pulled everyone out when the revolution was starting.
• 2:03:11
  Speaker 5: That's incredible to me.
• 2:03:13
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, there's a question of where and when
• 2:03:17
  Speaker 3: you should have embassies, which is beyond the scope of
• 2:03:20
  Speaker 3: what we're talking about today. But yeah, you know, I
• 2:03:26
  Speaker 3: think if you remember the Libya thing with Hillary, what
• 2:03:30
  Speaker 3: was the Libya where the ambassador was murdered?
• 2:03:34
  Speaker 2: You remember?
• 2:03:36
  Speaker 3: What's that? Yeah. Yeah, in Benghazi. I mean, when you
• 2:03:41
  Speaker 3: think about what was going on in Libya at the time,
• 2:03:44
  Speaker 3: the very fact that we had an ambassador there is
• 2:03:48
  Speaker 3: so insane. It is so irresponsible. And again, but nobody cares.
• 2:03:54
  Speaker 3: That's the thing. I mean, foreign policy, the failures in
• 2:03:57
  Speaker 3: foreign policy far exceeds any successes. And nobody seems to
• 2:04:02
  Speaker 3: ever get punished or the electorate doesn't seem to really
• 2:04:06
  Speaker 3: care about issues of foreign policy, even when American lives
• 2:04:11
  Speaker 3: are forsaken or sacrificed as a consequence. It's truly horrific.
• 2:04:16
  Speaker 3: All right. Lincoln, if 9-11 didn't occur, do we not
• 2:04:21
  Speaker 3: get the Patriot Act surveillance, or would politicians just use
• 2:04:25
  Speaker 3: a later attack to justify it? Well, I mean, we
• 2:04:32
  Speaker 3: certainly don't get it. What's that?
• 2:04:34
  Speaker 2: If there is a later attack.
• 2:04:37
  Speaker 1: But yeah, I don't think we get it in the
• 2:04:42
  Speaker 1: form that we get. And that's another major aspect of
• 2:04:47
  Speaker 1: 9-11 and the consequences in terms of what we're living
• 2:04:50
  Speaker 1: with today is there was this push towards we're going
• 2:04:58
  Speaker 1: to have more globalization. The Soviet Union has fallen. There's
• 2:05:04
  Speaker 1: ways in which India certainly is opening up. It seems
• 2:05:07
  Speaker 1: like China is opening up. And 9-11 was, it's the
• 2:05:15
  Speaker 1: beginning of the end of this kind of international focus.
• 2:05:20
  Speaker 2: And this is part of what we thought, and it's
• 2:05:22
  Speaker 2: part of why we responded, that.
• 2:05:25
  Speaker 1: If you don't turn on the enemy and fight the enemy,
• 2:05:30
  Speaker 1: you're going to, in various ways, turn on yourself. And
• 2:05:32
  Speaker 1: you're going to have a defensive bunker mentality, which inevitably,
• 2:05:37
  Speaker 1: if it continues, is going to, we have to ferret
• 2:05:41
  Speaker 1: out the traitors in our midst. Like, they're the ones
• 2:05:45
  Speaker 1: responsible for why we're still having all these attacks.
• 2:05:49
  Speaker 2: Because the attacks continued.
• 2:05:50
  Speaker 1: I mean, we didn't go through the long list of
• 2:05:54
  Speaker 1: Islamic-inspired attacks.
• 2:05:59
  Speaker 2: That occurred across the West, including in the US.
• 2:06:02
  Speaker 1: And the part of the turning inward was the whole TSA.
• 2:06:08
  Speaker 1: People can't now remember what it was like to fly.
• 2:06:11
  Speaker 1: You were touching on this, Iran, at the start or
• 2:06:14
  Speaker 1: near the start of what it was like to fly
• 2:06:17
  Speaker 1: before 9-11 and then what it was like after. But
• 2:06:20
  Speaker 1: it was, now you've got this whole agency that's suspicious
• 2:06:24
  Speaker 1: of the.
• 2:06:24
  Speaker 2: American public And that's the turning inward, but there's an
• 2:06:28
  Speaker 2: element of your turning against one another. And, oh, the
• 2:06:32
  Speaker 2: real enemy must be in our midst.
• 2:06:34
  Speaker 1: And maybe if we put him through another scanner, we'll
• 2:06:36
  Speaker 1: find him. That's the start of it. And then you've got, oh,
• 2:06:41
  Speaker 1: we need a Department of Homeland Security. Not we need
• 2:06:45
  Speaker 1: to prosecute the war in the places that we need
• 2:06:47
  Speaker 1: in the Middle East.
• 2:06:48
  Speaker 2: We're going to turn inward. We're going to have this
• 2:06:51
  Speaker 2: whole new.
• 2:06:53
  Speaker 1: body that's going to police us and you get the
• 2:06:55
  Speaker 1: NSA and the Patriot Act and so and it more
• 2:06:59
  Speaker 1: and more was turning inward and I don't think you
• 2:07:02
  Speaker 1: can understand sort of the repudiation and including it's the
• 2:07:08
  Speaker 1: repudiation of people who used to profess we care about
• 2:07:11
  Speaker 1: trade and global you can't understand how easily they turned
• 2:07:16
  Speaker 1: oh yeah we're pro-tariffs and we hate immigration um.
• 2:07:21
  Speaker 2: Unless you understand it's.
• 2:07:23
  Speaker 1: This kind of mentality that the enemy's within, and let's
• 2:07:27
  Speaker 1: identify the enemy within, and let's sort of divest ourselves
• 2:07:32
  Speaker 1: of all these foreigners who are screwing us. That's how
• 2:07:34
  Speaker 1: now trade is. When you trade with someone, apparently now
• 2:07:37
  Speaker 1: you're getting screwed by them. But that whole portrait, and
• 2:07:41
  Speaker 1: it wasn't an accident, for instance, with the demonization of immigrants.
• 2:07:45
  Speaker 1: There was this thing, oh, that's how all the terrorists
• 2:07:48
  Speaker 1: are coming through the southern border, which is not true.
• 2:07:51
  Speaker 2: It's not the root of where all these terrorist attacks come,
• 2:07:55
  Speaker 2: but that's the consequence.
• 2:07:57
  Speaker 1: If you don't identify what is actually going on, then
• 2:08:00
  Speaker 1: you need some kind of pseudo explanation for what's happening.
• 2:08:04
  Speaker 1: And if you're going to sort of give up on
• 2:08:07
  Speaker 1: understanding the foreign world, it's going to be all focused
• 2:08:12
  Speaker 1: inward and you're going to have this kind of retreat.
• 2:08:14
  Speaker 1: And that's part of it. People are experiencing it.
• 2:08:16
  Speaker 2: There's a way in which America's retreating from the world.
• 2:08:19
  Speaker 2: And that's true.
• 2:08:21
  Speaker 3: And I don't think you can explain ICE without all
• 2:08:23
  Speaker 3: of that. Gail says, I agree the American morality is
• 2:08:29
  Speaker 3: turning upside down. Thank you, Gail. Enric, how far back
• 2:08:34
  Speaker 3: did the left align with Islamists and how effective has
• 2:08:39
  Speaker 3: the alignment been in furthering the Islamist purpose? I mean,
• 2:08:48
  Speaker 3: I did a show with Nikos a few weeks ago
• 2:08:53
  Speaker 3: on the left and Islamist alliance, so you can go
• 2:08:56
  Speaker 3: back and listen to that. But, you know, certainly there
• 2:09:01
  Speaker 3: were alliances between Islam and the left going way back
• 2:09:08
  Speaker 3: to Stalin's era because he viewed, you know, they had
• 2:09:13
  Speaker 3: a common enemy. The Western colonialists were viewed as common enemies.
• 2:09:19
  Speaker 3: And then, of course, there's 1979 with the left, particularly
• 2:09:25
  Speaker 3: in France and Europe, supporting the Shah, supporting, sorry, Khomeini
• 2:09:31
  Speaker 3: and the revolution and getting really excited about the potential
• 2:09:35
  Speaker 3: of that revolution. So it goes back a long time,
• 2:09:38
  Speaker 3: but it's certainly been around since the Iranian Revolution. Let's see.
• 2:09:48
  Speaker 3: Michael says, was America's evasion before 9-11 not nearly as
• 2:09:54
  Speaker 3: severe a case of evasion as Israel's intelligence failure leading
• 2:09:59
  Speaker 3: up to October 7th?
• 2:10:02
  Speaker 1: I mean.
• 2:10:04
  Speaker 5: I don't know how to compare those.
• 2:10:05
  Speaker 4: I mean, there were so many warning signs in both
• 2:10:08
  Speaker 4: cases and yeah, I don't know what the scale would be.
• 2:10:13
  Speaker 5: They both are culpable and.
• 2:10:15
  Speaker 4: They both had ample reason to know something was coming.
• 2:10:19
  Speaker 3: And both driven by, I think very similar motivations of, of, uh,
• 2:10:27
  Speaker 3: you know, wanting to believe something about your enemy that
• 2:10:30
  Speaker 3: is not, is not real and not true. Um, But yes,
• 2:10:35
  Speaker 3: both are massive evasions. All right, Andrew says, a big
• 2:10:42
  Speaker 3: political awakening for me, 72 hours post 9-11, sitting in college,
• 2:10:47
  Speaker 3: polyscience class, the professor and many students blaming the United States.
• 2:10:53
  Speaker 3: I was shocked.
• 2:10:56
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 2:10:56
  Speaker 1: Yeah. There's a lot of people like that, that that
• 2:11:01
  Speaker 1: was a political awakening of that there is something really
• 2:11:07
  Speaker 1: wrong here.
• 2:11:08
  Speaker 2: But again, if you don't get good answers, so like
• 2:11:14
  Speaker 2: something's really.
• 2:11:14
  Speaker 1: Off with this, but to understand the rise of first
• 2:11:19
  Speaker 1: the Tea Party and then MAGA, you have to understand
• 2:11:22
  Speaker 1: it as yeah, like it's legitimate to be, to find this,
• 2:11:27
  Speaker 1: if you're in a class like this, or been in
• 2:11:29
  Speaker 1: that kind of environment.
• 2:11:30
  Speaker 2: Because it wasn't only in the classroom, to find that disgusting.
• 2:11:34
  Speaker 1: But unless you have like a real positive vision for that,
• 2:11:38
  Speaker 1: what you end up turning to is another string of
• 2:11:43
  Speaker 1: falsehoods of a different sort, promising, well, we're not them,
• 2:11:47
  Speaker 1: and those people are the enemies. So the kind of
• 2:11:50
  Speaker 1: tribalism that we descended into that like turning inward is
• 2:11:55
  Speaker 1: part of it is if you're about to ferret out
• 2:11:59
  Speaker 1: who really is the enemy and who's responsible, it's you're
• 2:12:02
  Speaker 1: going to be more and more loggerheads and it will
• 2:12:05
  Speaker 1: become more and more tribal if you don't have genuinely
• 2:12:09
  Speaker 1: thought out rational answers.
• 2:12:11
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 2:12:13
  Speaker 4: I was going to say you're on, there might be
• 2:12:15
  Speaker 4: a lot of questions still.
• 2:12:16
  Speaker 3: No, there's just one. There's just one. Okay.
• 2:12:19
  Speaker 5: We can encourage people to come to the live stream
• 2:12:22
  Speaker 5: on 9-11 itself.
• 2:12:23
  Speaker 3: So 9-11, there'll be a live stream on the Ayn
• 2:12:25
  Speaker 3: Rand Institute YouTube channel. So check that out, guys. This
• 2:12:29
  Speaker 3: one's for Ankar. It's a personal question. So Ankar, how
• 2:12:34
  Speaker 3: old were you when you first discovered objectivism? Were you
• 2:12:37
  Speaker 3: a Marxist before that? Any luck persuading family members of objectivism?
• 2:12:44
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I was 17. I was not a Marxist.
• 2:12:49
  Speaker 1: If anything, I sort of lean a little capitalist, but
• 2:12:53
  Speaker 1: I wasn't political in that sense.
• 2:12:56
  Speaker 2: Yeah, family members, some of them at least, have become
• 2:13:01
  Speaker 2: interested in objectivism.
• 2:13:03
  Speaker 3: Were you the first in your family?
• 2:13:06
  Speaker 2: No, I was second.
• 2:13:07
  Speaker 3: Okay.
• 2:13:08
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 2:13:08
  Speaker 3: All right. Thank you, guys. Thanks to all the Super
• 2:13:13
  Speaker 3: Chat questioners. Really appreciate the support. Thank you, Ilan. Thank you, Ankur.
• 2:13:18
  Speaker 3: We really appreciate this. And yeah, guys, check out the
• 2:13:22
  Speaker 3: 9-11 live stream on 9-11, obviously. And let's hope that
• 2:13:30
  Speaker 3: in 25 years we can look back and have a
• 2:13:33
  Speaker 3: more positive reckoning about what has happened in the 25
• 2:13:38
  Speaker 3: years that are going to pass in the future.
• 2:13:42
  Speaker 2: All right.
• 2:13:42
  Speaker 4: Thanks, Yaron.
• 2:13:43
  Speaker 3: Have a good night, everybody.
• 2:13:45
  Speaker 2: Bye.
• 2:13:55
  Speaker 3: Are we off?
• 2:13:56
  Speaker 2: I think so. Nice. Yeah, I think the YouTube is
• 2:14:10
  Speaker 2: paused now.
• 2:14:11
  Speaker 3: Okay. Okay, good. Okay.
• 2:14:14
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that's good.
• 2:14:14
  Speaker 3: Thanks, Uncle.
• 2:14:16
  Speaker 2: Bye.
• 2:14:30
  Speaker 3: Excellent shoe.
• 2:14:31
  Speaker 5: Right.