So to Speak Podcast Transcript: Ayaan Hirsi Ali will not submit

Note: This is an unedited rush transcript. Please check any quotations against the audio recording.

Nico Perrino: Welcome back to “So to Speak: The Free Speech Podcast” where every other week we take a look at the world of free expression through personal stories and candid conversations. I am your host, Nico Perrino. Today we are speaking with Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

Ayaan is a human rights activist, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, the founder of the AHA Foundation, and the host of the Ayaan Hirsi Ali Podcast which features guests who have a passion for free inquiry and speech, something I think our shows definitely have in common. Ayaan is also the best-selling author of a number of books including “Infidel,” “Nomad,” “Heretic,” and, “Prey.” I’ve been listening to Infidel recently on Audible, and I love that you do the recording and reading there, Ayaan.

I’ve been looking forward to having this conversation. Obviously, Ayaan, you and I have a shared interest in free inquiry and speech, but you’re also someone who has paid the price for defending those values. You left the Islamic faith, and since then have been one of Islam’s most prominent critics, costing you dearly.

As people and listeners who are familiar with this show know, or with your story I should say, one of your colleagues was murdered, you’ve lived with death threats for decades, and you’ve lost relationships with families and friends. And it’s comparably easy for someone like me to defend free speech and open inquiry when I don’t have to face those stark realities every day. So, you have the courage of your convictions, and that’s why I’m so pleased to speak with you today. Ayaan, welcome on to “So to Speak.”

Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Nico, thank you very much for having me, and thank you for that very warm and lengthy introduction. I just wanted to add, it’s November now, it is literally Wednesday, the day after the election in America, but in October I launched Courage Media, which is to encourage people in various institutions to speak up and to allow themselves the courage not to conform.

Nico Perrino: And what sort of institutions will you be working in?

Ayaan Hirsi Ali: So, my focus is on universities, but not just universities. It’s schools, it’s media, it’s corporations, it’s any kind of place where there is groupthink and where we know that there are individuals within. So, of the many years I’ve been here there is a lot of complaining, this is what goes on where I work, and I would like to do something about it or say something about it. And people are generally settling for, “Let someone else do it,” you know.

Nico Perrino: Yes.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Yeah. So, this is a platform for if you want to be a heretic, if you don’t want to conform, you have Courage Media.

Nico Perrino: Well, let’s talk a little bit about your story and why this concern about conformity is particularly important to you. You grew up a Muslim in a culture that forced you to conform, sometimes on pain of punishment and death and torture, right?

Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Yes. You conform and you become a slave. Your mind and your mentality is enslaved. You’re oppressed, you’re humiliated. You feel it and you know it. And you keep up a lie. And you really, truly see yourself as a victim and you’re victimized. So, there is very little − I don’t know how to explain it.

It begins with standing up to family members and saying, “You know what? I don’t believe in what you’re telling me to do. I believe in something else,” or, “I really think I see things differently.” Well, in the household that I was growing up in, the punishment would be physical and it would be swift, and that just shuts down everything. So, there is this sense of you have all these grownups that are physically bigger than me, and they are going to hurt me very badly. I watched them hurt my sister and my brother and others who would rebel. So, over time, you not only conform, but you become so apathetic, you become almost robotic.

So, when I first came to the Netherlands and people were saying, “Stand up for yourself. You as an individual, tell us what you think,” I thought that was very, very strange, and I thought, “How on earth are they able to have any kind of social cohesion if everybody kind of individually can say what they think and believe without any fear?” And yet, paradoxically, it is a society that allows free thought and freedom of conscience that is more stable, more real, more truthful, and a lot happier.

Nico Perrino: So, growing up in a culture of conformity like the one that you did in Somalia and then you moved kind of all over, you were in Saudi Arabia and Kenya, do people fully appreciate the level of conformity that was in those cultures, or was it like a fish in water? If you tell a fish about water, they might not know what you’re talking about because it’s just the world they’ve grown up in. They don’t know anything different. Did you know that there was something different out there growing up, and did you yearn for it?

Ayaan Hirsi Ali: It’s largely a fish in water, but because we are human beings, we tend to rebel and we tend to disagree. And so, I think one way of not conforming was by sneaking things, by telling lies, by doing what you wanted to do, but as long as you are not caught, that was great. But then that puts you in a state of terror because what if you were caught? So, there were all these secrets and lies that were going on. So, that was one way of not conforming.

If you openly rebelled, again like I said, that was swiftly put down, but there’s also a hierarchy of power. And another way I think of not conforming was to become an enforcer yourself. So, you would loudly pretend that you are more righteous than anyone else, and then you become a source of fear. People are afraid of you. And this is mostly used amongst men and real physical aggression. If you are bigger and stronger than your brothers and your cousins and the rest of the clan, you can then impose your will on them. So, that’s another way of rebelling is through tyranny.

So, everything I’m telling you about that society is just not conducive to honesty, to stability, to trust. And so, people are afraid of one another, they don’t trust one another, and therefore they’re not productive. They don’t collaborate effectively to realize what should be their common goal.

Nico Perrino: And was this unique just to the situation and culture in countries that you were raised on, or is there a tradition, any tradition, in Islam that privileges or respects free speech and open inquiry?

Ayaan Hirsi Ali: So, I’m going to turn the question around and say the situation I grew up in is much more universal than the one you grew up in. And so, it is the West that’s different. It’s not China, it’s not India before the British went there, it’s not the Arab Islamic world, it’s not even the Western world before the evolution of Christianity and where things are. So, you are the odd ones out. That’s what you don’t realize.

Nico Perrino: Well, was it even Christianity pre-enlightenment in a certain respect? You have the inquisitions, right?

Ayaan Hirsi Ali: I am now discovering that it is crucial in Christianity, and that the enlightenment is a child of Christianity, and in particular the teachings of Jesus Christ and all the sorts of fights within these different churches that’s took place over centuries as to what exactly does it mean to believe and to be a true believer, and then constantly edging towards fewer conscience. If you want fewer and truthful and honest conscience, then you have to remove the fact of fear. And so, if you’re not afraid of being killed or harassed or losing something, and you can truly express your conscience, then you are honest. And I think people proceeded in the West to protect that conscience and then to building institutions that protect that conscience.

So, growing up, when I started to speak my mind and to think, “I have a mind of my own. I’m going to demand this,” or, “I’m going to express myself this way or that way,” I was instantly at risk of behaving like White people. So, we didn’t really use the word “Westerner,” we used the word “infidel” when we were referring to things that were un-Islamic. And alien behavior that didn’t immediately inspire religious opposition, then we would say it’s White people.

You’re behaving like a White woman when you say you don’t want to be treated this way or that way. So, feminism was pretending to be a wise woman, which is to say, “We are not White. They’re decadent, they’re this, they’re that,” and all sorts of bad names would be said about them. But it was demands to think freely, to be an individual, to have freedom of conscience were alien and infidel.

Nico Perrino: And were they alien and infidel because of the doctrine of Islam, or rather how some interpreted it?

Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Well, first of all, you would be selfish. So, it is against the family and the clan. What is not in the interest of the collective, what does not advance the collective agenda, is seen as not just antisocial behavior, but it’s also seen as damaging and treacherous. And again, that’s why the punishment is so severe. So, the individual is there to serve the collective interest, and no individual interest or comfort or pursuit or creativity can be tolerated if it’s seen as a threat to the collective.

And if you’re a girl and you don’t behave according to the role described by the clan and by the tribe and by God as a Muslim, then you run the risk of other girls also making demands, and the whole thing then falls apart. So, everybody lives within their lane, their expectations of boys, their expectations of girls, their expectations of different age groups, and then all of these expectations are enforced using religion, using Islam in my family.

If I wanted to compete for attention with my brother, if I said, “Why is he allowed to have friends and go out of the house and be his own chaperon, but why am I chaperoned?” then my mother and grandmother would say, “That is God’s will, and you don’t debate God. You obey God.”

Nico Perrino: So, do you even need a state apparatus to enforce this code of conduct? One of the more prominent stories that went around the past week or so was the story of this Iranian woman who refused to wear a hijab in public, which from my understanding is mandatory in Iran. So, she stripped to her underwear at Tehran’s Islamic Azad University, and a group of men surrounded her, threw her in a car and drove away.

Now, of course the university’s public relations director said this woman was suffering from a mental health crisis. I think that’s a little bit hard to believe looking at some of the footage. But you have these state morality police in places like Iran, and their justification is Islam. And there’s this connection between the state and the religion that you don’t often see in Western countries.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali: That’s exactly right. Islam is the state. So, Islam, as you see, is a comprehensive rule book, and it dictates the theory of government and government institutions, and laws and the manner in which to enforce it, and the administrative state part of it, and it’s completely totalitarian. So, it’s family law, it’s the way neighbors interact with one another, and it’s also vertical, top-down. So, Iran, Islam is regime of Iran, is using the modeling means of the nation with a state with military means and with a bureaucracy and with police to enforce Islamic law on a population at this point that doesn’t want that, and that’s a majority of the Iranian public.

And this young woman, like many, many other brave women in Iran supported by their men, periodically come out in different forms and stand up for their rights, and they’re constantly met with this form of obscene violence metered out by the states. The arrests, and now she’s taken away, and heaven knows what they’re going to do to her. But that sends the message to other woman in Iran, “Don’t you dare.”

Nico Perrino: In recent years we’ve seen a lot of immigration to Western countries from Islamic countries, and you’ve argued that it’s not the responsibilities of those in the West to accommodate Muslim’s beliefs and sensitives, rather it’s the Muslims that must learn to live with our commitment to free speech. One of the things that I’ve heard argued is that Islam weaponized freedom of speech, association, religion, to conquer Western countries. So, the very freedoms that we take for granted or that we celebrate or that make us Western are also the freedoms that could be weaponized that want to destroy those freedoms.

What do you make of that?

Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Muslims as individuals are different. But Islam is one religion, and it’s an expansive religion. If you’re a true Muslim, you are required to not just practice Islam yourself but to enforce the practice of Islam within your family, your society and so on, and then to expand it, to bring it to others. So, organizations and movements like the Muslim Brotherhood seek to practice Islam using that interpretation of Islam, which is the political and military interpretation of Islam. When they come to the West and they start establishing organizations and chapters, Islamic centers, universities, mosques, what they seek to do is to Islamize the society that they have come to because they see that as a religious obligation.

Now, the West is not familiar with Islam in that way. I mean, the West obviously had wars with Islam and they studied Islam, but to have large minorities of Muslims come and settle in the West, that’s a very recent phenomenon. And so, I think there is this literal clash of civilizations where Westerners are saying, “You have freedom of religion here and freedom of association. Why don’t you enjoy it and become just like us?” and they are saying, “Well, hang on a minute. You have become secular, and sometimes you’ve become antireligious, and we have the good news for you. Why don’t you become Islam? We want to Islamize you.” Are you talking past one another at this stage?

And I think if you have Western nation states as today experiencing this, sometimes the word “post nation state” is used. I don’t want to use it after this election because I think there’s plenty of healthy national identity still alive. But globalization is a fact, and there are non-Islamic, very Western forces that think that they benefit from globalization. And then you have these pseudo-communists coming back who think that Westernization states should be punished for things they did in the past for all sorts of inequalities. And then beside that you have the Islamists who want to destroy the Western nation states and replace it with sharia law. And I think that cocktail produces a threat to the core of Western nation states.

Nico Perrino: Well, then the question becomes what do you do about it, right? You could approach it in two or more ways. You could allow those who want to destroy the Western nation state from within to speak freely, or you can sensor them. You could allow them into the country and then sensor them, or you could pursue a drastically more restrictive immigration program. Do you have thoughts on that?

Ayaan Hirsi Ali: I think you start by the question, “What sort of society do we want to live in?” And then you answer that question with, “What sorts of incentives do we want to encourage, and what sorts of forces do we want to bring to the surface?” We want political freedom, we want economic prosperity, we want [a] constitution. And again, we started with this freedom of conscience which you protect the First Amendment. In America, we also have the Second Amendment, and we have a whole slew of rules and regulations, or rules actually − or principles actually, not rules. It’s more like principles the country is founded on, and you want to protect those.

So, if that’s what we want, then I think it’s also just as important to identify what the threats are. And if we agree what the threat is, then we should use the means that are open to open societies to suppress these threats. Importing large numbers of people who threatened social cohesion of the host society, who openly say that they want to bring in sharia law, I think that’s a mistake, and I think we shouldn’t do that. But at this point, it’s probably a minority view. There are very few people like me who whole this view. Or maybe not. Again, yesterday’s election in America was very much about immigration. The economy was the most important item, and then immigration was the second most important item. In Europe, it’s the number one item over many elections. So, maybe it’s not a minority view anymore.

Nico Perrino: Well, theoretically, when you become a United States citizen, you take an oath to the United States Constitution, and to the extent sharia and the desire to implement sharia through the state runs contrary to that constitution, and these folks that become citizens. Are they just lying when they take the oath, or would the Islamic tradition say that you can’t lie about something like that? I guess what I’m asking is, is the oath to the Constitution not enough of a bulwark to prevent that sort of thing from happening?

Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Because we’ve degraded the process towards citizenship to mean just the material, you get a driver’s license, and you get a passport to travel with, and you get the right to vote, you get the right to do this, you get the right to do that, but we hardly ever tell anyone what the obligations are.

I think not just Muslims but most people would be bewildered if you suddenly say, “You can’t do this or can’t do that,” when all of these years you’re allowed to build mosques and madrasas and to proselytize and to shout over the rooftops that they want to establish here. You’ve allowed in the United States for Qatar and other countries to bring in a lot of money and to engage in this Islamization process, and then from one day to the next you turn around and you say, “Hey, you’ve taken an oath. What you’re doing is suddenly un-citizen or contrary to the oath of citizenship.”

So, I think the point is not to blame them so much as to reflect on the way we’ve been as a nation. We’ve been really negligent in the last few decades about the existence of subversive efforts from outside and from within and how to deal with that. And I think now because this problem is big enough to warrant attention, I think the way we answer these questions is really important.

What sort of society do we want to live in? What sort of society do we want to leave for our children? And can we have a subversive effort from a large, growing demographic representing, or saying to represent, claiming to represent, 1/5th of humanity establish itself here and promise to settle us and to transform as a society? Do we even ask ourselves these questions and what that means? And I think you won’t understand what I’m talking about until you go to Europe and travel in some of these countries and see what actual transformation looks like.

Nico Perrino: Speaking of transformation, our college campuses for the past decade and a half or so have been transformed, and trust in higher education in the United States has plummeted. I would argue that’s in no small part due to the censorship that has become pervasive on those college campuses. And that wave of censorship we at FIRE

have tagged toward kind of the end of 2013, also 2014 when you started seeing demands for trigger warnings, microaggression policing, campus disinvitations.

And you, Ayaan, were the subject of one of those disinvitations in 2014 when Brandeis University rescinded its offer of an honorary degree to you. Protests erupted over your criticism of Islam, there was a change.org petition that characterized your views as extreme and that said the decision to award you this degree was a blatant and callous regard by the administration of not only the Muslim students but of any student who has experienced pure hate speech. I’m not sure what pure hate speech is versus just regular hate speech.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Yeah.

Nico Perrino: But I’d be curious from your perspective, Ayaan, as being someone who probably confronted this and recognized this earlier than most, what you make of the decade since then. Have things gotten better, have they gotten worse, or are they just about the same?

Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Well, they have gotten worse. They’ve gotten a lot worse. In hindsight, I think we were all too apathetic. We should have reacted to it in 2014, maybe even earlier. There are some people who are older than me who say this has been going on since the 1960s. This postmodernist, Marxist, Maoist ideological virus that’s in American universities, it’s an anti-American force. It hates everything about America. It accused America of being racist and slave holders and misogynists, and it’s homegrown.

And what happened to me in 2014 was that the Muslim Student Association in Brandeis that organized this cancellation attempt that succeeded, they worked together with the leftist organizations. It was just around that time, you’re right, for demands for trigger warnings, and before that, there were demands to decolonize the curriculum and to decolonize the classics especially. Some people have taken this story as far back as when Jesse Jackson was shouting his slogans that Western civilization had to go, “Yo-ho-ho, Western civilization must go,” or something similar.

These things were not taken seriously, and now you have this unholy alliance between these woke people and then you have the Islamists, and together they are saying − it started with individuals like me. If you look at the complaints they had against me, it was that my very presence on the grounds of Brandeis’ campus would distress young students, there is so much that the university shouldn’t do that. If you read a demand like that and you think − and in 2014 I genuinely thought it is so silly and so unserious that no one is going to indulge this, and then it was indulged.

Initially, all the on-goers directed at the president of the university, but that particular incident was defined as, “Here’s a small minority. They’re Muslim. They’re going through a lot.” It was the years of the 9/11. There were terrorist activities and they were complaining about islamophobia. So, there was this tendency of, “Let’s tolerate that.”

I think what we missed was that this was riding on a wave of this woke intolerance, and now the two of them combined. The unholy red/green alliance has generated I think the ruining of the hearts and minds of at least one generation.

You saw what happened in the spring of this year in Colombia and now Penn university, at Harvard, where masses and masses of students came out in protest against Israel’s war on Hamas, and they sided with Hamas. They were waving Palestinian flags, they were shouting from the river to the sea.” A lot of these slogans they were shouting were genocidal, they were calling for the elimination of Israel, but also for the elimination of all Jewish people, and that’s where we are now. How do we capture those situations? What do we do about these students who have been brainwashed to hate their own country and to hate themselves? And what do we do about the growing entrenched force of Islamists that are advancing steadily and not so slowly anymore?

I remember again in the spring in Michigan that an Islamist felt confident enough to, I don’t know if he was on a balcony or out of a window, but to shout, “Death to America. Death to America.” And he was overlooking a mass of people waving these flags and shouting these slogans. So, that’s where we are now.

And the question we have to ask ourselves is, “How is it that our education system from K-12, and especially our universities, have become so rotten? And where are the grownups, and who is overseeing this? Who should we hold responsible? And can we turn this back?”

Nico Perrino: I mentioned at the top that it’s comparably easy for someone like me to defend free speech when I haven’t had to face the death threats, or the loss of relationships with friends or family, or colleagues who were murdered. I would be remiss if I didn’t ask you about those challenges. Theo van Gogh, who was your colleague who worked with you on the film “Submission,” was shot eight times, first from a distance and then at short range. And the killer left a note that said, “Ayaan is next.” That is you.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Yeah.

Nico Perrino: And then you see what happened with Salman Rushdie with the fatwa in 1989. He thought he was safe. He would get into New York City taxi cabs with Muslim drivers and went about his life, and then he shows up at an arts festival to speak and someone comes out of the audience and stabs him. Flemming Rose with the Muhammed cartoons, the Jyllands-Posten controversy from 2005, Charlie Hebdo where you have a whole newsroom murdered.

This is the cost that some people pay for criticizing Islam. What does that mean to you personally? How can you find and maintain your voice in such an environment?

Ayaan Hirsi Ali: So, it hasn’t been easy. It was absolutely awful actually after Salman Rushdie got attacked. It really did get under my skin, and I was terrified. And I can say looking back, just as you were describing, when Theo van Gogh was being shot, as the event itself was unfolding, as he fired the first shot and he was on his bicycle and the killer followed him, Theo was saying, “Can’t we talk about this?”

There was a lot of commentary right after Theo was killed in Holland, in the Netherlands, where that’s exactly how the Dutch approach life and conflict. “Can’t we talk about it? Why can’t we talk about it? Do we really have to shoot one another?” And I think again it has become increasingly the same in America where sometimes we’re faced with these implacable, relentless threats, people who want to take your life or take your country, and we sit back and say, “Can’t we talk about it?”

And so, I think the way to cope with it, and having done this for a number of years, is number one to avoid what I did, which was I lived in denial so it doesn’t affect me, which in fact it’s affected me very, very much. So, you have to try and remain mentally sane.

For me, what has worked now is faith. I’ve announced not so long ago that I’ve become a Christian, and I find a great deal of comfort and safety in that. So, I’m not constantly thinking about the threats, and I don’t feel the burden of guilt that I felt towards Theo’s death. I feel much better about those sorts of things. But it’s a huge toll on your mental health, if I can put it that way.

What I also find empowering is not to give in or to give up, and to just continue to speak out and speak up as long as the threat is there. There’s something even calming about that, that you know they can’t frighten you into silence. And that I know as long as I’m alive and I’m speaking about it, I hope I’m giving others reason and courage to do exactly the same.

Nico Perrino: By way of closing, what allowed you to find your voice in those first years that you started speaking out? You mentioned you grew up in a culture of conformity where speaking out wasn’t allowed, and that there was violence, or even the threat of violence, when you did so. And you didn’t start becoming an outspoken critic until, if I’m understanding the chronology right, after Salman Rushdie’s fatwa, right?

Ayaan Hirsi Ali: I didn’t become an outspoken critic until 2001, 9/11/2001. That’s the event that propelled me into speaking out.

Nico Perrino: So, over a decade later.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Yeah.

Nico Perrino: So, you grow up in this culture of conformity, especially so for women. How does one find their voice growing up in that sort of environment? What was the moment where you decided, “I need to speak up?”

Ayaan Hirsi Ali: So, the real speaking up and speaking out against these things for me happened only after 9/11/2001. I had graduated from University in the Netherlands, I had actually lived in the Netherlands for a little over 10 years, and I had learned the vocabulary of speaking out and I had developed some confidence that what I had to say as an individual mattered. So, that was the speaking out of it.

But before the speaking out was the rebellion. It was me running away. It was my father deciding, “This is the man you’re going to marry.” And after that decision, sending me off to join him in Canada and me constantly thinking about also, “I’m going to live like my mother. I’m going to live the life of my mother.” And not just my mother, but all these other women whose suffering I saw up close and personal. “Could there be a different way?” That question popping into my head and me thinking, “Yes, I could run away.” And I ran away.

You don’t speak up first. First you leave and you find a place of safety. And it’s only after that experience − and in the years that I was in the Netherlands, before I even spoke up, it occurred to me to speak up about anything. By the way, I thought my life in Holland was so idealist that there was nothing to speak up about.

But I was a translator/ interpreter. So, I was translating for women who were being commanded by their men who still lived in these households where they had to conform, and they were completely helpless. They were subjected to violence and have been told, “Cover yourself up. You can’t do this,” being forced into marriage, being circumcised as they call it but it’s really genital mutilation.

And it is all of that that made me think this is injustice that’s happening in the countries where these families fled to from the repression and from the poverty and from the arbitrariness of violence in those places. And now here they are, they’re in Holland, they have all of this stuff, and they continue to oppress girls. And there’s part of me that felt an obligation that I should say something to the Dutch and tell them, “This is how girls and women are treated.”

And at that time, Dutch society was very keen to encourage the assimilation of their Muslim minorities, and they found me highly assimilating. So, they said, “Can you help us?” And the first thing I said was, “Emancipate these girls and these women. If they’re emancipated and they’re free to choose who they want to marry, and they’re free to finish their education, and free to become individuals, they’ll be assimilated and they’ll be just like everyone else.” And I didn’t realize that even that was controversial at that time. It just seemed like common sense.

Nico Perrino: Are you hopeful for the values of free and open inquiry and free speech and the broader Western values that you advocated for?

Ayaan Hirsi Ali: I am, and really it’s because of many reasons, but the most important is this election. We’ve just had an election. Today is the 6th of November 2024, and America has spoken. And America has made me feel optimistic because this is a choice for the First Amendment first and foremost.

I think you should look for this little video that was running around last night on Twitter where you know the news media go and say, “This is the end of democracy. This is the end of democracy.” So, someone tapes through AI the word “bureaucracy” to cover democracy. It’s very funny. You should look for it and run it.

Nico Perrino: People are very creative. People are very creative.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Yeah, really creative. So, I think what this election means is that the general public made up of older people and younger people, people in rural areas and people in urban areas, Blacks, Hispanics, Whites, men, women is a huge majority that’s formed a coalition to say, “We want to go back to common sense. We want to preserve the First Amendment. We want economic prosperity. We want these wars to end.” So, in that sense, I’m highly, highly optimistic.

We need to reclaim our institutions of meaning making, of education, of information, and of culture. I hope that now the real fight begins to reclaim those institutions.

Nico Perrino: Well, Ayaan, I appreciate everything that you’ve done to preserve the First Amendment and the broader principles of free speech and open inquiry, and thank you for coming on So to Speak.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Thank you, Nico. Thank you very much for having me and for doing this.

Nico Perrino: That was Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and her new project is Courage Media, which you can learn more about by going to Courage.Media. I am Nico Perrino, and this podcast is recorded and edited by a rotating roster of my FIRE colleagues including Aaron Reese and Chris Maltby. The podcast is co-produced by my colleague, Sam Li. To learn more about So to Speak, you can subscribe to our YouTube channel or Substack page, both of which feature video versions of this conversation. You can also follow us on X by searching for the handle “Free Speech Talk,” and you can find us on Facebook. Feedback, if you have it, can be sent to sotospeak@thefire.org. Again, that is sotospeak@thefire.org. And if you enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify reviews. On those two platforms in particular help us attract new listeners to the show. And until next time, thanks again for listening.