Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s recent conversation with Dave Rubin is a wake-up call for every American who still believes in liberty and common sense. She lays out a simple, brutal observation: our best intentions—open borders, moral relativism, and a deluded faith in bureaucratic neutrality—are tearing the social fabric that once held free societies together.
Her story matters because it’s not abstract theory; it’s lived experience. Born in Somalia, escaping an arranged marriage, surviving female genital mutilation, and later serving in European politics, Hirsi Ali has spent decades fighting for women’s rights and confronting political Islam with real-world clarity. Americans should listen when someone with that background warns us about the perils of naiveté.
Most striking has been her intellectual journey: from Islam to atheism and now to Christianity. In a widely discussed essay she explained that secular liberalism lacks the moral foundations to unite a people and defend civilization against hostile ideologies, and she argues that the Judeo-Christian tradition supplies what raw rules and technocratic governance cannot. This is not sentimental nostalgia—it’s a sober assessment of what holds free societies together.
Hirsi Ali doesn’t mince words about the internal threat either. She warns that woke ideology, identity politics, and cultural relativism have hollowed out the West’s moral confidence and left a vacuum that illiberal forces—authoritarian states and Islamist movements alike—are all too ready to exploit. Conservatives who have been shouting about cultural decay get no quarrel here; the evidence is piling up and the consequences are visible on our streets and in our institutions.
She also used the Minnesota example to show what happens when clan loyalties and alternative moral systems move into a republic that no longer defends national identity. Hirsi Ali described how loyalty to clan or to an Islamist narrative can operate as a parallel authority, undermining the rule of law and incentivizing political entrepreneurs who trade dependency for votes. This is not fearmongering; it’s a diagnosis any honest policymaker must confront.
The policy implications are straightforward: if we want freedom to endure, we must restore the moral architecture that made freedom possible. That means stronger borders, assimilation-minded immigration policy, an unapologetic defense of our historical traditions, and a political class willing to speak in moral terms rather than technocratic euphemisms. Pragmatic solutions without moral clarity are a bandage on a growing wound.
None of this will be popular with the managerial class that benefited from multicultural experiments and now pretends to be surprised by the results. The red-green alliances between progressive activists and Islamist-oriented groups are a logical consequence of abandoning Enlightenment and Christian moral teaching; when you refuse to stand for anything, everything becomes negotiable. The choice is simple: defend the cultural inheritance that produced modern liberty, or watch institutions crumble as others fill the void.
Patriots should take Hirsi Ali’s warning as a charge, not a lecture. We can keep being generous and open without being stupid—by insisting newcomers embrace the rule of law, speak our language, and accept the moral basics that make a free society possible. If ordinary Americans reclaim common-sense patriotism and force leaders to choose real principles over fashionable doctrines, there is still a fighting chance to preserve what’s left of our classical liberal inheritance.
