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Ayaan Hirsi Ali,
I love her.
There was nothing more unacceptable at Columbia than to be a “SIX HIRB”: a sexist, intolerant, xenophobic, homophobic, Islamophobic, racist bigot.
“Right wing” is one of those terms of abuse I understood only after a number of my fellow Americans used it in a concerted and sometimes successful attempt to harass and censor me. In this context at least, I’ve learned that it does not refer to a set of social and economic preferences on the spectrum of American political possibilities. It means “disloyal”—disloyal to the tastes, opinions, values, and preferences of the financial, political, and cultural elite. The disloyalty of the lower and working classes to the ruling class.
“There were five American tanks and the North Korean Army destroyed four of them. How many are left?”
They are doing this with math in some American schools.
Nothing brings us into closer touch with the reality of our own biology than when we’re stripped of everything that makes us human, and are left with a single attribute: the instinct to survive.
But when I arrived in Seoul by plane from Mongolia on April 20,
I've done that.
In many places in the third world, in fact, obesity is a status symbol; it indicates wealth and abundance.
But in the United States, everybody wanted to look skinny—like starving North Koreans, I thought.
That's true in South Korea as well.
Without words to describe an emotion or phenomenon, I discovered, it is easy enough to live your life not even knowing they exist. Totalitarian regimes understand this fact quite well.
In America, I noticed that sidewalks were cut to accommodate people in wheelchairs, ramps and elevators accompanied stairs in every building, and special accommodations were built into everything from restrooms to public transportation. I later learned that this was the legacy of the Americans with Disabilities Act, passed by Congress in 1990.
South Korea wasn't very accessible to handicappee people either when I was there.
This one, narrow area of life—accommodations for people with disabilities—came to represent everything that I was learning to love about America: democracy, self-determination, civic participation, entrepreneurship, solidarity, and compassion.
It was everything that my teachers and peers at Columbia would spend the next four years trying to convince me were lies.
It is the genius of America that the literary talent and brilliance of a West African slave was ever discovered in the first place; it is the tragedy of America that she was destroyed by the conditions to which it subjected her.
that women were better at multitasking, better at working in teams, and more interested in people.
Worse than a bad grade was to be labeled by one’s classmates as a “SIX HIRB”: a sexist, intolerant, xenophobic, homophobic, Islamophobic, racist bigot.
Students are expected to receive ideas, not to wrestle or come up with them, and to internalize what they learn there for the remainder of their adult lives.
The threat of emotional harm was referred to by multiple instructors in order to implicitly explain—in so many words—why classrooms at Columbia do not allow the Socratic method.
Whatever disagrees, or is silent, is an enemy. Whatever agrees is a friend. No student shall speak offenses. No student shall touch another student. No student shall make another student feel unsafe. No student shall speak well of America. Only white men are free.
In reality, of course, Columbia’s “safe space” was elite code language for restrictions on ideological heterogeneity.
That’s why the subversion of critical thinking is so dangerous. It is the mechanism by which humans lose their faculties as individuals and succumb to groupthink, which is a precondition for every totalitarian society on Earth, and which ultimately felled my father.
If given the opportunity, would you put your marble in with the others, shake the jar, take another marble at random, and live that life instead? If the answer is no, then you know you have a blessed life.
“Since I was a child, he taught me that I had to be like a roly-poly toy. He said, ‘Yeonmi-ya, no matter how much life pushes you down, you have to be resilient like the roly-poly doll, and always roll back up and fight again.’ ”
My dad too.
What I love most about the United States of America, both in theory and in practice, is its commitment to each individual’s unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
But America is dedicated to the right of each inhabitant to try his or her best to be happy. This of course does not guarantee that anyone in particular will actually be happy.
I know for a fact that he’ll have to fight for respect. And so I knew from day one that my son would have to be a fighter. And there’s only one way to become one.
Maybe I have to fight for respect too.
I strongly believe that the great majority of the suffering we experience is actually caused by ourselves and the decisions we make (or don’t make).
THE CANADIAN psychologist and author Jordan Peterson is fond of pointing out that “suffering is an integral part of existence.”
It’s important to distinguish leftism from liberalism.
Liberalism has its foundation in liberty and individual rights: freedom of speech, of the press, of religion, and of the market. Leftism has its foundation in the centralization of these rights not in the individual but in groups organized and directed by the state.
(I’d like to invite leftists to experience their world citizenship from the comfort of North Korea—enjoy!)
Lol!
THE FOUNDING despot of North Korea, Kim Il Sung, rose to power on the premise not only of being a great leader, but of being a god. He did so in part by promising to solve all forms of inequality and injustice, which he explained were simple and unnecessary problems that required simple, obvious solutions.
THE TREES!
I’ve never felt like a victim, and I’ve certainly never wanted anyone in America or anywhere else to treat me like one.
But the attempt to paint their academic success as somehow related to the color of their skin is supported by popular leftist ideologues such as Boston University professor Ibram X. Kendi, of “antiracism” fame.
He's a clown.
“Standardized tests have become the most effective racist weapon ever devised to objectively degrade Black and Brown minds and legally exclude their bodies from prestigious schools.”
Agreed. I'm against standardized testing.
To this day, the North Korean government retains full UN membership, meaning its vote in the General Assembly is worth the same as America’s.
mostly peaceful,
Meaning "partially violent".
In America’s “racial reckoning” of 2020, it suddenly became possible, for example, for a white magazine editor to lecture a Black construction worker who planned to vote for the wrong presidential candidate for his “internalized racism.”
Once you start trading for yourself, you start thinking for yourself.
(If you know anyone who thinks that America is uniquely bigoted and xenophobic, just ask them to explain why the United States gets more visa, green card, and citizenship applications than any other country in the world.)
“A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both.”
The dirty secret about left-wing attacks on capitalism, the family, and meritocracy in America is that they’re regarded as quite the hilarious joke in China—which is happy to watch Americans devalue and degrade
In my first half-decade in America, I’d discovered that trying to use my own personal story to influence the actions or behavior of decision-makers was a dead end.
it’s worth taking a very brief look through Chinese history, which I first started to understand and appreciate by taking a course on it through Prager University.
She loses me here.
The response from elites has not been to help these people, but to stigmatize them all as racists, bigots, transphobes, and insurrectionists, in order to justify their declining fortunes.
freedom and civilization are extraordinarily delicate.
It is your job—and mine, and all of ours—to participate every day in self-government, not just to outsource democratic government to politicians.
Despite the deprivation of my early life, all the comforts and material gains in the world now mean nothing to me unless I can share and enjoy them with people who are now undergoing the same horrors I endured in my childhood.
“Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times”
