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David Dickson's avatar

Regarding the Ayaan Hirsi Ali thing:

The tragedy is, she’s only half wrong here.

China, Russia, and their allies really are trying to subvert and crack up the democratic world; they consider it, and us, a destabilizing threat to their governments by our very example. They will use whatever argument and ally they can to that end.

Where Ali goes wrong is where she connects the dots.

Ali’s made a career out of doing battle with the politically correct and the woke. Naturally, she obsesses over those groups she’s been in a deathmatch with, and points the finger at them as the primary “agents of subversion”.

Her bullshit blame-casting, like all bullshit, contains a tiny fragment of truth. It’s true that, specifically, pro-Hamas protests are being ably used by foreign propaganda right now to pry Western politics apart. More broadly, it’s true that residual leftist myopia about foreign policy, and their related historical inability to see the value of democracy in the world, is a strategic weakness both Russia and China can exploit.

But if Ali thinks those things are the real “subversion” happening in the U.S., she is choosing to misunderstand the situation.

Trump, and the MAGA right, are the dearest answer to China and Russia’s malign prayers in American politics right now, and it’s not a close contest. A Trump victory would essentially seal Ukraine’s and Taiwan’s respective fates. America, as we know it, would end as a beacon of hope in the world, as a criminal took charge and began purging American society as a campaign of revenge. The old 19th century maxim of “might makes right” would replace any Reagan-esque doctrine of the “city on a hill”, permanently.

For these reasons and more, Trump and MAGA are Russia and China’s most effective allies in “subverting” the United States. Their propaganda all but states this out loud, day in, day out. Ali does not understand this, because she does not want to understand it.

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