Ayaan Hirsi Ali spent years warning the West about threats it refused to see. Intellectuals praised her courage. Publishers celebrated her memoirs. Audiences packed her lectures. She was the dissident who escaped Islamic oppression to defend Enlightenment values—exactly the immigrant story America claims to want.
Now the West faces the consequences of ignoring those warnings. And the same people who lionized Ali suddenly discover reasons why responding to the threats she identified is beyond the pale.
In her recent appearance on The Rubin Report, Ali delivered a pointed analysis.
Drawing from her Somali background and decades observing immigrant communities in the West, she described how concentrated populations—like Minnesota’s 70,000-80,000 Somalis—import pre-modern social structures incompatible with liberal democracy. These aren’t abstract cultural differences. They’re concrete mechanisms of societal erosion.
The clan system Ali describes operates as a complete alternative to Western civic order. Children learn their lineage as a “passport” before they learn anything else. Bloodlines dictate loyalty, welfare distribution, conflict resolution, and trust. This isn’t ethnic pride or cultural heritage. It’s a rigid tribal framework that survived Somalia’s post-independence collapse precisely because it’s designed to operate independent of—and in opposition to—nation-states.
In diaspora communities, this system governs daily life. Welfare fraud becomes normalized because public benefits are viewed as communal resources to exploit rather than temporary assistance for citizens. Crime and corruption thrive because internal clan loyalty supersedes external law. The result is parallel societies where host-nation rules apply only when convenient.
Islam amplifies these dynamics. Ali traces the influence of Islamist movements like the Muslim Brotherhood, which gained traction in Somalia during the 1980s and followed immigrants to the West. In America, this manifests through organizations like CAIR—often led by Somalis in Minnesota—that work to transform Muslim communities into unified voting blocs while advancing sharia-influenced values.
The strategy is decentralized subversion. Turn ethnic enclaves into political constituencies. Demand benefits and accommodations. Label any resistance as bigotry. The goal isn’t integration. It’s Islamization from within.
Leftist politics enables every step. Ali identifies the Democratic Party’s electoral model as core to the problem: treat ethnic groups as vote farms, distribute benefits in exchange for loyalty, ignore fraud and subversion for short-term gains. This isn’t a conspiracy theory. It’s an observable strategy. Progressive ideology embraced multiculturalism as identity politics and abandoned assimilation as racist. The “red-green alliance” between progressives and Islamists accelerates because both oppose Western liberalism, just from different directions.
The stakes are existential. Ali warns of liberal democracy’s potential collapse through demographic transformation and internal conquest. She points to historical and contemporary examples: Christian versus Muslim-dominated regions in Kenya, Nigeria, Lebanon. The pattern repeats. When pre-modern tribal and religious systems replace Enlightenment frameworks, violence and authoritarianism follow.
This analysis demands response. Borders must close. Immigration must prioritize assimilation over diversity. Communities that operate as separatist enclaves must face consequences. And yes, mass deportations—messy as they are—become necessary when millions enter illegally and refuse integration.
This is where the enablers panic.
Not the open-borders left. Their position is consistent, however suicidal. They believe nation-states are oppressive constructs, borders are violence, and Western culture must be eradicated. They’re wrong, but they’re honest about their goals.
The dangerous enablers are the ones who claim to defend Western civilization, individual rights, and classical liberalism—then clutch pearls when those principles require enforcement. They praised Ali’s warnings but recoiled at ICE agents acting on them. They champion legal immigration and assimilation while condemning the deportation of people who entered illegally and never assimilated. They invoke rule of law while attacking the enforcement that makes law meaningful.
Their arguments collapse under the slightest pressure.
The Floating Abstraction of Unrestricted Entry
“Immigration restrictions violate individual rights,” they insist. “Freedom of movement is fundamental. Open borders are the only moral position in a free society.”
This drops every relevant fact about the society we actually inhabit.
The arguments for unrestricted immigration assume a fully capitalist system without welfare redistribution, public goods exploitation, or government subsidies for non-producers. That society doesn’t exist. In our mixed economy, unrestricted entry creates forced altruism: citizens fund welfare, education, healthcare, and infrastructure for millions who never contributed and often never will. This isn’t voluntary charity. It’s wealth transfer by government force.
Allowing mass entry without assimilation or economic contribution violates the rational self-interest of the citizens whose labor sustains the system. It sacrifices producers to non-producers. Pretending this arrangement defends freedom betrays the most basic requirement of rational thought: judge ideas by their consequences in reality, not by how they sound in theory.
The right to freedom of movement ends where it infringes on others’ rights to their property and security. A nation that cannot exclude those who would exploit or subvert its institutions ceases to protect individual rights at all. Sovereignty isn’t collectivism. It’s the prerequisite for any system of individual rights to function. Without borders that can be defended and membership that can be controlled, there is no polity capable of securing liberty.
Context matters. Ignoring it while chanting abstractions about rights isn’t principled. It’s evasion.
The Pretense That Enforcement Is Tyranny
“Mass deportations violate due process,” they claim. “ICE operations represent authoritarian overreach. We’re becoming what we oppose.”
This turns reality on its head.
Enforcement of existing law isn’t authoritarianism. It’s the minimum requirement for rule of law to exist. A government that selectively ignores violations—illegal entry, illegal residence, welfare fraud—while enforcing other laws creates arbitrary tyranny, not liberty. Selective non-enforcement is the destruction of law, replaced by political whim and favoritism.
The chaos stems from decades of non-enforcement, not from restoration of borders. Politicians invited lawbreaking for votes, built ethnic constituencies on illegal populations, then sabotaged enforcement when it became politically inconvenient. Officials like Minnesota Governor Tim Walz actively obstruct ICE operations, shield criminals from deportation, then blame federal agents for the disruption their obstruction creates.
The evidence is stark. Texas has ten times more ICE apprehensions than Minnesota without protests, riots, or agitators shot in confrontations with law enforcement. The difference isn’t ICE tactics. It’s government cooperation versus government sabotage. In Texas, state and local officials support enforcement. In Minneapolis, Portland, and Los Angeles, they actively obstruct it—then mobilize activist networks to create chaos around the enforcement their obstruction necessitated. The violence and disruption aren’t byproducts of deportation. They’re manufactured by the collusion between illegal populations, leftist officials, and activist organizations that benefit from the chaos. When enforcement meets cooperation, it proceeds quietly. When enforcement meets obstruction and agitation, officials like Walz blame the enforcers for the disorder they orchestrated.
Calling deportations “harsh” or “crude” evades the central fact: those being deported chose to violate sovereignty. They entered illegally. They remained illegally. They often exploited systems meant for citizens. Enforcement isn’t injustice. The injustice is forcing citizens to subsidize and accommodate millions who broke the law to be here.
Protecting the preconditions of a free society—controlled borders, enforceable membership, assimilation demands—is rational self-interest, not jingoism or tribalism of another sort. A society that refuses to defend itself against those who reject its foundations won’t remain free. It will dissolve into tribalism, clan loyalty, and pre-modern violence Ali fled Somalia to escape.
Refusing to exclude destroyers isn’t defending rights. It’s sacrificing victims to predators.
The Evasion of Concrete Threats
“Concerns about cultural incompatibility and welfare fraud is fear-mongering,” they say. “The problem is the welfare state, not immigration. End redistribution and only productive immigrants will come.”
This waits for utopia while reality burns.
Ending the welfare state is necessary. But millions already here exploit the existing system, form voting blocs to expand it, and import structures fundamentally hostile to individualism: clan tribalism that prioritizes bloodline over merit, Islamic law that subordinates individual rights to religious authority, ethnic solidarity that treats public resources as communal property to loot.
These aren’t theoretical concerns. Ali documents them from lived experience. Dismissing her warnings as collectivist or alarmist repeats the altruist error of sacrificing the able to the unable, the integrated to the hostile, the rational to the tribalistic.
Reality doesn’t wait for ideal conditions. Rational self-interest requires dealing with threats as they exist now. That includes exclusion and deportation when integration fails. That includes recognizing that concentrated populations maintaining pre-modern loyalties aren’t just “different cultures” but active subversions of the Enlightenment framework that makes rights possible.
The concrete costs fall directly on American citizens. Hospital emergency rooms overflow with non-paying patients while citizens wait. Schools divert resources to English-language instruction and remedial programs while American students lose opportunities. Housing costs spike as millions compete for limited supply. Public services strain under populations that consume far more than they contribute.
This isn’t an abstract resource allocation theory. It’s mathematics. Every dollar spent on welfare for illegal immigrants is a dollar extracted from citizens. Every hospital bed occupied by someone who entered illegally is a bed unavailable to someone who followed the rules. Every classroom overcrowded with non-English speakers reduces educational quality for American children.
The choice isn’t between generosity and cruelty. It’s between defending citizens’ rational self-interest and forcing them to subsidize their own displacement. Citizens owe illegal immigrants nothing. The countries these populations fled collapsed into violence, corruption, and dysfunction for reasons—failed cultures, tribal systems, religious authoritarianism. Importing those populations imports those pathologies.
Ignoring these threats while waiting for perfect capitalism is the cardinal sin: evasion. Concrete dangers demand concrete responses. Abstractions about what immigration might look like in some fantasy future don’t address the civilizational erosion happening today.
The Burden They Demand We Bear
The enablers offer a solution to the chaos mass immigration creates: expand state power to manage it. Increase police presence to handle crime. Expand anti-fraud infrastructure to catch welfare exploitation. Build more prisons. Hire more social workers. Fund more translation services. Enlarge the bureaucracy to process the dysfunction.
Then they call those who implement these measures authoritarian.
This is extortion disguised as policy. We’re told to accept millions who bring third-world pathologies, then build a surveillance state to contain the damage. We’re expected to sacrifice our limited-government principles to accommodate populations that never should have been admitted. We’re required to expand the very state power that threatens liberty—all to manage problems created by refusing to defend borders.
The rational response is exclusion at the border, not transformation of America into a police state. Countries that fail produce populations habituated to failure. Societies without rule of law create people who view law as an obstacle rather than framework for societal and civil functioning. Cultures built on clan loyalty and religious submission don’t suddenly embrace individualism and secular governance when transplanted.
The burden of change belongs to immigrants, not citizens. Assimilation means adopting first-world standards of public behavior, respect for law, and civic responsibility. It means abandoning loyalty structures incompatible with liberal democracy. It means becoming American, not recreating the systems that destroyed the countries they fled.
But the current mass of illegal immigrants demonstrates no interest in assimilation. They maintain ethnic enclaves. They demand accommodation rather than integration. They vote for politicians who promise more welfare, more language services, more cultural separation. Many harbor open contempt for America while exploiting its prosperity. The goal isn’t to join American society but to extract from it and, ultimately, reshape it.
This isn’t immigration. It’s colonization. And the enablers who demand we accommodate it—who insist we sacrifice our rights, our resources, and our civic culture to populations that actively reject American values—aren’t defending freedom. They’re facilitating conquest.
The Context-Free Border
“National borders are arbitrary collectivist constructs,” comes the final retreat. “Only private property lines matter.”
This demands benefits while denying prerequisites.
In the absence of full privatization—which doesn’t exist and won’t exist soon—a government must defend the territory where it claims to secure rights. Abandoning that defense dissolves the nation-state that makes individual rights enforceable. No borders means no jurisdiction means no protection means no rights.
Treating borders as illegitimate while enjoying their protection is a package-deal: wanting civilization’s benefits without accepting its requirements. A free society requires a framework capable of excluding those who would destroy it. That framework is sovereignty. That sovereignty requires borders. Those borders require enforcement.
This isn’t collectivism. It’s recognition that individual rights exist within a context, and that context must be defended or it ceases to exist. America’s right to exist as a sovereign entity defending liberty against aggressors isn’t negotiable. Dissolving borders in service to floating abstractions doesn’t create freedom. It creates the conditions for tribal warfare, theocratic subversion, and the death of the Enlightenment project.
The Feminized Retreat
Understanding why the enablers evade requires diagnosing the mindset that makes evasion possible. Their failure isn’t merely intellectual. It’s psychological and moral, rooted in the same feminized thinking that produced woke ideology’s therapeutic approach to civilization.
They prioritize how enforcement feels over what it accomplishes—though they would deny it. Deportations seem harsh, so they must be wrong—regardless of whether they’re necessary to preserve sovereignty. Border security appears uncompassionate, so it violates their moral sensibilities—regardless of whether citizens have a right to exclude those who would exploit or destroy their society. The emotional register determines the conclusion. Facts become secondary to feelings.
This is the core pathology of Wokism transplanted onto immigration policy. Safe spaces, trigger warnings, equity over merit—all stem from elevating emotional comfort over truth, safety over excellence, inclusion over standards. The same therapeutic mindset now insists we accommodate populations that reject Western values because excluding them feels mean. The same conflict-avoidance that sacrificed academic rigor to student fragility now sacrifices national sovereignty to avoid the discomfort of enforcement.
The inverse completes the pathology: they villainize the masculine traits required for civilizational defense. Strength becomes toxic masculinity. Assertiveness becomes aggression. Drawing and enforcing boundaries becomes bigotry. The willingness to use force in defense of legitimate interests becomes authoritarianism. Competitiveness becomes oppression. Standards become exclusion. They’ve spent decades pathologizing the very characteristics needed to maintain a free society—then wonder why that society can’t defend itself. A nation that treats male virtues as vices while elevating therapeutic sensitivity as the highest good doesn’t survive contact with populations that never abandoned strength, assertiveness, and in-group loyalty. The clash isn’t between equals. It’s between those who neutered themselves in pursuit of moral preening and those who retained the capacity for organized, just action. Ali understands this. She fled a society built on masculine honor codes twisted into clan violence, but she doesn’t make the Western mistake of abandoning masculine virtues. She knows defense requires the unflinching willingness to identify enemies and exclude them.
Performative compassion becomes the signal of moral sophistication. Defending borders marks you as crude, tribal, insufficiently evolved. The social cost of actually protecting civilization exceeds what they’re willing to pay. Better to signal enlightenment to their peer group than make hard choices that invite slander. Better to maintain status in their intellectual circles than defend the framework that makes those circles possible.
This is feminization in its classical sense: the elevation of nurturing impulses and conflict avoidance over the masculine virtues of reality-focus, strength, and willingness to defend. A healthy society balances both. Theirs abandons one entirely. They extend maternal solicitude to those who invaded illegally while ignoring the legitimate interests of citizens who built and sustain the nation. They recoil from necessary force because force is unpleasant, not because it’s unjust.
The contrast with Ali is total. She’s a woman who thinks like a civilizational defender, not a social worker. She escaped genital mutilation, forced marriage, clan warfare, and Islamic oppression—actual brutality, not microaggressions. She knows what pre-modern systems do to human beings. She recognizes threats because she survived them. Her analysis is unflinching because reality doesn’t negotiate with feelings.
She possesses what they lack: the masculine clarity to see what is, name it, and demand action regardless of social cost. She doesn’t traffic in abstractions about ideal immigration policy in fantasy capitalist societies. She describes the concrete mechanisms destroying Western nations right now. She doesn’t perform compassion for status. She warns of civilizational collapse because she’s witnessed it.
The enablers praised her when her warnings cost them nothing. Now those warnings demand they choose sides in an actual conflict, defend positions that invite attack, support policies their peer group condemns. So they retreat into the feminized evasions that protect their comfort: enforcement is too harsh, deportations lack nuance, borders are collectivist, we can’t become what we oppose.
They want civilization’s benefits without civilization’s responsibilities. They want to be seen as sophisticated without making sophisticated judgments. They want the moral superiority of defending the oppressed without acknowledging that many of the “oppressed” are predators and exploiters. They want Ali’s credibility without her courage.
This is the same intellectual and moral bankruptcy that turned universities into daycare centers and corporations into struggle-session facilitators. It sacrifices truth to comfort, excellence to inclusion, and survival to the performance of virtue. Applied to immigration, it imports dysfunction, enables subversion, and dissolves the foundations of liberal democracy—all while congratulating itself for transcending tribalism.
Ali knows better. The question is whether those who claim to defend Western values will summon the unflinching realism her warnings require—or continue their feminized retreat into abstractions while civilization burns.
The Choice They Won’t Make
The enablers want Western civilization’s benefits without defending its prerequisites. They want rights without borders, prosperity without gatekeeping, tolerance without standards. When confronted with reality—that maintaining liberal democracy requires excluding those who reject its foundations—they retreat into abstraction.
This isn’t principle. It’s cowardice dressed as philosophy.
This isn’t MAGA tribalism versus reasoned respect for rights, as it’s often framed. It’s reality versus evasion. Legal immigration built America because immigrants came to become American. They assimilated. They learned English. They adopted civic values. They saw America as an opportunity, not a host to exploit.
The Biden administration’s open invitation produced the opposite: millions who entered illegally, settled into ethnic enclaves, maintained clan and religious loyalties incompatible with American civic order, and became voting blocs for politicians who enabled their entry. That’s not immigration. It’s colonization with better PR.
Ali knows the difference. She lived it. She escaped Somalia’s clan warfare and Islamic oppression to embrace Western liberalism. She understands what assimilation requires and what its absence produces. Her warnings weren’t theoretical musings for seminar rooms. They were urgent alerts about civilizational collapse.
The enablers heard those warnings and applauded. They invited her to conferences. They cited her in arguments. They used her story to signal their own enlightenment.
But when her analysis demanded action—real enforcement, difficult choices, policies that invite slander—they discovered reasons to object. Suddenly the methods are too crude, the optics too risky, the politics too partisan. Suddenly abstract principles trump concrete survival.
This is fraud. Not honest disagreement but intellectual betrayal. They claim to defend reason, individual rights, and Western values while refusing every action those commitments require. They drop context, evade consequences, and sacrifice reality to floating abstractions.
The cost of their evasion is measured in communities that never assimilate, welfare systems drained by fraud, voting blocs that expand statism, and the slow replacement of Enlightenment foundations with pre-modern tribalism. That cost falls on citizens who followed the rules, contributed to society, and expected their government to defend the framework that makes rights possible.
ICE agents enforcing the law aren’t the threat to American values. The threat is the accumulated mass of people who broke the law to enter, refuse to assimilate, exploit systems meant for citizens, and vote for politicians who promise more of the same. Defending against that threat isn’t un-American. It’s preserving the nation that makes rights and prosperity achievable.
Ali warned us. She described the mechanisms. She identified the stakes. She outlined the necessary response.
The question is whether those who praised her warnings have the clarity to accept what those warnings demand—or whether they’ll keep finding reasons why action is always inappropriate, enforcement always excessive, and survival always optional.
Their abstractions won’t survive reality. Ali’s analysis will.
