 Ideas have consequences but so does silence insist Melissa Chen, the New York editor for the spectator and managing director of Ideas Beyond Borders, a non-profit that translates new and classic texts about science history and liberal political philosophy into Arabic and then distributes them free as e-books throughout the Middle East. Born and raised in Singapore, Chen came to the United States a little bit more than a decade ago to study genomics at Boston University. She quickly established herself as a foe of groupthink, political correctness and cancel culture in America, while critiquing authoritarian regimes in China, her birth country, and elsewhere. A frequent guest on shows and podcasts such as The Joe Rogan Experience, Bridget Fetacy's Walk-Ins Welcome, and The Reuben Report, Chen maintains one of the liveliest feeds on Twitter, mixing long threads with sardonic comments on the news of the day. Chen talks with me today about how an obsessive focus on identity politics led the media to keep insisting, without evidence, that the murder of massage parlor workers in Atlanta was a hate crime against Asian-Americans, why Hollywood is changing its products to police censors in the Chinese government, and how the best way to counter radicalization is with speech and information rather than repression. Melissa Chen, thanks for talking to Reza. Thank you, Nick, for having me on. Let's get right to it. You have one of the best Twitter feeds in existence. Your most recent tweet as of this taping was, I'd like to welcome the Arabs to the Schrodinger's White People's Club, signed Asians and Jews. What do you mean by that? Unpack that for me. Okay. So, well, you know, the Jews were probably the first ones to join the club. Many years ago, you know, during, I guess like right after the war, there were all these like college admission practices where they were trying to keep the Jews out, and they had quotas. So, you know, Jews were, you know, consider people of color, they were marginalized identities, but along the way, you know, they became one of the most successful immigrant groups and have now are now considered white. And it's the same thing with Asian Americans. Asian Americans have, you know, in the same way kind of crossed that Rubicon. And well, today, what happened was, you know, there was unfortunately just another shooting in America, 10 people were killed. And, you know, of course, you had a lot of people kind of jumping to conclusions that were like low resolution images of the shooter and people assumed he was white. A lot of sort of our media class was, you know, they were tweeting about how the very fact that this guy was taken into custody alive proves that he was white. It was just another white shooter in America. And of course, it turned out, you know, that he was actually a Muslim American, he had very, you know, visibly Muslim name. More details came out, he turns out to be Syrian. And so there were people trying to, you know, kind of move the goalposts then instead of saying, you know, I was wrong about this, shouldn't jump to conclusions. Then it became well, he had white privilege because he looks white. Arabs are white. And therefore he would, you know, this is why he was still taken into custody wasn't shot like he would have been if he was, you know, a black American. If I'm assuming if the Arabs are now joining the Jews as honorary whites, the Jews are going to want to recount or something like that? Perhaps, yeah. But there is this concept where the concept of whiteness is very fluid. You had a ridiculous headline in the New York Times a few months ago about this concept of multi-racial whiteness. This was after the elections, right? And, you know, one of the shocking things about the 2020 elections was actually Trump seemed to increase his lead among certain minority groups. And that was a bit of a shock. And so, you know, you have people kind of talking about this concept of multi-racial whiteness because whiteness is such a fluid construct. Basically, you know, whoever they wanted to paint in power is now considered under this umbrella. And so, you know, that was what I was poking fun at because Asian Americans, you know, with especially how they performed as a demographic in academia and also just looking at income, like, you know, median wage, for example. And Schrodinger, of course, is the physicist who came up with the idea of, you know, the famous example of a cat being dead and alive at the same time. And I know I've used it a lot, the great Schrodinger's immigrant who is both lazy and comes here to take welfare or is super energetic and comes here to steal our jobs. Like, they can be both, it's undecidable, they can be both at the same time, right? Exactly. And that's what we mean by using these identity groups as pawns in the larger culture war. And we're seeing a lot of that now with Asian Americans because on the one hand, you have universities, you know, this debate about universities discriminating against Asians. And on the other, suddenly they become minorities when it's very useful to the narrative. You've written and tweeted a lot about the impulse among many people to say that the mass shooting or spree killing, I guess, might be a more technical term for it in Atlanta, where, you know, a man went and shot eight people, six of whom were Asian of Asian descent. And that was immediately put into a framework that this is part of a massive increase in hate crimes against Asians. It turns out that that may not at all be the motivation of the shooter. You were one of the first people I saw in press saying, you know, what we really need to kind of think about this and think about what the motive is. What was your, you know, why were you so attuned to that? And why is it, you know, why is it important that we don't jump to conclusions about why mass killers do what they do? Well, it's not just mass killers. You know, I said the same thing when previous, you know, like sort of previous to this incident that kind of like rose to the national consciousness where a lot of incidents that were happening in some cities like Oakland, San Francisco, New York, because there were actually video surveillance captured of some assaults and attacks of mostly elderly Asians. And they were, you know, perpetrated by, you know, quite clearly people that were not white. And even under those circumstances, people were calling that, you know, some yet some conservative outlets calling it black on Asian crime. And I never saw that framing as useful because it implies something. You know, it's you're implying a certain racial motivation. And even under those situations, I said, you know, I did tweet that we should actually hold back. And, you know, it turns out the DA, like Chesa Boudin, they did not bring any hate charges yet. And even under those circumstances, I said, we should just wait for, you know, these people to be investigated, have their trial play out, figure out if racial motivation really is, is the reason for this, because ambient crime levels have been increasing across the board. And this is, you know, post COVID lockdowns, economics stagnation. And also you have the confluence of, I guess, government in aptitude. There's a trend where in some of these progressive cities where cops have been very reluctant to prosecute. So a lot of these factors have kind of come together. And it's caused crime in general to skyrocket. And so before we jump the gun to say that this is anything to do with, you know, a rise in Asian target crime, I think it behoos us to see if that really is the motivation, you know, through investigations, through interviews with the perpetrators. Because to make this claim is, is, is very serious charge. And you have a press, basically, that's very eager to link Trump's rhetoric, you know, saying that because of, he's been very, you know, saying things like Kung flu, or the China virus that this is causing people. There's a direct line between Trump saying these things, and, and, you know, causing people to actually act in a way that's violent towards Asians. And I think that's very dangerous. And it has not been proven. And moreover, the very fact that this is happening in, you know, the cities that are didn't didn't vote for him by long shot is, is, you know, it doesn't seem like a plausible explanation to me. You know, one of the studies that came out, and I think it was released just a day or two before the shooting, but it purported to show a 150% increase in 2020 over 2019 in hate crimes against Asians. And, you know, one of the things is that when you looked at the actual numbers, it, it seemed like there was less going on than people, you know, were drawing from the kind of headline conclusion. So in New York City, in 2019, they counted three hate crimes in, and then it was something like 23 or 28 in 2020. And, you know, when you're talking about a city of 8 million, I mean, obviously any of these, any, any hate crime is one too many, but we're not talking about thousands or tens of thousands of incidents. What, I mean, you know, it's, it's an interesting, I guess, kind of conundrum for Asian Americans. And I, I even bristled, you know, using that phrase because I grew up on the East Coast and I didn't remember people ever saying Asian American. It was much, it was always in the same way that Europeans were never called like Europeans or whites or Anglo. It was always Irish, American, Italian, American, Jewish, American. It was Korean, Japanese, Chinese, whatever, you know, the particular ethnicity, the person. But, you know, the Asian American, you know, now seems to struggle under the rubra or, you know, the moniker of a model minority. Is that, you know, is that what gives rise to a need among Asian Americans to say, hey, we are, you know, we're also oppressed, we're also exploited? What do you think is going on there? Well, I think many Asian Americans are, you know, at this point, the ones that are highly educated. There is a certain set of beliefs that are, you know, that are sort of touted in this particular class, the people that go to Ivy League schools, for example. And, you know, to remain on that cocktail circuit, you know, to be invited to this particular social networks where people are going to Aspen Institutes and all these, like, fancy places. Very dominant narrative is, is critical race theory. And, and part of critical race theory necessarily involves the rejection of the model minority myth. They keep calling it myth. Because everything is about power and pitting groups against each other. And that's how they view this, that because Asian Americans can be celebrated as a class, as a, as a demographic, it puts other demographics down. And it's, it's a bit of an equity kind of explanation. So, you know, because of the implication that, okay, if to celebrate this minority group success means that you're saying that other minority groups could do better. And that is something that that is completely frowned upon, that is, you know, you shouldn't be pitting these groups against each other. So that's really kind of where the rejection of that myth comes from. And ironically, you know, coming from the, the class of Asians that are highly educated that went to these very schools that, you know, kind of got in in spite of affirmative action. And I just actually want to circle back on something else that you said about, you know, you're comparing the statistic of 150% increase in hate crimes, just preliminary police data. The thing is the FBI doesn't collect hate crime statistics till November. So for the last year, you know, if we want statistics from 2020, we'll only get it in November of this year. So that data that you're quoting actually is just preliminary. And it's only been studied in 16 cities across the United States. And so that 150% comes from there. Now there was another group that came out. And because they wanted to track hate incidents in 2020, because this is the year of COVID lockdown, Donald Trump. And, and you had this activist group, it was a new advocacy group called Stop AAPI Hate shows up around last year, early last year. And they basically built a portal, a web portal where people can go and submit self report. I've just experienced a hate crime, log where it happened, you know, kind of describe the incident, categorize the incident and submit. And so for a while, you were seeing almost throughout 2020, a statistic that was sort of everywhere, quoted everywhere in the press, almost every article talked about the surge in anti Asian American, Asian American hate. It seemed like that was, you know, in 1900%, it was like 1000, you know, and, and till today, so about one year's worth of collection, there has been 3,800 hate incidents. And this sounds terrible, like this is like, you know, it's like one hate incident is enough is enough, but now you have 3,800 incidents. But then you kind of like, look a little closer at the data and you realize number one, this is not coming from official police data. This is actually self reporting. Anyone can log on in self report. Number two, this data was actually also cat categorized to show that actually majority of this wasn't even violent. It wasn't even a physical incident. We're talking about verbal incidents. We're talking about shunning like 20% of the case, the hate incidents were actually shunning. So if you've been creating, if you've been kind of fanning these, these flames and getting Asian Americans to think that people are out to get them, you know, you're walking in a supermarket and somebody gives you a stare, you might log that as a shunning incident, you know, or, or, you know, this hostess at a restaurant didn't want to serve me, could be for any reason, but there's a bit of confirmation bias going on now, because you're actually looking for it. That's why this narrative is, is dangerous. And, and when the media was uncritically parroting this statistic everywhere, quoting this advocacy group that, you know, sprouted out of nowhere just one year ago, I expected the media to at least be, you know, at least put some context, at least mention that in the pieces. But we saw none of that. And, and, you know, by October, you had the United Nations writing a report, excoriating Donald Trump for his rhetoric, and then, you know, putting in the report this exact statistic from the same group. And all of a sudden, the next thing, you know, the next iteration of the news cycle became the UN says that Asian American hate crimes have increased, blah, blah, blah. And this comes on the heels of Donald Trump's rhetoric. So now it has the credibility and of the United Nations. And it's just been quoted as the United Nations. Which may mean that it has no credibility at all, right? I mean, that's the upside. But yeah, that's, that's an amazing, you know, kind of story or thumbnail of, of how data or factoids, you know, things that have the shape of facts get circ, get created and circulated. Right. But I'm not doubting that there might be an increase in, in, you know, hate crimes against Asian. But, but, you know, the question is really, is it meaningful? And has it been tied to Trump's rhetoric? And it really looks like the, for the latter question, no. Whether it's meaningful, we really need to wait till November 2021 to see whether it is a meaningful rise. What has been your experience? And I realize, you know, you, you are trained as a scientist, you know, and so I realize that anecdote is in data. But I saw again on Twitter, you and Wesley Yang, who's somebody who I interviewed here, I don't know, like a year and a half ago or whatever, who's booked the Souls of Yellow Folk or is just a fantastic meditation on all sorts of things, including class and race and ethnicity in America. But both of you seem to be saying on Twitter that you have not felt, you know, a particular spike because I've seen a lot of people of Asian descent saying, you know, yeah, this past year has been pretty rough has, but your experience really has not been that. No, not at all. But again, I do think, you know, in part, when you're primed to feel a certain way, you can, you know, interpret a lot of incidents as some sort of that has animosity when it might not have any. But there's a lot of public sharing about these kinds of like, it's almost like public therapy, like collective therapy where people share, you know, there are these tweets that get thousands of retweets and likes about incidents. Like I was at a grocery store and, you know, this happened or I'm driving around and somebody flashes a white power sign. And, you know, which may or may not be a white power sign, right? I mean, the OK kind of, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, for Wesley and I, like one of the things you were talking about how also is that when incidents like that happen, all of a sudden you have, you know, white friends or something checking in with you and asking, how are you? Just, do you want to talk about something? And, you know, it's one of those things where I almost, that makes me feel more Asian than I've ever felt by checking in with me after an incident like that. It's like, oh, right. Yeah, I'm Asian, you know. How do you conceive of, it's kind of a weird question, but how do you conceive of Asian? I mean, is that a meaningful category to you or, yeah, or do you see yourself? I mean, you're originally from Singapore. I mean, do you see yourself more as Singaporean? Like, I don't, and I realize this is embedded in the rhetoric of, you know, white supremacy or of whiteness as universal. I don't think of myself as white. If I think of myself in terms of ethnicity, I think of, you know, I'm Irish American or Italian American. I don't think I'm European. But I mean, do you see Asian, is that like something that's very big in your head or is it something different? So, I conceive of myself as Asian the way Camille can see himself as black, which is Camille Foster. Camille Foster, which is, this is a fiction and, you know, in part bring up in Singapore, help to kind of feed that view because, you know, 75% of Singaporeans are Han Chinese. But we've never, you know, kind of identified with Han Chinese because to create, you know, a very diverse country out of four different races, four different religions, you had Malays who are Muslim, Indians who are mostly Hindu, Chinese who are mostly Buddhist. And then you also had Christians. Christians usually Eurations because there was a lot of intermixing. And to, you know, stuff these four groups, demographics into a city that is 360 kilometers squared, you know, in terms of area, it's basically four times the size of Manhattan. Just multiply Manhattan four times the size of Singapore. So you're basically stuffing, you know, 4 million, 5 million of these people of all these different races and religion into a size that's basically four times Manhattan. And it's a powder keg, right, especially as a young nation. So, you know, the founder of Singapore was very careful to, you know, kind of elevate national identity, because that's how you get people to put aside their differences. And so the Singaporean identity was created, you know, we speak actually like a syncretic blend of all four languages that creates like a language called Singlish, which is kind of a mix of everything. And so you have a very distinct identity that was separate from where all these immigrant groups came from. And in many ways, I think it's, you know, kind of similar in America, right? Like we have an American identity. It's, it's, it's e pluribus unum, right? Like from many one, and you create this like one identity, there are these principles and values and we kind of instinctively get what it means to be American. And I think it's the same way in Singapore. So it was always clear to me that, you know, that there was no, like what, what is Asian? Like firstly, it's a continent. I mean, my, my, you know, my co-founder is, he's Iraqi, he's Asian too, he's from the same continent. But we, you know, the cultures and backgrounds couldn't be more different. So in a way, I do see it like the way Camels use it, it's a fiction and it's, it's really meaningless as, as a category. But being Singaporean matters to you, doesn't it, on some level? I mean, it's just where I was born. It's the accident of, accident of birth, you know. And the values, what are the values? What would you say are, you know, the values that are promoted in a Singaporean identity? Very similar to the United States. You know, the idea of meritocracy is very important. It's almost enshrined in our national pledge, because, you know, again, it's, it's, you either have something merit-based or you have something that is, you know, you deserve things because either aristocracy or identity. And, and the only way to kind of make things fair and ensure that people have equal opportunity is to set up a system where, you know, you have a meritocracy. I would say also, Confucian values are very elevated in. So what, what does that mean? What are Confucian values? Confucian values in the sense of, you know, hierarchies are kind of natural. You, you know, the nuclear family is very important. Always respect your elders. It's, it's more communitarian. So, you know, things like you social harmony is kind of prized against individualism. And that I would say is a bit more, it's a very clear contrast between what we have here, where it is, where we're a lot more individualistic, right? We would kind of like, I mean, I wouldn't like it if we try, if anyone tried to justify, you know, curtailing of civil liberties with the argument that, oh, this is to preserve social harmony. So that, what I would say is the kind of major difference. What, now, when, when COVID hit, you were, you were, you were a critic of a lot of lockdown measures and, you know, Singapore was one of the places that was held up as a model for how to deal with COVID. What was wrong about Singapore's model? Or was it that it was, it, there was something fundamentally wrong with it as far as you were concerned, or it's that it's just fundamentally antithetical to how a free society should operate? I mean, you know, by all accounts, Singapore did very well. And by well, they, they didn't manage to keep the cases very low except for like a flare up with low wage blue collar immigrant workers, which actually the root cause of that was stuffing them in these dormitories. And so it really did highlight the foreign worker plight in Singapore. Because Singapore, like a lot of countries, and you know, and arguably the United States as well, there are, you know, there is a group of people who don't, who weren't born there, who come there and labor there and do a lot of the grunt work and are kind of segregated out of regular society. And so in Singapore, these people don't have access to the same social welfare benefits or citizenship or anything. A path to citizenship, unless maybe they're a local. But yes, they really shine the spotlight on this kind of like two tiered system, right? And on a parallel worlds where these workers actually, you know, have, you know, are paid really low wages. And so it was good that it kind of sparked that conversation. And I think that, that, you know, what happened, it will improve their, their prospects. But by all accounts, other than that one, Singapore did, you know, perform really well by all by most measures. And, you know, they never really had to lock down schools the way we did. But here's what happens if let's say I want or you wanted to travel to Singapore, you would have to be quarantined in an airport for two weeks. So they shut down the borders and was a mandatory quarantine. You would be tracked. And if you were found to have violated your, your quarantine as a American FedEx pilot discovered, he basically left his quarantine, I think half an hour earlier to pick up some drugs at the pharmacy before his flight back to the United States. He got arrested and he was jailed for two days. The, you know, it's from our perspective, something like that would be ridiculous to jail somebody for breaking a quarantine half an hour early. We're not even enforcing our quarantines, right? So even domestic travel, we've not even been enforcing it. But, you know, the Singapore mindset has always been to sort of enact certain punishments to make an example out of people because these examples then become the terms for other kinds of behavior. And in a way, that's actually a very kind of like tiger mom Asian kind of mindset. We have to, you know, make an example out of you. And so I think that's why you had such harsh punishments. And then they also started creating these apps to allow tracking. And I think one of my criticisms of it was actually that, you know, the government basically said, don't worry, this app is just to, you know, track the spread of COVID. But of course, it was used actually in some data was turned into the police who used it to arrest two individuals. So it's the classic slippery slope kind of problem that we worry about came to fruition. Otherwise, you know, I think it's a totally different country with very different ideals. And at the end of the day, they didn't have to shut down their schools. Businesses were actually open for a much longer time. And it remains to be seen, you know, which, which methods was, you know, better. Yeah, it's also it's not clear that we had to shut down, right? I mean, large, you know, shutting down the schools seems to have been a complete waste of time and resources with probably very long lived ramifications that we can barely begin to conceptualize for the moment. So you, you came over to the United States from Singapore in order to study and you were studying genomics. Why did you come here? And has the country paid off for you in the way that you hoped it would? I decided to come here because, you know, Singapore is always like, obviously kind of a very socially repressive place. If you're a natural rebel, which I was, it was, I knew I needed to leave to at least live a portion of my life outside the country. And, you know, the United States for me was the first choice, obviously, it appealed to me because of some values that were in direct opposition to, you know, the values that I grew up with in Singapore. The freedom of speech was very important. I was so aware of, of these, what we would call OB markers out of bounds markers. And, you know, when you have a law that would penalize people for speech that could be, you know, that basically if you offend the religious feelings of a certain group, you could be jailed as has happened. It really puts a damper on speech in the sense of self-censorship. So people do end up self-censoring. And you just feel like there's this general sense of you're walking on eggshells all the time. But in one way, it's just very clear. If you don't talk about race or criticizing the government too much or talk about the legal system, you'll be fine. And, you know, you kind of knew that you just, as long as you didn't go there, you're okay. But it does have an overall effect on people. And I was always kind of a rebellious kid anyway. And, you know, coming to the United States was quite important to me. And I imagine that, you know, in college, it would, you know, we'd be free to discuss anything. And, of course, you really picked the wrong time to come to the United States. I picked the right time by the time I graduated was 2009. So that was before. It was really only later on, and I was actually working on campus at the time that I started to see all the shenanigans. And, you know, that was like, I was probably one of the first ones to start speaking out about it because I could sense, I think people that live in countries where where speeches were pressed tend to have a particular sensitivity to it. It's like our antenna, like, oops, something's wrong. You have the kids here who these are supposed to be your educated class, they're going to be the elites of your entire cohort. And they're the ones clamoring for censorship. They're the ones displaying this uber sensitivity to everything. I wanted to shut, you know, shut speech down, disinvite speakers. And that's when I realized like something is wrong with America. But in speaking out, you know, one of the one of the pushbacks that I got was, this is kind of fine to, this is just fringe. Don't worry, it's a phase. They're just crazy college students. This will never survive contact with reality after they graduate it. Six years into it, right? Maybe this is like 2014. You know, that that was wrong. Yeah. Okay, so two questions. And first, you know, you said you were kind of a born rebel or individualist or whatever. Do you think it's really temperamental like that? Or were there particular experiences or books that you read? Because we're going to talk about ideas beyond borders, which translates books kind of Western enlightenment type books, the secular books into Arabic and then distributes them in the Arab speaking world. So you're exporting your trouble making even more than you might have been just by walking around Singapore. But you know, is it really just a kind of temperament? Or is it something that you think was learned by you from either the things you read or the experiences you have? Oh, I'm sure. I'm sure it's a mix of all things. But, you know, I grew up into a very, I guess my my mom with Methodist and so I was sent to, you know, Protestant schools my whole life and very active. She was very active in church. And I definitely remember questioning a lot of the Sunday school teachers, you know, even when I was six or seven to the point that I had to get out of class. And other kids who grew up, you know, in the same social milieu would just sit there and just kind of go along with it. I never really could get into religion and I tried. And I knew that speaking up was a bit of a, you know, it's a it's a kind of culture where where even just asking questions was found upon because, you know, part of Confucian values is there's hierarchy, you should always respect your teacher and information flow is top down, not bottom up. And, and that's one of the bigger contrasts with America. When I came here for college, I'm like, you mean you can talk back to the professor? You mean this is a discussion? I mean, it was mind blowing. It just was the total culture shock. You mean I can call the professor by his first name? I didn't have to like, you know, sir or madam. It's it's such a unless it's Dr. Jill Biden, you know, you can just call them Jill or, you know, Bill or whatever. You know, it's fascinating to think about, you know, introducing Protestantism, Protestant Christianity into an Asian culture or, you know, into a Catholic culture in Europe in the, you know, in the 17th, you know, 16th, 17th, 18th centuries where there's such a, you know, premium in Protestant theology and individual experience, individual interpretation, you know, that it seems like a bad idea to, you know, be, you know, introducing Christianity into Asian settings, if what you want is to maintain hierarchy. Actually is doing so well. So, you know, the country with largest number in proportion wise of Christians actually going to be China in the next by 2025. Look at mega churches in Korea, you know, it's, it's huge in Asia. Christianity is booming there and it's booming as it is on the decline here in the West in general. What explains that? Is it, you know, that they, you know, that it's actually true and people are going to be, you know, they're banking on being saved or what is appealing about Christianity in, you know, communist China? No, it's not really necessarily communist China. I think culturally, you know, the sort of, I think both Christianity and values like Asian values, which I really don't like that term, they, there's something that goes kind of hand in hand. This like work ethic, Christian ethic, the very simplicity of seeing the world, you know, with like good and evil and salvation, it's, it appeals to the Asian mindset very much. And then also Christianity is very focused on, on the nuclear family and social conservatism. And Asians are social conservatives, you know, and it's one of the reasons why many of them, you know, are vote for Republicans. So my other question was, when you started to encounter in an American context, students being the ones who were saying like, Hey, you know, don't ask questions or don't, don't make statements that are kind of upsetting to people. Where do you think that's coming from? Because, you know, it used to be the idea is that you would go to college and, you know, this is mythologized and romanticized, but the idea was you would go to college in order to be offended or to be exposed to things that you couldn't possibly believe are true. And you would have long late night conversations, you know, arguing about everything. And that seems to not be, you know, what the dream is anymore. What, you know, what, what's going on with a new kind of repression on campuses. I, I quite fully buy into George Flucanil's work and Jonathan Hyatt with calling up the American mind. And I think this concept of safetyism is really coming from the kind of, of parenting for a few decades that have led up to this point. So you're indicting me and my parenting point taken, you know, I offered no defense, but I mean, how different America would be if, if we were all brought up by in each one, we would be able to take a lot. It's, you know, okay, maybe that was extreme, but, but there is sense that that kind of parenting is not really incalculating a sense of resilience, emotional resilience to things. And, and we're so, you know, we're creating a generation that that's just used to having their feelings validated all the time. You could be anything participation trophy for you. You know, and, and in fact that, you know, in part that's a bit of a lie, right? Like we tell these kids all the time, you can be anything you want. And it's great. It's in fact, I mean, you know, liberalism was great coming from a conservative society where, you know, you're told, no, you can't be anything you want. It's not you do you, you know, basically your path available to use pretty constrained. If not Singapore itself in a lot of countries where it's like, at a certain age, you take an exam and if you don't make a certain score that, you know, whole swaths of the future are just blocked off to you. I mean, that's a terrible world to live in. I fully believe it's terrible. But there is a dark side to the American method, I think, and, and we're starting to feel it. I, you know, a lot of kids are not given that dose of reality. They're, you know, if you're told for your whole life that you'd be anything by the time you hit college and your options start doing willing, you start to see your own limitations. All of a sudden it hits you, you're like, wait a minute, maybe I can't do anything. And that, you know, dissidence that that existential crisis it creates is it can be pretty damaging. So let's talk about ideas beyond borders. The organization you co-founded with Faisal Matar, Matar, what is ideas beyond borders and why, why is it necessary to exist? You know, it's an organization that, you know, my co-founder who is from Iraq, we started to really fill a role. We wanted to plug a gap in knowledge and expose, you know, people that speak Arabic to ideas that were just not really available in that language, mostly because, you know, a lot of these books are just not translated. And, and the translations are hard. They're not economically feasible. The bookmark, book markets, publishing markets in most Arabic countries, Arabic speaking countries are actually not robust. I always skip the statistic just for people that have an idea. A New York Times bestseller here in the United States, you would need to sell about 5,000 copies in one week. An Arab bestseller will be, you know, a book that sells 5,000 copies in an entire year. So, and we wanted to kind of change that. There were a lot of books that we thought should exist in Arabic, that we should, you know, have people access, you know, be given free access to. That were ideas about books about the Enlightenment. You know, we actually just did translating John Stuart Mills on Liberty, the graphic novel into Arabic. You know, we've done, we're doing science books, books about philosophy. Just to kind of reignite this culture of reading. There was a time when, when the Arabic speaking world was actually, you know, very pluralistic. Scholars used to go there. There were libraries everywhere. And it's changed, you know, and it never really bounced back. Mostly, is that, is that largely in your understanding, is that largely a function of political ideology, emerging with religion? Or I know that you guys focus some attention on the idea of secularism as something that has gone missing. But it's also, I was talking to a woman who I guess was Syrian and was talking about how in the 60s, you know, women were wearing miniskirts and going to university in many ways. It was as or more advanced, many parts of the Arab world than, you know, than the West. So is it, is it simply Islam? Or is it also Islam plus kind of nationalism or pan national? Definitely the latter. I think Islam was co-opted in a way to shore up power. You know, I mean, Saddam, you know, people like, oh, Saddam was a secular guy, you know, and kind of pit him against al-Qaeda, contrasted him with al-Qaeda and an ISIS who are explicitly religious fanatics. But Saddam used religion, Saddam co-opted it to shore up power. And in fact, by, you know, killing all the moderates, killing all the liberals, he created a vacuum for these Islamist groups to thrive. And he, you know, just like them, didn't tolerate, there was no, you know, toleration of dissent, toleration of minorities of different viewpoints. So they were kind of a manifestation of the same intolerance. How many people have you reached? How do you measure the reach of ideas beyond borders? And generally, you translate the books. And I know I've talked to Faisal about this. I mean, it's pretty stunning and inspiring. You get, you know, people generally who live in that part of the world to translate books at, you know, real personal risk if they're on mass, but then you circulate them as PDFs or as Mobi files and things like that. But what's, you know, what's the, what's, what's a hit for you? Or what is the reach of your operation? So a book like Stephen Pinker's initially like Enlightenment Now, it's a very thick book. So that took a long time to translate. A book like his got 12,000 downloads in the first six months just from our website alone. And that's what we can track. But in the Middle East, books were actually shared a lot via Telegram. So there are these big channels where you have almost a black market of books. And so you would have something like Richard Dawkins book, The God Delusion About Atheism, translated it into Arabic and shared in these Telegram channels. Now, once it's in Telegram, we can't track it. So we don't know how far these books really go. And frankly, we don't care. The whole idea is to get it far and wide. I would say we pivot it to Wikipedia also because, you know, when you're translating Wikipedia, this is all common licensing. So we didn't have to worry about one of the major bottlenecks of this entire process is negotiating with publishers and the copyright holders, getting the contracts. I mean, there was a point when Faisal and I were thinking ourselves, why hadn't this been done before? You know, as a slam dunk idea, like obviously has to be done. Well, there's always a reason why hasn't been done before. You're not, you're never the first to think about something. And it's because it was hard. And it was hard to negotiate for this rights. And it's kind of stunning, though, people like Steven Pinker and Sam Harris and others, I guess Dawkins as well, kind of gave you the rights in Arabic, right? And I guess in a way, it's like the market is so small. It's, you know, in a way, it's, you know, it's easy to be generous with them, but it's pretty stunning that they were just like, yeah, take them and do that. Exactly. Very generous of them. And of course, there is some realities to be made. I will say that one of the most stunning turnarounds is actually a few publishers at the Baghdad Book Fair approached us and said they actually wanted to, you know, publish in print two of Sam Harris's books and one of Steven Pinker's books. And we were actually surprised because, you know, for a publisher to display such a book and have this book as on their shelves, it is a very big undertaking. And the fact that we actually, you know, we're moving from the digital world to getting printed copies of these books being sold in the country. And like this is kind of changed that we were hoping to see. And it was, it's very heartening, you know, and like you mentioned, the translators that work for us, we have 120 of them all across, you know, from Syria to Jordan to Egypt. These people are so inspiring. They're mostly very young, university educated, and they're very interested in science. One of our translators who's been targeted the most works a lot on evolution. And that is a very controversial topic. He got some. Thankfully, it's settled dogma in the United States, right? I mean, at least several of the Republican presidential candidates say they believe in evolution. So, you know, we're making real progress. Well, that's not a lightning rod anymore. You know, you have these debates about teach the controversy, teach, and that seems to have all faded away. Yeah. You know, you, you've written a lot about, you know, or as, as we're talking about all sorts of things, you know, and there's horrific violent crime in the United States. And there's a kind of shutdown of certain types of speech, you know, what's permissible in, you know, in public spaces. And another way, you know, it's also true that, you know, we live in the golden age of speech and expression. Everybody can say whatever the hell they want, which is great. But then you've written about Hong Kong, you know, which is still, you know, fighting, you know, with the Chinese Communist Party. Are you optimistic about the Middle East, about the Arab speaking Middle East? Are you optimistic about China and the way that it is dealing with places like Hong Kong as well as the countries and its most obvious sphere of influence? Or do you think, you know, the world is becoming darker? If I kind of focus just on, you know, what I, what I see with the trends of the youth and everything in the Middle East, it seems optimistic. Many of them have seen, you know, rotation, they've seen secular, you know, dictators, authoritarian governments, they've seen their society's collapse, terrorism, Islamist groups. So many young Arabs actually reject all of this. They're almost, you know, I think this is a breeding ground for libertarians, the entire region. I thought you were going to say they're nihilists and hence natural libertarians, but no, but I mean, so they're kind of post-totalizing ideologies at this point, whether it's a secular tyranny or a religious tyranny? Yeah, because all of them have brought, you know, have brought nothing and just death and chaos to their countries. But my main concern is actually the rise of, you know, an authoritarian ethno-state that is exporting their censorship apparatus, they're exporting it to the Middle East, that, you know, China has also begun putting out their state television, CGN TV, Sin Huan News Agency has, both of these outlets have Arabic channels, where you have like, you know, an Asian girl like speaking perfect Arabic, perfect accent. And, you know, during COVID, a lot of these channels were actually spreading misinformation. They were spreading ideas about this virus having been invented by the CIA or in a US lab and being released in China. Here's the proof. And so you have, you know, China basically winning these Arab countries over also by soft diplomacy, by the Belt and Road Initiative. You know, I think it was very telling that majority Muslim countries in the Arab world did not sign the letter condemning China to the United Nations for their treatment of the Muslims, the Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang. And again, that has all to do with market access. And, you know, the quid pro quo that China has provided these countries in the form of infrastructure. They've signed deals with Saudi Arabia for, you know, infrastructure spending and things like that. So it's very worrying. You have written and spoken about the way that China is corrupting Hollywood or, you know, US-based entertainment companies. Can you talk about, you know, what forms is that taking? I think all of us were familiar with the kind of brouhaha over the live-action version of Mulan, whereas, you know, a cast of thousands kind of, and it's like, yeah, it's Uyghurs in concentration camps. But can you talk a little bit about your, you know, what the Chinese government is doing and why it concerns you? You know, there have been quite a few movies that it hasn't impacted. Almost, there are almost no Hollywood movies today, major productions that are not financed by China. There was a certain point, I think, if you look at the James Bond films, there was one with the movies that featured North Koreans as the enemy. I can remember one of the Pierce Brosnan ones. That was actually supposed to have been China, Chinese individuals were, you know, where the general was like the enemy that James Bond had tried to take down. But China was able to pressure the rewriting of the scripts to, you know, instead have it be a North Korean general instead. So they've actively gone into, you know, if Tibet was an issue, you know, to erase that. So if the script called for a Tibetan monk as it did in Dr. Strange. Dr. Strange, yeah. By the way, an actual medical doctor, not a PhD, just Dr. Strange. Just like you, actually. Well, now I am a PhD but not a medical doctor. And so when I offer medical advice, really don't take it. But yeah, so and I mean, what, what, what is the solution or what, you know, what kind of, what is your solution to that? Because on a certain level, what Hollywood is doing, you know, Hollywood is a shorthand for this, because it also extends to the NBA, you know, where, you know, within the same week, you might have somebody like LeBron James, you know, talking about, you know, rightly criticizing certain types of police tactics in the United States, but then shutting down fellow players for daring to say anything bad about China. You know, what, you know, what is the right way to do that? Because on a certain level, these giant corporations, whether it's a movie studio or a, you know, a sports league, they're just going where the money is, right? Right. I mean, I think there's a difference between, you know, companies that are involved in the national security infrastructure. For those companies, anybody that's providing some sort of electronics to say the electrical grid, yeah, I think we have to be very careful about, about working with any, any company really, you know, that has relationships with China. Chinese companies do not have any separation. There's, there's this thing called the civil military fusion. Every company has to have a, on their board, a member of the Communist Party. So it's not like in the United States, where there is actually a wall of separation between industry and the state. In China, they are one in the same. So any, you know, node that passes through China, if your company's hosting a server there, you can almost bet your, you know, entire company's assets that on the fact that you will be spied on. And so I think the policies regarding these kinds of, you know, companies are very different than entertainment than the NBA, where we, we can't stop this from happening. There's, there's no law, you know, that this is not something that we can pass by legislation. But I do think that people speaking up about it, people pointing out the hypocrisy, at some point it has to be so obvious that, that you cannot take this public position because it is simply embarrassing. And so, you know, there, there are some, you know, liberal talk show hosts that have been highlighting this. Bill Maher is a very good example of one. And the more this kind of penetrates the public consciousness organizers, we need to have people that, you know, bring together people in Hollywood directors, whatever to talk about the problems they're facing with, you know, people who, journalists who study this problem, who know exactly what's going on in Xinjiang, and kind of bring them together to, to talk. Because I think a big part of this is, you know, for a long time, I think it was naivete, it was just, you can make money, we can all make money, we can get rich together, China will change. Clearly that, you know, the opposite has happened, China is not only not changing, but they are changing us. Yeah, can we talk about that a little bit because, yeah, there was, there was a moment, and I'm thinking back to like the early YouTube days when, you know, you would see videos, and this was kind of a paradigmatic YouTube video, and it made, you know, I think about it, I kind of choked up a little bit, but it would be Chinese kids singing or lip-syncing Backstreet Boys songs wearing Kobe Bryant Lakers jerseys, and it was like, okay, you know what, America or the West has tried, you know, military power, and that's come a crop, or it's just, you know, destroyed all sorts of things, including the economies of the West, and that, you know, we were all going to be able to communicate, you know, through shared entertainment and culture and, and things like that. That has really kind of disappeared, and we now, you know, seem to be in a place where it's like, no, it's just, you know, one popular line of thought is, you know, that China is just becoming, is rising in its dominance. Milton Friedman back in the 70s and in his 1980 miniseries for PBS Free to Choose talked a lot about how, you know, he believed that economic freedom, you know, allowed when, if you, if it gave people economic freedom, they became richer when they became richer, they started to demand political freedom. And then as the 80s unfolded, he seemed to be absolutely right that what was happening in China, you know, the after Mao died, the economy was liberalized, people got wealthier, the TNM Square, the democracy movement, you know, kind of rose, and then it was crushed. Do you think he was hopelessly naive that a rising center of living is ultimately going to force a political, you know, a kind of political freedom that is now maybe unimaginable in China? Or, you know, or is it just that his timeline was off and that it'll come down the road? It's funny because I remember this narrative and obviously what's reinforced by, you know, the end of history. Right. Yeah, it's, yeah, they're all part of the same kind of big story. Yes. But the reason I never bought it was because I was from a country that proved that that was wrong. Right. Singapore went through, was one of the first Asian Tigers. And, you know, it went from, it went to first world in like a few decades. And I remember, you know, by most accounts, Singapore was doing very well on GDP per capita, people were surprised at this country and how it really punched above its weight. It was by all accounts, a very prosperous nation. And it got there in a very, you know, quick amount of time. Well, I didn't notice that people were demanding for more political freedoms. They were actually very satisfied. And it's one of the things that bothered me about living there. You know, I was very bothered by the fact that it was 2010 and we still didn't have gay rights. We still had the, on the books, part of the law that criminalizes its homosexuality on the books. And I could see that people were very happy with the government and realized that if, as long as it was prosperous, as long as their, you know, matthewless hierarchy of needs were met, most people didn't need the self-actualization. Most people didn't need that at all. And, you know, the Gulf States also were kind of going down the same route where they were getting very wealthy, mostly oil and money, sovereign wealth funds were swelling. But people weren't trying to change and call for change in terms of more political rights, you know, liberalization of social norms. They were kind of static. And so I kind of had a sense something was wrong with that thesis. But, you know, the one thing that I kind of think that was, it's unfair to judge Milton Friedman for is in China's case, it's not a really fair assessment because China never really had a two-way street in terms of communication. So they had this big firewall and as they grew, they were able to keep their own population in the dark. Now, if those walls were taken down, if, you know, we could, if the average Chinese person could read everything about the world from the comforts of their own home and learn about the world that way, maybe they would have made, you know, they would have actually demanded for more political freedoms. Well, do you think it's likely? I mean, is it likely that the, you know, Chinese government will really be able to maintain, you know, a strict kind of firewall or, you know, is it already happening that, you know, this, you just can't keep the world out for too long, especially the more you trade with it, even if it's under very constrained circumstances? That's what we thought, right? But the way technology has gone is actually, it's reinforcing the surveillance state. It's actually shoring up their authoritarian power in a way that's almost unprecedented. You know, that, there's an amazing article in The Atlantic, the Penochtit Khan is already here, about how they're deploying that in Xinjiang and whatever you're seeing in Xinjiang, you know, that's going to be deployed for the rest of the country, the social credit system. So this is the broad social credit system where everything you do kind of gets tracked. And it may be, I mean, there may be a state version of that, and there may be a kind of private sector version of that coming in America. You've written one of the stories that you read for Spectator USA was about how Yelp is starting to add certain elements of a kind of social credit system to it, right? Could you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, I think that was with regard, I can't remember what the what the story was about, like the actual It was about like racists or racially charged behavior was noted at a restaurant or something like that, that they had a tag. Yes, and there've been a few cases of this nationally where, you know, owner and owner, I think, you know, in one case, there was a white woman who started a Chinese restaurant, and she declared that this was like a healthy version of Chinese food, you know, clean, use the word clean eating in her Instagram post to promote the restaurant. And people jumped on that and said, Why are you saying that Chinese food is dirty? You know, you, you must be racist. And anyway, a white woman starting a Chinese restaurant is problematic or something to that of that sort. And so she, you know, the the review system Yelp review systems were actually weaponized. It became a frontier for for the people accusing her racism. And, and, you know, when Yelp starts saying as a policy, we're going to actually note when a restaurant has been accused of racism. This is like saying, All right, we're just going to have profiles for everybody. We're going to note when somebody is accused of me to accused, and just have that label in their profile, and it's going to stick. What could go wrong? I mean, this is, you know, mob rush to judgment on steroids, and it's going to follow you. I mean, Europe is slightly better at this. I think they have things like the right to be forgotten. They care a little bit more about privacy. But although they also care a lot more about controlling expression, right? So that certain kinds of thoughts or words are verboten, you can't buy and sell certain things. As a final point, and I'm going to mangle the pronunciation, because I think it's Latin. And even though I took two years of Latin in high school, I have no idea how to pronounce it on your Twitter feed, which is Ms Mel Chen, and there'll be links to this at the reason page for those who are listening. You have a slogan that is KAPERAUDE, C-A-P-E-R-E-A-U-D-E. Do you remember what that is, and why is that important? Yes. My Latin is also bad, but thankfully, you know, that's it's not a microaggression to mispronounce Latin. Yeah, not anymore, right? Because Italians, Italians kind of became white along to, you know, about, you know, when Joe DiMaggio went hit in 56 games in a row, Italians became white. Except for the New Jersey ones, like, you know. That's, they're the worst, they're garbage. Yes. So what does KAPERAUDE mean? Up here, I think it's up here, S-A-D-E-R-E. It translates to dare to know, and it was kind of seen as the motto of the Enlightenment period. And I've always kind of identified with that phrase because, you know, the idea about daring to know something, know something that is forbidden, know something that is, you know, knowledge that was kept because at the time during Enlightenment it was controlled by the church, and the church was the one censoring all other publications and poor Voltaire had to be exiled. And you had to meet in these secret salons to discuss ideas and, you know, the entire Encyclopedia by Diderot was published in secret. And I've always identified with that because I think, you know, like this idea that right now we're kind of living in that culture again where there are certain ideas that we're not allowed to kind of talk about in public, not because of government censorship, but because, you know, of certain social mores, like questioning certain ideas, maybe even putting out data, you know, we you've had people fired for just quoting statistics that were coming out from academic journals. And, you know, it's not about, it's not about knowing all the answers, right? It's the most important thing in life is knowing that you can ask questions that lead to the answers. And we now live in a time where even questions cannot really be asked comfortably about certain topics. And so I kind of like use that phrase to remind myself of not, you know, don't be afraid, don't be afraid to ask because having all the questions is actually more important than having all the answers. All right, that's a great note to end on. We're going to leave it here. We've been talking with Melissa Chen. She's the managing director of ideas beyond borders. She's a columnist at the spectator USA. And you can find her on Twitter, clubhouse and virtually every social media platform. Melissa, thanks for talking to reason. Thank you, Nick.