from the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal. This is Free Expression with Jerry Baker.

Hello and welcome to Free Expression with me, Jerry Baker from the Wall Street Journal editorial page.

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At the journal's editorial page, we believe strongly in free expression.

So each week on this podcast, we explore in some candour issues of topical interest.

We speak in depth to people who are leading figures in their field, practitioners, experts, commentators, to give us a better understanding of the big issues of our times.

This week I'm delighted to say that my guest is Ayan Herssey Ali, celebrated writer and commentator.

Miss Ali was born in Somalia and brought up a Muslim.

After a family fled persecution there, she was educated in the Netherlands,

where she became a strong critic of Islam and Islamic culture and began a promising political career.

After the terrorist attacks of September 11,

2001, she spoke out strongly against radical Islam and its apologists. Her stance earned her

enemies, and she's been the object of repeated death threats from Islamist extremists. But a willingness

to challenge orthodoxy has caused waves here in the United States, too, where she now lives,

the supposed home of free speech and free expression.

She knows firsthand what cancel culture is like, having had the distinction of being canceled by a number of supposedly leading universities and cultural institutions. It hasn't stopped her from speaking out, however, which she does very, very articulately. She's written two acclaimed autobiographies and a number of other books, including most recently Pre, P P-R-E-Y, I should say, Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women's Rights. She's a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. I should also say she has her own podcast, the I-Anne, Herssey-A-Li podcast. So I'm doing a little bit of cross-promotion, the I-Anne. Thank you very much indeed for joining me. It's a pleasure to have you. So I want to talk a lot about culture and the culture that we

are currently dealing with in the United States, the hegemony of the intolerant left, the way in which

they control so much of the discussion here. But let me start, just I want to ask you a little

bit about your own personal experience.

I don't think anybody could be surprised that your outspoken criticism of Islam and Islamic culture earned you enemies in the Muslim world. Perhaps more surprising, though, is that you find

yourself the object of a lot of criticism here in the United States and, of course, in Europe, too.

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