Goody, humans. Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas. What does it feel like to be cancelled?

What does it feel like to be cancelled by the very opposite group of people who you might intuitively have thought would cancel you?

Meg Smaker was a firefighter, a young firefighter, in California when 9-11

happened. She empathized with the firefighters who died that day and she decided to figure out

why it happened. And unlike other peers of her age, the way that she decided to do that was to

leave the United States, hitchhike by

herself, through Afghanistan, end up in Yemen, and spend five years in Yemen, learning Arabic,

studying Islam, and teaching firefighting. Fast forward to her decision to make a documentary film. A documentary film about

the Guantanamo Bay detainees who was sent to a specialized Saudi Arabian Rehabilitation Center

for terrorists and jihadists. She made this incredible

humane film about their aspirations and the Saudi government's attempts in collaboration

with the United States and other Western powers to reform these people who are otherwise

perceived as irredeemable, guilty of the worst possible crimes.

And she was worried at the time that there might be some pushback from right-wing anti-Muslim

forces or militaristic pro-US forces saying, why are you humanizing these people?

That's not where the pushback to her documentary came from. It came from the left.

It came from people who hadn't seen the film, who thought that it, by definition, must be a

jingoistic pro-Western attempt to conflate jihadism and terrorism with all of Islam. It's

an extraordinary, compelling whirlwind of a story.

And when Meg's Maker was in Australia,

promoting this movie in spite of all of the efforts to have her silenced,

I was so proud and privileged and honored to have her visit our studio and sit down for a chat.

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