today, president trump holds a rally in manchester, new hampshire. that gives away at 7:00 eastern. campaign 2020re coverage with beto o'rourke giving a speech from el paso, texas. that is at 9:15 a.m., eastern. next, former national security advisor h.r. mcmaster talks about threats to free and open societies. other speakers include scottish historian neil ferguson and his wife. this discussion comes from the hoover institution at stanford university.

>> the leading critic of islamic extremism and fundamentalism. we showed in the interest of full disclosure say that she happens to be my wife. [applause] you there me reassure will be no softball questions.

quotation --with a this is the first time we have appeared on stage together. we have put it off and put it off. sons are the first hoover fellows to be bred in captivity. we will begin on more serious quoting from one of the grandmasters of strategic thoughts on foreign policy. henry kissinger, who has been astonishingly acute grasp of the issues we will be discussing this afternoon. he has written on artificial and he made the following observation "the -- andveness of network

social and military sectors has revolutionized fall abilities." i am basing most rules and regulations, it has created a state of nature, the escape of which provided the motivating force for creating political order. asymmetry is built into relations between powers and , both inn cyber powers diplomacy and in strategy. absent articulation of rules of international conduct, a crisis will arise from the inner dynamics of the system. system. a couple more quotes just afraid the subject. rodgers, former head of the national security agency and u.s. cyber command said a couple of years ago that we are at a tipping point. finally, i watched quote from an

nsa cryptographer, his famous rules of computer security. you may want to make a note of these because everybody has to be concerned about computer security. rule one, do not own a computer. rule two, do not pirate on . rule three, do not use it. with that to set the scene i want to turn to h.r. mcmaster. the strategy really did radically change the u.s. posture on a range of issues, of which the most noteworthy was our stance towards china. they had interesting things to theybout cyber warfare offered low-cost and deniable opportunities to damage or disrupt critical infrastructure,

cripple american businesses, we can our federal networks, and attack with tools and devices americans use every day. the united states will impose swift and costly consequences on foreign governments and other actors to undertake malicious cyber activities. can there be affected deterrence in cyberspace? asking what motivated this dramatic shift in policy that you saw broadly in the december 2017, just in time for the beach , 2018 was when we were able to put all this in place. there was a sense that we were at the end of the beginning of a ,ew era, but we are behind

largely because we were not competing effectively gives adversaries and rivals. ,he reasons we were behind is due in large measure, to overconfidence in the 90's, associated with trying from the cold war and the collapse of the soviet union. the lopsided victory over the six largest army in the world. sustained economic growth through 90's, with some people call the revolution in military affairs associated with these technologies. the first big.com boom here in the valley, we were flushed by this overconfidence that led to complacency. and then we confronted difficulties, so obviously, the mass murder attack against our nation. an anticipated length and difficulty of wars in iraq and afghanistan. of course, the 2008 financial crisis. i think that jolted confidence in a way that we became passive

and did not engage competitively for reasons of pessimism. so we made a conscious choice to figure out how to reenter arenas of competition from which we had been absent. , and to one of those answer the question, yes, we can deter certain attacks in cyberspace. one, which was alluded to in the paragraph, and to impose costs on a cyber actor or make clear that you can't impose costs which the cyber actor factored in at the outset of decision to but also, capabilities outside of cyberspace that you can bring to bear emerging power and physical space through sanctions and law enforcement actions.

when you have the authority to do so, military action as well. the other aspect of deterrence to go back to thomas schelling, deterrence by denial. we have to recognize that our enthusiasm for technologies also make us more vulnerable and prone to credit traffic collapse. i was reminded of a book from

the 1960's entitled men of machines in modern times in it, they say that men and women have expended a great deal of effort in trying to tame his national -- natural environment, but in so doing, has created an artificial environment that is much more complex. so i think we are on the right track in terms of recognizing this is a competitive domain. we have seen a lot of critical it easieren to make to use of offensive capabilities as a part of deterrence and defense. the certainly a long way to go. >> i want to pursue this further. we have the opportunity to learn from somebody who has been there in the room where it happens, remaking american policy we

, the a recent article turns in cyberspace is like imperfect prevention, it is not like deterrence in the age of the cold war we had to deter sovereign union. this was in world war iii and armageddon. this was a slightly different kind of deterrence. you're going to have cyber attacks and cyber warfare. a question of keeping the level down to not suffer serious disruption. >> i think cyber actors are trying to avoid the imposition upon them. and cyber is a way where we have seen rivals and competitors such as russia and china, north korea as well, trying to accomplish

objectives below the threshold that would elicit a response against them. so i think we have to do a number of things and develop a range of capabilities. it will see it in the midterm elections. more and more will be known overtime, but we did act much more aggressively than we did in the past. there are other actions we can take that are not of the defensive. we will talk more about influence operation and cyber-enabled information warfare. we will take a lot of tasks like educating ourselves in public so we are less susceptible to manipulation. or we should figure out a way to

present credible information. to be able to access that routinely in a way that sort of locks out some of that attempts. can we draw that distinction out? to bere is a distinction john between cyber warfare and information war. the united states spent much more time that he let cyber warfare prior to 2016, maybe because we invented it. our assumption was that if we do certain things to iran, sooner or later, some people do them to us, so we should be worried about computer viruses that controls our critical infrastructure. but in fact, with the russian did was something quite different from information warfare. >> it gets back to this complacency problem. a corollary to this

overconfidence, we believe there was an arc of history that guarantee the privacy of our it wasd open societies our confidence that came under attack -- attack. our common identity. we know that 80% of the messaging and bought traffic was aimed atedia dividing americans along lines of race. they were on immigration and gun can be an issue that could pull our society apart and pick us up against each other to attack our election to that we also don't have faith in our democratic processes. to theink we came late

game on this and it was again because we were overconfident in just the inherent strength of our society and our system. i'm glad you observe a moment ago that we did up our game. was not moreere coverage, it has to be done the way the administration hit back at the internet search agency. so you could say that we didn't learn and. learn quickly from 2016. -- we didn't learn and learn quickly from 2016. >> it is public knowledge that if you develop a cyber tool it has a shelf life of 96 hours until there is a countermeasure. have is a continuous nteraction

that is happening at electron speed internationally in this new form of competition. we had to do is align the authorities for those who are operating to defend us from these actors and to employ combinations of offense and defense of capabilities. turnis is a good moment to and remind ourselves that there will not be a major islamist terrorist attack in the united states for some time, it has not stopped around the world. and just to remind the audience, these are numbers from the u.s. studyal consortium, the of terrorism. the most recent report from 2017 reports 10,900 terrorist attacks around the world.

filling 6000, 400 people. the top perpetrators were islamic states, the taliban, overwhelmingly, terrorist incidents around the world that numbers arein large driven or perpetrated by radical islamist groups. i wanted to begin with a question about those groups, the ways in which they have used the technology developed in the west. it will organize and mobilize to build far bigger networks them al qaeda has back in 2001. talk about those educators and how they currently operate. i was listening intently to my colleague hr and thinking to my here we are talking about operations.

this is cyber, are these adversaries using cyber. and in the 15 years i've been in the united states, maybe even since 1989, the one thing we ideas,talk about our ideologies, and grounding principles. when hr said the very core of our identity, i assumed very subjectively that the call of our identity are these classical, liberal ideas. that the united states is established upon. forget is that there are people who organize and have political and social framework that are radically different it is a political and social philosophy with a religious underpinning.

but the agents who believe in this ideology, i think we look at islam is him and you see a tree with two main branches. one of main branch is the use of violence to achieve their aim, to achieve what they think of as something of a utopian idea. the ideal is to establish a society on a local level, maybe on a global level, to achieve an end goal that society is based on the rule of god. interpretation, their organizing philosophy. or most it as a treaty americans, everywhere i go, i asked them to raise their hand

if you think you know of the concept of jihad. just raise your hand. that's exactly it. maybe 80 or 90% will say i have heard of the concept and read about it, i am familiar with it. i asked people to raise your hand if you have ever heard of another concept. 3, is always a minority. that is the other main branch of the islamist tree. what does that mean? it makes believers in this particular philosophy that has its underpinnings in religion efforts in engaging in campaigns and arguments, propaganda. in short, it is the effort to promote the ideas, the effort to persuade.

that is where cyber comes into. i know that when it comes to jihad and we are focusing on ,hat and these big companies there are focusing on the jihadi aspect. where are they plotting an attack, where will that attack the? -- be? that is all under the branch of jihad. otherwise, you have to ask yourself how are they using cyber to raise awareness? how are they using cyber to organize, strategize, to exchange tips and tactics. how are they using cyber to raise money? and information warfare how are they using it to propagate conspiracy theories? united states of america is out to gave -- to get all muslims, that is one theory.

they are colluding with israel, that is another. i put that under the realm of this information warfare, and that is how it is used. everything my colleague hr said is absolutely true. we are used to fighting these operational wars. ,he two things you mentioned making sure you impose costs on niall.d defense by that is on the operational level, but the question remains, are we really engaged? and are we not really wasting the opportunity to use the internet, to use cyber to ?upport a counter ideology

i think that is where we are failing. >> one of the things that most struck me when i was writing a book related to all of this is how different state wars are too al qaeda. these attacksut partly because it was so caught off and closed as a tiny, conspiratorial network that it was undetected by our security forces, whereas the islamic state is quite a different. it is a very open and rapidly changing network that uses social media at all kinds of platform to disseminate its ideology when you look at work that has been done by national security that grasps the network , it is absolutely mind blowing how big this thing is and how sophisticated. is it writes to say the

islamic state may have been defeated on the ground in syria but it is still very much alive in cyberspace? think of the islamic state is only one brand of the global phenomenon of islamist. failed because they put all of their money on the jihadist branch. they thought they would shock the world into submitting, and that did not happen. they almost obliterated, and obviously, they adapt they learn from their mistakes like we learn from our mistakes. they will redevelop a focus on that dour branch, on getting into the minds of human beings to persuade them into our viewpoint. that is to schools, families, neighborhoods, and obviously, through the internet.

and they are making use of all of these various tools that are available to all of us. now, i want to say, we in the , we try to draw the straight lines of qaeda,tion between al between islamic states, the muslim brotherhood and other organizations. works.t is not how it you have to think of them as a global tree. they have disagreements on how to get to the end goal, but remember, they agree on the end goal. a lot of communication and collaboration takes place, a lot of exchange of money, a lot of commitment. much of it happens through cyber, but that is not the most important thing. the most important thing is that, while we refocus on brands like the islamic state, we are

missing the big picture. reconfigurations between the islamic state and the muslim brotherhood. others, if you read any of the newspapers you'll be told the sunnis and shiites are killing one another. that is the case, but is only part of the story. and a lot of the communication takes us through cyber and the but when our government describes making it is difficult with some turned back to the old -- it isommunicated difficult, they turned back to the old message communicated. thing is how important the internet is on the process one oftenization

reads that the perpetrator was radicalized online. happens happens?what >> there is a school of thought, a number of people who believe shut offe set off -- all the social beginning accounts, radicalization would disappear. i tend to disagree, because by the time an individual goes to his smart phone or laptop to access any of the social media , they have already at least been inspired. at the minimum, inspired to think things. most young people are looking for some kind of model. when you think about the rowdy, very often outside of the west, 90% of people will think about going to religion. will --go to your life

, but most ofam those places are displaced. they put a lot of money into messages and own infrastructure in place that have not displaced t established in most places. so you are a young person, you live here in the u k in bangladesh or sri lanka, thinking about the difference between right and wrong. youre to the mosque and listen to a ceremony they tell you about this worldview that is and it ist, so clear only then, because it is so complex that many individuals think. you references like i did he references. at the end of my talk, i say why don't you go to the hoover institution of site, what an ego

to a classical liberal website, they do the same thing. that's what you see on cyber. people come on, thinking they will get more information and they get sucked in. but cyber is only part of the story when used that way. >> i will come back to a bigger question i want to ask about the society.- open it's in the title of our event and i know you are a devoted reader. back to larry. we have talked about russia, talked about islam, let's talk about china. your information report talk a bit about technology theft but it struck me that it said relatively little about china's online activity. i like to ask you to talk a bit about that.

i wonder if we ain't seen nothing yet. russians, thee chinese have not begun information warfare. should we be bracing ourselves for that? >> thank you for that question. to begin, since we are talking about china, by noting today, thers ago chinese come in a state ordered the liberation army into tiananmen square and he is a massive and brutal military force to suppress what was probably the most important democracy uprising since the nationalist revolution. we don't know how many people , the estimates are somewhere between 2500 and 10,000 people. it was a seminal moment in the history of modern china and marked, as the brilliant essay

by my co-editor noted in his , a really decisive pit away from reform -- pit -- pivot away from reform and the orwellian aggressive state that the people's republic of china has become. i think that before we talk about the cyber element of this, we need to talk about, generally, what they are doing. in the world has a more dedicated international and institutionalized, the communist party apparatus. we have got a whole chart that just unveils and maps of the bureaucracy has a more dedicated infrastructure for propaganda and the promotion of influence.

it is in the subterranean and illicit fashion. we just said, you do not have to be doing this online in order impact.tremendous they have gathered all of their communications channels, china global television and radio international. the news agency and everything else they've got an something they called the verio original title, the voice of china. this is increasingly essentially directed as part of a massive campaign to propagate their narrative around the world to suppress other narratives to buy up newspapers, inserts of newspapers and radio stations.

to propagate a dominant line. and most of the disturbing that, our report found is if you look at the chinese language media in australia in the united states, in europe and the united states forget about africa and latin america is now predominantly inheriting a probation pro-beijing line. we have the chinese state congress party propaganda and direct intimidation within our countries of alternative voices. the point where i was just informed yesterday of a city councilmember, i won't name the city, but buffet is in

california -- but let's say it was in california who was told that if he met with a representative of the taiwan representative office, the chinese overseas community would mobilize their power to defeat this person in the next election. this is happening in the united in somef america, not asian semi-democracy or latin america. so we have a very serious problem. and we can look at what they are doing to penetrate the media, the universities. not just the confucius institutes, more than 150 of , for the chinese, mr. party ministry of education is writing the curriculum and appointing the instructors to teach chinese language. something i find inexplicable that we are letting happen in the united states of america. very simplyould end

by adding a new national defense that provides for federal government funding of chinese like which instruction, which is an important national security objectives let me add -- objectives. let me add that we engaged on hr's about overconfidence and amplacent we engaged in bipartisan act of unilateral disarmament. jesse helms wanted to shrink the international affairs budget. they weren't ready to fight it and had a number of other priorities. hisasically had given me left arm we are right arm, the clinton administration surrendered and close down the information agency, which was our instrument for fighting communist, terrorist the liberal and authoritarian propaganda.

that cap merged into the state into the new bureau of public diplomacy that has had on average about one under secretary every 18 months. recently, a bipartisan initiative. creation, and undersecretary pompeo, a serious effort to stand up a global engagement center to wage this battle of ideas. it must have a digital counter narrative encounter messaging component. but that is not enough. a lot of the way that people get news and information is not digitally, it is the old-fashioned way by reading newspaper and listening to the radio. and let's say we're talking how areclosed society

we going to get through their? -- there? we could take a large swath of the classic canon of liberal ideas we were referring to, put it on thumb drives and infiltrated quite a large number of them at very low cost into the people's republic of china into north korea and into a lot of nonpermissive societies. these aren't even expensive initiatives, but we are not andking creatively enough, even now, when we are getting more serious, we are matched and resolved to the area we are in -- arrow we are in -- era we are in. >> the chinese have a great system. they have a great firewall to keep things out they don't like.

they have a great canon they can point at anybody they want to take down. it seems to me that has become very asymmetrical. you can we do as you are saying, fundamentally, it is harder for us to do to them what they can do to us. >> that is absolutely true. that is why we stress in the report the need, whatever your , the trump be administration is pursuing considerabled with effectiveness, to get more reciprocity in the relationship. we can't just sit back passively and say we will wage this battle with one arm tied behind our back when they have all four limbs to run with.

that means that if our media companies are television companies, and this is my own , i could not sell it to my working group, but nevertheless, i feel it very strongly. if we can't get our cable television channels to be able to broadcast, in english or chinese, to the chinese public, why should china global to ourion have access television airwaves. that is not obvious to me. scholars and journalists are increasingly being threatened with the visa denial if they say or write something critical of xi jinping with government party leadership, why should they continue to have unfettered access to the other direction. ways wee some of the will never eliminate the asymmetry, but i think we can narrow it and fight back.

i want to say one other thing, it's asymmetrical in both directions. because we have an intrinsic advantage they do not have. and i feel this very deeply. the truth is on our side, if we and broadcast it and counter the lying narratives against the around the world. john f. kennedy's founding director of the information agency had a very good line. he said the truth is the best propaganda and lies are the worst. because lies can eventually be exposed, but we need to expose them. that means in africa, and latin america, we have to show you the truth about this society. what are people going to decide about the relative value of the two systems when they get a rounded exposure to the united states, with all of our division

, with all of our flaws, and c 2 million people of the muslim minority uighur ethnicity in shin jong province sitting in concentration camps, purely because of their ethnicity. most people don't know that and we need to make sure they do, and we have evidence to show them. >> i am really struck by the echoes of the cold war. >> that's your word, not mine. >> the kennedy administration's efforts to counter soviet propaganda, you take us back there, and i want to turns back to hr. there is a sense that we are moving towards a cold war two. two, we will have to have a more coherent sense of the need to combat the other side's propaganda.

when you were in government, how did you think about this, and has review changed? changed?s your view >> you know that we are skeptical about fast i'll uses of historical analogies. what will they learn from observations about the cold war. ist everybody recognizes what is fundamentally different about this competition is that we are intertwined with the people's republic of china economically and this is part of a global economic system, which you know far better than i do that it is far different from the isolated economies of the cold war. compete inmust different ways, this competition gives us more opportunities.

larry's comment about the truth on your side is borne out by the chinese communist party's failure to deal with not only the tiananmen square massacre, but any kind of movement towards representative government and rule of law within china. essay inng as a great foreign policy today about that, about the repression of historical memory within china. so i think we can mobilize, in some ways, history. chinese peoplehe really like to be oppressed, what i would characterize as bigotry masquerading as cultural sensitivity amongst those who say the chinese are just deferential to that kind of hierarchical order, a confusion thing that they can be preyed

upon. and of course, taiwan is an example to counter that. so i think we have to compete in different ways from an ideological perspective, but also from an economic effective. and we do see opportunities. when you are going to see following a concerted effort to call china out on unfair trade and economic practices as well as a sustained campaign of industrial espionage in the form of december 20. conventional wisdom is that we are on our own but december 20 of last year 60 nations called out the chinese hacking theirzation for industrialist and activities, sanctioned that organization and announced a number of indictments in a number of countries.

the next step in what you have ,alled a tech war with china can i quote gwyneth paltrow with a conscious decoupling? economiesng of our such that companies are no longer going to accept the risk of operating in china for short-term profits because the intellectual property is stolen and transferred to the state, used by state owned enterprises to overproduce at low cost and dump good back in those economy and drive them out of business what is going to happen economically, commercial will in some ways mirror what we have seen in the internet. there is a divergence, and our colleague has made his comments as well, a divergence towards

two separate systems. we will have to try and mitigate downside of that, but i think we are entering a fundamentally new phase in the relationship between the united states and like-minded companies and the people's republic of china. interestingly, i think the europeans share that feel i was in europe over the weekend -- that feeling. i was in your over the weekend at a conference of partnerships, it is interesting to see how attitudes have shifted. at the same conference, the view was that donald trump can never be elected president and brexit would never happen. 2017 was thate in this was the worst possible situation we could ever be in, what an utter nightmare. 2018, it was i guess we would have to get used to this.

week and they were so i'm bored with each other administration's policy that was almost no daylight. but i have not seen the same transmission of attitudes towards at -- towards islamic extremism in that sense, they don't seem at all interested in the way the administration is thinking about this problem. and i'm particularly struck by the fact that if there's going to be a fight combating are thent extremists, europeans not going to be in that fight on the right side? what we see behind the scenes if only we make a

chance and collaborate with oil-rich countries of the middle and diverge the attention away from spending money and lots and lots of money and propaganda, instead of diversifying economies, their come toons will somehow live by the principles of freedom and tolerance. they will be just like us. >> that is kind of what we thought would happen with china if we engaged economically, that they would become more -- >> that is another thing. we talk about overconfidence that sentiment in the west is very, very strong. actually, we defeated the soviet union on the battlefield of ideas. that whole deal, it does not

work. , and it was, we won the sense that it was the end of history. wayybody will come to our of thinking. but at the same time, that overconfidence that went along with an insecurity about our basic principles, the founding principles of this country, people are promoting them in colleges we are in the grip of a terrible nonsensical idea that is summarized in the four letter word woke. you hear phrases like toxic masculinity, white privilege. dive into this, and what do you learn? that the history of this country is all about exploitation, it's all about slavery. are fighting amongst ourselves to bring down the statue of the people who

establish our history. so there is, on the one hand, , but we arece inhibited when it comes to propagating our principles because our principles are evil, white privilege, and all that. at some point, we have to come to a place where we shed these identity politics. hr was talking about how our adversaries can come in and exploit our weaknesses, and so -- amplifieded racial tensions between children , genders,parents sexualities, you carry on and start to fragment our society along these thin and narrow lines mostly based on ideological ideas.

then we lose sight of our founding principles. it is very easy to persuade the populations of the middle east, of latin america, of africa, that the basic principles of classical liberalism are superior to the basic superior -- principles of radical islam. we can prove that empirically if only we propagated. so we had to marry our overconfidence that everybody will be come -- become like us. people want smartphones, to wear trousers and ministers, that's all true. can we sell the idea of capitalism? can we sell the idea of free enterprise and political freedom?

if we can't do that, we will end up becoming like them instead of them he coming like us. to the audience, and we are going to go to the audience so you had better think of some difficult questions but if you don't, i will cold call some people. larry, you have written about the democratic recession. if you take a step back and , doider the global picture you feel like there is a fundamental disadvantage as far as democracy is concerned? partly, that it is an open you canand partly that have the great firewalls. talk about the democratic recession you have written about , and if there are ways of combating it? the real challenge is to decide how to turn the tide back in favor.

you are asking me to summarize a whole book i have .ust published let me just say these bullet points. first of all, if you look at the data from freedom house or the economist magazine or most other , we will be ins a 10-12 year stagnation and increasing slide in terms of freedom and democracy. it has been getting worse for a lot of reasons. i think rising income inequality is a part of it and the divisions we have inflicted upon ourselves. the immigration crisis and the lack of sensitivity and of a andness well-intentioned government

leaders, nevertheless, ineffective. angela merkel was very naive and the way she handled this in germany. the election of donald trump shows that you got to have your year to the ground in terms of concerns about this. so i think there are a lot of drivers about democratic dysfunction and cultural backlash. now you have the big factor that many people have not been paying attention to until recently. i would say the 2017 national security strategy that hr lead the drafting of was a big factor in helping to educate americans in ahe world that we are new era. it is a return to the era of great power competition. dedicated,ourceful, and driven authoritarian

adversaries who are trying to discredit, and, reverse the very idea of freedom. you really just have to push back. war,'t use the term cold but i think there are a striking betweenf parallels where we were at the peak of the cold war around 1960 and where we are now. 1960, we got back a sense of purpose and self-confidence and energy in waging this ideological struggle. freedom forggle for open society. against all these sources of a liberal ideas, whether they are

radical islamists or, in the kremlin version of a white, christian, conservative against the rest of the world, or whether they come in the form of it's not coming to some authoritarian capitalism being superior. i just want to close with two points. one bills on -- builds on what was said. there are a number of reasons to be more hopeful about the opportunity at. one is that if you look at the public opinion data particularly from sub-saharan africa, you even though there has been a modern erosion in public support for democracy and liberal values, it remains

overwhelming. africards of people in and even in northern africa say they would like to have a democratic system of government. the political science skeptics say that if you peel it back, they say they want independent courts. they say they want checks and balances. they say they want their presidents not be able to serve more than two terms. less, thaty, more or they want to be secure in their rights to have an open society. that does not sound shallow to me. you can see it as a little more equivocal now and latin america, but you got a lot to work with. people do not want to live in an authoritarian, orwellian surveillance state where they privacy, andom, no

can be sent to a concentration camp at any point. if we can't make that work for us in this next round of global competition, we are doing something deeply wrong or ill-conceived. niall: larry and i -- almost worthy of a round of applause. [applause] niall: i want to invite you now if you have questions to take advantage of microphones that are standing right there on either side of the auditorium. i want to remind you a question is a short thing with a question mark at the end of it. >> [laughter] niall: and if you decide to give a speech, burly men will appear from the side of the auditorium and escort you up. >> thank you so much for your

courage and bravery at being the voice of women in the islamic world. you are really hero and i am so happy. [applause] ayaan: thank you. >> my question as a matter of fact i am looking for advice from you for women like me or for me as a matter of fact because i am in a critical situation. i would like to ask you because this is the point i will start to do something about my life. some years ago, advisor to gerald mcmullen from carnegie was here, and i never get to ask the question but i could tell her, share with her my idea about what issues have done or should do in afghanistan. and then she encouraged me very strongly to speak out, speak up and all those things.

and i have lived 35 years in fear of islam and political correctness and all of those things because i experience the revival of islam. can do and what it is doing with societies. then she encouraged me very much and told me one thing. she told me people in islam needed to hear from you. and she said these people take 10 years to understand what you are saying and i don't think it means my accent. but i have tried to really talk about this, but i am coming to a crashing point. i feel i am hitting my head to the wall because i feel i am betrayed by a society of intellectuals that were supposed

to support me, my new beautiful country of u.s. that should support me, but i feel that everywhere that i go is this political correctness and many other things. it is easy -- i can show you it is easy -- i can show you what is happening. niall: you have got to get to the question. >> my question is that i speak up against islam, i am thinking islam is imperialistic and pedophile ideology and we should tell the truth, not going with the line of the peaceful religion and so on. but i am crushed because people say they don't say they kill you -- niall: we need a question, we really do. [applause] >> i get islands down, and i am

crashing. and i want to ask you honestly, give me advice what should i do? should i stop working there? [applause] ayaan: i will be very short and said yes. maybe at this stage it is better to stop talking about islam and start talking about freedom. we are here to talk about how we can use online and cyber and all of that. it is not technologically impossible to connect a lot of people and see afghani women, women from afghanistan and i know a number of them are attracted to the ideas of freedom and equality and raising their children, especially their sons, to be different, to embrace these ideas. that is where to go. let's stop talking -- or let's talk less about what it is that has driven us out of the ideology of radical islam and talk about what has driven us to the principles of freedom.

[applause] niall: please keep it brief or others won't have a chance. >> wonderful insights. you don't read this in the new york times these days. thank you. i was trying to think of a difficult question and come up with one -- i would like to get perspectives from hr, from inside the government and then from ayaan, the outside. muslim brotherhood, it is kind of -- it is obvious why they drive this violence, jihad if ou will. sorry for using the word. we have failed to declare them a terrorist organization in the united states. i read that we tried but it is not happening. why is that? why have we failed to declare the muslim brotherhood a

terrorist organization even though -- >> should we identify it as terrorist organization? >> sometimes we try too hard to disconnect the dots because these groups are overlapping and mutually reinforcing but we also have to be cognizant that not all of these groups are the same especially in both muslim brotherhood which has different chapters, philosophies. some of them are actually active and useful disappearance of political processes. if you were to make a blanket designation against all of the brotherhood's and get -- brotherhood organizations, is it to drive them underground in a way that sets conditions for a ost mubarak egypt? there has to be a distinction made between those who advocate

for violence against innocence and were those who advocate to be able to determine with sharia law the nature of the government with the exclusion of other parties. that is the way to think about it. there is not a silver bullet solution to the problem of slamist groups, that want to restrict freedom, but i don't think they blanket designation of the muslim brotherhood does it for you. yaan: i agree with hr. everything he said is true. but we could go one step further and designate them -- like we are confronting china and what they are doing, it doesn't hurt to say muslim brotherhood, with all of your branches and chapters, we know what you are up to, and here is the answer. it is not a terrorist organization, but having them come to the white house and in our institutions of education and information i think in that

sense that is a mistake. hr: i think a way to think about this is to really make sure we ought to understand terrorists are using a permuted -- perverted definition of islam. today we ought to say eid mubarak to everybody. who are the victims? other muslims. we have to not play into the terrorist hands who try this conspiracy theory that is really the zionist crusader against them. it is a fight between all civilized people of all religions against those who are erverting islam. [applause] >> well said. niall: question from the

right-hand microphone. >> do foreign governments enjoy a bill of rights when it comes o an ownership of media and of newspapers, television stations, tc.? hr: i think the answer is no. think we have blocked chinese interests from buying radio stations in the united states. you know what they did? they bought the largest wattage radio station in north america in tijuana and from there started broadcasting over the border to southern california. in any case, i do not think that foreign governments have, and i don't think any court has established or suggested that foreign governments have, protection of freedom of speech or freedom of ownership inside the united states. particularly when they are pursuing ideological objectives that are hostile to our bill of rights. it would be perverse to suggest otherwise. niall: lady in the black dress. >> i% people who think the greatest threats to their lives are plastic straws, single-sex restrooms and trump's personality. what are the organizations we can support? where are the sparks of light that people in this room can get behind when they leave here to fight the battle you are escribing today?

niall: that's an easy one, the oover institution. niall: the last bastion of free thinking and the principles of open society in american

cademia. ayaan: what we do in open and free societies is we have our internal disputes. we have conservatives versus liberals, republicans versus immigrants and others, and sometimes we use an exaggerated language to describe and analyze these differences, when really it is not that exaggerated. so facing china, radical islam, is very different from the adversity republicans and democrats accuse one another f. at times as a relative newcomer, i think we really need to mind our language and sober up a bit and maybe that will one day get us to the quaint idea of

bipartisan cooperation. we should not confuse external enemies that wish us harm, existential harm with our omestic -- niall: one peculiarity of 1989 -- of the period of complacency that followed 1989 and our istaken reading of that time has been about eastern europe rather than beijing. i think in the absence of external threats, we fell upon ourselves. we divided ourselves more deeply than had been true when there was a clear external threat. seems to me one hopeful prospect of our wakening up to these different threats is we begin to see a return to bipartisanship on precisely these issues. what is the one thing democrats do not criticize president trump for? standing up to china because of

fact they were almost quicker han republicans to endorse the imposition of tariffs. this may be one of the unintended promising consequences of this discussion we are having. the lady at the microphone on the right. >> thank you for the brilliant conversation. it is a big discussion nowadays whether more technologies, blockchain, ai, artificial intelligence, military robotics, can really contribute to inclusion, decentralization of power, and helping open societies further. i believe how do you see this process going on and how that -- maybe they can even be used against the free society. what is your opinion? niall: you were involved in organizing this. what is your take? hr: any technological development will have tremendous

possibilities associated with it as also dangerous. we learned from the internet which many people saw as unmitigated good, that it can be used for nefarious purposes and within social media. i think what is important is to understand the implications of these technologies for our own security and the preservation of our way of life. if there are dangers, putting in place mitigating measures from the beginning but also accentuate the positive the blockchain, which has been an powered -- i think people in a way that has led to economic growth to formalize land in ways that can't be corrupted and also enables, enables may be a flattening of financial transactions in a way that is more democratic. there are positive aspects of that technology but as you know it encryption is the great example of a benefit in terms of privacy, but also a disadvantage in terms of how it can empower

terrorist organizations to coordinate efforts broadly without detection. niall: it was on this stage last year that someone observed may be ai was communist and crypto or blockchain was libertarian. i thought long and hard about that, but it does seem as if artificial intelligence is going to be the basis of this new cold war, china may have certain advantages precisely because there are no constraints of individual privacy when it comes to the chinese platforms mining ig data. the gentleman in the big -- pink t-shirt. >> this question is mostly for niall and ayaan. >> this question is mostly for niall and ayaan. brexit has not more -- not lost much popularity and in ayaan's country, euro skepticism is hic.

i am wondering about moving to the continent and what the young american like me can do to ensure the collapse of russels. [laughter] niall: do you want to take that question? ayaan: i want to point to the remarks larry made earlier which is in a free society the leadership, the people we elect, they have to hold their years to -- their ears to the ground and hold the concerns -- an listen to the concerns of the people. the european union was a project that started in my view very positive and started with a great deal of good intentions. but over time, people who live in europe are feeling they are not being heard, that their concerns are not taken seriously, that there are

people, from bureaucratic level, making decisions that have far-reaching consequences for people in their neighborhoods, in their schools and day-to-day lives and not being listened to. hen i served in the parliament in the netherlands, i felt that was a constant thing. we would go as members of parliament to our constituencies and try to persuade them in a certain direction area and listen to them, they would persuade us and we would start to get a majority for certain legislation. we will be told they would become prospect because it is against e.u. laws. people would ask, who are they? are we ruled from belgium or the hague? as long as european -- numeral from belgium you will have a lot of disaffection. it is an expression of the dissatisfaction of not listening and in a free democratic society if the leadership stops

listening constituencies, it is not a democracy anymore. niall: it must be said if you wanted to do advertisement for how to leave the european union, you would not follow british politics the way it has been followed the last three years. it has had the opposite effect on most continental europeans. the gentleman at the other mic. >> it was partially answered about china's right to broadcast, but how do we decide what discourse is appropriate for a free and open society? where do we draw the line and who decides? iall: larry?

larry: you always err on the side of the freedom of speech. i am not in favor of censoring chinese speech, russian speech and so on, but i think giving the access -- them access to airwaves and buying a radio station is a different thing. if they want to spend half $1 million to insert a large amount of posts, that is their right. i am not worried about that. i don't think many people are reading in washington. larry: i would always say err on the side of freedom of peech. we have, i don't need i think to get into it here, i think niall could give a real dissertation on this, we got a problem -- a problem of freedom of speech on college campuses. if we can't bridge the polarization in a university campus and look at all points of view with something of an open mind and a willingness to

debate, we are in real trouble as an open society, liberal society. we have got to turn the question back on ourselves in the university environment. niall: we need to bear in mind as the network platforms, be it facebook, be it google, youtube, twitter, come under increasing pressure from the woke left to restrict hate speech, we run the risk there is systematic censorship practiced in the most important part of our sphere. the bias should be in clear favor of free speech, and although they are not bound by the first amendment, first amendment rights online, it means hate also we will hear arguments from the chinese government and the muslim brotherhood but that is what a ree society is like. there should be truly an open society and not least on

university campuses. i think we have got time for one more question, and then i am going to have to disappoint the microphones because there is only four minutes left and there are two small boys running mok. not far from here. that one of us these get back. to>> this concerns chinese influence in africa. the west has a long history of ignoring global trends that are happening, and while they sleep, things happen. i do a lot of business in ip and watched china for many years confiscate western ip and now we have seen the trade imbalance grow and grow and there is no addressing of that. trump is trying. but we are missing the growing influence of china in frica. it is imperialism. they are confiscating resources, influencing governments like the congo.

what does the panel think, how big a threat is that and what if anything can the west due to reverse that? niall: i am going to ask each of you to respond. you get one minute each and we will end with the one african on the panel. but let's start with hr. hr: the new vanguard of the chinese communist party is a party official in a suit carrying a duffel bag of cash. what they are using is corruption and working with corrupt governments in particular to co-opt those governments and once they are there and create issues of dependency under the rubric of the one belt, one road, they change it to a course of relationship in which the country is used as you alluded to as a place from which to extract what china needs, but also to get this country to align with china's foreign olicy. there is push back significantly across the wall now. -- across the world now.

the curtain has been pulled back. you have small countries like sri lanka and the maldives who have changed governments because of the exposure of the corruption of their own overnment officials. it is in ecuador as well as malaysia is an important case with 1mdb but also chinese influence. there is a problem but also opportunity in the context of competing effectively. the first step is to pull the curtain back on chinese activity and expose it to sunlight. niall: you spoke eloquently about the african positive attitude. is china undermining that? larry: xi jinping sees democracy and the model of democracy in an open society and the rule of law as a threat to the china model. they have an increasingly global sense of this. this is where the truth is on our side and we need public diplomacy to pull back the

curtain wider, more vividly, and in the view of many more ordinary people. what is going on can only be described as gross eocolonialism. first of all, most of the bri construction is coming through loans and commercial rates that are really exploitative. china calls it, i think this is, if it is aid, it is a perverse kind. the classic instance of the sri lankan port, you get yourself $8 billion in debt and the chinese neo-colonialists say we can write that down if you give us your strategic port for 99 years. in australia, you have experience with this ourselves.

i think we just have to aggressively expose this. but it can't be all negative. we have got a lot of work to do i would say to revive maybe with a different kind of logic that re-energize western aid flows and capital flows, capital investment and infrastructure development in africa, if we don't want china being by default the major actor ere. the facts are on our side, the natural inclination of africans is on our side, and we need to organize our effort and story. ayaan: i want to use my one inute. to say something about free speech and intellectual honesty because we are in a university campus and we know there are problems going on here. i want to give you a demonstration. my colleague hr has said a few things about the muslim brotherhood. i hold a different view. i have a great deal of respect

for him and affection for him, but the fact i disagree with him i think the problems we are eeing a manifestation of violence, the subjugation of women, homophobia, i think that all of that is baked into the slamic cake. hr thinks islam is being perverted by bad people using it for other things. it is possible to sit on the same stage as grown-ups and disagree and share material with one another. you don't have to hate one another. if we can do this, demonstrate this, then i think we have hings going. [applause] thank you. [laughter] niall: it remains to me to thank my colleagues for their brilliant contributions, but to point out something very like tiananmen square might be going n in an african country, sudan

in khartoum and china backed by russia blocked a bit at the united nations security council to condemn the killing of civilians in that country. ladies and gentlemen, that is where we are in 2019. it may not be a cold war, but it doesn't feel like peace. [applause] >> thank you, what a wonderful discussion. thank you for coming and i hope you can all stay with us. we will have a reception in the pavilion and if you can't stay, will look forward to seeing you at our next event. good evening. [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org]

>> here's a look at our live coverage thursday. officials ands tech industry representatives talk about election security and voting system certification at an event hosted by the u.s. election assistance commission. rally in trump holds a manchester new hampshire as part of his reelection campaign. c-span2, campaign 2020 toverage with beddo o'rourke. coming up on today's washington journal, the trump administration's new public charge