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The Marxist and the Islamo-fascist deconstruction of the West is gaslighting Westerners into abandoning their roots.

This was the guts of Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s contributions to the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) 2026.

Holding fast to the theme of “Reconstruction”, Hirsi pointed out that the Western institutions she encountered after fleeing real oppression elevated individual responsibility.

Now, she argued, “the Islamists and the communists among us are saying let’s shift these institutions away from this focus on the individual towards the collective.”

The consequence of the West letting this go unchecked, Ayaan asserted, is the West becoming the same oppressive hell she fled.

Deconstruction Is Not Inevitable

That diagnosis doesn’t mean an inevitable death and/or replacement.

Talking about the importance of ARC, Ayaan said, “I think it’s what this conference is about, which is we can explain the deconstruction that’s been happening in the last few decades.”

“It is time to reconstruct all of these institutions back to focusing on individual well-being. Brick by brick and piece by piece rebuild all of these institutions.”

For Ayaan, what this involves is not “giving in to the demands of Islamists.”

“Confront them with the question, why are you here if Sharia law is so fantastic?

“Why are so many people in Muslim countries moving to the infidel West?”

The same approach applies to the democratic socialists, who have gained power in New York and the Fabians.

“There’s this idealist romantic story, that if only communism was done one more time, this time differently, it’s going to yield something else.”

“It will not,” she exclaimed.

What it “is going to yield is the exact same thing as it yields everywhere from Mogadishu to Caracas to the Soviet Union: lots of dead people, starvation, and hunger.”

“There is no alternative to what Christian Western civilisation has built,” the former atheist added.

‘I Make Sure They See’: How Ali Trains Her Children

Interviewed by Konstantin Kisin, when asked how kids who haven’t shared Ayaan’s experiences could be persuaded to avoid the same dire outcomes, she replied, “With my own children on a very micro level, I make sure that they have a choice and that they see.”

“I tell them about my life, and I show it to them, and they know.”

That can be hard, she said.

For instance, “my 14-year-old finds my life as a 14-year-old so unfathomable, as if I am from a different planet.”

“I think it’s very easy when you live in the West, and you breathe liberty, that you can get yourself into this delusional state of believing that there is some utopia out there.”

“What we’ve seen in the deconstruction period is all this censorship, the self-censorship, the political correctness.”

“The pretence that there are other systems and other ways of doing things and other gods that are better than what you already have.”

There is no alternative to the West, Ayaan declared.

“The one thing I love about the West is that we engage in self-reflection. We write these autopsies about why we fail.”

“And if we are honest about why we get things wrong, we can get them right.”

Collectivism and Abdicating Individual Responsibility

Targeting the differences between the West and the culture she was raised in, Ayaan recalled, “When I lived in Somalia and in Saudi Arabia and in Ethiopia, we used to scapegoat freely.”

“It’s the Jews who did it. It’s the Westerners who did it. Something was always happening to us as a collective.”

“We never took individual responsibility, because we weren’t allowed to be individuals.”

Conversely, in the West, Ayaan concluded, “you have a society that nurtures the individual, and you become an individual.”

“You become responsible. You are held accountable. And we’ve built institutions that are geared towards this.”

Asked by Kisin about counter-arguments about problems in the West being caused by hyper-individualism and narcissism, Ayaan answered, “I think that is a caricature of the system.”

“It is true that individualism can lead to extreme selfishness and narcissism.

“But again, the Christian story, the Western civilisational story, has the remedy for that. It is built into the system.”

It comes back to the fear of God. These days we fear everything else.

“We were checked by these biblical truths. In every institution, some form of accountability was built into it.”

“And what we did was remove these layers of accountability by labelling them white supremacist structures.”

That’s not what accountability and individual responsibility are. Those are, Ayaan concluded, “superficial accusations and they’ve been effective.”

Pointing directly at the gaslighting manipulation aspect of those accusations, she stated, “They work on you, and if you respond to it then it becomes easy to smuggle in these bad ideas, and you can have no push-back.”

In her conclusion, Ayaan slammed the West’s predominantly left-wing elite for importing incompatible cultures, saying, “It is not possible anymore for any Western European leader to go to any part of the third world and lecture them about human rights with atrocities like that taking place here.”

“Anytime you take the unit of well-being and shift it away from the individual to the group, you are going to have problems.

“We are seeing them today.

“When I came to this society, I could walk day and night freely, bicycle about 24 hours a day if I wanted to, wearing whatever I wanted to.

“A few decades on, we’re in a place where women are afraid to go out, where we have rape gangs.”

This was the first of two standout ARC 2026 talks featuring Hirsi.

Reconstructing the West

In the second, a panel that included Rod Dreher, Johannes Hartl and James Orr, Ayaan shared the analogy of a garden.

Unpacking the Oz Guinness analogy, she said, “we’ve neglected to take care of the weeds and look after the seed packets.”

“The seedbeds, or if you want to use an analogy of a battlefield, the battlefield for Western civilisation is in the hearts and minds of the young people, little girls and little boys, students at universities.

“Those seeds, the hearts and minds of young people have been filled with weeds.”

They’re captured by the tyranny of feelings.

Reconstructing the West requires rediscovering God.

“The only way we can get rid of this tyranny of feeling is to reclaim faith, hope, and rationality, reason,” Ayaan said.

“And then of course, [as Rod Dreher] talked about grace, forgiveness, and the hope of resurrection.”

The next necessary step to restoration is acknowledging where we’ve gone wrong, she explained.

Bad ideas are spreading like weeds because they have spread without correction.

It’s time to tend to the garden.

While leaving out any mention of God, The Sydney Morning Herald recounted Hirsi’s words, describing them as “galvanising.”

Her message, they said, “dominated the opening sessions of a conference.”

According to the SMH, 4,000 attended this year’s ARC event.

It’s worth adding that Ayaan’s assertions confidently align with an 1889 statement from J.C Ryle, who wrote, “Cold indeed, and dead, must that heart be which can study the condition of Africa, China, and Hindostan, and not thank God that he lives in Christian England.”

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Image via screenshot of YouTube.