“He came to visit a home that I was renting in Karachi, and he went off for an interview. And he never came back. The man whom he was supposed to interview had set a trap for Danny. It was actually a kidnapping scheme. And Danny was never to be seen again.”

In 2002, Wall Street Journal correspondent Asra Nomani was in Pakistan to investigate the Islamist ideology behind the 9/11 attacks—in defiance of State Department warnings—when her colleague, Daniel Pearl, was kidnapped by ISIS terrorists—and brutally beheaded.

“That was the moment that I knew, deep in my heart, that we were in this war with this extremism. And what was that extremism defined by? It was defined by sectarianism and it was defined by the most illiberal of ideas, which is that there is a hierarchy of human value in the world,” explains Nomani. “And that’s when I first confronted the fundamental idea of ‘identity’ as a weapon.”

Since then, Nomani has become an activist on many fronts, first as a Muslim reformer—“I, as a Muslim feminist, was declared ‘Islamophobic’ because I dared to challenge the sexism within my faith and the intolerance,” she says—and now as an ardent advocate of parental rights.

“They want a dumbing down of the United States of America, and that is why they came after my son’s school,” says Nomani.

She is the author of “Woke Army: The Red-Green Alliance That Is Destroying America’s Freedom.” We discuss her book and talk liberal values, the line between free speech and character assassination, Big Tech, and soft power.

“Soft power can be more damaging and can weaken a nation and a people even more than bullets or bombs,” says Nomani.