 Let's jump in about, what is it now? Just over a week ago, I think, the Hong Kong, Apple Daily, I think Barry Weiss described it as a combination, New York Post with William Lloyd Garrison's, the liberator, a tabloid, but a voice for freedom in Hong Kong was forced to shut down. Apple Daily was published for the first time in 1995, and it's been a thorn in the side of the Communist Party, the Chinese Communist Party ever since. It has been a strong advocate for freedom, for Hong Kong, for liberty, for free speech. It has supported the student movement in Hong Kong, both 2014 and more recently in 2019. It was a strong advocate for free markets, for capitalism, and for everything Hong Kong represents. Leo, I did get your $100 question and I do have it here and I will get to it today, I promise. Now, this is an incredibly significant event because I think it represents, in some sense, the end of freedom in Hong Kong. The death of Hong Kong is I knew it, as many people knew it, as a bastion of freedom in Asia, really in the world. So I wanna say a few things about Hong Kong and about its significance and certainly about what it means to me and I think really means to anybody who values freedom and values capitalism. I often say in my talks, I used to say in my talks, I used to ask people how many of them I've ever been in Hong Kong and I'd say, before you die, before you die, visit Hong Kong. And in recent years, I've been saying, don't wait until before you die, do it soon because Hong Kong is not gonna be Hong Kong for very much longer and unfortunately that has come true. But Hong Kong is one of the most magnificent cities in all of human history. 70 years ago, it was a fishing village. There was nothing there. It was poor. Nothing really existed there. It's probably more than 70 years now, probably 80, 90 years now. After World War II, I mean, Hong Kong is, in the south of China, it's like an island off this area with lots of little islands. Right off the coast of China, I mean, right there, it's part of the geography of China. The British leased it in the late 19th century for 100 years and right after World War II, they appointed a governor for Hong Kong a governor that was a real classical liberal, a believer in freedom, a believer in free markets, a believer in free speech, a believer that government should be limited, restricted to the protection, I don't think he would put it this way, but basically the protection of individual rights, to protecting property rights, to protecting contracts and that government otherwise should stay out of it, should not intervene in people's lives. And Hong Kong during this period with basically very, very, very minimal economic intervention, very few regulations, almost no redistribution of wealth. I mean, it wasn't perfect from pretty early on, much of the land was owned by the states and much of the housing was owned by the state, not quite as bad as Singapore, but pretty bad by our standards. But other than that, that is the major way in which the state intervened in economies through land regulation, but other than that, it left the city alone and the city just blew up. It just expanded like crazy. And it went from a few tens of thousands to seven and a half million people today on a tiny little piece of land, a section that's on the island itself in Hong Kong is mostly mountain, steep mountain. And yet people managed to build skyscrapers on the slopes of this mountain. And right by the water, right at the bottom, across on the other side of the water, skyscrapers went up on that side as well. Whole neighborhoods got built. Again, you went from several tens of thousands to seven and a half million. You went from complete poverty at the end of World War II per capita GDP being higher than the United States of America. So it took the United States of America 250 years to do. Hong Kong did in 70 years. No natural resources, no indigenous people to exploit, no slavery supposedly to live off of. No, just individuals pursuing their life, trying to make a better life for themselves. Most of the population are people who fled. China or other parts of Asia and who came there with nothing, nothing. I mean, maybe to illustrate this, let me tell you the story of Jimmy Lai, L-A-I. Lai fled from mainland China when he was 12. I think it was 1949. He was a stowaway on a fishing boat, 12 year old. He came alone with no family and he found a job in Hong Kong at a sweatshop. In the garment industry, textiles, sweatshops, what so many people today would want to ban. No, we don't want sweatshops. They're awful. Never went to school, never had formal education. But while he was a fellow, you know, while he was a garment worker and built a garment business, he was exposed by people around him to the works of Hayek, Milton Friedman and other free market thinkers. And he became one of the strongest, loudest advocates of free markets in Hong Kong. By the 1980s, so 30 years later, Lai had built out a retail empire. His company called Giudano, it's called Giudano after New York Pizza Spot, became a massive success. He became a billionaire from sweatshop to billions. And he was focused on his garment empire. And then Tiananmen Square happened. To remind you, Tiananmen Square was a massacre that the Chinese Communist Party engaged in against its own people, its own students who were demanding more freedom, who had gone out into the center of cities all over China, demanding more freedom. The economy had been freed up, freed up a lot during the 1980s. And now they were demanding political freedom as well. They wanted a match, the economic freedom they were seeing and benefiting from with the political freedom that they now knew from traveling and from television from tourists visiting them existed in other countries. And the Communist Party in China suppressed them brutally. Nobody knows how many kids were killed in Tiananmen Square in 1989. Thousands, tens of thousands, we don't know. There is no official record Chinese government denies it even existed. Anyway, this event changed Lai's life. He had made his fortune. And now he was committed to fighting the Chinese Communist Party. China was also taking control over Hong Kong. And he feared the fate and the future of Hong Kong. To quote him, he says, I hated the bastards. I knew evil when I saw it and they are evil. He shifted his focus from making T-shirts and other garments to newspapers and media. And he built a media empire in Hong Kong. In the first edition of the Apple Daily, which he published, and it was published, I think, for the first time in 1995, they wrote, quote, we're convinced that Hong Kongers who are accustomed to freedom will not stay silent in the face of unreasonable restrictions and unfair treatments. For Hong Kongers are born with a passion for freedom. And they fought for that freedom. But that fight was costly. After years in which Lai's home was fire-bombed, and by the way, I'm taking some of this at least from Barry Weiss did a piece on this. Lai's home was fire-bombed, his office was ransacked, he was a target of assassination attempts. He refused to shut up. And yet on December 12th, 2020, Chinese authorities arrested Jimmy Lai and sent him to prison where he still sits. In 2014, he had taken to the streets in solidarity with the students who were leading what was known then as the Umbrella Revolution. You might remember that, Umbrella Movement. In 2019, when millions of Hong Kongers took to the street, he was out there using the printing presses of the Apple Daily to print pro-democracy, pro-freedom posters for them to carry. And he was out there in the streets with them. And indeed he's been arrested for being involved in illegal demonstrations when the National Security Law passed last year, which basically imposed the rule of the Chinese Communist Party on Hong Kong, gave them complete control. Lai knew it wouldn't go well. He encouraged people to leave. He helped people leave the island. He knew that Hong Kong was in trouble. But when he was told that he should get out, that he should leave, he refused. When he was asked why, he basically says, I don't wanna be an asshole. I've been part of this fight since 1997, since the Chinese took over. If I leave now and I leave all these young people here, what kind of guy am I now? What I have, this place gave me. I will fight on till the last day. Now he's in jail, fund authorized assembly. Now, over the last, what is it now? 10 days ago or so, previous week, the offices of the newspaper he founded were raided, computers were taken, five of the company's top executives and editors were arrested, companies assets were frozen, and the newspaper published its last edition on the 23rd of June, 2021, and shut its doors. They printed a million copies of that last edition, and it was sold out almost immediately. By noon, it was sold out. Now, many argue that it was the only newspaper in Hong Kong that actually spoke about freedom, that advocated for freedom that stood up to the Chinese, that all the other media in Hong Kong had lost their way, had sold out, had become vehicles for the Communist Party. There are pictures online, you can find them on Twitter and elsewhere, of the last few hours of the newspaper, the editors, the journalists, who courageously and bravely put out that last edition in spite of knowing that their names were being taken down. But to a large extent, this is a symbol of the end, the end of one of the greatest, most prosperous, most beautiful, most energetic, most free cities in human history. And I don't say that lightly. I mean, this is a city that ranked one or two on the Economic Freedom Index every single year. On both Economic Freedom Indexes. This year, one of the two Economic Freedom Indexes has taken them off the list. Why, you ask? Because they've decided that Hong Kong is no different than China. China basically controls Hong Kong. So they don't qualify anymore as a separate political entity, and therefore not on the list anymore. Since last year, pro-freedom, demonstrators, anybody speaking for freedom, speaking against the Chinese government has been arrested. Hundreds, thousands have been arrested in Hong Kong. People don't talk. People don't protest. The Chinese authorities. I mean, I remember this in 19, when the demonstrations were going on, the question is, would the Chinese go in? Would the Chinese actually, in a sense, invade Hong Kong? Would they put troops on the streets? Would they do a Chinaman Square in Hong Kong? And they didn't, because they were afraid. They were afraid of the world's response. They were afraid of being seen hunting down Hong Kong citizen students down little alleys in the streets of Hong Kong. If you ever meet in Hong Kong, you know, the streets are tiny. There are alleys, many of them up and down, and windy, and it's a crazy city to try to invade. So they didn't. The police chased after the demonstrators from place to place. So how did they get away with killing Hong Kong? How did they get away with this murder? Well, they used COVID. They used the fact that the world was distracted. They used the fact that most people in Hong Kong were now at home. They weren't out demonstrating. They weren't out in the streets. They used the fact that nobody was watching. And while nobody was watching, they put their police into the streets. They hunted down the people they had identified from previous demonstrations, arrested them and locked them up. They used the fact that the world was morally bankrupt and completely silent. The British might have said something at some point. But Donald Trump did nothing while thousands of people were being arrested. Joe Biden has done nothing. Not a peep. I mean, yes, he said something, and yes, Congress passed something. No condemnation. No bringing your ambassador home. No calling up the president of China and yelling at him. Nothing. Just a shrug, a few words here and there. Shiny city on the hill doesn't exist anymore. Not America, not Europe. The enlightenment values for which Hong Kong stood for. Hong Kong was the enlightenment, all lit up. If you'd ever seen the nightline skyline in Hong Kong, maybe the most beautiful in the world, if not very close. The energy in the streets, the passion of the people, the hard work of the people, the work ethic, the passion, but really the energy. When you walked around in Hong Kong, the energy of the streets and just the beauty and the sense of freedom one had, all gone silently into the night. Nobody complaining, nobody resisting, nobody saying a word, a few brave souls in Hong Kong itself standing up, a million people buying a newspaper as it dies. But from the U.S., from our political leaders, from my intellectuals, I mean Barry Rice wrote a very good piece. That's it. I have a few comments here and there. Nobody, nobody wants to stand up to them. We're afraid, we're cowards. And what do we stand for? If anything, we see more and more people advocating for the kind of system China has. Look, look how successful they are. We'll get to it in a minute. Look, look at how strong they are. Look at how quickly they got rid of COVID. Yeah, maybe it leaked from a lab, but they know how to deal with stuff like that in China. They have the balls. So what many of us feared would happen to Hong Kong when the Chinese took over in 1997. And some of us, me included, hoped, and I'd say for a few years thought what would actually happen was that China would take over Hong Kong. There's a small window in which that looked like it might happen. Looked like it was happening. No, unfortunately, certainly since the financial crisis with American weakness and American leadership, political, intellectual, philosophical, as weak as it is, was something. But since the financial crisis capitalism is passe, freedom is passe. We did so poorly. Nobody wants to emulate us. We're no longer a shiny city on a hill. And since then China's becoming more and more and more authoritarian. And I think it was emboldened by the Trump administration, like first by Obama, then by Trump to be more and more and more aggressive. And here we are today with basically Hong Kong dead. I'm gonna try to find somebody from Hong Kong that I can interview on the show. We'll see us in a few emails out of some of the people who hosted me there. The times that I visited and gave talks there. Hopefully we can find somebody who's willing to talk. But I can't imagine what they're going through. Can't imagine what those who value freedom and fought for freedom and who cared about freedom are going through right now. It must be quite devastating. Sad. It'll go down as one of the most significant events in the history of the early 21st century. And one of the signs of the decay and bankruptcy of the West are silence over all this is just horrific. What we need today, what I call the new intellectual would be any man or woman who is willing to think. Meaning any man or woman who knows that man's life must be guided by reason, by the intellect, not by feelings, wishes, wins or mystic revelations. Any man or woman who values his life and who does not want to give in to today's cult of despair, cynicism and impotence and does not intend to give up the world to the dark ages and to the role of the collectivist broods. All right, before we go on, reminder, please like the show. We've got 163 live listeners right now, 30 likes. That should be at least a hundred. I figure at least a hundred of you actually like the show. Maybe they're like 60 of the Matthews out there who hate it, but at least the people who are liking it, I wanna see a thumbs up, there you go. Start liking it, I wanna see that go to a hundred. It all it takes is a click of a thing whether you're looking at this. And you know the likes matter. 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