 So, I'm reading the Los Angeles Times about Saturday's synagogue standoff in Texas. And it says, the Rabbi of a Texas synagogue, it's a reform synagogue, which is about the most liberal of the major Jewish denominations, Rabbi of a Texas synagogue said Monday that he threw a chair at the gunman and then escaped with two other hostages after a 10-hour standoff, crediting past security training for getting himself and his congregation out safely. So he threw a chair at the gunman. Violence, right? Sometimes violence is the right response, right? If he made a bad decision with throwing a chair, that could have escalated. So, sometimes a violent reaction, a tough reaction will escalate, make things worse. Sometimes a tough reaction, a violent reaction will end things and make things better, right? So, sometimes violence is the answer. You often hear this moronic saying that violence is never the answer. Well, violence is sometimes the answer, right? For everything, there's a time and a place under heaven. So, a lot of talk about morality, it focuses on just one value, such as civility or loving kindness or compassion or inclusion. Those values may have their place, but all values exist in a constellation and are competing with other values. And so, sometimes honesty is the right thing to do. Sometimes lying is the right thing to do. Sometimes violence is the right thing to do. So, Dak Prescott, the Dallas Cowboys quarterback, praised the Dallas Cowboy fans who threw debris at the referees leaving the stadium. So one, that was a terrible thing for the franchise quarterback, the Dallas Cowboys to say. And two, that was a terrible thing for the fans to do. And that situation, violence is not the answer, right? One situation, throwing a chair is apparently the right answer. Another situation, throwing debris at the refs, that is not the right answer, right? So, all actions have to be judged within their context, within their situation. And so, this idea that violence is always wrong and violence never solves anything, that's absurd, right? Violence is sometimes the answer, all right? And I like how the rabbi says he credits past security training for resolving this situation. So yeah, the more you train, if it's good training, the better situated you'll be. So you do have to train for challenging, horrible, violent situations. But then the second paragraph, the rabbi says he let the gunman in Saturday because he appeared to need shelter. Now, what kind of security training says, oh, you let total strangers into your building, particularly your synagogue, because they seem to need shelter? No security training would say that. That's absurd, that's the opposite of security training. So one thing I noticed after eight weeks in Australia, including five weeks in Sydney, which is like number four safer city in the world according to a recent survey, right? How much more stressful life is in Los Angeles and the big city because you have to constantly say no to other people and constantly be on guard and protect yourself against groups that have a very high likelihood of committing crime. And you don't let someone into your home who's a stranger who needs shelter. You don't let someone generally speaking into your business or to your church or to your synagogue or your mosque or your bowling club just because they need shelter. Now in Australia, you could do that because Australia is a very safe society with high social trust, but in America, we don't have high social trust. We don't have very much in common with our fellow citizens that you have like Jews or a tribe and you have African Americans are often very tribal, Mexican Americans are very tribal and Anglo Americans don't tend to be tribal explicitly, but maybe there's some implicit and okay, these different tribes generally speaking, you know, don't have a lot to do with each other if it's not absolutely necessary because in America, we don't tend to inhabit the same moral universe with our fellow citizens. We inhabit the same moral universe with our fellow Orthodox Jews or our fellow Anglicans or our fellow Seventh-day Adventists perhaps or now our fellow Atonies or whatever your in-group is, but we don't generally share in America a moral universe with our fellow citizens. So it's much more stressful here in Los Angeles, I'm just noticing getting off the plane and navigating traffic because you don't share that moral universe. You can't you can't predict how people will react and then you've got these ranting crazy people and these math freaks and these homeless who almost all of them are mentally ill and or addicted to drugs and alcohol. And so you have to constantly, you know, be prepared to say no to distance yourself to, you know, not let down your guard when you're mixing with this wide variety of people with whom you don't share a moral universe. If you don't share a moral universe with people, you have to be on guard. And that's tiring. So it's much more tiring and stressful to live in a big city in America compared to a big city in Australia or a big city in many of the Scandinavian countries. There are high rates of social trust in places like Denmark. So I can't believe this guy, he let the gunman in because he appeared to need shelter. All right. So compassion and helping the homeless and offering people shelter is a wonderful quality, but you don't want to just distribute it without discrimination. You need to discriminate. You can't just let people in. He let the gunman in because he thought the gunman needed shelter. That's insane. That's absurd. We can't let people into our lives, into our homes, into our businesses, into our houses of worship just because we think they need shelter. In America, in multicultural, multiracial America where we don't share a moral universe with many of our fellow citizens, you have to constantly be prepared to discriminate, to be on guard and to say no and to distance yourself and to create a safe space within your in-group and exclude outsiders fairly rigorously. Someone who needs shelter. The odds are about 90%, they're mentally ill and addicted. You don't just bring those people into your synagogue. I mean, that's insane. He said the man was not threatening or suspicious at first. Yeah, people who want shelter, they're not generally going to be terribly threatening or suspicious at first. Later he heard a gun click as he was praying. You want to be able to pray without hearing gun clicks, be very discriminating about the people you let into your space to pray with you. And on this similar theme, popular talk radio host Michael Jackson dies at 87, so he dominated the airways at ABC Radio in Southern California from about 1966 to 1998. And what he's well known for was his civility. But he was thrashed in the ratings during the 1990s by the rise of the brash Rush Limbaugh. Now civility is a wonderful virtue. Compassion is a wonderful virtue. Telling the truth is a wonderful virtue. But all virtues have to operate within situations and contexts and constellations, right? So civility is just one of many virtues, right? There are a lot of things in many situations that are far more important than civility, right? So the rabbi escaping from the gunman, right, throwing a chair at the gunman. That was not very civil to throw the chair at the gunman, but that was the right thing to do. Like throwing the chair and getting away from the gunman was 10,000 times more important than civility. So civility is a wonderful trait in talk radio hosts, but it's not necessarily the most important trait. So Michael Jackson said he refused to sacrifice his signature civility for a bump in the ratings. It says, I've been overly polite to guess, showing them greater deference, but I'm not going to become less polite. Rude-ness is such an easy excuse for not doing your homework. So yeah, civility is a wonderful trait, but it operates within a context, within a constellation sometimes, even as a talk radio host, there are a lot of traits far more important than civility, such as, you know, having something important to say or having something new to say. So what Rush Limbaugh launched was a more politically incorrect, a brusher, more visceral approach to politics. And I think some of it was overdone and some of it went too far. And I think much of the sum total of what Rush Limbaugh has wrought has made America a worse place. I think generally speaking, what I noticed in myself and in other people, the more they listen to right wing talk radio, the angrier they get, right? So the angrier you get, the less effective you get. So some people are able to appreciate justice entertainment and sometimes some useful information, but I noticed, you know, a wide number of people just get angry listening to talk radio, right? So when you get angry, that usually doesn't serve you. There are situations where anger serves you. If you're in an alley and someone's trying to kill you or rob you and you have a good chance to defend yourself, then getting angry is the right response, right? If you need energy to do certain important things to take care of certain difficult issues, if you need to have a tough conversation with your spouse, with your sister, with your employer, with your employees, with your neighbor, right? If you need to have some to do some difficult things that are not ordinarily within, you know, your comfort level and you have to get out of your comfort level to do these important things that kind of go against your nature. If you need to confront people and you don't like to confront, then getting angry can serve you, right? When does anger serve you? When it enables you, gives you the power to take care of things immediately, right? Anger that drags on day after day, week after week, month after month, doesn't serve you. But anger in the moment that enables you to get something done that gives you the courage to go out there and do things that you otherwise would not do. Maybe you become a public crusader for safe streets, or you become a public crusader for clean and fair elections, or you become a public crusader to help the homeless, or, you know, whatever you need to do, whatever your mission is, and if you wouldn't otherwise have the fuel, if you wouldn't have the power, if you wouldn't have the drive to get done what you need to get done, then anger can provide that fuel, but it comes at an enormous price. So it works when you need it right in the moment. So let's say someone comes into the chat and says something really obnoxious, and I just confront the person and get angry, right, and deal with the problem, then that's a useful way of harnessing the power of anger to do what needs to be done. If you need to clean up your life, if you need to confront someone, if you need to do something difficult, and if you can make an improvement to your life right now, then, yeah, anger serves you, right? In the moment, cleaning up a mess in your life, yeah, anger serves you. Like, if someone's taking advantage of you, if someone's deliberately stepping on your toes, if you need to confront someone and, you know, set them straight, you know, set a boundary with someone, let them know that that sort of behavior is not okay, then anger serves you. But day in, day out, week in, week out, just like being angry at Jews, being angry at blacks, being angry at Democrats, being angry at liberals or Republicans or talk radio, that's not going to serve you. And so what I noticed with a lot of talk radio, it largely depends on anger, because anger is like the easiest emotion to immediately tap into when you're doing a show on politics, right? You get something that's visceral, right? It's a hot button issue. And like, it's a lot easier to tap into people's hatred and anger than it is to appeal to the better angels of people's nature. So I'm a right-winger, so you'd think that I'd automatically side with right-wings, syndicated talk radios, you know, just a great thing for America. But much of its lowest common denominator is just going for, it's revenge porn. It's hate porn. It's easy porn. It's just quick, easy, visceral fuel to connect people and to grab their attention. It's far easier to grab people's attention by getting them angry than by enlightening them, by inspiring them, right? You get much more engagement with a social media post or a social media video if it appeals to the visceral emotions of anger and disgust and rage, right? That's the easiest way to get ratings and to get engagement. And you see that with the pundits. They generally play to their particular crowds. Ben Shapiro says the things that make conservatives happy. And Dennis Prager says the things that make his crowd happy. And left-wing pundits play to their crowd, and they kind of rile up their base. And that is good for the career of the pundit who does that. It's good for his income. It's good for his fame. It's good for his social status. It's probably bad for society. So as far as I'm concerned, especially all pundits are pretty much useless. I make occasional exceptions for Ann Coulter. I think Steve Saylor is valuable. And occasional exceptions for Tucker Carlson, he does some valuable things. But he does so much stupid, irresponsible, low-brow, pandering to the worst inclinations of his base that I'm not sure if Tucker Carlson does more good than bad. Do you know why they all do this? Because the older, more effective technique of having a really pretty girl on hand is denied them. So talk radio is largely a rage machine. One thing I would say for Rush Limbaugh is he recognizes primarily in an entertainment medium. And I do not remember feeling enraged by listening to Rush Limbaugh. So I would consistently feel more enraged after listening to Dennis Prager. And I haven't listened much to Sean Hannity or who's that screaming guy, Jewish guy, conservative, one of the top talk radio host, Mark Levine, Mark Levin, like it sounds like a screaming homeless guy. Obviously, his audience is all about riling people up. Now, I like a lot of what John and Ken do in KFI. Talk radio in Los Angeles, they watch out for the average tax-paying resident of Southern California. But again, it's a rage machine. And just like constantly stoking rage, I don't think that really serves people. Now, question in the chat, do I think I have a positive effect on people who listen to me? Yeah, I think I have a positive effect. You're not going to come away from my show, generally speaking, more enraged to the extent that I have any effect on people. I think I might give them an unexpected insight or some useful sources of information. And yeah, I think I, generally speaking, have either no effect or I think I have a mildly positive effect on some listeners. So some people get much more benefit from me than others. So I think people who have suffered or continue to suffer from any of the same addictions or troubles that I've had may get some benefit from like hearing what they're struggling with explicated. So I think a lot of people have troubles. They have misery, they have, their life isn't working, but they can't put a name to it. They can't articulate what's happening. It's just kind of hanging on them kind of a dark cloud or they're just consistently failing in one area of their life. I think some of my streams, people might get words, ideas, concepts, insights, analogies, metaphors that speak to what's troubling them and makes it much more clear. And perhaps encourages them to go get some help, whether it's therapeutic or becoming religious or meditation or yoga or Alexander Technique or 12-step programs, whatever it is. Homeless people have been getting a lot of bad press lately. Because for a while, there is a natural human inclination to feel compassion for the homeless. But there's also a natural human inclination to stay away from people who are obviously deeply troubled and disproportionately dangerous. And so the worse the homeless behave, the more people move away from compassion and towards restriction. So the better homeless behave, then the more people will be interested in helping them out. Am I angry at Richard Spencer? I don't feel any anger towards Richard Spencer. I think with most people, if you have an ongoing anger with someone, you put them in the wrong category. Once you put someone in the correct category, then you'll no longer have undue expectations for them. So Richard Spencer is an attention-seeking provocateur. And he's very good at that. Ben Shapiro takes the most conservative positions possible. And he's fairly good at articulating the most conservative positions possible. Dennis Prager is a talk radio host who has a background in Judaism and he's fairly good at bringing the Bible into modern day political and cultural issues. But he's not a scholar. So once you put people in the category, like I am an eccentric 55-year-old bachelor who has struggled with a lot of emotional addictions and had some recovery from them and made some improvements with his life and has read a lot of books and has experienced some things that may be of interest or used to other people. But I'm not really a scholar. Now I'm not a highly accomplished businessman. I'm not a highly accomplished media personality. I'm not a deeply learned Jew. I'm not the epitome of love and compassion. I'm an eccentric 55-year-old bachelor who's had some experiences and has some ability to articulate various parts of life that some people might find useful. So when you put me in the category eccentric 55-year-old bachelor who has an above-average ability with words and probably reads more books than 99% of people, that's all you should expect from me. I've never listened to any talk radio for more than about three minutes, says Robert. The government stayed a week at a Christian homeless shelter. Yeah, so if you wanna help the homeless, I think go volunteer within a structure where there are people who know what they're doing. So I think there probably are effective ways of helping the homeless but just going out on the street and giving people money or inviting people into your home or to your synagogue or to your church, I don't think it's so effective. Robert says, I miss Milton Rosenberg blasting out across America on WGN. So I mean, some of us have problems connecting normally with people in everyday life, okay? Me, like pretty much every time I have made a big move in my life, I then spend significant amounts of time writing letters to people who I used to live near and among and hung out with. I'd rather write letters and mythologize the past than build new connections in the present. So I think most, if you're watching me, the odds are you probably don't connect normally with other people and because we are wide to connect, we have to connect. If we don't connect normally with people in everyday life, then we're gonna seek out a connection through addiction, either drugs or processes or through parasocial relationships. So I have a parasocial relationship with many people in my chat. Like I not met them in real life, I don't see them in real life, but I have a sort of relationship, a parasocial. So para means, what does para mean? Come on. Associated with, closely resembling, all right? So para, social. So this resembles a social relationship, like if we were gathering at synagogue once a week and sitting around at Kiddish and talking about life. So if you, in a highly diverse, highly conflicted America where we don't feel like we share a moral universe with many of the people around us, we will often go online to try to get that connection that we're missing in our real life. So our real life, social life is not fulfilling us. We can't talk about the things that are most important to us. We can't talk about controversial issues of race and religion and sex. And so we look for places where we can talk about these controversial things. And so we come to the online world and have a virtual relationship, a parasocial relationship from LA to the subways, beneath New York City, the message is all the same. Stay away from the homeless. Well, they're disproportionately troubled. So if you're gonna work with the homeless, you should probably get some training and you should probably operate within some kind of structure. Because if you just go off on your own, very likely to do more harm than good. Bruce says, Luke helps me to be a more sophisticated racist and anti-Semite. So I don't believe in moral categories of racism and anti-Semitism. Obviously different groups have different interests. We're gonna see the world differently, experience the world differently and have different moral universes. And so that can be called racist and bigoted and anti-Semitic. I don't think that way. There are a substantial number of Jews who have instinctive negative views of non-Jews and there are an equal number of non-Jews who have instinctive negative views of Jews. And so people have life experiences. If you have a lot of negative experiences with members of a certain group, you're very likely to have negative views of that group. Luke brought me to Deep Left Joke, Kenneth Brown. And for that, I am eternally grateful. Luke, you need a prop for these live streams. I suggest you get a haircut and wear a suit and tie for these live streams. I was just planning to do a two-minute live stream, but I just got carried away. I just stimulated by the chat and I was just enjoying my conversation so much that I couldn't stop. So normally I'd put on a nicer shirt and do better lighting. And I would have shaved all my hair off three months ago, but I kept getting all these compliments about my longer hair. So I'm letting it go, letting my hair grow until I hear more comments, hey, you need to get a haircut. Then, oh, I really like you with your longer hair. Luke is like my little brother, he's like my bogey cousin from Down Under. In fact, more Gentiles hate Jews than Jews hate Gentiles. Yeah, because there are hundred times more Gentiles than Jews. I'm not saying getting short, just comb it. I didn't take a comb to Australia because I normally don't comb my hair because I don't have enough hair to comb. So just run my fingers through it after a shower or when I'm in the ocean, just, there goes my yarmulke. Oh my God. So I think I'm doing pretty good considering the Dallas Cowboys had such a devastating loss yesterday. So Steve Saylor notices that the front lash is trending on Twitter. Okay, where's my kippah? So Norm MacDonald had this great joke that his big fear was that some Islamic terrorists would get their hands on a nuclear weapon and explode it and kill hundreds of thousands of people. But his big fear was that this would precipitate anti-Islam attitudes. And so on Twitter, the top story was the synagogue hostage taking in Texas. But then the second top story, now Twitter selects which stories they wanna highlight in their Twitter trending section. So this is curated, it's overwhelmingly done with the leftist agenda. So the number two story that Twitter wants to promote after the Texas synagogue hostage taking is Islamophobia, right? Let's not fall into Islamophobia when a Muslim takes a rabbi and three congregants hostage in a synagogue in Texas. So Wajat Ali, January 15th after the synagogue hostage taking, he tweets, you're about to hear some ugly and vicious Islamophobia and anti-Muslim bigotry this weekend from elected officials, commentators, even mainstream media. Hope I'm wrong. People will use it to divide Jewish and Muslim communities so their political agenda, don't fall for it. So Muslim just as a category doesn't really have much meaning. You don't really know anything that someone's a Muslim. There are plenty of Muslims, there are plenty of Muslim areas and groups that never commit terrorism. So just like someone's Jewish, it doesn't really tell you much. But if you know that someone's Ashkenazi Jewish, their ancestors come from Eastern Europe, then you can get more of a picture of someone or if someone is, his family comes from the Middle East for five generations, comes from Iraq for five generations, Iraqi, then you start to get more of a specific understanding. So I think it's most useful for the sake of reality is understand religion as a subset of culture. So just Jewish or Christian or Muslim doesn't really mean anything or Buddhist, right? You need to get more specifics and then the picture starts falling in. So I see religion as a subset of culture. So Southeast Asian Islam is very different from Iranian Islam, which is very different from the Islamic state. All right, so to the best of my knowledge, we haven't had Islamic terrorists from Iran go into the West and start killing people. That's been the Sunni, certain Sunni Muslims have done that, but Shia Muslims have not done that. So just knowing that someone's Jewish, Christian Muslims doesn't really tell you anything. An African Christian, right, is not gonna have very much in common, generally speaking, with a Christian from Northern Europe and or a Christian from the favelas in Brazil, right? So often the culture or the race will tell you more about a person than their religious identification. So in Africa, when the Hutus and the Tutsis were going at it, like one side was genociding the other, there was Seventh-day Adventists who were leading the genocide. Now generally speaking, Seventh-day Adventists are really peaceful people, but in that particular African context, Seventh-day Adventists were leading the genocide. So in that context, knowing that some of the leaders of the genocide or Seventh-day Adventists doesn't really tell you anything. So yeah, Norm MacDonald had this great tweet, what terrifies me is if ISIS were to detonate a nuclear device and kill 50 million Americans, imagine the backlash against peaceful Muslims. So Norm MacDonald, what an under-owner. I read a great profile of him in the Washington Post and he would get all these opportunities and he would just blow it. Like he wouldn't get back to people. He wouldn't be a joy to work with. So very funny guy, but incredible self-destructive tendencies. Now why are so many people dying in car accidents and why are so many pedestrians dying? So the racial reckoning has not just led to this massive increase in murder rates. So murder rates have generally speaking gone up in America's biggest cities by an average of about 25% since George Floyd died, but it's not just murder rates and not just all sorts of crime rates and we saw what happened to those trains in Los Angeles getting looted and we have smashing grabs at many of LA and San Francisco's most exclusive stores, but why do we also have this massive increase in traffic deaths? Like what's wrong with American driving in 2021 and is it connected to the massive increase in crime? So Steve Saylor writes about this, evidence piles up the twin historic disasters of 2020, the dreaded COVID pandemic and the celebrated racial reckoning have left Americans crazier and lazier. So if you're on the right, you should have a negative, a skeptical perspective on human nature, whether you use a Christian language such as original sin or you have some other approach, but to be on the right is to be skeptical of human nature. And so if you remove the safeguards, if you remove deterrence from people, they will automatically start to behave worse. They will drive worse and they will commit more crimes and they will generally be more lazy and irresponsible. So Steve Saylor tabulated year-end homicide counts, 2021 versus 2019, from 44 of the 50 biggest cities in America found out the killings were up 45% in 2021 versus 2019. So this is overwhelmingly due to the racial reckoning that took off after the death of George Floyd. Now, what about year-end traffic fatalities for 2021? Well, car crash deaths rose 17% from 2019 to 2021. And I think for similar reasons that we have come to glorify criminals like George Floyd, like what happened to George Floyd was horrible, but he was not someone to be venerated, right? He had a long criminal history and this guy is venerated is insane. So when you start venerating bad guys, when you start venerating people do horrible things, you're gonna get more horrible behavior. So what's going on in our country, what's going on in our roads, bad behavior is being incentivized because police are being encouraged to back off policing. And because human nature is not basically good, then people start acting out more. So in 2020, the quantity of miles driven dropped versus 2019. So you would have thought that that would have reduced car deaths, but the quality of the driving plummeted. So total miles driven in 2020 down 13% from 2019, but deaths per million miles driven went up 23%. And all things being equal, traffic deaths should be dropping because we have superior technology. Now, in 2021, we had miles driven rebounded to only a few percent less than 2019. And but deaths per million miles driven continued at the awful rate of 2020. So when everything shut down in the spring of 2020, many drivers took advantage of empty streets and they started driving recklessly. The Utah Highway Patrol wound up issuing 31% more tickets than 2019 to drivers speeding over 100 miles per hour. And despite all this worse driving, American cops prudently ticketed drivers less, right? You incentivize the cops from backing off from enforcement. So we have worse behavior, more criminality, more bad driving, and cops are enforcing the law less. It's a horrible combo. So in Indiana, Indiana State Police issued 25,000 of your speeding tickets in 2020. So a 41% decrease in Connecticut. Number of traffic stops dropped from 512,000 in 2019 to 188,000 in 2021. So number of motorists killed by being ejected, which is perhaps the most spectacular way to go, right Steve Saylor here, increased 20% in 2020. So drivers are getting crazier and lazier but not even bothering to buckle their seatbelts. So deaths with an unbuckled seatbelt were up 15%. People are not gonna buckle their seatbelts as often if police are backing off on enforcement. Now you may think, oh, legalizing marijuana, that's gonna cut down on drunk driving. But instead, Americans are driving both drunk and high. The 60% of fatal crashes in 2020 involved impaired drivers in Washington. And an increasing number of these DUI crashes involve multiple substances, such as alcohol and marijuana. So after George Floyd died in late May 2020, our establishment decided that our most pressing problem in this country is too much law and order. That's just a terrible message to send in a country like America that's so diverse and where we don't share a moral universe with our fellow citizens. So we don't have social cohesion and social trust. And so we had an explosion of bad behavior, lazy behavior and criminal behavior. So blacks died in car wrecks 36% more often in 2020 than in 2019. Less enforcement, less fewer cops, fewer traffic stops, more bad behavior, more deaths. It's like with the civil rights. Once we, America passed massive civil rights legislation in the mid 1960s, the black crime rate skyrocketed and the black family, the quality of the black family life dramatically declined. So police retreat to the donuts and most everybody will then behave worse, but some groups will behave worse, worse than others. And why does this happen? Because cops figured out by June 2020 that our elite wanted to turn cops into the face of white supremacy. You know, over traffic stops gone wrong. So cops have backed off from enforcing the law. So we've, we've synchronized criminals over cops. And as a result, we've got a ton more dead bodies. So murders and car crashes tend to go up and down together. So the Ferguson effect, murders went up in 2016 by 23% and highway mortality went up by 15%. Then both measures fell during the first three years of the Trump administration before then shooting up since the death of George Floyd. So the Ferguson effect and the Floyd effect have given us a massive increase in murders and in car deaths. Root causes are both depressed police and exalted criminals. When you exalt criminals, valorize criminals, praise criminals and you demean police. This is what you get. And the degree of correlation in the rise of driving demisers correlates with the increase in the motor rate at that city level. So you have the worst increase in car fatalities in Minnesota, home to George Floyd. So Minneapolis where you had, you know, the mayor said, let the looters burn the police station, right? And Minneapolis, you know, launched the defund the police movement. Minneapolis then suffered the fifth biggest increase in homicide. So up 100% in 2019. Austin homicides went up 178%. Auto casualties grew 36%. Portland had 150% increase in murders, 34% increase in traffic mayhem. So in 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic in Seattle combined with the George Floyd protests prompted the Seattle police to reassess relying on police enforcement as a go-to tool. So patrol, a lot of cop patrols stopped, right? And then as a result, you got this tremendous ex, this tremendous jump in murders and traffic deaths. So remember the Obama administration turned the Ferguson police department upside down to try to find the racism it knew it must be there. Couldn't find anything. So then the Department of Justice announced, well, Ferguson was operating a speed trap. And this was considered giant national news. Speed traps are good. Like there are far, far, far fewer car deaths in Australia because there's so much law enforcement. There's so many ways of tracking how fast people are driving. There are drones, there are speed cameras. So people in Australia drive much more carefully. As a result, there are far fewer car deaths in Australia. So there's no defund the police movement to speak of in Australia. So Australians take it for granted that you need police and you need police to enforce the law. As a result, Australia has very little significant crime. And then we've got this crazy Vision Zero strategy. The mayor of LA has embraced this, Eric Garcetti, to eliminate all traffic fatalities by trying to rebuild roads to make them too scary to drive fast on and deemphasize law enforcement. So American cities overwhelmingly operated, run by Democrats, they're all adopting this Vision Zero strategy, Daydream, and deemphasizing law enforcement. And as a result of these policies, you have a massive increase in traffic deaths. All right, so not only are we not getting closer to Vision Zero for traffic deaths, we're getting farther away, we're having this massive explosion as a result in part of these Vision Zero strategies. So Steve Saylor notes Vision Zero to reminiscent of the 2002 No Child Left Behind legislation that George Bush and Ted Kennedy cooked up to mandate that all school children score, at least an average score by 2014. So didn't work, right? You didn't change racial gaps in education with this legislation. So setting up some clearly ridiculous goal of eliminating all fatal accidents isn't doing much good in the real world. Traffic deaths are up 17%. Now, the Japanese have set a challenging but reasonable goal of cutting fatal car crashes from 16,765 in 1970 to below 2,000 by 2025. They are on track. So in 2021, then you had 2,636 car deaths. So Japan, Syria's country, United States is increasingly a land of wishful thinking and make-believe. Bye-bye.