 But I want us to, this is a weekend to celebrate. I want us to focus on that, to focus on what this country represents, what this country has been, can be, should be, and will be once more with your hard work. And I really want to focus on, in that sense, to the extent that Hong Kong was a great place. It's a truly great place, maybe the greatest of the 20th century. It's because it was a little America. It was because it adopted American values. It was because it was unyielding with regard to those values, at least until the last few years. These are American values, and yet the values that are America are not bounded by geography. They're certainly not bounded by nationality, or by race, or by ethnicity, or by anything like that. These are universal values. Universal values that have been articulated in this country, articulated first in this country, and really, to some extent, this country was the only one that explicitly articulated it. And for much of this country's history, it has tried, at least, to live up to them. They're quite making it, never living fully up to the ideals. But it has tried. So what are those ideals? What makes America America? What is it that we celebrate on the Fourth of July? It is, in my view, the signing of the most important political document in human history. Not just because it founded America, the greatest country in human history. But because it set in motion freedom, liberty across the world. It changed people's attitude towards their own lives and towards the role of the state everywhere in the world. The Declaration of Independence has been felt in every corner of this planet. Its impact is there. You might not often see it. It might be pushed to the margins during certain periods of time. But that spirit, the spirit of the Declaration, is what keeps this world going. That spirit of the Declaration is what keeps any kind of hope in the world today still alive. It's that spirit of the Declaration that animates any freedom fighters, liberty fighters, anywhere in the world who are truly fighting for individual liberty, individual freedom. The Declaration declares, and put aside quibbles about this word or that word. But it declares that all men are created equal. And the founders did not have the delusion that we're all equal in any kind of sense of outcome or even opportunity. We're all different. We're all going to have different outcomes. We're all going to face different opportunities. But we're fundamentally equal in our freedoms, in our nature, in the fact that we are human. And therefore in the rights that we possess. The Declaration declares that we are all human beings as equal beings. We all possess, we all possess inalienable rights. Inalienable meaning that nobody can take them away from us. Not a majority. Nobody. The right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And these rights mean what? Well, these rights mean the freedoms to act, the freedom to do, the freedom to use your mind to identify and pursue the values that you deem necessary for your happiness. That's what rights mean. The freedom to use your mind to identify those values, in pursuit of those values, ultimately to enhance and better your life. The Declaration of Independence is inherently individualistic. It is about individuals possessing those rights. Individuals possessing those freedoms. Individuals choosing their values. Individuals pursuing their happiness. It is not about a group or collective or even a nation. It is about individuals. And it is about the pursuit of those rights. And what the identification of the rights of man and the setting up of a government that protects those rights. What that did is unleash the human spirit on this continent in ways that have never been seen in human history. It brought to the shores of this country millions and millions of immigrants, poor, hungry, often ignorant, but immigrants that wanted and came here for better life. Wanted and came here to do great things, to manifest their individual destiny, to create a life for themselves, to pursue their values, to discover those values. Many of them came here not knowing what they would do, not having any idea what kind of life they would live. They came here, there was no YouTube, there was no internet, there was no TV, there were no documentaries, there was no, nothing they didn't know what to expect. When they came here all they knew is a vague sense that they would be free. That in this country they could do what they wanted, that they could pursue their dreams, that they could find their future and live it and maybe hopefully achieve happiness, achieve prosperity, live a life well lived. That's what America was about. And Americans that were here and Americans that joined and their immigrants that joined them created a country of individuals who didn't stand still, who thought anything was possible. Individuals who embraced challenges, who went out into the wilderness and built a country, who laid railroad tracks, built industries, created farms, businesses, cattle ranches, all over this continent and lived the life that they chose to live. So America first and foremost is a country of individuals acting in pursuit of their dreams. It is a country of individuals pursuing their happiness. It is a country that resents authority or individuals who have historically resented authority. Iron Man wrote about Americans that they would never accept a dictator at least when she was writing this, she recognized the future might be different. She writes, a dictatorship cannot hold in America today. This was in the 60s. This country has yet cannot be ruled, but it can explode. It can blow up in a helpless rage and blind violence of a civil war. Sound familiar? It cannot be cowered into submission, passivity, benevolence, resignation. It cannot be pushed around. Defiance, not obedience is America's answer to overbearing authority. The nation that ran an underground railroad to help human beings escape from slavery or began drinking unprincipled in the face of prohibition will not say yes, sir, to the enforcers of ration coupons and cereal prices. Not yet. That was about 60, 50 years ago. I'm not sure they're not yet. Holds anymore given America's reaction, for example, to being locked down in a pandemic. The American spirit is the spirit of you won't hold me down. The American spirit is I will pursue my happiness. I will go out there and find my values and pursue them and you will not stop me. When she talks about it, she says here, you know, it cannot be cowered into submission. The American spirit is anti-submission. It is free, passivity. Americans act, they make, they produce, they build, they move, they travel, they build values, they create values, they pursue values, they don't sit still waiting for stuff to drop in their lap. That is un-American. It cannot be counted as submission, passivity, malevolence, Americans. The American spirit is the spirit of benevolence, of positivity, of confidence in the future and confidence in your own ability. It is a spirit of trust in your fellow man, of a deal made in a handshake, a belief in morality and that there are people around you because of their own self-interest are not gonna lie, steal, cheat. You always assume the best. That is the American spirit. It cannot be cowered into submission. Passivity, malevolence, resignation, Americans are never resigned. They don't accept the given. They don't accept their fate or their destiny. They stand up and say no. They change course, they learn, they improve. I mean, take the issue of racism in this country. Yes, the country was founded in a horrible contradiction, an immoral contradiction even for the time. They knew better and yes, it would have resulted in a civil war to fight it out at the founding. But it resulted in a civil war anyway and indeed Americans fought that civil war. In order to attain the consistency that the Declaration of Independence demanded they fought a civil war. 600,000 Americans died because they realized the slavery was untenable. Slavery was unacceptable. Slavery could not exist in the same land as the pursuit of happiness, could not exist in the same land as the right to life, could not exist in the same land with a role of governmentist that protect rights, not to enslave individuals. So they fought a war to change that and yes, they didn't win the war completely. Racism creeped back into America, particularly into the South with Jim Crow laws and other laws that were throughout the country that discriminated badly. And again, there was a movement, the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 60s to overthrow that and they did. This country is a country of individuals alone who get better, who improve, who have as they guide the idea that other people are individuals equal to them in their rights. And that's the greatness of America. Has been the greatness of America. That we treat each other as individuals, so we deal with each other as individuals. And that we take our own lives as individuals seriously. You know, I've said this many times, but I think this captures kind of the change in the American spirit. I said this on shows in the past and I said this on stage when I was debating Andrew Sullivan recently. And Andrew Sullivan brought into the conversation the awful consequence of capitalism which he described as the drug problem that we have in America today. The opioid, so-called epidemic. And this was a consequence of capitalism. This is a consequence of restructuring of American business, shutting down factories, changes to the economy, private equity going of Mark Tucker Carlson talks about this. People lost their jobs and they turned to alcohol, they became depressed and they turned to drugs ultimately in order to alleviate their pain. Now first, none of that is caused by capitalism per se, but yeah, it's true, capitalism shuts down factories. Capitalism shifts the allocation of capital to different places, to its most productive uses. And sometimes those productive uses are gonna be elsewhere. And certainly if you regulate, not over-regulate, but the more you regulate, the more you destroy businesses locally, the more they're gonna shift elsewhere. But my attitude towards the opioid crisis, my attitude towards the whole line of reasoning from Andrew Sullivan, who I have a lot of respect for, I mean, he writes beautifully, if nothing else, is that that attitude is un-American. Somebody with the spirit of America. Somebody who has the spirit of being an American, of pursuing happiness, of taking their lives seriously, doesn't sit around waiting for a job, doesn't get depressed because his plant closed and turned to alcohol or drugs in order to eliminate the pain. That's not an American response. That's resignation, that's malevolence, that's passivity, that's submission, that's everything that's the opposite of America. An American response to losing a job is go get another one. And if there are no jobs locally, the American response to losing one's job is to get in a car and go find somewhere where there are jobs. An American response to getting one's job is not to stand with your hand out, expecting the government to hand you a check or to hand you food stamps. The American response to losing a job is to go out and seek one, find one, create one, build one, make one. Get in the car, get off your butt. Go find a job, go find a life. Go make a life for yourself. Create, build, that's what America's about, not sitting around moaning and complaining. And the fact is there's always been jobs even when the economy's been weak in this country. But now, now the attitude is, we just wait. You know, a virus hit this country. What's the response? Well, how much money is the government gonna give us? How big unemployment benefit's going to be? How many companies will the government actually bail out? Will they be small companies, big companies? Maybe everybody, everybody will be bailed out. Indeed, that's the attempt that Trump administration has made a concerted effort to bail out every single segment of the U.S. economy to hand everybody a check so that we eradicate every last attempt in this country to stay independent of government handouts. Look, I don't blame anybody for taking the money. I blame the politicians for offering it. Everybody, from corporations, large, medium, small to small businesses, to individuals, to self-employed people, to every segment, every sector, the government has got a program for you. Talk about anti-Americanism. Talk about an anti-American administration, anti-American Congress. And almost nobody talks about the morality of these bailouts. Yeah, times are bad, times are tough, times are harsh. Roll up your sleeves and get to work. Find solutions. Oh no, you can't do any solutions. We don't allow you to find solutions because you have to stay at home. You can't go outside. You certainly can't open your business. You can't hire your employees unless we give you a special program to hire your employees. They can't work though. You can't open your restaurant. You can't serve your customers. No, you have to sit at home being passive, submitting, being benevolent with a sense of complete and out of resignation. What we're experiencing today, particularly since coronavirus hit, really, I think since Trump got elected, is the realization that what the Fourth of July represents vis-a-vis America is to a large extent gone. That spirit of America is disappearing as we speak. The spirit of America, that spirit of a thinking, acting, positive, generous, benevolent, benevolent, inspiring, populist individuals, they're not there anymore. Rebellious, refusing to submit to authority. Not there anymore. I mean, they choose to fight over masks. They were fine sitting at home. But now they're gonna fight over masks. Instead of fighting for the freedom and their liberty, they're fighting over whether a virus exists or doesn't exist. Denouncing science and embracing emotion. Remember that America is a product of the age of enlightenment. It is a product of the age of reason. It is a product of the age of science. This is a country built in the foundations of reason. A country founded on the ideas that every individual has a mind and therefore can take care of himself as a mind that discovers his values. Everything bring before reason. That was what made America great. What made it possible for America to constantly learn, innovate, change, improve. But we have become a country of snowflakes, of the right and of the left, of emotionalists, little children yelling and screaming and running to their mommy who has now become the state, asking for handouts, asking for help, demanding solutions, squabbling over nonsense. This is not the land of individual rights, not the land of liberty, not the land of freedom, not the land of self-possessed individuals pursuing their own self-interest. Can't even, you know, richest country in the world, most scientifically advanced country in the world, best epidemiologists in the world, can't even keep a virus in check. We become a joke, a laughing stock in the world. In that sense, I saw some, you know, surveys that of all the fourths of July, this might be the one where Americans feel the least proud in their own country. And that probably makes a lot of sense because what is there to be proud of right now? What is America doing right now to make us proud? Are we protecting individual rights? Are we allowing individuals to pursue their rational self-interest, their life, liberty and happiness? Are we elevating reason above all else in determining our actions, in determining how we respond to crises? And we focus on the individual, you know, we're living in a time of tribalism, emotionalism and tribalism, collectivism, the opposite of individualism, the opposite of respect for individual rights and the opposite of respect for reason, science, enlightenment. The spirit of America is in decay and it's up to you to resurrect it. I don't think this country's lost. There's still enough embers out there of people who care, who people have at least a sense that something is wrong, a sense that something is left unspoken, a sense that there's still greatness in this country even if they don't understand where it comes from and what it means. And it's time to remind them. It's time to fight for those values. And I said the other day, I said that one should not look backwards to the founding fathers, that it's not enough. That we need a vision that looks forward. We need a vision to articulate what this country can become, what we can do, what we can achieve. A vision that embraces modernity in a sense of modern technology, modern life. A vision that acknowledges that all men and women are equal politically, equal in rights. A vision that takes into account all the achievements that this country has achieved politically, socially, and economically over the last 200 and something years and project them forward. To some extent, Iron Man makes us, you know, argues for similar sentiment in an article called, It's Earlier Than You Think. And I think it's, she says, it's earlier than you think, it's earlier than you think in terms of creating a revolution. She wrote this in 1964. That's 56 years ago. Now, it might be later than you think. Unless we act soon, it might be too late. America's gone down, down, down. A horrific spiral driven by the left, which the right could not respond to, which corrupted the right thoroughly in every aspect of the right, which has now led the right and the left to basically compete on who can destroy this country faster. I know I wrote in that essay, It's Earlier Than You Think, the political quote, the political philosophy of America's founding fathers is so thoroughly buried under decades of statist misrepresentations on one side. That's the left. An empty lip service on the other, that's the right. That it has to be rediscovered, not ritualistically repeated. It has to be rescued from the shameful barnacles of platitudes now hiding it. It has to be expanded because it was only a magnificent beginning, not a completed job. It was only a political philosophy without a full philosophical and moral foundation, which the conservatives cannot provide. That's what I ran writing in 1964. This is after Goldwater was defeated thoroughly in that election. So what we need is to rediscover the ideas of the founders, flesh those ideas out, understand them, and then expand them. And we have what to expand it with. We have, I ran small, epistemological, and ultimately political philosophy to ground those great ideas of the founders in, or on. No longer does America have to stand on quicksand. It can now be built in a foundation of steel and concrete. America is dying. It's decaying. It is rotting from within. You can blame the Chinese. You can blame immigrants. Oh, I mean, illegal immigrants. You can blame the left. You can blame Marx. It doesn't matter. None of that is true. It's Americans who are killing America. America's committing suicide, as is the entire West. But seemingly America leading the way. And you will not find the saviors of this country on the right. You wanna find the saviors of this country among so-called conservatives. They have lost this country. They've betrayed this country. They've betrayed the founders. And they've gone missing. They've disappeared. They don't really exist anymore. You are gonna have to save it. You are gonna have to fight for it. You are gonna have to take Rand's philosophy and apply it. Use it, grow it to change this world. The West is committing suicide. America is committing suicide. And only Ein-Rand can protect it. Only Ein-Rand can save it. Ein-Rand and the founders. And only you, people who respect Ein-Rand and respect these ideas, can actually put them into action. So I think we're facing, have been facing for decades now, an existential crisis. I think this country today, with COVID, with demonstrations, with the rise of the crazy left and the rise of the crazy right, is truly it is the existential crossroads. And somebody better step forward. Some new movement better arise to fight for the Fourth of July. To fight for vision of man as heroic, as an achiever, as a doer, as a thinker, as a producer, as a creator, as a maker. Because that's not America anymore. Not America anymore. It's a couple of shows ago I asked those of you who are young and are motivated to start a revolution. I don't think, I'm not talking about an armed revolution because I don't think an armed revolution would go anywhere and has any chance of success. We're way too small. They're way too few of us. There's so much more that has to be done. I'm talking about an educational revolution, an ideological revolution, and a political revolution. And fundamentally, behind all of that, is a moral revolution, a revolution for individualism. Now, a lot of you have written to me, and we're gonna organize this soon. I don't know if it'll be next week or the week after that, but we will be organizing it. And so anybody who wants, I'll say this again, anybody who wants to be in on this first conversation about what can be done. And again, don't expect me to come to it with ideas. I don't have any. This is my idea. Just talking and asking you for ideas. And there are other actors. There's the Institute, the professionals, the intellectuals, there are all kinds of people acting in this way. But I'm thinking that some of you young people might have ideas that we don't have. How to launch a movement? A movement to change the world. Not an objectivist movement, but a movement inspired by Iron Man's ideas. A movement inspired by the Founding Fathers. A movement inspired by the Fourth of July. A movement inspired by the ideas of America, what it means to be in America, by the American spirit of liberty. Don't tread on me is a great slogan, but it's a negative. Don't tread on me so that I can go and pursue my happiness, so that I can use my mind to discover and pursue my values. That's what we need. And it does, it's not gonna be libertarian. I don't want a big tent libertarian BS. And I don't think anarcho-capitalists are invited. Don't waste your time. We want a movement of young people who are fed up. A movement of young people that need the buying in to the craziness on the left, no the craziness on the right. A movement of young people who expect that this country is about individualism even if they don't understand what individualism actually means and requires. And again, I'm gonna leave it up to you to figure out what that all means. So we're gonna do a Zoom call. I'll take on the Zoom call as many people who write to me, so you can write to me. Iran at uranbrookshow.com. Just put in the subject line, put Zoom. And I indicate that you're interested in being there and we will organize, you'll get an invitation to a Zoom meeting. We won't be recording it, we won't be, well maybe we'll record it, but we're not gonna put it, we're not gonna livestream it, we're not gonna make a public showing of this. This is a real strategy session. I'm happy to lead it, but I'm not gonna have the ideas. It's your ideas, your time. So prepare, think about what you wanna achieve, think about what you wanna, to discuss, to think about, to pursue. Let's make this not be a BS session, but a real thoughtful session about how we can change the politics of this country. What can be done to have a real impact? How can we launch a new movement? The email again is youron, that's my name, at youronbrookshow.com. Youron at youronbrookshow.com. And I don't know when we're gonna do the call, maybe next weekend, we will see. I will send you an invitation. Hopefully you'll be able to make it, can't can't. I'll record it for, maybe some of you will wanna hear it afterwards, but the idea is take it seriously, prepare for it, think about ideas, and particularly, and you gotta get young people here. I don't know, young people, 18 to 35. Because you have the most to lose. You have the most to lose, and you have the most energy. Most to lose and the most energy. And fresh thinking. You being involved in this movement, if you wanna, if we call it that, this movement, these ideas for the least amount of time. You're least fixed on a particular course. All right, definitely the most to lose, because you have the most to live under the authoritarians that are coming. All right, so before we get to the super chat question, tomorrow's the 4th of July. In many ways, it's my favorite holiday because my favorite people in history, maybe other than the, you know, Aristotle and some Greek sculptors and the Greeks. And but really, in a sense, certainly in politics, but generally, not just in politics, in their spirit, in their attitude, in their boldness. My favorite people are the founding fathers. They're just so exciting, they're so motivating, and they're so inspiring. They face the mightiest military power in human history to that point. And they launched a revolution in spite of that. And they won it, they had the audacity to win it. And then, they birthed the greatest nation in all of human history, a nation from which I have benefited enormously, as of all of you. Even if you don't live in America, you benefited from it. So tomorrow is a great day to remember them, to remember the principles they fought for, the principles they were willing to lay, their property, their life, and their honor for. And maybe a good day to commit yourself to those principles, the principles of liberty, of freedom, of individual rights, the principles of America and the America way of life. All right, that is my monologue for today. 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, whims, 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 broads. Using the super chat, and I noticed yesterday when I appealed for support for the show, many of you stepped forward and actually supported the show for the first time. So I'll do it again. Maybe we'll get some more today. If you like what you're hearing, if you appreciate what I'm doing, then I appreciate your support. Those of you who don't yet support the show, please take this opportunity, go to uranbrookshow.com, slash support, or go to subscribestar.com, uranbrookshow, and make a kind of a monthly contribution to keep this going. I'm not showing the next.