 Not going to let a little COVID or a little flu get me down. So Graham Greene wrote his Magnum Opus, the power and the glory, right? If I ever write my Magnum Opus, perhaps I will call it the structure and the situation. Have I ever spoken to you about the profound importance of structure and situation? So for example, the chattering classes, the news media, most people, when they talk about politics, they talk about it as though it's incredibly important who is the President of the United States. And they talk about as though the personality of the President of the United States is just such an important matter. And what about the personality of China's dictator, Xi Jinping? Like if he was a democracy-loving liberal, we'd be in a completely different situation, goes the conventional wisdom. But if Adolf Hitler was only such a bad guy, if only he loved democracy and human rights, we never would have had World War II. Well, we would have had World War II in our likelihood, even if the leader of Germany had been a democracy-loving, human rights-loving constitutionalist. Because the structure of the situation that Germany found itself in after World War I placed Germany in a position to try again for a quick victory. So Germany does not have naturally-defensible borders. And so Germany was situated to possibly win a very quick European war. And it almost pulled that off in World War I. It almost pulled that off in World War II. And just because Germany lost both wars doesn't mean that it made the wrong decision. Now, if Germany had launched World War I in 1905, it would have won. Because the structure of Germany's economy and armed forces in 1905 would have been decisive. Germany had the world's most efficient economy and the world's best armed forces. And soldier for soldier, the Germans were never beaten in either World War I or World War II when the numbers were approximately equal. So if Germany had launched the war in 1905, it would have won. And it wouldn't have mattered if it had a democracy-loving, human rights-loving leader or if it had a dictator. So without Adolf Hitler, there would not have been a Holocaust. So it's not that leaders matter for nothing. But a fish rots from the head broke. Yeah, it's a nice saying. But it doesn't really matter that much for international relations. So you just haven't read my magnum opus yet, because I haven't written it. But my magnum opus in international relations is the structure and the situation. So the structure of international relations and the situation that Germany found itself in after World War I meant that there was going to be another war for Europe. So the only way that that could have been prevented is if Germany could have been partitioned. And if the country surrounding Germany had kept up very formidable armed forces to completely discourage another war. But short of that, Germany was going to war, whether its leader was a nice guy or not a nice guy, whether their leader was someone who loved human rights, whether their leader was someone who read the Bible every morning, whether their leader was someone who believed that Jesus Christ was his personal savior, or someone who was an atheist. It would not have mattered that much for determining World War II. World War II was on, all right? And Adolf Hitler made a difference in that there would have been no Holocaust without Adolf Hitler. But there still would have been a Second World War in all likelihood, similarly with Japan. Even if Japan was ruled by the most freedom loving, constitution loving, human rights loving group of people that you could imagine, due to Japan's situation, it could either acquiesce to American domination of Northeast Asia, and so that there would just be a second tier country compared to the United States, or they would go to war and try to get some kind of quick victory. Is John Jay? I think that, theoretically, you can make a powerful case for isolationism. I think you can argue that the United States is manifestly secure in the Western Hemisphere. It has two giant motes to its east and to its west. It has thousands of nuclear weapons. That's my point, yeah. That's right, you can make that case. But the fact is nobody is seriously arguing that the United States should adopt an isolationist policy, number one, and number two, what people should care about is not what the chattering classes are saying. Who cares what the chattering classes are saying? The question is, what is the deep state doing? We just wanna know, what is Joe Biden and company? All right, so what the chattering classes are chattering about is not that important, right? Whether Joe Biden's up this week or down this week, whether his most powerful advisor is Joe, or Jenny, or Jeff, or Jay Vaughn, or Jay Kwan, that doesn't really matter that much. Joe Biden is the President of the United States, and he has a distinct foreign policy, and it's not that the President is irrelevant, but he's still operating within the structure of reality and the structure of great power politics, balance of power politics says that the United States has to pivot to restrain the rise of China, because if China expands the dump, ah, that the United States is roaming all over God's green acre, to quote John Mio Shimer, interfering in all sorts of different countries affairs, is because they are free to roam. They have no peer competitor, they have no threat to their supremacy in the Americans. They do, and the answer is that Joe Biden and company, just like Donald Trump and company, are deeply committed to containing China. You know, I hear all this talk about Taiwan. People are saying, should we defend Taiwan or not? This is a meaningless debate. The train has left the station. We are defending Taiwan, we meaning the United States. Period. And similar to that, Tom Wolf uses this analogy for American politics, which he found incredibly boring. American politics is like a freight train that leaves the station and people on the left have complaints and people on the right have complaints. But the train's going down the track, right? The train, ah, it can make a little difference, right? Which party has power, but it's overall structure of domestic politics and international politics is the primary determinant of what happens in the world as far as great power relations, international relations, great power politics, power politics balancing against other great powers. That's what's going on. Man, I keep muting while it's not me. It's the forces of darkness who are trying to suppress this message. So I know about you, all right? I can't see you, but I know that you care about the truth. All right, you may be on the left or you may be on the right, but what draws us all together here is that we care about the truth. And I recognize in you a quality that you might just see in me the dedicated pursuit of the truth. And that's what makes you so special. And that's why you're a winner. And that's why we're just gonna keep winning and winning until you say, 40, I'm tired of winning. Let's have no more winning. All right, the power of the situation. So Barack Obama began the big pivot to Asia. And then Donald Trump followed up the pivot to Asia and Donald Trump got increasingly tough with China. And there were permanent changes in international supply chains under Donald Trump as he significantly reduced Chinese imports and Chinese influence over the United States. But if Hillary Clinton had become President of the United States in 2016, something fairly similar would have happened as well. Now Joe Biden is president and has he gotten softer on China? No, he's even tougher on China than Donald Trump because China is America's nearest competitor. China is America's biggest threat. So whether Donald Trump is president, Joe Biden is president, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is president. Whoever's president, they only have this much room to navigate in. So I'm not saying that they're completely insignificant. They don't matter at all. But they only matter moderately. Even AOC as president would as a primary foreign policy task be containing the rise of China. So I feel like we often think we have a lot more freedom in the world than we do. We're tremendously circumscribed by our situations and by the structures that we work with it. You may think, oh, I wish I could go to work for 40. If 40 was the boss at my company, it would just be rockin', it would just be fun times. Well, it would depend on the structure of the situation. If the business was in danger of going under, I wouldn't have as much flexibility if I tremendously depended upon two key assistants who weren't very nice, but without them, business would flounder and go bankrupt. I'd have to give those two key assistants whatever they wanted, right? So someone who may seem like the most cool dude around put them in a situation that calls on them to be tough and they may not be so cool and so charming and so easygoing. And similarly, people who you think is really nasty and hard-ass and demanding and dictatorial, put them in a different situation and they're probably very easygoing, calm, pleasant, fun people. So you might think, oh, I wish I could dove in at 40, sure, if 40 started a synagogue, it would just be the coolest synagogue ever. But again, I'd be working within the fabric of Orthodox Judaism. The rules would be those of Orthodox Judaism. We would abide by the rules of Orthodox Judaism. We would fit in with the community of Orthodox Judaism. And I think that's the story the deep state has decided that. So all this talk about isolationism and restraint in terms of dealing China is to me, largely of interest to the chattering classes, but is not meaningful. All right, so whether Joe Biden did a number one or a number two when he was meeting with the Pope, it doesn't matter. That's just stuff for the chattering classes, guys. Yeah, and in fairness to your thesis, the Quad, US, Australia, India, Japan, and the AUKUS, this is the recent US, UK, Australia security arrangement, that reaffirms your point about the US commitment to the region. And polls show in this country, John, in Australia, AUKUS is overwhelmingly popular. But not everyone agrees. The former Prime Minister, Paul Keating, who was our Prime Minister from 1991 to 1996, he says the agreement constitutes, quote, a dramatic loss of Australian sovereignty, because, quote, it would rob Australia of freedom of choice in a future conflict where the US goes to... So I've had fantasies that I was the Prime Minister of Australia. And let's say, miracle of miracles, that happens again. I'd have to work within the fabric of Australia where the number one value is fairness, number one value in America is freedom, number one value in Australia is fairness. I'd have to work within that structure. And so too, if you are the leading Haredi rabbi in the world, you cannot be a Zionist, because as soon as you become a Zionist, you believe in a modern state of Israel, independent state of Israel, short of the Messiah coming, then you would no longer be Haredi. And so at one moment, you have the allegiance of two million perfectly orthodox Jews around the world. The next moment after you declare that you're a Zionist, you no longer have any community. So Nick Fuentes, for example, has a pretty big following. He can amass over 50,000 live viewers for his election night coverage. But if he came out and said things that disappointed his audience, his audience would just plunge overnight. I'm never gonna be able to develop a large following because I'm always changing my mind every week. I'm an intellectual jiggler. I'm falling in love with every cumbly idea that comes along but ultimately staying loyal to none. So as a pundit to build up an audience, you have to groom your audience and give your audience what it wants. You're a prostitute, you're feeding your audience what it wants. It wants to hear about how wonderful the constitution is or how wonderful free markets are or how great America is, how America is just number one in everything or whatever your particular niche as a pundit, you have to keep feeding that audience variations on the same theme. People listen to talk radio and people watch live streams in large part to hear the hits, the greatest hits over and over and over again. People wanna hear their perspective on the world just fed back to them. So that's the structure of the medium in which I work. And if I say, oh, F the structure, I just wanna do my own thing, then you're gonna pay a price because every genre has certain rules for how it works. And you break the rules of your genre and you're gonna struggle. So I don't know if I had COVID, I just got sick about a week ago and I've just been home ever since. And I went on Amazon looking for a take home COVID test. It takes a week for one of these to arrive. So what's the point of that? I'm finally starting to demand that whether it's COVID or a cold or a flu, I'm finally on the mend. And so I looked up the instructions if you think you might have COVID is to wait 10 days after the onset of your symptoms. And as long as you're no longer feverish and it's 10 days since the onset of your symptoms, you're not likely to be contagious. So that's what I plan to do. So yeah, people, everyone say, you know, get tested. Oh, I've been sick. Like it's the last thing I wanna do is go out and about and try to find a test. So I went on Amazon. All right, that's my solution looking for that take home test, but it takes a week to arrive. What's the point of that? All right, so more on the importance of structure and situation. So let's say you're out on a date with an attractive young woman and you have a very pleasant dinner at the end of your dinner, you say to her, hey, would you like to come back to my place? And she says, oh, okay. Or you have to throw her more. It's like, would you like to come back to my place and have a cup of herbal mint tea? Or would you like to come back to my place and see my etchings? All right, so you gotta throw something in. And cause, I mean, she knows what she's coming back to your place for, but you can't be ungentlemanly and not disguise it. So then comes back to your place and one thing leads to another and you start massaging her shoulders and you slip your hand under God forbid under her blouse. And that shouldn't come as any shock to a young lady who's going out with you and you invite her back to your place. Now, on the other hand, let's say you're out for dinner and dinner goes well and you invite her back to your place. And she says, no, but I'd like you, like to invite you back to my place so that you can play a monopoly with me and my whole family. All right, so you go back to her place to play a monopoly with her and her whole family and you know, cupping her breast under her blouse. That's just not on, all right? That's not appropriate. The situation has changed. The expectations for a situation where you're hanging out with her whole family playing a monopoly are very different than if you have her back to your place alone. Also, we change. I remember I first fell in love in the summer of 1982. I was 16. And so I was structurally in the same situation at times in the summer of 1982 and in the summer of 1983. But in the summer of 1982, I could not kiss the one that I loved. Why? Right? The same bloke, it'd be the same situation. It would be like a custodial room for, you know, janitorial room. Like she was a young lady janitor. And so I would go into her janitorial office and we'd be all alone in her office, but I couldn't kiss her. So why couldn't I kiss her? Because I'd never kissed a woman before, a girl before. I didn't know how to do it. I was 16. I was innocent. I just, I didn't know what to do. And so I was just kind of awkward and I'd kind of grab her and I'd twist her nipples. So one summer I'm twisting her nipples and then the next summer I'm making out with her passionately. So what changed? Well, I changed. I learned how to kiss. So over the course of my junior year, there was this one woman who got me alone in the newspaper room at Placer High School and gave me my first French kiss. And I was like, oh, this is how you do it. It was kind of overwhelming. And then I think on New Year's night, it was a Saturday night in January 1983. I was at this party and I met this freshman girl and she really knew how to kiss. I mean, she would just glide her lips over mine and she would just nibble my lips and the tongue would dart around in really playful fashion. It was completely different experience than just being like overwhelmed by that bigger, thicker tongue that went like right way down to the back of my throat. Like this young freshman girl, she really knew how to kiss. So in just that one easy lesson, that one Saturday night, it was the night that Penn State beat Georgia and Herschel Walker in something like the Sugar Bowl. So it was an amazing night, like a great football game, great make out sessions. I learned how to kiss in that one session. So when I came back to Pacific Union College and I saw the love of my life, my first love and I was walking her home and after we walked across a log across the stream, I took her in my arms and I kissed her. And when we were finished, like making out and French kissing and deep throating and all that, she said, we could have been doing this last summer, but I didn't know how to do it. I had changed the structure, situation, but also the person counts for something. Now, it used to be that if you were something Adventist, it was widely expected that you'd be a virgin when you got married, but in the United States and in Australia, the wider sexual revolution in the night. To war, Keating's not alone. Reassure those Australians who are worried about the loss of Australian sovereignty as a result of getting too close to Uncle Sam. Well, I disagree with Mr. Keating's rhetoric. The fact is Australia is not giving up its sovereignty. It's not giving up its right to choose what kind of foreign policy it wants. It's not giving up its right to choose whether it wants to ally with the United States. Okay, so it used to be if you were something Adventist, you're a virgin when you got married, but that started to shift after the 1960s when the sexual revolution in the secular war led out and affected what was going on among Christians. So Christians, prior to the 1960s, serious Christians were virgins when they got married. After the 1960s, many ostensibly serious Christians were no longer virgins when they got married. So what changed? The structure of the situation, society changed. And so society became increasingly sexualized, and so all sorts of moral norms broke down even within Christianity. Now, while this was going on, Orthodox Jews have largely remained virgins until they married. So why is it in big cities like Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, New York City, Denver, Seattle, Miami, Orthodox Jews overwhelmingly remain virgins until they marry? They generally speaking do not get divorced. They do not have abortions. So how have Orthodox Jews been able to remain so trad in an increasingly permissive society? Because there are certain norms that have been built into Orthodox Judaism and that are upheld within the community that encourage this. So while on the one hand, the Christians that I grew up with overwhelmingly did not wait until marriage to have sex. Overwhelmingly, the Orthodox Jews I've known have waited until marriage to have sex. So the structure of your community has a tremendous effect on how people behave, including in the bedroom, has an effect on how people do business. It takes a village, right? We're tremendously influenced by people around us. And the same thing goes for international relations, right? Xi Jinping's personality doesn't matter that much. Whether China has a communist social arrangement, political arrangement doesn't matter that much. China could be a liberal democracy with a stellar record on human rights and it would pose just as much a threat to United States interests as communist China because it's in China's interest to rise. This is China's interest whether it is a liberal democracy, whether it's a totalitarian dictatorship, whether it's authoritarian, whether it's communist or fascist. It's in China's best interest. It wants to rise. It wants to rise, take control, first of all, of the first island chain. Just 100 miles or so outside its borders and then push and extend its influence through the second island chain so that China has the same influence over its portion of the world as the United States has over the Americas. So the Americas have the Monroe Doctrine where America says we will not look kindly on European nations interfering in our backyard. It would make sense that China would want to do something the same for Northeast Asia. Australia is free to align with China if it wants. Australia is free to sit on the sidelines if it wants. You're not giving up your sovereignty. What's happening here is Australians or at least the deep state in Australia has decided that it is in Australia's interest to align with the United States. That's why you're doing it. And it makes perfect sense. The United States has decided that it's in its interest to contain China. And I think if you go back to the Australian case and what Keating said, he's wrong when he says that Australia is abandoning its sovereignty or giving up its sovereignty. It's not. It's just made a particular choice. Keating also says that in a Western Pacific conflict, John, the US would have little chance against China with its supply change far too strained. And now you debated. So great powers tend to be rogue elephants. Great powers tend to take what they want and the weak tend to endure what they must. This is true for international relations. This is true for the school yard. This is true for our interpersonal lives. So many people have gotten used to working from home over the past 18 months. And now bosses are increasingly say, hey, we want you back in the office 40 hours a week. This is an office job. And you are reading all these news articles about how employers have to compromise and they have to be willing to give workers more of a work-life balance. And there are all these jobs out there and maybe you'll just give your employer like the middle finger and you'll go out get one of those jobs out there. Well, the jobs that are out there are for people ready to go back to the office 40 hours a week. That's the structure, right? The people who have the power, the people have the money and the people who want to hire generally speaking want people back in the office. Now the chattering classes can talk more they want about work-life balance and how employers have to learn to be more flexible. But that's not gonna be the reality for most people on the job market or people holding down a job. There was a time for the past 18 months where many people could work from home. That time's coming to an end, right? Everyone has to go back to the office. That's the structure of work. And so it's not really about the individual personality of your employer or your individual personality. It's the structure of work. So Orthodox Jews have the same hormones as Christians and secular people, but they live within a structure that inhibits sex before marriage and inhibits extramarital sex generally speaking and inhibits the divorce and abortion and all sorts of elements of the promiscuous society. So there's a particular structure to Orthodox Judaism, which is not gonna be as strong if the community isn't strong. So if you go to some community where there are only seven Orthodox Jews, they're gonna have a much harder time maintaining that kind of structure. Orthodox Judaism depends upon a community. So I'm thinking about another time in the summer of 1983 when a group of my friends from sixth grade. So we've been friends for six years and it was a Saturday night and this is in the Seventh Day Adventist structure at the time. And we put on REO Speedwagon and High Infidelity, that album, and we'd probably been eating a lot of sugar and we all piled onto a couch together. Like eight of us just like all piled onto a couch together and there was this beautiful, beautiful young girl who was on the couch with me and I was touching her butt over her very tight 501 blue jeans. So in most situations, that would have gotten me a slap on the face, but because we were in a particularly raucous environment, that structure of that situation allowed for some behavior that would otherwise not gone down very well. So when you're a writer, the primary determinant of how many readers you get is how compelling you are and what makes writing or live streaming compelling, it's the topic, it's the nature of what you're engaged in, right? The material that you're writing, the quality of the material is more important than how you structure it, how you finesse it. So Tom Wolf used to think that great writing was 90% writing and 10% material and as he got older he came to realize it was about 70% material and about 30% how you structure it. It's very hard to produce a compelling live stream about yellow pages, right? It's very hard to produce a compelling public speech about the yellow pages. It's much harder writing about Michael Eisner in Disney than it is writing about Peter Goober and his blowout at Sony. People like Peter Goober and that mess he created at Sony is just a stunning book, hit and run, right? How John Peters and Peter Goober took Sony for a ride in Hollywood. Well, Nancy Griffin then followed up, I believe, there's the other, Kim Masters then followed up with that book with one on Michael Eisner, The Keys to the Kingdom, The Rise and Fall of Michael Eisner. So that was not nearly as compelling a book as hit and run, how John Peters and Peter Goober took Sony for a ride in Hollywood. So why was hit and run so compelling? The keys of the kingdom, not nearly as compelling because the material that you're working with is simply not as compelling. So it doesn't matter how good a job you do as a journalist and how great your writing is, if the material is not compelling, you're not gonna produce a compelling book. It's a lot easier for me to find compelling material when I was writing about the porn industry than when I'm writing about the Alexander Technique industry. Internet blood sports, right? That's compelling to get people on to argue, right? That had its time in the sun. It's much harder to do today, but you get two people fighting, that's compelling, right? It's a lot easier for me to go out and write compelling material about people fighting rather than people finding, say, 12-step recovery. I had a great early run in my blogging on the porn industry, so 1997, 1998, until people got a lot wiser and became a lot more careful in how they spoke to me. So much of my success as a blogger depended initially upon my subject speaking out in a way probably served me and my blog far more than it served them and that sort of model's not sustainable. And I'm thinking about that thought experiment that Roosh had that got him into so much trouble. He said, well, what if rape was not a crime on private property? Now, he wasn't calling for the legalizing of rape. He was using this as a thought experiment, saying that women, you should be careful about where you go because if you go back alone to a guy's place, then the odds are that he's gonna try something with you. He's gonna try to push you into doing things, doing sexual things. So bringing a girl back alone to your place is very different than going back to her place and playing nuffling with a family. We did Kishore Marble Barney on a CIS YouTube event last year, more than 440,000 views. Asking the question, has China won? So, are Keating and Marble Barney right here? Is Australia backing the wrong horse? John Meersheimer. I think the argument that China is gonna whip the United States is not a serious argument. That may be true in 20 or 30 years. The United States is the most powerful state on the planet militarily at this point in time. It has huge numbers of resources in Asia at this point in time. If you talk about the balance between submarines on the Chinese side and on the American side, it favors us decisively. The fact that we control Taiwan makes it remarkably difficult for China to project power beyond the first island chain. I don't wanna argue that China has no military capabilities. I don't wanna argue that China wouldn't put up a good fight against the United States today. But the argument that we're a pushover, we the Americans are a pushover and the Chinese could easily dispose of us in a fight is not a serious argument. Okay, what about the views of another former prime minister, Malcolm Fraser, who died in 2015? I'm just putting these views to you to test your thesis because Keating and Fraser, although they represent a minority viewpoint, they nevertheless represent a very cloudy viewpoint, particularly in certain media segments. Fraser's interesting because he told me before he died that he was a massive supporter of your work, John, on Russia, NATO and Ukraine, and he strongly admired your strong opposition to the Iraq invasion of 2003. He was, if you like, a bit of a Meshima groupie. But this is what he said before he died in 2015. People do not realize the extent to which we have been inclined in the United States policy in the last 15 or 20 years. At a time when the Cold War is over, the United States is now in the process of establishing a new Cold War in the Pacific. Her military policies failed in Vietnam, failed in Iraq, failing in Afghanistan. The Middle East is a mess and leaving all that behind, they say they're gonna shift their forces to the Western Pacific. We are part of this part of the world and we don't want to be part of America's future mistakes in this region. But has the government been frank with Australians, saying where it might lead, saying that we're going to be asked to pay for a lot of it? It's America trying to tie us into their policy of containment, which is about the most dangerous position Australia could possibly be in. So there's a terrific movie that came out around 1991, The Nostradamus Kid, and it's about a young Seventh-day Adventist lad in Australia who goes to a lot of Seventh-day Adventist camp meetings and he's convinced that the end of the world is at hand as the Seventh-day Adventist Church teaches and he falls in love with the preacher's daughter. And so he starts writing her notes and it just reminds me of my own story, I've always been a big letter writer throughout my life prior to the internet age. And so when I moved from Australia to California in 1977, I'd write to all my friends back in Australia. And when I moved from Pacific Union College to Auburn, I'd write to my friends back at Pacific Union College. And in this movie, this young man's writing notes to the pastor's daughter. And then eventually the pastor knocks him on the shoulder, taps him on the shoulder and said, maybe it'd be better if you wrote these letters to the whole family. So it's a very different rhetorical strategy that you're going to employ when you're writing letters to a young woman who you love versus writing letters to her entire family. The structure of that rhetoric is completely changed when you're writing to her whole family as opposed to just her individually. So yeah, I wrote a lot of love letters to the girl I fell in love with in 1982, 83, because most of the year we lived apart. But I think I would have completely lost my motivation if I had to write letters to her entire family. That's the former Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser just before he died in 2015. John Meshama. Well, I think we're Mr. Fraser is absolutely correct. And it's why our views were simpatico has to do with wars in developing countries like Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. We should have never gone to war and engaged in regime change in Iraq and Afghanistan. And we should have never entered the Vietnam War in 1965. And I think he and I are on the same page with regard to those conflicts. However, that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about great power competition. We're talking about the United States up against peer competitors. We're talking about the United States up against potential hegemons in places like Asia and Europe. And the United States has gone up against four potential peer competitors in the past. Imperial Germany, Imperial Japan, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. And in all four cases, the United States prevailed. We have a fundamentally different track record when it comes to great power politics than we do when it comes to intervening in developing countries and trying to do regime change. Okay, looking at the chat, Jim Bowden says, strong minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events and weak minds discuss people. Where do you place yourself? Look, I think it's nonsense. It's a cliche and it's absolutely stupid. There's nothing wrong with discussing people. Like what kind of person is not interested in people, right? If you care about people, you're going to talk about people. If you don't care about people, then don't talk about people. If you don't care about people, you're a profoundly antisocial, inhuman, dangerous person. So no, I don't think that ideas are more important than people. And people who have pursued ideas without regard to people have pursued some very dangerous ideas like communism. So you can venerate ideas at the cost of millions of lives. I don't think that's a good idea. I don't think it's true. And then there's another comment in the chat saying we don't have a Monroe policy look at Cuba. Well, Cuba shows the Monroe doctrine because Cuba has been absolutely crushed. Like Cuba is a very poor country since the communists have taken it over. American sanctions have crippled that nation. So no, the Monroe doctrine holds. And for proof of that, look at two countries that tried to buck against American hegemony, Cuba and Venezuela, and they're both basket cases. So the Monroe doctrine very much holds. What we're doing with regard to China is not synonymous with what we did in Vietnam or Iraq or Afghanistan, thank goodness. It's synonymous with what we did with the Soviet Union, Germany and Japan. And there we have a good track record. This is not to say we will ultimately be successful in the decades ahead against China. So I've got a lot of friends who make fun of psychotherapy and think it's absolutely useless. And I disagree, obviously there's mediocre psychotherapy and there's bad psychotherapy. Generally speaking, you engage in psychotherapy and your hippocampus is gonna grow, right? Your brain is going to change. Just like those cabbies who have to learn all the different maps in London to become an accredited cabbie, right? Their brain changes. So too, your prefrontal cortex is going to change through engaging in psychotherapy. So you learn new levels of intimacy. If you can say things to a psychotherapist that you, generally speaking, can't just automatically say to a friend because your friends all have an agenda. Your psychotherapist is much more likely to be closer to objective because your psychotherapist is not in your real life. Your psychotherapist is just a professional who you see. So just like your mechanic doesn't really care about what you do with your life, so too your psychotherapist is not gonna be engaged on what type of politics or religion or who you side with in a particular feud. So there's a big difference between talking to friends and talking to a psychotherapist. Generally speaking, you can't go two minutes talking to a friend without interruption. If you talk to your friend for two minutes without interruption, something's wrong. In all likelihood, they've completely checked out of the conversation. But you can go two, five, 10, 15, 20 minutes talking to a therapist without interruption. So when you talk to a friend, you have to be aware much more of consequences. I've fallen out with friends and things that I've confided in with them. They've then thrown in my face afterwards to hurt me. That doesn't happen with psychotherapists who are legally obliged to maintain your confidentiality. Christian clergy are also legally obliged to maintain confidentiality or it's part of their profession. Rabbis, however, are not. So if you confide in a rabbi, there's no inherent assumption of confidentiality like when you confide with a priest. So the type of conversation and intimacy of conversation is usually very different in psychotherapy compared to just talking to a friend. Your friends are much more likely to interrupt you. They're going to be much more likely to be distracted. They're much more likely to have an agenda. Man, oh man. China, who knows how this will play itself out? I would not bet against the United States but our track record here is much better. Now with regard to his last point that this is a very dangerous situation and that he as an Australian is very disturbed by the idea that Australia is getting dragged into this security competition, this dangerous security competition between the United States and China, I don't blame him one bit. If I were an Australian, I'd feel the same way. But the question you have to ask yourself is what is the alternative? Yeah, yeah. And the fact is, yeah, go on. No, go ahead. No, I was just going to say, are we alone here though? I mean, another critic, Hugh White, professor of strategic studies at the Australian National University, whom you know and you debated him at a CIS event in Canberra in 2019 in front of 500 people. Yeah, so if you talk to your rabbi about a problem you're having, orthodox rabbi, he's not going to be okay with if a problem, resolving a problem leads you to violate Jewish law. Also, a rabbi is prime concern is for the community, not just for your individual welfare. So the rabbi is going to look at anything you're saying through the lens primarily of how will this affect the community. So he will very likely be influenced how will this affect the most powerful members of the community. It's a very different thing than talking to a therapist. So a rabbi may want you to observe more Torah, to learn more Torah, to change your behavior in various ways where a psychotherapist won't necessarily have that same agenda. Terrific night, John. This is what he told the ABC's 730 recently. The fact is that most other countries in Asia don't share our approach in America's approach to China. So I think in Southeast Asia, and for that matter, further north, there'll be a lot of people who'll look at this. They might not complain about it out loud, but they'll look at it and see it as a negative development because it further entrenched the idea that we've got a new Cold War in Asia with America on the one side and China on the other. They're stuck in the middle. They don't want to choose. They see that Australia has made a choice. Now that's Professor Hugh White again on the ABC. John Mishimer, is that true? Are we Australians more outspoken in our support for the US Alliance than other Asian states? Well, I think if you look at the Quad, there are three Asian states that have basically made it clear that they're with the United States. They've chosen sides. That's Japan, India, and Australia. So I think there is a certain element of truth in what you said. Those other countries, right? And this includes countries like South Korea, the Philippines, and Vietnam, which I believe will eventually move decisively to the American side, are trying to straddle the fence. And I don't blame them, right? You saw this with Australia for many years. The Australians did not want to be forced to pick sides. And it's completely understandable. So there are a number of countries, as you points out, that are straddling the divide and eventually they will be forced to pick sides. There's no way the South Koreans and the Filipinos are not going to be forced to pick sides. Okay, a little bit on how does psychotherapy change our brain? So you take a chemical that's going to change your brain, but if you start dealing with your emotions more honestly, more forthrightly, more courageously, that's going to change your brain too. If you start learning Hebrew, if you start learning Talmud, if you go to law school, that's going to change your brain too. I remember when I started studying calculus and economics, it destroyed my ability to appreciate poetry. So psychotherapy rewires the brain. 12-step programs rewire the brain. So psychotherapy provides a certain type of learning environment. It encourages neural plasticity, that is the excitability, the growth, the connection, the reorganization of connections between neurons in your brain. I'm reading from an article here on psychology today. So the appropriate level of psychological stimulation and challenges encourages new growth and improve connections of neurons and a better blood supply to those neurons and will literally change the size of your hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex. You take psychiatric medications, they will inevitably tend to shrink the size of your prefrontal cortex. Your prefrontal cortex is where you make decisions. So your prefrontal cortex doesn't fully come online until about age 25, which is the age generally speaking when you're first allowed to rent a car. A good therapist encourages change by keeping stress and psychological arousal at mild to moderate levels, which activate growth hormones and best support learning. So stress and arousal are double-edged swords with when these things are very low, we're not motivated to learn it to change. When we're under too much stress and arousal, we are flooded by our primitive limbic system, which turns off our ability to think clearly. Then a supportive therapist acts initially like a good parent. So they're soothing and modeling how to re-regulate strong emotions. So repeated cycles of dysregulation and re-regulation allow a client to build and integrate the relevant neural circuits that allow our internal regulation. So neurobiological research shows that psychotherapy increases inhibitory feedback from the prefrontal cortex, which then down regulates the emotional limbic system. So we're not as run as powerfully by blind unconscious, non-conscious emotions. So once we regulate our subcortical subconscious emotional responses and impulses, our conscious verbal cortex, our prefrontal cortex can remain engaged even in the face of difficult situations and strong emotions. So we can create a safe internal environment to deal more thoughtfully with life and we are less likely to be overwhelmed. Psychotherapy encourages the integration of our feelings and our thoughts. When we're under stress, stress our capacity of thought and language is reduced. And psychotherapy can erase neural traces of unhelpful schemes and beliefs that get in the way of transformational change. It used to be assumed that old memories are never deleted. It just remained there, but therapy can bring up a specific memory with its associated 40 interpretations, bring it to consciousness, then encourage the voicing of contradictory information that we now know as adults and the conflict leads to the loss of the traces of earlier unhelpful beliefs and interpretations. So psychotherapy has a strong neurobiological rationale, reduces physical changes in the brain that allow for better functioning integration and regulation of the neural systems that underpin improved mental health, especially when we're under stress. The Vietnamese, they're moving gingerly as are the Singaporeese and others, but they understand that I believe, they understand I believe that in the end, it's in their interest to side with the United States. And this is part of your argument that America will increasingly form a coalition of states in the region to balance, check, contain China. Now, it is an increasingly intense Sino-American security competition. And one power that could be useful in being a counterweight to China, of course, is Russia. But as we know, during the Trump era, we were all too often told that the Putin regime is a thuggish, a corrupt, and of course Russia has shown it will play hardball to protect vital strategic interests in its near abroad. Why do you think Washington is capable? So early on in the pandemic, I followed Steve Seyla's advice and got an oximeter on Amazon. And even when I've been sick for the past week, it's never gotten below 96, it's usually been around 98. So right now I've got a pulse rate of 80 and a blood oxygen level of 98, which is just fine. So your blood oxygen level drops below about 92 and it's definitely time to go to the ER. Thank God I haven't faced that. And I think it's a great example of winning over the Russians in a balancing coalition against China. Well, I'm not sure at the moment that we could win over the Russians. I think we made an egregious error in alienating Russia in the first two decades of the 21st century. I think what's happened is terrible because we have in effect, we, the Americans, have in effect driven the Russians into the Chinese. It's a NATO expansion, all that, yep. It was a combination of three factors, NATO expansion, EU expansion, and the color revolutions. We threatened the Russians in ways that angered them greatly, led to the war in Georgia in August of 2008 and then led to the ongoing crisis in Ukraine, which broke out in February 2000. So the Washington Post has an article, Mitch McConnell spent decades chasing power. Heads Donald Trump who mocks him and wants him gone. So why would someone so powerful as the majority leader of the US Senate heed someone who mocks him and wants him gone? Because of the context, because of the structure, because of the situation, all right? The more powerful you have, the more power you have, the more fragile your grasp on power because you become increasingly beholden to other people. So you may think, oh, the more power I have, then the more free I am, but that's not how it usually works, right? The more prestigious your position, the more vulnerable you are to getting canceled. So just like a Haredi rabbi, he can only, if he's a powerful Haredi rabbi with a big following has only a very narrow range of opinions that are available to him. If he goes outside that narrow range, he loses his power. Donald Trump's not particularly very Republican, but Donald Trump adhered to many of the bases of Republicanism to take power in the Republican party and then reshape the Republican party in his image. But to do that, he had to pay obeisance to many Republican positions that Donald Trump doesn't particularly hold, such as cutting taxes and being pro-life. So how did Mitch McConnell, one of Washington's longtime Republican power players come to the preeminence of the 45th president? Because of the situation, because of the structure, the more powerful your position in Republican party politics, the less room you have to dissent from Donald Trump. Donald Trump right now effectively defines the Republican party. There's very little room for anyone who wants to succeed in the Republican party who's anti-Trump. So Mitch McConnell spent four years as one of Trump's chief enablers, boosting his election by keeping a Supreme Court seat open, pushing through his agenda with party line votes, standing by for weeks as Trump falsely claimed the 2020 election. But their marriage of political convenience that abruptly shattered in early December when Trump exploded at Mitch McConnell for acknowledging Joe Biden's victory. Now, after January 6th, Mitch McConnell reacted to the January 6th riots with anger and revulsion. But when it came time to hold Trump to account, Mitch McConnell backed off. Why? Because that's the situation. You cannot be Senate Majority Leader. You cannot be the leader of the Republican party in the U.S. Senate and go against Donald Trump. If Mitch could, he would, but he can't. So seven GOP senators voted to convict Trump following his impeachment by the House for inciting an insurrection, but Mitch McConnell supported acquittal, ensuring that Trump would face no formal penalty for inciting an insurrection. Now, today, Trump is once again dominating the Republican party. Trump is expected to run again in 2024 and Trump is utterly distanced for the Senate leader who helped save him. So Trump dismisses McConnell as a stupid person, and not a real leader because he didn't fight for the presidency. Well, for Mitch McConnell to hang on to his position, he can't fight back against Donald Trump. It's 14. Yeah, but just a quick time out, John. You see, a lot of our critics would say, are you being too soft on Russia and you're being too hard on China? You're basically saying the Americans pushed the American security guarantees right up to Russia's doorstep, upsetting the sensibilities of Moscow, but you're also saying America should be tougher on China. So some of your critics might say you're being inconsistent here. Yeah, but the problem with my critics is they're not thinking in terms of balance of power logic. The fact is that Russia is not a potential hegemon in Europe or in Asia. Russia is a declining great power. It's not a threat to us, meaning the Americans, certainly the Australians in any meaningful way. What's a giant gas station that's holding Europe to ransom during this energy crisis? That may be true, but who cares? That is not strategically important for the United States. What we care about is whether or not Russia has the capability to dominate Asia. The way China looks like it's going to have the capability to dominate Asia. That's the key issue on the table. We're not dealing with the Soviet Union here. We're dealing with Russia. And the fact is that relations between Russia and Europe and Russia and the United States are terrible today in large part because of the West policy towards Russia and especially American policy towards Russia. And your question is, can we turn this around? Yes. What about India as a counterweight? John, Raja Mahan, one of India's most distinguished security experts. He's in the process of writing a paper for CIS and it's tentatively called Between Geography and History, Delhi and Canberra in Indo-Pacific Security. Members should stay tuned for that paper by Professor Rohit Moham. And his point is this. Let me read this out to you. The whole idea of the Indo-Pacific as a strategic construct is about, A, recognising that the old framework of US alliances in the region and ASEAN multilateralism are no longer enough to secure the regional order and B, that the US has worked hard to bring India the only rising great power with a scale to match China. So if I don't have a girlfriend, I have more room to roam on this live stream. I have more time to live stream and I have a greater freedom in what I can talk about. But once I form relationships with others, including a girlfriend, then my freedom to roam gets steadily diminished. The more integrated I am into orthodox Judaism that my freedom to roam intellectually is similarly diminished. The more money I make and the more prestigious my position in society or in my community, then the less freedom I have. So if I were making $11 an hour, I'd likely feel a great deal more freedom. And what I'd say on here than if I was making $41 an hour or $71 an hour, right? So the more you've got to lose, the more careful you're gonna be. If you're making $11 an hour, you've got nothing to lose. So the situation that I put myself in, the structure within which I work, that has a tremendous effect on what I'm gonna say here. If I work for a fortune 500 company, that would have much more of an inhibiting effect on what I say here than if I work for a small business, as opposed to say working for myself or as opposed to just depending on a few key donors. If I depend for my living on just a few key donors, then I just need to keep them happy and I'm free to say whatever I want as long as they are happy. So the structure of where I make money, structure of where I go to synagogue, the structure of who my social circle is, the structure of my community has a tremendous effect on what I'm gonna say on a YouTube live stream. I'm gonna go into the equation to help balance and deter China. What about India, John? Well, I agree with what Raj says. The fact is that China is a threat, not just in East Asia, which is what you and I have been talking about in large part because we have an Australia-centric focus in this discussion, as well as an American-centric focus. But the fact is that China is a threat to India and it's a threat to India up in the Himalayas. There's a huge border dispute between India and China that is yet to be settled. And furthermore, China will eventually be a threat to India in the Indian Ocean because the Chinese are building a blue water navy that's designed to project power into the Persian Gulf. So the Indians are deeply concerned about China. And what we're trying to do with the creation of this notion of an Indo-Pacific theater is we're trying to tie East Asia and India together. And we want India to help as much as possible in East Asia. And of course, we want these countries in East Asia to help India as much as possible. And of course, the Americans are the critical actor here because they have the military capability to throw their weight around both in the Indian Ocean and in East Asia. But that's what's going on here. And just think about the Quad. Who are the four countries in the Quad? Australia, Japan, India and the United States. So you see very clearly how we're trying to sort of stitch together an alliance structure that includes not just East Asia but the Indo part of the Indo-Pacific. John, let's. Okay, so let's share some good news. All right, faced with soaring Ds and Fs, writes the Los Angeles Times. Schools are ditching the old way of grading. Isn't this exciting? So instead of failing students who aren't doing homework and who aren't showing that they're learning anything, we're just gonna do away with Ds and Fs. All right, so a substantial portion of minority youth in the Los Angeles Public School District are going to fail high school if you keep up any kind of standards. So how do you get around this problem? Well, you just drop the standards. So many teachers are doing away with giving students homework and they're giving them multiple opportunities to improve their work. So the goal is to base grades on what students are learning and remove behavior deadlines and how much work they do from the occasion. So educators are moving away from the traditional point-driven grading system aiming to close large academic gaps among racial, ethnic, and economic groups. The trend was accelerated by the pandemic and school closures that caused troubling increases in Ds and Fs across the country by cause to examine the role of institutionalized racism in schools in the aftermath of the murder of George Lloyd by a police officer. So the Los Angeles and San Diego Unified School Districts have directed teachers to base academic grades where the students have learned what was expected of them during course, not penalize them for behavior at work habits mis-deadlines. That's right. The problem with our public school system is that we're penalizing people for bad behavior like way too much. And so now students will get the opportunity to revise essays and retake tests showed that they have met learning goals rather than enforcing hard deadlines. So we're also doing away with fines but not returning box on time to the public library system because it was racist. So now we're getting rid of traditional grading because it was creating unequal educational opportunities based on a student's race or class. We were perpetuating achievement and opportunity gaps rewarding our most privileged students and punishing those who are not. Yeah. This really sounds like all work. Very exciting. All right, here's Michael Anton talking to Curtis Yavin in May. The fall of the Soviet Union taught us something. The Soviet Union fell in favor of the West. It basically people in the Soviet Union said, no, we would rather have Western competence. And in retrospect, you know, the show that ensued, I think taught us something about Western competence itself because it taught us that the West was, no, actually not competent to come in and restore the Soviet Union to competent government, which really should have taught us that all the competent government that we had here was a legacy. That said, of course the US can keep... Okay, so if the US government's so incompetent, where is it more competent? Right? If the US government is so incompetent, how come America is the most influential, most powerful nation in the world in economic terms, in military terms and in cultural terms and innovation terms? Slipping downhill, you know, anyone who has been to the third world at all has seen the future already. It's the, you know, future basically, you know, very, very rich, rich people and very poor, poor people and gated enclaves and government and massive corruption everywhere. We have so much further. I mean, just to get to the state where Brazil is not in any danger of falling, Brazil is doing just fine. And to get to the sort of state of civic disorder that they have in Brazil would be, you know, require another 20 years of rolling downhill. So, you know, I don't think... The thing is, I feel like people who expect... What basis would you say that Brazil is doing just fine? I think most of this would consider life in Brazil absolute hell. You know, there's a kind of wig history here of people who expect things or even Marxian history, you know, of people who expect things to happen by themselves, you know, automatically in some pre-destined fashion. I kind of don't... It's almost... Yeah, Travis Scott is a cultural ambassador for the American Hedgeman, specifically, Medley. Yeah, I'm really shocked that there'd be bad behavior at a rap concert. I always thought that rappers and people who love rap music tended to be model citizens. So, I'm shocked, shocked that there was bad behavior. Even though the police took him aside before the concert and warned him about danger, and somehow he didn't seem to pay attention. So, you really don't want to be at a rap concert. Not a good place to be. Then hang out with rappers and aspiring rappers if you put a priority on your safety. You're better off at a classical music concert. Not... I can't think of many people getting trampled to death at a classical music concert. I don't recall a lot of illegal drug use at a classical music concert. I don't recall a lot of shooting and raping at a classical music concert. Alvinist, like, I don't believe in that kind of, in these determined futures at all. Well, we had this debate. I don't... So, I don't want to repeat it since we had almost a similar identical discussion on Jack Murphy. But the problem I see with the Brazil analogy is there's an extent to which I don't think it's trivial. Brazil and all countries like it exist under the hegemony, under the umbrella of sort of American power, American centrality to the global financial system, the economy and stuff like that. And if the extremities go first, but eventually the heart and the vital organs fail, and the extremities can't sustain themselves without it. And the chat asked, where is Shangri-La? Well, dude, you've got to step into the fourth dimension. So, some people say Shangri-Las in a particular type of Christianity, or some people say Shangri-Las in a particular type of Judaism, but wherever you're going to find Shangri-La, it's going to require a lot of you. It's going to require an accounting of the soul. It's going to require hard work and discipline from you. There's no Shangri-La in being lazy and slovenly. That's my point is that, I mean, you know, that relationship, those relationships are already, you know, well, I mean, they're very disadvantageous in many ways to the center because they involve the displacement of domestic industrial and domestic productive activity in favor of foreign productive activity. But the point that a failure in the center is very, very different from a failure at the periphery and that in fact, we don't see these failures at the periphery. You know, these countries keep on carrying on in the state of glorious chaos and up to the point of being Venezuela. Now, is that a little different? I guess my point is that incompetence is not, you sort of abstractly. Yeah, did Travis Scott and his compadres call for less police presence at these concerts, right? What happens when we reduce the police on the streets? That massive increase in driving deaths, that a massive increase in murders, right? When the natural progression of things should be fewer deaths, the miles driven and fewer people getting murdered just because of increases in technology and medical technology in particular, like murder rates should be going down if things just proceed naturally by about 2% a year. Instead, we've had an explosion in murder since we had the F the police movement of Black Lives Matter driving cops away from discretionary policing and back to the donut shops. Seem to feel that incompetence is some kind of existential threat to the regime we have. But I utterly fail to see the form of that threat. I don't think it's a financial threat. I don't think it's an economic threat. I think that, you know, sort of clown world can just carry on getting a lot more clownish for quite some time, but not forever. And remember, he's talking, this is Curtis Yavin says America's clown world, right? The guy's not a serious thinker in this respect, right? America's the most powerful nation in the world economically, militarily, culturally. It leads the world in innovation, right? You're gonna call, why would you try to make a case that the most powerful nation in the world, militarily, economically, culturally, technologically is somehow clown world? If America's clown world, then where is it serious? China, really. Forever, so there will come a point. Yeah, not for, you know, but I think we're talking centuries here. I mean, the thing is that, you know, look at all the, you know, like, look at the Roman Empire and I mean, I mean, people, how long were people saying the Republic was dead before, you know, Caesar a century? You know, like, I mean, you know, it's, and I pray to God we're the Roman Republic and not the Roman Empire. And so, yeah, I just don't see, the thing is when you think that way, you're basically, you're relying. I pray to God that we're the Roman Republic and not the Roman Empire. Well, for certain groups, the Roman Empire was awesome. And for other groups, the Roman Empire sucked, right? Depends on the situation, depends on the context and depends for whom are you speaking. Lying on a kind of Deus ex machina. And instead, you know, you should be, the right thing to think about in my view is essentially you have two. Question from the chat. No aspect of America is clownish. Yes, plenty of America is clownish. The chattering classes are clownish. The news is frequently clownish. The news is frequently so gay it has AIDS, right? It is stupid. So the chattering classes are frequently clownish. Popular culture is frequently clownish. Much of political discourse is clownish. But the real work is getting done, right? So you can talk about, you know, whether or not Joe Biden defecated in his pants while he was meeting the Pope, all right? That's a clownish conversation. Doesn't really matter how the real world works, right? You come to this show, you're getting what's real, getting what's important. We cut underneath the clown talk and we get to the real talk. Question one, what provides the energy for some kind of regime transition? That's clearly popular energy. It's clearly a spike of populism. And then what does populism do with that baton given that they can only run a few yards of it? All right. And the thing is that what Caesarism is is basically the popularists of Rome passing the baton to essentially the Roman army. There's no inherent superiority to populism or elitism. In some problems, an elite approach will be superior to other problems. A popular approach will be superior, right? To some problems, a right-wing approach will be superior. To some problems, a left-wing approach will be superior. To some problems, a secular approach will be superior. To other problems, a religious approach will be superior. There's no one way of looking at life that inevitably produces the best outcomes. There's no one grand narrative that best makes sense of life and puts into context the most pressing problems we face. One day, one narrative does the best job of understanding the most pressing problems we face. And then just like that, the situation can change. The structure of the world around us can change. And so we need a whole new narrative, right? Salvation does not come from the Republicans or the Democrats, from the elites or from the populists, from the right or from the left, from the academics or from those who did not graduate high school. Which is just the most amazing organizational force in the world at that time. And the thing that I got from, the thing that I got, that I recommend this to you, Frud's Caesar of Sketch, really beautiful sort of literary history of, yeah, well, I'll give it to you now. It's a same guy, Frud. And he basically tells the story of the end of the... Good Medley makes an interesting point. Curtis Yavin hopes that we aren't the Roman Empire because then that would be the end. If we're the Roman Republic, we can still transition to the Empire. Yeah, but that's taking it for granted. The republics always transition to empires before they collapse, right? There's no inevitable in history, right? There's no structure of government that inevitably leads to a different form of government that then inevitably leads to dissolution, right? There's no inherent reason why American global dominance must end in our lifetimes or even in the century. Of the Roman Republic, from the perspective of a Victorian aristocratic historian, he was a Regius professor at Oxford. And it's really, it's a sort of beautiful, like I really didn't understand the character of Pompey, for example, before I read this. And one of the things... I didn't understand the character of Pompey until I read this. So this is Curtis Yavin. He reads one book and then suddenly he understands Pompey. It reads one book and then he understands Pompey. Things that you see very clearly in Frud is this, sort of amazing disparity and competence between anything that was executed by the senatorial regime and anything that was executed in a military way. And so for... Look, there'd be some things where the Senate will be more competent. There'll be other things where the military is more competent. Militaries are very good at running things for a short time, running things under certain circumstances. But military rule is not proven to be a good lasting solution for many countries. Military rule is a short-term solution. So China is an authoritarian power and it can force people to do certain things, but it does not foster creativity. It does not foster entrepreneurship because the state can jump in at any time and take all your assets and destroy, take over everything you've built. So yeah, in some things, an authoritarian militaristic approach is more effective, does not produce long-run prosperity, does not produce long-run stable, healthy societies. So it's very easy to fall in love with what an authoritarian militaristic solution can do for one particular problem. But when you take action like that, when you move to a military solution, then you have to ask what would be the consequences down the road from that military solution. For example, the episode of Pompey and the pirates. So Pompey is this kind of proto-ceaser who's also kind of, he's kind of a nerd actually. He just doesn't get politics at all. And so he's, when in politics, he's basically always kind of a puppet. And, but he's still a Roman soldier aristocrat and basically Rome has... Okay, here's Fox News reporting on the Charlottesville trial. This is Fox 46 News at 5.30. Now at 5.30, week two is in the books for the trial against Unite the Right organizers in Charlottesville. From the looks of things, this trial could be lasting longer than many thought. That could be because the plaintiffs are allowing the defendants to kind of use the stand as their own soapbox. It's something they also hope that could help them lead them to in a conviction. And today our legal correspondent, Seema Iyer was inside the courtroom as one defendant stepped down another step forward and Seema joins us now live in Charlottesville. Seema, one of the defendants here is an outspoken white supremacist, Dr. Michael Hill. Yeah, we were kind of wondering about that title, Seema. What kind of doctor is Hill anyway? I know you both are probably freaking out. Well, he's an academic doctor. He taught British history at a historically black college in Alabama. I think it's called Stillman. And he taught there for decades, but at some point he left, he kept his racist views to himself and he created this organization, co-founded rather, the League of the South and he created that in 1994 with his partner. And at one point they played a video of him saying that the Holocaust was a con game. He also said Jews were his enemies, but one stirring rendition on the stand was when he stated his pledge. I pledged to be a white supremacist, a racist and an anti-Semite, a homophobe, xenophobe, Islamophobe and any other kind of foe. It really threw me, I thought at one point this was a joke, a sick joke that he was actually saying these words. I also want to point out that it was a great contrast. And when I say great, I mean grand contrast from Richard Spencer, who's very conversational and swarthy. Whereas this guy, he was loud. His voice was thunderous and almost bombastic in an offensive way, guys. Yeah, kind of getting everything in the courtroom. There are a lot of fascinating testimony over the past few days. Yeah, Seema, and what can we expect to happen next week? Well, next week, I'm assuming they're still going to get through their plaintiffs because it seems like they've gone through more individual defendants than plaintiffs and there's still several plaintiffs left. Also, let me point out, there are two experts that are yet to testify. One expert is, or one or two experts, I believe, co-author to report regarding the language they use in social media, the code language, and almost to decipher this white supremacy conversations that happen on their chat channels. There's also an expert that's to testify who's going to reconstruct the scene of the Unite the Right rally and that fatal car crash that killed Heather Hire and injured 35 others, guys. A few years ago, to watch that video is still very, very jarring from 2017. And also, after a... Are we going to put it on trial the organizers of that rap concert and the people who are supposed to do security for that rap concert? We're looking at defendants today. Another plaintiff has taken the stand. Thomas Baker. Yeah, Seema, where is he in his questioning and what kind of claims is he making? Chris Cantwell was still cross-examining him and you guys know by now, very wealthy cross-examining him into Monday, but most of the other defendants, they just went through it. So he went there to support his community. Early on in his testimony, he said that during the rally, it appeared it was clear that the aggression was one-sided. That was certainly a gut punch to the defense. He also talks about how he was hurled into the air. He suffered a concussion, severe injuries that required major surgery. To this day, guys, he still cannot run, he cannot jump, he cannot even stand for a long time, and he told the jury that his injuries were permanent, that he believes at this point, at this moment... Yeah, don't go to events where violence is likely if you don't want to get hurt. If you don't want to get hurt, don't play football. Right, don't go onto the streets and participate in violent confrontation, even if you're convinced you're on the good side. If you don't want to get hurt, all right? Certain things you do come with high risk. Confronting violent confrontations come with high risk. At this moment, he will never be well again, guys. This is gonna stop her lifelong for that one. Seema Iyer, thank you so much for joining us and giving us the latest as it's... And this guy taking any responsibility for his own choices. I mean, I can't find almost anyone who wants to take responsibility for showing up to Charlottesville and for the negative consequences that come from that. People just want to blame the other side, right? Showing up to Charlottesville is an incredibly self-destructive thing to do, but ever side you're gonna be on. It's a risky, dangerous, and likely self-destructive act, but I don't think I've spoken to anyone who went to Charlottesville from any position and wanted to engage in some introspection that maybe that wasn't such a great idea. Has this, the whole Mediterranean has this fuck-up pirate problem that's developed over decades where you have these pirates who are like, they're like modern day drug gangs in Mexico. They have all these relationships with the local authorities, you know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And, you know, they're like pirate princes and it's this huge thing and it's costing huge amounts of... Now at 5.30, the trial against the unite the right organizers continues with Richard Spencer taking the stand in Charlottesville. Spencer could be the most infamous white nationalist he is known for coining the term alt-right and he spoke at length for the defense. Now the CrossFit examination is happening. And today our legal correspondent, Seema Iyer, was in the courtroom and Seema is live in Charlottesville right now. Seema today was your first day actually inside that courtroom. Really wanna hear what your observations were here about your legal perspective. Wait, this, I mean, we just heard this woman about how shocked she was, like how emotionally upset she was by hearing a different point of view and she's supposed to be the one providing this passionate analysis. And she was all emotionally upset about hearing a contrary point of view. What did you see? This is such a big deal, Brian. Fox 46 actually applied to be inside this courthouse a week ago and it took us a week to get access and then I got access. I've been here since Monday and I am only one at this point of seven or eight reporters and we're inside a press room and we are the only ones who get to see inside the courtroom through a... She's a reporter and an analyst who gets all upset and weepy and shocked and appalled and shaky hearing a contrary point of view. The video screen, besides the people who are actually in the courtroom, okay? Because there's so much security and I just wanna remind everyone this trial is setting the precedent for a similar lawsuit involving the January 6th Capitol rioters. Okay, so... Yeah, so people who don't graduate from high school, they're much more inclined to go to violent riots, right? I think the people who say go to graduate school, but the people who really get things changed in society, people who really make a difference, the people who go to things like law school and who wage law fair, right? Law fair, that's a winning strategy. Violent riots, not a winning strategy. Violent riots are for losers. Winners engage in law fair. That is how I got inside the courthouse. I am really only one of a handful of people who gets to find out and see what happens in court every day. But today... So, going on for a minute about how she's so special. Wonderful analysis here. Today, I got to be in the actual courtroom. Oh my God, in the actual courtroom. It was quite majestic, guys. You walk in the courtroom, the judge is there. And then, you know, in the jury box is actually all the plaintiff's lawyers. And on the defense side, there's just defendants and defense lawyers. So it was really incredible. And final thoughts, I got to ride in the elevator to lunch with the judge, guys. Oh, that keeps me up for this question right here. Okay, so she doesn't seem particularly smart, but I'm pretty sure she's gonna have a far better life trajectory than most of the people who engaged in violence in Charlottesville. That whatever her limitations are, she's on a much better path than those who are inclined to violent rioting. Did you say anything to the judge? And also, since you were there in the courtroom with the jury, what did the jury look like when you were watching them go in during their testimony? You know, I had to refrain myself, Brian. You know, I liked to flirt with judges, but I behaved myself. I just said, hello, and that was it. But let's talk about the jury. This is interesting. Because of COVID and social distancing, of course, everyone's in a mask, but the jury is seated in the audience. So I was the only person who was in the back, okay? I can't take any more. I mean, Ashley, those are really two very poor links. I mean, those were wasted time, but let's go back to the high level Kurdish Yavin talking to Michael Lantan back in there. Money and Rome was totally failing to solve it. And so finally, some senators. So this is Kurdish Yavin talking about how Rome failed to solve piracy in the Mediterranean. Well, there are all sorts of problems that you can't solve as a republic that you can't solve as an empire, right? There are certain situations. There are certain structures of reality where people in a country and a nation are much better suited for surviving challenging times as an empire rather than as a republic. There are other situations where a republic will fit you much better than an empire. It's not like republic is inherently good and empire is inherently bad, right? There are some problems, some situations where you're better off having an empire. There are other situations where you're better off having a republic, right? Republic is not better than empire. Empire is not inherently better than republic, right? Nationalism's good in some things and building an empire is good for other things. Situations change, people change, feelings change. And they say, you know what? We're gonna make Pompey the emperor of the seas. We're gonna basically put him in command of all things related to oceans and pirates, plenary authority, completely unconditional, and he's gonna solve the pirate problem. And then literally three months without any kind of IT, no radios, no gun. So a public health officer, every county in California is a public health officer. They have virtually unlimited power. They can go in and start shutting down businesses. Unlimited power if they believe that there's a public health hazard. So that's how power works, right? That there's no way around that. You're always going to have in every type of government, you're always going to be granting dictatorial powers to deal with emergency situations, right? There's no way to have a system of government that does not contain dictatorial powers. And challenging situations, emergency situations will always bring forth a dictatorial response, right? So the COVID pandemic response with social distancing and shutdowns, that was not just some massive plan by the left, that's just inherent in the nature of government. Got an unprecedented situation, you will react with unprecedented power. Very easy to be even keeled and all about people's rights when you're living in good times. When the survival of your nation or when the survival of a significant portion of your nation is at stake, then the dictatorial powers will come to the fore. Guns, no anything. Pompey clears the whole Mediterranean Sea. Excuse my French of pirates. And basically, you know, that's sort of the Roman equivalent of basically Silicon Valley coming in and fixing Obama's healthcare site. You know, it's like you see sort of the same problem and the disparity in the difficulty of these problems and the competence shown by- Right, so if piracy is a major problem, then you're going to be fine giving someone dictatorial power that they can solve it. If COVID's a major problem, then you're going to be fine giving dictatorial power to somebody to solve it. This is the young Turks on- Christopher Cantwell, also known as the crying Nazi, if you may remember. He's defending himself in court now as he and 23 other white supremacists are being sued by victims from that 2017 Unite the Right rally out in Charlottesville, Virginia, where he took part in. Now, before we get into the people that are helping him with this solo man defense, a plan that he has. First off, let's get into why this guy has to defend himself in the first place. So let's go straight into this from Buzzfeed News. So Mr. Cantwell has rendered attorneys continued representation of him unreasonably difficult, has created a conflict of interest between himself and attorneys, other clients, and has engaged in conduct. Attorneys consider repugnant or imprudent, which is what two of his former attorneys is how they put it before they dropped him. So now he's got to do it on his own because everyone is working with him is like, I'm tired of this guy. So where is this coming from now? What is his new legal help? Who is he listening to? How's he getting this information? A man who spent five months with Cantwell in the same unit in a medium sized security president, Marion Illinois, said Cantwell was inspired and emboldened by the polarizing messages emanating from Fox News, surprising. Specifically, Tucker Carlson, even more surprising. In a filing in the Charlottesville lawsuit, Cantwell specifically cites Carlson as someone with whom he shares many views. That's weird. Jared Williams Smith also told Buzz Feed News here in a phone interview that a group of white supremacists had banded together behind bars. They learned about what was happening outside the prison walls and the political messaging of the day from the far right outlet, again, Fox News, and specifically Tucker Carlson. So after, quote, the whites, as Smith called the group. They finished their legal work for the day. The group would regularly go to a television room in the prison to watch Tucker Carlson's evening program like it was like a Looney Tunes and Cartoon Network. So this is just the way that they have approached this. So Tucker Carlson is on the line for being his, I guess, his approach for his legal defense in this, I'm surprised he's not inspired by the things that happened on January 6th. So Tucker Carlson does not want to be associated with Charlottesville and he hasn't said anything to the best of my knowledge about what happened in Charlottesville. He doesn't want to be associated with this. He's not happy about this. So he's not talking about Charlottesville, right? It's now been four years since the violent white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, but the disturbing images of that August weekend are very hard to forget. Hundreds of far right protesters, white nationalists, neo-nazis, members of the KKK gathered in Charlottesville for a rally against the city's decision to remove a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee. The night before the plan to unite the white right rally, a group of white nationalists marched through the campus of the University of Virginia. So it's not dirty poor to point out that Christopher Campwell and many people like him, are big Tucker Carlson fans, right? I think that's fair and reasonable to point that out. That doesn't make Tucker Carlson a bad person. It just indicates that there is some simpatico between these various points of view. They carried lit tiki torches and chanted phrases, including white lies matter. Jews will not replace us. The Nazi slogan blood and soil. The next morning, things got even worse. City descended into violence as far right groups and counter protesters clashed in the streets. The governor declared a state of emergency and the rally was canceled. Then tragedy struck that afternoon when an avowed white nationalist plowed his car into a group of counter protesters killing 32-year-old Heather Hire. Today, the trial began against the organizers of that rally. It's not a criminal trial. It's a civil one. One of the defendants is Christopher Campwell. He became known as the crying Nazi after posting a video of himself weeping when a warrant was issued for his arrest in the wake of the rally. Now, he's already been convicted criminally of battery and assault, where his actions in Charlottesville there is crying. BuzzFeed reports that Campwell was defending himself in this civil trial because no lawyer has been able to tolerate his antics prepared for trial by watching Fox News host Tucker Carlson with white supremacists in prison and getting legal advice from a neo-Nazi. That's an interesting choice. Within the first minute of his opening statement in court today, Campwell quoted Adolf Hitler's So if you're so obnoxious that no lawyer will work with you, you're not on a good trajectory in life. He then later used the N-word according to reporters listening to the proceedings. One of those reporters following the trial with Charlottesville is Liz Lenz, a contributor to HuffPost where she recently wrote about a 19th century law that dismantled the KKK. Now it could bring down a new generation of extremists. And Liz Lenz, whose coverage I was following all day today, joins me now. It's great to have you on, Liz. Before we get to what happened today, just you wrote about the theory of the case here. And I wonder if you can just sketch out for folks that happened following this. This is a civil lawsuit under a law from the 19th century. What is what is the lawsuit alleged? And how is it being tried? So in 1871, Ulysses S. Grant asked for this sweeping legislation that he was swiftly granted. Something that doesn't really happen these days. Look, you really don't want to get sued. I was sued five times for libel. It's no fun, right? You're going to lose some sleep and you never know what's going to come out in a lawsuit. So try to maintain good relations with as many people as possible, all right? Avoid giving false expectations to clients, to other people. Document what you say and do. Don't initiate hostilities with people, right? Avoid or handle with care the borderline personality or just the troublesome person. Run, don't walk away from unsavory people, right? Don't go to unsavory situations. Run away from unsavory people. Try to address people's complaints and carry good liability insurance. But you really don't want to be in unnecessary feuds. And the best way to avoid unnecessary feuds is to try to get along with people as best you can, all right? Don't go around hurting people and you'll be much less likely to be sued. But it basically allowed civil suits against, it was specifically designed to dismantle the KKK. It allowed a civil lawsuit against anyone who restricts your civil rights, your ability to travel, your ability to move freely. And that landmark legislation was able to basically dismantle the KKK after the Civil War. And it dismantled them for a long time until about the 20th century when we've seen a resurgence of white supremacist violence. And so this case, Science v. Kessler is one of the most expansive uses of the KKK. It act of the 1871 law in modern day and they're trying to, the lawyers, the plaintiffs lawyers in this case are trying to basically sue the white supremacists out of existence. So that's what's going on. So the lawsuit, so under this 1871 claim. So if white supremacists get sued out of existence, what do you think is gonna happen? I mean, gosh, is that genocidal language really okay? I mean, driving people out of existence sounds rather genocidal to me. What do you think is gonna happen? If white supremacists are denied freedom of assembly, if white supremacists are denied freedom to organize, if white supremacists are denied the freedom to try to make their case, are they just going to go home and crumble up in bed and cry? No, they will find other ways to make their points most likely with violence. So if this trial succeeds, it could reduce white supremacist violence. It could dramatically instigate and expand white supremacist violence. It's not at all clear whichever way this trial goes, whether it's going to inhibit or encourage more white supremacist violence. Plan Act, which again was created in response to the sort of white supremacist terrorists who had risen in the wake of reconstruction in the South that were using violent means and intimidation to stop black folks from voting, to stop black folks from assembling, from registering to vote right. So this creates civil liability for people that engage in the white supremacist activities designed to restrict people's civil rights. The theory of the case here is these people at the United Right Rally did this and they are now civilly liable. They're facing trial today. What happened on day one? Who was there and what did you observe? Well, we've had a couple days of jury selection and today was opening statements. So we saw very, right in the beginning, we saw the plaintiffs saying they had been beaten and had their civil rights restricted by the white supremacists at the rally. And they say that this was a conspiracy of violence, that violence didn't just accidentally break out. What they're alleging and hope to prove through this case is that violence was planned, violence was coordinated and that violence was the point. And then we had the Motley crew of defendants, two of them are defending themselves and there's an assortment of lawyers who are all kind of trying to say, well, we didn't really plan it. It was kind of an accident. Okay, this is boring me. What does interest me is Kenneth Brown versus Edward Dutty. The squeaky wheel gets the grease response to Ryan Thompson. Lies on the right number three, Edward Dutton from Kenneth Brown. So Ryan writes, doesn't engage with ideas, problematizes them, complains someone doesn't wanna listen to him. Why should you listen to someone who doesn't actually engage with ideas and then accuses him of doing the same thing? Well, I think this level of abstraction where things are just ideas devoid of any kind of, political context is a little bit ridiculous. I think it's a very secular, atheistic way of viewing the world. So if I presented you a bunch of same-gender erotica and I said, this is an idea, engage with it, you'd say. That's not just an idea. That is an aesthetical, emotional, spiritual even thing. It is not merely a proposition, but it's actually something with a will behind it, right? And that's kind of what I'm saying here is we have to take note of our directionality. We can't simply say things like, if you were fat, is that something that you have to engage with? If you say, I think this about genetics or I think that and I say, well, you're fat, would you say, okay, I'm not going to engage with that? Does that mean you're avoiding the debate of whether you're fat or not? No, it just means that... So I respect Edward Dutton and Kenneth Brown, but I respect them for very different things. I respect Edward Dutton for being just tremendously compelling live stream personality and Kenneth Brown is not as compelling and polished a live stream personality as Edward Dutton, but Kenneth Brown surprises me quite a bit. But Kenneth Brown's frequently a very deep thinker. So I respect them for very different skills. That things can be focused on and they have to be. You know, we can't... This idea that we're just going to say things that are true and things that are true should be... So my chat has the opinion that Edward Dutton is 100 times better than Kenneth Brown, but better at what? Edward Dutton is 100 times more entertaining than Kenneth Brown, right? Edward Dutton is 100 times more skilled as a live stream personality than Kenneth Brown. But whose idea is a deeper? And whose idea is more useful? And who is going down deeper to the very depths of things? It's not at all clear to me that who's the winner there? Said necessarily and it's completely... Like, well, whatever the statistics say, the problem with that I think is that we've seen statistics can be narrow and information itself is useless without organization. So we have to determine our priorities and goals before we can even look at information. This idea of the a-perspectival man who's just, well, I'm just gonna be a blind neutral scientist and look at the data and whatever the data tells me. I guess that's what I believe. That's my worldview now. No, that doesn't... Well, that's not Edward Dutton. Edward Dutton, I think he's very open that he is a contrarian. So he's looking for data that give a contrary point of view. So Edward Dutton is tremendously entertaining, but he's very driven by a particular emotional impulse to be contrarian. Doesn't actually work. That's not how human beings work. We are alive not because of data, we're alive because of our will to live. And as soon as that will to live goes away, we stop living. It doesn't matter how much data you pile on. You can't convince someone to live, which is kind of the problem with arguing someone like Ryan. I don't know that he wants to live. I think, you know, I've spoken to anti-natalists before and I think anti-natalists and racialists share the same kind of philosophical pessimism where, you know, for the anti-natalists, it's a little more intellectually consistent. But for the racialists, there's still this tinge of, you know, the world is just bleak and terrible and everything's bad. And you just have to look at the data and if you just see the truth, you know that things are bad and terrible. So Kenneth Brown is not a guru, right? He doesn't flatter his audience. He doesn't try to give his audience what they want to hear. Edward Dutton has developed an audience by giving them what they want to hear. Kenneth Brown does not try to give his audience what they want to hear. So Kenneth Brown's not a guru. He's not grooming. He's not trying to fulfill your expectations. Which, you know, I don't believe, I don't think that's a legitimate perspective. But we're going to read through all of it because if you post, you know, several essay-length comments, you know, I'm forced, it's in the contract. I have to read them. He says, there are genetic differences between races with regard to intelligence. Okay, so Richard Lin's research, there are many questions about the legitimacy of Richard Lin's research. And Edward Dutton is primarily doing meta-analysis. He's looking at various other studies. He's not doing his own original research. Both of them because they are like the only living, and Richard Lin, by the way, he was like 90 years old. He's almost dead, okay? Richard Lin's almost dead. Edward Dutton is an odd fellow to say the least. And I consider both of these people to be fetishists. They are obsessed in the same way that an entomologist, not an etymologist, but entomologist, a study of bugs comes up. Okay, I think that's a cheap put down by Edward, what's his name? Not Edward, Kenneth Brown. So calling people obsessed is a put down, simply saying that people, it's just a put down. So you can also call them persistent, or principled, or driven, or focused, right? Those are not negative words. So instead of saying someone's focused, you say they're obsessed, it's some kind of cheap put down. So that was an unworthy angle of attack for Kenneth Brown here. And says, look at all these bugs I have. Some of them have six legs, and some of them, you know, I guess insect. Well, Darwin, what? Darwin wrote three books on very tiny animals. All right, so you read Origin of Species, it's just filled with evidence, but it's not the most exciting evidence. He digs down into things like bugs. So there's nothing inferior about devoting your life to studying bugs, right? That's as worthy as subject of inquiry as anything else. And the study of race is as worthy as study of inquiry is the study of theology, as is the study of economics, or philosophy, or feminism. Sex all have eight legs, and then arachnids have four, six, and eight, whatever. The point is, they're obsessively going over these racial statistics with the... And economists obsessively going over economic statistics. This is a really weak line of argument here. Implication or the supposed idea that the reason that we have, quote unquote, bad policies like affirmative action, civil rights, whatever, is because we just don't have the right data, we just don't have the right information. And if we just send Bill Gates... Well, some people think the truth matters. I mean, I assume I'd like to think that Kenneth Brown believes the truth matters. So Kenneth Brown can deride the pursuit of truth, all he likes, but to me that's pretty weak and does not reflect well on him. What essentially Kenneth Brown is doing right now is he is deriding the pursuit of truth. But I think truth matters. I think the pursuit of truth is noble. Kenneth Brown thinks that the pursuit of certain politically unpopular truths just show that you're lame. So I think Kenneth Brown's making a very weak point here. Does not reflect well on it. Read Dysgenics by Richard Lin. Read the book on Islam by Richard Depp. We just have to red pill Bill Gates. And then he'll understand that we're all white and we're all brothers, okay? What did they get wrong? What they got wrong is a total misunderstanding. I mean, look, there are a lot of fetishes out there. Some people have. So I'm just gonna guess here, I haven't watched this video that Kenneth Brown's not gonna be able to point out where they get anything wrong. What I think we're gonna get unfortunately is a lot of word salad here from Kenneth Brown. He's not gonna be able to point out what they get wrong. Catalogues full of pictures of feet. Some people like to study bugs. Some people like to study planets and the stars and the, the, the... None of these particular topics of study are inherently inferior or superior. Theodore Dowrymple said, when I was a young man, I thought metaphysics was the most exciting and important thing in the world, which now that I'd not wasted so much time on the imponderable questions of metaphysics, they used it to more worthwhile effect rather than study philosophy I should have studied insects. Kind of mindset that leads one to be a fetishist. I'm not going to criticize the hobbyist, the person who's... Oh, and Kenneth Brown's not a fetishist. And, I mean, Charles Darwin. It was Charles Darwin, a fetishist. Any great scientist, Albert Einstein. Was he a fetishist? Sort of obsessed with trains and maps, because I like maps and I've spent time in... So again, just using obsessed as a put-down where you could just as easily and more accurately and non-patriotatively use focused. Anyone who makes any substantial inroads in the world of scholarship does it through focus, through a narrow focus. Money on maps. And so I'm not going to criticize that, but I am going to criticize the lack of the understanding of context and what is the purpose of this fetishism? We have to put it in its proper... All right, this is really weak. Like either the research by Edward Dutton and Richard Lynn holds up. If it does hold up, and I'm not proclaiming it does or it doesn't, if it does hold up, then it is a worthy part of the pursuit of truth and all good people should favor the pursuit of truth. So Kenneth Brown's just giving a bunch of word salad here. And it feels like in this very narrow world of the alt-right, when people are taking a swing at each other, it's so often it's not about anything important, it's really just pure ego. Like I'm the most important thinker here, and this is why your work is useless. Proper place and understand that this is a personal obsession. This is not a... You don't... All right, so the study of a particular focused area of scholastic endeavor, Kenneth Brown wants to just deride as some kind of psychological weakness. And there's no evidence for that whatsoever. It's without point. And you don't have to study wider context, right? You can focus your entire life on studying insects. You don't have to also consider the role of feminism. Political philosophy. This is not a path to power. This is not a legitimate world. Wow. So the study of data is pointless because it's not a path to power. So only things that are a path to power are worthy of study. This is really pathetic. And I started out so, what I suppose towards Kenneth Brown. In a wider moral sense, we have a moral obligation, not just to quote-unquote tell the truth. I think, again... We have a moral obligation, not just to quote-unquote tell the truth. So telling the truth is not something that's very important to Kenneth Brown. And then when you talk about moral obligations, you have to be honest and forthright and say who's moral obligations according to which school of morality, according to the Hebrew Bible, according to the New Testament, according to the New York Times. Like, who's morality are you invoking here? And that's a very shallow, superficial contortion and perversion of... Wow, the pursuit of truth is a very shallow and superficial contortion. To me, the pursuit of truth, there's nothing more noble for a scholar than to pursue truth. That is what scholars should do. They should pursue truth. Of the truth. When you present things, the truth has... This is just a shallow perversion of the truth when you say you're interested in the truth. This is nonsense. It needs to be married to what is good. If you're just obsessively, quote-unquote, searching for the truth, entomology is true. There's a true... He's putting down an obsessive search for the truth, a diligent search for the truth, a passionate pursuit of the truth. So it's good that we're clear. Kenneth Brown has contempt for the pursuit of the truth. So we know something here about Kenneth Brown. The truth is not particularly important to him. He will use word salad and bogus categories such as obsessed, and you could just as easily say focused and dedicated, to put people down. Because some people pursue the truth, and Kenneth Brown considers that a psychological quirk and weakness that some people are interested in scholarship. Way to color a train set or to paint a model plane. There's a true... Like all these things are quote-unquote true. We have to understand the organizational context of information. If you throw it in... This is just throwing words at the wall like mud and seeing what sticks. You have to understand the organizational context of information. Why can't you just pursue truth? So I'll give you an example. In I think March of 1998, I uncovered that a man by the name of Mark Wallace Goldberg had was the most likely patient zero for an HIV outbreak in the San Fernando porn industry. He'd very likely transmitted HIV to up to approximately a dozen porn stars over the course of several years that he'd been getting away with this. What organizational context of information do I need to understand to break that news and to save countless people from getting a very deadly disease? I don't need to understand any of this word salad to save lives by transmitting accurate information. Encyclopedia at me, Grey's Anatomy. And you say, here's a bunch of true stuff. I don't need to read Grey's Anatomy. I don't need to read Encyclopedia to break news that saves lives by pointing out someone who's likely patient zero in a massive HIV outbreak. It's like, what is the context in which we're examining this? What's the context? Completely ignoring that. And there's no answer. There's no answer to that. There's no theory. There's no understanding. Why has the world gone the way it has? I have an explanation for that. I think these people don't. I think they refuse to look at it because understanding that would put all of- So Kenneth Brown has an explanation for why the world has gone the direction it has. I mean, that's such a huge topic. You could come up with any explanation. You could say it's because of unicorns. All right? That's not really something that can be resolved. And I'm sure Richard Lynn and Edward Dutton also have big explanations. What? Kenneth Brown thinks that only he has the big explanation. And Richard Lynn and Edward Dutton are simply not big-brained enough thinkers to come up with big explanation for why the world is the way it is. Look at their fetishism and perspective. That obsessing over- Fetishism and obsession. You could just as easily say focus and dedication. Black people in this hateful, resentful, arrogant, narcissistic way, you're basically trying to make yourself feel better. That's pathetic. Richard Lynn and Edward Dutton are not focused on black people and they're not conducting themselves in some kind of psychologically twisted way. If you have a valor criticism of their research, then point it out. But you can't. All you can do is launch personal attacks with no substance. This is Kenneth Brown at his absolute worst. If this is the only video I had seen of Kenneth Brown, I'd never watch him again. Because you don't have any power because you're a weak person. Oh, so if you don't have power, therefore, your scholarship doesn't count. If you're weak, guess what? Everybody's weak. Kenneth Brown has weaknesses. I have weaknesses. Edward Dutton has weaknesses. Richard Lynn has weaknesses. Joe Biden has weaknesses. There's nobody who is strong in all situations. We're all strong in certain situations and weak in other situations. Because you're a flawed person. And frankly, you know, we all are. Oh, so Richard Lynn and Edward Dutton are flawed people. And Kenneth Brown is speaking as though he is not a flawed person. I mean, how many levels of delusion is Kenneth Brown living under? I mean, part of this is just that Kenneth Brown's so young. All right, when you're in your teens and twenties, most people have a vast overestimation of their own abilities. And Kenneth Brown, like most people his age, has a vast overestimation of his own abilities. So far through the eight minutes and 20 seconds we've suffered through this, he's said almost nothing useful, but it's everything he said is either wrong or toxic or just nonsense. To an extent, we all have flaws, we all have weaknesses. So I understand that coping mechanism, but that's what it is. It's not a grandiose theory of civilization. It's not the means to save the white race. It is a coping mechanism for you don't have power in your life. Edward Dutton, Richard Lynn, have these people done anything monumental? Are they, you know, the president of a college? Oh, so you have to be a president of the college to do something monumental? Well, I like the perspective in Judaism. If you touch one life, you touch the whole world because that one person, he is the whole world. So yeah, I'm sure that Edward Dutton and Richard Lynn have done consequential things. What exactly has Kenneth Brown accomplished that Richard Lynn and Edward Dutton can only look at him with awe and admiration? I don't think so. What exactly have you accomplished, Kenneth? College, you know, Woodrow Wilson, I think was president of Harvard. You know, being president of a college is a very significant achievement. What are these people? They're tenured professors. Plenty of presidents of colleges don't achieve anything, right? It can be an administrative position where you leave no imprint. On the other hand, you can leave an imprint. When I was the editor of my high school newspaper, I left an imprint of that high school's newspaper that was significant for many years afterwards. I was told by my journalism advisor. So 14 years later, after I left the school, my tenure as editor of the high school newspaper had continued to affect the way that the newspaper operated. For example, I changed the name. And the name that I changed it to used to be the messenger. I changed it to the Holman messenger, whatever. The name change that I made during my tenure still existed 14 years later. So it's not particularly significant, but yeah, some people can become president or editor and leave no impression. Other people can leave a giant impression. There's nothing to inherently holding some administrative office that means that you have lasting importance or even temporary importance. You may just be a placeholder. This is out of how many millions of tenured professors. By the way, not even American, right? So do you think of all the millions of tenured professors in the world? And yes, these are two tenured professors in the world. Look, you can't go wrong, generally speaking, underestimating your own importance. So for most live streamers, we greatly overestimate our own importance, right? So you shouldn't think of yourself as so insignificant that it completely crushes your ability to make a contribution to the world. But almost everybody overestimates its own importance. Almost everybody who speaks on YouTube overestimates their reach and their influence. So yeah, I'm irrelevant. Kenneth Brown's irrelevant. Edward Dutton's irrelevant. In certain perspectives, Richard Lynn's irrelevant, right? We're all gonna die, and everything that we work for is gonna fall apart eventually. And they're obsessively cataloging racial differences in attempt to do what exactly? In attempt to quote unquote, red pill people like you who are similarly, you know, not doing anything, not accomplishing anything. Cataloging racial differences would, I don't know, probably be less than 10% of what Edward Dutton and Richard Lynn do. So in some contexts, it's important to note what different entities and groups have in common. In other contexts, it's more important to notice what they separates them, right? There's nothing inherent, the superior about noticing what different groups have in common, as opposed to noticing what separates different groups. Neither pursuit is inherently superior. Can you talk about this? Why do I talk about this? Because I don't think you're, like this person hates me for being Jewish, and I think this is like a fetishistic exercise for them. But I think maybe there are some people, I do believe, I believe that the 99% of people you can't change their mind on any given issue. You know, I had a debate on the Flat Earth and I went into it knowing my opponent wasn't gonna change his mind, I wasn't gonna change your mind. 99% of the people in the audience either were with me or against me, you know, let's say it was a 50-50 split. There's a very small percentage, maybe 1% that can be swayed either way. Don't tell me that Kenneth Brown was trying to make the case for a Flat Earth. I mean, if that's true, then I'd just turn this off right now. And I tried to reach, I tried to talk to the 1%, I tried to say, look, you know, this is interesting from a historical, cultural, psychologically, from a political dimension, and we can talk about that and think about that and blow it out. Like what is, what good thing could we derive from this debate? That was my approach, and a lot of people didn't like it. A lot of people wanted to see me BTFO my opponent, and I didn't see the interest in, I mean, I guess, you know, if I felt like I was an expert on the Flat Earth or whatever, and I had PhD in physics, then sure, I guess that would have been appropriate or more appropriate. This is more, I would say, my area of expertise. I mean, I would say I'm more of an expert in all of this than Mr. Ryan Thompson. All right, so let's get, because there's a lot more here, really 10 minutes in folks. He says, you claim that people who speak the truth. Again, I dispute that it's the quote unquote truth. When it comes to race, physical appearance, genetics, wear it on their sleeve as a belief system. I don't think that's my intention. Well, socially, there is something to the observation that most people don't talk publicly about race or race realists have a hard time talking about anything else. There is something contagious about studying or reading or listening to racial differences that tends to often take over people's minds. Attention here. When they are merely speaking, there's no such thing as merely speaking reality. Whenever you communicate, you are communicating to the exclusion of all other things. There is an opportunity cost every communication. Yet, you know, if I start reading the dictionary to you, is it true? That is, again, that's a perversion of the word truth. If I start reading the dictionary and I start in A with aardvark and I say aardvark, an animal with four legs, and I go on to ape, ape. You know, a cousin of the monkey. And I just keep reading for hours and hours and I make this my, and I call this, this is my political philosophy. I'm a dictionarist. We need to red pill everybody on dictionarism, sort of a dictionary political party to read the dictionary together. Is that quote unquote true? Do you see the problem with this? There is, if there is a cost to something, we better dang well be sure that that cost is worth it. There's such a thing as mere truth. Okay? There is life and there's living and there's communication, which is a tool of organization. Toward what? What are we organizing toward? I'm organizing. Okay. This is useless. Might as well call it a night. All is quiet. I want to be with you, be with you, be with you night and day. And I will be.