 Richard, Richard asks, I just confirmed that Norm Chomsky recently said, quote, the U.S. is living under totalitarian culture much worse than the Soviet Union, unquote. He could be right. What has caused the authoritarianism to rise in the U.S. the past 10 to 20 years? Well, first of all, he's not right. That is a ridiculous, bizarre, absurd, nutty, crazy, evil statement. Not by you, Richard, by Norm Chomsky. I mean, really, how many of you are going to the gulags? How many of you are being just outright killed? How many of you are just being outright poisoned and destroyed? I mean, we do not live in the Soviet Union. Tens of millions of people were murdered, murdered. I mean, even today in Russia is 100 times worse than what we have it here. I mean, you might get a Twitter gang attacking you on Twitter. Oh my God, you compare that to the KGB taking you into a cell and torturing you? Yes, we shouldn't make light of all culture. You might actually lose your job, and that's horrific, and that's terrible, and your reputation could be solid, and that's terrible, and that's horrific, and that's bad. It's still not, it's still not the gulags. You should read Gulag, a Capellagus, by Dostoevsky, God, by Solzhenitsyn. Read Solzhenitsyn's book. I read them in my teen years, in the 70s and 80s. God, you have no appreciation for how bad the Soviet Union was. I mean, Norm Chomsky knows better. He's an evil bastard. He knows better. To compare the Soviet Union to America today is bizarre and ridiculous. Now, we are moving towards more authoritarianism. We are certainly moving towards less freedoms, but it's a very slow process, and still fundamentally, by the way, free speech today in America is protected more than it's probably ever been in American history. More than it's protected in any other, as far as I can tell, any other place on planet Earth. We don't have hate speech laws like they do in Europe. You can kick the president of the United States off Twitter. What is better proof of liberty than that? Than the fact that we have free speech, the fact that the government doesn't control our media. Oh, Chomsky is brilliant and evil. So let's get a grip, people, about how bad things are. They're not that bad. Not as compared to the Soviet Union. Not as compared to Maoist China. Not as compared to Russia right now. So again, in the 1960s, Lenny Bush used to spend the night in jail for saying the F-word on a stage, which he was invited to. Today you can say anything. Nobody's going to put you in jail. So yes, there's a war culture. There's a culture. We've got private companies on social media who restrict what you can say and what you can't say up to a point. Jordan Peterson, I guess, got ticked off of Twitter. But he has one of the largest platforms in the world on YouTube and on the daily wire. So he can still speak, he can still say whatever he wants. He can still access millions and millions of people. So what are we so worried about in terms of, again, that comparison? Now, we are becoming more authoritarian. And what's causing that increase in authoritarian is a decline in enlightenment values. What's causing that growth in authoritarianism is the bankruptcy of the mixed economy, the mixed economy of the material world, of economics, and the mixed economy of the spiritual world of ideas. We want to have a cake and eat it, too. We want to have technology and religion. We want to have freedom and regulations. We want to have wealth and the welfare state. We want to have altruism and the pursuit of happiness. What's causing it, what's causing the state of the world is the bankruptcy of this wanting contradictions. It had to go bankrupt. And Anglican called this 40 years ago, 50 years ago. Atlas Shrugged, 70 years ago. She saw it. She saw it. You can't continue to live the contradiction. You can't have your cake and eat it, too, in that sense. You can't have reason and mysticism fighting over the culture. One of them will win. If it's not reason, it's mysticism. And reason is losing. And reason is losing because the defenders of reason are weak. The defenders of reason won't take Iron Man seriously. The defenders of reason won't use the best philosophy to defend reason, which is Iron Man. So you get the mystics of the left and the mystics of the right, the environmentalism on the left, and the Jordan Peterson's on the right. And both are authoritarian. Both ultimately want to dictate your life, your morality, your spiritual values, and your material values. They want to do it differently. They want to do it different paces in different ways. But it's mysticism. It's altruism and collectivism. Those are the three. Mysticism, altruism, collectivism. They're dominance. And the fact that reason, egoism, individualism, capitalism, have no defenders other than Iron Man. No real defenders other than Iron Man and a few voices out there that might be fellow travelers on some issue and not on others. There's just not enough of us to counter that. That's what's causing the increase in authoritarianism in America. But God, we're nowhere near as bad as the Soviet Union or Russia right now. Thank you for listening or watching the Iran Book Show. If you'd like to support the show, we make it as easy as possible for you to trade with me. You get value from listening. You get value from watching. Show your appreciation. You can do that by going to iranbrookshow.com slash support by going to Patreon, subscribe star locals, and just making a appropriate contribution on any one of those channels. Also, if you'd like to see the Iran Book Show grow, please consider sharing our content and, of course, subscribe. Press that little bell button right down there on YouTube so that you get an announcement when we go live. 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