 Radical, fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest, and individual rights. This is the Iran Brook Show. All right everybody, welcome to Iran Brook Show on this Monday, January 8th, I hope everybody had a fantastic weekend and ready for an incredibly productive week, hope you have a fantastic week. Okay, let's just jump right into it. Over the weekend, and it started last week as we talked about this on, I think it was on Friday's show, but over the last week we saw the continuation of what has come to be known as the plagiarism wars, as you, just let me give you some background. Bill Ackerman, Ackerman, Ackerman, Ackerman, there's no ER. For some reason, I think there's an Ackerman, but it's Ackman. Bill Ackman, who is an incredibly successful hedge fund manager, a billionaire, and has been in the hedge fund business since, what, the early 2000s, I think, and you know said, has an amazing track record. Anyway, actually he's been in the investment business since 1982. Ackerman became kind of the leader of I think many voices, but somebody, because he's such a successful hedge fund manager, he's not just a successful hedge fund manager. Over the years, he has made money and been involved in some pretty contentious, you know, battles within corporate America. So, and I think has gained a voice and a following as a consequence of that. And he has quite an active Twitter account, and he has expressed himself about corporate America, about his investments on that Twitter account in the past. So he's also a donor of Harvard University and alumni of Harvard University. And he became, if you will, the leader of, at least in terms of vocally, the leader of the group of donors, supporters of Harvard University, who were horrified by gay's testimony in front of the house and were calling for a resignation. And then he magnified, significantly magnified the concerns about the plagiarism, the plagiarism that gay had clearly committed, and was, I think, a real power behind all the different alumni who were drawing funds from Harvard. Some people have said that Ackerman, you know, drew a billion dollars of donations from Harvard. That's not true. But the speculation is that Ackerman and others, together, basically are withholding a billion dollars from Harvard. And that was part of what ultimately led to, you know, the pressure on gay to ultimately resign. Ackerman, yes, I got it. Ackerman. So Bill Ackerman has been at the forefront of calling for a resignation, of highlighting and amplifying the cause for a resignation, and amplifying the issue around plagiarism. Now, let me remind you, gay's plagiarism involved over half of her academic papers. It involved major, major issues of plagiarism. This is not, you know, this is not something, you know, this is not something trivial. It was not a sentence here, a sentence there. It was whole paragraphs. It was whole paragraphs where there was no attribution. Anyway, I think it was Thursday or Friday. Business Insider decided to go after Ackerman's wife. Ackerman's wife is Neri Ackerman. Neri Ackerman, I think is Israeli. I read somewhere she's Israeli. Anyway, she is a scientist. She worked, I think, for many years at MIT and was an academic at MIT, but now has a startup. I don't exactly understand what she does. But I've been told that the interview with, she has an interview with Lex Friedman. It's quite extraordinary and definitely worth watching. So I'm planning on watching her interview with Lex and understand a little bit more about what she does. Anyway, they came out and said in a dissertation written, I don't know, 2010, a long time ago, she committed plagiarism. And I talked about this Friday, these are minor cases of plagiarism. She didn't put the quotation marks, even though she gave the attribution and a few other things that were relatively minor and could easily be viewed as errors, mistakes, but not copy-paste. I'm just going to ignore it. And she gives clear attribution for these things. Anyway, over the weekend, a business insider clearly motivated. By revenge, clearly motivated by going after the guy you called out gay for plagiarism as if his wife is in the same status as the president of Harvard as somebody who claims to have that position because of her academic accomplishments. I mean, whatever Neri Oxman's status is, she's not president of Harvard. She's not in a public position like that. She's not in a position of leadership. She's got a startup. She runs a company, her company. Anyway, it's clearly, Akron, you went after the president of Harvard. We're going after you. And who's the we? So this is a business insider, most other or every other major mainstream media publication. Here's a shout out to the mainstream media who approached with the story of Oxman's supposed plagiarism turned it down. Business insider ran with it. Anyway, over the weekend, Ackman got a, what is it, a 6,000 word, you know, a long, long, long article, 7,000 word plagiarism allegation that they sent. They basically gave him and his wife, I don't even know if they're married. He calls his partner for life, but I don't know if they're technically married. Anyway, his partner for life, they gave him 90 minutes to respond, 90 minutes to respond. Of course, they didn't, you know, you can't respond to 90 minutes and accusation like this. And so they don't care. They don't care about facts. They don't care about reality. They don't care about, you know, what exactly, what she actually did or didn't do. They don't want her input on this. Remember, Gai, Claudine Gai had weeks, you know, plagiarism, the accusation of plagiarism being around for months. She had weeks to comment on them, to offer a defense, to offer a counter. Ackman's wife has given 90 minutes, but why is she even in the public eye? Why does anybody care? I mean, why should anybody care? But it's okay to go after and, you know, some of these headlines, you know, that they come out with, you know, accusing, just, you know, unbelievable, right? Just unbelievable. Anyway, Ackman is active on Twitter, defending himself, defending his wife, as I think he should be. But what I find interesting as part of this is, you know, Ackman is not somebody you want to mess with. As many corporate leaders I think have found out, he's going to, he is not going to let this go. He is demanding that business insider, you know, explain itself, why it's going after Ackman, why allowing them 90 minutes to comment and so on. What is this other than a vendetta? What exactly are the interests involved? Ackman will use his significant financial resources, I think, to go after these people, right? And he now is, I think, awakened. Maybe he's woke. Is this the meaning of woke? When you awaken to a reality, he's now awakened to the real challenges and real problems that our media has and the way it operates, the ideological take that they have. And of course, the ideological take our educational system has and discrimination that our educational system has and the fact that free speech is constrained on American campuses. He's going to take all this on. So he's a fighter and he has the resources to do it. And he has the platform to do it. So this is, again, another way in which I think beware if you're woke left, who and what you wake up, who and what you offend, and the kind of resources they're going to be thrown at you. I mean, my guess is that Bill Ackman is probably, I don't know, politically left of center, maybe center right, but he's not, he's not crazy right. He's not, I don't think he's a Trumpist, I don't think he's, I think he probably voted for Biden. I don't know. But that's my impression. You're waking these people up, these people who have not really been involved, these people who maybe have not really figured out where you are and what you've done to the institutions. And you're waking people up with a lot of influence, with a lot of money, and with a lot of ability. And he's not the only one. There's a bunch of moderate Democrats, many of them Jewish, who have woken up to what the left is doing, to what they're doing at our universities and how they're using the media to attack and slander and just orient the world in their direction by dishonest means. So he's after them. He is ready. I mean, he's also committed to real reform at Harvard, which I think is quite exciting. This is just a fact, I just, he just posted this on his Twitter account. He says, the ideological takeover of Harvard is nearly complete. We are all stepping in just in time to save it. But it's going to be a fight. And he's citing here a tweet from Nicholas Christakis. And again, Nicholas Christakis is, yeah, he's a professor of social and natural sciences at Yale. I don't know what his affiliation is. Again, anyway, Christakis writes, Harvard Online Course Catalog has a search box. Type in decolonize. That word is in the titles of seven courses. And the descriptions of 18 more. Type in oppression and liberation. They're in the description of more than 80 courses. So justice in more than 100 courses. That's a takeover of Harvard that now people like Ackman have are focusing their efforts on fixing, on straightening out, straightening out. So this is going to be interesting. It's going to be a real fight. The fight at the end of the day for Harvard is the fight for American academia. It's probably a losing fight. Harvard is probably lost. But that fight will resonate in other universities. Harvard sets the tone. Things happening at Harvard set the tone. If Harvard is under attack, other universities will pay attention. They'll be afraid. They'll pivot. They'll change. This could be a moment where you start seeing positive changes in American academia. And we'll see. It's going to take more than Ackman because he doesn't have the intellectual resources to win this, ultimately. He doesn't have the philosophical, I think, context to win this. It's interesting. Many of the other big financiers who've gone after, particularly University of Pennsylvania, the people who were drawn from U-Pen, most of the people who made the press about they were drawing funding from U-Pen are people I know as Iron Man fans. Ackman, I don't know one way or the other. But U-Pen, definitely. Maybe you could say this is one more way in which Iron Man is having an impact on the culture. There are a lot of billionaires today in the world, a lot of billionaires today in the world who are not objectivists, but who are heavily influenced by Iron Man and therefore heavily influencing the response to the insanity on the campuses of our universities. Now, primarily because of the response to October 7th, but I think, as a result, it is opening their eyes to the rest of the woke insanity, the DEI insanity that's happening out there. All right. I think this morning, no, over the weekend or maybe Friday, the US Customs and Border Protection released that more than 2.3 million migrants into the United States as a southern border have been released by the US Customs and Border Protection. So they've actually provided the numbers under the Biden administration. Most of these, a vast majority, migrant families and other adults, these figures published by the Department of Homeland Security the first time, so these are official numbers now. And it reflects kind of the overwhelming volume of micro-crossing the US-Mexico border because these are people who are caught. You've got to assume that a certain percentage you're not caught. I think the percentage you're not caught is significantly smaller, but 2.3 million is a big number, so even if it's smaller, that we're not caught. Because I think a lot of people just coming in, surrendering to the authorities and asking for amnesty. I don't think they were trying to get in illegally. Now, about 6 million migrants over the same period, I guess this is the total Biden administration, have been taking into custody during this period. And many of them are being sent back. But 2.3 are people in the United States released in the United States, free to roam the United States, I guess. I don't know how many of them can work. That would be interesting to discover how many of them actually have permission to work. So you can break down these numbers in a variety of different ways. A bunch of them were sent back. A bunch of them are held in captivity on the border. A bunch of them have been released. 2.3 million have been released. Anyway, this sounds horrible. This sounds like, oh my god, the world is going to end. I talked about this on the show last week. Oh my god, it's an invasion. 2.3 million have invaded the country. I mean, our institutions must be on the verge of collapse. The whole country must be just in one big, unmitigated disaster zone. I'm sure that most of you experiencing this in your neighborhoods, it must be unbelievably, horrible to live in in America. With 2.3 million migrants were being released in the population just over the last three years. And who knows how many came in undetected during that same period. It's a crisis, a disaster, an invasion. And yet, nothing's happening. I mean, yeah, there's some challenges in New York City and certainly the challenges in some of the border towns, challenges primarily driven by the fact that many of these immigrants are not a lot of work and therefore they receive welfare. But, you know, and of course, there have been illegal immigrants coming in for years. But in most of the country, let me suggest 99% of the country, this is having almost no impact at all. No impact at all. Now, I'm not against open immigration in today's context. But I'm not particularly against these people immigrating. I'm for the people immigrating into America. I'm against the immigration policies that we have. I'm against the emphasis on asylum. I'm against not letting them work. I'm against not having a robust legal immigration system that would make this unnecessary. I believe that with a robust immigration system, we probably have 5 million people entering the United States or maybe 2 million a year entering the United States over the period that's involved. So many, many more than the 2.3. I'm not objecting to 2.3. I'm objecting to the fact that we have such a pathetic immigration system that the only way they can come is illegally. But what are the negative consequences? Unemployment is historical lows. Wages are going up. Wages are going up. And what is happening to violent crime in the United States? So over the weekend, over the last few weeks, a number of statistics with regard to 2023 have come out with regard to violent crime. Now, these are not final statistics. These are, to some extent, estimates because we don't have final, final, final numbers for 2023. But it's pretty amazing, these numbers, because nobody's reporting them. Nobody's talking about them because it's mostly good news. Homicides in the United States dropped in 2023 by a record number. Maybe we'll see when the final numbers come in. Maybe at the highest rate ever in terms of a drop. That is, homicides in the United States are down somewhere around 13%, 14% from last year. That is a huge number. Now, we're not yet back to 2019 levels because 2020 and 2021 were such bad years. But those are the COVID years. And much of the increase in homicides can probably be attributed to COVID and everything that happened around it, particularly BLM, the riots and all of that, and the breakdown of neighborhoods not going to school. But since 2021, it turns out that in major cities in the United States, police forces have been beefed up. Resources for police department, in spite of defund the police, have been increased. And murder rates have come down, in spite of this invasion of illegal immigrants. Indeed, murder rates now are very close to the lowest. They've been ever, maybe, hard to tell in terms of murders for 100,000 people. They're coming down to levels not seen since the early 1960s or seen in the last, the bottom was in 2013. 2013 and 2014 were amazingly low years, probably the lowest homicide rates ever in American history, lower than the 1960s. And it looks like we're going to hit those numbers again. We're going to get to those numbers. They're certainly trending down from 2022 and 23. We're way down from previous years. What's amazing is these declines are all over the place. They're in New York City, declined by over 10%. They're in Chicago. Oh my god, the Chicago is seeing significant declines in murder rates in 2023. Los Angeles. Detroit, in 2021, they hired more police, increased the budget, increased community policing. Detroit is seeing plummeting murder rates. Even mid-sized cities that, you know, the St. Louis and cities like that, that had some of the highest rates in the United States are seeing murder rates come down. The only two major metropolitan areas that are seeing murder rates go up are Memphis, well, three. Memphis, Dallas, and with a murder rate increase of 36%, which is massive, Washington, DC. Note that none of those cities, maybe Dallas, but none of those cities have a lot of illegal immigrants in them in particular. Anyway, this is great news. And if you look at it more deeply, if you actually look at violent crime numbers, not just homicide numbers, violent crime numbers are down dramatically. The only crime, the only real crime that is up in the United States in 2023, was motor vehicles. Somebody's complaining that I'm not being, what, whatever, I'm not giving time comparisons. Okay, let's do time comparisons. So right now in the United States, the murder rate for 2023 is 5.8 per 100,000. 5.8 per 100,000, something like that. In COVID, during 2020 and 2021, it peaked at around 6.5, maybe 6.8, somewhere between 6 and 7. So it's gone below 6, above 5. So 5.5, 5.8 right now. It bottomed in 2014. 2014 was the best year ever for this. It's somewhere just above 4, right? Somewhere just above 4. The peak murder rate in American history, as far as we know, the data here goes back to, I have data going back to 1960. The peak year for violent crime in the United States was 19, this is for murders, was 1980. The more recent peak, the most recent peak, and that peak was at over 10. Over 10 murders per 100,000, right? The more recent peak was in 1993. Since then, it's been a steady decline through 2014. And then it went up a little bit, and then it was flat, and then it spiked during. So 20, in 1993, it was well over nine. It was somewhere like 9.5, 9.5 out of 100. That was 100,000, that was the crime rate. So right now, that was the murder rate, sorry. Right now, it's at, it's getting close to half what it was at the peak in 1980. And it's not that far from, it's not half, but it's getting down there dramatically from 9.8, so it's not that far from half of the 1993 peak. Generally, the United States right now in 2023 is one of the safest periods in American history in terms of murder, in terms of violent crime, more generally. So, I don't know, you guys, let's do this. Let's do this, let's do this. No, I don't wanna do that, that's not right. Give me a second, give me a second and we'll do this. I think that's it. All right, there we go. All right, there it is, right? Annual rate of homicide in the United States. You can see the trend 2023. It's good news, guys, it's good news. Yeah, I'm saying illegal immigrants are bringing down the crime rate, absolutely. I'm saying that the crime rate is not affected by illegal immigrants. That's what I'm saying. And so, stop it. Stop the hysteria, the panic, the insanity. Okay, let me just shift here. That'll give you a couple more graphs. There's the same graph. Let me see if I can move this one. You can see the same graph there. I wanna show you this table. Violent crime is down 2022 versus 2023. 8.2% murders down 15, rate 15, robbery nine, aggravated assault six, point eight, property crime, burglaries law. I'm just giving you some good news. I know, I know, I know. It can and Scott and the rest of it. It really, really hard for you to accept good news. Good news goes again, particularly Biden as president. You can't have any good news when Biden's president. But this is the reality, right? Motor vehicle theft primarily if you own a Kia and a Hyundai. Primarily if you own a Kia and a Hyundai, that is the primary. And then if you look at this table, I don't know if you can see this table. This is a table in the goddess cities. And you can see that in every category of cities, it's down, but the most dramatic decrease of crime, particularly motor rape is in big cities, over a million people. One shockingly, shockingly overwhelmingly by Democratic mayors. So I know, I mean, it's hard to comprehend. So the cities that have seen, the only cities that have seen increases, significant increases, DC, Dallas and Memphis. Unfortunately, those are the places that increase increase in crime. So a lot of good news guys. I like to talk about good news. And again, a lot of this happening in some of the worst hit cities like Chicago, like New York. New York is now one of the safest cities in the United States in terms of violent crime is New York. All right, it is what it is, right? At least the crime rates are going well. You might complain about other stuff and that's fine. And they weren't going well initially, right? 2020, 2021, well, horrible years. The crime rate jumped dramatically in Trump's last year as president and then stayed really, really high in Biden's first year and then started declining. All right, what else? Sanctions. I wanna quickly mention sanctions on Russia and sanctions on Iran and how those are fundamentally failing. And oh God, what did I do? I closed the window, I didn't wanna close. Reopen, close tap, there we go. No, I didn't close it. All right, I closed this somewhere else. So, and this is about, I think the, really the stupidity of sanctions. I've talked about this in regard to Russia, the fact that we have diplomatic relations, we pretend as if they were legitimate. They sit in the Security Council, the United Nations Security Council. We treat them with respect and with honor, but certain things we won't trade with them. We'll trade with them other things and certain individuals we sanction, but other individuals are fine and we'll sanction certain things, not others. It's complete and some countries do sanctions, some countries don't. And we pretend like we're doing something important. So, the example I had, and the window is closed, I don't have the stats on me, but the example is the European sanctions against Russia, automobile sanctions, other sanctions. And why are they not working? Well, they're not working because what is happening is that countries like Kazakhstan and Armenia and even Georgia, middlemen in those countries are buying stuff from Europe, and this is true also of things that probably have military application. And since those countries are not part of the sanction regime with Russia, they're just reselling it to Russia. So Russia is finding multiple ways around the sanctions. So the sanctions are doing a lot less harm, they're hurting Russia, but they're doing a lot less harm than people assume and a lot less harm than they should. Well, because it's very, very difficult, as we can see on our southern border, when people and goods, when there's demand for people and goods, and there's demand for labor in the United States, there's demand for example, for fentanyl in the United States, it's impossible to stop that from traversing the border. The same is true if Russia is demanding airplane parts and you're saying, well, we won't sell it to Russia, the Russians will find a way to get them. It's not a particular effective strategy for dealing with an enemy. An enemy, by the way, we won't name and we won't define as an enemy and so on. So the whole thing is just the whole sanctions regime is a charade, it's a charade. The same thing, by the way, is true of Iran. The challenge with Iran is a little different because a lot of the civilized world is really sanctioning them and for a while much of the rest of the world cooperated. But that is not happening anymore. So Chinese companies, China has a robust relationship now with Iran, Russia has a robust relationship with Iran. Because we have sanctions on Russia, we can't sanction the companies, the Russian companies doing trade with Iran. How would that work? We're already sanctioning those companies and with China, we're too afraid to actually tell China to stop because we want to continue trading with China and we want to have good relations with China. The same thing happens with North Korea all the time. We have sanctions in North Korea but China sells some stuff and we don't stop China and we don't sanction China because they're sanctioned. I mean, there's just no end to it. Even China, we've sanctioned certain individuals and certain companies, but not consistently and what's the point? Sanction regimes do not work. Iran right now is seeing a little boom because of its trade with Russia, particularly selling them weapons, drones, they're now selling them ballistic missiles. North Korea is seeing a little boom because they're selling them ballistic missiles and because Iran is selling massive amounts of oil to China. You want to hurt the Iranians. Iran is a threat to you. Then bomb their oil facilities. That'll stop their export of oil. That'll do it. But don't play at these sanctioned games and pretend that you're doing something. I just saw an interview I did in 2018 with Maria Baltoloma. Is that how you pronounce her name? Maria and I go back a long time. I did interviews for her way back and it's an interview I posted on Twitter. It's an interview where I'm supposed to talk about finance, we're supposed to talk about banking and indeed she introduces me as a partner in the hedge fund. But because she remembers me, she knows I can talk about anything. So immediately before she said that was a day like Trump got us out of the sanctions on Iran and out of the Iranian deal that Obama had cut. You know, one of the better things Trump had done and imposed sanctions on Iran and I was skeptical of the sanctions. And I just rewatched that interview and I was spot on in 2018. It's like everything I said has turned out to be true. The sanctions don't really work and you really want to take out what really should have happened is the Trump administration and the Biden administration should have taken out the Iranian regime. And I said that on Fox Business to Maria 2018. And I'll say it again today because it's still the number one best thing you could do in the Middle East right now is take out the Iranians. All right, I just want to mention Silvanos, thank you for the sticker, Gail, thank you for the sticker. Let's see if there were any other stickers here. Glan, not Glangian, sticker, thank you, I appreciate that as well. All right, yeah, let's see if Maria will have me back on Fox. We'll see if that'll happen. How are they willing to take me off their blacklist? That is the question because I have been for a long time on a Fox blacklist. So will they take me off on the Fox blacklist? Of course, as one of Freeman reminds us, a Peacock said the same thing to O'Reilly in 2001. I said the same thing to O'Reilly in 2003, I think it was, and then maybe again in 2005. I said it over and over and over again in speeches and talks. Lenin Peacock said it in his article that was published in the New York Times and Washington Post in a paid advertisement article that published, he said that right after 9-11. My blacklisting at Fox was a consequence of the fact two things. One, in 2012, I refused to endorse a candidate. I was running a nonprofit, I couldn't by law without threatening the nonprofit status of the nonprofit. Also didn't want to, I don't want to endorse candidates even though I supported Romney, but I didn't want to support, this was in the Republican primary. And they put me on a, and I continued on Fox to criticize Republican candidates. And I was put on a blacklist about six months before the election in 2012, while the primaries were still going on. I was told about the blacklist by three different people, by Judge Napolitano, by John Stasso, and by somebody who had connections into the Fox, higher ups. I then made it back into Fox in 2015, I think. And then when I came out strongly anti-Trump, they put me on another blacklist. So I've been on a blacklist because of my position on Trump, on Fox. So those of you who think that Fox is fair and balanced, and in Fox you can hear all opinions I was indeed blacklisted by Fox because I was too anti-Republican. Anyway, at least, I mean, if you believe, Napolitano, Stasso, and other people, but I've talked to media people, they say, yes, Fox has a blacklist, I have a gray list. I probably was on the gray list, but not banned forever, but for a while. All right, finally, beware of bipartisanship. Well, now finally, we've got two things. Oh, a weird thing happened on the weekend. The Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, it didn't happen on the weekend, it's happened over the last couple of weeks. I had a medical procedure in December 22nd and then was released from hospital. He then was readmitted into intensive care, I think on January 1st, because of pain he was experiencing. He then stayed in intensive care and still is in hospital today on January 8th. Nobody knows what this procedure was and what the pain involved was and that led him to go into intensive care, but what is truly concerning is at a time where the world is being ravaged by some pretty significant wars in which the United States has a real stake. The Secretary of Defense goes into intensive care, basically is unavailable and nobody really knows. I mean, his number two knows about it, but his bosses don't know about it. The White House doesn't know about it. He does not let them know. He does not send them any info. The Secretary of Defense has just gone AWOL and that is unbelievably crazy and strange, right? And yet, no explanation given. Now there's a lot of buzz in the media about this, a lot of criticism in the media and they'll probably find some underlaying who was supposed to let the president know who didn't to blame it all on, but this is creating a lot of buzz and it should. This is unbelievably irresponsible. It would be one thing if this was happening at a calm time of peace and so on. It would still be bad even then, but this is one of the most important jobs in government. Fawn Fais is one of the true responsibilities of government in terms of protecting the United States. The world is a mess right now and nothing happened and at the same time Biden is saying he has full confidence in his defense chief and nothing, no worries, don't worry about it. Well, we should worry about it. This is bad management. This is not responsible. Finally, wow, we're going over today, sorry. Our political leaders in Congress are agreeing again. It always scares the bejesus out of me when they agree. Congressional leaders have reached a bipartisan. There's the word I hate, I hate bipartisan. I'm against bipartisanship. They've reached a bipartisan deal on Sunday setting the federal spending level for the year at $1.6 trillion. Now this is not included. This is the, what do you call it, discretionary. This does not include Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, which are over 50% of the budget, so the actual budget is well over $3 trillion. They now have two weeks to break this down into actual spending bills for the different portions of government. This involves massive deficits. Republicans don't seem to particularly care. The conservatives, the not conservatives, the nutty wing of the Republican Party is very upset by this deal. But mostly what they want is what they call policy writers. They want to make sure that when the budget is passed, they got policy writers, because they don't actually care about the numbers. They don't actually care about the size of government. What they want is to use the policy writers to advance conservative social policy, which of course would make these laws vetoed by the Senate, where the Democrats still have a control. Anyway, this approximately $1.6 trillion federal budget is absurd, it's ridiculous, it is disgusting. A little bit more than half of that is defense department spending, about $886 billion. But the rest is mostly just waste and money spent on violating all of our rights. Even an $886 billion defense budget is too large. I've always claimed that you could cut significantly into the defense department if you focused on actually building weapons systems we need, if you focused on actual defense of America and if you focused on bringing many of the troops home that are all over the world doing pinpricks to our enemies instead of actually taking them on. You need probably to spend a little bit of money on one war that will end all this, the need for all these soldiers around the world and then bring them home. And you need to support the Ukrainians and Israelis as they fight pieces of our war they're doing a good job of it, distracting our enemies so we don't have to fight it directly. As I've always said, beware of bipartisanship. This is a good example of it. Republicans not fighting, not fighting at all for actual reducing spending. If they're fighting about anything, it's for their social agenda, limiting abortion and limiting other rights that we have. All right, thank you to all the superchatters. I'll remind you all that this show is, what am I thinking of? Yes, this show is funded by contributors from supporters like you. It is what keeps the lights on, these lights, those lights. I know I changed the lighting today again. It is what keeps us going. It is what makes this show possible. All the different types of shows, the morning shows, the morning, for some of you, the news roundups, the longer shows, the commentary shows, all those shows are made possible by supporters like you. Some of you choose to support the show with a super chat. Thank you for that. Those are the light people. Many of you, even more of you, actually choose to support the show on a monthly basis through Patreon and through PayPal, you're on bookshow.com. And some of you also support the show through the YouTube membership. There are lots of ways to support the show. I really, really appreciate it. If you want to keep it up, talk about supporters. Michael, one of our biggest here, particularly, you know, Michael does his supporting of the show on a very large scale here on the super chats. Thank you, Michael. Michael, there's a $50 question. How can radical nationalism dominate when these people have no intellectual power? The university's Hollywood, the media are vehemently hostile to white supremacy. And intellectual institutions are what dictate a cultural future. Well, I mean, we need to do a long show on cultural change. But look, it's not how it works to put it simply. It's not how it works. And here I encourage you to read the ominous parallels. The amount of a con leads us to the Nazis. Not because Emmanuel Kant was a Nazi. Indeed, what could argue that what Emmanuel Kant did is create a leftist culture in Germany filled with socialists and communists and subjectivists and rationalists of all type and philosophers who were advocating for leftist anarchy and postmodern type philosophy. And what the Nazis, so in that sense, what Kant did is he weakened and distorted the minds of the people. And then what the Nazis do is they come in and they provide an emotional justification. Remember, they had no intellectual power there. They didn't have the universities. They didn't have the movies. They didn't have media. They got them afterwards, some of them, right? But they didn't, the beginning, they had nothing. And as a consequence, but they took advantage of what the left had done to weaken the minds of the people and provided them with an emotional, an emotional rally, an emotional call, call to arms, an emotionalistic integration around nationalism and anti-Semitism. And at that point, they had the masses. Many of the intellectuals, many of those leftist intellectuals fled, escaped, left Germany. Some of them brought those ideas to America and brought those ideas to the rest of the world. Many of them were put in concentration camps and killed. And the same thing is happening today. The minds of Americans are polluted, diluted, weakened with woke DEI, oppressor, colonialist propaganda, nonsense. The inability to think, the dominance of a philosophy that tells people not to think, but to feel and undermines their ability to think at every turn. Then come the nationalists, the religionists, the authoritarians of whatever stripe you want and capitalize all of that. People can't think. They can't challenge them. They can't question them. It doesn't matter that the universities are opposed to them. They'll take care of the universities once they have power. But the people will rally to them because they provide them with an emotionally satisfying and they'd be told by the left that emotionalism is the peak, is amazing, is superior, rallies them around a nationalist, a religionist agenda. And the left has made that possible. The left has softened them up, has destroyed their minds so that this can happen. And this is exactly what you see today. You see it with the nationalist. You see it with the Trumpist. You see it with the alt-right. You see it with the... They're not appealing to an intellectual framework. Certainly Trump is not. They don't need to. The people are too intellectually weak. They're appealing to very base emotions just like the Nazis did. So his philosophy shapes the culture. It molds it into a particular way of looking at the world and then it's a question of who capitalizes on it. And it could be that America become communists like some people here think, that the communists are going to be the ones to exploit this weakening of the American mind or the egalitarians are going to exploit it, the woke are going to exploit it, they're going to dominate. I doubt that. I think DIMM suggests that that is not possible because they're fundamentally... Well, communism is an integrated, somewhat integrated ideology, but it is not an American ideology. It's an ideology that America will lose. So this is how I've laid it out that it's going to happen. And again, you don't have to dominate the cultural high ground. The communists hold the intellectual power in Russia in 1917, no. The Nazis in 1933, no. So that's not how it works. Not how it works. Remo, is there still a possible future regarding SPACs as an alternative to traditional IPOs? SPACs are these entities that raise money in a shell with no... The only thing they're raising money for is the idea of going out and buying a company and then in that sense converting it into a public company. So buying a private company that will then become a public company. It's possible. I mean, there are certain scenarios where SPACs make sense. But, you know, and I think the boom in SPACs that happened in the late 90s, the late God, at 20 teens and it was bubbly, and it came into the 2020s, and it's gone and it'll be gone for a while and then maybe you'll see a few SPACs where it makes sense. But you'll never see, I don't think, the way they were back then when they were super bubbly. It can make sense. It is a way to get around some of the hassle of kind of an IPO, which is very, very expensive, a project. Yeah. If you want to ask any questions, there is a super chat feature. It's easy to ask me questions over there. Many people use it. I think many feel afraid and seek to justify it by constantly exaggerating problems into crisis and then the constant demagoguing about crisis reinforces their fear. Why is our culture producing fear beyond necessity? Well, yes, there's no question. I think the whole border crisis, the panic, the hysteria, the congressman going down there, raving about a Trump-making... That's the demagogues. And they have every incentive in the world to make people afraid and people are geared towards freedom. Why are they geared towards fear? Why are they geared towards fear? They're geared towards fear. It's not an issue of entertainment. They're geared towards fear because fear is a state in which you live once you've in a sense a bad reason or once you've convinced yourself or been convinced by others that reason is impotent. Our educational institutions have been teaching, advocating for, telling us that reason is impotent for 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 years. It's sunken, but then what are people left with? They're left with an inability to understand the world. They're left with an inability to comprehend what's going on around them. They're left with an inability to deal with reality. And as a consequence, they feel afraid. They should. They've given up on the tool that will bring them facts, logic. For example, people are convinced out there if you ask people in the street today, what is happening to motor rates in the United States? Everybody will tell you they're through the roof. They're the highest rates they've ever been. And what's the cause? Certainly one of the causes would be all these illegal immigrants. Now, none of that is based on any facts, on any actual reality. None of it. But facts, reality, research, those are things that require reason. Those are things that require effort. Those are things that require trusting your own mind. And they don't. They don't look at research. They don't look at facts. They accept what the demagogues are telling them. And they are geared towards fear because the one thing we have to push back fear is reason. And they've given up on that. Michael was Keynes a nihilist, nihilist nihilist. The savings, a drain on the economy, is devising the economic model that evaporated people's savings, a form of hatred of the good for being the good. You know, I don't think so. I don't think Keynes was a nihilist. I think he was wrong. I think he got caught up in his equations. He got caught up in a perverse view of the world. He was philosophically corrupt. I really don't think he was a nihilist. I mean, he also was involved in Bretton Woods, which arguably was a pretty good thing if he was a nihilist. He would have wanted the world to collapse after World War II, and he didn't. So I think you have to be really careful when using the term nihilism about people. I mean, I try to be careful. Maybe I use it too much. But you got to be careful because, you know, now maybe he was ultimately. I haven't read enough of him to know. But Keynes said quite a lot of things. Some of the things are deeply, deeply wrong. But they are kind of consequences of the premise he had chosen and kind of the economic reasoning is wrong. Rationale, he engaged in. Michael says, don't let the need for comfort weigh the need for success. Yes, I agree with that completely. Anonymous user, it seems that you have gained a good number of subscribers lately. Is that just my imagination? I have you gained a few, all the best, Viva Argentina. I have gained quite a few subscribers. So subscription rates are at very high levels right now. I hope we can sustain them. I hope they can increase them either further. A few things have happened. Part of it is my response to October 7th got us uptick in subscribers. And then really three videos are responsible for a lot more. And then I'll tell you about the other reasons. So one is October 7th. Two, three short videos. The three short videos are, well, three videos, not short, three videos. One was my video on Ayan Hirsi Ali, where I analyzed her embrace of Christianity and critique it. That brought on almost a record number of subscribers. So my guess is I got a bunch of new atheists, maybe, who embraced my critique of Christianity and my critique of Ayan Hirsi Ali. Third was a, well, part of the second reason, three videos, the second video, is a video I did on Caroline Gaye, where I did a rant on her before I think she resigned. I think it was before she resigned. And for whatever reason, that did well. So that probably brought a bunch of conservatives. And then the third video, the third, I think, series of videos really, were the videos on Millet. The videos on Millet brought a bunch of people, particularly Argentinians. So I've got a whole bunch of new Argentinian followers, subscribers. So we've got libertarians, Argentinians, conservatives from Gaye and new atheists from, so those three. And then more recently, I'd say in the last couple of weeks, I've told you this. We are now using a AI piece of software that you basically feed them a long video, and the AI creates one-minute videos, and it ranks them based on what it, the AI thinks, and it edits them. It decides where to stop, where to start, and it gives them a title, and it gives them subtitles. You can watch these on my channel. And it basically gives them a rank based on what it thinks will go viral. So while none of them have gone viral, they've done better than old, or they've done pretty good. And you can create dozens of these very, very, very quickly. So what we've done is we've uploaded, or Christian has done this. He's uploaded a lot of the one-minute videos, what YouTube called shorts. And uploading those one-minute videos have increased viewership significantly. And because the viewership has increased, even if you only get two, three, four people additional subscribing in any one of these shorts, we're putting up so many of them that it's increasing the number of subscribers. So we're just flooding the channels. Now we can't do too much of that, because once you do a lot, then YouTube stops promoting your live shows. So we have to be careful how many videos we put up a day. But we could be putting up even more. We're also going to start at some point here, putting them up on TikTok and Instagram, because it appears that's relatively easy, and you can automate it in the software. So we'll be doing that as well. That hopefully will increase subscribers. But yes, we've added close to 2,000 subscribers in the last few months, and hopefully we can keep that up or accelerate that. All right, Bradley, what's the difference between evading and avoiding? The many shoulds in the culture are confusing. Keating was very social, but work avoided parties. Most would say work was evading his peers. Well, he was avoiding his peers. Evading is a decision not to think about something. It's to ignore something in thought, not to consider whatever it is that's over there. To avoid is to ignore. It's to not participate. So avoiding can involve evading. When there's something relevant, you know it's relevant, and you're avoiding it. I would call that evading. Avoid, I think, is a bigger category. But let's say you decide that this fact over here, this party, is insignificant to your life. Then you're avoiding it without evading, because you know it's insignificant to your life. So evasion is ignoring something important, relevant to your thinking. If avoiding is anything where you're just not engaging in something, whether it's important or not, whether it's relevant or not. Nick Fo, if something is proven to repeatedly cause damage, like asbestos, is it okay for the government to ban its use? Will regulatory agencies be needed to enforce the ban? I don't think so, because I think here the liability system takes care of it. Now it depends on how much damage is being caused and is the amount of use enough. Is it a little bit of damage? Does the damage increase with use? But here the liability system should take care of it. One lawsuit where somebody is using this product in spite of knowing that it causes harm and everybody would drop it, insurers would not ensure buildings that had it, they would ensure new construction with it. The market system works very quick, very fast. Now if it's egregious harm and it's instant and it's clear cut and there's no questions about it, then yes, I think the government can ban it. But I think it has to, why is it still pretty high standard for the government to ban something like that? All right, I think I saw, yes, Wes came in with $15 to get us over the top, over the goal. John, thank you for the sticker as well. This is how people can support using the Super Chat feature. Steven Halper, thank you and I think I'm caught up. All right, Christian, hi, my first Super Chat. Congratulations and thank you. That's amazing. But I'm quite a fan of your show for quite some time now. Watching from Luxembourg, where you ever hear, Yuan, if so, did you like it? I think I only drove through Luxembourg, so I can't say much about it. But if you're in Luxembourg, you should come to the Einwand Institute Conference. It's going to be in Amsterdam in March. And I'm actually going to do a public speaking seminar at the end of that conference. So anybody in Europe who would like to be a part of another public speaking seminar, it'll be in Amsterdam the day after the conference. If you come to conference, you can also stay on for the public speaking seminar. So more information about that in the days, weeks to come. Michael, Michael Sanders again. What do you make of people who got a lot out of reading Einwand but never persuaded by the philosophy? Are they intellectually lazy? No, they for some reason don't get it. There could be a lot of reasons they don't get it. It could be they're lazy. It could be that they just have some kind of error in their thinking that blocks their ability to pursue these ideas more fully. It could be they're making mistakes. It could be that they're emotionally so upset by what they read. They can't really think about it objectively. So there could be a lot of reasons why somebody who reads Einwand is not persuaded by the philosophy. They're not good reasons this early, but it could be a lot of reasons. Rafael, hi, Iran. We start an Einwand meetup group in Lisbon with 10 people showing up in the first event. Do you have any tips to share about how to run these events? I don't know. It depends what you're trying to achieve. I would say that an important part of it is you've got to make some of them intellectual where there's actually debate about topics because at the end of the day, an Einwand meetup group is about Einwand and it's about the ideas and it's about the philosophy. You want to have some real philosophical debate, a discussion. It could be once a month you discuss an Einwand essay or you discuss something she wrote or you do a reading group around Opa or Fountainhead or I don't know, depending on your members and how advanced they are or whatever. So something intellectual. But also you don't want to neglect the social sites. One of the things that attracts people to Einwand meeting groups is because a lot of people who read Einwand then feel alone. They feel like they're misunderstood by the culture. They feel like not enough people share their ideas. And you want to make sure that there's a social environment. So I think they really enjoy a social environment. So you want to create, whether you watch a movie together or whether you just have somebody say to dance. So you just hang out, you just have fun together. But watching a movie together is always fun because it combines the two. It's fun to watch a movie, it's fun to watch a movie with friends and it's fun to talk about the movie afterwards, particularly if the movie has some intellectual aspects. So combining these different types of events I think is really worthwhile to make it more interesting and to attract more people. To keep it fresh. Gail says, good interview Douglas Murray and I in her CLE. I haven't watched it yet, but it sounds like it was really good. All right everybody, Fenn Harper, thank you. Thank you for the support. I will see you all tomorrow at the same time. I think it will be 12 o'clock East Coast time. The rest of the week is smoky, particularly Thursday and Friday Saturday. It won't be a show Saturday for sure. Thursday, Friday we'll see what I can get in. I'll be traveling. I'll be in Denver. Don't forget those of you in Colorado. I will be in Colorado. I will give a talk that's publicly open. It costs $30 to attend, but publicly open on Friday. For more information about that, go to youronbrookshow.com and just scroll down. You'll see events and you'll see this as an event. It's in Centennial just south of Denver. So I hope you guys join me on Friday. And then there's also dinner. So it should be a fun day. So hopefully I'll see some of you in Denver, in Colorado on Friday. Talk to you soon. Bye everybody.