 Let's jump in. I mean, the lead story is, of course, Paul Krugman, to hell with the election. Who cares about the election? The lead story is Paul Krugman. So, Paul Krugman this morning published an editorial titled, as is the editorial in the New York Times, of course, the esteemed paper of record. How many Americans will Ein Rand kill? How many Americans will Ein Rand kill? An idea here is that the editorial goes on to say that it's Ein Rand like individualism. Ein Rand like selfishness, which is responsible for all the deaths in COVID and is going to be responsible for the deaths to come from COVID. In other words, it's the laissez-faire approach, the Ein Rand approach, the selfish approach, which is preventing people from doing the one thing that would save us all, of course, which is to wear masks, according to Paul Krugman, is preventing a mandate, a mask mandate, too much Ein Rand individualism. And it's a consequence of the, you know, people are gonna die because it's Ein Rand-like individualism on the right by Donald Trump, by Republicans and by individuals, which is causing people to be, to gather together without wearing masks and not take into account social distancing, to ignore science, to reject lockdowns, the whole mish-mash, everything you wanna throw at, right? Everything you wanna throw at the left claims that, you know, the left claims of problems with the response to the pandemic. Krugman is blaming on Ein Rand and blaming on individualism, blaming on egoism, blaming on laissez-faire, on capitalism. He doesn't use capitalism, but that's the implication that, you know, and of course, what he associates that with, and I'll get back to this point later, is he associates Donald Trump with this Ein Rand view and we'll get to the problems with that and actually a tweet that he did later on afterwards regarding that, that I think is important. Now this is clearly dishonest, really pathetic, shows a complete ignorance of Rand and who ideas and what you stood for. Rand ignoring science. Rand was the preeminent defender, philosophical defender of science in the 20th century. Rand's individualism, Rand's egoism does not, not, not mean uncaring about other people's lives, behaving in ways that place other people's lives in danger. I mean, quite the contrary. Rand viewed, Rand viewed first, egoism is caring about yourself and your own happiness, but caring about yourself and your own happiness doesn't quite the opposite, make you not care about other people, make you not care about what you inflict on other people. It is a bizarre notion that that would be Ein Rand's idea. Oh yeah, if you have the virus, go out, party, why should you care? You're an egoist, other people will get the virus. Why should you care about other people? But more than that, Ein Rand specifically said that this was within the realm of the rule of government. To prevent you from doing so once you test positive. That is, if you have a contagious disease, then it is the government's proper rule to isolate you, to prevent you from going out there. And being and becoming a risk to other people. So it is a complete lie, distortion of Rand's views. Talk about this, and Rand and the Ein Rand Institute and I have laid out clear, clear alternatives to both what Donald Trump has done and to what the left has done in terms of actually dealing with the pandemic and dealing with it based on science, based on reason and based on the limited role of government to protect our rights. But Corbyn ignores all that. Truth doesn't matter to him, facts don't matter to him. What Ein Rand actually said doesn't matter to him. What matters to him only, the hack that he is, is to distort, to pervert, to make those he disagree with look as bad as possible. Now this is not the first time he has mentioned Ein Rand. Indeed, he has mentioned Ein Rand many, many, many times over the years. It seems like a pet thing for Paul Krugman to do, is to mention Ein Rand at every opportunity possible. You get a sense that Krugman actually cares about Ein Rand. Why would he mention her so often if he didn't? And I think with Krugman it's clear. Krugman is smart. We'll get to my analysis of Krugman in a minute beyond this op-ed. But Krugman is smart. And Krugman is experienced, he's been around. He's done debates, he's gone up against all kinds of people. He knows what the right, in terms of what the right's opposition to his views is. Fundamentally he knows, I've no doubt in my mind that he knows, that the only real opposition his fundamental beliefs have, his altruism, his collectivism, his indeed evasion of reality have, is Ein Rand. Indeed there's nobody else out there who represents a real challenge, not to Paul Krugman, the economist who BS's all the time, but to Paul Krugman, the public intellectual. There is no opposition other than an opposition based on Rand, because only she can challenge his altruism. Only she can challenge his collectivism. Only she can challenge ultimately his form of mysticism. So Paul repeatedly attacks, repeatedly brings her up, whenever he wants to attack anybody. Whenever he wants to attack the right, he attacks Ein Rand because he knows that on the right, the only person worthy, the only person who actually presents a challenge to his set of beliefs is Ein Rand. Everybody else's at the fundamental level agrees with him. Now, he promotes mandatory mask wearing, mandatory, you know, lockdowns. Ein Rand doesn't promote any of that. Indeed, she opposes mandatory mask wearing, she would oppose mandatory mask wearing, and she would oppose lockdowns as we have from the beginning. But that's not because she's anti-science. It's because she's pro-science. And she would not oppose wearing masks in the right context, in the right place where a mask might help. And it's not because, I mean, Paul Krugman says, well, a mask protects other people. It doesn't protect you so much so she would be opposed to it. I mean, he implies that. Really? It's getting Ein Rand wrong. But because of the science, because of the mask wearing, because of the science, would advocate for the kind of policies that nobody did in the United States of America or in Europe for that matter. Nobody. There's not a model in the Western world for what needed to be done. The model for what needed to be done is in the East. It's in Taiwan. But Paul Krugman thinks that government is the solution to COVID. When government has proven completely and utterly incompetent in the United States in dealing with COVID. The Trump administration is a complete and utter disaster and failure when it comes to COVID. And the governors have been complete and utter disasters and failures when it comes to COVID, particularly when you take into account the economic effects of what they did. The solution is what Taiwan did where you saw actual leadership, where you saw actual science-based plan, where you actually saw a science-based plan executed well, and you got very few cases, almost no deaths, and no shutdown of the economy and almost no economic consequences directly from COVID. Sweden didn't do the right thing. Sweden did the right thing in some aspects and blew it in other aspects. That's why Sweden had relatively high death rates as compared to its Scandinavian neighbors. And it got a hit economically, not as bad as the United States and the UK, but worse than Taiwan. The model for the way to deal with this is, was, the Taiwanese. I mean, Sweden's doing okay right now, but they suffered a lot of deaths and they suffered a lot of deaths because they didn't do what Taiwan did. And we didn't do what Taiwan did. Nobody in the West did what Taiwan did, which is test, test, test, isolate people who have their virus, test, trace, isolate. I mean, saying this from February, test, trace, isolate. And if you do that early, if you do that aggressively, if you do that on scale, you don't need anything else. Masks are probably sub-profilers, although it probably makes sense to wear a mask in crowded areas and elevators and offices in places like that for a while. But if we had in February ramped up testing, if we had in February taken this seriously, if we had in February done what Taiwan had done, this would be all over, this would be gone. But no, we meandered, we couldn't make a decision, we couldn't come up with a strategy, we screwed it up at every single level. And then when the federal government was like, we have no idea what to do, we're completely incompetent, then the states took over and the little authoritarian dictators, Andrew Como and Gavin Newsom and all these others, you know, used their authoritarian instincts to shut everybody down, and to sacrifice economy and to send old people to nursing homes and to basically exacerbate this crisis and make it 10 times worse than it had to be. You start with a federal government failure, and then you get on top of that, state-level failures, one on top of the other, and there's no end to it, and it's still going on. It's still going on, numbers are increasing, we'll see what happened to death rates. Death rates have not increased anywhere near, but hospitalization rates are high. Luckily, not luckily, because of our great, of this country's great biotech industry, because of amazing doctors and nurses, because of healthcare professionals, we now are better, much better at treating COVID. So, yes, death rates are gonna be a lot lower, but the 200,000 dead, that's on the federal government, that's on Trump, that's on Como, that's on Newsom, that's on these guys, that's in our political class, that's, and I include Trump in our political class, that's in our government, but what, Paul Krugman want is more central planning. What Krugman wants is more of the same nonsense. Yeah, I mean, JDS writes from New Zealand, he writes that Taiwan had significantly less cases than New Zealand. New Zealand had one of the strictest lockdowns in the world, that's right, and they're both islands, and I don't know if they have similar populations, I think Taiwan has a bigger population than New Zealand. And yet, Taiwan executed, it executed. It did what was necessary. Test, trace, isolate, not that hard, guys. And that's what Sweden, by the way, didn't do. And because Sweden didn't do that, they had death rates that were unnecessary, they had large numbers of cases unnecessarily. I'm glad they didn't lock down, but what the government didn't do is they didn't properly test, particularly in nursing homes, a lot of elderly died in Sweden. Sweden is not this massive success story. Taiwan, even South Korea, are far, far better. The best cases are all in Asia. Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, those are the best cases in terms of response to COVID. All right, back to Krugman. No, he blames Iran, he blames individualism, he blames egoism. Not even thinking or caring that Iran actually wrote about this, that Iran actually has an opinion about this. Now, yeah, I'm gonna get to that, Jonathan. I saw that already. Now, this morning, when this came out, people started going after New York Times. And the Iran Institute launched on Twitter. We sent a letter to the editor. We communicated, we tweeted Krugman. We put out two videos about this. One of them I mentioned speaking about the proper government response to pandemics. The other one, Ilan Juno and Ankar Ghatte talking about the Krugman piece. It all went, we got a lot of stuff up and online. Challenging Krugman. So first, Krugman, Tara Smith wrote an email to Paul Krugman. And the first thing was that Paul Krugman responded by tweeting the following, tweeting the following. I'm getting some mail from people insisting that Iran had a more complicated than the caricature, right? Was more complicated than the caricature, right? So opinion was more complicated. Maybe, he says, but it doesn't matter, right? Facts don't matter. Reality doesn't matter. What she actually held doesn't matter. It's the rights idea of Rand that is killing thousands. Wow. So I'm gonna smear Rand because these people over here might have a false view of her. That's just disgusting for a human being to have that kind of view. It doesn't matter what Rand actually said. It doesn't matter what a philosophy actually advocates. It doesn't matter what even her philosophy students, people studying on Rand think. What matters is some ignorant people on the right. I'm gonna use that as the standard. Who cares about the truth? Well, Rand does. I mean, that's what the philosophy is about. It's about the truth, discovering the truth, seeking the truth in everything, including in this pandemic, figuring out what's right and wrong. Krugman doesn't care about the truth. So that was the first indication. I wanna get about this Rand and the right in a minute. So then we continued sending out material, tweeting and so on. And about an hour ago, the New York Times actually changed the title of the piece. They took Ein Rand's name out. They took Ein Rand's name out of the title. And they basically blame it on libertarianism. Now, Ein Rand is still in the text. They haven't taken that out. And just to read you the paragraph that has on Rand, Donald Trump's disastrous leadership is, of course, an important factor. But I also blame Ein Rand. Or more generally, libertarianism gone bad. So now the title of the piece is libertarianism gone bad. A misunderstanding of what freedom is all about. No. Ein Rand understood exactly what freedom is about. Ein Rand understood that freedom is not about violating the rights of your neighbor. It's not about putting your neighbor at unnecessary risk because of your subjective desires. Ein Rand understood exactly what freedom is about. You are attributing ideas to Ein Rand that are not true. And what's shocking is you don't care. You, Paul Krugman, don't care. Truth doesn't matter to you. The only thing that matters to you is, I guess, your subjective opinion. And using Ein Rand's name in order to track more readers. Using Ein Rand's name as a doll, you can push your pins in in a voodoo ceremony. It is truly, truly disgusting. Don't know why I expected anything better from Paul Krugman, but still. Just acknowledge you were wrong. What we need today, what I call the new intellectual, would be any man or woman who is willing to think. Meaning, any man or woman who knows that man's life must be guided by reason, by the intellect, not by feelings, wishes, whims, or mystic revelations. Any man or woman who values his life and who does not want to give in to today's cult of despair, cynicism, and impotence and does not intend to give up the world to the dark ages and to the role of the collectivist, brutes. All right, before we go on, reminder, please like the show. We've got 163 live listeners right now, 30 likes. That should be at least 100. I figure at least 100 of you actually like the show. Maybe they're like 60 of the Matthews out there who hate it, but at least the people who are liking it, I want to see a thumbs up, there you go. Start liking it, I want to see that go to 100. All it takes is a click of a thing, whether you're looking at this, and you know the likes matter. 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