A Yaron Brook Lecture: Antisemitism and Anti-Capitalism 11/27

the jew huckstering? What is this worldly god money? What in itself was the basis of the Jewish religion practical need egoism? The god of practical need and self interest is money. Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist. Money degrades all the gods of man and turns them into commodities. Money is the universal, self established value of all things. It has therefore robbed the whole world, both the world

of men and nature of its specific value. Money is the estranged essence of man's work and man's existence, and this alien espence since dominates him and he worships it. The God of the Jews has become secularized and has become the god of the world. The Bill of exchange is the real god of the Jews. The chimerical nationality of the jew is the nationality of the merchant, of the man of money in general. Now, who do you

think wrote that? Cormax? Cormax's first published essay was Under Jewish Question, published in eighteen forty three, and Cormas, who is a child his father converted from Judaism to Christianity, comes from a long line of a very well established German Jewish family. CarMax, in his first essay published essay basically links Jews with self interest. He links Jews with money, He links Jews with capitalism. The essay you can find it online. I think it's Marx dot org, and you

can find all of Marxist stuff online. You can find the es online fascinating read, but it reads like an anti Semitic screed. He is constantly putting down Jews, and he says, part of the problem in the world is that Christians have become Jewish. And what does he mean by that? He manamsact, Christians now have become capitalists. Capitalism is the real evil. The Jews represent capitalism. Therefore we

almost hate the Jews. This is eighteen forty three, and of course this is not the beginning of anti Semitism. Called Marx is leveraging on a long tradition going back really to the birth of is Christ or certainly to the establishment of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire. But Carl Marx is now taking it and spinning it in a slightly new, more expansive direction, and I think dominates the conversation on the left with regard

to Jews to this day. So I want to talk a little bit about kind of the origins of anti Semitism, particularly these origins of anta Semicism that are linked to economic aspects, to this connection with money and capitalism, and then I want to bring it to the modern day and to the campus demonstrations and what's happening in German cities, but really all of the world in terms of the anti Jewish sentiment that is out there, because I think

it's they're very much connected and very much, very much linked. One of the reasons you who's associated with money in car Marx's mind, but I think in the European mind more broadly, certainly of the nineteenth century and the twentieth century, is that for much of history, for much of Western history, Jews were the only ones who dealt on a regular basis and in a systematic way with banking, with money lending. Christians didn't do it, or if they did it, they

hit it. I mean, there was plenty of Christian money lending going on, There was plenty of Christian banking, but they always disguised it and hid it, whereas Jews were out in the open doing it. And why is this. There's an interesting passage in the Old Testament where God tells the Jews you shall not I'm paraphrasing, you shall not charge interest interest payment on a loan from your brother. So no interest. You can loan people money, but you

can can't expect interest. You can expect the money in return, but nothing more. Than that. And this goes back even to Aristotle, who did not believe you should be able to charge interest on a loan. You know, money was barren. You can't produce money for money, and therefore there's no rationale for gaining interest on a loan paid. Now, Jews interput in what God tells them as okay, my brother or other Jews. But we can charge interest from non Jews.

We can charge interest with people not our brothers. Christianity comes around, and Christianity is a universalist religion. Christianity has the perspective, well, all humanity is our brother and therefore we can't charge interests from anybody. So interest on a loan the very basic transaction in finance, right, the very basic transaction in capital formation, in any kind of building of an enterprise, That basic transaction is banned by Christianity. Indeed,

it's considered a mortal sin. Money lenders are considered people who go to hell. In Dante's Inferno, the money lenders in the seventh throng of Hell with a bag of money around the bag of gold, right, money around his neck, dragging him down into the fire to make sure he gets really bods. Well, if you remember if you've read, if you've read Shakespeare The Merchant of Venice, one of Shakespeare's great plays. The villain of the Merchant of Venice a Shylock who is a Jewish money lender. He lends

money and charges interest. The hero, the good guy in the Merchant of Venice, is a Christian money lender who lends money and does not charge any interest. Planes about how greedy and awful and horrible Shylock is because he dares to charge interest. How dare you? This is completely unacceptable and it's a sign of your people, of the

greed of your people. It's a very anti Semitic play, if you you know, if you read it, sometimes it's they cut out in the place some of the sections, But if you read the original, Shakespeare is clearly picking up. By the way, Shakespeare never met a Jew, because in Shakespeare's time, Jews were banned from England. They'd been kicked out of England for two hundred years. There were no Jews in England to some extent because of this phenomena

of lending money. So think about think about the Christian So just one more thing, you know, if you think about the Medici banks, and you think about like Lake medieval Renaissance banking, and you think about Christians lending money. They don't charge interest. They come up with all kinds of loopholes to find ways to charge the equivalent of interest, but they call it something different. Just like who does that today? What banks in the world? I don't know

if you guys know, do exactly that today? They don't charge and they don't give interest. Islamic banks, Islamic banks. If you go to the Middle East, you don't get interest on your checking account or your saving accounts. You get dividends or you get some other thing, but you don't get interest because interest is banned in Islam, just like it was man in Christianity. It's just like this

band among Jews, supposedly in Judaism. So the Medici banks functioned like an Islamic bank functions today, providing returns but never interested. Interest only became okay based on a Catholic church stop being a mortal sin in the late nineteenth century. And at the same time, at about the same time during the nineteenth century, they separated out two concepts. Suddenly there was a concept of interest on the concept of usury.

Interest being regularly charged interest that we all participate in. You know that the market determines, but is capped by something reasonable that the authorities think is okay. And usury being excessive interest, and usury is still banned in the United States. Many states in the US have usury laws. I don't know if you have usury laws here in Europe.

I wouldn't be surprised if you do. Actually, one of Donald Trump's proposals, which Bernie Sanders, if you know Bernie Sanders is the left wing, far left wing senator, agree on, and they said they're going to work together is to cap interest rates on credit cards because the credit card interest rates are usurus right, They're too high, so they want to cap them. I think a ten percent or

something like that. We can talk about why that's a really, really bad idea, but I think this group pretty much knows the answer to that. So during this period of almost two thousand years, Jews were the only legitimate, if you will, money lenders. According to their religion, it was

okay for them to charge interest to the Christians. The Christians needed capital, They needed money to go to wars, to start businesses, to do a variety of different activities that we all engage in using credit, and they had to go to the Jew to get the money. So think about that relationship and how well that relationship developed. Right that to go to somebody for money pay them interest something that they, as Christians believed was a mortal

sin committed by this other person. They had to develop resentments and hatreds towards the Jew as acting money lender. Indeed, a number of times it's it's been well documented that a number of times the programs where whole Jewish communities were wiped out were basically wiped out because the prince owed a lot of money to the Jewish money lander. And one way to not have to pay your debts

is to kill the banker. So if you wipe out the bankers, and you wipe out his books and they always conveniently get burnt, then you don't have to pay back the debts. In York, in England, there's a famous massacre of Jews which is basically oriented towards wiping out the debts of the local prince. But the same is true in continental Europe on several occasions. This is well documented. So during this entire period, there's this relationship that develops

between Christians and Jews. That is already complicated, right, because the Catholic Church basically do you know why Catholics tolerate Jews? According to Augustine, so there were certain early Christian thinkers that said, should just wipe out the Jews. They're bad people because they witnessed Christ. They were there when Christ appeared, and they still don't accept it, so we just should kill them. And Augustine said, no, no, no, we shouldn't kill them.

We should keep them alive for us to witness what happens when you don't accept Christ. That is, we need to keep them in misery. We need to keep them poor, we need to keep them suffering so that we as Christians could look and see, Yes, this is what happens to a people who don't accept Jesus Christ. It's testimony that reinforces our faith. This is, by the way, some

of the origin of the ghetto. The ghetto is meant to concentrate all the Jews in one place so that the Christians could easily observe the horror of being a Jew, the horror of not accepting Jesus Christ as one's savior.

So again, There are many causes of this kind of anti Semitism, going back to the acceptance of Jesus or not, but there is a suddenly an economic one related to this idea of usury and related to the fact that the Jews become bankers, and banking is a can be a relatively profitable business, so Jews do at least the ones who go into the money lending do quite well, and as a culture we've always resented the people who

do well. You know, there are various again teachings where the Christian or secular that tell us that success in business is motivated by self interest, which leads to greed, and self interest to greed are bad motivations. They evil in and of themselves, and therefore they should be rejected. So Jews the whole there's a whole building up of anti Semitism around this idea. The Jews are successful, they're

getting rich. They also become the merchants, so because they're not a lot of own property, they become traders, so they become middlemen, and again middleman just like money lenders. What's the productive role of a banker? For hundreds of years, nobody could really answer that question, really until the eighteenth century, economists didn't really have a good answer to what is the productive role of banking? What is the productive role

of a middleman? He seems like he's just taking a little bit, you know, he's just take adding profit, he's adding cost to the products. But again, a proper economic understanding of a merchant, of a middleman is something that again only develops with the Scholastics and of course leader Adam Smith and so on. But that's late. So there is a culture of resentment towards these people who trade in goods and then trade in even worse in money.

And to logic extent, we in the model world have inherited that resent I mean, when was the last time an economic crisis happened that we did not blame on bankers. We blame every economic crisis on bankers before we even know what caused the crisis. We know it's the bankers, right to Wall Street. Wall Street causes everything. So what caused the the what caused the the Great recession in

two thousand and eight. I remember in two thousand and eight, before anybody did any analysis, anybody could think about what actually happened and what was going on. Everybody knew it was Wall Street caused it was greed on Wall Street. Greed on Wall Street caused the Great Financial Crisis in two thousand and eight. I was like to ask people who advocate for that view, if there was greed on was Stet in two thousand and one and two and three, why did greed and varsity just invent itself in two

thousand and seven and suddenly cause the crisis? As far as I know, if greed is the wanting of more, then there's always been greed on Wall Seet. The whole place functions on wanting more on greed. We could analyze the causes of the financial crisis. I've done that. There's an eight hour course online on YouTube for free that you could take if you're interested in my view and

what caused the financial crisis? It wasn't Wall Street. And indeed, twenty years from now, I don't think any economist will believe it was Wall Street anymore than anybody an economist, really serious economists. I don't consider Paul Kogman one of those, but any serious economists I don't think believes that the Great Depression was caused by Wall Street. By the Stockman

could collapse anymore. Right, there was a period in which they all thought that, and the instinctual response right after, when we were in the Great Depression was what regulate wall Street? Wall Street caused this. This is all bankers,

This is all finance. There's something about finance that causes the particular mistrust that today we know that the causes of the Good Depression are much more complex than just blaming greed of the bankers, and the primary cause of the Great Depression, just like the primary cause of the Great Recession was monetary policy by the Federal Reserve and physical policy by the federal government. And because it's you know, relevant these days, tariffs played a big role in the

Great Depression and Smooth Holly in the nineteen thirties. So our tendency is always to be in the bankers, and the bankers even to this day, tend to be Jews, and those are linked, those are linked in people psyche. So I'd say a resentment towards finance, or resentment to its success economically is directly tied to resentment of Jews,

more broadly to anti Semitism. And of course, I think in modern times this has gained even a grada and this is what's going on on campuses in a sense of greater depth because now it has what they would consider some philosophical backing. So, you know, let's take a step back and think about what these kids are being taught at our universities. What it's the standard moral code that the culture accepts, that it's just acceptable in the

entire culture that everybody, everybody kind of manifests. The common moral code is a mal code of what of altruism, of the idea that the individual's moral responsibility is to sacrifice for fill in the blank, right, the group, the god, the sack, the religion, something. But to be moral is to be self lessed, I mean, moral is to sacrifice for something outside of you. Altruism, other ism. Well, I think the postmodern left, the left that is teaching at

our universities today, takes this idea very seriously. As I think this idea is travel through history and really being almost never challenged. You know, you can think of the number of philosophers challenging the idea that the mall purpose of life is to sacrifice for others. You can probably name two or three philosophers in entire history of the last two thousand years. Who challenges that idea. Well, the plus monitors take this very seriously and they say, okay,

we should sacrifice for other people. Who should we sacrifice for? Well, it makes use the sacrifice people who need it. So need is the standard by which we should sacrifice. So if you the more you need it, the more we should sacrifice to you. And what you have today. Is a theory that has been coined in the United States. I think it's come to Europe. I think it's kind

of filtered into Europe. It's called intersectionality. Intersectionality, and the idea here is that we should look at every individual and figure out, in a sense, how needy are they, and much of their neediness comes from the group that they belong to. So, if you're black in the United States,

you're very needy because your ancestors were slaves. So and you're still and you're still poor, probably like most I don't know, I wouldn't say most, but you know, a significant percentage of the black population in the United States. It's a relatively poor and therefore deserving of our sacrifice. Makes them good. And then the intersectionality comes in is if you're black and gay or if you're black and

trans even better. Right. That is, the more of a what's called the oppressed group you are, the more needy you are, the more we should sacrifice for you. The more elevated you become a kind of a molo hierarchy. And the hierarchy is really who should sacrifice to whom. Those who have should always sacrifice to those who haven't. But now it's not just about money, it's about every dimension.

It's about cutting up the groups and figuring out what group you know has and what group hasn't, and sacrificing the haves to they have not, which again has a very very long tradition, sacrificing the haves that they have not from each according to his from each according to his ability, to each according to his need. Right, it's basically the same idea. If you divide human beings like this.

If you take your group belonging and you figure out if your group is generally oppressed or not, and you place people in this hierarchy and this pyramid of neediness of oppression, what you find is so groups are particularly needy and therefore deserving of sacrifice, and they're the good guys, minorities, whether they're minorities of ethnic groups, or minorities that have to do with sexuality, or people who are poor, or

any primarily any combination of those. And then you've got groups who are successful and doing well, and those groups must be sacrificed to the other groups, to each from each according to his ability, ability reflected on how well things are going for you, to each according to your need, depending on how And then, of course, if you believe in a kind of a zero sum world, there's much of what's being taught in our university does then if some people have a lot and other people have a

little bit, then some people have a lot because of what because they've obviously taking it from other people. There's a wealth creation. So if it's your some world, if I have a lot, I must have taken it from somebody who doesn't have a lot. So again it fits into this higher chy of some groups are pressers exploiters, and other groups are oppressed and being exploited, and it's

a group thing. Each individual is slotted into the particular groups that he belongs to, supposedly, and then we're supposed to give them all credit. I'm all blame based on where you fall on it. Now, think about Israel and the Palestinians. For example, where did the Palestinians. Where did the Palestinians fall on this pyramid of need? Right, Well, they're poor, they don't have a state, they're politically homeless. They seem to be suffering, and therefore they are the needy.

They are the ones that should be sacrificed the wards, and therefore they must be virtuous. The meek shall inherit the earth. Right. And where do the Jews fall in this particular Israel? Well, they're relatively rich, incredibly successful, they're super strong. They must be the pressers, they must be the bad guys, and they must be sacrificed for the sake of the needy. And it's not just Israel and Palestinians, it's also Jews, because Jews in America are very successful.

They've made a lot of money, many of them are bankers. Therefore they must be their presses, they must be the people who need to be sacrificed. So it's kind of

the same old story. Now given this modern guise of intersectionality, postcolonial theory, identitarianism, all these fancy words that the modern left is created in order to explore these ideas and to apply this altruism, this morality of from Meach according to his ability due to coarding the needs in a modern context and kind of make it more scientific, we can now figure out exactly who should be sacrificed to whom and how much we should how much they should sacrifice.

And then for the antagonism towards Jews in America, it is because they're successful, it's because they've done well, it's because they're strong. Antagonism towards Israel is exactly the same. You can see this with Israel in Europeans, in particular in a shift that happened in nineteen sixty seven. Before nineteen sixty seven, Europe loved Israel. I mean, they really loved Israel. They supplied it with weapons and financially. You know, the United States had an arms embargo on Israel from

nineteen forty eight until nineteen sixty seven. The United States did not sell a single piece of weaponry. Jiseruel and Israel fought in nineteen sixty seven war. It folded with Meragi airplane, British tanks, German you know, weapons systems. Europeans loved Israel. Why because they were pathetic, poor suffering Jews who just survived the Holocaust, and now we're barely holding onto a country. And in nineteen sixty seven everything flipped

because what happened. These poor, pathetic, miserable Jews were strong. They beat seven other Arab countries, and they won a war, very very quickly, and Europe flipped almost overnight, over seven nights, they flipped. France put an Armsimbogo in Israel immediately didn't sell weapons to Israel for years. Israel had bought some submarines from France and landed up having to steal them

in order to get them. Germany, Britain nothing, and luckily for Israel, America stepped into the gap that was left behind. But now is almost perceived as strong. These Jews were successful, who was perceived as the good guys in the Middle East suddenly for the first time to Palestinians. Palestinian support in Europe was a creation of the nineteen sixty seven ward. It was a creation of the fact that Israel had proved to be strong, and therefore we don't like strong.

Antisemitism is really a product of the economics of money lending. It's a product of certain Christian beliefs about the importance of Jesus and the role of the Jews play in Jesus. If you ever go, if if in Italy or I'm

sure you can find them in museums here. You see some of the processions of Jesus carrying the cross to, you know, to where he's going to be crucified, or where he is crucified in And you look at the paintings closely, you can see how all the observers are portrayed, and they've all got, you know, these very explicit Jewish features, with nasty looks on their faces. Christianity is very anti

Jewish for most of its history. Most of its history, they crustified Christ, not the Romans, right, and why not? The Romans became very politically incorrect to blame the Romans for crucifying Christ. Why was that because Christianity became the religion of Rome. So the Romans didn't want to blame themselves, so they had to find somebody else to blame. So

it became put politically incorrect to blame the Romans. Even pious Pontus, whatever right, is given a free ride in the later interpretations of the story in order to put all the blames on the Jews. So you've got religious causes for anti Semitism, you have financial causes, and you've got the more funda the mental which I think drives the financial cause, which is altruism, which is the fact that we all are guided by a moral code that basically tells us that if you're successful, you must have

been self interested. Mark says it right. The Jew is self interested, the Jew is egoistic. And egoism and self interest we are taught by our mothers, by our preachers, by our philosophers. Self interest is evil, self interest is bad, It's wrong. Anti Semitism is a direct product of the philosophy and the morality that we are taught. As long as Jews are successful, again, when they're miserable, when they're weak,

we sympathize with them, and suddenly they're elevated up. The antidote, therefore, is ultimately the same antidote that leads us towards capitalism, because why do we have capitalism. One of the main reasons we had capitalism is because capitalism is the system of what, as Marx understood Marx's Marx had a deep understanding or capitalism was and what motivated capitalism and how it drove it, And then of course he hated it, but he had an understanding of it which most Marxists

today do not. Right, Max understood the capitalism created wealth, the capitalism was really good for the workers, that it made them wealthier. He just thought that also created eight nation and ultimately it would be they would rebel against it. Marxist today won't even acknowledge that capitalism creates wealth. Marx did. But the other thing that Marx understood is that capitalism is the system of self interest. What motivates on us under capitalism, it's the pursuit of our own interests. Why

do we go into the marketplace in capitalism? Right, why does the seller sell his goods. He sells his goods because he's trying to make a profit. And why do you go buy the goods from the seller? Because you want to make the world a better place. You want to help your fellow man. And I remember the first time I went to buy an iPhone, was was just heading into a session. It's like two thousand and eight, and I wanted to make sure people had jobs, So I went to them all and bought an iPhone right,

because that's why you go shopping. No, I mean you go shopping because you want to because it makes your life better, because you want to improve rationally or not, you want to improve your wellbeing. So capitalism is the place in which we pursue our self interest. But producer and consumer pursue their self interest, and we trade. We trade our mutual benefit, not to anybody's loss. Not that we don't sacrifice in capitalism. Nobody sacrifices anything in capitalism.

We pursue self interest, we pursue profit, we pursue gain, we pursue betterment. And that's why capitalism is hated. It's not hated for any factual issue people have with capitalism. They you know, they have all these myths about capitalism that we've answered every single one of them, and you know, and it's not because it doesn't work economically. We've had great economists that have answered every question. The Marxists and the Kynesian and all these people have thrown at us,

and we approove. Countries that tend to be more capitalists are richer, most successful, more prosperous company company. Countries that tend to be most socialists are poor. Reality is an outside. The economic theory is an outside. The only thing that's not an outside is moral theory. A morality says, if you pursue self interest, something's wrong. It's not good. Morality is about self sacrifice. Reality is about making yourself worse, not about making yourself better. And we have a clash

between morality and capitalism, and Marx. Marx understood this. He of course took the side of conventional morality, on the side of sacrificing. He said, yes, capitalism is bad because it allows people to pursue their self interest. How evil is that? And we all buy it? That is, our culture buys it. And Jews are roped into that because they're associated with that success. They're associated with that capitalism

and you know, really the only alternative to that. And I think the only way ultimately we're going to defend capitalism and ultimately get rid of anti Semitism, because I think again they're all tied together, is by accepting what call Mark says. Yes, capitalism is about self interest. Yes, it's even about greed. Yes it's about money. Money's good. Self interest is good, and greed if we understand it properly, it's good. There's nothing wrong with those things. Indeed, what

we need is a morality to defend self interest. What we need is a morality that defends the pursuit of one's own life, the pursuit of one's own values, without sacrifice, without suffering, the pursuit of life. The only author is

given such a defense is Iran. So Iran is the only philosopher in the last since Aristotle to actually develop a morality of self interest and therefore morality of capitalism, a morality of the trader, the morality of the kind of world that many of us strive to create politically. But one of the things that I think is really missing from our augmentation and our efforts is the moral piece,

which I think is the most important piece. It's the piece that allowed Marks to win because he's leveraging Christian morality, even if he's an atheist, he's leveraging two thousand years of Christian morality to achieve his goal, the idea of altruism,

the idea of sacrifice. And what we need to do is if we're going to challenge Marks, if we're going to challenge the anti capitalists of all form left and right, what we need to do is challenge the morality that they hold and now just challenge it, but often an alternative.

And there's a book there in German. I can't say it in German, but the selfishness, in other words, the virtue of self interest, the virtue of egoism, the virtue of making your life the standard of good, your life success as what morality should be about, the striving towards that success. To encourage those of you a German speakers to pick up a copy of any one of those books. But in particular related to what we're talking about now

is the virtue of selfishness. So if we can defend capitalism effectively, that don't mean that we defend self interest effectively. It means that we defend individualism successfully and we reject the collectivism that is implied by Marks and by all anti Semites. Not only do then we get a capitalist world, but I think if we do that properly, we also eradicate anti Semitism forever and and get rid of it on our campuses, on our left wing, on our right wing,

you know, in our culture. In totality. Thank you happy to take questions on anything, it doesn't have to be on this topic. A small group.

interesting to me. It's a very interesting inter inter I don't know, international story, inter ethnic story with the Germans and these Jews, let's say, from the tenth to the to the fourteenth century.

who were expelled by the Inquisition from Portugal and Spain. Spinosa, the famous philosopher, was a Jew expelled from His family was expelled from Portugal and they ended up in Amstem as a very large Valdi community in Amstem. The same in England. A lot of the Jews in England, the Italian Jews are mostly Sphaldi Jews, they're mostly from Spain originally, so I think it's more about whether you lived under

Islam or whether another Christianity. Christianity was particularly harsh against the Jews because again the Jews for theological reasons, the Jews were exposed to Jesus. He was one of them, right, and they turned their back on him, so therefore they

were bad, and therefore Christianity was particularly harsh. And then the because of the particular history, right, Islam fades as an economic power, as a real economic significance in terms of growth and economic growth starting in the twelfth century as Europe is rising, and that rise is fueled by capital, and that capital requires money lending, and that money lending is created is provided by Jews, and they, you know,

and they flourished as a consequence. But it's interesting, right because I didn't know this until recently, but you know, the problem of Jews in Germany starts a long time ago. You know, the first Crusade, first crusade around ten something, ten eighty, I can'try the exact days, but something around there. The first crusade is they're rallying to go and free Jerusalem from the Muslims, and what is the first thing

they do. They start in northern Europe and they start marching down towards the Byzantine Empire, ultimately towards Jewist thing they do is they start killing Jews. So if you track the path that crusade takes through Europe, they're going from town to town to town and basically here in Germany enough far from what we are right now, and killing the local Jews as part of this crusade. The

Pope doesn't like it. The Pope is but that's kind of how they get their motivation and their excitement are going and they have this happens what the folcusades, every single one of them, start in northern Germany by killing Jews and then traveling south and killing them along the way. So it it. You know, the the anti Semitism and the hatred of Jews is deeply interwound into the culture of the region. It's not far into this culture. And there's always people who you know, who say, you know,

but they're creating economic activity. We want them here, you know, there's values there. And then there are the others who want to wipe them out. Were the Jews in Yemen successful, I don't know. But certainly the Jews in places like Iraq, were Baghdad were very successful. They were they were some of the wealthiest people in Iraq. The same is true in Northern Africa, in certain areas in Northern Africa. So they were always put Jews. They will put Jewish here

in Europe as well. I mean, you know, Poland was full of little Jewish villages that weren't very successful, right, But what represented the Jew in so many people's eyes, called Marxist eyes, was that successful jew I mean the roth Childs. You know, we always say the roth Child's always represented kind of a certain mentality that represented Jewish mentality and a lot of the conspiracy theories that we still have today. Right, Jews control the world. Nobody ever

tells me about this. I'm insulted, but you know, Jews control the world. It's always goes back to the roth Childs and the big Jewish bankers who at the time. So Jews are not successful in that sense, right, But the ten percent of what represented the ten percent is what, particularly in Germany, is what Carl Marx is thinking of. For those who he came late. I started off with a really anti smantic kind of squeed by Carl Marx about Jews, which is his first essay that he got published.

It's called un the Jewish Question. You can find it online. It's a really good essay to read to get a real insight into cal Marx and how he thinks and what he hates about capitalism. What he fundamentally hates about capitalism is the same thing he hates about Jews is that it's self interested, it's egoistic, and he names it. He says, that's what it is. So you get a kind of the moral source of his hatred of both capitalism and of the Jewish people. Yeah, society, So when

does society change the small code? I don't. I wouldn't take Argentina as has changed small goals. I know Argentina's no less Catholic today than before me Lay was elected. It didn't reject Catholicism, and to elect me Lay, it's gonna have to reject Catholicism in or to keep the capitalism. If you can be successful and if you can actually make the changes that are necessary, I think ultimately they're gonna have to reject the morality of Catholicism to keep it.

But Dave for a while can say we just want him to you don't make us less poor, to change incentives, to cut gum and spending. You know, they abstract away from Oh no, this creates a system of self interest that I don't think anything existential can make it happen. You know, we can't close in the Enlightenment. I mean, the Enlightenment is clearly a period in which we're putting to the side religion. We're making religion a personal issue. It's out of the public square, it's out of politics.

It's not really that interesting philosophically. It's something if you want to believe at home, that's fine, right, And what is starting to be replaced with the thinkers of the alignment are starting to think about, is you know, this altruism stuff not quite right. There's something off here, but

they don't know whatever place it was. If you read the not so much a Scottish Enlightenment, if you read the French Enlightenment, they're really struggling with the idea of how we want to defend a new morality, a morality more about the individual, because they're individualists politically and they want to be individualists morally, and they don't know how to do it, you know. De Dreux and so the others around him, they're writing books about this stuff, but

they don't get it right. Thomas Jefferson and is struggling with this, and ultimately in a declaration of independence, in the American Declaration Independence, you have a right to your own life, and that's pretty self interested. And you have a right to the pursue happiness. Now that's a moral revolution.

It's just not fully articulated yet. And all of that rests on the idea that the Enlightenment had that is later rejected, that each individual has the capacity to reason for himself, and before each individual has the capacity to discover truth. Each individual therefore has the ability to take care of himself, to live his life, to pursue his happiness, that his life has meaning for him because he has

the capacity to think. Because if you take the view which Plato does, Plato takes the view, no, you all live in a cave. There are a few philosopher kings who know the truth, and you just see shadows on the wall. You'll never know the truth. You can't take care of yourself. You need philosopher kings. I mean Plato's benevolent. He wants you to have a good life, and he's saying you cannot have a good life if you rely

on yourself because you're too ignorant. So you need the philosopher king to guide you in your life, which is the Republic. They tell you what to do. So if you have that mentality, you can't have a The Enlightenment rejects that. It's starting to really embrace this, and then it's its peak. It's immediately attacked by a variety of different collectivist philosophers who all reject individualism, reject reason, and

reject ultimately self interest. And it takes irand to come and say to you, in a sense, comp I view I rand as completing what was begun in the Enlightenment. She completes the defense of the individual, she completes the defense of reason, she completes the defense of self interest. So now, when do we start as a culture when we acknowledge those ideas, when we embrace those ideas, when we start rejecting the past, rejecting altruism, and embracing these ideas.

And that won't happen because the president is elected. It won't happen because economically we're not doing well. It only happens through education. It happens because these are now the ideas in the air, These are the ideas that are conveyed by intellectuals to us. It takes a long time, Maorrol revolutions take a long time. It took you know, from you know, Jesus dying until Constantine, what three hundred and fifty years for that philosophy to dominate the Roman empires.

So you know, that's the scope of how long it takes for these kind of intellectual maral revolutions to happen. It doesn't happen in years or decades.

right morally? Well, it's implanted in our brain, some our categoric imperatives. They're just there, the truths that we have intuitions about, or you know, it's just now in our mind. He never really tells us where the categoric tempetters live, but they're just then. We just know it. You can't prove them by reason, You can't look at reality because we don't know what's real. They're just there.

he turns against the Enlightenment. And I don't think when we look at our philosophical tradition, we are right in categorizing. We should categorize him as the end of the Enlightenment,

as the beginning of the attack on the Enlightenment. And if you go from him to Hegel, right, who now rejects reason completely, and it's it's and he rejects the individual completely, and it's a state, the state that is the center of our being, and it's oneness and it's God, and it's you know, a completely non reason based philosophy.

And then you go, you know, kn't Hegel chopinaw Marx and it's a string of German And you can make a parallel with French philosophers who are rejecting the Enlightenment completely, And it's the anti Enlightenment movement ultimately wins the intellectual high ground. And you will find intellectuals at our university is defending the Enlightenment. I mean Stephen Pinker, right, But there's almost nobody the Enlightenment is finished. They reject it completely.

They're post modernists. They don't believe in truth, they don't believe in reason, they don't believe in the individual. Everything is about collective identity, and everything is about you know, some form of intuitionists, you know, some form of implied you know, knowledge that we have inside that just needs to reveal itself. Feels and Jordan Peterson, I mean, all of them. They complete rejection of the Enlightenment, right and left.

And it's the Enlightenment that gave birth to capitalism. It's the Enlightenment to give birth to liberalism in a positive sense of liberalism. It's the Enlightenment that gave birth to individualism. And if we don't resurrect that with a better foundation, with ancestor CONT's challenges, then we lose. And I think we're losing. And what you're seeing on campuses is it happens to be anti Jewish and anti Israel, but could

be anti anybody successful. Right. You could see the beginnings of this with Occupy Wall Street in two thousand and eight. It's the same people. It's the same mentality. Why did they hate Wall Street because Wall Street was successful? Wall Street represented, you know, the people who needed to be sacrificed. But yes, I mean philosophically, I think cont is the end. Yeah. So this is an excellent book. It's called The Ominous Parallels. And what Atlanta Peacock does in this book is he

compared the rise of Nazism in Germany. So he looks at the whole history and he's you know, he he's a student of Ivie Rance, so I mean he's the student of iron Man, and so he takes ideas seriously, his idea of shape history. So he tracks from the Enlightenment through Kant, through the different philosophers in Germany and the impact on the culture, and he shows that it's that intellectual tradition that leads to the Nazis. And he says, well,

that intellectual tradition is playing out in America. It's the same intellectual tradition. We haven't given up on those philosophers, and we've modernized them, but it's the same ideas. And he says, you've got this arminent parallel that what happening is in America parallels what happened in Germany leading up to the Nazis. And so he wrote this and it was probably something in eighty two, but if you read

it today, it's like even more. It seems even more real than it was back then in terms of the state of American culture.

those seeds to get more seeds. Seeds generate seeds. So it's okay to pay me interest when it comes to seeds. But he says, if I give you money, money doesn't multiply, the money doesn't grow. You don't get more money for money. Right. He can't see trade and how it exactly works, right, and so he says so he literally says money is barren and therefore charging usury or charging interest is wrong.

And you know, the Scholastics and christian you read Aristotle, and they struggle with this because at some point in European economy, particularly in the seventeenth century, it becomes obvious that no money does produce money, right, because wealth does increase. It's not a zoo some game, uh. And then they have to they have to struggle with the fact that Astota might be wrong about something, which is you know, again, the mentality of religion is that if it's written in

an ancient book. It is true period, you can't question it. And they treated Aristota that way. Aristotle was religion. They used to say, if your evidence, if the scientific experiment shows something the country Aristotle, then the scientific experiment as well. And this is some of the basis of which they criticized a Galileo. So it's an animosity that comes from I think, if you want to if you want an innocent perspective of it, it comes to a place of ignorance.

They just didn't understand how economics work. We don't have that excuse, right, And I mean again, the first, the first real understanding of interest and how it works, and how money works, and how capital creates more capital is really in the eighteenth century. People like to go it was a French economist of the Enlightenment, of course, Adam Smith, but many others during this period and some of the Scholastics had some understanding of this. But it's relatively a

modern concept. It's relatively modern understanding. So the embihemical religions were just reflecting the state of knowledge at the time. And the real question is why did Jews think they had this exemption from charging from non Jews and you know, they intuitively or in some way they saw that there was profits to be made here. They found a way around the biblical commandment. People are pretty good about that

difference between anti Semitism and anti Zionism. I mean, there suddenly can be I don't think they're the same thing necessarily. I can imagine being anti Zionist right, right, and anti Zionism is about a statement about Jews, you know, not, you know, should have a nation, not just a religion. It's a nation now, and this nation should have a state, right with boundaries and an actual state. And then add to that that that state should be in a particular

place where it is today now. Any one of those statements could be challenged, right, you know, I don't in myself a Zionist. I'm kind of a Zionist almost by I'm a Zionist by it would be a good word for this. Like in an ideal world, in my view, there would be no Israel because Jews would just assimilated into other countries and they'd live. The individual rights would be protected, we'd have wonderful capitalism. I mean, the boundaries between state would be not that important. In an ideal world,

there'd be a few. There'd be states, but not that many, and the boundaries wouldn't matter that much. We'd have free movement of capital, free motive labor, free movement of goods, and you know, we wouldn't have an obsession about identity as in Nay, we'd go where the business was best, or where the weather was best, or where we wanted to live, right, I mean, that's the vision I have for you know, five hundred years from now, when we win the battle and so you know as well has

open borders, and it doesn't, it doesn't become meaningful. I believe Zionism is an assess city only, is an act of self defense and an irrational world. In a world where there's anti semitism, Jews have no option but to define themselves and establish their own state and defend that state. But that's because the world sucks, not because the world's good. If the world is good, it would they would need that. But they do need it, right, So so I'm I'm a Zignist by default in that sense, not by not.

I'm not excited about being a Zignist because it's not part of my ideal world. My ideal world doesn't include it. So I think it doesn't have to be that. Anti Zionism doesn't have to be anti Semitism. But in the world in which we live, it usually is, and it mostly is. It's a it's a way to disguise a form of anti Semitism. Israeld just represents what it means to be Jewish. It represents the success and the prosperity that people associate with Jews. It represents the oppression that

is represented by Jews. And it's not an accident that campus, at least in the US, the demonstrations very quickly go from attacking Israel to attacking Jewish students on campus. Right whether the Jewish students are pro Israel or not, they they turn on the Jewish students because in their minds it's the same thing. So I think mostly in the world in which we live today, anti Zionism is anti Semitism.

But it but it doesn't have to be. I can imagine intellectual arguments where where you could be an anti Zionist and not an anti Semitis.

they're cutting a deal prematurely. This is way too soon. They should have gone all the way, destroyed Krisbala and then then gone for peace with Lebanon. Not a cease fire, but let's have a real peace agreement with the Lebanese, with the Lebanese government. And I think the Lebanese government would be interested in doing that if not for their fear that Chrisbella is going to come back and kill them.

So it's just a sign of weakness. But I'm being very critical of this government from the beginning from well from the beginning, really from the beginning way back, but certainly since October seventh, I think they've exhibited weakness repeatedly, and uh and they continue to do so. Yeah, you had a question. M. Yeah, well, I don't know if you know. I mean, we can talk about what freedom means.

I don't think you're no longer free, but you're suddenly You're suddenly in a in a in a bad situation, and it's easy at that point to blame the guy that you've borrowed the money from and make it about his fault. And he should have never charged you interest to begin with, And why did he even give you the loan. He should have never given you the loan.

He puts you in this situation, and it's a very easy to deflect your own personal responsibility onto somebody else, and as a consequence developed hatred towards that person and everybody who does that profession. And I think we do that in modern society, and I think we certainly did that in ancient societies. Yes, I mean. The solution to that is to take personal responsibility. You know. It's to say I screwed up. I took a loan when I shouldn't.

The interest rate, maybe it was too high, but I took it on It's my fault, and I need its man up right and take personal responsibility for this. I screwed up. I'm sorry. I'll pay back what I can. You know, I'll pay back in the future. But this is this is what it is. And I screwed up. But instead, because people don't have the self esteem to take personal responsibility, they deflect and they and they make it the responsibility of the person who made them the loan.

But making you the loan, it's a it's a it's a transaction. It's a win win. It should be at least you go into it with the expectation of win win. And and look, you know, I've taken on lots of loans in my life. I love loans. I like taking on debt. You know, you know, you just have to. You just have to make sure you pay back. But it gives you options that you just don't have. I couldn't have I couldn't buy the house that I have

right now if not for a mortgage. Right So I thank my bank every day for giving me that mortgage. And it couldn't be in a situation, you know, in a year where I can't pay the mortgage, I'll see to sell the place of far for bankruptcy. But that's me, that's not the bank. The bank. I'm thankful for the bank for making it possible for me to live in at home that I couldn't otherwise afford. And you know you can buy a nice car with that. You can

you can start a business with that. I mean, how many businesses have started with that and be successful?

I made a mistake. You don't blame the guy who's older to you unless he lied to you or deceived you or committed fraud. Right, But it's your responsibility. Sometimes you buy stuff that you regrant, so it's not win win, but you into the transaction with expectation and the need for win win. There's nothing different about that except that it has maybe bigger consequences in your life, but those are consequences you make. You create those consequences.

why interest is being charged. They resent the person. Wait a minute, you made a profit off of me, so you know. So, yes, it's it's the hatred because I can't pay you back, and now why did I take the loan? And it's your fault that I took the loan, and I resent you for that. It's the fact that you're making a profit off of me. We see that not just with you know, not just with finance. You see that with I don't know any company that announces

record profits. People resent it like I. When I hear a company made record profit, I'm going, yes, it means they created a lot of value. This is fantastic. Right, most people go, they make a lot of profits. They exploited me, they took advantage of me. Right. So it's

that orientation what causes people to hate. And if all these companies, all these banks, all a one ethnic group, a one religious group, then it's particularly if that religous group now has to wear different clothes and they clearly identified and they're supposed to live over there, it's easy then to project hatred onto that particular group.

is laws are there to protect individual rights. Laws are written to protect your freedom, to protect you from other people's fraud, to protect you from uh, other people punching you and you know, doing doing physical harm, to you. Regulations are limits on your freedom. They're saying you cannot do X, and you know, they come up with good reasons why you cannot do as, because it's dangerous, because

it might harm other people. But the reality is that the government has no The government should never get involved until harm is actually done.

not to take. So regulations are supposed to limit your freedoms, limit what you can do. Now, there are certain risks that you engage in to other people that the state can say no, that risk now is so great that it constitutes a violation of somebody else's rights. But then they have to prove that. They have to show that right. The crane is about to fall down, it hasn't fallen and hit anybody, but it's about to fall down. You can imagine the police coming and say no, no, you

got to straighten that crane. That's a risk to the people walking underneath. But you have to be able to show at least real potential for harm, not a theoretical Maybe if I don't behave myself something bad will happen. Yeah, but the risk has to be imminent and real, not theoretical and hypothetical. And maybe if the crane is standing like this, then there should be no rules apply to it, not hurting, not risking anybody.

is going to be involved in making automobiles anymore. You can you Germans can imagine that folks are gonna BMW and Mercedes, Benz and Porsche, you're gonna make cause now robots are gonna make all cause that's a reality. You can pretend that's not the case. And Germany is very good at pretending right now that that's not the case.

And as a consequence, right you're gonna keep all these employees making cars, and you're gonna wake up, or you've already woken up in a reality where China is making cause much cheaper, much better, just as effective, with almost no human intervention, at a fraction of the cost, and you're basically wiped out. So you're actually going to be

in a worse situation because you're ignoring reality. So allowing for flexible, for flexible you know, job market allows workers to constantly shift to where you're gonna maximize production, maximum productivity. That doesn't mean maximize building cars. It probably is the case the Germany should not be producing cars, certainly not given the climate you know, electric car nonsense that's going on. It probably is the case that you do not have

a competitive advantage of building casts. The longer you wait the longer it'll take for the market to figure out what you are good at and where those workers can be most productive. So you know, you can ignore reality, but reality won't ignow you. Shielding an economy is just a form of gnowing reality. So what is Germany really good at? I don't know, but you better figure out. And the only way to figure it out is to liberate the economy and let jobs go to where they're

most needed. And it's again, it's not going to be in building cars. So you know, again, I think all these political parties are just just selling you. Let's ignore reality and keep ignoring reality for whatever, because tariffs are not gonna protect you. None of these things will protect you. They never have in all of human history. The only thing that will protect the German economies in economy, it's more freedom. The United States should not be producing cars.

Maybe SUVs, but other than SUVs, the GM Forward and Chrisis should not be making a single automobile. You're not good at it. They're two expensive, they're not very good. Nobody really wants to buy an American car, right, and they're subsidized. At the end of the day, Yeah, Chrysler was bailed out, GM was bailed out Ford. They're all being bailed out by the government because they they're not sustainable.

You know, one day all the cars that we drive will be built in Africa, if things go well for Africa and fast, all the cause we buy will be built for Africa. And it's the same thing. You can go look in history, right, how many people today produce our food? Very few, and yet we have abundance of food. And yet just one hundred and fifty years ago, almost

all of us were farmers. But we had enough freedom and enough flexibility to move from the farm to the city and to engage in other work and division of labor, and we found better ways to use our resources and we're richer for us. So it's that same principle. There's no difference manufacturing farming. You wanna allow for flexible labors so that you can find the things that you were

best suited to doing. You won't find them. If you protect labor, you'll you'll just become a dinosaur'll you'll protect something that's dying. You have become a dinosaur. I mean that's the problem with Germany. It's become a dinosaur for economically because you won't allow for that flexibility. You insist on exports, you insist not to investment services. What are services? Everybody hates service jobs. What are service jobs? What's that

the less scalable? Now, service jobs are much more scalable. Okay, nurses nurses is a service job. We need a lot of nurses because we're an aging we're an aging population. We need lots of nurses. You're right, it's not scalable. But let's think of other Uh, you know, neither is a is a guy who does this all day on the assembly line. That's not scalable. What's scalable about this? Nothing? Right? So you know, at least the nurse actually provides value

to another human being. But think about other service jobs. They have flipping burgers as a service job. What a software writing? What's AI? Is open AI? A service company or manufacturing company? It's a service company. Almost all of Silicon Valley, all of Silicon Value today, all of Apple is a service company. It outsources production. What does it do? It designs, it plans, it provides services. That's all it does. That service is that scalable, massively scalable, a million times

more scalable than a manufacturing job. You can write code that will impact every human being on the planet just a few lines. So, uh, once I understand what service jobs really are, it's not flipping burgers. It is also flipping burgers. It's also being a nurse. But it's also writing code. And that's the future. The future is writing code. The future is not you know, assembling cause, because we're

going to write code to allow robots to assemble the cause. Yeah, I wish, I hope, uh I. I I'm not very hopeful in terms of what the Trump administration will do vias of Iran or what Israel will do. You know, as sad as it is to say, I'm really really hoping Iran attacks Israel soon so that the Israelis will actually go out and finish the job. Again, Israel does these half assed jobs and doesn't finish them, and the Middle East really needs Israel to finish the job. And uh,

I think Iran is ready for regime change. I think the Uranian people want regime change. I think the Uranian people are willing to go out into the streets and bring about regime change. They just need the military aspect

of the regime to be weakened. Enough so that they can have the confidence that they can be victorious, because the reality is that nobody in the in the army or in the revolutionary Guard has joined the kind of opposition in Iran, right, so Israel needs Hopefully, if Israel was aggressive enough, it would diminish the power of the military enough so that the people would have the courage to rise up and overthrow the regime. But that is the best thing that could happen to them, at least,

is for Iran to go away. I mean, for this regime to go away. And it's with this close, and I really think we're this close, and Israel won't pull the trigger, and the Biden administration won't pull the trigger,

and I suspect that Trump won't. I mean, Trump is already, if to believe the rumors and who knows if there's are true, is already negotiating in the background to kind of deal with Iran, which will be a tough deal, but it won't be the kind of deal that we would It won't be the kind of action we would want or to replace the regime. I know, I know, I'm a you know, I I'm I'm hugely inspired by the people of you on I you know, the Goals revolution uh two years ago and and last year it

was just unbelievably inspiring. And to see the world basically not care and ignore it and and continue to treat the regime in Iran as if it's a legitimate government to give them I don't know. Human Rights Commission at the U, N you know, the chair of the Human Rights Commission at the UN is just disgusting and despicable. But that's the world in which we live. It's it's sad. Are the questions?