U.S. Strikes ISIS in Nigeria + Brown Shooting Disinfo + TikTok Livestream Death

The United States launches missile strikes in Nigeria. A tiktoker is arrested for driving and hitting someone while livestream and a disinformation campaign about the most recent killer in Brown University from top government officials. All that and more today on Filtered. Hi and welcome. I'm TJ Walker. This is Filtered. Thanks so much for joining me. This is the show where we dive deeply into the top news stories of the day, business stories, technology stories and cultural stories and analyze it through the lens of communication skills, personal development and essentially truth. I appreciate you being here with me today. It's the day after Christmas. For those of you who celebrate the Christmas holiday, happy holidays to everyone. A fantastic Christmas. Well for me and my family here in sunny Florida. Beautiful, beautiful day here. Lots of happiness and good cheer. Let's dive right in to the top story of the day. According to the Times, the United States launched air and missile strikes against ISIS targets in northwestern Nigeria on Christmas day, hitting two militant camps with more than a dozen Tomahawk cruise missiles fired from a U.S. navy ship. President Trump said the strikes were aimed at ISIS fighters he claims have been slaughtering Christians. Turns out that's only part of the truth and the operation was conducted in coordination with Nigerian government. So this wasn't another one of these rogue experiences where we just go do whatever we want in another country. The Nigerian government did in fact invite us to participate. US And Nigerian officials cautioned the violence as part of a long running insurgency that has killed both Muslims and Christians in massive numbers. So let's look at some of the statistics here. Over 12 Tomahawk missiles launched by the U.S. navy. It hit two ISIS camps in the Sokoto state. That's the northwestern section of Nigeria. This involves Boko Haram. That is a nasty piece of work organization, frankly. They've killed tens of thousands of civilians. More than 12,000 Nigerians killed in 2025 alone. That's more than what's added up in certain official war zones. So a lot going on here. I want to share with you what I think are some, some relevant issues. So this is according to the Nigerian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. This is Kamibi IBN Affa who says terrorist violence in any form, whether directed at Christians, Muslims or other communities, remains an affront to to Nigerian values. I don't know why anyone would disagree with that. Here's another quote from Nigerian government officials to the New York Times. The web of violence of violent armed groups kills as many Muslims as Christians. Again, this is according to people on the ground. Now here's a statement From Pete Hegsett, the U. S. Defense secretary, sometimes erroneously not mislabeled as the secretary of war, he says, quote, the killing of innocent Christians in Nigeria and elsewhere must end. Okay? It turns out everything has to be an ugly partisan issue. And, folks, I'm here as a sane, sensible centrist. This is not Fox News or msnbc. I'm trying to discern clarity and messages so that you and I can together get better at our communication skills and personal development skills to be more successful. So I find it a bit rich, a bit ironic, that the very same people who are so offended, egregiously offended at the Black lives matter movement, that the labeling of black lives matter because they instantly interpret it as people say, oh, so all lives don't matter. So white lives don't matter? Is that what you're saying? Because that's certainly what we've heard from Trump and the Hegseths of the world. They're offense taken by people who talk about black lives Matter. And folks, I'm not here to defend everything black lives matter has done, but I do think it's essential to isolate the particular philosophical strand that has been talked about in the last half a dozen years and the fact that it's so offensive to those currently in power who. Who now appear to be doing exactly the same thing. According to all published reports going on in Nigeria, the extremists there, who, let's face it, are associated with a particular religion, a variant of the Islamic religion, are killing massive numbers of Muslims and Christians. They're killing Muslims and Christians. That's what according to government officials there are saying. It's been independently reported by a lot of observers from around the world. And here we have Pete Hegseth and President Trump apparently saying that, no, not all lives matter. Christian lives somehow matter more. So which is it? When you say black lives matter, that's offensive to you because it's implying all lives matter. But here we have people in Nigeria, international observers from around the world, saying all lives matter in Nigeria. But somehow the context for lobbying the bombs is not to protect U.S. citizens. There's, frankly, there's not a lot of U.S. citizens living in northwestern Nigeria. The context is that supposedly this is an affront to American values because they're killing Christians. Well, they're killing Muslims and Christians. This is not one religion just killing another religion. This is an example of religious extremists killing anybody who doesn't share their extremist religious views. And I just find it, frankly, sickening, appalling. Hypocritical for people who claim to value all human life, who are so offended if some group says our group is picked on more than others, therefore we have to elevate. And this is not my view, but this is the view of the critics who contend that some groups say anyone killed in our group is somehow a greater atrocity, a greater crime against humanity, is now doing exactly the same thing. Why can't this administration, why can't this Secretary of Defense, and that is the official congressionally approved title for Pete Higseth. Why can't they just state the truth in American terms, which is Americans find it offensive when an extremist group, whether it's backed by religion or some other bizarre ideology, kills people indiscriminately from a variety of religions. Why can't they just say that instead of having to turn things and filter it through their bizarre little bubble where all Christians are somehow great and innocent victims and anyone who isn't a Christian is therefore a terrorist. Their life doesn't matter because you're essentially saying when the Trump administration goes in and does sends the Tomahawk missiles into Nigeria to defend Christians, you're essentially by omission claiming you're not really going there to defend innocent Muslims. So you are essentially buying into the idea that you claim you detest, which is that some human lives are more valuable than others, some are less valuable. So all they had to say is make up your mind, which is it? All people have equal human worth and don't deserve to be slaughtered by extremists, or only some do. Misinformation is spreading around the world faster than ever. Only this time it's coming from official high level government sources. That's what's different. According to the Times, a deadly shooting at Brown University was followed by a rapid spread of false online claims. Some of these were amplified by elected officials and top business leaders. I'm talking about billionaires. That's different. That's unique. That didn't used to happen. They were mislabeling the motive and and falsely accusing a student. The rumors fueled harassment, death threats and a disruptive police investigation. Or it disrupted the police investigation, reignited alarms about accountability and an algorithm driven information ecosystem. Experts warned that when leaders joined the pylon, disinformation accelerates and trust collapse. That's. That statement alone may be dated because maybe there's no trust left. Let's look at the facts. Two students were killed at Brown University, December 13th. False claims started within hours. One victim was falsely labeled as targeting conservatives. That Was. It was. You know, it's, it's this cult of victimization. Conservatives are right when they say there's a cult of victimization in America and it trivializes really bad things and it makes everyone a victim, but they're wrong. And who's guilty of this? Right now we're seeing in our current culture conservatives always playing the victim card. Somebody shot it must have been because they were a poor victimized conservative and targeted for their conservative beliefs. So that's what we heard initially with regarding these. This Brown murder. Turns out none of it was true. A Palestinian student was falsely accused of the crime online. Several members of Congress amplified these fake rumors. Nearly 5,000 posts named particular students, none of whom were guilty. The posts were reposted 130,000 times. Thank you, Mark Zuckerberg. Thank you. Reddit police warned misinformation disrupted the investigation. It was a problem. Now later we found out the killer was a Portuguese scientist, someone who'd been in the country for decades, apparently a brilliant scholar who just went crazy. Sorry if that's not scientific enough for you, but that's essentially what happened. No particular ideological basis, wasn't a part of any extremist group, far left or far right. But that didn't keep a lot of people who should know better from weighing in. Congresswoman far right Congresswoman from my own state of Florida, Anna Paulina Luna, started insisting there's a cover up. It's suspicious. The information was removed from Brown University's website following the tragic shooting. No, it wasn't suspicious. You have Sean McGuire who was a partner at Sequoia, big time, big time powerful venture capitalist firm saying our elite universities have become terror breeding grounds. It's Camp Buka. But in America. Well, again, it wasn't terrorism. It was just an idiot who somehow lost his marbles. And we live in America where right wing culture defines basic human rights as everybody. Even mad men get their own guns. Okay, here's something from a bulletin that went out. According to several news and social media reports, the Brown shooter is a radical pro Palestinian activist, Mustafa Karboach, a radical Islamic terror falls. Now let's look at some of the specifics. Bill Ackman, who just can't seem to go more than five minutes without having his name in the media charging that everyone in the world is somehow bias against people he likes. He shared these reports stirring up hatred that was somehow a Muslim extremist. Senator Tommy Tuberville, the brilliant brain trust from Alabama specifically tweeted or posted on social media that the Brown University killing. The persons killed were targeted. One of them was targeted because she was a Republican. That's right folks, the cult of victimization lives on. And ground zero appears to be Alabama and Tommy Tuberville, the renowned football coach, renowned in the Senate for other things. But everyone's got to weigh in on this. And the problem of course is inherent bias, confirmation bias. And in case of Bill Ackman, you know, the bias of if the only thing you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If every single new piece of information comes in, it has to fit into your pre existing narrative of how the world works. Well then yes, any violence is because somebody you like is a victim of because of somebody else's religious belief that you don't like. And facts don't matter, investigation doesn't matter. Guilt or innocence doesn't matter. Just say it. And Tommy Tommerville, Tommy Tuberville, he also went on Benny Johnson, well known right wing influencer to spread this disinformation. And I'm telling you folks, this really does need to stop. Have there ever been a case where those on the left exaggerate things to make it seem as though those on the right were targeting them unfairly? Yeah, you could make a case for that. Yeah, you could make a case that so called black churches burned down at the same rate or less frequently than so called white churches. So it wasn't in fact some racial conspiracy. So I'm more than happy to say that there are those on the left who sometimes instantly pigeonholed facts and even worse things that are not facts into a narrative to paint themselves into a victim, victimhood. But now we have senior. I mean it doesn't get much higher in the US government than being a United States senator or member of Congress. To have them spreading misinformation within hours, within minutes of an active police investigation really skews things. It's disruptive to the investigation and ultimately what they are doing is helping criminals. In this particular case the criminal was just a scientist who was embittered about his career. This is the same guy who left Rhode island and went to Massachusetts and killed a former colleague of his who was an esteemed professor at the, at mit, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, apparently out of professional jealousy. So no, there were no odes to Muhammad, there were no trashings of Jesus or anything like that. It appears to be a case of somebody suffering mental illness and having access to guns, which is perhaps the number one are the two most common ingredients to mass murder in America. Hang on, I'll Be with you in just a minute. Hang on. I'm sure I can still do a great show here today for you and check Facebook and tweets and. No, I can't do that. That would be rude to you and be obnoxious and I wouldn't do a good job. Which brings up our next story here. This is shocking and yet not shocking. It's shocking it doesn't happen more frequently. The Independent reports that a TikTok influencer is now facing serious criminal charges after allegedly killing a pedestrian while live streaming herself driving. Police say Tanisha McCarty Roton, age 43, ran a red light while broadcasting on TikTok, fatally striking Darren Lucas, a 59 year old grocery worker. Investors say the live stream video was preserved and verified through warrants and digital analysis. Okay, I'm frankly surprised this doesn't happen 50 times a day in America and other parts of the world. Here are the facts. The crash occurred November 3rd on the evening commute. So I mentioned the victim, Darren Lucas, was a grocery store worker. It was happening on TikTok. It could have happened on any live streaming platform. Obviously, the charges now include reckless homicide. Good. It is reckless homicide. Anyone who's driving and even staring at their phone is bizarrely reckless. But when you're live streaming and you're trying to keep that audience and get, hey, look at me, look how cool I am. Hit like hit share, blah, blah, blah. And then boom, you run over someone and they're dead again. I'm frankly surprised it doesn't happen once an hour in America. Police cite the red light violation on video. It was a Ford Edge suv, although obviously it could happen in any car. I'm not saying there's something uniquely odd about SUV to make them. Make them culpable with anything. According to our government, 3,300 people were killed by distracted driving in 2023. I'm not quite sure how they deduce to get to those statistics. Presumably that. Well, I don't know. Presumably that eliminates those who are just driving drunk. Distraction can be you're fiddling with the knob to turn the radio to another station. If you still use a radio, it could include turning around to beat your kids if they're yelling or screaming in the car. Not that I endorse that, of course, but let's be honest, let's be real with ourselves. The number one source of distraction in a car is the number one source of distraction for everyone, everywhere, every time of the day. And it's this staring at your phone. And of course Live streaming sort of takes it up by a factor of a thousand because you're even more intently focused on, do people like me? Are people watching me? How many people are on right now? I'm hoping that authorities send a strong message with sentencing, but I also think it's time to get creative. I'm not suggesting this person should be treated leniently by getting less prison time, but I do think that some kind of prison sentence forbidding this person from ever having a smartphone again would be wildly, wildly appropriate. I'll leave it to others who figure out the constitutional niceties of how to do that. That's not the scope of our show. But if you've already shown you're so cavalier and so crass as to willingly endanger people's lives by live streaming, I don't know why in the world our society should empower you to do that again. Well, I mean, let's say this person serves a year or two in prison. They get out, are they going to be live streaming? Hey, look at me. I'm getting away with it again. And maybe they say, okay, I'm not going to live stream anymore, but certainly I can watch a Facebook video. Certainly I can watch filtered with teach. I hope they're not watching my show. If you are driving right now, please turn off my show. If you're watching it, you want to listen on podcast, okay. But please, please don't be watching me or anything or anyone while you're driving. It literally kills again. According to the United States government, it kills more than 3,000 people a year now. I'm glad to see the police in this case, it was the Zion police force using technology and saying, they've said, quote, the video was preserved and verified through extensive investigation. The son in law of the man killed said, our grieving will last forever, but seeing justice starting to happen helps. And the son of law also says he leaves behind a wife without her everything. So it's a sad, sad situation and it's entirely preventable. Okay, someone gets pancreatic cancer, that's obviously a sad, sad situation. According to most scientific experts, there's really not that much anybody can do. It's kind of just a bad luck of the draw. But driving over someone while you're live streaming, that is 100% preventable death. It's called put your cell phone away, turn it off, get over the delusion that people can't somehow go five minutes without seeing your face. And look, I realize that may be a bit rich coming for me because I do in fact, live stream 24 hours a day, but I don't ever do it if I'm driving. If you see me live streaming at 2 in the morning or 3 in the morning, it's not me actually speaking at that time. It's using technology to push out my video in a linear format. So let's be clear about that. I'm often struck by the fact that when I recently moved from a small urban village, Delray Beach, Florida, to a more suburban area. But where I was for the last four and a half years, until four months ago, was a little village where there were people driving everywhere, walking everywhere. It was a great place, except for the fact that I don't ever remember being at a stop sign or even watching people drive by slowly on Atlantic Avenue, the main drag, without seeing them staring at their phones like this. I mean, it was wildly dangerous. And folks, it's got to stop now. You may or may not buy into the philosophy proposed by Jonathan Haidt that cell phones are essentially destroying our brains and destroying kids and increasing dramatically the rate of especially teenage girls killing themselves, cutting themselves and suffering depression. You may say, well, T.J. that seems to be more correlation than causation. But I think the case is pretty clear that if you're driving, staring at your phone, not looking at the windshield, running over people and killing them, that's correlation and it's causation. And for that reason, it's time to get serious. You know, we mandated the cars have the technology of a seatbelt, and it has saved tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of lives at this point. And I'm old enough to remember when putting on your seatbelt was almost. They didn't use the term back then, but it was almost seen as kind of a woke, politically correct, precious thing, putting on a seatbelt. You know, macho people, real people don't do that. And then it gained acceptance. It grew and grew and grew. And all of a sudden laws were passed requiring it. People do it. Laws are passed that automobiles had to have seat belts. And then at some point, it got to the point where if you saw someone, a cab driver, an Uber driver, not with a seatbelt on, it felt weird. It felt like, who is this person? Are they crazy? Are they that foolhardy? The zeitgeist really change. And I think we need to figure out a way of designing a similar zeitgeist change when it comes to cell phones in cars. If you are driving, you could, for example, require that Apple and Samsung and other great manufacturers of cell phones Somehow put in a device that would simply turn off if it detects the car is in motion. You want to make a call, it's so important, pull off the side of the road and make a phone call. That could happen. I suppose there's a way of putting the onus on car manufacturers to put in some destabilizing signaling process that would make it impossible for your cell phone to send or receive messages. I think the cleaner way would somehow be to put it into cars or sue me into phones so that it's automatically destabilized. And then maybe okay, you're on a bus ride or you're in the backseat of a car and you want to use your phone. Maybe there are a number of steps to do that. I mean, let's face it, the, the folks, the tech, the technologists at Apple and Google are so sophisticated, GPS and everything. There's probably a way of determining, okay, if you are actually behind a driving wheel, the driver's wheel in a car, it should be able to detect that and automatically turn off your phone. Oh, but tj, how I listen to my favorite podcast. How will I listen to Filtered with TJ Walker? Guess what? You'll somehow survive. I will survive if you don't listen to or watch the program while you're driving. So again, 3,300 people are dying a year from so called distracted driving. That's more than died in 9 11. When you think of the massive hundreds of billions of dollars, if not trillions of dollars spent in the last quarter century on security measures because of those couple thousand people who died, all the anti terrorism measures, and I'm not saying it wasn't well spent or that wasn't a crisis worthy of changing society. But why is it that 150% of those people can die every year on our roads from something 100% preventable? And we're like, eh, I guess it doesn't, isn't that a shame? Well no, it is a shame, but it's time for our government to act. If we can wildly inconvenience everyone at airports taking off your shoes, I'm not saying that's a bad idea. But when you think of all of the safety provisions our government imposes on us to prevent the once a generation couple thousand people dying in the World Trade center, why can't we do maybe 2% of that to save the equivalent of a 9, 11 times 1.5 every year on our highways? It's Christmas time. It's that Christmas time of year. And of course that means they're going to be some politicians trying to exploit this for their own narrow political advantage. Let's take a look. According to the Times, several official Trump administration accounts posted Christmas messages that explicitly centered Jesus and Christian doctrine. Yes, I'm well aware that Christmas is based on the Christian belief. It's a sharp contrast to more universal, non sectarian tone government accounts often use and traditionally have used across the political spectrum. Now, now critics argue the messaging blurred the line between personal faith and state power, while the White House dismissed objections and some conservative voices applauded the shift. So to give you a little sampling, Pete Hegseth, the defense minister, the secretary of defense said, quote, today we celebrate the birth of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Now, Pete Hegseth certainly free to believe any religion or superstition of his choice. I certainly wouldn't want to take that away from him. But he is the leader of the single most powerful military force in the history of the world. People get a little confused when you conflate the two. In the past, Secretary of Defenses have kept their religious opinions to themselves, not because religion is necessarily bad in the eyes of most Americans, but because we have a secular government. I realize that's not a popular thing that instantly gets you branded as a lunatic fringe, according to some, to stay the obvious historical truth. But the United States was based on an idea of individual liberty to the the idea that individuals could decide what religion they like, what they don't like, if they love religion, if they can't stand religion. You are a part of this American experiment. To now see so many people in the highest rungs of government actively promoting one particular religion above others is disconcerting for many reasons. It's clearly a violation of the separation of church and state. It's clearly violating our constitutional amendments that say we are not trying to establish any one religion. And yet here we have Marco Rubio, one of the most powerful people in the world, in part because he's got about 10 jobs, because Trump can't find anyone else to work for him in many cases. But he is famously known as the Secretary of State, among other titles he has now. The joyous message of Christmas is the hope of eternal life through Christ. White House spokesperson Persons were dismissive when the author of this story wrote asking for a perspective on the why are you, why are you having to be so in your face about promoting a particular religion? Now, again, am I saying it's awful or evil to say Merry Christmas? No, I'm not. I say Merry Christmas. I said it yesterday on the show. I have a Christmas tree in my life, so I'm not some humbug kind of guy. Let's look at some, some bigger points here. The establishment clause exists to prevent official religious favoritism. When you have the president, the Secretary of defense, the Secretary of State actively, actively pushing one particular religion, all of a sudden it seems like the government's being very favorite. Also, these are official government accounts. It's not Marco Rubo Rubio's personal Facebook page. It's the official government accounts. Now when this happens, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, atheists, people who think religion is BS feel marginalized. Why do I understand why politicians do that? They want to pander to the base. But we're supposed to live in a culture, a democracy, that says, okay, when you want to campaign, campaign. If you win, you're now supposed to govern for everyone. Not say we're just here for our team. That is increasingly is happening now. Many of you are perhaps thinking, well TJ, you know, that's just been the last 30 years when these evil liberal, radical left secular humanists took over our country and stripped all religion out of the public square. If you're thinking that, you're not alone, but you're also not historically accurate. According to the Treaty of Tripoli in 1797, the US explicitly stated that it was not in any sense founded on the Christian religion. The last time I checked, the year 1797 was not in the last 30 years. It wasn't when the so called liberal Warren Court was in power. It was in 1787. Back in the original days of our country's founding. George Washington talked about providence. Now that's about as abstract and airy and generic a concept as possible. That kind of sort of gently hints at the notion of God. George Washington was not going around saying, do you believe that Jesus Christ is the one true savior and if you don't believe him, you're going to roast in h e double. Was George Washington walking around trying to tell citizens that no, he was not. In fact, there's just not a lot of evidence that he any particular connection with Christianity other than obviously he was familiar with Christians. According to Mount Vernon historians, George Washington never explicitly even talked about Jesus in private. Okay. Ben Franklin never accepted Christ's divinity. According to the National Humanities Center, Thomas Jefferson wrote his own Bible, believe it or not. And he, he stripped out all the miracles from the Bible. He thought those were nonsense. He was known as more of a deist. A deist was common among the educated elite who founded the United States. They Kind of felt like, okay, there's kind of sort of maybe some force higher than us that kind of created the world and then kind of backed away. Kind of like a nice grandpa you maybe saw once every year at Christmas time to give a Christmas reference. That was the perception of many of our founding fathers, but not all of them. To be fair. You had Thomas Paine, one of my favorites. Arguably, we would not have had a revolution without his pamphlet Common Sense. Thomas Paine wrote the Age of Reason, which is one of the most forceful and it's a good read by the way. I would recommend it is one of the most forceful denunciations ever of religion, an organized religion. He had nothing but absolute contempt for the Christian religion. Thomas Paine, certainly one of the most influential and important founders of our nation. Paine called churches human inventions to terrify and enslave. Boy, would the modern maga right have fun with that. Thomas Paine, you're too liberal, you're too left, you're too progressive, you're too woke. Why don't you go back to England? They would probably say. They'd probably try to deport Thomas Paine today, in which case there'd be no common sense. The pamphlet. In which case there might not be a United States today because his pamphlet Common Sense helped galvanize public opinion against the crown and in favor of revolution. It's so important to realize so many of our founding fathers never mentioned Jesus specifically. They just talked about. About God. And that was kind of an abstract concept to many of them. They certainly were not actively, actively trying to ram a particular religion down the throats of Americans. So this is the Founding. So you can call me a conservative if you want. You can say, well, T.J. you're too conservative. I actually think we should look at the founders original intents. Clarence Thomas says that about the Constitution. I think we should also use that judgment from time to time looking at how elected officials should comport themselves. And I think our founding fathers had a. They didn't have everything right. They obviously were kind of big fans of slavery. Okay. But a number of things they did get right. They were rebelling against the state controlling religious thought. That's why so many of them left England. That's why others left countries like Italy. They just didn't like the government telling you, here's the one true religion. You better believe in this or you're in big, big trouble. They didn't like that. That's why people came to America. And so I give a lot of credit to our founding Fathers and I think it's time to conserve their restraint regardless of their own religious views. They weren't using the power of office to impose their views. When Thomas Jefferson was president, he didn't put out an infomercial saying, buy the Thomas Jefferson Bible and send me 995 today and I'll send you the real Bible. And in mind, there's no miracles. He could have done that if he had the same attitude of the current occupant of the White House. But he didn't do that. No, he had his own private beliefs, which presumably he shared with close confidants. But an official speeches, official proclamations of the government, he didn't use it to try to promote his version of one religion or anybody else's. You know what? If it worked for Thomas Jefferson, it'll work for us. Today. It's still Christmas week. More Christmas cheer and more Christmas news. This from Washington, D.C. according to the Times, a beloved Christmas Eve jazz trans tradition at the John F. Kennedy center for the Performing Arts was abruptly canceled. That's right, canceled after Donald Trump forced his name on the building. Jazz musician Chuck Red, who hosted the show for nearly 20 years. Again, this was a tradition in Washington, D.C. at the Kennedy center for Performing Arts. Christmas Eve, that'd be this nice jazz show. Now, I used to Live in Washington, D.C. i'm afraid I didn't see it, but apparently it was a very popular thing. He said renaming the Kennedy center to the Trump Kennedy center crossed a line and prompted him to pull the plug. The move has ignited legal, cultural and historical backlash over branding a national arts memorial that has historically been tied to John F. Kennedy. Now, again, here are the facts. Concert ran for 20 years. Seven musicians were scheduled to perform. Red cancelled only after they changed the name to and added Trump's name to the building. It's now the Trump Kennedy Center. Donald Trump is the chairman of the board because apparently being president of the United States isn't a full time job and apparently he doesn't get enough attention in his day job. So he had to make himself president of the Kennedy Center. Now, the center was designated a memorial in 1964. So if you're up on your history, you realize Kennedy was dead by then. That's typically how memorials work. You have to die. First you die and then people, other people decide you are worthy of being memorialized. You don't get to decide yourself that you're so big and wonderful that there should be memorials named. That's how it's always worked throughout the history of this country. And so there's no ambiguity about this. Chuck Red, the artist, said, I decided last Friday to call off a performance. Now, there's currently lawsuits going on. According to Joyce Beatty, an act of Congress is required to rename the building. So there's active lawsuits going on. So here's the broader issues. There should be some public cultural institutions that are seen as neutral political spaces. That's why you don't typically name big public spaces after living politicians, because living politicians are. Are active in the battles of the day, as they should be. They have to be. They have to be weighing in on controversies. But no one wants to know John F. Kennedy's view on artificial intelligence regulation. You know why? Because he's been dead for more than 60 years. Therefore, there's no controversy. And that seemed to make sense to everybody all across the political spectrum forever until recently. And now, unfortunately, you have the situation where performers think, well, if I go and this person is actively in politics, am I endorsing their politics? If the John F. Kennedy Center. If Joe Biden had renamed the Kennedy center the Bernie Sanders center for Performing Arts, maybe Lee Greenwood would not have felt comfortable performing his one song at the Bernie Sanders Performing Arts Center. But guess what? Joe Biden didn't rename the Kennedy center to the Bernie Sanders or even the Joe Biden Center. He kept it the way it was, which is what George W. Bush did, was what Ronald Reagan did. It's what every president did. Now, people have jokingly said that the Lincoln Memorial will now become the Trump Lincoln Memorial. Well, why is that a joke? If you can add your name to anything, if you can add your name to memorials, why not add Donald Trump sitting on a throne maybe 10ft higher than Abraham Lincoln and just call it the Trump Lincoln Memorial? Sounds ridiculous. Sounds absurd. So did the idea of renaming the Kennedy center for Performing Arts the Trump Kennedy center for Performing Arts about five minutes ago. And now, unfortunately, it is a reality. So here's what's going on here, folks. If. If you're a conservative, you're supposed to be about conserving things of value. That's why, presumably, you don't want to run up massive debt in our culture and destroying the value of the US Dollar, which, speaking of, nobody's done a worse job at managing our country's finances than this incumbent. No one has ever raised more debt and added to the deficit than the current income. But that's a separate issue. You're supposed to conserve the idea of value. And we are seeing repeatedly, again and again and Again, the brand of America, not just the brand of the Kennedy center, but the brand of America is being sullied. It's being destroyed. People don't want to come here anymore. We're seeing international tourism drop by millions. Tourists don't want to come here. We're seeing many of the finest minds, many of the top artificial intelligence researchers saying, you know what? I want to come to America. I want to come to North America. I want to come to that great country, Canada. That's right. I have firsthand information of people I've tried to recruit fleeing war torn countries came to America and they said, you know what, tj, thanks, but I'm going to go to Canada because Canada's brand is better than the United States right now. I talked to tourists in Vietnam just last week saying, you know, we thought about going to the U.S. but all of these extra fees if we want to go to a national park, fingerprinting, headaches, hassles, it doesn't seem worth it. We are seeing, sometimes it's slow, but sometimes it's happening overnight, this destruction of the value of the brand. Now, in the business world, if you become the CEO of a company and its market cap goes from, you know, a trillion dollars to $10 billion or even 500 billion, a board of directors pretty much escorts you out the door quickly. This happened to Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of General Electric. It's happened to a lot of CEOs in the last decade. You're in, you're given the reins of power, but if you squander the brand, if you sell the brand, if you reduce the market value of the brand, you're shown the door. And yet, you know, here we are, just 11 and a half months or so into this CEO of the nation's tenure, and the brand destruction is happening quickly. Certainly our former European allies no longer trust the American brand. They feel like we betrayed them. They're on their own. And certainly dictators around the globe, whether it's Russia, whether it's Turkey, whether it's Hungary, other places around the world be like, oh, we don't have to worry about the US Brand anymore. They don't care. They don't stand for anything. We can do whatever we want. We can screw over our own citizens. We can invade countries. Brand USA that kept the entire world together from 1945 on is gone. It's evaporated. It's like some great TV manufacturing company that disappeared decades ago. No one can even remember. That's essentially what's happening to the US Brand. So I'm urging you, pay attention. Things like this, renaming the Kennedy center and just adding the name of a living politician, it's a sign of a much deeper sickness, and it is utterly destroying Brand usa.