Hi everybody this is Scott so at first I wanted to wish you a good upcoming weekend

I wanted to just briefly make some comments about the news that we found out today that the Russian activist

Navalny has died in prison. He was 47 years old and I want to situate what happened to him in the context of what I often hear from people who write to me saying,

you know, I really appreciate all of the efforts that you expend trying to

protect liberties and Western values and so on but I can't do it and then fill in the excuse.

And so it goes something like this, I can't do it because I might, you know, lose my circle of friends friends I might not do it because I'll lose my job if in

academia I might not do it because I don't have tenure yet or I have tenure but I'm going up for full professor so I can't speak until you know I'm able to get full

professorship or I can't speak because I'm applying for a grant.

And I don't mean to make light of all of those reasons that people come up for why they shouldn't speak.

But no war is ever fought, whether it be an

ideological war or a physical war, where you can be guaranteed to win the war without

ever incurring any costs. And so linking it back now to Navalny, he could have left Russia.

He could have never returned to Russia. He knew that if he returned to Russia things would go badly for

him. But his commitment to the cause, whether you agree with him or not, whether you're a Putin

fan or not, Navalny was certainly engaging in costly signaling, knowing full well that he might incur the greatest possible costs, as we now saw, and yet he was willing to die for his principles and so here I'm going to read for you a little snippet from my 20-20 book the parasitic mind.

This is at the end of the chapter titled non-negotiable

elements of a free and modern society. It starts on page 67 and then goes on to page

68 in chapter 3. So I end this chapter with a very

poignant quote from Ronald Reagan uttered nearly two decades

before he became president of the United States.

So now this is the quote by Reagan.

But freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.

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