So let's talk about this Khashoggi thing. So Khashoggi was the journalist who was allegedly slain by Saudi security forces, cut into pieces with a bone saw, and his body removed from the Turkish consulate. Now as I've questioned before, you always have to wait with this sort of thing because there's always going to be more to this story. It just didn't quite make sense the way we heard it. It sounded a little too fantastical for us to really have understood everything about this, and we're still waiting. So we don't know what else we'll learn.

But there's kind of an interesting question that's a sub-question about this. The journalist who was killed is a Muslim Brotherhood proponent. And the Muslim Brotherhood, as I understand it, the current incarnation promotes a peaceful transition, a democratic transition to Sharia law and enslave the world. So at least in their public face, the Muslim Brotherhood is a non-violent way to conquer the world for the benefit of Islam.

And I'm wondering how we in the West should look at something like this alleged murder, should it become confirmed. And somebody's saying, "Are you insane? Nonviolent?" No, I'm not insane. You're bad at listening. I said their public face and their public pronouncements are nonviolent. What they're doing behind the scenes I have not addressed. So if you believe they're doing something behind the scenes to support Hamas or support other terrorist groups, you would be agreeing with some of the Middle Eastern countries who also consider them a terrorist group.

But if we're just talking about Khashoggi, I've not been presented with any information, at least in the press, that would suggest that he in particular is in favor of any kind of violence. So I have not seen that suggested, and I think I would by now, right? But he was a Muslim Brotherhood person. And I think it would be fair to say that there are members of the Muslim Brotherhood who do not favor violence, but what they do favor is a view of the world that's by Western standards very anti-women and perhaps even more anti-LGBTQ. So anti-gay, anti-LGBTQ. I can never say that right. Anti-woman.

So when we're watching this and we're saying to ourselves how much trouble does the United States want to get into for what looked like sort of a Middle East internal problem, because I'm not sure we want to take this guy's side, do we? You know, how much do we want to support the person who would change our system to something we would consider a form of slavery for women? Right now I'm not saying that's necessarily everybody's interpretation, but by Western standards what Khashoggi was pushing was kind of a women second-class citizen baby-making slavery situation by Western eyes. Right? Obviously within the Islamic community they have a very different opinion of it.

But so the interesting question is, if I take my own judgment out of this, so I'm trying to describe this without infecting it with any opinions of my own because I don't really have strong opinions on a lot of stuff in the Middle East because I don't have the full context for things. But it's an interesting question: how much do we in the West, and we in the West are 50% women and then you add on to that the LGBTQ community and that's a majority, right? In the democratic West, most people, as in more than 50% of our population, is either a woman or a gay man. Because if you add the roughly half that are women to the 10 percent or so that are LGBTQ, and half of them are men, something like 55% of the West are women and gay men, something like that. So it's a majority.

How much should that majority in our democratic society care about proponents of Sharia law when one kills the other? Because somebody is arguing with my estimates. You can argue with the estimates, that's fine, but it's the same point. There's a clear majority in the democratic countries of people who are either a woman or gay man. If you add those two categories together, they're more than 50% of the population. Everybody agrees with that.

So it's not clear to me how much risk the West should take over what's kind of an internal squabble between two sides that we shouldn't like either one of them too much because of what they would do with the topics of women and gays in particular, should they get their way. And then you have this weird situation where I don't think you could argue that Saudi Arabia has a more enlightened approach to women and gays than the Muslim Brotherhood. I don't think you can necessarily make that case. But in terms of the public, we see this Bin Salman guy looking like a reformer. Women can drive and I think there were some other smaller changes there. So at least he's heading in the right direction.

So in terms of how it feels to us, it's going to feel like at least Bin Salman had something going on there that was the right direction, even if we don't like where he's at. That he had dirt on the regime. Somebody says that Khashoggi had dirt on the regime, which I've heard is true, but we don't know what that was. Anyway, but it does feel like a little bit of an internal problem, and I'm not sure how much the United States should embrace it as our problem.