The Justin Hart show is sponsored by the posterity pack. It's time to help you get grounded and help you make sense of the world. The Justin Hart show on the answer, San Diego. And here's your host, Justin Hart. Hello San Diego. Hello World, this is Justin Hart. Welcome to my show. You know, before we begin, I want to tell you a.
About Willie Brown. Now those of you who are in California know the name Willie Brown. He's a prominent democratic politician now in retirement. Someone related this little Diddy, this little story about him, and I thought it was a great humorous take and a good intro to one of the topics we want to cover today.
Willie Brown is in San Francisco, this is some time ago, and he's at a conference at a. In San Francisco, former mayor of San Francisco, Willie Brown, and they're having a luncheon before. He's the guest, Deju the, the speaker of honor there, and the staff are dutifully running around and setting up the plates and they get things ready for Willie Brown who's there at the head of the table, the former speaker of the assembly of the state of California, Willie Brown.
And along comes one of the staff who's in charge of the Butterball. Not the turkeys, but the little, little balls that are branded with the hotel logo they use for the bread. And he's dutifully placing one cube, one ball of butter on each plate. And he puts, one ball of butter on the plate of Willie Brown, the ex-boyfriend of Kamala Harris.
And, Willie Brown kind of looks at it and then he looks at the staff member and he says, You know, I, I think I'd like, three Butterballs please. And a staff member says, yeah, I'm sorry. I'm only allowed to give one out. He says, son, do you know who I am? And he rattles off. I'm the former mayor of San Francisco.
I'm the former speaker of the assembly of the state of California. I'm the ex-boyfriend of Kamala Harris. And, and, and he says, that's that's who I am. He's kind of laying down his credential. His, you know, his strata, his point on the pyramid where he, where he stands and the, the staffer looks at him and says, and whispers down and says, mayor Brown, do you know who I am?
And he looks at me and says, no, who are you? I'm the keeper of the butter. You get one ball. And he moved on. And that sort of accountability, right? That sort of, um, hierarchy that, you. Is something I want you to adopt in your life. It's something I've adopted too. I mean, who am I to talk about a lot of these issues, right?
A as I start off in my book Gone Viral, how Covid drove the world Insane. I, I talk about how I start out. My first line is I'm not a healthcare expert, right? And I don't pretend to be one, but I wouldn't normally insert myself into someone else's. , but they sure had no problem inserting themselves into my domain, my kids' education, my business into my barber shop, , you know, they, into my church.
They went on and on and it's like, no, no, that, that can't be, that can't be what this is about. Right. You, you, you can't have credentialism as it's called through the day, especially when you've been so wrong on things, and especially when it comes to your rights because you. Undergirded rights that you can call on both from God and from the Constitution, and those should never be in French.
The Constitution doesn't go into status or into a, a coma. It doesn't go into some declined state in the middle of emergency, although it certainly seemed a did. Right? And so as soon as the science moves into policy, you have every. and your credentials are just as good as the next one. And so the whole theme of this.
As we wind down, hopefully the covid motif and try to shed ourselves of all the bad habits that we and our government have adopted, that is something we need to look very closely at. And so I want to talk to you about this main theme for the year, accountability, not Amnesty, our healthcare. They must own up to their pandemic mistakes.
Eh, the failures are legion, you know, absent curiously are any serious acknowledgements of the harms caused by these policies from the people who promoted them throughout the pandemic. It take, for example, professor Emily Oster of Brown University, very credentialed, actually. Incredibly smart and a great data person.
That's something I can personally appreciate since that's my forte. But she admits in an article she wrote for the. The interventions like social distancing and outdoor masking were a quote, totally misguided and she decries the wildly irresponsible claims of many impositions of power. Ed admits that school closures have led to historic declines and student test scores, something we can all agree to and more and more.
So I, I feel a lot of indication every single week as all the stances. I stuck my neck out and many of you stuck your neck out for have been validated so profess. Officer acknowledges the offices. These, these policies had serious unintended consequences. Oncologists reports that 50% of cancers went undiagnosed during the federal lockdowns in just the spring of 2020.
People were too scared to seek treatment at one study estimated that we probably missed around over 200,000 cases of. Domestic abuse during the spring of 2020 because it's sharp-eyed teachers and administrators who usually call those things out, right? Well into 2022. I mean, we had to ask the question, how many bruises on mom's face did we miss because schools had masks required at drop-off?
Did anyone really weigh the true cost of shutting down the country, closing schools, and what should be our position? Policy makers who forced these Ill-founded interventions on the public. Some have called for a Nuremberg 2.0. What attitude should we strike with these key influencers who knew of these harms but did little to call for changes or anything?
And Professor Osters seems to recognize that the, the other shoe is dropping. So she, she launched this. Preemptive request for forgiveness. She says, quote, we have to put these fights aside and declare pandemic amnesty. Now, the professor was not an uninterested bystander, just so you know. Austin and her team had collected invaluable data on covid cases in school settings for nearly a year.
Starting like. August, 2020. And the data, also mapped the different in the, the differing interventions by state county district and allowed kind of a real-time lab comparison. So our team took her data that she published, we charted it. We found that schools that had mask mandates had a 21% higher case rate than students in schools with no.
And Oscar published a study, a Preprint, as they call it, that is at, it's just our, their initial findings. And she came to similar conclusions, then she dropped out of the discussion entirely. She submarined her data, refused to push for a peer review to get her. Study published any further, and she dropped the subject forever.
Now, numerous influential academics like Emily under pressure from peers and sort of establishment leaders, they caved, they stayed silent, they mothballed their data all together. It's, it's difficult to separate intimidation from self-censorship, and that's, that's tough, right? What, what was censorship on their part and what was sort of them dropping the ball, but a blanket amnesty for these folks seems kind of premature.
Of course, no apology will be forthcoming from Dr. Fauci. During numerous interviews the last few months, he's refused to even acknowledge any mistakes. Apparently, he fears that the slightest Maya Culpa would be quote, you know, taken out of context. Dr. Fauci, it's only tool was fear, and he's not gonna give up that tactic very easily.
Dr. Scott Atlas, as you know myself, my team, from a good portion of 2020, we were one of the main data. Helping Scott Atlas at the White House daily. We were getting requests from him and trying to understand what was happening. So we had kind of an inside scoop. And in his book, Scott relates a story he told me too, which is he confronted Dr.
Fauci in the hall, one hall day hallway one day, and he asked, so what you, you think people aren't frightened enough? Remember Dr. Scott Atlas was brought in? To bring order to that realm. And a lot of people dissed him, right? A lot of people said, ah, Scott Atlas, he's a radiologist. What does he know? Okie Stanford.
Fine. But he's a radiologist by profession. Why would you have him come in and sit on what is an of, of a virology, an epidemiology? We, we need that. No. Scott was a radiologist by trade and that was his training. But he had spent the last 25 years in rigorous application of policy science to policy. His, his forte was understanding here is the science.
And the science doesn't def facto dictate the policy. So he was trying to write the ship and get things, buttoned up there at the White House. And so he, he confronts Dr. Fauci. So you think people aren't frightened enough? Dr. Fauci reportedly replied, yes. They need to be more afraid now for fauci endorsed lockdowns, they were ineffective and damage.
Risks from Covid 19 are not uniform for the entire population, but they're directly aligned to your age. The mortality impact on children is almost immeasurable. That is, you can't measure it because it's so small, but we burned them with mandates and school closure. The fact that the last people to have mask mandates on them still removed.
I think just two weeks ago were kids in, in the federally funded preschool programs, headstart program. Mass mandates age have shown zero impact on quelling the spread of the disease, denied by fauci and company natural immunity and offers strong protection vaccines designed for a two-year-old variant have proven ineffectual at stopping the current crop of covid variants.
Dr. Fauci is cadre of unelected officials. Were on the wrong side of every one of these outcomes. They're made aware of every data point. But their one size fits all policies never changed significantly in the face of evidence. In their minds, there is only the panic and so fauci, he, he's unmoved by any of this, right?
When their predictions fail, they just simply wave them off or bury them in pass quotes. It's, it's really time to stop their gaslight, and that's why we need truth and accountability here. I mean, look at this March 29th, 20. Dr. Rochelle Lewinsky. She was the newly installed head of the c d c. She told msnbc, our data suggests that, you know, the vaccinated people do not carry the disease.
They don't get sick. Two months later, Dr. Fauci himself declared, when people are vaccinated, they can feel safe. They're not going to get infected. The fact that we know that these vaccines are highly effective, they're, they're really, really good against variants. That's a. As well into the summer of 2021, we could all look at the data and say, that's not the case.
None of the trials and none of the real world data supported these statements, but they put 'em out there anyway. And after a large summer of wave of the Delta variant and a massive vaccine evading mountain of Omicron cases, late 2021, they had to admit the shots were not sterilizing. That is they, they did not stop the.
Even Bill Gates, who himself was a big funder of and booster of these vaccines, as we all know, he admitted vaccine mandates at that point, made little sense. He gave up the ghost, he said, quote, the idea of checking if people are vaccinated. You know, if you have breakthrough infection, what's the point? So a survey conducted for the C D C shows that this latest round of bivalent boosters has not even hit, I think barely hit 30.
Of, the population there. And meanwhile, the, the newly approved vaccines for children under the age of five hasn't even hit 10%. And, and the infant toddler population, I think their moms are wisen up. I mean, are we finally immune ourselves now to the virus of bad public health policy? I hope so. So Professor Osters efforts on children, they were not all together silent.
She repeatedly stated claims for a quote, you know, safe reopenings, which was interpreted into the policies of schools of closure by proxy, the slightest exposure, sending children into 10 days of quarantine during the winter of 21, 22. And that was by policy. We had it here in San Diego. They had it all over the place, you know, when the schools closed down in the spring of 2020, and then many of them didn't reopen in 2020.
It was, and then we got into the 2122 school season. It was tough, right? It was really difficult. But when you got into that omicron variant and you had no idea if you were going to pull up your phone and see a voice message or text message from the school saying your kid would be home for 10 days, it was shut downs by.
Then shaming people and who haven't gotten, you know, vaccinated is likely never to work even as they admitted. So they, they went on their merry way. it is now widely acknowledged that the vaccines do not stop infection. They don't stop transmission of the disease, which was really the only reason for mandating and forcing vaccines on the public.
And, you know, we commend Emily for not shying away from some of these shaming tactics that she didn't. Dr. Fauci Extol and the White House perfected, but she was, she was wrong again, she just never stood up. The current crop of failed fear-mongering virus profits coupled with the low uptake of boosters, it's a stark, and this is really a terrible reminder that the institutions that pride in themselves on public health damage the public trust more than anything else.
Your, your trust. Should be in the bedrock of our constitution, not in some self endowed title of science. Public trust in our institutions is sinking and, and it may require a public trial of our policy decisions to write that ship. Professor os she, she might still find some goodwill for engaging with those, those of us who got it right, even if she attributes it in her article to a hefty element of luck that.
But she shouldn't presume that. We'll forget this anytime soon. So when someone approaches you and says, what do you know about any of this? Why would you ever go against these mandates? The masks, the vaccines, the plexiglass. What do you know about science? And you say, happen. American also. I'm the keeper of the butter.
You get one ball. Keep that in mind as you, as you go through your. you should have the confidence to know that as an American citizen, you have an absolute right to push back on these things. Now, good news, if you're here in San Diego, just for the first time in many, many years, the median price of a home has gone down to $785,000.
That's still pretty high, but, it'll be interesting to see what happens. The number of homes sold in the area 645. , which is down 50% year over year. And the number of days the houses have been on the market, eh, that's up 21 days from last year. It's, it's gonna be a, a, a really interesting ride. And the problem is it mirrors what happened with the vaccine.
That is to say they kept thinking, man, we can just get a whole head of this game by our plug and play software. You ever seen that, you know the Tesla now they can, they can update their software remotely. Right? So you wake up the next morning and just like your phone or anything, like anything, your, your, your, your car could drive itself now, right?
Well, that, that's how they envisioned this whole framework of the M mRNA vaccines. They thought, man, we could just plug and play. I kid you not, it, it's both impressive and also a little bit suspicious. We'll get into the latter part at some other future date, but did you know that Moderna had the code for their vaccine, their proposed vaccine for M r a, for the Covid, 19 virus?
They had that in January 2nd, 2020. They had it all ready to go, but they attributed that to sort of the incredible expertise of this technology. F. and they just wanna load it up and load it up and load it up and load it up with the next virus. But the problem is our government is stupid. And, and thankfully, that that can be a, a good thing in that they, they, they can't turn the guns fast enough to get you
So you can run away from them pretty quickly. But it also means that they do get, you, their guns are pretty old. So by the time they got to their bivalent vaccine to handle the omicron virulent, it was difficult to say if it would ever. because all the trials have been done. All the, all the trials have been unblinded and, they just don't have, they don't have the, the will and they don't have sort of the fortitude.
They don't really have the brains to do all this stuff. A a lot of people will con attribute, you know, this notion that somehow the 5G network is sending transmissions to chips within your vaccine. Ah, my main reason I don't believe that is the government's just not smart enough to do that. I remember having a conversation with Scott Atlas and I said, what's, what's happening?
You know, you've, you've shown them the door, you've shown them, you, you've, you've laid them flat, you've demolished them in arguments, you've shown all the data. Why aren't they changing courts? And he said, Justin, just confidentially, these people are dumb. They're not very smart. I'm so sorry to tell you that.
But that's, that's the case. our, our great health servants who, you know, do a lot of their careers in, in public, service, some of them are really bright, but a lot of them, you know, couldn't cut it in private practice, but I digress. Alright, we're gonna talk about a few other things, but, first I wanna tell you really quick about a project that's coming up.
I don't have all the details. , but people ask me, okay, I'm, I'm done with talking. The virus is behind me, but I know there's all this leftover stuff. We talked about this for the election. In fact, it was just seven days before the election. I was so gung-ho. I said, look, I know politics. I know midterm elections.
It's gonna be a red wave. And then I saw about 10 days out the mail in numbers come in. I go, oh no. Did Covid kill the red? Yes, Adida did because Covid inspired massive policy changes in 17 big states. Here in California. We adopted mail-in ballots and that had some problems with it. I don't think it's necessarily nefarious.
I think there's plenty of that. I don't think the nefarious would have enough to put the election over the top and but I think also I can guarantee you if there weren't mail-in ballot, In the fall of 2021, Gavin Newsom would not be our governor because that special election, that recall election recall, elections and special elections are all about energy.
They're all about momentum. And if your goal is how many people I can get out to the polls, you've got it won, but the game has changed. It's mail-in ballots a go-go every. So you are, they used to call this in politics, your 72 hour game, right? 72 hours before the election. Here are all the phone calls you make.
Here are all the mailers you've put here, all the emails you sent, the text messages. Here are the poll workers checking to who, see who's voted. You've gotta move that out to 72 days. That's a tough call. It's a tough transition. Now, we did pretty well. the Republican party did pretty well here in California, by comparison.
But, in other. They just thought it would go back to normal. Covid killed the red wave, I tell you for sure. So be, be apprised on that. The next time you have a conversation on what transpired and why the 2020, two election was such an anomaly by other standards. Well, let's talk about something else.
Let's talk about a little bit about the gun control issue. Look, We've had some two terrible events this past week here in California. There was a rampage at a ballroom, Monterey Park, California, that's East LA killed at least 10 people. I think 11. That was the last count that was on, a Saturday before.
It was one of the most deadly mass shootings in the States modern history. And according to officials, the men and women who were fatally shot were Asian. The perpetrator was also Asian, 72 years old, strange anomaly being that old. And then two days later, second mass shooting, seven people were killed by another gunman, two separate locations in Half Moon Bay.
The shootings took place on a mushroom farm in the new bride trucking facility. Perpetrators were 72 and 67, and both of Asian descent. Now this was right around. The Chinese New Year, but it, it certainly got you thinking as to what is going on. You know, we, we hate to go through those rash of mass shootings.
Everyone feels for these families that have to suffer through these things, and that's, that's just devastating in many ways. It can be really wrenching. But I want you put in context a a couple things. Let me, let me tell you a couple stories because yeah. Matt shootings can. Dreadful. They can be devastating.
And um, I wanna give you some examples of some devastating shootings. So first of all, let me tell you three stories. December one. This was 2022. Wisconsin woman fatally shot and stabbed a man in apartment on a bus of busted robbery that she was making. December 5th, Warner Roberts, Georgia. Mass robber jumped over the counter.
Shot five people dead. December 6th, Knoxville, Tennessee. Intruder shot a man and his wife in a home man. Returned home, find naked Intruder, ransacking his house and he was shot and killed. December 7th, Chicago Carjackers killed three people, stole their car at gunpoint, obviously. These are devastating, devastating deaths.
But, I'm telling a, a little bit of a fib here and, and I'm doing so to make a point. None of those deaths happened. None of those deaths actually happened. It's actually the reverse. And why? Because people were armed to defend the. Marionette, Wisconsin Local Police said a man who fairly shot a woman in an apartment complex was justified in his actions because it appears the woman had stabbed him and tried to assault him with a gun.
Warner Robbins, Georgia. Robert jumped over the fast food counter, demanded money, pistol whipped and employed, but another employee drew his own gun fired. Three shots striking him. The Roberts survived, but they were able to detain him. Knoxville, Tennessee Intruder shot a man with his wife. They came home, found the naked intruder, went to a man's, to a neighbor's house.
That neighbor had a gun. They suppressed a man. December 7th, Chicago. Those carjackers didn't kill anyone because someone produced a gun to stop that carjacking. Guns provide defense, but let's talk about this. This is a difficult but important issue. You be right back.
Look, you know, something is crazy wrong about the world sometimes. You see it every day around you from crazy covid policies to government censorship, a rollercoaster economy in the growing wave of powerful technologies that's probably gonna impact your life, definitely impact your kids' life, and for sure it's gonna impact your grandkids.
And that's why I'm here. I'm Justin. I'm the host of the new show on K C B Q, the answer, 10:00 AM Sundays, let's help you get grounded, helping you make sense of the world.
All right, well look, look, look, look. I know many people have been affected by gun violence in the United States. Especi. if you were, you know, in a certain demographic, if you were in a certain location, those things tend to happen, and it's horrific. It's awful. But you need to know that There are numerous examples like the ones I cited, and I did so in, in a way that was a little bit deceptive at first, but then I turned it around and showed you how those people could have been killed.
I've got 12 other examples just from. Those are the ones I could find in the news in November. I've seen people log 25 different examples. We believe that gun ownership actually prevents crimes on the order of hundreds of thousands of year. Okay, think about that again. There are hundreds of thousands of incidents in a given year where guns prevented a.
Now part of the problem though, is also we've got a big divide here and we're gonna have to figure out how we sort of narrow that. We could cite statistics all day long. We could go through and show how a majority or a very, very large portion of the deaths per capita happen in large democratically run blue cities within red State sometimes.
But at the same time, I think we need to sort of figure out how to pull up our trenches, right? Because we're all entrenched here. We're all just sort of dug in and we have very specific opinions. I'll, I'll give you an example, Rasmussen Poll from last year, and this was asking the question which, which is more to blame for mass shootings by young men in America.
You remember that big rash of terrible shootings we had in the last few. It said, mental health, family problems, school problems, social media, access to firearms, and the answers were thus likely voters is about, this was about, I think, 1, 2, 3, 4,000. people who answered the poll, 40% of likely voters said mental health was to blame.
30% said access to firearms. 10% said family problems. Another 10% said social media. and then it went on from there. School problems, and other, issues that you might come across. But in truth, the two big ones were this really interesting flip side of the coin, mental health and access to firearms and why this is really disconcerting.
Take mental health. So the, you know, the average Americans saying about 40% of them say that's the main issue. Mental health. Well, for people who are conservatives and Republican, 56% of them believe that mental health is the main issue. Nearly 60%. But if you're a Democrat, if you're a liberal, you're at 20%.
So this is one of your least likely options to choose access to firearms. All of a sudden, it flips average American. About 30% of Americans say that it's access to firearms. That is the main issue Republican. , they're at 10%, only 10%. And believe that access to firearms is the main issue. Whereas democrats, they're at 50%.
So you see how those numbers just completely flipped on this critical issue here. And I think it's a, it's a really good discussion point. and I'm hoping at some future point to bring in, some people who are on the other side of this debate. And I, I want to kind of put aside the numbers cuz you could go over those all day.
It's obvious that we have some problem where it fits in the scheme of things and whether it's a serious problem or what the cause the problem is another issue altogether. I'll give you another example and this is something I hope we can adopt in our own American culture. At some point we went from the melting.
To, what's the analogy now? The, the salad bowl. Right. And, and I think we lost something in between, you know, because cuz you came to this country and you became Americans. It's very rare that people see that outside of America. You don't, you don't immigrate to Greece and become Grecian. You don't immigrate to even the UK and become English.
You make it to America because you wanna become an American. , but that's becoming less and less favorable. And, and I, I think we're missing that sort of great cultural milu. Can I use that great Scrabble word milu? Right. I think I got 80 points on that one time. Milu, it all just showed up on my tiles. But the idea here is that we need some type of coherence.
And here's an example. I had a, a group of friends, who started a, a, a nonprofit group and they wanted to help. The issues in the Middle East, you know, small, small hurdle. Right. And it's not only between the, the, the Jewish state and the Arabs, but it's within the Arab community, the Muslim community itself.
You have major wars tracking on between those groups and sometimes you don't even hear about 'em. You know, postes weigh in the deserts that are just fighting against each other in the. And all over the place. And so their goal actually was really interesting. They went to these various warring tribes and, they got DNA samples from them.
They, they, they brought over some ancestry.com kits, , and they, they put it all together and they had each of the war tribes unknowns to either of them. but they, they, they said, Hey, let's, let's do this, genealogy test on you. They love genealogy. So they, they got these DNA tests back and then they would have a surprise meeting between these two warring factions, and they would get all uppity, but they brought out the papers and they put it out on the table and they showed their lineage and how they had a common ancestor and how Joseph over here and Muhammad over here were cousins by this person.
and believe it or not, that moment when they came to realize that they came from the same stock that put to to peace some of these people because they, they felt that sort of, that bonding of, Hey, I've, I've got a friend in you, . We're actually brothers and sisters and, and we have that common sort of resilience and that's why it's difficult to see in America.
How we can overcome these issues, which I think are a cultural issue where we, we need to, to figure out how to, how to do that. I, I'll give you an example. I've got eight kids, as those of you listen to me, know, , and, they range from all ages. it's a Brady Bunch scenario. my, my wife and I have three young kids.
she has two from her previous marriage. I have three from her previous marriage. And, five of the eight are out of the house. So we got four little, we got, well wait a minute. How am I counting? Three, four. I got four. So, another four are outta the house and on their way in life. And the, the issue that you have there is that, some of these kids in this new generation, they didn't have the same experiences we did.
Right? Like a lot of them aren't getting their driver's license. And it's a, it's a curious thing because they can Uber around or all their friends are local. They're making friends just on their phones and engaging that way. A huge drop in that. There's also a huge drop in the number of people who got a job.
I remember my first job, bay Area, Walnut Creek Yogurt Shop. I may have given some of you guys a little yogurt when I was 14 years old in the late eighties there, and that was fantastic. I got to learn all. the, the, the inner goings of running a business. My good friends started up a yogurt business and they made sandwiches and everything.
I also learned do not open the big, massive container of mayonnaise and breathe in there because it is a nasty smell would go on from that. But my kids didn't have that experience. They didn't learn the danger of opening up a big vat of band, bandaid, not, you know, smelling it. So a lot of kids don't get jobs until 16, 17, 18 years old, so they don't.
Young whipper snapper experience of, of growing old here in California. I I, you have to pull a lot of teeth before you can get a kid to, to work for you. And then you have to pay for their dental plan to put back the teeth that these are, these are difficult times for trying to get kids to, to actually do some work and get that, that dirt under their fingernails so they, they're getting their license lower in life.
They're, they're not getting jobs because a lot of the, the culture won't allow. and they're not having like relationships, they're not going on dates that dropped by like 20% in my life. That was in my, my time, you know, gen X eighties, bay area, that was a big thing. You're going on a date and they don't go on a date till they're 20 or more.
It's just a, it's a really interesting phenomenon and, and I think you, you lose something when you don't have that sort of bridge of. There's lots of different parts that are moving this whole thing. So you've gotta, you gotta juggle all these things together and try to understand what am I trying to do here?
And, and from a standpoint of culture, I think we need to sort of find and remind ourselves of those moments that bring us together. Unfortunately, in the past, the only things that have brought us together have been the moments of terrible disasters, and sadly, still, The Covid 19 pandemic that we all endured did not bring us closer together.
Nine 11, that was a worldwide event, definitely an event that impacted obviously us in America that brought the country together in a certain way. Now, the impact of that, some of them are positive, some of them are negative, but um, we need to find those cultural. And I hope we can do it without fostering a disaster up there.
But that cultural divide on the issue of gun control, on guns, on violence is something to behold. But I will tell you the one thing I've learned from the pandemic, you can always bet and support your rights that are articulated in the Constitution and you won't go wrong. Right? And I think that's what kind of got me through.
I remember waking up in the morning. They had just, given us the stay at home orders, the churches were closing, the schools were closing. people were accusing me of downplaying the pandemic. I was nervous about losing my account on Facebook and Twitter all the time. So there you go. All my, my freedom of assembly, my freedom of worship, my freedom of speech, all curved, all curved, my, my right to pursue happiness, right?
The, the, the first tenant of, of our founding documents, right? All of that was gone, but I knew, I knew I was in the right, if I just stood by those main rights. And you can't too, the second Amendment is extremely. Case law has been absolutely clear. You have a right even beyond the constitution to bear arms, and that right will not be infringed by the government.
And so I think if you stick with that, you'll understand why, and you'll understand why those people did not die in the incidents in which I said, here's just a few more. December 2nd. Conway South, South Carolina. Witnesses said that when two men, one of whom was armed, jumped over the counter of a Waffle House restaurant and assaulted an employee, the employee grabbed his gun, prompting the two men to flee December 20th to Oklahoma City.
Armed resident fatally shot a man who threw several Maloff cock cocktails through the window of his apartment, and what police said had been of targeted act of domestic violence. One neighbor reported hearing at least 10 gunshots during the. December 18th, Tucson, Arizona, owner of a local bar credited an armed patron with protecting the lives of these customers and employees by shooting and critically wounding a man who threatened them with a rifle.
These, they saved lives. They saved lives. these were incredible moments. There was a, a potential kidnapping and someone thwarted that, and that's just in December of last year. While we have these terrible, awful incidents of what I believe are a combination of bad cultural impacts on these people, terrible personal decisions, and probably a good dollop of mental health issues, you should also know that the reason you stick with your Second Amendment rights is that it will bolster you no matter what, and you can keep that up.
Well, let's talk a little bit more about sort of the impacts on our life and what we're seeing. hopefully you're apprised that this is going to be a little crazier. Now, again, as I say, I'm not a healthcare expert. I'm not an economist, but I'm a darn good data guy. And so you can see, you can see the trends of some very challenging moments ahead.
a lot of markets are down and the reason they're down are for various, purpose. First of all, we had this massive sky high inflation, and the sky high inflation was caused by several issues. If you wind back the yarn and try to find where it's wound around all the pieces of furniture, and it goes back to the initial decisions to shut down the country, to basically dole out free money to people, to keep people employed.
and then to go on from there and try to, impact, businesses, give them free loans, grants money. And then it went down to the states where everyone started paying money, free money to people just sit around and do nothing. And they thought that might curb the entire impact of the virus. It didn't.
Instead it brought about huge inflation. And then President Biden became president, installed this massive regime of money printing as. If you've seen your prices this last year go up 40% of the grocery market, that makes sense. I think the average is like 30, 35 or so for some of these items, 35%. And the reason why is because they, they printed 5% of money and then the GDP declined four or 5%.
And there you go. That's your inflation right there. You know, it, it is just a matter of economics on this whole thing. But now we got a. . You remember a year ago when all those boats off the shore here in Los Angeles, they didn't have enough workers to really bring them in. We talked about how they had these weird covid policies where you couldn't train someone in the same cabin of one of these big lifts, taking the, the, the, the, the, the goods off of these ships, right?
They couldn't do that cuz they were afraid the person would catch covid so they didn't train anyone. And because you didn't have enough poise, you couldn't get it off and everything backed up. So you had these huge backup issues for a myriad of issue of, of. and prices went up because you needed those goods and they weren't getting here on time, so you paid extra for those.
Meanwhile, there's more money, so your money is lower worth less because there's more in the market, and that became a huge inflation issue. But now that supply chains have come up and that the economy has tanked a bit, and it's probably gonna tank a little bit. You also have the issue of deflation.
Things are on the decline. Now, some of this is sticky. Your eggs will still be expensive. Bananas will still be expensive. the gas companies know that, you know you're gonna be used. It's kinda like boiling a frog. You, you got up to five or $6 a gallon, $7 a gallon, $8 a gallon, and you go, oh, well no. Four gallons at five Do $5 a gallon is, is a, is a deal, right?
they, they know you can think that way, but also it costs a lot more for them to bring. So you have all these issues that are gonna be kind of sticky inflation, but you're gonna see a lot of prices go down. Go go to your local Costco this weekend, all right? go go this week and, and tell me, tell me how, how much an 80 inch O L E D TV screen is.
You might be very surprised how quickly those prices will drop down. Remember, we had all those like shortages on chip? Well, they went by the wayside, and so we don't have a shortage. I mentioned how this mirrors the vaccine. Remember the vaccine rollout was if we can just get this huge technology sort of plugged in, then we can plug and play with the next variant and the next variant.
Well, they're slow on the go, and that's exactly what happened with our economy. The, the, the federal exchange, the, the, the, the f e C, the, the s e c, all these folks are really, really slow. And so they go through this whole mode where they're like, oh, I can't, I can't catch up. And by the time they catch up, all the supply chain bottlenecks have loosened.
There's no more ships waiting in the harbor. In fact, there's no ships coming in at all. And, there's gonna be a lot of challenges. That's why home prices are going down. Why no one is selling or buying homes in many ways. And, you're gonna find this huge reverse issue where things will still be expensive because your money is worth less and because there is sticky inflation, but that there's gonna be a whole host of.
There was a reason why Amazon let go 10,000 people during the busiest season of the year. There's a reason why FedEx canceled a hundred plus flights, right? Because there just wasn't the demand. That little Etsy shop not gonna last much longer, unfortunately. and so I hope you hold strong because there's gonna be some tight times ahead and, you just need to know that part of that is caused again, because our government just not that.
they think there are, but they move so slowly and it's difficult to move these big guns into place when they try to fire them across the bow and by the time the guns move over toward the target, the target is gone. So we're gonna, we're gonna see a lot of that. And then on top of that, you have these big cultural issues.
But I will tell you, I have a lot of hope still in America. I think there's some great moments where people can come together and try to find some semblance. of, pulling themselves up by the bootstraps and these things go in cycles. Everyone experiences these types of things. We've been very fortunate not to have major wars, on our, on our land for a generation right?
Or more. And so it's, it's difficult to see that, but I think we have to sort of find some semblance of reason. And as I said, accountability this year to bring it all into. Now I have a lot of colleagues who are slowly being restored on Twitter, which is great. I, I think we no longer feel kind of the threat there and there's a lot of engagement all of a sudden.
And it's amazing what some of these technologies can do. There's a technologies, there's a technology on Twitter called spaces, and it's kind of like, um, a tele-town. You come on there and they bring you up as a speaker and you talk about a topic and it can go on for six plus hours. I've seen a hundred thousand people come in and out of that room and it's an amazing thing to have that voice.
Now. That's the challenging thing that you have in our world. The internet is so powerful and yet it's impact can be so dreadful for a kid, for example, who knew that anything they. Could be shared by four people or 4 billion people. Right? That that has an impact on someone's psyche. That's why I always wondered.
I got a couple college kids and they were really kind of pro mask, a lot of them, pro-vaccine. They were very safety conscious. They had the least reason to be, and I think one of the problems that he had is that they really didn't quite understand. , but at the same time, I, I had to, I had a feeling of respect and understanding more when I took it in consideration of their lives and how if someone took a snapshot of them on campus not wearing a mask, being in a place they shouldn't, the shaming that comes with that is far riskier than the risks they would take if they stuck their neck out to go against a grain.
You think your grandparents in the late sixties, my. . You think, you think they would've put up with the government telling them to, to get Vaxxed, the government telling 'em to put up plexiglass and to stay at home? No. You think the Woodstock crowd would've, would've thought twice that? No. But today the social pressure is in a very, very different vein, and we're gonna have to solve that for our kids before we can really understand how we're gonna bring people together on this.
I hope you can bring with me and maybe, shoot me a note. You can find me on Twitter, Justin underscore heart, and try to understand what you are seeing out there. What are your kids experiencing and do they have the wherewithal to come and be Americans? And I think that's part of the shore there. You know, the, the promise America is so bold.
There's a, there's a Polish short. It's, by the author Mitski. he wrote p maybe you've heard of that novel. I think it was made into a big movie too. But he had a short story called The Potato, and it's an interesting story and it's about how the three ships of Columbus, the, the ships were coming over to, the new.
but right before they got to the American shores, the Greek gods in this short story or Greek gods exist, they froze time and they held the ships at bay. Right. And they, they didn't let Columbus continue. They had, they wanted to have a big debate. So they got all the gods together and they, they talked about, Let's, let's talk about whether we're gonna allow this or not.
Because one, people started making their cases in one side of the scale. And so they had these, these beautiful scales weighing whether or not to let the people pass or not. One, they would bring forth incredible atrocities on the Native Americans. Oh, that went against them two. Well, they would, they would have, great prosperity and they would have, great thinkings and, and incredible inventions.
And then there were other sides of the scale. It wasn't looking too, But with the bloodshed, slavery, all the violence, the things that would be perpetrated here in America, that goes with founding a new country. And they thought to themselves, well, what are we gonna do? But just around then, a little Sprite, an Irish Sprite came around and he put in a potato into the other side of the scale, and that put the balance towards letting the ships go.
By the abundance of that one vegetable brought. The, the, the sentiment among the gods that they should be allowed to go. I think there is something about getting back to the ground, getting back and planting your own crops, planting your own base of wealth, your own base of food, both in a figurative and literal sense.
But I want you to think about that. What are the seeds that you are planting that your ancestors foresaw and said, the reason I. My nice home in the suburbs of London where my dad was a piano maker. I'm talking about my great-great grandmother, and the reason I came to America and lived on a dirt floor for five years is that I knew my kids and grandkids would be able to live in abundance and they'd have plenty to eat that potato would see them through.
They would never go through a famine like our Irish friends did because of the abundance of this. It flows like milk and honey, and so keep him that in mind. You are the keeper of the butter. Don't let anyone tell you different. This is Justin Hart. Thanks for following me and listening to me today. Have a good one.
You've been listening to the Justin Hart Show. Tune in again next Sunday morning at 10. Right here on the answer, San Diego. The Justin Har show is sponsored by the Prosperity.
The Justin Hart Show Ep3