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April 22, 2020 - American Countdown - Barnes

01:47:06

20200422_Wed_Barnes

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	- The British are clever, the British are clever.
	- You are about to be part of the great debate.
	- And one for all friends.
	- America first.
	- And the clock, what's your country? - Welcome to another edition of American Countdown.
	Tonight, resolved that neither digital currencies nor digital vaccines are an American answer to this Chinese virus.
	We should not have a Chinese-style solution to this Chinese virus, and we should not be infected by a mindset and mentality of authoritarianism, and instead we should resort to our core methods and our core liberties of democracy and civil liberty and a free economy.
	In that context, for example, we have another more data.
	From if we look at chart number eight, which shows the same pattern continues unabated, which is there has been no explosive, exponential, endless growth of this virus.
	In fact, it continues to flatline.
	If we look at the amount of testing is directly proportionate to the amount of people reporting positive.
	And as you can see, the number in the chart has been going down and staying low for day after day after day, for week after week after week since the end of March.
	If we look at chart 15, we see a similar statistical trend as the growth rate, which is one of the most significant aspects of assessing the risk of this disease.
	We look at the contagion rate, we look at the means of contagion, we look at the consequences of the contagion, and in particular, we look at the mortality rate when evaluating and assessing the degree to which the death rate presents a risk.
	If we look at chart number 15, what we find and see is that, in fact, the death rate has continued to go down in its daily growth rate.
	And that is why you're not seeing the media and the press talk about a report.
	As you can see, it spiked early.
	It had the early 25 to 40 percent daily growth rates.
	Then it started to go down, and it continues to go down, and it continues to flatline.
	It has now been flatlining for weeks.
	For weeks, the growth in the death rate continues to decline.
	The day-over-day percent change in the number of deaths attributed to COVID-19 continues to go down.
	There was no explosive continuous growth.
	There was no endless exponential growth like the doomsayers said there would be, and was in fact the public policy pretext and pretense for this massive shutdown and suppression of civil liberty in our public economy.
	Similar data is coming out of additional places.
	For example, Switzerland did a survey and a study, and it's in German, so I won't go through all the translation, but what they found was that, in fact, the same rate of decline in the rate of the contagion, both in terms of testing those who had the virus, but more importantly, and consequently, those who, in fact, were at risk of hospitalization, ICUs, intensive cares, ventilators, and mortality,
	That that growth rate went up, then it hit a wall, then it continued to go down and go down and go down.
	And that's been, that was just what was happening in Wuhan.
	That's what happened in Iran.
	That's what's now happening in Switzerland.
	That's what's been happening for weeks in the United States.
	So increasingly what those from the Israeli Nobel Laureate and others were able to accurately forecast what was going to happen, those of us who have been saying this disease is being exaggerated in its potential effect.
	People like Professor Ioannidis at Stanford who warned that the shutdown was an evidence-less standard, that it was not based on evidence, that it was based on exaggeration of what the virus was likely to do.
	It turns out those of us who are skeptics are day after day after day being proven right, being proven correct.
	There was no ventilator shortage anywhere in America, not in New York City, the epicenter of this epidemic, or anywhere else in the country.
	There was no hospital bed shortage across hospitals across the country.
	In fact, hospitals are at undercapacity, not overcapacity.
	There was no ICU undercapacity.
	They said it was going to be that they needed four, five, ten times more ICU beds than they had available in New York.
	It turned out they didn't even need to use all the ICU beds they already had in New York.
	So not only did it not happen in New York, it didn't happen anywhere else in the country.
	So the prediction of doom and gloom, that the hospitals were going to be flooded and be war zones, that the effect of it was going to be that people were going to die on the floor in the hospital because they didn't have access to ventilators or ICU beds or nurses or doctors, turned out to be exaggerated, turned out to be untrue.
	We now know that and we've seen it and we witnessed it and yet politicians are continuing to keep the shutdown in effect.
	This is interesting because in Europe, not only does Sweden continue with their policies and procedures of not doing a shutdown at all, but more and more countries across Europe, including Germany, including Switzerland, including Denmark, and now including the Netherlands, are reopening.
	Reopening to such a degree they're actually reopening their schools even.
	As this headline article talks about, the Netherlands will start reopening primary schools and daycare centers on May 11th.
	And the only thing that they'll continue to prohibit are large mass gathering events, which can be super spreaders of the virus and the disease.
	That is more consistent with what happened in 1918 and 1919 in response to the Spanish flu.
	More and more studies and surveys are coming out that the lockdowns simply do not work as a matter of public policy.
	That the rate of contagion was not infectious enough.
	To warrant the shutdown, that the mode of contagion was of a kind that was not going to be limited or constricted by forcing people to stay in close continuous contact and confined quarters in nursing homes, intensive care units and homes around the country.
	And in fact, by prohibiting people from being outdoors, you're actually prohibiting activity that's healthy and that has extremely low risk of deathly contagion taking place.
	As this article goes into detail about how lockdowns don't work, they talk about historically ordering people to cower in their homes has no demonstrative effectiveness of any kind, historically or currently in the actual evidence.
	The article goes on to say, here's the thing, there's no evidence of lockdowns working.
	Indeed, if strict lockdowns actually saved lives, then maybe there would be a debate to had.
	But in fact, strict lockdowns have not proven to be effective ever historically or right now.
	By comparing states that did not lock down versus those that did, states that locked down later than other states, we find no evidence.
	from anywhere in the United States or around the Western world that lockdowns of this kind, of this scale, of this scope, of this severity have any consequential empirical evidence in their favor for actually prohibiting the spread of the infection at a deathly rate.
	Similar and not only that, increasingly there is more and more evidence that the first coronavirus, the first COVID-19 infection was here in the United States far earlier than anyone believed.
	So while there are some skeptics pointing out People like Julie Kelly at American Greatness, people like the guest that we had last week, Justin Hart, and others who are saying, you know, there may be reason to believe this virus was here in late November, early December.
	And there was, of course, evidence that China was aware of this virus spreading all the way back in November in China.
	That in particular in California, near the Bay Area, where there's a longstanding ties to China and where Chinatown most prominently is in the United States.
	That in fact, they have discovered new data shows that the first U.S. coronavirus death happened much earlier than thought.
	And remember, the death happens three to four to five weeks after they get infected originally.
	And because the people who got infected were not travelers, that means somebody else gave it to them in the first place.
	This means that it looks like the COVID-19 was spreading around California all the way back in January.
	So rather than this late February timetable for coronavirus having consequential effect here, it appears it was here much earlier.
	Now why is that significant?
	It means that the mortality rate, the lethality of this virus, is nowhere near what they said.
	Remember they originally said it was 30 to 34 times more deadly than the regular flu.
	It is turning out that it may in fact be close, or just three to four times more dangerous than a flu.
	That's serious, that's significant, but it's not serious or significant enough to shut down civil society and the public economy.
	Indeed, it is less lethal than the Spanish flu.
	Similar surveys and studies are showing that in fact where the deaths are occurring increasingly are in nursing homes.
	Rhode Island and other places more than half of the deaths outside of New York City are in nursing homes or long-term intensive care units.
	Places where we should have focused and concentrated our attention and where in fact we may have enhanced the problem by forcing them to stay in close continuous contact and confined quarters and not allowing people in those places or facility even outdoors at all or even to open the window to allow public air to come in.
	This is from a recent draft report that is being circulated by the state of California that identifies that nursing homes appear to be the primary source for most cities, counties, and states across the country of actual COVID-19 deaths.
	Similar surveys and studies are coming out of Europe as well that that's where the greatest risk has occurred.
	Immigrant communities and communities with high numbers of elderly and particularly those in long-term intensive care, at public hospitals and in nursing homes.
	That's where we should have focused, not distracted ourselves with mass house arrests, not distracted ourselves by chasing people down or taking a walk along the beach or a swim in the beach or anything else.
	Indeed, a study in Tennessee found that more people died of suicide than died of coronavirus or COVID-19 in Tennessee last week.
	Additional studies.
	In fact, going back to Justin Hart was talking all the back in early March about whether coronavirus had been here since last year.
	He was one of the people we had it on as a guest on this show because he's been studying and following the data and letting the data dictate what public policy should be recommended, not letting the political agenda of power grabs and shutting down the economy and beating Trump be the agenda, which appears to be the agenda in many mayors and governors across the country.
	A historian notes the same thing.
	The cure may be deadlier than the disease.
	In fact, he says it may be much deadlier.
	Jonathan Rose, the William R. Kennan Professor of History at Duke University, has written a wide range of books, particularly on the working class here in the United States and the United Kingdom.
	Goes in and talks about the first problem when you look at history is this trust the experts mantra tends to ignore the fact the experts in matters just like this as we saw last night in the 60 Minutes special about how wrong the experts got the last major pandemic that led to a rushed vaccine in 1976 as even 60 Minutes conceded in its 15-minute study and in the 4,000 plus lawsuits that were brought during that time period because of the neurological damage and death
	That vaccine caused far more harm than the virus itself, as they got the data wrong about how dangerous that pandemic in fact was.
	And he points out, when you look and consider that history, trusting the experts is an ill-advised strategy.
	Indeed, he goes further to note that the economic effects are as consequential as one could imagine.
	And here it's important to put things into context.
	The economic collapse of Europe in the 19-teens and 1920s gave us bread fascism, communism, Nazism, and an ideology and World War II.
	That not only led to mass deaths there in the Holocaust and the horrors of the Holocaust, but it led to communists having all kinds of power, not only in Europe, but also in Asia, because it helped facilitate the collapse of China.
	Which led to Mao's rise there.
	And now we're facing the problem of this COVID-19 because of the way the Chinese government chooses to operate.
	So, to a large degree, economic collapse tends to trigger political revolutions of the kind we don't want, we don't like.
	For example, after World War I, the Nazis could barely get 3% of the vote in Germany in the 1920s.
	It was only with the stock market collapse and economic fall that all of a sudden they became the number two and then the number one party in Germany.
	By the way, do you know how Weimar Germany was able to easily transition into Nazi Germany aside from the economic collapse providing unique political opportunity?
	Well, the Constitution of Weimar Germany, it's called Weimar Germany because that's the town in which the Constitution was passed after World War I and the Kaiser abdicated.
	The nature of that Constitution was considered one of the most forward-looking in the world.
	But it had one key flaw, according to legal and historical scholars.
	That flaw was that it allowed emergency powers for the President.
	To basically ignore the legislative process, ignore all of the other constitutional protections and provisions in the Weimar Constitution, and do pretty much whatever he wanted in time of emergency.
	And guess what he started doing right after the economy collapsed?
	That's exactly what the then president of Germany began doing.
	He began issuing emergency powers routinely and repeatedly.
	So that he could protect the privileged classes within Germany at the expense of the broader public, particularly farmers and manufacturers and others.
	And those people then were left to run into the arms of the Nazis in opposition to the Communists, which helped precipitate the Nazi revolution.
	So that's how, once we start going down this emergency path, that's when things start getting dangerous very quickly, very fast.
	And when we start doing things in ways that cause economies to collapse, that's when revolutions of the wrong kind occur.
	And that's what this historian goes through.
	He talks about how we may be looking at 32% unemployment in the United States.
	We may, that the global economy may contract by at least one third.
	That 30% of businesses will never come back.
	He's pointing out this is worse than the economic conditions that bred the key for communism, fascism and Nazism to rise in Europe.
	His point then is that that is a greater risk than the virus itself poses.
	Indeed, consider the kind of things that are happening right now all across the country and the globe in response to this.
	For example, we've had in a Japanese park, they decided to behead a hundred thousand tulips to avoid people gathering to look at the prettiness of the tulips.
	Let's play clip number seven.
	This park in Japan, beautiful park, they have tulip gardens all across Japan.
	They have some of the most beautiful flower gardens in the world in Japan.
	And they were scared that people would come out and look at them.
	And so they decided to cut off all the heads of the tulips rather than to allow people to even look at them, to take a walk through the beauty of the park.
	That's the mindset.
	That's the madness that is consuming the Western world.
	If we go to yesterday, of course, a woman just decided she wanted to take her kid to the park and in Idaho, no less, a place that is not necessarily known for its repressive regime or its other or those kind of policies being done.
	And what happened is when she did go to the park, they decided to arrest her.
	That's right.
	She took her kids to the park.
	We see this background right here.
	A mother arrested in front of her own children in Idaho because she decided to take her children, her own children, to a public park where they could play.
	Now let's go back and remember, by the way, the mode of contagion of this virus and who it threatens.
	First of all, it doesn't threaten children at all.
	I mean, the rate is extremely low.
	It's minuscule.
	Way below walking across a street in terms of danger risk to children.
	Second, it does not threaten mothers.
	It does not threaten people under the age of 65 almost at all.
	Unless you are elderly and have additional health problems, you are at extremely low risk.
	You're at less risk than the flu in terms of dying from this virus.
	The risk of this virus is disproportionate to those people Who have comorbid conditions, often as many as three on average, significant serious diseases who are elderly.
	That's who we should be working to protect.
	We do not need to worry about mothers playing with their kids in a public park.
	But that's not all.
	So not only is the mother not really at risk, not only is the child not really at risk, on top of all of that, they're out in public.
	They're out in the open air.
	They're out in the sunlight.
	They're out in the, to a large degree, at least it wasn't that cold, they're out in the heat.
	They're out in humidity.
	Guess what all of those things have in common?
	What all those things have in common is the heat helps kill the virus.
	Humidity helps kill the virus.
	Sunlight helps kill the virus.
	Open public air doesn't tend to transmit the virus.
	You need to have close continuous contact in confined quarters for about 15 minutes on average with recycled air or in direct less than six feet presence of someone with the virus to be at risk.
	So you have a child who's not at risk, you have a mother who's not at risk, just by their demographics, just by their health status, but what they're doing is extremely low risk, and in fact is healthy for them in terms of exercise, in terms of boosting their immune system, in terms of maintaining their mental health, in terms of reducing their stress, and yet she's the one getting arrested.
	Getting arrested in America for taking your kid to the park.
	That is something that you couldn't have even made up in a dystopian film.
	But that same kind of logic is happening everywhere.
	For example, they're now sending out police.
	In the old days, they used to send police helicopters to monitor where drug activity or terrorism activity might be.
	In fact, they could use infrared to look at people.
	Well, look at what they did here in Australia.
	They're actually sending around helicopters using infrared technology to see whether or not people are out and about on the rooftop drinking beer, chatting with each other in less than a six feet distance over a continuous time period.
	And then they're warning them from the helicopter.
	That's what they have Chinese drones going around doing across large parts of America.
	So here are the people outside.
	Number one, look at their age group.
	Their age group, they're almost at no risk of any deathly impact or effect from this disease.
	That's number one.
	Number two, the activity, they're out in the open, out in public, with open air.
	This disease does not transmit well in open air.
	There's very few cases where that has been the means of a contagion outbreak.
	It's extremely low.
	It's all in close, confined quarters that it's been taking place.
	Subways, big inside buildings, big workplaces, people's homes, nursing homes, etc.
	That's where the risk has occurred, not in any other context.
	In addition, here you have some kids who want to drink outside.
	Now there wasn't sunlight, but there's probably going to be some degree of heat or humidity in Australia at this time of year that also has a counter effect on the virus.
	So it's simply they are not at high risk.
	Their activity is not at high risk.
	And yet we're spending time having helicopters chase them around to see whether or not they're drinking beer in an unapproved manner on the rooftop.
	That's the kind of insanity that we are talking about.
	And it's not limited to that.
	Let's look, for example, there was a man arrested for simply for going out and trying to surf or paddleboard.
	There's men that have been arrested for trying to take a swim.
	Let's look at clip number four.
	And you'll see somebody just decided to go for a morning swim in a sort of middle-aged gentleman.
	And here are the police holding him down on the beach, on the grass after he came back from his swim.
	That's what we're doing.
	We're chasing down people who went for a swim.
	Now let's look again here.
	He's by himself.
	This is an isolated activity.
	This is at no risk of him either catching or transmitting the disease.
	The disease does not stay constantly airborne that somehow you can magically catch.
	That isn't what happens.
	And yet here you have someone that's being arrested, being grabbed, being held down by multiple police officers because he made the horrible offense of swimming in the public ocean at a public beach in the morning.
	That's the kind of mindset and mentality that's taking place.
	But it's not limited to just going to the park.
	It's not limited to just trying to go surfing.
	But let's look at one of those examples.
	If we look at clip number two, we'll see that what's happening to people that are just trying to surf, not just paddle boarders, but people that are just trying to surf in different parts of the world are getting chased.
	By police officers.
	In some cases, they've even been shot at by police officers.
	So not only do you have circumstances like Malibu, places all across the country, all across the world, you can't go surfing by yourself.
	Now, once again, that's out in sunlight.
	That's out in open air.
	That's usually by yourself.
	That's usually someone who is young.
	So it's someone who, by their demographics and health condition, is not at risk, at any serious risk of any kind.
	It's someone who, because of their activity, they're even less at risk.
	And yet that's who we're targeting for harassment.
	This is simply an experiment in power, in state power.
	They cannot justify what they're doing based on any empirical evidence that correlates to either the cause of the contagion, the rate of contagion, the mode of contagion, or the consequences of the contagion.
	Because the remedies they're choosing are not narrowly tailored.
	They're designed instead to invoke fear and create state control of the same kind that the German president started doing in 1930 that opened the door to the economic collapse and the rise of the Nazi Party.
	That's the same logic as what's taking place around the world.
	Here we have another example.
	We look at video clip number five.
	A woman just decided she wanted to go swimming in the pool at the hotel where she was sort of stuck at.
	And so that's what she did.
	So people were cheering her and people are saying, hey, and so another guy jumps in.
	Well, wait until the and so just taking a little swim.
	Now, again, there's more than six feet apart.
	No major problems.
	But in fact, what will ultimately happen is that the police will chase her down, grab her, pull her out, hold her down and arrest her.
	We're taking a swim by herself, in the sunlight, in the pool.
	As you can see, there's the police ready to grab her, snag her, make sure that they pull her in.
	How outrageous, how dangerous she is, because she's swimming in the pool, in the sunlight, in the sunshine, in the open air.
	She was doing it by herself, so she's at no risk, period.
	You can't spread the disease to yourself.
	There was no infection contagion risk from the presence of others.
	There was no infection contagion risk from where she was doing it.
	There was no contagion risk from any of those activities.
	This is happening all around the Western world.
	People are being arrested, seized, threatened, monitored, surveilled, spied upon, and harassed for doing basic activities like playing t-ball with your daughter, playing going to the park with a mother with her son, going for a public swim in the morning, taking a walk along the beach, deciding just to do a going for a public swim in the morning, taking a walk along the beach, deciding just to do a little surfing or a little paddle boarding, deciding to No.
	Those basic elementary activities, taking a drink on a rooftop with some pals, taking a little swim and a little dive in the pool, all of these things have now been basis for arrest, for harassment, for citations, for fines, not to mention the drive-in church services and attempts to drive in to watch the sunset, which have also been fined or threatened with fines across the country.
	That's the insanity of the kind of public policy and loss of civil liberties that have happened on a massive scale.
	Now fortunately, if we look at the data, the data shows almost all of this has no evidentiary basis, no empirical reasoning for it, and so it's leading to more suits and more legal action and more legal remedies.
	And some honorable sheriffs are refusing to follow it.
	Four sheriffs in Michigan said they wouldn't do it.
	Several sheriffs in Wisconsin said they wouldn't do it.
	And here's another recent headline.
	Franklin County Sheriff in Washington State says he will not, he won't enforce the stay-at-home order.
	Why?
	Because he says they infringe the constitutional rights.
	Every police officer in America takes only one oath.
	That oath is not, I hereby agree that I will do whatever the governor tells me to do.
	That's not the oath.
	The oath is not, I will hereby take an oath to do whatever my boss tells me to do.
	That's also not the oath.
	The oath is not I'll do whatever the politicians tell me to do, or whatever the public health officials tell me to do, whatever the people in the white lab coats tell me what to do.
	That is not the oath of any police officer in America.
	Instead, the only oath that they take is to the Constitution of their state and the Constitution of the United States of America.
	And here you have sheriffs, more and more police officers, more and more law enforcement officers, more and more sheriffs stepping forward.
	I'm receiving emails and communication from law enforcement across the country saying how they do not want to enforce this order.
	They see it as unconstitutional.
	They don't want to be that guy in the tank in China in Tiananmen Square who's going to go forward when he sees the protester in front of him.
	They want to honor their constitutional oath.
	They want to honor their moral obligations.
	They want to honor their legal duties.
	They want to honor the civil rights of the people that they serve by refusing to go along with these orders.
	And what happened with the Franklin County Sheriff is likely to be repeated and replicated in more cities, more counties, more states across the country as it must be.
	Because the only oath law enforcement officers take is to the Constitution of the United States.
	And it's no defense for violating someone's civil rights because you thought the governor or the mayor or sheriff told you to.
	Now legal actions and legal remedies are starting to expand across the legal landscape, as we talked about before.
	Not only have I brought suits on behalf of people in Tennessee, Chattanooga, and Tennessee, and in Michigan, and looking at suits in states, cities, and counties across the country, but additional lawsuits are happening dealing with the insurance industry, as we talked about several weeks ago.
	Indeed, travelers insurance is beginning to file lawsuits in this case against their own insured so they can get out of not paying them wanting to blame the pandemic rather than public policy response.
	So a lot of people have a form of shutdown insurance so that the government for whatever reason shuts them down they are insured and they pay premiums for if that event ever occurs they will be protected.
	But that's where the politicians citing the pandemic as the pretext for this is not only an attempt to get away with it constitutionally, but is also to help their insurance buddies and pals, because the insurance companies, the big insurance industry, can say, you know what?
	This was because of a virus that you suffered loss, not because a politician ordered you shut down that you suffered a loss.
	Now, I think the factual truth of these cases, once they're really dug into, is the political policy response by politicians is why people suffered losses in their business, not because of the virus.
	The virus didn't cause people to not go to that business.
	The order to shut down caused people not to go to that business.
	So you're going to see this legal issue developed in discovery and disputes all across the country.
	You have more people writing about how, including John Stessel and others now, about how the coronavirus restrictions simply go too far.
	How they're not proportionate.
	How they're not evidentiarily based.
	How they do not have an empirical reasoning for it.
	What we talked about last night, you're seeing more and more scholars, historians, scientists, political analysts, economists Say the same thing.
	There's a lack of evidentiary basis for these restrictions.
	These restrictions are not narrowly tailored to a compelling public interest.
	In fact, in many instances, there's no compelling public interest behind it, period, because the person they're trying to protect from exercising their constitutional liberties is not at public health risk in the first place, given the activity they're engaged in.
	Now, in the same context, there's attempts to try to blame China.
	As we talked about last night, there's another Law Review article from Professor Turley about why China is unlikely to be held liable for the pandemic.
	This goes to even though there's legitimate questions that surround the origin of the virus and clear legitimate evidence that China helped oppress the knowledge from getting out to the rest of the world about the virus.
	While they knew they had a horrible pandemic, they lied to the world and had people from that area, from the epicenter of that epidemic, go travel around the world to spread it.
	So there's real culpability and real complicity by the Chinese government for what happened.
	The problem is the United States Congress passed a special law that say foreign governments cannot be sued in United States courts outside of extraordinary circumstances.
	Jonathan Turley mentions that exact act.
	As we talked about on here, he confirms the same analysis we've been giving you on this show, which is the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act of 1976 extends blanket immunity ...to countries from most lawsuits in the United States.
	Why are our politicians so concerned with protecting foreign governments rather than our own citizens, rather than our own countrymen?
	It's time for that law to change like we did in the case of funding and financing terrorism.
	When we come back, we'll be talking to Jason Barak.
	About whether a digital global currency controlled by governments is soon in our making.
	Not just a digital vaccine, but a digital currency.
	How that could control you and control the population in ways that would completely eviscerate the Constitution.
	Welcome back to American Countdown.
	Tonight we're going to be talking with Jason Barrett.
	You can follow him at Twitter at Jason E B-U-R-A-C-K.
	He's available by phone tonight.
	You can also follow him on YouTube at Wall Street or Main Street.
	Which is spelled WallST for MainST.
	You can also follow him on Patreon where he gives exclusive information and insight, forecasts and predictions about things that are going to happen in the global economy that could impact you, either politically or economically or financially.
	And so for a very, very low rate, you can get a lot of inside intel and information that gives advance notice to everyone else.
	Jason has been one of the people that's been talking to George Gammon and others and talking about the issues and risks that we face currently, including the particular risks that may be posed if governments start shifting to a digital currency.
	And then when you add that to people like Bill Gates talking about having a digital currency that you could make as a chip in your arm along with your digital vaccine, you get the sense of a kind of a bond level villainous degree of control by either billionaires or governments over our citizenry.
	The concerns for a digital currency go wide and far.
	And the part of the context for which this digital currency may occur is the fact that they are using the pandemic as a pretext for a mass power shift in the economy.
	Some of which is a legitimate response to the pandemic.
	Some of which is an economic reaction due to the politicians shutting down and suppressing our economy and civil society.
	But some of which was always there.
	To some degree, I think that even people like President Trump did not fully appreciate that large aspects of our financial markets were not built on a foundation of concrete, but were built on a foundation of sand, and that they are falling and can fall quickly and easily with any kind of trigger, and that this pandemic is such a trigger.
	And so while some people may be using it as a pretext to shift money and resources around for the Fed to play the games the Fed is playing at a different level, They're also gambling with the future of Americans' freedom and the future of our public economy.
	So, Jason, I'm glad you could be with us tonight.
	Thank you so much, Robert.
	Nice to speak to you.
	Can you give people your background as to how you, I know you went into this somewhat with George, but just give folks a background as to how you ended up getting involved in doing this kind of economic analysis.
	Sure, I was a stockbroker from 2007 to 2008, an investment advisor representative, and it just so happened I started my career in the financial industry during the 2008 financial crisis.
	So I was being asked to sell stock mutual funds, bond mutual funds, while everything was melting down.
	At the same time, my grandfather had passed away recently.
	And my grandmother had also passed within a couple years of my grandfather passing and my parents had inherited a pretty substantial sum of money.
	And I saw that my grandmother, who did not have a financial education, had been totally fleeced for hundreds of thousands of dollars in losses and high commission garbage.
	From people in the mainstream financial industry.
	So the job I worked initially was just a sales job.
	They don't really tell you a whole bunch other than sales techniques, how to get high commission products, how to get lots of assets under management.
	And so after that, you know, I did not like the jobs I was working.
	I did not get any answers from any of my bosses.
	My parents didn't get any answers when they were losing lots and lots of money.
	And that just started me on a journey.
	I started reading a bunch of books.
	I found Peter Schiff.
	I started reading the Austrian School of Economics.
	I started looking into the details of the bailouts.
	And a lot of the problems, Robert, that happened in 2008-2009 were not fixed over the last 10 years.
	I like to say that they were papered over.
	So all the asset prices rally, the stock market went up a lot, the bond markets rallied, but the underlying economic problems, the misallocations of capital, the hedge fund managers that got bailed out in the last five or six weeks, Robert, the amount of bailouts that has been done and the Fed's official balance sheet.
	It looks bad.
	OK, so the official balance sheet is up two trillion dollars for the Federal Reserve in a little over two months.
	But the real fireworks are off balance sheet.
	I interviewed Danielle DiMartino Booth, Danielle DiMartino Booth, who worked at the Dallas Federal Reserve for nine years, two weeks ago.
	And she said that there are 40 bailout programs running by the Federal Reserve off balance sheet, that the Federal Reserve does not have to declare.
	There is a lack of transparency here, a lack of accountability.
	The American people need to understand this.
	What's really going on here?
	And that's why the stock market is rallying when the real economy is still not doing well.
	Exactly.
	I think that, like, I was even talking to someone the other day, and I was talking about how the Fed had added $2 trillion, and they got that confused with the $2 trillion stimulus package.
	So the degree to which people don't realize, the Fed is printing its own cash.
	It's creating its own credit.
	It's doing its own thing independent of any of the bailout legislation, any of the direct stimulus.
	Some portion of that was put under Treasury control, and that's where there was some confusion as to exactly what part was the Fed, what part was congressional legislation.
	But not only have they added, basically increased by almost 50% their balance sheet overnight in about a month when it took them about two years to even do that the first time around in 2009, 2010.
	That led to about seven years of economic malaise across the country.
	But in the same context, they are just – you're right.
	One of the interesting things is from a legal perspective.
	They've decided to do Enron-style accounting just at the Federal Reserve, moving everything off balance sheet, moving everything as a special vehicle, so it's not subject, because they're not supposed to be buying, directly buying equities, not supposed to be directly buying municipal bonds, so that they could potentially be the primary creditor of local governments across the country.
	Not supposed to be directly buying a lot of things other than mortgage-backed securities in certain instances and treasuries.
	But they're buying pretty much everything.
	I mean, they've committed to QE, quantitative easing, to infinity and beyond.
	And then they're involved in foreign exchange swaps.
	They're involved in bailing out corporations and governments around the world.
	They're potentially going to be bailing out Chinese companies and banks.
	There's going to be all kinds of political decisions that they're making that nobody is really meaningfully monitoring in part because the institutional press doesn't want to cover it.
	And that's where people like you have been critical and essential for people that don't have the kind of access to the data and information you have to be able to track this.
	So could you talk about in addition to this context, what was happening in China economically and what the potential economic fallout might be of this pandemic and the political response to it?
	Not only in China, but around the world.
	Sure.
	So the real Chinese economy has not been doing well for a number of years now.
	A lot of the Chinese manufacturers were extremely marginal.
	The government was bailing them out.
	And so there's a great book that your listeners should read.
	It's a must read.
	It's by Dinnie McMahon.
	It's China's Great Wall of Debt.
	He lived in China for 10 years.
	He speaks fluent Mandarin.
	And he details the stories of factory owners who could not make a profit manufacturing anymore a number of years ago.
	And so they pledged all their factories as collateral.
	Now, they were still running the factories.
	The government was still helping bail them out.
	It was not at a profit.
	They pledged their factories as collateral and then got into real estate speculation.
	So they got into construction, they got into speculative real estate.
	And so the Chinese economy over the last 10 years went from mostly exports, mostly manufacturing, Into an enormous percentage of their GDP became speculative real estate construction.
	And that's how a lot of profits in the Chinese economy were made.
	They were paper profits.
	There was wealth management products.
	There was a lot of dummy corporations in China called local government finance vehicles.
	And that's how the Chinese banking system more than doubled the size of the U.S.
	banking system.
	It got to over $40 trillion, the Chinese banking system.
	So there's tremendous, tremendous financial problems in China.
	And the reason your listeners should pay attention to this, Robert, is because so many countries that do exports all over the world, whether it's Germany, South Korea, a lot of emerging markets that are energy, agriculture or commodity based economies or luxury items, most of those exports have been shifted over the last 10 years into China.
	So when China gets sick, And, you know, not not coronavirus sick, like when China just gets when their economy gets sick before the coronavirus, then the rest of the world starts to get into a recession.
	And that's really what's been happening the last 18 months.
	So the U.S.
	stock market was really the only stock market that was performing well prior to the crash at the end of February and early March.
	So it was obvious that the global economy every pretty much every single country but the US was already in a recession and things were getting worse.
	I could talk data point after data point after data point that was getting worse over the last 12 to 18 months.
	President Trump putting the tariffs on China.
	It really hurt their economy.
	And to what degree?
	There's a lot of assumptions out there.
	I'm seeing headlines like this.
	Countries starting to hoard food.
	Threatening all kinds of forms of global trade.
	Congress and Federal Reserve issues with SBA loan failures.
	Farmers are going to have had 61,000 chickens euthanized because the demand for eggs has dropped off.
	There's also pigs and cattle that are being euthanized.
	Fruit and vegetables being thrown out.
	Milk being dumped in the streets.
	additional headlines like that.
	And then they're talking about 30% unemployment in the Western world.
	And yet I see a lot of people around, particularly Trump supporters and others, who seem to really believe that we're just going to have a V-shaped recovery and all we got to do is turn the key back into the engine and everything is fine.
	And I think there are two problems with that.
	One, that's not really how the economy works.
	But secondly, the fundamentals were not there in the first place.
	Could you talk about what people can reasonably expect in terms of as this goes on, in terms of the shutdown?
	What's going to be the economic effect even when the lockdown ends?
	To what degree can the economy come back quickly and easily given the fundamental issues that are present?
	Well, certain parts of the economy can come back faster than others.
	What really broke with the coronavirus was the global supply chain.
	Because in Wuhan and other parts of China, there was a lot of automotive parts manufacturers, there was the starting chemicals for a lot of generic prescription drugs, and those things have not been manufactured for Well, over a month, probably two or three months in some cases, considering especially out of Wuhan, which was shut down for a long time.
	But now if your listeners go to the China In Focus YouTube channel, which is free, it's a hot new YouTube channel.
	They are documenting an unbelievable amount of second wave cases for the coronavirus all over China.
	And until the global supply chain, until more manufacturing starts to leave China in the next two to seven years, and the divorce is going to be very, very messy between the U.S.
	and China, it's going to be like a country music song, Robert.
	It's going to be like slashing tires.
	The tariffs that the U.S.
	put on China are still not off.
	So it's going to be country music song, Messi, the divorce between the US and China for the next two to seven years as more manufacturers and global supply chain leave China.
	So it's not, it's going to depend on each industry, how quickly some industries come back.
	But overall, this is not going to be the V-shaped recovery because the Chinese economy is still having immense amounts of problems and how much manufacturing is done there.
	And can you talk about I think like one of the things that's fascinating to me that became more of a hot topic during the sort of policy response to the pandemic than I think was publicly discussed outside of limited circles was the degree to which the dollar has this unique dynamic where they may be trying to inflate it domestically But they're going to have problems with it.
	They may even want to deflate it internationally because of how much dollar denominated debt is out there, how much foreign currency swaps are going to be critical in trying to maintain the value of certain debts.
	Can you explain to people some of the basics of what has happened in terms of the currency politics and currency economics?
	That we're going to be seeing and that we are seeing that seem extraordinary in the sense of the US basically trying to bail out a range of foreign governments, foreign banks and foreign corporations because of currency issues that are partially the product of the Fed zone arbitrarily influencing the markets over the last 10 years.
	So in 2011, I believe the dollar index because of Ben Bernanke and all the quantitative easing programs that former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke did, the dollar index got to a low that it has not been in a very, very long time.
	And a lot of emerging market countries, a lot of emerging market private companies saw that trend and they expected that trend to continue.
	So at that time they were moving a lot of their economies to exporting luxury goods or agriculture or base metal or energy commodities to China and they figured the US, the dollar is going to continue to be weak.
	So they borrowed a ton of dollar denominated debt even though they were moving most of their exports to China.
	And what has happened surprisingly over the last two or three years is the dollar has not gotten weaker.
	The Federal Reserve did temporarily increase interest rates, did temporarily reduce their balance sheet, and people when they were looking at, when currency traders were looking at different exchange rates, they viewed this as that means the dollar should be stronger.
	So, when the global economy broke down, Robert, I did a video on my YouTube channel called A Cash Flow Problem.
	So, all levels of society meet cash flow.
	And right now, even though the Federal Reserve is intervening into markets, it has not fixed the cash flow problem.
	So, the Federal Reserve is papering over asset prices to try to move the asset prices back up.
	Meanwhile, in the real economy, in the global economy, In the global supply chain, cash flows are not moving.
	And so people to pay their bills, businesses to make investments, businesses to maintain property, plan and equipment, governments to pay tax revenue, governments to get tax revenues, everyone needs cash flow.
	And that is exactly what we don't have right now.
	So the I've labeled what's happened with the dollar right now and this might only last for a little bit longer because the Fed is doing what I call another day another bailout.
	They're trying to prevent the dollar index and the trade way to dollar from going on an enormous rally.
	Because if the dollar continues to rally, all that dollar-denominated debt, all those forward dollar swaps, which are derivatives, will default.
	And then that will be the equivalent of what happened in 2008, how subprime mortgage-backed security, subprime real estate people defaulted, and then that infected prime.
	So that emerging market governments, emerging market private companies, if they default, that will start to hurt U.S.
	multinational corporations, that will start to hurt the U.S.
	economy.
	So that's trying to be prevented.
	On top of that, a lot of currency is being created to be given out as bailouts, but the government is picking winners and losers.
	The people on Main Street, in my opinion, are getting scraps.
	There are a lot of honest, hard-working small business owners that are applying for an SBA loan that If they're going to give out bailouts, probably, and I'm not in favor of any bailouts, but if they're going to give out bailouts, those small business owners should get the bailouts first.
	Meanwhile, these large corporations and also Harvard University and other endowments are figuring out ways to get around the laws so hardworking Americans who work their butt off for a small business are not getting the loans.
	Well, exactly.
	I mean, the New York Times article back a ways talked about this problem, but then it's been enhanced since then about endowments boom as colleges bury earnings overseas.
	And then, of course, it turned out Harvard got more money than most small businesses did out of these bailouts.
	You're seeing sort of the inflated stock values that the Fed presumably could keep.
	Propped up forever if they're the only actual buyer in the marketplace effectively they could just never sell once they put it on their balance sheet and they're creating circumstances that are so artificial and arbitrary and don't do you know of any historical other than what we did in 2008 2009 where we did sort of a much in my view a much smaller scale version of what we're doing now Do you know of any historical example where something like this has worked?
	I mean, we've had histories of, you know, Weimar Germany obviously did in 1923.
	It led them to have to do a whole new currency.
	We had Hungary in 1946, Argentina in the 90s, Zimbabwe in the 2000s, Venezuela most recently.
	To what degree does this degree of monetary policy, helicopter money, specialized bailouts, artificial intrusion into the marketplace, not creating a, you know, having sort of confusion of market incentives and not getting real prices for things, favoring certain people over other I mean, that was pretty much Weimar Germany 1930 to 1933.
	They interfered in the economy in a wide range of ways.
	The president declared emergency powers, chose some groups to win and other groups to lose.
	And it helped bring about, of course, the rise of the Nazi Party and fascism there.
	So to what degree do we face that kind of risk in the sort of political favoritism that's taking place as these economic consequences spill out into the political arena?
	Well, there's a very high risk, and you also have a lot of people now who are blaming what the government and what the Federal Reserve is doing on capitalism.
	But this is a very anti-free market.
	This is very anti-capitalism.
	But you brought up an interesting point, Robert, about 2008-2009.
	You said it was not nearly as big.
	And I want to bring some things to the attention of your listeners.
	So, first of all, the great Ron Paul, he fought very, very hard for a one-time partial audit of the Federal Reserve.
	Able to actually get John McCain and Bernie Sanders to agree.
	Very impressive.
	And we found out a bunch of really interesting information from that tiny one-time partial audit that $19 trillion in emergency loans were given out to foreign banks, foreign governments, foreign private companies, multinational companies, you know, on and on and on.
	A long, long list.
	Well, then Bloomberg News also did a Freedom of Information Act request and the Federal Reserve's lawyers fought it, but they were able to get 30,000 documents in a data dump.
	And through those documents, the Levy Institute, your listeners can take a look at this.
	Go to the Levy Institute.
	We found out they went through most of those 30,000 documents and found out that the Fed had actually given out in 2008-2009 to maintain the status quo, a system that many people, I'm sure you and me don't really like, gave out $29 trillion.
	Most of it went to the European Union, but other foreign governments, foreign central banks, foreign corporations to maintain the system so the system did not collapse then.
	So the real number was 29 trillion.
	Now the Fed, the reason we didn't have hyperinflation like Weimar Republic, Or Argentina in the late 1990s or Venezuela or Zimbabwe was because the Fed, after the emergency loans were given out for six months or 12 months, the Fed started pulling those out and just waived the loans.
	So the loans were temporary.
	The Fed said it was only a crisis.
	They waived the loans.
	Some of them were forgiven.
	And this is government and the Federal Reserve picking winners and losers.
	And I believe, Robert, that a lot of the same things that happened then are happening now.
	They rolled out the bailouts even faster.
	Our mutual friend George Gammon has been covering this.
	There's all these alphabet soups of bailout programs, and a lot of them are off balance sheet for the Fed.
	So they can pick which companies they want to succeed.
	And buy up assets on the cheap, which companies they want to fail.
	So the Fed is not giving Lord & Taylor Department Stores, is not giving J.C.
	Penney's, and is not giving Neiman Marcus a bailout.
	Meanwhile, hedge fund managers who on repo madness, they're starting in September, they borrowed hundreds of billions, if not trillions of dollars in the repo market.
	They did these over-leveraged, unhedged bond trades with the risk parity trade.
	And the basis trade in treasuries and over the last seven or eight months since September, they blew up.
	So the kill shot from what I heard from speaking with different sources inside investment banks, bond portfolio managers, was we had in the last five or six weeks, Robert, we had these hedge fund managers, people like Ray Dalio and others, we had them blow up their hedge funds, these billionaires, they needed bailouts.
	So the credit markets froze up, the bond markets froze up, the commercial paper markets froze up, the money markets froze up.
	Why did the money markets froze up?
	Because the money markets were looking for higher interest rates, right, for their investors.
	And guess where they loaned the money into?
	Into repos so the hedge funds could gamble with that money and lose it and then couldn't pay it back.
	So of course the Fed had to come in and bail them out too.
	Well, it's extraordinary.
	It looks like what a lot of this is leading to, ultimately, is sort of a pretext for, well, for whatever reason, the currency or financial issues are not solving things and we need to replace them, we need to fix them, we need to remedy them.
	And it appears there's increasing calls, as you put out recently in a YouTube video describing just all the recent articles on this, that there's increasing calls for a digital currency, a government-controlled digital currency, which would have extraordinarily frightening consequences for people.
	Could you explain both what you're seeing in the demand for digital currency and what risk that poses for the ordinary person, particularly just in terms of freedom and liberty, independent of the economic effects it may have?
	So this would allow for, first and foremost, one of the major things government always does is all about taxes.
	So this would allow government for the people who are getting paid in cash under the table who don't put their cash into a bank account.
	This would prevent that because cash would be banned and people would be forced into a government cryptocurrency and then governments would have access to a larger tax base.
	I've seen research reports over the last six or seven years from the European Union that up to 40% of their entire economy is underground out of the banking system.
	So this is why governments are looking at that.
	They want to broaden the tax base.
	So number one, it's about taxes.
	Number two, it's about control.
	So this is to track and tax every transaction if government does.
	And this is what the Chinese government does with the social credit score.
	You buy something in mainland China that they don't like, you can get penalized.
	Or if you criticize the government on social media or speak out, you can get taxed.
	Or the worst case scenario, Robert, is it you and me?
	We start criticizing the government and we're respectful.
	We don't talk about, you know, using violence against them.
	We're just using our freedom of speech.
	And the government decides that they don't like that and that they want to shut out.
	They want to shut down our bank accounts and credit cards.
	That is a worst case scenario.
	I don't know the timeframe on that.
	But the thing is, I think there's competing factions inside the government and I think there's the faction out of Washington DC metro area, New York City and Silicon Valley that actually wants to maintain the status quo and they don't want the digital currency yet.
	So I think there's competing factions between a government cryptocurrency and just trying to maintain the status quo because a lot of people unfortunately still believe in government, don't question government and trust the government and a lot of people don't even know what the Federal Reserve is.
	I think that's the main problem.
	If people really understood what the Federal Reserve is, what it does, how their purchasing power gets worse and worse every 4, 5, 10 years, and the chart, the devaluation of the dollar is enormous, people would really start to question why the Federal Reserve even exists.
	Because without the Federal Reserve, Robert, I don't think any of this occurs.
	Exactly.
	The real power is the Fed.
	We want to thank Jason for joining us.
	You can follow him at jasoneburack on Twitter.
	You can go to his YouTube at Wall Street for Main Street.
	And you can be one of his Patreons and get inside advice before anybody else.
	Thanks for joining us.
	us when we come back in the next hour.
	We'll be taking your calls and discussing more about what the ramifications of a digital currency may be for your civil liberties, for your public economy, for your financial and personal future.
	Welcome back to American Countdown.
	In that same context, as we hear about digital currencies being introduced to sort of to control you, to monitor you, to give basically the Fed carte blanche over your personal life and your financial future and physical future, particularly if they were to make it a physically implanted digital currency, as was actually who's helping to develop the patent for that potential idea.
	The same guy who has an idea for a quantum dot tattoo named Bill Gates.
	So that's the sort of dynamic of people that have a particular future that's different than maybe the future that you envision for yourself or that our founding fathers did in the Constitution.
	There's a similar idea now getting new circulation in the same context, in the same vein.
	From the New York Times today, a wealth tax is the logical way to support coronavirus relief.
	Now let me explain what a wealth tax really is.
	It's a nice title, smart title politically.
	What it is, it's a property tax.
	That would be the proper legal phrase for it.
	It's a property tax.
	When they first passed the income tax, they said, now we had an income tax in the 80s during the Civil War.
	We had a kind of a version of a direct tax.
	on carriages back in the early 1800s.
	But the first direct tax on the domestic population was in the 1890s, which was found to be unconstitutional until the 16th Amendment was passed that allowed for the Congress to impose a tax on incomes without regard to the source.
	And the Supreme Court came in and interpreted that in a particular manner that led some to believe that the scope and scale of the income tax was limited constitutionally based on what people thought it meant in 1916 and 1913 when the 16th Amendment was passed and 1916 when the first Revenue Act in lieu of the 1913 Revenue Act was passed, as almost every Revenue Act since then is in lieu of the 1916 Revenue Act.
	And when they passed the income tax, the word income did not mean what it means today.
	Publicly, popularly, historically, income was something out of an old English novel.
	Income was something that people got from their estates.
	Income was something that wealthy, lazy people who did no work got.
	That's what income was.
	Income was not money from your wages.
	Income was not money made by exchanging and bartering for goods.
	Income was not what you sold as a farmer.
	The ordinary person did not think of the income tax as being about them.
	They thought of the income tax as being about Wall Streeters, as being about folks on their estate, about old British royalty, elites, the Dukes, those kind of people.
	Indeed, in Congress, at the time of the passage of the 16th Amendment, they said that the income tax quote would not tax the hair on a working man's head.
	Well, needless to say, over time, they would become more and more elastic with how they define income.
	Until we get to today, where they deliberately choose not to define income really at all.
	They define it in a manner that, as one Supreme Court brief put it, is self-referential and circular.
	In other words, if I came and knocked on your door and said, you owe a widget tax, we've been looking at it, and you owe a widget tax, you would say, well, okay, what's a widget?
	And they said, well, a widget, you owe the tax on all the widgets you made from all the widgets you sold.
	And he said, well, I still don't know what a widget is.
	Well, it's from all the widgets.
	It's self-referential.
	It's circular.
	That's the nature of actually the way they define income for the most part in our Internal Revenue Code.
	They define income as gross income.
	So it is all the income from all sources, from all places, that's grossed out up.
	Now, the ordinary person has a sort of colloquial understanding of what that means, but that's not the kind of legal definition that traditionally we required before someone could be taxed.
	We usually require the who and the what to be defined with clarity and precision.
	So that who was responsible for the tax, what's called the liability section, was clear without any question or controversy, without any doubt.
	You didn't have to guess whether you were a person made liable for the tax.
	And what was being taxed like a widget tax?
	So what was specifically defined in such a way as again to put you on clear notice that that particular activity was what's being taxed or that particular product or that particular property?
	Well, the nature of the income tax is such that it's an exception to the apportionment requirements in the Constitution.
	So, for example, the requirement that no direct taxes could be imposed unless they're done in a manner that's uniform across the states and apportioned to the population of the states.
	Practically makes it impossible for Congress to pass a direct tax.
	The net effect of it is that the income tax amendment was intended to remove the requirements of apportionment and uniformity from an income tax.
	But the court, the U.S.
	Supreme Court, made clear in 1916 in Brush Haber that a decision where they said, you know what?
	The 16th Amendment only means what I, the dissenting judge back in the 1890s, now Chief Judge, say it means, and that is that income has to have a limited definition, that it's something separate and severed from the source, that it can't be property itself, it can only be the gain severed from property.
	So there's this constitutional constriction on what income tax is allowed under the 16th Amendment by Congress.
	That is why Congress has never imposed a property tax.
	Technically, an estate tax is presumed to be a tax on an activity, in this case, inheritance.
	Now, they're sort of playing some arguable games with the definition of that from a language perspective, but it's one the courts have accepted.
	A tax on wages they've considered separate from the source, as if the core value of labor starts at zero.
	That's always been a politically debated issue, but that's how the courts have seen it and chosen to approach it.
	But the courts have been in agreement that a property tax would not be constitutional under the 16th Amendment unless it was apportioned or uniformed, and that's basically politically impractical in the modern age.
	So that's the key to this context in which this wealth tax is now being debated and discussed.
	They're going to call it wealth tax just like they called it the income tax.
	So they use a word that most people think that tax isn't going to impact me.
	That tax won't affect me.
	When what they should do is be honest about it and say this is a property tax.
	Because ordinary and everyday people do understand that that tax is a tax that's likely coming for them.
	It's a tax on your home, a tax on your car, a tax on your clothes.
	It's a tax that effectively could tax you for simply living.
	As one IRS agent or commissioner once said in the 1930s to Congress, people shouldn't be worried about what we tax, they should be happy about what we let them keep.
	That is the mindset mentality of some of these taxing takings kind of authorities.
	And so the fact that they're discussing a quote unquote wealth tax, understand that's Congress trying to use the pandemic as a pretext to impose a property tax on all Americans.
	That's what they're really trying to do, just as the Fed behind the scenes is using this to create off-book balance sheets, to create off-book entities, off-book enterprises that don't show up in a transparent or public way.
	That's the reason why people like Ron Paul have for decades called for laws that consistently, constantly, continuously audit the Fed so that we can have some transparency and see whether they're even complying with the legal limitations on their authority, which is that the Fed's not supposed to be buying stocks.
	Fed is not supposed to be buying bonds.
	Fed is not supposed to be propping up the corporate debt market.
	Fed is not supposed to be owning equities of various corporations and companies.
	The Fed is not supposed to be involved in these activities, and yet it's quite apparent that that is exactly what they are.
	As you heard in their interview, there's been a group of what they call alphabet agencies.
	That's because of like PPLF, ABCD, or whatever like three-letter, four-letter name they come up with to shift the money off books so you can't see it, don't know what it is, and so that even if it's non-compliant with the law, it's not technically non-compliant because it's not the Fed doing it.
	The Fed's feeding it over here, which leads to here, which leads to there and there.
	And the bad activities that's happening there and there is hidden because they made it one or two step removed.
	This is, by the way, what got Enron in such financial trouble and led to all those criminal prosecutions of people like Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling.
	But when the Fed does it, apparently it's all OK.
	So that's the scope of what's happening between the desire to impose a property tax on people, to talk of a digital currency, to the Fed's off balance sheets, off books balance sheet items into the trillions and trillions of dollars.
	You heard him talking about how much they really spent in the past was well in excess of the total global value of the GDP of our economy in a given year.
	That's the scale and scope and severity of what they're dealing with.
	So in that context, it is useful to note also what happened with the Small Business Administration loans.
	And if we look at chart number three, we see where the approved dollars went and who they ended up going to.
	And disproportionately, only 17% of the total amount of loans went to real small businesses that needed the loans, as most of it went to people that were making, had business loans over $350,000.
	We see almost 10% of the money was a loan size of over $5 million.
	That's not a small business that's getting that loan money.
	And yet that was considered the SBA loan money that was taking place.
	That sort of context is what's happening across the board in multiple arenas in the economic space.
	In the same vein, of course, while all of this is happening, we're in a situation that really the answer to 1984 is we need more 1776 solutions more than 1984 solutions.
	But it's exactly in this context that YouTube announced that it is going to begin to suppress independent information if it in any way can test or simply challenges what the World Health Organization talks about.
	Let's look at video clip number 11.
	Talk about that as raising authoritative information.
	But then we also talk about removing information that is problematic.
	Of course, anything that is medically unsubstantiated to people saying, like, take vitamin C, you know, take turmeric.
	Like, those will cure you.
	Those are the examples of things that would be a violation of our policy.
	Anything that would go against World Health Organization recommendations would be a violation of our policy.
	And so remove is another really important part of our policy.
	Anything that goes against World Health Organization recommendation will be removed, censored, and deleted from YouTube.
	By the way, you know what would have disagreed with World Health Organization recommendation in January of this year?
	Saying that the coronavirus could be spread between humans.
	Because the World Health Organization is the one that told everybody that China had confirmed, don't worry, this virus can't even spread between humans.
	You know what else would have refuted the World Health Organization?
	Saying that masks are good for you, even as of a couple weeks ago.
	Their official position was that you did not need a mask and it could be counterproductive to have one.
	So those are the kind of positions they're talking about going against World Health Organization recommendation.
	It very much reminds me of sort of chart number one, which is the old 1984 imagery.
	Where war is peace, where ignorance is strength, where freedom is slavery.
	That was the kind of logic that Orwell predicted almost, what now, 90 years, 80 years ago?
	70 years ago?
	It's clearly quite a wise man.
	He wrote this book in 1948, just flipped the years for his future prediction, and it just took a little bit longer for it to occur in the entire Western world compared to it happening in large parts of the Eastern world.
	Indeed, this logic of, hey, you cannot deviate from what the WHO says, you must obey, you must be in an obedient mindset, is reflective of the movie itself from 1984.
	And that's, let's take a look at video clip number 16.
	The forces of darkness and the treasonable maggots who collaborate with them must, can, and will be wiped from the face of the earth.
	We must crush them.
	We must smash them.
	We must stand out.
	We, the people of Oceania, and our traditional allies, the people of Eurasia, will not rest until the final victory has been achieved.
	Death to the eternal enemy of Oceania.
	have.
	Death!
	Brothers and sisters, one week from now, in this, in this square, we shall, as a demonstration of Those who attempt to threaten our party will be seen.
	The party of Nazis is going to execute publicly the same number of East Asian prisoners.
	I think, join, and join.
	The party of Nazis is going to execute publicly the same number of East Asian prisoners.
	The party of Nazis is going to execute publicly the same number of East Asian prisoners.
	In accordance with the principles of Doublethink.
	It does not matter if the war is not real, or when it is that victory is not possible.
	The war is not meant to be won.
	It is meant to be continuous.
	The essential act of modern warfare is the destruction of the produce of human labor.
	A hierarchical society is only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance.
	In principle, the war effort is always planned to keep society on the brink of starvation.
	The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects, and its object is not victory over Eurasia or East Asia, but to keep the very structure of society intact.
	Yes indeed, to keep things intact, to keep the Fed in control, to allow them to expand or extend their control, to allow the politicians to suppress or suspend constitutional and civil liberties.
	It took two centuries to build up, to suffocate and stifle the free economy that this president had helped restore on a populist campaign that was shockingly successful to the elites in the 2016 campaign.
	That's what we face now.
	But there is a pushback.
	There is a counter.
	And let's take a look at the image number two and look at what people like Jimmy Kimmel are saying when they witness that countering, when they witness the protest.
	According to Jimmy Kimmel, he slams citizen protest lockdowns, quote, they want us to die and they're taking us down with them.
	This is the kind of extreme, absurd, lunatic rhetoric we're seeing from the establishment comedian marketers of their political agenda.
	But there were in fact protests, and protests continue to form.
	Let's just take a look at one video clip of one of the protests in North Carolina that has been happening in video clip number 12.
	What do we want?
	No!
	What do we want?
	Freedom!
	What do we want?
	No!
	What do we want?
	Freedom!
	What do we want?
	No!
	What do we want?
	What do we want?
	Freedom!
	When do we want it?
	Now!
	What do we want?
	Freedom!
	No!
	And that reminds us of a different cinematic heritage.
	Whereas 1984 warned us of a potential future in the same way Aldous Huxley's Brave New World warned us.
	Or if you simply watched Westworld this past week, you saw them holding him down and in one character and they're putting the chip inside his mouth to make him happy for his own good.
	That kind of mindset is particularly pertinent and relevant In today's contemporary environment where people are talking about digital vaccines and digital certifications and digital currencies that they want to put inside your body or have other forms of control over you to simply access basic essentials like food and rent and housing and things of that and travel and transport and family and personal relationships.
	Particularly apropos in a world in which people are being arrested for taking a swim in the morning or simply going into the pool in the afternoon or wanting to take their kid to the park or wanting to play t-ball in the backyard or wanting to surf at the beach or go paddle boarding or simply go fishing off the docket or in a boat of their own kind.
	None of which they can do while the politicians spend every day having makeup made up a couple of times a day while they're transported in and have their full salaries protected in which when they talk about taking a pay cut or a haircut it's nickel on the dollar while everyone else is taking pay cuts of a hundred cents on the dollar in certain parts of our country and the world where there's talk of poverty tripling or quadrupling within months in terms of global impact on hunger and starvation and health that that would naturally have.
	Remember, during the Great Depression, over half of the people who got sick received no medical care at all.
	And a third that got seriously sick, disabling sick, debilitatingly sick, those people, even a third of them, received no medical care at all.
	That's why suicides jumped.
	That's why stress-induced deaths jumped.
	And the only reason the overall mortality rate did not rise was because of the dramatic leaps and bounds that medical science had made in the 1920s into the 1930s.
	In that same context, there is a cinematic counterpoint to the 1984 vision, and that was popularized in a film called V for Vendetta, where people learn to start putting the dominoes back into their favor.
	So let's take a look at clip number 15.
	Every day, gentlemen.
	Every day that brings us closer to November.
	Every day that man remains free is one more failure.
	347 days, gentlemen!
	347 failures!
	247 failures.
	Chancellor, we do not have the adequate force.
	We are being buried beneath the avalanche of your inadequacies, Mr. Creedy.
	I'll get you.
	Eric Finch?
	Yeah.
	Bloody hell.
	How many went out?
	So far we count eight boxcars, several hundred thousand at least.
	Christ.
	I want anyone caught with one of those masks arrested.
	Give me the money!
	Give me your fucking money!
	We're under siege here.
	The whole city's gone mad.
	This is exactly what he wants.
	What?
	Anarchy in the UK!
	Chaos.
	Mr. Creedy, I am holding you personally responsible for this situation.
	The problem is that he knows us better than we know ourselves.
	That's why I went to Lark Hill last night.
	That's outside quarantine.
	I had to see it.
	There wasn't much left.
	But when I was there, it was strange.
	I suddenly had this feeling that everything was connected.
	It's like I could see the whole thing.
	One long chain of events that stretched all the way back before Mark Hill.
	I felt like I could I could see everything that had happened.
	And everything that was going to happen.
	Thank you!
	It was like a perfect pattern laid out in front of me.
	And I realized that we were all part of it.
	And all trapped by it.
	And all trapped by it.
	So do you know what's gonna happen?
	No.
	It was a feeling.
	But I can guess.
	With so much chaos, someone will do something stupid.
	And when they do, things will turn nasty.
	Rioters were arrested in Brickstrap.
	And then, Sutler will be forced to do the only thing he knows how to do.
	At which point, all V needs to do is keep his word.
	And then... And then... And then...
	And then...
	And then...
	And then... And then...
	And then... And then... And then... And then...
	The beginning of the resistance.
	That's what we saw in cities and counties and states all across the country, as a different domino reaction occurred as people began standing up for their protest and their rights.
	In fact, it was happening all around the world.
	It was happening in Germany this past weekend, where in fact they're arresting people for doing what?
	Public protest.
	Happened in North Carolina.
	People arrested for nothing more than public protest.
	Threats of it happening in various cities and counties and states in the United States, simply for beginning to resist.
	But it is that beginning of that resistance that can trigger the system beginning to collapse and beginning to forfeit its attempts to seize power from people.
	Indeed, to give just one small illustration, on behalf of a church parishioner, I brought suit against the mayor of Chattanooga, Tennessee.
	All that she wanted was for her and her child to be able to celebrate Easter Sunday at their church, participate in a drive-in church service where she could see her friends, her child could see their friends, they could participate and enjoy one of the most ancient religious holidays in the world, and one of the most celebrated in America.
	That's all that she wanted.
	It was something that posed no risk of harm to her child, no risk of harm to herself, no risk of harm to other people, because they would be, after all, in their own vehicles, enjoying the church service.
	They could see and be in the physical presence of their fellow parishioners, but not within any, even if they were completely separate, even within social distancing guidelines.
	And this is of course outdoors, where there's sunshine, where there's heat, where there's humidity, where there's open air, where the virus simply doesn't spread much at all.
	Amongst parishioners, many of whom were going to be young, many of whom in this case were children, who faced no meaningful risk or exposure from this virus to begin with.
	That's all she wanted.
	Well, she was denied that right because the mayor of Chattanooga, my hometown in the southeast corner of Tennessee, decided that he could be a monarch for a Sunday.
	And so he decided to unilaterally declare and dictate that no, the Easter Sunday holiday could not be worshipped in any manner, by any means, even for sitting in your own car or any mechanism of peaceable assembly.
	I told him that we would be bringing suit if he didn't take action or remediate what he did.
	He refused.
	So that parishioner reached out to me, wanted to bring suit so that it did not happen again.
	So we brought the suit.
	We brought the suit on Friday.
	The mayor got word that I had not only brought the suit, but that would be bringing public attention to the nature of what he did so that others could also join the suit if they wanted to and could also demand a political remedy if he was unwilling to offer a legal one.
	His risk would be that as a 42 U.S.C. 1983 claim, he could face potential legal fees that the city would have to pay because of his actions.
	Fortunately, within 12 hours of that suit being filed and notice and awareness being made to the mayor's office that there would be public attention to the suit, the mayor found his own religious experience and decided his own conversion experience and decided that, in fact, the Constitution did apply in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and that, the Constitution did apply in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and that, in fact, drive-in church services could continue without interference or impairment from him moving forward.
	That's the power and effect a simple individual, in this case a young mother and her child, trying to resist oppression and suppression of civil liberties and civil rights can make.
	In the same way that Rosa Parks did by just choosing not to ride in the back of the bus.
	In the same way that films like V for Vendetta celebrate in showing the power and the potency of the individual soul and the individual person to resist oppression and to make it a difference.
	We are a minute to midnight in the United States, and that's why the show is called American Countdown.
	On the Constitutional Republic, we took two centuries to build.
	If we continue to fight as individuals and collectively and aggregately, we can continue to make the change to hold our politicians accountable and responsible and keep our constitutional liberties alight so that the Statute of Liberty is not simply have its flame blown out by these repressive politicians of today.
	So in the next half hour, bottom half the hour, we'll take your calls from you, the jury.
	So call in at 877-789-2539.
	That's 877-789-2539, and we'll listen to your calls, the jury.
	And visit the website of our sponsor, InfoWarsStore.com, where you can buy storable food and other goods that are good for you now, while it's still legal to be at least a little bit free in America.
	Welcome back to American Countdown.
	We're going to be taking your calls.
	You can, as you the jury, you can call in at 877-789-2539.
	That's 877-789-2539.
	And we'll be taking your calls about your questions and your inquiries.
	First, let's go to Sean in Connecticut.
	You're on.
	Hey, Robert.
	Good to speak with you.
	Good to see you.
	Thank you.
	And thank you for lending your eloquence and legal brilliance to the Fight for Liberty.
	We desperately need more people like you on our side.
	What I just want to ask about today is that it's clear that the ultimate vehicle for tyranny in the 21st century isn't necessarily the government.
	It's giant monopolistic companies that we all depend on, like Big Tech, Amazon, most of our employers.
	Um, of course, self-censor, do things that we don't want to do because we need the paycheck or affordable goods, whatever it might be.
	I'm just wondering, how do we legally combat what companies are doing now and what they're probably going to do next?
	Like, for example, I'm in visiting my local grocery store saying you can't come inside without a mask or my employer saying you need to take a test or vaccine to come back to the office.
	You're fired, like things that are laughable and that I literally never comply with.
	And I just want to know what What law could you immediately tell them that they're violating?
	Because I know that their immediate defense would be, oh, we're a private company, we can dictate whatever we want.
	But that's definitely not true, because if a store says to someone, you know, you can't come in here because you're wearing a burqa, for example, you know, they'd get sued immediately.
	And I know that there's also an antitrust angle to this, too, I would think, because if a company says, well, if you don't like it, you can go work somewhere else, go shopping somewhere else.
	Well, every company today is adopting the same policies, because they work in concert with each other, or they're good at social media mobs.
	My basic question is, how do we counter the, they can do whatever they want because they're a private company in defense, or they're just doing this for everyone's safety in defense, just as a private citizen against a private company?
	Yeah, thanks for the question.
	I mean, it depends on the context.
	So it is, we're looking at whether there's ways to bring legal action where a private company is requiring someone to have a mask, whether as an employee or as a condition of employment or as a condition of being a customer and purchasing needed products and goods when they may be the only establishment open in town, a sort of state-created monopoly due to the shutdown policies.
	And the short answer is I'm not sure yet.
	There is a lot of leeway that private companies enjoy as it relates to private citizens, but when they're acting on the behest and at the behalf of a government agency, then that can change the story.
	So for example under 1983 statutes 42 USC 1983 the civil rights laws there are provisions that if someone is acting in concert someone is effectively acting in collusion or acting at the behest or behalf or as an agent of the government or in conspiracy with the government Then they can be held liable as a private actor for the violation of any constitutional liberty.
	That the government cannot simply outsource its repression of people's civil liberties and civil rights if the private party is acting at the behest or in concert with the government actor.
	So that can be a remedy in certain circumstances.
	Facebook opened up that possibility by saying that they were going to suppress people's rallies and speech activities on Facebook.
	at the behest of various government agencies.
	Once they did that, once that came out, once that leaked through Oliver Darcy at CNN, it may not have been his intention to leak it in the manner he did, but the net effect of it was that meant they could be sued.
	And, of course, since then they've started to retract and backtrack on their position.
	Other potential issues involving big tech is that under the Communications Decency Act, what's called Section 230 of that act, provide special immunity for a wide range of digital platforms, that if they are presumed to be effectively acting as not as a publisher, not as an editor, that if they are presumed to be effectively acting as not as a publisher, not as an editor, but simply as a platform, to the degree that they are exercising editorial privileges or publisher privileges or prerogatives, that they should be
	And that the only exception would be is to modify Section 230 to make clear what the language, in my view, was there to begin with, but the courts have not consistently enforced it, is to make it clear that, in fact, unless they comply with First Amendment standards, then Section 230 should not provide them with immunity.
	Their Section 230 immunity should be contingent upon their compliance with First Amendment provisions for access to their platform.
	In a similar context, you could have monopoly charges based on if a company or enterprise is the only business in town, the only employment opportunity in town.
	There may be issues in which competitors, consumers, or others may have an antitrust or anti-Sherman Act claim or Sherman Act claim under the antitrust laws or the Clayton Act claims under the antitrust law.
	Or may have various state provisions that are analogous to the antitrust or consumer protection or anti-competition provisions of the relevant state laws that may be applicable in certain circumstances.
	In addition to that, there are, as you note, non-discrimination provisions, at least religiously, that are in discrimination laws across the board for a wide range of businesses or enterprise that operate at a certain scale.
	And that's why, to a certain degree, to the extent Wearing a mask or not wearing a mask is a matter of religious freedom and religious expression and religious liberty.
	There would be issues with their attempts to either force it or coerce it or to restrain it or restrict it.
	In the same context, there are some states across the country that have protection for your political liberties.
	And to the degree that the perception is that wearing or not wearing a mask is a matter of public political expression, then there may be a right to resist doing so in those states where such laws are on the books.
	As a general rule, it is difficult to do much about the current mask rules because they're generally being imposed by private companies, not always at the command of the governments.
	And it's an area of law that has less precedent in public policy persuasive arguments of parallel cases in its support.
	So it's still an open question.
	There's definitely a risky proposition for our governments and businesses to begin to do medical Sharia law, which is effectively what's taking place.
	But the remedies are not yet clear and research is still ongoing in that subject matter.
	So thanks for your call.
	Let's go to Jefferson in Virginia.
	Hey, Mr. Barnes.
	Thanks for taking my call.
	Absolutely.
	Julie?
	Your guest tonight made it pretty clear that if the Federal Reserve can create $27 trillion out of thin air, off book, off balance sheet, and not tell us about it for 10 years, that our economy is a bubble that can burst and be burst at any moment when they choose to burst it.
	So we must replace the Fed some way.
	And what do we replace it with?
	What sound money system should we come up with to replace it?
	Well, I think in that context, there's a wide range of conversations out there.
	And one of the more common ones is that some form of gold-based currency that has objective value that's independent of and separate from and outside of the manipulations and machinations of the state banks and centralized governments.
	is important and critical to sort of defeat the core problem.
	The core problem being the scope and scale of their power to simply create credit and print cash with, in the words of Ben Bernanke, a few strokes on a computer.
	That he can create literally more money in the world than the entire U.S. economy generates in a year.
	He can generate in five seconds.
	That poses risk.
	And so there are those that believe that some form of a gold or objective asset-backed currency like the kind we had in most parts of the world up until this last century provide a critical check and counterbalance on the power of central banks and financial institutions to simply run rampant with their power of the print of the currency and of the control of the currency and of the control of the credit that correlates to that currency.
	So that's one possibility.
	Other possibilities are people that have suggested things like Bitcoin.
	Bitcoin having a certain built-in limitation due to the nature of its structure, intended to provide an objective check on the capacity to simply print ceaseless, endless amounts of money into infinity and beyond.
	That's another possibility.
	Either way, at a minimum, we need transparency, we need audits, we need reviews, we need public consent.
	We need to make sure the Fed is operating within the law, not outside of it.
	We can at least start there.
	And then if what we see is anywhere as bad as we believe it to be, that will give us the factual predicate and the public policy persuasive capabilities to say we need to move away from a Federal Reserve-based monetary system altogether.
	Why should central banks have the monopoly on control of cash and credit and currency in the world?
	It's simply too dangerous.
	They've proven themselves utterly unreliable and utterly undependable to favor the privileged and protected few at the expense of the public and the many.
	They are not someone we can continue to empower in this way, lest we risk complete debacle and disaster in the way that the last group of bankers created World War I, which gave us not only World War I, but also gave us the consequences that flowed from it.
	Communism, Nazism, Fascism, hundreds of millions of dead within half a century.
	So if we want either good quality of life or quantity of life, we need to make sure that people like the Federal Reserve do not have the carte blanche to act in secret in control of our economy and our financial futures in the way they currently do.
	Now, moving down a path of a digital currency is an even more risky bargain, particularly in the hands and in possession of the Fed.
	Who's already busy buying up the bonds that own and control our local governments.
	You are busy buying up the corporate debt and corporate stocks and equities that would end up buying mortgage-backed securities that could end up owning our homes, could end up owning our businesses, could end up owning our major enterprises.
	If that isn't enough that they already control our currency, our cash, and our credit, now all of a sudden they would have the capacity to own our businesses, our homes, and small towns.
	And then they may add to that a digital currency that may even be an implanted digital currency for the purposes of complete control, H2P.
	A true endgame of its own kind, with a horrific and dystopian ending.
	So in order to preclude that and prevent that, we need to start pushing back against it today, and the more we do so, and the more often we do so, the better we off, and we start that.
	With public education, public information, public broadcasting, sharing the links to shows like these, supporting our sponsor, which is InfoWarsStore.com, where you can buy products directly outside of the big chains and the big businesses and the big enterprises.
	You can get storable food so you're not dependent or contingent upon access to the local grocery store.
	If for some reason that's shut down tomorrow, given these extraordinary times in which we live, If you want basic health products or supplements while they're still legal to buy before they ban those too.
	After all, the governor of Michigan has even banned people from buying flags and banned people from buying seeds for their own garden.
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	You can also buy a wide range of products from coffee to supplements that can benefit You particularly while it's still legal to do so because who knows how that long that's gonna last as the inanity and insanity only continues to expand when they're arresting mothers in parks for playing with their kids and we get a sense of how risky we're a world we live in today.
	So thanks for calling Jefferson.
	Let's go to Tim in Seattle.
	Yes, I was kind of curious, how many moves on the chessboard does Trump have to make in order to withdraw from the UN completely?
	So that would be a range of things.
	I mean, technically, the president can withdraw from the binding aspects of a lot of international organizations and entities in the same way he simply defunded the World Health Organization, at least the U.S.
	contribution to it, recently.
	So, for example, there's nothing that keeps the president in NATO that's legally binding or financially worthwhile.
	So the key thing he has is control of the funds to a large degree.
	Now, there's some discretion he has.
	There's some discretion that is in the control, in the cabinet control of Congress.
	As the entire Ukrainian impeachment debacle revealed and reflected.
	So there's always that sort of limitation or constriction on the capacity of the president's action in terms of some are either treaties that we've signed or congressional control over purse strings.
	Outside of that, he often has a wide range of discretion where he can act.
	Often the treaties are non-binding and non-compulsory in a wide range of settings.
	So he could really meaningfully, functionally withdraw from United Nations, World Health Organization, NATO, any organization as he sees fit with a wide range of freedom and liberty to do so.
	Outside of those contexts where a treaty compels him to do a particular thing, Or where Congress has compelled through funding, strings on funding to do a particular thing.
	Those are the only true constrictions on his obligations as it relates to those international entities.
	And we've seen those international entities are mostly undermined rather than expand freedom and liberty as we see how the World Health Organization has acted in the past several months involving this pandemic and the policy responses to it.
	Indeed, the World Health Organization today was out talking about how people needed to get ready for a new way of living, as if the World Health Organization really meant new world order and they were there to tell you what the world was going to be like moving forward.
	They have not proven themselves able and capable of protecting the public health of the people as much as protecting the political interests of those favored few, like the billionaires like Bill Gates, who use their economic wherewithal to have a disparate and disproportionate influence in the public debate and dialogue, particularly as it relates to organizations like the World Health Organization.
	So thanks, Tim, for calling in.
	Let's go to John in Virginia.
	Thank you for taking my call.
	Yes, sir.
	So I just want to acknowledge I feel like I'm one of the minorities in viewing Infowars.
	I consider myself to be like a centrist when it comes to ideology.
	But I wanted to talk about because I've heard of this like a lot in the news cycle.
	Well, maybe not as often as this week, but definitely like in March, they were talking about alternatives for voting in November.
	And it seems like people on the right are staunchly against voting by mail.
	And I think earlier this month, I saw an article by FiveThirtyEight that I think Pennsylvania was testing out remote voting or something like that.
	And I just wanted to like kind of get your take on like alternatives to voting in November should the coronavirus still be around by that time.
	And also keeping in mind, like, that senior citizens especially seem to be, like, at the highest risk for getting this disease or virus or whatever you call it.
	And, like, maybe thinking of, like, an alternative for them as well.
	So, yeah, that's just my question.
	Yeah, so there's a wide range of voting alternatives being debated and discussed.
	And really it all comes down to maximizing two different value systems.
	One is protecting people's ability and opportunity to vote.
	Maximizing public participation so that every person who wants to vote has the easy means to vote.
	So that they can exercise their franchise.
	The most powerful tool many Americans have is their voting power.
	The ability to exercise that with the fewest restraints or restrictions, undue bureaucratic hindrance or obstacle.
	So that's the one value and often the Democratic side of the aisle and the left is the ones pushing that focal point, making sure there's maximum participation.
	Now, in Trump's case, he often benefits from maximum participation, particularly older and working class voters are disproportionately Trump voters, but they're often what's called low propensity voters in the political parlance, meaning they're voters who often do not turn out to vote.
	There's also the context of the South Park episode of Vote or Die from the famous P. Diddy episode that they did, sort of mocking the sort of insanity of the degree of that kind of position, that sometimes the left really takes almost a statist, Soviet-style approach To justifying and legitimating their power by the degree of public participation by making voting a coercive condition of citizenship rather than making it something free that you can either choose to use or not use as you see fit.
	A lot of people will choose not to vote because they don't want to reward or encourage or justify or validate a party system that they see is often denying them any meaningful choice in the system.
	So part one is making sure people that are able to exercise their franchise as they see fit with as few bureaucratic obstacles and restrictions as possible.
	On the other side is the concern over fraud.
	The concern of that the method by which the voting occurs incentivizes certain means of contaminating the vote count.
	By basically what, in particular, what happened in California in 2018, where they identified what they call ballot harvesting.
	So what happened in California is they allowed voting by mail on an entirely different scale.
	And most importantly, they allowed two things to happen.
	They allowed votes to be brought into the local ballot box, the local voting location, after the day of the election.
	And they allowed on the premise that, well, maybe the vote was cast on election day.
	It just took them a little while to get it over to the ballot box, to get it over to the vote counters.
	And secondly, they allowed people to transport those votes who were not themselves the voter.
	So the concern is that you can basically vote for people.
	And what would be the check on that with something like vote by mail with ballot harvesting on a massive scale?
	It reminds me of the old Chicago joke, which was a young man was following his political elder and mentor around, and the political elder and mentor was explaining that it was very important that he get all the names that they were properly registered.
	And about two-thirds of the way through the cemetery, the young fellow said, do we have to keep doing this?
	And the political mentor explained, would you dare deny these people the right to vote?
	So there's the long other underbelly of the methods of voting facilitating voter fraud.
	So that's the and that usually is a concern on the Republican or right or conservative side of the aisle.
	The reason why President Trump is concerned with voter by mail is because of what happened in California in 2018, where a lot of elections went a very peculiar direction, both compared to public opinion and polling in the area.
	And according to Election Day results, completely changing where you had a whole bunch of Republican seats at the legislative and congressional level flip hands and flip sides after Election Day, based on a whole bunch of ballots pouring in by people who say they had gathered based on a whole bunch of ballots pouring in by people who say they had gathered the ballots on Election Day, but weren't themselves the voter and the ballot wasn't So that's the counter concern.
	There are others that are suggesting what about Internet voting?
	What about and here again, you're probably going to get to a place where somebody proposes as a solution.
	For the combination of maximizing voter access and voter choice and minimizing risk of voter fraud, take a wild guess where they're going to point to.
	They're going to say, well, if you just chip everybody with a little chip that we can monitor their digitally vote, then that way you don't have to worry about voter fraud because it will be able to track them through the blockchain and the digital technology of their chip.
	Well, at the same time, they'll have maximum freedom and liberty to vote because they just have to confirm it in some digital programming format.
	So I don't be surprised if that's the solution they propose down the road.
	I think there is something to be said for having people get out and exercise their franchise in a personal way.
	But I also think that there's aspects of the left that are right, that we have a lot of dumb, crazy rules.
	We create precincts that are difficult to get to.
	You have to sit in line for hours just to exercise a vote.
	There's simply no reason for that.
	We create undue and unnecessary risk to people in this context because there are a lot of older people that may be vulnerable, susceptible, who are stuck standing in line in close, confined quarters and close, continuous contact for more than 15 minutes, which is the highest risk profile for this virus, if it's still present.
	So I think there are serious concerns on both sides that require going back to our constitutional roots and having an efficient, expedient process that incentivizes personal participation while at the same time minimizing public risk and health.
	And I think there's a way to do that without resorting to either doing everything as vote by mail or digital balloting or by restricting people to long lines and limited precincts.
	So that's the sort of the long answer to that short question.
	So thanks for calling.
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