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May 21, 2020 - American Countdown - Barnes

01:47:06

20200521_Thu_Barnes

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	The British are coming!
	You are about to be part of the drink today.
	A warm moral plan for land.
	America first.
	And hot.
	What's your husband?
	Welcome to Thursday, May 21st, 2020.
	Day 60, 70, 80, or 90.
	Depending on where you are in the world of the lockdown that continues in different parts of the world, despite accumulating evidence that the lockdown doesn't even achieve its purported objective.
	Not only does it impose a wide range of costs on both civil liberties and the public economy, but it continues to show no evidence that it substantiates or justifies the lockdown itself.
	Indeed, let's start looking at some of what the data is, both in terms of economic impact and the lack of evidence supporting the lockdown.
	First, if we look at chart number one, we're going to see what the market view is of credit risk for a wide range of industries across the United States and the West.
	And normally this credit risk, a risk basically a probability of default, is down below 1%.
	It's in that blue number, that light blue number.
	Instead, now between the dark blue number and the market view adjustment based on what's been happening in response to the shutdown, it's approaching 6% for the automotive industry, for capital goods industry, for industrial products industry, for the retail industry, for airlines, For construction industry, for metals and mining industry, for the hotel and restaurant industry, it's above.
	It's getting closer to 8 to 9 percent.
	For the media, it's also approaching 8 or 9 percent.
	For telecoms, for services and businesses, and also for real estate.
	The economic prospects continue to look worse and worse.
	Meanwhile, additional unemployment claims filed today.
	They're projected now to be over 40 million new unemployment claims that have been filed in just the last nine weeks.
	Now the unemployment rate is estimated to be 16.5%.
	I mean, look at that.
	This goes all the way back to 1967.
	So it's going back over 50 years, over half a century.
	And we're seeing that the continued claims, the insured unemployed, this is what this chart is, as a percentage of the civilian labor force, has never gone above 5% in the recent era, in the last half century.
	It's now at 16.5% and climbing.
	In the same context, we see the unprecedented rise in unemployment described in chart number three, and that was over 30 million.
	Now that number is 40 million that have filed for unemployment claims in just the last eight weeks.
	Meanwhile, if we look at the data in something that's called R-NOT, if we look at chart four, this is from a report that was printed out and was sent to me.
	What they noted is that, in fact, it appears that the R has already been under 1 since March 21st.
	And the full lockdown didn't happen until March 23rd.
	Meaning that, in fact, the transmission rate had declined long before then.
	The R-naught rate, in fact the conclusions from this are the full lockdown was not necessary, the R-rate has not been further reduced since the lockdown, and in fact achieved its major benefit before the lockdown even occurred.
	R-naught is R and it has a little number zero next to it.
	That's the number that tells you what the transmission rate is, the infection rate is.
	And what was unique about this disease, according to the so-called experts, was that it was both highly infectious and highly lethal.
	As the MD that we had on explained, that is highly unusual and doesn't normally occur.
	And the reason for that is, in order for a disease to be highly infectious, it needs to not be highly lethal.
	If it is highly lethal, it is rare that it is highly infectious.
	So Ebola, for example, is highly lethal, but for that very reason is not highly infectious.
	Because if it kills off its host, it reduces its ability to transmit and spread.
	Well, if we go all the way back, there was evidence that the R-naught rate, this rate of transmission, if it's one, that means for each person that's infected will infect one other person.
	If it's two, that means for each person that's infected will infect two people.
	An R-naught rate of three means for each person that's infected, they'll infect three people.
	You can understand how that can exponentially increase the transmission if it has a high R-naught rate.
	The problem was, there was early evidence that this R0 rate was only highly transmittable amongst a very vulnerable, susceptible part of the population.
	Particularly elderly, vulnerable people and other certain groups.
	But that once it got through that group, the R0 rate dramatically declined and dropped off amongst anybody that was healthy under 60.
	So not only was its lethality reduced to a certain sub-segment of the population, but its successful transmission Was reduced to a certain subsection of the population.
	The evidence of this first came out of Wuhan.
	They followed everybody who had been around and in close continuous contact in confined quarters.
	That's where this disease is most infectious and able to spread.
	And they looked at how many of the people that were in that situation, close continuous contact, confined quarters with an infected person, themselves became infected.
	What they found was only five or six percent ended up getting infected.
	We got additional, that would suggest a very low R-naught rate amongst the general population.
	In other words, it might have a high transmission rate amongst a certain group like, say, people in a nursing home that are elderly, that are susceptible, that are vulnerable, that are in close continuous contact and confined quarters and have a particular physical or medical condition that makes them vulnerable both to getting the disease and to the disease being highly lethal to them.
	Or causing hospitalization and incubation and intensive care needs, which was the primary concern behind the original premise of the lockdown, versus the wider or broader population or other groups like, say, children or, say, young people or, say, college students or, say, middle-aged people, those who are otherwise healthy and don't have other comorbid conditions or make them uniquely vulnerable.
	Well, we ended up with two petri dish test cases to see what the true transmission rate of this disease were very early on.
	Aside from the tests and surveys that came out of Wuhan, and the argument was you couldn't deal with any data from China unless it was data that said the virus was terrible, terrible, terrible.
	If it said anything about the virus being good, you had to magically ignore just that portion of the data from China.
	Well, let's say we even do that.
	The next test was from the Diamond Princess.
	That was the cruise ship where people were stuck in close, continuous contact, in confined quarters, with recycled air, with dubious levels of ventilation, because of the nature of a cruise ship.
	They were getting their food from infected chefs.
	They were having their rooms cleaned by infected cleaners.
	And yet, despite being on there for three weeks, locked down, stuck in that cruise ship in that situation, more than 83% of the people never got infected.
	That was the first sign, even though that was a disproportionately vulnerable or susceptible audience due to the age profile of those who are on cruise ships.
	That was an early indicator that this was not a highly infectious disease for most people.
	Indeed, the second test, the second Petri dish that we got came out of the USS Roosevelt.
	That was the aircraft carrier, which if you've ever seen how people live and work on an aircraft carrier, it's almost all in incredibly close contact in exceptionally confined quarters.
	It's not that different than a submarine.
	Basically, they're mostly, they bunk three to a row, and there's usually as many as 30 or people within a certain room, within tight, tight, tight quarters.
	They had an infected patient on there, an infected soldier on there, for three weeks.
	And during the time period again, we had another Petri dish.
	This was a perfect place to measure the transmission rate of the disease.
	And once again, More than 80% of the soldiers on board never got infected.
	They all got tested, like the Diamond Princess, that test and tracing that the politicians are saying we now need.
	Well, we actually have an example of that in both the Diamond Princess, where they were all tested, and in the USS Roosevelt, where they were all tested.
	And the results in both times said For whatever reason, even people that are in close, continuous contact, in the most confined quarters imaginable, for an extended, multiple-day, multiple-week time period, more than 80% never got infected.
	The possible reasons for this vary.
	If you dig into the data, much of the virologists and epidemiologists don't even really know why most viruses simply die of their own accord.
	They believe that the primary medical reason is that it's simply not very infectious to most people, and that once it hits the susceptible population, it will vanish on its own accord because the rest of the population simply does not get infected.
	So they don't even spread it.
	What was significant about the USS Roosevelt also was that so many people were asymptomatic.
	Asymptomatic people don't have the viral load necessary to transmit it.
	That's what they're discovering with children.
	Children simply do not get infected.
	The few who do don't have enough of a viral load to transmit it to anyone else.
	The risk to children is actually from adults, not children to adults.
	And children themselves are more at risk of dying in a car accident than they are from COVID-19.
	Indeed, for most people under 25, that's the reality of it.
	Yet we haven't shut down all car traffic in the world and taken away car automobiles, as would be the logic of those pushing the lockdown proposals.
	So once we knew from those two data points that in fact this had a low RO rate amongst the broader population, then you could understand why and how the models got information wrong.
	All the models presumed, including Imperial College, which projected more than 250 million Americans would be infected.
	It's less than 1% of that.
	And similar data for all of the countries around the world.
	That's what they said the infection rate was going to be, and the only question was whether we could drag out the length of time in which it occurred, not preventing it from occurring.
	Yet that never happened.
	They end up being off by a ratio of 100x.
	How did that happen?
	That happened because they presumed the high infectious rate amongst the vulnerable subset of the population was the same R0 infection rate amongst the whole population.
	It never was.
	That is why serology studies that are showing in many parts of the country and in the world, including in Spain, France, Italy, Sweden, they're coming back with Infection rates of 1, 2, 3 percent, maximum 5 percent.
	Only in New York City, due to something unique about the demographics there, something unique about how they transport there, has anything come back in the 20 percent range.
	Only a few towns have had that kind of response.
	As a general rule, and even in those places, 75 to 80 percent not infected, even though clearly likely exposed to it.
	So what we're seeing is that most people are simply not vulnerable to it.
	That means that given that most people don't live in close continuous contact in confined quarters, the equivalent of a cruise ship or aircraft carrier, it meant that most people could, with just very reasonable, minimal steps, be outside more, get sunlight more, be outdoors more, boost your immune system, have good ventilation wherever you're at indoors, practice reasonable degrees of not too much close continuous contact with random strangers on an extensive basis, or intensive basis, Then you could easily reduce the risk of this virus.
	And we already know from the lethality rate that it was also far less than they projected and estimated.
	Indeed, it appears to be equal to the flu for most healthy people under the age of 50.
	So what we have is something that uniquely impacted one group of people, people that are very old and very vulnerable, and those are the one group of people our politicians mostly chose not to protect, particularly Democratic governors in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Michigan and elsewhere.
	The most extreme lockdown politicians were the ones that have led to the most needless deaths in this equation.
	And that is what more and more the data continues to show and evidence.
	Meanwhile, we're seeing a continued problem with the collapse of the food supply chain, leading to spikes in food prices.
	If we look at a chart, chart 5, we'll see that in April we had one of the highest brief monthly rises in food prices that we've seen in the last 10 plus years.
	It was almost triple what the norm had been.
	We've mostly kept food prices stable, and all of a sudden they're spiking at an extraordinary level.
	That was predicted by George Gammon, who we've had repeatedly on this show, who will be on the show next week to discuss some of those related issues.
	Meanwhile, as our guest tonight will be talking about in part, disproportionately the Fed has been picking winners and losers.
	The nature of what they have done, where they have spent their money, where they've printed all that digital cash that the Fed Chairman talked about on 60 Minutes, is disproportionately going to a select set of politically preferred, politically protected actors.
	As Chart 6 shows, The winners in dealing with the crisis are large cap stocks that have access to Fed liquidity.
	That's who's able to bounce back the most compared to the small cap companies and your Main Street businesses that are getting shellacked.
	Meanwhile, and this goes to chart seven, the Fed has spent an extraordinary amount of money.
	You can see just how much it's spiked up to an extraordinary level.
	We're approaching seven trillion dollars that's on the Fed's balance sheet, almost half of which has been spent in just the last six weeks.
	But almost all of it is going to the politically protected and politically preferred, but at public expense and public exposure.
	Meanwhile, the hedge funds that have been active are telling us something about what they think the future looks like and how much they think it looks like a Bill Gates-oriented, policy-driven future.
	If we look at chart number eight, we see that hedge funds have been the net equity buyers in the recent rally.
	In terms of the net exposure to equity markets, they have been the number one purchasers, aside from the Fed.
	And let's look at what stocks in particular have been going up based on these investments.
	If we look at chart number nine, we see they're investing heavily in IT stocks, global technology related stocks.
	In fact, the other charts that they are also looking at is you'll also see them investigating and investing heavily in pharmaceutical stocks.
	So for whatever reason, hedge funds thinks big pharma and big tech are going to be the big winners of the post-pandemic political world, while the Fed continues to protect the politically protected.
	We look at chart number 10, we see again, this is someone who simply tracked how SARS developed, and because COVID-19, he believed would have a similar pattern of spread as SARS, and like SARS, died off on its own accord.
	Imperial College also predicted wild numbers in both 2003 and 2009 that were going to spread that never occurred.
	If we looked at it, he projected that if it followed the SARS pattern, it would be seasonal, number one.
	And number two, it would be extinct on its own accord.
	It would start to diminish in its effectiveness on its own accord.
	And so he projected, he has the SARS chart here at the bottom, and here's what the COVID chart is.
	And what's happening is, that's exactly the same pattern is repeating itself.
	It's seasonal, as more data and information shows and substantiates.
	And it repeats the pattern of SARS, like most viruses.
	Why?
	Because they don't spread amongst people broadly.
	They only spread amongst a subset of susceptible population.
	That's why even though the Spanish flu mutated multiple times, two-thirds of the people who were exposed to it never got it.
	And that was a much more vicious virus than COVID-19 has got even close to being.
	Indeed, if we look at a conclusion from a recent report, chart number 11, coronaviruses, COVID-19 is a coronavirus, are sharply seasonal.
	They appear, based on serial interval and secondary infection rate, to have similar transmission potential to influenza in the same population.
	So they're saying the same, they're drawing the same conclusions that basically they are a lot like or more akin to the influenza than they are to some sort of plague-like, Ebola-like virus in their infectious rate in terms of the demographics of who is most impacted by it and its rate of transmission and its seasonality.
	If we look at chart 12, chart 12 is what we were talking about earlier, about where the hedge funds have been investing lately.
	And where do we see them going?
	We see, at a record high, global pharma.
	So big pharma is suddenly getting big infusions of cash.
	Big tech is suddenly getting big infusions of cash, aside from the Fed-protected groups.
	And that's where the hedge funds are putting money.
	They're betting on a Bill Gates future, unless things reverse politically in America.
	Meanwhile, Whole Foods is talking about the direction that we've been talking about on this show, the fear and risk of a digital currency replacing real currency, and the degrees to which a state-driven, state-monopolized digital currency could have all kinds of deleterious effects and control impact.
	The documentary from the Corbett Report series that we've been documenting notes Bill Gates' particular interest in a cashless society and how he has propagated it, as we've reported here and others have reported as well.
	Of course, Bill Gates has patents on potential digital cryptocurrency chips and other kinds of products.
	Well, look at this picture from Whole Foods.
	And what are they saying at this particular store?
	Cash not accepted.
	Credit, debit, EBT only and no cash back.
	Is this the beginning of an experiment to see if we can force people into a credit card or cryptocurrency government-type driven system that is not about the independent cryptocurrencies that have privacy and security attributes like Bitcoin, but instead a government-controlled cryptocurrency that could effectively determine where you could even spend money at any point or where you could receive money at any point, could control your life, To a degree never before imagined outside of the gulags of the Soviet Union.
	Another chart today documenting, of course, what has been happening in Sweden.
	There are more inaccurate reports coming out from the press saying that somehow what's happened in Sweden is particularly bad or pernicious.
	Trying to use Sweden as a bad example as they tried to do with Florida and failed.
	Tried to do with Georgia and failed.
	Tried to do with Texas and failed.
	Now there's a wide range of misleading data coming out about Sweden.
	Well, if we look at chart 14, we can see what the projections were from the various modeling agencies, particularly those connected to Bill Gates.
	And look, they were projecting this huge ICU bed need based on Sweden refusing to lock down.
	The actual rate is all the way down here.
	It mostly just went up initially and then it flattened out and is declining.
	That big rate never happened.
	So without doing any lockdown, Sweden was able to achieve the same benefits that the modelers said could only be achieved with a lockdown.
	If we look at the global monetary and fiscal amounts of cash that are being funneled into the world's economy, this is a useful chart, chart number 15, which talks about how much money the central bank has injected, how much the governments have injected, and what the combination rate is as compared to a percentage of GDP in the rate.
	The United States has put almost 10 trillion dollars into the system.
	Most of it going to politically protected, politically preferred parties on Wall Street.
	Equal to almost half of our GDP.
	That gives you an idea of just how... I mean, that's in a tiny time period.
	If you did this on an annualized basis, we're spending more than our annual GDP on an annualized basis.
	Eurozone has put almost 30% of cash into the system from the central bank into the government of their GDP.
	Japan, almost the same, with one-third.
	And the U.K. and China has closer to 15%.
	So what we're seeing is massive infusions from the West, particularly those countries in the U.S. and Europe that did lockdowns, and that's going to be a bill that's going to have to be paid at some point.
	Meanwhile, if we look at the comparing first-quarter deaths from all causes in Stockholm, which was the hot spot in Sweden, this is another refutation of the argument that Sweden is having trouble.
	If we look at chart 17, we see that the total number of all cause deaths is equal to the earliest earlier part of the decade.
	So in fact, it's still less than 2000, which was a was a severe flu season in Europe.
	And we're seeing it's about on par with most early years.
	And what you're going to see is you're going to see people, they'll probably take 2019 because it's one of the lowest, was a good year.
	And you're going to see a lot of comparisons in 2019 by misleading you into not knowing that 2019 was an unseasonably low level of all-cause mortality in Europe and in other places.
	And consequently, try to mislead you.
	But if you look at the data in context, Sweden is basically experiencing nothing like what the modelers predicted and something that is, in fact, on average for this century.
	The same pattern we see in Georgia.
	If we look at Georgia daily deaths from COVID-19, chart 18, they opened up right around here.
	We can see that, in fact, the death rate has continued to flatline and decline.
	That was not supposed to happen after they've been open now for a little about a month.
	The same is true if we look at when the Georgia social interaction score, there's been some people arguing, well, no, they are still practicing social distancing.
	And so social distancing benefit of the lockdown is still occurring.
	But that's not really the case.
	Since they unlocked back about a month ago.
	Almost 30 days exactly.
	They went from almost a 50% decline in social mobility before then, to now only being about 10% below average.
	So in fact, there isn't much social mobility declination during the reopening.
	People are back open, engaged with one another.
	And there has been no spike in deaths.
	And if we look at chart 20, we'll also see there's been no spike in cases either.
	So the infection rate would show up sooner than the mortality rate.
	We have enough data now to look at the mortality rate, and it's not going up.
	But if we look at the case rate, that would show up very quickly, much more quickly.
	And we see, in fact, since they opened up right, it was not long after they peaked, they've just been declining.
	They haven't been going up at all.
	The spike that was supposed to occur never occurred.
	In the same context, If we look at chart 21, we'll see what's happened to consumer confidence in the United States during this time period.
	Remember, the key component of consumer confidence is critical, is one of the three prongs that holds up the economy, because it's consumer confidence that drives consumer spending, that in turn drives production and employment, that creates its own positive cycle.
	And the reverse is equally true.
	An implosion of consumer confidence, which was the main driving factor to the Great Depression, led to less production being made because there were less consumption taking place, which led to less employment, which then led to even more declines in consumer confidence.
	Well, if we look at chart 21, we will see the precipitous decline.
	Trump had it at a rate that was unparalleled in the modern era.
	Consumer confidence was just skyrocketing.
	And now, because of the shutdown, consumer confidence has completely collapsed.
	It is down to one of the lowest levels it has been in recent memory.
	That is also going to be showing up in things like savings rates.
	Meanwhile, the Fed continues to prop up zombie companies.
	So if we look at chart 22, now what is a zombie company?
	A zombie company are companies that would be insolvent and on paper are insolvent and should be dead, but the Fed is keeping them alive with corporate buybacks of stocks, by propping up the repo market, propping up the corporate bond market so their bonds don't drop to junk status.
	And by doing that, they prop up the ability of pension funds to invest in those corporate bonds, which they otherwise couldn't if they were junk status.
	It's this sort of combination of effects that allows these zombie companies, these insolvent companies, these financially dead companies to stay alive and stay afloat a little bit longer in ways that usually prolongs recessions and depressions rather than prevents them.
	And we're seeing the industrial conglomerates, various hardware companies, energy companies, hotels, restaurants and leisure.
	Those companies, a lot of them are employed close to 2 million people, but are effectively zombie companies only being kept afloat and alive thanks to the politically preferred, politically protected class that they inhabit with the Federal Reserve.
	Meanwhile, even JP Morgan is now into doing the data analysis on COVID-19, and they've double-checked and cross-checked the various analysis we've been reporting on here from a wide range of data sources, Showing that in fact there's no relationship between the transmission rate, that R-naught rate I was talking about earlier, and the lockdown effects and social distancing effects.
	So they did, if we look at chart 23, they looked at the R-naught rate during the lockdown versus after the lockdown by states.
	And what they did is they compared it all the way across the board and what they found, generally speaking, was it didn't matter when the lockdown occurred, it didn't have any impact on the R0 rate.
	In fact, states that never shut down, like North Dakota and others, are experiencing better outcomes than others.
	Meanwhile, in terms of economic effect, the money continues to just pump out like a machine.
	If we look at the money stock that's taking place, that's called the M1.
	That's the amount of money out there in the system.
	The Federal Reserve reports today that rate is at the highest rate it has ever been.
	If we look at that by comparison, the rise in the money stock.
	This goes all the way back to the 1970s.
	And the percent change from the year before and the numbers of billions of dollars has just It's gone through the roof.
	That usually leads to an inflationary effect, but it may be a targeted inflationary effect because people aren't spending a lot of that money in the consumer economy or in the corporate side of the economy.
	Instead, they're trying to just prop up stocks and keep up equities on that side of the aisle.
	As one more reminder on Sweden, we have another chart, chart 25, which shows here's what the prediction was of the Imperial College, which they said if they didn't lock down, that R was going to be this disastrous rate for them.
	If they did a UK style, it was still going to be bad, but nothing like the debacle.
	The reality, as you can see, is way, way below that in the death rate in Sweden.
	So those who are predicting otherwise or showing otherwise are missing the data point.
	In further support of the Morgan study, we also see from a study that compared the lengths of lockdowns to the death rate by particular regions and states, put them in five different groups.
	When they put them in those five different groups on chart 26, we see that those that did no shutdown had approximately five deaths per 100,000 people.
	Those that shut down for 30 days on average had a higher death rate of 8 deaths per 100,000.
	For those who locked down even longer, an average of 41 days, their death rate doubled to 16 deaths per 100,000.
	For those that locked down for 50 days, the death rate again increased to 20 deaths per 100,000.
	And those who locked down the most, In California, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Louisiana, Michigan, New Jersey, New Mexico, Ohio, Oregon, and Pennsylvania, they have experienced an average of 32 deaths per 100,000.
	So the ones that locked down the most experienced a death rate per capita four times higher, in fact almost five times higher, than those that never locked down at all.
	More evidence that the lockdown has had no causative effect or relationship with any aspects of this.
	When we come back, we'll be talking to a CEO who made himself famous by declining his $1 million salary in exchange for making sure his employees got paid the best that they could.
	So we'll be talking to Dan Price, talking about what's happening and how it's been happening in the real economy and the impact on Main Street.
	Compared to what the benefits have been flowing to Wall Street instead due to the political decisions of political decision makers.
	So we'll be talking about that and more.
	So come back and join us after the break and get more inside information on what's happening in this era of pandemic politics.
	Welcome back to American Countdown.
	We are pleased to have with us Dan Price, who made himself famous by willing to reduce his own pay as a CEO so that his employees could have a living wage.
	He's also been commenting on the lack of impact of pandemic policy politicians protecting the Main Street economies that have been most affected and impacted by this lockdown.
	Dan, glad you could be with us.
	Thanks for having me, Robert.
	I really appreciate you having me on your show.
	Absolutely.
	Dan D., could you describe, you've been following things like what the impact is on Main Street economics in general, and you've been reminding people what unemployment does to people in terms of opioids, in terms of suicides.
	Could you go into some of what the real-world health impact is of people losing their jobs and losing pay?
	Yeah, well, absolutely.
	So small businesses in particular have been hit so hard.
	Our 20,000 small businesses saw a bottom of being down 55% of their revenue.
	And some, as you know, we're down 100%.
	And I appreciate the fact that You all are raising awareness about when you lose your financial security, it affects your mental health.
	It affects your ability to live a good life.
	It affects everything.
	We found, for example, that when we increase the minimum pay at gravity from about 30 or $35,000 a year to $70,000 a year, we saw people start going from having between zero and two babies born per year across the entire company to we've had 50 in the last five years since we put that in place.
	So that's an example of a real life thing that is impacted by people's financial security.
	And also we saw a savings rate for retirement double or triple.
	Think of the stress that we feel when we're not saving enough for retirement or we're in debt.
	We saw people's debt go down 70 percent of the people at gravity.
	Uh, that work there reported that they were able to pay down debt.
	And, and as you know, very well, you know, losing your financial security, you know, for, for every, uh, bit that you lose under whatever a living wages, which we think is about 70 or $75,000 per person for every dollar that you lose below that, it hurts you more and it puts you more in danger.
	So we're very, um, heartbroken by what's happening to main street American businesses.
	And we're also very fearful for how that's impacting the lives of people.
	You know, these are mothers, daughters, fathers, sons.
	You know, these are real-life situations that are affecting all of us.
	Could you describe for people what Gravity Payments does?
	Because you're really in a unique position to get real-world data on what's happening to Main Street business, small business economies.
	Yeah, so there are all these obviously huge companies like Amazon and Starbucks and Walmart and all these companies that have really been taking a bite out of small businesses.
	And what Gravity's job is, is to provide them with the commerce tools, with the payment solutions and other digital commerce tools to be able to compete in 2020.
	But unfortunately, because of the pandemic, because of the restrictions, the social distancing restrictions that go along with it, all of those tools Where small businesses have a hard time catching up, you know, they are really being hit the hardest by this.
	So, Gravity has pivoted almost completely because before we were trying to avoid the monopolies of Visa and MasterCard and the big banks and the financial system coming down too hard by charging small businesses too much just to accept a credit card.
	I mean, some small businesses pay three, four, five, six percent Just to accept a credit or debit card, it makes no sense.
	And so our job as a company for the last 16 years since I started it has been trying to make that less unfair and level the playing field for those small businesses.
	But in the midst of the pandemic, and even before that, over the last five or six years, we really have had to shift our mandate to providing those technology tools.
	So any business out there That needs to accept credit cards for payment or needs tools to be able to have your customers be able to trust you to take their credit card, be able to provide the service.
	And, you know, our approach is regardless of what the rules are, regardless of what the public confidence is from a health perspective, we need to deliver the tools to your small business to allow you to safely accept payment so that you can provide the good or service that your small business has.
	And in fact, I wanted to tell you, we even have a specialized division for lawyers.
	I know that you're a lawyer and have your own law firm.
	And we have a tool, for example, just to illustrate what I'm talking about.
	That's an email invoicing tool that automatically goes to puts the money in the right account in terms of how much of these funds need to go into a trust account for future services.
	And how much of these funds need to go to pay for services that you've already rendered?
	It's very important obviously for lawyers because of the rules that lawyers have to follow that those monies go into the right accounts.
	And so this system automates that ensures the accuracy.
	And allows a lawyer to send out an email to their client, just click to pay.
	But we're doing the same thing, for example, with veterinarians.
	We have a pay-by-car solution where the veterinarian can take the animal out to your car and they can text you to pay so you can just click the link and you can pay on your phone.
	And we're coming up with literally like 30, 40 different solutions like this right now for all of these various industries because we have to protect our Main Street businesses.
	Can you describe how it struck me how much a lot of the policies that have been announced appear to completely ignore Main Street in favor of Wall Street.
	I mean, there's the popular meme that says you can't be on the beach, but you can go inside to Walmart.
	And you can't go to your local store, your homegrown store, but you can go to the big box stores.
	Seeing the same thing in terms of what the Fed is doing.
	You've been following what the PPP program has done and failed to do.
	Can you talk about how some of the Those policy choices have impacted Main Street small businesses.
	Well, first and foremost, we live in an economy that's based on trying to build monopolies, and that's happening more and more.
	Peter Thiel wrote a book called Zero to One about 10 years ago, and it's probably the most influential book for people starting, you know, entrepreneurial tech type businesses that are trying to scale and dominate the world.
	And basically the point is if you can create a monopoly, you can stick your elbows out and you can crowd out all competition and then you can treat regular people with impunity.
	You can charge them whatever you want.
	You can start to cut back services and you can start to lay off employees.
	So that's the context that we came into this pandemic with.
	But then with the government policy of basically providing $4 billion of extra liquidity to those big companies, many of whom are taking that monopoly approach, and you see it, think of how many different ways you are nickel and dimed on a daily basis.
	By airlines, by hotels, by these large companies, by your cell phone company.
	There's so many different ways where this is impacting regular people and the approach that's really the Americans like solving approach for this is to have competition, to have small businesses.
	But small businesses are on the ropes and they have a lower share of the profits than ever.
	And the PPP program, while it did help many small businesses, the way it was designed was highly restrictive.
	And in some cases, I hate to say this, but I've heard from business owners that they took advantage of the PPP program and they're going to have their most profitable year ever because of the government assistance, which really makes my stomach just kind of cringe inside.
	I'm sure it does for you, too.
	And then we've had other businesses close the doors and say the way the rules for the PPP program were written.
	You have to spend all the money in the eight week period and then basically you're completely out of luck after those eight weeks.
	And what we didn't get was any kind of assistance from rent, from mortgages, all those sorts of things that are going to help these main street businesses.
	So I don't know what's going to happen with the virus.
	You know, I'm not a public health expert or anything like that, but my approach is if we are going to rely on small businesses, to take the brunt of the problem, shouldn't the small businesses be compensated for taking the brunt of that?
	And that would provide the right type of incentives for us and not only small businesses, but regular people.
	Can we send out a $2,000 monthly check to everybody out there until this pandemic is over, until we can open back our economy, until we can really fully recover from this?
	And it's not just the social distancing requirements from a regulation standpoint, which are very difficult on small businesses, but it's also rebuilding that public trust, rebuilding the consumer confidence.
	And so it's got to be a multi-pronged strategy, and we just have not done nearly enough.
	Yeah, I mean, especially from a constitutional law perspective, my view is that when the government shuts down your business effectively by making choices, whatever the basis or wisdom or lack of wisdom those choices may have been, it doesn't matter.
	That's the whole point of the Just Compensation Clause.
	That we don't take somebody's business or property without compensating for them.
	They should not be the ones to absorb all the risk.
	It looks like they're absorbing all the pain, but not getting any of the benefit of what close to 10 trillion that has been spent in one way, shape, or form between the Fed and the governments on supposed to be relief for the people suffering the most.
	In that context, there's been a lot of talk about V-shaped recoveries.
	You've been mentioning that when you do this kind of damage to small business, it's not that easy.
	Could you talk about how this may not be a V-shaped recovery for Main Street America?
	Yeah, well, you know, because small businesses are so on the ropes and because regular Americans have been squeezed for so long, we're going to have a demand issue at some point.
	And so we're all reliant on that.
	The shift of so much concentration, well, since the pandemic started, billionaires have added $50 billion to their wealth.
	And almost half of that has gone to one man that doesn't live too far from me, Jeff Bezos.
	And when all that wealth is concentrated on top, that's not wealth really for spending, that's wealth for investing.
	But that investment wants the greatest return possible.
	So they're putting it into these types of companies to act like a monopoly.
	There is a sense that these companies are using public resources to increase their advantage over small businesses.
	And you have the everyday Americans that are being left behind.
	Those everyday Americans.
	Did we lose them?
	Ah.
	We'll be reconnecting here in just one minute as we get him back up.
	We won't blame Jeff Bezos for that part.
	Do we have him?
	Yeah, so we need to do a complete 180 degree about face in this situation and stop thinking about bailing out the huge companies.
	Stop thinking about providing more liquidity to the huge companies.
	And it really is going to have to be a bottom up recovery if we want it to be as short as possible.
	And I think we're going to have to do it eventually.
	The longer we wait to really compensate and take care of the people at the bottom, Of the economic ladder that are bearing the brunt of this the longer it's going to take for us to get our economy back into shape and the sad thing is that the huge companies and the wealthy people they don't have the same incentives to take care of that because they're being so well taken care of.
	I mean, I think I saw a study recently, two different studies.
	One that was 40% of the jobs lost are likely not coming back, according to the University of Chicago.
	And then in addition, over 40% of the job losses have occurred with people that make $40,000 or less.
	And that's going to trigger cash hoarding, it's going to trigger all those other problems.
	Could you talk about how much it's those everyday people's employment and ability to spend and confidence in what's going forward that really drives whether the economy can bounce back or not.
	Yeah, that's right.
	And so there's kind of two ways that those people are being affected.
	One, a lot of them are essential workers, right?
	And so if they're concerned about their health, if they're in an at-risk population or what have you, they may have to choose between risking their lives Or risking their lives on the other side economically.
	And that's brutal on the one side.
	And on the other side, as you said, 40% of those people have lost their incomes, lost their job, without even having the opportunity to make that choice.
	And so that is so clear where the investment needs to be made.
	And I'm hoping that all of our politicians and, you know, at this point, I'll take a way of solving this from anybody.
	I don't care what side of the political aisle it comes from at all.
	We just need to support those people that are most affected.
	And we also don't know.
	I mean, the coronavirus, you know, could easily go away very quickly and it could easily stay around for a long time.
	The epidemiologists that I speak to, They really say they don't know what's going to happen, so they're monitoring it.
	And I think we need to steel ourselves, prepare ourselves for all circumstances and every dollar that we, for example, I heard there was a tax cut for real estate billionaires that was put into the CARES Act that was supposed to be to recover for Main Street.
	That dollar is a dollar that could be going to all of the people that are watching this into your pocket.
	And the only thing that we all need to do is raise our voice in unison.
	I've been on every side of the political spectrum.
	You know, I grew up reading the Bible literally an hour a day out loud, memorizing an hour a day, and then studying theology from a Christian perspective an hour a day every day for school and homeschooling.
	I was, you know, listening to Rush Limbaugh from 10 to 1 every day.
	And, you know, I have other opinions that are more on the progressive or liberal side.
	So I don't care about those kind of things.
	I love and care about everybody.
	And I think we need to set aside any of those grievances that we have and really raise our voice in unison, come together.
	And realize that what brings us together is so much than what tears us apart.
	And it really is becoming a situation where the majority of Americans are being left behind.
	So if we just all get together and get past anything that might be dividing us, we can overcome this together with our votes and by asking and demanding that our politicians look at us and acknowledge us in this process.
	No doubt about it.
	What do you think led to your concern to sort of ordinary people?
	Because what has been lost in a lot of this debate is it's the politically protected who get protected rather than ordinary people on Main Street.
	Yeah, I'll give you two answers if that's okay.
	So one is the one that I give more often, which is that I, you know, as my parents, my parents, neither one of them have a college degree.
	I'm the fourth of six kids and they homeschooled and raised six kids.
	We were out, you know, gardening in the backyard.
	Doing chores.
	I mean, my parents worked so hard, as you could imagine, you know, in their early 20s, starting to have kids and raising six kids.
	All six of their kids graduated from college.
	All six of their kids are successful.
	The other five are all married, so I'm the only one they're still waiting on there.
	But, you know, my parents were such a great example.
	But the other thing, and they're definitely, like I say, on the conservative side of things in pretty much every way you could imagine, But also I've found that there are people on the progressive side, because I live now in Seattle, and there's people on the progressive side that have just influenced me a lot as well and have that same genuine care.
	And so it's cool that I've seen those two things overlapping.
	And I think that the people that I go to work with every day at Gravity, they basically just want to help small businesses succeed.
	They'll walk away from a date or a weekend or they'll give up a day off to go help a small business.
	And whenever I talk to any of our clients, they say, wow, how do you have employees that are so dedicated to us?
	And I just pinched myself because a lot of those people that I work with every day, they were making before $30,000, $35,000 a year.
	And believe it or not, they were working just as hard back then as when they started making $70,000 or more.
	And so they're my inspiration every day today.
	But I have to also thank my family and my parents and acknowledge what a huge advantage that was and benefit that was to have parents and a family like that.
	How much are your small business customers and clients describing how much stress they're under right now?
	I feel like I get kicked in the stomach about 10 times a day right now.
	You know, I haven't done it as much, but I admitted to my team that, you know, for the first six or eight weeks of the whole crisis, because, you know, it hit us here in Seattle early, I was bawling my eyes out for 20-30 minutes a day over these small businesses, over what was going on with them.
	And I also have seen tragedy on the health side directly related to the virus, but I've seen far more, as I know many people have, small businesses and people's life savings being ruined.
	And I literally see a story of somebody's life savings and small business being ruined multiple times every day, people that I've known for more than a decade.
	And these are the people that I started my company to serve when I was 17, I was in a rock band, a Christian rock band, and my band broke up.
	And there was a coffee shop owner that we used to play in that consoled me and let me work with her and help her negotiate her credit card processing for Moxie Java, Caldwell, Idaho, her coffee shop that we used to play at.
	And that was how I got my start in business.
	And although there was a period of time where I was making a lot of money, that's not why The reason why I got into this was to help people like Heather, and I've been able to see that over the 18 years that I've been working on this business.
	And to see all of that hard work and risk, really financial and economic heroes that invest in young people, train them, teach them how to get ahead in life and then set them free to another job or keep them around.
	These are the heroes that are being squeezed out of our economy right now and we really need them.
	How much longer can some of them survive if various forms of lockdown politics continues in different parts of the country?
	Well, without any kind of change or assistance, we're talking, you know, a matter of weeks and not months.
	And that is a very scary thing.
	But we're trying to extend that because, you know, wherever you stand on what would be the right, you know, kind of policies, What's true is none of us can just on our own control that and these small businesses therefore are kind of victims to the virus and to the social distancing policies.
	And, and the interaction between the two.
	And so that's why it's so important for us to get these tools into the hands of those small business owners.
	But we can't possibly keep up with these huge companies that are, that really are run like monopolies and are funded to be monopolies someday.
	So for example, you know, we have like less than 1% of the sales people on our staff of some of the big companies in our industry.
	And they don't necessarily have the wherewithal or the will to support these small businesses with having those contactless payment solutions that can not just deal with social distancing, but also restore consumer confidence.
	So to the extent that you have a small business owner in your life that you care about, you know, let us help them to see if we can maybe come up with some way that they can continue to engage in their business.
	Obviously, you know, some people are in industries where it's really, really hard.
	And for them, you know, we have to give them all the support we can because every dollar that we give to a small business right now, instead of Amazon, instead of Walmart, instead of Starbucks, is keeping that business open for a little bit longer and keeping their employees employed for a little bit longer.
	But we need to give them the technology and tools to be able to accept that payment.
	Yeah, that reminds me of the old populist revolution from which the word came from after the 19th century, where it started out, before it was ever political, started out as just a lot of small businesses and small farmers supporting one another to be able to resist the monopolies of the railroads and the cartels and the economic cartels that were coming down the pipeline.
	Can you talk about the importance of small businesses and individuals finding ways to support small businesses, particularly to keep them alive in this pandemic political environment?
	Yeah, well, the big guys, you know, the Amazons of the world, they hire engineers to basically build these what Warren Buffett calls moats around their business.
	What he means by a moat is that they can basically do whatever they want and they can crowd out competition.
	And so sometimes it takes a little bit extra thought.
	Because the small business is not tracking your movement everywhere online.
	The small business is not necessarily keeping all of your payment info, you know, on hand 24 hours a day, ready to take your money.
	Those are practices that while they do create convenience for us, they also could be seen as an invasion of privacy.
	And there's a lot of engineers, very highly paid, you know, software engineers that are building those solutions, and even more highly paid venture capitalists that are funding them.
	So it can take an extra step, an extra thought to say, hey, can I walk down to my neighborhood hardware store and buy some batteries rather than buying it on Amazon?
	Now, can we can we work together and build some type of solution where those small businesses could band together and compete with Amazon?
	Absolutely we can and absolutely we will.
	And we're working on thinking through all those But in the meantime, we all as educated consumers can be a lifeline and understand that our dollars go further in our community when we support those small business owners.
	Oh, exactly.
	Dan, can you tell people where they can find you and if they want to use your business's services in helping protect small business in this pandemic era where small business is particularly at risk?
	Yeah, well, I love engaging with you on Twitter and I'm at Dan Price Seattle on Twitter.
	You can also email me dprice at gravitypayments.com.
	That's my personal email address.
	It goes to me and our website gravitypayments.com.
	A small business can go on there and they can schedule a one-on-one personalized consultation for what their needs are in this pandemic.
	And they can talk through somebody who's a specialist in understanding how to restore that consumer confidence Right on our website, GravityPayments.com.
	Fantastic!
	Thanks for being with us, Dan.
	Dan is one of the last true Americans in the small business world.
	Thanks for being with us.
	Thank you.
	Thanks for having me.
	Absolutely.
	We'll be right back after the break to take more of your calls.
	Welcome back to American Countdown.
	In this segment, we'll be taking your calls from you, the jury, and get your input.
	You can call in at 877-789-2539.
	That's 877-789-2539.
	at 877-789-2539.
	That's 877-789-2539.
	Or if you're calling internationally, 512-646-1776.
	That's 512-646-1776.
	We'll take your calls and try to give you the best answers that we can.
	In this same context, there's a friend of mine, a lawyer up in Canada, who has reached a level of frustration and exacerbation with the various craziness and looniness that has been taking place across the Western world in these shutdown policies and politics.
	Let's take a look at one of his recent videos where he explains his frustration with what's happening in the West.
	Let's look at video clip number one.
	I am not into those expletive-filled rants, and there is no but.
	but I just have to get a few things off my chest.
	Viva Fry, Montreal litigator turned YouTuber, and for those of you with astute observation skills, you might notice a little something right there on my head.
	It's not a pimple.
	Earlier today, I smashed my head on an ornamental piece of art I got for my wife for her birthday a few years back.
	It's a bird.
	It's a roadrunner made out of recycled industrial metal, like rebar for the bass, and the beak itself is made out of sharp metal.
	It was tucked in the corner of our living room, the birdseed was underneath it, and I just wanted to fill up the bird feeders with birdseed, and I bent over to get the birdseed, and the beak smashed me in the head.
	People in the park across the street heard me scream.
	It was straight out of the Pits of Despair from The Princess Bride.
	That is the sound of ultimate suffering.
	It hurt.
	It hurt.
	And with the headache I have right now, it is the perfect opportunity for me to rant and get a few things off of my chest.
	I am, like many others I suspect, frustrated and concerned with what I see going on in the world today.
	There is a meme going around the internet to the effect that it only took a virus with an over 99% survival rate to cause us all to give up our most basic rights and civil liberties.
	And what makes these memes so effective and so powerful is the element of truth that is ingrained in a short, concise message.
	I was having a virtual discussion with one of my friends on this very subject, and this person told me, you know, scientists and governments alike throughout the world are in agreement that the best way to slow down the spread of the Myotronosirus is through continued social distancing.
	To which I responded, this is always going to be true.
	There are no viruses in the Antarctica, but this was not the scope of the project upon which we embarked.
	When the contract was entered into and the lockdown announced two or three months ago, depending on where you are, it was never to stop the spread of the virus entirely.
	It was to slow it down, flatten the curve, so that we would not overwhelm our hospitals, so that we can get the hospital beds in order, the ventilators in order, the PPE in order, etc.
	And we did that.
	We accomplished that mission.
	Exceptions aside, hospitals were not overwhelmed.
	They had the required ventilators, many of which remain unused.
	Emergency field hospitals that were set up just in case the hospital system got overloaded were dismantled, having never treated any patients.
	We entered into a contract with a clear goal in sight.
	We accomplished that goal, and somewhere along the lines, it went from flatten the curve to stop the spread altogether.
	It went from temporary lockdown to indefinite lockdown, from free state to police state overnight.
	It went from the goal of flatten the curve to a virtual international competition as to who could enact the most stringent rules and regulations.
	It went from who could enact the most draconian executive orders to who could enforce them with an iron fist.
	It's an amazing thing.
	Google the news on Sweden and just read it in chronological order.
	When Sweden didn't go the route of draconian, almost tyrannical lockdown like the rest of the world, everybody else was saying, just wait two weeks, their numbers are going to be through the roof, they're going to suffer the consequences.
	Two weeks later, when those predictions of doom and gloom do not come to fruition, wait another two weeks.
	A month later, when those predictions of doom and gloom again do not come to fruition, everybody says, oh, well, look how badly they're doing in comparison to the other Nordic countries who impose draconian, tyrannical lockdowns.
	When the doom and gloom predictions never come to fruition and the spike never comes, then the argument turns into one of, well, look at their death rate per capita compared to the other countries that were on these crippling lockdowns.
	As if somewhere along the line it became an international competition of sorts among nations to be the best, civil rights be damned.
	As if the only meaningful statistic on earth right now to govern national and international policy is the number of My Sharona Cyrus deaths.
	As if there's not going to be some necessary casualty trade-off between the basic suspension of modern preventive medicine.
	As if there's not going to be some massive casualty trade-off for people not getting elective surgeries.
	People not going to hospitals even when they need to because they have been traumatized so much by the government around them that they are not going to the hospitals when they need to.
	In Canada, as at shooting this vlog, we are at 5,909 fatalities as a result of the Myochronosiris in Canada.
	5,909 fatalities in Canada and roughly half of those come from long-term health care facilities or old-person homes.
	Montreal is being regarded as the Maestro and Osiris epicenter of Canada.
	We have over 2,300 fatalities.
	And you know what?
	Almost 85% of them are coming from long-term health care facilities or old-people homes.
	We're closing schools, cancelling summer camp, blocking off playgrounds for a demographic that is virtually unaffected by the sirens, while failing to protect the people who are most susceptible to it.
	Our government is more intent on forcing the forfeiture of civil liberties than actually doing what is required to protect those who are most at risk.
	How is that not frustrating?
	Now, I know some of you are going to say the numbers would be much worse if we were not doing what we're doing.
	Others might say that while there are no fatalities for certain age brackets, there is nonetheless potentially some evidence to suggest that some kids will have lasting effects if they catch the Cyrus.
	But here you see we have moved the target from the measurable and achievable flattening the curve so as not to overwhelm the healthcare facilities, to the immeasurable and unachievable goal of stopping the spread altogether.
	If the government had initially said, we go into lockdown until we achieve the discretionary level, or lack thereof, of transmission of the Microna Cyrus, according to the government opinions, I think we might have had a different perspective of this proposed lockdown.
	The government effectively presented us a bike and said, this bike costs $500, go out and make $500 so you can buy this bike.
	We go out, we make $500, we come back, the government says, no, now it costs $1,000, go out and make another $500.
	We go out and make another $500, come back, the government says, you know what, I don't know how much I want to sell this to you for, but $1,000 is not enough anymore.
	People who statistically don't need the protection are on lockdown.
	They're unable to work.
	They're unable to make money, to pay taxes, to support the very healthcare system that we didn't want to overload from the beginning.
	Above and beyond that, because people have been put out of work by the government, now the government is saying, here's $2,000 a month until you can go back to work if your job exists when you go back.
	People are not working to make the money to pay the taxes that are required to support the healthcare systems while the government is giving them $2,000 a month in the interim.
	People who statistically, based on their demographics, were at minimal risk of the mitorona virus in the first place.
	The livelihoods of people, their very existence, is being destroyed indefinitely by a government who then says, come to us for support while we destroy your lives.
	We'll let you have your life back when we achieve the goals we now think we need to achieve, which were not the goals we told you we needed to achieve when we set out on this adventure together.
	How is that not frustrating?
	And the level of terror, fear, and trauma that has been instilled in the population, it's over the top!
	Stop!
	We now have people who feel compelled to wear face masks, not in crowded stores, not in hospitals, but outside while jogging in open air.
	The checkpoints and questions to enter stores, the social distancing, the constant reminders to wash your hands even if you haven't left your house in three days.
	It's created a level of paranoia such that people are wearing face masks in open air when there is not another person in sight.
	I mean, that is like putting on suntan lotion while you're in your living room.
	People have been conditioned to fear other people.
	Walking on the street, it's like people think that if they come within two meters of you, they're somehow going to get electrocuted to death.
	People literally jumping in the street to avoid getting within two meters of another person as though something can just jump across, grab them by the face, and suffocate them.
	I would think that the greater danger than coming within two meters of somebody on the street is jumping into the street and getting hit by a car!
	We are being conditioned and traumatized to fear other people.
	At the same time, we are being taught that we live at the mercy of our government.
	Our very freedoms, our very livelihoods, our very existence exists at the whim of the government.
	We have now learned that if the government deems a risk to be great enough, they can take your existence away.
	They can lock you in your homes indefinitely with no end in sight, with no objective in sight.
	Loss of our most basic civil liberties.
	Being conditioned to fear other people.
	Totally ignoring the casualty trade-off that is necessarily going to follow from these draconian measures.
	Now we're being warned that as a result of the cure implemented by the government, it might cause hundreds of millions of people to starve to death.
	What do you think the governments of the world are going to do then?
	They're going to find a solution to the bigger problem they created while trying to solve another problem.
	The measures implemented don't even make any sense.
	Canceling school for a demographic that statistically has virtually no risk.
	Okay, it's not being done for them.
	It's to protect those who are at risk.
	Well, here's an idea then.
	Protect those who are at risk while allowing those who are least at risk to get back to life.
	And then to add insult to injury, while our government is not even sitting regularly, you have Prime Minister Justin Trudeau passing sweeping gun bans by order and counsel during a pandemic when the government is not sitting.
	And for anybody who has not read that lengthy order, it was not drafted overnight.
	It had clearly been in the works for some time and our Prime Minister decides that the best time to pass a ban is by order and counsel during a pandemic while government is not even sitting.
	It doesn't even matter if you are 1000% in agreement with the law.
	That should be disconcerting for everybody.
	And what I find most frustrating and disconcerting about it is that people have just accepted that this is the way it is.
	We have now established the precedent that the government can destroy your livelihoods, take away your fundamental rights and liberties, lock you in your house indefinitely if it determines that the risks warrant it.
	All of this over a virus with a survival rate of over 99%.
	Alright, that is my rant.
	Those are my frustrations.
	I'm not sure if I feel any better, and I'll see how I feel about this video when editing it, but if you are watching it, it is because I have published it.
	Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
	One more thing, the most important thing.
	We were told that we need to go on lockdown to flatten the curve so that we can get ventilators, PPE, and medicines to treat those people who are going to need them going into our healthcare system.
	What did we learn after the lockdown went into effect?
	We were lacking ventilators, we were lacking PPE, and we were totally dependent on China for medicines.
	We discovered that we didn't even have the equipment we were going to need and we needed to buy it from China.
	I discovered for the first time in my entire life how utterly dependent we were on China, not just for things that we don't really need, but for essential medical supplies and medicines.
	And if there is one lesson that we need to draw from this as a nation is that we cannot be reliant on any foreign country for essential medical supplies and essential supplies altogether.
	We need to be independent.
	We need to have stockpiles.
	We need to be able to produce what we need at home.
	And we need to be able to do this so that the next time there is a problem like this, we don't need to go on lockdown, cripple the economy, put people out of work.
	We can just respond to our own needs for ourselves.
	Any country that is reliant on another country for essential supplies, regardless of whether or not that other country is hostile or friendly, is itself not a free country.
	They are held hostage to that other country.
	Alright, and now I'm really done.
	And with that said, if you like my videos and you like my content, please be sure to like, share, subscribe, hit the notification bell, drop a comment in the comment section below because it feeds the algorithm.
	If you want to support the channel, all of these support links are in the pinned comment, but above all else, take care of yourselves.
	It looks like we are going to start heading back to some degree of normalcy to the extent that that exists once we are all allowed to.
	Summer is hopefully coming, both physically and metaphorically, and now you know your vlog.
	Peace out.
	That was from Viva Frye.
	You can follow him on YouTube at Viva Frye, or you can follow him on Twitter at the same place, same location, The Viva Frye.
	But that's someone that's sort of centrist, sort of moderate mindset and personality politically, who's increasingly exacerbated.
	By the lockdown policies and politics and the various pretexts and excuses the politicians have used to try to suppress and censor speech, to try to deprive us of our core liberties, while they suspend basic aspects of constitutional protections, as well as shutting down the public economy.
	Steven Crowder had a similar reaction in explaining just how many wrong, how many times the modelers and quote-unquote experts have been wrong.
	Let's take a look at his most recent summation of that, video clip number four.
	They were wrong about death totals, fatality rates.
	They were wrong about masks.
	They were wrong about ventilators.
	They were wrong about the curve.
	They were wrong about social distancing changing the curve, whereas the actual change occurred before social distancing.
	They were wrong about economic impact.
	They have been wrong about everything.
	What does it mean, trust experts, and how do you pick which experts?
	Has this pandemic changed your faith in some institutions?
	Now, that institution could be the WHO, though we would not advise that.
	You should trust everything the WHO says, including that the coronavirus cannot be transmitted from human to human contact, and it was created by the Marines and Avatar.
	So, nothing we'd say would go against the hoop, but let me just be really clear about this.
	This right now, in the face of overwhelming data, is one of the greatest hoodwinks ever in the American public.
	As far as the transition from laws or protocols that would be appropriate initially, without data, which we all understood, we all got on board with, the American society's good nature has been preyed upon now.
	And it is at a point, I think most Americans are fed up.
	Exactly.
	The good nature of the American public has been preyed upon by politicians pushing false narratives in order to seize power and shut down the public economy.
	It's led to memes like this one, if we look at chart 29, where people are demanding everybody suddenly wear masks, people are being arrested, people are being laid off, people are being denied access to essential goods unless they wear a mask.
	Well, take a look at chart 29.
	It's a good little meme where a person says, you should wear a mask even if you don't need one.
	And the guy responds, I sort of like carrying a gun.
	And then, of course, the liberal mask wearer just turns into an NPC character out of a game.
	Indeed, let's take a look at an Instagram from a doctor about masks in chart number 31.
	And he explains, masks, OK, he's going to explain because he's been a surgeon of 30 years.
	He goes, folks, let a surgeon of 30 years, aka me, teach you about masks.
	COVID-19 virus particle size averages 125 nanometers, or 0.125 microns.
	The range of the particle size is 0.06 microns to 0.14 microns.
	.125 microns.
	The range of the particle size is .06 microns to .14 microns.
	One needs an electronic microscope to even see a COVID-19 virus particle.
	Meanwhile, the N95 mask filters, and those are much better than bandanas or anything else, even those filter only down to 0.3 microns.
	So even the N95 masks blocks few, if any, virus particles.
	This is a simple fact.
	Other surgical masks, homemade masks, and bandanas do the following.
	They allow free passage both ways in and out of COVID-19 virus particles.
	Secondly, they become a warm, damp, or moist reservoir of such particles in asymptomatic carriers.
	For surgeons, years of training, intimidation, and humiliation teach us to touch nothing but our surgical field.
	Laypeople constantly touch, rearrange, and manipulate their masks, wonderfully inoculating thousands of virus particles onto their bare hands, or even worse, clubbed hands.
	So these masks encourage the transmission, not discourage it.
	And he goes on about the danger and the false sense of security of masks.
	And yet, for example, I as a lawyer will not be allowed to go into courtrooms all across the country as more and more courts order me to wear a mask walking in.
	I'm going to have to challenge that, of course.
	The nature of it, but people are being threatened with their jobs, being threatened with essential services, being threatened with violence.
	Here in Austin, Texas, a person ran after a customer at a 7-Eleven.
	She had a bat in her hand screaming at the guy because he wasn't wearing a mask.
	By the way, she wasn't wearing a mask.
	That's the nature of the kind of craziness and zaniness that we're seeing, witnessing and leading to the objections of people like Viva Frye, Steven Crowder, and ordinary people all across the country.
	And on the economic front, along the lines of what Dan was talking about, let's take a look at chart number 30, which shows the National Association of Home Builders showing how much home building activity has fallen off a cliff.
	It too has dropped precipitously, almost to the lowest levels during the last home-driven recession of 2008-2009.
	That's what we're seeing economically.
	In the same vein, as another article reports, millions of Americans skip credit card payments, They're skipping car payments.
	They're also skipping mortgage payments.
	They're also skipping rent payments because they're not in a position to be able to afford it or have access to it.
	That's the economic effect as more and more people that do have resources are hoarding it rather than spending it, reflecting the crisis of consumer confidence that happens when 40% of the people who rely upon their job for daily and weekly economic and physical sustenance are laid off without any prospect of reemployment anytime soon.
	Indeed, as Zero Hedge describes in an article called, the con-man elites that want to, quote, save us from COVID-19.
	Going into how the Fed is helping out the politically protected allies, not protecting Main Street or the ordinary person.
	Talking about how there's going to be shifts in the manufacturing base to favor certain politically preferred classes rather than others.
	The loss of jobs, the loss of economic opportunity, the deprivation of civil liberty.
	The article goes into great detail about what's really happening in these so-called protective classes who are effectively protecting themselves, not us.
	In the same way, the Federalists did a study of setting out across America to discover the state of Main Street.
	And what they found was that two months of shutdown have exhausted the economy, strained the food supply, ransacked treasuries across the country, and threatened to destroy Main Street for good.
	That businesses that have been shuttered, that have been selectively left open, those that are politically protected, the big box retailers and the like, whereas your small shop operations may never be able to come back.
	Indeed, estimates as many as millions of businesses lost forever.
	So you heard Dan talk about businesses that have been around for decades having to shut down already, and others on the verge of having to shut down some more.
	In the same context, in fact, as the New York Times admits, a wave of small business closures is on the way.
	And they talk about, can Washington save it or stop it?
	Well, they haven't done anything really to do so to date.
	The Paycheck Protection Program, as Dan described, only partially worked because it had so many rules and regulations.
	It was designed for lobbyists who knew how to get the cash rather than a lot of your small businesses.
	So some of your politically connected businesses were able to protect themselves.
	Some of your well-informed businesses were able to protect themselves.
	But a lot of your mom-pop shops are gone and gone forever because there's been no meaningful effort to reach out to them.
	There's been no just compensation for the taking of their property by all of these politicians.
	Meanwhile, as Dan described, American billionaires got $434 billion richer in just the last two months.
	Just to give you some scale and sense of it.
	It's the big politically protected groups that are getting the Fed It's the big politically protected groups that are getting disproportionate amounts of the stimulus funding.
	It's the big politically protected groups that are getting tax loopholes related to these issues.
	It's the big politically protected groups that have been left open.
	It's the big politically protected groups that have had more and more business shift in their direction from the online economy.
	That's the nature of what's been really happening is all of these crises are often used as a means to shift Political and economic power.
	That while you're distracted by the crisis, you don't see the power shifting, happening right behind that crisis.
	Indeed, as Bloomberg reports, the U.S.
	equity markets are continuing to boom back, even while there is a doom economy everywhere else.
	Sooner or later, that likely will catch up at some point to pension funds and other institutional investors.
	But for now, the Fed is propping up to politically protect it on Wall Street.
	Meanwhile, as AP reports, amid the pandemic, the world's working poor have to hustle to even survive.
	Indeed, they go through the various working poor families around the world who are having to, just to be able to feed their families on a weekly basis, come up with the most creative mechanisms available to them simply to achieve that small objective.
	That's the nature of what's been happening, and so it's no surprise that more and more people have voiced outrage at it.
	Now, we're going to be taking more of your calls in the bottom half of the hour.
	You can call in to the number and we'll take more of those calls.
	In that context, we also want to support our sponsor, InfoWarsStore.com.
	You can call 877-789-2539.
	That's 877-789-2539 and we'll take your calls in the bottom half of the hour.
	In the same vein, the store that makes this show possible, that provides this platform for independent information that's cross-pollinated ideologically and intellectually with just outsider ideas that the gated institutional narrative wants to foreclose and prohibit you from hearing.
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	It's healthier because they have a variety of health products that are some of the best out there, period.
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	In that context, the various products you have, one of them that you can get is called Vitamin Mineral Fusion.
	So it's a product that I use that just has a wide range of things in it.
	And you can look on the back.
	You can also go to the site and you can see everything that's in it.
	And then you can Google it and look at what the potential benefits are.
	As just one example, this has zinc in it.
	And zinc has, of course, come up in the news because it ends up being beneficial in other contexts when combined with other products for particular health purposes.
	But in this context, I was just curious about zinc.
	And it was fascinating to me the number of people who had never heard of zinc, had no idea about zinc, didn't know if its connection is being part of a therapeutic treatment that was related to what the president was talking about.
	Well, zinc is something that has a wide range of benefits to it, and to just give you an example of what you can do by looking at what's on the list of the product itself at InfoWars Store, you just go and Google and research for yourself.
	And one of the things you can find is, I'll look up the Mayo Clinic, talking about zinc.
	And how does it describe zinc?
	Because I ran into people who thought this is just some sort of snake oil or fake thing.
	It's amazing, the people that think big pharma is trustworthy, and ordinary natural health products that have been around for centuries somehow are bad for you.
	It's an incredible world in which we live, that the gated media would have us, have this modern-day idiocracy they want to impose upon us.
	But here's what the Mayo Clinic says about zinc.
	Zinc is a nutrient found throughout your body.
	It helps your immune system.
	It helps metabolism.
	It helps both of those function.
	It's important to wound healing.
	It's important to your sense of taste, to your sense of smell.
	It talks about how you can get it not only through various food products, but you can also use it to treat colds.
	It can also decrease the effectiveness of other drugs and it can have other side effects and you can look at what is most beneficial for you.
	But it goes through all the detail about how zinc deficiency can be a major problem, the ways in which it can work with wound healing, that oral zinc supplements can reduce the symptoms of diarrhea in children, it can help deal with age-related degeneration, a whole range of products.
	These are the kind of things that are in the various products at InfoWarsStore.com.
	You can go there, you can shop there, you can find out which products you like, which products fit what you want.
	You get them also, that's the healthier part of InfoWarsStore.com, aside from the small business impact that it also has.
	The wealthier part is these products are at the best level at the lowest price.
	So you'll frequently find they are substantially discounted.
	Many of these right now are at 40, 50, 60 percent off even with the sale currently going for Memorial Day weekend.
	And on top of that, they're already the sales price is substantially discounted off of what you could get anywhere else in the public marketplace.
	At the same time, so that's how you can get wealthier in the process.
	And you can also get wiser.
	And you get wiser by both supporting your own health and becoming more self-educated about your personal health.
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	By being able to not be locked into the gated institutional narrative governing what you're allowed to see, hear, and think.
	So please support our sponsor and make it to continue to make this show available to you, but also to continue to support your own health, to support your own wealth, to support your own wisdom, and to support small business in America.
	In that same context, what we are told is the thing that we are supposed to be waiting on is the solution to COVID-19.
	And why the lockdown must continue unabated is we need a Bill Gates vaccine for it.
	Well, let's look at a little clip where they were talking about Bill Gates' birth controls ideas and about the utility of a remote control birth control.
	Who exactly would benefit the most from a remote control chip in your body?
	Would you need a remote control for that?
	Let's take a look at clip number eight.
	The Gates Foundation is developing a new way to deliver drugs to your body in a small sort of chip and capsule that goes underneath your skin that can be controlled remotely.
	So this has huge implications for things like contraceptives.
	So say for example you want to take birth control and be able to stop and you know start at any time you could theoretically do that by going to a doctor and wear it for up to 16 years.
	The other benefit of sort of this device is that because it's in your body it could more easily Yes, wouldn't that be exciting?
	Bill Gates have a remote control chip in your body for the whole world.
	In that context, there was a response to the Gates vaccine idea by the inimitable Michelle Malkin.
	have positive things that could come out of this.
	I think it's incredibly exciting, both.
	Ah, yes.
	Wouldn't that be exciting?
	Bill Gates have a remote control chip in your body for the whole world.
	In that context, there was a response to the Gates vaccine idea by the inimitable Michelle Malkin.
	Let's take a look at what she thought about this in clip number three.
	Silicon Valley has paired up with the likes of the Bill Gates and the big pharma companies and the control freaks to push vaccine skeptics off of the internet and off of the public square.
	They can't do it anymore.
	And there's a parallel here with the America First movement, because the more they try to squash these voices, the more they proliferate.
	The more that you tell normal members of the public, you can't watch that, you can't see that, you can't say that, what happens?
	There's a backlash.
	And that backlash has been phenomenal.
	I don't think anybody who has worked in this arena of raising doubts and questions about the conflicts of interest financially, the ideological agenda, the threat to parental sovereignty, the junk science that's been used, the cover-ups, the conspiracies.
	Yes, sometimes conspiracies are true.
	They're not conspiracy theories.
	They're conspiracy truths.
	They're conspiracy facts.
	But I don't think anybody who has worked in this area and has become an advocate could have ever predicted how huge the backlash has been.
	And there was a poll this week, I can't remember how many people it was, what the number was, but it showed that increasing numbers of people have stood up and said, I will not take the Gates vaccine.
	Indeed, the Gates vaccine is educating more and more people about some of the risks in that aspect of the world.
	And instead, people are beginning to second-guess and question the institutional narrative, whether it relates to economic policy, lockdown policy, pandemic data, vaccine utility or health, or any of the rest of it.
	So when we come back from the break, we'll be taking your calls and answering your questions.
	Feel free to ask what you want.
	We'll answer it the best we can.
	Try to have your question within about a minute or so so that we can get to as many people as possible.
	But we're here to answer your questions in ways that our politicians and press are continually trying to censor and suppress.
	So come back and join us right after the break.
	Welcome back to American Countdown.
	Even large sections of the left and we're seeing more cross-ideological, cross-pollination ideas questioning the wisdom of having Bill Gates run the world.
	Consider is this article from Vox titled, there are trade-offs we make when we depend on billionaires to save us.
	As the beginning sentence describes it, it's deeply frightening to be relying upon billionaires to have this degree of power and influence.
	That how the pandemic policies and politics of these politically connected billionaires increasingly reveals their power and how entrenched it has become over the past decade.
	They note that it's these billionaires, particularly Bill Gates, but others as well, in alliance with him, dating back to that secret meeting in 2009 he had, were the principal ones behind the pandemic models.
	Also the principal ones behind vaccines research and promotion.
	And as they point out, who elected Gates to be this guy?
	That the anti-democratic nature of this reliance is itself sufficiently problematic to second-guess it and question it.
	Indeed, they also note this tends to lead to political insulation for these billionaires' corporations.
	It also, in turn, enhances their legacy and individual immunity from political second-guessing by the press and the public, while it is enhancing the power of big tech and their institutional corporations that they are part of.
	Indeed, as another left-leaning publication entitled it, quote, the flip side to Bill Gates' charity billions, talking about how Andrew Bowman has been doing an investigation about the, quote, unpleasant side effects of all of Bill Gates' disproportionate and disparate power.
	The way it goes back and flows back into various Bill Gates designed economic interest and policy interest without full discussion, without transparency, without elections, without democratic checks meaningfully being done.
	Indeed, as the article talks about, accountable to whom?
	Because it appears Bill Gates has created a circular structure where the people he's accountable to are the people he put into that position of power in the first instance.
	And indeed, that leads to other serious questions and controversies about Gates.
	That wasn't the only left-leaning publication to begin to question Bill Gates.
	The next was The Nation, as it's called Bill Gates Charity Paradox.
	Tim Schwab goes into detail about how in fact, first of all, that Netflix did a recent documentary series on Bill Gates called Inside Bill's Brain.
	What they didn't disclose is that the people producing it and profiting from that Netflix documentary are actually connected to Bill Gates himself.
	It's basically a hagiography, not a biography.
	It's not an investigative report, it's basically published propaganda, disguised as independent investigative work and research.
	And big media wonders why they are increasingly questioned and challenged in their institutional control of the Gatekeeper narrative.
	But that's not all.
	As it goes through, it talks about Bill Gates' control in a wide range of categories, has the nice book of Bill as Bill being our new Catholic inquisitor, our new Catholic priest for this era of pandemic politics, directing and manipulating politics at every level, and future economic policy.
	His ties, of course, to Warren Buffett.
	His ties to the other consequences that are occurring that he himself appears to either be politically or personally profit from.
	He may not be motivated by money.
	His motivation may be power, but it may be policy, but in either instance it's not been democratically approved and hasn't been meaningfully democratically checked because so much of the institutional media has been bought off effectively from questioning or criticizing him.
	That led to another independent publication questioning him.
	In the American Magazine, saying Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and the case against billionaire philanthropy as we know it.
	Going through all of the problems of this monopolistic philanthropy, to paraphrase Politico's EU article about Bill Gates in 2017, and all the political problems that flow from it.
	All the potential public health consequences that may be detrimental that flow from it.
	All the invasion of privacy that may be incidental to it.
	So more and more people are listening and getting the message about the problem of a Bill Gates monopolistic approach to philanthropy, to politics, to pandemic policy in particular.
	And consequently, it is starting to pollinate in a wide range of ideological and intellectual sectors, in large part because of the work done by you, the audience, and other people willing to raise these issues, willing to second guess it, willing to question it, and willing to spread the message, spread the news, spread the links, spread the stories, and get it out there.
	So you have played a critical, essential, and fundamental role as a jury checking the powers that be in much the same way a civil or criminal jury does and was intended to under the Constitution.
	But in that vein, let's go to you, the jury, and get some of your questions and get some of the best answers that we can provide.
	Let's go to Jefferson in Virginia.
	Good evening, Mr. Barnes.
	Thanks for taking my call.
	Yes, sir.
	Thank you.
	We are fighting.
	We're so ensnared in so many false narratives.
	Don't you think it's time, and I want to know if this is constitutional, for the United States to have a Truth and Reconciliation Commission where people can be summoned to appear and they don't get their Fifth Amendment protections.
	They just have to tell the truth and they can tell us all the crimes they committed and they have immunity for that, but they have to tell us the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
	Well, I mean, we should have something like that.
	I mean, if they wanted to restore credibility and confidence in the institutions that govern us, whether it be the press or whether it be the political class, then they would have a church-like committee to fully vet, fully investigate, fully discuss, become fully transparent about what they've done and what they did.
	We sort of did a version of that after the Nazi horrors with the Nuremberg investigation, the Nuremberg trials that led to Nuremberg conventions.
	Limiting human experimentation.
	Limiting biochemical weapons.
	Limiting that form of governance.
	Now, it at least established certain standards that everybody agreed they were supposed to be governed by.
	We'll be getting into next week whether or not that actually happened and occurred in the bioweapon atmosphere and environment.
	But you're absolutely right.
	We need both the investigative aspect, the church committee.
	The church committee was from Senator Frank Church from Idaho.
	He was one of the first senators, politicians ever spied on illegally by the National Security Agency after its formation.
	So he led with the sort of Watergate, post-Watergate reform Congress that promised to clean things up for the public.
	He created the first special select committee on the intelligence industry and infrastructure in the United States.
	And it was initially a select committee.
	It's subsequently become a permanent committee that has become captured by the very people they're supposed to be regulated.
	It's called regulatory capture.
	And that has led to, in fact, a lot of the today's Intelligence Committee is run by the Byrds and the Rubios, so we don't get what we're supposed to get and what we did get with the Church Committee.
	But I think you're right, we need more transparency, we need more honesty, we need more accuracy.
	As I have said before, confession is often a necessary component to contrition.
	And if we're going to have any degree of being able to come to remedy, to be able to trust, once again, these institutions and the individuals that are within them, we need to have full transparency.
	We need to have full investigative capabilities.
	We need to have a church-like committee.
	And there's no question that what you're talking about they often did to resolve civil wars, to get dictators to leave power.
	They had a form of it in South Africa.
	They had a form of it in other countries around the world.
	There's a certain degree of it that took place with Nuremberg, even though that was more accusatory, interrogatory, and punitive in character.
	It still had the same objective of at least establishing agreed social standards globally for how people could govern people in the future.
	So there's no question that can be the case.
	It probably should be the case.
	Constitutionally, there's the means to do so.
	The question is whether our political officials or public officials will ever agree or exceed to it.
	But the only way to get that to happen is to have more pressure on them.
	It's useful to remember that predicting that the church committee would out the radioactive experimentation that was taking place, the human experimentation that was taking place, MKUltra mind control projects that were taking place, the various overthrow attempts and foreign assassination attempts.
	All of that was outed in a very short time period in the mid-1970s by Senator Frank Church, but just three years before, you would have imagined it couldn't possibly have happened.
	Arguably, in fact, COINTELPRO, Hoover, the rogue agents within the CIA and the NSA felt they had the most power, and there was evidence that they had more power than ever.
	They were experimenting on the U.S.
	population at an extraordinary rate.
	In the 1960s, early 70s, even to the point the Joint Chiefs of Staff was recommending in Operation Northwoods that they stage terrorist events in the United States as false flag events to justify a war against Cuba.
	So they were at the peak of their pernicious misuse and abuse of their power, and yet within a decade that suddenly reversed.
	It reversed because ordinary everyday people were willing to empower those politicians willing to question and challenge that logic rather than go along with it and be complicit in it.
	And because ordinary everyday people were out there getting the information that challenged the institutional narrative across the board.
	Just look at what's happening with vaccines.
	Something that had been elevated to sort of religious status for you to question a vaccine.
	Even though vaccine is just a drug that somebody in a white lab coat wants to stick in somebody and wants to stick a bunch of chemicals in them.
	Maybe it's good, maybe it's bad, but traditionally we would evaluate it as on each vaccine's basis, each drug's basis, each medical treatment's basis.
	Instead, all they had to do was magically label it vaccine, and all of a sudden you were a heretic to even say anything to, well, maybe there's side effects, maybe people should have informed consent, maybe juries should decide whether something went wrong, not a government agency in D.C., maybe there shouldn't be immunity for people who supposedly aren't doing anything wrong.
	All of a sudden, you were a wacko.
	You were a lunatic.
	You had to be isolated.
	And now, just within a few months, watching what Bill Gates' agenda is, is educating more people across the ideological, intellectual, and political spectrum to be willing to question and contest these established wisdoms.
	So you're absolutely right, it's a good idea and it's something that we should continue to push for.
	It's clearly capable of being done within the constitutional framework and the key is going to be whether or not we actually do so and get the political will to do so within the political class and that can only happen from public pressure by ordinary people.
	So it's a very good question and thanks for calling in.
	Let's go to Matthew in Texas.
	Hey Mr. Barnes, how are you doing?
	Yes sir, how are you?
	I'm well thank you.
	So I know today we had our city council session over here in San Antonio, Texas, and they're discussing some more authoritarian policies in which to implement.
	But me and a couple of gentlemen were outside and we're protesting, and I had my bullhorn there.
	And there's a noise ordinance in San Antonio, Texas, where you can't exceed 85 decibels.
	I stated that my megaphone was 80 decibels, and they attempted to detain me eventually.
	So they stated in—I showed them the ordinance, and one of the exceptions was if that individual is encouraging people to participate in elections.
	And that is exactly what I was doing.
	So they stated that that exception was only valid in the case where I was to be arrested and that would be my defense before the judge.
	So to my understanding ordinances, the punishment that can go along with the ordinance is just a fine or a ticket or a citation, not actual incrimination.
	So I'm very confused about that and it's very hard to try to speak any sense into these individuals because unfortunately here in San Antonio we have a crooked police chief McManus, we have a crooked sheriff Salazar, and then every single one of our city council members and our mayor himself are crooked as they come as well.
	What exactly would someone do in that situation where they're put against the wall and under duress have to give up their liberties and their freedoms that are protected by the Constitution when an organization or the law enforcement themselves aren't abiding by the United States Code, you know, Title 18, Section 242, when they are enforcing laws that are unconstitutional?
	Yes, so there's several different subcomponents there.
	The first is that there are sometimes criminal penalties attendant to violation of ordinances and depends on the particular statute and the particular location.
	As to the 18 U.S.C. 242 That is essentially something that the U.S.
	Attorney has almost exclusive carte blanche control over.
	So what happened was the civil rights statutes were passed in the 1870s to protect, particularly it was intended to protect African Americans in the South, but it was meant to protect everybody because it recognized what the slavery era exposed was the ability of local governments to abuse the constitutional rights of citizens and people within their custody and jurisdiction.
	So to prevent that from happening in the future, federal law was going to preempt that and protect those individuals.
	It created a range of laws intending to do so, and that includes the civil rights statutes, and a part of the civil rights statutes have civil enforcement mechanisms, others have criminal enforcement mechanisms, and others have injunctive mechanisms.
	Now, who can bring the different legal claims also differs and depends upon the nature of the claim, which statutes being used, and what the basis is.
	So, for example, 242 for the most part is something that a U.S.
	attorney can use to prosecute local officials for violating people's civil rights.
	There's other provisions, section 1983, that predominantly deals with bringing civil suit where that occurs.
	And so that gets us to the third area to your question.
	When someone's civil rights are being violated or threatened with being violated, you don't have to wait for an arrest, you don't have to wait for you to be in court, you can bring a civil rights suit against them because you've been threatened that it will happen again and it already happened to you before.
	If you've been detained or denied the ability to express yourself politically within the realms that the law permits and provides, such as participating in a permitted rally or permitting in public protest where it is allowed and is not disallowed, then you are able to bring a civil rights suit against the authorities that violated that.
	And sometimes it's against the individual officer, if it's an individual officer who did it.
	If, on the other hand, it appears to be a custom and practice of the local community, such as, say, the city of San Antonio or the county of Bexar, then you can bring a legal action against the city and the county itself.
	So you can bring a legal action against anyone accountable and responsible for the civil rights violation, and it will depend on the nature of what they did, the scope of their liability.
	Your remedy in a civil rights claim is threefold.
	One, you can get an injunction that enjoins them from being able to do it in the future.
	Secondly, you can get declaratory relief that says here is a declaration of your rights, you have those rights, and you can keep them in your pocket.
	And the next time they have a question, say, here's a federal judge's order that says I have these rights.
	The third thing you can do is you can seek monetary relief.
	Sometimes that's, and it's as part of that, you can also seek your attorney's fees.
	So there are more lawyers who will take a civil rights case, a federal civil rights case, than will take these cases under state law because often the damages are not very, not of such a high amount monetarily that you can recover a big monetary recovery sufficient to get contingency fees based lawyers involved.
	And often the legal expense would exceed the monetary value of what you could get back.
	The way the civil rights laws counterbalance that is they provide what they call private attorney generals.
	And that allows a private lawyer to be your private attorney general to vindicate your constitutional and civil rights.
	And that if they prevail at all in the lawsuit, then the city or the county or the officer or the individual that was responsible for the violation of those civil rights has to pay your lawyer's legal fees.
	And often a lawyer will take that case on a contingency.
	Now, not all lawyers do.
	To give an example, when I take civil rights cases, I make a lot less than I do if I'm doing other cases.
	I take them because I believe in them as a matter of principle.
	And so you get different scales of the quality of lawyers involved.
	Uh, but there's no question that what you can do is you can bring a civil rights suit if that's what's happened.
	Um, but staying self-educated, staying self-informed is critical.
	Uh, doing that was important to how you defended and protected yourself in that context.
	And you can seek civil rights, uh, remedy.
	um, as part of that.
	And in that context, you can also, uh, I'm part of an organization, help start it.
	That does civil rights cases for people across the country.
	Since the ACLU decided to take a long nap on real civil rights for most Americans.
	And that's the free America law center.
	And so if you have a case or you have a question, you can write into there, You can also go to my law firm site, BarnesLawLLP, as in Peter.com, and there's a contact form for people to send in information and we'll try to help however we can.
	So if we can't help directly, then try to refer someone or do whatever we can to help as best as is practicable in this extraordinary time when people's rights are being violated all across the country.
	So, the best way to do it is stand up for your rights, stay informed, stay non-violent, deal with it in a civil manner, and if they continue to threaten that right or have done so in the past, then seeking a civil rights suit can be the remedy.
	So, thanks Matthew for calling in!
	Let's go to George in Connecticut.
	Hi, Mr. Barnes.
	I just want to congratulate you on your beautiful way of expressing the law a couple of nights back.
	I mean, you have such a succinct and clear way of presenting things.
	I think you'd be a great one to actually have somebody write a law book when you're dictating, because you have such an ability to take complex issues and boil them down to such beautiful points.
	And I think what you should do is maybe, if you think about it in the future, maybe do once a month, do a video for particular parts of the law so people can learn and understand their own law.
	And even if it was by subscription, I think it would be very useful for a lot of people.
	But my point that I'm calling about...
	I'm calling about, since so many of these people are basically breaking our contract, basically, there are our employees, whether they want to be elected or they're bureaucrats, why can't we go after them financially since they broke the law?
	They didn't follow any particular law or constitutional rights.
	And the bureaucrats that basically supported these governors, why can't we go after their pensions, their fat pensions and things like that?
	Because I guarantee you, once there is a successful rate of going after the support staff to help these governors break the law, I guarantee you they will fold and start to say, I mean, in fact, that's a good idea.
	Basically what we should do is we should modify the law so that if a politician or political official or any individual official violates civil rights of an individual and is found to have done so, that they lose their pension.
	As a consequence and as a penalty.
	They lose their paycheck and they lose their pension.
	Because that would make the individuals have skin in the game.
	Right now, one of the key problems is that too few people have real skin in the game.
	In fact, Nassim Taleb even wrote a whole book about skin in the game.
	And it's basically about how if people don't suffer personally from their bad choices or bad advice, then they're less likely to avoid Those bad choices and bad advice.
	We see it constantly.
	We see these so-called pundits who make ridiculous predictions who are consistently wrong, but they never face any consequences.
	And the biggest hurdle right now to the issue of politicians being held individually responsible in terms of their pensions, in terms of their paychecks, in terms of their promotions even, is that currently the law provides for a form of sovereign immunity that makes it very is that currently the law provides for a form of sovereign immunity that makes it very difficult When you can sue them, only the government treasury or the insurance company or the taxpayer ends up having to pay the bill.
	It's a flaw in our system.
	Our system should make it so that if in fact you're an officer of the, whether you're an officer of the government, officer of the court, whatever you are as a state officer, law enforcement officer, whomever you may be, if you would have to risk your own house, risk your own pension, risk your own paycheck before you violated someone's rights, then there'd be a different consequence.
	And let me give you an example of the longer history of this.
	And it goes back to what happened in the Trump campaign in 2016 where Trump people were getting beat up routinely.
	The riot laws in the United States used to be that if a riot happened, the local town had to pay for all of the property damage caused by the riot.
	In fact, you can go back to the Civil War riots that were portrayed in a variety of films and whatnot later.
	That go into details about all the different things the city and county had to pay for because the riot occurred.
	They were strictly liable for anything that went on in that riot.
	So what that did is that created a maximum incentive for the local police officials to prevent riots, to preclude consequences from riots, because they could be held personally responsible for those riots.
	Well then, in the late 1960s, just in case you had any doubt that riots were increasingly becoming a political tool, a French-like political tool, to use the risk of public violence to leverage political power on one side or the other, to escalate a political narrative in favor of one side or the other, well all of a sudden all these governments started changing the laws in the 1960s, particularly the late 1960s, where all of a sudden the deterrent risk, the skin in the game, got flipped.
	Instead of cities and counties being held responsible for property damage, they were now completely immune from any liability of anything that happened at a riot.
	And the only thing they could get sued for is if they used excessive force to stop the riot.
	That's how you get things like Charlottesville.
	The way that happens is they can deliberately create an atmosphere where two people are going to go at each other, or two groups of people are going to go at each other, and you're given an incentive as a policeman to not intervene, to not do anything about it, to let the violence escalate, to let the problems get worse, because you're not going to be responsible for anything that happens, property damage or personal injury, but you will be responsible for any attempts to stop the riot from occurring, because then you can be sued for excessive force.
	That's why what happened, what happened in California.
	So that's why we have this perverse system with sovereign immunity, this perverse system with riot immunity, this perverse system with vaccine immunity, that lets the wrong people off the hook.
	We should trust the jury.
	We should trust the people.
	We should trust our little d-democratic systems.
	And in order to do so, we should enforce the Constitution in the words it was written in.
	And that is all that we're asking for.
	That is all that we're calling for.

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