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Justin Haskins joins us to talk about his and Jack McPherrin's new book, "The Next Big Crash," covering the shady dealings of Wall Street insiders and elites who have conspired to rig our economy and transfer control over our futures to massive financial interests. When the next crash comes, it could very well be more devastating than any before. On a brighter note, federal employment is at the lowest level it has been since 1966, showing that the Trump administration really has made progress on cutting federal bloat, while American private sector jobs are improving. Meanwhile, the SAVE America Act may be passed soon, but Democrats say it will disenfranchise voters by requiring them to simply have ID.
On UNHINGED: How would you feel about living in a constant, ubiquitous surveillance state? Ring is more than happy to provide, but promises it will only be used for finding lost dogs.
The Heartland Institute's Linnea Lueken, S.T. Karnick, Jim Lakely, Chris Talgo, and guest Justin Haskins will talk about all of this and more on Episode #526 of the In The Tank Podcast.
Join us LIVE at 1 p.m. ET on YouTube, Rumble, X, and Facebook.
Visit our sponsor, Advisor Metals: https://climaterealismshow.com/metals
On UNHINGED: How would you feel about living in a constant, ubiquitous surveillance state? Ring is more than happy to provide, but promises it will only be used for finding lost dogs.
The Heartland Institute's Linnea Lueken, S.T. Karnick, Jim Lakely, Chris Talgo, and guest Justin Haskins will talk about all of this and more on Episode #526 of the In The Tank Podcast.
Join us LIVE at 1 p.m. ET on YouTube, Rumble, X, and Facebook.
Visit our sponsor, Advisor Metals: https://climaterealismshow.com/metals
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What is In The Tank?
The weekly flagship podcast from The Heartland Institute features in-depth policy discussions connected to current news. Host Donald Kendal leads the discussion with the usual crew of Heartland Institute Vice President Jim Lakely, Socialism Research Center “Commissar” Justin Haskins, Editorial Director Chris Talgo, and others at this national free-market think tank. The entertaining and informative discussions often hit topics such as the environment, energy policy, Big Tech censorship, the troubling rise of socialism, globalism, health care, education, that state of freedom in America and around the world, and much more.
This podcast is also available as part of the Heartland Daily Podcast, the “firehose” of all the organization’s podcasts that take deep and entertaining dives into public policy.
Alright. We are now live. Welcome to the show, everyone. Justin Haskins is going to join us today to talk about his and Jack McFerrin's new book, The Next Big Crash, covering the shady dealings of Wall Street insiders and elites who have literally conspired to transfer control over our futures to massive financial interests. But it's not all doom and gloom for the future.
Linnea Lueken:The size of government is actually shrinking, and employment numbers are improving elsewhere. Meanwhile, the Save America Act is passed, but Democrats say that it will disenfranchise voters if it passes the senate by requiring them to simply have identification. And for unhinged, how would you feel about living in a constant ubiquitous surveillance state? Enter the Ringopticon. Alright.
Linnea Lueken:We are going to talk about all of this and more on episode 526 of the In the Tank podcast. Alright, guys. Welcome to the In the Tank podcast. I am Lynea Luken, your host. And as usual, we also have Jim Lakeley, vice president and director of communications at Heartland Institute, Sam Karnik, senior fellow, Chris Talgo, editorial director and socialism research fellow.
Linnea Lueken:And also this week, we have a special guest, as I said in the intro, Justin Haskins, vice president of policy at the Heartland Institute. He's a senior fellow for our Glenn c Haskins Emerging Issues Center. He has been all over the place. You've seen him on the Glenn Beck program, Fox. He's written multiple best selling books.
Linnea Lueken:Justin, how on earth did you find the the time to come on our little show here this week?
Justin Hakins:I I was forced into it. There's actually somebody over here holding a shotgun. He's making me do the interview. So, no, it's actually I feel great being back. It's it's very nostalgic.
Justin Hakins:You know? Haven't haven't used to do the show a lot more, obviously. But ever since we switched over to Lanea, we kicked out Donald Kendall who sucked. I'm no longer good enough to be on the show, so I'm just thankful that I was invited, honestly. That's that's how I feel right now.
Linnea Lueken:Well, we're gonna talk about your book a little bit into the show. The book is called the next big crash, so everyone stay tuned for that. We're gonna we're gonna hit it pretty early. But before we get started, you guys, as always, if you want to support the show, you can go to heartland.org/inthetank and donate there. Please also click the thumbs up to like the video.
Linnea Lueken:Look. I see all you guys are watching right now. There's a ton of people in the chat. You can hit the like button right now. It's not gonna bite you too hard.
Linnea Lueken:Remember that sharing it also helps to break through some of YouTube suppression. It helps us out with the algorithm. Even just leaving a comment helps too. If you're an audio listener, you can help us out by leaving a nice review. Okay.
Linnea Lueken:So before we get to the book, I do want to talk about our unhinged segment here, which I have titled Behold the Ring Opticon. I did steal that joke from Angorand Decusi on x from a very funny post that he put there. For those who don't know, the Panopticon is a prison design where the holding cells, like, encircle a courtyard with a big guard tower at the center and so that the guard can, like, watch everywhere at any time. And the purpose of this was so that all the prisoners are constantly paranoid that they are the one being watched. So I thought that this was very appropriate for this.
Linnea Lueken:And we can play the video now from Ring camera. We can pull that video up in a second.
Justin Hakins:This is Milo.
Jim Lakely:Pets are family. But every year, ten million go missing. And the way we look for them hasn't changed in years Until now. One post of a dog's photo in the Ring app starts outdoor cameras looking for a match. Search Party from Ring uses AI to help families find lost dogs.
Jim Lakely:Since launch, more than a dog a day has been reunited with their family. Be a hero in your neighborhood with Search Party. Available to everyone for free right now. Join the neighborhood at ring.com.
Linnea Lueken:Yeah. It's just dog facial recognition technology using AI, you guys. Don't worry about it. So, yeah, this new feature called search party links all the doorbell cameras and outdoor cameras in the neighborhood to surveil an area. And, again, it's just for silver alerts and lost dogs, guys.
Linnea Lueken:Don't worry about it. The Federalist posted a really good article about this titled the doorbell camera surveillance state is not just about finding Fido and grandma. Millions of Ring cameras are already equipped with free facial recognition software that can be harnessed for mass surveillance the moment someone requests it. The only way to opt out of the search party function is to manually disable it in the doorbell camera's control center, which sparked outrage and even spoofs from rival cam camera companies. It doesn't take a technology expert to understand that refusing to pay for the cloud storage doesn't mean doorbell cameras aren't watching or collecting your data.
Linnea Lueken:You might not have access to watch what happens on your front porch or outside of your home because you're too cheap to pay a monthly or yearly fee, but Google, Amazon, and other tech companies do. So what are we thinking about this, guys? I mean, I'll admit it. I have a doorbell camera, the blink one, and an outdoor camera on my chickens. So, you know, no big no little critter is safe from big brother here.
Linnea Lueken:You know, big take big tech has all of the data on all of the dastardly raccoons in my neighborhood that come after my chickens. But but what are we thinking here? I mean
ST Karnick:I've got a couple of thoughts on this. So with the Nancy Guthrie investigation, you know, being all over the news so recently, has been a lot of talk about ring doorbells and and, surveillance and, you know, using it to catch, you know, people who who, commit crimes and stuff like that. I do think that that obviously does have some benefit to it. This also is voluntary, so no one's forcing you to put a Ring camera on your home. I think that people are doing it for many reasons.
ST Karnick:They're doing it for convenience. They're doing it for safety. So, you know, like I like everything, there's, like, a good and a bad. So there is a security side to this, but there's also, like you said, the potential for invasive surveillance. So, you know, I think we're just at the base of this, we're we're gonna be surrounded by cameras, you know, almost twenty four seven.
ST Karnick:So I don't really see this going away anytime soon. I personally I mean, well, first of I live in an apartment building, so I can't do this. But I don't know if I would want to have a Ring doorbell for for my own, you know, personal privacy reasons. But I can I can understand why a lot of people do? So that's just kinda
Chris Talgo:Let's Let's briefly talk about the good side of this. Let's see. More than one dog per day is 400, 500 out of how many dogs are lost every day? Ten trillion?
Justin Hakins:Ten ten million, they said in the commercial.
Chris Talgo:You know? So 10,000,000 dogs, four or 500 found. That is a very, very poor record. And then Samantha Guthrie, they haven't found her mom. All they saw was a guy in a mask.
Chris Talgo:I mean, how good is that? This doesn't seem like a great trade off to me. But, hey. What do I know?
Justin Hakins:Yeah. That's a great point. That was the first thing I thought of too, the 10,000,000. I mean, I don't know what the odds are of winning the lottery, but it's, like, kinda similar, I think. So I don't know.
Justin Hakins:It it it just seems like, you know, Chris' point is right. This is not the government doing it. This is people just willingly putting up cameras to protect, you know, their chickens against the scourge of raccoons. Like, that's what this is. And I think that that's fine.
Justin Hakins:I I I don't have any problem with that. What is scary is you're building this infrastructure that exists that could easily with not a lot of work, just be turned into a surveillance state situation. I think that's the scariest part of all of it. And I don't know you you can't solve it. It will never be solved because people will see the technology, and they'll say, the benefits for me personally in my life are worth, you know, are worth me giving up a little bit of my privacy, and everyone is going to do it.
Justin Hakins:And, you know, or a lot of people are going to do it. And then collectively, all these people making those individual choices are going to create this network. It's just a matter of can we make sure that it's not being abused by by the government or by other powerful interests? And that's that's going that's that question is going to be applied to almost all new technology going forward for the foreseeable future. That's always going to be the issue now.
Justin Hakins:The technology is so good and so useful, but how do we make sure that it's not abused? What sorts of protections are individuals going to have in that kind of world? And so that's really the issue. And in a way, Ring did kind of a favor to everybody because they brought this whole issue up. This was going on already, and people didn't even know that it was happening.
Justin Hakins:And now we're having a conversation about whether this is, like, a terrifying thing or not, which we wouldn't have done had they not run this commercial about saving 400 dogs out of 10,000,000 because I guess they thought it'd be good for PR or whatever. So it it is really interesting. But these are the conversation we have to have about everything. Everything in technology. It's gotta be this, how do we make sure that we're getting the benefits of the technology without it turning into 1984?
Linnea Lueken:Yeah. One of the other bad things about this and about the, like I mean, at this point, you know, the the gate is open here. There's no there's no putting this genie back in the bottle, when it comes to the cameras everywhere and stuff because they're so cheap and they're so easy to install. You know? But some something that a lawyer friend of mine pointed out recently that I had not considered, but in his experience as prosecuting attorney, he said that stuff like this, like the amount of surveillance that we have now is actually making it harder to convict people in cases where there is no video.
Linnea Lueken:Because jurors assume that if there's no video, that means it didn't happen because they think that there's no good reason for there not to be, like, four k footage of whatever it is that they do, which is just not the case. Like, is ubiquitous, but there's a lot of, you know, empty shopping centers and stuff and all sorts of places that people can go to do crimes where they're not gonna get caught, but it's actually starting to make it difficult to convince the juries that a case in which there is no video evidence is legitimate.
ST Karnick:Well but, Lynea, how valuable is video gonna be when AI can basically create a video that most most people cannot distinguish the difference between if it was created by AI or if it was, you know, indeed reality. So, I mean, we're still Yeah. You know, at the very beginning of of that whole, you know, mess.
Linnea Lueken:Yeah. Oh, yeah.
Jim Lakely:Yeah. Let me let me, let me see if I can bring up Andy, the producer, is out today. We have Keely in the back in the background trying to do this and me as well. Yes. It worked out.
Jim Lakely:So this is first of all, I cannot believe that the CEO of Ring and nobody at the company thought that any of this thing would be would be creepy at all. I mean, look at this shot from the commercial. It's like everyone's eyes are on you. You know? It's like we have we have it all covered, man.
Jim Lakely:You can't get away from us. It's like there isn't a single person in their in the company that thought, hey. Wait a minute. Because one of the things the features of this is that you have to turn it off. A lot of people have Ring cameras and did not know that this is already happening and that the company has full access to your the front of your house or wherever your Ring doorbell is going, and you have to opt out of it.
Jim Lakely:I mean, I was I'd like to watch football games, you know, and I I have my computer open, and I have Twitter open, I'm, you know, live commenting and reading other people's live commentary on the game. And I did that for the Super Bowl. The backlash against this this commercial on Twitter was instantaneous and and and really funny. As one person on on Twitter pointed out, this was part of the plot in one of the Christian Nolan Batman movies. And even this even this technology was too much for Batman to catch the Joker.
Jim Lakely:He's like, we can't do this. This would be an invasion of people's privacy, and I'll find I'll catch the Joker some other way because this is too far. It's apparently not too far for for Ring. I don't have a Ring doorbell. I I don't think I will ever want to get one just because I don't think it's really necessary, and it's because of these sorts of things that the fact that, frankly, millions of people had a Ring doorbell and didn't really notice that the when you scroll through the, you know, 10,000 word, you know, conditions and then click yes at the end, that it apparently, it included, you know, Ring will have instantaneous access to your to your camera at any time and can do with it what they wish.
Jim Lakely:And, of course, as we know, they share it with law enforcement, which I guess is okay. But most people don't really know that that is a big part of their, you know, of their their terms and conditions. Right? You know, or their yeah. Terms of what do
Justin Hakins:they call it?
Linnea Lueken:Terms and conditions. Well, like, I want I want crimes to be stopped. I'm a big making the world as like, making the country a safer place to live and be able to, like, walk outside after dark and stuff is a is a major part of my political evolution. So that that's a that's a big deal for me. And if there was, like, some kind of a crime in my neighborhood and the police wanted to have everybody's, like, door camera footage or whatever for it, then I would gladly hand it over
ST Karnick:Well, keep in mind that that also does require a warrant. So, I mean, I've been watching this this Guthrie case pretty extensively because I'm just very curious. It seems so strange to me. But the FBI did have to go and get Warren Steven examine the cloud data in her Ring doorbell camera.
Linnea Lueken:What's interesting, though, is that what we're finding out is that even if you stop paying for the service that allows you access to your cloud stored data, it's still being stored and kept, and it can still be accessed by outside parties if they get the right permission. So that is kinda disturbing to me. Like, if I'm not having access to my data, I don't want everybody else to. That would that kinda sucks. I I'm not a fan of that, situation.
Chris Talgo:So I really doubt I really doubt that anyone on this program or even watching it, thinks that it would be a good thing, that the government would have access to this this information and that they and that the government will forever say, woah. We're our hands are off. We're not gonna touch that kind of footage. We're never gonna look at it. We saw what happened during the February with the, Biden administrations, the jawboning social media and and threatening them and and getting what they wanted from them.
Chris Talgo:And the notion that they wouldn't do this for this pan Panopticon that they're that is being created is frankly absurd. And it's interesting to note really quickly that Jeremy Bentham was the person who came up with the term Panopticon, And he was the, philosopher who came up with the idea of utilitarianism, which is whatever is good for the most people is the is what you should do. And, of course, that always falls to the the the problem of who will who will identify and decide and ascertain and determine what is good and therefore what happens. So it's ultimately going to fall to the government to decide, okay. This is good.
Chris Talgo:And by the way, we're, we're taking it. So this is just this is really going to be wonderfully empowering for the for the government and disempowering for the rest of us.
Linnea Lueken:Yeah. Well, and it's it's the Panopticon issue. Like, the the whole point of the Panopticon is not that that the one guard that they have employed at the in the guard tower can actually watch all the prisoners at
Chris Talgo:the same time. Prison. The point is We are the prisoners now.
Linnea Lueken:No. But the point is that everyone suspects that they could be the one being watched at any given time. It gives them that, like, background paranoia that makes them behave. Right? That's the point of the Panopticon.
Linnea Lueken:So they don't even need to actually have a cohesive surveillance state in order to achieve that. They just have to give you the impression that they have it. Right? Yeah.
Justin Hakins:And I think Well yeah. And and that's and that's I I think they actually I I think this is where we're headed kinda no matter what. Like, I there's just no doubt about it. You're going to enter a world where you're gonna have people at some point voluntarily giving this data over anyway to the government. Just they just want the government to have it.
Justin Hakins:You know? And and we saw stuff like that happen in with COVID. You know, when Charlie Kirk's assassin, when they were looking for him, they used these this this technology, this exact same kind of thing. I don't know if they got a warrant for it or if people just handed it over or whatever, but they were able to track the shooter going through the neighborhood using these cameras. And so you're gonna have people just voluntarily handing this stuff over, and the argument is going to be as it is almost always the case with this kind of when you have new technology like this that offers you this great benefit, but then you gotta sacrifice your privacy, it's going to be, well, look at the benefit.
Justin Hakins:You know? Are you are you you know, like, in this case, you know, how many lost dogs are you willing to sacrifice, you know, in order to protect your precious freedom? You know? Like, why do you hate dogs so much? Like, that's that's honestly, that's the kind of thing.
Justin Hakins:Like, are you and and and we you'll lose that battle. You just will. And so we're gonna enter into this era where we have to have, I would argue, we have to have a legislation that says you can't use this information for certain purposes except in this these narrow instances so that we have actual privacy protection still in place. Otherwise, you're gonna have this, you know, vast network of private surveillance that the government will tap into whenever they are because they're working in public private partnerships with all these big corporations. They'll they'll be able to use it without actually being the ones that collect it and without privacy protections put into law that stop that kind of arrangement from happening.
Justin Hakins:This is all going to be inevitable, and that has to be one of the focuses that, policymakers have going forward with all new technology, not just surveillance, but, you know, video surveillance, but all sorts of other things as well.
Jim Lakely:The the the thing the thing here I think that really shocked people is that they they announced that they had found all these dogs. And then people who have a Ring camera who have, you know, who love their freedom and didn't read all of the terms and conditions before they said yes is, wait a minute. You mean you probably used you might have used my camera and I didn't even know about it to find a dog? I mean, I yeah. I mean, I'm glad the dog is home now, but, you know, I didn't know you were able to do that.
Jim Lakely:And I think most people win the Ring that have a Ring camera. My sister has one. I'm sure she didn't know, and and she doesn't care probably. But, you know, I watch a lot of, you know, British, you know, crime dramas and spy stuff like that. I'm watching Slow Horses right now, which is on Apple TV plus, which I highly recommend.
Jim Lakely:It's very good. And my joke I joke that if it wasn't for CCTV, every criminal would get away with their crimes in in Great Britain because every single every single investigation starts and ends basically with, like, looking at the CCTV. And, you know, we all saw that coming. You know, we all saw that happening in The UK. What it they've had basically blanket coverage of every street and every alley and every nook and cranny of of The UK and the cities for, gosh, at least twenty years now.
Jim Lakely:And we haven't really had that in The United States. I mean, it's happening a little bit. You see it here and there, but it's not a blanket coverage like like in The UK. But now thanks to Ring doorbell cameras, if everybody has one, they're gonna have that. Do you know how expensive it would be to set up this sort of surveillance network in The United States?
Jim Lakely:It would cost bill maybe a trillion dollars to set it up like this. And here we have millions of people that are voluntarily and often without knowing it becoming part of a vast surveillance network. That's what I think like, the, like, the CEO doesn't even think about that. The PR I I imagine the the the the head of marketing or PR at Ring basically jumping out a window when they saw that when they saw the reaction to this video like Tommen in Game of Thrones, just off you go, because they didn't think about that. That people would think, wait a minute.
Jim Lakely:I am an I did not volunteer to be part of a vast millions of homes wide, you know, national surveillance network, yet here I am. I bet they lost some Ring subscribers over the last week since that Super Bowl ad. I guarantee you.
Linnea Lueken:Oh, yeah. And here's the an individual who I was referring to earlier. He's on ex JT Alexander who's a prosecuting attorney. He said, that's all but official policy here, Jim. I've advised stores and police before that if a crime happens somewhere the public believes a camera ought to be and we don't have footage, then we will never get a conviction.
Linnea Lueken:It might as well have never happened. Yeah. Yeah. Bad times. Alright.
Linnea Lueken:So I don't wanna black pill us too badly here to the today on the show, but I do want to move on to the very the very subtle and and cheerfully titled book that Justin has written, co written with Jack McFerrin, which is called The Next Big Crash Conspiracy Collapse and the Men Behind History's Biggest Heist. Speaking of criminals. Right? Alright.
ST Karnick:That's right.
Linnea Lueken:So, Justin, this book already has a 4.6 star rating on Amazon, which is pretty great. Do you know how many copies you've sold so far? I was trying to
ST Karnick:figure that out.
Justin Hakins:Yeah. We're still there's, like, a delay in the processing of it, but several thousand. You know?
Jim Lakely:So it's
Justin Hakins:off to a good start so far. I've gotten a lot of press. Glenn Beck's covered it. We've got an interview with Ali Bett Stuckey coming out. I've done a whole bunch of interviews with the Blaze radio networks all over the country.
Justin Hakins:So it's been a busy week or so as people are kinda discovering this crazy, crazy story. And, hopefully, more people will learn about it and buy books as well over the next several weeks.
Linnea Lueken:It even has an audiobook, which was narrated by you. I mean, what was was that hard to record? We'll talk about the synopsis in a second, but I was really curious when I saw that it had an audiobook. Yeah. Was that hard to do?
Linnea Lueken:How was that?
Justin Hakins:It was very hard to do. It was very hard to do. It was it was a very time consuming process. I did all the audiobook recording myself, all the editing, all that stuff. And it was it was a it was a lot of work.
Justin Hakins:But it was it it was I learned a lot in the process of doing it. And, actually, a fair number of the people who have bought the book, it's probably, like, a quarter have bought the audiobook. So, you know, I think a lot of people do listen to books with now only exclusively with audiobooks. So I think it's important to have that as an option.
Jim Lakely:Are you telling me that I can have the Justin Haskins read me a dystopian bedtime story every night?
Justin Hakins:That's exactly right. That's exactly right, Jim. And the and the price is the price is not not as high as you might think either.
Jim Lakely:A time story night with Justin Haskins.
Linnea Lueken:If you could give the audience a bit of a, I guess, a synopsis here on on, you know, why they should read this book other than the fact that it's written by Justin Haskins and the and other Heartland Institute visionaries. So what's our what's our reason here?
Justin Hakins:Yeah. So the the main premise of the book is not causes of the next big crash, the next big economic or financial crash. We do we do talk about some of the big risks that could be heading our way over the next year or two years, three years, in the first chapter of the book. But most of the book is about the potential effects of the next big crash. What could happen?
Justin Hakins:What are the main things we're worried about occurring as a result of the next crash? Because crashes in capitalist markets or really in all markets for that matter, all societies are inevitable. You're going to have economic, big economic downturns, and I think we're headed for one. And so I was really concerned about some of the things I had been hearing over the past few years from researchers and lawmakers and other people about a variety of different topics. But what we did in this book was focus on two main things.
Justin Hakins:So the first one is this really incredible no other way of describing it. It's a conspiracy that occurred beginning in the nineteen sixties and seventies and has gone on for decades, really, in a variety of different ways to transform your relationship to investments. And by that, what I mean is back in the nineteen sixties and seventies, when you would buy investments, we're talking about securities investments, stocks, bonds, things like that. When you think of Wall Street investments, that's what we're talking about. Your retire all the stuff in your retirement account for the most part, those are securities investments.
Justin Hakins:When you buy one of those in the nineteen sixties, seventies, you would actually own that investment. You would get a piece of paper, stock certificate, and it would have your name on it, and you would be the direct registered owner of that investment. Beginning in the nineteen sixties, seventies, they these big powerful special interests all got together, with some other really suspect characters and transformed the way that you, own your investments. So that now when you go and you buy investments, either through a brokerage account or through your retirement account, 401, whatever it is, you are not the actual owner of that investment that you bought and paid for. And this is true of virtually everybody no matter how much you've invested.
Justin Hakins:You could be investing millions or billions of dollars. This is true of institutional investors. You know, even BlackRock, for example, they don't directly own most of their investments. The, They transformed the way that you are you you you own a contract that's related to your investment, but you don't actually own the investment itself. So what what they did instead was centralize, as these big institutions tend to do, ownership into one institution.
Justin Hakins:So they built this brand new, institution in the seventies called the Depository Trust Company, and they put all of the securities in this one institution, and they made this one institution the owner of it. And everybody else just has contracts that are related to the investments held by this one institution. And this one institution is a subsidiary of another institution that's a corporation that's owned by all the big Wall Street firms. So all the big Wall Street firms, investment managers, etcetera, or really it's more of the brokerage houses, not investment. So Fidelity, for example, or Merrill Lynch, banks that use this service, they are part owners in this corporation that owns another company that is the actual owner of all of these investments.
Justin Hakins:So the reason this matters so much is because you're not the direct registered owner of the investments you make, you don't have the same level of property rights. Your property rights are not the same as, like, for your house or your car or things that are in your wallet, the clothes on your back. You have a much stronger constitutional property right case when it comes to all of those things. When it comes to your investments, you're just a you just basically own a contract that's related to an investment. And Wall Street has capitalized on this over several decades, building building all these other structures and rules and things on top of that system that's allowed them to make lots and lots of money, billions and billions and billions of dollars, and also build in special protections for these big institutions that say that in the event of a crash under certain circumstances, these institutions will be bailed out, and you might end up with nothing as a result of it depending on how things go, depending on how they what they do with the rules.
Justin Hakins:There's all sorts of caveats we get into in the book. But it is a really incredible, terrifying story. It sounds unbelievable. I realize that. But this is the the book is a culmination of three years of research we go through.
Justin Hakins:Jack and I went through all of the different sources. You can see it for yourself. Read on the SEC. You know, write from the SEC, the Securities and Exchange Commission saying the same things that I'm saying now. Read the law itself.
Justin Hakins:Read the people who designed the laws. All of this was set up to help big institutions, and the cost was your property rights. And it could be a lot higher. The cost could be a lot higher in the future when we have another big crash.
ST Karnick:So I've read the book, I love it, Justin. You know, I think this stuff is super fascinating. And one of the things that really stood out to me was how you get into the, fact that these financial institutions have used our securities as collateral in the derivatives market and all these other, you know, crazy, ways in which they are basically using their customers' money to make these big bets and big gambles. And if that does come crashing down, which at some point, it probably is going to, it's gonna be it's gonna be a nightmare for investors like like me because I won't have the, priority if, Merrill Lynch, you know, gets in, in big trouble here. So can can you just expand on that a little bit?
Justin Hakins:Yeah. So what what Chris is referring to is, so in over several decades, after they built this system where everything all the securities investments are centralized in one place, They started the big institutions went to lawmakers all across the country, and they lobbied them to change rules so that they could get all kinds of advantages that they said were necessary to protect too big to fail institutions. Before anybody had heard the words too big to fail, they were talking about that with with state lawmakers. And for the most part, I think state lawmakers didn't know what they were signing up for, but they agreed to a lot of these changes. One of the things that they changed was this they created this rule that's in state code.
Justin Hakins:It's part of the uniform commercial code, which is a state law in all 50 states. It's absolutely crazy that this is in there, but it really is in there. You can look it up for yourself. It's in article eight of the UCC. And what it says is if your broker like, you have a everybody who has investments in Wall Street, they have a they have a broker.
Justin Hakins:K? If your broker takes your investments and uses your investments as collateral when they go get a loan, even if they're not supposed to do that, because there's a lot of situations where they're not supposed to do that. But even if they do it they do it and they're not supposed to, if the broker then goes bankrupt because of, let's say, a big crash or something, like with Lehman Brothers, this exact situation, a very similar situation happened with Lehman Brothers. If they go bankrupt and the bank wants their money back from, say, Lehman Brothers, they can take your assets, your investments. They can take the value of that and keep it for themselves as collateral Even though you didn't have anything to do with this and even though your broker wasn't supposed to do it in the first place, they can still do that.
Justin Hakins:The other really crazy thing is that there are all these emergency powers laws and other things that are on the books right now that would make it very easy for these for lawmakers to change the rules so that a broker could legally take your investments and pledge it as collateral to get financing from another financial institution. So even though they're not supposed to do it in many cases today, there are some exceptions to that where they can do it legally. Even if they're not allowed to do it legally today, the laws, the rules, the regulations could easily be changed in the event of a crash to make that a legal possibility for these institutions. And so the whole point of this structure that's been built is if Wall Street needs wealth, they can access your wealth. That's the whole reas that's one of the main reasons they did this.
Justin Hakins:The other reason that they did this was it allowed them to build the modern stock market. It wasn't possible with the old system, which is all run on paper, and you had a really strong individual property right. The new system that they've built, because you're not the direct registered owner of the investments that you make on Wall Street. Wall Street's able to use those investments to increase volume on the stock market, to do derivatives trading on the stock market. So when you think about things like options trading or futures trading, when people talk about shorts, like they're gonna they're gonna go short on a stock or go long on a stock, margin accounts where they're borrowing wealth in order to borrowing stock in order to make riskier bets on what's going to happen in the future.
Justin Hakins:Basically,
Linnea Lueken:none
Justin Hakins:of that was able to happen anywhere near the kind of scale we have today under the older system where people had strong property rights. But under the new system, this is a very easy thing to do because only one institution owns basically everything. So it's there's no one that they have to go get permission to unless it's a regulation in a in a particular situation. They usually don't have to go get permission to use the whole country's stocks and bonds and other things to make that available for institutions to do this kind of gambling and derivatives trading and other things. So the whole modern system is built on this idea that you're not really the owner of these things, that there's one institution that owns it.
Justin Hakins:And then over time, they've built more and more favorable rules for these big institutions on top of that problem to make sure that as one person who helped put all this together said, if there's an Armageddon scenario, they use the word Armageddon, there's an Armageddon scenario, the big institutions will be protected from cast a cascading series of failures in the system so that we don't have the whole stock market come crashing down because of all this all these derivatives that have been built on top of each other. So the vast majority of people have no idea that this is what's going on, that these are the rules, that when you buy a stock and you pay your commission, that you don't really own it, that your retirement account, you don't really own any of those things. You're just just people just have no idea that this happened. It all happened behind the scenes with really powerful special interests. And the conspiracy behind it, that story alone is worth buying the book, the next big crash, because it is an unbelievable story.
Justin Hakins:It's just an absolutely unbelievable story that involves a guy who was a longtime CIA officer, someone who was involved with doing all kinds of nefarious things in in South America in the nineteen sixties. It involves the Rockefellers. It involves all kinds of crazy stuff. Well documented. I know it sounds too crazy to be true, but if you read the book, you'll see the sources.
Justin Hakins:We've got the receipts. It's one of the most unbelievable stories, and it impacts almost everybody in the economy. So I urge people take the get the get the book. Buy as many copies of the book as you possibly can. I don't make any money from the book, by the way.
Justin Hakins:All of the money is gonna go to nonprofit organizations, including the Heartland Institute. So I'm not trying to make any money off of this. If you wanna be part of the solution, the best thing you can do is buy a copy of the book and help us inform the public and inform lawmakers all across the country so that we can get laws passed that will try to reverse some of these problems.
ST Karnick:The the book the book is fantastic. And at the end sorry. Just real quick, Lynette. At the end, you also offer advice for people as to what they can do. So that was very valuable for me personally.
Linnea Lueken:Yeah. And I think that a lot of people would be, like, surprised to know even after the way things have worked for years and years. I think a lot of people would be surprised to know that they don't actually own the stocks that they buy when they go through these brokerages and stuff, especially. I mean, I think and a lot of people found that out, if you guys remember during the the GameStop kerfuffle where Robinhood was just able to, like, say, no. Actually, we're taking these away from you.
Linnea Lueken:You can't be buying these.
ST Karnick:Yeah.
Justin Hakins:Yeah. Crazy. And, you know, it's funny in the store. I I I put the story in the book. When I first heard about this, I thought it was totally nuts, and I thought it was a a conspiracy you know, crazy conspiracy theory.
Justin Hakins:I didn't think there was any truth to it whatsoever. And I remembered I would see these things, parts of the law or whatever. And I thought, you know, it does seem like that that's the case, but I must be missing something because the uniform commercial code is notoriously complicated. It's massive. It's, like, at least a thousand pages long.
Justin Hakins:It's probably even longer than that. It's it's insane. Nobody can really understand it. And so I thought, must be missing something. And so I went to someone who's a friend of mine who is a top notch investment banker, big on Wall Street, made tons and tons and tons of money.
Justin Hakins:And I said to this person, who I'm not gonna get in trouble by naming, I said to this person, hey. I've been hearing these stories about ownership in Wall Street and how all this stuff works. And have do you know anything about this? Is this whole you know, is this just some crazy thing? I mean, I must be missing something.
Justin Hakins:Right? And my friend said, no. It is true, and everybody on Wall Street knows this. This isn't like a I mean, everybody on Wall Street knows this is how the system works. Everything is centralized into this one institution.
Justin Hakins:Everybody knows. Everybody knows on Wall Street, but everybody on Main Street, like, literally everybody, has never heard of any of this. And that tells you a lot about how this whole system was developed.
ST Karnick:Keep in mind that they also used a system, a state system, the UCC, to do this over several, you know, years or decades. They didn't pass some national law. Congress never did. So this has been done in a, back, you know, backroom door style. And, yeah, Justin, I mean, I was so shocked because I followed this stuff super closely.
ST Karnick:And, you know, until you started bringing this up to my attention, I didn't even know about this. So, yeah, Americans need to understand that this is a big deal.
Linnea Lueken:It's insidious enough as it is, but it's even more so when you start to think about, like, the stuff that, you and Donnie and everyone in the emerging issues center works on, Justin, with regards to the, like, great reset. You will own nothing and be happy. So it's not enough that you can't own your own investments. You also don't get to own, like, your own physical property either. They want you to rent everything.
Linnea Lueken:I think Donald's big big issue right now other than AI is the, you know, nation of renters stuff. And Sam's on this too. Everyone's on this at the Heartland Institute because it's such a big deal. The idea that, you know, you can't you everyone should be renting their home. Everyone should be leasing or renting their car.
Linnea Lueken:Everyone should be like, every single thing that you own could just go poof in a second, even more so than in, like, the Great Depression or something. You know, at least in the Great Depression, you could sell your car back and make some a couple of dollars on it to get in the bread lines with or something. But, like, this is just a catastrophe waiting to happen.
ST Karnick:It's also the over financialization of the economy, in my opinion. You know, they talk about the tokenization economy where, you know, like, precious cars and precious art now can be swapped and traded. That to me is a little bit dangerous. And, Justin, when you when you talk about the derivatives market and the sheer enormity of it was a quadrillion dollars, that is that is just like, we can't even fathom that. So if you thought 2008 was really bad when credit default swaps and when the housing, you know, bubble burst, imagine when the whole the whole thing burst.
Justin Hakins:That's Yeah.
ST Karnick:What that's what, you know, this is about.
Justin Hakins:Yeah. That's that's exactly right. I mean, people who've saw the movie, the big shorts, if people remember, you know, the mortgage backed securities crisis in 2008, when they think about that that kind of thing that's going on in Wall Street, a lot of the crazy stories that have been talked about on Wall Street over the past several years, A lot of it is related to derivatives, and derivatives is is depends derivatives can be used in a good way, but a lot of derivatives trading is just straight up gambling. I mean, that's what a lot of it is. It's just betting on what's gonna happen in the future, and you're often borrowing stock in order to do it or borrowing, you know, basically money in order to do it.
Justin Hakins:And so it's very risky in a lot of cases. Not in all cases, but in lot of cases, it's very risky. And none of that would have been possible without this centralized ownership system, not at the scale that it's at today, because you would have to go to people and ask permission to borrow stock to use in all of these derivatives. But because nobody owns any of it and it's all just sitting in one place, they they they do sometimes ask permission to do it in margin accounts and things like that, but it's a lot of that's just an illusion. The stock is not registered to any individual person.
Justin Hakins:None of the securities are. They're held in pools in these in in one place, and all they do is move things around on paper. And not even on paper, they move it around digitally. And and that's how the whole system works. And so the the best way of thinking about it, I think, is, like, the way a lot of modern Wall Street works is it's like if you imagine a football game and you've got two teams and they're playing each other and that's the game.
Justin Hakins:But then you have people betting on the outcome of the game, but it's not the game itself. The bets are not the game, but they're tied to the game. But then you could have people betting on the outcome of the bets. Yep. And then you could have people betting on the bettors who are betting on the outcome of the game and and on and on you go.
Justin Hakins:And you have layers upon layers upon layers of basically betting what's going to happen and people buying and selling the bets and pack taking the bets and packaging them together and selling them. And and, like, all this crazy stuff, that's what's going on. And so Chris threw out that number 1 quadrillion. That's the total value they think because they don't even know. They think that's the total value of all the derivatives.
Justin Hakins:1 quadrillion dollars. But there isn't a quadrillion dollars worth of securities. And so how does that how does that work? There might be 80. I think there's roughly a $100,000,000,000,000 in securities held by DTC.
Justin Hakins:How can you have how can you have a quadrillion dollars, which is a number we can't even really think about, on a $100,000,000,000,000? Because the bets themselves have this value because the market says they have value. But in reality, there's there's not enough wealth underlying all of it to support the weight of the system. It's it's all kind of an illusion of what's going on, and it's a very, very dangerous illusion that if it's not managed just the right way, which the experts will say, don't worry. We're managing it just the right way.
Justin Hakins:But if it's not managed just the right way and the whole thing comes crashing down, it would be extremely difficult for people to pull it all apart and figure out who gets what wealth. But what what they've done for sure is made the laws in such a way that the big institutions are the first ones that are gonna be protected in most cases, not you, the individual person.
Chris Talgo:Your analogy is really good, Justin, and explains it very well. And it brings us to the point that that you're making, which is that the regular person is going to be last in line if there's ever a problem. They're going to be last in line to get paid off for their investment when they are the ones who actually supplied the original investment. So it's as if you had all the bettors, the farthest off bettors in the betting on betting on betting on betting on betting get all the money, but those who actually played in the game only get paid after everybody else, which they never get. The other thing to remember is that this is all, as you said, pretty much impossible without this system of being able instantly to reassign reassign the the ownership of something.
Chris Talgo:That's what that's what is is happening there. It's like a Amazon Prime book. You know? You own that book, but you don't own it. You only own the right to read it on your Kindle or other device.
Chris Talgo:And then you could give that you could sell, gift that book to somebody else. Well, what this is like is Amazon saying, hey. We're gonna give that book to somebody else instead of you because they gotten they somehow got the the the the right to do that. Well, the way they got the right to do that and the way all this happened was government. Government created this system, and it's going to take government action to change it and reform it.
Chris Talgo:We, you know, we always wanna have I don't want big government, and I don't want government doing things. Well, in order to stop the government from doing things like this when it's already done it, you have to get a reform. But the big problem, as you point out, is that it's also tangled at this point that it virtually impossible to untangle it without creating a collapse of the system. So what you will get is ultimately, you will get the collapse of the system on its own because it's not sustainable. As you notice, two and a half times as much money being bet on the bet on the bets as the real the real game itself.
Chris Talgo:So there will be some crash as you as you state. That's absolutely true. And the and what it will do is it will concentrate wealth even farther than it is now.
Linnea Lueken:And, Sam, I think Jim's got a question. Justin has a hard cutoff at at the top of the hour here, so I'm gonna hand it over to Jim for his question. Really quick, Justin. Thank you so much for being on in case you have to close out the second you finish answering the question. Yeah.
Linnea Lueken:Sure. So here's Jim.
Jim Lakely:Justin's never been known to take a lot of time to answer a question. I don't know why you're saying that. So, you know, I mean, the title of the book, Justin, is the next big crash. And, of course, it makes everyone watching and listening to this podcast think about the last big crash, right, in 2008. Pick another one from farther in the past.
Jim Lakely:And, of course, there were huge bailouts. Right? So the government bailout of all the big banks and all of that. When you're talking about a quadrillion dollars, which I half of me doesn't even believe that's an actual word and it doesn't really exist, and that a quadrillion dollars, you might as well just make up a name. But there cannot be, it seems to me, a bailout for the next big crash because it just it just we we there isn't the capability of doing it.
Jim Lakely:I mean and I just my it's a two part question. Maybe you can talk about the last big crash and the bailouts and whether that was you know, people criticize the bailouts all the time, and we did too. I mean, in as a free market think tank, you know, part of freedom and and economic freedom means there's consequences to bad bets. Right? And that the market will correct itself, and that's why.
Jim Lakely:And when you bail out, you distort the market and you actually make things worse. But there are other people not us necessarily, but, you know, regular investors, people with four zero one k's, are like, you know, well, gosh. I'm glad the bailout happened so that I have something to retire on. So can you talk about, you know, the bailouts in context from the last big crash and how if there could be a bailout for the next big crash?
Justin Hakins:Yeah. The so, obviously, you know, the next big crash, if it does involve the derivatives market, it doesn't necessarily mean the whole derivatives market crashes. It doesn't mean that the entire economy goes down. Although if you had the right, you know, AI system and a a good quantum computer, you could probably hack your way to destroying the entire economy. But what it does in if the crash is big enough, the question becomes, well, what happens?
Justin Hakins:In the past, what they've done, as you've noted, is they the Fed working in tandem with the government has printed massive amounts of money. They've created massive amounts of money, and they've dumped it into the financial system, and they've dumped it into Wall Street. And that's made Wall Street very happy. They've all gotten a lot richer. In fact, everybody who's owned assets over the last twenty years, if you've owned assets and you've held on to them through all of these things that have happened, you've made lots of money from money printing.
Justin Hakins:The people who don't already have a lot of assets are the ones who are in a bad situation because assets become more and more expensive all around them, houses, stocks, etcetera. And if you don't buy in today, then who knows if you'll be able to afford it in a year. That's that's basically what's been going on. So this has really hurt a lot of younger people working, and middle income people have not been able to keep up with all of this while the rich have gotten richer and richer and richer from all of the money printing. The problem that the system has today is is, by the way, this DTC organization that owns all of the investments, the direct register as the direct registered owner is part of the Fed.
Justin Hakins:It's a Fed bank officially. So the Fed is invested heavily in making sure that this institution does not collapse. But the problem we have today is they've already printed so much money and dumped it into the economy that they created for themselves an inflation crisis that is not going away. And they have a debt they're in they have a debt spiral now as well. So they they're they're the government is in so much debt that they have to spend a, you know, a trillion dollars or something like that every year just to pay the interest on the debt.
Justin Hakins:And because they're not stopping their spending, they keep increasing spending on top of this problem. They're going deeper into debt, which means their interest payments go up, which means they might need to go deeper into debt to pay the interest payments, and it goes it gets worse and worse and worse and worse and worse. So the that's the biggest difference between today and when Obama when when George w Bush did TARP and Obama added on to TARP, that whole thing that those bailouts were in a context where we had a debt crisis, but it wasn't anywhere near as bad as the debt crisis we have now. So now if you have a big crash, the people, the Fed, and the government are in a really tough spot. Because normally, the solution is we just print the money, dump it into the financial system, and everything gets stable, and the rich get richer, and but there's no gigantic crash.
Justin Hakins:But if they keep doing that strategy, we go deeper into debt, which requires more and more of this money printing, which creates more and more problems, and inflation is such a political issue for them now. That's a risk for them. They may not wanna do that. And that's why I'm so concerned about having all of this all of these securities, this wealth just sitting off to the side because that doesn't to access that doesn't require printing more money. You have a $100,000,000,000,000 worth of securities sitting off to the side.
Justin Hakins:And it would be so tempting for the government to say, you know what? Maybe we shouldn't print money this time, or maybe we print some money, but not as much as we need depending on how big the bailout is. Why don't we just let Wall Street use some of this wealth that's sitting off to the side here in order to bail themselves out of this jam that we're in right now? And, yeah, regular people, they might be screwed, but we'll make sure that they're taken care of in the future. Don't worry.
Justin Hakins:You know, they'll be fine. And we need to do this in order to bail out Wall Street. As we go deeper into this debt crisis, that prop that that possibility, I think, becomes increasingly more likely because they gotta get the wealth from somewhere, and the wealth is just sitting in this centralized institution where they could theoretically, if they wanted to, access it. And I think I think that that's a very real danger today in a way that it probably wasn't in 2000 or 2005 or something like that. They weren't gonna do it back then.
Justin Hakins:Even even 2008, 2009, 2010, they had a lot more money printing that they could they they could do. That was the easier solution. But now with all the inflation problems and the fear of creating even more inflation problems in the future, I don't know if that's true. And as time goes on, I think that that possibility of a bailout using these securities instead of just printing money becomes increasingly more likely.
ST Karnick:Do you think that that could also lead to a central bank digital currency?
Justin Hakins:So the other thing that we talked about in the book thank you for mentioning that. The other thing we talked about in the book is the CBDC, central bank digital currency. I mean, that was another big that's that's the other big thing that I'm worried about happening. I think that there's no question that central banks all over the world, including the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, the Bank of China, all the basically, large central bank that matters in the entire world is working on some kind of central bank digital currency. And and it's an incredibly scary thing because a central bank digital a central bank digital currency, almost all of the designs of them that have been put out there by these big institutions are programmable, which means you can design it in such a way that you can make rules for how people use it.
Justin Hakins:You can surveil what people are doing with it. You can tie special interest rates to it so that you get rewards when you do things the government likes, and you get penalized when you do things the government doesn't like. In China, they've already got systems like this in place. They've tied digital currencies to social credit scores so that good citizens get rewarded with digital money and bad citizens get punished. And and, like, this whole thing is incredibly terrifying, and all the central banks are saying, yeah.
Justin Hakins:We're working on it. We're trying to do it. We want it to happen. And that is going to happen. And and the reason I say it's going to happen almost certainly is because they the the dollar, as we understand it, is dying.
Justin Hakins:It is dying. And and, eventually, the plan is at least with central banks, we're gonna take the dollar away, and we're gonna move it to this new thing. That's a it it's we're gonna call it a dollar. We're gonna say it's a a digital dollar, but it's not actually a a dollar. It's a new currency.
Justin Hakins:And it's gonna we're gonna fool everybody, we're gonna sort of force the transition. And then everyone will be using this new currency that will be able to easily control and manipulate in a way that's a lot easier than the existing system. There'll be no more cash, no physical currencies that we have to worry about. And then when you talk about things like the the surveillance state and all of that, it's going to be I mean, that's that's the end really of any freedom at all if we end up with a central bank digital currency. So there is going to be a push for that to happen.
Justin Hakins:The question is, can we stop it? And that's what the Heartland Institute is is trying to do.
ST Karnick:So what you're saying is between the Ring cameras and the CBDC, we're all screwed. Great. Yes. I'm gonna go live in the woods off the grid. I'm gonna go live in Montana, everybody.
ST Karnick:Peace. Yeah.
Linnea Lueken:Yeah. Fantastic. Thank you very much for that good news, Justin.
ST Karnick:We're Happy to happy
Justin Hakins:to bring it to you.
Linnea Lueken:Yeah. Well, and you and thank you so much for being on the show. I know you have to get going, but we really appreciate you taking time out. I know you've been researching all sorts of stuff for probably new books now that one is out. I imagine that you have another project on the pipeline.
Linnea Lueken:Where where where should people other than buying the book on Amazon, which everybody should do or anywhere that this book is sold, what else should they be, keeping a lookout for?
Justin Hakins:Yeah. I I think the big thing is there's lawmakers all across the country at the state level who are starting to take notice of this, and they're trying to pass rules related to the uniform commercial code that will provide people won't fix all the problems, but it will stop some of the most egregious issues related to the stuff we've talked about today. So pay attention to what's going on in your state. States can actually fix a decent amount of the issues that I talked about today, at least the worst parts of it. And so, that's that's a big thing for people to pay attention to.
Justin Hakins:State lawmakers can make this problem, can can they can't totally solve it, but they can make it a a lot less problematic. They, but they need push. They need support. They need people talking about it in the public, and that's why we spent so much time putting this book together.
ST Karnick:Well, since my since my role on this podcast is to, be optimistic, here's why I am optimistic. Because I've known Justin for a very long time, and Justin has raised the alarm bell on ESG, the great reset, and modern monetary theory. And last time I checked, all those three things went in, down in a, you know, ball of flames. So I am somewhat optimistic because I am such a cheerful, you know, glass half full kinda guy as everyone in my life knows that we can avoid this.
Justin Hakins:Well, thank Justin has I hope that happens.
Chris Talgo:To leave, but I I I agree with Chris, and we'll probably maybe go a little longer after you're gone. But there are scenarios in which this crash that that is expected and that we should expect is averted. And there are also scenarios in which you have the crash, and this is not the outcome. So it's and and you and I have discussed this. We've all discussed these, these scenarios.
Chris Talgo:So there are other possibilities, but the point that Justin makes and the point that you and Jack make in your book is really critical is that it's in our hands right now as Americans to make a difference, to change this if that's what we want to do. But we're going to have to hold the politicians' feet to the fire, as you say, and make sure that they understand that now we know what's going on, and we're not going to have it.
Linnea Lueken:Absolutely. Well, you know, you guys, the, the cabal, I guess, you could say is definitely not going anywhere here. We're definitely still in danger even if things are getting better. As we will discuss in the next segment, we will have a little bit of a silver lining to talk about in a minute here. You know, there was this massive transfer of wealth, especially most recently around COVID, you know, from businesses and families to multinational corporations and financial institutions.
Linnea Lueken:And it really it really does make you wonder who you can trust with your money. Right? I mean, I guess there's one thing that you could do, which is to stuff your mattress with precious metals. And if the government wants to come steal them, you can say that you lost them in a boating accident. So a lot of people in conservative, libertarian, and even plain old prepper spaces will hit you with ads for buying precious metals.
Linnea Lueken:And they're not wrong, but they are a good investment, especially when it comes to physical precious metals instead of just certificates. But you wanna be careful about who you buy those metals from. At In The Tank, we trust advisor metals over all of those other guys. And that's because we know that the person running the place is the best of the best. A great friend of Liberty, Ira Brushetsky, owns and is the managing member of Advisor Metals.
Linnea Lueken:He has decades of experience in precious metals and is the only person in the physical precious metals industry who has the Commodities Futures Trading Commission federal registration. That's a mouthful. What does it mean for you? Well, it's a great thing because it means everything that Ira or a member of his team says to you has to be 100% factual. So there's no sketchy sales pitch or bait and switch.
Linnea Lueken:He is held to the highest ethical standards, and there is full transparency, which is way too lacking, obviously, from what Justin just showed us in other places nowadays. So if you want to diversify your investment portfolio and your savings, if you're planning for retirement and are concerned about economic uncertainty, if you want a tangible asset that is easy to buy and sell, you can secure your assets with a wide range of physical precious metals by getting in touch with our friend Ira at Advisor Metals. He will make it super easy for you. Please visit climaterealismshow.com/metals, and you can leave your information for Ira and get started with investing in precious metals and expand your current portfolio. So go to climaterealismshow.com/metals.
Linnea Lueken:And when you talk to Ira, be sure to let him know that we are the ones who sent you. That helps us as you're helping your financial future by diversifying with precious metals at Advisor Metals. Alright. So this is our economics update here. I'm gonna really depend on you for this one, Sam.
Linnea Lueken:So the economy is, you know, still struggling. What what parts of the economy are not totally fake according to according to Justin's fantastic research are still struggling, but the ship is slowly, slowly turning around. One of the indicators is that the trend where federal jobs increase while private sector jobs died off has reversed. So now the private sector job market is growing while the federal government is actually shrinking. Imagine that.
Linnea Lueken:So this this tweet here by a real e j Antoni, says it has shrunk so much that federal employment is at its lowest level since 1966, and we haven't felt it at all. You know? There was a lot of doom and gloom months ago with, liberals saying, you know, what are we gonna do if you lay off all these federal employees? Nothing. Nothing happened at all.
Linnea Lueken:So that makes you wonder, you know, why on earth did everyone think all this was necessary in the first place?
Chris Talgo:Mhmm.
Linnea Lueken:And, Sam, you wrote on this at Life Liberty property last month. And I love your, you know, your realistic, but also optimistic takes on economics. Even though I saw in the comments there, we had someone ask you if you think that the government is going to do anything about what's going on. They said, do you believe our government have the intellectual wherewithal to understand the problem yet let alone fix it? And you said, I have no faith whatsoever that the government will do the right thing.
Linnea Lueken:So, great. But also so you are realistic. And you wrote though in Life Liberty property last month that job growth has been stagnant overall, but as beneficial government shrinkage continues. So that's because we're losing way more jobs in government. The movement from part time work to full time employment, though, is a positive trend, a highly positive trend.
Linnea Lueken:So people are swapping, holding multiple part time jobs for single better paying full time jobs. And one of the biggest things you pointed at was the number of jobless claims have fallen this year or this last year. So it's I'll let you take it from here because you can explain this stuff a lot better than I can.
Chris Talgo:Oh, good graph. That's a very good graph there. I like that one. Yeah. So let me let me, jump in here.
Chris Talgo:What really has happened is that you you have a movement. You have a couple of important movements in employment. Now one is that now the the actual, job market is is strengthening. So on net, even though you're losing plenty of jobs from the federal government, thank you very much, and and the state governments as well, even though you're losing jobs there, you're gaining so many jobs in the private sector that you're that that the job situation has turned around. It's becoming a a a tighter job market.
Chris Talgo:So that's a really, really positive, thing that there are more jobs. But the other thing about it is in addition to there being more jobs and there being in the private sector, which is where everything gets produced, it's not in the government bureaucracy that you get productivity. So, in addition to that, though, you have people moving from, part time work to full time work. So when you put those two things together, you find that the industrial production in The United States rose point 4% month over month in December, and it is it rose again in in January. So what's happening is, industrial production and, all production overall is rising in the private sector.
Chris Talgo:And, of course, the only way to get, more production of goods and services is to have more jobs, more people doing it. You increase productivity, yes, but you need more people to to produce these things. Well, guess what? Productivity has risen in the in the past, few months. So, overall, we had things trending down.
Chris Talgo:If you look at the numbers for, you look at the graph on industrial output, manufacturing output, it was going down throughout the yeah. Right right there. It was going down throughout the Biden administration. And and this is not partisan. This is just a fact that during that period, it was decreasing.
Chris Talgo:And it and it kept going down until January, and then it starts to go back up. And it it has risen very fast since then. So we're we're reindustrializing as a nation. That's that's good. It's, honestly, it doesn't make much difference, frankly, whether we whether we reindustrialize or not.
Chris Talgo:What makes a difference is, are we creating goods and services overall, and are people getting employed to do those? And another point, are they getting paid more? Well, here's the nice thing. With productivity having increased, wages are going up, and wages have gone up faster than inflation over the last year. That is a big turnaround for this country because what it means is your real income is going up as a whole.
Chris Talgo:Now we don't live on the the mean or median dollar. We live on what we get, but more people are getting more pay than they were before. And a big part of that, as I mentioned, the move from part time work to full time work. The final point I wanna, touch on is that the, decrease in immigration to a negative net migration, has shrunk the the labor supply a bit, and that's what's pushing up wages on top of the the greater demand. So all these factors are very, very positive.
Chris Talgo:And it goes to my principle, which is that the fundamentals are always what counts. So you can you can manipulate things. You can manipulate money. And as Justin pointed out, you can bet on bets on bets and so forth, and that's that's all good. You're going to win sometimes.
Chris Talgo:You're gonna win very big. You're going to lose a lot and lose very big. But the fundamental things apply as time goes by, as the song says. And it's building things, making goods and services, and providing those at a more efficient rate and pace as you go on so that you are in it's called increasing productivity. And as that happens, things do get better.
Chris Talgo:Now we we have a whole lot of problems in our economy, but those are things that have been going on for decades. And they were exacerbated terribly in 2022 and 2023 because of extremely rapidly rising inflation. That's what created the affordability crisis. This is what will repair it. This is what will fix it.
Chris Talgo:More goods and services produced more efficiently.
ST Karnick:Stan, wanna I I agree with most of what you just said, but there's one thing that I don't agree with, and that is production is rising mostly because of automation, AI, and robotics, not necessarily because they're hiring more workers. And I just checked the, labor participation rate, and it's still in the doldrums. It's 62.4%, still way lower than it was even a couple years ago, and, also, manufacturing jobs are down. So I think that we can have two things happening at the same time here. We can have the, economy becoming more productive.
ST Karnick:GDP growth is, you know, very good and very robust. However, American workers are still struggling big time, and you do make a good point that, the, wage growth is slightly ahead of, inflation, but it's only 1.1%. We need to get that much more into the three, four, 5% range. And, you know, I do think that we are still at the very beginning of this automation revolution. So let's not, conflate productivity with, you know, workers necessarily doing doing better.
ST Karnick:So and that's just, you know, one one one one way of looking at it. But I do I do agree with you that, generally speaking, because of the one big beautiful bill and the incentives that were put in place for manufacturing to, you know, to be you know, come back here on, you know, on American shores, that's all great. I just do wonder, and it's not just me. I, you know, speak to other people about this, that if we are on the cusp of a manufacturing renaissance that is not going to, be super beneficial to, you know, blue collar workers more than it is to people in the, robotics, automation, and, you know, AI realms. So it's just something I think you should keep in mind.
Chris Talgo:I appreciate those, comments, Chris. It's very interesting because, like, as you mentioned about manufacturing jobs, at present, there are seven to 9,000,000 manufacturing jobs that are unfilled because they cannot get people to take those jobs. And those jobs are unfilled because we have a I think because we have a very expansive welfare state that makes it very you could you can live fairly well working zero hours per week as opposed to working forty hours a week or forty five or fifty. You get more money if you work if you go to work. But is it really worth it?
Chris Talgo:And so there are many jobs that are unfilled. So when you look at the the job numbers, things like that, you you have to look at the fundamentals. What are the causes? What are what is what is causing, these various things to happen? So one of the things that's happening, as I say, is that people actually are not taking those jobs.
Chris Talgo:And, you know, the economic principle is that, well, the wages will just rise such that people will take those jobs, but you can only pay so much for a particular position. And what you need to do is stop the government from taking people out of the labor market like that. So, again, as I say, there are all kinds of things that you could say, well, this isn't quite as good as we'd like, and that isn't. Absolutely right. But the the important thing is that the markets and people are doing the right things, and they're only being stopped by government.
Chris Talgo:And that's that's always the case. It's always the case. If you leave people alone, they will produce goods and services. Why? Because they want goods and services, and that's how you get them, by trading.
Chris Talgo:So when the government sticks sticks a big giant pipe wrench into the machine, it all goes fluey. So they're slowly it's like they're slowly pulling it out. It's not perfect, and it is very far from it. But the, as I say, the numbers indicate to me and and as I say, as Lynea kindly said it, I said this a month ago, that this is what was happening. And if you look at the fundamentals, you will you will never be wrong.
Chris Talgo:The only thing that's unpredictable is how irrational and destructive and stupid the government can get.
Linnea Lueken:Yeah. Oh, I I do wanna move us on to our last topic today just so we can get a little touch on it. I wanted to say, you know, the house passed the Save America bill with all Republicans and one Democrat voting for it. But I also wanted to say that just while we were on the air here, Trump and EPA administrator Lee Zeldin announced the end of the vehicle emissions endangerment finding. So that is a big win for everybody involved in our area of expertise, which is the climate issue.
Linnea Lueken:So yay, Heartland Institute. Yay, CFAQ. Yay, everybody involved in all this stuff. Yep. Jim?
Jim Lakely:Can I I know I know we wanna move on to this to the SAVE Act? Just just a couple really quick points on on the economy that
Linnea Lueken:Oh, sure.
Justin Hakins:Chris Sorry.
Jim Lakely:Chris and SAVE had on there. No. It's okay. You know, look. The Biden jobs numbers from the Bureau of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics in the Biden years were overinflated, especially before the twenty twenty four election, and most of the jobs created under Biden were government jobs.
Jim Lakely:We showed the chart up there. The fact that there are fewer federal employees today, it is at the lowest place since 1966. I believe Sam's the oldest person on this podcast. I am fifty fifty six years old or I'm sorry. No.
Jim Lakely:55 years old. I'll be fifty six fifteen months. That's older than me. I mean, this is it's really amazing. It's something Ronald Reagan wasn't able to accomplish, but this is it's mind blowing.
Jim Lakely:And I think it's important to point out, although, you know, there are some issues with the economy, the fundamentals of the economy are stronger than they were a year ago or two years ago and maybe for a long you know, for many for several years. I mean, the tariffs, love them or hate them, they actually have incentivized bringing manufacturing back into The United States. The US just this month passed Japan in steel production. That hasn't happened in decades. That is a big, big deal.
Jim Lakely:And as you mentioned, Lynette, unnecessary regulations like the engagement firing are being rolled back, you know, and it's not just that one. It's other ones as well. Illegal immigration has stopped to literally zero. I think last month, not a single crossing. So and, you know, so people taking jobs from native born Americans are also self deporting on top of that.
Jim Lakely:That opens up more jobs which, you know, helps wages rise, and it makes housing more affordable. I mean, none of these good things happened under Biden. I mean, it's because of policy decisions. Horrible policy decisions when it comes to to economics. And so this is just starting now, and, hopefully, you know, that the voters will reward the party, frankly, that has put these policies in place because none of this would be happening if Kamala Harris was president and the Democrats were in control of everything.
Chris Talgo:Okay. Me see. One one quick follow-up.
ST Karnick:We are we are in a better position for sure. However, when you, poll Americans about, are you better off than you were one year ago? Are you confident that the economy is moving in the right direction? The polls show that they are not. So I really hope that we're not getting all rah rah right now.
ST Karnick:I agree with you, Jim, that the seats could be in place for a big economic boom, and it's I think it would have to be a middle class slash lower class boom like we experienced, during the first Trump administration for, you know, for the people to really, you know, think, okay. This is actually helping me, but I still don't think we're at that point yet. So granted, you know, two things can be true at the same time. The economy in a macro sense can be, firing on all cylinders, which, you know, many people say it is. However, it can still not be, you know, you know, coming down and and, you know, and making, the average American household feel like, wow.
ST Karnick:Things are really getting better. So I still just don't think we're there yet. And I just, you know, think that we we should, you know, be cautious and optimistic, but not, you know, think, okay. Everything's, you know, everything's great because there's still some, you know, major major flaws. And I always look at thing try to look at things from the middle class slash lower class, working class, you know, perspective, and they're still struggling big time.
ST Karnick:So that's all I'm just trying to say.
Linnea Lueken:Well, I don't think anyone
Chris Talgo:on this panel, Chris, is
Linnea Lueken:popping party poppers saying we won. It's over. We've
Justin Hakins:succeeded it. I know.
Linnea Lueken:Economy. Everyone's just saying I know. We're headed in a in a significantly better direction than we were even just a year ago.
Chris Talgo:Yeah. I think that Yeah. It's important to recognize that during the last year of the Biden administration, all the net jobs went to immigrants. And in fact, they they, what's his name? Native native born Americans were leaving the economy, leaving the job market, and being replaced by immigrants.
Chris Talgo:So you had a net negative. That is completely reversed, and that is a positive thing. Totally. What it does is it it it, you know, tightens the labor supply. So that means workers get more money.
Chris Talgo:And, I think that we're not as, Linda said very well, we're not, you know, popping party poppers. What what I'm trying to do is look at the facts and say, what really is going on here? If you look at polls, you're getting, people's opinions and their thoughts, which are are derived from the the media more than from the Heartland Institutes in the in the tank show. Nonetheless, I think that if you look at the if you look at the fundamentals and you look at the real numbers and you you tease them out and find the the truth behind them, and then you look at the polls and the polls are telling you a different story, believe the numbers because that's what people are actually living. More people, especially native born Americans
ST Karnick:agree with that because
Chris Talgo:have jobs now and are get being paid more than before.
ST Karnick:The Biden administration tried to do that, and we rightfully, you know, you know, held their feet to the fire by saying, oh, the economy is great. You just don't know it yet. I I just think that's a really dangerous road to go down, and I think we should always, always, you know, take, you know, what Americans are feeling, you know, first and foremost. And according to the polls, and this is not just, you know, CNN or MSNBC or MSNow, you know, saying this is Fox News polling, gala polling, you know, all the polls saying that the vast majority of, you know, Americans still think that they are unable to get ahead in today's economy. And I do remain a little bit concerned about the automation, you know, that's coming down the pike.
ST Karnick:And, you know, people who are much smarter than me about this stuff, like Elon Musk, they say that, you know, this could really completely transform the job environment. So we're still at the very beginning of that. So these are just things that I just think it's always good to kinda, you know, keep in mind and, you know, just be open minded about it. And and, you know, that's all I'm saying.
Linnea Lueken:Alright. Can we talk about the Save Save America Act now? Thank you. Okay. So we're we're gonna just spend, like, a couple minutes on this.
Linnea Lueken:So we'll go a little bit overtime because I really wanted to get to this just to just to mention or at least keep our our viewers up to date on this stuff because I think it's important. You know, we've been we we talk not very often actually about, like, voter integrity measures, and I just think that this one is kind of this situation is kind of incredible. So this is the house. The house has passed the Save America bills, like I said before, with all Republicans and one Democrat voting for it. Axios wrote probably one of the dumbest articles I've ever seen about a bill on the situation.
Linnea Lueken:It's just like pure propaganda. And so I'm going to read it to you, the people.
Justin Hakins:So I think they
Linnea Lueken:this article this article is titled how the Save America Act could impact 21,000,000 voters. President Trump's push to nationalize elections includes his backing of a bill that could be a nightmare for voters, election experts told Axios. Why it matters. The house is scheduled to vote on the save they already have, which requires proof of citizenship to vote and could potentially prevent millions of people from casting their ballots. Trump and Republicans have framed their election overhaul efforts as necessary to stop noncitizen voting, but that is both illegal and rare, says Axios.
Linnea Lueken:So because it's illegal, that means it's not happening. Anyway, Democrats have accused Trump of using the bill to manipulate midterms in the GOP's favor, which is a crazy thing to accuse him of, with senator Adam Schiff saying on Sunday on ABC News that Trump intends to try to subvert the elections. The Save America Act sends clear marching orders for state lawmakers to enact Trump's extreme elections agenda, all with an eye toward this year's midterms, said Samantha Terrazzi, CEO of the Voting Rights Lab. So what does this bill do? It requires proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections.
Linnea Lueken:So that's crazy. Options to prove citizenship include insane things like an ID a real ID compliant ID showing that you're a citizen, or a passport, or a military ID, or a government issued photo ID showing US birth or a birth certificate or other proof of US birth or naturalization documents. Unsurprisingly, Todd Belt, a professor at George Washington University, which has long since become a crazy woke, cesspit, who researches campaigns and elections told Axios that if the SAVE Act is passed, people without a government issue ID will no longer be able to vote. Yes. That is the point.
Linnea Lueken:He said most political analysis of the impacts the impact demonstrates a lower turnout rate among blacks, Latinos, and low income voters, he said, which I find incredible. One of the other incredible things that, Democrats are now pushing very hard in the news is that asking for ID to vote will disenfranchise women, especially married women who might not have changed their ID to their new name yet. So so glad we have these guys looking out for us. This is just racism, and it's it's just the same old liberals are racist thing as ever. You know, they're saying that, you know, if you are required to do a little bit of paperwork or go to the DMV to make sure that you have your ID ready, that that's something that, like, women and minorities are incapable of achieving, which is a thing to say.
Linnea Lueken:I don't I don't even know. Guys, is this going to ruin, like, your wives and the women in the the women in your life's ability to vote? Is it is this just handing the country over to the patriarchy?
ST Karnick:Well, Lanea, just real quick. So at the beginning, you said that this is something that Perlin doesn't really touch, but actually, we did. We had a really good poll on this in 2020 in which we polled people and we asked them, did you follow, you know, the the the legal voting procedures? And many of them, after the fact, said, no. We didn't.
ST Karnick:Like, a very large portion. And we actually did the math, and that could have, you know, if you extra extrapolate that out, that could have actually impacted the entire, 2020, presidential election. Election. So the the notion that this is only happening at the margins is just obviously not true. And we've already had states pass similar things like this.
ST Karnick:And I think one of our viewers noted that in Georgia, which passed a law specifically requiring voter ID and you had to prove that you were a citizen, what happened? The amount of minority vote, the the total percent went up. So it's just really I mean, you talk about gaslighting. I mean, the gaslighting going on with this, and I'm watching this on CNN and MS Now and, you know, the other networks and looking at how they're, portraying it on some of the, you know, liberal, news website. And like you said, it's really sick because what they're saying is a large portion of the American people are are literally unable.
ST Karnick:They're incapable. They're too dumb to go and get an ID and present that and vote. Yet they, you know, are required to do that when they go to an airport or when they go, you know, buy liquor or, like, you know, and so many other things. It's it's it's very difficult for me to believe that there are 20,000,000, 21,000,000, apparently, to to that article, people that just don't have ID. It's like, how do you function in society?
ST Karnick:So I really think that the and and lastly, this is an 8020 issue in which 80% of the people, and that includes a majority of Democrats, think, of course, you should have voter ID when you go to vote. So I think that, you know, this this, you know, has the possibility of, of being passed. It looks like the senate's not going to. I mean, Chuck Schumer already said it's DOA, and, you know, it would require, you know, breaking of the filibuster to get this passed. I don't see that happening.
ST Karnick:But the fact that it's even, you know, you know, in the political conversation these days is great. And, you know, I I think that we really need to do this.
Chris Talgo:The headline on that article should have just been democrats, quote, our voters are dumb.
Jim Lakely:Their voters are That's what they're
Chris Talgo:saying is that that their voters are too stupid to be able to get an ID, And they're and so they're you're you're we're going to lose elections. But here's the important thing in my view is that what the what the SAVE Act does is it attacks the very heart of the democrats' own problem, which is this. They imported many, many, immigrants and, found that those immigrants were beholden felt beholden to them, made them feel that way at least. And so they're they, got good, support from them. And then as those immigrants have been here for a while, they become Republicans.
Chris Talgo:They start voting Republican. So it's like, well, we gotta get some more in. And then, ultimately, you had I think it was was it the mayor of Boston, Wu, I think, who said that everyone in the world has a right to come to America. And that's true, in for Democrats because you get to a point where you have to keep importing people to into America in order to get enough Democrats to win the elections or at least make the wins look plausible. And so you have so many that, basically, you have to open up the entire world.
Chris Talgo:Well, next thing, of course, dogs and cats will have to get the vote so that they can vote democrat and then fish and then amoebas and the like. And and it'll take it'll take long to a long time to count those votes, but that's okay as long as we get the right answer, which is Yeah. Democrat wins.
Linnea Lueken:I wanna point I wanna point this out too. Like, voter ID laws are de facto discriminatory. Right? Because you cannot get an ID if you're not a citizen, therefore, you are being discriminated against to vote in our elections unless you get, like, fake you steal someone's ID or something, but now you've committed identity theft.
ST Karnick:Well, they argue they argue they argue that many people and they say they have data to back this up. I don't know that many many Americans don't have their original birth certificate, or they just, like, lost those records. I can see maybe, but I'm pretty sure you can go and reapply. Like, you can you can you can go and re you know, like, get, you know, alternative versions of those things. I mean, I happen to have my birth certificate, but I'm sure that not every single person, you know, has those those documents.
ST Karnick:But even when you set up a mailing address and I had to go to the DMV when I moved back to Illinois a few years ago, they made me bring all sorts of documents to prove that I did indeed live at that address, and I did bring multiple documents showing that I was US citizen. So that's just kind of a, you know, like, a very weak excuse.
Linnea Lueken:Yeah. I I would
Chris Talgo:to say get your American it's really hard to get your American birth certificate when you were, in fact, born in El Salvador. So that's the problem.
Linnea Lueken:I'll I'll say this too. I I and this might be an unpopular position for people who are a little bit more liberal inclined, who might otherwise agree with the Voting ID Act. I think it's a good thing. Like, if you are someone who is a is a legal, you know, American citizen, but you don't care enough about the elections in general to go out and make sure that you have proper identification so that you can vote, I don't feel bad that you're not voting. Good point.
Linnea Lueken:I do want to disenfranchise people who don't care enough about our elections to do you know, to go to the dang DMV and get your paperwork finished properly. Like, no. I don't think you should be voting if you're not willing to do that. That small of a thing. Something that you need to do that in order to buy, like you said, buy liquor.
Linnea Lueken:And most people are willing to go through that hassle so they can have a legal identification so that they can buy alcohol. You can do that to go vote.
Jim Lakely:A 100%.
Chris Talgo:Let's be like Europe and require people to show an ID.
Jim Lakely:Yeah. It's this it's already too easy. I'm I'm with you. That's not unpopular opinion with me, Linea. I'm with you a 100%.
Jim Lakely:It's already too easy to vote in this country. In fact, it's so easy to vote in this country. It is the only thing easier than voting in this country is cheating and stealing elections. There is the only reason the Democratic party or anybody with a brain and and reason and who was reasonable would be against voter ID is so that elections can be stolen. Sam had, pointed out that there the open border policy of the Biden administration for four years, anywhere between 10 to 20,000,000 illegals just pouring over the border and then spread out.
Jim Lakely:And Frank in in fact, using the money of left leaning NGOs to sprinkle illegal immigrants into red states, to be honest, in order for for maximum political disruption. It was the Democrat party's number one job for the last in the four years of the Biden administration. We are now seeing that there are some real investigations and inquiries going on in Georgia about the election irrigalities in 2020. Democratic judges throwing out any challenges in Georgia because you don't have standing. That is that is going well.
Jim Lakely:I believe the supreme court just issued a decision that a loser in election actually, this is so logical. I can't believe it it took this long to to be decided by the supreme court. But, yeah, if you ran for office and you think your opponent cheated to win, you should have standing to sue and have an investigation begun. Supreme Court said that is okay. The again, the only the only reason the Democrats oppose this is because I I'm just let's just say it flat out.
Jim Lakely:I don't think the Democratic party could win a fair election in this country, and it wouldn't even be close. If you look at the ideological journey that the Democratic Party has taken over the last ten years or so, maybe twenty years, they are so far to the left and out of the mainstream. You know, that old beam, you know, where people are standing in the middle and and the Democrats and the and the and the, you know, the left just keeps going farther and farther away. None of their policies are popular. They weren't popular during the Biden administration.
Jim Lakely:I still am looking for a explanation of how Barack Obama, the most celebrated and fitted, a fitted candidate in the in American history got, what was it, 68 and sixty six and sixty eight million votes, and then Joe Biden gets 81,000,000 votes. And then Kamala Harris's vote total goes back down to, like, 60 something. I still have not found an explanation for that. Does anyone have an explanation for that? Has that ever been answered?
Jim Lakely:It has not been answered. I don't I frankly don't think Democrats could win an election fair and square in this country. And I think that they know that, and that's why all of these steps have been taken, especially in the last four years, to ensure that they can cheat in these elections. And they and when they get power, what do they do? Virginia just drew a a new districting map, by the way, because you you put in illegal immigrants are also included in the population, so that determines how many congressional districts you get and also how many electoral votes you get in the electoral college for president.
Jim Lakely:What did their so called moderate democrat, new governor Spanberger, do in Virginia? She and the democrats drew a map in which of the 11 districts, 10 of them are for democrats and the GOP gets one. I think more than, you know, 10% of Virginians voted for Donald Trump in 2024, but they're not gonna get any represent representation in congress. Too bad. Because when Democrats have power, they use it ruthlessly.
Jim Lakely:And all the democrat the Republicans are trying to do here with this bill in congress is not to use their power ruthlessly, is to pass a common sense elections, you know, integrity law that has got 80% support in this country. Even 70 something percent of, you know, rank and file democrats are in support of this bill, but the the democratic power base, in congress will oppose this to the death because they know they can't win elections fair and square. Do you know how many, Sam, how many Republican districts do you think there are in the state of Massachusetts?
Chris Talgo:I think it's zero.
Jim Lakely:It is zero. This many. That's right. Do you have what percentage of, of people in in Massachusetts voted for Donald Trump? Surprisingly, a third of
ST Karnick:them did. Yeah.
Jim Lakely:And so, you know and and then another thing on how, again, the Democrats and the and the deep state and the power structure all work together with the NGOs and all of that, You may have seen you can Google it or ask Grok to find it for you, but the the US Census Bureau had to admit that they made some big mistakes on counting the population of The United States in 2020. Some states got too many people in them, so they got too many congressional districts, too much representation in congress, and also too many electoral votes. Every single error was in favor of the Democrats. All of them. Oh my gosh.
Jim Lakely:I just we miscounted how many people in California. Oopsies. Oh, we've oh, sorry. We miscounted or we overcounted how many people live in Illinois. We undercounted Florida.
Jim Lakely:We undercounted Texas. Oops. Sorry. It was just an honest mistake. That's bullshit.
Jim Lakely:Everybody knows it. The reason we need the SAVE Act is to save this country and by saving our elections. Because if we don't have honest elections, we don't have a country. We we are then ruled by people who are lying, cheating, and manipulating the power that we're supposed to give them temporarily to oppress us and to run this country. It is not legitimate unless we can get the save act, Pat.
ST Karnick:The save act also does a really good thing that I think it's not getting as much attention. It would almost outlaw mail in voting, and it would severely restrict it to only people who have, like, disabilities or, you know, like, they have a legitimate reason to need to vote by mail. And, another thing that one of the the, polls that we did or not polls, we asked voters, if they had committed voter fraud, basically, in the twenty twenty election. We did notice that many of them committed it through mail in ballots. So, you know, in my lifetime, I remember, you know, twenty years ago, voting by mail was very rare.
ST Karnick:I mean, it was really rare. And, obviously, that changed pretty significantly in 2020 with the pandemic and all that stuff. But the SAVE Act would require states like Oregon that have these drop boxes, and you can just go and throw. You know what? It doesn't have to be your ballot.
ST Karnick:You can just throw ballots and ballot harvesting and all that stuff, which I think, you know, definitely did benefit a certain party over another. So all I was trying to do is just clean that up. And, you know, I think Jim's Jim hit the nail on the head here. Elections are very important. We wanna make them as, you know, as on you know, as just, you know, above above, you know, any sort of, suspicion as possible.
ST Karnick:And when you see that, you know, people are just dumping tens and, you know, dozens of ballots in drop boxes and they come in after the election and then they're still counted and all that kind of stuff, I think it does make, you know, a lot of Americans, not just not just Republicans, but independents and Democrats say, gee. I mean, I don't know if that election was really on the up and up. And, as time has you know, as history has shown, once people do start losing, you know, confidence in in in the electoral system, things can go really bad really soon. So we do need we do need to make sure that, only citizens are voting and that people are only voting once. And what the Republican Party did put on the floor and passed the house would do a very good job of doing that.
ST Karnick:It's frustrating that, you know, Chuck Schumer is basically saying it's DOA, but there are I've heard that there are some other parliamentary tactics they could use to try to pass this, you know, in the future, maybe, in a second reconciliation bill. So all hope is not lost. You know? And I just wanna say that, you know, 8080%, eight out of 10 of Americans want this. And when something is that popular, usually, it does get done somehow, you know, finally.
ST Karnick:So I think I think we're moving in the right direction on this.
Jim Lakely:If every election was held just on election day and only absentee ballots to the to the people who had historically qualified for them back in the eighties or eighties and nineties and early two thousands, and there was no early voting, there was none of this thing where the the polls are open for a month, you can just wander in on your way to the dry cleaner or something like that. But if these elections were held the way I was when I first voted, when I was 18, election day, you show up, you vote. I don't think the repub I don't think the Democrats could get more than a 100 members of the house of representatives and maybe 20 senators. I really believe that. That we need to get closer.
Jim Lakely:As as you said, Lanea, you know, the franchise is probably, a little bit too expanded. It's certainly too easy to vote. And the easier you make it to vote, the easier it is to cheat. And there's no question there's a lot of cheating going on in this country.
ST Karnick:A couple of years ago, someone asked me to write a a a opinion on whether or not I think election should be a national holiday. And at the time, I thought no. But I've actually changed my mind on that because I do think that if you were to say, okay. This date is gonna be a federal holiday, so, therefore, you have a legitimate excuse or, you know, reason to, get, know, like, a two hour break from work, that would also then, you know, disqualify a lot of the people that say, I work seven days a week, twenty four hours a day, so therefore, I can't vote. So there I'm on election day.
ST Karnick:So therefore, I I get it get to do a mail mail or I can vote a month before the election. And I do agree with Jim that voting a month before the election is probably not the greatest idea. We wanna get that as close to election day, if not on election day in person as possible because things can change very much six weeks before an election. So those are just common sense things, and I I I hope that we move in that direction. I I think we are.
ST Karnick:I hope we are.
Chris Talgo:And in August, we need a federal holiday, a get a dang ID holiday. So
ST Karnick:there are no excuses. Well, and states have also said because another I remember another common, you know, complaint from from people was it costs money. But states like Florida and Georgia have said, no. No. We'll we'll do this all for free.
ST Karnick:So a lot of the excuses are are, you know, very shallow.
Linnea Lueken:Alright, guys. That is really all the time we have.
Justin Hakins:Woman show ever. It's it's been the
Linnea Lueken:long it's been all the time we have for the last, like, twenty minutes. But, anyway
ST Karnick:Can we talk about the Nancy Guthrie case now? I gotta Yeah. Okay.
Linnea Lueken:So now we're gonna yeah. No. Thank you everybody for your attention to these matters. We are live every single week on Thursdays at noon central on Rumble, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, except for the weeks that we're not. Jim, what have you got for the audience today?
Jim Lakely:We have the Climate Realism Show tomorrow as it is every Friday at 1PM eastern time. We are going to be celebrating and talking about the repeal of the endangerment finding and how important it is and what it means for the future along with, more crazy climate news of the
Linnea Lueken:week. Alright. Sam?
Chris Talgo:Yeah. Thank you. Get the news on the economy and your rights and governance a month before everybody else is going to get it by going to stkarnick.substack.com.
Linnea Lueken:Good pitch. Chris? I
ST Karnick:highly recommend reading this book. I've I seriously, you know, think that Americans will learn a lot. It's very digestible. It's very readable. Please go read it.
Linnea Lueken:Yep. And it's an audiobook. So for people who like to, you know, consume their literature by listening on their way to work and stuff, it's a great way to do it. Alright. So for those audio listeners, please rate us well on whatever service you're using.
Linnea Lueken:Leave a review. Thank you so much to all of our usual panelists and Justin if he's, tuning in later. Thank you. And thank him as well, guys. Leave nice say nice things about Justin in the comments, and, thank you all to our viewers.
Linnea Lueken:We will see you again next week.