The world has suffered and continues to suffer catastrophic economic and social damage from the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020 - but not from the virus itself. 

Rather we’re in the midst of a continuing global crisis created by governments’ policy responses to the pandemic. 

• Trillions of dollars of Federal “relief” spending

• Financed by the Federal Reserve massively increasing the money supply

• And the countless coercive rules and restrictions implemented to stop a Covid virus that came anyway.

The result is the highest inflation in 40 years, which is not slowing down but accelerating. Of course there are other forces at work, like the Biden Administration’s war on fossil fuels, but the root causes of inflation were in place before that.

To understand this better and what we need to be concerned about next, in this episode I talk with the great Jeffrey A. Tucker, the founder of the Brownstone Institute and author of the recently published “Liberty or Lockdown.” Our topic: his speech at Hillsdale College and related article about“The Economic Disaster of the Pandemic Response.”

From the beginning - and starting with Donald Trump’s response - the idea of “the economy” – viewed as mechanistic, money-centered, mostly about the stock market, and detached from anything truly important – was pitted against public health and lives,” reminds Jeffrey.

When governments started declaring some businesses essential and others non-essential what they did not understand is that everything in a economy is interconnected. It's woven. It’s never obvious, but if you cut even one thread, all of a sudden the whole fabric can start to unravel. You cannot just turn off an economy and expect that you can restart it with a snap of your fingers.

The same thing was done with medical procedures and treatments and hospital beds. Some were declared “essential”, others not. Perversely, spending on healthcare plummeted during the pandemic. Non-virus health conditions worsened and life expectancy in America fell.

“We lost two years of education, substance abuse and addiction rose and hundreds of thousands of businesses were destroyed,” says Jeffrey. “Vaccine mandates led to more than a million people being displaced from their jobs.”

In the almost three years after the virus emerged from Wuhan China, “we face an economic crisis without precedent in our lifetimes, the longest period of declining real income in the post-war period, a health and educational crisis, an exploding national debt plus inflation at a 40-year high, continued and seemingly random shortages, dysfunction in labor markets that defies all models, the breakdown of international trade, a collapse in consumer confidence not seen since we started tracking it, and a combustible level of political division.”

So here we are. We all need to be deeply concerned about not just this one crisis, but authorities response to the inevitable next “crises” as well. 

“To this day, the educated elites in the public health establishment defend every last thing they did. Not a single power that they used to lock us down before has been diminished,” worries Jeffrey. “Yes, the courts have cut this policy or that policy a little bit here and there, too little, too late. But in general, all the policy, all the powers that they had before, they have now still, and they will use them again.”

We can’t afford to sit on the sidelines and let this happen. Listen in as Jeffrey and I explore what happened and what we need to do to prevent it next time.

To put it mildly, the expected massive Republican Red Wave in the recent 2022 midterm elections didn’t materialize.  Even though 75% of Americans believe the country is on the wrong track, the election gave us status quo. Virtually every Governor, Senator and House incumbent won reelection. Trump states elected Republican Senators and Biden states elected Democrats. And despite House Republicans getting six million more votes than Democrats (52.3% compared to 46.2%), these votes did not translate into a surge of seats for Republicans. With more and more districts tightly gerrymandered, Democrat incumbents hung on if only by narrow margins.  So what happened? Was it the issues, the money, the candidates, local factors, or something else?  Joining me to explore this question, and where we go from here, is Paul Teller PhD, the Executive Director of Advancing American Freedom who served in the Trump White House as Special Assistant to the President for Legislative Affairs, and then as Director of Strategic Affairs for Vice President Mike Pence. Paul was also Chief of Staff for Senator Ted Cruz. Issues and candidates matter, but how we vote now may matter much more.  The COVID lockdowns in 2020 provided the pretext of crisis to radically change American elections to mail-in and early voting, and in ways that now vary wildly state-by-state. Election Day is a thing of the past. Mail in ballots start coming in months earlier. Returns are not counted for days and ballots are both cast and counted under radically different and often suspicious conditions. “The reason in-person voting was always so important was someone else checks you in,” explains Paul. “A different person gives you a ballot, maybe a different person shows you how to in insert your ballot. Just different eyeballs. And so there's less chance for fraud because there's so many different kind of checks in the system.” The Democrats—with overwhelming media and money advantages—have mastered the arts of massive and unprecedented early, mail-in, and absentee voting. Democrats have far more control of the election machinery and almost total control of the American media and Republicans don't. Still, Republicans seem bent on winning “hearts and minds” and on energizing their voters to show up on Election Day. But it is far easier to finesse and control the mail-in ballots than to “get out the vote.”  Since the advent of massive ballot mail-in and collection drop-off processes, “votes” have become increasingly less valuable and “ballot collection” has become a key to Democrat party success.  Case in point: In Pennsylvania, Oz drew 500,000 more voters to the polls on Election Day than Fetterman did. But Fetterman’s mail-in total exceeded 868,000, four times Oz’s mail-in total, netting a 655,000-vote difference in Fetterman’s favor. With boxes of ballots always seeming to show up at the last minute in close elections to push Democrat candidates into the win column, more and more American will likely never again trust our election results. There is an alternative. Same day voting. In person. With paper ballots. On a Sunday, or make it a national holiday. If Brazil can hold an election and on the same day get the results tabulated by 10 pm, we can too. Paul and I also talk about the great work Advancing American Freedom is doing and their Biden Accountably Tracker which monitors all the bills that Biden proposes, bills he signs, executive orders he issues, letters and directives the White House issues to the agencies, regulations they put out for comment and on and on … all the horribles of Biden’s bad policy choices. Elections matter.

In this episode I’m joined by Bion Bartning, the founder of FAIR, the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism. An entrepreneur and investor, Bion also co-founded eos Products, a personal care brand best known today for its iconic egg-shaped lip balm. 

Bion launched FAIR to address head-on the tribalism, identity culture and politics of division that are pitting Americans one against the other. 

With innocuous terms like diversity, equity and inclusion, or arcane ones like critical race theory, a cynical and intolerant orthodoxy of division is being advocated and enforced throughout America.

It’s infected virtually every American institution: colleges, businesses, government, the media, museums and the arts, the military and most alarmingly, our children's K-12 schools. 

 In schools, “what’s called an “anti-racist” curriculum,” explains Bion, “is in every sense of the word, racist and is teaching children to see themselves fundamentally as defined by the color of their skin, by their immutable characteristics instead of seeing each other as unique individuals who are united by our shared humanity.”

What we must be doing instead is to share and teach what it means to be pro-human.

These so-called “anti-racist” ideologies have manipulated language in a way that makes it very difficult for normal people to oppose them. Suppose somebody comes in and says, "I'm bringing anti-racism to your institution," and they tell you anti-racism means ending racism, who could be opposed? 

“Our approach is to reclaim the words, reclaim the language,” explains Bion.

“We're just insisting on what those words really mean to the vast majority of people. For example, the word equity means the quality of being fair and impartial.” 

“And we're not going to give up on the word diversity. Diversity is a good thing and just because somebody's pushing conformity and calling it diversity doesn't mean that we give up on the word diversity.”

In just a year and half, FAIR a mostly volunteer organization, has grown into a national grassroots network of 1,000s of people with chapters in over 40 states. 

With its compelling aim to promote a common culture based on fairness, understanding, and our common humanity, FAIR’s big tent has attracted people from across the political spectrum with diverse backgrounds, ancestries, ideologies to advance civil rights and liberties for all Americans.

“I think what most people need is to feel that they're part of a community,” explains Bion, pushing back against these toxic ideologies. “They need to feel that there are people backing them up, supporting them, who can help them with messaging and how to talk about how we are unique individuals with a shared common humanity. We call it being pro-human.”

pro-human

adjective \ ‘prō-’hyü-men \

Advocating for one human race, individual civil rights and liberties, and compassionate opposition to racism and intolerance rooted in dignity and our common humanity.

The Foundation Against Intolerance and Racismis an idea whose time has come. Listen to Bion Bartning explain its work and then sign up to support the FAIR cause. 

I know I will.

Recently The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by my guest on this episode, Yale freshman Sahar Tartak.

Titled “My High School’s ‘Antiracist’ Agitprop”, she described how illiberal her supposedly liberal high school had become, and the ways she and other students were “berated, bullied and insulted” for voicing dissent towards the school’s race essentialist policies and programs.

The story goes like this.

In 2021 Great Neck North High School directed the student government to give $375 of student funds to a “racial equity” group to speak to the student body about “systemic racism.” 

Sahar, then a Senior at Great Neck, was the student government’s treasurer, and felt they didn’t know enough about the organization and its mission to disburse the funds. 

So she refused to sign the check.

What happened next was that the full weight of the education cartel’s racialist star chamber fell upon a smart and courageous 17 year old. 

The teachers who advise the student government berated, bullied and insulted her at their next meeting. They began by announcing that her social studies teacher would be present. Together, the three adults told her that the principal himself found my stance “appalling.” She had made them and the school “look bad,” they told her. One teacher said the situation gave her “hives.” Another said “If you’re not on board with systemic racism, I have trouble with that, girlfriend.”

The adults in the room were teachers who had the power to grade and affect her prospects of getting into college.

After that, there were a series of tense meetings between Sahar and the administration and her parents, resulting in stalemate.

Sahar, whose mother escaped revolutionary Iran, and grandfather escaped the Nazis, wouldn’t back down. 

“The experience prompted me and a few like-minded others to look into our school’s curriculums. What we found was an arsenal of lopsidedly race-obsessed lesson plans.” 

One was the American Psychological Association’s “Apology to People of Color” for its role in “Promoting, Perpetuating, and Failing to Challenge Racism.” Another asserted that America is a place where racism is “no better today than it was 200 years ago.”

So what does she do? She presents her findings in an audacious speech to the school board and receives a standing ovation - from other students parents, not the school board. 

In this episode I’m talking again with Myron Ebell, Director of the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Center for Energy and Environment, one of our most effective advocates for Free Market Environmentalism. Myron led the successful decade-long fight to defeat cap-and-trade legislation and led the effort to convince President Trump to withdraw from the Paris climate treaty. The list of those in the “climate industry” who fear Myron’s effectiveness is long. The radical head of the Sierra Club has said he is “one of the biggest threats our planet has ever faced.” 

But when you actually listen to Myron, you conclude that nothing could be further from the truth. 

Some Takeaway From Our Conversation:

Inflation and an economy heading south are far and away the biggest issues that concern American voters. Climate change barely makes the list.

But instead of easing inflation, the falsely named Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) pours climate change subsidies onto the inflation bonfire. Inflation is not a natural disaster. It is a politician-made disaster brought about by massive Federal spending and tax subsidies. 

The Inflation Reduction Act lavished massive spending on green energy and climate change. Almost $400 billion in subsidies for wind power, solar power, carbon capture and storage, credits for buying electric vehicles and a myriad of yet to be proven technologies.

But as we all know, in Washington you need to follow the money. Who are the lobbyists? Who benefits? Who is getting this money?

One of the biggest recipients is what Myron Ebell calls the “Climate Change Industrial Complex.”

The climate change industrial complex is thrilled with the Inflation Reduction Act. “The climate economy is about to explode,” crows Robinson Meyer writing in The Atlantic. “Many of the IRA’s most important provisions are “uncapped” tax credits. That means that as long as you meet their terms, the government will award them and theIRA’s total spending is likely to be more than $800 billion, double what the Congressional Budget Office projects.” 

These wind and solar subsidies benefit already wealthy investors who want to have a guaranteed return on their investment and the federal tax credit is necessary to assure that. The Manchin-Schumer Permitting Bill, which failed by only one vote in the Senate, contained even more massive tax subsidies for transmission lines and vastly expand the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s (FERC) authority over the electric grid. 

It’s scheme was to allow the FERC to put climate goals ahead of electric reliability and affordability. 

According to Myron, “The total costs of transmitting intermittent and unreliable electricity from locations where the wind blows or the sun shines to the distant places where most Americans live in order to achieve “net zero emissions” have been estimated at trillions of dollars.”  

Green energy mandates and subsidies reduce real wages and real GDP by shifting resources from high-productivity uses such as fossil-fuel extraction toward low-productivity and unreliable green energy projects with unproven technologies. 

But isn’t it all worth it if we “save the planet?” Perhaps, if wind and solar green energy could actually deliver the goods. But it can’t.