Conspiracy or REAL? 2024 Election Could Be Postponed! | Paradigm Press
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Do you have a prediction on who’s going to win this year’s election? First of all, I’ll be pleasantly surprised if there is an election, if there’s a genuine fear that Trump could win, the election could just be canceled. The 2024 election cycle is underway, and our guest today poses the question, will there even be an election in November? Jeffrey Tucker is founder and president at Brownstone Institute. He’s also the author of ten books, including Life after Lockdown and many thousands of articles.
Online today, we talk extensively about the recent Supreme Court case and its potential impact on the 2024 election. And he contrasts a Biden or Trump victory and what the economy may look like as a result in 2025 and beyond. He wastes no time getting into it, so please enjoy the discussion. All right. Hello, Jeffrey. It’s really good to see you again. How are you, sir? As well as I can be, given the state of the world.
What an answer. Yeah, well, I think that’s a common refrain these days, regardless of who you’re talking to. I’m really glad to have you on here today because we’ve got the 2024 election. It’s bearing down upon us, and it’s setting up to be probably the most contentious election in recent memory. I’d like to frame this election around this idea of this case that’s in the Supreme Court right now.
It’s Murthy v. Missouri and how it might pertain and how it might impact this year’s presidential landscape as well as presidential elections going forward. So I don’t think that people know much about Murthy versus Missouri. So if you could kind of tell us what that case is all about and kind of explain the wide reaching implications for the outcome. The case came about because a lot of people were silenced during 2000 and 22,021, a lot of my friends were taken down from social media, their posts throttled, their accounts deleted, and that sort of thing.
And these were top scientists that were saying scientific things, true things, true things, and they were consistently blocked while fake science was pushed in exchange. It became strange because the scientists were just saying normal things, like natural immunity works. Masks don’t stop respiratory viruses. Lockdowns are not going to somehow extinguish a virus with a zoonotic reservoir. Normal things like that that everybody accepted and believed in. 2019 suddenly became untrue.
And all my friends were getting notifications that, well, this is a violation of community standards. So it all began with FOIA requests. And what we found out was that the head of the National Institutes for Health. Francis Collins had written to Anthony Fauci saying, we need to take down these crazy fringe epidemiologists and make sure that they experience devastation and refutation. And it became a little strange that sort of provoked some deeper looks and then eventually a lawsuit and more for you requests, and then discovery from the lawsuit, and at the end of which we ended up with 20,000 pages discovering a vast machinery of censorship and control where there’s this kind of unified relationship, I mean, contentious, but unified, between agencies, federal government agencies, and social media companies.
They were working very closely together, and they weren’t really denying it. But of course, for these kind of lawsuits, you have to have any evidence. So the evidence was all there. And all these researchers, and again, many of them associated with Brownstone Institute, discovered that because the federal government knows that it can’t just directly censor, it can’t just order Google to do things. It came up with a scheme whereby it paid university based centers and various nonprofit organizations, some not entirely located in the US, and really developed a network of hundreds of institutions that they could use to develop credibility and forge relationships with social media companies.
And then federal agencies would engage in a process they called switchboarding. So let’s say they decide that Doug Hill is a bad guy. Then the next step would be to try to figure out, well, what’s the best way to get at him. And, oh, let’s use the election integrity partnership, or let’s use the center for putting down hateful people on the Internet or whatever, and they would contact them and drop your name or the subject you’re talking about, and then push these social media companies to engage in this, and then even agitate for the social media companies to rewrite their terms of use so that it would exclude what it is you’re talking about.
And this got worse from 2020 to 2021, to the point that if you said, look, I have a vaccine injury, Facebook would not push that out, even if it was entirely. So. With just these little kind of threads, we discovered a giant to continue the know blanket or something. I don’t know how you would describe it, but it’s a huge apparatus whereby the administrative state is specifically curating and controlling the public mind, sometimes in cooperation with their embedded employees at places like Microsoft, Google, and Twitter 1.
0, and sometimes through third parties, through the switchboarding operations. But it was highly effective and definitely run from the cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security agency of the Department of Homeland Security, which is the same. It’s called CISA, founded in 2018, the same agency that broke the workforce into essential and unessential four years ago on March 19, 2020, and then also verified the safety and integrity of mailing ballots. So this stuff gets crazy once you start looking at it.
And let’s just say it’s obviously unconstitutional. So this case went to the Fifth Circuit, and the judge was alarmed. He said, this is the worst violations of free speech in american history. And so he issued an injunction which went through the usual rounds and landed at Supreme Court. And Supreme Court heard the case, and the justices were, I would say, mostly very confused about what they were hearing because they’re just encountering this trillion dollar enterprise for the first time.
And they said, well, what does this injunction mean? Does that mean that government agencies can’t be in communication with Facebook? What’s wrong with that? That doesn’t violate any free speech. And so the plaintiff’s attorney was up to him to try to explain, that’s really not what we’re talking about. We’re not just talking about communication. We’re talking about building a massive machinery of compulsion and coercion to basically end freedom on the Internet.
I mean, that’s really what’s at issue. But I would say that things did not go well with court. And very likely the injunction will not be approved and agencies will suddenly be celebrating and there’ll be cheers all around, and hundreds of government agencies are going to get involved in crushing alternative points of view on the Internet. And this is going to all unfold because this judgment will come down in June.
This is my prediction that the injunction won’t be upheld or be upheld so narrowly as to be irrelevant. And then they’ll have between July and November to completely control and manage all media in the country, from CNN to Google to every app on your phone. And they’re going to start taking down websites and taking down alternative sources of news. I’m sorry to report this, but it looks tremendously grim.
There’s a reason why hardly anybody has read about this. It’s because most media and mainstream social media is completely captured. Yeah. It’s interesting that you mentioned the terms of service as being the tool that they pressured social media sites on. And if I’m understanding you correctly, because that makes complete sense, right? For lack of a better word, it puts the company in a position of saying, no, this type of speech does not fit our new terms of service, which you’re saying has been forced upon them in some way or another by an administration or a three lettered agency or whatever.
Do I have that characterization right? Yeah. And keep in mind, we have 20,000 pages of documentation on this, and it probably could be expended to a quarter million and probably will be by the time the case has gone to trial, which it hasn’t yet. And just in case any of our listeners think that, oh, well, this is all going to work out in the end, because the american court system is fair, I don’t believe that.
I think it’s going to be five or six years in litigation, and then at the end, an appeals court will reject the entire thing on grounds that the plaintiffs don’t have standing or something absurd like. Absurd like that. But let me give an example of these terms of use. I think it was in 2021, I don’t know the precise month, but YouTube suddenly announced that anything that contradicts the public health advice of the World Health Organization or the CDC will now not be allowed on YouTube, which is pretty much anything.
I mean, like, if I said, yeah, I have my doubts that masks are going to end this pandemic, they could just delete the video. But if you can’t contradict the World Health Organization, that’s basically everything related to health and medicine on YouTube has to get through this filter. And they took down millions of videos, millions of videos a day. I mean, it was just unbelievable. But they changed their terms of use.
And YouTube is owned by Google, so that means that Google, which is used for 96% of people’s Internet searches, is entirely censored according to the demands of the World Health Organization. And it’s not just that. It’s on everything related to politics. Election fraud, if you dare to claim the election was stolen from Trump, you’re going to be silenced really quickly. You’re going to be canceled and deleted. You will be offed in any kind of electronic sense instantly.
So this is what we’re coming down to, and this is what the court was trying to consider. But I wouldn’t say there was a single justice there who understood the scale and implications of what we’re talking about here. Even the justices themselves. It’s the strangest thing, because I was observing this yesterday, are themselves victims of this censorship industrial complex, so that you cannot know what you do not know.
And they continue to believe that this is a normal country with normal inflammation flows. And if this were true, they would surely know it. Well, the opposite is the case. I mean, when you’re in a situation where the Supreme Court justices themselves could be plaintiffs in the cases they’re adjudicating, but don’t know. Weird. We’re in a weird know. I find that whole trust the science idea, and I know you’ve written a book about it, life after lockdowns.
And we’ll talk about that book here, Jeffrey, on this call today. But the whole idea of trust the science, the scientific method, is based on the idea of having a thesis and then trying to prove it wrong, publishing that thesis and having other people point out all the problems with it, or all the particular exceptions. But in this environment, that process, during the COVID process, it completely went away.
It was, this is the truth, right or wrong. And it turns out we’re learning over the last four years, a lot of what they were saying was absolutely wrong, but you weren’t allowed to say it. And so I wonder where that leads us if this thing does actually pass. The truth of the matter is actually much worse than you can even imagine. Because the sort of gold standard of public health research that would examine do metaanalysis, which is like looking at all the existing studies and aggregating them, and coming to a generalized conclusion concerning random controlled trials, which is sort of the gold standard of science, I think probably wrongly, but that’s what is widely considered.
So, back in 2005, it’s a publication called the Cochrane Review, which was set up specifically to get rid of all the junk science. It was put together by a gang of people at Oxford University and elsewhere who believed they were evidence based. It was called evidence based science journal. And everybody in the world accepted the Cochrane Review as being the standard. I mean, if it wasn’t the standard, nobody knew what is.
Okay, so that’s it. From 2005 onwards, they had done a meta analysis of physical interventions to interrupt the spread of viral pandemics, or viral spread of disease, flus or whatever, any respiratory infections. And their analysis from 2005, all the way up to the minute of lockdowns in 2020. And they had done, I’m going to say, eight iterations of the same study had consistently said that none of these things work.
Masking, distancing, infinite hand washing and leaping around one way grocery aisles or whatever the hell it is, did absolutely nothing. And so this was the scientific consensus. Acknowledged, admitted, linkable, public, universally accepted, so on, so on. Over 15 years of meta analyses of random controlled trials, this is what they concluded, that none of these things work. And yet we did it. Know, once you look at it, it’s astounding.
So, by force, by administrative decree, not just in the US, but in many other places in the world, there was a forced replacement of existing scientific orthodoxy with a phony baloney experiment. And gibberish. And it was the gibberish that got amplified all through the media over the last 40 years and the science that was specifically blocked, suppressed, censored and so on. So we know this now. I’m almost astonished to hear myself even explain to you what happened because it sounds so crazy, but it is that crazy.
Well, I want to read something because I was looking up, I was on PolItico this morning and I saw this headline and I wanted to read it. And we’ll put it up on the screen here. The headline is challenge to Biden, hectoring of social media firms appears doomed at the Supreme Court. And the first paragraph of this says, a lawsuit aimed at stopping the Biden administration from urging social media companies to take down purported disinformation about COVID vaccines and election fraud got a decidedly chilly reception at the Supreme Court Monday.
Now, I want to move this into the election and the impact it could have on this year’s election, but the framing of this just in politico, I don’t know how Reputable Politico is. It’s a name, certainly as popular, but framing it as a Biden administration stopping this one administration seems to fall short. It doesn’t pass the sniff test for me because if they strike this down and they allow government to go ahead and do whatever they want in terms of making sure that news or posts are sanitized for our own protection, if they do that, it would certainly allow the Biden administration to continue to do it, but also future administrations to do it.
So what is the moral hazard here that we’re throwing ourselves into to try and protect ourselves? The critical way to understand all american politics is that it’s not really, in the end, except at the most superficial level, a battle between Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, and all these other ideological things or party politics. This is the key disaterata to understand our times is that we’re facing an epic, titanic struggle between the administrative state, which is the permanent bureaucracy of the federal government and all their outposts in states and localities, versus the people and their aspiration to have some control over the regime under which they live.
If you understand that, then you pretty much understand absolutely everything. The administrative state is a couple million, 3 million people. Administrative state includes a sector called the Deep state, which includes most intelligence agencies. They’ve been seriously empowered over the last four years, and they have every intention of retaining this power whomever is elected, whether it’s the Democrats or the Republicans. And if Trump wins, there’s going to be a full court press to make sure that administrative apparatus maintains hegemony over Washington, just like they did in the first Trump administration.
And if Biden wins, then it’s going to be a green mean. The Biden administration is nothing but marionettes who just dance for the public and let the administrators run everything. So a Trump administration will try to contain the know, and they have every intention of doing it. But I tell you, the administrative state has all the institutional knowledge. They know all the tricks of the trade. They know what’s what.
They know how Washington runs, and no amount of elected interlopers is going to be able to interrupt that. So that’s the struggle we face today. That’s the essence of it. And the administrators are very panicked right now that the people are catching on. They don’t like it by the people are catching on. I mean, maybe ten or 15%, all right? But that’s way more than was true five years ago.
I think it’s pretty clear. Free speech is the most critical. It’s the reason why it’s the first thing listed in the constitution. So what are the implications for this year’s election if this thing does not go the way we want it to? All right, well, so if the defense, which is to say the Biden administration gets a real victory here, which I’m fully expecting, they will, then all media consumed between June and November will be vote for Biden propaganda.
Right? That’ll be it. Completely whitewashed, in your view. Completely. You won’t be able to know anything else. And then starting after the election, if Biden really does win again, there’s going to be considered efforts on the part of the agencies and everybody else associated with legacy government power to take down independent sources of news. Either capture them or take them down. Whether it’s substack or Elon Musk’s ex or your various channels or anybody else’s independent websites like you either have to go along or risk what’s called lawfare to destroy your existence.
And that’s the goal. It’s complete control of the Internet in the United States and Europe. Similarly, in the same way they have it already in China. That’s the ambition. And at a court judgment against the injunction in favor of the defense, to throw it back to the district court to actually hear the case, which will unfold over the next 3456 years, that’s what that’s going to amount to.
At the end of which there will be no more information freedom and the First Amendment will become a dead letter. That’s terrifying. Yeah. And my sadness about this situation. You’re right. It’s existential, right? I mean, this is the core of the constitution. It really is. Just like, you might as well break into the national archives and smash that glass, pick up that piece of parchment and rip it into shreds at that point, there won’t be anything left of it.
At that point. If we lose the First Amendment, we’ll lose every other bit of it. And we’ve already lost a lot of it. But we have believed that we have freedom of speech. But it turns out, looking back, that they’ve made so many encroachments on this, and they’ve done it mostly in secret. And now that it’s coming to the fore and Supreme Court heard the case, yet more people know about it than ever.
But if the court doesn’t go the right direction, then the censorship hedgemon will just make gigantic advances. And as I say, people won’t know what they don’t know, and they won’t know they’re being centered, and the dissonance will be treated as thought criminals. And, yeah, we’ll be in territory of totalitarianism at that point. That’s genuinely how serious this is. And I wish I could present to you an alternative scenario in which the people rise up and take back their government, but I’m not so sure that that’s in the cards.
I just wonder how people perceive a message like this, because I think that it seems so preposterous that we’re at this decision and this discussion that’s being had at the Supreme Court is that dire. If it goes one way versus the other, I think it doesn’t land with people. I don’t know that anyone sitting at home right now is, you know, your head’s in the clouds, whatever. Right? But I agree with you.
I think that this is a monumental case. And if it doesn’t move the right way, we’re all going to see things that we thought we never would see before. Much like pre COVID. Prior to COVID, if you said that the government was going to lock down the economy, you would have been called a lunatic. You’re like, what are you talking about? They have no interest in doing that.
But yet it happened, and they’re setting the table for if it does happen again, which is likely, maybe not be a pandemic, but maybe it’s something else, a financial crisis or whatever, those critical voices are going to be silenced, and that should fear everybody watching this call. Well, what I’d like to do, Jeffrey, is move on to the light. First off, do you have a prediction on who’s going to win this year’s election? And does what happened in June play a role in your mind as to who may win? Well, first of all, I’ll be pleasantly surprised if there is an election.
Okay. You’re going to have to explain that. It’s one thing that NATO countries are doing now is just canceling elections. So that could happen. If there’s a genuine fear that Trump could win, the election could just be canceled under any pretense. It could happen. I mean, I think that’s very possible. They’ll just say, look, there’s too much disinformation. We’ve got reports that Russia is taking over our channels of communication.
Too dangerous. We cannot have a fair election under these conditions. Whatever. This is an emergency. We’re going to put this off. We’re going to put this off till January, till we can see what’s going on. So that’s a possibility, especially if Trump continues to making these advances. And if you look at the betting ODs, which I don’t think the betting ODs tell you what’s true, but they may be closer to what’s true than the polls.
And the betting ODs are right now dramatically favor Trump by 15, 1617 points. So if that continues to be true, you could just see the cancellation of elections. So here’s the thing. On grounds that Trump is such a dangerous figure that he’s called for a bloodbath as he wins, that all the lies you hear, they could just say, look, in order to protect and preserve democracy as we know it, this guy just simply cannot be allowed to win.
And this is existential for the United States. We’re a democracy. This guy is not believing the system has already shown us from January 6, when he tried to engage in insurrection. So in the name of preserving our freedoms and rights and democracy, we have to get rid of this election. I mean, I’d like to talk a little bit about that, because that seems even more preposterous than a COVID shutdown prior to COVID.
So is there any precedent for anything like that in. No precedent? No. There was no precedent for lockdowns either. As you say. There’s no precedent for stay at home voters in peacetime. I mean, there was no precedent for this kind of censorship. There’s no precedent for canceling two successive seasons of religious holidays. There’s no precedent for any of this stuff. So it was all based on shock and awe, get us used to extreme situations.
So, yeah, canceling the election sounds like extreme, but it’s something I wouldn’t rule out. I wouldn’t say it’s the most likely, but it could happen. So I think the most likely thing is that Biden will win because they’ve already figured out the balloting situation. That’s the reason for the waves of immigration. That’s not just a long term strategy to game the census, to make sure that red states don’t lose representation, they’ll gain it.
Most of the migrant populations are being sent to purple states to flip them to blue, so they don’t want the red states to gain. That’s the goal there. But beyond that, with mail in voting, there’s no way that you can verify citizenship. It’s just a box. You check it. And by the, even, I’m not even saying that these migrant populations are definitely going to vote for Joe Biden or fill out mail in balance.
They’re not going to. The point is to rig the system so that your ballot numbers are not inconsistent with your population numbers so you can have a plausible outcome. So I think this is the way they’re going to pull it off next time. The idea that Trump wins a fair and square election, I think that’s a really small chance of that actually happening. The wild card here is Kennedy.
And normally, I would fully rule out the possibility that a third party in the United States could ever really win an election or even make any get any more than, like, what did Ross pro get? I guess he got like, 13% or something like that, which is extremely high. You wouldn’t expect that. And the reason it has to do with what’s called Duvager’s law. And the idea is that in an election, winner take all election of any sort, three choices will always default to two, because people engage in strategic voting.
They fear one candidate more than the other, so they vote for somebody they don’t particularly like in order to prevent the victory of somebody they really despise. So that could mean that Kennedy could be polling higher than Trump or Biden, but still lose dramatically, because the people who are voting fear either Biden or fear trump more. And so they don’t want to so called waste their vote on a third party.
So I would think normally Duvager’s law would take Kennedy off the. You know, even that. That’s an empirical law, it’s not a law, like. Right. So I think there’s a chance. I don’t know exactly what scenario is. I mean, some people talk about neither Biden nor Trump getting enough electoral votes to win the presidency, and then that would cause the election to go to the House of Representatives, where then the compromised candidate would be Kennedy.
That seems like a lot of things that have to happen before that result happens. But I know that the Kennedy people are talking like that. I mean, the other option is that he manages somehow to get on ballot in every state. He’s gotten on a fair number of ballots, the last I’ve heard. Is that right? I think he’s at four states now. Four. Okay. I thought it was.
Yeah. So he’s talking about joining with the libertarians, which usually that’s a, you know, we’ll see how that, you know, you have to kind of consider for him to actually win something like that, you would have to have people willing to put up with either a Trump or a Biden victory. They’re, like, indifferent to that. On the far flung hope that Kennedy could actually win. I don’t really see that.
You know, I guess these days in the United States, anything is actually possible. All right. It’s worth considering. Let me throw out an alternative. Jim Rickards, who is on this channel very regularly, he is suggesting that there’s a real possibility that Biden doesn’t run. And once all the delegates have been cast for Biden to be the, that a third person comes, know, whether that be Kevin Newsom or some other individual to run in Biden stead, what probability do you put on that? Is that far flung, or do you think that that’s potentially likely given the poor polling numbers that he’s seen thus far? Well, there’s no question that that is plan B.
I mean, there is a scenario in which that really happens, and a lot of it entirely depends on how well they calibrate Biden’s drug doses and they can keep him function and make him a plausible functioning human being. So if that’s no longer possible, then plan B will definitely happen. All right, so let’s talk a little know, you cover a lot of topics at Brownstone, and we’ll talk about the Brownstone Institute here in a moment.
But you talk a lot about the economy as well. And so I wanted to get your take on material things that may change under a Biden versus a Trump presidency. So let’s say for a moment that Biden wins or the Biden replacement, the plan B wins. What changes do you see, economically speaking, over the following four years, do you see taking place? Well, I think a new Biden regime would be more of the same.
They are not backing off of their Green new Deal EV stuff. I mean, it’s actually extremely weird that they’re coming up with ever more intense mandates to force car manufacturers to make cars that nobody wants to buy. I mean, it’s just simply unbelievable. Now, if you go back to 2020, the whole EV craze was entirely artificial. What happened was the lockdowns happened. Car manufacturers canceled orders for chips.
And then once the demand for these cars picked back up again, let’s say a year later, they tried to, or six, eight months later tried to reorder the chips. Well, the chip manufacturers had moved on to making gaming units and laptops and that sort of thing. They couldn’t get the chips. I mean, it was a weird period because some cars were completed and shipped without automatic steering, for example.
It’s unbelievable. It’s actually happened. But there was a gigantic shortage of cars in the fall of 2021. And so by the time the cars came onto lots, a lot of car manufacturers have been propagandized that, oh, everybody just wants an EV now. This is the way of the future. You’re gonna. You better make EVs or you suck, you know? So they sold a ton of EVs. Well, it turns out nobody likes them.
They break, they’re very high insurance costs, 25, 30, 40% higher than internal combustion cars, and the resale value is very low. So people just turned against them. And so car manufacturers have stopped making them, and they’re trying to comply with Biden administration mandates by making more hybrid cars, which people are buying. But even that’s going to go away. And people want gas cars. Unless you’re looking for a speedy, zippy, fancy golf cart to drive around as an urban driver in nice weather, these EVs are just not going to take over the market.
But you got Biden administration mandating them anyway, which, I don’t know, it sounds like. So you make the car and what, throw it into the river? I mean, it doesn’t make any sense, but that kind of thing is going to happen. Your gas stoves are going to be taken from you, for sure. Water restrictions, and then the blackouts come because the grid cannot handle even the current usage.
Say nothing of forecasted increases in usage over the next three, four, five years. So there’ll be rashing of electricity. It’s only going to get worse. And not to mention wage and price controls will start to see Biden’s attack on shrinkflation, which represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the dynamics of inflation. They’re going to continue to target corporate America. I think wage and price controls would just be the beginning.
They’re going to have regulations on packaging size and all sorts of things. It’s going to be a level of despotism we never have seen before, just over the particulars of economics. Yeah, it’s interesting. Just the ignorance or, I don’t want to put blame, but. Or ignoring all the research and all the real world experience that we have on things that don’t work, we’re piling them all into, or as many of them as we can into one.
Mean, there are discussions of minimum income out in California. I know they’re doing some pilot projects out there. Yeah, but here’s the thing, Doug. We need to get rid of this idea that we used to have in our heads, that there’s some mechanism in the social order that is self correcting. I mean, it’s just funny to hear you take it just like a normal human being. Well, if that doesn’t work, why would they continue to do it? That’s just the point.
I’m sorry to say it. No, I’m naive, I get it. We used to work together at laissez fair books and we used to talk about these ideas. Yeah, the good old days. The good old days. And it’s hard. It’s a hard adjustment. But when you see government agencies blocking science and putting forward crazed mythologies to reward industrial partners and that sort of thing, anything becomes possible. So I don’t think these sort of self correcting mechanisms are in place anymore.
Things don’t work, they’re going to do them anyway and do them harder. I mean, you’ve got a gang of bureaucrats in charge of the world who believe first and foremost in their ideology, and they’re angry at the rest of the world for not complying with their ideology, and that just makes them lash out like the. That’s, I’m sorry to say, but that is genuinely what’s happening here. And by the way, I’m not entirely sure trump administration is the answer.
I’m just saying that I think maybe it’d be better. I think there’s more normal people there. But when you see him threatening Mexico with 100% tariffs on car imports, you realize something that’s extremely strange about Trump, that people think they understand Trump. I don’t think they do. My read on him, and it’s been true for now, going on ten years, is that 90% of his brain is occupied by one subject only, and that’s tariffs.
That’s what he thinks about all the time. That’s what he loves. He loves tariffs and he thinks tariffs solve everything. We got to have tariffs as high as possible with as many countries as possible, and then american prosperity will come back. He believes this. Nobody can convince him otherwise. He’s always believed this. And that’s what he’s going to use all of his power, president, to impose. And he has that power.
Right. Can you give me an example of when tariffs worked for the country that’s imposing them? Well, some people claim they worked in the 1880s to give the steel industry in the United States advantages over Germany, but there’s reason to doubt that, too. But that’s the only case I can think of. We’re talking 120 years ago. Yeah, it may have possibly worked, but he did the same thing with semiconductors in China.
Really, all that does is if you’re not going to ship chips and we’re just going to say, hey, we’re not going to ship chips to you, it’s not a tariff, but we’re going to have these control roles. It’s just going to force them to find an alternative for not needing your product. And it doesn’t. Long term, it doesn’t work. It just hurts. It’s a good sound bite for a politician, but that’s it.
Americans pay tariffs as you pay taxes. It’s just the same. China doesn’t pay, Mexico doesn’t pay. Americans pay, american importers pay, businesses and consumers pay tariffs. So that’s Trump. I don’t think he’s ever understood that. And you pay in two ways. One, the direct payment for the tariff, but then also the higher prices from the restricted supply and higher costs associated with the domestic good than you could otherwise get outside the border.
So you could drive us further into a great depression with that kind of policy. But nonetheless, overall, I don’t think Trump wants to get rid of oil and gas. So there’s mean. So you have a grid that actually can work and function, and we’re not relying on other countries. That’s good for our energy. Yeah, we might be able to keep our gas stoves and we won’t have rolling brownouts.
You take what you can get. I love my gas stove so much, I might become a member of the deep state just so I can keep it when those things come down. I know, right? That’s the thing. We were developing a ruling class that has all the privileges and access to everything, including charter flights and a life without COVID boosters. You can get all that stuff if you’re part of the elites, but if you’re part of the Hoipoloi, like you and I are.
99% of the public is. Then yeah, you have to comply and go along. I do think it’s important to understand something when you talk about the kind of economic policies and the economic situation under a new presidential administration. What could happen? We are not yet come to terms with what is happening already. Now almost all the economic data that are being cranked out by the agencies these days are fake.
So the job status are fake on multiple levels. We’ve been losing full time jobs for a year. All jobs in the last twelve months have been new part time jobs. Real income is still declining. And we’ll find that out for sure from the Census Bureau because I think they’re still telling the truth about that. Unlike the Department of Labor and the output data has been heavily manipulated by fake GDP statistics that privileged government spending over actual productivity.
So my own view, and we can talk about this some other time, but I don’t think we ever got out of the recession of March 2020. We never left it. The reason we haven’t had a hard landing in the so called recovery is that there never really was a recovery. We’re just going further into depression. And to bounce back to the unemployment data, they talk about unemployment rate at 3.
6. But once you include discouraged workers and all the people who dropped out of labor force after lockdown, so we’d never recovered in terms of labor participation or population worker ratios, you can get figures that are as high as 23 and 24%. Unbelievable on unemployment. And that compares to, I think the height of unemployment at the Great Depression was 25. 6. We’re very close to great depression levels in terms of unemployment output.
I think we’re in a long secular recession. And then inflation data. Lawrence Summers, the last decent president of Harvard and an economist, just released a paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research recalculating inflation over the last 20 years, consistently applying the cost of money. So the borrowing costs of mortgages and cars and credit card loans and all that, that’s just one piece of the CPI, which excludes that and came up with, and you’re not going to believe this, Doug came up with a peak inflation number of 18%.
And this is not some cranky friend of mine who says, I don’t believe these inflation numbers. I think it’s worse than it looks. 18% from the most establishment oriented economist in this country publishing a paper with National Bureau of Economic Research, which is the official business cycle dating institution, private, not government, but official. And he says that inflation peaked at 18%. Now the inflation of 1979 and 1980 only reached 13%.
And that was revolutionary, right? That brought in a new president that led american households to go from one incomes to two. It was unprecedented cultural, political upheaval as a result of that inflation. So you’re talking about an inflation even worse than we experienced in 1970, 919, 80. And that doesn’t even include all the machinations around health insurance costs, which they have the most cockamamie formula for determining how much health insurance is going up in terms of CPI.
And we talk about that again some other time. But let’s just say that last year or in 2022, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said your health insurance went down about 40%. Okay, you know that’s not true, right? So how do they come up with that? It’s another subject. I can explain it. It doesn’t matter. But that’s what’s manipulating this data. So in other words, the inflation data is wildly fake, the output data is fake, and the unemployment data is wildly fake.
What does that tell you about our current times? What it tells me is that we’re probably right now in something like the great Depression that we saw in the 1930s. We just don’t know it because the data is all lying to us. So whatever you want to say about the grim future, we need to come to terms with the reality now. And the truth is that most people experience this now.
You talk to anybody? How are things going? Listen, it’s terrible. I’m suffering. I’m barely able to get by. I’m living paycheck to paycheck. I can hardly go shopping anymore. This is what they’ll tell you. But then you ask the Biden administration, no, it’s the greatest recovery in human history. So we live in this weird fantasy world of fake data, almost like Khrushchev’s Russia, where the economy is always growing, but the people are always getting poor.
Sort of what we’re in right now. You see these job numbers, and 100% I buy into everything that you’re talking about because the numbers do not feel right to me. You see people with three jobs and complaining they can’t, never mind buy a house, they can’t pay rent and have a car payment. That 18% inflation rate probably feels right with all the. You torture numbers enough, they’ll tell you whatever you want them to say.
I’m not blaming the Biden administration. I think this has probably been ongoing for a longer period of time than just most recently. But, boy, you can really feel it right now. And like you said, you ask people around, it’s tough out there for a lot of people. And it frustrates me because we have these statistical releases that come out on regular intervals, every two weeks, every month, whatever.
And then the agencies pump out these fake numbers and then they end up in fake headlines and then Wall street trades based on the headlines. Not that they believe them, but they believe that other people believe know it’s the usual Wall street dance. And so it means we’re just kind of living in this weird fake world. And you look back and this is why this Lawrence Summers paper from Nber rocked my world.
When I read it, I was like, oh, and keep in mind, he’s only looking at one aspect of the CPI and he calculates that we peaked at 18%. I said, you know what? That makes a lot more sense. Jeffrey, we’re well over the time that I had allotted for you, and I really appreciate you being here. You have opened my eyes to a couple different scenarios for this year that I hadn’t considered.
Where can people find you online if they’re so inclined to look you up? Yeah. Well, you can’t believe it, but I write every single day for the epoch times. I believe it. You do believe it. And that is a nice little venue because it’s actually the fourth largest circulation newspaper in the United States. So I’m pleased to say that they’re thriving. And I’m pleased to say that they somehow let me write for them six or seven days a week.
So that’s nice. And in addition to that, I run Brownstone Institute and I try to write as little as possible for Brownstone Institute because it’s not about me, but I still end up with two or three articles a week. You can always find my stuff at Brownstone. Well, thank you very much. And you wrote the book life after lockdown, I assume that is online on Amazon and other outlets, as it you can get at Amazon.
I was very pleased that Rand Paul wrote it. Forward to the book. Yeah. Well, as always, Jeffrey, it was great catching up with you. Thank you for your time again, and we’ll hope to have you on the channel once again soon. Good to see you, Doug. Thank you. All right, thank you. .
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