Morning Wire - Economic Unrest Up, Trust In Institutions Down | 1.21.23

Episode Date: January 21, 2023

A yearly world survey shows economic stress is up and trust in institutions is down, A whistleblower says USDA guidelines have more to do with money than health, and a new study shows church attendance on the decline. Get the facts first on Morning Wire.  Get 10% off your first order or Coffee Club subscription with code WIRE: https://www.blackriflecoffee.com/ Get pre-qualified and find the best deals near you: https://carzing.com/wire Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

An annual global survey found economic stress is up and trust in institutions is down. How did answers from Democrats and Republicans differ? And how did COVID policy affect the results? I'm Georgia Howe with Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief John Bickley. It's January 21st, and this is your Saturday edition of Morning Wire. The USDA is supposed to make healthy food recommendations, but one whistleblower says guidelines have more to do with money than how much. help. We are getting sicker, fatter, more infertile, more depressed at an exponential rate. It's because

of food. And post-pandemic church attendance is on the decline. We break down the data on why so many pews are sitting empty. Thanks for waking up with Morning Wire. Stay tuned. We have the news you need to know. Hey, guys, producer Brandon here, Black Rifle Coffee has expanded their team of active duty service members, veterans and veteran family members, all thanks to your support. This year alone, they were able to donate 120,000 bags of coffee to veterans and first responders. If you want to continue supporting this incredible company, go to black rifle coffee.com and use promo code wire for 10% off your purchase and your first coffee club order. That's black rifle coffee.com promo code wire.

Black Rifle Coffee, America's Coffee. A massive new global study is shining a light on which institutions people still trust and how they feel about their own economic outlook heading into the new year. Here with more on the trends, we saw. globally and how Americans responded is Daily Wire Senior Editor Cabot Phillips. Cabot will get to how Americans are feeling and who they trust the most. But first, what did we see around the world? So every year the firm Edelman releases its trust barometer, an enormous global survey that gauges which institutions people around the world trust the most and how they feel about the year ahead. Now, this year, the survey talked to 32,000 people in more than two dozen countries,

and the results were fascinating. On the confidence in the economy metric, we saw get this all-time lows in 24 of the 28 countries surveyed. Wow. The only country where the majority of people believe they'll be better off in five years was China, a country where it's obviously tough to trust that people are giving honest answers. Of the 14 developed nations that were surveyed, there was not a single one where more than 35% of people said they think they'll be better off in five years. Pretty grim.

What did we learn about who is and who isn't trusted? Yeah, this was also fascinating. The survey asked about four main institutions, business, government, media, and and non-governmental organizations, NGOs. It found that of those four, the only institution that people trusted was business, which was at 62% worldwide. And in the average country,

people had 11% more trust in business than government. As far as institutional leaders go, the most trusted by far were, quote, scientists and my coworkers, while the least trusted were journalists and government leaders. And one more interesting nugget when it comes to global trust in companies headquartered in each country,

the U.S. did pretty well, 55% first place was Canada at 67% and at the bottom where China and India at 32 and 34% respectively. Okay, so looking specifically at the numbers from the U.S., what were some trends we saw? Well, let's start on the economic front where just 36% of Americans say that they think their family will be better off in five years. More broadly, 55% of Americans say they trust business, while 42% say they trust the government. But what's fascinating is that for the first time in the history of this poll, Republicans were, actually less likely than Democrats to say that they trust business as an institution. That discrepancy really played out across the board with the other institutions as well,

as the majority of Republicans were also distrustful of government, media, and NGOs. Each of those was around the 35% range. So what do we think has caused that dip in trust specifically in business? Well, there seem to be a few theories. We've talked on the show about the fact that many conservative Americans feel businesses are pushing what they view as woke ideologies and prioritizing social justice over serving their customers, and that does seem to be playing a factor here. And remember, many big businesses implemented vaccine mandates that were pretty unpopular among many on the right,

that likely played a role as well. Now, the dip in government trust is actually pretty common every few years among the party out of power. For example, Republicans had much greater trust in the government from 2016 to 2020, but this time we saw a 20-point drop in one year, which is really unprecedented. Now, other polls seem to indicate the biggest factors there, beyond the election of President Biden are the government's handling of COVID lockdowns, the implementation of vaccine mandates, and concerns over election integrity. Okay, let's get to the other side of the aisle. What did we learn about Democrats?

So many of the trends that we saw among Republicans just simply went the opposite direction for Democrats. Every major institution polled was trusted by a majority on the left, usually in the 54 to 57% range. Another interesting nugget here is that the institution which gained the most trust last year among Democrats was the government, which gained six. points, quite the outlier there from what we saw among Republicans. Yeah, interesting stuff.

Cabot, thanks for reporting. Anytime. That's the Daily Wire's senior editor, Cabot Phillips. Coming up, are Lucky Charms healthier than eggs? One government study says yes. Use car prices are dropping, but before you walk into a dealership, you've got to check out Carzing. Carzing is an online car shopping website with millions of listed vehicles.

By partnering with credit agencies, lenders, and dealerships, Carzing provides you with everything you need before stepping full. into a dealership. Visit carsing.com slash wire today to skip the guesswork and find the best deals near you. That's carsing.com slash wire. Viral screenshots from an NIH-backed nutrition tool developed at Tufts University, which showed, for example, that Lucky Charms cereal was more nutritious than eggs, is shining the light on rampant corruption in the food industry.

Joining us with the details is Daily Wire's Michael Whitaker. So Michael, recently there was an image circulating around from a Tufts University nutrition tool that showed some pretty bizarre food recommendations. For example, it said that beef was extremely bad and should be avoided, but sugary cereal was good. Now, what does this have to do with corruption in the food industry? Well, essentially, large food companies have purchased influence of politicians, special interest groups, public health officials, and researchers at some of the country's most prestigious academic institutions, and use that influence to buy subsidies in bogus research that helps them push high sugar, low-quality food on millions of people.

A whistleblower named Cali Means has been speaking out recently, exposing just how blatant some of the corruption has become. Means is a former consultant for Coca-Cola and has recently tweeted out about a quid pro quo he saw in the backroom negotiations the company had with the NAACP. That tweet got almost 12 million views and provoked a media firestorm. I spoke to Means, who was shocked by how transparent the agreement was. It was an explicit playbook.

The first step is to identify civil rights groups, in this case, with Coke, it was the NAACP and the Hispanic Federation. The agreement is that Coke pays them millions of dollars and they call opponents racist. In this case, the opponents were parents that were concerned about their kids, you know, drinking a hundred times more sugar, ingesting a hundred times more sugar than a kid did 100 years ago, which is leading to absolute devastation for the health. The U.S. spends tens of billions of dollars on food stamps every year. In 2021, we spent over $100 billion on the program. 13% of the American population uses food stamps, and 10% of that money is spent on soda. In 2012, there was talk of removing soda purchases from the program. Coke went to extreme lengths to stop that. But it's not just Coke. 80% of U.S. agricultural subsidies go to grains and processed sugars. Corporations outspend the government on nutrition research at a rate of 11 to 1,

and researchers from big-name universities like Harvard and Stanford and think tanks on the left and right keep recommending more and more processed grains in our diet. Coincidentally, two-thirds of our population are now overweight or obese, and childhood obesity rates have climbed to almost 20 percent. Now, what about the public research? Have those findings differed at all? Not really. But it's important to remember that the NIH doesn't actually do any of its own research.

It issues grants to respected researchers in universities, who are overwhelmingly on big foods payroll, and 95% of the government's dietary guidelines advisory committee have some sort of tie to the food industry. For example, a recent NIH-backed study to update the food pyramid was co-sponsored by several large food conglomerates and explicitly plugged several of their products. It says honeynut churios are more nutritious than beef. Then pharma and healthcare systems, you know, hospitals, etc., profit, but say nothing about why people are getting sick. 80% of medical schools in the United States don't require a single nutrition class for doctors.

So it sounds like the overwhelming majority of our researchers are on the food industry's payroll. all. Exactly, and that's a huge part of the problem. Policymakers and interest groups are able to cite peer-reviewed studies, which are the scientific gold standard, and people take them at their word. But the reason that those are the gold standard is because they limit bias. What are we supposed to do when institutions have become so corrupt with the short-circuit the scientific method? It's hard to oversell the scope of this problem. Eight out of the ten leading killers of Americans are directly linked to bad diets, heart disease, diabetes, several forms of cancer. The generative diseases, Alzheimer's and dementia have been linked to diabetes. Most COVID deaths had several diet-related

comorbidities. Even some cases of depression have been linked to gastrointestinal problems. And we're subsidizing bad food. We're dishing it out in our school lunches and in our prisons. We're propping it up with bad research and we're increasingly reaping what we've sown. Well, I will say I personally cut out all grains this year and I've never felt better. Michael, thanks for reporting. Thanks for having me. That was Daily Wires, Michael Whitaker. In the aftermath of the COVID pandemic, church attendance rates among young and liberal Americans have fallen dramatically, according to a new study.

The survey done by the American Enterprise Institute showed that overall the number of Americans who never attend a worship rose from 25 percent to 33 percent, but among liberals and those under 30, that number leapt from 30 percent to almost 45 percent. Here discussed the study as columnist David Marcus. Dave, how much of this is COVID-related and how much is a longer-standing trend? Morning. It's a bit of both. And certainly among the groups you mentioned, liberals and young adults, a 14% jump in people who'd never crossed the threshold of a house of worship since just 2020 is extremely significant. In much of the country, during the lockdowns, people were literally not allowed to attend church.

And it seems that some casual attendees simply fell out of the habit. Yeah. Now, given that the decline is made. mainly among those who weren't going very much anyway, how important is this attendance drop after COVID to the overall religious makeup of the country? Well, when you look specifically at the large drop among not just people under 30, but also those who have never been married, the change from rarely attending to never could be a harbinger.

People in their 20s who don't have kids have always tended to stray from observance. I know I did. But often many come back as they get older or feel a desire to bring their children. into the fate. The casual attendance in those early years can be touchstones that make returning more regularly easier and more likely. Now, there are some churches that are bucking this trend, and in fact, seeing many more worshippers. What do we know about the approaches they've taken? Yeah, there's fronts where growth has been seen by really targeting the laps and offering different ways to experience church. We asked Pastor Eric Reid, whose Nashville church has seen such growth,

how they've done it. We're preaching the Bible, and I know every church would say they're preaching the Bible, but we are teaching and explaining the scriptures. We are grounding people with foundations and theology, and people are looking for that right now, and people are desperate for foundations, because everything in the culture right now feels so unstable to them. So it seems counterintuitive, but a more traditional, more scripture-based approach appears to be having more success, then attempts at religion light or, you know, the cool priest who plays guitar. We see this among many young Catholics as well. They're known as tradcats. And they're not just going to mass. They're going to Latin. So there does seem to be an appeal here. Yeah, that's interesting.

So what is the impact of a declining rate of church attendance in America? It's a complicated question, but I think there is a suite of issues where rising atheism has a demonstrable effect. Euthanasia is a big one. Legally assisted suicide is far more common in less religious societies because the religious prohibition is gone. Also in drug legalization or creating safe drug use sites, in the absence of the notion that we are lit by a divine spark, it's easier to say, look, this guy's an addict, always will be, let's just ease his physical suffering rather than save his soul. Those are very different propositions. Philosophers have struggled for centuries with how to create and enforce moral codes without the concept of God,

and it's proven very difficult, which is why even the atheistic left often uses the trappings of religion and why some conservatives claim that wokeness is, in fact, a new religion, with God replaced by the self and the idea of things like my personal truth. Is a continued decline inevitable? Are there ways to reverse this trend going forward? It's interesting. The United States has had several periods of religious revival in its history,

in the 19th and the 20th century, and we could be on the verge of another. The Old Testament itself is replete with stories of societies abandoning God, suffering because of it, and coming back to him. Trends are trends, and they matter. But history teaches us never to count out the human need for God and religion. Well, David, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. That was Daily Wire contributor, David Marcus.

Another story we're tracking this week. Workers across France went on strike Thursday to protest the government. plan to raise the country's retirement age. Teachers, railway, health, and oil workers all went on strike forcing many closures. That's all the time we've got this morning. Thanks for waking up with us. We'll be back tomorrow with the news you need to know.