Shaun Newman Podcast - #341 - Justin Hart

Episode Date: November 14, 2022

Founder of rationalground.com where they continue to develop & curate a set of trusted data sources to track and gauge the impact of COVID-19. He is also the author of Gone Viral: How Covid drove the world insane.  Let me know what you think Text me 587-217-8500

Hey everybody, this is Paul Brandt. This is Wayne Peters. This is Sean Baker. I'm Megan Murphy. This is Jess Moskaloop. I'm Rupa Supermonia. This is Sheila Gunn-Reed, and you're listening to the Sean Newman podcast. Welcome to the podcast, folks.

Happy Monday. I hope everybody's weekend was enjoyable. On this end, as always, busy, busy, busy, we never stop it. We're just pedal to the metal. Way we go. Before we get on to today's show, let's get to today. episode sponsors, Canadians for Truth, nonprofit organization consisting of Canadians,

who believe in honesty, integrity, and principal leadership in government as well as the Canadian Bill of Rights, charter rights and freedoms, and the rule of just laws. They've been rolling along with shows. They got Chris Barber. We just had Chris Barber about a, what was it, a week ago, two weeks ago. Geez, my brain's going, been running too hard, I guess.

They got a show coming up, a live show in Calgary, November 19th with Chris Barber. That'll have Jamie and, and Jamie Salae and Theo Fleury on stage with Chris Barber, that is, live at their theater there where their office is. But they've been spitting on some shows. They got Theo Fleury and Jamie Slea doing what they do. And then, of course, they had Arder Poloski in a multiple locations,

Calgary Swift Current. So if you're wanting to pay attention what they're doing, CanadiansforTruth.ca, or head to their Facebook page, Canadians for Truth, to see what they're all about. Profit River, the team over there, they specialize in Porting Fire. from the United States of America and pride themselves in making the process as easy for all their customers as humanly possible. It doesn't matter where you're situated here in Canada.

If you're looking for a team that can get what you're looking for into your hands and get you through all the paperwork and legally and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Just go to profitriver.com. I'd love to sit here and get into the semantics of everything. But, I mean, at the end of the day, if you're looking to get a firearm and you want to make sure that all the eyes are dotted, T's crossed. Just go to Profitriverriver.com. They are the major retailer of firearms, optics, and accessories serving all of Canada. Windsor Plywood, builders of the podcast studio table for everything.

Wood, these are the guys. You know, I talk about the podcast studio, the table here a lot. Just because, you know, I wish every guest came in person. You know, once upon a time, that's how this started, was I wasn't going to do a podcast unless it was in person, times have changed, and with that, the idea has changed. But one of the things that I love about the studio, and it was a centerpiece at the original studio,

and certainly now again, and whenever I get somebody in the studio to take a look at it, you know, and give it a little bit of a, wow, this is nice, a nice little rub. You could have the same thing, you know, whether we're talking mantles, decks, windows, doors, or sheds, or a table, you know, a centerpiece. Windsor plywood can get you hooked up.

When it comes to wood, they just have such amazing I don't know, I call it chunks, hunks, whatever you want to call it, pieces of wood. Either way, give me a call, 7808-75-9663. You're stopping today here in Lloyd Minster. Tyson and Tracy Mitchell with Mitchco Environmental, a family-owned business that has been providing professional vegetation management services for both Alberta and Saskatchewild and industrial sector since 1998. You know, I've been saying, you know, the snow's flying and we've got a foot of snow and whatever we got.

you know like they're they're in their off season right now but i've been trying to remind uh college students university students that if you're looking for summertime employment you know um you should really check out mitchco and it actually doesn't matter you know i i don't mean to make this sound sexist by any stretch of imagination but when i worked there it was about a 50 50 split maybe 60 40 men versus women but a lot of women do it uh too because lots a huge chunk of it isn't uh this like you know, backbreaking labor. It's a pretty, and I'm not saying women can't do backbreaking labor, geez, I sound terrible here.

Just that I think it lends to both sides of the coin. And if you're looking for work that you can be busy at, make some good coin, Mitchco is always looking for good people. So take a look at a MichkoCorp.ca, or give them a call, 780214,4004. Gartner Management, Lloyd Minster-Binster-based company specializes on all types of run property to help in your needs, whether you're looking for a small office or you've got multiple employees. Give way Gertner a call. He can get you hooked up. 780808, 5025. Now let's get on that tail of the tape brought to you by Hancock Petroleum for the past 80 years. They've been an

industry leader in bulk fuels, lubricants, methadone, chemicals delivering to your farm. Commercial or oilfield locations, for more information, visit them at hancockpatroleum.com. He's the founder of Rationalground.com, where they continue to develop and curate a set of trusted data sources to track and gauge the impact of COVID-19 on the United States and the rest of the world. He's also the author of Gone Viral, How COVID Drove the World Insane. I'm talking about Justin Hart. So buckle up. Here we go.

This is Justin Hart. You're listening to the Sean Newman podcast. Welcome to the Sean Newman podcast today. I'm joined by Justin Hart. So first off, sir, thanks for hopping on. I am so glad to be with you here, Tom. Thanks for having us. Thanks, son.

what uh well actually no i'm going to start here um people might the reason i stumbled on you justin was people passed along your your book uh gone viral and and from there i'm like oh this sounds fascinating right like right up my alley i'm like i should try and reach out of course uh that's how i get put on to you for the listener if they've never heard of you never heard of your book how about we just start with uh who you are and we'll go from there sure you know i I grew up in the Bay Area. That is the San Francisco Bay Area. You poor bugger. Yeah, I know. Well, in the 80s, it was a fantastic place to grow up.

We loved that place. That was the time of Jerry Rice and Steve Young and everything else, and Joe Montana was a great time to grow up in the 80s. But, yeah, it's changed just a little bit. I high-tailed it out to D.C. eventually, where I wanted to marry sort of all things, internet and all things politics. And that's my background, is kind of doing internet strategies. But I got there in 96 in D.C. was doing a lot of fun stuff, but it was still going to be a decade before I was ever going to bring Internet into the political scene. So I cut my teeth on the first dot-com boom bus doing major data analytics and internet strategies for Fortune 500 companies as a consultant. And that's been kind of my baseline training, right?

And then, you know, it came time for what we call down, you know, here in the U.S., the Tea Party movement. right in 2008 and people knew that I was kind of hot for politics. They pulled me into that to do some really fun, fendangled stuff, connecting, for example, Twitter to our fundraising engine for a couple of my clients. And then I ended up eventually on the Mitt Romney campaign and was there on the end, right until 2012, right to the end when the next four years didn't quite work out for my future boss, I decided to hightel it back to California. I spent the next decade basically doing startups, airline agencies, all sorts of fun, really interesting things.

I was the chief marketing officer of a big telecom company. And then coming into 2020, Sean, I had a great set of clients. My first client was a high-end golf excursion service for baby boomers. Just hold your laughter for a second there. Then the second one was a major sort of platform. form that we were building for parents wanting to send their kids to college. Again, don't, don't laugh at me yet. Okay, we're good. Now, the third one was a high-end vacation club for families. And so you can imagine by the time April was done, all of my clients were done too.

So I came into the pandemic with the best clientele of my life. I live down here in San Diego now. I've got eight kids, Brady Bunch Mix, and we have three really young ones who are five. and three and one. And during this entire pandemic realm, it was quite the endeavor to deal with all of those things for our schools. But I remember early in March when I started doing the numbers, because I'm a numbers guy, I go, I think they've got this all wrong. I think these numbers are just completely wrong. And I'm not a health care expert, as I say, Sean. And normally I wouldn't insert myself into someone else's domain. But Sean, they seem to have no problem inserting themselves into my domain, my kids' education, my health, my barbershop, my coffee shop, my church.

And so I hope they'll forgive me if I check the numbers, because we check the numbers. It turns out they were wrong. So I put together basically a ragtag group of analysts, activists, experts, COVID-contrarians, as we call them, just moms and dads, who were like, hey, I think, first of all, the reaction to this is completely over the top. And I think the numbers they're feeding us are completely the bogus. And we checked about, we said, sure enough. So we basically became then for the, we called a group called Rational Ground. And so at Rationalground.com and on Twitter mostly, we endeavor to basically fight back the powers of COVID.

And we did that for the last two and a half years now. We're still going strong. During the summer of 2020, our group was the backbone for Scott Atlas when he was at the White House. He had nobody. So pro bono, we stepped up and said, we're going to do charts, we're going to do data. whatever you need, right? And he was trying to write the policy ship there. He was trying to get that back on course, and we were one of the groups in the background helping him on that. And since that time, we've grown and grown. We basically have been kind of under the radar,

but basically pulling a lot of strings to get things changed. And then the book came out, just this last two weeks gone viral, how COVID drove the world insane by Regnery here. And so legit publisher, never published a book of my life, but it's written so, much about this that it was actually the hardest thing I've ever done. But in truth, I wanted to make this really accessible to the layperson because myself, yourself, Sean, most of your audience, I'm sure over the last two years has probably forgotten more about COVID than most people know, right? Just being into the weeds on this whole thing. And so I wanted to write this for that group of people who are kind of, it's for those folks who want to remember, yeah, I remember

these points and they want to make sure it never happens again. But it's also a real shield, a defense for people who are just coming back from the darkness, right? That one neighbor of yours, you know, who's still double masks in the car and they don't really quite understand why they're doing it. Maybe you can grab them a copy for that, right? But really, it's a defense. It's a weapon. And it's a myth busting book. We take every single myth from the COVID era and we try to just bust it up with stories and data.

I hope it's an accessible tone that people can take and say, yeah, I really, read this really quickly and I can get to the data in the back. We got some templates and letters and everything else you can use for your school board. So that's the that's the A to Z of where I come from and where we are at A. You know, one of the things when you talk about putting it all together, you know, you talk about you probably forgot more than you can remember. Sorry, I got something in my throat today, folks, but either way, we'll fight through. One of the things about like compiling it and then just starting to like list off all the things

that happened in the last, I mean, you're in California. You're not sitting in Florida for the listener here, right? So of all the states to be sitting in, California wasn't this, you know, walking the ballpark, so to speak. You guys had your own fights, probably still have your own fights going on. But when you compile it all, it seems pretty freaking ridiculous, you know, what we put ourselves through in the last two years, doesn't it? It does.

Yeah. One of my friends said, this is so necessary and it was so painful to get through because he couldn't believe all the stuff that we've been through, right? And there's the silly stuff, right? Like we talk about a picture of a priest who's trying to perform his pastoral duties by performing a baptism on a child. He's standing six feet away from the font. The mom is holding up the child six feet on the other side of the font.

Child looks all beautiful in their little baptismal dress. The priest has got a squirt gun, and he's squirting at the child. I guess it seems a little blasphemous to me, but, you know, you know, and that was silly stuff. I remember up your way, Calgary, actually, in that way, there was the, the sheriff of Calgary got up there during October 2020. I'll never forget that picture. And he's demonstrating how you can still hold Halloween with the little ghoulins who were going to come around to your door, right? But do it safely. So they took like, you know, one of those big tubes that you get after you're done with the wrapping paper. And that way you can use it, you know,

to deliver the candy from your door to the back without getting anyone infected. Right? That was the nonsense stuff. But then you get to the real deep stuff. Like one stat, this just cuts across political boundaries. Everyone understands it. No one can quite fathom what we've done when they hear this, which is we believe through two studies, one from University of Miami, one from a university of Chicago.

And they pointed out, we believe we missed about 200,000 cases. of potential child abuse, domestic abuse, because it's typically sharp-eyed teachers and administrators who catch those things and kids weren't in school, right? I mean, how many, how many issues, how many bruises did people miss on mom's face because she had to drop the kids off in a mask, right? Just ask yourself that question. That's the devastating impact that we have, the impact on our kids who don't have a vote tomorrow here in the United States, and we have to vote for them. You know, you talk about devastating impacts. Wife's a teacher.

And when the kids, you know, for some kids, um, the safest place, the place where they're getting a little bit of food, uh, a helping hand, etc, etc.

is at school. And when you keep them out of school, where are they at now? And where they, you know, and you talk about devastating impacts that, uh, um,

I mean, I don't got to go much further than that. You know, when you bring up stats, I, I, I love the stats because it cuts through, like you say, left, right, whatever side of the political spectrum.

It's like, no, here's a stat. Like, here's a stat that's really going to cut through the bullshit. And one of the things I love about where I was looking at you, if it was in one of your substack articles or your website, there's a list of like, I just stopped reading. And I was like, this is, this is hurting my brain at how many stats are on missed this and missed that and all these things that are going to snowball into real bad complications. For the listener, what's maybe some other shocking stats, Justin, that you look at when it comes to the last two years that just stick out and you can't refute it? Yeah, the lockdowns in particular, the first lockdowns in the spring of 2020, where they were across the board, they led to so many complications.

So, for example, oncologists were the first one to come to us and to others and say, look, either COVID has cured cancer or something else has happened altogether because they were diagnosing half as many cancers in the spring of 2020 as they would in the spring of 2019. And the reason why is that people were too scared to go to the hospital, right? And those cancers were still there. They just weren't being caught. And so those are now appearing at stage three and four cancers. I always put it to people, just think in your own minds, this is anecdotal, of course,

you probably know someone who got COVID. Heck, you probably got COVID yourself, likely did, right? You may know someone who went to the hospital for COVID, maybe one or two people. You might even know someone that died from COVID, but they're probably older. And, but if I asked you, do you know someone in the last two and a half years who died suddenly of a late stage diagnosed cancer or something that was completely unexpected? And you see that repeated again and again. Those are the impacts that are hard to qualify because they come under the radar, right? You mentioned kids in schools. We know that in Los Angeles, the L.I. Unified School District, the largest school district in the country, that 30% of all the students never showed up for a single Zoom class, right? And now you look at the grades that are coming out, the national assessments as to how are our ninth grade it's doing with math? How are they doing with English, right? And they say that it's satisfactory. back about 10 to 30 years as far as the numbers go there. I know myself, I have young kids, as I mentioned, and we had two kids in preschool. And it was crazy. It was difficult.

How would, sorry, you got to clarify something for me. How would missing one year set us back 10 to 30 years? Well, part of the thing is that it was the improvement, right? They were seeing this steady, steady improvement of English scores and math scores. And so what happened was then the ninth grade, for example, which is the first part, the first year of secondary school here in the United States, the freshman took an assessment. And it turns out that their average test scores basically were where we were at 30 years ago. So that's what I mean by setting us back, that the average scores across the country just fell dramatically, two levels we haven't seen in, you know, a generation. So, and so it's like, well, you know, we don't know what it will take to get those people.

back on par. In fact, we know a lot of details around projections for these folks and what that will mean for their life, right? We can actually do the statistical assessments and say, for every, you know, 10 people that don't graduate high school, one dies of, you know, an overdose later on in life or, you know, has a shortened years because of alcohol abuse. We know that based on certain loss of grades, everything else there, your earnings income will go down significantly. So these are all things that are well tested in the sociological literature that you can project through the data.

And this is just, this is just thrown a wrench in the works of so many people. And like I said, I had two small kids who were in preschool and the teacher comes up to us one time. She says, I'm so sorry. You know, your daughter's probably not going to be totally ready for kindergarten. Because, you know,

I can't get these kids to pronounce the letter H through a mask, right? And that's the really difficult thing. One of the big myths that we bust at the outside of the book is that the risk of COVID to everyone is the same, right? That was kind of an assumption, right? Which is a, and we've known that since March of 2020, when the first stats came out, that it basically was it was gradated along your age. And then the numbers now, we just had John Ianitas out of Stanford, the most cited

living doctor and scientist published. And he went to, did a, a, a six, country cross-examination of all the data. And it came back with that the risk of a child dying of COVID compared to like an 80-year-old, which was the average age of death, is literally like a hundred thousand times lower. Like their risk isn't even calculable in many ways. And here we are we burdened them the most. I mean, the last group that in some cases is still masked up, depending on where you are, are preschoolers. Preschoolers, you know, and these kids, their risk is so low and we're devastating to them because they have, they have, you know, lower emotional cues because they don't see people's faces.

And yet it's just, it's like, it defies logic, right? One of the lovely things about where I'm sitting today here in Western Canada is we've been, I forget how many months it is now, but it's for the most part, all gone. I shouldn't say it's all gone because I literally just had an interview with a group of guys who lost a contract with a company here in Alberta because they wouldn't abide by the vaccinated. You know, everybody on site has to be vaccinated and all that. And you're like, I can't believe that's still in anything right now. Right. Like it's almost insane to assume that that's still a thing.

You know, when you're talking about you probably knew somebody who had COVID. You probably knew somebody who blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. One of the things I would, a couple of things I would add it is one, we probably all know somebody who died from it or died with COVID. I would always put that little phrase in there, right? Because one of the things that started to be very well known was, are they dying from COVID or with COVID? Anyways, I, you know, the other thing is, is I knew more people, certainly knew a ton of people who got COVID. But I now know five guys I played hockey with throughout my career, vaccine side effects that have, like, you know, some of it's been debilitating to, you know, for a month.

Others are longer than that. And when I, that you start doing that, Matthew, you're like, this is insane. Like I, and this is the people that are willing to talk about it. I'm sure there's more and more that I actually know that have had something that just don't want to talk about it, which is totally fine, except for the fact that it was literally forced on our population, your population, like, to unbelievable level. I guess is what I'm trying to get at. And then the final thing I thought of while you were talking, Justin,

is the cancer early detection. I was wondering, it would have been December 2020 when I was sitting and we did this live stream to raise money for the hospital in Lloyd, not for the COVID ward or anything for. It was, I forget what we were raising money for actually back then. Either way, it doesn't matter. I had a lady talk about how they weren't testing for,

cancer anymore. They weren't doing breast exams. They weren't doing any of that. I was like, wow, well, let's talk about that. So we talked about it just briefly. And then it was like six months later, they said that that had all been shut down because of the unvaccinated filling the hospitals and things such as that. I was curious, in your book, do you bring up, do you talk about anything like that or do you have any thoughts generally on the unvaccinated is the reason why we're so far behind in the cancer treatments, you know, the preventative things around, you know, just finding depilitating diseases and life-ending diseases, I guess. Yeah, look, it's a difficult subject because for years and for the last maybe two decades,

any sort of pushback on vaccines has been sort of a third rail of health care politics, right? And we talked about this with our friends across the way in Europe, we do these calls with them. And they say, why aren't you pushing back on the vaccine? It's like, because we'll instantly get taken down. I mean, we will literally lose all our accounts if we start talking about this issue. And so we had to talk about it in roundabout ways. Because the data was unmistakable, right? I mean, that there was, for example, we now know definitively that these vaccines can disrupt a woman's menstrual cycle.

And we know now that out of a study out of Turkey, that could be as high as 10% of women who took the vaccine who are still in women bearing age there. And we also know that, and this is, again, repeated several dozen studies about the rate of myocarditis, a very serious condition for especially young men. And I had a good conversation going with a lot of people online. Scott Adams, for example, the creator Dilbert, nice guy. We had some good conversations. He and I would trade DMs. And he was, you know, not necessarily.

He thought lockdowns were probably over the top, but he was big into vaccines. And as soon as I mentioned, I said, I had to do this in offhanded ways. I said, in about three years, you're going to see the largest class action lawsuit that will make mesothelioma and asbestos look like child's play. And he blocked me after that, right? It's a very sensitive subject. People don't want to talk about that. Why is that? Why do you think that is? Well, I think part of it is just in general, like with any of these interventions, whether it's the masks or the plexiglass or the stay-at-home orders or the quarantines of kids, right? All those different factors that they were completely wrong on that had debilitating things and didn't change

the course of the pandemic. I think it's a natural thing for people, it's hard for them to stomach, right? There was an article I read, and this is nothing, I read an article, it was in Des Moines, and it stated it said, the American people are perfectly willing to do whatever it takes, but they greatly dislike finding that the sacrifices they made were worth not. But that was that was written in 1919. Around the time of that same pandemic, they had this. same issues. They did mask mandates. They did quarantines. They did a bunch of stuff. And it was a big sacrifice for a lot of people there too. And then they come to find out masks didn't help at all. We knew that 100 years ago. And we never learned those lessons. And again, I think we're coming to

that point where a lot of Americans are trying to stomach the idea that not only did, you know, the school closed down, still closures harm. They didn't affect anything. Mass didn't work. Everyone kind of agrees to that. If you get to the vaccine, and now the vaccines don't work as they promised and they don't, right? Because we have the records. We have, you know, Dr. Fauci, Dr. Walenski going on online. We have this in the book where they say the vaccines are 100% effective against hospitalization and death, right?

If you get this, you're not going to go sick. Dr. Fauci says they're really good against the variance, right? And we know all the data now. They can't hide that. In fact, go to any county website. I told people to do this. Go to your county website and go look up the deaths by. vaccination. You will find that 70 to 80% of all the deaths are people that are vaccinated

and boosted. Now, that actually might be the ratio of the population that you have. That is to say 70 to 80% of people in your county might be vaccinated, right? But then you have to ask yourself, well, wait, wait, if I had told you a year ago that a super majority, a near 80, 90% of people that were dying, were dying, being vaxed. And, boosted and dying, at least on the books as quote COVID, right? You would go, that's nonsense, right? You wouldn't expect the vaccines to work that way or you expect it to work better, I guess is the better way to put it. But yeah, it's going to be, it's a challenging thing and people are just coming to terms with it. And our government still is in total denial.

I mean, you look across the way Sweden just the other day said, yeah, we're not going to give this thing to anyone under 30, right? They just know it. They know the data. And we do too, but we ignore it. And it's not going to be pretty. We just built a modern a plant in Quebec. In Germany was a? Yeah, yeah. In Quebec.

Like, they're still saying, you know, the best way to protect it against COVID is going to get vaccinated. And I'm, I'm like baffled at this point because you talk about, I bet you you know if somebody had COVID, I bet you know,

you can't even count them all. There's so many that have been vaccinated and have had COVID once or twice. Like, it's absolutely insane. And we all remember when Fauci and all of them would get up there. It's 100% effect. It's 94% effect. If it's 86% effect, you're like, how low does it got to get to where you're like,

maybe I shouldn't just watch what the talking heads are doing anymore. We should move on. Well, and fortunately, when Dr. Fauci just yesterday was at some forum, and he ended it by saying how frustrated he was that, you know, very few people have taken up the booster, the bivalent, you know, the thing that's supposed to address Omicron and everything else there. And it's true. I mean, it's under 20%, I think.

And when you look down to the young infant approvals of the vaccine, that is for kids that are like six months to five years, that uptake is less than like 6%, 7% across the country, people aren't doing it. And I think they're getting wise. And you're right, it's not just because they're, you know, these aren't anti-vaxers. Hey, I got my kids vaxed with all the stuff they needed for schools, right? But those vaccines had been on the market for a decade and a half before they even were considered into the schedule. And here we are, the CDC, the ACIP, their panels are approving vaccines for kids based on a study of eight rats. Right. And I'm like, what, what's going on? And they'll say, look, these aren't going to be mandates, right? We're not making these requirements. Like, no, you don't get to play that game because we went through two years of that hell, which is I'd go to my county director, health director. I'd go to my county supervisor.

I say, so why are you masking the kids? Why are you doing these like slightest exposure kidneys to quarantine for 10 days? And they go, I don't tell you. That's the state regulation. And you go to the state. You say, why are you doing these things? They say, it's up to the county, how they want to, you know, enforce it. So you go to the county. You say, well, they say it's your fault. They say, well, it's the CDC. That's their recommendation. You know, the hot potato game of excuses is never ended. Right. Never ended. And still going on, you know, unless you have had a change of government. One of the one of the lovely things here in Alberta specifically, Justin, is we, we just had a big change. Yeah, we just had a big change. And so they're willing to be like, listen,

we, you know, part of the French, but we fucked up. I mean, they didn't say that, but that's basically what they said, right? Not as many, probably a little more articulate than that, but that's basically what they're saying. No, to her credit, your new gal there, I mean, she's the only, the only sort of elected official. I've heard on this side of, you know, the Mississippi, on this side of the ocean that has ever acknowledged an issue, right, and apologized. And I think a reporter put it to it and said, do you want to offer apology? We manifestly apologize. I mean, it's just, that's refreshing.

And because a lot of our politicians aren't doing that now, they're going to fill it tomorrow. I hope. That's kind of the plan. And I have it on good authority that if there is a changing of the guard, we will have some hearings next year. that would be a very positive thing too, I think. Do you think anyone on, do you think somebody's going to jail for this? Like the wife and I had a discussion about it. And she thought, you know, I don't know if anyone's going to jail for this or going down or

anything. And I go, I don't know, there's too much anger. We can certainly get into the Atlantic article and amnesty and all that. But like, to me, I don't know how you set the place on fire. Watch it burn down. Watch people just, you know, and then nothing happens from it. That's my thought. it's hard for me to see Dr. Fauci frog marched out of Congress, you know.

It's actually easy for me to see that. Realistically, though, I don't think that's going to happen. I don't think people are going to go to jail for this, except perhaps on the corporate side. Like, if it can be shown, and this is kind of where everything is headed over in Europe, right, that Pfizer and Moderna, Pfizer particularly over there, have been deceptive, right? that they hadn't really been forthcoming in what their vaccine was told to do and everything else there. There's a lot of anger around that. I think that could come to bear over there. And there could be, you know, some corporate things that go in there.

I think, as I said, you know, these groups have, you know, some sort of immunity that they can claim based on a 1983 law. But we have a pretty litigious society down here, the 50, right? and I think they'll find a way. I'll be shocked if nobody not loses their head for it. I don't mean that. We're not going to haul people out to the guillotine, I don't think. But to me, I would just be shocked. The amount of things that went wrong for two years, it may take time, but I just, I don't see how something doesn't happen.

Yeah, there needs to be come up in. I think we will have some of that. There's going to be a lot of stuff coming out. That's the thing, you know, the piece that you mentioned the other day, Emily Oster, Oster, who is a very actually fine professional. She's got a lot of good date of experience. And the issue was she wrote an article for The Atlantic and it basically said, we need to call for amnesty for those who got it wrong, right? And we're like, no, no, no. You need to have transparency.

There needs to be accountability first. And Emily's story is interesting, right? We actually worked with her before. Emily and her crew, she's at a Brown University. She was one of the only groups that was actually collecting data on schools, gauging masks, gauging distancing, gauging policies between New York, Florida, and a few other states, and then also counting cases, right? And so she put together this data from August 2020 until July of the next year.

And it was amazing. It was the work that CDC should have been doing, should have been doing, but didn't do. And she had her stuff together. And then she made it open and available. And we pulled down the data and we showed, hey, turns out schools that were masking had cases that were 21% higher than those that were masking. Right. And she came out with a paper that wasn't quite so furtive, but she made the same assessment in the end that the data shows that these masking mandates and other interventions do nothing, right? in kinder words.

That went to preprint and then she dropped it. And we pushed her. We said, can you give us the data? Can you keep collecting this data? No one else is collecting. We need you to collect this data. Will you push for your paper to go to full peer review so we can get this published? She sat on it.

She didn't do anything. She had zero courage because the pitchforks from the science establishment were coming for her. And she could read the tea leaves there. And she would post an article occasionally saying, you know, we need to safely reopened schools, but safely reopened schools is code word for quarantine to the slightest exposure. Because here in the U.S., we had schools that were closed in the spring of 2020. And then when they came back for the next school year, the 2020 to 21 school year, they were closed for a good portion of that year. I think a lot of them did open until the winter or the spring.

And then for that next year, that 2021, 2022 school year, the winner of 2021 was brutal because then they put into effect these Vax versus unvaxed, these quarantine exposure. If your kid was just had the slightest exposure to a kid in school, there were 10 days at home. And that happened several times over for our kids. We had one in high school. We had three in preschool. And it was devastating. I mean, because that was totally unpredictable. It was so frustrating. I talked about in the book how my 14-year-old stepdaughter, she went to a school rehearsal for a play. And then we get a word that, oh, someone tested positive among the cast. So she's going to have to spend 10 days in quarantine. And mind you, I'm sending you to a classical Christian private school that I'm paying for. And they still succumbed and broke like a card table under our county's thumb and their regulations. So they said, well, can she, can she test to stay? Like, we'll take a test every

morning if she can say, no, she wasn't wearing a mask at the time of exposure. Well, what does that have to do with anything? Well, also, she's not vaccinated. Well, and then I said, then I had this bright idea when I'm talking to him. I'm like, oh, hey, the kid who got, the kid who got tested positive, was he vaxed or unvaxed? I can't tell you that. Tell me that. And they said he was vaxed. Yeah. So, here's this vax kid, gets a positive test. He has probably no symptoms, but he gets to go back to school very quickly because he's vaxed. So do her team, her schoolmates were masked. She wasn't. And so she had to spend 10 days and miss the Christmas concert. Just to, you know, we, we spent 18 years. My wife spent 18 years with those kids in that

school, building up that school from scratch with her two daughters, her old, two oldest daughters. We left it. We just can't deal with it. And that was, again, a classical Christian school built on reason and rhetoric. I talked about this one episode, the lunch lady comes to my daughter, all eating lunch outside. You know, it's like winter of the spring of 2020 or something like that, you know, and she's, or sorry, the, the, the, the fall. And she says, oh, you're going to need to sit perpendicular to the, to the lunch table because we don't want you facing your classmate.

Because, because what, COVID only goes in one direction, right? It was nonsense. And it drove people insane. And part of the book is that sort of that cascade of really interesting stories about the the crazy moments that everyone experienced and everyone has a story to tell about, you know, being chased down the aisle because you're going the wrong direction, right? Or, you know, some Karen Park who's saying, you've got a mask up outside, arguments on the plane, constant reminders to keep it up, right? The Plexiglass, right? I mean, there's a case and

point. We talked about this in detail. Tens of millions of dollars spent on Plexiglass, right? Every single retail store, every school became basically like a locked down bank. You know, and you couldn't understand anybody. And it was just like, oh, well, this will help, right? This will help stop the spread. Well, the CDC quietly dropped that recommendation in March in 2021. They didn't give any big fanfare. They just dropped it. And the reason why is because it wasn't working because it became another surface you had to clean, right? It closed off ventilation, which is actually a really positive thing to not spread COVID, right? And so here is this thing, tens of millions of dollars, complete failure. No science behind it.

and you can still go to Home Depot today and they've still got their barriers up. And it's just, it's asinine. It's insane how quickly we let ourselves go there. So that's kind of the story of the book, which is retelling that story, but then coming back around and saying, what do we learn from that?

How do we stop this again? You know, there's going to be a big portion of my audience that is just like, uh-huh, uh-huh, I get it. Uh-huh. Yep. Know all about it. Everything. they've been on this sucker since the beginning kind of thing, you know? My question is, have you made it palpable, do you think, your book specifically,

to where somebody who got vaccinated will pick it up, read through it and go, man, that's why I got duped, or not even do, like, I just, how did I miss some of this? Or you know what I mean? Because like there's a portion of the population up here and certainly down in the states that are just on it. They just get it. They don't need any more books. They don't need any more notes.

They're just like, I got it. And saying that, if there was a way to get that next portion of the population that got it against their will or whatever the word is for the next chunk of it. Do you think that's plausible or have you seen that? Or I don't know, I guess it might be a little bit of a gray area. Yeah, I would say we probably have to take a page from AA, you know, alcohol. Alcoholics Anonymous here. They're going to need a friend, okay? And that's what this book is really designed for. It's for those folks who, you know, you know this stuff. This articulates it. This gives you all the data, right? Your tips your finger. It gives you the stories you need to, because people, I think, will relate to stories and try to bring that into their minds as to what they're going to do, right? And I think people need to step up and have courage to walk that through. We had a conference here in San Diego about three weeks ago. We had Scott Atlas speak. We had Jay Bocatari. speak. We had Jennifer say, just great keynote speakers. People have really stuck their necks out and really risked their professional careers on this thing, right? And so we've been doing that.

And one of the key things, we had 100 plus people show up. And we had some people who said, I am so happy to be here. I haven't found anyone that was willing to talk to me about this stuff, right? So you'd be surprised at the number of people out there that are just kind of closeted team reality people, right? And they know in the back of their minds, they're just looking for an excuse to get done with this, right? And this will get people on the same page. And, you know, I think part of what is, part of what brings that sort of camaraderie is laughing at the ridicule of what was just off the charts crazy. Like, I've thought about this rom-com, right, that you might have in the city of San Francisco. And the idea was with, uh, with, uh,

you know, it's kind of love in a time of COVID, right? And that was the crazy thing. So like, think of two star cross lovers in San Francisco, right? And there after an evening of drinking turns into a one-night stand. You know, the, the, the embarrassed couple, they wake up. There's a set of health inspectors at the door. I'm sorry, you can't leave this apartment. According to city guidelines, if you had an intimate relationship with someone not of your household,

you must quarantine with them for 14 days. And it sounds like a joke, but it was true. That was an actual mandate on the books under emergency orders for anyone in San Francisco, right? And those are things that you can laugh about. And then think about like you can start this conversation about toilet paper. We all went through that big rash several times, right, where there was like, oh my gosh, there's no TP, right? And I remember my wife and I, we were in line for that first batch of shortages.

I think we went to Costco, right? And that was a crazy scene, right? You're going to get one of those infamous 30-year-old Kirkland slabs to haul home. And they had the lines snaking around there. But, you know, the policy of TP became a joke. But I talked to people in the industry. And here's what happened is that the reason we were short on toilet paper was that people do, if you'll excuse the expression, half of their business at their businesses, right?

And the type of supply chains, the quality of the paper, how it's distributed, how it's bought, how it's marketed, how it's stored. You know, you have like, you go to a stadium. They got these big old rolls that will mount on the sides of these stalls, right? That's half of the business of the TP industry, right? So all of a sudden, they're like, holy crap, we're going to have to start making that, you know, soft, cushy bear stuff very quickly. And so they had to scramble to get all the production back to there, right? And now they're left with all this TP on the side, right?

Now, your listeners will be fun. This is a fun little thing. And this is a fun little thing to do with anyone. Just Google Charmin Forever, okay? And they've created this massive product, which is basically taking one of those massive roles. They said it'll last you an entire month. And they'll actually send it with a metal mount that you can put right next to the latrine, right?

And it's called Charmin Forever. So, like, that was like one incident and one industry in how it impacted them. We spoke with people who are a janitorial staff in Vegas, okay? These are other things that you could like just have a great conversation with people with and try to get them to say, yeah, that was crazy. So, you know, here's Vegas. It shuts down for like two months or more. I can't remember how long it was gone. And the staff there basically spent their entire days and nights wandering the halls of the hotels, flushing the loo, running the sinks, running the shower in every single hotel room.

Because if you didn't, it's going to back up with Legionnaires disease and everything else there. the whole systems are designed for a certain amount of people staying there and flushing every day. And so they had to simulate thousands of people coming to town. Otherwise, all the sewers back up. And so it was a crazy scene that they had to go through. But then you get on the other side of the equation. I remember I got a text message from a friend of mine, Orange County, which is just north of me here in San Diego. He said, Justin, both of my parents have passed away now.

my dad from an undiagnosed cancer, my mom from a blood disease, and both of them, neither of them had COVID, but they were too scared to go out and seek treatment. I mean, that's the devastation that you get where fear was the main tool that they used to keep us under their thumb. And the key lesson is why this is important now, because I know that people are like, well, it's kind of in our rearview mirror. No, no, the tactics, the strategies that they used, they will bring them back again. these elected officials, many people in the press and on the left, they would gladly weld you inside your house if they thought it would change the direction of the pandemic, just like they did in China. And so whether it's going to be for the next wave of COVID, the next pandemic, or whatever other boogeyman they come up with, right? That's what they're going to use. They're use these same tactics.

And they're very pleased that a lot of us acquiesced. Well, certainly up north here. If it isn't for a trucker convoy going to Ottawa, I don't know where. we sit. And I mean, like we saw it firsthand. Uh, so I, I, I'm right with you that I have no idea what comes next, but after these tactics have worked so well, um, it's hard not to kind of go back to the same drawing board, so to speak, and try it all over again and see if the population will, you know, go down the same, the same hole, so to speak. You know, um, before we're going to have to, by the time this is released, the midterm elections are going to be over.

I was just remembering that by the time we get through this, they're going to be done. And saying that, this is going to be interesting because you're on the spot, but at the same time, by the time you talk, or if people hear this, it'll be over. What are your thoughts about the upcoming midterm elections here in the United States? You know, I've heard that it's not going to be a red wave. It's going to be a red tsunami. Do you think that? what are your thoughts on what you're seeing down south?

Yeah, so I predicted that President Trump was going to win the election in 2016, much of the chagrin of many of my friends. I was a big Trump booster too. I liked his policies. I liked the idea of training the swamp. I had worked in politics for quite some time, so I knew what kind of chaos was there, had a terrible time on the Romney campaign and seeing just the establishment work at front there.

But then in 2020, it came around. I remember that fateful day. It was March 29th. It was in the Rose Garden. It was the day that President Trump, Mike Pence, Deborah Burke's, Dr. Fauci announced that they were extending the 14-day lockdown for another 40 days. And I tweeted out. I said, Trump just lost the election. And I knew it.

I knew he lost the election because even if just two or three percent of that older demographic decide to stay home, up a data guy, I knew that he would lose. Now, there were plenty of shenanigans in the election, and actually I was one of the guys in the forefront calling those out. I don't think there's enough evidence right now to demonstrate that he absolutely was foiled and that this was wrongdoing. I can't say it was so it's just opaque, right? But I, my prediction now is that there will be a very large red wave, but I caution, and I put up a post on this on our website, Rational Ground, And one of the things I talked about was I think that there's possibility that there could be some some breakers that might slow the red wave from coming ashore. And the reason why is that there are so many COVID election policies still in the books.

And if it comes down to Pennsylvania, and that's the deciding factor for whether the Senate turns Republican or not, it's, it's, it's, is not going to be pretty. There's going to be a lot of, a lot of things to work through there. Wisconsin, the same thing. Georgia kind of got their act together. They cleared out all of those things. Just to give you an example, like Georgia, in previous elections, in 2016, they had mail-in ballots. I think they had 300,000, 400,000 ballots that were mailed in. People requested absentees, and they mailed those in. And the rejection rate was like 6%. Okay. This time around, 2 million people or more. I think it was, you know, everyone got like a mail home ballot, right?

And the rejection rate was 0.6%, 0.4%, actually. So it was like a factor of 10 lower. And it's like, well, wait, wait, wait. You had a 10x increase in the number of ballots that were cast, and yet a 10x decrease in the number of ballots that rejected this. Something's off, right? I can't really explain it. But they fixed that up.

I don't worry about them anymore because they just fixed up a lot of stuff. there and made it very clean. Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, a few other states, not so clean. So I'm still predicting a very strong night. We'll know early on just watch New Hampshire and that Senate race. Watch Ohio. Those start reporting about 730. We're having a, yeah, those are the things that I would look at.

Of course, you know, it's come and gone, so we'll see what my prediction is. Very strong on that. But at the same time, I urge caution because it could get as nasty. as those late days in 2020 were. When you say clean up, they cleaned up their act or cleaned up their, you know, I don't know, you're talking about Georgia, you know, you're talking like, how can that be? They had less rejections. I get exactly what you mean there.

But what have they done specifically that you call cleaning up? They've really cleaned up some things. Yeah, they had a very controversial omnibus bill, which basically you have to show an ID to vote. You can only request absentee ballots for X, Y, and Z. You can't just get them willy-nilly. They put more gubernatorial controls into how recounts are done. You recall, one of the big chaoses was just like you'd get the CCTV footage of these people that are counting votes. And all of a sudden they pull a trunk out.

You're like, where did that trunk come from of boats? Right. And it just had this perception of really gratuitous awfulness that was going on. And so I think Georgia kind of buttoned up a lot of like, so an example, in 2020, 17 states had full universal mail-in ballots, right, which can cause a lot of problems. I mean, they had TV interviews of people saying, yeah, I got 16 ballots to my address. I don't know who these are. Right. And so those can lead to a lot of challenges. And so I think that's down to eight now. So a lot of states sort of said, okay, we're going to roll that back. But here in California, for example, we had this issue, Gavin Newsom said, by executive order, it would be, mail and ballots from here on going forward, right? And then the Republicans like, hey, you can't really do that. It's a legislative thing. So they took him to court and it went through the court and it got to the California Supreme Court. The California Supreme Court said, yeah, he was wrong to do that. That's not his prerogative, even at emergency powers. Oh, but it's November 2nd. Sorry about that.

I mean, the ballots were already there, right? And now they've codified it into law. So like, for example, if we didn't have universal mail and ballots last year for 2021, it's very likely Gabbynizum not be our governor now. Because in those special types of elections, it's all about who can you get out to the polls. When getting out to the polls is, you know, there on your couch, that's fine. I think it makes it more accessible. I think there are a lot of challenges, but it definitely changes the game, right? And it's like, you know, we kind of prepped for a campaign that would be, let's get people to the polls instead of let's get people, you know, to their number two pencil there in their bathroom, right? It just wasn't really accounted for us. That's really difficult.

You know, up here, uh, one, I mean, I'm a Joe Rogan fan. Obviously, he went to Texas and, and you've just heard different stories of California in particular. What have, would have been your thoughts on Gavin Newsome and, I don't know, just California in general, uh, Justin, you've been living there for some time. Like, are you like, no, this is still a great state? Or are you like watching, I don't know, whatever unfold. You know, it's November here in California. I think the weather is something close to 70 degrees out here. So those are one of the reasons you state.

If I get in my car and drive for seven minutes, I'm there at the beach, right? I'm here in San Diego. It's a great place to live. My family's been here for three generations. My wife's family goes back to the 1800s, right? It's hard to leave California, especially if you grew up here in the 80s where it was such a terrific place to grow up. It was idyllic and so exciting, right? But it's changed dramatically. And part of that is that, you know, the taxes are high. The services are not great.

Everything is basically abjorn to whoever the squeakiest wheel is. You've got billions of dollars spent on high-speed rail that never be built. They bring in all the money, but it's all coming from just a few sectors of the economy. A third of all the restaurants closed down in the in the state because of COVID. A third. One third of all restaurants closed down because they just, and you go across to any one of these malls, except for a few other places. And it's like, sometimes it's a ghost town.

It's crazy. And they'll, they'll kind of gloss over it. Gab Newsom has spearheaded that craziness as well. And then you have, you know, these attorneys generals in different cities and everything else that aren't prosecuting crime. In the place where I grew up in a Nordstrom that I used to go. go to, right? Just great suburban white kid place to go, right? It was crazy. You just admit it straight up front and then they, they, there's like people come in full, you know, not even armed.

They're just letting them come in and take all the stuff and leave. And it's happening in San Francisco. My dad has worked in San Francisco for 40 years. They lost a 10th of the population there. And so California is going to pay the price for that down the road unless they wise up. And so it's going to be a, it's going to be a rough couple years here starting. probably next year for California. Well, but it's tough to leave. It's tough to leave.

You know, sticking on California here just for a few more minutes. You know, like I remember a story of them talking about vacant hotel rooms, putting homeless in it. You talk about San Diego here.

You talk about San Francisco and the crime where if it isn't over a certain amount, well, they're not going to prosecute today and just got people coming in and grabbing and walking out. Like, are citizens just up in arms? Are they just like,

You know what? I'm just going to piece out. I'm going to go to a different state. Are they like, it's beautiful here? We'll take it. We'll roll with it. Like to me up here, hearing the different stories, Justin, I'm like, this is wild. Well, the election is taking place by the time this airs, but I think, I think we'll come to find out that they took some action. That's my prediction of release, California. There's going to be some very big surprises, very big surprises. And I think it goes down to the county level and to the school board level. I mean, who do? your unelected health bureaucrat in your county would have so much onus over your kids' education, your barber shop, your coffee shop, your own business. I remember she came up there. Wilma Wooten is the one who's here in San Diego. And I don't know what her background is, but I'm guessing just maybe she was failed in the private space, but she came to public space and makes untold money to basically say,

you should consider everyone a vector of disease. And I'm saying, that's the worst thing you could ever say for a public. populace because, you know, you're just losing a lot of people in that realm. And here's a case and point. We have, you know, I think 2030, I can't remember how many deaths we have in California, some, you know, tens of thousands of deaths from COVID, right? But when you map it up to the excess deaths, it is, we expect a certain amount of people to die every day in California and across the country and across the world, right? And so if if the number comes in higher than what you're expecting, then you go, well, wait. So what? What?

happen, there must have been some event, right? So here in the United States, about 8,000 people die every day and about 40,000 people die in nursing homes every month. Here in California, we have a portion of that. But the excess deaths that we've logged, especially for people under 50, here in California, they don't map up to the number of deaths for COVID. And so what happened to, I think it's like 8,000 deaths. Eight thousand people died of something, and it wasn't COVID, and we weren't expecting them to die. So what were those? Fentanyl over? is yeah. Something else, possibly vaccine-related? Possibly. There's just, you know, a lot of unknowns there. And that's the, you know, what's great about California, these state projects is California is a great comparison to Florida. Florida relatively open from the spring of 2020. California closed down until literally just months ago. And if you compare it, apples to apples and you say, well, you do the age adjusted death rates. It's exactly the same. Exactly the same. So all those interventions, all those sacrifices made as Californians were for nothing.

It made no difference. And that's a tough thing for people to stomach. I hope I can get to my neighbors and convey that to them. When you talk about excess deaths, is that, do you know, I don't know if you know this off top of your head. Is that similar across all states, excess deaths, or is it worse in places that had the harshest lockdowns? Or do you know that? It's lockdowns definitely did not have a crude benefit. And we can see in some instances that, especially for younger groups there, that there is some correlation between the number of deaths there.

The highest correlation we can find, though, especially on the state level, is just the comorbidities with COVID obesity. So like Alabama has one of the highest rates of death per capita, but they also happen to have the highest obesity rates. And that's a crazy thing. You know, you think about it. We know we have all these great new Scrabble words, you and I, you know, comorbidities, no so comial, you know, all these really interesting health care phrases that we didn't quite know, but now we have on the back of our hand. And when you look at that and you say, well, we know that the two key issues that might predict if you have a worse outcome of COVID are one, a lack of vitamin D and two, obesity. And it's like, well, whose idea was it? stick us inside, out of the sun, eating takeout for a year.

Everyone putting on their COVID-19, I know I did, right? And that's a crazy scene. We know that a third of Americans put on 30 pounds or more during the pandemic. We know that the obesity rates and kids went up by like 300%. Like the amount of, you'd see that. It's devastating. We can calculate what sort of guaranteed, guaranteed, guaranteed the death. from lockdowns will far exceed the deaths from COVID.

Man, I tell you what, if that isn't a way to just kind of close out the conversation, before I let you out of here, we always end with the final question from Crude Master. It's he's words, if you're going to stand behind a cause, then stand behind it absolutely. What's one thing Justin stands behind? I stand behind sticking your neck out. I remember April, I mean, I wrote my first articles in March of 2020 and I was scared. By April, I'm like, what if this really is that apocalypse? What if I'm wrong?

What if I'm completely downplaying this? And I'm sending people to their graves like they say I am, right? And I just remember sticking my neck out and say, I'm just going to stick with it. I know I trust my numbers. And then people like John I need has come along and like in April and say, yeah, this is a once a lifetime data disaster. We're making terrible decisions on these things. And then I found other people who thought like I did as well. And yeah, there were times I'm like, wow, these numbers, I don't know what to make of these. And then we'd turn around. We go, oh, it's all coming around to

our side now. So glad I stuck my neck out, changed my life forever, changed trajectory. But I hope it, and I hear from a lot of people that it changed their life too and gave them courage to stick their necks out because if you don't, you end up with lockdowns as a constant part of life. And that's not pretty. Yeah, I hear you. For the listener, if they want to buy a copy of your book or find you, where can they do that? Yeah, you can go to gone viralbook.com. Goneviralbook.com will take you right to Amazon to buy it. And then you can find me on Twitter, Justin underscore Hart. That's our main piece there. And then if you love Substack, we have great substack. COVID reason.com. We're going to keep that going. And that's the stick of it. But yeah, find me online. Reach out to me.

I'd love to hear from people. Justin underscore hard on Twitter. Well, I appreciate you giving me some time today, Justin. It's been, well, it's always enjoyable to sit down and pick someone's brain. Appreciate you coming on and giving me some of your time. Thanks, Sean. Great to be with you too.