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Today we're going to go back in time to June 27, 1519 to a place called Pleysenburg Castle in Leipzig, Germany. Now, this is the air of the Holy Roman Empire. And the Emperor Maximilian I had died a few months prior, and there was to be a new emperor elected the following day. And there in Plysonburg Castle, all the workers were there. They were getting ready.
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They were hanging tapestries and the great hall and putting up chairs and so forth, getting ready for this really big event. And you would think that that event would have something to do with the election of the new emperor. That would be the talk of the town. Oh, my God, who's going to be the new emperor? That's going to be the new emperor chosen?
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Who's going to be nobody cared, at least not in Leipzig. Perhaps everywhere else across the whole room and empire. They were thinking about that, but not in Leipzig because something far bigger was happening in Leipzig the next day. It was, curiously enough, a debate, which sounds kind of boring. Who cares about a debate?
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But for these guys, it was like the Super Bowl. It was a huge event because it was a battle between the world's most powerful institution and somebody who we would probably consider today essentially a celebrity influence, an up and coming celebrity influence. And somebody had recently shot to stardom. And they were going to debate together in the great hall of Pleysenberg Castle. And it was such a big deal.
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Nobody cared about the election of the emperor and who was going to be chosen emperor because it was all about this debate. They were talking about things that up until that moment were basically taboo. You just didn't talk about these things. There was a fierce exchange over the nature of free will. You didn't talk about free will back then.
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That was a taboo subject. You didn't talk about these things. And it was things that just had never been discussed in public before. And it was a big deal. It became known as the Leipzig debate.
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And again, on one side, you have the most powerful institution in the world, the Catholic Church, which at that point basically controlled virtually everything. Controlled politics and even warfare and finances across Europe, controlled moral thinking, intellectual development, all these things. What you could and could not say, what you could and could not do. And the Catholic Church was represented by this scholar, this religious scholar named Johan Ek. On the other side, again, this new celebrity influencer who had shot to stardom.
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He was an academic. He was a professor at the University of Wittenberg. He's a 36 year old guy. His name was Martin Luther. Of course you know the name.
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And the two debated, and Luther destroyed Ek in this debate. Destroyed Ek. Luther was powerful. He was brilliant. He was insightful, he was funny.
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And by comparison, eck. Looked just like a stooge compared to Martin Luther. But the thing is that winning the debate wasn't actually Johanneck's goal. Johanneck was really trying to trap Martin Luther into committing some sort of blasphemy. Martin Luther was a thorn in the side of the Catholic Church.
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He was a problem. And they were trying to figure out a way to make him go away. At first, they thought like, oh, let's just excommunicate him. But they couldn't quite do that because Luther was so popular. So they needed to trap him.
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They needed to get him to say something was so outrageous, so blasphemous, that the Pope could easily have grounds to excommunicate him. And so Eck was trying to lure Martin Luther into a trap. And they brought up another philosopher, a guy that had actually been burned to the stake by the Church, branded as a heretic. And so they said, Martin Luther, do you agree with this guy who was burned to the stake? And Lou said, well, yeah, actually, there are some things that he said that were completely plausible and reasonable and maybe we should consider them.
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And so, of course, X, you know, thinking to himself, I got this guy, I got this guy. And so they go back to the Pope and, you know, he tells the Pope said, look, he agreed with this heretic. He agreed with the guy we burned at the stake, and he said it in public, and everybody heard him. So now we got him, right? Now we got him.
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And he got to sort of pause. Now, we didn't talk about the Pope because the Pope is a the Pope is kind of a very interesting guy in this whole scenario. The Pope is a guy named Leo the 10th. Leo the 10th was born Giovanni Demetici and of course, these from the famous Medici family. And he was actually the son of the most famous Medici of all, lorenzo Dietici, who is known as Lorenzo the Magnificent.
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Now, Lorenzo the Magnificent was one of the most powerful figures probably in the history of Europe, certainly at this time. And Lorenzo was I mean, he had his fingers in everything. He had been I mean, banking and government and warfare and everything. And of course, why not the Church, right? So he he goes and he has he has a very clear, long term plan about making his son Pope.
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He pushes his son into religious service starting from the age of seven. And if you could even imagine this, I mean, Lorenzo was so powerful that when his son Giovanni is just 13 years old, he has giovanni made a cardinal. That's how powerful Lorenzo was, is that Giovanni was made a cardinal when he was just a kid, 13 year old cardinal. I mean, what do you think about it today? It's ridiculous, but that's how much power Lorenzo Medici had.
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And so here there's this 13 year old kid who's made basically a senior executive within the bureaucracy of the church at 13 years old. I mean, the guy's still got pimples all over his face. He's a cardinal now. It's ridiculous. And it wasn't long after that Giovanni de Medici was made Pope Leo the 10th.
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He was 37 years old. I mean, think about it today. That's incredibly young to be made pope. And he became Pope Leo the 10th. And as you would imagine, he used church resources.
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He was a Medici, so he used Church resources to advance the interests of his family, to support all his different relatives in banking and government, et cetera. He waged ridiculous wars. There was a war. He waged war against France. There was no reason why they should have gone to war against France.
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He started joining other wars and basically just shoving his fingers into European politics and completely destroyed Church finances to do so. And while at the same time this guy had extravagant taste, he was legendary for his extravagant this guy had a pet elephant. He had a pet elephant who would wander around Rome. The pet elephant's name was Hanno. I mean, this isn't some crazy story.
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This is actually a real thing. The guy had a pet elephant. I mean, they were dining like kings, and there was spending so much money. And there was also a lot of rumors about this guy's unquenchable sexual appetite. Some historians debate that and say, well, there's not really any clear evidence, but it's not like they would have written that stuff down.
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But Leo, he was a human being, right? He was a human being. This isn't about all these things that I'm saying, by the way. This is nothing about the Catholic faith. We're talking about human beings who are basically politicians running a very large institution, who the historical record shows very clearly, at a minimum, abuse their authority.
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And Leo is no exception to that. There are a lot of people who came before him, a lot of people who came after. And the thing about Martin Luther is martin Luther knew it. Everybody knew it. Everything that Leo did, everything that previous popes did, everybody knew it.
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And Luther was actually a bit of an apologist for Leo the 10th. He said, but he said, oh, the pope's a good guy, and he had a troubled childhood, sort of like Prince Harry. It's like, oh, boohoo, I'm a royal millionaire, and I've had a difficult life. And that's kind of the way people sort of apologize for Leo. And so Luther was kind of on his side, but where he had a real problem, where he had a real problem, at least at first, he was on his side.
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But where Luther had a real problem was with the financial corruption. This thing you probably heard of this idea of the selling of indulgences. Now, in the Middle Ages, the concept of an indulgence was very different from what was today, 500 years ago. The indulgence, this in practice was essentially that you were trading eternal salvation in exchange for money. And there's actually a formal.
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You'd get like a certificate. You get this piece of paper saying, we absolve you of these things. It basically became this snake oil industry. It got so ridiculous. You had a priests and bishops and the Pope himself going out selling these things.
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There were professionals who would go out and basically broker these deals. There were professionals who would go out. They were called professional partners. And they would go out sometimes they would front run. They would go out and get a bunch of these certificates upfront.
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They would go and pay the clergy for these certificates and then go out and resell the certificates. It was sort of like sort of like getting like a blank indulgence certificate and then go out and resell the stuff. These people were pardoners. They were professional partners. They go around to people and say, well, oh, are you a center here?
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Come and give me some gold, and I'll give you this certificate. And everybody knew they were so sick of this stuff. It was so legendary. If you've ever read or at least heard of jeffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in Canterbury, tails is actually one of the tales, is the partner's tale. And the partner actually goes and admits, like, oh, yeah, I totally fleece people.
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It's so easy to fleece people when you're promising them eternal salvation. And this basically made its way into popular literature at the time. That's how outrageous it was. Everybody knew it. Everybody knew it was bullshit.
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Everybody was sick and tired of it. And this is the thing that Luther again, this guy, he was a professor of moral theology at the University of Wittenberg. He had a huge problem with this because he thought, why are we lining the pockets of the clergy and these snake oil salesmen? We could do a lot better with that money. Hell, we could just give it to the poor.
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Poor. If the whole idea is to do something good with this money, instead of giving it to the clergy, just give it to them directly to the poor. Cut out the middlemen, and maybe we'll do some good here. This was Luther's view, and he felt that this concept of selling, of indulgences was extremely immoral from his position as a professor of moral theology. But he viewed it almost as an academic lens.
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Luther wasn't a revolutionary. He never intended to be a revolutionary. The big story in 1517, Luther writes the 95 Theses, and he goes to the church door in Vittenberg, and he nails the church door, and there's sort of this historical story, like he's marching to the church door with hammer in hand, ready to start a revolution. But that's not what it was at all. Luther was an academic, and his 95 Theses was essentially an academic paper.
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It was just written almost as something to say, oh, here's some discussion points that maybe we can talk about at some point. And he puts it on the door or the church door in Vinberg because the church door was essentially like a bulletin board. That's where you say, hey, I lost my dog because anybody's seen my dog? And you nailed that to the church door. It was just this community bulletin board.
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And it wasn't this thing to say, I'm starting a revolution. It was really just this very harmless, innocent sort of event. But what ended up happening was he touched a nerve. Luther touched a nerve. He wasn't the only one.
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There was somebody he had actually a colleague, a guy named Carlstatt who just a few months prior wrote 152 theses against indulgences. It didn't really catch on because 95 theses was the right number. It was a catchier title or something like that. But, you know, Carl status didn't really catch on. Martin Luther's did.
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Martin Luther's did. It touched a nerve. There was this there was this, you know, relatively new technology. The printing press. It had been around for a while, but but it was getting more and more popular.
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And Luther's work was copied and copied and widely circulated. And people were reading this, going, yes, yes, this is exactly what it is. This guy, he nailed it. No pun intended. He nailed it.
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Luther really touched a nerve. Everybody knew what was going on. Everybody knew the selling of indulgences was a really terrible practice. Everybody knew. It was immoral.
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It was unethical. These guys are on the take. They're basically stealing money from poor people and living high off the hog. They got an elephant running around Rome. They're eating feasting like kings at the expense of the poor.
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And everybody knew it. And Luther was one of the guys that said something about it. Again, not intending to be a revolutionary, but he was really talking about it from an academic perspective. But it was the public that got hold of this and the public said, yes, Martin Luther, you are our champion. And the thing about Martin Luther that separated him from other people again, people like Carl Stat and others that were also saying this martin Luther became the champion of the cause partly because he was brilliant.
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Carlstadt was at that debate as well. But Carlstatt got destroyed. But Luther was brilliant. He was eloquent. The other thing about Martin Luther, though and this is something that a lot of people, I think, don't really appreciate about Martin Luther this guy loved to fight.
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He loved to fight, and he had huge balls. He didn't care. He would he would go up against the Catholic Church. He went he went and poked his eye, you know, poked his finger right in the eye. The Pope, right in the eye of the Catholic Church.
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Did not care. Love to fight. Love to fight. Everybody else is a little bit no, we shouldn't ruffle their feathers. Let's not rock the boat.
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Everybody just wanted to kind of placate, maybe reach a compromise. Luther didn't care. Luther wanted to fight. And that's something I think a lot of people don't really know or really appreciate. Luther really loved to fight because of that, and he was brilliant and he was eloquent.
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He became the champion of this cause. So the thing that really kicks off the revolution at first, Luther again, he tried to say, well, look, the Pope, he had a tough time, he had a tough childhood, all this Prince Harry stuff, right? It was really silly, but it was the way that the Pope responded. And this is the thing that really people just furious. The first thing that the Pope's, they communicate, they issue these things called bulls, right?
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The papal bull. It's this sort of official proclamation, and the Pope issues this bull, and he says, I haven't done anything wrong. Everything I've done is completely right, and there's nothing to see here. There's no improper selling of indulgences. There's no financial corruption, and nobody has done anything wrong here, and there's nothing to see.
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And that made people furious because it's like, don't insult my intelligence. We all know what's going on. But he followed that up with yet another one. This was now after the the great debate in Leipzig. And again, Johanne Eck had lured Martin Luther into committing blasphemy, said, Ah, he agreed with that guy that heretic that we burned at the stake.
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And so they he goes back to Pope Leo. Now, Johanneck, he said, hey, we got Martin Luther. We got him. We nailed him. He's he's he's committed blasphemy.
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He agreed with that guy. We burned the stake. He agreed with the heretic, so let's excommunicate him. So Pope Leo issues another bull, and this other bull comes out on June 15, 1520. Things moved a little bit slower back then, right?
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So they had the debate in 1519, and now it's 1520, things move a little bit slower. So Populous issues this other bull, and they actually name the bull the Bull. I love this name. Ex sergey dominate means arise, O Lord. And in this papal bull, excerjay dominate.
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He condemns exactly, precisely 41 of Martin Luther's statements. And as a result of this heresy that Martin Luther had committed in these 41 statements, he orders the public burning of all of Martin Luther's works. And he gives Lutheran ultimate and he says you have 60 days to come to Rome and publicly recant your 41 condemned heretical statements or else we will excommunicate you and you will burn in hell forever and ever until the end of time. And you will be shunned as a heretic by all the faithful and civil authorities will take you into custody and deliver you to Rome and all these things. And again, people were furious.
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People were furious. That was really a breaking point, because, again, rather than to admit to say, yeah, you know, what? We've made some mistakes. Martin Luther. You're right.
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You're actually right about a lot of things. And we should have a discussion, and maybe we bring you into the fold here and help us, help advise us on how to clean this up. And we're working on cleaning it up, and we want to clean it up, but hey, you know what? We're just humans, and it's not about us. It's about our faith.
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And let's focus on that, and we'll try and do better. Instead of doing that, they double down on the lie. They have this completely tone deaf response and say, the guy who says the things that everybody knows are true, they say, you're a heretic. We're going to excommunicate you. You have to publicly recant.
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And they double down on this lie and prove they have learned absolutely nothing. And that was the final straw. That was the final straw. And that story ends with Martin Luther. He actually so he's given 60 days to come to Rome.
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He waits 60 days. And on the 60th day, he knew that he had tremendously popular support from the people, people who understood the truth, and especially younger people, people that were studying academics, and they were reading this stuff, and they go, Come on, we all know. But I mean, even the lowliest peasant, they all knew what was going on. They all know. They're giving their money to the clergy.
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And the clergy, wow, they sure do have nice lives. You see this today? Well, those guys sure do. They sure do have nice cars. They sure do have nice houses, even though they're men of the cloth.
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That's a little bit strange. Luther publishes this open letter. It's written in German instead of Latin. Latin was the academic vernacular at the time, but he writes this letter in German to German people, right? And it's an open letter.
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And he basically says, you know what? Forget about these experts. We can't we can't leave our own, you know, personal and moral philosophy to the expert class. Every person has the right to interpret, you know, the Scriptures and the Bibles in his or her own views. And number two, by the way, there ought to be an investigation and examine.
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Why do all these big shots in Rome? Why do so many members of the clergy live better than the richest kings in the world? Doesn't that seem strange? Why should we, as Germans, continue to support this theft? Why should we keep sending our money to these people in Rome who are going to live high off the hog and have these luxurious lifestyles and so forth?
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I mean, again, this is what you see. You still see a lot of this stuff today, not necessarily in the Catholic Church so much, but a lot of these other denominations. You gotta a lot of very wealthy people in religion with extremely nice houses, extremely nice cars. They go out and get money from poor people. This stuff still exists today, and it's the same thing everybody sees today, says, well, that's so obvious.
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It was obvious in the 1005 hundreds. It just happened to be the Catholic Church back then. And Luther raised a big red flag about that and said, we should have an investigation about this. And he went on and actually blasted the Pope specifically and said, Why do you keep burning heretics? Basically saying, if you have to burn somebody alive because they disagree with you, then your argument clearly has no merit.
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Luther said, quote, we should vanquish heretics with books, not with burning, which is a very powerful statement back then. Again, these are still the days of the Inquisition, and they would just resort to violence. And Luther said, no, that's stupid. If you have to resort to violence, your argument has no merit. The last thing he said, and this is when it was on, this was when it was clearly war, is he said, There should be no special treatment for the clergy.
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We're all human beings. We all fall into the same sky, and there should be the same rules governing the clergy as the rest of society. There should be no special legal treatment. They should have to follow the same rules as all the rest of us. The Pope saw this and said, oh, no, you can't say that.
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Of course we get special treatment. And you can't say that we don't get special treatment. You can't say that we should be investigated. And so, of course, that's pretty much the end. Now Luther, the whole thing just spirals out of control and begins really what history calls the Reformation.
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Martin Luther is credited with starting this Reformation, but it was essentially a revolution. You got to think about the Catholic Church at the time. It was basically a supranational authority, a supranational theocracy. Yes, there were kings and queens. You had monarchy in Spain and monarchy in France and monarchy in England and the Holy Roman Emperor and all these things, but essentially, the Pope was there over everybody.
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The Pope had the ability to wage wars and make pieces and so forth, and really could meddle in all over European politics. And that's one of the things people were rejecting. They said, no, it was almost sort of like a proto European Union headed by a religious leader, right? And people said, no, we don't want that. We want our own sort of sovereign independence.
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And at the same time, we think that we don't need this powerful institution to tell us every single thing how we can live and what we can do and what we can say and what we can read and so forth. Like, no, we're tired of that. We're tired of this expert class telling us how to live our lives. And it was, in that respect, a revolution. It was almost a political revolution against the supranational authority.
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It was an intellectual revolution, that it was through this intellectual revolution that we got things like the Age of Enlightenment and the Age of Discovery and all the different scientific advance and so forth that came from that. It was from the Reformation, this intellectual revolution. And Martin Luther, again, is credited with starting it. But you got to also look especially at the Pope and realize they just didn't get it. They had learned nothing.
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They knew their credibility was declining, had been declining for centuries. They knew this, but they did nothing about it. And their response to this whole thing, again, instead of saying, yeah, we've made mistakes. We shouldn't be doing it. It wasn't just Poplio.
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Everybody had come before him was selling indulgences instead of actually admitting it and admitting mistakes and saying, we got to get better, and let's figure out how to do that, their response was totally tone deaf, and they proved to everybody that they had learned nothing. And that's what leads me to today, curiously enough, this is what leads me to none other than Woody Harrelson, the actor who you might have seen recently went on Saturday Night Live. He told a joke. This is a comedy show. He told a joke about COVID-19.
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He made this joke. He said that his agent gave him a movie script, and Woody Harrelson saying basically he said the movie script is the biggest drug cartels in the world. Get together and buy up all the media and all the politicians and people around the world basically forced to stay locked up in their homes and can only come out if they take the cartels drugs and keep taking them over and over again. It was a joke, obviously, about COVID-19 essentially telling the story of what happened during the Pandemic. And so almost on cue, you had the usual, you know, the Washington Post and Newsweek and all these countless others coming out and saying, he's a conspiracy theorist, and you got to look at it.
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They called him an antivaxxer. And you go like, wait a minute. He didn't even say the word vaccine. There was nothing about vaccines and the monologue at all. He didn't say anything about vaccines.
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He didn't say, don't take them. He didn't say that they're unhealthy. He didn't say that people shouldn't use them. He didn't say anything about it, didn't even use the word vaccine. But these activists who masquerade as journalists are so sensitive, they're so tightly wound.
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You say anything at all, they just jump on antivaxx, antivaxx. He's an antivaxxer, even though he didn't say anything about it. And then, of course, the other one they roll out is conspiracy theorist. You go, well, hold on. I would love to find out which exactly which part is conspiracy theory, because he talks about the biggest drug cartels in the world.
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You go, okay, maybe you could have said oligopoly rather than cartel, but cartel is actually you look at the American American heritage dictionary definition of cartel. Quote, a group of parties united in a common cause certainly seems applicable to the major drug companies during the pandemic. As a group of parties united in a common cause. There are drug cartels, there are the banking cartels. It's not a conspiracy theory to use the word cartel.
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Sure, okay, maybe you could use oligopoly. But this is hardly a conspiracy to say that the drug cartel certainly meets the definition they say, oh, they bought up all the media. How is this not true? Check out the university of Texas school of media. Actually has a really great review of top advertisers on cable and network news.
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Guess who consistently ranks as number one? The drug companies. And we know this. And you watch turn on the CBS nightly news. What do you see at every commercial break?
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Talk to your doctor to find out blah blah blah is right for you. It's all the drug companies. It's ridiculous. Any foreigner that comes and turns on American television and sees all these drug commercials got to think that the United States is the sickest country in the world. And maybe it is, right?
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Then he has this comment about buying up all the politicians. Really? Is this a conspiracy theory? Big pharma. You can see this yourself.
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You go to opensecrets.org and check out lobby groups by industry, and you can see that big pharma is far and away the number one industry among lobby groups, completely dwarfing the number two industry by almost 70%. Number two, you may not be surprised to find out the number two industry lobbying washington is, wait for it big tech. Big tech. But big pharma spends 70% more money than big tech, right? Then, of course, there's the incredibly well documented revolving door between the pharmaceuticals industry and key politicians and bureaucrats.
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These people that go in the most senior positions, CDC and the FDA, and even in congress, they go back and forth. They go, oh, you just left the FDA. Come and join our board of directors. Oh, we have somebody who's a senior executive in our drug company. Oh, now you're going to be on this board of commissioners.
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It goes and approves drugs from our very company. So how is this a conspiracy theory? What else? They say people were forced to stay in their homes. I'm sorry, that's a conspiracy theory?
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Did you sleep through it like that's? Literally what happened? And that people would only come out if they take these drugs. Well, this is what Tony fauci said. He kept being asked, when are the lockdowns going to end?
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When are the mask mandates going to be lifted? When can we go back to normal? And he would always say it was a function of uptake. He said, oh, it depends on how many people take, which got 50% of people got to take the vaccines 70% of people got he kept moving the goalpost, but that was literally. The things that he was saying is that we can go back to normal and we can end the lockdowns and end the mandates as soon as enough people take the drugs.
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So exactly which part is the conspiracy theory? So all these people go antivaxxer conspiracy theory. And to me, it just reminds me of Pope Leo. It reminds me that these people who over the last three years I mean, these are the guys if you think back three years ago, they were the cheerleaders, this whole thing, they were responsible. It's just so much of the destruction.
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What do we know now, three years later? We know the lockdowns were totally destructive. They were a very prominent, courageous scientist that stepped up early in the pandemic and said, no, we can't do this. These lockdowns are dangerous. They're going to have terrible consequences.
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We can't do this. We have to protect the most vulnerable population and let everybody else go out and live their lives. And those people were destroyed. They were canceled. Zero apologies have been issued.
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Zero retractions have been made. But we know this now. We know the lockdowns were destructive. We can see the mental health toll. We can see the destruction of an entire generation of young people that got left behind in school that didn't learn.
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We can see the alcoholism and the drug abuse and the economic devastation. We can see all these things now, right? The media was there the whole time saying, we got to lock down. We got to do all these things. Zero polygy tissue, zero retractions.
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Remember back in the days where they canceled anybody who said, oh, I think it was a Wuhan lab leak. Canceled. Canceled. This is now not only mainstream idea, the government is even saying this. They canceled anybody who dared to say that a vaccinated person could still get COVID.
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Do you remember those days early on, somebody dared to say, well, you could actually still get COVID if you're vaccinated canceled. But this is obviously everybody knows this now. You could get 10,000 vaccines and you could still get COVID in the same way you can still get all sorts of things if you get vaccinated, because no vaccine is 100%. That's not misinformation. That's just true.
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Right? They canceled all these people for all these things, and it was the media leading the charge. And now we know that all these things are wrong. We know all these things that they were saying were wrong. Have they learned anything?
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No, because as soon as somebody comes out and even says it as a joke, they jump all over this guy who says things that are actually all true, says it as a joke, and rather than go, okay, yeah, that was funny. Oh, yeah, hey, we were wrong. Jeez, we're not going to do that again. We're going to try and do better. Oh, no.
[00:27:35.300]
They jump all over this guy and say, conspiracy theorist. He's an antivaxxer, proving that they have learned absolutely nothing. Now, we could do that all day, right? I mean, you could look at I love to look at the Federal Reserve, right? Federal Reserve central bank that responsible for the Federal Reserve of the United States, largest central bank of the world, managing the largest currency in the world, got totally off caught off guard by inflation 2021.
[00:28:01.050]
We started seeing some inflation, and they started off just rejected it outright. It was March, April of 2021, and people were saying, like, hey, what about this inflation? They say inflation. What are you talking about, inflation? I mean, just gaslighting people.
[00:28:14.460]
You're crazy. You think there's inflation? You're stupid. You don't understand anything if you think there's inflation. Finally, they sort of say, all right, there's inflation, but it's transitory, right?
[00:28:23.300]
And then they finally said, okay, maybe it's not transitory. And now they they started this like, oh, my God, we have to do something about this. We have to cause widespread unemployment to fix this. What's incredible is the Federal Reserve gets together, and they meet from time to time. They take dozens of people in the room, all these very smart people, all these experts, PhDs and so forth, and they get together in a room, and they actually I mean, they they release the minutes of these meetings.
[00:28:47.040]
You can actually see what they talk about, and it's, you know, talk about people that have learned nothing. I love reading these minutes. It's sad, but kind of hilarious, because they talk about inflation, and what are they blaming inflation on? Putin and the virus and all these things. And it's like, oh, my God, it's so just face palm.
[00:29:06.790]
How do you not get it? How do you still not understand? Even a high school economics student knows that price levels are basically the result of supply and demand, where supply and demand intersect. And what did they do during the pandemic? They destroyed supply.
[00:29:19.910]
They paid people to stay home and not go to work. They paid people literally to not work. Gee, what a surprise. The supply of goods and services absolutely cratered. The supply of goods and services declined because they paid people to stay home and not work, to not produce goods and services.
[00:29:37.500]
So what a surprise. There weren't enough goods and services. There were shortages of things. Duh. And those lingering effects still exist today.
[00:29:45.050]
You had people that because of COVID they just exited the labor market entirely, said, I'm out. I'm not going to work anymore. I'm retired. Whatever. And so, of course, when things started to open back up again, there were fewer employees available to hire.
[00:29:57.880]
And so then all of a sudden, business is like, oh, we can't find employees anymore. Because it's not like those people just disappeared. They are still there, but they just don't want to work anymore. They just fell out of the labor market entirely. And all these things, they just don't understand.
[00:30:10.880]
They don't understand the impact of all these anti capitalist, anti productive regulations. I mean, all these ridiculous things. You got an administration that goes and appoints these hardcore woke activists to key positions. You get the head of the Federal Trade Commission, which is basically one of the government's chief divisions to regulate large corporations. The person they appointed to be the head of the FTC is somebody that absolutely despises large corporations.
[00:30:34.530]
And so everything they do is they're constantly going and suing big businesses. I mean, now you got the Justice Department. Why is it the Justice Department's role? They got the Justice Department going and suing, trying to stop a merger between two discount airlines. We can't let two private companies merge together that for some reason the government's got to get involved in all these things that are so anti capitalist, anti productive.
[00:31:00.220]
They got this horrendous energy policy. They've declared war on oil companies. Every time he has the opportunity, the President, United States aviator, sunglasses in chief, goes and shits all over the energy company, says, oh, they're horrible people. They're making too much money. We don't like them drilling.
[00:31:14.460]
We think what they do is evil. He goes and denies them federal land leases to go and drill for more oil. Oh, wow, what a surprise. Oil production in the United States is dwindling. Gee, who could have possibly predicted that?
[00:31:29.230]
When you constantly dump on the energy companies and you do everything you can to prevent them from producing, who could have possibly predicted that oil supplies, oil production in the US would start dwindling? Who could have possibly seen that coming? These are the sorts of things that never show up in the Fed minutes. They never talk about any of this stuff. It's they say, inflation, Putin and the virus.
[00:31:50.770]
You just have to look at this. Go, have you not learned any of this? They don't understand how they destroyed supply. They don't understand how at the same time, while destroying supply, they artificially boosted to band. They say, oh, let's cut interest rates to zero.
[00:32:03.130]
Let's print trillions of dollars and shovel all that money into the economy. Let's actually enable and facilitate the government paying people to stay home and give this endless stimulus and all this stuff to people and states and so forth. And obviously, when you shovel that much money in the economy, what are you doing? You're artificially boosting demand. You're just putting money in people's pockets.
[00:32:23.030]
They're going to go out and spend it, but now there's fewer goods and services to spend the money on because you destroyed supply. So, gee, what's going to happen? We destroy supply. We increase demand by shoveling money into the economy. What do you expect is going to happen?
[00:32:36.120]
Lower supply, higher demand. You're going to create inflation. A 15 year old economics student in high school is going to understand that not the Federal Reserve, that all these PhDs, they can't possibly understand. A lot of people predicted this. I was one of the guys that predicted this.
[00:32:50.040]
Even as early as April 2020, early in the pandemic, I wrote something, said, hey, look, we're going to see, quote, significant price inflation in the coming years. Explained all this stuff, about trillions of dollars being printed and so forth. And I was not even anywhere near the only one. A lot of people figured this out. Nobody at the Fed could figure this out.
[00:33:06.570]
Nobody could see this coming. It's all about Putin. It's about the virus. And now, of course, their only solution. So, oh, well, how do we fix inflation that we help facilitate?
[00:33:15.010]
We are there every step of the way to help facilitate is to cause a recession. Their view is if fewer people have jobs, there will be less spending. And if there's less spending, there will be less demand. And that's going to bring down inflation, which is actually totally stupid. And the reason it's stupid is because their solution I'm doing air quotes focuses only on the demand side.
[00:33:34.720]
In no way are they addressing the supply side of things, which is really crucially important. They destroyed supply, and it hasn't come back. They're only focused on demand. And the thing is, they fail to realize that the government is going to bail those people out anyhow. If your whole thesis is, we got to, we got to, we got to increase unemployment so there will be less spending, the government is just going to step in and bail those people out.
[00:33:57.050]
The government's going to step in with unemployment benefits. So it's like, those people aren't going to get money. Instead of getting money from their job, they're going to get money from the government. The government's just going to give them money. And where is the government going to get that money from?
[00:34:07.850]
They're going to borrow it from the Fed. So that the Fed doesn't even understand. It's like, dude, you're going to be in this anyways. You're going to be printing money. Give it to the government.
[00:34:16.260]
The government is going to give it to the people anyhow that you that you've just put out of work. So what is the point? What is the point? But they just don't understand any of this. They don't even understand the unemployment statistic.
[00:34:25.900]
It's hilarious. We can see white collar jobs are dwindling, high paying jobs dwindling. We see a lot of layoffs, et cetera. But they say, oh, the unemployment rate is still low. They're furious that the unemployment rate is low.
[00:34:36.630]
They want more people need to be out of work. Then they're furious that the unemployment rate is low. But they only look at the quantity of jobs. They look at the quantity of the unemployment rate. They never look at the quality.
[00:34:48.160]
They don't actually look at the numbers and realize, oh, wow, all those new jobs that are being created, it's all for waiters and bartenders. That's what's surging. It's jobs for waiters and bartenders. It's not software engineers. It's waiters and bartenders.
[00:35:00.840]
America is becoming a bartender economy. But the Fed hasn't figured this out. What a surprise. They've learned nothing. Just like the media, they've learned nothing.
[00:35:09.440]
And again, we can do this all day. We can look at all these institutions. The White House, the administration of aviator sunglasses in chief learned nothing. They keep doing the same destructive things. Again, they've declared war on the oil companies.
[00:35:21.700]
Oil production is dwindling. Wow. Who could have possibly predicted so what do they keep doing? They keep dumping on the oil companies. They've learned nothing.
[00:35:29.200]
They helped create inflation by spending too much money. So what do they do? Just yesterday, aviator sunglasses in chief, the guy that shakes hands with thin air, just released a new budget for $7 trillion. $7 trillion. It's such a staggering amount of money.
[00:35:46.740]
And you just look at this. Go have men. Have you learned nothing? Have you learned nothing? Of course he's learned nothing.
[00:35:52.850]
Guy's been in government for 50 freaking years. He's learned nothing that entire time. If you spend $7 trillion, that's going to be inflationary duh duh. How do we know that? Because they spent almost 7 trillion.
[00:36:06.700]
They actually spent less than that during COVID-19 and created tons of inflation. Now they want to spend even more money and think that that's not going to cause inflation. They've learned nothing. These woke corporations have learned nothing. These woke corporations go and alienate their customers.
[00:36:20.720]
They wag their finger. Their customers say, you're a terrible person, right? And they take these idiotic sort of woke ideological positions that only appeal to a small handful of very silly crybabies on Twitter. But they just keep doing it over and over again. They keep wagging their fingers and alienating their customers, and they've learned nothing.
[00:36:39.470]
The progressives learn nothing. They keep losing elections. These progressive prosecutors keep turning violent criminals out on the street. They keep getting recalled even in places like San Francisco. But they continue to insist on their terrible policies.
[00:36:53.310]
Again, these terrible policies that only appeal to a handful of very silly crybabies on Twitter. But they keep doing the same things. They've learned nothing.
[00:37:03.110]
The high priests of climate change, the John Kerry's of the world, have learned nothing. They completely ignore willfully, I'm convinced, ignore the abundance of obvious solutions. Are they even talking about nuclear power? Absolutely not. All these things that are out there, they go, no.
[00:37:22.930]
What is John Kerry talking about? And I quote, money, money, money. I think we'll have to do a whole podcast just about this. And, oh, we got to keep all the peasants from using gas stoves. They're so out of touch, they fly into Davos on their private jets to talk about keeping the peasants from using Gaste, talking about money, money, money.
[00:37:41.970]
They've learned absolutely nothing. So tone deaf. They've learned absolutely nothing. And again, we can keep doing this all day, wiggling all these institutions, all these people, and just show they just haven't learned anything from their own stupidity, from their own mistakes. They keep making the same mistakes over and over and over again.
[00:37:59.660]
In a way, it's kind of textbook insanity. Now, if we go back to 1520 again, this is Pope Leo issues that tone deaf Papple Bowl of his own. This is at that point, the Reformation roars to life. People declared their independence. People declared their intellectual independence and realized they could take more control over their lives from an institution that up till that point had controlled virtually every aspect of their lives.
[00:38:22.500]
What you can do, where you can go, what you can believe, all these things. And it was a big deal because, again, it was from that movement we got the age of enlightenment. We got the scientific revolution. We got so many things that really propelled humanity forward. And frankly, I see the same elements today.
[00:38:40.550]
People are sick to death, these institutions who control their lives. And we see this. We see the numbers of the polls. The trust levels are at all time lows for all these institutions that tell us to stay at home and cower and fear in our basements, to tell us what we have to put in our bodies, to tell us that we aren't allowed to have an opinion about how our children are educated while they go and they teach five year old kids to embrace victimhood and work towards the, quote, disruption of Western nuclear family dynamics. And you think I'm kidding.
[00:39:07.060]
That's actually a direct quote from the Virginia Teachers Union, something that just actually came out very recently. These are the people that create inflation with their own idiotic and short sighted policies. And then when inflation comes around, they reject it. Then they say it's transitory, and then they say the only way to fix it is for you to lose your job. They go and they spend trillions of dollars these people call a press conference and they stare at the camera and actually have the audacity to close their thumb and their index finger together and say that trillions of dollars of this legislation will, quote, cost nothing.
[00:39:40.220]
They tell us what we're allowed to believe. They try and control what we're allowed to say, that if you have an opinion about something, they'll call you the worst things in the world, including now, even a domestic terrorist. These are the people that tell us that violent criminals should be turned back out onto the streets in the name of social justice. And yet, over and over again, despite the complete and total abject failure of their policies and their ideas, they prove time and time again that they've learned absolutely nothing. But the good news here is that people are finally starting to reject these idiots.
[00:40:13.260]
We're starting to see it in little ways again. They have recall elections in San Francisco to throw out progressive prosecutors. People fired the mayor of Chicago. We're starting to see these signs, and not just in politics, but again, we see the trust in institutions at all time blow. We see this just as it was in the 1000 hundreds, in the 1005 hundreds.
[00:40:34.020]
Their big institution trust was at an all time lowe. People were sick of it. And people stood up and said, you know what, I'm capable of forming my own opinion, thank you very much. I'm taking back control over my own life. And this is what's happening.
[00:40:45.310]
What a surprise. News media is seeing like record lows. I mean, their viewership has just dropped off a cliff. Nobody's watching CNN anymore. Nobody cares.
[00:40:55.580]
Nobody's watching MSNBC anymore. Nobody cares. They burn through all of their credibility. Nobody listens to what they have to say. Nobody cares.
[00:41:03.130]
And we realize that we have options. If you don't like what the media has to say, you just got to turn off the TV. And there's plenty of other alternatives. In independent media, it's not hard to find other sources of news. If we don't like big tech, great.
[00:41:16.620]
Delete the app, delete the TikTok, stop using Gmail. There's plenty of other alternatives out there, including even going and hanging out with people in person. Or plenty of other email alternatives that don't actually involve somebody that's going to constantly spy on you. If we don't like silly woke corporations, great. We just stop using their products.
[00:41:36.400]
Plenty of alternatives. Plenty of small businesses out there. If you don't like McDonald's because they got silly and they got woke and they put bizarro pink fluid in their hamburgers and also there's plenty of small businesses out there that could make you a hamburger. It's not hard to find alternatives to things like that. If we don't have confidence in our central bankers, right?
[00:41:57.720]
We look at these people and go, oh my God, they are clueless. They don't have, they don't have the foggiest idea what they're doing. Great. We're not constrained by our central bankers. We can do whatever we want.
[00:42:08.750]
We can take a portion of our savings and we can put it in other instruments. There are a lot of options out there. If you're looking for better stores of value, you've got one of the oldest currencies in the world, like gold, some of the newest currency in the world, like crypto. They've got a lot of options in between. They're fantastic investments out there.
[00:42:23.550]
Income generating opportunities, really great businesses that are trading at steep discounts to intrinsic value. There are so many different options out there. Better stores of value, all these things to counteract all their foolhardy ideas. All those things are out there. We have options.
[00:42:37.380]
We have options to educate our kids. We even have options in terms of other places to live if we really want to, even just if need be as a plan B. There are plenty of options out there. All these things that we can do to take control over our lives. We really do have tremendous control, and we can start to see the early stages of people beginning to exercise that control.
[00:42:59.050]
Obviously, all these people, the media keeps howling. They think people are actually paying attention to them. It's hilarious. They're not. The expert class keeps howling.
[00:43:07.710]
Fewer and fewer people are paying attention. This is basically a new reformation. It's like the 1005 hundreds all over again. We might not be at 1520 or 1530 yet. Maybe we're still at 1510 15.
[00:43:20.850]
But the seeds of a new revolution have already been planted. It's here. We can already start to see it coming. And this is actually a very exciting time because it's ultimately how our society is finally going to start moving forward again. Thanks very much for listening, and we'll speak again next week.
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Schiff Sovereign Podcast