However Bad Things Are, Will It Get Worse?

Justin Haskins, Heartland Institute, joined Preston to talk about the challenges facing America as the midterms loom.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Third hour show fifty six nineteen of The Morning Show
with Preston Scott. If you'd have told me when I
started this program twenty four years ago and some change
the things that would be occupying the news headlines today,
I would have slapped you in the mouth and called

(00:25):
you a liar. There's just you cannot make it up.
And so I am privileged to try to find guests
that are able to help make sense as best as
we can of the things that are happening. And perhaps

(00:48):
no one stands taller on that mountain than this gentleman.
Justin Haskins is the Vice president Policy with the Hartland
Institute and a prolific writer author. You'll find his books
on Amazon and all the different booksellers that are out there.

Speaker 2 (01:04):
Justin how are you, I'm doing so well? How are you?

Speaker 1 (01:10):
I'm I'm I'm hanging in there, but justin I'm hanging
in there. I am so I told I told our
audience earlier in the show that the only way I
navigate through what I do is my faith in Christ.
Because God's on the throne, he knows the end before

(01:31):
the beginning, and it's going to come to a point
where it's going to make sense in the grand scheme
of things in God's economy. But I'm having trouble making
sense of everything from Graham Platner to the Save Act
to where we are today. How do you filter through everything?

Speaker 2 (01:50):
Oh, you know, it's a lot of coffee, a little
bit of alcohol, a lot of praying. Honestly, I go.
I went into this when Republicans won the last election,

(02:14):
Trump won the presidency. I went into this believing that
they would let me down. So this is pretty much
what I was expecting. Yeah, I mean, I think I
think Donald Trump has done a lot of good stuff
through executive action and and things like that. But I

(02:36):
think for the most part, our way the Republican Party
is right now, and the way Congress is set up
and the rules of the Senate and everything else, we
are just not going to get good legislation passed. It
just is not going to happen. And without that occurring,
we really can't fix the structural problems that exist. We

(02:59):
can we can put band aids on bullet holes. That's
all we can do. And it is incredibly frustrating and
very disappointing. And this but this is this is where
we are and the Democrat party likes to stand on
its you know, soapbox and tell tell the Republicans how

(03:20):
horrible they are for you know, having less than perfect
candidates in office, and then they go and they pick
up like a Nazi, you know, and it's like, that's
of course that's the case, because Democrats are not a
viable option for a lot of people either. And so

(03:41):
it's just it's just politicians right now. Is the entire
political system in Washington is so broken, and that's why
people elected Trump in the first place. But we keep
running into this same cycle over and over and over again,
where we elect politicians who say that they're going to
do something different and they don't do something different, and
then and then a section of the vote of the

(04:04):
populace switches parties, votes for the other party. They come
into power because they say they're going to do something different,
they don't, and we bounce back and forth between these
two parties and nothing changes. It's incredibly frustrating.

Speaker 1 (04:16):
Justin we just talked about the the failure of the
parties Republicans, I would say that it's enough of them
without conviction and uh, just being the elected people that
we've grown to accustomed to having in Congress, and with Democrats,

(04:38):
they're just woefully misguided in their philosophy and have no
anchor point whatsoever. And all the while this is going on,
the socialist communist Islamis faction of this country is gaining strength.

Speaker 2 (04:53):
Yep, that's that's an accurate assessment. It's not good. I
would I would say that we have huge, massive problems
coming in this country, not just because of the socialist
factions that are growing, which I think is a huge crisis,

(05:15):
but something I've been working on for many years now,
because huge sections of the young American populists eighteen to
you know, say, thirty nine year olds, believe in socialist policies.
Many of them say they openly support socialism and want
to see socialist candidates become president. Depending on the poll

(05:35):
you're looking at, you know, it could be as high
as forty to fifty percent want that. But if you
ask about specific crazy policies like do you want to
nationalize whole industries and do you want to take away
vast amounts of wealth of other people's money, not even
just the super rich, but just people who have me,

(05:57):
they say yes, they want these policies too, they want
to blow up the Constitution, they want to blow up
the Supreme Court, not literally, but they want to start
all over huge portions. Again, we're talking, depending on the question,
anywhere between thirty to fifty percent of young people want that.
And on top of all of that, we have this

(06:18):
looming problem of artificial intelligence causing lots of economic disruption
in the future, especially for young people. It's already i think,
starting to happen, and that's going to make socialism even
more attractive, which is why people like Bernie Sanders are
working so hard on that issue, because they know that.
So these are huge problems, not to mention all of

(06:41):
the stuff that's going on overseas. There's tons of things
we could talk about there with China and Russia and
so on and so forth. And for the most part,
we can't even get our politicians in America to pass
common sense, basic laws that make sure that the people
who are filling now ballots are really the people who

(07:03):
we think they are, so we don't just send massive
amounts of ballots in the mail to people's houses. We
can't even get them to do that, And that's really
the issue here. We just don't have good enough politicians
when it comes down to it.

Speaker 1 (07:19):
Why I haven't found it yet? Why have Tom Tillis,
Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and Mitch McConnell coming in opposition
of the Save Act?

Speaker 2 (07:30):
Oh gosh, I don't know how anybody is opposed to
the Save Act other than you want voter fraud, and
in those truly, I know that sounds extreme or whatever,
but I really believe that that's the case. In their
particular situation, it doesn't benefit them. I think their thing

(07:52):
is a little bit different for each of them. But
I think in Murkowski and Collins's case, for example, they're
in states where it benefits them to be a quote
unquote moderate, middle of the road, you know, not partisan person.

Speaker 1 (08:07):
But that's not that's not middle of the road or moderate.
Eighty three percent plus of this country think it's what
we should do, even Democrats and Blacks and Latinos yep.

Speaker 2 (08:18):
Every I know, I know, and I and I don't
understand that at all. I don't understand it. I mean,
in Susan Collins's case, I think it's because you know,
she's in a Democrat leaning state, and democrats in that
state think it's a conspiracy theory that voter fraud happens.
So maybe that's part of it. In Alaska, I don't.

Speaker 3 (08:39):
I can't.

Speaker 2 (08:39):
They have lots of mail in balloting in Alaska and
they have for a long time because of how rural
it is. Sure, so maybe that's the reason there. But
ultimately there's no reason why we can't have some version
of the SAYAC and they're just totally unwilling to go
along with any good, really great piece of legislation. It's

(08:59):
not just this, but to say that, to me is
the most important one, because if you can't trust the elections,
and what's the point.

Speaker 1 (09:07):
All Right, we're gonna go ahead and do it. What
if Justin haskins with me from the Heartland Institute, where
he's vice president of policy and the website, by the way,
where you can go with your kids, Like I'm not kidding,
your kids, your middle schoolers, your high schoolers, stoppingsocialism dot com,
mom's dads, it's up to you. Justin with us. I'd

(09:30):
asked you in the break prepare us for what you
believe will happen if Democrats take back control of the
House and the Senate in the midterms.

Speaker 2 (09:42):
Yeah, I think what everybody needs to understand is that
we are on the precipice here of a very dark
period in Orish history.

Speaker 3 (09:54):
It's things don't go well in the next four to
let's say, twelve years, you know, three four to ten years,
somewhere in that range.

Speaker 2 (10:07):
It's going to be very difficult for America to turn
things around. And of course people have been saying that
for a very long time, and I know that this
is the most important election of their lifetime. I'm not
saying this election coming up is the most important, but
it is incredibly important. And the reason for this is
because of the things that we talked about in the

(10:28):
last couple of segments. Here we have the rise of socialism,
our children and the generations who are not even children anymore.
People who are in their twenties and early thirties are
infatuated with socialist ideas. They believe that the things that
we all think America make America great are actually horrible.

(10:52):
Many of them are ashamed of their country, don't actually
love America. Some of them openly say in polls, huge
segments of them, I don't have the data in front
of me, but huge segments of them say they would
put the United Nations in charge of America if they
had the chance. Oh my god. And you have artificial
intelligence rising up now. That's going to do a lot

(11:13):
of job displacement in this country. And automation and things
like that. People are going to need new jobs. There's
going to be a lot of unhappy, miserable, angry people
on top of all of the problems we already have
and all the issues going on overseas. And you have
to have good policy. We have to have it or

(11:34):
else this country is going to continue to slide down
the path toward towards socialism and communism. That's where we're
going to go. And the Democrats are completely fine with that.
They want the disruption, they want the chaos because it
benefits them politically. And that's why Bernie Sanders and people

(11:56):
like that are out there saying the things that they do.
Why AOC is the darling of the media on the left.
Not all Democrats obviously are like this, but the party itself,
a lot of the people who are now powerful in it,
they've thrown out all the moderates. It's a socialist party.
The stakes could not possibly be higher at this point.

Speaker 1 (12:16):
If you were advising Joe Gruder's chairman of the RNC,
who I know of him because of his time here
in Florida. What would you be telling him they'd need
to be doing right now.

Speaker 2 (12:32):
Well, I would say it's too late. Well, the biggest
problem that they have in the party is you can
make promises that help you win elections, but if you
don't follow through on them, which someone you know, the
RNC leadership can't necessarily control, then it doesn't matter. And
that's the issue. The reason that Republicans won in a

(12:53):
landslide in the last election is because primarily of the
economy and things not being good for people in terms
of the ability to buy a home, the skyrocketing personal debt,
skyrocketing student loan debt, all of these, the inflation crisis,
supply chain issues that were going on, the chaos that

(13:14):
was overseas, the craziness going on in kids' schools. It
was a lot of basic foundational issues in some of
the most important things. And then really the Republicans in
Washington have not focused on those issues, some of them,
and we don't have solutions to most of those problems,

(13:35):
and things just continue to get a little bit worse
for people, regular working people. Wealthier people are doing okay,
but regular working people are struggling. And if you don't
follow through on those promises, you're going to be in
huge trouble. And so what I would tell them is
to focus on those things. But at this point, I

(13:56):
don't know how much credibility they have in this election cycle.
It's people who believed things were going to be different
this time and now here they are getting the same
thing that they've always get, which is a whole lot
of nothing from people in Washington, d c. Other than
the President who is trying through executive action. But there
are limits to what you can do to improve the

(14:18):
economy using executive orders.