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September 11, 2024 16 mins
I am betting you might come up with one, but I doubt you can name the three biggest issues which wil dramatically shape this country. I visited with one of the most informed, well-researched, minds in America, Justin Haskins of the Heartland Insitute and challenged him to identify the trio. 
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Episode Transcript

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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Morning ruminators, ladies and gentlemen, men and women, males and females, only,
boys and girls. We appreciate you joining us for the
third hour of the Morning Show with Preston Scott. Did
I ever think I would be living in an era
where I would need to make such qualifications? No, I

(00:25):
did not, And it's great to be with you this morning.
Hose can you see over there in Studio one A.
I'm here in Studio one B, and I am joined
by our friend from the Heartland Institute. He is justin Haskins.
Good morning, dear sir, how are you.

Speaker 2 (00:39):
Good morning? It's been a while. Missed our morning chats,
our five am morning chats for me, I've missed them.

Speaker 1 (00:48):
Yeah. How in the world do you function without starting
a day with me? I don't know.

Speaker 2 (00:56):
I don't I function one day a month at best.

Speaker 1 (01:00):
Thank you, Thank you, sir. I appreciate that. All right.
I gave you the mission, and it's it's a daunting
one because I think there are likely so many consequential
things that will be impacted by the November fifth election
between Donald Trump and now Kamala Harris. First of all,
are you going to watch the debate?

Speaker 2 (01:23):
I will watch it. I probably won't watch it live,
but I will watch it. Yes.

Speaker 1 (01:27):
Can I ask you what you would be looking for
by watching, because I've been obviously I'm going to be
in bed, sleep and getting ready for the Tomar Show,
but I'll watch it as well at some point too.
But what would you be looking for?

Speaker 2 (01:43):
Well, to be totally honest, and this probably sounds pessimistic,
but I have a theory about presidential elections, and they
don't necessarily apply to all kinds of elections, but presidential elections.
My theory is that the more likable candidate wins the
election almost every single time. And if you go back

(02:06):
through the history of presidential candidates and you really think
about each of the candidates' personalities and how they come
across the people compared to their opponent, the rule almost
always plays out that way. The more likable candidate went
And so I think what I'm looking for tonight is
who comes across as being more likable, which really is

(02:28):
not what these debates are supposed to be about. But unfortunately,
I think that's how a lot of people in the
middle and there's very small group of people in this
country who still don't know who they're voting for. I
think that's how a lot of those people ultimately make
their decisions, not even consciously, but I think they make
it based on who they like personally, and that's going

(02:49):
to be a big factor, I think in this debate
and for the rest of the election. But this is
really the only time maybe where we see both of
them on the same stage at the same time, giving
people the ability to really compare the two, and so
that's the thing that I'm looking for. Who is more likable?

Speaker 1 (03:07):
I offered last hour justin that Tulsea Gabbert has been
working with Trump. We have no idea who, if anyone's
worked with Kamala Harris, but I suggested that if he
listens to her advice, does not get personal, focuses strictly
on the issues and the policies of Biden Harris, and

(03:31):
does not personally attack Kamala, he will win this debate
hands down. With the independence.

Speaker 2 (03:38):
I think that's one hundred percent right. I think the
rules that they have for the debate no essentially their
mics are turned off, They're not allowed to interrupt each
other in real time. I think it's absolutely huge for
Trump because I don't think he can help himself sometimes
in these situations that helped him huge, which is so
ironic because I think the left is the one that
really wanted that initially with Joe, and it played to

(04:01):
Trump's advantage last time big in a huge way. And
this time it'll be the same thing does if he's
not rude, if he's respectful, but he is firm and
clear about what he wants to do, and he stays
focused on how he's going to fix the mistakes, the
broken economy, all of the problems, the embarrassing things that
have happened overseas, the dangerous things that have happened overseas

(04:24):
and with Russia and Ukraine and Afghanistan, et cetera, and
that all of that stuff is the result of the
Harris Biden administration that they're both to blame for it.
I don't know how he could lose, truly, but if
he gets suck into these personal attacks and things like that,
I think he'll come across as being a lot less likable,

(04:45):
and I think people are looking for a reason in
the middle to vote against him. I think he needs
to avoid that trap. And Kamala Harris is going to
do everything in her power to try to pay him.

Speaker 1 (04:58):
Into that no morning show would dress in Scott's Boy.

Speaker 2 (05:02):
That escalated quickly. I mean that really got out of
hand fast.

Speaker 1 (05:06):
On WFLA. You see him all over, He's on Fox,
He's on a lot of the networks out there. He
is widely read. And oh, by the way, he writes
a bunch of stuff with Glenn Beck Justin Haskins with

(05:27):
the Heartland Institute. Our guest, Justin, I tasked you with
coming up with three things that were you think most
consequential that will be determined by this election, whether it's
Kamala Harris or Donald Trump. And we understand Congress plays
a significant role here, but just looking at the White House,

(05:48):
what are the top three issues you think that are
going to be impacted dramatically by this election.

Speaker 2 (05:53):
Yeah. So the first one's easy. Supreme Court justices. This
is huge. This was the most important thing that Trump
did in his presidency. The Supreme Court right now controlled
by conservative leaning justices. Not all of them are true conservatives,
I think he could say, but six six ' three,
But there are the two oldest justices on the bench

(06:15):
right now are Alito and Thomas, who are the two
best justices that we have. Yep, Thomas is seventy six,
Alito seventy four. So if those two turn to the
other side, if they leave and they're replaced by two
far left wing, liberal activist judges, now all of a sudden,
that six ' three majority for our side flips, so

(06:36):
a five four majority for the other side. That's a
huge problem. Not only that, but there's been a lot
of talk about the left trying to pack the Supreme Court,
and I think that if they get enough votes in
Congress to do that, and they have the White House,
they will pack the Supreme Court. And now I don't
even know if you have a country in the wake
of that, So I would say that is is number

(06:57):
one justin let me.

Speaker 1 (06:59):
Let me let me follow up on that. Does Trump
need to do a better job of the vetting process?
Should he fill vacancies? Now? I personally think if he
doesn't win, Alito and Thomas are going to hold out
if they can, for another four years. But that's just
that's a guess. If they can. But he's got to
do better at picking true originalists than he did the

(07:19):
first time around.

Speaker 2 (07:21):
Yeah. Absolutely, it's all about who you're getting your advice
from and I think unfortunately some of the justices that
he picked last time around, you know, are not true originalists.
And I really don't understand why Republicans have had such
a hard time picking good Supreme Court justices in my lifetime,

(07:45):
but they really have struggled with that. YEP. And really,
what you want is someone who's just like Alito and
just like Clarence Thomas. That's what you want, and so
you need to find advisors who share that vision and
who will pick people just like that. But because I
don't think his picks the last time around, we're spectacular.

Speaker 1 (08:03):
Now if we get to a Trump presidency, will visit
again about who might be good candidates. But for now,
let's go to number two.

Speaker 2 (08:12):
YEP. Inflation, the economy, the value of the dollar, all
of that stuff. I mean, the Harris Biden administration has
been catastrophic for people's wallets. I think anyone with common
sense knows that, whether you're a Republican or a Democrat,
historic levels of inflation stuff we haven't seen in forty
or fifty years. CPI, which is not a good measure

(08:34):
for inflation because it underestimates inflation, is up twenty percent
thirty percent over just a few years. And so we're
talking about everybody being poorer than they were when we
started because wages have not kept up with that inflation.
Kamala Harris has no plans that will help deal with
that issue. All she wants to do is spend increasingly

(08:56):
more money. She's even worse than Joe Biden historically when
it comes to spending. This as a reminder to people,
she co sponsored, co sponsored the AOC Socialist screen New Deal,
not the Joe Biden version, the AOC version, the one
that cost ninety trillion dollars that had every crazy policy
in the universe in it, including wiping out all the cows,

(09:19):
by the way, that was part of that policy. I mean,
just absolutely crazy stuff. She is a socialist candidate. By
all measures. She's a socialist candidate, and so I think
if she becomes president of the United States, expect more spending,
Expect more debt, and as a result of that, more
money printing and less value for your dollar.

Speaker 1 (09:46):
Look at me being disciplined. I'm on time. That never happens.
Justin Haskins with me from the Heartland Institute. Justin the
third item, all.

Speaker 2 (09:57):
Right, number three, A little more complicated, but favorite issue
of mind ESG laws law I got to fit in
every time.

Speaker 1 (10:07):
Absolutely.

Speaker 2 (10:09):
Yeah. Social credit scoring system. That's what ESG is, Environmental
social governance metrics. It's a social credit scoring system, a
left wing one that they've been pushing all over the world,
trying to transform society by transforming corporations and businesses and
how they act and behave through the social credit scoring metrics.

(10:30):
One of the biggest ways that the left is doing
this is through banking. So banks use these social Most
people don't know this, but a lot of banks already
use some version of social credit scores to screen out
certain kinds of businesses to eliminate certain what they call
reputational risks, which are really just conservatives involved in activist

(10:52):
groups and things like that that they don't like. They
started the banking conservatives and everything. So this is all
part of this ESG movement. Well, Donald Trump has been
a champion of that issue for a long time. He's
promised to stop that through federal regulation, stop banks from
using these ESG scores. He's a big champion of it,

(11:13):
and I think that Ron de Santis, of course, with Florida,
probably the nation's biggest champion of that if Florida has
one of the best anti ESG laws, actually the best
anti ESG law in the country, but Trump is promising
to take that to the federal level. When he was president,
at the very end of his administration, he did put
regulations into place to stop this. And then when Biden

(11:36):
came into power, one of the first things he did
the very first weeks he was in office was eliminate
that regulation that Trump had started to put into place.
And so that's a huge, huge, huge thing, because you
can transform all of society without passing the law, just
by having these big corporations and banks all moving in
the same left wing direction. Because if you can't have

(11:58):
a bank account, you can't get insurance because insurance is
affected by this as well. If you can't do business
with the biggest corporations because you don't have a good
ESG score, then you have to adopt you can't survive,
So you have to adopt those policies. And that's been
going on now for over a decade, and it is
one of the reasons why all these big corporations have

(12:20):
gone woke in recent years.

Speaker 1 (12:22):
Yeah, it's interesting. We talked about DEI, And of course
DEI is under the umbrella of ESG. And how ironic
it is that we are we have gone back around
to a time when we are supposed to judge people
by the color of their skin, by their outward appearance,
not by the quality of their work, not by the

(12:43):
content of their character, but by these outward representations of whatever.
And it's horrifying that we are now in a place
where it's impacting banking in every major part of our economy.

Speaker 2 (12:58):
YEP, that's exactly right. DEI is a massive part of ESG.
It's one of the biggest things that's been going on
in that for a long time. And the reality is,
for the left generally, the ends always justify the means.
There is no such thing as a sort of universal
moral principle that they're operating under. It's the ends justify

(13:19):
the means. So DEI helps them right now, they're going
to support it. If DEI stops helping them in the future,
they won't support it. That's the way they do virtually everything.
And ESG is just a big toolbox. They can change
the metrics anytime they want. It's a toolbox for transforming
the country and it's already happening. So it's not about

(13:40):
stopping something often too the future. It's about stopping the
transformation that's happening to our society right now.

Speaker 1 (13:46):
Wouldn't it be fair to point to the immigration invasion
of this nation as an example, an absolute example of
what we're talking about. I've been saying that the murders,
the deaths of Americans at the hands of these illegals
coming into our country, that it's accepted as collateral damage.
It's it's acceptable because, as you say, the means are

(14:06):
justified by the end. So yeah, it's a shame that
people are losing their life, but we're getting people into
this country that deserve to be here.

Speaker 2 (14:15):
Look, if I think every conservative in the universe knows
this is true. If the as everyone coming across the
southern border was a die in the wool Republican voter
the moment they got here, there is no way this
would be happening. There is no way, and I think

(14:37):
we all know that. There's if we were bringing in
if we were bringing in a bunch of like, you know, libertarians, Yeah, yeah,
there's no way that this would be what the Democrats
are doing. They are doing it purely because the ends
justify the means.

Speaker 1 (14:53):
Justin, as always, we never have enough time. If you
ever visit Tallahassee, you just got to do the studio thing.

Speaker 2 (15:00):
And I've never I've never been, but if I do,
I absolutely will take you up on that aufite.

Speaker 1 (15:05):
We'll do two hours, great, unprecedented. I've never done that.
That would be so much fun. Yeah, to just sit
and chop up this stuff for a while. In the meantime,
we'll settle for this and we're greatly appreciative of your time.
As always, my best to your family.

Speaker 2 (15:21):
Thank you, same to you. Take care.

Speaker 1 (15:23):
Justin Haskins with us this morning Heartland Institute. He mentioned
socialism he ought to know. He heads up the Stopping
Socialism project at the Heartland Institute. Do you know the
website Stoppingsocialism dot com. Oh, check it out, stoppingsocialism dot com.

(15:44):
It's our man, Justin. That's his work right there with
his team, fighting the good fight and also co authoring
books with Glenn Beck. In his spare time, The Morning
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