Geopolitics and Empire is joined by Justin Hart, who's an executive consultant with more than 25 years of experience with Fortune 500 companies and presidential campaigns.

He's also chief data analyst and founder of Rationalground.com, which helps companies public officials and even parents gauge the impact of COVID-19 across the country.

He's worked with everyone from Governor Ron DeSantis to Dr. Scott

Atlas. He's a father to eight and the author of The Just Published Gone Viral, How COVID Drove the

World Insane. Welcome to Geopolitics and Empire, Justin. Oh, great to be with you today.

Now, yeah, your book is sort of a post-mortem on COVID-1984, as I like to call it. It's a short book,

but it covers a lot of points, and we won't get to them all, but perhaps some of the key issues.

You've said that the virus of the mind is more damaging than the virus itself. So, you know,

where do we begin to unpack the mind virus of the past two plus years, which is still

ongoing?

Well, you know, you could go back to the 17th century Milan, where they had a plague that was a very,

very real pandemic, where the fatality rate was one out of every three people.

We know this from a 19th century novel called The Betrothed by

Alessandro Monsini. And what he did is went back and researched actual journals from people

that lived in that era during a time of plague. This is kind of where you get that phrase,

love in a time of plague, right? And of where you get that phrase love in a time

of plague, right? And he went through and followed a couple that was trying to get married,

but having a heck of a time in the middle of the chaos. But what was interesting is a lot of the

same patterns we experienced here in 2020, 2021 and 2022 were seen almost 400 years ago, the chaos and everything

that would ensued. And Manzoni had that line, which was the fear of the mind gripped the

people more than the pandemic itself. At one point, he recounts an episode where it was

feared that people from outside of the town were spreading the disease by whitewashing the walls or anointing the benches in plague-ridden waters.

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