As the death toll mounts, Democrats launch investigations into the Trump administration's coronavirus response, Bernie Sanders refuses to drop out, and the Trump team prepares to target Joe Biden, Ben Shapiro reports on it all on today's show with Ben Shapiro of The Ben Shapiro Show. Ben Shapiro is a writer, comedian, and podcaster. His work has appeared in The New York Times, CNN, CBS News, CBS Radio, NPR, ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox News, and other media outlets. He is a frequent contributor to The Daily Wire and the Hill, and is a regular contributor to CNN and CBS News. His latest book, "Coronavirus: How to Fight It," is out now and available for pre-order on Amazon Prime and Vimeo worldwide. See linktr.ee/BenShapiroShow Subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts! Subscribe on iTunes Learn more about your ad choices. Rate, review, and subscribe to our other podcast episodes on Apple News, the Ringer, and help spread the word of Ben Shapiro's new podcast, The Weekly BONUS! Subscribe, rate and review our new show on all social medias, and become a supporter of the show wherever you get your favorite podcast on the internet. Subscribe and review Ben Shapiro s work is available. If you like what you listen to, consider supporting Ben Shapiro on his podcast, subscribe on iTunes and subscribe on your favourite podcasting platform, leave a review on iTunes, and leave us a rating and review on your podcasting app, too! and share the podcast on your thoughts and reviews on your social media platforms! Thank you for listening to Ben Shapiro and I'm listening to this podcast! - Ben Shapiro and much more! Timestamps: 5 Starred: 5 Star Potential: 6 Starred 7 Starred? 8 Starred in this episode 9 Starred In This Episode 10 Starred Out? 11 Starred & Reviewed in this Episode? 13 Starred and Reviewed by 15 Starred by You're a Good Person? 16 Starred, 17 Starred Meals on the Road to Meals? 18 Starred on Yelp 21st Day 19 Starred On This Week? 21 Starred By Meals On The Road 22 Starred at The Daily Mail
00:00:00.000As the death count mounts, Democrats launch investigations into the Trump administration's coronavirus response, Bernie just won't drop out, and the Trump team prepares to target Joe Biden.
00:00:39.000Hopefully it's only a rough month and not beyond that.
00:00:42.000The latest death count in the United States is over 5,100.
00:00:45.000Yesterday, we saw in excess of 1,000 deaths in the United States from coronavirus in Italy, in excess of 720 deaths in Spain, in excess of 900 deaths in France, in excess of 500 deaths in the UK, nearly 600 deaths.
00:00:57.000So this thing is beginning to spike in terms of death across the West.
00:01:01.000The question is when it peaks, how long that peak lasts, whether the summer kills it off.
00:01:08.000They are going to get ugly over the next couple of weeks, because as we identify new cases, there's a time delay between when the cases are identified and when people actually die from this stuff.
00:01:18.000Meanwhile, we're hearing reports that the death toll in even countries that are being open, like Italy, might be greatly undercounted.
00:01:26.000According to the Wall Street Journal, Margarita Stancati and Eric Silver's reporting, in the town of Cocaglio, in Hours Drive east of here, the local nursing home is at east of Milan.
00:01:34.000A local nursing home lost over a third of its residents in March.
00:01:36.000None of the 24 people who died there were tested for coronavirus, nor were the 38 people who died in another nursing home in the nearby town of Lodi.
00:01:44.000Italy's official death toll from the virus stands at 13,155, the most of any country in the world.
00:01:49.000But that number tells only part of the story because many people who die from the virus don't make it to the hospital and are never tested.
00:01:54.000So just as I've been saying all along, there are tons and tons of people who aren't being tested who have coronavirus and are not dying.
00:01:59.000There are also tons of people who are dying and are not being tested because by the time they die, it's too late to test them.
00:02:06.000Lots of people dying outside the hospital.
00:02:07.000So probably the estimates go that maybe twice as many people are dead in Italy as we already know about.
00:02:13.000Meanwhile, Over at the White House, experts are apparently telling the White House that research is showing coronavirus can be spread not just by sneeze or cough, so it should create that six-foot radius that you're supposed to be outside of, but also just by talking or possibly even breathing, which is just wonderful, and does suggest that everyone's an idiot for suggesting that we shouldn't be wearing face masks full-time.
00:02:32.000While the current coronavirus-specific research is limited, the results of available studies are consistent.
00:02:36.000With aerosolization of virus from normal breathing according to the letter written by Dr. Harvey Feinberg, chairman of a committee with the National Academy of Sciences.
00:02:43.000Feinberg says that he will start wearing a mask when he goes to the grocery store.
00:02:46.000He's not going to wear a surgical mask.
00:03:41.000I mean, it really is really terrible news.
00:03:44.000Among, there's a reason that Eric Garcetti, who I will, as you will see a little bit later on in the program, we're going to go through the timeline here.
00:03:50.000Eric Garcetti, the mayor of Los Angeles, on Wednesday he called on the city's millions of residents to start covering their faces whenever they are out in public as part of the efforts to combat the outbreak of the novel coronavirus.
00:04:00.000He tweeted, Early data suggests many who are infected are not symptomatic, which is why we are recommending you use cloth face coverings plus physical distancing for essential activities.
00:04:09.000Do not wear surgical and N95 masks, which are reserved for first responders and medical workers.
00:04:13.000Well, if you already have one, you can wear them, obviously.
00:04:15.000But if you—my wife is a medical worker.
00:04:39.000I mean lots of horrible news out there.
00:04:43.000Well, I at least have one piece of good news for you while you are curling up at home.
00:04:47.000And that is, you could be in the world's most comfortable gear.
00:04:51.000You're really going to appreciate your Tommy John underwear when you're just sitting around the house or putzing around the house, doing your gardening, doing the cleaning in the back room.
00:04:57.000For that reason, Tommy John, the revolutionary loungewear and underwear brand that's redefining comfort, is offering you 20% off site-wide.
00:05:38.000For 20% off site-wide plus the free shipping, tommyjohn.com slash ben.
00:05:43.000If you're going to treat yourself, treat yourself to something you're going to be using like every day while we all wait for this horrific situation to end.
00:05:59.000Okay, so the federal supplies are apparently in short supply, according to the New York Times.
00:06:05.000The federal government has nearly emptied its emergency stockpile of protective medical supplies as state governors continue to plead for protective gear for desperate hospital workers, according to a senior administration official.
00:06:14.000The official said that the FEMA Stockpile has delivered more than 11.6 million N95 masks, 5.2 million face shields, 22 million gloves, 7,140 ventilators, exhausting the emergency stockpile.
00:06:28.000The official said there was a tiny slice of personal protective equipment left over that is being preserved for emergency medical workers for the federal government.
00:06:35.000While there's no more personal protective equipment in the stockpile left over for the states, apparently the administration still has more than 9,400 ventilators ready to be deployed.
00:06:44.000Governor Andrew Cuomo said on Wednesday, the only hope for a state at this point is the federal government's capacity to deliver.
00:06:50.000He said, you have a shortfall on gowns.
00:06:51.000American companies can make gowns and not like wedding gowns, like paper gowns, make the gowns, make the gloves, make the masks.
00:06:56.000You know, why are we running out of these basic supplies?
00:06:58.000Well, honestly, that is a serious question for like Andrew Cuomo.
00:07:15.000I mean, Gavin Newsom came out yesterday and he said, this is an opportunity to get progressive priorities done in California.
00:07:20.000Because that's really, if you're thinking of a pandemic as an opportunity to get progressive priorities done, you're doing being a human being wrong.
00:07:26.000We do not consent to the complete rewriting of the bargain between government and individuals on the basis of a government failure to prepare for and respond to a global pandemic.
00:07:36.000You don't get to rewrite the entire constitutional bargain on the basis of a Black Swan event that you guys honestly should have prepared for and then responded to in the crappiest possible way.
00:07:44.000But Gavin Newsom did say something that I think is a valuable reminder, which is that the first line of defense in these situations is states.
00:07:50.000You're seeing it handled differently state by state.
00:07:53.000Larry Hogan in Maryland is doing an excellent job.
00:07:56.000Mike DeWine in Ohio is doing an excellent job.
00:07:58.000And Gavin Newsom, in terms of actually getting the supplies, is doing a pretty good job and getting no credit.
00:08:02.000Because Andrew Cuomo is from New York and the media are New York-based.
00:08:04.000They like the fact that Cuomo is sitting there and railing it at the feds to give him more stuff.
00:08:09.000But Gavin Newsom yesterday was with Jake Chapper.
00:08:11.000He said, listen, we've got millions of masks.
00:08:17.000And the number of masks provided to us by the federal government is a drop in the bucket compared to what we ourselves have actually procured.
00:09:05.000I mean, it's important to keep those stats in mind because the the national media being national in scope rarely focus on where the real issues are, which are at the local and state levels.
00:09:13.000And what's one of the things that's been so weird about this crisis is that there are hotspots all around the country and it's being treated as though the federal government is the first line of defense for a local for a local Hotspot.
00:09:24.000Now, the federal government is definitely one of the lines of defense, but the first line of defense, Trump said this, he got all sorts of crap for it, the first line of defense is your local government, and then it is the state government, and then it is the federal government.
00:09:33.000The principle of subsidiarity does not actually disappear.
00:09:36.000Federalism did not disappear just because there's a national crisis.
00:09:39.000The fact is that Gavin Newsom himself is talking about how he procured 35 times the number of N95 masks as the governor of the state of California that the federal government has distributed to the entire country.
00:09:49.000That's the way this is supposed to work.
00:09:53.000You want to judge a governor on how he's doing?
00:09:55.000How about you judge him on how he's actually obtaining the gear himself, rather than how much he yells to the media about how he needs help from the federal government.
00:10:03.000Calling for help from the federal government, I'm not saying it's unnecessary.
00:10:07.000What I'm saying is that we judge you as a governor based on what you do for your state, and that one of the elements of that is yelling at the federal government, and the other 99% of the job is not yelling at the federal government, it's getting things done.
00:10:18.000Meanwhile, there are reports, scary reports, that some of the ventilators are actually going to fail in the national stockpile.
00:10:27.000The ventilators in the national stockpile are not in great shape.
00:10:30.000According to the New York Times, President Trump has repeatedly assured Americans the federal government is holding 10,000 ventilators in reserve to ship to the hardest-hit hospitals around the nation as they struggle to keep the most critically ill patients alive.
00:10:41.000Already in New York, They're experiencing shortages of ventilators.
00:10:43.000We had on Dr. Marty McCary from Johns Hopkins University yesterday.
00:10:46.000He mentioned that New York hospitals, they are already splitting ventilators, which is never the preferred methodology.
00:10:51.000You can't control the airflow back into the lungs the same way that you could if you were not splitting the ventilator.
00:10:55.000So the sort of shortages that were predicted, those predictions apparently were correct, right?
00:10:59.000I was wondering whether those predictions were correct because originally they said beginning of last week, the hospitals were going to be overrun.
00:11:04.000Apparently the overrun has already begun in New York City and we are only on April 2nd.
00:11:09.000The ventilators in the federal government stockpile are not all operational, according to the New York Times.
00:11:13.000Federal officials have neglected to mention that thousands more of the life-saving devices are unavailable after the contract to maintain the government stockpile lapsed late last summer, and a contracting dispute meant that a new firm did not begin its work until late January.
00:11:24.000By then, the coronavirus crisis was already underway.
00:11:27.000The revelation came in response to inquiries to the Department of Health and Human Services after state officials reported that some of the ventilators they received were not operational, which stoked speculation the administration had not kept up with the task of maintaining the stockpile.
00:11:38.000In fact, the contract of the company that was maintaining the machines expired at the end of last summer.
00:11:43.000A contract protest delayed handing the job to Agiliti, a Minneapolis-based provider of medical services and equipment, Agiliti was not given the $38 million task until late January, when the scope of the global coronavirus crisis was first becoming clear.
00:11:56.000It's not known whether problems with the ventilators predated the contract lapse.
00:12:30.000He said that the city still needs 3.3 million N95 masks, 2.1 million surgical masks, 100,000 isolation gowns, and 400 additional ventilators.
00:12:39.000Apparently, de Blasio said that James O'Neill, the former police commissioner who's now an executive with Visa, was actually returning to the government to oversee operations and logistics related to the virus outbreak.
00:12:47.000De Blasio said New York would continue to have great need for supplies well after Sunday.
00:12:50.000By the end of April, he estimated the health care system would need 65,000 additional hospital beds to accommodate new virus patients, as well as the people to staff them.
00:12:59.000The city's public hospital system plans to convert, this is the New York Times, all of its facilities, all of them, to ICU units.
00:13:05.000Officials said, adding that supplies and personnel were crucial to increasing the number of ICU beds.
00:13:10.000Patients who do not have the virus will be sent to large scale temporary hospitals like the ones set up at Javits Convention Center or hotels converted into temporary medical facilities.
00:13:18.000So basically, all of the hospitals turn into ICU beds.
00:13:20.000All of these ancillary beds turn into non-ICU beds.
00:13:24.000de Blasio says that the goal is within reach.
00:13:29.000Actually, the region itself has passed 2,000 deaths total.
00:13:33.000New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, well, about 2,400 deaths at this hour.
00:13:39.000Meanwhile, hospitals and doctors are feeling a financial squeeze because it turns out that one of the ways the doctors make their money is by performing surgeries, for example.
00:13:46.000And coronavirus patients don't actually pay that much as compared to surgeries.
00:13:51.000This is not a case for nationalized healthcare.
00:13:59.000Obviously, this is another area where the government is going to have to step in.
00:14:02.000If you're talking about bailing industries out and making sure that people get paid on time, the doctors and the nurses would be the people Who you are most worried about at this point.
00:14:11.000Governors in at least 17 states have halted or urged hospitals to stop elective procedures in recent weeks.
00:14:15.000Hospitals themselves have canceled surgeries to clear space for expected coronavirus patients and preserve scarce protective equipment.
00:14:21.000Many patients have decided to avoid medical settings, obey government stay at home orders.
00:14:24.000That means income to the hospitals are is has been dropping extraordinarily fast.
00:14:29.000Williamson, West Virginia, is at the risk of losing its facility.
00:14:33.000Williamson Memorial Hospital, just as the virus is expected to spread.
00:14:35.000The hospital said it would close its doors in April after revenue dropped 45% in March.
00:14:39.000Visits to the emergency room fell by about a third.
00:14:42.000Inpatient days dropped by two-thirds, said Gene Preston, interim chief executive of the 76-bed hospital.
00:14:46.000The hospital is still operating in bankruptcy and has secured financing intended to keep it open until a buyer took over.
00:14:52.000The new pressure meant that the money would not be enough.
00:14:56.000Bottom line is that under emergency circumstances, bailing out some of these less successful hospitals is going to be necessary just to ensure that everybody can still get the medical care they need.
00:15:05.000And before everybody starts screaming about how nationalized healthcare would save us, let me just point to Italy, Spain, the UK, France.
00:15:21.000I mean, the fact is that we have better doctors and better nurses and better registered, better respiratory therapists than nearly any place on earth.
00:15:27.000We have better health facilities than, public health facilities, than virtually any place on earth.
00:16:04.000And we're going to trace that timeline because, believe it or not, this is getting politicized almost immediately.
00:16:10.000We'll get to more of this in just one second.
00:16:12.000First, we do work with a ton of sponsors on this program, as you have noticed, whose products they believe could be of value and interest to our audience.
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00:17:44.000The good habits coming to keep those good habits going, even in the midst of a really rough time.
00:17:48.000In fact, that's when it's most important to keep your good habits going.
00:17:52.000And meanwhile, how is the federal government responding to all of this?
00:17:55.000Well, there's a lot of talk about mass public testing, how in order for us to even gauge how we end this thing, we have to have mass public testing.
00:18:02.000Dr. Burks, Dr. Deborah Burks, she says we need antibody tests as fast as possible to determine who's already had this thing so they can go back out there and work again.
00:18:10.000And one of the big questions is how we transition from the complete shutdown economy back to something that remotely resembles a normal economy.
00:18:16.000That has gained additional sort of urgency, given the fact that the U.S.
00:18:22.000weekly jobless claim has doubled to 6.6 million last week.
00:18:27.000That means that over the last two weeks, two weeks, 10 million Americans have filed for unemployment.
00:18:35.000To put that by way of contrast, the previous high week was 652,000.
00:18:39.000Okay, in two weeks, we have lost 10 million jobs in the American economy.
00:18:43.000That is not because of coronavirus purely.
00:18:46.000That is because a forcible shutdown from the federal government and state governments of nearly every business in America.
00:18:52.000And it turns out that contrary to the popular Bernie Sanders belief, business owners do not have piles of cash lying in the back room that they are storing away from their employees.
00:19:00.000They reinvest in their business, they invest in their employees, and that means that everybody is relying on additional income, relying on revolving credit lines, Relying on the continuation of the economy.
00:19:10.000So when the economy is forcibly stopped dead, when the economy hits a brick wall, the way that the government has made it hit a brick wall, that means the jobs fall off extraordinarily, extraordinarily fast.
00:19:18.000And that is what is happening right here.
00:19:20.000And that's why the government is justified in filling the gap.
00:19:22.000And it's why you are justified in taking the money.
00:19:24.000It is not welfare for you to take money when the government drives a Ford F-150.
00:19:28.000As I've said a thousand times, the government drove a Ford F-150 through the front door of your house.
00:19:33.000They now have to pay you for driving a Ford F-150 through the door of your house.
00:19:36.000Maybe they had a reason for doing it that was proper.
00:19:39.000But that does not mean they don't have to compensate you for that.
00:19:41.000The government also has a reason for paving your house over and building a highway.
00:19:44.000That doesn't mean they get to seize your property and not pay you for it.
00:19:46.000This is the takings clause of the Fifth Amendment.
00:19:48.000They have completely removed your property from you and your ability to work, and they have to pay you for that privilege, at least until the ability to receive a job.
00:20:36.000COVID-4 can probably be more forward-looking at the economy.
00:20:40.000And if we're going to do infrastructure, because there's nothing better than getting the infrastructure going and going in a big, strong way, we need it big, we need it bold, and we need it futuristic, which means green.
00:20:51.000There's traditional infrastructure, roads, bridges, highways.
00:22:19.000McConnell said she needs to stand down on the notion we're going to go along with taking advantage of the crisis to do things that are unrelated to the crisis.
00:22:26.000Nonetheless, she says the victims of the coronavirus pandemic cannot wait.
00:22:30.000It is moving faster than the leader may have suspected.
00:22:32.000Even he has said some things should wait for the next bill.
00:22:34.000I hope we can work in a four corners manner for the common good.
00:22:38.000Again, this is people trying to take advantage of a horrible situation in order to try and promote their own political priorities.
00:22:54.000The federal government, in order to uphold the value of global currency, has been buying back our bonds and injecting dollars into the global economy.
00:23:02.000That's what the Federal Reserve is doing right now.
00:23:04.000The Treasury Department is doing this.
00:23:06.000Okay, at a certain point, you think there's a tremendous market for American bonds as we continue to shovel money out the door on random projects?
00:23:14.000What we need to be doing right now is expediting the money that we've already passed to get in the hands of people.
00:23:18.000We need the Small Business Administration coordinating better with banks so you can get those loans on the same day.
00:23:23.000We were promised that if you walked into a bank and you provided your documentation, you were going to get a loan the same day.
00:23:27.000And banks were like, no, that's not right.
00:24:08.000They don't pull back in your loan and foreclose on your house.
00:24:11.000So the Federal Reserve on Wednesday eased rules around how banks account for their super-safe assets and moved men to boost the flow of credit to cash-strapped consumers and businesses during the coronavirus shutdown.
00:24:20.000The Fed said it would exclude for one-year treasuries and deposits held at the central bank from banks' supplementary leverage ratio calculation.
00:24:26.000The ratio measures capital funds that banks raise from investors, earn through profits, and use to absorb losses as a percentage of loans and other assets.
00:24:32.000In other words, By law, if you borrow from the Federal Reserve, you have to have a certain amount of cash on hand.
00:24:39.000Treasuries on hand, they're starting to loosen those rules so that you can actually get loans from the bank to float your business for the moment.
00:24:47.000And that's stuff that needs to be done.
00:25:12.000I don't think he's been substantially better than Gavin Newsom.
00:25:14.000I certainly don't think he's been better than Mike DeWine in Ohio, who's done a particularly excellent job, or Larry Hogan in Maryland, who's been very, very good.
00:25:19.000But Cuomo has the adoration of the media because he's in New York.
00:25:22.000But his musing on what needs to happen after this is not the wrong musing.
00:25:26.000Like, our government still has not figured out how to stop something like this from happening again.
00:25:31.000And by the way, when we say it could happen again, I mean, like, in September.
00:25:34.000Because there could very easily be a second wave of this.
00:25:36.000All the studies that are being trotted out right now do not take into account a second wave in September.
00:26:51.000Because right now we're going to do the hindsight is 2020 routine.
00:26:53.000Now, yesterday I tweeted something out.
00:26:55.000It got a lot of flack from folks on the left.
00:26:57.000I tweeted out that President Trump did a bad job in the early days of this.
00:27:01.000Because he did do a not good job in the early days of this.
00:27:03.000And I said, so did mostly everyone else.
00:27:05.000Now, that doesn't mean they did an equally bad job or talked about this in equally a bad way, but there are gradations of how seriously people took this.
00:27:12.000And what I basically said is nobody took this incredibly, incredibly seriously until early March.
00:28:14.000I think there are also Democrats, like Bill de Blasio, who's the epicenter of this thing, who are super dismissive.
00:28:19.000And I have a question for all the folks on the left.
00:28:21.000Who are really questioning, you know, Trump was so dismissive, he was so dismissive, and we were taking it seriously.
00:28:25.000Really, I don't remember all your criticism of Bill de Blasio in the epicenter of this thing, who was spending weeks on end telling people to go out in public.
00:28:32.000But I want to trace the timeline here, because I think it's accurate to get this timeline down.
00:28:36.000We'll get to that in just one moment, because I think we have to be honest about this.
00:28:40.000The reason is not as a defense of President Trump.
00:28:42.000The reason is because there's a narrative that is being set, and the narrative is being set right now.
00:28:45.000On the one side, there's the narrative that I have put forward, which is that government basically sucks at everything.
00:28:51.000They don't do the things they are supposed to do, and it's a bipartisan failing because when you have a giant lumbering moron, which is the government— The best you can hope for is that they respond in slow and delayed fashion and in powerful fashion.
00:29:03.000And you need that to happen sometimes.
00:29:05.000But to expect that the government is ever going to be a government that moves with alacrity and quickness and that the government is always going to foresee every crisis and that government is ever good at this stuff, that is wrong.
00:29:15.000And the reason that's important is because people are trying to extend pandemic politics to non-pandemic politics.
00:29:19.000They're trying to say, Well, if only the right people had been running this thing, it all would have been fine, which demonstrates that if the right people ran government, everything would be fine.
00:29:29.000When I say that this is a bipartisan failing, that everyone failed here, and again, there are a few exceptions, like Senator Tom Cotton was on this thing early.
00:29:35.000Chris Murphy was on this thing early from Connecticut.
00:29:38.000But with very few exceptions, everyone botched this thing.
00:29:40.000I'm not even talking just about the United States.
00:29:42.000Boris Johnson just locked this thing down like a week ago in the UK.
00:29:47.000Italy was late on this thing, which is why their hospitals were completely overrun.
00:29:50.000Spain was late on this thing, which is why their hospitals were completely overrun.
00:29:54.000France was late on this thing, which is why their deaths per million population is higher than those in the United States.
00:30:01.000Okay, so this is not just a bipartisan failing, this is a failing of government.
00:30:21.000But the case that Democrats have been trying to make is that it's all Trump.
00:30:23.000And if Democrats had been in charge, this would have been perfect, which demonstrates that in a time of non-pandemic politics, if we just put Democrats in charge, all ills will be solved.
00:30:38.000And they're trying to set the narrative early that if only Joe Biden or Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton had been in charge, all of this would have been avoided.
00:30:45.000We're going to go through the timeline and I'm going to demonstrate to you that this is just not true.
00:30:50.000We're going to go through it in a fair bit of detail in just one second.
00:30:55.000If you are sitting at home and you are not on camera every day like I am, perhaps you are giving that quarantine beard a shot.
00:31:02.000I know that Colton over here is giving the quarantine beard a shot.
00:31:04.000You already know it's not as easy as it looks because beards can dry out, they can get itchy, they can look kind of dumb, depending on if you can't grow a very nice thick beard.
00:32:07.000Okay, so in just a second, I'm going to get to the Democrats who are now launching investigations from the House Select Committee on the coronavirus response in the middle of the pandemic.
00:32:15.000Like, there's plenty of time to do this in, like, I don't know, wait six weeks.
00:32:19.000But they're going to do it right now because it is top priority that we blame Trump as fast as possible, which is what this is going to come down to.
00:32:25.000Even though we all know what this really is, right?
00:32:27.000There will be a 9-11 Commission-style report, and what we'll find is that years in advance, years in advance, there were systemic failures, because this is what happened in 9-11.
00:32:35.000And then there were warnings that were not properly heeded.
00:32:38.000And then the warnings were not taken seriously enough.
00:32:40.000And in hindsight, we should have been able to see that somebody was going to fly a plane into the World Trade Center, into the WTC.
00:32:48.000But it turns out that in actual time, it's difficult to tell that warning from the thousand other warnings coming across your desk.
00:32:54.000And that when you are faced with the prospect of exponential growth, and you haven't even seen the evidence yet because China's lying about it, it turns out that if you're two weeks late, it makes a big, big difference.
00:33:05.000But those are human mistakes, not somebody who's sitting there deliberately saying, I want millions of Americans to die, right?
00:33:10.000It'll look exactly like the 9-11 report.
00:33:12.000But Democrats are intent on politicizing this thing like right now, right now, and driving that narrative that I talked about before, which is that in the end, government could be incredible at this.
00:33:24.000If you just put Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi in charge, if you just put Joe Biden, who's not even alive, in charge of the government, then all of this could have been prevented.
00:33:33.000And we're going to get to more of this in just one second.
00:33:35.000First, you should go over right now and subscribe to dailywire.com.
00:34:06.000I believe I'm doing one tomorrow night, right before Shabbat.
00:34:10.000Tonight, I believe it's Andrew Klavan.
00:34:12.000So you can hang out with Andrew and hear him make pretentious literary references and, you know, you can watch as he attempts to escape coronavirus being part of the target group.
00:34:21.000So basically it's like a suspense novel, except in real time.
00:34:24.000You can see if Klavan keels over in the middle of the show.
00:34:27.000The show is intended for our all-access members.
00:34:29.000During this national emergency and time of isolation, we've opened it up to all our members.
00:34:32.000Go subscribe right now at dailywire.com and come hang out with us.
00:34:35.000You're listening to the largest, fastest-growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.
00:34:39.000Okay, so the breaking news this morning is that Nancy Pelosi is creating a House Select Committee on Coronavirus.
00:34:50.000It will be chaired by Jim Clyburn, so we're going to do impeachment all over again.
00:34:55.000House Democrats on Wednesday had called for the creation of an independent panel to investigate the Trump administration's response to coronavirus once the pandemic subsides, but they didn't wait for half a minute.
00:35:04.000Nancy Pelosi's already setting up a select committee investigation with Jim Clyburn heading it.
00:35:08.000Representative Benny Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi, chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, said it's clear that we as a nation are at another inflection point.
00:35:14.000Americans today will again demand a full accounting of how prepared we were, how we responded to this global public health emergency.
00:35:20.000Americans will need answers on how our government can work better to prevent a similar crisis from happening again.
00:35:50.000We're going to find that governors, state governors, local mayors didn't do the job they were supposed to do in warning people.
00:35:56.000We're going to find out that our policy with regard to China was a complete failure.
00:35:59.000We're going to find out a lot of things.
00:36:00.000You know what we're not going to find out?
00:36:02.000That if President Trump had not been president, then all this would have magically been solved.
00:36:06.000That's what we're not going to find out.
00:36:07.000But that is exactly what Democrats are going to try and pitch.
00:36:10.000Adam Schiff, who was busy distracting the entire nation throughout January on impeachment, he said, Now, I'm not saying that the Trump administration should have been distracted by impeachment.
00:36:55.000Okay, I'm gonna go through the timeline now.
00:36:56.000So let's go through the timeline exactly how this thing, how this thing went forward.
00:37:02.000So how did this thing get screwed up so badly?
00:37:05.000Well, let's start with the stuff from years ago that we're supposed to ignore.
00:37:09.000So the federal stockpile of N95 respirator masks, the shortage of it can be traced back to 2009 after the H1N1 swine flu pandemic when the Obama administration was advised to replenish a national stockpile but did not.
00:37:21.000According to reports from both Bloomberg News and the LA Times, the Washington Examiner reporting, the Trump administration is scrambling to replenish a stockpile of protective medical gear for healthcare workers and patients as coronavirus sweeps across the nation.
00:37:33.000N95 respirator masks are one of the most needed medical supplies amid the outbreak.
00:37:37.000The George W. Bush administration published the National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza Plan in 2005.
00:37:43.000It called on the feds to distribute medical supplies from the national strategic stockpile governed by the HHS in the event of an outbreak.
00:37:51.000It led to 274,000 hospitalizations and nearly 13,000 deaths and a depletion of the respirator masks.
00:37:58.000A federally backed task force and safety equipment organization both recommended to the Obama administration the stockpile be replenished with 100 million masks used after the H1N1 outbreak.
00:38:55.000Elements that are going to come into play.
00:38:56.000In at least 10 government reports from 2003 to 2015, federal officials predicted the U.S.
00:39:00.000would experience a critical lack of ventilators and other life-saving medical devices if it faced a viral outbreak like the one currently sweeping the country.
00:39:07.000The drumbeat of warnings undermines President Trump's claim that nobody in their wildest dreams could have imagined the demand for ventilators that now exists.
00:39:13.000But it also undermines, by the way, that CNN reporting.
00:39:15.000It also undermines the narrative that everybody did a wonderful job up until Trump of replenishing the ventilator stockpile.
00:39:21.000If we had dozens of reports over the course of 12 years when Donald Trump was not president to replenish the ventilator stockpile and nobody did it, then how is that Trump's fault exactly exclusively?
00:39:32.000He should have done it, but he wasn't president for like the 15 years preceding his presidency.
00:40:03.000Okay, so now let's look at the more modern timeline here.
00:40:05.000So some people took this seriously early, and some people did not.
00:40:09.000Okay, so let's talk about who took this seriously pretty early.
00:40:11.000So Lamar Alexander took this seriously early.
00:40:15.000Politico reported this, like, just a few days ago.
00:40:19.000On January 24th, at the urging of Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee, administration officials held a briefing for the full Senate.
00:40:26.000The classified session was sparsely attended, according to two Senate aides.
00:40:30.000It was put together at the last minute.
00:40:31.000It was held on the same day as a deadline for senators to submit their impeachment questions.
00:40:47.000The initial thought from the Dems, I think, is we were trying to distract from impeachment, said a GOP Senate aide.
00:40:52.000A White House official recalled feeling surprised at the incredibly poor attendance, noting it came even though the amount of concern expressed then was rather intense.
00:41:03.000Alexander then issued a bland statement saying we're monitoring the outbreak of coronavirus.
00:41:08.000Then people started increasing their warnings.
00:41:10.000But the warnings, again, the statements that were made, better than the statements that Trump made by a number of officials, including Chuck Schumer.
00:41:16.000But the actual measures they were calling for are not even in the same league as what we have actually done here.
00:41:21.000They're not in the same league as what would have been necessary.
00:41:29.000Better than saying the wrong things or putting out misinformation about how this is just like the flu.
00:41:33.000But, number one, a lot of people on the left were saying this was just like the flu, including the Washington Post as of early February, including Vox.com as of late January.
00:41:42.000And beyond that, let's be real about this, you saying this is not like the flu and then proposing, as Chuck Schumer did, to spend $85 million in funding for federal agencies, I guess that solves the problem.
00:41:52.000That does not count as you being sufficiently concerned.
00:41:56.000That counts as you being more concerned than Trump was.
00:41:58.000But I don't use President Trump's level of concern as the bar for everything would have been okay if you had been in charge.
00:42:06.000On January 26th, according to Politico, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called on the Department of Health and Human Services to declare coronavirus a public health emergency that would free up $85 million in funding for federal agencies.
00:42:18.000In January 28th, Patty Maria Maria Cantwell, the Washington state's two Democratic senators, already Washington state was being hit by this, demanded in a January 28th letter that Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar keep them apprised with the latest information regarding the severity of the disease, the country's capacity to diagnose cases, what steps were being taken to prepare U.S.
00:42:35.000healthcare workers, what screening systems were in place.
00:42:37.000There were only five cases of coronavirus discovered in the United States at that time, And by the way, Patty Marie and Maria Cantwell, I'm sorry, a demand letter saying, I want more information is not quite the same thing as let's shut down the entire American economy for two weeks.
00:42:48.000Let's make sure that we have millions of tests available.
00:42:50.000Again, no one foresaw what this was going to take.
00:42:53.000This does not mean the Trump administration did a wonderful job.
00:42:56.000It means everyone sucks at this, not in equal levels, but everyone was sucky.
00:44:03.000The question is, were the plans actually sufficient?
00:44:05.000And the answer was no, because nobody was talking about the kinds of measures that would eventually be put in place.
00:44:10.000Here's what Joe Biden suggested as his plan.
00:44:12.000This is in this January 27th op-ed he keeps referring to.
00:44:14.000Again, you saying coronavirus is a problem in January 27th is better than Trump sort of pretending it wasn't a problem as of January 27th, for sure.
00:44:22.000But it doesn't mean that you handling the reins of government would have done anything like what was necessary in order to stop this thing.
00:44:28.000If Donald Trump had proposed on January 27th, we need a two-week shutdown of the entire American economy.
00:44:33.000Also, we're going to need $2 trillion in spending.
00:44:37.000Also, we're going to need $4 trillion for the Federal Reserve to disperse and the Treasury Department.
00:44:43.000How do you think that would have gone in late January?
00:45:11.000We dispatched our military on a limited mission to help build the urgent infrastructure necessary to coordinate a massive global public health response.
00:45:21.000We contributed $2 billion to international institutions.
00:45:26.000Does any of this sound like what was necessary?
00:45:29.000At the same time that Joe Biden was saying this stuff publicly, Joe Biden was also saying that it was a very bad idea to ban travel from China.
00:45:38.000He was saying that it was xenophobic and cruel to do so.
00:45:42.000Now the only people I'm aware of who actually were talking about the kinds of solutions that were necessary were Scott Gottlieb.
00:45:47.000Scott Gottlieb wrote a piece, this would have been in January 28th.
00:45:52.000Scott Gottlieb and Luciana Borio wrote some op-eds talking about actual suggestions.
00:45:57.000It had been early February, talking about how we need massive levels of testing, how we need surveillance systems, like all the stuff that we actually need.
00:46:08.000So the stuff they were talking about, Chuck Schumer talking about freeing up $85 million, which is like, we just spent a vast multiple of that.
00:46:15.000And Joe Biden talking about how we need to fully fund the CDC when we did fully fund the CDC.
00:46:20.000The Washington Post on February 1st wrote a piece saying that flu was the biggest threat.
00:46:26.000That's literally the title of an article from the Washington Post.
00:46:29.000The flu is a much bigger threat than coronavirus, for now, by Lenny Bernstein in their health section.
00:46:35.000Right, so again, I think we need to be accurate about the timeline here, which is that when it comes to the measures necessary, I'm not talking about the general level of seriousness where you said, yes, I think coronavirus will be a problem.
00:46:45.000I'm talking about the what needs to be done, which is what you're supposed to do in government.
00:46:50.000No one, except for Scott Gottlieb and Borio, we're talking about the necessaries.
00:46:57.000Maybe you had Tom Cotton who was taking this more seriously.
00:47:00.000Again, Chris Murphy tweeted something out where he was taking this seriously, and I want to mention this because some people were taking this more seriously, like Chris Murphy.
00:47:07.000He tweeted out, Okay, well, Chuck Schumer had said the previous week, we need $85 million.
00:47:09.000Is that what Chris Murphy was talking about?
00:47:11.000Like, I'm glad that he expressed concern, but expressions of concern are not worth very much.
00:47:14.000Okay, well, Chuck Schumer had said the previous week, we need $85 million.
00:47:22.000Is that what Chris Murphy was talking about?
00:47:24.000Like, I'm glad that he expressed concern.
00:47:25.000But expressions of concern are not worth very much.
00:47:28.000By the way, even Donald Trump, amidst his bizarrely chaotic response to coronavirus, even he was making expressions of concern.
00:47:36.000Remember, Trump did mention during his State of the Union coronavirus while Nancy Pelosi was zoning out.
00:48:15.000By the way, speaking of people who didn't take this seriously, the Huffington Post had a piece, January 31st, titled, Don't Listen to Senator Tom Cotton about Coronavirus.
00:48:23.000Don't listen to Senator Tom Cotton about Coronavirus.
00:49:10.000I would be on the phone with China and making it clear.
00:49:13.000We are going to need to be in your country.
00:49:17.000Weird, I don't hear any of the measures that have now been taken coming out of the mouth of Joe Biden.
00:49:20.000I just hear him yelling about how Trump, by the way, did not cut the funding to the CDC.
00:49:23.000He proposed a cut to funding to the CDC that did not go through.
00:49:26.000Meanwhile, where were the Democrats criticizing, you know, actual mayors in charge of the crisis in the biggest hotspot on planet Earth, New York City?
00:49:34.000Let's just flashback for a second to Mayor Bill de Blasio and his health leaders over in New York City.
00:49:38.000And by the way, Nancy Pelosi as of February 24th.
00:49:40.000Okay, this is all the way in the middle of February, when supposedly everyone except Trump was taking it super seriously.
00:49:45.000Here are all these Democrats and when people say, well put aside de Blasio, how do you put aside the mayor of the town where all the deaths are happening?
00:49:53.000Here's Mayor Bill de Blasio and a bunch of his local health officials.
00:49:57.000The Department of Sanitation is ready for Mardi Gras 2020.
00:50:29.000Okay, so before we pretend that Donald Trump was the only person who was missing the boat here, or that the Trump administration were the only people who were missing the boat, that is not true.
00:50:37.000Number two, even if you weren't missing the boat and you said coronavirus is a problem, none of you were proposing the kind of response that was necessary.
00:50:43.000Only Gottlieb, as far as I'm aware, was proposing publicly the kinds of responses that were necessary.
00:50:47.000On February 26th, Congress offered $8.3 billion to Trump For all this stuff.
00:50:53.000Trump said, I want $1.5 billion to $2 billion.
00:50:55.000And Chuck Schumer tweeted out that we want to give all sorts of new funding, like $8.3 billion.
00:50:59.000Republicans were saying, we want that to be not unfunded, right?
00:51:02.000We want to take that money from other places.
00:51:04.000And Chuck Schumer was fighting them on it.
00:51:06.000And President Trump then came out and he said, if you give us the money, we'll take the money, right?
00:51:09.000You wouldn't give us the money for the wall, but you'll give us the money for this.
00:52:11.000Deb Fischer put forward a bill in early March.
00:52:14.000A bill with bipartisan backing that would protect makers of respirators like 3M from lawsuits if the companies produced masks upon federal government requests.
00:52:21.000According to a Senate GOP 8, every time we tried to pass Deb Fischer's bill, the trial lawyers were the first ones out blocking it.
00:53:39.000I remember being bizarrely puzzled by this sort of thing because I had, I'll tell you on a personal level, I'd started getting much more serious about looking into this in late February when it seemed like a lot of the notes were getting pretty bad.
00:53:51.000And I wrote a piece on March 6th talking about the fatality rates from coronavirus, which by the way was accurate on the data.
00:53:57.000And what I basically said is it may not be as deadly as people are making it out to be, but I was certainly concerned about the transmission rate of the virus.
00:54:04.000Okay, so, as of, like, I can tell you, in fact, the exact date, because I remember it.
00:54:08.000The exact date where it finally dawned on me this thing was going to be a disaster area.
00:54:12.000And that was March, basically March 10th.
00:54:17.000So I remember thinking, okay, people are saying this is really serious, but Mayor Eric Garcetti is just letting 20,000 people run in the street and spit on each other, right?
00:55:09.000And then there was a party down the block, like a house party.
00:55:12.000And I remember saying to my parents, I really don't think we should be going to this house party.
00:55:15.000That was when I started getting serious enough that it was like we started self-limiting on a social level.
00:55:21.000Okay, and then it took like another, that was March 10th, it took another week for San Francisco to issue a stay-at-home order.
00:55:28.000The stay-at-home order that started this whole thing, you know, in terms of like very strict measures, March 16th is when the stay-at-home order happened.
00:55:35.000I believe that we at Daily Wire told all of our own workers to go home as of March 16th.
00:55:41.000I think it has been a couple weeks, right?
00:55:43.000So I think it was that week that we told people at Daily Wire If they can work from home, they should absolutely work from home.
00:55:50.000California, more broadly, issued a stay-at-home order.
00:56:49.000I think Tucker Carlson was instrumental in awakening the president on a personal level to how dangerous this thing was.
00:56:56.000But to pretend, as the Democrats surely will, that everybody was on top of this thing except for Trump?
00:57:02.000And that Congress can be trusted, and that everyone can be trusted, and that everything is hunky.
00:57:05.000I mean, on March 11th, AOC was going on her Instagram and telling people that it was racist not to eat at Chinese restaurants on March 11th.
00:57:50.000It will cost the world economy $10 trillion, $15 trillion, endless amounts of money to come out of this, and you've cost the world tens of thousands of lives.
00:57:59.000Meanwhile, China is getting aggressive militarily.
00:58:02.000We're supposed to treat them like they're our friends?
00:58:03.000According to the Asia Times, China seizes COVID-19 advantage in the South China Sea.
00:58:08.000With the COVID-19 pandemic mostly contained in China and now wreaking havoc on the United States, security analysts are closely watching Beijing's military moves in the hotly contested South China Sea.
00:58:17.000In recent days, China has conducted military drills and deployed large-scale military assets to the maritime area, while at the same time officially celebrating strides made in exploiting disputed energy resources in the fossil fuel-rich sea.
00:58:28.000While some see China's nationalistic message as a bid to rally its people, Others view the increasingly aggressive naval maneuvers as a bid to exploit America's weakened condition to secure new advantage in the hotspot theater.
00:58:38.000So they're taking advantage of the fact that we just had to remove a carrier basically from circulation thanks to coronavirus infections.
00:58:43.000They're taking advantage of all of this in order to get aggressive on the world stage, not a shock.
00:58:48.000The Philippines and Malaysia, both at territorial loggerheads with China in the sea, have both recently placed their administration and commercial capitalists under weeks-long military-enforced lockdown.
00:58:58.000The U.S., the long-term guarantor of the region's law-based order, is now grappling with the world's worst outbreak.
00:59:03.000The Pentagon has been mobilized to help out at home.
00:59:09.000Meanwhile, this has gone hand-in-hand with attempts to drive a diplomatic wedge between the U.S.
00:59:13.000and its traditional transatlantic allies, some of which have recently committed naval vessels to U.S.-led freedom-of-navigation operations in the South China Sea.
00:59:24.000So Beijing is putting out propaganda trying to blame the United States for all of this.
00:59:27.000Meanwhile, if they had not lied about this for a month, over a month, and commanded the WHO to do their bidding, there'd be a lot more people alive today and certainly a lot more preventable deaths would have been prevented.
00:59:39.000Good for the Japanese Vice Prime Minister.
00:59:41.000He came out and he said, the WHO, the World Health Organization, should be renamed the Chinese Health Organization.
00:59:45.000We're going to have to radically rethink how we do business with the WHO.
01:00:35.000Meanwhile, one of my favorite things, Is the Chinese government trying to put out propaganda suggesting that it's U.S.
01:00:44.000military operations in the South China Sea that are increasing the risk of confrontation?
01:00:49.000According to a Beijing-based think tank, shocker, the U.S.
01:00:52.000intensified its military activity in the South China Sea last year, raising the risk of confrontation with China.
01:00:56.000So China's trying to put out the notice that as it gets more aggressive in the South China Sea, because everybody else is busy dealing with the pandemic they just unleashed from their own country, The Chinese government, that it's everybody else's aggression that is pissing off the Chinese.
01:01:09.000So the South China Morning Post, which to the best of my understanding is a Chinese official publication, or semi-official publication.
01:01:16.000conducted eight so-called freedom of navigation operations in the year, three more than in 2018, during which its vessels sailed within 12 nautical miles of land claimed or occupied by China, according to the South China Sea Strategic Situation Probing Initiative's annual report.
01:01:29.000American forces also engaged in at least 50 joint and multiple exercises with countries from Southeast Asia and elsewhere in the region.
01:02:00.000The supply chains have been disrupted.
01:02:03.000China deserves to have its ass kicked on an international stage, if not militarily, then financially.
01:02:10.000I mean, this is just what a disaster area that government is.
01:02:14.000We should all pray for a major change of government in that region to free a billion people from the servitude under which the Chinese government has placed them.
01:02:41.000Apparently, Chinese authorities had supposedly banned the trade and consumption of wild animals, but they are continuing to lie about that.
01:02:48.000Apparently, wet markets are still open in China.
01:02:49.000They've also been lying about the number of people who are dead there.
01:02:52.000They've been lying about reopening industry.
01:03:09.000We'll go through it in a reasonable fashion.
01:03:11.000And remember, in the end, in the end, America remains the greatest country on earth, not because the government is so spectacular at things, It remains great because Americans are great, because Americans care for each other, because we're looking out for each other.
01:03:24.000With that said, continue the social distancing.
01:03:26.000Continue to wear masks if you go out in public so you're not coughing on other people or breathing on other people.
01:03:30.000Continue to do all the things that are necessary to bring this to an end so we can all get back to work, make the economy boom again, and then...
01:03:36.000And then move forward to a more successful future, hopefully a future in which we certainly rethink our relations with places like China and international institutions that have become cat's paws of the Chinese government.
01:03:47.000All right, we'll be back here later today or we'll see you here tomorrow.