On today's show, Ben Shapiro talks about the global economic pandemic and how it's time to diversify into precious metals as a safe haven and a diversification tactic in the midst of the worst downturn in decades. Ben also points out that the crisis is becoming more and more political every day, and that's a good thing, because the left is using the crisis as an opportunity to push their political priorities. In fact, Ben argues that we should be worried about the political impact of the crisis, not the economic fallout from it, because it's going to have a big impact on our political system and our ability to get our economy back on track. Today's show is sponsored by ExpressVPN. My savvy fans secure their internet at ExpressVpn. Join them at expressvpn.net slash Ben Shapiro on The Ben Shapiro Show wherever you get your news and information. If you can't get enough of what's going on in the world, then you should check out the Anchor.fm account at anchor.fm/TheBenShapiroShow. Anchor is your one stop financial hub for all things financial and investing advice, including financial news, financial strategy, and investing recommendations. Don't miss it! Subscribe today! Learn more about your ad choices. Use the promo code: "WEBINAR" to receive 20% off your first month of the month with discount code: BONUS. at checkout. Ben Shapiro's newest book, "I'm a Conservative" is available for purchase! and receive 10% off the entire month of January through May 1st through June 1st, 2019. Subscribe to his new book "I'll Tell Meals on Earth, I'll Tell You What I'm a Goodie Box! by clicking HERE. and learn more about my upcoming book "It's a Conservative's Guide to Everything I Can't Do It, I'm A Conservative, Too Good For That Too Good by Ben Shapiro." and much more! I'll be giving you a discount code for your ad-free version of the Ben Shapiro book "The Ben Shapiro Guide to All Things Conservative? coming soon! Get all the best deal on my new book out in May 1/6/9/19/10/19, including shipping and shipping FREE PRICING, shipping only in the coming weeks! FREE FASTEST INTERVIEW AND PROMO!
00:00:44.000We're all trying to get through this together, and they offer some great services, so if you Can afford to shop right now if you got money, and if you like any other services, please continue to patronize our advertising partners.
00:00:54.000They help us bring in enough money to keep our employees employed.
00:00:58.000I know that everybody is having a tough time right now financially, and I really appreciate both your listenership and the fact that you patronize our advertising partners.
00:01:07.000I know they really appreciate it as well.
00:01:09.000Also, worth noting, have you noticed that the market is a little bit volatile right now?
00:01:12.000When I say a little bit volatile, I mean insane.
00:01:14.000Did you see that the price of oil actually went negative yesterday?
00:01:17.000So apparently, if you drove over to the gas station, they were just handing out checks or something?
00:01:21.000I mean, I guess that's how this works now.
00:01:22.000Well, maybe now might be a good time to think about diversifying into something that never loses its value.
00:01:29.000Over 22 million people have now lost their jobs from the economic fallout of coronavirus, even with the stock market having had a slight recovery.
00:01:36.000Nobody knows what the long-term impact of this thing is going to be, how long it's going to take to recovery.
00:01:40.000This is going to look more like a U-shaped curve than like a V-shaped curve in all probability, simply because human behavior has changed.
00:01:45.000You might want to think about diversifying into precious metals, and you know what I'm going to say.
00:01:49.000Talk to my friends over at Birchgold to do that.
00:03:28.000But a lot of conservatives were saying, OK, well, you know, if we got to lock down for the moment so that we can get this thing under control and not overwhelm our health care system, then let's go ahead and do that.
00:03:35.000You think that confirmed political priors for conservatives?
00:03:48.000Last night, President Trump tweeted out, in light of the attack from our invisible enemy, and he's talking here about coronavirus, of course, as well as the need to protect the jobs of our great American citizens, I will be signing an executive order to temporarily suspend immigration into the United States.
00:04:01.000And this has made people absolutely crazy.
00:04:03.000How could Trump suspend immigration into the United States?
00:04:05.000First, practically speaking, immigration is suspended.
00:04:07.000Courts are not processing green cards and visas right now.
00:04:10.000If you're looking for a travel visa, now would not be the time to do it.
00:04:12.000European countries have been shutting down travel inside Europe.
00:04:15.000The so-called Schengen Zone, which was an area of free travel, has basically been shut down right now.
00:04:20.000Countries are shutting their borders to each other inside the EU.
00:04:23.000Singapore is seeing travelers come back, people who had visas come back to Singapore, and spiking a second wave of infections in Singapore right now.
00:04:31.000Okay, and so, why would we not be suspending immigration right now?
00:04:35.000On a practical level, the executive order, we'll see how it's worded, but it probably isn't actually going to do very much.
00:04:40.000Also, does the president have a point that we don't actually need a huge base of more labor coming into the country right now?
00:04:47.000I mean, yeah, I mean, we have a surplus of labor right now.
00:04:51.000You're not going to have the wages artificially lowered by having more immigrants come into the country right now because there are just too many people out of work.
00:04:59.000You have 22-30 million people out of work right now.
00:05:03.000So you've got the health issue, you've got the economic issue, you always have concerns about immigration.
00:05:08.000And the concerns about immigration, to begin with, were always about What our immigration policy should look like.
00:05:14.000On the one side, you had people who were sort of suggesting that people have a right to immigrate to the United States, which of course is silly and not true.
00:05:19.000On the other side, you had people who said, if you want to immigrate to the United States, you have to show how you are going to be a net benefit to the United States.
00:05:24.000And that's why Trump has even said that migrant workers who constitute a heavy share of labor in places like California will continue to be allowed into the United States, even under this executive order.
00:05:33.000So the media are covering this as though this is just Trump confirming his political priors that he doesn't like immigration.
00:05:38.000But the fact is, Just because it confirms his political priors doesn't necessarily mean that he is wrong in this particular case.
00:05:44.000And I find it very bizarre that the same Democratic Party, which has now flipped on whether we should have banned travel from China in January.
00:05:51.000Remember a couple of weeks ago, Joe Biden flipped his position on this thing.
00:05:53.000Now they're playing exactly the same game with Trump.
00:05:56.000Trump says, we're going to have to shut our borders for a bit.
00:05:58.000And the Democrats are like, no, that's bad.
00:06:03.000On any sort of rational level, I don't think a lot of Americans are looking forward to taking in millions of people who are not properly vetted, who have not been checked for health, and presumably who are going to increase the labor base at a time when you don't... It's one thing to increase the labor base when you have more openings than people willing to fill them.
00:06:20.000It is another thing to increase the labor base at a time when you have 30 million people out of work.
00:06:25.000According to the New York Times, in recent weeks, the Trump administration has said health concerns justified moving swiftly to bar asylum seekers and undocumented immigrants from entering the country.
00:06:32.000Alarming immigration advocates who have said that Trump and his advisors were using a global pandemic to further hardline immigration policies.
00:06:39.000Well, if you're an undocumented immigrant, you know what's kind of hard to do?
00:06:48.000There's a good case we shouldn't be allowed- I mean, people were crossing the border legally and they infected the American population to the tune of a minimum of 800-700,000 infections to date, right?
00:06:57.000And those are just the infections that we know about.
00:06:59.000The actual number of infections is probably ten times that.
00:07:02.000The president's late night announcement on Monday signals his most wide-ranging attempt yet to seal the country off from the rest of the world, as though everybody else is not doing this.
00:07:27.000Because again, political priors matter more than actual policy considerations.
00:07:32.000And it's because Americans are starting to see political priors take the place of considered policy ramifications that they are becoming very skeptical of the left-wing view that we have to lock down forever and for all time, which seems to be one of the views, right?
00:07:47.000When people are saying we're going to lock down until there are 20 million tests available per day, okay, well, when pigs fly, then I guess we can get out of lockdown.
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00:09:00.000I am very safety concerned, as you know, very safety conscious, and I've been using Ring on my own property for years.
00:09:22.000First, there's this controversy over the immigration shutdown.
00:09:26.000Workers who have for years received visas to perform specialized jobs in the United States would be denied permission to arrive, though some workers in industries deemed critical will be exempted from the ban, apparently.
00:09:34.000That will include healthcare workers, so people who are tweeting out stats as to how many immigrants are in the healthcare system.
00:09:39.000Those people will still be allowed to come in and work.
00:09:43.000The number of visas issued to foreigners abroad looking to immigrate to the United States has already declined by about 25% in this fiscal year.
00:09:51.000This should not be all that controversial.
00:09:53.000Nonetheless, it is massively controversial.
00:09:55.000The New York Times obviously is ripping this thing up and down, suggesting that it is all basically a lie.
00:10:02.000Under an executive order, the Trump administration will no longer approve applications from foreigners to live and work in the U.S.
00:10:06.000for an undetermined period of time, effectively shutting down the legal immigration system in the same way the president has long advocated closing the borders to illegal immigration.
00:10:15.000So, again, do I think that this is a violation of law?
00:10:18.000No, he's got pretty broad authority in this area.
00:10:20.000The president has pretty significant authority when it comes to borders and immigration.
00:10:25.000Beyond that, now is a good time to shut the borders.
00:10:27.000I mean, that's just the reality of the situation.
00:10:29.000Meanwhile, speaking of people who are confirming their political priors, so yesterday, oil futures completely dumped.
00:10:42.000Well, because there literally is no storage facility.
00:10:44.000The fact is that right now what we are watching is a collapse in demand.
00:10:48.000And this is one of the problems is when you talk about the recovery, one of the things that you have to look at is how much has the underlying demand curve actually changed because people's behavior has changed.
00:10:58.000The oil industry isn't tanking for financial reasons or systemic reasons.
00:11:01.000It is tanking because no one is driving.
00:11:04.000And because businesses are not operating and that means that nobody has any use for oil.
00:11:07.000So there's a glut of oil on the market and oil has an expiration date and it needs to be refined and it's more expensive right now to refine it than it would be to just dump it at this point and do nothing with it.
00:11:17.000And so the futures contracts which are going to take Hold in May on May 1st.
00:11:22.000Basically, the oil companies are betting that there will be no buyers for the oil and there will be a complete glut of oil.
00:11:27.000So this is obviously not great for the oil industry because if they can't make profit, then they are going to start shutting down the pumping.
00:11:34.000And what you're going to see is that these oil companies are not supremely flexible, that as the economy ramps back up, they're going to start pumping again, but slower.
00:11:43.000American fracking is actually a lot more flexible and is going to fill some of that gap, which is not a bad thing for American fracking.
00:11:48.000But when I say confirming political priors, let me show you a perfect example.
00:11:53.000The oil prices dump in historic fashion.
00:11:56.000According to the New York Times, prices went negative, meaning that anyone trying to sell a barrel would have to pay a buyer 30 bucks, in part because of the way oil is traded.
00:12:03.000Futures contracts that require buyers to take possession of oil in May are expiring on Tuesday.
00:12:08.000Nobody wants the oil because there's no place to store it.
00:12:10.000So AOC immediately tweets out a couple of absolutely asinine things because she is a moron, okay?
00:12:24.000Okay, she really just, she is just an idiot.
00:12:27.000Okay, so she tweets out, you would absolutely love to see it.
00:12:30.000This, along with record low interest rates, means it's the right time for worker-led mass investment in green infrastructure to save our planet.
00:12:38.000Okay, so I'm not sure why she's coughing.
00:12:40.000I mean, I hope that all is well with AOC's health, but First of all, to celebrate, you absolutely love to see the collapse of the oil industry that supports tens of thousands of American jobs.
00:12:53.000But then, she put up a new tweet, and her new tweet is just as stupid.
00:12:57.000She tweets, now is the time to create millions of good jobs, building out the infrastructure and clean energy necessary to save our planet for future generations, for our economy, our planet and our future.
00:13:07.000I don't think she understands how prices work.
00:13:10.000She's read out this snapshot is being acknowledged as a turning point in the climate movement.
00:13:14.000Fossil fuels are in long term structural decline.
00:13:17.000This, along with low interest rates, means it's the right time to create millions of jobs, transitioning to renewable and clean energy, a key opportunity.
00:13:25.000What in the actual F is she talking about?
00:13:35.000Was she dropped on her head as a small child?
00:13:37.000I can't think of any other explanation.
00:13:39.000BU needs to get, she should get a, I'm gonna advocate for AOC to get her college tuition waived from BU, because she did not get her money's worth.
00:13:50.000She was an econ double major at BU, and somehow she graduated with a degree.
00:13:53.000This does not speak well of Boston University.
00:13:56.000So if she's looking for a legal advocate for her free tuition at BU, she didn't get anything for her money.
00:14:01.000There was no consideration in that particular contract.
00:14:03.000When the price of oil is zero, that is a horrible time to invest in windmills and green energy.
00:14:28.000Like, the whole point is, now's a great time to fill up your car, right?
00:14:32.000Now's a horrible time to invest in expensive alternative energies, when the pri- like, does she not understand the purpose of a carbon tax, right?
00:14:38.000The purpose of a carbon tax is to artificially raise the price of oil, to artificially raise the price of filling your car, so that it creates an economic incentive for you to instead invest in more expensive alternative energies, which, thanks to the raised price of oil, would now be lower in cost than the oil.
00:14:53.000But if the prices of oil drop, no one in the- like, are you buying an energy-efficient vehicle for more money?
00:15:16.000That people are not being honest about broad-scale public policy.
00:15:20.000See, right now, if you want people to take life-altering measures, like staying at home, like keeping their kids at home, no summer camps, no movies, no restaurants, no eating out, you want people to shelter in place, you're gonna need a high level of trust.
00:15:35.000And that trust is gonna have to be based on the idea that you are not doing this for an ulterior motive.
00:15:42.000There's so many things where you rely on people not having an ulterior motive.
00:15:47.000Somebody says to you that you bring your car in, your car is broken, you bring it to an auto body shop, and they say, okay, well, we need to replace the transmission.
00:15:55.000And then you find out that they are being subsidized by the transmission company, and for every transmission they sell, they're getting a $200 kickback.
00:16:03.000Well, that's going to change your math on whether you actually need to replace the transmission, isn't it?
00:16:06.000You're going to think to yourself, oh, this person has an ulterior motive.
00:16:08.000Maybe they're not being honest with me.
00:16:11.000In order for there to be any level of trust in the most broad-ranging and deep measures in American history, there is going to, I mean, in terms of civilian populations, there's gonna have to be a high level of trust.
00:16:23.000That trust is being undermined each and every day by partisan actors who obviously are attempting to confirm their own priors rather than looking at the actual events on the ground.
00:16:32.000We're gonna get to more of this in just one second.
00:16:37.000There is some good news, and that is that there is Some again more information more and more information coming out that this thing is not nearly as deadly as we had previously supposed that doesn't mean that it is that it is not deadly it does not mean that it is not easily transmitted but study after study after study is now showing that the actual infection fatality rate meaning the number of people who are infected right on the denominator the number of people who are dead in the numerator right that that that percentage is actually A lot lower than we've been led to believe.
00:17:04.000We're going to get to that in just one second.
00:17:06.000First, let us talk about the fact that now is a horrible time to go to the post office.
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00:18:11.000Stamps.com, it's a no-brainer, especially now.
00:18:13.000It saves you time, it saves you money, and it keeps you safe.
00:18:38.000Showing that the actual number of people who are infected in society is far higher than the number of people who are dying, and that the case fatality rate, the infection fatality rate, is the total number of infected.
00:18:48.000Case fatality rate is the number of confirmed cases, so I've been using case fatality rate for weeks.
00:18:52.000Really should have been saying infection fatality rate to be a little more exact.
00:18:55.000Okay, the infection fatality rate is a lot lower than people have been saying.
00:19:00.000According to hot-air John Sexton writing, earlier this month, researchers from the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine set up drive-thru testing sites in six locations around L.A.
00:19:28.000Adjusting the estimate for statistical margin of error, that means anywhere from 2.8% to 5.6% of the county's adult population has antibodies to the virus.
00:19:36.000That translates to anywhere from 221,000 to 442,000 adults in L.A.
00:19:38.000221,000 to 442,000 adults in LA County alone who have had the infection.
00:19:43.000The number of COVID-related deaths in the county has now surpassed 600.
00:19:49.000The press release doesn't do the math.
00:19:51.000What that actually means is that the death rate currently for coronavirus, with a current death toll of 617, if you took 4.1% right in that mid-range, you're looking at a death rate of something like 0.2%, which is about twice the rate of the flu.
00:20:03.000So the good news is that a lot of people may have had this with few, if any, symptoms.
00:20:09.000County case rate is still only 5%, so we are not close to herd immunity.
00:20:14.000But it is also true that there is not really herd immunity to the flu.
00:20:18.000There's not herd immunity to the flu, but there have been several studies at this point.
00:20:23.000There's one from Wuhan, one from the Netherlands, I talked about it, one from Massachusetts, one from King County, Washington, one from the hospital in New York, and all of them are showing that the actual case fatality rate is a lot lower than has been shown, right?
00:20:38.000That it is anywhere from 0.2% to 0.6% on the upper end probably, okay?
00:20:43.000I mean, that means this thing is a lot less deadly than previously supposed.
00:20:46.000And again, if you are young and you are healthy, the chances that you are gonna die from this thing are exceedingly low, which is why I've been suggesting that testing is really designed to do one thing and one thing only professionally.
00:21:02.000It may delay you getting this thing over time.
00:21:04.000It may prevent a widespread epidemic outbreak that overwhelms the healthcare system.
00:21:09.000But that's how we should be judging public policy right now.
00:21:11.000One of the things that I hate more than anything, and this is why I think the media coverage also is confirming political priors, a lot of the media coverage right now is just not accurate.
00:21:20.000A lot of the media coverage when it comes to flattening the curve suggested that the number of people who are going to be infected was going to be lowered overall by the flattening of the curve.
00:21:27.000That's not the idea of flattening the curve, you adults.
00:21:30.000The goal of flattening the curve was to prevent overload of the healthcare system, but the area under the curve is still the same.
00:21:35.000If the curve looks like this, and I'm making a very high wave in the air and then very low after, Or, it looks like this.
00:21:41.000A flatter wave, but the maintenance level is higher at the end.
00:21:45.000Okay, the area under the curve is still the same, so you're still going to get infected, just maybe four months from now, as opposed to right now, so that you don't overwhelm the healthcare system.
00:21:54.000The reason this matters is because when you're talking about testing, you have to be accurate about what exactly you are attempting to do.
00:22:06.000And Dr. McCary basically confirmed what I was saying, which is that testing is not designed to prevent everyone from getting this thing.
00:22:12.000It's designed to prevent there from being a major spike in an area because the testing capacity itself is not sufficient to stop one person from infecting a bunch of other people around them in the immediate basis.
00:22:23.000It is just enough to help contain it so that you can contact trace for some people.
00:22:27.000So that's what the testing is designed to do.
00:22:29.000If we're accurate about that, then we can be more accurate about what testing is actually designed to do, how much testing is necessary.
00:22:35.000And we can throw out these estimates that suggest that we're going to have to have 20 million tests a day in order so that people can go back to work.
00:22:54.000And this is why you're starting to see states that are reopening businesses, because these states are basically saying, all we can do at this point is do what we can do, which means let responsible citizens be responsible.
00:23:07.000You just have to make sure that the policies that you are taking are indeed responsible, that they balance the risk and the reward of reopening, and that you have enough systems in place so that you can hotspot and contact trace.
00:23:17.000Now, the hotspot and contact tracing, again, are not designed to prevent infection overall over the long haul.
00:23:24.000What they are designed to do is prevent the overwhelming of the health care system.
00:23:27.000So when you look at places that are opening up more, it is a foolish thing, a very foolish thing that the media are doing by focusing in on the near term effect of removal of lockdowns.
00:23:38.000You saw this in their coverage of Sweden.
00:23:42.000Their strategy was more people will be infected in the near term and more people will die in the near term than they will in the Netherlands or than they will in Denmark, right?
00:23:51.000And their policy was, the area under the curve will be the same, but we have not shut down our economy and people are going to continue to go out and they're going to be able to live their lives to a certain extent.
00:23:59.000Our economy will not take the same sort of hit as other economies will take.
00:24:15.000But that's not how you gauge a policy.
00:24:17.000As I said yesterday, the person at the gym who's finally getting in shape and working off the weight and vomiting in the corner looks like a sucker to the guy sitting on the couch.
00:24:26.000But over the course of the next year, when that guy gets in shape and the guy on the couch is struggling for breath, that didn't look like a sucker's play, did it?
00:24:34.000Okay, well, Sweden is basically saying we are trying to do the responsible thing while not destroying our economy.
00:24:40.000And people are like, well, in the near term, there are more.
00:24:42.000Yes, in the near term, there are more infections.
00:24:44.000When we all go back to work, when we all go back to our offices, when kids go back to school, there will be more infections and there will be more deaths.
00:24:50.000And that does not mean that the counter narrative or the counterfactual would have been better, that we stay in our houses for a long period of time, because eventually we're all going to come out.
00:24:59.000Unless somebody comes up with a miracle vaccine.
00:25:02.000All we are doing is buying time and preventing the health care system from being overwhelmed.
00:25:10.000So, with those things in place, all we're gonna really be able to do is minimize...
00:25:15.000The number of people who are elderly and who have pre-existing conditions who are out there in public and that's going to rely on personal responsibility and yes, regulations about visiting nursing homes and such.
00:25:23.000And we are going to put in place some testing and contact tracing such that there aren't these massive spikes in areas that overwhelm the healthcare system.
00:25:30.000But like, can we please be accurate about this?
00:25:32.000When people are being inaccurate, it makes me think that maybe they have that ulterior motive again.
00:25:36.000Because I think there are a lot of ulterior motives running around.
00:25:56.000No, what they said is social distance, walk six feet away from other people, Wear a mask, and then if you want to go walk along the beach, go walk along the beach.
00:26:41.000That's called being responsible because they don't have a lot of cases out there and people are socially distancing.
00:26:46.000Florida's Department of Health website is extraordinary.
00:26:50.000And this is what every Department of Health should have.
00:26:52.000Because when you go to that website, you can see that most of the cases are in southern Florida, in the Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Broward County area.
00:27:01.000And if you look in Jacksonville, they had less than 20 cases.
00:27:05.000What, you mean treating American citizens as though they are responsible actors in a republic?
00:27:23.000How dare people do this sort of stuff?
00:27:25.000OK, so the states that are also coming in for all sorts of criticism include South Carolina and Georgia.
00:27:32.000So according to the New York Times, South Carolina allowed retail shops ranging from department stores to flea markets to reopen on Monday afternoon, shortly after its governor, Henry McMaster, signed an executive order reversing some of the closings he ordered earlier this month.
00:27:42.000On Friday, residents of Georgia will be allowed to return to the gym and get haircuts, pedicures, massages and tattoos.
00:27:48.000According to Governor Brian Kemp, next Monday they can dine in restaurants and go to the movies.
00:27:52.000Tennessee's stay-at-home order will expire April 30th, allowing most businesses there to reopen on May 1st, according to Governor Bill Lee.
00:27:59.000The moves by three Republican governors of southern states to let some businesses reopen came as the outbreak continued to spread in parts of the nation, and as some other governors and public health experts have warned in recent days, the testing remained inadequate to quickly identify and contain new outbreaks.
00:28:12.000Massachusetts has been particularly hard hit recently.
00:28:14.000At the White House briefing on Monday evening, Dr. Deborah Birx, coronavirus response coordinator, noted we still have a significant number of cases in the Boston area and across Massachusetts and Chicago.
00:28:24.000President Trump Outlined non-binding guidelines last week for states to ease the restrictions.
00:28:30.000South Carolina is moving to let its retail stores reopen Monday at 5 p.m., but they have to adhere to social distancing requirements.
00:28:36.000They have to operate at 20% occupancy or at five customers per 1,000 square feet, whichever is less.
00:28:42.000Okay, which by the way, is the same policy that they are undertaking in Germany.
00:28:44.000Opening shops and then telling people that the occupancy is now one fifth, one quarter of what it used to be.
00:28:50.000That's what they have been doing in Europe.
00:28:52.000Okay, so South Carolina's policy is no different from what Europe is doing.
00:28:55.000It also said businesses should not allow customers to congregate within six feet of one another.
00:28:59.000The state plans to reopen public beach access points, piers, docks, and wharves at noon on Tuesday, which again, makes sense.
00:29:05.000This is called responsible citizens being responsible.
00:29:07.000In Georgia, Kemp said at a news conference the state would allow the reopening of gyms, bowling alleys, and salons on Friday.
00:29:13.000He said his decisions would be the operational standard in all jurisdictions.
00:29:17.000He says local action cannot be taken that is more or less restrictive.
00:29:21.000He said that theaters, private social clubs, and dine-in restaurants would be allowed to open April 27th, bars, nightclubs, live performance venues would remain closed, and you are seeing some businesses reopen as soon as next Monday in Tennessee.
00:29:31.000Now, the Georgia order is broader than the South Carolina order, and this is the one that has come under the most scrutiny.
00:29:39.000On a personal level, I think that the riskiest sensors here are probably places like gyms.
00:30:13.000All of these areas are allowed to reopen only with specific social distancing guidelines and sanitation mandates, including enhanced workplace sanitation, The minimum basic operations.
00:30:24.000You have to do this if you want to reopen in Georgia.
00:30:26.000Screening workers for fever and respiratory illness.
00:30:58.000Was their healthcare system overwhelmed?
00:30:59.000If their healthcare system was not overwhelmed, well then, this is just what's called living in public.
00:31:04.000And also, people should use their own best judgment, okay?
00:31:07.000If you are elderly, you should stay indoors.
00:31:09.000If you are away from other people, if you have pre-existing conditions, you should not go out and party it up.
00:31:14.000Everybody should be acting responsibly with masks and social distancing.
00:31:18.000And the way the media are covering this thing is though Kemp did something that is completely evil.
00:31:23.000I, again, don't see that at this point.
00:31:27.000We'll only know if you're responsible if there is a spike and it is not detected by testing and contact tracing because that's the only thing that can be prevented.
00:31:33.000I'm only going to judge the activity of governors by the stuff they can prevent.
00:31:36.000Okay, well, and when I mean the stuff they can prevent, there are going to be people who say, well, you can prevent everything by keeping everybody home forever.
00:31:49.000And they will be doing exactly the same sorts of stuff that Kemp is doing.
00:31:51.000They'll just do it three weeks from now, or a month from now, or six weeks from now.
00:31:54.000And the only way you're going to be able to tell whether Kemp was right or wrong is after a year, what were the death rates in Georgia, Adjusting for population size, adjusting for demographics, adjusting for pre-existing health conditions, versus California.
00:32:08.000People are going to try and judge this thing in real time.
00:32:10.000People are going to try and judge this thing as though there's a spike in cases in Georgia because people are out and about.
00:32:14.000Again, yes, because people are out and about.
00:32:25.000Okay, in a second, we're gonna get to why this is becoming so political.
00:32:29.000And it is becoming really political, because politics always intrude when it comes to massive public policy decisions like all of this.
00:32:35.000We'll get to all of that in a moment, because as you will see, when it comes to pushing priors, As I keep saying, we are now seeing a serious movement on the left to suggest that anybody who wants to reopen in measured, smart fashion, that anybody who actually wants to reopen based on the evidence, wants lives to be lost.
00:32:54.000That's the first resort of people who are full of crap.
00:32:56.000If you ever hear somebody say, this political conversation, I can't even have this conversation.
00:33:32.000Whether it's AOC suggesting that an oil drop is an opportunity to invest in green energy, which of course makes as much sense as a screen door on a submarine or an injector seat on a helicopter.
00:33:42.000Or whether you are a person who is suggesting that we need to completely remake America's economic system because there was a pandemic and because this has exposed all the evils of American society.
00:33:52.000It's why people are saying, I don't want you in control because I think that you actually have conflicting Motives here, not that you want the economy to die, not that you're a bad person, but you think that it's a double win.
00:34:03.000I keep people at home longer and fewer people die in the near term.
00:34:05.000And also this gives me an opportunity to broaden the size and scope of government.
00:34:10.000Well, what if I want the economy to recover?
00:34:12.000Because I think that's actually a priority and a serious thing and people need to have jobs in the private sector.
00:34:16.000Okay, we'll get to more of this in just one second.
00:34:18.000First, being locked inside right now, it requires double the excitement.
00:34:21.000What could be more exciting than, wait for it, look at this, here's one leftist tears tumbler.
00:34:24.000Wait for it, wait for it, wait for it.
00:34:53.000You also get an ad-free website experience, access to all of our live broadcast and show library, the full three hours of The Ben Shapiro Show, access to the mailbag, and now exclusive Election Insight op-eds from me.
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00:35:06.000You also get to participate in All Access Live, that is our brand new interactive program featuring one of us, Daily Wire hosts, as we hang out with you each night, 8 p.m.
00:36:06.000And the politics of the current negotiations over another bailout package, those politics have not ceased either.
00:36:14.000Democrats keep insisting on loading up this bill with more and more and more stuff, including now they want bailouts for states and localities.
00:36:22.000Now, if a state or locality has incurred cost at the behest of the federal government, it makes sense that the federal government should backfill that.
00:36:29.000But, if states and localities are just looking for a bailout for the fact that they've run their states like garbage for years, this seems like a stupid policy.
00:36:35.000And I don't know why California's mismanagement should be the fault of Texas.
00:36:39.000I don't know why New York's state deficit should be the fault of Texas.
00:36:42.000Right now, according to the Washington Post, I believe, a Republican and Democrat in the Senate are proposing a $500 billion fund for state and local governments as part of the next comprehensive rescue package from Congress.
00:36:56.000Apparently, they want $150 billion from municipalities' virus expenses, but that was the one in March.
00:37:04.000It provided for virus expenses, but it didn't address budget shortfalls.
00:37:22.000That is just as political as people asking for bailouts of companies that don't deserve a bailout.
00:37:26.000That weren't damaged by this, just ran their companies badly.
00:37:30.000Meanwhile, speaking of, again, the partisan politics here, The New York Times is suggesting this thing became political because of the right wing, right?
00:37:40.000The line is that the right wing has made this political.
00:37:43.000Jeremy Peters reporting for The New York Times.
00:37:45.000He has a piece called, How Abortion, Guns, and Church Closings Made Coronavirus a Culture War.
00:37:50.000He says, This is what it looks like when a pandemic collides with the culture wars in America.
00:37:54.000The mayor of Louisville, Kentucky warned churches that holding services on Easter Sunday would defy the city's social distancing guidelines.
00:38:00.000Mitch McConnell answered with a stern letter arguing religious people should not be singled out for disfavored treatment.
00:38:04.000The Democratic governor in Michigan extended bans on certain outdoor activities to include using motorboats.
00:38:09.000Conservatives called her an authoritarian and caricatured her moves to slap at people who enjoy the outdoors.
00:38:14.000Even though firearm stores remain free to do business in most of the country, The NRA has a stark message for gun owners.
00:38:18.000They want your guns, and they want them all.
00:38:20.000This is what Charlie Daniels said in a promotional video.
00:38:30.000Well, maybe it's inflaming passions because the policies have been patchwork inconsistent and having nothing to do with public health.
00:38:36.000Christine Whitmer, Gretchen Whitmer, rather, in Michigan, is telling people they cannot take a motorboat out on the lake.
00:38:44.000But they can take a boat that does not have a motor out on the lake, by the way.
00:38:49.000So no buying seeds at the local Target, but definitely make sure you can have an abortion.
00:38:52.000An essential service to have an abortion.
00:38:55.000Is that maybe her not actually saying something about public health, but saying something about politics?
00:38:59.000When you have people suggesting that churches should be singled out as places for public gathering, not just general policy saying don't get together in big groups, and that includes everything from churches to social groups to movie theaters, right?
00:39:13.000And by the way, I'm a religious person who goes to synagogue regularly, and I was advocating for the shutdown of synagogues before like anybody else.
00:39:21.000I specifically avoided Purim parties in my neighborhood because of all of this.
00:39:27.000There's a difference between that and singling out religious institutions.
00:39:30.000Could it be that maybe the reaction has been driven by the petty authoritarianism of people who seem to be reveling in their newfound authority?
00:39:38.000Could it be that a lot of people in the media have been pumping up a political vision of this in which President Trump is to blame for every ill, but every governor who takes an authoritarian action is somehow a hero?
00:39:50.000Could it be that when the media prop up Andrew Cuomo as somehow being America's governor at a time when he completely blew it in New York, by the way?
00:39:56.000According to the New York Times, he blew it in New York.
00:39:58.000He should have shut down a week and a half earlier, two weeks earlier.
00:40:02.000And then they propped him up as like a hero because he kept yelling about how the federal government needed to send ventilators.
00:40:07.000And as Rich Lowry has written in National Review, the federal government did send ventilators.
00:40:10.000And New York did not need 40,000 ventilators.
00:40:12.000And the federal government was trying to be flexible so other states would also have access to ventilators.
00:40:17.000And when all of that happened, the media portrayed it as though Trump was evil and Cuomo was good.
00:40:22.000Is it possible this thing was political and then the right is responding to the politicization and saying, well, it seems to me that I can't trust you to be honest about this sort of stuff.
00:40:30.000Is it possible this got political when you have a poll out today that shows that 60% of Democrats say that Trump is more to blame for the current crisis than China is?
00:41:03.000Is it possible that when we look at people on the left who are eager and just jumping, champing at the bit to remake the entire American system, to tear down the private healthcare system, to tear down free markets, to suggest massive redistribution and slavery reparations and all sorts of leftist goodies they wanted five minutes ago, but now they want on the back of a pandemic?
00:41:23.000Is it possible that we're saying to you guys, well, maybe you have an ulterior motive here?
00:41:28.000I'm seeing piece after piece released suggesting that America sucks.
00:41:31.000This is the new talking point, is that America sucks and therefore we need vast change.
00:41:38.000Again, this is what is driving a lot of the resistance.
00:41:41.000Like, okay, well, if my choice is that I have to look at America being turned upside down and inside out, and the nature of America changed deeply because of the pandemic,
00:41:53.000If I wait three more weeks or six more weeks to go back to work so that the testing is slightly better, or I can go back to work now and urge my governor to go back to work now because the testing is already sufficient, or I think the testing will be ramped up in the next two weeks and I want to get back to work and I don't want to rely on government benefits and I don't want to spend the next 60 days entrenching government largesse, then I'm evil, right?
00:42:15.000If that's the logic of the left, then I think this is a little bit political.
00:42:19.000And the media are so dishonest in all of this.
00:42:21.000There's honest good-faith disagreement about what is the actual tipping point when you can actually go back to work, right?
00:42:26.000That's an actual good-faith argument that can be had based on data.
00:42:28.000We have the argument every day here, right?
00:42:30.000I've had conversations with nearly every health expert at the top of government about this.
00:43:00.000He says that the only people who want to reopen, they only want to reopen because they want a haircut.
00:43:05.000This is the most dismissive, garbage, bullcrap I've heard in a long time.
00:43:08.000That the reason that people want to go back to work and have a job is because they want a haircut?
00:43:14.000No, Don, I'm pretty sure it's because there are people who are now going to food banks because they don't have food in their fridge.
00:43:19.000Don Lemon is over at the CNN studios with a job and with a salary.
00:43:24.000And Chris Cuomo is able to work from home even with coronavirus.
00:43:27.000How about all the people who don't have jobs today and who have had their dreams stripped away as their small business has been tanked by the economy and tanked by the force of the federal and state governments?
00:43:37.000Don Lemon sneering at people who want to go back to work.
00:43:40.000Maybe I think if you mischaracterize your opposition this badly, then maybe I don't trust you when it comes to broad scale public policy.
00:44:43.000And when you see, again, members of the media who are just, they cannot contain themselves at the amount of change they want to perform on the American system, on the back of this thing, it makes people suspicious.
00:45:13.000If anything good emerges out of this period, says this columnist, it might be an awakening to the pre-existing conditions of our body politic.
00:45:18.000We are not as healthy as we thought we were.
00:45:20.000The biological virus afflicting individuals is a social virus.
00:45:23.000Its symptoms, inequality, callousness, selfishness, a profit motive that undervalues human life and overvalues commodities, were for too long masked by the hearty good cheer of American exceptionalism, the readiness of someone a few steps away from a heart attack.
00:45:37.000Oh, you mean, you know, the profit motive that's actually getting people to produce the masks and the ventilators and all of the medical equipment and the PPEs and that is keeping our hospitals open in flexible fashion in a way Italy was not able to and the NHS in Britain was not able to?
00:45:49.000The eagerness, the desire to completely remake the American economy on the back of a pandemic?
00:45:55.000Yeah, it makes me suspicious that you are fine with staying at home because yes, you get to claim that you are saving more lives in the near term and also you get to then perform all the changes you've always wanted to perform.
00:46:06.000This columnist says, even if America, as we know it, survives the coronavirus, it can hardly emerge unscathed.
00:46:10.000If the illusion of invincibility is shredded for any patient who survives a near-fatal experience, what might die after COVID-19 is a myth.
00:46:29.000And that America has a history of settler colonization and capitalism that ruthlessly exploited natural resources and people, typically the poor, the migratory, the black, and the brown.
00:46:39.000That history manifests itself today in our impulse to hoard, knowing we live in an economy of self-reliance and scarcity and our dependence on the cheap labor of women and racial minorities.
00:46:48.000Okay, and then you're telling me to stay home?
00:46:51.000The general response of Americans to this is going to be, people like you are telling me to stay home?
00:47:06.000And this is not the only article like this.
00:47:08.000Charlie Warzel, the opinion writer at large for the New York Times, has a piece today called, Protesting for the Freedom to Catch the Coronavirus.
00:47:15.000The Reopen America protests are the logical conclusion of a twisted liberty movement.
00:47:21.000He says, at a string of small Reopen America protests across the country this week, maskless citizens proudly flouted social distancing guidelines while openly carrying semi-automatic rifles and waving American flags and signs with ironic swastikas.
00:47:33.000He's not going after the majority of people there who were socially distancing and just holding signs like, I want to get back to work.
00:47:38.000He finds the craziest people in the crowd, which is the easiest game in American politics.
00:47:43.000But the idea is that this is just like the Tea Party, because the Tea Party was a bunch of nuts who wanted smaller government, and so are these people.
00:48:01.000You want to know why people are not paying attention to your recommendations on policy?
00:48:03.000Because we don't believe you that you are honest about what you think it will take to stop the pandemic and what it will take to get back working again.
00:48:09.000We think that you want to change the American economy and that you are more than happy to sit around until that happens.
00:48:14.000All right, time for a thing I like and then some things that I hate.
00:48:35.000Alex Garland and Alex Griswold works here.
00:48:38.000Anyway, Alex Garland and Devs is basically the premise is that they've designed a machine that is capable of Of identifying down to the most microscopic portions of any physical object, everything about that object, which means that you can then extrapolate out from that thing all of past and all of future.
00:49:00.000So the basic metaphor that's used in the series is that if you push a pencil and it rolls across the desk and you could measure the pencil, like really measure the movement of the pencil, you could see how much force is applied on it.
00:49:09.000You could fill in how hard it was pushed, who pushed it, what that person's body mass was.
00:49:14.000You could actually extrapolate the past and the future, how fast that's going to roll.
00:49:18.000And so, the whole series is about determinism and free will.
00:50:13.000Okay, time for some things that I hate.
00:50:15.000So, as I say, there's been a complete push on the left for this idea that we need to completely remake the American system because this is pre—it's exposing all of the evils of American society, So as I say, there's been a complete push on the left for this idea that we need to completely remake the American system because this is pre it's exposing all of the evils of American society, which is amazing because basically we now have an unfalsifiable thesis from the left.
00:50:34.000If things are going really well, that's a mask for all the bad things happening in American society.
00:50:38.000If things are going really poorly, then that is exposing all of the bad things that are happening in American society.
00:50:43.000So no matter how you slice it, bad things are happening and it requires complete remaking of the system.
00:50:47.000Elizabeth Warren, the senator, was pushing this nonsense.
00:50:50.000She was suggesting that the disparities in health outcomes for black and white women, it has to be because health care professionals are racist or something.
00:50:57.000I mean, really, this is what she is pushing.
00:50:59.000She's pushing the disparities in black maternity mortality statistics, which has been pushed by everybody from Stacey Abrams to The New York Times.
00:51:07.000Neglecting to mention the fact, by the way, that there are racial disparities in outcomes in Europe as well, which doesn't have the same history as the United States, obviously.
00:51:15.000And also neglects to mention that there are pre-existing conditions that run concomitant to race.
00:51:21.000It's not caused by race, but there's crossover that largely explain Black maternal mortality rates being higher, namely malnutrition in the womb, obesity of mothers, right?
00:51:32.000These are things that help explain the disparity in black maternal mortality rate.
00:51:37.000Okay, with all of that said, Elizabeth Warren making the common and obvious error of mistaking all inequality for an underlying structural inequity.
00:52:02.000And why it is so important to raise this issue because It's not like somebody deliberately says, oh, you know, I'm not going to pay attention.
00:52:14.000And if you don't raise awareness about it and get some accountability in the system, too many people say, well, I didn't have anything to do with that.
00:52:25.000Okay, well, what if they didn't have anything to do with that and it wasn't them?
00:52:27.000I mean, like, again, the idea is that now you're going to attribute all of the inequalities in a system to current people doing bad things that they don't even know they are doing.
00:52:39.000Now we are attributing motives to people that they don't have themselves, but deep in the recesses of their brain, they're still a little racist, and that is why you are getting these outcomes.
00:52:47.000I mean, strange that everything amounts to the same.
00:52:50.000It doesn't matter what happens in front of the equal sign.
00:52:53.000It doesn't matter what the equation is in front of the equal sign.
00:53:42.000Even in times this weird, conservative media is like Earth 2.
00:53:48.000All the rest of us are on Earth One, and they are on a completely different planet in terms of what the news is and what it means to cover it.
00:53:56.000And the conservative media is as influential as they ever were, if not more so, when it comes to Republican elected officials and conservative voters in the Republican Party base.
00:54:06.000But the conservative media, the most influential parts of it, really are living in and describing and now promoting a completely different world than the one that all the rest of us live on.
00:54:19.000Okay, you know, the one that you live on, Rachel Maddow, is the one where you are operating from a studio and getting your salary paid.
00:54:24.000That's the world that you are living on.
00:54:26.000The world that Chris Cuomo is living in, that's the world that everyone in CNN is living in.
00:54:30.000All the members of the media do not live the same lives as the 30 million people who are now unemployed.
00:54:34.000They do not live the same lives as the small business owners who sunk their life savings into a restaurant to watch it disappear.
00:54:38.000They are not living in the same world as people who actually were living on the bubble and now need to go make a living.
00:54:45.000They're not living in the same world as you.
00:54:47.000This is why you end up with ridiculous comedian Patton Oswalt tweeting out over the weekend, just, you know, we say that it's a sacrifice.
00:54:54.000You can always just sit home and just watch Netflix.
00:54:56.000No, Patton Oswalt can sit in his mansion and watch Netflix.
00:54:58.000There are a bunch of people who actually don't have a full fridge.
00:55:06.000So the RNC put out an ad about Nancy Pelosi.
00:55:09.000So I showed you a clip the other day of Nancy Pelosi Standing in front of a very expensive fridge.
00:55:14.000And again, I'm all for very expensive fridges, but I'm also for people being able to work so that they can afford food in their fridge.
00:55:20.000Apparently, Nancy Pelosi is not for that.
00:55:22.000So she's holding up funding for small businesses, and she's standing in front of this fridge talking about how it's stocked with expensive gelato, chocolate ice cream.
00:55:30.000And the RNC cut this viciously brutal ad.
00:55:32.000It is perfectly honest, and it does demonstrate the disconnect.
00:56:36.000So, Bill de Blasio today tweeted out, or his office tweeted out, that when this is all over, they want to hold a ticker tape parade for healthcare workers.
00:56:42.000Now, I'm all for rewarding healthcare workers, but a ticker tape parade sounds like a very, very bad idea.
00:56:48.000At this time, what the hell are we talking about?
00:56:49.000That wasn't even his most delusional comment of the last 36 hours.
00:56:52.000My favorite, I did enjoy this, I did enjoy this, is Bill de Blasio And New York officials have decided that it is worthwhile to release inmates from Rikers Island.
00:57:00.000Rikers is the jail facility where people are being held before trial.
00:57:05.000And they decided we're not going to hold people.
00:57:47.000I've not seen a huge amount, but any amount is obviously troubling, and I think it's unconscionable just on a human level that folks were shown mercy, and this is what some of them have done, but, you know, it's a small number of people.
00:58:03.000And you know, it's troubling and it's unconscionable.
00:58:14.000Because Bill de Blasio doesn't exist in the same world as the rest of you peons.
00:58:18.000He's walking in the park with his wife.
00:58:20.000Bill de Blasio doesn't live in your world.
00:58:24.000The double standard that applies to people in positions of political and media power, it does allow them an enormous amount of wiggle room when it comes to declaring that everything is basically manageable as it currently stands.
00:58:40.000It is not manageable as it currently stands.
00:58:42.000And this is why you have to independently assess, and everybody should independently assess, what are the risk factors, the risks and the rewards of the policies that we are paying attention to?
00:58:53.000Anybody who gives you an easy answer, oh, we should open up right now, or we should close up right now, what the conditions are, nobody has an easy answer.
00:59:00.000Anyone who suggests an easy answer is lying to you.
00:59:03.000There's no answer that reduces the risk to zero.
00:59:05.000There is no answer that is going to completely save the economy in the absence of underlying demand.
00:59:12.000So take everything with a grain of salt.
00:59:14.000And I guess now we have to examine the motives of our public policymakers because they're making fairly obvious that many of them do have, in fact, ulterior motives and are disconnected from the worries of many people in American society.
00:59:25.000And that's what's driving a lot of the political unrest.
00:59:27.000You want to know how this became political?
00:59:28.000Because, for a lot of people, it never stopped being political.
00:59:32.000Alrighty, we'll be back here a little bit later today with two additional hours of content.
00:59:35.000Otherwise, we'll see you here tomorrow.
01:00:08.000Hey everybody, it's Andrew Klavan, host of The Andrew Klavan Show.
01:00:10.000You know, some people are depressed because the American Republic is collapsing, the end of days is approaching, and the moon has turned to blood.
01:00:17.000But on The Andrew Klavan Show, that's where the fun just gets started.