Dr. Anthony Fauci makes waves before the Senate, Los Angeles makes moves to lockdown until, well, forever, and Democrats push a $3 Trillion wishlist. Ben Shapiro: This is The Ben Shapiro Show, and it's sponsored by ExpressVPN. Why haven t you gotten a VPN yet? Visit ExpressVPN to get a FREE VPN trial, and get 20% off your first purchase when you enter the invite code: "VPN" at signup.org/BenShapiroShow. You can also join the "Sign Up" and "Become a Member" mailing list, and receive a FREE gift when you sign up! Sign up HERE to receive the FREE gift HERE! You'll get access to all of Ben Shapiro's newest books, "The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F(asterisk) as well as "The Dark Side Of," "The New York Times Bestseller," "Vanity Fair," and "The Huffington Post's" "Most Influential Person." Subscribe here to receive weekly epsiode releases, plus special bonus episodes throughout the week, plus weekly bonus episodes, and "special limited-edition hardcover copies of the books you've been reading and listening to throughout the past week." You won't get a chance to review the books Ben has written and won't be able to access anywhere else! Thanks to Ben Shapiro for the book "Noah's New book, "Mr. Ben Shapiro, " " and " " " and "And so much more! " Subscribe to his new book "Here's the link to watch it on Amazon Prime Video and "More than that and more " " Subscribe to His Insta Story? Subscribe and review it on iTunes and "This Is It's That and This Is That And This And This & This and This And That And That & This And More! Subscribe It's Also That And More at His Freebie Thanks & Review It's More than That and More at This and More ... Thank You, Subscribe and Reviewed It's And This Is This & More at My Reviewed Here's My Review And More And This and His Story And More, And His Story, Here's His Story On This And His And His Review And His Free Story And His Music And His & His Story on His Story and More And His Work And His Video And His Podcasts And More...
00:01:32.000The fact that we are now looking to sort of delegate all decision-making authority to the experts is the tail end of the progressive era stupidity that suggested that if we just gave all power to the quote-unquote experts in governments, then everything would magically be solved.
00:01:49.000Now, experts are good for what experts are good for.
00:01:50.000Experts are good for knowing a lot of things about one particular subject, but they're not famous for knowing lots of things about lots of particular subjects.
00:01:58.000If you ask Dr. Fauci about Keynesian versus Milton Friedman-esque economics, my guess is that he wouldn't know much more than the average guy.
00:02:05.000But if you ask him about disease vectors, then he probably knows a lot more than the average guy.
00:02:08.000Asking him to be the sole policymaker is really foolhardy.
00:02:15.000And so the sort of move from the left to appoint Dr. Fauci the head of government when he is not the head of government, or to use him as a club to wield against elected officials, all of whom are answerable to us, The fact that people on the left want to do that, and then the fact that people on the right are responding to that by blaming Fauci, as though Fauci is to blame for lawmakers abdicating their duty and just pointing to Fauci and going, well, he's going to solve all of our problems.
00:02:39.000I mean, frankly, I think that Dr. Fauci would be the first person to say that it's stupidity.
00:02:43.000He is there to provide medical knowledge and guidance.
00:02:46.000And then it is up to us to determine what risks we are willing to undertake as a society.
00:02:50.000What this means is that when people like Dr. Fauci, when public health experts testify publicly, they're always going to testify on behalf of caution.
00:02:57.000Because their job is to first do no harm on a public health level, not an economic level, not on a freedom level, not on a constitutional level, not on a governmental level.
00:03:06.000Their first job is to say, how do we save the most lives?
00:03:09.000Well, in the middle of a pandemic, the easy answer, if you're not looking at any of the other factors, is stay home until we have some sort of therapeutic or until we have some sort of vaccine.
00:03:17.000But of course, there are other factors to take into account when it comes to public policymaking, such as the fact that we may never have a vaccine.
00:03:24.000Or a therapeutic may not be all that effective.
00:03:25.000And the fact that 30 million people have lost their jobs in the last six weeks.
00:03:28.000And that there are countervailing costs to people losing their jobs, losing their livelihoods, 100,000 small businesses shutting down.
00:03:34.000This is where it is up to our public officials, the people who we actually elect, our elected officials, to weigh the evidence that Dr. Fauci is providing and his advice, with the evidence provided by economists, with the values that we hold dear as a nation.
00:03:47.000I mean, just take a different example for a second.
00:03:49.000In a wartime, let's say that you were to ask a public health expert in wartime, what is the best policy?
00:03:54.000Well, public health expert's job is to save as many lives as possible.
00:03:56.000And so the public health expert would say, best strategy here is probably not to do the war, right?
00:04:01.000No war is good because that means few people are going to get shot and killed.
00:04:04.000But if you are an elected official and it's World War II, you know that there are going to be a certain number of people who are going to have to risk their lives on the beaches of Normandy.
00:04:11.000This is not to suggest that the public health experts are wrong about everything.
00:04:14.000This is to suggest that everybody has their own specific area of expertise, and to pretend that this means a broad area of expertise is really foolish.
00:04:21.000And in a republic, we rely on the notion that a diffuse level of value judgment among the American population is going to be better than any one individual's values.
00:04:31.000That the American people overall are going to be wiser about weighing all of these factors in balance when they elect people than just one guy who's part of a bureaucracy.
00:04:40.000We'll get to what Dr. Fauci had to say yesterday, because in that light, I don't think what he had to say was all that controversial, but I think there are politicians who are completely looking to abdicate responsibility for their actual decision-making role in American politics right now, and simply shouting, data and science and public health officials, look what Fauci is saying, look what, look what Birx is saying, look what all the scientists are saying.
00:05:01.000You're supposed to take all that into consideration, and then you are supposed to weigh all of the values that are currently under consideration.
00:05:06.000Plus, you're supposed to determine the level of certainty that public health officials are expressing about the future generally.
00:05:15.000Because experts may be more expert than you, but that does not mean that they have 100% certain knowledge of the future.
00:05:20.000And we'll get to all of that in just one second.
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00:07:13.000And again, Dr. Fauci is only going to get blamed if there are excess deaths.
00:07:17.000This is the other thing you have to understand about job description.
00:07:19.000If your job description is you're a doctor and somebody comes in and they're looking for a cancer screening, you're only going to get sued for malpractice if you miss the cancer.
00:07:27.000You're not going to get sued for malpractice if you do too many tests.
00:07:31.000If you run too many tests, you're not going to get sued for malpractice.
00:07:33.000If you miss the cancer and the person dies, you're going to get sued for malpractice.
00:07:35.000Okay, so now take that to epidemiology.
00:07:37.000If you are Dr. Fauci and you recommend a full-scale lockdown forever, You're never going to get blamed for excess deaths, because first of all, that's never going to happen, and you recommend it against it.
00:07:46.000And number two, that is the do no harm principle on a medical front.
00:07:50.000You are going to get blamed if you're like, you know what?
00:07:53.000If you're young, then first of all, everything is not basically okay.
00:07:55.000But if you are young, then you are very unlikely to get a serious case of this disease and you are extraordinarily unlikely to die.
00:08:02.000If you are older, then you should probably shelter in place.
00:08:04.000If Fauci were to say something like that and be clear about the actual Chances of something terrible happening to you based on age and based on pre-existing condition?
00:08:12.000Like, it's amazing to me that we are now how many months into this thing and we still cannot get straight answers from our public officials about what are your chances if you're 20 years old and healthy of dying of COVID-19?
00:08:30.000It is a chance that you are willing to take to go back to work and enjoy your life, obviously.
00:08:34.000But if you are an epidemiologist, you only get blamed if you say that things are, you know, basically okay for particular sectors of the population and then there's an unexpected outbreak and you get blamed for that.
00:08:45.000You never get blamed in the field of epidemiology and prediction science for being overly pessimistic.
00:08:50.000You only get blamed for being overly optimistic.
00:08:52.000Every time there's a massive economic downturn, everybody who said, oh, the Dow was headed for $35,000, all those people are like, oh, you idiot.
00:08:58.000The Dow was headed for $35,000, you moron.
00:09:02.000And the person who's like, well, I told you there was going to be doom.
00:09:05.000And then that one time there was doom, like, oh, I told you there was going to be doom.
00:09:08.000All you have to do, if you are a pessimist in the field of public health or predictions or any of this sort of stuff, is to be right once.
00:09:14.000You don't have to be right 10,000 times, you have to be right once.
00:09:16.000If you're an optimist, you have to be right every single time, because the one time that you are wrong, everybody is going to say to you, well, if it weren't for you and your optimism, then there would be this many people alive, wouldn't there?
00:09:25.000And it doesn't matter that the optimistic take is right 9 times out of 10.
00:09:29.000We're only going to blame you for the downside risk.
00:09:32.000So here is Dr. Fauci yesterday before the Senate, and he says that the U.S.
00:09:34.000death rate is unacceptable compared to other countries.
00:09:36.000Now, again, the way that he's phrasing this is kind of silly.
00:09:40.000The reality is that every death is quote-unquote unacceptable.
00:09:43.000Is anybody, like, happy with the levels of death in the United States?
00:09:45.000But compared to other industrialized countries, the United States is actually not doing particularly poorly.
00:09:49.000We're right in the middle of the pack when it comes to Europe.
00:09:52.000If you take New York out of the calculations, and New York was obviously the hardest hit and is sort of an outlier in terms of population density.
00:09:59.000If you take New York out of the picture, the United States ranks kind of near Germany, like closer to Germany in terms of death per million population.
00:10:05.000Here's Dr. Fauci, though, saying that the U.S.
00:10:06.000death rate is unacceptable compared to other countries.
00:10:10.000The death rate in the United States, especially when compared with other nations, is unacceptable, isn't it?
00:10:18.000I mean, a death rate that high is something that in any manner or form, in my mind, is unacceptable.
00:10:52.000For folks who can't see, he's wearing a bandana around his neck directly from the assassination of Jesse James by the coward Robert Ford, 2007.
00:11:05.000But that's an obvious gotcha by Kaine.
00:11:06.000And Fauci is being Fairly circumspect in the way that he's phrasing this stuff because, again, his job is to be an epidemiologist, not to be a policymaker.
00:11:14.000So Fauci also says there could be consequences if we reopen too quickly.
00:11:19.000It is also true that he's only going to get blamed if we reopen too quickly.
00:11:23.000Meaning, what do you think he's going to say?
00:11:24.000Guys, go out, willy-nilly, have at it.
00:11:26.000He's, of course, not going to say that.
00:11:28.000If he says, you know, we set some standards for being careful, and if we hold to those standards, then I think that we will suffer less death than if we don't hold to them.
00:11:49.000The consequences could be really serious, particularly, and this is something that I think we also should pay attention to, that states even if they're doing it at an appropriate pace, which many of them are and will, namely a pace that's commensurate with the dynamics of the outbreak, that they have in place already
00:12:12.000The capability that when there will be cases, there is no doubt, even under the best of circumstances, when you pull back on mitigation, you will see some cases appear.
00:12:32.000But he's not actually setting a standard as to what he thinks is a safe level of infection, because the truth is Fauci doesn't know the answer to that.
00:12:38.000What Fauci knows is that if you let people out of lockdown, then more people will be infected, more people will die.
00:12:43.000But we are going to have to let people out of lockdown.
00:12:46.000And you know who is best situated to make these decisions?
00:12:48.000Individual governors who are answerable to people.
00:12:50.000Because the fact is voters are going to have to decide whether they think their governors did a good job in protecting them and also protecting the economy.
00:12:56.000By the way, worth noting, Brian Kemp, the governor of Georgia, who's been ripped up and down, the infection rates in his state are not spiking yet.
00:13:11.000No overwhelming infection rates in Texas.
00:13:13.000In fact, it seems like things are kind of spiking faster in California than they are in some of these other states, and California is still in full-scale lockdown.
00:13:18.000Okay, so Rand Paul makes this point yesterday, and he's ripped up and down by the left for making it, but Rand Paul says, I don't think that you're the be-all end-all.
00:13:24.000Now, the only part about this that I object to seriously is I'm not sure that Fauci thinks he's the be-all end-all.
00:13:28.000In fact, Fauci sort of admits it, right?
00:13:29.000So Rand Paul says, listen, I don't think that you're the decision-maker.
00:13:32.000I think we're the decision-maker, and you're here to provide information.
00:13:36.000Rand Paul, by the way, is a medical doctor, so here's Rand Paul.
00:13:39.000He doesn't have to wear the mask because, obviously, he's already had COVID-19, so he can walk around like he's bulletproof at this point.
00:13:44.000Here's Senator Rand Paul growing a pandemic beard as well.
00:13:47.000One thing that I'm enjoying about this is apparently everybody is now going to dress and grow facial hair like we are in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, which, I mean, honestly, kind of cool.
00:13:59.000Like I could go I want to see some handlebar mustaches.
00:14:01.000I want to see some Ambrose Burnside sideburns.
00:14:03.000I want to see like like the like let's go full out at this point.
00:14:12.000As much as I respect you, Dr. Fauci, I don't think you're the end all.
00:14:15.000I don't think you're the one person that gets to make a decision.
00:14:18.000We can listen to your advice, but there are people on the other side saying there's not going to be a surge and that we can safely open the economy.
00:14:26.000But if we keep kids out of school for another year, what's going to happen is the poor and underprivileged kids who don't have a parent that's able to teach them at home We're not going to learn for a full year.
00:14:35.000Senator Paul, thank you for your comments.
00:14:37.000I have never made myself out to be the end all and only voice in this.
00:14:41.000I'm a scientist, a physician, and a public health official.
00:14:44.000I give advice according to the best scientific evidence.
00:14:48.000There are a number of other people who come into that and give advice that are more related to the things that you spoke about, about the need to get the country back open again and economically.
00:14:59.000I don't give advice about economic things.
00:15:02.000I don't give advice about anything other than public health.
00:15:12.000I mean, everyone should be on the same team, which is we have to take the advice and then we have to calculate that in whatever formula we're using for when reopening is good and possible.
00:15:20.000And as Rand Paul points out, You know, the level of certainty that experts have had in making predictions has been off pretty much every step of the way.
00:15:27.000Sometimes too high, sometimes too low.
00:15:29.000As more data comes in, hopefully the predictions get better.
00:15:32.000And we also have to kind of decide which experts know best, because the experts do conflict with each other fairly widely, as I'm going to talk about in just a moment.
00:15:38.000I mean, it turns out a lot of the models originally were quite wrong.
00:15:42.000It also turns out a lot of the public health officials don't know crap about stuff.
00:15:45.000I mean, like, I think Fauci actually knows some things.
00:15:47.000Let me just tell you, the public health officials in California, they don't know a damn thing.
00:15:50.000I mean, seriously, the policies that they are trotting out at this point are some of the dumbest policies I've ever seen, and they frankly have no qualifications to make these policies.
00:15:58.000Like, seriously, they don't even have the qualifications of a Fauci or a Birx in terms of, you know, like an actual medical degree to make these sort of qualifications.
00:16:07.000I think the one-size-fits-all that we're going to have a national strategy and nobody's going to go to school is kind of ridiculous.
00:16:12.000We really ought to be doing it school district by school district.
00:16:15.000And the power needs to be dispersed because people make wrong predictions.
00:16:20.000And really the history of this, when we look back, will be of wrong prediction after wrong prediction after wrong prediction, starting with Ferguson in England.
00:16:28.000So I think we ought to have a little bit of humility in our belief that we know what's best for the economy.
00:16:35.000Okay, that of course is exactly right.
00:16:51.000They have a higher death rate per million than we do.
00:16:53.000If they had locked down their nursing homes, which is something they acknowledged they should have done, Sweden would be in the best shape of anybody and it would not really be close because there's not going to be a second wave in Sweden.
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00:17:38.000And as we reopen the economy, there are going to be businesses that are looking to staff up and hire up.
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00:18:18.000Okay, so speaking of the models and the experts, when we talk about expertise, we have to determine what exactly is the level of expertise of which we are speaking.
00:18:25.000So, there's a good piece in The Spectator, the UK Spectator, by Johan Norberg.
00:18:30.000And he writes about the modeling with regard to Sweden.
00:18:33.000He says Maria Gunther and Maria Westholm in Dagens Nyheter, Sweden's biggest daily, just took a look at two of the most influential models in Sweden.
00:18:39.000Both were inspired by the Imperial College study and published on the preprint server medRxiv in April.
00:18:46.000Both were used by critics to argue the Swedish model would quickly break our healthcare system and that we had to make a U-turn into lockdown as Britain did.
00:18:54.000There was one by a guy named Shiodan that said that the critical care demand would peak above 16,000 patients per day by early May, and pre-pandemic intensive care unit capacity would be exceeded by a factor of 30.
00:19:05.000Then there was a second study that was even more pessimistic, showing a peak of over 20,000 patients by early May, with an ICU requirement about 40 times the actual capacity.
00:19:14.000Sweden's public health agency rejected the models and instead planned for a worst-case scenario that was much less pessimistic, suggesting a peak around 1,700 ICU patients in the middle of May.
00:19:22.000That was still more than three times the pre-pandemic capacity.
00:19:33.000In fact, it wasn't exceeded by a factor of three.
00:19:36.000At this moment, when the model suggested Sweden would have 30 to 40 patients fighting over every available ICU bed, there was spare capacity in beds, equipment and personnel of around 30%, One of those models predicted that Sweden would have 82,000 COVID-19 deaths by the 1st of July, or 1,000 deaths every day since the paper was published in mid-April.
00:19:52.000The total number of COVID-19 deaths at the time of writing is 3,313.
00:19:57.000One reason the models failed is that they underestimated how millions of people spontaneously adapt to new circumstances.
00:20:30.000Now there are some people who are just going to shake their fist at the moon and be like, you know, I'm going to go make out with a stranger at a restaurant.
00:20:37.000The vast majority of people are not doing that.
00:20:39.000And that means that all of the predictions about mass carnage Are probably wrong.
00:20:43.000They're probably off fairly substantially.
00:20:45.000It is also necessary to point out that people who are being pushed forward as experts in many cases, policy makers and quote-unquote experts, are not, in fact, experts.
00:20:53.000Okay, so for example, in L.A., there's a woman named Dr. Barbara Ferrer.
00:20:57.000County Department of Public Health, right?
00:21:29.000What's actually happening here is that the county of Los Angeles is trying to create a legal excuse for telling people they don't have to pay their rent.
00:21:35.000That's really what's actually going on here.
00:21:37.000What they want to say to people in LA is, sure, we're in lockdown.
00:21:40.000And because we're in lockdown, and I'm putting lockdown in air quotes for those who can't see, we're in lockdown, which doesn't mean you can't go to work.
00:21:45.000It just means you don't have to pay your rent.
00:21:47.000That's what LA County is attempting to do.
00:21:48.000We're going to jack landlords is basically the idea here.
00:21:51.000It makes sense on a mortgage level because you can add months to the back of the mortgage, right?
00:21:55.000What doesn't make a whole hell of a lot of sense is doing that with regard to rent.
00:22:00.000County Board of Supervisors and the Public Health Department decide that because of lockdown, you don't have to pay your rent while we're in the middle of lockdown.
00:22:08.000Let's say that that one-year lease expires at the end of lockdown.
00:22:12.000Is the landlord going to receive back rent?
00:22:14.000Or is the landlord just going to be out a year of rent?
00:22:16.000I mean, it's fairly obvious what exactly is happening here.
00:22:19.000There's a reason that landlords, I mean, I know landlords in LA, they're already saying, okay, I want to sell my building, get the hell out of here.
00:22:24.000There's going to be such epic flight from Los Angeles after this is over.
00:22:36.000But speaking of Dr. Barbara Ferrer, let me talk about her qualifications for a second.
00:22:41.000So why exactly is she the head of public health in LA County?
00:22:44.000What are her, what are her bona fides?
00:22:45.000Well, she was executive director of the Boston Public Health Commission, where she led a range of public health programs and built innovative partnerships to address inequities in health outcomes and support healthy communities and healthy families.
00:22:55.000She secured federal, state, and local funding for critical public health infrastructure and community-based programs.
00:23:00.000Okay, so what exactly is her background in science?
00:23:04.000Well, she has a PhD in Social Welfare from Brandeis.
00:23:06.000She has a Master of Arts in Public Health.
00:23:08.000Master of Arts, not Master of Sciences.
00:23:10.000Master of Arts in Public Health from Boston University.
00:23:13.000A Master of Arts in Education from University of Massachusetts, Boston.
00:23:16.000A Bachelor of Arts in Community Studies from UC Santa Cruz.
00:23:20.000So in other words, what is the evidence that this person is scientifically knowledgeable in any actual way?
00:23:53.000Like the 17-year-old whose main accomplishment in life is going around and screaming at adults about how angry she is.
00:23:59.000That's literally, like, she's an expert on yelling at adults.
00:24:03.000Listen to the experts, guys, especially small children who are screaming at you about how we need to destroy the... First of all, I think in terms of the economic impact of all of this, let's be real, the Green New Deal that she has proposed is exactly what is happening right now.
00:24:16.000So if you're enjoying what's going on right now, then if you want more of that, talk to Greta Thunberg, because that's what you'd like to see in perpetuity in terms of economic activity.
00:25:03.000It gives us tons of time and tons of money.
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00:25:47.000Okay, so our health experts here in LA County, Dr. Barbara Ferrer, and I guess the CNN's appointed health expert, Greta Thunberg, who again, When I think, who would I go to in terms of handling a pandemic?
00:26:01.000I think 17-year-old Swedish child who screams at adults to the applause of the media.
00:26:41.000We here at CNN, we listen to the experts.
00:26:43.000Chris Cuomo yesterday was doing this routine, right?
00:26:45.000Chris Cuomo, who listens to the experts so much that he was violating his own quarantine while he had COVID-19, and was meanwhile asking sycophantic questions to his big brother Andrew, who is the worst governor in America, by numbers, on COVID-19.
00:26:59.000Here is CNN's Chris Cuomo yesterday being like, you know what?
00:27:01.000We have to listen to the experts, guys.
00:27:42.000America makes choices every day that increase risk to its citizens because that's called freedom.
00:27:47.000Seriously, no one's talking about going to nursing homes and snuffing out grandma.
00:27:50.000Everybody here is talking about how you mitigate risk while also allowing tens of millions of people to go back to work and get jobs again and function in an economy.
00:27:59.000This is the sort of disgusting, it really is disgusting, the sort of disgusting demagoguery from, have you ever seen Americans willing to sacrifice 10,000 lives for what?
00:28:16.000It's not about sacrificing lives, right?
00:28:18.000That is a framing of the question that is so deeply dishonest, but I'm sure he can get buy-in from Greta Thunberg over at CNN.
00:28:23.000Okay, so this sort of idiocy leads to the kind of policies that we have seen in the state of California, my home state.
00:28:28.000So the state of California has not suffered from a massive outbreak.
00:28:31.000The state of California has, last I checked, something like 7 deaths per 100,000 citizens in the state of California.
00:28:38.000Grand total in the state of California, California COVID-19 deaths, last I checked, were under 3,000 deaths statewide.
00:28:44.000We have 40 million citizens in the state of California.
00:28:48.000We have 2,770 confirmed deaths from COVID-19 in the state of California, according to sort of the numbers that Google is popping up for me here right now.
00:28:57.000Okay, so those are not massive, incredibly large numbers.
00:29:13.000And we should be careful when we reopen.
00:29:15.000But the state of California has basically decided that we are now engaged in a kindergarten game of one-upsmanship.
00:29:23.000And it was pretty obvious that this is how things were going to go when the lockdowns originally occurred, right?
00:29:26.000San Francisco lockdown, and then immediately thereafter, LA lockdown, and then immediately thereafter, New York lockdown.
00:29:31.000And so it's going to be the other way around, right?
00:29:33.000You're seeing one game of follow the leader when it comes to reopening, with some states saying, listen, we got to reopen or our economy is going to die.
00:29:39.000Other states are saying, listen, we're not going to be blamed, right?
00:29:42.000If you're Gavin Newsom, If you want to avoid scrutiny, what you say at this point is, we're never going to reopen.
00:29:59.000Politicians cannot lock down this way.
00:30:02.000Americans are just not going to stand for it.
00:30:04.000And they're particularly not going to lock down in the idiotic fashion that is now being promoted by the Los Angeles state government.
00:30:09.000So California is saying, well, why don't we let people decide on a county-by-county basis?
00:30:13.000Just going to point out, when Donald Trump says that, according to the states, when he says states should decide, localism should rule, he's very bad.
00:30:21.000When Gavin Newsom says counties should decide on a county-by-county basis, then Gavin Newsom apparently, according to the media, is very, very good.
00:30:27.000But according to County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer, she said at Tuesday's Board of Supervisors meeting, based on her Community Relations degree from UC Santa Cruz, based on all the data we're looking at, we know with certainty we'll be extending health officer orders for the next three months.
00:30:48.000We couldn't forecast this thing two weeks out.
00:30:52.000Ferrer said, while the safer at home orders will remain in place over the next few months, restrictions will be gradually relaxed under the county's existing roadmap to recovery.
00:30:59.000We're counting on the public's continued compliance with the orders to enable us to relax restrictions.
00:31:06.000County Board of Supervisors is trying to claim that they were taken out of context because the original statement is that the stay-at-home orders would remain in place as is for three months.
00:31:15.000Mayor Eric Garcetti said, I think quite simply, she's saying we're not going to fully reopen Los Angeles and probably anywhere in America without any protections or any health orders in the next three months.
00:31:22.000I think it's going to be even longer than three months.
00:31:24.000Okay, that's not what the original statement was.
00:31:25.000The original statement was the stay-at-home orders are going to remain in place for three months until the end of July, which is patently insane.
00:31:32.000It means the end of the economy of Los Angeles, as everybody well understands.
00:31:35.000And as it turns out, the policies that are being promulgated in LA are completely idiotic.
00:31:39.000So are the policies in California for reopening counties.
00:32:15.000I'm gonna take my kids, I'm going to walk down with them to the water, throw them in the water, take them out of the water, walk back to the car, shove them inside.
00:32:21.000Like, what the hell are you talking about?
00:32:45.000But that's not even the extent of the stupidity.
00:32:49.000So according to Gavin Newsom's standards, there are two criteria as to which counties can move into reopening phases.
00:32:57.000Whether deaths have stopped completely in the last 14 days from COVID-19, and whether there is no more than one case per 10,000 residents in that same time period.
00:34:22.000So you're telling me that until there's not one COVID-19 death in all of L.A.
00:34:25.000County, so I guess like in a hundred years, when several generations of Los Angelinos have died, Then I guess we can reopen according to these standards.
00:34:46.000Well, they can't explain it, because the reality is that young people are not in particularly terrible shape.
00:34:50.000In fact, young people are in particularly good shape.
00:34:52.000If you're vulnerable, you should stay off campus.
00:34:54.000And Mitch Daniels, who's the president over at Purdue, the dean over at Purdue, he said, we're gonna reopen, and we're going to take precautions for people who are vulnerable.
00:35:00.000This would be the rational solution, but we cannot pursue rationality in any way.
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00:38:40.000Most Americans want us to get it right.
00:38:42.000You look at polls across the country, certainly here in Los Angeles, it's go slow, don't go fast, and get it right so we don't have to retreat.
00:38:50.000So she wanted to make sure that I communicated and what she was communicating is that we still need to have a public health order because there are some populations who will need to stay at home.
00:38:59.000People need to know whenever possible it is safer to stay at home.
00:39:41.000This is particularly true when your end goal for American government is the radical growth of American government, universal basic income, the government paying people to stay home, which is exactly what Democrats are proposing.
00:39:51.000Here was Joe Biden yesterday saying he's frustrated that people are trying to open the economy.
00:40:36.000By setting up this false binary, this allows Democrats to claim that what we must do is expend trillions of new dollars on things like extended unemployment benefits through January.
00:40:46.000Which, by the way, is fairly a guarantee that people aren't actually going to be able to hire people back.
00:40:49.000One of the major problems that's been happening right now is that businesses across America, small businesses, are saying to their own employees, guys, you know, there's going to come a point where we want you to come back.
00:40:56.000And if you're young and healthy, you should come back.
00:41:01.000This is a hole that was pointed out by Senators Tim Scott and Marco Rubio and Ben Sasse.
00:41:06.000And they were saying, guys, you know, our last CARES Act package, that included payments that were greater than people would be receiving in the absence of a salary.
00:41:15.000Meaning that if you were making $1,200 a month or $1,200, if you're making $1,200 a week, Before, now you're going to make more than that from unemployment, so why the hell would you go back to work?
00:41:24.000Democrats would like to extend that now.
00:41:26.000So this is what Nancy Pelosi is suggesting.
00:41:29.000She's saying, look, we have the opportunity to save lives and our democracy.
00:41:34.000We have the opportunity to save lives and our democracy means we have the opportunity to tell you that we are saving lives by keeping the economy closed and also to quote unquote save democracy by radically reshifting the balance of power between the federal government and individuals.
00:41:46.000These numbers require action that we've never had to take before.
00:41:50.000There are those who said, let's just pause.
00:41:53.000But the families who are suffering know that hunger doesn't take a pause, the rent doesn't take a pause, the bills don't take a pause, the hardship of losing a job or tragically losing a loved one doesn't take a pause.
00:42:05.000This is an historic challenge and therefore momentous opportunity for us to meet the needs of the American people to save their lives, their livelihoods, and our democracy.
00:42:16.000What a pathetic, pathetic human being Nancy Pelosi is, truly.
00:42:19.000This is not an opportunity to take a pause.
00:42:21.000Twice in the last month, twice, she has quote-unquote taken a pause on major legislation designed to help out business and help out individuals.
00:42:29.000She shut down the passage of the CARES Act for a full week, and then she shut down the passage of the Payroll Protection Act for a full week.
00:42:38.000We gotta rush forward with our $3 trillion wish list of garbage.
00:42:41.000Here's what is in the Democrats' $3 trillion plus virus relief bill.
00:42:45.000And they're just gonna keep spending here.
00:42:47.000We are going to effectively try modern monetary theory and find out how it works.
00:42:50.000Modern monetary theory is, of course, the idiotic theory that we can continue to spend money at infinite pace without bearing any results down the road.
00:42:57.000Either in terms of radically increased taxation or in terms of inflating the currency, which is great.
00:43:02.000I mean, if it's true, I guess we can just magically spend government money and people will just continue taking out debt because they're idiots, apparently.
00:43:07.000Apparently, everybody across the world is a moron.
00:43:09.000And if we continue to take out debt, then everybody across the world, instead of investing in other opportunities, they're going to just buy the American debt.
00:43:17.000Sure, because they feel like it's going to get paid off at some point.
00:43:20.000So what exactly is in this new $3 trillion package?
00:43:24.000Fiscal aid to states and local governments.
00:43:26.000The Democratic bill provides more than $900 billion to states Local governments, as well as Indian tribes and territorial governments, to help prevent layoffs of public workers, cuts to services, or tax hikes.
00:43:36.000So instead of forcing states to actually tighten their belt and look at the union contracts that they have signed that are garbage, and look at all the pension plans they've signed that are garbage, instead the federal government is going to bail out all of the garbage plans, blaming it on the pandemic.
00:43:55.000The state debt of these states was exorbitant.
00:43:58.000Like hundreds of billions of dollars, maybe trillions of dollars in the state of California before any of this happened.
00:44:04.000And now the Democrats are basically using this as an excuse to say, you know what we can do?
00:44:08.000We can have state governors who just sign these really, really rich contracts, these ridiculous contracts with unions that say things like, don't worry guys, we're going to give you like an 8% year on year increase in the pension.
00:44:19.000And then we'll just tell you that we'll invest our pension funds properly and they will return 8%.
00:44:23.000That's what we actually did with CalPERS in California.
00:44:27.000The union contracts with CalPERS, it basically suggested that there was going to be a seven to eight percent rate of return year on year in the CalPERS fund, which is insane.
00:44:52.000Well, they want a second round of direct payments to individuals, making those benefits more generous than an earlier round, which limited payments for dependent children to $500.
00:45:00.000Instead, it provides new payments of $1,200 per family member, up to $6,000 for a household.
00:45:17.000Like at a certain point, we would like to have a functioning economy again.
00:45:20.000And by the way, they would like to keep the unemployment benefits extended by $600 per week federal unemployment, which supplements the state unemployment benefits.
00:45:28.000They want that supplemented through January 2021.
00:45:32.000Hey, I'm not cutting it off at the end of July when the pandemic is supposedly supposed to wave.
00:45:35.000I'm not even extending it two more months.
00:45:37.000They want to extend it to January, which is, not surprisingly, past the election.
00:45:42.000They would like for the unemployment rates to remain high, apparently, because people won't go back to work.
00:45:47.000And that is not just relieving people who cannot go back to work.
00:45:51.000If you're talking about this thing, or directed toward people who showed some sort of serious illness, a pre-existing condition, you have diabetes, you don't want to be back in public because you got diabetes, and this thing is dangerous.
00:46:00.000You're above the age of 60, and so you don't want to be back at the workplace because it's dangerous to you.
00:46:04.000And then we want to create unemployment benefits specifically for those people.
00:46:10.000What I cannot get on board with is the idea that if you're perfectly healthy and 25 years old, you should be receiving endless government benefits because you don't really believe that you should go back to work.
00:46:18.000And because any sort of arbitrary risk calculation by you means that I'm supposed to pay your bills and everybody else is supposed to pay your bills.
00:46:28.000Also, they want to provide $25 billion for the U.S.
00:46:31.000Postal Service, which is expected to run out of money by the end of September without congressional aid because it's losing so much revenue.
00:46:36.000You know the reason they're losing revenue.
00:46:37.000It's not because people have stopped sending mail.
00:46:39.000It's because people started sending the mail.
00:46:41.000The dirty little secret of the post office is that they lose money when they don't ship mail, and they lose money when they do ship mail because the postage rates are too low.
00:46:49.000That's why it's more expensive to ship via FedEx than it is to ship via the U.S.
00:46:57.000Also, they want to provide $175 billion to states to help renters and homeowners pay mortgages, rent, and other housing costs and avoid default, with much of the money aimed at lower-income people.
00:47:06.000Well, again, if the states are the ones making the decisions on when to reopen, why should not the states be actually taking out the debt to do that?
00:47:12.000Why is it that Texas, which is reopening faster, ought to pay the bills for California, which is reopening more slowly?
00:47:17.000They also want $15 billion for state transportation departments for highway needs, $16 billion to mass transit systems hit by the massive drop off of ridership and lower income from fares.
00:47:26.000So in other words, we are now going to pay the New York subway system for being shut down.
00:48:11.000Because every inequality is an inequity.
00:48:14.000Inequality means that two things are not equal.
00:48:16.000Inequity means that two things are not fair.
00:48:19.000So any inequality is now an inequity, according to this Democratic bill.
00:48:22.000They want to support the modernization of data collection methods and infrastructure for the purposes of increasing data related to health inequities such as racial, ethnic, socioeconomic, sex, gender, and disability disparities.
00:48:33.000And they want to provide guidance, technical assistance, and information to grantees under this section on best practices regarding culturally competent, accurate, and increased data collection and transmission.
00:49:01.000We've already spent about, or in the process of spending about $2.8 trillion.
00:49:08.000We now have a debt the size of our economy.
00:49:13.000So I have said, and the president has said as well, that we need to take a pause here.
00:49:19.000And take a look at what we've done, see what's working, see what isn't, and also begin to encourage the governors around the country who have the decision-making ability to begin to open up the economy.
00:49:34.000Nah, so what the Democrats really want is for lockdown to be the preferred policy of states and then the bailout to happen at the federal government level so they can radically reshift the nation and quote-unquote save democracy.
00:49:45.000This thing didn't have to become politically polarized.
00:49:47.000It is becoming politically polarized when you just shout lockdown infinitely and then basically present zero data to actually support how you are coming to that conclusion and how you plan to reopen.
00:49:58.000Okay, time for some things that I hate.
00:50:00.000So I have legitimately no clue why the judge in the Michael Flynn case is slamming the brakes on the DOJ attempt to drop the case.
00:50:14.000They are now making the case, the judge is basically delaying all of this, saying that he wants to hear amicus briefs, which is an amazing suggestion.
00:50:27.000According to lawandcrime.com, federal judge Emmett G. Sullivan stopped, at least temporarily, the federal government's attempt to drop its case against National Security Advisor Michael Flynn.
00:50:35.000Sullivan made the move shortly after Flynn asked the case against him be dismissed immediately.
00:50:38.000The judge, in a minute order posted to the Flynn case's electronic docket, said he anticipated amicus briefs would be filed in the matter and wanted to give any interested parties time to participate.
00:50:47.000These so-called friend of the court briefs allow others who are not party to the case to submit arguments only for the benefit of the court.
00:50:53.000Sullivan said, it is solely within the court's discretion to determine the extent, fact and manner of the participation of amicus parties.
00:50:59.000The briefs are helpful when the amicus has unique information or perspective that can help the court beyond the help that the lawyers for the parties are able to provide.
00:51:07.000He also noted reasons why parties should not be allowed to file amicus briefs.
00:51:11.000Flynn's lawyers have filed a motion to prevent an amicus brief from entering the record.
00:51:16.000In issuing the order, Sullivan quoted a similar minute order from the judge who oversaw the trial of former Donald Trump confidant Roger Stone.
00:51:21.000He said, as Judge Amy Berman Jackson has observed, while there may be individuals with an interest in this matter, a criminal proceeding is not a free-for-all.
00:51:27.000In other words, while Sullivan is giving parties some time to have their voices heard, his patience is not unlimited.
00:51:32.000He says the court will enter a scheduling order governing the submission of amicus curiae briefs.
00:51:58.000According to Law & Crime's Aaron Keller, lawyers for Donald Trump's former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn voice strong opposition to that order.
00:52:05.000Per Flynn's legal team, a group referring to itself as Watergate Prosecutors submitted an email stating they wish to file amicus curiae briefs.
00:52:12.000The so-called friend of the court briefs help to assist judge in making decisions.
00:52:16.000Flynn's attorneys say this court has consistently, on 24 previous occasions, summarily refused to permit any third party to inject themselves or their views into this case.
00:52:24.000Sullivan's decision resulted in this particular backlash.
00:52:27.000They said, They say it's no accident amicus briefs are excluded in criminal cases.
00:52:52.000A criminal case is a dispute between the U.S.
00:52:55.000There's no place for third parties to meddle in the dispute, certainly not to usurp the role of government's counsel.
00:53:00.000For the court to allow another to stand in the place of the government would be a violation of the separation of powers.
00:53:06.000They said that the Watergate prosecutors don't have a dog in this hunt any more than former Whitewater prosecutors or the Clinton impeachment prosecutors do.
00:53:12.000They said this is a case of extraordinary national and international interest.
00:53:15.000There are countless people, including former prosecutors on both sides of the parties, who would like to express their views.
00:53:20.000There are many reasons there's no provision for outsiders to join a criminal case.
00:53:23.000Of course, former prosecutors can submit opinion pieces to assorted media outlets, but this court is not a forum for their alleged special interest.
00:53:34.000I mean, seriously, I've never heard of anything really like this.
00:53:37.000Maybe there's precedent for it, but I've never heard of this idea that I'm allowed to file an amicus curiae brief in the middle of a criminal trial.
00:53:46.000I mean, the case at issue here is whether the prosecutors are allowed... By the way, what's amazing about this, truly amazing, is that we've had cases before, like Proposition 8 in California, where Attorney General Kamala Harris, she was then the Attorney General of the state of California, she was a god-awful AG, then she became a god-awful senator.
00:54:04.000One of the things that she did when she was our god-awful AG is there was a provision called Proposition 8 in the California Constitution that sanctioned traditional marriage and said there will be no same-sex marriage legalized by the state or approved by the state in the state of California.
00:54:21.000There was a lawsuit filed against it, right, and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ended up striking down Prop 8.
00:54:26.000This thing was going to go to the Supreme Court.
00:54:28.000The AG of the state of California, Kamala Harris, said, I'm not going to defend it in court.
00:54:32.000I'm not going to defend this in court.
00:54:33.000Now, that is an abdication of her duty.
00:54:34.000She's the AG, which means she is supposed to defend the existing law.
00:54:38.000She is not supposed to be able to say, I don't like this law, so I'm not defending it.
00:54:42.000The Supreme Court then ruled that because the state of California was not defending the law, there was no other party to step in.
00:54:50.000And other parties were like, well, how about this?
00:54:52.000And the court was like, no, only the state of California can defend the law.
00:54:55.000So if the state of California decides not to defend its own law, we're done here.
00:54:58.000So very weird policy apparently from the federal judiciary that if you are an AG of a state and the people of that state pass a referendum you don't like, you can moot that law by not defending it in court.
00:55:08.000But if you are the prosecutors in a case and you decide to drop the case, now the judge will hear amicus curiae briefs to hear whether the case should remain open.
00:55:18.000The reality here is that the media coverage of this thing has been overwhelmingly ridiculous.
00:55:23.000Michael Flynn appears to have been railroaded by a lot of the available evidence.
00:55:28.000That does not mean that Michael Flynn should be National Security Advisor.
00:55:30.000I objected to him as National Security Advisor when he was first named.
00:55:33.000It also doesn't mean that he did anything that rises to the level of the criminal.
00:55:36.000Liz Cheney, the representative from Wyoming, said it's pretty obvious that members of the Obama administration believe they were above the law.
00:55:41.000They clearly believed they were above the law.
00:55:44.000And when you look at what was going on in terms of unmasking the names of U.S.
00:55:48.000officials that were in the classified documents, when you look at what they were doing after they fired General Flynn, clearly there was some sort of a vendetta underway.
00:55:57.000When you look at Jim Comey, you know, Jim Comey on tape publicly on video saying that he knows that he basically violated the rules, violated the practice when he sent his FBI agents over to interview General Flynn.
00:56:10.000So they clearly were trying to criminalize their political differences and they need to be investigated.
00:56:17.000I think you will see some investigations of people like James Comey.
00:56:21.000Confirmation bias is a hell of a drug.
00:56:23.000And there are a lot of people who tend to believe that the Trump team was in collusion with Russia because they could not deal with the fact that he won the election.
00:56:30.000And so they were going to bend every rule in order to confirm their biased notions as to what exactly was happening here.
00:56:41.000So, the thing that I like today is the movie Shawshank Redemption.
00:56:47.000Okay, so I know, I know, it's a thing everybody likes.
00:56:49.000But I've been re-watching some old classics and what I found is, you know, I've spent a long time during, you know, really I like watching new movies.
00:56:56.000I like watching movies I've never seen.
00:56:57.000I'm finding renewed pleasure in watching old movies and re-watching old movies.
00:57:01.000So in the past week or so, I've been re-watching old movies.
00:57:03.000My wife and I did a Christopher Nolan binge right before our kid was born.
00:57:05.000Now I'm going back to some older movies.
00:57:08.000And I will discuss one of those tomorrow, which is maybe the greatest movie ever made, or at least the greatest couple of pairs of movies ever made.
00:57:14.000But Shawshank Redemption is, in fact, a fantastic movie.
00:57:38.000For those who haven't seen it, it's a great movie and the good news is that by the time you finish watching it, the pandemic will be over because it's nine hours long.
00:57:43.000I must admit, I didn't think much of Andy the first time I laid eyes on him.
00:59:29.000Hey everybody, it's Andrew Klavan, host of The Andrew Klavan Show.
00:59:32.000You know, some people are depressed because the American Republic is collapsing, the end of days is approaching, and the moon has turned to blood.
00:59:38.000But on The Andrew Klavan Show, that's where the fun just gets started.