The White House releases models suggesting at least 100,000 Americans could die in the coronavirus pandemic. The Fed continues to pump dollars into the economy, and partisanship continues to rear its ugly head. Ben Shapiro explains why the United States should not be treating this pandemic the same way other countries are treating other pandemic epidemics. And he explains why we should be treating it differently than other infectious diseases. Plus, a doctor tells a story about how his ER is at the "breaking point." And Ben explains why social distance is the key to success in dealing with a pandemic like this. Ben's full show is available on most major podcast directories, including Podcoin, The Daily Mail, and The Huffington Post. Subscribe to The Ben Shapiro Show on Apple Podcasts and leave us a rating and review! Thanks for listening and share the podcast with your fellow podulters! You can also become a Friend of the Show by becoming a patron! Subscribe, Like, Share, and Subscribe to Ben Shapiro's newest podcast, The BenShapiro's New York Times Radio and other podcasting platforms wherever you get your favorite shows. You'll get access to the latest newest episodes of the show, plus special bonus episodes, unlimited ad-free listening and merchandising throughout the world, including the use of our social media platforms, and a chance to win a FREE 7-day VIP membership! and much more! - subscribe to Ben's newbies only on Audible and VaynerMedia's newest streaming platform, The Benny Shapiro's new podcast, Ben Shapiro s New York Reviewed. and Vimeo, wherever you listen to the show gets the best listening to the best podcast on the best of the best vids available on the most authentic and most authentic podcasting service in the best places in the world? Ben s new podcasting opportunity? Subscribe and subscribe to his new show on all major podcasting platform, Ben s newest podcasting app, The Biggest podcasting experience ever? v=QCREATIVITY? Subscribe & subscribe to the Ben s podcast is a must listen to Ben s latest podcast? Learn more about Ben s thoughts on all things Ben s most authentic, the most profound and the most influential podcast on everything else on the biggest podcasting podcast in the place you can vlogged about it's best vizzionable, most authentic guy on the internet?
00:00:45.000We are expecting those numbers to rise, presumably, according to the models, every day up until April 15th, tax day.
00:00:51.000The United States already has close to 200,000 cases that have been diagnosed in the United States, and we are starting to see all of the emergency situations in hospitals coming to fruition.
00:01:02.000Although we have not yet been forced to ration ventilators, the situation in ERs, particularly New York is very ugly.
00:01:08.000Seth Mandel, who is the editor over the Washington Examiner magazine, he just got a note from a doctor friend in Queens, says, I spent 24 of the last 36 hours in my ER.
00:01:30.000With COVID-19 crammed into spots, corners, crevices, all of our ICU and step-down units together can usually handle 50 patients.
00:01:36.000We are managing ventilators in hallways.
00:01:39.000Now, again, managing ventilators in hallways is still better than no ventilators, but it is obviously Insufficient to deal with the influx of people who are being admitted to hospitals and ERs in the New York region.
00:01:50.000In 22 years of medicine, says this doctor, I've never seen the staff look this tired physically and emotionally drained.
00:01:54.000At least twice an hour we hear the call overhead that somebody upstairs is in cardiac arrest.
00:02:00.000People we were caring for are dead 12 hours later.
00:02:02.00030-year-olds, 50-year-olds, 70-year-olds, nobody is spared now.
00:02:05.000At this point it is worthy of mention.
00:02:07.000If you go into the ER, there's a good shot that, or at least a better shot, that there is something seriously wrong with you in terms of the people across the country who are getting coronavirus and then getting significant symptoms.
00:02:16.000If you're older, if you have pre-existing conditions, that's where the real risk lies.
00:02:20.000This doctor says we're at the breaking point.
00:02:56.000Those measures that have been put in place, we are seeing the sort of contrasting data you would expect to see.
00:03:01.000Highly populated areas that took a little longer to lock down are seeing trend lines that are a lot uglier than areas that are sparsely populated and or are locked down more often.
00:03:10.000And to pretend that every single area of the United States should be treating this equivalently is foolhardy.
00:03:14.000Obviously, if you're in a rural area where you're not seeing tons of people on a daily basis, you shouldn't be treating this exactly the same way you would if you're living in a heavily populated area like New York City.
00:03:23.000But even in Europe, You're starting to see the differential data emerge from places like Sweden, Netherlands, Denmark.
00:03:28.000Places that are locking down in Northern Europe are seeing the curve start to flatten.
00:03:32.000Places like Sweden are seeing the curve start to steepen.
00:03:35.000So, obviously the social distancing measures are, in fact, effective.
00:03:39.000And now, does that mean that in the end, when all is said and done, the social distancing measures will have been worth wrecking the entire world economy?
00:04:12.000Reality has set in for the Trump administration, but it's been set in for about three weeks now.
00:04:16.000We're starting to see all the recriminations from the partisans in the media who are suggesting, well, if Trump had just been on top of this in late January, then everything would have been different.
00:04:23.000Well, listen, it would have been great if the Trump administration had been Over seeing the CDC with regard to testing a lot earlier and a lot better.
00:04:29.000It also would've been great if three successive administrations had not ignored all of the requests for building up ventilator and hospital bed capacity.
00:04:37.000Also, it would've been great if the Democrats had not been downplaying it at the same time as Trump.
00:04:42.000I'm getting kind of sick of the sort of timeline politics that are being played right here where Democrats We're calling for a full lockdown in late January.
00:04:50.000If Donald Trump in January 28th, when he issued the China travel ban, had said, not only am I barring travel from China, also we need a two-week lockdown so we can ramp up testing in the United States.
00:04:59.000You think Democrats would have gone along with that?
00:05:00.000Is there any shot at all that Democrats would have gone along with it?
00:05:03.000Vox was running pieces in late January about how this was the seasonal flu.
00:05:06.000So let's be real about the fact that nobody knew anything in late January sufficient to take the most drastic step in the history of the American economy and in the history of American government in a non-wartime scenario.
00:05:20.000Let's be real about imperfect knowledge in times of imperfect knowledge.
00:05:23.000Let's also be real about the way that the media are treating some of these death tolls.
00:05:27.000So you're seeing a lot of headlines today.
00:05:29.000Things like The United States could be on pace to lose more people than the Vietnam War, that yesterday we surpassed the death toll from 9-11.
00:05:37.000Yes, because these diseases are not like wars or like terrorist attacks, you idiots.
00:05:41.000Okay, there's a lot of talk about how this is not like the flu.
00:05:45.000It's like the flu in that it is a disease.
00:05:46.000It is not like the flu in that it has a much higher transmissibility rate and presumably a higher death rate, although the estimates range from around flu rates to 10 times flu rates, and those estimates vary, ranging from Dr. Jay Bhattacharya from Stanford who says this is going to look like seasonal flu when it comes to the final fatality rates, to the folks over at Imperial College who think that it's around 1%.
00:06:57.000Botchery and wars is not quite the same thing as we have a shortage of ventilator supplies and we are all doing our best to get those ventilators out there and also we have to stay home.
00:07:05.000That is not the same thing in any way, shape, or form, and your media, who are so determined to turn this into a political disaster as opposed to just a human disaster, are making a very large-scale mistake.
00:07:16.000Okay, we're going to get to what exactly President Trump said yesterday.
00:07:19.000We're going to get to all of the modeling, and we're going to get to some more data talking about who is actually the most vulnerable in all of this.
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00:08:48.000Okay, so President Trump yesterday gives this press conference at the White House, and he says this is going to be a very, very rough couple of weeks.
00:08:54.000We're going to have some rough weeks and months ahead.
00:08:57.000I want every American to be prepared for the hard days that lie ahead.
00:09:02.000We're going to go through a very tough two weeks.
00:09:05.000And then hopefully, as the experts are predicting, as I think a lot of us are predicting after having studied it so hard, You're going to start seeing some real light at the end of the tunnel, But this is going to be a very painful, very, very painful two weeks.
00:09:22.000When you look and see at night the kind of death that's been caused by this invisible enemy, it's incredible.
00:09:37.000And that was a very rough press conference yesterday.
00:09:39.000I mean, it was a useful press conference, but it was a rough press conference because it was finally the acknowledgement that a lot of people are going to die from this.
00:09:45.000According to the modeling, President Trump did go out of his way to praise doctors and nurses.
00:09:49.000Again, I've been doing that every day on the program too.
00:14:17.000If you were to say that the United States ends up performing more like those nations, that in the end we end up in the 70 range, 70 deaths per 1 million population, Which is sort of like the countries that are not Spain and not Italy but also not being spared this horrific virus.
00:14:34.000Then you would end up with approximately 23,000 deaths in the United States.
00:14:40.000So maybe that ends up being really low.
00:14:42.000Maybe that ends up being really low, but maybe it doesn't.
00:14:44.000Maybe it ends up being about right if we all stay home and if we all take the precautions.
00:14:48.000Now, one of the questions is going to be, these estimates are made over the course of the year.
00:15:20.000We'll see about 2,300 deaths that day.
00:15:23.000Well, 81,000 deaths in the next four months doesn't really – I'm not sure how that model ends up with as we relax things over the course of the next 12 months because that's what we're going to have to do.
00:15:33.000How do you end up with only 100,000 deaths if you have 81,000 by the end of the summer?
00:16:18.000I think that one of the things the government is doing right now, I think Fauci's doing this, I think Birx is doing this, I think Trump is doing this, is they're saying, here's how bad things could get even with the stuff we have in place.
00:19:47.000Something you can treat your eyes and your headache to.
00:19:49.000In the middle of a very unpleasant situation.
00:19:52.000All right, so Dr. Deborah Birx, she followed up from Fauci.
00:19:56.000She says, yeah, you know, we modeled for SARS here, right?
00:19:58.000The Chinese were basically lying to us.
00:20:00.000And so we were modeling for a disease that really has a completely different vector than this particular disease.
00:20:05.000I think when you looked at the China data originally and you said, oh, well, there's 80 million people, you start thinking of this more like SARS than you do this kind of global pandemic.
00:20:18.000So I think the medical community made, interpreted the Chinese data as that this was serious, but smaller.
00:20:28.000than anyone expected because I think probably we were missing a significant amount of the data now that when we see what happened to Italy and we see what happened to Spain.
00:20:41.000Okay, so, as we put in new data, we change the model.
00:20:45.000Fauci did say in an interview yesterday that the rate of increase is dropping off across the United States, which, as I say, suggests that the social distancing measures, the stay-at-home stuff, is actually working.
00:20:56.000It's starting to work not just in the United States, it's working in Italy as well.
00:20:58.000Here's Anthony Fauci talking about it.
00:21:00.000So what we're starting to see right now is just the inklings and I don't want to put too much stock on it because you don't want to get overconfident, just want to keep pushing on what you're doing.
00:21:12.000You're starting to see that the daily increases are not in that steep incline They're starting to be able to possibly flatten out.
00:21:21.000I mean, again, you look at it carefully, hope it's going in the right direction, but that's what we really are trying to attain, that multi-phase component where it ultimately starts to come down.
00:21:36.000Italy, by the way, is starting to see the curve flattened just a bit.
00:21:40.000Marcus Walker from the Wall Street Journal reports, Italian authorities believe the country's coronavirus epidemic is slowing down appreciably after three weeks of national lockdown, a hopeful sign for other Western countries that are following approaches similar to Italy's with a time lag.
00:21:52.000Italian officials and health experts said it will take until after Easter to cut new infections enough to begin loosening the lockdown and reopening parts of Italy's economy.
00:21:59.000Silvio Bruce Aferro, president of the National Health Institute, Italy's main disease control center, says we seem to be arriving at a sort of plateau, which shows that the measures are working.
00:22:07.000Meanwhile, there's new CDC data that is out showing that the people who are most at risk are obviously, we have seen this already, people who are suffering from pre-existing conditions.
00:22:16.000People of chronic medical conditions like diabetes, lung disease, heart disease.
00:22:20.000They face an increased chance of being hospitalized with COVID-19 and put into intensive care, according to new data from the CDC.
00:22:27.000That is consistent with all the reports from China and Italy as well.
00:22:29.000The new data gives the most sweeping look at the way COVID-19 is causing serious illnesses among people in the United States who already face medical challenges.
00:22:37.000The report reinforces a critically important lesson.
00:22:39.000Although the disease is typically more severe among older people, people of any age with underlying medical conditions are at increased risk if they contract the virus.
00:22:47.000But again, the people who are most at risk are the people who have those underlying medical conditions.
00:22:51.000The pre-existing conditions covered in the CDC records include heart and lung diseases, diabetes, chronic renal disease, chronic liver disease, immunocompromised conditions, neurological disorders, Neurodevelopmental or intellectual disability, pregnancy, current or former smoker status, and other chronic disease, the CDC found, of people requiring admissions when ICU, 78% had at least one underlying health condition.
00:23:11.000Of people hospitalized but not requiring ICU, 71% had at least one such condition, compared to 27% of people who didn't need to be hospitalized.
00:23:19.000Among all cases analyzed, 10.9% of patients had diabetes, 9.2% had chronic lung disease, 9% had cardiovascular disease.
00:23:28.000There was no report as to whether severity of disease corresponded to pre-existing condition.
00:23:35.000Obviously, those with pre-existing conditions are at the highest levels of risk.
00:23:40.000Now, as I've said, one of the questions about the modeling in all of this is going to be, what is the time delay factor here?
00:23:46.000So that University of Washington model I said earlier, 81,000 deaths by July, they're talking about 84,000 deaths by August, something like that.
00:23:53.000And then total, they're saying like somewhere between 100 and 240,000 deaths.
00:23:56.000Hard to see how if we have 84,000 deaths by August, and there's a second wave, That doesn't look really a lot higher by the time we get to the end of the year.
00:24:09.000That we are seeing a second wave of diseases that are breaking out in Asia as well.
00:24:13.000And that does raise the question of how we reopen all of this.
00:24:17.000Holman Jenkins over the Wall Street Journal asks that question.
00:24:20.000He says, experts are now planning ways to get Americans back to work with mass testing and mass provision of masks and gloves.
00:24:26.000Second, thoughts about the lockdown aren't due only to economic costs.
00:24:29.000Accumulating evidence seems to show COVID-19 spreading to the most vulnerable through close family contact rather than casual interactions.
00:24:35.000The experts' recovery plans But is that even possible?
00:24:37.000...on whether the goal is to slow the rate at which we get exposed or save us from getting infected altogether.
00:24:41.000The polling data on which President Trump made the decision this week to extend social distancing guidelines... ...can be read as most Americans believing they should be kept safe from ever getting the virus.
00:24:52.000Holman Jenkins says, if we were being as candid in the U.S. as they are in Australia... ...each of us might be asking ourselves the herd immunity question...
00:24:59.000So I belong among the 60% who need to get infected or the 40% who should avoid all exposure until the epidemic snuffs itself out.
00:25:06.000He says, I tend to think of myself as on the bubble.
00:25:08.000When we get back to work, we're going to have to determine who is the most likely to get the disease and die from the disease as people go back to work, because this cannot last indefinitely.
00:25:29.000And you can't just float people money until the end of time.
00:25:32.000That's not something that is even possible.
00:25:34.000And as I say, Asia has a new wave of virus cases that demonstrate that this thing is not going away anytime soon.
00:25:40.000According to the New York Times, in China, international flights have been cut back so severely that Chinese students abroad wonder when they will be able to get home.
00:25:46.000In Singapore, recently returned citizens must share their phone's location data with the authorities each day to prove they are sticking to government-ordered quarantines across Asia.
00:25:54.000Countries and cities that seem to have brought the coronavirus epidemic under control are suddenly tightening their borders, imposing stricter containment measures, fearful about a wave of new infections imported from elsewhere.
00:26:03.000The moves pretend a worrisome sign for the United States, Europe, and the rest of the world still battling a surging outbreak.
00:26:09.000Any country's success with containment could be tenuous.
00:26:11.000The world could remain on a kind of indefinite lockdown.
00:26:14.000That lockdown cannot, in fact, remain completely indefinite.
00:26:18.000There is no way for the lockdown To remain completely indefinite given the fact that the Fed cannot just continue floating people money forever.
00:26:28.000Bloomberg is reporting the Federal Reserve is now acting as the central banker to the world by seeking to provide the global financial system with dollar liquidity it needs to avoid seizing up.
00:26:38.000In its latest measure to combat the economic fallout from coronavirus, the Fed said Tuesday it was establishing A new program that was designed to provide liquidity across the world.
00:26:47.000It was establishing a temporary repurchase agreement facility to allow foreign central banks to swap any treasury securities they hold for cash.
00:26:54.000So we are going to give them cash, they're going to sell us back our bonds.
00:26:56.000So basically you've got treasury buying back all the bonds, which essentially means inflation.
00:27:01.000That's yet another step beyond the actions it took in the 2008 financial crisis.
00:27:04.000Former Fed official Ted Truman, now senior fellow for the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, says to the Federal Reserve's credit, it is playing the role of central bankers of the world rather than denying it and trying to ward it off.
00:27:15.000The Fed is trying to prevent a liquidity squeeze amid a worldwide rush into dollars as the virus wreaks havoc on a global economy that is dependent on the dollar as its linchpin.
00:27:23.000Julia Coronado, founding partner of Macro Policy Perspectives in New York, former Fed economist, said in an interview, a lot of borrowing in commerce and investing is done When you have dollar crunch, it can turn a recession or contraction into a financial crisis very quickly because the dollar shortage can trigger defaults and deleveraging, meaning people start calling in their loans.
00:28:29.000It does provide incremental protection if you wear it right, and it doesn't encourage you to touch your face.
00:28:33.000The problem with the mask is when people have it on, sometimes they're more likely to adjust it and touch their face, and then that defeats the purpose of the mask.
00:28:39.000But the bigger benefit from the mask is that if you have infection, it dramatically reduces your risk of transmitting that infection.
00:28:46.000The mask is going to provide incremental benefit regardless.
00:28:49.000And I think, you know, if we're at the point of telling people they have to shelter in place, I think imposing a requirement that they have to wear a mask if they do, in fact, go out isn't isn't that burdensome.
00:28:57.000I mean, that that of course is exactly right.
00:29:02.000We're going to have to start thinking differently about how we do the office.
00:29:04.000I think a lot of people who can continue to work from home will continue to work from home.
00:29:08.000Otherwise, people are going to go back to stores, people are going to go back to retail establishments.
00:29:12.000And hell, wouldn't you rather wear a mask at this point and be able to go to a store?
00:29:17.000I mean, seriously, what a mask prevents you from doing is touching your own face.
00:29:22.000And I've seen a bunch of people at the grocery store, when I go, who are either not wearing masks at all, or if you're wearing a mask, you're wearing it over your mouth, but not over your nose.
00:29:31.000That's what the masks are designed to do.
00:29:32.000They're designed to prevent you from breathing out your germs on everybody else.
00:29:35.000The other thing that masks are good for is to prevent you from touching your own nose and mouth, which are going to, again, be the typical vectors.
00:29:40.000Now, you touch your face, there's a better chance that you're going to get somebody else's germs on you.
00:29:46.000But we're going to have to think about how do we socially distance?
00:30:02.000Now, does that mean that the masks are available right now?
00:30:05.000No, but I promise you that the mask development is going to ramp up dramatically, dramatically in the very, very near future.
00:30:11.000Now, speaking of the resources, the federal government is bringing all of its resources to bear.
00:30:16.000I mean, nobody, again, it's easy to say people expected this, but when you have a federal government that has two million people in it, and when you have tons of reports each and every day, and you can pick reports over the course of a decade and a half saying we need more ventilators, we need more masks, and everybody basically ignored them, it's hard to specifically fault the Trump administration for that.
00:30:35.000I remember the same sort of thing happened after 9-11.
00:30:36.000I remember there was a report that said that perhaps terrorists are seeking to use planes, and then everyone was like, oh, well, the Bush administration should have known.
00:30:46.000Yeah, and there were similar reports during the Clinton administration, and also it didn't say the planes were going to be crashed into the World Trade Center.
00:31:28.000We are working around the clock to get supplies to cities across the country, to mayors and to governors, but we aren't going to supply our way out of this problem.
00:31:36.000The way we solve this problem is by everyone coming together, stopping the spread, by limiting large gatherings, by staying at home.
00:31:44.000So, you know, again, we are mobilizing.
00:31:48.000Even Andrew Cuomo in New York, he's been saying the White House has been very helpful.
00:31:51.000Again, I'm sort of bewildered as to how the media treatment works here, because the way the media treatment seems to work is they praise Cuomo for basically just giving pressers every day.
00:32:01.000I mean, really, like, he's doing what he's supposed to be doing, but I don't see how he's doing anything different than Gavin Newsom.
00:32:05.000He just receives outside praise because he has been openly critical of President Trump in a way that Gavin Newsom has not.
00:32:11.000So I guess that makes him hero of the resistance.
00:32:12.000Anyway, here's Andrew Cuomo acknowledging the White House has been very helpful here.
00:32:17.000The federal government is a partner in this, obviously.
00:32:20.000I spoke to the president again yesterday about this situation.
00:32:33.000Okay, so in just a second we're going to get to What is important and what is not important about what is happening in the media because then the media have obviously been been covering the wrong kind of stuff and the angles that they are taking are politically driven very often and that that truly is ugly.
00:32:47.000We're going to get to that in just one second.
00:32:49.000First, I want you to go over to dailywire.com right now and subscribe.
00:32:57.000It's a lot more relaxed than our typical programming.
00:32:59.000Basically, one of our hosts, We will get out here and we will just hang out with you for 45 minutes or an hour and basically just kick it with you because we're all stuck in our house.
00:33:27.000Pacific tonight, join us on all access live over at dailywire.com.
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00:33:34.000So one of the, you know, one of the unfortunate aspects of this is the media covering all the wrong stuff.
00:33:46.000The media would prefer to do recriminations right now than, like, get the information to the public about what needs to happen.
00:33:51.000So every so often, you get an article that's actually useful.
00:33:54.000So, for example, the business section of the Washington Post today has an article of frequently asked questions about how you, a small business owner, can actually get a small business loan.
00:34:06.000That article, by the way, does talk about when the funding will be made available.
00:34:10.000Apparently the loans will be made available starting on Friday.
00:34:12.000That goal was confirmed Tuesday by senior administration officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
00:34:15.000So if you're a small business and you need a loan, then by Friday they're supposed to get this situation online.
00:34:20.000The application has been really stripped down from what they normally use at the Small Business Administration.
00:34:25.000Same day approvals will still be a challenge.
00:34:27.000Most small businesses will take days gathering the documents they need to apply.
00:34:31.000Even the most sophisticated banks will have a hard time short-cutting their processes to get money out the door really fast, according to Haicham Odgiri, the chief executive of small business-focused data analytics firm.
00:34:40.000The new loans will cover payroll costs and employee benefits, mortgage interest incurred before February 15th, 2020.
00:34:45.000Rent and utilities under lease agreements in force between February 15th, 2020 and utilities, for which the service began before February 2020.
00:34:53.000Payroll costs include salary, wages, commissions, and tips capped at $100,000 for each employee.
00:34:57.000It also includes benefits for vacation, parental leave, medical leave, sick leave, some other limited benefit categories.
00:35:02.000In some cases, they can also cover interest on other debts.
00:35:06.000The new loans are available to any business for which current economic uncertainty makes the loan necessary.
00:35:11.000Approved lenders will make a determination of need for your business based on SBA guidelines.
00:35:17.000Small businesses, nonprofits, tribal business concerns that meet the SBA's standard business size definition with fewer than 500 employees are eligible for loans under the program.
00:35:26.000Self-employed individuals, independent contractors, sole proprietors are also eligible.
00:35:29.000If you're in the food service business, the 500 employee cap is applied on a per physical location basis.
00:35:34.000So presumably restaurant chains are allowed to get these loans.
00:35:39.000The loans could be up to 10 million dollars to cover payroll and certain other expenses or 2.5 times your total payroll expenses from the loan period.
00:35:48.000The sorts of stuff that could disqualify you?
00:35:50.000Well, you can't receive a Paycheck Protection Program loan if your business or any of its owners have been previously suspended, disbarred, proposed for debarment, declared ineligible.
00:35:58.000You'll be excluded if you've ever taken a loan from the SBA that caused a loss.
00:36:01.000So, we're not just going to reward you with another loan if you've failed before with an SBA loan.
00:36:06.000The application also excludes businesses in which any 20% owner is an individual who is currently subject to criminal charges.
00:36:14.000The new loans apply to costs incurred from February 15th through June 30th.
00:36:18.000The Treasury Department is setting the loan rate at 0.5%, but the CARES Act caps the interest rate for Paycheck Protection Program at 4%, so it's possible the interest rate could increase over time.
00:36:27.000The first payment is due six months after it is incurred.
00:36:37.000If you cover costs for the first eight weeks for companies able to keep employees on the payroll or continue paying bills throughout the coronavirus pandemic.
00:36:45.000So the eligibility for loan forgiveness starts eight weeks after loan origination date.
00:36:52.000That's some useful stuff that you can use right now.
00:36:54.000What is not useful right now is most of the stuff on the op-ed pages, which is mainly directed at playing the blame game and suggesting that the Trump administration is the worst, or Jim Acosta going out there and just sparring with the president because he just feels like pissing on the president.
00:37:10.000And man, ladies, find you somebody who loves you like Jim Acosta loves Jim Acosta.
00:37:14.000Here's Jim Acosta going at the president yesterday again asking useless questions.
00:37:18.000Is there any fairness to the criticism that you may have lulled Americans into a false sense of security when you were saying things like it's going to go away?
00:38:06.000It is true that the CDC had complete failures during February.
00:38:09.000It is also true that as I've shown you through clip after clip after clip, neither did Mayor Bill de Blasio, neither did Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who on February 24th was down in Chinatown in San Francisco telling people to come on out and party it up.
00:38:20.000So yeah, Trump didn't take it seriously enough, but I have a question, Jim Acosta.
00:38:25.000Again, I'm just going to go back to that question that somebody slid to an OANN reporter who was asking Trump a sort of sycophantic question.
00:38:31.000How does this question help us fight coronavirus?
00:38:34.000If you're going to ask a question of the President of the United States, how about what factors go into the decision making in terms of how you make a national lockdown pronouncement?
00:39:50.000Julian Castro, former failed presidential candidate, he says, we have an affordable housing problem in the United States.
00:39:56.000Seriously, that's where you're going with all of this is affordable housing?
00:39:59.000We're trying to fight a global pandemic right now.
00:40:00.000You might want to put your Marxist backburner ideas on backburner.
00:40:05.000One of the things that this coronavirus has revealed is just how close so many million American families are to poverty.
00:40:12.000And one of the things that I think we need to focus on more is that we need to be bolder when it comes to housing assistance to make sure that people can stay in the apartment or the home that they're living in.
00:40:24.000So we need to be addressing this right now for the coronavirus period or crisis that we're in, but also it has demonstrated the long-term problem that we have when it comes to housing affordability out there.
00:40:50.000So if you want to add another $2 trillion on top of that to fill potholes, I'm going to go no on that.
00:40:55.000And meanwhile, speaking of New York City, speaking of government watchdogs that just are throwing politics in front of the needs of the American people.
00:41:05.000New York City's human rights watchdog, according to the Wall Street Journal, is now investigating Amazon.com over allegations an employee of a Staten Island warehouse was fired for helping to organize a walkout over work conditions in the midst of the new coronavirus pandemic, according to city officials.
00:41:18.000The company fired Chris Smalls, a stock worker at the warehouse, on Monday.
00:41:21.000The company said in a statement that Smalls violated social distancing guidelines, including ignoring orders to stay home for two weeks after coming into contact with a co-worker who had a confirmed case of COVID-19.
00:41:31.000Walkouts did occur at several warehouses across the country on Monday.
00:41:34.000Employees were protesting what they said were unsafe conditions for the coronavirus pandemic.
00:41:38.000Mayor Bill de Blasio, the worst mayor in America, said at a press conference on Tuesday, the city's Commission on Human Rights is now investigating the allegations.
00:41:46.000Investigate the allegations that Amazon fired A derelict ne'er-do-well attempting to organize walkouts in the middle of a supply chain crisis in the United States.
00:41:55.000If the allegations are true, the mayor said, that would be a violation of our city's human rights law, and we would act on it immediately.
00:42:01.000The spokeswoman for Amazon said, we didn't terminate Mr. Small's employment for organizing a 15-person protest.
00:42:05.000We terminated his employee for putting the health and safety of others at risk, in violation of his terms of employment.
00:42:12.000De Blasio has been criticizing Amazon's work history.
00:42:15.000De Blasio said, we'd all love to have a time machine and go back and figure out how to make this work.
00:42:18.000The fact is, I actually think city government, state government agreed to a fair deal.
00:42:20.000This is after New York nixed the deal with Amazon.
00:42:24.000There's an entire opinion piece in the New York Times talking about the evils of Amazon.com by Greg Bensinger.
00:42:29.000Okay, I'm going to go with like all the people who are in their houses right now relying on that Amazon truck to pull up with their groceries, have a bit of a different thought on all of this.
00:42:37.000And by the way, I don't think that it should be illegal for Amazon to fire a worker for organizing a walkout in the middle of a pandemic after offering all workers a $2 an hour increase in the middle of the vastest unemployment wave in the history of America, and also offering them protective gear, and also offering them that they get to stay home when they are sick, they get paid sick leave, and telling them that they need to stay home when they are sick.
00:42:59.000And people at Amazon, like, let's not forget what the chief demands of these workers who are walking out is.
00:43:12.000Six million people over the last two weeks, in fact, are probably fully capable of walking into an Amazon warehouse right now loading boxes.
00:43:19.000So, it's amazing to me that the media will hold up people as heroes like this.
00:43:23.000You wouldn't be holding up as heroes medical professionals who say they're going to walk out on the job.
00:43:28.000Well, our supply lines matter right now.
00:43:30.000The same people who are talking about we need to nationalize, we need to use the Defense Production Act to force businesses to produce, are talking about how I'm talking about how it's right for workers to walk off the job in the middle of this.
00:43:42.000By the way, if the government nationalized this, you'd think the government would be... Jacobin magazine, the commies over there, they said that we should nationalize Amazon in order to make all this better.
00:43:50.000So that the government could force people to go to work?
00:43:53.000As opposed to you now calling for the workers to be rewarded for walking off the job?
00:43:57.000It's just amazing and utterly backwards.
00:44:00.000And the New York Times, again, they have an editorial today from Greg Bensinger, a member of the Times editorial board, talking about the evils of Amazon.
00:44:07.000Talking about how it's terrible that bricks-and-mortar retail has been falling apart and Amazon took advantage.
00:44:13.000Okay, if it had not been for Amazon taking advantage, we can't even go to brick-and-mortar stores anymore.
00:44:18.000Ben Singer says during the pandemic, reliable delivery of essentials like milk, eggs, toilet paper, cleaning supplies has been a lifeline for those who are reluctant or unable to venture outside their homes.
00:44:26.000Amazon branded trucks have remained a familiar sight in residential neighborhoods.
00:44:29.000The competitive advantage of Amazon's meticulously constructed worldwide logistics network Built to shuttle nearly every imaginable item to customers in as little as an hour are especially evident in this crisis.
00:44:40.000Amazon has pledged to hire 100,000 temporary workers to keep up with demand.
00:44:43.000Several other retail giants like Walmart and Target have kept pace with coronavirus quarantine demands by keeping physical stores open and leaning on their own delivery networks.
00:44:51.000Well, Amazon and Walmart deserve credit for preparing for a calamity.
00:44:54.000Some of their ability to deliver during such a crisis may have come at the cost of employee protections.
00:44:59.000Ah, yes, now is an excellent time to talk about the evils of Amazon.
00:45:02.000Well, it is the only company that is keeping people connected to food.
00:45:20.000By the way, you think Amazon has an interest in its workers dying off like flies, or its factories being overrun, or its warehouses being overrun with coronavirus?
00:45:26.000I have some serious doubts about all of that.
00:45:28.000Okay, time for a quick thing I like, and then we'll get to a thing that I hate.
00:46:12.000Well, Rick Scott, the senator from Florida, he says that the WHO needs to be held accountable for their role in promoting misinformation and helping communist China cover up a global pandemic.
00:46:20.000He added, we know communist China is lying about how many cases and deaths they have, what they knew and when they knew it.
00:46:25.000The WHO never bothered to investigate further.
00:46:39.000The total number of deaths in Taiwan at this moment is well under 50, I believe.
00:46:44.000So Taiwan has really handled this thing as well as anybody can handle this thing.
00:46:49.000The number of deaths in Taiwan total is 5.
00:46:52.000Out of 329 cases, this is according to worldometers.
00:46:56.000So they have one of the lowest rates of death in the industrialized world from this thing.
00:46:59.000They're not even a member of the WHO at the behest of the Chinese government.
00:47:03.000The WHO has praised Beijing for its response.
00:47:05.000The WHO ignored the fact that Beijing lied about this thing for months.
00:47:10.000As I mentioned yesterday on the radio show, Reason Magazine cited a study that suggested that if the Chinese had been more forthcoming about this thing three weeks earlier, it could have saved 95% of casualties across the planet.
00:47:22.000The WHO has done nothing but praise China and talk about how wonderful China is.
00:47:26.000WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, according to the Daily Caller, who won his election to the post with the backing of China, praised the government's openness to sharing information about the pandemic after traveling there on January 28th.
00:47:36.000Okay, that was like a week after China claimed there was no human-to-human transmission.
00:47:41.000Dr. Bruce Aylward, assistant director of the WHO, has praised China's agile and aggressive response to the virus.
00:47:46.000He's the one who was interviewed by a journalist in Hong Kong who asked why Taiwan isn't part of the WHO, pretended that his connection cut out, and then his biography just mysteriously was removed from the WHO website.
00:47:58.000Aylward said at a WHO press conference on February 27th on a fact-finding mission, which is weird since China has apparently been lying about all of its statistics.
00:48:39.000The entire purpose of a WHO is to prevent disasters.
00:48:42.000The entire purpose of a UN is to prevent disasters.
00:48:44.000And yet these things are treated like democracies in the sense that not the most powerful country like the United States has the most weight.
00:48:51.000Instead, the leaders of these nations are going to spend their days recognizing that the U.S.
00:48:56.000will foot the bill and everyone else will free ride.
00:48:58.000China will free ride, and then the United States will just continue footing the bill because we are supposedly the bedrock of international institutions.
00:49:06.000Well, if we're the bedrock, we should start throwing around our weight.
00:49:10.000The fact that the WHO completely failed in its one task and we footed 15% of the budget at the time is a disaster area.
00:49:41.000It was not multilateral, as it turns out.
00:49:43.000It turns out that China was very not multilateral, and its failure to be multilateral is what has led to this pandemic.
00:49:47.000And then, by the way, China started its propaganda effort trying to blame the United States online, and its propaganda effort where they sent resources to other countries, like Spain, that were complete failures.
00:50:59.000Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
00:51:05.000Okay, so there's an article in The Atlantic today by Adrian Vermeule, who's a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School, and I think it is worthy of a brief discussion.
00:51:14.000The dominant conservative philosophy for interpreting the Constitution has served its purpose, and scholars ought to develop a more moral framework.
00:51:20.000This is part of the common good conservatism wing of the conservative movement.
00:51:23.000There's a really interesting ideological battle that's been put to the side, obviously, during a global pandemic, but It's kind of interesting and fun to discuss because it will rear its head very quickly, I think, in the near future.
00:51:33.000And that is, there's a side of conservatism right now, or a side of the conservative movement, that basically suggests that government is there to do the common good.
00:51:40.000That government is there to, quote-unquote, do justice.
00:51:42.000Which, if that seems vague and scary to you, that's because it is vague and vaguely frightening.
00:51:47.000The sort of libertarian-ish wing of the classical liberal wing of the Republican Party says that government is there to perform the functions that independent society cannot perform.
00:51:56.000And it is there to enforce neutral rules that the goal of the government is to essentially prevent harms from one person toward another person on the federal level.
00:52:07.000And then when it comes to local government and subsidiarity, when it comes to me and my friends in my local government creating rules for the community we wish to live in, as long as people can leave, then you have a little bit more leeway with what you can do with government.
00:52:17.000That's sort of the traditional classical liberal view, right?
00:52:20.000That mixes a bit of Baron de Montesquieu Localism with the classical liberal philosophy of John Locke, along with probably some John Stuart Mill, the sort of non-harm rule, right?
00:52:33.000Then there's the common good conservatism view, and that suggests that all the things that I like, right, family and church and marriage, And social networking, right, that all of that sort of stuff ought to be promoted by the government, even if that means violating the restrictions on government.
00:52:49.000Now, the most dangerous form of this is being expounded by Professor Vermeule, or by Adrian Vermeule.
00:52:55.000He is suggesting that basically conservatives ought to embrace this not as a legislative strategy, not just as we get elected to the federal government, now we're going to push laws that We think promote the common good, which is a sort of lefty perspective on how to use government itself, but that we ought to use the judiciary in order to do so, which is a complete violation of the checks and balances that were originally set forth by the founders.
00:53:17.000And one of the reasons that the founders took a more classically liberal view of what government ought to do is because they had very little trust in the people who run government.
00:53:22.000They thought that the people who run government are ambitious.
00:53:34.000This is why they instituted checks and balances.
00:53:36.000Common good conservatism suggests, sort of like early 20th century progressivism, that those checks and balances ought to be put by the wayside in favor of the common good.
00:53:44.000Now, that scares me because, to me, the government is a giant gun.
00:53:47.000I called it a giant lumbering idiot before.
00:54:06.000Nobody is calling for everybody out in the streets and the government can't do anything it's doing, right?
00:54:09.000So, in emergencies, we understand we need the government, but in non-emergencies, we want those checks and balances to apply.
00:54:14.000Adrian Vermeule is basically expounding the opposite.
00:54:18.000He is saying that we want government to be able to do whatever Adrian Vermeule wants it to do today, which sounds a lot like, even if I agree with Adrian Vermeule, it sounds a lot more like the leftist version of what government ought to do.
00:54:30.000Then like the principled containment of government for the preservation of individual liberty.
00:54:35.000So Adrian Vermeule writes originalism in the judiciary, which is the perspective that the Constitution itself ought to be strictly interpreted such that you can't add stuff to the powers of government, right?
00:54:46.000The Constitution is a document of delegated powers.
00:54:49.000It says exactly what the government can do, and then everything it doesn't say the government can do, the government cannot do.
00:54:53.000That's what the Constitution is designed to do.
00:54:55.000And originalists on the judiciary, they say our job is to interpret the Constitution strictly like any other piece of law.
00:55:01.000People who are on the left on the court have for generations suggested that we have to broadly construe the Constitution such that we can read our own moral wants into the vague language of the Constitution.
00:55:11.000Vermeule says conservatives should do the same thing.
00:55:12.000He says originally has outlived its utility.
00:55:15.000has become an obstacle to the development of a robust, substantively conservative approach to constitutional law and interpretation.
00:55:22.000Such an approach, one might call it common good constitutionalism, should be based on the principles that government helps direct persons, association, and society generally toward the common good, and that strong rule in the interest of attaining the common good is entirely legitimate.
00:55:34.000Now remove the conservatism part of that, and I'm going to read that sentence again, and that is indistinguishable from what you would read at Jacobin Magazine.
00:55:41.000Government helps direct persons, associations, and society generally toward the common good, and that strong rule in the interest of attaining the common good is entirely legitimate.
00:55:49.000Does that sound like the checks and balances conservatism you know about?
00:55:53.000The limited government conservatism you knew about?
00:55:56.000The God-given rights given to individuals pre-existing government that you learned about in the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution?
00:56:01.000And that doesn't sound anything like that?
00:56:11.000Anybody who gives you the cheat, it is a cheat.
00:56:13.000Anybody who gives you the cheat of suggesting that pandemic politics are normal politics is not to be trusted.
00:56:19.000In a time of pandemic, that, you know, if somebody breaks into my house in the middle of the night, and I go and I rack my shotgun, and then I know they're on the other side of the wall, and I can hear them creeping on the other side of the wall.
00:56:31.000And so I blow a hole through the wall to get the guy on the other side of the wall with my shotgun.
00:56:36.000Somebody creeping around in my house, don't know who it is.
00:56:38.000I can see on my camera it's not a family member, and I blow a hole through the wall.
00:56:42.000That does not suggest that in a normal, non-prowler-in-the-house situation, I should randomly go around blowing holes in my wall with my Mossberg.
00:56:50.000Okay, and yet, that's what these pandemic politics people are saying.
00:56:54.000They're saying, look, it's a pandemic.
00:56:55.000See how we need government during a pandemic?
00:56:57.000That means we should use government like this during a non-pandemic.
00:56:59.000We see this from Democrats routinely with regard to the language of war.
00:57:03.000That's why you get the war on poverty.
00:57:08.000Franklin Roosevelt, in his For Freedom speech, suggested that freedom from want was a key freedom.
00:57:12.000No, freedom from want is not A freedom that is guaranteed by the Constitution.
00:57:17.000Freedom of speech is guaranteed by the Constitution.
00:57:20.000Freedom from want is something that should be accomplished through community and social network and social fabric.
00:57:26.000But again, equating everything to a time of war, equating everything to a time of pandemic is a cheap way to move toward dictatorship.
00:57:34.000Vermeule says alternatives to originalism have always existed on the right, loosely defined.
00:57:39.000One is libertarian constitutionalism, which emphasizes principles of individual freedom that are often in uneasy tension with the Constitution's original meaning and the founding generation's norms.
00:57:48.000The founding era was hardly libertarian on a number of fronts that loom today, such as freedom of speech and freedom of religion.
00:57:53.000Well, this is why I have not suggested that it is a particularly originalist perspective to, for example, suggest that flag burning was enshrined by the U.S.
00:58:16.000He says that another alternative is Burkean traditionalism, which tries to slow the pace of legal innovation.
00:58:21.000Here too, the difference with originalism is clear.
00:58:23.000Originalism is sometimes revolutionary.
00:58:25.000Consider the court's originalist opinion declaring a constitutional right to own guns, a standing break with the court's long-standing precedent.
00:58:31.000So he's contrasting his vision with these other visions.
00:58:51.000So in other words, what he wants is the judiciary to become an activist judiciary on behalf of things that Adrian Vermeule likes that have nothing to do with the Constitution.
00:58:58.000How do we know that he is now mirroring the perspectives of the left?
00:59:02.000And he says, I'm talking about a different, more ambitious project, one that abandons the defensive crouch of originalism and that refuses any longer to play within the terms set by legal liberalism.
00:59:11.000Ronald Dworkin, the legal scholar and philosopher, used to urge moral readings of the Constitution.
00:59:16.000Common good constitutionalism is methodologically Dworkinian, but advocates a different set of substantive moral commitments and priorities from Dworkin's, which were of a conventionally left-liberal bent.
00:59:27.000Then he tries to proclaim that this is not legal positivism, meaning that it is not tethered to the particularly written instruments of civil law or the will of legislators who created them.
00:59:35.000Instead, it just draws on the tradition of the Western canon, the inner logic that the activity of law should follow in order to function well as law.
00:59:53.000It says, finally, unlike legal liberalism, says Adrian Vermeule, common good constitutionalism does not suffer from a horror of political domination and hierarchy because it sees that the law is parental, a wise teacher, an inculcator of good habits.
01:00:08.000Hey, that sounds exactly like Barack Obama and his nudge strategy for what law ought to do.
01:00:13.000It ought to make us better people, law.
01:00:14.000Your parents ought to make you better people.
01:00:16.000Your religious community ought to make you a better person.
01:00:19.000Your moral teachings ought to make you a better person.
01:00:22.000If you're relying on the government to make you moral and wise, let's just say that there's not a long history of that being particularly effective.
01:00:29.000Just authority and rulers, says Adrian Vermeule, can be exercised for the good of subjects, if necessary, even against the subject's own perception of what is best for them.
01:00:37.000Perceptions that may change over time anyway, as the law teaches, habituates, and reforms them.
01:00:42.000Okay, this is... I'm sorry, this is dystopian language.
01:00:51.000That common good constitutionalism is anything other than the arbitrary application of government power to a set of principles that you like, even if I like the same principles, is to completely reject the founding vision of a limited government Honestly, how do you fight the American Revolution under these terms?
01:01:09.000The American Revolution was based on the idea that there are pre-existing rights.
01:01:45.000I swear, if you look at the members of government, or the members of our judiciary for that matter, and you think, these people ought to be my wise moral teachers, I don't know who you're talking about.
01:01:53.000I seriously don't know who you're talking about.
01:01:55.000There's no other way to describe that.
01:01:57.000Given that it is legitimate for rulers to pursue the common good.
01:02:00.000Again, you're not defining common good.
01:02:01.000Constitutional law should elaborate subsidiary principles that make such rules efficacious.
01:02:06.000Constitutional law must afford broad scope for rulers to promote peace, justice and abundance.
01:02:12.000Today we may add health and safety to the list in much the same spirit.
01:02:16.000In a globalized world that relates to the natural and biological environments in a deeply disordered way, a just state is a state that has ample authority to protect the vulnerable from the ravages of pandemics, natural disasters, from climate change, from the underlying structures of corporate power that contribute to the events.
01:02:31.000I honestly, honest to God, don't know what is conservative about this in any way, like in any way.
01:02:37.000Vermeule finishes, in this sense common good constitutionalism promises to expand and fulfill in new circumstances and with a new emphasis the constitution's commitments to promoting the general welfare and human dignity.
01:02:48.000Overall, constitutionalism will become more direct, openly more moral, less tied to tangentious law office history, and endless litigation of dubious claims about events centuries in the past.
01:02:57.000So basically, law is arbitrary, but if Adrian Vermeule agrees with it, you're good with it.
01:03:00.000This is just Ruth Bader Ginsburg from the right.
01:03:03.000And it's no good when it's Ruth Bader Ginsburg, because it is not intellectually or morally coherent, and it is no good From the right either.
01:03:10.000Common good constitutionalism has nothing to do with conservatism.
01:03:16.000It's not Burkean because it does not constrain.
01:03:20.000It is not Lockean in that it does not see any value in individual rights.
01:03:26.000If you resonate to this just because you think the judiciary should do what it wants to do to protect your values the same way the left does, then I don't know what your principle is other than you like a bunch of things that the left doesn't.
01:03:39.000And I may agree with you on that, but your vision of government should not be the same.
01:03:42.000If it's just a question of which dictator controls us.
01:04:37.000While police departments around the country are springing child rapists from the slammer, law enforcement is turning a decidedly less lenient eye on another group of miscreants, Christian pastors.
01:04:48.000We will examine why preachers are getting arrested while the criminals run free.
01:04:51.000Then everyone from politicians to grocery store workers are jumping to take advantage of this pandemic.
01:04:56.000We'll take a look at ethics in times of plague.