The U.S. now has the most confirmed cases of coronavirus in the world, leading the way in terms of deaths. Some have suggested that this shows the United States is a "bleephole country." Ben Shapiro argues that this is not the case at all, and that the problem is much bigger than the number of confirmed cases. He argues that the real problem is the lack of understanding of math by the media and other third-world nations about the problem, which is why we need a nationalized healthcare system to solve the problem. Ben Shapiro's show is sponsored by ExpressVPN. Don't let others track what you do - don't let them do it. Keep yourself safe at ExpressVpn.org/KeepSafeBenShapiro Subscribe to the Ben Shapiro Show on Apple Podcasts! Subscribe on iTunes Learn more about your ad choices. If you like what you hear, please consider becoming a supporter of the show by becoming a patron. It helps spread the word to your friends about the show and help keep it safe and keep it on the road to those who need it the most important things in their lives. Thank you Ben Shapiro. You can get 10% off his new book, "Ben Shapiro's New York Times bestselling book "New York Times Besties" out there! out on Amazon Prime Day! Subscribe and review the show on Tuesday, February 15th, only on best used with code: Ben Shapiro, by clicking here. Subscribe at Amazon Prime and Vimeo. Thanks for listening to the show? Subscribe & review Ben Shapiro s new episodes on Vimeo? VaynerSpeak v=AQ& tag=a&utm_t=1QQ&q&q=4q&t=3q&ref=1a&qid=8&qref=3d&qlist=3&qset=1&qtr=3s&qq&s=3 Thanks Ben Shapiro is a writer and Ben Shapiro And thank you, Ben Shapiro and Ben is a friend of the podcast is a fellow & Ben is also a fellow writer? Ben is an avid reader of Ben Shapiro? & ben is a patron of the book "The Facts Is My Name is Ben Shapiro Is a fellow? And a fellow of Ben is thank you on Vogue
00:00:51.000That, of course, is supposed to be making fun of President Trump, who suggested he didn't want people immigrating from bleephole countries because they might not actually be the best American citizens, depending on the culture from which they came.
00:01:03.000Again, that was a very controversial comment at the time and poorly expressed by the president, but let's just put it this way.
00:01:08.000The United States is not a bleephole country because we have a lot of tests, okay?
00:01:12.000If you were going to identify which countries are having the hardest time with coronavirus, the United States, yes, we are having a rough time with coronavirus.
00:01:19.000It is not even close to the countries that are having the toughest time with coronavirus.
00:01:33.000Truly, because you cannot measure the ability of a country to deal with a crisis by simply the bottom line number as to how many people have experienced the crisis.
00:01:41.000It's how those people actually recover from the crisis, how many people die.
00:01:44.000So while it is true that the United States now has the most cases of diagnosed coronavirus, that is largely because China has undoubtedly been lying about the coronavirus situation in China.
00:01:54.000Supposedly, according to China, they're having like 25 new cases of coronavirus a day.
00:02:01.000Literally the day after they expelled American journalists, they apparently stopped testing in China.
00:02:05.000That is according to sources inside China.
00:02:08.000Beyond that, the United States right now, as of now, has about 86,000 confirmed cases of coronavirus in the United States.
00:02:14.000Okay, that's not spectacular, but that means a death rate of approximately 1.3%.
00:02:20.000Italy has 81,000 cases of coronavirus and 8,200 deaths.
00:02:25.000So eight times as many deaths as the United States, about seven times, eight times about as many deaths as the United States, and fewer diagnosed cases.
00:02:32.000Spain has 64,000 diagnosed cases and nearly 5,000 deaths.
00:02:37.000So the notion that the United States is a bleephole country because of the number of coronavirus diagnoses is ridiculous.
00:02:44.000I mean, France has more deaths right now, and they only have 30,000 diagnosed cases.
00:02:49.000By the way, nationalized healthcare systems in most of these places.
00:02:51.000So the kind of triumphalism, a very weird triumphalism you're seeing from the media, well, now that the United States has the most coronavirus cases, that demonstrates that the United States is the worst country.
00:03:02.000Or alternatively, it demonstrates that you don't understand math.
00:03:04.000So maybe we have the worst math programs in the country, because you idiots don't understand what a numerator and a denominator are in terms of determining rates.
00:03:11.000But with that said, again, the United States is dealing with this thing so far, and the big question is going to be whether coronavirus overcomes the capacity of the healthcare system.
00:03:20.000That has been the question for a long time.
00:03:21.000I've been talking about it on the program for weeks at this point.
00:03:24.000When we talk about flattening the curve, the point of flattening the curve is not that everyone will not eventually get coronavirus.
00:03:29.000In all likelihood, everyone will eventually get coronavirus.
00:03:32.000The question is whether that swamps our capacity to deal with it.
00:03:35.000And right now, it is unclear exactly how much we are going to be swamped because we're seeing reports that suggest we're going to be swamped.
00:03:41.000The media obviously Are trying to kind of get ahead of those reports.
00:03:46.000We saw Casey Hunt over NBC News tweet out earlier today that hospitals were already making decisions about who would get a ventilator and who would not, except for the fact that hospitals are not actually doing that at this point.
00:03:57.000And so the notion that we are being overwhelmed right now, right this second, we don't know that yet.
00:04:03.000There have been these forecasts that we were going to get overwhelmed by earlier this week.
00:04:06.000I remember Andrew Cuomo suggested that by Tuesday, New York City's hospitals, ICU beds, their ventilators were going to be overwhelmed.
00:04:12.000And then the suggestion was that by today, by Friday, that the New York system was going to be overwhelmed.
00:04:16.000And we'll see whether it is indeed overwhelmed, although the reality is that most of the New York public officials are saying right now that they are not overwhelmed.
00:04:51.000And by the way, I strongly suspect that not tens of thousands, not hundreds of thousands, but millions of Americans actually have had coronavirus.
00:05:04.000The suspicion of virtually everybody who has taken a look at these numbers.
00:05:07.000Yesterday, we had on a doctor from Stanford University suggesting that he thinks that if you take the number of people, broadly speaking, across the United States who have had coronavirus or do have coronavirus and don't know about it and experience no symptoms or mild symptoms and then moved on with their life.
00:05:21.000If you take that number and you take the number of deaths over the actual number of people who have had or do have coronavirus, you're looking at a death rate that actually does look much more akin to the flu.
00:05:30.000Now, that does not mean you're not going to see more absolute death in the United States because if 300 million people get it and it has the same death rate as the flu, you are still going to end up with like five times as many people dying from that as from the flu because every season in the United States, you get about 50, 60 million people with the flu.
00:05:46.000If instead you had 300 million people with the flu, more people on an absolute level will die.
00:05:50.000But the reason I suspect this is because you're seeing a lot of prominent people come down with this thing.
00:05:55.000Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister of Great Britain, announced today that he has mild symptoms of coronavirus, and he tested positive for coronavirus.
00:06:03.000So the question becomes, why is it that all of these prominent people are getting coronavirus?
00:06:06.000You've got the NBA, where a bunch of people have coronavirus.
00:06:08.000You're seeing celebrities like Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson have coronavirus.
00:06:11.000You're seeing fairly famous people come down with coronavirus.
00:06:14.000So the question is, is this a thing that only famous people are getting?
00:06:18.000Or alternatively, is it that in a time of a shortage of testing, Is it possible the only people who are getting tests are the celebrities, right?
00:06:24.000Which is probably the accurate assessment of the situation, right?
00:06:28.000The NBA was getting early tests because all those people are rich and famous and celebrities and they have hookups with doctors and they can get a connect.
00:06:35.000So it's not that only NBA players are getting it or that only Prime Minister Boris Johnson is getting it.
00:06:39.000It's that you may have had it or you might have had it, but you didn't get a test because you're not famous and because the tests are hard to come by.
00:06:45.000Okay, so, according to the New York Times, the United States is the world's third most populous nation.
00:06:49.000So, of course, that's not a shock that we also have the world's highest number of coronavirus cases.
00:06:54.000And also, it's difficult to compare the United States to, like, Italy, right?
00:06:58.000Italy has nearly as many cases as we do, and they have 60 million people.
00:07:03.000So, on a per capita basis, we're not even close to number one.
00:07:06.000On a per capita basis, we're somewhere in the middle of the pack, actually, in terms of diagnosed coronavirus cases.
00:07:10.000If you took the United States versus the EU, which is closer to apples to apples, then you would be looking at the EU just swamping the United States.
00:07:18.000And as I say, China is number one in terms of population.
00:07:20.000India is number two in terms of population.
00:07:28.000In any case, we don't actually have any data from India, and China's been lying about their data.
00:07:32.000So we don't actually know if the United States is number one.
00:07:34.000That, again, is not stopping people in the media from suggesting that this is because the United States is uniquely weird and evil and all this.
00:07:41.000The same people who will accuse religious Americans of having this apocalyptic view of the United States Uh, accuse religious Americans of sitting around going, well, God is sending a plague on this cruel nation.
00:08:06.000We'll get to more of this in just one second because there is good news today and there's bad news today.
00:08:10.000We're going to get to the bad news first and then we'll get to some of the good news as to where things stand because, again, there's a lot of data floating around that we're going to try to go through all of it.
00:08:18.000The theme of the show, if you haven't noticed for the past several weeks, is I don't know.
00:08:21.000And you don't know, and anybody who claims they know is lying to you.
00:08:25.000Okay, so when you watch the media, and you watch the media's narrative on this thing evolve in real time, understand that's because the data's moving around.
00:08:31.000Some people are gonna be honest about that, and some people are gonna lie to you about that.
00:08:34.000We're gonna be honest about that and suggest we don't know what we don't know.
00:08:36.000Okay, because right now there's this sort of pressure for everybody to come down hard, for people to go to their priors, to people immediately.
00:08:45.000To declare it's either a huge problem or no problem at all.
00:08:48.000We're just going to give you the data and then we're going to, you know, kind of comment on how people are reacting to it.
00:08:52.000First, let us talk about the reality of the situation.
00:08:55.000Right now, we've got to save every penny we can.
00:08:57.000A lot of Americans, many, many Americans have outstanding credit card debt.
00:09:00.000Even after the government is done floating people money, the economy is still going to be a lot weaker than it was just three, four weeks ago.
00:09:06.000A lot of people are going to be out of work.
00:09:08.000Now would be an excellent time for a credit card consolidation loan with a LightStream credit card consolidation loan.
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00:09:47.000If you are prepping for a weaker economy, which is undoubtedly going to come in the next few weeks, and is already hitting us, then you should be consolidating your credit cards right now and prepping for the future.
00:09:56.000Subject to credit approval rate includes 0.50%.
00:10:08.000Be responsible about your finances, especially in this rough time.
00:10:11.000Okay, so as I say, that was the big headline that the United States is number one in terms of coronavirus diagnoses, but that doesn't make a huge difference It's really how many people die compared to that number and whether the health system gets overwhelmed.
00:10:25.000Now speaking of that, Scott Gottlieb, who is the former Trump head of the FDA, has become one of the trusted voices on this thing.
00:10:32.000He put out a chart showing the emerging situations in various American cities and how exactly the deaths are doubling.
00:10:41.000In New York City, basically, deaths are doubling every couple of days.
00:10:44.000Andrew Cuomo suggested that that is starting to flatten out, that thanks to the social distancing, thanks to the lockdown, that is starting to flatten out a little bit.
00:11:43.000There are gonna be some fairly serious questions to be asked to Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio if this really does get bad in New York City as to why they were leaving public transportation running in the middle of all of this.
00:11:53.000Seriously, like, why were all the subways running?
00:11:54.000I mean, those are the places that are most likely to be the areas in which people acquire coronavirus.
00:11:58.000It's a bunch of hard surfaces in small areas underground, right?
00:12:02.000That's going to be... What you're noticing here, by the way, is that many of the areas that have public transportation systems are the ones that are getting the hardest hit.
00:12:09.000It turns out that Maybe your personal protective equipment was your car.
00:12:14.000Being on public transportation is a place where you're most likely to acquire germs.
00:12:17.000Among others, New Orleans is seeing a pretty sharp spike right now.
00:12:19.000New Orleans, Dallas, Atlanta, Miami, Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia, among others, New Orleans is seeing a pretty sharp spike right now.
00:12:25.000In China, no province outside Hubei ever had more than 1500 cases.
00:12:29.000In the United States, 11 states are already hit that total.
00:12:32.000Our epidemic is likely to be national in scope.
00:12:35.000Well, it is true it's likely to be national in scope, but there are likely to be differences by area.
00:12:39.000We're going to get to that in just a moment.
00:12:41.000Meanwhile, again, all eyes on New York City, because New York City is sort of the canary in the coal mine.
00:12:47.000It is the epicenter of the outbreak in the United States.
00:12:49.000According to the New York Times, the New York City death toll hit 365 last night.
00:12:53.000The case count topped at 23,000, which means that Somewhere between one-third and one-half of all cases in the United States are happening in New York City.
00:13:02.000Health officials reported late Thursday that New York City had added 3,100 new confirmed coronavirus cases since the same time on Wednesday, bringing the total to 23,112.
00:13:10.000By comparison, more than 4,400 new cases were added from Tuesday to Wednesday, so maybe the curve is starting to flatten out.
00:13:16.000Andrew Cuomo had suggested that to the governor.
00:13:18.000The number of virus-related deaths climbed to 365 on Thursday, up from 280 the day before.
00:13:24.000From Wednesday morning to Thursday morning, 100 people died of coronavirus in the state overall, said Andrew Cuomo at a news briefing on Thursday.
00:13:30.000He said the number of patients hospitalized in New York had shot up 40% in a day, which was the sharpest increase in days.
00:13:35.000He said that older and weaker patients have been keeping on the ventilators for 20 days or longer before they succumb to respiratory failures.
00:13:42.000That means that the shortages that we're talking about are not just number of ventilators versus number of people who are sick.
00:13:48.000It is also that once you're on a ventilator, you're staying on a ventilator for quite a while.
00:13:51.000He says the longer you're on a ventilator, the more probability of a bad outcome.
00:13:55.000He said the governor emphasized that the numbers on any single day did not necessarily capture the damage being caused by the virus.
00:14:00.000He said when you talk to projection models, what they'll say is you get a fluctuation.
00:14:03.000They don't know if it's a deviation in what hospitals happened to report that day, so he says don't take the day-by-day numbers in New York, take the three-day averages, the three-day swinging averages.
00:14:13.000However, Cuomo did express some optimism that perhaps New York was in fact slowing the growth of the curve.
00:14:19.000With all of that said, We're still trying to figure out where these projections end up, and it's very difficult to tell where these projections end up at this point.
00:14:28.000There is the suggestion that the peak is not going to be hit until sometime in April.
00:14:33.000There's one study that came out, I mentioned it briefly yesterday, from the University of Washington School of Medicine, suggesting the coronavirus pandemic could kill more than 81,000 people in the United States in the next four months and might not subside until June.
00:14:44.000They say the number of hospitalized patients is expected to peak nationally by the second week of April, Though the peak may come later in some states because, again, this thing does not spread perfectly evenly.
00:14:51.000Some people could continue to die of the virus as late as July, although deaths should be below epidemic levels of 10 per day by June at the latest, according to the analysis.
00:14:59.000The analysis has a wide range of outcomes, ranging from as low as 38,000 deaths to as high as 162,000 deaths, which is why, again, you should take every prediction with a grain of salt.
00:15:08.000When the range is literally fourfold...
00:15:11.000It is very difficult to tell exactly where this thing is going to go.
00:15:15.000The variances do impart to disparate rates of the spread of the virus in different regions, which experts are still struggling to explain, said Dr. Christopher Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, who led the study.
00:15:27.000The analysis also highlights the strain placed on hospitals.
00:15:29.000At the epidemic's peak, sick patients could exceed the number of available hospital beds by 64,000, could require the use of around 20,000 ventilators, which is interesting because that study says 20,000 ventilators.
00:15:39.000New York alone has been calling for 30,000 to 40,000 ventilators.
00:15:43.000So this study from the University of Washington says that at peak, you might need 20,000 ventilators.
00:15:47.000That's half of what we were being told like days ago about the 40,000 ventilators that were going to be needed.
00:15:54.000The doctors at University of Washington, they said the virus is spreading more slowly in California.
00:15:59.000They say that peak cases there would come later in April.
00:16:01.000Social distancing measures might need to be extended in the state for longer.
00:16:04.000They expect that Louisiana and Georgia are going to be fairly hard hit throughout all of this.
00:16:10.000All of this has led to the politicization of talk around ventilators.
00:16:13.000There's a story from the New York Times about how the federal government had supposedly canceled a contract with GM and Ventec Life Systems to produce ventilators, and it was flying around Twitter last night.
00:16:23.000I want to give you the actual story, because it's buried in like paragraph 10 of the New York Times piece.
00:16:29.000According to the New York Times piece, basically the Trump administration thought ventilators were too expensive.
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00:18:01.000There's a story from the New York Times that the Trump administration had almost cut a deal with General Motors and Ventac to produce all of these ventilators.
00:18:07.000The story's by David Sanger, Maggie Haberman, and Zolan Kano-Youngs.
00:18:10.000See, the White House had been preparing to reveal on Wednesday a joint venture between GM and Ventec Life Systems that would allow for the production of as many as 80,000 desperately needed ventilators to respond to an escalating pandemic when word suddenly came down that the announcement was off.
00:18:22.000Now, notice, it really is fascinating how variable all these numbers are, right?
00:18:34.000government was going to try to acquire 80,000 ventilators.
00:18:36.000Now listen, I'd rather have too many than too few, obviously, but when you are off by, you know, a factor of four in some of these predictions, it is very diff- I mean, this is all catch-as-catch-can-as-catch-as-catch-can, it is incredibly sloppy.
00:18:48.000And that's just the way that life is sometimes.
00:18:50.000But let's recognize that this is not pinpoint accuracy.
00:18:57.000The decision to cancel the announcement, government officials say, came after FEMA said it needed more time to assess whether the estimated cost was prohibitive.
00:19:04.000That price tag was more than $1 billion with several hundred million dollars to be paid up front to GM to retool a car parts plant in Kokomo, Indiana, where the ventilators would be made with Ventex technology.
00:19:14.000Government officials said the deal might still happen, but they're examining at least a dozen other proposals.
00:19:18.000They contend that an initial promise that the joint venture could turn out 20,000 ventilators in short order had shrunk to 7,500 with even that number in doubt.
00:19:25.000So that would be the actual story, right?
00:19:27.000The way that the New York Times played this and the way that the reporters tweeted this out was that the Trump administration was on the verge of generating all the ventilators overnight tomorrow and they just decided a billion dollars was too much.
00:19:37.000And so people on Twitter were like, okay, hold up a second.
00:19:39.000We're spending $6 trillion and you can't find $1 billion to provide the ventilators?
00:19:44.000It sounds like GM couldn't even guarantee they were going to produce the ventilators.
00:19:48.000It sounds like they didn't even know they were going to produce 7,500 ventilators.
00:19:51.000And so the government, FEMA, went back and opened up the contract and said, OK, well, let's get some competitive bids in here.
00:19:57.000Longtime emergency managers at FEMA are working with military officials to sort through the competing offers and federal procurement rules while under pressure to give President Trump something to announce.
00:20:07.000With all of that said, President Trump got himself in a little bit of hot water yesterday because he suggested that We don't actually need 40,000 or 30,000 ventilators.
00:20:16.000He said, you go into major hospitals sometimes and they will have two ventilators.
00:20:19.000And now all of a sudden they're saying, can we order 30,000 ventilators?
00:20:22.000People in the media, again, fulminating over President Trump saying that, but there's been no information that Trump is actually denying New York what it needs.
00:20:29.000Like Cuomo's calling him up and saying, I need 30,000 ventilators.
00:20:52.000We're likely not to hit the peak according to any study until around Easter.
00:20:56.000That is the most likely time when we hit the peak number of cases in the United States according to sort of the pandemic, the pandemic studies, the pandemic methodologies that are being applied.
00:21:05.000Here's Dr. Anthony Fauci saying, no, Easter is a little bit optimistic.
00:21:09.000I think that the president was trying to do, he was making an aspirational projection to give people some hope, but he's listening to us when we say we really got to reevaluate it in real time, and any decision we make has to be based on the data.
00:21:25.000I mean, you know, the numbers that you showed, when you have a situation when the cases today compared to tomorrow is increased dramatically, and then the next day is increased dramatically, that's no time to pull back.
00:21:38.000Okay, and I think that everybody gets that, right?
00:21:39.000Trump was expressing an optimistic date when he said April 12th.
00:21:42.000He was not saying we're definitely open by Easter.
00:21:45.000But, you know, to have your eye on the ball as to when we reopen, that is a good thing.
00:21:48.000Now, it's time for a little bit of good news, so...
00:21:51.000President Trump yesterday, he did an interview on Sean Hannity's Fox News program, and he suggested that he thinks the mortality rate for this thing is well below 1%.
00:21:58.000Now, just a few weeks ago, that was verboten.
00:22:18.000Again, we had a doctor from Stanford University yesterday on the radio show, and he suggested that this thing might look a lot more like actual influenza death rates than it looks like SARS or MERS, which is likely.
00:22:33.000As I say before, I think that the best data suggests that that is the case.
00:22:36.000Here's President Trump saying, I think the mortality rate is well below 1%.
00:22:39.000One thing that I can say that's really good, the mortality rate is much, much better in our way than I was, than people were thinking at the beginning.
00:22:51.000Because you were hearing 3, 4, 5 percent.
00:22:53.000And now, with all of the testing and all of the things, you see the people who die, you take a look at the people, you know, I think you're talking about very significantly under 1 percent.
00:23:04.000And I think that's a tremendous, that's a tremendous thing.
00:23:09.000So again, if you said this a few weeks ago, if you said that the death rate looked a lot more like flu and a lot less like SARS or MERS, then you're considered a denier.
00:23:17.000This is one of the problems with fast-developing scientific consensus, is that very often, they are happening before you actually have the data in.
00:23:24.000And by the way, Anthony Fauci was saying this, like, in late February.
00:23:28.000On February 28th, there was a piece that he wrote, along with Robert Redfield, who is one of the heads of the CDC, and Clifford Lane.
00:23:35.000It was accessed last, on March 26th, 2020.
00:23:40.000And in that article, he suggested that the best data suggests the overall clinical consequences of COVID-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza, which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%, or a pandemic influenza, similar to 1957 or 1968.
00:23:51.000pandemic influenza similar to 1957 or 1968, like that was actually called the Hong Kong flu in 1957, rather than a disease similar to SARS or MERS, which have had case fatality rates of 9 to 10 percent and 36 percent, respectively.
00:24:05.000So this has actually been a fairly well-known scientific consensus, it sounds like, for several weeks, is that this thing is far less deadly than originally thought.
00:24:11.000But if you said this in the media, then you were labeled a denier.
00:24:15.000Okay, well, the good news about that is that means that when we see vast swaths of people getting this thing, Yes, some of those people are going to die, but it ain't going to be 3 or 4%.
00:24:22.000And if you get it, the chances that you're going to die of it, unless you are vulnerable prior, unless you're elderly, unless you have a pre-existing condition, are pretty low.
00:24:31.000Now again, that doesn't mean that on an absolute level, like just the way stats works, you may be the one, right?
00:24:37.000Okay, so this is why everybody should still be, you know, concerned.
00:24:41.000But if you're just taking a lottery and the rates are 0.1%, like influenza, that means that one out of every thousand people is going to die of acquiring this thing, right?
00:25:43.000Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York, he said, maybe we shouldn't have done a total shutdown.
00:25:46.000Maybe this wasn't actually the best policy.
00:25:48.000Maybe we were over the top in how we did this entire thing.
00:25:51.000Now, I think a hard stop was necessary because we didn't have the data at that point.
00:25:54.000But as the data comes in, we're going to have to reassess this.
00:25:57.000And we'll get to that reassessment in just one second.
00:26:00.000But the kind of new fangled consensus is that the most catastrophic studies here are overstated.
00:26:07.000The kind of estimates that huge numbers of Americans are going to die, hundreds of thousands of Americans are going to die, that is probably a wild overestimate.
00:26:14.000Deborah Birx, who is leading up the coronavirus effort on behalf of the administration, She basically lectured the media yesterday, saying, you guys keep suggesting that all of our ICU beds are going to run out, that everybody's going to be sharing a ventilator, that there's going to be mass death in the streets, cats and dogs living together, the end of the world.
00:26:42.000And she was like, well, because those probably aren't going to materialize.
00:26:45.000Maybe you should actually give some nuanced information.
00:26:46.000Here was Deborah Brooks just tearing into the media yesterday.
00:26:49.000Please, for the reassurance of people around the world, to wake up this morning and look at people talking about creating DNR situations.
00:27:00.000Do not resuscitate situations for patients.
00:27:04.000There is no situation in the United States right now that warrants that kind of discussion.
00:27:11.000You can be thinking about it in a hospital, certainly many hospitals talk about this on a daily basis, but to say that to the American people, to make the implication that when they need a hospital bed, it's not going to be there, or when they need that ventilator, it's not going to be there.
00:27:27.000We don't have an evidence of that right now.
00:27:30.000Okay, so, I mean, that is a pretty stunning statement, right?
00:27:32.000The media keeps saying, as I say, they keep saying kind of worst case scenario, we're going to run out of beds, ICU beds, there won't be any, there won't be any hospital beds, we're not going to have any ventilators, you're going to go into the hospital, it's going to look like Italy, where they're going to shuttle you off into a hallway somewhere where you choke for breath and then die, right?
00:27:47.000And Deborah Birx is like, guys, you might want to wait on that.
00:27:49.000By the way, it's not just Deborah Birx.
00:27:52.000Bill de Blasio, who's been as panic-stricken as any public leader in America, truly, Right.
00:27:58.000Bill de Blasio came out today and he said, you know, you guys keep talking about this protective gear shortage for health care workers in New York and it doesn't exist.
00:28:18.000By the way, Andrew Cuomo, again, said the same thing.
00:28:23.000Andrew Cuomo said, we do have the personal protective equipment in New York, but if you watch the media, it's all nurses and doctors wearing trash bags, shortage of medical equipment, everybody is going to die in the hospital after being coughed on by a patient with coronavirus, everyone's going to have to share a ventilator, we're going to have to convert all the CPAP machines, mass casualties.
00:28:43.000We are reassured after meeting with colleagues in New York, there are still ICU beds remaining.
00:28:47.000Over a thousand or two thousand ventilators that have not been used yet.
00:28:51.000She said, like, stop exaggerating this thing.
00:28:54.000She says, you could be thinking about it in a hospital.
00:28:55.000Certainly many hospitals talk about it on a daily basis.
00:28:58.000But to say that to the American people, to make the implication that when there's a hospital, but it's not going to be there, we don't have evidence.
00:29:03.000She said, there's no reality on the ground where we can see that 60 to 70 percent of Americans are going to get infected in the next 8 to 12 weeks.
00:29:10.000So when people say, like, a huge percentage of Americans will be infected or have been infected, that may happen in the future, but not necessarily right now.
00:29:18.000And by the way, I trust Dr. Deborah Birx.
00:29:19.000More than I trust the people at the New York Times.
00:29:21.000And until five seconds ago, it was people at the New York Times saying we should trust Berks and not Trump.
00:29:26.000What I'm saying is replicating what Fauci said, right?
00:29:28.000I'm quoting Fauci and I'm quoting Berks.
00:29:30.000And yet, if you quote them, now this is controversial.
00:29:34.000Like, Berks started trending on Twitter yesterday for having the temerity to point out that people are getting panic-stricken about this and that the media are deliberately stoking the panic.
00:29:44.000Like, again, best data suggests that there will be a lot of people who die from this.
00:29:51.000I mean, this has been my constant complaint.
00:29:52.000We don't have the data from the New York government, from the federal government, as to how many ventilators they actually think we're going to need.
00:30:00.000If it's bad data in, it's bad data out.
00:30:02.000How many ventilators we are going to need that we don't already have?
00:30:04.000How those ventilators are going to be deployed?
00:30:07.000How much the New York City system is going to be overwhelmed?
00:30:10.000Are there outlying systems where people can be shifted out of hospital beds?
00:30:13.000This is happening, by the way, in New York City.
00:30:15.000People are being moved out of beds that are not ICU beds, just kind of normal hospital beds, and they're being moved to other sort of medical centers so we can make room.
00:30:23.000The Javits Center is being converted for normal hospital beds, right?
00:30:26.000You had a surgery two weeks ago and you're still recovering from the surgery, but you don't need ICU care.
00:30:30.000So we're converting over a lot of the beds that are in hospitals where you can have better treatment.
00:30:34.000And we're taking we're setting up hotel rooms and stuff for people who are just sort of in recovery.
00:30:39.000But all you need is an IV, which all that stuff is being done in real time.
00:30:44.000And again, there's still serious questions to be asked about the models that are being applied in the first place.
00:30:49.000The Netherlands has been applying completely different models.
00:30:52.000According to Science Magazine, Martin Enserink and Kai Koepfertschmidt writing, they say, with COVID-19, modeling takes on life and death importance.
00:31:01.000They say, The Netherlands has so far chosen a softer set of measures than most Western European countries.
00:31:06.000It was late to close its schools and restaurants.
00:31:09.000In a March 17th speech, Prime Minister Mark Rutte rejected working endlessly to contain the virus and shutting down the country completely.
00:31:15.000Instead, he opted for controlled spread while making sure the health system isn't swamped with COVID-19 patients, which, by the way, is sort of the South Korean model, kind of.
00:31:22.000He called on the public to respect the government's expertise on how to thread that needle.
00:31:28.000The predictions put out by Jaco Willinga, whose computer simulations are being used by the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment over in the Netherlands, right?
00:31:37.000His simulations predict the number of infected people needing hospitalization will taper off as of next week.
00:31:42.000So there are some pretty stark differences between models, right?
00:31:45.000You had the Imperial College model that was suggesting that half a million people were gonna die if there were no measures taken in the UK.
00:31:51.000And then yesterday, the head of that study suggested that thanks to the lockdown models, and then he sort of Kind of slid in there.
00:31:58.000And also thanks to the lower death rate, he was predicting now that there might be only 20,000 people who died in the UK.
00:32:03.000That was not him throwing out his old model.
00:32:05.000It was him saying that if we apply like heavy tamp down, then we are going to dramatically lower the curve.
00:32:10.000I mean, it's pretty dramatic lowering of the curve from 500,000 to 20,000.
00:32:13.000But even his models are under pressure.
00:32:16.000Oxford put out a model that suggested the death rates were even lower than that.
00:32:19.000The Netherlands has put out models suggesting that this thing is going to peak next week.
00:32:23.000Welinga is confident that the number of new infections caused by each person when no control measures are taken is just over two.
00:32:30.000He trusts data showing that three to six days elapse between the moment someone is infected and the time they start to infect others.
00:32:36.000Welinga says he is least confident about the susceptibility of various age groups, but he also suggests that we are not going to be overwhelmed in the Netherlands, okay?
00:32:44.000Again, there's this assumption that every case is going to be worst case like Italy or Spain, but the evidence that every case is going to be like Italy or Spain is just not there.
00:32:55.000We keep hearing that it's about to happen in New York City.
00:32:57.000That's why I say the tsunami may be coming.
00:32:59.000We just don't know because it's hard to know whom to believe.
00:33:02.000The story seems to be changing on a daily basis.
00:33:06.000The media are not particularly trustworthy in their tone and tenor.
00:33:09.000They're bringing you best available information, but so much of it is anecdotal.
00:33:12.000The New York Times every day is printing stories about a doctor or a nurse who says, we're being overwhelmed at a hospital.
00:33:18.000And then you go to the hospital administration and the hospital administration is like, no, we're, We're okay.
00:33:22.000I mean, we're stretched and we're strained, but we're handling it.
00:33:25.000And by the way, even in Italy, new coronavirus cases are actually slowing.
00:33:29.000According to Chico Harlan and Stefano Petrelli over at the Washington Post, Italy's nationwide lockdown is showing the first small signs of payoff.
00:33:35.000The number of coronavirus cases is still rising, but at the lowest day-on-day pace since the outbreak began.
00:33:40.000The WHO calls the slowdown encouraging.
00:33:42.000The health chief in the hardest hit region says there's light at the end of the tunnel.
00:33:47.000Italy was the first Western country to contend with a mass outbreak and order a lockdown.
00:33:50.000Now they're trying to figure out how long the restrictions could last.
00:33:54.000But the bottom line is that even Italy, which has been overwhelmed, is starting to tamp down and move beyond the day-to-day increases in the virus.
00:34:06.000All of which is a very, very good thing.
00:34:09.000President Trump spoke yesterday, by the way, about the resources that are being applied in the United States.
00:34:12.000He says, we're shipping tons of resources.
00:34:14.000Like, people are pretending that we're not getting masks out to people.
00:34:16.000We're not getting personal protective equipment out to people.
00:34:18.000Here's President Trump at a press conference yesterday talking about the numbers of resources being shipped all over the country.
00:34:25.000FEMA has shipped over 9 million N95 masks, 20 million face masks, 3.1 million face shields, nearly 6,000 ventilators, 2.6 million gowns, 14.6 million gloves, and we're sending more every day, and we've got tremendous amounts of equipment coming in.
00:34:47.000Okay, so again, the notion that the federal government is doing nothing is just not true.
00:35:04.000So the panic, in other words, may be over, maybe it's not, but may be overstated.
00:35:08.000Deborah Birx, who I trust a lot more than the New York Times, is suggesting that the panic is overstated.
00:35:13.000I trust her more than I trust the New York Times.
00:35:15.000Dr. Fauci has not made any public statements, so far as I'm aware, that all of the systems in New York are going to be completely overwhelmed, death in the streets, we're going to have to choose between old patients and young patients, this is going to be Italy.
00:35:24.000Here's President Trump yesterday, saying we're building hospitals in New York.
00:35:28.000We're building four hospitals, four medical centers, and many other things.
00:35:33.000We've developed and sent thousands of ventilators, and hopefully they're going to do well.
00:35:41.000So again, resources are being brought to bear.
00:35:44.000And this does raise the question, OK, so if we have raised, as I've said all along, if we have flattened the curve enough and we have raised that line of medical resources enough that the line now clears the flattened curve, then we have to start having conversations about how to get back to work.
00:35:56.000And maybe that is not applied on an even basis across the United States, because not every place is a hotspot center of this outbreak.
00:36:11.000I mean, major cities are gonna be the epicenters of this stuff, but how about outlying rural areas?
00:36:16.000Are we seeing mass death in the rural areas?
00:36:18.000Which, by the way, is where you sort of would expect to see mass death, considering hospital resources are far less.
00:36:22.000There are tons of counties in the United States that don't have a single hospital.
00:36:25.000There may be neighboring counties that have the hospital, but rural outlying areas, they don't actually have the medical resources being brought to bear, but you're not seeing mass death in those areas.
00:36:34.000So in one second, we're going to get to the question of when we reopen, because what you're going to see, it's pretty incredible, is that Andrew Cuomo and Donald Trump are basically saying the same thing.
00:36:42.000And Donald Trump is getting just his ass kicked by the media.
00:36:45.000And meanwhile, Andrew Cuomo is getting his ass kissed by the media.
00:36:50.000Trump is getting his ass kicked and Cuomo is getting his ass kissed.
00:36:53.000And they're saying exactly the same thing about how we reopen this thing, how we open this thing back up.
00:36:59.000And that is because the media's desire for a binary narrative in which President Trump is responsible for every cruel ill of the United States and Trump is sitting there with his arms crossed putting on the Trump frown and saying to people, No, not gonna give the ventilators.
00:37:16.000He and Cuomo are saying almost identical things, and the media is treating them as though they're saying things that are separated by 180 degrees, and it's just a lie.
00:37:23.000We're gonna get to that in one second.
00:37:31.000He knows what it takes to get through the long work week.
00:37:33.000In the picture, Tiller is sporting an American worker trucker hat while holding the world's greatest beverage vessels in front of an eye chart that hilariously reads, Epstein did not kill himself.
00:37:43.000The post caption reads, Making parts for the Apache helicopter can be exhausting, but I'm able to work 50-plus hours weekly thanks to my refreshing Leftist Tears tumbler.
00:37:50.000Always refilling, sometimes hot, sometimes cold, always delicious.
00:37:59.000First of all, thank you to all of the folks in the supply lines.
00:38:02.000Thank you to all the folks in the trucking industry who are doing hard work each and every day to make sure there's stuff at the groceries, making sure this country is still moving.
00:38:09.000You see folks, this is why you need to become a DailyWire member.
00:38:12.000Take it from a man making the vital components of an incredible attack helicopter that supports the greatest military the world has ever known.
00:38:23.000Also, if you haven't had a chance to see some of our new content called All Access Live, you should head over to dailywire.com and check it out.
00:38:29.000Jeremy Boring and I kicked it off last week.
00:38:31.000All of the other hosts have done live streams over at dailywire.com.
00:38:34.000We're gonna continue all this week at 8 p.m.
00:40:19.000Yesterday, Andrew Cuomo, governor of New York, widely held by the media to be the greatest of all possible leaders, which, honestly, I found a little bit weird because Gavin Newsom has basically done exactly the same thing as Andrew Cuomo, but nobody ever talks about Gavin Newsom out in my home state of California.
00:40:31.000And Andrew Cuomo was late to the game.
00:40:34.000He has shifted his narrative somewhat.
00:40:37.000Bill de Blasio was saying, we need a full shutdown.
00:40:39.000And Cuomo's like, I'm not doing a full shutdown.
00:40:40.000And then five minutes later, he's like, you know what?
00:40:43.000Well now, Andrew Cuomo is saying, maybe we shouldn't have done a total shutdown, maybe we should have done this in parts.
00:40:47.000We had to do what we had to do on sort of a catch-as-catch-can basis, which, at least he's honest about that.
00:40:52.000I think the real reason that Cuomo is getting high marks is because in these TV pressers, he seems to be authentic and honest, which, again, is all the media care about.
00:40:58.000It's all performance art for the media.
00:41:00.000But in any case, Andrew Cuomo says, maybe we shouldn't have done a total shutdown, which is weird, because when Trump says this sort of thing, he gets ripped up and down.
00:41:07.000What we did was, we closed everything down.
00:41:18.000All businesses, all workers, young people, old people, short people, tall people, every school, close everything.
00:41:25.000If you rethought that or had time to analyze that public health strategy, I don't know that you would say quarantine everyone.
00:41:37.000I don't even know that that was the best public health policy.
00:41:41.000There's Cuomo acknowledging full-on that maybe we should have considered other public health policies.
00:41:45.000And this is one of the problems, that in the middle of a panic, which this basically isn't, maybe for good reason, the easiest thing to do is try to hit the policy with a blunt instrument, right?
00:41:55.000That's what this giant bailout package was, or stimulus bill, whatever you want to call it.
00:42:12.000I'm just saying that as more data comes out, we need to seriously reconsider exactly how we go about getting back to our daily business and how we go about getting back to life.
00:42:20.000I say that, people rip me up and down.
00:42:21.000You're not taking this seriously enough.
00:42:23.000Andrew Cuomo says the exact same thing, and people are like, oh man, what a genius.
00:42:26.000I mean, wow, like he's really being serious about this thing.
00:42:29.000Here is Andrew Cuomo saying, over time, maybe some people can go back to work.
00:42:32.000How do you modify the public health strategy to make it smarter from a public health point of view, but also starts to get you back to work?
00:43:38.000They changed that very quietly late last week.
00:43:41.000But it's being treated differently all over the continent.
00:43:43.000It's being treated differently all over the world.
00:43:45.000The United States is a very, very large chunk of territory.
00:43:48.000To suggest that we have to treat coronavirus exactly the same way in Salt Lake City, Utah, as we do in New York City, is really kind of ridiculous.
00:43:54.000And the Trump administration pointed this out.
00:43:56.000According to Rebecca Ballhaus reporting for the Wall Street Journal, the Trump administration is planning to issue guidelines categorizing counties across the nation as high-risk, medium-risk, or low-risk.
00:44:05.000to help state and local authorities decide whether to bolster or relax social distancing measures instead intended to combat the coronavirus.
00:44:11.000In a letter to governors on Thursday, President Trump said the administration's growing testing capabilities would enable it to publish, in consultation with public health officials and scientists, criteria for classifying counties by risk, in the hopes that some parts of the country may be able to return to work sooner than others.
00:44:27.000He wrote, this new information will drive the next phase in our war against this invisible enemy.
00:44:30.000As we enhance protection against the virus, Americans across the country are hoping the day will soon arrive when they can resume their normal economic, social, and religious lives.
00:44:38.000Okay, and this was immediately, this was immediately seized on by the media as Trump doesn't care about humans.
00:44:56.000Every single major world leader is considering exactly that thing.
00:45:00.000In a briefing later on Thursday, Trump said he intended to start the process of relaxing social distancing guidelines pretty soon, said the administration might tailor guidelines to specific parts of the country, said our people want to go back to work.
00:45:10.000I'm hearing it loud and clear from everybody.
00:45:11.000They don't want to sit around and wait.
00:45:15.000Again, this is very much in line with what Andrew Cuomo is saying.
00:45:17.000It's just that when Trump says it, it's bad because he's an orange person.
00:45:20.000And when Andrew Cuomo says it, it's very good because he doesn't like the orange person.
00:45:24.000So here's President Trump yesterday saying, we're going to have to think about opening up parts of the country, but again, we're going to do this on a piecemeal basis.
00:45:30.000The end result is we've got to get back to work, and I think we can start by opening up certain parts of the country, you know, Farm Belt, certain parts of the Midwest, other places.
00:45:41.000But I think that, as an example, you go to Texas, there are places in Texas, great governor, Greg Abbott, there are places in Texas where, you know, this is a tremendously big state, That aren't impacted by this.
00:45:56.000So I think we can open up sections, quadrants, and then just keep keep them going until the whole country is opened up.
00:46:28.000And by the way, if you've ever been to Texas, you're driving for long stretches of territory where there's like a house, a cow, right?
00:46:33.000I mean, like, the notion that we're gonna treat You know, some podunk town in Texas, the same way that you read Dallas or Houston, is obviously absurd.
00:46:51.000He's saying the same kind of stuff as everybody else.
00:46:53.000Trump says, by the way, that social distancing will remain after coronavirus.
00:46:56.000Much of the guidelines like shaking hands, maybe people aren't going to be shaking hands anymore.
00:47:02.000You know, Tony had mentioned to me, Tony Fauci, the other day that I don't think he would be too upset with the concept of not shaking hands anymore.
00:47:11.000He was saying that the flu would cut down, the regular flu would be cut down by quite a bit if we didn't do that, if we didn't shake hands.
00:47:18.000You know, the regular flu, of which, you know, you have a lot of deaths and a lot of problems with that, too, when we're open.
00:47:26.000That doesn't mean you're gonna stop with the guidelines.
00:47:28.000You'll still try and distance yourself.
00:47:30.000Maybe not to the same extent because you have to lead a life.
00:47:33.000Okay, well, again, what is he saying that's so wrong?
00:47:35.000I mean, he's explicitly saying that social distancing is good.
00:47:39.000So the New York Times ran a headline yesterday, or CNN rather, they ran a headline saying Fauci encourages social distancing while Trump talks about other... Trump is encouraging social distancing.
00:47:49.000He's saying maybe we shouldn't shake hands ever again.
00:47:50.000By the way, I'm totally on board with that.
00:48:15.000Let's get all the resources where they need to be, and then let's wait for the data.
00:48:18.000By the end of next week, we're gonna know an awful lot more.
00:48:20.000I thought, frankly, we were gonna know an awful lot more by the end of this week.
00:48:23.000I mean, given the projections, I thought by today, by like this Friday, we were gonna know whether the health systems were gonna be overwhelmed.
00:48:32.000Probably because, at least in large part, because of the lockdown.
00:48:35.000But we're going to find out by the end of next week, certainly by the week after that, we're going to be finding out exactly how bad this thing is going to be.
00:48:41.000Because by pretty much everybody's estimation, early April, mid-April, you're going to start to see this thing start to pick up in terms of tempo and peak.
00:48:49.000And then the question is going to be, did we have the resources that were necessary on hand?
00:48:54.000Or do we end up just being the UK, right?
00:48:56.000Where again, the new estimates suggest that the health system will not be overwhelmed.
00:49:00.000Now, with all of that said, the Democrats are moving swiftly to try and use crisis in order to push forward even more spending.
00:49:09.000So Nancy Pelosi, who held up a bill that her own party had helped negotiate over the weekend, is supposed to vote on this thing today, right?
00:49:15.000The House is supposed to vote on this thing today.
00:49:18.000Nancy Pelosi says, well, this is just the beginning.
00:49:19.000We're going to spend even more and more and more and more.
00:49:21.000We literally are spending $6 trillion.
00:49:41.000It feels like People are very uncomfortable, just generally.
00:49:45.000People are extremely uncomfortable with not being able to simply go back to their pre-existing suppositions about the way the world works.
00:49:53.000And so, as quickly as possible, people move back into their fighting corners and they wait for the situation to emerge where they can go back to fighting the way that they are used to fighting.
00:50:02.000Whenever there's a pandemic, whenever there's something brutal that happened with 9-11, whenever there's a major crisis, people get out of their corners for just a minute and they think to themselves, okay, how do I help out my neighbors?
00:50:10.000How do we craft a policy that works for right now?
00:50:13.000And then as soon as humanly possible, we're not comfortable in that space.
00:50:16.000We're comfortable going back to our corners.
00:50:18.000And so you see people like Nancy Pelosi immediately swivel into green new deal.
00:50:21.000You see Nancy Pelosi swivel into we need more spending.
00:50:24.000And you see Republicans, meanwhile, swivel back into their priors too.
00:50:29.000Like everybody swivels back into their priors.
00:50:30.000Now, listen, I agree with the Republican priors, obviously, a lot more than the Democrat priors.
00:51:30.000Basically, the Democrats are in real time now going to try, according to Nancy Pelosi, to apply Elizabeth Warren's modern monetary theory, which suggests that you can just float debt just interminably, just forever.
00:51:41.000You can just continue to take out debt and debt and debt and debt.
00:51:43.000Well, that assumes there's an appetite for the debt.
00:51:44.000Who the hell has the money to pay for the debt right now?
00:51:47.000Do you think Britain's going to be buying American bonds en masse?
00:52:11.000How about we deal with the crisis at hand, and we all get out of those corners, and we deal with it, and then we start figuring out how we go back to a life that happened before.
00:52:20.000Because I'll tell you what, right now, life is a lot worse than it was three weeks ago, a lot worse than it was four weeks ago.
00:52:25.000How about we set our sights on, let's get back to where we were four weeks ago, before you decide that you want to fundamentally transform the American economy along your ridiculous big government lines.
00:52:36.000Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
00:52:43.000So speaking of people who are seeking to go back to their priors, there is this bizarre, bizarre attempt every time there's a national crisis by local leaders to shift the responsibility onto the national leaders.
00:52:53.000And I recall this happening during Hurricane Katrina when Mayor Ray Nagin, who is the mayor of New Orleans, did not evacuate the city when he was told that he probably should evacuate the city and then the city was swamped.
00:53:04.000And then he blamed President Bush and suggested that President Bush was a racist and that it was Bush's fault that the resources weren't made available, even though he was the mayor and it really was his responsibility to clear the thing.
00:53:12.000I remember that I think the governor at the time was Kathleen Blanco.
00:53:15.000I remember she said sort of the same thing.
00:53:17.000It's always the impetus is always on local leaders to try and blame national leadership for your own failures.
00:53:22.000Well, this week, the New Orleans mayor blamed President Trump for not shutting down Mardi Gras.
00:53:27.000The mayor's name is Cantrell, and she suggested that President Trump is to blame for the city of New Orleans not shutting down Mardi Gras.
00:53:34.000Here she was on CNN with Wolf Blitzer.
00:53:37.000You're saying no one from the federal government came to you and urged you to at least cancel or postpone Mardi Gras.
00:54:15.000At least Garcetti isn't out there trying to claim that it's Trump's fault that he allowed the LA Marathon to happen like two weeks ago on a Sunday in the middle of a pandemic.
00:54:22.000I mean, this woman going out there and suggesting that she needed a personal phone.
00:54:25.000By the way, you know what would have happened if Trump had called her up and said, you know, you really should shut down Mardi Gras on the basis of this coronavirus pandemic in mid-February?
00:54:34.000When, by the way, half the media was still not taking this seriously, like, at all.
00:54:36.000I mean, really, like, Vox.com ran a piece on January 31st about why this was going to be no worse than the seasonal flu.
00:54:43.000For her to suggest that if Trump had called her up and been like, I want you to shut down Mardi Gras, she'd have been like, Mr. President, you can't do that.
00:54:49.000Of course that's what she would have said.
00:54:55.000If you're a local leader and you blew it, it's because you blew it.
00:54:58.000Why are we pretending the President of the United States is some godlike figure who can descend from on high and then order you to do all the things you're supposed to do as a local leader?
00:55:04.000You get the same crap from Bill de Blasio.
00:55:07.000You tried to run for president on the basis of that.
00:55:09.000It seems to me you should be able to make some local decisions.
00:55:12.000Weird, because it seems like there are some local leaders who did make some of those local decisions to shut down major public events.
00:55:18.000That her blaming Trump for the outbreak in New Orleans is just, like, everything is Trump's fault.
00:55:23.000Or, alternatively, again, everybody shifting back to their priors, the New York Times ran a piece today called, The Road to Coronavirus Hell Was Paved by Evangelicals.
00:55:32.000Evangelicals, okay, let me just ask a question.
00:55:35.000So the centers of the outbreak that we've seen thus far are China, famous for its huge evangelical Christian population, China.
00:55:41.000I mean, just tons of evangelicals over there.
00:55:44.000It's like a convention of religious evangelical Christians over in China, a communist atheist country.
00:55:52.000Again, hugely famous for having tons of evangelicals in Italy.
00:55:55.000Not like it's the home of the Catholic Church or anything.
00:55:57.000Like, it's all evangelicals over in Italy.
00:55:59.000And in the United States, New York City, where evangelicals just swarm New York City.
00:56:03.000I know, like, probably two-thirds of the population of New York City is evangelical.
00:56:08.000Of course, I'm being a little sarcastic here, and by a little, I mean a lot.
00:56:11.000But if you're blaming evangelicals for the outbreak of coronavirus, By the way, these are the same people, presumably, who would say that if you say Chinese virus, it's very, very racist.
00:56:18.000If you blame it on the government of China, very racist.
00:56:27.000But the New York Times ran this piece anyway, because nothing says unifying the country like blaming evangelicals for coronavirus.
00:56:33.000Catherine Stewart, the author of The Power Worshippers, Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism, So her priors are fairly well established.
00:56:42.000She says Donald Trump rose to power with the determined assistance of a movement that denies science, bashes government, and prioritizes loyalty over professional expertise.
00:56:49.000In the current crisis, we are all reaping what that movement has sown.
00:56:54.000At least since the 19th century, when the pro-slavery theologian Robert Louis Dabney attacked the physical sciences as theories of unbelief.
00:57:01.000Hostility to science has characterized the more extreme forms of religious nationalism in the United States.
00:57:05.000Today, the hardcore of climate deniers is concentrated among people who identify as religiously conservative Republicans.
00:57:11.000And some leaders of the Christian nationalist movement, like those allied with Cornwall Alliance for the Steward of Creation, which has denounced environmental science as the cult of the Green Dragon, cast environmentalism as an alternative and false theology.
00:57:23.000This denial of science and critical thinking among religious ultra-conservatives now haunts the American response to the coronavirus crisis.
00:57:32.000I'm just going to point out, is Anthony Fauci, who stands next to Trump like every single day on the podium, is that guy like an evangelical Christian science denier?
00:57:48.000Trump is listening to people who deny science totally while also recommending what his scientists tell them?
00:57:57.000On March 15th, says this columnist, Guillermo Maldonado, who calls himself an apostle and hosted Mr. Trump earlier this year at a campaign event at his Miami megachurch, urged his congregants to show up for worship services in person.
00:58:07.000Do you believe God would bring his people to his house to be contagious with the virus?
00:58:12.000Okay, so your best evidence that Trump is following evangelical science deniers, your best evidence is that a guy who hosted Trump at a campaign event earlier this year said a thing now.
00:58:23.000That, wow, strong evidence, New York Times.
00:58:26.000Really, really doing amazing work over here, blaming evangelicals for the rise of coronavirus.
00:58:31.000Religious nationalism, says this columnist, has brought to American politics the conviction that our political differences are a battle between absolute evil and absolute good.
00:58:39.000Only a heroic leader, free from the scruples of political correctness, can save the righteous from the damned.
00:58:57.000In the middle of pandemic, how about you put aside your hatred for evangelical Christians, and you just say, listen, we're all Americans, we're all in this together, and we are all waiting for the data to come out, as opposed to, blame the Christians.
00:59:36.000I know there's some blood drives going on, so you might want to call your local hospital because I know that there are a lot of young people who can give blood.
00:59:41.000If you're listening to this show and you can't give blood, there are blood shortages around the country, so that would be a great thing to do.
00:59:45.000My wife has encouraged me to say that on the show, so I'd be remiss if I did not.
00:59:48.000Try to do something good for the country this weekend and not read the New York Times.