Ben Shapiro's new book, "How to Destroy America in 3 Easy Steps," details the deep-rooted divisions in America over the idea of what America is and what it was supposed to be. He also discusses the devastating effects of the coronavirus scare, and how China continues to silence whistle-blowers who dare to speak out about it. Ben Shapiro is a regular contributor to the New York Times and host of the podcast "The Ben Shapiro Show" on Comedy Central. He is the author of several books, including "How To Destroy America: Three Easy Steps to Endanger America," which is out July 21, 2019. His new book is available for pre-order now. It's available for purchase on Amazon starting July 21st. Thanks to our sponsor, LegalZoom, for sponsoring the show. Don't let others track what you do - keep yourself safe at ExpressVPN. Keep yourself safe by using ExpressVPN, where you can be tracked wherever you go, and be part of a community of likeminded people who are just as safe as you are. Protect yourself and your fellow cyber-citizens everywhere by using the ExpressVPN service. Use the promo code: "KeepMeSafe" to get 20% off your first month with ExpressVPN membership! You'll get 10% off the entire month, plus free shipping on all future orders, and up to $50 off your next month, when you sign up for $99.99. You get 7 months free of ads, free shipping, and unlimited access to all other offers, plus a 3 months of VIP membership, and a free 7-day trial, plus an additional 3-day shipping plan, plus 2-weekly shipping offer, and 3-month shipping, plus 3-months of free of a maximum of $99/month, plus they'll get you'll get an ad-free version of the show gets you access to the show, plus all that gets you a course that starts on the show starts at $99, plus you get $99 gets $24,99 gets you get a choice of $29,000, plus she gets $5,000 gets $4,99, and she gets an ad on the first time they can choose a VIP gets a maximum, and they get my ad-only deal, and I'll get access to my ad on my ad starts starts starts, plus I'll also get a discount on my site, too!
00:00:00.000The Pulitzer Prize Committee rewards the 1619 Project, the models drastically revise upward predicted coronavirus deaths, and China continues to silence its whistleblowers.
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00:01:53.000So we will get to everything coronavirus related in just a little while here because there is some more news about the models and the models revising fairly radically upward the That is not a great shock given the fact that the lockdowns are in fact being mitigated.
00:02:07.000It's also not a great shock given the fact that the tail end of the bell curve doesn't actually look like a bell curve so much as it does a plateau in places like New York.
00:02:14.000We'll talk about strategy and what exactly we're aiming for here because it seems like, once again, politicians are lying to you.
00:02:21.000They don't want to openly acknowledge the trade-offs that are inherent in any policy decision.
00:02:24.000Instead, they simply want to maintain that there are no trade-offs at all.
00:02:28.000We'll get to all that in just a moment, but I want to begin today with an issue that I think is incredibly important and undercover, and that is the divisions in America over the issue of history.
00:02:40.000So I have a new book coming out July 21st.
00:02:41.000It's called How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps.
00:02:44.000One of those steps is to destroy our common image of what America is.
00:02:47.000So, my book basically suggests that America needs to share a basic philosophy expressed in the Declaration of Independence, a basic culture of rights expressed in the Constitution of the United States, and a basic perception of American history.
00:02:59.000And that perception of American history goes something like this.
00:03:02.000America was founded on eternal good truths.
00:03:04.000They are embodied in the Declaration of Independence.
00:03:07.000Rights that pre-exist government, a government designed to protect those rights, answerable to the people, justly accountable to those people.
00:03:13.000That is the basic philosophy of the Declaration of Independence.
00:03:20.000It was not guaranteed to all Americans at the beginning.
00:03:22.000It was gradually expanded to include more and more Americans over time.
00:03:25.000So the story of America is the expansion of the founding promises to all the people to whom it originally was supposed to apply.
00:03:31.000And yes, the founders understood that these were universal human promises.
00:03:35.000Even slaveholders at the founding expressed that they understood the hypocrisy in which they were engaged.
00:03:39.000This includes people like Thomas Jefferson.
00:03:42.000It's Thomas Jefferson who suggested that basically the wrath of God would fall upon the United States for allowing slavery to continue.
00:03:47.000So that story of American history is about the triumph of original American ideals over the nastiness of human nature that has existed in all times and at all places.
00:03:57.000What makes America exceptional is not our flaws.
00:04:29.000At the time when it was written, it was a lie.
00:04:31.000Those eternal principles, they never really applied and they were never really true in the first place.
00:04:35.000Instead, America was founded on poisonous roots.
00:04:39.000And those poisonous roots have seeped into the body politics such that all of America's modern day ills are attributable to those historic injustices.
00:04:57.000There was nothing great about America.
00:04:59.000There was no point at which America was great.
00:05:01.000Not its founding principles, not its constitution, not its declaration.
00:05:04.000That's the perspective of the 1619 Project, which attributes everything, literally everything, from you checking your employees' work hours to traffic patterns, to a lack of nationalized healthcare, to America's historic racism and reliance on slavery.
00:05:22.000It's bad history because it is not even presented as a corrective to a sort of whitewashed, simplistic version of American history that's jingoistic or overpatriotic.
00:05:32.000It's presented as a replacement of that history.
00:05:35.000Not that 1619 is something we should look at seriously and recognize the evil side of American history.
00:05:39.000No, instead, 1619 is the true founding of America, according to the 1619 Project.
00:05:43.000So the Pulitzer Prize Committee just decided to reward Nicole Hannah-Jones, who is the creator of this, or the founder of this thing.
00:05:51.000They gave her an award for her essay on the 1619 Project.
00:05:54.000That essay There's some parts of it that actually are not bad, and then there's some parts of it that are truly egregious.
00:06:00.000I talked about this at the time the 1619 Project came out.
00:06:02.000One of those aspects was a passage in which she suggested that the founding fathers and that the founding colonists actually rebelled against the British in order to preserve slavery.
00:06:23.000So the New York Times actually had to issue a correction, saying, It's difficult to even explain why it's among the motivations of the colonists who fought the Revolutionary War, given the fact the British Empire was not going to outlaw slavery.
00:06:36.000They weren't outlawing slavery in the South.
00:07:03.000The motivations of the colonists really did not have much to do with slavery, again, given the fact that the revolutionary generation was not rebelling against an anti-slavery Britain.
00:07:11.000In fact, the original Declaration of Independence included a provision from Thomas Jefferson that suggested that King George III had quote-unquote waged cruel war on the inhabitants of a far-flung nation by bringing them to American shores.
00:07:24.000That by involving America in the slave trade, that King George III had done something wrong to the colonists, right?
00:07:30.000That was only removed at the behest of the southern colonists.
00:07:33.000Other historians have ripped up and down the 1619 Project, including James McPherson of Princeton and Gordon Wood of Brown.
00:07:39.000James McPherson, of course, is one of the premier Civil War historians in America.
00:07:42.000Nicole Hanna Jones then proceeded to rip him as a white historian on Twitter, because that's the way we're supposed to read history, is not as history, but based on the victim groups to which you belong, or non-victim groups to which you belong, in the case of James McPherson.
00:07:58.000These historians penned a letter to the Times identifying the project's errors.
00:08:01.000On the American Revolution, pivotal to any account of our history, the project asserts that the founders declared the colonies independence of Britain in order to ensure slavery would continue.
00:08:13.000Yet every statement offered by the project to validate it is false.
00:08:16.000Some of the other material in the project is distorted, including the claim that for the most part, black Americans have fought their freedom struggles alone, right?
00:08:23.000That was another claim that was made in the essay, is that black Americans fought the freedom struggles alone, which would come as quite a shock to the millions of Americans who supported the Civil Rights Movement, including the virtually all-white Congress that supported the Civil Rights Act.
00:08:36.000But again, the goal of the 1619 Project was to completely rewrite American history such that all of today's modern ills can be blamed on the evils of American history.
00:08:45.000And the Pulitzer Prize Committee decided to basically provide their imprimatur of decency and legitimacy on the 1619 Project so they could be taught in public schools.
00:09:00.000The rewriting of American history as basically a competition between various interest groups that continues to this day is a justification of tearing apart the country.
00:09:08.000It is, as I say in my book, disintegrationist.
00:09:19.000And that doesn't require, if you want to correct American history, it doesn't require you to overthrow the idea that America has a founding philosophy that is good, or a culture of rights, or a history that we're all supposed to share together, including the dark spots.
00:09:31.000And that we should feel horrible about parts of American history.
00:09:35.000And that some people in America have ancestors who were victimized by other people in America.
00:09:40.000But that's not the goal of the 1619 Project.
00:09:42.000The goal of the 1619 Project is to say that America was dirty from the beginning and remains dirty today.
00:09:53.000And again, you know, it's self-serving, but I'm just going to say it anyway.
00:09:55.000You should go buy a copy, pre-order a copy of my new book, How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps.
00:09:59.000I devote about a third of the book to precisely this topic.
00:10:02.000So it is no shock to me that the Pulitzer Committee did this.
00:10:04.000Again, this isn't a long line of rewritings of American history along sort of Materialist Marxist lines.
00:10:11.000Going all the way back to Charles Beard suggesting that the American founders only founded the country because they wanted to protect their property interests moving forward through the garbage of Howard Zinn.
00:10:18.000People's History of the United States.
00:11:19.000RockAuto.com always offers the lowest possible prices, rather than changing prices based on what the market will bear, like the airlines do.
00:11:53.000So, There are a couple of new studies out suggesting there will be a radical increase in the number of coronavirus deaths over the course of the next several months.
00:12:01.000That, of course, is not a particular shock.
00:12:02.000Some of us have been maintaining for a long time that the charts that we were being shown were not accurate because they did not include a second wave.
00:12:09.000Remember, they kept showing you that flatten the curve chart, and the flatten the curve chart showed you two curves in a line.
00:12:14.000That there was a big, huge curve, right?
00:12:16.000a big spike and then a quick devolution, right, back to zero.
00:12:20.000And then it showed a line, and it showed that a huge percentage of that bump was going to be over the line.
00:12:37.000Now, what happens when you extend that chart further in time?
00:12:41.000What happens when people go out afterward?
00:12:44.000Are we really back down at zero cases?
00:12:46.000Or, alternatively, do you get a second wave?
00:12:48.000Do you get a bunch of people who go out?
00:12:49.000It's not even a second wave, it's a first wave, because there was an artificial suppression of the wave.
00:12:53.000That's just the natural consequence of people going out.
00:12:55.000Well now the models are starting to take into account people going out again.
00:13:00.000And unsurprisingly, the numbers have risen fairly precipitously.
00:13:03.000So you have a couple of different models that have been presented.
00:13:05.000The White House and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have disavowed one particular report that was put out there by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
00:13:15.000It projects COVID-19 cases surging to about 200,000 per day by June 1st, a staggering jump that would be accompanied by more than 3,000 deaths each day, if that were to be accurate.
00:13:24.000That forecast stopped at June 1st, but shows both daily cases and deaths on an upward trajectory at that point.
00:13:31.000The CDC and the White House have disavowed the report, although the slides carry the CDC's logo.
00:13:35.000The creator of the model said the numbers were an unfinished projection shown to the CDC as a work in progress.
00:13:42.000Those are high estimates compared to other epidemiological models.
00:13:46.000But the IHME model, which has gotten more accurate as time has gone on, because obviously the IHME model, that is the model from the University of Washington, is a curve-fitting model.
00:13:55.000So as you get more information in those curves, the new curves that are being drawn by the algorithm tend to be more accurate about the future.
00:14:01.000They are suggesting that there will be something like 135,000 deaths in the course, by the end of the next couple of months.
00:14:09.000That's a radical, a radical increase in the number of people who would die over the 74,000 that were originally suggested.
00:14:17.000They're saying 134,475 in a range of 95,000 to 242,000 by June 1st, I believe, is when this goes.
00:14:31.000So, why exactly do they update the models?
00:14:33.000Well, they say these projections are considerably higher than previous estimates, representing the combined effects of death model updates and formally incorporating the effect of changes in mobility and social distancing policies into transmission dynamics.
00:14:45.000New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and Michigan are projected to have the highest cumulative COVID-19 death toll through August.
00:14:51.000While these states have generally been among those with the highest predicted tolls from COVID-19, each of their cumulative death projections have increased by at least 2,000.
00:14:58.000This is in part due to updates to death data and modeling approaches, with the latter now estimating longer epidemic peaks and slower downward trajectories following those peaks in many locations.
00:15:06.000In other words, this thing is not going to die out quickly.
00:15:08.000It goes up and then it sort of plateaus.
00:15:10.000And then it slowly recedes back towards zero, if never hitting zero.
00:15:30.000Any state that took the policy that if an elderly person went to the hospital and got COVID-19 tested and was positive and was sent back to their nursing home and then proceeded to infect the entire nursing home and kill everybody, that would be on the government.
00:15:41.000Protecting the nursing homes would have cut out something like 40 to 60 percent of all COVID-19 deaths in Europe and the United States.
00:15:47.000By available statistics, elder care centers are the absolute epicenters of this pandemic.
00:15:54.00040 to 60% of all deaths in every Western country are at nursing homes for this thing, which means the first thing everybody should be doing is protecting the nursing homes, obviously.
00:16:02.000That is obviously priority number one.
00:16:04.000I mean, if you could reduce the number of deaths by 40% by snapping your fingers, I mean, that would be a pretty massive, massive move, would it not?
00:16:11.000How is that not the low-hanging fruit?
00:16:13.000But in any case, as we open up, there will be additional deaths.
00:16:16.000And this is just recognizing a reality.
00:16:19.000The reality is we're not going to remain locked down forever.
00:16:21.000And when people go out, they will infect each other.
00:16:23.000And when they go out, those infections will result in increased risks of death.
00:16:28.000According to the UW study, They say, By the way, they have also updated their predictions for cumulative COVID-19 deaths for a variety of other nations, including Italy, France, Spain.
00:16:39.000So basically, they were undercounting before, thanks to the lack of increased tests.
00:16:44.000By the way, they have also updated their predictions for cumulative COVID-19 deaths for a variety of other nations, including Italy, France, Spain.
00:16:50.000They actually lowered their prediction for Sweden.
00:16:55.000Sweden, they lowered by some 7,000 deaths.
00:17:00.000Because Sweden isn't going to see a second wave.
00:17:01.000Because Sweden is actually pursuing herd immunity, and they didn't change their policy.
00:17:05.000Basically, any place that's changing policy is getting upgraded.
00:17:08.000Any place that did not change policy is getting downgraded in the number of expected deaths, which is precisely what you would expect.
00:17:14.000So in a second, we're going to talk about what exactly our strategy is on all of this, because it turns out social distancing has not been quite as effective as originally thought.
00:18:45.000Okay, so we now know that these death estimates have been heightened.
00:18:49.000We know that social distancing isn't having the effects that many people had hoped for, according to Paige Cunningham, writing for the Washington Post Health Policy 202, which is a very good blog, by the way.
00:18:59.000She says, despite encouraging signs on the nation's east and west coast, daily diagnosed cases of the coronavirus appear to still be on the rise in about 20 states.
00:19:06.000A number of rural counties have become unexpected hotspots in recent weeks, including in the Black Belt region of Mississippi and Alabama, in communities throughout Iowa and northern Texas around the Oklahoma Panhandle.
00:19:15.000The country's overall daily figures of diagnoses and deaths have plateaued, worrying health policymakers as many states move to reopen part of the economy.
00:19:23.000She points out that the steep curve of COVID-19 cases in March and April is not receding the way that it rose, and that's not happening in New York either.
00:19:30.000In New York, you're starting to see a drop-off, but the drop-off is not particularly steep.
00:19:35.000According to Scott Gottlieb, the former FDA commissioner who has been a guest on the program, he says, everyone thought we'd be in a better place after weeks of sheltering in place and bringing the economy to a near standstill.
00:19:45.000Social distancing and other measures have slowed the spread, but the halt has not brought the number of new cases and deaths down as much as expected or stopped the epidemic from expanding.
00:19:53.000So what that means is that we actually have to consider the possibility that our strategies may have to change here.
00:20:02.000And so the question becomes, what is the goal of the strategy?
00:20:04.000Especially if, as some reports suggest, that this coronavirus may mutate, which means a vaccine might be very difficult.
00:20:13.000A report from the Los Angeles Times today suggesting that scientists have identified a new strain of the coronavirus that has become dominant worldwide and appears to be more contagious than the versions that spread in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a new study led by scientists at Los Alamos.
00:20:26.000The new strain appeared in February in Europe, migrated quickly to the east coast of the United States, and has been the dominant strain across the world since mid-March, according to the scientists.
00:20:34.000In addition to spreading faster, it may make people vulnerable to a second infection after a first bout with the disease.
00:20:40.000Wherever the new strain appeared, it quickly infected far more people than the earlier strains that came out of Wuhan, China.
00:20:45.000Within weeks, it was the only strain that was prevalent in some nations, according to the report.
00:20:49.000The new strain's dominance over its predecessors demonstrates it is more infectious, according to the report, although exactly why is not yet known.
00:20:56.000So that is depressing news, because according to study leader Betty Korber, a computational biologist at Los Alamos, she said, the story is worrying.
00:21:03.000We see a mutated form of the virus very rapidly emerging.
00:21:07.000When viruses with this mutation enter a population, they rapidly begin to take over the local epidemic, thus they are more transmissible.
00:21:14.000She says this is hard news, but don't be disheartened by it.
00:21:17.000Our team at Los Alamos was able to document this mutation and its impact on transmission only because of a massive global effort of clinical people.
00:21:26.000The bottom line here is that scientists at major organizations working on a vaccine or drugs told the LA Times they're pending their hopes on initial evidence the virus is stable.
00:21:34.000The Los Alamos report could theoretically upend that assumption.
00:21:37.000Well, if that's the case, then we... Waiting for a vaccine?
00:21:43.000Now, on the other side, there are some places that have been accelerating vaccine.
00:21:46.000The American pharmaceutical corporation Pfizer, partnered with German pharmaceutical company BioNTech, announced their potential novel coronavirus vaccine started their human testing phase in the United States on Monday.
00:21:56.000They're hoping for a rollout of the vaccine by September, so that could be theoretically good news.
00:22:52.000We have to acknowledge that over time, people are going to relax their vigilance against this particular virus, particularly among young populations, which are not at high risk of death from this virus.
00:23:00.000If you are below the age of 20, your chances of dying from this virus are something like 1 in 10,000.
00:23:05.000If you are below the age of 30, your chances of dying from this virus are 7 in 10,000.
00:23:09.000If you are below the age of 40, your chances of dying from this virus... This includes, by the way, pre-existing conditions.
00:23:14.000If you are below the age of 40, your chances of dying from this virus are something like 2 in 1,000.
00:23:19.000So, as people begin to relax their vigilance, there will be broader spread of the virus.
00:23:27.000And we all also acknowledge we're not going to lock down for two full years.
00:23:30.000Chris Christie acknowledged this yesterday and got ripped for it, but what he says here is not wrong.
00:23:34.000Of course everybody wants to save every life they can.
00:23:36.000But the question is, towards what end ultimately?
00:23:40.000Are there ways that we can thread the middle here to allow that there are going to be deaths, and there are going to be deaths no matter what.
00:23:47.000And if we can do things to keep people in the mode of wearing masks, of wearing gloves, of distancing where appropriate.
00:23:55.000We've got to let some of these folks get back to work, because if we don't, We're going to destroy the American way of life and these families, and it will be years and years before we can recover.
00:24:05.000Okay, so he's getting ripped up and down for that, but here's the reality.
00:24:09.000Andrew Cuomo is acknowledging the same thing.
00:24:11.000There is untold damage going on, not just to the American economy, but suicide hotlines have reported something like a 1000% increase in the number of people calling.
00:24:20.000Of course, because as people lose their life savings, lose their jobs, and are scared to go outside, it turns out that people get suicidal.
00:24:26.000It turns out that domestic violence rises dramatically.
00:24:29.000It turns out there are pretty significant downsides to making 20% of the American population unemployed over the course of a month.
00:24:36.000And people who are dismissing those costs were doing so at the risk of others who are being affected by their refusal to acknowledge that there are trade-offs here.
00:24:45.000Trade-offs are a thing when it comes to public policy.
00:24:47.000In a second, we're going to talk more about those trade-offs and the fact that if you're Andrew Cuomo and a Democrat, you can talk sort of about the trade-offs.
00:24:52.000If you're a Republican, it's very evil.
00:24:53.000You're not allowed to talk about this stuff.
00:24:55.000We'll get to that in just a second first.
00:24:57.000Lots of people are looking for work right now.
00:24:59.000It's time to make your job search as efficient as possible.
00:25:02.000This is why ZipRecruiter is still focused on ensuring that if you're looking for a job, that you can find the best job for you and ensuring that employers can find the best employees for their people.
00:25:11.000But to fill those slots right now, all of my employees know that if they slack one iota, there are many, many people who are willing to fill that job.
00:25:20.000ZipRecruiter It's dedicated to helping you get hired whether you're looking for a job in caretaking, delivering food and goods, building medical facilities, supplying protective equipment, and so much more.
00:25:28.000And as the economy begins to ratchet back up, and it will, as that happens, you're going to need a job.
00:27:36.000We did not overwhelm the healthcare system.
00:27:38.000And that is due to the vigilance of our healthcare professionals who are just heroic.
00:27:43.000It's due to the fact that government did basically what it was supposed to do.
00:27:46.000The federal government did what it was basically supposed to do.
00:27:48.000Now it seems like the goalposts have shifted with regard to flattening the curve.
00:27:51.000So now people are suggesting That we have to keep flattening the curve because we're basically buying time to develop a therapeutic or a vaccine.
00:27:57.000If we're doing that, let's say so out loud, because this is called the hope strategy.
00:28:01.000The hope strategy is, well, you know, hopefully if we kind of open up the economy just a little bit and we go back to 25% and people go to restaurants and socially distance and 25% of the customer base can go back, then I guess we'll slow this thing down, the economy can sort of sustain at low ebb, and then eventually we will be able to get something that will change the game, right?
00:28:21.000There'll be a game changer on the horizon.
00:28:23.000Hope is not an actual strategy, is one of the problems here.
00:29:13.000If we're just waiting for a game changer, then presumably the best we can do is the sort of social distancing, low ebb, lock up everybody who is elderly and in poor condition, people who have pre-existing conditions, and then just hope for the best.
00:29:48.000Also, the question is, is it really an alternative to operate at 25% capacity in the economy indefinitely for years, hoping for a change that may never arrive and a vaccine that may never develop?
00:30:06.000If you're young and you're healthy, and you believe, as the statistics tend to show, if you're young and healthy, then you're not going to die from this thing in all statistical likelihood.
00:30:13.000And when I say all statistical likelihood, I mean to a near certainty, right?
00:30:16.000If you're under the age of 20, there is a 9,999 chance in 10,000 that you are not going to die from this thing.
00:30:23.000And those stats are probably even a little bit high.
00:30:28.000Okay, then you're willing to undergo that risk on a fairly regular basis, every time you go out the door, basically.
00:30:37.000If we're waiting for a deus ex machina, while tens of millions of people lose their jobs and fall into poverty and despair, and we don't have a timeline, that's not called a plan, that's just called hope for the best.
00:30:46.000So again, are we trying to buy time while reopening the economy to the best of our ability?
00:30:51.000Or, at some point, do we have to aim for herd immunity a la Sweden?
00:30:53.000Because those actually have two different strategies.
00:30:55.000Not for people who are obese, people who have prediabetes, for people who are elderly.
00:31:00.000For those people, the strategy is the same.
00:31:03.000The strategy remains the same for those people.
00:31:04.000Stay away from other humans until either there's a vaccine or there's herd immunity.
00:31:08.000That's just the reality of the situation.
00:31:10.000But I'd like to point out that when we open up the schools in September and the kids go back to school, those people are going to have to remain locked down anyway.
00:31:21.000Right now they're sheltering in place with us.
00:31:24.000In September, if my kids go back to school, which they likely will, I'll have to tell my parents they need to shelter at home at that point.
00:31:32.000Okay, so we need to actually discuss what these trade-offs look like.
00:31:35.000So, if we are aiming for buying time, then you do want the social distancing, you do want the mask wearing, you do want the schools to stay shut down, right?
00:31:42.000You want as much lockdown as possible while still allowing some economic activity to take place so that not everybody in the world is out of a job.
00:31:51.000But, again, that's hoping for a solution.
00:32:02.000Put out by a set of professors in epidemiology and health policy management and applied mathematics in Israel.
00:32:10.000And their strategy is basically sort of the Swedish strategy.
00:32:13.000You protect the most vulnerable members of the population and then you actually encourage everybody else to get the virus so that it passes through the population and you reach herd immunity.
00:32:23.000That is a strategy widely perceived as dangerous.
00:32:28.000There may not be an alternative because otherwise you're just pursuing herd immunity slowly and killing the economy in the process.
00:32:34.000If nothing happens, then the slowing of the spread while protecting the elderly, the spread still happens.
00:32:41.000You're just protecting people for slightly longer.
00:32:44.000And if no vaccine arrives, herd immunity is eventually reached.
00:32:47.000It just takes you three years to get there as opposed to three months to get there, depending on the amount of social distancing you're doing.
00:32:53.000So we actually have to determine on a public policy level what are we hoping is going to happen here.
00:32:57.000Now what's funny about this is the passion with which people are taking up these positions.
00:33:01.000We'll get to that in just one second, because it does betray where we are politically, the passions with which we are taking up these positions.
00:33:06.000Because what I'm really asking is, how do you forecast the future?
00:33:09.000How do you forecast whether there will be a vaccine, or whether there will be therapeutics, or whether there won't be a vaccine and therapeutics?
00:33:16.000If there's no vaccine and no therapeutics, we are going to end up going for herd immunity, because there's no alternative.
00:33:20.000If there is a vaccine or therapeutics, we should avoid going outside right now, because we want the vaccine and herd immunity to be conferred by the vaccine.
00:33:29.000We don't want people dying in the meantime.
00:33:31.000But that's a question about probabilities about the future.
00:33:34.000You can be agnostic on the question, right?
00:33:35.000You can say, I don't know enough to even make an informed decision.
00:33:38.000But instead, people have taken up very passionate sides in this debate.
00:33:42.000And they align really strongly with pre-existing politics, which suggests that people are actually forecasting not based on the best available information.
00:33:49.000They are forecasting based on what is going on right now.
00:33:53.000They're either saying, I kind of like what's going on right now, and therefore, it's okay if this continues to go, and if we sort of bet on a Deus Ex Machina, alright, I can live with that.
00:34:01.000Or, people saying, I hate what's going on right now, and therefore, my presumption is that nothing is going to change, and we are wasting all of our time, and we should all go back to work right now.
00:34:09.000That is not based on different information.
00:34:11.000That is based on different perceptions of what's going on right now.
00:34:13.000And in fact, there's a study that suggests that that's exactly what's going on in America right now.
00:34:16.000That really, the debate about reopening is a debate reflecting fundamental values, not reflecting differential assessment of the future path of the virus.
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00:36:20.000The tumblers are overflowing with tears at the thought of this offer ending, gang.
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00:36:49.000I know, people were shocked by this last night.
00:36:50.000I've been announcing it for a week, guys.
00:36:52.000If you become an All Access member, you get All Access Live.
00:36:54.000It's literally called All Access Live.
00:36:56.000So if you become an All Access member, then you can hang out with me and watch as I put on a Darth Vader mask and pick up a lightsaber.
00:37:02.000That is a thing that happened yesterday.
00:37:26.000This is the largest, fastest-growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.
00:37:30.000Okay, so as I say, if you expect that in the future something magically is going to change, that there will be some massive change, then what you actually want is people to stay apart from each other You want to lower the amount of infection as fast as possible.
00:37:48.000If you believe that nothing is going to change, what you really want to do is protect the most vulnerable in the society and then actually urge herd immunity.
00:37:54.000This is sort of what Sweden has been doing.
00:37:56.000And there are some people who are like, well, we can't do Sweden, right?
00:37:59.000Because there are too many vulnerable people in the United States.
00:38:01.000Yeah, there may not be an alternative.
00:38:13.000I've asked them the same question over and over.
00:38:15.000What is testing and tracing designed to do in the United States?
00:38:17.000Testing and tracing in the United States is designed to prevent hotspot flare-ups.
00:38:21.000It is not going to kill the baseline transmission of the virus.
00:38:23.000Testing and tracing as a destroyer of the curve, not a flattener of the curve, as a destroyer of the curve, testing and tracing only works when you do it super duper early like South Korea, where you end up with 10,500 total cases as opposed to 1.2 million confirmed cases in the United States.
00:38:41.000Or if you have a tiny, teeny, tiny population like Iceland or New Zealand.
00:38:45.000Right then, you can test and trace enough people because you only have 360,000 people total in your population.
00:38:50.000You cannot test and trace to kill the curve.
00:38:53.000You can do it to prevent a huge spike in a very localized area.
00:38:56.000You can't do it to kill the curve, like bring it down to zero in a place like New York.
00:38:59.000That's just not a thing that's going to happen.
00:39:00.000So, acknowledging The realities of testing and tracing.
00:39:04.000Then the question, again, goes back to that simple binary.
00:39:07.000In the future, do you think that we are going to get therapeutics and vaccine faster?
00:39:11.000Or do you think, and in less deadly fashion, in the meantime, or do you think that we are going to reach herd immunity faster?
00:39:23.000So I don't know the answer to that question.
00:39:24.000You don't know the answer to that question.
00:39:26.000But I think it's a question that we really need answers from our politicians about.
00:39:29.000Like, how long do you expect this to go on?
00:39:31.000And what's your phased plan for saying, okay, we need to change the plan.
00:39:35.000Let's say that we get four months from today and there's been no therapeutic and there's been no vaccine.
00:39:40.000Every month that we are not urging a herd immunity campaign is a month that we are destroying the economy.
00:39:45.000Because the herd immunity campaign basically assumes that people who are young and healthy go back to work and engage.
00:39:49.000They go to bars, they go to restaurants, they go to sports games.
00:39:52.000They do all of those things because they're young and healthy and have a low chance of dying.
00:39:56.000But the anti-herd immunity campaign suggests that we don't want any of that spread, even for the low-risk people, because they will spread it to elderly people at some level.
00:40:04.000And when the vaccine comes, we can protect all those people, even the young people, without really having to worry about the consummate cost.
00:40:10.000All of that depends on timeline, right?
00:40:14.000The economy can't exist at 25% capacity for two years, three years.
00:40:17.000That's not a thing that can really happen.
00:40:20.000In fact, they're already tranching populations over in the UK.
00:40:23.000So when people say, how can you talk about, you know, tranching populations and protecting some and leaving other people to get infected or telling other people that it's okay if they get infected?
00:40:31.000Well, the answer is because the virus treats different people differently.
00:40:34.000If you are 20 years old, you are not going to die from this virus.
00:40:36.000If you are 80 years old, there's a very good shot that you may die from this virus.
00:40:40.000That means we should protect you differently, obviously.
00:40:42.000I would not protect my 95-year-old grandmother living in a nursing home in the same way that I protect myself or my wife.
00:40:55.000This is why Britain is already doing this.
00:40:56.000Millions of Britons face a grim return to work in which all normal social contact remains heavily restricted, a leaked government blueprint revealed yesterday.
00:41:03.000Draft guidance seen by the Daily Mail suggested that there will be no return to normality in the foreseeable future.
00:41:09.000Most importantly, workers are not allowed to lend each other pens for fear of spreading virus.
00:41:14.000And really most importantly, if you're obese, you're being told to stay home.
00:41:18.000If you're vulnerable, you're supposed to stay home.
00:41:36.000Let's just, you know, we're going to assume that nothing changes and we can't last like this forever.
00:41:40.000In fact, we can't even last like this now.
00:41:41.000Let's go out, let's protect the vulnerable populations, and let's pursue herd immunity like Sweden.
00:41:47.000Democrats, conversely, are saying, you know, we can't afford to do that.
00:41:50.000What we really need to do is we need to lock down as many people as humanly possible, really as possible, because something will change in the near future.
00:41:59.000Okay, so is that based on a differential assessment of forecasting?
00:42:03.000Do Republicans really think nothing is going to change in the future?
00:42:05.000And do Democrats really think everything is going to change in the future?
00:42:07.000Or is it possible that Republicans are just super uncomfortable with what's happening now, and so they are projecting into the future things that are going to happen that justify their position of discomfort right now.
00:42:18.000And folks on the left are doing the exact same thing.
00:42:21.000So there's a great story from Heterodox Academy, this is Jonathan Haidt's organization at NYU, talking about this differential.
00:42:29.000What kinds of ideological goals were most important in explaining conservatives' relative apathy toward COVID-19?
00:42:34.000Out of six, the strongest effects emerged for goals that involved government-imposed social distancing rules.
00:42:38.000Conservatives oppose the government telling them when they can or cannot leave their homes.
00:42:44.000Because a threatening disease might validate government interventions that conservatives dislike, conservatives appear motivated to downplay the severity.
00:42:51.000Or, conversely, because a threatening disease might validate government interventions that liberals do like, liberals seem motivated to magnify the threat.
00:42:59.000Note that our results cannot say which of these is happening in greater measure.
00:43:02.000And the answer is some of both is really the answer.
00:43:05.000There are people whose priors basically say, I can live like this.
00:44:36.000So what we're going to do is we're going to urge caution, because that way we can't get blamed.
00:44:40.000We can't get blamed by one side for having gone aggressive like Sweden, and we can't get blamed by the other side for having gone full lockdown like China.
00:46:32.000Anybody who says social distancing exists with children is out of their mind.
00:46:34.000That's not a thing that's going to happen.
00:46:36.000So all the hard decisions will come in September.
00:46:39.000So maybe the idea is that we'll have to hold down until September, but I'd like to see the economic fallout from that, because as Health Policy 202 points out, massive increase in suicidality, massive increase in depression, massive increase, by the way, in people not going to the doctor for the health problems that they have that are underlying.
00:46:55.000So I've seen a sort of minimization, again, mapping onto political priors, minimization.
00:46:59.000On the one side, the people who are pro-lockdown are being like, what, so you just don't want to go to a restaurant?
00:47:03.000You want to open up so you can go to a restaurant?
00:47:04.000No, I don't care about going to a restaurant.
00:47:11.000And on the other side, people are like, the only reason you don't want to lock down, the only reason you want to lock down is because you want to control me going to church.
00:47:18.000No, I think that most people who want to lock down are not, like, chiefly concerned about the churches.
00:47:23.000The answer is, in the face of uncertainty, in the face of uncertainty, what do you do, and on whom does the burden lie to provide a plan?
00:47:29.000And so far, nobody has provided a plan.
00:47:30.000All we've gotten is basically a bunch of futzing.
00:47:38.000And then nobody understands what the hell those things mean, and then they misinterpret all of those things to mean the same thing, we're gonna stop the virus.
00:47:47.000Alrighty, meanwhile, speaking of what's the plan, Joe Biden has a bit of a problem.
00:47:51.000So the plan for Joe Biden's campaign continues to be rather lackluster.
00:47:55.000This is particularly true because it turns out that Biden's double standard is exorbitantly bad.
00:47:59.000He was on The View back in 2019, and Joe Biden suggested on The View that if you are interviewing for a job like Justice Kavanaugh, there doesn't need to be any proof that you did the thing of which you are alleged.
00:48:09.000And yeah, if you hold that standard to Joe Biden, dude's toast.
00:48:13.000She's responsible for significant changes and she deserves credit for it.
00:48:18.000And one of the things you saw is, how about the last hearing?
00:48:25.000There's so much more work to do to figure out.
00:48:31.000And if there's anything in terms of mindset of Supreme Court hearings and those kinds of circumstances, Supreme Court hearing is not a trial.
00:49:22.000So, not a shock that a lady who did not require evidence that she was Native American might also think that Joe Biden requires no evidence by her own standard.
00:49:43.000Well, if you want some good history, go check out Gordon Woods' The Radicalism of the American Revolution.
00:49:48.000It's an excellent work of history all about And this one won the Pulitzer Prize back before the Pulitzer Prize was just a guise for left-wing politics.
00:49:56.000It basically talks about the movement away from class-based politics in Britain and toward the egalitarian politics of the United States.
00:50:03.000It is something that goes without remark in the United States, but it truly is incredible.
00:50:06.000For all the talk about America's a class-based system, it's so terrible because of class, America is the most egalitarian economic system in the history of the world.
00:50:13.000In Britain, You literally could be identified by your class.
00:50:17.000I read any British novel from the 17th or 18th centuries, and it's all about class.
00:50:21.000It's all about people who are fit for the House of Lords, marrying people who are fit for the House of Commons, and how there's these terrible class conflicts between people who are born to the purple and people who are not.
00:50:32.000That just didn't exist in the United States in nearly the same way.
00:50:37.000The Radicalism of the American Revolution.
00:50:40.000Again, that's a Pulitzer Prize winner who actually wrote history, not Garbage about how the United States was founded solely on slavery and that was the animating principle of the United States or anything like that.
00:50:56.000So Nicolas Cage is getting cast as Joe Exotic and that is just, that is the part that Nicolas Cage was born to play, right?
00:51:01.000I mean, what is bad about Nicolas Cage?
00:51:03.000He's basically just gonna do a southern accent from Con Air.
00:51:06.000And he, it'll be great, because there's no way to overact Joe Exotic.
00:51:11.000And that is Nicolas Cage's thing, is chewing the scenery.
00:51:14.000So chewing the scenery as Joe Exotic is just being Joe Exotic.
00:51:17.000Great casting, very excited for the miniseries based on the miniseries based on Joe Exotic.
00:51:22.000That'll be very exciting stuff, so that is good news.
00:51:25.000In a time of difficult news, that is good news.
00:51:27.000We can all, we may all die from COVID-19, but we can still watch as Nicolas Cage plays Joe Exotic.
00:51:33.000Alrighty, time for some things that I hate.
00:51:36.000So China continues to silence all of its critics, which is really not shocking in the slightest.
00:51:47.000Apparently, according to the New York Times, the text messages to the Chinese activists streamed in from ordinary Wuhan residents, making the same extraordinary request.
00:51:57.000One said his mother had died from coronavirus after being turned away from multiple hospitals.
00:52:01.000Another said her father-in-law had died in quarantine.
00:52:04.000But after weeks of back-and-forth planning, the seven residents who had reached out to Yang Jianqing, the activist, suddenly changed their minds in late April or stopped responding.
00:52:11.000At least two of them had been threatened by the police, according to Mr. Yang.
00:52:14.000The Chinese authorities are clamping down as grieving relatives, along with activists, press the ruling Communist Party for an accounting of what went wrong in Wuhan, the city where the coronavirus killed thousands before spreading to the rest of China and the world.
00:52:25.000Lawyers have been warned not to file suit against the government.
00:52:27.000The police have interrogated bereaved family members who connected with others like them online.
00:52:31.000Volunteers who tried to thwart the state's censorship apparatus by preserving reports about the outbreak have disappeared.
00:52:38.000You mean that China is a horrible totalitarian country?
00:52:41.000And that they lied about coronavirus throughout?
00:52:43.000Now Mike Pompeo was put on the hot seat over the weekend because he suggested that maybe this thing escaped a lab in Wuhan.
00:52:48.000Now, the evidence suggests that this came from a bat that was not native to this particular region, and so the suggestion has been that there is a lab there that does study coronaviruses, and they brought a bat in from like 600 miles away, and that the Poor treatment of waste basically allowed this to escape.
00:53:03.000Not that they crafted the virus in order to kill lots of people, but that it accidentally escaped the lab.
00:53:10.000has provided no evidence from the U.S.
00:53:12.000government to back up allegations that the coronavirus could have originated at a lab in the Chinese city from Wuhan.
00:53:18.000Well, I'm sorry, but I feel like we have better evidence in the fact that the bat is not native to that particular region.
00:53:24.000We have better evidence that this went through a lab at Wuhan than the wet markets than you had to suggest there was no human-to-human transmission.
00:53:30.000The fact that the WHO just continues to sort of repeat Chinese propaganda lines is pretty incredible.
00:53:35.000Dr. Michael Ryan told reporters in Geneva, It is also true that calls for internal investigations into China have been shut down by the Chinese government.
00:53:42.000Ryan reiterated the evidence and advice that the UN Health Agency has received suggests the novel coronavirus is of natural origin.
00:54:05.000Now again, that is not in conflict with the idea that this could have come from the Wuhan Institute of Virology lab.
00:54:11.000The virus could be of natural origin and also they didn't do their waste disposal properly.
00:54:16.000The conflation by the media of the accusation this came from a lab with it was created and militarized by the Chinese military, those are not the same accusation at all.
00:54:25.000According to Mike Pompeo, you said there was significant amount of evidence.
00:54:30.000But again, they're gonna have to explain how this bat ended up basically infecting half the globe when it was only available there, presumably because of the laboratory.
00:54:42.000Alrighty, so we'll be back here a little bit later today with two additional hours of content.
00:54:46.000In the meantime, why don't you go ahead and pre-order my book, How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps.
00:55:28.000In an interview conducted in front of the Lincoln Memorial, President Trump claims he's the most persecuted president in history, including Honest Abe.
00:55:36.000While everyone on the left and right mock the wild claim, few are picking up on the keen piece of political wisdom in Trump's statement.
00:55:44.000Michigan Dictatrix Gretchen Whitmer calls her conservative constituents Nazis.
00:55:49.000The New York Times wins a Pulitzer for rewriting American history.
00:55:53.000And the federal government predicts more deaths from coronavirus.