Canadian truckers shut down the Ambassador Bridge as Justin Trudeau struggles to respond, and Democrats turn on a dime and begin talking about ending COID restrictions. Ben Shapiro's take on it all on The Ben Shapiro Show with Ben Shapiro (The Authoritarian Moment) on today's episode of The Weekly Standard. Subscribe today using our podcast s promo code: PODCAST to receive 20% off your first month with discount code: "PODCAST" at checkout. Enjoy this exclusive clip from our live show featuring Ben Shapiro! Subscribe to the Weekly Standard to receive immediate access to all of our latest podcasts and listen to all new episodes wherever you get your favourite podcasting devices. Use the promo code POWER10 at checkout to receive $10 OFF your first purchase when you place your first order. You'll get 10% off the first month, plus free shipping on all orders over $99.99 when you enter the Promethean Rewards program. If you haven't yet, you can trust Birch Gold to help you diversify your 401k and IRA into gold and silver, and get a FREE information kit on gold and precious metals! You can trust them to protect your savings! And for a limited time, when you buy, they'll send you a signed copy of my brand new book, The Authoritarianmoment: A Call Me! by Ben Shapiro, you'll get all the info you need on gold, silver, precious metals, and a free guide on how to get started on your journey to becoming a free account with me, and more! . You won't want to miss it! The authoritarian Moment is a chance to become a Friend of the authoritarian moment? by becoming a supporter of freedom, liberty, not a friend of the Authoritarian moment, not just gold, and freedom, not only in gold, but in a free book, and so much more. FREE PRICING, but also in the process of learning how to be free, and access to gold, tips, knowledge, and information about gold, so you can have it all, so that you can get it all at last chance to help defend your day to help protect your day-to day, no matter where you go, and you get the most of it, and everything you need it, too, and it's all in the best possible access to it, no questions asked for it, everywhere, anywhere, no more, no less!
00:00:00.000Canadian truckers shut down the Ambassador Bridge as Justin Trudeau struggles to respond, and Democrats turn on a dime and begin talking about ending COVID restrictions.
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00:00:22.000We'll get to all the news in just one moment.
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00:01:29.000In Canada, things are happening that are worth covering, which is a rarity.
00:01:32.000We don't cover Canadian politics all that extensively here on the Ben Shapiro Show because, hey, I mean, it's Canada.
00:01:38.000However, the trucker protests that have now spawned like-minded protests all over the world are a major, major news story, and they should be a major news story.
00:01:46.000You have literally thousands of truckers who are descending on Ottawa, which is the capital, and they are also now blocking the Ambassador Bridge in Toronto.
00:01:54.000Which is the single biggest bridge connecting the United States and Canada in terms of trade, according to the Washington Post.
00:02:01.000The busiest crossing on the US-Canada land border was blockaded Tuesday as demonstrations against vaccine mandates that have paralyzed Canada's capital spread to a crucial trade artery while inspiring similar protests from Europe to Australia.
00:02:12.000The Ambassador Bridge, which links Windsor, Ontario to Detroit, was temporarily closed for passengers and commercial traffic, authorities on both sides of the border said on Tuesday.
00:02:20.000The Windsor Police said limited traffic was being allowed into the United States.
00:02:23.000The 1.6-mile suspension bridge is an important trade link, particularly for the region's auto industry.
00:02:28.000It also connects families, friends, and essential workers, including Canadian nurses who work in Detroit-area hospitals.
00:02:33.000The blockade there apparently began on Monday.
00:02:43.000Transportation Department estimates the bridge carries about 30% of all annual trade between Canada and the United States.
00:02:49.000This is all part of the so-called Freedom Convoy, which has jammed major thoroughfares in downtown Ottawa with idling big rigs and other vehicles.
00:02:56.000He told them that they need to go home.
00:02:58.000Justin Trudeau, who definitely, definitely, definitely is not Fidel Castro's son.
00:03:03.000I know there have been some rumors out there that Justin Trudeau is Fidel Castro's son because he looks exactly like Fidel Castro because his mom was known to be a swinger and because his mom was visiting Cuba, apparently about eight and a half months before Justin Trudeau was born.
00:03:15.000That said, he's definitely not Fidel Castro's son, either ideologically or biologically.
00:04:28.000And by the way, I'm not the only one who finds him irritating.
00:04:29.000The Canadian public finds him extraordinarily irritating.
00:04:32.000In fact, Trudeau's own party is starting to turn on him over COVID restrictions.
00:04:36.000According to Politico, a backbench lawmaker from Justin Trudeau's own caucus is accusing the Prime Minister of dividing and stigmatizing Canadians by politicizing vaccine mandates and COVID-19 restrictions.
00:04:46.000Joelle Lightbound delivered a stunning scathing assessment Tuesday in Ottawa with the big rigs of the so-called Freedom Convoy just outside the door.
00:04:52.000The convoy protests against COVID measures have grabbed global attention and paralyzed Canada's capital city for more than a week.
00:04:58.000Lightbound said both the tone and policies of my government changed drastically on the eve and during the last election campaign.
00:05:04.000A decision was made to wedge, to divide, and to stigmatize.
00:05:06.000I fear that this politicization of the pandemic risks undermining the public's trust in our public health institutions.
00:06:22.000Well, I mean, the same thing could be said of the mandates that you have placed on your country over the course of the last couple of years.
00:06:28.000In just a second, we will get to a Wall Street Journal editorial talking about the message of the Canadian trucking protest.
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00:07:41.000The Wall Street Journal has a piece today talking about the message of the Canadian trucker protest by the editorial board.
00:07:48.000This latest act in a week-long show of civil disobedience is more akin to political life in France or the United States.
00:07:53.000That it happened in restrained Canada is a signal to the political class across the West Large swaths of humanity are done with COVID-19 restrictions, mandates, and excessive meddling in their lives.
00:08:02.000They want to go back to making their own health risk assessments.
00:08:05.000The Ambassador Bridge, which carries some $323 million in goods daily in cross-border trade, and an estimated $137 billion last year, reopened on Tuesday morning.
00:08:14.000But truckers continue their protest in Ottawa, which is disturbing the peace and wars in that usually peaceable Canadian capital.
00:08:20.000The truckers should be prosecuted if they break the law, says the Wall Street Journal, but As the Omicron virus shows itself to be less lethal and positive test rates fall, the truckers are sending a message to Democratic governments.
00:08:30.000It's time for the pandemic emergency orders to end.
00:08:48.000But Justin Trudeau, who heads a minority government, has chosen this moment to order that truckers be vaccinated if they want to cross back into the country from the United States.
00:08:57.000The Canadian left is calling all of these people Trumpians.
00:08:59.000Trudeau smeared them as, quote, a few people shouting and waving swastikas.
00:09:02.000But of course, that's not what this is at all.
00:09:04.000And just as part of the general left-wing attempt to paint anyone who disagrees with them as a racist or a Nazi, they have this bag of insults that they go to every time somebody disagrees with them, God forbid.
00:09:15.000And then they just throw that, here comes the swastika, boom!
00:09:21.000And what is the evidence that the thousands and thousands of people in Ottawa protesting so they can maintain their jobs that those people are Nazis?
00:09:30.000Instead, what the media have been doing in Canada and elsewhere is they have been finding they've been nut picking is what it's called.
00:09:35.000They find a few fringe members of the protest, and then they say these people represent the entire protest as opposed to the core ideology.
00:09:42.000And the media, by the way, will do precisely the opposite when it comes to Black Lives Matter.
00:09:46.000So Black Lives Matter, the cause was not righteous.
00:09:48.000The cause of Black Lives Matter was predicated on a basic lie, which is that law enforcement across the United States are systemically racist and targeting black people, which is the only reason a disproportionate number of black people end up in prison for violent crime, for example.
00:10:37.000They may be used to it in actual tyrannical states, but they're really not used to it in the West and they don't like it.
00:10:43.000Says the Wall Street Journal, a majority of Canadians don't support the Ottawa protests, according to polls.
00:10:47.000But a recent survey by the Angus Reid Institute found a majority favors lifting restrictions, suggesting the Trudeau mandate, which went into effect on January 15th, was a political miscalculation.
00:10:56.000By energizing a significant part of the electorate, until now less present in public discourse, he set off a backlash, deepened Canadian polarization and raised the stakes in a showdown with the truckers.
00:11:05.000The global left is beginning to feel it because they've spent the last two years insisting they're on the side of the science and they're not on the side of the science.
00:11:11.000It turns out that the best thing that they could have done would have been to shield the vulnerable, as they did in Sweden, and then to allow people to live their lives.
00:11:19.000Instead, they decided to restrict everyone.
00:11:21.000And, again, the pitch is that freedom itself is bad.
00:11:25.000We have to crack down on people using the word freedom.
00:11:28.000There's a much-trafficked op-ed from a national affairs columnist for the Globe and Mail in Canada called Gary Mason.
00:11:35.000And the name of the column was, How Truck Convoy Protesters Like Pierre Poivre Have Weaponized Freedom.
00:11:48.000By the way, it's always the case that for the left, whenever the right does something bad, whenever the left does something bad, according to the left, this means that the right is pouncing.
00:11:56.000We're weaponizing freedom here on the right.
00:11:59.000I mean, I would hope that we weaponize freedom.
00:12:00.000It seems like a good thing to weaponize, frankly.
00:12:02.000And this columnist says, if you watched any of federal conservative MP Pierre Polivre's video announcing his candidacy for the leadership of his party, you might have discerned a theme.
00:12:12.000Variations of the word were used nine times in his three-minute performance.
00:12:15.000If he is elected leader and is ultimately successful in becoming prime minister, Mr. Polivre promised, among other things, to make Canadians the freest people on earth.
00:12:22.000With freedom to make your own health and vaccine choices, freedom to speak without fear.
00:12:26.000Freedom over fear, he recently tweeted.
00:12:30.000Freedom is a word that gets bandied about a lot these days, but has mostly been co-opted by the alt-right, both here and in the United States.
00:12:36.000See, if you say freedom, what they hear is Nazi.
00:12:39.000This is how perverse the wild left, the COVID restrictionist left has become.
00:12:45.000This columnist says freedom as an ideology has been appropriated by the Make America Great Again wing of the U.S.
00:12:51.000There's a strong MAGA fan base in this country, apparently with prominent supporters, such as Candace Bergen, the new interim leader of the Federal Conservative Party of Canada.
00:12:58.000Undated photos circulating on social media appear to show Ms.
00:13:01.000Bergen sporting a camouflaged MAGA hat.
00:13:11.000Freedom, of course, says this columnist, has not always been a concept usurped for selfish, malicious purposes.
00:13:15.000It's been a rallying cry behind great triumphs, such as the end of slavery and the civil rights movement.
00:13:19.000But others have believed freedom is about protecting property rights, even if that has to occur at the diminishment of democracy.
00:13:26.000Freedom has nothing to do with property rights, according to these folks.
00:13:29.000True freedom is seizing other people's property, of course.
00:13:32.000More recently, political leaders and others, with an unprecedented megaphone in the form of the internet and social media, have used the call for freedom to promote bigoted, racist, anti-democratic ideals.
00:13:43.000Freedom is bad because they might say something that this guy doesn't like.
00:13:46.000As Elizabeth Anker, a professor of American Studies at George Washington University and author of Ugly Freedoms recently wrote in the New York Times, Today, more and more, laws, caucuses, rallies, and hard-right movements use the language of freedom as a cudgel to erode democratic governance and civil rights.
00:14:00.000These laws expand the creep of authoritarianism.
00:14:04.000Yes, nothing says authoritarianism quite like leave people alone so they can make their own choices about vaccinations and masking.
00:14:12.000Alrighty, coming up, a bunch of folks are now saying that it's time for not Fidel Castro's son, definitely not Fidel Castro's son, Justin Trudeau, to get out of politics.
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00:16:12.000According to the National Post, a vast majority of Canadians believed the country was more divided than ever following that federal election.
00:16:19.000More than half said Justin Trudeau should step down after a cynical and opportunistic campaign.
00:16:23.000In a survey by Meru Public Opinion, 77% of respondents said Canada feels more fractured than ever following a summer campaign that produced roughly the same seat count as the last parliamentary session.
00:16:32.000Just 23% of respondents said the country is now more unified under Trudeau.
00:16:37.000A slim majority of respondents, 52%, said that Canada's democratic system is entirely broken and needs a major overhaul.
00:16:45.000So Canadians sound a lot like Americans at this point.
00:16:47.000This is what happens when the left pushes too far, too fast.
00:16:50.000One parliamentarian came out against Trudeau yesterday and said, why is it impossible for you to just articulate an off-ramp?
00:16:56.000This parliamentarian, Raquel Dancho, How is it that other highly advanced, developed nations like the UK, Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway, Denmark, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland, the United States, how is it that they have all the same tools we have, they have all the economic resources we have, their citizens have done all the work and made all the sacrifices.
00:17:20.000Why is it that those citizens get a plan for hope of when we get back to normal, when we get our lives back, when the people outside, you think they want to be here, Mr. Speaker?
00:17:35.000And Justin Trudeau is about to feel the wrath of the Canadian people, which is inherently hilarious.
00:17:40.000The wrath of Canadians sounds like a really bad horror movie.
00:17:42.000In any case, the Ottawa police chief, here's the thing.
00:17:44.000This has been combined with a fascistic crackdown on freedom of speech in Canada.
00:17:49.000This has been a serious problem in Canada, in Australia, people outlawing protests that they just don't like.
00:17:53.000Here's Ottawa's police chief saying, well, you know, we can identify and target protesters, not rioters, protesters.
00:18:00.000We have increased ability to identify and target protesters and supporters of protesters who are funding and enabling unlawful and harmful activity by the protesters themselves.
00:18:16.000Investigative evidence gathering teams are collecting financial, digital, Vehicle registration, driver identification, insurance status, and other related evidence that will be used in prosecutions.
00:18:31.000By the way, can you imagine if the US police had said this during the BLM riots?
00:18:35.000Like, even during the riots, not just during the protests.
00:18:37.000But imagine they had said during the protests what this guy is saying.
00:18:40.000We can track all of the financial information of anyone who gave to a BLM organization, and we intend on finding people who support and enable bad activity.
00:18:50.000Because that's not how freedom of speech is supposed to work.
00:18:52.000Meanwhile, in the United States, Jen Psaki is busily dismissing the Canadian trucker protests, pretending that they don't matter, even though they're now shutting off a main trade artery to the United States.
00:19:01.000I know there's been some suggestion, not by reporters necessarily at all, but that this congestion is related to the vaccine requirements.
00:19:10.000I mean, I'm saying I'm going to get to the protests, but the protests going on across Canada, which have spread to a bridge, are leading to sporadic congestion and blockages.
00:19:19.000While we do see some of these congestion due to protests, it's just clear that these disruptions have broadened in scope beyond the vaccine requirement implementation.
00:19:33.000Now, in reality, these politicians are being mugged by reality, which is why Alberta announced that it would be ending its vaccine passport program midnight on Tuesday, according to the Edmonton Journal.
00:19:44.000Albertans are waking up when states what could be the beginning of the end of COVID restrictions in this province, despite warnings the government may be moving too quickly.
00:19:51.000Alberta Premier Jason Kenney announced Tuesday the province's COVID-19 vaccine passport program will end immediately.
00:19:56.000At an evening news conference, Kenney said the restriction exemption program has served its purpose, but it's no longer needed because Alberta passed the peak of Omicron infections about three weeks ago.
00:20:04.000Okay, so do you think he is doing this because of the data?
00:20:06.000Or do you think he's doing this because of the protests?
00:20:08.000It turns out public protest does mobilize politicians.
00:20:11.000Politicians are not motivated by data.
00:20:13.000They're not motivated by quote unquote, doing the right thing.
00:20:15.000They're motivated by political incentive structures.
00:20:19.000Kenny said, none of this has anything to do with a few trucks parked at the Coutts border crossing.
00:20:24.000He said, I think a bit of a bit of a mugs game to say, keep this going for a few days when we know that many areas are already having compliance problems.
00:20:31.000Oh, okay, so it has nothing to do with the protests, according to these folks.
00:21:51.000And no one's going to come and just steal your home because that would be really, really tough because it's kind of bolted to the ground and everything.
00:21:57.000But what they could do is steal the value inherent in your home with home title fraud.
00:22:01.000And here's the thing, your homeowner's insurance doesn't cover it.
00:22:03.000The FBI calls home title fraud one of the fastest growing crimes.
00:22:06.000That is why you need to go to HomeTitleLock.com, America's leader in home title protection.
00:22:31.000Debra thought her common identity theft service would protect her after a criminal got onto the deed to her home and actually had her evicted from her own home.
00:22:50.000Right now in the United States, COVID deaths are at the highest in a year as Omicron targets the unvaccinated and the elderly, according to the Washington Post.
00:22:58.000And so we are now at the highest death rate in the United States in a year.
00:23:02.000And yet politicians all across the left have decided now is the time to loosen the restrictions.
00:23:33.000Whatever right wing populist movement was in its infancy in 2016 is about to be just completely multiplied exponentially by what the left has done during COVID.
00:23:45.000Because it turns out that when an elite cadre of people tell you that they can save grandma and that number one, they can't save grandma, but they can destroy your job and destroy your life and destroy your children's lives.
00:23:53.000When the elite tell you when they promise you the world and they deliver a pile of flaming dog crap, people get mad.
00:24:00.000And the left is about to feel the wrath.
00:24:02.000Again, in the United States, according to the Washington Post, though considered milder than other coronavirus variants, Omicron has infected so many people and has driven the number of daily deaths beyond where it was last spring, before vaccines were widely available, according to Washington Post data.
00:24:15.000Omicron has been particularly lethal to people over 75, the unvaxxed, and the medically vulnerable, according to doctors and public health officials.
00:24:22.000The soaring death toll also illustrates why experts pled with the public to beware of the highly contagious variant, even though it is less virulent than others.
00:24:29.000Jennifer Nuzzo, epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins, says this feels quite jarring to people, who may have assumed Omicron is generally, on a per-case level, less severe, and given the fact we have been vaccinated, at least some portion of the country.
00:24:40.000Even if, on a per case basis, fewer people develop severe illness and die, when you apply a small percentage to a very large number, you get a substantial number.
00:24:49.000But none of that changes the underlying logic here.
00:24:51.000Either you're vaxxed, or you're unvaxxed.
00:24:52.000If you are vaxxed, you are very unlikely to die from Omicron, just as you are very unlikely to die from Delta.
00:24:57.000If you have natural immunity, you're very unlikely to die from Omicron, just as you are very unlikely to die from Delta.
00:25:02.000If you are a person who has severe underlying health conditions, or you are elderly, There's a much better shot that you're going to die from Omicron, just as you are much more likely to die from Delta.
00:25:12.000So even if Omicron is less severe, which it is, just because it's less severe on an individual basis doesn't mean that if a bajillion people get it, you're not going to have a large absolute number of people who end up dying from it, which is what's happening right now.
00:25:24.000But none of the actual underlying logic has changed.
00:25:26.000The left is just pretending that the logic has changed because the people have had it.
00:25:54.000It's a bunch of Democratic governors who are beginning to say the same thing.
00:25:57.000You can see it happening across the country.
00:26:01.000And so the White House, belatedly, because they're very bad at reading tea leaves, the White House is belatedly moving in the right direction.
00:26:07.000The White House is beginning to realize that they have to start leaving people alone.
00:26:11.000They're going to have to tell their own base that their own base needs to stop panicking, like, right now.
00:26:16.000According to Politico, blue state governors and state health officials who most vigorously embrace pandemic restrictions are now pivoting toward a new era, using Omicron's decline to dial back precautions that have become a hallmark of the last two years.
00:26:28.000Health departments from Oregon to Maine have, over the last few weeks, ended almost all of their government-run COVID-19 contact tracing operations and shifted the responsibility to the public.
00:26:36.000Now, again, have the underlying data changed?
00:26:39.000The COVID tracing program has been a giant fail since day one because it wasn't in place early enough.
00:26:44.000The only way that... I've been saying this for two years!
00:26:47.000The only way that contact tracing works is when you have a low number of people on an absolute level who are transmitting.
00:26:53.000Once you have what is called community spread, where you're getting COVID from anonymous guy on the subway, this means you can no longer trace how you got COVID or who you gave COVID to.
00:27:02.000There are just too many people with COVID to trace.
00:27:04.000But we kept fighting yesterday's battles like, oh, well, you know, we must have testing.
00:27:08.000No, we need a testing in February of 2020.
00:27:11.000According to Politico, at the same time, Democratic governors in the North, East, and West, where case counts are dropping dramatically, are loosening mask policies and preparing residents for the reality that COVID-19 will be around long-term.
00:27:21.000Oh, you mean it's going to turn into a generalized background noise?
00:27:26.000As some of us have been saying for a year?
00:27:38.000It's so maddening because, again, when you know that the right public policy was not pursued a year ago, and now all these people flip on a dime and pretend that they are doing it for the right reasons, don't believe them.
00:28:16.000Governors in Connecticut and Delaware, as well as Oregon's Health Department, announced on Monday students could soon remove their masks.
00:28:22.000Governors in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and New York have also signaled forthcoming changes to their mask rules, while California Governor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, announced he is ending the indoor mask mandate next week, but keeping masks in classrooms for now, because they still have to keep holding on to the lie that they are doing this for public policy purposes, as opposed to the real reason they're doing it, which is they got walloped by reality.
00:28:42.000Vermont Health Commissioner Mark Levine said last week Omicron has, quote, hastened our pathway to the endemic state.
00:29:24.000In Republican-controlled states, where governors have largely resisted mask mandates and economic restrictions, declining case counts are providing a reason to end remaining traces of states' pandemic response.
00:29:33.000Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds announced her final emergency declaration extension and plans to decommission the state's COVID data sites.
00:29:58.000Like, welcome to the party, and I'm glad for the American people that many Americans living in blue states will now have additional freedoms.
00:30:03.000Also, the people you elect are douchebags.
00:30:07.000Your public health officials are douchebags against Dr. Anthony Fauci.
00:30:12.000So, yesterday, Anthony Fauci, who, until, like, the last five minutes, was telling you that, you know, there could be another two years of pandemic response and we can't let it up too early.
00:30:23.000We might have to mask children until they're adults.
00:30:26.000If they're five now, perhaps when they're 25 and they've been through 87 rounds of COVID.
00:30:31.000And I am still, at the NIH, I'll be 122 years old.
00:30:36.000At that point, maybe we can discuss how life will change.
00:30:42.000As we get out of the full-blown pandemic phase of COVID-19, which we are certainly heading out of, these decisions will increasingly be made on a local level, rather than centrally decided or mandated.
00:30:52.000There'll also be more people making their own decisions on how they want to deal with the virus.
00:31:04.000We had to go through like a year and a half of you pretending you knew what you were doing for you to get to the same point that Ron DeSantis was making a year and a half ago?
00:31:18.000As we get out of the full-blown pandemic phase of COVID-19, which we are certainly heading out of, these decisions will increasingly be made on a local level rather than centrally decided or mandated.
00:31:28.000There will also be more people making their own decisions.
00:31:58.000Meanwhile, the gaslighting that's going on to Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the gaslighting is just astonishing.
00:32:03.000Because now we're being led to believe that the reason that we can have these mandates reversed is because Joe Biden's done such a wonderful job.
00:32:09.000So more people died under Joe Biden than died under Donald Trump, despite the fact that he had an actual working vaccine.
00:32:15.000And Hakeem Jeffries is telling us that now we can remove all of these mandates because Joe Biden has been such a wild success.
00:32:44.000That's because under President Biden's leadership, a public health infrastructure was put into place beginning with the American rescue plan without a single Republican vote to ensure that we can do everything possible to crush the virus.
00:34:49.000Here is the head of the actual Democratic Party, Randy Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers, saying that regardless of what these public policy officials are now saying, she's going to make the policy, and the policy is, our teachers feel unsafe, never unmask.
00:35:02.000I am in favor of an off-ramp on masks.
00:35:05.000The real issue becomes, is the spread low enough so that there's no dissemination or transmission in schools?
00:35:17.000And it's not the teachers transmitting to kids, it's more kids and kids, particularly in elementary schools right now.
00:36:28.000Younger children use all parts of the face, even when masked, to look for emotion.
00:36:32.000But you're bringing up, I think, a very important point.
00:36:34.000When parents are surveyed about, you know, wanting to have masks or not have masks, it becomes so emotional that I think we have to acknowledge that we're all frustrated and we all need to understand when we can remove masks and when we need to put them back into place.
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00:41:14.000And then they get to claim credit for things they have no control over, like the course of the COVID pandemic as a general rule.
00:41:20.000It is not a coincidence that the entire Democratic Party began to run screaming away from their own policies here as soon as there were a million photos of Stacey Abrams unmasked with a bunch of small children.
00:41:30.000There are a bunch of these photos now.
00:41:32.000So here she is, bunch of kids masked, everybody masked in the presence of Stacey Abrams, the great and good representative of the people.
00:41:39.000She's going to get shellacked in November, or at least she should.
00:41:42.000And look, there she is behind a classroom of what, 50 kids here, all of them masked.
00:41:47.000The kids always come last for these folks.
00:42:56.000Protocols matter, and protecting our kids is the most important thing, and anything that can be perceived as undermining that is a mistake, and I apologize.
00:43:04.000Okay, what she should be saying is, I was unmasked because I'm vaxxed, and I'm already immune, and these kids don't need to be masked either.
00:43:38.000So as soon as all of this started to hit home for the Democrats, that is when they shifted their policies.
00:43:43.000Even Kathy Hochul in New York says that she's expecting to start releasing the mask mandates.
00:43:49.000According to the New York Times, POCA will drop New York's stringent indoor mask mandate on Wednesday, ending a requirement that businesses ask customers for proof of full vaccination or require mask wearing at all times, and marking a turning point in the state's COVID response, according to three people briefed on her decision.
00:44:03.000Why, it's almost like it's coordinated.
00:45:11.000She has a piece in the Washington Post pretending that she is part of the data-driven crowd.
00:45:16.000She's not part of the data-driven crowd.
00:45:17.000She never was part of the data-driven crowd.
00:45:21.000She says in this piece of the Washington Post, throughout much of the pandemic, there were two camps, one that opposed restrictions and one that supported them.
00:45:27.000As both sides became more entrenched, a third has emerged.
00:45:30.000This group advocated restrictions from the start, but now believes circumstances have changed enough that mandates can go.
00:45:35.000Policymakers would do well to heed this group.
00:45:37.000Some of us were part of that group from the beginning, Leanna, but you weren't, so don't pretend you were now.
00:45:44.000Alrighty, we'll be back here later today with an additional hour of content, including some talk about why Joe Biden is handing out free crack pipes to people.
00:45:52.000In the meantime, go check out our newest podcast, Morning Wire.
00:45:55.000On today's episode, they report on the American-born skier winning gold while representing China.
00:46:00.000That episode is available right now on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.