The Ben Shapiro Show - Coronavirus Can’t Kill Politics | Ep. 1013

00:00:00.000 Barack Obama returns to slam President Trump and call for fundamental change.

00:00:04.000 Joe Biden lays out a new radical program.

00:00:06.000 And Democrats begin to realize that Americans kind of want to reopen.

00:00:09.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

00:00:09.000 This is the Ben Shapiro Show.

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00:01:47.000 Okay, so let's begin with some very, very good news.

00:01:51.000 There actually is a fair bit of good news this morning.

00:01:54.000 Piece of good news number one, the testing trends all over the United States seem to suggest that the summer is actually having a fairly significant impact on COVID-19.

00:02:02.000 Because as the lockdowns are ending, state by state, the southern states seem not to be experiencing a wild uptick in the number of infections, even though they are gradually reopening.

00:02:11.000 Again, they are gradually reopening.

00:02:12.000 I've talked to people in Florida.

00:02:14.000 I've talked to people in Georgia.

00:02:15.000 I've talked to people in Texas.

00:02:17.000 And despite the media reports that everybody is willy-nilly going out in the streets and making out with each other, that's not actually what's happening.

00:02:22.000 A lot of stores have remained closed because they can't actually abide by some of the strict regulations.

00:02:26.000 Most people are still wearing masks.

00:02:27.000 Most people are socially distancing.

00:02:29.000 And even though you're seeing pictures from places like California and New York with lots of people out there, a lot of those pictures are taken with particular type of lenses that actually make it look as though people are closer together than they actually are.

00:02:40.000 It's a trick of photography and it's sort of disturbing that people do it, but it is a reality.

00:02:44.000 Yesterday, my wife and I took the kids out to a park.

00:02:47.000 There's pretty much no one around.

00:02:48.000 People who were around were socially distancing.

00:02:50.000 We've been doing that for weeks.

00:02:51.000 People sort of understand on a general level what is smart and what is not.

00:02:55.000 That doesn't mean everybody, but that does mean that more people than you would suspect, and that means That even if there are some infections, it's going to be a lower level than prior to the lockdown because people are engaging in different behavior.

00:03:05.000 We're starting to see those trends.

00:03:06.000 Scott Gottlieb, former FDA commissioner, put out a series of tweets looking at some of those trends.

00:03:12.000 So in tweet number one, he put out from AEI a graph showing the number of tests going up across the country really, really rapidly.

00:03:22.000 So as of May 1st, We were experiencing something like 290,000 tests, something like that, run on May 1st.

00:03:28.000 And on average, probably the first week of May, we were running somewhere in the neighborhood of probably 250,000 tests a day.

00:03:35.000 Now we are running, on average, closer to 400,000 tests a day.

00:03:40.000 Meanwhile, the number of positives has gone down steadily during that time.

00:03:44.000 Which means, basically, the number of people who are positive with COVID-19 has been stagnant, and the number of tests is going up.

00:03:49.000 Because, again, the percentage is just the numerator over the denominator.

00:03:52.000 So if the numerator remains the same, meaning the number of people infected, and the denominator increases, meaning the number of people tested, you are going to see a decrease in the positivity rate.

00:04:00.000 Now, there have been people in the media who are lying to you, and it is lying with statistics.

00:04:04.000 When they say things like, increasing numbers of positives, increasing number of absolute positives, If you test more people, you will get more positives.

00:04:12.000 That does not mean, contra to some people's, again, statistical illiteracy, that does not mean that the test is making people positive.

00:04:20.000 It means that you're likely to pick up the positives that are already there when you test more often, obviously.

00:04:25.000 So two things can be true at once.

00:04:26.000 One, the number of absolute positives coming back can be higher.

00:04:29.000 And two, the rate of positivity can be declining because you're doing more absolute tests.

00:04:35.000 So Scott Gottlieb also tweeted out the states where cases are increasing.

00:04:40.000 It's showing slight increase in Texas, but again, very difficult to tell whether that increase in Texas is due to like an absolute increase or whether that is due to a percentage increase or whether that is due to additional testing.

00:04:52.000 In all likelihood, it's due to additional testing.

00:04:53.000 In Louisiana, very slight increase after seeing a major peak earlier this year.

00:04:57.000 In Virginia, slight increase.

00:04:58.000 In Arkansas and South Dakota, a slight increase.

00:05:00.000 But again, Testing is increasing in all of those states.

00:05:02.000 It is also worthwhile noting only about 60% of the United States actually releases the results of these tests.

00:05:07.000 Meanwhile, there are a solid probably 25 states where there has been no increase in new cases, where there is no actual spike in cases.

00:05:20.000 And that is states ranging from Nevada to Connecticut to Maryland to Florida.

00:05:25.000 Again, Florida was supposed to be, you know, patient zero in the outbreak.

00:05:28.000 Florida was supposed to be where we were going to see this vast increase in a second wave because evil, evil Ron DeSantis had allowed people go to the beaches.

00:05:35.000 Turns out none of that was true.

00:05:37.000 It turns out that Florida is much more of a success story than people are making it out to be.

00:05:41.000 And one of the things that you're noticing is that again, hotter states, Just are not experiencing this in the same way that colder states have experienced it throughout the country.

00:05:49.000 California did not get hard hit.

00:05:51.000 Texas did not get particularly hard hit.

00:05:52.000 Florida did not get particularly hard hit.

00:05:55.000 Major cities, you know, Louisiana is a fairly warm place, but Louisiana has New Orleans.

00:05:59.000 New Orleans got hit.

00:06:00.000 The rest of the state really did not get hit all that hard.

00:06:02.000 Okay, so Gottlieb concludes from this.

00:06:05.000 He suggests that nationwide recent models suggest doubling time is about 45 days and the R0 is around 110.

00:06:11.000 So the R0 is the statistical infection rate.

00:06:16.000 If you're above one, that means that it is growing.

00:06:18.000 If you are below one, that means that it is decreasing because it's basically how many people one person infects.

00:06:24.000 So if the R0 is around 1.1, then that is a slow epidemic.

00:06:29.000 Slow enough that you're not going to overwhelm the healthcare system.

00:06:31.000 Gottlieb says while it's still expanding, it's doing so at a much slower pace.

00:06:35.000 Hopefully there will be a seasonal effect in the summer that slows it further.

00:06:39.000 Okay, so all of that is very good news.

00:06:41.000 Meanwhile, there's another piece of good news that's being kind of positioned as a piece of bad news, and that is that as coronavirus testing expands, not enough people are actually testing.

00:06:51.000 So all the talk about tests, tests, we need more tests, more and more and more tests.

00:06:54.000 According to the Washington Post, people aren't taking the tests that are out there.

00:06:57.000 By the way, I've experienced this myself.

00:06:59.000 My wife, earlier this week, came down with a fairly high-grade fever.

00:07:02.000 It turns out that she just had an infection.

00:07:05.000 But she went to, we went and we actually got a COVID-19 test.

00:07:07.000 She's nursing, she got an infection from that.

00:07:09.000 We actually went and we got a COVID-19 test.

00:07:12.000 We were in line for like two seconds.

00:07:14.000 Seriously, two seconds.

00:07:16.000 They have stations set up all around Southern California.

00:07:20.000 The availability of tests is extremely high.

00:07:24.000 According to the Washington Post, in fact, the availability of testing is so high that not enough people are actually accessing the testing.

00:07:31.000 So the Washington Post reports four months into the U.S.

00:07:33.000 coronavirus outbreak, tests for the virus finally are becoming widely available, a crucial step toward lifting stay-at-home orders and safely returning to normal life.

00:07:41.000 While many states no longer report crippling supply shortages, a new problem has emerged.

00:07:45.000 Too few people lining up to get tested.

00:07:48.000 Okay, so on the one hand, the suggestion is that a lot of people should be getting tested who are not getting tested.

00:07:52.000 On the other hand, what that really means is, listen, right now in America, if you have coronavirus symptoms, high likelihood you're going to go get tested.

00:08:00.000 High likelihood, but that really means there are a lot of asymptomatic people out there or people who are actually not sick with coronavirus at all.

00:08:05.000 A Washington Post survey of governor's offices and state health departments found at least a dozen states where testing capacity outstrips the supply of patients.

00:08:12.000 Many have scrambled to make testing more convenient, especially for vulnerable communities, by setting up pop-up sites and developing apps that help assess symptoms, find free test sites, and deliver quick results.

00:08:21.000 But the numbers, while rising, are well short of capacity and far short of targets set by independent experts.

00:08:25.000 Utah, for example, is conducting about 3,500 tests a day.

00:08:28.000 That's a little more than a third of its 9,000 test maximum capacity.

00:08:31.000 Health officials have erected highway billboards begging drivers to get tested for COVID-19.

00:08:36.000 Why aren't more people showing up?

00:08:37.000 Well, that's the million-dollar question, said Utah Health Department spokesman Tom Hudachko.

00:08:41.000 It could be simply that people don't want to be tested.

00:08:43.000 It could be that people feel like they don't need to be tested.

00:08:46.000 It could be that people are so mildly symptomatic, they're just not concerned that having a positive lab result would actually change their course in any meaningful way.

00:08:53.000 See, I think it's probably the latter.

00:08:55.000 Maybe it's just confirmation bias from the people I talk to in my crowd.

00:09:01.000 It's certainly anecdotal.

00:09:02.000 But let's just put it this way.

00:09:03.000 If anybody in my circle had coronavirus symptoms, they would immediately go get tested.

00:09:08.000 I don't know how many people across the United States have the symptoms.

00:09:10.000 They're like, you know what?

00:09:11.000 Screw it.

00:09:11.000 Not getting tested today.

00:09:13.000 Maybe it's just that not that many people are experiencing symptoms, or at least severe symptoms, sufficient that they feel like they need to go get tested.

00:09:20.000 Experts say several factors may be preventing more people from seeking tests, including a lingering sense of scarcity, a lack of access in rural and underserved communities, concerns about cost, and skepticism about testing operations.

00:09:31.000 Ayla Stanford is a pediatric surgeon in Philadelphia. 0.98

00:09:33.000 She's providing free testing in low-income and minority communities.

00:09:36.000 She says, we know there's a lack of trust in the African-American community with the medical profession.

00:09:39.000 She has an effort which offers testing in church parking lots.

00:09:42.000 They've serviced more than 3,000 people in recent weeks.

00:09:45.000 Also, there's lingering confusion about who qualifies.

00:09:49.000 Last month, the CDC relaxed its guidelines to offer tests to people without symptoms or referred by local health departments or clinicians.

00:09:56.000 Some states have relaxed their testing criteria dramatically.

00:09:58.000 Governor Brian Kemp has encouraged all Georgians, even if you're not experiencing symptoms, to schedule an appointment.

00:10:04.000 So by the way, if George is actually encouraging people to go out and get tested, and so they have a larger number of people getting tested, you would expect to see a spike in positives, right?

00:10:12.000 Again, Republican urged residents earlier this month to call 2-1-1, find a location close to you, even if you don't have symptoms and you are just curious.

00:10:21.000 Ashish Jha, who directs the Harvard Global Health Institute, said a lot of states put in very, very restrictive testing policies because they didn't have tests.

00:10:27.000 They've either not relaxed those or the word is not getting out.

00:10:29.000 We want to be at a point where everybody who has mild symptoms is tested.

00:10:31.000 That's critical.

00:10:32.000 That is still not happening in a lot of places.

00:10:34.000 But, again, as we move forward, it seems like if you... Listen, if you wanted to get tested before, you basically had to fib.

00:10:42.000 If you wanted to get tested, you had to say that you knew something because the CDC standards were so ridiculous that it was like, do you know somebody who's had coronavirus?

00:10:48.000 It's like, well, I don't know.

00:10:49.000 That person wasn't tested.

00:10:51.000 Well, okay, so to get the test, you fib.

00:10:53.000 And Peggy Noonan talked about this in the Wall Street Journal.

00:10:54.000 But now, that is not the way that this is working.

00:10:57.000 Now, basically, if you say that you have symptoms, you can get tested virtually across the country.

00:11:02.000 California has sufficient lab capacity to conduct nearly 100,000 tests a day.

00:11:05.000 They're averaging fewer than 40,000.

00:11:09.000 In Chicago, a major chain of urgent care clinics temporarily halted mobile testing last week.

00:11:13.000 It ran out of test kits.

00:11:15.000 As states trying to encourage people to return to normal life ramp up testings, experts worry that widespread shortages could occur.

00:11:22.000 But the federal government is moving to fill that gap.

00:11:24.000 The federal government is moving quickly to fill that gap.

00:11:27.000 Bottom line is this.

00:11:31.000 It does not seem like there is on-the-ground demand for testing that is not appearing so much as a national demand for testing because there is this, again, slogan out there that testing and tracing are the solution to this thing.

00:11:42.000 When you're providing more tests than people are actually taking advantage of, that is not a problem of supply, that is a problem of demand.

00:11:46.000 And the federal government is doing its best to fill that in.

00:11:49.000 But what that really shows is that we are not experiencing overwhelming of the healthcare system.

00:11:53.000 We're not experiencing overwhelming numbers of cases.

00:11:55.000 And this is driving a sort of change in the rhetoric that you're seeing from Democrats.

00:11:59.000 So for a while there, the rhetoric was, we got to shut down until we have a vaccine.

00:12:02.000 And by the way, another piece of good news, Moderna is now announcing that they've had positive interim phase one data for their new mRNA vaccine.

00:12:10.000 They're saying that their new tests on the vaccine are successful and they're moving forward.

00:12:15.000 So there are many vaccines apparently that are now in preclinical result testing.

00:12:20.000 And they've seen some very positive results.

00:12:23.000 They're trying to figure out exactly what the dosage should be.

00:12:27.000 But the bottom line is that this is very good news.

00:12:29.000 As Scott Gottlieb says, encouraging news today on Moderna vaccine technology will eventually let us reduce the COVID threat and reclaim normal times.

00:12:35.000 Early data shows it generates robust immune reaction.

00:12:38.000 It's dose dependent.

00:12:39.000 Getting dose right is key.

00:12:40.000 Moderna is now testing a new 50 milligram dose.

00:12:44.000 We must establish, or microgram dose, rather.

00:12:46.000 We must establish regulatory measures for antibody titers, clinical measures of benefit to serve as clear benchmarks of success for studies.

00:12:53.000 Right now, FDI requires neutralizing antibody titer of at least 1 to 160 for convalescent serum donors.

00:12:58.000 Is that the level for a vaccine?

00:12:59.000 There's some suggestion that vaccines could protect us from bad symptoms of COVID, but not totally protect us from getting the infection, sort of like a flu shot.

00:13:05.000 OK, well, I think that we would all go for that, right?

00:13:07.000 If this was reduced to the danger of the flu, I think we would all be like, OK, done, done.

00:13:12.000 OK, and then good news is that seems to be the direction we are moving.

00:13:15.000 So all of this is good news.

00:13:16.000 All of this is good news.

00:13:18.000 The summer seems to be slowing the spread, as Dr. Marty Makary of Johns Hopkins told me last week.

00:13:22.000 It seems as though the testing shortages are are actually not supremely material in most major states at this point.

00:13:30.000 It seems like it's really more a problem of people being aware that they can get a test or people wanting to get a test than it is that the tests are not available, which is good news.

00:13:39.000 And this is changing a lot of the rhetoric politically surrounding a reopening.

00:13:42.000 We'll get to that in just one second.

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00:13:51.000 Look at your window coverings.

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00:14:53.000 Alrighty, so you can see.

00:14:55.000 That the democratic rhetoric around this thing, as I say, is really changing fairly radically.

00:15:01.000 So, for example, Andrew Cuomo on testing.

00:15:03.000 So last week, Andrew Cuomo was like, we don't have enough testing.

00:15:05.000 The testing is not there.

00:15:06.000 Testing, testing.

00:15:06.000 We just don't have enough testing.

00:15:07.000 And it turns out that Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York, he did the same thing with testing he did with ventilators, which is he said he needed a lot more than he needed, right?

00:15:14.000 He said, I need 100,000 ventilators.

00:15:16.000 Turns out they didn't need a fraction of that.

00:15:18.000 So over the course of the last few weeks, it's been Cuomo saying, we need testing, testing, many tests.

00:15:21.000 We just need tons of tests.

00:15:23.000 Yesterday, Cuomo announced that the New York State drive-thru and walk-in locations are capable of testing 15,000 people a day, and they are currently testing 5,000 people a day.

00:15:31.000 In other words, there is a surplus per day of 10,000 tests.

00:15:35.000 Okay, that is not a testing shortage.

00:15:38.000 So all the rips, remember?

00:15:39.000 The rip was on Trump.

00:15:40.000 He's not getting the ventilators.

00:15:41.000 Then he got the ventilators.

00:15:41.000 Then it was, they're not getting us the tests.

00:15:43.000 Then they got them the tests.

00:15:45.000 Seems like the problem right now is that COVID-19 is just a part of life, right?

00:15:51.000 That is the problem for now.

00:15:52.000 The problem is not the testing.

00:15:53.000 The problem is not the medical care because we have not swamped the medical system.

00:15:56.000 The problem is that we are all just going to have to assess our own personal levels of risk and be responsible.

00:16:00.000 And that's it.

00:16:00.000 That's all we can do until a vaccine is developed.

00:16:02.000 Good news is it looks like a few months until maybe there will be some sort of workable vaccine that at least drives down the symptoms or a therapeutic that drives down the symptoms sufficient we can go back to our normal everyday lives.

00:16:11.000 When I say normal everyday lives, I don't mean with social distancing, with masks.

00:16:14.000 I mean, I think that we are probably a few months away from going back to like actual regular life.

00:16:18.000 I think that we are going to get back to the point where people actually do go to ballgames.

00:16:22.000 We're going to get back to the point where people do shake hands with one another.

00:16:24.000 I don't think handshakes are dead forever, by the way.

00:16:26.000 I think we'll hopefully we'll still keep some things like washing our hands a lot and not touching our faces so much.

00:16:31.000 But I think that as we develop therapeutics and a vaccine, that is the hope.

00:16:34.000 Don't do it prematurely, but that is the hope in the near future.

00:16:38.000 And until then, we mitigate risk and buy ourselves time because the therapeutics are coming down the pike.

00:16:41.000 Now, as I say, You know, there is this sort of pessimistic vision of the future in which there's no vaccine and there's no therapeutic, in which case you just want to achieve herd immunity as fast as possible, which in the United States would be pretty dangerous because there are a lot of unhealthy people, but...

00:16:55.000 I don't think that's necessary.

00:16:56.000 I think that if we're all responsible for a few months, we're going to get closer to normal by September, October, November, certainly by the beginning of next year, than many people had thought, including me, early on in this process.

00:17:08.000 And you're starting to see Democrats adapt their talk about this.

00:17:10.000 So here's Cuomo explaining, we actually have more testing than we can use right now.

00:17:14.000 We have more sites and more testing capacity than we're using.

00:17:20.000 Okay, that's a good problem.

00:17:21.000 But that is the next from hurdle to hurdle, right?

00:17:25.000 Stone to stone?

00:17:26.000 Yeah, I see it more like from hurdle to hurdle down the track.

00:17:31.000 Now we have more testing capacity and more sites than we're actually using.

00:17:36.000 We have driving sites that can do 15,000 per day.

00:17:39.000 We're doing about 5,000 per day.

00:17:42.000 Okay, so again, we're not actually short on the test at this point in New York State, which is the state hardest hit by this stuff.

00:17:49.000 Meanwhile, over in Colorado, Jared Polis, who's a Democrat, he came out and he said, you know what we're actually doing?

00:17:53.000 We're recounting our COVID-19 deaths.

00:17:55.000 We think we overestimated how many deaths there were, which is pretty astonishing.

00:17:58.000 Remember, when Trump said this, he was ripped up and down.

00:18:00.000 When any Republican has suggested that the classification of COVID deaths has actually been too broad because it counted people who died with COVID as opposed to people who died of COVID.

00:18:09.000 So you're 82 years old.

00:18:10.000 You have many preexisting medical conditions.

00:18:12.000 You get COVID, but you actually die of something else.

00:18:14.000 You'd have a heart attack or something.

00:18:15.000 And you are classified as a COVID-19 death or you're classified as a COVID-19 death when you die in your home and you're just an excess death and we don't actually know why you died.

00:18:22.000 The policy is like, you know what, if we're actually going to be statistically accurate about this thing, Then we need to measure people who died of COVID-19 as opposed to people who died with COVID-19.

00:18:31.000 This guy's a Democrat.

00:18:32.000 That means he's not getting ripped up and down.

00:18:34.000 That's the way this works in the media.

00:18:35.000 You can make exactly the same argument if you are a Democrat as if you are a Republican.

00:18:38.000 The Democrat will be praised for the argument.

00:18:40.000 The Republican will be ripped.

00:18:40.000 Here's Jared Paulus making an argument that many people have been making on the Republican side of the aisle for a while.

00:18:46.000 These are deaths that should not be politicized.

00:18:49.000 The CDC criteria include anybody who has died with COVID-19.

00:18:55.000 What the people of Colorado and the people of country want to know is how many people died of COVID-19.

00:19:00.000 In our state, about 900 have died from COVID-19 on their death certificate or from the attending physician.

00:19:07.000 About 1,100 have died with it.

00:19:09.000 That those 200 in the middle, it might have been a contributing factor, but it wasn't deemed the sole factor or the only factor in their death.

00:19:16.000 Weird, because again, if you mentioned this like just a few weeks ago, then the suggestion is you were downplaying the virus.

00:19:21.000 Again, Jared Powell can reopen Colorado in exactly the same way as Brian Kemp reopened Georgia, and he can say exactly the same stuff as President Trump about downgrading the number of deaths.

00:19:30.000 Not a shred of criticism from the media.

00:19:31.000 Not one.

00:19:32.000 Andrew Cuomo can completely blow it in his state.

00:19:34.000 Not a shred of criticism from the media.

00:19:35.000 That dude has an 80% approval rating, and he was shoving old people with COVID-19 back into nursing homes. 0.78

00:19:40.000 Now Cuomo, by the way, is actually on the defensive.

00:19:42.000 So yesterday, he said, we're not going to prosecute anyone for nursing home deaths.

00:19:46.000 Come on, guys.

00:19:46.000 That's not serious.

00:19:47.000 I mean, come on.

00:19:48.000 We're not going to do anything about that.

00:19:50.000 Who is accountable for those 139 deaths?

00:19:55.000 How do we get justice for those families who had 139 deaths?

00:20:00.000 What is justice?

00:20:02.000 Who can we prosecute for those deaths?

00:20:06.000 Nobody.

00:20:08.000 Nobody.

00:20:09.000 Mother Nature, God, where did this virus come from?

00:20:14.000 People are going to die by this virus.

00:20:18.000 That is the truth.

00:20:20.000 Okay, and then he went on to say, and this is a direct quote, older people, vulnerable people are going to die from this virus.

00:20:26.000 This is going to happen despite whatever you do.

00:20:28.000 Weird, because there were those of us who were saying this when it came to risk mitigation.

00:20:32.000 There were those who were saying this when it came to how do we strategize about tranching populations back into the workforce.

00:20:37.000 There were those of us who were saying this and we trended on Twitter for saying this.

00:20:40.000 Andrew Cuomo says it and everybody's like, oh, well, you know, Andrew Cuomo, hero of the people, man, hero of the people.

00:20:45.000 So now we're allowed to say the stuff that's true out loud when it becomes clear that now we are on the downtrend and when it becomes clear that it's going to cost Democrats if they continue to keep Every part of the economy shut down for extended periods of time, despite the fact that the evidence doesn't show that we should do all of that.

00:21:01.000 Rahm Emanuel, the former chief of staff to Barack Obama, he says, guys, I think Democrats are kind of too resistant about reopening.

00:21:06.000 We're going to need to talk reopening now.

00:21:08.000 On the Democratic side on messaging, we look a little too much messaging, too much about resistance about reopening, too much about reluctance about reopening.

00:21:17.000 And we should go to a message of rebuilding America.

00:21:20.000 If the president wants to talk about reopening, we want to talk about rebuilding America and the relief.

00:21:25.000 Let's take the unemployed. 1.00

00:21:26.000 If you're unemployed in the service sector, JCPenney, some of these others, those jobs aren't coming back.

00:21:31.000 So we're going to give you a coupon.

00:21:32.000 Go become a computer coder in six months.

00:21:35.000 We'll pay for it.

00:21:36.000 You don't have to pay a penny out of your pocket.

00:21:39.000 Learn to code is the Democrats' new program.

00:21:41.000 But the main point of what Rahm Emanuel is saying is correct, which is the Democrats have been extremely resistant to reopening.

00:21:46.000 Because the media calculus was such, until the last five minutes, the media calculus was such that if you said lockdown until every life is safe, my grandmother, she means everything to me, then you were rewarded.

00:21:46.000 Why?

00:21:56.000 And if you said, guys, we have to figure out a way to reopen because the economy is dying and 40 million people are out of work and everybody is losing their life savings and their life dreams, then you were a bad person.

00:22:04.000 But now that it appears that we are on the downslope, Then, and it appears that Florida and Georgia, and things could reverse, but Florida and Georgia, among many other states, do not appear that they're being overwhelmed in terms of the healthcare system and not being close to overwhelmed in terms of the healthcare system.

00:22:17.000 Now the rhetoric is starting to change.

00:22:20.000 And we're all getting to where I suggested we were going to be in the first place, which is individual decision-making about risk mitigation.

00:22:26.000 Well, who could have suggested all of this stuff weeks ago, months ago?

00:22:29.000 Oh, right.

00:22:30.000 Yeah, I did.

00:22:31.000 Not to say I'm right, but I was totally right.

00:22:31.000 Sorry.

00:22:34.000 We'll get to that in just... We'll get to how right I was in just one second.

00:22:36.000 First, let's talk about the fact that this is a crazy job market and you could use nothing better than to find the best employee in this market and to find the best employer in this market if you're now looking for a job.

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00:23:41.000 Okay, so as we see, people are engaging in risk mitigation or risk taking as they see fit.

00:23:50.000 In New York, people were going back out to bars and beaches, according to the New York Post.

00:23:54.000 Lockdown-weary New Yorkers ditching the distancing to get social instead this weekend, transforming parts of the Big Apple into raucous late-season Mardi Gras.

00:24:01.000 Yet the city's COVID-be-damned attitude was nothing compared with the scene in Belmar, New Jersey, a beach popular with Staten Islanders and Brooklynites. 0.53

00:24:07.000 Huge crowds waited shoulder-to-shoulder on the boardwalk for their turn to buy beach badges. 0.95

00:24:11.000 The line for beach badges was like four non-socially distanced blocks long, tweeted Jared Seidler, who described the boardwalk as obscenely packed.

00:24:19.000 I don't know the beach badges thing.

00:24:22.000 Is that something they're doing just because of COVID-19, or is that something that you actually have to do in New Jersey?

00:24:25.000 I just actually don't know the answer to that. 0.94

00:24:27.000 If the government has now restricted it so you have to buy a beach badge so as not to overcrowd the beach, so you just end up with a crowded line, then that's what you call policy stupidity at the highest level.

00:24:37.000 Outside bars on the Upper East Side, the Upper West Side, the East and West Villages, and in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, The Post found booze hounds arriving for the takeout cocktails and then staying and staying to sip drinks on packed sidewalks and soak up the lively scenes.

00:24:49.000 Are you going to drink with a mask on, said one reveler, hairdresser Akeem Kelly.

00:24:53.000 His mask dangled below his chin as he stood outside the Upper East Side's popular Dorian's Red Hand Bar, where crowds exceeding three dozen, nearly all in masks, were found in the early evenings of Friday and Saturday.

00:25:03.000 They don't care about us, said Anne Trent, 72, of Manhattan on Saturday.

00:25:06.000 She sat on a bench at the west end of the Brooklyn Bridge as a steady stream of mask-free sightseers and bicyclists passed her by, and she mused, what happened to all of us protecting everybody else?

00:25:14.000 Okay, I'll tell you what happened, is that a bunch of young people said, I don't care if I get this.

00:25:17.000 Right, that's actually what's going on right now.

00:25:19.000 And that may not be best policy.

00:25:21.000 And in fact, if you see an elderly person anywhere in your near vicinity, you're going to want to throw up that mask. 1.00

00:25:25.000 But can we stop pretending that a bunch of 20-year-olds hanging out at a bar is the same thing as a bunch of people at a nursing home hanging out together?

00:25:31.000 It is not.

00:25:32.000 Okay, now, again, I think that for purposes of slowing the spread, here's my rule.

00:25:36.000 My personal rule has been that when I'm out and about, if I'm six feet away from everybody else and outdoors, I don't wear a mask.

00:25:42.000 When I'm outdoors with my kids, I don't wear a mask.

00:25:44.000 When I go into a restaurant to pick up food, when I go over to the garden supply store where I'm in close proximity with people, I put on the mask.

00:25:51.000 And I think that that's a fairly good rule.

00:25:53.000 And that's a good rule mainly because, you know, I just don't know who's vulnerable and who is not vulnerable.

00:25:57.000 However, if you're talking about like a bar scene and everybody there is 20, I gotta say that the risk factors in terms of people dying of COVID are not particularly high, especially if everybody, again, socially distances from the most vulnerable.

00:26:09.000 And that's a decision that you are going to have to make yourself.

00:26:11.000 What is not a smart decision and not a good decision is if you're not wearing the mask and you are near somebody who you know is vulnerable. 1.00

00:26:17.000 That would be a stupid decision. 1.00

00:26:18.000 But again, I think that young, stupid people tend to do young, stupid things. 1.00

00:26:23.000 That does not mean that you're going to get people to stop doing young, stupid things. 1.00

00:26:25.000 That didn't even stop during the COVID outbreak. 0.98

00:26:28.000 So here's what's actually happening.

00:26:29.000 Most people who are risk-averse are being risk-averse.

00:26:31.000 Most people who are being risk-seeking are being risk-seeking.

00:26:34.000 And most people are actually being fairly smart about this. 0.54

00:26:37.000 The media are going to pick out these instances of people who are being dumb, and then they're going to highlight those so that they can claim that the government needs to be deeply involved in regulating individual behavior.

00:26:45.000 But the reality is that if you got tens of millions of people who are engaging in individual decision-making anyway, that's just how it's going to be. 0.84

00:26:51.000 That's just the reality of life.

00:26:53.000 There's a good article today in the San Jose Mercury News talking About risk assessment.

00:27:00.000 Says, as an infectious disease expert, Dr. George Rutherford knows all about the horrors of COVID-19.

00:27:05.000 There's one risk the UC San Francisco professor wearing a mask is willing to take, hugging his two-year-old granddaughter.

00:27:10.000 For two months, we've been diligent about staying home, but as Bay Area residents start to venture out with parts of the state gradually loosening lockdown restrictions, how do we navigate this new landscape of peril and promise?

00:27:18.000 We can't stay isolated and fearful forever.

00:27:20.000 The new normal looks like this.

00:27:22.000 Social lives carefully built around risk reduction, rather than the strict and absolute safety of isolated sheltering.

00:27:28.000 Stanford University Communications Professor Jeff Hancock, he says we need to balance our needs with what we know about the coronavirus.

00:27:34.000 He said abstinence doesn't work.

00:27:35.000 Plans that are practical and recognize basic human needs will be more successful than plans that don't.

00:27:39.000 Do we need a vacation in Costa Rica with lots of friends?

00:27:41.000 Do we need intimate and social moments?

00:27:41.000 No.

00:27:43.000 Yes.

00:27:45.000 Risk isn't binary, experts agreed.

00:27:46.000 All or nothing approaches have bad consequences.

00:27:49.000 Where have you been for the last several months?

00:27:51.000 Serious!

00:27:52.000 Like, if you mentioned this before, that risk mitigation was gonna be the answer, you were the bad guy.

00:27:57.000 But now, apparently we're all allowed to talk risk mitigation.

00:28:00.000 I wonder what changed.

00:28:01.000 I wonder what changed.

00:28:02.000 Maybe it was that a bunch of Republican states started to reopen, didn't see massive spikes, and people around the country, they're like, oh, look at that.

00:28:08.000 Oh, look at that.

00:28:09.000 OK, well, what all of this has led to is a change in sort of democratic messaging for 2020.

00:28:14.000 So as I say, they started to talk reopening.

00:28:16.000 That's a thing that has happened.

00:28:17.000 But they also have to come up with a new message, because let's say that people start reopening and people are generally responsible and the economy starts to reopen.

00:28:25.000 People start getting hired back slowly but surely.

00:28:27.000 We come up with some therapeutics.

00:28:29.000 By the time we get to fall, schools are open and we are basically, let's say, best case scenario, we're back to 80 percent of normal by November.

00:28:36.000 And the economy is moving back up again, and no one's going to blame Trump for the coronavirus.

00:28:40.000 It's just not going to happen.

00:28:41.000 You can't blame Trump for a worldwide pandemic that knocked out places like Italy and knocked out places like the UK.

00:28:47.000 The United States ranges middle of the pack when it comes to number of deaths per million, and when you take out New York City, we range near the bottom.

00:28:53.000 So really, it was a New York failure, and everybody else did kind of okay, aside from some of the major cities like New Orleans and Chicago.

00:29:00.000 Because the United States is a fairly diffuse place in terms of population, except for those major populations that are specifically in New York City.

00:29:07.000 So the Democrats have to come up with a new message.

00:29:10.000 And they have.

00:29:11.000 Their new message, which they will get all the support in the world from the media from.

00:29:16.000 Four, is they need to remake the system utterly and completely.

00:29:20.000 So Barack Obama wheeled out this new message today.

00:29:22.000 It's the same as their old message, right?

00:29:25.000 Every crisis is an opportunity.

00:29:28.000 Every bad situation is just an indicator that we need to remake the system completely.

00:29:31.000 So Barack Obama gave a speech over the weekend to people who are graduating from college and was widely praised by the media for doing so because Obama could fart and the media would praise him for it.

00:29:39.000 His farts smelled like roses according to the members of CNN's editorial board.

00:29:43.000 So Barack Obama gave this speech And his speech included, I don't know why in the middle of a graduation he would do this, but apparently it's a very unifying thing. 0.99

00:29:51.000 It's very unifying to say that the leadership of the country sucks when you're the ex-president. 0.87

00:29:55.000 Man has Jimmy Carter syndrome. 0.89

00:29:57.000 It is kind of amazing, by the way.

00:29:58.000 You notice how Republican presidents, I don't think Trump will do this, but every other Republican president basically went away after their president.

00:30:04.000 Reagan stopped talking.

00:30:05.000 H.W.

00:30:05.000 didn't talk.

00:30:06.000 W. didn't talk.

00:30:07.000 It was like, okay, we're done.

00:30:07.000 Now my job is over.

00:30:09.000 Not Barack Obama, right?

00:30:10.000 Obama's out there and he is jabbering up a storm because he has to defend his legacy against President Trump, he thinks.

00:30:17.000 We'll get to Barack Obama's address to graduates in just one second.

00:30:21.000 First, right now, not a great time to go to the post office.

00:30:24.000 First of all, why would you go to the post office anyway?

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00:30:28.000 But right now, waiting in line, holding packages with a bunch of people who are also holding packages in line in a closed area.

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00:31:51.000 Alrighty, in just a second, we're going to get to Barack Obama and the new democratic agenda.

00:31:55.000 It was Trump is blowing this thing.

00:31:57.000 Now it turns out Trump didn't blow the thing that bad.

00:31:59.000 It turns out that Trump is not a great communicator, as we all knew. 0.99

00:32:03.000 And he does dumb things on Twitter. 0.99

00:32:04.000 And also, the ventilators were there. 0.97

00:32:06.000 And also, the testing is being provided.

00:32:07.000 And also, states are basically taking the lead.

00:32:10.000 And also, the people who are defending China look terrible today.

00:32:14.000 So Democrats have to come up with a new plan.

00:32:16.000 Obama laid it out yesterday.

00:32:17.000 We'll get to that momentarily.

00:32:18.000 First, the double tumbler is back, but it is only available for our most exclusive membership tier I'm talking about.

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00:33:26.000 Leave it to producer Nick to inform me that those are triples.

00:33:35.000 That's correct, the trouble with tribbles.

00:33:37.000 Okay, so, President Obama gives this speech to graduates, and he lays out the Democratic program. 0.99

00:33:42.000 Program number one, he's gonna yell at Trump about how Trump sucks. 0.86

00:33:44.000 Program number two, this COVID-19 shows that America needs fundamental change. 0.96

00:33:49.000 Weird, because I thought that when he came onto the scene, we got the fundamental change, right?

00:33:52.000 Turns out, there's never change fundamental enough for the left, because in the left-wing worldview, any inequality is an inequity, meaning anything that is unequal in life is not about The fact that people are not actually equal in all of their capacities and all of their skill sets.

00:34:07.000 I am short.

00:34:07.000 I'm not going to be playing in the NBA.

00:34:09.000 I have no jump shot.

00:34:09.000 I can't dunk.

00:34:10.000 Right?

00:34:11.000 But apparently that's inequity.

00:34:12.000 That's some sort of unfairness.

00:34:13.000 So everything in America is about unfairness.

00:34:16.000 It is not about the fact that any statistical division you draw in American society is going to include inequality.

00:34:23.000 So if that is your viewpoint, then the only indicator that you have reached fairness is when everybody ends up with exactly the same results, basically no matter what they do.

00:34:31.000 You take the decision-making out of the process.

00:34:33.000 So that means that it is perpetual revolution on the left.

00:34:36.000 It means it doesn't matter if Obama fundamentally transformed America.

00:34:38.000 Doesn't matter.

00:34:40.000 Not fundamental enough.

00:34:41.000 It's never fundamental enough.

00:34:42.000 We never reached that utopia.

00:34:44.000 Okay, so Barack Obama said two things.

00:34:45.000 One, he ripped into Trump.

00:34:47.000 Two, he suggested that COVID-19 shows systemic racism.

00:34:52.000 Okay, it doesn't matter that we are expending extraordinary resources for all Americans so they can get the treatment that they need.

00:34:57.000 No, this is really about how America has a legacy.

00:35:00.000 Somehow, the death rates from COVID-19 are evidence of Jim Crow and slavery.

00:35:05.000 Which, again, I guess in a certain sense is true, but only in the sense that all history is contingent.

00:35:10.000 Meaning that all history leads to other things happening in the future.

00:35:14.000 If Adam and Eve hadn't eaten from the apple tree, then presumably fewer people would be dying of COVID-19 right now.

00:35:20.000 That's not a supremely helpful analysis of the current situation when it comes to policy on the ground.

00:35:24.000 Here's Barack Obama making the fundamental case for transformation of American society, which is now being picked up by Joe Biden as well.

00:35:30.000 More than anything, this pandemic has fully finally torn back the curtain on the idea that so many of the folks in charge know what they're doing.

00:35:40.000 A lot of them aren't even pretending to be in charge.

00:35:43.000 If the world's going to get better, it's going to be up to you.

00:35:47.000 With everything suddenly feeling like it's up for grabs, this is your time to seize the initiative.

00:35:54.000 Okay, weird.

00:35:55.000 So you're going to seize the initiative?

00:35:57.000 That's very odd, because what I've been told by people like Obama is that if he were in charge, then we could all just listen to him.

00:36:02.000 But since Trump is in charge, you should use your own individual judgment.

00:36:05.000 As opposed to me, where I say, like, I don't care who's in charge, you should use your individual judgment.

00:36:08.000 You notice how this works?

00:36:09.000 When a Democrat is in charge, pay attention to authority.

00:36:12.000 When a Democrat is not in charge, it's up to you, America.

00:36:16.000 A disease like this just spotlights the underlying inequalities and extra burdens that black communities have historically had to deal with in this country.

00:36:21.000 terrible and the 1619 Project is right. 1.00

00:36:23.000 This is the message that Obama's pushing here.

00:36:25.000 A disease like this just spotlights the underlying inequalities and extra burdens that black communities have historically had to deal with in this country.

00:36:36.000 We see it in the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on our communities, just as we see it when a black man goes for a jog and some folks feel like they can stop and question and shoot him if he doesn't submit to their questioning.

00:36:50.000 there.

00:36:52.000 Injustice like this isn't new.

00:36:55.000 Okay, that's insane.

00:36:57.000 Okay, what he is saying right now is totally insane.

00:36:58.000 The reason that is totally insane is, first of all, if you're going to differentiate how COVID-19 is affecting populations, you'd have to first figure out a couple of things.

00:37:06.000 One, people who are obese and have diabetes and have pre-existing conditions.

00:37:10.000 This is more prevalent in minority communities than it is in the white community.

00:37:13.000 That is just a statistical truth.

00:37:15.000 Okay, that has nothing to do with race.

00:37:17.000 That has everything to do with eating habits and the kind of food people have access to and all that kind of stuff.

00:37:22.000 Two, are people actually socially distancing?

00:37:25.000 Do people live in intergenerational households?

00:37:28.000 A lot of people who are white tend not to live as much with grandma.

00:37:31.000 A lot of people in minority communities, Hispanic communities, for example, have lots of cross-generational pollination.

00:37:37.000 This is also true in the black community.

00:37:38.000 That's not a bad thing. 0.86

00:37:39.000 That's not a rip.

00:37:40.000 I think it's actually quite a good thing in many ways.

00:37:42.000 But it does mean that you are more susceptible to passing on COVID-19 to other people.

00:37:46.000 But you have to take all of these into account.

00:37:48.000 That does not mean that some inequity has taken place.

00:37:50.000 You'd have to actually filter out all of the different decision-making variables.

00:37:53.000 But according to Obama, if black people are hit harder by COVID-19 statistically, that means that America is racist and this can always be attributed to Jim Crow.

00:38:00.000 He doesn't even have to bother to do the statistical analysis and figure out how much of this is due to inequity.

00:38:05.000 He can just immediately cite inequality.

00:38:07.000 And he can then connect it to another case where it is not clear that the driving factor was racism.

00:38:11.000 The Ahmed Arbery case.

00:38:13.000 So the Ahmed Arbery case is an awful, awful case. 0.99

00:38:15.000 We talked about this at length the day after this broke in the news like big.

00:38:19.000 We talked about the fact that I think that those guys should be prosecuted.

00:38:21.000 That you don't have the ability to chase down somebody and basically hold them at gunpoint for a non-crime.

00:38:27.000 That is not something you can do.

00:38:29.000 However, we do not have evidence at this point that the incident was driven by race primarily, as opposed to being driven by vigilantism, by the people who are actually doing this thing, and driven by an insider corrupted deal, basically, between the DA in that area and the ex-cop who committed the shooting along with his son.

00:38:49.000 I mean, this is why Obama's demagoguery is really so dangerous. 0.99

00:38:54.000 When Trump is demagoguing, he just says something dumb. 1.00

00:38:56.000 He just says something ridiculous. 1.00

00:38:58.000 He'll just say, like, Joe Scarborough is off killing interns or something. 0.99

00:39:00.000 He'll just say something where we can immediately be like, come on.

00:39:02.000 Obama tries to create a superstructure of extraordinarily radical claims on top of very thin reads, and then wait for the media to bolster him.

00:39:13.000 So he will say things like the Ahmaud Arbery, so what he did in that clip is pretty incredible.

00:39:17.000 He said the Ahmaud Arbery shooting is about racism.

00:39:20.000 Again, we don't know that it's about racism because we don't know the background of the guys who committed the shooting.

00:39:23.000 Do they have all sorts of racist texts?

00:39:26.000 Do they have racist background?

00:39:27.000 Was this done specifically because they saw a black guy or is it because somebody in their neighborhood said somebody's burglarizing a house?

00:39:32.000 And they were like, okay, well, whatever, man.

00:39:34.000 I'm a vigilante and we've had this before and I'm going...

00:39:37.000 By the way, still criminal, still bad, they should still go to jail.

00:39:40.000 But we don't know the answer to that yet.

00:39:41.000 So he takes a case where not all of the facts are known, he immediately attributes it to deep-seated American racism, then he connects that to another issue where it is not clear that racism is the deciding fac- Again, is the suggestion that our medical professionals are racist?

00:39:55.000 Is the suggestion that our federal and state governments all across the nation, that the New York government, Bill de Blasio, has seen wildly disproportionate cases of black people dying as opposed to white people.

00:40:03.000 Is Bill de Blasio and the city government of New York racist?

00:40:06.000 And Bill de Blasio is like a full-blown communist.

00:40:08.000 So you're gonna have to explain that.

00:40:11.000 But he hasn't bothered to explain it.

00:40:13.000 The entire program is about...

00:40:15.000 Again, America has inequalities, therefore America is bad, and therefore America needs to be fundamentally transformed.

00:40:20.000 And this is where Obama and Bernie were on exactly the same page.

00:40:23.000 Obama is just more subtle about how he goes about this, right?

00:40:26.000 Bernie will just say, America's terrible.

00:40:28.000 America's a terrible place, filled with capitalism and brutality and viciousness, and we need to transform it into a socialist utopia.

00:40:35.000 But Bernie, Obama is soft Bernie.

00:40:37.000 He just lets get there gradually.

00:40:39.000 Bernie is hard Bernie.

00:40:41.000 Bernie is like, give me pudding and communism.

00:40:44.000 Obama still says that he likes the free market.

00:40:46.000 Maybe he does, you know, in a very limited fashion, heavily regulated fashion, the same way Elizabeth Warren likes the free market as an ox that you can sort of chain up to the plow of the American economy and then direct it how you want, even if it ends up killing the ox.

00:41:00.000 But Bernie says this more clearly.

00:41:02.000 So Bernie over the weekend, he says, we need to fundamentally rethink how society works.

00:41:05.000 Now, remember, Everybody who is saying the stuff that they were already saying before COVID-19, if this has not challenged any of your preconceptions about when government should step in and when government should not, it's because you're not actually following the facts.

00:41:15.000 You are just reinforcing exactly what you thought before.

00:41:17.000 As I've said before, reinforcing your priors, reinforcing your prior beliefs.

00:41:21.000 That is Bernie.

00:41:21.000 It doesn't matter what the antecedent is in an if-then statement.

00:41:26.000 All that matters is the conclusion.

00:41:28.000 It doesn't matter what the if is.

00:41:29.000 The then is we should be socialist.

00:41:31.000 So it could be, if the sky is blue, we should be socialist.

00:41:34.000 If there's COVID-19, we should be socialist.

00:41:36.000 Here's Bernie yesterday explaining we need fundamental change.

00:41:39.000 If there is any silver lining in the midst of this terrible, terrible and unprecedented moment in American history in terms of the economy, in terms of the pandemic, it is that maybe we start rethinking some fundamental tenets about the way our government and society works.

00:41:55.000 And we should ask ourselves, among other things, Is healthcare a human right that all of us deserve because we're human beings?

00:42:03.000 Or is it simply a healthcare benefit that somehow we lose when we lose our jobs?

00:42:10.000 So Biden is picking up this torch.

00:42:12.000 So Biden has been looking for some sort of raise in debt for his campaign.

00:42:15.000 His campaign doesn't exist for anything.

00:42:17.000 It's a campaign about nothing.

00:42:18.000 It's the Seinfeld of campaigns.

00:42:20.000 He sits in a basement and then he does nothing and then he hopes to be president.

00:42:24.000 Now, as I've said before, that was actually his best feature.

00:42:26.000 His best feature was the return to normalcy campaign.

00:42:29.000 He's actually making a very large strategic error here.

00:42:31.000 So because it turns out that maybe we'll get through this.

00:42:35.000 It turns out that we're moving back toward normalcy.

00:42:37.000 It turns out that our medical system withstood it and the federal government did not, in fact, do a terrible job.

00:42:41.000 And it turns out many state governors who are Democrats, like Andrew Cuomo, did an awful job.

00:42:45.000 Maybe J.B.

00:42:46.000 Pritzker in Illinois didn't do a fantastic job.

00:42:48.000 Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan didn't do a fantastic job. 1.00

00:42:51.000 As that turns out to be the case, Biden is now shifting his message and he's looking for a positive reason to be president.

00:42:56.000 Now, this is directly counter to why he was nominated.

00:42:59.000 The reason he was nominated is because people didn't want Bernie.

00:43:02.000 The reason he was nominated is because he was campaigning on the Warren G. Harding 1920 return to normalcy routine.

00:43:08.000 His entire campaign was going to be about basically Return to status quo, return to a time that was not too crazy, return to a time where everything was sort of more even, even keel.

00:43:20.000 No one is voting for Joe Biden because they want fundamental change.

00:43:22.000 People are going to vote for Joe Biden because they don't want Trump.

00:43:25.000 That was the initial theory of the Biden campaign, and it was strong enough to win him the nomination over a fundamental change candidate like Bernie Sanders.

00:43:31.000 Well, now Biden is going full Bernie, according to the New York Times.

00:43:34.000 More than 36 million Americans are suddenly unemployed.

00:43:37.000 Congress has allocated $2.2 trillion in aid, with more likely to be on the way as the fight looms over government debt.

00:43:42.000 Millions more people are losing their health insurance and struggling to take care of their children and aging relatives.

00:43:46.000 Nearly 90,000 are dead in a continuing public health catastrophe.

00:43:49.000 This was not the scenario Joe Biden anticipated confronting when he competed for the Democratic nomination or on a conventional left-of-center platform.

00:43:57.000 Now, with Mr. Biden leading President Trump in the poll, the former VP and other Democratic leaders are racing to assemble a new governing agenda that meets extraordinary times, and they agree it must be far bolder than anything the party establishment has embraced before.

00:44:08.000 See, this is such a misread.

00:44:10.000 It is such a dramatic misread.

00:44:12.000 The best case that you can make to moderates is, you know what we're going to get back?

00:44:15.000 3.5% unemployment.

00:44:16.000 You know what we're going to get back?

00:44:17.000 Back to normal.

00:44:18.000 You know what we're going to get back?

00:44:20.000 All the good stuff that was happening just before this. 1.00

00:44:22.000 But Biden is better at doing that than Trump, because Trump is volatile, and he says crazy things on Twitter, and he annoys you, and he says dumb crap. 0.99

00:44:28.000 That was the heart of the Biden campaign. 0.99

00:44:30.000 That's why it was like, elect this dead man, as opposed to electing Elizabeth Warren, a fundamental change candidate.

00:44:35.000 Or electing Bernie Sanders, a fundamental change candidate.

00:44:38.000 Now Biden is saying, well, I guess, you know, in light of this disaster, I'm going to go full, full bore radical.

00:44:44.000 Now that actually opens the door to Trump.

00:44:46.000 It's kind of shocking.

00:44:47.000 Truth, truth, like this is political malpractice on an incredible level.

00:44:51.000 Biden is not a fundamental change candidate.

00:44:53.000 And if he nominates a VP who is a fundamental change candidate, Kamala Harris, If he nominates a VP who's a fundamental change, Stacey Abrams, then the attack by the Trump campaign is not going to be on Joe Biden is old and incompetent and senile.

00:45:08.000 The campaign is going to be about, would you like back the 3.5% unemployment we had just before this with a functioning economy?

00:45:13.000 Or do you want Joe Biden spending trillions of dollars on programs he didn't like in the first place, like universal health care, Medicare for all, that involves everybody losing their private health care?

00:45:22.000 Are you really interested?

00:45:24.000 And Joe Biden just wiping away every last student loan after you paid your student loans and then thrusting that on the back of the taxpayers?

00:45:32.000 This is the greatest time for a return to normalcy campaign.

00:45:32.000 It's incredible.

00:45:35.000 Because guess what everybody is aching for in their bones?

00:45:39.000 A return to normalcy, right?

00:45:40.000 It's what I want.

00:45:40.000 That's what you want.

00:45:41.000 It's what everybody wants.

00:45:42.000 And Trump is trying to say, okay, I'm going to get back there.

00:45:44.000 But Biden could easily say, look, Donald Trump is not... I'm old enough to remember when the slogan against Trump was, this is not normal, right?

00:45:51.000 This is not normal.

00:45:52.000 And if we don't accept Trump as normal, then we can get back to the old normal of kind of half corrupt politicians like Joe Biden, He's been a lifelong politico, and sure, he's boring, and sure, he's not all that bright, but at least you knew what was coming in the morning.

00:46:06.000 That was the campaign for Joe Biden, and now he's shifting it.

00:46:08.000 According to the New York Times, Mr. Biden's campaign has been rapidly expanding its policy-drafting apparatus, with the former VP promising on Monday to detail plans for the right kind of economic recovery.

00:46:17.000 He has already effectively shed his primary season theme of restoring political normalcy to the country, replacing it with promises of sweeping economic change.

00:46:23.000 He is running directly counter.

00:46:25.000 To the basic political calculus that says you run to the left during the primaries and you run to the center during the general.

00:46:30.000 He ran to the center during the primaries, and now he's running to the left during the general.

00:46:34.000 How does that make any sense at all?

00:46:36.000 He is now opening the door.

00:46:37.000 Like, listen, as a Republican, I'm happy.

00:46:40.000 If you want Trump reelected, you should be happy.

00:46:41.000 Because it does allow you to make the argument, the very proper argument, that Joe Biden is going to radically shift the country on the back of a pandemic.

00:46:49.000 On Wednesday, Biden signaled anew he was willing to reopen his policy platform, announcing six policy task forces covering issues including health care, climate and immigration, as well as the economy, that combine his core supporters with left-wing allies of Senator Bernie Sanders, his vanquished primary opponents.

00:47:02.000 And now he's going to just eat alive the Bernie Sanders program.

00:47:06.000 Honest to God, if Trump does not go after him for the radicalism, it's political malpractice.

00:47:11.000 It's amazing.

00:47:12.000 It's amazing that he's doing this. 0.62

00:47:13.000 It's so politically incompetent on every insane level.

00:47:18.000 It's sort of like when Mitt Romney decided he was going to campaign on the basis of being severely conservative.

00:47:23.000 Well, he was really campaigning on being not Obama, and then Obama somehow made it into a referendum on Romney. 0.97

00:47:28.000 Well, now Trump can make this into a referendum on Biden if Biden starts proposing radical crap. 0.97

00:47:33.000 But that's what they're doing. 0.79

00:47:34.000 They're talking about pumping trillions more into the economy, enacting infrastructure and climate legislation far larger than previously envisioned, passing a raft of aggressive worker protection laws, expanding government-backed health insurance, creating enormous new investments in public health jobs, health care facilities, child care programs.

00:47:49.000 Banning stock buybacks, compelling big corporations to share more of their profits with workers, a fundamental remaking of the American economy.

00:47:55.000 You think anyone was on board with this?

00:47:57.000 That's why Biden was nominated, because no one was on board with this.

00:48:00.000 And he's doing it anyway.

00:48:01.000 He's doing it anyway.

00:48:02.000 It's an amazing, amazing thing.

00:48:04.000 I mean, talk about seizing defeat from the jaws of victory right now.

00:48:09.000 So this should be the campaign for Trump.

00:48:10.000 The campaign for Trump should be very easy.

00:48:13.000 Joe Biden proclaimed that he is going to be back to normalcy.

00:48:16.000 This ain't normalcy.

00:48:17.000 And he's openly saying he doesn't want normalcy.

00:48:19.000 Pretty incredible, incredible stuff.

00:48:21.000 Okay, time for some things that I hate.

00:48:23.000 So let's talk about the media.

00:48:29.000 The media are just absolutely egregious.

00:48:32.000 Egregious!

00:48:33.000 I mean, they will cover any democratic narrative in the way that Democrats would like.

00:48:38.000 It's truly impressive.

00:48:40.000 So let's take, for example, Stacey Abrams.

00:48:42.000 Stacey Abrams is a non-entity.

00:48:44.000 She lost by 50,000 votes in the state of Georgia.

00:48:47.000 50,000 to Brian Kemp.

00:48:49.000 That is not a close election.

00:48:50.000 That is a not-close election.

00:48:52.000 She is still being heralded as the next big thing.

00:48:55.000 So much so that the Washington Post magazine printed an entire piece called The Power of Stacey Abrams.

00:49:02.000 Despite losing the Georgia governor's race in 2018, she has moved quickly to political prominence.

00:49:06.000 Will she be the vice presidential pick for Democrats? 0.99

00:49:08.000 It would be insane to do this, but maybe Biden's gonna do that.

00:49:11.000 Maybe that's his job.

00:49:12.000 Maybe he thinks that if he campaigns radical, then it's gonna redound to his benefit because what you need is senility and radicalism on the ticket.

00:49:19.000 Makes perfect sense. 0.64

00:49:20.000 How ridiculous is the Washington Post piece about Stacey Abrams? 0.74

00:49:24.000 They included a picture that looks as though she's being backlit for a Broadway show. 0.89

00:49:30.000 She's like, there's fog emerging from behind her as she wears a white see-through cape. 0.99

00:49:34.000 And she's entirely in silhouette.

00:49:36.000 I mean, what in the world is going on?

00:49:38.000 She looks like a magician from Las Vegas.

00:49:40.000 Like, slap a top hat and a cane in her hand and she's gonna make a tiger appear or something. 1.00

00:49:45.000 It's absurdity.

00:49:46.000 She's gonna start singing theme songs from Wicked.

00:49:48.000 It's a bizarro world.

00:49:50.000 This is what the Washington Post portrays her as.

00:49:53.000 The top picture, by the way, from the Washington Post of her, is a picture of her sitting, you know, with a shiny table right in front of her.

00:50:02.000 And the pictures of her holding up to her eye what looks like a giant monocle of an American flag.

00:50:07.000 And every picture is like this. 0.96

00:50:08.000 I mean, this picture is particularly ridiculous. 0.75

00:50:11.000 I've never seen a profile picture like this. 0.71

00:50:13.000 Then there's a giant picture in the profile of a mural of her, of a mural of her in Atlanta on the side of a building.

00:50:21.000 They're giving her, like, full Che Guevara treatment here.

00:50:23.000 There's a picture of her holding up a mirror of herself.

00:50:26.000 So you can see, I mean, like, every photo is a romantic photo.

00:50:29.000 Now, the media have never taken a good picture of Donald Trump, ever.

00:50:32.000 Every picture of Donald Trump is him giving the smug grin, or he looks a little bit orange or something.

00:50:36.000 But Stacey Abrams, they, like, posed her in front of fog. 1.00

00:50:40.000 In front of fog.

00:50:41.000 And you have to listen to how this piece is written.

00:50:44.000 They actually have like a full paragraph describing how you walk onto a stage.

00:50:48.000 Not kidding.

00:50:49.000 This is from the Washington Post piece.

00:50:50.000 You ready?

00:50:52.000 Pandemonium ensues as she walks to the far left of the stage like a runway supermodel. 1.00

00:50:56.000 Stops on a dime, poses, tilts her head slightly, and smiles. 0.76

00:51:00.000 Camera flashes explode.

00:51:01.000 She next pivots and walks slowly to the center of the stage, freezes there, and repeats the pose. 0.94

00:51:05.000 Again, the flashes explode.

00:51:07.000 Abrams is summoning her inner actress, and she is both enjoying the moment and getting through it to get to the conversation.

00:51:12.000 She then pivots and walks to the far right of the stage. 1.00

00:51:14.000 Same.

00:51:15.000 You wonder whether she has done this before, because it is not necessarily what one would expect from a 46-year-old politician who has nearly elected the first black female governor in U.S. 0.56

00:51:22.000 history.

00:51:22.000 She lost by fewer than two percentage points in the 2018 Georgia race riddled with allegations of voter suppression.

00:51:28.000 Before that, she was a state legislator who had served as a leader in the Georgia General Assembly for a decade.

00:51:32.000 Now her name is on political pundits' shortlist of potential running mates for Joe Biden.

00:51:36.000 She also happens to have predicted she'll be elected president by 2040. 0.94

00:51:39.000 Wow, she says it?

00:51:40.000 I guess we have to take it seriously.

00:51:41.000 The losing gubernatorial candidate in Georgia predicts?

00:51:44.000 And she lost, by the way, in a horrible year for Republicans.

00:51:47.000 She predicts she's going to be president by 2020.

00:51:48.000 Well, I take that at face value.

00:51:50.000 I take that at face value.

00:51:52.000 I think my daughter is going to be elected president of the United States by 2060.

00:51:54.000 I guess we'll have to take that super duper seriously now.

00:51:58.000 Just as quickly, Abrams leaves the runway and returns to politics.

00:52:02.000 A balloon of silence in the meeting room is punctured time and again by, amen, and preach, and you go girl.

00:52:07.000 Okay, this is your media. 1.00

00:52:09.000 This is your pathetic, stupid, terrible media. 1.00

00:52:11.000 And they are awful. 1.00

00:52:12.000 Awful in every possible way.

00:52:15.000 And this has even infused people who I generally like in the media.

00:52:19.000 Okay, so you've heard me on this show praise Jake Tapper before.

00:52:22.000 I think Jake is a very good journalist.

00:52:24.000 I also think that Jake's coverage of the Trump administration can be exceedingly biased.

00:52:29.000 Okay, so let me give you an example.

00:52:31.000 So today, yesterday, Jake Tapper was on with Alex Azar, and he suggested that they were talking about coronavirus and the Trump administration response, and Jake suggests that we were hit much harder than other countries.

00:52:41.000 This is not true.

00:52:43.000 It is not true.

00:52:44.000 By population, we were not hit harder than other countries.

00:52:47.000 In terms of deaths per million, the United States ranks somewhere in the middle of Europe.

00:52:50.000 And if you rank us without New York City, we rank near the bottom of Europe.

00:52:53.000 You can't take the number of cases in the United States or number of deaths in the United States and compare it to Italy, which has one-sixth our population.

00:53:01.000 You can compare us to the rest of Europe.

00:53:03.000 If you take us compared to Europe, we're doing better than Europe overall.

00:53:06.000 But here is Jake not getting this right.

00:53:08.000 This is just not getting it right.

00:53:10.000 The United States has less than 5% of the world's population, but the United States has also almost 30% of the world's officially reported coronavirus deaths.

00:53:21.000 You said back in January that, quote, the risk is low, our job is to work to keep it that way.

00:53:25.000 So did the U.S.

00:53:26.000 government fail?

00:53:27.000 Why is this virus hitting our country so much harder than it's hitting other countries?

00:53:32.000 So first, just in terms of the actual case counts, we are testing more than other countries or than other major countries, and so we're seeing a tremendous number of cases.

00:53:42.000 Again, it is not correct to suggest that the United States has hit harder than other countries.

00:53:48.000 Europe has been hit with 162,000 deaths.

00:53:50.000 The United States has been hit with approximately 90,000.

00:53:52.000 That doesn't mean everything was handled great here.

00:53:53.000 It wasn't.

00:53:54.000 It was mostly not handled great by governors, who are the first line of defense against this sort of stuff, not shoving people back into nursing homes with COVID-19.

00:54:02.000 But this is just not, like, and then you see Chuck Todd, right?

00:54:04.000 Chuck Todd doing the same routine.

00:54:06.000 Trump is exploiting the virus to pull us apart.

00:54:07.000 Really?

00:54:07.000 Is Trump doing that?

00:54:08.000 Or is it the media suggesting from the very get-go that President Trump was blowing this thing?

00:54:12.000 Suggesting that he was withholding ventilators on the base of personal predilections?

00:54:16.000 Suggesting that Andrew Cuomo was a hero and Ron DeSantis was a villain?

00:54:19.000 I'm very tired of the media who have been engaged in exactly the same sort of political polarization as Trump, suddenly discovering that Trump is polarizing.

00:54:26.000 Like, this does not excuse Trump for being polarizing during a time we need unity.

00:54:29.000 But the media have been just as polarizing, and in many cases more polarizing, by deliberately miscovering the stats.

00:54:35.000 Again, when you say that the United States has seen more cases of coronavirus, we are testing more than any other nation.

00:54:39.000 That doesn't mean that the tests generate the positives, as I've said before.

00:54:43.000 It does mean that unless you test for flu, you don't know whether people have flu.

00:54:46.000 Unless you are testing for a heart attack, you don't know whether somebody had a heart attack or some other cause.

00:54:50.000 Here was Chuck Todd blowing it yesterday, too.

00:54:53.000 Even before the coronavirus hit, political division was our pre-existing condition.

00:54:57.000 And all this makes it easy to forget how much most of us are actually pulling in one direction to get us through the worst health and now economic crisis in a century.

00:55:08.000 So maybe this is a good moment to remind ourselves of all those acts of kindness, selflessness, and heroism that do pull us together, even as protesters, partisans, and some high-profile politicians exploit the situation to try to pull us apart.

00:55:23.000 Okay, again, this is just, like, have you been watching the media coverage?

00:55:26.000 The media coverage has all been about a narrative of good and evil, and now it's shifted in real time as it turns out that we can start moving toward reopening.

00:55:33.000 It's just incredible.

00:55:34.000 Meanwhile, the same media who say that only Trump is polarizing, that Trump is very bad, they've jumped on people talking about quote-unquote Obamagate as a conspiracy hoax.

00:55:43.000 Now I'm just going to point out that when Donald Trump suggested that the media coverage of coronavirus was a hoax, that they were saying the federal government wasn't doing anything and that was a hoax, the media immediately suggested that what Trump meant by that is the coronavirus itself was a hoax.

00:55:55.000 That was a hoax.

00:55:56.000 That wasn't true.

00:55:57.000 That was a four Pinocchio claim.

00:55:58.000 It was repeated endlessly by members of the media, repeated endlessly by the Democratic Party.

00:56:02.000 It is not a conspiracy hoax to point out that half of the Obama administration was involved in unmasking Michael Flynn and that it was a pretty good shot that if you spend half your time following around Michael Flynn and you have half the administration with access to Michael Flynn's name and then it leaks to the media that somebody somewhere did something wrong.

00:56:20.000 That is not a hoax, when it turns out that the evidence supporting the idea of a Trump-Russia collusion allegation was extraordinarily skimpy.

00:56:29.000 Like, really skimpy.

00:56:30.000 The first half of the Mueller report, which is all about Trump-Russia collusion, is extraordinarily thin.

00:56:34.000 Like, really thin.

00:56:36.000 Thin like Homer Simpson's hair thin.

00:56:37.000 Unbelievably thin. 0.99

00:56:39.000 It's the second half, when it comes to obstruction, where you start getting into Trump acting like a crazy person.

00:56:43.000 But the first half, the Trump-Russia collusion stuff, turned out to be a big nothing burger.

00:56:47.000 A giant burger of nothing.

00:56:49.000 And when you say, it looks like they bent the rules on that FISA warrant for Carter Page, which they did, which a judge, which the inspector general found, when you find that Andrew McCabe lied to the media, I mean, lied to the FBI, right, and didn't get prosecuted, when it turns out that James Comey was keeping open an investigation into Michael Flynn, even after the FBI knew that there was no actual material reason for the investigation to be open against Michael Flynn, you start to think, okay, Well, let's take best case scenario.

00:57:14.000 These people are firmly convinced that Trump-Russia collusion happened, and they're willing to bend any and every rule in order to prove that it happened.

00:57:20.000 And carried on for two, three years, and the media were complicit in that.

00:57:23.000 But then, like Jake yesterday, he goes after Senator Ron Johnson, he says, this is all a conspiracy hoax, this Obamagate thing.

00:57:29.000 Okay, it is not a conspiracy hoax to point out that people were routinely bending rules, that they were being overbroad about their application, I'm not claiming that it was a top-down conspiracy to get Michael Flynn.

00:57:45.000 I'm not claiming that it was a top-down conspiracy to leak his name to the media.

00:57:53.000 I'm not claiming any of those things.

00:57:54.000 I'm just claiming that a bunch of people who are thinking in the same direction, namely that Trump-Russia collusion definitely happened and we have to stop these guys before it's too late, that those people bent the rules in extraordinary ways that if this had happened Trump to Obama and not Obama to Trump, we would be talking about impeachment on that basis alone, probably.

00:58:10.000 That is just a reality.

00:58:11.000 Here is Jake Tapper, though, suggesting to Ron Johnson that all of the Obamagate discussion, all the Michael Flynn discussion is a conspiracy hoax.

00:58:19.000 You have not made the allegation that the Trump administration is making, which is that President Obama committed crimes.

00:58:25.000 You haven't said anything along those lines.

00:58:27.000 But your work, your requesting of this information of the Director of National Intelligence, Rick Grenell, and again, I'm pro-transparency, true, at least at all, but your work is being cited as evidence for this crackpot conspiracy theory.

00:58:45.000 Does that bother you?

00:58:46.000 Again, you keep calling it Crackpot Conspiracy Theory.

00:58:49.000 I'm just trying to find out what happened.

00:58:52.000 Again, I don't know where people keep getting this idea that anyone who is serious...

00:58:57.000 He's claiming that Barack Obama was like, I want you to go falsely get Michael Flynn.

00:59:01.000 Like that's not what anybody is really claiming here.

00:59:03.000 They're claiming that Obama was in the loop on the pursuit of Michael Flynn.

00:59:06.000 And again, I think that there were people inside the administration who were convinced that Flynn did something of which he was guilty and that he needed to be pressured by the FBI.

00:59:13.000 That's why the investigation stayed open.

00:59:16.000 The evidence supports that theory of the case.

00:59:18.000 It does.

00:59:18.000 That is not a conspiracy theory.

00:59:20.000 Those documents are public.

00:59:21.000 We now see them.

00:59:23.000 So, but the media are willing, it is, it's pretty amazing.

00:59:26.000 And Kayleigh McEnany, who's doing a very good job as press secretary, by the way, Kayleigh McEnany, she came out yesterday and she scolded the media for their lack of curiosity in the Flynn case, and she's right to do so.

00:59:36.000 You're an attorney and the president's spokesperson.

00:59:38.000 Perhaps you could lay out the elements of this crime.

00:59:41.000 What crime was committed and in what way?

00:59:44.000 I assume you're referring to the Obama administration and the unmasking and... But the president calls Obamagate.

00:59:50.000 What is it?

00:59:50.000 What are the elements of that crime?

00:59:52.000 Yeah, I'm really glad you asked because there hasn't been a lot of journalistic curiosity on this front and I'm very glad that you asked this question.

00:59:58.000 Look, there were a number of questions raised by the actions of the Obama administration.

01:00:06.000 And she is correct about all of that.

01:00:07.000 And again, I don't think you leave it to President Trump to lay out the theory of the case here, nor do I think that anybody's going to get prosecuted, nor should they be prosecuted.

01:00:15.000 I don't think Susan Rice gets prosecuted for unmasking. 0.88

01:00:17.000 I think that the person who leaks to the media should be prosecuted.

01:00:20.000 But if you don't have evidence, then you should.

01:00:21.000 But again, there was this general miasmatic level of corruption inside the Obama administration, where basically Obama would say, wouldn't it be nice if this happened? 0.73

01:00:30.000 And then somewhere down the line, it would happen.

01:00:32.000 Obama didn't order the IRS to explicitly go out there and censor 501c3 groups on the basis of ideology.

01:00:38.000 It just happened after he suggested publicly that it would be nice if 501c3 groups weren't biased toward the right.

01:00:46.000 Obama is a smart political operator.

01:00:48.000 He wouldn't be caught dead with his hand in the cookie jar on this sort of stuff.

01:00:52.000 That is not to suggest even malign motive.

01:00:55.000 Maybe he actually thought that Trump was colluding with Russia.

01:00:58.000 Maybe all these people convinced themselves that's what was happening.

01:01:00.000 But that does not exempt people from following the rules.

01:01:03.000 Okay, time for a very, very quick thing that I like.

01:01:06.000 So, things that I like today.

01:01:07.000 There's a really interesting novel by an Israeli novelist named Yochi Brandes.

01:01:11.000 It's called The Orchard, and it's all about the generation that really created the Talmud, or right previous to the creation of the Talmud. 0.52

01:01:19.000 It's really the story of Rabbi Akiva's wife and Rabbi Akiva.

01:01:22.000 Rabbi Akiva is one of the most famous sages in Jewish history.

01:01:24.000 It's revisionist, so if you're an Orthodox Jew, it's got some stuff in there that's going to leave you scratching your head.

01:01:28.000 You're going to be like, well, I don't remember this part from the Talmud.

01:01:31.000 But with that said, the last 20 pages or so of this book are quite moving and quite excellent.

01:01:35.000 The book is called The Orchard by Yohi Brandes, and if you're interested in sort of ancient Jewish conflicts in ancient Jewish philosophy.

01:01:41.000 The Christians come into play a lot here because this is around the birth time of Christianity.

01:01:45.000 Paul, Saul of Tarsus, is a character in the book.

01:01:48.000 You can check it out.

01:01:49.000 The Orchard by Yochi Brandes is translated from the Hebrew and the translation is pretty good.

01:01:52.000 Alrighty, we'll be back here later today with two additional hours of content.

01:01:54.000 Otherwise, we'll see you here tomorrow.

01:01:56.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

01:01:56.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show.

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01:02:14.000 Playback and media operated by Nick Sheehan.

01:02:16.000 Associate producer Katie Swinnerton.

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01:02:27.000 Hey everybody, it's Andrew Klavan, host of The Andrew Klavan Show.

01:02:30.000 You know, some people are depressed because the American Republic is collapsing, the end of days is approaching, and the moon has turned to blood.

01:02:37.000 But on The Andrew Klavan Show, that's where the fun just gets started.

The Ben Shapiro Show - May 18, 2020

Coronavirus Can’t Kill Politics | Ep. 1013

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