The Ben Shapiro Show - Is The Law An Ass? | Ep. 1003

00:00:00.000 As more and more Americans move outside, authorities debate how to crack down.

00:00:03.000 George W. Bush releases a COVID-19 video, and Joe Biden continues to struggle with Tara Reade's sexual assault allegation.

00:00:09.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

00:00:09.000 Shapiro, this is The Ben Shapiro Show.

00:00:11.000 Today's show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.

00:00:19.000 Protect your data from prying eyes at expressvpn.com.

00:00:23.000 All right, well, may the fourth be with you.

00:00:26.000 And quick note on that, let's just all hope that one day Disney will stop taking all the nostalgia we have for what was one of the great intellectual property pieces in the history of Hollywood And using all that nostalgia in order to promulgate social justice warrior bullcrap.

00:00:39.000 That will be the day when they can stop blaming their toxic fandom.

00:00:42.000 Because the reality is, Star Wars is fantastic.

00:00:45.000 My son loves Star Wars.

00:00:46.000 My daughter loves Star Wars.

00:00:47.000 My son's birthday is this week.

00:00:48.000 We're having a Star Wars themed party.

00:00:49.000 You know who's not going to appear at that party?

00:00:51.000 Anyone from the new Star Wars series.

00:00:52.000 It will be all the originals because that's all he cares about.

00:00:55.000 All he cares about.

00:00:56.000 You know why?

00:00:56.000 Because the originals are good and everything else blows.

00:00:59.000 And you know why that is?

00:01:00.000 Because they used to care about the story in Hollywood.

00:01:02.000 Alrighty, well, now to the actual news of the day.

00:01:05.000 So, over the weekend, the President of the United States, President Trump, he did a town hall event with Fox News at the Lincoln Memorial.

00:01:15.000 Pretty stunning backdrop, actually.

00:01:17.000 And there are a couple of big headlines that came out of this.

00:01:19.000 Headline number one is that President Trump revised upward his estimate of the number of deaths From coronavirus to up to 100,000.

00:01:25.000 He is not wrong about this.

00:01:27.000 Obviously, we will probably hit 100,000 over the course of the year.

00:01:30.000 We already have about 70,000, a little bit under 70,000.

00:01:33.000 I saw a rumor going around last night that the CDC had revised downward their estimate by half.

00:01:36.000 That's not true.

00:01:37.000 The CDC data was not taken into account the last couple of weeks because they were just relying on number of actual reported deaths as opposed to the number of estimated deaths.

00:01:45.000 Those tend to Come in over the course of the next couple of weeks.

00:01:49.000 So we are currently at about 65,000, 66,000 dead in the United States.

00:01:53.000 The virus will kill somewhere between 75 and 100,000.

00:01:55.000 President Trump is correct about this.

00:01:57.000 This was the original estimate that Dr. Birx put out and that Anthony Fauci put out from the IHME model.

00:02:03.000 It suggested it could be as high as a quarter of a million, and we will end up somewhere in that range in all likelihood.

00:02:08.000 Here's President Trump acknowledging that and also acknowledging that the steps taken by the government have actually prevented this from being a lot higher.

00:02:16.000 We're gonna lose anywhere from 75, 80 to 100,000 people.

00:02:20.000 That's a horrible thing.

00:02:22.000 We shouldn't lose one person over this.

00:02:23.000 This should have been stopped in China.

00:02:25.000 It should have been stopped.

00:02:27.000 But if we didn't do it, the minimum we would have lost is a million two, a million four, a million five.

00:02:32.000 That's the minimum.

00:02:33.000 We would have lost probably higher than, if possible, higher than 2.2.

00:02:38.000 Okay, well, one of the big questions here is whether that is because the healthcare system would have been swamped and it would have looked like Italy, because even Italy didn't end up with those kinds of numbers, or whether the only thing preventing us from hitting that 1.5, 2.2 million is the fact that we are locked down, in which case the letting up of the lockdown is going to lead to a dramatic spike in cases.

00:02:56.000 So either the modeling is somewhat wrong, or we have basically acknowledged that we're not going to end up between 100 and 240,000.

00:03:01.000 See, this is sort of the problem here.

00:03:04.000 Is that what the model suggested is that even with social distancing, we would end up between 100 and 240,000.

00:03:08.000 And most states have really not completely released their population, even in states like Georgia or Colorado, which have started to release their population.

00:03:16.000 People aren't crowding into movie theaters.

00:03:17.000 People are still wearing masks.

00:03:18.000 People are social distancing.

00:03:19.000 And one of the things that's fascinating is that it's unclear what exactly we're aiming for at this point.

00:03:23.000 What exactly are we aiming for?

00:03:25.000 Are we stalling for time?

00:03:26.000 Are we trying to play for time so that there are new therapeutics that are brought to bear or so that a vaccine is developed?

00:03:31.000 Are we basically doing the Sweden thing and aiming for herd immunity?

00:03:33.000 Because Sweden continues to approach herd immunity in places like Stockholm.

00:03:36.000 We already know that according to the antibody tests, well over a quarter of the people in New York City have had COVID-19, which means that they're kind of getting to the point where herd immunity is not that far off.

00:03:48.000 Right now, there's a lot of death until you get to herd immunity is sort of the idea.

00:03:51.000 But even there, the real question is, how much death is necessary for herd immunity if you can segment off the populations that are most vulnerable?

00:03:57.000 Meaning, that if you actually look at the stats in various areas around the world, what you see is that anywhere from 40-50% of all deaths in places like Italy, in places like Sweden, in places like the Netherlands, are happening in old age homes.

00:04:09.000 In the United States, that number is anywhere from 25-40%.

00:04:13.000 So, if you were actually able to protect those places, if you were able to test all the people going into those places, if you were able to restrict the movement of people who are inside the old age homes, then you could immediately remove, presumably, about 25 to 30 percent of that entire death toll from the rolls, which starts to make this look a lot less deadly for the rest of the population, particularly under age 60.

00:04:30.000 If you're under age 60, the chances that you are going to die from this thing are very low, unless you have a serious pre-existing condition like diabetes.

00:04:37.000 And if you're under the age of 40, there's almost no chance that you die from this thing or even sustain serious damage from this thing, statistically speaking.

00:04:45.000 So the question is what we are aiming for.

00:04:47.000 And I'm going to get to that in just a moment because President Trump, it's not clear whether we are just waiting for a vaccine to be developed or whether we think that therapeutics will be like, what is the change?

00:04:56.000 Where is the game changer here?

00:04:57.000 And if there is no game changer, then nature will have recourse.

00:05:00.000 The only question is how long it takes for nature to have recourse.

00:05:04.000 If nothing changes, then either a lot of people die over the course of a longer period of time or a lot of people die now.

00:05:08.000 I mean, those are the two choices and neither one of them is very good.

00:05:12.000 We're going to get to more of this in just one second.

00:05:13.000 First, I need to take a moment to give a shout out to all of our advertising partners who help make the show possible.

00:05:18.000 Obviously, there's a rough economic times and they rely on you to continue patronizing them and we rely on them to continue advertising on the program to ensure that this show can continue to be brought to you.

00:05:26.000 We are super grateful for our advertising partners.

00:05:28.000 I love all of the products that we sponsor on this show and all of our advertisers.

00:05:32.000 We're all trying to get through this together, and we really appreciate you patronizing our advertising partners.

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00:07:16.000 Okay, so the president says that he is confident we'll have a vaccine by year's end.

00:07:20.000 He's been engaged in a grand attempt to accelerate progress toward a vaccine.

00:07:25.000 Here is the president.

00:07:26.000 We are very confident that we're going to have a vaccine at the end of the year.

00:07:29.000 By the end of the year, have a vaccine.

00:07:31.000 By the end of this year?

00:07:33.000 We think we're going to have a vaccine by the end of this year.

00:07:36.000 And we're pushing very hard.

00:07:37.000 You know, we're building supply lines now.

00:07:39.000 We don't even have the final vaccine.

00:07:42.000 Johnson & Johnson, if you look at Johnson & Johnson is doing it.

00:07:45.000 We have many companies are, I think, close because I meet with the heads of them and I find it a very interesting subject because it's so important.

00:07:57.000 Okay, so if we're betting on the vaccine by the end of the year, then presumably the goal is that we continue social distancing, we continue wearing masks, herd immunity is not something that we aim for because obviously once the vaccine arrives, then we can artificially create herd immunity.

00:08:09.000 I mean, that's effectively what a vaccine does.

00:08:10.000 It artificially creates herd immunity that would normally happen through a disease's natural progression through the population.

00:08:16.000 You keep as many people alive as you can until then.

00:08:18.000 You vaccinate all the people who are capable of getting the vaccination and then you move on with your life because that's the best you're going to do.

00:08:23.000 So hopes for the vaccine are actually maybe balancing against a wider opening up.

00:08:28.000 If you think a vaccine is not going to be developed for five years here, then you may as well say have at it.

00:08:33.000 You may as well say, okay, here's what we're going to do.

00:08:35.000 We're just going to protect the most vulnerable populations.

00:08:36.000 We're going to tell them to stay at home.

00:08:38.000 We're going to aim for herd immunity with the rest of the population and go out and willy-nilly have fun.

00:08:42.000 In fact, There are some scientists who are suggesting exactly that.

00:08:46.000 We'll get to that in just a minute.

00:08:47.000 But what's really fascinating about all of this is the imagistics of the whole situation.

00:08:51.000 The imagistics of the whole situation are really interesting.

00:08:53.000 So, President Trump's actions, as I've said from the beginning, have been pretty good.

00:08:57.000 I mean, once the Feds got serious about this, they got really serious.

00:09:00.000 There was no ventilator shortage.

00:09:01.000 I mentioned this last week.

00:09:02.000 Everybody was talking ventilators, ventilators, ventilators.

00:09:04.000 There was no ventilator shortage.

00:09:05.000 There was talk about overwhelming the medical system.

00:09:07.000 Didn't happen.

00:09:08.000 There was talk about the federal government not giving people what they need.

00:09:11.000 Didn't happen.

00:09:11.000 In fact, every major Democratic governor in America has come out and said that the federal government did what they were supposed to do in getting people what they wanted.

00:09:19.000 That's not stopping Joe Biden from claiming, however, that Donald Trump blew this in dramatic fashion, even though Joe Biden has no evidence that Donald Trump actually blew this in dramatic fashion.

00:09:26.000 This has led Joe Biden to putting out an ad.

00:09:28.000 He has to run on the back of the pandemic because the fact is that before the pandemic, Joe Biden was probably going to lose.

00:09:33.000 Before the pandemic, Joe Biden was in serious trouble because the economy was quite good, because Donald Trump remains popular in a lot of those swing states, more popular than he is in the country at large.

00:09:42.000 Now Joe Biden is jumping on the pandemic really to attack Trump.

00:09:44.000 And this is why image matters.

00:09:47.000 The buck stops here.

00:09:49.000 Harry Truman said it.

00:09:51.000 It means no excuses.

00:09:53.000 It means taking responsibility, the ultimate responsibility for the biggest decisions in the world.

00:10:00.000 Every great president has lived up to it.

00:10:03.000 But Donald Trump?

00:10:04.000 Yeah, no, I don't take responsibility at all.

00:10:06.000 First of all, the governors are supposed to be doing a lot of this work.

00:10:10.000 We're a backup.

00:10:11.000 We're not an ordering clerk.

00:10:12.000 We're a backup.

00:10:13.000 Donald Trump thought the job was about tweets and rallies and big parades.

00:10:19.000 He never thought he'd have to protect nearly 330 million Americans.

00:10:22.000 Okay, so that's Biden's ad.

00:10:24.000 Here's the thing.

00:10:25.000 When it comes to shifting blame, the Obama administration was, bar none, the best at this.

00:10:29.000 They were incredible at this.

00:10:30.000 How many people went under the bus in the Obama administration?

00:10:33.000 I mean, that bus would just speed bump its own staff regularly.

00:10:36.000 I mean, the number of heads of departments who ended up going under that bus, very low.

00:10:40.000 Kathleen Sebelius at HHS was one of the people who ended up under the bus.

00:10:43.000 Lois Lorner at the IRS ended up under the bus.

00:10:46.000 Lots of people ended up under that bus.

00:10:47.000 Joe Biden, not famous for taking responsibility, famous for stealing other people's verbiage to make speeches, but not particularly famous for taking responsibility.

00:10:56.000 Nonetheless, The push by the Democrats and by the media is going to be that President Trump is too volatile to lead.

00:11:02.000 Now, the reality is, again, that Trump's actions in the pandemic, the actions, have actually been okay.

00:11:07.000 It's the messaging that's been a problem.

00:11:09.000 And here's a perfect example of this.

00:11:10.000 So, Andrew Cuomo has about 77% popularity in New York.

00:11:13.000 He's been horrible.

00:11:14.000 I mean, really horrible. 0.93

00:11:16.000 His leadership has been terrible.

00:11:17.000 He did not shut down the subway system.

00:11:19.000 If you're gonna lock this thing down, you gotta shut down the subway system.

00:11:21.000 He didn't do it.

00:11:22.000 Andrew Cuomo.

00:11:24.000 Did not even bother to shut down the subway system overnight for disinfecting until last week.

00:11:28.000 Andrew Cuomo had a rule in place in New York that if a person in an old age home went and was diagnosed with COVID-19, they had to be let back into the old age home, which is basically a recipe for infecting everybody and killing everybody.

00:11:41.000 Andrew Cuomo didn't lock down the state until late March.

00:11:44.000 Andrew Cuomo spent all of his time on TV whining about how he wasn't getting ventilators, rather than presumably changing the rules so that he could protect more of his citizenry. 0.91

00:11:52.000 Meanwhile, Bill de Blasio in New York, horrible mayor, spent the weekend ripping on the Jews.

00:11:57.000 Meanwhile, people were out at the parks en masse. 0.61

00:12:00.000 But nonetheless, Andrew Cuomo's popularity is at like 77%, including 53% of Republicans.

00:12:05.000 Why?

00:12:05.000 Because Andrew Cuomo understands the image here, which is, I take this seriously.

00:12:09.000 So Andrew Cuomo over the weekend, for example, he went out and he personally disinfected trains.

00:12:13.000 He was out there personally disinfecting the trains.

00:12:16.000 Okay.

00:12:17.000 Wow.

00:12:18.000 What a hero.

00:12:19.000 What a hero. 1.00

00:12:20.000 This sort of kind of political posturing is really dumb. 0.96

00:12:22.000 I remember that Barack Obama used to do this every time there was some sort of natural disaster. 0.98

00:12:26.000 He would jet in and then he would take the helicopter to the natural disaster.

00:12:29.000 There'd be pictures of him looking out over the natural disaster.

00:12:31.000 And this meant that he cared a lot, a lot, a lot.

00:12:33.000 Well, now Andrew Cuomo, who should have shut down the subways originally because the subways were the chief spreading point for the virus.

00:12:39.000 Now he's out there and there are pictures of him disinfecting because he cares so much.

00:12:44.000 He cares, okay, so he understands the game.

00:12:45.000 The game might, listen, this is the thing about Trump. 1.00

00:12:48.000 Trump says the game doesn't exist, the game is dumb. 1.00

00:12:50.000 He is not wrong about this, right? 1.00

00:12:51.000 This is one of the things that people actually, on his side, kind of like about Trump is the fact that he just says the game is stupid and I'm not going to play it. 0.99

00:12:58.000 But the reality is that most people are susceptible to the game. 0.99

00:13:01.000 Cuomo knows this, which is why he's out there doing this sort of thing.

00:13:03.000 It's also why it's damaging for Trump to get volatile with regard to Sort of unifying messages.

00:13:08.000 So George W. Bush put out a message over the weekend that was sort of a unifying message for the country.

00:13:13.000 That's not a bad thing.

00:13:14.000 He's the ex-president of the United States. 0.85

00:13:16.000 And Trump promptly just crapped all over him.

00:13:18.000 Which again, is that a great look in the middle of a time when we need unity?

00:13:22.000 No, it isn't.

00:13:22.000 And that again, is Trump fundamentally misunderstanding what his job is to do right now, politically speaking.

00:13:28.000 He understands his job when it comes to trying to secure the American people.

00:13:31.000 It's actually precisely the reverse of the Obama administration when it came to keeping the American people safe.

00:13:35.000 The Obama administration was not very good at keeping the American people safe, particularly when it came to foreign policy.

00:13:41.000 When it came to pandemics, they never had to face anything like this.

00:13:44.000 Nobody's had to face anything like this for 100 years in the United States.

00:13:46.000 But when it came to foreign policy, the Obama administration was constantly leading from behind, shifting responsibility, not doing the things that were necessary to keep the American people safe, and then posturing about it.

00:13:56.000 Shockingly, it's actually quite bad at the posturing, but the policy is actually quite good.

00:14:00.000 We'll get to that in just one second.

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00:15:23.000 Okay, so Trump misunderstanding sort of the imagistics of all of this.

00:15:28.000 Here's President George W. Bush giving a statement in which he calls for unity, and then you'll see how Trump responded.

00:15:34.000 We cannot allow physical separation to become emotional isolation.

00:15:38.000 We cannot allow physical separation to become emotional isolation.

00:15:39.000 This requires us to be not only compassionate, but creative in our outreach.

00:15:44.000 Let us remember how small our differences are in the face of this shared threat.

00:15:49.000 In the final analysis, we are not partisan combatants.

00:15:53.000 We are human beings, equally vulnerable and equally wonderful in the sight of God.

00:16:01.000 We rise or fall together, and we are determined to rise.

00:16:06.000 Okay, so that is Bush fundamentally understanding the kind of stuff Americans want to hear.

00:16:10.000 And then Trump immediately takes the opportunity to smack Bush.

00:16:13.000 Which is like, how exactly is this useful?

00:16:15.000 He tweeted out Pete Hegseth.

00:16:16.000 Oh, by the way, I appreciate the message from former President Bush, but where was he during impeachment calling for putting partisanship aside?

00:16:22.000 He was nowhere to be found in speaking up against the greatest hoax in American history.

00:16:26.000 Not everything is about you, dude.

00:16:27.000 Not everything is about you.

00:16:28.000 And that kind of narcissism does not serve President Trump well in the middle of a pandemic.

00:16:34.000 It just doesn't.

00:16:34.000 Most Americans don't want to hear that stuff.

00:16:36.000 They don't.

00:16:36.000 Now, again, that is Trump not getting the imagistic part of the job correct.

00:16:41.000 But here's the thing about Trump.

00:16:43.000 He is getting a lot of the substance right.

00:16:45.000 So President Trump has a gut feel that Americans want to get back to work.

00:16:47.000 And he is correct about this.

00:16:48.000 So President Trump, over the weekend, He said, listen, people want to go back.

00:16:52.000 You see it in the protests.

00:16:53.000 More than seeing it in the protests, you see it in the number of cars on the road.

00:16:56.000 Seriously, you want a better gauge for how many people want to go back to work than the protests?

00:17:01.000 All you have to do is drive around the freeways in Los Angeles on a weekday.

00:17:05.000 Traffic is up like 25 to 30 percent.

00:17:07.000 It used to be that you could really just speed through L.A.

00:17:10.000 You'll actually hit traffic jams on occasion during weekdays, and L.A.

00:17:13.000 is still technically shut down.

00:17:14.000 Here's President Trump saying, people do want to go back.

00:17:16.000 He is correct about this.

00:17:17.000 I honestly don't understand how this has become a partisan issue.

00:17:21.000 This should be a data-driven issue.

00:17:23.000 Somehow this has become a partisan issue.

00:17:25.000 I think I have an inkling as to why it has become a partisan issue.

00:17:28.000 And that is because, as I've said before, there's a part of the hard left that sees this crisis as an opportunity and speaks out openly about that.

00:17:36.000 Hillary Clinton said this crisis is an opportunity.

00:17:38.000 And the longer you lock down, the more of a crisis it becomes economically, which requires the government to step in.

00:17:43.000 So for folks on the left, for folks on the right, there are a bunch of countervailing interests that have to be balanced here.

00:17:48.000 One is How do we, what is our exact policy here with regard to saving lives and flattening the curve?

00:17:53.000 Are we aiming for herd immunity or are we not aiming for herd immunity?

00:17:56.000 How do we protect people who are most vulnerable?

00:17:58.000 How do we allow people who want to go back to work to go back to work?

00:18:00.000 Also, how much economic damage can we take before the damage becomes essentially irreparable and you have tens of millions of people who are, for all intents and purposes, on long-term unemployment insurance?

00:18:12.000 For Democrats, those questions just don't exist in the same way because the idea is, well, you know, if we lock down forever, then that's obviously the way that we save the most lives in the immediate term.

00:18:22.000 Sure, more people might commit suicide because they don't have jobs.

00:18:25.000 Sure, more people might lose their life savings.

00:18:27.000 Sure, more people might not have homes.

00:18:29.000 Sure, more people might not be able to sustain their businesses.

00:18:34.000 That's where the government steps in.

00:18:35.000 And so it's a win-win because we wanted the government to step in in the first place.

00:18:37.000 As we'll see, this is an actual agenda item for many Democrats right now, which is why a lot of Republicans are like, okay, so I think that you have a separate agenda here.

00:18:45.000 Your agenda here is not actually about saving the maximum number of lives.

00:18:47.000 Your actual agenda is changing the underlying political dynamics of the situation.

00:18:52.000 When you lose faith in the law, that's when you start to see people disobeying the law.

00:18:57.000 Here's President Trump explaining, people do want to go out and you see it in the protests.

00:19:01.000 I think you can really have it both ways.

00:19:03.000 I think a lot of people want to go back.

00:19:04.000 They just want to go back.

00:19:05.000 You see it every day.

00:19:06.000 You see demonstrations all over the country.

00:19:08.000 And those are meaningful demonstrations.

00:19:10.000 It's big stuff.

00:19:12.000 But you also have some people that are very scared.

00:19:15.000 Probably everybody's scared when you get right down to it.

00:19:17.000 It's a terrible thing.

00:19:18.000 A terrible thing that happened to our country.

00:19:21.000 Okay, what he's saying there is obviously correct.

00:19:23.000 But the question becomes, how scared are people not to go out?

00:19:27.000 People are going out.

00:19:28.000 Okay, the reality is not to protest.

00:19:30.000 The reality is many, many Americans are leaving their homes.

00:19:33.000 Many Americans are leaving their homes.

00:19:34.000 In fact, by data provided to NPR by a mobile phone location data company called SafeGraph, based on locations of about 18 million mobile phones across the country, NPR's analysis determines the percentage of cell phones that did not leave their home location daily in every US county.

00:19:49.000 It has been dropping steadily.

00:19:51.000 Since the middle of April.

00:19:53.000 And it is dropping precipitously now.

00:19:56.000 About 50% of mobile phones that Safegraph had data on stayed home on April 12th, which was Easter.

00:20:00.000 That number hasn't come down since.

00:20:02.000 That number hasn't since come anywhere close, showing a steady decline with the most recent numbers showing that less than 40% stayed home on April 27th.

00:20:10.000 The trend is consistent across the entire country. 0.99

00:20:12.000 It's for all the talk about it's red states and these red state idiots who are going out in danger. 1.00

00:20:16.000 It's true everywhere. 1.00

00:20:17.000 You should have seen the pictures from New York yesterday.

00:20:19.000 Have you seen some of the pictures from New York?

00:20:20.000 I mean, they're insane.

00:20:21.000 The pictures from New York of people who are not even close to social distancing in the middle of lawns in New York City, like blanketed with human beings.

00:20:27.000 By the way, not the Hasidim. 0.85

00:20:29.000 Okay?

00:20:29.000 People who are shirtless, in the sun, in New York City, two feet away from each other.

00:20:35.000 Bill de Blasio may be deeply concerned only about the Hasidim. 0.98

00:20:38.000 It turns out there are tons of people in New York who have not been socially distancing.

00:20:41.000 Bill de Blasio, however, is so concerned about the Hasidim, he actually sent the NYPD to break up study sessions where people were socially distancing and wearing masks, which is always a great look over there. 1.00

00:20:50.000 The bottom line, though, is that metrics are showing that people are getting out of their house a lot more.

00:20:56.000 A lot more.

00:20:57.000 If you take a look, for example, at Arlington, Virginia.

00:21:00.000 On April 20th, nearly half of cell phones Safegraph provided data for were staying at home.

00:21:04.000 Over the next couple days, the number declined to one-third, as low as it was during the middle of March.

00:21:09.000 Okay, so people are beginning to say, you know what?

00:21:12.000 We're basically done with this.

00:21:14.000 We're basically done.

00:21:14.000 And as time increases, and as the number of headlines coming out of New York decreases, you are going to see an increasing push to open things back up.

00:21:22.000 And open things up in pretty serious ways.

00:21:25.000 President Trump understands this.

00:21:27.000 He understands this at an innate level.

00:21:29.000 And frankly, he should understand this, because this is not sustainable.

00:21:33.000 Folks on the left may want it to be sustainable, as we'll see in a second, but it is, in fact, not sustainable.

00:21:37.000 So the question becomes, what exactly are we aiming for?

00:21:40.000 What exactly is the goal here?

00:21:42.000 So, you have Deborah Birx suggesting that protesting without social distancing is worrisome, because you're going to get a broader spread, and that we have to keep being vigilant.

00:21:48.000 And she's right about this, depending on what we're aiming for.

00:21:50.000 Here's Dr. Deborah Birx.

00:21:53.000 It's devastatingly worrisome to me personally because if they go home and infect their grandmother or their grandfather who has a comorbid condition and they have a serious or an unfortunate outcome, they will feel guilty for the rest of our lives.

00:22:09.000 So we need to protect each other at the same time we're voicing our discontent.

00:22:14.000 Okay, so again, she's not wrong about this, but the question becomes, and I've said this now several times, what exactly are we aiming for?

00:22:20.000 So, here's the debate.

00:22:22.000 The debate is between Dr. Scott Atlas, who is a professor over at Hoover Institute at Stanford University, and between a historian who has written a book about This pandemic.

00:22:34.000 The historian's name is John Barry, and I will give you the debate in one second because this is the next stage of the debate that people don't want to talk about but we're going to have to talk about.

00:22:43.000 So we're going to get to that in just one moment.

00:22:45.000 First, let us talk about a great, great gift you can get for your parents for Mother's Day.

00:22:49.000 I'm talking about maybe the most important thing you can get them, preservation of their memories.

00:22:53.000 So out in their garage right now, Are a bunch of old film reels that are just rotting away.

00:22:58.000 A bunch of old VHS tapes.

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00:24:09.000 Okay, so what exactly are we aiming for is the big question.

00:24:12.000 John Barry is the author of a book called The Great Influence of the Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History.

00:24:17.000 And he wrote a piece called Will Warm Weather Slow Coronavirus from the New York Times.

00:24:21.000 And the answer is maybe, but we actually don't know because the fact is that so much of the population has not actually been exposed to coronavirus.

00:24:27.000 He says, modelers estimate that the true number of infected persons is up to 20 times the reported number, which still leaves about 95% of the population susceptible.

00:24:35.000 If, as in 1918, susceptibility proves more important than seasonal influences, hot weather will not give as much relief as hoped for.

00:24:43.000 By the same token, that would mean the expected seasonal surge when colder weather arrives might not be as large as feared.

00:24:47.000 In other words, more people will get it now, and less people will be We'll be available to get it later, basically, because many people have had it.

00:24:54.000 Also, COVID-19 mutates much more slowly than influenza, and its key spike protein, the part of the virus that attaches to cells, seems particularly stable.

00:25:01.000 Amid all of the bad news that this virus has brought, this characteristic of the virus is a silver lining in several ways.

00:25:06.000 This reduces almost to zero the chance it will become more virulent.

00:25:09.000 That's what happened in 1918.

00:25:12.000 Also, mutation will probably not account for a new wave soon.

00:25:16.000 Also, it is possible a vaccine will most likely protect reasonably well against COVID-19.

00:25:21.000 Third, the incubation period on average nearly six days is roughly triple the average incubation period of influenza.

00:25:27.000 The disease itself takes much longer for people to recover from and stop shedding virus from.

00:25:31.000 Therefore, even without social distancing, it would take months for the outbreak to pass through a community as opposed to six to ten weeks for influenza.

00:25:38.000 With social distancing necessary to reduce deaths by keeping hospitals from being overwhelmed, it will take even longer.

00:25:43.000 Additionally, the incubation period allows an asymptomatic person more opportunity to spread the disease. 0.96

00:25:48.000 Now, I'm not sure about the stats there.

00:25:50.000 The reason I'm not sure about the stats is because if the incubation period is longer and if the disease vector is longer and you're shedding more of the virus and it's more infectious, you're going to be able to spread the disease.

00:25:58.000 Yes, it takes longer from beginning to end for each person to get it and then clear of it.

00:26:02.000 But also, you're infecting three times as many people.

00:26:05.000 So I'm not sure that actually is much slower than the flu, statistically speaking.

00:26:10.000 But this guy is fairly sanguine.

00:26:12.000 He says the country will then have more time to expand testing and contact tracing, isolating, and quarantine contact.

00:26:18.000 He says, we can't wait for herd immunity to develop from natural infection.

00:26:21.000 That would take many months and be accompanied by an unacceptable death toll, nor can we wait a year or more for the vaccine.

00:26:27.000 Instead, we're talking about a phased-in approach.

00:26:29.000 Okay, so everybody at this point is talking about a phased-in approach, right?

00:26:33.000 I'm old enough to remember when that was irresponsible, where you got ripped up and down for suggesting a phased-in approach where healthy people go back to work first, followed by people who are more vulnerable, that we continue to wear masks and socially distancing.

00:26:43.000 Some people have been pushing that for literally a month and a half.

00:26:46.000 Among those people like me.

00:26:47.000 But beyond that, the question becomes really this one specific sub-question, which is, should we wear masks and should we social distance?

00:26:55.000 I know this is now a heretical question, and I've been calling for wearing masks and socially distancing because, again, I would prefer that if we're waiting for a therapeutic or we are waiting for a vaccine and we have not actually taken the measures necessary to protect people who are older and vulnerable, that We should all do our best to prevent the spread of the infection to people who are older and and who are more vulnerable.

00:27:16.000 And this is particularly true if you live with somebody, right?

00:27:18.000 The reason that I am broadcasting from home and not going into the office is not because I fear for me or fear for my wife or fear for my kids.

00:27:23.000 We are all, thank God, young and healthy.

00:27:25.000 It's more because I fear for my parents who are in their mid-60s.

00:27:28.000 But the question becomes, okay, on a societal level, what should we do if nothing changes over time?

00:27:33.000 So Scott Atlas from Hoover Institute has a piece over at The Hill called How to Reopen Society Using Medical Science and Logic.

00:27:39.000 And here is what he suggests.

00:27:41.000 He says, first, policymakers must apply logic and critical thinking to the massive amount of evidence we have acquired and combine that with decades of established medical science.

00:27:48.000 Second, we must demonstrate and fully convey the logic underlying the plan to reassure a public that has become almost paralyzed With panic and fear.

00:27:57.000 So he says, important to note that most of the people who are dying are people over 70.

00:28:01.000 91% in Michigan's Oakland County were people over 60, similar to what was noted in New York.

00:28:07.000 Younger, healthier people have virtually zero risk of death, little risk of serious disease.

00:28:10.000 Under 1% of New York City's hospitalizations were people under 18 years of age.

00:28:14.000 Less than 1% of deaths at any age are in the absence of underlying conditions.

00:28:19.000 That is not him suggesting that human lives are not more valuable at one age than another or anything like that.

00:28:25.000 That is him suggesting, instead, that we have to tranche populations and figure out whom to protect and how we actually tranche back in populations, just like every other person with a functioning brain has been suggesting.

00:28:35.000 So here's what he suggests.

00:28:36.000 He says, let's finally focus protection on the most vulnerable nursing home patients already living under controlled access.

00:28:42.000 This suit includes strictly regulating all who enter and care for nursing home members by requiring testing and protective masks for all who interact with these highly vulnerable people.

00:28:50.000 We should continue to inform the public about what they have already successfully learned regarding the at-risk group.

00:28:55.000 This means issuing rational guidelines, advising the highest standards of hygiene and appropriate social distancing, while interacting with elderly friends and family members at risk, including those with diabetes, obesity, and other chronic conditions.

00:29:06.000 Second, those with mild symptoms of the illness should strictly self-isolate for two weeks.

00:29:10.000 It's not urgent to test them, simply assume they have the infection.

00:29:12.000 That includes confinement at home, having the highest concern for sanitation, and wearing protective masks when others in their home enter the same room.

00:29:18.000 Third, open all the schools.

00:29:20.000 Children have no risk of serious illness from COVID-19.

00:29:22.000 Exceptions exist, but again, standards for consciously protecting elderly and other at-risk family members or friends would still be employed.

00:29:29.000 Now here is where we get the controversial section of what Atlas is saying buried.

00:29:33.000 He says, fourth, open businesses, including restaurants and offices, but require new standards for hygiene, disinfection and sanitization via enforceable, more stringent regulations than in the past.

00:29:33.000 Here's what he says.

00:29:45.000 It is reasonable to post warnings for customers who are older or in other ways vulnerable.

00:29:48.000 Avoid unnecessary requirements for spacing of customers, though.

00:29:53.000 It is not logical that otherwise healthy adults, especially younger age groups, should be isolated or maintain a six-foot spacing from each other.

00:30:00.000 If infection is still prevalent, socializing among these low-risk groups represents the opportunity for developing widespread immunity and eradicating the threat.

00:30:07.000 Public transportation should resume.

00:30:09.000 Regional authorities could require barrier masks for passengers.

00:30:12.000 Parks and beaches should open.

00:30:14.000 There's no scientific reason to insist that people remain indoors.

00:30:18.000 Finally, implement prioritized testing for three groups, nursing home workers, healthcare workers, and first responders and patients in hospitals.

00:30:25.000 Widespread testing is not a predicate for reopening.

00:30:27.000 Contact tracing is not valuable after a disease is already widespread, even though it would be an important part of the overall preparation for future potential outbreaks.

00:30:34.000 Okay, so, Atlas is actually kind of saying we should be aiming for herd immunity, and this is what Sweden has done.

00:30:40.000 Sweden has basically suggested we are going to allow you, if you're young and healthy, to go out and socialize with others.

00:30:46.000 They'd recommended social distancing, but you can see from the pictures that people are not, in fact, social distancing nearly as much.

00:30:52.000 People are advised to keep apart and work from home if possible, to stay inside if aged over 70, and to avoid unnecessary travel.

00:30:58.000 But people have basically been going around and doing what they want.

00:31:02.000 And as time goes on, people are not going to want to wear masks.

00:31:04.000 People are not going to want to socially distance from each other forever.

00:31:08.000 People are just not built for any of this.

00:31:10.000 So, are we aiming for herd immunity or are we not?

00:31:12.000 And that really requires More data on whether there's a therapeutic that is in the works and we need to wait for three weeks, or we need to wait for two months, or we're waiting until the end of the year.

00:31:23.000 That is the big question.

00:31:23.000 Right?

00:31:24.000 And so the balanced approach that I have sort of been recommending is that we get back to work, if you're young and healthy particularly, that you do wear the mask, that we do aim to slow the spread of the disease.

00:31:34.000 We don't aim for herd immunity specifically.

00:31:36.000 We aim to buy time until there is a vaccine.

00:31:38.000 But that is based on people continually saying that we might be able to ramp this thing up by September or ramp this thing up by the end of the year.

00:31:44.000 If we're talking 12 to 18 months, if we're talking two years, as some people suggest, then the notion that we are going to be able to hold down the spread for two years is just bizarre.

00:31:52.000 It's not going to happen.

00:31:53.000 At that point, you really should just basically tell everybody who's most vulnerable, you need to stay home.

00:31:59.000 You need to isolate them.

00:32:00.000 You need to keep them protected.

00:32:01.000 And then you need to tell people who are young that they need to go out and achieve herd Seriously, if you're talking two, three years, five years as some people have been suggesting, then that essentially is the only option.

00:32:12.000 We can pretend there are other options, but there are not tons of other options.

00:32:16.000 Now it is also possible that this thing Starts to wane a little bit as time goes on.

00:32:21.000 We just don't know because nobody is that far ahead of us to be able to determine this.

00:32:25.000 And we have seen some spikes in places that are a little bit ahead of us, places like China.

00:32:29.000 Suffice it to say that a lot of the measures that have been assumed to have been slowing this thing down, however, have actually been overkill.

00:32:37.000 And this is where we get into the question as to why people should obey laws that are clearly not designed to actually prevent the spread of the disease.

00:32:44.000 I mean, yesterday, for example, in my neighborhood, there were helicopters flying around and firing their sirens off at people who are not socially distancing.

00:32:52.000 Outside.

00:32:54.000 Let's be frank about this.

00:32:55.000 The number of people who are going to get infected outside is way lower than the number of people who are going to be infected inside. 0.86

00:33:01.000 Also, the notion that California is doing this right is ridiculous.

00:33:05.000 There was a video that was going around of Huntington Beach.

00:33:09.000 And you can actually see the helicopters going around and yelling at people on Huntington Beach to socially distance.

00:33:15.000 Well, there were no people on Huntington Beach.

00:33:18.000 Huntington Beach was empty by state order yesterday.

00:33:20.000 Do we have that video?

00:33:21.000 Yeah, you can see.

00:33:22.000 Look, there's this helicopter flying around.

00:33:26.000 And if you can hear the sound, they're actually announcing to people over loudspeakers that we want you to socially distance.

00:33:33.000 Now look at the beach.

00:33:35.000 There's no one on it.

00:33:37.000 There's no one on it, so we are wasting taxpayer dollars to send a helicopter to tell an empty beach that people need to socially distance.

00:33:43.000 There are no human beings there.

00:33:45.000 None.

00:33:46.000 None.

00:33:47.000 Zero.

00:33:47.000 Zip zilch.

00:33:48.000 No humans.

00:33:49.000 None. 1.00

00:33:49.000 This is idiotic. 1.00

00:33:52.000 Meanwhile, the NYPD is announcing that they are going to start enforcing the ban, that they are past the point of warnings when it comes to social distancing. 1.00

00:34:00.000 I understand that. 0.99

00:34:00.000 I'm just wondering why you idiots didn't shut down the subway system weeks ago if you actually want to prevent the spread. 0.99

00:34:05.000 We're going to get to more of this in just one second. 1.00

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00:34:13.000 That means that when you lie down on a mattress, the last thing you want to be thinking about is the fact that you've got a creaky old mattress, that crappy old box spring that you've been sleeping on for years.

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00:35:15.000 Alrighty, we're gonna get to more of this in just one second.

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00:36:30.000 So basically the big question that I'm asking here is the question of how long we can continue to avoid most of the activities of regular life without supreme data that that's It is one thing to say that we don't want people willy-nilly infecting each other.

00:36:53.000 And again, even that question is now on the table because seriously, we have to wonder if nothing changes over the next couple of years and if we are aiming for herd immunity over time, is that better than aiming for herd immunity as quickly as possible like Sweden was doing?

00:37:05.000 Right.

00:37:05.000 Sweden was was slowing the spread somewhat, but not too much since they now have Stockholm like 40 percent penetration rate of this of this disease.

00:37:13.000 So the question becomes, OK, do you want the spike to happen now or would you like the spike to happen later?

00:37:17.000 And that's what people are beginning to realize.

00:37:19.000 But if the choices between that or responsibly social distancing or complete lockdowns, then complete lockdowns really should not be on the table.

00:37:28.000 These complete lockdowns are not useful.

00:37:30.000 The complete lockdowns do not have an endpoint.

00:37:33.000 They do not have a logical endpoint.

00:37:34.000 Because again, nobody has yet really suggested the vaccine is going to be available tomorrow or a therapeutic will be available tomorrow that allows us to all go back to our lives.

00:37:42.000 So you're starting to see mayors, hypocritical mayors actually, going out and saying, we're going to arrest you if you don't socially distance.

00:37:49.000 Now, I get it. 0.96

00:37:51.000 I do.

00:37:51.000 I get arresting people.

00:37:53.000 Lori Lightfoot also was disobeying her own orders in Chicago to go get haircuts in the middle of the pandemic, and then proclaiming that as mayor, it's very important to get a haircut. 1.00

00:38:01.000 Here is Lori Lightfoot suggesting that people would be arrested in Chicago.

00:38:04.000 We will shut you down.

00:38:06.000 We will cite you.

00:38:07.000 And if we need to, we will arrest you and we will take you to jail.

00:38:13.000 Period.

00:38:14.000 There should be nothing unambiguous about that.

00:38:17.000 Don't make us treat you like a criminal.

00:38:20.000 But if you act like a criminal and you violate the law and you refuse to do what is necessary to save lives in the city in the middle of a pandemic, we will take you to jail.

00:38:32.000 Period.

00:38:34.000 Okay, now all of that is well and good, unless what you're talking about is people just going to a park.

00:38:39.000 If what you're talking about is, like, really, if you're talking about one of those big social gatherings with a thousand people infecting each other in downtown Chicago or something in the south side of Chicago, which is what we were seeing a couple of weeks ago, fair enough.

00:38:49.000 I don't even have a problem with Bill de Blasio arresting people in mass gatherings, although it's weird that he would single out just the Jews in his tweets.

00:38:55.000 A lot of people were doing that sort of stuff.

00:38:57.000 The idea that the NYPD is going to come break it up or that Lori Lightfoot is going to come break it up, that's fine.

00:39:02.000 But that changes.

00:39:03.000 That math changes.

00:39:05.000 When you start looking at ridiculous shutdown orders of public places like beaches or parks, that's what we've seen in California.

00:39:12.000 Instead, how about this?

00:39:13.000 How about we actually engage in data-driven methods that are meant to reopen to the extent that people can actually live with it, at least for a certain amount of time?

00:39:23.000 Ron DeSantis over in Florida, for example.

00:39:24.000 He's been ripped up and down.

00:39:26.000 Because Ron DeSantis didn't shut down Florida fast enough.

00:39:26.000 Why?

00:39:28.000 There's only one problem.

00:39:29.000 The results in Florida are not bad.

00:39:31.000 Florida's doing about the same as California.

00:39:33.000 You know what Ron DeSantis didn't do?

00:39:34.000 He didn't shut down the entire city.

00:39:36.000 I mean, the entire state.

00:39:37.000 He didn't.

00:39:38.000 He said big cities are going to have to shut down mostly.

00:39:41.000 Smaller places, not so much.

00:39:42.000 There was Governor DeSantis who was ripped.

00:39:44.000 You remember, the media coverage endlessly was about how evil Ron DeSantis was for not preemptively shutting the state.

00:39:49.000 The beaches are full.

00:39:50.000 Spring break.

00:39:50.000 Oh my God, people are going to die.

00:39:52.000 They were all young.

00:39:53.000 None of those people were gonna die.

00:39:55.000 Or at least very few of those people were gonna die.

00:39:57.000 And Ron DeSantis, his state is basically fine.

00:40:00.000 Here was Ron DeSantis yesterday explaining his approach to this thing.

00:40:04.000 The only thing we have to fear is letting fear overwhelm our sense of purpose and determination.

00:40:11.000 We need to focus on facts and not fear.

00:40:14.000 And I think that there's been a lot that's been done to try to promote fear.

00:40:19.000 We were told over and over again Florida was going to be just like New York when it came to the coronavirus.

00:40:26.000 Well, let's look at the tail of the tape.

00:40:29.000 How close were we to New York?

00:40:31.000 Fatalities.

00:40:32.000 Obviously a much different picture.

00:40:35.000 Okay, and he is correct about that, obviously.

00:40:37.000 DeSantis also explained that he is going to set up mobile RV labs so that they are going to be able to check out old age homes, which of course is sort of what Scott Atlas is suggesting, right?

00:40:48.000 That what we have to do is mainly focus on protecting the most vulnerable populations.

00:40:52.000 Here is DeSantis.

00:40:53.000 Again, why DeSantis became the criminal here is pretty incredible.

00:40:57.000 DeSantis became the criminal because he's a Republican, in the view of the media.

00:41:02.000 But guess what?

00:41:02.000 His state is fine.

00:41:04.000 Here's DeSantis.

00:41:06.000 I'm going to be unveiling a mobile RV lab that we can drive across Florida.

00:41:11.000 The results are going to come back in 45 minutes.

00:41:13.000 So we're going to go to nursing homes.

00:41:15.000 It's going to be our number one thing.

00:41:17.000 Test the staff.

00:41:18.000 Test the residents.

00:41:19.000 And eventually, Maria, once we get enough rapid tests, I'd like to be able to test the family members and let them go visit their loved ones.

00:41:26.000 These people haven't had visitors for close to two months.

00:41:29.000 That's not an easy thing.

00:41:30.000 Obviously, we've got to err on the side of safety.

00:41:32.000 But if a son or daughter can get a test, So what exactly did DeSantis do?

00:41:41.000 The Wall Street Journal has a piece today called Smart or Lucky?

00:41:43.000 How Florida Dodged the Worst of Coronavirus.

00:41:46.000 When the coronavirus pandemic swept toward Florida, public health professionals nationally warned of a potentially devastating wave of infections that could imperil the state's large senior population.

00:41:55.000 But so far, the state seems to have dodged that fate, despite not following advice to impose measures such as an early blanket lockdown to minimize spread.

00:42:02.000 So what exactly happened?

00:42:04.000 DeSantis restricted visitation to nursing homes, but he left early lockdown decisions to local authorities.

00:42:08.000 Mayors in some hard-hit large communities shut down faster and more aggressively than the state, gaining valuable time.

00:42:13.000 While Disney World closed two weeks before the statewide order, spring breakers went back home.

00:42:17.000 Some scientists point to Florida's low population density, others to its subtropical climate to explain fewer infections.

00:42:23.000 Though the governor did not impose a statewide stay-at-home order until April 3rd, people began hunkering down en masse in mid-March, according to firms that analyze anonymous cell phone data.

00:42:30.000 That was around the same time deaths in the U.S.

00:42:32.000 topped 100 and residents of New York started staying home.

00:42:36.000 The state needs to double its current volume of testing to more than 32,000 tests a day to detect and respond to flare-ups, says Charles Lockwood, the Dean of University of South Florida Morsani College of Medicine.

00:42:45.000 That will take about a month.

00:42:46.000 As of Saturday, Florida had more than 35,000 cases of COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus.

00:42:52.000 In late March, a model developed by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at UW was predicting nearly 7,000 deaths in the state by August.

00:42:59.000 A figure the modeler said could shift depending on adherence to social modeling.

00:43:03.000 Florida has six deaths per 100,000 people as compared to 42 in Louisiana, 56 in Massachusetts, 97 in New York.

00:43:09.000 California had five deaths per 100,000 people.

00:43:11.000 Texas had three.

00:43:13.000 So maybe it turns out that local leaders have the best view of this stuff.

00:43:18.000 That local leaders actually did what they were supposed to do in their local communities.

00:43:21.000 That individual human beings are risk averse and smart enough to recognize that they're going to have to avoid risk. 0.94

00:43:27.000 The notion that DeSantis did something totally wrong by allowing local officials to have their way is just ridiculous. 0.56

00:43:32.000 He is not wrong about this.

00:43:33.000 In fact, it was a better data-driven program than a lot of what was happening statewide.

00:43:37.000 Like New York State?

00:43:38.000 Upstate New York should not have shut down.

00:43:39.000 New York City should have shut down.

00:43:42.000 California?

00:43:43.000 You think Central California should have shut down?

00:43:44.000 There's nobody in Central California.

00:43:48.000 L.A.

00:43:48.000 is very spread out.

00:43:49.000 L.A.

00:43:50.000 shouldn't have completely shut down.

00:43:51.000 We should have socially distanced.

00:43:52.000 And maybe in downtown L.A., but even there, the population density isn't that high.

00:43:56.000 In San Francisco, you do a shutdown, and then you let people back out again.

00:44:00.000 New York City is not like other places.

00:44:02.000 New Orleans is not like other places.

00:44:03.000 Detroit is not like other places. 1.00

00:44:05.000 And treating all those places like places within the state is idiotic. 1.00

00:44:08.000 Treating Philadelphia like the suburban and rural areas outside of Philadelphia is ridiculous. 0.99

00:44:13.000 That's not data-driven.

00:44:15.000 You want to know why DeSantis didn't get crushed?

00:44:17.000 DeSantis didn't get crushed because people basically did the responsible thing.

00:44:19.000 You want to know why New York got crushed?

00:44:21.000 Because New York is New York.

00:44:23.000 That's why New York got crushed.

00:44:24.000 Yes, there was some mishandling.

00:44:25.000 I pointed out the mishandling.

00:44:27.000 But in the end, we are drawing closer and closer to the reality of the situation, which is going to be that if nothing happens in the near future, what all we can do, all we can do is protect the most vulnerable people in our population and then let everybody else go back to work.

00:44:40.000 And we have to determine what percentage of those people are actually vulnerable and what percentage are not.

00:44:45.000 One of the things we've heard is the question.

00:44:47.000 It's a serious question.

00:44:48.000 What percentage of Americans are actually vulnerable?

00:44:50.000 Like seriously vulnerable.

00:44:52.000 If you go by population, I'm gonna look it up right now.

00:44:55.000 The population statistics in the United States of US by age.

00:44:59.000 The population of the United States by age.

00:45:02.000 There are about 15 to 19.

00:45:06.000 There are about, let's see.

00:45:12.000 The population of the United States, there are about 20 million people who are under the age of five.

00:45:18.000 We really start to balloon out at age 55 plus.

00:45:22.000 Total, you're talking about a, let's see, 20 million there.

00:45:25.000 You're talking somewhere in the neighborhood of 45 to 50 million people who are above the age of 60 in the United States.

00:45:31.000 And then you have to figure out how many of the remaining population are people who have preexisting conditions like obesity or diabetes.

00:45:38.000 But once you figure that out, then you have to determine who's healthy.

00:45:42.000 And if that healthy, let's say that healthy population, let's say the healthy population of the United States is somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 to 60%.

00:45:49.000 Okay, well, if all those people get infected and none of those people die, which is basically what COVID-19 is doing, if you're young and healthy, you're not dying from this thing.

00:45:57.000 Then you have to start thinking about how close are we actually to herd immunity?

00:46:00.000 What are the possibilities for herd immunity?

00:46:05.000 I know these have been verboten words.

00:46:06.000 We're not supposed to say herd immunity anymore.

00:46:09.000 But what do you think a vaccine is?

00:46:10.000 So either a vaccine is going to do it, or your natural immunity is going to do it.

00:46:14.000 And the question is, is one of those things possible, and is one of those things not possible?

00:46:19.000 Meanwhile, one of the reasons why people are a little doubtful about these statewide lockdown orders is it seems like there's a wild coincidence in which all of the places that are locking down most harshly are also eager to push world-changing social policies.

00:46:34.000 We'll get to that in just a minute.

00:46:36.000 First, it's time for things I like and some things that I hate.

00:46:38.000 So, things that I like.

00:46:39.000 Over the weekend, I read another Robert Harris novel.

00:46:41.000 This guy's great.

00:46:42.000 He wrote a novel called An Officer and a Spy.

00:46:44.000 It is about the Dreyfus Affair.

00:46:45.000 For folks who don't know the Dreyfus Affair, the Dreyfus Affair was a situation in which A French high-ranking officer named Alfred Dreyfus, back in the late 19th century, was accused of spying on behalf of the Germans.

00:46:57.000 It turns out that the evidence had been completely, not only wrong, but the evidence had been actually made up by high-ranking intelligence officials in order to convict the guy?

00:47:07.000 This book is a very well-grounded historical novel about the detective who figured that out and then basically revealed that evidence to the public.

00:47:14.000 Dreyfus had been put on Devil's Island for four years.

00:47:16.000 He spent four years on Devil's Island by himself alone, pegged as a traitor.

00:47:21.000 It turns out it was another officer in the army because Dreyfus was Jewish.

00:47:24.000 There was a lot of momentum for keeping him there, and people basically were willing to blame the Jews.

00:47:28.000 I mean, the Dreyfus affair was largely responsible for the rise of the Zionist movement in Europe, because France, which was considered one of the most cultured countries in Europe, had masses of people out in the streets shouting death to the Jews.

00:47:39.000 Because of Dreyfus, it led Theodor Herzl, who was at that point a fairly secular Jew, to say to himself, hold up a second, I think the Jews might need their own country here, because every time, like, this guy was a loyal army officer, And he was humiliated in front of the entire French National Army.

00:47:54.000 And then he was sent to Devil's Island, and then people were chanting death to the Jews, even as it became obvious that the government had not only covered up his innocence, but had actually manufactured the evidence in the first place.

00:48:06.000 It's an amazing story, and it's really well told by Robert Harris.

00:48:08.000 I mentioned that they've made a movie out of this.

00:48:10.000 Roman Polanski made a movie out of this.

00:48:11.000 Apparently the movie's really good, but we'll never get to see it because Roman Polanski's a bad, bad man.

00:48:15.000 He is, in fact, a bad man.

00:48:16.000 He's been convicted of child rape in the United States.

00:48:19.000 But I'm just wondering why it is that the people in Hollywood were cheering him when he won an Oscar for The Pianist, but now we can't see this movie because he's been declared newly bad, or what?

00:48:29.000 In any case, my general feeling about art and artists, as I mentioned last week, is that if you're a crappy person as an artist, that doesn't mean we shouldn't be able to see your art.

00:48:36.000 Alrighty, time for a bevy, a cornucopia, a veritable panoply of things I hate. 0.53

00:48:41.000 Let's do it.

00:48:46.000 Alrighty, so, as I mentioned, one of the reasons that there is increasing skepticism about the full lockdown orders is because of the dishonesty of the media and because of the political agenda of some of the people pushing this thing.

00:48:55.000 It seems like there are people who are rooting hard against Sweden, rooting hard against places that are opening up, that they want those places to fail.

00:49:00.000 You just get this underlying sense from people in the media.

00:49:02.000 They would love to see Georgia fall on its face.

00:49:04.000 They would love to see Florida fall on its face. 0.97

00:49:06.000 They want to see Texas fall on its face.

00:49:08.000 And not because they want to see more dead people, but because they want to see Republican governors humiliated for not taking coronavirus seriously enough.

00:49:15.000 What they should be doing is rooting that this thing is not as deadly as we have been told.

00:49:18.000 This thing is well under 1%.

00:49:19.000 They should be rooting that it doesn't pass as easily or that the summer kills it off or that we can get back to regular life.

00:49:24.000 I mean, I wouldn't care who's president.

00:49:26.000 I'm rooting to go back to regular life.

00:49:27.000 But you do get the feeling that there are some people who are a little bit too sanguine about exactly how these lockdowns are going.

00:49:34.000 And they're looking for an excuse in order to keep the lockdowns going, in order so that they can promulgate policies that they wanted in the first place.

00:49:41.000 And that is how this becomes a political issue.

00:49:44.000 If we're all doing data-driven analyses, then, as I say, you want to know what's so fascinating about all of this?

00:49:51.000 Look at the purple states.

00:49:53.000 Don't look at the red states.

00:49:54.000 Don't look at the blue states.

00:49:55.000 Look at the purple states.

00:49:56.000 The purple states are the ones that are fascinating.

00:49:58.000 Abbott is going to be, in Texas, more freedom-oriented.

00:50:01.000 DeSantis, in Florida, is going to be more freedom-oriented.

00:50:04.000 Newsome in California, very blue state.

00:50:06.000 He's going to be significantly non-freedom oriented.

00:50:08.000 In New York, Cuomo is going to be significantly non-freedom oriented.

00:50:11.000 Then, look to some of the purple states.

00:50:13.000 Colorado is a purple state.

00:50:15.000 What's happening in Colorado?

00:50:16.000 Starting to open up.

00:50:17.000 Montana is a red state with a blue governor, right?

00:50:20.000 Bullock is the governor of Montana.

00:50:22.000 He just ran for president, if you recall that five minutes.

00:50:25.000 Bullock has kept the state open throughout.

00:50:27.000 Maine is a purple state.

00:50:29.000 Maine is reopening.

00:50:31.000 Minnesota is a purple state.

00:50:32.000 Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, is a Democrat.

00:50:34.000 He's reopening.

00:50:36.000 Interesting how the purple states are starting to reopen.

00:50:39.000 It's one of the reasons why sort of the hot spots of these debates are happening in purple states.

00:50:43.000 Happening in Wisconsin.

00:50:44.000 Happening in Michigan.

00:50:45.000 Happening in Pennsylvania.

00:50:47.000 Because this is where the rubber hits the road.

00:50:50.000 Governors who are in those purple states are under pressure, and the reason they're under pressure is because there are a lot of people saying, we don't want to see a fundamental change in our society come about as a result of COVID-19.

00:51:00.000 Meanwhile, in California, which is totally blue, people are like, well now, lockdowns, maybe we can do something magical with that.

00:51:07.000 Tim Arango and Thomas Fuller writing for the New York Times.

00:51:09.000 After the virus, California liberals say returning to normal won't be enough.

00:51:13.000 Oh, who couldn't see this one coming?

00:51:16.000 That's right, every crisis an opportunity.

00:51:19.000 Dateline Los Angeles.

00:51:20.000 Housing for the homeless.

00:51:21.000 Criminal justice reform.

00:51:22.000 Addressing the digital divide for school children in rural areas.

00:51:26.000 Propelled by the urgency of the coronavirus crisis and despite severe economic headwinds, liberal Californians see this moment as an opening to push through an agenda that addresses some of the state's most intractable and long-debated problems.

00:51:36.000 Okay, can I be real about the housing for the homeless issue?

00:51:40.000 Drive around LA the only people you'll see on the streets are the homeless.

00:51:43.000 Okay, literally every underpass still has homeless people living under it, in close coordination.

00:51:48.000 And the only reason that they are not there is because they are being physically rousted by the police, because the police are finally being allowed to do what they should have been allowed to do all along, which is rouse people who are living in public areas.

00:51:57.000 So the pitch by the media is that the reason that the homeless are off the streets is because of the housing made available for the homeless.

00:52:03.000 That is not why the homeless are off the streets.

00:52:04.000 The reason the homeless are off the streets is because the police are telling them that if they do not get off the streets, they will be physically put into places like these hotels.

00:52:12.000 Anyway.

00:52:13.000 Thousands of people have been let out of the state's jails and prisons.

00:52:16.000 Cash bail has been eliminated for most crimes.

00:52:18.000 Thousands of homeless people now have roofs over their heads.

00:52:20.000 They're being threatened.

00:52:21.000 And children in rural and poor areas of the state are being sent tens of thousands of laptop computers for distance learning.

00:52:26.000 Temporary measures to confront the pandemic that leaders are hoping will become durable solutions to long-standing problems of inequity.

00:52:33.000 Oh, there it is.

00:52:34.000 We're going to use this crisis.

00:52:35.000 Can I point something out?

00:52:37.000 The laptop's being sent to these rural communities.

00:52:40.000 I'm homeschooling my kids.

00:52:42.000 If parents aren't doing responsible schooling in the presence of schools, what makes you think that when you homeschool the kids, the parents are sitting there every minute of every day making sure the kids are learning?

00:52:51.000 Really, is there any evidence that sending kids home from schools has somehow rectified educational inequity if you send them a laptop?

00:52:58.000 I've seen no evidence that if you send a kid home with an iPad, and the real problem in education is the kid's home environment, that the iPad has magically changed things.

00:53:06.000 Meanwhile, many in the country talk about returning to normal, but a common refrain is emerging among California's powerful political left wing and many liberal leaders across America.

00:53:14.000 Normal wasn't working.

00:53:15.000 Well, weird, because you guys have been running the state my entire lifetime.

00:53:19.000 Whether you're talking about homelessness, whether you're talking about criminal justice system and incarceration, we're doing things today that should have been done a long time ago, said George Gascon, a former San Francisco district attorney, now running for the same office in LA.

00:53:30.000 He's been at the vanguard of a national movement of prosecutors looking to reduce mass incarceration.

00:53:34.000 So we're going to let all the criminals out of prison.

00:53:36.000 We are going to round up the homeless and put them in hotels. 0.99

00:53:40.000 And we are going to send kids laptops.

00:53:43.000 And this is California shifting its positions in the middle of the crisis.

00:53:48.000 Yet, buried in paragraph 8, grand ambitions are also coming up against stark realities.

00:53:52.000 Though California is deeply blue, with Democrats holding all the top offices and a supermajority in the legislature, the state has failed for decades to tackle some of the biggest issues surrounding inequality.

00:54:02.000 I like how that sentence is phrased.

00:54:03.000 Though California is deeply blue.

00:54:05.000 No, because California is deeply blue, the state has failed for decades to tackle some of the biggest issues surrounding inequality. 1.00

00:54:11.000 Because it's deeply blue, because these leftist policies are failures, because taxing people and then spending lots of money does not actually rectify inequality, you morons. 0.99

00:54:21.000 By one measure, California has the nation's highest poverty rate. 0.98

00:54:23.000 Some Californians, whether the will to enact significant change will endure past the initial stage of coronavirus crisis.

00:54:29.000 I love that a state that's been permanently blue basically my entire adult lifetime is now saying, will we have the will to change this thing afterward?

00:54:36.000 But you want to know why?

00:54:37.000 I have some serious doubts about why exactly Gavin Newsom is going so overboard shutting down Huntington Beach and sending helicopters to yell at sand.

00:54:45.000 It's because of articles like this one.

00:54:48.000 Newsom says, it's the spirit of our times.

00:54:51.000 What often takes a year, now we need to do in months.

00:54:55.000 In Los Angeles, Eric Garcetti has proposed using the crisis as a catalyst to achieve free higher education and mitigate inequality.

00:55:01.000 He says, the shock to our economy and our lives recalls the scale and the challenges faced by the generation who sacrificed through the Great Depression and World War II.

00:55:09.000 Yeah, the Great Depression was lengthened eight years by bad government policy and World War II had an external enemy that required us to send people to barracks and to risk their lives against bullets and bombs in order to kill Nazis and in order to kill members of the Japanese Imperial Army.

00:55:25.000 By the way, it's not just happening at the state level.

00:55:27.000 Nancy Pelosi is taking advantage of all of this in order to grab power. 1.00

00:55:31.000 According to Bradley Byrne, over at the Wall Street Journal, he says, for nearly two months, my staff and I have been fielding calls from the people of Southwest Alabama, small business owners, bankers, seniors, and many others.

00:55:40.000 The government's response to coronavirus is affecting their livelihoods.

00:55:43.000 Their congressman may be the only voice they have in Washington, but when the lights are turned off in committee rooms and on the floor of the House, who's watching out for them?

00:55:49.000 Who's holding Washington accountable?

00:55:51.000 More important than the flawed message Congress's absence sends to the American people, that their representatives value personal protection, is the reality.

00:55:58.000 When nobody is around, it is easier to make backroom deals, and Speaker Pelosi is taking advantage.

00:56:02.000 She has consolidated the power of the institution in her person.

00:56:05.000 Without lawmakers there to speak up for their districts and influence the legislative process, Pelosi has made herself the sole voice and negotiator for the House as it passes massive funding and regulatory bills. 1.00

00:56:15.000 In other words, she's taking advantage.

00:56:16.000 Byrne is a Republican in Alabama's 1st congressional district.

00:56:18.000 gain maximum concessions from Trump.

00:56:19.000 She calls the House back to Washington to be quickly and quietly herded into chamber to cast an up or down vote, bypassing committees, markups in every process that gives lawmakers a voice. 0.97

00:56:28.000 In other words, she's taking advantage.

00:56:30.000 Byrne is a Republican in Alabama's first congressional district.

00:56:34.000 And meanwhile, taking advantage are ideological warriors of the left who are taking advantage of this pandemic in order to claim that America is racist, sexist, bigoted, homophobic, etc., Charles Blow, the aptly named Charles Blow over at the New York Times, has a piece today titled COVID-19's Race and Class Warfare.

00:56:52.000 You know, because, like, the virus kills lots of people who are not poor, and it's a virus, and it doesn't know whether you're rich or poor because it only attacks you, your body.

00:57:01.000 But according to Charles Blow, again, it's because America is evil.

00:57:06.000 For the thousandth time, the reason that people... I ask whether the law is an ass. 0.99

00:57:10.000 The reason I ask whether the law is an ass is because there are only a few reasons why people are going to obey the law. 0.98

00:57:15.000 One is the law is good, right? 0.64

00:57:16.000 The law is beneficial.

00:57:17.000 The reason that you obey a law is because the law is beneficial.

00:57:20.000 If the law is not beneficial, there are only two other reasons you would obey the law.

00:57:22.000 One, you hope for some reward.

00:57:23.000 Two, you risk some punishment.

00:57:26.000 But as the American people realize that perhaps the reward of going back to work is better than the punishment of not going back to work, they're just going to go back to work. 0.95

00:57:34.000 And the government threatening punishment for laws that are unenforceable and stupid is not going to result in people obeying the laws.

00:57:40.000 And if I believe that your law is designed specifically in order to undermine the free markets that have brought the world from the brink of starvation to the brink of prosperity, if that's what I think your agenda is, I'm not going to obey your law. 1.00

00:57:52.000 Your law is garbage. 0.81

00:57:54.000 And the only thing that will keep me obeying the law is your threat of punishment. 0.99

00:57:57.000 No one wants to die.

00:57:58.000 Nobody is interested in passing this on to a parent.

00:58:01.000 At a certain point, the reason that DeSantis is right in Florida and Abbott is right in Texas is because you're going to have to trust the American people.

00:58:07.000 And I know the media have been doing nut picking and going around and finding people who are crazy, who are not socially distancing and spitting all over each other and partying it up.

00:58:14.000 The reality is most Americans, particularly those who care about the vulnerable, are staying away from each other.

00:58:20.000 But this is not changing the underlying math.

00:58:23.000 So, Blow has this entire piece about how America is evil.

00:58:26.000 Now, quick note.

00:58:27.000 I have a book that is coming out July 21st called How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps.

00:58:31.000 We've released the cover.

00:58:32.000 It is all about this.

00:58:33.000 It is all about how there is a segment of American society that wishes to see America as evil, sees our philosophy as evil, sees the abounding American philosophy as evil, sees our culture of rights as merely cover for a caste hierarchy.

00:58:46.000 That sees our history as an unending series of abuses.

00:58:49.000 And these folks are using this pandemic as an excuse to simply double down on that position.

00:58:54.000 Blow is one of those.

00:58:55.000 So he says, people, mostly white, sometimes armed, occasionally carrying Confederate flags or hosting placards emblazoned with a Nazi slogan from the Holocaust, have been loudly protesting to push their state governments to reopen business and spaces before enough progress has been made to contain the coronavirus.

00:59:10.000 This is yet another illustration of the race and class divide this pandemic has illuminated in this country.

00:59:15.000 For some, a reopened economy and recreational landscape will mean the option to run a business, return to work, go to the park or beach, have a night on the town at a nice restaurant or swanky bar.

00:59:23.000 But many, on the lower rungs of the economic ladder, it will only force them back into a compulsory exposure to more people, often in occupations that make it hard to protect oneself and that pay little for the risk.

00:59:32.000 Okay, this is such absolute sheer insanity.

00:59:36.000 First of all, to suggest that everybody who's protesting is carrying a confederate flag or hoisting placards with nazi slogans and we've talked to some of the people at these protests that is not what is happening here and also the notion that if you're on the lower rungs of the economic ladder your best interest lies in the government picking up the check for you as opposed to you having a job is again total insanity the people who are losing their jobs are disproportionately blue-collar workers many of whom are disproportionately minority and those people need their jobs back and many of them want to work

01:00:04.000 They want to work in safe conditions, we would all like to work in safe conditions.

01:00:08.000 But if you have an underlying pre-existing condition, there's nothing that you can do about that other than stay home.

01:00:12.000 And for those people, we should be encouraging those people to stay home.

01:00:15.000 And maybe we should be talking about how this virus has created a necessity for a broader social safety net, not necessarily even from the government, but from private charity.

01:00:26.000 But according to Charles Blow, this is all about the evils of the white infrastructure.

01:00:30.000 Again, all inequality in the view of the left is inequity.

01:00:33.000 All inequality is evidence of America's root system.

01:00:37.000 The reason for this is because the left believes that human beings are infinitely malleable, that all situations are infinitely malleable, and if you get the economics just right through redistribution, then everybody becomes perfect and everybody has an equal outcome.

01:00:49.000 Not true, never will be true, but the fact that inequality is a permanent condition of human life means that the quest to destroy the entire superstructure will continue apace.

01:01:01.000 Charles Blow says, these are the struggling workers who entertain and aestheticize people of means.

01:01:06.000 These businesses were by no means essential, and they put these workers in danger.

01:01:10.000 He's talking about tattoo parlors, barber shops, hair salons, and nail shops.

01:01:13.000 I have a question.

01:01:15.000 Why were they not essential?

01:01:16.000 Because Charles Blow says they're not essential?

01:01:18.000 You know one of the things I noticed?

01:01:19.000 Customers were showing up.

01:01:21.000 Particularly customers were showing up in minority communities.

01:01:24.000 Read the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

01:01:26.000 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution made clear there were actual racial divides in the number of people showing up to barbershops and nail salons.

01:01:32.000 Through personal choice, not because they were being forced to go out there.

01:01:34.000 Customers.

01:01:36.000 And many of the people doing these jobs, says Charles Blow, will have to take public transit to get to work, search for suitable childcare before they leave home.

01:01:42.000 Schools, in most cases, are still closed.

01:01:44.000 But even among professions we don't immediately consider low-wage or minority-dominated, there are areas of high risk and low wages.

01:01:50.000 For many, the image that comes to mind about the medical field, those on the front lines are doctors and nurses, people highly educated and highly paid.

01:01:56.000 But there are many other people in the hospitals that make them run.

01:01:59.000 For instance, a majority of nursing assistants are members of racial minority groups.

01:02:03.000 A third are African-American.

01:02:04.000 Half have completed no formal education beyond high school.

01:02:06.000 According to registered nursing, the median annual wage for a nursing assistant in a hospital is just 30 grand.

01:02:12.000 Okay, so?

01:02:16.000 So?

01:02:16.000 I mean, really?

01:02:18.000 So?

01:02:19.000 I don't understand how that has to do with societal racism.

01:02:24.000 Maybe those are people who are attempting to work their way up the job ladder.

01:02:29.000 Good for them.

01:02:30.000 Good for them.

01:02:30.000 Those are heroes.

01:02:31.000 And demeaning them to the level of victims of American racism because they're going in and being heroic is wild.

01:02:39.000 Blow says it's been widely reported the virus is having a disproportionate impact on black and brown people in America, both in terms of infections and death.

01:02:45.000 But that is only one aspect of the disparities.

01:02:47.000 In a country where race and ethnicity often intersect with wealth and class, there are a cascade of other impacts, particularly economic ones, to remain conscious of.

01:02:54.000 Reality of the situation.

01:02:55.000 The virus is not targeting black and brown people. 0.87

01:02:57.000 The virus is targeting people who have diabetes, obesity, asthma.

01:03:01.000 The virus is targeting people based on health condition that tends to overlap with poverty and that tends to overlap with race.

01:03:07.000 Some of that is the result of historic injustice in the United States.

01:03:10.000 A huge part of that has nothing to do with the historic injustices of the United States.

01:03:15.000 Historic wealth gaps have been rectified by many different racial groups in the United States.

01:03:19.000 The question is how fast that is happening and whether the rules that are currently in place are conducive to that happening.

01:03:25.000 But again, the goal for a lot of people is to use the pandemic as the latest evidence that America is deeply evil today, not was evil back in the 1960s with Jim Crow, is evil today, and thus must be torn down around our ears.

01:03:35.000 And then you wonder why people are bucking the system and saying, maybe we don't trust your motivations in keeping this thing closed.

01:03:41.000 Maybe we don't trust your motivations in avoiding the data.

01:03:43.000 All right, we'll be back here later.

01:03:45.000 So we have two additional hours we will get to everything Joe Biden related then, because Joe Biden has a serious problem on his hands.

01:03:50.000 We'll get to that a little bit later today.

01:03:53.000 Otherwise, we'll see you here tomorrow.

01:03:54.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

01:03:54.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show.

01:03:55.000 The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Colton Haas.

01:04:02.000 Directed by Mike Joyner.

01:04:03.000 Executive producer Jeremy Boring.

01:04:05.000 Supervising producer Mathis Glover and Robert Sterling.

01:04:08.000 Assistant director Pavel Lydowsky.

01:04:10.000 Technical producer Austin Stevens.

01:04:11.000 Playback and media operated by Nick Sheehan.

01:04:14.000 Associate producer Katie Swinnerton.

01:04:15.000 Edited by Adam Sajovic.

01:04:17.000 Audio is mixed by Mike Koromina.

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01:04:25.000 Hey everybody, it's Andrew Klavan, host of The Andrew Klavan Show.

01:04:28.000 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.

01:04:35.000 But on The Andrew Klavan Show, that's where the fun just gets started.

The Ben Shapiro Show - May 04, 2020

Is The Law An Ass? | Ep. 1003

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