Ted Cruz takes it on the chin after traveling to Cancun in the middle of the Texas freeze. New studies find that all of American life has turned political. And Team Biden promotes endless COVID restrictions. Today's show is sponsored by ExpressVPN. Protect your data from big tech with the VPN I trust. Visit expressvpn.org/ProtectYourData to get 20% off your first month with discount code "DIDDLE250" and receive $50 off your second month when you make the switch! Protect your privacy and data privacy by becoming a supporter of The Courage Campaign.Become a supporter today using the promo code POWER10 at checkout and get 10% off the entire purchase when you sign up for the Courage Campaign membership! You get the same great coverage as one of the big carriers but you can even keep your phone and your number, but you will be saving a fortune! That s why over 1000 of you, my wise listeners, have made the switch from your overpriced wireless carrier to Pure Talk USA over the past couple of months. When you do, you will save hundreds of dollars over the course of the year by shifting from AT&T, Verizon, or T-Mobile, or Sprint, you ll be saving hundreds more than $800 a year just by shifting to PureTalk USA. So what do you have to lose? Grab that mobile phone, Dial Pound 250, say my name, Ben Shapiro, you have the chance to save $30 a month? You will save $150 a month by calling in 250,000 a month, say me, say keyword "say keyword Ben Shapiro). You have got to lose $30, 250, I'll be saving me $30 of a month ... I'll have it by dial pound 250, says me, I have it, I've got it, say you have a chance to lose that chance to say me in the day, I'm gonna lose that I trust you have it like that I'll say that I'm going to lose it? I'll get it, right, say it, you'll be saved $50 of a day like that, say I trust me, you get it I'll do that, I know that I can do it, she'll be that I get it? I'm not gonna be that chance, I can be that seeeeeeeeeeeeedeedeedeeeedeeeeeeeeeeeeded that I do that?
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00:01:39.000According to the UK Daily Mail, which has a 59 photo spread, I kid you not, a 59 photo spread, because this is the only story that the media would like to cover today, is the fact that Senator Cruz left Texas and went down to Cancun, and then he came back, And was super apologetic about having gone down to Cancun while Texas is freezing and millions of people don't have power.
00:01:56.000So here is the UK Daily Mail reporting.
00:01:58.000A chastened Ted Cruz landed back in Houston on Thursday afternoon and said he regrets flying to Cancun in the middle of the state's energy crisis for a vacation, but insisted he was just trying to be a dad.
00:02:08.000Cruz enraged his state by fleeing in the midst of the worst snowstorms to hit in decades, with the power failing for millions and people left freezing in the subzero temperatures.
00:02:14.000At least 24 people are known to have died in Texas.
00:02:17.000Cruz claims his 10 and 12-year-old daughters asked him on Wednesday if they could go on vacation to Mexico with their friends, so he and his wife boarded a plane hours later.
00:02:23.000It was obviously a mistake, and in hindsight, I would not have done it, he said, speaking on arrival at his home in Houston.
00:02:28.000Here is what Cruz had to say, justifying why he had gone to Cancun in the first place.
00:02:34.000Well, Texas is going through horrific storms, and millions of Texans have lost power and lost peace and have been hurt.
00:02:47.000And, uh, yesterday my daughters asked if they could take a trip with some friends.
00:02:52.000And Heidi and I agreed, so I flew down with them last night, dropped them off here, and now I'm headed back to Texas and back to continuing to work to try to get the power up.
00:03:03.000What's happening in Texas is unacceptable, and a lot of Texans are hurting.
00:03:07.000Okay, so a few things that are worth noting right off the bat.
00:03:12.000Because rule number one of politics in today's day and age is that you have to appear on the scene whenever there is something bad that happens.
00:03:19.000I'll be honest with you, I've never been a big fan of this rule.
00:03:22.000Like, I always thought that it was ridiculous that people were upset with, for example, George W. Bush for not landing on the ground during Hurricane Katrina.
00:03:28.000Like, okay, so now he's looking at the water.
00:03:42.000But, you know, like, Politicians, obviously a lot of the job is optics, a lot of the job is appearing to be sympathetic or be compassionate, and Cruz failed here, no question, right?
00:03:52.000Which I think Cruz himself would acknowledge at this point, but this is like the most obvious political move of all time.
00:04:17.000I mean, they track down, like, every aspect of this.
00:04:20.000So much so that the New York Times uncovered texts between Heidi Cruz, Ted's wife, and the neighbors.
00:04:26.000So I guess that we are done with the whole, you're not allowed to access texts without people's permission routine.
00:04:31.000I guess we're done with that whole thing.
00:04:33.000Because it was a group text and somebody gave it to the New York Times, so that's okay now, right?
00:04:35.000So, Hunter Biden's computer, Twitter had to shut down the entire New York Post account for putting out information based on Hunter Biden's laptop, even though there was no legal barrier to that information actually being put out there.
00:04:47.000Here, apparently it's totally okay to start leaking people's texts that are directed at friends.
00:04:55.000So apparently here is what happened according to the New York Times.
00:04:59.000Like millions of his constituents across Texas, Senator Ted Cruz had a frigid home without electricity this week amid the state's power crisis.
00:05:05.000But unlike most, Mr. Cruz got out, fleeing Houston and hopping a Wednesday afternoon flight to Cancun with his family for a respite at a luxury resort.
00:05:11.000Photos of Mr. Cruz and his wife Heidi boarding the flight ricocheted quickly across social media and left both his political allies and rivals aghast at a tropical trip as the disaster unfolded at home.
00:05:20.000The blowback only intensified after Cruz, a Republican, released a statement saying he had flown to Mexico to be a good dad and accompany his daughters and their friends.
00:05:26.000Which, of course, is never a good look.
00:05:27.000Saying that your kids are the reason that you did X is never a particularly good look.
00:05:31.000Although I will acknowledge there are folks on the left being like, why would you ever take advice from your kids?
00:05:35.000The same people who think a three-year-old should decide their gender.
00:05:38.000In any case, text messages sent from Ms.
00:05:40.000Cruz to friends and Houston neighbors on Wednesday revealed a hastily planned trip.
00:05:48.000Cruz invited others to join them at the Ritz-Carlton in Cancun, where they'd stayed many times, noting the room price this week, 309 bucks a night, and it's good security.
00:05:55.000The text messages were provided to the New York Times and confirmed by a second person on the thread who declined to be identified because of the private nature of the text.
00:06:21.000Now, something is obviously true here.
00:06:25.000And that is that the media's attempt to paint this as the greatest act of political hypocrisy in modern American history is absurd on its face.
00:06:36.000Let me give you, say, four examples of hypocrisy in the last year.
00:06:40.000Okay, so, example number one of hypocrisy.
00:06:43.000Andrew Cuomo declaring himself an unbelievably great leader, like such a great leader that he won an Emmy.
00:06:48.000People declaring him the greatest leader of all time.
00:06:51.000Chris Cuomo going on TV with him and making jokes with him every night.
00:06:53.000CNN waving its own conflict of interest rules so that they could do that little comedy routine.
00:06:58.000Andrew Cuomo being praised to the skies by Dr. Anthony Fauci and it turns out he was lying to his own party and to the public and to the families of people who had died of COVID by suggesting that the death count in nursing homes was significantly lower than it actually was.
00:07:10.000Which may in fact be a criminal act and now he's under investigation.
00:07:13.000Okay, so that's act of political hypocrisy number one.
00:07:15.000Declaring yourself a leader while simultaneously avoiding the cost of leadership by failing to take responsibility for your own policies.
00:07:22.000And that's hypocrisy because you have said, essentially, that your standard is a standard that applies to no one else.
00:07:28.000You can lie, and you can cheat, and you can lie about people dying, and that's totally okay.
00:08:04.000Gavin Newsom, very much a fan of the lockdown rules across the state of California.
00:08:10.000Small businesses being forcibly shut, people being put out of work because Gavin Newsom will not allow them to open their businesses even if they are trying to do so in safe and secure fashion.
00:08:18.000And then Governor Gavin Newsom heads on over to the French Laundry.
00:08:22.000Right, that is another example of political hypocrisy.
00:08:24.000And we saw lots of examples that look exactly like that one, right?
00:08:26.000You had the mayor of, I'm trying to remember which Texas city, heading on over to Cabo.
00:08:32.000It was different than Cruz because he was actively advocating that people not travel while traveling.
00:08:37.000Okay, so we'll get to Cruz in a second because Cruz, this isn't, it's a bad politically, it's a bad political move optically.
00:09:14.000If everybody could get out, presumably, he'd be in favor of everybody heading on over to Cancun.
00:09:18.000So, again, politically tone-deaf on an extraordinary level, for sure, and he will pay the price for that.
00:09:23.000But the media are treating the cruise incident as significantly worse than any of the other incidents.
00:09:28.000In order for you to be a true hypocrite, you have to actually foster support for a rule, or in many of these cases, implement a rule yourself, and then not abide by the rule.
00:09:40.000Right, you have to be a governor who advocates for a lockdown and then you break the lockdown.
00:09:42.000You have to be a mayor like Lori Lightfoot who says, don't go out and get your hair done and then go out and get your hair done.
00:09:46.000Right, that is an act of political hypocrisy.
00:09:49.000It's locking down people when they don't want to be locked down and then you don't have to lock down because you're the special.
00:10:06.000And these major newspapers have dedicated reporters to checking on Ted Cruz's dog.
00:10:10.000The blowback from this on the right is probably not going to be against Cruz, frankly, over the course of time, because the media always overplayed their hand.
00:10:18.000They can't just say this is politically stupid and it shows that he's uncompassionate or that he's out of touch, all of which you can make the case based on this particular incident, right?
00:10:26.000But instead, they're going so far that they're being like, what a hypocrite, what a terrible person.
00:10:31.000There's a piece over at The Atlantic talking about what an awful human being Ted Cruz is because he jet set it off to Cancun.
00:10:37.000David Graham at the Atlantic has an entire piece titled, Ted Cruz is no hypocrite.
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00:12:06.000As I say, the media's attention on the Ted Cruz jaunt is absolutely overwhelming.
00:12:11.00059 pictures, 59 pictures from the UK Daily Mail.
00:12:15.000The New York Times dedicated an entire report to the text messages between Heidi Cruz and friends.
00:12:24.000Cruz told a television crew at the Cancun airport what's happening in Texas is unacceptable.
00:12:28.000He was wearing a Texas state flag mask and a short sleeve polo shirt tucked into jeans.
00:12:31.000The temperature in Cancun was above 80 degrees Fahrenheit on Thursday and in the 30s in Houston.
00:12:35.000And then when he came back to the United States, Cruz offered a new statement with a different tone when he had tried to explain the vacation without regrets.
00:12:41.000Speaking to reporters after his arrival home, he conceded the trip was obviously a mistake, said he had begun having second thoughts as soon as he boarded the plane to Mexico, intent on a few days of remote work in the sun.
00:12:50.000He said the plan had been to stay through the weekend with the family.
00:12:52.000That changes from his original statement where he said that he was going to go there, drop the kids, and come back.
00:12:57.000He said, And of course, this trended on social media.
00:12:58.000You got Flyin' Ted, which of course is a play on Trump's nickname for Cruz, Lyin' Ted.
00:13:36.000The media are going further, and they are suggesting that this thing not only ought to be national news for a day, but it's like the worst thing that has ever happened in the history of mankind.
00:13:45.000Believe it or not, Reporters were deployed to Ted Cruz's house to check on his poodle.
00:13:53.000Apparently, Snowflake, that's the name of his dog, was spotted by a reporter at 1 p.m.
00:13:57.000on Thursday looking out the front door.
00:13:59.000A security guard stationed outside the property said he had been tasked with feeding and tending to the dog in the freezing home.
00:14:04.000The dog was adopted by the family as a puppy in 2014.
00:14:09.000So, much of this is just, you know, people hate Cruz, and this is a great, great way to dunk on Ted Cruz.
00:14:16.000But the way that this is being played in the media is that this is some sort of referendum on Republican policy in some way, which is weird, because what the hell does this have to do with policy?
00:14:26.000Again, it has to do with the politician making an absolutely bad-toned, optical decision.
00:14:31.000What does it have to do with policy, per se?
00:14:33.000I think the answer here is pretty obvious, not much.
00:14:36.000But that's not stopping the media from, again, going too far.
00:14:38.000Again, I gave all those examples of hypocrisy.
00:14:40.000If you're gonna rank those examples of hypocrisy and how much attention they deserve, it'll go Cuomo, number one with a bullet, right?
00:14:45.000I mean, Cuomo was treated as the greatest governor in the history of planet Earth, and it turns out that he was lying to people openly.
00:14:54.000He was not just lying to people openly.
00:14:56.000And by the way, we knew this since May.
00:14:57.000The media just decided not to cover it until after the election.
00:15:01.000He was actively threatening other members of the New York Democratic Party.
00:15:07.000For example, New York Democratic Assemblyman Ron Kim, he came out yesterday and he was like, you know what?
00:15:11.000My family was absolutely terrified of Cuomo.
00:15:14.000Like, if you're going to talk about the disparity in coverage, Most of the major networks last night carried blanket coverage for Ted Cruz going to Cancun.
00:15:23.000How many of them have ever had blanket coverage for Andrew Cuomo, the sitting governor of New York, actively lying about how many people died in nursing homes because of his crappy COVID policy, and actively threatening other members of the Democratic Party?
00:15:40.000But it's pretty obvious which one of these is a bigger story the media should be paying attention to.
00:15:44.000Here is New York Democratic Assemblyman Ron Kim explaining that the sitting governor of New York, the greatest of all governors in the history of the world, was actively threatening him.
00:15:51.000Governor Cuomo called me the next day at 8 p.m.
00:16:38.000This is a pure referendum on how crappy the media are at their jobs.
00:16:41.000In one case, you have a governor actively lying about how many people died in his state because of his policy, and threatening members of his own party.
00:16:49.000And the media are like, Well, you know, it's a story.
00:17:05.000He did what he was supposed to do as a senator in the sense that he's not flying.
00:17:09.000He did what he was supposed to do in terms of policy by contacting the White House and asking for a federal emergency declaration, which was then received.
00:17:17.000Okay, that is not even close to on par with even the active hypocrisy of Gavin Newsom, who is actively promulgating a policy that he himself was not abiding by.
00:17:26.000Cruz is not responsible for the freeze.
00:17:27.000Cruz is not responsible for going and thawing the pipelines.
00:17:32.000He's responsible for the political dumbassery of not heading over to a local church and handing out blankets or something, the way that Beto O'Rourke is.
00:17:39.000O'Rourke at least understands that side of the business.
00:17:41.000He also understands how to skateboard.
00:17:44.000You know, you're responsible for that, for sure, but that is not on the same part.
00:17:47.000I mean, again, Bill de Blasio, the mayor of New York, was ripping into Cuomo yesterday.
00:17:51.000How is it not a bigger story that the mayor of New York is ripping into the governor of New York for being a liar and an authoritarian?
00:17:57.000It's a sad thing to say, Mika, but that's classic Andrew Cuomo.
00:18:02.000A lot of people in New York State have received those phone calls.
00:18:07.000You know, the bullying is nothing new.
00:18:10.000I believe Ron Kim, and it's very, very sad.
00:18:13.000No public servant, no person who's telling the truth should be treated that way.
00:18:19.000But yeah, the threats, the belittling, the demand that someone change their statement right that moment.
00:18:29.000Many, many times I've heard that, and I know a lot of other people in this state have heard that.
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00:20:17.000Well, because Ted Cruz backs libertarian energy policy, and that means that he's really bad.
00:20:24.000According to David Graham, Cruz's approach to politics and Texas' approach to electrical generation flow from the same libertarian-inflected, low-regulation, small-government vision.
00:20:33.000In this worldview, the government's role is to set a minimal baseline requirement, offer market-based incentives to ensure they work, and then stay the hell out of the way.
00:20:40.000Consider how this works out in the case of electricity.
00:20:42.000states are divided into two big electrical grids except for Texas, which maintains its own independent system.
00:20:47.000The state maintains a separate grid to avoid having to comply with federal regulation.
00:20:51.000If Texas had been connected to the broader national grid, the state might have been able to borrow power that would have filled the hole left when the large parts of the system failed in the storm.
00:20:59.000Instead, Texas has experienced staggering blackouts.
00:21:03.000What in the world does this have to do with Ted Cruz going down to Cancun?
00:21:06.000Ted Cruz is not in favor of people living without electricity.
00:21:19.000The swaggering Texas brand of free market governance that's central to the state's political identity is taking a beating, according to Mark Caputo.
00:21:27.000So Ted Cruz goes down to Cancun, and the answer is, you know what, we need more regulation.
00:21:31.000What do these have to do with one another?
00:22:11.000If Ted Cruz goes to Cancun, then we should follow democratic policy.
00:22:15.000If there's a big Texas freeze, then we should follow democratic policy.
00:22:19.000If Florida and California have completely differing COVID policies that end with similar numbers of deaths, despite the fact that Florida didn't wreck its economy and has more old people, then we should follow democratic policy, right?
00:22:30.000It doesn't matter what the antecedent is.
00:22:32.000The end of the statement will always be exactly the same.
00:22:35.000So every time a Republican does something that is dumb, this becomes an example of why Republican policy is bad in the extreme.
00:22:42.000Now I can much more easily make the case that when Gavin Newsom violates his own strictures, then maybe the strictures are bad because he's not even living by them.
00:22:53.000I can make the case that when Andrew Cuomo lies about his own policy, maybe that's because his policy was bad.
00:22:57.000You can see the connection between the antecedent, the if, in the statement, and the then in the statement.
00:23:03.000But for the media, there is no connection.
00:23:05.000It's just about, hey, we can dunk on Ted Cruz.
00:23:07.000And since we're dunking on Ted Cruz and we don't like Ted Cruz, and it's fun to dunk on Ted Cruz, that means that Texas's energy policy is super bad and you should vote for Democrats, not because you should get rid of Cruz, You should vote for Democrats across the board.
00:23:25.000Again, you can make a savvy political case that Cruz is going to face some really tough sledding in the next Texas election because of this, specifically.
00:23:33.000But it's going to be hard to make the case that every Republican ought to pay the brunt because Ted Cruz went to Cancun or something.
00:23:41.000Okay, meanwhile, COVID policy continues to be a complete mess from the Biden administration.
00:23:46.000How much of a mess is COVID policy from the Biden administration?
00:23:49.000So, there is a piece in Politico talking about Joe Biden's failures with regard to COVID, right?
00:23:57.000He has not answered when we can take the mask off.
00:23:58.000He has not answered when we are gonna be able to go back to normal.
00:24:01.000He has suggested maybe we're gonna have to do it till next year.
00:24:03.000He has put out bad information about herd immunity.
00:24:08.000He has suggested that schools don't need to reopen, and then they should reopen, but they can only reopen part-time, but they should reopen full-time, and we should have ventilation and masking and vaccine.
00:24:23.000The real problem, the real problem for Joe Biden is that, you know, the reality is that reality's hard, man.
00:24:30.000And Joe Biden is just running up against reality.
00:24:32.000So you never heard this kind of throat clearing when it came to Donald Trump.
00:24:36.000When it was Donald Trump and he was president, then it was every single death is to be placed at Donald Trump's doorstep.
00:24:41.000Here's how Politico opens a story on Biden's completely mishkabobbled COVID policy.
00:24:46.000Quote, President Joe Biden's presidency, hey, hinges in large part on his success in handling the pandemic. But nearly a month into power, he's beginning to discover just how much of that task is out of his control. Oh, you see, it's not that he's blowing it. And it's not that he's bad at this. And it's not that it's Mischka bobbled. It's that it's just out of his control, I mean, you can't blame the old sucker.
00:25:05.000I mean, why exactly would you think that it was in his control in the first place?
00:25:09.000So, after a year of everything that goes wrong is Donald Trump's fault, up to and including a crazy lady in Arizona feeding her husband fish tank cleaner and him dying of it, Everything is Trump's fault.
00:25:30.000The White House is locked in a delicate dance with governors over reopening schools, distributing COVID shots, and enforcing mask mandates, with Biden's team wary of alienating key state leaders, even as it takes stock of the lurching response to the crisis.
00:25:41.000Governors, in turn, are starting to push back on the first federal efforts to pressure them.
00:25:44.000The administration has poured energy into courting both Democrats and Republicans, pitching itself as an equal partner, an eager collaborator.
00:25:50.000It's a sharp contrast from the Trump era, when most decisions were thrown to the states.
00:25:55.000Yes, because most decisions should be done at the state level.
00:25:58.000If it had been up to Biden, Florida would have been a lockdown like California, not the opposite.
00:26:03.000This whole time, governors have felt like they're the ones under the guns, said one advisor to several governors.
00:26:07.000They understand the way this has been set up.
00:26:09.000People are inclined to blame them if things don't go well.
00:26:12.000Yet the federal government's charm offensive threatens to bog down Biden's early efforts to rein in the virus and claim political credit for restoring a sense of normalcy.
00:26:20.000Yeah, you know, it's tough being Biden.
00:26:22.000The angle of these articles is so great.
00:26:24.000I mean, it's so perfectly predictable.
00:26:26.000Everything Donald Trump did was super duper duper terrible on every possible level.
00:26:30.000Not just the bad stuff, all of the stuff.
00:26:32.000Everything Joe Biden does that's incompetent and bad.
00:26:34.000By the way, where is Joe Biden in the middle of all this Texas freeze?
00:26:37.000He called a lid yesterday at like 8 a.m.
00:26:42.000His campaign has just continued, meaning he's just asleep.
00:26:52.000Meanwhile, his administration continues to be a complete mess when it comes to exactly how to treat COVID.
00:26:56.000So, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the greatest of all doctors except for Dr. Joe Biden, he is now saying, maybe we'll get back to normal in fall or winter.
00:27:06.000I mean, now, in a second, I'm gonna explain why this is crazy, why we should be back to normal, essentially, by summer.
00:27:11.000But here is Dr. Anthony Fauci saying, maybe fall, maybe winter, maybe never.
00:27:15.000Here is Dr. Fauci, the greatest of all doctors, sexiest man alive, Dr. Anthony Fauci.
00:27:20.000If you're going to ask is what about getting back to a situation where you can have theaters that might be able to have below capacity that restaurants indoor dining can be happening but with moderately diminished capacity.
00:27:39.000That's going to be somewhere between the fall and the end of the year.
00:28:16.000If you're so scared of your own shadow that after people who are vulnerable have taken a vaccine that creates 95% immunity for a disease that for people under the age of 65 Still was going to kill about five in 1,000 people who actually got it, and now you have 95% immunity from that five, which means, according to my mathematical calculations, you are now down to 0.5 out of 1,000, and you're still staying home?
00:28:44.000Okay, at that point, it's on you, man.
00:28:48.000Now, by the way, this is all very silly, because the reality is, according to Dr. Marty McCary, who's been a frequent guest on this program from Johns Hopkins University, he's a professor over there, At the School of Medicine, he has an article in the Wall Street Journal pointing out that COVID cases have dropped 77% in six weeks.
00:29:05.000According to Dr. McCary, we're going to have herd immunity by April.
00:29:09.000He says, amid the dire COVID warnings, one crucial fact has been largely ignored.
00:29:12.000Cases are down 77% over the past six weeks.
00:29:15.000If a medication slashed cases by 77%, we'd call it a miracle pill.
00:29:18.000Why is the number of cases plummeting much faster than experts predicted?
00:29:22.000In large part, because natural immunity from prior infection is far more common than can be measured by testing.
00:29:26.000Testing has been capturing only from 10 to 25% of infections, depending on when the pandemic someone got the virus.
00:29:33.000Applying a time-weighted case capture average of 1 in 6.5 to the cumulative 28 million confirmed cases would mean about 55% of Americans already have natural immunity.
00:29:49.000Former Food and Drug Commissioner Scott Gottlieb estimates 250 million doses will have been delivered to some 150 million people by the end of March.
00:29:59.000As more people have been infected, most of whom have mild or no symptoms, there are fewer Americans left to be infected.
00:30:08.000At the current trajectory, I expect COVID will be mostly gone by April, allowing Americans to resume normal life.
00:30:14.000He says the antibody studies almost certainly underestimate natural immunity.
00:30:17.000Antibody testing doesn't capture antigen-specific T-cells, which develop memory once they are activated by the virus.
00:30:22.000Survivors of the 1918 Spanish flu were found in 2008, 90 years later, to have memory cells still able to produce neutralizing antibodies.
00:30:30.000Researchers at Sweden's Karolinska Institute found the percentage of people mounting a T-cell response after mild or asymptomatic COVID-19 infection consistently exceeded the percentage with detectable antibodies.
00:30:42.000COVID-19 deaths in the United States would also suggest much broader immunity than recognized.
00:30:46.000About 1 in 600 Americans has died of COVID-19, which translates to a population fatality rate of about 0.15%.
00:30:52.000The COVID-19 infection fatality rate is about 0.23%.
00:30:56.000These numbers indicate that roughly two-thirds of the U.S.
00:31:01.000In my own conversations with medical experts, it says, Dr. Makary, I've noticed they too often dismiss natural immunity, arguing we don't have the data.
00:31:07.000The data certainly doesn't fit the classic randomized control trial model of the old guard medical establishment.
00:31:12.000There's no control group, but the observational data is compelling.
00:31:17.000He says that his prediction that COVID will basically be gone by April is based on lab data, mathematical data, published literature, and conversation with experts.
00:31:24.000It's also based on direct observation of how hard testing has been to get, especially for the poor.
00:31:28.000If you live in a wealthy community where worried people are vigilant about getting tested, you might think most infections are captured by testing.
00:31:34.000If you've seen the many barriers for testing to low-income Americans, you might think very few infections have been captured.
00:31:39.000Keep in mind, most infections are asymptomatic, which still triggers natural immunity.
00:31:44.000As Macari points out, herd immunity has been well documented in the Brazilian city of Manaus, where researchers in The Lancet reported the prevalence of COVID-19 infection to be 76%, resulting in a significant slowing of the infection.
00:31:57.000So basically, what he's saying is there's a lot of public pressure not to talk about herd immunity because people freak out.
00:32:02.000But the reality is we are almost there.
00:32:25.000One of the things I said is the problem with slowing the spread now is that there will be widespread spread later, which of course was true.
00:32:33.000But once it became clear, the trajectory of the virus and how it acted, it has become clearer and clearer.
00:32:39.000And the way the Democrats acted about this.
00:32:41.000I was living in LA where we were locked down.
00:32:43.000I mean, locked down tight, welded in our homes.
00:32:46.000I mean, you couldn't go out to a park.
00:33:45.000Well, I guess that if she says so, if medical expert Nancy Pelosi says that vaccination really does nothing, it's unbelievable.
00:33:52.000You're trying to get people to take the vaccine right now, and then you are simultaneously telling them that even after mass vaccination and herd immunity, we're still going to be wearing masks in December.
00:34:17.000But if Dr. Fauci is fond of telling the noble lie, even if he doesn't believe that we'll be back to normal by summer if we all get the vaccine, shouldn't he be saying it?
00:34:25.000By the way, he would be more medically correct than he is right now when he's saying that we're going to be December, January of next year before we take off the mask.
00:34:35.000We're in a free state here in Florida, and you can see people who have had vaccines, they're not going to want to wear that mask for much longer.
00:34:41.000You can see that people who have had the disease, and they've recovered, and they're okay, They're not going to want to do this for much longer.
00:34:48.000People want to go back to their regular lives.
00:34:49.000I know Democrats don't, apparently, but there are lots of people who do.
00:34:53.000And if you don't like it, you're going to have to just get out of the way.
00:34:56.000Nonetheless, the desire for control is astonishing.
00:34:58.000Representative Katie Porter from California, she says, listen, we can't put kids back in school.
00:35:04.000I mean, sure, all the data says we can, but we can't.
00:35:07.000What's going to happen when they do all go back to school?
00:35:09.000And that's where Senator Michael Bennett from Colorado and I have authored a letter to the Department of Education pointing out to them that we can't just put kids back in school as if their learning and social and emotional development has not been severely interrupted.
00:35:24.000And this problem is particularly acute with regard to math and science education.
00:35:38.000Meanwhile, they all send their kids to private school.
00:35:41.000That would be hypocrisy, as long as we are talking about the politics of hypocrisy.
00:35:44.000Okay, in just a second, we are going to get to a fascinating article in Reason Magazine talking about how the country is polarizing on every line.
00:35:54.000First, reminder, last Friday we announced a partnership with cancelled Star Wars actress Gina Carano to produce an upcoming film exclusively for DailyWire members.
00:36:02.000Gina, if you're unaware, was the star of the hit Disney Plus Star Wars show, The Mandalorian.
00:36:06.000was dropped from the series and by her talent agency after a series of social media posts criticizing the woke mob.
00:36:12.000Within hours of us making that announcement, the news went absolutely viral from USA Today to the LA Times.
00:36:16.000Whether it was shock or outrage, there was a massive show of coverage.
00:36:19.000In fact, right now on IMDb, the most popular actress in America is Gina Carano.
00:36:24.000Headline after headline documented Gina's rejection of canceled culture.
00:36:29.000In this week's edition of Sunday Special, we are going to bring you Gina's side of the story in her first sit-down interview since getting canceled.
00:36:35.000She's been smeared by some of those powerful people in Hollywood.
00:36:38.000Now it's time for Gina to set the record straight.
00:36:40.000Be sure to tune in to the Sunday special at dailywire.com or YouTube this weekend to get the full story.
00:36:46.000Our interview with Gina and the movie deal, it's more than a statement.
00:36:48.000It is fighting back against the totalitarian, authoritarian, woke mob, and the leftist narrative that has dominated our culture for so long.
00:36:55.000In Gina's own words, they cannot cancel us if we don't let them.
00:37:56.000This is having a dramatic impact on the social fabric.
00:37:58.000It's something I've been talking about for a very long time.
00:38:01.000It is very, very bad for the country, and the left has wanted it for a long time.
00:38:04.000Ever since the 60s, when the left declared that the personal is political, meaning that whatever you do in your personal life is actively a political move, right?
00:38:15.000Where you went to school is political.
00:38:16.000What this leads to is identity groups based on politics, and those identity groups feel threatened the moment somebody disagrees with them.
00:38:24.000That leads to a tearing apart of the culture.
00:38:31.000Being black is being in an identity group, at the very least, because if somebody attacks the color of your skin, that is an attack on an immutable characteristic shared by millions of other people.
00:38:40.000If somebody attacks your politics, that is not an identity group.
00:38:48.000So there's a difference between attacking somebody for race and attacking someone for politics.
00:38:52.000But the problem is, once you make politics your identity, and that identity is expressed in a wide variety of ways across all of American life, what you end up with is a mathematics whereby where you shop is political, and if I don't shop at your store, this means I'm insulting you, and I'm offending you, and I've done something wrong to you as a human being.
00:39:10.000Reason Magazine has a great piece out today by J.D.
00:39:14.000Taseel, titled, Politics is Seeping into Our Daily Life and Ruining Everything.
00:39:17.000He runs down some of the data on this point.
00:39:20.000According to a new paper in the Journal of Public Policy and Marketing by researchers from Arizona State University, the University of Wyoming, and four other U.S.
00:39:27.000universities, quote, political polarization is having far-reaching impacts on American life, harming consumer welfare, and creating challenges for people ranging from elected officials and policymakers to corporate executives and marketers.
00:39:38.000The researchers find that people's chosen political identities become self-reinforcing through associations with groups with shared beliefs.
00:39:44.000Our associations can even create a group-shared specific reality that makes it harder to relate to those with opposing views.
00:39:51.000According to the researchers, as society has become increasingly polarized, politicians' objectives diverge and their animosity toward the opposition grows, thereby reducing opportunity for compromise.
00:40:00.000Partisan incivility is a major reason for failed dialogue, uncivil exchanges result in disagreement, and greater polarization regardless of the evidence presented.
00:40:10.000According to Reason, people's partisan identities influence the range of people with whom they are willing to have relationships, the brands they purchase, and the jobs they take.
00:40:18.000In an era of public health concerns, people choose positions on matters like vaccines or mask-wearing, not based on rational assessment of the issues, but on a plug-and-play adoption of their tribe's stances.
00:40:26.000The researchers say, with political positions influencing decisions, people may sacrifice wages, lose out on jobs, make suboptimal purchases, and disregard opportunities to save.
00:40:35.000For example, research has found that employees accept lower wages to work for politically like-minded entities, and people may select higher-priced products or ones that offer less functional value.
00:40:45.000Polarization has the potential to prevent neighbors or colleagues of opposing parties from developing friendships.
00:40:49.000This ultimately deprives individuals of intellectual diversity among other things.
00:40:54.000Now, this all builds on a mountain of data.
00:40:56.000There was a 2018 survey that found that nearly two-thirds of consumers around the world will either buy or boycott a brand solely because of its position on a social or political issue.
00:41:05.000In the United States, that number was 59%.
00:41:08.000In 2020, there was another survey that reported that 83% of millennials find it important for the companies they buy from to align with their values.
00:41:15.000Which means that the price and quality of the products is actually secondary, which is a problem in the marketplace.
00:41:20.000If you want better things, you need competition in the marketplace, not based on the politics of the corporation, but instead based on the quality of the product.
00:41:27.000That's how we all get better products.
00:41:29.000The reason you get new iPhones every couple of years is because Android is on their tail.
00:41:33.000But if you've decided that you don't like the politics and Android, as you're always going to buy the iPhone, well, that just means that you are providing a base for a company that no longer has to innovate.
00:41:42.000Christine Moorman wrote for Forbes, Since then, the trend has only intensified.
00:41:45.000Political activism will help shape public opinion and potentially lead to lasting change while simultaneously cementing their reputations as moral leaders or change agents.
00:41:52.000Since then, the trend has only intensified.
00:41:56.000Recent events accelerate a broader movement in business to address social and political issues, according to a piece in the Wall Street Journal from January.
00:42:03.000Pennsylvania State University, Daniel, Professor Daniel Della Posta asked in a study published in June, 2020, what if polarization is less like a fence getting taller over time and more like an oil spill that spreads from its source to gradually taint more and more previously apolitical attitudes, opinions, and preferences?
00:42:19.000Even many initially apolitical lifestyle characteristics, from musical taste to belief in astrology, can become politicized as signals for deeper beliefs and preferences, a tendency most aliently captured in the popular image of the latte liberal.
00:42:31.000It also happens to be that when you do all of this, what you do is make American life worse, because there is no common way that we can share anything.
00:42:38.000If I share a product with somebody, I have now poisoned the product.
00:42:44.000There was a survey that was done fairly recently, in which, it was from Harvard Business Review, I believe it was 2018, and they created essentially a focus group.
00:42:53.000And the focus group was made up of conservatives and liberals and people in between.
00:42:57.000And the focus group examined two companies, One company, well, actually three.
00:43:31.000Obviously, that was all liberals and leftists who decided that they hated this corporation.
00:43:35.000They understand that the default is that corporations are liberal.
00:43:39.000This is the thing about renormalization of American politics.
00:43:42.000I've talked about this at length, and this is really what Reason is talking about.
00:43:45.000The renormalization of American politics happens when one intransigent group of people decide that they are not going to go along with commonly held beliefs, and they cudgel everybody else into silence.
00:44:11.000They feel like they can't speak up and they can't speak out and they can't just, you know, go to a ballgame or go to a restaurant or decide what kind of product they want without having to fear that they are going to be judged and castigated.
00:44:22.000That's a terrible thing for the country.
00:44:23.000It means that we have nothing in common anymore.
00:44:26.000I mean, it's been a long time since we could even pretend that we had the American flag in common.
00:44:30.000Half the country thinks the American flag stands for oppression, apparently.
00:44:33.000So what exactly is going to hold us together?
00:44:35.000As things become more and more political, things get worse and worse.
00:44:49.000The local authoritarians don't want you to know your neighbor.
00:44:51.000In fact, if you get to know your neighbor and your neighbor happens to be a Republican, they will cancel you.
00:44:55.000They will go after you for having the temerity to have a conversation with that person.
00:45:00.000This is the culture that we now occupy, and it's a culture that we're going to have to fight back against if we actually wish to preserve the country moving forward into the future.
00:45:07.000Unfortunately, too many people don't want to preserve the country this way, which is the reason why you are seeing that big tech is about to be brought in before House Democrats, and they're going to grill top executives at Facebook, Google, and Twitter as Democrats take fresh aim at the tech giant for failing to crack down on dangerous political falsehoods and disinformation.
00:45:26.000The idea here, again from House Democrats, being that if you allow people to speak freely in ways we disagree with, you're making the country worse.
00:45:31.000No, you know what makes the country worse?
00:45:33.000The idea that we don't all get to have our opinion and then have conversation about those opinions, lest we grant credence to the evil among us.
00:45:40.000That is not treating your fellow American as a fellow American, it's treating your fellow American as an enemy.
00:45:44.000And that's the direction in which we are moving.
00:45:46.000Alrighty, well on that depressing note, we will see you here next week.
00:46:03.000Also remember to download The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special, very special episode this Sunday.
00:46:09.000Like Saved by the Bell, except with Gina Carano, where Gina Carano is going to discuss everything that's been going down for the past couple of weeks.