Ben Shapiro speaks on the impact of the ongoing government shutdown and why you should be diversified in precious metals. He also discusses the dangers of over complicating the process of finding a solution to the problems we are facing and why it s time to diversify your asset base. Ben Shapiro is the host of the Ben Shapiro Show on Fox News Radio and host of The Daily Wire's Conspiracy Theories. He is a regular contributor to the Financial Times and has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and the New York Times, among other publications. Ben is also the author of the bestselling book, "The Dark Side of the Street: How to Succeed in an Uncertain World," which is available in Kindle, iBook, Paperback, Hardcover, and Audio Book format. His newest novel Other Words For Smoke is out now and available for pre-order on Amazon Prime, Blu-ray, and also rental on Vimeo. See linktr.ee/TheBenShapiroShow on the Apple App Store or Google Play. Thanks for listening and share the podcast with your fellow podcasting friends! Timestamps: 5:00 - How do you know when the government shutdown is over? 6:30 - What's next? 7:15 - Where do we go from here? 8:40 - What is the long-term impact? 9:20 - How will the shutdown affect the economy? 10:00 11: What are we going to do in the long term? 15:00- What are the risks? 16: What will the longterm effects of the shutdown? 17: How will we know what's going to happen? 19:30 21: Does the government have a chance to get back on track? 22:15 23:40 24:00 -- What will we learn from this? 25:30 -- Is it a good thing? 26:40 -- Is there a silver and gold and gold? 27:10 - What s going to be the best option? 29: What s the best thing we can do? 30:00 | Does it matter? 35:00 Is it possible? 36:00 Does the economy better than gold and silver? 31:30 | What are you going to get out of this situation? 32:00 + 33:00 Thoughts on the future?
00:00:22.000Before we begin, I want to take a moment to give a shout out to all of our advertising partners who helped make this show possible.
00:00:27.000Obviously during down economic times, it is very difficult for everybody, particularly people who are in the viewing audience and the listening audience to patronize our advertisers.
00:00:38.000We got to keep business going in this country and our advertisers make it possible for us to continue.
00:00:42.000to bring you the news and commentary you want each and every day.
00:00:46.000Speaking of which, right now, it is fairly obvious that the markets are volatile.
00:00:50.000We don't know what the future is going to hold.
00:00:51.000One thing that we can fairly bet is that at some point, the government is going to have to tax or inflate its way out of the debts that it's currently sustaining.
00:00:56.000This is why you should be diversified at least a little bit into precious metals.
00:00:59.000Over 26 million people have now lost their jobs, upward of 30 actually, from the economic fallout of coronavirus.
00:01:04.000of coronavirus, even with the stock market having a slight recovery, we don't know the long-term impact of this many workers being displaced all at once.
00:01:05.000Even with the stock market having a slight recovery, we don't know the long-term impact of this many workers being displaced all at once.
00:01:10.000That's only going to be felt over time.
00:01:10.000That's only going to be felt over time.
00:01:12.000We have no idea what's going to happen next.
00:01:12.000We have no idea what's going to happen next.
00:01:13.000So what exactly would be the prudent thing to do?
00:01:14.000So what exactly would be the prudent thing to do?
00:02:12.000The big question, obviously, in all of this COVID-19 situation is where we go from here.
00:02:18.000And nobody seems to have a good answer to this.
00:02:20.000And the easy answer is we just do what the science says.
00:02:23.000But as I've said, the science doesn't answer these questions.
00:02:25.000The science is merely an input that you put into whatever formula you are using to determine the output.
00:02:31.000Science can just give you how many deaths they expect to happen if given particular factors, but they don't tell you how you're supposed to weigh the value of those deaths against the value of the entire global shutdown of the economy.
00:02:42.000They can't really tell you how many people are going to commit suicide, how many lives will be ruined, how many women will be the victims of domestic abuse because of all of this, how many kids will have exacerbated mental conditions because of all of this.
00:02:51.000There's no way for the scientists to tell you this.
00:02:53.000And I understand in difficult situations when we're looking for some level of peace of mind, we want to think that there are these experts out there, this group of unnamed experts who are going to solve all of our problems for us.
00:03:09.000So Neil Ferguson is the guy behind that famous study from Britain that suggested 2.2 million deaths in the United States from COVID-19.
00:03:15.000Now it turns out that those numbers are probably going to be off by at least one scale of magnitude.
00:03:21.000Even if the United States were to see extraordinarily heavy levels of death in the United States over the coming year, the numbers are never going to reach 2.2 million.
00:03:29.000They're just not going to hit 2.2 million.
00:03:33.000Even if we opened up everything, which nobody is advocating, even if we opened up everything willy-nilly, let all the old age homes just be invaded by COVID-19, the number of dead in the United States is not going to be 2.2 million.
00:03:43.000There's There's no other study that supported that 2.2 million number.
00:03:46.000Okay, well, Neil Ferguson was the one who put out that study over at Imperial College.
00:03:49.000It was widely derided by people from Oxford University to even the University of Washington as too high.
00:03:55.000Well, now, Neil Ferguson has been fired.
00:04:01.000By the way, he had also been the author of a study about HIV-AIDS.
00:04:04.000that it suggested a death toll way above what it eventually ended up being.
00:04:06.000He had suggested the bird flu was going to be significantly more deadly than it ended up being.
00:04:10.000The nice thing about being a modeler is that you never get penalized for having a model that is too dire.
00:04:14.000You only get penalized for having a model that is too sanguine about the situation.
00:04:18.000If you're Paul Ehrlich at University of Berkeley and you suggest in the 1960s that billions will die of global starvation, and then none of that materializes, in fact, the opposite happens, you still have a job at University of Berkeley.
00:04:28.000If you suggest that everything is going to be fine and then a billion people die of starvation, then you lose your job.
00:04:33.000So anyway, this guy didn't lose his job for the bad modeling at Imperial College.
00:04:36.000Instead, he lost his job because he broke social distancing rules to meet his married lover, which is just a delicious little side treat in all of this situation.
00:04:47.000So Neil Ferguson had stumped for vast lockdowns across the UK, except when it applied to his married lover, who is the mother of two, who had stopped by his apartment and they did not engage in social distancing.
00:04:58.000According to the UK Telegraph, Neil Ferguson allowed the woman to visit him at home during the lockdown while lecturing the public on the need for strict social distancing in order to reduce the spread of coronavirus.
00:05:07.000The woman lives with her husband and their children in another house.
00:05:14.000And again, that doesn't mean that his models were necessarily wrong.
00:05:18.000What made the models wrong is that the models were wrong, not that the man was shitting a married woman during his off hours.
00:05:23.000But it does speak to the idea that there are a lot of experts out there who are telling you to social distance, who are telling you that it's imperative that you lock down, who are not, in fact, obeying these rules themselves.
00:05:31.000The name Chris Cuomo springs to mind, lecturing everybody about not leaving home while biking around and presumably infecting everybody within a six-foot radius.
00:05:39.000In any case, There are new models out, and the new models are suggesting elevated levels of death.
00:05:55.000But if you recognize this, then people yell at you.
00:05:57.000Because we're supposed to believe that there is a policy out there, a unicorn policy, that allows us to not completely tank the entire world economy, Until the end of time, and also saves every single life.
00:06:10.000And if you mention that there are trade-offs to policy, as I've been saying for a while, and this is my bugaboo right now, is that nobody will honestly discuss the trade-offs to policy.
00:06:16.000So instead, we have stupid conversations about, if you don't like my policy, it's because you want people to die.
00:06:22.000Like, I'm sorry, that is complete idiocy.
00:06:47.000But on a political policymaking level, we make risk calculations about the risks we are willing to undertake in public life literally all the time.
00:06:57.000If Andrew Cuomo really believed in public policy terms, not in moral terms, in public policy terms, that you have to mitigate the risk to every human life down to zero, he could never discuss reopening because there is no bar that would be low enough to clear for that.
00:07:13.000Cuomo yesterday suggesting a human life is priceless, period.
00:07:16.000But if that were the case, you could never reopen, including in upstate New York, including in rural areas, because any time you tell people they can leave their homes, you've increased their risk.
00:08:20.000Now, a human life is priceless in moral terms, meaning that we have to prohibit murder, right?
00:08:25.000We have to prohibit, people have said, when I point this out, in public policy, we actually calculate the value of human lives on actuarial tables, right?
00:08:32.000It's called quality-adjusted life years.
00:08:34.000It is a chief factor in every calculation we ever do about public policy.
00:08:39.000Because if we actually believed that every human life was quote-unquote priceless in public policy terms, we would put you in a plastic bubble and leave you there and feed you through a feeding tube, presumably.
00:08:50.000When it comes to protecting human life from others' predations, that would be like abortion, for example, then of course there's no countervailing cost in terms of stopping people from killing other people.
00:09:00.000You may think that there's a priority to a woman being able to kill an unborn child.
00:09:04.000I do not think that that is a priority.
00:09:06.000I think the priority is saving the person's life.
00:09:10.000There's a trade-off, but the trade-off there does not look like the trade-off with regard to destroying the entire American economy, for example, which would involve the deaths of presumably hundreds of thousands or millions of people and cost you hundreds of millions of people as well.
00:09:24.000When you outlaw murder, there presumably is a countervailing cost to outlawing murder, namely the murderers go to jail.
00:09:30.000But that is not a cost that stacks up against the loss of human life.
00:09:33.000When it comes to public policymaking, every human life is priceless in the sense that you cannot deliberately take the life of another human being.
00:09:40.000But in terms of what levels of risk are we willing to tolerate as a society in order to live free, there the answer is, well, it's not quite priceless because you are then asked to value your own life.
00:09:51.000And we as a society are asked to make the decision as to what levels of risk we're willing to tolerate for everybody in the public sphere.
00:09:57.000This is the question of public policy.
00:09:59.000And so it is a cop out for Andrew Cuomo to say, every life is priceless when it comes to policymaking.
00:10:04.000Because again, he doesn't even believe that.
00:10:05.000If he believed that, then he wouldn't be opening up at all.
00:10:07.000There'd be no situation under which you could open up.
00:10:10.000And so this has become the go-to argument of people who don't even want to have a discussion about reopening or how to reopen in a responsible fashion.
00:10:18.000This is how you end up with this idiotic tweet with 30,000, 34,000 retweets from Kumail Nanjiani.
00:10:26.000A guy from Silicon Valley, I guess he's in one of the new Marvel movies, if eventually we go back to the movies, he tweeted out, after weeks of careful preparation, planning and strategizing, most of the country has landed on the following approach.
00:10:36.000Let's just open it all up and see what happens.
00:10:38.000Not a single governor has settled on that approach.
00:10:50.000But the way that people talk about this, in order to avoid the discussion, is by suggesting that the alternative to lockdowns are completely opening it up without thinking about how to protect the elderly, without thinking about how to protect nursing homes, without thinking about how to protect the vulnerable.
00:11:06.000But at some point, one of the conversations that we are going to have is, again, what level of risk are we willing to tolerate?
00:11:10.000And in past episodes, I've talked about the need to make those risk calculations with regard to everything from the number of kids in public schools to the speed limits, right?
00:11:22.000If you wanted to prevent deaths and every life were quote-unquote priceless in public policy terms, you would lower the speed limits to two miles an hour.
00:11:29.000Because elderly people and 16 and 17 year olds are disproportionately killed in car accidents.
00:11:34.000We tolerate a certain level of risk in life.
00:11:36.000Toleration of risk in public policy does assume that we can value certain economic costs against the additional risk that people are going to hurt themselves.
00:12:03.000They say governors in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware have a lot to consider before fully reopening.
00:12:08.000If they open too quickly, that could result in more deaths, according to a new model from the Wharton School.
00:12:12.000Reopening states' economies certainly comes with a cost, and that could result in more deaths.
00:12:17.000But some economists argue not only can you put a value on human life, but they urge elected officials to do just that when making policy decisions.
00:12:22.000Right, because literally every policy decision does calculate out how much it is going to cost to do X, right?
00:12:32.000The entirety of human life cannot be reduced to a dollar number, obviously.
00:12:35.000But when you are talking about reducing economic activity to dollar numbers or quality of life to dollar numbers, you are now taking a bunch of things that are larger than dollar numbers and you're reducing it to dollar numbers so that you can actually make a calculation.
00:12:47.000Because otherwise you simply cannot do public policy.
00:12:49.000So, Alex Arnone, a senior analyst at the Penn Wharton Budget Model, he says, the economic costs have been enormous.
00:12:55.000We are suffering really significant, unprecedented costs as a result of these policies.
00:13:31.000In reality, you have to figure that if everybody stays home and we lose 18.6 million jobs on a permanent basis, it's not going to be $7 trillion.
00:13:42.000But let's assume that those $7 trillion are enough to tide us over for all of the job loss, the 20 million's job lost, if the stay-at-home orders continue until the end of June.
00:13:54.000Scenario two is the partial reopening, right?
00:13:56.000That is social distancing, 25% reopening of restaurants, we keep the theaters closed, we keep all the public events closed, They say that by the end of June, we'd have 162,000 additional deaths.
00:14:51.000So this is the Wharton School calculation.
00:14:54.000Now, the more interesting calculation comes about when you look at what they value human life.
00:14:59.000Okay, so pre-COVID-19, the Center for Disease Control did this, right?
00:15:02.000The Center for Disease Control actually had calculations where they determined the quote-unquote value of human life in economic terms, like how much it costs to the economy if somebody dies when they are young, for example.
00:15:11.000And other federal agencies, their baseline was roughly, on average, $10 million a person.
00:15:17.000That a human life is worth that $10 million.
00:15:22.000This is from the CDC and other federal agencies.
00:15:25.000So if you actually use that calculation for a second, what that would suggest is that even if we only spent $7 trillion, which we are not going to under scenario number one, and we saved approximately 232,000 lives from scenario three, where everybody just goes willy-nilly back out to work, That would mean that you're spending about $60 million per life in order to save each one of those lives based on the economic cost, which is six times what the calculation is for the CDC in terms of value of a human life.
00:15:50.000Now, again, maybe that valuation is wrong, but we should at least acknowledge that the valuation that we are using in unspoken fashion is way higher than any other valuation ever used in human history when it comes to policymaking along these lines.
00:16:03.000If you were to do a partial reopening and you were to lose an additional 45,000 lives, You would still be spending about 42, and let's assume it would cost $5 trillion, which of course is not true.
00:16:14.000But let's assume it would cost $5 trillion.
00:16:16.000You're still spending about $42 million per life saved.
00:16:20.000Then scenario three is you spend $0, right, because presumably most people keep their jobs.
00:16:25.000And so you're coming in underneath that $10 million.
00:16:27.000So the answer, if you were looking to spend about $10 million to save each life, would be somewhere between the partial reopening and the full reopening.
00:16:35.000It is also necessary to look at how much money you would have to spend per job saved.
00:16:40.000So in terms of amounts of money that you'd be spending per job saved, if you were looking at the amounts of money, $7 trillion, right, over the 232,000 additional lives, then what you would be looking at presumably is per job saved you'd be spending Not all that much money, right?
00:17:02.000You'd be spending a lot less money per job saved in terms of the worst case scenario.
00:17:07.000So, is this a case for the worst case scenario?
00:17:09.000This isn't the case for reopen it all up.
00:17:11.000Because again, there are certain basic things that we obviously should be doing.
00:17:15.000It is also necessary to mention in these models that these models only go through June, so the numbers could balloon way further than this, right?
00:18:33.000So if this thing is as deadly as it's going to be and we don't overwhelm the healthcare system, what people were worried about was specifically This area above the line, these would be excess deaths.
00:18:43.000But in terms of total number of infections, the total number of infections is going to be exactly the same.
00:18:47.000So when we look at those models that look through June, that is not enough.
00:18:50.000You would actually have to look at the model through the extent of the year and then decide on economic costs here.
00:18:54.000These are all the calculations that actually go into the calculations, but it's important to note them because no one is willing to discuss this stuff out loud.
00:19:00.000It is politically unpalatable to discuss this stuff out loud, which means that the policy is going to end up being really stupid.
00:19:07.000That the policy is going to end up being super dumb.
00:19:09.000Because if you can't discuss out loud the actual considerations that are going in, what you end up with is, on the one hand, the posturing of people who suggest that they're going to save every life, Andrew Cuomo is not going to save every life, the dummy just started cleaning the subways five seconds ago.
00:19:38.000But we've reduced our conversation to the dumbest possible point.
00:19:41.000We're gonna start having to have these tough conversations about when to reopen, what the actual costs are, what are the monetary costs, whether we are using anything besides gut.
00:19:49.000It's so funny, people say data and science and Trump is using his gut about reopening.
00:19:53.000I'll tell you who's using their gut about reopening.
00:19:54.000People who refuse to even have the conversation about mathematical values that are used in every other actuarial investigation of every other policy in human history.
00:21:36.000So, President Trump is getting all sorts of flack for mentioning the fact that it is indeed time to open and that we are going to have to figure out how to reopen in decent fashion.
00:21:44.000Texas Governor Greg Abbott is taking a hit.
00:21:46.000So here is Trump yesterday mentioning, yeah, we can't keep this closed forever.
00:22:31.000Apparently, the call-ins to suicide hotlines are up 1,000%.
00:22:35.000Apparently, people are not going in for chemo treatments.
00:22:38.000Those quote-unquote elective surgeries that actually help people's quality of life, including the elderly, those are not being performed.
00:22:43.000Medical personnel are being laid off across the country when these hospitals are not even near capacity because people are not performing elective surgeries.
00:22:49.000Here's Trump mentioning all of this, but apparently it's very bad to mention this.
00:22:52.000If you mention this, you're a bad, bad man.
00:23:46.000There's no great win one way or the other.
00:23:50.000Okay, so, President Trump is right about this.
00:23:52.000Also, the Texas governor, Greg Abbott, who's ripped up and down because he was on a phone call, apparently, and on this private phone call, Greg Abbott suggested that, you know what?
00:24:00.000If we reopen, that's going to add risk.
00:24:26.000Those people are not very likely, when I say not very likely, I mean exorbitantly unlikely to die of COVID-19.
00:24:32.000And to pretend that everybody is equally susceptible or that you cannot open in a responsible fashion, namely by starting by protecting nursing homes, which have been responsible for 40 to 50% of all deaths in the EU and in California.
00:24:44.000In New York, a lot of people have been dying in their apartments because nursing homes in New York City are not like a huge thing.
00:24:48.000They're kind of bigger across the state because of the heavy population.
00:24:52.000But the fact is that if you protected the nursing homes, you would lower the number of deaths across the United States overall, and certainly in Europe, by anywhere from 20 to 50 percent, which would be near miraculous.
00:25:05.000But Greg Abbott was being ripped up and down for recognizing that there are additional risks when you open things up.
00:25:12.000And when people are ripping on Abbott for this or ripping on Trump for this, it's because they do not wish to come to the grips with the reality of public policymaking.
00:25:19.000Instead, they're involved in this idiotic political calculation that suggests that we are all supposed to pretend that public policy has no trade-offs.
00:25:28.000It's what makes nonpartisan issues like risk calculation into partisan issues, when you suggest that people actually want people to die in order to reopen the economy.
00:25:40.000How do we know reopening businesses won't result in faster spread or more cases of COVID-19?
00:25:48.000Listen, the fact of the matter is pretty much every scientific and medical report shows that whenever you have a reopening, whether you want to call it a reopening of business or just a reopening of society in the aftermath of something like this, that whether you want to call it a reopening of business or just a reopening of society in the It's almost ipso facto.
00:26:22.000I've provided several different possibilities here.
00:26:25.000None of them involve full lockdown forever.
00:26:27.000Those possibilities range from the controlled avalanche strategy proposed by Israeli scientists in which we protect the elderly, we protect the most vulnerable, and everybody else is encouraged to actually go into the population and interact And to obtain an immunity to it, because if you are young and healthy, again, it is very unlikely this does severe damage to you, and you move toward herd immunity.
00:26:46.000In controlled fashion, meaning that you still do some social distancing, but the reality is that over time you actually want people to get this so it moves through the population, get herd immunity.
00:26:56.000Possibility number two, you go out, you continue to socially distance, you wear a mask, you do protect the nursing homes, the economy really takes a hit, like a more severe hit than it would otherwise.
00:27:05.000And it takes longer to reach herd immunity, but at least you haven't killed that many people in terms of the increased risk in the amount of times it takes to develop a therapeutic or vaccine.
00:27:14.000That you're hoping for a real change on the ground.
00:27:46.000A lot of the essential workers, you know what's happening with the essential workers?
00:27:48.000Many of them are disproportionately, essential workers, particularly in the healthcare industry, like nurses or delivery people, disproportionately minority and poor.
00:27:57.000Those people are already out interacting.
00:27:59.000Those people are already getting COVID.
00:28:00.000The people we're talking about going back to work are largely not blue collar workers.
00:28:04.000And the people who are finding it very easy to stay shut down forever are people who can sit in their basement with a step and repeat behind them on CNN and get paid.
00:30:18.000My stylist couldn't feed their families.
00:30:19.000So before Luther was sentenced to a week in jail, the judge gave her an opportunity to apologize and promise not to reopen her salon until she was allowed to do so.
00:30:32.000I've never been in this position before, and it's not someplace that I want to be.
00:30:39.000But I have to disagree with you, sir, when you say that I'm selfish because feeding my kids is not selfish.
00:30:50.000I have hairstylists that are going hungry because they'd rather feed their kids.
00:30:56.000So, sir, if you think the law is more important than kids getting fed, then please go ahead with your decision, but I am not going to shut the salon.
00:31:05.000Okay, and she, by the way, she was willing to socially distance inside the salon.
00:31:09.000She was willing to do mask wearing inside the salon.
00:31:12.000The only difference between what she was jailed for and not being in jail was one week.
00:31:17.000Because by the end of the week, guess what Texas is doing?
00:31:19.000They're opening up all the salons with social distancing and with mask wearing.
00:31:26.000And it does betray, for a certain group of people in the United States, a real Feeling that is antithetical to freedom itself.
00:31:36.000I'll give you an example of this from a columnist at the New York Times momentarily.
00:31:40.000First, let us talk about the simple fact that the job market right now is a bit of a mess.
00:31:45.000If you need a job, the best place you can go is ZipRecruiter.
00:31:47.000And if you are looking to hire, ZipRecruiter is going to be the best way for you to find the best qualified employees.
00:31:52.000ZipRecruiter is doing deeply important work right now at a time when the job market is in complete flux.
00:31:56.000As we move back into normalization, ZipRecruiter is going to become more and more important.
00:32:01.000Go register over there right now at ziprecruiter.com slash worktogether.
00:32:04.000ZipRecruiter's app will send you up-to-date job openings so you can be one of the first to apply.
00:32:08.000And if you're actively hiring, ZipRecruiter will invite candidates to apply to your most urgent roles, making it faster and easier to reach the people you need.
00:32:14.000By connecting people who need jobs and companies that need people, ZipRecruiter is working with all of us so we can continue to move forward.
00:32:48.000Alrighty, we're gonna get to more of this because, again, Undergirding a lot of the arguments or non-arguments about public policy here?
00:32:55.000is an actual antipathy toward American freedom.
00:32:58.000I'll give you a perfect example of this in just a moment.
00:33:00.000First, I want to take a moment to tell you about The Daily Wire's newest, most exclusive membership tier, the All Access Insider.
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00:34:09.000So when I said that there are people out there who seem to be rooting for the lockdowns because they don't actually like freedom very much.
00:34:16.000Charlie Warzal is an opinion writer at large for The New York Times.
00:34:18.000He has a piece today titled, Open States, Lots of Guns.
00:34:21.000America is paying a heavy price for freedom.
00:34:24.000And he uses the same logic with regards to coronavirus that he uses with regard to guns.
00:34:29.000Namely, you shouldn't be able to own a gun as a normal law-abiding citizen because apparently this raises the risk of gun violence in your state.
00:34:38.000He mentions a tweet from a friend of mine, actually my editor over at Broadside Books.
00:34:50.000We get less vigilant as it slows very spread as it very slowly spreads.
00:34:54.000By December, we're close to normal, but still losing 1,500 people a day.
00:34:57.000As we tick past 300,000 dead, most people aren't concerned.
00:34:59.000Wurzel said, this hit me like a ton of bricks because just how plausible it seemed.
00:35:04.000The day I read Nelson's tweet, 1,723 Americans were reported to have died from the virus, and yet their collective passing was hardly mourned.
00:35:10.000After all, how to distinguish those souls from the 2,097 who perished the day before or the 1,558 who died the day after?
00:35:17.000And then he says, there's a national precedent for Nelson's hypothetical, America's response to gun violence and school shootings.
00:35:23.000He says, as a country, we seem resigned to preventable firearm deaths.
00:35:26.000So just like The reality is that the that freedom of guns means that some people get bad guns, but also that you can protect against bad people.
00:35:37.000The American freedom to keep and bear arms is bad because according to him, it means more dead Americans.
00:35:42.000Now, you can make the counter argument, which is that the people who have guns are getting them in many cases and using them for crime are not people who tend to abide by the law in the first place.
00:35:50.000That banning assault weapons isn't going to be effective.
00:35:52.000But even taking his logic, even taking his baseline logic, which is that additional risks in American life come with additional American freedoms.
00:35:59.000The end point of his logic is that if you want no risk, there can be no freedom.
00:36:07.000He says, left to their own devices, states are opening up many anxiously and with little idea as to how it'll play out.
00:36:13.000The White House could lean on governors to slow the reopening process or urge caution until we can fully establish test and trace strategies that have worked in countries like South Korea.
00:36:21.000Instead, the administration seems to be cheering on the reopening while internally preparing for a substantial increase of loss of lives.
00:36:27.000An internal document based on modeling by FEMA projects the daily death toll will reach about 3,000 on June 1st, a 70% increase from the May 1st number of about 1,750.
00:36:36.000Along the same lines, on April 30th, the day after Trump told Americans the virus was going to go, it's going to leave, it'll be gone, NBC News reported the federal government had ordered more than 100,000 body bags.
00:36:46.000And then he, again, likens this to gun control policy, suggesting, well, if we just ban the freedom to keep and bear arms, there'd be less gun deaths.
00:36:53.000Same way if we just ban freedom totally, then presumably there'd be less coronavirus deaths.
00:36:58.000All right, so I'm going to take up the other half of that argument.
00:37:00.000Which is, freedom does come with additional risk.
00:37:26.000Okay, but what he is talking about basically is, you know what would be great is if we banned all guns, presumably by the same logic, if we banned all freedom, there would be no coronavirus deaths.
00:37:34.000Just in terms of numbers, by the way, I think that it is important to mention right here.
00:37:37.000That if we lose 2,000 people a day from coronavirus for the next several months, which again, there are very few projections that expect this, but let's say that that happens.
00:37:47.000This will be a horrible, terrible thing.
00:37:49.000That also does not answer the question as to whether we will lose that many people in total over the course of the next 12 months from coronavirus.
00:37:57.000There is no alternative being provided.
00:37:59.000I mean, the fact also remains that in the United States, we lose approximately 2,000 people every single day from both heart disease and from cancer.
00:38:07.000About 600,000 people die every year from heart disease and another 600,000 people die every year from cancer.
00:38:12.000But he says, the idea of freedom, I mean, this is really the root of the debate.
00:38:16.000Charlie Warsaw writes, the idea of freedom is an excuse to serve oneself before others and a shield to hide from responsibility.
00:38:23.000If that's how you think of freedom, we should end freedom.
00:38:26.000Now, I think that people can be both free and virtuous.
00:38:29.000People can be free and they can attempt to mitigate risk for others.
00:38:32.000This is why I think that we should tranche populations and people who are healthier should go back to work first.
00:38:36.000And if we think that there's a therapeutic or a vaccine on the way in fairly short order, we should socially distance in order to restart the economy, but also ensure that we don't have a vast spread before a vaccine can be developed.
00:38:49.000But according to Charlie Warzel, the American people cannot be trusted, and thus freedom must be ended.
00:38:54.000You can't be trusted with a gun as a law-abiding citizen, because the very presence of a gun means the presence of freedom, and the presence of freedom means more people dying from gun violence.
00:39:02.000And the same thing is true of coronavirus.
00:39:04.000The presence of freedom means more people going out and acting stupidly, and that means we cannot have freedom at all.
00:39:10.000Well, that is an argument that, as we used to say in law school, proves too much.
00:40:12.000Alright, I mean, if this is what- if this is what coronavirus lockdowns look like in the end, There's no policy that's been proposed that makes this look okay.
00:40:25.000And there's no actual discussion of the data.
00:40:26.000And there's no discussion of any of this.
00:40:27.000Because everybody who wants the lockdowns and is comfortable with curbs on American freedom is just shouting at the moon that every life is priceless without recognizing that every single element of public policy is based on the premise that risks to life are calculable when it comes to freedoms and prosperity and all the things that actually make America worth living in.
00:40:46.000And meanwhile, you got Democrats who are taking advantage of the situation to say that the federal government should bail them out.
00:40:50.000So California, as they call for a full lockdown, see this is one of the issues here, is that states are now looking to the federal government to bail them out.
00:40:56.000So as the lockdowns continue in states like New York and in California, they're looking increasingly to the federal government to bail them out.
00:41:01.000California has now borrowed from the federal government to make their unemployment payments.
00:41:06.000Well, why should the federal government fill in California's holes when it comes to their own unemployment system?
00:41:17.000Here's what the Wall Street Journal reports.
00:41:19.000About 3.7 million people have filed unemployment claims in California since mid-March.
00:41:23.000California had about $1.9 billion in its unemployment trust fund in mid-April, down from $3.1 billion at the end of February, the month before the coronavirus upended the U.S.
00:41:32.000The state's Labor Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
00:41:37.000California serves as an early sign of the potential magnitude of federal assistance that could be required if states are to continue paying out jobless benefits.
00:41:45.000It is one of more than 20 states and jurisdictions that entered the current economic crisis without enough money in their unemployment trust funds to pay benefits through a year-long recession according to the Labor Department data.
00:41:55.000By that measure, California was prepared to make unemployment payments for just over two months in the event of a recession.
00:42:02.000So California was deeply irresponsible, decided to blow all of its money on crap union contracts with various public sector unions, and they didn't have money to pay unemployment insurance.
00:42:10.000And now it's up to people in other states to pay for all of that?
00:42:34.000Now this has led demagogues like Andrew Cuomo to suggest that the federal government needs to step in and fund the states.
00:42:40.000So here's Cuomo yesterday suggesting that New York needs to be funded.
00:42:44.000Now, last I checked, New York has the second richest citizen body in the United States, after California, and they tax them at exorbitant rates and yet they've run out of money incredibly quickly.
00:42:55.000Could that have to do with their crap spending habits and the bad union contracts they signed?
00:42:59.000Maybe it has to do with that, but according to Andrew Cuomo, it's up to the federal government to bail them out, of course, because you can always cast all responsibility at the feet of the federal government.
00:43:49.000When you look at the Republicans who now say, well, we don't want to help the Democratic states, they are actually the states that have been taking more every year.
00:44:19.000Okay, the way that he is calculating this is he is taking the tax dollars paid by New York citizens to the federal government and then the tax dollars received by New York citizens from the federal government.
00:44:27.000New York is a disproportionately wealthy state.
00:44:29.000California is a disproportionately wealthy state.
00:44:32.000It is not that the federal government takes money from the state of California and then only gives money back to the state of California.
00:44:38.000What he is talking about is the fact that Kentucky, for example, is a disproportionately poor state.
00:44:43.000So there are fewer people who are paying in federal income tax to the federal government, and there are more people who are receiving directly.
00:44:49.000But at no point does the state government actually act as the intermediary there.
00:44:53.000Basically, you're saying that poor people are receiving more money from the federal government than rich people.
00:44:58.000That is 100% true, and that rich people are paying more money into the federal government than they are receiving from the federal government.
00:45:04.000Another thing that happens to be true, the people who are disproportionately receiving money from the federal government tend to vote Democrat.
00:45:13.000What he's attempting to avoid is the reality of the situation, which is the reason that New York is in trouble, despite the richest population in America outside of California.
00:45:20.000Despite that, New York is in trouble because Andrew Cuomo couldn't get his spending habit under control.
00:45:25.000Neither could anybody else in New York.
00:45:36.000But this is just demagoguery to avoid responsibility, which is what Cuomo is apparently really good at.
00:45:40.000It is unbelievable to me, the man remains a popular governor, despite the fact that only now in May is he starting to clean the damn subways.
00:45:47.000That his original move with the nursing homes was, oh look, an old person who has COVID-19, let's send him back to the nursing home.
00:46:04.000Okay, time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
00:46:07.000So there is a new movie on Netflix that is a fun watch.
00:46:12.000It is, I will not say it is, you know, the world's most fun watch.
00:46:17.000It has some great action sequences is really what this comes down to.
00:46:19.000It's Chris Hemsworth running around Dhaka, Indonesia, and basically just Destroying everything.
00:46:25.000There's one about 20-minute action sequence that's getting a lot of attention in this movie, Extraction, because it is supposedly done in one shot.
00:46:31.000It is not done in one shot, obviously.
00:46:39.000The basic premise is basically the same as Man on Fire.
00:46:41.000Guy who is hired to extract a kid who's been kidnapped, and then things go wrong, and now he still has to extract the kid who's been kidnapped.
00:47:08.000Grab a hold of my vest and hang on as tight as you can.
00:47:21.000Okay, so the, uh, the actual best scene in this movie is actually a scene where Chris Hemsworth is forced to, um, to face down a herd of child soldiers because it is just hilarious watching a six-foot-four Nordic god basically throw around a bunch of 13-year-old children.
00:48:30.000Betsy DeVos, the Secretary of Education.
00:48:32.000The reason Betsy DeVos is super evil is because, according to the Washington Post, she plans to release as early as Wednesday her much-anticipated final rules governing how schools must investigate sexual assault allegations, bolstering the rights of the accused, according to people familiar with the matter.
00:48:45.000In its broad outlines, the sweeping regulation is unchanged from the proposed version released in 2018, though there were minor adjustments made throughout, according to one person familiar with the matter who was unauthorized to comment publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.
00:48:57.000The rules will give universities and colleges a clear but controversial roadmap for handling emotionally charged conflicts that often pit one student against another.
00:49:05.000They'll replace less formal guidance issued by the Obama administration that was friendlier to those making the allegations.
00:49:12.000The original Obama-era allegations did not give students the ability to confront their accuser or even to rebut the allegations.
00:49:18.000They basically made it so that an allegation was tantamount to guilt.
00:49:24.000Under the new rules, college students accused of sexual assault and harassment must be given the right to a live hearing and the ability to cross-examine their accuser as much as the proposed rule directed.
00:49:31.000Before, you didn't even have the right to confront your accuser and you weren't given the right to a live hearing.
00:49:36.000You were literally not given the right to a live hearing.
00:49:37.000If someone accuses you of rape and you say, no, that wasn't rape, that was a consensual sexual...
00:49:43.000And the old rules basically said you have no ability to defend yourself.
00:49:47.000Also, the rules also define sexual harassment narrowly, limiting it to conduct that is both severe and pervasive, not just one or the other.
00:49:54.000Well, again, that makes sense, because if the pervasiveness is, you look nice today, that's not sexual harassment.
00:50:02.000Okay, if the pervasiveness is you keep grabbing people's asses repeatedly, then it's got to be severe.
00:50:09.000I mean, first of all, that's sexual assault, right?
00:50:10.000If you actually physically grab someone, that's an assault.
00:50:36.000Because their suggestion is that Title IX regulations should basically allow people, with the allegation alone, to go ahead and condemn folks to the purgatory of guilt forever.
00:51:03.000This just says you have a right to defend yourself.
00:51:04.000USCC, USCCR, and legal affairs secretary for Gavin Newsom, the governor of California.
00:51:10.000She said, Betsy DeVos presides over taking us back to the bad old days that predate my birth when it was permissible to rape and sexually harass students with impunity.
00:52:30.000So 19-year-olds who are getting accused of sexual assault allegations, they don't have the right to defend themselves, according to Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi and the entire Democratic infrastructure.
00:52:38.000But 80-year-olds who are running for president, those people we just kind of let off the hook, right?
00:52:42.000I mean, they can just say, I didn't happen, it didn't happen, and we're basically done.
00:52:48.000And it demonstrates that when it comes to due process, the Democrats just don't believe in it.
00:52:53.000What Democrats actually believe in is that due process should only exist for people that they like.
00:52:58.000And people that they like include, generally, people who are not part of the quote-unquote power superstructure, right?
00:53:05.000So if you're a rich white male like Brett Kavanaugh, then you deserve no due process.
00:53:08.000This was an actual case made about Brett Kavanaugh.
00:53:10.000People say, well, he's a rich white male.
00:53:11.000He had an entitlement complex, and that's why he doesn't deserve to be on the Supreme Court.
00:53:16.000And they say the same thing about 19-year-old college students, right?
00:53:19.000Rich white males in college, the most privileged among us.
00:53:23.000But if you're a rich white privileged male like Joe Biden, and you're running for president, then we sort of let you off the hook.
00:53:29.000Due process is specifically due process because it equally applies to everyone.
00:53:33.000Equal protection of the law is equal protection of the law because it is supposed to apply to everyone.
00:53:37.000The fact that there's so many people on the left, Who wants to turn these standards on their head because they believe that equal protection of the law is inherently unequal because some people are less well situated than others.
00:53:48.000Therefore, those rich people don't deserve equal protection under the law.
00:53:51.000That's French Revolution off with their head kind of stuff.
00:53:54.000And that is exactly what Democrats have proposed with regard to Title IX.
00:53:56.000They're defending Joe Biden at the same time that they're ripping on exactly the same kind of protections Joe Biden will have to rely on in order to survive these sexual assault allegations.
00:54:06.000So the Lincoln Project is a group of people led by George Conway.
00:54:13.000And George Conway is, of course, Kellyanne's husband.
00:54:15.000This is a group of people who were anti-Trump Republicans in 2016 and never got over it and have decided better to submit.
00:54:23.000Many of the members of the Lincoln Project literally suggested they would vote for Bernie Sanders before Donald Trump, which doesn't seem super conservative to me.
00:54:39.000So they put out an ad within the last couple of days.
00:54:42.000This is the most depressing anti-American ad I have seen in quite a while.
00:54:46.000They call themselves the Lincoln Project.
00:54:48.000Apparently, Abraham Lincoln would have approved of ads that basically suggest that America is an absolute, utter, complete hellhole where death is vast and everyone is impoverished because of Donald Trump.
00:55:47.000By the way, if this is the tone Joe Biden goes for, he gets skunked.
00:55:49.000Because seriously, Americans are not going to abide being told that we are richer and poorer and that we are sicker and poorer and worse off and everything is terrible and we're all dying of COVID-19.
00:56:14.000And you don't have to credit Trump in creating that hope.
00:56:16.000George W. Bush didn't when he put out a little video about it.
00:56:18.000Even Joe Biden hasn't been doing this.
00:56:20.000The fact that these folks are so vindictive about Trump, that they're going to blame COVID-19 on Trump, that they're going to show pictures of body bags rolling out of morgues and blame that on Trump.
00:56:32.000Again, Andrew Cuomo's the governor of New York, guys.
00:56:34.000Gavin Newsom's the governor of California.
00:56:36.000The death centers of this country are all happening in blue areas.
00:56:39.000Not just because of bad governance, but also because those are heavily populated areas.
00:56:44.000This is such a bad strategy, but there are a lot of people who are embracing it because you gotta blame Trump for everything.
00:56:48.000Speaking of which, a lot of people blaming Trump today because President Trump is supposedly thinking about closing down the coronavirus task force.
00:57:31.000But, on a practical level, is the federal government going to stop caring about COVID-19 because the coronavirus task force has been quote-unquote disbanded?
00:57:39.000No, Dr. Fauci will still be meeting with Trump.
00:57:41.000Dr. Birx will still be meeting with Trump.
00:57:43.000All these people will still be meeting with Trump.
00:57:44.000They will still be doing press conferences.
00:57:46.000But this prompted all sorts of angst yesterday.
00:57:50.000The PR of COVID-19 for the media is far more important than the actual policy.
00:57:56.000When it comes to the actual policy, they don't want to talk about it because the actual policy would force them to acknowledge trade-offs in policy.
00:58:02.000Instead, they go to the PR because the PR can be black and white and the PR is always Trump is awful and evil and everything he does is terrible.
00:58:07.000So that means it's supposed to be a super big deal that he's quote-unquote dissolving the task force.
00:58:11.000The meetings in the Situation Room of the White House have been shorter.
00:58:14.000The task force no longer meets every day, according to NBC News.
00:58:17.000Doctors Deborah Birx and Anthony Fauci are still expected to be at the White House daily, but other members of the task force may be present less frequently.
00:58:23.000However, sources familiar with the matter noted the task force did meet on Tuesday.
00:58:28.000And President Trump said, we're now looking at a little bit of a different form.
00:58:57.000I think that as far as the task force, Mike Pence and the task force have done a great job, but we're now looking at a little bit of a different form, and that form is safety and opening, and we'll have a different group probably set up for that.
00:59:14.000The mission accomplished is when it's over.
00:59:18.000Again, the fact that Acosta is trying to pin on him the mission accomplished war in Iraq banner that was flying after the United States invaded Iraq and destroyed the Iraqi army, that he's trying to get him to gaffe, right?
00:59:30.000This is all the media are intent on doing right now.
00:59:32.000They honestly do not care at this point about which policy is pursued, so long as the policy pursued is anti-Trump.
00:59:39.000If Trump actually wanted to open up the country, tomorrow he'd call for a national lockdown ad infinitum.
00:59:43.000Seriously, the media would flip on a dime.
00:59:47.000We gotta lock this thing down forever until there's a vaccine.
00:59:49.000Immediately, the media would start reporting on the economic dispossession happening across the country, and they would start taking seriously the fact that people are losing their livelihoods.
00:59:56.000Because for the media, it's all about Trump and all about the media, and it is not at all about a responsible discussion of public policy, at least for those in the political media who are outside the sort of health industry.
01:00:06.000Alrighty, we'll be back here later today with two additional hours of content.
01:00:08.000Otherwise, we'll see you here tomorrow.