Ben Shapiro talks about the shooting of a black man in Georgia, and how it was caught on camera by a member of a posse, including a retired cop and his son. He also discusses the recent shooting and killing of Ahmed Arbery, a 25-year-old black man who was shot and killed by two armed men who thought he looked like a burglary suspect. Ben also talks about how dangerous it is to go outside in the winter, and why you should never go out in the snow in the dead of winter, even if it's a warm, sunny day in the city and why it's not a good idea to go out at all in the blustery cold of winter in some parts of the country in order to prevent frostbite and other cold symptoms of the dreaded cold virus, coronavirus, which can be deadly if you catch it in your body, and the Dallas police shooting of an African-American shopkeeper in Dallas, Texas, who was carrying a gun and chasing a white man in a pickup truck. And he plays a video of the whole thing, and it's pretty graphic. If you don't want to watch it, then you should turn away from this one, but if you do, you're in for a real treat. Today's show is sponsored by Crossrope, a new cardio and full body home workout app from CrossRope. Get up to 40% off, plus free shipping, when you go to CrossRpe.com/Shapirop! Get 40% all-inclusive with promo code SHAPirope@chris.co and get 40% OFF your first month with discount code SHIPPERSHOT10 at checkout at checkout@chips.co/shapiroep@chickscoop.coop@chryscoop and get 20% off your entire month with code SHOPBOARD at checkout when you enter the discount code CHECKOUT. That's $40% off the entire month, plus FREE shipping when you sign up at CHECKROPROPE.COM/CHECKROPE.COM! CHECK OUT $40, $10, $25, $50, $55, $60, $75, $99, $100, and $75 gets you a year, and gets you an ad-free membership when you use the promo code CHESTSHOTROPE at CHSOTTERPROKE.COM?
00:00:32.000We'll get to all of that momentarily first.
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00:02:13.000We'll get to all the coronavirus news in just a second.
00:02:15.000First, we need to talk about the biggest sort of national flashpoint of the day, and that is the shooting and killing of Ahmed Arbery.
00:02:24.000I apologize if I'm pronouncing his name wrong.
00:02:26.000He's a 25-year-old black man who was killed in February after being chased by two armed men who told police he looked like a burglary suspect, according to the Washington Post.
00:02:34.000Here, the video is actually available of the shooting.
00:02:37.000It appears that the video was taken by a member of basically the posse of these two guys, one of whom was a retired cop and his son.
00:02:47.000So in the video, what you're about to see, and it's very graphic, so if you don't want to watch this, then by all means turn away.
00:02:54.000If you're listening to it, I'll describe it for you.
00:02:57.000But basically, what you're about to see is this 25-year-old black man who appears to be jogging, and he is jogging down the road, and then right in front of him, there is a white pickup truck.
00:03:05.000In the back of the white pickup truck is an older gentleman, an older man, who is carrying a gun.
00:03:10.000And outside of the truck is his son, who's in his 30s, and is carrying a shotgun.
00:03:14.000And this whole thing is being filmed from behind, presumably by one of their friends, because Why else would you just be filming a random black guy running down the road?
00:03:23.000I'm gonna play the video and I'll narrate it.
00:03:24.000So, you can see that what's happening right here is Arbery jogging, right?
00:03:29.000I mean, he doesn't appear to be sprinting away or sprinting sideways.
00:03:31.000He sort of moves toward the left side of the truck.
00:03:34.000Then, he proceeds to run around the right side of the truck when he sees he's being confronted.
00:03:37.000And there's a man there carrying a shotgun, and the man carrying the shotgun, he confronts the man with the shotgun, grabs the shotgun, and then you can see that they get into a fight, and at that point, the man with the shotgun appears to either pull the trigger, or the gun is pulled, and his finger's on the trigger, and Arbery is dead.
00:03:55.000I mean, Arbery is killed in the video.
00:03:57.000It also appears, and it's hard to tell, that the man on the back of the pickup truck, it looks like he takes a pot shot before any shot is fired from the shotgun, although it's difficult to tell from the video because the video is kind of grainy.
00:04:27.000And then we'll go through the various legal arguments on behalf of first degree murder versus second degree murder slash manslaughter in this particular case.
00:04:37.000Whatever you say, the legal case here to put these guys in jail is pretty strong.
00:04:42.000And there are several pieces I'm going to go through to talk about that today.
00:04:46.000The tape is at least somewhat dispositive as to what happened here.
00:04:51.000If you were a man running down the road and you were confronted by people with guns, and they were blocking your way in an attempt to stop you, It would not be out of your purview to run and try to fight the guy with the gun to try and get away.
00:05:04.000They were literally attempting to obstruct him.
00:05:07.000The original narrative, as we'll see, is that they pulled off to the side of him and asked him to stop because they thought that he had burglarized something.
00:05:14.000There was not a lot of evidence, apparently.
00:05:16.000That they'd actually seen the burglary in process, which would change the status here under law because you're only allowed to pursue somebody and try to arrest them if you actually see a crime in progress.
00:05:24.000If you're going to make a citizen's arrest, there's a national citizen's arrest law in the state of Georgia that does not appear to have been fulfilled here.
00:05:29.000So they charge around the so they stopped him.
00:05:32.000Looks like in the middle of the road and called a friend and the friend is filming this whole thing.
00:05:36.000And if you're that guy and you're just running down the road and you see somebody Forget about race for a second.
00:05:40.000If you see somebody with a shotgun and a guy in the back of the pickup truck with a handgun, and they're attempting to stop you, and you've committed no crime, and you can't get around them, what the hell else are you supposed to do?
00:06:01.000It was how the 25-year-old former high school football standout stayed fit, his friend said.
00:06:05.000It was not unusual to see him running around the outskirts of the small coastal Georgia city near where he lived.
00:06:09.000But on a Sunday afternoon in February, as Mr. Arbery ran through a suburban neighborhood of ranch houses and moss-striped oaks, he passed a man standing in his front yard, who later told the police that Arbery looked like a suspect in a string of break-ins.
00:06:20.000According to a police report, the man, Gregory McMichael, who's 64, called out to his son, Travis McMichael, 34.
00:06:25.000They grabbed their weapons, a .357 Magnum, a revolver, and a shotgun, jumped into a truck, and began following Mr. Arbery.
00:06:31.000Okay, so as we will see, the question is whether they actually witnessed a crime in progress and then got active.
00:06:38.000is one of the operative questions here.
00:06:40.000You don't have the right to, let's say that three weeks ago you saw a grainy videotape, and you say, hey look, I saw a guy walk down the street who looks just like that suspect.
00:06:47.000In Georgia, you don't have the right to go grab your gun and try to arrest that guy.
00:06:49.000You can't effectuate a citizen's arrest unless you watch a crime in progress and you are attempting to stop the crime.
00:06:57.000"Stop, stop," they shouted at Mr. Arbery, "we wanna talk to you." Moments later, after a struggle over the shotgun, Arbery was killed, shot at least twice.
00:07:03.000No one has been charged or arrested in connection with the February 23rd killing.
00:07:06.000The case has received little attention beyond Brunswick, but it raised questions in the community about racial profiling because Arbery was black and the father and son are white, and about the interpretation of the state's self-defense laws.
00:07:16.000Now, again, the level of the charge is going to be at issue when this thing does go to court, 'cause it will go to court.
00:07:24.000Number one, because how do you interpret the first degree murder statute?
00:07:28.000They stopped dead in the middle of the road.
00:07:30.000If this was a false imprisonment connected with a killing, then it's first degree murder, meaning that if this is the equivalent of a kidnapping because they had no evidence that the guy actually committed a crime, And then they shot him.
00:07:41.000If there was evidence that the guy had committed a crime or if they thought he had committed a crime reasonably, right?
00:07:47.000This is what the jury is going to determine.
00:07:49.000Then the attempt to arrest him could end up being something more akin to manslaughter because it's fairly obvious when you have somebody videoing a situation like this from behind that you don't actually expect that it's going to end in somebody getting shot.
00:08:00.000It makes no sense for these people's allies to be tracking this guy down the street because they want to watch him get shot on tape just so that these guys can get indicted, right?
00:08:07.000The tape is the most damning thing about this.
00:08:09.000If there had been no tape, it would be very difficult to indict because all you would have is the accounts of the people involved.
00:08:15.000And that would be, again, very difficult on the basis of evidence, on evidence alone.
00:08:19.000The tape is the most damning thing about anything in this entire compendium of facts.
00:08:25.000Our Barry was killed three days before the anniversary of the 2012 killing of Trayvon Martin, the unarmed African-American teenager whose confrontation with a Florida neighborhood watch captain, George Zimmerman, helped ignite the Black Lives Matter movement.
00:08:35.000And it is important to distinguish the fact patterns of these particular cases.
00:08:38.000In that particular case, there was controversy because Zimmerman, again, followed Trayvon Martin by Zimmerman's testimony, which again, there was no tape.
00:08:45.000Tape would have been very helpful in the George Zimmerman case.
00:08:48.000Zimmerman testified that he followed Martin, then he turned around and then Martin confronted him.
00:08:52.000And then Martin was on top of him by witness testimony beating his head into the pavement.
00:08:55.000There was a struggle over the gun and he shot Martin.
00:08:58.000That is a different fact pattern than this one where you have two people lying in wait for the guy coming down the road and then the guy on basic self-defense grounds attempts to defend himself.
00:09:07.000Also, as we'll see, there's all sorts of racial stuff that came up in the Zimmerman case where the media basically lied about Zimmerman.
00:09:14.000They suggested that he was clearly doing this because he was a racist.
00:09:16.000They suggested that he was a white person, even though he was actually Hispanic, and then they termed him a white Hispanic.
00:09:22.000They suggested that there was no evidence that he'd actually been hit by Martin when he, in fact, had a broken nose.
00:09:26.000There are all sorts of complicating factors.
00:09:28.000In the George Zimmerman case, and that case was overcharged by the prosecution.
00:09:31.000If they charged him with manslaughter, fairly decent shot, they would have convicted him.
00:09:34.000But when it comes to this particular case, to get back to the fact pattern here, according to documents obtained by the New York Times, a prosecutor who had the case for a few weeks told the police the pursuers had acted within the scope of George's citizen's arrest statute, and that Travis McMichael, who held the shotgun, had acted out of self-defense.
00:09:49.000The police report doesn't mention whether Arbery was in possession of a weapon.
00:09:54.000The prosecutor who wrote the letter was a guy named George Barnhill, who was the district attorney for Georgia's Waycross Judicial Circuit, and had recused himself from the case this month after Arbery's family complained he had a conflict of interest.
00:10:04.000A prosecutor from another county was then put in charge, and then he decided that this thing will go to a grand jury yesterday.
00:10:10.000So the fact pattern is obviously in dispute here.
00:10:15.000But as we'll see, we'll go through the full analysis of the fact pattern momentarily.
00:10:18.000The fact pattern cuts in favor of an indictment at the very, very least.
00:10:22.000Friends and family say that Arbery was exercising.
00:10:26.000One of his friends said everybody in the community knows he runs.
00:10:29.000Others contend Arbery was up to no good.
00:10:30.000On the day of the shooting, apparently moments before the chase, a neighbor in Satilla Shores called 911.
00:10:36.000Telling the dispatcher a black man in a white t-shirt was inside a house that was under construction and only partially closed in.
00:10:42.000And he's running right now, the man told the dispatcher.
00:11:01.000Okay, that's certainly not a crime where you get to chase someone down and then hold them at bay because you're waiting for the cops to come.
00:11:08.000In his letters to the police, Barnhill noted that Arbery had a criminal past.
00:11:11.000Court records show that Arbery was convicted of shoplifting and violating probation in 2018.
00:11:16.000Five years earlier, according to the Brunswick News, he was indicted on charges he took a handgun to a high school basketball game, none of which is supremely relevant to what happened in this particular case.
00:11:25.000You bring a gun to a high school basketball game five years beforehand.
00:11:28.000That has no relevance as to why these particular people are trying to block your particular way on this particular highway.
00:11:35.000Even if Arbery committed a property crime on the afternoon he was killed, activists and family members said it would not have warranted a chase by armed neighbors.
00:11:43.000And then we get into the racial issue, right?
00:11:45.000Our Barry's mother said she believed the men had judged her son by his skin color.
00:11:48.000She does not believe he committed any crimes that day.
00:11:50.000If he had, she said he should have been handled by the police.
00:11:52.000Now, I tend to agree, he should have been handled by the police.
00:11:54.000When we get into the racial angle here, that's where things start to go sideways.
00:11:59.000The reason I say that is because certainly you can interpret this as a racial shooting.
00:12:03.000It's three white men apparently confronting a young black man in disputed circumstances and then killing him, right?
00:12:44.000I mean, this is the point that Adam Carolla has made before, that if you're a black person in America with the terrible history of law enforcement with black Americans, If you were pulled over for speeding as a black man, and you didn't really think that you were speeding, and the white officer came and was rude to you, you might assume that it was because the officer was a racist.
00:13:00.000Because Adam Carolla is a white guy, he says, I would just assume that the officer is an a-hole.
00:13:04.000So it's unclear in this particular case whether it's racial.
00:13:06.000The same thing, by the way, was true with regard to the George Zimmerman case.
00:13:09.000In the George Zimmerman case, There are several investigations, including a federal investigation by the Eric Holder Justice Department that found no evidence of racial intent in that particular case.
00:13:18.000We don't actually know whether there was racial intent here.
00:13:20.000The attempt to blow this up into a racial narrative Maybe.
00:13:55.000If the media can treat a terrible incident like this as an incident that indicts America more broadly along the lines of racism, it becomes a national story.
00:14:05.000And it doesn't stop being a national story.
00:14:09.000If it turns out that everybody's like, okay, this was a bad shooting and maybe it was racist and maybe it wasn't, but these guys should be at least tried, then the controversy goes away.
00:14:18.000Because that's exactly what happened in the case of Walter Scott, who was the black man in South Carolina who was gunned down by a police officer.
00:14:31.000No controversy whatsoever because everybody basically agreed, you do a bad thing, you should go to jail.
00:14:35.000It's only when the media can turn it into a broader indictment of American racism that the media are interested in the story.
00:14:41.000So the fact that there seems to be pretty broad and wide agreement that these guys at the very least should go to a grand jury and be indicted and then get their day in court, it kind of cuts against the idea that Americans are deeply desirous of protecting people on the basis of a possible racial killing.
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00:16:13.000Because if you witness a crime in the state of Georgia by statute, then you're allowed to attempt a citizen's arrest.
00:16:18.000But if you are just somebody who heard about it third-hand from somebody, not the same thing.
00:16:23.000Right, if my producer, Colton, sees somebody committing a crime, and then he calls me, and I have not witnessed the crime, and then he says, that guy's running down your street, you should go do something about it.
00:18:29.000They began pursuing Arbery in their vehicle.
00:18:30.000So, a few things that are important here to note.
00:18:32.000One, there were not at least a reported spate of break-ins in Scintilla Shores.
00:18:36.000From January 1st to February 23rd, by local newspaper coverage, there was a grand total of one, one, count them, one police report on break-in in the area.
00:18:44.000Again, this is rather distinguishing from the case in George Zimmerman's neighborhood in Florida, where there had been a huge spate of break-ins that everybody acknowledged, according to police reports.
00:18:52.000From the police report, it appears there were two vehicles and three individuals involved in the chase.
00:18:56.000McMichael said he tried to cut off Arbery on the road, so did an individual named Roddy.
00:18:59.000McMichael says he then got into the bed of the pickup truck and continued the pursuit.
00:19:03.000Here is how the police report described the fatal encounter.
00:19:05.000McMichael stated they saw the unidentified male and shouted, stop, stop, we want to talk to you.
00:19:09.000Okay, so there are a few things about this particular police report that do not jibe with the facts.
00:19:12.000time Travis exited the truck with a shotgun.
00:19:14.000McMichael stated the unidentified male began to violently attack Travis and the two men then started fighting over the shotgun, at which point Travis fired a shot and a second later there was a second shot.
00:19:22.000McMichael stated the male fell face down on the pavement with his hand under his body.
00:19:26.000McMichael stated he rolled the man over to see if the male had a weapon.
00:19:28.000Okay, so there are a few things about this particular police report that do not jibe with the facts.
00:19:33.000One, it appears that just if you play the tape, you can hear three shots, not two.
00:19:36.000Second, the notion that he pulled up next to him is not true.
00:19:40.000The vehicle is waiting directly in the center of the road, right?
00:19:47.000So, as David French points out, the video doesn't depict McMichael pulling up beside Arbery, but instead shows him waiting, blocking the road with his truck.
00:19:53.000Arbery changes direction to avoid the truck.
00:19:55.000Travis McMichael moves to intercept Arbery while holding a shotgun, the two scuffled, and then Travis fires three shots.
00:20:00.000Although it's not clear, again, whether Travis fires three shots or whether somebody in the back of the truck fires a shot first.
00:20:06.000And then there are two shots fired from the shotgun.
00:20:08.000Not totally clear, but you can hear three shots, not two.
00:20:11.000So, as David French points out, the Brunswick News noted only one burglary had been reported to local police between January 1st and the day of the shooting.
00:20:19.000Also, McMichael is a former police detective and investigator for the Brunswick District Attorney's Office.
00:20:23.000According to the New York Times, the first district attorney, Jackie Johnson, recused herself because McMichael had worked with her.
00:20:29.000A second district attorney stepped away from the case, also because he knew McMichael.
00:20:34.000So his argument was the three men were in hot pursuit of a burglary suspect with solid first-hand probable cause in the effort to execute a citizen's arrest.
00:20:40.000And he says this was just open carrying weapons is lawful in Georgia.
00:20:43.000The shooting occurred only after Arbery attacked McMichael and tried to grab his shotgun, which, again, goes to the question as to whether this was a premeditated murder in the sense that they were waiting to ambush him, which it does not appear to be, or whether they were waiting to arrest him and they had no right to arrest him.
00:20:59.000And so it was a shooting that was combined with false imprisonment, which would amount to felony murder.
00:21:03.000That's the case the French is going to make.
00:21:04.000Georgia law does indeed permit a person to execute a citizen's arrest, but in very narrow circumstances.
00:21:09.000The relevant false arrest statute holds that, quote, a private person may arrest an offender if the offense is committed in his presence or within his immediate knowledge.
00:21:16.000If the offense is a felony and the offender is escaping or attempting to escape, a private person may arrest him upon reasonable and probable cause of suspicion.
00:21:24.000Once the citizen's arrest is properly made, Georgia law requires the citizen to take the suspect before a judicial officer or a peace officer without any unnecessary delay.
00:21:32.000It's also true that an unlawful attempt to take and hold a person is itself a crime false imprisonment.
00:21:36.000Moreover, according to Georgia case law, you can't use a citizen's arrest statute to question a suspect.
00:21:41.000In fact, stating an intention to question a suspect can be evidence that the individual claiming a right to make a citizen's arrest is uncertain and did not have immediate knowledge the victim had been a perpetrator of the alleged crime.
00:21:50.000So, if you actually apply the law to the facts, says David French.
00:21:53.000On the day Arbery died, a 911 caller said a man matching Arbery's description was walking inside a vacant construction site.
00:21:58.000Another caller said there's a black male running down the street.
00:22:01.000Gregory McMichael claimed he recognized Arbery from surveillance video after several break-ins in the neighborhood.
00:22:05.000The only offense committed in anyone's presence is the report of a person walking into a construction site.
00:22:09.000If that merits mounting up an armed three-person, two-vehicle posse to chase a man in broad daylight and menace him with weapons, many of us are lucky to be alive and free.
00:22:17.000The other possible argument is that in the unspecified video footage, the break-ins constituted immediate knowledge that a crime had been committed days or weeks ago, and that an alleged older crime provided them with reasonable and probable grounds of suspicion.
00:22:30.000But that would be a pretty large-scale extension of the law.
00:22:35.000Georgia case law says past incidents may not justify present citizen pursuit.
00:22:40.000A 2000 Georgia Court of Appeals opinion says the term within his immediate knowledge enables a private citizen to use any of his senses to obtain knowledge that an offense is being committed.
00:22:49.000Also again, there are problems with the police report.
00:22:53.000Now, does this mean that these guys get convicted without a trial?
00:22:57.000It means that this will go to a grand jury, and then they will have a defense, and then all of the facts will come out.
00:23:02.000And then we will know exactly what their motivation was, and we will know exactly what went down, and what was the crime they were attempting to report, and how all of this went down.
00:23:10.000And so to say in this positive fashion these guys deserve to go to jail, Again, based on the evidence that we have seen, the answer seems like yes, but we're going to have to have a trial, right?
00:23:30.000Why for two months did they sit on this thing?
00:23:32.000And that appears, the question there is, was that based on racism or was that based on the fact that every prosecutor in town knew this McMichael guy and they were like, okay, well, you know, he worked with us over at the cop's office and we're going to let it go.
00:23:43.000That gains additional relevance when you get to the racial aspect of the case, which of course is what the media are jumping on.
00:23:49.000And maybe the racial aspect of the case is the key aspect of the case, but there's just as solid a case that the racial aspect of the case is secondary to generalized law enforcement overzealousness or ex-law enforcement overzealousness combined with an insider nature for people who worked with law enforcement in the first place.
00:24:03.000So we'll get to that in just one second.
00:24:05.000First, Let us talk about the fact that now is not a great time to go to the auto parts store.
00:24:10.000You want to stay home, but your car is broken.
00:24:12.000Number one, why would you ever go to the auto parts store when you can get exactly the part you need at the best available price at rockauto.com?
00:25:25.000Because it means that what appeared to be a bunch of people in the DA's office who were friends with the guy at issue, that those people are not the people who end up prosecuting the case.
00:26:37.000At the same time, it is very important that law enforcement do its job specifically in order to fight perceptions like this.
00:26:42.000Now, that doesn't mean that you should make up cases against people, God forbid.
00:26:45.000We have due process of law in this country, but it looks bad when you have local law enforcement not taking seriously enough allegations that have taped to back them like this.
00:26:53.000Now, the legal issue in this case really is going to come down to, did they witness this guy commit a crime?
00:26:58.000If they witnessed this guy commit a crime, and then they tried to stop him, okay, then It can very easily be argued that this is a terrible case in which Arbery was acting in his own self-defense.
00:27:12.000And once he grabs the gun, then the guy who shot him was also acting in mutual self-defense.
00:27:15.000But that really depends on whether the citizen's arrest was justified in the first place.
00:27:20.000If the citizen's arrest was just, we're suspicious of this guy running down the road because we think he looked like the guy from two days ago, and we're vigilantes and we're not going to call the cops.
00:27:27.000And if we do call the cops, we're not going to wait on them.
00:27:31.000Then you end up in the case of felony imprisonment slash felony murder, right?
00:27:36.000Which is which is the case that David French is making.
00:27:39.000And the statute again in Georgia is fairly clear.
00:27:42.000The statute is fairly straightforward that you have to witness the immediate crime.
00:27:46.000But when the media immediately jumped to, we know for a fact that this was white guys chasing down a black guy because there's a black guy in a white neighborhood and they decided to go and shoot him that day.
00:27:54.000Again, the evidence doesn't support the idea that these guys were like out to gun down a black guy that day.
00:27:58.000It does support the idea, I think much more obviously, that these were overzealous Want to be cops and ex cops who decided that they were going to be vigilantes that day.
00:28:09.000And then this thing went wrong and you are guilty for that, right?
00:28:12.000That is a thing that you are guilty for under the criminal laws of the state of Georgia, which is why this is going to go to grand jury and all the facts are going to come out.
00:28:19.000But you suggest on the basis of of the case itself.
00:28:23.000That black people are gunned down every day in the United States.
00:28:26.000That black people are at tremendous day-to-day risk from normal white people walking down the road.
00:28:40.000The reason that this is an outlier case and is getting all sorts of attention is, number one, because we have tape, and number two, because it is a really bad fact pattern.
00:29:15.000They will have a chance to defend themselves in court.
00:29:18.000That's the way this is supposed to work.
00:29:19.000The real issue, to me, beyond the actual fact pattern of the case, is why the prosecutors didn't go forward.
00:29:25.000And the implication is going to be, they didn't go forward because it was white guys shooting a black man, they don't care.
00:29:30.000It seems to me that the much more likely scenario is this didn't go forward with an indictment in the first place because everybody was friends with the guy who did the shooting.
00:29:37.000That basically it was an insider problem in which you had a former member of law enforcement who knew all the DAs.
00:29:43.000And they were like, would Billy Bob over here?
00:29:45.000Would Jim have really gone out and just randomly shot somebody?
00:29:50.000Which, again, is not the way that you pursue law enforcement.
00:29:52.000And it does undermine the credibility of law enforcement because baseless or not, the widespread perception that black people are in widespread fashion targeted by white law enforcement in this country That is undermined.
00:30:06.000That perception is underscored every time the law enforcement apparatus does not actually go forward with an indictment in cases where it appears an indictment seems to be warranted.
00:30:18.000So that's where we stand on this and I'm glad that a grand jury case will go forward on this and these people should have a chance to defend themselves because everybody should have a chance to defend themselves.
00:30:27.000It appears to me that David French's case is pretty strong, that this looks like a felony murder based on people being vigilantes in violation of the law.
00:30:35.000Okay, now we're going to get to everything coronavirus related because, again, nobody has a plan.
00:30:40.000It's the Kobayashi Maru problem from Star Trek.
00:30:43.000And the idea that if you look at various plans that you are somehow very bad and very evil, this continues to be the pervading attitude of many in the media.
00:30:54.000First, let's talk for a second about knowing what's going on in your neighborhood.
00:30:59.000We're home more than usual these days, but it's still hard to keep a close eye on things.
00:31:03.000I've got my kids running all over my property.
00:31:04.000There are people dropping off packages all the time because we have to buy all of our groceries remote.
00:31:08.000Well, you want to know when people are at your front door or what they're doing at your front door.
00:31:11.000Ring is on a mission to make neighborhoods safer.
00:31:13.000Their home security products are designed to give you peace of mind around the clock.
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00:31:30.000Ring gives you protection at every corner.
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00:31:38.000With outdoor security cameras, you can check in on every part of your house and never miss a moment.
00:31:43.000Get a special offer on the Ring Welcome Kit when you go to ring.com slash ben.
00:31:46.000The Welcome Kit includes the Ring Video Doorbell 3 and Chime Pro.
00:31:49.000It's all you need to start building custom security for your home today.
00:32:01.000Okay, we're gonna get to everything coronavirus related in a second.
00:32:04.000First, gotta take a moment to tell you about the magical All Access Insider tier of DailyWire membership.
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00:33:04.000So as you say, the media tend to traffic and outrage on all stories.
00:33:12.000When it comes to this story in Georgia, the outrageous part is presumably that it wasn't put in front of a grand jury.
00:33:18.000The media are attempting to turn this into, again, a broader racial narrative about the United States.
00:33:22.000This is why, if the American people basically react to this by saying, okay, the law should take its course here.
00:33:28.000Then the media simply go away because then they can't make the argument this is about broader American tolerance for racism or for bad shoots.
00:34:13.000It needs to be applied in widespread fashion.
00:34:16.000So it may just be that this is the new risk level in life.
00:34:19.000And if this is the new risk level in life, then the question becomes, okay, why are we not protecting people who are the most vulnerable and then moving toward opening up very, very quickly?
00:34:28.000But the media seem to have an interest in claiming that lockdowns are the best available policy.
00:34:34.000And that if you oppose the lockdowns, if you say, guys, there's some actual cost to what's going on here, then you're very, very bad.
00:34:58.000Is it a surrender when you just say, listen, we don't know what's going to happen from here on in, but we are going to have to plan for the reality, which is that maybe nothing changes here?
00:35:07.000I understand that you want to yell at the government over changes that may never happen, but I've yet to hear an actual policy put forward by anybody who's advocating for lockdowns that looks like anything realistic.
00:35:15.000Here is Chuck Todd, again, sort of just outrage ginning.
00:35:20.000The federal government, led by President Trump, considering, for a lack of a better word, surrendering to this virus.
00:35:26.000With more than 70,000 Americans dead, the president is telling the public that the country must reopen, even if it means more death.
00:35:33.000But he doesn't have a plan for doing that.
00:35:35.000The uncertainty surrounding the White House's strategy, which we seem to utter about on a daily basis, comes in the numerous warning signs that we're not anywhere near ready to safely reopen the country from a public health standpoint or a consumer confidence standpoint.
00:35:50.000Okay, there is no standard that has been put forward by anybody that says what safely reopening the country looks like.
00:35:55.000What does safely reopening the country look like?
00:35:57.000Now, according to the media, it means 50 million tests a day, and that ain't gonna happen.
00:36:45.000Because when he says, no life is worth losing, to add one more point to the Dow, so presumably, he's just going to ban death, because it turns out your risk of dying increases every time you go out the door, with or without COVID-19.
00:36:55.000So presumably, we should all just be locked down in our homes forever, and the government can, you know, just make money appear out of thin air.
00:37:02.000Like, what the hell is he talking about?
00:37:46.000And this is disproportionately hitting minority Americans.
00:37:49.000For all the people saying, all the people who want to reopen are rich and white.
00:37:52.000Weird, because it seems to me like all the rich and white people in the media don't want to reopen.
00:37:56.000And those people are disproportionately rich and white.
00:37:58.000It seems to me that all the liberals in California who are disproportionately rich and white in the Malibu enclaves, they're fine with it staying shut.
00:38:05.000It's the people who actually need to work who are getting jacked, and those people are disproportionately poor and minority.
00:38:10.000According to the Associated Press, people of color have not only been hit harder by the deadly coronavirus than have Americans overall, they're also bearing the brunt of the pandemic's financial impact, according to a recent survey.
00:38:19.000The poll found 61% of Hispanic Americans say they experienced some kind of household income loss as a result of the outbreak, including job losses, unpaid leave, pay cuts, and fewer scheduled hours.
00:38:28.000That is compared with 46% of Americans overall.
00:38:31.00037% of Latinos, 27% of Black Americans say they have been unable to pay at least one type of bill as a result of the coronavirus outbreak.
00:38:39.000These are extraordinary, extraordinary numbers.
00:38:42.000The survey, which was conducted in mid-April, found that 21% of Hispanics have been unable to make a rent or mortgage payment as a result of the outbreak.
00:38:49.00023% have been unable to pay a credit card bill.
00:38:53.00015% of black Americans have been unable to pay a credit card bill.
00:38:56.000So the notion that if you want to reopen, it's because you dislike minorities, you're going to have to explain that one to me.
00:39:00.000You're also going to have to explain to me how you solved all the problems, Joe Biden, by simply declaring that You're going to end death.
00:39:08.000Nearly a fifth of young children, according to Brookings Institute, a fifth of young children are not getting enough to eat.
00:39:14.000The rate is three times higher than in 2008, at the worst of the Great Recession.
00:39:18.000When food runs short, parents often skip meals to keep children fed.
00:39:21.000A survey of households with children 12 and under found 17.4% reported that children themselves were not eating enough, compared with 5.7% during the Great Recession.
00:39:31.000So, you're telling me that it's bad to reopen?
00:39:34.000And then you won't set any standard for reopening?
00:39:53.000You don't have to downplay the number of people being killed in order to point out that we simply cannot continue this way.
00:39:59.000And that the people who are being disproportionately harmed by this are people who are impoverished, people who are already living on the brink.
00:40:05.000It is also important to recognize here that if we started by protecting just the nursing homes, we would have lowered the deadliness of this thing dramatically.
00:40:13.000According to a report in the Hartford Courant, nearly 90% of all coronavirus deaths in Connecticut last week were nursing home patients. 90%.
00:40:22.000So, Andrew Cuomo and company who keep saying every life is precious, but didn't defend the nursing homes.
00:40:26.000In fact, forced by law, nursing homes to take back people who had COVID-19.
00:40:39.000Every single person knows it in America.
00:40:41.000They're just the people who refuse to recognize it because it's a lot easier to play righteous indignation about reopening when you don't, when you never set a standard that can never be met for reopening.
00:40:50.000Here was Trump saying we can't keep the country closed down for years, which of course is true.
00:40:53.000We can't keep our country closed down for years, and we have to do something.
00:41:00.000And hopefully that won't be the case, John, but it could very well be the case.
00:41:05.000You won't be locked in a house, and some people should stay if you're over a certain age.
00:41:11.000But we have to get our country open again.
00:41:41.000And for how long do you expect that people are going to be able to continue to exist this way?
00:41:46.000In fact, it turns out that the people who are being diagnosed with new cases in New York are not being diagnosed by going out in public.
00:41:52.000Andrew Cuomo pointed this out yesterday, which is an incredible admission.
00:41:56.000Here's Andrew Cuomo basically acknowledging that the lockdowns may have slowed the spread of the virus, but right now the spread of the virus is entirely happening inside the lockdown.
00:43:21.000Meanwhile, over in Sweden, which again the left is loving to hate on these days, Over in Sweden, important to note that they're actually bending the curve back down.
00:43:29.000So the daily death toll has been dropping again in Sweden, which means that as they approach herd immunity, presumably, that the daily death toll is going to drop.
00:43:40.000Like we can debate on the level of reopening, whether it should be 50% full or whether we should be doing controlled avalanche in which we actually just basically encourage people to pursue herd immunity.
00:43:49.000There's all sorts of discussions we can have on that.
00:44:16.000Well, as it becomes obvious that kids are going to have to be fed, nobody is going to go along with the government's order here.
00:44:24.000Because basically the logic went something like this.
00:44:25.000Government says, you need a lockdown for 30 days.
00:44:27.000Everyone's like, okay, I guess we'll do that.
00:44:29.000And then it became, you need a lockdown for 60 days.
00:44:31.000And we said, well, how am I going to feed my kids?
00:44:32.000And the government was like, okay, well, we will pay all your bills.
00:44:34.000And then all these people who couldn't feed their kids were calling up the government and the line was busy.
00:44:38.000And so they said, okay, I guess we're going to have to go back to work because like, seriously, I need to feed my kids.
00:44:42.000And the government was like, yeah, but if you go back to work, we're going to put you in jail.
00:44:46.000Does that sound like that's sustainable in any way, shape, or form?
00:44:49.000Here was the attorney for Shelly Luther talking yesterday about the fact that she's going to end up in jail while criminals are being released onto the streets.
00:44:58.000She committed the actual crime of heresy against the city of Dallas, and it's an oligarchy that decided that real criminals could go to jail, but people who were heretics, or people who were real criminals could be let out, but the heretics could go to jail.
00:45:12.000And he demanded that she admit she was being selfish and being offensive and apologize to everybody.
00:45:18.000He actually said, I want you to apologize for being selfish.
00:45:22.000And so, of course, she wasn't being selfish.
00:45:26.000Okay, so in amazing news, I mean, this is how Americans operate and this is, you can see where the passion is right now.
00:45:31.000She has raised, her legal defense fund has raised half a million dollars.
00:45:35.000Not only that, the Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, he offered to pay the $7,000 fine and to do her jail time for her.
00:45:41.000Yesterday, the Attorney General of the state of Texas said this is ridiculous, said that we cannot jail people for this.
00:45:47.000He said, I find it outrageous and out of touch that during this national pandemic, a judge in a county that actually released hardened criminals for fear of contracting COVID-19 would jail a mother for operating her hair salon in an attempt to put food on her family's table.
00:45:58.000The trial judge did not need to lock up Shelly Luther.
00:46:01.000His order is a shameful abuse of judicial discretion.
00:46:19.000Human beings were not built for interminable lockdown.
00:46:21.000They're not built for social distancing.
00:46:23.000And as it becomes clear that there is no relief in sight, that there is no therapeutic, that there is no actual That there is no actual vaccine on the way anytime in the near future.
00:46:34.000That all the talk about, yeah, we're working on all these vaccines and it's going to be the cure-all and all this, that is speculative at best.
00:47:02.000The good news is we do know how to protect the nursing homes.
00:47:05.000We do know how to protect the most vulnerable in our society.
00:47:07.000And we have the capacity as independent individuals to protect ourselves.
00:47:11.000If you want to lock down, you can continue to lock down.
00:47:13.000But as we move forward, the question is going to be, why people who are young and healthy should be locking down and why the government has the thinks that that is a better strategy in the long run.
00:47:24.000The big question here is going to be, and this is the question no one has yet answered to my satisfaction.
00:47:28.000If the area underneath the curve is the same, no matter what you do, but the curve is sharper at the beginning, which means that less economic damage is done in the long run, Do you want to take the pain now or do you want to spread it out over the course of a couple years if nothing changes?
00:47:44.000No one has been able to answer this question for me.
00:47:52.000But again, if the curves have the same area underneath them, if both of them are not spiking over the line in the healthcare system, if you have one curve that looks like this, and you have one curve that looks like this, And the line is the healthcare system.
00:48:06.000And neither of these curves is going over the healthcare system.
00:48:08.000The question becomes, which curve do you want?
00:48:11.000Because curve number one, right, which is this really heavy bump right here, has the same area underneath it as curve number two.
00:48:17.000And curve number two means that we shut down the economy basically forever.
00:48:21.000And curve number one means that we take the pain now and then we get back into business.
00:48:26.000The original flattening the curve situation, the key to the flattening the curve situation was that in this particular graphic, the dark red shade, the kind of maroon shaded area, right?
00:48:34.000That's the people who would die needlessly because we don't have the ability to care for them.
00:48:37.000Now, as it turns out, even with the ability to care for people, ventilators didn't help, right?
00:48:41.000We were afraid of ventilators being in short supply.
00:48:44.000It turns out that 90% of people on ventilators were dying anyway, but you don't want the healthcare system being overwhelmed, obviously.
00:48:49.000But take that line out of the graph because we have not overwhelmed the healthcare system.
00:48:53.000If you have the choice between two curves, one that is sharper at the beginning, but recedes faster, and that lets us all go back to work and back to ballgames and back to movie theaters, or one that lasts a really long time and has the exact same number of people who are dead, why would you take the shallower curve?
00:49:07.000That's the question no one has been able to answer to my satisfaction, or even presented an answer to.
00:49:22.000Because when we are talking about the damage to be done to the American economy, we have to tell how many lives we are actually saving, and how many people are just having their deaths delayed by a month or two, because we are flattening the curve just a little bit.
00:49:35.000Enough to destroy the economy, but not enough to actually save people's lives over the course of a year.
00:49:39.000I want to see models that go out a year from now.
00:49:56.000We all know if we release fast, more people will die in the short run, but that's not the question.
00:50:00.000If you cut off the model, right, to go back to my little chart right here, if you cut off the model here and you say that this model is June 2020, and if you go here, And this is June 2021.
00:50:40.000And no one is honestly discussing the timeline, and that is why, if we are going to honestly discuss policy, we don't need models that go out a month.
00:51:10.000Bill Simmons does it over at The Ringer, and it is kick.
00:51:13.000Basically, it's him and a few of his friends just recapitulating movies that you love to, what he calls, watch and rewatch.
00:51:20.000And I was listening to an episode the other night about Gladiator, And uh, this prompted me to actually go back and watch part of Gladiator.
00:53:08.000So, Bill de Blasio is not taking on any sort of onus for the fact that he completely botched this thing.
00:53:14.000Instead, he's blaming the nursing homes themselves in the state of New York.
00:53:17.000Not the state of New York law that said that if a person in your nursing home gets COVID-19, that they have to be let back into your nursing home.
00:53:50.000But I think in terms of each individual, it's a case-by-case.
00:53:54.000You've got to figure out what's right for each senior.
00:53:57.000Well, so it's on the nursing homes, except that we forced by law them to take back all these people, and so nursing homes have become hotspots for this sort of thing.
00:54:08.000Those are the places where people are dying en masse in huge, huge numbers.
00:54:12.000Meanwhile, Andrew Cuomo, America's governor, is really demonstrating his bona fides.
00:54:17.000Speaking on Tuesday, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo reportedly said healthcare workers who travel to New York to help the state's reeling To help the state reeling from coronavirus, we'll have to pay state taxes.
00:54:25.000This is according to Hank Barry in The Daily Wire.
00:54:27.000Cuomo stated, we're not in a position to provide any subsidies right now because we have a $13 billion deficit.
00:54:31.000So, there's a lot of good things I'd like to do.
00:54:35.000But it would be irresponsible for me to sit here looking at a $13 billion deficit and say, I'm going to spend more money when I can't even pay the essential services.
00:55:11.000The reason that people on the left are okay with that is because all those hard truths they can then blame on Trump.
00:55:16.000If a Democrat were president, they wouldn't love Andrew Cuomo anymore.
00:55:18.000They'd be talking about how he was terrible.
00:55:20.000But because Donald Trump is president, then everything that Cuomo says that the state of New York is doing right can be attributed to Cuomo, and everything that is bad can be attributed to Trump.
00:55:29.000The luckiest person in America that Donald Trump is president is Andrew Cuomo.
00:55:32.000And the second luckiest is Bill de Blasio.
00:55:34.000Because it allows them to shift responsibility from themselves to the federal government.
00:56:09.000Meanwhile, Democrats in the federal government also doing yeoman's work on behalf of garbage policy.
00:56:14.000The Wall Street Journal has a good editorial today talking about many of the risks of reopening.
00:56:19.000They say the plaintiff bar is trying to cash in as really quickly as the coronavirus has spread.
00:56:23.000Trial lawyers are filing suits against emergency supply manufacturers for false advertising, colleges for refusal to refund student fees, cruise lines for emotional distress, retailers for wrongful death, nursing homes for negligence, and governments for denial of hazard pay.
00:56:36.000There's little point in lifting lockdowns if employers don't open for fear of lawsuits.
00:56:39.000A number of governors used emergency powers to grant liability protections to healthcare workers, but trial lawyers will attempt to get friendly state courts to invalidate them.
00:56:46.000Most orders also fail to address the wider economy or novel pandemic-related legal claims.
00:56:54.000But the better answer is for Congress to pass legal protections related specifically to the pandemic and economic recovery that set a national standard and limit the trial bar's ability to forum shop class actions in friendly state courts.
00:57:05.000So, you should probably eliminate frivolous lawsuits that don't claim serious injury.
00:57:09.000Law firms are already filing lawsuits against cruise lines, arguing that even passengers that did not contract the virus were subject to emotional harm and entitled to punitive damages.
00:57:18.000Businesses are being subjected to the threat of lawsuit for the great sin of telling people that they can come back to work under circumstances that try to protect the employees.
00:57:28.000Also, we need protections for health providers, including those who are using new treatments, because everything has to be thrown at the wall at this point.
00:57:35.000This is why the White House and Senate Republicans want liability protection to be part of any new virus relief.
00:57:39.000Democrats are opposing this all the way.
00:57:42.000Senate Democrats, they do, as the New Wall Street Journal, work for the lawyers and law firms.
00:57:45.000They've contributed more than $8 million to Chuck Schumer's campaigns, some $1.6 million to Nancy Pelosi's campaign.
00:57:50.000They've given more than $4 million to the DSCC, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, and $3 million to the House Democratic Committee in this election cycle.
00:57:59.000So the addition of liability on top of all this is going to prevent business from opening, which is really quite terrible.
00:58:05.000Meanwhile, the Democrats, of course, seem rather sanguine with the whole lockdown strategy.
00:58:08.000It seems like they've come up with a political strategy, and that is, we are going to now suggest that lockdown is the status quo and should be the de facto status quo, and any attempt to remove lockdown, you can be blamed for each individual death.
00:58:19.000Meanwhile, we'll just keep spending, which we wanted to do anyway.
00:58:21.000Chuck Schumer, the Senate Minority Leader, he said that yesterday.
00:58:30.000We need big, bold action, and we need it soon.
00:58:34.000We need action to help those who are unemployed deal with their lives and not lose everything, their homes, the ability to feed their kids, the ability to get health care.
00:58:44.000We need to make sure that businesses, small businesses, get the help that they need.
00:58:49.000We need our stake in local governments, which are our firefighters and our police officers and our bus drivers.
00:59:23.000Nothing is fundamentally changing here.
00:59:25.000The testing and tracing stuff everybody's talking about is designed to tamp down the hotspots.
00:59:28.000By the way, the first place you're going to know the hotspots are emerging is not actually from the testing and the contact tracing, not when the baseline level of cases is this high.
00:59:35.000The first place you're going to know it is when the hospitals start feeling it.
00:59:39.000It's, this is, it's badly calibrated policy.
00:59:41.000There are no good answers, but Democrats have their easy political answer and that is shut everything down and then pretend that anybody who dies is the fault of our political opponents.
00:59:48.000Alrighty, we'll be back here a little bit later today with two additional hours of content.
00:59:51.000You're listening to The Ben Shapiro Show.
00:59:56.000The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Colton Haas.
01:00:22.000Hey everybody, it's Andrew Klavan, host of The Andrew Klavan Show.
01:00:25.000You know, some people are depressed because the American Republic is collapsing, the end of days is approaching, and the moon has turned to blood.
01:00:32.000But on The Andrew Klavan Show, that's where the fun just gets started.