Defenders of the WHO emerge after President Trump calls out the organization, Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida is owed an apology by the media, and Elizabeth Warren would love to dictate how businesses operate in exchange for keeping them alive. I'm Ben Shapiro, and this is The Ben Shapiro Show, the show where I talk about everything you need to know about the current flu pandemic. Today's episode features: - Why Florida and Georgia are not seeing massive upticks in cases and deaths from the flu, and why all other states are beginning to reopen Why you should be worried about young people getting the flu more than you are and why you should care What are the risks to young people, and who are being hit the hardest by the flu? And why should you care about them, because they are much more likely to die from it than older people with the flu If you're under 25, the flu is being about 17 times more deadly to you than coronavirus, and if you are under the age of 25, it is significantly more deadly than COV19, then what you're being hit. And we now have some statistics that bear out exactly who is being hit by it. - Avik Roy, Free Op, FreeOp Ben Shapiro's full of statistics that prove that the flu isn't just deadly to people under 25 years old, it's deadly to those under 20 years old. The flu is a lot more deadly for people who are under 25 than it's being about a year older than COVID-19, but it's 17 times deadly to someone under 20 year old, and it's about a lot less deadly to them than it is a year less deadly than a year than COID19. Ben's full list of the top 1% of people who have been hit by the virus Free Op's statistics on the flu virus. Subscribe to the Ben Shapiro show: FreeOp's free epsiode of the flu. FREE MOversation: Free Op is a free market economics thread on the topic of The flu virus and the impact of the virus on the population Subscribe on Apple Podcasts and other tools to help spread the word about the flu and other viral epidemics on social media and other social media tools to find out what's going on in the world of the viral flu virus, and help spread it everywhere else! Links From This Episode
00:00:13.000The Ben Shapiro Show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.com.
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00:00:25.000Alrighty, well, let's begin with the continuing big news of the last week and a half.
00:00:31.000States are following Georgia and Florida's lead, and the reason for this is because you're not seeing massive upticks and massive spikes in cases and deaths in Florida and Georgia.
00:00:38.000You're seeing a downtick in cases and deaths in Florida and Georgia, particularly the positives as a percentage of the greater number of tests that are currently being taken.
00:00:47.000And this is why all 50 states have reopened it to some degree.
00:00:50.000According to the New York Times, Connecticut was among the last states to take a plunge back to business on Wednesday.
00:00:55.000Its stay-at-home order lifted, and stores, museums, and offices were allowed to reopen.
00:00:58.000Not far away in New Jersey, the reopening has been more limited, with only curbside pickup at retail stores and allowances for certain industries.
00:01:04.000The contrast illustrates a dynamic playing out across the country as governors grapple with how to handle a pandemic when it comes with no political playbook.
00:01:11.000States in the Northeast and on the West Coast, as well as Democratic-led states in the Midwest, have moved the slowest toward reopening, several governors taking a county-by-county approach.
00:01:19.000By contrast, several states in the South opened earlier and more fully.
00:01:22.000Those social distancing requirements were put in place.
00:01:24.000Restaurants, salons, gyms, and other businesses have been open in Georgia for several weeks.
00:01:28.000There has not been the predicted spike.
00:01:29.000We keep hearing next week will be the spike in Georgia.
00:01:31.000It has now been a month since Georgia moved toward reopening in a very significant way.
00:01:35.000There has not yet been the spike that was predicted.
00:01:38.000Now, you would see, presumably, an uptick in positive numbers of cases because people are associating once again, but it has not been this overwhelming wave that we were supposedly going to hear about.
00:01:47.000We've seen isolated cases where churches, for example, have had to shut down.
00:01:50.000There was one in Texas, I believe there was one in Georgia, both of which shut down after people got too close to one another and a couple of people died.
00:01:57.000But that is not particularly shocking.
00:01:58.000Again, once you let people out of lockdown and they are associating with one another, then you are likely to see a little bit more transmission of the virus.
00:02:05.000That does not mean you are overwhelming the healthcare system, which of course was the goal of lockdown in the first place, was to prevent the overwhelming.
00:02:11.000Alaska has now announced it will go even further.
00:02:13.000On Tuesday, Governor Mike Dunleavy said he would lift restrictions on businesses by the end of the week, allowing restaurants, bars, gyms, and others to return to full capacity.
00:02:20.000That's because Alaska has not been hard hit in any way.
00:02:22.000Sports and recreational activities will also be allowed.
00:02:25.000Dunleavy said it will all be open just like it was prior to the virus.
00:02:28.000He said social distancing strategies would be recommended but not required.
00:02:31.000Even as it announced plans to ease restrictions on residents, Alaska said it was maintaining its requirement for travelers arriving in the state to stay quarantined for 14 days and keeping visitor restrictions at senior centers and prisons, all of which makes perfect sense, right?
00:02:43.000Once your state has lowered the curve, then preventing people who have this thing from entering your state makes perfect sense.
00:02:50.000Also, protecting your senior citizens and protecting your jails and places where people are in close proximity makes perfect sense as well.
00:02:56.000Again, the people who are being hardest hit by all of this are the seniors.
00:03:00.000And we now have some statistics that bear out exactly who is being hit.
00:03:04.000So Avik Roy over at FreeOp, which is an organization dedicated to free market economics, the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, Avik Roy has now put out a thread about the risk factors by population, like how much more deadly is the flu than COVID for various age groups.
00:03:22.000And it turns out that if you're looking at young people, the flu is way more deadly.
00:03:27.000And when I talk about young people, I'm talking about people who are under the age of 25.
00:03:29.000If you're under age 25, the flu is significantly more deadly to you than COVID-19.
00:03:34.000In fact, it is 17 times more deadly to you than COVID-19.
00:03:38.000If you assume 150,000 deaths will occur from COVID-19 over the course of the season, then what you're looking at is the flu being about 17 times more deadly than the coronavirus for people who are under a year for babies.
00:03:51.000It's about 20 times more deadly if you're under four.
00:03:53.000It is about seven times more deadly if you're between five and 14.
00:03:57.000And it's about 1.3 times more deadly if you're between 15 and 24.
00:04:00.000Now, once you hit 25, then COVID starts to be more deadly than the flu.
00:04:05.000Once you hit 25, then COVID is about two times more deadly than the flu if you're under Again, this takes into account everybody.
00:04:44.000Because it turns out that those people die at extraordinarily high rates anyway.
00:04:48.000I mean, again, one of the things that we are recognizing here is that as we start to study the underlying statistics, people in nursing homes died in extraordinary rates anyway.
00:04:56.000They represent about 0.5% of the American population.
00:04:58.000They represent nearly 20% of all deaths in a given year in the American population.
00:05:02.000So an uptick in nursing homes is not exactly a shocker.
00:05:05.000That is, the most vulnerable group in our population always has been.
00:05:08.000If you're over 85, by the way, it's only about 1.7 times more deadly than the flu, COVID-19, according to Avik Roy over at FREOP.
00:05:16.000He says, here's another way to think about the very low risk to children.
00:05:20.000Sweden has one of the lowest pediatric infection rates in the industrialized world and exactly one pediatric death from COVID-19.
00:05:25.000So when you hear politicians saying we can't reopen the schools, well, unless you have people going to the schools and then immediately like being dropped off at the nursing home, probably you don't have to worry about this so much.
00:05:34.000Children are really not the disease vector for this thing.
00:05:38.000Not only that, we have some very good news in terms of the way this thing spreads.
00:05:43.000I'm shocked, frankly, that this is not the top story in the country, considering how much people have been worried about cleaning off surfaces, for example.
00:06:27.000Everyone is different, so Noom adjusts to your lifestyle.
00:06:29.000They teach you the psychology behind the decisions you make, and then help you keep track of everything from workouts and steps to analyzing your diet and recommending healthy recipes.
00:06:36.000You have to adopt a new way of life, and Noom helps you do that.
00:07:12.000Okay, so here is a good piece of news.
00:07:13.000According to The Blaze, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has updated its guidance on COVID-19 to say the disease does not spread easily on contaminated surfaces.
00:07:22.000The disease has always been thought to spread mainly through person-to-person contact by respiratory droplets produced when an infected person coughs, sneezes, or talks.
00:07:29.000Up until recently, the CDC was maintaining the virus could also spread through contact with contaminated surfaces.
00:07:34.000Now, the CDC says, the virus does not spread easily in other ways.
00:07:38.000In other words, if somebody doesn't sneeze on you or cough on you or talk real close to you for a prolonged period of time, you're probably not getting this thing.
00:07:44.000If you just go to the park and you touch a surface, unless someone sneezed on that surface like half a second before, the chances are extraordinarily low that you're going to end up with COVID-19.
00:07:53.000The CDC guidance now says it may be possible for COVID-19 to spread in other ways.
00:07:56.000These are not thought to be the main ways the virus spreads.
00:07:59.000According to Yahoo News, the guidance used to simply say that the spread in other ways may be possible without the added disclaimer.
00:08:04.000But that is a fairly significant development.
00:08:09.000Much of the thinking on the virus's spread through contaminated surfaces stemmed from a New England Journal of Medicine study in March that found the virus could survive in the air for hours and on certain surfaces for days.
00:08:17.000In April, when the FDA announced customers don't need to worry about contracting the virus from grocery packaging, the CDC guidance expressed caution, citing the study.
00:08:24.000But now, it turns out, based on the epidemiology, according to a senior scholar at Johns Hopkins' Center for Health Security, Dr. Amish Adalja, based on the epidemiology, we know that the main way this virus is infecting people is from direct contact with other infected people.
00:08:41.000Respiratory virus is largely spread through breathing in infected respiratory droplets.
00:08:45.000So in other words, wash your hands a lot.
00:08:46.000Don't wipe your face immediately after touching surfaces.
00:08:49.000But if you pick up an Amazon package at the front door, the chances are extraordinarily high you're not getting COVID-19 from the Amazon package over at the front door.
00:08:56.000And this is why you're starting to see many states now considering reopening schools and camps.
00:09:00.000The Wall Street Journal has a piece today talking about how various countries have decided to deal with all of this.
00:09:07.000They talk about the fact that there have been a few cases of a new condition that is similar to Kawasaki disease, but it's very rare.
00:09:16.000In fact, it's rare enough that it likely won't affect most decisions to reopen camps and schools, according to health and policy experts.
00:09:22.000Many experts said parents should be reassured that this affects an extremely small percentage of children, has caused very few deaths.
00:09:28.000Stephen Kearney, the Chief of Pediatric Critical Care of Medicine at New York Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children's Hospital in Columbia says, it's probably hundreds of thousands of kids in the New York area who've been exposed to the virus.
00:09:37.000It seems like a really small number of people are getting this.
00:09:39.000The hospital has had about 40 children with this particular syndrome.
00:09:43.000They're treated with steroids and they usually recover in three to four days and then follow up with a cardiologist.
00:09:49.000So camps are now considering whether they're going to reopen for the summer.
00:10:12.000According to Bloomberg, Officials in continental Europe's major economies are closely monitoring coronavirus data for signs of resurgence and infections as restrictions on daily life are phased out.
00:10:22.000Countries must focus on more than daily case numbers and death tolls because those are lagging indicators.
00:10:26.000A better guide might come from the length of lines outside the doctor's office or surveys conducted at random.
00:10:31.000However, Europe's coronavirus spread seems to be in check even as the lockdowns are loosened over in Europe.
00:10:37.000And again, in America, people are picking this back up.
00:10:41.000Danish bars and cafes are completely back in business.
00:10:44.000Social distancing has now been scaled back to one meter, which is a little over three feet.
00:10:49.000It means more customers can now be seated at restaurants because it turns out it's very difficult to fill a restaurant when everybody is seated six feet apart.
00:11:05.000They're already a rare sight in Denmark.
00:11:07.000Groups of up to 10 friends can already sit together.
00:11:09.000For pubs, there will be no more customers propping up at the bar.
00:11:12.000They aren't allowed to face staff for more than 15 minutes, mainly because they don't want people breathing on the staff on a continuous level.
00:11:18.000But we are starting to see, you know, countries all over the world open up.
00:11:21.000So when people on the left in the United States suggest that it's crazy that southern states are opening up, just recommend and just point out that Europe is doing exactly the same thing and they're not seeing an uptick in cases.
00:11:30.000Meanwhile, over in Ohio, Governor Mike DeWine has lifted Ohio's safe-at-home order.
00:11:34.000According to Cleveland.com, more of Ohio's mandatory restrictions to curb the spread of coronavirus will be cut short, according to Governor DeWine.
00:11:41.000Some key social distancing rules, including a ban on most mass gatherings, restrictions on bars and restaurants, will still remain mandatory.
00:11:47.000The language of the new advisory order was not immediately available.
00:11:50.000The document had not yet been signed, but DeWine says the state will continue to enforce a number of mandatory rules, most notably requirements that patrons at bars and restaurants must remain seated while eating and drinking and stay at least six feet away from others.
00:12:01.000Also, Ohio's ban on most gatherings of 10 or more people will remain in place.
00:12:06.000But obviously, everybody is moving toward reopening, and this is obvious across the country.
00:12:16.000Now, it's amazing to see the lengths to which the media will go to try and portray Florida as a giant failure, despite the fact that Florida has nearly the same population as New York, almost identical populations to New York, in terms of the number of people.
00:12:26.000And they've experienced, what, one-tenth, one-twelfth the number of deaths.
00:12:29.000There's not been a major outbreak in Florida.
00:12:47.000The latest attempt, by the way, by the media to get DeSantis was so obviously stupid that I pointed this out yesterday, and then it turns out, of course, the story fell apart.
00:12:54.000I talked about this yesterday on the program.
00:12:56.000There was a story from Miami Herald yesterday suggesting that Florida's data analysts had been fired because she was attempting to bring the truth to the people, and DeSantis stepped in and Bigfooted her to prevent her from bringing the actual news about coronavirus to the people.
00:13:09.000Now it turns out she was fired for insubordination.
00:13:12.000According to the Post-Gazette.com, facing an explosive — from the Sarasota Herald-Tribune in Florida — facing an explosive charge that his administration is manipulating coronavirus data to help make the case for reopening Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis played down the controversy Tuesday as a non-issue.
00:13:25.000Health experts say that the milestone in Florida—they topped 2,000 deaths—should serve as a sobering reminder to exercise caution as the state reopens.
00:13:33.000DeSantis has presented his reopening plan as safe and step-by-step, but the accusations leveled by Rebecca Jones were undermining that push, except for the fact that Jones apparently was not telling the truth.
00:13:44.000She suggested that there was going to be a cover-up of data.
00:13:46.000The article itself—the original article itself—said there had been no cover-up of the data.
00:13:50.000DeSantis said Tuesday Joan sent an email to her supervisor saying that her comments were being misinterpreted.
00:13:56.000DeSantis said, I don't know who she is.
00:13:57.000They gave me an email she sent to her supervisor said that, uh-oh, I may have said something that was misinterpreted.
00:14:02.000I said they've got a team working on it now.
00:14:03.000What I meant is I don't expect the same level of accessibility is that they are busy and can't answer every single email they get right away.
00:14:09.000And that it was ridiculous that I managed to do it in the first place and that I was tired and needed a break from working two months straight.
00:14:14.000Okay, that is not what she said in her original public letter.
00:14:15.000What she said in her original public letter is that the accessibility would be limited because of a cover-up.
00:14:21.000DeSantis said that the state's COVID-19 dashboard is a heck of a tool.
00:14:24.000He said, I'm proud of the folks who work on it.
00:14:27.000Jones told Florida Today she was fired on Monday.
00:14:29.000And then she said that she faced blowback because she manually refused to change data to drum up support for the plan to reopen.
00:14:34.000The governor's office then released a statement saying, Joan's was terminated, quote, after a repeated course of insubordination, including her unilateral decisions to modify the department's COVID-19 dashboard without input or approval from the epidemiological team or her supervisors.
00:14:48.000He said accuracy and transparency are always indispensable, especially during an unprecedented public health emergency like COVID-19.
00:14:53.000Having someone disruptive cannot be tolerated during this pandemic, which led the department to determine it was best to terminate her employment.
00:15:02.000Okay, so basically, the media ran with this bullcrap story because they wanted to get to Santa's.
00:15:06.000Meanwhile, by the way, just a quick note, the states that are actually changing their data now are Democratic states.
00:15:12.000Governor Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer, she announced that Michigan would now quietly uptick the number of deaths that they estimate are due to COVID-19 in the state.
00:15:26.000According to Lynn Sutphin, a state health spokesperson, the state this week will start reporting probable cases.
00:15:33.000She said, that would be a death where the death certificate lists COVID-19 disease as a cause of death or a significant condition contributing to death without a positive COVID-19 confirmed lab results.
00:15:41.000In other words, most states have been reporting probable COVID-19 deaths as COVID-19 deaths.
00:15:47.000So that means that they've under-accounted the number of deaths by probably thousands in Michigan.
00:15:53.000In Colorado, a state representative called for an investigation after the state acknowledged that it was counting as COVID-19 deaths cases in which the disease was not listed as the cause of death, but they had tested positive for coronavirus.
00:16:03.000So you're starting to see Colorado reversing course.
00:16:06.000In April, New York City began counting probable deaths in which COVID-19 was listed as a cause of death, but there wasn't a positive test.
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00:17:56.000The answer is the media will not be apologizing at any time in the near future.
00:18:00.000Rich Lowry has a good piece in interview with Ron DeSantis.
00:18:03.000He says, Florida went out of its way to get COVID-19 positive people out of nursing homes, while New York went out of its way to get them in, a policy now widely acknowledged to have been a debacle.
00:18:10.000as a hero, even though DeSantis' approach to nursing homes was obviously superior to that of Cuomo.
00:18:14.000Florida went out of its way to get COVID-19 positive people out of nursing homes, while New York went out of its way to get them in, a policy now widely acknowledged to have been a debacle.
00:18:23.000The media didn't have their eyes on the ball.
00:18:24.000The day the media had their first big freakout about Florida was March 15th, says DeSantis, which was, there were people on Clearwater Beach and it was this big deal.
00:18:31.000That same day, we signed the executive order to one, ban visitation in nursing homes, and two, ban the reintroduction of a COVID-positive patient back into a nursing home.
00:18:39.000DeSantis has been mused by the obsession with Florida's beaches.
00:18:42.000When they reopened in Jacksonville, it was a big national story, usually relayed with a dire tone.
00:18:46.000Jacksonville has almost no COVID activity outside of a nursing home context, he said.
00:18:54.000It's like, okay, we just move on to the next target.
00:18:57.000Perhaps more understandably, the villages, the iconic senior community, was a focus of media worries.
00:19:01.000According to DeSantis, as of last weekend, there had not been a single resident of the villages in the hospital for COVID-19 for about a week.
00:19:08.000At one point, the infection rate in the villages was so low, state officials were worried they were missing something.
00:19:13.000So he says, I got the University of Florida to do a study.
00:19:15.000They did 1,200 asymptomatic seniors at the villages.
00:19:19.000Not one came back positive, which was really incredible.
00:20:03.000But how can you rely on something when it says you're peaking in a week and the next day you've already peaked?
00:20:07.000Florida was also able to handle this better because they've dealt with natural disasters many times, and Florida protected the nursing homes because they have a disproportionate number of nursing home residents in Florida.
00:20:16.000Mary Mayhew, who heads the nursing home effort, says it was clear to me there were much higher standards related to infection control being outlined by the federal CDC that well exceeded what our nursing homes traditionally have been expected to adhere to, so we never had false expectations.
00:20:30.000Inspectors and assessment teams visited nursing homes.
00:20:32.000The state homed in on facilities where, Mayhew said, we had historically cited around infection control.
00:20:36.000We used that to prioritize our visits to those facilities, understanding that the guidance from the CDC was changing quickly.
00:20:42.000Florida required all staff and any worker that entered to be screened for COVID illness temperature checks.
00:20:46.000Anyone symptomatic would simply not be allowed to go in.
00:21:14.000I said repeatedly to the hospital, to the CEOs, to the discharge planners, to the medical officers, I understand for 20 years it's been ingrained, especially because of Medicare reimbursement, to get individuals in and out.
00:21:24.000I'm not sending anyone back to a nursing home who has the slightest risk of being positive.
00:21:29.000She said, we said, let's not have two cases become 20 or five become 50.
00:21:32.000If you don't manage the individuals, you return them back, you'll have far more being transferred back to the hospital.
00:21:37.000Make it was unmovable on the question.
00:21:40.000Okay, so Florida handled this exactly right, and Florida was blamed, because the media had an agenda from beginning to end here, and that agenda continues to be carried out, despite the fact that the facts no longer support the agenda.
00:21:51.000You could at least make the argument that this was good-hearted at the beginning, because everybody was risk-averse.
00:21:55.000But what happens when it turns out that New York's a freaking disaster area, and that Florida is fine, because Florida handled it the way you're supposed to, and the way that I've been talking about for literally months.
00:22:04.000Protect the elderly, protect the nursing homes, recognize differential risk assessments, But instead, Florida was the bad guy here.
00:22:38.000And now their internet activity is protected with the click of a button.
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00:23:57.000It is a government that jails a million Uyghurs for the crime of being Muslim.
00:24:00.000It is a government that keeps a billion people in repression.
00:24:04.000It is a government that will Maybe, we'll certainly jail you and maybe kill you if you cross them.
00:24:10.000It is a government that is trying to claw back all of its treaty obligations to Hong Kong.
00:24:15.000It is a government that would love nothing better than to take over Taiwan, a free and independent Taiwan.
00:24:20.000It is a government that lies routinely to the world population.
00:24:23.000It is a government that, it is a full-on dictatorship.
00:24:26.000The fact that anybody treats China as a legitimate world power, as opposed to an illegitimate government that is a world power, is beyond me.
00:25:11.000Secretary of State to applaud a Taiwanese president on their election, according to the Chinese government, which demonstrates, by the way, how pathetic the American government has been on this issue for a very long time.
00:25:20.000Taiwan ought to be free and independent.
00:25:22.000One of the great tragedies of history is that Mao Tse-tung won the battle against Chiang Kai-shek.
00:25:27.000Would that all of China were governed by the same people who govern Taiwan, not the other way around.
00:25:34.000issued a congratulations to Taiwan, which by the way, we have a defense obligation to.
00:25:39.000And the Chinese government immediately said that Pompeo's, Mike Pompeo, the Secretary of State, his statement seriously violated the one China principle.
00:26:06.000Remember right before the coronavirus pandemic back in January, there was a lot of talk about repression in Hong Kong.
00:26:11.000China is now taking advantage of the pandemic to crack down and arrest all of the leaders of that effort against China.
00:26:19.000China took exception to Pompeo referring to Tsai as president.
00:26:21.000Pompeo said in his statement, China immediately got angry because China immediately got angry because they said that it's very bad that we pointed out that someone was elected in Taiwan.
00:26:43.000Better that the leader should be selected by the Politburo and there should be no elections apparently.
00:26:47.000The Ministry, the Foreign Ministry of China said, China urges the U.S.
00:26:50.000side to immediately correct its mistakes.
00:26:52.000The Chinese side will take necessary countermeasures to respond to the above-mentioned erroneous actions by the U.S.
00:26:57.000side should bear the consequences arising therefrom.
00:27:12.000You should bear the consequences of taking control of the W.H.O.
00:27:16.000By the way, there's some pretty incestuous ties between the Chinese government and the W.H.O., including high-ranking members of the W.H.O.
00:27:21.000being married to members of the Chinese government.
00:27:24.000But according to the New York Times, President Trump's angry demands for punitive action against the WHO were rebuffed on Tuesday by the organization's other members, who decided to conduct an impartial independent examination of the WHO's response to the coronavirus pandemic.
00:27:37.000And a four-page later, late Monday night, Trump threatened to permanently cut off U.S.
00:27:41.000funding to the WHO unless it committed to major substantive improvements within 30 days.
00:27:45.000That was a significant escalation of his repeated attempts to blame the WHO in China for the spread of the virus and deflect responsibility for his own handling of a crisis that has killed more than 90,000 people in the United States.
00:27:55.000Let me just point out how disgusting the New York Times coverage is here.
00:27:58.000Trump points out the WHO is a disaster area.
00:28:20.000But the way that the New York Times covers that, that's an editorial decision, right?
00:28:25.000They say that when Trump rips on China and the WHO, it's to quote, deflect responsibility for his own handling of the crisis.
00:28:31.000Or alternatively, it is to criticize China for unleashing this pandemic around the world, knowing full damn well that there was human to human transmission and allowing 5 million citizens to leave the Wuhan area while they knew that this disease was spreading widely.
00:28:44.000Representatives of the organization's member nations rallied around the WHO.
00:28:48.000You mean that Russia and China resisted the United States?
00:28:52.000The European Union chided Trump's heated rhetoric even as they acknowledged the need to review the WHO's response as the virus spread from China to the rest of the world.
00:28:58.000That's because the EU is filled with a bunch of pansies who are afraid to stand up to the Chinese government because the Chinese government does a lot of business with them.
00:29:05.000Same deal as the EU refusing to stand up to Iran when the United States, under President Trump, was the only country willing to stand up to Iran.
00:29:12.000Public health experts noted Trump's threats to withdraw from the organization and permanently halt funding ignored the reality that any such moves would require the consent of Congress.
00:29:19.000But the president's continued attacks on the WHO said experts.
00:29:27.000Threatened to hobble the organization and seriously damage international efforts to combat the virus.
00:29:32.000Which was more damaging, Trump threatening to cut off funding unless they get their act together or the WHO never having their act together in the first place?
00:29:38.000Yesterday, President Trump said the WHO has to clean up their act.
00:29:41.000He's not talking about the rock musical Tommy.
00:29:45.000Here's President Trump going after the WHO.
00:30:07.000Okay, so he is exactly right about all of this.
00:30:09.000And what's amazing about this is Trump is such a polarizing figure for the media that the media immediately leaped to defend China.
00:30:16.000The only reason to blame China, the only reason to blame the Chinese government, which again is evil, the only reason to blame them is because Trump is very bad at his job.
00:30:23.000Now again, should we point out at this point that the deaths per million in the United States stands below most European nations outside of Germany?
00:30:31.000Is it okay to point out that the vast botchery of this thing mainly happened in New York?
00:30:36.000That somehow Florida handled it okay, Texas handled it okay, even California handled it okay.
00:30:40.000Washington state had an early outbreak and then got it under control.
00:30:44.000Is it okay to point out that Trump got the ventilators where they need to go?
00:30:47.000And that right now we have more testing capacity than people looking to be tested?
00:30:51.000Are we allowed to point any of that out or is it just all Trump bad all the time?
00:30:54.000So Susan Rice, the garbage National Security Advisor who lied to the American public repeatedly about the Benghazi attacks, which I know we're not supposed to talk about, the scandal of the Benghazi attacks in which the State Department routinely turned down requests for additional security in Libya and then tried to pretend that the attack was spontaneous and not planned and was in fact driven by a YouTube video.
00:31:15.000I know we're supposed to pretend that was not a big deal at all.
00:31:19.000And then you put it in a tweet and you put it with letters vertically.
00:31:22.000We're supposed to pretend that was not a big deal.
00:31:24.000Susan Rice went on national TV and lied about it like a thousand times.
00:31:26.000Now she is considered a possible presidential vice presidential pick for Joe Biden.
00:31:31.000And we're going to get to Susan Rice on China.
00:31:33.000By the way, if this is a battle that Trump has to fight, this is like the best election battle ever for Trump.
00:31:38.000If this election comes down to Trump pointing out that China is a garbage heap and the Democrats suggesting that Trump is just a meanie for targeting China, that is a battle Trump wins every time.
00:31:45.000We're going to get to more of this in just one second.
00:31:47.000First, let's talk about the fact that now is a fantastic time to save money.
00:31:50.000Why would you not save money if it were free to do so?
00:31:53.000If it didn't cost you any money to save money?
00:33:45.000The tumblers are overflowing with tears at the thought of this offer, people.
00:33:49.000Finally, all access members get all the benefits of all the other membership tiers that get the ad-free website experience, access to all of our live broadcasts, show library, access to the mailbag, the full three hours of the Ben Shapiro Show every day, along with dedicated editorials from moi.
00:34:10.000You're listening to the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.
00:34:14.000So one of the funny things is watching the New York Times editorial side decide the New York Times objective media coverage So the objective media coverage, so much objectivity, so much media-izing, and so much journalism.
00:34:31.000I mean, just incredible levels of objective journalism happening over at the New York Times.
00:34:35.000So they'll actually headline things like, deflecting from his own incompetence, Trump blames China, and that'll be their objective news story.
00:34:41.000And then you head on over to the op-ed page, and why there's Susan Rice just writing the same thing.
00:34:45.000So Susan Rice says, there's a long history of American presidential candidates using China as a campaign cudgel.
00:34:50.000From Bill Clinton blasting President George H.W.
00:34:52.000Bush in 1992 for dealing with a Chinese premier known as the Butcher of Beijing, to Donald Trump's 2016 attack that the Obama administration had allowed China to rape the United States while Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State.
00:35:02.000This election year, China bashing will reach a new level as Mr. Trump seeks to capitalize on high voter disapproval of China, Beijing's failure to contain the coronavirus, and persistent bilateral tensions between our countries.
00:35:12.000Well, it seems like those are all relevant factors.
00:35:14.000Like the fact that, again, China is an evil, evil government that has released a virus and then tried to blame the United States for the release of the virus.
00:35:23.000And also that they're a repressive, horrifying regime.
00:35:26.000But according to Susan Rice, Trump is just a meanie.
00:35:28.000Desperate to obscure the reality of more than 90,000 American deaths and 36 million unemployed amid Mr. Trump's utterly incompetent handling of the pandemic, Republicans have no better strategy than to play the China card.
00:35:38.000The Republicans are executing a 57-page campaign memo that recommends branding opponents soft on China and reveals their rationale for repeated refrains of China virus and Wuhan lab.
00:36:00.000But China won't allow any investigation and in fact has threatened sanctions against places like Australia for suggesting some sort of independent investigation.
00:36:06.000But Susan Rice is really mad about this.
00:36:09.000She says that we cannot be so mean to China.
00:36:12.000First, she tries to claim that Biden is really harsh on China, which is hilarious.
00:36:19.000Joe Biden flew to China with his son, and then his son received a billion-dollar investment in a fund that he was running while Biden was vice president.
00:36:31.000This is something that Hunter frequently did, obviously.
00:36:34.000But, says Susan Rice, Mr. Trump will run his standard play, trying to deflect responsibility for his monumental failings by dishonestly projecting onto Mr. Biden his own weakness on China.
00:36:43.000Trump seemingly will do anything to win in November.
00:36:45.000His China gambit may be the least of it.
00:36:47.000Still, campaigning on China, while a well-worn strategy, is particularly dangerous in these tense times, when it fuels Asian hostility at home and anti-American sentiment abroad.
00:36:56.000Okay, so this is gonna be the other angle that is run by the media, is that every time Trump mentions China, it's because he wants Chinese-Americans targeted, which is absurd.
00:37:03.000Trump has repeatedly talked about how stupid that is, and it is indeed stupid.
00:37:08.000But it is amazing to watch how the objective journalism side takes its cues directly from the op-ed page over at the New York Times.
00:37:14.000By the way, talking about soft on China, never forget that it was Joe Biden who suggested that a travel ban on citizens coming from Wuhan in China, that that was actually xenophobic hysteria.
00:37:26.000Here was Joe Biden doing just that back in January.
00:37:28.000A national emergency, you know, worldwide alerts.
00:37:32.000The American people need to have a president who they can trust what he says about it, that he is going to act rationally about it.
00:37:41.000In moments like this, this is where the credibility of a president is most needed, as he explains what we should and should not do.
00:37:51.000This is no time for Donald Trump's record of hysteria xenophobia, hysterical xenophobia.
00:38:00.000No, it's time for Joe Biden to go back to sleep.
00:38:03.000He needs his nap, or he gets a little tired in the middle of these events.
00:38:06.000Rachel Maddow, by the way, over at MSNBC, doing the same routine.
00:38:16.000They cite the Lancet Medical Journal to the notion that this thing may have been spreading since November or December.
00:38:22.000There was, in fact, a report that this thing may have been spreading from November or December.
00:38:25.000Lancet came out and said, we don't want to be used as a tool against the WHO because all of these medical organizations rely on the WHO and work with the WHO.
00:38:32.000Rachel Maddow went on a rant last night about how we have to stop being mean to the WHO.
00:38:37.000And Trump is just terrible for being mean to the WHO.
00:38:39.000Honestly, if you want to make this your campaign, that you're going to defend the WHO in China for their behavior during this pandemic, go for it, guys.
00:38:48.000President's letter said, quote, "We know the following: the WHO consistently ignored credible reports of the virus spreading in Wuhan in early December 2019 or even earlier, including reports from the Lancet Medical Journal." Well, the Lancet Medical Journal wrote to the White House today to say, "Oh my God, what are you talking about?" I'm paraphrasing that, but that's basically what they said.
00:39:14.000I mean, here's what they actually said.
00:39:28.000It is also true that The Lancet did report later that it is possible that there was some sort of outbreak that took place earlier than December.
00:39:39.000They say the first reports the journal published were on January 24, 2020.
00:39:42.000In a paper by Chao and Huang and colleagues, the first 41 patients from Wuhan with COVID-19 were described.
00:39:47.000The scientists and physicians who led the study were all from Chinese institutions.
00:39:50.000They worked with us quickly to make information about the new epidemic outbreak and disease it caused fully and freely available to an international audience.
00:39:58.000That's not what Trump was referring to, but okay, fine.
00:40:01.000So let's assume that was just a blatant error.
00:40:03.000Does that invalidate any of the other four pages of problems that are cited with the WHO?
00:41:13.000Now, if you look at some of the reports that came out from Italy, that came out from France, that came out from other — a lot of our frontline workers take it because it possibly — and I think it does, but, you know, people are going to have to make up their own mind.
00:41:30.000Okay, so when he says that this thing is a Trump enemy statement, that is not useful.
00:41:35.000I'll tell you what is amazing, though, is how the media and the Democrats are fully willing to say anything, including things that are inaccurate, in order to rebut President Trump.
00:41:44.000So Joe Biden, for example, he says no doctor has said to use hydroxychloroquine.
00:43:29.000Very shiny Nancy Pelosi talking about this.
00:43:32.000I didn't know that he would be so sensitive.
00:43:34.000He's always talking about other people's voix de voix, their weight, their pounds.
00:43:41.000I don't even want to spend any more time on his distraction, because as you see in the last couple of days, so much of the time has been spent on what he said.
00:43:52.000Rather than that, I think you should recognize that his words weigh a ton.
00:44:39.000Okay, so here's Andrew Cuomo doing his best.
00:44:42.000He says to Trump, you're not tweeting your way through this.
00:44:45.000Andrew Cuomo was asked yesterday about nursing home deaths and he was like, it's just because the media keep focusing on nursing home deaths that I'm getting all this flack.
00:44:53.000Here's Andrew Cuomo, the world's worst governor, talking about how Trump can't tweet his way through this.
00:44:57.000But he can just talk his way through this.
00:44:58.000The media will continue to kiss his ass.
00:45:02.000Today, government's going to be held to a different standard.
00:45:05.000And it has to be fundamentally different.
00:45:47.000This is why, honestly, like allowing individuals to make their own decisions and allowing individuals to mitigate their own risk and allowing individuals to actually be informed of the information and then actually decide for their own lives what is most valuable.
00:47:00.000And that's because the government shut everything down.
00:47:02.000But as we move back into a functional economy, it is not good to pay people more than they were making at their job to sit at home on their couch.
00:47:17.000Democrats are not worried about any of that.
00:47:19.000They want this unemployment policy continued ad infinitum, really forever.
00:47:24.000So when President Trump says, we don't want to extend unemployment benefits all the way out to January because people are getting back to work, Democrats are responding by saying, no, no, no, we need to do it forever, forever.
00:47:33.000House Democrats have proposed extending the aid through January 2021.
00:47:36.000Congressional Republicans say they're concerned some workers are making more money on unemployment insurance than if they were on a payroll, and they have less incentive to return to work or find a new job.
00:47:44.000Lindsey Graham said, you can extend some assistance.
00:47:46.000You don't want to pay people more unemployed than they'd make working.
00:47:48.000You should never make more than your actual wages.
00:47:51.000Graham said that Trump agrees that it is hurting the economic recovery.
00:47:55.000And then, of course, the Washington Post goes to, many economists fear cutting off the benefit extension could hamper the economic recovery.
00:48:01.000Paying people not to work will hamper the economic recovery.
00:48:04.000Again, I'm all in favor of filling in the gap that was created by government forcibly shutting down the entire economy and being put into a coma.
00:48:12.000But now that we are coming out of the coma, now would be the time where you stop giving people the anesthetic.
00:48:16.000At the lunch, Trump had a lunch with Senate Republicans.
00:48:19.000He implored Senate Republicans to take their time on the next phase of coronavirus legislation to get it right, which makes sense, because we've just been rushing these bills out the door, and the bills kind of suck.
00:48:29.000I mean, they're the best you can do when you're in a giant rush, but they kind of suck.
00:48:33.000Meanwhile, Harry Reid, who was responsible, along with Nancy Pelosi, for holding up the first two tranches of coronavirus response, is now saying, why don't we have a plan to get 36 million people back to work?
00:48:43.000We do have a plan, you just don't like that plan because your plan is to not have them go back to work.
00:48:46.000Your plan is to pay them to stay unemployed forever.
00:48:49.000Mr. President, why haven't you announced a plan to get 36 million unemployed Americans back to work?
00:49:44.000Meanwhile, it's funny because again, Democrats are of two minds about the shoveling money out the door.
00:49:49.000On the one hand, they want to shovel money out the door sufficient that people never have to go back to work.
00:49:53.000On the other hand, they want to not shovel money out the door to businesses so those businesses can continue to function.
00:49:58.000So the Heroes Act that Democrats have been proposing basically puts vast restrictions on businesses that take business loans.
00:50:07.000The Wall Street Journal editorial board talks about the first round of the bill which allowed the Small Business Administration and Treasury Department to give forgivable loans to small businesses.
00:50:20.000Senate Democrats on Tuesday lashed Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell for not doing enough to help businesses and workers, while warning them not to bail out companies.
00:50:28.000If you want a prescription for a slow economic recovery, that would be it.
00:50:32.000Congress has appropriated $500 billion to backstop Federal Reserve lending facilities for mid-sized and large companies, as well as local governments, plus $670 billion for Paycheck Protection Program loans to small businesses.
00:50:42.000These funds were needed to keep businesses liquid amid government-ordered lockdowns so workers have jobs to return to once the pandemic recedes.
00:50:49.000One problem is Mnuchin has been too willing to bend to Democrats who want to use the business relief to attack the Trump administration.
00:50:55.000Chief among the requirements Democrats are focusing in on is a requirement that businesses use 75% of loans for payroll in order to qualify for loan forgiveness.
00:51:03.000Treasury says this mandate fulfills Congress's apparent intent that loans be used to retain workers, but it has deterred many small businesses and especially restaurants with high overhead costs from applying.
00:51:11.000So Elizabeth Warren went after Mnuchin on this basis yesterday.
00:51:13.000So here is Senator Elizabeth Warren, who again, would love to completely remake all businesses in America according to a model that she apparently likes, even though she's never run a successful business.
00:51:22.000Here's Elizabeth Warren talking about, we have to force businesses to keep people employed.
00:51:27.000So we're going to sign businesses a check so that they can keep people employed when they have no market to actually cater to.
00:51:33.000Which of course is not how businesses work.
00:51:34.000I pointed out this flaw when these bills were first passed.
00:51:38.000That if you are giving a loan to a small business, but the mandate on small businesses, you have to keep 90% of your people employed.
00:51:56.000You have to force them to pay employees who literally are, you're banning them from working.
00:52:00.000So you're having the employers pay employees not to work.
00:52:05.000Well, that's not sustainable because guess what's going to happen the very first moment that the businesses open their doors?
00:52:09.000They have to fire all those employees instead of put people on unemployment if they cannot work right now and then businesses can rehire them as needed.
00:52:18.000That creates fluidity in the market that allows you to actually decide what the wages should be as the market starts to come back.
00:52:22.000Because again, the market when it comes back is not going to be what it was when it originally went down.
00:52:27.000But according to the Democrats, they want every business that takes a loan to have to use the vast majority of the money it gets to pay employees who are not working.
00:52:36.000Then what the hell is the unemployment insurance for, exactly?
00:52:39.000Here's Elizabeth Warren going after Steve Mnuchin.
00:52:42.000What I want to know is are you going to require companies that receive money from this half a trillion dollar slush fund to have to keep people on payroll?
00:52:53.000Yes or no, are you going to require that?
00:52:56.000First, let me say that our number one objective is keeping people employed.
00:53:02.000I take it your answer to my question that whether or not you're going to require, as part of the terms of the loan, that people be kept on payroll is no?
00:53:33.000I can maybe survive another two months, but what I can't do is take a loan from the government that I then have to repay.
00:53:38.000And now I'm in hot to the government, a bunch of money.
00:53:41.000And I've also lost my ability to fire employees or furlough employees, because if you fire furlough employees, then the loans are not forgivable.
00:53:47.000So what's the point of me taking out the loan?
00:53:49.000I'd rather just lay off the employees, and then they can go get them unemployment, and then they can come back when the time is right.
00:53:55.000But according to the Democrats, they don't want to give businesses loans to keep them alive unless those businesses use the loans to do stuff that Democrats want, which is not how business works.
00:54:04.000According to the Wall Street Journal, Treasury says that this mandate, about 75% of loans being used for payroll, fulfills Congress's apparent intent loans be used to retain workers, but it has deterred many small businesses, especially restaurants, with high overhead costs from applying.
00:54:17.000But Mnuchin has refused to relax the requirement, which our sources say is because he doesn't want to get hammered by Democrats for letting businesses prioritize paying landlords over workers.
00:54:25.000But again, the goal of the business is to pay its bills and to make one more dollar than it expends.
00:54:31.000The goal of businesses is not to create jobs.
00:54:33.000This is a full failure to understand how economics works.
00:54:37.000They are byproducts of catering to markets.
00:54:39.000Businesses do not create jobs for fun.
00:54:42.000And they do not do it out of the goodness of their heart.
00:54:44.000And they do not pay workers out of the goodness of their heart.
00:54:46.000That would be a welfare program or a charity program.
00:54:49.000Treasury and the Fed keep fiddling with the rules for the Main Street lending facilities, including the stake that banks are required to retain in loans they issue, as well as leverage limits for borrowers.
00:54:58.000Mnuchin said last month, I think it's pretty clear if Congress wanted me to lose all the money, that money would have been designated as subsidies and grants as opposed to credit support.
00:55:04.000He clarified during Tuesday's hearing that Treasury is willing to take losses in certain scenarios, such as.
00:55:09.000And Mr. Powell says the Fed expects to have the Main Street facility up and running by the first week of June, but businesses needed the cash weeks ago.
00:55:17.000Even now, many will be reluctant to borrow because the Fed has restrictions on dividends and executive compensation, and those continue for a year after the loan is repaid.
00:55:24.000So you repay the loan and the government's still going to control how you run your business.
00:55:27.000By the way, all these bans on stock buybacks, if you like the stock market actually having some semblance of recovery, If a company feels that its stock is being undervalued, a stock buyback is actually good policy.
00:55:38.000Everybody rips on stock buybacks because they don't understand that as a company just investing in itself and recognizing that the market is undervaluing its future prospects.
00:55:46.000So again, this is... The economic recovery is dependent on markets.
00:55:50.000Democrats are looking to undermine markets because Democrats don't like the markets.
00:55:54.000And they are blaming the markets for a government-insured and government-created crisis in the first place.
00:56:09.000She wrote one of the worst profiles I've ever seen on my friend Jordan Peterson, in which she accused Jordan Peterson of basically wanting to force single women into marriage and all sorts of crap like this.
00:56:30.000Wait until Ford owners find out that Henry Ford both liked the free market, but also was kind of a Nazi.
00:56:39.000Wait until they find out that Henry Ford was publishing full-on anti-Semitic propaganda and was given an award by the Nazi government in 1938.
00:56:45.000Wait until people find out that Volkswagen And BMW were complicit in the Nazi regime.
00:56:50.000Like, wait until people find out that a lot of Japanese automobile companies were involved with the Japanese imperialist government during World War II.
00:56:58.000You mean the people buy products, and they like the products, but they don't care all that much what the founders have to say about things?
00:57:19.000I don't know a single one of them who is reconsidering their Tesla purchase because Elon Musk has been tweeting, cancel, cancel, cancel culture on Twitter.
00:57:50.000Elon Musk, the bombastic head of Tesla and SpaceX, exhorted his 34 million Twitter followers on Sunday to take the red pill.
00:57:55.000The comment was quickly embraced by his followers, including Ivanka Trump, President Trump's elder daughter, who announced she had taken the pill already.
00:58:01.000The exchange referred to a scene from The Matrix, the 1999 science fiction action film.
00:58:06.000But the meaning of red pill and the idea of taking it have since percolated into online forums and become a deeply political metaphor.
00:58:12.000So Tesla owners are having to grapple with a car that carries a few new connotations.
00:58:16.000Marcos Melitzus, author of The Resistance Handbook, 45 Ways to Fight Trump, says, Why are you quoting Marcos Melitzus?
00:58:30.000The guy was like the founder of Daily Kos.
00:58:31.000Why are you quoting Marcos Malitzis as though he is representative of Tesla owners everywhere?
00:58:38.000The guy is a rabid leftist, Marcos Melitzus.
00:58:40.000He has been for like his entire career.
00:58:43.000That's like saying that you found out that Alex Jones owns a Prius and now he's really pissed to find out that the Prius is an environmentalist symbol.
00:58:54.000In the Matrix, the movie's hero, Neo, played by Keanu Reeves, is given the option to take a pill that lets him see the truth.
00:58:59.000The world he thinks is real turns out to be an entertaining lie.
00:59:02.000His body is actually trapped in a farm where people are being used as human batteries.
00:59:05.000Taking the blue pill would let him return to living in the ignorant but blissful lie, while taking the red pill would launch him into the arduous journey through a brutal but fulfilling reality.
00:59:13.000The idea of taking the red pill later grew to mean waking up to society's grand lies.
00:59:17.000It was embraced by the right, especially by members of its youngest cohort, who organized and spent their time in online forums like Reddit and 4chan.
00:59:24.000The truth to be woken up to varied, but it ended up being usually about gender.
00:59:27.000To be red pill meant that you discovered feminism was a scam that ruined the lives of boys and girls.
00:59:31.000In this view, for a male to refuse the red pill was to be weak.
00:59:34.000Red pill forums were often filled with deeply misogynistic and often racist diatribes.
00:59:38.000Okay, so now we're going to play the game where because Elon Musk said take the red pill, he is actually an incel.
00:59:44.000Elon Musk by saying take the red pill, what he doesn't mean is we need to reopen the economy in a responsible fashion and get back to work.
00:59:50.000Instead, Elon Musk is hanging out on 4chan and being a Nazi according to Nellie Bowles.
01:00:01.000As these conversations seeped into the mainstream, pulled along by a host of other internet language from message boards to establishment Republican conversations on sites like Breitbart, the meaning broadened and got watered down.
01:00:10.000To be redpilled can now mean broadly skeptical of experts, to be distrustful of the mainstream press, or to see hypocrisy in social liberalism.
01:00:17.000Why do you have to go through the etymology of redpill?
01:00:21.000The reason you go through the etymology of redpill is because what you're attempting to do is, of course, link Elon Musk to the most radical aspects of these.
01:00:28.000And so Nellie Bowles goes on for hundreds more words talking about the evils of Elon Musk.
01:00:34.000And then she quotes Lily Wachowski, a Matrix co-creator, who told Mr. Musk and Ms.
01:00:38.000Trump in colorful language on Twitter they could take a hike.
01:00:56.000This is, we have to shame Elon Musk the same way that we shamed Mozilla Firefox into firing Brendan Eich, the same way that we are now going after Catherine Herridge.
01:01:03.000Anybody who is in a perceived liberal occupation and who has betrayed, betrayed the particular set of elites, they must be cast out like a leper.
01:01:13.000Elon Musk's sin, he didn't sin, like Nellie Bowles had nothing to say about this when Elon Musk was on Joe Rogan's Smoke and Dope.
01:01:18.000Right, like that, he had nothing to say about that.
01:01:20.000Which by the way, there was like a temporary drop in the stock price and then it spiked again.
01:01:24.000But she has lots to say about the fact that Elon Musk may politically disagree with Nellie Bowles.
01:02:16.000That's what makes CBS's Catherine Herridge so exceptional.
01:02:18.000In an era when too many network journalists slant their reporting to serve establishment opinion, Herridge sticks to the facts.
01:02:23.000Her sterling quality and integrity have also put a target on her back.
01:02:26.000When it came to the collusion hoax, she dared to let the truth guide her, likewise with her reporting into the government misconduct in the prosecution of President Trump's first National Security Advisor, Michael Flynn.
01:02:35.000Most of her colleagues reveled in collusion falsehoods and ignored FBI wrongdoing.
01:02:40.000But there is a price to refusing to conform.
01:02:43.000A Biden flak named Andrew Bates called her a partisan right-wing hack.
01:02:46.000A scurrilous story appeared in the Daily Beast in which various CBS journalists, speaking anonymously, voiced their disgust with her for not sharing their partisan prejudices.
01:02:54.000This has also happened to journalists like Sheryl Atkinson, who was basically cast out of mainstream media for the great crime of reporting things that the media didn't like them reporting.
01:03:03.000Meanwhile, people like Ronan Farrow, who, as it turns out, is a journalist who is driven more by ideology than by good journalistic practices, he is hailed as a hero because, of course, he reinforces all the things the media want to be true in the world.
01:03:15.000So Katherine Harrods, very bad for putting out actual news.
01:03:18.000Ronan Farrow, very good because he targeted Matt Lauer and because he targeted Harvey Weinstein.
01:03:22.000So the target mattered more than the journalistic practices.
01:03:24.000By the way, worth noting today, Matt Lauer being raked over the coals for writing a piece for Mediaite, pointing out all the flaws of reporting in Ronan Farrow.
01:03:32.000Okay, now, you don't have to like Matt Lauer.
01:03:34.000You can think Matt Lauer's a scuzzbag.
01:03:35.000Sounds to me like Matt Lauer's a scuzzbag.
01:03:37.000But he points out that Ronan Farrow, his reporting on Matt Lauer, quote, consistently failed to confirm stories told to him by his main sources, failed to provide evidence of important communications he alleged took place between accusers and me.
01:03:50.000He says, in most cases, Ronan doesn't even claim to have personally seen evidence of those communications, used misleading language to manipulate readers into believing things that could easily be false or at least unprovable.
01:03:59.000In some cases, he undeniably withheld information from the reader that would call the credibility of sources into question.
01:04:04.000And according to Matt Lauer, he routinely presented stories in a way that would suit his activist goals as opposed to any kind of journalistic standard, specifically.
01:04:11.000Specifically, Lauer is upset with the way that Ronan Farrow covered the rape allegation by Brooke Nevels.
01:04:17.000Okay, and he points out like a thousand flaws with Ronan Farrow's reporting that are legitimate flaws.
01:04:22.000You don't have to like, you can think Matt Lauer is a scuzzbag who sexually harassed the help.
01:04:26.000A rape allegation is a pretty damn serious thing, and if you're gonna make that allegation, then you'd best do your research beforehand.
01:04:33.000According to, according to Matt Lauer, that never happened.
01:04:37.000According, he quotes Ronan Farrow in his book Catch and Kill, says Neville's told a million people about Lauer.
01:04:46.000She made the seriousness of what happened clear.
01:04:49.000Lauer says, does Ronan offer any proof of this claim?
01:04:51.000Does he say he confirmed the story with any of the friends or colleagues she claims to have told about the seriousness of what she alleges happened?
01:04:57.000Does he include a single comment or quote from a corroborating source for these claims?
01:05:21.000Sharon, concerned she might not have been aware of a serious situation involving a member of her staff, contacted Brooke's direct superior and they spoke at length.
01:05:27.000That new boss told Sharon Scott that one night, Brooke simply stated talking, started talking about having an affair with me.
01:05:32.000She said, most importantly, Brooke never said a single word about this being anything but a consensual affair.
01:05:36.000She said, Brooke in no way conveyed the seriousness of what she now claims.
01:05:40.000The superior says Ronan Farrow never reached out to her to confirm the story that referenced her in the book.
01:05:46.000Believe Matt Lauer or don't believe Matt Lauer?
01:05:47.000The reality is that because Ronan Farrow targeted the right people and Matt Lauer is a bad guy, Ronan Farrow was able to get away with bad journalistic practices.
01:05:55.000By the way, Ronan Farrow's response to Matt Lauer was incredibly dismissive.
01:05:59.000He didn't bother to actually respond to the immediate allegations made by Matt Lauer.
01:06:03.000He basically just said Matt Lauer is a meanie.