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Feb. 27, 2020 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:01:20
Putting the Panic in Pandemic | Ep. 962
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Time Text
Democrats blame President Trump for a pandemic that hasn't happened yet.
Biden aims for a South Carolina comeback.
And Bernie's record just keeps getting worse.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
Today's show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.
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Slash Ben.
Well, coronavirus is on the tip of everybody's tongue.
I don't mean literally because then a lot of us would be dead.
But coronavirus is obviously in the news and it should be in the news.
It's very scary stuff.
The reason it's very scary stuff is because no one knows anything.
And so when you hear folks in the media talking as though they know something, as though either they know that this is not going to become a major issue or they know that it is going to become a major issue.
Understand, no one knows anything at this point.
And one of the reasons nobody knows anything at this point is because China has been actively quashing the information coming out of China about the extent of the coronavirus.
How many people have been infected?
How transmissible it is?
How deadly it is?
There are two rates that you really want to know about when you're talking about a virus.
The first rate is the transmissibility, right?
How high is the transmissibility?
Is it transmissible via bodily fluids like Ebola, for example, or is it transmissible via air?
If it is transmissible via air, how hard is it to acquire the virus?
This virus appears to have a very high rate of transmission, meaning it appears to be very easily transmissible.
This is why you saw that situation with the cruise ship, the South Korean cruise ship, or the Japanese cruise ship, in which the cruise ship, the Diamond Princess ship, was quarantined For like two weeks and suddenly everybody on board had this virus.
It is very easily transmissible.
The problem is we don't actually know the death rates because we don't actually have good statistics from China as to how many people have acquired this virus and how many people have died from this virus.
So latest statistics suggest about 80,000 people in China have acquired the virus and about 3,000 people in China have died from the virus.
That is a significant death rate.
That's a very high death rate compared to, for example, the flu.
So the flu has a death rate, a mortality rate of about .1%, maybe a little bit less than .1%.
This virus has a death rate, at least according to the Chinese model, that is well in excess of 2%.
It may be approaching as high as 3%.
Now, we don't have full information.
As to which sectors of the population this most affects.
Is it affecting young healthy people?
Is it affecting older people?
I'm gonna give you the information that we have to start.
Because I think that we ought to start with the information that we do have before we start all the speculation.
Because everyone, in terms of politics and the economy, is politicizing this thing.
You have people on the Democratic side of the aisle who are already claiming that President Trump is responsible for the spread of coronavirus, despite the fact that we are still in double digits as far as the number of Americans we know who have acquired coronavirus.
And then you have President Trump out there suggesting that this thing is all a media creation, that there's no reason to worry about coronavirus at all.
You got the stock market, which has plummeted 10% since it's open on Monday.
The stock market closed to an all-time high on Friday at close to $29,000, and it is all the way down at about $26,000 as of this morning.
That obviously is driven by lack of information rather than plethora of information, right?
If there were more information, we'd know whether this thing is a buy market or a sell market, right?
If we knew that this thing were going to cool off and that it was going to die out, people would be buying stocks.
I mean, it would be a great time to buy stocks.
If, however, this thing is going to get worse and the supply chains are going to be disrupted, then that sell-off continues and a market readjustment occurs that Really is significant.
Okay, so here is what we know.
The best article I've seen on this comes from Quentin Fatrell over at MarketWatch talking about a study from JAMA, which is a medical journal, the Journal of American Medicine.
They released a paper analyzing whatever data was available from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
Now again, the big problem here is that China was literally imprisoning people who were talking about this thing early on.
It turns out that authoritarian regimes have a horrible record of stopping pandemics, specifically because they are more worried about the image of the regime than they are about stopping the pandemic.
So they will take low-level officials who are trying to raise this thing up the chain, and they will punish them.
They try to take people who are disseminating information to the public outside of China, and they will throw them in jail.
I mean, all of that is not a good move when you are trying to shut down a pandemic and keep people informed, because people are flying in and out of China every single day.
While the Chinese government is more focused on its image-making publicly, Okay, we'll get to more of what exactly the statistics show, at least the statistics that we have available.
Again, there's a lack of information.
Anybody who tells you differently, anybody who's engaging in sort of irresponsible speculation about where this thing is going without giving you the facts first is doing you a disservice.
You should be taking whatever precautions are necessary.
What I mean by that is not that you should be barricading yourself in your home, but it does mean that, like any other emergency, you probably should have a two-week supply of food and water.
This is what the CDC recommends.
They recommend this if you have got tornadoes or earthquakes.
That really should not change things dramatically.
We're not yet at the point where we are talking about full-scale school shutdowns, but we've seen other countries that are engaging in that sort of thing.
So there's a lack of information.
It's making people feel very unsettled.
And it is too early, frankly, to tell people whether they ought to be feeling unsettled or not, because we just don't know.
And we just don't know is one of the scariest things in the English language.
It really is.
Because what you look to from the government is sort of the protection that you would get from God if you prayed, right?
That government is going to come in and solve all your problems.
Government can't even solve all your problems where you have an authoritarian government in China.
The notion that government is going to be able to preemptively tell you that everything is going to be fine in an area of great uncertainty is obviously not true.
So being realistic about what government can tell you, government can do things, but being realistic about what government is capable of telling you in an area of grey information, at the very least?
That I think is the responsible thing to do.
So we'll bring you some more information on this thing in just one second.
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Okay, so back to this study from the medical journal JAMA.
So they're basing this on statistics released by China as of February 11th.
Again, this is incomplete.
China particularly is going to have a stake in claiming that it really is only claiming old people because it makes them look really bad if young people are dying from the virus.
The sample's overall case fatality rate was 2.3%, which is approximately 230 times higher than the flu's death rate.
I mean, that is a very, very high death rate.
Again, the flu's death rate in the United States last year was about 0.1%.
If you multiply that by 10, sorry, it's about 23 times higher.
My bad, it's not 230 times, but about 23 times higher by the statistics that I've seen.
No deaths occurred in those aged nine or younger, which makes me a little suspicious of these statistics, but cases in those aged 70 to 79 had an 8% fatality rate for people aged 80 years or older, fatality rate of 14.8%.
No deaths reported among mild and severe cases, but if you have a secondary condition that exacerbates it, then you got a real problem on your hands.
If you have diabetes or cardiovascular disease or chronic respiratory disease or hypertension, then this exacerbates whatever underlying condition you have, and you're likely to have a higher mortality rate.
In the latest China-based study, not peer-reviewed by U.S.
scientists, of course, because China will not let anyone in, China is a bad actor on the world stage, man.
They're a bad actor on the world stage, and it's causing a lot of people to rethink investments in China now and in the future.
It found that men had a fatality rate of 2.8% versus 1.7% for women.
Probably a large part of that is due to the fact that men in China smoke at a much higher rate than women apparently.
About 50% of men in China smoke.
And so if you have an underlying lung condition, you have emphysema or something, then it is more likely that you're going to die from exacerbation of that condition via coronavirus.
According to this JAMA study, there are about 82,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19, that's what it's called, and at least 2,768 deaths as of Wednesday.
That is according to the Johns Hopkins Whiting School of Engineering's Centers for System Science and Engineering.
There are more than 440 cases in northern Italy.
So this has indeed become a pandemic because it is well outside of China.
On Thursday, China's National Health Commission said there were 433 new confirmed cases of coronavirus and 29 more deaths as of Wednesday, bringing the total number of cases in that country near 80,000, the total number of deaths near 3,000.
South Korea has also reported 334 new cases.
That means that there are more than 1,500 cases in South Korea.
Denmark and Estonia have confirmed their first cases of the coronavirus.
Brazil confirmed its first case of coronavirus late on Wednesday.
And of course, in the United States, there are about 80 people who have been locked down in various areas of the United States.
The first The first case of an American who has coronavirus from an untraceable source emerged in Northern California.
What that means is that everybody else we've been able to trace to some sort of flight out of China or contact with somebody else who had coronavirus.
The fact that we're now seeing cases that are cropping up in which people are getting it from we don't know where, that's obviously very scary.
One of the big problems with coronavirus as opposed to, for example, Ebola, is that Ebola is only transmissible once the symptoms hit.
So once you start vomiting blood, that's when you are transmissible.
Coronavirus apparently has up to a two-week latency period where you are exhibiting no symptoms, and yet you're hanging around people, and you're sneezing on them, and you're shaking hands with them, and you can transmit the virus.
That means that this thing does have a very, very high transmissibility rate.
Naturally, stocks are continuing to tumble.
The virus has spread to some 4,700 countries and has put pressure on business and supply chains around the world, according to the New York Times.
Stocks on Wall Street fell sharply in early trading on Thursday as the sixth straight day of losses for the S&P 500, as investors continued to react with fear to the spreading of coronavirus outbreaks.
The selling could push major benchmarks into the United States into a correction, which would indicate that an index is down more than 10% from its most recent high.
We have pushed into that territory.
Again, it is very unclear at this point How far the coronavirus crisis is going to go.
Analysts at Goldman Sachs predicted that companies in the S&P 500 would generate no profit growth as a result of the crisis because of a severe decline in Chinese economic activity, disruption in the supply chain for American companies, and a slowdown in the United States economy.
Again, this is not a specifically American problem.
In fact, America is getting hit by coronavirus at a rate far lesser than virtually every other country.
But it is a problem pretty much everywhere else.
We have seen coronavirus crop up in dozens and dozens of countries.
In Iran, it's hitting like every major person in the government, which is pretty incredible.
According to an Iranian official, this is Joyce Karam, who is a reporter.
She is reporting on the situation.
She's a Washington correspondent for The National at UAE.
She is reporting four Iranian officials testing positive for coronavirus, including the vice president for women and family affairs, one lawmaker, the deputy health minister, and another lawmaker.
One Iranian official says there have been 254 cases of known coronavirus in Iran and 26 deaths, which would put their death rate at about 10%.
They've actually canceled Friday prayers in Iran, which is a big deal in Iran, obviously, very religiously oriented country.
Also over in Japan, you have seen the government of Japan ordering a close to all schools in Japan for like a month.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was asking all elementary, middle, and high schools to remain shut until spring holidays begin in late March.
This is according to the UK Metro.
The measure affects 12.8 million students at 35,000 schools nationwide, according to the Education Ministry.
Abe said the coming week or two is an extremely important time.
This is to prioritize the health and safety of the children and take precautions to avoid the risk of possible large-scale infections for many children and teachers who gather and spend hours together.
Every day.
Japan now has more than 890 cases, so much more severe than the United States, including 705 from that quarantined cruise ship.
An eighth death from the virus was confirmed Thursday in Japan's northernmost island of Hokkaido, now considered to be the site of a growing cluster.
There have been a bunch of local governments who had already announced their decisions to suspend classes.
We've already seen outbreaks in Northern Italy.
Israel has shut down travel to Asia because there are a lot of Asian flights that go in and out of Israel.
Israel has shut down travel out of there.
There's a lot of worries about permeability of borders in the Middle East, that if Iran is sending people across the border to Iraq, you could see outbreaks in Iraq, you could see outbreaks in Syria.
So the problem with pandemics is obviously pandemics grow in a couple of very specific situations.
Well, in general situations too, but very specific conditions.
One, transmissibility of borders, permeability of borders, people moving freely in large groups of people.
That is going to spread this thing much more quickly.
And so there's been a lot of talk about immigration and how this is really shutting down a lot of Europe's open immigration policies.
And two, The health conditions and informational conditions in a country make a big deal, make a big difference.
If you don't have great health facilities, if you are understaffed, then the possibility of this thing really running rampant through a population is very high.
If you can't quarantine people.
If your medical workers, for example, don't have masks, this has been a huge problem in China.
They don't have the proper masks, they don't have the proper gear.
If you don't have the proper masks and the proper gear, the first line of defense is your medical personnel.
And if your medical personnel are obtaining this stuff and then dealing with a bunch of other people who are coming in for checkups, And the transmissibility rate is going to go up wildly.
So how well you deal with this depends on the resources that are available and yes, your capacity to shut down the movement of human beings in largely permeable areas.
And in the Middle East, that's a huge problem because these borders are largely wide open.
In the United States, NASA health officials are warning residents to remain vigilant as over 80 people remain under voluntary quarantine for possible coronavirus exposure.
The county's Department of Health Commissioner, Dr. Lawrence Eisenstein, this is according to WCBS 880, says 175 residents have had some sort of voluntary isolation from the public, family and friends after traveling to China.
Though there have not been any confirmed cases in the county or the rest of New York, there are 83 people still under isolation.
They have to remain under quarantine for 14 days to prevent the possible spread of coronavirus should they be infected.
Because again, we may not even be able to detect if somebody has coronavirus until they become symptomatic and they can still pass that thing along.
So people are now being put in quarantine for a couple of weeks at a time.
Meanwhile, in Germany, Germany is warning over the virus epidemic.
Germany's health minister said Wednesday the country was at the beginning of an epidemic, as authorities in the West tested dozens of people who had contact with a couple infected with the coronavirus, gaining a foothold in Europe.
Germany has been bracing for an increase in confirmed cases because of the number of infected people spiking in nearby Italy.
Again, that permeability of borders in the EU not serving well.
The people of various countries in Europe.
We'll get to more of this in just one second.
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Okay, I really don't think you are.
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It tends to overwhelm our prefrontal cortex, the part of our brain that says, let's exercise some reason.
There have been 3,000 people dead worldwide in a globe of 7 billion people.
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So as I say, the Associated Press reporting that Germany has been bracing for an increase in confirmed cases because Italy has been hit with a wave of cases.
Testing in Western Germany came after a 47-year-old man with the virus was hospitalized in serious condition in Dusseldorf.
The man's wife works in a kindergarten, which is great.
She was confirmed to have contracted the virus as well.
A soldier in the German Air Force who had contact with the hospitalized man has also tested positive as well.
That means there are 21 total cases in Germany.
Meanwhile, the President of the United States is finally speaking out about all of this.
And this is where things get quite political, quite quickly.
We'll get to President Trump in just one second.
One piece of good news, so there's good news and bad news.
The more cases of coronavirus that are reported, and the fewer cases of death that are reported, the lower the death rate is, which is good.
I mean, you want a low death rate, it means that your chances of dying are presumably lower.
At the same time, it makes it very difficult to contain because the more mild cases there are, the more this thing is being transmitted.
This is being reported by Vivian Wang for the New York Times in Hong Kong.
As a dangerous new coronavirus has ravaged China and spread throughout the rest of the world, the outbreak's toll has sown fear and anxiety.
Nearly 3,000 deaths, more than 81,000 cases, six continents infected.
But government officials and medical experts in their warnings about the epidemic have sounded a note of reassurance.
Though the virus can be deadly, the vast majority of those infected so far have only mild symptoms and make full recoveries.
It is an important factor to understand, medical experts said, both to avoid unnecessary global panic and to get a clear picture of the likelihood of transmission.
Many people are now panicking.
Some actually are exaggerating the risk.
And Dr. Jin Dongyan, a virology expert at University of Hong Kong, for governments, for public health professionals, they also have to deal with these because these will also be harmful.
Again, it is important to remember that even if the death rate is 2.3 percent, right, that sounds really scary.
It means two out of every hundred people die, but this is a brain trick to a certain extent.
Number one, your chances of obtaining coronavirus are not 100%.
Two, even if you do have coronavirus, there's a 98 out of 100 chance that you will not die from it.
Hey, which sounds a lot better than 2 out of 100 that you will die.
It's a weird way that the human brain works, is that if you say to somebody, your chances of death are 2 in 100, they're like, oh, bleep.
If you say to, honestly, 49 out of 50 people who obtain this do not die.
98 out of 100 people who obtain this do not die, and the chances that you're going to obtain it are fairly low.
It kind of lowers the rates of panic.
With that said, again, because there are so many mild cases, that means that it is hard to determine how far and how fast this thing is going to move.
Apparently, the overall fatality rate in China is 2.3%, but the number is inflated by the much higher fatality rate in Hubei province, which is 2.9%.
The rest of the country, it's 0.4%.
So that's a lot more, that makes it a lot more sanguine, right?
I mean, the fact is that Hubei, which is where this thing started and before the government really started to crack down, and happens to be one of the more impoverished areas of China, Right, that's why they're eating food from wild animal markets.
Right, that area has a 2.9% death rate, but 0.4% death rate means that 99.6% of people who obtain the virus do not die from it.
Right, 996 people, well, yes, 996 people out of 1,000 will not die from the virus.
So that is somewhat, I mean, it's a little bit more, it's a little bit more, I would say, calming With that said, we still don't know what it would mean if the coronavirus outbreak hit the United States, what exactly people would do in schools.
Would they shut down the schools?
Presumably.
Presumably a lot of people would be sent home.
And here we get into the Trump administration response.
So, the Trump administration response is the same as every other government response, which is, we're doing the best we can.
And now, one of the things that you don't want from the government is you don't want mixed messages, you don't want them downplaying the risk to the point where it seems like they're not taking it seriously, and you also don't want the President of the United States just going out there and shooting off the cuff, right?
This is an area where message discipline really does matter.
And the fact that President Trump has this habit of going on Twitter and firing off missives on the topic is really dumb.
Now, as we will see, the Democrats are trying to blame Trump for a pandemic that, number one, has nothing to do with Trump, and number two, Trump hasn't botched yet.
So it's very, they're obviously trying to take advantage of this, but two things can be true at once.
It can be true that Trump's handling of public relations is very haphazard, and that President Trump tends to speak, again, like a talk radio caller, and that puts him And that makes people uneasy.
The president over the last week, since this has started to explode in the news, the president over the last week tweeted out that the media were making the most of coronavirus, C-A-R-O, spelling it wrong.
And then he suggested that a vaccine was going to be developed within the month.
That is not true.
His people then came forth and said he was talking about Ebola vaccine, which is super useless.
Great.
Apparently it's going to take 12 to 18 months, according to the CDC, to develop some sort of really effective vaccine against coronavirus.
So the president was putting out information that wasn't exactly true.
I've been saying for weeks at this point, since the coronavirus thing started, let your experts talk, Mr. President.
Sit down and don't do this.
And don't be the guy who has to mouth off on all of this stuff.
Dr. Nancy Messonnier is director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the CDC.
She said she had contacted her own local school superintendent this week, asked if the district was prepared.
She advised his parents to do the same.
She suggested that perhaps internet-based teleschooling could replace traditional schools.
Not clear exactly how that is going to work.
With that said, the government should be taking this stuff incredibly seriously and downplaying the sort of risks of this thing.
That would be a rather large mistake.
So, President Trump held a press conference yesterday.
And he explained that Americans should be feeling pretty good about this thing.
He said we made Americans much safer early on.
Which is, honestly, it's hard to take super seriously when you're seeing the first cases in the United States of community infection crop up.
Community infection meaning somebody got infected we don't know from where.
Here's President Trump yesterday saying, we made Americans safer early on.
We have through some very good early decisions, decisions that were actually ridiculed at the beginning.
We closed up our borders to flights coming in from certain areas.
Uh, areas that were hit by the coronavirus and hit pretty hard.
And we did it very early.
A lot of people thought we shouldn't have done it that early.
And we did.
And it turned out to be a very good thing.
And the number one priority from our standpoint is the health and safety of the American people.
And that's the way I viewed it when I made that decision.
That's good, Trump.
OK, that's good, Trump.
Because the fact is that what you do need from the president at this point is him saying, yeah, we put up the walls.
Yes, I mean the border's closed.
We're not importing this disease from all areas of the globe.
So that's good Trump.
Bad Trump is where the president then dismisses warnings from the CDC.
The CDC basically said that there will be an outbreak here, it's inevitable.
And Trump said, it's not inevitable, I disagree with my own CDC head.
Honestly, I don't think that the President is an expert in virology.
I don't think that the President is an expert in medicine.
I don't think that the President is an expert in anything medically related.
I mean, this is a guy who in 2012 was tweeting out that vaccines cause autism.
So, I really am not taking seriously his battle with the CDC.
It's hard to credit that.
Again, let your people talk.
Let your people talk and don't downplay.
Rich Lowry, who's certainly an ally of the president over at the National Review, he was pointing out at Politico that the president should be pointing out that this is like a thing that people should be taking seriously.
Americans are taking this seriously.
When you downplay people's fears in the United States, it doesn't make them feel any better.
It's like when you are having a fight with your spouse and you say to them, calm down.
Has anyone ever gotten calmer when told to calm down?
There's not a single person on planet Earth who has gotten calmer when told to calm down.
The only way that people feel calmer is when you take their fear seriously and you say, okay, I totally understand the fear.
Here's what we're doing to mitigate it.
A lot of that fear is reasonable.
Here's what is probably unreasonable.
That's the way to handle this thing.
Going out there and battling with your own CDC and saying it's not inevitable.
That's not useful.
So good Trump was, we made Americans safer early on, we shut down a lot of travel.
Here's bad Trump dismissing his own CDC's warning.
I don't think it's inevitable.
It probably will.
It possibly will.
It could be at a very small level, or it could be at a larger level.
Whatever happens, we're totally prepared.
We have the best people in the world.
You see that from the study.
We have the best prepared people, the best people in the world.
Congress is willing to give us much more than we're even asking for.
It's nice for a change.
But we are totally ready, willing, and able.
So he said that the risk to the American people remains very low.
And then he said, we're ready to adapt, we're ready to do whatever we have to do if the disease spreads.
If it spreads, we'll spend whatever is appropriate, right?
That's the part, again, the good Trump is, we're gonna do what we have to do, right?
Good Trump is, we did what we had to do by shutting down the borders.
We're gonna do what we have to do going forward.
Whatever happens, we're prepared for it, right?
That's good, reassuring Trump.
Bad Trump is, I'm gonna argue with the assessment of my own scientific community about the quote-unquote inevitability of some sort of outbreak in the United States.
Dr. Anne Schuchat is the Principal Deputy Director of the CDC.
She said, Which again, is the responsible thing to do.
Okay.
I think that the president is handling this about pretty much what the president should do, right?
We shut down the border.
We're going to do whatever we have to do to shut this down.
We're going to make resources available and all of the rest.
And frankly, I don't think that the president is unjustified in blasting Nancy Pelosi and the rest of the Democrats.
As we will see momentarily, the Democrats have been jumping on this to claim that President Trump is responsible for the spread of coronavirus, which is just insane.
I'm sorry.
It's just a crazy contention.
Now, does the president have a big mouth when he says things like, I doubt my own CDC, I don't know if it's inevitable?
Yes, that's big mouth stuff.
It doesn't make the American people feel better.
With that said, has the president done anything to merit the kind of insane media coverage that is blaming him for a pandemic that has not yet happened?
Of course not.
And it shows that the media are covering this thing in the same way they have covered everything during the Trump administration.
They are preemptively blaming.
They are preemptively shaming without the evidence actually being there.
Nancy Pelosi is out there blaming Trump for a pandemic that has not yet occurred.
Suggesting that he has botched the response already.
Explain.
Explain how he's botched the response.
So Trump yesterday blasted Pelosi, said she's incompetent, and she's trying to use this to score political points.
Again, both of those things are true.
I think Speaker Pelosi's incompetent.
She lost the Congress once.
I think she's going to lose it again.
She lifted my poll numbers up 10 points.
I never thought that I would see that so quickly and so easily.
I'm leading everybody.
We're doing great.
I don't want to do it that way.
It's almost unfair if you think about it.
But I think she's incompetent, and I think she's not thinking about the country.
She knows it's not true.
She knows All they're trying to do is get a political advantage.
This isn't about political advantage.
We're all trying to do the right thing.
Okay, this right here is absolutely true.
I mean, when Trump goes after the Democrats for what they are saying on this sort of stuff, that is 100% true.
I'm going to show you an example of the New York Times literally blaming the entire virus on Trump.
I mean, it's insane.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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All righty.
In just a second, we're going to get back to the Democrats blaming Trump for the outbreak of coronavirus, which is just – I'm sorry.
That's crazy on every level.
We'll get to that in a second.
First, let's talk for a second about my friend Matt Walsh.
Matt Walsh is one of our hosts here at The Daily Wire.
He has a brand new book out.
It is called Church of Cowards, a wake-up call to complacent Christians.
Christians in other countries are still being martyred for their faith.
How many American Christians are even willing to put down their smartphones for their faith?
Walsh breaks down the problem found in modern American Christianity.
This thing is surging up the charts, so go check it out right now.
Pick it up at Amazon or Barnes & Noble today.
The book is called Church of Cowards by my friend Matt Walsh.
Also, if you haven't yet jumped on a Daily Wire party bus, a reader's pass is a great way to dip your toe into the community if you're obsessed with news.
A reader's pass will enable you to read our articles ad-free, including my op-eds, which are exclusive for Daily Wire members only.
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By the way, next Tuesday, March 3rd, join me, God King Jeremy Boring, Andrew Klavan, and Michael Knowles on Daily Wire backstage.
We're going to watch those results from Super Tuesday roll in and in and in and in.
All night long, we'll have a cavalcade of stars who will be stopping by to join us.
Should be a lot of fun.
So stop by for that.
You're listening to the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.
So Democrats, super, super easy, super eager to blame President Trump for coronavirus.
They're very upset because Trump appointed his vice president, Mike Pence, to lead up the coronavirus task force.
Here was Mike Pence yesterday paying tribute to President Trump, as only Mike Pence can do.
But Democrats are going nuts over all of this.
Trump's made clear from the first days of this administration, we have no higher priority than the safety, security, health and well-being of the American people.
And from the first word of a outbreak of the coronavirus, the president took unprecedented steps.
to protect the American people from the spread of this disease.
He recounted those briefly, but the establishment of travel restrictions, aggressive quarantine effort of Americans that are returning, the declaration of a public health emergency and establishing the White House Corona Task Force are all reflective of the urgency that the president has brought to a whole-of-government approach.
Okay, so, you know, people are very angry at Pence because he's saying nice things about Trump, which is literally his job description, right?
He's the vice president.
When was the last time Biden said something bad about Obama?
It just doesn't happen.
But people are going nuts because, like, Pence is a science denier, a science denier.
He's not denying coronavirus exists, nor is he holding up the necessity for measures that have to be taken.
The Trump administration is already going to Congress for additional funding.
They should receive that additional funding.
This one is bipartisan and easy, guys.
You provide the resources that are necessary in order to fight the possibility of an outbreak.
But the media are already blaming Trump for a thing that hasn't happened yet.
This is an insane piece by Gayle Collins.
I mean, totally and utterly nuts.
Gayle Collins over at the New York Times.
So let's just be straight about this.
You have a virus, a coronavirus, that has popped up, COVID-19, that has popped up In China, on the basis of a wild animal market, people eating freaking bats and weird animals nobody's ever heard of before.
And then they get a virus, they spread it throughout this particular area.
The Chinese government shuts down all information.
The virus goes wild.
It goes wild in that area.
Then it is spread across the globe to countries all over the globe.
I mean, just in this show, I've mentioned Israel, Italy, Germany, Brazil.
Japan, South Korea, it's everywhere.
I mean, it is now gone to every single populated continent on planet Earth.
Every populated continent on planet Earth has been hit with coronavirus at this point.
And the New York Times' take from Gail Collins is, I'm not kidding, this is their headline, let's call it Trump virus.
Trump virus.
We don't have one confirmed death in the United States from coronavirus yet.
We have 3,000 in China.
We have a bevy in various other areas of the world.
We are still in double digits as far as the number of people we know actually have coronavirus in the United States, and we have one, count them, one confirmed case of somebody with a community infection in the United States.
And Gayle Collins wants to call this Trump virus.
I'm fairly certain that the Trump virus has infected her brain, and now like syphilis, it's corkscrewing through the soft tissues.
I mean, this is wild!
The sub-headline is, if you're feeling awful, you know who to blame.
Really?
So you end up with coronavirus, and your first thought is, Trump.
It's not, damn, I wish the Chinese government weren't such a corrupt, awful, authoritarian, evil place.
Your first thought is, Trump.
Okay, there's something wrong with Gayle Collins.
I don't know what happened to her.
I don't know if she was dropped on her head as a baby or what, but here is her idiotic piece.
Again, this is printed in the New York Times, the paper of record.
So our coronavirus star is going to be Mike Pence.
Feeling more secure?
I know full well the importance of presidential leadership, the VP said as soon as he was introduced in his new role.
Totally qualified.
First criteria for every job in this administration is capacity for praising the gloriousness of our commander-in-chief.
Yeah, when you think of Mike Pence, you maybe don't think about Pandemic Fighter Supreme.
But as President Trump pointed out repeatedly, he has already run Indiana.
Well, it could have been worse.
Having a czar does make you feel there's somebody in charge.
At least Trump didn't come before the cameras and announce solemnly, today I'm asking every American to cross your fingers.
Like, what is this piece?
This piece is basically, I don't like Trump, and I don't like Pence, and therefore, if I get coronavirus, it's their fault.
Okay, I don't like Bernie Sanders, but if I get coronavirus, it ain't Bernie's fault.
Bernie's a schmuck, but he has nothing to do with the transmission of coronavirus.
Our president had to be going crazy over a problem that involves both declining stock prices and germs.
This is the guy, after all, says Gayle Collins, who thinks shaking hands is barbaric, who is followed around by AIDS-bearing sanitizer.
During his press conference, he told the story of a fever-ridden supporter who gave him a hug.
Do you think it was an apocryphal fantasy?
Either way, the idea has been haunting him forever.
So let me just get this straight.
You're so paranoid about coronavirus, you're now blaming it on Trump.
But saying that Trump uses hand sanitizer after shaking a thousand hands, he's paranoid?
Okay, like, little secret to people who don't shake a thousand hands at events.
I've done it before.
You know what you do afterward?
You go wash your hands.
Because you're an idiot if you don't go wash your hands after you shake a thousand hands.
The chances are very good that somebody had a cold.
Come on.
Meanwhile, according to Gail Collins, Trump has come up with a totally new explanation for the stock market skid.
It turns out investors were frightened not so much by the pandemic as the Democratic debate, and then Trump pointed out that people are frightened by the Democratic candidates.
And Trump said that he had discovered that the flu in our country kills 25,000 people to 69,000 people a year.
So the problems are Democrats and the flu.
Again, like, I don't like that the president doesn't know how many people die from the flu every year, but that does not mean that he is not deploying the resources that are necessary.
By the way, this was not even the dumbest response.
Okay, the dumbest response came courtesy of genius with the plan, Elizabeth Warren.
So Senator Warren, Stumping for president in a quixotic campaign to be Bernie Sanders's second, which is really what's going on here.
She did a CNN town hall last night, and she was asked about coronavirus.
Her response is so all-fired moronic, it is almost difficult to describe how stupid this is.
And this was cheered because people are idiots.
Here is Elizabeth Warren.
I'm glad to see that she has broken into the primary color section of the Ann Taylor Loft sweater closet.
So here is Elizabeth Warren explaining that she is going to redirect money from border control to coronavirus.
Here is Elizabeth Warren's plan for dealing with coronavirus.
The way I think about this is first we think about allocation, kind of our overall approach.
I'm going to be introducing a plan tomorrow to take every dime that the president is now spending on his racist wall at our southern border and divert it to work on the coronavirus.
We also need someone in the White House who is coordinating all of the work and all of the messaging and all of the information.
And we need someone who is not actively disqualified from doing that the way the Vice President is.
Why is Mike Pence actively disqualified from doing that?
She kind of failed to explain that point, other than she doesn't like Mike Pence and he needs a new haircut.
Like, that's pretty much her only case.
I do love that she, like, just to boil this down, she is going to shut down Trump's racist border wall.
By the way, walls are inanimate objects, so it's weird that it's racist.
Like, inanimate objects typically don't have personality that way.
But she says that Trump's racist, we're going to shut down the border wall to flips through card, checks card, Stop global pandemics.
So your answer to pandemics, where the problem is people transmitting a virus through personal travel and crossing borders, your solution is less border security.
So the American government spends $4 trillion a year.
It seems to me there are a few grab bags of cash in there somewhere that we could use in an emergency.
Plus, we do sell an awful lot of bonds here in the United States.
In fact, bond yields are at an all-time high, so taking out additional debt is probably not going to be a problem at this point, but the bond yields are at an all-time low rather than the demand is at an all-time high.
When Elizabeth Warren says that her solution is to raid the border fund, Like, just on principle, I understand the wall's not going to be built for a little while, but on principle, if your first move is, I'm going to go open the border to stop a pandemic, You are a full-scale idiot.
Full stop, period.
You're a moron.
If your solution to, we have too much transmissibility of viruses because of human travel, if your solution is get rid of the border wall, it's because you're an idiot.
I love the people clapping like seals.
Yeah, because I hate walls!
Walls are bad!
Also, I'm going to stay home and I'm never going to go into a public place again because I'm scared of coronavirus.
But yeah, walls are super bad!
They're super bad!
How do we know how stupid this is?
New York Times, today.
Oh, you don't say.
It turns out that people crossing borders without being checked could spread disease.
You know who's been making that case for a long time?
Border hawks.
Many, many border hawks.
Reporting from Brussels, for Europe, the coronavirus could not have arrived at a worse time.
This was the year with Britain out, terrorism waning, and the migrant crisis at an ebb that the EU had hoped to repair and revive its cherished goal of open internal borders.
But cases of the virus have emerged nearly daily in new European countries, Spain, Greece, Croatia, France, Switzerland.
And on Wednesday in Germany, many of them can be traced back to Europe's largest outbreak in Italy, where more than 300 people are now infected.
As the cases spread and multiply, calls for closing borders have grown louder, most predictably from the far right and populists who are never fans of the bloc's open border policy.
So far, no country has taken that drastic step, but privately, European officials warn this could change quickly.
On Wednesday, the bloc's top official for communicable diseases said that Europe needed to prepare more broadly for the kind of crisis that is hit Northern Italy.
The official, Andrea Ammann, director of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control says, our current assessment is that we will likely see a similar situation in other countries in Europe.
We also need to consider the need to prepare for other scenarios, for example, large clusters elsewhere in Europe.
But!
That doesn't mean people aren't talking about shutting borders.
Some people like Dr. Claire Wenham of the London School of Economics Global Health Initiative.
She says travel restrictions don't work.
People find another way around it.
It might only slow the virus down.
Well, I mean, slowing viruses down is a good thing.
Last I checked.
But it is amusing to watch as the New York Times begins to recognize that open borders have costs.
Meanwhile, Elizabeth Warren's like, let's open that border!
Solution to pandemics!
Open that border!
Open that border!
So, Democrats keep trying to blame Trump for coronavirus.
Trump's reaction should be measured, which of course is difficult, but he should react.
How he reacted to Pelosi is fine, by the way.
Him saying to the Democrats, you guys are trying to make hay out of political out of a non-political tragedy is really disgusting.
And we should all be on the same side on this one.
We're all doing our best, right?
That is how Trump should be responding to this.
And he should also be saying, yes, we take it seriously.
Yes, we are doing everything we can.
We don't know where this is going yet, but I promise you'll be the first to know as soon as we get information.
Radical transparency, all of that would be useful.
The Democrats, however, taking advantage of this by claiming that Trump is responsible for Trump virus.
This is because everyone is a complete and utter fool.
Okay, meanwhile, we are approaching the South Carolina primaries.
They're happening on Saturday.
And believe it or not, Joe Biden could creep back into this race.
He easily could creep back into this race.
So there are a couple of new polls that are out in South Carolina, and they are all showing Joe Biden up very, very big.
Like, not small, big.
Apparently there are two new polls.
They show Biden up by there's one from Monmouth today.
It shows Joe Biden up by 20 points, 20 points in South Carolina with Bernie Sanders running even with Tom Steyer, which means that Steyer could actually finish ahead of Sanders.
There's also an East Carolina University poll that came out yesterday showing Biden up eight over Sanders.
And Sanders again running within spitting distance of Tom Steyer.
And a public policy polling, it's a Democratic firm, a polling firm that found Biden up 15 points.
In the RealClearPolitics poll average, Biden is up 14 points.
If Biden wins by double digits, this race changes really dramatically.
It changes really dramatically in a hurry because the conventional wisdom, and I will admit, I had helped buy it.
Was that, as Joe Biden had collapsed in the first states, that his black support would start to collapse in South Carolina and you would see Bernie pull out, if not a victory, then a very narrow loss in South Carolina.
But that doesn't appear to be the way that the polls are going right now.
And that means that Super Tuesday all of a sudden looms very large.
Bill Sherr, who is an analyst for Real Clear News and Politico, he put forward a couple of different scenarios on the math.
In one scenario, he says Biden wins 40 to 25 in South Carolina over Bernie, and that translates to identical wins in the South on Super Tuesday, Alabama, Arkansas, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and Bernie beats him badly in California, Colorado, Maine, Utah, and Vermont.
He wins narrowly in Massachusetts over Warren, and he basically splits with Klobuchar in Minnesota.
In that scenario, The Super Tuesday plus South Carolina delegate count looks like this.
Sanders 679, Biden 642.
So basically a dead heat after Super Tuesday in that case.
Let's say that Biden wins 30-20 in South Carolina and then duplicates that sort of response in a variety of other states in the South.
Still, if Warren ends up picking up like 15% across these various states and ends up with 285 delegates, say, that means that Biden and Sanders end up within spitting distance of one another.
So that would be Biden staying within reach.
Now, if this turns into a two-candidate race, Sanders versus Biden, everything changes.
Everything changes radically because the Democratic Party does not want Bernie to be the nominee.
They don't want him to be the nominee.
They are recognizing more and more that Bernie as nominee is absolutely disastrous.
I mean, really disastrous.
They seem to be taking the position that Donnie Deutch took on MSNBC yesterday.
He said, there's no way that Sanders can beat Trump.
Like, this is just not a thing that's going to happen.
Clip 17.
Everybody gets up and talks about what an existential threat Trump is, and he is.
This is serious game time.
And these candidates, the candidates you mentioned, Bloomberg, really have to kind of look in the mirror and say, do I want to be a part of serving Bernie Sanders up, who I think has zero chance of beating Donald Trump?
We are at a moment in time.
Imagine Trump four more years.
Imagine, God forbid, Bernie on the ticket, and they take the House.
It's over.
Also, Democrats, two superdelegates, are looking at this and saying, if this thing ends up pretty close to dead even, we are not handing it to Bernie.
Article in the New York Times today, Democratic leaders willing to risk party damage to stop Bernie Sanders.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senator Chuck Schumer, the minority leader, hear constant warnings from allies about congressional losses in November if the party nominates Bernie Sanders for president.
By the way, Michael Bloomberg has already said he is pulling all of his money from Bernie if Bernie is the nominee.
He will not give one thin dime to Bernie Sanders if Bernie is the nominee.
He'll give money down ballot, but Bernie's gonna hurt people down ballot.
Officials in the national and state parties are increasingly anxious about splintered primaries on Super Tuesday and beyond.
Dozens of interviews with Democratic establishment leaders this week show they are not just worried about Sanders' candidacy, but are also willing to risk intraparty damage to stop his nomination at the national convention in July if they get the chance.
Since Sanders' victory in Nevada, the Times has interviewed 93 party officials and found overwhelming opposition to handing Bernie the nomination if he arrives with the most delegates but fell short of the majority, which could result in a brokered convention.
Jim Himes, Connecticut congressman and superdelegate, he says we're way, way, way past the date where party leaders can determine an outcome here.
But I think there's a vibrant conversation about whether there is anything that can be done.
Sanders continues to insist that he can win, but most Democrats do not think he can win.
Most of them think he's going to drag them down on the ballot.
And again, if Biden comes back, that may be enough of a story for Democrats to rally around Joe Biden.
Now, the big problem for Joe Biden is that he hasn't done any of the legwork in a lot of the Super Tuesday states.
At the same time, the New York Times is reporting that Biden has not actually spent any time in many of these southern states he's expected to win, places like Arkansas.
Michael John Gray, chairman of the Democratic Party of Arkansas, says Arkansas was, in my opinion, going to be a default Biden state.
He hasn't been here.
Of all the campaigns, the least organized in Arkansas is Biden.
Now, that may not make a difference.
Maybe none of these campaigns are spending an awful lot of time in these states.
But Biden's campaign has been lackluster.
His organization has been lackluster.
He thought he was just going to cruise to the nomination.
That obviously Has not been true.
The Biden campaign has been, has been lackluster in terms of the ground game.
Gilberto Hinojosa, the Democratic Party chairman in Texas, which is the second biggest delegate prize on Super Tuesday, he said, Bernie has a ground game because he has a ground game.
His whole campaign is grassroots.
Bloomberg has a funded ground game.
Elizabeth Warren has a ground game.
He says, I haven't seen anything other than the events he's had in Texas for Biden.
So Biden hasn't done all the hard work necessary in order to actually go get those delegates.
Now, maybe that changes after Super Tuesday.
Maybe he gets an infusion of cash if he somehow emerges alive from Super Tuesday, or if he blows everybody out in South Carolina.
Suffice to say, the race isn't quite over.
Biden does have a shot, but Biden has run a really lackluster campaign.
It's a mess for the Democrats.
It is an absolute mess for the Democrats.
Right now, over at 538, they've got their estimates on who is likely to win the nomination.
They've got no majority at now the largest chance, a one in two chance, 50% chance that there is no majority and you have an open convention.
They've got Bernie at about a 40% shot and they've got Biden at about a 1 in 8 shot at winning a majority of the delegates, which doesn't estimate the delegate leaders, right?
I mean, it could be that Biden ends up as the delegate leader and there's still no majority.
So it's a mess.
South Carolina is looming large, guys.
Saturday's gonna make a big, big difference.
Okay, time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
So, things that I like today.
So, I do like clarity.
I'm a fan of clarity.
And it is incredible to me that Louis Farrakhan, who's been hobnobbed with by half the Democratic establishment.
I mean, literally half the Democratic establishment.
Bill Clinton is hobnobbed with Louis Farrakhan.
Barack Obama used to hobnob with Louis Farrakhan.
Half of the members of the Congressional Black Caucus have hobnobbed with Louis Farrakhan.
He doesn't hide the bald as Louis Farrakhan.
Not only is he a vicious anti-Semite, he also happens to be a terror supporter.
So, here is Louis Farrakhan, yesterday, calling Qasem Soleimani, a man responsible for the death of hundreds of American soldiers in Iraq, his brother.
This guy, Louis Farrakhan, you can't even get Linda Sarsour to denounce Louis Farrakhan.
You can't get.
Anybody, like, I'd love to hear Ilhan Omar denounce Louis Farrakhan.
You think she would do that?
I'll bet Bernie wouldn't denounce Louis Farrakhan.
Seriously, somebody should ask Bernie, proud Jew Bernie, about either him or his surrogates denouncing Louis Farrakhan.
But here's Louis Farrakhan just this week talking about how his brother was Qasem Soleimani.
Mr. Trump killed my brother, Qasem Soleimani, and you say that my brother is a terrorist.
And you got the power to define people.
You may not like me.
So you might call me a terrorist tomorrow to justify what the government is planning to do to me and the nation of Islam.
But I'm just inviting you.
Honestly, this guy is very open about exactly who he is.
And I very much look forward to the media asking serious questions of Bernie surrogates.
Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.
About what they think of Louis Farrakhan.
Imagine if every Republican member of Congress were hanging out with David Duke.
Okay, Louis Farrakhan is David Duke.
He's just awful.
He's an awful, awful human being.
But I don't think that Bernie will be asked about any of that sort of thing.
I don't think any of his surrogates will be asked about any of that sort of thing.
By the way, again, it is amazing.
We keep hearing from people in sort of the Bernie camp that Bernie is, in fact, not an actual socialist.
Like, this is the new line.
The new line is that now the Democrats are very focused on maintaining that Bernie is not who Bernie is.
So Bernie's been pretty clear about who he is.
Right now he's trying to lie a little bit.
Now he tries to say that socialist just means that I want everybody to have health care.
But that's obviously not what Bernie means.
I mean, Bernie used to be a lot clearer about this stuff back in his more honest mayor of Burlington days.
This is back in the 1980s, Bernie being asked if he's a capitalist and him saying, no, capitalism's terrible.
You're a capitalist.
No, I'm not a capitalist.
So you don't believe in the profit motive free enterprise?
If I have a better mousetrap, I make more money.
There's something to be said for free enterprise on a local level and the competition.
But what we're happening in our society is we don't live in a free enterprise society.
You live in a corporate capitalist society where in virtually every single industry, you have giant multi-billion dollar corporations competing, driving the small businessmen out.
So he's not in favor of any of this stuff.
He's on a local, maybe we will let a few local people, you know, compete to sell the eggs, but we are not going to allow national corporate, like, This is who he is.
This is who he is.
He's not hiding the ball.
Okay, but everybody else is going to try to hide the ball for him.
Al Sharpton, who's another disgusting human being.
Again, the fact that Al Sharpton has been allowed to trot around in the media.
I mean, the man has a show on MSNBC, and he was responsible, or at least involved in not one, but two race riots in New York City over the course of his career.
I don't know how many race riots you've been involved in.
For me, the answer is none.
For Al Sharpton, the answer is two.
Al Sharpton was comparing, yesterday in South Carolina, he compared Bernie Sanders to Martin Luther King because people opposed Martin Luther King and also they opposed Bernie Sanders' socialism.
The civil rights movement always was targeted by those that would use the red scale.
They accused Dr. King of being a communist.
Every major leader in the 60s they tried to call socialist or communist.
Whatever you decide to do on Saturday, Do not go by those that use the socialist tag to try to separate us from what we need to do for this country.
Don't try to use the socialist tag.
Bernie's like, um, I call myself a socialist.
I don't understand.
I'm the one saying it.
What's going on?
The retconning of Bernie Sanders is really entertaining.
It really is.
It's sort of like in The Rise of Skywalker, the Kennedy team, or J.J. Abrams at least, he decided that he was going to retcon The Last Jedi.
He was just going to make it that The Last Jedi never happened.
And then he was going to retcon the entire history of Star Wars where Leia had actually been trained as a Jedi, spoiler alert, and all of this stuff, right?
He retconned it.
Everybody's retconning Bernie now.
So Bernie has a very long history here.
A very long history of being awful.
And now we're retconning him.
He was never really a socialist.
He was really a free market guy.
He never really supported dictators.
He was really like just, he was against their authoritarianism.
He just liked their literacy programs, guys.
Bernie Sanders never attacks war heroes.
Here's CNN's Kirsten Powers saying that Trump is worse morally than Bernie because Bernie has never attacked war heroes.
Again, this is a full-on retconning.
Here's CNN's Kirsten Powers trying to defend Bernie.
That's crazy.
I mean, truly, I'm sorry, with all respect.
The idea that Bernie Sanders is some mirror image of Donald Trump's in terms of his lack of civility.
I mean, does Bernie Sanders attack war heroes?
Does Bernie Sanders attack the parents of war heroes?
Does Bernie Sanders troll people on Twitter every single day and make misogynist attacks against people, racist attacks?
I mean, it's just, it's ridiculous and we need to put this aside.
He doesn't attack, Sanders does not attack war heroes.
Do you understand that?
Quote.
From 1972, Bernie Sanders about American soldiers.
American soldiers.
U.S.
military action in Vietnam was, quote, almost as bad as what Hitler did.
Almost as bad as what Hitler did.
He also suggested that everybody who's fighting the Viet Cong, he said they were very, very poor people.
Some of them don't have shoes.
They eat rice when they can get it.
They've been fighting for the freedom of their country for 25 years and they can hardly fight back.
But don't worry, he has never slandered American war heroes.
Ever.
He's never done that.
Except for declaring that basically every American war action of the last 30 years is a human rights violation.
But other than that, he's a perfect moderate, guys.
Perfectly, perfectly moderate.
Again, the retconning of Bernie Sanders is going on apace.
We'll see how successful it is.
I don't think it's going to be particularly successful, and I think it's one of the reasons why Joe Biden has continued, at least in the last little while, it's why Joe Biden has continued to be a durable candidate, at least in South Carolina.
We'll see if it carries forward.
Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
You remember there was this really wonderful moment, like everything good has to be ruined in America, that is the rule.
You remember there was this really wonderful moment, maybe a couple of years ago, where Pete Davidson on SNL, he made a joke about my friend Dan Crenshaw, representative from Texas, Congressman Crenshaw.
And Congressman Crenshaw's a Navy SEAL who lost his eye to an IED in Afghanistan.
And Crenshaw made some sort of dismissive joke about how Crenshaw looked like a pirate.
And then he said, well, you know, he probably just, I guess he, you know, got blown away by an IED or something, right?
Kind of dismissively suggested that.
And people got very offended because it turns out that when you insult the physical appearance of people who have been wounded in war, that's not a particularly popular viewpoint, right?
That's kind of an ugly thing to say.
Now, I don't think Davidson should have lost his job or been suspended over that.
He's a comedian.
Comedians say offensive things all the time.
I believe I said this at the time, but that doesn't mean that the comment wasn't gross.
I mean, it was gross.
Okay, so, Crenshaw... So Davidson apologized, and he brought Crenshaw on, and they had this kind of wonderful moment on SNL where Davidson talked about how, I think it was his father, had died on 9-11, and Crenshaw talked about how he had served after 9-11, and they had this sort of kumbaya moment where Crenshaw went on, and he made fun of Pete Davidson, And everybody came away thinking that Pete Davidson was a bigger man than when he had started.
Right?
That was the takeaway.
The takeaway was, Pete Davidson realized he had said something nasty, and he took the hit, and he did the right thing, and he invited Crenshaw on, and Crenshaw handled it with class, and Davidson handled it with class, and everybody felt pretty good about this.
Right?
Left, right, and center, you could feel good about this because Crenshaw had taken it like a man.
He'd taken the hit, he'd treated it with good humor, he hadn't acted insulted or whiny about it.
He'd just gone on there, made a few jokes, and then they'd basically hugged it out.
And Davidson had realized that he had said something offensive, and so he did what a responsible person should do, and he had basically just eaten it.
He had just taken the hit.
And it was a manly thing to do.
Well, now Pete Davidson, being apparently not a very manly sort of fellow, he's now coming back two years later with the jerk store response.
He's very upset.
He says, I never should have made Dan Crenshaw famous because it was my fault, never should have made Crenshaw famous, never should have apologized, just should have owned it.
Now, is there a purpose to this?
Is there a purpose to this?
The answer is, there is no purpose to this other than Davidson trying to buy back his leftist bona fides.
It's Davidson trying to now get back in the good graces of a vicious left that is fine with making fun of war heroes, contra Kirsten Powers of CNN.
Here is Pete Davidson in his comedy routine talking about how bad it was that he made Dan Crenshaw famous.
I said whatever and people were like, you hate America!
Like, no!
I just didn't want to be incorrect about how he lost his f***ing eye.
Is that a f***ing crime?
He could've lost his eye in war or whatever.
I don't know how he lost his eye.
It could've been in Afghanistan.
Could've been making a sandwich.
I have no f***ing idea.
I did not... I did not do anything for that guy.
The only thing I did do, which I am guilty of and I apologize for, is I did make that guy famous and a household name for no reason, right?
I did what, like, Ariana Grande did for me, right?
It's a funny line about him and Ariana Grande, but at the same time, the line that he made Crenshaw famous for no reason and that he never should have done any of this, I understand it's a comedy routine.
I'm not going to get offended by his comedy routine.
His comedy routine is supposed to break barriers and all this, but I assume he actually means this.
If he actually means this and it's not just part of his comedy routine, buying it back, then it's a pretty nasty thing to do, right?
I mean, like, again, we had this nice bipartisan—can't we just have nice things?
Like, a nice thing.
Like, a nice bipartisan moment where you realize you made a mistake and that it was kind of offensive, and then you backed off it.
Nobody thought the worst of Pete Davidson.
I thought much better of Pete Davidson in the aftermath.
And by the way, I didn't think that Pete Davidson was, like, the worst guy in the world for making the Dan Crenshaw joke in the first place.
I thought it was just dumb, and I thought that it betrayed a certain level of—of Carelessness about how you speak of people who are wounded in war, but at the same time, like, him now trying to buy that back and say, oh, well, I never should have done that.
I made Crenshaw famous.
Just be nice.
Just be nice!
Like, especially because you've already done it.
You don't have to be nice in the first place, but once you've been nice, buying back the niceness is not a really great trade.
Once you've done a nice thing, it's like you give your wife a gift, and then the next day, and she's really happy about it, like, you make a mistake, and you bring your wife flowers, and the next day, for no reason at all, you're like, you know what, honey?
And you just pick up the flowers and you trash them.
You're like, take that!
I never should have given you those flowers in the front!
Well, now you've reopened this thing.
Now you've done it again, dude.
And maybe you need the controversy to sell your comedy special or whatever.
But wouldn't it be nice if we could just let nice things be left alone?
And that thing ended nicely and you bought it back.
It's amazing.
Alrighty, well, we'll be back here later today with two additional hours of content.
Otherwise, we'll be back here tomorrow for more content for you.
By the way, next Tuesday, March 3rd, join me, God King Jeremy Boring, Andrew Klave, and Michael Knowles on Daily Wire backstage while we watch the results from Super Tuesday Rollin'.
That means that my wife needs to have a baby or something, man, because we need to get that done before Super Tuesday, because that's gonna be a busy day.
So go check us out.
March 3rd, Super Tuesday, we will be having that special Daily Wire backstage.
It'll be virtually endless.
So while I suffer with my colleagues here, You know, I have to suffer sitting in a room while they perform performative masculinity, smoking cigars as they prepare us for coronavirus.
You can at least join us and be part of the show.
We'll have a bunch of great guests.
Go check it out.
Otherwise, we'll see you here later today or tomorrow.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
Shapiro, this is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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