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March 13, 2020 - The Ben Shapiro Show
59:41
A Grinding Halt | Ep. 971
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America grinds to a halt as Americans lock down to stop the spread of coronavirus.
Joe Biden gets political by attacking President Trump's response.
And politicians spar over the appropriate response.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
Today's show is sponsored by ExpressVPN's Stand up for your digital rights.
Take action at expressvpn.com.
Okay.
First of all, folks, we're all going to get through this.
We're going to get through this together.
It's going to be okay.
We're going to be here with you the entire time.
We're adding all sorts of new services where we can hang out together while we're at home self-quarantining.
You're going to be spending a lot more time at home in the next few weeks.
We're adding new services here at Daily Wire.
We are ensuring that you're up to date on all the news.
Here's the truth.
There is an expiration date for this thing.
This is not going to change American life forever.
Three years from now, we're not still going to be locked in our homes.
But it is a very good thing that Americans are taking coronavirus seriously.
Over time, it has become obvious how serious this coronavirus threat is.
And it is not an unserious threat.
And we're not going to know just how serious the threat is until a little bit of time passes.
So being cautious, And shutting things down, that is the smart thing to do.
Now the reason that it's the smart thing to do, the reason that we should be shutting things down and why it's a smart thing, to avoid mass gatherings, why it is a smart thing to use social distancing, why it is a smart thing to stay home a little bit more than usual and Netflix and chill.
The reason for this is because what we're trying to do is flatten the curve, right?
That is the goal.
You've heard this phrase before, flatten the curve.
Now here's what people mean when they talk about flattening the curve.
So let's assume for a second, That you have a sort of bell-shaped curve as to when most of this outbreak is going to take place.
And let's assume that that bell-shaped curve is early on, meaning that a lot of people get it very quickly.
And let's assume, as is the truth, that we have limited resources to deal with the number of people who are going to be input in the system.
Well, if the number of infections is spread out over a broader period of time, then the bell-shaped curve is shallower.
If it's spread out over time, then you get a shallower shaped bell shaped curve.
If it is spread out very quickly, then you end up with a very narrow and tall bell shaped curve.
So I'm going to show you how this works.
So let's say that here is worst case scenario.
Okay, this is worst-case scenario.
If you can't see it, I'm holding up a piece of paper, and it shows a taller bell-shaped curve.
Worst-case scenario, right?
Early on, you get a lot of infections.
And here is sort of best-case scenario.
Same number of infections, but spread out over a broader period of time.
The reason this matters is let's assume that the number of hospital beds available is this particular line.
Okay, this line is the number of hospital beds available, and it's constant over time.
Now, that's not really true.
There's going to be an increase in hospital beds and ICU beds.
There's going to be an increase in the federal government's capacity to respond, and in private industry's capacity to respond, by the way.
It is imperative to note, for all the talk of Medicare for All and the federal government handling all this stuff, it is mainly private labs.
It is mainly hospitals that have private funding that are going to be taking care of a lot of these problems, and that's a very good thing.
Okay, America does have good public health response.
America does have some elasticity in its market and some flexibility in what private industry is allowed to do.
The testing kits that everybody is complaining about, most of those are not going to be coming courtesy of the federal government.
Most of those are going to be coming courtesy of private labs that are being repurposed, like Quest Diagnostics.
They're going to be repurposed in order to do lots of coronavirus tests.
Okay, so back to this little chart.
So let's say that this is best case scenario.
Perfect.
Okay, so this is a better graphic.
As you can see, I'm basically drawing the same thing.
Number of cases is on your vertical axis.
Time since first case is on your horizontal axis.
Y-axis is number of cases.
X-axis is the time since the first case.
And let's say the healthcare system capacity is the dotted line that you see across the middle of the screen.
Okay, if If there are no protective measures and everybody gets this thing early, right?
We're all out in big crowds.
We're going to NCAA basketball games.
This thing is spreading quickly.
Then what you see is all of the cases grouped very early on, right?
Time since first case, everybody's getting grouped very early, okay?
And over time, if you get put protective measures in place, people are getting it.
People are still getting it, right?
You're still getting it.
But instead of you getting it in April, you're getting it in September.
What's important about that is that if you are acting below that dotted line, then yes, there will be a bed for you at the hospital, even if you need a ventilator, even if you need a respirator, that stuff is available to you.
If, however, there is a glut in the system, this is what's happening in Italy.
This is why Italy is a disaster area.
If there's a glut in the system and there just aren't enough beds, you end up in worst case scenario.
And worst case scenario is a lot, a lot of people who are diagnosed and they are above the healthcare system capacity.
And that's when you have to start doing as Ezekiel Emanuel, the founder of Obamacare and now Obama, and now Obama Biden advisor.
That's where you get healthcare rationing, right?
That is worst case scenario.
That is the government, that is the hospitals deciding who deserves care and who does not, right?
How you prioritize those people.
Ezekiel Emanuel had a very scary column in today's New York Times talking specifically about the necessity.
for rationing if it comes to that, and how exactly we think about those things.
And that, of course, is stuff that nobody wants to think about, right?
It's stuff about, are you prioritizing medical personnel, right?
A doctor gets it.
Does that person get higher priority than a publicist?
You're prioritizing based on age, based on health and life expectancy.
Do you prioritize the 30-year-old over the 80-year-old?
Do you prioritize based on the amount of healthcare needed, right?
Because if you have one person who's going to suck up a lot of resources and live versus five people who are going to suck up fewer resources and live, you pick the five over the one, right?
You get into basic lifeboat ethics and that's where you don't want to be.
So it is very good that it's a country.
And let's just be real about this.
This is not because of the federal government.
It's not.
It's because people across the country suddenly started taking various and private industry started taking very seriously the threat of coronavirus.
Okay.
Disneyland shut down.
You've seen the NCAA shut down.
The NBA shut down.
I know in my own community, our schools, our kids' schools shut down, starting on Monday.
All the schools are gonna be shut down.
The synagogues are shutting down all across, I mean, to understand how crazy this is.
I've never seen anything like it in my lifetime.
You've never seen anything like it in your lifetime, unless you remember 1918.
In order for you to understand how crazy this is, understand that in Judaism, it is a religious obligation.
Like, it is a full-on mitzvah for you to go to synagogue and pray on Saturday with a minion.
In Israel, for a couple of weeks now, they've already had measures in place that say, don't go to synagogue, right?
Stay home.
We'll figure out a different way for you to fulfill the obligation.
Even if you can't fulfill the obligation, there is too much of a threat for you to go to synagogue.
Local synagogues in my area, in Los Angeles, are shutting their doors and saying, okay, we are not even going to hold services.
And we know that in Italy, they've shut down mass, which of course is the same thing.
They're shutting down religious services.
The Mormon Church, the Church of Latter-day Saints, they shut down all of their communal services.
This is all good.
This is all smart.
This is what the American people should be doing.
And maybe we'll look at the best-case scenario.
We look back on all of this and we say, well, you know what?
We did too much.
We didn't actually need to do all of that.
That is best-case scenario.
If we actually want to get this thing under control, if we want to bend that curve below the healthcare capacity, it is imperative that people exercise discretion.
It is imperative that people continue to do things like washing their hands.
It is imperative they avoid large public gatherings.
If you are going to be out in public, you got to have a certain amount of distance from other people.
This is all changing our way of life and it cuts directly against, it really does, it cuts directly against what we as human beings tend to do in times of crisis.
When you're in a crisis, when there's a real danger, human beings tend to flock to the herd, right?
I mean, that's just natural human thing.
You want human company.
You want to be around other people.
You want to feel safe because you feel safer in the herd, right?
We are a social creature.
Humans are social animals.
And now we're being told, okay, time of danger, isolate.
Okay, that is directly contrary to everything that we are used to.
That's right.
You know, frankly, thank God for the Internet.
Thank God for the fact that we can communicate as easily as we can in the modern world, that we can FaceTime with friends and family.
It's not a substitute, obviously, for being in the same room with somebody, or hugging a friend, or shaking hands with somebody.
Those going the way of the dodo bird, it's actually quite tragic, because these are ways that we communicate with each other, natural human ways that we communicate with each other.
With that said, We here at Daily Wire, we're gonna make it a point to try and reach out to you more.
We're gonna try and make it a point so that you don't feel alone.
We don't feel alone.
We're all in this together.
We really are.
And again, there is an end point here.
Even people who are really pessimistic about this kind of stuff, like Scott Gottlieb, the former FDA commissioner, even he is saying, we're not looking at a forever change here.
We are looking at a couple months change, and then there are gonna be some permanent changes to our way of life.
Like, you know, things may change as far as how movie theaters are seated.
Things may change as far as how you go to a ballgame.
But the fact is that this is a temporary thing.
A vaccine will be developed.
We will get through this.
We are going to bring all resources to bear.
And if we're smart about it, then we will have bent the curve so that fewer people die, particularly older and sicker people and people with pre-existing conditions, because those are the people who are uniquely vulnerable.
Okay, I'm going to get to more of this in a second, because information first and politics second, okay?
I'm really tired.
Frankly, I do a political show.
I am sick and tired of everything being political.
This is not a time for politics.
If you are sitting around and your first thought is, how does this affect Trump?
Does this mean he's going to get reelected or not reelected?
If you're sitting there on the left and you're cheering because you think, OK, well, this means that Biden's going to be president.
Or if you're on the right going, fulminating because focus on the focus on the virus is hurting President Trump.
You're doing being human wrong.
OK, that is a secondary priority at this point.
The only thing that matters is saving lives.
And frankly, I think that I hope that even our politicians know this.
I have my doubts, as we'll get to in a second, but I think that most human beings deep down know that this is a time when we need to put the politics aside and really focus on what exactly is going to save lives.
Okay, we're going to get into more of that in just one second.
First, let's talk about your sleep quality.
So, is all this keeping you awake at night?
It may be.
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Okay, so how bad is this thing going to get?
Well, Nobody knows is the answer because we don't actually know the transmission rate.
We know it's easier to transmit than the flu apparently.
We also know it's more deadly than the flu according to Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institute for Allergies and Infectious Disease.
According to Fauci, this thing is at least 10 times as deadly as the flu.
We don't actually know the rates because in some areas it's a lot lower than in other areas.
We don't know because we don't know what the public health response is going to be.
We don't know how much of this is due to lack of proper medical staffing and how much of this is due to the actual deadliness of the disease itself.
With that said, it is obviously very risky and there have been a wide variety of sort of articles put out there about how bad this thing could get.
The New York Times has put together a model.
Nicholas Kristof and Stuart Thompson writing, what's at stake in this coronavirus pandemic?
How many Americans could become infected?
How many might actually die?
The answers depend on the actions we take and crucially on when we take them.
Working with infectious disease epidemiologists, we developed an interactive tool that lets you see what may lie ahead in the United States, how much of a difference it could make if officials act quickly.
The figures are for America.
The lessons are broadly applicable to any country.
Okay, so they have a bunch of different scenarios here as far as what exactly could happen.
So they say if we stayed on current track, then the model predicts that roughly a third of Americans, more than 100 million people could become infected, including more than 9 million people at one time.
As we take no protective measures, basically.
That's if we just kind of leave everything as it is, we don't build up capacity, we don't stay home, we don't cancel events.
That, of course, is not what's happening.
We're already moving along the South Korean tack, which is lock it down, lock everything down, stay home, which is the smart thing to do.
In this particular scenario, Up to a million people could die in the United States, which of course would be just an unbelievable trauma, an unbelievable trauma to the United States.
That'd be if no action was taken and if the peak of the infections happened in mid-July.
That also assumes that presumably the summer would not really curtail the spread of the virus, which is sort of doubtful.
Okay, interventions early on mattered an awful lot.
If there are additional interventions, like ending public gatherings, closing workplaces and schools, mass testing, fortifying hospitals, if those additional interventions were to begin sometime in May, which, I mean, frankly, I think that it seems like we've snapped into place pretty quickly here.
I mean, it's really early March.
If that happens, then you could see 4.5 million infections at the peak and 475,000 total deaths.
Now, to put that in perspective, that would be like 10 times the number of people who die from the flu every year.
So that would still be a massive trauma.
If it's even earlier, then obviously the numbers go down.
If the interventions be in one month later, like in the middle of July, the number of infections climbs by more than two million, you get two thirds of a million deaths.
So, moving as quickly as humanly possible would be the best possible scenario.
They're sort of suggesting that the best possible scenario, let's say that we put into action these interventions like right now.
According to the Times model, you'd get 3 million infections at the peak and you get about 320,000 total deaths.
It's like their best case scenario.
Okay, so maybe they're wrong.
Maybe that thing wanes in the summer.
But aggressiveness matters, right?
If you aggressively act, if you get very aggressive, like everything shuts down, then this starts to look more like a seasonal flu.
If you act right now, best case scenario, you act right now, everything shuts down, the schools shut, we stop going to ball games, we stop going to... If we go to restaurants, we stay far away from one another, we clean our areas.
If you go to the gym, you wipe down all your equipment, you start doing a lot more things at home.
Basically, you revert to sort of a cabin mentality.
You're in here with your family, you go on hikes.
That's sort of what your life becomes.
A lot of homeschooling, less communal gathering.
If you do that, then according to this New York Times model you get 513,000 infections at peak and 51,000 total deaths.
And then it starts to look much more like a seasonal flu.
As the New York Times points out, what matters is not only the total number of infections, but also how many occur at once.
Overloaded hospitals and shortages of ventilators in ICUs would result in people dying unnecessarily from coronavirus, as well as from heart attacks and other ailments.
Successful interventions are crucial.
They flatten the curve.
We're much better off if the 100 million infections occur over 18 months rather than over 18 weeks.
If you look at the same number of ICU cases as before, but modeled at a much slower rate to finish beneath the 95,000 available ICU beds in the country, then the number of deaths is a lot, a lot lower.
So it is really important that people take aggressive actions right now not to get in group scenarios.
This is according to the scientists, okay?
So I'm just citing the scientists here.
This is not alarmism.
This is not politically oriented in any way.
Be smart.
Don't go to big parties.
Postpone your parties, okay?
If you're gonna have a wedding, you might think about postponing the wedding until post-July, right?
See where things are at in a couple of months.
If you're talking about major gatherings, you might talk about postponing those major gatherings.
If you're talking about a birthday party, you might think about saying, okay, you know what?
Next year we're going to go twice as big on the birthday party as opposed to getting together this year.
Listen, all of this hurts.
I know, I know.
I have young kids, right?
I have a kid who is six.
I have a kid who is three.
I have a kid who is a week old, right?
I get all this.
I have parents who are in their sixties.
They run the gamut in terms of vulnerability.
I understand my kids want to play with the other kids.
My kids want to go to school.
They don't want to stay home.
I get all of this.
I want to eat at restaurants.
I want to go to ballgames.
I bought tickets for a ballgame with my dad like a month ago.
Now I'm very glad that the MLB is pushing back its season.
I'm very glad that the NBA is doing what it's doing.
Lock it down.
Lock it down.
Be responsible.
And by the way, a lot of these supply lines are going to come back online in terms of hand sanitizer.
Don't worry about there being a permanent outage of hand sanitizer.
There's a rush right now.
In two weeks, the rush will basically be over.
There will be supply lines for groceries.
People are not going to starve in the United States.
Even in Italy, the grocery stores and pharmacies are still operating.
So right now people are sort of buying up, understandably, right?
We're all freaking out a little bit.
So everybody's going to the grocery stores and they're buying out the shelves.
Producer Pavel was showing me a picture from his local grocery store and everything was taken off the shelves except for the cauliflower, oddly enough.
Turns out that people would rather die than buy the cauliflower, which is perfectly understandable.
Vegan dishes are still not seeing an uptick in their spike here.
But with that said, This will alleviate the one area of American life where things will continue to be produced is in the grocery and pharmacy section.
So I wouldn't worry too much about that.
The government is going to take some aggressive actions in terms of shoring up the financial infrastructure.
We're going to get to more of this in just one second.
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Okay, so what exactly are the measures that have been taken in different countries around the world?
Now, the measures vary widely.
If you look at the outbreak levels and the death levels in various countries, The New York Times, their maps on this are actually quite good.
The New York Times has some outbreak maps showing exactly how many people have been diagnosed in particular areas of the world.
The United States currently has over 1600 diagnoses, but we have a tremendous lack of testing.
Mike DeWine, the governor of Ohio, basically announced that maybe there's a 1% infection rate in the state of Ohio already, which would mean presumably 100,000 infections.
China, which has been lying about its numbers for a long time, they said there are 81,000 cases in China.
South Korea says 7,800.
Japan has 1,300.
Most of those are from the Diamond Princess cruise.
Iran has over 10,000.
Italy has over 15,000.
Spain has 3,800.
France has 2,800.
Germany has 3,000.
These numbers are not that big.
On a raw scale, what people are afraid of, of course, is the exponential growth.
As I mentioned yesterday, human beings do not have a great capacity to understand exponential growth.
We understand arithmetic growth.
Right?
Yesterday, there was one.
Tomorrow, there will be two.
The day after, there will be three.
Right?
We understand arithmetic growth, the straight line growth.
What we don't understand is the curve.
Right?
We don't understand because the curve looks like 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, and suddenly every doubling becomes enormous.
Right, suddenly you're talking about doubling from 10,000 cases to 20,000 cases in the same period of time.
It took to double from one to two.
Okay, so right now what we're looking at in Italy is 15,000 cases and 1,000 deaths.
It's a very high death rate.
Again, that is because of strains on the healthcare system over there.
But if you look in places like South Korea, those rates are significantly, significantly lower.
Okay, so what exactly is happening in these various countries that have done a successful job trying to shut this thing down?
According to the New York Times, The various scenarios that have been used make a big difference.
Benjamin Cowling and Weiwen Lim.
Cowling's an epidemiologist, Lim is a graduate student in epidemiology.
They write about Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, talking about how they brought the outbreaks under control.
They say, in late January, after a sluggish and problematic initial response, the government of mainland China put in place unprecedented containment and social distancing measures and locked down major cities, noticeably Wuhan, the epicenter of the outbreak.
And impose various travel restrictions throughout the country.
There's a piece in the New York Times that ridiculously suggests that China bought us time.
China is the reason this is a problem in the first place.
It's because it's a poor, decrepit country that runs top down in a fashion where they silence people who are trying to bring information to the general public, imprisons them, shuts them down.
And then the country is so poor overall that people are literally eating pangolins because they have nothing else to eat with these crap exotic meat markets.
You've got a communist dictatorship that is unable to even shut down the meat markets that have been responsible for SARS, MERS, and now this one?
I mean, seriously, I don't want to hear China getting credit for its literacy programs from Bernie.
China is at fault for this.
China in the international trade sphere is going to be held responsible for this.
People are not going to create factories in China at the rate they once did.
There will be a diversification economically.
Away from China in response to the fact that China has now been the source of several of these pandemics.
It's what a disaster area.
But Chinese response was a complete lockdown.
The testing capacity of laboratories was rapidly expanded to relieve pressure on hospitals.
Patients with milder symptoms were placed in temporary isolation facilities set up in gyms and event halls.
New hospitals were constructed.
People who had come into contact with anyone infected were sent to designated facilities, typically converted hotels or hostels, for prophylactic quarantine.
Home quarantine was advised only for those at slight risk of infection.
Initially, all residents of Wuhan basically were required to stay home.
Schools and workplaces were closed well after the end of the Lunar New Year festival.
The scale was extraordinary, but it seems to have worked to contain the spread of COVID-19 in China.
The number of new cases reported every day is a lot lower than it was before.
But instead of looking at China, which is obviously a repressive authoritarian country, we should instead look at some less authoritarian and repressive countries, places like Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Okay, so let's look at some of these other examples of countries that have done a good job at locking down.
As of midday on Friday, according to these columnists, one epidemiologist for the New York Times, Singapore had 187 confirmed cases and no deaths for a population of about 5.7 million.
Taiwan had 50 confirmed cases, including one death for a population of 24 million.
Hong Kong had 131 confirmed cases, including four deaths for a total population of about 7.5 million.
All three governments have implemented some combination of measures to, first, reduce the arrival of new cases into the community.
Those would be travel restrictions, as we'll see in a little while.
The media, intent on hitting President Trump, are ripping on his travel ban from Europe.
The fact is, Dr. Anthony Fauci, who I trust a hell of a lot more than any of the people criticizing Fauci on virtually all of this stuff, he was defending the European travel ban.
In fact, here is Dr. Fauci specifically talking about why the European travel ban is a pretty good idea.
I think that was a prudent choice.
We spent a lot of time thinking about it, discussing it, about whether we should do it, and it was the right public health call.
And here's the numerical reason why.
New cases throughout the world, the majority of them are from Europe, Europe to other countries.
If you look in the United States, at states that have new cases, the majority of them are coming from that region.
It was based on that that the travel restriction was suggested and accepted.
OK, this is backed by Dr. Robert Redfield, who happens to be the head of the CDC.
He was testifying yesterday and he suggested, yeah, of course we recommended the travel ban.
Like, it's not just that Trump came up with this thing off the top of his head.
Like, there's some pretty good evidence for it.
Real risk in general right now, and this is why the president took the action he did last night.
Within the world now, over 70 percent of the new cases are linked to Europe.
And in the United States, I think it was now 35, 30 states in our country.
30 states or more were linked to actually the cases of Europe.
Europe is the new China.
And that's why the president made those statements.
Okay, so the media obviously are ripping on Trump for the European travel ban, but everybody acknowledges that a travel ban, shutting down travel for the moment, internationally at the very least, is probably a good idea.
These columnists, including an epidemiologist for the New York Times, continue, The other measures taken by Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore specifically prevent possible transmission between known cases and the local population, which is quarantines.
And finally, generally suppress silent transmission in the community by reducing contact between individuals, self-isolation, social distancing, heightened hygiene.
Each of these countries has a different approach.
Singapore could take aggressive measures to block the arrival of infection from China, and they did.
The Singapore authorities also undertook especially intensive efforts to trace the context of people known to be infected.
We already have community infection in the United States, so we're sort of past that at this point, but...
Singapore has implemented all sorts of recommended personal hygiene habits, using a tissue when you cough or you sneeze, using designated serving spoons during group meals, using trays when you eat or drink to limit contamination in case of spills, keeping public toilets clean and dry, regular hand washing.
Taiwan took a slightly different tack.
As soon as early January, Taiwanese medical authorities would board incoming flights from Wuhan and inspect and screen travelers on the plane.
Taiwan has also taken a rather mixed approach in its efforts to reduce transmission within the community.
Home quarantine has been the predominant method of isolation, even when state facilities were in fact available, and they've been ensuring strict penalties against anyone who breaks an isolation order, including fines of up to $30,000 if you're ordered to stay home and then you do not.
Also, religious institutions, suspended services, organizers of mass events were encouraged to defer or cancel those events.
Hong Kong had a different approach.
Their approach, again, involved screening people who were coming in from China.
And they also recommended that anybody who arrived from elsewhere was forced to undergo a mandatory 14-day period of quarantine.
So all of these measures are things that, most of these measures are things that we in the United States can do.
Now the big question is how widespread this is in the United States right now.
And the big short fall of the federal government thus far has been the lack of testing kits available those testing kits are mainly going to be produced as i've said before by private industry so while a lot of people are talking about the evils of private industry medicare for all and all the rest of this the fact is that it is private industry that's going to be picking up the slack here it is private companies private testing companies that have picked up the slack in fact there there's new tests that are being brought out as in like right now that are going to allow 24 hour turnaround
The FDA is allowing the emergency use of a novel coronavirus testing system designed by Roche Molecular Systems, according to CNN.
Within 24 hours of receiving the application, the first commercially distributed diagnostic test received an emergency use authorization during the COVID-19 outbreak, demonstrating once again that when you cut through bureaucratic red tape, it is usually a good idea.
And remember, just a couple of days ago, the New York Times was reporting that people were ready to do these tests in January in Seattle, and the CDC and FDA shut them down because of the bureaucratic idiocy of all of this.
Now, Dr. Anthony Fauci, again, being taken out of context, he pointed out that the testing regimen put out there has been failing because we just don't have enough test kits.
People shorthanded this to say that the government response is failing.
That is not what he said.
Listen to the full clip of Dr. Fauci.
The system does not, is not really geared to what we need right now, what you are asking for.
That is a failing.
A failing, yes.
It is a failing.
Let's admit it.
The fact is, the way the system was set up is that the public health component that Dr. Fauci...
that Dr. Redfield was talking about was a system where you put it out there in the public and a physician asks for it and you get it.
The idea of anybody getting it easily the way people in other countries are doing it, we're not set up for that.
Do I think we should be?
Yes, but we're not.
Okay, he didn't say the entire system is failing.
He said this is a-failing.
It is a-failing.
The media covered this as though Fauci said the entire system was failing, and the media spun this out of control to suggest that this, of course, is President Trump's fault.
And this is where the politics of this thing comes in.
We all know what we have to do.
Okay, this is no longer a giant mystery.
We know what we have to do.
We know we gotta wash our hands.
We know we gotta stay home as much as possible.
We know we gotta avoid populated areas.
We know that if we're gonna order from a restaurant, order delivery, or order out, we know what to do.
This is no longer a broad-based mystery.
This is no longer a question of what to do.
The only question is what measures Congress can take to shore up the economy in the short term, which presumably would include a payroll tax holiday.
It might include American Enterprise Institute's recommended cash payments to people who literally cannot make their bills, at least in the temporary and short term.
It would include maybe the government allowing paid sick leave, but the government The government allowing it and it being sunsetted so that it's not a permanent program.
Like Nancy Pelosi literally wanted to implement in these bills, she wanted a permanent paid sick leave that would include paid sick leave for like spousal abuse or something, right?
Which has nothing to do whatsoever with coronavirus.
Like at this point, Put the partisan bullcrap aside, guys.
Seriously.
We don't need the partisan bullcrap.
What we need is specifically directed responses to specific people who are going to be harmed by this.
And we need to make sure that our credit systems don't fail.
The federal government is standing in the breach when it comes to that sort of stuff.
And again, for all of those who are saying, well, aren't you a libertarian?
Yes, I'm a libertarian.
And libertarians understand externalities when the entire system is at risk.
In a time of war, there are no libertarians when it comes to Should there be an army or not?
Libertarians are not anti-military when you're under attack.
When a major virus is threatening externalities, I don't know a single libertarian who is suggesting that the government has no role to play in the presence of a pandemic.
We'll get to more of this in just one second, and we'll get to the inevitable politicization of a time when things really should not be politicized.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Okay, we'll get to more of this and the inevitable politicization.
It was going to happen, and indeed it did, because people just cannot stop.
Never stop, never stopping is the rule in American politics.
And my God, folks, like, Cut it out.
Just quit it.
We'll get to that in one second.
First, it is that glorious time of the week when I give a shout out to a Daily Wire subscriber today.
It's KC Anne on Instagram, who has a husband who knows the way to a wife's heart.
In the pic, KC Anne is in her car, happily brandishing the greatest, most elite beverage vessel the world has ever seen.
Also, we have another, we have another picture.
We have two pictures today.
Okay, that one says, best mail day ever.
I got my leftist tears hotter cold tumbler after two years of listening to official Ben Shapiro podcast and everyone else at the Real Daily Wire.
My husband surprised me with a two year subscription.
Just awesome.
Glad you've been enjoying our shows.
And now you get all the extras that only a Daily Wire membership brings.
Thanks for the pick, KCN.
Thanks to your husband for his service in the U.S.
Army.
Also, we have a beautiful picture of a very, very little child carrying a copy of the U.S.
Constitution in one hand and a Leftist Tears tumbler in the other.
I mean, just gorgeous stuff.
This is the young daughter of Yael and Chaim.
They also run a great company called LavishLayette.com.
You can go check them out.
Great baby stuff.
I checked them out.
This is what an adorable kid.
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So we have a couple of winners today in our Leftist tears, Tumblr sweepstakes.
If that doesn't make you happy and down day, I don't know what does.
I mean, look at that baby.
That's a cute, cute baby.
And check out their company, Lavish Layout, while you're at it, if you need baby clothes.
Pretty awesome stuff.
Also, make sure to check out our new Sunday special.
This week, I sat down with Ezra Klein, the opinion journalist, podcaster, and co-founder of Vox.com.
It's an animated conversation.
It's really fascinating.
We get into the details specifically of identity politics.
He has a brand new book out about why we're polarized.
I have some quibbles, but it is a fascinating, fascinating conversation.
It's definitely not one you'll want to miss.
It's great to have interesting conversations with interesting people with whom you disagree.
We had a great one with Ezra that will be available on Sunday, so go check that out.
Also, as I mentioned, you should go subscribe over at dailywire.com.
You should do that right now.
One of the reasons you should do that, we're going to start providing additional services during this lockdown where we're going to be That's what we're seeking to do.
We're putting plans in place right now so we can communicate more with you.
We can hang out more with you.
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So come on over to dailywire.com and join the fun.
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Okay, so we all basically know what we need to do here.
That's not stopping Congress from fighting over all of this, basically because Democrats insist on shoveling a bunch of crap into every crisis bill.
You remember they did this after Hurricane Maria?
You remember?
They've been doing this for every crisis.
Every crisis is an excuse for the government to spend endless amounts of money.
Well, I'm not in favor of spending useless amounts of money.
We should spend the money we need to spend.
Meaning right now, we have an unforeseen Black Swan event.
That means there are going to be a lot of people who are off from work.
That means there are going to be a lot of people we want to encourage people who are sick to stay home.
So the idea of a mandatory paid sick leave is not a bad one.
We don't want people spreading.
This is the pure externality situation.
You have a disease, you can't afford not to go to work, but if you stay home from work, you're not going to get paid.
The idea of the government stepping into the breach there is not a bad one.
We have to encourage people to stay home.
It makes sense to have a payroll tax holiday.
So that companies have more money to spend on their employees.
Like, listen, we have a lot of employees here.
You think that we want to not pay our employees?
Of course we want to pay our employees.
I don't know a single business owner who doesn't want to continue paying their employees.
I told you that my kid's school got shut down.
Well, we have a nanny, right?
Because my wife is indeed a doctor.
And that means that the nanny has a child too.
And her kid's school is shut down.
We already told her, like, spend whatever time you need at home.
We're going to continue paying you, right?
That is the ideal, is that everybody who's employing other people wants to continue employing other people.
Whatever facilitates that is going to be good, especially because when we come out the other end of this, whenever that is, in June, July, when we come out the other end of this, there will be a fairly solid recovery, and it should be fairly fast, because the fact is that this is not an underlying threat to the global economic system.
It's a threat to supply lines.
It's gonna require some replacement of factories, but it's not because the United States has serious underlying economic problems.
It's because when nobody is allowed to go out, it turns out that spending goes way down, investing goes way down.
Why would you invest in businesses?
Also, tip for people who are in the stock market, unless you have to liquidate like right now because you just don't have the cash flow, leave your money in the stock market.
Do not sell into a falling market.
You want to talk about wealth redistribution?
If you're a person who's middle-class, middle-upper class, and you don't have to access that 401k, but you think that the market's going to drop further, so you drop it right now, don't do it.
All you're doing is giving opportunities for younger people who have disposable income the opportunity to go out and buy all of that stock and then get rich on the other end.
Down markets are where rich people get really rich, is the reality of the situation.
Don't be a sucker.
In other words, leave your money in the market.
Do not pull your money out of the market.
Again, I'm not telling you which socks to buy, because I'm not qualified to do that.
I'm just telling you, why would you possibly sell a depreciating asset when you know it's going to appreciate again in fairly short order?
Meanwhile, again, Congress continues to argue over what to do about all of this.
The legislation that Pelosi is proposing includes enhanced unemployment benefits, which again, depending on, I mean, we're going to need cash transfers to people who don't have a job right now, free virus testing, aid for food assistance programs, and federal funds for Medicaid.
All this sounds fairly good on the surface.
The question, the devil's always in the details.
Apparently, Nancy Pelosi was attempting to put in funding that was not subject to the Hyde Amendment, so the funding could eventually be used for abortion.
She's also attempting to make all of these programs permanent, which is not the goal here.
It's an emergency funding measure.
It is not a measure that is designed for permanent places in American life.
This is not a situation in which we should all be thinking, never let a good crisis go to waste.
That's not what we should be thinking here.
The package includes 14 days of paid sick leave, as well as tax credits to help small and medium businesses fulfill that mandate.
Pelosi says she wants another package that will take further effective action that protects the health, economic security and well-being of the American people.
We will see exactly what this stuff means because Congress is always going to say that.
The question is how much of that is legit and how much of that is not really legit.
So once we see more details on the bill, then we can tell you.
Basically, where we stand on what the government is doing and whether it is a good idea for us to be spending this sort of cash.
Peter Suderman has a piece over at Reason.com talking about the sort of stimulus that all of these Congress people are calling for.
He's very critical.
He says, the proposal, as explained by the Trump administration, would eliminate the collection of individual employer payroll taxes, which fund Social Security and Medicare.
The idea is to stimulate the economy by giving workers bigger paychecks.
They suggest that this plan could result in a lot of lost revenue.
That's true.
But it's likely to fail on a lot of levels because not only would it push the already high federal budget deficit to unprecedented levels, it would also offer little help to those who need it most.
It wouldn't address the underlying crisis or anything like that.
Also, right now, we have a bit of a debt crunch because who wants to buy debt in a time when, again, the economy is sinking?
So...
We do have to be specific and careful about how we spend our money.
We can't just start blowing wads of cash and assume that the cash is going to be there on the other end.
Okay, meanwhile, speaking of politicization.
So Joe Biden gave a speech yesterday.
Now imagine for one second, just one single solitary second, that a Democrat were president.
And let's assume that the response were fairly similar.
Because the fact is, the response would be fairly similar.
Okay, Democrats don't have a magic wand to suddenly make testing kits available across the country any more than President Trump does.
Fauci would probably still be the head of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases.
The same people who are currently staffing would probably be staffing.
The same problems that exist would probably exist.
And all the critiques would be coming from the right.
Now imagine that it were a presidential race, and let's imagine it was Barack Obama and Mitt Romney again or something.
Or better, let's imagine that it were Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.
It was 2016 all over again and Barack Obama were president and Donald Trump went on the stump and then he gave a big speech about how the administration was completely botching the response to coronavirus in the middle of what is indeed a public panic, right?
In the middle of that, went out there and exacerbated all of the doubts that people had about authority, all the doubts that people had about the government, all the doubts that people had about the measures that are being taken place and the sufficiency thereof.
Do you think the media for a single solitary second would sit there and echo the complaints?
Or do you think they would say, what are you doing?
It's a time for us to come together.
It's a time for us to all bring each other together and recognize, I mean, the election isn't tomorrow.
The election is eight months from now.
It's a time for all of us to figure out what we can do best to bring the country together right now instead of sniping from the upper tier.
But Joe Biden did a speech yesterday widely praised by the media in which he basically echoed most of the things that Trump is already doing.
He just added a bunch of snark.
So he suggested go out and wash your hands.
Yeah, Trump has said that before.
He suggested social isolation.
Yeah, we've we've talked about this.
He suggested testing kits and availability of testing kits.
You think that Trump isn't working on that?
Of course he's working on that.
But the media were just over the moon about this.
And this is why I say partisan politics is a hell of a drug.
So here is Joe Biden yesterday and again.
Basically, his entire speech was making snide remarks about Trump's insufficiency in this crisis.
People are going to make their decision based on the actions of the Trump administration.
Believe me, Trump's getting hit for having downplayed this thing in the early days.
The Trump administration has taken it on the chin from people who think that the administration basically wasted a month in not ramping up development and testing.
But with that said, is it a good look for the opposite political party in a time of what?
I mean, listen, this is the most shocking public crisis that I have seen in my entire life.
Okay?
And I was alive for 9-11.
I was a near adult.
I was in 2001.
I was 17 years old.
So I remember 9-11 fairly well.
The public response to this dwarfs 9-11.
Dwarfs it.
Okay?
My parents have never seen anything like this.
My parents are 65.
So, like, this is a major moment when the country really needs to come together and we all need to rely on each other and we need to say, listen, there have been failures in the past, but we need to give the government time to do what it needs to do.
We all know what needs to be done.
The recriminations can happen later.
Believe me, they will.
If you think that Joe Biden isn't going to cut a bevy of ads in September of Donald Trump talking about how 15 people are sick and it's going to go down to zero, or Donald Trump talking about how this thing is going to be fine and the market's going to be fine.
If you think Biden isn't going to cut those ads, you're wrong.
He is going to cut those ads.
But now is not the time for that bullcrap.
Right now is the time when you say, OK, we need whatever you think of President Trump, whatever you think of the administration.
Now's the time when we all have to be together.
We're all working together to get this right.
That's not what Joe Biden did yesterday.
Instead, Biden decided that it was a perfect time to snipe.
So here is Biden yesterday to the cheers of the media.
Being overly dismissive or spreading misinformation is only going to hurt us and further advantage the spread of the disease.
But neither should we panic or fall back on xenophobia.
Labeling COVID-19 a foreign virus does not displace accountability for the misjudgments that have been taken thus far by the Trump administration.
OK, it is not xenophobia to point out this is a foreign virus.
That is not xenophobia.
It is a foreign virus.
And again, playing defense for the Chinese government is a hell of a thing.
I mean, really, the Chinese government is responsible for the spread.
You don't want to call it the Chinese virus, call it the communist virus.
Fine, do it that way.
Because the fact is that they were literally threatening to imprison people who talked openly about Wuhan virus back in December and January.
And so all of the late breaking, well, you know, now it's European.
Yeah, now it's European.
So what?
Ebola didn't just stay in Africa, but it was still called Ebola.
The idea that this is all about Trump's xenophobia, like really, is this what we need right now?
This is the public debate we need right now?
Not the encouragement of everybody to take the proper measures, not the encouragement to help out the private companies that you know need help, and help out private people, not any of that.
Really, we're gonna go on the xenophobia bender right now?
We're gonna go on the social justice warrior bender in the middle of a pandemic?
Okay, and it didn't stop there.
Joe Biden, again, he was just using this as an opportunity to bash Trump.
Again, based on nothing.
Okay, Dr. Anthony Fauci knows a lot more about epidemiology than Joe Biden.
He knows a lot more than I do, which is why I take his word over Trump's.
I take his word over Biden's.
I take his word over mine.
He says that the European travel ban is a good idea.
Here's Joe Biden saying it's a bad idea.
And it will not stop.
Banting all travel from Europe or any other part of the world may slow it, but as we've seen, it will not stop it.
And travel restrictions based on favoritism in politics rather than risk will be counterproductive.
Okay, Biden continued along these lines, and again, it was just him ripping into Trump.
I have a question.
How does that help?
Is he the head of a shadow government I don't know about?
Does he have any capacity to actually do anything?
The answer, of course, is no.
As the head of the Democratic Party, right?
And he is.
He's now the titular head of the Democratic Party.
He's a Democratic nominee, de facto.
Joe Biden should be saying, listen, there'll be plenty of time for me to analyze President Trump's response to this later.
Right now is the time for us to come together.
Here's the stuff that we should be doing.
Like, that would be a graceful move.
And Biden is supposed to be the graceful candidate, right?
It's Trump who's violated all norms of politics and etiquette.
It's not Biden who's done that, supposedly.
But here's Biden violating every rule of politics.
I mean, this is when you don't have to have a rally around the Trump effect.
You don't.
Because whatever you think of Trump, you already think of Trump.
But you have to have at least a let's come together effect.
You didn't get that from Joe Biden last night when he was busy yelling at the president.
Here he was talking about how the president's incapacity for dealing with this is the reason he should be president.
Joe, I have news for you.
The vote ain't until November.
It's not until November.
We're gonna be a lot of people who die between now and November.
If this is your chief message right now, you're doing... Really, this is... I think there's a moral problem with this.
A real moral problem with this.
Because you're doing nothing that actually leads the Trump administration to better activity here.
Protecting the health and safety of the American people is the most important job of any president.
And unfortunately, this virus laid bare the severe shortcomings of the current administration.
Public fears are being compounded by a pervasive lack of trust in this president, fueled by adversarial relationships with the truth that he continues to have.
Our government's ability to respond effectively has been undermined by hollowing out our agencies and disparagement of science.
And our ability to drive a global response is dramatically, dramatically undercut by the damage Trump has done to our credibility and our relationships around the world.
We have to get to work immediately to dig ourselves out of this hole.
And that's why today I'm releasing a plan to combat and overcome the coronavirus.
Okay, yeah, but you're not president.
You're not.
Why aren't you encouraging Nancy Pelosi to pass legislation?
Why aren't you working with the other Democrats to get something together?
Honestly, the fact the media we're cheering this on demonstrates the Trump derangement syndrome that has set in.
There's plenty of fair criticism of Trump.
I've made a lot of it on this program.
Okay, but it is not a correct thing in the middle of a pandemic to spend your time making giant speeches about how everything Trump is doing is wrong and he's bad for the job and all this.
I promise you there will be plenty of time for this campaign.
There'll be plenty of time for this campaign.
And making hay in the middle of an actual public crisis?
is a bad look.
It's a very bad look.
Okay, time for a couple of things that I hate, and then I want to do a little bit of Bible talk.
So, a couple of things that I hate.
So if you remember, I mean, this is pretty incredible.
Andrew Gillum was nearly governor of Florida.
Remember this?
Andrew Gillum ran as a Democrat in Florida.
He lost to Ron DeSantis very, very narrowly.
Apparently, former Florida gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum was allegedly involved in an incident involving crystal meth at a Miami Beach hotel early this morning, according to an incident report obtained by the Miami New Times.
The report itself is super disturbing.
Apparently, an orgy is suspected but unconfirmed?
This guy was like this far from being governor of Florida, and he was the new up-and-coming Democratic star.
Just a reminder, politicians are people too, and most of them suck.
Because most people kind of suck.
According to the Miami Beach Police report, clear plastic baggies containing suspected crystal meth were found in both the bed and floor of a hotel room.
The three small baggies of suspected narcotics were impounded at the Miami Beach Police Station property and evidence unit for destruction.
There are photos of all of this.
Furthermore, here's the crime report.
Apparently, two officers responded in emergency mode to a cardiac arrest.
Upon arrival, Miami Beach Fire Rescue was on scene providing treatment to one patient named Travis Dyson.
Miami Beach Fire Rescue advised officers that Dyson was being treated for a possible drug overdose.
He was in stable condition, but he was being transported to a local hospital.
Officers then made contact with two other males who were inside.
One was the complainant, his name is Aldo Mejias, and Andrew Gillum, who was an involved other.
According to Mejias, he provided his credit card information to Travis Dyson to rent a hotel room for the night.
Mejias was to meet Mr. Dyson later on in the day.
Dyson rented the room at approximately 4 o'clock.
Mejias arrived at the hotel at approximately 11 o'clock at night, where he discovered Travis Dyson and Andrew Gillum inside the room under the influence of an unknown substance.
Per Mr. Mejias, Mr. Dyson opened the hotel room door and immediately walked over to the bed and collapsed in a prone position.
Wow, wow, wow, wow.
observed Mr. Gillum inside the bathroom vomiting.
Mejia stated that he observed Dyson having difficulty breathing, prompting him to wake him up.
Dyson then began vomiting on the bed and immediately collapsed again.
Officers attempted to speak with Gillum.
Gillum was unable to communicate with officers to his inebriated state.
That guy was this far from being governor of Florida.
This far from being governor.
And he was the new face and wave of the Democratic Party.
Wow, wow, wow, wow.
That is just well done, everybody.
Seriously, well done.
Okay, other things that I hate today.
So I've said before that the late night industry, the late night comedy industry is neither comedy nor apolitical.
Proof positive of this, Pete Buttigieg hosted Jimmy Kimmel's show last night on ABC.
He did like an opening monologue and then hosted on ABC to no audience because there was no live audience because of coronavirus.
So basically his campaign.
And basically his campaign where he spoke To the plaudits of people who are college educated on the coast and no one cared, nobody listened.
He wasn't very funny because this isn't his job.
Wow, look at that audience.
A stunning audience.
Look at the social distancing.
They got like 10 people in the room and Pete Buttigieg, I mean, thankfully he didn't kill it.
Like literally, wow, the awkwardness, the insane awkwardness of this Of this monologue.
Do we have any audio?
Okay, so Buttigieg.
He was not great last night.
The reviews were not particularly sterling.
But can you imagine if they just let Ted Cruz host Jimmy Kimmel live?
Of course not.
Of course not.
So apparently, this was true across the evening, by the way, that the audiences were not there.
Buttigieg, because nobody's ever told.
Like, what's amazing about the Democrats is they've never told a self-effacing joke.
So, Buttigieg joked, when you don't have a real audience, you have to fake one, just like Trump's inauguration.
See, if Buttigieg actually made the joke, here I am, you know, on a popular late-night show, you know, speaking to people who are of my own ilk, with no audience, that actually would have gotten a laugh, because self-effacing humor is actually kind of funny.
But the fact that Pete Buttigieg was even doing this in the first place is really kind of amazing.
It's amazing that this guy was hosting late night and demonstrative of where the entire industry is.
Okay, you know what?
It's time for a little bit of Bible.
So, the end of the week, it feels like biblical end times, but let's talk a little bit of Bible.
So, this week, if I were going to synagogue, because synagogue is closed, then we would be reading the Bible portion of of kitisa which is the the bible portion in which there is in which it talks about the the golden calf and the the golden calf incident is really puzzling obviously because you have a people who have just been brought out with signs and wonders that miraculously brought out of the land of egypt the sea is split for them they walk across god talks directly to them brings them the 10 commandments
and then they're immediately like you know what we're going to do We're gonna make this fake cow.
Let's do that.
Let's make a fake cow out of gold.
And it is indicative of the attention span of human beings.
It is also indicative, a lot of commentators suggest, of the fact that if you are going to have a true, long-lasting belief in God, it can't be based on signs and miracles, because people tend to rationalize that stuff away.
It has to be based on true faith and a real rational perspective on exactly on exactly how the world works.
But there's something else here.
So the real question is, why Aaron, who's Moses' brother, took part in all of this?
Aaron is one of the great figures in Jewish history, in biblical history.
Aharon HaCohen, Aaron the Cohen, he is the secondary figure in the entire Pentateuch, right?
I mean, it's Moses, and then Aaron is the one who's actually his spokesperson, going out and talking to the people, much more popular with the people.
Aaron is a more naturally gifted leader than Moses.
Aaron is a more powerful speaker, right?
Moses himself acknowledges this when he's at the burning bush and God says, you should go speak to the Jews.
And Moses is like, I'm not sufficient for this.
And then God says, okay, well, you can use Aaron, right?
That is Moses acknowledging that Aaron is actually a better leader for the people in terms of the people and speaking directly to the people.
But this is Aaron's downfall, is Aaron refuses to tell the people the truth.
Aaron is more interested in public approval at this point than he is in telling the people the truth.
And this is obvious from the text of the Bible.
Here's what the Bible says.
This is in the book of Exodus.
He took them from their hands, he fashioned it with an engraving tool, and made it into a molten calf, upon which they said, These are your gods, O Israel, who have brought you up from the land of Egypt.
Now, the reason they did a calf is because calves were worshipped in the land of Egypt, and so they were actually replicating what they had once known as slaves.
When Aaron saw this, he built an altar in front of it, and Aaron proclaimed and said, Tomorrow shall be a festival to the Lord.
So this isn't Aaron trying to twist pagan idolatry into service to God.
He's trying to take the people and channel them towards something better by acceding to their requests.
So how can Aaron's behavior be excused?
So there are three basic answers that are offered by the different biblical commentators in Judaism.
First, they argue that Aaron was just trying to stall.
That basically he assumed this is going to take a while to make this golden calf.
In the meantime, Moses is going to come down from the mountain.
We'll stop this whole thing.
Then there's the second theory, fear.
According to the Midrash, which is sort of commentary on the Bible that fills out the narrative a little bit.
Midrash says that the Jews actually went to Aaron's nephew, a guy named Hur, before they went to Aaron, and then when Hur refused to participate in their idolatry, they murdered him.
Aaron thought they'd murder him too, at which point they couldn't be forgiven their sins, so he thought that it was better to participate with them in the sin of idolatry than to involve himself in a chain of circumstances that would lead them to kill a high priest.
Then there's a third theory, that Aaron was attempting to take the sin on himself to avoid the sin of the people, but of course that doesn't work because then there's a massive plague that breaks out immediately after this.
All three of the theories have one thing in common.
Aaron cares about the fate of the people above all else.
The people are the institution he seeks to preserve, not their honor, not their decency, not even really their holiness, their purpose for existing.
This is Aaron's grave sin.
This is very different from Moses, right?
Here's how Moses responds to God, because God sees this, right, in the Bible, and God says to Moses, I'm going to destroy these people.
I mean, look at these people.
These jerks.
Look what all I do for them.
I'm up here giving you the law.
You're going to go down and bring them the most holy thing they've ever seen.
These Ten Commandments on these tablets.
And they're down there making a golden calf.
Like, what is this nonsense?
And here's how Moses responds.
Moses pleads before God.
This is according to the Bible.
He says, Why, O Lord, should your anger be kindled against your people, whom you have brought up from the land of Egypt with great power and with a strong hand?
Why should the Egyptians say, He brought them out with evil intent to kill them in the mountains and to annihilate them from upon the face of the earth?
Retreat from the heat of your anger.
Reconsider the evil intended for your people.
Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, your servants, to whom you swore by your very self and to whom you said, I will multiply your seed like the stars of heaven and all this land, which I said that I would give to your seed that shall keep it as their possession forever.
What Moses is saying is that God's honor is at stake.
Moses' chief concern here is that the Jewish people cannot exist without their God.
And when God threatens to remove his presence from Israel and use an angel instead to take the people to Israel, Moses demurs.
Aaron is concerned with preserving life.
Moses knows that the people have to come around to the right answer.
So Moses never would have acceded to the people's request.
Moses would have said, stick it.
Moses would have told the people the truth.
You can't substitute a fake God for a real God.
And that God is not going to live with your sin, nor is he going to excuse your sin.
This has some relevance to today's discussion.
And the fact is, here's what we deserve from our leaders.
We deserve the truth.
It may be unpopular.
It may get our leaders in trouble.
Our leaders may not win re-election if they tell us the truth.
We deserve the truth.
And it's not about us deserving the truth.
It's about the truth being the purpose of politics and human communication.
It's about the truth being the only thing that is going to allow us to retain our morality and our decency in a grave and serious time.
We don't need leaders who are simply going to tell people what they want to hear.
We don't need leaders who are playing politics.
We don't need leaders who are acting on the will of the people.
That's not what we need.
We need people who are going to speak ultimate truth to people.
That's the story of the golden calf.
Aaron should have said to the people, listen, you do this and you are violating every reason you're brought out of Egypt.
You do this and you sacrifice your souls.
You do this and you betray the reason that God chose you in the first place.
Whether Moses comes down from that mountain or not, you are not allowed to violate the chief precepts of your reason for being.
Okay, telling the people the truth is not... Put aside what the people deserve.
The people deserve whatever the people get, but put that aside.
What actually people need, what they need, is truth.
So at this time, above all else, I urge everybody to engage in the pursuit of truth and the speaking of truth.
And that means speaking to people about what they need to do at this time.
It means not hiding the numbers.
It means if it's scary, it's scary.
But we can all get through this together so long as we base what we do on the truth.
Okay.
A little bit later on today, we'll have two additional hours of content.
Otherwise, stay safe this weekend.
Have a great weekend with your family.
You know, really spend some time.
It can be fun, right?
You can be home with your family.
I'm looking forward to it.
So, hopefully, we will see you all here on Monday and we'll recap everything that's going on.
We'll hang out some more.
Otherwise, have a great weekend.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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