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March 18, 2020 - The Ben Shapiro Show

59:17

The Chinese Virus | Ep. 974

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Time	Text
	New information emerges on coronavirus as countries around the world lock down.
	The U.S.
	ramps up its own response and China tries to avoid the consequences of its own evil government.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
	The Ben Shapiro Show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.
	Your data is your business protected at expressvpn.com.
	We're going to get to all the news in just one second.
	And as always, plenty of news there is.
	As always, just going to remind you, we are all in this together, even if we are apart.
	Don't worry.
	We're going to make it through this.
	There will be an end to this.
	We're going to talk about when that end might come, what the projections are for, how long this lasts, what the measures are that are going to be taken, how long those will last, because right now there's a lot of uncertainty out there, a lot of misinformation out there.
	We're going to get into it.
	We're going to break all of it down.
	But first, Let's talk about a simple fact.
	The markets are up and down and up and down and all around and up and down.
	The markets today are already smashing down through the 20,000 barrier, which of course is not a great shock because there's so much uncertainty in the economy right now.
	We don't know when these measures are going to be alleviated.
	We don't know how long people are going to be at home.
	We don't know how many millions of jobs are going to be lost throughout all of this.
	Now might be a good time to take some of your money that you have lying around the house and invest that in some gold.
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	Now it's down below $20,000.
	It's down 10% one day, then it's up 12%, and then it's down 15%.
	It's all over the place.
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	So, Let us begin with some new information on coronavirus.
	One of the reasons the market is up and down and all around is because we have no idea what's going on.
	Nobody knows anything.
	Okay, that is the theme of today's show.
	Nobody knows anything except that the Chinese government is going to have to be punished at some point for the evil they've inflicted on this planet and it is grave and it is ridiculous.
	We'll get to the Chinese virus.
	It is the Chinese virus.
	That doesn't mean it has anything to do with Chinese people.
	It doesn't have anything to do with racism.
	Or ethnicity, it has to do with an awful evil communist Chinese virus.
	Okay, the fact is this thing would not have been unleashed on the globe if it had not been for the malfeasance and evil action of the Chinese government, which has been a crap show since the revolution that Mao brought into place.
	Okay, this is just an evil government and the fact that we have not treated it as such is one of the reasons we are now seeing the results that we are seeing globally today.
	And we ought to be treating them as the global As the global threat that they are, and that means taking them a lot more serious than we have heretofore.
	When we are out of this thing, there need be consequences for the Chinese government, serious consequences for the Chinese government.
	We'll get to that a little bit later on in the show.
	But first, we'll bring you some of the sort of miasma of information that is floating around.
	So there's some good news and there's some bad news.
	And there are all sorts of different estimates as to the path, the trajectory that this coronavirus is going to take.
	Sharon Begley has an interesting piece today over at statnews.com talking about the death rates.
	Now, I had suggested a couple of weeks ago the death rates were gonna be lower for coronavirus than were being bandied about.
	The World Health Organization had originally suggested a 3.4% death rate for those inflicted with coronavirus.
	I said at the time, this is way too high.
	The Diamond Princess Cruise did not evidence that kind of death rate, even though you had 700 people in extraordinarily close quarters.
	It didn't evidence a 70% infection rate.
	It didn't evidence a 3.4% death rate.
	Okay, well now we are finding that even in Wuhan province, where this thing started, those are not the death rates.
	Sharon Begley writes, in a rare piece of good news about COVID-19, a team of infectious disease experts calculates that the fatality rate in people who have symptoms of the disease caused by the new coronavirus is about 1.4%, which is really high, right?
	I mean, that is a lot higher than, for example, the seasonal flu, which is about 0.1%.
	Although that estimate applies specifically to Wuhan, the Chinese city where the outbreak began, and is based on data from there, it offers a guide to the rest of the world where many countries might see even lower death rates.
	The new figure is significantly below earlier estimates of 2% or 3%, well below the death rate for China based on simply dividing deaths by cases, which yields almost 4%.
	It's still higher than the 0.1% death rate from seasonal flu, as I mentioned, but it does raise hopes that the worst consequence of the coronavirus will still remain uncommon.
	Now, cutting against that optimism, because no one was immune to the new virus, the majority of the population will be infected absent the quick arrival of vaccine or drastic public health interventions such as closing public places and canceling public events.
	Those same scientists conclude in a paper submitted to a journal, but not yet peer-reviewed.
	So, there have been these estimates floating around that anywhere from 40 to 70% of the population may eventually get the coronavirus, eventually being the key word there, because if that happens over the course of a couple of years, Well, then that is not actually a health emergency.
	It's just a bad situation.
	A health emergency is everybody gets that within the next two months, right?
	Then we are just swamped.
	That's when that bell curve moves over the line, and the line representing the amount of medical capacity that we as a society have.
	But if that is spaced out over the course of the next couple of years, then it just becomes a really, really horrible seasonal flu that takes a lot of people from us, but is not beyond our capacity to contain to a certain extent.
	The expectation that a majority of the population will become infected reflects a worst-case scenario about who encounters whom, something modelers call homogenous mixing.
	But even the more realistic assumption that not everyone mixes with everyone else means at least a quarter to a half of the population will very likely become infected absent social distancing measures or a vaccine, According to Joseph Wu and Cathy Leung of the University of Hong Kong, who are leaders in the modeling of infectious diseases.
	Now, as I say, there is some controversy over exactly how long this thing is going to last and what level of infection is going to take place.
	And also, this is leaving out the fact that treatments may in fact get better without even a vaccine.
	For example, there's an article today in EN24 News talking about hydroxychloroquine.
	which I believe is an antimalarial treatment, which is now starting to be used as a treatment for coronavirus.
	Early indications, according to EN24, is that the treatment with hydroxychloroquine would reduce the load, and the results are even more promising with hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin, an antibiotic effective against viruses.
	So you might see some new results from particular drugs that are brought to bear that could lower the chances of death or severe impact of the virus, which, of course, would lower the death rate and make it less dangerous.
	Meanwhile, there's an open debate as to how long this thing is going to last sort of in society generally, because while we are treating this virus as though it is going to just be with us basically forever, the hot zone of the virus or the hot period of the virus, it does have a rise and it does have a fall.
	Okay?
	Yesterday we had an expert from Johns Hopkins University on the radio show.
	It served in both the Trump and the Obama administrations and he said that he thinks the thing's gonna peter out by May because there is sort of a three-month period that we've seen Where the case numbers rise and then they tend to tail off.
	He says that these viruses tend to start off very hot and then they seem to cool down a little bit.
	So there are some alarmist reports today about how easy it is to transmit.
	That's true.
	It's one of the reasons why we're engaging in social distancing.
	It's one of the reasons why we are all staying home for the moment.
	We'll get to some different responses from different countries in just a second because it is sort of a fascinating social experiment to see how different countries are treating coronavirus and what measures they are taking.
	But, according to the New York Times, coronavirus can live for three days on some surfaces like plastic and steel, according to new research.
	It's one of the reasons why gyms have been shut down.
	Experts say the risk of consumers getting infected from touching those materials is still low, although they offered additional warnings about how long the virus survives in air, which may have important implications for medical workers.
	The new study, published Tuesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, also suggests that the virus disintegrates over the course of a day on cardboard, lessening the worries that deliveries will spread the virus during this period of staying and working from home.
	When the virus becomes suspended in droplets smaller than 5 micrometers, like aerosols, it can stay suspended for about half an hour before drifting down and settling on surfaces where it can linger for hours.
	The finding on aerosol is inconsistent with the World Health Organization's position that the virus is not transported by air.
	That would mean that it's a lot more easy to transmit if it's just hanging around in the air after somebody sneezes, for example.
	The virus lives longest on plastic and steel.
	It can survive for up to 72 hours, but the amount of viable virus decreases sharply over this time.
	It also does poorly on copper, surviving for about four hours.
	On cardboard, it can survive up to 24 hours, which suggests that packages that arrive in the mail should have only low levels of the virus unless the delivery person coughed or sneezed on it or handled it with contaminated hands, which is true in general.
	Unless the people handling any of this stuff are sick, the actual risk of getting infected is incredibly low.
	So, you know, there are people, I mean, I know somebody who's immunocompromised, and every time they have a package come in their house, they immediately wash it down with sort of a solution of diluted bleach.
	If you're really paranoid about this stuff, or if you have an underlying health condition, if you're elderly, that might be something to consider at this point.
	Now, with all of that said, there are wildly varying estimates on how durable this virus is gonna be over the course of time, which of course is the big question.
	The reason the market dropped today, and the reason the markets are gonna continue to drop, is because the market, excuse me, is trying to Don't worry.
	We disinfect everything here.
	People are far away from me.
	I'm alone in the studio, guys.
	When I cough, no one's getting dead.
	Okay, so, the... But when we talk about...
	When we talk about the path that this virus is taking, there are these widely variant estimates.
	So, for example, there's an Israeli Nobel laureate named Michael Levitt.
	He won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
	He's praising Israel.
	Israel has taken preventative measures.
	They've basically locked everybody in their house.
	He said most people are naturally immune to the disease.
	He said the infection rate in China is slowing down, so the end of the pandemic is near.
	He said that he's an American-British-Israeli biophysicist.
	He says that he crunched the numbers.
	And he said, he wrote to his friends in Hubei province.
	He said, when they answered us describing how complicated their situation was, I decided to take a deeper look at the numbers in the hope of reaching some conclusion.
	The rate of infection of the virus in the Hubei province increased by 30% each day, which is a scary statistic.
	He said, I'm not an influenza expert, but I can analyze numbers.
	That is exponential growth.
	Had the growth continued at that rate, the whole world would have become infected within 90 days.
	But as Levitt continued to process the numbers, the pattern changed.
	On February 1st, when he first looked at the stats, Hubei province had 1,800 new cases a day.
	By February 6th, the number had reached 4,700 new cases a day.
	On February 7th, something changed.
	He said the number of new infections started to drop linearly and did not stop.
	A week later, the same happened with the number of deaths.
	This dramatic change in the curve marked the median point and enabled better prediction of when the pandemic will end.
	Based on that, I concluded that the situation in all of China will improve within two weeks.
	And indeed, now there are very few new infection cases.
	As we'll see, maybe the Chinese government is just lying about all of that.
	Maybe there are new infection cases in China.
	But, by best available data, which is the data that was presented to Levitt, he says this thing will slow and stop within weeks.
	Levitt likened the trend to diminishing interest rates.
	He says if a person receives a 30% interest rate on their savings on day one, a 29% rate on day two, and so on, you understand that eventually you're not going to earn very much.
	Similarly, although new cases are being reported in China, they represent a fraction of those reported in the early stages.
	He said, even if the interest rate keeps dropping, you can still make money.
	The sum you invested doesn't lessen, it just grows more slowly.
	When we discuss diseases, it frightens people a lot because they keep hearing about new cases every day.
	But the fact that the infection rate is slowing down means the end of the pandemic is near.
	Levitt predicts that the virus will likely disappear from China basically entirely by the end of March.
	So he's not dismissive of the precautions.
	He says that you still have to keep the precautions because that is one of the things that is allowing time for this thing to burn out.
	He says that Italy's higher death rate than places like China or South Korea.
	He says that's due to the fact that elderly people make up a greater percentage of the population.
	Also, he says Italian culture is very warm.
	Italians have a very rich social life.
	This is true.
	Contrary to sort of common sense, the fact is that people who actually have richer social lives are more likely to get this thing.
	Okay, so if you were a shut-in, now is a great time to be a shut-in.
	Now's a great time to be a person who habitually washed their hands too much.
	Okay, the fact is that Italian culture does have a lot of cross-generational pollination.
	That's one of the reasons why young people are bringing the disease to their elderly grandparents.
	So that is one estimate.
	Then you have the estimate from Ezekiel, Emmanuel, Susan Ellenberg, and Michael Levy.
	We'll get to that in just one second because their estimate is very different and it's this sort of uncertainty that is leading to the vast amount of justified unease.
	We'll get to that in just one moment.
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	Okay, so one estimate basically says that in China this thing's gonna be alleviated by March.
	Considering it started in mid to late December and alleviated by March, what you'd expect in the United States is that this thing started in early March, late February.
	You'd expect that presumably March, April, May.
	That by May, which is exactly what this epidemiologist from Johns Hopkins told me yesterday on the show, That by May, this thing is going to start to let up.
	Ezekiel, Emmanuel, Susan Ellenberg, and Michael Levy, these are all various doctors.
	Emmanuel is an oncologist and medical ethicist.
	Ellenberg is a biostatistician.
	Dr. Levy is an epidemiologist at University of Pennsylvania.
	They have a piece titled, The Coronavirus is Here to Stay, So What Happens Next?
	And they say that there may be variant rounds of social distancing and business shutdowns and all the rest.
	By the way, worth noting, it is kind of weird to hear this sort of stuff from Ezekiel Emanuel, who wrote a piece in The Atlantic, what, five, six years ago during the Obama administration, talking about how he would like to die at age 80.
	The virus is killing mainly people who are above the age of 70.
	So suddenly, Ezekiel Emanuel is having second thoughts about the whole everyone above 80 should just die routine.
	In any case, this piece in The New York Times says, In the last few days, most Americans, even President Trump, have come to terms with the need for social distancing.
	Though they feel fine, they're staying home and developing new routines, killing time baking, binge watching, figuring out how to homeschool their kids.
	It took far too long for Americans to accept how serious coronavirus is.
	Now that we've finally taken the necessary measures in many places to close schools, offices, restaurants, and other businesses, people are asking how soon will it all be over?
	Two weeks?
	Four weeks?
	When can we go back to normal?
	They say, unfortunately, normal is a long way off.
	We need to be thinking in terms of months, not weeks.
	We need to stop picturing that ubiquitous flat in the curve chart and start imagining a roller coaster.
	They say social distancing works, which is true.
	They say as China, South Korea, and other countries have demonstrated, it's possible to slow the spread of the virus and limit how many people are infected at one time.
	This will keep hospitals from being overwhelmed with patients so that those who are sick can be treated competently and compassionately.
	And this is already apparently rearing its ugly head in New York City where there's a shortage of ICU beds and ventilators.
	Apparently there are messages going around last night from at least one person I'd heard of in a hospital who is suggesting the medical ethics boards were having to decide who to give a ventilator, a person who is elderly with cancer or a person who is young with coronavirus.
	No one knows for sure how long social distancing will have to last to reduce the spread to near zero.
	If South Korea and China are appropriate exemplars, we'll need to stay apart now for at least eight weeks and maybe more.
	China locked down Wuhan and other cities in Hubei province January 23rd.
	Today, provincial officials are reporting few or no cases of the virus.
	Just a few days ago, they closed the last of their 16 makeshift emergency hospitals.
	Restrictions are easing.
	Schools and offices are slowly opening.
	People are beginning to go out and see other people.
	That timeline, says Ezekiel Emanuel, suggests your kids are not going back to school April 1st, nor are you returning to the office or catching a movie anytime soon.
	Plan for social distancing at least until mid or late May.
	Be thankful if it eases off earlier.
	Now again, that's sort of what I suggested earlier, that we are talking about an eight-week period here of social distancing, an eight-week period where you're working from home as much as possible.
	When can we expect that Americans slowly emerge from their homes?
	Like much of the novel virus, say Ezekiel Emanuel, as well as these other doctors, we don't know for sure.
	A likely scenario is there will be a subsequent wave of the disease.
	That's what happened in Denver in the flu outbreak, the Spanish flu pandemic, and Toronto during the 2003 SARS outbreak.
	Over the next few months, South Korea, China, other countries will generate some relevant evidence to show how this might play out.
	They say the reality is that influenza and most cold viruses wane in the summer, but they do so in part because a lot of people catch them in the winter.
	Since we've never been infected with this coronavirus before, there's no acquired immunity, so we don't know that there will be a seasonal reprieve.
	Although it is true that there has been a seasonal reprieve in some of the more equatorial countries that are seeing the transmission of coronavirus.
	They say the irony of successful social distancing is that fewer will develop immunity, which means that social distancing 2.0, 3.0, maybe even 4.0 will likely have to occur.
	They say the next round of social distancing will be activated more rapidly because officials and the public will be more prepared.
	It should also be shorter because fewer people are going to be likely to be infected, but it will still disrupt people's lives and the economy will have canceled conferences and sporting events.
	People will not frequent restaurants and will not travel.
	The service industry will be severely curtailed.
	It's going to happen again and again.
	So I think this is probably true, but this does raise the question as to how long Americans are going to undergo the harshness of the of the current regime, which is basically everybody stay home and never come out of your houses again.
	I don't think Americans are going to live with that for indefinite periods of time.
	If you tell people that eight weeks is sort of the outer limit of that, which is sort of what Ezekiel Emanuel is saying, and then you say, and here's our plan beyond eight weeks.
	I think people will feel a lot more secure.
	The markets will feel a lot more secure.
	So we'll talk in just a second about exactly what that policy would look like.
	Internationally, everybody is locking down.
	I made the mistake yesterday of suggesting that Denmark was not locking down.
	They've actually taken some significant measures, particularly in the last week and a half.
	In order to lock down in the same way that other countries are locking down as well.
	Israel is now completely locking down.
	The government rolled out a new set of restrictions on the Israeli population Tuesday.
	They have 427 coronavirus patients in Israel.
	They've not yet had a death in Israel.
	Bibi Netanyahu, the Prime Minister, he said, we started today using digital technology that detects those who come in contact with coronavirus patients.
	We'll send those people into isolation.
	These will be large numbers.
	Isolation is not a recommendation.
	It is mandatory.
	We will enforce it without compromise.
	He committed to dramatically increasing the number of people tested for coronavirus to the largest number per capita in the world.
	He says he expects between 3,000 and 5,000 tests to be taken per day comparing Israel to South Korea.
	And this does bring up the policy that South Korea has actually followed.
	Because South Korea has had a different policy than a lot of these other countries.
	France is now in the middle of a complete lockdown.
	Emmanuel Macron, the president, called for citizens to restrict themselves from taking unnecessary trips outside their homes for at least two weeks.
	So everybody is sort of pursuing the lock everything down routine.
	That didn't actually happen in South Korea.
	The reason being, in South Korea, they had vast numbers of tests available.
	If we'd had vast numbers of tests available, it would have made an enormous, enormous difference.
	In just a second, I'm going to explain how the South Korean example worked and how it could work in the future, right?
	After we let this thing up in May, then the new model is going to have to be, obviously, we have to have more flexibility with our ICU beds, but maybe we can then apply the South Korean model because we'll have the resources, we'll have the tests available.
	We'll talk about what South Korea actually did.
	And how their economy has continued to actually operate in the middle of all this as opposed to completely shutting down the American economy, which is exactly what's going on right now, which is going to lead to some pretty dire consequences.
	Again, I think the American people are willing to shut down the economy temporarily.
	We are not willing to shut down the economy for 12 to 18 months.
	That is not something the United States is going to be able to recover from.
	At a certain point, we all become wards of the state.
	And at that point, it's going to be very difficult to reverse back into the most powerful economy in the history of the world.
	It's also going to be very difficult to regain a lot of the economic freedoms that we have traditionally relied upon.
	Entrepreneurship will hit the skids.
	We'll get to all that in just a little bit first.
	Let us talk about the fact that even if your business is now operating largely remotely, that does not alleviate your HR issues, okay?
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	Okay, so how does South Korea handle all of this?
	Well, according to an article from the American Institute of Economic Research, there's an article by Peter Earle over there talking about how South Korea took a different tack than a lot of other countries.
	He said, South Korea has seen a steady decrease in new coronavirus cases for the latter half of the last week.
	The country had the fourth most cases of coronavirus in the world.
	There were no geographic quarantines enforced by armed guards.
	Instead, the sole focus was on widespread testing and isolating the sick.
	After averaging over 500 new cases per day back to the last week of February, between Friday and Sunday, the daily totals numbered 438, 367, and 248, according to the Korea Center for Disease Control.
	How is it that without deploying the military or imposing widespread enforced quarantine, The spread of coronavirus in South Korea is apparently slowing.
	Actually, there's a better question.
	Why should the U.S.
	copy China rather than South Korea?
	The United States is deep in the throes of an election season at present, and so haughty invokings of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence are recurrent.
	Of course, talk is generally cheap, all the cheaper when coming from the mouths of politicians.
	South Korea...
	is operating in a freer way than China.
	South Korea is leveraging private property rights to thwart the spread of the virus.
	Building owners have been posting and enforcing no mask, no entry signs.
	Drive-through testing stations have been set up nationwide, through which individuals, after a 10-minute test, are notified within a few hours if they're infected.
	A voluntary self-diagnosis phone app was created in the early stages of the pandemic.
	Living and treatment centers were set up in a soft quarantine spirit.
	Mostly, South Koreans are acting based on their experience with the H1N1 pandemic in 2009.
	They're washing their hands frequently, making an effort not to touch their faces, wearing masks, and social distancing to the extent possible.
	The high level of personal technology and access in South Korea makes the latter most eminently practicable, given the ubiquity of video telecommunications and other such technologies.
	This columnist for AIER says it's true that certain aspects of South Korea's handling of the outbreak nevertheless infringes upon individual rights, in particular where privacy is concerned because they're using camera surveillance and tracking cell phone and banking activities of people who may have coronavirus, but that's a hell of a lot less restrictive than everybody go home and stay home forever.
	So the premise of the South Korean government approach, according to Vice Health Minister Kim Ganglip, was, quote, without harming the principle of a transparent and open society, we recommend a response system that blends voluntary public participation with creative applications of advanced technology.
	And South Korea has handled this without shutting down their economy in the same way that we are currently shutting down our economy.
	It also demonstrates the foolishness of all of the advice that you were getting not to wear a face mask early on.
	There's a difference between the medical-grade face masks that were in short supply and are needed by doctors and the face masks that you wear when you go to the hospital, you know, basically just a piece of cloth with some loops for your ears.
	That's not what we're talking about when we say the doctors need medical masks.
	Those are not the same types of masks.
	South Korea has been applying those masks in public for a very long time.
	The reason is not because it's going to prevent you from getting coronavirus, it's because it's going to prevent you from transmitting coronavirus, because the orifice is most likely to generate the germs on your nose and your mouth.
	Zeynep Tufekci is a professor of information science specializing in social effects of technology, has a piece at the New York Times saying exactly this today, saying why telling people they don't need masks backfired.
	As the pandemic rages on, there will be many difficult messages for the public, says this columnist.
	Unfortunately, the top-down conversation around masks has become a case study in how not to communicate with the public, especially now that traditional gatekeepers like media and health authorities have much less control.
	The message became counterproductive, may have encouraged even more hoarding, because it seemed as though authorities were shaping the message around managing scarcity, rather than confronting the reality of the situation.
	First, many health experts, including the Surgeon General, told the public simultaneously that masks weren't necessary for protecting the general public and that healthcare workers needed the dwindling supply.
	This contradiction obviously confused the ordinary listener.
	Why is it that healthcare workers need it, but I don't?
	Second, there were attempts to bolster the first message that ordinary people didn't need masks by telling people that masks, especially medical-grade respirator masks like the N95, needed proper fitting and that ordinary people without such fitting wouldn't benefit.
	Again, that is deeply counterproductive.
	Many people wash their hands wrong.
	We don't tell them not to bother washing their hands.
	And then, of course, masks work.
	Maybe not perfectly, and not all to the same degree, but they do provide some protection.
	Their use has always been advised as part of the standard response to being around infected people, especially for people who may be vulnerable.
	WHO officials wear masks during their news briefings.
	That was the reason I bought a few in early January.
	I'd been conducting research in Hong Kong, which has a lot of contact with mainland China, and expected to go back.
	I had studied, says this columnist, and taught about the sociology of pandemics and knew from the SARS experience in 2003 that health officials in many high-risk Asian countries had advised wearing masks.
	It's true the masks don't work perfectly, that they don't replace hand-washing and social distancing, that they work better if they fit properly.
	And surgical masks, which are the disposable type that I'm talking about, don't filter out small viral particles the way medical grade Masks do, but even surgical masks protect a bit more than not wearing masks at all.
	We know from flu research that mask wearing can help decrease transmission rates, along with frequent hand washing and social distancing.
	Now that we're facing a respirator mask shortage, the Federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is recommending that surgical masks are an acceptable alternative for healthcare workers, again, obviously, because some protection, even if imperfect, is better than none.
	Fourth, the WHO and CDC told the public to wear masks if they were sick.
	So again, there are all these conflicting messages.
	Here's the bottom line.
	Moving forward, after this thing alleviates and people go back to work, here's what we're gonna need.
	We're gonna need the widespread availability of testing so that you can get tested quickly and then you can isolate fast.
	We are going to need people to continue social distancing.
	We are going to need those who can telecommute and do telehealth to do that.
	We are going to need people to wear masks.
	That is going to be something that we probably are going to need.
	These sort of long-term policies are going to be useful.
	The South Korean strategy becomes viable when those resources are available.
	But the South Korean strategy was not viable and is not viable in the United States because, number one, people don't have the masks.
	Number two, we don't actually have the capacity at this point to give those widespread tests.
	But this is why the government policy needs to be generated right now toward making all this stuff available, right?
	We need more ICU beds.
	We need widespread testing.
	And then when we get back to regular life, the economy can continue functioning again.
	Okay, meanwhile, the United States government is taking new measures.
	The U.S.
	is planning to swiftly turn back people entering from Mexico illegally.
	According to the New York Times, the Trump administration plans to immediately turn back all asylum seekers and other foreigners attempting to enter the U.S.
	from Mexico illegally.
	Saying the nation cannot risk allowing the coronavirus to spread through detention facilities and border patrol agents, according to four administration officials.
	Those administration officials said ports of entry would remain open to American citizens, green card holders, and foreigners.
	With proper documentation, some foreigners would be blocked, including Europeans currently subject to earlier travel restrictions imposed by the administration.
	Points of entry will also be open to commercial traffic, but Border Patrol agents are going to immediately return anyone to Mexico who attempts to cross the southwestern border.
	By the way, we are also closing our borders to Canada, so stop calling this racist because it simply is not.
	Meanwhile, the United States has reported its 100th death.
	We are now up to, at current count, and again, this is just at the present time, we're now up to 115 deaths or so, somewhere in that neighborhood.
	In the United States, we saw a jump in New York last night, 16 deaths in New York last night.
	The Trump administration is also moving to enlist more agencies in a whole-of-government response to the virus.
	We'll get to that in just one second.
	First, let's be real about this.
	You're gonna be home for a while.
	Okay, so now would be a fantastic time to work on that degree you've always wanted.
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	ashford.edu slash ben.
	Okay, we're gonna get to more of the news.
	Plus, we have to get to what we're gonna do with the Chinese government.
	Okay, the Chinese government is responsible for this.
	Everybody who keeps saying, don't say Wuhan flu, don't say Kung flu, don't say Chinese virus, shut the hell up.
	I mean, seriously, it's ridiculous.
	It's ridiculous.
	The Chinese government is responsible for this.
	No one's talking about Chinese people.
	Nobody's talking about being racist against Chinese people.
	Stop with this absolute politically correct garbage.
	If you do not look at the Chinese government as the cause of all of this, it's because you're not looking closely enough or because you wish not to look at that.
	And you're too busy in your politically correct bizarre universe to actually look at the reality.
	We'll get to that in just a second.
	First, I hope you've had a chance to see some of our new content we started this week called All Access Live over at DailyWire.com.
	Jeremy Boring and I kicked off Monday evening.
	We talked movies, we talked a little bit of religion, and then Jeremy and Michael Knowles followed up last night.
	We're doing an episode the rest of the week, like every night this week at 8 p.m.
	Eastern, 5 p.m.
	Pacific.
	You know, it was actually pretty fun shooting All Access Live.
	It was a little more relaxed than our normal programming.
	We just sat around and shot the bleep.
	Well, we're all kind of stuck in isolation right now.
	It's really important that we actually come together as a community.
	I think these live streams with our audience help bring us together, even if it's through a computer, make you feel a little less lonely.
	It's less focused on bringing you news and information, more about just hanging out with you at the end of a long workday or a long day sitting in isolation waiting for this thing to end.
	This show is actually intended for all Access members, but because, like, right now, we all need a little bit of help, we accelerated the launch, and we opened it up to all of our Daily Wire members for the time being.
	So please let us know if you like the show, actually, and what you'd like to see more or less of.
	I know, you want less knolls.
	I get it already.
	But remember, we're going to get through this.
	We're going to be stronger as a nation, as a community, when we do.
	So if you're around at like 8 p.m.
	Eastern, 5 p.m.
	Pacific tonight, join us on All Access Live again over at dailywire.com and you can watch the live stream and join the chat.
	We are always trying to bring our community together and bring you new information.
	Now's a great time to join the club over at dailywire.com.
	We are the largest, fastest-growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.
	So more on the federal response...
	So the Trump administration is now starting to activate various branches of the federal government.
	The New York State government is pleading for help from the Army Corps of Engineers.
	to quickly build hospitals.
	Oregon's governor repeatedly pressed the Department of Health and Human Services for hundreds of thousands of respirators, gowns, gloves, face shields, goggles.
	President Trump is enlisting much of the government in what the White House had called for weeks a whole-of-government approach to the rampaging coronavirus.
	He says we're starting the process.
	Now, presumably, that should have started weeks ago, obviously.
	And yes, there are going to be heads that have to roll in the federal government over the slow response over all this.
	Yes, the lack of tests from January on is pretty much unforgivable.
	If South Korea could turn out these tests, "Why could not the United States government "the most powerful force in the history of the world?
	Why?
	Why is that not a reality?
	Why weren't the tests available?
	And those are serious questions that are going to have to be asked.
	We're going to have to ask why we weren't spending the last few weeks prepping the ICU beds that we all knew we were going to need.
	But at least the shift is happening.
	Apparently, an internal report from the DHS has concluded the pandemic will last 18 months or longer, could include multiple waves of illnesses.
	The virus will cause significant shortages for government, private sector, individual U.S.
	consumers, and coordination by the feds would be imperative, according to the document.
	A lot of these various agencies were not brought into play until the last couple of days.
	Hospital ships right now are at port.
	The Department of Veterans Affairs awaits requests for help.
	The Veterans Department has a surplus of beds in many of its 172 hospital centers, a robust number of special rooms for patients with breathing disorders, although If the media is pretending that those are going to be up to snuff in terms of the numbers we need, that is probably wrong.
	The sprawling system of emergency doctors and nurses ready to be deployed by the Department of Health and Human Services, the National Disaster Medical System, is also still waiting for orders, other than to staff locations where passengers offloaded from cruise ships are being quarantined.
	The Department of Defense, home to 1.3 million active duty troops, and a civilian and military infrastructure that has made planning for national emergencies almost an art form, has yet to be deployed to its fullest capacities.
	Again, all of this is incredibly fluid.
	All of this is incredibly fluid.
	Now, the New York Times suggests that this is the fault of the Trump administration.
	They point out that President Obama dispatched 3,000 American troops to Liberia to build hospitals and treatment centers to help fight Ebola.
	That's true.
	It's also a lot easier to figure out where exactly you're going to send your troops when all you have to do is send them to a foreign country and then ask the government there where to send them.
	Presumably, we're going to do the same thing here.
	The Pentagon opened a joint command operation at a hotel in Liberia's capital to coordinate the international effort.
	So they're trying to say that Obama did a great job with Ebola, whereas we're doing a crappy job with coronavirus.
	These are not the same thing at all.
	Okay, an outbreak in a foreign country that is a lot smaller than the United States, and where you don't have to try and figure out which citizens to protect and which ones not to protect, a lot less difficult than what the federal government is trying right now.
	Defense Secretary Mark Esper said on Tuesday, the Pentagon will make available to the Department of Health and Human Services up to 5 million N95 masks, which can be used to help protect health workers and vulnerable people against the virus.
	The first million are going to be available immediately.
	Now, why that wasn't done weeks ago is beyond me.
	The Pentagon is also making available 2,000 ventilators for hospitals, which is not putting a serious dent in what is needed at this point.
	But bottom line is that it is late, but it is happening.
	At least the federal government is doing what it can do at this point.
	Now, meanwhile, on the local level, Bill de Blasio is fighting with Andrew Cuomo.
	Bill de Blasio is saying maybe we need an entire shelter-in-place order.
	One of the things that we have to be careful of is letting the evidence lead us where we're supposed to go in terms of actual public action.
	Because San Francisco declared a shelter-in-place order, now every mayor in the United States basically has an incentive to double down on what is the most restrictive possible thing to do.
	And so we have to determine whether that is actually useful or whether it is not useful.
	There hasn't been much of a debate so far as to what's useful and what's not useful.
	Everybody just snaps to, okay, we got to do something and we got to do something significant.
	And I think that that's probably right in terms of instinct.
	But as time passes, the question is to whether you need to actually tell people that social distancing is not enough, that it's not enough to tell people not to go to restaurants, that we actually have to force people to stay in their homes for prolonged periods of time.
	How that lasts for eight weeks, honestly, like just on a realistic level, it's going to be very difficult to police all this.
	And I do have to note that the insanity of the fact that the New York City government right now is telling everybody that they may have to shelter in place while the Brooklyn District Attorney, Eric Gonzalez, attorney, Eric Gonzalez, is publicly announcing that his office will immediately stop prosecuting low-level nonviolent offenses and will consider freeing jailed suspects who are vulnerable to infection.
	I don't know how you simultaneously hold those positions.
	You're telling people you're going to prosecute them if they go open their restaurant, but if you decide to break into the restaurant and steal cash from the tiller, you won't be prosecuted.
	How is that not a perverse incentive?
	I mean, seriously, this is insane.
	How can you have local governments announcing that if you commit a crime, it's going to be fine?
	Like, at the very least, shut your face, dude.
	Even if you're not going to enforce it, you seriously want to say openly?
	I mean, what is this, the purge?
	You want to say openly to criminals?
	Guys, have at it.
	We're not going to prosecute anything.
	New York implemented decades ago the broken windows theory by James Q. Wilson, which suggested that policing of low-level crimes prevents the commission of larger-level crimes, and that is true.
	Social science statistics prove this.
	So I guess now New York, and apparently Philadelphia as well, they're pursuing a policy of go break the windows.
	Go break the windows, we won't prosecute you.
	What do they think that's going to do to crime levels?
	And by the way, do you really believe that young people across the country Many of whom are impoverished are simply going to sit at home without any sort of social life.
	They better come up with a better policy fast, is all I'm saying, because the policies that are being pursued by local governments are not workable.
	These are not workable in the long term.
	They may be workable for a period of time.
	Law-abiding people will follow them, but we are now cracking down on all the law-abiding people while telling all the non-law-abiding people that we're not going to crack down on them.
	I have no idea how that is possibly good policy.
	It makes no sense at all.
	It makes no sense at all.
	Again, I'm not saying that we shouldn't stay at home.
	I'm staying at home.
	Right?
	Everybody that, like seriously, like we're in LA.
	Everybody's at home.
	It's a zombie apocalypse out there.
	There's no one on the roads.
	And I think that in the short term, given the resources available, that is perfectly appropriate.
	But how can you at the same time tell people that the cops are not going to enforce the law?
	Are we insane here?
	Brooklyn D.A.
	VA spokesperson Orin Yaniv said, it's just a bunch of low-level offenses.
	Basically anything where there's no kind of violence and no requirement to see a judge.
	Really, the idea is just to decrease the number of people in the system.
	Are you insane?
	Like, what in the world?
	So apparently we're now just going to release criminals into the wild, and that's not gonna have any downside.
	Great stuff.
	Great, great stuff.
	Yeah, again, Philadelphia police are doing the same thing.
	They're stopping low-level arrests to prevent jail overcrowding.
	Nothing like incentivizing criminality to make everybody's life better in the midst of a pandemic.
	And meanwhile, there's all of this ridiculous controversy Over what we label this thing.
	President Trump suggested openly the other day that this is the Chinese virus and he was smacked for it.
	And President Trump was asked about this yesterday.
	He said, yeah, I'm going to continue to call it the Chinese virus because the Chinese government is responsible for all of this.
	China and others have criticized you for using the phrase Chinese virus.
	How do you feel about that?
	Are you going to continue using that phrase?
	Well, China was putting out information which was false, that our military gave this to them.
	That was false.
	And rather than having an argument, I said, I have to call it where it came from.
	It did come from China.
	So I think it's a very accurate term.
	But no, I didn't appreciate the fact that China was saying that our military gave it to them.
	Our military did not give it to anybody.
	Critics say using our phrase creates a stigma.
	No, I don't think so.
	No, I think saying that our military gave it to them creates a stigma.
	Correct, accurate, win for President Trump.
	This is absolutely correct.
	Okay, can we just be frank about this?
	The Chinese government is responsible for this.
	They're responsible for this at every level.
	The Chinese government actively sought to silence people who are talking about the coronavirus.
	They actively tried to arrest people.
	They forced them to recant true statements about coronavirus.
	Not only that, according to the UK, the Sunday Times, Chinese scientists destroyed proof of the virus in December.
	According to the Times of London, Chinese laboratories identified a mystery virus as a highly infectious new pathogen by late December last year.
	They were ordered to stop tests, destroy samples, and suppress the news, a Chinese media outlet has revealed.
	A regional health official in Wuhan, center of the outbreak, demanded the destruction of the lab samples that established the cause of unexplained viral pneumonia on January 1st.
	China did not acknowledge there was human-to-human transmission until more than three weeks later.
	The detailed revelations by Cakes and Global, a respected independent publication, provide the clearest evidence yet of the scale of the cover-up in the crucial early weeks when the opportunity was lost to control the outbreak.
	By the way, the WHO bought this hook, line, and sinker.
	The World Health Organization suggested in middle of January that coronavirus is not a threat because they had been informed of that by the Chinese government.
	The Chinese government is responsible for this.
	They are responsible for it from beginning to end.
	The Chinese government attempted actively to silence doctors, warning others about the disease, according to the Washington Post.
	As word of a mysterious virus mounted, Li Wenliang shared suspicions in a private chat with his fellow medical school graduates.
	The doctor said seven people seemed to have contracted SARS, the respiratory illness from China that was sent to two dozen countries and left hundreds dead in the early 2000s.
	He urged people to be careful.
	Li and seven other doctors were quickly summoned by Chinese authorities for propagating rumors about SARS-like cases in the area.
	The warnings were prescient.
	Soon, health officials worldwide would be scrambling to combat a novel virus with a striking genetic resemblance to SARS.
	As Jim Garrity says in National Review, Chinese authorities spent January denying it could spread between humans, something doctors had known was happening since late December.
	Now we know they were destroying the proof, and went ahead with a Chinese Lunar New Year banquet involving tens of thousands of families in Wuhan.
	Doctors say in Wuhan, people who had no connection to the Huanan market were among the first showing the symptoms.
	So the Chinese authorities understood human-to-human transition was happening right from the very outset.
	Even by the Chinese government's own accounts of events, President Xi Jinping knew about the disease for two weeks before making any public comments about it under fire.
	For its response to the coronavirus epidemic, according to the New York Times, China's authoritarian government appears to be pushing a new account of events that presents President Xi Jinping as taking early action to fight the outbreak that has convulsed the country.
	But in doing so, the authorities have acknowledged for the first time that Mr. Xi was aware of the epidemic and involved in the response nearly two weeks before he first spoke publicly about it and while people at the epicenter were still downplaying the dangers.
	According to the Wall Street Journal, the Chinese government let some 5 million people leave Wuhan without screening.
	Chinese medical authorities also banned staff from discussing the disease in public or via text or images.
	Eight days after this ban went in place, a nurse in one of these departments started to feel sick, was confirmed she was infected by coronavirus.
	By early March, three doctors at this particular hospital had died from the infection.
	Even today, Chinese citizens who criticize the government are disappeared.
	Okay, WeChat is currently banning Chinese Americans for talking about Hong Kong.
	I mean, this is insane.
	The Chinese government announced yesterday it's going to expel American journalists.
	According to Mark Tracy, Edward Wong, and Lara Jakes, in a sharp escalation of tensions between the two superpowers, China announced on Tuesday it would expel American journalists working for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post.
	It also demanded that those outlets, as well as The Voice of America and Time Magazine, provide the Chinese government with detailed information about their operations.
	The announcement was made by China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
	They are blaming it on America booting out Chinese propagandists who have been claiming that America's military was behind this whole thing.
	But in reality, is it possible that China is still covering this thing up?
	Of course, it's highly possible is that China is still covering this thing up.
	So I don't want to hear any of this crap from Stephen Colbert about how it's racist to call this the Chinese virus.
	It is the Chinese government virus.
	And furthermore, once this abates and once things start to go back to normal, The Trump administration should tell the Chinese government that the travel ban on Chinese citizens moving to and from the United States and on American citizens moving to and from China should continue until the Chinese authoritarian government shuts down these wet markets.
	The wet markets are these animal markets where people are eating civets, people are eating bats, people are eating snakes.
	This has now been responsible for swine flu, bird flu, SARS, H1N1 and this.
	Okay, so we have seen virus after virus after virus emanating from these wet markets in China and the Chinese authoritarian government, which will jail you or maybe kill you, depending on what you say about the government or what you say about coronavirus.
	They won't shut down these markets.
	How is it that the international community is willing to allow a global pandemic to take place on its watch and the entire world economy is shuttered to a screeching halt?
	I mean, it's unbelievable.
	The entire world economy is now stopped dead, like completely stopped dead.
	All because China would not shut down the practice of people eating frickin' bats at the local markets.
	This has been a problem for decades.
	Okay, this is nothing new.
	Going all the way back to the 1950s, there was an Asian flu, it was literally called the Asian flu, an Asian flu outbreak in the late 1950s, and it came from these animal markets.
	The Chinese government is an authoritarian government.
	At the very least, they should be outlawing these markets.
	They should be prosecuting people who are selling exotic animals for people to eat.
	And by the way, that's not cultural racism in any way.
	Don't eat the fricking bats, you idiot!
	I mean, seriously, how many lives would have been saved if the Chinese government had spent one ounce of its authoritarianism cracking down on perfectly illegal activity, or activity that ought to be illegal?
	Like eating the local wildlife.
	I mean, this is insane.
	The Trump administration, the rest of the world should be on board for this too, honestly.
	Like, can we all afford to do this once every four or five years?
	Because that's the future.
	The future is that once every four or five years, once every ten years, there will be another virus emanating from China, which has yet to shut down this stuff, and then has covered it up in authoritarian fashion, and they unleash it on an unsuspecting global community, and then all of the people in the media go, oh, it's so racist, it's so ethnically unpalatable to say this is the Chinese virus.
	It has nothing to do with the skin color of the people or the location or the ethnicity of the people who are saying this stuff.
	It has to do with the Chinese Communist authoritarian government, which has now unleashed for the one millionth time a virus on the rest of the world because they will not shut down what is obviously disgusting activity.
	I'm sorry, it is disgusting to eat a civet.
	Okay, it's gross.
	Beyond being gross.
	I don't care, you can do whatever is gross to your liking, okay?
	I'm a libertarian on this stuff.
	Except if they're externalities.
	And it turns out, you eating a civet, you eating a pangolin, has some pretty significant externalities.
	You think we're gonna lose $10 trillion in this economy because of this routine?
	Seriously.
	There better be some consequences to the Chinese government after all of this.
	I mean, the stock market again is down below $20,000.
	This is...
	This is wild.
	And our chief focus is Stephen Colbert sitting by his fireside in his nicely apportioned mansion, talking about how terrible it is to label this the Chinese virus.
	Give me a freaking break.
	Steve Mnuchin, the Treasury Secretary, is warning that this virus could yield a 20% jobless rate if we don't spend trillions of dollars.
	Is that worth not punishing the Chinese government and forcing them to shut down these markets at the very least?
	I mean, forget... I'm not even saying that we ought to force the Chinese government to openness.
	I'm not even saying that we ought to root for the overthrow of the Chinese communist regime, which, by the way, we should.
	I mean, it's an evil, evil regime.
	Forget about what they do with the civets.
	This is a regime that has overseen the forced sterilization of presumably tens of millions of women over the course of the last 30 years.
	I mean, it's an evil government.
	It is.
	It is an evil government, just as evil as the Soviet Union, just nobody talks about it.
	I mean, literally is evil.
	The Great Leap Forward killed far more people than the Holodomor, the murder of millions in Ukraine by the Stalin regime.
	This is an evil regime, and we've been treating it with kid gloves for years.
	We should not be.
	But put that aside, even if you're just talking about shutting down these ridiculous eating the exotic animals markets, we're going to go from a 3.5 unemployment rate in this country to a 20% unemployment rate in this country because China refused to crack down on people eating wild animals?
	Seriously?
	Here is Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin.
	Apparently, he says that the jobless rate could hit 20% according to CNBC.
	I'm told that in those meetings that the Treasury Secretary said that if Congress does not pass this package that unemployment could touch 20%.
	Trying to highlight the dire consequences that could await this country if Congress does not actually move forward this package of unprecedented proportions that would deliver that money directly to Americans.
	Okay, so the measures that are currently being taken by the federal government, by the way, include things like keeping that commercial paper window open, which is a good thing.
	They're talking about floating cash to people so that they can make rent for the next couple of months.
	There's been some talk, Andrew Ross Sorkin has a piece in the New York Times today suggesting that effectively the government floats zero interest loans for the next five years repayable to businesses that need them over the next few months.
	And again, all of this I think should be off the table if it were not the government that were imposing the lockdown in the first place.
	The government is imposing the lockdown in the first place.
	That means that these businesses, normally the answer is like in 2007-2008, businesses that were poorly run and made bad decisions.
	And then they're hit by a downturning economy that is not the result of an external shock or an internal shock directed by government.
	Those businesses don't deserve a bailout.
	But if you're talking about the federal government forcibly shutting down businesses, that is a different story.
	So even that distinguishes between businesses.
	Like the airline business.
	There's a good case we made.
	The airlines should not actually be bailed out.
	That we should be bailing out their employees because the airlines have been using their money for stock buybacks because the airlines Should have banked up enough cash to at least survive, even if it means furloughing their employees for the foreseeable future, and then we should compensate the employees.
	But if you're talking about keeping business afloat for a couple of months, if you're talking about making sure that basically we freeze the economy in place for a couple of months, as long as there's an end date to that, then all possibilities are sort of on the table.
	But we should examine the consequences of those policies.
	The danger, of course, to open-ended loans like that is a lot of people who are never going to repay those loans.
	There is some winnowing that is going to happen in this economy.
	This is going to change the way people live in particularly significant ways.
	Even when this ends, the movie industry is going to take a hit.
	The entertainment industry is going to take a hit.
	Do you really want the government floating loans to industries that are going to take a permanent hit over the course of time because our way of life just radically changed?
	That is unclear how people earn back their money at this point.
	Perhaps the best way to do it, Sorkin suggests, that basically you should go to the banks, and then you should say to the banks, we're gonna back whatever loans you choose to give.
	And that may be the best way to do it, because the banks actually have an actuarial interest in only giving out loans that will eventually be repaid, as opposed to the federal government, which has an interest in handing out free cash, helicopter cash, to everybody.
	Okay, so, the bottom line here, Is that we don't know where any of this is going.
	And you are seeing local restaurants shut down.
	You're seeing people hurt.
	We're going to have to figure out in pretty short order what the trajectory of this thing is.
	Greatest Hope, by May, this thing starts to wane.
	By May, people start going back to, if not normal, something slightly resembling normal.
	It's gonna change our way of life, particularly in small spaces.
	I think that the concert industry is gonna have a rough time.
	I think a lot of local restaurants are gonna have a rough time.
	Everything may translate over to in-room dining, you know, delivery.
	It may transfer over to bigger restaurants with more space so that people can be spaced out a little bit more.
	But with all of that said, we are going to have to figure out what the second step here is, because it is just not sustainable for everybody to be locked in their homes for 6, 12, 18 months.
	That's not sustainable.
	The economy cannot take it.
	Because at a certain point, who's going to buy the debt?
	Who's going to buy the bonds?
	At a certain point, the federal government's going to have to just start inflating the currency, at which point everybody who has any money is worth nothing.
	So it's very, it's very, you know, bottom line is that the federal government has to take measures to keep the economy running for the moment, but that should be temporary.
	And we should have a plan for what happens next.
	Okay.
	Meanwhile, in other news, Joe Biden cleaned up last night.
	So there were some primaries yesterday.
	Joe Biden won primaries in Florida, Illinois, and Arizona.
	He did it easily.
	The percentages for him were extraordinarily high.
	That is not a big shock.
	The turnout was actually on pace to surpass the 2016 primary in places like Arizona, which is kind of shocking given the fact that pretty much everybody is supposed to be in lockdown.
	In Maricopa County, which included Phoenix, more than 40,000 people voted in person on Tuesday compared to 35,000 there in 2016.
	Much of Sanders' support has come from young voters.
	That didn't play out in Arizona.
	It didn't play out in Florida.
	He just got skunked in Florida.
	Both Florida and Arizona surpassing the turnout.
	Honestly, it was irresponsible to hold these primaries.
	If you are seriously concerned about the coronavirus, it's irresponsible to have huge numbers of people in line.
	Biden, of course, One Illinois with big, big numbers.
	So in a time of panic, Joe Biden, who's, as I've said, mashed potatoes and chicken soup.
	That guy is is probably the I mean, this is helping Biden versus Bernie.
	Obviously, Bernie is a destabilizing force in a time that requires stability.
	It just demonstrates how crazy Bernie is that yesterday Bernie suggested that any business receiving aid at all should receive, the government should own a part of it.
	This is nuts, by the way.
	It is the government that is causing the economic downturn right now.
	It is.
	It's the government that is telling everybody to go home.
	I'm not saying they're wrong to do it.
	I'm just saying that for the government to say to everybody, stay home, we're going to destroy your business.
	Also, We're going to give you loans and also we're going to own your business is totally wild.
	That's wild.
	I mean, that's just a thug tactic by the government.
	That's basically nationalization by a backdoor and Bernie Sanders is all for it.
	Here's Bernie being a nut yesterday.
	We must make sure that companies that get bailouts are required to sell equity to the government and put workers on their board of directors.
	This is crazy.
	The government is going to force companies into bankruptcy, which is what is happening right now, and then is going to bail them out for a share of the company?
	I mean, that's crazy towns.
	Because it is the government that is telling people to stay home right now.
	Because there are a lot of companies where if they were not told to stay home right now, people would be at work.
	People would continue to operate.
	Because the businesses would have to make the very tough decision between How much exposure can we take as a business in terms of people being out there and also laying off every employee we have?
	I mean, there are hotel chains that laid off tens of thousands of people yesterday.
	The unemployment rate on this thing is going to skyrocket.
	So adding the additional threat, which is if you take a loan from the federal, who's going to take a loan from the federal government under those circumstances?
	Seriously, you think that if my business is starting to have a rough time, that I am then going to take a loan from the federal government?
	I'd rather go bankrupt, seriously, than take a loan from the federal government that lets the federal government run my business.
	How's that not a first?
	This is why this guy is losing all the primaries.
	He should be losing all the primaries.
	Joe Biden yesterday appealed to Bernie Sanders supporters.
	Senator Sanders and I may disagree on tactics, but we share a common vision.
	some 20% of Democrats are Sanders supporters.
	Most of a huge number of them, like 40% of those people say they won't vote for Joe Biden because they don't think he's radical enough, which by the way, is kind of crazy because Joe Biden is very much on the left.
	Here is Joe Biden trying to appeal to Bernie supporters.
	Senator Sanders and I may disagree on tactics, but we share a common vision for the need to provide affordable healthcare for all Americans, reduce income inequity that has risen so drastically to tackling the existential threat of our time, climate change.
	Senator Sanders and his supporters have brought a remarkable passion and tenacity to all of these issues.
	Together they have shifted the fundamental conversation in this country.
	So let me say, especially to the young voters who have been inspired by Senator Sanders, I hear you.
	I know what's at stake.
	I know what we have to do.
	Our goal as a campaign, and my goal as a candidate for president, is to unify this party, and then to unify the nation.
	Yeah, good luck with that.
	The Bernie supporters are going to have no part of this.
	By the way, Joe Biden did finish the speech on a very odd note.
	He appeared not to know whether the camera was on or off, and so he just stood there awkwardly as his wife came to usher him off the stage, which is always a great look.
	Here's what that looked like.
	Thank you all for listening.
	He's just standing there.
	Now he's just standing there.
	And standing there.
	And there is Dr. Joe.
	And then she's like, he's like, oh, there you are.
	Thanks.
	And then there's just more awkwardness.
	OK.
	Like somebody at some point should have turned off the camera.
	That's not Biden's fault, totally.
	But he's just standing there.
	What's going on?
	Like seriously?
	Speaking of all of this, Bernie Sanders still has not dropped out.
	He's saying he's reconsidering his campaign.
	That, of course, is the appropriate action at this time.
	Claire McCaskill, former senator from Missouri, she says, yeah, it is long past time for Bernie Sanders to drop out.
	I think the conversation is going to quickly turn to how and when does Bernie Sanders unite the Democratic Party.
	I predict that just like in Michigan and Mississippi and Missouri, we're going to see every county in Florida go for Joe Biden.
	Every county in Arizona go for Joe Biden.
	And every county in Illinois go for Joe Biden.
	He's going to end up netting a big number of delegates after tonight.
	And so I think it is time.
	And well, this is the end of Bernie Sanders's campaign, but it is not the end of Bernie Sanders's impact, because what will Joe Biden have to give the Sanders supporters in order to get them back in the tent?
	A lot of those people are not going to show up to vote.
	They are young, they are motivated, and they are really, really far on the left.
	So how many of them are going to stick around for Joe Biden?
	Joe is going to have to pick somebody.
	Who is somewhat radical for his VP or he's going to risk losing all of the Sanders supporters.
	Honestly, if Biden were smart, what he would probably do at this point is even though he hates Sanders and thinks that he's a radical kook, which he is, Biden should probably offer Sanders some sort of administration post.
	And that's probably something that he should do if he wants to unify the party.
	But if Biden hopes that the Sanders people are just going to come around, that is not going to happen.
	Alrighty, we'll be back here later today with two additional hours of content, all your latest updates.
	We'll be back here tomorrow with all of your latest updates.
	Stick with us over at Daily Wire.
	We have all sorts of great content to get you through this unbelievably trying time.
	We're all here, guys.
	We're in it together, apart.
	So we will use the internet to connect with one another.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	Shapiro, this is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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