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March 20, 2020 - The Ben Shapiro Show
56:07
Lockdown Mayhem | Ep. 976
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As coronavirus numbers spike across America, California announces an across-the-board shelter-in-place order, the Republican Congress pursues a bizarre bailout policy, and senators fall under scrutiny for some rather conveniently timed stock sales.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
Shapiro, this is the Ben Shapiro Show.
All righty, so as you can tell, we are now broadcasting from the Shapiro Hostel.
I mean, it is, it is, what a beautiful, beautiful place.
We now have a shelter-in-order place here in California.
That means that people are working from home as much as possible, and so we have transferred this show to the bunker.
Today's show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.
My savvy fans secure their internet.
Join them at expressvpn.com.
Slash Ben, we are here to provide you with all of your coronavirus updates, Where everything stands, as we say, we'll get to the California lockdown in just a second.
It is a statewide lockdown.
It is enforceable by law, so people presumably will be pulled over and asked where they are going if they're not going to the grocery store, or if they're not going to the pharmacy, then presumably they'll be given some sort of ticket.
It is hard to imagine exactly how that's enforced on 40 million citizens across the state of California.
We'll get to that in just a second.
First, we begin with your updated numbers as of this morning.
Right now, there are 14,250 diagnosed cases of coronavirus across America.
Suffice to say, those numbers are way too low.
The reason they are way too low is because tests are still not available.
It takes a while for the tests to finally come back, anywhere from 24 to 72 hours.
And lack of testing is making everybody's life miserable.
It is.
This stuff matters.
Why?
Well, if you're single, And let's say that you have the symptoms for COVID-19.
And they say, okay, go home, go home, just go home.
The answer is, okay, I could do that.
But let's say that you're a member of a family.
Let's say that you have, as I do, three children.
And let's say that maybe you think that somebody has the symptoms for COVID-19 in your house.
And let's say that you have childcare helping out because you have a newborn, for example.
And let's say that you want to go get a test, and it is impossible to get a test.
Well, it's easy for them to say, shelter in place, and don't go out of the house, and don't have any childcare.
But what if you still have to work?
And what if you have to keep your children separated from one another?
And what if now your childcare is basically out the window because you don't know if it's COVID-19 or whether it's the flu?
If it's just the flu, Then you can still have your parents over.
If it's the flu, you can still have your nanny over.
But if it's not, then everybody is out, and suddenly you're on your own.
Okay, well, that would be my situation if somebody here came down with the symptoms.
Those situations are happening all over the United States.
People having an inability, like do you go to work?
Do you not go to work?
Do you stay home?
How exactly do you separate off members of your family?
How about what if your parents want to visit?
How do you deal with all of this?
The bottom line is lack of testing means tremendous lack of clarity, and that has incredible ripple effects across the entire system.
Okay, so all of this is being undertaken.
Presumably.
As I've mentioned 1,000 times before, presumably all of this is being undertaken so that we can flatten the curve.
And so I'm going to show you this chart one more time.
I'm going to draw it by hand.
Okay, here is the chart that we are supposedly pursuing right now.
Okay, this... Okay, so... Here is the supposed curve.
of cases.
The high curve is the curve of supposed cases in the possibility that we don't do anything to flatten the curve.
Everybody just goes out and they do what they want to do.
The line is medical capacity.
So that would be the beds, that'd be the tests, that'd be the ventilators, that'd be the ICU beds, right?
All the things that you possibly, the masks, right?
That'd be the medical capacity.
And then this flattened curve is supposedly what is going to happen if we stay home and if we all lock down and if we all involve ourselves in social distancing, right?
This is sort of the been presented to you by the media as well as by the Trump administration.
So across the board, this is the chart that is being used.
The problem is that there are two questions about this chart that people have yet to answer.
Question number one, is the line actually here or is the line down here?
Because if the line of medical capacity is not actually over that shallow curve, if, as it turns out, you could flatten the curve and the medical capacity line is still all the way down here at the dotted line, it ain't going to matter.
It ain't gonna matter.
You can flatten the curve and just as many people are gonna die.
And so you will have shut down the economy to no effect, which is why what I've been saying is the entire purpose of what we are doing right now is to raise the line from this dotted line to this top line, is to raise medical capacity.
So what exactly are the plans to do that, guys?
And floating hospital ships ain't gonna do it.
Adding a thousand beds by floating a Navy ship off the coast isn't going to cover it.
Adding a few thousand ventilators is not going to cover it.
If what we are being told is true, that this thing is super transmissible and super deadly, and all of that is true, we need a radical escalation in the number of beds.
Well, those are the sorts of estimates that the government should be giving us right now.
Have you heard anything from the federal government or from the state governments in terms of their prospectus in terms of increasing capacity?
You've heard some numbers floating around.
You've heard that there are more masks floating around, but you're not seeing that on the ground.
You have heard that there are more ventilators floating around, but you are not actually seeing that in the hospitals, so far as I am aware.
You've heard that more ICU beds are being built, but so far I've yet to see any evidence that massive new numbers of ICU beds are being built.
So if we are not increasing this dotted line to this top line, it will not matter whether or not you flatten the curve.
Okay, then there is the second problem.
The second problem is that, as you see, this chart conveniently ends at the right side of this piece of paper.
For you, the right side of this piece of paper.
The chart conveniently ends there.
What if, however, this chart does not end there?
What I mean by that is, let's say that you release the lockdown procedures.
And so now we are going to draw a version of this chart that has a longer timeline.
So you have the original curve, you have the line, and then you have the flattened curve, and then everybody is let out.
what if the chart instead looks like this?
Okay, so, in this chart, for those who cannot see, you still have that same big spike.
It rises above the medical capacity.
Then you have the chart that we've been shown, which typically is said to end somewhere around here, right, where my pen is, right?
This is where the chart always ends, when you see it in the media, and when you see it in the media, and when you see it from the White House, right?
The chart always ends at the pen.
If there's going to be a lower curve, it's going to somehow be below the level of medical capacity, and therefore, everybody is going to live.
What happens if that's not what happens?
What I mean by this is that what happens if, in fact, you let everybody out of confinement and instead of everything petering out the way it did on chart number one, right on the right side of this chart, it peters out at the very end.
Everybody lives along.
Happiness abounds.
Everything is great.
Prince Charming goes home with Snow White.
Everything's fantastic.
What if instead of that, you end up with everybody comes out of confinement and boom, secondary spike, which is exactly what you are currently seeing in Singapore.
You're starting to see it in Hong Kong.
You're starting to see it in Taiwan.
What if when you release the lockdown measures it turns out people go out and infect each other anyway?
And so you end up with a secondary spike that actually is close to as high as the first spike except there's still not herd immunity and you've not really raised your medical capacity.
So what that means is that what we really need to be looking at is how do we raise our medical capacity Seriously, that is the big question.
If we do not have a plan.
medical capacity up from what is the current, even if you think current is sustainable, to the upper dotted line.
So question for the government, what is your plan?
What is your plan?
And if you don't have a plan, why are we doing any of this?
Seriously, that is the big question.
If we do not have a plan, I said this yesterday, I am fine with locking things down so long as there is a plan to raise the level of medical capacity, so long as there is a plan for applying treatment, so long as we know that when we are let out of confinement, that we are actually going to live in a world in which if you come down with COVID-19, you don't end up in a non-ICU bed that we are actually going to live in a world in which if You end up dying on your couch, right?
As long as that is the case, as long as they are increasing capacity, then we can take a two-week break.
Yes, it'll be brutal.
Yes, it will be terrible.
But, and it can't be interminable, right?
We can't do this for a month.
We can't do this for two months.
That's not a thing that can happen.
But the key right now is we are not hearing anything, like word one, from anyone in the government about how they plan.
What do those numbers look like?
We keep hearing estimates, top-level estimates.
A million point one die if we let everybody out of confinement.
Okay, do you have a plan for 500,000 ICU beds?
Like, what exactly is your plan here?
By the way, that's the one factor that the government supposedly can control.
The government can't actually control the rate of transmission.
The government can do that for a temporary period of time, but people are going to leave their houses.
People are going to go back to work.
It's all fun and games until you lose your job.
Because as much as the government says they're going to float these small businesses loans and all of this, small businesses cannot survive simply paying employees to be sick without any stream of income and knowing that there's going to be a recovery on the other side of this.
Because the government doesn't just The economy doesn't just snap back in place immediately upon the end of this thing.
People are going to have to go out again.
All those restaurants that have been shut down, you think their clientele is going to come back day one?
Or do you think that people are more likely to order takeout for another year before a vaccine is developed?
All of these entertainment areas where people are getting together in crowds, do you think people are going to go to MLB ballgames?
They're going to go to the NCAA?
Do you think that people are going to go out into major crowds?
Like Disneyland will take a hit for two years following this, minimum.
Right.
Do you think that all of that revenue is going to simply reappear or are companies going to have to lay people off because of all this?
So you can say you're going to fill everybody's pocket with 500 bucks or a thousand bucks, but guess what?
That's going to pay for like a month.
Like one month.
And if you extend it for two months, maybe two months.
And so with this government lockdown comes the possibility, and this is what freedom-minded Americans should be thinking about too, with that possibility comes the possibility of permanent, huge-scale government in our lives, not going away.
Because if the government causes the crisis, and the government becomes the solution to the crisis, and the crisis does not abate, then the government just becomes a permanent feature of our life, and the economy doesn't go back to normal.
Now, again, all of this is an argument worth having, If, and only if, there is a plan to save lives.
But if the plan to save lives does not kick in, if all that's happening here is the government marking time until they let us all out of confinement, we infect each other anyway, and all the old people die, then what exactly are we doing here?
So how about some clarity?
The only clarity we've seen so far is the government demonstrating that it can control our lives.
Well, we knew that already.
We've seen no clarity on how the government plans to actually lower the death rates.
Okay, yes, again, we can flatten that curve, but there are two real problems with the flatten-the-curve scenario.
One is, if our medical capacity is actually not where the chart says it is, it is all the way down here, if our medical capacity is way lower than they say it is, then people are still going to die, and all we've done is wreck the economy to no avail.
Or, possibility number two, there's a secondary spike, which is what most doctors are saying there's going to be in the fall anyway.
In which case, if you have not raised capacity by then, then we're screwed anyway, right?
And all you've done is shut down the world economy to achieve pretty much absolutely nothing.
Okay, so what does that mean?
That means that we need plans from the government.
How are you going to maximize the ICU beds?
How are you going to maximize the masks?
How are you going to maximize the ventilators?
What are you going to do to bring this to an end?
If you have no plan to end it, then you delaying things and marking time and buying time is not buying time to any effect.
Right?
Then you're in the situation that we were.
Yes, President Trump shut down travel from China.
That was a good move.
I am very happy that President Trump shut down travel from China.
That was designed to buy us what?
A month or two?
And in that month or two, how'd we do?
Did we increase the number of ICU beds?
No.
Did we increase the number of ventilators?
No.
Did we increase the amount of testing?
No.
So, what good was it?
It was some good.
It slowed it.
But the slowing of it is only good if you don't end up with the spike that we are now attempting to forestall.
We're going to get to more of this in just one second.
We're going to talk some worst case scenarios, some best case scenarios.
We're going to talk about the government shutting down the entire economy and whether that is sustainable or not.
Plus, we're going to get to at least several senators involved in what looks like insider trading.
On the back, I mean, just horrible, horrible stuff.
You want to destroy faith in capitalism and faith in government at the same time?
This is pretty much how you do it.
We'll get to that in just one second.
First, you know, right now would be a great time to change some of your habits, right?
You're at home anyway.
You're trying to live out this economy.
Now would be an excellent time to change how it is that you work, how it is that you live, and how do you live more healthy, right?
Right?
You're worried about your health right now?
Because this disease is coming for people with pre-existing conditions?
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Okay, so what are the best case scenarios and the worst case scenarios here?
So Nicholas Kristof, believe it or not, has a pretty good column at the New York Times talking about this.
Best case scenario is the possibility that the virus mutates and actually dies out.
Dr. Larry Brilliant, I hope aptly named.
An epidemiologist who as a young doctor was part of the fight to eradicate smallpox explained that only in movies do viruses seem to become worse over time.
SARS and MERS both petered out.
That is possible here.
COVID-19 will not survive as my hopes, said Dr. Charles Prober, a professor at Stanford Medical School.
China is reporting not a single new case of domestic transmission.
Now there's serious doubts about whether China is lying or not.
If ever in doubt, China is lying.
China lied to the WHO and the WHO believed them.
This is why when you hear prescriptions from the WHO or their takes on life, the WHO, you should really take that with a major grain of salt.
With that said, according to Nicholas Kristof, Singapore would be the best case scenario where everything is sort of shut down for a while and then you go back to a more open society.
Tom Inglesby, expert on pandemics at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health said the fact that Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea and China and to some extent Japan have all flattened their curves despite having the initial onslaught of cases should give us some hope we can sort out what they're doing well and emulate it.
Washington state seems to have been stabilizing.
The weather may also help us because some respiratory viruses decline in summer from a combination of higher temperatures and people not being huddled together.
So it's possible that northern hemisphere nations enjoy a summer break before a second wave in the fall.
Okay, that is the second wave is what I'm worried about.
And I think most epidemiologists are worried about is what happens when you release people from confinement.
Even if this thing goes away during the summer, if it comes back with a vengeance during the fall, it can be super damaging.
The Spanish influenza, which by the way, you know how ridiculous it is in our political world?
Somebody went on Wikipedia and just changed it to the 1918 flu because they wanted to forestall Trump's argument that you can say Spanish flu so you can say Chinese virus.
Anyway.
The goal would be that maybe this thing dies out, it loses sort of its fire and its flair.
Also, the death rates, I've been saying this for weeks and I've been criticized for it, the death rates that were being put out there by the WHO were just not real.
In South Korea and in China, outside Hubei province, about 0.8% of those known to be infected died.
That rate was 0.6% on a cruise ship.
I talked about all of this weeks ago.
That's not to suggest the virus isn't dangerous.
It's very dangerous.
It's significantly more dangerous than the flu.
It is to suggest that people who are suggesting that 4% of the people who get it are going to die, that was not true.
About four out of five people known to have had the virus had only mild symptoms.
Even among those older than 90 in Italy, 78% survived.
Two-thirds of those who died in Italy had pre-existing medical conditions and were elderly, and 99% had pre-existing conditions.
Dr. Tara Smith, epidemiologist at Kent State, said, I think this can work.
She said it will take eight weeks of social distancing to have a chance to slow the virus.
Success will depend on people changing behaviors and on hospitals not being overrun.
And that's what I've been saying about increasing that medical capacity.
Now, there's the worst case scenario.
Dr. Neil Ferguson, a British epidemiologist, he produced a sophisticated model that showed a worst case of 2.2 million deaths in the United States.
His best case scenario, according to Nicholas Kristof, is 1.1 million deaths, which is obviously frightening as all hell.
The hope that the U.S.
can emulate Singapore or South Korea could be a leap because South Korea took the epidemic really seriously.
They have tremendously effective testing.
It's very widespread.
We are still, as I mentioned, way behind in testing, so far behind that you end up with situations like Peggy Noonan.
So Peggy Noonan from the Wall Street Journal was sick with two weeks, 101 fever, coughs, and chills, and she had to lie in order to get a COVID test.
Because right now the CDC still has restrictions that suggest you can only get a COVID test even if you are in the most risky age demographic and you have all the symptoms.
You can only get a COVID test if number one, you have been traveling to China or number two, you know somebody who has been diagnosed with coronavirus.
Which of course is ridiculous since we've now had community transmission in the United States for weeks on end.
Which demonstrates the dramatic lack of testing.
And that is the fault, as we will talk about, of the CDC.
And at the highest level of the Trump administration, because in the end, the buck does stop with the president.
That doesn't mean the president isn't doing the right things now to fix it.
He is.
But it does mean that those two months where the CDC was blowing it, heads need to roll over there.
Nicholas Kristof says that there is an interactive model of the virus that suggests that up to 366,000 ICU beds might be needed in the U.S.
for coronavirus patients at one time, which is more than 10 times the number available.
There's a Harvard study that has said the same.
How quickly can we roll those things out?
That is the big question.
And we've heard no, no estimates as to how fast all of that is going to be rolled out.
And that does raise the question of how long are we going to have to do this?
How long exactly is this going to last?
And as I say, you know, even this is a suggestion that there won't be a massive second wave that takes out an enormous number of people.
The fact is that in China, which is now claiming they've tamped this thing down, there are serious questions about whether they are lying about tamping it down in the first place.
In California, the governor has now announced that we are in a state of lockdown.
Gavin Newsom on Thursday night ordered 40 million residents to stay home except for essential trips, extending similar restrictions statewide barrier counties have previously enacted.
One of the serious questions about this, particularly, is number one, whether it's effective.
Number two, whether it is designed to achieve the goals that they say it's designed to achieve.
Meaning, how can you lock people down this long?
And the answer is, it's going to be very, very difficult to lock people down this long.
The stricter the lockdown, the less time it can last.
It's one thing to tell people, as I said yesterday about diets.
It's one thing to tell people, for the foreseeable future, no cookies.
It's another thing to tell people, for the foreseeable future, no food.
That's just not something that people are going to be able to outlast for a very long time.
Here's Gavin Newsom, our Kendall of a governor, announcing that it's time to shelter in place in the state of California.
Number of days ago, there were six Bay Area counties that led with stay-at-home orders.
Now, as I speak, some 21.3 million Californians reside in a community, in a city and or county that have similar orders.
A state as large as ours, a nation-state, is many parts, but at the end of the day, we're one body.
There's a mutuality, and there's a recognition of our interdependence that requires of this moment that we direct a statewide order for people to stay at home.
That directive goes into force and effect this evening, and we were confident, we are confident, that the people of the state of California will abide by it.
Okay, so, we will see how long people abide by it, because you cannot tell people interminably to stay in their homes again, especially as the economy dies, and these jobs do not come back.
It's very easy for the government to say, we're going to freeze everything in place, none of these jobs will die.
That is just not true.
These are major systemic changes taking place throughout our economy, and they have significant, significant ramifications.
Newsom said, this is not a permanent state, it's a moment in time.
Okay, well, then we need to know how long the moment's gonna last, or what your estimate of the moment is going to be.
I was talking to panicked friends last night who have businesses in the state of California, and now those businesses simply will not run because nobody can go into the office.
And this order, by the way, from Newsom is supposed to last until April 19th.
Okay, a full month.
How long do you think this is actually going to last?
We're now in the Star Wars scenario.
As Princess Leia says, the more you tighten your grip, Vader, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.
This is where we are.
The more the government tightens its grip, the more there's going to be pushback against all of that, particularly as these losses mount.
We're hearing.
That we may lose this week over 2 million jobs in the American economy.
We are hearing estimates that the economy may contract up to 20% in Q2.
One-fifth of the American economy, poof, disappears at the behest of the American government.
So as they say, you want to make the case that we ought to do that?
I need to hear a very strong case as to how this is going to prevent deaths.
It is not enough to say that we're doing it to prevent deaths.
I want to see the plan for preventing the deaths.
I want to know how many beds you're creating, how many ventilators you're creating.
I want to know how you plan to stop the slow of this virus when we all go back outside after a month and when half of us don't have jobs.
Really, I mean, and by the way, all of the Republican relief efforts or Democratic relief efforts are not going to fix this problem.
They're not.
The best you can do at this point is provide floating loans to the banks to not call in their bridge loans to businesses.
Back the commercial paper window, for example.
But at a certain point, people are not going to buy American bonds.
And number two, what makes everybody think there's going to be a V-shaped recovery?
The longer these businesses are out, the less a chance there is that these businesses ever go back in.
If you spent your life savings to purchase a rib joint, And now you've been running that rib joint for 10 years, and the government just shut it down, and shut down every restaurant across the country, effectively.
Do you think that's coming back anytime soon, and that $1,000 a month check is going to suffice?
It is not.
And by the way, economics is real life.
When people say, well, you're choosing the economy over real life, no.
Economics is real life.
It is people's jobs.
It is people's livelihoods.
It is how people live.
It is the suicidality rate.
It is the sense of community.
This is not to argue that we should be weighing the economy against human life.
This is arguing that we should always take the tack that is most likely to preserve human life, and that would also include human quality of life.
This is not an argument we should let everybody out right now.
I've not made that argument anywhere in here.
Instead, the argument I'm making is, if you are going to do the most restrictive thing any American government has ever done in the history of the United States to the American people, right?
We're not in wartime here, right?
There's a virus.
If you're going to do this unbelievably restrictive thing, you better damn well have a plan for how we come out of this and that it saved lives.
Because if you just destroyed 20% of the American economy and sent the unemployment rate up to 15 or 20% and you saved zero lives in the process, Or, there's a net loss of life because it turns out that poor people are more likely to get involved in the opioid epidemic, and people who have just lost their jobs are more likely to feel despair, and families are more likely to break apart, and all of this.
And so you're going to put the net loss of life after all of this?
Then people are going to be asking some serious questions about whether this was in fact a smart move, or whether this was not in fact a smart move.
So you better damn well have a plan to increase medical capacity above all of the possible curves.
Because if you don't, then Americans are not going to stand by this.
They're just not going to stand by this.
And we're going to get to more of all of this in just one second.
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Okay, so as I say, I am skeptical as to the capacity of the government to actually do the things necessary to raise the line.
So prove me wrong, government.
Prove to me that you can fix this problem.
The government failed.
At ensuring that people could get the test.
And as I say, that's having real-world ramifications right now.
If you can't get a coronavirus test, and they're telling you to shelter in place, your life just got appreciably worse.
Appreciably worse.
Because you don't even know whether you can transmit this to other people.
And that may be, as I say, a lot easier if you're single and living alone.
But let's say that you're single and you're living with roommates.
What are your roommates supposed to do?
That's a lot of people in the United States.
What are you supposed to do for groceries?
You're supposed to not go out?
I mean, like, you need to go to the pharmacy.
So now you have to have a friend go to the pharmacy.
But we've also been told that germs pass so easily that if I hand you a plastic bag, maybe it's living on the plastic bag.
Like, if no one can test, then no one knows who the hell's a carrier.
Okay, and that is exactly why you have these social distancing measures put in place by the government.
But the only way to alleviate that would be widespread testing in the mode of South Korea.
As I've been saying for a week now, the goal here is to move from the Chinese model, lock everything down, to the South Korean model.
And even that South Korean model is going to assume that there's no second wave, which may or may not be true.
Hey, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that when cases of the new coronavirus began emerging several weeks ago in California, Washington State, and other pockets of the country, U.S.
public health officials worried this might be the big one, according to emails and interviews.
The testing program they rolled out to combat it was a small one.
Limited testing has blinded Americans to the scale of the outbreak so far, impeding the nation's ability to fight the virus through isolating the sick and their contacts.
And that is why you're seeing these massive numbers rack up.
We should actually be encouraged by the fact that massive numbers are racking up, because that means that testing actually is taking place.
As I say, In the last week alone, in the last couple of days, we've seen a doubling of the number of diagnosed cases in the United States, and that is simply because of the number of tests taking place, not because a bunch of people just got the disease.
But as I say, the government policy that is currently being pursued is not well calibrated, at least in the absence of information as to what exactly they plan to do.
I mean, a good sign of this is that the Trump administration is now asking states to suppress specific unemployment claim data.
The Trump administration is now apparently asking state labor officials to delay releasing the precise number of unemployment claims they're fielding, an indication of how uneasy policymakers are about further roiling a stock market already plunging in response to the coronavirus outbreak.
Okay, if you're asking people to hide information and you're the federal government, that means things are really bad, like a lot worse than people are telling you.
This is not a minor shock to the economy.
This is the biggest shock to the economy we have ever seen.
Okay, including the Great Depression, because the Great Depression was an inflation-caused, on the one hand, or liquidity-crunch-caused problem.
It was not an external caused problem by a giant pandemic virus that has not been alleviated in any way.
And it was not the government forcibly shutting down every business in the United States.
It is never a good sign when the Department of Labor is telling people not to report unemployment statistics.
That should scare the living hell out of everyone.
And as far as the plans to alleviate this crisis, I'm sorry, but spending a trillion dollars this month and a trillion dollars next month and a trillion dollars the month after that is not going to be a solution.
And certainly what is not going to be a solution is making these programs permanent over time.
Let me take a quick example.
So apparently the bill that President Trump signed into law this week that was designed to get immediate relief to people included a paid sick leave provision.
According to the HR specialist that I have talked to, that paid sick leave provision not only mandates that businesses have to pay 14 days of paid sick leave when they have no money on hand because they have no income on hand, it also mandates that if you have a sick family member and you say that you can't come into work, that you are supposed to, you basically have maternity leave, 12 weeks of 60% salary from your company.
How many companies do you think are going to abide by that?
And what happens if the company just says, listen, I'm not going to do any of that.
I'm just going to fire you.
Why do you think unemployment rates are skyrocketing?
Why do you think companies preemptively fired everyone before Trump signed that bill or went into effect?
Okay, the government action here to mandate that private business cover the losses incurred by the government and increased by the government is insane.
It's why this isn't a bailout, what the government is doing right now.
This is the government paying you back for what the government is taking away from you, but the government is not capable of paying you back for what it's taking away from you, because it's not just taking away from you the next month of business.
It may be taking away from you the capacity for your business to even operate at all after a month is over, because we don't know what the hell is going on beyond this.
So Senate Majority Leader McConnell released a massive economic stimulus bill on Thursday to fight coronavirus's fallout.
And the suggestion is direct cash payments to many Americans.
The problem is it's means-tested based on your 2018 income, which makes no sense whatsoever.
Because guess what?
Your 2018 income has nothing to do with what you made this year.
Also, by the way, let's say that you made $200,000 in 2018, when the economy was a hell of a lot stronger.
And let's say that today your business just went bankrupt.
So, you made $200,000 in 2018, so you do not get any money from the government, but now your business is bankrupt, and so you are bankrupt, and so you have no money.
Why are we means-testing based on 2018 income?
Even means-testing based on today's income is probably a mistake, given the fact that you have bills.
The means-testing, by the way, kicks out at like $100,000.
Those people have bills, too?
They still have mortgages to pay, so the government solution is, okay, well, we'll freeze the mortgages.
We'll freeze the evictions.
For how long are you going to do that?
And when that business is no longer there, do you think that the evictions, when they are unfrozen, are going to take stock of the fact that your business no longer exists?
Senator Lindsey Graham is among several GOP senators voicing concern or outright opposition to the idea of direct payments, even as McConnell unveiled the trillion-dollar stimulus plan that would be the starting point for negotiations with Democrats.
McConnell called for the talks to begin today.
A number of economists have predicted the U.S.
economy is plunging into recession.
The unemployment rate could soar because Americans are staying home out of fear of catching the virus.
The centerpiece of the Senate GOP plan would be hundreds of billions of dollars sent to Americans in the form of checks as a way to flood the country with money in an effort to blunt the dramatic pullback of spending.
That ain't gonna work.
People are still at home.
Okay, if you're freezing the mortgages or if you are freezing the evictions, the best thing that you can do right now is float actual no-interest loans to small businesses via the banks that are already providing those loans.
That is the best thing that you can do right now because the biggest problem here is banks calling in loans on small businesses that are operating on a day-to-day basis.
These small checks are simply, like, are they going to help some people?
Sure.
But one of the problems here is that one of the other factors in this legislation, apparently, is that if you haven't paid federal income tax, then you also don't receive a check back.
Okay, that's a lot of poor people, gang.
That's a lot of people who may not be receiving the money.
The size of the checks would diminish for those earning more than $75,000 and phase out completely for those earning more than $99,000.
The poorest families would see smaller benefits.
The minimum would be set at $600.
Yeah, good luck in not breaking the economy based on this.
The vast majority of middle class people would receive a cash payment.
The percentage doing so falls dramatically toward the bottom of the income spectrum.
And none of this makes any sense.
The democratic clans make even less sense because they are looking for permanent plans that would basically turn an enormous swath of human beings into wards of the state even after this crisis ends.
This is one of the problems.
Every crisis amounts to a dramatic growth in American government involvement in the economy.
If you're talking about the biggest crisis in the history of the American economy, presumably that would also, according to Democrats, mean the most American government economic involvement in history, and they're trying to make it permanent.
House Speaker Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Schumer have slammed the stimulus proposal.
They said it tilted too much toward helping business, even though the vast majority of this is directed at direct cash payments to individuals.
Pelosi and Schumer said, we're beginning to review Senator McConnell's proposal, and on first reading, it's not pro-worker.
It puts corporations way ahead of workers.
By the way, if those corporations go under, who is around to pay people their salaries when this thing ends?
It's the jobs disappearing that is the problem.
Yes, the money disappearing for the next two months is a major problem.
The jobs disappearing is a forever problem.
If those businesses go under, who exactly is going to hire the workers?
This is how you get to Bernie Sanders' federal jobs guarantee.
And the government made this happen all by simply declaring that the economy was shut down.
Now again, you want to say it's temporary?
You want to say you got a plan to fix this thing?
Then show me how it's temporary and the plan to fix this thing is actually going to be effectuated.
Otherwise, we seriously need to be considering what the measures we are taking here are.
The Wall Street Journal editorial board has a good piece on this today, titled, Rethinking the Coronavirus Shutdown.
They say financial markets paused their slide on Thursday, but no one should think this rolling economic calamity is over.
If this government-in-order shutdown continues for much more than another week or two, the human cost of job losses and bankruptcies will exceed what most Americans imagine.
This will not be popular in some quarters, but federal and state officials need to start adjusting their antivirus strategy now to avoid an economic recession that will dwarf the harm from 2008-2009.
The vast social distancing project of the last 10 days or so has been necessary and has done much good.
Warnings about large gatherings of more than 10 people and limiting access to nursing homes will save lives.
The public has received a crucial education in hygiene and disease prevention.
Even young people may get the message.
With any luck, the behavior change will reduce coronavirus spread so that we're not overwhelmed.
But the costs of the national shutdown are growing by the hour, and we don't mean federal spending.
We mean a tsunami of economic destruction that will cause tens of millions to lose their jobs as commerce and production simply cease.
Many large companies can withstand a few weeks without revenue, but that isn't true of millions of small and mid-sized firms.
Even cash-rich businesses operate on thin margins and can bleed through reserves in a month.
100% true.
If you're a profitable business, that means that you had enough to pay your workers this month, and then you have a little bit left over.
You have a multiple of your entire company budget lying in a bank somewhere.
That's not the way this works.
First, they'll lay off employees, and then out of necessity, they'll shut down.
Another month like this week, the layoffs will be measured in millions of people.
The deadweight loss in production will be profound, says the Wall Street Journal, and take years to rebuild.
In a normal recession, the U.S.
loses about 5% of national output over the course of a year or two.
In this case, we may lose that much, or twice as much, this month alone.
Wall Street economist Ed Hyman on Thursday adjusted his estimate for the second quarter to an annual rate loss in GDP minus 20%.
That is the entire economy of the United States losing one-fifth of its production.
If GDP seems abstract, consider the human cost.
Think about the entrepreneur who has invested his life in the Memphis ribs joint, I mentioned this earlier, only to see his customers vanish in a week.
Or the retail chain with 30 stores that employs hundreds but sees no sales and has to shut its doors.
Or the recent graduate with 20 grand in student loan debt who finds herself laid off from her first job.
Maybe she can live at home, but what if mom and dad don't have a job?
Or, alternatively, what if she is 20 and her parents are 65?
Some of the media who don't understand American business say that China managed a comparable shock.
Yeah, the difference is that China is a communist country.
They don't care if a bunch of people are out of work or die.
If they cared about that, they wouldn't be a communist country.
The politicians in Washington, says the journal, are telling Americans, as they always do, they're riding to the rescue by writing checks to individuals.
But there's no amount of money that can make up for losses in the magnitude we are facing if this extends for several more weeks.
After the first trillion this month, are we going to spend another trillion in April and another in June?
And you can see this in the bond yields.
Who the hell is going to buy this stuff?
Who the hell is going to buy any of this stuff?
By the way, the market is off again today.
The market immediately, upon opening, dropped something like 500 points.
The market continues to drop fairly dramatically, and that is because nobody feels secure here.
Nobody is going to buy up debt they feel is never going to be repaid.
By the time the Treasury Small Business Lending Program runs through the bureaucratic hoops, complete with ordering owners they can't lay off anyone as a price for getting the loan, which of course is not going to be a thing.
Millions of businesses will be bankrupt.
Tens of millions will be jobless.
That's of course true.
Because you're not even allowed to lay anybody off in the knowledge that the next couple of years are going to be super rough.
So are you going to take that loan only to not be able to pay anyone anyway and go bankrupt two months from now?
Perhaps we'll be lucky, says the Wall Street Journal, the human and capitalist genius for innovation.
We'll produce a vaccine faster than expected, or at least treatments that reduce COVID-19 symptoms.
Barring that, our leaders in our society will very soon need to shift their virus-fighting strategy to something sustainable.
Dr. Fauci has explained this severe lockdown policy is lasting 14 days in its initial term.
The national guidance would then be reconsidered, depending on the spread of the disease.
That should be the moment to offer new guidance on what might be called Phase 2 of the coronavirus pandemic campaign.
And that will surely include strict measures to isolate and protect the most vulnerable, our elderly, those with underlying medical problems.
There shouldn't be a debate over how many lives to sacrifice against how many lost jobs we can tolerate.
Substantial social distancing, other measures will have to continue in some form for some time, but no society can safeguard public health for long at the cost of the entire economy's health.
Even America's resources to fight a viral plague aren't limitless and they'll become more limited by the day when no one has a job.
When no one is able to go out of the house.
Meanwhile, the White House is trying to float 50 and 25-year bonds to finance the stimulus packages.
Who the hell is gonna buy that?
Like seriously, why would you buy a 50-year bond?
Because either you believe that the economy is going to rise, in which case you wouldn't buy a 50-year bond, you'd buy stock, or you believe the economy is going to decline, in which case, why in the living hell would you trust the American government to pay you back 50 years from now?
I can't trust the American government to pay me back 5 minutes from now!
Forget 50 years from now.
The bond yields, again, are up.
Bond yields move in inverse proportion to demand.
When demand for bonds is down, the yields go up.
The bond yields are up.
People don't want to buy bonds.
They don't trust the government right now.
Now speaking of lack of trust in government, you want to talk about dramatically undermining and continuing to undermine trust in government?
This story from the Daily Beast is devastating.
Senator Kelly Loeffler apparently dumped millions in stock after a coronavirus briefing.
She's the second senator who got rid of her holdings right as the stock market went bad.
It turns out there are four such senators who got rid of their stocks as the stock market went bad.
Now some of these, I want to be accurate in the reporting here.
People are listing, for example, Senator Dianne Feinstein among the senators who got rid of stock.
The pattern of her selling stock does not appear to be the same as some of the more egregious apparent abuses of the system.
Feinstein serves as a ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and her husband sold between $1.5 million and $6 million in stock in California biotech company Allogene Therapeutics between January 31st and February 18th, according to the New York Times.
Feinstein apparently was not directly involved in the sale.
Her assets are in a blind trust, according to her spokesperson.
She has no involvement in her husband's financial decisions.
Reports identified three other senators, James Inhofe, Kelly Loeffler of Georgia, and Richard Burr of North Carolina, as people who are selling vast amounts of stock.
Feinstein's doesn't appear to match the pattern simply because she didn't actually make a lot of money on the stock sale.
As opposed to, and the same thing is true of Inhofe, Loeffler and Richard Burr are a bit of a different story.
Burr apparently, who's the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, used more than 30 transactions to dump between $630,000 and $1.72 million on February 13th, according to ProPublica.
That report said the transactions involved a significant percentage of the senator's holdings and took place about a week before the impact of the virus outbreak sent stock prices plunging to the point where gains made during President Trump's term in office were largely erased.
A Burr spokesperson said, Senator Burr filed a financial disclosure form for personal transactions made several weeks before the U.S.
financial markets showed signs of volatility due to the growing coronavirus outbreak.
As the situation continues to evolve daily, he's been deeply concerned by the steep and sudden toll this pandemic is taking on our economy.
On Friday, the Senator tweeted an updated statement saying he relied only on public news reports to guide his decision on the sale.
He's asking for a Senate Ethics Committee review of his actions.
Burr was an author of the Pandemic and All Hazards Preparedness Act, a law that helps determine the federal response to situations like coronavirus outbreak.
Burr's office would not comment on what kind of information Burr received about coronavirus prior to his stock sales.
Apparently, Burr made ominous comments about coronavirus behind closed doors last month.
He said at a February 27th meeting of business leaders in Washington, quote, There's one thing I can tell you about this.
It's much more aggressive in its transmission than anything we've seen in recent history.
It's probably more akin to the 1918 pandemic.
So supposedly, Richard Burr was getting inside information, because he's a member of the Intelligence Committee, about the extent of the pandemic.
He was telling people about it in particular speeches.
He was not speaking super publicly about it, and he was dumping his stock at insane rates.
He was not the only one.
We'll get to more of this in just one second.
First, if you haven't had a chance to see some of the new content we started this week called All Access Live, you should head over to dailywire.com and you should check it out.
Jeremy Boring and I kicked off Monday evening.
Jeremy and Michael Molls followed up on Tuesday night.
Matt Walsh and Andrew Klavan did live streams the last two nights.
I am planning another stream tonight, exigent circumstances notwithstanding.
We'll continue all of next week at 8 p.m.
Eastern and 5 p.m.
Pacific.
If you're wondering what All Access Live is about, it's a lot more relaxed than our normal programming.
Basically, we're just hanging out with you because we understand this is crisis time.
It is very difficult for everybody.
Now we're all locked indoors, basically.
So, let's hang out together.
Let's have a good time.
These are live streams with our audience.
They help bring us together, even if it's just through a computer.
The show is intended for our All Access members.
During this national emergency and time of isolation, we've opened it up to all our members, and in doing so, accelerated the launch.
So, please let us know what you think of it.
If you're around at 8 p.m.
Eastern, 5 p.m.
Pacific tonight, join us on All Access Live over at dailywire.com.
Also, Sunday Special is back.
It is back, and better than ever.
This Sunday, I have the great pleasure of sitting down with Hollywood mogul Jason Blum, who's made some of my favorite movies, including Whiplash.
He's also producer of the horror series, Paranormal Activity and The Purge.
We discussed his latest movie, The Hunt, which is now available video on demand.
A thrill with some unexpected political commentary.
That's this Sunday, March 22nd.
Hollywood created a certain way information is consumed.
One of the reasons President Trump was elected was because the way that we consume information has been changed by the media industry across Hollywood and New York.
So don't miss it.
We are the largest, fastest-growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.
Now, meanwhile, according to the Daily Beast, it's not just Richard Burr who's in hot water over allegations of insider trading.
It is also Senator Kelly Loeffler of Georgia.
Apparently, she sold off seven figures worth of stock holdings in the days and weeks after a private all-senators meeting on the novel coronavirus that subsequently hammered U.S.
equities.
Lafleur reported the first sale of stock jointly owned by her and her husband on January 24th, the very same day her committee, the Senate Health Committee, hosted a private all-senators briefing from administration officials including CDC Director and Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases on Coronavirus.
She tweeted, appreciate today's briefing from the president's top health officials on the novel coronavirus outbreak.
The first transaction was the sale of stock in the company Resideo Technologies, valued between $50,000 and $100,000.
The company's stock has fallen by half since then.
It was the first of 29 stock transactions Loeffler and her husband made through mid-February, all but two of which were sales.
One of Loeffler's two purchases was stock worth between $100,000 and $250,000 in Citrix, a technology company that offers teleworking software and which has seen a small bump in its stock price since Loeffler bought in as a result of coronavirus-induced market turmoil.
Loffler's office did not respond to a request for comment from the Daily Beast on the transactions and whether they are prompted or informed by information shared at that late January briefing.
It's illegal for members of Congress to trade on non-public information gleaned through their official duties.
That's the reason, presumably, why Richard Burr is saying, yeah, I was just trading based on public reports.
And the question is, is that true or is that not?
And how do you prove that it's not true if it is not true?
Late Thursday night, she offered a statement.
She tweeted, this is a ridiculous and baseless attack.
I do not make investment decisions for my portfolio.
Investment decisions are made by multiple third party advisors without my or my husband's knowledge or involvement.
As confirmed in the periodic transaction report to Senate Ethics, I was informed of these purchases and sales on February 16th, 2020, three weeks after they were made.
Now, one of the big problems here is that that statement does not say that she was not communicating with her husband or with her investment advisors.
Like, I don't actually handle my own investments either.
But if I went to my investment advisor and said, guys, I have some pretty good information that this coronavirus thing is going to be an absolute bleep show and the economy is probably going to tank.
Do with that what you will.
And then three weeks later, they were like, oh yeah, by the way, we got rid of all your stock that week.
That's still insider trading.
Okay, that is still a violation of law.
So we're gonna have to find out what exactly the communications chains were here.
At the very least, it looks very suspicious.
In the week after her spate of stock trades, Loeffler sought to downplay the public health and financial threats posed by coronavirus.
She tweeted on February 28th, Democrats have dangerously and intentionally misled the American people on coronavirus readiness.
Here's the truth, Donald Trump and his administration are doing a great job working to keep Americans healthy and safe.
And she tweeted on March 10th, concerned about coronavirus.
Remember this, the consumer is strong, the economy is strong, jobs are growing, which puts us in the best economic position to tackle COVID-19 and keep Americans safe.
Here's the bottom line.
Anybody in Congress.
who is using insider information to profit off of coronavirus should not only be ousted from their job, impeached if they are guilty of this.
Again, everyone should have the opportunity to provide the evidence.
There should be Senate ethics investigations on every senator who involved in this.
That does include Senator Feinstein, even if she appears to be more innocent than some of these other transactions, which facially appear to be pretty corrupt.
Everybody should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
Okay, and nothing undermines faith in both the private market and in government, like the sort of crony garbage that these allegations involve.
The sort of crony capitalism that is involved in senators trading on private information, which by the way, the author Peter Schweitzer has been writing about for a very long time.
That sort of activity undermines not only faith in government, but in private markets.
That is what that does.
It's hard to think of a scandal more geared to undermine public trust than a scandal like this, particularly at this time.
So, Tucker Carlson last night said that Senator Burr should resign.
Here's what I say.
Senator Burr should have that ethics committee check him out.
You know, we have to have due process in this country.
We do have to have people provide their side of the story.
And if it turns out that he can provide no evidence, On his behalf and that there is evidence on the other side that he was calling up his stockbrokers or that he was in or that he was talking openly with his financial people about the implications of coronavirus while publicly downplaying it and selling stock at the same time.
Not only should he be impeached, not only should he be thrown out of the Senate, he should get whatever the law can give to him in terms of a prison sentence.
The same thing holds true of lawful or it holds true for anybody.
If guilty, if guilty, the allegations on their own are devastating.
I mean, really, really damaging.
So this is all of this stuff.
There's no good news today.
I wish I could bring you good news.
The only good news today is that the testing does appear to be ramping up generally across the United States.
We can hope that the government is actually taking measures that are designed to alleviate the problem in the near term.
But if we are looking at the leviathan growth of government, because here's the problem, the longer this thing lasts, the more damage is done, the more damage is done, the more permanent damage is done, the more permanent damage is done, the more permanent government programs are going to be seen as the solution.
If you throw 20 million Americans out of work.
Unemployment benefits are going to be made permanent.
I mean, they just will.
If you throw 20 million Americans out of work, there will be... The Bernie Sanders agenda starts to look a lot more popular after the government forcibly destroys the economy.
When the economy is booming, it's easy to say to people who want to nationalize large swaths of industry, guys, you really want to destroy the economy?
When the economy is already destroyed, even if government did it in the first place, it becomes a lot easier sell to replace the private economy with something resembling a command and control economy.
So got to be very careful.
All this stuff must be temporary.
And that means the shutdown must be temporary.
And that means the government better get its ass in gear.
Because if this all happened, if we shut this whole thing down, To no avail?
To not increase our capacity?
To not lower the death rate?
Then not only has this been the biggest cluster F in the history of American economics, it has been a meticulous attempt by incompetent people to destroy the fundamentals of the most powerful economy on the face of the planet.
And that is devastating.
Again, I'll go along with this program.
I think everyone should go along with this program.
For a period of time, but not without assurances that the government is doing what it's supposed to do.
We're all doing what we're supposed to do.
I'm doing this from my house, right?
I'm doing this show from my house.
We are all doing what we are supposed to do.
We are all social distancing.
We're all staying at home.
We're all staying six feet away from each other.
We're all doing it.
I am asking one simple thing, for the government to do its effing job.
And if the government does not do its job, Then not only is this thing going to get worse, and I'm not talking about the virus, it is going to result in a completely different America.
And that was not the promise.
The government forcibly shutting down the economy to take control of the economy would be the worst thing to happen in the history of American government outside of slavery and Jim Crow and overt rights abuses like that.
Watch carefully.
The government better come up with a plan.
They better come up with a damn plan.
Because staying in place until further notice is not a plan.
It is just not a plan.
Alrighty, time for a quick thing that I hate here.
So.
Let us point out that everybody in the media is still focused on President Trump calling this the Chinese virus.
Like, stop.
Just stop.
It's so unbelievably stupid.
Seriously.
If you think the American people are sitting around and just angry at President Trump for calling it the Chinese virus when the Chinese government released this virus, they did.
They let 5 million people from Wuhan walk around knowing full well there was human-to-human transmission.
Like, come on.
So yesterday, somebody took a picture of the president's speech that he was giving from the podium, and he had crossed out the word coronavirus and he had written above it Chinese.
Oh, it shows how evil it is.
Oh, it shows how it was meticulous and how he's doing it deliberately.
Well, yeah, no bleep, he's doing it deliberately.
Of course he's doing it deliberately.
And guess what?
He should be doing it deliberately.
The fact is, everyone needs to know that Chinese communism resulted in the widespread of this virus.
That is what happened here.
Every step of the way from allowing these wet markets to continue being open for years on end after the release of SARS, after multiple diseases have been unleashed from these wet markets.
Not only that, they then censored anybody who talked about this thing.
They shut down internet usage.
They tried to prosecute people who talked about it openly.
They lied to the WHO.
They're probably lying right now.
When they say that the economy is back on track in China and that this thing is not spreading in China, They certainly could be lying.
I have a very hard time believing that the Chinese government that was lying about this thing back in December is suddenly telling the blatant overt truth about it.
They've locked it down, man.
They've really locked it down.
And if you believe that, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.
But meanwhile, there are a bunch of people In the Democratic Party, who are focused laser-like on labeling this the Chinese virus.
How could Trump do this thing?
How?
Susan Rice, who busily lied on American television about how the Benghazi terror attacks were not in fact terror attacks, they were a response to a YouTube video.
Susan Rice yesterday said, it's such a racist description by Trump.
Racist.
Racist?
Truly?
It's directed at the Chinese government.
Anybody who thinks this is directed at Chinese people is an idiot.
It has nothing to do with Chinese people.
It has to do with the Chinese government not doing the only thing that it should be doing.
Shutting down these vectors of... I mean, we're a free government here in the United States.
We have an elected government here in the United States.
We have a non-authoritarian government.
And somehow everybody is going along with the lockdown of the American way of life.
China is an authoritarian state.
They couldn't even do this?
It's unbelievable.
But apparently if you say Chinese virus, it's very bad according to Susan Rice, pathological liar.
Certainly China is not behaving well in trying to blame this on the United States.
But the flip side of it is we are not behaving well when we talk about, as the president does every day, the Chinese virus, the Wuhan flu, and all of these racist descriptions.
The fact of the matter is that viruses don't know borders.
They don't Okay, really?
Like, so we have to work with the Chinese government?
Blaming people for where viruses arise, which can arise anywhere on the planet, and get into the business of working together to defeat them.
Okay, really?
So we have to work with the Chinese government.
If we only work with the Chinese, yeah, like they've been working with us the whole time.
Right now, they are actively disseminating propaganda information, blaming the United States government for the release of coronavirus.
So spare me.
Spare me.
It's not just Susan Rice.
Obviously, it's Tim Kaine, the former vice presidential candidate, the most forgettable vice presidential candidate maybe in the history of the United States.
Remember that guy?
He ran with Hillary Clinton.
You don't remember him?
Yeah, I don't either.
Tim Kaine, senator from Virginia.
He says, we have to stop all of this China bashing.
Really?
They are attempting to propaganda.
I mean, it's unbelievable.
Here he goes.
Quit the inflammatory China bashing.
Did this virus originate in China?
Yes.
But Mr. President, that does not excuse your weeks and weeks of tweeting lies and misinformation about the virus, while the leaders of other nations were taking steps to make sure their populations could be safe.
The President's decision to call this China virus or Wuhan virus or other epithets that he and members of his team use are a crass effort to deflect blame away from the acceptance of responsibility that a president should do.
The buck stops with you, Mr. President.
Okay, but the thing started with China.
Yes, the buck stops with Trump.
But guess what?
The buck started with China.
So that makes a rather large-scale difference.
It does make a rather large difference.
By the way, there are polls out today from ABC News about the president's handling of the coronavirus situation.
He's at about 55% approval rating on the coronavirus situation, which frankly is kind of astonishing given the slow response of the federal government at the outset.
The response has been significantly better, as I said, over the last week and a half.
It's been significantly better lately.
The federal government better get its ass in gear because those approval ratings ain't going to last.
If we're two months into this thing, everybody's still at home and we haven't increased capacity enough to get ready to go back to work and every small business in the country is under.
Okay, so move fast, move in concerted fashion because the current status cannot continue to be the new normal.
It can't.
And when I say it can't, I'm not talking about two months from now.
I'm talking about a month from now.
I'm talking about three weeks from now.
This is not going to be the new normal.
Americans will not take it, nor frankly, if they don't see the prospect of lowering death rates by a significant amount, should they take it.
All righty, well, we will be back here a little bit later today, we hope, with two additional hours of content.
Also, later today, I am planning to stop by to hang out with you, like 5 p.m.
today, Pacific time.
We'll hang out, maybe talk a little bit of Bible, maybe talk a little bit of entertainment, sports, yeah, something.
We'll figure out something to talk about.
So we'll check you out then.
Otherwise, we will see you here on Monday for all of the updates.
Stay safe in there, not out there.
Stay safe in there, and let's all pray for each other and take care of each other because this is a rough time.
We'll get through it together, apart.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Colton Haas.
Directed by Mike Joyner.
Executive producer Jeremy Boring.
Supervising producer Mathis Glover and Robert Sterling.
Assistant director Pavel Lydowsky.
Technical producer Austin Stevens.
Playback and media operated by Nick Sheehan.
Associate producer Katie Swinnerton.
Edited by Adam Sajovic.
Audio is mixed by Mike Koromina.
Hair and makeup is by Nika Geneva.
The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire production.
Copyright Daily Wire 2020.
You know, the Matt Wall Show, it's not just another show about politics.
I think there are enough of those already out there.
We talk about culture, because culture drives politics, and it drives everything else.
So my main focuses are life, family, faith.
Those are fundamental, and that's what this show is about.
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