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March 30, 2020 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:01:50
The Tide Rises | Ep. 982
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Dr. Anthony Fauci predicts 100,000 to 200,000 dead from coronavirus in the United States.
China's lies continue.
And President Trump extends his social distancing measures to the end of April.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
The Ben Shapiro Show is sponsored by ExpressVPN's Surf the web with peace of mind.
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Well, before we get to the news, you may have noticed that the stock market has been a little bit volatile.
And by that, I mean that it lost like one third of its entire value over the course of the last six weeks.
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All right, so first we begin.
I hope that you had a wonderful weekend, or at least a somewhat relaxing weekend, given the fact that there is nothing to be relaxed about.
I mean, if you're not having nightmares at this point, if you are not nervous, if your blood pressure is in higher than Really good for you and please tell me how you're doing it because the reality is that while concern is absolutely normal, panic is not out of the question given all the news that has been coming in.
You know, the fact is that you can't watch the footage from New York City where you're seeing hospitals that are beginning to be overrun, you're seeing emergency rooms that are full, you're seeing coronavirus patients who are racking up In these ERs, you're seeing tape of people being moved out in body bags to morgues and all this stuff is supremely scary.
And then you look at the pictures of the empty streets in New York City and Los Angeles.
And I mean, this is different than anything in living memory for people in the United States.
probably for literally everyone.
Because how many people actually remember the Spanish flu pandemic?
And even during the Spanish flu pandemic, one of the big issues is that there was no nationwide shutdown, which is why the thing became so deadly in the first place.
And nobody has ever seen anything like this.
It's a global thing right now.
I mean, what we have seen globally is the streets cleared everywhere from the UK to Israel to Italy.
I mean, it's just all over the planet.
People are hunkering down and basically waiting for summer to come and hoping that it kills off this virus.
Right now, the latest statistics on coronavirus are that globally, we now have 730.
741,914 cases.
So almost three quarters of a million cases of coronavirus that have been diagnosed.
We have 35,000 deaths globally from coronavirus.
And we are watching this thing surge in a lot of Western countries because most of these Western countries are following the path that has already been trod unfortunately by Italy and Spain.
I don't want to say most of them are treading that path, but certainly enough of them are looking at that path that it's obviously very scary.
Over the weekend, Italy continued to escalate the number of deaths.
They now have almost 11,000 total deaths in Italy out of 97,000 confirmed cases.
Again, those confirmed cases, that confirmed case number is not really a good and useful number.
I discussed this with both Vice President Mike Pence and Dr. Deborah Birx on the Sunday special yesterday.
But the fact is that confirmed cases is a bad number because that's the people who are actually coming in for a test.
Apparently there are 5 to 10 people for every person who comes in for a test who are non-symptomatic or experiencing very slight symptoms, don't come in for a test, or who came in for a test and didn't get a test.
So a confirmed case number is not actually the number we should be looking at.
Also, there are tons of countries that are wildly underreporting this stuff, as we'll get to when we get to talking about China, which is continuing to lie about all of this stuff.
You've seen the media triumphantly, many of them, I mean really, it's almost triumphantly, announcing that the United States is number one in coronavirus cases, as though this is an indicator of the evils of the American system.
The reality is that there's no question that China is number one and they've been lying to the world about all of this.
We'll get to that a little bit later.
However, you've seen an uptick in death in Spain, where there are now 7,340 deaths as of this hour, including 537 deaths yesterday.
You've seen an uptick in death in Iran.
They've been lying about this.
They say that they only have 2,700 deaths in Iran.
That is very unlikely.
Sources on the inside in Iran say that it is multiple times that number.
In the UK, you've got 1,400 deaths with 187 deaths added just yesterday.
And in the United States, right here at home, we've had 2,600 total deaths in the United States, which certainly is a multiplication of what we had last week.
I mean, early last week, we were talking about 200 deaths, 250 deaths, and then the exponential growth began.
And so we have seen day over day total coronavirus cases going up.
That's because we are doing additional testing, which is good.
We've seen total coronavirus deaths going up exponentially as well, which obviously is quite bad.
On March 27th, there were 400 daily deaths from coronavirus.
March 28th, 525 deaths from coronavirus.
And March 29th, 362 deaths.
This is according to the Johns Hopkins map of the situation.
So obviously very, very scary times.
And President Trump, acknowledging how scary these times are, he has now pushed back his deadline on when he thinks people are going to get back to work.
It was always an optimistic deadline.
Nobody seriously thought, who had studied this issue, that we were getting back to work on April 12th.
Even Dr. Fauci had got out there.
He said that was President Trump sort of trying to be optimistic.
But President Trump extended the social distancing guidelines that he put forward.
Basically, stay at home, stay away from other people, no big events.
He had extended that through the end of April.
That is the very earliest that we are going to start to see people Moving out back into the world again.
And that, again, would be largely reliant on warming temperatures in the United States.
So start rooting for global warming now, guys.
Here's President Trump talking about extending social distancing through the end of April.
Have to follow the guidelines that our great Vice President holds up a lot.
He's holding that up a lot.
He believes in it so strongly.
The better you do, the faster this whole nightmare will end.
Therefore, we will be extending our guidelines to April 30th to slow the spread.
On Tuesday, we will be finalizing these plans and providing a summary of our findings, supporting data, and strategy to the American people.
So President Trump was, in fact, retreating from the desire to relax all of that by mid-April, but the numbers just did not support that.
The latest numbers suggest, in fact, that this thing is going to peak around the time that President Trump was talking about people maybe starting to get back to work.
According to Axios, April is going to be very hard, but public health officials are in agreement that hunkering down and weathering one of the darkest months in American history is the only way to prevent perhaps millions of American deaths.
Estimates now being echoed by the Trump administration find that the U.S.
coronavirus outbreak should peak in about two weeks.
That is if everybody hunkers down now.
So if you are out and about and you are not hunkering down right now, then you're probably lengthening the amount of time before everybody can sort of go back to normal, unless you're out in more rural areas where there's not a lot of social interaction anyway.
But if you're in a major city and you're going out to the beaches and you're hanging out with other people and you are perpetuating the spread of this thing, you are doing something wrong.
You shouldn't be doing it.
Deborah Birx, who's coordinating the White House coronavirus response, Mentioned by name, a University of Washington Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, they predicted that demand for hospital beds and supplies, including ventilators, will far exceed supply as of April 14th, barring some sort of radical uptick.
On that day, according to that particular model, 2,300 coronavirus deaths are expected in one day, which of course would be a massive, massive number of deaths.
In the United States, about 7,500 people die every day, so that'd be increasing the death rate on top of that by about Well, that'd be 40% on top of that.
Sorry, one third.
It'd be exactly one third.
It'd be increasing the death rate by about one third on top of the normal death rate.
That model predicts that 81,000 Americans will die over the next four months, and that is assuming strong adherence to social distancing measures.
Without social distancing, as many as 2.2 million Americans Could die, according to President Trump.
That was the number of deaths that was predicted by the Imperial College report that came out a little bit earlier this month.
That, of course, is at war with another report that came out from Oxford University suggesting that the death rates are much lower than all of that.
Bottom line is, nobody knows at this point.
Nobody knows how bad things are going to get right here.
Dr. Anthony Fauci yesterday, he estimated that even with the strong social distancing measures, we could see 100,000 to 200,000 dead in the United States.
When you use numbers like a million, a million and a half, two million, that almost certainly is off the chart.
Now, it's not impossible, but very, very unlikely.
So it's difficult to present.
I mean, looking at what we're seeing now, you know, I would say between 100 and 200,000 cases.
But I don't want to be held to that because it's it's it's excuse me, deaths.
I mean, we're going to have millions of cases.
But I just don't think that we really need to make a projection.
When it's such a moving target that you can so easily be wrong.
Okay, so because of that, I would take the $100,000 to $200,000 with a slight grain of salt.
The University of Washington model said $81,000.
Also, Fauci's not giving a period on that.
Does he mean over the course of the year?
Does he mean over the course of the next few months?
Unclear from his statement.
Here's one thing that is clear.
If you're a public health official, what you don't want to do is lowball the estimate, right?
You want to highball the estimate.
You want to say that the number of deaths is going to be higher than the number of deaths that come in.
Number one, because you'd prefer that people are a little bit more scared than not, so that they stay home.
But number two, because you don't want to look as though you are downplaying the effect of the virus.
So you always want to be on the upper end of that particular estimate.
That is a big number.
That's a big number.
That's twice the number of deaths that we see from the flu in an average year in the United States.
If you're talking about 200,000, it's four times the average that you're seeing from the flu in the United States.
Now, that would still suggest that Fauci is holding by his original estimate in the New England Journal of Medicine that this thing is about as deadly as the flu.
It's just far, far more widespread because the replication rate on the thing is 2.5 to 3, as opposed to the flu, which is like 1.5.
Maybe if you have the flu, you infect one person, maybe half of another person.
I don't know which half, but if you are a person who is infected with coronavirus, good shot that you've infected two to three other people.
President Trump says by June 1st we'll be on our way to recovery, which of course is a far cry from April 12th, where I've been at six weeks off.
And Dr. Fauci said, the idea that we may have these cases, many cases played a role in our decision to try to make sure that we don't do something prematurely and pull back when we should be pushing.
It is pretty obvious that what you don't want to do is tell people that everything is okay, because getting people to do this again is going to be much more difficult than getting them to do it the first time.
That is pretty obvious.
Dr. Deborah Birx came out yesterday.
She said no metro area is going to be spared.
Cities particularly are going to be pretty hard hit.
Here was Deborah Birx on Meet the Press.
That's the way pandemics work and that's why we all are deeply concerned and why we've been raising the alert in all metro areas and in all states.
No state, no metro area will be spared and the sooner we react and the sooner the states and the metro areas react and ensure that they put in full mitigation at the same time understanding exactly what their hospitals need, then we'll be able to move forward together and protect the most Americans.
And that is the big question, is whether we are going to exceed our capacity.
Governor John Bel Edwards, who's a Democrat from Louisiana, he said on Meet the Press, if we don't flatten the curve, we're on a trajectory currently to exceed our capacity in New Orleans for ventilators by about April 4th.
All beds available in hospitals by about April 10th.
So we're doing everything we can to surge capacity.
It's very difficult.
Of course, you're seeing anecdotal evidence from New York City that hospitals are having a tough time with the surge.
It is not clear from data, like hard data at this point, whether capacity has been or when it will be exceeded.
We'll keep looking for that data.
Right now, it's all anecdotal.
We'll get to more of this in just one second.
First, let's talk about the fact that you're spending an awful lot of time at home right now, but you may need to fix your car.
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Okay, so a couple of pieces of positive news in an extremely, extremely dark time.
Health insurers have said that they are going to protect their customers from out-of-pocket costs if they need treatment for COVID-19 because obviously during an epidemic, you want to make sure that people aren't infecting each other by staying home.
Instead, if they're really sick, you want them going to the hospital.
By the way, If you are really sick, do go to a hospital.
Okay?
Especially if you're in a metro area.
If you are seriously ill, go to a hospital.
I know there are a lot of people saying, don't go to the hospital because maybe they're overrun, or maybe you'll be worse treated at a hospital.
If you're really ill, you need to go to the hospital.
Do not stay home.
And you'll know when you need to go to the hospital.
It's what I've been told by doctors.
That it gets so severe, you're having trouble breathing.
Go to the hospital.
Don't wait until it has already Been difficult to perfuse your lungs with oxygen.
Get there while you are still sentient and breathing, would be the rule.
Two of the nation's largest health insurers, Cigna and Humana, agreed to protect their customers from out-of-pocket costs if they need treatment, a decision that represents a rapid change in how companies are responding to the pandemic, according to the New York Times.
Describing the insurer's decision as a big deal, President Trump on Sunday said companies don't waive co-pays too easily.
We asked them.
They did it.
While insurers and government officials have taken steps in recent weeks to limit people's out-of-pocket costs when they get tested, the bills associated with treatment for COVID can run in the tens of thousands of dollars for a single hospital stay.
David M. Kordani, the chief executive of Cigna, said, Under the new policy, customers don't have to worry about the financial burden of the virus while their lives are being turned upside down, said Bruce Broussard.
The Chief Executive of Humana.
Remember when industry was super duper duper terrible and evil and horrible and terrible and evil?
Turns out private industry is really stepping into the breach in a lot of these situations.
Last week, another large insurer, Aetna, which is now part of CVS Health, said it would waive cost sharing related to hospital stays.
Employers that self-insure provide coverage to the majority of workers in this country.
They would not be affected by the insurer's decision.
They would have to decide individually whether they would take similar action.
It's going to be a client-by-client decision, said Cordani.
So that is, that at least is a piece of good news.
The insurers are trying to relieve the burden from that.
Another piece of good news, the FDA has issued emergency authorization of hydroxychloroquine.
And the media are upset about this for some reason.
Some members of the media.
I mean, listen to the, listen to the sub-headline over at Politico.
FDA issues emergency authorization of anti-malaria drug for coronavirus care.
The drugs have been championed by President Donald Trump for treatment, despite scant evidence.
Okay, the emergency use authorization means people are on their deathbed, like they are going to die.
And the FDA is saying, these people who are going to die, you know what would be better than death?
Trying this thing that has not yet been tried in clinical trials, but has shown some promise.
And Politico's first response is, why would the FDA waive these rules?
What are you, an idiot?
They're waiving the rules because people are on their deathbeds and they want the treatment that they think may have shown some promise.
Here is President Trump yesterday in the Rose Garden announcing that hydroxychloroquine is being used in New York City.
I want to point out that the hydroxychloroquine is being administered to 1,100 patients, people in New York, along with the Z-Pak, which is azithromycin.
And it's very early yet.
It started two days ago.
But we will see what happens.
The agency is allowing for the drugs to be donated to the Strategic National Stockpile to be distributed and prescribed by doctors to hospitalize teen and adult patients with COVID-19 when a clinical trial is not available or feasible.
See, I don't know why the media would be upset about this, considering a clinical trial is not available or feasible.
We're in the middle of a pandemic, you morons.
Seriously, one of the big problems with the FDA, I mean, there's been a push by Republicans for years for right-to-try legislation that basically suggests if you are a terminal patient, Then you should be able to try anything that you want to try.
You shouldn't be held back by the FDA approving clinical trials of particular material.
And believe it or not, people in hospitals, doctors, are not going to start prescribing fish tank cleaner or as they have been in Iran.
I'm not kidding.
They were using toxic methanol.
Seriously, people were telling them, take toxic methanol, and people were giving it to their kids, and their kids were getting blinded by it, because things in Iran turned out to be quite horrible.
This virus is bad enough without stupidity causing people to die.
So if everybody could quit with the fish tank cleaner, the eating of the bats, and the taking of the toxic methanol, that would be extremely helpful at this point.
If a doctor prescribes hydroxychloroquine based on the fact that it's shown some promise, and you're on your deathbed, like, what are you whining about, that the FDA removed the regulation here?
The move was supported by the White House, part of a larger Trump-backed effort to speed the use of anti-malaria drugs as a potential therapy for a virus that has no proven treatment or cure.
FDA already has allowed New York State to test administering the medication to seriously ill patients.
Some hospitals have added it to their treatment protocols.
Trump himself said at a press briefing, let's see how it works, it may and it may not.
HHS Secretary Alex Azar tweeted on Sunday night, scientists in America around the world have identified multiple potential therapeutics for COVID-19, including chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine.
Career scientists have been skeptical of the effort, noting the lack of data.
Seriously?
This is where you're going to draw the line, guys?
I feel like this is probably not the place you want to draw the line.
Meanwhile, Dr. Anthony Fauci is saying, we are ramping up capacity, another piece of good news.
People are going to get what they need.
And also, there's this push by the media that suggests that President Trump has to have a good personal relationship with governors in order to help supply them from the federal level.
And Fauci's like, Calm yourselves down.
That's not what's happening here.
People who hate Trump are still getting what they need, which, by the way, is true.
I mean, I'm going to show you two different, I'm going to show you two different Democratic governors in a second who are thanking the feds for their response on this.
Here's Fauci saying, this is not a personal thing.
This is just business, Sonny.
One way or the other, he needs the ventilators that he needs.
And hopefully, we will get him the ventilators that he needs.
They may be closer to him than is realized, but if they're not, we'll get them there.
And if they are, we'll try to help him get access to the ones that are there.
I mean, I know the spirit of the task force, and when we talk about when people need things, it doesn't matter who they are.
We try to get them what they need.
Okay, and that, of course, is absolutely true.
Like, for example, Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards, he says the stimulus that you guys have all been criticizing, that you and the media have been ripping, is insufficient.
The stimulus is definitely going to help people in my state.
Here's Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards.
The $2 trillion package that Congress passed, that the President signed into law, we know is going to help with hospitals with unreimbursed expenses, the expansion of telehealth.
We know that families are going to benefit, small businesses, employees.
Is it enough?
Nutrition for our schools and our food banks.
Well, you know, it's a very generous package.
It's the largest one in the history of our country.
Right, but is it enough for you?
There's about $1.8 billion.
There's $1.8 billion for the state that's going to help, and so there's going to be additional legislation coming forward, I believe, as well.
But we know that this is a good start, and I appreciate everything that they have done in Congress in order to help us.
By the way, listen to the questions there, right?
I mean, it's so, it's, I'm sorry, it's terrible.
I mean, the members of the media who are spending all of their time just asking people, is it enough?
Is it enough?
I mean, they're looking for bad news at this point.
How about this?
How about when a democratic governor of a state says that the feds are doing their best in providing help, you say, oh, that's good news.
Instead of, is it enough?
What more can you get out of them?
Like, I don't think those kinds of questions would be forthcoming if this were a Republican governor during Hurricane Sandy talking about how Barack Obama had provided all the support necessary.
In fact, I know that that wouldn't have happened because it didn't happen in 2012 when Hurricane Sandy happened and Chris Christie was hugging Barack Obama on the tarmac and the media were treating Barack Obama as the savior of the East Coast during Hurricane Sandy.
for doing, like, basically what the federal government should just do as a baseline in the middle of a national disaster, right?
And the media has been treating it like this the whole time, right?
CBS's Margaret Brennan, she had Steve Mnuchin on, the Treasury Secretary, and he was saying, like, we're providing stimulus, we're doing our best here.
Margaret Brennan was the same person who was questioning Governor Bell Edwards there, if you didn't hear her.
And Margaret Brennan, she's saying to Mnuchin, you don't know all these jobs are going to come back.
You don't know.
Of course he doesn't know all the jobs are going to come back.
Nobody knows all the jobs are going to come back.
This is the greatest shutdown in the history of the world economy.
Without a doubt.
Without a doubt.
I mean, we have literally forcibly shut every business in the United States, effectively.
And Margaret Brennan's like, you don't know all the jobs.
No bleep, she doesn't know all the jobs are going to come back.
Nobody knows all the jobs are going to come back.
That's one of the hard parts about dealing with, you know, an unprecedented global pandemic, Margaret.
Here she is on CBS.
Do you need to level with the American people here and tell them you simply don't know that all these jobs are going to come back?
This program is going to be enormously successful in stabilizing the U.S.
economy while hardworking Americans who lost their jobs or aren't able to work because of the medical situation, that they get help.
So this money is going to go into the economy very quickly.
It is going to help American workers very, very quickly.
And I don't know how long it's going to take to kill this virus.
I do know we will kill this virus.
And when we do, I have great confidence that the U.S.
economy will become roaring back.
Okay, but it's the questions that are like, everyone knows this.
Does everyone ever actually think that the jobs are magically coming back after the greatest shutdown in the history of the world?
Literally?
I mean, Jay Inslee from Washington, who hates Trump, right?
Hates Trump.
And Trump is no fan of Jay Inslee.
Now, we're getting help from the national stockpile.
We have got thousands and tens of thousands of masks and gloves, and we really appreciate from the federal stockpile.
We're having soldiers.
The 627th from Colorado arrived yesterday to build a hospital for us in Century Link Field.
So there's some good things happening from the federal government, and we have a lot of gratitude for everybody involved in that.
So again, while the media are out there suggesting the Trump administration is doing a horrible job, most of the governors who are speaking up about this, including Andrew Cuomo, by the way, are saying the feds are giving us what they can.
You know, maybe they started late, but everybody screwed this thing up.
And that's going to be one of the themes we're going to talk about in a second here, is it is very easy to see the bias of the media.
Some good journalists like Jake Tapper has been extremely critical of Trump, but you'll see he actually went after Bill de Blasio yesterday.
Some in the media Are spending their time pretending that the federal government led by Trump was uniquely wrong on this coronavirus thing?
Let's be real about this.
Everyone was wrong about this coronavirus thing up until about three weeks ago.
Up until it became obvious that this was going to become a serious issue in the United States, people across the aisle were not taking this seriously enough.
And the media are now doing this revisionist history where it was only one side of the aisle because Trump is the man in power.
It was only one side of the aisle that was not taking this seriously enough, and that just is not true.
It just isn't true.
We'll get to more of this in just one second.
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Okay, so, in other pieces of good news, a field hospital is being set up in New York City right now.
Dozens of people working in a drizzle to erect the facility for an expected influx of COVID-19 patients at the epicenter of this coronavirus pandemic were working throughout the day yesterday.
This is according to Yahoo News and Agence France-Presse, the AFP.
Samaritan's Purse, a U.S.-based global relief agency, is setting up the hospital on the park's East Meadow lawn.
Workers in face masks are unloading a white tarp and other equipment on the grass.
They've already set up the Javits Center as well, so we are quickly ramping up capacity in New York City, which is deeply important.
A piece of actual good news is that in Washington state, Which entered into the social distancing measures and the stay-at-home measures early, they have seen a drop-off in the number of new cases.
According to the New York Times, the Seattle area, home of the first known coronavirus case in the United States and the place where the virus claimed 37 of its first 50 victims, that old age home.
is now seeing evidence that strict containment strategies imposed in the earliest days of the outbreak are beginning to pay off at least for the moment.
Deaths are not rising as fast as they are in other states.
Dramatic declines in street traffic show people are staying home.
Hospitals have not been overwhelmed.
Preliminary statistical models provided to public officials in Washington state suggest the spread of the virus has slowed in Seattle in recent days.
While each infected person was spreading the virus to an average of 2.7 other people earlier in March, that number has dropped.
One projection suggests that in the Seattle area, it's now down to 1.4, which is more in line with the seasonal flu.
The researchers preparing the latest projections, led by the Institute for Disease Modeling, which is a private research group in Bellevue, have been watching a variety of data points since the onset of the outbreak.
They include tens of thousands of coronavirus test results, deaths, mobility information including traffic patterns, and movements of Facebook users to estimate the rate at which coronavirus patients are spreading the disease.
The progress is precarious, but The findings offer a measure of hope that the emergency measures disrupting life will, in fact, bend the curve.
Now, with all of that said, stay home.
Don't be stupid.
It is one thing to be out in some rural areas of the United States where there's not a ton of evidence that coronavirus exists, and treating every area of the United States as though it is equivalent would be foolish.
Seattle, New York, LA, these are not the same as podunk Iowa.
Although, major cities in Iowa are getting hit, by the way.
I mean, there have been Thousands of cases across the Midwest in the United States that have already been diagnosed, but if you are attending megachurches in Louisiana, Ohio, Florida, do not do this.
Do not do this.
Okay?
And I speak as a member of the Orthodox Jewish community, where they have been canceling all of the minyanim, right?
Which are the biblically mandated, biblically mandated events where you are supposed to, where you're supposed to pray with 10 other men.
Those have been cancelled all over the place.
One of the reasons they've been cancelled is because we have seen widespread of cases from synagogues, from orthodox synagogues where people continue to go despite the recommendations not to go, from weddings where people were not supposed to go but they were showing up anyway for the weddings.
I personally know of several cases in my community alone of people who have come down with coronavirus because they went to weddings not in this city.
They went to a wedding in a different city, and they ended up coming down with coronavirus.
Apparently, somebody there had it.
A lot of people ended up getting it because weddings happen to be a place where it's pretty easy to pass.
Lots of dancing, lots of sweating, lots of celebrating and drinking and eating and all of that.
Right now is not the time to be attending the megachurch.
And anybody who sort of buys into the prosperity gospel motion that you can avoid coronavirus by going to church or going to synagogue or going to mosque, do not be a stupid.
Do not be an idiot.
That doesn't mean that Bill de Blasio isn't an idiot.
Bill de Blasio, the mayor of New York yesterday, he threatened permanent synagogue closings if synagogues refused to abide by the mandate.
Synagogues should certainly abide by the mandate, obviously.
I'm right here telling people, don't go to synagogue.
I'm not the only one, by the way.
What we call in the Orthodox community, Gedolah Hador, meaning the people who are like the biggest rabbis in the Jewish community.
They've been telling people to stay home because we have seen a fairly large outbreak, particularly in places like Crown Heights and Queens and some of these other areas that are heavily Jewish.
In any case, Bill de Blasio, though, because he's an idiot, he goes too far.
He says, OK, well, I want you to stay home or I'm going to shut down your synagogues permanently.
You don't have the power to do that, Bill de Blasio.
That's unconstitutional.
But with that said, take it with a grain of salt.
Folks, do not go out and congregate right now.
Now is not the time.
Even if you believe that this thing is overblown, by the way, even if you believe that in the end we're going to look back and say we went wild on this thing, you need to give the program a chance to work.
Even if you think that the Tylenol wasn't necessary, you should take the Tylenol right now just in case it is.
I mean, let's make the Pascals wager here, guys.
And even if you're a skeptic, we're already in the midst of this thing.
Give it a chance to work.
Here's Bill de Blasio yesterday going too far.
Yeah, I don't know how you can close the building permanently.
going on, they will go to the officials of that congregation.
They'll inform them they need to stop the services and disperse.
If that does not happen, they will take additional action up to the point of fines and potentially closing the building permanently.
I don't know how you can close the building permanently.
Again, that would be unconstitutional.
But it would be a foolish move right now to violate the orders that are in place, the You want to get out of this thing fast?
Seriously?
Let's let the measures work.
That's the basic theme here.
We'll get to what comes next and what those measures should look like and how we get out of this thing in just one second.
But first, let's talk about the fact that it's difficult to predict life.
It really is.
There are many things in life where you think, how did I get it so wrong?
Like, for example, that time I joined a law firm.
That was not great.
Well, everybody's going to get things wrong.
That's just life.
But there are also things we can get right on the first try, like shopping for life insurance.
And this is where PolicyGenius.com comes in.
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We all get things wrong from time to time.
And I once worked for a law firm.
They got it wrong too.
I was not a great lawyer at the law firm.
But!
We can all get life insurance right at policygenius.com.
Again, that is policygenius.com.
Go check them out right now at policygenius.com.
Okay, I have a lot more to get to.
We're gonna get to a couple of pieces of practical advice for you in the midst of all this.
There are a couple of pieces of advice on how you should deal with packages that are coming to your house, maybe why we should start wearing masks, what the end of this looks like, how China is still lying.
Like, we have a ton to get to still.
But if you haven't had a chance to see some of our new content, it's called All Access Live.
We were planning on launching this a little bit later this year, but we accelerated it and we made it available to all of our members, not just our All Access members.
Head on over to dailywire.com, check it out.
Jeremy Boring and I kicked it off last week.
All the other hosted live streams over at dailywire.com.
We're going to continue all this week at 8pm Eastern, 5pm Pacific.
All Access Live.
It's really chilled out and laid back.
It's less focused on bringing you news and information, more just like we hang out together.
In fact, my dad and I have been planning a special treat.
I think that we may do like some violin and piano stuff over at All Access Live when you become a Daily Wire member.
My dad will take requests.
My dad's like a full-on professional pianist.
Played at a restaurant for years and years and years.
Tremendous jazz pianist.
So maybe we'll do something fun like that while I answer questions.
I am hosting today.
I'm not sure whether today will be the music day or whether that will be later this week.
We are prepping.
But go check us out at All Access right now.
All Access live at dailywire.com and join the club and hang out with us because listen, this is rough for everyone.
Everybody is chafing at the bit to get out again.
It's gonna be a while.
So we're gonna have to sit our asses down and we're gonna have to hang out together.
We might as well make the best of it.
Head on over to dailywire.com, 8 p.m.
Eastern, 5 p.m.
Pacific tonight.
Join us on All Access Live, I believe, starring moi tonight at dailywire.com.
We'll see you there a little bit later.
Later, you're listening to the largest, fastest-growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.
Okay, so let's talk about something real practical for a second.
I sent this to my parents, so I figured that it might be useful for you as well.
There are a lot of people right now who are taking takeout meals, people who are taking packages from Amazon, and you read all these articles about how long these viruses can live on surfaces and it freaks you out.
There's a good article by Joseph Allen, Assistant Professor of Exposure and Assessment Science and Director of the Healthy Buildings Program at Harvard, and he talks about exactly how you should handle packages, and I feel like this is some practical advice that everybody should know.
He says, a recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine is making people think twice about how they might be exposed to COVID-19 if they open a box delivered by UPS, touch packages at the grocery store, or accept food delivery.
He says the risk is low.
He says disease transmission from inanimate surfaces is real, so he's not minimizing that.
In the New England Journal of Medicine study, there's a finding that grabs headlines that says the coronavirus can be detectable up to four hours on copper, 24 hours on cardboard, two to three days on plastic, and stainless steel.
But that's detectable, not that you're going to get coronavirus from the actual touching of the package.
The virus, says this professor, can be detected on some surfaces for up to a day.
The reality is that the levels do drop off quickly.
For example, the article shows the virus's half-life on stainless steel and plastic is 5.6 hours, 6.8 hours, respectively.
Half-life is how long it takes for the viral load to decrease by half and then by half and then by half and then by half.
So he says, let's examine the full causal chain that would have to exist for you to get sick from a contaminated Amazon package at your door or a gallon of milk from the grocery store.
In the case of the Amazon package, the driver would have to be infected and still working despite limited symptoms.
Let's say they wiped their nose, didn't wash their hands, and then transferred some of the virus to your package.
Even then, there's lag time from when they transferred the virus until you packed up your package at the door.
The virus degrades that whole time.
In the worst case scenario, a visibly sick driver picks up your package from the truck, walks to your front door, sneezes into their hands, or directly on the package immediately before they hand it to you.
Even in that highly unlikely scenario, you can break the causal chain.
So what you should do, presumably, is to cut the chain.
You can leave the cardboard package at your door for a few hours, or you can bring it inside and leave it right inside your door and then wash your hands again.
If you're still concerned there was any virus on the package, you could wipe down the exterior with a disinfectant, or open it outdoors and put the package in the recycling can and then wash your hands.
That's what I've been doing.
I personally receive all the packages at my house.
When they come, I immediately slap on a pair of surgical gloves, I rip open the package, I throw it in the garbage, I walk inside, I throw out the surgical gloves, and I wash my hands.
And that's, I think, the paranoid way to do this.
And paranoia at this point is not the worst thing in the world.
Shop when you need to.
Keeping six feet from other customers, says this professor.
Load items into your cart or basket, keep your hands away from your face while you shop, wash them as soon as you are home, put away your groceries, and then wash your hands again.
If you wait even a few hours before you use anything, most of the virus will be significantly reduced.
If you need to use something immediately, wipe the package down and wipe off all your fruits and vegetables just the way that you normally would, wash them off in the sink.
So, just feel like that's good information that everybody should have because people are so paranoid.
You think that you touch anything, the floor is lava, you're gonna die.
And that is not the case.
Meanwhile, I do have to point out the trend that has been happening here, which is that the media have been suggesting that the Trump administration uniquely got things wrong.
Now, let me be clear.
The Trump administration blew it in February.
They did.
They blew it in February.
Okay, in January, Trump was exactly right to shut down travel from China.
And he's also correct that the media were telling people Not to shut down travel from China.
This is all xenophobia and racism and all that.
Trump can be right about that.
Also, we then spent a month doing nothing.
We spent a month not developing the test.
And this is of deep concern and deeply upsetting because we don't know right now what the death rates are of this virus.
We don't even know the transmissibility rates.
We're sort of assuming.
And we don't know anything in part because China is lying to us.
There's some fairly good evidence That China has been lying dramatically, considering that, I mean, there's seriously an article from Radio Free Asia suggesting that there may be 40,000 dead people in Wuhan province, right?
They've said there's like 3,000 or 2,500.
But that's pretty obviously inaccurate.
According to Radio Free Asia, as authorities lifted a two-month coronavirus lockdown in the central Chinese city of Wuhan, residents said they were growing increasingly skeptical that the figure of some 2,500 deaths in the city to date was accurate.
Since the start of the week, seven large funeral homes in Wuhan have been handing out the cremated remains of about 500 people to their families every single day, suggesting that far more people died than ever made the official statistics.
A Wuhan resident said, it can't be right.
The incinerators have been working around the clock.
How can so few people have died?
Seven funeral homes currently serve Wuhan, Hankou, Wuchang, and Hanyang.
Social media users have been doing some basic math to figure out their daily capacity.
The news website Kexin reported that Orcasian, don't know how to pronounce it, reported that 5,000 urns had been delivered by a supplier to Hankow Funeral Home in one day alone, which is double the official number of deaths total.
Some social media posts have estimated all seven funeral homes in Wuhan are handing out 3,500 urns every single day.
Funeral homes have informed families they'll try to complete cremations before the traditional grave-tending festival of King Ming on April 5th.
That would indicate a 12-day process beginning March 23rd.
Such an estimate would mean 42,000 urns would be given out during that time.
Another popular estimate is based on cremation capacity of the funeral homes, which run a total of 84 furnaces with a capacity over 24 hours of 1,560 urns citywide, assuming one cremation per hour.
That calculation results in nearly 47,000 deaths.
So China has been lying about this all along.
That's why when you see the media accepting Chinese statistics, They're doing the work of a Chinese autocracy that lied about this thing and then released it on the world.
I mean, China's gonna have to pay for this in some way.
It's just horrific.
It's just absolutely horrific.
By the way, the head of emergency at Wuhan tried to go public with this stuff months ago and then magically was disappeared by the Chinese government.
It truly is, it's truly incredible.
Also, the WHO, right, which is supposed to be the trusted source in all of this, the WHO, the World Health Organization, that originally bought China's lie, there was no human-to-human transmission, and they bought it for like a month.
The WHO was asked over the weekend about whether, by someone in Chinese media, I believe this is in Hong Kong, which means that it's run by China at this point, because Hong Kong is a democracy in name only.
That's why they had the giant protest all of last year.
One of the heads of the WHO was asked whether they would reconsider Taiwan's independent membership.
And the WHO refused to say because they are in hock to the Chinese.
The WHO is basically, they're making it obvious every day they are a corrupt organization that is willing to accept bad information from the Chinese government.
It's really, it's horrific.
Here's some of this interview.
This woman asks, Will the WHO reconsider Taiwan's membership?
Because China, of course, considers Taiwan to be a part of China, which is ridiculous.
It is not.
It's an independent nation, and the West certainly has a priority in protecting Taiwan from Chinese predations.
One of the great tragedies in human history is that Chiang Kai-shek's armies were defeated by Mao Tse-tung, and he was driven off the continent into Taiwan.
In any case, the WHO refuses to say whether they would reconsider Taiwan's membership.
It's amazing.
WHO considered Taiwan's membership.
It's official from WHO.
He simply pretends he doesn't hear the question.
I couldn't hear your question.
Okay, let me repeat the question.
Okay, let's move to another one then.
Right, because I'm actually curious on talking about Taiwan as well, on Taiwan's case.
And then he just pretends he doesn't hear the question and then he cuts off.
And then he cuts off the stream.
That is one of the heads of the WHO.
Okay, so when everybody talks about how the Trump administration screwed this up, okay, there's duplicity and then there's just screwing up.
Okay, the duplicity comes from the Chinese government.
And honest to God, they've killed tens of thousands of people with this thing.
Hundreds of thousands of people will likely die because the Chinese government is an evil autocracy.
We should never forget that.
When it comes to what happened in the United States, what we should never forget is that the same government that we trust to fix all of our problems blew this one on every possible level and has been blowing it for years.
And that holds between administrations.
Okay, this is not a partisan thing.
On the one hand, there are people who are suggesting it was just Trump.
And they're citing the fact that the United States did not ramp up their testing capacity in February and that they missed the boat, which is true.
The CDC totally blew it.
The FDA totally blew it.
And heads should roll over there.
There's an entire article in the New York Times talking about the failures of the federal government during February.
They say, early on, the dozen federal officials charged with defending America against coronavirus gathered day after day in the White House Situation Room, consumed by crises.
They grappled with how to evacuate the U.S.
consulate in Wuhan, China, ban Chinese travelers, extract Americans from the Diamond Princess and other cruise ships, The members of the Coronavirus Task Force typically devoted only 5 or 10 minutes, often at the end of contentious meetings, to talk about testing.
The CDC, its leaders assured the others, had developed a diagnostic model that would be rolled out quickly as a first step.
But large-scale testing of people who might have been infected did not happen because of technical flaws, regulatory hurdles, business-as-usual bureaucracies, lack of leadership at multiple levels, according to interviews with more than 50 current and former public health officials, administration officials, senior scientists, and company executives.
The result was a lost month when the world's richest country, armed with some of the most highly trained scientists and infectious disease specialists, squandered its best chance of containing the virus's spread.
Instead, Americans were left largely blind to the scale of a looming public health catastrophe.
Okay, this is 100% true.
Okay, the fact is that people at the CDC should be fired over this thing.
The fact that there are people who are at the FDA who should be fired at this thing.
People can blame this on President Trump all they want.
The reality is that it is the job of people inside the federal government to help convince the president to take this thing seriously.
So people should be fired over this.
This is a failure of the Trump administration.
But it is also true that there were failures in prior administrations about the ventilator supply.
For example, CNN reported over the weekend in at least 10 government reports from 2003 to 2015.
That spans the Bush administration and the Obama administration.
Federal officials predicted the U.S.
would experience a critical lack of ventilators and other life-saving medical supplies if it faced a viral outbreak like the one currently sweeping the country.
The drumbeat of warnings undermines President Trump's claim last week nobody in their wildest dream could have imagined the demand for ventilators that now exists.
Okay, well that's true, but why weren't the ventilators there from the Obama administration then?
So in other words, everybody missed it.
And this is one of the things that drives me nuts is the rush to the partisan politics of pandemics when everybody blew it.
See, I've said before that government is more veep than it is house of cards.
In other words, it is not a bunch of clever people around a table making calculated decisions about how to advance their interests.
It's a bunch of morons.
It's all the people you work with except with actual power.
And when they blow it, they blow it big time.
And so it turns very quickly from comedy to tragedy because them blowing it every day doesn't have tremendous ramifications for you until it absolutely does.
Because there's only one thing.
Government has one job.
So here's the thing.
If you think government is good for everything, then you think government is good for this too.
But if you think government has one job and they blow the one job, it should undermine your trust in government that the government blows it this way every single time there's a major crisis.
When's the last time there was a major crisis the government didn't blow it?
Now, we mobilize quickly, we respond quickly, but the government always blows it because the government is staffed by human beings.
And if you're going to tell me that the United States has handled this worse than any other country, there's literally like two countries that handled it decently.
South Korea is one, and that's because they actually prepped in the aftermath of a pandemic that nailed them with SARS.
Okay, but Italy is getting hit way harder than we are.
Spain is getting hit way harder.
Both of those have nationalized healthcare systems, enormous governments, giant bureaucracies, extraordinary tax rates.
So, bottom line is this.
Government sucks at things.
It doesn't stop sucking just because this is a thing that's very important for it to do.
And it's a bipartisan suckage.
Okay, the suckage is not unique to one side.
It's not like Trump handled this way better than Obama would have, or Obama would have handled this so much better than Trump did.
I have no evidence of that whatsoever.
Again, this report from the New York Times, from CNN, suggests that there was a May 2003 GAO report saying that there needs to be more medical equipment.
A 2005 Congressional Research Service report An HHS report that same month in November 2005.
A July 2006 report from the CBO.
A Defense Department report from August 2006.
A November 2007 Interior Department Pandemic Influenza Plan.
A 2009 OSHA publication.
A 2009 report by the Executive Office to the President that said that they might need mechanical ventilation that could reach 10 to 25 per 100,000 population.
Which, if you multiply that out, that would be 30,000 to 60,000 ventilators, which is exactly what we're talking about right now.
A 2015 study from the DHHS and the Center for Disease Control suggesting that we might need an additional 7,000 to 11,000 ventilators.
And in a high severity scenario, at least 60,000 additional ventilators.
So everyone blew it.
Every single person blew it.
And you can see how the partisanship falls apart when we just accept this simple truth.
Bill de Blasio was asked by Jake Tapper, who again, Jake will actually ask tough questions of Democrats on occasion.
De Blasio was asked yesterday about, you know, like a month ago you were downplaying the whole virus, like for a while.
We talked about the timeline on Friday.
And De Blasio's like, we shouldn't look backward, we shouldn't look backwards.
Weird, because five seconds ago you were saying we should look backwards at what the Trump administration blew.
How about this?
How about there's plenty of time to look backward and cast blame at everybody?
Now let's try and get this crisis solved and let's accept government sucks at things, okay?
So the case that I've been hearing from folks on the left is not everyone's a socialist in a pandemic.
Yeah, when it's an emergency situation and there's literally no other option, then you have to rely on the government.
But this is exactly why you should not rely on the government when there is any other option.
Here's Bill de Blasio explaining, I don't want to look backward anymore.
Weird, because five seconds ago you were totally into looking backward, Bill de Blasio.
In retrospect, is that message, at least in part, to blame for how rapidly the virus has spread across the city?
You know, Jake, we should not be focusing, in my view, on anything looking back on any level of government right now.
This is just about how we save lives going forward.
We all were working.
Everybody was working with the information we had and trying, of course, to avoid panic.
And at that point, for all of us, trying to keep, not only protect lives, but keep the economy and the livelihoods together.
Okay, so weird how he shifted his tune.
By the way, speaking of people who have shifted their tunes, so Nancy Pelosi yesterday, she did a press conference and she said, as the president fiddles, people are dying, right?
The president is just messing around while people are dying.
Well, here she was with Jake Tapper being asked about it.
His denial at the beginning was deadly.
His delaying of getting equipment to where It continues.
His delay in getting equipment to where it's needed is deadly.
What did he know and when did he know it?
That's for an after-action review.
But as the president fiddles, people are dying.
And we just have to take every precaution.
But are you saying that his downplaying ultimately cost American lives?
Yes, I am.
Okay, let me go back to Nancy Pelosi.
February 24th, in San Francisco, in Chinatown.
Okay, this is weeks after the virus' outbreak.
Everyone knew at this point that things were getting serious in Italy.
But this is weeks after the outbreak.
Again, everyone failed.
Everyone failed here.
Here's Nancy Pelosi failing.
And now, of course, it's President Trump downplayed it.
What would you call it if you went to Chinatown, where presumably there are lots of travelers from China, in Chinatown, in the middle of a pandemic, and you suggested everybody should come out and join you, Nancy Pelosi?
What would you say to that?
It's exciting to be here, especially at this time, to be able to be unified with our community.
We want to be vigilant about what is out there in other places.
We want to be careful about how we deal with it.
But we do want to say to people, come to Chinatown.
Here we are.
We're, again, careful, safe, and come join us.
Okay, literally acknowledging there's a problem in China.
At the same time, she is suggesting that everybody should come out to Chinatown and join them.
For measures of cultural diversity, presumably.
Okay, this is a bipartisan failure.
Everyone failed.
Your government sucks.
And it's not just our government.
Our government is just as good as any other government.
It's just all governments suck.
The difference between an authoritarian government and the U.S.
government, by the way, is that an authoritarian government lies to you.
The American government doesn't lie to you.
They're just not good at things because the government is not good at things.
I'd rather have a government that's not good at things than a government that lies to me.
Also, I'd like the capacity to Get out of government's clutches whenever possible.
So two things can be true at once, as always.
In a panic, right?
Not in a panic, but also in a pandemic, obviously, you may have the only option maybe to rely on government.
But this just suggests why we should not be relying on government in nearly any other circumstance, like at all, ever.
Because they suck at things, and then they blame each other for sucking at things.
Honest to God, they all suck at everything.
This has not shaken my fundamental faith in the basic principle, which is that your government is brutally incompetent, that it can mobilize eventually to do some of the right things, but if you ever have the option of not relying on the government, you should absolutely take it.
Okay, time for some things I like and then a thing that I hate.
So, speaking of governments that are brutal and authoritarian, Henry Hazlitt, who wrote one of my favorite books, Economics in One Lesson.
I've recommended that book many, many times to people.
If people say, I only have time to read one book, what should it be?
I usually recommend Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson.
It's a great take on libertarian economics and how the economy ought to work and why government regulations stifle the economy.
He actually wrote a novel that very few people have read called Time Will Run Back.
And the basic premise is that there is a son of a dictator who's obviously Stalin slash Lenin.
And the son is put in charge of the Soviet Union.
This is written in like the late 40s and about the same time as 1984.
And that he realizes that why communism is a failure and he starts to gradually liberalize the economy of the Soviet Union.
But this is like taking place 200 years in the future when the Soviet Union now dominates the entire earth.
It's a really kind of great...
Basic take on what Marxism is and the effects of Marxism, why Marxist philosophy is wrong on both a moral and economic level.
One of the points that Hazlitt makes in the book, and again, it's didactic.
It's not the world's greatest novel, but it is a great teaching tool.
One of the points that Hazlitt makes in the book is that truth just is of different value in authoritarian states.
Truth is of practical value, meaning that whatever forwards the regime becomes true in an authoritarian state.
And that's obviously true in China.
It's why I've seen a global pandemic from what was A local problem.
People eating the damn bats in a wet market.
So it's an informative book.
It's a good book, I would say, for sort of young teenagers, like 13, 14-year-old.
Time will run back.
Henry has it.
Got some time on your hands anyway, so go pick up a copy.
And if you can't get your kids to digest economics straight, then this is a pretty good elucidation of the differences between capitalism and communism, capitalism and Marxism.
State ownership and private ownership of the means of production by Henry Hazlitt.
Time will run back by Henry Hazlitt.
Okay, time for some things that I hate.
So, as I have been saying, one of the big problems in the midst of a pandemic is because you have to rely on government in the midst of a pandemic, crises become the locus of government control.
It's something we ought to be very careful about here in the United States.
This is a crisis.
It does require government control, and that government control should be temporary.
It should not be permanent.
It's why when we were looking at the bailout plans, I was very focused on what here is temporary and what here is permanent, because Democrats would love to make all of these bailouts permanent.
They'd love to have permanent UBI, universal basic income.
They would love to have huge swaths of American industry owned directly by the government.
It would be ruinous.
Democrats want to make emergency situations permanent, specifically so that governments can maximize its power.
That is one of the One of the times that I've been proudest of President Trump was he was asked about why he had not authorized the Defense Production Act more robustly.
And he said, because nationalization is generally a bad thing.
Look at Venezuela.
That is correct.
That is correct.
And you're starting to see around the world, authoritarians taking the reins of power and then maximizing that power in order to deal with the pandemic and probably having very few plans to give it up.
So you've already seen it in Russia, right?
There are no stats out of Russia on how many deaths they've had on COVID, but they're apparently locking everybody down.
And in the midst of all of this, Vladimir Putin has been consolidating his political control.
He started it before COVID and now he's maximizing that.
Meanwhile, the Hungarian parliament just passed a bill That gives Prime Minister Viktor Orban unlimited power and proclaims a state of emergency with no time limit, rule by decree, a suspension of parliament, no elections.
If you spread fake news or rumors, you can get up to five years in prison, supposedly.
And if you leave quarantine, you can get up to eight years in prison.
Which sounds very much like a dictatorship if there is no time limit to that decree.
That's some scary stuff.
Meanwhile, obviously in China, they have been shunting people off to work camps, presumably, or killing them, if they talk openly about this stuff, and then lying about everything else.
According to the Wall Street Journal, With much of the world on lockdown, the coronavirus pandemic has chipped away at individual liberties everywhere.
In more places, it is being used as an excuse to weaken democratic institutions and oversight, an authoritarian slide that could endure once the current health emergency subsides.
In Russia, President Vladimir Putin this month pushed through Parliament the removal of term limits, ensuring he could remain in power for life.
In Bolivia, the interim and unelected government has cancelled presidential elections slated for May.
In Hungary, Prime Minister Orban just moved ahead with the legislation I just mentioned.
In Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud party used the coronavirus to prevent the opposition, which gained a majority of seats in the March 2nd elections, from taking control of parliamentary proceedings.
Well, that's not completely fair, right?
The last one on Israel is not completely... The reason I say that's not fair is because what basically happened is that Benny Gantz, who was the head of the Blue and White Party, not to get into, you know, too many details with regard to Israeli politics.
There are two major parties in Israel right now, Likud, which is led by Benjamin Netanyahu, and Benny Gantz's Blue and White Party.
The Blue and White Party is basically an anti-Netanyahu coalition.
And Benny Gantz decided, listen, we can't have another election in the midst of a pandemic.
I will take the deal that Netanyahu offers, which is a rotating prime ministership where I am foreign minister.
That retains Netanyahu as prime minister up until, I believe, September 2021.
Benny Gantz ends up as foreign minister until then.
That actually split the Blue and White Party because half of his own party walked out and said, we're not cutting any deal with Netanyahu, which basically gives Netanyahu an enormous coalition.
And there's no way he gets thrown out of office barring an actual criminal proceeding at this point.
But put Israel aside, the rest of these cases are cases where authoritarian governments are maximizing their power.
The gravity of the coronavirus pandemic, which just in two weeks has killed several thousand people in Europe and the United States, according to the Wall Street Journal, has already generated unprecedented restrictions on fundamental liberties in much of the West.
These restrictions, if they lead to postponement of elections in some countries, don't by themselves alter a nation's democratic nature.
The UK remains a democracy through World War II, despite draconian wartime legislation.
That was true in the United States as well.
But the question is going to be how long this lasts beyond.
Because obviously we've seen authoritarians rise in places ranging from the Philippines to Turkey.
How much will these measures stay in place after the emergency is over?
This is why I mentioned earlier when Bill de Blasio says that if you violate his orders regarding staying home from synagogue, he is going to shut down your building permanently.
That's where you start to run into serious constitutional concerns and concerns about basic fundamental civil liberties.
Meanwhile, China's propaganda apparatus has already launched an all-out effort at home and abroad to portray It's ability to contain the virus as a testament to the superiority of its party-state system.
And you're starting to see members of the media repeat this garbage.
Members of the media will say, look at how China locked this thing down.
Isn't it amazing how China locked this thing down?
Look how authoritarianism is so great.
I remember years ago, Thomas Friedman expressed his sort of wonderment at the Chinese one-party system in true Walter Durante fashion.
Walter Durante was the columnist for the New York Times who went over to the Soviet Union, completely ignored the fact that they were starving millions of people in Ukraine and talked about how he had seen the future and it was working.
Yeah, well, you've seen the same thing from journalists since time immemorial.
Edward Snow was a journalist, I believe, for the New York Times, who went to Mao's China and walked around with Mao and came away with the conclusion that China was a wonderful, great, authoritarian state.
Well, now you're seeing the same sort of stuff from many journalists with regard to China.
Look at a wonderful job they did locking this whole thing down.
China's lying.
China is continuing to lie.
If you buy their lies, you are forwarding their lies.
I don't know why in the world you'd want to forward the aspirations of the Chinese Communist regime, one of the worst regimes on planet Earth, if not the worst regime on planet Earth, by buying the lie that they locked this thing down with alacrity and suddenly they are some sort of altruistic nation.
I've seen so many journalists, I can't even tell you, who are repeating Chinese propaganda, and it's astonishing to me.
Astonishing.
People saying, yeah, the United States is number one in cases.
It shows how we failed.
We're the worst in the world.
Really?
Are we the worst in the world?
Did we weld people in their houses and then allow 5 million people to leave the region from a pandemic zone and move into the rest of the world?
Did we do that?
Did we lie to the WHO about human-to-human transmission?
Are we killing people who are speaking out about the pandemic in the United States?
I miss that part.
I miss that part.
If you are doing the propaganda work of the Chinese, you're doing the work of authoritarians.
The Kremlin has joined the bandwagon.
Russian military trucks laden with surprise are parading through the streets of Italy this week in order to demonstrate that Russia is in fact handling this thing supremely well.
The initial wavering and slow decision-making that allowed the virus to spread in Europe and the U.S.
have been described with near glee on Russian TV.
Although, again, we have no information from inside the Kremlin on how this thing is going because, of course, the Kremlin is not going to release any of that information.
Moscow insists it's able to keep the infection at relatively low levels, despite reports of many hidden cases, and has not imposed a lockdown so far.
Andrei Kortunov, Director General of the Russian International Affairs Council, says as far as the Russian leadership is concerned, this crisis confirms its worldview that Western systems are inefficient, that the liberal political model simply can't cope.
Okay, alternatively, what's happening is that authoritarian states are using a crisis in order to maximize their authoritarianism.
That's what they're doing.
Okay, everybody maximizes authoritarianism during times of crisis.
Woodrow Wilson did it in the United States.
FDR did it in the United States.
The question is, do things go back to normal when the crisis ends?
And in many nations, the answer is no.
In Azerbaijan, President Ilham Aliyev last week labeled his political opposition national traitors endangering public health.
He said during the existence of the disease, isolation of the representatives of the fifth column will become a historical necessity.
Again, this is not a great shock.
The fact is that authoritarians are always gonna maximize their power.
Do not be complicit by repeating the propaganda they put out there in order to maximize their system's supposed credibility at the expense of democracies, which, yes, react slowly, but do react better and actually respect the rights of their citizens when these things are over.
Okay, so we'll be back here later today with two additional hours of content.
Plus, five o'clock tonight, I'll be back here hanging out with you.
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