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April 1, 2020 - The Ben Shapiro Show

01:05:07

Models Of Doom | Ep. 984

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	The White House releases models suggesting at least 100,000 Americans could die in the coronavirus pandemic.
	The Fed continues to pump dollars into the economy, and partisanship continues to rear its ugly head.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
	The Ben Shapiro Show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.
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	All right, so let's just jump right into the coronavirus updates.
	So as of yesterday, this is according to Worldometers, the United States experienced nearly a thousand new deaths from coronavirus.
	We are now in excess of 4,000 deaths in the United States from coronavirus.
	We had the biggest single-day tally of death.
	That is not unexpected.
	We are expecting those numbers to rise, presumably, according to the models, every day up until April 15th, tax day.
	The United States already has close to 200,000 cases that have been diagnosed in the United States, and we are starting to see all of the emergency situations in hospitals coming to fruition.
	Although we have not yet been forced to ration ventilators, the situation in ERs, particularly New York is very ugly.
	Seth Mandel, who is the editor over the Washington Examiner magazine, he just got a note from a doctor friend in Queens, says, I spent 24 of the last 36 hours in my ER.
	It's an absolute nightmare.
	I personally intubated three patients in just under an hour.
	We have over 400 patients admitted with coronavirus.
	82 of them are on ventilators.
	To put things in perspective, my ER is built to have about 80 to 100 patients.
	We had 172 people admitted.
	With COVID-19 crammed into spots, corners, crevices, all of our ICU and step-down units together can usually handle 50 patients.
	We are managing ventilators in hallways.
	Now, again, managing ventilators in hallways is still better than no ventilators, but it is obviously Insufficient to deal with the influx of people who are being admitted to hospitals and ERs in the New York region.
	In 22 years of medicine, says this doctor, I've never seen the staff look this tired physically and emotionally drained.
	At least twice an hour we hear the call overhead that somebody upstairs is in cardiac arrest.
	This acutely exacerbates our distress.
	People we were caring for are dead 12 hours later.
	30-year-olds, 50-year-olds, 70-year-olds, nobody is spared now.
	At this point it is worthy of mention.
	If you go into the ER, there's a good shot that, or at least a better shot, that there is something seriously wrong with you in terms of the people across the country who are getting coronavirus and then getting significant symptoms.
	If you're older, if you have pre-existing conditions, that's where the real risk lies.
	This doctor says we're at the breaking point.
	We're out of space in our hospital.
	We're out of space in the emergency room.
	I was caring for a woman with an oxygen level of 64%.
	I had to have her sitting in a chair for an hour until I could find a stretcher.
	Multiple doctors in the hospital are out sick with the virus.
	I'm caring for patients in their homes.
	As long as their oxygen level is above 90%, I'm trying to keep them from going to the hospital.
	So obviously, grim news out of New York.
	We are seeing some trend lines from places like New Orleans that are looking fairly ugly.
	We're seeing some trend lines from Florida that are looking fairly ugly.
	The trend lines in places like Los Angeles are not nearly as ugly yet.
	In San Francisco, the trend lines have evened out to a significant extent.
	The social distancing is working.
	Those measures that have been put in place, we are seeing the sort of contrasting data you would expect to see.
	Highly populated areas that took a little longer to lock down are seeing trend lines that are a lot uglier than areas that are sparsely populated and or are locked down more often.
	And to pretend that every single area of the United States should be treating this equivalently is foolhardy.
	Obviously, if you're in a rural area where you're not seeing tons of people on a daily basis, you shouldn't be treating this exactly the same way you would if you're living in a heavily populated area like New York City.
	But even in Europe, You're starting to see the differential data emerge from places like Sweden, Netherlands, Denmark.
	Places that are locking down in Northern Europe are seeing the curve start to flatten.
	Places like Sweden are seeing the curve start to steepen.
	So, obviously the social distancing measures are, in fact, effective.
	And now, does that mean that in the end, when all is said and done, the social distancing measures will have been worth wrecking the entire world economy?
	We don't know yet.
	I mean, frankly, all we can do at this point is go on the best available data.
	And that's what these models that were presented by the White House yesterday are.
	That's really what it comes down to.
	So yesterday, over at the White House, The Trump administration laid out some models for what is going to happen going forward.
	President Trump announced that this is going to be painful.
	There's going to be painful weeks and months ahead.
	This obviously is true.
	Reality has set in for the Trump administration, but it's been set in for about three weeks now.
	We're starting to see all the recriminations from the partisans in the media who are suggesting, well, if Trump had just been on top of this in late January, then everything would have been different.
	Well, listen, it would have been great if the Trump administration had been Over seeing the CDC with regard to testing a lot earlier and a lot better.
	It also would've been great if three successive administrations had not ignored all of the requests for building up ventilator and hospital bed capacity.
	That would've been really good.
	Also, it would've been great if the Democrats had not been downplaying it at the same time as Trump.
	I'm getting kind of sick of the sort of timeline politics that are being played right here where Democrats We're calling for a full lockdown in late January.
	That's not true.
	If Donald Trump in January 28th, when he issued the China travel ban, had said, not only am I barring travel from China, also we need a two-week lockdown so we can ramp up testing in the United States.
	You think Democrats would have gone along with that?
	Is there any shot at all that Democrats would have gone along with it?
	Vox was running pieces in late January about how this was the seasonal flu.
	So let's be real about the fact that nobody knew anything in late January sufficient to take the most drastic step in the history of the American economy and in the history of American government in a non-wartime scenario.
	Let's be real about the timeline.
	Let's be real about imperfect knowledge in times of imperfect knowledge.
	Let's also be real about the way that the media are treating some of these death tolls.
	So you're seeing a lot of headlines today.
	Things like The United States could be on pace to lose more people than the Vietnam War, that yesterday we surpassed the death toll from 9-11.
	Yes, because these diseases are not like wars or like terrorist attacks, you idiots.
	Okay, there's a lot of talk about how this is not like the flu.
	That's true, it's not like the flu.
	It's like the flu in that it is a disease.
	It is not like the flu in that it has a much higher transmissibility rate and presumably a higher death rate, although the estimates range from around flu rates to 10 times flu rates, and those estimates vary, ranging from Dr. Jay Bhattacharya from Stanford who says this is going to look like seasonal flu when it comes to the final fatality rates, to the folks over at Imperial College who think that it's around 1%.
	But, with all of that said...
	To compare this to Vietnam is idiotic.
	To compare this to 9-11 is idiotic.
	I mean, if we're going to do disease tolls as compared to wars, then let's just be straight about the flu itself.
	The flu itself, in a bad year, will kill 58,000, 60,000 people in a bad year in the United States.
	That's as many as we lost during the entire Vietnam War.
	It never saw any headlines about how the flu is our new Vietnam.
	That's not the way this works.
	A disease is a disease.
	It requires really strict treatment right now.
	But to compare it to terrorist attacks or the Vietnam War, which were In large part, political failures is just ignorance, okay?
	What we are watching right here is a pandemic washing through the population and taking out a lot of people.
	Not even- You want to compare it to something compared to the Spanish flu from 1918?
	You want to compare it to something compared to the 1958 Hong Kong flu?
	If you want to compare it to something, compare it to SARS.
	Compare it to other diseases, you idiots!
	This is a category error.
	Do not compare it to wars.
	Wars are not the same thing.
	Botchery and wars is not quite the same thing as we have a shortage of ventilator supplies and we are all doing our best to get those ventilators out there and also we have to stay home.
	That is not the same thing in any way, shape, or form, and your media, who are so determined to turn this into a political disaster as opposed to just a human disaster, are making a very large-scale mistake.
	Okay, we're going to get to what exactly President Trump said yesterday.
	We're going to get to all of the modeling, and we're going to get to some more data talking about who is actually the most vulnerable in all of this.
	We'll get to all of that momentarily.
	Let's talk about the reality.
	The reality of the situation is that we like to make the most out of our day.
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	I want every American to be prepared for the hard days that lie ahead.
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	Okay, so President Trump yesterday gives this press conference at the White House, and he says this is going to be a very, very rough couple of weeks.
	We're going to have some rough weeks and months ahead.
	This obviously is true.
	I want every American to be prepared for the hard days that lie ahead.
	We're going to go through a very tough two weeks.
	And then hopefully, as the experts are predicting, as I think a lot of us are predicting after having studied it so hard, You're going to start seeing some real light at the end of the tunnel, But this is going to be a very painful, very, very painful two weeks.
	When you look and see at night the kind of death that's been caused by this invisible enemy, it's incredible.
	It is indeed distressing.
	And that was a very rough press conference yesterday.
	I mean, it was a useful press conference, but it was a rough press conference because it was finally the acknowledgement that a lot of people are going to die from this.
	According to the modeling, President Trump did go out of his way to praise doctors and nurses.
	Again, I've been doing that every day on the program too.
	Registered nurses, respiratory therapists.
	And I watched the doctors and the nurses walking into that hospital this morning.
	It's like military people going into battle, going into war.
	The bravery is incredible.
	of the reasons we got to expedite the creation of the of the masks and the personal protective equipment.
	Here's President Trump yesterday praising the doctors and the nurses.
	And I watched the doctors and the nurses walking into that hospital this morning.
	It's like military people going into battle going into war.
	The bravery is incredible and I just have to take my hat.
	I I would take my hat.
	If I were wearing a hat, I'd rip that hat off so fast.
	And I would say you people are just incredible.
	They really are.
	They're very brave.
	Okay.
	Meanwhile, President Trump did finally say coronavirus is not the flu.
	That comes several weeks after he said that it was very much like the flu.
	Now, to be real, Vox also, as I say, Vox is a left-wing outlet run by Ezra Klein.
	Nice guy.
	We had him on the Sunday special.
	But Vox.com in late January was saying that this was like the flu.
	They ended up deleting that tweet.
	And it depends on what you mean by like the flu.
	I mean, I don't mean to be a lawyer here, but it does I mean, this is a virus.
	It is a very grave, very serious virus.
	It does spread like the flu, only more so.
	It is more deadly than the flu.
	So if you're saying it's like the flu, as in it is just exactly like the flu, like you're equating them, that's true.
	That's not true at all.
	If you are saying that it is disease like the flu, that is certainly more accurate than saying it's like Vietnam or 9-11.
	Anyway, here's President Trump acknowledging finally that coronavirus is not like the flu.
	And listen, he's been on this track for weeks now.
	I don't think anybody in the country really believes that coronavirus is like the flu.
	That's why we're all in our houses right now.
	Here's President Trump.
	A lot of people have said, a lot of people have thought about it.
	Write it out.
	Don't do anything.
	Just write it out and think of it as the flu.
	But it's not the flu.
	It's vicious.
	When you send a friend to the hospital and you call up to find out, how is he doing?
	It happened to me, where he goes to the hospital.
	He says goodbye.
	He's sort of a tough guy.
	A little older, a little heavier than he'd like to be, frankly.
	And you call up the next day, how's he doing?
	And he's in a coma?
	This is not the flu.
	Yeah, obviously, President Trump is correct about this.
	Dr. Anthony Fauci, he got up and he said, okay, well, let's just lay it out on the table.
	We expect between 100,000 and 240,000 deaths, and that includes the mitigation.
	That includes the mitigation.
	Now, Fauci, as we'll see, also said that we could be completely wrong, right?
	The data's only good as what we are putting in.
	Modeling is only as good as the data that you put in.
	If the situation changes, then the outcomes change fairly radically.
	We saw this from Dr. Neil Ferguson over at Imperial College in London.
	He originally had suggested that if there was no mitigation, then you could see millions of deaths, half a million deaths in the UK.
	And then with mitigation, it could be like 20,000 deaths.
	And then he downgraded again.
	He said, maybe we're only going to see 5,000 or 10,000 deaths.
	from this.
	But here is Dr. Fauci suggesting that the models are showing 100 to 240,000 deaths with mitigation.
	Now notice, the range on that is enormous.
	I mean, that's an enormous range.
	There's a major difference between 100,000 and 240,000 deaths across the United States.
	To put this by way of contrast, about 640,000 people, 650,000 people die every year in the United States from heart disease.
	About 600,000 die in the United States from cancer.
	The difference between 100,000 and 240,000 is basically the death toll times two from the flu.
	That's about 100,000 in a bad year.
	And the death toll, that is like half of heart disease in the United States, which is a huge, huge number.
	Anyway, here is Dr. Fauci saying, here's what we expect.
	But again, the range shows how much uncertainty there is in the modeling.
	And that's not the fault of the modelers.
	That's just the reality of life.
	I mean, the data that we are getting from China has not been accurate so far.
	There's been wide variation in the data that we are getting from places like Italy and places like Germany.
	If you look at the actual per capita deaths per 1 million population, it varies incredibly widely.
	Right now, the United States has 12 deaths per 1 million population.
	That will go up because the population does not rise, really, and the deaths do rise.
	You're going to see that number go up.
	In Italy, you've seen 206 deaths per 1 million population.
	So literally 20 times as many deaths per 1 million of the population in Italy as in the United States.
	Same kind of thing in Spain.
	Spain has Italy-type numbers.
	France, which is a little bit ahead of us on the curve, they have 54 deaths per 1 million population.
	The Netherlands has 68 deaths per 1 million population.
	Belgium has 71.
	If you were to say that the United States ends up performing more like those nations, that in the end we end up in the 70 range, 70 deaths per 1 million population, Which is sort of like the countries that are not Spain and not Italy but also not being spared this horrific virus.
	Then you would end up with approximately 23,000 deaths in the United States.
	So maybe that ends up being really low.
	Maybe that ends up being really low, but maybe it doesn't.
	Maybe it ends up being about right if we all stay home and if we all take the precautions.
	Now, one of the questions is going to be, these estimates are made over the course of the year.
	How are they even modeling?
	They didn't break down the model in super specific detail yesterday at the White House.
	How are they actually modeling the second wave?
	How are they modeling the possibility of us going back to work?
	Because this is with heavy mitigation measures.
	Again, giving sort of the bottom line doesn't give you all the details that you need at this point.
	What's the timeline here?
	Not totally clear.
	It seems that they are using the University of Washington study as the basis for these statistics.
	That study suggested in the next four months there will be 81,000 deaths.
	It will peak around April 15th.
	We'll see about 2,300 deaths that day.
	Well, 81,000 deaths in the next four months doesn't really – I'm not sure how that model ends up with as we relax things over the course of the next 12 months because that's what we're going to have to do.
	How do you end up with only 100,000 deaths if you have 81,000 by the end of the summer?
	That's sort of difficult to fathom.
	In any case, here was Dr. Fauci announcing those numbers.
	Dr. Fauci, should Americans be prepared for the likelihood that there will be 100,000 Americans who die from this virus?
	Did The answer is yes.
	We need, as sobering a number as that is, we should be prepared for it.
	Is it going to be that much?
	I hope not.
	And I think the more we push on the mitigation, the less likelihood it would be that number.
	But as being realistic, we need to prepare ourselves that that is a possibility, that that's what we will see.
	Okay, again, that's a lot of hedging right there, right?
	And that's good.
	I mean, the hedging is good.
	I think that one of the things the government is doing right now, I think Fauci's doing this, I think Birx is doing this, I think Trump is doing this, is they're saying, here's how bad things could get even with the stuff we have in place.
	So how about hunker down more?
	How about more of what you're doing, right?
	If in doubt, stay home is sort of the message that's coming out from the government.
	I don't think that's necessarily the wrong message.
	You know, again, I am not an epidemiologist, so I'm not going to doubt the numbers.
	I'm just going to point out there's a lot of play in the joints here, because that is factually true.
	There is a lot of play in these joints.
	That's why the models are constantly changing, constantly shifting, constantly being revised and updated.
	Even Fauci said that, right?
	Fauci said the models are only as good as the assumptions you put into them.
	Here's Dr. Fauci yesterday making clear that these models are not in any way the word of God.
	What we do is that every time we get more data, you feed it back in and re-look at the model.
	Is the model really telling you what's actually going on?
	And again, I know my modeling colleagues are going to not be happy with me, but models are as good as the assumptions you put into them.
	And as we get more data, Then you put it in and that might change.
	So even though it says according to the model, which is a good model that we're dealing with, this is full mitigation.
	As we get more data as the weeks go by, that could be modified.
	Right.
	I mean, so keep that in mind, right?
	The numbers that they're giving right now are sort of a very, very basic guide.
	They're not the final word on this by any stretch of the imagination.
	We'll get to more of this in just one second.
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	In the middle of a very unpleasant situation.
	All right, so Dr. Deborah Birx, she followed up from Fauci.
	She says, yeah, you know, we modeled for SARS here, right?
	The Chinese were basically lying to us.
	And so we were modeling for a disease that really has a completely different vector than this particular disease.
	I think when you looked at the China data originally and you said, oh, well, there's 80 million people, you start thinking of this more like SARS than you do this kind of global pandemic.
	So I think the medical community made, interpreted the Chinese data as that this was serious, but smaller.
	than anyone expected because I think probably we were missing a significant amount of the data now that when we see what happened to Italy and we see what happened to Spain.
	Okay, so, as we put in new data, we change the model.
	Now, there is some good news here.
	Fauci did say in an interview yesterday that the rate of increase is dropping off across the United States, which, as I say, suggests that the social distancing measures, the stay-at-home stuff, is actually working.
	It's starting to work not just in the United States, it's working in Italy as well.
	Here's Anthony Fauci talking about it.
	So what we're starting to see right now is just the inklings and I don't want to put too much stock on it because you don't want to get overconfident, just want to keep pushing on what you're doing.
	You're starting to see that the daily increases are not in that steep incline They're starting to be able to possibly flatten out.
	I mean, again, you look at it carefully, hope it's going in the right direction, but that's what we really are trying to attain, that multi-phase component where it ultimately starts to come down.
	Okay, so that is some good news.
	Italy, by the way, is starting to see the curve flattened just a bit.
	Marcus Walker from the Wall Street Journal reports, Italian authorities believe the country's coronavirus epidemic is slowing down appreciably after three weeks of national lockdown, a hopeful sign for other Western countries that are following approaches similar to Italy's with a time lag.
	Italian officials and health experts said it will take until after Easter to cut new infections enough to begin loosening the lockdown and reopening parts of Italy's economy.
	Silvio Bruce Aferro, president of the National Health Institute, Italy's main disease control center, says we seem to be arriving at a sort of plateau, which shows that the measures are working.
	Meanwhile, there's new CDC data that is out showing that the people who are most at risk are obviously, we have seen this already, people who are suffering from pre-existing conditions.
	People of chronic medical conditions like diabetes, lung disease, heart disease.
	They face an increased chance of being hospitalized with COVID-19 and put into intensive care, according to new data from the CDC.
	That is consistent with all the reports from China and Italy as well.
	The new data gives the most sweeping look at the way COVID-19 is causing serious illnesses among people in the United States who already face medical challenges.
	The report reinforces a critically important lesson.
	Although the disease is typically more severe among older people, people of any age with underlying medical conditions are at increased risk if they contract the virus.
	Now, that is true.
	But again, the people who are most at risk are the people who have those underlying medical conditions.
	The pre-existing conditions covered in the CDC records include heart and lung diseases, diabetes, chronic renal disease, chronic liver disease, immunocompromised conditions, neurological disorders, Neurodevelopmental or intellectual disability, pregnancy, current or former smoker status, and other chronic disease, the CDC found, of people requiring admissions when ICU, 78% had at least one underlying health condition.
	Of people hospitalized but not requiring ICU, 71% had at least one such condition, compared to 27% of people who didn't need to be hospitalized.
	Among all cases analyzed, 10.9% of patients had diabetes, 9.2% had chronic lung disease, 9% had cardiovascular disease.
	There was no report as to whether severity of disease corresponded to pre-existing condition.
	But with all of that said...
	Obviously, those with pre-existing conditions are at the highest levels of risk.
	Now, as I've said, one of the questions about the modeling in all of this is going to be, what is the time delay factor here?
	So that University of Washington model I said earlier, 81,000 deaths by July, they're talking about 84,000 deaths by August, something like that.
	And then total, they're saying like somewhere between 100 and 240,000 deaths.
	Hard to see how if we have 84,000 deaths by August, and there's a second wave, That doesn't look really a lot higher by the time we get to the end of the year.
	I mean, the fact remains.
	That we are seeing a second wave of diseases that are breaking out in Asia as well.
	And that does raise the question of how we reopen all of this.
	Holman Jenkins over the Wall Street Journal asks that question.
	He says, experts are now planning ways to get Americans back to work with mass testing and mass provision of masks and gloves.
	Second, thoughts about the lockdown aren't due only to economic costs.
	Accumulating evidence seems to show COVID-19 spreading to the most vulnerable through close family contact rather than casual interactions.
	The experts' recovery plans But is that even possible?
	...on whether the goal is to slow the rate at which we get exposed or save us from getting infected altogether.
	The polling data on which President Trump made the decision this week to extend social distancing guidelines... ...can be read as most Americans believing they should be kept safe from ever getting the virus.
	But is that even possible?
	Holman Jenkins says, if we were being as candid in the U.S. as they are in Australia... ...each of us might be asking ourselves the herd immunity question...
	So I belong among the 60% who need to get infected or the 40% who should avoid all exposure until the epidemic snuffs itself out.
	He says, I tend to think of myself as on the bubble.
	This is right.
	When we get back to work, we're going to have to determine who is the most likely to get the disease and die from the disease as people go back to work, because this cannot last indefinitely.
	It just cannot.
	There's no way that we can be in August and everybody is still working from home.
	Not with the unemployment rates shooting up to in excess of 30%.
	That's not going to work.
	Everybody is furloughing people.
	Everybody is taking salary cuts.
	Everybody is laying people off.
	And you can't just float people money until the end of time.
	That's not something that is even possible.
	And as I say, Asia has a new wave of virus cases that demonstrate that this thing is not going away anytime soon.
	According to the New York Times, in China, international flights have been cut back so severely that Chinese students abroad wonder when they will be able to get home.
	In Singapore, recently returned citizens must share their phone's location data with the authorities each day to prove they are sticking to government-ordered quarantines across Asia.
	Countries and cities that seem to have brought the coronavirus epidemic under control are suddenly tightening their borders, imposing stricter containment measures, fearful about a wave of new infections imported from elsewhere.
	The moves pretend a worrisome sign for the United States, Europe, and the rest of the world still battling a surging outbreak.
	Any country's success with containment could be tenuous.
	The world could remain on a kind of indefinite lockdown.
	But here's the thing.
	That lockdown cannot, in fact, remain completely indefinite.
	There is no way for the lockdown To remain completely indefinite given the fact that the Fed cannot just continue floating people money forever.
	Bloomberg is reporting the Federal Reserve is now acting as the central banker to the world by seeking to provide the global financial system with dollar liquidity it needs to avoid seizing up.
	In its latest measure to combat the economic fallout from coronavirus, the Fed said Tuesday it was establishing A new program that was designed to provide liquidity across the world.
	It was establishing a temporary repurchase agreement facility to allow foreign central banks to swap any treasury securities they hold for cash.
	So we are going to give them cash, they're going to sell us back our bonds.
	So basically you've got treasury buying back all the bonds, which essentially means inflation.
	That's yet another step beyond the actions it took in the 2008 financial crisis.
	Former Fed official Ted Truman, now senior fellow for the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, says to the Federal Reserve's credit, it is playing the role of central bankers of the world rather than denying it and trying to ward it off.
	The Fed is trying to prevent a liquidity squeeze amid a worldwide rush into dollars as the virus wreaks havoc on a global economy that is dependent on the dollar as its linchpin.
	Julia Coronado, founding partner of Macro Policy Perspectives in New York, former Fed economist, said in an interview, a lot of borrowing in commerce and investing is done When you have dollar crunch, it can turn a recession or contraction into a financial crisis very quickly because the dollar shortage can trigger defaults and deleveraging, meaning people start calling in their loans.
	The loans are bad.
	People who have loans to the lenders or who have securities that are backed by those loans start to default.
	So the Fed is basically inflating.
	Well, you can't inflate forever.
	I mean, it's just not possible to continue inflating until the end of time.
	And that means that we are going to have to get to work at some point.
	And that also means that we're going to have to come up with some new plans.
	Maybe one of those plans would be the reintroduction of masks, right?
	Everybody in the government was basically fibbing to you for months when they said you don't need a mask.
	The truth is you probably do.
	Not to avoid getting disease, but to avoid spreading disease.
	Scott Gottlieb has stated as much, who's on CNBC this morning, and he said, why are we not using masks?
	Like, look at the vectors of countries that are using masks.
	It's a lot better.
	I think now that it's become epidemic in certain cities, a mask can be of value.
	A mask has two benefits.
	One, it can protect you.
	It does provide incremental protection if you wear it right, and it doesn't encourage you to touch your face.
	The problem with the mask is when people have it on, sometimes they're more likely to adjust it and touch their face, and then that defeats the purpose of the mask.
	But the bigger benefit from the mask is that if you have infection, it dramatically reduces your risk of transmitting that infection.
	The mask is going to provide incremental benefit regardless.
	And I think, you know, if we're at the point of telling people they have to shelter in place, I think imposing a requirement that they have to wear a mask if they do, in fact, go out isn't isn't that burdensome.
	I mean, that that of course is exactly right.
	We're going to have to start thinking differently about how we do the office.
	I think a lot of people who can continue to work from home will continue to work from home.
	Otherwise, people are going to go back to stores, people are going to go back to retail establishments.
	And hell, wouldn't you rather wear a mask at this point and be able to go to a store?
	I mean, seriously, what a mask prevents you from doing is touching your own face.
	That's what masks are designed to do.
	And I've seen a bunch of people at the grocery store, when I go, who are either not wearing masks at all, or if you're wearing a mask, you're wearing it over your mouth, but not over your nose.
	Don't be an idiot.
	Wear it over your nose.
	That's what the masks are designed to do.
	They're designed to prevent you from breathing out your germs on everybody else.
	The other thing that masks are good for is to prevent you from touching your own nose and mouth, which are going to, again, be the typical vectors.
	Now, you touch your face, there's a better chance that you're going to get somebody else's germs on you.
	But we're going to have to think about how do we socially distance?
	How do we get people back to work?
	How do we delay this thing?
	Maybe the summer helps us.
	Maybe the summer really helps kill this thing off.
	But do we start wearing masks again come the winter?
	At least until a vaccine is developed?
	I think the answer is probably yes.
	Now, does that mean that the masks are available right now?
	No, but I promise you that the mask development is going to ramp up dramatically, dramatically in the very, very near future.
	Now, speaking of the resources, the federal government is bringing all of its resources to bear.
	I mean, nobody, again, it's easy to say people expected this, but when you have a federal government that has two million people in it, and when you have tons of reports each and every day, and you can pick reports over the course of a decade and a half saying we need more ventilators, we need more masks, and everybody basically ignored them, it's hard to specifically fault the Trump administration for that.
	I remember the same sort of thing happened after 9-11.
	I remember there was a report that said that perhaps terrorists are seeking to use planes, and then everyone was like, oh, well, the Bush administration should have known.
	Yeah, and there were similar reports during the Clinton administration, and also it didn't say the planes were going to be crashed into the World Trade Center.
	And bottom line is this.
	The one thing the government is supposed to be good at, right?
	The government is a giant lumbering idiot, right?
	That's what the government is.
	The one thing it is supposed to be good at is planning for catastrophic situations.
	It also is another thing the government is bad at, because the government is bad at everything.
	And when the government actually responds, it can do so in a more collectivized fashion than individuals can.
	But that does not mean that the government is good at risk assessment.
	The government is very not good at risk assessment.
	And laying that exclusively at the feet of Trump is a mistake.
	With that said, supplies are being brought to bear.
	The U.S.
	Surgeon General, Jerome Adams, said this yesterday.
	People need to stay at home.
	You've heard me say it many times.
	We are working around the clock to get supplies to cities across the country, to mayors and to governors, but we aren't going to supply our way out of this problem.
	The way we solve this problem is by everyone coming together, stopping the spread, by limiting large gatherings, by staying at home.
	So, you know, again, we are mobilizing.
	Even Andrew Cuomo in New York, he's been saying the White House has been very helpful.
	Again, I'm sort of bewildered as to how the media treatment works here, because the way the media treatment seems to work is they praise Cuomo for basically just giving pressers every day.
	I mean, really, like, he's doing what he's supposed to be doing, but I don't see how he's doing anything different than Gavin Newsom.
	He just receives outside praise because he has been openly critical of President Trump in a way that Gavin Newsom has not.
	So I guess that makes him hero of the resistance.
	Anyway, here's Andrew Cuomo acknowledging the White House has been very helpful here.
	The federal government is a partner in this, obviously.
	I spoke to the president again yesterday about this situation.
	I spoke to the vice president.
	I spoke to Jared Kushner.
	The White House has been very helpful.
	Okay, so obviously that is good.
	Okay, so in just a second we're going to get to What is important and what is not important about what is happening in the media because then the media have obviously been been covering the wrong kind of stuff and the angles that they are taking are politically driven very often and that that truly is ugly.
	We're going to get to that in just one second.
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	So one of the, you know, one of the unfortunate aspects of this is the media covering all the wrong stuff.
	The media would prefer to do recriminations right now than, like, get the information to the public about what needs to happen.
	So every so often, you get an article that's actually useful.
	So, for example, the business section of the Washington Post today has an article of frequently asked questions about how you, a small business owner, can actually get a small business loan.
	That's good, right?
	I mean, that's useful.
	We need to know that sort of stuff.
	That article, by the way, does talk about when the funding will be made available.
	Apparently the loans will be made available starting on Friday.
	That goal was confirmed Tuesday by senior administration officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
	So if you're a small business and you need a loan, then by Friday they're supposed to get this situation online.
	The application has been really stripped down from what they normally use at the Small Business Administration.
	Same day approvals will still be a challenge.
	Most small businesses will take days gathering the documents they need to apply.
	Even the most sophisticated banks will have a hard time short-cutting their processes to get money out the door really fast, according to Haicham Odgiri, the chief executive of small business-focused data analytics firm.
	The new loans will cover payroll costs and employee benefits, mortgage interest incurred before February 15th, 2020.
	Rent and utilities under lease agreements in force between February 15th, 2020 and utilities, for which the service began before February 2020.
	Payroll costs include salary, wages, commissions, and tips capped at $100,000 for each employee.
	It also includes benefits for vacation, parental leave, medical leave, sick leave, some other limited benefit categories.
	In some cases, they can also cover interest on other debts.
	The new loans are available to any business for which current economic uncertainty makes the loan necessary.
	Approved lenders will make a determination of need for your business based on SBA guidelines.
	There will be no SBA separate review.
	Small businesses, nonprofits, tribal business concerns that meet the SBA's standard business size definition with fewer than 500 employees are eligible for loans under the program.
	Self-employed individuals, independent contractors, sole proprietors are also eligible.
	If you're in the food service business, the 500 employee cap is applied on a per physical location basis.
	So presumably restaurant chains are allowed to get these loans.
	The loans could be up to 10 million dollars to cover payroll and certain other expenses or 2.5 times your total payroll expenses from the loan period.
	The sorts of stuff that could disqualify you?
	Well, you can't receive a Paycheck Protection Program loan if your business or any of its owners have been previously suspended, disbarred, proposed for debarment, declared ineligible.
	You'll be excluded if you've ever taken a loan from the SBA that caused a loss.
	So, we're not just going to reward you with another loan if you've failed before with an SBA loan.
	The application also excludes businesses in which any 20% owner is an individual who is currently subject to criminal charges.
	The new loans apply to costs incurred from February 15th through June 30th.
	The Treasury Department is setting the loan rate at 0.5%, but the CARES Act caps the interest rate for Paycheck Protection Program at 4%, so it's possible the interest rate could increase over time.
	The first payment is due six months after it is incurred.
	The full loan is due after two years.
	Also, it looks like there could be some loan waivers.
	The loan could be forgiven.
	If you cover costs for the first eight weeks for companies able to keep employees on the payroll or continue paying bills throughout the coronavirus pandemic.
	So the eligibility for loan forgiveness starts eight weeks after loan origination date.
	So that is some basic information.
	That's good journalism, right?
	That's some useful stuff that you can use right now.
	What is not useful right now is most of the stuff on the op-ed pages, which is mainly directed at playing the blame game and suggesting that the Trump administration is the worst, or Jim Acosta going out there and just sparring with the president because he just feels like pissing on the president.
	Like, Jim Acosta.
	And man, ladies, find you somebody who loves you like Jim Acosta loves Jim Acosta.
	Here's Jim Acosta going at the president yesterday again asking useless questions.
	Is there any fairness to the criticism that you may have lulled Americans into a false sense of security when you were saying things like it's going to go away?
	Well, it is.
	And that sort of thing, but... Jim, it's going away.
	But when you were saying... It's going to go away, hopefully at the end of the month, and if not, it hopefully will be soon after that.
	Hasn't your thinking on this evolved?
	You're taking it more seriously now.
	I think from the beginning, my attitude was that we have to give this country hope.
	I know how bad it was.
	All you have to do is look at what was going on in China.
	It was devastation.
	I'm not about bad news.
	I want to give people hope.
	I want to give people a feeling that we all have a chance.
	Okay, a couple things can be true at once.
	One, Trump didn't take this seriously enough in early February.
	In mid-February, in early March, he did not take it seriously enough.
	That is true.
	It is true that the CDC had complete failures during February.
	It is also true that as I've shown you through clip after clip after clip, neither did Mayor Bill de Blasio, neither did Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who on February 24th was down in Chinatown in San Francisco telling people to come on out and party it up.
	So yeah, Trump didn't take it seriously enough, but I have a question, Jim Acosta.
	How does this help us going forward?
	Again, I'm just going to go back to that question that somebody slid to an OANN reporter who was asking Trump a sort of sycophantic question.
	How does this question help us fight coronavirus?
	How is that useful?
	If you're going to ask a question of the President of the United States, how about what factors go into the decision making in terms of how you make a national lockdown pronouncement?
	Should you be making a national lockdown pronouncement given the fact that Florida and Texas are still not locked down?
	What factors go into making that decision?
	And if Trump doesn't have the answer, then he's got Fauci and Birx right there, so he can just go right back to them.
	But the media are too busy playing politics.
	It really is ridiculous.
	By the way, so are many folks on sort of the Democratic left.
	President Obama yesterday decided that it was necessary to sound off about global warming in the midst of all of this.
	He tweeted out, we've all seen too terribly the consequences of those who denied warnings of a pandemic.
	We can't afford any more consequences of climate denial.
	All of us, especially young people, have to demand better of our government at every level and vote this fall.
	I have a question.
	Like, we're in the middle of a global pandemic.
	You think that the global warming talk is really going to be like the thing that we're all worried about super a lot right now?
	By the way, come on global warming.
	I'm rooting for global warming right about now to kill off this virus.
	I'm willing to take the hit 100 years from now if we can have a little more global warming in the next five minutes.
	That'd be fantastic.
	But when President Obama is out there playing this game, question, is that useful?
	Is that super useful?
	Julian Castro, former failed presidential candidate, he says, we have an affordable housing problem in the United States.
	Seriously, that's where you're going with all of this is affordable housing?
	We're trying to fight a global pandemic right now.
	You might want to put your Marxist backburner ideas on backburner.
	One of the things that this coronavirus has revealed is just how close so many million American families are to poverty.
	And one of the things that I think we need to focus on more is that we need to be bolder when it comes to housing assistance to make sure that people can stay in the apartment or the home that they're living in.
	So we need to be addressing this right now for the coronavirus period or crisis that we're in, but also it has demonstrated the long-term problem that we have when it comes to housing affordability out there.
	Okay, come on.
	Come on.
	Your side projects don't matter.
	By the way, neither does President Trump's $2 trillion call for infrastructure spending.
	Sorry, we're too busy destroying the entire future of the American federal budget.
	We're going to do that over here.
	So if you want to add another $2 trillion on top of that to fill potholes, I'm going to go no on that.
	And meanwhile, speaking of New York City, speaking of government watchdogs that just are throwing politics in front of the needs of the American people.
	New York City's human rights watchdog, according to the Wall Street Journal, is now investigating Amazon.com over allegations an employee of a Staten Island warehouse was fired for helping to organize a walkout over work conditions in the midst of the new coronavirus pandemic, according to city officials.
	The company fired Chris Smalls, a stock worker at the warehouse, on Monday.
	The company said in a statement that Smalls violated social distancing guidelines, including ignoring orders to stay home for two weeks after coming into contact with a co-worker who had a confirmed case of COVID-19.
	Walkouts did occur at several warehouses across the country on Monday.
	Employees were protesting what they said were unsafe conditions for the coronavirus pandemic.
	Mayor Bill de Blasio, the worst mayor in America, said at a press conference on Tuesday, the city's Commission on Human Rights is now investigating the allegations.
	High priority.
	Investigate the allegations that Amazon fired A derelict ne'er-do-well attempting to organize walkouts in the middle of a supply chain crisis in the United States.
	If the allegations are true, the mayor said, that would be a violation of our city's human rights law, and we would act on it immediately.
	The spokeswoman for Amazon said, we didn't terminate Mr. Small's employment for organizing a 15-person protest.
	We terminated his employee for putting the health and safety of others at risk, in violation of his terms of employment.
	De Blasio has been criticizing Amazon's work history.
	De Blasio said, we'd all love to have a time machine and go back and figure out how to make this work.
	The fact is, I actually think city government, state government agreed to a fair deal.
	This is after New York nixed the deal with Amazon.
	There's an entire opinion piece in the New York Times talking about the evils of Amazon.com by Greg Bensinger.
	Okay, I'm going to go with like all the people who are in their houses right now relying on that Amazon truck to pull up with their groceries, have a bit of a different thought on all of this.
	And by the way, I don't think that it should be illegal for Amazon to fire a worker for organizing a walkout in the middle of a pandemic after offering all workers a $2 an hour increase in the middle of the vastest unemployment wave in the history of America, and also offering them protective gear, and also offering them that they get to stay home when they are sick, they get paid sick leave, and telling them that they need to stay home when they are sick.
	And people at Amazon, like, let's not forget what the chief demands of these workers who are walking out is.
	Twice their pay.
	Twice their pay.
	You know who's out of work right now who could work at Amazon?
	A lot of people.
	A lot of people.
	Six million people over the last two weeks, in fact, are probably fully capable of walking into an Amazon warehouse right now loading boxes.
	So, it's amazing to me that the media will hold up people as heroes like this.
	You wouldn't be holding up as heroes medical professionals who say they're going to walk out on the job.
	Well, our supply lines matter right now.
	It's amazing.
	The same people who are talking about we need to nationalize, we need to use the Defense Production Act to force businesses to produce, are talking about how I'm talking about how it's right for workers to walk off the job in the middle of this.
	By the way, if the government nationalized this, you'd think the government would be... Jacobin magazine, the commies over there, they said that we should nationalize Amazon in order to make all this better.
	Why?
	So that the government could force people to go to work?
	As opposed to you now calling for the workers to be rewarded for walking off the job?
	It's just amazing and utterly backwards.
	And the New York Times, again, they have an editorial today from Greg Bensinger, a member of the Times editorial board, talking about the evils of Amazon.
	Talking about how it's terrible that bricks-and-mortar retail has been falling apart and Amazon took advantage.
	Okay, if it had not been for Amazon taking advantage, we can't even go to brick-and-mortar stores anymore.
	You couldn't get anything.
	Ben Singer says during the pandemic, reliable delivery of essentials like milk, eggs, toilet paper, cleaning supplies has been a lifeline for those who are reluctant or unable to venture outside their homes.
	Amazon branded trucks have remained a familiar sight in residential neighborhoods.
	The competitive advantage of Amazon's meticulously constructed worldwide logistics network Built to shuttle nearly every imaginable item to customers in as little as an hour are especially evident in this crisis.
	Amazon has pledged to hire 100,000 temporary workers to keep up with demand.
	Several other retail giants like Walmart and Target have kept pace with coronavirus quarantine demands by keeping physical stores open and leaning on their own delivery networks.
	Well, Amazon and Walmart deserve credit for preparing for a calamity.
	Some of their ability to deliver during such a crisis may have come at the cost of employee protections.
	Ah, yes, now is an excellent time to talk about the evils of Amazon.
	Well, it is the only company that is keeping people connected to food.
	Good idea, guys.
	Really, really strong stuff.
	Factories are cutting output.
	We're going to lose six million jobs in the course of two weeks.
	And the folks at the New York Times are concerned that people have their salaries doubled in a time of mass unemployment.
	Really?
	By the way, you think Amazon has an interest in its workers dying off like flies, or its factories being overrun, or its warehouses being overrun with coronavirus?
	I have some serious doubts about all of that.
	Okay, time for a quick thing I like, and then we'll get to a thing that I hate.
	So, quick thing that I like.
	So the WHO definitely needs to feel the heat.
	The World Health Organization has been a disaster area from begin to end.
	They had one job here, one job, and their job was make sure a global pandemic does not overrun the world.
	The United States, by the way, pays millions and millions of dollars into the WHO every single year.
	The United States is the single largest funder of the WHO.
	We contribute nearly 15% of the WHO's annual budget.
	China, which apparently now runs the WHO, contributes a lot less than that.
	China contributes like 2% of the annual budget of the WHO, last time I checked.
	Something like that.
	Well, Rick Scott, the senator from Florida, he says that the WHO needs to be held accountable for their role in promoting misinformation and helping communist China cover up a global pandemic.
	He added, we know communist China is lying about how many cases and deaths they have, what they knew and when they knew it.
	The WHO never bothered to investigate further.
	Their inaction costs lives.
	That of course is 100% true.
	The WHO is a disaster.
	The WHO has refused to admit Taiwan.
	By the way, Taiwan is one of the only nations that actually handled this thing well.
	It's a nation of 24 million people.
	The total number of deaths in Taiwan at this moment is well under 50, I believe.
	So Taiwan has really handled this thing as well as anybody can handle this thing.
	The number of deaths in Taiwan total is 5.
	Out of 329 cases, this is according to worldometers.
	So they have one of the lowest rates of death in the industrialized world from this thing.
	They're not even a member of the WHO at the behest of the Chinese government.
	The WHO has praised Beijing for its response.
	The WHO ignored the fact that Beijing lied about this thing for months.
	As I mentioned yesterday on the radio show, Reason Magazine cited a study that suggested that if the Chinese had been more forthcoming about this thing three weeks earlier, it could have saved 95% of casualties across the planet.
	The WHO has done nothing but praise China and talk about how wonderful China is.
	WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, according to the Daily Caller, who won his election to the post with the backing of China, praised the government's openness to sharing information about the pandemic after traveling there on January 28th.
	Okay, that was like a week after China claimed there was no human-to-human transmission.
	Dr. Bruce Aylward, assistant director of the WHO, has praised China's agile and aggressive response to the virus.
	He's the one who was interviewed by a journalist in Hong Kong who asked why Taiwan isn't part of the WHO, pretended that his connection cut out, and then his biography just mysteriously was removed from the WHO website.
	Aylward said at a WHO press conference on February 27th on a fact-finding mission, which is weird since China has apparently been lying about all of its statistics.
	So the WHO failed at every level.
	Good for Rick Scott for pointing out the United States should not be footing the bill for the WHO's failures here.
	There needs to be a radical reconsideration of exactly how these international organizations are run.
	Because the bottom line is that when it comes to fighting a pandemic, these are not democratic decisions, okay?
	I can think of nothing less democratic than shutting down the entire world economy, okay?
	It's pretty undemocratic.
	Pandemic response is not the same as normal response.
	And international institutions exist for disaster response.
	That is their goal.
	The entire purpose of a WHO is to prevent disasters.
	The entire purpose of a UN is to prevent disasters.
	And yet these things are treated like democracies in the sense that not the most powerful country like the United States has the most weight.
	Instead, the leaders of these nations are going to spend their days recognizing that the U.S.
	will foot the bill and everyone else will free ride.
	China will free ride, and then the United States will just continue footing the bill because we are supposedly the bedrock of international institutions.
	Well, if we're the bedrock, we should start throwing around our weight.
	The fact that the WHO completely failed in its one task and we footed 15% of the budget at the time is a disaster area.
	It truly is.
	And this has been true for the United Nations as well.
	The United Nations has for a very long time been promoting some of the worst policy on planet Earth.
	We've been footing the bill for the United Nations.
	It's time to rejigger exactly how the United States interacts with these international institutions.
	I've heard a lot of people saying the United States should be more multilateral.
	Question.
	Was China super multilateral in its original approach to this problem?
	I don't think it was.
	Do you?
	It was not multilateral, as it turns out.
	It turns out that China was very not multilateral, and its failure to be multilateral is what has led to this pandemic.
	And then, by the way, China started its propaganda effort trying to blame the United States online, and its propaganda effort where they sent resources to other countries, like Spain, that were complete failures.
	They sent testing to Spain.
	The test didn't work.
	But it didn't matter.
	The entire media ran with the headlines.
	Only now are the media beginning to catch on to the fact that China was lying.
	Like, only now.
	It's pretty incredible.
	I mean, the fact that the media are only now realizing that perhaps China is not to be trusted.
	Like, so we should trust the media, which blame Trump but not China, and New York Times editorials about the Trump virus and all of this.
	Okay, good for Rick Scott.
	It's time to, honestly, we need to take a chunk out of China for this.
	The repercussions for this need to be extraordinarily grave.
	Okay, China just cost the planetary economy probably $10 trillion minimum.
	It cost us $6 trillion just here in the United States.
	So, apparently, Beijing is still disappearing people over there.
	Seriously, ridiculous.
	So again, the WHO needs to be re-examined.
	Any international institution in which China takes part needs to be re-examined.
	And we need to start using our leverage in order to force China into a corner.
	They need to be put in the corner.
	It's really horrible.
	Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
	Okay, so there's an article in The Atlantic today by Adrian Vermeule, who's a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School, and I think it is worthy of a brief discussion.
	It's called Beyond Originalism.
	The dominant conservative philosophy for interpreting the Constitution has served its purpose, and scholars ought to develop a more moral framework.
	This is part of the common good conservatism wing of the conservative movement.
	There's a really interesting ideological battle that's been put to the side, obviously, during a global pandemic, but It's kind of interesting and fun to discuss because it will rear its head very quickly, I think, in the near future.
	And that is, there's a side of conservatism right now, or a side of the conservative movement, that basically suggests that government is there to do the common good.
	That government is there to, quote-unquote, do justice.
	Which, if that seems vague and scary to you, that's because it is vague and vaguely frightening.
	The sort of libertarian-ish wing of the classical liberal wing of the Republican Party says that government is there to perform the functions that independent society cannot perform.
	And it is there to enforce neutral rules that the goal of the government is to essentially prevent harms from one person toward another person on the federal level.
	And then when it comes to local government and subsidiarity, when it comes to me and my friends in my local government creating rules for the community we wish to live in, as long as people can leave, then you have a little bit more leeway with what you can do with government.
	That's sort of the traditional classical liberal view, right?
	That mixes a bit of Baron de Montesquieu Localism with the classical liberal philosophy of John Locke, along with probably some John Stuart Mill, the sort of non-harm rule, right?
	That's sort of where I come down.
	Then there's the common good conservatism view, and that suggests that all the things that I like, right, family and church and marriage, And social networking, right, that all of that sort of stuff ought to be promoted by the government, even if that means violating the restrictions on government.
	The government ought to be grown.
	Now, the most dangerous form of this is being expounded by Professor Vermeule, or by Adrian Vermeule.
	He is suggesting that basically conservatives ought to embrace this not as a legislative strategy, not just as we get elected to the federal government, now we're going to push laws that We think promote the common good, which is a sort of lefty perspective on how to use government itself, but that we ought to use the judiciary in order to do so, which is a complete violation of the checks and balances that were originally set forth by the founders.
	And one of the reasons that the founders took a more classically liberal view of what government ought to do is because they had very little trust in the people who run government.
	They thought that the people who run government are ambitious.
	Check.
	They think that the people who run government are incompetent.
	Check.
	They think that people who run government are willing to use powers in ways that most people are not happy with.
	Absolutely.
	This is why they instituted checks and balances.
	Common good conservatism suggests, sort of like early 20th century progressivism, that those checks and balances ought to be put by the wayside in favor of the common good.
	Now, that scares me because, to me, the government is a giant gun.
	I called it a giant lumbering idiot before.
	It is.
	The government is a giant lumbering idiot.
	So, that means that you really only want the giant lumbering idiot awakened when there is nearly 100% approval for an action.
	We have the power to do that through building of consensus.
	In an emergency, everyone is on board, right?
	I'm libertarian-ish.
	Reason Magazine is fully libertarian.
	Nobody is calling for everybody out in the streets and the government can't do anything it's doing, right?
	So, in emergencies, we understand we need the government, but in non-emergencies, we want those checks and balances to apply.
	Adrian Vermeule is basically expounding the opposite.
	He is saying that we want government to be able to do whatever Adrian Vermeule wants it to do today, which sounds a lot like, even if I agree with Adrian Vermeule, it sounds a lot more like the leftist version of what government ought to do.
	Stuff I like.
	Then like the principled containment of government for the preservation of individual liberty.
	So Adrian Vermeule writes originalism in the judiciary, which is the perspective that the Constitution itself ought to be strictly interpreted such that you can't add stuff to the powers of government, right?
	The Constitution is a document of delegated powers.
	It says exactly what the government can do, and then everything it doesn't say the government can do, the government cannot do.
	That's what the Constitution is designed to do.
	And originalists on the judiciary, they say our job is to interpret the Constitution strictly like any other piece of law.
	People who are on the left on the court have for generations suggested that we have to broadly construe the Constitution such that we can read our own moral wants into the vague language of the Constitution.
	Vermeule says conservatives should do the same thing.
	He says originally has outlived its utility.
	has become an obstacle to the development of a robust, substantively conservative approach to constitutional law and interpretation.
	Such an approach, one might call it common good constitutionalism, should be based on the principles that government helps direct persons, association, and society generally toward the common good, and that strong rule in the interest of attaining the common good is entirely legitimate.
	Now remove the conservatism part of that, and I'm going to read that sentence again, and that is indistinguishable from what you would read at Jacobin Magazine.
	Government helps direct persons, associations, and society generally toward the common good, and that strong rule in the interest of attaining the common good is entirely legitimate.
	Does that sound like the checks and balances conservatism you know about?
	The limited government conservatism you knew about?
	The God-given rights given to individuals pre-existing government that you learned about in the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution?
	And that doesn't sound anything like that?
	Because it isn't anything like that.
	Vermeule says, in this time of global pandemic, the need for such an approach is all the greater.
	Quick, quick point.
	Anybody who gives you the cheat, it is a cheat.
	Anybody who gives you the cheat of suggesting that pandemic politics are normal politics is not to be trusted.
	In a time of pandemic, that, you know, if somebody breaks into my house in the middle of the night, and I go and I rack my shotgun, and then I know they're on the other side of the wall, and I can hear them creeping on the other side of the wall.
	And so I blow a hole through the wall to get the guy on the other side of the wall with my shotgun.
	That's a legitimate response.
	Somebody creeping around in my house, don't know who it is.
	I can see on my camera it's not a family member, and I blow a hole through the wall.
	That does not suggest that in a normal, non-prowler-in-the-house situation, I should randomly go around blowing holes in my wall with my Mossberg.
	Okay, and yet, that's what these pandemic politics people are saying.
	They're saying, look, it's a pandemic.
	See how we need government during a pandemic?
	That means we should use government like this during a non-pandemic.
	We see this from Democrats routinely with regard to the language of war.
	That's why you get the war on poverty.
	That's how you get the war on want.
	Franklin Roosevelt, in his For Freedom speech, suggested that freedom from want was a key freedom.
	No, freedom from want is not A freedom that is guaranteed by the Constitution.
	Freedom of speech is guaranteed by the Constitution.
	Freedom from want is something that should be accomplished through community and social network and social fabric.
	But again, equating everything to a time of war, equating everything to a time of pandemic is a cheap way to move toward dictatorship.
	Vermeule says alternatives to originalism have always existed on the right, loosely defined.
	One is libertarian constitutionalism, which emphasizes principles of individual freedom that are often in uneasy tension with the Constitution's original meaning and the founding generation's norms.
	The founding era was hardly libertarian on a number of fronts that loom today, such as freedom of speech and freedom of religion.
	Well, this is why I have not suggested that it is a particularly originalist perspective to, for example, suggest that flag burning was enshrined by the U.S.
	Constitution.
	I'm not sure that that constitutional decision by Justice Scalia was in keeping with original intent.
	Do I think that flag burning laws are dumb?
	Yeah, I think they're counterproductive.
	But I also am not sure that they should be ruled out by the Constitution.
	Nonetheless, Vermeule continues.
	He says that another alternative is Burkean traditionalism, which tries to slow the pace of legal innovation.
	Here too, the difference with originalism is clear.
	Originalism is sometimes revolutionary.
	Consider the court's originalist opinion declaring a constitutional right to own guns, a standing break with the court's long-standing precedent.
	So he's contrasting his vision with these other visions.
	He says, circumstances have changed.
	The hostile environment that made originalism a useful rhetorical and political expedient is now gone.
	Outside the legal academy, legal conservatism is no longer besieged.
	If President Trump is reelected, some version of legal conservatism will become the law's animating spirit for a generation of more.
	Or more.
	So in other words, what he wants is the judiciary to become an activist judiciary on behalf of things that Adrian Vermeule likes that have nothing to do with the Constitution.
	How do we know that he is now mirroring the perspectives of the left?
	Because he quotes people on the left.
	And he says, I'm talking about a different, more ambitious project, one that abandons the defensive crouch of originalism and that refuses any longer to play within the terms set by legal liberalism.
	Ronald Dworkin, the legal scholar and philosopher, used to urge moral readings of the Constitution.
	Common good constitutionalism is methodologically Dworkinian, but advocates a different set of substantive moral commitments and priorities from Dworkin's, which were of a conventionally left-liberal bent.
	Then he tries to proclaim that this is not legal positivism, meaning that it is not tethered to the particularly written instruments of civil law or the will of legislators who created them.
	Instead, it just draws on the tradition of the Western canon, the inner logic that the activity of law should follow in order to function well as law.
	He says it's not libertarianism.
	It's not legal liberalism.
	Its aim is not to maximize individual autonomy.
	Bottom line is there's no limiting principle here.
	This is not limiting principle.
	It says, finally, unlike legal liberalism, says Adrian Vermeule, common good constitutionalism does not suffer from a horror of political domination and hierarchy because it sees that the law is parental, a wise teacher, an inculcator of good habits.
	Hey, that sounds exactly like Barack Obama and his nudge strategy for what law ought to do.
	It ought to make us better people, law.
	Your parents ought to make you better people.
	Your religious community ought to make you a better person.
	Your moral teachings ought to make you a better person.
	If you're relying on the government to make you moral and wise, let's just say that there's not a long history of that being particularly effective.
	Just authority and rulers, says Adrian Vermeule, can be exercised for the good of subjects, if necessary, even against the subject's own perception of what is best for them.
	Perceptions that may change over time anyway, as the law teaches, habituates, and reforms them.
	Okay, this is... I'm sorry, this is dystopian language.
	It really is.
	If this were written by somebody on the left, we would all be calling it tyranny.
	To pretend...
	That common good constitutionalism is anything other than the arbitrary application of government power to a set of principles that you like, even if I like the same principles, is to completely reject the founding vision of a limited government Honestly, how do you fight the American Revolution under these terms?
	The American Revolution was based on the idea that there are pre-existing rights.
	Those rights pre-exist government.
	If government were to violate those rights, it would lose its reason for being.
	This suggests that the government is basically the wise teacher.
	So what rights do you have that exist outside of government?
	Government is the wise teacher.
	Its law is just changing you.
	Promoting a substantive vision of the good is, always and everywhere, the proper function of rulers.
	No, promoting a substantive vision of the good is not the proper function of rulers.
	Protecting people from each other is the proper function of rulers.
	Promoting a vision of good is for parents.
	It is for actual moral teachers.
	I swear, if you look at the members of government, or the members of our judiciary for that matter, and you think, these people ought to be my wise moral teachers, I don't know who you're talking about.
	I seriously don't know who you're talking about.
	You're high.
	There's no other way to describe that.
	Given that it is legitimate for rulers to pursue the common good.
	Again, you're not defining common good.
	Constitutional law should elaborate subsidiary principles that make such rules efficacious.
	Constitutional law must afford broad scope for rulers to promote peace, justice and abundance.
	Today we may add health and safety to the list in much the same spirit.
	In a globalized world that relates to the natural and biological environments in a deeply disordered way, a just state is a state that has ample authority to protect the vulnerable from the ravages of pandemics, natural disasters, from climate change, from the underlying structures of corporate power that contribute to the events.
	I honestly, honest to God, don't know what is conservative about this in any way, like in any way.
	Vermeule finishes, in this sense common good constitutionalism promises to expand and fulfill in new circumstances and with a new emphasis the constitution's commitments to promoting the general welfare and human dignity.
	Overall, constitutionalism will become more direct, openly more moral, less tied to tangentious law office history, and endless litigation of dubious claims about events centuries in the past.
	So basically, law is arbitrary, but if Adrian Vermeule agrees with it, you're good with it.
	This is just Ruth Bader Ginsburg from the right.
	And it's no good when it's Ruth Bader Ginsburg, because it is not intellectually or morally coherent, and it is no good From the right either.
	Common good constitutionalism has nothing to do with conservatism.
	It just doesn't.
	Not in the traditional sense.
	It's not Burkean because it does not constrain.
	It is not Lockean in that it does not see any value in individual rights.
	If you resonate to this just because you think the judiciary should do what it wants to do to protect your values the same way the left does, then I don't know what your principle is other than you like a bunch of things that the left doesn't.
	And I may agree with you on that, but your vision of government should not be the same.
	If it's just a question of which dictator controls us.
	I'm not in for that.
	I'm not in for that game.
	And I don't think the founders would be either.
	Alrighty, we'll be back here a little bit later today with two additional hours of content.
	Otherwise, show up tonight.
	Matt Walsh will be hanging out with you over at Daily Wire, all access.
	Otherwise, we'll see you here tomorrow for all the updates.
	Stay safe in there.
	And hopefully we'll have some more entertainment recommendations for you a little later on Twitter.
	We've been doing that a little bit.
	So go check me out over at Twitter.
	And I'll see you a little bit later.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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	Copyright Daily Wire 2020.
	While police departments around the country are springing child rapists from the slammer, law enforcement is turning a decidedly less lenient eye on another group of miscreants, Christian pastors.
	We will examine why preachers are getting arrested while the criminals run free.
	Then everyone from politicians to grocery store workers are jumping to take advantage of this pandemic.
	We'll take a look at ethics in times of plague.
	And finally, Joe Biden, remember him?
	He launches a podcast.
	And much like the entire mainstream media, he refuses to mention the MeToo allegations against him.

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