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April 2, 2020 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:04:38
Hindsight Is 2020 | Ep. 985
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As the death count mounts, Democrats launch investigations into the Trump administration's coronavirus response, Bernie just won't drop out, and the Trump team prepares to target Joe Biden.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
The Ben Shapiro Show is brought to you by ExpressVPN.com.
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Well, obviously we have tons of news to get to today, so let's just begin.
It's all bad.
I'm just going to put that out there right now.
Not a lot of good news to report to you here today.
This is going to be a rough, rough couple of weeks, as President Trump said.
Could be a rough month.
Hopefully it's only a rough month and not beyond that.
The latest death count in the United States is over 5,100.
Yesterday, we saw in excess of 1,000 deaths in the United States from coronavirus in Italy, in excess of 720 deaths in Spain, in excess of 900 deaths in France, in excess of 500 deaths in the UK, nearly 600 deaths.
So this thing is beginning to spike in terms of death across the West.
The question is when it peaks, how long that peak lasts, whether the summer kills it off.
The stats are ugly at this point.
They are going to get ugly over the next couple of weeks, because as we identify new cases, there's a time delay between when the cases are identified and when people actually die from this stuff.
Meanwhile, we're hearing reports that the death toll in even countries that are being open, like Italy, might be greatly undercounted.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Margarita Stancati and Eric Silver's reporting, in the town of Cocaglio, in Hours Drive east of here, the local nursing home is at east of Milan.
A local nursing home lost over a third of its residents in March.
None of the 24 people who died there were tested for coronavirus, nor were the 38 people who died in another nursing home in the nearby town of Lodi.
These are not isolated incidents.
Italy's official death toll from the virus stands at 13,155, the most of any country in the world.
But that number tells only part of the story because many people who die from the virus don't make it to the hospital and are never tested.
So just as I've been saying all along, there are tons and tons of people who aren't being tested who have coronavirus and are not dying.
There are also tons of people who are dying and are not being tested because by the time they die, it's too late to test them.
They're not at the hospital.
Lots of people dying outside the hospital.
So probably the estimates go that maybe twice as many people are dead in Italy as we already know about.
Meanwhile, Over at the White House, experts are apparently telling the White House that research is showing coronavirus can be spread not just by sneeze or cough, so it should create that six-foot radius that you're supposed to be outside of, but also just by talking or possibly even breathing, which is just wonderful, and does suggest that everyone's an idiot for suggesting that we shouldn't be wearing face masks full-time.
While the current coronavirus-specific research is limited, the results of available studies are consistent.
With aerosolization of virus from normal breathing according to the letter written by Dr. Harvey Feinberg, chairman of a committee with the National Academy of Sciences.
Feinberg says that he will start wearing a mask when he goes to the grocery store.
He's not going to wear a surgical mask.
Clinicians need those.
But I have a nice western style bandana I might wear.
Or I have a balaclava.
I have some pretty nice options.
Dr. Fauci told CNN on Tuesday the idea of recommending broad use of masks in the U.S.
to prevent spread of coronavirus is under very active discussion by the group, which of course is not a great shock.
It's just that for weeks they've been telling us nobody should wear a mask.
It's actually counterproductive and a waste of time.
Meanwhile, foreign countries like Israel have been mandating that everybody wear masks.
When they go into public.
Aerosolization is basically worst case scenario for the passage of a virus.
There are a few different ways that viruses can get past.
If it's like Ebola, then it has to be passed directly through bodily liquid.
If you are looking at what the original perception of coronavirus was, then it could be passed by coughing, right?
Larger droplets that land on somebody's face and then get into their nose or mouth.
Aerosolization is you breathe, it stays in the air.
We don't know how long it stays in the air.
You breathe the air.
I mean, it's just, it's worst case.
I mean, it really is really terrible news.
Among, there's a reason that Eric Garcetti, who I will, as you will see a little bit later on in the program, we're going to go through the timeline here.
Eric Garcetti, the mayor of Los Angeles, on Wednesday he called on the city's millions of residents to start covering their faces whenever they are out in public as part of the efforts to combat the outbreak of the novel coronavirus.
He tweeted, Early data suggests many who are infected are not symptomatic, which is why we are recommending you use cloth face coverings plus physical distancing for essential activities.
Do not wear surgical and N95 masks, which are reserved for first responders and medical workers.
Well, if you already have one, you can wear them, obviously.
But if you—my wife is a medical worker.
She has N95 masks at home.
That's kind of a different thing.
If you don't have N95 masks, then you shouldn't be taking those away from medical workers because there's a short supply of them.
Meanwhile, we're learning From the New York Times, that the federal government's stock of protective medical supplies is nearly gone.
We'll get to that in just one second.
So, lots of good news out there.
I mean lots of horrible news out there.
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Okay, so the federal supplies are apparently in short supply, according to the New York Times.
The federal government has nearly emptied its emergency stockpile of protective medical supplies as state governors continue to plead for protective gear for desperate hospital workers, according to a senior administration official.
The official said that the FEMA Stockpile has delivered more than 11.6 million N95 masks, 5.2 million face shields, 22 million gloves, 7,140 ventilators, exhausting the emergency stockpile.
The official said there was a tiny slice of personal protective equipment left over that is being preserved for emergency medical workers for the federal government.
While there's no more personal protective equipment in the stockpile left over for the states, apparently the administration still has more than 9,400 ventilators ready to be deployed.
Governor Andrew Cuomo said on Wednesday, the only hope for a state at this point is the federal government's capacity to deliver.
He said, you have a shortfall on gowns.
American companies can make gowns and not like wedding gowns, like paper gowns, make the gowns, make the gloves, make the masks.
You know, why are we running out of these basic supplies?
Well, honestly, that is a serious question for like Andrew Cuomo.
You're the governor of the state.
Why won't you prepare?
I will say I am absolutely bewildered by the notion that the federal government is the first line of defense against this sort of stuff.
Because guess what?
It actually is not.
Like Gavin Newsom is the governor of my state, California.
And he's awful.
I mean, Gavin Newsom came out yesterday and he said, this is an opportunity to get progressive priorities done in California.
Because that's really, if you're thinking of a pandemic as an opportunity to get progressive priorities done, you're doing being a human being wrong.
We do not consent to the complete rewriting of the bargain between government and individuals on the basis of a government failure to prepare for and respond to a global pandemic.
Sorry, no.
The answer is no.
You don't get to rewrite the entire constitutional bargain on the basis of a Black Swan event that you guys honestly should have prepared for and then responded to in the crappiest possible way.
But Gavin Newsom did say something that I think is a valuable reminder, which is that the first line of defense in these situations is states.
You're seeing it handled differently state by state.
Larry Hogan in Maryland is doing an excellent job.
Mike DeWine in Ohio is doing an excellent job.
And Gavin Newsom, in terms of actually getting the supplies, is doing a pretty good job and getting no credit.
Because Andrew Cuomo is from New York and the media are New York-based.
They like the fact that Cuomo is sitting there and railing it at the feds to give him more stuff.
But Gavin Newsom yesterday was with Jake Chapper.
He said, listen, we've got millions of masks.
We got millions of masks.
We are a state.
We are a powerful state.
And the number of masks provided to us by the federal government is a drop in the bucket compared to what we ourselves have actually procured.
Here's Governor Gavin Newsom.
We're blessed here in California with purchasing power that's second only to the federal government.
We've ordered 101 million N95 masks.
I've been able to distribute 35.4 million N95 masks.
I'll put it in perspective.
It's not a critique.
It's just an observation.
All of the deliveries from the national stockpile, and there have been three, total 1,089,000 N95 masks.
We've distributed 35 plus million.
So it gives you a sense that states are getting a little bit of support.
But we're going to have to be resourceful.
OK, well, but that that's what states are designed to do.
Again, it's usually public health crises in which states are supposed to step into the breach.
So good for Newsom.
I mean, it's important to keep those stats in mind because the the national media being national in scope rarely focus on where the real issues are, which are at the local and state levels.
And what's one of the things that's been so weird about this crisis is that there are hotspots all around the country and it's being treated as though the federal government is the first line of defense for a local for a local Hotspot.
Now, the federal government is definitely one of the lines of defense, but the first line of defense, Trump said this, he got all sorts of crap for it, the first line of defense is your local government, and then it is the state government, and then it is the federal government.
The principle of subsidiarity does not actually disappear.
Federalism did not disappear just because there's a national crisis.
The fact is that Gavin Newsom himself is talking about how he procured 35 times the number of N95 masks as the governor of the state of California that the federal government has distributed to the entire country.
That's the way this is supposed to work.
You want to judge a governor on how he's doing?
How about you judge him on how he's actually obtaining the gear himself, rather than how much he yells to the media about how he needs help from the federal government.
Calling for help from the federal government, I'm not saying it's unnecessary.
It may very well be necessary.
What I'm saying is that we judge you as a governor based on what you do for your state, and that one of the elements of that is yelling at the federal government, and the other 99% of the job is not yelling at the federal government, it's getting things done.
Meanwhile, there are reports, scary reports, that some of the ventilators are actually going to fail in the national stockpile.
The ventilators in the national stockpile are not in great shape.
According to the New York Times, President Trump has repeatedly assured Americans the federal government is holding 10,000 ventilators in reserve to ship to the hardest-hit hospitals around the nation as they struggle to keep the most critically ill patients alive.
Already in New York, They're experiencing shortages of ventilators.
We had on Dr. Marty McCary from Johns Hopkins University yesterday.
He mentioned that New York hospitals, they are already splitting ventilators, which is never the preferred methodology.
You can't control the airflow back into the lungs the same way that you could if you were not splitting the ventilator.
So the sort of shortages that were predicted, those predictions apparently were correct, right?
I was wondering whether those predictions were correct because originally they said beginning of last week, the hospitals were going to be overrun.
Apparently the overrun has already begun in New York City and we are only on April 2nd.
The ventilators in the federal government stockpile are not all operational, according to the New York Times.
Federal officials have neglected to mention that thousands more of the life-saving devices are unavailable after the contract to maintain the government stockpile lapsed late last summer, and a contracting dispute meant that a new firm did not begin its work until late January.
By then, the coronavirus crisis was already underway.
The revelation came in response to inquiries to the Department of Health and Human Services after state officials reported that some of the ventilators they received were not operational, which stoked speculation the administration had not kept up with the task of maintaining the stockpile.
In fact, the contract of the company that was maintaining the machines expired at the end of last summer.
A contract protest delayed handing the job to Agiliti, a Minneapolis-based provider of medical services and equipment, Agiliti was not given the $38 million task until late January, when the scope of the global coronavirus crisis was first becoming clear.
It's not known whether problems with the ventilators predated the contract lapse.
Maintenance in the machines did halt.
That delay became a potentially deadly lapse.
Meanwhile, the New York City virus death toll has neared 1,400.
from this report or what that contract dispute meant or what the contract protest was.
Bottom line is that the number of operational ventilators is actually lower than the federal government has been saying.
Meanwhile, the New York City virus death toll has neared 1400.
Mayor Bill de Blasio, the most incompetent mayor in America, has said that April 5th was a demarcation line in the coronavirus fight.
And he gave some stats.
He said that the city still needs 3.3 million N95 masks, 2.1 million surgical masks, 100,000 isolation gowns, and 400 additional ventilators.
Apparently, de Blasio said that James O'Neill, the former police commissioner who's now an executive with Visa, was actually returning to the government to oversee operations and logistics related to the virus outbreak.
De Blasio said New York would continue to have great need for supplies well after Sunday.
By the end of April, he estimated the health care system would need 65,000 additional hospital beds to accommodate new virus patients, as well as the people to staff them.
The city's public hospital system plans to convert, this is the New York Times, all of its facilities, all of them, to ICU units.
Officials said, adding that supplies and personnel were crucial to increasing the number of ICU beds.
Patients who do not have the virus will be sent to large scale temporary hospitals like the ones set up at Javits Convention Center or hotels converted into temporary medical facilities.
So basically, all of the hospitals turn into ICU beds.
All of these ancillary beds turn into non-ICU beds.
de Blasio says that the goal is within reach.
Actually, the region itself has passed 2,000 deaths total.
New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, well, about 2,400 deaths at this hour.
Meanwhile, hospitals and doctors are feeling a financial squeeze because it turns out that one of the ways the doctors make their money is by performing surgeries, for example.
And coronavirus patients don't actually pay that much as compared to surgeries.
This is not a case for nationalized healthcare.
Okay?
People are getting the care.
The insurance companies are waiving the cost.
It does mean that there is financial squeeze.
And financial squeeze is not a shock.
Obviously, this is another area where the government is going to have to step in.
If you're talking about bailing industries out and making sure that people get paid on time, the doctors and the nurses would be the people Who you are most worried about at this point.
Point.
Governors in at least 17 states have halted or urged hospitals to stop elective procedures in recent weeks.
Hospitals themselves have canceled surgeries to clear space for expected coronavirus patients and preserve scarce protective equipment.
Many patients have decided to avoid medical settings, obey government stay at home orders.
That means income to the hospitals are is has been dropping extraordinarily fast.
Williamson, West Virginia, is at the risk of losing its facility.
Williamson Memorial Hospital, just as the virus is expected to spread.
The hospital said it would close its doors in April after revenue dropped 45% in March.
Visits to the emergency room fell by about a third.
Inpatient days dropped by two-thirds, said Gene Preston, interim chief executive of the 76-bed hospital.
The hospital is still operating in bankruptcy and has secured financing intended to keep it open until a buyer took over.
The new pressure meant that the money would not be enough.
Bottom line is that under emergency circumstances, bailing out some of these less successful hospitals is going to be necessary just to ensure that everybody can still get the medical care they need.
And before everybody starts screaming about how nationalized healthcare would save us, let me just point to Italy, Spain, the UK, France.
Everyone's overrun.
Everyone is overrun.
Okay?
And this is not a referendum on the U.S.
medical system.
I mean, the fact is that we have better doctors and better nurses and better registered, better respiratory therapists than nearly any place on earth.
We have better health facilities than, public health facilities, than virtually any place on earth.
This is a black swan event.
It's obviously a black swan event.
Our doctors and nurses are exhausted.
They are overrun.
It's a full-on, it's a full-on disaster area.
And as we will see, this was not predicted by anyone.
It was not predicted by anyone.
When I say not anyone, there are a few exceptions.
People who took this with grave concern.
A few members of both parties.
Tom Cotton comes to mind on the Republican side of the aisle.
Governor Chris Murphy of Connecticut, he comes to mind on the other side of the aisle.
But, overall, no one expected scale and scope like this.
Okay, overall.
And we're going to trace that timeline because, believe it or not, this is getting politicized almost immediately.
We'll get to more of this in just one second.
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And meanwhile, how is the federal government responding to all of this?
Well, there's a lot of talk about mass public testing, how in order for us to even gauge how we end this thing, we have to have mass public testing.
Dr. Burks, Dr. Deborah Burks, she says we need antibody tests as fast as possible to determine who's already had this thing so they can go back out there and work again.
And one of the big questions is how we transition from the complete shutdown economy back to something that remotely resembles a normal economy.
That has gained additional sort of urgency, given the fact that the U.S.
weekly jobless claim has doubled to 6.6 million last week.
That means that over the last two weeks, two weeks, 10 million Americans have filed for unemployment.
10 million Americans.
To put that by way of contrast, the previous high week was 652,000.
Okay, in two weeks, we have lost 10 million jobs in the American economy.
That is not because of coronavirus purely.
That is because a forcible shutdown from the federal government and state governments of nearly every business in America.
And it turns out that contrary to the popular Bernie Sanders belief, business owners do not have piles of cash lying in the back room that they are storing away from their employees.
That's not the way any of this works.
They reinvest in their business, they invest in their employees, and that means that everybody is relying on additional income, relying on revolving credit lines, Relying on the continuation of the economy.
So when the economy is forcibly stopped dead, when the economy hits a brick wall, the way that the government has made it hit a brick wall, that means the jobs fall off extraordinarily, extraordinarily fast.
And that is what is happening right here.
And that's why the government is justified in filling the gap.
And it's why you are justified in taking the money.
It is not welfare for you to take money when the government drives a Ford F-150.
As I've said a thousand times, the government drove a Ford F-150 through the front door of your house.
They now have to pay you for driving a Ford F-150 through the door of your house.
Maybe they had a reason for doing it that was proper.
I think they probably did.
But that does not mean they don't have to compensate you for that.
The government also has a reason for paving your house over and building a highway.
That doesn't mean they get to seize your property and not pay you for it.
This is the takings clause of the Fifth Amendment.
They have completely removed your property from you and your ability to work, and they have to pay you for that privilege, at least until the ability to receive a job.
Renews itself.
But obviously the urgency here is extraordinary.
We cannot allow this to go on for months on end.
We certainly shouldn't allow this to be the rationale for rewriting the entire bargain between government and the American people.
As I mentioned earlier, Governor Gavin Newsom in California, he's been saying that this is a time to get progressive priorities done.
The hell it is.
It's the time to make sure that Americans don't die and that we can all get back to work.
You're starting to see this kind of nonsense from Chuck Schumer too.
He says, you know, during the next infrastructure package, I want green infrastructure.
Really, like, this is your push right now?
Is that we need to build some frickin' solar panels?
We've got 10 million Americans who just lost their jobs in the last two weeks.
By the way, not in the solar panel industry.
Here is Chuck Schumer being a fool.
COVID-4 can probably be more forward-looking at the economy.
And if we're going to do infrastructure, because there's nothing better than getting the infrastructure going and going in a big, strong way, we need it big, we need it bold, and we need it futuristic, which means green.
There's traditional infrastructure, roads, bridges, highways.
We need that.
But we also need new green infrastructure.
These people cannot wait to spend your money.
They cannot wait to spend money that does not exist.
We have spent $6 trillion, with a T, trillion dollars, more than the entire GDP of the United States.
Well, let's see.
The federal government spends $4 trillion a year.
The entire GDP of the United States is at $20 trillion a year.
So we've spent one third of the entire GDP.
in the last three weeks, in the last two weeks.
And they're already going like, yeah, we need $2 trillion on random infrastructure jobs that will not materialize.
And we need, and again, the infrastructure jobs are not the problem.
Are you going to socially distance while you do the infrastructure jobs?
The question is not government jobs here.
The question is, how do we get people back to their regular jobs?
I mean, Producer Colton, you feel like going out and working on a road right now?
Like, is that exactly what you're, like, go build some solar panels?
Okay, you have a job.
There are a bunch of people out there who don't have jobs.
They want their old jobs back.
They don't want to go work a road.
Like that's not a substitute for anything.
And again, you haven't solved the underlying problem, which is the coronavirus pandemic.
Nobody wants to go out and work right now in the middle of a coronavirus pandemic.
You can offer people road jobs right now and they're not going to go take them because the underlying problem has not been solved.
And yet the Democrats cannot wait to spend more of your money and some Republicans too.
Mitch McConnell, good for him.
He says that we should move slowly on considering any follow-up legislation.
He's going to ignore efforts by Nancy Pelosi to jumpstart talks.
She cannot wait to spend more money.
McConnell said she needs to stand down on the notion we're going to go along with taking advantage of the crisis to do things that are unrelated to the crisis.
Nonetheless, she says the victims of the coronavirus pandemic cannot wait.
It is moving faster than the leader may have suspected.
Even he has said some things should wait for the next bill.
I hope we can work in a four corners manner for the common good.
Again, this is people trying to take advantage of a horrible situation in order to try and promote their own political priorities.
And we don't have the money for that.
Okay, we literally have no money left.
All the money is gone.
The money is gone.
Right now we are on the verge of just printing money.
That's where we are.
The federal government, in order to uphold the value of global currency, has been buying back our bonds and injecting dollars into the global economy.
That's what the Federal Reserve is doing right now.
The Treasury Department is doing this.
Okay, at a certain point, you think there's a tremendous market for American bonds as we continue to shovel money out the door on random projects?
What we need to be doing right now is expediting the money that we've already passed to get in the hands of people.
We need the Small Business Administration coordinating better with banks so you can get those loans on the same day.
We were promised that if you walked into a bank and you provided your documentation, you were going to get a loan the same day.
And banks were like, no, that's not right.
You can't do that.
Like we actually need, it might take three days.
It might take four days.
The government has been lying about this.
Okay, the government has been saying that you're going to receive checks forthwith.
State unemployment programs are just not up to the task.
They're taking weeks to get to people.
This is why you're seeing food banks being overrun.
How about Congress focuses on the stuff they should be focused on?
Making sure that the money that they just shoveled out the door actually gets to the people it is supposed to get to right now.
Wouldn't that be the major concern?
Also, making sure that banks are backed so that they don't pull in their loans.
Floating them the loans.
They don't pull back in your loan and foreclose on your house.
So the Federal Reserve on Wednesday eased rules around how banks account for their super-safe assets and moved men to boost the flow of credit to cash-strapped consumers and businesses during the coronavirus shutdown.
The Fed said it would exclude for one-year treasuries and deposits held at the central bank from banks' supplementary leverage ratio calculation.
The ratio measures capital funds that banks raise from investors, earn through profits, and use to absorb losses as a percentage of loans and other assets.
In other words, By law, if you borrow from the Federal Reserve, you have to have a certain amount of cash on hand.
Treasuries on hand, they're starting to loosen those rules so that you can actually get loans from the bank to float your business for the moment.
And that's stuff that needs to be done.
It needs to be done right now.
But focusing on green infrastructure or how you can change the bargain, that's not what we should be focused on.
And credit to Andrew Cuomo, he's actually talking in realistic terms about what we need to be focused on beyond this.
And that is, how do we prevent something like this from happening again?
Honestly, he was musing about this aloud yesterday, Andrew Cuomo.
I've been critical of Andrew Cuomo's media coverage.
I think that Cuomo has been okay.
I don't think he's been substantially better than Gavin Newsom.
I certainly don't think he's been better than Mike DeWine in Ohio, who's done a particularly excellent job, or Larry Hogan in Maryland, who's been very, very good.
But Cuomo has the adoration of the media because he's in New York.
But his musing on what needs to happen after this is not the wrong musing.
Like, our government still has not figured out how to stop something like this from happening again.
And by the way, when we say it could happen again, I mean, like, in September.
Because there could very easily be a second wave of this.
All the studies that are being trotted out right now do not take into account a second wave in September.
They don't.
I asked several scientists about this yesterday.
Several doctors and epidemiologists.
So those estimates, where we're seeing 100,000 to 240,000 dead, that could be by August, gang.
That doesn't mean a year from now.
That means by, like, the end of August.
Anyway, here's Andrew Cuomo musing about how do we stop something like this from happening again.
That's the question we all need answered right now.
Not, can we build a windmill in Ohio?
Chuck Schumer.
Here's Andrew Cuomo.
We're never going to be the same again.
We're not going to forget what happened here.
The fear that we have, the anxiety that we have, that's not just going to go away.
When do we get back to normal?
I don't think we get back to normal.
I think we get back or we get to a new normal.
So how we come out of this and making sure that it's positive and not negative.
How do we learn from this and how do we grow from this?
Okay, that really is the question.
But don't worry, don't worry, guys.
The actual question that Democrats want to ask is, how can we blame Trump for this?
How can we blame Trump for this?
Because right now we're going to do the hindsight is 2020 routine.
Now, yesterday I tweeted something out.
It got a lot of flack from folks on the left.
I tweeted out that President Trump did a bad job in the early days of this.
Because he did do a not good job in the early days of this.
And I said, so did mostly everyone else.
Now, that doesn't mean they did an equally bad job or talked about this in equally a bad way, but there are gradations of how seriously people took this.
And what I basically said is nobody took this incredibly, incredibly seriously until early March.
And people went nuts.
No, we all took it super seriously all the way back in late January.
We took it super seriously going all the way back.
Okay, let's define super seriously.
Because let's talk about what exactly has been necessitated.
Millions of tests.
Millions of tests right across the country.
Shutdowns of all public events.
Shutdowns of ability to gather.
Mask wearing.
Antibody tests.
Vaccination development.
You know, like actual measures.
That would have been taking it super seriously.
Do you remember any time in February, Democrats calling for exactly the measures we've taken in March?
Do you remember any of that?
I don't.
Do you remember the Dem- Do you remember Democrats- Opposing President Trump saying that we should not allow travel from China?
I remember that.
So here, let's go through the timeline.
Because again, not everyone was equivalently head in the sand about this.
Not everyone was equivalently dismissive of this.
And I generally agree with the idea that in the early days, Trump was far too dismissive of this thing.
I think that's true.
I think there are also Democrats, like Bill de Blasio, who's the epicenter of this thing, who are super dismissive.
And I have a question for all the folks on the left.
Who are really questioning, you know, Trump was so dismissive, he was so dismissive, and we were taking it seriously.
Really, I don't remember all your criticism of Bill de Blasio in the epicenter of this thing, who was spending weeks on end telling people to go out in public.
But I want to trace the timeline here, because I think it's accurate to get this timeline down.
We'll get to that in just one moment, because I think we have to be honest about this.
The reason is not as a defense of President Trump.
The reason is because there's a narrative that is being set, and the narrative is being set right now.
On the one side, there's the narrative that I have put forward, which is that government basically sucks at everything.
They are late on everything.
They don't do the things they are supposed to do, and it's a bipartisan failing because when you have a giant lumbering moron, which is the government— The best you can hope for is that they respond in slow and delayed fashion and in powerful fashion.
And you need that to happen sometimes.
But to expect that the government is ever going to be a government that moves with alacrity and quickness and that the government is always going to foresee every crisis and that government is ever good at this stuff, that is wrong.
And the reason that's important is because people are trying to extend pandemic politics to non-pandemic politics.
They're trying to say, Well, if only the right people had been running this thing, it all would have been fine, which demonstrates that if the right people ran government, everything would be fine.
Government could control everything.
Now, quick note.
When I say that this is a bipartisan failing, that everyone failed here, and again, there are a few exceptions, like Senator Tom Cotton was on this thing early.
Chris Murphy was on this thing early from Connecticut.
But with very few exceptions, everyone botched this thing.
I'm not even talking just about the United States.
Boris Johnson just locked this thing down like a week ago in the UK.
Italy was late on this thing, which is why their hospitals were completely overrun.
Spain was late on this thing, which is why their hospitals were completely overrun.
France was late on this thing, which is why their deaths per million population is higher than those in the United States.
Okay, so this is not just a bipartisan failing, this is a failing of government.
Government is not perfect.
Government is staffed by incompetent people.
And even competent people who are there have to work through bureaucracies.
Government is not all-knowing.
Government is not all-powerful.
Government is a blunt force instrument.
And sometimes you need blunt force instruments, like in a global pandemic.
Understood.
But the case that Democrats have been trying to make is that it's all Trump.
And if Democrats had been in charge, this would have been perfect, which demonstrates that in a time of non-pandemic politics, if we just put Democrats in charge, all ills will be solved.
This has never been true.
It will never be true.
So they're launching investigations instead, trying to undermine Trump's 2020 re-elect campaign.
That's what's going on.
And they're trying to set the narrative early that if only Joe Biden or Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton had been in charge, all of this would have been avoided.
We're going to go through the timeline and I'm going to demonstrate to you that this is just not true.
That this is just not true.
We're going to go through it in a fair bit of detail in just one second.
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Okay, so in just a second, I'm going to get to the Democrats who are now launching investigations from the House Select Committee on the coronavirus response in the middle of the pandemic.
Like, there's plenty of time to do this in, like, I don't know, wait six weeks.
But they're going to do it right now because it is top priority that we blame Trump as fast as possible, which is what this is going to come down to.
Even though we all know what this really is, right?
There will be a 9-11 Commission-style report, and what we'll find is that years in advance, years in advance, there were systemic failures, because this is what happened in 9-11.
And then there were warnings that were not properly heeded.
And then the warnings were not taken seriously enough.
And in hindsight, we should have been able to see that somebody was going to fly a plane into the World Trade Center, into the WTC.
But it turns out that in actual time, it's difficult to tell that warning from the thousand other warnings coming across your desk.
And that when you are faced with the prospect of exponential growth, and you haven't even seen the evidence yet because China's lying about it, it turns out that if you're two weeks late, it makes a big, big difference.
But those are human mistakes, not somebody who's sitting there deliberately saying, I want millions of Americans to die, right?
It'll look exactly like the 9-11 report.
But Democrats are intent on politicizing this thing like right now, right now, and driving that narrative that I talked about before, which is that in the end, government could be incredible at this.
Government could be.
If you just put Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi in charge, if you just put Joe Biden, who's not even alive, in charge of the government, then all of this could have been prevented.
And we're going to get to more of this in just one second.
First, you should go over right now and subscribe to dailywire.com.
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We accelerated the launch of it.
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Basically, one of our hosts hangs out with you every night.
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I believe I'm doing one tomorrow night, right before Shabbat.
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Okay, so the breaking news this morning is that Nancy Pelosi is creating a House Select Committee on Coronavirus.
It will be chaired by Jim Clyburn, so we're going to do impeachment all over again.
Good times.
House Democrats on Wednesday had called for the creation of an independent panel to investigate the Trump administration's response to coronavirus once the pandemic subsides, but they didn't wait for half a minute.
Nancy Pelosi's already setting up a select committee investigation with Jim Clyburn heading it.
Representative Benny Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi, chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, said it's clear that we as a nation are at another inflection point.
Americans today will again demand a full accounting of how prepared we were, how we responded to this global public health emergency.
Americans will need answers on how our government can work better to prevent a similar crisis from happening again.
OK, here's the answer.
You want to know the answer?
The answer is that you know what is one of the key things that keeps people alive in a pandemic?
That would be ventilators.
And you know what people have been warned about for literally decades?
Lack of ventilators.
And you know what government completely ignored?
The ventilators.
You know what it turns out people need in times of pandemic?
N95 masks.
You know how many times that stockpile was blown through and not resourced?
Fair number of times.
You know what we're going to find?
We're going to find that governors, state governors, local mayors didn't do the job they were supposed to do in warning people.
We're going to find out that our policy with regard to China was a complete failure.
We're going to find out a lot of things.
You know what we're not going to find out?
That if President Trump had not been president, then all this would have magically been solved.
That's what we're not going to find out.
But that is exactly what Democrats are going to try and pitch.
Adam Schiff, who was busy distracting the entire nation throughout January on impeachment, he said, Now, I'm not saying that the Trump administration should have been distracted by impeachment.
They shouldn't have.
They should be able to walk and chew gum at the same time.
But I don't remember Adam Schiff saying three words about coronavirus in January, do you?
It was all impeachment all the time.
It was all impeachment all the time.
And I also remember there's some fairly important dates throughout this.
Like, for example, on February 4th, you remember President Trump spoke at the State of the Union address.
He actually mentioned coronavirus, and Nancy Pelosi tore up the paper.
And then you recall that we had a bunch of primary debates.
Coronavirus was asked about like one time, a couple times.
People were holding rallies.
Okay, I'm gonna go through the timeline now.
So let's go through the timeline exactly how this thing, how this thing went forward.
So how did this thing get screwed up so badly?
Well, let's start with the stuff from years ago that we're supposed to ignore.
So the federal stockpile of N95 respirator masks, the shortage of it can be traced back to 2009 after the H1N1 swine flu pandemic when the Obama administration was advised to replenish a national stockpile but did not.
According to reports from both Bloomberg News and the LA Times, the Washington Examiner reporting, the Trump administration is scrambling to replenish a stockpile of protective medical gear for healthcare workers and patients as coronavirus sweeps across the nation.
N95 respirator masks are one of the most needed medical supplies amid the outbreak.
The George W. Bush administration published the National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza Plan in 2005.
It called on the feds to distribute medical supplies from the national strategic stockpile governed by the HHS in the event of an outbreak.
In 2009, there was an outbreak.
It led to 274,000 hospitalizations and nearly 13,000 deaths and a depletion of the respirator masks.
A federally backed task force and safety equipment organization both recommended to the Obama administration the stockpile be replenished with 100 million masks used after the H1N1 outbreak.
Instead, that did not happen.
Instead, there was basically no refilling of the inventory.
Okay, so that's a failure, right?
These failures, and again, I'm not saying that the Republicans would have done better here.
I'm saying everyone screws stuff up all the time.
That's the nature of government.
Welcome to the actuality about government.
Government is not your savior.
Government can act in crucial situations to stop the incoming bullet by throwing your body in front of it.
But government, or your job in front of it, more important, you know, more accurately, But government is not perfect.
Government makes mistakes.
Black Swan events take governments by surprise.
We've had Black Swan events under every president, and they've always taken the government by surprise.
Because guess what?
Government ain't God.
And it's staffed by human people.
Elements that are going to come into play.
In at least 10 government reports from 2003 to 2015, federal officials predicted the U.S.
would experience a critical lack of ventilators and other life-saving medical devices if it faced a viral outbreak like the one currently sweeping the country.
The drumbeat of warnings undermines President Trump's claim that nobody in their wildest dreams could have imagined the demand for ventilators that now exists.
But it also undermines, by the way, that CNN reporting.
It also undermines the narrative that everybody did a wonderful job up until Trump of replenishing the ventilator stockpile.
If we had dozens of reports over the course of 12 years when Donald Trump was not president to replenish the ventilator stockpile and nobody did it, then how is that Trump's fault exactly exclusively?
He should have done it, but he wasn't president for like the 15 years preceding his presidency.
I mean, and the list goes on and on.
Report in May 2003.
November 2005.
Another one from November 2005.
July 2006.
August 2006.
November 2007.
2009 OSHA publication.
August 2009.
2015 study from the DHHS and the CDC.
Okay, so that's a lot of failures, is it not?
Okay, so is that exclusively on Obama or Bush?
Or Trump?
Or is this how disasters happen?
Okay, so now let's look at the more modern timeline here.
So some people took this seriously early, and some people did not.
Okay, so let's talk about who took this seriously pretty early.
So Lamar Alexander took this seriously early.
Politico reported this, like, just a few days ago.
On January 24th, at the urging of Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee, administration officials held a briefing for the full Senate.
The classified session was sparsely attended, according to two Senate aides.
It was put together at the last minute.
It was held on the same day as a deadline for senators to submit their impeachment questions.
Ah, very important stuff.
Only about 14 senators showed up for the briefing for the full Senate on coronavirus on January 24th.
14 senators.
Senator Lamar Alexander was there.
The initial thought from the Dems, I think, is we were trying to distract from impeachment, said a GOP Senate aide.
A White House official recalled feeling surprised at the incredibly poor attendance, noting it came even though the amount of concern expressed then was rather intense.
Alexander then issued a bland statement saying we're monitoring the outbreak of coronavirus.
Then people started increasing their warnings.
But the warnings, again, the statements that were made, better than the statements that Trump made by a number of officials, including Chuck Schumer.
But the actual measures they were calling for are not even in the same league as what we have actually done here.
They're not in the same league as what would have been necessary.
So again, expressions are nice.
Tweets are nice.
Saying things.
Good!
Better than saying the wrong things or putting out misinformation about how this is just like the flu.
100%.
But, number one, a lot of people on the left were saying this was just like the flu, including the Washington Post as of early February, including Vox.com as of late January.
And beyond that, let's be real about this, you saying this is not like the flu and then proposing, as Chuck Schumer did, to spend $85 million in funding for federal agencies, I guess that solves the problem.
That does not count as you being sufficiently concerned.
That counts as you being more concerned than Trump was.
But I don't use President Trump's level of concern as the bar for everything would have been okay if you had been in charge.
That's not where the bar lies.
On January 26th, according to Politico, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called on the Department of Health and Human Services to declare coronavirus a public health emergency that would free up $85 million in funding for federal agencies.
In January 28th, Patty Maria Maria Cantwell, the Washington state's two Democratic senators, already Washington state was being hit by this, demanded in a January 28th letter that Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar keep them apprised with the latest information regarding the severity of the disease, the country's capacity to diagnose cases, what steps were being taken to prepare U.S.
healthcare workers, what screening systems were in place.
There were only five cases of coronavirus discovered in the United States at that time, And by the way, Patty Marie and Maria Cantwell, I'm sorry, a demand letter saying, I want more information is not quite the same thing as let's shut down the entire American economy for two weeks.
Let's make sure that we have millions of tests available.
Again, no one foresaw what this was going to take.
This does not mean the Trump administration did a wonderful job.
It means everyone sucks at this, not in equal levels, but everyone was sucky.
Okay.
And no one was going to prevent the, the levels of insanity that we are now seeing in terms of public policy.
And let's look at this timeline, right?
So Joe Biden has been pitching this op-ed that he wrote January 27th about coronavirus.
He's been saying, well, this shows that I took things super seriously.
A lot of his allies have been saying this.
So let's look at that op-ed.
So he says that President Trump is a bad person to lead our country through a global health challenge.
And in that article, he talks about how it was bad to stop people from crossing borders.
Quote, diseases do not stop at borders.
They cannot be thwarted by building a wall.
We cannot keep others safe without helping to keep others safe as well and without listing the help of other nations in return.
And then he talked about what he was going to do, right?
So people like, well, Joe Biden proposed solutions.
They say Elizabeth Warren also had a plan.
Yeah, Elizabeth Warren, you may remember her campaign, had a plan for lesbian, Inuit, Inuit dock workers, right?
She had a plan for everything.
The question is, were the plans actually sufficient?
And the answer was no, because nobody was talking about the kinds of measures that would eventually be put in place.
Here's what Joe Biden suggested as his plan.
This is in this January 27th op-ed he keeps referring to.
Again, you saying coronavirus is a problem in January 27th is better than Trump sort of pretending it wasn't a problem as of January 27th, for sure.
But it doesn't mean that you handling the reins of government would have done anything like what was necessary in order to stop this thing.
If Donald Trump had proposed on January 27th, we need a two-week shutdown of the entire American economy.
Also, we're going to need $2 trillion in spending.
Also, we're going to need $4 trillion for the Federal Reserve to disperse and the Treasury Department.
How do you think that would have gone in late January?
We were all alive then, most of us.
So I think that you recall that would not have gone particularly well.
So what did Joe Biden propose on January 27th?
What did he propose?
He suggested that what we ought to do was spend more money on international institutions.
Here's what he says.
He says, We brought the world together behind a response that is about Ebola that only the U.S.
could mobilize.
We dispatched our military on a limited mission to help build the urgent infrastructure necessary to coordinate a massive global public health response.
We deployed disaster assistance response teams.
We unleashed the NIH.
We contributed $2 billion to international institutions.
Does any of this sound like what was necessary?
At the same time that Joe Biden was saying this stuff publicly, Joe Biden was also saying that it was a very bad idea to ban travel from China.
He was saying that it was xenophobic and cruel to do so.
Now the only people I'm aware of who actually were talking about the kinds of solutions that were necessary were Scott Gottlieb.
Scott Gottlieb wrote a piece, this would have been in January 28th.
Scott Gottlieb and Luciana Borio wrote some op-eds talking about actual suggestions.
It had been early February, talking about how we need massive levels of testing, how we need surveillance systems, like all the stuff that we actually need.
That was picked up by no politician.
No politician picked up on that.
None.
Okay.
So the stuff they were talking about, Chuck Schumer talking about freeing up $85 million, which is like, we just spent a vast multiple of that.
And Joe Biden talking about how we need to fully fund the CDC when we did fully fund the CDC.
The Washington Post on February 1st wrote a piece saying that flu was the biggest threat.
That's literally the title of an article from the Washington Post.
Get a grip, America.
The flu is a much bigger threat than coronavirus, for now, by Lenny Bernstein in their health section.
Right, so again, I think we need to be accurate about the timeline here, which is that when it comes to the measures necessary, I'm not talking about the general level of seriousness where you said, yes, I think coronavirus will be a problem.
I'm talking about the what needs to be done, which is what you're supposed to do in government.
No one, except for Scott Gottlieb and Borio, we're talking about the necessaries.
No one was talking about this.
Maybe you had Tom Cotton who was taking this more seriously.
Again, Chris Murphy tweeted something out where he was taking this seriously, and I want to mention this because some people were taking this more seriously, like Chris Murphy.
He tweeted out, Okay, well, Chuck Schumer had said the previous week, we need $85 million.
Is that what Chris Murphy was talking about?
Like, I'm glad that he expressed concern, but expressions of concern are not worth very much.
Okay, well, Chuck Schumer had said the previous week, we need $85 million.
Is that what Chris Murphy was talking about?
Like, I'm glad that he expressed concern.
But expressions of concern are not worth very much.
By the way, even Donald Trump, amidst his bizarrely chaotic response to coronavirus, even he was making expressions of concern.
Remember, Trump did mention during his State of the Union coronavirus while Nancy Pelosi was zoning out.
This is from February 4th.
Protecting Americans' health also means fighting infectious diseases.
We are coordinating with the Chinese government and working closely together on the coronavirus outbreak in China.
My administration will take all necessary steps to safeguard our citizens from this threat.
Later, of course, Nancy Pelosi would tear up that speech and say that it was a miasma of misinformation and a complete pack of lies.
The truth is, everyone was counting on the CDC to handle this thing right.
They didn't.
The CDC blew it.
In vast and incredible ways.
By the way, speaking of people who didn't take this seriously, the Huffington Post had a piece, January 31st, titled, Don't Listen to Senator Tom Cotton about Coronavirus.
Don't listen to Senator Tom Cotton about Coronavirus.
Saying that it was xenophobic.
Again, the Washington Post claimed that it was the flu.
Vox.com claimed it was the flu.
This is late January.
Then, as time moved forward, let's look at the actual timeline.
The actual timeline here, let's flash back to the Democratic debates.
These were happening all throughout February.
What was the sort of laser-like focus that supposedly would have prevented all of this?
Here was Joe Biden, who supposedly was taking this super serious.
This is a month after his op-ed.
He was asked about coronavirus in the February 25th Democratic debate.
Here was his answer about what he would do with coronavirus.
By the way, this is like two weeks before we went on national lockdown, essentially.
Here was Joe Biden, February 25th.
He cut the funding for CDC.
He tried to cut the funding for NIH.
He cut the funding for the entire effort.
And here's the deal.
I would be on the phone with China and making it clear.
We are going to need to be in your country.
Weird, I don't hear any of the measures that have now been taken coming out of the mouth of Joe Biden.
I just hear him yelling about how Trump, by the way, did not cut the funding to the CDC.
He proposed a cut to funding to the CDC that did not go through.
Meanwhile, where were the Democrats criticizing, you know, actual mayors in charge of the crisis in the biggest hotspot on planet Earth, New York City?
Let's just flashback for a second to Mayor Bill de Blasio and his health leaders over in New York City.
And by the way, Nancy Pelosi as of February 24th.
Okay, this is all the way in the middle of February, when supposedly everyone except Trump was taking it super seriously.
Here are all these Democrats and when people say, well put aside de Blasio, how do you put aside the mayor of the town where all the deaths are happening?
Here's Mayor Bill de Blasio and a bunch of his local health officials.
The Department of Sanitation is ready for Mardi Gras 2020.
The facts are reassuring.
We want New Yorkers to go about their daily lives.
There's really no need to panic and to avoid activities that we always do as New Yorkers.
We are a hardy people.
Americans do not need to panic.
What I would suggest, however, is that Americans take this as a wake-up call for seasonal flu.
Okay, so wake up, call for a seasonal vote.
This is what officials were saying.
Okay, so before we pretend that Donald Trump was the only person who was missing the boat here, or that the Trump administration were the only people who were missing the boat, that is not true.
Number two, even if you weren't missing the boat and you said coronavirus is a problem, none of you were proposing the kind of response that was necessary.
Only Gottlieb, as far as I'm aware, was proposing publicly the kinds of responses that were necessary.
On February 26th, Congress offered $8.3 billion to Trump For all this stuff.
Trump said, I want $1.5 billion to $2 billion.
And Chuck Schumer tweeted out that we want to give all sorts of new funding, like $8.3 billion.
Republicans were saying, we want that to be not unfunded, right?
We want to take that money from other places.
And Chuck Schumer was fighting them on it.
And President Trump then came out and he said, if you give us the money, we'll take the money, right?
You wouldn't give us the money for the wall, but you'll give us the money for this.
So I guess we'll take the money.
We'll take care of states because states are working very hard.
We have hospitals in states that make rooms available and they're building quarantine areas, areas where you can keep people safely.
We're working really well with states.
It's a very big part of it.
So, you know, my attitude of Congress wants to give us the money so easy wasn't very easy for the wall, but we got that one done.
If they want to give us the money, we'll take the money and we'll just do a good job with it.
Okay, so he wasn't rejecting the money.
In fact, he ended up signing into law a bill, but only on March 6th.
Because Nancy Pelosi was too busy trying to use that bill to strip protections for N95 mask makers.
Not kidding you.
Okay, so that bill was proposed in late February.
It took until early March to pass that bill.
Why?
Why?
Because Nancy Pelosi didn't want to waive consumer rights to sue a company over potentially faulty equipment.
So Republicans were arguing we should relieve liability so companies will produce this stuff faster and we can get it out faster.
And Nancy Pelosi was too busy worrying about the trial lawyers.
Right?
Deb Fischer put forward a bill in early March.
A bill with bipartisan backing that would protect makers of respirators like 3M from lawsuits if the companies produced masks upon federal government requests.
According to a Senate GOP 8, every time we tried to pass Deb Fischer's bill, the trial lawyers were the first ones out blocking it.
They refused to negotiate with us.
Democratic leaders tried to hold this thing up for like a week.
One of Pelosi's aides said, why should mask makers have special immunity?
We're trying to get these things out the door, and Nancy Pelosi's worried about how people can sue other people.
So clearly, everyone acting with a great sense of urgency.
We have been told everyone had, except for President Trump.
Okay, so how long did it take for everybody to respond to this thing?
On March 4th, Seattle officials recommended that high-risk residents stay at home over coronavirus in King County and Snohomish Counties.
That is because the chief sensor of the outbreak at the time was in Seattle.
That was on March 4th, 2020.
Olivia Mester reported that for the Daily Beast.
The sub-headline was, Don't Panic.
Okay?
And then, what happened next?
Well, March 4th was also Super Tuesday, if you recall.
Millions of people across the country came out and voted.
There was no talk on Super Tuesday.
I was there.
I remember.
There's not a lot of talk about the risks being taken on Super Tuesday to vote in primaries.
Instead, the questions were about the results.
That was all the media coverage.
Joe Biden was still holding rallies.
Donald Trump was still holding rallies.
Bernie Sanders was still holding rallies.
They were all going out in public.
They were all discussing whether or not they should continue to hold those rallies.
On March 6th, Trump signed that $8.3 billion relief package.
On March 8th, L.A.
Mayor Eric Garcetti did not cancel the L.A.
Marathon.
I remember being bizarrely puzzled by this sort of thing because I had, I'll tell you on a personal level, I'd started getting much more serious about looking into this in late February when it seemed like a lot of the notes were getting pretty bad.
And I wrote a piece on March 6th talking about the fatality rates from coronavirus, which by the way was accurate on the data.
And what I basically said is it may not be as deadly as people are making it out to be, but I was certainly concerned about the transmission rate of the virus.
Okay, so, as of, like, I can tell you, in fact, the exact date, because I remember it.
The exact date where it finally dawned on me this thing was going to be a disaster area.
And that was March, basically March 10th.
Right around that weekend.
So I remember thinking, okay, people are saying this is really serious, but Mayor Eric Garcetti is just letting 20,000 people run in the street and spit on each other, right?
27,000 people ran in the LA Marathon.
And you know what Eric Garcetti said about this?
He said, quote, there's no reason to cancel it.
That was March 6th.
Don't tell me everybody was super serious about this stuff in late January or throughout February.
It's just not true.
Right?
On March 6th, they allowed this to go forward.
That was Eric Garcetti on March 6th.
I remember, I got super serious about this.
So my baby was born March 4th.
We got out of the hospital sort of that weekend.
We were concerned about it.
And then Purim, which was Jewish holiday, happened a little bit later that week.
It was like March 10th.
And I remember that we went to, there was talk already by March 10th about shutting down the services.
Like, should you go to services or not?
And we went to services that day.
And then there was a party down the block, like a house party.
And I remember saying to my parents, I really don't think we should be going to this house party.
That was when I started getting serious enough that it was like we started self-limiting on a social level.
Okay, and then it took like another, that was March 10th, it took another week for San Francisco to issue a stay-at-home order.
The stay-at-home order that started this whole thing, you know, in terms of like very strict measures, March 16th is when the stay-at-home order happened.
I believe that we at Daily Wire told all of our own workers to go home as of March 16th.
I think it has been a couple weeks, right?
So I think it was that week that we told people at Daily Wire If they can work from home, they should absolutely work from home.
California, more broadly, issued a stay-at-home order.
The broad stay-at-home order.
That was March 19th.
Right, so if everybody was taking this super seriously, why were these orders not being emanated, like, early March?
The beginning of March?
And where was all the protest of Bill de Blasio?
Again, Bill de Blasio was being an idiot for, like, months at a time.
Where was he?
Where was all the criticism?
March, New York did not issue, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo did not issue a stay-at-home order until March 20th.
March 20th.
So for all the talk about, yeah, we were all taking it super seriously except for Trump.
You guys are governors of states and mayors of towns and you are members of Congress and you are the Speaker of the House.
I don't remember trillion-dollar packages.
I don't remember tens of billions of dollars being spent on filling the ventilator requests.
I don't require, I don't remember I don't remember this great sense of tremendous urgency kicking in until early March.
Now again, that is not to alleviate responsibility on Trump for downplaying this thing, which I think he did do.
I think he downplayed it through February.
I think that's true.
I think Tucker Carlson was instrumental in awakening the president on a personal level to how dangerous this thing was.
But to pretend, as the Democrats surely will, that everybody was on top of this thing except for Trump?
And that Congress can be trusted, and that everyone can be trusted, and that everything is hunky.
I mean, on March 11th, AOC was going on her Instagram and telling people that it was racist not to eat at Chinese restaurants on March 11th.
I mean, come on.
Just, come on.
Come on.
Like, the timeline exists.
You cannot reverse the timeline just because you wish that the narrative were different.
Okay, time for, let's do a quick thing that I hate, I suppose.
China continues to be the world's most horrible actor.
I feel like Biff in Back to the Future.
You just did 300 bucks damage to my car, you son of a bitch, and now I'm going to take it out of your ass, right?
That's how I feel about China right now.
You have destroyed the world economy.
It will cost the world economy $10 trillion, $15 trillion, endless amounts of money to come out of this, and you've cost the world tens of thousands of lives.
Meanwhile, China is getting aggressive militarily.
We're supposed to treat them like they're our friends?
According to the Asia Times, China seizes COVID-19 advantage in the South China Sea.
With the COVID-19 pandemic mostly contained in China and now wreaking havoc on the United States, security analysts are closely watching Beijing's military moves in the hotly contested South China Sea.
In recent days, China has conducted military drills and deployed large-scale military assets to the maritime area, while at the same time officially celebrating strides made in exploiting disputed energy resources in the fossil fuel-rich sea.
While some see China's nationalistic message as a bid to rally its people, Others view the increasingly aggressive naval maneuvers as a bid to exploit America's weakened condition to secure new advantage in the hotspot theater.
So they're taking advantage of the fact that we just had to remove a carrier basically from circulation thanks to coronavirus infections.
They're taking advantage of all of this in order to get aggressive on the world stage, not a shock.
The Philippines and Malaysia, both at territorial loggerheads with China in the sea, have both recently placed their administration and commercial capitalists under weeks-long military-enforced lockdown.
The U.S., the long-term guarantor of the region's law-based order, is now grappling with the world's worst outbreak.
The Pentagon has been mobilized to help out at home.
China is moving to capitalize.
Meanwhile, this has gone hand-in-hand with attempts to drive a diplomatic wedge between the U.S.
and its traditional transatlantic allies, some of which have recently committed naval vessels to U.S.-led freedom-of-navigation operations in the South China Sea.
So Beijing is putting out propaganda trying to blame the United States for all of this.
Meanwhile, if they had not lied about this for a month, over a month, and commanded the WHO to do their bidding, there'd be a lot more people alive today and certainly a lot more preventable deaths would have been prevented.
Good for the Japanese Vice Prime Minister.
He came out and he said, the WHO, the World Health Organization, should be renamed the Chinese Health Organization.
We're going to have to radically rethink how we do business with the WHO.
Radically rethink this thing.
It's a disaster area.
International institutions cannot be run by the world's worst players while we foot the bill.
It's horrifying.
I mean, I wish, I honestly God wish there were a way for us to cancel the debt that we owe to China.
There is no way to do it because the face bonds don't actually have on it signed to China on there.
But we're going to have to take strict measures in the future with how we deal with China.
China is not just a geopolitical enemy.
They're a rogue state that is a danger to everyone in the world.
They hid this thing for a month.
They allowed five million Wuhan residents to go out and move around freely in the world without telling anybody.
They lied to the WHO.
As of January 14th, the WHO was still maintaining publicly that there was no human-to-human transmission of this thing.
They've wrecked the world economy.
I mean, it's just, it's unbelievable.
Meanwhile, one of my favorite things, Is the Chinese government trying to put out propaganda suggesting that it's U.S.
military operations in the South China Sea that are increasing the risk of confrontation?
According to a Beijing-based think tank, shocker, the U.S.
intensified its military activity in the South China Sea last year, raising the risk of confrontation with China.
So China's trying to put out the notice that as it gets more aggressive in the South China Sea, because everybody else is busy dealing with the pandemic they just unleashed from their own country, The Chinese government, that it's everybody else's aggression that is pissing off the Chinese.
So the South China Morning Post, which to the best of my understanding is a Chinese official publication, or semi-official publication.
Says the U.S.
conducted eight so-called freedom of navigation operations in the year, three more than in 2018, during which its vessels sailed within 12 nautical miles of land claimed or occupied by China, according to the South China Sea Strategic Situation Probing Initiative's annual report.
American forces also engaged in at least 50 joint and multiple exercises with countries from Southeast Asia and elsewhere in the region.
Ah, how provocative.
How insanely provocative.
Yeah, probably it's the U.S.
provocation that is responsible for all of this.
Probably this is the problem.
By the way, you know about those shortages of supply that we've had in masks?
That's not because we didn't contract for the masks.
It's because all the supply chains ran through China.
You know what China did when they needed the masks?
They just seized the supplies.
You know all the drugs that people are looking to get?
I'm talking about like everyday drugs, not even coronavirus drugs.
A lot of those are produced in China.
The supply chains have been disrupted.
China deserves to have its ass kicked on an international stage, if not militarily, then financially.
I mean, this is just what a disaster area that government is.
We should all pray for a major change of government in that region to free a billion people from the servitude under which the Chinese government has placed them.
Just astonishing, astonishing stuff.
By the way, good news.
Shenzhen just became the first Chinese city to ban eating cats and dogs.
Oh, good.
I'm glad that they've finally gotten on this thing about not eating the cats and not eating the dogs.
Good stuff.
Apparently, Chinese authorities had supposedly banned the trade and consumption of wild animals, but they are continuing to lie about that.
Apparently, wet markets are still open in China.
They've also been lying about the number of people who are dead there.
They've been lying about reopening industry.
That is all a lie.
This is a rogue state, a rogue state.
All right, so we'll be back here a little bit later today with two additional hours of content.
Otherwise, we'll be back here for all of your updates tomorrow.
Hang in there.
I know this is rough.
It's rough for everybody.
The news is going to get rougher over the next two weeks.
Stick with us.
We'll bring it all to you.
We'll go through it in a reasonable fashion.
And remember, in the end, in the end, America remains the greatest country on earth, not because the government is so spectacular at things, It remains great because Americans are great, because Americans care for each other, because we're looking out for each other.
With that said, continue the social distancing.
Continue to wear masks if you go out in public so you're not coughing on other people or breathing on other people.
Continue to do all the things that are necessary to bring this to an end so we can all get back to work, make the economy boom again, and then...
And then move forward to a more successful future, hopefully a future in which we certainly rethink our relations with places like China and international institutions that have become cat's paws of the Chinese government.
All right, we'll be back here later today or we'll see you here tomorrow.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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Directed by Mike Joyner.
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Edited by Adam Sajovic.
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The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire production.
Copyright Daily Wire 2020.
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