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April 22, 2020 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:05:37
What If Nothing Changes? | Ep. 995
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Well, everyone waits for a game changer to emerge.
We ask a simple question.
What if it doesn't?
Meanwhile, Congress passes another round of aid for small business and it's Earth Day, guys.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
Today's show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.
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Take action at expressvpn.com slash Ben.
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Alrighty, so today's Earth Day.
Are you excited?
I'm excited.
Everybody loves Earth Day.
Come on!
Earth Day!
It's the best!
What's there not to love about Earth Day?
I mean, a holiday that was created by a person who composted his girlfriend.
I mean, that is a dude who took Earth Day super seriously.
True story.
The guy who started Earth Day, killed his girlfriend, and put her in a trunk in his closet where she proceeded to drip into the bottom apartment, which is how she was originally.
Birthday's great.
Listen, we all appreciate our environment, particularly when it's trying to kill us.
I will say that my original take on nature has stood up pretty well over time, which is nature is trying to murder you.
And basically, all of human life is about trying to avoid nature murdering you.
The reason that I bring this up is because this morning, I'm starting to see the pagan awakening of some members of the radical left, many members of the radical left, suggesting that this is nature's revenge.
Nature's revenge.
Now, I have been informed by reliable sources That nature does not actually have intent.
I've been informed by reliable sources on the left that God doesn't exist, number one, and then even if God did exist, nature does not have intent, right?
I mean, evolutionary biology suggests that basically it's survival of the fittest out there, that nature is trying to kill you, and that those who survive, survive.
So the idea that nature is having her revenge because we were mean to nature, and now Mother Nature is coming out and just blasting us.
Mother Nature has decided to release a virus, unleash a plague upon us.
Pretty pagan.
Pretty pagan crap.
And frankly, I'm a bit upset with the Pope for pushing it.
So Pope Francis actually pushed this nonsense yesterday.
Or today, rather.
He made an impassioned plea, according to Reuters, for protection of the environment on Wednesday's 50th anniversary of the first Earth Day, which, again, is a pagan holiday.
Environmentalism has become a religion for a lot of folks, and complete with activities, like we have to separate our recycling and our trash, even though most of the time the recycling goes to the same place as the trash does, namely to the dump, or that it is more expensive in many cases to recycle than it is to throw things in the garbage.
I've talked about articles in the past that actually detail the cost breakdown to the environment, by the way.
in the entire recycling movement.
Recycling does some good things.
It also does some things that are pretty not great for the environment, including some fairly significant carbon emissions, depending on how you process all of that.
But it's become sort of a ritualistic thing for a lot of environmentalists to talk about the environment as though it has its own level of brute force intent, which, of course, it does not.
And the fact that the Pope is buying into it is pretty amazing.
Now, listen, I'm all in favor of protecting the environment from predations.
been saying it was necessary for young people to quote, take it to the streets to teach us what is obvious.
That is, there will be no future for us if we destroy the environment that sustains us.
Now, listen, I'm all in favor of protecting the environment from predations.
I'm all in favor of environmental regulations that prevent externalities, prevent you from polluting a river that I'm going to use, prevent you from just willy-nilly chopping down forests for no apparent reason.
I'm all...
Those regulations are good.
Otherwise, you end up with the so-called tragedy of the commons.
But the Pope's moral language here with regard to the environment itself is quite bizarre.
He recounted a Spanish proverb that God always forgives, man sometimes forgives, but nature never forgives.
Well, nature, I mean, nature doesn't forgive because nature does not have the power to forgive.
If you're looking for some sort of thing that you can do that will make nature nicer to you, good luck with that.
Good luck with that.
Most of human history was marked by privation and danger, thanks to the environment.
And it is only technology that has allowed us to surpass that.
We've forgotten about that because we live in an industrialized society.
We've forgotten about the fact that danger is just an inherent part of life and that nature is a very, very dangerous place.
One of the reasons that you live in comfort is because of technology designed against nature.
I'm not a big camping... I know a lot of people love camping.
I'm not a big camping person because civilization was basically designed to avoid camping.
That's it.
That's what civilization was designed to do.
So you have a permanent roof over your head.
And I understand getting out there and enjoying nature.
Really, I get it.
You know, I want to take my walk every day.
I want to go out and go for a hike with my kids.
But this bizarre idea that nature is taking revenge on us and that this is a punishment for global warming or some such is really quite insane.
And we are starting to see sort of the inklings of that on the left, an almost quasi celebration.
It started off a few weeks ago in like the in what they call the deep green movement, people who are celebrating.
Look at the cities going back to the animals, the cities being overrun by nature again.
Look how clear the sky is over Los Angeles.
We'll get in a second to the left's take on global warming, because the radical left, and it's not the entire left, right?
Most people on the left want to get back to work.
Most people who are liberals want to get back to work, and they are not into the whole, what if we just shut down all of human civilization?
Isn't this great?
But I'll show you in a second how this is starting to cross streams with some of the environmental movement.
Pope Francis said, we see these natural tragedies, which are the Earth's response to our maltreatment.
What?
The Earth doesn't have its own paganistic capacity.
He said, I think if I ask the Lord now what he thinks about this, I don't think he would say it's a very good thing.
It is we who have ruined the work of God.
I mean, right now, I'm fairly certain it is the environment that is responsible for, you know, hundreds of thousands of deaths around the world, tens of millions of people out of work.
The Earth's response to our... The Earth did not respond.
The Earth is not alive.
It says we have sinned against the earth, against our neighbor, and in the end, against the creator.
You can sin against your neighbor, and you can sin against the creator.
And you can say that failure to protect the environment is a sin against the creator.
I don't know how you sin against an inanimate object.
I don't know how it's possible to do that.
So this sort of, like, Frank, coming from the Pope, it's pagan nonsense.
I'm kind of shocked that he said all of this, except that he had talked about the notion of environmental sin before, so it's...
I find it puzzling.
That's all I will say about that.
However, this does cross streams, as I say, with other parts of the environmentalist movement.
We'll get to that in just a moment, and then we'll get to non-Earth Day related news, like actual important news.
We'll get to that in just one moment.
First, let us talk about the fact that when you are running a business, HR issues can kill you, especially right now.
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OK, so as I as I mentioned, sort of last note on the environmentalist movement that is using this as using this pandemic as sort of a bizarre pagan ...belief system in which, because we drove cars, now nature has taken her revenge by killing 85-year-olds.
That is how nature has gone about doing this.
One aspect of this is the Green Movement's focus on global warming.
So Eric Holthaus, who is just a very, very clever fellow, apparently, he writes on climate at the cores.
He calls himself an eco-socialist.
And he wrote this.
So, CBC News put out this notice.
The coronavirus pandemic is expected to drive down carbon dioxide emissions by 6% this year, the World Meteorological Organization says.
It would be the biggest annual drop since World War II.
And Eric Holthaus wrote this.
This is roughly the same pace the IPCC says we need to sustain every year until 2030, to be on pace to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius and hit the Paris climate goals.
This is what rapid, far-reaching, unprecedented changes in all aspects of society looks like.
We're doing it.
It's possible.
We need to take some serious time and energy during this pandemic to look around and see what parts of this new way of living we can keep, like less air travel, and what parts we can't, like huge unemployment.
There is a balance.
We'll find it.
That's the whole point of a Green New Deal.
We need a just transition for workers and those who have been marginalized by the excesses of the capitalist system that got us into this mess.
We can build a better world for everyone out of the ashes of the old one.
And all I can think of here is that Monty Python sketch with Jesus on the cross singing, always look on the bright side of life.
Like, that's all I can think of here.
In the middle of a global pandemic, it's killing hundreds of thousands of people and tens of millions of people are out of work and can't feed their families.
And Eric Holdcost is like, yes, We can do this indefinitely.
And we can bring down the climate by 1.5 degrees Celsius over the next hundred years if we just keep this up for like the next decade.
If we just figure out how to do this for like the next decade.
Okay, sure, sure.
And these are the people who supposedly are deeply concerned about humanity and our future.
Great.
Okay, meanwhile, in other news, the Senate has now passed its bill for small business.
That was held up for a week for no apparent reason.
That was exciting stuff.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the Senate bill was struck last night.
It was a deal with the White House.
It was created Tuesday to send hundreds of billions of dollars in fresh aid to small businesses and hospitals.
That's the federal government's latest efforts to keep pace with the twin economic and public health crises created by the coronavirus pandemic.
The Senate on Tuesday evening passed the $484 billion bill by a voice vote, sending it to the House for an approval expected on Thursday.
President Trump said on Twitter he supported the legislation.
Its final components were hammered out between top White House officials and congressional leaders in the early morning hours on Tuesday.
The package which lawmakers dubbed an interim emergency bill.
So we have now spent, by the Senate and by the Congress of the United States, we've now spent in excess of $2.6 trillion in the last four weeks.
That does not include the $4 trillion expended by the Treasury.
Also includes funding to ramp up the country's testing for new coronavirus.
It does not include funding sought by Democrats for hard-hit state and local budgets, which was instead pushed off to the next round of stimulus negotiations.
As I've said, you got to be real careful about that.
It's one thing to fill in the gaps created by federal policy.
It is another thing to pay off California for California's crap policy for the last 10 years, running up its debt.
Or Illinois.
Or New York.
Top Republican signaled concerns about the mounting debt would play a bigger role in talks about future stimulus aid, which it should.
We cannot spend this money endlessly, guys.
And by the way, the original CARES Act was filled with holes.
It now turns out that the Republican objection that the CARES Act, which paid people $1,200 a month and then added $600 a month on top of that so that some people were making more money by staying home than by going to work, that has actually had some fairly significant effects.
It turns out a lot of people were like, OK, well, I'm not going back to work.
Why would I go back to work?
We've taken calls on the radio show from business owners who are going to their employees and saying, we want you to come back to work so we can get a small business loan because you have to maintain 90% employment to get the small business loan through the Paycheck Protection Act.
And employees being like, no, I'm not coming back to work.
I'm making more money staying at home.
Because that's what happens when you create perverse incentives.
Every government program sucks.
This one might be necessary, and it also might suck.
Both of those things can be true at the same time.
The Democrats held this thing up for a week for no reason at all.
Kevin McCarthy, the House Minority Leader, he says, you're going to have to explain, like, name one thing that Nancy Pelosi has done well during this pandemic.
Because all she's been doing is holding up aid relief bills in the middle of a crisis, and that will lead to further unemployment.
Name me one productive thing Speaker Pelosi has accomplished during this pandemic.
When President Trump on January 31st put in the ban from China, February 24th she asked people to gather together in San Francisco.
She actually fought the ban.
We wanted to put the CARES Act together.
She came in, held it up.
Now we had a small business program working.
She's now held up the money.
There's 700,000 small business applications in right now trying to keep their doors open.
Last week we watched 5 million people, new numbers, for unemployment.
How many more millions of Pelosi's layoffs will we have to endure before she'll put people before politics?
And the answer is, as many as Nancy Pelosi sees fit to make people endure so that she can dump a bunch of pork into each one of these programs.
At the core of our agreement, says Mitch McConnell, is $320 billion more for the Paycheck Protection Program, which is already saving millions of small business jobs and helping Americans get paychecks instead of pink slips.
Those funds were exhausted inside of like two weeks.
Businesses are just shutting down everywhere because nobody, the market doesn't exist.
I mean, the reason that oil prices sank to negative levels as of May 1st, is because nobody's driving to work.
I mean, there's nobody on the roads.
There's nobody who's going out and driving.
Eric Holthaus couldn't be happier.
I mean, we are saving the earth.
All we had to do was make all of human civilization stop dead and put tens of millions of people out of work.
Democrats were pressing for changes to the program to widen its access to loans.
$60 billion will be set aside for small, midsize, and community lenders.
A separate program, the Economic Injury Disaster Loan Fund, aimed at delivering a mix of grants and loans, gets $60 billion in the legislation.
Loans can be forgiven if businesses maintain the size of their workforce.
So it's good that this passed.
Nancy Pelosi held it up again to basically achieve nothing.
And this is the second time that she has done this, right?
She held up the CARES Act for a week after it had already been hammered out by Schumer and McConnell.
She held it up for a week for no apparent reason.
She held this one up for a week for no apparent reason because she's just awful.
She's just awful in every possible way.
Here she was on MSNBC this morning suggesting Republicans had held up the bill even though, again, the deal had been hammered out and then she jet-setted in from her very expensive palatial estate in California to hold the thing up.
We're very pleased that the Senate finally accepted the fact that we needed more money for testing, for hospitals, for lower and smaller businesses to participate in the Paycheck Protection Program.
Mitch McConnell likes to say we delayed the bill.
No, he delayed the bill.
Weeks ago, he came to the floor and said, this is all we're doing, just the 250.
And the Democrats were reunited, House and Senate.
The Senate Democrats went to the floor and said, no, no to that.
We have a better idea.
Nope.
change very much over time.
Nancy Pelosi did not earn much more in the bill.
It was just a holdup.
Okay, so meanwhile, all of this leads to the asking of a question.
None of this is sustainable, right?
We can't just keep spending money like this.
At a certain point, we're going to have to inflate the currency.
There's no market for our debt at a certain point.
We're going to start floating 50 and 100-year bonds.
You just can't do this for very long.
There's just no way to do it.
In a country of 330 million people and the engine of economic civilization, you cannot do this indefinitely.
So the question becomes, how do we reopen, obviously?
And the real question becomes, what exactly are we supposed to wait for?
Like, what is the level of waiting we are supposed to engage in?
What are we waiting to happen to allow us to reopen?
Some people are saying, we're waiting for a vaccine.
Well, the vaccine ain't arriving, okay?
It's not arriving anytime soon.
At best, 12 to 18 months.
By the way, there is zero evidence so far that there will even be a vaccine at all.
I mean, like, at all, at all.
The flu vaccine is not particularly effective.
The reason it's not particularly effective is because the flu virus mutates.
We have yet to come up with a single vaccine for coronavirus that is actually...
100% effective or 90% effective or anything close to it.
Coronavirus is its own sort of strain.
It's very difficult to come up with a vaccine for it.
And according to a new study, a vaccine is not going to be forthcoming maybe, maybe ever.
We'll get to that in just one second.
That doesn't mean we're not going to get some treatments, but we need to be realistic about what the future looks like if we hope to get back to anything presuming normal or even remotely approaching normal.
We'll get to that in just one second.
First, let us talk about the fact you're spending an awful lot of time on screens, right?
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Okay, so let's go through the sort of future here.
What the future looks like.
So I've got good news and I've got bad news.
OK, so why don't we start with the bad news?
Because that's what I always do.
I always start with bad news.
We get that out of the way.
So here is the bad news.
There may not be a vaccine.
For all the talk about a vaccine, we're going to develop a vaccine.
Everyone's working on a vaccine.
As I say, there's been very little evidence that vaccines for coronavirus have been particularly successful.
Remember, it took us like 30 years to even come up with a drug cocktail that was effective against HIV AIDS.
So the idea that you're going to come up inside of a year with a vaccine for a coronavirus seems fairly difficult.
Also, the Jerusalem Post reports a new study in China has found that the novel coronavirus has mutated into at least 30 different variations, showing that medical officials have vastly underestimated the overall ability of the virus to mutate.
So if it's mutating, then you're not going to be able to create a successful vaccine for it.
And meanwhile, the CDC director is saying that the second wave in winter could theoretically be even worse.
Robert Redfield spoke with the Washington Post.
He said there's a possibility the assault of the virus on our nation next winter will actually be even more difficult than the one we just went through.
When I've said this to others, they kind of put their head back.
They don't understand what I mean.
So, you know, the reason that he is saying that is if the virus is still around and if people go out and they are back in school and they're going about their business, well, then presumably the spread will be wider.
I mean, right now the spread is not all that wide because everybody has locked down and it depends on area.
So there's an article that I saw today in Spiked Online Magazine talking about the effectiveness of lockdowns.
The article is by a guy named Wilfred Riley, who's a political scientist, and he points out that states that have not locked down are not doing worse than states that have locked down.
The seven states that have not locked down are Arkansas, Iowa, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming.
The states reported 37, 60, 21, 9, 7, 20, and two deaths, respectively, for an average of 22.3 deaths.
Throwing in South Carolina, the states averaged 33 deaths.
If you measure up those states against the rest of the United States, what you see is that they're actually doing significantly better than the rest of the United States.
Now, the answer is that it has nothing to do with those states don't have lockdowns, the other states do have lockdowns.
It has to do with population density, obviously.
Okay, and you can adjust for population density, sort of, but you can't really adjust for the fact that New York City is a massively, massively populous place that is responsible for something like 30%, 30, 25 to 30% of all deaths in the United States are just New York City.
So, really heavily populous places, you might need lockdowns if you hope to curb the spread of this thing.
But if you're looking at Utah, probably not.
People just live further apart.
The risk factors are not the same.
You can adjust for population in the stats, but it doesn't completely adjust for populations in the stats.
So, if you extend this more broadly across the world, it is not clear that lockdowns are going to be particularly effective, at least not for long, because as people go out, they're going to infect each other again.
So, what exactly can we hope for?
Well, we can hope for some sort of drug reductions here.
We can hope for the success of that Gilead Pharmaceuticals drug, Resmidivir.
That one, Remsidivir.
We can hope for the effectiveness of that particular drug.
We can hope that some of the new techniques that are being used, like immunosuppressants, because there's a belief that maybe cytokine storms are leading, too strong an immune response is leading to overload of the system, basically.
We can hope for that.
We can't really hope for the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine anymore.
There's a new malaria study on hydroxychloroquine, a nationwide study.
With 368 patients, it was the largest look so far at hydroxychloroquine with or without azithromycin.
The study was posted online and it found that 28% of those who were given hydroxychloroquine plus usual care died versus 11% of those getting routine care alone.
22% of those getting the drug plus azithromycin died too.
The difference between that group and the usual care was not considered large enough to rule out other factors.
Hydroxychloroquine made no difference in the need for a breathing machine either.
So hydroxychloroquine has not been effective.
There were scientists in Brazil.
They stopped part of a study testing chloroquine, which is an older drug similar after heart rhythm problems developed in one quarter of people, given the higher doses of two being tested.
So Plaquenil, which is the on brand version of the drug, has not been effective against There was anecdotal evidence that maybe it was working, but it appears not to be.
Meanwhile, there's another drug that is being put out in Israel, a COVID-19 treatment called Pluristem.
Which is now being utilized and tested in the United States.
There's a report by the company showing that six critically ill coronavirus patients in Israel considered high risk for mortality were treated with Pluristem's placenta-based cell therapy product and survived, according to preliminary data provided by the Haifa-based company.
There was one U.S.
case where this was treated.
That patient was critically ill with respiratory failure due to acute respiratory distress syndrome, was intubated in an ICU for three weeks.
So they're hoping that maybe this will be a mitigating circumstance.
That's probably the best that we can hope for at this point, is that by the time we get to fall, there are some new drugs on the market that help curb the effect of this thing.
But other than that, I don't think there are going to be a lot of major changes until the fall.
Other than the development of drugs, I don't think there's going to be a lot of major changes until the fall.
So, what are you locking down until, is the question.
Like, what is the purpose of locking down?
So, if you're locking down until you have curbed the spread such that we can actually measure hotspot increases, as I mentioned yesterday, that's fair, right?
We want to at least get it to the point where you can identify a hotspot when it arises.
That's fine.
Once the state has done that, that's about all they can do.
And that brings us to a little bit of good news and possible strategies.
We'll get to that in just one moment.
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Okay, so in a piece of good news, Despite all of this, as Dr. Deborah Brooks said yesterday, the United States still has one of the lowest death rates on planet Earth.
So the talk about how the United States has completely botched this and mishandled this, there's this massive disconnect in the media between how they think the U.S.
has handled this and how the U.S.
has actually handled this.
If you look at deaths per million in the United States, we rank right in the middle of European countries.
We are not the worst in the world.
We don't have the worst healthcare system in the world.
Our systems were not overwhelmed the way systems were overwhelmed in Italy and are now being overwhelmed in Japan.
All the talk of how the United States healthcare system is so Byzantine and it's so terrible and it's just crap.
It's just not true.
Okay, we have a one city that has an extraordinarily dense population with a lot of people with pre-existing conditions, a lot of elderly folks, and the death rates there are exceedingly high.
Even there, the healthcare system is not overwhelmed.
Here's Dr. Deborah Birx pointing out that we still have one of the lowest death rates in the world.
They have been on the front lines now for weeks and weeks and weeks.
And so no matter what city they have been in, they have not seen the relief that we've been able to talk about at the end of the tunnel because of the delay in hospitalizations and deaths.
So to our health care providers, to our respiratory therapists, and to everyone in the labs, thank you for the work that you're doing to protect Americans and give us one of the lowest mortality rates in the entire world.
Okay, and that is good news.
It is also good news that we are seeing a study out of Stockholm, Sweden.
I honestly don't understand why people are so negative about Sweden.
Like, I understand if you don't like their policy, or you think their policy is the wrong policy.
That's fine.
Like, policy critiques are fine.
There are people who seem to be actively rooting against what Sweden is doing.
Because maybe they like the lockdown policy so much that they're rooting against Sweden or they're rooting against Georgia.
They're sort of hoping against hope that something bad happens in Georgia to convince people to stay home across.
You should be rooting for the success in Sweden.
According to the Swedish experts, they're now saying, They're now saying that there will be a fairly high percentage of people who have been infected in Sweden in very short order, so they are approaching herd immunity.
That is Sweden's approach, right?
You sort of let people walk around and be responsible.
I've now asked pretty much everybody, left, right, and center, where we are going to end up in terms of actual policy.
The answer is we will end up doing what Sweden does.
The only question is whether we do that sooner or whether we do that later.
And as we are seeing, some states are doing it sooner and some states are doing it later.
And pretending that all states are equivalent is ridiculous.
The New York-based media is so angry at Georgia for suggesting reopening of shops.
And by the way, just because you say that shops can reopen does not mean that shops will reopen.
Many shops are not reopening in Georgia.
Many shops are saying, listen, we don't have the capacity to do temperature checks.
We don't have the ability to socially distance.
So we're just not going to open until the spread has been slowed a little bit more.
The media, I think, completely got wrong the Georgia policies as well, because those suggestions seem to be that people are going to willy-nilly go out bowling, no masks, no social distancing, that people are going to go to restaurants and spit on each other.
That is not the case.
In order for you to reopen your business, you have to take certain preliminary steps, like everyone has to be masked, everybody has to socially distance, right?
Enforceable by law.
That's in the Georgia order.
Brian Kemp, who's the governor of Georgia, was on Fox News with Martha McCallum, and he was explaining the policy.
Can you explain why you would start with those kinds of businesses on day one?
Well, those are the ones that are closed.
The other businesses in Georgia are still currently opening under the order that I have now, and we're coming down.
I think that's what a lot of people don't understand, but you also have to give that fitness owner or that owner in a hair salon the ability to be able to be a partner in this fight that we're in.
This is going to take some common sense.
Our people in our state have learned a lot through this.
They have helped us be a solution to the problem, to flatten the curve, and to start getting on the other side of this.
Okay, people on the left are wildly angry at Brian Kemp for doing this.
Like, they should be rooting for it to work, right?
Because that way we can all start tranching back into work, which would be the idea.
People who are vulnerable will still be out of the workforce, people who have pre-existing conditions, people who are elderly, people who live with people who are older, right?
Those people will be last to go back to the workforce because you don't want to expose people.
But we're going to have to start getting back to something that approaches a workforce at this point.
The media, we're fighting mad about this.
So Chris Hayes over at MSNBC says this is reckless, it's illogical, it's just terrible.
Why is Georgia doing something like this?
Look at the state of Georgia, which is about to reopen a wide range of businesses under Republican Governor Brian Kemp.
If that sounds insane to you, you're not alone.
For the record, Georgia does not meet the White House guidelines.
It does not have a 14-day trajectory of declining cases.
It has tested less than 90,000 people out of a population of more than 10 million.
Mayors in Georgia are describing the governor's decision as reckless, dangerous, and illogical.
Okay, well, those mayors are ignoring the fact that actually the infection rate is now below one in Georgia.
If you actually look at the stats in Georgia, what you'll see is that there's an increasing number of positive tests, but if you chart that against the number of tests overall that are being taken, that chart shows the lines diverging, meaning that hugely increasing number of tests, slightly and consistently increasing number of positive cases.
You can actually see the chart if you're watching the show.
That red line is the number of total tests being taken in Georgia.
That blue line is the number of positive tests.
What you would expect to see is the blue line trending up at a faster rate as the number of tests increases.
Instead, what you are seeing is a consistency in the number of tests that are coming back positive, which is a smaller percentage than the total number of tests that are coming back in.
Eric Erickson, who's a radio host in Georgia, he says, The infection rate does not get talked about a lot.
It's the measure of a virus's ability to reproduce, the reproduction rate.
If the RT, which is what it's called, is above 1, the virus will spread.
If it's below 1, the virus will stop spreading.
Healthcare experts have been telling us since March people need to shelter in place to get the RT below 1.
Once it was below 1, we could start slowly reopening.
In Georgia, the state is below 1.
Not only that, but daily new cases continue to fall.
Here are the present numbers in Georgia based on daily new cases.
April 14th, 830.
April 15th, 634.
April 16th, 661.
April 17th, 537.
April 18th, 256.
April 19th, 157.
April 20th, 96.
April 21, 23.
The trend is remarkably good.
The virus is definitely declining.
537, April 18th, 256, April 19th, 157, April 20th, 96, April 21, 23.
The trend is remarkably good.
The virus is definitely declining.
So Georgia is, in fact, flattening the curve.
I mean, Georgia's flattening the curve.
So why exactly are people rooting against all of this?
I do not understand.
So Sanjay Gupta over at CNN, he was saying, it's clear that we're not ready to open parts of the country.
Look, even Andrew Cuomo in New York is saying that elective surgeries in parts of New York that are not New York City should be allowed.
Businesses in New York are going to reopen.
It's just not going to be in New York City first.
Here's Sanjay Gupta with Chris Cuomo.
We are clear that the virus is still out there.
We are clear that we are not ready.
It is clear what the guidelines are and that we haven't met them.
And it's also clear that a lot of people, Chris, are frightened about this.
They're frightened to go out.
So you open up businesses, but people are not likely to go.
Is that doorknob safe?
Did that person get tested?
Has this place been sterilized?
What about the ventilation?
I mean, all these questions still coming up among people because people are, you know, they're understandably worried.
Right, but what if none of those things change?
Really, what if none of those things change?
What if the testing is in place?
And that doesn't mean people aren't walking around infected.
It just means that you can identify a hotspot.
All the things he mentioned are probably going to be part of the new reality.
Is that doorknob infected?
Was this table sterilized?
Are people near me carrying it?
Right, all that is going to be part of the new reality.
That's just the way that it works.
Okay, that is the reality.
Until there's new treatments that come out, a vaccine, as I say, is I think unlikely.
We're going to have to deal with the increased risk, and we're going to have to go back to a certain level of reality, because this cannot last.
What is happening right now simply is not palatable.
It's not something that can last.
And as we will see, the federal government is going to take some steps to step in if states continue to lock down indefinitely without any sort of actual measurement, any metric of when it is safe.
By Gupta's standard there, there is no metric by which it is safe to go back to work.
If we can't go back to work until everybody feels secure that the virus is no longer out there, well, then we're going to get the Eric Holdhout solution of being home for the next 10 years.
Which is not an actual solution.
We'll get to more of this in just one second.
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Okay, in a minute, we are going to get to President Trump's immigration order.
And people being crazy about it.
We're also going to get to Democrats maintaining two separate positions.
One, the actual position, which is that the Trump administration has done a pretty good job getting them resources.
And two, that the Trump administration is responsible for every evil on planet Earth.
We'll get to all of that in a second.
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So there seems to be this sort of panicked belief that we are not going anywhere until there's a vaccine.
I'm part of many in the media, many Democrats, that somehow there's going to be a deus ex machina, that there will be some outside intervention that will fix all of this tomorrow.
And part of that is our attention span in modern society is five seconds long.
And so you're constantly refreshing Twitter to see if somebody has come up with a cure.
Part of that is also our risk level in society has dropped so dramatically.
That we are not willing to undertake certain risks.
And listen, I'm not saying that if you are elderly or vulnerable, if you don't have a pre-existing condition, and when I say elderly, I really mean above age 60, that you should be out running around willy-nilly no problem, right?
You should be taking all the measures you can take to keep yourself safe.
If you're in regular contact with those people, you should be taking measures to keep those people safe.
All of that happens to be true.
It also happens to be true That your baseline level of risk if you are young and healthy is nearly zero.
It is extremely, extremely low.
And if governors are waiting for something, I'm not sure what they are waiting for.
Once you have, again, lowered the rate to the point where your healthcare system will not be overwhelmed, and two, you can actually identify hotspots as they grow, that's pretty much all you can do.
Well, Attorney General William Barr said on Tuesday the DOJ is going to consider supporting people and groups who allege that their rights have been violated by pandemic policies, which is good.
You're starting to see these bizarre videos emerge all over the country of police arresting people doing, like, absolutely nothing.
There was a video that was floating around Twitter, and unless there's more to the story, it's egregious, of a mother being arrested because she took her kid to the park.
Like, seriously, enough.
This is not sustainable.
It's just not sustainable.
The American people should not stand for this kind of garbage.
I will say, I've never been proud of America.
And I was when I saw the story that Bill de Blasio had requested that everybody in New York send tips to the mayoral office of people who are not socially distancing.
Snitch on your neighbors.
And instead he was inundated with dicks.
Instead he was inundated with people sending pictures of their junk.
America was already great.
Here was Attorney General William Barr saying, listen, if governors are pursuing policies that violate people's civil liberties and violate their constitutional rights, and there is not evidence to back those policies, we are going to sue those governors.
I think the president's guidance has been, as I say, superb and very commonsensical.
And I think a lot of the governors are following that.
And, you know, to the extent that governors don't and impinge on either civil rights or on the national commerce, our common market that we have here, then we'll have to address that.
These are very, very burdensome We have to remember, for the limited purpose of slowing down the spread, that is bending the curve, we didn't adopt them as the comprehensive way of dealing with this disease.
Well, that is right.
I mean, the new normal can't be you stay home.
The new normal may be something that is annoying, like you have to wear a mask all the time, like you have to socially distance.
At our offices, I know that that's what people are doing, right?
I mean, that is what people are doing.
We have a disproportionately young office, and we are in a vital industry, so people are allowed to work at our offices.
We're not violating the law, nor are we encouraging people to do so.
That is going to be something like the new normal.
Now, meanwhile, President Trump finally put out his executive order on immigration.
And guess what?
It's not bad.
Like, there's nothing wrong with the executive order.
There are some people who say it's not strict enough in limiting immigration because all it really does is it temporarily bars new immigrants, including some family members of U.S.
citizens and foreign workers, looking to move to the United States in the next 60 days alone under a new executive order.
The temporary immigration suspension is designed to reduce immigration at a time when tens of millions of Americans have lost jobs.
There are some people who are saying that's not going to do it.
I mean, a 60-day ban isn't going to do it because people aren't even going back to work, many of them, in the next 60 days, particularly in areas like New York or New Jersey.
The executive order does not impact immigrants already living in the United States or foreigners coming on temporary visas for work or travel.
So that means that you're actually not even decreasing the number of workers, which, you know, frankly, it seems to me that if you're trying to limit the amount of labor in American society at a time when 30 million people are out of work, Which is not the world's worst idea, then this is insufficient.
That category includes H-1B visas, which allow more than 85,000 high-skilled foreigners to come to the United States for at least three years to work.
It also includes seasonal migrant workers who come to the U.S.
annually to work on farms where they make up about a tenth of the agricultural workforce.
And in other businesses, such as resorts and county fairs, the executive order is less restrictive than advocates on both sides had earlier expected.
It doesn't actually impact most employment-based immigration.
So basically it just says you can't come in right now.
Mark Krikorian, who is the strict-on-immigration president of the Center for Immigration Studies, he says it's a PR stunt more than anything else, which it may very well be.
So all of the objections that this is like the end of the world, that's just not correct.
That has not prevented people from fulminating in the most idiotic fashion.
Beto O'Rourke tweeted about how he wanted people to work on the farms.
I mean, honestly, if a Republican had tweeted this, everybody would be like, this guy's kind of a racist.
Beto O'Rourke tweeted, and this is great because I get to bring back my Beto.
Who the bleep do you think is working on the farms and feedlots, brah, in the packing houses and processing plants at a time when we are struggling to feed ourselves?
Kickflip!
Who's in the kitchen?
Who's picking, preparing, serving the food we eat, cleaning up afterwards?
Yeah, yeah.
Not great there, Beto O'Rourke.
Meanwhile, reporters were asking Trump, are you using the coronavirus to reduce legal immigration?
Is this your cruel, cruel... Again, it doesn't actually reduce even the employment visas that are coming in, really.
Here's a reporter completely botching the story as per our usual arrangement in the American media.
Some critics are saying that you are using the virus now in this crisis to follow through on that promise to reduce legal injuries.
No, no.
Well, I want people that are in this country, I want our citizens to get jobs.
I don't want them to have competition.
We have a very Unusual situation.
I don't want them to compete right now.
There's a big difference when we have a full economy and frankly where some of the companies, we have many companies moving in, where they need actually, they need workers.
That's a big difference between that and where all of a sudden a lot of people lose jobs.
Okay, so again, there's the reporter completely blowing it.
Speaking of the media completely blowing it, the continued insanity of Chris Cuomo is pretty amazing.
So yesterday, Chris Cuomo emerged from his basement To the wild cheers of, I guess, the internal staff at CNN, he emerged from his basement in what is obviously the most produced video everywhere, of any time.
He's overacting more than Nicolas Cage in every Nicolas Cage movie.
He emerges from his basement.
Now, what's hilarious about this, of course, is that CNN's Chris Cuomo had been spotted Like actually traveling from one of his houses to a construction site where construction was taking place in another one of his houses.
So this is not the first time he's emerged from the basement.
I guess the idea here was that if he emerged from the basement and then went back down into the basement, then we would get six more weeks of winter.
But here was Chris Cuomo emerging from the basement over at CNN in the most dramatic possible fashion.
Here it is.
The official re-entry from the basement.
Cleared by CDC.
A little sweaty.
Just worked out.
Happens.
This is what I've been dreaming of, literally, for weeks.
My wife... She was cleared by the CDC.
She doesn't have fever.
She doesn't have the symptoms anymore.
More than seven days from her quarantine.
We're still a little scared, so I'll just give you one of these.
Just give you one of these.
Bella has, of course, taken the video.
This is the dream.
Okay, except that he had emerged from that basement many times before.
So, well done, CNN.
So, Chris Cuomo, when he's not emerging in a fake, obviously, second-take video, when he's not emerging from his basement, he has also explained that we're not seeing urgency from our leaders.
And this is the media narrative that drives me up a wall.
The media have promoted two specific lies here.
Lie number one is that there will come a time in the near future when we are all safe and we can all go back to work as normal, and that will require 87 million tests a day, and also it will require a vaccine, and anybody who says differently wants to kill you.
That is lie number one.
That is completely ridiculous.
Flattening the curve was never about that.
Testing was never about that.
So that is deeply irresponsible of the media.
The other thing that the media keeps saying is that the federal administration, because Trump is the president, that they are not doing sufficient action, that they don't care deeply about this.
What are you talking about?
What are you talking about?
So here is Chris Cuomo suggesting we're not seeing urgency from our leaders.
Are we really not?
Are we not seeing urgency from our leaders, Chris Cuomo?
Seriously?
We've dumped, at this point, $7 trillion out the door on the federal level.
We've created hundreds of thousands of ventilators.
It is amusing, right?
Here's Chris Cuomo explaining that our leaders are not showing great urgency in the middle of the worst pandemic in modern American history.
People are doing amazing things all the time to help other people during this pandemic.
My frustration is we need that from our leaders as well.
That desperate times, desperate measures, doing what you can.
We're seeing it in people.
We're seeing it in our healthcare workers.
We're not seeing it with the urgency that we need to from our leaders yet.
And that's what worries me about what the CDC said tonight.
Well, weird because Andrew Cuomo, Chris's brother, they basically interview each other on CNN.
They have like a buddy cop show.
Andrew Cuomo said yesterday that the White House has been very helpful and that, in fact, New York no longer needs the U.S.
ship Comfort.
Remember that Comfort's steaming into New York Harbor?
And it was like a big deal.
All the pictures looked unbelievably tragic.
Inside of two weeks, they're saying we don't need that ship anymore.
So where is the lack of urgency?
Seriously, where is it?
The meeting went well, and I think it was productive.
The big issue was testing.
As everybody knows, that's going to be the next step as we go forward.
The President sent up a Navy ship, the Comfort, which was a hospital ship, which, by the way, was very good to have in case we had overflow.
But I said, We don't really need the comfort anymore.
It did give us comfort, but we don't need it anymore.
So if they need to deploy that somewhere else, they should take it.
Not acting with urgency?
I mean, everyone is acting with urgency right now.
Obviously.
Obviously.
But this contributes.
The media's coverage here is basically just a Democratic talking point, because everybody sort of understands at this point the administration is doing what they need to do.
At least they're doing their best.
And yet the Democratic talking point is that everything the administration does is insufficient, and the only thing that would be sufficient are things that are not possible.
So you end up with people like Anderson Cooper suggesting on national television that we need 4 million tests per day.
We don't need 4 million tests per day to open.
That's insane.
And he's saying this to John Kerry.
That's not a thing.
Like Scott Gottlieb, right, who knows a lot more about this stuff than Anderson Cooper, said maybe we need 300,000 tests a day to open.
Not 4 million.
Okay?
Where are they getting this crap?
They're just pulling it straight out of thin air.
Here's Anderson Cooper again setting up a bar that just does not exist.
I mean, that bar is not real.
We all want to see the economy open.
Everybody does.
Everybody wants to get out of their house.
There are a lot of safe ways to do it, but the safest way of all is clearly by being able to test the virus itself, who has it, and being able to test the antibodies to determine who may have had it.
There are about 150,000 tests being done roughly every day right now.
A latest Harvard study was showing initially 4 million would need to be done every day, maybe going up into double digits by July just to get everything going and people confident.
Okay, by the way, that Harvard study did not suggest that that was going to be the bar to governors opening states.
What the Harvard study suggested is that if you want people to like go back to concerts and movie theaters in mass numbers, you need 20 million a day.
Guess what?
That ain't happening.
But the media have been using that number as a cudgel to wield against the Trump administration.
Well, if you don't make 20 million tests available, first of all, all of this is basically on governors.
Remember, we have a federalist system.
Somehow Gavin Newsom in California was able to obtain enough ventilators that we were sending ventilators from this coast to the other coast in the middle of the pandemic.
Well, they can do the same with state budgets.
It turns out that if states can pay for all the stupid crap that they pay for, they should be able to pay for some of these tests.
But all of this feeds into the general democratic talking point here, which is that the Trump administration is a giant failure.
Here's AOC summing it up, suggesting that the government is responsible for a 9-11 worth of death every single day.
We are going to pass a small potatoes bill and then we are talking about recessing again until May 4th.
And if we are going to bring every member or call back almost every member who can back to D.C.
to pass a small incremental bill and with the knowledge that we are not coming back until next month again, that's two rent checks.
And the last time we left again, we lost Over one 9-11's worth of people due to this lack of action.
Really?
What lack of action?
What was the action that was supposed to be taken that wasn't taken?
Other than Democrats holding up two separate massive funding bills for a grand total of two weeks.
What action was not taken?
This is the part where it is a Democrat media narrative that does not reflect reality.
The reality is the feds are doing what they are supposed to do and what they can do.
That is the reality.
And the states, many of them are trying to do what they can do, and some of them are overzealous in doing it, and some of them are saying, listen, Georgia is not New York.
But to pretend that public officials are insufficiently acting so that you can elect Democrats is pretty disgusting.
Okay, time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
So, things that I like today.
If you are a music fan, and not too discriminating in your taste, then you might enjoy a video that we just posted on YouTube.
My dad and I have had a little bit of extra time to practice violin and piano together, and so we put together basically a single take of Ave Maria by Bach and Gounod.
My dad on piano, me on violin.
Believe it or not, there are certain people who clamor for me on violin.
I'm not sure why that is, but here is a little bit of the beginning of Ave Maria by Bach.
I know you can go see that on YouTube.
I think it's got like a million views on Facebook.
You can go check it out.
Have fun.
Okay, so you can go listen to the whole thing over there.
Also, I believe we are posting a singletake version of Meditation from Thai East by Jules Massenet, which is one of the more famous violin solo pieces.
It's a really pretty piece.
I think we have that up on Instagram also.
So if you enjoy that kind of thing, then see if you can bury your way through something like that.
Okay, other thing that I like today.
One thing that I really do love about some members of the social left is that many of the things that they say are moral, they will not engage in themselves because they inherently know they're not particularly moral.
Now, this is not the libertarian position.
The libertarian position very often is that things that I don't think are moral are still allowed.
In a free society, lots of stuff I don't approve of, but that doesn't actively harm other people.
It's not really my job to step in and do something about that, because if we all use our subjective preferences as to what is right and wrong, but with regards to things that don't damage other people, that's how you end up with authoritarian states.
That is the libertarian position.
In other words, I explicitly say that things I don't like are still legal.
That is not the leftist position.
The leftist position is only things I like should be legal.
If I don't like your language, it should be illegal.
If you say a thing I don't like, it's hate speech.
If you participate in a religious service I don't like, we should shut it down.
If you want to homeschool your kids, that should be illegal.
We talked about this a little bit earlier this week.
There was a Harvard Magazine piece about how homeschooling should be illegal because evil, evil Christians are teaching social priorities that this professor at Harvard does not like.
So the leftist position is not a libertarian one.
Like, I don't like this moral position, but it should still be allowed because I have a different view of what government should do than enforce morality.
No, the leftist position is the government should enforce morality.
So, therefore, the government should only allow things that I personally like.
Well, this has led to some very weird sort of, some weird contradictions.
And it leads to this very puzzled piece that I absolutely love from Mel Magazine.
The piece was written by Ceci Kuwabara Blanchard.
It is called, Why Won't Woke Boys Pay for Sex?
Bernie bros, male feminists, and good guy liberals all support sex work.
But for some reason, they aren't paying girls like me for sex.
Four months before Violet, a 25-year-old transsexual with dollish cheekbones and primary color wardrobe, moved to Brooklyn, she toyed with the idea of holding a farewell tour in her lifelong home of Portland, Oregon.
Her approach to putting a bow on her 20-plus years in a city, mocked for its liberal leanings, was to collide her two disparate worlds, her friend circle of jewel-puffing, mulleted Bernie bros, with her recent professional foray into bleeping for cash.
What if I put it out there that I'm available as a sex worker for people I know for highly discounted rates?
Violet, now a good friend of mine, recently tells me over FaceTime, recalling the logic behind her maniac idea.
She admits it was both a stab at giving her friends a last chance to F while also raking in as much money as she could before she hit the Big Apple.
Violet took to Instagram stories to vibe-check these guys.
She assumed that her peers, millennial Zoomer cusps with art degrees and hard-ons for progressive politics, would be prime clients.
After all, as youngish liberals, they seemed to overwhelmingly support sex workers and the decriminalization of their profession, and they were right in line with those of others in their demographic categories.
Despite stereotypes of Johns being unattractive older men, some research shows that clients of sex workers tend to have their first experience of paid sex when they're young, hot, and in their 20s.
In other words, the numbers suggest that more of Violet's followers should have been down with paid sex, but that's not what happened.
The woke guys in her social circle who responded weren't bringing the same kind of hurrah they had for the idea of standing in solidarity with sex workers, and exactly none of them offered to cough up cash.
That left her confused.
If these young dudes were politically rooting for sex workers, and are in the period of their lives when they're most likely to first see one, why aren't they seizing en masse the opportunity for one of Violet's bargain bin leaps?
Or one of those friendly neighborhood sex workers, for that matter?
Some have pragmatic excuses.
Of course, I don't have the money.
I don't want sex that bad.
I can get leaped without paying for it.
They DM'd Violet.
But it's more than that.
As two trans girls who keep leftist male hotties in their company and turn tricks as a side hustle, Violet and I both have observed that our peers can't get our politics straight.
For one, these guys support decriminalizing sex work because they're feminists, but they also seem to not pay for sex because they're feminists.
So they are they are so woke that they are all in favor of people being paid for sex.
Like they think it's perfectly moral to pay for sex, but also they think it's a little bit immoral to pay for sex because that might be violating feminist precepts.
Because the feminist movement is actually confused about this thing, so they are confused similarly.
Also, it turns out, a lot of people on the left, the social policies that they proclaim are actually moral and decent and wonderful, they're engaging themselves.
A great example of this.
Hollywood is constantly promoting single motherhood.
Constantly talking about how single motherhood is not only a valid life choice, but a heroic life choice.
That if you're a single mother, you're more heroic in some fashion than a woman who got married and settled down and had a family.
That's the easy decision.
Being a single mother and kicking dad out of the house because he's a bad guy that you decided to have sex with irresponsibly and now you have a baby, that's actually a brave decision according to most Hollywood and TV films.
That is what Hollywood promotes.
But nobody in Hollywood actually lives like that.
The marriage rates in Hollywood are very, very high.
There are not a lot of single mothers in Hollywood.
Why?
Well, because it turns out that in people's actual lives, the moral decisions that they make are not the moral decisions that they promote.
So there is a great irony to this article from Mel Magazine lamenting that, number one, a lot of leftist guys who say that trans women are women will not have sex with a trans woman because it turns out that trans women are not, in fact, women.
And so they're very upset about this.
Very, very upset.
And I find that hilarious.
And then, I also find it hilarious that the feminist movement has created such insecurity in feminist Bernie bros.
That the feminist Bernie bros, on the one hand, they're like, yeah, all in for sex work.
Sex work's great, man.
Liberation!
Liberation!
Also, I can't engage in that, because I think it would be somehow victimizing you.
And I've been told by some feminists that sex work is actually demeaning to women and objectifying women.
So while I think it's gung-ho, go for it, me personally, no on that.
No on that.
So, this holistic worldview has not been particularly successful on the left, so I am enjoying that.
According to this Mail Magazine piece, woke boys are likely not just swerving around paid sex because of their mixed-signal feminism.
Their refusal to pay for sex also seems to come from believing a John to be the antithesis of a successful heterosexual male.
Because, you see, they're mean to Johns.
Like, if you have to pay for sex somehow, you are lesser.
You are lesser, which is discriminatory, according to Mel Magazine.
Is it possible that... Wow.
Is it possible that maybe this moral code does not stand up to any level of realistic scrutiny?
Brad had only ever been with cisgender women, he told me.
I was his first.
Knowing this, I checked in with him multiple times throughout the night to make sure his heterosexual ego was still intact.
I couldn't help but feel the whole latte flirtation and wine date was a charade to bed me, secure his shemale fantasy, and then return to his cis girlfriend.
If he was looking to bleep a girl's male genitalia, he should have just paid a prostitute, ideally me.
That's not the straightest thing.
I'm just gonna put that out there.
Not the straightest activity.
The self-contradictions in the feminist movement are extraordinarily hilarious and well-deserving of mockery.
So thank you, Mel Magazine.
I really appreciated that.
Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
So Joe Biden continues to not be sentient.
Joe Biden continues to not be able to string sentences together.
Yesterday, like every live stream he holds, and I live stream every day and I'm sure I make errors, but not errors like this.
Every live stream Joe Biden has, he makes errors not because he's distracted, but because he is not with us.
Joe Biden is clearly not with us in the way that Entering the latter part of his last term, Woodrow Wilson was not with us and his wife, Edith, ended up governing the country basically for the last year and a half of the Wilson administration.
Joe Biden, just yesterday, he was doing his live stream from his basement and he confused Labor Day and Memorial Day and called the Pennsylvania governor Dale instead of Tom, who's a completely different human being.
Here was Joe Biden just screwing things up left and right.
And all Dale's been saying, Governor Wolf, is listen to the scientists.
Do you think we'll have a candidate by Memorial Day?
I'm quite sure that'd be the case because right now the convention is scheduled in August before Memorial Day.
Are you saying Memorial or Labor?
I said Memorial Day.
Oh, no, no, no, no.
It won't be before Memorial Day.
No, it won't.
We're just getting the process underway.
Yeah, so he's not with us, Joe Biden.
But he is thinking about Michelle Obama as a potential VP pick.
I thought we were done with sort of the era.
Trump was a ringing rebuke of the era of sort of family politics, right?
Because we'd had two Bushes, and so the idea of Jeb was just unpalatable to a lot of Republicans, and then we'd already had Bill Clinton, and then Hillary was running, and people were like, well, we're not super into that.
So now Joe wants to bring in Michelle, right?
I understand why.
Michelle Obama has done a magnificent job of remaking herself from the radical she was in 2008, talking about how this is the first time she was proud of her country, was her husband's nomination.
She's remade herself into a sort of late night TV host figure or midday TV host figure, inspiring and apolitical.
And obviously, Joe Biden is trying to appeal to the black community by saying that he would pick Michelle Obama as his running mate.
Here he is.
I've heard some speculation about Michelle Obama as vice president.
If she said to you she'd be willing to be your running mate, would you ask her?
Oh, I take her in a heartbeat.
She's brilliant.
She knows the way around.
She is a really fine woman.
Okay, so he obviously is trying to pander here.
What's hilarious, though?
And this is the part I hate is the pandering in the Democratic Party is actually not directed at black Americans.
The people who actually care in America about the race of the presidential candidate, it turns out, are a bunch of woke white liberals.
And those are the people who actually care.
OK, that is according to Pew Research data.
So they put out a poll in the last couple of weeks.
And what they found is that here is the question.
Regardless of who you supported for the Democratic nomination, would you say that the fact that the likely Democratic nominee is a white man in his 70s either bothers you or doesn't bother you?
So 59% of all Democrats and leaning Democrats registered voters say it doesn't bother them.
41% say that it bothers them.
Now here's the breakdown by race and here's where it gets super hilarious.
Among black Americans, Asked whether it bothers them that the nominee is an old white man.
72% of black voters say no, we don't care.
72% say it doesn't bother us at all.
Only 28% say it bothers them.
Among Hispanics, 70% say it doesn't bother me.
And only 30% say that it bothers them.
Among white Democrats, 51% say it doesn't bother me.
me.
And only 30% say that it bothers them.
Among white Democrats, 51% say it doesn't bother me.
49% say it bothers me.
So it's a bunch of woke white liberals, the sort of people who pay Sarah Rao to talk about how racist they are at dinner parties, at $300 dinner parties with Cabernet Sauvignon on the table and, and a nice red meat vegan steak, right?
The, Those sorts of people are the ones who are super bothered by the fact that Joe Biden is old and white and isn't actually black Americans.
Why?
I think that the idea that black Americans believe that America is inherently, deeply, unapologetically, and forever racist, I think that's overplayed.
I think the media overplayed that.
I think the people in the media are all white, woke liberals who say that they are bothered by this sort of stuff.
And then they go vote for Joe Biden anyways.
They're just a bunch of hypocrites.
By the way, the breakdown by age is not particularly stellar either.
So older Democrats say they don't care that the Democrat is a white man in his 70s.
That's basically everybody above the age of 50 in the Democratic Party says they don't care.
If you are 30 to 49, 55% of Democrats say they don't care about the fact that Biden is old and white.
If you are 18 to 29, 54% say that they care about this.
Which is not good for the future of America.
If you look at a nominee and your first reaction is, I don't like that guy's race, and I don't like that guy's age.
It's weird, because if Republicans were to say, you know, that guy seems too old, then all of a sudden it's, look at how ageist they are.
And if they say, well, look at another white guy, huh?
So how about that fabled diversity?
And it's, oh, look at them, Republicans shouldn't talk about this.
If the younger part of our country is interested in the sort of woke virtue signaling attendant here, then that is very bad news.
By the way, the other thing you see is that there is indoctrination going on at these colleges, at these universities.
You would think that racial politics would be the preserve of people who are less educated, right?
This is always what people say in the Republican Party, is that the people who are most racist are the people who are less educated.
Opposite in the Democratic Party, apparently.
If you're a post-grad worker, If you have a postgraduate degree, 58% of people with a postgraduate degree say they are bothered that Joe Biden is old and white.
If you're a high schooler, 76% say they are not bothered by the fact that Joe Biden is old and white.
So, just shows you where the Democratic Party is.
And that is bad for the future of the country.
If you are breaking people down by race and by age in order to determine their merit, you are doing all of these things wrong.
And yet the Democratic Party, as it gets younger and more educated, is actually moving in the wrong direction.
Hilariously enough, it is the racially divergent contingent, the racially diverse contingent of the Democratic Party that is still tethered to some form of reality.
All the white woke liberals, they've completely lost it.
They've completely lost touch with reality.
And they deserve what they get.
They deserve what they get here.
Alrighty, well, we'll be back here today with two additional hours of content.
Also make sure that 4 p.m.
today, Pacific time, you come by for our Daily Wire backstage.
We are socially distancing.
It shall be a party.
And since I'm forced to be here, you should be here too.
I'll see you a little bit later today or see you here tomorrow.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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