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April 24, 2020 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:09:17
Sunlight Is The Best Disinfectant | Ep. 997
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New data suggests that summer may help tamp down coronavirus.
President Trump and Chris Cuomo's wife both have some interesting medical suggestions.
And Congress continues to vomit out money.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
The Ben Shapiro Show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.
You have a right to privacy protected at expressvpn.com.
All righty, so I definitely do want to get to everything coronavirus medical suggestion related, but let's be honest about this.
This is all stupid.
It's seriously, seriously stupid.
People focusing in on Trump's sort of John Belushi-esque rantings from Animal House about medical solutions because he sort of understands it and he sort of doesn't.
That is not where people should be putting their focus right now.
How about putting our focus on the fact that our food supply chains are in a bit of trouble?
I mean, the fact is that farmers are plowing under crop because they can't make money from selling that crop at a time when food shortages would probably mean riots in the streets.
Restaurants, which were providing a huge market for all of our agriculture, Those restaurants are going under at incredibly rapid rates.
That means that you're probably going to be seeing more expensive products on a shelf at a time when people have less money to spend.
It's a real, real problem, right?
That's something we should think about.
We should be thinking about, how are we supposed to reopen in an environment in which the data are so uncertain?
And we'll talk about that in a little bit.
What the media are focused on is continuing to be the gotcha game of President Trump said something dumb at a press conference.
And Okay, I mean, all right, I suppose.
But if you really believe that that is of vital importance, then you're out of your mind.
And this is the same media that suggested that President Trump, by recommending hydroxychloroquine as a possible treatment for COVID-19, that he forced a woman to feed her husband fish tank cleaner, and then the guy died.
And the media are like, that's Trump's fault, which is a pretty fantastic way of creating an alibi for murdering your husband.
Not saying she murdered her husband, but if you were going to murder your husband and then have the media establish an alibi, would there be a better way to do it?
Like the Carole Baskin of fish tank cleaner over here.
Let's start with actual news and then we'll get to all of the pseudo-controversy today over President Trump and Clorox and whether you can ingest sunlight, whether you can actually just eat a ball of sunlight and it will actually fix everything.
We've now reached the stupid part, right?
It always takes a little while for serious stories to become incredibly stupid.
It took us about five weeks, really, for an incredibly serious story to turn into just full-scale utter stupidity.
That's sort of at the outside.
I mean, the fish tank cleaner story was a couple of weeks ago, and that was real dumb, but we are now reaching new lows.
First, let's bring you some actual useful information.
So I have some questions about this whole coronavirus knowledge level.
Nobody seems to know anything.
I mean, seriously, no one seems to know what the hell is going on with this thing.
I say this because there's an article out today suggesting that two-thirds of seriously ill COVID-19 patients didn't even have a fever, like at all, like did not have a fever.
So you've been told that you're going to have a fever for like a week if you get COVID-19, and that is one of the first symptoms we should look out for.
We should be doing temperature tests at the doors of our major businesses.
And it turns out that, you know, that, hmm.
According to ABC News, a new study is presenting surprising findings about COVID-19 and which factors play the biggest role in how severe the disease is for some people.
With New York being the epicenter for the virus in the United States, researchers from the state's largest healthcare system quickly moved to document findings that would help identify others and treat COVID-19 patients.
One thing stood out in the study published in the Journal of American Medicine.
A senior researcher, Karina Davidson, she says, the most surprising finding was two-thirds of the patients who were seriously ill with an active infection did not actually have a fever.
Okay, well, so do we know anything about this virus?
Like, seriously?
It's not clear to me that we know all that much more than we started with.
There are certain things we know more about.
We know that the death rate is not three or four percent.
Another story from yesterday is that New York has finally tested for antibodies, and what they found is that about one-fifth of people in New York City already have antibodies for COVID-19.
Now, that's good news in the sense it means the actual death rate from COVID-19 in New York City is 0.6.
0.6 of 8%, which is a lot lower than 3 or 4%.
It still means about six times as deadly as the flu and spreads three times more than the flu.
If you were to reach herd immunity in New York City, New York City's experienced about 11,000 deaths.
If you were to reach herd immunity in New York City, which is about 60% of the population at a baseline, you need to be immune to a disease to create herd immunity.
To get there, presumably if you just apply the same rates, you'd have to have about 35,000 people dead in New York City.
In a given year, you have about 53,000 people who die in New York City.
So you'd have to increase their death rates by nearly double, right?
You'd have to increase it by 80% in order to get to herd immunity.
So that is the bad news.
The good news is that not as deadly as previously thought, if you get it.
Bad news is that in order for herd immunity to be attained, a lot of people would have to die in order to in order to get there.
So that's a little bit more information.
Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York, he announced this yesterday.
He announced the antibody results.
Here was Andrew Cuomo explaining the sort of statewide results.
About 14% of the population of New York State has the antibodies, and about 21% of the population of New York City has the antibodies.
Here was Andrew Cuomo on this yesterday.
The statewide number is 13.9% tested positive for having the antibodies.
What does that mean?
It means these are people who were infected and who developed the antibodies to fight the infection.
13% of the population is about 2.7 million people who have been infected.
If you look at what we have now as a death total, which is 15,500, that would be about 0.5% death rate.
Okay, that is a lot lower than people thought, right?
They were saying three to four percent.
In New York City, if you just took the number of actual diagnosed cases as the denominator, and you took the actual number of deaths as a numerator, it was looking at like 11 or 12 percent.
It is not even close to that, right?
0.5 percent, 0.6 percent, that is a lot lower.
So that's good news.
I mean, the good news is if you get this thing, only six out of a thousand people who get this thing are going to die.
Those six out of a thousand people are likely to be people who are in their late In their late 70s, in their 80s.
The average age of death in New York City I believe is around 63 right now, but virtually everybody who has died from this thing has a couple of different pre-existing conditions.
That doesn't mean it's safe for everybody else.
I mean, I know personally at least one person who did not have pre-existing conditions about 60 years old and died of this thing.
And I think a lot of people who have friends in New York City know people or at least know of people who have died from this thing without pre-existing conditions just because so many people have died of this.
I mean, we're approaching 46,000 people dying in five weeks across the United States during an incredible lockdown the likes of which we've never seen in our lifetime.
This thing is still very dangerous because even if it is only five times as deadly as the flu, if it spreads three times as quickly as the flu, then if you just took the flu's raw statistics and say the flu kills 50,000 people, you'd have to multiply that by a factor of three.
In order to get to the death, in order to get to the case fatality rate, and then you'd have to multiply it again by a factor of three, because it spreads three times as quickly among three times as many people in the population, presumably if left unchecked.
So you'd have to multiply it by a factor of, if it's 0.5 to 0.1, you'd have to multiply it by a factor of 15.
So you're ending up with over half a million deaths easily from this thing, if there's no mitigation, if people do not put on masks.
Now people will put on masks, people will socially distance.
I have faith in the American people that they will do this.
Again, the good news is it's less deadly than thought.
The bad news is it's so widespread and so asymptomatic that the notion that we're ever going to be able to test to the extent that people are just going to be taken out of the population if they have it generally is not true.
You're going to be able to see a major spike if the testing is in place.
And that's why you've seen people like Scott Gottlieb at the FDA suggest 300,000 tests a day would be necessary because that way you can at least have sort of a sample size test in particular areas of New York City.
It'd be heavily located in major urban areas.
You'd be able to see where the thing is spiking and then maybe do some contact tracing.
Although contact tracing in a city like New York is going to be nearly impossible.
I have no idea how you contact trace in the subway system.
Truly.
South Korea has been doing this for 20 years and they're fairly good at it.
Hong Kong's been doing this for 20 years.
They're pretty good at it.
We'd be doing it in like a month.
Can you imagine contact tracing the New York subway system?
Incredibly, incredibly complicated.
There have been some suggestions.
People can download an app.
The app would immediately notify you if you were within a particular area of somebody because it's tracing you via your phone.
I think a lot of people would have privacy concerns about that.
But even beyond that, It's gonna be very difficult to get people not to infect each other if they are in close proximity, which is why the subway system has been one of the chief problems here.
So, the antibody test has some good news and it has some bad news.
In other relevant information, it looks like there is another experimental drug that is being put out there now.
Hydroxychloroquine?
I wouldn't say completely dismissed, but certainly a lot of people are very skeptical of hydroxychloroquine based on the studies that are out there not showing tremendous upside.
There was a study that was put out by China on remdesivir, which is that drug that was put out by Gilead Sciences.
The study was not good, and in fact the enrollment was so low they had to cancel the study.
It was published preliminarily without peer review in Lancet, and then it was immediately taken down.
So we still don't know the results from that, but people have sort of Taking the early indicators is maybe it's not quite the cure-all that people were thinking it was.
There's another drug on the way.
I'm gonna talk about that with you in just one second.
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Okay, so there are several drugs that are in the pipeline and are moving through the FDA approval process and through testing phase.
Drug maker Eli Lilly, according to the Wall Street Journal, said it expects to begin human testing as soon as next month for an experimental COVID-19 treatment that uses antibodies derived from the blood of people who have recovered from the viral disease.
The testing could yield results by late summer if successful, potential emergency authorization by the FDA by early fall.
So maybe a couple of months from now, a few months from now, this could reduce the viral load in people either about to get sick or who are sick or even hospitalized.
And that would really help knock down that second wave that everybody is afraid of in the fall.
So that is some good news.
And by the way, the entire medical community is on this thing.
So some people have been saying, what is the point of locking down or even doing any sort of lockdown, right?
Why not just go out?
And in fact, each other willy-nilly since nothing is really going to change.
And the answer is something is going to change.
One of the things that is going to change is that when you have the entire medical establishment on one disease, presumably they will come up with some sort of therapeutic treatments that help knock that down.
Now, some of the other things that are going to change, we're going to have to protect our nursing homes a hell of a lot better.
Our nursing homes have been the source of an enormous percentage of death in the United States.
Particularly in New York.
It's been just awful.
Nursing homes are hotbeds for this sort of stuff because everybody is inside.
Because everybody has a frail immune system.
Because people are older.
Because they really don't have testing capacity at a lot of these nursing homes.
And because one person bringing in from the outside can lead to a raging wildfire inside the nursing home of COVID-19.
Michael Goodwin has a piece over at the New York Post talking about Andrew Cuomo's nursing home policy.
He talks about how the Cuomo policy basically was nothing.
They didn't have a real policy for nursing homes.
He says, The letter was heartbreaking as it recounted the death of an 88-year-old woman in a New York nursing home who was also angry and accurate about a strange New York policy that is fatally wrongheaded.
According to the letter, I'm wondering who will hold Governor Cuomo accountable for the deaths of so many older people due to his reckless decision to place COVID-19 patients in nursing and rehabilitation homes.
I'm writing as a daughter who lost her beautiful 88-year-old mother, who is receiving physical therapy at one such facility.
The writer, Arlene Mullen, went on to recount examples of the governor promising to protect the elderly because of their known vulnerability.
She noted he named his stay-at-home order after his own mother and talked several times about protecting her.
My mother is not expendable.
Your mother is not expendable, Cuomo said a month ago.
Mullen had another complaint, that the media never even bothered asking the governor about an order mandating that nursing homes admit and readmit patients who tested positive for the coronavirus despite the extraordinary number of deaths among the elderly.
He was asked about this by the post-Bernadette Hogan at his daily briefing yesterday.
And he said, that's a good question.
I don't know.
And then he turns to the state health commissioner who confirmed the policy saying, if you are positive, you should be admitted back to a nursing home.
The necessary precautions will be taken to protect the other residents there.
I mean, that's a crazy policy, obviously.
The state already concedes that almost 3,500 residents of nursing home or adult care facilities are known to have died from coronavirus, or nearly 25% of all deaths in New York.
More than 2,000 of the total are in the five boroughs.
So we're going to have to get better at protecting the elderly.
And we are going to get better at this stuff.
So I don't think that the death rate is going to be the same as it has been prior.
Or rather, let's put it this way.
I don't think the infection rate is going to be the same as it has been prior.
When we say that the death rate in New York City is 0.5 or 0.6%, that is the death rate.
But the infection rate is really the problem in New York City.
That infection rate is not going to be mimicked all over the country.
New York is a uniquely bad place for infection because everybody is in close contact in closed areas.
And so it's important to keep that in mind when we talk about treating different areas differently.
And we should be treating different areas differently.
When Dr. Anthony Fauci suggests that he is not overly confident with COVID-19 testing capabilities, that makes a hell of a lot more difference in New York City than it makes in rural Georgia, for example.
Here was Anthony Fauci yesterday.
Absolutely need to significantly ramp up.
Not only the number of tests, but the capacity to actually perform them.
So that you don't have a situation where you have a test, but it can't be done because there's not a swab, or not an extraction media, or not the right vial.
All of those things got to be in place.
I am not overly confident right now at all that we have what it takes to do that.
Okay, well, he's right about that, but the question is what the testing is going to accomplish when 20% of New York City had this thing without anybody knowing about it.
It's pretty astonishing.
Again, the question is, how much testing and to what end?
And public policy officials are not really being clear in what they intend from this, which is why there's so much confusion about reopening.
Now, we're going to get to the confusion about reopening in just one second.
We're going to get to that in a few minutes.
But we have to discuss, obviously, the big story of the day, which is everybody is mad at President Trump because President Trump, it turns out, is President Trump and says things.
And as I've said many times on his epitaph, it will say, Donald Trump, 45th president of the United States, he said a lot of bleep, right?
That's, that'd be the nice version of the epitaph.
Again, I like a lot of the stuff he's done as president.
I think that he's handled the coronavirus situation in terms of policy actually really, really well.
It's just that it ain't great when you're rambling on about sunlight and eating it.
We'll get to that in just one second.
It's also not quite fair.
He didn't quite say that.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Okay, so now to the topic of the day, and that is science.
Science.
So, this all sort of turned bad yesterday at the White House after the head of the DHS or a spokesperson for the DHS named Phil Bryant got up and he explained some good news.
The good news, he said, is that sunlight and heat may in fact kill the virus.
So we had heard a study earlier this week from France in which somebody in a lab turned up the heat really high on the virus and the virus didn't die.
But now, apparently, William Bryant, the Undersecretary for Science over at the DHS, he says, well, actually, we have some good information that sunlight and heat may help kill the virus.
Now, by the way, this does show how stupid it was to lock down parks.
How stupid it was to tell people to shelter in their homes as opposed to being out in public, not near other people.
It is a good thing to be at parks on beaches.
It is a good thing to be away from other people, but in the sunlight.
You're not coughing on other people.
You're not sneezing on other people.
When you're out in the open air, there's a place for the germs to go as you breathe.
There are lots of reasons to be outside.
Well, among those reasons are that sunlight and heat may help kill the virus.
Sunlight literally being the best disinfectant in this particular case.
Here is the DHS's William Bryan.
Our most striking observation to date is the powerful effect that solar light appears to have on killing the virus, both surfaces and in the air.
We've seen a similar effect with both temperature and humidity as well, where increasing the temperature and humidity or both is generally less favorable to the virus.
As the temperature increases, As the humidity increases, with no sun involved, you can see how drastically the half-life goes down on that virus.
So the virus is dying at a much more rapid pace just from exposure to higher temperatures and just from exposure to humidity.
So they're saying that 70 to 75 degrees with 20 percent humidity during the summer with with sunlight, right?
With summer sunlight.
That means that aerosolized saliva droplets, right?
You breathe, you talk, you sneeze in the air.
The half-life on that is gonna be about 1.5 minutes, which is a lot better than people have been suggesting, that this stuff was gonna sit around in the air for three hours, four hours, that basically could be walking around and just walk right into a cloud of the virus without even knowing about it.
So that's really good news.
And it does suggest, by the way, that when we do reopen businesses, people should be trying to do business outdoors as much as humanly possible.
Maybe we can have barber shops that are actually doing haircuts outdoors.
Maybe if you're going to go to a restaurant, instead of just seating people inside the restaurant, if you've got a parking lot, put some tables out there in the parking lot and socially distance the tables, and you're a lot better off than you are inside the restaurant.
There are things that this allows business to do.
I mean, this is good information.
And it's possible that if we just tamp this thing down for a few months, that gives the medical profession a chance to come up with new solutions by the time we come back.
Okay, so all that's good, right?
I mean, that's good information.
And that is the real headline.
That should be the headline.
I mean, I'm looking for encouraging news.
Are you looking for encouraging news?
I would like to not die.
I would like my parents to not die.
I would like all Americans to not die.
So that is the real news.
Well, then President Trump gets up.
And President Trump, who sort of speaks from a half-remembered dream when it comes to the science very often, right?
He sort of – he takes in information and then it bounces around in there and then just comes right back out but in a very garbled form.
He starts kind of riffing about that time that the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor.
He starts riffing about injecting disinfectant and how we can get UV light inside people.
Now, in a second, I'm going to explain what he actually meant because what he actually meant, I think, is not actually crazy.
It's actually fairly well-established.
The way he says it, if you don't know what he means, there's no way not to read this as he's telling you that you should actually take Clorox and just go right into the... Or that you should take a ball of sunlight and just down it.
Or that you should take a light bulb and shine it up your nose or something.
It's a very bizarre statement that he makes here.
And the media, of course, jump all over this.
Now, as I say, is this an important story?
No, it's not an important story.
Is it good for Trump?
No, it's not good for Trump because, again, Credibility and trustworthiness and level head.
These are things that people value, particularly in an emergency time, in an election year.
Now, let's be real about this.
Joe Biden is not sentient.
So Joe Biden could have said exactly the same thing and the media would have just ignored it and then made excuses for it.
For Trump, they won't do the same thing.
That's just the reality of the situation, which is why Trump, just as a matter of self-preservation politically, should be a lot more careful about the stuff that falls out of his face.
But here is President Trump making the comments that set a thousand ships ablaze.
Supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way.
And I think you said you're going to test that too.
Sounds interesting.
Right.
And then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute, one minute.
And is there a way we can do something like that?
by injection inside or almost a cleaning, because you see it gets on the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs.
So it'd be interesting to check that so that you're going to have to use medical doctors with.
But it sounds interesting to me.
Well, okay.
Okay.
In a second, we'll get to him clarifying this, because again, what he heard was probably, he does this all the time.
He hears a piece of information.
The piece of information is right when he hears it.
He processes it.
It comes out wrong on the other end, right?
He did this with hydroxychloroquine.
Like people were saying, hydroxychloroquine may be a possible treatment for this thing.
And then he went out and he oversold it because that's what Trump does.
He's a real estate guy.
So he oversells things.
And so he sort of comes up with the bumper sticker version of what he thinks he heard.
And then he says it.
I'll give you what he actually meant in a second and you'll see he sort of tries to clarify it even in the middle of this press conference and the media lose their minds over all of this.
I will say that the reaction shot of Dr. Birx in this is pretty stellar.
I mean, it's directly from Arrested Development.
I mean, it's pretty incredible.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Okay, so what exactly was Trump talking about?
Well first, just because it's hilarious.
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Okay, so what exactly was Trump talking about?
Well, first, just because it's hilarious.
I mean, I'm sorry.
It can still be funny.
Deborah Birx, the cutaway shot to her from the other angle while Trump is riffing about whether we can inject disinfectant and whether we can put sunlight inside the body in some way is pretty stellar.
Dr. Birx, who's been on our Sunday special, and she's got a rough job.
I mean, if you are in the Trump administration, you have to balance, let's get good things done and also let's not piss off Trump, right?
That really is the balance.
I know a lot of people in the administration.
Anybody who tells you that's not the balance is lying to you.
That, of course, is the balance.
President Trump is not the world's thickest skinned dude, and he doesn't like being publicly criticized.
And so it puts these scientists in sort of a weird position because, I mean, you'll actually see it.
One of these scientists is called back up.
and asked about whether this is smart or not.
And the guy's like, well, we're not actually testing it.
And then Trump is like, well, the medical people might be testing it.
Maybe.
And the guy's not going to answer a straight question as to whether we are going to test if you can actually just swallow a UV light bulb or something.
Like that's it's.
So what exactly is Trump actually talking about?
Well, Jim Carrey has a good piece over at National Review.
He says that Columbia University's Center for Radiological Research developed lighting that uses far UVC that can kill viruses and bacteria without harming human skin, eyes, and other tissues, as is the problem with conventional ultraviolet light.
You could put that lighting in public places and you could mitigate airborne viruses that way, but it's not going to get in your lungs or the rest of your body.
It's not going to be put under the skin or anything.
Like that.
And when the president is talking about how sunlight, maybe that could be ingested.
Again, that is a botched and odd read of when you go out in sunlight, you have higher vitamin D production in your body.
Vitamin D production in your body is helpful to your immune system.
It helps prevent infection or reduce the risk of infection.
But the media are obviously jumping on this to suggest that President Trump is a dunderhead.
This is their real agenda here, right?
They're very concerned with President Trump being a dunderhead.
You'll even hear Trump correct his own comments in the middle of this because Trump understands he doesn't really know what he's talking about here.
Trump has never admitted he doesn't know what he's talking about, ever.
He knows the most about everything from the Afghan lemur to the airspeed of a flying British swallow.
If you ask Trump what he knows about a thing?
Everything.
I know everything there is to know about it.
There are experts who say I know more.
He's never going to admit that.
But right here, for example, he basically tries to correct himself because he understands.
I'm just saying things that I've sort of heard.
He walks it back.
I mean, he really does.
We're talking about almost a cleaning and sterilization of an area.
Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't work, but it certainly has a big effect if it's on a stationary object.
On surfaces, the heat, the hot summer, and whatever other conditions, humidity and lack of humidity, that that would have an impact.
So that on surfaces where it can be picked up, it will die fairly quickly in the summer, whereas in the winter it wouldn't die so quickly.
Okay, so again, that, what he's saying there, if you use it on an area, that is what we mean by using disinfectant, right?
Or if you spray it in particular areas of the air, maybe that helps, right?
What he's saying there makes sense, so he corrects himself.
The media, of course, run with the first headline because it's a lot more colorful.
Then you had a reporter asking Trump if it's irresponsible for Trump to suggest that people go outside.
No, that's not irresponsible.
That's actually what his own scientists are saying.
So this is where you can see that the media are off the rails.
They're not trying to accurately interpret Trump.
They're trying to drive a narrative that suggests that Trump is telling people to do unsafe things.
Now, we already know that, right?
We already know that they tried to blame him for a lady feeding her husband fish tank cleaner.
And now they're trying to blame Trump for suggesting that it's good to go outside.
Okay.
Okay, I'm not going to make any bones about that.
than inside.
I've been saying this for weeks.
All available studies show it is better to be outside than inside if you have a choice.
Why?
Because you are not in close contact with other human beings and breathing all over them in recirculated air.
This is perfectly obvious.
This has been true for a long time.
Okay, I'm not gonna make any bones about that.
So here was a reporter asking Trump, is it do you think it's irresponsible for you to make people safe?
To feel that they will be safe from the virus in the heat?
That's not what he's saying!
He's saying you're going to be safer from the virus in the heat outside than you will be in your home in air conditioning in a small area, which is of course true.
And here is Trump basically pointing this out.
Is it dangerous for you to make people think they would be safe by going outside in the heat, considering that so many people are dying in Florida, considering that this virus has had an outbreak in Singapore, places that are hot and are humid?
Here we go.
The new headline is, Trump asks people to go outside.
That's dangerous.
Here we go.
Same old group.
You ready?
I hope people enjoy the sun.
And if it has an impact, that's great.
Again, I say, maybe you can, maybe you can't.
I'm not a doctor.
I'm like a person that has a good, you know what.
He's a person that's good, you know what?
But what he said, I'll say it, okay?
Because the doctors are saying it.
That being outside, there was a study from China.
It found that a grand total of two, count them, two coronavirus cases were diagnosed from people who are actually outside talking with each other.
And they were in close contact outside.
If you are far away from other people outside, it is better to do that than it is to be inside locked in with other people.
Bottom line truth.
This is true about any coronavirus, by the way.
It's true about the flu.
It's true about colds.
It's true about any of these things.
If you are far away from other people and in sunlight, that is better than being inside in recirculated air.
This is why subway systems are really bad for this sort of thing.
To pretend that it's dangerous for Trump to say this is fully idiotic, and you can see the narrative forming in real time.
Now, the broader narrative is not just that Trump is incompetent and terrible and really a bad, bad person and all this.
The broader narrative is that Republicans are anti-science.
And there's two broader narratives that members of the Democratic Party and the media, but I repeat myself, are trying to push.
One is Republicans hate science, and the other is that Republicans hate human life.
And both of those are absolute, utter bullcrap.
Republicans don't hate science and they don't hate human life.
In fact, many of us are trying to look hard at the science and figure out what the risks and rewards are.
What Democrats are trying to do now is create this binary where if you are in favor of removal of lockdown in gradual and responsible fashion, this makes you an anti-vaccine activist, or this makes you somebody who is in favor of people just infecting each other willy-nilly.
Of course, this plays into pre-existing stereotypes that the media have been trying to create for a long time, which is that if you are on the right, then this is because you are a climate change denier, and because you're evil and you deny science, and you don't care about old people dying, and you don't care about poor people dying, right?
This is all their pre-existing narratives.
They're now just trying to shoehorn coronavirus into it, and it doesn't fit.
I mean, this is the stepsister trying to put on Cinderella's shoe.
It just doesn't fit.
So now they're cutting off toes trying to fit that foot into that shoe.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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In a second, I'm going to show you how dishonest the whole Republicans oppose science, but the left is fully on board with science.
Nonsense is.
It really is complete and utter nonsense, and I'm going to show you some proof of it in just one second.
First, being locked inside right now, it requires double the excitement.
It requires double the joy.
It requires a second leftist tears tumbler.
Not just one, two.
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And two mounds.
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When you become a Daily Wire Insider Plus or All Access member, you get that second Leftist Tears Tumblr.
With Bernie Sanders out of the race for president, the tears are overflowing.
Daily Wire members get many amazing benefits, including, of course, the magnificent, irreplaceable, incomparable, singular, unbelievable, and incredible Leftist Tears Tumblr.
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Also, it is that magnificent time of the week.
I want to give a shout out to a Daily Wire subscriber.
Today, it's Kyle Trepanier on Instagram.
Who's out there on the front lines doing his part to fight the global pandemic.
In this picture, Kyle and two of his comrades are opening, are operating a testing checkpoint, dressed in their military fatigues, protective rubber gloves, face shields, and best of all, proudly brandishing their elite beverage vessels.
The caption reads, hey Ben, cheers.
Brr, it's cold to our ears, but warm leftist tears mitigate all Rona fears with our Air Force peers.
Hashtag leftist tears, hashtag Air Force medicine, hashtag Corona screening, hashtag COVID drive-thru.
So first of all, they're heroes.
Second of all, they're poets.
On the order of Keats or Shelley.
This is just fantastic.
Well done.
We're so grateful for the incredible job all of you are doing.
By the way, just a quick note.
Not just members of the military doing an incredible job, all of our medical professionals.
If you see somebody who's delivering packages today, thank them.
Seriously, like if an Amazon driver stops by your house, give them a big thank you because those are the people who are continuing to keep the country running.
Thanks for the picture.
Stay safe out there.
And meanwhile, again, go subscribe.
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Okay, so again, there are two narratives that the media and the Democrats are trying to push.
One is Republicans don't care about science.
The second is that Republicans don't care about human life.
And they are they're merging these two narratives.
So the Republicans don't care about science thing.
Every time Trump says something that seems bizarre, that is going to be radically magnified.
Not just because he's president.
Because, I mean, we all know he's the president.
He says bizarre things all the time.
I mean, have you seen the man?
I mean, like, this is what he does.
But they're trying to turn this into a broader Republicans don't respect science narrative, which is patently not true, particularly when it comes to coronavirus.
It is also true that people on the left have been really denying science all the way throughout the coronavirus pandemic.
For example, trotting out the false case fatality rates to inflate the statistics on this thing.
Like we knew those were wrong from the very beginning.
We know there was no way that those were right.
They're being trotted out by the media consistently as though those were the right infection fatality and case fatality rates.
I mean, we kept hearing over and over and over that the who, to doubt the who, was to be terrible.
We kept hearing that if you said that it was not a 3.4% death rate from coronavirus, that it was actually under 1%, this is because you were some sort of science denier.
No, it turns out that you were the science denier.
And it's not as though that was speculative.
Everybody knew early on that there were a huge number of asymptomatic cases.
When people were suggesting that flattening the curve was going to alleviate the virus completely, or that testing is going to be a cure-all, that is bad science.
I have now asked The surgeon, the former Surgeon General of the United States, professors from Stanford, the head of Johns Hopkins epidemiology department, the head of the UCSF medicine department.
I've asked a number of people who know far better than I what testing is designed to do.
It is not designed to knock the virus completely out of the US population.
That is not something testing can do.
And yet if you listen to the media, that is the suggestion that you will receive.
And if you listen to Democrats, that's the suggestion that you will receive.
That's science denial.
Hey, speaking of science denial, I get idiots like John Kerry.
John Kerry, reporting for duty.
Face like a mudslide in the Hollywood Hills.
Collapsing in on itself like a dying star.
His chin used to be at least five inches closer to the top of his head.
But over time, he has resembled more and more an Easter Island egghead.
Easter head island.
Here he is, talking about the biggest threats to America.
I'll tell you it's Corona.
It's not Corona, actually.
Let me correct.
It is climate change.
Here's John Kerry being a science-y science man.
Most challenging, perhaps of all, getting beyond the pandemic of coronavirus, is climate crisis.
And the climate crisis could not be more real.
Um, even if you take the climate situation incredibly seriously, to suggest that it is a bigger threat than coronavirus, um, yeah, gonna go no on that one.
Gonna go no.
Gradual change in the climate over the course of the next hundred years is not as much of an issue as the complete breakdown of the world economy, mass unemployment, and hundreds of thousands if not millions of people dead like in the next five months.
That seems, that seems a lot worse.
That seems a lot, lot, lot worse.
Meanwhile, speaking of science denial, I'm constantly amused that Chris Cuomo is going on TV and talking about how people are not socially distancing and how terrible it is when we now know that he broke his own quarantine to go to his second property and he was yelling at a biker outside his house.
Also, just going to point out that this is an actual real thing.
His wife is Christina.
She put up a blog.
It's called the Cuomo's Corona Protocol, week three.
It says, just as my husband Chris began to kick this, I was stricken with the coronavirus.
I spent a week in isolation battling COVID-19.
Here's what I learned and what I did to push it out over the week.
And she talks about all of the various things that she did.
It's not super sciency.
She says, I decided to go on the course I set for Chris of oxygenated herbs.
I enlisted Dr. Linda Lancaster, who put us on a path of natural remedies to build our immune systems, and it's working for us.
I'm sharing this, but this isn't a debate.
If you think these are far-fetched treatments, think again!
I went through tons of antibiotics for Lyme disease this past year, which did not help eradicate the Lyme.
Only when I took a natural course did I get better.
I'm applying that information to the virus because I believe in natural medicine, which by the way, one of my favorite memes online is the, there's a meme online that shows folders on a computer and it shows, it says science, natural medicine, Next folder that you open up is evidence, and then empty.
Because natural medicine, not tons of evidence to support it, as it turns out.
She says, we're all trying to find tools to help beat this.
I'm grateful I have the ability to research and educate myself on natural remedies.
And then she talks about all the things that she did.
She talks about resonance breathing and pranayama, helping to expand the lungs.
And then she talked about vitamins, herbs, and minerals.
She talked about three Synex daily, three antivirals daily, three Caparest daily, three OXO, non-toxic quinine, daily.
And then she made a liver-cleansing beverage with one raw garlic clove, one orange, one lemon, a tablespoon of cayenne pepper, a spoonful of olive oil, a crunch of ginger, and a piece of turmeric.
And then she made a big batch of this stuff.
Also, she suggested that she was going to bathe in bleach At the direction of my doctor, Dr. Linda Lancaster, who reminded me that this is an oxygen-depleting virus, she suggested I take a bath and add a nominal amount of bleach.
Yes, bleach.
So I add a small amount, a half cup only, of Clorox to a full bath of warm water.
Why?
To combat the radiation and metals in my system and oxygenate it.
That's... That... That doesn't sound like...
Super science-y to me.
Granted, I am not a scientist or a doctor.
This does not sound super science-y.
She also used a machine, a body charger, which energy specialist Randy Oppit suggested I borrow from a friend.
It sends electrical frequencies through my body to oxygenate my blood and stimulate the healthy production of blood cells to fortify my immune system.
It also rebalanced my energy.
Rebalance the energy?
Well, I mean, I can't wait to hear how she uses leeches to cure the humors.
Like, what are we talking about here?
Again, this is not to suggest that she is on the same level as the President of the United States when he just completely botches the science after having heard it and then he spits it out wrong.
But, can we stop pretending that, like, failures of science exist only on one side of the aisle for political purposes?
Because it's just very silly.
The other thing that people are citing is this idea that Republicans are just not taking seriously the threat to human life.
Again, they're trying to combine, on the left, this idea that Republicans are anti-science and the idea that Republicans are anti-life, and it is a stretch.
So, for example, over at Mediaite, Tommy Christopher, who is, you know, a very hardcore Democrat, He says 40% of Republicans say the threat from coronavirus has been exaggerated.
Another 10% aren't sure.
A drastic difference from the rest of Americans polled.
A Yahoo News YouGov poll published Thursday found stark partisan divides on a number of key questions related to public health and the state of COVID-19.
40% of Republicans said that the threat of COVID-19 was exaggerated.
According to Democrats, only 25% said, sorry, 11% of Democrats said that the threat of COVID-19 was exaggerated.
About 25% of Independents.
Said the threat of COVID-19 was exaggerated.
Now, it depends what you mean by exaggerated.
If you mean that it's not a threat at all, then of course you're wrong.
If you mean that people were saying for literally months here that the threat of COVID-19 was so bad that you were going to randomly walk down the street, obtain it, and now your chances of dying were 10%, then yeah, that was exaggerated.
I mean, if you're talking about the actual statistical threat to young people right now in the United States, there's no question that the media's anecdotal coverage of this sort of stuff has created an exaggerated perception of the threat of the disease.
That doesn't mean it's not serious.
Things can be serious and also exaggerated.
Or you can say that the Beatles are a good band and also overrated.
You can say that things are bad, but also the threat has been exaggerated of those things.
And it is true that the media have exaggerated the threat to your specific human life from COVID-19 unless you are elderly or have pre-existing conditions.
I mean, that is what all the data suggests.
To suggest somehow that Republicans, who are more skeptical of the media than others, are simply taking the science to not seriously enough is to ignore the fact that the media have done a horrible job on this stuff, a really horrible job.
And now this is being conflated with if you are in favor of ending lockdowns, if you're in favor of moving beyond lockdowns, this is because you don't care enough about human life.
There's an entire article over at the Los Angeles Times trying to tie together anti-vaccine activists and coronavirus protesters.
The vast majority of people who want to see these lockdowns ended and people given the freedom to make their own risk assessments, the vast majority of those people are not people who deny the efficacy of vaccines or stump against vaccines.
You're gonna be hard-pressed to find anybody on the right who's more pro-vaccine than I am.
Like, seriously.
I've come out in favor in California of vaccine mandates if you're gonna go to a public school for communicable diseases that you can pass on to other people and no religious exemptions for it.
I've come out in favor of that because that is a threat to other people.
A generic policy that suggests that you should not be able to pass on a grave disease to somebody with leukemia or cancer or to a small child or to a pregnant mother.
I'm all for it.
I'm very, very pro-vaccine.
I've done entire episodes of this podcast, actually, in which I go through all the details about vaccines to suggest that I am anti-vaccine because I also think that the government is, without data now, moving into an era where they are not actually making good policy decisions.
It's just a lie.
And I think that's true for most of the people who are saying we need to go back to work and tranche people back in responsibly.
Again, the key word there is responsibly.
There are some people, I'm not gonna deny it, there are some people who are like, okay, this is not really a threat, we should just go out and willy-nilly do what we want.
I don't think that that is even close to the majority of people who are in favor of moving beyond the lockdowns.
The fact is, the lockdowns were established to achieve a goal.
The goal was to prevent the overwhelming of our hospital system.
End of story.
That was the entire thing.
The lockdowns were never going to prevent widespread infection of the disease.
Not unless you lock down forever, which is not palatable and nobody's gonna do it.
I mean, we already see our food supplies dwindling.
We see the food supply lines that are actually threatened right now.
So, barring that, we are all going to go back to work, and the question is going to be under what conditions we do.
As I've said now for, I think, several weeks, we're all going to end up doing what Sweden did.
The only question is when we should start doing what Sweden did, and what level of testing is necessary in order to do the hotspot testing and tracing.
And when I say we all agree on this, you want to talk about how things have become incredibly partisan?
Like truly incredibly partisan?
All you have to do is look at the coverage of Georgia.
So in Colorado, they've basically done the same thing that they are talking about doing in Georgia.
Jared Polis talks about opening businesses in Colorado, and nobody seems to care because he is not a Democrat.
Meanwhile, the conditions under which businesses can actually reopen in Georgia, it turns out they're actually fairly strict.
It is not as though you can just reopen willy-nilly.
Governor Kemp's executive order in Georgia, this is just, again, it's media malfeasance designed to target Republicans in order to generate a narrative, a narrative that has a headline that looks like this one from Timothy Egan, moron over at the New York Times.
How Republicans became the party of death.
People are disposable, so is income.
For the pro-life party, one is more important.
No, one is not more important.
This is about coming up with a public policy that saves the most lives possible while also not destroying the most lives possible.
Lives can be destroyed without killing people, as it turns out.
And it turns out that a lot of lives do end precipitously when you have Great Depressions.
But this is all, this is the narrative.
Okay, but take Georgia as a perfect example.
So I'm looking right now at a document from Governor Kemp about which entities can engage in minimum basic operations.
So he says the gyms, fitness centers, bowling alleys, body art studios, barbers, cosmetologists, hair designers, nail care artists, aestheticians, all of these can begin engaging in minimum basic operations April 24th, 2020.
This means these businesses can open to the public on a limited basis subject to restrictions.
So what are those restrictions?
Wouldn't that be the key question?
Wouldn't the key question be, what do they have to do to reopen?
Here's what they have to do.
The minimum necessary activities to maintain the value of a business, establishment, corporation, non-profit, corporation, or organization.
They have to provide services, manage inventory, ensure security, process payroll and employee benefits, etc.
The minimum necessary functions.
They have to be able to allow people to work remotely and instant.
And they want to allow people to work outdoors because outdoors is a lot safer.
Here is what they have to do as businesses.
One, they have to screen and evaluate workers who exhibit signs of illness, such as a fever over 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit, cough or shortness of breath.
So they screen every worker.
They have to require workers who exhibit signs of illness to not report to work or seek medical attention.
They have to enhance sanitation of the workplace, require hand washing or sanitation by workers at appropriate places within the business location, provide PPEs as available and appropriate to the function and location of the worker, prohibit gatherings of workers, permitting workers to take breaks and meals outside, implementing telework for all possible workers, implementing staggered implementing telework for all possible workers, implementing staggered shifts for all possible workers, holding meetings and conferences virtually, delivering intangible services remotely, discouraging workers from using other workers' phones, desks, offices or other work tools,
prohibiting handshaking, placing notices that encourage hand hygiene everywhere, suspending the use of personal identification number pads, PIN entry devices, electronic signature capture, and any other credit card signature requirements to the extent such suspension is permitted by agreements with credit card companies and credit agencies, enforcing social distancing of non-cohabiting persons while present on such entities' leased or owned properties,
Providing for alternate points of sale outside of buildings, including curbside pickups, increasing physical space, providing disinfection and sanitation tools, increasing physical space between worksites to at least six feet.
Okay, that means that everybody's gonna stay closed.
Okay, that's a lot of conditions.
That's a lot of conditions.
Nobody was really able to open up, but nobody focused on the conditions of opening up, which, by the way, is how businesses will open up under all those conditions everywhere.
They're not focusing on that.
Instead, they're focusing on how dare he even say the word reopening.
It's a lot easier if you're a governor right now to simply just say you're going to keep things closed and then suggest that your political opponents want people to die if they disagree is what J.B.
Pritzker in Illinois is doing.
He says he's extending the stay-at-home order through May 30th without providing a metric as to why that is or how he hopes to restore some level of economic mobility and freedom in his state.
Next week, I intend to sign an extension of our stay-at-home order with some modifications through Saturday, May 30th.
To everyone listening, we are in possibly the most difficult part of this journey.
I know how badly we all want our normal lives back.
Believe me, if I could make that happen right now, I would.
But this is the part where we have to dig in.
Okay, again, I'm fine with the digging in, but you have to explain how you're going to get out of the hole that you have now dug.
And so far, many of these governors are not.
Many of these governors are not saying what their expectations are going to be, how many tests are actually necessary, when people can go back to work, under what conditions they can go back to work.
That's irresponsible.
It is irresponsible.
How do you expect the American people to trust that you have their best interests at heart when you won't even lay out A plan.
It's pretty incredible.
Okay, time for a quick thing I like, and then some things that I hate.
So, things that I like today.
I will admit, my kids did not sleep well last night.
They are, it's, you know, being at home this much.
Interesting times, interesting times.
But I have three kids under the age of seven.
That means that my six-year-old woke me up for nightmares, and then my three-year-old woke me up because for the first time in like a year and a half, he had an accident.
And then my baby woke me up because she needed a nurse.
So it was just good times.
It was good times.
Well, if you're looking for relaxing literature for your children, like good bedtime literature and just great literature generally, The Complete Tales of Winnie the Pooh by A. A. Milne.
It's so charming and so wonderful.
And A. A. Milne was such a talented fellow.
I mean, it really is pretty incredible.
He went from writing these kind of serial comic plays on topical political issues to writing Winnie the Pooh.
And Winnie the Pooh has surprising depth to it.
It tells me one of the things that's really charming about Winnie the Pooh also is there are no villains.
So it's amazing that he's able to sustain entire stories with no villains, just kind of with charming fun.
And it's all character-based charming fun. - Yeah.
The movie is great, but the movie is not.
It doesn't hold the candle to the books.
The books are clever, and fun, and witty, and really, really enjoyable.
My daughter is really enjoying it.
My father is a great dramatic reader, so he's sitting inside right now reading to my daughter, and it is pretty spectacular.
Go check that out.
It's charming.
It'll relax you as a parent.
It'll relax you to read The Complete Tales of Winnie the Pooh.
Go check it out right now by A.A.
Milne.
Okay, time for some things that I hate.
So, on a Friday, I have many, many things that I hate today.
So many things I hate.
Let's begin with Joe Biden saying dumb stuff.
So, Joe Biden, yesterday, he suggested that President Trump will postpone the election.
He said, mark my words, I think he's going to try to kick back the election somehow and come up with some...
He said he's going to come up with some rationale why it can't be held.
Imagine threatening not to fund the post office.
Now what in God's name is that about?
Other than trying to let the word out that he's going to do all he can to make it hard for people to vote, that's the only way he thinks he can possibly win.
This is not how the Constitution of the United States works.
You can't just propone an election as the president.
Not how it works.
It requires an act of Congress to change the electoral rules.
And Joe Biden is an idiot.
He doesn't know anything about the Constitution of the United States.
And neither do members of the media, because somebody should have asked him the follow-up question, um, how?
Hell, Trump's just gonna say we're not doing an election this year?
How is that possible?
And the answer is, it's not possible.
But the thing is, members of our media don't know very much about the Constitution either.
Because nobody in this country knows very much about American history.
There's a story out of the Associated Press today.
The latest Nations report card shows eighth graders scores in U.S.
history and geography declining since 2014.
Results that Education Secretary Betsy DeVos on Thursday called stark and inexcusable.
Maybe the fact that all the schools are out right now and people are at home means the kids will actually increase their educational capacity because I'll tell you what, they're not doing much in public schools apparently.
Civic scores on the 2018 assessments Or the same as in the last round of tests four years earlier.
The assessments were given for the first time digitally on tablets instead of on paper.
They were administered to 42,700 8th grade students in 780 public and private schools across the nation.
Administrators said that lower-performing students lost more ground than middle and higher-performing students, mirroring a pattern seen in recent reading and math scores, which of course is not a great shock.
Very often, low-performing students are not performing badly through any fault of their own.
It's because they don't have the same sort of familial infrastructure that higher-performing students generally have.
The problem is likely to be made worse by the loss of class time caused by coronavirus.
Across all three subjects, a quarter or less of students scored at or above proficient, meaning they showed a solid understanding of challenging concepts.
Another quarter or more failed to demonstrate a level of basic understanding the results showed.
So that means that only a quarter scored at or above proficient, so one in four students scored at or above proficient, and 25% did not even have a basic level of understanding.
DeVos said in a written statement, in the real world, this means students don't know what the Lincoln-Douglas debates were about, nor can they discuss the significance of the Bill of Rights or point out basic locations on a map.
Only 15% of them have a reasonable knowledge of U.S. history.
All Americans should take a moment to think about the concerning implications for the future of our country.
The score gaps between white students and black and Hispanic peers did not change significantly from 2016.
The average U.S.
history score out of 500 in 2018 was 263 out of 500.
to 2019, the average U.S. history score out of 500 in 2018 was 263 out of 500.
So if you're just taking baseline guesses, you'd probably end up in that ballpark.
The results categorized 15% of 8th graders as proficient when asked, for example, to explain the significance of certain documents and ideas in American history.
History scores declined across the board for white, black, and Hispanic students.
The average geography score was 258 out of 500.
The 2018 civics score, which measured students' knowledge of government, only about 24% scored at or above proficient.
There was no significant change across ethnic groups.
Okay, why does this matter?
The reason this matters is because we are in the midst, and this battle has not waned thanks to coronavirus.
of a serious debate over what the country means, over what America is.
You're seeing a lot of stories these days about whether American exceptionalism has been tested by all of this.
We are not exceptional.
We're bad.
We're cruel.
I've read some of these pieces.
Bernie Sanders talking about how we need to fundamentally restructure American society.
A piece from a guy named Wen over at the New York Times suggesting that American history is a history of racist, settler colonization and oppression.
And that America needs to move beyond the unfettered, unbridled greed of capitalism into a new era.
In order to believe these things, you have to be really ignorant about American history.
Like you have to be taught a version of American history that is context free.
You have to basically read a synopsis of Howard Zinn, which is very often what is being taught in these schools.
You have to not understand what American history is truly all about.
When you don't teach American history in the proper way, when people don't know American history, when they don't know the Constitution, when they don't know the Declaration of Independence, they start to believe that America is just basically a bordered country in which we are all trapped as a series of competing interest groups.
And this is what a lot of people on the left would like.
I have a new book coming out that is on this topic in July.
What many on the left would like is for us to believe that we are not part of the same America, that America was never an idea.
It was never a creed.
It was never an ideal that we were striving toward.
Instead, America was basically a bunch of fuzzy words put on a piece of paper so that people who are in positions of power could continue to oppress people who are not in positions of power.
And that pattern continues until today.
Study of American history is crucial and vital to understanding how wrong and stupid this is.
It's also crucial and vital to understanding how often politicians just say things that are utterly unrealistic and ridiculous.
When Joe Biden says things like, the president will just push off the election, a cursory glance at the Constitution of the United States would tell people, this is not possible.
You cannot just do that.
But nobody knows that because nobody actually has read the Constitution of the United States.
When people on the left suggest that America's unbridled, unfettered greed derives from its settler colonization past, that is so context-free.
It is free of the context that all of human history is basically about people settling and conquering and colonizing.
And that does not mean that the sins of America's past are not sins.
It does mean that to take those out of context as though those are unique to America, whereas the greatnesses of America are somehow international in scope or just things that happen.
It is a complete reversal of actual American history.
And you see this from the left all the time.
You see this idea that when America accomplishes something, it's a world accomplishment.
You saw this around the marking of the 50th anniversary of the Apollo, the Apollo moon landing.
You saw that people were saying, oh, it was a global accomplishment.
No, that was an American accomplishment.
So a global accomplishment, according to the left, the Apollo flights to the moon, global accomplishment.
The vast rise from poverty to unprecedented prosperity.
The fighting of disease.
Not an American accomplishment, a global accomplishment.
Slavery and American accomplishment, right?
Anything that was universal and bad, that's uniquely American.
Everything that sprang from America and has provided benefits to everybody else is universal accomplishment.
Many on the left want to see America as an inherently bad place, and the only counter effect to that is the disinfectant of true knowledge of American history and understanding of American history.
It's why the 1619 Project, which is a bunch of bad history put out by the New York Times, is really damaging.
It is context-free history.
It is why the goal of the left, which is to portray America in a bad light, has serious Implications for the future of the country.
Dividing us along racial and class lines in order so that the left can recast America as a bad guy and then redraw all of the American bargain.
That's incredibly dangerous.
That's what people are fighting against.
And this has been channeled now into the coronavirus fight.
Because a lot of the people who are protesting against the lockdowns, what they are saying is we are deeply suspicious that there are a lot of people at the governmental level who are perfectly comfortable with rewriting the bargain between Americans and their government on the back of a global pandemic.
I've said this for a while.
I think that that skepticism is warranted.
I do not think that means that we have to pretend the disease is not dangerous.
It's incredibly dangerous that we have to pretend that lockdown measures were completely useless.
I don't know, particularly in New York City, I don't think they were completely useless.
But when you see a near 100% crossover in the Venn diagram, like it's a circle between the people who think America is bad and the people who want continued lockdown, that starts to make people suspicious.
And that, again, you want to remove the political considerations from this?
Stop proclaiming that America needs fundamental change on the back of a black swan event that is the worst in modern American history.
Ignorance is a breeding ground for hatred of America.
Ignorance is a breeding ground for that.
And so the fact that our schools have failed so dramatically in teaching people the basics of American history is a complete tragedy.
Okay, another thing that I hate today.
The government just continues to spend inordinate amounts of money.
The House approved another aid package.
The aid package had to be done.
The Paycheck Protection Act had been essentially exhausted immediately because, like all big government programs that are rushed out the door, it was a piece of crap.
I mean, it turns out that they didn't have good standards for who could borrow and who could not borrow.
You had Harvard University getting money out of the thing.
You had big corporations that actually didn't need the money getting money out of the thing.
And you saw the same thing with the CARES Act.
I mean, one of the big disasters of the CARES Act, Trillion-dollar spending plan is that there was a part of the plan that made it so that you would make more money on unemployment in some cases than you would make at a business.
And people like Bernie Sanders are like, why do we care?
Just get the money out there.
Just pay people not to work.
What's the problem?
They're not working.
Pay them.
You think they want to not work?
But then you see people like AOC, who's campaigning with Bernie, telling people actively not to work.
You can't have it both ways.
Bernie was like, you can pay people more to not work than to work, but people love to work.
They'll go back to work when they can.
And then you have AOC being like, but what if we don't?
What if, like, we stay home, like, forever?
Like, well, like, well, uh-huh.
Yeah, bro.
Yeah, like, well, uh-huh.
So the CARES Act had a lot of problems with it.
The new bill also has many problems with it.
It is $484 billion to restore that depleted loan program for distressed small businesses.
One of the big problems with these distressed loan programs is that When the government is handing out loans to basically fill in the damage, there are two competing priorities here, and we ought to acknowledge them.
One is, the government did unbelievable damage to your business by shutting down the economy.
The other is, when we come out the other side of this, your business may still be damaged because the underlying conditions have changed.
Meaning there are certain businesses, because they're locked down, they'll come back, right?
They're not businesses that were dependent on in-person clientele meeting in small amounts of space, for example.
So let's say that you own a jewelry business and the government shut you down, but most of your work was done online.
People are coming in kind of on a sporadic basis.
It's not like your shop is super crowded all the time.
You make your money by selling expensive items.
You're probably fine, right?
You go back to work and what the market that was there, it's changed some because people are not as rich as they were, but The fundamental underlying market conditions for your business have not changed in a severe way.
You're a restaurant owner, and you own a bodega in New York City that can fit a person with social distancing.
Not like it can fit 10 tables.
It can fit a person, a human being, once you socially distance.
When you come back to work, the government providing you a loan to keep that business afloat is actually just a giant waste of money.
The government actually should just have said, your business is basically dead and now we're going to pay you to be on unemployment for a while and compensate you for that loss, but we can't float loans to businesses that are going to be unsuccessful.
This is why I suggested that the best way to do this was to have banks actually assess risk in loans and then have the government promote the bank's lending under these circumstances to businesses that need money floated to them.
In other words, if the loan was a bad loan, then there is no reason why you should continue to float the loan.
As this continues, there's going to be a lot of pressure for the government to continue to float money to businesses that are not going to be viable on the other end of this because underlying human activity has changed.
That actually is a serious problem.
And it's one of the reasons why we actually need to get back to work.
One of the reasons we need the lockdowns to end and we need to get back to work is because we need to know what the market feedback loop looks like.
The way that you can tell which businesses are going to be successful and which ones are not is when people get back out there and they start to actually patronize businesses again.
And then we need fluidity in the labor market.
All the people who are losing jobs in the restaurant industry, if let's say the delivery industry is now going to rise concomitant with that.
Or let's say that the retail industry is going down, the online industry is rising.
People need to be able to know that so they can move from one industry into the other.
Fluidity of labor can only be had when you have full transparency into what the market is demanding of particular businesses.
Creating glue in that system is actually not a very good idea.
But unfortunately, it's not just that glue that's a problem.
It is also the fact that the Democrats are now pushing for states to be bailed out.
Now, if the state has incurred some sort of debt on the back of federal mandates and federal recommendations and damage done by the federal government, going to the federal government to be filled in is not a particularly horrible idea.
If, however, states are basically coming and saying, so, here's the deal, guys.
We ran up a massive credit card, like huge, over the past few years.
And now, we'd love for you to fill that in.
No, the federal government should not be filling that in.
So Mitch McConnell said, listen, if you are the state of California and you are running this massive debt, state of California has an enormous amount of debt.
You're the state of New York.
The state of New York has on the books $137 billion of debt.
It is probably a lot more than that because they have unfunded liabilities that they lie about.
California does.
California will sign contracts with unions and then say, don't worry, don't worry guys.
We've set up a pension fund for you and it's going to earn out at 7% a year.
If I could get 7% a year on my investments, I'd be investing with the state of California.
It's just nonsense.
They've just been filling these things in in union contracts, understanding they're going to have to tax people and sell bonds later to pay for it.
With all of that said, these states are running massive deficits.
So Mitch McConnell was like, okay, you incurred new costs from coronavirus.
Your economy is going to get hit.
You're not going to take in as much tax revenue.
You're not going to be able to fulfill your obligations.
You should do what municipalities have been doing.
You should renegotiate your debt with these various entities and pension funds, because it is not up to the taxpayers of Kentucky or Texas to pay for this.
So Mitch McConnell said this.
And then all of the various left-wing big blue governors and senators decided to go crazy on him.
Here is Chuck Schumer saying, McConnell is being, he's just being mean.
He's being mean.
No, me paying your credit card bill for things unrelated to coronavirus is not actually being mean.
That's just called common sense.
Here's Chuck Schumer.
Mitch McConnell's remarks are so far out of the mainstream, he's gonna have to walk them back.
This is not an abstract concept.
There are food safety inspectors risking their lives to see that the food that's produced is safe, and so many others that are vital, and to just sort of give them the back of your hand.
And say, go bankrupt, which is huge pain to millions of families across America.
It's a position that is hard to imagine.
It is mean-spirited.
And Senator McConnell, as I said, he will have to walk this back.
You should not walk this back.
The fact is that if a state incurred debt that has nothing to do with coronavirus and now your revenues aren't meeting what you thought they were going to meet, that's just called you being bad at business.
And notice the consistency here.
I'm saying that if you're a business that is not viable, people should not be floating you loans.
And if you're a state that is not viable, people should not be floating you loans.
They should certainly not be bailing you out, right?
They should pay for the damage they've done at the federal level, and then you should have been fiscally responsible if you're a state.
And if you have to renegotiate those, like, where does the money come from?
Either it's coming from states that are more fiscally responsible, or it's coming from future taxpayers who did not make these deals in the first place.
The money does not grow on trees.
But here you have Andrew Cuomo slamming McConnell's bailout comments as well.
That's not who we are.
It's just not who we are as a people.
I mean, if there's ever a time for humanity and decency, now is the time.
And if there was ever a time to stop your political, obsessive political bias and anger, which is what it's morphed into, just a political anger, Now is the time.
And you want to politically divide this nation now?
With all that's going on?
How irresponsible and how reckless.
No, what's irresponsible and reckless is racking up debt for years.
For years and years and years and years and decades.
And then being like, oh look, our revenues didn't meet the shortfall, how about you bail me out?
That is the definition of irresponsibility.
The Wall Street Journal points out that Cuomo warned for months about a $6 billion state deficit thanks to runaway Medicaid costs and taxpayers leaving his high-tax state.
He signed a $177 billion business-as-usual budget on April 3rd that allows him to borrow $11 billion if spending exceeds revenue.
In Illinois, J.B.
Pritzker proposed a $41 billion budget including $9 billion for public pensions.
He raised taxes in 2019.
He wants to make the state's current flat tax progressive if voters approve a constitutional change this fall.
And yet, he and the unions who own the Statehouse have blocked pension or spending reforms.
Bottom line is that these states have been irresponsible for years.
So has the federal government, by the way.
Racking up 21 trillion dollars in debt on the back of basically bullcrap.
And then being like, oh look, we don't have enough money.
No, the answer is no.
States should declare bankruptcy if they have been so fiscally irresponsible that now they're asking to be bailed out, not from coronavirus-related decisions, but everything else.
McConnell is saying the right thing here.
And fiscal responsibility, last I checked, should still be a priority for our congresspeople, even though apparently it never will be again, and we're just going to spend money that doesn't exist until the end of time, and then hyperinflate our way out of it 10 years from now, or create austerity renegotiations in 10 years, which is most likely to happen.
Here's the bottom line.
You can either renegotiate it now and be fiscally responsible, or you can renegotiate it later when you have a bunch of people who are waiting on their pensions, many more people than now, and who are going to be deprived of those pensions because the states are too lazy and the politicians are too gutless to make hard decisions right now.
Okay.
We'll be back here later today with two additional hours of content.
Otherwise, we will see you here on Monday.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Colton Haas.
Directed by Mike Joyner.
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The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire production.
Copyright Daily Wire 2020.
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