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May 4, 2020 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:04:38
Is The Law An Ass? | Ep. 1003
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Time Text
As more and more Americans move outside, authorities debate how to crack down.
George W. Bush releases a COVID-19 video, and Joe Biden continues to struggle with Tara Reade's sexual assault allegation.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
Shapiro, this is The Ben Shapiro Show.
Today's show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.
Protect your data from prying eyes at expressvpn.com.
All right, well, may the fourth be with you.
And quick note on that, let's just all hope that one day Disney will stop taking all the nostalgia we have for what was one of the great intellectual property pieces in the history of Hollywood And using all that nostalgia in order to promulgate social justice warrior bullcrap.
That will be the day when they can stop blaming their toxic fandom.
Because the reality is, Star Wars is fantastic.
My son loves Star Wars.
My daughter loves Star Wars.
My son's birthday is this week.
We're having a Star Wars themed party.
You know who's not going to appear at that party?
Anyone from the new Star Wars series.
It will be all the originals because that's all he cares about.
All he cares about.
You know why?
Because the originals are good and everything else blows.
And you know why that is?
Because they used to care about the story in Hollywood.
Alrighty, well, now to the actual news of the day.
So, over the weekend, the President of the United States, President Trump, he did a town hall event with Fox News at the Lincoln Memorial.
Pretty stunning backdrop, actually.
And there are a couple of big headlines that came out of this.
Headline number one is that President Trump revised upward his estimate of the number of deaths From coronavirus to up to 100,000.
He is not wrong about this.
Obviously, we will probably hit 100,000 over the course of the year.
We already have about 70,000, a little bit under 70,000.
I saw a rumor going around last night that the CDC had revised downward their estimate by half.
That's not true.
The CDC data was not taken into account the last couple of weeks because they were just relying on number of actual reported deaths as opposed to the number of estimated deaths.
Those tend to Come in over the course of the next couple of weeks.
So we are currently at about 65,000, 66,000 dead in the United States.
The virus will kill somewhere between 75 and 100,000.
President Trump is correct about this.
This was the original estimate that Dr. Birx put out and that Anthony Fauci put out from the IHME model.
It suggested it could be as high as a quarter of a million, and we will end up somewhere in that range in all likelihood.
Here's President Trump acknowledging that and also acknowledging that the steps taken by the government have actually prevented this from being a lot higher.
We're gonna lose anywhere from 75, 80 to 100,000 people.
That's a horrible thing.
We shouldn't lose one person over this.
This should have been stopped in China.
It should have been stopped.
But if we didn't do it, the minimum we would have lost is a million two, a million four, a million five.
That's the minimum.
We would have lost probably higher than, if possible, higher than 2.2.
Okay, well, one of the big questions here is whether that is because the healthcare system would have been swamped and it would have looked like Italy, because even Italy didn't end up with those kinds of numbers, or whether the only thing preventing us from hitting that 1.5, 2.2 million is the fact that we are locked down, in which case the letting up of the lockdown is going to lead to a dramatic spike in cases.
So either the modeling is somewhat wrong, or we have basically acknowledged that we're not going to end up between 100 and 240,000.
See, this is sort of the problem here.
Is that what the model suggested is that even with social distancing, we would end up between 100 and 240,000.
And most states have really not completely released their population, even in states like Georgia or Colorado, which have started to release their population.
People aren't crowding into movie theaters.
People are still wearing masks.
People are social distancing.
And one of the things that's fascinating is that it's unclear what exactly we're aiming for at this point.
What exactly are we aiming for?
Are we stalling for time?
Are we trying to play for time so that there are new therapeutics that are brought to bear or so that a vaccine is developed?
Are we basically doing the Sweden thing and aiming for herd immunity?
Because Sweden continues to approach herd immunity in places like Stockholm.
We already know that according to the antibody tests, well over a quarter of the people in New York City have had COVID-19, which means that they're kind of getting to the point where herd immunity is not that far off.
Right now, there's a lot of death until you get to herd immunity is sort of the idea.
But even there, the real question is, how much death is necessary for herd immunity if you can segment off the populations that are most vulnerable?
Meaning, that if you actually look at the stats in various areas around the world, what you see is that anywhere from 40-50% of all deaths in places like Italy, in places like Sweden, in places like the Netherlands, are happening in old age homes.
In the United States, that number is anywhere from 25-40%.
So, if you were actually able to protect those places, if you were able to test all the people going into those places, if you were able to restrict the movement of people who are inside the old age homes, then you could immediately remove, presumably, about 25 to 30 percent of that entire death toll from the rolls, which starts to make this look a lot less deadly for the rest of the population, particularly under age 60.
If you're under age 60, the chances that you are going to die from this thing are very low, unless you have a serious pre-existing condition like diabetes.
And if you're under the age of 40, there's almost no chance that you die from this thing or even sustain serious damage from this thing, statistically speaking.
So the question is what we are aiming for.
And I'm going to get to that in just a moment because President Trump, it's not clear whether we are just waiting for a vaccine to be developed or whether we think that therapeutics will be like, what is the change?
Where is the game changer here?
And if there is no game changer, then nature will have recourse.
The only question is how long it takes for nature to have recourse.
If nothing changes, then either a lot of people die over the course of a longer period of time or a lot of people die now.
I mean, those are the two choices and neither one of them is very good.
We're going to get to more of this in just one second.
First, I need to take a moment to give a shout out to all of our advertising partners who help make the show possible.
Obviously, there's a rough economic times and they rely on you to continue patronizing them and we rely on them to continue advertising on the program to ensure that this show can continue to be brought to you.
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Okay, so the president says that he is confident we'll have a vaccine by year's end.
He's been engaged in a grand attempt to accelerate progress toward a vaccine.
Here is the president.
We are very confident that we're going to have a vaccine at the end of the year.
By the end of the year, have a vaccine.
By the end of this year?
We think we're going to have a vaccine by the end of this year.
And we're pushing very hard.
You know, we're building supply lines now.
We don't even have the final vaccine.
Johnson & Johnson, if you look at Johnson & Johnson is doing it.
We have many companies are, I think, close because I meet with the heads of them and I find it a very interesting subject because it's so important.
Okay, so if we're betting on the vaccine by the end of the year, then presumably the goal is that we continue social distancing, we continue wearing masks, herd immunity is not something that we aim for because obviously once the vaccine arrives, then we can artificially create herd immunity.
I mean, that's effectively what a vaccine does.
It artificially creates herd immunity that would normally happen through a disease's natural progression through the population.
You keep as many people alive as you can until then.
You vaccinate all the people who are capable of getting the vaccination and then you move on with your life because that's the best you're going to do.
So hopes for the vaccine are actually maybe balancing against a wider opening up.
If you think a vaccine is not going to be developed for five years here, then you may as well say have at it.
You may as well say, okay, here's what we're going to do.
We're just going to protect the most vulnerable populations.
We're going to tell them to stay at home.
We're going to aim for herd immunity with the rest of the population and go out and willy-nilly have fun.
In fact, There are some scientists who are suggesting exactly that.
We'll get to that in just a minute.
But what's really fascinating about all of this is the imagistics of the whole situation.
The imagistics of the whole situation are really interesting.
So, President Trump's actions, as I've said from the beginning, have been pretty good.
I mean, once the Feds got serious about this, they got really serious.
There was no ventilator shortage.
I mentioned this last week.
Everybody was talking ventilators, ventilators, ventilators.
There was no ventilator shortage.
There was talk about overwhelming the medical system.
Didn't happen.
There was talk about the federal government not giving people what they need.
Didn't happen.
In fact, every major Democratic governor in America has come out and said that the federal government did what they were supposed to do in getting people what they wanted.
That's not stopping Joe Biden from claiming, however, that Donald Trump blew this in dramatic fashion, even though Joe Biden has no evidence that Donald Trump actually blew this in dramatic fashion.
This has led Joe Biden to putting out an ad.
He has to run on the back of the pandemic because the fact is that before the pandemic, Joe Biden was probably going to lose.
Before the pandemic, Joe Biden was in serious trouble because the economy was quite good, because Donald Trump remains popular in a lot of those swing states, more popular than he is in the country at large.
Now Joe Biden is jumping on the pandemic really to attack Trump.
And this is why image matters.
The buck stops here.
Harry Truman said it.
It means no excuses.
It means taking responsibility, the ultimate responsibility for the biggest decisions in the world.
Every great president has lived up to it.
But Donald Trump?
Yeah, no, I don't take responsibility at all.
First of all, the governors are supposed to be doing a lot of this work.
We're a backup.
We're not an ordering clerk.
We're a backup.
Donald Trump thought the job was about tweets and rallies and big parades.
He never thought he'd have to protect nearly 330 million Americans.
Okay, so that's Biden's ad.
Here's the thing.
When it comes to shifting blame, the Obama administration was, bar none, the best at this.
They were incredible at this.
How many people went under the bus in the Obama administration?
I mean, that bus would just speed bump its own staff regularly.
I mean, the number of heads of departments who ended up going under that bus, very low.
Kathleen Sebelius at HHS was one of the people who ended up under the bus.
Lois Lorner at the IRS ended up under the bus.
Lots of people ended up under that bus.
Joe Biden, not famous for taking responsibility, famous for stealing other people's verbiage to make speeches, but not particularly famous for taking responsibility.
Nonetheless, The push by the Democrats and by the media is going to be that President Trump is too volatile to lead.
Now, the reality is, again, that Trump's actions in the pandemic, the actions, have actually been okay.
It's the messaging that's been a problem.
And here's a perfect example of this.
So, Andrew Cuomo has about 77% popularity in New York.
He's been horrible.
I mean, really horrible.
His leadership has been terrible.
He did not shut down the subway system.
If you're gonna lock this thing down, you gotta shut down the subway system.
He didn't do it.
Andrew Cuomo.
Did not even bother to shut down the subway system overnight for disinfecting until last week.
Andrew Cuomo had a rule in place in New York that if a person in an old age home went and was diagnosed with COVID-19, they had to be let back into the old age home, which is basically a recipe for infecting everybody and killing everybody.
Andrew Cuomo didn't lock down the state until late March.
Andrew Cuomo spent all of his time on TV whining about how he wasn't getting ventilators, rather than presumably changing the rules so that he could protect more of his citizenry.
Meanwhile, Bill de Blasio in New York, horrible mayor, spent the weekend ripping on the Jews.
Meanwhile, people were out at the parks en masse.
But nonetheless, Andrew Cuomo's popularity is at like 77%, including 53% of Republicans.
Why?
Because Andrew Cuomo understands the image here, which is, I take this seriously.
So Andrew Cuomo over the weekend, for example, he went out and he personally disinfected trains.
He was out there personally disinfecting the trains.
Okay.
Wow.
What a hero.
What a hero.
This sort of kind of political posturing is really dumb.
I remember that Barack Obama used to do this every time there was some sort of natural disaster.
He would jet in and then he would take the helicopter to the natural disaster.
There'd be pictures of him looking out over the natural disaster.
And this meant that he cared a lot, a lot, a lot.
Well, now Andrew Cuomo, who should have shut down the subways originally because the subways were the chief spreading point for the virus.
Now he's out there and there are pictures of him disinfecting because he cares so much.
He cares, okay, so he understands the game.
The game might, listen, this is the thing about Trump.
Trump says the game doesn't exist, the game is dumb.
He is not wrong about this, right?
This is one of the things that people actually, on his side, kind of like about Trump is the fact that he just says the game is stupid and I'm not going to play it.
But the reality is that most people are susceptible to the game.
Cuomo knows this, which is why he's out there doing this sort of thing.
It's also why it's damaging for Trump to get volatile with regard to Sort of unifying messages.
So George W. Bush put out a message over the weekend that was sort of a unifying message for the country.
That's not a bad thing.
He's the ex-president of the United States.
And Trump promptly just crapped all over him.
Which again, is that a great look in the middle of a time when we need unity?
No, it isn't.
And that again, is Trump fundamentally misunderstanding what his job is to do right now, politically speaking.
He understands his job when it comes to trying to secure the American people.
It's actually precisely the reverse of the Obama administration when it came to keeping the American people safe.
The Obama administration was not very good at keeping the American people safe, particularly when it came to foreign policy.
When it came to pandemics, they never had to face anything like this.
Nobody's had to face anything like this for 100 years in the United States.
But when it came to foreign policy, the Obama administration was constantly leading from behind, shifting responsibility, not doing the things that were necessary to keep the American people safe, and then posturing about it.
Shockingly, it's actually quite bad at the posturing, but the policy is actually quite good.
We'll get to that in just one second.
First, let's talk about the fact that Mother's Day is coming up and you have a chance to get your mom the best bouquet available.
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Okay, so Trump misunderstanding sort of the imagistics of all of this.
Here's President George W. Bush giving a statement in which he calls for unity, and then you'll see how Trump responded.
We cannot allow physical separation to become emotional isolation.
We cannot allow physical separation to become emotional isolation.
This requires us to be not only compassionate, but creative in our outreach.
Let us remember how small our differences are in the face of this shared threat.
In the final analysis, we are not partisan combatants.
We are human beings, equally vulnerable and equally wonderful in the sight of God.
We rise or fall together, and we are determined to rise.
Okay, so that is Bush fundamentally understanding the kind of stuff Americans want to hear.
And then Trump immediately takes the opportunity to smack Bush.
Which is like, how exactly is this useful?
He tweeted out Pete Hegseth.
Oh, by the way, I appreciate the message from former President Bush, but where was he during impeachment calling for putting partisanship aside?
He was nowhere to be found in speaking up against the greatest hoax in American history.
Not everything is about you, dude.
Not everything is about you.
And that kind of narcissism does not serve President Trump well in the middle of a pandemic.
It just doesn't.
Most Americans don't want to hear that stuff.
They don't.
Now, again, that is Trump not getting the imagistic part of the job correct.
But here's the thing about Trump.
He is getting a lot of the substance right.
So President Trump has a gut feel that Americans want to get back to work.
And he is correct about this.
So President Trump, over the weekend, He said, listen, people want to go back.
You see it in the protests.
More than seeing it in the protests, you see it in the number of cars on the road.
Seriously, you want a better gauge for how many people want to go back to work than the protests?
All you have to do is drive around the freeways in Los Angeles on a weekday.
Traffic is up like 25 to 30 percent.
It used to be that you could really just speed through L.A.
You'll actually hit traffic jams on occasion during weekdays, and L.A.
is still technically shut down.
Here's President Trump saying, people do want to go back.
He is correct about this.
I honestly don't understand how this has become a partisan issue.
This should be a data-driven issue.
Somehow this has become a partisan issue.
I think I have an inkling as to why it has become a partisan issue.
And that is because, as I've said before, there's a part of the hard left that sees this crisis as an opportunity and speaks out openly about that.
Hillary Clinton said this crisis is an opportunity.
And the longer you lock down, the more of a crisis it becomes economically, which requires the government to step in.
So for folks on the left, for folks on the right, there are a bunch of countervailing interests that have to be balanced here.
One is How do we, what is our exact policy here with regard to saving lives and flattening the curve?
Are we aiming for herd immunity or are we not aiming for herd immunity?
How do we protect people who are most vulnerable?
How do we allow people who want to go back to work to go back to work?
Also, how much economic damage can we take before the damage becomes essentially irreparable and you have tens of millions of people who are, for all intents and purposes, on long-term unemployment insurance?
For Democrats, those questions just don't exist in the same way because the idea is, well, you know, if we lock down forever, then that's obviously the way that we save the most lives in the immediate term.
Sure, more people might commit suicide because they don't have jobs.
Sure, more people might lose their life savings.
Sure, more people might not have homes.
Sure, more people might not be able to sustain their businesses.
That's where the government steps in.
And so it's a win-win because we wanted the government to step in in the first place.
As we'll see, this is an actual agenda item for many Democrats right now, which is why a lot of Republicans are like, okay, so I think that you have a separate agenda here.
Your agenda here is not actually about saving the maximum number of lives.
Your actual agenda is changing the underlying political dynamics of the situation.
When you lose faith in the law, that's when you start to see people disobeying the law.
Here's President Trump explaining, people do want to go out and you see it in the protests.
I think you can really have it both ways.
I think a lot of people want to go back.
They just want to go back.
You see it every day.
You see demonstrations all over the country.
And those are meaningful demonstrations.
It's big stuff.
But you also have some people that are very scared.
Probably everybody's scared when you get right down to it.
It's a terrible thing.
A terrible thing that happened to our country.
Okay, what he's saying there is obviously correct.
But the question becomes, how scared are people not to go out?
People are going out.
Okay, the reality is not to protest.
The reality is many, many Americans are leaving their homes.
Many Americans are leaving their homes.
In fact, by data provided to NPR by a mobile phone location data company called SafeGraph, based on locations of about 18 million mobile phones across the country, NPR's analysis determines the percentage of cell phones that did not leave their home location daily in every US county.
It has been dropping steadily.
Since the middle of April.
And it is dropping precipitously now.
About 50% of mobile phones that Safegraph had data on stayed home on April 12th, which was Easter.
That number hasn't come down since.
That number hasn't since come anywhere close, showing a steady decline with the most recent numbers showing that less than 40% stayed home on April 27th.
The trend is consistent across the entire country.
It's for all the talk about it's red states and these red state idiots who are going out in danger.
It's true everywhere.
You should have seen the pictures from New York yesterday.
Have you seen some of the pictures from New York?
I mean, they're insane.
The pictures from New York of people who are not even close to social distancing in the middle of lawns in New York City, like blanketed with human beings.
By the way, not the Hasidim.
Okay?
People who are shirtless, in the sun, in New York City, two feet away from each other.
Bill de Blasio may be deeply concerned only about the Hasidim.
It turns out there are tons of people in New York who have not been socially distancing.
Bill de Blasio, however, is so concerned about the Hasidim, he actually sent the NYPD to break up study sessions where people were socially distancing and wearing masks, which is always a great look over there.
The bottom line, though, is that metrics are showing that people are getting out of their house a lot more.
A lot more.
If you take a look, for example, at Arlington, Virginia.
On April 20th, nearly half of cell phones Safegraph provided data for were staying at home.
Over the next couple days, the number declined to one-third, as low as it was during the middle of March.
Okay, so people are beginning to say, you know what?
We're basically done with this.
We're basically done.
And as time increases, and as the number of headlines coming out of New York decreases, you are going to see an increasing push to open things back up.
And open things up in pretty serious ways.
President Trump understands this.
He understands this at an innate level.
And frankly, he should understand this, because this is not sustainable.
Folks on the left may want it to be sustainable, as we'll see in a second, but it is, in fact, not sustainable.
So the question becomes, what exactly are we aiming for?
What exactly is the goal here?
So, you have Deborah Birx suggesting that protesting without social distancing is worrisome, because you're going to get a broader spread, and that we have to keep being vigilant.
And she's right about this, depending on what we're aiming for.
Here's Dr. Deborah Birx.
It's devastatingly worrisome to me personally because if they go home and infect their grandmother or their grandfather who has a comorbid condition and they have a serious or an unfortunate outcome, they will feel guilty for the rest of our lives.
So we need to protect each other at the same time we're voicing our discontent.
Okay, so again, she's not wrong about this, but the question becomes, and I've said this now several times, what exactly are we aiming for?
So, here's the debate.
The debate is between Dr. Scott Atlas, who is a professor over at Hoover Institute at Stanford University, and between a historian who has written a book about This pandemic.
The historian's name is John Barry, and I will give you the debate in one second because this is the next stage of the debate that people don't want to talk about but we're going to have to talk about.
So we're going to get to that in just one moment.
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Okay, so what exactly are we aiming for is the big question.
John Barry is the author of a book called The Great Influence of the Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History.
And he wrote a piece called Will Warm Weather Slow Coronavirus from the New York Times.
And the answer is maybe, but we actually don't know because the fact is that so much of the population has not actually been exposed to coronavirus.
He says, modelers estimate that the true number of infected persons is up to 20 times the reported number, which still leaves about 95% of the population susceptible.
If, as in 1918, susceptibility proves more important than seasonal influences, hot weather will not give as much relief as hoped for.
By the same token, that would mean the expected seasonal surge when colder weather arrives might not be as large as feared.
In other words, more people will get it now, and less people will be We'll be available to get it later, basically, because many people have had it.
Also, COVID-19 mutates much more slowly than influenza, and its key spike protein, the part of the virus that attaches to cells, seems particularly stable.
Amid all of the bad news that this virus has brought, this characteristic of the virus is a silver lining in several ways.
This reduces almost to zero the chance it will become more virulent.
That's what happened in 1918.
Also, mutation will probably not account for a new wave soon.
Also, it is possible a vaccine will most likely protect reasonably well against COVID-19.
Third, the incubation period on average nearly six days is roughly triple the average incubation period of influenza.
The disease itself takes much longer for people to recover from and stop shedding virus from.
Therefore, even without social distancing, it would take months for the outbreak to pass through a community as opposed to six to ten weeks for influenza.
With social distancing necessary to reduce deaths by keeping hospitals from being overwhelmed, it will take even longer.
Additionally, the incubation period allows an asymptomatic person more opportunity to spread the disease.
Now, I'm not sure about the stats there.
The reason I'm not sure about the stats is because if the incubation period is longer and if the disease vector is longer and you're shedding more of the virus and it's more infectious, you're going to be able to spread the disease.
Yes, it takes longer from beginning to end for each person to get it and then clear of it.
But also, you're infecting three times as many people.
So I'm not sure that actually is much slower than the flu, statistically speaking.
But this guy is fairly sanguine.
He says the country will then have more time to expand testing and contact tracing, isolating, and quarantine contact.
He says, we can't wait for herd immunity to develop from natural infection.
That would take many months and be accompanied by an unacceptable death toll, nor can we wait a year or more for the vaccine.
Instead, we're talking about a phased-in approach.
Okay, so everybody at this point is talking about a phased-in approach, right?
I'm old enough to remember when that was irresponsible, where you got ripped up and down for suggesting a phased-in approach where healthy people go back to work first, followed by people who are more vulnerable, that we continue to wear masks and socially distancing.
Some people have been pushing that for literally a month and a half.
Among those people like me.
But beyond that, the question becomes really this one specific sub-question, which is, should we wear masks and should we social distance?
I know this is now a heretical question, and I've been calling for wearing masks and socially distancing because, again, I would prefer that if we're waiting for a therapeutic or we are waiting for a vaccine and we have not actually taken the measures necessary to protect people who are older and vulnerable, that We should all do our best to prevent the spread of the infection to people who are older and and who are more vulnerable.
And this is particularly true if you live with somebody, right?
The reason that I am broadcasting from home and not going into the office is not because I fear for me or fear for my wife or fear for my kids.
We are all, thank God, young and healthy.
It's more because I fear for my parents who are in their mid-60s.
But the question becomes, okay, on a societal level, what should we do if nothing changes over time?
So Scott Atlas from Hoover Institute has a piece over at The Hill called How to Reopen Society Using Medical Science and Logic.
And here is what he suggests.
He says, first, policymakers must apply logic and critical thinking to the massive amount of evidence we have acquired and combine that with decades of established medical science.
Second, we must demonstrate and fully convey the logic underlying the plan to reassure a public that has become almost paralyzed With panic and fear.
So he says, important to note that most of the people who are dying are people over 70.
91% in Michigan's Oakland County were people over 60, similar to what was noted in New York.
Younger, healthier people have virtually zero risk of death, little risk of serious disease.
Under 1% of New York City's hospitalizations were people under 18 years of age.
Less than 1% of deaths at any age are in the absence of underlying conditions.
That is not him suggesting that human lives are not more valuable at one age than another or anything like that.
That is him suggesting, instead, that we have to tranche populations and figure out whom to protect and how we actually tranche back in populations, just like every other person with a functioning brain has been suggesting.
So here's what he suggests.
He says, let's finally focus protection on the most vulnerable nursing home patients already living under controlled access.
This suit includes strictly regulating all who enter and care for nursing home members by requiring testing and protective masks for all who interact with these highly vulnerable people.
We should continue to inform the public about what they have already successfully learned regarding the at-risk group.
This means issuing rational guidelines, advising the highest standards of hygiene and appropriate social distancing, while interacting with elderly friends and family members at risk, including those with diabetes, obesity, and other chronic conditions.
Second, those with mild symptoms of the illness should strictly self-isolate for two weeks.
It's not urgent to test them, simply assume they have the infection.
That includes confinement at home, having the highest concern for sanitation, and wearing protective masks when others in their home enter the same room.
Third, open all the schools.
Children have no risk of serious illness from COVID-19.
Exceptions exist, but again, standards for consciously protecting elderly and other at-risk family members or friends would still be employed.
Now here is where we get the controversial section of what Atlas is saying buried.
Here's what he says.
He says, fourth, open businesses, including restaurants and offices, but require new standards for hygiene, disinfection and sanitization via enforceable, more stringent regulations than in the past.
It is reasonable to post warnings for customers who are older or in other ways vulnerable.
Avoid unnecessary requirements for spacing of customers, though.
It is not logical that otherwise healthy adults, especially younger age groups, should be isolated or maintain a six-foot spacing from each other.
If infection is still prevalent, socializing among these low-risk groups represents the opportunity for developing widespread immunity and eradicating the threat.
Public transportation should resume.
Regional authorities could require barrier masks for passengers.
Parks and beaches should open.
There's no scientific reason to insist that people remain indoors.
Finally, implement prioritized testing for three groups, nursing home workers, healthcare workers, and first responders and patients in hospitals.
Widespread testing is not a predicate for reopening.
Contact tracing is not valuable after a disease is already widespread, even though it would be an important part of the overall preparation for future potential outbreaks.
Okay, so, Atlas is actually kind of saying we should be aiming for herd immunity, and this is what Sweden has done.
Sweden has basically suggested we are going to allow you, if you're young and healthy, to go out and socialize with others.
They'd recommended social distancing, but you can see from the pictures that people are not, in fact, social distancing nearly as much.
People are advised to keep apart and work from home if possible, to stay inside if aged over 70, and to avoid unnecessary travel.
But people have basically been going around and doing what they want.
And as time goes on, people are not going to want to wear masks.
People are not going to want to socially distance from each other forever.
People are just not built for any of this.
So, are we aiming for herd immunity or are we not?
And that really requires More data on whether there's a therapeutic that is in the works and we need to wait for three weeks, or we need to wait for two months, or we're waiting until the end of the year.
Right?
That is the big question.
And so the balanced approach that I have sort of been recommending is that we get back to work, if you're young and healthy particularly, that you do wear the mask, that we do aim to slow the spread of the disease.
We don't aim for herd immunity specifically.
We aim to buy time until there is a vaccine.
But that is based on people continually saying that we might be able to ramp this thing up by September or ramp this thing up by the end of the year.
If we're talking 12 to 18 months, if we're talking two years, as some people suggest, then the notion that we are going to be able to hold down the spread for two years is just bizarre.
It's not going to happen.
At that point, you really should just basically tell everybody who's most vulnerable, you need to stay home.
You need to isolate them.
You need to keep them protected.
And then you need to tell people who are young that they need to go out and achieve herd Seriously, if you're talking two, three years, five years as some people have been suggesting, then that essentially is the only option.
We can pretend there are other options, but there are not tons of other options.
Now it is also possible that this thing Starts to wane a little bit as time goes on.
We just don't know because nobody is that far ahead of us to be able to determine this.
And we have seen some spikes in places that are a little bit ahead of us, places like China.
Suffice it to say that a lot of the measures that have been assumed to have been slowing this thing down, however, have actually been overkill.
And this is where we get into the question as to why people should obey laws that are clearly not designed to actually prevent the spread of the disease.
I mean, yesterday, for example, in my neighborhood, there were helicopters flying around and firing their sirens off at people who are not socially distancing.
Outside.
Let's be frank about this.
The number of people who are going to get infected outside is way lower than the number of people who are going to be infected inside.
Also, the notion that California is doing this right is ridiculous.
There was a video that was going around of Huntington Beach.
And you can actually see the helicopters going around and yelling at people on Huntington Beach to socially distance.
Well, there were no people on Huntington Beach.
Huntington Beach was empty by state order yesterday.
Do we have that video?
Yeah, you can see.
Look, there's this helicopter flying around.
And if you can hear the sound, they're actually announcing to people over loudspeakers that we want you to socially distance.
Now look at the beach.
There's no one on it.
There's no one on it, so we are wasting taxpayer dollars to send a helicopter to tell an empty beach that people need to socially distance.
There are no human beings there.
None.
None.
Zero.
Zip zilch.
No humans.
None.
This is idiotic.
Meanwhile, the NYPD is announcing that they are going to start enforcing the ban, that they are past the point of warnings when it comes to social distancing.
I understand that.
I'm just wondering why you idiots didn't shut down the subway system weeks ago if you actually want to prevent the spread.
We're going to get to more of this in just one second.
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So basically the big question that I'm asking here is the question of how long we can continue to avoid most of the activities of regular life without supreme data that that's It is one thing to say that we don't want people willy-nilly infecting each other.
And again, even that question is now on the table because seriously, we have to wonder if nothing changes over the next couple of years and if we are aiming for herd immunity over time, is that better than aiming for herd immunity as quickly as possible like Sweden was doing?
Right.
Sweden was was slowing the spread somewhat, but not too much since they now have Stockholm like 40 percent penetration rate of this of this disease.
So the question becomes, OK, do you want the spike to happen now or would you like the spike to happen later?
And that's what people are beginning to realize.
But if the choices between that or responsibly social distancing or complete lockdowns, then complete lockdowns really should not be on the table.
These complete lockdowns are not useful.
The complete lockdowns do not have an endpoint.
They do not have a logical endpoint.
Because again, nobody has yet really suggested the vaccine is going to be available tomorrow or a therapeutic will be available tomorrow that allows us to all go back to our lives.
So you're starting to see mayors, hypocritical mayors actually, going out and saying, we're going to arrest you if you don't socially distance.
Now, I get it.
I do.
I get arresting people.
Lori Lightfoot also was disobeying her own orders in Chicago to go get haircuts in the middle of the pandemic, and then proclaiming that as mayor, it's very important to get a haircut.
Here is Lori Lightfoot suggesting that people would be arrested in Chicago.
We will shut you down.
We will cite you.
And if we need to, we will arrest you and we will take you to jail.
Period.
There should be nothing unambiguous about that.
Don't make us treat you like a criminal.
But if you act like a criminal and you violate the law and you refuse to do what is necessary to save lives in the city in the middle of a pandemic, we will take you to jail.
Period.
Okay, now all of that is well and good, unless what you're talking about is people just going to a park.
If what you're talking about is, like, really, if you're talking about one of those big social gatherings with a thousand people infecting each other in downtown Chicago or something in the south side of Chicago, which is what we were seeing a couple of weeks ago, fair enough.
I don't even have a problem with Bill de Blasio arresting people in mass gatherings, although it's weird that he would single out just the Jews in his tweets.
A lot of people were doing that sort of stuff.
The idea that the NYPD is going to come break it up or that Lori Lightfoot is going to come break it up, that's fine.
But that changes.
That math changes.
When you start looking at ridiculous shutdown orders of public places like beaches or parks, that's what we've seen in California.
Instead, how about this?
How about we actually engage in data-driven methods that are meant to reopen to the extent that people can actually live with it, at least for a certain amount of time?
Ron DeSantis over in Florida, for example.
He's been ripped up and down.
Why?
Because Ron DeSantis didn't shut down Florida fast enough.
There's only one problem.
The results in Florida are not bad.
Florida's doing about the same as California.
You know what Ron DeSantis didn't do?
He didn't shut down the entire city.
I mean, the entire state.
He didn't.
He said big cities are going to have to shut down mostly.
Smaller places, not so much.
There was Governor DeSantis who was ripped.
You remember, the media coverage endlessly was about how evil Ron DeSantis was for not preemptively shutting the state.
The beaches are full.
Spring break.
Oh my God, people are going to die.
They were all young.
None of those people were gonna die.
Or at least very few of those people were gonna die.
And Ron DeSantis, his state is basically fine.
Here was Ron DeSantis yesterday explaining his approach to this thing.
The only thing we have to fear is letting fear overwhelm our sense of purpose and determination.
We need to focus on facts and not fear.
And I think that there's been a lot that's been done to try to promote fear.
We were told over and over again Florida was going to be just like New York when it came to the coronavirus.
Well, let's look at the tail of the tape.
How close were we to New York?
Fatalities.
Obviously a much different picture.
Okay, and he is correct about that, obviously.
DeSantis also explained that he is going to set up mobile RV labs so that they are going to be able to check out old age homes, which of course is sort of what Scott Atlas is suggesting, right?
That what we have to do is mainly focus on protecting the most vulnerable populations.
Here is DeSantis.
Again, why DeSantis became the criminal here is pretty incredible.
DeSantis became the criminal because he's a Republican, in the view of the media.
But guess what?
His state is fine.
Here's DeSantis.
I'm going to be unveiling a mobile RV lab that we can drive across Florida.
The results are going to come back in 45 minutes.
So we're going to go to nursing homes.
It's going to be our number one thing.
Test the staff.
Test the residents.
And eventually, Maria, once we get enough rapid tests, I'd like to be able to test the family members and let them go visit their loved ones.
These people haven't had visitors for close to two months.
That's not an easy thing.
Obviously, we've got to err on the side of safety.
But if a son or daughter can get a test, So what exactly did DeSantis do?
The Wall Street Journal has a piece today called Smart or Lucky?
How Florida Dodged the Worst of Coronavirus.
When the coronavirus pandemic swept toward Florida, public health professionals nationally warned of a potentially devastating wave of infections that could imperil the state's large senior population.
But so far, the state seems to have dodged that fate, despite not following advice to impose measures such as an early blanket lockdown to minimize spread.
So what exactly happened?
DeSantis restricted visitation to nursing homes, but he left early lockdown decisions to local authorities.
Mayors in some hard-hit large communities shut down faster and more aggressively than the state, gaining valuable time.
While Disney World closed two weeks before the statewide order, spring breakers went back home.
Some scientists point to Florida's low population density, others to its subtropical climate to explain fewer infections.
Though the governor did not impose a statewide stay-at-home order until April 3rd, people began hunkering down en masse in mid-March, according to firms that analyze anonymous cell phone data.
That was around the same time deaths in the U.S.
topped 100 and residents of New York started staying home.
The state needs to double its current volume of testing to more than 32,000 tests a day to detect and respond to flare-ups, says Charles Lockwood, the Dean of University of South Florida Morsani College of Medicine.
That will take about a month.
As of Saturday, Florida had more than 35,000 cases of COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus.
In late March, a model developed by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at UW was predicting nearly 7,000 deaths in the state by August.
A figure the modeler said could shift depending on adherence to social modeling.
Florida has six deaths per 100,000 people as compared to 42 in Louisiana, 56 in Massachusetts, 97 in New York.
California had five deaths per 100,000 people.
Texas had three.
So maybe it turns out that local leaders have the best view of this stuff.
That local leaders actually did what they were supposed to do in their local communities.
That individual human beings are risk averse and smart enough to recognize that they're going to have to avoid risk.
The notion that DeSantis did something totally wrong by allowing local officials to have their way is just ridiculous.
He is not wrong about this.
In fact, it was a better data-driven program than a lot of what was happening statewide.
Like New York State?
Upstate New York should not have shut down.
New York City should have shut down.
California?
You think Central California should have shut down?
There's nobody in Central California.
L.A.
is very spread out.
L.A.
shouldn't have completely shut down.
We should have socially distanced.
And maybe in downtown L.A., but even there, the population density isn't that high.
In San Francisco, you do a shutdown, and then you let people back out again.
New York City is not like other places.
New Orleans is not like other places.
Detroit is not like other places.
And treating all those places like places within the state is idiotic.
Treating Philadelphia like the suburban and rural areas outside of Philadelphia is ridiculous.
That's not data-driven.
You want to know why DeSantis didn't get crushed?
DeSantis didn't get crushed because people basically did the responsible thing.
You want to know why New York got crushed?
Because New York is New York.
That's why New York got crushed.
Yes, there was some mishandling.
I pointed out the mishandling.
But in the end, we are drawing closer and closer to the reality of the situation, which is going to be that if nothing happens in the near future, what all we can do, all we can do is protect the most vulnerable people in our population and then let everybody else go back to work.
And we have to determine what percentage of those people are actually vulnerable and what percentage are not.
One of the things we've heard is the question.
It's a serious question.
What percentage of Americans are actually vulnerable?
Like seriously vulnerable.
If you go by population, I'm gonna look it up right now.
The population statistics in the United States of US by age.
The population of the United States by age.
There are about 15 to 19.
There are about, let's see.
The population of the United States, there are about 20 million people who are under the age of five.
We really start to balloon out at age 55 plus.
Total, you're talking about a, let's see, 20 million there.
You're talking somewhere in the neighborhood of 45 to 50 million people who are above the age of 60 in the United States.
And then you have to figure out how many of the remaining population are people who have preexisting conditions like obesity or diabetes.
But once you figure that out, then you have to determine who's healthy.
And if that healthy, let's say that healthy population, let's say the healthy population of the United States is somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 to 60%.
Okay, well, if all those people get infected and none of those people die, which is basically what COVID-19 is doing, if you're young and healthy, you're not dying from this thing.
Then you have to start thinking about how close are we actually to herd immunity?
What are the possibilities for herd immunity?
I know these have been verboten words.
We're not supposed to say herd immunity anymore.
But what do you think a vaccine is?
So either a vaccine is going to do it, or your natural immunity is going to do it.
And the question is, is one of those things possible, and is one of those things not possible?
Meanwhile, one of the reasons why people are a little doubtful about these statewide lockdown orders is it seems like there's a wild coincidence in which all of the places that are locking down most harshly are also eager to push world-changing social policies.
We'll get to that in just a minute.
First, it's time for things I like and some things that I hate.
So, things that I like.
Over the weekend, I read another Robert Harris novel.
This guy's great.
He wrote a novel called An Officer and a Spy.
It is about the Dreyfus Affair.
For folks who don't know the Dreyfus Affair, the Dreyfus Affair was a situation in which A French high-ranking officer named Alfred Dreyfus, back in the late 19th century, was accused of spying on behalf of the Germans.
It turns out that the evidence had been completely, not only wrong, but the evidence had been actually made up by high-ranking intelligence officials in order to convict the guy?
This book is a very well-grounded historical novel about the detective who figured that out and then basically revealed that evidence to the public.
Dreyfus had been put on Devil's Island for four years.
He spent four years on Devil's Island by himself alone, pegged as a traitor.
It turns out it was another officer in the army because Dreyfus was Jewish.
There was a lot of momentum for keeping him there, and people basically were willing to blame the Jews.
I mean, the Dreyfus affair was largely responsible for the rise of the Zionist movement in Europe, because France, which was considered one of the most cultured countries in Europe, had masses of people out in the streets shouting death to the Jews.
Because of Dreyfus, it led Theodor Herzl, who was at that point a fairly secular Jew, to say to himself, hold up a second, I think the Jews might need their own country here, because every time, like, this guy was a loyal army officer, And he was humiliated in front of the entire French National Army.
And then he was sent to Devil's Island, and then people were chanting death to the Jews, even as it became obvious that the government had not only covered up his innocence, but had actually manufactured the evidence in the first place.
It's an amazing story, and it's really well told by Robert Harris.
I mentioned that they've made a movie out of this.
Roman Polanski made a movie out of this.
Apparently the movie's really good, but we'll never get to see it because Roman Polanski's a bad, bad man.
He is, in fact, a bad man.
He's been convicted of child rape in the United States.
But I'm just wondering why it is that the people in Hollywood were cheering him when he won an Oscar for The Pianist, but now we can't see this movie because he's been declared newly bad, or what?
In any case, my general feeling about art and artists, as I mentioned last week, is that if you're a crappy person as an artist, that doesn't mean we shouldn't be able to see your art.
Alrighty, time for a bevy, a cornucopia, a veritable panoply of things I hate.
Let's do it.
Alrighty, so, as I mentioned, one of the reasons that there is increasing skepticism about the full lockdown orders is because of the dishonesty of the media and because of the political agenda of some of the people pushing this thing.
It seems like there are people who are rooting hard against Sweden, rooting hard against places that are opening up, that they want those places to fail.
You just get this underlying sense from people in the media.
They would love to see Georgia fall on its face.
They would love to see Florida fall on its face.
They want to see Texas fall on its face.
And not because they want to see more dead people, but because they want to see Republican governors humiliated for not taking coronavirus seriously enough.
What they should be doing is rooting that this thing is not as deadly as we have been told.
This thing is well under 1%.
They should be rooting that it doesn't pass as easily or that the summer kills it off or that we can get back to regular life.
I mean, I wouldn't care who's president.
I'm rooting to go back to regular life.
But you do get the feeling that there are some people who are a little bit too sanguine about exactly how these lockdowns are going.
And they're looking for an excuse in order to keep the lockdowns going, in order so that they can promulgate policies that they wanted in the first place.
And that is how this becomes a political issue.
If we're all doing data-driven analyses, then, as I say, you want to know what's so fascinating about all of this?
Look at the purple states.
Don't look at the red states.
Don't look at the blue states.
Look at the purple states.
The purple states are the ones that are fascinating.
Abbott is going to be, in Texas, more freedom-oriented.
DeSantis, in Florida, is going to be more freedom-oriented.
Newsome in California, very blue state.
He's going to be significantly non-freedom oriented.
In New York, Cuomo is going to be significantly non-freedom oriented.
Then, look to some of the purple states.
Colorado is a purple state.
What's happening in Colorado?
Starting to open up.
Montana is a red state with a blue governor, right?
Bullock is the governor of Montana.
He just ran for president, if you recall that five minutes.
Bullock has kept the state open throughout.
Maine is a purple state.
Maine is reopening.
Minnesota is a purple state.
Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, is a Democrat.
He's reopening.
Interesting how the purple states are starting to reopen.
It's one of the reasons why sort of the hot spots of these debates are happening in purple states.
Happening in Wisconsin.
Happening in Michigan.
Happening in Pennsylvania.
Because this is where the rubber hits the road.
Governors who are in those purple states are under pressure, and the reason they're under pressure is because there are a lot of people saying, we don't want to see a fundamental change in our society come about as a result of COVID-19.
Meanwhile, in California, which is totally blue, people are like, well now, lockdowns, maybe we can do something magical with that.
Tim Arango and Thomas Fuller writing for the New York Times.
After the virus, California liberals say returning to normal won't be enough.
Oh, who couldn't see this one coming?
That's right, every crisis an opportunity.
Dateline Los Angeles.
Housing for the homeless.
Criminal justice reform.
Addressing the digital divide for school children in rural areas.
Propelled by the urgency of the coronavirus crisis and despite severe economic headwinds, liberal Californians see this moment as an opening to push through an agenda that addresses some of the state's most intractable and long-debated problems.
Okay, can I be real about the housing for the homeless issue?
Drive around LA the only people you'll see on the streets are the homeless.
Okay, literally every underpass still has homeless people living under it, in close coordination.
And the only reason that they are not there is because they are being physically rousted by the police, because the police are finally being allowed to do what they should have been allowed to do all along, which is rouse people who are living in public areas.
So the pitch by the media is that the reason that the homeless are off the streets is because of the housing made available for the homeless.
That is not why the homeless are off the streets.
The reason the homeless are off the streets is because the police are telling them that if they do not get off the streets, they will be physically put into places like these hotels.
Anyway.
Thousands of people have been let out of the state's jails and prisons.
Cash bail has been eliminated for most crimes.
Thousands of homeless people now have roofs over their heads.
They're being threatened.
And children in rural and poor areas of the state are being sent tens of thousands of laptop computers for distance learning.
Temporary measures to confront the pandemic that leaders are hoping will become durable solutions to long-standing problems of inequity.
Oh, there it is.
We're going to use this crisis.
Can I point something out?
The laptop's being sent to these rural communities.
I'm homeschooling my kids.
If parents aren't doing responsible schooling in the presence of schools, what makes you think that when you homeschool the kids, the parents are sitting there every minute of every day making sure the kids are learning?
Really, is there any evidence that sending kids home from schools has somehow rectified educational inequity if you send them a laptop?
I've seen no evidence that if you send a kid home with an iPad, and the real problem in education is the kid's home environment, that the iPad has magically changed things.
Meanwhile, many in the country talk about returning to normal, but a common refrain is emerging among California's powerful political left wing and many liberal leaders across America.
Normal wasn't working.
Well, weird, because you guys have been running the state my entire lifetime.
Whether you're talking about homelessness, whether you're talking about criminal justice system and incarceration, we're doing things today that should have been done a long time ago, said George Gascon, a former San Francisco district attorney, now running for the same office in LA.
He's been at the vanguard of a national movement of prosecutors looking to reduce mass incarceration.
So we're going to let all the criminals out of prison.
We are going to round up the homeless and put them in hotels.
And we are going to send kids laptops.
And this is California shifting its positions in the middle of the crisis.
Yet, buried in paragraph 8, grand ambitions are also coming up against stark realities.
Though California is deeply blue, with Democrats holding all the top offices and a supermajority in the legislature, the state has failed for decades to tackle some of the biggest issues surrounding inequality.
I like how that sentence is phrased.
Though California is deeply blue.
No, because California is deeply blue, the state has failed for decades to tackle some of the biggest issues surrounding inequality.
Because it's deeply blue, because these leftist policies are failures, because taxing people and then spending lots of money does not actually rectify inequality, you morons.
By one measure, California has the nation's highest poverty rate.
Some Californians, whether the will to enact significant change will endure past the initial stage of coronavirus crisis.
I love that a state that's been permanently blue basically my entire adult lifetime is now saying, will we have the will to change this thing afterward?
But you want to know why?
I have some serious doubts about why exactly Gavin Newsom is going so overboard shutting down Huntington Beach and sending helicopters to yell at sand.
It's because of articles like this one.
Newsom says, it's the spirit of our times.
What often takes a year, now we need to do in months.
In Los Angeles, Eric Garcetti has proposed using the crisis as a catalyst to achieve free higher education and mitigate inequality.
He says, the shock to our economy and our lives recalls the scale and the challenges faced by the generation who sacrificed through the Great Depression and World War II.
Yeah, the Great Depression was lengthened eight years by bad government policy and World War II had an external enemy that required us to send people to barracks and to risk their lives against bullets and bombs in order to kill Nazis and in order to kill members of the Japanese Imperial Army.
By the way, it's not just happening at the state level.
Nancy Pelosi is taking advantage of all of this in order to grab power.
According to Bradley Byrne, over at the Wall Street Journal, he says, for nearly two months, my staff and I have been fielding calls from the people of Southwest Alabama, small business owners, bankers, seniors, and many others.
The government's response to coronavirus is affecting their livelihoods.
Their congressman may be the only voice they have in Washington, but when the lights are turned off in committee rooms and on the floor of the House, who's watching out for them?
Who's holding Washington accountable?
More important than the flawed message Congress's absence sends to the American people, that their representatives value personal protection, is the reality.
When nobody is around, it is easier to make backroom deals, and Speaker Pelosi is taking advantage.
She has consolidated the power of the institution in her person.
Without lawmakers there to speak up for their districts and influence the legislative process, Pelosi has made herself the sole voice and negotiator for the House as it passes massive funding and regulatory bills.
In other words, she's taking advantage.
Byrne is a Republican in Alabama's 1st congressional district.
gain maximum concessions from Trump.
She calls the House back to Washington to be quickly and quietly herded into chamber to cast an up or down vote, bypassing committees, markups in every process that gives lawmakers a voice.
In other words, she's taking advantage.
Byrne is a Republican in Alabama's first congressional district.
And meanwhile, taking advantage are ideological warriors of the left who are taking advantage of this pandemic in order to claim that America is racist, sexist, bigoted, homophobic, etc., Charles Blow, the aptly named Charles Blow over at the New York Times, has a piece today titled COVID-19's Race and Class Warfare.
You know, because, like, the virus kills lots of people who are not poor, and it's a virus, and it doesn't know whether you're rich or poor because it only attacks you, your body.
But according to Charles Blow, again, it's because America is evil.
For the thousandth time, the reason that people... I ask whether the law is an ass.
The reason I ask whether the law is an ass is because there are only a few reasons why people are going to obey the law.
One is the law is good, right?
The law is beneficial.
The reason that you obey a law is because the law is beneficial.
If the law is not beneficial, there are only two other reasons you would obey the law.
One, you hope for some reward.
Two, you risk some punishment.
But as the American people realize that perhaps the reward of going back to work is better than the punishment of not going back to work, they're just going to go back to work.
And the government threatening punishment for laws that are unenforceable and stupid is not going to result in people obeying the laws.
And if I believe that your law is designed specifically in order to undermine the free markets that have brought the world from the brink of starvation to the brink of prosperity, if that's what I think your agenda is, I'm not going to obey your law.
Your law is garbage.
And the only thing that will keep me obeying the law is your threat of punishment.
No one wants to die.
Nobody is interested in passing this on to a parent.
At a certain point, the reason that DeSantis is right in Florida and Abbott is right in Texas is because you're going to have to trust the American people.
And I know the media have been doing nut picking and going around and finding people who are crazy, who are not socially distancing and spitting all over each other and partying it up.
The reality is most Americans, particularly those who care about the vulnerable, are staying away from each other.
But this is not changing the underlying math.
So, Blow has this entire piece about how America is evil.
Now, quick note.
I have a book that is coming out July 21st called How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps.
We've released the cover.
It is all about this.
It is all about how there is a segment of American society that wishes to see America as evil, sees our philosophy as evil, sees the abounding American philosophy as evil, sees our culture of rights as merely cover for a caste hierarchy.
That sees our history as an unending series of abuses.
And these folks are using this pandemic as an excuse to simply double down on that position.
Blow is one of those.
So he says, people, mostly white, sometimes armed, occasionally carrying Confederate flags or hosting placards emblazoned with a Nazi slogan from the Holocaust, have been loudly protesting to push their state governments to reopen business and spaces before enough progress has been made to contain the coronavirus.
This is yet another illustration of the race and class divide this pandemic has illuminated in this country.
For some, a reopened economy and recreational landscape will mean the option to run a business, return to work, go to the park or beach, have a night on the town at a nice restaurant or swanky bar.
But many, on the lower rungs of the economic ladder, it will only force them back into a compulsory exposure to more people, often in occupations that make it hard to protect oneself and that pay little for the risk.
Okay, this is such absolute sheer insanity.
First of all, to suggest that everybody who's protesting is carrying a confederate flag or hoisting placards with nazi slogans and we've talked to some of the people at these protests that is not what is happening here and also the notion that if you're on the lower rungs of the economic ladder your best interest lies in the government picking up the check for you as opposed to you having a job is again total insanity the people who are losing their jobs are disproportionately blue-collar workers many of whom are disproportionately minority and those people need their jobs back and many of them want to work
They want to work in safe conditions, we would all like to work in safe conditions.
But if you have an underlying pre-existing condition, there's nothing that you can do about that other than stay home.
And for those people, we should be encouraging those people to stay home.
And maybe we should be talking about how this virus has created a necessity for a broader social safety net, not necessarily even from the government, but from private charity.
But according to Charles Blow, this is all about the evils of the white infrastructure.
Again, all inequality in the view of the left is inequity.
All inequality is evidence of America's root system.
The reason for this is because the left believes that human beings are infinitely malleable, that all situations are infinitely malleable, and if you get the economics just right through redistribution, then everybody becomes perfect and everybody has an equal outcome.
Not true, never will be true, but the fact that inequality is a permanent condition of human life means that the quest to destroy the entire superstructure will continue apace.
Charles Blow says, these are the struggling workers who entertain and aestheticize people of means.
These businesses were by no means essential, and they put these workers in danger.
He's talking about tattoo parlors, barber shops, hair salons, and nail shops.
I have a question.
Why were they not essential?
Because Charles Blow says they're not essential?
You know one of the things I noticed?
Customers were showing up.
Particularly customers were showing up in minority communities.
Read the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution made clear there were actual racial divides in the number of people showing up to barbershops and nail salons.
Through personal choice, not because they were being forced to go out there.
Customers.
And many of the people doing these jobs, says Charles Blow, will have to take public transit to get to work, search for suitable childcare before they leave home.
Schools, in most cases, are still closed.
But even among professions we don't immediately consider low-wage or minority-dominated, there are areas of high risk and low wages.
For many, the image that comes to mind about the medical field, those on the front lines are doctors and nurses, people highly educated and highly paid.
But there are many other people in the hospitals that make them run.
For instance, a majority of nursing assistants are members of racial minority groups.
A third are African-American.
Half have completed no formal education beyond high school.
According to registered nursing, the median annual wage for a nursing assistant in a hospital is just 30 grand.
Okay, so?
So?
I mean, really?
So?
I don't understand how that has to do with societal racism.
Maybe those are people who are attempting to work their way up the job ladder.
Good for them.
Good for them.
Those are heroes.
And demeaning them to the level of victims of American racism because they're going in and being heroic is wild.
Blow says it's been widely reported the virus is having a disproportionate impact on black and brown people in America, both in terms of infections and death.
But that is only one aspect of the disparities.
In a country where race and ethnicity often intersect with wealth and class, there are a cascade of other impacts, particularly economic ones, to remain conscious of.
Reality of the situation.
The virus is not targeting black and brown people.
The virus is targeting people who have diabetes, obesity, asthma.
The virus is targeting people based on health condition that tends to overlap with poverty and that tends to overlap with race.
Some of that is the result of historic injustice in the United States.
A huge part of that has nothing to do with the historic injustices of the United States.
Historic wealth gaps have been rectified by many different racial groups in the United States.
The question is how fast that is happening and whether the rules that are currently in place are conducive to that happening.
But again, the goal for a lot of people is to use the pandemic as the latest evidence that America is deeply evil today, not was evil back in the 1960s with Jim Crow, is evil today, and thus must be torn down around our ears.
And then you wonder why people are bucking the system and saying, maybe we don't trust your motivations in keeping this thing closed.
Maybe we don't trust your motivations in avoiding the data.
All right, we'll be back here later.
So we have two additional hours we will get to everything Joe Biden related then, because Joe Biden has a serious problem on his hands.
We'll get to that a little bit later today.
Otherwise, we'll see you here tomorrow.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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