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May 5, 2020 - The Ben Shapiro Show
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The Rewriting Of America | Ep. 1004
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The Pulitzer Prize Committee rewards the 1619 Project, the models drastically revise upward predicted coronavirus deaths, and China continues to silence its whistleblowers.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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All right, we're gonna get to everything news related in just a moment.
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So we will get to everything coronavirus related in just a little while here because there is some more news about the models and the models revising fairly radically upward the That is not a great shock given the fact that the lockdowns are in fact being mitigated.
It's also not a great shock given the fact that the tail end of the bell curve doesn't actually look like a bell curve so much as it does a plateau in places like New York.
We'll talk about strategy and what exactly we're aiming for here because it seems like, once again, politicians are lying to you.
They don't want to openly acknowledge the trade-offs that are inherent in any policy decision.
Instead, they simply want to maintain that there are no trade-offs at all.
We'll get to all that in just a moment, but I want to begin today with an issue that I think is incredibly important and undercover, and that is the divisions in America over the issue of history.
So I have a new book coming out July 21st.
It's called How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps.
One of those steps is to destroy our common image of what America is.
So, my book basically suggests that America needs to share a basic philosophy expressed in the Declaration of Independence, a basic culture of rights expressed in the Constitution of the United States, and a basic perception of American history.
And that perception of American history goes something like this.
America was founded on eternal good truths.
They are embodied in the Declaration of Independence.
Rights that pre-exist government, a government designed to protect those rights, answerable to the people, justly accountable to those people.
That is the basic philosophy of the Declaration of Independence.
And that philosophy is good.
And it's applicable to all Americans.
It was not guaranteed to all Americans at the beginning.
It was gradually expanded to include more and more Americans over time.
So the story of America is the expansion of the founding promises to all the people to whom it originally was supposed to apply.
And yes, the founders understood that these were universal human promises.
Even slaveholders at the founding expressed that they understood the hypocrisy in which they were engaged.
This includes people like Thomas Jefferson.
It's Thomas Jefferson who suggested that basically the wrath of God would fall upon the United States for allowing slavery to continue.
So that story of American history is about the triumph of original American ideals over the nastiness of human nature that has existed in all times and at all places.
What makes America exceptional is not our flaws.
The flaws are universal to humanity.
What makes America exceptional is the fact that we've done so much good.
And that we have attempted to live up to those founding principles more and more over time.
So that's one story of American history.
Then there's another story of American history.
And this is the story presented by the 1619 Project.
That story basically suggests that America was not founded on good, true, immutable principles.
Instead, America was founded on slavery, racism, bigotry, homophobia, and sexism.
America was rooted in the domination by some groups of other groups.
And 1776 was a lie.
At the time when it was written, it was a lie.
Those eternal principles, they never really applied and they were never really true in the first place.
Instead, America was founded on poisonous roots.
And those poisonous roots have seeped into the body politics such that all of America's modern day ills are attributable to those historic injustices.
So America was never great, right?
This is the reply you see from folks on the left very often to President Trump saying, make America great again.
It was not.
America had great principles and didn't live up to them.
It was America was never great.
There was nothing great about America.
There was no point at which America was great.
Not its founding principles, not its constitution, not its declaration.
That's the perspective of the 1619 Project, which attributes everything, literally everything, from you checking your employees' work hours to traffic patterns, to a lack of nationalized healthcare, to America's historic racism and reliance on slavery.
All of that's in the 1619 Project.
So that is just bad history.
It's bad history because it is not even presented as a corrective to a sort of whitewashed, simplistic version of American history that's jingoistic or overpatriotic.
It's not presented as a corrective.
It's presented as a replacement of that history.
Not that 1619 is something we should look at seriously and recognize the evil side of American history.
No, instead, 1619 is the true founding of America, according to the 1619 Project.
So the Pulitzer Prize Committee just decided to reward Nicole Hannah-Jones, who is the creator of this, or the founder of this thing.
They gave her an award for her essay on the 1619 Project.
That essay There's some parts of it that actually are not bad, and then there's some parts of it that are truly egregious.
I talked about this at the time the 1619 Project came out.
One of those aspects was a passage in which she suggested that the founding fathers and that the founding colonists actually rebelled against the British in order to preserve slavery.
That's obviously a lie.
It's just not true.
The British Empire did not outlaw slavery in its territorial holdings until the middle of the 19th century, until like 1833.
This would have been 1776.
So the New York Times actually had to issue a correction, saying, It's difficult to even explain why it's among the motivations of the colonists who fought the Revolutionary War, given the fact the British Empire was not going to outlaw slavery.
They weren't outlawing slavery in the South.
Not.
Not really.
The motivations of the colonists really did not have much to do with slavery, again, given the fact that the revolutionary generation was not rebelling against an anti-slavery Britain.
In fact, the original Declaration of Independence included a provision from Thomas Jefferson that suggested that King George III had quote-unquote waged cruel war on the inhabitants of a far-flung nation by bringing them to American shores.
That by involving America in the slave trade, that King George III had done something wrong to the colonists, right?
That was only removed at the behest of the southern colonists.
Other historians have ripped up and down the 1619 Project, including James McPherson of Princeton and Gordon Wood of Brown.
James McPherson, of course, is one of the premier Civil War historians in America.
Nicole Hanna Jones then proceeded to rip him as a white historian on Twitter, because that's the way we're supposed to read history, is not as history, but based on the victim groups to which you belong, or non-victim groups to which you belong, in the case of James McPherson.
These historians penned a letter to the Times identifying the project's errors.
Here's what they said.
On the American Revolution, pivotal to any account of our history, the project asserts that the founders declared the colonies independence of Britain in order to ensure slavery would continue.
This is not true.
It's supportable.
The allegation would be astounding.
Yet every statement offered by the project to validate it is false.
Some of the other material in the project is distorted, including the claim that for the most part, black Americans have fought their freedom struggles alone, right?
That was another claim that was made in the essay, is that black Americans fought the freedom struggles alone, which would come as quite a shock to the millions of Americans who supported the Civil Rights Movement, including the virtually all-white Congress that supported the Civil Rights Act.
But again, the goal of the 1619 Project was to completely rewrite American history such that all of today's modern ills can be blamed on the evils of American history.
That was the goal.
And the Pulitzer Prize Committee decided to basically provide their imprimatur of decency and legitimacy on the 1619 Project so they could be taught in public schools.
In fact, the Pulitzer Committee already has a project with the 1619 Project in order to do this.
This is a deep problem.
The rewriting of American history as basically a competition between various interest groups that continues to this day is a justification of tearing apart the country.
It is, as I say in my book, disintegrationist.
It's all about disintegrating, right?
Disintegrating, like moving away from the integration of the United States along a unified line.
That is the goal here.
And that doesn't require, if you want to correct American history, it doesn't require you to overthrow the idea that America has a founding philosophy that is good, or a culture of rights, or a history that we're all supposed to share together, including the dark spots.
And that we should feel horrible about parts of American history.
And that some people in America have ancestors who were victimized by other people in America.
But that's not the goal of the 1619 Project.
The goal of the 1619 Project is to say that America was dirty from the beginning and remains dirty today.
And they're fairly obvious about it.
And that's what the Pulitzer Committee was giving a reward to.
And that is really terrible.
And again, you know, it's self-serving, but I'm just going to say it anyway.
You should go buy a copy, pre-order a copy of my new book, How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps.
I devote about a third of the book to precisely this topic.
So it is no shock to me that the Pulitzer Committee did this.
Again, this isn't a long line of rewritings of American history along sort of Materialist Marxist lines.
Going all the way back to Charles Beard suggesting that the American founders only founded the country because they wanted to protect their property interests moving forward through the garbage of Howard Zinn.
People's History of the United States.
One of the worst books ever written.
Truly a terrible book.
No footnotes.
Lots of errors.
Painting America in the worst possible light.
And then cited, of course, by Ben Affleck and Matt Damon as a sign of intellectual bravery.
Okay, in just a second we'll get to everything coronavirus related because there is some news there.
Some fairly bad news and maybe a little bit of good news.
And then we'll talk about exactly what our policy is aiming for.
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On to everything coronavirus related.
So, There are a couple of new studies out suggesting there will be a radical increase in the number of coronavirus deaths over the course of the next several months.
That, of course, is not a particular shock.
Some of us have been maintaining for a long time that the charts that we were being shown were not accurate because they did not include a second wave.
Remember, they kept showing you that flatten the curve chart, and the flatten the curve chart showed you two curves in a line.
That there was a big, huge curve, right?
a big spike and then a quick devolution, right, back to zero.
And then it showed a line, and it showed that a huge percentage of that bump was going to be over the line.
The line was medical capacity.
The stuff over the line was excess deaths.
Then there was the flattened curve, and it showed a flatter curve.
It never went over the line.
And the goal was flatten the curve so you don't overwhelm the hospital system.
And I said, okay, I'm all for it.
Now, what happens when you extend that chart further in time?
What happens when people go out afterward?
Are we really back down at zero cases?
Or, alternatively, do you get a second wave?
Do you get a bunch of people who go out?
It's not even a second wave, it's a first wave, because there was an artificial suppression of the wave.
That's just the natural consequence of people going out.
Well now the models are starting to take into account people going out again.
And unsurprisingly, the numbers have risen fairly precipitously.
So you have a couple of different models that have been presented.
The White House and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have disavowed one particular report that was put out there by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
It was a draft government report.
It projects COVID-19 cases surging to about 200,000 per day by June 1st, a staggering jump that would be accompanied by more than 3,000 deaths each day, if that were to be accurate.
That forecast stopped at June 1st, but shows both daily cases and deaths on an upward trajectory at that point.
The CDC and the White House have disavowed the report, although the slides carry the CDC's logo.
The creator of the model said the numbers were an unfinished projection shown to the CDC as a work in progress.
Those are high estimates compared to other epidemiological models.
Those are probably too high.
But the IHME model, which has gotten more accurate as time has gone on, because obviously the IHME model, that is the model from the University of Washington, is a curve-fitting model.
So as you get more information in those curves, the new curves that are being drawn by the algorithm tend to be more accurate about the future.
They are suggesting that there will be something like 135,000 deaths in the course, by the end of the next couple of months.
That's a radical, a radical increase in the number of people who would die over the 74,000 that were originally suggested.
They're saying 134,475 in a range of 95,000 to 242,000 by June 1st, I believe, is when this goes.
Sorry, through August.
Through the end of August.
So, why exactly do they update the models?
Well, they say these projections are considerably higher than previous estimates, representing the combined effects of death model updates and formally incorporating the effect of changes in mobility and social distancing policies into transmission dynamics.
New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and Michigan are projected to have the highest cumulative COVID-19 death toll through August.
While these states have generally been among those with the highest predicted tolls from COVID-19, each of their cumulative death projections have increased by at least 2,000.
This is in part due to updates to death data and modeling approaches, with the latter now estimating longer epidemic peaks and slower downward trajectories following those peaks in many locations.
In other words, this thing is not going to die out quickly.
It goes up and then it sort of plateaus.
And then it slowly recedes back towards zero, if never hitting zero.
That is the basic idea here.
And New York is constantly updating its data because they're getting in new data.
For example, there was a story today that 1,700 deaths have been added to New York's rolls just from nursing homes.
Now, quick note here.
That's on Andrew Cuomo.
Okay, it is on Andrew Cuomo.
It is on Gavin Newsom.
Any state that took the policy that if an elderly person went to the hospital and got COVID-19 tested and was positive and was sent back to their nursing home and then proceeded to infect the entire nursing home and kill everybody, that would be on the government.
Protecting the nursing homes would have cut out something like 40 to 60 percent of all COVID-19 deaths in Europe and the United States.
By available statistics, elder care centers are the absolute epicenters of this pandemic.
40 to 60% of all deaths in every Western country are at nursing homes for this thing, which means the first thing everybody should be doing is protecting the nursing homes, obviously.
That is obviously priority number one.
I mean, if you could reduce the number of deaths by 40% by snapping your fingers, I mean, that would be a pretty massive, massive move, would it not?
How is that not the low-hanging fruit?
But in any case, as we open up, there will be additional deaths.
And this is just recognizing a reality.
The reality is we're not going to remain locked down forever.
And when people go out, they will infect each other.
And when they go out, those infections will result in increased risks of death.
According to the UW study, They say, By the way, they have also updated their predictions for cumulative COVID-19 deaths for a variety of other nations, including Italy, France, Spain.
So basically, they were undercounting before, thanks to the lack of increased tests.
By the way, they have also updated their predictions for cumulative COVID-19 deaths for a variety of other nations, including Italy, France, Spain.
They actually lowered their prediction for Sweden.
Sweden, they lowered by some 7,000 deaths.
Why?
Because Sweden isn't going to see a second wave.
Because Sweden is actually pursuing herd immunity, and they didn't change their policy.
Basically, any place that's changing policy is getting upgraded.
Any place that did not change policy is getting downgraded in the number of expected deaths, which is precisely what you would expect.
So in a second, we're going to talk about what exactly our strategy is on all of this, because it turns out social distancing has not been quite as effective as originally thought.
It may be.
It may be more effective than the alternative, but we'll get to that in just one moment.
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Okay, so we now know that these death estimates have been heightened.
We know that social distancing isn't having the effects that many people had hoped for, according to Paige Cunningham, writing for the Washington Post Health Policy 202, which is a very good blog, by the way.
She says, despite encouraging signs on the nation's east and west coast, daily diagnosed cases of the coronavirus appear to still be on the rise in about 20 states.
A number of rural counties have become unexpected hotspots in recent weeks, including in the Black Belt region of Mississippi and Alabama, in communities throughout Iowa and northern Texas around the Oklahoma Panhandle.
The country's overall daily figures of diagnoses and deaths have plateaued, worrying health policymakers as many states move to reopen part of the economy.
She points out that the steep curve of COVID-19 cases in March and April is not receding the way that it rose, and that's not happening in New York either.
Right?
In New York, you're starting to see a drop-off, but the drop-off is not particularly steep.
According to Scott Gottlieb, the former FDA commissioner who has been a guest on the program, he says, everyone thought we'd be in a better place after weeks of sheltering in place and bringing the economy to a near standstill.
Mitigation hasn't failed.
Social distancing and other measures have slowed the spread, but the halt has not brought the number of new cases and deaths down as much as expected or stopped the epidemic from expanding.
So what that means is that we actually have to consider the possibility that our strategies may have to change here.
And so the question becomes, what is the goal of the strategy?
Especially if, as some reports suggest, that this coronavirus may mutate, which means a vaccine might be very difficult.
A report from the Los Angeles Times today suggesting that scientists have identified a new strain of the coronavirus that has become dominant worldwide and appears to be more contagious than the versions that spread in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a new study led by scientists at Los Alamos.
The new strain appeared in February in Europe, migrated quickly to the east coast of the United States, and has been the dominant strain across the world since mid-March, according to the scientists.
In addition to spreading faster, it may make people vulnerable to a second infection after a first bout with the disease.
Wherever the new strain appeared, it quickly infected far more people than the earlier strains that came out of Wuhan, China.
Within weeks, it was the only strain that was prevalent in some nations, according to the report.
The new strain's dominance over its predecessors demonstrates it is more infectious, according to the report, although exactly why is not yet known.
So that is depressing news, because according to study leader Betty Korber, a computational biologist at Los Alamos, she said, the story is worrying.
We see a mutated form of the virus very rapidly emerging.
When viruses with this mutation enter a population, they rapidly begin to take over the local epidemic, thus they are more transmissible.
She says this is hard news, but don't be disheartened by it.
Our team at Los Alamos was able to document this mutation and its impact on transmission only because of a massive global effort of clinical people.
The bottom line here is that scientists at major organizations working on a vaccine or drugs told the LA Times they're pending their hopes on initial evidence the virus is stable.
The Los Alamos report could theoretically upend that assumption.
Well, if that's the case, then we... Waiting for a vaccine?
Is that a strategy?
Now, on the other side, there are some places that have been accelerating vaccine.
The American pharmaceutical corporation Pfizer, partnered with German pharmaceutical company BioNTech, announced their potential novel coronavirus vaccine started their human testing phase in the United States on Monday.
They're hoping for a rollout of the vaccine by September, so that could be theoretically good news.
But we just don't know.
We just don't know at this point.
And that is the big problem.
So, what exactly are we aiming for?
When we look at the policies that we are pursuing, we need to ask a simple question.
What are we aiming for?
What is the goal of the policy?
Because it is now clear we are not going to lock down for two years.
So are we simply slowing the curve in order so that we can buy time?
Or are we slowing the curve because we don't have an alternative?
Right?
What exactly are we doing here?
Now, to acknowledge trade-offs in politics is death.
Chris Christie learned this the hard way.
The governor of New Jersey was on CNN yesterday, and he pointed out, you know, guys, when we reopen, people are going to die.
I mean, that is one of the realities here.
To acknowledge even these trade-offs gets you in serious trouble in the world of the media, because we live in a very stupid time.
And we have to acknowledge the lockdowns will not continue forever.
People will go out.
We have to acknowledge that over time, people are going to relax their vigilance against this particular virus, particularly among young populations, which are not at high risk of death from this virus.
If you are below the age of 20, your chances of dying from this virus are something like 1 in 10,000.
If you are below the age of 30, your chances of dying from this virus are 7 in 10,000.
If you are below the age of 40, your chances of dying from this virus... This includes, by the way, pre-existing conditions.
If you are below the age of 40, your chances of dying from this virus are something like 2 in 1,000.
So, as people begin to relax their vigilance, there will be broader spread of the virus.
That is something we all know.
Every doctor acknowledges this.
And we all also acknowledge we're not going to lock down for two full years.
Chris Christie acknowledged this yesterday and got ripped for it, but what he says here is not wrong.
Of course everybody wants to save every life they can.
But the question is, towards what end ultimately?
Are there ways that we can thread the middle here to allow that there are going to be deaths, and there are going to be deaths no matter what.
And if we can do things to keep people in the mode of wearing masks, of wearing gloves, of distancing where appropriate.
We've got to let some of these folks get back to work, because if we don't, We're going to destroy the American way of life and these families, and it will be years and years before we can recover.
Okay, so he's getting ripped up and down for that, but here's the reality.
Andrew Cuomo is acknowledging the same thing.
There is untold damage going on, not just to the American economy, but suicide hotlines have reported something like a 1000% increase in the number of people calling.
Of course, because as people lose their life savings, lose their jobs, and are scared to go outside, it turns out that people get suicidal.
It turns out that domestic violence rises dramatically.
It turns out there are pretty significant downsides to making 20% of the American population unemployed over the course of a month.
Turns out that's a real bad thing.
And people who are dismissing those costs were doing so at the risk of others who are being affected by their refusal to acknowledge that there are trade-offs here.
Trade-offs are a thing when it comes to public policy.
In a second, we're going to talk more about those trade-offs and the fact that if you're Andrew Cuomo and a Democrat, you can talk sort of about the trade-offs.
If you're a Republican, it's very evil.
You're not allowed to talk about this stuff.
We'll get to that in just a second first.
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So as I say, everybody is acknowledging that there are trade-offs involved here.
Originally, if you mentioned the drafts, it was very bad.
Just a week ago, Andrew Cuomo was saying, there are no trade-offs because death.
No, Andrew Cuomo's like, you know what?
There are kind of some trade-offs here.
Yes, we know, Governor Cuomo.
We know.
You know where there didn't have to be trade-offs is if you had protected the nursing homes.
But aside from that, trade-offs are a thing that has to be done in public policy.
And acknowledging this doesn't make you evil, it means that you're thinking about this rationally.
And we need to consider the rational possibilities.
Here's Andrew Cuomo talking about how the shutdown is just unsustainable.
Let's be smart about what we do.
And I get the emotion, and I get the impatience, and I get the anxiety.
We all feel it.
When I say this situation is unsustainable, it's unsustainable on many levels.
It's unsustainable economically.
It's unsustainable personally.
A lot of anxiety is now all through our community.
We see it in increased alcoholism, increased substance abuse, increased domestic violence.
So this is a very, very difficult period and people want to move on.
Yes.
He said this is not a sustainable situation.
Close down everything, close down the economy, lock yourself in your home.
You can do it for a short period of time, but you can't do it forever.
Weird when Andrew Cuomo says it, then it's very good.
When everybody else says it, then it's apparently very, very bad.
Okay, so what exactly are the policy considerations that we are taking into account?
It seems to me that there are some unspoken assumptions that are being made when it comes to how we shape this policy.
So we keep hearing flattening the curve, right?
The goal was to avoid spiking over the capacity of the healthcare system.
And we didn't.
Thank God.
We did not overwhelm the healthcare system.
And that is due to the vigilance of our healthcare professionals who are just heroic.
It's due to the fact that government did basically what it was supposed to do.
The federal government did what it was basically supposed to do.
Now it seems like the goalposts have shifted with regard to flattening the curve.
So now people are suggesting That we have to keep flattening the curve because we're basically buying time to develop a therapeutic or a vaccine.
If we're doing that, let's say so out loud, because this is called the hope strategy.
The hope strategy is, well, you know, hopefully if we kind of open up the economy just a little bit and we go back to 25% and people go to restaurants and socially distance and 25% of the customer base can go back, then I guess we'll slow this thing down, the economy can sort of sustain at low ebb, and then eventually we will be able to get something that will change the game, right?
There'll be a game changer on the horizon.
Hope is not an actual strategy, is one of the problems here.
So maybe that hope is justified.
But let's hear what the actual hope is.
Let's hear the trade-offs.
Because that is a trade-off.
The reality is that if you say to a restaurant, you can open again, but you're at 25% capacity.
Restaurants do not survive at 25% capacity.
The choice is not between 25% capacity and being shut down.
The choice is between being open and being shut.
The margins at a restaurant are like 2%, 3%.
You remove 75% of their business, it's gonna be very difficult to sustain.
I mean, they have rent, they have actual fixed costs.
And it's not just restaurants, obviously.
It's huge percentages of small businesses.
So we have to recognize these costs.
So what exactly is our question?
What exactly are we pursuing here?
So there are a couple of strategies that have been suggested.
Again, we have to question what are the assumptions here?
Is there going to be a game?
If we're just waiting for a game changer, then presumably the best we can do is the sort of social distancing, low ebb, lock up everybody who is elderly and in poor condition, people who have pre-existing conditions, and then just hope for the best.
Right?
That is one possibility.
The other possibility is acknowledging that nothing may change for two years.
There may not be a vaccine for years.
That's what some people are suggesting.
There may not be a game-changer for years.
The therapeutics may not be a game-changer.
And if that's the case, then maybe the Swedish possibility is a possibility, meaning, like, actually aim for herd immunity.
Herd immunity has become a dirty word because herd immunity assumes that there will be increased risk for populations.
That is true.
Also, the question is, is it really an alternative to operate at 25% capacity in the economy indefinitely for years, hoping for a change that may never arrive and a vaccine that may never develop?
Is that sustainable?
And the answer there is no.
You can see people voting with their feet.
People already leaving their homes.
People already going back to work.
If you're young and you're healthy, and you believe, as the statistics tend to show, if you're young and healthy, then you're not going to die from this thing in all statistical likelihood.
And when I say all statistical likelihood, I mean to a near certainty, right?
If you're under the age of 20, there is a 9,999 chance in 10,000 that you are not going to die from this thing.
And those stats are probably even a little bit high.
Okay, then you're willing to undergo that risk on a fairly regular basis, every time you go out the door, basically.
So how much of this is sustainable?
If we're waiting for a deus ex machina, while tens of millions of people lose their jobs and fall into poverty and despair, and we don't have a timeline, that's not called a plan, that's just called hope for the best.
So again, are we trying to buy time while reopening the economy to the best of our ability?
Or, at some point, do we have to aim for herd immunity a la Sweden?
Because those actually have two different strategies.
Not for people who are obese, people who have prediabetes, for people who are elderly.
For those people, the strategy is the same.
Stay away from other humans.
The strategy remains the same for those people.
Stay away from other humans until either there's a vaccine or there's herd immunity.
That's just the reality of the situation.
But I'd like to point out that when we open up the schools in September and the kids go back to school, those people are going to have to remain locked down anyway.
That's just a reality.
And when my kids go back to school, I'm going to have to make a decision what to tell my parents.
My parents are 64.
Right now they're sheltering in place with us.
In September, if my kids go back to school, which they likely will, I'll have to tell my parents they need to shelter at home at that point.
That is the situation.
Okay, so we need to actually discuss what these trade-offs look like.
So, if we are aiming for buying time, then you do want the social distancing, you do want the mask wearing, you do want the schools to stay shut down, right?
You want as much lockdown as possible while still allowing some economic activity to take place so that not everybody in the world is out of a job.
But, again, that's hoping for a solution.
Maybe it arrives, maybe it doesn't.
The other possibility is a possibility proposed by some Israeli scientists.
It's called the controlled avalanche strategy.
I mentioned this briefly yesterday.
Put out by a set of professors in epidemiology and health policy management and applied mathematics in Israel.
And their strategy is basically sort of the Swedish strategy.
You protect the most vulnerable members of the population and then you actually encourage everybody else to get the virus so that it passes through the population and you reach herd immunity.
That is a strategy widely perceived as dangerous.
It may not be an alternative.
There may not be an alternative because otherwise you're just pursuing herd immunity slowly and killing the economy in the process.
If nothing happens, then the slowing of the spread while protecting the elderly, the spread still happens.
You're just protecting people for slightly longer.
And if no vaccine arrives, herd immunity is eventually reached.
It just takes you three years to get there as opposed to three months to get there, depending on the amount of social distancing you're doing.
So we actually have to determine on a public policy level what are we hoping is going to happen here.
Now what's funny about this is the passion with which people are taking up these positions.
We'll get to that in just one second, because it does betray where we are politically, the passions with which we are taking up these positions.
Because what I'm really asking is, how do you forecast the future?
How do you forecast whether there will be a vaccine, or whether there will be therapeutics, or whether there won't be a vaccine and therapeutics?
If there's no vaccine and no therapeutics, we are going to end up going for herd immunity, because there's no alternative.
If there is a vaccine or therapeutics, we should avoid going outside right now, because we want the vaccine and herd immunity to be conferred by the vaccine.
We don't want people dying in the meantime.
But that's a question about probabilities about the future.
So you can be split on this.
You can be agnostic on the question, right?
You can say, I don't know enough to even make an informed decision.
But instead, people have taken up very passionate sides in this debate.
And they align really strongly with pre-existing politics, which suggests that people are actually forecasting not based on the best available information.
They are forecasting based on what is going on right now.
They're either saying, I kind of like what's going on right now, and therefore, it's okay if this continues to go, and if we sort of bet on a Deus Ex Machina, alright, I can live with that.
Or, people saying, I hate what's going on right now, and therefore, my presumption is that nothing is going to change, and we are wasting all of our time, and we should all go back to work right now.
That is not based on different information.
That is based on different perceptions of what's going on right now.
And in fact, there's a study that suggests that that's exactly what's going on in America right now.
That really, the debate about reopening is a debate reflecting fundamental values, not reflecting differential assessment of the future path of the virus.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Alrighty.
We're going to get to more of the calculus here, right?
Should we be attempting Sweden?
Should we be attempting South Korea?
What is more possible and what is more probable?
And why has this broken down politically the way that it has?
We'll get to that in one second.
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Okay, so as I say, if you expect that in the future something magically is going to change, that there will be some massive change, then what you actually want is people to stay apart from each other You want to lower the amount of infection as fast as possible.
If you believe that nothing is going to change, what you really want to do is protect the most vulnerable in the society and then actually urge herd immunity.
This is sort of what Sweden has been doing.
And there are some people who are like, well, we can't do Sweden, right?
Because there are too many vulnerable people in the United States.
Yeah, there may not be an alternative.
I keep hearing testing and tracing.
Testing and tracing allows you... I've discussed this with Gottlieb.
I've discussed this with various other members of the epidemiological community.
This is not coming from me.
I've asked them the same question over and over.
What is testing and tracing designed to do in the United States?
Testing and tracing in the United States is designed to prevent hotspot flare-ups.
It is not going to kill the baseline transmission of the virus.
Testing and tracing as a destroyer of the curve, not a flattener of the curve, as a destroyer of the curve, testing and tracing only works when you do it super duper early like South Korea, where you end up with 10,500 total cases as opposed to 1.2 million confirmed cases in the United States.
Or if you have a tiny, teeny, tiny population like Iceland or New Zealand.
Right then, you can test and trace enough people because you only have 360,000 people total in your population.
You cannot test and trace to kill the curve.
You can do it to prevent a huge spike in a very localized area.
You can't do it to kill the curve, like bring it down to zero in a place like New York.
That's just not a thing that's going to happen.
So, acknowledging The realities of testing and tracing.
Then the question, again, goes back to that simple binary.
In the future, do you think that we are going to get therapeutics and vaccine faster?
Or do you think, and in less deadly fashion, in the meantime, or do you think that we are going to reach herd immunity faster?
Right?
Those are the real questions.
And people are mapping their priors onto this.
This is what's fascinating.
So I don't know the answer to that question.
You don't know the answer to that question.
But I think it's a question that we really need answers from our politicians about.
Like, how long do you expect this to go on?
And what's your phased plan for saying, okay, we need to change the plan.
Let's say that we get four months from today and there's been no therapeutic and there's been no vaccine.
Every month that we are not urging a herd immunity campaign is a month that we are destroying the economy.
Because the herd immunity campaign basically assumes that people who are young and healthy go back to work and engage.
They go to bars, they go to restaurants, they go to sports games.
They do all of those things because they're young and healthy and have a low chance of dying.
But the anti-herd immunity campaign suggests that we don't want any of that spread, even for the low-risk people, because they will spread it to elderly people at some level.
And when the vaccine comes, we can protect all those people, even the young people, without really having to worry about the consummate cost.
All of that depends on timeline, right?
Because there will be tipping points.
The economy can't exist at 25% capacity for two years, three years.
That's not a thing that can really happen.
In fact, they're already tranching populations over in the UK.
So when people say, how can you talk about, you know, tranching populations and protecting some and leaving other people to get infected or telling other people that it's okay if they get infected?
Well, the answer is because the virus treats different people differently.
If you are 20 years old, you are not going to die from this virus.
If you are 80 years old, there's a very good shot that you may die from this virus.
That means we should protect you differently, obviously.
I would not protect my 95-year-old grandmother living in a nursing home in the same way that I protect myself or my wife.
My grandmother needs more protection.
She's at a nursing home.
She's 95 years old.
This is why Britain is already doing this.
Millions of Britons face a grim return to work in which all normal social contact remains heavily restricted, a leaked government blueprint revealed yesterday.
Draft guidance seen by the Daily Mail suggested that there will be no return to normality in the foreseeable future.
Most importantly, workers are not allowed to lend each other pens for fear of spreading virus.
And really most importantly, if you're obese, you're being told to stay home.
If you're vulnerable, you're supposed to stay home.
So we are already tranching people.
The question is, for everybody else, Should we be tranching or should we not?
And that question relies again on that perspective on the future.
So as I say, what's fascinating about this is how this is mapped onto political priors.
So Republicans are more likely to say, go for herd immunity.
Do it, man.
Let's just, you know, we're going to assume that nothing changes and we can't last like this forever.
In fact, we can't even last like this now.
Let's go out, let's protect the vulnerable populations, and let's pursue herd immunity like Sweden.
Democrats, conversely, are saying, you know, we can't afford to do that.
What we really need to do is we need to lock down as many people as humanly possible, really as possible, because something will change in the near future.
Okay, so is that based on a differential assessment of forecasting?
Do Republicans really think nothing is going to change in the future?
And do Democrats really think everything is going to change in the future?
Or is it possible that Republicans are just super uncomfortable with what's happening now, and so they are projecting into the future things that are going to happen that justify their position of discomfort right now.
And folks on the left are doing the exact same thing.
So there's a great story from Heterodox Academy, this is Jonathan Haidt's organization at NYU, talking about this differential.
What kinds of ideological goals were most important in explaining conservatives' relative apathy toward COVID-19?
Out of six, the strongest effects emerged for goals that involved government-imposed social distancing rules.
Conservatives oppose the government telling them when they can or cannot leave their homes.
Liberals support such policies.
Because a threatening disease might validate government interventions that conservatives dislike, conservatives appear motivated to downplay the severity.
Or, conversely, because a threatening disease might validate government interventions that liberals do like, liberals seem motivated to magnify the threat.
Note that our results cannot say which of these is happening in greater measure.
And the answer is some of both is really the answer.
There are people whose priors basically say, I can live like this.
This is all right.
And if you get a bigger government, that's okay too.
And so I think that if we all go out, we're going to die.
And so we need to stay home until the virus has been solved.
And then there are people who are like, no, this is intolerable, guys.
This is invading my core American freedoms.
And if we go out, no matter what you do, there ain't going to be no deus ex machina.
Nothing is going to save us from this.
So you're just going to, the only way out is through.
So this has become mapped onto political priors, which is truly, truly fascinating.
But here's what we must demand from our leaders.
Seriously demand from our leaders.
We need to demand from our leaders what they think the future looks like.
What are their hopes?
What do they actually think the chances are that we get a vaccine?
We keep hearing vaccine.
We've heard it three months, six months, 12 months, 18 months, maybe never.
Well, I mean, that's going to change what we do now.
If the answer is never, then we should pursue herd immunity because we have no choice.
If the answer is three months, we should stay home because in three months, everything will be fine.
Right?
These are big, big questions.
And we're not hearing enough from our leaders about it because here's the reality.
The leaders are going to pursue the most politically motivated strategy, the most politically palatable strategy.
And the politically palatable strategy is generally to slice the baby in half strategy.
Which is to say, okay, well, we'll allow you kinda to go back to work.
And really stay away from each other, because we don't want to pursue herd immunity, because if we do that, then the risks go up.
But also, we're not going to tell you to completely stay home, because that's not palatable.
So it has nothing to do with our risk assessment in the future.
We don't know.
We don't know anything.
In fact, nobody knows anything.
So what we're going to do is we're going to urge caution, because that way we can't get blamed.
We can't get blamed by one side for having gone aggressive like Sweden, and we can't get blamed by the other side for having gone full lockdown like China.
Instead, we'll sort of go halfway.
And the problem with halfway is that you kind of get the worst of all available worlds halfway.
Because on the one hand, let's say you reopen the economy to the tune of 25%.
Is that really going to save the economy?
Is that going to save all these jobs?
Doubtful.
Now, there are some people who are sort of pro-opening who say that we have to open in part, mainly because it's a ratchet effect.
That once you say to people, 25% open, people are not going to go back down to 0% open.
But governors have been told that they should go back down to 0% open if the stats change, right?
So you get sort of the worst of all available worlds.
You don't get Sweden, which is basically saying, yeah, we're aggressively pursuing herd immunity.
And you also don't get full lockdown.
You sort of get none of this, none of this, right?
So politicians are not going to tell you about any of this, obviously, because it cuts against their vital interests.
But the reality is that we should all be thinking about this sort of stuff.
And the first thing we should be doing, no matter what, is protecting the nursing homes and protecting the vulnerable and the elderly.
And guess what?
This conversation is going to radically escalate in September.
No, we think it's bad now.
It's May.
Wait till we hit September, and parents have been a year without school for their kids.
Because when we send the kids back to school, right there, that's going to answer a lot of questions.
Because those kids are going to come home, they're going to have grandparents there.
You're going to end up with basically people, because if you're sending your kid to school, let's be real about this.
Okay, I have kids who are six and four, or will be four in a couple of days.
I have six, four, and newborn.
Two of those kids are in school.
You think there's social distancing among four-year-olds at preschool?
Schools are germ factories.
Everything I have gotten in the last two years has been a result of my daughter going to school.
So once those schools open up again, you can kiss goodbye to the whole social distancing thing.
It's over at that point.
Anybody who says social distancing exists with children is out of their mind.
That's not a thing that's going to happen.
So all the hard decisions will come in September.
So maybe the idea is that we'll have to hold down until September, but I'd like to see the economic fallout from that, because as Health Policy 202 points out, massive increase in suicidality, massive increase in depression, massive increase, by the way, in people not going to the doctor for the health problems that they have that are underlying.
So I've seen a sort of minimization, again, mapping onto political priors, minimization.
On the one side, the people who are pro-lockdown are being like, what, so you just don't want to go to a restaurant?
You want to open up so you can go to a restaurant?
No, I don't care about going to a restaurant.
I'm totally fine.
I can cook at home.
What I care about is the complete meltdown of the world economy.
That would be the thing.
And on the other side, people are like, the only reason you don't want to lock down, the only reason you want to lock down is because you want to control me going to church.
No, I think that most people who want to lock down are not, like, chiefly concerned about the churches.
The answer is, in the face of uncertainty, in the face of uncertainty, what do you do, and on whom does the burden lie to provide a plan?
And so far, nobody has provided a plan.
All we've gotten is basically a bunch of futzing.
And a bunch of bumper stickers.
Flatten the curve.
Testing and tracing.
And then nobody understands what the hell those things mean, and then they misinterpret all of those things to mean the same thing, we're gonna stop the virus.
You didn't.
It ain't.
Now, what's the plan?
Alrighty, meanwhile, speaking of what's the plan, Joe Biden has a bit of a problem.
So the plan for Joe Biden's campaign continues to be rather lackluster.
This is particularly true because it turns out that Biden's double standard is exorbitantly bad.
He was on The View back in 2019, and Joe Biden suggested on The View that if you are interviewing for a job like Justice Kavanaugh, there doesn't need to be any proof that you did the thing of which you are alleged.
And yeah, if you hold that standard to Joe Biden, dude's toast.
She's responsible for significant changes and she deserves credit for it.
And one of the things you saw is, how about the last hearing?
There's so much more work to do to figure out.
The one important thing I know.
And if there's anything in terms of mindset of Supreme Court hearings and those kinds of circumstances, Supreme Court hearing is not a trial.
It's a job interview.
It's a job interview.
And you don't have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt anything as to why you shouldn't put so-and-so on the court.
And so, look, I'm grateful she took my call.
Okay, so that was Joe Biden's standard like five minutes ago.
Now, of course, he's saying we need proof.
He doesn't apply that, by the way, to college students who are accused of committing some sort of sexual misconduct.
You know who has flipped also?
It's Elizabeth Warren.
So now Elizabeth Warren says, you know who I believe?
I believe Joe Biden.
She believes Joe Biden, guys.
I mean, Elizabeth Warren, unbelievable.
So she was asked if she believes the Tara Reid allegations need to be probed.
She seemed satisfied with Biden's comments last week.
She called them credible and convincing.
Mm-hmm.
So, not a shock that a lady who did not require evidence that she was Native American might also think that Joe Biden requires no evidence by her own standard.
Amazing how fast that switched.
Amazing how fast that switched.
Okay, time for a thing I like and then some things that I hate.
So, things that I like today.
So, I talked early on in today's show about the 1619 Project, which is just bad history.
It is bad history.
Well, if you want some good history, go check out Gordon Woods' The Radicalism of the American Revolution.
It's an excellent work of history all about And this one won the Pulitzer Prize back before the Pulitzer Prize was just a guise for left-wing politics.
It basically talks about the movement away from class-based politics in Britain and toward the egalitarian politics of the United States.
It is something that goes without remark in the United States, but it truly is incredible.
For all the talk about America's a class-based system, it's so terrible because of class, America is the most egalitarian economic system in the history of the world.
In Britain, You literally could be identified by your class.
I read any British novel from the 17th or 18th centuries, and it's all about class.
It's all about people who are fit for the House of Lords, marrying people who are fit for the House of Commons, and how there's these terrible class conflicts between people who are born to the purple and people who are not.
That just didn't exist in the United States in nearly the same way.
Gordon Wood explains why.
It's a really great book.
The Radicalism of the American Revolution.
Again, that's a Pulitzer Prize winner who actually wrote history, not Garbage about how the United States was founded solely on slavery and that was the animating principle of the United States or anything like that.
Go check it out.
The Radicalism of the American Revolution from an actual historian as opposed to Nicole Hannah-Jones.
Other things that I like today.
So Nicolas Cage is getting cast as Joe Exotic and that is just, that is the part that Nicolas Cage was born to play, right?
I mean, what is bad about Nicolas Cage?
He's basically just gonna do a southern accent from Con Air.
And he, it'll be great, because there's no way to overact Joe Exotic.
And that is Nicolas Cage's thing, is chewing the scenery.
So chewing the scenery as Joe Exotic is just being Joe Exotic.
Great casting, very excited for the miniseries based on the miniseries based on Joe Exotic.
That'll be very exciting stuff, so that is good news.
In a time of difficult news, that is good news.
We can all, we may all die from COVID-19, but we can still watch as Nicolas Cage plays Joe Exotic.
Alrighty, time for some things that I hate.
So China continues to silence all of its critics, which is really not shocking in the slightest.
Apparently, according to the New York Times, the text messages to the Chinese activists streamed in from ordinary Wuhan residents, making the same extraordinary request.
Help me sue the Chinese government.
One said his mother had died from coronavirus after being turned away from multiple hospitals.
Another said her father-in-law had died in quarantine.
But after weeks of back-and-forth planning, the seven residents who had reached out to Yang Jianqing, the activist, suddenly changed their minds in late April or stopped responding.
At least two of them had been threatened by the police, according to Mr. Yang.
The Chinese authorities are clamping down as grieving relatives, along with activists, press the ruling Communist Party for an accounting of what went wrong in Wuhan, the city where the coronavirus killed thousands before spreading to the rest of China and the world.
Lawyers have been warned not to file suit against the government.
The police have interrogated bereaved family members who connected with others like them online.
Volunteers who tried to thwart the state's censorship apparatus by preserving reports about the outbreak have disappeared.
Wow, what a shock.
You mean that China is a horrible totalitarian country?
And that they lied about coronavirus throughout?
Now Mike Pompeo was put on the hot seat over the weekend because he suggested that maybe this thing escaped a lab in Wuhan.
Now, the evidence suggests that this came from a bat that was not native to this particular region, and so the suggestion has been that there is a lab there that does study coronaviruses, and they brought a bat in from like 600 miles away, and that the Poor treatment of waste basically allowed this to escape.
Not that they crafted the virus in order to kill lots of people, but that it accidentally escaped the lab.
Now the WHO is claiming that the U.S.
has provided no evidence from the U.S.
government to back up allegations that the coronavirus could have originated at a lab in the Chinese city from Wuhan.
Well, I'm sorry, but I feel like we have better evidence in the fact that the bat is not native to that particular region.
We have better evidence that this went through a lab at Wuhan than the wet markets than you had to suggest there was no human-to-human transmission.
The fact that the WHO just continues to sort of repeat Chinese propaganda lines is pretty incredible.
Dr. Michael Ryan told reporters in Geneva, It is also true that calls for internal investigations into China have been shut down by the Chinese government.
Ryan reiterated the evidence and advice that the UN Health Agency has received suggests the novel coronavirus is of natural origin.
Now again, that is not in conflict with the idea that this could have come from the Wuhan Institute of Virology lab.
The virus could be of natural origin and also they didn't do their waste disposal properly.
The conflation by the media of the accusation this came from a lab with it was created and militarized by the Chinese military, those are not the same accusation at all.
According to Mike Pompeo, you said there was significant amount of evidence.
This came from a laboratory in Wuhan.
You got all sorts of flack for that.
But again, they're gonna have to explain how this bat ended up basically infecting half the globe when it was only available there, presumably because of the laboratory.
Alrighty, so we'll be back here a little bit later today with two additional hours of content.
In the meantime, why don't you go ahead and pre-order my book, How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps.
It's available at Amazon right now.
It comes out July 21st.
Get on that list so that you don't exhaust supply.
And we will see you here tomorrow.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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