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May 6, 2020 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:00:57
The Experts Don’t Have The Answers | Ep. 1005
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As models predict higher levels of death, there are still no answers on reopening strategy.
The costs of shutting down continue to mount, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg is hospitalized.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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to bring you the news and commentary you want each and every day.
Speaking of which, right now, it is fairly obvious that the markets are volatile.
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of coronavirus, even with the stock market having a slight recovery, we don't know the long-term impact of this many workers being displaced all at once.
Even with the stock market having a slight recovery, we don't know the long-term impact of this many workers being displaced all at once.
That's only going to be felt over time.
That's only going to be felt over time.
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Alrighty.
The big question, obviously, in all of this COVID-19 situation is where we go from here.
And nobody seems to have a good answer to this.
And the easy answer is we just do what the science says.
But as I've said, the science doesn't answer these questions.
The science is merely an input that you put into whatever formula you are using to determine the output.
Science can just give you how many deaths they expect to happen if given particular factors, but they don't tell you how you're supposed to weigh the value of those deaths against the value of the entire global shutdown of the economy.
They can't really tell you how many people are going to commit suicide, how many lives will be ruined, how many women will be the victims of domestic abuse because of all of this, how many kids will have exacerbated mental conditions because of all of this.
There's no way for the scientists to tell you this.
And I understand in difficult situations when we're looking for some level of peace of mind, we want to think that there are these experts out there, this group of unnamed experts who are going to solve all of our problems for us.
The fact is, they are not.
The unnamed experts are not going to solve all of our problems for us.
Hell, they can't even solve their own problems.
Example, remember Neil Ferguson?
So Neil Ferguson is the guy behind that famous study from Britain that suggested 2.2 million deaths in the United States from COVID-19.
Now it turns out that those numbers are probably going to be off by at least one scale of magnitude.
Even if the United States were to see extraordinarily heavy levels of death in the United States over the coming year, the numbers are never going to reach 2.2 million.
They're just not going to hit 2.2 million.
We've seen 70,000 deaths to date.
Even if we opened up everything, which nobody is advocating, even if we opened up everything willy-nilly, let all the old age homes just be invaded by COVID-19, the number of dead in the United States is not going to be 2.2 million.
There's There's no other study that supported that 2.2 million number.
Okay, well, Neil Ferguson was the one who put out that study over at Imperial College.
It was widely derided by people from Oxford University to even the University of Washington as too high.
Well, now, Neil Ferguson has been fired.
Not because his science was wrong.
Not because his studies were wrong.
By the way, he had also been the author of a study about HIV-AIDS.
that it suggested a death toll way above what it eventually ended up being.
He had suggested the bird flu was going to be significantly more deadly than it ended up being.
The nice thing about being a modeler is that you never get penalized for having a model that is too dire.
You only get penalized for having a model that is too sanguine about the situation.
If you're Paul Ehrlich at University of Berkeley and you suggest in the 1960s that billions will die of global starvation, and then none of that materializes, in fact, the opposite happens, you still have a job at University of Berkeley.
If you suggest that everything is going to be fine and then a billion people die of starvation, then you lose your job.
So anyway, this guy didn't lose his job for the bad modeling at Imperial College.
Instead, he lost his job because he broke social distancing rules to meet his married lover, which is just a delicious little side treat in all of this situation.
So Neil Ferguson had stumped for vast lockdowns across the UK, except when it applied to his married lover, who is the mother of two, who had stopped by his apartment and they did not engage in social distancing.
According to the UK Telegraph, Neil Ferguson allowed the woman to visit him at home during the lockdown while lecturing the public on the need for strict social distancing in order to reduce the spread of coronavirus.
The woman lives with her husband and their children in another house.
So, good times over in Great Britain.
And again, that doesn't mean that his models were necessarily wrong.
What made the models wrong is that the models were wrong, not that the man was shitting a married woman during his off hours.
But it does speak to the idea that there are a lot of experts out there who are telling you to social distance, who are telling you that it's imperative that you lock down, who are not, in fact, obeying these rules themselves.
The name Chris Cuomo springs to mind, lecturing everybody about not leaving home while biking around and presumably infecting everybody within a six-foot radius.
In any case, There are new models out, and the new models are suggesting elevated levels of death.
That, of course, is not a surprise.
And anybody who's telling you that it's a surprise is being a fool.
Of course, there are going to be elevated risks of death when you start to reopen the economy.
Everyone recognizes this.
Every single human recognizes this.
But if you recognize this, then people yell at you.
Because we're supposed to believe that there is a policy out there, a unicorn policy, that allows us to not completely tank the entire world economy, Until the end of time, and also saves every single life.
That's not a possibility.
And if you mention that there are trade-offs to policy, as I've been saying for a while, and this is my bugaboo right now, is that nobody will honestly discuss the trade-offs to policy.
So instead, we have stupid conversations about, if you don't like my policy, it's because you want people to die.
Like, I'm sorry, that is complete idiocy.
And nobody actually believes that.
Nobody actually believes that.
Let me give you an example of this kind of logic that is being used right now, and then we'll get to some of the new studies.
So, Andrew Cuomo yesterday, he was talking about how you make the calculation in New York to reopen.
And he said that a human life is priceless.
Well, on a moral level, of course a human life is priceless.
Of course a human life is priceless.
But on a political policymaking level, we make risk calculations about the risks we are willing to undertake in public life literally all the time.
All the time.
Every element of policy is like this.
If Andrew Cuomo really believed in public policy terms, not in moral terms, in public policy terms, that you have to mitigate the risk to every human life down to zero, he could never discuss reopening because there is no bar that would be low enough to clear for that.
There's a cost of staying closed.
Cuomo yesterday suggesting a human life is priceless, period.
But if that were the case, you could never reopen, including in upstate New York, including in rural areas, because any time you tell people they can leave their homes, you've increased their risk.
So here is Andrew Cuomo yesterday.
This is, again, the if it just saves one life logic is not political logic.
It is it is simply posturing in demagoguery.
Here is Andrew Cuomo yesterday.
There's a cost of staying closed.
There's also a cost of reopening quickly.
That is the hard truth that we are all dealing with.
Thank you.
And let's be honest about it.
And let's be open about it.
And let's not camouflage the actual terms of the discussion that we're having.
And the question comes back to, how much is a human life worth?
To me, I say, the cost of a human life, a human life is priceless.
Period.
Okay, but he doesn't actually believe that.
Right?
Nobody believes in public policy terms that a human life is priceless.
Truly.
Now, a human life is priceless in moral terms, meaning that we have to prohibit murder, right?
We have to prohibit, people have said, when I point this out, in public policy, we actually calculate the value of human lives on actuarial tables, right?
We actually do this.
It's called quality-adjusted life years.
It is a chief factor in every calculation we ever do about public policy.
Because if we actually believed that every human life was quote-unquote priceless in public policy terms, we would put you in a plastic bubble and leave you there and feed you through a feeding tube, presumably.
When it comes to protecting human life from others' predations, that would be like abortion, for example, then of course there's no countervailing cost in terms of stopping people from killing other people.
You may think that there's a priority to a woman being able to kill an unborn child.
I do not think that that is a priority.
I think the priority is saving the person's life.
That's it.
There's a trade-off, but the trade-off there does not look like the trade-off with regard to destroying the entire American economy, for example, which would involve the deaths of presumably hundreds of thousands or millions of people and cost you hundreds of millions of people as well.
When you outlaw murder, there presumably is a countervailing cost to outlawing murder, namely the murderers go to jail.
But that is not a cost that stacks up against the loss of human life.
When it comes to public policymaking, every human life is priceless in the sense that you cannot deliberately take the life of another human being.
But in terms of what levels of risk are we willing to tolerate as a society in order to live free, there the answer is, well, it's not quite priceless because you are then asked to value your own life.
And we as a society are asked to make the decision as to what levels of risk we're willing to tolerate for everybody in the public sphere.
This is the question of public policy.
And so it is a cop out for Andrew Cuomo to say, every life is priceless when it comes to policymaking.
Because again, he doesn't even believe that.
If he believed that, then he wouldn't be opening up at all.
There'd be no situation under which you could open up.
And so this has become the go-to argument of people who don't even want to have a discussion about reopening or how to reopen in a responsible fashion.
This is how you end up with this idiotic tweet with 30,000, 34,000 retweets from Kumail Nanjiani.
A guy from Silicon Valley, I guess he's in one of the new Marvel movies, if eventually we go back to the movies, he tweeted out, after weeks of careful preparation, planning and strategizing, most of the country has landed on the following approach.
Let's just open it all up and see what happens.
Not a single governor has settled on that approach.
Not one.
Not one.
There are zero people who have settled on that approach.
I mean, this is, like, come on.
Come on.
Nobody's talking about this.
But the way that people talk about this, in order to avoid the discussion, is by suggesting that the alternative to lockdowns are completely opening it up without thinking about how to protect the elderly, without thinking about how to protect nursing homes, without thinking about how to protect the vulnerable.
Literally no one is discussing that.
No one.
But at some point, one of the conversations that we are going to have is, again, what level of risk are we willing to tolerate?
And in past episodes, I've talked about the need to make those risk calculations with regard to everything from the number of kids in public schools to the speed limits, right?
If you wanted to prevent deaths and every life were quote-unquote priceless in public policy terms, you would lower the speed limits to two miles an hour.
Because elderly people and 16 and 17 year olds are disproportionately killed in car accidents.
We don't do that.
We tolerate a certain level of risk in life.
Toleration of risk in public policy does assume that we can value certain economic costs against the additional risk that people are going to hurt themselves.
This is why you buy insurance.
Insurance companies do this for a living every single day.
This is what they do.
Okay, so this raises a question about the new model.
So this is really interesting stuff.
There is a new model that is out from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
This is being reported by CBS Local.
They say governors in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware have a lot to consider before fully reopening.
If they open too quickly, that could result in more deaths, according to a new model from the Wharton School.
Reopening states' economies certainly comes with a cost, and that could result in more deaths.
But some economists argue not only can you put a value on human life, but they urge elected officials to do just that when making policy decisions.
Right, because literally every policy decision does calculate out how much it is going to cost to do X, right?
And that cost can be calculated.
The entirety of human life cannot be reduced to a dollar number, obviously.
But when you are talking about reducing economic activity to dollar numbers or quality of life to dollar numbers, you are now taking a bunch of things that are larger than dollar numbers and you're reducing it to dollar numbers so that you can actually make a calculation.
Because otherwise you simply cannot do public policy.
So, Alex Arnone, a senior analyst at the Penn Wharton Budget Model, he says, the economic costs have been enormous.
We are suffering really significant, unprecedented costs as a result of these policies.
So, they put together this model.
Here is what their model says.
Scenario one.
You can put that graphic back up, because it's actually a useful graphic.
Scenario one.
States continue their stay-at-home orders.
Everybody stays home.
So, what they would forecast is 117,000 deaths by the end of June.
This is if everybody stays home, right?
Social distancing is not a thing because everybody stays home.
We don't have to worry about people getting back out.
So this would be 18.6 million jobs lost.
And by the way, the jobs lost plus whatever cost we then take on at the federal government level.
We've already spent $7 trillion. $7 trillion.
In reality, you have to figure that if everybody stays home and we lose 18.6 million jobs on a permanent basis, it's not going to be $7 trillion.
It'll be $15 trillion.
We're gonna double our cost.
But let's assume that those $7 trillion are enough to tide us over for all of the job loss, the 20 million's job lost, if the stay-at-home orders continue until the end of June.
So 117,000 deaths, that's scenario one.
Scenario two is the partial reopening, right?
That is social distancing, 25% reopening of restaurants, we keep the theaters closed, we keep all the public events closed, They say that by the end of June, we'd have 162,000 additional deaths.
With 14 million job losses.
Right, so that would be 162,000 deaths.
If we partially open.
And then they say scenario three is all the states fully reopen, right?
This is the willy-nilly Kumail Nanjiani suggestion that people are going for.
There'll be 350,000 deaths and 500,000 jobs lost.
So we would only, we'd save about 18.1 million jobs, right?
We would lose an additional 232 million lives and we'd save about 18.1 million jobs.
We would lose an additional 232 million lives, and we'd save about 18.1 million jobs.
So for every life lost, so you get about 18.1 million divided by 232,000.
Basically, for every life lost, you would save 78 jobs under that calculation, right?
That's the calculation.
So this is the Wharton School calculation.
Now, the more interesting calculation comes about when you look at what they value human life.
Okay, so pre-COVID-19, the Center for Disease Control did this, right?
The Center for Disease Control actually had calculations where they determined the quote-unquote value of human life in economic terms, like how much it costs to the economy if somebody dies when they are young, for example.
And other federal agencies, their baseline was roughly, on average, $10 million a person.
That a human life is worth that $10 million.
That is the calculation, not from me.
This is from the CDC and other federal agencies.
So if you actually use that calculation for a second, what that would suggest is that even if we only spent $7 trillion, which we are not going to under scenario number one, and we saved approximately 232,000 lives from scenario three, where everybody just goes willy-nilly back out to work, That would mean that you're spending about $60 million per life in order to save each one of those lives based on the economic cost, which is six times what the calculation is for the CDC in terms of value of a human life.
Now, again, maybe that valuation is wrong, but we should at least acknowledge that the valuation that we are using in unspoken fashion is way higher than any other valuation ever used in human history when it comes to policymaking along these lines.
If you were to do a partial reopening and you were to lose an additional 45,000 lives, You would still be spending about 42, and let's assume it would cost $5 trillion, which of course is not true.
But let's assume it would cost $5 trillion.
You're still spending about $42 million per life saved.
Then scenario three is you spend $0, right, because presumably most people keep their jobs.
And so you're coming in underneath that $10 million.
So the answer, if you were looking to spend about $10 million to save each life, would be somewhere between the partial reopening and the full reopening.
It is also necessary to look at how much money you would have to spend per job saved.
So in terms of amounts of money that you'd be spending per job saved, if you were looking at the amounts of money, $7 trillion, right, over the 232,000 additional lives, then what you would be looking at presumably is per job saved you'd be spending Not all that much money, right?
You'd be spending a lot less money per job saved in terms of the worst case scenario.
So, is this a case for the worst case scenario?
Hell no!
This isn't the case for reopen it all up.
Because again, there are certain basic things that we obviously should be doing.
It is also necessary to mention in these models that these models only go through June, so the numbers could balloon way further than this, right?
This is only through June.
It is also necessary to mention that there's no guarantee that the lockdowns through June end up with a lower total number of deaths.
Remember, everybody keeps talking about that flattening of the curve stuff, right?
The flattening of the curve was designed, again, to prevent the overwhelm of the healthcare system.
So I'm gonna draw the curve for you one more time because people seem really not to understand this in the media.
Okay, the flattening of the curve was supposed to prevent the curve from being overwhelmed.
It was not supposed to change the area underneath the curve.
Okay, and this is why everybody is being kind of dumb about all of this.
So, this is what the curve was originally supposed to look like, right?
Here was the big curve.
This is the big curve right here.
If you can watch this, you can see it.
On the left hand, let's see, it would be your left hand side of the page.
On your left hand side of the page, you can see the big spike.
The line is the medical capacity.
And then here is the lower curve.
The lower curve is supposed to stay below that line.
Great.
The actual area, the shaded area that I'm about to shade in right here, that is the number of deaths total.
That is the number of deaths total.
Or the number of infections total, rather.
So the number of infections total is going to be the same over time.
Recognize that.
So if this thing is as deadly as it's going to be and we don't overwhelm the healthcare system, what people were worried about was specifically This area above the line, these would be excess deaths.
But in terms of total number of infections, the total number of infections is going to be exactly the same.
So when we look at those models that look through June, that is not enough.
You would actually have to look at the model through the extent of the year and then decide on economic costs here.
These are all the calculations that actually go into the calculations, but it's important to note them because no one is willing to discuss this stuff out loud.
It is politically unpalatable to discuss this stuff out loud, which means that the policy is going to end up being really stupid.
That's what it ends up meaning.
That the policy is going to end up being super dumb.
Because if you can't discuss out loud the actual considerations that are going in, what you end up with is, on the one hand, the posturing of people who suggest that they're going to save every life, Andrew Cuomo is not going to save every life, the dummy just started cleaning the subways five seconds ago.
It's May, guys.
It's May.
They shut down everything in March except the subways, the chief incubator for this thing.
They only started cleaning the subway systems at night now, like yesterday.
But he's saying he's out there saving every life.
Of course that is not true.
Of course that is not true.
But we've reduced our conversation to the dumbest possible point.
We're gonna start having to have these tough conversations about when to reopen, what the actual costs are, what are the monetary costs, whether we are using anything besides gut.
It's so funny, people say data and science and Trump is using his gut about reopening.
I'll tell you who's using their gut about reopening.
People who refuse to even have the conversation about mathematical values that are used in every other actuarial investigation of every other policy in human history.
Frankly, it's ridiculous.
It's ridiculous.
You have to make these calculations because there is no other way to make the calculations.
Otherwise, you are just reduced to, my gut is, that we should just stay in.
Until when?
I don't know.
Until what happens?
Meh.
What are the costs?
Well, it doesn't matter.
Every human life is priceless.
That is not policymaking.
That is posturing.
Political posturing.
Okay, we'll get to more of this in just one second.
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So, President Trump is getting all sorts of flack for mentioning the fact that it is indeed time to open and that we are going to have to figure out how to reopen in decent fashion.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott is taking a hit.
So here is Trump yesterday mentioning, yeah, we can't keep this closed forever.
It's kind of time to open.
I'm viewing our great citizens of this country to a certain extent and to a large extent as warriors.
They're warriors.
We can't keep our country closed.
We have to open our country.
One day, they said, we have to close our country.
Well, now it's time to open it up.
And you know what?
The people of our country are warriors, and I'm looking at it.
I'm not saying anything is perfect.
And yes, will some people be affected?
Yes.
Will some people be affected badly?
Yes.
But we have to get our country open, and we have to get it open soon.
Okay, Trump is correct about this, and he says the shutdown is going to kill people, too.
Yes, this is also true.
This is obviously true.
Apparently, the call-ins to suicide hotlines are up 1,000%.
Apparently, people are not going in for chemo treatments.
Those quote-unquote elective surgeries that actually help people's quality of life, including the elderly, those are not being performed.
Medical personnel are being laid off across the country when these hospitals are not even near capacity because people are not performing elective surgeries.
Here's Trump mentioning all of this, but apparently it's very bad to mention this.
If you mention this, you're a bad, bad man.
President Trump's a bad bet.
Like, this is the dumbest form of our political conversation.
It is so stupid because no alternative has actually been provided.
None.
I'm sorry.
Lockdown is not an alternative.
Full-time lockdown forever until the end of time with no schooling, with no summer camps, with no work.
None of this is a reality.
But it's very easy to sit in your corner and just shout, you don't care about human life, you don't care about human life.
As we'll see in a second, there's an actual New York Times columnist who's suggesting the problem here is American freedom.
I have a feeling this person had a problem with American freedom long before the pandemic.
Here is President Trump talking about how the shutdown will kill people too.
The fact that we're letting people go and go to their jobs, they have to do it.
You know, if they held people any longer with the shutdowns, you're going to lose people that way, too.
And you already have, I'm sure.
But between drug abuse and, I mean, they say suicide, a lot of different things.
There's no win, just so you know.
There's no great win one way or the other.
Okay, so, President Trump is right about this.
Also, the Texas governor, Greg Abbott, who's ripped up and down because he was on a phone call, apparently, and on this private phone call, Greg Abbott suggested that, you know what?
If we reopen, that's going to add risk.
Yeah, no bleep, Sherlock.
Like, this is the basic premise of a lockdown.
The whole pro— If going back to work doesn't add a risk, why did we lock down?
Seriously, like, that would be the question.
The counter question is, Were we not supposed to expect additional risk when we go out?
Of course we're supposed to expect additional risk.
The question is, which populations are least likely to suffer from the additional risk?
I will give you the answer.
Young people, healthy people, children.
That's your answer.
Those people are not very likely, when I say not very likely, I mean exorbitantly unlikely to die of COVID-19.
And to pretend that everybody is equally susceptible or that you cannot open in a responsible fashion, namely by starting by protecting nursing homes, which have been responsible for 40 to 50% of all deaths in the EU and in California.
In New York, a lot of people have been dying in their apartments because nursing homes in New York City are not like a huge thing.
They're kind of bigger across the state because of the heavy population.
But the fact is that if you protected the nursing homes, you would lower the number of deaths across the United States overall, and certainly in Europe, by anywhere from 20 to 50 percent, which would be near miraculous.
But Greg Abbott was being ripped up and down for recognizing that there are additional risks when you open things up.
Again, why is any of this a shock?
And when people are ripping on Abbott for this or ripping on Trump for this, it's because they do not wish to come to the grips with the reality of public policymaking.
Instead, they're involved in this idiotic political calculation that suggests that we are all supposed to pretend that public policy has no trade-offs.
This is my bugaboo.
It drives me up a wall.
It's what makes nonpartisan issues like risk calculation into partisan issues, when you suggest that people actually want people to die in order to reopen the economy.
Absolute idiocy.
Here is Greg Abbott yesterday.
How do we know reopening businesses won't result in faster spread or more cases of COVID-19?
Listen, the fact of the matter is pretty much every scientific and medical report shows that whenever you have a reopening, whether you want to call it a reopening of business or just a reopening of society in the aftermath of something like this, that whether you want to call it a reopening of business or just a reopening of society in the It's almost ipso facto.
That's true.
He got ripped up and down for even acknowledging this.
We're supposed to pretend that it's not going to lead to an increase in spread.
Yes, we get it.
So what's the alternative?
Again, I keep asking this to people.
I've provided several different possibilities here.
None of them involve full lockdown forever.
Those possibilities range from the controlled avalanche strategy proposed by Israeli scientists in which we protect the elderly, we protect the most vulnerable, and everybody else is encouraged to actually go into the population and interact And to obtain an immunity to it, because if you are young and healthy, again, it is very unlikely this does severe damage to you, and you move toward herd immunity.
That's basically Sweden's strategy.
In controlled fashion, meaning that you still do some social distancing, but the reality is that over time you actually want people to get this so it moves through the population, get herd immunity.
That's possibility number one.
Possibility number two, you go out, you continue to socially distance, you wear a mask, you do protect the nursing homes, the economy really takes a hit, like a more severe hit than it would otherwise.
And it takes longer to reach herd immunity, but at least you haven't killed that many people in terms of the increased risk in the amount of times it takes to develop a therapeutic or vaccine.
That you're hoping for a real change on the ground.
Those are a couple possibilities.
I'll tell you what's not a possibility.
Keeping it going like this.
And you know who's not evil?
I'm sick of the media portraying people as evil this way.
You know who's not evil?
The person who wants to go back to work.
This is such crap.
It's utter, absolute, nonsensical crap.
It's not only quote-unquote rich and white people who will do well reopening.
Okay, so the former Obama CDC director said that the only reason people want to reopen is because they're rich and white.
What absolute, sheer, unmitigated garbage.
You know who's getting this right now?
Like right now?
A lot of the essential workers, you know what's happening with the essential workers?
Many of them are disproportionately, essential workers, particularly in the healthcare industry, like nurses or delivery people, disproportionately minority and poor.
Those people are already out interacting.
Those people are already getting COVID.
The people we're talking about going back to work are largely not blue collar workers.
And the people who are finding it very easy to stay shut down forever are people who can sit in their basement with a step and repeat behind them on CNN and get paid.
I have it easy.
I can lock down basically forever.
I can.
I mean, the reality is that my job does not require me to leave my house.
But let me tell you a story.
That ain't true for 90% of the population.
It is not rich white people who benefit from the ends of the lockdown.
The rich white people are rich.
They have money.
The people who benefit from the end of the lockdown are all the people who are losing their jobs.
All the people who can't keep their small business afloat.
This is the most demagogic nonsense.
Dr. Richard Besser, former acting director of the CDC.
What's not being done?
We don't have the testing capacity now to know where this disease is.
We haven't scaled up the thousands and thousands of contact tracers that we need.
We don't provide safe places for people to isolate or quarantine if they're identified as either having an infection or being in contact.
We are saying, if you have money and you're white, you can do well here.
If you're not, good luck to you.
That is such nonsense.
It's such absolute nonsense.
We should be protecting people.
If they get sick, they should be able to go home.
They should get paid leave from the government, unemployment insurance, or whatever it is.
No one wants people to die.
We have to acknowledge that there are trade-offs to public policy, but apparently we're never going to acknowledge this.
And this is how you end up with the stupidity of a Dallas salon owner getting seven days in jail for reopening.
Okay, in Texas, where Greg Abbott is supposedly willy-nilly reopening everything.
That's not what's happening.
That's not what's happening.
There's a woman named Shelly Luther.
She defied local and state orders and a judge's restraining order.
She operated her business during the pandemic.
What exactly did she do?
She went into her salon, Salon a la mode, and she opened it.
And she was taken into custody.
Her business was deemed non-essential, which of course is nonsense.
The government should not be able to deem your business non-essential.
It was forced to close March 22nd after the county enacted its stay-at-home order.
She reopened the salon April 24th, tore up a cease and desist letter from the county judge Clay Jenkins.
The temporary restraining order was signed April 28th.
I've never been in this position before.
since the county stay-at-home order was set in March.
She said that she applied for one of the federal loans, but it didn't receive it for weeks.
She said, I couldn't feed my family.
My stylist couldn't feed their families.
So before Luther was sentenced to a week in jail, the judge gave her an opportunity to apologize and promise not to reopen her salon until she was allowed to do so.
And here was her answer in court.
I've never been in this position before, and it's not someplace that I want to be.
But I have to disagree with you, sir, when you say that I'm selfish because feeding my kids is not selfish.
I have hairstylists that are going hungry because they'd rather feed their kids.
So, sir, if you think the law is more important than kids getting fed, then please go ahead with your decision, but I am not going to shut the salon.
Okay, and she, by the way, she was willing to socially distance inside the salon.
She was willing to do mask wearing inside the salon.
The only difference between what she was jailed for and not being in jail was one week.
Because by the end of the week, guess what Texas is doing?
They're opening up all the salons with social distancing and with mask wearing.
This is just, this is nonsense.
I'm sorry, this is absolute nonsense.
And it does betray, for a certain group of people in the United States, a real Feeling that is antithetical to freedom itself.
I'll give you an example of this from a columnist at the New York Times momentarily.
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Alrighty, we're gonna get to more of this because, again, Undergirding a lot of the arguments or non-arguments about public policy here?
is an actual antipathy toward American freedom.
I'll give you a perfect example of this in just a moment.
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All righty.
So when I said that there are people out there who seem to be rooting for the lockdowns because they don't actually like freedom very much.
Charlie Warzal is an opinion writer at large for The New York Times.
He has a piece today titled, Open States, Lots of Guns.
America is paying a heavy price for freedom.
And he uses the same logic with regards to coronavirus that he uses with regard to guns.
Namely, you shouldn't be able to own a gun as a normal law-abiding citizen because apparently this raises the risk of gun violence in your state.
He mentions a tweet from a friend of mine, actually my editor over at Broadside Books.
Eric Nelson is my editor.
He tweeted, someone poke holes in this scenario.
We keep losing 1,000 to 2,000 a day to coronavirus.
People get used to it.
We get less vigilant as it slows very spread as it very slowly spreads.
By December, we're close to normal, but still losing 1,500 people a day.
As we tick past 300,000 dead, most people aren't concerned.
Wurzel said, this hit me like a ton of bricks because just how plausible it seemed.
The day I read Nelson's tweet, 1,723 Americans were reported to have died from the virus, and yet their collective passing was hardly mourned.
After all, how to distinguish those souls from the 2,097 who perished the day before or the 1,558 who died the day after?
And then he says, there's a national precedent for Nelson's hypothetical, America's response to gun violence and school shootings.
He says, as a country, we seem resigned to preventable firearm deaths.
So just like The reality is that the that freedom of guns means that some people get bad guns, but also that you can protect against bad people.
He thinks that that is bad, right?
The American freedom to keep and bear arms is bad because according to him, it means more dead Americans.
Now, you can make the counter argument, which is that the people who have guns are getting them in many cases and using them for crime are not people who tend to abide by the law in the first place.
That banning assault weapons isn't going to be effective.
But even taking his logic, even taking his baseline logic, which is that additional risks in American life come with additional American freedoms.
The end point of his logic is that if you want no risk, there can be no freedom.
And he's okay with that.
That's actually what he's okay with.
He says, left to their own devices, states are opening up many anxiously and with little idea as to how it'll play out.
The White House could lean on governors to slow the reopening process or urge caution until we can fully establish test and trace strategies that have worked in countries like South Korea.
Instead, the administration seems to be cheering on the reopening while internally preparing for a substantial increase of loss of lives.
An internal document based on modeling by FEMA projects the daily death toll will reach about 3,000 on June 1st, a 70% increase from the May 1st number of about 1,750.
Along the same lines, on April 30th, the day after Trump told Americans the virus was going to go, it's going to leave, it'll be gone, NBC News reported the federal government had ordered more than 100,000 body bags.
And then he, again, likens this to gun control policy, suggesting, well, if we just ban the freedom to keep and bear arms, there'd be less gun deaths.
Same way if we just ban freedom totally, then presumably there'd be less coronavirus deaths.
All right, so I'm going to take up the other half of that argument.
Which is, freedom does come with additional risk.
Freedom comes with additional risk.
And that's what freedom is called.
That is a reality.
And that doesn't mean that we should not mitigate that risk.
Right?
I've been in favor of bans on... Even using his logic, I've been in favor of bans on machine guns, for example.
And I've been in favor of federal criminal background checks when you purchase a gun through a federally licensed firearms dealer.
Even the NRA is for that.
Okay, but what he is talking about basically is, you know what would be great is if we banned all guns, presumably by the same logic, if we banned all freedom, there would be no coronavirus deaths.
Just in terms of numbers, by the way, I think that it is important to mention right here.
That if we lose 2,000 people a day from coronavirus for the next several months, which again, there are very few projections that expect this, but let's say that that happens.
This will be a horrible, terrible thing.
That also does not answer the question as to whether we will lose that many people in total over the course of the next 12 months from coronavirus.
There is no alternative being provided.
I mean, the fact also remains that in the United States, we lose approximately 2,000 people every single day from both heart disease and from cancer.
About 600,000 people die every year from heart disease and another 600,000 people die every year from cancer.
But he says, the idea of freedom, I mean, this is really the root of the debate.
Charlie Warsaw writes, the idea of freedom is an excuse to serve oneself before others and a shield to hide from responsibility.
If that's how you think of freedom, we should end freedom.
We should unfree them.
Now, I think that people can be both free and virtuous.
People can be free and they can attempt to mitigate risk for others.
This is why I think that we should tranche populations and people who are healthier should go back to work first.
And if we think that there's a therapeutic or a vaccine on the way in fairly short order, we should socially distance in order to restart the economy, but also ensure that we don't have a vast spread before a vaccine can be developed.
I'm all for these things.
But according to Charlie Warzel, the American people cannot be trusted, and thus freedom must be ended.
You can't be trusted with a gun as a law-abiding citizen, because the very presence of a gun means the presence of freedom, and the presence of freedom means more people dying from gun violence.
And the same thing is true of coronavirus.
The presence of freedom means more people going out and acting stupidly, and that means we cannot have freedom at all.
Well, that is an argument that, as we used to say in law school, proves too much.
It proves too much.
It is an insane argument that essentially argues for the ending of all American freedom.
And again, we're beginning to see this in some of the petty authoritarianism that just cannot last.
Yesterday, there was tape coming out of a Texas SWAT team raiding a restaurant that was open.
Again, I don't see any evidence in this protest that people were violating social distancing protocols.
The Hector County Sheriff arrived in a freaking tank with a gun turret on top.
Just solid, solid stuff.
You're the one with the shirt!
Keep your hands up!
Where is it?
You with the hat and green shirt!
Keep your hands up!
I can't see them!
I mean, they're going in with actual guns blazing.
To people who have an open business.
This is- I'm sorry, do those people look like they're super close together to you, or do they look like they're 10 feet apart?
Media guy, get back!
Media guy in white shirt, get back!
Alright, I mean, if this is what- if this is what coronavirus lockdowns look like in the end, There's no policy that's been proposed that makes this look okay.
None.
None.
And there's no timeline.
And there's no endpoint.
And there's no actual discussion of the data.
And there's no discussion of any of this.
Because everybody who wants the lockdowns and is comfortable with curbs on American freedom is just shouting at the moon that every life is priceless without recognizing that every single element of public policy is based on the premise that risks to life are calculable when it comes to freedoms and prosperity and all the things that actually make America worth living in.
And meanwhile, you got Democrats who are taking advantage of the situation to say that the federal government should bail them out.
So California, as they call for a full lockdown, see this is one of the issues here, is that states are now looking to the federal government to bail them out.
So as the lockdowns continue in states like New York and in California, they're looking increasingly to the federal government to bail them out.
California has now borrowed from the federal government to make their unemployment payments.
Well, why should the federal government fill in California's holes when it comes to their own unemployment system?
Truly.
It's because California is incredibly irresponsible with its own spending.
You know how I can tell this?
Here's what the Wall Street Journal reports.
About 3.7 million people have filed unemployment claims in California since mid-March.
California had about $1.9 billion in its unemployment trust fund in mid-April, down from $3.1 billion at the end of February, the month before the coronavirus upended the U.S.
economy.
The state's Labor Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
California serves as an early sign of the potential magnitude of federal assistance that could be required if states are to continue paying out jobless benefits.
It is one of more than 20 states and jurisdictions that entered the current economic crisis without enough money in their unemployment trust funds to pay benefits through a year-long recession according to the Labor Department data.
By that measure, California was prepared to make unemployment payments for just over two months in the event of a recession.
Two months.
So California was deeply irresponsible, decided to blow all of its money on crap union contracts with various public sector unions, and they didn't have money to pay unemployment insurance.
And now it's up to people in other states to pay for all of that?
New York did the same thing.
They blew out their budget, and now they don't have enough money to pay for the stuff they should have had the money to pay for.
And now they're turning to the federal government for the bailout.
And if they get those bailouts, you know what that incentivizes?
It incentivizes governors to spend oodles of money they never have because they know that at the end, it's too big to fail.
California is too big to fail.
New York is too big to fail.
Now this has led demagogues like Andrew Cuomo to suggest that the federal government needs to step in and fund the states.
So here's Cuomo yesterday suggesting that New York needs to be funded.
Now, last I checked, New York has the second richest citizen body in the United States, after California, and they tax them at exorbitant rates and yet they've run out of money incredibly quickly.
Could that have to do with their crap spending habits and the bad union contracts they signed?
Maybe it has to do with that, but according to Andrew Cuomo, it's up to the federal government to bail them out, of course, because you can always cast all responsibility at the feet of the federal government.
States need funding.
States need funding, A, for testing, tracing.
B, states need money because we have a deficit after the coronavirus.
And you have not been given that money, so you don't have enough.
Right.
All right.
Right.
If they don't pass a piece of legislation, Chris, well, hold on a second.
They are now, they were supposed to do it this week.
They are going to come back next week.
If they don't pass a piece of legislation, game over.
Game over.
And then he says, you know what should happen here?
Republican states are the ones taking out more money.
The Republican states are the ones who are taking out more money from the kitty.
Again, this is what he is saying here is so economically illiterate.
It's almost beyond comprehension.
When you look at the Republicans who now say, well, we don't want to help the Democratic states, they are actually the states that have been taking more every year.
Virginia, Maryland, Kentucky.
Senator Mitch McConnell, he's Kentucky, $37 billion more every year.
Alabama, Florida.
Everything's about Florida.
Why?
Because it's a swing state and we're in an election year.
I get it.
Okay, this is not true!
Okay, the way that he is calculating this is he is taking the tax dollars paid by New York citizens to the federal government and then the tax dollars received by New York citizens from the federal government.
New York is a disproportionately wealthy state.
California is a disproportionately wealthy state.
It is not that the federal government takes money from the state of California and then only gives money back to the state of California.
What he is talking about is the fact that Kentucky, for example, is a disproportionately poor state.
So there are fewer people who are paying in federal income tax to the federal government, and there are more people who are receiving directly.
But at no point does the state government actually act as the intermediary there.
Basically, you're saying that poor people are receiving more money from the federal government than rich people.
That is 100% true, and that rich people are paying more money into the federal government than they are receiving from the federal government.
That is also true.
Another thing that happens to be true, the people who are disproportionately receiving money from the federal government tend to vote Democrat.
Studies show this.
So what the hell is he talking about?
What he's attempting to avoid is the reality of the situation, which is the reason that New York is in trouble, despite the richest population in America outside of California.
Despite that, New York is in trouble because Andrew Cuomo couldn't get his spending habit under control.
Neither could anybody else in New York.
And the same thing in California.
No, New York is not the victim of a benefits payment scam here.
It's ridiculous.
But this is just demagoguery to avoid responsibility, which is what Cuomo is apparently really good at.
It is unbelievable to me, the man remains a popular governor, despite the fact that only now in May is he starting to clean the damn subways.
That his original move with the nursing homes was, oh look, an old person who has COVID-19, let's send him back to the nursing home.
Genius move, Andrew Cuomo, genius.
That guy is great.
He's great at his job.
But around to Sanford and Greg Abbott in Texas, very, very bad at their jobs.
And Brian Kemp, oh, just awful at his job.
Incredible, incredible.
Okay, time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
So there is a new movie on Netflix that is a fun watch.
It is, I will not say it is, you know, the world's most fun watch.
It has some great action sequences is really what this comes down to.
It's Chris Hemsworth running around Dhaka, Indonesia, and basically just Destroying everything.
There's one about 20-minute action sequence that's getting a lot of attention in this movie, Extraction, because it is supposedly done in one shot.
It is not done in one shot, obviously.
They game the system.
They're moving through windshields, and there's some subtle cuts, obviously.
But it's really well choreographed.
The basic premise is basically the same as Man on Fire.
Guy who is hired to extract a kid who's been kidnapped, and then things go wrong, and now he still has to extract the kid who's been kidnapped.
Here's a little bit of the preview.
The best thing you could do for that kid would be to put a bullet in his brain.
We can send a chopper and get you out.
But you're gonna leave the kid behind.
Are you gonna leave me in the street?
I'll get you out.
Grab a hold of my vest and hang on as tight as you can.
Okay, so the, uh, the actual best scene in this movie is actually a scene where Chris Hemsworth is forced to, um, to face down a herd of child soldiers because it is just hilarious watching a six-foot-four Nordic god basically throw around a bunch of 13-year-old children.
That is one of the scenes.
It's kind of absurd.
The whole movie is kind of absurd.
I mean, it's one of those, somehow he is bulletproof.
Like, he gets shot and hit by a car in one sequence, and the next day he's basically fine.
He's up and moving around.
Totally cool.
Takes about nine shots to take him down.
Anyway, the movie is worth the watch if you're into action flicks.
So you can go check out Extraction.
Time for some quick things that I hate.
All righty.
So first of all, there is the story that Ruth Bader Ginsburg has been treated for a minor.
She had minor surgery for a gallbladder infection.
We wish the best to anybody who's in a position of public policy.
Obviously, we wish for her long-term health.
I also hope that she retires, but she's not going to retire.
But, you know, we wish for her health, so that is some bad news.
But in terms of real things that I hate, so people are going nuts today.
They're going nuts today over Betsy DeVos.
Betsy DeVos is very evil, you know.
Betsy DeVos, the Secretary of Education.
The reason Betsy DeVos is super evil is because, according to the Washington Post, she plans to release as early as Wednesday her much-anticipated final rules governing how schools must investigate sexual assault allegations, bolstering the rights of the accused, according to people familiar with the matter.
In its broad outlines, the sweeping regulation is unchanged from the proposed version released in 2018, though there were minor adjustments made throughout, according to one person familiar with the matter who was unauthorized to comment publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.
The rules will give universities and colleges a clear but controversial roadmap for handling emotionally charged conflicts that often pit one student against another.
They'll replace less formal guidance issued by the Obama administration that was friendlier to those making the allegations.
That is a wild understatement.
The original Obama-era allegations did not give students the ability to confront their accuser or even to rebut the allegations.
They basically made it so that an allegation was tantamount to guilt.
Under the new rules, college students accused of sexual assault and harassment must be given the right to a live hearing and the ability to cross-examine their accuser as much as the proposed rule directed.
Before, you didn't even have the right to confront your accuser and you weren't given the right to a live hearing.
You were literally not given the right to a live hearing.
If someone accuses you of rape and you say, no, that wasn't rape, that was a consensual sexual...
Congress.
And the old rules basically said you have no ability to defend yourself.
Also, the rules also define sexual harassment narrowly, limiting it to conduct that is both severe and pervasive, not just one or the other.
Well, again, that makes sense, because if the pervasiveness is, you look nice today, that's not sexual harassment.
Okay, if the pervasiveness is you keep grabbing people's asses repeatedly, then it's got to be severe.
I mean, first of all, that's sexual assault, right?
If you actually physically grab someone, that's an assault.
That's not just harassment.
But if you say something deeply sexual and you do it and it's severe and it is pervasive, then you can be disciplined.
In one change, the regulation explicitly adds dating violence and stalking as allegations that must be investigated.
So it's actually made this thing stronger in some ways.
DeVos said the new rules would restore balance in a system that had been skewed in favor of the accusers.
Now this prompted people on the left to become very, very angry.
Very angry.
Because their suggestion is that Title IX regulations should basically allow people, with the allegation alone, to go ahead and condemn folks to the purgatory of guilt forever.
That was the basic allegation.
And people were tweeting about that today.
So there were actual tweets that people were issuing about how terrible it was to allow due process in cases like this.
Which of course is completely crazy, right?
Catherine Lamon, who is...
Excuse me?
Excuse me?
This just says you have a right to defend yourself.
USCC, USCCR, and legal affairs secretary for Gavin Newsom, the governor of California.
She said, Betsy DeVos presides over taking us back to the bad old days that predate my birth when it was permissible to rape and sexually harass students with impunity.
Excuse me?
Excuse me?
This just says you have a right to defend yourself.
It doesn't say that you are not, that you are not punished for sexual assault or sexual harassment.
But Catherine Lamone says, today's students deserve better, including fair protections consistent with law.
And it This is just, I'm sorry, this is insanity.
This is insanity.
But it's particular insanity given the fact that the Democrats continue to defend Joe Biden.
Because by Joe Biden's standards, by his own Title IX standards, that dude's guilty as sin.
Here's Nancy Pelosi yesterday saying, you know what, I'm not going to answer any more questions on Joe Biden.
I'm not going to answer any more questions on these Biden allegations because we're done here.
I mean, what is there more to say?
Weird, because under Title IX regulations, Joe Biden is guilty of sin and he'd be expelled from college for this, if not for plagiarism.
I have said I am proud to support Joe Biden for president.
I believe him when he says it didn't happen.
But I also believe him when he said, let them look into the records.
And that's what they should do.
But I'm not going to answer this question again.
I will just say I have every confidence that Joe Biden will be a great president of the United States.
She has great confidence.
So 19-year-olds who are getting accused of sexual assault allegations, they don't have the right to defend themselves, according to Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi and the entire Democratic infrastructure.
But 80-year-olds who are running for president, those people we just kind of let off the hook, right?
I mean, they can just say, I didn't happen, it didn't happen, and we're basically done.
I mean, that is an incredible thing.
It's an incredible thing.
And it demonstrates that when it comes to due process, the Democrats just don't believe in it.
What Democrats actually believe in is that due process should only exist for people that they like.
And people that they like include, generally, people who are not part of the quote-unquote power superstructure, right?
So if you're a rich white male like Brett Kavanaugh, then you deserve no due process.
This was an actual case made about Brett Kavanaugh.
People say, well, he's a rich white male.
He had an entitlement complex, and that's why he doesn't deserve to be on the Supreme Court.
And they say the same thing about 19-year-old college students, right?
Rich white males in college, the most privileged among us.
But if you're a rich white privileged male like Joe Biden, and you're running for president, then we sort of let you off the hook.
Due process is specifically due process because it equally applies to everyone.
Equal protection of the law is equal protection of the law because it is supposed to apply to everyone.
The fact that there's so many people on the left, Who wants to turn these standards on their head because they believe that equal protection of the law is inherently unequal because some people are less well situated than others.
Some people are richer than others.
Therefore, those rich people don't deserve equal protection under the law.
That's French Revolution off with their head kind of stuff.
And that is exactly what Democrats have proposed with regard to Title IX.
They're defending Joe Biden at the same time that they're ripping on exactly the same kind of protections Joe Biden will have to rely on in order to survive these sexual assault allegations.
So that's pretty incredible.
Okay, one more thing that I hate.
So the Lincoln Project is a group of people led by George Conway.
And George Conway is, of course, Kellyanne's husband.
This is a group of people who were anti-Trump Republicans in 2016 and never got over it and have decided better to submit.
Many of the members of the Lincoln Project literally suggested they would vote for Bernie Sanders before Donald Trump, which doesn't seem super conservative to me.
I'll just put it out there.
I don't think that's a super Republican view that you'll vote for the, you know, the communist before he voted for Donald Trump.
And actually advocated for the communists to win.
Some of these people were doing this.
So they put out an ad within the last couple of days.
This is the most depressing anti-American ad I have seen in quite a while.
They call themselves the Lincoln Project.
Apparently, Abraham Lincoln would have approved of ads that basically suggest that America is an absolute, utter, complete hellhole where death is vast and everyone is impoverished because of Donald Trump.
Here's the ad.
I mean, I've yet to see a more depressing ad than this one.
With the economy in shambles, more than 26 million Americans are out of work.
The worst economy in decades.
Trump bailed out Wall Street, but not Main Street.
This afternoon, millions of Americans will apply for unemployment.
With their savings run out, many are giving up hope.
Millions worry that a loved one won't survive COVID-19.
There's mourning in America.
And under the leadership of Donald Trump, our country is weaker, and sicker, and poorer.
Okay, what?
I mean, okay, we're all a little stressed right now.
Is this super helpful?
Is this super helpful?
By the way, if this is the tone Joe Biden goes for, he gets skunked.
Because seriously, Americans are not going to abide being told that we are richer and poorer and that we are sicker and poorer and worse off and everything is terrible and we're all dying of COVID-19.
What a misfire.
What a dramatic misfire.
That's the kind of ad that you make, seriously, when you don't care who gets hurt in order for Donald Trump to be thrown out of office.
Because the reality is that we're all a little worried right now.
You know what would be good?
Some hope.
Some hope would be good.
And you don't have to credit Trump in creating that hope.
George W. Bush didn't when he put out a little video about it.
Even Joe Biden hasn't been doing this.
The fact that these folks are so vindictive about Trump, that they're going to blame COVID-19 on Trump, that they're going to show pictures of body bags rolling out of morgues and blame that on Trump.
It's perverse.
It's absolutely perverse.
Again, Andrew Cuomo's the governor of New York, guys.
Gavin Newsom's the governor of California.
The death centers of this country are all happening in blue areas.
Not just because of bad governance, but also because those are heavily populated areas.
This is such a bad strategy, but there are a lot of people who are embracing it because you gotta blame Trump for everything.
Speaking of which, a lot of people blaming Trump today because President Trump is supposedly thinking about closing down the coronavirus task force.
And this is a very bad thing.
Now, let's point something out.
When it comes to the federal government, you don't actually need task forces, okay?
Task forces are a way to posture to the rest of the world.
Task forces are a way to say, I'm taking this seriously.
It's like when Obama would set up a green jobs czar, right?
He would set up a czar, and then, oh, well, he's taking it seriously.
There's a czar now.
This czar was pretty serious last time around, so this czar will be super serious.
We'll set up a new department, Department of Homeland Security.
Now we're serious.
The same staffers were already in the government, they were just in different departments.
No, it's not.
This is dumb PR.
It is, it's dumb.
There's no rationale for it.
But, on a practical level, is the federal government going to stop caring about COVID-19 because the coronavirus task force has been quote-unquote disbanded?
No, Dr. Fauci will still be meeting with Trump.
Dr. Birx will still be meeting with Trump.
All these people will still be meeting with Trump.
They will still be doing press conferences.
But this prompted all sorts of angst yesterday.
The PR of COVID-19 for the media is far more important than the actual policy.
When it comes to the actual policy, they don't want to talk about it because the actual policy would force them to acknowledge trade-offs in policy.
They don't like that.
Instead, they go to the PR because the PR can be black and white and the PR is always Trump is awful and evil and everything he does is terrible.
So that means it's supposed to be a super big deal that he's quote-unquote dissolving the task force.
The meetings in the Situation Room of the White House have been shorter.
The task force no longer meets every day, according to NBC News.
Doctors Deborah Birx and Anthony Fauci are still expected to be at the White House daily, but other members of the task force may be present less frequently.
However, sources familiar with the matter noted the task force did meet on Tuesday.
And President Trump said, we're now looking at a little bit of a different form.
That form is safety and opening.
We'll probably have a different group set up for that.
He said, the mission accomplished is for when it's over.
There was no mission accomplished.
But apparently, if you call it, for example, the reopening task force, and it's exactly the same people, then you are evil and bad.
So here's Jim Acosta, Jim Acosta-ing all over Donald Trump yesterday about the task force.
Do you need to continue to meet with the task force to get this scientific expertise?
We will have certain people.
I think that as far as the task force, Mike Pence and the task force have done a great job, but we're now looking at a little bit of a different form, and that form is safety and opening, and we'll have a different group probably set up for that.
Are you saying mission accomplished?
No, no, not at all.
The mission accomplished is when it's over.
Again, the fact that Acosta is trying to pin on him the mission accomplished war in Iraq banner that was flying after the United States invaded Iraq and destroyed the Iraqi army, that he's trying to get him to gaffe, right?
This is all the media are intent on doing right now.
They honestly do not care at this point about which policy is pursued, so long as the policy pursued is anti-Trump.
If Trump actually wanted to open up the country, tomorrow he'd call for a national lockdown ad infinitum.
Seriously, the media would flip on a dime.
If Trump just said, you know what?
We gotta lock this thing down forever until there's a vaccine.
Immediately, the media would start reporting on the economic dispossession happening across the country, and they would start taking seriously the fact that people are losing their livelihoods.
Because for the media, it's all about Trump and all about the media, and it is not at all about a responsible discussion of public policy, at least for those in the political media who are outside the sort of health industry.
Alrighty, we'll be back here later today with two additional hours of content.
Otherwise, we'll see you here tomorrow.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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Edited by Adam Siovitz.
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The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire production.
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