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May 7, 2020 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:00:34
The Quiet Rebellion | Ep. 1006
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More and more Americans consider venturing outside despite heavy government pressure.
The media continue to push non-answers to reopening and a Dallas shop owner becomes a national flashpoint.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
Today's Ben Shapiro Show is sponsored by ExpressVPN U.S.
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We'll get to all of the news in just a moment.
Everything coronavirus related, plus the shooting of a black man in Georgia that is generating national headlines as well.
It should.
We'll get to all of that momentarily first.
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Okay, so.
We'll get to all the coronavirus news in just a second.
First, we need to talk about the biggest sort of national flashpoint of the day, and that is the shooting and killing of Ahmed Arbery.
I apologize if I'm pronouncing his name wrong.
He's a 25-year-old black man who was killed in February after being chased by two armed men who told police he looked like a burglary suspect, according to the Washington Post.
Here, the video is actually available of the shooting.
It appears that the video was taken by a member of basically the posse of these two guys, one of whom was a retired cop and his son.
So in the video, what you're about to see, and it's very graphic, so if you don't want to watch this, then by all means turn away.
If you're listening to it, I'll describe it for you.
But basically, what you're about to see is this 25-year-old black man who appears to be jogging, and he is jogging down the road, and then right in front of him, there is a white pickup truck.
In the back of the white pickup truck is an older gentleman, an older man, who is carrying a gun.
And outside of the truck is his son, who's in his 30s, and is carrying a shotgun.
And this whole thing is being filmed from behind, presumably by one of their friends, because Why else would you just be filming a random black guy running down the road?
Okay, so here's what the video shows.
I'm gonna play the video and I'll narrate it.
So, you can see that what's happening right here is Arbery jogging, right?
I mean, he doesn't appear to be sprinting away or sprinting sideways.
He sort of moves toward the left side of the truck.
Then, he proceeds to run around the right side of the truck when he sees he's being confronted.
And there's a man there carrying a shotgun, and the man carrying the shotgun, he confronts the man with the shotgun, grabs the shotgun, and then you can see that they get into a fight, and at that point, the man with the shotgun appears to either pull the trigger, or the gun is pulled, and his finger's on the trigger, and Arbery is dead.
I mean, Arbery is killed in the video.
It also appears, and it's hard to tell, that the man on the back of the pickup truck, it looks like he takes a pot shot before any shot is fired from the shotgun, although it's difficult to tell from the video because the video is kind of grainy.
So here is the backstory on this.
And the white guys who shot the black guy, They were not prosecuted for two months.
They were left to go free for two months.
And that's where everybody is starting to go crazy because they're saying, okay, why for two months was nobody arrested for all of this?
So here is the backstory.
And then we'll go through the various legal arguments on behalf of first degree murder versus second degree murder slash manslaughter in this particular case.
Whatever you say, the legal case here to put these guys in jail is pretty strong.
And there are several pieces I'm going to go through to talk about that today.
Again, it's on tape.
The tape is at least somewhat dispositive as to what happened here.
If you were a man running down the road and you were confronted by people with guns, and they were blocking your way in an attempt to stop you, It would not be out of your purview to run and try to fight the guy with the gun to try and get away.
They were literally attempting to obstruct him.
The original narrative, as we'll see, is that they pulled off to the side of him and asked him to stop because they thought that he had burglarized something.
There was not a lot of evidence, apparently.
That they'd actually seen the burglary in process, which would change the status here under law because you're only allowed to pursue somebody and try to arrest them if you actually see a crime in progress.
If you're going to make a citizen's arrest, there's a national citizen's arrest law in the state of Georgia that does not appear to have been fulfilled here.
So they charge around the so they stopped him.
Looks like in the middle of the road and called a friend and the friend is filming this whole thing.
And if you're that guy and you're just running down the road and you see somebody Forget about race for a second.
If you see somebody with a shotgun and a guy in the back of the pickup truck with a handgun, and they're attempting to stop you, and you've committed no crime, and you can't get around them, what the hell else are you supposed to do?
Right?
That guy actually has an extraordinarily strong self-defense slash stand-your-ground claim that Jogger does.
Arbery does.
Okay, so here is the lead up to all of this.
This is according to the New York Times.
Ahmed Arbery loved to run.
It was how the 25-year-old former high school football standout stayed fit, his friend said.
It was not unusual to see him running around the outskirts of the small coastal Georgia city near where he lived.
But on a Sunday afternoon in February, as Mr. Arbery ran through a suburban neighborhood of ranch houses and moss-striped oaks, he passed a man standing in his front yard, who later told the police that Arbery looked like a suspect in a string of break-ins.
According to a police report, the man, Gregory McMichael, who's 64, called out to his son, Travis McMichael, 34.
They grabbed their weapons, a .357 Magnum, a revolver, and a shotgun, jumped into a truck, and began following Mr. Arbery.
Okay, so as we will see, the question is whether they actually witnessed a crime in progress and then got active.
is one of the operative questions here.
You don't have the right to, let's say that three weeks ago you saw a grainy videotape, and you say, hey look, I saw a guy walk down the street who looks just like that suspect.
In Georgia, you don't have the right to go grab your gun and try to arrest that guy.
You can't effectuate a citizen's arrest unless you watch a crime in progress and you are attempting to stop the crime.
This will become an issue.
"Stop, stop," they shouted at Mr. Arbery, "we wanna talk to you." Moments later, after a struggle over the shotgun, Arbery was killed, shot at least twice.
No one has been charged or arrested in connection with the February 23rd killing.
The case has received little attention beyond Brunswick, but it raised questions in the community about racial profiling because Arbery was black and the father and son are white, and about the interpretation of the state's self-defense laws.
Now, again, the level of the charge is going to be at issue when this thing does go to court, 'cause it will go to court.
Number one, because how do you interpret the first degree murder statute?
They stopped dead in the middle of the road.
If this was a false imprisonment connected with a killing, then it's first degree murder, meaning that if this is the equivalent of a kidnapping because they had no evidence that the guy actually committed a crime, And then they shot him.
Then it's felony murder.
If there was evidence that the guy had committed a crime or if they thought he had committed a crime reasonably, right?
This is what the jury is going to determine.
Then the attempt to arrest him could end up being something more akin to manslaughter because it's fairly obvious when you have somebody videoing a situation like this from behind that you don't actually expect that it's going to end in somebody getting shot.
It makes no sense for these people's allies to be tracking this guy down the street because they want to watch him get shot on tape just so that these guys can get indicted, right?
The tape is the most damning thing about this.
If there had been no tape, it would be very difficult to indict because all you would have is the accounts of the people involved.
And that would be, again, very difficult on the basis of evidence, on evidence alone.
The tape is the most damning thing about anything in this entire compendium of facts.
Our Barry was killed three days before the anniversary of the 2012 killing of Trayvon Martin, the unarmed African-American teenager whose confrontation with a Florida neighborhood watch captain, George Zimmerman, helped ignite the Black Lives Matter movement.
And it is important to distinguish the fact patterns of these particular cases.
In that particular case, there was controversy because Zimmerman, again, followed Trayvon Martin by Zimmerman's testimony, which again, there was no tape.
Tape would have been very helpful in the George Zimmerman case.
There was no tape in that case.
Zimmerman testified that he followed Martin, then he turned around and then Martin confronted him.
And then Martin was on top of him by witness testimony beating his head into the pavement.
There was a struggle over the gun and he shot Martin.
That is a different fact pattern than this one where you have two people lying in wait for the guy coming down the road and then the guy on basic self-defense grounds attempts to defend himself.
Also, as we'll see, there's all sorts of racial stuff that came up in the Zimmerman case where the media basically lied about Zimmerman.
They suggested that he was clearly doing this because he was a racist.
They suggested that he was a white person, even though he was actually Hispanic, and then they termed him a white Hispanic.
They suggested that there was no evidence that he'd actually been hit by Martin when he, in fact, had a broken nose.
There are all sorts of complicating factors.
In the George Zimmerman case, and that case was overcharged by the prosecution.
If they charged him with manslaughter, fairly decent shot, they would have convicted him.
But when it comes to this particular case, to get back to the fact pattern here, according to documents obtained by the New York Times, a prosecutor who had the case for a few weeks told the police the pursuers had acted within the scope of George's citizen's arrest statute, and that Travis McMichael, who held the shotgun, had acted out of self-defense.
The police report doesn't mention whether Arbery was in possession of a weapon.
Apparently, he was not.
The prosecutor who wrote the letter was a guy named George Barnhill, who was the district attorney for Georgia's Waycross Judicial Circuit, and had recused himself from the case this month after Arbery's family complained he had a conflict of interest.
A prosecutor from another county was then put in charge, and then he decided that this thing will go to a grand jury yesterday.
So the fact pattern is obviously in dispute here.
But as we'll see, we'll go through the full analysis of the fact pattern momentarily.
The fact pattern cuts in favor of an indictment at the very, very least.
Friends and family say that Arbery was exercising.
One of his friends said everybody in the community knows he runs.
Others contend Arbery was up to no good.
On the day of the shooting, apparently moments before the chase, a neighbor in Satilla Shores called 911.
Telling the dispatcher a black man in a white t-shirt was inside a house that was under construction and only partially closed in.
And he's running right now, the man told the dispatcher.
There he goes right now.
Now again, that is not a burglary, okay?
Like, being on a construction site where there is nothing worth stealing is not a burglary.
Have you ever walked in an open construction site?
I have.
Virtually everyone I know has.
You're walking around a neighborhood, you want to see how they're constructing a house, and you walk into the construction site.
That is not a crime.
Okay, that's certainly not a crime where you get to chase someone down and then hold them at bay because you're waiting for the cops to come.
In his letters to the police, Barnhill noted that Arbery had a criminal past.
Court records show that Arbery was convicted of shoplifting and violating probation in 2018.
Five years earlier, according to the Brunswick News, he was indicted on charges he took a handgun to a high school basketball game, none of which is supremely relevant to what happened in this particular case.
You bring a gun to a high school basketball game five years beforehand.
That has no relevance as to why these particular people are trying to block your particular way on this particular highway.
Just going through the fact pattern.
Even if Arbery committed a property crime on the afternoon he was killed, activists and family members said it would not have warranted a chase by armed neighbors.
And then we get into the racial issue, right?
Our Barry's mother said she believed the men had judged her son by his skin color.
She does not believe he committed any crimes that day.
If he had, she said he should have been handled by the police.
Now, I tend to agree, he should have been handled by the police.
When we get into the racial angle here, that's where things start to go sideways.
The reason I say that is because certainly you can interpret this as a racial shooting.
It's three white men apparently confronting a young black man in disputed circumstances and then killing him, right?
I mean, then he's shot.
The question, as always, when it comes to overzealous people getting involved in cases like this, which is what it appears to be.
Again, they had this on tape.
Is it about race?
Is it about racism against a black man running in a largely white area?
Or if the guy were Hispanic and were running through the neighborhood, would they have made the call?
If it had been a guy who looked like he was a white guy, Who they were suspicious of?
Would they have made the same call?
In other words, is it possible that these are overzealous cops who are overzealous cops?
Turns out the guy was an ex-cop, right?
And very often you do see this.
I mean, this is the point that Adam Carolla has made before, that if you're a black person in America with the terrible history of law enforcement with black Americans, If you were pulled over for speeding as a black man, and you didn't really think that you were speeding, and the white officer came and was rude to you, you might assume that it was because the officer was a racist.
Because Adam Carolla is a white guy, he says, I would just assume that the officer is an a-hole.
Right?
So it's unclear in this particular case whether it's racial.
The same thing, by the way, was true with regard to the George Zimmerman case.
In the George Zimmerman case, There are several investigations, including a federal investigation by the Eric Holder Justice Department that found no evidence of racial intent in that particular case.
We don't actually know whether there was racial intent here.
The attempt to blow this up into a racial narrative Maybe.
Right?
Maybe.
But we don't have the evidence of that.
Now that does not change whether these guys should be indicted.
So that brings us to the state of the law.
Okay, so there are a couple of different pieces on this that are worth going through.
One is from my friend David French, who is a very, very good lawyer over at the Dispatch.
He says that the killers should be arrested and tried for murder.
He says, let's walk through the events.
And then he goes through all of the evidence.
We'll go through all of the evidence in just one second.
And we'll go through sort of the legal case.
And then we'll get to the broader political ramifications.
Because one thing is obviously true.
If the media can treat a terrible incident like this as an incident that indicts America more broadly along the lines of racism, it becomes a national story.
And it doesn't stop being a national story.
And the media encourages that.
If it turns out that everybody's like, okay, this was a bad shooting and maybe it was racist and maybe it wasn't, but these guys should be at least tried, then the controversy goes away.
How do I know this?
Because that's exactly what happened in the case of Walter Scott, who was the black man in South Carolina who was gunned down by a police officer.
The police officer lied about it.
It was on tape.
The police officer ended up in, his name was Michael Slagle.
He ended up in jail for 20 years.
No controversy whatsoever because everybody basically agreed, you do a bad thing, you should go to jail.
It's only when the media can turn it into a broader indictment of American racism that the media are interested in the story.
So the fact that there seems to be pretty broad and wide agreement that these guys at the very least should go to a grand jury and be indicted and then get their day in court, it kind of cuts against the idea that Americans are deeply desirous of protecting people on the basis of a possible racial killing.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Okay, so, as I say, my friend David French over at the Dispatch has a good piece on this.
He says that there was a 9-1-1 call, and it's unclear who made the call.
It's not clear who made the call.
So this makes a difference.
Because if you witness a crime in the state of Georgia by statute, then you're allowed to attempt a citizen's arrest.
But if you are just somebody who heard about it third-hand from somebody, not the same thing.
Right, if my producer, Colton, sees somebody committing a crime, and then he calls me, and I have not witnessed the crime, and then he says, that guy's running down your street, you should go do something about it.
No citizen's arrest for me.
Right, that's not something that I get to do.
So, in the call, the guy makes it clear there was no immediate break-in.
He said, there's a guy in the house right now, it's under construction.
The man gave her an address, the dispatcher, and the dispatcher says, you said someone's breaking into it right now?
And the man says, no, it's all open, it's under construction.
Okay, so right now, it's very obvious that the person is not witnessing a crime in progress.
Which is very different from the original story we were told by the prosecutor who recommended not charging.
He said, oh, we witnessed a crime in process.
That's what was happening.
So Georgia's citizen's arrest statute kicks in.
Nah, not by this 911 call.
It doesn't.
The dispatcher says, that's fine.
I'll get the police out there.
I just need to know what he was doing wrong.
Was he just on the premises and not supposed to be?
The next sentence the guy says, he's been caught on camera a bunch at night.
It's kind of an ongoing thing.
The man building the house has got heart issues.
I think he's not going to finish it.
And the dispatch says, okay, that's fine.
You said he was a male in a black t-shirt.
And the guy says, white t-shirt, black guy, white t-shirt.
He's done run into the neighborhood again.
So now the guy is trying to link this Arbery fellow with grainy video footage from prior crimes.
Again, none of this is immediate.
As we will see, that makes a difference.
The Georgia law is you have to immediately witness a crime.
It is not.
I saw a tape three weeks ago of somebody shoplifting.
Now that guy appears in my neighborhood and he's walking around an open construction site.
No, this does not count.
And minutes later, another person calls 911.
The guy says, I'm out here at Satilla Shores.
There's a blackmail running down the street.
Okay, well, last I checked, a blackmail running down the street is not actually a crime.
That's just a description of a human being running down the street.
So, how that qualifies as worthy of, you need to stop him and threaten him with a gun, I have no idea.
And the dispatcher says, where at Satilla Shores?
The man says, I don't know what street we're on.
And then he says, stop.
He can be heard shouting, watch that.
Stop, damn it, stop.
The call goes blank for several minutes.
The dispatcher tries to reach the caller and the call eventually hangs up.
At some point in the sequence, says David French, a man named Gregory McMichael saw Airberry allegedly hauling ass down the street.
Not clear if McMichael is one of the 911 callers.
McMichael told police there had been several break-ins in the neighborhood and the suspect was caught on surveillance video.
He grabbed his 357.
His son grabbed a shotgun.
They began pursuing Arbery in their vehicle.
So, a few things that are important here to note.
One, there were not at least a reported spate of break-ins in Scintilla Shores.
From January 1st to February 23rd, by local newspaper coverage, there was a grand total of one, one, count them, one police report on break-in in the area.
Again, this is rather distinguishing from the case in George Zimmerman's neighborhood in Florida, where there had been a huge spate of break-ins that everybody acknowledged, according to police reports.
From the police report, it appears there were two vehicles and three individuals involved in the chase.
McMichael said he tried to cut off Arbery on the road, so did an individual named Roddy.
McMichael says he then got into the bed of the pickup truck and continued the pursuit.
Here is how the police report described the fatal encounter.
McMichael stated they saw the unidentified male and shouted, stop, stop, we want to talk to you.
Okay, so there are a few things about this particular police report that do not jibe with the facts.
time Travis exited the truck with a shotgun.
McMichael stated the unidentified male began to violently attack Travis and the two men then started fighting over the shotgun, at which point Travis fired a shot and a second later there was a second shot.
McMichael stated the male fell face down on the pavement with his hand under his body.
McMichael stated he rolled the man over to see if the male had a weapon.
Okay, so there are a few things about this particular police report that do not jibe with the facts.
One, it appears that just if you play the tape, you can hear three shots, not two.
Second, the notion that he pulled up next to him is not true.
The vehicle is waiting directly in the center of the road, right?
So that part is not true.
So, as David French points out, the video doesn't depict McMichael pulling up beside Arbery, but instead shows him waiting, blocking the road with his truck.
Arbery changes direction to avoid the truck.
Travis McMichael moves to intercept Arbery while holding a shotgun, the two scuffled, and then Travis fires three shots.
Although it's not clear, again, whether Travis fires three shots or whether somebody in the back of the truck fires a shot first.
And then there are two shots fired from the shotgun.
Not totally clear, but you can hear three shots, not two.
So, as David French points out, the Brunswick News noted only one burglary had been reported to local police between January 1st and the day of the shooting.
Also, McMichael is a former police detective and investigator for the Brunswick District Attorney's Office.
According to the New York Times, the first district attorney, Jackie Johnson, recused herself because McMichael had worked with her.
A second district attorney stepped away from the case, also because he knew McMichael.
So his argument was the three men were in hot pursuit of a burglary suspect with solid first-hand probable cause in the effort to execute a citizen's arrest.
And he says this was just open carrying weapons is lawful in Georgia.
The shooting occurred only after Arbery attacked McMichael and tried to grab his shotgun, which, again, goes to the question as to whether this was a premeditated murder in the sense that they were waiting to ambush him, which it does not appear to be, or whether they were waiting to arrest him and they had no right to arrest him.
And so it was a shooting that was combined with false imprisonment, which would amount to felony murder.
That's the case the French is going to make.
Georgia law does indeed permit a person to execute a citizen's arrest, but in very narrow circumstances.
The relevant false arrest statute holds that, quote, a private person may arrest an offender if the offense is committed in his presence or within his immediate knowledge.
If the offense is a felony and the offender is escaping or attempting to escape, a private person may arrest him upon reasonable and probable cause of suspicion.
Let's look at the question.
Once the citizen's arrest is properly made, Georgia law requires the citizen to take the suspect before a judicial officer or a peace officer without any unnecessary delay.
It's also true that an unlawful attempt to take and hold a person is itself a crime false imprisonment.
Moreover, according to Georgia case law, you can't use a citizen's arrest statute to question a suspect.
In fact, stating an intention to question a suspect can be evidence that the individual claiming a right to make a citizen's arrest is uncertain and did not have immediate knowledge the victim had been a perpetrator of the alleged crime.
So, if you actually apply the law to the facts, says David French.
On the day Arbery died, a 911 caller said a man matching Arbery's description was walking inside a vacant construction site.
Another caller said there's a black male running down the street.
Gregory McMichael claimed he recognized Arbery from surveillance video after several break-ins in the neighborhood.
The only offense committed in anyone's presence is the report of a person walking into a construction site.
If that merits mounting up an armed three-person, two-vehicle posse to chase a man in broad daylight and menace him with weapons, many of us are lucky to be alive and free.
The other possible argument is that in the unspecified video footage, the break-ins constituted immediate knowledge that a crime had been committed days or weeks ago, and that an alleged older crime provided them with reasonable and probable grounds of suspicion.
But that would be a pretty large-scale extension of the law.
Georgia case law says past incidents may not justify present citizen pursuit.
A 2000 Georgia Court of Appeals opinion says the term within his immediate knowledge enables a private citizen to use any of his senses to obtain knowledge that an offense is being committed.
Also again, there are problems with the police report.
Now, does this mean that these guys get convicted without a trial?
Of course not.
Of course not.
It means they get a trial.
It means that this will go to a grand jury, and then they will have a defense, and then all of the facts will come out.
And then we will know exactly what their motivation was, and we will know exactly what went down, and what was the crime they were attempting to report, and how all of this went down.
And so to say in this positive fashion these guys deserve to go to jail, Again, based on the evidence that we have seen, the answer seems like yes, but we're going to have to have a trial, right?
And that's what trials are for.
That's why they're going to indict with a grand jury.
The broader question is why there was no arrest in the first place.
Why was it that there was no arrest on the original grounds, right?
That's a serious question.
Why for two months did they sit on this thing?
And that appears, the question there is, was that based on racism or was that based on the fact that every prosecutor in town knew this McMichael guy and they were like, okay, well, you know, he worked with us over at the cop's office and we're going to let it go.
This is just an insider question.
That gains additional relevance when you get to the racial aspect of the case, which of course is what the media are jumping on.
And maybe the racial aspect of the case is the key aspect of the case, but there's just as solid a case that the racial aspect of the case is secondary to generalized law enforcement overzealousness or ex-law enforcement overzealousness combined with an insider nature for people who worked with law enforcement in the first place.
So we'll get to that in just one second.
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Go to rockauto.com instead.
Write Shapiro in there.
How did you hear about us box?
Okay.
So back to the story in this particular case, and this is where the media start to become an issue.
So, it is good that there was public attention brought to this case by the media.
That is a good thing.
Because it means that what appeared to be a bunch of people in the DA's office who were friends with the guy at issue, that those people are not the people who end up prosecuting the case.
Right?
That is a good thing.
We want to make sure that law enforcement actually does its job.
But, it is also true that the media, in cases like this, immediately tend to jump to, this is a racial case first and foremost.
That this is a case of race.
This is undergirded by tweets from people like LeBron James.
LeBron James tweeted out We're literally hunted every day, every time we step outside, a step foot outside the comfort of our homes.
Can't even go for a damn jog, man.
Like, what the F, man?
Are you kidding me?
No, man, for real.
Are you kidding me?
I'm sorry, Ahmad.
Rest in paradise.
And my prayers and blessings sent to thee.
Okay, so this has 302,000 likes.
Now, statistically speaking, it is not true that black people are hunted every time they step outside the comfort of their homes.
There's a reason we know the names of people to whom this has happened.
It's just not statistically true that black people are hunted by white people all across the country.
That was true for a long time in American history.
That was true during large swaths of Jim Crow when the KKK was basically a legal terror organization.
That is not true today.
It is just not true that white people are running around the country willy-nilly hunting now black people.
It's not statistically true.
At the same time, it is very important that law enforcement do its job specifically in order to fight perceptions like this.
Now, that doesn't mean that you should make up cases against people, God forbid.
We have due process of law in this country, but it looks bad when you have local law enforcement not taking seriously enough allegations that have taped to back them like this.
Now, the legal issue in this case really is going to come down to, did they witness this guy commit a crime?
If they witnessed this guy commit a crime, and then they tried to stop him, okay, then It can very easily be argued that this is a terrible case in which Arbery was acting in his own self-defense.
And once he grabs the gun, then the guy who shot him was also acting in mutual self-defense.
But that really depends on whether the citizen's arrest was justified in the first place.
If the citizen's arrest was just, we're suspicious of this guy running down the road because we think he looked like the guy from two days ago, and we're vigilantes and we're not going to call the cops.
And if we do call the cops, we're not going to wait on them.
We need to go stop this right now.
Then you end up in the case of felony imprisonment slash felony murder, right?
Which is which is the case that David French is making.
And the statute again in Georgia is fairly clear.
The statute is fairly straightforward that you have to witness the immediate crime.
But when the media immediately jumped to, we know for a fact that this was white guys chasing down a black guy because there's a black guy in a white neighborhood and they decided to go and shoot him that day.
Again, the evidence doesn't support the idea that these guys were like out to gun down a black guy that day.
It does support the idea, I think much more obviously, that these were overzealous Want to be cops and ex cops who decided that they were going to be vigilantes that day.
And then this thing went wrong and you are guilty for that, right?
You're guilty for that.
That is a thing that you are guilty for under the criminal laws of the state of Georgia, which is why this is going to go to grand jury and all the facts are going to come out.
But you suggest on the basis of of the case itself.
That black people are gunned down every day in the United States.
That black people are at tremendous day-to-day risk from normal white people walking down the road.
That's just, it's not true.
Which is why, again, this is getting all sorts of national attention.
If this were true, that this were happening every single day, you know what the news doesn't report on?
Stuff that happens every single day.
The reason that this is an outlier case and is getting all sorts of attention is, number one, because we have tape, and number two, because it is a really bad fact pattern.
It's a really bad situation.
So I would urge everybody to wait for all the facts to come in.
I'm glad that the video is out there and that we can all look at it.
I've been a fan of dash cams on police officers for a long time and cameras on police officers for a very long time.
It seems to me, based on this fact pattern, that it is completely correct for the prosecutor's office to put in a grand jury indictment.
I do not know.
Trey Gowdy said the same thing on Fox News yesterday.
I do not understand why, for two months, there was no indictment put forward, no grand jury case.
They will get a defense.
They will have a chance to defend themselves in court.
That's the way this is supposed to work.
The real issue, to me, beyond the actual fact pattern of the case, is why the prosecutors didn't go forward.
And the implication is going to be, they didn't go forward because it was white guys shooting a black man, they don't care.
It seems to me that the much more likely scenario is this didn't go forward with an indictment in the first place because everybody was friends with the guy who did the shooting.
That basically it was an insider problem in which you had a former member of law enforcement who knew all the DAs.
And they were like, would Billy Bob over here?
Would Jim have really gone out and just randomly shot somebody?
Probably he was fine.
Probably it was not a big deal.
Which, again, is not the way that you pursue law enforcement.
And it does undermine the credibility of law enforcement because baseless or not, the widespread perception that black people are in widespread fashion targeted by white law enforcement in this country That is undermined.
That perception is underscored every time the law enforcement apparatus does not actually go forward with an indictment in cases where it appears an indictment seems to be warranted.
So that's where we stand on this and I'm glad that a grand jury case will go forward on this and these people should have a chance to defend themselves because everybody should have a chance to defend themselves.
It appears to me that David French's case is pretty strong, that this looks like a felony murder based on people being vigilantes in violation of the law.
Okay, now we're going to get to everything coronavirus related because, again, nobody has a plan.
It's the Kobayashi Maru problem from Star Trek.
Nobody has a plan.
And the idea that if you look at various plans that you are somehow very bad and very evil, this continues to be the pervading attitude of many in the media.
And that's just not appropriate.
We'll get to that in just a minute.
First, let's talk for a second about knowing what's going on in your neighborhood.
We're home more than usual these days, but it's still hard to keep a close eye on things.
I've got my kids running all over my property.
There are people dropping off packages all the time because we have to buy all of our groceries remote.
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Okay, we're gonna get to everything coronavirus related in a second.
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This is the largest, fastest-growing conservative podcast and radio show for the nation.
So as you say, the media tend to traffic and outrage on all stories.
When it comes to this story in Georgia, the outrageous part is presumably that it wasn't put in front of a grand jury.
The media are attempting to turn this into, again, a broader racial narrative about the United States.
This is why, if the American people basically react to this by saying, okay, the law should take its course here.
Then the media simply go away because then they can't make the argument this is about broader American tolerance for racism or for bad shoots.
That will go away.
Well, the media are trafficking in all sorts of outrage when it comes to COVID-19 as well.
They continue to claim that recognizing the reality, which is that nothing major may change with regard to COVID-19.
This just may be the new reality, meaning that the risk levels in society exist.
No new therapeutics.
No vaccine.
And maybe, by the way, it may be years before we develop a vaccine.
Like the fastest people have ever developed a coronavirus vaccine in the past has been like four years.
So the idea that we're going to do this in six months and that it's going to be extraordinarily effective.
The flu vaccine, which is a pretty effective vaccine, is only 45% effective.
To reach herd immunity, you really do need this thing to be about 70% effective.
So it needs to be super effective.
It needs to be applied in widespread fashion.
So it may just be that this is the new risk level in life.
And if this is the new risk level in life, then the question becomes, okay, why are we not protecting people who are the most vulnerable and then moving toward opening up very, very quickly?
But the media seem to have an interest in claiming that lockdowns are the best available policy.
And that if you oppose the lockdowns, if you say, guys, there's some actual cost to what's going on here, then you're very, very bad.
So here's an example.
Chuck Todd yesterday on MSNBC says, is the federal government considering surrendering to this virus?
I have a question.
What would fighting the virus look like?
Really, I mean, we're devoting extraordinary resources to private research and development.
We are funding a huge testing regimen across the country.
States are doing this.
What does he mean, surrender?
Is it a surrender when you just say, listen, we don't know what's going to happen from here on in, but we are going to have to plan for the reality, which is that maybe nothing changes here?
I understand that you want to yell at the government over changes that may never happen, but I've yet to hear an actual policy put forward by anybody who's advocating for lockdowns that looks like anything realistic.
Here is Chuck Todd, again, sort of just outrage ginning.
The federal government, led by President Trump, considering, for a lack of a better word, surrendering to this virus.
With more than 70,000 Americans dead, the president is telling the public that the country must reopen, even if it means more death.
But he doesn't have a plan for doing that.
The uncertainty surrounding the White House's strategy, which we seem to utter about on a daily basis, comes in the numerous warning signs that we're not anywhere near ready to safely reopen the country from a public health standpoint or a consumer confidence standpoint.
Okay, there is no standard that has been put forward by anybody that says what safely reopening the country looks like.
What does safely reopening the country look like?
Now, according to the media, it means 50 million tests a day, and that ain't gonna happen.
It's just not going to happen.
That is more tests than are carried out on any day in America's entire medical system for all diseases combined.
So what you're talking about is just nonsense.
And when you say America is not ready to safely reopen, you have not set the standard for what safely reopening looks like.
So how the hell do you know when America is ready to safely reopen?
This is how you end up with the stupidity of Joe Biden tweeting out last night.
And Joe Biden did tweet out last night.
Do we have Joe Biden's tweet here?
He tweeted, I've said it before and I'll say it again.
No one is expendable.
No life is worth losing.
To add one more point to the Dow.
So this is just such a false binary.
The idea here is that somehow, if you want to reopen, all you care about is your Dow Jones Industrial Average stock market.
Such absolute utter crap.
First of all, I have a question for Joe Biden.
Does he plan on ending death?
Is that his plan?
That he's going to ban death?
Because when he says, no life is worth losing, to add one more point to the Dow, so presumably, he's just going to ban death, because it turns out your risk of dying increases every time you go out the door, with or without COVID-19.
So presumably, we should all just be locked down in our homes forever, and the government can, you know, just make money appear out of thin air.
Like, what the hell is he talking about?
That's not setting up a standard.
The deliberate attempt to avoid setting up any standards for reopening at all is the mark of political dishonesty.
It's true political dishonesty.
It's the same thing as Andrew Cuomo doing the... I will give you my answer as to whether we think that this thing is going to...
Well, we have to answer seriously the calculation between cost and benefit.
And I will give you my answer.
Every life is priceless.
It's like that.
It's not giving the answer.
You're eliding the question, dude.
You're avoiding having the actual discussion that needs to be had.
Because guess what?
The costs here are pretty damned extraordinary.
Pretty damned extraordinary.
Okay, the fact is that the United States lost another 3.2 million jobs.
We're now up to 33 million jobs lost.
And this is disproportionately hitting minority Americans.
For all the people saying, all the people who want to reopen are rich and white.
Weird, because it seems to me like all the rich and white people in the media don't want to reopen.
And those people are disproportionately rich and white.
It seems to me that all the liberals in California who are disproportionately rich and white in the Malibu enclaves, they're fine with it staying shut.
It's the people who actually need to work who are getting jacked, and those people are disproportionately poor and minority.
According to the Associated Press, people of color have not only been hit harder by the deadly coronavirus than have Americans overall, they're also bearing the brunt of the pandemic's financial impact, according to a recent survey.
The poll found 61% of Hispanic Americans say they experienced some kind of household income loss as a result of the outbreak, including job losses, unpaid leave, pay cuts, and fewer scheduled hours.
That is compared with 46% of Americans overall.
37% of Latinos, 27% of Black Americans say they have been unable to pay at least one type of bill as a result of the coronavirus outbreak.
These are extraordinary, extraordinary numbers.
The survey, which was conducted in mid-April, found that 21% of Hispanics have been unable to make a rent or mortgage payment as a result of the outbreak.
23% have been unable to pay a credit card bill.
15% of black Americans have been unable to pay a credit card bill.
So the notion that if you want to reopen, it's because you dislike minorities, you're going to have to explain that one to me.
You're also going to have to explain to me how you solved all the problems, Joe Biden, by simply declaring that You're going to end death.
Because guess what?
Nearly a fifth of young children, according to Brookings Institute, a fifth of young children are not getting enough to eat.
The rate is three times higher than in 2008, at the worst of the Great Recession.
When food runs short, parents often skip meals to keep children fed.
A survey of households with children 12 and under found 17.4% reported that children themselves were not eating enough, compared with 5.7% during the Great Recession.
So, you're telling me that it's bad to reopen?
And then you won't set any standard for reopening?
Deeply irresponsible nonsense.
Deeply, deeply irresponsible nonsense.
Now, this does not mean that on the other side, it is worthwhile to question the death toll of the virus.
So there's a report that President Trump is complaining to advisors about the way the coronavirus deaths are being calculated.
Here's the reality.
This thing is deadly.
It's killing a lot of people.
You don't have to downplay the number of people being killed in order to point out that we simply cannot continue this way.
And that the people who are being disproportionately harmed by this are people who are impoverished, people who are already living on the brink.
It is also important to recognize here that if we started by protecting just the nursing homes, we would have lowered the deadliness of this thing dramatically.
According to a report in the Hartford Courant, nearly 90% of all coronavirus deaths in Connecticut last week were nursing home patients. 90%.
So, Andrew Cuomo and company who keep saying every life is precious, but didn't defend the nursing homes.
In fact, forced by law, nursing homes to take back people who had COVID-19.
Well done everybody.
So is Trump wrong?
Is he bad when he says we can't keep the country closed down for years?
Of course he's not wrong.
Of course he's not bad.
He is exactly right.
And everybody knows it.
Every single person knows it in America.
They're just the people who refuse to recognize it because it's a lot easier to play righteous indignation about reopening when you don't, when you never set a standard that can never be met for reopening.
Here was Trump saying we can't keep the country closed down for years, which of course is true.
We can't keep our country closed down for years, and we have to do something.
And hopefully that won't be the case, John, but it could very well be the case.
You won't be locked in a house, and some people should stay if you're over a certain age.
But we have to get our country open again.
And you see it.
Look, you cover it.
People want to go back.
You're going to have a problem if you don't do it.
100% correct.
But this means he's very bad and that the federal government is abandoning, abandoning their efforts to fight COVID-19.
Okay, again, let's get to a reality.
Do you think that something magical is going to happen now?
Really, that's the question.
Do you think there's a therapeutic that comes in and reduces the death rate of this thing by 50%, 60%?
Do you think that herd immunity is going to be achieved by vaccination?
And if so, when?
And for how long do you expect that people are going to be able to continue to exist this way?
In fact, it turns out that the people who are being diagnosed with new cases in New York are not being diagnosed by going out in public.
Andrew Cuomo pointed this out yesterday, which is an incredible admission.
Here's Andrew Cuomo basically acknowledging that the lockdowns may have slowed the spread of the virus, but right now the spread of the virus is entirely happening inside the lockdown.
Here's Cuomo.
Where are those new cases still coming from?
Because we've done everything we can to close down.
How are you still generating 600 new cases every day?
Where are they coming from?
These people were literally at home.
2% took car services.
9% were driving their own vehicle.
Only 4% were taking public transportation.
2% were walking.
84% were at home.
Okay, 84% were at home, literally.
Were they working?
No.
You have two categories.
Confirmed deaths and then probable or presumed deaths.
And they list numbers in both categories.
Some people combine the two.
Confirmed deaths and presumed deaths and have one number.
Some people keep them separate.
And then they're often reported separately or they're reported together.
So does this really speak to the efficacy of the lockdown?
When the spread is still happening and it's happening inside houses?
What is the efficacy of that?
Meanwhile, over in Sweden, which again the left is loving to hate on these days, Over in Sweden, important to note that they're actually bending the curve back down.
So the daily death toll has been dropping again in Sweden, which means that as they approach herd immunity, presumably, that the daily death toll is going to drop.
And here's the question.
I just don't know what the alternatives are.
I seriously don't know.
Like we can debate on the level of reopening, whether it should be 50% full or whether we should be doing controlled avalanche in which we actually just basically encourage people to pursue herd immunity.
There's all sorts of discussions we can have on that.
One thing is absolutely true.
These lockdowns cannot continue this way.
And the American people know it.
And this is why it's become such a flashpoint, this case of this Dallas salon owner.
So we talked about this yesterday.
There's a Dallas salon owner who defied a court order and opened up.
And she was jailed for it.
Her name was Shelly Luther.
And the judge asked her to apologize.
If she would apologize and say she would never go out without the state's permission again, then he would basically waive her sentence.
And she was like, no, I'm not doing that.
I have to feed my kids.
Well, as it becomes obvious that kids are going to have to be fed, nobody is going to go along with the government's order here.
Because basically the logic went something like this.
Government says, you need a lockdown for 30 days.
Everyone's like, okay, I guess we'll do that.
And then it became, you need a lockdown for 60 days.
And we said, well, how am I going to feed my kids?
And the government was like, okay, well, we will pay all your bills.
And then all these people who couldn't feed their kids were calling up the government and the line was busy.
And so they said, okay, I guess we're going to have to go back to work because like, seriously, I need to feed my kids.
And the government was like, yeah, but if you go back to work, we're going to put you in jail.
Does that sound like that's sustainable in any way, shape, or form?
Here was the attorney for Shelly Luther talking yesterday about the fact that she's going to end up in jail while criminals are being released onto the streets.
She committed the actual crime of heresy against the city of Dallas, and it's an oligarchy that decided that real criminals could go to jail, but people who were heretics, or people who were real criminals could be let out, but the heretics could go to jail.
And he demanded that she admit she was being selfish and being offensive and apologize to everybody.
He actually said, I want you to apologize for being selfish.
And so, of course, she wasn't being selfish.
She's just trying to earn a dollar.
Okay, so in amazing news, I mean, this is how Americans operate and this is, you can see where the passion is right now.
She has raised, her legal defense fund has raised half a million dollars.
Not only that, the Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, he offered to pay the $7,000 fine and to do her jail time for her.
Yesterday, the Attorney General of the state of Texas said this is ridiculous, said that we cannot jail people for this.
He said, I find it outrageous and out of touch that during this national pandemic, a judge in a county that actually released hardened criminals for fear of contracting COVID-19 would jail a mother for operating her hair salon in an attempt to put food on her family's table.
The trial judge did not need to lock up Shelly Luther.
His order is a shameful abuse of judicial discretion.
He should release Ms.
Luther immediately.
Even the governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, came out and he said, probably this lady shouldn't be in jail.
That's like the last available, that's the last available thing.
Now, things are going to get really rough here.
They are.
Because the fact is, human beings were not built for this.
They are not built for this.
Human beings were not built for interminable lockdown.
They're not built for social distancing.
And as it becomes clear that there is no relief in sight, that there is no therapeutic, that there is no actual That there is no actual vaccine on the way anytime in the near future.
That all the talk about, yeah, we're working on all these vaccines and it's going to be the cure-all and all this, that is speculative at best.
Really at best.
People are going to begin saying, okay, I am young and I am healthy.
I'm 40 years old and I have no preexisting conditions.
My chances of death are 7 in 10,000.
You know what?
I'm going to work.
You know what?
I'm going to a ballgame.
You know what?
I'm getting back to daily life.
Because people have a unique capacity to absorb terrible things happening to them, their lives, then move on like nothing is happening.
This is a grand shock.
There is some good news.
The good news is we do know how to protect the nursing homes.
We do know how to protect the most vulnerable in our society.
And we have the capacity as independent individuals to protect ourselves.
If you want to lock down, you can continue to lock down.
But as we move forward, the question is going to be, why people who are young and healthy should be locking down and why the government has the thinks that that is a better strategy in the long run.
And I talked about this yesterday.
The big question here is going to be, and this is the question no one has yet answered to my satisfaction.
If the area underneath the curve is the same, no matter what you do, but the curve is sharper at the beginning, which means that less economic damage is done in the long run, Do you want to take the pain now or do you want to spread it out over the course of a couple years if nothing changes?
No one has been able to answer this question for me.
No one.
I'm fully on board with we can't let it spike so much that it overwhelms the healthcare system.
I'm there.
I got it.
We all get it.
But again, if the curves have the same area underneath them, if both of them are not spiking over the line in the healthcare system, if you have one curve that looks like this, and you have one curve that looks like this, And the line is the healthcare system.
And neither of these curves is going over the healthcare system.
The question becomes, which curve do you want?
Because curve number one, right, which is this really heavy bump right here, has the same area underneath it as curve number two.
And curve number two means that we shut down the economy basically forever.
And curve number one means that we take the pain now and then we get back into business.
The original flattening the curve situation, the key to the flattening the curve situation was that in this particular graphic, the dark red shade, the kind of maroon shaded area, right?
That's the people who would die needlessly because we don't have the ability to care for them.
Now, as it turns out, even with the ability to care for people, ventilators didn't help, right?
We were afraid of ventilators being in short supply.
It turns out that 90% of people on ventilators were dying anyway, but you don't want the healthcare system being overwhelmed, obviously.
But take that line out of the graph because we have not overwhelmed the healthcare system.
If you have the choice between two curves, one that is sharper at the beginning, but recedes faster, and that lets us all go back to work and back to ballgames and back to movie theaters, or one that lasts a really long time and has the exact same number of people who are dead, why would you take the shallower curve?
That's the question no one has been able to answer to my satisfaction, or even presented an answer to.
I don't want to see models.
Honestly, I don't want to see any more models about how many people are going to die by June.
I want to see more models as to how many people are going to die by a year from June.
Those are the ones that I care about.
Why?
Because when we are talking about the damage to be done to the American economy, we have to tell how many lives we are actually saving, and how many people are just having their deaths delayed by a month or two, because we are flattening the curve just a little bit.
Enough to destroy the economy, but not enough to actually save people's lives over the course of a year.
I want to see models that go out a year from now.
That's what I want to see.
Even with uncertainty effects.
I want to see what those models look like.
And I want to see what those models look like in the case of controlled avalanche.
And I want to see what those models look like when it's no controlled avalanche, it's just people social distancing and wearing masks.
How about those models?
Why does every model go a month out?
We all know if we release fast, more people will die in the short run, but that's not the question.
If you cut off the model, right, to go back to my little chart right here, if you cut off the model here and you say that this model is June 2020, and if you go here, And this is June 2021.
The charts look very different.
Okay?
The charts look very, very different.
If you look like this, and the cutoff on your model is June 2020, obviously you want the lower curve.
Right?
Because if you cut off the model right here, what does it look like?
That higher curve is a lot of people who are dead.
And the lower curve is not as many people who are dead.
Now, you move it out to June 2021, the same number of people are dead.
The same number.
The timeline is what matters here.
And no one is honestly discussing the timeline, and that is why, if we are going to honestly discuss policy, we don't need models that go out a month.
We need models that go out a year.
This is what I've been saying about Sweden the whole time.
People ripping on Sweden.
No, Sweden's really bad because they're taking the hit in the immediate term.
Yes, in the immediate term they are taking the hit.
Correct.
They're taking the hit in the immediate term, which means they're not taking the hit in the long term.
Okay, time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
So, I will acknowledge that there is a podcast that I really, really enjoy listening to.
It is a lot of fun.
It's called The Rewatchables Podcast.
Bill Simmons does it over at The Ringer, and it is kick.
Basically, it's him and a few of his friends just recapitulating movies that you love to, what he calls, watch and rewatch.
And I was listening to an episode the other night about Gladiator, And uh, this prompted me to actually go back and watch part of Gladiator.
And it's pretty fantastic.
Gladiator is, so Ridley Scott has made like three really great movies.
He made Aliens, he made Blade Runner, he made this.
I'm not even a Blade Runner fan, Aliens is a very good movie.
So, this is, so Gladiator is, it's become sort of underrated because for a while it was a little bit overrated.
But the movie is really entertaining.
It is like popcorn entertainment at its finest.
minus.
Here's a little bit of the trailer for Gladiator if you've never seen it.
Okay, so it's like an old school trailer with no actual voiceover, but...
Will you move your helmet and tell me your name?
My name is Gladiator.
Father to a murdered son.
Husband to a murdered wife.
And I will have my vengeance.
Okay, so basically this movie is kind of like half Braveheart, half Sword and Sandals epic, and it's pretty fantastic.
It's so over-the-top and so great.
And Oliver Reed really chews the scenery.
Apparently Oliver Reed and Russell Crowe actually nearly came into a fistfight because that's who Oliver Reed was.
Oliver Reed was sort of the Russell Crowe of his day.
He was a great actor who was a total maniac, basically.
And he died in the making of this film.
In fact, the original plot of the film was supposed to have Oliver Reed fighting Russell Crowe after betraying him.
In the gladiatorial arena.
Anyway, the movie is fun, so if you're looking for a popcorn flick tonight, go check out Gladiator.
Okay, time for some things that I hate.
The lack of responsibility of people in New York City governance is truly astonishing.
I mean, really, really crazy.
So, Bill de Blasio is not taking on any sort of onus for the fact that he completely botched this thing.
Instead, he's blaming the nursing homes themselves in the state of New York.
Not the state of New York law that said that if a person in your nursing home gets COVID-19, that they have to be let back into your nursing home.
He's not blaming the law.
No, he's blaming the nursing homes themselves because everyone is to blame except Bill de Blasio.
Here he was yesterday.
There's going to be times where the nursing home is the place that can better care if it's set up that way.
Remember, a lot of these are for-profit organizations.
I think there's going to be a lot of questions about whether they put their residents first or whether they put profit first.
But I don't like what's happening in the nursing homes.
I want to see change.
But I think in terms of each individual, it's a case-by-case.
You've got to figure out what's right for each senior.
Well, so it's on the nursing homes, except that we forced by law them to take back all these people, and so nursing homes have become hotspots for this sort of thing.
Again, protect the nursing homes.
Protect the nursing homes.
Those are the places where people are dying en masse in huge, huge numbers.
Meanwhile, Andrew Cuomo, America's governor, is really demonstrating his bona fides.
Speaking on Tuesday, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo reportedly said healthcare workers who travel to New York to help the state's reeling To help the state reeling from coronavirus, we'll have to pay state taxes.
This is according to Hank Barry in The Daily Wire.
Cuomo stated, we're not in a position to provide any subsidies right now because we have a $13 billion deficit.
So, there's a lot of good things I'd like to do.
If we get federal funding, we can do.
But it would be irresponsible for me to sit here looking at a $13 billion deficit and say, I'm going to spend more money when I can't even pay the essential services.
You're not spending money.
That's not your money.
Those people came in because you asked them, you begged them to come in and help.
They came in and helped, and now you're just going to grab their wallet?
Like, this is good governance?
What the actual hell?
How is that good governance?
I'm just wondering.
What makes this guy so popular?
It's astonishing.
It truly is.
How is he able to get away with being such a garbage governor and everybody's like, oh, he's great because he isn't Trump.
Because he'll tell us the hard truths.
Here's the reality.
Andrew Cuomo, when people say, well, you know, he's honest.
He tells us the hard truths.
The reason that people on the left are okay with that is because all those hard truths they can then blame on Trump.
If a Democrat were president, they wouldn't love Andrew Cuomo anymore.
They'd be talking about how he was terrible.
But because Donald Trump is president, then everything that Cuomo says that the state of New York is doing right can be attributed to Cuomo, and everything that is bad can be attributed to Trump.
The luckiest person in America that Donald Trump is president is Andrew Cuomo.
And the second luckiest is Bill de Blasio.
Because it allows them to shift responsibility from themselves to the federal government.
It's truly an amazing thing.
And they've botched this thing so poorly in every way.
You saw the videos over the last couple of days of them finally cleaning the subways.
That's like me telling my kid to clean their room.
They clean the subways nearly as often as my kid cleans his room.
Which is to say, never.
In history.
It's been like a decade since they cleaned the subways.
And I'm like, oh, you know what?
Maybe we should clean the subways.
Yeah, in May.
You shut down the city in March and left the subways running 24 hours a day.
And you didn't even bother to disinfect them, like, once a day?
Well done, everyone.
Well done.
Meanwhile, Democrats in the federal government also doing yeoman's work on behalf of garbage policy.
The Wall Street Journal has a good editorial today talking about many of the risks of reopening.
They say the plaintiff bar is trying to cash in as really quickly as the coronavirus has spread.
Trial lawyers are filing suits against emergency supply manufacturers for false advertising, colleges for refusal to refund student fees, cruise lines for emotional distress, retailers for wrongful death, nursing homes for negligence, and governments for denial of hazard pay.
There's little point in lifting lockdowns if employers don't open for fear of lawsuits.
A number of governors used emergency powers to grant liability protections to healthcare workers, but trial lawyers will attempt to get friendly state courts to invalidate them.
Most orders also fail to address the wider economy or novel pandemic-related legal claims.
Legislation is needed.
Some state legislatures are moving.
But the better answer is for Congress to pass legal protections related specifically to the pandemic and economic recovery that set a national standard and limit the trial bar's ability to forum shop class actions in friendly state courts.
So, you should probably eliminate frivolous lawsuits that don't claim serious injury.
Law firms are already filing lawsuits against cruise lines, arguing that even passengers that did not contract the virus were subject to emotional harm and entitled to punitive damages.
Businesses are being subjected to the threat of lawsuit for the great sin of telling people that they can come back to work under circumstances that try to protect the employees.
Also, we need protections for health providers, including those who are using new treatments, because everything has to be thrown at the wall at this point.
This is why the White House and Senate Republicans want liability protection to be part of any new virus relief.
Democrats are opposing this all the way.
Senate Democrats, they do, as the New Wall Street Journal, work for the lawyers and law firms.
They've contributed more than $8 million to Chuck Schumer's campaigns, some $1.6 million to Nancy Pelosi's campaign.
They've given more than $4 million to the DSCC, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, and $3 million to the House Democratic Committee in this election cycle.
So the addition of liability on top of all this is going to prevent business from opening, which is really quite terrible.
Meanwhile, the Democrats, of course, seem rather sanguine with the whole lockdown strategy.
It seems like they've come up with a political strategy, and that is, we are going to now suggest that lockdown is the status quo and should be the de facto status quo, and any attempt to remove lockdown, you can be blamed for each individual death.
Meanwhile, we'll just keep spending, which we wanted to do anyway.
Chuck Schumer, the Senate Minority Leader, he said that yesterday.
He said, you know what?
Mitch McConnell is balking at more stimulus.
We need to keep spending, man.
Let's just keep spending.
Forever.
Let's just keep doing it.
We need big, bold action, and we need it soon.
We need action to help those who are unemployed deal with their lives and not lose everything, their homes, the ability to feed their kids, the ability to get health care.
We need to make sure that businesses, small businesses, get the help that they need.
We need our stake in local governments, which are our firefighters and our police officers and our bus drivers.
We need them not to be laid off.
And our Republicans' friends seem to be twiddling their thumbs.
Okay, you know who's twiddling their thumbs?
People like you, who are not providing any sort of actual standard for reopening.
Instead, you set these bars that can never be surpassed.
And then you're like, well, have you just stopped working toward our never-surpassable bars?
If we give up, we can reopen once everybody in America is given a unicorn.
Once everybody gets a unicorn, we can reopen.
Why isn't the federal government working harder to ensure that everybody gets a unicorn?
Let's be real about this.
Nothing is fundamentally changing here.
The testing and tracing stuff everybody's talking about is designed to tamp down the hotspots.
By the way, the first place you're going to know the hotspots are emerging is not actually from the testing and the contact tracing, not when the baseline level of cases is this high.
The first place you're going to know it is when the hospitals start feeling it.
It's, this is, it's badly calibrated policy.
There are no good answers, but Democrats have their easy political answer and that is shut everything down and then pretend that anybody who dies is the fault of our political opponents.
Alrighty, we'll be back here a little bit later today with two additional hours of content.
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