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May 11, 2020 - The Ben Shapiro Show

01:08:44

Obama Returns To Center Stage | Ep. 1008

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	Barack Obama returns to slam President Trump's coronavirus response and the release of Michael Flynn, states debate when to reopen, and the media attempt to create American conflict over the tragic killing of Ahmad Arbery.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
	The Ben Shapiro Show is sponsored by ExpressVPN professionals.
	Protect your online privacy today at expressvpn.com slash Ben.
	Well, I hope that you had just a wonderful, relaxed weekend since all of the days have now bled from one into another.
	I hope you got outside.
	I hope you got outdoors.
	A lot of people outdoors yesterday at various places that my family was going.
	And that's a good thing.
	More vitamin D is good.
	You know, socially distance.
	Make sure that you're not infecting the elderly.
	Don't walk into an old age home or anything like that.
	Other than that, get outside.
	It is good for you.
	Okay, so let's begin with some good news today.
	I know, I know we're not allowed, but good news, good news.
	So, there are a couple of different studies, and these are controversial, that suggest that it is possible that children are actually not infecting their parents.
	There are a couple of different studies that are along these lines.
	In Switzerland, there was a study that suggested that kids were not actually infecting their parents, that they were apparently either getting a low viral load of COVID-19, or if they were infected, They were not passing it along to their parents, and therefore this really is adult-to-adult transmission.
	The kids are actually not infecting the people around them, which would be really good news.
	It would basically mean that it's time to open up the schools because the key with opening up the schools is not that we are afraid kids are going to infect each other.
	We've seen, I believe, double-digit deaths in the United States, maybe, in terms of the number of children who have died total across the United States.
	Under the age of 20, the numbers are insanely, insanely low.
	This is just not a dangerous disease in terms of death for those who are under the age of 20.
	In fact, in terms of death, it's really not even that dangerous for those under the age of 30, so long as you don't have a significant pre-existing condition.
	If those people cannot even pass along the infection, well then what you're really talking about is it's time to get all those kids back to school.
	Because even if they come home, having been hit with COVID-19, they're not going to pass it along to mom and dad.
	There's a study from Iceland that suggests exactly this.
	According to sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk, they did an interview with Roger Highfield, who's the science director in Iceland.
	And they talked with Kerry Stephenson, the CEO of the Icelandic company DecoGenetics in Reykjavik, which has studied the spread of COVID-19 in Iceland with Iceland's Directorate of Health and the National University Hospital.
	Kerry Stephenson says that children don't seem to be passing this along, actually, which obviously is really, really good news.
	They say children under 10 are less likely to get infected than adults.
	If they get infected, they are less likely to get seriously ill.
	What is interesting is that even if children do get infected, they are less likely to transmit the disease to others than adults.
	We've not found a single instance of a child infecting parents in Iceland.
	Not one.
	Which is kind of shocking, because pretty much every flu bug that I've gotten in the last three years has been from my kids.
	If you have kids, you know that they are little germ factories.
	They go to school, and they interact with all the other little germ factories, and then they come home, and they spit on you, and now you're sick.
	Well, if it turns out that COVID-19 is actually not impacting children the same way as adults, and in fact, children are not transmission vectors, then that is really, really good news.
	Meanwhile, other good news.
	The U.S.
	rates are continuing to decline.
	Scott Gottlieb, former head of the FDA, Actually tweeted out a chart yesterday showing that in the last week, the United States ran an average of 270,000 tests per day with a total of more than 2 million tests runs.
	The number of tests is going steadily up and the number of positive cases are continuing to go down.
	So the United States continues to see a decline in the in the rate of positivity.
	Now, it is possible that this is the after effect, likely that this is the after effect of lockdown, right?
	Lockdown means that fewer people are out there interacting with other people and you're not seeing a spike in the cases.
	What it does mean is that we are not in any danger right now of overwhelming the healthcare system, like, at all.
	That is not a danger now.
	If there's a massive spike, could we be on the verge of overwhelming the healthcare system again?
	Sure, theoretically.
	Although the fact is that the biggest population center in the United States, New York, was already really, really hard hit.
	And even in New York and in places like New Jersey, the main disease vectors happened at old age homes.
	So what that means is that if you can protect very specific spaces, as we're going to talk about, then you have a better shot of tranching populations, which is something I've been talking about since the very beginning.
	Another piece of good news, Scott Gottlieb tweeted out an important finding that was put out by a group in, I believe this is Great Britain.
	And the finding was that it was put out by a series of professors, M. Gabriela Gomez, Ricardo Aguas, Rodrigo Corder.
	What they found is that it is possible that herd immunity to COVID-19 does not require 60 to 70% of the population to be immune.
	They say that because there's variation in susceptibility, meaning that kids do not pass this thing along, and there's a lot of people who obviously are not supremely vulnerable to COVID-19, if you want to hit herd immunity, you may not actually have to hit 60-70% of the population.
	You may only need to hit 40% of the population.
	Which would mean that the policy of attempting to stop the spread completely is actually wrongheaded.
	Scott Gottlieb points out that this would radically change the math.
	He says, Let's take New York.
	Zero prevalence studies done earlier show up to 20% were exposed to COVID.
	It's higher now as the epidemic grew.
	So if 30% of the New York City population zero convert, the city could be closer to herd immunity than the 60% presumed needed.
	Which would be a huge story, right?
	That would be a really, really good piece of news.
	We'd probably see that first in Sweden, right?
	Because Sweden, a heavy percentage of their population already has had COVID-19.
	The antibody tests in Sweden are showing well over 30% of places like Stockholm already have had COVID-19, already have antibodies for COVID-19.
	And apparently they're starting to see a collapse in their death rates.
	Those are the early reports is finally they're starting to see that long-awaited collapse in their death rates.
	We'll give you a little more good news in just one second because there are there's a major race for a vaccine going on right now.
	We'll talk about that momentarily.
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	Okay, other pieces of good news.
	There are a bunch of competing vaccines that are now on the table, according to Wired.com.
	It's been four months since researchers in China sequenced the novel coronavirus known as COVID-19.
	At least 3.8 million people around the world have been diagnosed with COVID-19.
	As of Friday morning, more than 267,000 people have died a vaccine.
	could stop the virus before an infection can take hold.
	And we are seeing a bunch of different options that are popping up.
	Clinical testing generally has three stages, says Wired.
	Phase one involves a few dozen healthy volunteers.
	Phase two expands to several hundred in the outbreak area.
	And phase three repeats the experiment with several thousand.
	Then FDA officials have to review the data and decide if the shot is safe and effective enough to approve.
	All of these vaccines are basically being accelerated.
	There are a bunch of different vaccines that are on the table.
	There's one from a company called Moderna.
	There's one from the Oxford Group.
	There's one from CanSino Biologics.
	So it is possible that we are moving toward a vaccine as well.
	So that is a fair bit of good news.
	The Johnson & Johnson Chief Science Officer actually came out yesterday and he said, listen, a vaccine is probably going to be available this year, which would certainly be good news as well.
	Is there any possibility that the hope that the president had called for earlier in the week that there could actually be some kind of an effective vaccine in 2020?
	Is that realistic at all?
	Well, clinical trials will need to be done to show that it's effective, and that will take some time.
	We will have some vaccine available this year, but it will depend on the authorities, the FDA and others, to decide whether it can be used earlier, before clear efficacy data are available.
	Okay, so hopefully we are looking at the possibility of a vaccine sometime later this year.
	Okay, all of these pieces of good news suggest that the lockdown policies that we are pursuing right now are not exactly the smartest move.
	The reason they are not the smartest move is because one of the things that is obvious, that lockdown has prevented the spread, which I assume is good news, But when I say I think it's good news, it's good news in the sense that if you're hoping that something is magically going to change, then you have bought yourself some time.
	But the strategies that are now being pursued are simply not being accurately portrayed by the media.
	So we are seeing experts who are saying things like, we need tens of thousands of contact tracers before we can reopen.
	Well, just a question.
	What is contract tracing designed to do?
	In the United States, it is designed to prevent viral outbreaks, right?
	Real massive outbreaks.
	But we are going to know that because of the fact that so much of this is transmitted asymptomatically.
	We're first going to know about the outbreak, not by people contact tracing individual cases, per se, because it's going to be very difficult to contact trace for people who are asymptomatic.
	You're mostly going to know that when people start showing up at hospitals en masse.
	So this works when you have a zero baseline in terms of cases.
	Contact tracing works in South Korea, but it only works in South Korea so long as people are locked down for a significant period of time.
	As soon as the lockdowns end, by the way, South Korea is seeing a spike again.
	Now, Scott Gottlieb is pushing fast acting testing.
	He says that maybe if we can get really fast acting testing, that that might be a game changer.
	One of the problems with the fast acting tests is they're 85% effective.
	85% ain't 100.
	In fact, it ain't even close to 100.
	85% means that you could go in and there's a 15 in 100 chance that you still have the thing and you're testing negative for it.
	So that is not exactly comforting when you're talking about the massive kind of numbers the United States has in terms of human beings who could be moving this virus along.
	Here was Scott Gottlieb yesterday on CBS News.
	And by the way, when I say that the purpose of testing is to prevent the spikes that overwhelm the healthcare system, you know who told me that?
	Scott Gottlieb, on one of our Sunday specials.
	So this is not coming from nowhere.
	I asked him specifically, what's the purpose of testing?
	He said the purpose of testing is not to wipe out the virus, it's to prevent the spikes.
	So as long as you are preventing the spikes, then presumably you've got enough testing, you've got enough contact tracers.
	The idea that we're going to contact trace this thing into oblivion is just not reality.
	Not in a country of 330 million people with 1.3 million diagnosed cases.
	Here's Scott Gottlieb.
	This kind of technology is a real game changer.
	And this test was authorized by the FDA under the leadership of Jeff Sherin, who runs that device center in 24 hours from receiving the application.
	What it is, it's a very rapid test that can be used in a doctor's office.
	Doctors now have about 40,000 of these Sophia machines already installed in their offices.
	And you do a simple nasal swab and the test itself scans for the antigens that the virus produces.
	The test is about 85% sensitive, so let's say 100 people come into a doctor's office who have COVID-19.
	85 of them are going to be able to be tested positive with this test very quickly.
	Okay, but the problem is, what about the other 15 who then go out and they spread it?
	I mean, the fact is that an 85% effective test is better than a 0% effective test, but even an 85% effective test, what that is going to do is it's going to prevent the overwhelming of the healthcare system, which was the point of the lockdowns.
	I understand we've now shifted our talk about what the lockdowns were designed to do.
	They were not designed to slow the spread indefinitely.
	What they were designed to do is prevent the spread from overwhelming the healthcare system.
	I cannot emphasize this enough.
	The narrative has changed.
	And the reason the narrative has changed is because we have now shifted from a world where there was an actual timeline to a world where there is no timeline.
	The world of slow the spread so we don't overwhelm the healthcare system assumes that when we don't overwhelm the healthcare system and we get low enough below that medical resources line, then people are going to have to start moving back into work.
	Because otherwise the economy is completely stopped and also because eventually there is going to need to be some form of herd immunity whether it comes through vaccine or whether it comes naturally.
	And then the question is all the risks and rewards of the various policies.
	But what you've seen in sort of the public terminology about all this stuff is that lockdown policies are now being justified for their own sake.
	Meaning the proof of the lockdowns working is that the spread is slow.
	But we already knew that that's what lockdowns were designed to do.
	The question is what the endpoint of that is.
	If you shift it into, we're supposed to lockdown indefinitely to slow the spread, the indefinitely means that there is no endpoint.
	It means there is no timeline.
	And people are simply not going to abide by that.
	Especially when it is perfectly obvious that the moment we leave our homes, I'm constantly astonished by the media treating it in shocked fashion when there are increases in diagnosed cases after lockdowns end.
	What do you think was the purpose of the lockdown, you idiots?
	Of course, if the lockdowns were good for anything, it was to prevent people from infecting each other.
	But the purpose of the lockdown was not just to prevent people from infecting each other.
	It was to prevent people from infecting each other to the level where the healthcare system could not cope with everybody.
	The media's coverage of this stuff is just garbage.
	It really is terrible.
	I mean, it's really, really bad media coverage.
	I mean, the fact is that when we look at Asia, for example, the lockdowns have been ending, and you know what's happening?
	Their cases are spiking there, too.
	So we get blamed here in the United States.
	Oh, well, you know, you end lockdown in Georgia, you're going to get a spike in cases.
	South Korea is seeing a spike in cases.
	According to the Wall Street Journal, more than 50 cases have been linked to a 29-year-old man who in a single night last week visited five clubs and bars in a popular Seoul neighborhood, health officials said.
	He tested positive on Wednesday.
	The same day the South Korean government rolled out relaxed social distancing measures.
	The country of roughly 51 million people hasn't resorted to a lockdown like the U.S.
	and Europe.
	Instead, South Korea relied on aggressive testing, tech-heavy contact tracing, and a willingness by many to stay indoors.
	Yes, but that's because they were diagnosed with like 10,000 cases total.
	They never had the giant widespread cases.
	And again, I have a question.
	If the South Korean government was rolling out relaxed social distancing measures, then they were in fact in part lockdown.
	Relaxed social distancing measures implies that there were pretty harsh social distancing measures.
	Meanwhile, we are seeing an uptick in other areas of the world as well.
	South Korean President Moo Jae-in spoke Sunday after a new cluster of coronavirus cases emerged in Seoul.
	He said it's not over until it's over.
	South Korea was among the first places to deal with the coronavirus epidemic and seemed to be on track to loosen restrictions after weeks of social distancing measures and careful surveillance.
	But now they're going to re-up the restrictions again.
	Meanwhile, I think that it's important to note, when people look at some of the models, and not South Korea, but even South Korea actually, if you look at the models in Asia, one of the things they've been doing is stuff that we just would not tolerate in the United States.
	I'll explain in just one second.
	Like, they're actually doing things we will not tolerate in the United States in a free country.
	I'll explain.
	First, let's talk about the fact that you are at home right now, but you got a problem with your car.
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	Okay, so as I say, it is important to recognize that while we, people in the United States, in the media particularly, look at South Korea like, oh, what if we just did like South Korea, like contact tracing and all that.
	You wanna know what's the thing that South Korea has been doing?
	If you test positive for COVID-19, they literally remove you from your home and they put you in a dorm.
	You think that Americans are going to tolerate this?
	According to the Wall Street Journal, across swaths of Asia, from China's coronavirus epicenter of Wuhan to Singapore and South Korea, the well-known strategies of tracing and testing have worked in tandem with a third big logistical task.
	And this is the part nobody's been talking about because they think that Americans will just ignore this.
	Isolating mild cases outside their homes.
	A sprawling Singapore exhibition center known for hosting an aerospace show now has thousands of beds for patients with mild or no symptoms.
	So you test positive for COVID-19?
	And you feel fine?
	And you're good?
	They will say to you, you're going to infect people in your house.
	We will force you to stay in this jail cell along with a thousand other people, effectively.
	South Korea used dormitories including those belonging to Samsung Life Insurance and LG Display Company for the same purpose.
	People who test positive can neither decline to be isolated in these facilities nor remain at home.
	So Chris Cuomo would have immediately been carted off to some facility to stay with a thousand other dudes in a mass facility.
	In Vietnam and Hong Kong, where relatively contained outbreaks have made it possible for hospitals to take in both mild and severe cases, authorities have gone a step further.
	They separate not just confirmed cases, but also close contacts of the sick in facilities.
	So you are not even infected, and they will take you and they will throw you into some sort of confinement.
	This approach, as the Wall Street Journal points out, is vastly different from much of the West, where those that need medical care are admitted to hospitals, while mild cases are largely asked to self-isolate.
	Many public health experts in Europe and the U.S.
	say it's time to change that.
	Others argue it goes too far by constraining civil liberties and separating people from their loved ones.
	Well, yeah, I don't think the American people are up for that.
	You think that if my wife were to get COVID-19, I would be like, okay, honey, I'm sorry, we're gonna have to ship you off to a facility for two weeks?
	Run by the government?
	Like, my parents, like, what are you talking about?
	What are you talking, especially because we don't even know how this disease works.
	I mean, what if my parents are asymptomatic because they have a low viral load, and then they go somewhere and they get a heavier viral load?
	Like, we don't know anything about how this disease works yet.
	This is pretty incredible stuff, but nobody has reported on this.
	In South Korea, many mild cases were isolated at home, but authorities converted corporate dormitories equipped with little more than beds, Wi-Fi, and the occasional television for those who weren't in critical or serious condition.
	They actually amended their infectious disease law, allowing it to take action against those who refused to follow orders.
	Individuals could not contest the decision.
	So how exactly do you think that that's going to work in the United States?
	That sound like a good plan for you in the United States?
	Yeah, I didn't think so.
	And meanwhile, the media continue to push these lockdowns as the only possible solution, even though, again, they are not a solution.
	They are not a solution.
	And there's a piece, and they're particularly not a solution when you talk about the countervailing problems here, including the complete collapse of the world economy.
	There's a study that came out last week suggesting there could be 75,000 deaths of despair from suicide, drug, and alcohol abuse.
	That seems like a low-end estimate to me.
	It seems to me like it's gonna be a lot more than that if you're talking about 20% unemployment, which is what we are talking about at this point.
	But again, the language around the lockdowns has changed.
	It went from, don't swamp the system to, what if we just kept this thing tamped down indefinitely?
	This is why you see people like, there's a University of Washington professor on TV yesterday talking about, we're going to see an increase in cases.
	Yeah, we know that.
	That's not the question.
	The question isn't whether we see an increase in cases.
	The question is whether we have the medical capacity to deal with the cases that come in.
	And by the way, the truth is that when it comes to medical capacity and people being swamped, most of the people who ended up on ventilators died.
	The 90% of people who ended up on ventilators died.
	So all of the talk about ventilators and the Trump administration's shortcoming with regard to ventilators, talk about the media completely blowing it.
	The media were focused on ventilators day in and day out.
	Ventilators, ventilators, ventilators.
	Now it turns out we're going to have way too many ventilators.
	There's a piece, according to the Associated Press, They literally titled the piece, Becoming King of Ventilators May Result in Unexpected Glut.
	So the media for months pounded Trump on, you're not handing out the ventilators.
	Cuomo, we don't have enough ventilators.
	We need ventilators.
	So Trump was like, okay, we'll ramp up the ventilators.
	He even invoked the Defense Production Act for the production of ventilators.
	Now we're going to have like 100,000 ventilators.
	And it turns out doctors aren't even using ventilators because ventilators may in fact be exacerbating the problem.
	Especially for people who are coming in and they can breathe okay, but their oxygen saturation isn't very good.
	So, but apparently Trump is to blame when we have too many ventilators and also when we have too few ventilators.
	And so here's this University of Washington professor noting, oh yeah, by the way, there might be additional cases as we open up.
	Yeah, we know.
	We know.
	The question is, what is the purpose of keeping us locked down?
	And there may be a purpose.
	Maybe the purpose is we think that we're not going to be able to stop the infection hitting vulnerable people.
	That's a purpose.
	So then, tailor your strategy so we can protect the vulnerable.
	Like, for example, at the old age homes.
	Here's this University of Washington professor.
	What's driving the change is, simply put, the rise in mobility.
	And that's the key driver.
	We're seeing in some states, you know, a 20 percentage point increase in just 10 days in mobility.
	And that will translate into more human contact, more transmission.
	Our suspicion is that there will be, about 10 days from now, in these places that have had these big increases in mobility, we are expecting to see a jump in cases.
	Of course we're expecting to see a jump in cases.
	The question is, what is the purpose of preventing the jump in cases?
	And don't tell me you're preventing deaths when you literally don't have a strategy for preventing death for people who are infected.
	And you also understand that right now, people are going to get infected.
	The minute you let people out of lockdown, there will be additional infections.
	And we cannot stay locked down forever because it turns out 66% of new infections in New York are based on people who are members of the family staying in the same houses with other people.
	I'm going to give you some of the dishonest arguments that are being made by so-called health experts.
	And again, there are a lot of health experts who are on the other side of the lockdown argument, like a lot of them.
	I've talked to many of them.
	The question right now is not the science.
	Everybody kind of agrees on the science.
	There will be more infections.
	There will be more deaths.
	We don't necessarily know what exactly the infection case fatality rate, the infection fatality rate is.
	It could be anywhere from 0.2 to 0.6 in all likelihood.
	But we do know that more people out there will mean more infections.
	That's not the question.
	The question is, what is the strategy?
	And the dishonesty when it comes to approaching the strategy is quite incredible.
	We'll get to that in just a moment.
	First, let's talk about the Second Amendment.
	So, if you're a believer in the Second Amendment, you really should have a gun that works for you.
	And let me tell you, the Second Amendment has never been more important.
	I mean, we're watching, seriously, as local law enforcement is basically being informed by the politicos that they should not actually enforce the law.
	I have a friend down the block the other day who literally, I'll get to this a little later in the program, I really have a friend who was robbed within two days.
	And like two days ago, somebody tried to rob their house.
	And the only reason these people ran is because the guy had a gun.
	And then the police came and said, we can't do anything about it because we have zero bail here in Los Angeles.
	So all that'll happen is that we'll arrest them and then we'll have to let them out of jail the same day.
	So what's the purpose of even arresting them?
	I mean, this is insanity.
	Having a gun in order to defend yourself and your property and your family makes a hell of a lot of sense in order to protect against the destruction of American rights.
	You know who agrees with me?
	Bravo Company Manufacturing.
	BCM builds a professional-grade product built to combat standards.
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	With that in mind, every component of a BCM rifle is hand-assembled and tested by Americans.
	The people of BCM feel it is their moral responsibility as Americans to provide tools that are not going to fail the user when it's not just a paper target but somebody coming to do them harm.
	Owning a firearm is not about just going target shooting or going hunting.
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	Great, great people.
	Okay, so let's talk for a second.
	about the case in favor of lockdown.
	So there's a piece by Leanna Nguyen, emergency physician and visiting professor at the George Washington University Milken Institute of Public Health.
	She served as Baltimore's health commissioner.
	So she talks about six arguments that are made in favor of ending lockdown.
	So here are the arguments that she says are bad.
	Instead of preventing COVID-19, we should let people infect each other to achieve herd immunity.
	She says herd immunity occurs when enough people in a community, generally 60-80%, develop antibodies to an illness either through vaccination or recovery.
	Banking on herd immunity without a vaccine is a dangerous proposition.
	It's unclear whether people acquire immunity after contracting COVID-19.
	Even if those who recover become immune, an infection rate of 60% could mean nearly 200 million infected Americans.
	Millions could die.
	Okay, so, question.
	What?
	There's no vaccine.
	There's no therapeutic.
	Do you have an alternative?
	Like, seriously, what is your alternative?
	Whenever people say we can't allow herd immunity to take place, vaccines create herd immunity.
	That is the purpose of a vaccine.
	And by the way, we do not have good information that there have been reinfections.
	We've had false positives on tests.
	There's not been good information that people are reinfected after they develop antibodies for COVID-19.
	So I keep wondering.
	People say herd immunity is very bad.
	We can't allow herd immunity.
	It's super dangerous.
	Do you have an alternative?
	Again, protect the most vulnerable.
	The point of developing herd immunity is, let's say that you need 60% of people to get COVID-19 in order to develop herd immunity, right?
	Because then there's just not enough people, the replication rate drops below one because there are not enough people who can pass this on.
	What if we could theoretically ensure that the people most likely to get COVID-19 before herd immunity is reached are the least vulnerable?
	So for example, let's say 60%, let's say 70% of your population is young and healthy.
	Right, people under the age of 40, children, people who don't have significant pre-existing conditions, not people in old age homes in other words.
	So you can protect the people who are most vulnerable and ensure that the people who are most likely to get COVID-19 are people who are younger and people who are healthier.
	Well, that would probably be the safest way to do this, right?
	I mean, that is the controlled avalanche strategy, because not everybody is equally likely to die of COVID-19, even if everybody is equally susceptible to getting COVID-19.
	Okay, argument number two.
	Most cases of COVID-19 are mild.
	We can keep older people home and allow young, healthy people to go back to school and work.
	First, she says this is wrong for multiple reasons.
	She's going to have to explain that to literally every policymaker in Europe and the United States, because that is the plan, guys.
	That is the plan.
	That is the plan in Israel.
	It is the plan in Sweden.
	It is the plan in Italy.
	It is the plan in Germany.
	That is the plan everywhere.
	She says older people aren't the only ones contracting COVID-19.
	One in five patients requiring hospitalization in the United States are aged 20 to 44.
	Okay, first of all, that suggests that four and five are over the age of 50, basically.
	Infected people in their 30s and 40s are dying of strokes.
	This is one of my... I am so irritated by the lack of statistical exactitude in pieces like this.
	When she says, infected people in their 30s and 40s are dying of strokes, that's true.
	Are they doing so in mass numbers?
	Are we seeing thousands and thousands of cases of people in their 30s and 40s dying of strokes?
	The answer is no, we are not.
	So when you equate the chief method of death for COVID-19, which effectively is you die of pneumonia after you get COVID-19 because your lungs stop functioning properly.
	You actually drown.
	It's really horrifying.
	And when you conflate the rate of that in older people versus infected people in their 30s and 40s are dying of strokes.
	That is not an intelligent response.
	You need to give an actual statistical breakdown.
	She says, even if young people are not as likely as older individuals to become severely ill, they can be asymptomatic carriers who spread the virus.
	Okay, but the entire presupposition of your argument here is that we were going to protect the older and vulnerable.
	So even if they're carriers and they carry it to people who are less vulnerable, that's not that big a deal.
	And then she says, okay, people are getting sick and dying from other illnesses in greater numbers than COVID-19.
	She says, this is a bad argument for lockdown.
	She says, it's true that emergency department visits for other illnesses are decreasing and patients are eschewing medical treatment because they fear risking infection.
	Allowing the coronavirus to spread without restrictions would lead to hospital overcrowding, further inhibiting patients from obtaining necessary care.
	Controlling the pandemic would create confidence and increase people's willingness to seek care for other conditions.
	Okay, well, again, I agree, but that goes back to the overwhelming the healthcare system.
	Right?
	You do want to make sure that as we release here, we release the healthiest population so you don't overwhelm the healthcare system.
	The question is not what percent of population and what percent of hospitalizations are young.
	The question is what percentage of young people are being hospitalized.
	Those are two separate questions.
	And then she says, it's worth the sacrifice if some people die so this country has a functioning economy.
	She says, this is a false choice.
	I agree it's a false choice.
	I agree it's a false choice.
	Nobody is saying that it is worth the sacrifice if some people die so the country has a functioning economy.
	What we are talking about is the inevitability of infection and how do we get past this the fastest so that we reduce the amount of death and we reduce the amount of human suffering.
	So what does she do to respond to that argument?
	Instead, she suggests that if you're in favor of Ending lockdowns, tapering off lockdowns, it's because you don't care about people of color.
	That's literally what she says.
	what she says minorities and working class Americans of all ethnicities unable to shelter at home will continue to bear the brunt of infections illness and death individual liberty cannot take precedence over the health and well-being of less privileged okay nobody is suggesting that we want to send people who are vulnerable back to work if you are if you're a black person who is vulnerable you should not go back to work under these If you're an elderly Hispanic person, you should not go back to work under these conditions.
	Nobody is urging that to happen.
	We should make provision for you.
	But if you are a young, healthy, 25-year-old Hispanic man, you should probably be thinking about going back to work, especially if you're not living with somebody who is 60 or over.
	And then she says, we've been in lockdown for more than a month and cases aren't declining, social distancing doesn't work.
	No, we know that social distancing does work.
	Nobody's making that argument.
	And finally, she says it's a bad argument to end lockdown because we can't keep the country in lockdown until a vaccine is developed, which could take years.
	She says, no one is arguing to extend stay-at-home orders for years, but reopening criteria set by the White House's own Coronavirus Task Force have not been met.
	Removing restrictions too soon would have predictably grim results.
	Okay, but you have not offered an alternative.
	Again, there are no alternatives offered.
	It's amazing how many people will just say lockdown when there are no alternatives offered.
	And as you will see, this translates over into public policy.
	So for example, J.B.
	Pritzker, who is the governor of Illinois, He said yesterday that we will continue this until we are, we'll continue the lockdowns indefinitely.
	Literally indefinitely.
	We'll do it pretty much forever until there is some way to eradicate it.
	Before we would have a vaccine, assuming maybe we never get a vaccine, we're going to have to deal with, you know, hopefully a treatment that will come along that will be very effective.
	But even without that, everyone's going to have to wear a mask.
	We're still going to have to socially distance.
	The truth is that coronavirus is still out there.
	It hasn't gone anywhere.
	And so we all are going to have to change the way we do things until we're able to eradicate it.
	That is, we're not going to be able to change anything until we're able to eradicate it.
	So we're locking down until we can eradicate this.
	Good luck with that.
	And then you have Andrew Cuomo suggesting maybe physical schooling is actually over.
	Maybe we'll stop physically schooling children.
	And then you're going to make the case that kids have to go to public school as opposed to homeschooling.
	Explain, Andrew Cuomo.
	You know, the old model of everybody goes and sits in a classroom and the teacher is in front of that classroom and teaches that class and...
	And you do that all across the city, all across the state, all these buildings, all these physical classrooms.
	Why?
	With all the technology you have.
	It's not about just reopening schools.
	When we are reopening schools, let's open a better school.
	And let's open a smarter education system.
	He said maybe remote learning could be the wave of the future.
	So we're just gonna end schools now.
	How is any of this productive policy?
	It's quite possible, by the way, even according to a lot of experts, that closing the schools was a mistake in the first place because it actually put kids at home with mom and dad and grandpa and grandma.
	Speaking of blown public policy, this is the same Andrew Cuomo who says, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, by the way, we're reversing our nursing home policy.
	It was his garbage nursing home policy that forced nursing homes to take back in people with COVID-19 that probably led to a vast spate of deaths in New York.
	Hospitals going forward cannot discharge a patient to a nursing home unless the patient tests negative for COVID-19.
	So we're just not going to send a person who is positive to a nursing home after a hospital visit.
	Period.
	But he's a hero because he wants lockdown.
	This dolt didn't put these policies into place until May.
	Until the middle of May.
	So from the beginning of March to May, the policy in New York State was, if an 80-year-old goes into the hospital to test positive for COVID-19, send them back to the nursing home.
	That was the policy in New York.
	Hero of the Republic, Andrew Cuomo.
	And I'm supposed to listen to him about how lockdown policy is supposed to work?
	I'm not going to trust leaders like Andrew Cuomo, are you?
	Or J.B.
	Pritzker?
	Do these people sound like they have any sort of calibrated approach to this issue?
	I'll tell you who does sound like they have a more calibrated approach is Mike DeWine in Ohio, right?
	Mike DeWine has been very pro-lockdown throughout this process.
	He's opening this thing up, and he was asked, okay, well, you haven't exactly hit the White House's marks as far as the sustained level of decline in cases, so why are you doing that?
	The purpose of the lockdown was to prevent people from overwhelming the healthcare system, and we have measures to prevent that from overwhelming the healthcare system.
	This is a person who actually understands what lockdowns were designed to do, as opposed to everybody else who keeps dragging on these lockdowns because they have no idea what they were designed to do, apparently.
	What we do now have, Chris, is great capacity in regard to testing.
	We did not have that two weeks ago.
	We are standing up a big force of people to do, to go talk to people, to run that virus down, isolate people.
	So those are two things we did not have before.
	It's a work in progress.
	We're getting that.
	By the way, worth noting, Brian Kemp, the governor of Georgia, who's been ripped up and down for reopening, he actually put out a tweet yesterday saying, guess what guys?
	Actually, we are seeing some fairly low hospitalizations.
	Every time there's a bad day in Florida, it turns into, you reopened and now people are dying.
	But they never report when there's a good day.
	day in places like Georgia, Brian Kemp said today marks the lowest number of COVID-19 positive patients currently hospitalized statewide since hospitals began reporting this data April 8th.
	Today also marks the lowest number of ventilators in use, 897, with another 2,000 available.
	We will win this fight together.
	Also worth noting, talk about projections in California, cases and deaths rising more than expected.
	We'll get to that in just one second because it is worth looking at the overall numbers in terms of excess deaths, meaning how many deaths over normal is COVID-19 providing in states like California.
	We'll get to that in a second.
	Plus, we're going to get to Barack Obama, who's reinserting himself into the political debate.
	I'm sure that Donald Trump is most excited about all that.
	He loves that debate.
	We'll get to that in just one second.
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	So, as I say, there's a new study out today suggesting that California is going to see a major spike in cases.
	Christopher Murray, who is the director of the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, that is the IHME study that is constantly being used, that model, he says, some states where cases and deaths are going to go up more than we expected.
	Illinois, Maine, Arizona, Florida, California.
	Researchers are predicting California could see more than 6,000 COVID-19 deaths by the end of August, up from 1,420 from projections released on Monday.
	The upward revisions are a result of the combination of updated daily death and case data, recent actions to ease previously implemented social distancing measures, and steadily rising levels of mobility in many places.
	California added about 2,200 coronavirus cases and 64 related deaths on Saturday.
	40% of the new cases were reported by LA County, which makes sense.
	It's a population center.
	As were 45 of the new deaths.
	The state is now up to about 2,700 deaths statewide.
	Okay, now here's the question.
	The question is, how many deaths is this overall in California?
	Because California is a state of 40 million people.
	So 40 million people, let's say there's 6,000 deaths by the end of August for 40 million people.
	On a weekly basis, on a weekly basis in the state of California, 1,200 people die of heart disease.
	1,100 people die of cancer on a weekly basis.
	We're talking about the end of August.
	Right now it is May.
	So if you're talking about 6,000 people who die of this by August, and then let's say you fast forward that, let's say you double it for the year.
	So you end up by 12,000 by the end of the year, which would be a high number, right?
	It's a big number.
	Every life lost, horrifying and tragic.
	You're still talking about something that charts at like number five, perhaps?
	Number four, number five in terms of death causes in the state of California.
	In the state of California, you see something like 207, 240,000 people die every year in California.
	So it is an increase.
	It is a significant increase, but it is not a doubling of the state rate of death in the state of California when you talk about COVID-19, right?
	Again, it's really bad, but it is important to put that in perspective.
	If you're talking about the total number of deaths that are going to be attributable to COVID-19 over the entire country over the course of the next year, you're probably talking about increasing the deaths in the United States by somewhere between 4% and 5% total.
	It's not a 50% increase.
	It's not a 10% increase.
	It's a 5% increase.
	Horrible.
	Terrible.
	No good.
	We should do whatever we can to prevent that.
	But the question is, how do we prevent that?
	How do we stop that the fastest?
	And locking things down, all that's going to cause, honestly, here's what's going to happen.
	States that are locked down are going to see people leave.
	So Elon Musk basically said this yesterday.
	He said, listen, I'm just going to move Tesla out of California.
	I'm not going to stick around here.
	He said, Tesla is filing a lawsuit against Alameda County immediately.
	The unelected and ignorant interim health officer of Alameda is acting contrary to the governor, the president, our constitutional freedoms, and just plain common sense because they continue to keep the factories shut.
	Meanwhile, speaking of lack of common sense, over in Washington state, and a bunch of different states actually, they've been lowering the ability of police to actually prosecute criminals in the middle of all of this.
	As my friend Jason Rantz writes over at KTTH, days after Governor Jay Inslee's coronavirus prisoner release plan, three inmates fresh out of jail are accused of re-offending, which of course is not a shock.
	And as I mentioned a little bit earlier, LA now has rules.
	There's no bail to be had.
	You go in, you're immediately released.
	No bail to be paid because we want people out of jails because people are infecting each other in the jails.
	So yesterday, my friend, his brother lives next door to him.
	His brother was robbed by three guys.
	These dudes just walked right into his house.
	And he was at home at the time.
	He was the only one at home at the time.
	And he shouted, My friend, who's his brother, immediately grabbed his gun because he lives next door and racked the shotgun.
	These guys took off down the street.
	They called the police.
	The police said they literally had these guys on tape.
	They had them on tape because they have security cameras.
	The police were like, sorry, there's nothing we can do about it.
	Because if we arrest them, they're just going to be out within five minutes.
	So we now have our police who are unable to do anything.
	You think people are going to want to live in states like California where you can't go to work?
	Where even with social distancing, you are still having pressure put on you not to open your business.
	Where if you are a landlord, right, if you're somebody who actually leases properties to others, you've been told that you cannot receive rent for a year.
	Not kidding, for a year.
	Because for six months, there's coronavirus relief, meaning you don't have to pay your rent.
	And then for another six months, it takes another six months just to adjudicate whether you can be evicted in places like California.
	You think anybody who has the means is gonna stay in California?
	There's gonna be a mad rush to get out of California if this kind of policy continues, especially if the policy does not seem to be calibrated to actually Ending this thing ASAP.
	And when I say this thing, I mean both COVID-19 and the lockdowns.
	Okay, meanwhile, you have President Obama sounding off on this.
	So it's very easy to be Barack Obama because you are never blamed for any of your own mistakes.
	It's pretty incredible.
	And Barack Obama's administration was chock full of corruption from Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch, Kathleen Sebelius at HHS, the IRS.
	There were a bunch of scandals during the Obama administration.
	He was treated with kid gloves the entire time because as America's first African-American president and as a historic president, President Obama was just treated with absolute lavish love by the media at all times.
	Well, this means that his perception of his own presidency is wildly skewed.
	He suggests that the response by the federal administration here has been an absolute chaotic disaster, as though he would have handled it any better.
	Again, I've yet to hear the Democratic policies recommended in February that would have done anything to stem what has happened here.
	Barack Obama might have a harsher view of states that are reopening, but there's no evidence to suggest that that is a better view than the states that are actually doing the reopening.
	Barack Obama did a conference call with his Obama supporters in advance of 2020.
	Here's what he had to say.
	It has been an absolute chaotic disaster when that mindset of what's in it for me And to heck with everybody else when that mindset is operationalized in our government.
	To heck with everybody else.
	What is he talking about?
	Who has that mindset?
	That strawmanning of people who just disagree with his policy predilections?
	The strawmanning of, well, you don't care about other people, obviously, right?
	All you do is, it's just every man for himself.
	Dog eat dog.
	Nobody's talking about that.
	What the hell are you saying?
	What are you saying?
	Again, it's amazing to me.
	Jared Polis in Colorado is pursuing the same policies as Brian Kemp in Georgia.
	And nobody talks about Jared Polis or Tim Walz in Minnesota.
	Or the governor of Maine.
	Or the governor of Montana, Steve Bullock, who never shut down in the first place.
	But according to Barack Obama, this is completely about the chaotic disaster and the dog-eat-dog mentality.
	That sort of high-handed garbage coming from Obama is nothing new.
	By the way, he didn't stop his criticism there.
	He also suggested, and this was even more ridiculous, he suggested that the release of Michael Flynn, the refusal to prosecute Michael Flynn, is all about politics inside the administration.
	As opposed to, you know, when Eric Holder was calling himself Barack Obama's wingman and Loretta Lynch was meeting on the tarmac with Bill Clinton while Hillary was under investigation.
	Now, that wasn't political at all.
	No politicization from the Barack Obama DOJ, as Barack Obama knew personally about the Michael Flynn phone calls and was directly asking people in the chain of command below him who should have known, like Sally Yates, about Michael Flynn in White House Oval Office meetings.
	No corruption at all.
	No corruption at all when the Barack Obama FBI and Barack Obama DOJ were working together with the tacit assumption that the Trump campaign was colluding with Russia, and then they're willing to bend virtually every rule in order to pursue that line of attack.
	Here's Barack Obama attacking the Trump administration for supposed corruption on Michael Flynn.
	There is no precedent that anybody can be blamed for someone who's been charged with perjury.
	Just getting off scot-free.
	That's the kind of stuff where you begin to get worried that basic, not just institutional norms, but our basic understanding of law is but our basic understanding of law is at risk.
	Okay, he's, I'm sorry, he was a joke when he was president.
	He was constantly, in high-handed language, doing exactly the same sort of tribalizing activity with regard to American politics he accuses others of.
	By the way, there is actually very good precedent for prosecutions being dropped against people because of corruption inside the prosecution.
	And at the high levels of politics, you know what there's no precedent for?
	Trying to prosecute a national security advisor on the basis that he had a conversation with the ambassador from Russia.
	That is not threatening that person with the Logan Act.
	That is insane.
	It's insane.
	And then not turning over exculpatory evidence.
	There's good evidence, by the way, of charges being dropped for lack of the prosecution doing what it was supposed to do.
	Perfect example.
	Same judge in this case, in the Flynn case, Judge Sullivan of the U.S.
	District Court for the District of Columbia.
	Back in 2009, he killed the prosecution of Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, who was convicted of violating federal ethics laws.
	It turns out a team of prosecutors from the DOJ did not hand over key exculpatory evidence and knowingly presented false evidence to the jury.
	So they killed the prosecution of Ted Stevens as well.
	So actually there is a fairly solid precedent for this.
	The Wall Street Journal points out Even discounting Obama's partisan audience, this gets the case willfully wrong.
	Flynn was never charged with perjury, lying under oath in a legal proceeding.
	Flynn pled guilty to a single count of lying to the FBI in a meeting at the White House that he was led to believe was a friendly chat among colleagues.
	As for Scott Free, that better applies to former President Bill Clinton, who lied under oath in a civil case and was impeached for perjury, but then was acquitted by the Senate.
	We understand why Obama wouldn't bring that up.
	The fact is that Obama was in the loop on this stuff.
	I mean, from what we understand, Barack Obama was in the loop on what his team was doing.
	And then he is talking about corruption inside the Trump DOJ for killing a prosecution that was obviously malicious in intent.
	Pretty wild stuff from Barack Obama.
	But it's got to be easy.
	When you've spent your entire political career being immune to slings and arrows, it's pretty easy to throw stones, is it not?
	Alrighty.
	And let's get to some things that I hate.
	So as I mentioned, the media coverage throughout the pandemic has been abysmal.
	The media coverage over the Flynn stuff is abysmal.
	The media have utterly beclowned themselves throughout a time when you actually need trust in institutions.
	So our political leaders don't appear to have a clue as to what they are doing.
	Andrew Cuomo in New York is saying things like, only now am I going to start, you know, washing the subways and making sure that the elderly are protected.
	But my policies on lockdown are the best and the media are cheering him along.
	My favorite is Chuck Todd.
	So Chuck Todd had himself a weekend, man.
	So Chuck Todd, he started off by suggesting there's no plan for what comes next from the administration.
	Because every time the administration presents a plan, you just suggest it is not a plan.
	It seems like the only plan that Chuck Todd and company want is the plan where everybody shuts down, or they just shout test and trace all the time, when test and trace is not actually a realistic strategy for a country of 330 million people with free movement and 80% asymptomatic transmission.
	Here's Chuck Todd.
	To say the administration's response to this coronavirus pandemic has been both confused and confusing, and it raises troubling questions.
	What's the plan for testing and contact tracing?
	Or does the federal government think that's just too hard to do without a breakthrough?
	What's the plan for maintaining social distancing as states reopen?
	What's the plan for making people feel confident about returning to work when even the White House can't keep the virus out?
	And what's the plan for treating this pandemic as our greatest national crisis since the Second World War?
	In other words, what's the plan?
	Okay, but you have not actually expressed what you think the plan is.
	And then you blame Trump when he allows other states to involve their own plans.
	So which is it?
	Do you want him to take national control?
	Or would you like Andrew Cuomo and Gavin Newsom to lead the way?
	Are you angry that we are too loose?
	Or are you angry that we are too strict?
	What exactly are you talking about?
	And again, by the way, the media have been abysmal throughout this.
	The media every day were going to the White House and asking about ventilators because Andrew Cuomo was talking about ventilators.
	It turns out that there was a 90% death rate on ventilators.
	They may have actually been counterproductive in many cases.
	And by the way, we're not going to need close to 100,000 ventilators.
	The Associated Press, as I mentioned earlier, is now reporting that we didn't need all these ventilators.
	We're going to have a surplus of 90,000 ventilators, guys.
	But you're saying that Donald Trump was evil for suggesting that New York would not need 40,000 ventilators, which, by the way, New York did not need.
	Then, that wasn't even the worst moment of the weekend for Chuck Todd.
	Chuck Todd, his show on NBC, deceptively edited Bill Barr.
	So Bill Barr, the Attorney General, and he's the one who decided they were going to drop charges against Michael Flynn on the basis that basically the prosecution had not turned over evidence showing that they were attempting to manipulate Flynn That they had no basis for the prosecution of Flynn in the first place.
	Essentially, they tried to drop the investigation against Flynn at the beginning of January and then it was revivified just in time to try and pressure him to turn on other members of the Trump administration or at least to go after him so that he would be outside the chain of command.
	So Bill Barr made a statement.
	The statement that Bill Barr made I want you to listen to this Bill Barr answer to a question about what will history say about this.
	Wait till you hear this answer.
	we may end up on the losing side of that.
	The reality is the reality.
	NBC deliberately miscut the clip of Bill Barr to make it look as though he is going to rewrite history in line with his own desires.
	It's just I mean, I'm sorry, this is just media corruption.
	I want you to listen to this Bill Barr answer to a question about what will history say about this?
	Wait till you hear this answer.
	Take a listen.
	When history looks back on this decision, how do you think it will Well, history is written by the winner, so it largely depends on who's writing the history.
	OK, he cuts it off right there, which sounds like, oh, we're the winners, so we're going to rewrite the history.
	That's not what he said.
	That's not what he said.
	Here is the rest of that.
	Do we have the rest of the clip?
	OK, here's what he here's what he actually said.
	He said history is written by the winner, so it largely depends on who's writing the history.
	But I think a fair history would say it was a good decision because it upheld the rule of law.
	It helped.
	It upheld the standards of the Department of Justice and it undid what was an injustice.
	So he wasn't saying that we're rewriting history because we have the power to do it.
	They literally cut the first two lines and then forgot the rest.
	Here's the rest of what Bill Barr had to say.
	History looks back on this decision.
	How do you think it will be written?
	Well, history is written by the winner, so it largely depends on who's writing the history.
	But I think a fair history would say it was a good decision because it upheld the rule of law.
	It upheld the standards of the Department of Justice, and it undid what was an injustice.
	Okay, so the media portrayed this as though it was Barr basically triumphantly stomping on the rule of law.
	That is not what he is doing there.
	Just be clowning themselves.
	In dramatic fashion, by the way, meet the press later.
	Put out a little tweet apologizing.
	Oh yeah, yeah, sorry, we mis-edited that.
	Really?
	I mean, that's amazing.
	By the way, that led Chuck Todd to say, well, Barr doesn't even bother to make the case he's upholding the rule of law.
	Literally in the next sentence, he makes that case.
	In the very next sentence.
	So Chuck Todd should either fire one of his producers, or Chuck Todd should take the hit for this one, because it really is bad.
	I was struck, Peggy, by the cynicism of the answer.
	It's a correct answer, but he's the Attorney General.
	He didn't make the case that he was upholding the rule of law.
	He was almost admitting that, yeah, this is a political job.
	No, he wasn't.
	He literally said it in the next sentence.
	Well done, our trusted mainstream media.
	By the way, speaking of our trusted mainstream media, media watchdog Brian Stelter.
	So, Brian Stelter, yesterday, he was very, very upset that people were covering Flynn in the right-wing media, that we on the conservative side were covering Michael Flynn.
	Now, let's be real about this.
	There are people, you know, my friend Dan Bongino has been covering this Flynn stuff in depth for a very long time, right, and making that case with alacrity.
	I gotta be honest with you, I wasn't super interested in the Flynn stuff until all the facts started to come out at the very end here, and when Bill Barr's DOJ really exposed to the public light the entire set of facts and circumstances surrounding Michael Flynn.
	There were people on the right when Mark Levin was covering this thing at length in ways that I was not.
	That's true.
	OK, but that's newsworthy.
	I covered it like a lot last week because it is extraordinarily newsworthy when it turns out that the Obama administration at the very top levels of the administration knew that its own FBI was basically skirting the rule of law in order to go after Michael Flynn, threatening him with a Logan Act violation, a law that has not been prosecuted successfully in 150 years.
	And then attempting to spin Dross into gold simply because everybody inside the chain of administration was convinced that the only reason Trump could have won is because of Russian interference and collusion.
	So Brian Stelter got mad about this.
	And Brian Stelter's like, why are they even covering this?
	Why don't they cover COVID?
	Why aren't they covering COVID?
	They only want to talk about Flynn.
	You guys talked about Russia nonstop for two and a half years.
	Nonstop.
	And then you talked about Ukraine for another half of a year.
	Are we allowed to talk about the fact that the Obama administration, basically because they were so convinced that Trump was evil and a Russian lackey, decided to violate the rule of law to go after people who actually had not committed crimes and keep investigations into them open?
	That they decided to wiretap members of the Trump foreign policy team, people like Carter Page.
	That they decided to do all this on the flimsiest of pretexts because they were convinced, in their confirmation bias way, that their political opponents were the bad guys.
	Are we allowed to talk about that for, how about like five minutes we just take for that?
	Okay, because I took like one episode.
	But here's Brian Stelzner saying, we can't talk about any of this.
	I mean, COVID's happening, man.
	It's so disappointing to look at what we're seeing from right-wing media these days, where there's such an obsession with the deep state and these revelations about the Russia probe and the decision about Michael Flynn.
	They're treating the Michael Flynn story like it's a bigger deal than the deaths of 2,000 Americans a day.
	When the president called in to Fox & Friends the other morning, Friday morning, right before the unemployment rate numbers came out, he talked about the Flynn case for 20 minutes before he was asked about the pandemic.
	In what right mind is any scandal, any political scandal, any Department of Justice story more important to ask the president about than the pandemic that's raging?
	What?
	What?
	I mean, it's kind of important when your former national security advisor is effectively accused of treason and colluding with the Russians and lying to other people about it so that you can flip him against other members of the administration.
	Then it turns out the whole thing was bullcrap.
	That's kind of a big deal.
	And when Obama knew about the calls all the way through, It turns out that Obama was aware of the Flynn phone call and was using that as a pretext to ask members of his own DOJ what exactly was going on with the Flynn case.
	That's kind of a big deal, but I'm amazed that Brian, what a media watchdog.
	What an objective media watchdog.
	How dare people talk about Michael Flynn when it's the biggest story in the country for at least one day.
	Amazing, amazing stuff.
	Okay, time for one more thing that I hate.
	And it's a bit of a biggie.
	So, This case of Ahmaud Arbery.
	We talked about this at length last week.
	This is the case of the 25-year-old black jogger in Georgia who was apparently spotted inside a construction site.
	He was looking around at a house that was under construction.
	And then somebody called the police on him and also apparently called their friends.
	And this led a father and son to grab the guns and go out and catch this guy.
	And so they roadblocked him.
	Somebody else was coming up from behind with a video camera.
	And you can see them blocking the road.
	This appears to have been by witness testimony the second time they confronted him.
	That's what it kind of sounds like to me.
	It sounds like they confronted him and told him to stop.
	And then he ran.
	And then they took the car around, stopped him on the road.
	And one of them had a shotgun, one of them had a handgun.
	He tried to charge around.
	Somebody confronted him with a gun.
	And thinking, hey, why are these guys presumably thinking This is kind of dangerous when these guys are trying to stop me with a gun.
	He then went after the guy with the gun and was shot in the process.
	And now these guys are being charged with murder.
	They should certainly be charged with at least manslaughter.
	Because the fact is that you don't go vigilante style trying to capture people when there is no evidence that a crime was committed in the first place.
	It is not a crime to walk around an open construction site.
	That is not a crime.
	This wasn't a guy charging out of a crime scene Covered in blood.
	And then you grab, because that wouldn't be a controversy, right?
	It's a controversy when somebody gets called the cops on because they were walking around an open construction site and then the guy's basically shot for his trouble for going around an open construction site.
	So there are some people who are very upset that folks like me were critical of the shooting of Arbery, which I frankly don't see how you can be not critical of the shooting of Arbery given the tape and given the circumstances.
	So, there was a tape of Arbery inside the construction site that was released over the weekend.
	And it basically shows Arbery walking around, again, an open construction site.
	That's pretty much all it shows.
	You know, there he is.
	He's walking.
	And you can see him kind of jogging into this open construction site.
	Because there's a commode out front.
	And then, he leaves.
	And there was tape from inside the house as well.
	You can see somebody spotting him and calling the police, I think, is what we are seeing on this tape, if we are contemporaneously describing.
	So he comes on out, and then he is going to jog away.
	Now, it is not a crime to be in an open construction site.
	And in fact, the homeowner who is linked to this case, and there's a picture of Arbery inside the construction site, a homeowner said his residence was never burglarized.
	He said, I've never had a police report of it or anything stolen from my property or any kind of robbery.
	He was having a waterfront home built in Brunswick, this homeowner.
	The 911 audio from before the shooting shows a caller reporting a black man in a white t-shirt at a house under construction.
	The operator asked if the subject was breaking into it, and the guy said, no, it's all open.
	It's under construction.
	He's running right now.
	There he goes right now.
	And the operator asked what the man in the white t-shirt was doing.
	The caller said the person was running down the street.
	The operator asked again, saying she needed to know if the man in white was doing anything wrong.
	The audio was somewhat garbled, but the caller said the man had been recorded on camera before as an ongoing thing.
	He also mentioned the man building the house was probably not going to finish it because of heart problems.
	So, again, no crime was actually being committed in this particular case.
	So, everybody was basically on board with this investigation.
	It turns out that probably what happened here is that the person, the elderly man, the older man who's 65, who was the father in this particular case, was very tight with the DAs, and one specific prosecutor decided to kill the charges.
	So it was an insider issue.
	It was an insider corruption issue is what it appears to be.
	Now, the Georgia state government is asking the DOJ to investigate the handling of the Arbery killing.
	Not just the killing, the handling of the killing.
	The Georgia state governor has denounced the slaying as horrific.
	President Trump called the shooting heartbreaking and very disturbing.
	Attorney General Chris Carr said in a statement, we are committed to a complete transparent review of how the Arbery case was handled from the outset.
	The family, the community, the state of Georgia deserve answers.
	We'll work with others in law enforcement at the state and federal level to find those answers.
	Esley Merritt, the lawyer representing Arbery's parents, applauded the move to further examine what he called the potential cover up of a murder.
	He said, we've requested the involvement of the DOJ since we first took this case.
	There are far too many questions about how this case was handled and why it took 74 days for two of the killers to be arrested and charged in Arbery's death.
	Hey, that is all of this is a good thing.
	This is why it's good that the video came out, because the right thing is happening.
	Right now we are going to have a full investigation of how this happened.
	Now, my theory here is that this has less to do with racism than it has to do with vigilantism, and then it has to do with corruption inside a system in which ex-cops get special treatment from prosecutors.
	And by the way, it's true that in certain cases, cops get special treatments from prosecutors as well, which is not a good thing, right?
	You don't want that.
	So, it seems to me that if racism does play a role in this, it is a more subtle role than the account that's being put forward by some, which is that these guys just decided to hunt down a black guy that day, which is not what the tape actually shows.
	What it shows is them trying to stop what they, for whatever reason, believe is a criminal.
	That does not mean that it's not manslaughter.
	You don't get to basically see a guy running on the street, or going into an open construction site, saying, oh, he's probably a criminal, I'm gonna go grab my gun and stop him.
	That's not a thing that you get to do.
	Okay, but this has not stopped the media from trying to polarize this by pretending that people are on different sides.
	Now, I don't think people are on different sides of this.
	I just cited you, Brian Kemp.
	I just cited you, Donald Trump.
	Now, I'm a conservative.
	Virtually every other mainstream conservative that I know is appalled by the footage and believes that these people should at the very least be brought before a grand jury and should be prosecuted.
	Everybody from the folks at National Review to the folks at Reason Magazine to the folks Over at the Federalist, like everybody's on the same page here.
	Daily Wire, we're all on the same page essentially.
	Which is that, this is vigilantism, and vigilantism has to be prosecuted.
	The only controversy is whether we know that these guys were doing this because they were racist or whether they were doing this because they had, or because they were, they were idiot vigilantes who decided they were going to go out and stop a crime that was not being committed or that there was no evidence of being committed.
	This has not stopped people from trying to, trying to polarize.
	And this is where the media really get ugly.
	I mean, this is ugly stuff.
	So here's Don Lemon suggesting that there's apathy about the shooting.
	Is there apathy?
	I miss the apathy.
	Because I talked about this for half an episode last week.
	Nearly a full episode last week.
	Everybody else I know has talked about this.
	There have been a variety of articles written about this and some interesting thing pieces.
	Like, there's no apathy.
	I don't know what Don Lemon is talking about here.
	We are tired of jumping on everyone else's bandwagon to help everybody else.
	To help women who are fighting discrimination in the workplace.
	To help the Me Too movement.
	To help everybody else.
	LGBTQ communities.
	When are people going to care?
	Us too.
	Us too.
	When are people going to care?
	Hashtag us too.
	When are people going to care about our issues?
	Why should African Americans care about opening up this country and rebuilding the economy if you're going to rebuild the economy on our backs when we are the people who are dying?
	What the?
	What?
	Why should black people care about reopening the economy?
	Because they're part of the economy.
	Who's saying that they want black people to die?
	This is just sheer malicious bullcrap from Don Lemon.
	Who doesn't care about black people?
	Who?
	Who's saying that it's... Really, what is he talking about?
	It's a deliberate attempt to polarize in a time when, again, there are not very many Americans who are saying this should go uninvestigated and unindicted.
	But this sort of nonsense continues.
	The Atlanta mayor tried to blame Trump.
	Tried to suggest that these guys were given permission by Trump to go black people hunting in the middle of Georgia.
	It's insane!
	I'm sorry, this is Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms in Atlanta.
	With the rhetoric that we hear coming out of the White House in so many ways, I think that many who are prone to being racist are given permission to do it in an overt way that we otherwise would not see in 2020.
	Because you have to remember, Jake, You know, in cities across this country, even if local leadership fails, there was always the backstop of our Justice Department to step in and make sure that people are appropriately prosecuted.
	But we don't have that leadership at the top right now.
	The DOJ is doing an active investigation right now.
	Right now.
	And then there was a Vanderbilt professor who tried to connect the Arbery shooting with the anti-lockdown protests, suggesting that somehow it's the same.
	You know, we're a country that allows anti-lockdown people to go to the Capitol with guns and they don't get shot.
	But if you're a black man running on the street, then you will get shot.
	OK, well, the people who did the shooting in Georgia are the ones who are getting prosecuted and they are white.
	What are you talking about?
	If you commit a crime, you should be prosecuted in the United States, obviously.
	And everyone who doesn't agree with this is an idiot.
	Here's this Vanderbilt professor trying to, you know, talk about how America is deeply racist when we're all on the same side.
	I've said it a thousand times.
	We're all on the same side of this sort of stuff.
	When bad racist things happen, we're on the same side.
	Here he is.
	I would say that the bigger context here about the ways in which guns have been constructed as symbols of white privilege in a way, the ways in which guns, particularly carrying guns in public like this, has been constructed as a way of showing a particular form of white authority, I think provides a lot of the context for a lot of these shootings that we're seeing, particularly the Arbery shooting.
	Okay, why does that provide context?
	What context?
	And by the way, when I speak of cases that are not getting national attention, here's another one.
	Okay, so here's one that's not getting national attention.
	Why?
	Because the right thing happened.
	When the right thing happens, it doesn't get national attention.
	When the wrong thing happens, in this case, what appears to be an insider job, then it gets national attention.
	So here is an example.
	So there is a case, this is from New Hanover County.
	in, I believe, North Carolina, in which an all-white mob, led by an off-duty New Hanover County Sheriff's deputy, terrorized a teenager and his family over a case of mistaken identity.
	In a letter addressed to New Hanover and Pender County District Attorney Ben David, James Lee claims the armed group of people, all white, knocked on the door of the home of Monica Shepard late Sunday night.
	Shepard was asleep, but her son Damian, a high school senior, was awake and playing video games in front of the home located in the Avondale community in Pender County.
	The Shepards are black.
	When Damian answered the door, Leah said the group demanded to know information about a young missing girl.
	The group was apparently looking for an individual named Josiah who lived next door but left the neighborhood a month earlier.
	Lay says Damien identified himself by name several times.
	The group continued to press for information he didn't have.
	There was a person carrying an assault weapon, another with a shotgun, according to the letter.
	Also part of the group was an off-duty member of the new Hanover County Sheriff's Office.
	When Damien attempted to shut the door after telling the group who he was, the new Hanover County deputy stuck his foot in the door and demanded to come inside.
	Okay, this is scary stuff, obviously.
	The deputy blocked her from closing the door as the group demanded to come inside.
	The attorney said Pender County deputies made no attempt to detain or identify members of the mob.
	But, on Friday, District Attorney Ben David and Pender County Sheriff Alan Cutler held a press conference to announce criminal charges in the incident.
	David announced that Deputy Kida became former Deputy Kida.
	They fired him.
	He's being charged with forcible trespass, breaking and entering, willful failure to discharge duties.
	Another man is being charged with going armed to the terror of the community.
	Okay, so why isn't that a national controversy?
	Because the prosecutors did what they were supposed to do.
	So in other words, what members of the media like is when somebody does something corrupt and bad, so they can try to impute that bad action to the entire country, as opposed to when the prosecutors do the right thing.
	Like in the case of Walter Scott in South Carolina, the black man who was shot in the back by a police officer, and then the police officer tried to fabricate evidence, and that guy went to jail for murder.
	That's not a national controversy because we're all on the same side, right?
	Because the people did the right thing.
	Alrighty, well, we have gone way past our allotted time, but we will see you here a little bit later today for two additional hours of content.
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