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May 13, 2020 - The Ben Shapiro Show
59:41
Lockdown Infinity! | Ep. 1010
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Dr. Anthony Fauci makes waves before the Senate.
Los Angeles makes moves to lockdown until, well, forever.
And Democrats push a $3 trillion wish list.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
The Ben Shapiro Show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.
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Visit ExpressVPN.com slash Ben.
Alrighty, so, Dr. Anthony Fauci went before the Senate yesterday, and this caused all sorts of controversy.
Now, frankly, I'm sort of perturbed at the controversy.
The reason being, I don't think that Fauci is a bad guy.
I don't think that Fauci is out to ruin the American economy.
I don't think that he is a malign influence on President Trump.
I think that Dr. Fauci is an epidemiologist, and his job is to be an epidemiologist.
His job is to be a doctor of public health when it comes to pandemics.
His job is not to balance all of the risks and rewards.
When you go to a doctor, and you look for a diagnosis.
Usually the doctor puts before you a fair number of choices.
And it is now your determination as to which choice you seek, right?
The doctor puts before you have cancer, God forbid.
And the doctor says to you, okay, so here are the choices.
You could have a surgery.
Here are the risks and the possibilities.
You can have chemotherapy.
Here are the risks and the possibilities.
Or, depending on your age, maybe the best thing is to sort of let it take its course.
If you're 85 years old and you have prostate cancer, maybe the treatment is actually worse than the disease.
And now you have a bunch of choices in front of you.
It is not the doctor's job to make the final determination.
When it comes to public policymaking, our elected officials are elected to make exactly these determinations.
Why?
Well, because they're answerable to we.
They are answerable to us.
They're answerable to we, the people.
The fact that we are now looking to sort of delegate all decision-making authority to the experts is the tail end of the progressive era stupidity that suggested that if we just gave all power to the quote-unquote experts in governments, then everything would magically be solved.
Now, experts are good for what experts are good for.
Experts are good for knowing a lot of things about one particular subject, but they're not famous for knowing lots of things about lots of particular subjects.
If you ask Dr. Fauci about Keynesian versus Milton Friedman-esque economics, my guess is that he wouldn't know much more than the average guy.
But if you ask him about disease vectors, then he probably knows a lot more than the average guy.
Asking him to be the sole policymaker is really foolhardy.
And even Dr. Fauci knows this.
And so the sort of move from the left to appoint Dr. Fauci the head of government when he is not the head of government, or to use him as a club to wield against elected officials, all of whom are answerable to us, The fact that people on the left want to do that, and then the fact that people on the right are responding to that by blaming Fauci, as though Fauci is to blame for lawmakers abdicating their duty and just pointing to Fauci and going, well, he's going to solve all of our problems.
It's stupidity.
I mean, frankly, I think that Dr. Fauci would be the first person to say that it's stupidity.
He is there to provide medical knowledge and guidance.
And then it is up to us to determine what risks we are willing to undertake as a society.
What this means is that when people like Dr. Fauci, when public health experts testify publicly, they're always going to testify on behalf of caution.
Because their job is to first do no harm on a public health level, not an economic level, not on a freedom level, not on a constitutional level, not on a governmental level.
Their first job is to say, how do we save the most lives?
Well, in the middle of a pandemic, the easy answer, if you're not looking at any of the other factors, is stay home until we have some sort of therapeutic or until we have some sort of vaccine.
But of course, there are other factors to take into account when it comes to public policymaking, such as the fact that we may never have a vaccine.
Or a therapeutic may not be all that effective.
And the fact that 30 million people have lost their jobs in the last six weeks.
And that there are countervailing costs to people losing their jobs, losing their livelihoods, 100,000 small businesses shutting down.
This is where it is up to our public officials, the people who we actually elect, our elected officials, to weigh the evidence that Dr. Fauci is providing and his advice, with the evidence provided by economists, with the values that we hold dear as a nation.
I mean, just take a different example for a second.
In a wartime, let's say that you were to ask a public health expert in wartime, what is the best policy?
Well, public health expert's job is to save as many lives as possible.
And so the public health expert would say, best strategy here is probably not to do the war, right?
No war is good because that means few people are going to get shot and killed.
But if you are an elected official and it's World War II, you know that there are going to be a certain number of people who are going to have to risk their lives on the beaches of Normandy.
This is not to suggest that the public health experts are wrong about everything.
This is to suggest that everybody has their own specific area of expertise, and to pretend that this means a broad area of expertise is really foolish.
And in a republic, we rely on the notion that a diffuse level of value judgment among the American population is going to be better than any one individual's values.
That the American people overall are going to be wiser about weighing all of these factors in balance when they elect people than just one guy who's part of a bureaucracy.
We'll get to what Dr. Fauci had to say yesterday, because in that light, I don't think what he had to say was all that controversial, but I think there are politicians who are completely looking to abdicate responsibility for their actual decision-making role in American politics right now, and simply shouting, data and science and public health officials, look what Fauci is saying, look what, look what Birx is saying, look what all the scientists are saying.
Okay, that's not your only job.
You're supposed to take all that into consideration, and then you are supposed to weigh all of the values that are currently under consideration.
Plus, you're supposed to determine the level of certainty that public health officials are expressing about the future generally.
Because experts may be more expert than you, but that does not mean that they have 100% certain knowledge of the future.
And we'll get to all of that in just one second.
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Okay, so Dr. Fauci before the Senate yesterday.
So he's testifying.
And again, Dr. Fauci is only going to get blamed if there are excess deaths.
This is the other thing you have to understand about job description.
If your job description is you're a doctor and somebody comes in and they're looking for a cancer screening, you're only going to get sued for malpractice if you miss the cancer.
You're not going to get sued for malpractice if you do too many tests.
If you run too many tests, you're not going to get sued for malpractice.
If you miss the cancer and the person dies, you're going to get sued for malpractice.
Okay, so now take that to epidemiology.
If you are Dr. Fauci and you recommend a full-scale lockdown forever, You're never going to get blamed for excess deaths, because first of all, that's never going to happen, and you recommend it against it.
And number two, that is the do no harm principle on a medical front.
You are going to get blamed if you're like, you know what?
Everything is basically okay.
If you're young, then first of all, everything is not basically okay.
But if you are young, then you are very unlikely to get a serious case of this disease and you are extraordinarily unlikely to die.
If you are older, then you should probably shelter in place.
If Fauci were to say something like that and be clear about the actual Chances of something terrible happening to you based on age and based on pre-existing condition?
Like, it's amazing to me that we are now how many months into this thing and we still cannot get straight answers from our public officials about what are your chances if you're 20 years old and healthy of dying of COVID-19?
I'll give you the answer.
The answer is you have about a 2 in 10,000 chance of dying of COVID-19 according to the antibody tests.
That is not a high chance.
1 in 5,000 is not a high chance.
It is a chance that you are willing to take to go back to work and enjoy your life, obviously.
But if you are an epidemiologist, you only get blamed if you say that things are, you know, basically okay for particular sectors of the population and then there's an unexpected outbreak and you get blamed for that.
You never get blamed in the field of epidemiology and prediction science for being overly pessimistic.
You only get blamed for being overly optimistic.
Every time there's a massive economic downturn, everybody who said, oh, the Dow was headed for $35,000, all those people are like, oh, you idiot.
The Dow was headed for $35,000, you moron.
And the person who's like, well, I told you there was going to be doom.
And then that one time there was doom, like, oh, I told you there was going to be doom.
All you have to do, if you are a pessimist in the field of public health or predictions or any of this sort of stuff, is to be right once.
You don't have to be right 10,000 times, you have to be right once.
If you're an optimist, you have to be right every single time, because the one time that you are wrong, everybody is going to say to you, well, if it weren't for you and your optimism, then there would be this many people alive, wouldn't there?
And it doesn't matter that the optimistic take is right 9 times out of 10.
We're only going to blame you for the downside risk.
So Fauci knows that too.
So here is Dr. Fauci yesterday before the Senate, and he says that the U.S.
death rate is unacceptable compared to other countries.
Now, again, the way that he's phrasing this is kind of silly.
The reality is that every death is quote-unquote unacceptable.
Is anybody, like, happy with the levels of death in the United States?
But compared to other industrialized countries, the United States is actually not doing particularly poorly.
We're right in the middle of the pack when it comes to Europe.
If you take New York out of the calculations, and New York was obviously the hardest hit and is sort of an outlier in terms of population density.
If you take New York out of the picture, the United States ranks kind of near Germany, like closer to Germany in terms of death per million population.
Here's Dr. Fauci, though, saying that the U.S.
death rate is unacceptable compared to other countries.
The death rate in the United States, especially when compared with other nations, is unacceptable, isn't it?
Yes, of course.
I mean, a death rate that high is something that in any manner or form, in my mind, is unacceptable.
And Dr. Fauci, the experience of other nations shows that the U.S.
death rate is not only unacceptable, but it's unnecessary.
Isn't that correct?
I don't know if we can say that, Senator.
But would you say that the U.S.
has to do better?
Of course, you always have to do better.
Okay, this is idiotic.
Remember Senator Tim Kaine, who was Hillary Clinton's vice presidential candidate?
Now he's a professional stagecoach robber.
So that's exciting stuff.
For folks who can't see, he's wearing a bandana around his neck directly from the assassination of Jesse James by the coward Robert Ford, 2007.
Good movie.
But the notion that we could do better.
We can always do better.
Sure, we can always do better.
But that's an obvious gotcha by Kaine.
And Fauci is being Fairly circumspect in the way that he's phrasing this stuff because, again, his job is to be an epidemiologist, not to be a policymaker.
So Fauci also says there could be consequences if we reopen too quickly.
Now, of course, that's true.
It is also true that he's only going to get blamed if we reopen too quickly.
Meaning, what do you think he's going to say?
Guys, go out, willy-nilly, have at it.
He's, of course, not going to say that.
If he says, you know, we set some standards for being careful, and if we hold to those standards, then I think that we will suffer less death than if we don't hold to them.
Like, what do you expect him to say?
The CDC set particular standards.
I think that those standards are probably overly restrictive.
But Fauci thinks not, and of course he's going to defend his standards.
It'd be silly of him not to.
So here's Fauci yesterday.
The consequences could be really serious, particularly, and this is something that I think we also should pay attention to, that states even if they're doing it at an appropriate pace, which many of them are and will, namely a pace that's commensurate with the dynamics of the outbreak, that they have in place already
The capability that when there will be cases, there is no doubt, even under the best of circumstances, when you pull back on mitigation, you will see some cases appear.
OK, and that's true.
OK, so he's not really giving you any information you didn't know.
In other words, the more you lock down, the fewer people are going to be infected.
Yeah, we knew that.
But he's not actually setting a standard as to what he thinks is a safe level of infection, because the truth is Fauci doesn't know the answer to that.
What Fauci knows is that if you let people out of lockdown, then more people will be infected, more people will die.
But we are going to have to let people out of lockdown.
Everyone recognizes this.
And you know who is best situated to make these decisions?
Individual governors who are answerable to people.
Because the fact is voters are going to have to decide whether they think their governors did a good job in protecting them and also protecting the economy.
By the way, worth noting, Brian Kemp, the governor of Georgia, who's been ripped up and down, the infection rates in his state are not spiking yet.
They are not.
Rhonda Sands is in Florida.
The massive, overwhelming infections that were supposed to happen, they have not been happening in Florida.
Texas.
No overwhelming infection rates in Texas.
In fact, it seems like things are kind of spiking faster in California than they are in some of these other states, and California is still in full-scale lockdown.
Okay, so Rand Paul makes this point yesterday, and he's ripped up and down by the left for making it, but Rand Paul says, I don't think that you're the be-all end-all.
Now, the only part about this that I object to seriously is I'm not sure that Fauci thinks he's the be-all end-all.
In fact, Fauci sort of admits it, right?
So Rand Paul says, listen, I don't think that you're the decision-maker.
I think we're the decision-maker, and you're here to provide information.
Rand Paul, by the way, is a medical doctor, so here's Rand Paul.
He doesn't have to wear the mask because, obviously, he's already had COVID-19, so he can walk around like he's bulletproof at this point.
Here's Senator Rand Paul growing a pandemic beard as well.
One thing that I'm enjoying about this is apparently everybody is now going to dress and grow facial hair like we are in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, which, I mean, honestly, kind of cool.
Like I could go I want to see some handlebar mustaches.
I want to see some Ambrose Burnside sideburns.
I want to see like like the like let's go full out at this point.
Bandanas, hats.
I'm into it.
Anyway, here's Senator Paul.
As much as I respect you, Dr. Fauci, I don't think you're the end all.
I don't think you're the one person that gets to make a decision.
We can listen to your advice, but there are people on the other side saying there's not going to be a surge and that we can safely open the economy.
And the facts will bear this out.
But if we keep kids out of school for another year, what's going to happen is the poor and underprivileged kids who don't have a parent that's able to teach them at home We're not going to learn for a full year.
Senator Paul, thank you for your comments.
I have never made myself out to be the end all and only voice in this.
I'm a scientist, a physician, and a public health official.
I give advice according to the best scientific evidence.
There are a number of other people who come into that and give advice that are more related to the things that you spoke about, about the need to get the country back open again and economically.
I don't give advice about economic things.
I don't give advice about anything other than public health.
Correct.
Correct.
Okay, so Fauci is acknowledging the truth here.
So everybody was taking it as though Paul and Fauci were really going out of here.
They're on the same team here.
I mean, everyone should be on the same team, which is we have to take the advice and then we have to calculate that in whatever formula we're using for when reopening is good and possible.
And as Rand Paul points out, You know, the level of certainty that experts have had in making predictions has been off pretty much every step of the way.
Sometimes too high, sometimes too low.
As more data comes in, hopefully the predictions get better.
And we also have to kind of decide which experts know best, because the experts do conflict with each other fairly widely, as I'm going to talk about in just a moment.
I mean, it turns out a lot of the models originally were quite wrong.
It also turns out a lot of the public health officials don't know crap about stuff.
I mean, like, I think Fauci actually knows some things.
Let me just tell you, the public health officials in California, they don't know a damn thing.
I mean, seriously, the policies that they are trotting out at this point are some of the dumbest policies I've ever seen, and they frankly have no qualifications to make these policies.
Like, seriously, they don't even have the qualifications of a Fauci or a Birx in terms of, you know, like an actual medical degree to make these sort of qualifications.
Here is Rand Paul.
I think the one-size-fits-all that we're going to have a national strategy and nobody's going to go to school is kind of ridiculous.
We really ought to be doing it school district by school district.
And the power needs to be dispersed because people make wrong predictions.
And really the history of this, when we look back, will be of wrong prediction after wrong prediction after wrong prediction, starting with Ferguson in England.
So I think we ought to have a little bit of humility in our belief that we know what's best for the economy.
Okay, that of course is exactly right.
It's exactly right.
In just a second, I'm going to explain to you how many of the models, pretty much all the models, got the Swedish death rates wrong.
So Sweden has been sort of the whipping post for a lot of the Democrat and left-leaning views of lockdown.
Sweden's terrible.
Sweden's horrible.
They have a higher death rate per million than we do.
If they had locked down their nursing homes, which is something they acknowledged they should have done, Sweden would be in the best shape of anybody and it would not really be close because there's not going to be a second wave in Sweden.
They're not changing their policy.
Dr. Fauci said yesterday, there will be a second wave in the United States.
Yeah, I would assume there would be.
And we'll get to that in just one second.
First, let us talk about the fact that this is a really, really rough time in the American economy.
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Okay, so speaking of the models and the experts, when we talk about expertise, we have to determine what exactly is the level of expertise of which we are speaking.
So, there's a good piece in The Spectator, the UK Spectator, by Johan Norberg.
And he writes about the modeling with regard to Sweden.
He says Maria Gunther and Maria Westholm in Dagens Nyheter, Sweden's biggest daily, just took a look at two of the most influential models in Sweden.
Both were inspired by the Imperial College study and published on the preprint server medRxiv in April.
Both were used by critics to argue the Swedish model would quickly break our healthcare system and that we had to make a U-turn into lockdown as Britain did.
Here are what the models predicted.
There was one by a guy named Shiodan that said that the critical care demand would peak above 16,000 patients per day by early May, and pre-pandemic intensive care unit capacity would be exceeded by a factor of 30.
Then there was a second study that was even more pessimistic, showing a peak of over 20,000 patients by early May, with an ICU requirement about 40 times the actual capacity.
Sweden's public health agency rejected the models and instead planned for a worst-case scenario that was much less pessimistic, suggesting a peak around 1,700 ICU patients in the middle of May.
That was still more than three times the pre-pandemic capacity.
Sweden refused to lock down.
The results were that the number of ICU patients was about 500 to 550 since mid-April.
Capacity was never exceeded.
In fact, it wasn't exceeded by a factor of three.
At this moment, when the model suggested Sweden would have 30 to 40 patients fighting over every available ICU bed, there was spare capacity in beds, equipment and personnel of around 30%, One of those models predicted that Sweden would have 82,000 COVID-19 deaths by the 1st of July, or 1,000 deaths every day since the paper was published in mid-April.
The total number of COVID-19 deaths at the time of writing is 3,313.
One reason the models failed is that they underestimated how millions of people spontaneously adapt to new circumstances.
And this really is the key.
The fact is that Americans are adapting to this stuff.
And there's a new study out today showing that 25 million more Americans are moving around freely.
They're going around and they are driving around by data.
They're not staying at home.
But that doesn't mean they're not taking precautions.
Again, I've been out and about in Los Angeles with my kids.
We're going to parks.
We've gone to a beach.
The fact is that people are social distancing.
People are being careful in how they approach this sort of stuff.
People are not stupid.
People don't want to die.
Now there are some people who are just going to shake their fist at the moon and be like, you know, I'm going to go make out with a stranger at a restaurant.
Most people are not doing that.
The vast majority of people are not doing that.
And that means that all of the predictions about mass carnage Are probably wrong.
They're probably off fairly substantially.
It is also necessary to point out that people who are being pushed forward as experts in many cases, policy makers and quote-unquote experts, are not, in fact, experts.
Okay, so for example, in L.A., there's a woman named Dr. Barbara Ferrer.
She's the L.A.
County Department of Public Health, right?
She runs the L.A.
Department, the County Department of Public Health.
L.A.
County just announced that they were going to lock down until the beginning of August.
Okay, as in like, I know, I checked the calendar too yesterday when I found out about this.
It was May 12th yesterday for those who missed it.
Okay, so that means that they are now locking down two and a half months in advance, which, let's be real about this.
The actual intent here has nothing to do with lockdown.
Everybody understands people are going to go back to work before that.
Everyone understands that.
What's actually happening here is that the county of Los Angeles is trying to create a legal excuse for telling people they don't have to pay their rent.
That's really what's actually going on here.
What they want to say to people in LA is, sure, we're in lockdown.
And because we're in lockdown, and I'm putting lockdown in air quotes for those who can't see, we're in lockdown, which doesn't mean you can't go to work.
It just means you don't have to pay your rent.
That's what LA County is attempting to do.
We're going to jack landlords is basically the idea here.
It makes sense on a mortgage level because you can add months to the back of the mortgage, right?
What doesn't make a whole hell of a lot of sense is doing that with regard to rent.
Let's say you have a one-year lease.
And then the L.A.
County Board of Supervisors and the Public Health Department decide that because of lockdown, you don't have to pay your rent while we're in the middle of lockdown.
It's a one-year lease.
Let's say that that one-year lease expires at the end of lockdown.
Is the landlord going to receive back rent?
Or is the landlord just going to be out a year of rent?
I mean, it's fairly obvious what exactly is happening here.
There's a reason that landlords, I mean, I know landlords in LA, they're already saying, okay, I want to sell my building, get the hell out of here.
There's going to be such epic flight from Los Angeles after this is over.
It's going to be incredible.
People are going to move from New York.
People are going to move from LA.
They're going to move to other states.
The population movement in the aftermath of this pandemic, based on local governance, is going to be absolutely astonishing.
That is my prediction.
But speaking of Dr. Barbara Ferrer, let me talk about her qualifications for a second.
So why exactly is she the head of public health in LA County?
What are her, what are her bona fides?
Well, she was executive director of the Boston Public Health Commission, where she led a range of public health programs and built innovative partnerships to address inequities in health outcomes and support healthy communities and healthy families.
She secured federal, state, and local funding for critical public health infrastructure and community-based programs.
Okay, so what exactly is her background in science?
Well, she has a PhD in Social Welfare from Brandeis.
She has a Master of Arts in Public Health.
Master of Arts, not Master of Sciences.
Master of Arts in Public Health from Boston University.
A Master of Arts in Education from University of Massachusetts, Boston.
A Bachelor of Arts in Community Studies from UC Santa Cruz.
So in other words, what is the evidence that this person is scientifically knowledgeable in any actual way?
I do not know.
And yet, this is the person who is tasked with leading up the experts in L.A.
County.
By the way, CNN is promoting its own batch of experts.
Who are the experts that CNN is promoting?
They're having a new town hall.
One of their astonishingly great town halls.
Who are they actually hosting?
Well, they're having on former Acting CDC Director Richard Besser.
Fine.
The former HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.
Fine.
Dr. Sanjay Gupta.
And Greta Thunberg.
Greta Thunberg.
Like the 17-year-old whose main accomplishment in life is going around and screaming at adults about how angry she is.
That's literally, like, she's an expert on yelling at adults.
Listen to the experts, guys, especially small children who are screaming at you about how we need to destroy the... First of all, I think in terms of the economic impact of all of this, let's be real, the Green New Deal that she has proposed is exactly what is happening right now.
So if you're enjoying what's going on right now, then if you want more of that, talk to Greta Thunberg, because that's what you'd like to see in perpetuity in terms of economic activity.
But how?
Like she's being trotted forth as an expert?
CNN, the most trusted name in news.
Trust the experts, guys.
Trust the experts.
We'll get to the trust the experts attitude in just one second.
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Okay, so our health experts here in LA County, Dr. Barbara Ferrer, and I guess the CNN's appointed health expert, Greta Thunberg, who again, When I think, who would I go to in terms of handling a pandemic?
I think 17-year-old Swedish child who screams at adults to the applause of the media.
That's who I would go to.
And honestly, that's who I usually go to.
When I'm looking for good advice on serious issues, I immediately go to my own children, who are excellent at screaming at adults.
It turns out they are great at it.
I have a six-year-old daughter.
She's fantastic at screaming at me.
And so is my four-year-old son.
And when I want policy advice, I go right to them, and then I let them scream in my face for a while.
And then I'm like, oh, problem solved.
Done.
Maybe they should be on CNN as public health experts.
They know as much about pandemics as Greta Thunberg.
Come the hell on, CNN!
And then you expect me to take seriously?
Ah, listen to the experts.
We here at CNN, we listen to the experts.
Chris Cuomo yesterday was doing this routine, right?
Chris Cuomo, who listens to the experts so much that he was violating his own quarantine while he had COVID-19, and was meanwhile asking sycophantic questions to his big brother Andrew, who is the worst governor in America, by numbers, on COVID-19.
Here is CNN's Chris Cuomo yesterday being like, you know what?
We have to listen to the experts, guys.
Listen to the experts.
Here he was demagoguing yesterday.
How can we beat the virus if we can't even get on the same page about how important the fight is?
If we can't even agree on what it takes to win?
Let's bring in Dr. Sanjay Gupta and Andy Slavitt.
First, just a slap in the face of reality for us, fellas.
Sanjay, 10,000 deaths is the approximated cost of reopening as of now.
Have you ever seen America make a choice like this before?
What the hell is he talking about?
America makes choices every day that increase risk to its citizens because that's called freedom.
Seriously, no one's talking about going to nursing homes and snuffing out grandma.
Everybody here is talking about how you mitigate risk while also allowing tens of millions of people to go back to work and get jobs again and function in an economy.
This is the sort of disgusting, it really is disgusting, the sort of disgusting demagoguery from, have you ever seen Americans willing to sacrifice 10,000 lives for what?
Something like freedom?
Something like being able to work or a functioning economy?
I mean, actually, fairly regularly, that's called public policy.
That's called public policy.
It's not about sacrificing lives, right?
That is a framing of the question that is so deeply dishonest, but I'm sure he can get buy-in from Greta Thunberg over at CNN.
Okay, so this sort of idiocy leads to the kind of policies that we have seen in the state of California, my home state.
So the state of California has not suffered from a massive outbreak.
The state of California has, last I checked, something like 7 deaths per 100,000 citizens in the state of California.
Grand total in the state of California, California COVID-19 deaths, last I checked, were under 3,000 deaths statewide.
We have 40 million citizens in the state of California.
We have 2,770 confirmed deaths from COVID-19 in the state of California, according to sort of the numbers that Google is popping up for me here right now.
Okay, so those are not massive, incredibly large numbers.
Every death is a tragedy.
Every death is bad.
But California is not the center of this outbreak.
I guess it's up to 2,882, according to the LA Times.
Okay, that's terrible.
It's bad.
And we should be careful when we reopen.
But the state of California has basically decided that we are now engaged in a kindergarten game of one-upsmanship.
And it was pretty obvious that this is how things were going to go when the lockdowns originally occurred, right?
San Francisco lockdown, and then immediately thereafter, LA lockdown, and then immediately thereafter, New York lockdown.
And so it's going to be the other way around, right?
You're seeing one game of follow the leader when it comes to reopening, with some states saying, listen, we got to reopen or our economy is going to die.
Other states are saying, listen, we're not going to be blamed, right?
If you're Gavin Newsom, If you want to avoid scrutiny, what you say at this point is, we're never going to reopen.
Ever.
We're not reopening until there's a vaccine.
If you're JB Pritzker in Illinois, we're not reopening until there's a vaccine because I'm not going to be blamed for one excess death.
I'm not going to be blamed for any sort of excess death.
Here's the reality.
Politicians cannot lock down this way.
Americans are just not going to stand for it.
And they're particularly not going to lock down in the idiotic fashion that is now being promoted by the Los Angeles state government.
So California is saying, well, why don't we let people decide on a county-by-county basis?
Just going to point out, when Donald Trump says that, according to the states, when he says states should decide, localism should rule, he's very bad.
When Gavin Newsom says counties should decide on a county-by-county basis, then Gavin Newsom apparently, according to the media, is very, very good.
But according to County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer, she said at Tuesday's Board of Supervisors meeting, based on her Community Relations degree from UC Santa Cruz, based on all the data we're looking at, we know with certainty we'll be extending health officer orders for the next three months.
Three months.
The stay-at-home restrictions orders will be in place for three months.
How do you even know that?
How can you?
We couldn't forecast this thing two weeks out.
Ferrer said, while the safer at home orders will remain in place over the next few months, restrictions will be gradually relaxed under the county's existing roadmap to recovery.
We're counting on the public's continued compliance with the orders to enable us to relax restrictions.
They say that instead the L.A.
County Board of Supervisors is trying to claim that they were taken out of context because the original statement is that the stay-at-home orders would remain in place as is for three months.
Mayor Eric Garcetti said, I think quite simply, she's saying we're not going to fully reopen Los Angeles and probably anywhere in America without any protections or any health orders in the next three months.
I think it's going to be even longer than three months.
Okay, that's not what the original statement was.
The original statement was the stay-at-home orders are going to remain in place for three months until the end of July, which is patently insane.
It means the end of the economy of Los Angeles, as everybody well understands.
And as it turns out, the policies that are being promulgated in LA are completely idiotic.
So are the policies in California for reopening counties.
I'll explain the policies, okay?
Here are some of the policies.
The policies, according to the LA Times, At the beaches.
You ready for this?
How people can use the sand will look different.
Face coverings will be required when not in the water.
Sunbathing won't be allowed.
Only active recreation, surfing, running, walking, and swimming will be permitted.
Coolers, chairs, umbrellas, and any of the other accessories that typically dot the shoreline should be left at home.
Do people understand, like, why masks are useful?
Or why being outside is good?
Or why social distancing is useful?
So the idea is what?
I'm gonna, like, take my kids to the beach.
I'm gonna pop open that back door.
I'm gonna take my kids, I'm going to walk down with them to the water, throw them in the water, take them out of the water, walk back to the car, shove them inside.
Like, what the hell are you talking about?
This is not how beaches work.
What are you talking about?
And if I'm, if I've got a 20-foot radius around me and I'm sitting there on the sand, explain to me how that's a bad thing.
Explain.
Explain to me why I need to wear a face mask when I'm socially distancing from other people.
There's literally no reason.
I don't need to wear a face mask if I am outside in the sun.
The sun, by the way, which does kill the virus, according to best available evidence.
And I'm 10 feet away from everybody else.
Like, this is madness.
But that's not even the extent of the stupidity.
So according to Gavin Newsom's standards, there are two criteria as to which counties can move into reopening phases.
Whether deaths have stopped completely in the last 14 days from COVID-19, and whether there is no more than one case per 10,000 residents in that same time period.
Most of California failed that test.
In fact, 95% of Californians live in counties that don't meet that standard.
The Times analysis found not a single county in Southern California nor the San Francisco Bay Area met the criteria.
Deaths have stopped for 14 days.
Deaths have stopped for 14 days.
Okay, let me just ask a quick question.
Has anybody in California, has there been any place in California?
Like L.A.
County.
Let's take L.A.
County.
Would L.A.
County have to shut down for the actual flu?
This is more dangerous than the flu.
This is always my stipulation because people in the media get very uptight when you mention the flu in the same sentence as COVID.
So, let it be known.
COVID is more dangerous than the flu and more transmissible.
But, I'm pointing out that we are not shutting down for the flu in L.A.
County.
There has not been a week in California for six years where somebody did not die of the flu.
Here is a chart provided to you by LA County, which shows that, it turns out, people die of the flu every single week, every week!
From 2014 to present, right?
This is pneumonia and influenza as a percent of all deaths in L.A.
County 2013 and 2014 to 2019-2020.
So what the hell are you talking about?
There won't be a death for 14- You know how many people live in L.A.
County?
There are 10 million people in L.A.
County!
So you're telling me that until there's not one COVID-19 death in all of L.A.
County, so I guess like in a hundred years, when several generations of Los Angelinos have died, Then I guess we can reopen according to these standards.
This is just madness.
It's complete and utter insanity.
Meanwhile, California State University is going to teach remotely in the fall.
They're not going to let the students go back to school.
Why?
Well, they can't explain it, because the reality is that young people are not in particularly terrible shape.
In fact, young people are in particularly good shape.
If you're vulnerable, you should stay off campus.
And Mitch Daniels, who's the president over at Purdue, the dean over at Purdue, he said, we're gonna reopen, and we're going to take precautions for people who are vulnerable.
This would be the rational solution, but we cannot pursue rationality in any way.
It's lockdown infinity.
Lockdown, and then lockdown infinity plus one.
That's the way this is gonna work for a lot of politicians.
When the media set up a standard such that reopening is considered You green lighting death.
It is not a shock that politicians respond to that political incentive by saying, okay, let's lock down forever.
And as we'll see, that's exactly what Joe Biden is doing.
Who again is like, the man is barely alive at this point.
We'll get to that in just one moment.
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Okay, in just a second, we're going to be getting to the Political incentive to never open up ever, ever again.
And how Democrats are taking advantage of this to attempt to cram down trillions in new spending on garbage that they have always sought.
We'll get to that momentarily.
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All righty.
So the Democrats are naturally glomming on to the media calculus here.
The Democrats continue to push lockdowns that move beyond the possibility of any sort of real calibrated response.
It's not as though they've set a timeline that's in any way realistic.
Again, that LA County timeline is insane.
14 days with no deaths from COVID-19.
How about 14 days with no deaths from a car accident before we can get back on the roads?
That's nuts.
It's just nuts.
But you have Eric Garcetti saying, Americans want us to get it right.
Yes, we do.
You know what getting it right looks like?
There will not be a functioning economy in the city of Los Angeles.
And if you think that all you're going to do is just tax the rich people in LA, guess what rich people have the capacity to do?
Move.
To leave.
They're the only people in LA who have the capacity to leave.
Now here's Mayor Garcetti.
Most Americans want us to get it right.
You look at polls across the country, certainly here in Los Angeles, it's go slow, don't go fast, and get it right so we don't have to retreat.
So she wanted to make sure that I communicated and what she was communicating is that we still need to have a public health order because there are some populations who will need to stay at home.
People need to know whenever possible it is safer to stay at home.
So if you can telecommute, etc.
And there's no radical changes in the next week coming.
Okay, so again, when he says that people want to go slow, nobody is defining these terms.
Go slow.
Nobody is defining what exactly that looks like.
All the polls are extraordinarily vague about which exact policies people approve of.
People are basically on board with the masking.
People are basically on board with the social distancing.
But very few people are on board with the, let's just stay in lockdown until the end of time.
And yet that's exactly what you're getting from Joe Biden.
Again, it's very easy to sit outside the decision-making process like Joe Biden is in his basement.
And basically suggest, okay, we don't have to make any tough decisions here.
It's an easy decision.
Just lock down forever.
This is particularly true when your end goal for American government is the radical growth of American government, universal basic income, the government paying people to stay home, which is exactly what Democrats are proposing.
Here was Joe Biden yesterday saying he's frustrated that people are trying to open the economy.
You know what I'm frustrated at?
The fact that Joe Biden is utterly incompetent and has no actual advice to offer.
It's amazing.
He keeps writing editorials talking about how seriously he takes this, and then he offers no actual solutions.
I reject the premise that somehow this is hurting us.
There's no evidence of that.
I'm following the rules.
Following the rules.
The president should follow the rules instead of showing up at places without masks and the whole thing.
I'm getting really frustrated with not you, with this, the whole notion that somehow we can just open, we can move.
Okay, well, no one's talking about completely reopening at this point.
Literally not one state in America.
What the hell is he talking about?
By setting up this false binary, this allows Democrats to claim that what we must do is expend trillions of new dollars on things like extended unemployment benefits through January.
Which, by the way, is fairly a guarantee that people aren't actually going to be able to hire people back.
One of the major problems that's been happening right now is that businesses across America, small businesses, are saying to their own employees, guys, you know, there's going to come a point where we want you to come back.
And if you're young and healthy, you should come back.
And people are saying, why?
I can get more on unemployment.
This is a hole that was pointed out by Senators Tim Scott and Marco Rubio and Ben Sasse.
And they were saying, guys, you know, our last CARES Act package, that included payments that were greater than people would be receiving in the absence of a salary.
Meaning that if you were making $1,200 a month or $1,200, if you're making $1,200 a week, Before, now you're going to make more than that from unemployment, so why the hell would you go back to work?
Democrats would like to extend that now.
So this is what Nancy Pelosi is suggesting.
She's saying, look, we have the opportunity to save lives and our democracy.
It's the last part that matters.
We have the opportunity to save lives and our democracy means we have the opportunity to tell you that we are saving lives by keeping the economy closed and also to quote unquote save democracy by radically reshifting the balance of power between the federal government and individuals.
These numbers require action that we've never had to take before.
There are those who said, let's just pause.
But the families who are suffering know that hunger doesn't take a pause, the rent doesn't take a pause, the bills don't take a pause, the hardship of losing a job or tragically losing a loved one doesn't take a pause.
This is an historic challenge and therefore momentous opportunity for us to meet the needs of the American people to save their lives, their livelihoods, and our democracy.
What a pathetic, pathetic human being Nancy Pelosi is, truly.
This is not an opportunity to take a pause.
Twice in the last month, twice, she has quote-unquote taken a pause on major legislation designed to help out business and help out individuals.
She shut down the passage of the CARES Act for a full week, and then she shut down the passage of the Payroll Protection Act for a full week.
Like, what the hell?
But now, it's we gotta rush forward.
We gotta rush forward with our $3 trillion wish list of garbage.
Here's what is in the Democrats' $3 trillion plus virus relief bill.
And they're just gonna keep spending here.
We are going to effectively try modern monetary theory and find out how it works.
Modern monetary theory is, of course, the idiotic theory that we can continue to spend money at infinite pace without bearing any results down the road.
Either in terms of radically increased taxation or in terms of inflating the currency, which is great.
I mean, if it's true, I guess we can just magically spend government money and people will just continue taking out debt because they're idiots, apparently.
Apparently, everybody across the world is a moron.
And if we continue to take out debt, then everybody across the world, instead of investing in other opportunities, they're going to just buy the American debt.
Sure, because they feel like it's going to get paid off at some point.
So what exactly is in this new $3 trillion package?
Here's what's in it.
Fiscal aid to states and local governments.
The Democratic bill provides more than $900 billion to states Local governments, as well as Indian tribes and territorial governments, to help prevent layoffs of public workers, cuts to services, or tax hikes.
So instead of forcing states to actually tighten their belt and look at the union contracts that they have signed that are garbage, and look at all the pension plans they've signed that are garbage, instead the federal government is going to bail out all of the garbage plans, blaming it on the pandemic.
Let's be real about this.
California was basically bankrupt before any of this happened because they signed garbage pension deals.
The same thing is true in Illinois.
The same thing is true in New York.
The state debt of these states was exorbitant.
Like hundreds of billions of dollars, maybe trillions of dollars in the state of California before any of this happened.
And now the Democrats are basically using this as an excuse to say, you know what we can do?
We can have state governors who just sign these really, really rich contracts, these ridiculous contracts with unions that say things like, don't worry guys, we're going to give you like an 8% year on year increase in the pension.
And then we'll just tell you that we'll invest our pension funds properly and they will return 8%.
That's what we actually did with CalPERS in California.
The union contracts with CalPERS, it basically suggested that there was going to be a seven to eight percent rate of return year on year in the CalPERS fund, which is insane.
No one does that.
Warren Buffett doesn't do that.
Okay, so you sign all these bad contracts and then, when there's a crisis, you go, you know what?
We can't pay unemployment because we're bankrupt because, you know, we wasted all our money on stupid garbage and bad contracts.
So, well, it'd be great as if the Feds could fill us in.
So that's what's in the Democrat bill.
What else?
Well, they want a second round of direct payments to individuals, making those benefits more generous than an earlier round, which limited payments for dependent children to $500.
Instead, it provides new payments of $1,200 per family member, up to $6,000 for a household.
$6,000 for a household.
That is a crap load of money.
And so your family of four and you get a $6,000 check in the mail?
Why would anybody go back to work?
Seriously.
Like at a certain point, we would like to have a functioning economy again.
And by the way, they would like to keep the unemployment benefits extended by $600 per week federal unemployment, which supplements the state unemployment benefits.
They want that supplemented through January 2021.
Hey, I'm not cutting it off at the end of July when the pandemic is supposedly supposed to wave.
I'm not even extending it two more months.
They want to extend it to January, which is, not surprisingly, past the election.
They would like for the unemployment rates to remain high, apparently, because people won't go back to work.
And that is not just relieving people who cannot go back to work.
If you're talking about this thing, or directed toward people who showed some sort of serious illness, a pre-existing condition, you have diabetes, you don't want to be back in public because you got diabetes, and this thing is dangerous.
You're above the age of 60, and so you don't want to be back at the workplace because it's dangerous to you.
And then we want to create unemployment benefits specifically for those people.
I could get on board with that.
I could get on board with I can.
What I cannot get on board with is the idea that if you're perfectly healthy and 25 years old, you should be receiving endless government benefits because you don't really believe that you should go back to work.
And because any sort of arbitrary risk calculation by you means that I'm supposed to pay your bills and everybody else is supposed to pay your bills.
I mean, that's insanity.
Also, they want to provide $25 billion for the U.S.
Postal Service, which is expected to run out of money by the end of September without congressional aid because it's losing so much revenue.
You know the reason they're losing revenue.
It's not because people have stopped sending mail.
It's because people started sending the mail.
The dirty little secret of the post office is that they lose money when they don't ship mail, and they lose money when they do ship mail because the postage rates are too low.
That's why it's more expensive to ship via FedEx than it is to ship via the U.S.
Postal Service.
But instead of raising rates, they just want to bail out the U.S.
Postal Service again.
Also, they want to provide $175 billion to states to help renters and homeowners pay mortgages, rent, and other housing costs and avoid default, with much of the money aimed at lower-income people.
Well, again, if the states are the ones making the decisions on when to reopen, why should not the states be actually taking out the debt to do that?
Why is it that Texas, which is reopening faster, ought to pay the bills for California, which is reopening more slowly?
They also want $15 billion for state transportation departments for highway needs, $16 billion to mass transit systems hit by the massive drop off of ridership and lower income from fares.
So in other words, we are now going to pay the New York subway system for being shut down.
This is my favorite one.
They want to dedicate $100 billion to states, school districts, and universities to defray additional costs associated with the pandemic.
What additional costs?
No one's coming to school.
You are closed.
What the hell are you talking about?
The teachers are not in the classroom.
There are no- Like, what?
So, you're gonna have to explain to me.
Do we spend more money when the kids are in school or when the kids are out of school?
What- Like, what is this?
What is this?
So naturally, the Republicans are bucking at all of this nonsense.
And there are also provisions in this bill that are just obviously stupid.
They wanted to vote, the House Democrats, $1 billion for quote-unquote modernization of state and local health inequities data.
Not inequality data, inequities data.
Because every inequality is an inequity.
Inequality means that two things are not equal.
Inequity means that two things are not fair.
So any inequality is now an inequity, according to this Democratic bill.
They want to support the modernization of data collection methods and infrastructure for the purposes of increasing data related to health inequities such as racial, ethnic, socioeconomic, sex, gender, and disability disparities.
And they want to provide guidance, technical assistance, and information to grantees under this section on best practices regarding culturally competent, accurate, and increased data collection and transmission.
What the hell does that mean?
We're going to do gender studies now with a billion dollars during a pandemic?
Sounds great.
Sounds great.
Naturally, Mitch McConnell has objected.
This means that he's a very bad man.
He says, our debt is now the size of the American economy.
And you're talking about taking out trillions of dollars to pay for random garbage.
No.
We've already spent about, or in the process of spending about $2.8 trillion.
We now have a debt the size of our economy.
So I have said, and the president has said as well, that we need to take a pause here.
And take a look at what we've done, see what's working, see what isn't, and also begin to encourage the governors around the country who have the decision-making ability to begin to open up the economy.
Nah, so what the Democrats really want is for lockdown to be the preferred policy of states and then the bailout to happen at the federal government level so they can radically reshift the nation and quote-unquote save democracy.
That's the actual plan.
This thing didn't have to become politically polarized.
It is becoming politically polarized when you just shout lockdown infinitely and then basically present zero data to actually support how you are coming to that conclusion and how you plan to reopen.
Okay, time for some things that I hate.
So I have legitimately no clue why the judge in the Michael Flynn case is slamming the brakes on the DOJ attempt to drop the case.
They are now making the case, the judge is basically delaying all of this, saying that he wants to hear amicus briefs, which is an amazing suggestion.
It's a criminal case.
How do you hear an amicus brief in a criminal case?
That's bizarre.
According to lawandcrime.com, federal judge Emmett G. Sullivan stopped, at least temporarily, the federal government's attempt to drop its case against National Security Advisor Michael Flynn.
Sullivan made the move shortly after Flynn asked the case against him be dismissed immediately.
The judge, in a minute order posted to the Flynn case's electronic docket, said he anticipated amicus briefs would be filed in the matter and wanted to give any interested parties time to participate.
These so-called friend of the court briefs allow others who are not party to the case to submit arguments only for the benefit of the court.
Sullivan said, it is solely within the court's discretion to determine the extent, fact and manner of the participation of amicus parties.
The briefs are helpful when the amicus has unique information or perspective that can help the court beyond the help that the lawyers for the parties are able to provide.
He also noted reasons why parties should not be allowed to file amicus briefs.
Flynn's lawyers have filed a motion to prevent an amicus brief from entering the record.
In issuing the order, Sullivan quoted a similar minute order from the judge who oversaw the trial of former Donald Trump confidant Roger Stone.
He said, as Judge Amy Berman Jackson has observed, while there may be individuals with an interest in this matter, a criminal proceeding is not a free-for-all.
In other words, while Sullivan is giving parties some time to have their voices heard, his patience is not unlimited.
He says the court will enter a scheduling order governing the submission of amicus curiae briefs.
This is bizarro world.
I really have not heard a lot of precedent for the idea that you're supposed to be able to submit an amicus brief in a criminal trial.
That's so weird.
Like in the O.J.
Simpson case, wouldn't it have been weird if Judge Lance Ito had been like, you know what?
Let's hear from the public now.
If you've got any sort of brief on O.J.
Simpson, would love to hear it.
Would love to hear it.
So odd.
According to Law & Crime's Aaron Keller, lawyers for Donald Trump's former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn voice strong opposition to that order.
Per Flynn's legal team, a group referring to itself as Watergate Prosecutors submitted an email stating they wish to file amicus curiae briefs.
The so-called friend of the court briefs help to assist judge in making decisions.
Flynn's attorneys say this court has consistently, on 24 previous occasions, summarily refused to permit any third party to inject themselves or their views into this case.
Sullivan's decision resulted in this particular backlash.
They said, They say it's no accident amicus briefs are excluded in criminal cases.
A criminal case is a dispute between the U.S.
and a criminal defendant.
There's no place for third parties to meddle in the dispute, certainly not to usurp the role of government's counsel.
For the court to allow another to stand in the place of the government would be a violation of the separation of powers.
They said that the Watergate prosecutors don't have a dog in this hunt any more than former Whitewater prosecutors or the Clinton impeachment prosecutors do.
They said this is a case of extraordinary national and international interest.
There are countless people, including former prosecutors on both sides of the parties, who would like to express their views.
There are many reasons there's no provision for outsiders to join a criminal case.
Of course, former prosecutors can submit opinion pieces to assorted media outlets, but this court is not a forum for their alleged special interest.
This, of course, is exactly right.
This is so bizarre.
I mean, seriously, I've never heard of anything really like this.
Maybe there's precedent for it, but I've never heard of this idea that I'm allowed to file an amicus curiae brief in the middle of a criminal trial.
Because... what?
I mean, the case at issue here is whether the prosecutors are allowed... By the way, what's amazing about this, truly amazing, is that we've had cases before, like Proposition 8 in California, where Attorney General Kamala Harris, she was then the Attorney General of the state of California, she was a god-awful AG, then she became a god-awful senator.
One of the things that she did when she was our god-awful AG is there was a provision called Proposition 8 in the California Constitution that sanctioned traditional marriage and said there will be no same-sex marriage legalized by the state or approved by the state in the state of California.
There was a lawsuit filed against it, right, and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ended up striking down Prop 8.
This thing was going to go to the Supreme Court.
The AG of the state of California, Kamala Harris, said, I'm not going to defend it in court.
I'm not going to defend this in court.
Now, that is an abdication of her duty.
She's the AG, which means she is supposed to defend the existing law.
She is not supposed to be able to say, I don't like this law, so I'm not defending it.
The Supreme Court then ruled that because the state of California was not defending the law, there was no other party to step in.
And other parties were like, well, how about this?
How about we defend the law?
And the court was like, no, only the state of California can defend the law.
So if the state of California decides not to defend its own law, we're done here.
So very weird policy apparently from the federal judiciary that if you are an AG of a state and the people of that state pass a referendum you don't like, you can moot that law by not defending it in court.
But if you are the prosecutors in a case and you decide to drop the case, now the judge will hear amicus curiae briefs to hear whether the case should remain open.
Very, very weird stuff.
The reality here is that the media coverage of this thing has been overwhelmingly ridiculous.
Michael Flynn appears to have been railroaded by a lot of the available evidence.
That does not mean that Michael Flynn should be National Security Advisor.
I objected to him as National Security Advisor when he was first named.
It also doesn't mean that he did anything that rises to the level of the criminal.
Liz Cheney, the representative from Wyoming, said it's pretty obvious that members of the Obama administration believe they were above the law.
They clearly believed they were above the law.
And when you look at what was going on in terms of unmasking the names of U.S.
officials that were in the classified documents, when you look at what they were doing after they fired General Flynn, clearly there was some sort of a vendetta underway.
When you look at Jim Comey, you know, Jim Comey on tape publicly on video saying that he knows that he basically violated the rules, violated the practice when he sent his FBI agents over to interview General Flynn.
So they clearly were trying to criminalize their political differences and they need to be investigated.
Well, that I think is exactly right.
I think you will see some investigations of people like James Comey.
Confirmation bias is a hell of a drug.
And there are a lot of people who tend to believe that the Trump team was in collusion with Russia because they could not deal with the fact that he won the election.
And so they were going to bend every rule in order to confirm their biased notions as to what exactly was happening here.
Alrighty.
Time for, should we do a quick thing I like?
Okay, fine.
We'll do a quick thing I like.
So, the thing that I like today is the movie Shawshank Redemption.
Okay, so I know, I know, it's a thing everybody likes.
But I've been re-watching some old classics and what I found is, you know, I've spent a long time during, you know, really I like watching new movies.
I like watching movies I've never seen.
I'm finding renewed pleasure in watching old movies and re-watching old movies.
So in the past week or so, I've been re-watching old movies.
My wife and I did a Christopher Nolan binge right before our kid was born.
Now I'm going back to some older movies.
And I will discuss one of those tomorrow, which is maybe the greatest movie ever made, or at least the greatest couple of pairs of movies ever made.
But Shawshank Redemption is, in fact, a fantastic movie.
It is a great movie.
It works on every level.
It's one of those movies where... It's one of those TNT movies, right?
There's a series of TNT movies for a while, when people used to get cable, where you'd be flipping the channel, and this would be on.
You'd be like, okay, I'm gonna watch for three minutes.
And two hours later, you were still sitting there watching it.
And you have the DVD, but you're not gonna pop in the DVD.
You're just gonna wait for the commercials to pass.
Shawshank Redemption.
Addictive movie.
Here's a little bit of the trailer.
For those who haven't seen it, it's a great movie and the good news is that by the time you finish watching it, the pandemic will be over because it's nine hours long.
I must admit, I didn't think much of Andy the first time I laid eyes on him.
He had a quiet way about him.
A walk, a talk that just wasn't normal around here.
There are places in the world that aren't made out of stone.
There's something inside that they can't touch.
Let me tell you something, my friend.
Hope is a dangerous thing.
Okay, so this movie is great, obviously.
If you haven't seen it, you're missing out.
And I'm sure everybody has seen it.
It's a pretty brutal film, but it is a great movie.
By the way, another great movie by Frank Darabont.
Very underrated.
Green Mile.
Green Mile is also an excellent movie, which is worthy of a watch.
So, what's amazing about this movie, by the way, is it was a complete failure when it first came out at the box office.
It really did not do well.
One of the reasons is because it has one of the worst names in the history of film.
Right?
Shawshank Redemption means nothing.
Like the title means nothing, but it's one of those movies where because it hit basic cable, it became a backlogged hit.
And now it's, according to IMDb, everybody's favorite movie.
So go check it out if you have not and enjoy yourself this evening.
Okay, we'll be back here later today with two additional hours of content.
Otherwise, we'll see you here tomorrow as we enjoy lockdown infinity plus one.
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