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May 18, 2020 - The Ben Shapiro Show

01:02:40

Coronavirus Can’t Kill Politics | Ep. 1013

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	Barack Obama returns to slam President Trump and call for fundamental change.
	Joe Biden lays out a new radical program.
	And Democrats begin to realize that Americans kind of want to reopen.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
	Today's show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.
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	Before we begin, I want to take a moment to give a shout out to our advertising partners.
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	Okay, so let's begin with some very, very good news.
	There actually is a fair bit of good news this morning.
	Piece of good news number one, the testing trends all over the United States seem to suggest that the summer is actually having a fairly significant impact on COVID-19.
	Because as the lockdowns are ending, state by state, the southern states seem not to be experiencing a wild uptick in the number of infections, even though they are gradually reopening.
	Again, they are gradually reopening.
	I've talked to people in Florida.
	I've talked to people in Georgia.
	I've talked to people in Texas.
	And despite the media reports that everybody is willy-nilly going out in the streets and making out with each other, that's not actually what's happening.
	A lot of stores have remained closed because they can't actually abide by some of the strict regulations.
	Most people are still wearing masks.
	Most people are socially distancing.
	And even though you're seeing pictures from places like California and New York with lots of people out there, a lot of those pictures are taken with particular type of lenses that actually make it look as though people are closer together than they actually are.
	It's a trick of photography and it's sort of disturbing that people do it, but it is a reality.
	Yesterday, my wife and I took the kids out to a park.
	There's pretty much no one around.
	People who were around were socially distancing.
	We've been doing that for weeks.
	People sort of understand on a general level what is smart and what is not.
	That doesn't mean everybody, but that does mean that more people than you would suspect, and that means That even if there are some infections, it's going to be a lower level than prior to the lockdown because people are engaging in different behavior.
	We're starting to see those trends.
	Scott Gottlieb, former FDA commissioner, put out a series of tweets looking at some of those trends.
	So in tweet number one, he put out from AEI a graph showing the number of tests going up across the country really, really rapidly.
	So as of May 1st, We were experiencing something like 290,000 tests, something like that, run on May 1st.
	And on average, probably the first week of May, we were running somewhere in the neighborhood of probably 250,000 tests a day.
	Now we are running, on average, closer to 400,000 tests a day.
	Meanwhile, the number of positives has gone down steadily during that time.
	Which means, basically, the number of people who are positive with COVID-19 has been stagnant, and the number of tests is going up.
	Because, again, the percentage is just the numerator over the denominator.
	So if the numerator remains the same, meaning the number of people infected, and the denominator increases, meaning the number of people tested, you are going to see a decrease in the positivity rate.
	Now, there have been people in the media who are lying to you, and it is lying with statistics.
	When they say things like, increasing numbers of positives, increasing number of absolute positives, If you test more people, you will get more positives.
	That does not mean, contra to some people's, again, statistical illiteracy, that does not mean that the test is making people positive.
	It means that you're likely to pick up the positives that are already there when you test more often, obviously.
	So two things can be true at once.
	One, the number of absolute positives coming back can be higher.
	And two, the rate of positivity can be declining because you're doing more absolute tests.
	So Scott Gottlieb also tweeted out the states where cases are increasing.
	It's showing slight increase in Texas, but again, very difficult to tell whether that increase in Texas is due to like an absolute increase or whether that is due to a percentage increase or whether that is due to additional testing.
	In all likelihood, it's due to additional testing.
	In Louisiana, very slight increase after seeing a major peak earlier this year.
	In Virginia, slight increase.
	In Arkansas and South Dakota, a slight increase.
	But again, Testing is increasing in all of those states.
	It is also worthwhile noting only about 60% of the United States actually releases the results of these tests.
	Meanwhile, there are a solid probably 25 states where there has been no increase in new cases, where there is no actual spike in cases.
	And that is states ranging from Nevada to Connecticut to Maryland to Florida.
	Again, Florida was supposed to be, you know, patient zero in the outbreak.
	Florida was supposed to be where we were going to see this vast increase in a second wave because evil, evil Ron DeSantis had allowed people go to the beaches.
	Turns out none of that was true.
	It turns out that Florida is much more of a success story than people are making it out to be.
	And one of the things that you're noticing is that again, hotter states, Just are not experiencing this in the same way that colder states have experienced it throughout the country.
	California did not get hard hit.
	Texas did not get particularly hard hit.
	Florida did not get particularly hard hit.
	Major cities, you know, Louisiana is a fairly warm place, but Louisiana has New Orleans.
	New Orleans got hit.
	The rest of the state really did not get hit all that hard.
	Okay, so Gottlieb concludes from this.
	He suggests that nationwide recent models suggest doubling time is about 45 days and the R0 is around 110.
	So the R0 is the statistical infection rate.
	If you're above one, that means that it is growing.
	If you are below one, that means that it is decreasing because it's basically how many people one person infects.
	So if the R0 is around 1.1, then that is a slow epidemic.
	Slow enough that you're not going to overwhelm the healthcare system.
	Gottlieb says while it's still expanding, it's doing so at a much slower pace.
	Hopefully there will be a seasonal effect in the summer that slows it further.
	Okay, so all of that is very good news.
	Meanwhile, there's another piece of good news that's being kind of positioned as a piece of bad news, and that is that as coronavirus testing expands, not enough people are actually testing.
	So all the talk about tests, tests, we need more tests, more and more and more tests.
	According to the Washington Post, people aren't taking the tests that are out there.
	By the way, I've experienced this myself.
	My wife, earlier this week, came down with a fairly high-grade fever.
	It turns out that she just had an infection.
	But she went to, we went and we actually got a COVID-19 test.
	She's nursing, she got an infection from that.
	We actually went and we got a COVID-19 test.
	We were in line for like two seconds.
	Seriously, two seconds.
	They have stations set up all around Southern California.
	The availability of tests is extremely high.
	According to the Washington Post, in fact, the availability of testing is so high that not enough people are actually accessing the testing.
	So the Washington Post reports four months into the U.S.
	coronavirus outbreak, tests for the virus finally are becoming widely available, a crucial step toward lifting stay-at-home orders and safely returning to normal life.
	While many states no longer report crippling supply shortages, a new problem has emerged.
	Too few people lining up to get tested.
	Okay, so on the one hand, the suggestion is that a lot of people should be getting tested who are not getting tested.
	On the other hand, what that really means is, listen, right now in America, if you have coronavirus symptoms, high likelihood you're going to go get tested.
	High likelihood, but that really means there are a lot of asymptomatic people out there or people who are actually not sick with coronavirus at all.
	A Washington Post survey of governor's offices and state health departments found at least a dozen states where testing capacity outstrips the supply of patients.
	Many have scrambled to make testing more convenient, especially for vulnerable communities, by setting up pop-up sites and developing apps that help assess symptoms, find free test sites, and deliver quick results.
	But the numbers, while rising, are well short of capacity and far short of targets set by independent experts.
	Utah, for example, is conducting about 3,500 tests a day.
	That's a little more than a third of its 9,000 test maximum capacity.
	Health officials have erected highway billboards begging drivers to get tested for COVID-19.
	Why aren't more people showing up?
	Well, that's the million-dollar question, said Utah Health Department spokesman Tom Hudachko.
	It could be simply that people don't want to be tested.
	It could be that people feel like they don't need to be tested.
	It could be that people are so mildly symptomatic, they're just not concerned that having a positive lab result would actually change their course in any meaningful way.
	See, I think it's probably the latter.
	Maybe it's just confirmation bias from the people I talk to in my crowd.
	It's certainly anecdotal.
	But let's just put it this way.
	If anybody in my circle had coronavirus symptoms, they would immediately go get tested.
	I don't know how many people across the United States have the symptoms.
	They're like, you know what?
	Screw it.
	Not getting tested today.
	Maybe it's just that not that many people are experiencing symptoms, or at least severe symptoms, sufficient that they feel like they need to go get tested.
	Experts say several factors may be preventing more people from seeking tests, including a lingering sense of scarcity, a lack of access in rural and underserved communities, concerns about cost, and skepticism about testing operations.
	Ayla Stanford is a pediatric surgeon in Philadelphia.
	She's providing free testing in low-income and minority communities.
	She says, we know there's a lack of trust in the African-American community with the medical profession.
	She has an effort which offers testing in church parking lots.
	They've serviced more than 3,000 people in recent weeks.
	Also, there's lingering confusion about who qualifies.
	Last month, the CDC relaxed its guidelines to offer tests to people without symptoms or referred by local health departments or clinicians.
	Some states have relaxed their testing criteria dramatically.
	Governor Brian Kemp has encouraged all Georgians, even if you're not experiencing symptoms, to schedule an appointment.
	So by the way, if George is actually encouraging people to go out and get tested, and so they have a larger number of people getting tested, you would expect to see a spike in positives, right?
	Again, Republican urged residents earlier this month to call 2-1-1, find a location close to you, even if you don't have symptoms and you are just curious.
	Ashish Jha, who directs the Harvard Global Health Institute, said a lot of states put in very, very restrictive testing policies because they didn't have tests.
	They've either not relaxed those or the word is not getting out.
	We want to be at a point where everybody who has mild symptoms is tested.
	That's critical.
	That is still not happening in a lot of places.
	But, again, as we move forward, it seems like if you... Listen, if you wanted to get tested before, you basically had to fib.
	If you wanted to get tested, you had to say that you knew something because the CDC standards were so ridiculous that it was like, do you know somebody who's had coronavirus?
	It's like, well, I don't know.
	That person wasn't tested.
	Well, okay, so to get the test, you fib.
	And Peggy Noonan talked about this in the Wall Street Journal.
	But now, that is not the way that this is working.
	Now, basically, if you say that you have symptoms, you can get tested virtually across the country.
	California has sufficient lab capacity to conduct nearly 100,000 tests a day.
	They're averaging fewer than 40,000.
	In Chicago, a major chain of urgent care clinics temporarily halted mobile testing last week.
	It ran out of test kits.
	As states trying to encourage people to return to normal life ramp up testings, experts worry that widespread shortages could occur.
	But the federal government is moving to fill that gap.
	The federal government is moving quickly to fill that gap.
	Bottom line is this.
	It does not seem like there is on-the-ground demand for testing that is not appearing so much as a national demand for testing because there is this, again, slogan out there that testing and tracing are the solution to this thing.
	When you're providing more tests than people are actually taking advantage of, that is not a problem of supply, that is a problem of demand.
	And the federal government is doing its best to fill that in.
	But what that really shows is that we are not experiencing overwhelming of the healthcare system.
	We're not experiencing overwhelming numbers of cases.
	And this is driving a sort of change in the rhetoric that you're seeing from Democrats.
	So for a while there, the rhetoric was, we got to shut down until we have a vaccine.
	And by the way, another piece of good news, Moderna is now announcing that they've had positive interim phase one data for their new mRNA vaccine.
	They're saying that their new tests on the vaccine are successful and they're moving forward.
	So there are many vaccines apparently that are now in preclinical result testing.
	And they've seen some very positive results.
	They're trying to figure out exactly what the dosage should be.
	But the bottom line is that this is very good news.
	As Scott Gottlieb says, encouraging news today on Moderna vaccine technology will eventually let us reduce the COVID threat and reclaim normal times.
	Early data shows it generates robust immune reaction.
	It's dose dependent.
	Getting dose right is key.
	Moderna is now testing a new 50 milligram dose.
	We must establish, or microgram dose, rather.
	We must establish regulatory measures for antibody titers, clinical measures of benefit to serve as clear benchmarks of success for studies.
	Right now, FDI requires neutralizing antibody titer of at least 1 to 160 for convalescent serum donors.
	Is that the level for a vaccine?
	There's some suggestion that vaccines could protect us from bad symptoms of COVID, but not totally protect us from getting the infection, sort of like a flu shot.
	OK, well, I think that we would all go for that, right?
	If this was reduced to the danger of the flu, I think we would all be like, OK, done, done.
	OK, and then good news is that seems to be the direction we are moving.
	So all of this is good news.
	All of this is good news.
	The summer seems to be slowing the spread, as Dr. Marty Makary of Johns Hopkins told me last week.
	It seems as though the testing shortages are are actually not supremely material in most major states at this point.
	It seems like it's really more a problem of people being aware that they can get a test or people wanting to get a test than it is that the tests are not available, which is good news.
	And this is changing a lot of the rhetoric politically surrounding a reopening.
	We'll get to that in just one second.
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	Alrighty, so you can see.
	That the democratic rhetoric around this thing, as I say, is really changing fairly radically.
	So, for example, Andrew Cuomo on testing.
	So last week, Andrew Cuomo was like, we don't have enough testing.
	The testing is not there.
	We just don't have enough testing.
	Testing, testing.
	And it turns out that Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York, he did the same thing with testing he did with ventilators, which is he said he needed a lot more than he needed, right?
	He said, I need 100,000 ventilators.
	Turns out they didn't need a fraction of that.
	So over the course of the last few weeks, it's been Cuomo saying, we need testing, testing, many tests.
	We just need tons of tests.
	Yesterday, Cuomo announced that the New York State drive-thru and walk-in locations are capable of testing 15,000 people a day, and they are currently testing 5,000 people a day.
	In other words, there is a surplus per day of 10,000 tests.
	Okay, that is not a testing shortage.
	So all the rips, remember?
	The rip was on Trump.
	He's not getting the ventilators.
	Then he got the ventilators.
	Then it was, they're not getting us the tests.
	Then they got them the tests.
	Seems like the problem right now is that COVID-19 is just a part of life, right?
	That is the problem for now.
	The problem is not the testing.
	The problem is not the medical care because we have not swamped the medical system.
	The problem is that we are all just going to have to assess our own personal levels of risk and be responsible.
	And that's it.
	That's all we can do until a vaccine is developed.
	Good news is it looks like a few months until maybe there will be some sort of workable vaccine that at least drives down the symptoms or a therapeutic that drives down the symptoms sufficient we can go back to our normal everyday lives.
	When I say normal everyday lives, I don't mean with social distancing, with masks.
	I mean, I think that we are probably a few months away from going back to like actual regular life.
	I think that we are going to get back to the point where people actually do go to ballgames.
	We're going to get back to the point where people do shake hands with one another.
	I don't think handshakes are dead forever, by the way.
	I think we'll hopefully we'll still keep some things like washing our hands a lot and not touching our faces so much.
	But I think that as we develop therapeutics and a vaccine, that is the hope.
	Don't do it prematurely, but that is the hope in the near future.
	And until then, we mitigate risk and buy ourselves time because the therapeutics are coming down the pike.
	Now, as I say, You know, there is this sort of pessimistic vision of the future in which there's no vaccine and there's no therapeutic, in which case you just want to achieve herd immunity as fast as possible, which in the United States would be pretty dangerous because there are a lot of unhealthy people, but...
	I don't think that's necessary.
	I think that if we're all responsible for a few months, we're going to get closer to normal by September, October, November, certainly by the beginning of next year, than many people had thought, including me, early on in this process.
	And you're starting to see Democrats adapt their talk about this.
	So here's Cuomo explaining, we actually have more testing than we can use right now.
	We have more sites and more testing capacity than we're using.
	Okay, that's a good problem.
	But that is the next from hurdle to hurdle, right?
	Stone to stone?
	Yeah, I see it more like from hurdle to hurdle down the track.
	Now we have more testing capacity and more sites than we're actually using.
	We have driving sites that can do 15,000 per day.
	We're doing about 5,000 per day.
	Okay, so again, we're not actually short on the test at this point in New York State, which is the state hardest hit by this stuff.
	Meanwhile, over in Colorado, Jared Polis, who's a Democrat, he came out and he said, you know what we're actually doing?
	We're recounting our COVID-19 deaths.
	We think we overestimated how many deaths there were, which is pretty astonishing.
	Remember, when Trump said this, he was ripped up and down.
	When any Republican has suggested that the classification of COVID deaths has actually been too broad because it counted people who died with COVID as opposed to people who died of COVID.
	So you're 82 years old.
	You have many preexisting medical conditions.
	You get COVID, but you actually die of something else.
	You'd have a heart attack or something.
	And you are classified as a COVID-19 death or you're classified as a COVID-19 death when you die in your home and you're just an excess death and we don't actually know why you died.
	The policy is like, you know what, if we're actually going to be statistically accurate about this thing, Then we need to measure people who died of COVID-19 as opposed to people who died with COVID-19.
	This guy's a Democrat.
	That means he's not getting ripped up and down.
	That's the way this works in the media.
	You can make exactly the same argument if you are a Democrat as if you are a Republican.
	The Democrat will be praised for the argument.
	The Republican will be ripped.
	Here's Jared Paulus making an argument that many people have been making on the Republican side of the aisle for a while.
	These are deaths that should not be politicized.
	The CDC criteria include anybody who has died with COVID-19.
	What the people of Colorado and the people of country want to know is how many people died of COVID-19.
	In our state, about 900 have died from COVID-19 on their death certificate or from the attending physician.
	About 1,100 have died with it.
	That those 200 in the middle, it might have been a contributing factor, but it wasn't deemed the sole factor or the only factor in their death.
	Weird, because again, if you mentioned this like just a few weeks ago, then the suggestion is you were downplaying the virus.
	Again, Jared Powell can reopen Colorado in exactly the same way as Brian Kemp reopened Georgia, and he can say exactly the same stuff as President Trump about downgrading the number of deaths.
	Not a shred of criticism from the media.
	Not one.
	Andrew Cuomo can completely blow it in his state.
	Not a shred of criticism from the media.
	That dude has an 80% approval rating, and he was shoving old people with COVID-19 back into nursing homes.
	Now Cuomo, by the way, is actually on the defensive.
	So yesterday, he said, we're not going to prosecute anyone for nursing home deaths.
	Come on, guys.
	That's not serious.
	I mean, come on.
	We're not going to do anything about that.
	Who is accountable for those 139 deaths?
	How do we get justice for those families who had 139 deaths?
	What is justice?
	Who can we prosecute for those deaths?
	Nobody.
	Nobody.
	Mother Nature, God, where did this virus come from?
	People are going to die by this virus.
	That is the truth.
	Okay, and then he went on to say, and this is a direct quote, older people, vulnerable people are going to die from this virus.
	This is going to happen despite whatever you do.
	Weird, because there were those of us who were saying this when it came to risk mitigation.
	There were those who were saying this when it came to how do we strategize about tranching populations back into the workforce.
	There were those of us who were saying this and we trended on Twitter for saying this.
	Andrew Cuomo says it and everybody's like, oh, well, you know, Andrew Cuomo, hero of the people, man, hero of the people.
	So now we're allowed to say the stuff that's true out loud when it becomes clear that now we are on the downtrend and when it becomes clear that it's going to cost Democrats if they continue to keep Every part of the economy shut down for extended periods of time, despite the fact that the evidence doesn't show that we should do all of that.
	Rahm Emanuel, the former chief of staff to Barack Obama, he says, guys, I think Democrats are kind of too resistant about reopening.
	We're going to need to talk reopening now.
	On the Democratic side on messaging, we look a little too much messaging, too much about resistance about reopening, too much about reluctance about reopening.
	And we should go to a message of rebuilding America.
	If the president wants to talk about reopening, we want to talk about rebuilding America and the relief.
	Let's take the unemployed.
	If you're unemployed in the service sector, JCPenney, some of these others, those jobs aren't coming back.
	So we're going to give you a coupon.
	Go become a computer coder in six months.
	We'll pay for it.
	You don't have to pay a penny out of your pocket.
	Learn to code is the Democrats' new program.
	But the main point of what Rahm Emanuel is saying is correct, which is the Democrats have been extremely resistant to reopening.
	Why?
	Because the media calculus was such, until the last five minutes, the media calculus was such that if you said lockdown until every life is safe, my grandmother, she means everything to me, then you were rewarded.
	And if you said, guys, we have to figure out a way to reopen because the economy is dying and 40 million people are out of work and everybody is losing their life savings and their life dreams, then you were a bad person.
	But now that it appears that we are on the downslope, Then, and it appears that Florida and Georgia, and things could reverse, but Florida and Georgia, among many other states, do not appear that they're being overwhelmed in terms of the healthcare system and not being close to overwhelmed in terms of the healthcare system.
	Now the rhetoric is starting to change.
	And we're all getting to where I suggested we were going to be in the first place, which is individual decision-making about risk mitigation.
	Well, who could have suggested all of this stuff weeks ago, months ago?
	Oh, right.
	Yeah, I did.
	Sorry.
	Not to say I'm right, but I was totally right.
	We'll get to that in just... We'll get to how right I was in just one second.
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	Okay, so as we see, people are engaging in risk mitigation or risk taking as they see fit.
	In New York, people were going back out to bars and beaches, according to the New York Post.
	Lockdown-weary New Yorkers ditching the distancing to get social instead this weekend, transforming parts of the Big Apple into raucous late-season Mardi Gras.
	Yet the city's COVID-be-damned attitude was nothing compared with the scene in Belmar, New Jersey, a beach popular with Staten Islanders and Brooklynites.
	Huge crowds waited shoulder-to-shoulder on the boardwalk for their turn to buy beach badges.
	The line for beach badges was like four non-socially distanced blocks long, tweeted Jared Seidler, who described the boardwalk as obscenely packed.
	I don't know the beach badges thing.
	Is that something they're doing just because of COVID-19, or is that something that you actually have to do in New Jersey?
	I just actually don't know the answer to that.
	If the government has now restricted it so you have to buy a beach badge so as not to overcrowd the beach, so you just end up with a crowded line, then that's what you call policy stupidity at the highest level.
	Outside bars on the Upper East Side, the Upper West Side, the East and West Villages, and in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, The Post found booze hounds arriving for the takeout cocktails and then staying and staying to sip drinks on packed sidewalks and soak up the lively scenes.
	Are you going to drink with a mask on, said one reveler, hairdresser Akeem Kelly.
	His mask dangled below his chin as he stood outside the Upper East Side's popular Dorian's Red Hand Bar, where crowds exceeding three dozen, nearly all in masks, were found in the early evenings of Friday and Saturday.
	They don't care about us, said Anne Trent, 72, of Manhattan on Saturday.
	She sat on a bench at the west end of the Brooklyn Bridge as a steady stream of mask-free sightseers and bicyclists passed her by, and she mused, what happened to all of us protecting everybody else?
	Okay, I'll tell you what happened, is that a bunch of young people said, I don't care if I get this.
	Right, that's actually what's going on right now.
	And that may not be best policy.
	And in fact, if you see an elderly person anywhere in your near vicinity, you're going to want to throw up that mask.
	But can we stop pretending that a bunch of 20-year-olds hanging out at a bar is the same thing as a bunch of people at a nursing home hanging out together?
	It is not.
	Okay, now, again, I think that for purposes of slowing the spread, here's my rule.
	My personal rule has been that when I'm out and about, if I'm six feet away from everybody else and outdoors, I don't wear a mask.
	When I'm outdoors with my kids, I don't wear a mask.
	When I go into a restaurant to pick up food, when I go over to the garden supply store where I'm in close proximity with people, I put on the mask.
	And I think that that's a fairly good rule.
	And that's a good rule mainly because, you know, I just don't know who's vulnerable and who is not vulnerable.
	However, if you're talking about like a bar scene and everybody there is 20, I gotta say that the risk factors in terms of people dying of COVID are not particularly high, especially if everybody, again, socially distances from the most vulnerable.
	And that's a decision that you are going to have to make yourself.
	What is not a smart decision and not a good decision is if you're not wearing the mask and you are near somebody who you know is vulnerable.
	That would be a stupid decision.
	But again, I think that young, stupid people tend to do young, stupid things.
	That does not mean that you're going to get people to stop doing young, stupid things.
	That didn't even stop during the COVID outbreak.
	So here's what's actually happening.
	Most people who are risk-averse are being risk-averse.
	Most people who are being risk-seeking are being risk-seeking.
	And most people are actually being fairly smart about this.
	The media are going to pick out these instances of people who are being dumb, and then they're going to highlight those so that they can claim that the government needs to be deeply involved in regulating individual behavior.
	But the reality is that if you got tens of millions of people who are engaging in individual decision-making anyway, that's just how it's going to be.
	That's just the reality of life.
	There's a good article today in the San Jose Mercury News talking About risk assessment.
	Says, as an infectious disease expert, Dr. George Rutherford knows all about the horrors of COVID-19.
	There's one risk the UC San Francisco professor wearing a mask is willing to take, hugging his two-year-old granddaughter.
	For two months, we've been diligent about staying home, but as Bay Area residents start to venture out with parts of the state gradually loosening lockdown restrictions, how do we navigate this new landscape of peril and promise?
	We can't stay isolated and fearful forever.
	The new normal looks like this.
	Social lives carefully built around risk reduction, rather than the strict and absolute safety of isolated sheltering.
	Stanford University Communications Professor Jeff Hancock, he says we need to balance our needs with what we know about the coronavirus.
	He said abstinence doesn't work.
	Plans that are practical and recognize basic human needs will be more successful than plans that don't.
	Do we need a vacation in Costa Rica with lots of friends?
	No.
	Do we need intimate and social moments?
	Yes.
	Risk isn't binary, experts agreed.
	All or nothing approaches have bad consequences.
	Where have you been for the last several months?
	Serious!
	Like, if you mentioned this before, that risk mitigation was gonna be the answer, you were the bad guy.
	But now, apparently we're all allowed to talk risk mitigation.
	I wonder what changed.
	I wonder what changed.
	Maybe it was that a bunch of Republican states started to reopen, didn't see massive spikes, and people around the country, they're like, oh, look at that.
	Oh, look at that.
	OK, well, what all of this has led to is a change in sort of democratic messaging for 2020.
	So as I say, they started to talk reopening.
	That's a thing that has happened.
	But they also have to come up with a new message, because let's say that people start reopening and people are generally responsible and the economy starts to reopen.
	People start getting hired back slowly but surely.
	We come up with some therapeutics.
	By the time we get to fall, schools are open and we are basically, let's say, best case scenario, we're back to 80 percent of normal by November.
	And the economy is moving back up again, and no one's going to blame Trump for the coronavirus.
	It's just not going to happen.
	You can't blame Trump for a worldwide pandemic that knocked out places like Italy and knocked out places like the UK.
	The United States ranges middle of the pack when it comes to number of deaths per million, and when you take out New York City, we range near the bottom.
	So really, it was a New York failure, and everybody else did kind of okay, aside from some of the major cities like New Orleans and Chicago.
	Because the United States is a fairly diffuse place in terms of population, except for those major populations that are specifically in New York City.
	So the Democrats have to come up with a new message.
	And they have.
	Their new message, which they will get all the support in the world from the media from.
	Four, is they need to remake the system utterly and completely.
	So Barack Obama wheeled out this new message today.
	It's the same as their old message, right?
	Every crisis is an opportunity.
	Every bad situation is just an indicator that we need to remake the system completely.
	So Barack Obama gave a speech over the weekend to people who are graduating from college and was widely praised by the media for doing so because Obama could fart and the media would praise him for it.
	His farts smelled like roses according to the members of CNN's editorial board.
	So Barack Obama gave this speech And his speech included, I don't know why in the middle of a graduation he would do this, but apparently it's a very unifying thing.
	It's very unifying to say that the leadership of the country sucks when you're the ex-president.
	Man has Jimmy Carter syndrome.
	It is kind of amazing, by the way.
	You notice how Republican presidents, I don't think Trump will do this, but every other Republican president basically went away after their president.
	Reagan stopped talking.
	H.W.
	didn't talk.
	W. didn't talk.
	It was like, okay, we're done.
	Now my job is over.
	Not Barack Obama, right?
	Obama's out there and he is jabbering up a storm because he has to defend his legacy against President Trump, he thinks.
	We'll get to Barack Obama's address to graduates in just one second.
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	Alrighty, in just a second, we're going to get to Barack Obama and the new democratic agenda.
	It was Trump is blowing this thing.
	Now it turns out Trump didn't blow the thing that bad.
	It turns out that Trump is not a great communicator, as we all knew.
	And he does dumb things on Twitter.
	And also, the ventilators were there.
	And also, the testing is being provided.
	And also, states are basically taking the lead.
	And also, the people who are defending China look terrible today.
	So Democrats have to come up with a new plan.
	Obama laid it out yesterday.
	We'll get to that momentarily.
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	Leave it to producer Nick to inform me that those are triples.
	That's correct, the trouble with tribbles.
	Okay, so, President Obama gives this speech to graduates, and he lays out the Democratic program.
	Program number one, he's gonna yell at Trump about how Trump sucks.
	Program number two, this COVID-19 shows that America needs fundamental change.
	Weird, because I thought that when he came onto the scene, we got the fundamental change, right?
	Turns out, there's never change fundamental enough for the left, because in the left-wing worldview, any inequality is an inequity, meaning anything that is unequal in life is not about The fact that people are not actually equal in all of their capacities and all of their skill sets.
	I am short.
	I'm not going to be playing in the NBA.
	I have no jump shot.
	I can't dunk.
	Right?
	But apparently that's inequity.
	That's some sort of unfairness.
	So everything in America is about unfairness.
	It is not about the fact that any statistical division you draw in American society is going to include inequality.
	So if that is your viewpoint, then the only indicator that you have reached fairness is when everybody ends up with exactly the same results, basically no matter what they do.
	You take the decision-making out of the process.
	So that means that it is perpetual revolution on the left.
	It means it doesn't matter if Obama fundamentally transformed America.
	Doesn't matter.
	Not fundamental enough.
	It's never fundamental enough.
	We never reached that utopia.
	Okay, so Barack Obama said two things.
	One, he ripped into Trump.
	Two, he suggested that COVID-19 shows systemic racism.
	Okay, it doesn't matter that we are expending extraordinary resources for all Americans so they can get the treatment that they need.
	No, this is really about how America has a legacy.
	Somehow, the death rates from COVID-19 are evidence of Jim Crow and slavery.
	Which, again, I guess in a certain sense is true, but only in the sense that all history is contingent.
	Meaning that all history leads to other things happening in the future.
	If Adam and Eve hadn't eaten from the apple tree, then presumably fewer people would be dying of COVID-19 right now.
	That's not a supremely helpful analysis of the current situation when it comes to policy on the ground.
	Here's Barack Obama making the fundamental case for transformation of American society, which is now being picked up by Joe Biden as well.
	More than anything, this pandemic has fully finally torn back the curtain on the idea that so many of the folks in charge know what they're doing.
	A lot of them aren't even pretending to be in charge.
	If the world's going to get better, it's going to be up to you.
	With everything suddenly feeling like it's up for grabs, this is your time to seize the initiative.
	Okay, weird.
	So you're going to seize the initiative?
	That's very odd, because what I've been told by people like Obama is that if he were in charge, then we could all just listen to him.
	But since Trump is in charge, you should use your own individual judgment.
	As opposed to me, where I say, like, I don't care who's in charge, you should use your individual judgment.
	You notice how this works?
	When a Democrat is in charge, pay attention to authority.
	When a Democrat is not in charge, it's up to you, America.
	A disease like this just spotlights the underlying inequalities and extra burdens that black communities have historically had to deal with in this country.
	terrible and the 1619 Project is right.
	This is the message that Obama's pushing here.
	A disease like this just spotlights the underlying inequalities and extra burdens that black communities have historically had to deal with in this country.
	We see it in the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on our communities, just as we see it when a black man goes for a jog and some folks feel like they can stop and question and shoot him if he doesn't submit to their questioning.
	there.
	Injustice like this isn't new.
	Okay, that's insane.
	Okay, what he is saying right now is totally insane.
	The reason that is totally insane is, first of all, if you're going to differentiate how COVID-19 is affecting populations, you'd have to first figure out a couple of things.
	One, people who are obese and have diabetes and have pre-existing conditions.
	This is more prevalent in minority communities than it is in the white community.
	That is just a statistical truth.
	Okay, that has nothing to do with race.
	That has everything to do with eating habits and the kind of food people have access to and all that kind of stuff.
	Two, are people actually socially distancing?
	Do people live in intergenerational households?
	A lot of people who are white tend not to live as much with grandma.
	A lot of people in minority communities, Hispanic communities, for example, have lots of cross-generational pollination.
	This is also true in the black community.
	That's not a bad thing.
	That's not a rip.
	I think it's actually quite a good thing in many ways.
	But it does mean that you are more susceptible to passing on COVID-19 to other people.
	But you have to take all of these into account.
	That does not mean that some inequity has taken place.
	You'd have to actually filter out all of the different decision-making variables.
	But according to Obama, if black people are hit harder by COVID-19 statistically, that means that America is racist and this can always be attributed to Jim Crow.
	He doesn't even have to bother to do the statistical analysis and figure out how much of this is due to inequity.
	He can just immediately cite inequality.
	And he can then connect it to another case where it is not clear that the driving factor was racism.
	The Ahmed Arbery case.
	So the Ahmed Arbery case is an awful, awful case.
	We talked about this at length the day after this broke in the news like big.
	We talked about the fact that I think that those guys should be prosecuted.
	That you don't have the ability to chase down somebody and basically hold them at gunpoint for a non-crime.
	That is not something you can do.
	However, we do not have evidence at this point that the incident was driven by race primarily, as opposed to being driven by vigilantism, by the people who are actually doing this thing, and driven by an insider corrupted deal, basically, between the DA in that area and the ex-cop who committed the shooting along with his son.
	I mean, this is why Obama's demagoguery is really so dangerous.
	When Trump is demagoguing, he just says something dumb.
	He just says something ridiculous.
	He'll just say, like, Joe Scarborough is off killing interns or something.
	He'll just say something where we can immediately be like, come on.
	Obama tries to create a superstructure of extraordinarily radical claims on top of very thin reads, and then wait for the media to bolster him.
	So he will say things like the Ahmaud Arbery, so what he did in that clip is pretty incredible.
	He said the Ahmaud Arbery shooting is about racism.
	Again, we don't know that it's about racism because we don't know the background of the guys who committed the shooting.
	Do they have all sorts of racist texts?
	Do they have racist background?
	Was this done specifically because they saw a black guy or is it because somebody in their neighborhood said somebody's burglarizing a house?
	And they were like, okay, well, whatever, man.
	I'm a vigilante and we've had this before and I'm going...
	By the way, still criminal, still bad, they should still go to jail.
	But we don't know the answer to that yet.
	So he takes a case where not all of the facts are known, he immediately attributes it to deep-seated American racism, then he connects that to another issue where it is not clear that racism is the deciding fac- Again, is the suggestion that our medical professionals are racist?
	Is the suggestion that our federal and state governments all across the nation, that the New York government, Bill de Blasio, has seen wildly disproportionate cases of black people dying as opposed to white people.
	Is Bill de Blasio and the city government of New York racist?
	And Bill de Blasio is like a full-blown communist.
	So you're gonna have to explain that.
	But he hasn't bothered to explain it.
	The entire program is about...
	Again, America has inequalities, therefore America is bad, and therefore America needs to be fundamentally transformed.
	And this is where Obama and Bernie were on exactly the same page.
	Obama is just more subtle about how he goes about this, right?
	Bernie will just say, America's terrible.
	America's a terrible place, filled with capitalism and brutality and viciousness, and we need to transform it into a socialist utopia.
	But Bernie, Obama is soft Bernie.
	He just lets get there gradually.
	Bernie is hard Bernie.
	Bernie is like, give me pudding and communism.
	Obama still says that he likes the free market.
	Maybe he does, you know, in a very limited fashion, heavily regulated fashion, the same way Elizabeth Warren likes the free market as an ox that you can sort of chain up to the plow of the American economy and then direct it how you want, even if it ends up killing the ox.
	But Bernie says this more clearly.
	So Bernie over the weekend, he says, we need to fundamentally rethink how society works.
	Now, remember, Everybody who is saying the stuff that they were already saying before COVID-19, if this has not challenged any of your preconceptions about when government should step in and when government should not, it's because you're not actually following the facts.
	You are just reinforcing exactly what you thought before.
	As I've said before, reinforcing your priors, reinforcing your prior beliefs.
	That is Bernie.
	It doesn't matter what the antecedent is in an if-then statement.
	All that matters is the conclusion.
	It doesn't matter what the if is.
	The then is we should be socialist.
	So it could be, if the sky is blue, we should be socialist.
	If there's COVID-19, we should be socialist.
	Here's Bernie yesterday explaining we need fundamental change.
	If there is any silver lining in the midst of this terrible, terrible and unprecedented moment in American history in terms of the economy, in terms of the pandemic, it is that maybe we start rethinking some fundamental tenets about the way our government and society works.
	And we should ask ourselves, among other things, Is healthcare a human right that all of us deserve because we're human beings?
	Or is it simply a healthcare benefit that somehow we lose when we lose our jobs?
	So Biden is picking up this torch.
	So Biden has been looking for some sort of raise in debt for his campaign.
	His campaign doesn't exist for anything.
	It's a campaign about nothing.
	It's the Seinfeld of campaigns.
	He sits in a basement and then he does nothing and then he hopes to be president.
	Now, as I've said before, that was actually his best feature.
	His best feature was the return to normalcy campaign.
	He's actually making a very large strategic error here.
	So because it turns out that maybe we'll get through this.
	It turns out that we're moving back toward normalcy.
	It turns out that our medical system withstood it and the federal government did not, in fact, do a terrible job.
	And it turns out many state governors who are Democrats, like Andrew Cuomo, did an awful job.
	Maybe J.B.
	Pritzker in Illinois didn't do a fantastic job.
	Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan didn't do a fantastic job.
	As that turns out to be the case, Biden is now shifting his message and he's looking for a positive reason to be president.
	Now, this is directly counter to why he was nominated.
	The reason he was nominated is because people didn't want Bernie.
	The reason he was nominated is because he was campaigning on the Warren G. Harding 1920 return to normalcy routine.
	His entire campaign was going to be about basically Return to status quo, return to a time that was not too crazy, return to a time where everything was sort of more even, even keel.
	No one is voting for Joe Biden because they want fundamental change.
	People are going to vote for Joe Biden because they don't want Trump.
	That was the initial theory of the Biden campaign, and it was strong enough to win him the nomination over a fundamental change candidate like Bernie Sanders.
	Well, now Biden is going full Bernie, according to the New York Times.
	More than 36 million Americans are suddenly unemployed.
	Congress has allocated $2.2 trillion in aid, with more likely to be on the way as the fight looms over government debt.
	Millions more people are losing their health insurance and struggling to take care of their children and aging relatives.
	Nearly 90,000 are dead in a continuing public health catastrophe.
	This was not the scenario Joe Biden anticipated confronting when he competed for the Democratic nomination or on a conventional left-of-center platform.
	Now, with Mr. Biden leading President Trump in the poll, the former VP and other Democratic leaders are racing to assemble a new governing agenda that meets extraordinary times, and they agree it must be far bolder than anything the party establishment has embraced before.
	See, this is such a misread.
	It is such a dramatic misread.
	The best case that you can make to moderates is, you know what we're going to get back?
	3.5% unemployment.
	You know what we're going to get back?
	Back to normal.
	You know what we're going to get back?
	All the good stuff that was happening just before this.
	But Biden is better at doing that than Trump, because Trump is volatile, and he says crazy things on Twitter, and he annoys you, and he says dumb crap.
	That was the heart of the Biden campaign.
	That's why it was like, elect this dead man, as opposed to electing Elizabeth Warren, a fundamental change candidate.
	Or electing Bernie Sanders, a fundamental change candidate.
	Now Biden is saying, well, I guess, you know, in light of this disaster, I'm going to go full, full bore radical.
	Now that actually opens the door to Trump.
	It's kind of shocking.
	Truth, truth, like this is political malpractice on an incredible level.
	Biden is not a fundamental change candidate.
	And if he nominates a VP who is a fundamental change candidate, Kamala Harris, If he nominates a VP who's a fundamental change, Stacey Abrams, then the attack by the Trump campaign is not going to be on Joe Biden is old and incompetent and senile.
	The campaign is going to be about, would you like back the 3.5% unemployment we had just before this with a functioning economy?
	Or do you want Joe Biden spending trillions of dollars on programs he didn't like in the first place, like universal health care, Medicare for all, that involves everybody losing their private health care?
	Are you really interested?
	And Joe Biden just wiping away every last student loan after you paid your student loans and then thrusting that on the back of the taxpayers?
	It's incredible.
	This is the greatest time for a return to normalcy campaign.
	Because guess what everybody is aching for in their bones?
	A return to normalcy, right?
	That's what you want.
	It's what I want.
	It's what everybody wants.
	And Trump is trying to say, okay, I'm going to get back there.
	But Biden could easily say, look, Donald Trump is not... I'm old enough to remember when the slogan against Trump was, this is not normal, right?
	This is not normal.
	And if we don't accept Trump as normal, then we can get back to the old normal of kind of half corrupt politicians like Joe Biden, He's been a lifelong politico, and sure, he's boring, and sure, he's not all that bright, but at least you knew what was coming in the morning.
	That was the campaign for Joe Biden, and now he's shifting it.
	According to the New York Times, Mr. Biden's campaign has been rapidly expanding its policy-drafting apparatus, with the former VP promising on Monday to detail plans for the right kind of economic recovery.
	He has already effectively shed his primary season theme of restoring political normalcy to the country, replacing it with promises of sweeping economic change.
	He is running directly counter.
	To the basic political calculus that says you run to the left during the primaries and you run to the center during the general.
	He ran to the center during the primaries, and now he's running to the left during the general.
	How does that make any sense at all?
	He is now opening the door.
	Like, listen, as a Republican, I'm happy.
	If you want Trump reelected, you should be happy.
	Because it does allow you to make the argument, the very proper argument, that Joe Biden is going to radically shift the country on the back of a pandemic.
	On Wednesday, Biden signaled anew he was willing to reopen his policy platform, announcing six policy task forces covering issues including health care, climate and immigration, as well as the economy, that combine his core supporters with left-wing allies of Senator Bernie Sanders, his vanquished primary opponents.
	And now he's going to just eat alive the Bernie Sanders program.
	Honest to God, if Trump does not go after him for the radicalism, it's political malpractice.
	It's amazing.
	It's amazing that he's doing this.
	It's so politically incompetent on every insane level.
	It's sort of like when Mitt Romney decided he was going to campaign on the basis of being severely conservative.
	Well, he was really campaigning on being not Obama, and then Obama somehow made it into a referendum on Romney.
	Well, now Trump can make this into a referendum on Biden if Biden starts proposing radical crap.
	But that's what they're doing.
	They're talking about pumping trillions more into the economy, enacting infrastructure and climate legislation far larger than previously envisioned, passing a raft of aggressive worker protection laws, expanding government-backed health insurance, creating enormous new investments in public health jobs, health care facilities, child care programs.
	Banning stock buybacks, compelling big corporations to share more of their profits with workers, a fundamental remaking of the American economy.
	You think anyone was on board with this?
	That's why Biden was nominated, because no one was on board with this.
	And he's doing it anyway.
	He's doing it anyway.
	It's an amazing, amazing thing.
	I mean, talk about seizing defeat from the jaws of victory right now.
	So this should be the campaign for Trump.
	The campaign for Trump should be very easy.
	Joe Biden proclaimed that he is going to be back to normalcy.
	This ain't normalcy.
	And he's openly saying he doesn't want normalcy.
	Pretty incredible, incredible stuff.
	Okay, time for some things that I hate.
	So let's talk about the media.
	The media are just absolutely egregious.
	Egregious!
	I mean, they will cover any democratic narrative in the way that Democrats would like.
	It's truly impressive.
	So let's take, for example, Stacey Abrams.
	Stacey Abrams is a non-entity.
	She lost by 50,000 votes in the state of Georgia.
	50,000 to Brian Kemp.
	That is not a close election.
	That is a not-close election.
	She is still being heralded as the next big thing.
	So much so that the Washington Post magazine printed an entire piece called The Power of Stacey Abrams.
	Despite losing the Georgia governor's race in 2018, she has moved quickly to political prominence.
	Will she be the vice presidential pick for Democrats?
	It would be insane to do this, but maybe Biden's gonna do that.
	Maybe that's his job.
	Maybe he thinks that if he campaigns radical, then it's gonna redound to his benefit because what you need is senility and radicalism on the ticket.
	Makes perfect sense.
	How ridiculous is the Washington Post piece about Stacey Abrams?
	They included a picture that looks as though she's being backlit for a Broadway show.
	She's like, there's fog emerging from behind her as she wears a white see-through cape.
	And she's entirely in silhouette.
	I mean, what in the world is going on?
	She looks like a magician from Las Vegas.
	Like, slap a top hat and a cane in her hand and she's gonna make a tiger appear or something.
	It's absurdity.
	She's gonna start singing theme songs from Wicked.
	It's a bizarro world.
	This is what the Washington Post portrays her as.
	The top picture, by the way, from the Washington Post of her, is a picture of her sitting, you know, with a shiny table right in front of her.
	And the pictures of her holding up to her eye what looks like a giant monocle of an American flag.
	And every picture is like this.
	I mean, this picture is particularly ridiculous.
	I've never seen a profile picture like this.
	Then there's a giant picture in the profile of a mural of her, of a mural of her in Atlanta on the side of a building.
	They're giving her, like, full Che Guevara treatment here.
	There's a picture of her holding up a mirror of herself.
	So you can see, I mean, like, every photo is a romantic photo.
	Now, the media have never taken a good picture of Donald Trump, ever.
	Every picture of Donald Trump is him giving the smug grin, or he looks a little bit orange or something.
	But Stacey Abrams, they, like, posed her in front of fog.
	In front of fog.
	And you have to listen to how this piece is written.
	They actually have like a full paragraph describing how you walk onto a stage.
	Not kidding.
	This is from the Washington Post piece.
	You ready?
	Pandemonium ensues as she walks to the far left of the stage like a runway supermodel.
	Stops on a dime, poses, tilts her head slightly, and smiles.
	Camera flashes explode.
	She next pivots and walks slowly to the center of the stage, freezes there, and repeats the pose.
	Again, the flashes explode.
	Abrams is summoning her inner actress, and she is both enjoying the moment and getting through it to get to the conversation.
	She then pivots and walks to the far right of the stage.
	Same.
	You wonder whether she has done this before, because it is not necessarily what one would expect from a 46-year-old politician who has nearly elected the first black female governor in U.S.
	history.
	She lost by fewer than two percentage points in the 2018 Georgia race riddled with allegations of voter suppression.
	Before that, she was a state legislator who had served as a leader in the Georgia General Assembly for a decade.
	Now her name is on political pundits' shortlist of potential running mates for Joe Biden.
	She also happens to have predicted she'll be elected president by 2040.
	Wow, she says it?
	I guess we have to take it seriously.
	The losing gubernatorial candidate in Georgia predicts?
	And she lost, by the way, in a horrible year for Republicans.
	She predicts she's going to be president by 2020.
	Well, I take that at face value.
	I take that at face value.
	I think my daughter is going to be elected president of the United States by 2060.
	I guess we'll have to take that super duper seriously now.
	Just as quickly, Abrams leaves the runway and returns to politics.
	A balloon of silence in the meeting room is punctured time and again by, amen, and preach, and you go girl.
	Okay, this is your media.
	This is your pathetic, stupid, terrible media.
	And they are awful.
	Awful in every possible way.
	And this has even infused people who I generally like in the media.
	Okay, so you've heard me on this show praise Jake Tapper before.
	I think Jake is a very good journalist.
	I also think that Jake's coverage of the Trump administration can be exceedingly biased.
	Okay, so let me give you an example.
	So today, yesterday, Jake Tapper was on with Alex Azar, and he suggested that they were talking about coronavirus and the Trump administration response, and Jake suggests that we were hit much harder than other countries.
	This is not true.
	It is not true.
	By population, we were not hit harder than other countries.
	In terms of deaths per million, the United States ranks somewhere in the middle of Europe.
	And if you rank us without New York City, we rank near the bottom of Europe.
	You can't take the number of cases in the United States or number of deaths in the United States and compare it to Italy, which has one-sixth our population.
	You can compare us to the rest of Europe.
	If you take us compared to Europe, we're doing better than Europe overall.
	But here is Jake not getting this right.
	This is just not getting it right.
	The United States has less than 5% of the world's population, but the United States has also almost 30% of the world's officially reported coronavirus deaths.
	You said back in January that, quote, the risk is low, our job is to work to keep it that way.
	So did the U.S.
	government fail?
	Why is this virus hitting our country so much harder than it's hitting other countries?
	So first, just in terms of the actual case counts, we are testing more than other countries or than other major countries, and so we're seeing a tremendous number of cases.
	Again, it is not correct to suggest that the United States has hit harder than other countries.
	Europe has been hit with 162,000 deaths.
	The United States has been hit with approximately 90,000.
	That doesn't mean everything was handled great here.
	It wasn't.
	It was mostly not handled great by governors, who are the first line of defense against this sort of stuff, not shoving people back into nursing homes with COVID-19.
	But this is just not, like, and then you see Chuck Todd, right?
	Chuck Todd doing the same routine.
	Trump is exploiting the virus to pull us apart.
	Really?
	Is Trump doing that?
	Or is it the media suggesting from the very get-go that President Trump was blowing this thing?
	Suggesting that he was withholding ventilators on the base of personal predilections?
	Suggesting that Andrew Cuomo was a hero and Ron DeSantis was a villain?
	I'm very tired of the media who have been engaged in exactly the same sort of political polarization as Trump, suddenly discovering that Trump is polarizing.
	Like, this does not excuse Trump for being polarizing during a time we need unity.
	But the media have been just as polarizing, and in many cases more polarizing, by deliberately miscovering the stats.
	Again, when you say that the United States has seen more cases of coronavirus, we are testing more than any other nation.
	That doesn't mean that the tests generate the positives, as I've said before.
	It does mean that unless you test for flu, you don't know whether people have flu.
	Unless you are testing for a heart attack, you don't know whether somebody had a heart attack or some other cause.
	Here was Chuck Todd blowing it yesterday, too.
	Even before the coronavirus hit, political division was our pre-existing condition.
	And all this makes it easy to forget how much most of us are actually pulling in one direction to get us through the worst health and now economic crisis in a century.
	So maybe this is a good moment to remind ourselves of all those acts of kindness, selflessness, and heroism that do pull us together, even as protesters, partisans, and some high-profile politicians exploit the situation to try to pull us apart.
	Okay, again, this is just, like, have you been watching the media coverage?
	The media coverage has all been about a narrative of good and evil, and now it's shifted in real time as it turns out that we can start moving toward reopening.
	It's just incredible.
	Meanwhile, the same media who say that only Trump is polarizing, that Trump is very bad, they've jumped on people talking about quote-unquote Obamagate as a conspiracy hoax.
	Now I'm just going to point out that when Donald Trump suggested that the media coverage of coronavirus was a hoax, that they were saying the federal government wasn't doing anything and that was a hoax, the media immediately suggested that what Trump meant by that is the coronavirus itself was a hoax.
	That was a hoax.
	That wasn't true.
	That was a four Pinocchio claim.
	It was repeated endlessly by members of the media, repeated endlessly by the Democratic Party.
	It is not a conspiracy hoax to point out that half of the Obama administration was involved in unmasking Michael Flynn and that it was a pretty good shot that if you spend half your time following around Michael Flynn and you have half the administration with access to Michael Flynn's name and then it leaks to the media that somebody somewhere did something wrong.
	That is not a hoax, when it turns out that the evidence supporting the idea of a Trump-Russia collusion allegation was extraordinarily skimpy.
	Like, really skimpy.
	The first half of the Mueller report, which is all about Trump-Russia collusion, is extraordinarily thin.
	Like, really thin.
	Thin like Homer Simpson's hair thin.
	Unbelievably thin.
	It's the second half, when it comes to obstruction, where you start getting into Trump acting like a crazy person.
	But the first half, the Trump-Russia collusion stuff, turned out to be a big nothing burger.
	A giant burger of nothing.
	And when you say, it looks like they bent the rules on that FISA warrant for Carter Page, which they did, which a judge, which the inspector general found, when you find that Andrew McCabe lied to the media, I mean, lied to the FBI, right, and didn't get prosecuted, when it turns out that James Comey was keeping open an investigation into Michael Flynn, even after the FBI knew that there was no actual material reason for the investigation to be open against Michael Flynn, you start to think, okay, Well, let's take best case scenario.
	These people are firmly convinced that Trump-Russia collusion happened, and they're willing to bend any and every rule in order to prove that it happened.
	And carried on for two, three years, and the media were complicit in that.
	But then, like Jake yesterday, he goes after Senator Ron Johnson, he says, this is all a conspiracy hoax, this Obamagate thing.
	Okay, it is not a conspiracy hoax to point out that people were routinely bending rules, that they were being overbroad about their application, I'm not claiming that it was a top-down conspiracy to get Michael Flynn.
	I'm not claiming that it was a top-down conspiracy to leak his name to the media.
	I'm not claiming any of those things.
	I'm just claiming that a bunch of people who are thinking in the same direction, namely that Trump-Russia collusion definitely happened and we have to stop these guys before it's too late, that those people bent the rules in extraordinary ways that if this had happened Trump to Obama and not Obama to Trump, we would be talking about impeachment on that basis alone, probably.
	That is just a reality.
	Here is Jake Tapper, though, suggesting to Ron Johnson that all of the Obamagate discussion, all the Michael Flynn discussion is a conspiracy hoax.
	You have not made the allegation that the Trump administration is making, which is that President Obama committed crimes.
	You haven't said anything along those lines.
	But your work, your requesting of this information of the Director of National Intelligence, Rick Grenell, and again, I'm pro-transparency, true, at least at all, but your work is being cited as evidence for this crackpot conspiracy theory.
	Does that bother you?
	Again, you keep calling it Crackpot Conspiracy Theory.
	I'm just trying to find out what happened.
	Again, I don't know where people keep getting this idea that anyone who is serious...
	He's claiming that Barack Obama was like, I want you to go falsely get Michael Flynn.
	Like that's not what anybody is really claiming here.
	They're claiming that Obama was in the loop on the pursuit of Michael Flynn.
	And again, I think that there were people inside the administration who were convinced that Flynn did something of which he was guilty and that he needed to be pressured by the FBI.
	That's why the investigation stayed open.
	The evidence supports that theory of the case.
	It does.
	That is not a conspiracy theory.
	Those documents are public.
	We now see them.
	So, but the media are willing, it is, it's pretty amazing.
	And Kayleigh McEnany, who's doing a very good job as press secretary, by the way, Kayleigh McEnany, she came out yesterday and she scolded the media for their lack of curiosity in the Flynn case, and she's right to do so.
	You're an attorney and the president's spokesperson.
	Perhaps you could lay out the elements of this crime.
	What crime was committed and in what way?
	I assume you're referring to the Obama administration and the unmasking and... But the president calls Obamagate.
	What is it?
	What are the elements of that crime?
	Yeah, I'm really glad you asked because there hasn't been a lot of journalistic curiosity on this front and I'm very glad that you asked this question.
	Look, there were a number of questions raised by the actions of the Obama administration.
	And she is correct about all of that.
	And again, I don't think you leave it to President Trump to lay out the theory of the case here, nor do I think that anybody's going to get prosecuted, nor should they be prosecuted.
	I don't think Susan Rice gets prosecuted for unmasking.
	I think that the person who leaks to the media should be prosecuted.
	But if you don't have evidence, then you should.
	But again, there was this general miasmatic level of corruption inside the Obama administration, where basically Obama would say, wouldn't it be nice if this happened?
	And then somewhere down the line, it would happen.
	Obama didn't order the IRS to explicitly go out there and censor 501c3 groups on the basis of ideology.
	It just happened after he suggested publicly that it would be nice if 501c3 groups weren't biased toward the right.
	Obama is a smart political operator.
	He wouldn't be caught dead with his hand in the cookie jar on this sort of stuff.
	That is not to suggest even malign motive.
	Maybe he actually thought that Trump was colluding with Russia.
	Maybe all these people convinced themselves that's what was happening.
	But that does not exempt people from following the rules.
	Okay, time for a very, very quick thing that I like.
	So, things that I like today.
	There's a really interesting novel by an Israeli novelist named Yochi Brandes.
	It's called The Orchard, and it's all about the generation that really created the Talmud, or right previous to the creation of the Talmud.
	It's really the story of Rabbi Akiva's wife and Rabbi Akiva.
	Rabbi Akiva is one of the most famous sages in Jewish history.
	It's revisionist, so if you're an Orthodox Jew, it's got some stuff in there that's going to leave you scratching your head.
	You're going to be like, well, I don't remember this part from the Talmud.
	But with that said, the last 20 pages or so of this book are quite moving and quite excellent.
	The book is called The Orchard by Yohi Brandes, and if you're interested in sort of ancient Jewish conflicts in ancient Jewish philosophy.
	The Christians come into play a lot here because this is around the birth time of Christianity.
	Paul, Saul of Tarsus, is a character in the book.
	You can check it out.
	The Orchard by Yochi Brandes is translated from the Hebrew and the translation is pretty good.
	Alrighty, we'll be back here later today with two additional hours of content.
	Otherwise, we'll see you here tomorrow.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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	Copyright Daily Wire 2020.
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