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May 19, 2020 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:01:57
Fighting About Dumb Crap | Ep. 1014
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President Trump announces he's been taking hydroxychloroquine, cities lack the courage of their lockdown convictions, and a columnist for the New York Times decides Believe All Women was a right-wing plot all along.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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Okay.
So if you live on Twitter, what you will notice that there is a vast disconnect between the crap that people care about on Twitter and the stuff that happens in real life, like in real life.
We're all worried about jobs and we're all worried about the stock market and our economy and dying of COVID.
There are actual things to worry about in real life.
And the good news is there's a bunch of good news with regard to the real things happening in real life.
And I want to bring you that good news because frankly, I think it's much more important than what is happening on Twitter.
But the disconnect on Twitter is truly astonishing.
There are a bunch of important stories happening today.
And then there's a bunch of random crap happening that Twitter thinks is super important.
And we'll get to all of those things.
Let's begin with the actual important news.
So, actual important news.
It now appears that vaccines could be on the way.
That doesn't mean that they will be available for public consumption by the end of the year, but it does mean that probably sometime early next year, we are looking at public consumption of a vaccine for COVID that drastically reduces the death rate.
And this has resulted in a skyrocketing stock market, according to the Associated Press, Asian shares rose Tuesday on optimism about a potential vaccine for coronavirus after hopes for a U.S.
economic recovery in the second half of the year sent Wall Street into a rebound.
Japan's benchmark Nikkei 2.25 added 1.9% in morning trading.
Australia's S&P jumped 2%.
South Korea's KOSPI was up almost 2%.
The mood is assertively risk-on, with sentiment having been tipped over by fresh hope sparked for a COVID-19 vaccine, says Jingyi Pan, a market strategist for IG.
Massachusetts-based Moderna saw its stock jump 20% in New York trading on Monday.
The S&P 500 climbed 3.2%.
That was its best day Since early April, the gains raised all the losses from last week when the index posted its worst showing since late March and its third weekly loss in the last four.
Bond yields rose broadly and in other signs that investors were becoming more optimistic.
Bond yields rise inversely proportional to demand.
That means that demand for bonds drop.
People are looking to invest in the stock market as opposed to relying on bonds.
Investors were also encouraged by remarks over the weekend from Fed Reserve Chair Jerome Pell.
He expressed optimism.
That is some very good news.
begin to recover in the second half of the year.
Once the outbreak has been contained, he said the economy should be able to rebound substantially.
And so you saw the S&P 500 gaining 90 points and the benchmark index is still down from about 13 percent from its all time high.
But that is not 30 or 40 percent.
The Dow Jones Industrial surged almost 4 percent as well.
So that is some very good news.
And other very good news.
It now turns out that covid patients who are testing positive after recovery are not actually infectious, according to a new study.
So there was some speculation that you might still be positive for COVID-19 and able to pass it to other people once you had recovered from COVID-19.
That apparently is not true.
According to Bloomberg, there's a report of a study that says that people are only shedding dead virus.
So they're testing positive for the dead virus, but they are not actually shutting into the public stream, which means that people are not actually going to die after meeting someone who has recovered from COVID-19, which is really, really good news.
Based on those results, according to Atul Gawande, who's a very well-respected healthcare researcher, he says the Korean CDC is lifting requirements to have a negative test for return to work or school after a COVID-19 infection.
Under the new protocols, no additional tests are required for cases that have been discharged from isolation.
So that is very good news as well.
In other news, the president of the United States is now taking a hammer to the WHO, which is a...
which is a good thing.
The president issued a letter to the WHO basically saying, you guys need to stop being lackeys of the Chinese government, or we are simply not going to participate in that which you seek.
He wrote, Dear Dr. Tedros, On April 14, 2020, I suspended U.S. contributions to the World Health Organization pending an investigation by my administration of the organization's failed response to the COVID-19 outbreak.
This review has confirmed many of the serious concerns I raised last month and identified others that the WHO should have addressed, especially the World Health Organization's alarming lack of independence from the People's Republic of China.
Based on this review, we now know the following.
The WHO consistently ignored credible reports of the virus spreading in Wuhan in early December 2019 or even earlier, including reports from the Lancet Medical Journal.
The WHO failed to independently investigate credible reports that conflicted directly with the Chinese government's official accounts, even those that came from sources within Wuhan itself.
I know later than December 30th, the World Health Organization in Beijing knew there was a major public health concern in Wuhan.
Between December 26th and December 30th, China's media highlighted evidence of a new virus emerging from Wuhan.
By the next day, Taiwanese authorities had communicated information to the WHO, which they ignored.
Internal health regulations require countries to report the risk of a health emergency within 24 hours.
China did not inform the WHO of Wuhan's cases of pneumonia of unknown origin until December 31st, even though it likely had knowledge of these cases days or weeks earlier.
According to Dr. Zhang Yongzhen of the Shanghai Public Health Clinic Center, he told Chinese authorities on January 5th he had sequenced the genome of the virus.
There was no publication of this information until six days later when Dr. Zhang self-posted it online.
The next day, the Chinese authorities closed his lab for rectification.
As even the WHO acknowledged, Dr. Zhang's posting was a great act of transparency, but the WHO has been conspicuously silent with respect to both the closure of Zhang's lab and his assertion that he notified Chinese authorities of his breakthrough six days earlier.
The WHO has also made claims about coronavirus that were either grossly inaccurate or misleading.
On January 14th, they suggested no human-to-human transmission.
On January 21st, President Xi Jinping of China reportedly pressured the WHO not to declare the coronavirus outbreak an emergency.
And on January 22nd, the WHO said that this was not a public health emergency of international concern.
On January 28th, after meeting with President Xi in Beijing, Dr. Tedros praised the Chinese government for its transparency.
Even after the WHO belatedly declared the outbreak a public health emergency of international concern, January 30th, they didn't press China for the timely admittance of a WHO team of international medical experts.
And so that team didn't even arrive until February 16th.
Even then, the team was not allowed to visit Wuhan until the final days of their visit.
Also, the WHO strongly praised China's strict domestic travel restrictions, but were inexplicably against the closing of the U.S.
border or the ban with respect to people coming from China.
And the list goes on and on and on of WHO failures.
And so the president concludes, until you stop becoming basically a lackey of the Chinese government, we're cutting off your funding.
He says, my administration has already started discussions with you on how to reform the organization, but action is needed quickly.
We don't have time to waste.
That is why it is my duty as President of the United States to inform you that if the WHO does not commit to major substantive improvements within the next 30 days, I will make my temporary freeze of U.S.
funding to the WHO permanent and reconsider our membership in the organization.
Okay, so that's big news, and that is good news.
That's something good that President Trump is doing.
We'll get to more of the actual news, and then we'll get to all of the news that people apparently care about on Twitter in just one second.
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Okay so In other news, that is good.
There are a variety of states that are now opening up for sports or thinking about opening up for sports.
That is a very good thing.
According to the Washington Post, the prospects for the nation's professional sports leagues to resume operations were boosted Monday when the governors of New York, California, and Texas announced their support for pro sports returning in their states.
New York State is ready and willing to partner with major sports teams that are interested in playing games safely without fans.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo wrote on Twitter, The announcements from the states, which are home to more than two dozen franchises across the NFL, NBA, NHL, and Major League Baseball, Don't provide certainty as to how or when this is going to happen, but leagues are making tentative plans to return.
MLB is discussing a return to play proposal with its players union, has an eye on a possible resumption of training next month and a season beginning in early July, perhaps with teams playing in their home cities and stadiums being grouped geographically for scheduling purposes to limit travel as well.
The NFL is not scheduled to begin until September.
That gives them some time to figure all of this out.
So all of this is very good.
In Texas, Governor Greg Abbott has already announced professional sports can resume May 31st without any spectators.
The pronouncements don't resolve the league's return to play issues, but they bolster hopes that sports can return on a more widespread basis in the coming weeks and months.
So, the fact is that Americans are ready for this shutdown to be over.
They are.
And they are acting as such.
I'm hopeful that people are going to act responsibly here.
I think it's very important that people act responsibly here.
In fact, we already have some evidence that things are not going to be as bad in terms of the outbreak as people originally suspected.
The Atlanta mayor, Who is very, very critical of the Georgia governor.
She says, listen, this thing, I thought it was going to be really terrible.
I'm not so sure it's going to be so terrible anymore.
It's not as bad as I thought that it would be, so I am pleased about that, but I still think it's too soon to say.
The reason being, whereas initially we were seeing increases between deaths and people testing positive, rising anywhere from 25 to 30 percent over a seven-day period, right now we're somewhere between 12 and 15 percent, and so it's better than it was, but it's still not great.
Okay, well, again, better than it was, but still not great.
It's never gonna be great until this thing is totally over, but the fact that the Atlanta mayor is now having to walk back the Brian Kemp is going to kill everybody routine is pretty astonishing.
Because remember, Brian Kemp was evil.
He wanted to kill Grandma.
So that is a positive thing.
In sort of negative stuff, there's police footage showing a massive block party in Florida yesterday.
People apparently were just going out willy-nilly and then engaging on a massive level.
And this does not look like a socially distanced party, frankly.
If you take a look at this footage, you can see The helicopter is flashing.
This is Pensacola police that released this footage.
People associating in mass numbers.
Listen, people still have to be careful if you don't want to get COVID-19.
If you're young and you don't care about getting COVID-19, I suppose that's on you.
Try not to infect somebody who is older.
That would be the thing that we are most focused on.
One of the big problems here is that the lockdown was so severe and so strict that now that people are being let out of jail, basically they're saying, I'm going to do what I want willy-nilly.
Now, it is important to recognize that, by the way, in Sweden, that actually is sort of what happened, right?
In Sweden, there was this notion that everybody was mask wearing and socially distancing.
No, some people were, but the level of compliance was not actually supremely high, even in places like Sweden.
The level of compliance is actually kind of low in places like Sweden.
It was like 60% of the public was complying.
Now, you don't actually need 100% of the public complying in order to lower what they call the R naught, which is the replication rate of the virus, right?
All you need is maybe 60, 70, 80% of people who are complying by the rules.
However, you do have a bit of a collective action problem in that it is more fun to not socially distance than to socially distance.
And what this means is that the people who are most calling for social distancing and who are strictest when it comes to these lockdowns, they better have the courage of their convictions.
Well, as it turns out, they do not, in fact, have the courage of their convictions.
I'll give you an example.
So, Bill de Blasio yesterday, he said, listen, we're just going to pull you right out of the water.
Like, if you go down to the beach and then you get in the water, you take one foot and you put it in the water on Memorial Day, we'll pull you out of the water.
First of all, let's just note something.
Memorial Day, the Atlantic Ocean, It's like 50 degrees.
It's not like people are willy-nilly jumping into the Atlantic Ocean on Memorial Day.
If you've ever been in New York at this time of year, it don't work that way.
But here was Bill de Blasio anyway trying to suggest that he was going to personally go and muscle people out of the water.
Fencing will be there, but it won't be implemented at first.
We're hoping everyone just listens to the rules, follows the rules.
No swimming.
No sports.
No gatherings.
No parties.
You know, just common sense.
Observe social distancing.
If you walk on the beach, remember, don't go in the water.
You're not supposed to go in the water.
It's a dangerous situation to ever go in the water when there's not lifeguards present, so there'll be a constant reminder of that.
If anyone tries to get in the water, they'll be taken right out of the water.
Okay, so he sounds like he's going to be very strict as far as how he actually makes this happen, right?
Well, in reality, he's not going to be that strict.
And I'll tell you why he's not going to be that strict.
Because it turns out that if he's arresting people, it is disproportionately people of color.
And this is upsetting folks.
So the New York Times editorial board, which was, if you go out without a mask, you're going to kill people.
If you go out and you don't social distance, everybody is going to die.
Now the New York Times is like, you know what?
Maybe we shouldn't use the police for this thing.
Okay, good luck then.
Good luck!
Because the reality is that if you actually want to enforce this thing, then you are going to have to, you know, promulgate it by use of law enforcement.
So this creates a bit of a catch-22.
The stricter you are in that which you call for, the less people are going to obey it.
And the more you're going to have to use law enforcement.
Which means that you better be pretty obvious and open about why people need to socially distance.
You better explain yourself.
Unfortunately, authorities don't feel the need to explain themselves.
Instead, they just say things like, we'll come and we'll arrest you if you violate the rules.
Well, as we'll see, these folks do not have the courage of their convictions.
They're not actually going to arrest you if you violate the rules.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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And so, in an attempt to drive the idea that people need to socially distance, the media are going overboard.
Again, being fully transparent with people is probably the best way to do all of this.
I feel like that's what I try to do on the show.
I try to give you as much information as possible, then you make your own decisions.
Because I trust you as an individual human being to make responsible decisions.
So I've encouraged you, when you're in a populated area, particularly an area where you believe there are going to be older and vulnerable people, you should wear a mask.
I know there are a lot of conservatives who are very not on board with masks.
I don't fully understand that.
I don't like wearing a mask either.
It's annoying.
It's irritating.
When I'm out on the streets with my kids walking around away from people, I'm not wearing a mask because that's stupid.
When I'm in my car alone, I'm not wearing a mask.
If I go into a place that is populated and enclosed, I am wearing a mask.
Mainly because I don't want other people around me to be infected with COVID-19.
Even if I don't have COVID-19, I don't know because maybe I have it and I'm asymptomatic.
You just don't know.
So it seems like a good, caring thing to do.
But the media are being deeply irresponsible in how they are reporting this sort of stuff.
So let me give you an example.
There's an article from the UK Guardian.
It says, US lockdown protests may have spread virus widely.
Cell phone data suggests.
Okay, so you would imagine that if the data were suggesting that the protests have spread this widely, here's what you would expect.
You would expect An outbreak at a protest, and then that that outbreak was brought home by a bunch of people, and outbreaks where people brought the virus home, right?
That's not what the article says.
All the article shows is that people came from different places to the protest and then went back to different places.
At no point does it show an outbreak in any of those places.
At no point does this article suggest that there was an outbreak at the protest.
Instead, all the article says is, cell phone location data suggests that demonstrators at anti-lockdown protests, some of which had been connected with COVID-19 cases, are often traveling hundreds of miles to events, returning to all parts of their states and even crossing into neighboring ones.
The data provided to The Guardian by the progressive campaign group, the Committee to Protect Medicare, shocker, raises the prospect that protests will play a role in spreading coronavirus epidemics to areas which have so far experienced relatively few infections.
Okay, so at no point do they actually demonstrate this has happened.
Instead, they just say people are traveling.
And that's supposedly enough for us to determine these protests are spreading the disease far and wide.
Now listen, I may think that it increased the risk of the spread of the disease, but that is not the same thing as may have spread the disease far and wide.
If you're gonna say that that happened, you actually have to provide some data to support it.
Also, here's another great example of the media panicking to try and suggest that things are bad where there's no evidence that they're actually bad.
So Florida has been a real black mark for the media.
The media really botched Florida because the media treated it as though Ron DeSantis in Florida was a bad, bad, very evil man who wanted to kill grandma, and Florida was going to get absolutely shellacked by COVID-19.
And it turns out that Florida, with a population basically the same as New York State, has experienced about one-fifteenth, one-twentieth of the deaths of New York State.
It has not been hit anywhere near the same as New York State.
So, the new report that the media are trying to push out there is that a researcher, a data chief for Florida, was fired.
And she claimed, without evidence, without presenting any evidence, that she was fired because the Florida government was trying to cover up bad evidence of COVID-19.
And this is what everybody ran with.
This was the headline that everybody on Twitter ran with.
On Twitter, right now, trending, architect and manager of Florida's COVID-19 dashboard says her removal was not voluntary.
And then people start tweeting out that DeSantis is covering up the data.
He's covering up the data.
Ooh, he's covering up the data.
Except that's not what the article says.
When you actually read the article, what it says is that this woman claims that maybe she was fired For some data reason, she can't quite discern.
Here's what the article says.
She warned, she does not know what the new team's intention are for data access, including what data they're now restricting.
So she doesn't even claim that the data were covered up in the aftermath of her firing.
In her original note, which she posted on Facebook, she said, as a word of caution, I would not expect the new team to continue the same level of accessibility and transparency I made central to the process during the first month.
After all, my commitment to both is largely, arguably entirely, the reason I'm no longer managing it.
Okay, well that's a pretty big allegation.
So, if she's going to make that accusation, what you would imagine is that the data would then go missing, right?
You wouldn't be able to access it.
Only one problem, you can still access all the data.
Also, she's provided no evidence of her allegations.
Also, she won't respond to media requests.
And then, the article basically quotes a bunch of experts saying it would be really bad if Florida hid the data.
So the article does not substantiate the allegation in any way.
All it does is say, would it be bad, to a bunch of quote-unquote experts, would it be bad if they hid the data?
Yes, it would be very, very bad.
And this turns into Ron DeSantis is firing people to cover up the evidence on COVID-19.
Again, the evidence is not there that that's happening.
Also, don't you think the media would be all over it, all over it, if Florida were experiencing a massive uptick right now?
Another example, there's a big story out of Georgia.
The story out of Georgia is that in a public presentation of a chart, the Georgia government put together a bizarre chart in which they sort of cited random dates in which there was a downturn in cases to demonstrate a clear charted downturn in cases.
So instead of showing you a trend line drawn through various dates that were consistent, instead they sort of picked and chose dates that made the trend line look clearer.
So instead of showing every day what the trends line were in terms of cases and diagnoses and deaths, instead they picked the highest dates and then the lowest dates.
And the media went crazy.
Oh, Kemp is trying to hide the data.
There's only one problem with the he's-trying-to-hide-the-data argument.
The actual data demonstrate that there's been about a 6% reduction in the number of infections in Georgia.
So he didn't have to hide the data.
That's just bad data management by somebody on his comms team.
But that is not him hiding a massive uptick in Georgia because the massive uptick in Georgia does not exist.
So again, if you want to push social distancing, if you want to push mask wearing, then how about this?
How about we are accurate about that which we are trying to push?
How about you're transparent with the American public?
Because here's the reality.
As I've said before, I think it was, was it Dan McLaughlin on Twitter?
I always wanted to credit people, but I'm forgetting the name.
There are only three reasons Why people obey the law.
One, because they think the law is good.
Two, because they're being threatened.
Three, because they're being bribed.
The problem is you can't bribe people to stay in their houses forever because people don't actually like staying in their houses.
This has been pretty terrible.
And as for justifying to people your policies, our politicians don't even feel the need to do that, which leaves you with coercion.
And now, as it turns out, for all the talk about from Lori Lightfoot in Chicago and the governor of New Jersey, Phil Murphy, when it comes to coercion, The authorities don't actually want to utilize coercion because the disproportionate impact of coercion is going to fall on poor and minority communities apparently, and this is true in New York City.
And then they will be accused of racism.
So it turns out that the coercion ain't gonna work anyway.
I'll explain in just one second.
It's hilarious.
The New York Times, which has been stumping for lockdown, lockdown, lockdown, lockdown, when they realize that that means the NYPD is going to be issuing citations largely to black and Hispanic people, then they're like, well, I guess we're not so hot on the lockdown anymore, are we?
Weird, weird.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Okay, so as I say, If there are three reasons to obey law, one is that it makes sense.
Second is you can be bribed.
And third is coercion.
The first two have already been taken off the table.
Because bribery ain't gonna work to keep people home forever.
People don't want to be home forever.
They want to hang out with each other.
Second, does the law make any sense?
I'm not going to follow Bill de Blasio's prescriptions because he's blown all of his credibility.
This is why it was so important from the beginning for our leaders to explain their decision-making process.
And because they refused to do so, and because they were not doing so in transparent or even factual manner, that led to a widespread distrust of the authorities when it comes to this stuff.
And so this means radical transparency.
This means that we need to be very clear about why it is that you are wearing a mask.
The reason that you are wearing a mask today, folks, is not to protect yourselves.
The masks, unless it's N95, are not filtering out particles at the rate necessary to prevent you from getting COVID-19.
Masks are meant to protect other people.
So, if you're in a place where you think there will be people who are vulnerable, then you should wear a mask.
If you're in a place where there are no people who are vulnerable, then there's a case that maybe wearing a mask isn't so important.
Okay, seriously, if you're around a bunch of 17-year-olds, like, we were out the other day on a Sunday, and there were a bunch of teenage girls hanging out together.
Did I think to myself— They weren't wearing masks.
Did I think to myself, oh my god, danger to the republic?
Not really.
I thought to myself, okay, well, they're young people.
If they get COVID-19, they're going to be fine because they're 17.
The risk factors to people who are 17 is extraordinarily low.
That's a choice.
Is it a choice that I think is a great choice?
Not necessarily, but it's a choice they're going to have to make and their parents are going to have to help them make as well.
I mean, I assume their parents know that they're hanging out together and not wearing masks for the most part.
But with that said, we have not justified our policies, and we have tried to bribe people, and that's not working.
So we are now down to coercion.
And as it turns out, coercion tends to fall on people who are not paying attention to the rules.
And so I need to point something out, and this is how this has been treated in New York City.
So Bill de Blasio tweeted yesterday, Earlier today, the NYPD shut down a yeshiva, conducting classes with as many as 70 children.
I can't stress how dangerous this is for our young people.
We're issuing a cease and desist order, and we'll make sure we keep our communities and our kids safe.
So first of all, if it's yeshiva for, like, people who are 10, there's very little evidence that schools are dangerous for kids.
Denmark never shut down its schools.
Sweden never shut down its schools.
Much of Europe never shut down its schools.
Why?
Because kids are not really being damaged by coronavirus in mass numbers.
Or even in mild numbers, as it turns out.
There are statistical outliers, but they are real statistical outliers.
But beyond that, notice how de Blasio, every tweet he sends about a group is always about the Jews.
Every single one.
These Jews gathering in Williamsburg.
Those are bad Jews.
We need to get the police out there and break up the Jews.
Oh man, we had to break up a wedding the other day because of those Jews.
And now, as I've said, if you are Jewish, and I have a lot of Jewish listeners, obviously I'm an Orthodox Jew myself, Don't hold big weddings without social distancing.
It's a great way to spread it to people who are vulnerable.
Just don't do it.
Right?
If you're going to engage in events, socially distance.
Like, I've been encouraging this for a while, okay?
So I've been consistent on this.
But, Bill de Blasio only talks about Jews, ever.
But who's he arresting?
Is Bill de Blasio arresting Jews?
Disproportionately, Bill de Blasio is not arresting Jews.
Disproportionately, Bill de Blasio's NYPD are arresting people who are Black and Hispanic.
Now, this has led people on the left to suggest this is because the NYPD is racist.
Is it possible, maybe, that Bill de Blasio is picking on the Jews, but the reality is that people of various groups are not socially distancing at the same rate?
Is that possible?
I know, that would cut against all of the narratives about how disparate healthcare outcomes when it comes to COVID-19 are entirely the result of American racism.
But is it possible that the disproportionate hit that the Orthodox Jewish community took in terms of COVID-19, and the Orthodox Jewish community did take a disproportionate hit, particularly in New York, in terms of COVID-19.
I know three separate people, all in the Orthodox community in New York, who died of COVID-19.
Okay, so the Jewish community did take a disproportionate hit.
Was that because of the racism and anti-Semitism of the healthcare system in New York?
Or is it because a lot of Jews got together right around Purim, March 10th, and they hung out together and then they infected each other?
And is it possible that the same thing is true in minority communities that are being hard hit?
That in order to actually chart whether racism is to blame for America's healthcare system disparities, We actually have to determine whether people are paying attention to the social distancing or not.
Because as it turns out, in New York, according to the New York Times, of the 125 people arrested over offenses that law enforcement officials described as related to the coronavirus pandemic, 113 were black or Hispanic.
Are you getting that?
Of the 125 people arrested, 113 were Black or Hispanic in New York City.
So, does that mean that Bill de Blasio is a racist?
That's 90% of people who have been arrested in New York City for not obeying the law on COVID-19 are Black or Hispanic.
Of the 374 summonses from March 16th to May 5th, 300 were given to Black and Hispanic New Yorkers.
That's 80%.
Videos of some of the arrests are hard to watch.
In one posted to Facebook last week, a group of some six police officers are seen tackling a black woman in a subway station as her young child looks on.
She's got a baby with her, a bystander shouts.
Police officials told the Daily News the woman had refused to comply when officers directed her to put the mask she was wearing over her nose and mouth.
Contrast that with photographs across social media showing crowds of sunseekers packed into parks in wealthy, whiter areas of the city, lounging undisturbed as police officers hand out masks.
So it is obvious the city needs a different approach to enforcing public health measures during the pandemic.
Mayor Bill de Blasio seems to understand this.
He's promised to hire 2,300 people to serve as social distancing ambassadors.
Good luck with this.
So their new idea is they're going to go around warning people.
They're going to build a public health corps to enforce social distancing measures.
They don't have the power to punish or fine or anything.
They have the power to walk up to you and scold you.
Yes, I'm sure scolding is going to go incredibly well in New York City, home to the vast majority of the United States a-holes.
Have you met New Yorkers?
That is not a criticism of New Yorkers.
They're wonderful a-holes, but let's be real about New Yorkers, okay?
I've spent an awful lot of time in New York.
New Yorkers are not known for being tactful and polite.
That is not their thing.
New Yorkers are brash.
It is their a-holeness that makes them uniquely American.
You think that walking around saying to New Yorkers, You know, you really should socially distance.
Hey!
F you!
Get out of here!
Good luck to this.
Good luck to this.
In this approach...
Especially trained civilians could fan out across neighborhoods and parks, helping with pedestrian traffic control and politely encouraging New Yorkers entering parks to protect one another by wearing masks and keeping their distance.
Police department school safety agents who are not armed could help.
Such a program could also provide much needed employment for young people.
So that's the real purpose is we're going to hire a bunch of scolds to go around telling people to socially distance.
The police department, according to the New York Times, would play only a minimal role in this approach, stepping in to help with crowd control, for example, something it does extremely well.
Without a significant course correction, the department's role in the pandemic may look more like stop and frisk, the policing tactic that led to the harassment of hundreds of thousands of innocent people, most of them black and Hispanic, while rarely touching white New Yorkers.
So again, it's hilarious.
The New York Times was fine when de Blasio was screaming at the Jews.
But the minute that it turns out that the people who are being arrested are largely black and Hispanic, just like, by the way, most of the criminal arrests in New York City, then all of a sudden it turns into the NYPD is racist and the only way that we can really do this is to recommend the course of action.
The New York Times' double standard with regard to which groups are worthy of criticism is really something to behold.
And the same thing is true of Bill de Blasio.
But it does underscore the basic truth here that libertarians have been speaking for a very long time.
If you are not willing to enforce a law, do not put the law on the books.
And if you're going to inform people as to why they ought to pursue certain action on a voluntary basis, you need to be more transparent about how you are making those decisions.
Otherwise, people have no incentive to do this.
And again, I cannot think of something more ready for late night TV than a bunch of schoolmarm hall monitors walking around the streets of Crown Heights telling people they need to socially distance.
Good freaking luck.
Good luck.
Okay, in just a second.
So this is all the news that actually matters because this is how we're going to reopen.
It's about whether we're going to be responsible when we reopen.
It's about the consequences politically for people on the left who actually want lockdowns, right?
It's all about the health data.
Now we're going to get to the stuff that the media decided that was very important to cover over the last 24 hours.
Suffice it to say, it is not important things.
We will get to that momentarily.
First, let us talk about the fact that right now, you don't want to be going to the auto parts store, right?
Do you really want to be waiting in line at the auto parts store?
If you're going to wait in line, is that really the place you want to be?
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Or then just get to the front of the line and the person's like, well, I can put that on order for you.
Yeah, I know.
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Go to rockauto.com right now, see all the parts available for your car or truck, write Shapiro in their How Did You Hear About Us box, So they know that we sent you, again, that is rockauto.com.
Go check them out right now.
Don't spend too much money on your auto parts.
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And write Shapiro in there, how did you hear about us box?
Okay, first, in exciting news, my new book is now available for presale, guys.
Like really, go out and buy my new book.
As you are well aware, Americans are now more divided than ever, and they are looking to get more divided.
Just yesterday, the New York Times reported that Joe Biden wants to completely undermine many of America's institutions.
We've seen Barack Obama out there suggesting we need fundamental transformative change in the United States.
Nothing could be more divisive than this in a time of coronavirus pandemic.
We're seeing serious divisions over issues that should be unifying.
Take, for example, the fact that the 1619 project by the New York Times about the dark roots of slavery as part of our country's history was actually about how America is rooted in slavery and based on slavery.
And this has become the rote talking point for large swaths of the Democratic Party.
This was rewarded with a Pulitzer earlier this month.
I'd devote a huge section of my book, How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps, that's the name of the book, How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps, to examining its intent as well as its content.
If you don't have a copy yet, you can pre-order one at dailywire.com or you can find it at Amazon or Barnes and Noble.
It's available for pre-order right now.
Right now in America, there are fundamentally two different visions for the country on the table.
One is unifying.
It finds our unity, what keeps us together in a shared philosophy, culture, and history.
The other disintegrates our country and sees us all as various interest groups that are basically bashing each other about the skull for control of the government.
That is an image that the left wants to push.
And that push is destroying the country from within.
And this election, this 2020 election is very much about that.
So oddly enough has the pandemic response, it has become a referendum on how you view the country and whether the country requires fundamental change.
Every time you see Democrats out there suggesting that COVID has really exposed the deep roots of American injustice.
We need to remake the system.
That is what we're talking about.
That is a step toward the destruction of the country.
My new book is called How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps.
It talks about what should bring Americans together and how those who want disintegration are tearing the country apart.
Again, head on over to dailywire.com slash ben and order your copy today.
You're listening to the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.
All righty, so let's talk about now what the media want you to talk about today.
They don't want you to talk about the vaccines.
They don't want you to talk about the stock market.
They don't want you to talk about the reopening of the states and whether the data are supporting a downturn.
They don't want you to talk about any of that stuff.
They don't want to talk about Trump going after the WHO.
They want to talk about one thing and one thing only.
Yesterday, President Trump announced he was taking hydroxychloroquine.
Oh no.
Okay, so here's my view on this.
I'm not a doctor.
I don't know.
Are you a doctor?
Do you know?
Here's what we know about hydroxychloroquine.
In several studies, hydroxychloroquine alone has not been shown to have any power to cure this COVID-19.
There was a study that came out from NYU, and it showed that hydroxychloroquine in combination with azithromycin, Azipak, and zinc improved coronavirus patients' chances of being discharged and cut the death risk by almost 50%.
Researchers at NYU Grossman School of Medicine looked at 932 coronavirus patients hospitalized between March 2nd and April 5th.
Half were given a combination of hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin, and zinc sulfate.
The other half didn't get zinc.
Patients receiving the triple drug combination were 1.5 times more likely to recover, enough to be discharged, and 44% less likely to die.
If you took just hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin and no zinc, then basically there was no impact on your health outcome.
So President Trump didn't just say he was taking hydroxychloroquine, he also said he was taking zinc and Z-packs.
Now, should you be taking that preemptively before you have COVID-19?
I haven't seen any studies on people who are taking this stuff preemptively.
I haven't.
And I'm not sure any studies have actually been done about that.
But Trump's doctor, who presumably doesn't want the President of the United States to drop dead of a heart attack on his watch, said that President Trump can take it.
So I assume Trump isn't going in the back and drinking the fish tank cleaner.
I assume that the President of the United States is actually following his doctor's advice.
Now, is it possible the doctor wouldn't have advised this in the first place?
Sure.
Is it also possible that Trump went to him and said, listen, I keep hearing this stuff about hydroxychloroquine, and I hear about zinc and azithromycin.
The people are telling me.
I've heard many people, many expert people.
And the doctor's like, listen, there's some studies.
It shows that it's kind of effective.
I don't think you have a high health risk because you have a pretty good heart.
We do like a physical on you every year.
You don't have a history of heart difficulty.
So sure.
I mean, it can't really hurt.
And then Trump took it?
That seems to me the most likely thing.
Again, do you really think that Trump's doctors, the doctors for the President of the United States, are like, Mr. President, if you want to take that fish tank cleaner, you just go right ahead and down it.
And if you die, it'll be my fault.
Like, who thinks the doctors are thinking that way?
It's not like Trump is just disobeying his doctors and then buying opioids off the streets and shooting them into his veins.
Like, what the hell are you talking?
Okay, so here was President Trump yesterday saying he was taking hydroxychloroquine, and then the world ends because Dr. Pelosi arrives to talk about it, and Dr. Cuomo arrives to talk about it.
There are many doctors who say you should not take hydroxychloroquine to fight this thing.
And you shouldn't take it alone.
There's literally no evidence that if you take hydroxychloroquine alone, that that is going to help you in any way.
Or even if you take hydroxychloroquine with azithromycin, that'll help you in any way.
There's some evidence from that NYU study, again, I'm studying the study, okay, from NYU School of Medicine, that if you take the 3-pack, right, the Z-pack and the zinc and hydroxychloroquine, the reason this matters is because hydroxychloroquine apparently sort of opens the ability of cells to absorb zinc, which is good for fighting COVID-19.
If you do that after you have COVID-19, there's some evidence that this is effective in treatment.
Okay, that's all we know.
I've given you all the things we know.
But here was Trump yesterday announcing that he's taking hydroxychloroquine, everybody going nuts.
And you'd be surprised at how many people are taking it, especially the frontline workers, before you catch it.
The frontline workers, many, many are taking it.
I happen to be taking it.
I happen to be taking it.
Hydroxychloroquine?
I'm taking it.
Hydroxychloroquine.
Right now, yeah.
A couple of weeks ago, I started taking it.
Because I think it's good.
I've heard a lot of good stories.
And if it's not good, I'll tell you right.
I'm not going to get hurt by it.
Okay, so everybody's like, you're not a doctor, Mr. President.
Right, but you're also not his doctor.
And again, do you really imagine the President of the United States is just downing the fish tank cleaner in the back room without the doctor overseeing it?
Okay, so Neil Cavuto on Fox, he says, okay, you should not take azithro, you should not take hydroxy because you will die.
So don't, don't go ahead and do that.
Again, there's a difference between the President saying, I'm taking it and everybody else should take it.
You should go to your doctor and ask about things before you take drugs.
As husband of a doctor, you know what's the thing I do before I take anything?
I ask my wife.
Because she is a doctor.
You should always ask your doctor before you start taking drugs.
Of any sort.
I assume that President Trump has done that.
Because again, the White House doctor does not want to be on the table when the president dies of a heart attack.
That is not a good look.
Here is Neil Cavuto, though, informing the American people, don't take it or you're gonna die.
The VA study, to which the President alluded, wasn't a loaded political one.
It was a test on patients there, and those who took it, in a vulnerable population, including those with respiratory or other conditions, they died.
I want to stress again, they died.
If you are in a risky population here, and you are taking this as a preventative treatment to ward off the virus, Or in a worst case scenario, you are dealing with the virus and you are in this vulnerable population.
It will kill you.
I cannot stress enough.
This will kill you.
Okay, this will kill you if you take it back.
Again, it may not kill you.
It does raise the risk of heart attack.
Okay, like that's what the studies show.
It does raise a risk.
It's not just ineffective.
If you take it without the zinc, without the azitromycin, without COVID-19, it could absolutely raise your risk of dying of heart attack, right?
That's what the study shows.
So Cavuto is not wrong that you could die from it.
He doesn't say it won't inevitably kill you, okay?
It's not like you take the hydroxy and then you absolutely die, but there's no benefit and there is increased risk.
That is the more proper way of putting this.
Then you have Chris Cuomo going off.
Now, Chris Cuomo has zero credibility on this.
When we talk about people who have no credibility, talk about health solutions to COVID-19, his wife literally was bathing in bleach.
I'm not kidding you.
His wife put out a statement.
She had COVID-19, he had COVID-19.
She put out like a giant statement, we talked about it on the show, about all the weird crap she's doing that she apparently got from like Gwyneth Paltrow's goop or something, where she's like, well, you know, I took some bleach and I poured it in, I took some Clorox, I put it in the bathtub and then I bathed in the Clorox.
Okay, Chris, sit down, dude.
Like really, sit down.
He didn't even pay attention to his own quarantine.
He was going out, going to his second house.
Here's Chris Cuomo going off on how could the president be this non-health conscious?
Again, you're basically like waving dream catchers in the air and doing rain dances to stop COVID-19, dude.
You don't get to talk on this.
He wins this argument.
Why?
Because he believes.
Because he's taken a chance.
Because he's strong.
He's not the party of no.
He's not the Democrats.
No, don't take the hydroxychloroquine just in case.
You stay home.
You can't go out.
You can't work.
You can't eat.
You can't live.
That's where he's put the Democrats.
Some of it's messaging.
But some of it's more than that.
Okay, he's such an idiot.
My God.
This man.
What adult?
Seriously, what adult?
It's pretty amazing that Mario Cuomo's name alone could make his son governor and Chris Cuomo gets a job on CNN.
What idiocy.
Okay, the best comment, of course, was reserved for Nancy Pelosi, who gets on TV and then tells Anderson Cooper, this is real news right here, that President Trump shouldn't be taking hydroxychloroquine, says Dr. Pelosi, because he's morbidly obese.
Now, let me just ask a question in the aftermath of this.
When is it now okay to fat sham people?
Because I was informed this is very bad.
Here's Nancy Pelosi saying the president, he's just so fat.
He's super fat, fat, fatty, fat, McFat, fat.
Look at him, he's fat.
So fat.
Very fat.
Fat.
As far as the president is concerned, he's our president and I would rather he not be taking something that has not been approved by the scientists, especially in his age group and in his, shall we say, weight group.
What is morbidly obese, they say.
So, I think it's not a good idea.
So she calls him morbidly obese.
And then it was like, Slay Queen on Twitter, right?
This is the stuff people care about.
Not the vaccine.
Not the stock market.
Not how we're reopening.
Not the impact of any of that.
Not the president of the United States going after the WHO.
Not the fact that we now have more tests available in most states than people to take the tests.
Not the fact that we now have a surplus of ventilators.
None of that is newsworthy.
And the newsworthy thing is that Pelosi called Trump a fatty McFat.
Fat McFatter.
Fataroo.
He's ginormously fat.
President Plump was trending on Twitter.
Cause Trump plump.
Plump plump.
So, a few questions.
One, does this mean that we now get to point out when politicians are morbidly obese?
Can we point that out now?
Like, is that okay?
Because I've been informed reliably by the media that it's very important we point out if politicians are morbidly obese because that does make a difference in terms of their overall health quota.
So, do we get to, like, look at the weight of Stacey Abrams now or no?
Do we get to, like, again, I don't know, Chris Christie, like, are we allowed to say this sort of stuff or it only applies to Republicans?
You can say that Chris Christie's a fatty McFatFat.
But if you point out that J.B.
Pritzker, the governor of Illinois, that that dude needs to be lowered into the Illinois Statehouse by crane, that apparently is very, very bad.
You're not allowed to do that at all.
When does this apply?
I think that the rule on Twitter is that it's okay to call Trump a fatty McFat, fat McFat face fatty, big orange fat man.
You're allowed to say that?
But you are not allowed to say that anybody else is fat ever, especially celebrities, right?
If a celebrity, female particularly, is plump.
If a celebrity female is morbidly obese, like in bad health morbidly obese, you cannot point that out because that's body shaming.
So much so that if somebody who is slightly overweight or somewhat overweight but not morbidly obese, like Adele, loses a bunch of weight, then we have to yell at her about losing the weight.
We have to talk about how it's very bad.
She's undermined.
She's bought into society's standards of beauty.
Maybe Trump just didn't buy into your standards of beauty, people.
Maybe Trump believes that actual round oranges are beautiful.
How do you know?
I gotta tell you, the person who's going to enjoy this most of all is Trump.
Because now Trump just gets to talk about Nancy Pelosi's immovable face for the last 25 years.
Like Trump, he never had any problem going there in the first place, but now the media have no leg to stand on after shouting, Slay Queen at the Moon, because Nancy Pelosi was like, he's morbidly obese.
Now the president of the United States is going to be like, yeah, well, her face hasn't moved in 25 years.
I mean, look at her.
She's like a Roman statue.
There's so much Botax in there.
Her face froze in place.
Now, when I was a kid, my parents told me that if I made an ugly face, it would stay that way forever.
Nancy Pelosi, it's the reality.
You know Trump's going to go here now, right?
And very important stuff.
Very important stuff.
So we have to focus on the fact that Trump is taking hydroxychloroquine and is overweight.
Very, very important stuff.
Our media, man, focusing on the things that matter.
By the way, speaking of the media, focusing on things that matter, you want to talk about some more media malpractice?
This is a pretty great story.
So, this started trending today also.
The Daily Beast reported that Trump will not unveil Obama's White House portrait.
So normally, the current president will bring the ex-president and then unveil the White House portrait at the White House.
Trump isn't going to do that.
But here is the actual story.
Obama doesn't want him to do it.
Right, the real story is that Obama preemptively shut this thing down.
According to NBC, Obama has, quote, no interest in taking part in the tradition as long as Trump occupies the White House.
So it was actually Obama who shut it down preemptively and the media blamed Trump.
He's tactless and he's crass.
How terrible.
How terrible.
So that is another aspect of media malpractice.
But I'll tell you what the media know that we shouldn't cover.
We certainly should not cover Obamagate in any way.
No covering of the Obamagate.
Also, the media have figured out that Believe All Women is a right-wing trap.
So that's exciting stuff.
There's an entire op-ed in the New York Times yesterday suggesting that the slogan Believe All Women was made up by the right wing in order to trap the Democrats.
This is great.
From now on, the Democrats just get to claim that every stupid thing they ever say is made up by Republicans, which is super extraordinarily fun.
Apparently, from each according to his ability to each according to his needs is a right-wing slogan because it's failed every time it's tried.
So it must be that the right has somehow boxed everybody in.
Alrighty, time for some things that I hate.
The media are desperate, desperate to defend President Obama to every extent possible.
And this is why if you say a bad word about President Obama, then you will be covered as though you have committed a grave, brutal sin.
My friend Meghan McCain yesterday on The View said something perfectly obvious about Barack Obama.
I mean like 100% perfectly obvious.
And that is that Barack Obama is not innocent in the culture wars.
Barack Obama, in fact, was a progenitor of the culture wars and an eager participant in the culture wars and continues to be an eager participant in the culture wars.
That has been obviously true.
It was Barack Obama who suggested that Trayvon Martin could have been his son in the middle of a contentious legal dispute over a disputed shooting in Florida.
It was Barack Obama who suggested the Cambridge police acted stupidly.
It was Barack Obama who suggested that the Michael Brown verdict in St.
Louis In Ferguson, Missouri, was unjustified.
It was Barack Obama who suggested that big businesses ought to obey him because the pitchforks were outside.
It was Barack Obama who was ripping into Fox News at every available opportunity.
It was Barack Obama who was shining a rainbow flag on the White House after the Supreme Court baselessly decided the Constitution of the United States mandates gay marriage.
Barack Obama was an eager participant in the culture war.
He never saw a TV show he didn't want to be a part of.
He never saw a sports event he couldn't Parachute into and try and grab the attention.
Okay, so Meghan McCain points this out and then she basically says and then Trump has exacerbated those cultural conflicts But Obama started them and the media went nuts over this because Obama must be protected at all costs Obviously, everyone on the left has basically appointed President Obama as nothing short of a saint.
And obviously, I feel different, as most Republicans and conservatives do.
I will say, the culture war that I believe is real and is raging in this country, I believe was ushered in with his administration and then exacerbated in the Trump administration.
And if the election were held today, I do believe Trump would be re-elected.
And I think at a certain point, we have to start talking to each other in the middle.
Okay, this is exactly right.
How dare she say Obama and Trump in the same sentence?
We must never utter Obama's name.
It's holy.
It's like the anti-Voldemort.
You must never say Obama.
You must simply say The One.
If you ever say Obama in a bad context, it's because you're very, very evil and also racist.
And Meghan McCain is clearly evil and also racist for saying a perfectly obvious thing.
So the media's latest iteration of this stupidity.
is the unwillingness to cover so-called Obamagate.
So again, Obamagate is about the idea.
The basic theory of Obamagate is very simple, and that is that the Obama administration had convinced itself that Trump and Russia were in collusion, and that is the reason that President Trump won the election, and then they basically loosed the hounds and allowed them to bend all the rules in the attempt to demonstrate what they thought was a foregone conclusion, which is that Trump and Russia were colluding in order to shift the election, and then that in the aftermath of Trump's election, they were going to undermine America's security by working with the Russians.
That is Obamagate.
Now, does that mean criminal activity took place?
Not at the top levels.
It could have been that people at the top levels were like, you know, I'm kind of interested to see what this Flynn thing is about.
We should find out whether Flynn talked to the Russians and then they unmasked him.
That's not illegal.
It is illegal to leak it.
So not everything that is bad is illegal.
As we found out over and over and over, right?
Trump has done a bunch of stuff that I think is bad, but also that is not illegal.
Like, I don't think Trump should have gotten on the horn with the Ukraine, with the Ukrainian politicians, and been like, you know what?
It would be really great if you could go investigate Burisma and Joe Biden.
Like, I don't think that that was a smart thing to do.
I think that was a bad thing to do.
I said this many, many times.
Do I think that it was illegal the way he did it?
No, I don't.
I don't think he violated a bribery law.
I don't think that he violated an extortion law.
I don't think that he violated any law.
I don't think he should have done it anyway.
Barack Obama did many things during his tenure that were bad but not illegal.
Obamagate falls under the category of bad but not illegal except for the people who actually violated the law by leaking to the press illegally or by using FISA warrants illegally.
But the media have decided it's totally not worth covering.
So imagine an opposite situation in which Donald Trump was firmly convinced that Barack Obama was in the pocket of the Pakistani government.
And so he decided, you know what?
There was a conversation between Susan Rice and the Pakistani government.
I want to unmask Susan Rice in that conversation.
And then, you know, if somebody leaks it, they kind of leak it, whatever.
Imagine that he was like, you know what?
It's very important that we get Susan Rice's phone on tap, the former national security advisor.
We get her phone on tap and we need to tap her phone.
And if you need to bend some of the rules to do it, you just kind of go ahead and you do that.
And his people come to him and say, listen, there's no basis for the investigation.
He's like, well, it'd be good if it stayed open anyway.
Would that be a scandal?
Obviously it would be a scandal.
But according to the media, if you cover Obamagate, it's only because you're a Trump lackey.
It's only because you're a Trump lackey.
Now again, you don't have to buy into the darkest version of Obamagate, which is that Obama knew everything, was directing it like a puppeteer top-down, was telling people explicitly to violate the law and all of this.
You don't have to believe any of that to believe that bad stuff went on and that it is not good when an outgoing administration is basically loosing the hounds of war on the incoming administration on the basis of skimpy or no evidence.
That is a bad thing.
In fact, you know who believes that theory of the case, right?
The non-crazed, the non-over-the-top theory of the case is William Barr, the current Attorney General.
So William Barr was asked specifically about the Russian inquiry, whether it was an Obama ply.
He said no.
He said, are you going to prosecute Obama and Biden?
He said no.
This is Bill Barr, the supposed lackey of the Trump administration who only violates the law on behalf of the Trump administration.
The Durham investigation is trying to get to the bottom of what happened.
And it will determine whether there were any federal laws broken.
And if there were, those who broke the laws will be held to account.
But this cannot be, and it will not be, a tit-for-tat exercise.
As to President Obama and Vice President Biden, whatever their level of involvement, based on the information I have today, I don't expect Mr. Durham's work will lead to a criminal investigation of either man.
Okay, so that is a perfectly reasonable thing for Barr to say.
People are being reasonable in how they are pursuing this at the level of the Trump administration.
But that does not mean that it is not worth looking into when you are talking about several violations of law at a minimum.
Molly Hemingway has a good piece on this over at The Federalist, talking about the media failing to report on all of this.
She says, many of our supposedly smart media elites are dinosaurs who are completely unaware of the asteroid headed right to them.
Instead, they are doing their part in an all hands on deck effort to continue pushing out Democratic talking points that got them into this mess.
This week, that meant they regurgitated the Democratic claim that the Obama administration spying and leaking was normal and that to be concerned about it is nothing more than a distraction.
Susan Glasser at The New Yorker suggested that acknowledging the Obama administration's recorded attempts to undermine a duly elected administration through spying and leaking was a form of political agitprop.
Her husband Peter Baker at the New York Times took the same line, but went with the authoritative gaslighting approach, in which he suggested it was odd that Trump would want to correct the false narrative that he was a traitor to his country, and replace it with the truth that he was a victim of a coordinated attack to spy on his campaign, criminally leak against him, and force him out of office.
Jake Tapper reported for duty to spread this partisan talking point as well.
She says, the big problem with covering the story honestly is that it might help Trump and Republicans, but they should look to left-wing journalists who are able to put aside their genuine dislike of the orange bad man and his co-partisans and retain their journalistic integrity.
Among the few journalists on the right who covered these issues well, there are many who weren't particularly fond of Trump.
She says, look, the reality is that we know that people inside the Obama administration We're firmly convinced that they were going to get Trump here and that they then basically bent the rules in order to go after Trump.
And that, again, is the story.
But if you even cover it, then you are doing the work of Trump.
And this is where the media's obvious bias comes out.
So now the media are going back to 2016 and saying, we shouldn't have covered Hillary's emails.
It was a non-entity.
It was a non-story.
We never should have covered Hillary's emails.
Again, it seems worth covering when the former Secretary of State set up her own private server so that all of her mail, including government mail, was going through her server and there would be no record of it and she could wipe it clean.
That is a very, very large story.
In fact, it is in fact a violation of law.
James Comey lied when he rewrote the law in order to avoid the implication that Hillary Clinton had violated the law.
If he didn't want to prosecute her, what he should have said is, listen, she did violate the law.
We don't prosecute everybody who violates the law because the reality is that common practice sometimes means that we sort of look the other way.
But he wasn't going to be that honest.
In fact, James Comey came out and he basically made the case for why Hillary should be prosecuted and then he was like, well, we're not going to prosecute her.
But the media are very angry at themselves because by covering the emails, they made that top line issue.
There was an entire study that came out yesterday showing sort of how many people associated various words with the various campaigns.
And the number one word associated with Hillary Clinton in 2016 was emails.
So the media regret this.
So this leads Margaret Sullivan, formerly the publisher of the New York Times, to say we should not have covered any of this.
She's over at the Washington Post.
She says it's becoming clear that journalists never reckoned with the mistakes of the 2016 campaign coverage.
We know this because they seem poised to repeat them.
As you may recall, the news media, from Fox News to the New York Times and plenty of others across the political spectrum, managed to make the relative molehill of Hillary Clinton's dicey email practices into a daily obsession roughly equal to the mountain of Donald Trump's financial and personal transgressions.
Hey, let me just note, Donald Trump was not a member of government.
Donald Trump did not violate the law.
Donald Trump violates— Donald Trump did not hand over his IRS records.
That's not a crime.
Donald Trump has been audited by the IRS several times.
If he's going to be criminally prosecuted, you would imagine somebody would have done it already.
Hillary Clinton was a member of government who violated the law as a member of government.
One of those things was very, very noteworthy.
But Margaret Sullivan says, Don't look now.
This is happening again before our eyes.
Its name this time is Obamagate.
That's a moniker that, in President Trump's outrage tweets, is rendered in all capital letters.
But let's not.
This vaporous, apparently made-up offense, according to Trump, is the political crime of the century.
And heck, last century too, because he claims it makes the 1970s Watergate scandal look like child's play.
As best as he even attempted to spell out, it supposedly involves a deep state conspiracy by the former president and his allies to undermine Trump by being informed of the identity of private citizens having covert and legally questionable discussions with the Russian ambassador, a citizen who turned out to be Trump's national security adviser-designate, Michael Flynn.
Despite the fact that this practice is legal and normal, the non-scandal around it is getting plenty of attention.
Okay, so, a couple things can be true.
One, unmasking is legal, and it is normal.
Unmasking by half the administration of an incoming national security advisor, and then the leaking of that advisor's name to the media is not normal, and the leaking is not illegal.
On Chris Wallace's Sunday morning interview show, The bottom of the screen, Kyron read, is Obamagate, an effective campaign strategy.
Trump water carrier, Karl Rove, was allowed to opine.
There were some very serious questions that need to be answered.
It does stink.
Juan Williams tried to pour water on this nonsense.
There's no Obamagate, he said bluntly, declaring Trump's blather a smoke screen to distract from his disastrous handling of coronavirus.
Still, the conversation about the non-scandal went on for almost seven minutes on this popular show at the nation's most watched cable network.
At CBS News, Catherine Herridge has been heavily hyping her updates on the non-story scoop she declared on Twitter to herald her story that acting DNI Richard Grenell had notified Congress about the Great Unmasking.
CBS's hiring of Herridge, says Margaret Sullivan, from Fox News last year was sharply criticized by liberals who recalled her persistent reporting on the Clinton email debacle and on debunked allegations that the former Secretary of State personally approved the diminishment of security at the Benghazi compound in Libya before the 2012 attack there.
So let's just say, Obamagate's getting plenty of attention across the media spectrum.
This led Sean Illing of Vox, who by the way, I like Sean.
I mean, he's a nice guy.
He and I correspond.
spot.
He said, watching the media pounce on this story like greyhounds chasing mechanical rabbits has been painful, but also deeply familiar.
And it's so horribly familiar because we have failed to learn very much, if anything, about how much attention to give exaggerated pseudo scandals Hilarious that the media that spent three years saying that undoubtedly Trump would be uncovered as a Russian cat's paw is now saying it's a pseudo-scandal to investigate whether or not members of the Obama administration were bending and breaking the rules in order to follow their hearts and the suggestion that Donald Trump was in fact a Russian cat's paw.
Amazing, amazing stuff.
And then the media are like, trust us.
Okay, here's the deal.
We don't.
And when you suggest openly that you are not going to cover a story because you do not like the political implications of that story, when you suggest that retrospectively Hillary Clinton's emails were a big nothing burger, when they in fact were not a nothing burger, All that shows is that you're upset that you were honest about Hillary Clinton, and so now you plan on being dishonest in the future.
That's the basic idea here.
Which, of course, goes to undermining media credibility evermore.
Okay, we'll be back here a little bit later today with two additional hours of content.
Also, tonight, I am hosting All Access Live.
You should go subscribe right now at dailywire.com slash subscribe and become a member.
You can hang out with me tonight as I perform various stupid human tricks.
And wear a t-shirt.
That's basically the pitch.
Say that you're into it or you're not, but you can go subscribe right now and join the club and hang out with us in this time of pandemic.
Otherwise, we'll see you here later today or tomorrow.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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