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May 20, 2020 - The Ben Shapiro Show

01:07:47

WHO’s On First | Ep. 1015

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	Defenders of the WHO emerge after President Trump calls out the organization.
	Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida is owed an apology by the media.
	And Elizabeth Warren would love to dictate how businesses operate in exchange for keeping them alive.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
	The Ben Shapiro Show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.com.
	Protect your data from prying eyes at expressvpn.com.
	Alrighty, well, let's begin with the continuing big news of the last week and a half.
	States are following Georgia and Florida's lead, and the reason for this is because you're not seeing massive upticks and massive spikes in cases and deaths in Florida and Georgia.
	You're seeing a downtick in cases and deaths in Florida and Georgia, particularly the positives as a percentage of the greater number of tests that are currently being taken.
	And this is why all 50 states have reopened it to some degree.
	According to the New York Times, Connecticut was among the last states to take a plunge back to business on Wednesday.
	Its stay-at-home order lifted, and stores, museums, and offices were allowed to reopen.
	Not far away in New Jersey, the reopening has been more limited, with only curbside pickup at retail stores and allowances for certain industries.
	The contrast illustrates a dynamic playing out across the country as governors grapple with how to handle a pandemic when it comes with no political playbook.
	States in the Northeast and on the West Coast, as well as Democratic-led states in the Midwest, have moved the slowest toward reopening, several governors taking a county-by-county approach.
	By contrast, several states in the South opened earlier and more fully.
	Those social distancing requirements were put in place.
	Restaurants, salons, gyms, and other businesses have been open in Georgia for several weeks.
	There has not been the predicted spike.
	We keep hearing next week will be the spike in Georgia.
	It has now been a month since Georgia moved toward reopening in a very significant way.
	There has not yet been the spike that was predicted.
	Now, you would see, presumably, an uptick in positive numbers of cases because people are associating once again, but it has not been this overwhelming wave that we were supposedly going to hear about.
	We've seen isolated cases where churches, for example, have had to shut down.
	There was one in Texas, I believe there was one in Georgia, both of which shut down after people got too close to one another and a couple of people died.
	But that is not particularly shocking.
	Again, once you let people out of lockdown and they are associating with one another, then you are likely to see a little bit more transmission of the virus.
	That does not mean you are overwhelming the healthcare system, which of course was the goal of lockdown in the first place, was to prevent the overwhelming.
	Alaska has now announced it will go even further.
	On Tuesday, Governor Mike Dunleavy said he would lift restrictions on businesses by the end of the week, allowing restaurants, bars, gyms, and others to return to full capacity.
	That's because Alaska has not been hard hit in any way.
	Sports and recreational activities will also be allowed.
	Dunleavy said it will all be open just like it was prior to the virus.
	He said social distancing strategies would be recommended but not required.
	Even as it announced plans to ease restrictions on residents, Alaska said it was maintaining its requirement for travelers arriving in the state to stay quarantined for 14 days and keeping visitor restrictions at senior centers and prisons, all of which makes perfect sense, right?
	Once your state has lowered the curve, then preventing people who have this thing from entering your state makes perfect sense.
	This is happening all over the world.
	Also, protecting your senior citizens and protecting your jails and places where people are in close proximity makes perfect sense as well.
	Again, the people who are being hardest hit by all of this are the seniors.
	And we now have some statistics that bear out exactly who is being hit.
	So Avik Roy over at FreeOp, which is an organization dedicated to free market economics, the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, Avik Roy has now put out a thread about the risk factors by population, like how much more deadly is the flu than COVID for various age groups.
	And it turns out that if you're looking at young people, the flu is way more deadly.
	And when I talk about young people, I'm talking about people who are under the age of 25.
	If you're under age 25, the flu is significantly more deadly to you than COVID-19.
	In fact, it is 17 times more deadly to you than COVID-19.
	If you assume 150,000 deaths will occur from COVID-19 over the course of the season, then what you're looking at is the flu being about 17 times more deadly than the coronavirus for people who are under a year for babies.
	It's about 20 times more deadly if you're under four.
	It is about seven times more deadly if you're between five and 14.
	And it's about 1.3 times more deadly if you're between 15 and 24.
	Now, once you hit 25, then COVID starts to be more deadly than the flu.
	Once you hit 25, then COVID is about two times more deadly than the flu if you're under Again, this takes into account everybody.
	This is pre-existing conditions too.
	So if you're healthy, then obviously your risk factors are lower.
	So COVID is about twice as deadly as the flu for people who are between 25 and 34.
	It's about three times as deadly as the flu for people between 35 and 44.
	It is about 3.6 times as deadly if you are between 45 and 54.
	It is about 3.6 times as deadly if you are between 45 and 54.
	It is about 3.85 times more deadly.
	It's about four times as deadly as the flu between 55 and 64.
	And then 3.5 for 65 to 74.
	And then, shockingly, it's only about 2.6 times more deadly than the flu for people between 75 and 84.
	Why?
	Because it turns out that those people die at extraordinarily high rates anyway.
	I mean, again, one of the things that we are recognizing here is that as we start to study the underlying statistics, people in nursing homes died in extraordinary rates anyway.
	They represent about 0.5% of the American population.
	They represent nearly 20% of all deaths in a given year in the American population.
	So an uptick in nursing homes is not exactly a shocker.
	That is, the most vulnerable group in our population always has been.
	If you're over 85, by the way, it's only about 1.7 times more deadly than the flu, COVID-19, according to Avik Roy over at FREOP.
	He says, here's another way to think about the very low risk to children.
	Sweden never closed its schools.
	Sweden has one of the lowest pediatric infection rates in the industrialized world and exactly one pediatric death from COVID-19.
	So when you hear politicians saying we can't reopen the schools, well, unless you have people going to the schools and then immediately like being dropped off at the nursing home, probably you don't have to worry about this so much.
	Children are really not the disease vector for this thing.
	Not only that, we have some very good news in terms of the way this thing spreads.
	I'm shocked, frankly, that this is not the top story in the country, considering how much people have been worried about cleaning off surfaces, for example.
	We'll get to that in just one second.
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	Okay, so here is a good piece of news.
	According to The Blaze, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has updated its guidance on COVID-19 to say the disease does not spread easily on contaminated surfaces.
	The disease has always been thought to spread mainly through person-to-person contact by respiratory droplets produced when an infected person coughs, sneezes, or talks.
	Up until recently, the CDC was maintaining the virus could also spread through contact with contaminated surfaces.
	Now, the CDC says, the virus does not spread easily in other ways.
	In other words, if somebody doesn't sneeze on you or cough on you or talk real close to you for a prolonged period of time, you're probably not getting this thing.
	Right?
	If you just go to the park and you touch a surface, unless someone sneezed on that surface like half a second before, the chances are extraordinarily low that you're going to end up with COVID-19.
	The CDC guidance now says it may be possible for COVID-19 to spread in other ways.
	These are not thought to be the main ways the virus spreads.
	According to Yahoo News, the guidance used to simply say that the spread in other ways may be possible without the added disclaimer.
	But that is a fairly significant development.
	Much of the thinking on the virus's spread through contaminated surfaces stemmed from a New England Journal of Medicine study in March that found the virus could survive in the air for hours and on certain surfaces for days.
	In April, when the FDA announced customers don't need to worry about contracting the virus from grocery packaging, the CDC guidance expressed caution, citing the study.
	But now, it turns out, based on the epidemiology, according to a senior scholar at Johns Hopkins' Center for Health Security, Dr. Amish Adalja, based on the epidemiology, we know that the main way this virus is infecting people is from direct contact with other infected people.
	Contaminated surfaces play some role.
	It is likely much smaller.
	This is a respiratory virus.
	Respiratory virus is largely spread through breathing in infected respiratory droplets.
	So in other words, wash your hands a lot.
	Don't wipe your face immediately after touching surfaces.
	But if you pick up an Amazon package at the front door, the chances are extraordinarily high you're not getting COVID-19 from the Amazon package over at the front door.
	And this is why you're starting to see many states now considering reopening schools and camps.
	The Wall Street Journal has a piece today talking about how various countries have decided to deal with all of this.
	They talk about the fact that there have been a few cases of a new condition that is similar to Kawasaki disease, but it's very rare.
	In fact, it's rare enough that it likely won't affect most decisions to reopen camps and schools, according to health and policy experts.
	Many experts said parents should be reassured that this affects an extremely small percentage of children, has caused very few deaths.
	Stephen Kearney, the Chief of Pediatric Critical Care of Medicine at New York Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children's Hospital in Columbia says, it's probably hundreds of thousands of kids in the New York area who've been exposed to the virus.
	It seems like a really small number of people are getting this.
	The hospital has had about 40 children with this particular syndrome.
	They're treated with steroids and they usually recover in three to four days and then follow up with a cardiologist.
	So camps are now considering whether they're going to reopen for the summer.
	And again, this is all good news.
	It's funny because, listen, we're all nervous.
	You know, it's hard.
	People get used to the situation they are in.
	Once the government tells you that you are only safe if you lock down, it's nerve wracking when people say you can open back up again.
	But pretty much a lot of the news has been very, very good.
	And this is true in Europe as well.
	According to Bloomberg, Officials in continental Europe's major economies are closely monitoring coronavirus data for signs of resurgence and infections as restrictions on daily life are phased out.
	Countries must focus on more than daily case numbers and death tolls because those are lagging indicators.
	A better guide might come from the length of lines outside the doctor's office or surveys conducted at random.
	However, Europe's coronavirus spread seems to be in check even as the lockdowns are loosened over in Europe.
	And again, in America, people are picking this back up.
	In Europe, by the way, in Denmark.
	Danish bars and cafes are completely back in business.
	Social distancing has now been scaled back to one meter, which is a little over three feet.
	It means more customers can now be seated at restaurants because it turns out it's very difficult to fill a restaurant when everybody is seated six feet apart.
	The two meters was a big issue.
	It didn't allow us to have enough revenue, said Jacob Niebuhr, the chairman of Denmark's Restaurant and Cafe Association.
	He thinks most restaurants will be ready to open this week.
	Face masks aren't compulsory.
	They're already a rare sight in Denmark.
	Groups of up to 10 friends can already sit together.
	For pubs, there will be no more customers propping up at the bar.
	They aren't allowed to face staff for more than 15 minutes, mainly because they don't want people breathing on the staff on a continuous level.
	But we are starting to see, you know, countries all over the world open up.
	So when people on the left in the United States suggest that it's crazy that southern states are opening up, just recommend and just point out that Europe is doing exactly the same thing and they're not seeing an uptick in cases.
	Meanwhile, over in Ohio, Governor Mike DeWine has lifted Ohio's safe-at-home order.
	According to Cleveland.com, more of Ohio's mandatory restrictions to curb the spread of coronavirus will be cut short, according to Governor DeWine.
	Some key social distancing rules, including a ban on most mass gatherings, restrictions on bars and restaurants, will still remain mandatory.
	The language of the new advisory order was not immediately available.
	The document had not yet been signed, but DeWine says the state will continue to enforce a number of mandatory rules, most notably requirements that patrons at bars and restaurants must remain seated while eating and drinking and stay at least six feet away from others.
	Also, Ohio's ban on most gatherings of 10 or more people will remain in place.
	But obviously, everybody is moving toward reopening, and this is obvious across the country.
	And so here's the question.
	When does Ron DeSantis get his apology?
	The Florida governor.
	Now, it's amazing to see the lengths to which the media will go to try and portray Florida as a giant failure, despite the fact that Florida has nearly the same population as New York, almost identical populations to New York, in terms of the number of people.
	And they've experienced, what, one-tenth, one-twelfth the number of deaths.
	There's not been a major outbreak in Florida.
	There were some cases.
	There were not tremendous numbers of deaths in Florida.
	Their deaths per million people are about the same as California, for example, where we've had no major outbreaks in California.
	And yet, the media have been all over DeSantis from day one, suggesting DeSantis didn't know what he was doing.
	It turns out DeSantis got it right.
	The latest attempt, by the way, by the media to get DeSantis was so obviously stupid that I pointed this out yesterday, and then it turns out, of course, the story fell apart.
	I talked about this yesterday on the program.
	There was a story from Miami Herald yesterday suggesting that Florida's data analysts had been fired because she was attempting to bring the truth to the people, and DeSantis stepped in and Bigfooted her to prevent her from bringing the actual news about coronavirus to the people.
	Now it turns out she was fired for insubordination.
	According to the Post-Gazette.com, facing an explosive — from the Sarasota Herald-Tribune in Florida — facing an explosive charge that his administration is manipulating coronavirus data to help make the case for reopening Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis played down the controversy Tuesday as a non-issue.
	Health experts say that the milestone in Florida—they topped 2,000 deaths—should serve as a sobering reminder to exercise caution as the state reopens.
	DeSantis has presented his reopening plan as safe and step-by-step, but the accusations leveled by Rebecca Jones were undermining that push, except for the fact that Jones apparently was not telling the truth.
	She suggested that there was going to be a cover-up of data.
	The article itself—the original article itself—said there had been no cover-up of the data.
	DeSantis said Tuesday Joan sent an email to her supervisor saying that her comments were being misinterpreted.
	DeSantis said, I don't know who she is.
	They gave me an email she sent to her supervisor said that, uh-oh, I may have said something that was misinterpreted.
	I said they've got a team working on it now.
	What I meant is I don't expect the same level of accessibility is that they are busy and can't answer every single email they get right away.
	And that it was ridiculous that I managed to do it in the first place and that I was tired and needed a break from working two months straight.
	Okay, that is not what she said in her original public letter.
	What she said in her original public letter is that the accessibility would be limited because of a cover-up.
	And now she's backtracking on it.
	DeSantis said that the state's COVID-19 dashboard is a heck of a tool.
	He said, I'm proud of the folks who work on it.
	Jones told Florida Today she was fired on Monday.
	And then she said that she faced blowback because she manually refused to change data to drum up support for the plan to reopen.
	The governor's office then released a statement saying, Joan's was terminated, quote, after a repeated course of insubordination, including her unilateral decisions to modify the department's COVID-19 dashboard without input or approval from the epidemiological team or her supervisors.
	He said accuracy and transparency are always indispensable, especially during an unprecedented public health emergency like COVID-19.
	Having someone disruptive cannot be tolerated during this pandemic, which led the department to determine it was best to terminate her employment.
	I mean, that's amazing.
	Okay, so basically, the media ran with this bullcrap story because they wanted to get to Santa's.
	Meanwhile, by the way, just a quick note, the states that are actually changing their data now are Democratic states.
	Governor Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer, she announced that Michigan would now quietly uptick the number of deaths that they estimate are due to COVID-19 in the state.
	According to Lynn Sutphin, a state health spokesperson, the state this week will start reporting probable cases.
	She said, that would be a death where the death certificate lists COVID-19 disease as a cause of death or a significant condition contributing to death without a positive COVID-19 confirmed lab results.
	In other words, most states have been reporting probable COVID-19 deaths as COVID-19 deaths.
	Michigan has not so far.
	So that means that they've under-accounted the number of deaths by probably thousands in Michigan.
	In Colorado, a state representative called for an investigation after the state acknowledged that it was counting as COVID-19 deaths cases in which the disease was not listed as the cause of death, but they had tested positive for coronavirus.
	So you're starting to see Colorado reversing course.
	In April, New York City began counting probable deaths in which COVID-19 was listed as a cause of death, but there wasn't a positive test.
	So it's just a mess out there.
	Meanwhile, again, Ron DeSantis, he didn't handle things wrong in Florida, right?
	He's been raked over the coals.
	Whitmer has been propped up as a heroine, even though she's been awful.
	She's been far too restrictive on counties in Michigan.
	Like, far too restrictive.
	Like, you can't buy seeds.
	You can't buy car seats at the local Target.
	You can't put a motorboat on the lake, but you can put a rowboat on the lake.
	Like, idiotic stuff like that.
	She's a hero.
	Andrew Cuomo's a hero.
	Ron DeSantis, apparently, is the bad guy.
	We'll get to Ron DeSantis in just one second.
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	So where does Ron DeSantis go to?
	I get his apology.
	The answer is the media will not be apologizing at any time in the near future.
	Rich Lowry has a good piece in interview with Ron DeSantis.
	He says, Florida went out of its way to get COVID-19 positive people out of nursing homes, while New York went out of its way to get them in, a policy now widely acknowledged to have been a debacle.
	as a hero, even though DeSantis' approach to nursing homes was obviously superior to that of Cuomo.
	Florida went out of its way to get COVID-19 positive people out of nursing homes, while New York went out of its way to get them in, a policy now widely acknowledged to have been a debacle.
	The media didn't have their eyes on the ball.
	The day the media had their first big freakout about Florida was March 15th, says DeSantis, which was, there were people on Clearwater Beach and it was this big deal.
	That same day, we signed the executive order to one, ban visitation in nursing homes, and two, ban the reintroduction of a COVID-positive patient back into a nursing home.
	DeSantis has been mused by the obsession with Florida's beaches.
	When they reopened in Jacksonville, it was a big national story, usually relayed with a dire tone.
	Jacksonville has almost no COVID activity outside of a nursing home context, he said.
	Their hospitalizations are down.
	ICU is down since the beaches opened a month ago.
	But nobody talks about it.
	It's like, okay, we just move on to the next target.
	Perhaps more understandably, the villages, the iconic senior community, was a focus of media worries.
	According to DeSantis, as of last weekend, there had not been a single resident of the villages in the hospital for COVID-19 for about a week.
	At one point, the infection rate in the villages was so low, state officials were worried they were missing something.
	So he says, I got the University of Florida to do a study.
	They did 1,200 asymptomatic seniors at the villages.
	Not one came back positive, which was really incredible.
	So what exactly did DeSantis do?
	Well, first, he looked at South Korea.
	He said it was pretty dramatic the extent to which this was concentrated in older age groups.
	I think the first real fresh set of South Korea numbers I looked at, they had no fatalities under 30.
	80% of them were 70 or above.
	It was really dramatic.
	Then there was Italy.
	He says, I think a lot of policymakers in the U.S.
	acted like Italy would happen in the U.S.
	When you looked under the hood in Italy, there were huge differences.
	There were reasons why that part of Italy fared as poorly as it did.
	I think the median age of fatality was like 82 in those areas of northern Italy.
	So we looked at that.
	That really helped inform the strategy to focus most of our efforts on the at-risk groups.
	He was hesitant about sweeping lockdowns because there wasn't a lot of precedent for them.
	Also, they didn't put much stock in dire predictions.
	He says, we kind of lost confidence early on in the models.
	We looked at them closely.
	But how can you rely on something when it says you're peaking in a week and the next day you've already peaked?
	Florida was also able to handle this better because they've dealt with natural disasters many times, and Florida protected the nursing homes because they have a disproportionate number of nursing home residents in Florida.
	Mary Mayhew, who heads the nursing home effort, says it was clear to me there were much higher standards related to infection control being outlined by the federal CDC that well exceeded what our nursing homes traditionally have been expected to adhere to, so we never had false expectations.
	Inspectors and assessment teams visited nursing homes.
	The state homed in on facilities where, Mayhew said, we had historically cited around infection control.
	We used that to prioritize our visits to those facilities, understanding that the guidance from the CDC was changing quickly.
	Florida required all staff and any worker that entered to be screened for COVID illness temperature checks.
	Anyone symptomatic would simply not be allowed to go in.
	And they required staff to wear PPE.
	He says we recognize these facilities were not prepared to deal with something like this.
	So he sent a total of 10 million masks just to our long-term care facilities, a million gloves, half a million face shields.
	Okay, so DeSantis handled this exactly the way he was supposed to.
	By the way, Mary Mayhew, who again was in charge of the suffrage, said she had calls with hospitals every day.
	She said, I would hear the same comments and questions around, we need to get individuals returned back to nursing homes.
	We drew a hard line early on.
	I said repeatedly to the hospital, to the CEOs, to the discharge planners, to the medical officers, I understand for 20 years it's been ingrained, especially because of Medicare reimbursement, to get individuals in and out.
	That is not our focus.
	I'm not sending anyone back to a nursing home who has the slightest risk of being positive.
	She said, we said, let's not have two cases become 20 or five become 50.
	If you don't manage the individuals, you return them back, you'll have far more being transferred back to the hospital.
	Make it was unmovable on the question.
	Okay, so Florida handled this exactly right, and Florida was blamed, because the media had an agenda from beginning to end here, and that agenda continues to be carried out, despite the fact that the facts no longer support the agenda.
	You could at least make the argument that this was good-hearted at the beginning, because everybody was risk-averse.
	But what happens when it turns out that New York's a freaking disaster area, and that Florida is fine, because Florida handled it the way you're supposed to, and the way that I've been talking about for literally months.
	Protect the elderly, protect the nursing homes, recognize differential risk assessments, But instead, Florida was the bad guy here.
	Truly, truly incredible.
	In just a second, we're going to get to more agenda-driven politics, this time on China.
	We'll get there in just one second.
	First, let's talk about the fact that you are at home right now.
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	You need to protect your own online activity.
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	So what exactly is the downside?
	All right.
	Meanwhile, the Trump administration is pointing out that, oh yeah, by the way, The W.H.O.
	is a garbage heap.
	So yesterday, President Trump issued a letter to the W.H.O.
	saying we need systemic change inside the W.H.O.
	because you guys didn't just blow this, you blew this royally.
	You're taking all of your advice from the Chinese government.
	And let's just be real about this.
	The Chinese government is a flaming trash heap.
	The Chinese government is an evil government.
	Ronald Reagan suggested that the Soviet government was the evil empire.
	The Chinese government is in fact an evil empire.
	It is an evil government.
	It is a government that jails a million Uyghurs for the crime of being Muslim.
	It is a government that keeps a billion people in repression.
	It is a government that will Maybe, we'll certainly jail you and maybe kill you if you cross them.
	It is a government that is trying to claw back all of its treaty obligations to Hong Kong.
	It is a government that would love nothing better than to take over Taiwan, a free and independent Taiwan.
	It is a government that lies routinely to the world population.
	It is a government that, it is a full-on dictatorship.
	The fact that anybody treats China as a legitimate world power, as opposed to an illegitimate government that is a world power, is beyond me.
	China is an evil empire.
	It has been an evil empire for a very long time.
	They were involved in the forced abortion of literally millions and millions of children.
	They were involved in the forced sterilization of hundreds of thousands of women.
	This is a government that their one child policy spanned from like 1970 to 2015.
	This is an evil, evil government.
	It's an evil government.
	And the fact that people are defending that government because they hate Trump so much is truly astonishing to me.
	So how evil is this government?
	So Mike Pompeo gave a congratulations to the Taiwanese president on her second term.
	She sent a message to President Tsai Ing-wen on her inauguration.
	He was the first U.S.
	Secretary of State to applaud a Taiwanese president on their election, according to the Chinese government, which demonstrates, by the way, how pathetic the American government has been on this issue for a very long time.
	Taiwan ought to be free and independent.
	One of the great tragedies of history is that Mao Tse-tung won the battle against Chiang Kai-shek.
	Would that all of China were governed by the same people who govern Taiwan, not the other way around.
	Okay, so the U.S.
	issued a congratulations to Taiwan, which by the way, we have a defense obligation to.
	And the Chinese government immediately said that Pompeo's, Mike Pompeo, the Secretary of State, his statement seriously violated the one China principle.
	F the one China principle.
	The one China principle is a bunch of crap.
	They say that it's one nation, It's one China, two countries.
	Taiwan is not China.
	It's not governed the same way as China.
	Hong Kong is not China, which is why you're seeing tens of thousands of people out in the streets.
	By the way, undercover of this coronavirus pandemic, China is cracking down on all dissent inside Hong Kong.
	Everybody's ignoring that.
	Remember right before the coronavirus pandemic back in January, there was a lot of talk about repression in Hong Kong.
	China is now taking advantage of the pandemic to crack down and arrest all of the leaders of that effort against China.
	China took exception to Pompeo referring to Tsai as president.
	Pompeo said in his statement, China immediately got angry because China immediately got angry because they said that it's very bad that we pointed out that someone was elected in Taiwan.
	Better that the leader should be selected by the Politburo and there should be no elections apparently.
	The Ministry, the Foreign Ministry of China said, China urges the U.S.
	side to immediately correct its mistakes.
	The Chinese side will take necessary countermeasures to respond to the above-mentioned erroneous actions by the U.S.
	side.
	The U.S.
	side should bear the consequences arising therefrom.
	Consequences arising therefrom?
	How about you bear some consequences for unleashing a pandemic that's going to kill probably a million people on planet Earth?
	And destroy the entire world economy for a year.
	Maybe you should bear the consequences of that.
	How about you?
	You should bear the consequences of taking control of the W.H.O.
	By the way, there's some pretty incestuous ties between the Chinese government and the W.H.O., including high-ranking members of the W.H.O.
	being married to members of the Chinese government.
	But according to the New York Times, President Trump's angry demands for punitive action against the WHO were rebuffed on Tuesday by the organization's other members, who decided to conduct an impartial independent examination of the WHO's response to the coronavirus pandemic.
	And a four-page later, late Monday night, Trump threatened to permanently cut off U.S.
	funding to the WHO unless it committed to major substantive improvements within 30 days.
	That was a significant escalation of his repeated attempts to blame the WHO in China for the spread of the virus and deflect responsibility for his own handling of a crisis that has killed more than 90,000 people in the United States.
	Let me just point out how disgusting the New York Times coverage is here.
	Trump points out the WHO is a disaster area.
	They are a disaster area.
	They lied to the public for weeks about human-to-human transmission.
	They suggested that China was handling this thing better than anybody else, that China was being fully transparent.
	Dr. Tedros is a disaster area at the WHO.
	He's not even a medical doctor, by the way.
	Okay, the fact is, That criticizing the WHO and China is not a deflecting tactic.
	It is a reality of life.
	But the way that the New York Times covers that, that's an editorial decision, right?
	They say that when Trump rips on China and the WHO, it's to quote, deflect responsibility for his own handling of the crisis.
	Or alternatively, it is to criticize China for unleashing this pandemic around the world, knowing full damn well that there was human to human transmission and allowing 5 million citizens to leave the Wuhan area while they knew that this disease was spreading widely.
	Representatives of the organization's member nations rallied around the WHO.
	There's a damn shock.
	You mean that Russia and China resisted the United States?
	The European Union chided Trump's heated rhetoric even as they acknowledged the need to review the WHO's response as the virus spread from China to the rest of the world.
	That's because the EU is filled with a bunch of pansies who are afraid to stand up to the Chinese government because the Chinese government does a lot of business with them.
	Same deal as the EU refusing to stand up to Iran when the United States, under President Trump, was the only country willing to stand up to Iran.
	Public health experts noted Trump's threats to withdraw from the organization and permanently halt funding ignored the reality that any such moves would require the consent of Congress.
	But the president's continued attacks on the WHO said experts.
	Oh, experts said.
	Wow.
	You know, unnamed experts saying things.
	Woo!
	Color me really concerned.
	Threatened to hobble the organization and seriously damage international efforts to combat the virus.
	Which was more damaging, Trump threatening to cut off funding unless they get their act together or the WHO never having their act together in the first place?
	Yesterday, President Trump said the WHO has to clean up their act.
	He's not talking about the rock musical Tommy.
	Here's President Trump going after the WHO.
	What reforms do they need to do?
	Well, it says so in the letters.
	I don't want to go through it.
	The letter is a very detailed, long letter.
	But basically, they have to clean up their act.
	They have to do a better job.
	They have to be much more fair to other countries, including the United States.
	So we're not going to be involved with them anymore.
	We'll do it a separate way.
	Okay, so he is exactly right about all of this.
	And what's amazing about this is Trump is such a polarizing figure for the media that the media immediately leaped to defend China.
	The only reason to blame China, the only reason to blame the Chinese government, which again is evil, the only reason to blame them is because Trump is very bad at his job.
	Now again, should we point out at this point that the deaths per million in the United States stands below most European nations outside of Germany?
	Is it okay to point out that the vast botchery of this thing mainly happened in New York?
	That somehow Florida handled it okay, Texas handled it okay, even California handled it okay.
	Washington state had an early outbreak and then got it under control.
	Is it okay to point out that Trump got the ventilators where they need to go?
	And that right now we have more testing capacity than people looking to be tested?
	Are we allowed to point any of that out or is it just all Trump bad all the time?
	So Susan Rice, the garbage National Security Advisor who lied to the American public repeatedly about the Benghazi attacks, which I know we're not supposed to talk about, the scandal of the Benghazi attacks in which the State Department routinely turned down requests for additional security in Libya and then tried to pretend that the attack was spontaneous and not planned and was in fact driven by a YouTube video.
	I know we're supposed to pretend that was not a big deal at all.
	And you know, big deal.
	Benghazi.
	And then you put it in a tweet and you put it with letters vertically.
	We're supposed to pretend that was not a big deal.
	Susan Rice went on national TV and lied about it like a thousand times.
	Now she is considered a possible presidential vice presidential pick for Joe Biden.
	And we're going to get to Susan Rice on China.
	By the way, if this is a battle that Trump has to fight, this is like the best election battle ever for Trump.
	If this election comes down to Trump pointing out that China is a garbage heap and the Democrats suggesting that Trump is just a meanie for targeting China, that is a battle Trump wins every time.
	We're going to get to more of this in just one second.
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	We're going to get more into the democratic defense of China.
	Like, what are they thinking?
	We're going to get to that in just a second.
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	So one of the funny things is watching the New York Times editorial side decide the New York Times objective media coverage So the objective media coverage, so much objectivity, so much media-izing, and so much journalism.
	I mean, just incredible levels of objective journalism happening over at the New York Times.
	So they'll actually headline things like, deflecting from his own incompetence, Trump blames China, and that'll be their objective news story.
	And then you head on over to the op-ed page, and why there's Susan Rice just writing the same thing.
	So Susan Rice says, there's a long history of American presidential candidates using China as a campaign cudgel.
	From Bill Clinton blasting President George H.W.
	Bush in 1992 for dealing with a Chinese premier known as the Butcher of Beijing, to Donald Trump's 2016 attack that the Obama administration had allowed China to rape the United States while Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State.
	This election year, China bashing will reach a new level as Mr. Trump seeks to capitalize on high voter disapproval of China, Beijing's failure to contain the coronavirus, and persistent bilateral tensions between our countries.
	Well, it seems like those are all relevant factors.
	Like the fact that, again, China is an evil, evil government that has released a virus and then tried to blame the United States for the release of the virus.
	And also that they're a repressive, horrifying regime.
	But according to Susan Rice, Trump is just a meanie.
	Desperate to obscure the reality of more than 90,000 American deaths and 36 million unemployed amid Mr. Trump's utterly incompetent handling of the pandemic, Republicans have no better strategy than to play the China card.
	The Republicans are executing a 57-page campaign memo that recommends branding opponents soft on China and reveals their rationale for repeated refrains of China virus and Wuhan lab.
	Again, this was released from Wuhan.
	We don't know if it happened from a Wuhan lab.
	We don't believe that it was released intentionally or that it was created in the Wuhan lab.
	That is not the suggestion.
	But China won't allow any investigation and in fact has threatened sanctions against places like Australia for suggesting some sort of independent investigation.
	But Susan Rice is really mad about this.
	She says that we cannot be so mean to China.
	First, she tries to claim that Biden is really harsh on China, which is hilarious.
	I mean, truly hilarious.
	Joe Biden flew to China with his son, and then his son received a billion-dollar investment in a fund that he was running while Biden was vice president.
	They flew on Air Force Two to China.
	He and Hunter did.
	And Hunter picked up bags of cash.
	This is something that Hunter frequently did, obviously.
	But, says Susan Rice, Mr. Trump will run his standard play, trying to deflect responsibility for his monumental failings by dishonestly projecting onto Mr. Biden his own weakness on China.
	Trump seemingly will do anything to win in November.
	His China gambit may be the least of it.
	Still, campaigning on China, while a well-worn strategy, is particularly dangerous in these tense times, when it fuels Asian hostility at home and anti-American sentiment abroad.
	Okay, so this is gonna be the other angle that is run by the media, is that every time Trump mentions China, it's because he wants Chinese-Americans targeted, which is absurd.
	Trump has repeatedly talked about how stupid that is, and it is indeed stupid.
	But it is amazing to watch how the objective journalism side takes its cues directly from the op-ed page over at the New York Times.
	By the way, talking about soft on China, never forget that it was Joe Biden who suggested that a travel ban on citizens coming from Wuhan in China, that that was actually xenophobic hysteria.
	Here was Joe Biden doing just that back in January.
	A national emergency, you know, worldwide alerts.
	The American people need to have a president who they can trust what he says about it, that he is going to act rationally about it.
	In moments like this, this is where the credibility of a president is most needed, as he explains what we should and should not do.
	This is no time for Donald Trump's record of hysteria xenophobia, hysterical xenophobia.
	No, it's time for Joe Biden to go back to sleep.
	He needs his nap, or he gets a little tired in the middle of these events.
	Rachel Maddow, by the way, over at MSNBC, doing the same routine.
	She was full-on defending the WHO.
	This is where we are.
	And what is her basis for defense?
	Her basis for defense is in a four-page letter.
	There is one error.
	They cite the Lancet Medical Journal to the notion that this thing may have been spreading since November or December.
	There was, in fact, a report that this thing may have been spreading from November or December.
	Lancet came out and said, we don't want to be used as a tool against the WHO because all of these medical organizations rely on the WHO and work with the WHO.
	Rachel Maddow went on a rant last night about how we have to stop being mean to the WHO.
	And Trump is just terrible for being mean to the WHO.
	Honestly, if you want to make this your campaign, that you're going to defend the WHO in China for their behavior during this pandemic, go for it, guys.
	I mean, really own it.
	Just like own it.
	Here's Rachel Maddow owning it.
	President's letter said, quote, "We 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." Well, the Lancet Medical Journal wrote to the White House today to say, "Oh my God, what are you talking about?" I'm paraphrasing that, but that's basically what they said.
	I mean, here's what they actually said.
	said, I can quote it.
	Well, this statement is factually incorrect.
	The Lancet published no report in December 2019 referring to a virus or outbreak in Wuhan or anywhere else in China.
	Okay, that is true.
	It is also true that The Lancet did report later that it is possible that there was some sort of outbreak that took place earlier than December.
	They say the first reports the journal published were on January 24, 2020.
	In a paper by Chao and Huang and colleagues, the first 41 patients from Wuhan with COVID-19 were described.
	The scientists and physicians who led the study were all from Chinese institutions.
	They worked with us quickly to make information about the new epidemic outbreak and disease it caused fully and freely available to an international audience.
	That's not what Trump was referring to, but okay, fine.
	So let's assume that was just a blatant error.
	Does that invalidate any of the other four pages of problems that are cited with the WHO?
	Of course not.
	So go for it, guys.
	I mean, really go for it.
	Now, that would be, you know, Trump going after China is in fact a smart play.
	It is also the morally correct play.
	I'll tell you what is not particularly a smart play is the continued focus on hydroxychloroquine.
	President Trump continues to jump on the hydroxychloroquine thing.
	I'm not sure exactly why.
	Doctors are going to recommend what doctors are going to recommend.
	In his own Come on!
	to his doctor.
	His doctor said, if you take hydroxychloroquine with zinc and you take it with azithromycin, then there may be some good results.
	And Trump said that he started taking it after there was possible exposure at the White House.
	Then somebody said to him, you know, there was a study that suggested that hydroxychloroquine is not particularly effective.
	So Trump being Trump, he immediately said that the hydroxychloroquine study was a Trump enemy statement, which it is not.
	It is just a study.
	Come on.
	Come on.
	How is this useful?
	I've worked with doctors.
	And if you look at the one survey, the only bad survey, They were giving it to people that were in very bad shape.
	They were very old, almost dead.
	It was a Trump enemy statement.
	Now, if you look at some of the reports that came out from Italy, that came out from France, that came out from other — a lot of our frontline workers take it because it possibly — and I think it does, but, you know, people are going to have to make up their own mind.
	Plus, it doesn't hurt people.
	Okay, so when he says that this thing is a Trump enemy statement, that is not useful.
	I'll tell you what is amazing, though, is how the media and the Democrats are fully willing to say anything, including things that are inaccurate, in order to rebut President Trump.
	So Joe Biden, for example, he says no doctor has said to use hydroxychloroquine.
	No doctor has said to use it?
	Truly?
	None?
	Because there are some... I am aware of thousands of people who are taking hydroxychloroquine in combination with azithromycin and zinc.
	Like, really, that is a reality.
	There are lots of doses that have been prescribed across the country for a variety of reasons by many doctors.
	Joe Biden, medical Joe Biden, here we are.
	This is absolutely irresponsible.
	There's no serious medical personnel out there saying to use that drug.
	It's counterproductive.
	It's not going to help.
	OK, again, the willingness of anybody to say anything because they oppose Trump is truly incredible.
	Meanwhile, Nancy Pelosi and Trump are in a teenage school fight.
	So Nancy Pelosi suggested the other day that Trump was morbidly obese.
	So we live in a world where it's OK to call Trump morbidly obese, but call Stacey Abrams a supermodel, which is exciting stuff.
	Nancy Pelosi then came out after Trump.
	So Trump ripped into her.
	He said Pelosi has a lot of mental problems.
	All right.
	Fair, I guess.
	Fair.
	But why are we governed?
	Seriously, this is what you chose, America.
	Why are we governed by a bunch of people who appear to have stopped their brain development in sixth grade?
	Serious question.
	Here's President Trump pointing out that Pelosi has mental problems.
	Then we'll get to Pelosi responding, and then they say, nanner, nanner, neener, neener.
	And then they slap each other like characters from The Three Stooges and walk away.
	Here's President Trump.
	These people are sick.
	Pelosi is a sick woman.
	She's got a lot of problems, a lot of mental problems.
	We're dealing with people that have to get their act together for the good of the country.
	Okay, and then Nancy Pelosi responded, well, I guess he's offended.
	I guess he's triggered.
	I guess he's triggered, President Trump.
	Here's Nancy Pelosi.
	Very shiny Nancy Pelosi talking about this.
	I didn't know that he would be so sensitive.
	He's always talking about other people's voix de voix, their weight, their pounds.
	I don't even want to spend any more time on his distraction, because as you see in the last couple of days, so much of the time has been spent on what he said.
	Rather than that, I think you should recognize that his words weigh a ton.
	His words weigh a ton.
	And then, oh, a ton.
	You get it?
	Because he's heavy.
	He's a fatty McFat, fat McFat, fat, fat face.
	Okay, then Andrew Cuomo, whose great activities in New York have led to the deaths of presumably tens of thousands of elderly people.
	Andrew Cuomo was like, Trump can't tweet his way through this picking up on Joe Biden.
	You know what Joe Biden has termed Trump?
	I will say, Trump is gifted at giving nicknames.
	The man is gifted.
	For a sixth grader, he's gifted at it.
	Like, he's amazing at it.
	His nicknames are catchy.
	They are to the point, right?
	Sleepy Joe still works.
	I think he called him Nasty Nancy and he's got like all of these various nicknames and they're very good.
	Joe Biden came up with President Tweety for Trump.
	President Tweety, like the bird.
	That doesn't, what?
	Seriously?
	Okay, so here's Andrew Cuomo doing his best.
	He says to Trump, you're not tweeting your way through this.
	Andrew Cuomo was asked yesterday about nursing home deaths and he was like, it's just because the media keep focusing on nursing home deaths that I'm getting all this flack.
	Here's Andrew Cuomo, the world's worst governor, talking about how Trump can't tweet his way through this.
	But he can just talk his way through this.
	The media will continue to kiss his ass.
	Today, government's going to be held to a different standard.
	And it has to be fundamentally different.
	It has to be smarter than it was.
	It matters now what happens.
	You have to know what you're doing now.
	Not just look like you know what you're doing.
	Not just sound like you know what you're doing.
	You have to be smart.
	You're not going to tweet your way through this.
	You have to be smart.
	You have to be competent at what you do.
	There's something called government.
	Okay, Andrew Cuomo lecturing us all on being smart and competent and the thing called government.
	I'm sorry, no.
	I'm gonna go no on that, Andrew Cuomo.
	My goodness.
	We're run by a bunch of children.
	It's incredible.
	This is why, honestly, like allowing individuals to make their own decisions and allowing individuals to mitigate their own risk and allowing individuals to actually be informed of the information and then actually decide for their own lives what is most valuable.
	I trust them more than any of these people.
	Any of these people.
	Who of these people are you like, oh man, his word is his bond.
	Her word is her bond.
	These are mature adults taking care of us.
	Absolute insanity.
	Alright, time for some things that I hate.
	Many, many things that I hate today.
	So let's talk about the economic response to coronavirus.
	So the federal government has been shoving money out the door.
	I mean, they took a fire hose.
	They put money in one end.
	The fire hose is just spraying money out to Americans at an extraordinary rate, like far faster than any time in history.
	But now Democrats are saying, we need to know where the money is going.
	Democrats have never cared for one iota of time, where the money is going.
	Now they're very concerned.
	Why?
	Because there are two tranches of money.
	One went out to individual American citizens.
	68% of Americans are currently being paid more than they were being paid to be employed, to be unemployed.
	Okay, now in the short term, that's fine, right?
	I mean, you're not employed right now, right?
	You don't have a job.
	So that's okay.
	And that's because the government shut everything down.
	But as we move back into a functional economy, it is not good to pay people more than they were making at their job to sit at home on their couch.
	That is not sustainable.
	That is not good.
	It does lead to a longer and slower economic increase.
	That is a reality.
	Democrats are not worried about any of that.
	They want this unemployment policy continued ad infinitum, really forever.
	So when President Trump says, we don't want to extend unemployment benefits all the way out to January because people are getting back to work, Democrats are responding by saying, no, no, no, we need to do it forever, forever.
	House Democrats have proposed extending the aid through January 2021.
	Congressional Republicans say they're concerned some workers are making more money on unemployment insurance than if they were on a payroll, and they have less incentive to return to work or find a new job.
	Lindsey Graham said, you can extend some assistance.
	You don't want to pay people more unemployed than they'd make working.
	You should never make more than your actual wages.
	Graham said that Trump agrees that it is hurting the economic recovery.
	And then, of course, the Washington Post goes to, many economists fear cutting off the benefit extension could hamper the economic recovery.
	You're right.
	Paying people not to work will hamper the economic recovery.
	Again, I'm all in favor of filling in the gap that was created by government forcibly shutting down the entire economy and being put into a coma.
	But now that we are coming out of the coma, now would be the time where you stop giving people the anesthetic.
	At the lunch, Trump had a lunch with Senate Republicans.
	He implored Senate Republicans to take their time on the next phase of coronavirus legislation to get it right, which makes sense, because we've just been rushing these bills out the door, and the bills kind of suck.
	I mean, they're the best you can do when you're in a giant rush, but they kind of suck.
	Meanwhile, Harry Reid, who was responsible, along with Nancy Pelosi, for holding up the first two tranches of coronavirus response, is now saying, why don't we have a plan to get 36 million people back to work?
	We do have a plan, you just don't like that plan because your plan is to not have them go back to work.
	Your plan is to pay them to stay unemployed forever.
	Mr. President, why haven't you announced a plan to get 36 million unemployed Americans back to work?
	You're overseeing historic economic despair.
	What's the delay?
	Where's the plan?
	I think we've announced a plan.
	We're opening up our country.
	Just a rude person you are.
	We're opening up our country.
	We're opening it up very fast.
	The plan is that each state is opening, and it's opening up very effectively.
	And when you see the numbers, I think Even you will be impressed, which is pretty hard to impress you.
	Good for Trump.
	Honestly, good for Trump.
	It is a ridiculous question.
	That is not a question.
	Why don't you have a plan for X?
	That's not a question.
	That's an accusation.
	Okay, when Trump says, no, our plan for the restored economy is to reopen, that is obviously true.
	Guess whose plan that is?
	Everybody on Earth.
	Everybody on Earth's plan, except apparently for members of the media, whose plan for recovery is shovel money out the door.
	continuously and forever.
	Meanwhile, it's funny because again, Democrats are of two minds about the shoveling money out the door.
	On the one hand, they want to shovel money out the door sufficient that people never have to go back to work.
	On the other hand, they want to not shovel money out the door to businesses so those businesses can continue to function.
	So the Heroes Act that Democrats have been proposing basically puts vast restrictions on businesses that take business loans.
	The Wall Street Journal editorial board talks about the first round of the bill which allowed the Small Business Administration and Treasury Department to give forgivable loans to small businesses.
	Senate Democrats on Tuesday lashed Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell for not doing enough to help businesses and workers, while warning them not to bail out companies.
	If you want a prescription for a slow economic recovery, that would be it.
	Congress has appropriated $500 billion to backstop Federal Reserve lending facilities for mid-sized and large companies, as well as local governments, plus $670 billion for Paycheck Protection Program loans to small businesses.
	These funds were needed to keep businesses liquid amid government-ordered lockdowns so workers have jobs to return to once the pandemic recedes.
	One problem is Mnuchin has been too willing to bend to Democrats who want to use the business relief to attack the Trump administration.
	Chief among the requirements Democrats are focusing in on is a requirement that businesses use 75% of loans for payroll in order to qualify for loan forgiveness.
	Treasury says this mandate fulfills Congress's apparent intent that loans be used to retain workers, but it has deterred many small businesses and especially restaurants with high overhead costs from applying.
	So Elizabeth Warren went after Mnuchin on this basis yesterday.
	So here is Senator Elizabeth Warren, who again, would love to completely remake all businesses in America according to a model that she apparently likes, even though she's never run a successful business.
	Here's Elizabeth Warren talking about, we have to force businesses to keep people employed.
	So we're going to sign businesses a check so that they can keep people employed when they have no market to actually cater to.
	Which of course is not how businesses work.
	I pointed out this flaw when these bills were first passed.
	That if you are giving a loan to a small business, but the mandate on small businesses, you have to keep 90% of your people employed.
	What exactly?
	Just pay the people to be on unemployment.
	Seriously, because what you're actually doing is you are forcing the business to not pay its bills, right?
	You're not, they can't pay the landlord.
	They can't pay for the fixed costs.
	You have to force them to pay employees who literally are, you're banning them from working.
	So you're having the employers pay employees not to work.
	Well, that's not sustainable because guess what's going to happen the very first moment that the businesses open their doors?
	They have to fire all those employees instead of put people on unemployment if they cannot work right now and then businesses can rehire them as needed.
	That creates fluidity in the market that allows you to actually decide what the wages should be as the market starts to come back.
	Because again, the market when it comes back is not going to be what it was when it originally went down.
	But according to the Democrats, they want every business that takes a loan to have to use the vast majority of the money it gets to pay employees who are not working.
	Then what the hell is the unemployment insurance for, exactly?
	Here's Elizabeth Warren going after Steve Mnuchin.
	What I want to know is are you going to require companies that receive money from this half a trillion dollar slush fund to have to keep people on payroll?
	It's a simple question.
	Yes or no, are you going to require that?
	First, let me say that our number one objective is keeping people employed.
	I take it your answer to my question that whether or not you're going to require, as part of the terms of the loan, that people be kept on payroll is no?
	Is that right, Secretary Mnuchin?
	That was discussed with people on both sides of the aisle.
	Okay, so he's saying, listen, what's in the bill is in the bill.
	And she's saying, well, we need to force you to force businesses to keep people employed.
	But again, if you're a business and you're thinking, okay, what's going to come next?
	I have some fixed costs.
	I can maybe survive another two months, but what I can't do is take a loan from the government that I then have to repay.
	And now I'm in hot to the government, a bunch of money.
	And I've also lost my ability to fire employees or furlough employees, because if you fire furlough employees, then the loans are not forgivable.
	So what's the point of me taking out the loan?
	I'd rather just lay off the employees, and then they can go get them unemployment, and then they can come back when the time is right.
	But according to the Democrats, they don't want to give businesses loans to keep them alive unless those businesses use the loans to do stuff that Democrats want, which is not how business works.
	According to the Wall Street Journal, Treasury says that this mandate, about 75% of loans being used for payroll, fulfills Congress's apparent intent loans be used to retain workers, but it has deterred many small businesses, especially restaurants, with high overhead costs from applying.
	But Mnuchin has refused to relax the requirement, which our sources say is because he doesn't want to get hammered by Democrats for letting businesses prioritize paying landlords over workers.
	But again, the goal of the business is to pay its bills and to make one more dollar than it expends.
	The goal of businesses is not to create jobs.
	This is a full failure to understand how economics works.
	Businesses create jobs.
	They are byproducts of catering to markets.
	Businesses do not create jobs for fun.
	And they do not do it out of the goodness of their heart.
	And they do not pay workers out of the goodness of their heart.
	That would be a welfare program or a charity program.
	Treasury and the Fed keep fiddling with the rules for the Main Street lending facilities, including the stake that banks are required to retain in loans they issue, as well as leverage limits for borrowers.
	Mnuchin said last month, I think it's pretty clear if Congress wanted me to lose all the money, that money would have been designated as subsidies and grants as opposed to credit support.
	He clarified during Tuesday's hearing that Treasury is willing to take losses in certain scenarios, such as.
	And Mr. Powell says the Fed expects to have the Main Street facility up and running by the first week of June, but businesses needed the cash weeks ago.
	Even now, many will be reluctant to borrow because the Fed has restrictions on dividends and executive compensation, and those continue for a year after the loan is repaid.
	So you repay the loan and the government's still going to control how you run your business.
	By the way, all these bans on stock buybacks, if you like the stock market actually having some semblance of recovery, If a company feels that its stock is being undervalued, a stock buyback is actually good policy.
	Everybody rips on stock buybacks because they don't understand that as a company just investing in itself and recognizing that the market is undervaluing its future prospects.
	So again, this is... The economic recovery is dependent on markets.
	Democrats are looking to undermine markets because Democrats don't like the markets.
	And they are blaming the markets for a government-insured and government-created crisis in the first place.
	Okay, other things that I hate today.
	So Elon Musk is now being raked over the coals.
	There's an incredible article at the New York Times by Nellie Bowles, who's just an awful reporter.
	I mean, she's just truly terrible.
	She wrote one of the worst profiles I've ever seen on my friend Jordan Peterson, in which she accused Jordan Peterson of basically wanting to force single women into marriage and all sorts of crap like this.
	This is an awful, awful piece.
	So Nellie Bowles is an awful journalist, and she has a piece today titled, Tesla Owners Try to Make Sense of Elon Musk's Red Pill Moment.
	A liberal status symbol now has a founder who's moving to the right.
	Oh no!
	Wait until Ford owners find out that Henry Ford both liked the free market, but also was kind of a Nazi.
	Wait until they find out that Henry Ford was publishing full-on anti-Semitic propaganda and was given an award by the Nazi government in 1938.
	Wait until people find out that Volkswagen And BMW were complicit in the Nazi regime.
	Like, wait until people find out that a lot of Japanese automobile companies were involved with the Japanese imperialist government during World War II.
	You mean the people buy products, and they like the products, but they don't care all that much what the founders have to say about things?
	Unbelievable!
	No, it's not true.
	It's not true.
	Now, everybody who owns a Tesla is reconsidering owning a Tesla because of Elon Musk.
	Now, I just have a question.
	Who?
	Who are these people?
	I know a bevy of people who own Teslas.
	I don't know a single one.
	By the way, many of them right-wing.
	I don't know a single one of them who is reconsidering their Tesla purchase because Elon Musk has been tweeting, cancel, cancel, cancel culture on Twitter.
	Or take the red pill on Twitter.
	But according to Nellie Bowles, owning a Tesla, a luxurious electric car is a major liberal status symbol.
	It signals nothing more than good taste, the perfect balance of wealth with care for fossil fuels.
	But the man behind the brand, Really?
	Because it seems like most of his fans were kind of libertarian-ish?
	It may now prove to be a challenge for his fans.
	Really?
	Because it seems like most of his fans were kind of libertarian-ish?
	And people who had a wild side?
	Elon Musk, the bombastic head of Tesla and SpaceX, exhorted his 34 million Twitter followers on Sunday to take the red pill.
	The comment was quickly embraced by his followers, including Ivanka Trump, President Trump's elder daughter, who announced she had taken the pill already.
	The exchange referred to a scene from The Matrix, the 1999 science fiction action film.
	But the meaning of red pill and the idea of taking it have since percolated into online forums and become a deeply political metaphor.
	So Tesla owners are having to grapple with a car that carries a few new connotations.
	Marcos Melitzus, author of The Resistance Handbook, 45 Ways to Fight Trump, says, Why are you quoting Marcos Melitzus?
	Why are you quoting Marcos Malitzis?
	The guy was like the founder of Daily Kos.
	Why are you quoting Marcos Malitzis as though he is representative of Tesla owners everywhere?
	The guy is a rabid leftist, Marcos Melitzus.
	He has been for like his entire career.
	That's like saying that you found out that Alex Jones owns a Prius and now he's really pissed to find out that the Prius is an environmentalist symbol.
	And what are you talking about?
	Nelly Bulls is just office.
	In the Matrix, the movie's hero, Neo, played by Keanu Reeves, is given the option to take a pill that lets him see the truth.
	The world he thinks is real turns out to be an entertaining lie.
	His body is actually trapped in a farm where people are being used as human batteries.
	Taking the blue pill would let him return to living in the ignorant but blissful lie, while taking the red pill would launch him into the arduous journey through a brutal but fulfilling reality.
	The idea of taking the red pill later grew to mean waking up to society's grand lies.
	It was embraced by the right, especially by members of its youngest cohort, who organized and spent their time in online forums like Reddit and 4chan.
	The truth to be woken up to varied, but it ended up being usually about gender.
	To be red pill meant that you discovered feminism was a scam that ruined the lives of boys and girls.
	In this view, for a male to refuse the red pill was to be weak.
	Red pill forums were often filled with deeply misogynistic and often racist diatribes.
	Okay, so now we're going to play the game where because Elon Musk said take the red pill, he is actually an incel.
	Elon Musk by saying take the red pill, what he doesn't mean is we need to reopen the economy in a responsible fashion and get back to work.
	Instead, Elon Musk is hanging out on 4chan and being a Nazi according to Nellie Bowles.
	What is her evidence for this?
	That the term red pill is sometimes used by people on 4chan boards.
	Unbelievable.
	As these conversations seeped into the mainstream, pulled along by a host of other internet language from message boards to establishment Republican conversations on sites like Breitbart, the meaning broadened and got watered down.
	To be redpilled can now mean broadly skeptical of experts, to be distrustful of the mainstream press, or to see hypocrisy in social liberalism.
	Okay, why don't you just say that?
	Why do you have to go through the etymology of redpill?
	The reason you go through the etymology of redpill is because what you're attempting to do is, of course, link Elon Musk to the most radical aspects of these.
	And so Nellie Bowles goes on for hundreds more words talking about the evils of Elon Musk.
	And then she quotes Lily Wachowski, a Matrix co-creator, who told Mr. Musk and Ms.
	Trump in colorful language on Twitter they could take a hike.
	And then I like this.
	Is red pill a Silicon Valley thing?
	To some extent.
	There's long been a strain of men's right activism in Silicon Valley.
	I mean, this is a long, ridiculous piece about the history of red pilling because Musk used the term red pill.
	And what is this really?
	This is, we have to shame Elon Musk the same way that we shamed Mozilla Firefox into firing Brendan Eich, the same way that we are now going after Catherine Herridge.
	Anybody who is in a perceived liberal occupation and who has betrayed, betrayed the particular set of elites, they must be cast out like a leper.
	Elon Musk's sin, he didn't sin, like Nellie Bowles had nothing to say about this when Elon Musk was on Joe Rogan's Smoke and Dope.
	Right, like that, he had nothing to say about that.
	Which by the way, there was like a temporary drop in the stock price and then it spiked again.
	But she has lots to say about the fact that Elon Musk may politically disagree with Nellie Bowles.
	And whoa, whoa, we can't have that.
	You mean a head of a major company disagreeing with Nellie Bowles?
	That means you gotta sell your Tesla, gang.
	You gotta sell it.
	The same way that we had to boycott SoulCycle when it turned out that one of the owners of SoulCycle was a Trump fan.
	Oh, man.
	Now, again, this sort of censorious bullcrap From the same people who proclaim that they are for free speech and open debate.
	It's truly astonishing.
	And they do it to members of the media, too.
	All the talk about Trump undermining the media.
	Today, there are multiple articles out about the evils of Catherine Herridge.
	What is Catherine Herridge's great sin?
	Catherine Herridge's great sin is she once worked at Fox News and she was reported on the Michael Flynn story.
	And so, we have seen people in the media smearing Catherine Herridge.
	According to Jonathan Tobin over at the New York Post, and this is exactly correct, journalists are pack animals.
	That's especially true in Washington.
	That's what makes CBS's Catherine Herridge so exceptional.
	In an era when too many network journalists slant their reporting to serve establishment opinion, Herridge sticks to the facts.
	Her sterling quality and integrity have also put a target on her back.
	When it came to the collusion hoax, she dared to let the truth guide her, likewise with her reporting into the government misconduct in the prosecution of President Trump's first National Security Advisor, Michael Flynn.
	Most of her colleagues reveled in collusion falsehoods and ignored FBI wrongdoing.
	She did the opposite.
	But there is a price to refusing to conform.
	A Biden flak named Andrew Bates called her a partisan right-wing hack.
	A scurrilous story appeared in the Daily Beast in which various CBS journalists, speaking anonymously, voiced their disgust with her for not sharing their partisan prejudices.
	This has also happened to journalists like Sheryl Atkinson, who was basically cast out of mainstream media for the great crime of reporting things that the media didn't like them reporting.
	Meanwhile, people like Ronan Farrow, who, as it turns out, is a journalist who is driven more by ideology than by good journalistic practices, he is hailed as a hero because, of course, he reinforces all the things the media want to be true in the world.
	So Katherine Harrods, very bad for putting out actual news.
	Ronan Farrow, very good because he targeted Matt Lauer and because he targeted Harvey Weinstein.
	So the target mattered more than the journalistic practices.
	By the way, worth noting today, Matt Lauer being raked over the coals for writing a piece for Mediaite, pointing out all the flaws of reporting in Ronan Farrow.
	Okay, now, you don't have to like Matt Lauer.
	You can think Matt Lauer's a scuzzbag.
	Sounds to me like Matt Lauer's a scuzzbag.
	But he points out that Ronan Farrow, his reporting on Matt Lauer, quote, consistently failed to confirm stories told to him by his main sources, failed to provide evidence of important communications he alleged took place between accusers and me.
	He says, in most cases, Ronan doesn't even claim to have personally seen evidence of those communications, used misleading language to manipulate readers into believing things that could easily be false or at least unprovable.
	In some cases, he undeniably withheld information from the reader that would call the credibility of sources into question.
	And according to Matt Lauer, he routinely presented stories in a way that would suit his activist goals as opposed to any kind of journalistic standard, specifically.
	Specifically, Lauer is upset with the way that Ronan Farrow covered the rape allegation by Brooke Nevels.
	Okay, and he points out like a thousand flaws with Ronan Farrow's reporting that are legitimate flaws.
	You don't have to like, you can think Matt Lauer is a scuzzbag who sexually harassed the help.
	A rape allegation is a pretty damn serious thing, and if you're gonna make that allegation, then you'd best do your research beforehand.
	According to, according to Matt Lauer, that never happened.
	According, he quotes Ronan Farrow in his book Catch and Kill, says Neville's told a million people about Lauer.
	She told her inner circle of friends.
	She told colleagues and superiors at NBC.
	She was never inconsistent.
	She made the seriousness of what happened clear.
	Lauer says, does Ronan offer any proof of this claim?
	Does he say he confirmed the story with any of the friends or colleagues she claims to have told about the seriousness of what she alleges happened?
	Does he include a single comment or quote from a corroborating source for these claims?
	He does not.
	Did he try to track down the superior at NBC that she talked to?
	Did he include a quote or comment from that superior?
	Did he find out if the superior had been told about the seriousness of what Brooke claims?
	He did not.
	How do I know, says Matt Lauer?
	Because I did.
	It took me 15 minutes to find out who the boss was that Nevels had supposedly reported to.
	He says, I contacted Sharon Scott.
	Sharon, concerned she might not have been aware of a serious situation involving a member of her staff, contacted Brooke's direct superior and they spoke at length.
	That new boss told Sharon Scott that one night, Brooke simply stated talking, started talking about having an affair with me.
	She said, most importantly, Brooke never said a single word about this being anything but a consensual affair.
	She said, Brooke in no way conveyed the seriousness of what she now claims.
	The superior says Ronan Farrow never reached out to her to confirm the story that referenced her in the book.
	Like Matt Lauer or hate Matt Lauer?
	Believe Matt Lauer or don't believe Matt Lauer?
	The reality is that because Ronan Farrow targeted the right people and Matt Lauer is a bad guy, Ronan Farrow was able to get away with bad journalistic practices.
	By the way, Ronan Farrow's response to Matt Lauer was incredibly dismissive.
	He didn't bother to actually respond to the immediate allegations made by Matt Lauer.
	He basically just said Matt Lauer is a meanie.
	That was his essential response.
	So, you know, that again, here's his only tweet.
	All I'll say on this is that Matt Lauer is just wrong.
	Catch and Kill was thoroughly reported in fact checks, including with Matt Lauer himself.
	OK, how about some responses to specific allegations made by Matt Lauer?
	He makes some pretty specific allegations there.
	How about bringing forth your sources?
	Those are pretty specific allegations.
	But, of course, people celebrated Ronan Farrow owning Matt Lauer, because he didn't even respond to the allegations.
	Again, this is not to say that Matt Lauer is innocent of the charges made against him.
	It is to say, it is not a response to say, I don't like Matt Lauer, he's mean, and I stand by my reporting.
	If someone makes a specific allegation that you didn't call somebody, you need to bring forward the person you talked to.
	That would be the normal journalistic practice.
	But, this is the way it works in the media.
	You confirm people's belief systems, and you get away with it.
	You cross them, and you become Katherine Harridge or Sheryl Atkinson.
	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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