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May 21, 2020 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:00:54
What If The News Is Finally Good? | Ep. 1016
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Time Text
The media continue to pump bad news, even if the news is actually kind of good.
Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida finally goes ape on reporters, and the Michael Flynn case gets more and more curious.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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So we actually have a lot of good news.
The last couple of weeks have been a time of good news.
Now listen, there's never unqualifiedly good news in the middle of a pandemic.
There are always going to be more deaths.
There's always going to be more suffering.
That is just the reality of life.
But if you had told people several weeks ago that the curve would be flattened, that states would be beginning to be reopened, and you wouldn't see these massive spikes as those states reopen, then in fact, Many of the states reopening are seeing lower rates of infection and death than they were even when they were closed.
You would think that was kind of a bit of good news, would you not?
What if you found out that the virus is not as easily transmissible as it was once thought to be?
Meaning that if it's going to be transmitted, it is mainly done through face-to-face contact.
As I mentioned yesterday, the CDC downgraded its risk assessment level from getting this thing on surfaces.
They basically said that's pretty unlikely you're going to get this from surfaces.
Now, at CNN, there's a piece suggesting that staying safe isn't just about staying six feet away from others and washing your hands with soap.
It's about staying away from people in closed areas for significant amounts of time.
Aaron Bromage, a comparative immunologist and professor of biology at University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, summed it up with a short and sweet equation, successful infection equals exposure to virus times time.
Meaning that you actually have to be exposed to the virus for a long period of time, which is why you're seeing a lot of medical workers who are getting this because they are in contact with people who have this for long periods of time.
A lot of nursing home workers have gotten this.
But if you just walk through a room where somebody sneezed five minutes beforehand, the chances that you're going to get this are actually pretty low.
Ramesh's simplified formula was part of a recent blog post explaining ways to lower your risk of catching COVID-19.
The main idea is people get infected when they are exposed to a certain amount of viral particles.
That viral threshold can be reached by an infected person's sneeze or cough, which releases a large number of viral particles into the air, but an infected person talking or even just breathing releases some virus into the air.
Over a long period of time in an enclosed space, that means that the viral load in the area obviously increases.
This is why you've seen, for example, widespread infections during choir practices.
People are singing and they are projecting and they're in very close contact with one another.
But if you have restaurants where people are seated fairly far apart or outside, then you don't see a lot of people who are infecting other people.
And this also means that there may be some good ways to alleviate this sort of stuff.
Namely, make sure that the air conditioning ventilation at particular restaurants is better.
Make sure that you're sitting a little bit further apart.
Make sure that you don't spend an hour at the restaurant.
Spend 10 minutes at the restaurant.
You know, sitting down outside for coffee or something.
The bottom line is that that is good news.
It means that you are probably not going to get this just from walking around.
And this is what you would suspect anyway, because we've had tons of people going to grocery stores and virtually nobody is getting it at the grocery store.
A few of the grocery clerks have been getting it because, again, they are experiencing lots of people directly across from them.
And that is why they put up the spit guards, which is a good thing.
But we've had grocery stores that are basically chock full of people.
You haven't seen viral outbreaks at Walmart, for example.
Why?
Because you're just not in constant contact with people for very long.
You're brushing past them and you're moving on.
You are singing at churches.
Why?
Because you're sitting on a pew next to somebody else for like an hour.
You saw it at Minyanim in the Jewish community.
Spreading very widely.
Because again, you are sitting in a room that is closed for two hours at a time.
And so, while singing.
So that is likely to lead to wider viral spread.
All of this is good news.
And yet the media seem just desperate, desperate to continue portraying all the news in the worst possible light.
I'll show you a couple examples of this in just a moment.
Because instead of just reporting the facts as they come in, and reporting them with any level of complexity and nuance, which is the real world, instead the media basically look for a headline that says things are bad, and then just repeats that headline even when it doesn't actually mesh with the facts.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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So as I say, it seems like a lot of the media are really intent on painting the worst case scenario as the probable scenario, even when the evidence doesn't actually support that.
And so you'll see a lot of headlines about modeling these days, but the headline from the modeling is completely unrelated to reality.
So for example, Matt Drudge, over at Drudge Report, has really been playing up sort of the disastrous side of the pandemic.
And Matt's great at his job, but the reality is that if you watched a Drudge Report, you would be in a state of sheer panic nearly all the time about coronavirus.
He's been taking this thing to the next level.
Now, to be fair to Matt, he also did this with Ebola.
Anytime there's a viral outbreak anywhere, Matt covers it with extreme, extreme sort of telescopic view or microscopic view rather.
I mean, he puts a real spotlight on it.
But he headlined today over at the Drudge Report this new model that suggests that some five million people could be infected and a quarter million people could be dead by August.
It is a big headline today saying summer scary.
Models predict quarter million dead by August.
Well, there's only one problem.
That model that he is citing is a model from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School.
They predict that the COVID-19 cases could reach 5.4 million and the death toll could be 290,000 if every state in America were to fully reopen with no social distancing and no mask wearing.
Has anybody talked about this like at all?
There's not a single state in America where people aren't recommending social distancing and mask wearing.
And by and large, Americans, like 80% of Americans, are very, very cautious in their approach to this thing.
70 to 80% of Americans are very much in favor of mask wearing, particularly when you are in closed areas.
And, you know, I'm one of the people who's been urging that caution.
When you're outside, you're far away from people, you're not getting this thing.
When you are inside, wearing a mask is just common courtesy, honestly, at this point.
Until we know more.
But this model, citing the top line of the model, is nearly useless.
I mean, that is like saying that if there were no speed limits in the United States, and if everybody just decided to drive 120 miles an hour, you'd have five times as many deaths in car accidents.
Okay, but your premise is completely false.
There are speed limits, and nobody's driving 120 miles an hour because they wouldn't even if they could, because they'd be afraid of dying.
And so there's this piece from the Daily Mail which says, the ominous forecast from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School model accounts for all states fully reopening with no social distancing measure.
In comparison, the model predicts nearly 4.3 million cases and 230,000 deaths by July 24th if states reopen but individuals maintain their social distancing efforts.
So you're talking about the difference between 290,000 deaths and 172,000 deaths, even according to this model.
to, the model forecast 3.1 million infections and 172,000 deaths.
The best case scenario, which would involve each state maintaining lockdown restrictions as of May 17th, with social distancing and measures still in place, there could be 2.8 million infections and 157,000 deaths.
So you're talking about the difference between 290,000 deaths and 172,000 deaths, even according to this model.
But by the way, this particular model also happens to be extraordinarily pessimistic.
There's a separate model from the University of Massachusetts It's Influenza Forecasting Center.
They project that deaths could surpass 113,000 by mid-June.
But let's be real about the models.
The models are variable.
They change really fast.
I mean, we were originally told that if there were no social distancing measures, that on the upper end we'd be looking at 2.2 million deaths in the United States.
That was the Imperial College model.
So relying on models rather than the data as they come in seems to be not all that effective.
Also worth noting, while we focus heavily in the United States on lockdown policy, there is no good correlation between the states that have locked down and the states that have not locked down.
Now, it's quite possible that in high population density centers, like New York City, that a lockdown is absolutely necessary.
But South Dakota didn't lock down.
Vermont did lock down.
They have kind of the same population, and they have basically the same number of deaths.
This, by the way, holds true across Europe.
There's a study from Bloomberg today that says with governments across Europe reopening their economies for business, it's a good moment to look back on the different paths taken to control COVID-19 outbreaks to try to see how effective they were.
The chart below shows the relative severity of Europe's restrictions based on work done by the University of Oxford's Lovatnik School of Government, which tracks a range of measures and scores how stringent they've been each step of the way.
For many European countries, stringency levels increased substantially after the WHO declared a pandemic, even when their caseloads were low.
While not a gauge of whether the decisions taken were the right ones, nor of how strictly they were followed, the analysis gives a clear sense of each government's strategy for containing the virus.
Some, like Italy and Spain, enforced prolonged and strict lockdowns after infections took off.
Others, like Sweden, preferred a more relaxed approach.
Portugal and Greece chose to close down while cases were relatively low.
France and the UK took longer.
But there is little correlation between the severity of a nation's restrictions and whether it managed to curb excess fatalities, a measure that looks at the overall number of deaths compared with normal trends.
So among the countries that have very high, extremely high excess mortality, you're looking at England being in that group.
Italy is in that group.
On the low end of the group is Berlin.
Sweden is sort of somewhere in the middle of the pack in terms of excess mortality.
So the UK, Netherlands, and Spain had very, very high excess mortality.
Sweden and Switzerland, they had excess mortality, but significantly less than the first group.
And then there was Greece and Germany.
So according to that Bloomberg study, the overall impression is that while restrictions on movement were seen as a necessary tool to halt the spread of the virus, when and how they were wielded was more important than their severity.
Early preparation, plentiful healthcare resources were enough for several countries to avoid draconian lockdowns.
So in other words, the faster you got on it, the less it mattered whether you locked down.
If you got on it really fast and you were able to test really fast, you didn't have to lock down in the first place.
So it was the timing and not actually the lockdown measures that mattered.
Which is why Vermont, which was not hard hit, it doesn't matter whether they locked down or not because, again, they weren't hard hit.
South Dakota, which was not hard hit, didn't matter whether they locked down or not because they weren't hard hit.
New York, it would have mattered an awful lot if they had locked down a little bit earlier.
In fact, there was a study out today suggesting that many, many fewer people would have died in New York if they had actually locked down much sooner.
These modelers in the United States, again, suggest that tens of thousands of U.S.
deaths could have been prevented if everybody locked down a lot earlier, but that was mostly in places like New York.
They suggest that if the lockdown had happened early March, like a week earlier, then it could have prevented some 36,000 deaths.
My only doubt about that is if these deaths were taking place at nursing homes, and if people with COVID-19 were being shoved back into the nursing homes, and 40, 50% of all deaths were happening in nursing homes, I'm not sure that that is exactly the case.
But the media are pushing this a little bit because the idea is that if you precipitously remove lockdown, then you're going to have a second wave spike that's going to swamp the system.
Again, I think that the data for that are very much up in the air.
I do not think the data are very clear.
Now, as I say, the media are definitely attempting to push a particular narrative here.
I'll give you another example in just one second.
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So in another example of the media just blatantly miscovering the news, blatantly miscovering it, there's a piece at the L.A.
Times by Hannah Fry, Rongon Lin II, Luke Money, and Colleen Shelby, so half the team.
It's called, A New Hive for Coronavirus Deaths in California as Counties Push Ahead with Reopening.
So what would you get from that headline?
What you would get from that headline is, this is risky, guys.
We can't reopen while there's a high in deaths.
I mean, are we crazy?
We just had the daily high in deaths.
And here you are, pushing for precipitous reopening.
And then you read the article, and here's what you find.
They say California recorded 132 new coronavirus-related fatalities Tuesday, the most in a single day since the pandemic began, as counties across the state continue cementing plans to reopen their economies.
First of all, note, California has 40 million people living here.
132 deaths?
Every one of those is a tragedy.
Every one of those is horrible.
Statistically speaking, that is not a massive number in the state of California.
The highest number of deaths previously reported in a single day statewide was 117 in late April.
So this was the highest day, but that's because California has not been particularly hard hit by the coronavirus in terms of number of deaths.
But that's not even what I'm talking about here.
What I'm talking about is buried in paragraph six, is while the death count continues to rise, other metrics show significant progress, enough that even some of the most cautious local health officials have agreed to begin slowly reopening businesses and public spaces.
The number of newly identified coronavirus cases across California declined from the previous week.
Hospitalizations have dropped more than 15% from a peak six weeks ago, according to a Times analysis.
So, the peak happened six weeks ago.
There's a trailing number of deaths because, again, there are a lot of people in the hospital who linger before, unfortunately, they pass away.
Hospitalizations have dropped more than 15%.
By the way, I know a bunch of people who work in hospitals in this region, in this area, they're empty.
The hospitals are completely empty.
People who are going in and staffing the hospitals and literally sitting there watching Netflix all day because they do not have any patients.
Patients are not showing up to the hospitals.
My wife had to go in for a COVID test maybe a week and a half ago.
She was literally the only person in the COVID room waiting for a test at UCLA.
The only person!
And UCLA is a rather major hospital.
In L.A.
County, which has become the center of the coronavirus outbreak in California with more than 1,900 deaths and nearly 40,000 cases, officials have cautioned that reopening the economy will be more difficult than in other parts of the state.
But the reality is that outside of L.A.
County, There are not a lot of cases.
And again, the peak has been reached in California for weeks at this point.
And yet the headline there is, record number of deaths in California.
This sort of media coverage is irresponsible.
The headline does not match the actual content of the piece.
The headline should be, California hits high in deaths, but other indicators show it's on the downswing.
That would be the accurate headline.
Not, look at these crazy people reopening as we've hit a maximum number of deaths.
That's a lagging indicator.
It is not a good indicator.
And then you see headlines like this from the Washington Post.
Coronavirus hotspots erupt across the country.
Experts warn of second wave in South.
They say Dallas, Houston, Southeast Florida's Gold Coast, the entire state of Alabama, several other places in the South that have been rapidly reopening their economies are in danger of a second wave of coronavirus infections over the next four weeks, according to a research team that uses cell phone data to track social mobility and forecast the trajectory of the pandemic.
The model developed by the Policy Lab at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, updated Wednesday with new data, suggests most communities in the United States should be able to avoid a second wave spike in the near term if residents are careful to maintain social distancing even as businesses open up and restrictions are eased.
But the risk for resurgence is high in some parts of the country, especially in places where cases are already rising fast, including the counties of Crawford, Iowa, Colfax, Nebraska, Texas, Oklahoma, and the city of Richmond.
Since May 3rd, Crawford County caseload has risen by 750%.
There are preliminary signs that hotspots could flare across parts of the South and Midwest.
Why?
Well, because they're saying that basically they're tracking cell phone data and they're seeing people moving more.
Again, that is a model.
If you want to point to the counties where they're actually having hotspots, why don't you point to the counties where they're actually having hotspots?
Don't point to the places where they don't have hotspots yet.
Remember, the article begins by saying Dallas, Houston, Southeast Florida's Gold Coast, and Alabama.
And then, where are the actual counties they're citing that have had a spike?
Crawford, Iowa, Colfax, Nebraska, Texas, Oklahoma, and the city of Richmond.
Which, last I checked, were not Dallas, Houston, Southeast Florida's Gold Coast, and the entire state of Alabama.
Now, maybe there is going to be a spike in those places.
Maybe that's going to happen.
But to headline, the headline again was, coronavirus hotspots erupt across the country.
Experts warn of second wave in South.
That makes it sound like, oh, you know, like the most populous areas in America are about to get just absolutely savaged.
We've been hearing that about Georgia for a month.
Georgia hit a low in number of diagnosed cases yesterday.
We have a surplus of testing capacity in most states and people not taking advantage of the tests.
This sort of reporting is just not responsible.
It is not.
It is not reflective of reality.
We're seeing the same thing with regards to reporting on children, by the way.
There's all this reporting on how children are at risk.
We can't reopen the schools.
Washington, D.C., I believe, just announced they're not going to reopen the schools in September, which is crazy.
It's May.
How are you going to announce what the hell you're doing in September?
I would not be shocked to see L.A.
County do exactly the same thing, saying we're not reopening the schools.
By the way, Taiwan never closed its schools.
Denmark never closed its schools.
Because you know what they kind of figured out early?
Kids are not passing this thing, at least not very easily by all available studies.
There has yet to be a single study showing that kids are passing this thing at the same rate as adults.
There has yet to be a single study showing there's significant risk to children.
In fact, the fatality rate from COVID-19 among children is about one-third that from the flu.
Okay, among older people, it's a lot more than the flu.
Among younger people, like, not tranching the population when you look at the overall case fatality rate or infection fatality rate is really, really stupid.
And the reality is that a study in the Journal of American Medical Association Pediatrics last week found that only 48 children, 48 total, between March 14th and April 3rd were admitted to 14 pediatric ICUs in the US.
83% had an underlying condition.
That's 48 children total in like three weeks.
In that same period, tens of thousands of Americans were dying.
The fatality rate for kids in the ICU was 5% compared to 50 to 62% for adults.
Also, kids don't seem to be carrying this thing at the same rate.
There have been a bevy of studies from a variety of sources, ranging from Australia to China, showing that kids were more likely to pick up the virus from their parents than vice versa, and that they're really not passing it to adults.
Australia's National Center for Immunization Research and Surveillance tracked COVID-19 cases at 15 schools from March 1st to April 16th.
At the outset, 18 individuals were infected.
After six weeks, two of their 863 close contacts at the school had become infected.
So kids are not passing this at school, is what we have been finding in a fair number of these studies.
And as for the reporting about this sort of Kawasaki disease syndrome that has been popping up, that is among a vast, vast, vast minority of kids.
So how was that reported?
It was reported as top line news in every major newspaper.
Now again, I think that we should all be cautious.
None of this... I keep saying this over and over because people deliberately in the media will misread anything to suggest that if you are skeptical of full-scale lockdown, it's because you want everybody to just ignore all the social distancing and mask wearing requirements.
There are some people who are doing that.
It is a small percentage of people.
The vast majority of people are up for the, I'm gonna wear a mask when I go out and when I'm with vulnerable people.
Most people are up for that.
But the media coverage here is just, it truly is astonishing because again, they will say that states that have not yet been hit hard are about to get hit hard.
Meanwhile, they will just frankly cover up for governors who have done an absolute garbage job.
And take for example, I mean, they're ripping governors who have never fully locked down and they are just praising governors who locked down but did a garbage job.
Take, for example, the most trusted name in news over at CNN.
First of all, I don't know how it's journalistically ethical to have Chris Cuomo covering his brother.
I was under the misimpression that if you are actually related to the person you are covering, that generally is not good journalistic practice.
Wait until you hear Chris Cuomo doing his buddy cop routine with his broheim last night on CNN.
Pretty astonishing stuff.
Most trusted name in news.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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All right, so let's talk about the media's differential coverage of states.
We've talked about, sort of broadly speaking, the media trying to play up bad news everywhere that they possibly can, including basing it on the modeling, as opposed to, you know, basing it on the actual outcome in places like Georgia.
Remember, by the way, when we were talking about the dire outcomes for ventilators, how ventilators were necessary?
More and more ventilators, everybody's gonna die without a ventilator?
Turns out that the vast majority of people who are on ventilators died.
So, I mean, and that just disappeared from the news.
Meanwhile, by the way, Georgia, which is supposed to be, you know, completely ripped up, only 866 ventilators are in use in Georgia.
They have a supply of nearly 3,000 ventilators.
But don't worry, the media are going to rely on projections that have been wrong in virtually every state here.
And that's not to say that we should disregard the projections.
It is to say that the projections change based on new data as it comes in.
We just don't know very much about how this virus operates.
Okay, so, meanwhile, the media have been covering states differentially.
I will explain, you know, a perfect example.
Florida, Ron DeSantis ripped up and down, up and down.
We talked yesterday on the program about how Ron DeSantis is one of the few governors who actually took the proactive step of saying, we are not shipping patients with COVID-19 who are in nursing homes back into nursing homes.
But meanwhile, he's being ripped for keeping the beaches open.
Well, yesterday, Ron DeSantis went on a tear against the media.
I mean, honestly, I've been waiting months for him to do this.
Here he was yesterday, just blowing, blowing through the media.
It was pretty great.
Our data is available.
Our data is transparent.
In fact, Dr. Birx has talked multiple times about how Florida has the absolute best data.
So any insinuation otherwise is just typical partisan narrative trying to be spun.
And part of the reason is that because you got a lot of people in your profession who waxed poetically for weeks and weeks about how Florida was going to be just like New York.
Wait two weeks, Florida's gonna be next.
Just like Italy, wait two weeks.
Well, hell, we're eight weeks away from that, and it hasn't happened.
Not only do we have a lower death rate, well, we have way lower deaths generally, we have a lower death rate than the Acela corridor, D.C., everyone up there.
We have a lower death rate than the Midwest, Illinois, Michigan, Indiana, Ohio.
But even in our region, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida has the lower death rate, and I was the number one landing spot from tens of thousands of people leaving the number one hot zone in the world to come to my state.
So we've succeeded.
And I think that people just don't want to recognize it because it challenges their narrative.
It challenges their assumption.
So they got to try to find a boogeyman.
Maybe it's that there are black helicopters circling the Department of Health.
If you believe that, I got a bridge in Brooklyn I'd like to sell you.
Good for him.
Seriously, good for him.
He's exactly right on all this.
Meanwhile, you have Chris Cuomo, who's basically just giving his brother a massage on national TV every night.
Last night, Chris Cuomo... Has Chris Cuomo ever asked his brother about protecting nursing homes?
Of course not.
But you know what he did do?
He did some buddy comedy about how his brother has a big nose and here's a giant nasal swab for you.
This is the normal swab I'm holding up here now and for everybody at home.
A very valuable object.
There's only one company in the entire country that makes these up in Maine.
Alright, here's the swab.
Is it true that this was the swab that the nurse was actually using on you and that at first It went into your nose and disappeared so that in scale, this was the actual swab that was being used to fit up that double barrel shotgun that you have mounted on the front of your pretty face.
So much newsing happening over at CNN.
There's great newsing happening over at CNN.
That guy is the worst governor in America.
His state has experienced 30,000 deaths.
30,000.
I.E., 15 times more deaths than Florida, which has a similar population.
That dude is a terrible governor.
But his bro is on CNN.
And by the way, his bro, who's breaking quarantine and taking bleach baths in order to fight his own coronavirus, is your most trusted name in scientific news on CNN.
And then people wonder why the right looks at CNN cross-eyed.
Because you guys are terrible at your jobs.
Meanwhile, how has your coverage been of Phil Murphy in New Jersey?
That has been widely praised across the media.
Look at him.
He's so strong on these lockdowns, Phil Murphy.
Look how he's shutting down these gyms.
I mean, what a stud Phil Murphy is.
It turns out that 1 in 13 people in nursing homes in New Jersey is dead.
1 in 13 is dead.
That's Phil Murphy's state.
Why?
Because it turns out that the state did virtually nothing to protect people in nursing homes.
NewJersey.com reports, knowing nursing home residents were at grave risk, state inspectors did not begin to make on-site inspections until April 16th, according to officials.
That was 36 days after New Jersey reported its first death, not until reports surfaced that one nursing facility was storing 17 bodies in a makeshift morgue.
Asked why teams were not sent earlier, state health commissioner Judith Pershelli said in mid-April they didn't have proper fitting masks.
She said she later gave hospitals first dibs on PPE, and she left a short supply of ill-fitting masks for nursing home inspectors.
So, for weeks, they just didn't get any PPE, which meant that some 89 people in nursing homes who worked there died.
When nursing home operators urgently called for staffing help, they received little assistance.
The National Guard was not deployed until May.
The state health department didn't announce until earlier this month it would even conduct widespread testing of nursing home residents.
Earlier this month, May, this thing broke out in March.
The health department refused to publish a list of positive COVID-19 cases until three weeks after families pled with them to tell them what the hell was going on.
And you've been seeing this in state after state.
In Pennsylvania, which has been fairly hard hit, the state health director was taking He's a transgender woman, his own mother out of a nursing home facility, age 95, while simultaneously maintaining that nursing home facilities should take in people who had COVID-19.
Have you heard any critique of the governorship of Tom Wolfe in Pennsylvania?
No, you have not.
Only Ron DeSantis, only Brian Kemp.
The differential media coverage is astonishing.
It's astonishing.
So, which is it?
Does the media love lockdown?
And therefore, are they praising governors who participate in lockdown?
Or is it the media and the Democrats basically have the same idea?
Which is, they all have the same sort of political biases.
If Democrats embrace a policy, so do the media, because they are one and the same.
I shouldn't be asking why the media repeat Democratic talking points.
The real question is why I'm even separating Democrats and the media, because they basically are the same thing at this point.
Huge swaths of the so-called objective media are just Democratic aides at this point in time.
And by the way, you can also see this when you talk about the coverage of the Michael Flynn story.
So we have been told that the Michael Flynn story is a complete non-story.
It's a nothing burger.
And in fact, it's wrong to even cover it.
You shouldn't cover the Michael Flynn story.
You should only cover the Michael Flynn story when Michael Flynn was essentially being railroaded into pleading guilty on the basis of not committing a crime.
But you shouldn't cover it when it turns out the DOJ completely drops the case because it was botched from beginning to end, because the investigation never should have been maintained after early January, and because it turns out that high-ranking members of the Obama administration were involved in oversight of the Flynn matter.
Now we should just kind of let it go.
Why can't you guys just let this go?
I mean, it's been 27 minutes since the story broke.
Why can't you let the story go?
The media wish to, wish to ignore this as long as possible.
You've had editorial after editorial in major American newspapers saying, well, now why would we cover this?
This is not worth covering.
Brian Stelter, the watchdog at TNN.
Why are you covering this?
I don't know.
He spent three years covering Trump-Russia allegations that turned out to be a bowl of crap.
Why shouldn't we cover a story in which it seems that members of the Obama administration were pretty intent on bending the rules, even if they were well-intentioned and thought that there was Trump-Russia collusion.
Bending the rules in order to get people?
Typically not good practice.
And if Trump had done it about Obama incoming, you think that everybody would be quite so sanguine?
Of course not.
They're not even sanguine about the fact that the Senate Intelligence Committee is now looking into Hunter Biden.
So why would they be sanguine if Trump were going after an Obama National Security Advisor?
If Trump were basically unmasking Susan Rice, would they be super happy about that?
Especially if you're unmasking Susan Rice in front of half the administration and then it leaked to the press?
Would that be a genius move?
We'll get to this in just one second.
Because again, the media coverage here, it just demonstrates Democrats must have a 10-point advantage in nearly every national election simply based on the media coverage.
That does not alleviate the responsibility for Republicans to be better at their jobs, but it is simply the case that Democrats have a massive built-in advantage here.
We'll get to the Michael Flynn case and the 2020 election in just one second.
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All righty.
So looking at the media coverage of the of the Flynn situation, if you really want to understand media coverage, just assume they're Democrats.
And then it all makes sense.
So, for example, there was a memo that was covered as a complete non-story.
By Susan Rice.
It was put out January 20th, like the last day of the Obama administration.
And the memo basically said, we should really, you know, we really handled and should handle this whole Michael Flynn thing by the book.
It was a memo to file.
We have no idea what the file was.
That's what you call a cover your ass memo.
That is a memo that is designed to say, yeah, we told, listen, we told everybody by the book.
The only reason to write that is because you don't actually feel that you did something by the book.
And you're now trying to cover up for the fact that you didn't go by the book in the first place.
Andrew McCarthy over at National Review has a good piece on this.
He says Rice, Susan Rice, has gone from claiming to have had no knowledge of Obama administration monitoring of Flynn and other Trump associates, to claiming no knowledge of any unmaskings of Trump associates, to admitting she was complicit in the unmaskings, to now a call for a recorded conversation between retired general Michael Flynn and the Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak.
She wants that released because it would purportedly show the Obama administration had good reason to be concerned about Flynn.
By the way, if that's the case, that doesn't really explain why the, why the, People who are on Mike Flynn's side also are kind of in favor of seeing this released.
Apparently Flynn's own lawyers are interested in seeing the call released simply so they can demonstrate that there is nothing there that would have justified the sort of wiretapping that went on afterward.
Andrew McCarthy says, We have now learned that Rice was deeply involved in the Obama administration's Trump-Russia investigation, including its sub-investigation of Flynn.
And also, Rice's previously unreported email memorializing a White House meeting on these subjects from January 20th is kind of telling.
Again, why would you write a memo to file saying, we went right by the book, unless it were absolutely necessary?
Maybe it's to comment on a meeting that took place January 5th that involved Rice, Obama, Biden, the administration's top political hierarchy and national security matters, along with Obama's top law enforcement and counterintelligence officials, Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, and FBI Director James Comey.
Prior to actions already demonstrated, the meeting's central purpose was to discuss the rationale for withholding intelligence about Russia from the incoming Trump national security team.
Comey would join other intelligence chiefs in briefing Trump on Russia's interference in the 2016 campaign, but they did conceal the Obama administration's investigation of the Trump campaign.
The Obama administration hoped to conceal what he had done, so the FBI and Justice Department, which Comey and Yates would be staying on to lead, could continue the investigation even after Trump took office.
And they did just that.
The Bureau and DOJ renewed the FISA surveillance warrants on Carter Page, which again, were deeply flawed and based on the crap Steele dossier.
They renewed it twice more.
Clearly, Rice, Obama, and Biden realized who would eventually become known to Trump and top advisors.
That the Obama administration had investigated his campaign and had laid the groundwork to persist in investigating his administration.
The patent point of Rice's last second email written to the file as she was leaving her office on January 20th, memorializing a meeting that occurred two weeks earlier, was to shift responsibility from Obama to Comey for the pursuit of the Trump-Russia probe, right?
It says, Obama says that we should do this thing by the book and James Comey's gonna do what James Comey's going to do.
That's essentially what the letter was supposed to do.
The newly unredacted paragraph from Rice's email relates that Comey reported to Obama, Biden, and Rice on the FBI's investigation of Flynn.
The FBI director is said to have framed it as both a law enforcement matter, the theory that Flynn committed a crime by violating the Logan Act, which was nonsense, and a national security matter, the suggestion that the bureau had some sort of damning information on Flynn that should prevent him from being part of the apparatus.
According to Rice, Comey was noncommittal when asked whether Russian intelligence should be withheld from Flynn.
Rice claims Obama left the matter of concealing information from the Trump team unresolved.
Now again, this memo was written two weeks after the original Trump meeting.
So all of this is deeply suspicious and curious, but the media suggests that none of it is worth covering.
It just isn't worth covering.
And the reason it isn't worth covering is because obviously, if we were to cover it, then that would be suggesting that the Obama administration was not pure as the driven snow, and was indeed driven by ulterior motives, even if they thought those motives were good, like Trump is in bed with the Russians.
It turns out that bending the law in order to get there, and then railroading someone into essentially a confession of a crime he didn't commit is a bad thing.
But we're not supposed to cover all that, according to the media.
What we are supposed to cover is President Trump firing inspectors general.
So there have been a couple inspectors general who have been fired.
Credit to producer Nick for correcting me on inspector generals.
Inspectors general.
So, President Trump has fired a couple of inspectors general.
He specifically fired one over at the State Department.
And the idea was that Mike Pompeo had this guy fired because he was so close to the truth, so close to the truth.
Pompeo yesterday came out and he was like, yes, I had him fired.
Yes, there's plenty of good reason I had him fired.
No, it wasn't because he was investigating me.
This didn't stop Chuck Schumer from bloviating on about it, obviously, without all the information.
That's the way this works.
And so here is Chuck Schumer yesterday saying, it's a dictatorship, dictatorship!
The Inspector General should have been allowed to pursue these cases on his own, without interference from either the Secretary of State, and certainly without being fired by the President.
It's outrageous.
It's outrageous.
And he's done this time and time again.
The head of BARDA.
The head of BARDA said hydroxychloroquine is bad for you.
Trump didn't like to hear that.
He fired the guy.
It's like a dictatorship.
It's not like a democracy.
We depend on truth in this democracy, and this president runs away from it, and it's hurting the American people every single day.
I'm sorry, such patent nonsense.
That story about Rick Bright?
The guy was on the chopping block for a year, and he had sent memos to people saying that he was glad that they were expediting the hydroxychloroquine clearance for doctors.
So we've seen in the last month a bevy of stories about Trump randomly firing people and how it has to be nefarious and it has to be really bad.
But if you ever mentioned, by the way, that the Obama administration actually fired people under some pretty curious circumstances, we shouldn't talk about that.
Very bad that the State Department IG got fired.
Very non-worthy of coverage, that back during the Obama administration, the Inspector General Gerald Walpin was fired for trying to protect taxpayer dollars, basically because Walpin was going after the mayor of Sacramento, a guy named Kevin Johnson, who happened to be an extraordinarily close political ally of Barack Obama.
I talk about this in my book, The People vs. Barack Obama.
But it wasn't covered as a major scandal for Obama.
Anytime Trump does something, it's covered as a major scandal.
For this reason among others, President Trump is now trailing Joe Biden by significant points.
Now listen, I'm not going to put that all in the media.
The media coverage of Trump has been consistently bad, obviously.
It was consistently bad of Bush also.
It was consistently bad of Romney.
It doesn't alleviate Trump's responsibility not to get involved in stupid poop fights with various Democrats.
But The media certainly play a major role here.
There's a massive gap in the polls between Americans right now.
So right now, there's an 11 point Biden lead, 50 to 39.
On the president's handling of the economy, 50% of people still approve, 47% of people disapprove.
That is a slight decrease for Trump compared to a 51 to 44 gap in April.
On healthcare, the president is underwater by about 13 points.
On Trump versus Biden, Biden outscores Trump on honesty, 47 to 41.
People think that Trump is not honest, 62 to 34.
They say that Biden has good leadership skills, 51 to 40%.
They say Trump does not, 58 to 40%.
They say that Biden cares about average Americans, 61 to 30.
Trump does not, 56 to 42.
He's not supremely favorable Biden.
He's got like a 45% approval rating.
Trump has about a 40% approval rating.
By a 16 point margin, 55 to 39 voters think that Biden would do a better job than Trump handling the response to the coronavirus.
And that would be the big one right now.
That's the thing that is really changing fairly significantly, is people's reactions to Trump and coronavirus.
And again, a lot of that is driven by the media.
And some of that is driven by the fact that Trump keeps getting caught in his own silliness when he talks about this sort of stuff.
But the reality is that if the media covered any of this stuff in even-handed fashion, the gap would be smaller.
Not because they would be portraying Trump any more credibly, but because they would be pointing out that the Democrats are absolutely awful at this.
For example, Joe Biden, who is now, you know, right now, if the election were held today, he would probably win.
Joe Biden literally cannot get through six sentences without stumbling.
It's incredible.
Biden literally forgot what he was talking about last night in another virtual roundtable.
There's a lot we can do that related to what has already been passed for small businesses that the president just hasn't done.
Look, you know, a combination of failing to move quickly He's not there.
Guys, he's not there.
If you talk about he's not there, then apparently you're ageist or something.
But he's not all there.
Meanwhile, Nancy Pelosi, our mature leader.
Jennifer Rubin says she's a godsend to the country because Jennifer Rubin's a good conservative columnist at the Washington Post.
Nancy Pelosi has now been relegated.
Is it that as our politicians get older, their insults get more childish?
Here's Nancy Pelosi saying that Trump is like a child with doggy-do on his shoes.
Doggy-do?
What are we, in second grade here?
Here's Nancy Pelosi.
You're asking me about the appropriateness of the actions of this President of the United States?
So completely inappropriate in so many ways that it's almost a given.
It's like a child who comes in with mud on their pants or something.
That's the way it is.
They're outside playing.
He comes in with Doggy-do on his shoes.
And everybody who works with him has that on their shoes, too, for a very long time to come.
Doggy-do on his shoes.
We've been reduced to morbidly obese.
No, you're crazy.
You have doggy-do on your shoes.
What in the?
We're like five seconds from I'm rubber and you're glue, right?
We are five seconds from that in this country.
So this is honestly, this is the best case for Trump.
The best case for Trump is everybody's incompetent and you want them all out of your lives.
That is the best case for Trump.
And never has that been better accentuated than by the fact that Kamala Harris, who may be the frontrunner to get the VP nomination from Joe Biden, for no reason at all, she won nine votes.
Like, seriously, no votes in any of the primaries.
For some reason, people think that she would strengthen Joe Biden's ticket, which makes no sense at all.
She doesn't bring anybody home to Joe Biden.
Joe Biden blew her out with black voters.
Nobody likes Kamala Harris, yet she is perceived as some sort of important voice to be added to the ticket.
What's she been doing for the past couple of weeks?
She has filed for a resolution condemning all forms of anti-Asian sentiment related to COVID-19, including the use of the terms Chinese virus or Wuhan virus, or Kung flu.
She has introduced Senate Resolution 580, which is co-sponsored by Elizabeth Warren and Maisie Hirono of Hawaii, who has taken Barbara Boxer's slot as dumbest U.S.
Senator.
They say that public officials should denounce such rhetoric in any form.
It also calls on law enforcement officials to investigate, document, prosecute the perpetrators of hate crimes against Asian Americans.
By the way, not tons of data suggesting a radical increase in hate crimes against Asian Americans.
Obviously, when we talk about people being idiots and targeting Asian Americans, even Trump has repeatedly condemned that.
But, like, are you kidding me?
That Kamala Harris is concerned right now about calling it the Chinese flu?
Like, this is where we are?
Our politicians are our joke.
Like, nearly all of them.
Nearly all of them.
There are very few competent politicians.
That is the best case for Trump.
Not that he's supremely competent, but that everybody else is similarly incompetent, and at least he doesn't want to control your life.
Trump ain't the authoritarian here.
Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer are the authoritarians here.
I've been saying for a long time, the pandemic is one of the times when I'm most grateful that Trump is president, because if a Democrat were president, can you imagine the kinds of federal control they would be attempting to leverage over every aspect of American life right now?
Instead of trying to get the economy to reopen, they would be talking about the sort of transformational change that Joe Biden has gotten very familiar with talking about.
So, the media will do their best to obscure that, but that's what the election really should be about.
What the election should be about is who wants to control your life more in the aftermath of the greatest single crackdown on American freedom in certainly my lifetime, certainly my parents' lifetime.
Who do you want in there?
Somebody who wants more control or somebody who wants less control?
Okay, time for some things that I hate.
Alrighty, so we obviously have a serious problem of supply and demand in this country when it comes to racism.
Now, there are racists out there.
There are people who are racist and do racist things.
And those people should be condemned.
Their racist behavior should be condemned.
We should all be unified in condemning that behavior.
But what we see in the way that the media cover things and the way that people respond to things online is that every small possibility of racism, anything that can be read as racism, is read to the broadest possible extent and then imputed to American society as a whole.
So, there just is not enough of a supply of racism in America to meet the demand.
There's a high demand for racism because people want to declare that America is deeply brutal, racist, homophobic, hierarchical, vicious.
They want to claim all those things.
Because that allows them to argue for the tearing down of the system, right?
This is what I talk about in my new book, How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps.
It's coming out in July.
They require examples of American viciousness in order to justify tearing down the system from the inside, in order to justify eviscerating the system, right?
That's the goal.
So what that means is that people will seize specifically on controversial examples of maybe racism, maybe not, in order so that when somebody says, wait, I don't actually see the evidence here, they go, ah, because you're a racist too, right?
This is why, you will see, the media did not cover the Walter Scott shooting in South Carolina in the same way that they are covering the Arbery shooting in Georgia.
Not at all.
Why?
Well, the Walter Scott shooting was pretty clearly racist, right?
I mean, the cop in that case shot the guy in the back, planted a gun on the guy, and everyone went, well, that seems pretty awful.
That guy should go to jail.
And then he went to jail for 20 years.
And everybody was like, all right, good.
The Arbery shooting, There's not tons of evidence of racism inherent in the case yet.
Maybe it will materialize, but it seems like right now most of the case is vigilante-based.
People who were told that a crime was going on and decided, we're going to get our guns, we're going to stop this guy, and then they went out there and it ended in a bad shooting.
And they will probably end up going to jail for at the very least manslaughter.
But if you say, I'm not seeing all the evidence of racism yet, then the implication is, you don't see the evidence of racism because you're blind to racism generally.
Okay, perfect example of this today.
Perfect example.
So last night, on Twitter, I noticed that the hashtag BoycottFedEx was coming up.
And I thought to myself, BoycottFedEx?
FedEx is keeping the country running in the middle of a pandemic.
What the hell are you talking about?
Why would I boycott FedEx?
Okay, so there was a video that was going around by a person named Antonio Braswell.
And I'm going to play you the entire video.
It's about 45 seconds long.
And what the video shows is this fellow, I think this is Antonio Braswell or he's the guy in the truck, unclear to me which one he is.
And it's a video of a guy in a FedEx outfit who is yelling at and being filmed by what appears to be a white homeowner.
Braswell is black.
This became the basis for the number one hashtag on planet Earth last night, Boycott FedEx.
Here, I'll play the tape, then I'll explain the account, and then I'll show you how, in the absence of any actual evidence, people immediately leapt to the conclusion that FedEx is a brutal, racist company.
Here's the actual tape last night.
I watched it three times to make sure I wasn't missing anything.
But you didn't have to come out there cussing me like that like I'm some child!
I ain't no little boy!
I'm no little boy!
I'll wait till the police come.
You can record all you want, girl.
I got you.
That's where your power at right there.
That's your power.
That's his power.
That's where your power at right there.
Man, I ain't finna waste my time with you.
You got my information.
You got my information.
They'll find me.
They'll find me.
You need to get your glasses back on.
Yeah, I thought you were going to walk my ass too.
Okay, so then they take off in the car.
So is there anything?
Is there any evidence that the white guy was being racist there?
I mean, really, I don't see any evidence.
I see that the person who is driving the car is angry, and I see a confrontation, but I have no idea what led up to the confrontation.
Literally no idea.
You can't tell from the tape itself.
The white guy isn't shouting slurs at the black guy.
Right, in fact, he barely says anything.
He says, I thought you were gonna, pretty much the only thing he says is, I thought you were gonna wait for the cops.
That's pretty much the only thing he says in the entire video.
Okay, so, this fellow tweets out the backstory.
He says, he says, update, FedEx called and told me to take down this video and fired both of us today.
I'm reposting this video because people like him, doesn't matter white or any race, should never disrespect essential workers putting their lives in jeopardy, especially with this COVID-19.
Now again, I'm not seeing tremendous disrespect in that video, per se.
It looks like two people who are kind of having a fight and one is filming it.
In fact, two people were filming it, right?
Because this FedEx driver's friend inside the truck was also filming it.
So then he tells his backstory.
His backstory.
All we did just delivered his package.
Mind you, he was in the house.
It was a quick stop.
As soon as we were leaving, he ran out his house cursing and threatening us.
And we just apologized.
But he kept escalating the situation, then kept saying he would whoop our black asses.
Now, if that's caught on tape, that's a racist incident, right?
Then everybody's unified.
Because if somebody runs out of the house after a FedEx guy drops off a package, and says he's gonna whoop your black ass, then pretty sure that's racist, and pretty sure that guy is in a hell of a lot of media trouble.
Right?
And should be.
And should be.
Okay, but that part's not the part that's on tape.
So this person says, that's when we told his wife to get the police on us.
He told, that's when he kept following us.
He pulled out his phone to record us and start playing the victim role.
We drove off at first, but they yelled, F y'all.
So we stopped the truck and that's when I started recording the incident.
After the video, the police came and we told our side of the story.
And the man said to the police, they look like they would have broke into my house while my wife is there.
The white dude was lying the whole time.
Mind y'all, we all go through this all the time.
He was actually the first to come at us crazy, and all we doing is our job.
We work six days out the week to deliver these packages during this coronavirus going on.
I really appreciate the job opportunity I had with FedEx.
No hard feelings.
I pray I can get back on my feet because I have a daughter now.
Shout out to my trainer.
He a real good dude.
He taught me a lot, 100%.
Okay, so, I don't know whether this guy's story is true.
You don't have any idea whether this guy's story is true.
Presumably, there is more to the tape.
Presumably, there is a police report.
Presumably, there were several witnesses to this exchange.
Twitter didn't care.
Twitter didn't care at all.
This trended number one on Twitter.
Boycott FedEx.
Why?
Because FedEx fired these guys.
Now maybe FedEx did an investigation you never knew about.
Maybe FedEx called up the police.
Maybe FedEx called up the homeowner.
Maybe FedEx thought, you know what's actually not great policy?
Having our FedEx guys driving around taping the customers.
Even if the customers are taping us, we just have a general policy.
We don't want our employees taping and publicly posting videos of customers.
That's not an unreasonable policy for FedEx to take.
It isn't.
Okay, so this didn't matter.
The idea was boycott FedEx because FedEx was to blame.
Now again, we don't know anything about this story other than the guy's account, which we have no verification of and the tape doesn't show anything of.
Doesn't matter.
This was the number one trend in America.
Again, the supply of racism is outstripped by the demand in dramatic fashion.
People had a virtue signal to demonstrate that they took the story at face value, because if you don't take the story at face value, it means you're a racist, is the way this works now.
Online, the way that this works is an accusation is tantamount to guilt, no matter what, so long as the person who is making the accusation is part of the hierarchy of groups who have been oppressed in America before.
Another example of this.
So there's a piece at NBC News, I'm not kidding you, it's called, Why?
So what is wrong with Peloton?
during the pandemic saved me.
But the more I ride, the more weary I get.
Why?
So what is wrong with Peloton?
According to the columnist, David Kaufman, he says, the company wants to be hashtag woke.
But if I hear one more all white 1980s playlist while a white coach uses black vernacular to encourage riders, I'll scream.
So Peloton is racist because people are using 80s music, which very often is wise, like Huey Lewis in the news, and sometimes uses black vernacular when they talk?
Here's what this columnist says.
Like many people in quarantine, every day I find some time to hide from my children and hop onto my Peloton.
I love my Peloton, which, despite the hefty price tag, has much more than paid for itself in burn calories and much-needed zen.
I'm clearly not alone.
But the more I use my Peloton bicycle, the more I don't feel so good about the company behind it.
Because just as their now infamous holiday season ad last year convinced many people the company had an unacknowledged gender problem.
This is the dumbass controversy over an ad in which a husband gives his wife a Peloton bike and then she's real happy about it, which is bad.
You're never supposed to give your wife an exercise piece of equipment that she's unhappy, that she's happy about.
Because it means that you're body shaming her, gentlemen.
Now, this comment says, It's not that Peloton the company is actively racist or has even failed at being woke.
A quick spin through Peloton's app or blog reveals the brand is intentionally including racially conscious content throughout their marketing materials.
The problem is more subtle.
Subtle is code for it doesn't exist, but I'm just going to make a big deal out of it so that I can get some press.
With each bike priced at over $2,200 plus $39 per month more for streaming classes, Peloton users are typically demi-one percenters with cash to spare and homes spacious enough to house those speedy racers.
And in fact, Peloton CEO and co-founder John Foley said those users were his target demographic.
Those users must now find free hours to actually ride their bikes and run on their treadmills in between other lockdown demands, whether work conferences or Zoom classes for the kids.
The upper middle class whiteness informs everything I've experienced about Peloton's almost cultish community.
Oh, so much whiteness.
So much whiteness.
That community mostly connects during Peloton rides or runs, which are streamed into folks' homes on screens mounted on the front of their equipment.
They'll have cutesy names that indicate effort level and music genre.
Think 30-minute pop ride or 45-minute hit and hills ride, a pun playing off the acronym for high-intensity interval training and the fact that you'll be hearing whatever is atop the billboard charts at the moment.
This is where the race issue becomes most apparent because black instructors offer rides filled with typically black music, rap, Caribbean, or hip-hop, while white instructors offer ones with mostly white music, rock, pop, and heavy metal.
Though the thought that white people don't work out to rap or hip-hop music and black people don't use rock or pop music to fuel their sessions in 2020 is laughable.
Hold on.
So now you're accusing a white trainer you don't know of being a racist for not playing rap music?
First of all, I would guarantee you that a huge percentage of the pop music they are playing is from people who are of color.
They're playing probably Nicki Minaj.
They're probably playing Ariana Grande.
A huge number of those artists are people who are Black or Hispanic.
But apparently very bad, Rihanna, right?
This is very bad, very bad.
He says, the deliberateness of those choices becomes more apparent in the playlists of the rides with musical themes from a specific decade, whether the 70s, 80s, or 90s.
Also taught by mostly white instructors, such rides feature popular era hits, but from predominantly white bands.
So the 70s focused rides are all classic rock and a bit of country, the 80s rides are full of new wave, and the 90s classes are big on grunge and Dave Matthews.
It's as if black music, let alone disco or Tejano, simply didn't happen during those years.
And when black music does appear outside of hip-hop or rap, it's often part of a more specialized class category such as Groove Ride.
Are you kidding me?
Are you seriously kidding me?
So Peloton is racist now because people choose the playlist that they wish to play in order to draw a crowd that they think will show up.
Again, all this says is that America is a pretty damned great place when you have to search this hard for racism at Peloton.
And final example of this today.
So Lana Del Rey, who I'm not a Lana Del Rey fan.
I don't really listen to pop music very much.
So I don't really care.
I don't have a dog in this fight.
Lana Del Rey is now being dragged on Twitter.
Why?
Because she put out a letter today pointing out that she's been criticized for not being feminist enough in her music.
And then she says, why is it that everybody else gets to do their version of feminism, which could include cheating or stripping or being terrible, but my version of feminism, which involves me exposing my own vulnerabilities in my music, is considered very bad.
And so she has this letter.
She says, now that Doha Cat, Ariana, Camila, Cardi B, Kehlani, and Nicki Minaj and Beyonce have had number ones with songs about being sexy, wearing no clothes, effing, cheating, etc.
Can I please go back to singing about being embodied, feeling beautiful by being in love, even if the relationship is not perfect, or dancing for money, or whatever I want, without being crucified or saying that I'm glamorizing abuse?
I'm fed up with female writers and alt-singers saying I glamorize abuse when in reality I'm just a glamorous person singing about the realities of what we are all now seeing are very prevalent emotionally abusive relationships all over the world.
With all of the topics women are finally allowed to explore, I just want to say over the last 10 years, I think it's pathetic that my minor lyrical exploration detailing my sometimes submissive or passive roles in my relationships has often made people say I've set women back hundreds of years.
Let's be clear, I'm not a feminist, but there has to be a kind of place in feminism for women who look and act like me.
And she talks about, you know, some of the music that she has written, and she was ripped up and down for this because she mentioned women of color.
Lana Del Rey's a racist now.
She's a racist.
We're pointing out that there's differential treatment between versions of feminism and what women are allowed to say.
Now she's a racist.
Again, this all comes down to people are looking for a rationale for being racist.
People are looking for a rationale for suggesting that racism is rife in American society so that they can claim that the society itself is to blame for the racism.
Okay, time for a very, very quick thing I like.
There's a great book that I referred to on my All Access Live a couple of days ago called Crisis of the House Divided by Harry Jaffa.
When we talk about divisions in America, It is important to remember this is not the most divided time in American history.
There was a time when half the country actually held slaves, the greatest evil in American history by a long shot.
Harry Jaffa has a great book about the debates between Lincoln and Douglas and the reading of the Declaration of Independence into the Constitution, the second American founding that happened during the Civil War.
Those second American founders would include people like Frederick Douglass and include people like Abraham Lincoln, obviously.
It's a great book.
It is not particularly an easy read, but Harry Jaffa is one of the great American thinkers about American philosophy and particularly the Civil War.
He has a couple of fantastic books on this.
Crisis of the House Divided is an absolute classic.
You should go pick it up today.
It'll teach you a lot about American history and a ton about American philosophy.
Go check that out right now.
Okay, I'll be here a little bit later today with two additional hours of content.
Otherwise, I'll see you here tomorrow or go subscribe right now at dailywire.com slash subscribe.
Join our all-access live later today where you'll hear me do stupid people tricks.
Also, Join us on Wednesday the 27th for a backstage.
7 p.m.
Eastern, 4 p.m.
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So join today.
All sorts of goodies for you when you become an All Access subscriber.
Go check it out right now.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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