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May 26, 2020 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:01:36
Stepping On Your Own Bleep | Ep. 1018
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Fallout continues from Joe Biden's statement that no black person could vote for Trump.
Trump has himself a very Twitter weekend, and Americans battle over masks and social distancing.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
Well, I hope that you guys had a wonderful Memorial Day weekend.
Today's show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.
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Well, there's nothing like coming back from a weekend where you consider the sacrifices made by so many on behalf of the freedoms of this country to realize that everything has gotten stupider.
Somehow everything has gotten stupider and worse over time.
It just, it continues to get stupider and worse, like without end and without cease.
So I think to begin, We need to talk a little bit about Joe Biden last week.
Why?
Because it really has something to say about the state of the nation.
Because we saw a series of stories over the weekend that had to do with race in America.
And we should all be able to agree, I've always been sort of puzzled by the notion that we can't all agree on the basics here.
Here are the basics.
The basics here, most Americans are good-hearted and not racist.
Also, there are some racists.
And there are people who are also just giant jackasses who do things that appear to be racist but may not actually be racist.
They might just be jackasses.
These all seem like fairly commonsensical things.
Also, if you're going to blame an institution for being racist, you should be able to cite the rules of the institution that discriminate against somebody.
Also, if somebody within an institution acts outside the scope of authority and does something racist and or bad, that person should lose their job.
All of these things I think we should all be able to agree on because this is just called basic human decency at this point.
Well, all of this has broken freshly into public view because Joe Biden last week decided to invoke the race issue once more.
And this ties into a broader discussion about race in America.
And that is putting all the commonsensical stuff aside.
Putting aside the ability of all of us to agree on most of the things that I just said, the basic idea here is that America is at root racist, that most Americans are not in fact good-hearted, that deep inside the heart of most Americans is an unspoken racism, is a bias against black Americans, and that every story that demonstrates bias is an indicator of the great evil that is America, and every story that indicates non-bias is an outlier.
What you see as the common and what you see as the outlier is almost flipped in this particular view of America.
Okay, so as you'll recall, last week, when last we left our story, before you had a Memorial Day weekend, Joe Biden had gotten himself in trouble.
Why?
Well, he went on a show called The Breakfast Club.
He was talking to a host called Charlamagne Than God, and the vice president and the presidential front runner, Joe Biden, he said that you're not black if you support President Trump, or even if you have to think about whether to support President Trump.
Listen, you gotta come see us when you come to New York, VP Biden.
I will.
It's a long way until November.
We got more questions.
You got more questions.
But I tell you, if you have a problem figuring out whether you're for me or Trump, then you ain't black.
Okay, now that got him in all sorts of trouble, at least for a brief moment in time.
And then everybody moved on with their lives because Democrats decided this was not in fact a bad thing to say.
In fact, what Biden said, it may have been kind of rough, but the reality is that what he was saying was basically good.
It was basically okay.
So you got two different angles here.
One was that This was not a big deal.
We should stop talking about Biden's gap.
So here's a montage of Democrats over the weekend basically suggesting there's nothing to see here, that when Joe Biden suggests that if you're a black Republican, you're not actually black, that that's not a big deal.
Here's a giant montage of people ranging from Val Demings to other characters on CNN talking about the non-story that is Joe Biden's comment here.
The president shouldn't have said it.
He apologized for it.
But I really think the gall and the nerve of President Trump.
I believe that Joe Biden was incorrect in saying the statement, you ain't black.
But I also believe that his apology was sufficient.
That apology was given swiftly.
He was saying, I'm sorry.
I was being too cavalier.
I apologize.
To his credit, Joe Biden recognized within minutes that he had gotten carried away.
I think he has apologized and he should have apologized.
It was like, you know, one of those jokes that just falls flat.
Okay, so when people were playing this as a joke, it was no big deal.
Jonathan Capehart at the Washington Post today says that it's a joke.
That was Jade Johnson saying it's a joke, and Michelle Sindoor saying that it's a joke.
Everybody basically saying it's a joke.
Now, when Trump tells a joke, it's not a joke.
When Joe Biden doesn't tell a joke, it is a joke, is sort of the way this works.
But underlying a lot of this is the basic perception in radical left circles and among many of the intelligentsia in the mainstream media that basically Joe Biden was right.
When Joe Biden says you're not legitimately black, unless you vote for a Democrat, that he is basically correct.
And I think that this viewpoint is worth exploring because I do think that it animates a lot of our politics today.
The attempt to see all of politics in terms of racial verity.
We'll get to that in just one second.
Because again, I think that there are two ways of viewing politics of race.
One is with certain baseline commonsensical understandings.
And one is that everything is seen through the prism of America is inherently bad.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Okay.
So, let's look at this perspective.
So, there are a couple of people who just said the quiet part out loud.
And the quiet part is that Joe Biden is actually right.
The one Joe Biden says that Black people who don't vote for him are not Black, that he's actually right, is Nikole Hannah-Jones, who is one of the chief, one of the leaders of the 1619 Project.
She's won the Pulitzer Prize for an essay that had some good parts, but was horribly fact-checked and just told open lies about the state of America and about the history of America.
She tweeted out, There is a difference between being politically black and being racially black.
I'm not defending anyone, but we all know this and should stop pretending that we don't.
And people responded to her and said, well, I'm black and I'm Republican, so what are you talking about?
And she said, well, if you don't know, I won't tell you, which is always the mark of somebody who has a lot of faith in their own statements here.
She ended up deleting this tweet because, of course, it was pretty humiliating to the New York Times that there's a difference between being politically black and being racially black.
Jemele Hill, who used to be on ESPN, now I believe she is with The Ringer, she tweeted out the issue wasn't what Joe Biden said because it was accurate.
The issue is that it came from Biden.
It was also clearly a joke that didn't land.
I'm wondering where all this outrage was yesterday when you all president decided his public devotion to a declared his public devotion to a Nazi sympathizer.
I, you know.
Okay, so anyway, that's Jemele Hill, fairly typical.
The issue wasn't what Joe Biden said because it was accurate.
So I want to actually take this view seriously because I think that this view is worth taking seriously considering so much of it dominates our public debate.
So I think that there are a few things we need to consider.
One is race does not decide politics, obviously.
The level of melanin in your skin does not determine whether you are a Democrat or Republican.
It is also true that you could make the argument that certain policies are better for black Americans and certain policies are worse for black Americans.
And you could do this about any group.
You can say certain policies are better for gay Americans, certain policies are worse for gay Americans.
But how people decide on which values they perceive to be important in politics really does not have to be decided by race.
So for example, let's say that there's a policy that you think is good for black Americans like affirmative action, but you also believe that this comes along with a lot of democratic baggage that you don't agree with.
And so you vote Republican instead, even if you agree with affirmative action.
Or let's say that you think that affirmative action may be good for a subset of Black Americans, but it is not generally good for Black Americans or good for America more broadly.
These are all calculations you can make.
So the basic idea that if you are Black and not a Democrat, that you are not Black is, of course, incredibly silly.
Clarence Thomas is presumably Republican.
The man grew up the grandson of a sharecropper after he didn't know who his father was.
Thomas Sowell grew up extraordinarily poor, lived in a segregated area.
There are plenty of Black Republicans who have Been fully black, right?
That statement is silly.
But there is a sense in which you could perceive that voting for a particular party would call your self-perception of race into question.
Okay, the only way this would work is not based on differential value assessments of politics.
It would be when you are under existential threat.
And this explains why so much of democratic rhetoric, why so much of wild leftist rhetoric is about the idea That voting is not about prioritization of values or costs and benefits of particular policies.
It's about survival.
Because the truth is that for black Americans, for a long time, voting was about survival.
If you were a black American and you were voting in favor of Democrats who were keeping you segregated in 1956 Alabama, There's a good case to be made that you are not thinking about your own race properly, right?
And that would be true of any race.
If you're a race that is under the threat of extermination, the threat of extinction, the threat of open discrimination, not covert, not implied open discrimination.
If you voted for somebody who said black people are inferior, Right?
It wasn't like there was another and it wasn't like there were no other choices or something.
Okay, then you could see somebody like Nicole Hannah-Jones saying, okay, well, that's, you're not being politically black, meaning your group is under actual threat.
And therefore you have to vote like your group is under actual threat.
The problem is that in America right now, black Americans are not under actual threat from political group.
Now that does not mean that there aren't individual instances of racism.
And one of the things that we need to go back to the commonsensical view of is that we all have the ability to call out instances of racism when we see them.
So, for example, over the weekend, there was a woman who trended on Twitter because a tape came out of her calling the police on a black man.
This video was put out by a person named Melody Cooper.
Cooper tweeted, Okay, when Karens take a walk with their dogs off leash in the famous Bramble in New York Central Park where it is clearly posted on signs that dogs must be leashed at all times and someone like my brother, an avid birder, politely asks her to put her dog on the leash, then she calls the cops.
So here is the video of this woman.
And this can fairly be said to be racist.
I mean, what she's doing here seems to be a pretty obvious instance of racism.
So this black man says to her, put your dog on the leash, according to him.
And then she basically threatens to call the cops.
And not only does she threaten to call the cops, what's amazing about this is she is imputing to the police her own level of racism.
Because she says, I'm going to call the cops and I'm going to tell them that an African-American man is threatening my life.
Assuming, presumably, that the police being brutal, vicious racists at the NYPD are going to arrive and immediately just shoot the black guy.
Which, of course, there's no evidence of.
So here is a little bit of the video.
This is a racist incident.
This is a woman being a racist.
She probably doesn't even perceive herself as a racist because she's probably a good Upper West Side liberal.
But this is about as racist as it gets.
Here she is.
Sir, I'm asking you to stop.
Please don't come close to me.
Sir, I'm asking you to stop recording me.
Please don't come close to me.
Please take your phone off me.
Please don't come close to me.
And I'm taking a picture and calling the cops.
Please call the cops.
Please call the cops.
I'm going to tell them there's an African-American man threatening my life.
Please tell them whatever you like.
There is an African-American man.
I am in Central Park.
He is recording me and threatening myself and my dog.
I'm sorry, I can't hear you either.
I'm being threatened by a man in the Ramble.
Please send the cops immediately!
Okay, and she's getting hysterical.
Meanwhile, she's collaring the dog.
By the way, the dog ended up being taken away from her by the shelter that saw this video because she's grabbing the dog without the leash.
She's grabbing it by the collar to subdue it.
When the police arrived, only the woman remained on the scene, according to the police.
Melody and Christian Cooper did not return messages seeking comment on Monday night.
So Christian Cooper is the name of the man.
He put out an account, and he explained that basically she was making a false report to the police.
So, according to the New York Daily News, according to the New York Daily News, on Monday night, a firm for which the woman is believed to have worked, Franklin Templeton, tweeted a statement she'd been placed on administrative leave while they investigated the incident.
The dog rescue organization in which she was involved, Abandoned Angels Cocker Spaniel, said on its Facebook page she had voluntarily surrendered the rescue pup.
She apparently has now apologized for the situation.
I sincerely and humbly apologize to anyone who saw this, especially to that man.
His family was unacceptable.
I humbly and fully apologize to everyone who's seen that video, everyone that's been offended, everyone who thinks of me in a lower light.
I understand why they do.
I've come to realize, especially today, that I think of the police as a protection agency, and unfortunately, this has caused me to realize there's so many people in this country that don't have that luxury.
She said that her entire life is being destroyed right now because she's put on administrative leave.
She said, I'm not a racist.
I did not mean to harm that man in any way.
The NYPD first deputy commissioner, Benjamin Tucker, told WPIX 11 Tuesday, the department isn't looking to charge the dog owner.
He said, we're not going to prosecute that.
We have bigger fish to fry.
The DA would not prosecute.
It's not even clear it would be actionable.
It's hard to understand why she did what she did.
The fact she invoked race is disturbing.
She's got a dog.
The science of the dog must be leash.
And in effect, she was the problem.
So again, basically he requested, according to Melody Cooper, that she leash her dog and apparently she went nuts on him and then he started videotaping her to document the exchange.
Again, the part of this that seems racist is that she keeps saying that he's an African-American man and she's going to call in the cops to take care of this African-American man.
Seems to sort of be the implication.
So I think that this woman should be doxxed online.
No, I don't.
I think that we can all see the racism.
I think that she is going to be ostracized from her social circles.
I don't think it's necessary for everybody online to pile on to demonstrate their virtue signaling.
But again, this is an example of a fairly well-documented racist incident, and everybody basically agrees.
Right, because when things aren't well documented, everybody basically agrees.
I'll give you another example.
There's a story from the Associated Press today.
A black man has died in Minneapolis police custody after video shared online from a bystander showed a white officer kneeling on his neck during an arrest as he pleaded that he couldn't breathe.
His death, which occurred Monday night after a struggle with police officers, was under investigation by the FBI and state agents.
Minneapolis Police Chief Medaria Arradondo, speaking to reporters on Tuesday morning, was asked about the use of the knee on the man's neck during the arrest.
Arradondo said we clearly have policies in place regarding placing someone under control.
And he said that this will be an investigation that they do internally.
Apparently, somebody was called to investigate a report of a forgery at a business, which I didn't even realize was a thing.
Like, how do you stop a forgery in progress?
Police found a man believed to be in his 40s matching a suspect's description in his car.
According to the police, he was ordered to step from the car.
After he got out, he physically resisted officers.
Officers were able to get the suspect into handcuffs and noted he appeared to be suffering medical distress.
He was taken by ambulance to the Hennepin County Medical Center.
He died a short time later.
The name of the officer seen kneeling on his neck was not immediately released.
Apparently, he kept saying over and over that he couldn't breathe and people were saying he needed to get off his neck because he can't breathe.
Okay, so this is an incident where it's not clear whether it is racist or just police incompetence.
Whatever it is, they're gonna get to the bottom of it and someone's probably gonna get prosecuted.
Okay, so again, this would be an instance where everyone basically agrees.
Right, so, the common sense view of this is that America is, overall, not a racist place.
That when people are racist, and there's video of it, people go nuts on Twitter, on social media, it becomes a national story.
That when an incident happens in Minneapolis, there's a full investigation, and there should be.
That when there's a cover-up, people are gonna lose their jobs in the Ahmaud Arbery case over in Georgia.
I promise you, that DA's, the original DA is gonna be, maybe, I mean, if there was corruption hauled up on charges, and people are being tried for murder, So what does that say about the state of America?
Well, it says that Joe Biden is wrong, right?
Because black Americans are not under existential threat from Republicans.
The argument that Joe Biden was innately making, which is that black Americans have to vote for him because they are under existential threat from Republicans, that's not true.
But that's not stopping the media from pushing A continued narrative that is absolutely free of common sense.
And that's particularly true when it comes to COVID-19.
And that's the next move in COVID-19.
I've been predicting for literally months that this is the direction the media were going to move, that eventually they would try to racialize COVID-19, even though it's hitting everybody, particularly older people.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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So as I say, the media have tried to take the underlying Joe Biden narrative, which is that if you are Republican, you are threatening the lives of black people and then extend that into COVID-19 because Donald Trump is president.
If Barack Obama were president, Let me just explain.
If Barack Obama were president, there would still be a disproportionate number of black and Hispanic Americans dying.
Some of that would be for obvious medical reasons, namely that obesity is a massive issue.
It is particularly large.
It's huge among whites.
It's even bigger among minorities in America.
And obesity is a massive confound when it comes to COVID-19.
Also, there's an article from Fiona Mitchell over in The Lancet, which is, again, kind of the medical journal of record, Talking about how vitamin D supplementation is a key here, that people who do not get enough vitamin D have been experiencing serious symptoms of coronavirus.
Not only does that mean that if you're older and you don't get enough vitamin D, that it could have a real problem for you.
According to The Lancet, quote, data from the UK office for national statistics shows that black people in England and Wales are more than four times more likely to die from COVID-19 than are white people.
Is that because of American racism?
So what we keep hearing from the media, as we'll see, is that black Americans are dying at a higher rate than white Americans because black Americans were victims of racism and continue to be victims of racism.
There's an entire article in the New York Times today blaming slavery for differential rates of death from COVID-19.
Um, then what about Britain?
Why exactly are black people in England and Wales four times more likely to die from COVID-19?
Well, the Lancet suggests black and minority ethnic people who are more likely to have vitamin D deficiency because they have darker skin seem to be worse affected than white people by COVID-19.
So in other words, medical reasons would likely explain the differential.
This, by the way, is also true of maternal mortality.
Not with regard to vitamin D, but with regard to obesity rates and premature birth.
Maternal mortality rates are very, very different between black and white in America.
They're also vastly different in Europe.
Nobody ever seems to go across the water and notice the racial disparity, which would seemingly remove American racism as the unique cause of these sorts of disparities.
That doesn't stop the New York Times from running a piece today called, It's Not Obesity, It's Slavery.
We know why COVID-19 is killing so many black people.
So you're going to have to explain why slavery, which technically entered the United States in 1865, is going to have to do with the differential rate.
I mean, 1865, last I checked, was 160 years ago.
You're going to have to explain to me why that has to do with differential rates.
And Sabrina Strings doesn't really bother.
She just sort of says that it's not about obesity.
She says, Okay, you can make this argument in like 1880.
You can even make this argument during Jim Crow.
You can make this argument in 1970, probably.
You can't make this argument in 2020.
Okay, you can make this argument in like 1880.
You can even make this argument during Jim Crow.
You can make this argument in 1970, probably.
You can't make this argument in 2020.
It is now 55 years since the Civil Rights Act.
At some point, you're going to have to say, maybe people should just eat healthier.
Maybe personal habits have something to do with differentials.
Because let's be real about this.
If you are a healthy young black person, you're dying of this at the same rate as a healthy young white person.
If you're an unhealthy white person, you're also dying of higher rates.
In other words, looking at the racial confounders as though that is the key indicator is not right.
Looking at the medical confounds is the key indicator would be right.
But this plays into the Joe Biden narrative, which is that if he were president, black people would not be dying at a higher rate, which of course is silly.
And Barack Obama would make the same argument.
And then if we're pointed out that, by the way, people are going to die at the same rates regardless because the situation on the ground is the situation on the ground, then you just blame historic racism, which of course is connected with the evils of today's Donald Trump.
You play this intellectually dishonest game where you say slavery equals Donald Trump.
Therefore, slavery led to this.
Therefore, Donald Trump is leading to it right now.
This is why this New York Times piece argues, Despite the lack of clarity surrounding findings, one interpretation of the disparities is the idea that black people are unduly obese, which is seen as a driver of other chronic illnesses and is believed to put black people at high risk for serious complications from COVID-19.
These claims have received intense media attention.
According to CDC, 42.2% of white Americans and 49.6% of African Americans are obese.
Researchers have yet to clarify how a 7 percentage point disparity in obesity prevalence translates to a 240% to 700% disparity in fatalities.
Experts have raised questions about the rush to implicate obesity, and especially severe obesity.
Well, what about the other issues?
The vitamin D issues?
What about the fact that diabetes tends to run higher in the black community?
What about eating habits?
Not everybody who is obese has exactly the same sort of medical issues.
In other words, trying to blame this on slavery is a bit of a stretch.
And then, of course, this person in the New York Times blames the 1619 Project.
So this is the goal here.
The goal is that in order to target Republicans as the root of all evil, you're going to suggest that slavery is the root of all evil and that every outlier, every bad situation in America, every racist situation in America is an indicator of deep American evil, not a situation in which you can look and you can actually see in real time as good-hearted Americans on all sides of the aisle condemn the racism.
It's easier to move into the idea that America is deeply racist because people are dying at differential rates of COVID-19.
We're going to get to more of this in just one second because this would provide Donald Trump with an opportunity to be a unifying figure considering the Democrats right now, including Joe Biden, are trying to divide Americans along racial lines in a time when we have a pandemic that is hitting everybody and when everybody is scared and we've had the greatest lockdown in American history.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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OK, so Democrats have been forced to focus on the race narrative again because Democrats are worried that the economy is going to recover.
That's not me making some sort of speculative argument.
That's an article in Politico.
It is called the general election scenario that Democrats are dreading.
Written by Ryan Lizza and Daniel Lipman, neither one of them a right winger.
In early April, Jason Furman, a top economist in the Obama administration, now a professor at Harvard, was speaking via Zoom to a large bipartisan group of top officials from both parties.
The economy had just been shut down, unemployment was spiking, and some policymakers were predicting an era worse than the Great Depression.
The economic carnage seemed likely to doom President Donald Trump's chances at re-election.
Furman, tapped to give the opening presentation, looked into his screen of poorly lit boxes of frightened wonks and made a startling claim.
We're about to see the best economic data we've seen in the history of this country.
The former Cabinet Secretaries and Federal Reserve Chairs in the Zoom boxes were confused.
Furman said everyone looked puzzled, as though I'd misspoken.
He then laid out a detailed case for why the months preceding the November election could offer Trump the chance to brag truthfully about the most explosive monthly employment numbers and GDP growth ever.
This makes perfect sense.
If you artificially shut down the economy, and then the economy springs back to life, you're going to see massive numbers, right?
If the economy dumps 40%, and then month on month you see a 10% increase, those are going to look like massively explosive numbers.
A former White House Obama official says, quote, this is my big worry.
Asked about the level of concern, Montauk Party officials said it's high, high, high.
Okay, first of all, you shouldn't be concerned about the recovery of the economy.
You should be celebratory about the recovery of the economy.
The fact that Democrats are concerned that there may be a V-shaped recovery.
is pretty unfortunate.
It is not only unfortunate, it also means that people are suspicious that Democrats are going to artificially tamp down the economy in order to ensure that Donald Trump isn't reelected.
I mean, it's hard not to draw that conclusion when you're saying you're deeply worried that the economy may recover.
In a V-shaped recovery, the economy would recover much faster than during the Great Recession.
Furman said the Trump argument will be he's producing the fastest job growth and fastest economic growth in history.
If he has any ability to do nonce, he will say, we're not there yet.
Re-elect me to finish the job.
The Biden argument will be the unemployment rate is still 12%.
Even with those millions of jobs, we are still down 15 million jobs and we need new economic policies.
If you see it as a massive recovery that is damaging to Democrats.
So this is why a lot of Democrats are moving into the sort of territory of race first, of race first.
Okay, well, but that leads to, that gives President Trump a pretty good opening here, right?
All President Trump has to do to win re-election.
And there are some polls out, by the way, from CNBC showing that President Trump is still doing fairly well in the swing states.
In a hypothetical matchup among all the battleground voters surveyed, he has a 48-46 lead over Joe Biden, this is according to CNBC on May 20th.
41-32 edge among independents.
Democrats and Republicans in Arizona, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin basically have Trump running a little bit ahead.
So that is a narrow lead, and he's leading among independents, and he is leading Biden 51 to 40 in terms of who would do a better job handling the economy.
That seems like a pretty solid base to run on.
When you add on top of that the widespread American perception, the widespread American agreement that we are not at root a racist country, that America is actually filled with good-hearted people who are willing to call out racism, and the Democrats' racial narrative starts to fall flat too.
So yesterday was Memorial Day and President Trump spoke on Memorial Day and he talked about the National Anthem and the National Anthem uniting us.
Now, if President Trump were a unifying figure, this would be a great pitch.
It would.
Because the fact is that most Americans still believe in the National Anthem and the American flag.
And the fact that so many Democrats have gone out of their way to express sympathy for people who kneel for the National Anthem is a big electoral loser for them and is not a winner for them.
Here's President Trump talking about this yesterday.
Every time we sing our anthem, every time its rousing chorus swells our hearts with pride, we renew the eternal bonds of loyalty to our fallen heroes.
We think of the soldiers who spend their final heroic moments on distant battlefields to keep us safe at home.
We remember the young Americans who never got the chance to grow old, but whose legacy will outlive us all.
OK, so all of that is good stuff.
And then President Trump yesterday, of course, when he laid a wreath at Arlington, the media totally miscovered this because Trump then went golfing a little bit later in the day.
And so they showed pictures of Joe Biden at Memorial Day at a local veterans memorial, and then they juxtaposed that with Trump golfing.
But Trump did go to lay a wreath at Arlington.
National Cemetery.
People were giving him flack because he wasn't wearing a mask.
He was outdoors.
He was six feet from everybody else.
That was not really the issue.
We'll get to the masking issue in just a second, which has become shockingly partisan.
But the president did go to Arlington yesterday.
OK, so all of this would be a good opportunity for Trump, right?
Just politically speaking.
All of this is a good opportunity for Trump.
Joe Biden is trying to claim that Republicans are an existential threat to black Americans.
That they literally, I mean, that is the underlying message that he is providing, echoed by Nikole Hannah-Jones, echoed by Jemele Hill, right?
That is the message.
And on top of that, they are deeply worried about the economy.
So all Trump has to do is say, listen, we brought you the best economy in American history up until coronavirus.
When we come out of this, there will be a spike in the economy.
It's going to be great.
What you don't need is fundamental remaking of American society, right?
That's his reelection pitch.
Instead, the president has Twitter.
And I gotta say, it's just, it's imbecility of the highest order on a political and moral level to do with his Twitter what he does.
It is stupid.
It is stupid.
I understand a lot of people like the Twitter.
I don't, frankly, care.
I don't care.
Because the people who love his Twitter are not the people who are not gonna go to the polls anyway.
You're not the people he needs to win.
You're gonna vote for him anyway.
You know what's not useful?
In a time when you are running against a deeply divisive opponent like Joe Biden.
And he is!
He's deeply divisive.
He's trying to run as a unifier.
He is not.
Barack Obama was a deeply disunifying president.
In a time when Democrats are openly worried about an economic recovery, for Donald Trump to get on Twitter and then fulminate over Joe Scarborough and suggest that Joe Scarborough is a full-on murderer, Question, how in the world is that useful?
How?
And not only useful, how is it moral?
How is it decent?
What's the pitch?
Make me the pitch.
Give me the elevator pitch for Donald Trump needs to tweet about Joe Scarborough murdering an intern.
Like, seriously, what is the actual argument here?
So between that, he had a hell of a Twitter weekend.
You're the president of the United States in the middle of one of the worst situations in American history.
Grow the F up.
Grow up.
Do better.
And I understand there are people out there saying, well, he's never going to do better.
This is what he is.
Got it.
That does not relieve you or me of the obligation to call out immorality when I see it.
Not only immorality, political malpractice.
On the highest level.
Because if you believe in a lot of the Donald Trump agenda, in terms of stuff he's doing policy-wise, you need to root for him to stop this bullcrap.
It's insanity.
And we can get to more of this in just one second.
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Okay, so we're gonna get to President Trump's busy and insane Twitter weekend, a complete, not only waste of time, completely counterproductive.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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All righty.
So President Trump had himself a hell of a Twitter weekend, as I say.
This would be a time for unifying.
He's got Joe Biden living in a basement, not able to string together a sentence, and claiming that black people are under existential threat because of the same Joe Biden who suggested that Mitt Romney was going to re-enslave black people in 2012.
So this is nothing new for Joe Biden.
And so what does Trump decide to do?
Well, he decides to retweet a bunch of stuff.
So what did he retweet?
Well, he retweeted a guy named John Stahl, who I've never heard of, saying, So, number one, I doubt that Trump even read the entire tweet.
Right?
Because that's what he does.
I'm thinking they must have called the same 1,000 people from 2016 that said that HRC, the bleep, was up 68%.
So number one, I doubt that Trump even read the entire tweet, right?
Because that's what he does.
He'll tweet like the first half of the tweet.
HRC, the word is skank there, by the way.
So he retweets that, which is always a great look.
Then, he retweets John Stahl again.
I don't know why he was on this guy's account.
We just got a look at the official portrait for the self-proclaimed governor of Georgia.
She fought a tough race, kissed a lot of babies, visited every buffet restaurant in the state.
Joe will be a racist if he doesn't pick her.
So you got the president now calling Stacey Abrams fat, which is always an excellent, excellent look.
Then he decided, you know, it's a good idea.
I'm going to spend the entire weekend implying that Joe Scarborough murdered an intern.
So for people who didn't know this story, back when Joe Scarborough was in Congress, there was an intern in his office and she died in one of his congressional offices.
She died because she had an undiagnosed heart condition.
She had apparently some sort of heart attack and she banged her head on a desk and she died.
It's a really tragic story.
This led Donald Trump to tweet out, And then he links to truepundit.com.
And then he continues along these lines, A blow to her head.
Body found under his desk.
Left Congress suddenly.
Big topic of discussion in Florida.
And, he's a nutjob with bad ratings.
Keep digging.
Use forensic, geniuses.
Okay, that wasn't it.
This morning, he was back at it.
Was the President of the United States.
And just like he said, the opening of a cold case against psycho Joe Scarborough was not a Donald Trump original thought.
This has been going on for years, long before I joined the chorus.
In 2016, when Joe and his wacky future ex-wife Mika would endlessly interview me, I would always be thinking about whether or not Joe could have done such a horrible thing.
Maybe or maybe not, but I find Joe to be a total nutjob, and I knew him well, far better than most.
So many unanswered and obvious questions, but I won't bring them up now.
Law enforcement eventually will.
Question.
So here's the thing.
When Doc Brown fell off his toilet and hit his head on the sink, he invented the flux capacitor.
When Donald Trump fell off his toilet and hit his head on the sink, he just tweets.
Apparently.
What in the absolute F is this?
What is this?
What is this?
Seriously?
This led to the wonderful spectacle of the husband of the woman writing a letter to Jack Dorsey of Twitter saying, Mr. Dorsey, nearly 19 years ago, my wife, who had an undiagnosed heart condition, fell and hit her head on her desk at work.
She was found dead the next morning.
Her name is Lori K. Klausitis, and she was 28 years old when she died.
Her passing is the single most painful thing I've ever had to deal with in my 52 years and continues to haunt her parents and sister.
I have mourned my wife every day since her passing.
I have tried to honor her memory and our marriage.
As her husband, I feel one of my marital obligations is to protect her memory as I would have protected her in life.
There has been a constant barrage of falsehoods, half-truths, innuendo, and conspiracy theories since the day she died.
I realize this may sound like an exaggeration.
Unfortunately, it is the verifiable truth.
Because of this, I have struggled to move forward with my life.
The frequency, intensity, ugliness, and promulgation of these horrifying lies ever increases on the internet.
These conspiracy theorists, including most recently the President of the United States, continue to spread their violent misinformation on your platform, disparaging the memory of our wife and our marriage.
And then he asks Jack Dorsey to delete Trump's tweets.
Like, question.
How in the world is this useful?
How in the world is this useful?
Like, put aside the immorality of it.
It's obviously immoral to accuse people of murder without evidence.
It turns out to be a very, very immoral thing to do.
It also turns out that when you're accusing a woman who is married of having an affair with another man without any evidence, that's also a very ugly and terrible thing to do.
But put aside that, if you're a Republican and you're thinking you want Trump re-elected, This is political malpractice.
Speaking of political malpractice, President Trump decided to go after Jeff Sessions, his former Attorney General.
Now, let's just understand something.
Senator Sessions, okay, or Attorney General Sessions, he'd been a senator in Alabama.
When he first ran in Alabama, he ran a competitive race.
By the time he ran for re-election, for like the third time, Jeff Sessions had no opponents.
He was winning over two-thirds of the vote.
Now, Jeff Sessions was not available to run in the last senatorial election.
Instead, Alabama Republicans decided Roy Moore would be their candidate, a guy who allegedly was trolling the food courts for 14-year-olds when he was in his 30s.
And then he lost to Doug Jones, specifically because people don't like electing people who troll the food courts for 14-year-olds when they are 30 years old.
So Doug Jones, a Democrat, ended up representing Alabama.
That Alabama Senate seat is a debacle.
There's no way it should be blue.
All Trump has to do is just let Jeff Sessions go back to the Senate.
Now, there's another candidate in there named Tommy Tuberville, a former Auburn football coach.
Maybe he'll win.
Maybe he'll do great.
I don't know Tommy Tuberville very well.
I do know one thing.
Jeff Sessions has won that race like 11 times.
Jeff Sessions is a guaranteed shoe-in victory in Alabama.
That seat goes back to red.
And by the way, Jeff Sessions votes 100% of the time.
100% of the time with Donald Trump.
Jeff Sessions was the first major American political figure to endorse Donald Trump.
The first.
Not one of the first.
The first.
When no one was taking Trump seriously, Sessions did, on the basis of immigration policy alone.
I know that because I remember when he did it.
And I know Jeff Sessions.
And I know Stephen Miller.
And I know all the people who were involved.
So I remember when Sessions did that.
It was a big shock.
Because a lot of people thought Sessions might have endorsed Cruz.
So then he becomes Attorney General.
And by law, he has to recuse himself.
Well, Trump is very angry that Sessions ever accused himself.
He suggests that Jeff Sessions should have resigned.
Jeff Sessions offered to resign and Trump turned it down.
Jeff Sessions also didn't know that the Obama apparatus was still investigating the Trump administration when he took office.
Okay, so this has led Trump to tweet out Jeff Sessions over and over about how Jeff Sessions is bad.
This is so counterproductive and idiotic.
Again, I cannot believe how stupid this is.
Because he's not throwing over Jeff Sessions because Jeff Sessions isn't going to win the seat or vote with him.
He's throwing over Jeff Sessions because he can't put aside the petty personal slights.
Like, again, political malpractice.
You lose, right now, the Republicans are in serious danger of losing the Senate.
There's a very, very good shot that when January 2021 comes around, Joe Biden is sitting in the Oval Office, and he has a Democrat majority in the Senate, a Democrat majority willing to get rid of the filibuster, and he has a Democrat majority in the House.
And then how's all this gonna look?
Is all this gonna be just fun and games on Twitter?
How about when, how about if it turns out that Tommy Tuberville Who has not been supremely vetted.
Turns out to be vetted by the media in that Alabama race.
And Doug Jones wins a squeaker or something.
Okay, so Donald Trump decides he's gonna tweet out.
He says, Jeff, you had your chance and you blew it.
Recused yourself on day one.
You never told me of a problem and ran for the hills.
You had no courage and ruined many lives.
The dirty cops and others got caught by better and stronger people than you.
Hopefully this slime will pay a big You should drop out of the race and pray that super liberal Doug Jones and weakened pathetic puppet for crazy Nancy Pelosi and crying Chuck Schumer gets beaten badly.
He voted for impeachment based on zero.
Disgraced Alabama.
Coach Tommy Tuberville will be a great senator.
And then Trump went on national TV and trashed sessions again.
I mean, this is just, like, in terms of personal loyalty, forget about, like, the personal qualities it takes to be this disloyal to a human being who put his career on the line and became your Attorney General.
By the way, he was a good Attorney General, Jeff Sessions.
He was actually good at his job.
And he did the right thing in recusing himself.
He legally had to.
He did not have any other options.
Trump slammed Sessions again on national TV with Sheryl Atkinson.
Like, this is just...
Does he understand that he's President of the United States and he has a responsibility to his own voters not to do dumbass stuff?
Here's Trump.
Jeff Sessions was a disaster as Attorney General.
Should have never been Attorney General.
He's not qualified.
He's not mentally qualified to be Attorney General.
He was the biggest problem.
I mean, look, Jeff Sessions put people in place who were a disaster.
They took over.
They've always had the Department of Justice, but they kept it under Jeff Sessions.
And the whole thing, the Russian thing, is a total hoax.
Think of it.
They spent 40, 45 million dollars investigating him.
It took two and a half years.
They found nothing.
No collusion.
And then Ann Coulter, of course, came forth and she blasted Trump.
She's been long allied with Jeff Sessions on immigration.
She's almost solely immigration focused.
And she, of course, was one of the chief Trump backers in the early going.
She wrote an entire book called In Trump We Trust, which always goes to show you never substitute human for God in any sort of sentence.
It never goes well.
But she tweeted out the most disloyal actual bleep that has ever set foot in the Oval Office is trying to lose and take the Senate with him.
Another Roy Moore fiasco so he can blame someone else for his own mess.
So this is all just genius stuff.
It's genius stuff.
Again, the president has an opportunity here.
He had an opportunity here.
And he's blowing his opportunity.
Even the way that he tweets about COVID.
Listen, the president tweeted about COVID.
And again, I'm not trying to be unduly harsh with Trump.
I intend on voting for the man.
I want him to retain the presidency.
I don't want to see Joe Biden come in and push Medicare for all.
I don't want to see Joe Biden come in and continue to play the race card along the lines of the 1619 Project and allow all of Bernie Sanders' old staffers to take positions in the White House.
That's not what I'm looking for here.
So Donald Trump tweeted out over the weekend, great reviews on our handling of COVID-19, sometimes referred to as the China virus.
Ventilators testing, medical supply distribution.
We made a lot of governors look good and got no credit for doing.
Most importantly, we helped a lot of great people.
You might want to start with the, we helped a lot of great people, as opposed to great reviews.
This isn't a Broadway show, dude.
Also, like speaking of political malpractice, I've been saying for weeks, how is it that Trump and the White House team have not cut Basically an ad showing every Democratic governor saying they got what they needed from the White House.
How has that not been done yet?
How is that even possible?
So here's the reason why this is so frustrating.
Because as the country reopens, and as we move closer to something that looks like a recovery, we cannot be distracted with this kind of absolutely idiotic, insane, ridiculous, useless, I mean, I run out of thesaurus words here.
We cannot.
Because guess what?
There's actual good news.
There's actual good news happening right now.
And we're missing it.
Because we have to cover all this stupidity.
So, for example, piece of good news.
Scott Fauci points out COVID-19 testing in the United States continues to expand.
Positivity rate continues to decline.
So for all of the talk about how there are gonna be these massive spikes and we're gonna overwhelm the healthcare system again, not a lot of evidence of that.
Even Anthony Fauci, who was capped in lockdown five seconds ago, Anthony Fauci from the NIH, right, he says, we can't stay locked down forever.
In fact, it could be damaging if we stay locked down forever.
Welcome to the club, Dr. Fauci.
Depending upon the dynamics of the infection in the particular state, city, region, county that you're in, we certainly want to, in a cautious way, reopening.
We can't stay locked down for such a considerable period of time that you might do irreparable damage and have unintended consequences, including consequences for health.
So this, of course, is exactly right.
By the way, you know, there's evidence from The New York Times.
That people are not going to the emergency room when they need to go to the emergency room.
I know personally people who are not going to the emergency room when they need to go to the emergency room.
There are people who are not going in for transplants because they're afraid that they're going to get COVID and they're going to die if they go into the ER.
By the way, this is not right.
Hospitals are now encouraging you, if you need to go into the hospital, go into the hospital.
They have very good protective measures for the areas that have COVID.
They basically have COVID rooms and they have COVID areas of the hospital.
You're not going to be infected if you go into The general areas that are not COVID designated.
And as we now know, the fact is that the costs of the shutdown are extraordinarily large.
Scott Atlas has a good piece from Hoover Institute, along with John Burge, Ralph Keeney, and Alexander Lipton.
Over at the Hill, talking about the shutdowns.
John Burge, Professor at University of Chicago Booth School of Business.
Ralph Keeney, Professor Emeritus in Business at Duke University in Engineering.
Lipton is visiting Professor and Dean's Fellow at the Jerusalem Business School, talking about the economy coming back and how we need to reopen.
In other words, Trump has a re-election strategy here, and it's a very obvious and open re-election strategy.
And the fact that he continues to fulminate on Twitter about Joe Scarborough is just beyond reason.
It's beyond reason.
Okay, time for some things that I hate.
So the media malpractice when it comes to COVID-19 continues apace.
Just because we're seeing increasing numbers of cases nationally does not mean that we are seeing an increased percentage of positives.
So as I mentioned before, Scott Gottlieb, former FDA commissioner, he tweeted out this morning that the national positivity rate on COVID-19 tests continues to decline, which is very, very good news.
We are not seeing a spike in terms of ICU care.
We're not seeing a spike in terms of deaths.
Maybe that'll trail a couple weeks from now.
But most importantly, we're not seeing our emergency rooms overwhelmed.
And we cannot continue this way.
There's a piece in The Hill by Scott Atlas and company talking about the costs of continued shutdown.
He says our governmental COVID-19 mitigation policy of broad societal lockdown focused on containing the spread of the disease at all costs instead of flattening the curve and preventing hospital overcrowding.
Although well-intentioned, the lockdown was imposed without consideration of its consequences beyond those directly from the pandemic.
The policies have created the greatest global economic disruption in history with trillions of dollars of lost economic output.
These financial losses have been falsely portrayed as purely economic.
To the contrary, using numerous National Institute of Health Public Access publications, CDC, and Bureau of Labor Statistics data, we calculate these policies will cause devastating non-economic consequences that will total millions of accumulated years of life lost in the United States, far beyond what the virus itself has caused.
Pandemics have afflicted mankind throughout human history.
So far, the current pandemic has produced almost 100,000 U.S.
deaths, but the reaction of a near-complete economic shutdown is unprecedented.
The lost economic output in the U.S.
alone is estimated to be 5% of GDP, or $1.1 trillion for every single month of the economic shutdown.
This lost income results in lost lives.
These incidents are particularly severe on the lower-income population.
They're more likely to lose their jobs.
Mortality rates are much higher for lower-income individuals.
Statistically, every $10 million to $24 million lost in U.S.
incomes results in one additional death.
One portion of this effect is through unemployment, which leads to an average increase in mortality of at least 60%.
That translates into 7,200 lives lost per month among the 36 million newly unemployed Americans, over 40% of whom are not expected to regain their jobs.
In addition, many small business owners are near financial collapse.
With an average estimate of one additional life lost per $17 million lost in income, that would translate to 65,000 lives lost in the U.S.
for each month because of the economic shutdown.
Lives are also lost due to delayed or foregone healthcare imposed by the shutdown and the fear it creates among patients.
He says emergency stroke evaluations are down 40%.
Of the 650,000 cancer patients receiving chemo, an estimated half are missing their treatments.
These unintended consequences of missed healthcare amount to more than 500,000 lost years of life per month, not including all the other known skipped care.
The reason that he is using lost years of life is because that is a better and more specific metric than just lives lost.
Because if you have a lot of people who are dying in a nursing home and their life expectancy was another 4 or 5 months and they die 5 months early, that is a different thing in terms of calculating public policy than a 30-year-old dying 50 years early.
Or a 40-year-old dying 40 years early.
That does not mean that every life lost isn't a moral tragedy, but when you're making actuarial decisions, as I've said before, you have to take into account the differences between losing 5 months of life and losing 40 years of life, obviously.
Okay, so the media continued to get this wrong.
Chris Wallace went after Dr. Deborah Birx the other day.
He asked if they opened it too soon, if there was too much opening too soon.
No, there was not too much opening too soon.
The evidence was that there was not going to be an overwhelming of the healthcare system.
Again, people are just ignoring what the original purpose of the lockdowns was because the goalposts have moved.
Here is Chris Wallace.
A month ago, you were saying we were going to come down below the low end of the model, which is 100,000 to 240,000 to 60,000.
So I guess my question is, in this last month, did you underestimate the strength of the virus?
Did we reopen too soon?
Did we reopen without sufficient restrictions?
What I was saying in that briefing that you were talking about is what that current model was showing.
And that's exactly right.
Why is it that she's being asked about being a little too optimistic, but we never hear about the Niall Ferguson model over in Britain that was off by like orders of magnitude.
That's really what we should be hearing about.
By the way, it is not too early to open.
Burke says that they are preparing for a second wave in the fall.
You knew this was coming.
This was, of course, always going to come.
It's one of the reasons why lockdown was never going to continue to be a strategy.
It's just not going to be a strategy that is worth doing.
We are preparing for that potential fall issue, both in PPE, which is protective devices, both in ventilators, stockpiles, and ensuring that we're really pushing on therapeutics and vaccine development so we can be ready if the virus does come back in a significant way.
Okay, and that is the plan.
By the way, the economy is starting to come back.
I mean, this is good news.
According to the Wall Street Journal, for economy, worst of coronavirus shutdowns may be over.
Recovering air travel, hotel bookings, and mortgage applications are among the early signs the U.S.
economy is slowly creeping back to life.
You can see this, by the way, just by looking at the traffic in Los Angeles, which is up radically.
You can see it over Memorial Day weekend.
People were going out to beaches.
People were, in general, being responsible.
People were wearing masks.
People were socially distancing.
It is amazing how the mask wearing has become such a flashpoint for politics at this point.
Again, my feeling is that we should all be responsible, that we should try and continue to slow the spread, that it is not too much to ask people to wear masks, particularly if they are dealing with the vulnerable.
There are a lot of churches that are reopening, and that's a good thing.
When President Trump said last week that governors should reopen churches, he was right.
He was the president on Friday making the announcement that he wanted governors to reopen churches.
Some governors have deemed liquor stores and abortion clinics as essential, but have left out churches and other houses of worship.
It's not right.
So I'm correcting this injustice and calling houses of worship essential.
I call upon governors to allow our churches and places of worship to open right now for this weekend.
If they don't do it, I will override the governors.
In America, we need more prayer, not less.
He doesn't have the power to do that.
Theoretically, he could have some lawsuits filed by the DOJ, and the Attorney General could theoretically file some freedom of religion lawsuits, but realistically speaking, governors do have plenary control over stuff like this.
With that said, churches were starting to reopen, synagogues are starting to reopen, now the question is just be responsible.
And again, the folks who are Very, very upset about mask wearing.
There's two things that are happening.
One is, there's a group of people who are like, I'm not wearing masks under any circumstances because it's a pansy move.
And I'm not going to wear a mask because if I wear a mask, that just shows that I'm not brave and people need to get back out there and be brave.
No, the mask isn't to protect you.
The mask is to protect other people around you.
It's not brave to expose other people around you to possibility of coronavirus and you won't know if you have it because 80% of people who have this thing are asymptomatic.
So if you're in an old age home, you'd wear it.
Now, if you're with a bunch of other young people at a pool party or something, I'm not sure that it's honestly, I'm not sure it's the biggest deal.
Like there was a tape that was going around.
From the Ozarks of people not socially distancing and not wearing masks and they're all in a pool.
Okay, they're all 18.
They're all 20.
They're outdoors.
They're also in a pool filled with chlorine.
Chlorine apparently does kill the virus.
So is this a great idea?
No, it's an idiotic idea.
But at the same time, is this like where I'm most worried about an outbreak of coronavirus?
Not unless all those people go home and infect grandma, right?
That would be the irresponsible activity.
If they decide to engage this way and risk themselves, that is one thing.
If they decide to go somewhere else and risk grandma, that is a completely different thing.
So everybody is so reactionary now.
So the left basically was suggesting that mask wearing is a sign of pure, unbridled virtue.
President Trump, for some reason, took up that challenge.
Instead of saying, let's be responsible, let's wear masks where we need to wear masks, let's not wear masks where we don't.
Instead, he was like, I'm never wearing masks.
And so that means that for Democrats, they're now going to wear masks as like a fashion symbol.
So now we get Democrats basically saying you should wear a mask everywhere.
That's why if you drive around LA, you'll see people wearing masks in their cars by themselves, which makes no sense at all.
Or people who are walking around at the park, a hundred feet from other people, wearing masks.
Let's just do virtue signaling at this point.
That is not a useful thing.
Mike DeWine, the governor of Ohio, he gets this right.
He says, I don't really understand why there's controversy over this.
Wearing a mask is about courtesy if you're within a certain distance of other human beings.
What we do directly impacts others.
And we're not saying if you're in a car and you're driving by yourself, you don't have to wear a mask.
You don't have to wear a mask if you're out, you know, away from people, hiking, or doing all kinds of different things, or in your own house.
But when you go out and interact directly with people, We're asking Ohioans to do this.
And so it's not about politics.
It's not about conservative or liberal.
It's about helping other people.
Okay, that is basically correct.
But this has led to Democrats being like, well, you're stupid if you don't wear a mask.
If you don't wear a mask everywhere you go, it's because you're dumb.
So Andrew Cuomo, who couldn't even protect the old age homes, Andrew Cuomo over the weekend, he was like, yeah, you're dumb if you don't wear a mask.
Why you wouldn't use it There's no legitimate, rational explanation.
Well, I don't like the way it looks.
You know what?
Paint something on the mask, right?
Get a new color.
It's not smart.
It's not smart.
My colleague, Melissa DeRosa, said yesterday, it was stupid.
That's another way of saying, not smart.
Sort of the hyper New York way of saying that.
Takes less words.
Okay, so this turned into over the weekend, Donald Trump goes to Arlington, he's not wearing a mask.
He doesn't need to wear a mask.
He's away from other people.
He's outdoors.
He's also the most tested person on earth, I'm sure.
Joe Biden goes to a veterans memorial with his wife, and he's being feeded for wearing a mask.
He literally, look, you can see the tape.
He's nowhere near other human beings.
Nowhere near them.
The reason he's wearing a mask is because he's virtue signaling now.
So this has turned into, if you take COVID seriously, you're wearing a mask.
If you don't take COVID seriously, you're not wearing a mask.
How about this?
Wear a mask when you're supposed to, and you don't need to wear a mask if you're outdoors at a veterans memorial.
You know, again, this has just turned into fashion.
It's a fashion thing now.
Everything in America begins as like a serious policy proposal and eventually turns into a polarized discussion about absolute, utter, stupid nonsense.
Just ridiculous on every level.
Here's the reality.
Want to get back to work?
Want to have that v-shaped recovery?
Wear the mask when you're indoors with other people.
When you're within six feet of other people.
Don't do it when you're outdoors and away from other people.
And then go back to work.
And if you don't want to be with other people and you don't trust other people, then stay home.
There's a reopening policy.
We've done it.
Magic.
Because that's exactly what people are doing on every level.
That's exactly how things are going.
The fact that everything breaks down into prior partisanship is just insane to me.
Utterly, utterly crazy.
Alright, time for a quick thing that I like.
So, my wife and I have sort of run out of new movies because no new movies are being made.
And I happen to have seen nearly every movie ever made at this point.
And so we've been going back and watching some great oldies, or at least that's what we call them where I'm from.
Back to the Future is just, you forget how good a movie this is because it's so popular.
The script to this movie is so good.
And the score to this movie by Alan Silvestri is just phenomenal.
It is a phenomenal score.
The last 15 minutes are one long musical cue, and it is one of the best musical cues in film history.
It's a fantastic cue.
Everything from when Marty gets back to Doc and then the storm starts, From that to the end of the movie is basically one musical cue.
It is a great cue.
It's fantastic.
The script is incredible.
Michael J. Fox is absolutely charming.
The backstory to the movie is kind of fantastic because Michael J. Fox had a conflict when he was doing Family Ties and so he actually couldn't play Marty McFly.
Are you telling me that you built a time machine?
Son of a DeLorean?
movie with another actor.
And then they went back and they spent $3 million and reshot it with Michael J. Fox because they realized that the actor just wasn't working out.
I'm trying to remember his name.
He actually became kind of a famous actor.
But the movie is great.
Here's a little bit of the trailer.
If you've never seen Back to the Future, you're really, really missing out.
It's fantastic.
Are you telling me that you built a time machine instead of a DeLorean?
He's sending Marty 30 years back in time.
It worked!
It's a floating saucer from outer space!
Now, he's trapped in the past.
This has got to be a dream.
About to meet... Chocolate!
His future father.
He's a...
Wow!
And he's making an impression.
Originally, it was Eric Stoltz who was supposed to play this part.
He went on to play, you know, a lot of other parts have a fairly big career, particularly doing kind of character actor-y stuff.
But the movie obviously requires Michael J. Fox, who remains one of the most charming people who was ever on a movie screen.
Really, like, think about the fact that he was a 50, that he was a 5'5 guy.
He was 24 when he played this, I believe.
And just the most charming thing on TV.
I mean, imagine having the biggest hit on TV and the biggest hit in movie theaters at the same time, which is exactly what he did.
Pretty incredible.
All right.
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.
The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Colton Haas.
Directed by Mike Joyner.
Executive producer Jeremy Boring.
Supervising producer Mathis Glover and Robert Sterling.
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Associate producer Katie Swinnerton.
Edited by Adam Siovitz.
Audio is mixed by Mike Koromina.
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