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May 27, 2020 - The Ben Shapiro Show

01:07:10

The Man In The Cloth Mask | Ep. 1019

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Time	Text
	America begins to reopen amid good coronavirus news.
	Joe Biden decides that masking is, in fact, his campaign strategy.
	And President Trump goes at it with Twitter.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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	Okay, so we have a lot of good news on coronavirus.
	And we actually do.
	So, first piece of good news.
	I mean, it doesn't sound like good news, but it is.
	The total of the US virus deaths has been under 700 nationwide for the third straight day.
	To put this in contrast, when we were at our height, we were close to 3,000 a day.
	We were losing close to 3,000 people a day.
	We are now down to under 700.
	And to put that even more into contrast, The number of Americans who die on a normal day is about 7,500 Americans dying on a normal day.
	So, with COVID-19, during the heat of this thing, when it was really just running roughshod through New York, you were increasing the death rate across the country by something like one-third.
	I mean, it was an insane level.
	And you were seeing in New York, specifically, people dying at a rate of like four to five times what they were normally dying of in New York.
	700 people a day dying across the United States.
	It sounds bad, and it is bad, obviously.
	It's a lot of people, but In comparison to the number of people who die daily in the United States generally, it is certainly not on the order of what it was.
	And that's a very, very good thing.
	In fact, the CDC is now releasing new information demonstrating the infection fatality rate.
	And the CDC is saying that the fatality rates for coronavirus, and this is, by the way, for identified cases.
	This does not include the asymptomatic.
	And they say about 35% of all cases are now asymptomatic.
	This is what the CDC is now suggesting, according to PJ Media.
	The CDC is saying, here's the fatality rate for coronavirus.
	So if you are anywhere below the age of 50 years old, your fatality rate for coronavirus, meaning if you actually get it, is 0.05%.
	is .05%, .05, not 5%, not .5%, .05%, okay, which is a very, very low rate, right?
	Actually lower than the flu.
	The flu rate is 0.1% generally for all American populations.
	Not sure what it is for people under 50.
	Presumably it'd be a lot lower than that, but this is not an extraordinarily dangerous virus if you are under the age of 50, particularly if you don't have a significant underlying condition like diabetes or severe obesity.
	If you are 50 to 64 years old, it is a 0.2% fatality rate.
	If you're 65 plus years old, it is 1.3% fatality rate.
	And again, that includes everybody who's above the age of 80, where the fatality rate is greatly increased.
	Overall, they are saying now that the case fatality rate is 0.4% or about four times as deadly as the flu, which again is a far cry from what was originally planned.
	I've been saying this for months, by the way, right?
	I have been saying for a long time.
	that I thought the actual case fatality rate on this thing was somewhere between 0.2% and 0.6%.
	Turns out it's dead in the middle, 0.4%, according to the CDC.
	According to the CDC's current best estimate, the case fatality rate of coronavirus is 0.4%.
	That's just among the symptomatic cases.
	The CDC estimates that that's 65% of all cases, which means that if actually the case fatality rate were to include all of the asymptomatic infections, even according to the CDC, it would be approximately 0.26%.
	0.26%, which is really, you know, that is optimistic, right?
	I mean, that is a good number.
	When I say it's good, obviously it's bad.
	I mean, all these numbers are bad, but it is certainly not nearly as deadly as we were originally told.
	We were told that it was 10 times, like 10X, maybe 15X, that rate.
	It is not, in fact.
	It's closer to, again, 0.4, maybe 0.25.
	And by the way, if there are more asymptomatic cases than 35% of all cases, then you're talking about lower than that for most groups.
	So all of this is very good news.
	And this is why you are starting to see This move by various areas, including New York and L.A., toward reopening.
	Important thing to mention when it comes to viruses like this.
	There have been some theories out there, one from a Hebrew University scientist who suggested that viruses tend to burn themselves out.
	This tends to be true, that the most virulent strain of a virus burn their way through a population, and then you get sort of weaker strains of the virus that continue to linger on in the population for a long period of time.
	Theoretically, that could be happening here.
	We don't know yet.
	But bottom line is that everybody now recognizes that We cannot remain in lockdown like this, not on the basis of these statistics.
	This is why in Los Angeles County, which has been one of the most locked down places in America, Supervisor Catherine Barger announced that L.A.
	County has now achieved readiness criteria and will apply for a variance with the state of California tomorrow.
	If granted, the variance from the state public health order will allow L.A.
	County to advance further in Stage 2 and into Stage 3 of the state's roadmap to recovery.
	What that means is that the county is moving toward additional steps, meaning the immediate reopening of in-person shopping and houses of worship.
	That doesn't mean there won't be social distancing and mask wearing.
	There will.
	But this would mean that they can move beyond simply takeout orders.
	You can go to a restaurant again.
	You just have to social distance from places, presumably, is going to be the next step.
	So all of this is optimistic, and that's good.
	Why should we be downplaying good news?
	This is good news.
	Even Governor Cuomo in New York is saying that New York City could be reopened by mid-June.
	Which again is a good piece of news.
	This is according to the Wall Street Journal.
	He says that New York City could begin a phased reopening in the first or second week of June.
	This is according to Bill de Blasio.
	De Blasio said at a press conference the city will have about 180 testing sites open by the end of June with the expectation to run about 50,000 coronavirus tests daily by August 1st.
	A June 1st goal to hire 1,000 contact tracers has already been met and exceeded.
	Some 700 of those workers are based in the city's hardest hit communities and speak some 40 different languages.
	de Blasio says hundreds of thousands of people will need to use mass transit in the initial phase of the reopening, which allows construction, manufacturing and retail for curbside pickup.
	Officials are trying to determine how exactly they can operate the subways and the buses without overcrowding.
	But the bottom line is that even New York City is now moving toward reopening.
	And it's happening in New Jersey as well.
	According to reporter Carl Quintanilla at CNBC, he points out that 13 states have been open for more than three weeks now.
	Those states have now seen daily cases fall 29%, 29% over the prior three weeks, which is kind of incredible because you'd expect actually the number of cases to be upticking, not downticking, right?
	As the number of people out in public rises, you would expect, again, that kind of spike again, but we are not really seeing that spike again.
	In fact, we are seeing a declining rate of positivity across the country.
	Father John Jenkins, who's the president of the University of Notre Dame, he is suggesting that it is time to reopen Notre Dame as a school.
	He says that we are announcing plans to return students to campus for the fall semester in order to reduce the chances that students from around the country and the world with multiple departures and returns will carry pathogens with them, will bring students back two weeks early, forego a fall break and finish the semester before Thanksgiving, they'll conduct orientations to welcome them back in the COVID-19 era, They'll institute extensive protocols for testing, contact tracing, and quarantining, preventive measures such as hand-washing, physical distancing, and in certain settings, the wearing of masks.
	In certain settings is the key, right?
	Athletic competition provides another set of challenges.
	They believe that they can keep student-athletes safe.
	Fans in the stadium is going to be a different question.
	But bottom line again is that the reason markets are optimistic right now is because people are looking at reopening.
	And the reopening is going to be more swift than I think people think it's going to be.
	Because once you allow people out, people are going to want to hang out with each other.
	People are willing to undertake the risk once they become comfortable that we're not spiking over the healthcare system.
	Once they become comfortable that this is not looking like Italy, people may continue to wear masks.
	I can tell you in LA, people are still wearing masks.
	They should be.
	I am a mask advocate.
	I know there are a lot of people on the right who believe that masks are terrible, horrible, no good, very bad things.
	I disagree with this on a general level.
	I think that the science disagrees with this.
	The bottom line is that people get this from droplets and from prolonged close contact with the other human beings who have this sort of thing.
	If you are in a closed area with another person within six feet of that person, you should be wearing a mask.
	If you are outside six feet of that person, then you probably should not be wearing a mask or it doesn't matter.
	If you're outdoors, it probably is not going to matter all that much unless you are in extremely, extremely close contact.
	Okay, so that's where I am on the mask wearing.
	We'll get into the mask wearing in just a second because this has become an issue of contention.
	But all of this is very, very good.
	So why exactly are the media trying to downplay it?
	We'll get to that in just one second.
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	So there's been a lot of eagerness to reopen and the stock market is reflecting that.
	So I'm honestly bewildered by all the people who are bewildered by the stock market increase.
	The stock market is increasing because people are pricing the future into the present.
	This is exactly what stock markets do.
	Stock markets are designed to take all of the knowledge and speculation about the future and then to price that into the stock price.
	This is why insider trading is a crime.
	Because if you know what's going to happen two days from now, you can price that into how you consume particular stocks.
	So why is the stock market up some 35% since it hit the bottom?
	Well, because we know where the bottom was.
	We know that there's going to be a recovery.
	And people feel like they can buy low.
	I mean, I was buying stock during this time.
	I was telling people not to sell their stock during this time because there was going to be an increase in the stock market.
	Okay, but this has still led people who don't like President Trump to basically suggest that the stock market is delusional, that the stock market is disconnected from reality.
	It is not disconnected from reality.
	The stock market tumbled from 30,000 to 18,000 during a government-mandated shutdown.
	Now, as that shutdown ends, people are beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel.
	They're getting more optimistic, and they're investing in companies again, which makes perfect sense.
	Well, this led to a big blow-up this morning on CNBC.
	Andrew Ross Sorkin, who, nice guy, I'm pretty friendly with him, he got into a tiff ...with another person named Joe Kernan on CNBC who's been talking up the stock market and saying now's a pretty good time to buy, which is true.
	And Ross Sorkin basically suggests that if you're talking up the stock market right now, then this is because you are a shill for President Trump.
	That's just nonsense.
	Panicked about ever going out again.
	Panicked that we'd ever get back to normal.
	Joseph, you didn't panic about anything!
	What good is that?
	What good is it?
	Why not help people keep their head?
	100,000 people died, Joe, and all you did was try to help your friend the President.
	That's what you did.
	Every single morning on this show.
	Every single morning on this show, you abuse and abuse your position, Joe.
	That's totally unfair.
	You abuse and abuse your position.
	I'm trying to help investors keep their cool, keep their heads.
	Okay, again, that's just nonsense.
	It's bad media coverage.
	It's bad media coverage.
	The reason that people are talking up the stock market is because right now is actually a fairly good time to buy into the stock market.
	But, again, there's a narrative that has to be driven, which is that if you're optimistic about the future, it's because you are not taking the virus seriously.
	Or, there's another narrative that's going around now, and that narrative is that if you're in favor of ending lockdown, it's because you're vicious and cruel.
	It's because you're nasty.
	This is what Andy Beshear, the Democratic governor of Kentucky, is saying.
	There was a rally outside the statehouse, I guess, somewhere in Kentucky, and somebody hanged him in effigy.
	Hung him in effigy.
	Hanged is for a picture.
	Hung is for a human being.
	They hung him in effigy, which is a nasty thing and an ugly thing.
	And then, Bashir basically blamed every Republican, which is just stupidity.
	I'm sorry.
	No one was actually encouraging people to hang the governor in effigy.
	Here he was blaming Republicans for wanting to end the lockdown because supposedly this leads to people burning people in effigy.
	You cannot fan the flames and then condemn the fire.
	Those at the previous rally, those elected officials that embraced these individuals and that stood in front of people dressed in tactical gear and the rest and threw as much red meat as possible at them, they have to claim responsibility because they absolutely know what could have happened.
	And they are in part responsible for what they did.
	With that said, if you were in favor of ending the lockdowns, you're not responsible for some jackass being a jackass in front of a governor's house.
	That's not a thing.
	That really is not.
	I'm very tired of this game.
	This game gets played all the time.
	Unless you're a Bernie Sanders supporter and you shoot up a bunch of Congress people, then obviously Bernie Sanders has nothing to do with it.
	This only works one way.
	Okay, so all of this is leading to the inevitable political conflict The political conflict is now going to be that Republicans supposedly don't take this thing seriously, and Democrats do take this thing seriously.
	This doesn't have to be political.
	What if I take this seriously, but I also understand the cost to lockdown?
	What if I take this seriously, but I also believe that America has to reopen?
	What if I take this seriously, but I believe that the individual Americans who live particularly in highly populous areas are generally responsible, and that you actually don't need every single American to be responsible in order to keep down the transmission of the virus?
	Because that actually happens to be the case.
	But this is pure binary politics because we always revert to pure binary politics when in doubt.
	We'll get to that in just one second.
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	Okay, so this obviously was going to break down politically And it was going to break down politically because it turns out that when you look at the stats, it's fairly obvious who blew it and who didn't.
	And when you look at which governors performed well and which governors performed poorly, it is pretty obviously who did pretty well and who did pretty poorly.
	So President Trump highlighted this yesterday.
	He said, it's a disgrace how the governors handled nursing homes.
	This is 100% true.
	47% of all deaths in the United States happen in nursing homes.
	Here was Trump going after governors for how they treated nursing homes, which is not his fault.
	That would be the governor's fault.
	We're using every tool at our disposal to protect our nursing homes from outbreaks.
	You saw the disaster of how badly some of the governors handled nursing homes.
	It's a disgrace what they've done.
	What the governors, what some of the governors have done is a disgrace.
	Our seniors are very special people.
	All of our citizens are special.
	But our seniors, we have to take care of our seniors.
	Okay, so he is correct about this.
	Now, where the Democrats have opened up a gap is in the idea that Trump was unserious about this thing and that Democrats were serious about this thing, and this is why you're seeing Joe Biden.
	Trying to draw a contrast around the issue of mask wearing.
	Okay, so there's all sorts of conflict over whether masks should in fact be mandated or whether they should not.
	And this is a serious question.
	The reason it's a serious question is because if it's mandated by the state, that means the police can come and arrest you if you don't wear a mask.
	Or the police are going to tackle you.
	Now, we've seen in New York that Bill de Blasio is not willing to, you know, follow through on the courage of his convictions and actually have people tackled in the open because they're not wearing masks.
	Instead, it's sort of people going by and announcing that you should wear a mask or that you should socially distance.
	There are people on the right who are very much anti-mask because they believe that this leads to a perception of a new normal in which we are all expected to wear masks.
	I don't think anybody really believes that long term we're all going to be wearing masks.
	I think what people believe is that for the moment, in order to prevent the spike of the spread, in order for us to all get back to business, we should probably wear masks to protect the most vulnerable, particularly when the most vulnerable are there.
	According to CNN, as more places across the U.S.
	offer people a chance to shop or dine inside, the issue of whether to wear a mask has again become a flashpoint.
	There are 17 states where the number of coronavirus cases are trending up.
	Many governors have told citizens that now is an important time to wear a face covering.
	Virginia on Tuesday became the latest state to compel people to wear masks in certain situations.
	The rule applies to anyone 10 years of age or older within a public indoor space, according to Governor Ralph Northam.
	This, of course, came immediately after Ralph Northam was out in public with other people doing photo lines and not wearing a mask.
	The hypocrisy of our politicians is something to behold.
	The CDC recommends wearing a cloth face covering in public when it is hard to stay socially distant.
	Dr. Deborah Birx says what we have said to people is there's clear scientific evidence now by all droplet experiments that happen and that others have done to show a mask does prevent droplets from reaching others.
	We need to be wearing masks in public when we cannot social distance.
	But some Americans argue that this feels like a forfeiture of freedom.
	There are a bunch of people who are basically implying that wearing a mask is foolish or it's giving up basic American freedoms.
	I don't think that's right.
	I don't think that the state should be compelling you to wear a mask if you are out in public.
	But I do think that you are not being, how to put this, kind to others if you are in a place with vulnerable people and you're not wearing a mask.
	At the same time, if you're wearing a mask alone in your car, you're a moron.
	If you're wearing a mask alone in your car, you're stupid.
	If you're out in public and you're 100 feet away from everybody and you're wearing a mask, let's say you're at a Veterans Memorial in Delaware and you're within 50 feet of nobody and you're wearing a mask, that's just virtue signaling at this point.
	And this has become the point, is that Joe Biden wants to virtue signal.
	He wants this contrast.
	Because again, the idea here is that if he wears a mask and Donald Trump does not, it's because he takes this thing seriously, and Donald Trump does not.
	So yesterday, Biden tweeted out, just wear a mask.
	I mean, that's literally the entire tweet.
	Wear a mask.
	So this is his campaign.
	His campaign is wear a mask, as opposed to Trump, who refuses to wear a mask.
	Again, now here's the thing.
	I think that Trump is actually kind of foolish to cede this ground.
	Most Americans are on board with the idea that when you are in a crowded area, you're supposed to wear a mask, at least for the moment.
	I think that it's the desire to virtue signal on both sides is truly insane.
	Not because it's bad to wear a mask.
	Again, I've given you my perspective on masks, but there is a group of people who basically spend all day, and I know the term now on the internet has become Karening, like the basic idea is that you're going to go around and Karen at people.
	I mean, you're going to yell at people if they're not wearing a mask.
	And you're going to shame them and make them feel bad, even if they're not endangering anybody, because you're better than they are.
	It's just become another example of the sort of 1930s style.
	You're flying the Blue Eagle.
	That means you're loyal to the government as opposed to you're not wearing a mask.
	And that means you're disloyal to the government or something like that.
	Trump is foolish to fall into this.
	On the one hand, this is idiocy.
	Hey, if you're not endangering anybody, you're not endangering anybody.
	And if you're young and healthy and you don't have this thing, then you're not endangering anybody.
	And no, President Trump really does not have to wear a mask because we know he doesn't have it.
	He's being tested like every single day.
	And he's the most monitored person on planet Earth.
	And also, he has apparently been wearing the mask behind the scenes when he has been in close contact with people.
	But on the one hand, you have the people who are like, if you don't wear a mask, you're a disloyal American, you're a very bad person.
	On the other hand, you have people who are like, I'm never wearing a mask ever because if I wear a mask, then it just shows that I'm bowing to government authority.
	Or how about this?
	How about you trust in Americans to be reasonable?
	This is why, as the social fabric has decayed, this gap really does demonstrate how people have filled the gap in social fabric with desire for government interventionism.
	See, here's the thing.
	I trust my neighbors and I trust my friends that they're not going to endanger me.
	I do.
	In fact, our synagogue put out a statement yesterday about how they're going to reopen.
	And the way they're going to reopen is no kiddish, meaning that people are not going to be eating and drinking in buffet lines, that they are going to socially distance the table six feet, that you are supposed to wear a mask at all times during davening, right?
	All of these things are voluntarily being undertaken.
	They're not being undertaken as an aspect of the government ordering.
	Why?
	Because we all trust each other and we don't want to get each other sick.
	But as the social fabric has decayed, people want the government to enforce all this stuff.
	And then you get people who are cracking back at that saying, OK, well, I'm never listening to the government ever.
	OK, what if like both things are bad?
	What if what if the government should not be mandating the masks, but we should have a social fabric in which we trust each other enough not to be idiots to each other?
	How about that?
	So Joe Biden came out.
	He said that Donald Trump is a fool for not wearing a mask, which, of course, is ridiculous.
	Ralph Northam wasn't wearing a mask.
	Joe Biden in this particular interview with CNN isn't wearing a mask like this is.
	In certain situations, you should wear a mask.
	If you're walking into an old age home, you should be tested and you should wear a mask.
	And if not, if you're like out in public and a hundred feet from people, you shouldn't wear a mask.
	This is silly.
	He's a fool.
	An absolute fool to talk that way.
	I mean, every leading doc in the world is saying we should wear a mask when you're in a crowd.
	And especially when you know you're going to be in a position where you're going to inadvertently get closer than 12 feet to somebody.
	I know we're 12 feet apart.
	I get that.
	But it's just absolutely this macho stuff for a guy.
	I shouldn't get going, but it just is.
	It's cost people's lives.
	The reason this is bad politics for Trump, and it's smart politics for Biden, honestly, is because particularly the soccer moms from 2004, the security moms, who are very worried about terrorism and therefore voted for George W. Bush, what makes them feel safer?
	A president who is taking seriously the virus to the extent that he's being over-serious, or a president who's being cavalier and treating it as a sign of masculinity.
	Like, just on a political level, this is not particularly smart.
	Like, so yesterday, President Trump was calling a reporter politically correct for wearing a mask.
	Now, he's not wrong that the reporter is virtue signaling by wearing a mask when the reporter is far away from everybody.
	I mean, that part is true.
	But the question is, why is this the image that he wants to project?
	Like, why is this an important thing to do?
	They're inside, they don't wear masks, and so I thought it was very unusual that he had one on, but I thought that was fine.
	I wasn't criticizing him at all.
	Why would I ever do a thing like that?
	And your second question was?
	I couldn't hear you.
	Can you take it off because I cannot hear you.
	I'll just speak louder, sir.
	Okay, good.
	You want to be politically correct.
	Go ahead.
	No, sir.
	I just want to wear the mask.
	Go ahead, go ahead.
	Okay, so there's the president ripping into mask wearing.
	Why he would allow this to become political is beyond me.
	It's political malpractice, but we've seen a lot of political malpractice this week.
	By the way, the media are indeed hypocrites on this particular issue.
	The best clip of yesterday was an MSNBC reporter trying to shame people around him for not wearing masks, and a person in Wisconsin not wearing a mask immediately turns to him and says, your cameraman's not wearing a mask.
	It was pretty spectacular.
	Are the people there just not worried about it, Cal?
	Are they not worried about their own personal safety?
	I haven't met anybody who is.
	But you can see.
	Here.
	Just around.
	Nobody's wearing them.
	Nobody's, uh... Including the cameraman.
	There you go.
	Including the cameraman.
	Yeah.
	Katie?
	Captain Crew's not wearing them.
	Striking images.
	I love the guy just owning MSNBC with facts and logic right there.
	By the way, the hypocrisy exists on all sides.
	All this is so annoying because it's so stupid.
	It truly is.
	I really feel like 85% of Americans are on the same page here, which is be responsible, socially distance, wear a mask when you have to, and get back to work.
	Protect the elderly.
	Why is this unreasonable?
	I'm so confused as to how this has become such a wildly partisan issue, except that everything now is about signaling.
	And it's not even virtue signaling.
	It's about commitment signaling.
	And that's what I'm going to get to in a second, is this commitment signaling routine that we get on Twitter.
	Because in our age, it's not even about your signaling your virtue or your signaling your beliefs.
	It's your signaling your loyalty to a particular person or particular cause.
	And if you're signaling loyalty without virtue, loyalty without virtue is not a merit.
	It is a demerit.
	We're going to get to that in just one second.
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	My big question continues to be, how all of this has gotten so partisan?
	Because again, I think that everybody is sort of ending up in the same place, which is be reasonable.
	And Democrats in their own actions are being more reasonable than they are in their rhetoric.
	So take, for example, Gretchen Whitmer.
	So Gretchen Whitmer was like, shut it all down.
	You can't buy seeds at the local store.
	You can't you can't buy a baby seat.
	And then her husband was like headed off to their second property and calling up calling up boathouses and telling him to load his boat into the lake for Memorial Day and all of this.
	And Gretchen Whitmer was trying to deny that yesterday.
	The very strict lockdown governor of Michigan who is cramming down all of her silly restrictions on the people of Michigan because she can't trust them, but she can trust her husband.
	Here's Whitmer.
	My husband made a failed attempt at humor last week when checking in with the small business that helps with our boat and dock up north.
	Knowing it wouldn't make a difference, he jokingly asked if being married to me might move him up in the queue.
	Obviously, with the motorized boating prohibition in our early days of COVID-19, he thought it might get a laugh.
	It didn't.
	And to be honest, I wasn't laughing either when it was relayed to me.
	Yeah, I'm sure it was a joke.
	Or alternatively, he was trying to call in and be a big shot and get the rules broken for him.
	So good times here by Democrats.
	Again, everybody is a human being here.
	Underneath all of the politics, everybody's a human being.
	We're all going to end up individually assessing our risks and then acting accordingly.
	That's where we're going to end up.
	And that's not a bad thing.
	That's a good thing.
	That's a very good thing.
	And by the way, it's not just happening here.
	It's happening in Europe as well, right?
	All of this is like human beings acting responsibly.
	I thought that that was the predicate for virtually all Behavior in Republic.
	We have to trust each other enough to act responsibly.
	But everything has become politicized because everything now is about commitment signaling.
	And this is really the key.
	When it comes to masks, it's commitment signaling.
	How committed are you to the mask?
	I'm so committed to the mask that I mask when I'm alone, in my bathroom, at night, in my house.
	That's how committed to masks I am.
	How committed are you to liberty?
	I'm so committed to liberty that I'm going to go into a giant crowd of a thousand people and I'm just going to breathe on everybody.
	Just breathe on everybody to prove liberty.
	Is any of this virtuous?
	Is any of this moral?
	Is any of this decent?
	Or is it just about commitment signaling?
	So a perfect example of commitment signaling happened yesterday online over this idiotic situation in Central Park.
	So there's a woman, her name is Amy Cooper, and she is apparently a lifelong Democrat.
	Which, by the way, you could absolutely tell from all of the outside indicators here.
	Because if you watch this little clip that went viral yesterday, And the day before, there's a woman named Amy Cooper, and then there's a dude named Christian Cooper.
	Okay, they're not related because one is white and one is black.
	And Amy Cooper is in the park, walking her dog through a place called the Ramble, which is apparently like this bird-watching sanctuary.
	And Christian Cooper gets mad because the dog is there.
	And Christian Cooper, according to his own account, basically says to the lady, put your dog on a leash.
	And she says, I don't want to put the dog on a leash, because they've shut down all of the areas where my dog can run around.
	And he says, well, if you don't put your dog on the leash, if you're going to do what you're going to do, then I'm going to do what I'm going to do, and you're not going to like it.
	Which is a tacit threat, obviously.
	I mean, that doesn't sound exactly like he's going to pet the dog, does it?
	OK, and then he signals that her dog should come over, and he takes some doggy treats out of his pocket.
	Now, he doesn't have a dog, and he's taking doggy treats out of his pocket.
	At that point, she loses it, and she says a racist thing.
	She says, I'm going to call up the NYPD.
	I'm going to tell them an African-American man is threatening my life.
	Not sure why exactly the race is relevant there, except that, as a good liberal who gave money to Barack Obama, she probably thinks the NYPD are a bunch of vicious racists who are gonna come and shoot the black guy, right?
	That is probably the underlying message there.
	So, she says the racist thing, then she calls the cops, and she says, there's an African-American man threatening me, and then he takes this tape, and he puts it online.
	And then she gets fired.
	Now, there's no evidence she worked at some sort of financial firm.
	No evidence that she's ever been racist in her career.
	No evidence that her financial career has been motivated and plagued by bigotry.
	She lost her job over all of this.
	And she was harangued and people were tweeting their commitment to it.
	And there was this basic idea that if you tweeted that this woman was bad, you had demonstrated your commitment.
	It wasn't commitment to virtue.
	It was just your commitment to the clause.
	Now, getting her fired is not actually virtue.
	Having the woman's dog removed from her and getting her fired, that seems pretty crappy, honestly.
	Now, I'm not a dog owner, so I really can't speak to is she really mistreating the dog in the particular tape.
	She's holding the dog by the collar as it kind of struggles against her, so I don't know the answer to that.
	But, the idea that the woman ought to lose her job because there was a guy who took a video of her and he was not acting wonderfully and then she said something racist.
	How is that like the best outcome?
	How is this a good outcome?
	And the answer is on Twitter and in social media and in our political lives right now, it's all about the level of commitment you're willing to signal.
	So it's not enough to just say, wow, this woman said a racist thing, that's bad.
	Instead it's, let's find her home address and let's send her mail.
	Let's go outside her house.
	Let's go to her business and let's make sure she loses her job and her livelihood.
	Because I've demonstrated to all of you through my commitment to the cause, just how committed I am.
	And all it took was a few clicks of the keys and everything was great.
	My commitment signaling is super duper strong.
	According to the New York Times, the woman, this has now been viewed 30 million times, this video, touching off intense discussions about the history of false accusations made to the police against black people, sometimes putting their lives in danger.
	She has given up her dog, publicly apologized, and been fired from her job.
	Even Christian Cooper was like, I'm sorry that this has been the extent of the blowback.
	Christian Cooper was like, I feel like this is not actually the way this should have gone.
	He appeared with Anderson Cooper yesterday, or Don Lemon rather, and he was like, I feel like this is over the top, guys.
	All I meant to do was kind of shame the lady a little bit, and instead everybody decided to demonstrate their commitment by getting her fired.
	Some of the messaging I am told has been death threats.
	And that is wholly inappropriate and abhorrent and should stop immediately.
	I find it strange that people who were upset that they tried, as they see it and rightly, that she tried to bring death by cop down on my head would then turn around and try to put death threats on her head.
	Where is the logic in that?
	Where does that make any kind of sense?
	Okay, by the way, the notion that she, in the actual call, there is a difference in what she says to him and what she says to the police.
	In the actual, you can see her make the police call.
	In the police call, she says, he's threatening my dog.
	In what she says to him is, you're threatening me.
	Okay, so presumably there'd be a difference in response by the police to those two things.
	But in any case, even he says, Christian Cooper, he says correctly, if our goal is to change the underlying factors, I'm not sure this young woman having her life completely torn apart serves that goal.
	And that is exactly correct.
	I mean, that's exactly right.
	But again, everything has now become about commitment signaling.
	And you're seeing this with regard to President Trump on Twitter as well.
	We'll get to that momentarily.
	None of this is good for the country.
	It really is not.
	Your commitment, demonstrating your commitment to the cause on Twitter, does not make you a better person.
	It doesn't.
	It doesn't make you morally superior.
	It doesn't make you decent.
	In fact, it makes you very indecent.
	If you're committed to the cause to the extent that you're doing an immoral thing to demonstrate your commitment to the cause, then that just makes you a radical.
	And listen, extremism in pursuit of liberty is no vice, but extremism in the pursuit of stupidity is a definite vice.
	Extremism in the pursuit of demonstrating your commitment and loyalty to a particular cause without any decency attached to it doesn't make you a better person.
	You saw that happen in this case, and as we will see, This also happened with regard to Twitter and President Trump yesterday and it's just, it's ugly and it's dumb and it's all reactionary.
	We're gonna get to more of this in just one second.
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	Okay, so we're going to get to more of the commitment signaling that we are seeing across It's just, yeah, we're gonna get to that in just a second.
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	Okay, so when we talk about commitment signaling, that one aspect of commitment signaling is just doubling down on the stupid crap you've said before.
	That's demonstrating your commitment.
	You never back off, you never apologize, you never stop, never stop, never stopping.
	You just continue down this road.
	And the way this works is that if the president, for example, if President Trump decides that he is just going to randomly accuse Joe Scarborough of murdering a Catholic Republican intern, Twenty years ago.
	And he's just going to go off on this thing.
	He's going to suggest it.
	By the way, this used to be a Democrat thing, right?
	Michael Moore once suggested that Joe Scarborough had murdered an intern.
	Marcos Melitzus suggested Joe Scarborough had murdered an intern.
	So recognize that the rumor actually started on the left.
	But Trump repeating it is obviously immoral, right?
	It is an immoral thing.
	Accusing people of murder without evidence.
	Immoral.
	Immoral when you're doing it to Raphael Cruz and suggesting he killed John F. Kennedy.
	Immoral when you're doing it to Joe Scarborough.
	Immoral!
	Do not accuse people of murder.
	Also, really, really immoral.
	Accusing a dead Catholic woman of having been having an affair with a congressperson and then being murdered over the affair.
	Really, really bad.
	Really bad stuff, guys.
	Okay, like, I don't care who says this.
	I don't care that you like President Trump.
	Bad thing to do.
	Bad thing to say.
	And if you have a hard time saying bad thing to do, bad thing to say, get your priorities straight.
	I'm not saying you can't vote for the man.
	I've said before, I'm intending on voting for him.
	But that is despite all this garbage, not because of all this garbage.
	But right now, the way this works is that if Trump says something unbelievably terrible about the Joe Scarborough intern situation, if he continues to double down on that, and if you question it, then you are insufficiently committed.
	And this is one of the ugliest things about our politics right now.
	That you have to demonstrate your commitment by defending everything.
	And suggesting, well, you know, the media are constantly attacking Trump.
	I mean, Scarborough said nasty things about Trump, so why shouldn't he say nasty things about Scarborough?
	And the answer is, what are we, in second grade here?
	Seriously.
	Like, in second grade, we learn that if somebody says something mean to you, the proper response is not to call their mother a whore.
	Right?
	This is like the first thing that you learn when you're a kid.
	If you have good parents, your parents teach you that just because that other kid did something does not mean that you also get to do that thing or do it worse to them.
	Right?
	That's not a thing you get to do.
	Also, there's collateral damage here.
	He's not just accusing Joe Scarborough of stripping puppies or something, which would be, you know, on its face ridiculous and silly and all that.
	He's actually accusing a dead Catholic woman of having violated her marital vows with Joe Scarborough before being murdered.
	Okay, that's really bad stuff.
	It is.
	Can we just acknowledge this for a second?
	But if you acknowledge this, you're insufficiently committed.
	So what people love about Trump, for good or ill, is that the man is committed.
	He's committed to his own priorities.
	Apparently he's not committed to political brilliance because I don't know who he is winning over with this garbage.
	Now people are like, well, he's not losing any votes with it.
	Yeah, he is.
	He is.
	There are a bunch of people who are Let me tell you, Republican women in the suburbs.
	Do you think they're showing up more or less over all of the, if you are a mask, you're a cuck, and if you are a Catholic intern for Joe Scarborough, you're probably murdered by Joe Scarborough.
	Have people forgotten that politics is about demonstrating to voters that you're fit to be president?
	Demonstrating to voters two things.
	One, the other guy's unfit.
	Two, you are fit.
	Trump is great at the former and awful at the latter.
	If you want him to win re-election, he needs to stop this bullcrap right now.
	I've already talked about the morality, but just on a political level.
	Okay, but again, we live in a world where you're supposed to demonstrate your commitment to the cause by neglecting the evils on your own side and pretending that they're okay.
	Or you're supposed to sort of laugh at it as though it's a joke.
	Or you're supposed to blame Joe Scarborough for Trump accusing a dead Catholic woman of being an adulteress.
	Okay, so here was President Trump yesterday defending his claim about Scarborough's intern.
	I'm sure that ultimately they want to get to the bottom of it, and it's a very serious situation.
	I also saw a clip with Joe and Imus, where they were having a lot of fun at her expense, and I thought it was totally inappropriate.
	No, it's a very suspicious thing, and I hope somebody gets to the bottom of it.
	It'll be a very good thing.
	As you know, there's no statute of limitations, so it would be a very good thing to do.
	Okay, meanwhile, Joe Scarborough, of course, went on the air last night, and he pointed out that Lori Clausitis, that's the name of the intern who died, that she was a lifelong Republican and faithful Catholic.
	Like Scarborough, you can hate Scarborough, but Scarborough ain't wrong about this.
	A good woman, a young woman's desire to do something good for the country that she has loved.
	Has led first to people on the far left on the internet sullying her name.
	And then a Republican senatorial candidate years later sullying her name.
	And then people on the far left later sullying her name.
	And now the president of the United States sullying this good woman's name.
	Okay, so we can point out all this is bad.
	That's okay.
	You're allowed.
	You're allowed.
	Doesn't mean you have to vote for Biden.
	Doesn't mean you have to not vote for Trump.
	You're allowed to say this is bad stuff.
	But commitment signaling means you must never, ever do that.
	Meanwhile, Twitter itself is engaged in commitment signaling.
	So Twitter has to demonstrate to the left that they really, really hate Trump.
	Now, here's the thing.
	If you're on the left, I don't know why in the world you'd want Trump's Twitter voice silenced.
	Seriously, if you're on the left, what you want is Trump tweeting this crap every single day.
	Like, Joe Biden is celebrating.
	He's doing a little dance, or as much as he can pick his feet up off the ground these days, he's doing a little dance in his basement every time Trump does this sort of stuff.
	But the media yesterday were suggesting that Trump should be removed from Twitter.
	Don Lemon was suggesting that Twitter is a cesspool that has not held Trump accountable.
	Again, it's not Twitter's job to hold Trump accountable.
	Guess whose job that is?
	That's everybody else's job.
	Just like they hold Joe Biden accountable.
	But, again, it's commitment signaling.
	You can't just say that Trump did a bad thing.
	You have to demonstrate how committed you are to hating Trump by saying that Trump should be removed from Twitter.
	So this is where the media, again, blow it.
	So everybody's blowing it on all sides.
	It's unbelievable.
	Nobody has fundamental sejel.
	Nobody has any common sense.
	Sejel is the Yiddish word for common sense.
	Nobody has any common sense at all.
	So you get the members of the media who are pro-free speech.
	Everybody gets to speak their opinion.
	Except for Trump.
	If he says a crappy thing, you should ban him from Twitter.
	Why?
	How would that make things better, to ban him from Twitter?
	I mean, it gives Don Lemon something to talk about.
	And by the way, I think the American people are smart enough to figure out whether they like Trump's Twitter or not.
	Here's Don Lemon yesterday.
	Stop companies like Jack Dorsey.
	Stop hiding behind the First Amendment for profit.
	Stop doing it.
	Do the right thing.
	Stop allowing families like this family to have to go through this, to grieve their loved one over and over and over and over again.
	So they are letting the president use their platform to drag us all right into the mud.
	Letting him get away with it.
	No, no, no, no.
	Okay, so this is the media just being terrible at their job.
	So Twitter, of course, because they too have to commitment signal.
	They have to signal their commitment to fighting Trump.
	So how do they do that?
	Do they do that by taking down his tweets about the Scarborough intern?
	No.
	Instead, they decide they're going to put fact checks on his tweets.
	Not only are they going to put fact checks on his tweets, they're going to be wrong.
	Okay, so yesterday, Twitter, according to Reuters, for the first time prompted readers to check the fact in tweets sent by President Trump, warning readers his claims about mail-in ballots were false and had been debunked by fact checkers.
	The blue exclamation mark notification prompted readers to get the facts about mail-in ballots and directed them to a page with news articles and information from fact-checkers about his claims.
	Trump had claimed in tweets earlier in the day mail-in ballots would be substantially fraudulent and result in rigged elections.
	He singled out the governor of California over the issue.
	Twitter said this was the very first time it had applied a label to a tweet by the president under its new misleading information policy, which had been introduced earlier in the month.
	There's only one problem.
	There's only one problem.
	They were wrong.
	The fact check was incorrect.
	According to Alipundit at Hot Air, instead of fact checking like he killed his intern routine, they decided to fact check the mail-in ballot stuff.
	And they're wrong!
	Okay, click the fact-check link in the tweets.
	According to Alipundit, you're sent to a page which claims, among other things, that fact-checkers say there's no evidence mail-in ballots are linked to voter fraud.
	That is not true.
	As per an NPR story from early April, election experts say Trump is partially correct that there is slightly more fraud in mail voting than in in-person voting.
	The same experts told NPR election fraud is extremely rare in all instances.
	But it is not true that there's no evidence that mail-in ballots are linked to voter fraud.
	In fact, yesterday, yesterday, there was an actual case filed by the U.S.
	Attorney for the Northern District of West Virginia, in which a letter carrier was charged with election fraud related to mail-in requests for primary ballots.
	Yesterday, the mail-in primary ballot requests appeared to have been part of a state plan to send absentee ballot requests to everyone in West Virginia during the novel coronavirus pandemic.
	The postman defendant, Thomas Cooper, faces one count.
	That's according to court documents obtained by Law and Crime.
	He even admitted to altering some of the requests.
	So at the same time that Twitter is claiming that there's no evidence of mail-in ballots being fraudulently used or obtained, the federal government is filing a case against somebody for doing just that.
	So Twitter's fact-checking.
	Again, everybody's incompetent.
	Everybody's terrible.
	Twitter is fact-checking and using the wrong facts, which is incredible.
	By the way, if you're going to fact-check things, it turns out that Twitter needs to fact-check its own site integrity head.
	There's a person named Yoel Roth.
	He is the head of Twitter's fact-checking team.
	There's only one problem.
	Yoel Roth has tweeted about how Trump was a Nazi.
	He suggested that he is Joseph Goebbels.
	He compared Kellyanne Conway to Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propagandist.
	So are they going to fact-check his tweets?
	So, obviously, this opened the way to President Trump going after Twitter.
	So now we have Trump versus Twitter, which again is a better battle for Trump than Trump versus Joe Scarborough's dead intern.
	But does it lead to any sort of principled outcome?
	No.
	Now we're going to get commitment signaling on behalf of Trump that is anti-free speech, which is just Mind-boggling.
	So Trump is objecting to the fact that people are saying that people should take down his tweets or fact-check his tweets.
	I agree.
	Twitter should not be fact-checking his tweets.
	If you want to fact-check his tweets, you have the Google machine.
	Do it yourself.
	If you want to check the fact-checkers, the fact-checkers have all the information out there.
	People are tweeting about it.
	That's what Twitter is for.
	It's a fulsome engagement with various points of view.
	But President Trump responds to this by saying, you're trying to censor me on Twitter?
	Well, what if I just shut down Twitter entirely?
	What if I, President of the United States, simply shut down the social media company?
	We saw what they attempted to do and failed in 2016.
	that social media platforms totally silence conservative voices.
	We will strongly regulate or close them down before we can ever allow this to happen.
	We saw what they attempted to do and failed in 2016.
	We can't let a more sophisticated version of that happen again.
	Just like we can't let large-scale mail-in ballots take root in our country.
	It would be a free-for-all on cheating, forgery, and the theft of ballots.
	Whoever cheated the most would win.
	Likewise, social media.
	Clean up your act now.
	So now he's threatening as President of the United States to take down Twitter.
	To take down Facebook.
	And by the way, he's doubling down on it again.
	This morning, he's just on a rampage on all of this.
	And now, in order to demonstrate your commitment, to demonstrate your commitment, it is now necessary that you back President Trump basically calling for the end of social media.
	He says, Twitter has now shown that everything we've been saying about them and their other compatriots is correct.
	Big action to follow.
	Okay, now I agree that Twitter is really biased.
	I agree that Jack Dorsey is a terrible CEO.
	I agree with all of those things.
	I don't know why it's the role of the government to shut down Twitter.
	That seems like a very dangerous thing.
	Does it not to you?
	How would you like the idea of the left just shutting down talk radio because they don't like the voices that are being disseminated on it?
	Or how would you like the return of the Fairness Doctrine?
	What's good for the goose is good for the gander.
	By the way, Trump again this morning was going after Joe Scarborough.
	He's a psycho.
	Joe Scarborough is rattled.
	Not only by his bad ratings, but all of the things and facts that are coming out on the internet about opening a cold case.
	He knows what is happening.
	What the actual... What the actual...
	Okay, everything is terrible, everything is stupid, and everyone is stupid.
	This is the short conclusion.
	Also, do not be a commitment signaler.
	Instead, signal virtue.
	Or just be virtuous.
	How about that?
	You're not signaling anything.
	Just be virtuous.
	Just be decent.
	Why is any of this difficult?
	I'm so confused as to why any of this is difficult.
	Be responsible.
	Don't be a jackass.
	Really, not hard.
	Stick to a commitment to principles, not a commitment to follow a particular person down the primrose path or follow a particular cause so far that you are indecent and nasty in pursuing it.
	But apparently, again, it's never about the truth anymore, never about decency.
	Okay, time for a bevy of things that I hate.
	Alrighty, so a variable cornucopia of things that I hate today.
	So many things to hate.
	So, President Trump announced today that the United States is going to be bringing back our soldiers from Afghanistan.
	So that means we've been there for 19 years and the Taliban is going to take over.
	So that went great.
	So I'm glad that we went into Afghanistan to stop the Taliban from taking over because the Taliban had provided a safe haven for Al Qaeda, which resulted in 9-11.
	And now, we are just going to hand the country back to the Taliban, is apparently the plan.
	So that's really bad stuff.
	I know a lot of people are saying that war is useless, that that war is not a good idea, and that war has been a failure.
	The reality is that terrorism from Afghanistan has radically reduced since we took the Taliban out of place, simply putting the Taliban back in.
	is full-on crazy.
	I mean, and that's basically what we are talking about doing right now.
	I'm old enough to remember when everybody sort of agreed that that was the good war, that the good war was fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan.
	Iraq was the bad war, right?
	Because there was no terrorism coming from Iraq and the WMD and all of that.
	But now the idea is that Afghanistan is the bad war.
	According to the New York Times, senior military officials are set to brief President Trump in the coming days on options for pulling all of American troops out of Afghanistan with one possible timeline for withdrawing forces before the presidential election, according to officials with knowledge of the plans.
	Now remember, this was Barack Obama's policy, and I'm old enough to remember when Republicans were like, wait, you're handing the country back to the Taliban?
	That seems like a bad idea.
	I'm old enough to remember when people were angry that Obama was negotiating directly with the Taliban via Kuwait.
	I'm old enough to remember that because I'm more than five years old.
	But apparently when Trump does it, it's now okay.
	It is not okay.
	It is bad.
	It is stupid.
	The fact is, General David Petraeus suggests that you at least have to keep a skeleton force on the ground to prevent the fall of the government and the restoration of the evil Taliban regime, which would immediately become a safe haven for terrorism again.
	They plan to propose and advocate a slower withdrawal schedule.
	But, again, when you present Trump with a fast schedule and a slow schedule, likely that Trump takes the fast schedule.
	In recent months, Trump has repeatedly voiced a desire to leave Afghanistan sooner than the timeline laid out in the February 29th peace agreement with the Taliban, which stipulated that U.S.
	troops would leave in 12 to 14 months if the insurgent group met certain conditions.
	The Pentagon is expected to try and persuade the president that he should basically take this a lot slower.
	The debate highlights the mounting difficulty facing the February agreement.
	Political strife and bloody Taliban attacks have derailed what little progress has been made since the deal signing, because it turns out that the Taliban have no intention of keeping to the deal.
	The Taliban intend on fully coming in and just murdering everybody who cooperated with the United States, which would just be another wonderful example of the United States interfering in the Middle East with good intentions and then basically leaving people to die, which is exactly what the United States did to the Kurds in 1991 after the Gulf War.
	It was really great.
	I don't know, honestly, if you're a person who is fighting tyranny on the ground in any of these countries, can you trust the United States if the United States simply withdraws and just lets you take the hit?
	I'm not sure why people would do this.
	That's what Vietnam was too, by the way.
	It was about literally hundreds of thousands and millions of people cooperating with the United States, the United States leaving, and those people just being left to the tender mercies of the Viet Cong.
	It turns out that where America's boots go, liberty follows.
	And where America's boots withdraw, liberty recedes.
	At least before you've established something that is workable.
	And we're not talking about hundreds of thousands of troops in Afghanistan right now.
	We're talking about maintaining a status quo.
	And that's kind of important.
	It is.
	I understand that everybody wants the troops home.
	I would love the troops home too.
	It's not that anybody's a warmonger here.
	Nobody's in favor of starting a new war.
	Nobody's talking about ramping up the troop presence to hundreds of thousands of troops.
	But to remove all tenuous gains that have been made in Afghanistan in order to signal to the American public that you're tired of this is not actually good policy, whether, again, if it were Barack Obama, I would be saying exactly the same thing, and I did.
	You can go back and listen to it.
	And so there's that.
	Meanwhile, on foreign policy, the State Department is announcing, Mike Pompeo has announced that Hong Kong can no longer be considered separate and autonomous from China, which basically means that China has now taken over Hong Kong.
	Which is an incredible demonstration that when the West does not stand up to tyranny, then the tyrants take over.
	According to Bloomberg, the U.S. has certified that Hong Kong is no longer politically autonomous from China, a move that could have far-reaching consequences on the special trading status the former British colony has with the United States.
	According to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, this, of course, comes in the aftermath of the Chinese government using the pandemic as an excuse to go in and quash all dissent inside Hong Kong.
	It comes after 20 years of the Chinese government basically violating every, abrogating every element of the treaty that it had with the British government.
	The British government withdrew from Hong Kong in 1997.
	The basic deal was that Hong Kong would still be allowed to have an autonomous government, even if it worked in close cooperation with the Chinese.
	It would be allowed domestic rule.
	And instead, the Chinese government just ignored it, and they understood that there would be no consequences for doing so, because what exactly was Britain going to do?
	Reoccupy?
	This is why it is always and invariably an idiotic idea to withdraw from places in favor of a tyrannical regime and trust that their commitments are going to be kept.
	So the people of Hong Kong have now been put directly under the thumb of the Chinese government.
	If you have any sympathy for the people of Hong Kong, you should recognize how evil it is what the Chinese government is doing.
	I mean, Hong Kong no longer being politically autonomous from China is...
	The people in Taiwan have to be looking over their shoulders at this point, right?
	I mean, China claims sovereignty over Taiwan.
	Taiwan is a United States ally.
	And the Chinese government's been threatening Hong Kong continuously.
	So China continues, even as they unleashed a pandemic on the rest of the world, they continue to exacerbate their political control over the region.
	There better be some harsh consequences here.
	And I mean serious economic harsh consequences against the government of China.
	And if the media feel the necessity to back China just because President Trump is anti-China, I think they are demonstrating full scale their actual priorities.
	Okay, other things that I hate today.
	So I guess that we are now going to reduce everything to the racial because again, very important to signal your commitment to particular causes.
	As I've said yesterday, when it came to issues of race, I think that we can all agree that racism still exists in the United States, that instances of racism are evil, that we can all condemn them, and that we should all be on the same side when it comes to this sort of stuff.
	It is also true that we are now doing a routine where we are in hunt for instances of racism.
	Now, instances of racism absolutely exist.
	That situation in Central Park looked like an instance of racism.
	It did.
	We've had shootings and killings that have looked like instances of racism.
	You know what doesn't seem like an instance of racism to me?
	Jimmy Fallon dressing up as Chris Rock in 2000 on SNL.
	I'm sorry, it doesn't.
	It doesn't seem like an instance of racism.
	You know who else it didn't seem like an instance of racism to?
	Anyone at SNL or anyone for the prior 20 years.
	It turns out, by the way, that if you don't like Jimmy Fallon dressing up as Chris Rock, then you should also not like Jimmy Kimmel dressing up as Karl Malone.
	But Jimmy Kimmel is the woke pope, and so he is granted absolution, despite the fact that, by the way, Jimmy Fallon's impression of Chris Rock was significantly less offensive than Jimmy Fallon's impression of Karl Malone.
	His impression of Karl Malone was basically playing Karl Malone as a stereotypical, ugly, awful, dumb... I mean, it was really bad.
	It was really bad.
	Go back and watch the Jimmy Kimmel tape.
	That one actually looks a lot more racist.
	The Jimmy Fallon one, he's playing Chris Rock.
	And again, I think it's important to recognize here that there are in fact gradations.
	Juan Williams told me this on the show a couple of years ago when we discussed this, and he was right.
	There are gradations in terms of how bad it is to dress up as a black person, right?
	There is dressing up in full-scale blackface, stereotypical fashion, 1920s, you're mocking black people as Shiftless and dumb and all that's ugly and horrifying and has a history in slavery and Jim Crow and all of that.
	And then there is, you dressed up as Michael Jackson in 1987 because you like Michael Jackson music.
	And that is not the same thing.
	It's not.
	You may think that that's insensitive.
	Okay.
	And in today's day and world, I wouldn't do it.
	I don't think people should do it.
	It's insensitive.
	Not the same thing for Jimmy Fallon to dress up as Chris Rock, a specific human being with whom he is friends, again, and to treat that as though he was dressed up in quote-unquote blackface.
	That's not the same thing.
	Jimmy Fallon said, in 2000 while on SNL, I made a terrible decision to do an impersonation of Chris Rock while on blackface.
	There's no excuse for this.
	Again, Blackface has an actual meaning, and putting on black makeup is not the same as blackface.
	Blackface has an actual meaning, and that was to dress up as a black person in order to mock black people in stereotypical, awful, and evil ways.
	That's not what Jimmy Fallon was doing when he dressed up as Chris Rock.
	He says, I'm very sorry for making this unquestionably offensive decision.
	Thank you, all of you, for holding me accountable.
	This is what we have to do.
	We have to do struggle sessions to demonstrate full-on commitment to the cause at this point, instead of him basically saying the same thing that Sarah Silverman said.
	By the way, try and spot a comedian in the last 20 years who didn't do this.
	Seriously, in the last 30 years.
	Sarah Silverman did it, Jimmy Kimmel did it, Jimmy Fallon did it.
	That should speak to how it was perceived at the time, and it was not perceived as mocking black people, because guess what?
	Racism was not in vogue in 2000.
	It wasn't.
	Okay, meanwhile, if you want to talk about actual instances where race becomes an issue, then we can talk about this situation in Minneapolis.
	So, if you haven't seen this awful, awful tape, it really is bad.
	There's a tape of police officers on the neck of a black perpetrator.
	The perpetrator apparently was doing some sort of forgery and they caught him doing a forgery in progress.
	I don't even know how you do that.
	Okay, but in any case, there's a forgery being reported.
	This guy was in his car.
	He apparently was committing the forgery.
	Then he got out of the car, and he confronted the cops, and he was resisting arrest.
	Okay, so at this point, you subdue the person, and then you put them in the paddy wagon, and you take them to jail, right?
	I mean, that's normally how this works.
	Instead, a police officer decided it would be a great idea to kneel on the back of the neck of the person.
	And then the person died because it turns out that you're not supposed to kneel on the back of other human beings.
	Now, a couple of things.
	As I always say, proof of incompetence, stupidity, and evil does not mean proof of racism.
	And there was a case out here in California, very, very famous case in California, not famous nationwide, in which there was a white homeless man.
	His first name was Kelly, and I forget his last name.
	And he was basically beaten to death by the police.
	He was a white homeless guy.
	He was quasi-resisting arrest, but not really.
	They started wailing on him, and he died from it.
	And this was not considered a nationwide story, specifically because it was about police brutality and cruelty and incompetence, and it wasn't about racism.
	When, if he had been black, then the story would have been racism.
	So, the guy's name was Kelly Thomas.
	That's right, Kelly Thomas.
	I remember, it's a big story out here.
	Okay, that was not considered a name worth remembering, obviously, because he was white.
	Now, the question in this particular case in Minneapolis is whether this is just police incompetence or whether the police officer was just a vicious racist who decided to kill this guy because he was black or took less of a care about him because he was black.
	And there were riots last night in Minneapolis.
	The Minneapolis mayor, Men went out there and used language that was extraordinarily highly charged.
	He suggested being black shouldn't be a death sentence.
	I'm not aware that being black is a death sentence in the United States.
	In fact, statistically speaking, it is absolutely not a death sentence in the United States.
	But because every instance of awful police work in which there's a white police officer and a black person has to be perceived as an indicator of broad-based American racism and not as an indicator of police officer sucking at their job.
	And I know lots of police officers who would look at this and be absolutely horrified on every level.
	But instead, this turns into a racial debate, even though, again, there's not evidence that this was a racial killing, as opposed to the police officer's just a bad, bad person at his job, at the very least.
	Being black in America should not be a death sentence.
	For five minutes, we watched as a white officer pressed his knee into the neck of a black man.
	For five minutes.
	When you hear someone calling for help, you are supposed to help.
	Okay.
	This officer failed in the most basic human sense.
	Okay, he did fail in the most basic human sense.
	That doesn't necessarily mean this thing was motivated by racism.
	The only reason that I point this out is that it sort of seems important that if you're going to suggest that race is the motivating factor, you provide some evidence that race is the motivating factor.
	I sort of like claims that are backed by evidence.
	Also, Worthy of note, is there a single human being on planet Earth, well on planet Earth, in America?
	Are there very many human beings?
	There's some overt racists, people really hate black people.
	But, are there very many human beings in the United States, who if they found out that this guy murdered a black man in cold blood because he was a racist, wouldn't want this guy put on the electric chair?
	Seriously, who's out there who doesn't feel that way?
	But there's an attempt right now to suggest that America, again, is rooted in racism and viciousness.
	Gayle King, who, again, she's the anchor at CBS this morning, she suggested that basically it is open season on black men after racial incidents.
	It's open season.
	It is not open season on black men in America.
	It is not.
	And if there's a racist incident, we should all be on the same side.
	This is the commitment signaling.
	The commitment to the narrative that America is deeply racist in every way and every individual instance, every anecdotal piece of evidence, not data, not like broad-based data that's statistical in nature.
	Every anecdotal piece of evidence is evidence of that broad-based narrative.
	That is signaling your commitment to the narrative.
	It is not necessarily signaling your commitment to the truth.
	I want truth and I want evidence and I think that once the evidence comes out we can all be on the same side because I think that at root we all have the same belief system here.
	The same belief system.
	Racism is bad.
	Police incompetence is bad.
	Murder is bad.
	I feel like we're all on the same page on these things.
	But there's an attempt to rush out without the evidence.
	And I feel like this is the case with so many of these instances.
	And it's not just with regard to racism.
	It seems like with regard to everything these days, there is a motivation to rush out and look at cases where there is a deliberate lack of full evidence, make claims that stretch the evidence in order to get to a conclusion, and then suggest that if you say, well, I need to wait for the evidence, that you are insufficiently committed to the cause.
	That's a problem.
	It's a problem, because it actually robs us of our ability to agree on things that we all agree on.
	Again, I think we all agree, racism bad, murder bad, police incompetence bad, right?
	We all agree on these things.
	But, if you pick instances where the evidence is not fully in on the racism aspect, and you then immediately call everybody who says, I'd like to see the evidence on that, insufficiently committed to the anti-racist cause, what you're actually incentivizing is acting without evidence in order to signal your commitment.
	Commitment signaling needs to end, because if you are so committed to commitment, maybe you should be committed.
	All right, we're gonna be here a little bit later today with two additional hours of content, plus we have our backstage live tonight, so go check us out tonight.
	Subscribe over at dailywire.com, become an all-access member.
	We've got all sorts of good stuff for you over there, and we'll see you then.
	I'm Ben Shapiro, this is The Ben Shapiro Show.
	The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Colton Haas.
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	Executive producer Jeremy Boring.
	Supervising producer Mathis Glover and Robert Sterling.
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	Audio is mixed by Mike Koromina.
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	The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire production.
	Copyright Daily Wire 2020.
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