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June 26, 2020 - The Ben Shapiro Show
54:41
Everything Is Republicans’ Fault | Ep. 1040
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As coronavirus reemerges, the media and Democrats blame Republicans, cultural icons move to appease the woke left, and Chaz meets its untimely demise.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
Today's Ben Shapiro Show is sponsored by ExpressVPN Units.
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Protect yourself at expressvpn.com slash Ben.
Well, I want to get to everything COVID related in just a moment.
First, I do want to announce a piece of actual good news.
Like I actually think this is very good news.
So NASCAR released a photo of the noose that wasn't a noose in Bubba Wallace's garage.
And it looks like a noose.
It does.
I mean, there's a picture, and I am not an expert on knots in any way.
If I had seen this, I would have thought this looks like a noose.
I would have.
I don't know why NASCAR didn't release it in the first place.
The FBI did a full investigation.
Apparently, they found that this was the only hand-tied pull-down rope in, like, all of NASCAR that looked like this.
So, to be immediately suspicious of this would not have been wrong.
For NASCAR to be suspicious wouldn't have been wrong.
For Bubba Wallace to be suspicious of this wouldn't have been wrong.
So, I'm very glad about that because, honestly, race hoaxes are really bad.
People just making mistakes.
Normal human life.
And that's fine.
And that's good.
It means that everybody went into this with good intentions and is coming out with good intentions.
And I prefer that story a lot more than some sort of nefarious race hoax happened here in order to gin up outrage or anything like that.
Now, NASCAR should have gone through the full investigation before they ran with the story, obviously.
But at least when it comes to Bubba Wallace, Bubba Wallace seems like he was acting in good faith throughout.
And that's really good.
And so any implication to the contrary, I apologize for if that implication was made, because Now that the photo's out, you can see why Bubba Wallace thought that this thing looked, in his words, like a straight-up news.
I totally get it.
So that's good news.
Again, better intentions on everybody's part is a very good thing, I think.
I mean, good intentions is better than bad intentions.
Just as I said that Bubba Wallace should be happy, as he said yesterday he was, that this wasn't a hate crime, I am very happy that nobody was trying to put anything over on anybody.
It was just a good-faith mistake.
Like that's a much better story for the country all the way around.
Okay, so meanwhile, coronavirus is resurging across the United States, also in Europe.
So people are neglecting that it's resurging in Europe.
The reason they're neglecting that it's resurging in Europe is because there's a narrative the media have to push.
The narrative the media are pushing in the United States is that it's only happening in red states.
It is not happening in blue states.
Now, on its face, that is simply not true.
It is resurging very, very strongly in California right now.
L.A.
County is apparently now the county with the most coronavirus cases in America.
It's resurging in states like Washington state, which is where it started in terms of the Chinese strain of the virus.
New York was European strain of the virus, meaning it had passed from China to Europe and then finally onto New York.
So it's just inaccurate to suggest it's only red states that are experiencing this.
But the media's new game is to pretend that blue state governors have been doing an amazing job with this and red state governors have been doing a terrible job with this.
We'll get to that in a second.
It isn't really true.
But one of the big problems with that narrative is that this thing is resurging all over the world.
It's not just resurging in the United States.
It's resurging in Europe as well, according to the BBC.
In 11 places, including Armenia, Sweden, Moldova, and North Macedonia, accelerated transmission has led to a very significant resurgence, said regional director Dr. Hans-Henry Kluge.
His warnings about the risk of resurgence had become reality, he said.
If left unchecked, he warned health systems would be pushed to the brink again.
More than 2.6 million cases of COVID-19 And 195,000 deaths have been reported in the WHO's European region, which is expansive, covering 54 countries and seven territories across Europe, the Middle East, and Central Asia.
Almost 20,000 new cases, more than 700 new deaths are being recorded daily.
Those numbers look very much like the United States' numbers, frankly.
Not in terms of the number of cases being identified, but the number of deaths being recorded daily.
That looks very much like the United States across the WHO's European region.
And the population of the United States, broad scale in terms of number of people, looks very much like Europe.
So this idea that the United States is being vastly outplayed by Europe, it's just not true.
Again, the WHO's European region has seen 195,000 deaths.
We've seen about 120,000 deaths here in the United States.
All of this is horrifying, of course.
In several countries across Europe, the risk has now become a reality.
30 countries have seen increases in new cumulative cases over the past two weeks, and 11 of those countries accelerated transmission has led to very significant resurgence that, if left unchecked, will push health systems to the brink once again, said the WHO.
Dr. Klug said that countries like Poland, Germany, Spain, and Israel had responded quickly to dangerous outbreaks associated with schools, coal mines, and food production settings, and brought them under control through rapid interventions.
He said the WHO anticipates that the situation will calm down further in the majority of the countries over the summer, but in the fall when COVID-19 may meet seasonal influenza, pneumonia, and other diseases, because ultimately the virus is still actively circulating, there's no effective treatment, no vaccine yet, We have to prepare for the fall.
And this has led to enormous repercussions in the United States and worldwide about what happens when kids go back to school.
Various regions of the United States are treating this differently.
For example, there's been talk in Massachusetts about reopening with full course load.
In Fairfax, Virginia, however, Fairfax, Virginia, that county has already announced that they're only going to go two days per week of school.
I know that in my child's school, what they've been talking about is all the kids coming back, but the kids being forced to sit at little cubicles and not eat lunch together, and they're supposed to be taking their food from different sort of little cubby holes, and their work from different cubby holes, so they're not sharing any of the pens, any of the erasers, any of the markers and all this.
Honestly, they're children.
I don't understand how that's going to work.
I think it's going to be very, very difficult for that to be workable.
I think there are going to be serious questions to be asked about whether reopening the schools is even possible if COVID-19 continues to be resurgent this way.
Now, there's some good news about COVID-19, and that is the CDC says that COVID-19 cases in the U.S.
may be 10 times higher than reported.
The estimate comes from a nationwide look at antibody tests.
Now, why is that good news?
Well, the reason that's good news is because if not that many people are dying, but tons of people are infected, that means the infection fatality rate of this thing is a lot lower than originally supposed.
Remember, originally the infection fatality rate Was calculated by the WHO at like 3.5%, meaning out of 100 people, 3.5 died.
And then the CDC last month announced that they thought the actual infection fatality rate was 0.26, meaning that out of every 10,000 people, 26 people died, which is a lot, a lot lower, right?
A lot lower.
And then they are now suggesting that maybe for every case that's reported, there are actually 10 other infections.
Which would mean that it's quite possible that the actual infection fatality rate looks more like the flu.
It's just way, way more transmissible than the flu.
The flu has a reproduction rate of a little below 2, is my understanding.
The reproduction rate on this virus, if left unchecked, is well above 3.
So that means, like, if everybody in the country got the flu, more people would die of the flu, even if the flu were just the flu.
Well, it's possible.
That's actually what we're seeing right here.
It does hit different populations in different ways, by the way.
Obviously, for young people, it is significantly less deadly than the flu.
If you're younger than the age of 25, by all statistics, it's less deadly than the flu.
If you're over the age of 25, it's a multiple of how deadly the flu is, depending on, again, how many outstanding, untested cases you believe there are.
According to NBC News, the assessment comes from looking at blood samples across the country for the presence of antibodies to the virus.
For every confirmed case of COVID-19, 10 more people had antibodies, Redfield said, referring to proteins in the blood that indicate whether a person's immune system has previously fought off the coronavirus.
The samples aren't just from people who have had antibody testing.
They also come from testing performed on donated blood at blood banks or from other laboratory testing of blood.
Currently, there are 2.3 million COVID-19 cases reported in the United States.
The CDC's new estimate pushes the actual number of coronavirus cases up to at least 23 million.
So there's good news and there's bad news.
The good news is that if you get it, and it turns out that lots of people are asymptomatic, then that means that maybe the chances aren't that great that you die.
Which is fantastic news, right?
You get it, it's not a death sentence.
On the other hand, if it's really transmissible, that means that there's a better chance that you are going to get it and experience that risk in your life.
Redfield said the virus causes so much asymptomatic infection.
The traditional approach of looking for symptomatic illness and diagnosing it obviously underestimates the total number of infections.
On Thursday, the CDC expanded its list of who is at greatest risk for COVID-19 complications, removing the age cutoff of 65.
Dr. Jay Butler, the head of the COVID-19 response at the CDC, said there's not an exact cutoff of age at which people should or should not be concerned.
He said, rather, a person's risk increases with age, but that does not preclude younger adults from complications.
Indeed, people of any age with underlying health conditions have a higher risk, obviously.
CDC also clarified other conditions that might increase a person's risk of severe illness.
That includes asthma, high blood pressure, neurologic conditions like dementia, cerebrovascular disease, such as stroke and pregnancy.
The CDC is incentivized by the way to be extremely careful about this sort of stuff so that means that if you have high blood pressure it's not going to be quite as deadly as if you have like type 2 diabetes or something so lumping it all together is a little bit inaccurate but the bottom line is That when you look at the rate of death from the behavior, that is the rates of death from behavior may be a lot lower than originally suspected.
That does not mean that the danger is gone, obviously, or that the virus is not dangerous, obviously.
And again, we still don't know how many people are asymptomatic.
Very difficult to test for people who are asymptomatic, except with sort of broad scale.
Antibody testing.
And we still don't know, by the way, if the antibodies are truly protective, which is a serious problem, right?
I mean, if you get the antibodies, it's not necessarily guaranteed that there's not going to be a second reinfection.
People get the flu every year, and then the next year they get the flu again.
So there's still a lot of open questions about all of this.
Now, we're going to get We'll get to the political side of this, which is really stupid and really ugly, but that's our time, stupid and ugly.
We'll get to that in just a moment.
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Hey, so here's where it gets really, really stupid.
The media have decided they're really going to cover in large scale only Texas, Florida, and Arizona.
California just is not going to get the same kind of coverage.
So California, which again is experiencing a massive resurgence of COVID-19 right now.
And California, which was locked down heavily, it still is locked down heavily.
Like you can't go to a restaurant in California right now.
If you try to go to a restaurant in California, they basically just reopened in the last couple of weeks.
Many restaurants still have not fully reopened because they can't Actually fulfill all of the basic prerequisites for reopening.
Major businesses are still not open in places like Los Angeles.
Los Angeles has been very slow to come around on this thing.
Over the past few weeks, really since the protests, you've started to see L.A.
open up a lot more and California open up a lot more.
And it is perfectly obvious that everybody was basically abiding by the stay-at-home orders until these massive protests broke out and the entire media infrastructure decided that you were immune to COVID if you went out to a major protest.
And then precisely two weeks later, exactly as everybody suspected, You started to see this massive uptick in places like California.
Now everyone wanted to blame that on Memorial Day, but Memorial Day happened May 25th.
Protests started May 26th.
So it's really, really difficult to suggest that it was just Memorial Day and not, you know, the obvious problem of hundreds of thousands of people out in the streets in America's major cities.
So California has been really hard hit in this resurgence.
There are states like Idaho that have been very hard hit in the resurgence.
Washington State, which, as I say, was a starter state for this thing, has been very hard hit in the resurgence.
But the media have decided they are only going to cover Abbott and DeSantis.
They're going to cover Greg Abbott in Texas.
Texas has now paused reopening as hospitals have been inundated with an explosion of COVID-19 cases.
Officials in Texas yesterday reported 47 more deaths, nearly 6,000 infections, a quote-unquote grim new daily record.
Now worth noting, New York State yesterday still recorded, I believe, more deaths than that.
So New York is supposed to be in the downswing of this thing, and they are.
But even in their downswing, they're recording more deaths on a daily basis than, I believe, either Texas or Florida.
If not more, then absolutely in the same ballpark.
The governor of Texas hit the brakes on reopening his state Thursday as hospitals were inundated with an explosion of COVID-19 cases, according to NBC News.
The last thing we want to do as a state is go backwards and close down businesses, Governor Greg Abbott said in a statement.
His temporary pause will help our state corral the spread until we can safely enter the next phase of opening our state for business.
Abbott urged all Texans to do their part to slow the spread of COVID-19 by wearing a mask, washing their hands regularly, socially distancing from others.
He said the more we all follow these guidelines, the safer our state will be, the more we can open up Texas for business.
Now, that makes perfect sense.
Again, I've been saying for a long time, if you want the economy to be reopened, then put on a mask.
Like seriously, slow the spread of the thing.
Make sure the elderly aren't being killed.
The question is what good policy looks like here.
Here's what good policy looks like to me.
And I've been saying this literally for months.
Protect the elderly and the vulnerable, particularly at the nursing homes where a disproportionate number of deaths have taken place.
Wear a mask if you are in a public place where this thing is easily transmitted.
And socially distance if you can.
That's pretty much all you can do.
Those are all the things.
There are no more things than that.
And limit giant public gatherings, obviously, because giant public gatherings are where these things spread and where people tend to take off the masks and where... By the way, masks don't reduce risk to zero.
If you're wearing a surgical mask...
You might reduce the risk by 30-40%, as Dr. Marty McCary from Johns Hopkins University said, but you're not going to reduce the risk by 100%.
But a lot of people reducing it by 30-40% is definitely a good thing.
Texas Medical Center in Houston has reported all of its ICU beds are now occupied.
So Houston has been particularly hard hit.
The United States saw a record number of new coronavirus cases in a single day, 45,557 reported on Wednesday, according to a tally by NBC News.
Southern and Western states like Arizona and Florida that began aggressively reopening around Memorial Day are now seeing staggering spikes that make clear the deadly virus is showing no signs of going away.
Now, this is where the media's coverage bias starts to come in.
Okay, the reality is a lot of these states started opening before Memorial Day.
A lot of these states started opening like mid-May, and they didn't see a spike.
In fact, everybody was sort of puzzled.
Why aren't we seeing a spike?
And the answer was that people were going about their business, but they were being responsible in how they went about their business.
In fact, I'm gonna look it up right now.
When did Florida reopening?
I wanna actually see the calendar.
So, the original reopening, let's see.
Florida reopened certain businesses through much of the state May 4th.
May 4th, right?
Starting May 4th, restaurants were allowed to offer outdoor seating with six foot spaces between.
So they started their reopening May 4th.
Nothing for a month.
Nothing for a month.
Then, massive protests.
Suddenly resurgence.
Don't tell me it was Memorial Day.
Okay, when you start reopening at the beginning of May, and there were other states that did this too, right?
Georgia started reopening beginning of May.
No massive resurgence.
Giant protests.
Massive resurgence.
So you're gonna try and put it on the reopening?
As opposed to, like, people who are attending restaurants and sitting six feet apart from each other?
As opposed to, you know, giant protests where people are up on each other yelling and spitting?
And by the way, the yelling and spitting is a key thing here, right?
One of the chief vectors of the spread of COVID-19 is projection.
This is why churches have been a place where people are getting very sick.
Because if you go to a church and everybody's singing together, when you sing, you aerosolize a lot of the particles in your body, a lot of your spit, and then it goes in the air, and then lots of people can get infected.
But again, the media are focusing only in on Florida and Arizona.
They're trying to blame Republicans for this, is the bottom line.
Buried way down in the article is California, which was among the first to put in place a statewide lockdown, has also been reporting record numbers of new cases, many of them young people.
And there was no evidence yet that the Black Lives Matter protests that swept the nation after the police killing of George Floyd were fueling the sudden rise.
Okay, so you're gonna have to explain why California, which has been completely locked down but allowed massive protests, is also seeing a significant spike.
Where was the other giant public activity?
It did not exist.
I'm from L.A.
No one was going out of their house.
Then, L.A.
was locked down during curfew.
And then, shockingly, the cases rise.
Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said it's important for the American people to know this is a localized situation.
It's not everywhere.
It's in certain places particularly.
Scott Gottlieb, former FDA commissioner, he said, we reopened against the backdrop of a lot of persistent spread in those states.
It's inevitable the cases were going to go up.
I think they've gone up more than most people expected.
I've certainly been surprised by the acceleration in the cases as well.
I think most of us were.
In Texas, Dr. Faisal Mazood, the medical director of critical care medicine at Houston Methodist Hospital System, said they were managing for now.
But, quote, if this trajectory is what it was the last 10 days when we literally had a tripling of our cases, we can't do that for a couple of weeks at all.
He said, this isn't good.
The explosion of patients all across that explosion has to slow down.
One of the things that's happening is people are assuming that all the ICU beds are available for COVID-19.
COVID-19 represents about a quarter of the number of people who are in the ICU.
People are in the ICU for a number, but like you have a heart attack, you're in the ICU.
You don't have COVID-19.
Meanwhile, in New York, Governor Andrew Cuomo insisted he was serious about enforcing a two-week quarantine.
Can governors of New Jersey and Connecticut want all visitors from current coronavirus hotspot states like Texas, Florida, and Alabama to follow?
And this is where we get into the real hardcore media bias.
Okay, so in a second, we're gonna hear the Washington Post try to blame Sean Hannity for the uptick in COVID-19.
And we're also gonna hear the media try and tout governors Andrew Cuomo and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, two of the worst governors in America.
If you are a governor, there are really only a few things you can do.
One is bar large gatherings.
Two is you can have a statewide mask mandate, but it's very difficult to enforce.
Basically, you rely on the compliance of the American people is all you can really do.
And three is you protect your nursing homes.
Whitmer and Cuomo both shipped old people with COVID-19 back into nursing homes.
And they killed a huge percentage of the old people in nursing homes in their state.
And they're being touted by the media because there is now a time delay between when we watched New York get walloped and Michigan get walloped.
And now?
Now we're supposed to believe that they were great at this, that they did an amazing, amazing job.
Because after we lost, what, 25,000 people in New York City?
Something along those lines?
After we lost tens of thousands of people in New York City because Governor Cuomo and Bill de Blasio are terrible at their jobs, now they're good at their jobs because they're on the other side of the decline.
Yeah, you killed off everybody who's vulnerable.
Turns out that now the spread isn't as grave in New York as you thought.
By the way, my prediction, in the next couple of weeks, because of the protests, you will in fact see a spike in cases in New York as well.
I don't think this is gonna be restricted to places like Florida or California.
We'll get to more of this in just one second.
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Okay, so the media are now trying to turn this on Republicans.
It's all Republicans' fault.
You guys are gaslighting us.
You're gaslighting us.
You spent weeks explaining that going out and protesting in the streets was fully justified because racism was more dangerous than COVID.
Now COVID is spreading across the country unchecked, and you're like, oh, it's the Republicans' fault.
By the way, this is why it was political malpractice for the President of the United States to start holding indoor rallies.
He should have immediately said, listen, I'm taking this seriously.
Look who's not taking this seriously.
Everything that happens from here on in, that's on the Democrats who said it was okay to get together in giant, giant groups and scream and yell.
It's political malpractice not to have done that, frankly.
Okay, so Florida and Texas, acting responsibly, are slowing down the reopening.
Ron DeSantis said that he never said when Florida would move to the next phase.
He said that South Florida is on its late reopening schedule.
Most businesses have resumed in Florida, including bars and nightclubs, with the exception of the hard-hit Miami metropolitan area, but there are still strict capacity limits and other rules as well.
Which I know about.
I mean, these things are accurate.
People are not crowding into spaces.
People are mostly eating outside.
But according to the media, again, the only people to blame here are members of the Republican Party and or conservative members of the media.
Not Andrew Cuomo suggesting this was not a big deal in early March.
Not Bill de Blasio telling people to come on down to Chinatown.
Not Bill de Blasio telling people to go to theaters.
Everything was all fine.
Not Nancy Pelosi explaining that everybody should celebrate Chinese New Year's in downtown San Francisco.
Like, none of that.
The only people to blame ever are Republicans.
There's an awful piece in the Washington Post today called New Research Explores How Conservative Media Misinformation May Have Intensified the Severity of the Pandemic.
Big emphasis on May.
Big emphasis on May.
In recent weeks, three studies have focused on conservative media's role in fostering confusion about the seriousness of the coronavirus.
Taken together, says the Washington Post, they paint a picture of a media ecosystem that amplifies misinformation, entertains conspiracy theories, and discourages audiences from taking concrete steps to protect themselves and others.
The end result, according to one of the studies, is that infection and mortality rates are higher in places where one pundit who initially downplayed the severity of the pandemic, Fox News' Sean Hannity, reaches the largest audience.
The study's awful.
Like, I've looked at the study.
The study is just garbage.
The study basically suggests that they put aside all confounds and then basically suggest that if you watch Sean Hannity, you are more likely to go out and act in an irresponsible way.
And here's their final conclusion.
The authors used anonymous location data from millions of cell phones to explore how the popularity of Fox News in a given zip code related to social distancing practices there.
By March 15, they found a 10% increase in Fox News viewership within a zip code reduced its residents' propensity to stay home in compliance with public health guidelines by about 1.3 percentage points.
That's not even close to causality.
Do you think that people spend all day watching Fox News in a county?
That's all they do?
There are no confounding factors there?
I'm sorry, this is just absurd.
It's plausible, of course, this difference in behavior could be attributed to other characteristics of Fox viewers, such as their age, or political ideology, or the fact that they live, by the way, in more rural areas where people are not as afraid of coronavirus because they don't think they're in a big city.
There are plenty of reasons.
But it seems to me that New York, Michigan, New Jersey got absolutely walloped by this thing.
These are not Sean Hannity centers of gravity.
The attempt to paint this is a Sean Hannity problem.
I mean, it's truly amazing.
And blame it on, it's all Sean's fault.
What absolute horse crap.
What absolute horse crap.
Meanwhile, Democrats being played up as heroes during all this.
So Chris Cuomo, who's been giving just propaganda slots to his brother, Andrew Cuomo, yesterday, he did this routine praising his brother, Andrew Cuomo.
He is the best.
He's the bestest governor.
He's my favorite, favorite, bestest governor, and he's my bro, and he's the bestest governor.
So Chris Cuomo did this sickening, sycophantic routine with his brother, who completely botched the effort to contain COVID in his own state.
Here is Chris Cuomo praising Andrew Cuomo.
This is real news right here.
I hope you are able to appreciate what you did in your state, and what it means for the rest of the country now, and what it will always mean to those who love and care about you the most.
I'm wowed by what you did, and more importantly, I'm wowed by how you did it.
This was very hard.
I know it's not over.
But obviously, I love you as a brother.
Obviously, I'll never be objective.
Obviously, I think you're the best politician in the country.
But I hope you feel good about what you did for your people, because I know they appreciate it.
Nothing's perfect.
You'll have your critics.
Thank you.
But I've never seen anything like what you did.
And that's why I'm so happy to have had you on the show.
Absolutely incredible.
So proud of you, bro.
You've just done the best job.
Yeah, talk to the people whose relatives died alone in nursing homes.
Talk to those people.
And then, Andrew Cuomo had the gall.
The gall.
I mean, unmitigated gall.
I will say, the dude has Has stones to say something like this.
He goes on national TV and he says that red state governors played politics and lost.
Played politics and lost.
Let me just make this clear.
To date, to date, New York state, I'm gonna read you the statistics, okay?
New York state has COVID-19 deaths.
New York state total COVID-19 deaths at this point.
Let's see.
About 24,800 COVID-19 deaths in New York.
Now, I'm gonna look at Florida.
Florida, to date, with the same population as New York, effectively.
3,327 deaths.
In New York, again, just so I can repeat that, slowly, for those of you in the mainstream media who don't seem to understand basic statistics, New York had nearly 25,000 deaths from COVID-19.
Florida is still well under 4,000 deaths.
Texas, another horrible state, a hellscape for all of this.
Texas has had under 2,300 deaths so far.
Arizona, another hellscape, completely botched because of terrible, terrible Governor Doug Ducey, has had less than 1,500 deaths so far.
But don't worry, Andrew Cuomo's the real hero in this.
Here's Andrew Cuomo explaining that it was the Republicans playing politics and they lost.
How is it possible that they lost when you're the one who lost almost literally ten times the number of people in your state with the same population?
Explain, Andrew Cuomo, explain.
Look at the numbers.
You played politics with this virus and you lost.
You told the people of your state and you told the people of this country, White House, don't worry about it.
Just open up, go about your business.
This is all Democratic hyperbole.
Oh, really?
Now you see 27 states with the numbers going up.
You see the death projections going up.
You see the economy going down.
It was never politics.
It was always science.
And they were in denial.
And denial is not a life strategy.
Okay, they're in denial and then denial is not a life strategy.
No one's in denial except for you.
Okay, you are the one who's shipping people with COVID-19 back into nursing homes and then blaming Trump for it and pretending that it was all about Trump not telling you the source of the virus was Europe, not China.
I mean, like, it's just absurd.
It's absurd.
And this guy gets played as a person who knows what he's doing.
I mean, you want like clearest case media bias ever.
This is clearest case media bias ever.
Okay, other example of media bias today.
An insane New York Times profile of Governor Gretchen Whitmer It's got the photo of her looking off into the distance, this black and white photo of her looking off into the distance from Phil Montgomery.
And here's the headline.
A governor on her own, with everything at stake.
From her living room, Gretchen Whitmer has led Michigan through a pandemic, an economic meltdown, and even a dam collapse, all at a time when government itself seems broken.
Okay, just gonna read you the stats from Michigan.
Michigan has over 6,000 deaths.
Michigan has over 6,000 deaths.
Texas, again, still has less than 2,500.
Florida still has less than 3,500.
Arizona still has less than 1,500.
Her state has 6,000 deaths already.
They lost 18 people yesterday in Michigan.
And yet she's getting the just the royal treatment, the absolute wonderful royal treatment in her state.
I'm going to need some evidence as to why Gretchen Whitmer, who also, by the way, was shipping people back into nursing homes with COVID-19, which is like the number one thing you do not do.
Why she is getting this sort of treatment from the mainstream media other than the media are trying to play up Democrats.
Some of the quotes from this thing, I mean, it's like her press office wrote it.
The New York Times says, Whitmer is not naturally introspective, recounting the almost incomprehensibly consequential decisions she was making on a daily basis.
She rarely lingered on how she felt or the magnitude of the moment.
She was more inclined to review events and discuss strategy, approaching it all with the same practical mindset and vocabulary she brought to more manageable government challenges, like fixing potholes.
The effect wasn't necessarily stirring.
There was no soaring rhetoric about the need to rise to this historic challenge, but it was oddly reassuring.
She was channeling panic into process.
Oh, what an amazing, amazing person.
As the days passed, the decisions facing Whitmer came to seem less complicated.
The next time I talked to her, she had just returned from a march through Detroit with a group of local religious leaders.
She went with one of her two teenage daughters who'd been pestering her for days to let her attend a protest.
It was a peculiar development, a head of government participating in a protest against the government.
But it also made perfect sense in this deeply disorienting moment.
There's a lot of pain across this country, she said, when I asked what had inspired her to go to the protest.
This is a righteous cause, and I wanted to be there in person.
In the middle of a pandemic.
Well, chiding other people.
What, what, what, what?
What a heroine.
What a heroine.
I mean, just incredible stuff.
So, I think we can all get the picture here.
The picture is very simple.
If you're a Republican, you're a bad guy.
If you're a Democrat, you're a good guy.
All this does translate into some of the national polling that we are seeing right now, amidst all of the chaos on race, which we'll get to in a moment.
Amidst the fact that this pandemic continues to spread across the country, somewhat unabated, the death rates are significantly down, but still, obviously, it's a dangerous virus.
People think that, according to particular estimates, there'll be 200,000 people dead by the end of summer, which obviously would be a tragedy of historic proportions.
President Trump is down in even the Fox News swing state polls.
According to Fox News, President Trump is down nine in Florida, 49-40.
He's down two in North Carolina, which he won last time, 47-45.
He won all of these states, by the way.
Biden is up two in Georgia, 47-45.
And Biden is up one in Texas, according to the Fox News poll.
Okay, if those polls are anything close to accurate, then the president's got a serious problem.
Meanwhile, Joe Biden is just basically sleeping through this campaign.
I mean, really sleeping through it.
Where is his great leadership?
This isn't about Trump.
It's not about Biden's great leadership.
This is almost solely about Trump's behavior.
Truly.
The American people are not willing to undergo a pandemic without leadership.
They're not willing to watch statues torn down and the country riven by race riots without any sort of leadership.
They're not willing to see republics of Chaz set up without any sort of presidential leadership.
This is not about Biden.
The way you can tell it's not about Biden is Biden's still in crack in 50%.
In the national polling, the ones that show up like 14%, it shows him at like 50 to 36.
It's not showing him at 60 to 40.
It's not showing him in 60, 40.
It's not showing him 55 to 40.
It's showing him at 49, right?
He's always below 50, which means that this is not about Joe Biden.
It is purely about the unpopularity of president.
And that makes, that makes perfect sense.
What Joe Biden right now is showing is that it is very difficult, literally, to beat a dead horse.
That's what we're seeing right now.
It is almost impossible to beat a dead horse, because that's all he is.
He's just a stand-in for inanimate objects.
Now, as we're about to discuss, he actually is not an inanimate object, and that's what's dangerous.
What makes him a dangerous candidate is the fact that how he acts as president is not going to be anything like the dead horse that he is as a candidate.
And he is, you know, obviously not performing as a candidate.
People are like, it's a brilliant campaign.
No, it's not a campaign at all.
He understands that all his campaign has to be is just there.
It just has to be breathing.
And that's pretty much all you're getting.
I mean, even when he's supposed to be speaking about things like COVID, he's just blowing it, right?
I mean, he said yesterday that we have 120 million dead from COVID, which I feel like would be bigger news if that were true.
Here is Joe Biden staggering his way through another interview.
But This guy's in the lead, and he's only in the lead for one reason.
The feeling of chaos, the feeling of volatility, and the feeling that these things aren't getting locked down, and that Joe Biden represents some sort of return to normalcy.
Now, as we will see, he does not represent a return to normalcy.
That's what makes this election so dangerous.
Here's Biden.
People don't have a job.
People don't have anywhere to go.
They don't know what they're going to do.
And a lot of people you have unnecessarily, now we have over 120 million dead from COVID.
A hundred and twenty million dead from COVID.
Wow.
Figured wouldn't known about them.
Yeah, we're gonna get to in a second why it's dangerous for this man to become president of the United States, because the quick, quick spoiler alert.
The answer is because Joe Biden, like most members of the Democratic Party, he's beholden to his radical left.
It's hard to portray him that way because he's old and because he's doddering and because he's unthreatening and because he explicitly disassociated from sort of the Bernie Sanders wing of the party.
But He won't actively disassociate from some of the more radical planks that people in his party want.
He's a weakling, in other words.
We're gonna get to that in a second.
First...
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Okay, so.
The reason that Joe Biden remains a danger to the country, despite the fact that he's effectively senile and not with it at this point, is specifically because he is not going to be stymying his left-wing base.
The left-wing base is taking control of the party, completely.
How do you know this?
Well, over the past several days, there has been this real push, this very, very hard push, To tear down all the statues, right?
Not just the statues of Confederate generals.
To blow up Mount Rushmore.
I mean, I predicted this, but there's a campaign afoot to change Mount Rushmore.
There's a campaign afoot to get rid of the Jefferson Memorial.
There's a campaign to get rid of statues of George Washington.
Nancy Pelosi is now caving to this.
Nancy Pelosi was asked yesterday about tearing down statues.
And she said, well, maybe we should consider whether any statues are to exist.
I mean, this is...
This is wild stuff.
These mainstream Democratic politicians who run the party, caving to the woke base of their party that wants to rip down statues of the founders of the country, which again is endemic of a certain ideology that is truly ugly about the United States.
Here is Nancy Pelosi yesterday with the Washington Post.
These Confederates, Jefferson Davis, Alexander Stevens, they committed treason against the United States.
In the name of slavery.
I think that's a different story.
But you know what?
Subject everything to scrutiny and make a decision.
But I do think we should do it in a safer way rather than a more dangerous way.
Subject it all.
Subject it all to scrutiny.
Jefferson, Washington.
She says, yeah, it's different.
It's different for like Jefferson Davis, which of course is true.
But then she's like, well, maybe we should, let's consider all of it.
Joe Biden's campaign.
When I say that this has infected the entire democratic infrastructure, The Daily Caller reached out to the Biden campaign and asked them if the former vice president agrees with Democrats who want to tear down statues of George Washington, Ulysses S. Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, and some depictions of Jesus.
The campaign was given over 24 hours to respond to the inquiry.
They did not do so.
That is not a shock at all.
Of course they're not going to do so.
The entire campaign of Joe Biden is to play dead, to appease his woke base.
Now, what will he do when he's in office?
So, I don't think he's stupid enough to actually attempt to tear this sort of stuff down, but I also do not think that he is in control of his own party.
And I think that his own party has gone so far off the rails at this point that it's being dictated to by the likes of Nicole Hannah-Jones, the founder of the 1619 Project.
There's a whole now nationwide discussion prompted by a bad essay by Nikole Hannah-Jones on slavery reparations that likens the death of Michael Brown to lynchings from 1910 in Oklahoma.
I mean, it's an absurd piece.
It's being discussed ad nauseum on television today because the Democratic Party has been taken over by the wokest members of the wokest members of their political of their political clique.
By the way, I think it's important to note where Nicole Hannah-Jones is coming from.
So, here's the thing.
If you wrote something like 25, 30 years ago, and then you repudiate it and you say, yeah, that was a bad idea, that was a stupid thing to write, I get it.
I've done it myself.
I was writing from the time I was 17 years old, and when you write publicly, you are subjected to scrutiny, as you should be.
I have an entire list online of things that I have said from the time I was young that I regret having said and thought was stupid or bad.
That's all normal.
That's a normal thing in public discourse.
So, it is not outside the realm of reality to ask about Nikole Hannah-Jones.
Uh, about this, this letter to the editor that she apparently wrote this according to the Federalist reporting today.
Jordan Davidson reporting over at the Federalist.
A letter from Nikole Hannah-Jones to the editor of the school newspaper at Notre Dame.
Now, this doesn't mean anybody should be cancelled.
I'm not saying Nikole Hannah-Jones should be cancelled.
She shouldn't be cancelled.
In fact, I think it's very good that the New York Times is just allowing her free reign over there so we can see that the New York Times is a trash compost heap, that it's just garbage.
Because, frankly, the 1619 Project is garbage in and of itself enough that Like, I don't need further cause to think that Nikole Hannah-Jones is very bad at her job.
I've read you enough quotes of her saying crazy things that I don't think you need more proof that she's bad at her job.
But it does go to the question of sort of motivation and whether she has changed her opinion on any of this stuff, because it's coming from a lot of the same places.
Here is what she wrote back when she was in college.
I find it hard to believe that any member of the white race can have the audacity and hypocrisy to call any other culture savage.
The white race is the biggest murderer, rapist, pillager, and thief of the modern world.
Europeans have colonized and destroyed the indigenous populations on every continent of this planet.
They've committed genocide against cultures that have never offended them in their greed and insatiable desire to control and dominate every non-white culture.
Christopher Columbus and those like him were no different than Hitler.
The crimes they committed were unnecessarily cruel and can be only described as acts of the devil.
Africans had been to the Americas long before Columbus or any Europeans.
The difference is that Africans had the decency and respect for human life to learn from the Native Americans and train technology with them.
This is a weird thing.
The pyramids of the Aztecs and the great stone heads of the Olmecs are lasting monuments to the friendship of these two peoples.
Well, that's an interesting take on where those monuments came from.
But as David Walker wrote in his Appeal of 1829, the white men acted, quote, more like devils than accountable men.
Whites have always been an unjust, jealous, unmerciful, avaricious, and bloodthirsty set of beings, always seeking after power and authority.
It was not enough for whites to come to the Americas and learn.
They looked upon the native people as inferior and a people to be annihilated.
Their lasting monument was the destruction and enslavement of two races of people.
Using Christianity as their excuse, the white race denied the native people their humanity.
Not only did they rape and murder the indigenous peoples of America, they killed off many more by introducing diseases which came from filth and uncleanliness to the native people.
Poop only existed in Europe.
The white race used deceit and trickery, warfare and rape to steal the land from people who had lived here for thousands and thousands of years.
Over and over again, whites made peace treaties with the Native Americans, telling them if they moved just this one time and gave up their land to the greedy settlers just this one last time, they would never have to move again.
It was common knowledge that the white man's word could not be trusted.
Even today, the descendants of these savage people pump drugs and guns into the black community, pack black people into the squalor of segregated urban ghettos, and continue to be bloodsuckers in our communities.
Yes, it was Columbus that set the platforms for these racist American institutions.
A devil calling someone a savage is like a pot calling the kettle black.
But, after everything these barbaric devils did, I do not hate them or their descendants.
I understand that because of some lacking, they felt they needed to constantly prove their superiority.
Okay, wild stuff, right?
So, here's the thing.
Again, she shouldn't be canceled over this, because I don't think people should be canceled over opinions generally.
I think it's a complete waste of time.
And it's not like we didn't know that this is the kind of stuff that she was writing back in college, because she basically writes a watered-down version of this today.
It is just a very, it seems to me, very important to recognize the root ideology that is now being promulgated in the Democratic Party at its most crude form.
And by the way, it's not just Nikole Hannah-Jones.
Like, she's an ideological thought leader and obviously the de facto editor of the New York Times at this point.
But it's people like Jamal Bowie.
Jamal Bowie literally just said the other day, quote, Instead, the slaves freed the slaves.
Emancipation was, quote, something they took for themselves.
The most that can be said of Lincoln and the nation's political leadership is that they, quote, helped set freedom in motion and eventually codified it into law with the 13th Amendment.
Bowie says that the Union Army basically only delivered the news of the Emancipation Proclamation. - Yeah.
Um... What?
What?
Yes, black Americans were very important in contributing to the abolitionist movement.
Also, hundreds of thousands of white men died to free black slaves.
Abraham Lincoln spent his presidency working to free black slaves.
Abolitionism was a longtime cause in the white community in the United States.
William Lloyd Garrison, right?
I mean, like, this is just so, it's so ignorant on every level and stupid on every level and divisive on every level.
But, you know, this is the new narrative.
The new narrative is that America is root evil, and that it's root evil and racially divided in its entirety.
That's the ideology that's taken over the Democratic Party, and it's really, really, really dangerous stuff.
It's really dangerous stuff.
And the fact that Biden is not forcibly disavowing that sort of ideology, that does not speak to a moderate presidency, should he ever gain power.
We're gonna get to more of this in just a second.
The cultural revolution continuing apace.
We'll get to that first.
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Okay, we're gonna get more into the cultural revolution and The very, very sad death of Chaz.
Chaz, not a person, the place.
Chaz has met its untimely demise.
The best story of the year.
I mean, really, it's been a terrible year.
Chaz is a fantastic story.
We'll get to that in just one second.
First, if you've never pre-ordered a book before, make this your very first time pre-ordering a book, because I think my most important book, and I really like Right Side of History.
I think this is a more important book for the time.
This book, How to destroy America in three easy steps.
I wrote back in December and January.
I talked about the coming dissolution of the country.
I talked about how the 1619 project was destroying our history.
How there was an attempt afoot by what I call disintegrationists to divide America along racial and class lines.
How America's philosophy was being destroyed in real time.
The philosophy of equal rights before the law being discarded.
How our culture of rights, our belief in things like freedom of speech, the right to bear arms, all this was being discarded.
The book is not just a diagnosis of our ills.
It is a solution to the ills because it explains what is so great about America in the first place.
Why are all these things worthy of being upheld?
And why is the argument being made by people like Nicole Hannah-Jones just so wrong, both historically as a matter of fact, and also why is it so wrong ideologically and so dangerous for the country?
The book is called How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps.
I think it's a really, really important book.
I didn't have any idea how relevant it was going to be when I wrote it.
Turns out, supremely relevant.
You want to know what's happening in the country?
How to fix it?
Pre-order it right now at dailywire.com slash ben to pre-order the book.
It's out July 21st, so you'll get it like the first few days it is in stock when you pre-order at dailywire.com slash ben.
Meanwhile, it is that glorious time of the week when I give a shout out to a Daily Wire member.
Today, it's Megan on Instagram, who understands that sometimes you have to make tough sacrifices.
Yeah, well done there.
Thanks for the pic.
picture.
Megan's son sports a Spider-Man t-shirt and he is smiling ear to ear, proudly holding the world's greatest beverage vessel.
It is indeed fantastic.
The caption reads, Caleb is three.
He's already claimed my leftist tears Tumblr.
He calls it his Ben Shapiro cup and wanted me to send this picture to you.
Hashtag leftist tears Tumblr.
Hashtag your youngest fan.
That is an extraordinarily cute child.
Yeah, well done there.
Thanks for the pick.
Big hello to Caleb Zion.
Also, if you haven't seen the verdict podcast with Ted Cruz, you do need to check it out.
My very best friend in the whole wide world, Michael Mills, and I'm being facetious because he is the worst person I've ever met, co-host the show on their most recent episode they had on AG Bill Barr.
Here's a bit of what that sounded like.
We are seeing Strong evidence of coordination in many of these violent episodes.
Fundamentally, what you have here is you have demonstrators, some of them go there with the intent of demonstrating, but you have a group of provocateurs and agitators, sometimes a significant group, that try to convert those into violent activity.
And they seem to be very well coordinated when they show up.
Alrighty, so check that out wherever podcasts are found.
Try to ignore the fact that Knowles is on the show and enjoy Senator Cruz along with A.G.
Barr.
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All righty.
So the cultural revolution, as I say, continues apace.
There's now a push to replace the Star Spangled Banner, because it was written by Francis Scott Key.
There's a piece by Lindsay Parker, the editor-in-chief of Yahoo Music, suggesting that we replace, I am not kidding you, we replace the Star Spangled Banner with Imagine.
With the worst song ever written in human history.
And by the way, maybe we should just do it.
We've fallen further from God's grace every day here in this country.
And I think that if God has really decided to punish us this way, perhaps Imagine is the final shameful adoption of that which has become our national credo.
A nation without any sort of principle, borders, religion, concept of sin, a vindictive, horrifying nation of people enacting intolerable cruelties like singing Imagine to them on each other.
So there's a push to get rid of the national anthem.
Also, it's all stupid posturing at this point.
Mayor Bill de Blasio wants to paint Black Lives Matter on the street outside Trump Tower, which is just idiotic.
Congratulations, Mayor de Blasio.
You solved all the problems in New York City, including the massive spate of shootings that has happened in your city over the last 14 days because you have decided to castrate the police.
So, more dead people, but also paint on the sidewalk to make fun of Trump.
You owned him.
You owned him.
All those dead people, they feel really great about Mayor Bill de Blasio painting crap outside.
I love that you're painting Black Lives Matter outside Trump Tower while black people get shot in New York.
Really, the irony is, I think, lost on very few people.
Really, really amazing stuff.
And Trump is so easily goaded.
He then tweeted in response.
He said he referenced de Blasio's plan to, quote, paint the fabled and beautiful Fifth Avenue right in front of Trump Tower slash Tiffany.
And then he went after Black Lives Matter and pointed out that the Black Lives Matter group is incredibly radical, which, of course, is true.
But these sort of fulminations, are these super useful?
Meanwhile, even minor violations of our new creed in America must be expunged.
So, good news, they're changing Splash Mountain.
Splash Mountain will now be the Princess and the Frog.
Do I really care about that?
Not really.
I kind of like Princess and the Frog.
And if you ever go to... I'm a big Disneyland person.
We have annual passes.
If you ever go to Mickey's Magical Map, the culmination of that whole show, is a number from Princess and the Frog.
So it's a lot of fun.
You want to do that?
Fine.
It's on Disney to do that.
That's cool.
But the reason they are doing it is because apparently Splash Mountain was giving out like subtle racist messages because it uses Zippity-Doo-Dah, which comes from Song of the South, which is an actual racist cartoon.
But nobody who has ever sung Zippity-Doo-Dah for the last 50 years is aware of the origins of Zippity-Doo-Dah.
Like no one.
I've been on Splash Mountain a thousand times.
It has never occurred to me it has anything to do with race at all.
There are not even people on the ride, right?
It's Br'er Rabbit and the weird bear and all this.
Like, that... Okay.
Anyway, they're changing that because even the mildest hint of something bad in history has to be expunged.
Also, the Dixie Chicks are changing their name.
They're no longer the Dixie Chicks.
Now they will be known as the Chicks.
Which doesn't really seem to me to solve the problem.
I feel like that's just radically sexist.
Shouldn't they be the Wimmicks?
Shouldn't they be the pronoun of unspecified gender?
Chicks seems a little bit, it seems a little bit demeaning, the chicks.
So they're getting rid of Dixie because apparently this means that, like if you ever say Dixie, so like Winn-Dixie, does Winn-Dixie have to change its name?
If you use the term Dixie, which is like a geographic region, if you use that term, do you have to get rid of it?
By the way, was anybody under the misimpression that the Dixie chicks were like confederates?
I'm just wondering.
So all of this seems very stupid, but the good news is at least we can find humor in this stupidity.
So this is the best story of the day.
Chazz is falling apart, guys.
It's falling apart.
And it's falling apart in the most hilarious possible way.
Apparently, people are just leaving.
People are fleeing the beautiful, beautiful landscape of democracy-ridden Chazz.
A block party of joy.
Where people are just getting shot kind of randomly.
They're just leaving this peaceful preserve away from the predations of American capitalism and the brutality of America's racist cops.
And they're fleeing this wonderful utopia for the racist, violence-ridden hellscape of the United States.
So they've left the independent Republic of Chaz and they're moving back into the United States.
A statement from a Twitter account that claims to be associated with the protest zone said, only a few people remain in our beloved CHOP.
Only a few people.
That's the super, super sad stuff.
By the way, Mayor Jenny Durkan, who had declared this thing like a democracy protest and all of this, she had said that we're going to clean this thing out in the next few weeks because it turns out people keep getting shot in Utopia.
Thousands of protesters occupied it, and then everybody left.
By the way, a bunch of business owners now suing the city properly for not protecting their property.
Properly.
Hip-hop artist and de facto chop warlord Raz Simone acknowledged the protesters have drawn attention from critics.
You're not in America!
You're in CHAZ!
So that's on you, dude!
That is an issue.
A lot of peaceful protesters are being harmed.
So it's sad that's where we're at in America.
You're not in America.
You're in Chaz.
So that's on you, dude.
If you're the leader of Chaz and people are getting shot in your territory, I feel like that's you.
The best quote on this is from a Seattle community leader named Andre Taylor.
He said, it's over because of the violence.
I've told people here, don't be focused on the location.
CHOP is not a location.
It's an idea.
It's an idea.
True CHOP has never been tried.
True CHAZ has never been tried.
It's an idea, guys.
Sure, the reality is people bleeding out in the streets, and us trying to farm by dumping topsoil on cardboard and calling it a farm, and us sitting out there and Mao-shaming each other, doing Maoist struggle sessions about our white privilege.
But really, it's more an idea than it was a reality.
True chop has never been tried.
It's really great.
Chop really was the friends we made along the way, except the ones who are dead.
Those ones, we don't remember them.
But everybody else, it was the journey.
Chop was the journey, not the destination, guys.
Chop was the idea, it wasn't the reality.
Indeed.
Chop.
A sad R.I.P.
to Chop.
We hope that it will one day be resurrected in a newer, better form.
Sort of like Venezuela versus Cuba.
Probably it'll work out exactly differently.
Probably it won't be... It'll be great.
It'll be great.
Alrighty.
Well, come back here later today for two additional hours of content.
Otherwise, try to have yourself a weekend.
Don't pass on an infection to anybody.
Try not to tear down a statue accidentally.
Try not to burn down the country.
I keep encouraging people to do this over the weekend, then everybody just ignores it.
Maybe I should go the other way.
Maybe I should just encourage people to do evil things, and then they'll ignore me and do the right things.
Because it seems like my attempts to push people to be better have failed dramatically.
Sorry about that.
It's on me, guys.
It's on me.
I accept my own white privilege, as Robin DiAngelo might say.
We'll see you here next week.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Colton Haas, executive producer Jeremy Boring, supervising producer Mathis Glover and Robert Sterling, assistant director Pavel Lydowsky, technical producer Austin Stevens, playback and media operated by Nick Sheehan, associate producer Katie Swinnerton, edited by Adam Sajovic, audio is mixed by Mike Koromina, hair and makeup is by Nika Geneva.
The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire production, copyright Daily Wire 2020.
You know, the Matt Wall Show, it's not just another show about politics.
I think there are enough of those already out there.
We talk about culture, because culture drives politics, and it drives everything else.
So my main focuses are life, family, faith.
Those are fundamental, and that's what this show is about.
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