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Aug. 6, 2020 - The Ben Shapiro Show
50:31
Is Joe Biden Mentally There? | Ep. 1068
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As the campaign heats up, Joe Biden, stumbling and bumbling, begins to bite him.
The Biden campaign dumps a scurrilous COVID ad on the Trump administration.
And we tell the amazing story of a fake Native American bisexual professor who didn't die of COVID.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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Alrighty, so.
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What you do need Okay, so before I begin, you may have noticed that we have changed venue a little bit.
The reason we have changed venue is for the same reason my voice sounds a little bit different today.
I got a bit of a cough, got a bit of a cold, and so I had a COVID test yesterday.
I'm waiting for the results.
In the meantime, I am isolating here in Casa de Shapiro.
When I find out what's going on, then I will head back into the office when I am clean and am no longer a danger to others around me.
Okay, so I just want to make that brief note so you know what the hell is going on.
Meanwhile, I'm not the only one relegated to my basement.
Joe Biden continues to be relegated to his basement.
The big problem for Joe Biden is that he is falling apart.
He's just falling apart.
It is perfectly obvious to anyone, any sentient human being with a functioning pair of eyes and a prefrontal cortex that Joe Biden is not even what he used to be.
And let's face it, Joe Biden used to be not that great.
So he's even less great now.
Joe Biden is just mentally inept.
He can't string sentences together anymore.
He sounds like He sounds like a normal person after they've had a bunch of Ambien.
And that is what Joe Biden sounds like.
And this is not due to the fact that he had a stutter when he was younger.
He overcame that.
What we are seeing now is simply age manifest.
It doesn't mean that he's completely senile.
It does mean that his faculties have begun to degrade.
And you can see it in real time.
And he says weird thing after weird thing.
So far, it has not come back to bite him because Donald Trump is so volatile that all Biden has to do is basically point to Trump.
As we see more and more of Biden, there are going to be serious questions to be asked.
And if Trump can somehow hold himself together for more than five seconds, a lot of the focus in this campaign is going to shift to Joe Biden.
In fact, there's some pretty good poll numbers suggesting that the race is tightening even this early.
And when I say this early, I mean, it's still kind of early, right?
I mean, it's the beginning of August.
We haven't had conventions or anything yet.
Biden's RealClearPolitics polling average is now only six points up.
He's only six and a half points up on Donald Trump.
Okay, well, just a couple of weeks ago, that looked a lot more like nine or 10 points.
In fact, in three of the last four national polls, Donald Trump is within striking distance, namely three or four points of Joe Biden.
According to a new Hill-Harris poll, Biden is up only three nationally, 43 to 40.
And if he's up 43 to 40, Trump wins the election.
Really, because Trump is going to do better than 40.
And if Biden is stuck down to 43, that looks very much like a lot of the polls that Hillary Clinton had going into 2016, where she was getting like 44% of the vote and Trump was at 39.
There are a couple numbers to watch.
One is the gap.
The other is the fact that Biden seems unable to break 50% in nearly any poll.
He's having real trouble breaking 50% in the last few polls.
He's down around 47, 48%.
Trump will finish somewhere up around 45%.
He will.
So you've got the Hill-Harris poll.
Then you have a Rasmussen poll that shows Biden up 48, 45.
And you have an Emerson poll showing Biden up 50 to 46.
In all of those, Donald Trump is significantly within striking distance.
Now in the swing states, Biden is leading in all the swing states at this point, but it is also true that Trump is within striking distance in a lot of those swing states.
He's within about four in North Carolina.
He's within about four in Florida.
He's within about five in Pennsylvania.
He's within three in Arizona.
He needs to win a lot of those states, but Could it happen?
Sure.
Especially again, if the focus begins to shift to Biden.
Speaking of which, so Joe Biden over the last 48 hours, he's just fallen all over himself.
So he was doing an interview with the National Association of Black Journalists, and he just randomly decided that he was going to say that all black people think alike, unlike Latino people.
Unlike Latino people who are quite diverse, black people all think alike.
Here is Joe Biden falling all over himself.
What you all know, but most people don't know, unlike the African American community, with notable exceptions, the Latino community is an incredibly diverse community, with incredibly different attitudes about different things.
So, that's wild.
Okay, like, really, if Donald Trump went out there and he's like, all the black people, they think the same, and they, like, look the same, and...
Everybody's like, well, what, what now, Donald?
But Joe Biden's out there being like, Latinos are very diverse and very diverse, unlike black people who are not diverse at all.
They all kind of are thinking the same.
Okay, so that guy is not with us.
Joe Biden is not with us.
And it's literally every other word that comes out of his mouth is incoherent.
I mean, yesterday, again, National Association of Black Journalists, here he is just stumbling all over himself again.
And this is like a regular thing.
I'm so forward-looking to have an opportunity to sit with the President or stand with the President in debates.
There's going to be plenty of time.
And by the way, as I joke with him, you know, I shouldn't say it.
I'm going to say something I probably shouldn't say.
Anyway, I am very willing to let the American public judge my physical as well as my mental fitness.
Guys, he's super happy to have the American public judge his physical and mental fullness.
That guy is who the Democrats chose.
He is very lucky right now.
That he is basically in the basement.
Because if this person were out there on the campaign trail, this would be all the footage, wall to wall, all the time.
And then he botched his own China policy.
So again, it's not like he's doing this a little bit.
He's doing it pretty much every single thing he says.
Here was Joe Biden yesterday botching his own China policy.
The way China will respond is when we gather the rest of the world that in fact believes in open trade and making sure that we're in a position that the world, that we deal with WHO the right way, that in fact, that's when things begin to change.
That's when China's behavior is going to change.
He's not speaking English, guys.
He is not speaking English.
And it is perfectly fair to point this out because what it really means is that whoever he picks as his VP is going to be president.
And we can fairly assume that within a couple of years, Joe Biden, I mean, if he's declined this much just over the course of the campaign, and he has, then who is going to be effectually be the president?
It ain't going to be Biden.
That is not an absurd contention, nor is it an ageist contention.
He is just not fully there.
There are plenty of people who are 80 who are fully there.
Joe Biden is declining.
Listen, I had a violin teacher when I was younger.
He was 80 years old.
His name was Abram Stern.
Fantastic, fantastic teacher.
He was with it.
He was sharp.
I have a grandmother who's 89.
She's with it.
She is sharp.
She's much more with it than Joe Biden is right now.
No question.
How not with it is Joe Biden.
Again, if you just reversed the parties, he'd be getting ripped up and down for the kind of crap that spews out of his mouth on a regular basis.
Yesterday, he asked a black journalist from CBS News if he was a junkie, not joking, a thing that happened in real life.
Please clarify, specifically, have you taken a cognitive test?
No, I haven't taken a test.
Why the hell would I take a test?
Come on, man.
That's like saying you, before you got in this program, you take a test where you're taking cocaine or not.
What do you think, huh?
Are you a junkie?
What do you say to President Trump who brags about his test and makes your member state an issue for voters?
Are you a junkie?
Look at that crazy-ass Cesar Romero Joker smile pasted on that grill.
My goodness.
My goodness.
Well, it's no wonder that many medical professionals are wondering about what they are seeing in Joe Biden.
And don't give me the, you don't get to speculate from afar on his medical condition.
I'm not speculating on his medical condition.
I'm just telling you what I see in front of my very own eyes.
This didn't work for Hillary Clinton when she tried to claim that she was totally fine and then collapsed into a van.
It certainly is not going to work for Democrats whistling past the graveyard, no pun intended, with Joe Biden.
With Joe Biden going around basically pretending he's perfectly fine and we can all see that he is basically bumping into the furniture.
There's a doctor named Mark Siegel, he's on Fox, he was on with Sean Handy last night, he said, Joe Biden should probably have some sort of diagnostic assessment because this does not look particularly good.
Again, I can't diagnose him over a video camera, but when he was talking about those two animals, he wasn't even talking about the president.
He was talking about a CNN anchor that made that mistake.
That show is wandering.
I've made my career about not diagnosing remotely, but I'm concerned about a lot of the things I'm seeing, and I feel more towards the president's point that it's fair game.
It's something that's fair game.
If these tests aren't done, then the voters have to decide, right?
But I think it's right to have an assessment.
Now, we had a medical examination in December, a full medical examination, but this was not addressed at that time, Sean.
Again, he seems to be falling apart.
We're going to get to more of Joe Biden in just a second.
The fact that he's falling apart is allowing him to avoid the actual blame for the stuff that he's saying.
I mean, saying that all black people think the same while all Latino people do not is pretty racist.
It really is.
I mean, I don't know what he thinks he is saying there, but it's pretty incredible that he said it out loud, and then everybody's like, oh, okay, well, that's just Joe being senile.
Okay, either his senility is a point in his favor or it is a point against him.
You cannot have it both ways.
We'll get to more of this in just one second.
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Alrighty, so...
Good news for Biden is that Biden gets to continue hiding in the basement.
He has announced that he is not ever going to leave the basement.
Originally, he was scheduled to fly to Wisconsin to accept the party nomination.
Now he's not going to.
No one else will go to Milwaukee.
He's instead going to just stay in his basement and accept the nomination from there, which, again, makes sense.
He's basically playing prevent defense here, is Joe Biden.
It's not like he has a great offense here.
Joe Biden's entire campaign is, I'm not Trump, and I'm also barely alive.
So staying in the basement serves him perfectly well.
It is hilarious to watch Nancy Pelosi say the reason that Biden is staying home is because he's so serious about COVID.
That seems somewhat unlikely to me.
I mean, Biden could certainly do a socially distanced speech in Milwaukee.
He's staying at home because it's very comfortable at home.
And it means that he never has to leave the basement or ask or answer any significant questions.
Here is Nancy Pelosi, dentures a-clackin'.
Oh, I think that we're all learning this at the same time now, that he won't be there.
But I think it's an indication of the seriousness with which he judges the situation.
This pandemic is dangerous and the increase in numbers just demands that we keep our distances.
I commend him for doing that.
It's going to be a great convention.
Yes, I'm sure that that's exactly what's going to happen.
I'm sure that it's all about the pandemic, and it has nothing to do with the fact that Joe Biden is perfectly comfortable staying out of the limelight and letting Trump have his own way with the limelight.
Meanwhile, President Trump is campaigning against Biden, and he is correct.
He says, listen, Joe Biden is going to be whatever they tell him to be.
Joe Biden is not in control of himself.
He is not in control of this campaign, and he is not in control of the Democratic Party platform.
There was Trump going after Biden yesterday.
Joe Biden's whatever they tell him to be.
And I think it's good that a wife is... I would expect a wife to say that.
That's the appropriate thing to say.
But Joe is being taken so far left.
Look at the manifesto that he and Bernie agreed to.
That's further left than Bernie ever was.
And Trump is exactly right about all of this.
Mike Pence did a speech yesterday in which he went after Biden with alacrity as well, pointed out that Joe Biden wants a $1 trillion tax increase in a time of economic crisis, which is pretty much the worst idea ever.
Here was the vice president going after Joe Biden.
I mean, in the midst of a pandemic, Joe Biden would raise taxes by a trillion dollars.
The contrast?
President Donald Trump cut taxes for the American people and we're going to keep fighting for tax relief for the American people for four more years.
More broadly, Pence is saying that Biden is going to set us on a path toward socialism and decline.
Now, here's the thing.
The Trump campaign basically has to make a two-step argument when it comes to Joe Biden.
Step number one, dude's not in control of himself.
Step number two, the people who are in control are the people who are radical.
The good news for them is that Biden is providing evidence of that every day, and whoever he selects as his VP pick is going to go a long way toward opening a door for Republicans.
This is why I think his smart pick is probably Susan Rice.
She appears somewhat more moderate in public than, for example, a communist like Karen Bass.
She's not nearly as off-putting as Kamala Harris.
I think it'll probably end up being Susan Rice, if I had to bet money on it.
But with that said, whoever he selects, whomever Biden selects, is likely to become the focal point of the campaign.
Pence says, listen, Biden is going to set us on a path toward socialism and decline.
And he's not going to be a bulwark in favor of any of the values of capitalism or Americanism that America historically has stood for.
Cuz the truth is Joe Biden and the Radical Democrats would set America on a path of socialism and decline.
President Trump set our nation on a path of freedom and opportunity from the very first day of this administration.
All Trump has to do, so the question of this campaign, just like the question of the last campaign, is who voters are focused on when they go into the voting booth or when they mail in their mail-in ballot, as the case may be.
So in 2016, the great myth is that people were thinking about Trump when they cast their ballot.
The truth is they were thinking about Hillary and how much they didn't like Hillary Clinton.
And that is why voters who didn't like either Hillary or Trump voted overwhelmingly for Trump.
Well, in 2020, the same question applies.
Are people thinking about Biden or are they thinking about Trump when they go into the voting booth?
Right now, they're overwhelmingly thinking about Trump.
But if Biden continues to gaffe and if he selects someone radical as his VP, that could seriously change.
It could also change if President Trump would tone it down a little bit and be concerted in his actual approach to his own campaign.
That is why it seems like just another foolish move for the president to decide that he is going to give his nomination acceptance speech from the White House, which raises all sorts of questions about the legality of, are you allowed to use taxpayer resources in order to campaign this way?
Yesterday, President Trump dismissed legal questions on accepting the nomination directly from the White House, an unprecedented move.
Senator John Thune questioned whether or not that's actually legal given the Hatch Act.
Is this something that you would get clearance for?
John Thune did.
The Republican John Thune.
Okay, well, it is legal.
There is no hat check because it doesn't pertain to the president.
But if I use the White House, we save tremendous amounts of money for the government in terms of security, traveling.
If we go to another state or some other location, the amount of money is, you know, very enormous.
So that's something to consider also.
Yeah, the kind of backhanded slap at John Thune, as though John Thune is doing something wrong by pointing out that typically American presidents don't conduct openly political campaign speeches from the White House.
Trump is wrong about this, Nancy.
It gives it gives Democrats room to run.
It's just, again, political malfeasance.
Here's Nancy Pelosi saying Trump can't do that.
He can't do that.
You can't do that.
I mean, you would be very surprised, I think, at the fact that when you're at the White House, you're talking about policy and the rest.
You're not talking politics.
We never did You would have a limited reference as it probably to our civic life as terms of politics, but you don't talk politics in the White House, and you don't talk politics under the dome of the Capitol, except perhaps a reference to it, but not an event.
You don't have political events in the Capitol.
You don't have political events in the White House.
No, I'm just going to point out that five minutes ago, she was kneeling wearing kente cloth on the floor of the Capitol with the other Democrats.
So, you know, look, Trump is always saying the quiet part out loud, namely that politics obviously infuses the White House, obviously infuses halls of Congress and all the rest.
But is it a good precedent?
Do we actually want Democrats doing this sort of thing from the White House?
Probably not.
Is it a smart political move?
I don't think it's a smart political move either.
My goodness, we need to start teaching English as the first language because Pelosi doesn't speak English.
Trump sometimes speaks English.
Joe Biden doesn't even speak human language anymore.
It's all very weird.
And in just a second, we're going to get to the chief line of attack for Joe Biden, because the chief line of attack in favor of Joe Biden right now is all COVID stuff.
And this ties into the COVID policies that are currently being pursued.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Okay, so the Democratic campaign against President Trump is now basically about one issue and one issue only, and that is his handling of COVID.
You know, his personality was always going to be an issue because his personality is an issue.
It's very off-putting to many suburban women.
It's very off-putting to certain members of minority groups, for example.
But that was always going to be an issue.
It didn't matter because Trump was probably going to win if the economy was as good as it was back in January or February.
Well, now that COVID has hit, the big issue has become COVID.
And that means that the Biden campaign has to play it as though Trump totally blew it on COVID.
Now, the problem with that is that everyone kind of blew it on COVID.
There's no such thing as not blowing it on COVID.
We're seeing spikes all around the world.
We are seeing spikes in blue states.
Now we are seeing secondary waves in certain blue states.
And yet the notion, the going mythology and narrative that's being promoted is that blue states handled this perfectly.
And the only person who screwed this up was Donald Trump.
So Joe Biden put out an ad in Florida featuring a couple from the villages talking about how they can't visit their grandkids and blaming Trump for that.
Here's the ad.
It really is quite scurrilous.
Roger and I decided that we wanted to move to the villages.
We were ready to retire.
We were both 60.
He was in the military.
I had the business for 10 years.
My husband and I are both concerned about the virus and catching it.
I know other people have things a lot worse, but we feel trapped here because we can't go to be with the ones that we love.
My husband and I have been gifted with two beautiful grandchildren.
We try to see them as often as possible, and it's been six months.
And it's way too long.
And while I don't blame Donald Trump for the virus, I blame him for his lack of action.
And because of that, we're sitting here, Zooming or FaceTiming with our grandchildren instead of hugging and kissing them.
And that's hard.
Joe Biden knows that every moment is precious.
I trust Joe Biden to get this virus under control.
I'm Joe Biden, and I approve this message.
I mean, I'm sorry, that's a disgusting message.
You trust Joe Biden to get this under control?
How?
How?
Seriously, how?
Because nobody has this under control.
There are literally zero places on planet Earth where if you're a grandparent who is in a vulnerable health position, you should feel supremely comfortable about hugging your 10-year-old, 12-year-old grandkids.
This is a bizarro world ad.
Again, the idea, I don't blame Trump for the virus, I blame him for the fact that I can't visit my grandkids.
Question, are people visiting grandkids all over the world?
How's that going?
Because it's not.
The answer is it's not.
But again, there's this mythology that's been created by the media, that's been created by the Democrats, that Trump really blew this thing.
And I keep asking people, okay, what is Trump supposed to do?
Like, what do you want him to do?
And people say things like national mask mandate.
Okay, let's be real about this.
Where the virus is the hottest, people are wearing masks.
This has been true for a very long time.
It turns out that people were socially distancing before the government told them to do so, because overall, people are self-driven and are self-perpetuating and are not idiots.
They're gonna protect themselves.
But what else is Trump saying?
He's supposed to ramp up the testing.
The United States is doing more tests on a per capita basis than virtually any other nation on earth.
We're doing hundreds of thousands of tests every single day.
Is there a delay in the results of the tests?
Sometimes there is, sometimes there's not.
Can we help with that?
Sure.
Should states do a better job?
Absolutely.
But what would Biden be doing that's any different?
I have no idea and nobody can explain what he would be doing that is any different.
That ad is really gross.
I mean, saying that grandparents can't visit their grandkids because of Trump?
Weird.
I didn't hear Andrew Cuomo's name anywhere in there, or Phil Murphy from New Jersey.
I didn't hear his name anywhere in there.
There's a headline from Politico, by the way, talking about the success of New Jersey and flattening the curve.
New Jersey literally has the worst death per million rate, I think, on planet Earth.
It's like 1,789 deaths per million in New Jersey.
So, I'm sorry, the narrative that Donald Trump is the one who blew this, I just, I don't get it.
I don't understand it.
Meanwhile, the social media giants are cracking down on Trump's comments.
They're fact-checking them with alacrity.
So, both Facebook and Twitter removed some comments that Trump made on COVID.
The problem is that Trump was basically right.
Okay, the language he used was inexact, but as per our usual arrangement, Trump's inexact language masks something fundamentally true.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Okay, so...
Facebook and Twitter removed some comments that Trump made about COVID.
The suggestion, of course, was that Trump had done something deeply, deeply wrong.
What exactly did they remove?
Well, it was a clip of President Trump talking in a phone interview about children.
And he says, if you look at children, children are almost, and I would say almost say definitely, but almost immune from this disease.
And they removed that clip from Facebook and Twitter.
Why?
Because they said that it was inaccurate.
It was in violation of Twitter rules on COVID-19 misinformation, said a Twitter spokeswoman.
By the way, a Twitter spokesperson came out and said that as well.
That spokesperson happened to be a former press secretary for Kamala Harris.
So if you wonder whether Big Tech is biased, depends on the company, but Twitter is using a former Kamala Harris aide to shut down Trump tweets and then explain it.
Now here's the reality.
Kids may not be immune to COVID-19.
They do obtain COVID-19.
Kids aren't dying of it.
They're not.
The number of kids who are dying from COVID-19 is a fraction of a percent.
A fraction of a fraction of a percent.
It is a tiny number of children who have died from this.
Like, we're still talking in the mid-double digits.
Last I checked, in the United States, kids who had died of COVID-19, far, far less than nearly any other disease you can name in the United States.
So is Trump totally wrong?
No.
They're just taking that down so they can claim that he's putting out misinformation.
Now, meanwhile, again, Trump's getting blamed for everything bad that's happening on planet Earth.
But let's be real about this.
Things are not great everywhere.
According to the UK Daily Mail, second wave is striking Europe.
Spain reintroduces lockdown.
Greece sees worrying rising cases.
The virus is more active in Germany amid warnings France could, quote, lose control at any moment.
According to the UK Daily Mail, a second wave of COVID-19 appears to be striking Europe, forcing Spain to reimpose lockdowns and cases spiking to a three-month high in Greece.
The head of Germany's doctors' union has declared the country is already in the midst of the second wave because people have flouted social distancing rules.
Well, this is perfectly predictable.
You can't keep people locked down forever, like for literally years at a time.
It's not a thing that you can do.
Instead, you're going to have to at some point allow people who are young and healthy to go out there, and if they get it, they get it.
That is in fact what Sweden is doing.
And Sweden, which remember until five minutes ago was the bad guy, Sweden has basically flattened the curve.
It looks like Sweden may have reached herd immunity, is what it actually looks like.
Meanwhile, in other countries, they got a problem.
In fact, it seems pretty obvious what's happening here.
Italy has not seen a second uptick.
Why hasn't Italy seen a second uptick?
Because they got nailed.
Basically, here is the rule.
If it burned through your population, maybe you're done.
If it has not burned through your population, you probably are not done.
Spain saw 8,500 new cases over the weekend.
An all-inclusive resort in Majorca was shut down.
Two towns north of Madrid have been put under strict lockdown as well.
Finland today announced that it plans to reintroduce recommendations to work from home whenever possible.
By August 1st, Finland's cases had risen by more than 300% in two weeks.
That Ron DeSantis, that governor of Florida, can't believe he's also governor of Finland.
Donald Trump obviously blowing it over in Finland.
He's blowing it over in France as well.
Authorities in France grappling with a sharp increase in fresh cases, which has seen more than 7,000 new infections within the last week.
As well as a rise in the number of people being treated for COVID-19 in the ICU.
Around 1,200 new cases are being reported per day two weeks ago.
The rolling average was 719.
Meanwhile, in Germany, they're seeing an uptick as well.
Some 730 cases have been reported each day on average this week against the 460 being recorded per day about two weeks ago.
So the second wave is in fact hitting Europe.
It really is kind of the first wave.
It really is more the first wave, because the first wave basically just got a little bit squished and delayed.
Basically, everything just got delayed.
Meanwhile, Sweden seems to be coming out the other end of this.
According to Newsweek, as of Sunday, the latest death rate in Sweden, death per 100,000 people, was reported to be 56.4.
The figure is lower than that reported in the UK, 69.6, Spain, 60.88, and Italy, according to the latest report Sunday by Johns Hopkins University.
The UK currently has the world's fourth highest death toll.
Spain and Italy were the former two European countries hit worst by the outbreak.
Sweden's latest case fatality ratio, that's the portion of deaths compared to total cases, was reported to be about 7.1%.
That figure is more than half the percentage reported in the UK, half that of Italy and Belgium, and nearly half that of France.
The reason being that a lot of young people are getting it in Sweden, and it's burned through some of the young population, and now they're basically done.
Sweden's seven-day rolling average of daily new cases has been mostly declining since as far back as April 16th, when the average was at 99.
The average dropped to two.
Two average daily new deaths on August 2nd, according to Worldometer.
New infections for 100,000 people in Sweden reported in the past 14 days has dropped some 46% compared to that reported in the 14 days prior.
Meanwhile, Spain, France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, each spiking between 58 and 206% in new cases.
New cases in Denmark, Norway, and Finland, all the other places that supposedly handled it better than Sweden, they've also seen their percentages increasing at around three times the percentage drop in new cases seen in Sweden in the past two weeks.
So what that sort of says is it looks like Sweden may have beat this thing.
It may look like it's over in Sweden.
Anders Teknell, the chief epidemiologist at Sweden's public health agency noted last week, quote, we've cut down on movement in society quite a lot.
If compared to how much we travel in Scandinavian countries, the decrease in travel is the same in Sweden as in the neighboring countries.
In many ways, the voluntary measures we put in place in Sweden have been just as effective as complete lockdowns in other countries.
In other words, when you tell people, don't travel all that much, people take it pretty seriously.
But the point here is that for all the talk about how we know how to handle this and we just have to shut everything down, lockdown this, lockdown that.
Sweden didn't lock down and Sweden may be the smartest of all.
Sweden may be the smartest of all.
Speaking of which, even Anthony Fauci is now saying he doesn't think that we're going to have to do another shutdown.
So as I've said before, the experts keep kind of shouting lockdown.
At the same time, they're acknowledging that lockdown is kind of a bad idea.
Here's Anthony Fauci yesterday.
I don't think we have to go into shutdown mode, Sanjay.
I am cautiously optimistic.
I do have an abiding faith in the American spirit.
And that's the reason why I invest the time, and I love being on with you in any forum, because we can start talking about the science.
And the more we give a consistent message, the more people are going to start to understand what we need to do.
Okay, and everybody sort of understands all that we can do, which is social distance, wear some masks, that's about it.
That's about it.
And then there are experts who are just saying things that don't make tons of sense.
So, for example, Ezekiel Emanuel yesterday, he said we have to reduce the amount of time kids are spending with other kids.
Why?
Seriously, why?
My kids are in camp right now.
They should be in camp right now.
The reason that they're at home today is because they came down with some cold symptoms.
So, if they're sick, we isolate them.
And if they're not sick, we don't isolate them.
And that's pretty much it.
Because it turns out that kids giving this thing to other kids is not killing kids.
In fact, there's a study out of Japan today, and it demonstrates that school closures carried out in Japan did not show any mitigating effect on the transmission of novel coronavirus infection.
Again, not a great shot.
Schools are not the chief transmission vectors here.
But here was Ezekiel Emanuel yesterday saying we have to reduce the amount of time kids are spending with other kids.
Doing things indoors has to be limited.
You have to, what's called, de-densify.
Reduce the number of children to allow physical distancing.
You have to have face masks for the older children.
You have to not use the cafeteria where crowding can take place.
So you have to think through every step of the process and, you know, reduce the crowds, reduce the congestion, reduce time that kids spend with other kids and teachers.
Okay, well, no, you could also just, you know, have younger teachers teaching young kids.
But again, lockdown has become the all-purpose solution to all of this.
And this is political, because if lockdowns are the all-purpose solution and Trump isn't saying lockdown, then Trump is the bad guy.
So some of this is just plainly political.
Eric Garcetti was pushing this yesterday.
Eric Garcetti, our idiot mayor here in Los Angeles.
He said yesterday he is going to shut off the power to any place holding an unregistered gathering or party.
He's literally just going to cut off the water power.
I have no idea how this is possibly legal.
This is also the same idiot, Eric Garcetti, who's out there protesting without a mask in the middle of BLM protests with a bunch of other people without masks.
Meanwhile, in New York City, they've announced that they're going to be setting up quarantine checkpoints So Bill de Blasio is saying that they're going to announce $10,000 fines and checkpoints for any traveler who flouts the New York City quarantine.
Meanwhile, he's not opening anything in New York City.
So I'm not sure why does he care about quarantining when everything is still locked down?
Seriously.
If everybody's still in their house, then what exactly is he so worried about?
Here is Bill de Blasio saying something that probably is also patently illegal.
I have no idea how Bill de Blasio has the power to tell people who are coming in from out of state that they have to So starting today, we're going to do something new in New York City.
We will have checkpoints at key entry points to the city.
Travelers coming in from those states will be given information about the quarantine.
They will be reminded that it is required, not optional.
They'll be reminded that failure to quarantine is a violation of state law, and it comes with serious penalties.
In fact, under certain circumstances, the fines can be as high as $10,000.
So this doesn't sound totalitarian at all.
You come into the state of New York, you go to New York City, and what?
He's going to shut down all the bridges and the tunnels?
He's Bane from Batman?
What in the world is going on here?
I will say one of my favorite things about New York State politics is the gap between Andrew Cuomo and Bill de Blasio.
Basically, if de Blasio takes a position, Cuomo hates his gut, and so he'll immediately take the reverse position.
Shockingly, Andrew Cuomo is now the voice of reason in New York.
So Andrew Cuomo, yesterday, was telling Bill de Blasio, do not raise taxes on people in New York City, and he was begging rich people to come back to New York City because the tax base is basically gone.
Welcome to the Republican Party, Andrew Cuomo, when reality finally hits.
I literally talk to people all day long who are now in the Hamptons' house, who also lived here, or in their Hudson Valley house, or in their Connecticut weekend house.
And I say, you gotta come back!
When are you coming back?
We'll go to dinner!
I'll buy you a drink!
Come over, I'll cook!
They're not coming back right now.
And then he says, 1% of the population is paying 50% of all the taxes.
Welcome to the Republican Party, Governor Andrew Cuomo, who's realizing that raising taxes randomly on high earners drives them out of major cities and out of major states.
Okay, in just a second, we're going to get to the continuing cultural battle over whether America sucks or not.
Oprah has now taken a side.
A woman worth $2.6 billion who rose from abject poverty to become one of the most powerful people on earth.
She says America blows.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Okay, we'll get to the cultural battles.
Over race and the nature of the country in just one second.
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All righty, so meanwhile, our cultural battles continue apace.
I'm putting aside the insanity over COVID and the presidential election.
The deeper battles in the country continue to be over the nature of America and whether America is fundamentally good or whether it fundamentally is not.
My book, How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps, on the New York Times bestseller list again this week, that book is all about this gap, this gap between people who believe that America inherently sucks and people who believe that America's founding principles were good, imperfectly realized over time, but increasingly perfectly realized over time.
In the former category, people who think Americans suck are a great many people who have benefited inordinately from America.
People who grew up in abject poverty in the direst of circumstances and have become insanely powerful and wealthy.
One of those people, case A1, would be Oprah Winfrey.
Oprah Winfrey, her life story is truly an American miracle.
I mean, this is a person who was in the worst circumstances, in just terrible personal circumstances, endemic poverty, and she somehow makes her way to be worth $2.6 billion.
She owns like half the island of Maui.
That didn't stop her yesterday from denouncing America's white privilege.
She says that if you're white, you have this privilege no matter what.
Here is Oprah Winfrey yesterday.
White people, there are white people who are not as powerful as the system of white people, the caste system that's been put in place, but they still, no matter where they are on the wrong or the ladder of success, they still have their whiteness.
Oh, well, they still have their whiteness.
I mean, I would trade my whiteness right now for for Oprah Winfrey as well.
That seems like a really, really solid deal, frankly.
In fact, I would trade my whiteness for like like I don't care about my whiteness.
I think most people don't care very much about the color of their skin.
And if they do, I think that they're spending their time in life on the wrong things.
I don't see why the color of your skin should define you.
It seems like there are many, many other attributes about you as a character and as a human being that should define you.
But for Oprah Winfrey, she's now pushing this new book called C.A.S.T.
This is written by the same person who suggested that there have been only three durable C.A.S.T.
systems in world history.
Nazi Germany, the United States and India, which is patently crazy.
Caste, unfortunately, is a feature of a wide variety of cultures and subcultures all around the earth.
And the notion that the United States has a durable caste system today in 2020 is patently crazy.
It's insane.
It's insane.
And nonetheless, Oprah Winfrey pushed that one yesterday as well.
And at this point, you have to imagine to yourself, what does she, like, does she really believe that black Americans don't have any opportunity in a country where she went from absolute poverty to being one of the wealthiest people on earth?
Does she believe that she's the only exception?
Because she obviously is not.
The average black income in the United States is $58,000 a year.
The median household income in the United States for black Americans is $41,000 a year.
Black Americans are richer than any other African-origin people anywhere on Earth.
Black Canadians do not earn as much as black Americans.
Black Britishers do not earn as much as black Americans.
Black people in Africa do not earn as much as black Americans.
So if the idea is that the United States is uniquely terrible, I'm just wondering what the evidence is for the United States being uniquely terrible.
You can make that case when Jim Crow was in place, certainly, obviously.
You can make that case when slavery was in place, certainly and obviously.
You can't make that case very well today when we've had a two-term black president of the United States overwhelmingly elected.
We've had black people in nearly every powerful position in the United States, which is great.
I mean, all of this is a good thing.
I mean, I don't like Barack Obama, but it says something good about our country that we elected a black man president of the United States in a majority white country.
I mean, that's a pretty amazing thing that's unprecedented in virtually all of world history.
But apparently critical race theory, which is the theory that we can all basically be melted down into our racial essentials.
And so if you're white, your essential is that you are privileged at the expense of black people.
And if you're black, then you are racially essentialized into victimhood at the hands of white Americans.
And that leads to the predictable result that any disparity between black and white is the system at work.
So this is how you get Ibram Kendi, who literally says this.
He literally says any inequality between black and white is attributable to the system.
You get Ibram Kendi on MSNBC suggesting that when black people die at higher rates of COVID, that suggests that there is something wrong with the society.
He's going to have to explain in which society black people are not dying at higher rates than white people.
Literally across Europe, black people are dying at higher rates than white people.
I do not understand what is his control.
In order to make this sort of claim, it's a pretty far-reaching claim, you have to have a control group.
What's his control group here?
If the problem is COVID racial disparities, Black people being two and a half times more likely to die of COVID-19, we need to realize that it's not because there's something wrong with Black people.
It's because there's something wrong with our policies.
There's something wrong with society.
There's something wrong with that Black and Brown people are more likely to have to essentially be essential workers.
They can't work from home or They're more likely to live in polluted neighborhoods.
They're less likely to have access to health insurance or high quality care.
And those are systemic issues that need to be changed.
Now he's talking about class issues.
He's not talking about race issues, right?
There are a lot of poor white people who are working.
There are a lot of poor white people who live in polluted neighborhoods.
But everything boils down to racial essentialism.
The problem is that all of this is incredibly counterproductive.
So there's a study that demonstrates pretty significant and clearly that the sort of diversity training where you hire Robin DiAngelo or Ibram Kendi to tell all of your white staffers how racist they are, That sort of training not only doesn't work, it causes an enormous amount of racial tension.
There's a good piece over at theconversation.com by Amna Khalid, an associate professor of history at Carleton College, and Jeffrey Aaron Snyder, another associate professor over at Carleton College, all about diversity training.
And here's what they say.
In terms of reducing bias and promoting equal opportunity, diversity training has failed spectacularly, according to the expert assessment of sociologists Frank Dobbin and Alexander Kolob.
When Dobbin and Kolob evaluated the impact of diversity training at more than 800 companies over three decades, they found that the positive effects are short-lived and that compulsory training generates resistance and resentment.
A company is better off doing nothing than mandatory diversity training, Kalev concluded.
Some of the most popular training approaches are of dubious value.
There's evidence, for example, introducing people to the most commonly used readings about white privilege can reduce sympathy for poor whites, especially among social liberals.
Actually, what those studies tend to show is that social liberals don't feel better about black people.
They just feel worse about white people.
There's also evidence that emphasizing cultural differences across racial groups can lead to an increased belief in fundamental biological differences among races, which means that well-intentioned efforts to celebrate diversity may in fact reinforce racial stereotyping.
The main beneficiaries of these people are the diversity trainers themselves, who've been able to rake in oodles of cash, obviously.
So, if it doesn't work at companies, how do you think it works for a country?
When you decide to re-educate the entire country that America is a racially essentialist caste system, when you suggest that every inequality is a reflection of the evils of the United States, do you think that's going to result in more anger, or do you think that it's going to result in a diverse new tolerance?
What do you think?
The answer is more anger, and also more stupidity.
This is one of my favorite stories ever.
It's a pretty spectacular story.
Mashable reports it, but it was all over the internet yesterday.
Quote, what first seemed to be a tragic story, a professor was forced to work in person and later died of COVID, now seems to be a strange hoax.
Multiple reports and information uncovered from online sleuths suggest the Twitter account Sciencing Bi, who claims to be a bisexual professor of Native American descent, may have actually been fake.
It appears it was the creation of Beth Ann McLaughlin, the head of a group called MeToo STEM, which aims to fight sexual harassment in scientific fields.
In June, the account Sciencing By claimed on Twitter that her employer, Arizona State University, forced her to deliver lectures in person in April to 200 students, which led her to get COVID.
On July 31st, McLaughlin announced from her Twitter account But ASU officials said it had no reports of a faculty member dying from the coronavirus, and that it never employed a professor matching Sciencing By's description.
The university also closed its campus in March, so there couldn't have been classes in April.
ASU spokesperson Katie Paquette told BuzzFeed News, we've been looking into this for the last 24 hours and cannot verify any connection with the university.
We've been in touch with several deans and faculty members.
No one can identify the account or who might be behind it.
The account had apparently tweeted for years about their experiences as an indigenous woman being LGBTQ in academic circles and more recently their long drawn out suffering from COVID-19.
Lots of folks familiar with this particular corner of Science Twitter pointed out inconsistency with the stories, including in now inaccessible instances where they apparently used stock images to accompany apparent real-life experiences.
McLaughlin denied she created Sciencing By out of whole cloth, but did admit she had access to the account.
She claimed that as far as she knew, this account did die of COVID-19.
She said she got that from a family contact.
McLaughlin has reportedly declined to reveal Sciencing By's actual identity, and also said she had met her in real life.
After the alleged death, McLaughlin seemed to suggest they were in an intimate relationship, tweeting, looking at her side of the bed and crying.
Just a lot of crying.
I literally can do nothing.
This is not the first instance of controversy surrounding McLaughlin.
A March report from Science Magazine detailed that McLaughlin, while hosting Me Too STEM, allegedly sidelined people of color and bullied volunteers, activists, and fellow leaders.
In other words, this is a crazy lefty lady who was using all of the trappings and all of the hallmarks of woke culture in order to get ahead, in order to generate sympathy for an agenda that she was pushing.
That says something about where the halls of power in America truly lie, does it not?
You don't see a lot of people who are seeking power attempting to ape conservatives, like pretend to be a conservative.
You don't see that a lot.
You don't see a lot of people who want power attempting to be white.
You don't have reverse Rachel Dolezals.
And that is an indicator of where power lies in a society, right?
During Jim Crow, it was a fairly common and horrific thing.
I mean, horrifically that anybody felt that they needed to do this, that light-skinned black people would sometimes attempt to pass for white, right?
This is a very, very, there've been a number of famous novels on this particular topic, because white was power for a lot of American history.
Well, now there are not a lot of black people masquerading as white people, but you will see a Rachel Dolezal attempting to be black, and here you will see a professor pretending to be a bisexual Native American woman.
The halls of power are replete with the diversity crew, and that is where people are attempting to pander in order to get ahead.
Which says something about where America stands.
It doesn't say that America is deeply intolerant of diversity.
It says precisely the opposite, that we are so militantly in favor of diversity that we'll swallow any stupid thing put forth so long as you slap a diversity label on it.
Alrighty, we'll be back here tomorrow with more content, or later today with a couple additional hours of content.
You're listening to The Ben Shapiro Show.
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Joe Biden forgets about his cognitive decline.
Billionaire Oprah Winfrey tells poor white people that they have a whole lot of privilege.
And Millard Fillmore gets canceled 170 years after the Compromise of 1850.
Shocking, shocking stuff.
Plus the mailbag.
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