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Oct. 13, 2020 - The Ben Shapiro Show

01:05:21

It’s Easy As ACB | Ep. 1114

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	Amy Coney Barrett's nomination cruises ahead as Democrats struggle for a response.
	President Trump tests negative for COVID while the media frets selectively about masking.
	And Portland rioters knock over statues of Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
	Protect your online privacy today at expressvpn.com slash Ben.
	Alrighty, we have a lot to get to today.
	We'll get to everything involved in the Amy Coney Barrett hearings.
	We'll also get to Joe Biden, who continues to stumble over himself, but it turns out that that doesn't matter because in the end, he is making this thing a referendum on Trump.
	We'll get to all that in just one second.
	First, we are in the final days leading up to one of the most contentious Presidential elections in our nation's history.
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	What if we only have eight Supreme Court justices?
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	What if the Democrats try to quarterback?
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	Okay, so yesterday launched the Amy Coney Barrett hearings and it became quickly obvious that the Democrats have no line of attack against Amy Coney Barrett.
	Now, the truth was they had no line of attack against Brett Kavanaugh either.
	He was a very well-qualified jurist.
	And not only was he well-qualified, but he had not really ruled on anything particularly controversial.
	Connie Barrett has not really ruled on anything particularly controversial.
	She's made some statements in her law review articles about how originalism ought to be interpreted.
	And those statements are well in line with traditional originalist philosophy.
	So Democrats really don't have a great line of attack.
	And therefore, they've come up with two lines of attack on Amy Coney Barrett.
	One is that she's something out of The Handmaid's Tale.
	Michael Moore yesterday tweeted out a...
	A miscolorized photo of Amy Coney Barrett.
	She was wearing what looked like a purple slash pink outfit yesterday and he retouched it up so that she was wearing red.
	And then he tweeted out that she was a member of the Handmaid's Tale because as it turns out, every woman who has ever worn red is a member of the sex cult in the Handmaid's Tale.
	Right, it's great.
	So that means Elizabeth Warren, Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Michelle Obama, all of whom have worn red at one point or another.
	The only reason that a woman would ever wear red is because she's a member of a cult from the Margaret Atwood novel.
	The other possibility, of course, is that it has not, I mean, first of all, you had to mis-colorize the photo, but second of all, like it turns out this is just stupid.
	So one attack on Coney Barrett is that she's religious and all religious people are bigots and all bigots ought to be kept off the court.
	And that line of attack is very dangerous for Democrats.
	They've been shying away from that one a little bit.
	The other one is that it is just illegitimate for Republicans to fill the seat.
	Republicans should never under any circumstances fill the seat because Republicans did not fill the Merrick Garland seat.
	They didn't vote on Merrick Garland.
	Well, the reason they didn't vote on Merrick Garland is because Merrick Garland didn't have the votes.
	It turns out that they didn't have 51 votes for Merrick Garland.
	They do have 51 votes, as it turns out, for Amy Coney Barrett.
	So they were left with pretty much nothing except screaming and mewling and whining and yelling at the moon.
	Now, one of the questions here is how this is going to affect the presidential race.
	A lot of people, including me, speculated that if Democrats went overboard here, it would hurt Joe Biden in the same way that going overboard against Brett Kavanaugh and calling him a gang rapist hurt Democrats for a brief moment in time before Trump redirected the nation's attention toward the caravan, the illegal immigrant caravan moving up through Central America, Central Latin America.
	Now, the Democrats have been careful not to do that.
	They've been careful to avoid that particular issue.
	Also, it turns out, I don't think the Amy Coney Barrett hearings are going to have much to do with the election on a presidential level.
	On a Senate level, they could have something to do with it.
	And I know everybody in the world, I've been saying this for now a week, I know everybody in the world wants to focus in on the presidential race.
	Here are the facts about the presidential race right now.
	It is not a close race.
	That is the simple fact of the matter right now.
	By polling data, it is not a particularly close race.
	Joe Biden has been up consistently in double digits for at least three weeks.
	Joe Biden in every single swing state is at least running dead even or ahead.
	That is according to the polls.
	Now, could it be that Donald Trump is going to pull out a come-from-behind victory at the last minute?
	Absolutely, there is still time.
	It is also possible that the polls are off, although they would have to be off by probably an order of magnitude in order for them to be wrong nationally and for Trump to somehow win the popular national vote.
	But he's within spitting distance in Florida.
	He's within spitting distance in Ohio.
	These are all very close states.
	He's not really within spitting distance right now in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, or Michigan, according to the latest polling data.
	He's going to have to draw closer there.
	But recognize that if you're a conservative, he's not the only person on the ballot.
	It turns out that your Senate candidates are on the ballot as well.
	And Joe Biden as president with a Democratic Senate is significantly more dangerous to the future of the Republic than Joe Biden as president with a Republican Senate.
	Especially given the fact that there tends to be an off-year election blowback against the party in power in the executive branch, which means that if Republicans were to hold the Senate this time around, then you would imagine they would pick up some seats.
	This is a bad map for them.
	You would imagine they would pick up some seats next time around and strengthen that Senate majority.
	And so you have a number of close Senate races.
	The ACB hearings actually benefit Republicans in this way because Democrats acting like idiots, particularly from purple states, that does not cut in favor of those Senate candidates.
	And right now we are starting to see some evidence that there will be some ticket splitting.
	That wouldn't be a huge surprise.
	There was some of this in 2018.
	There were races that Republicans were supposed to lose and they ended up winning.
	The most obvious one is Ron DeSantis in Florida.
	He was running against Andrew Gillum.
	The media basically suggested that Gillum was a foregone conclusion.
	And then Andrew Gillum not only lost, but ended up in a hotel room with a gay hooker and some meth.
	So it turns out good decision, Floridians, for Ron DeSantis.
	In any case, There's the possibility of ticket splitting, even if Trump were to lose.
	This is not conceding that Trump is going to lose the election.
	It's just recognizing the political realities on the ground, which is a lot of very tight Senate races and by polling numbers, a lot tighter than the presidential race at this point.
	And the Amy Coney Barrett hearings could have some impact on that because you do have some swing state senators who are involved in the Amy Coney Barrett hearings.
	Like right now, if you look at the Senate statistics, Steve Daines has picked up some ground.
	He was down a little bit to Bullock in Montana.
	He now looks like he is in the lead.
	In the North Carolina race, the Democrat Cal Cunningham has been hit with a sex scandal.
	There are not a lot of great polls that are out right now.
	There's one poll that came out, I guess, in the last week, and that one had Cunningham up fairly solidly over Tom Tillis, but again, I expect that one to draw a lot closer.
	Lindsey Graham was suspected to be running dead even.
	There's a new poll out today showing Lindsey Graham up fairly substantially.
	Those Senate races matter an awful lot.
	So right now, I'm telling you, if you're a Republican and you have to choose, you don't have to choose, but if you have to choose whether to give your money to the presidential race or whether to give your money to your Senate candidate, give your money to your Senate candidate.
	Truly.
	It's the safe bet.
	It is the safer bet.
	Giving your money to the Senate candidate.
	Again, that's not conceding the presidential race.
	That is just being a political realist about the necessity of Republicans retaining the Senate.
	Because if Democrats pick up the Senate, they're going to go for broke.
	They're going to break the filibuster.
	That is no question.
	They're probably going to add states.
	And they've talked about cord packing.
	Even if they only do the first two, it wrecks the balance of power in the American government and leads to nothing but running room for Democrats in the future.
	If you're gonna target where you're giving right now, I would say you gotta give to Joni Ernst in Iowa.
	Because right now, her opponent, Theresa Greenfield, is up by about 4 points in most of these polls.
	But that is a very, very close race.
	I would say that you have to give to Tom Tillis in North Carolina.
	I would say that you should take a serious look at giving to Susan Collins.
	I know if you're a Republican, you've got problems with Susan Collins.
	Remember, if it were not for Susan Collins, Brett Kavanaugh would not be on the Supreme Court.
	And losing that seat to Sarah Gideon would be a real disaster area.
	Right now, that race is tight as a tick.
	Extremely tight.
	Like, within one point tight.
	So, go give to Susan Collins as much as you have problems with Susan Collins.
	It is necessary that Republicans maintain the Senate if you are, in fact, a Republican.
	Obviously.
	The other races that look fairly close right now.
	Colorado is not really inside margin of error, but there's not been a ton of polling that has been done there.
	And John Hickenlooper, who's a very scandal-ridden candidate, he has yet to break 50%.
	So those are those are the races that I would be focusing on.
	And again, the Amy Coney Barrett hearings could make a difference there if Republicans put in a strong showing in some of these swing states.
	If you want to go for, by the way, if you want to go for a great candidate who is running an extraordinarily competitive race in a very bad year for Republicans in his state, John James in Michigan is a stud.
	John James is running a one point race right now.
	He's running a one point race with Gary Peters in Michigan, which is truly an amazing feat.
	Okay, he ran last time.
	He lost by a little bit.
	If Trump somehow loses Michigan and James wins the seat in Michigan, good for John James.
	That's pretty incredible.
	Okay, so that's where things stand.
	Now, to the Amy Coney Barrett hearings.
	As we say, it turns out the Democrats don't have a great comeback for Amy Coney Barrett because it turns out that she is witty, she is charming, and she knows what she's doing.
	She's been qualified, is well qualified by the American Bar Association, which is a designation I don't really take super seriously because frankly, I think the American Bar Association is a leftist outlet and it has been for quite a long time.
	Nonetheless, Democrats have struggled for a response to Amy Coney Barrett in a way that they struggled with Brett Kavanaugh before the fake rape allegations by all available evidence against Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
	So again, narrative number one is that Amy Coney Barrett is a religious bigot.
	This is why you saw Amy Coney Barrett protesters dressed up as the Handmaid's Tale.
	I don't, like, read another book or watch another show.
	It's just, it's so ridiculous.
	First of all, it is hilarious to me that these people are reduced to cosplaying the, cosplaying Handmaid's Tale.
	So here they were outside wearing their Handmaid's Tale outfits.
	By the way, overrated book.
	Wildly overrated book.
	Okay, but here's the real question.
	Does Amy Coney Barrett look like something out of The Handmaid's Tale to you?
	If so, it's probably because you've lost your mind.
	So here was Amy Coney Barrett yesterday in her opening statement, and she was talking about the importance of her family, which apparently is very bad.
	It's bad when Republicans talk about the importance of their family.
	It shows that they are merely members of religious cults.
	Here's Amy Coney Barrett talking about her family.
	As I said when I was nominated to serve as a justice, I'm used to being in a group of nine.
	My family.
	Nothing is more important to me and I'm very proud to have them behind me.
	My husband Jesse and I have been married for 21 years.
	He has been a selfless and wonderful partner every step of the way.
	Okay, so this means, of course, that she's a subservient woman.
	That's how that works.
	That her husband has been supportive of her all the way up to the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals and now to the Supreme Court.
	She talked about her philosophy of government, and this, frankly, is music to the ears of an originalist like me.
	I mean, I have long said that the job of the court is to interpret the law as closely as possible to the verbiage of the law, as it was meant at the time.
	That is what judges are tasked to do, and she backs that up here.
	Courts are not designed to solve every problem or right every wrong in our public life.
	The policy decisions and value judgments of government must be made by the political branches, elected by and accountable to the people.
	The public should not expect courts to do so and courts should not try.
	Okay, so first of all, I think it's important to note here, this is the precise opposite of what people on the left claim about Amy Coney Barrett and about every conservative justice.
	So every conservative justice that I know of has said exactly this, that there is a unique role for the courts.
	The courts are designed to interpret the law as written and then enforce the law as written.
	And then the executive branch does the actual hardcore enforcement, right?
	That is what the courts are designed to do.
	The left says, That the right wants to use the courts in order to enforce their own moral opinions, their own theocracy, that is blatantly false.
	And the way you can tell this is blatantly false is there's actual statistical evidence of this.
	Ilya Shapiro over at Cato Institute has done actual statistical studies of how often you see textualist and originalist judges writing dissents and also crossing the aisle on issues on which they disagree.
	Take a perfect example, Justice Scalia.
	Famously ruled in a couple of different cases on principles where he personally disagreed, but he recognized it was not the job of the judiciary to do his personal bidding.
	Those two examples that come to mind, there are many of them, two of those examples that come to mind Or Justice Scalia's opinion in the flag-burning case, in which, obviously very much against flag-burning, nonetheless ruled that the First Amendment protected flag-burning as expressive speech.
	And also, there was a case in which Justice Scalia took a similarly free-speech opinion on Larry Flint running a disgusting cartoon about Jerry Falwell stooping his mother in an outhouse.
	And he said, as much as I don't like this cartoon, this is all protected First Amendment stuff.
	and the standard for defamation of a public figure was incredibly high.
	Right. You can see that from conservative justices all the time.
	Right. Even justices who I think are not going the full David Souter and just deciding to become members of the hardcore left. People like Justice Gorsuch, who have been pretty good throughout, even they will sometimes wander off their own political opinion or off their priors and cross the aisle and vote with Democrats.
	Ruth Bader Ginsburg never did that.
	I mean, she voted directly down the line.
	This is why when people say that conservatives very often don't get what they want from the justices they appoint, that's because justices very often are not doing political bidding if they are of the right.
	They recognize that the political branches are not the same as the judicial branch.
	So when Amy Coney Barrett says, listen, my job is not to enforce morality.
	My job is to enforce the law.
	That is precisely the opposite of what her political opponents suggest about her.
	recognize that the true theocrats are the people who treat leftism as a religion, then expect the courts to be the rabbinate of the entire system, that the priesthood of the entire system, the priestly caste of the entire system.
	Amy Coney Barrett continued along these lines. She said that courts have a vital responsibility to the rule of law, which of course is true. There's a tendency in our profession to treat the practice of law as all-consuming while losing sight of everything else.
	But that makes for a shallow and unfulfilling life.
	I worked hard as a lawyer and as a professor.
	I owed that to my clients, to my students, and to myself.
	But I never let the law define my identity or crowd out the rest of my life.
	A similar principle applies to the role of courts.
	Courts have a vital responsibility to the rule of law, which is critical to a free society.
	Okay, that's, of course, exactly right.
	One of the things I like about Amy Coney Barrett is that she says that courts have a role.
	Again, for conservatives, government has a role.
	Courts have a role.
	Legislators have a role.
	In the view of the left, everything is political.
	Nobody has a role.
	It's just a question of how you get things done, right?
	This is whenever I hear a politician say I'm a pragmatist, I start to shudder.
	Left or right?
	Because once you say you're a pragmatist, it means you don't care about institutions and you don't care about systems.
	And if you don't care about systems, what that really means is that your core philosophy is power.
	It is not protection of individual rights.
	Okay, so Democrats have no comeback for any of this.
	And so Amy Coney Barrett, again, well-qualified nominee.
	She's going to sail through.
	She'll be confirmed next week.
	Democrats have no comeback for this.
	So they've decided that their comeback is it's unfair.
	They cry, right?
	It's just one long crazy person's scream after Trump's election in 2016.
	The crazy lady screaming at the sky.
	That was what Democrats' response was to all of this.
	So Kamala Harris, who, I mean, it's just unbelievable to me that this lady is going to end up as vice president of the United States, possibly.
	She is awful.
	In every way, awful.
	I mean, she is manipulative.
	She is terrible.
	She is a damned liar.
	And the fact that there are people on the left who actually like her is astonishing to me, considering how dishonest she is.
	I have a lot of sympathy for the Bernie Sanders left who looks at Kamala Harris and they say, this lady's just, yeech.
	She really is.
	She's bad.
	I mean, there are many women inside the Democratic Party who are not this, right?
	Amy Klobuchar would have been a much better pick for Joe Biden.
	But again, Biden thought that he had to please the intersectional base of the Democratic Party.
	We'll get to Kamala Harris and her take on the Amy Coney Barrett nomination in just one second.
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	OK, so Democrats, they have to respond to Amy Coney Barrett's nomination.
	So Kamala Harris says that the will of the people is being defied, which is weird because the will of the people put Donald Trump, at least in electoral terms, in the White House.
	Now, I understand, everybody with the popular vote and this, that's not how the process works.
	The process works how the process works.
	The will of the people has put the people in positions to vote, who are now in the positions to vote, according to the American system of government.
	But Kamala Harris says, the will of the people will not be done if Amy Coney Barrett fills Ruth Bader Ginsburg's slot.
	Now, what's amazing to me in all of this, is it is incredible how politicians and members of our government Avoid responsibility.
	There's really only one person to blame for the fact that Donald Trump is going to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg with Amy Coney Barrett.
	That person's name is Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
	Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in her mid-80s.
	She had been sick since 2009.
	She could have stepped down any time during the Obama administration.
	There were people encouraging her to do so.
	She thought Hillary Clinton was a surefire winner, and therefore she stuck around.
	In fact, she told people in the Democratic Party, who would you rather have on the court than me?
	The answer from the Democratic Party, of course, was somebody who thinks like you but 30 years younger.
	But nonetheless, this is all the evils of the Trump administration for filling a seat that came open.
	Again, it came open through chance and circumstance and fate.
	That's just the way this works.
	But here's Kamala Harris suggesting it's very bad to fill the seat.
	More than nine million Americans have already voted, and millions more will vote while this illegitimate committee process is underway.
	A clear majority of Americans want whomever wins this election to fill the seat.
	And my Republican colleagues know that.
	Yet, they are deliberately defying the will of the people in their attempt to roll back the rights and protections provided under the Affordable Care Act.
	Okay, I'm sorry.
	First of all, the evidence that she's going to overturn the ACA is nil.
	There's one law school essay in which she points out that John Roberts' decision in the ACA case is wrong.
	That's true.
	It is wrong.
	It also happens to be that they're not gonna overturn the ACA case.
	It was decided years ago, and it would be rejected on an appeal to the Supreme Court because the case has already been decided.
	It was decided not very long ago.
	The notion that she is going to simply overturn the entire ACA on the basis of the fact that John Roberts wrote a crappy opinion in the first Obamacare case, it's just not true.
	Democrats are pushing this lie anyway.
	And then you get Cory Booker.
	You gotta love Mr. Potato Head over here.
	He didn't just bring his angry eyes, he brought his concerned eyes.
	And Cory Booker, if there's one person who can make Kamala Harris look not rehearsed, it is Cory Booker.
	He makes her look spontaneous and joyous.
	Cory Booker is the most rehearsed politician I have ever seen in my entire life.
	He is perhaps the most irritating politician.
	I mean, and I watch politicians for a living.
	This dude is as irritating as itching powder in your eyes.
	I mean, this guy is just nails on a chalkboard irritating.
	Here is Cory Booker, who is very upset that a vote is even going to be held on Amy Coney Barrett.
	You can tell he's upset because he uses both his upset eyes.
	He brought his angry eyes.
	He takes out his upset eyes, pops them in, blinks a lot.
	Very upset, Cory Booker.
	And then he just repeats things over and over.
	He repeats Beetlejuice until Michael Keaton randomly appears in the well of the Senate.
	Here was Cory Booker being obnoxious.
	What is going on in America today, in the midst of a deadly pandemic and an ongoing election, having a rushed Supreme Court nomination hearing is not normal and we cannot normalize it.
	People are voting right now.
	the American people should decide.
	The American people should decide.
	The American people should decide.
	I will not be voting to confirm Judge Barrett's nomination.
	Okay, either Cory Booker is the most emotional person who has ever been in American politics, or he's completely unemotional and he's kind of a sociopath.
	And I sort of feel like the latter, because every time, I'm so upset.
	The American people should decide.
	Tinkerbell should live!
	Amy Coney Barrett shouldn't be on the court!
	Clap until Tinkerbell lives, Cory!
	Clap!
	Clap, Spartacus!
	Clap!
	It's a Spartacus moment!
	Tinkerbell's living!
	We're doing it!
	Yeah, it's not happening.
	Amy Coney Barrett is going to the court.
	So congratulations, Cory Booker.
	Meanwhile, Dick Durbin is saying that it is a self-serving proposal.
	This is the senator from Illinois who, again, once called American soldiers akin to Pol Pot.
	I remember this.
	Senator Durbin says it's self-serving for Republicans to fill the seat.
	After all, they didn't fill the seat with Merrick Garland.
	Yes, because they weren't going to vote for Merrick Garland because they disagree with his judicial philosophy.
	Senator Durbin.
	Here is Durbin, again, doing this routine.
	We can't win the vote, so there shouldn't be a vote.
	People had already begun casting votes, and my Republican colleagues marched in front of the cameras, looked down at their shoes, dutifully reversed their positions, and lined up obediently behind their leader again.
	It gets down to this.
	Either the American people do get an election year voice regarding a vacancy on the Supreme Court, or they don't.
	In 2016, Senator McConnell said, give them a voice.
	Now he says, don't give them a voice.
	is a shameless, self-serving, venal reversal.
	Okay, just a note.
	It's also a shameless, self-serving, venal reversal that you all said that Merrick Garland should get a vote and now you say that Amy Coney Barrett should not.
	Pat Leahy, most famous for having a cameo in the Batman movies.
	I heard Senator Leahy from Vermont saying the same thing.
	They're breaking their word.
	You guys are pledging to pack the Supreme Court, guys, and kill the filibuster.
	I think that them, quote unquote, breaking their, they didn't give their word that they were never going to vote on a Republican nominee.
	They said when the parties are controlled, parties control different branches in an election year, then you should wait for that to be decided by the American public.
	I think it's a dumb principle.
	I don't think you have to vote on anybody you don't want to.
	You're the Senator of the United States.
	But Democrats are trying to hang their head on this.
	We shouldn't be holding a hearing three weeks from a presidential election.
	When millions of Americans have already voted, no one doing so requires that literally half of the Senate goes back on their word.
	Think of that, my Republican colleagues, literally half of the Senate had to break their word, contradicting every argument they made four years ago about the American people needing Okay, so screaming at the sky and whining about a perfectly traditional process.
	Again, there have been more than a dozen.
	I think the statistic was close to 20 people who have been nominated during an election year.
	And usually when the parties control the same branches, when they control the executive and the legislature, the person gets confirmed.
	When a different party controls the legislature from the presidency, they do not get confirmed.
	It is that simple.
	Okay, in just a second, we'll get to the more substantive critiques of Amy Coney Barrett.
	And as we'll see, Not good critiques there either.
	We'll get to that in just one second.
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	Always like doing the announcer voice at the very end right there.
	Alrighty, so the Democrats then have to, they have a second line of attack.
	So first line of attack is we shouldn't hold this vote because votes are mean.
	Second line of attack is we are afraid that Amy Coney Barrett is gonna do exactly what she pledges to do and rule in accordance with the constitution.
	And as we all just want Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
	Now note, if you are a political actor, so Kamala Harris.
	She did this from home and she put up a book, a children's book of Ruth Bader Ginsburg behind her as she made the speech.
	She shifted this out a couple of times, right?
	She had this little prop stand behind her and it says, I dissent.
	Ruth Bader Ginsburg makes her mark as she makes the case that apparently the Ruth Bader Ginsburg Occupied seat.
	Should be occupied by, apparently, children of Ruth Bader Ginsburg or descendants of Ruth Bader Ginsburg from now into perpetuity.
	It should be just like a communist country.
	In communist countries, judges appoint their own successors.
	Apparently, or the party does.
	The same thing should happen, obviously, with Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
	Now, I just want to note something.
	Ruth Bader Ginsburg, she may be a great feminist hero.
	She was not a good justice.
	I know it's impolitic to point this out at this point.
	Her judgments stink.
	Okay, in controversial cases, she wrote opinions that were completely removed from the Constitution in every area except for civil procedure.
	Civil procedure, oddly enough, she's actually an expert on, and she would actually rule in interesting and textualist ways.
	She would actually try to fulfill the mandate of a judge when it came to civil procedure.
	When it came to everything socially related, she literally just looked into her heart, found the answer, and then twisted the Constitution to fit it.
	She was a bad justice.
	She voted on every single social case the same way that Kamala Harris would.
	If you vote like a senator and you're on the court, you're not a good judge.
	That is a good way to tell whether somebody is a good judge.
	Would they vote exactly the same way on the court as they would as a senator?
	And if the answer is yes, then you don't know the difference between the political branches of government and the judicial branch of government.
	But Kamala Harris makes the case that ACB is gonna be real bad because ACB is not RBG and RBG's seat should remain for RBG and not for ACB.
	And then she just throws in a reference to the notorious BIJ for fun.
	Here's Kamala Harris.
	Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg devoted her life to fight for equal justice.
	And she defended the Constitution.
	But now her legacy and the rights she fought so hard to protect are in jeopardy by replacing Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg with someone who will undo her legacy.
	President Trump is attempting to roll back Americans' rights for decades to come.
	Oh, what are those rights that we're talking about?
	She gets more specific.
	The rights that she's talking about here are Roe versus Wade, right?
	Abortion and rights on quote-unquote Obamacare, which is not a right.
	Okay, that is a privilege granted by government.
	It is an entitlement granted by government.
	And this is what Harris said.
	It's been interesting, actually, to watch as the Democrats shy away from Roe v. Wade talk.
	So you would think That most of their attack would be on Amy Coney Barrett and Roe v. Wade, because the polling tends to show that Americans are somewhere between pro-life and pro-choice, meaning they don't buy into the Democrats' crazy position that you should be able to abort a baby all the way to point of birth.
	And depending on if you're the governor of Virginia, maybe a little later than that.
	And they also disagree with the full-on pro-life position.
	I mean, this is just what polls show.
	They disagree with my own position, which is that abortion should be banned from point of conception.
	I have a feeling that will change over time as the science of embryology gets stronger to the point where you can actually see inside the womb with more clarity from the point of conception.
	This is what keeps happening, is the American public keeps moving back toward conception, the date on which they think abortion is okay.
	It used to be they thought it was like six months in, now it's looking more and more like the last couple of trimesters Americans are getting uncomfortable with, which of course they should be, because it looks like a baby by the time you're already at week nine, week ten, it's starting to look Like a baby, just a very, very tiny baby.
	In any case, the Democrats have decided to shy away from the abortion issue because they've progressively been losing on that issue because of the science.
	And instead, they're focusing in on the possibility that ACB is gonna rule to get rid of Obamacare.
	That's not going to happen.
	Again, that's not going to happen.
	But Kamala Harris tweeted out, November 10th, that's when the U.S.
	Supreme Court is set to hear a case to strike down the Affordable Care Act.
	Senate Republicans are fast-tracking this nominee today in order to ensure that happens.
	Yes, I am sure they're doing it with an eye toward what is widely perceived to be a rather fringe case on Obamacare.
	I'm sure that that's exactly what they're doing.
	They're not fast-tracking the nominee to get it in before the election.
	They're doing it so that she can rule on the Obamacare case.
	Sure.
	Sure.
	Okay, Cory Booker.
	Again, my least favorite American senator.
	I don't know.
	There are a few competitors.
	He's up there.
	Mazie Hirono is awful.
	But Booker is... I can't say enough words about Booker.
	He is as artificial as the Mr. Potato Head he appears to emulate.
	And here is Cory Booker saying that Roe vs. Wade and Obamacare are the will of the American people.
	So a couple things.
	One, Even if you want to make the case that Obamacare is the will of the American people because elected branches voted for it, I mean, I guess you could make that case.
	That's fair.
	Although the repudiation right after Obamacare was pretty staunch against the Democrats.
	Roe vs. Wade was never the will of the American people.
	The American people didn't vote for Roe vs. Wade.
	Roe vs. Wade was a complete judicial usurpation of the political function of the government.
	Roe vs. Wade was the federal government deciding that the Constitution of the United States suddenly mandated tolerance for abortion past Before point of viability.
	And it has like nothing to do with the Constitution, and it was usurpation of state power, and it was usurpation of legislative power, even if you wanted to do it at the federal level.
	But Cory Booker, see, here's the thing.
	Too many Democrats believe in the Rousseau-ian will of the people.
	Namely, if something I like happens, it's because it was the will of the people.
	If something I don't like happens, it's because it was not the will of the people.
	So the same Democrats who say that Obamacare was the will of the people because the elected branches did it, say that Amy Coney Barrett should not be on the court because the will of the people disagree.
	In other words, the will of the people, as a phrase, sounds suspiciously like I agree with it to Democrats.
	So here's Cory Booker saying that everything he agrees with is the will of the people.
	We're here because in the middle of a deadly pandemic, in the middle of an ongoing election, Senate Republicans have found a nominee in Judge Barrett who they know will do what they couldn't do, subvert the will of the American people and overturn the ACA and overturn Roe v. Wade.
	That's what this is about.
	That's why we're here.
	It's very simple.
	Senate Republicans know the American people don't want this, but they don't care.
	Okay, that's not even true.
	By polling data, plurality of Americans are totally fine with ACB being nominated.
	Then you get Pat Leahy, who's here to explain that a Catholic mother of seven, one of the most powerful females will be in America and in American history.
	Pat Leahy says that she will be harmful to women.
	Yes, I definitely trust Pat Leahy on what's harmful to women.
	They're scared, Judge Barrett.
	They're scared that your confirmation would rip from them the very health care protections the millions of Americans have fought to maintain, and which Congress has repeatedly rejected and eliminated.
	They're scared that the clock Okay, if women are scared of that, it's because they've been misinformed by Democrats, and women who are scared of it are uninformed.
	We are not living in a world where abortion is on the menu in terms of banning abortion wholesale.
	As much as pro-lifers like me would love to protect every unborn life, It is a state issue.
	It will remain a state issue even if Roe vs. Wade were to be discarded.
	It is just as simple as that.
	And when he says that women are afraid that they're going to be forced from the workplace, like what the hell is he talking about?
	Discrimination in the workplace against women is federally illegal under Title IX of the Civil Rights Act.
	What the hell is he talking about?
	It's just, I'm sorry, the Democrats' case is absurd.
	Meanwhile, Republicans are reveling in their chance to actually talk about the Constitution.
	Lindsey Graham, who has now opened up a rather substantial lead, like a six-point lead in South Carolina, according to the latest polling data.
	He was running dead even until a moment ago.
	He's getting a chance to be Lindsey Graham 2.0 in this hearing.
	Lindsey Graham's best moments have been in judiciary hearings.
	He was great during the Brett Kavanaugh hearings.
	He was good yesterday.
	Here was Senator Graham talking about our constitutional duty.
	The bottom line is, Justice Ginsburg, when asked about this several years ago, said that a president serves four years, not three.
	There's nothing unconstitutional about this process.
	This is a vacancy that's occurred through a tragic loss of a great woman, and we're going to fill that vacancy with another great woman.
	The bottom line here Is that the Senate is doing its duty constitutionally.
	Okay, that of course is true.
	Ted Cruz points out correctly that the Democrats see the judiciary as a policymaking body.
	They do not see it as a body designed to interpret the law.
	Of course, this is true.
	Democrats and Republicans have fundamentally different visions of the court.
	Of what the Supreme Court is supposed to do.
	What its function is.
	Democratic senators view the court as a super legislature, as a policymaking body, as a body that will decree outcomes to the American people.
	Now, that vision of the court is something found nowhere in the Constitution.
	And it's a curious way to want to run a country.
	That, of course, is exactly right.
	But you know what?
	It doesn't really matter all that much because Democrats are going to continue to run the country that way.
	Whatever tool is at their disposal, they will use.
	But Democrats are being pretty careful here.
	I mean, acknowledge this.
	The Democrats are being pretty careful so far in their questioning of Amy Coney Barrett.
	They do not want to repeat the debacle of the Kavanaugh hearing that actually resounded against them in pretty significant ways.
	Okay, in just a second, we're going to get to the other aspect of the Supreme Court hearing, which is the looming specter of court packing.
	We'll get to that in just one second.
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	Okay, and then we get to the Democrats final response to Amy Coney Barrett and that is maybe we'll pack the court. Right? This is I don't think it's real.
	I mean, I'll just be frank with you.
	I do not think the Democrats really intend on packing the court, because if they did pack the court, then the political response from the other side would be to pack the court.
	The other way, I mean, it would completely trash the institution.
	But I think that they feel it necessary to offer a glimpse of hope to their own base.
	This is why Joe Biden is playing footsie with it.
	So Biden yesterday was actually asked again about it.
	And he said he's kind of uncomfortable with court packing, but he refused to come out and just condemn it outright.
	Naturally, the other Democrats are trying to dodge the question as well.
	Tim Kaine, former vice presidential candidate with Hillary Clinton and senator from Virginia.
	He was asked about Biden and court packing.
	He said Biden doesn't have to answer those questions.
	He doesn't.
	Naturally, the good news is that members of the media will never actually hold Democrats to account for this.
	And I don't even know the members of the public care that much.
	Why won't he answer that question?
	Well, I haven't asked him, but I have a pretty good idea, Bill, because it's not his business.
	The Constitution gives no power to the president or vice president to pack the court.
	I heard Senator Ernst say, Joe needs to say he won't pack the court.
	It's not a presidential responsibility.
	Congress, according to Article 1 of the Constitution, sets the compositions.
	You haven't heard Joe Biden said he would send a plan to the court.
	I don't think this is a matter for the President at all.
	Okay, that's a lie.
	It would have to be approved by the President.
	He could veto the bill.
	And there are certain things that the President is not required to get involved with.
	For example, getting rid of the filibuster.
	Asking Biden about getting rid of the filibuster?
	He's the president, you know, if he gets elected.
	And so he actually has no say in that.
	He could tell his party not to do it.
	But the president doesn't actually have a role in that.
	It's a Senate procedural move.
	When it comes to court packing, there have to be a bill signed by the president.
	So, of course, Tim Kaine is just lying there.
	Maisie Hirono, the dumbest person in the United States Senate.
	Cory Booker is the most irritating.
	Maisie Hirono is probably the dumbest.
	She dodged on court packing yesterday as well.
	I have been thinking about court reform for a number of years, but we don't have a serious discussion about court reform, which, by the way, it will take serious discussion.
	It's just not a matter of, do you want this change?
	Do you want that change?
	That kind of discussion doesn't happen unless the Democrats take back the Senate.
	And yes, I expect Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to be laser focused on the potential for this country to give this out of control Okay, so we're not going to answer any of these tough questions.
	Naturally, the entire Democratic commentariat is now pushing court expansion.
	Eugene Robinson, the columnist for the Washington Post, he has a piece today called Republicans are trying to make court expansion a mortal sin.
	Don't let them.
	That is the dumbest argument I have ever heard in my life.
	So you can only ask a politician about what they're going to do once they've been elected because only then do they have the capacity to do it.
	That is directly counter to how democracies or republics work.
	then and only then will court packing be an actual possibility.
	That is the dumbest argument I have ever heard in my life.
	So you can only ask a politician about what they're going to do once they've been elected because only then do they have the capacity to do it.
	That is directly counter to how democracies or republics work.
	If you're going to vote for a candidate, typically you're allowed to ask them what they're going to do when they get the power.
	That's absurd.
	But, says Eugene Robinson, they should actually manipulate the court.
	He says there's more than one way to skew or unskew the ideology of the high court by manipulating the number of sitting justices.
	You could do it effectively by reducing the number of seats to eight, keeping one seat vacant for more than a year, as Republicans did with Barack Obama's nominee in 2016.
	They didn't do that to keep the seat open.
	I mean, not so that there could be eight justices.
	They didn't care about there being eight justices.
	If Barack Obama had nominated someone whose judicial philosophy they liked, presumably they would have gone along with it.
	Or he could rush through a hasty confirmation process, says Eugene Robinson.
	But you could also just pack the Constitution.
	If Democrats were to win the White House and Senate and keep control of the House, they would have options for how to respond to the long Republican campaign to capture the courts and the shenanigans they've used to pursue it.
	Expanding the size of the Supreme Court wouldn't be their only option.
	Recognize something about the courts?
	Every single Norm that has been broken around the courts was first broken by Democrats.
	It was Democrats who broke the norm around approving qualified judicial nominees by borking Robert Bork.
	It was Democrats who broke the norm surrounding judicial nominees and treating them with respect during the Clarence Thomas hearings and then again during the Brett Kavanaugh hearings.
	It was Democrats Who decided to nuke the judicial filibuster under Barack Obama.
	So let's be clear here.
	Everything Republicans have done, they've done because Democrats set the precedent.
	It is not because Republicans set the precedent.
	But in any case, all of this, I think, is all of this may be really a moot point.
	Maybe we're putting too much focus on the court packing thing.
	And I say that as someone who cares deeply about court packing.
	Why?
	Because it's just one aspect of a simple fact, which is that Joe Biden will not be asked any tough questions from now until the election.
	Joe Biden is not a coherent person.
	He's not.
	And asking him to be coherent is a mistake.
	He's a doddering old fool.
	He's been a fool for a while, but now he's doddering and old as well.
	He cannot string together a sentence.
	This is why it was such an act of political error for President Trump to keep interrupting him during that first debate.
	By the way, if you look at the polling data, And I know, I know.
	Every time I say polls, people start screaming at their phones and their radios.
	Okay, guys, data is data.
	If you look at the polling data, the closest that Trump and Biden have been was September 29th.
	Then the polls diverge.
	They split.
	Biden goes almost straight up and Trump goes almost straight down starting September 29th.
	What happened September 29th?
	That first debate.
	Why?
	Because people wanted to see if Joe Biden could hold up.
	And all Joe Biden had to do was stand there.
	Let the guy talk.
	I think that, frankly, if it requires a Zoom debate in order for Biden to be allowed to talk, then do the Zoom debate.
	More Biden speaking on camera is better.
	Biden speaking on camera in any situation where he's being asked a tough question is bad for Joe Biden.
	In fact, Joe Biden is such a terrible, I mean, he's a terrible candidate.
	He is.
	This is why I've said before that if Trump, look, if any Republican losing to a Democrat, Republicans face a bunch of institutional obstacles, namely the media who hate their guts and will cover them negatively while carrying around a slop bucket for the Democratic candidate.
	They have to face the institutional biases of some members of the government.
	There are certain obstacles that Republicans just have to face as candidates.
	That's true.
	But if you lose to Joe Biden by double digits, this old doddering idiot, you lose to this guy who ran for president one million times and lost every time until now.
	Then some of that has to be on your own campaign strategy, because Biden cannot hold it together.
	He is not capable of holding it together.
	So, for example, yesterday, Joe Biden was asked specifically about a Gallup poll.
	It showed 56% of Americans were happier now than they were four years ago.
	And he was asked, what do you say to those people who say they were happier now than four years ago about why they should vote for you?
	And Biden literally said they shouldn't vote for me.
	The poll says 56%, dude.
	Do you not understand how numbers work?
	That's a pretty amazing, amazing statement.
	Here was Joe Biden saying just that.
	Gallup reported last week 56% of Americans said that they were better off today than they were four years ago would have been under the Obama-Biden administration.
	So why should people who feel that they are better off today under the Trump administration vote for you?
	Well if they think that they probably shouldn't.
	But that was not the only Joe Biden fumble and stumble.
	Like, this should be the story of the campaign.
	The story of the campaign should be that this guy is not going to be president for long if he is president.
	He needs to get a food taster, first of all, for Kamala Harris.
	Never let Kamala serve you tea.
	But beyond that, this is not a person who's going to be president in four years, let alone eight years.
	Here is Joe Biden stumbling once again and saying he was running for Senate of the United States.
	You know, we have to come together.
	That's why I'm running.
	I'm running as a proud Democrat for the Senate.
	Well, no, you're not, though.
	So there's that.
	And then Biden also forgot Mitt Romney's name.
	He only ran against the Romney campaign in 2012.
	OK, this is not like 40 years ago and he's mixing up senators or something.
	Here he was forgetting Romney's name and calling him the Mormon guy.
	You may remember I got in trouble when we were running against the senator who was a Mormon.
	I'm the governor, okay?
	Okay, well done.
	Well done, Joe Biden.
	He is not coherent.
	He is not with it.
	So maybe we shouldn't put too much focus on the fact he won't answer questions on court packing.
	I'm not sure he's capable of answering serious questions on anything.
	The bar is so low for him at this point that if he is even mildly in the same ballpark as a topic, people credit him with doing a great job as he did during that CNN town hall.
	But this is why Trump pressuring him and then letting him talk would be the good strategy from here on out.
	By the way, that tactic does work.
	So Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, he is running against Amy McGrath in Kentucky.
	He's going to beat Amy McGrath.
	Again, Democrats have poured money down a rat hole running against Mitch McConnell in Kentucky.
	I feel it's necessary to spend an awful lot of time, or as much time as possible, with Republicans who are capable of articulating conservative principles and pointing out that Democrats stand against a lot of the major institutions of American government.
	It's why I spent a lot of time on that Pence-Harris debate, where I said, like, if you strip the Trumpian attitude from the Trump administration, all you get is a lot of good policy and some conservative ideology.
	It doesn't mean everything the Trump administration has done is good.
	They've spent out the wazoo, for example.
	Articulation of conservative principle in a solid way is a winner.
	Here was Mitch McConnell going after Amy McGrath in their Senate race.
	They had a Senate debate the other night.
	And McConnell just thoroughly, thoroughly trashed her.
	My opponent says she's the most progressive person in Kentucky.
	What does that mean?
	That means they want to stack the Supreme Court.
	In other words, add numbers so they can get an outcome that they like.
	She wants to make the District of Columbia a state, Puerto Rico a state, get rid of the filibuster in the Senate.
	In short, there's not a dime's worth of difference between my opponent and all the National Democrats that you've watched.
	If you give them control of the government, that's what they'll do.
	This is exactly right.
	This is why, at the very least, I'm hopeful that Republicans make that argument in Senate races around the country.
	Again, it is looking much more competitive in the Senate races right now than it is in the presidential race overall.
	And as I say, if Republicans hold Maine, if they hold Montana, If they hold Georgia, both seats in Georgia, if they somehow take Michigan, if they hold the seat in Iowa, they'll retain the Senate.
	And that will be a very, very important thing because, again, Democrats in control of the presidency and the House and the Senate is one of the scarier propositions on the ballot.
	So if you're going to take that money and donate it somewhere, donate it to a Senate race because those things are real close and the Senate is going to matter an awful, awful lot in coming years.
	Even if Trump wins, it's going to matter an awful lot.
	If Trump wins and Democrats take the Senate, nothing's getting done.
	So, those Senate races matter an awful lot.
	More focus on the Senate, less on the presidential race, is my quick sort of political pick for the day.
	Okay, meanwhile, controversy has broken out over COVID once again.
	So, a couple things.
	One, there was supposed to be a debate this week.
	The Commission on Presidential Debate said they could not have an in-person debate.
	Well, as it turns out, President Trump has now tested negative for coronavirus on consecutive days and is no longer infectious to others, according to Dr. Sean Conley.
	He said in a statement in response to your inquiry regarding the president's most recent COVID-19 test, I can share with you he has now tested negative on consecutive days using the Abbott BinaxNOW antigen card.
	It is important to note this test was not used in isolation for the determination of the president's current negative status.
	Repeatedly, negative antigen tests taken in context with additional clinical and laboratory data, including viral load, subgenomic RNA, and PCR cycle threshold measurements, as well as ongoing assessment of viral culture data, all indicate a lack of detectable viral replication.
	So, that means that it has been a mistake for the Commission on Presidential Debate to cancel the debate, but no shock there.
	They stepped in just in time to save Joe Biden from a second debate.
	Okay, meanwhile, Trump out on the campaign trail in his post-COVID state.
	And things are getting exciting out there.
	So President Trump danced to YMCA.
	He was down in Florida, in Sanford, Florida, doing a big rally.
	And here was the president looking enthused and healthy and ready to go.
	It's hard not to laugh because, listen, the president's a funny guy.
	So here is President Trump dancing.
	That's a that's a look.
	It's a look.
	It's a thing.
	It's a thing that has happened in human history.
	And then Trump, obviously very excited to be back out on the stump.
	And he says he's going to wade into the crowd and kiss people.
	Some of us actually predicted this, right?
	I said that he was going to body surf.
	He was going to jump out into the crowd, get carried around on the shoulders of various Trump supporters.
	He said he was going to wander out there and just kiss everybody.
	I went through it.
	Now they say I'm immune.
	I can feel, I feel so powerful.
	I'll walk into that audience.
	I'll walk in there, I'll kiss everyone in that audience.
	I'll kiss the guys and the beautiful women and everybody.
	I'll just give you a big fat kiss.
	He's a funny man.
	He does the funniest.
	That is for sure.
	I will say, is it a smart closing pitch?
	Is it a super smart closing pitch?
	Well, it shows that, listen, Americans are still worried about COVID.
	I think that a lot of that worry is overblown, not because of fears of COVID if you're in a vulnerable subpopulation, but because the death rates on COVID have dropped dramatically, dramatically from March.
	I mean, I would actually hazard to say that if Trump had gotten COVID in March when people didn't know what they were doing, there's a much better chance that the man would have died from it.
	Because that's true for everybody in a vulnerable subgroup, right?
	He had to take remdesivir.
	That was not available in the early going.
	He took monoclonal antibodies.
	Those were not available in the early goings.
	The hospitalization rates are down and the death rates in hospitals are down by something like 80 to 90 percent.
	So this thing is not nearly as deadly as it was the first time around.
	With that said, are Americans still fearful?
	Is a certain amount of caution still merited?
	Absolutely, absolutely.
	And that's why, again, from a political point of view, I really don't understand why Republican politicians particularly are being so cavalier about the mask wearing.
	Listen, I understand that we live in a reactionary era where whenever Democrats in the media say something is important, the immediate reaction is to say it's not important at all.
	I understand that it's irritating to watch members of the media saying selectively that certain masks are useful and certain masks are not, that if you're dancing for racial justice, In crowds, or if you're going to a party in a minority neighborhood, then mask wearing is not important.
	But if you're a Jew going to shul, or if you're a Trump rallier going to a Trump rally, or if you're going to an ACB event, then that is super, super important.
	Then the masks are super important.
	And the selective application of mask shaming is really irritating.
	That doesn't mean it is smart for American Republican politicians to take off the mask and wade into crowds.
	Because the minute they get COVID, then the media is going to turn around and say, because you weren't cautious enough.
	Now, there's no guarantee that you're going to avoid COVID, even if you wear a mask.
	There was a recent self-reported survey saying that 85% of people who said that they had gotten COVID said that they frequently or often wore masks.
	Now, again, that's self-reported data.
	That may be a little bit high.
	Nonetheless, the sort of perception widespread among the American public is that you're not being as cautious as you could be if you are not wearing masks.
	So I don't understand.
	By the way, you know who understands is Mitch McConnell, right?
	Mitch McConnell was asked the other day about why he's not visiting the White House so often.
	He said because they're not taking enough precautions on COVID.
	That is a widespread public perception.
	So Trump doing these big outdoor rallies with a lot of people not wearing masks, It doesn't make tons of sense to me, frankly.
	On a political level, it doesn't make a lot of sense.
	Mark Meadows did some of this yesterday, so Meadows was being quizzed by the media, and he wanted to take off his mask, so he just kind of wandered away.
	That way I can take this off to talk.
	Well, I'm more than 10 feet away.
	Well, I'm not going to talk through a mask.
	Okay, so you heard one of the members of the media say, no, don't take off the mask, and I'm more than 10 feet away.
	That's not all Meadows' fault, obviously.
	It's not all of Meadows' fault.
	And that is the media's fault for, I mean, really, like, I get it.
	It makes no scientific sense.
	But let's just be real about what politics is.
	Very often, politics is the meme.
	And right now, the meme is the mask.
	Democrats understand this.
	For some reason, Republicans seem not to.
	Again, I get it.
	The media are super irritating on the subject, right?
	Jim Acosta was at a Trump rally yesterday.
	And people were chanting, CNN sucks.
	Fact check true.
	And then he started saying that, you know, getting coronavirus, that also sucks.
	It's terrible.
	Thank you, Jim Acosta.
	We needed your expert medical advice, Jim Acosta.
	And ladies, find you a gentleman who loves you like Jim Acosta loves Jim Acosta.
	Iowa and North Carolina really states it should be in the bag for President Trump right now.
	That's an indication as to how much trouble he's in politically right now, Wolf.
	And as this crowd is chanting that there are members of the press here who suck, I should also point out, Wolf, what also sucks?
	Getting the coronavirus.
	Um, so thank you for that, Jim Acosta.
	Yes, it turns out getting coronavirus does, in fact, suck.
	And it still turns out that on the death per million level, Democratic states still have the most deaths.
	So if you're turning this into a political thing, let's recognize that that cuts a fair number of ways.
	Now, this is broken out into a controversy In which Trump finally, the media have been trying to get this to happen all along.
	Trump was smart to avoid it for months.
	Now it's breaking out into the open.
	He's having a direct conflict with Dr. Anthony Fauci, who again, never should have been propped up as Captain COVID, right?
	The guy who knows more about COVID than any other human being.
	He was wrong about a lot of stuff.
	Early on, he said that it was not a real threat.
	You should go about your daily lives.
	And then he said that you should not bother with masks because apparently he was lying to the American people in order so that we wouldn't use PPE and we'd reserve it for medical workers.
	And then he was very much in favor of lockdowns, and now it turns out that those lockdowns were not such a great idea as the WHO now recognizes.
	In fact, there's a tremendous amount of rising COVID in Europe.
	First of all, we should not actually use number of cases as a good indicator of whether a country is handling this well.
	You should use hospitalizations, ICUs, and deaths as the indication of whether a country is handling this particularly well.
	If you're going to use infections as the gauge, then you should determine whether you're on the downside of a curve or whether you're just in the middle of a lockdown.
	So Sweden right now has not really seen a tremendous increase in the number of cases because they've been open basically forever.
	But UK, France, they're seeing an absolute skyrocketing number of cases right now.
	Does that mean like the end of the world?
	Apparently not.
	Apparently Europe is staying open.
	According to the Washington Post, England has seen new coronavirus cases quadruple in the past three weeks, now has more COVID-19 patients hospitalized than before the government imposed a lockdown in March.
	Well, I mean, yes, that makes perfect sense.
	A lot of people are being infected.
	Like much of Europe, Britain, however, is pursuing targeted local restrictions.
	They're closing pubs in Liverpool, for example, while doing everything it can to avoid another national lockdown and closure of schools.
	In a statement to Parliament, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said he was trying to take a balanced approach between the extremes of shuttering our lives and our economy and abandoning the fight.
	He has set up a three-tiered system.
	This is common across Europe.
	Countries across Europe are similarly looking for compromises as they scramble to contain a resurgence in infections and hospital admissions.
	Even still, they face more anger and frustration from businesses and individuals than they did in the spring.
	Ravi Gupta, microbiologist at the University of Cambridge, said that in Britain and other European countries, a full lockdown is off the political agenda, in part because the fear factor around the coronavirus is not what it was in the spring.
	He says it's clear people cannot endure long-term restrictions outside of authoritarian regimes.
	So this is not a great shock, and it's not restricted to the United States.
	What that does mean is that the lockdown skeptics were correct.
	Lockdown has not, in fact, been a big boon.
	All it did was delay this thing.
	Maybe that had the effect of tamping down the death rates in March and April, which is good, but it did not have the effect of quashing the virus or stopping the virus in any real way.
	Okay, bottom line is this.
	In American politics, you know, come back across this side of the water where everybody pretends that America exists in isolation.
	The Trump administration policy, as I've been saying all along, was not wrong.
	Their policy was actually much better than what a Democratic administration policy would have been, which would have been a fascistic top-down control over every area of the American economy, which would have been really bad.
	I mean, Joe Biden is basically threatening it now.
	It would have been really bad.
	However, there are two sides to this.
	One is the policy, as always with the Trump administration.
	One is the policy, and one is the messaging.
	When it comes to messaging, you know it is a bad idea to be at war with Anthony Fauci, who again has been propped up by the media and put on the cover of InTouch magazine.
	If Trump wanted to put him front and center originally, then you can't always be at war with your own personnel.
	So Trump quoted Fauci in an ad, in which Fauci said that, I think that they've done more than anybody else would have.
	Basically showing that Fauci himself was a fan of the Trump administration's action.
	Then Fauci, who is a political actor.
	I mean, he is political.
	To pretend he is not political is to ignore his actions over the past few months.
	He is political.
	That does not mean that targeting him is smart.
	Fauci then went on CNN and said that he's angry that there's a commercial quoting him.
	Okay, here's the deal, dude.
	If you don't want to be in the media, don't be in the media.
	If you are in the media, get ready for people to quote you in commercials.
	So, Trump is not wrong to be angry at Fauci.
	That also does not mean it's smart to go to war with Fauci.
	Here is Fauci going after Trump yesterday.
	Should the Trump campaign take this ad down?
	You know, I think so, Jake.
	I think it's really unfortunate and really disappointing that they did that.
	It's so clear that I'm not a political person.
	And I have never, either directly or indirectly, endorsed a political candidate.
	And to take a completely out-of-context statement and put it in, which is obviously a political campaign ad, I thought was really very disappointing.
	Okay, so there he is going after Trump.
	By the way, the statement was not really out of context.
	It really was not.
	And there's Fauci going after Trump.
	Look, he doesn't like Trump.
	It's pretty obvious Trump doesn't like him.
	Fauci did have to admit that Trump is right about being immune to the virus at this point.
	The problem with the word immune, it means different things to different individuals, Jake.
	If he means that he's been infected, and having been infected and recovered, that he will not get infected again.
	That's true for a limited period of time.
	What we do not know is how long that protection lasts.
	So technically speaking, The fact that he has recovered from an immunological standpoint, he has an immune response in him that very likely would protect him from being reinfected.
	Okay, well the media are disappointed in this answer because they've been proclaiming that Trump is lying when he says he's immune.
	Okay, but again, Fauci is...
	To pretend he's not political is a mistake.
	Here is Anthony Fauci suggesting that he can't think of any reasons for excess COVID deaths except for COVID.
	Now, it is true that the excess deaths year on year are largely attributable to COVID.
	It's also true we've seen excess deaths in terms of suicide and depression.
	We've seen deaths of despair.
	We have seen excess deaths in terms of people who didn't go to the hospital and they should have gone to the hospital.
	So there were excess deaths that were attributable to lockdown, and it is unscientific.
	It really is for Fauci not to at least acknowledge that.
	Do you think that this is a sign that we are actually undercounting coronavirus deaths?
	Yeah.
	No, you can't say for sure, Jake, but it certainly suggests that that is the case, unless you can find another reason, which I can't think of, of there being these excess deaths in the context of coronavirus.
	You'd have to make an assumption that is reasonably possible, if not likely, that those are deaths that are related to corona and they're just not being counted.
	Okay, and then Fauci got political again.
	He was asked about rallies.
	Now, again, he was perfectly willing to answer when it came to rallies, Trump rallies, saying that these political rallies they're asking for trouble, they're really bad.
	Do you remember Fauci being particularly vocal about the giant racial justice rallies that were happening across, the so-called racial justice rallies that were happening across the country?
	I don't remember him being a leader on that particular issue.
	I remember him sort of receding into the background.
	But here was Fauci going after Trump's rallies.
	Put aside all of the issues of what political implications a rally has and just put that aside and look at it purely in the context of public health.
	We know that that is asking for trouble when you do that.
	We've seen that when you have situations of congregate settings where there are a lot of people without masks.
	The data speak for themselves.
	It happens.
	And now is even more so a worse time to do that.
	Okay, so Trump responded this morning on Twitter.
	He went after Fauci on Twitter.
	That seems like a bad move.
	However much I disagree with Fauci on a lot of this stuff.
	And I disagree with Fauci about his general strategy.
	I disagree with Fauci on the way he's characterized these problems.
	I disagree with Fauci about downplaying the effects of lockdown while upplaying the threat of COVID beyond what I think is entirely reasonable. I think he's been far too hesitant to convey true data about the deadliness of COVID to people based on age and condition stratification. I think he should be much clearer from the outset. And I think that his strategy overall has not been good. Trump going after Fauci is a mistake. And he's tweeting incessantly about Fauci today. He tweeted today, Tony's pitching arm is far more accurate than his
	prognostications. No problem, no masks. WHO no longer likes lockdowns. Just came out against.
	Trump was right. We saved 2 million American lives. Now, 2 million American lives statistic is coming from that very bad Niel Ferguson.
	10.
	Ridiculous study in Britain, not Neil Ferguson, the historian, Neil Ferguson, the epidemiologist in Britain.
	There's a terrible study he did in which he suggested that America would experience 2.2 million deaths from coronavirus if everything was left alone.
	He says, well, we only lost 200,000, therefore we saved 2 million lives.
	I think that is scientifically dubious, but coming out against Fauci in a time when people are still worried about COVID and you're saying that you're going to body surf a crowd is just not a good message.
	It's just not like, is that your closing pitch?
	I don't understand how you win an election on that basis, especially because it, again, allows the media to focus in on you rather than focusing in on the absolute incompetence and wild incoherence of Joe Biden and a radical Democratic Party who will do long-term damage to the institutions of the United States.
	Alrighty, so we'll be back here a little bit later today with two additional hours of content.
	Otherwise, we'll see you here tomorrow.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
	The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Colton Haas.
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	Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
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	Democrat senators humiliate themselves at the confirmation hearings for SCOTUS nominee Amy Barrett.
	The CDC finds 85% of people infected by COVID wore their masks always or often, and 56% of Americans feel they're doing better than they were four years ago.

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