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Feb. 19, 2021 - The Ben Shapiro Show
47:02
Ted Cruz And The Politics Of Hypocrisy | Ep. 1199
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Time Text
Ted Cruz takes it on the chin after traveling to Cancun in the middle of the Texas freeze.
New studies find that all of American life has turned political.
And Team Biden promotes endless COVID restrictions.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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Slash Ben, we'll get to all the news in just one moment.
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Alrighty, so the big news of the day is that Ted Cruz went to Cancun.
Yep, that's where we are in American life.
So, here is what happened.
According to the UK Daily Mail, which has a 59 photo spread, I kid you not, a 59 photo spread, because this is the only story that the media would like to cover today, is the fact that Senator Cruz left Texas and went down to Cancun, and then he came back, And was super apologetic about having gone down to Cancun while Texas is freezing and millions of people don't have power.
So here is the UK Daily Mail reporting.
A chastened Ted Cruz landed back in Houston on Thursday afternoon and said he regrets flying to Cancun in the middle of the state's energy crisis for a vacation, but insisted he was just trying to be a dad.
Cruz enraged his state by fleeing in the midst of the worst snowstorms to hit in decades, with the power failing for millions and people left freezing in the subzero temperatures.
At least 24 people are known to have died in Texas.
Cruz claims his 10 and 12-year-old daughters asked him on Wednesday if they could go on vacation to Mexico with their friends, so he and his wife boarded a plane hours later.
It was obviously a mistake, and in hindsight, I would not have done it, he said, speaking on arrival at his home in Houston.
Here is what Cruz had to say, justifying why he had gone to Cancun in the first place.
Well, Texas is going through horrific storms, and millions of Texans have lost power and lost peace and have been hurt.
And, uh, our family was among them.
We had no heat and no power.
And, uh, yesterday my daughters asked if they could take a trip with some friends.
And Heidi and I agreed, so I flew down with them last night, dropped them off here, and now I'm headed back to Texas and back to continuing to work to try to get the power up.
What's happening in Texas is unacceptable, and a lot of Texans are hurting.
Okay, so a few things that are worth noting right off the bat.
Obviously, horrifying optics, right?
The worst optics.
Because rule number one of politics in today's day and age is that you have to appear on the scene whenever there is something bad that happens.
I'll be honest with you, I've never been a big fan of this rule.
I think this rule is kind of dumb.
Like, I always thought that it was ridiculous that people were upset with, for example, George W. Bush for not landing on the ground during Hurricane Katrina.
Like, okay, so now he's looking at the water.
Great.
By the way, Barack Obama, during the last Louisiana hurricane in 2016, Barack Obama stayed up in Martha's Vineyard for much of that.
In fact, Donald Trump took advantage of that in the 2016 campaign.
He himself flew down to Louisiana.
But, you know, like, Politicians, obviously a lot of the job is optics, a lot of the job is appearing to be sympathetic or be compassionate, and Cruz failed here, no question, right?
Which I think Cruz himself would acknowledge at this point, but this is like the most obvious political move of all time.
You can't jet off to Cancun.
If you wanna send your wife and your kids, go ahead and send your wife and your kids.
You gotta stay there, obviously, okay?
That is number one, and is perfectly obvious, and it is perfectly true that it was a horrible move by Cruz not to stick around in Texas.
All of that happens to be true.
The amount of attention the media are paying to this is overwhelming and kind of insane.
Kind of insane.
I mean, they track down, like, every aspect of this.
So much so that the New York Times uncovered texts between Heidi Cruz, Ted's wife, and the neighbors.
So I guess that we are done with the whole, you're not allowed to access texts without people's permission routine.
I guess we're done with that whole thing.
Because it was a group text and somebody gave it to the New York Times, so that's okay now, right?
So, Hunter Biden's computer, Twitter had to shut down the entire New York Post account for putting out information based on Hunter Biden's laptop, even though there was no legal barrier to that information actually being put out there.
Here, apparently it's totally okay to start leaking people's texts that are directed at friends.
By the way, these friends are jerks.
I'm just gonna say that.
So apparently here is what happened according to the New York Times.
Like millions of his constituents across Texas, Senator Ted Cruz had a frigid home without electricity this week amid the state's power crisis.
But unlike most, Mr. Cruz got out, fleeing Houston and hopping a Wednesday afternoon flight to Cancun with his family for a respite at a luxury resort.
Photos of Mr. Cruz and his wife Heidi boarding the flight ricocheted quickly across social media and left both his political allies and rivals aghast at a tropical trip as the disaster unfolded at home.
The blowback only intensified after Cruz, a Republican, released a statement saying he had flown to Mexico to be a good dad and accompany his daughters and their friends.
Which, of course, is never a good look.
Saying that your kids are the reason that you did X is never a particularly good look.
Although I will acknowledge there are folks on the left being like, why would you ever take advice from your kids?
The same people who think a three-year-old should decide their gender.
In any case, text messages sent from Ms.
Cruz to friends and Houston neighbors on Wednesday revealed a hastily planned trip.
Their house was freezing, as Ms.
Cruz put it, and she proposed to get away until Sunday.
Ms.
Cruz invited others to join them at the Ritz-Carlton in Cancun, where they'd stayed many times, noting the room price this week, 309 bucks a night, and it's good security.
The text messages were provided to the New York Times and confirmed by a second person on the thread who declined to be identified because of the private nature of the text.
Okay, so let me just say this.
Whoever was deleting this and then confirming it to the Times, jackass.
Like, seriously.
Like, nasty thing to do.
But, put all that aside, again, is it a smart political move to jet set off to Cancun in the middle of a freezing winter?
Obviously, bad optics.
And politics is half the optics game.
That is a reality.
Now, something is obviously true here.
And that is that the media's attempt to paint this as the greatest act of political hypocrisy in modern American history is absurd on its face.
Absolutely absurd on its face.
Let me give you, say, four examples of hypocrisy in the last year.
Okay, so, example number one of hypocrisy.
Andrew Cuomo declaring himself an unbelievably great leader, like such a great leader that he won an Emmy.
People declaring him the greatest leader of all time.
Chris Cuomo going on TV with him and making jokes with him every night.
CNN waving its own conflict of interest rules so that they could do that little comedy routine.
Andrew Cuomo being praised to the skies by Dr. Anthony Fauci and it turns out he was lying to his own party and to the public and to the families of people who had died of COVID by suggesting that the death count in nursing homes was significantly lower than it actually was.
Which may in fact be a criminal act and now he's under investigation.
Okay, so that's act of political hypocrisy number one.
Declaring yourself a leader while simultaneously avoiding the cost of leadership by failing to take responsibility for your own policies.
And that's hypocrisy because you have said, essentially, that your standard is a standard that applies to no one else.
You can lie, and you can cheat, and you can lie about people dying, and that's totally okay.
So that is hypocrisy number one.
Okay, so that's example of hypocrisy number one.
Hypocrisy example number two.
Nancy Pelosi is very much in favor of lockdowns.
The entire city of San Francisco is locked down, and Nancy Pelosi waves the rules for herself to go indoors and get her hair did.
That is example of hypocrisy.
Number two, because Nancy Pelosi was an advocate for many of the rules she was then breaking herself.
In order to be a hypocrite, you have to be an advocate for a rule, and then you have to violate that rule.
Right, so Nancy Pelosi violates that rule.
Okay, similar sort of example.
Gavin Newsom, very much a fan of the lockdown rules across the state of California.
Small businesses being forcibly shut, people being put out of work because Gavin Newsom will not allow them to open their businesses even if they are trying to do so in safe and secure fashion.
And then Governor Gavin Newsom heads on over to the French Laundry.
Right, that is another example of political hypocrisy.
And we saw lots of examples that look exactly like that one, right?
You had the mayor of, I'm trying to remember which Texas city, heading on over to Cabo.
It was different than Cruz because he was actively advocating that people not travel while traveling.
Okay, so we'll get to Cruz in a second because Cruz, this isn't, it's a bad politically, it's a bad political move optically.
It is not actually hypocrisy.
In order for it to be hypocrisy, Cruz would have had to do something that he advocated for no one else.
But that's not actually what Cruz did here.
Cruz, again, Being politically foolish here and optically ridiculous and all of that, and he's paying the price for it today.
It's not actually even close to the level of these other folks.
He did not advocate for Texas freezing over.
He did not advocate for people to be trapped in their homes.
He's not somebody who's like, you know what?
It would be great if you stayed home in the middle of this freeze.
I'm taking off.
If everybody could get out, presumably, he'd be in favor of everybody heading on over to Cancun.
So, again, politically tone-deaf on an extraordinary level, for sure, and he will pay the price for that.
But the media are treating the cruise incident as significantly worse than any of the other incidents.
In order for you to be a true hypocrite, you have to actually foster support for a rule, or in many of these cases, implement a rule yourself, and then not abide by the rule.
Right, you have to be a governor who advocates for a lockdown and then you break the lockdown.
You have to be a mayor like Lori Lightfoot who says, don't go out and get your hair done and then go out and get your hair done.
Right, that is an act of political hypocrisy.
It's locking down people when they don't want to be locked down and then you don't have to lock down because you're the special.
Okay, that's not what Cruz did here.
For the 1000th time, two things can be true at once.
Politically tone deaf, not nearly meritorious of the kind of media coverage that is currently being provided with regard to Cruz.
It is blanket and it is overwhelming.
And these major newspapers have dedicated reporters to checking on Ted Cruz's dog.
The blowback from this on the right is probably not going to be against Cruz, frankly, over the course of time, because the media always overplayed their hand.
They can't just say this is politically stupid and it shows that he's uncompassionate or that he's out of touch, all of which you can make the case based on this particular incident, right?
But instead, they're going so far that they're being like, what a hypocrite, what a terrible person.
There's a piece over at The Atlantic talking about what an awful human being Ted Cruz is because he jet set it off to Cancun.
David Graham at the Atlantic has an entire piece titled, Ted Cruz is no hypocrite.
He's worse.
He's worse than a hypocrite.
And we'll get to more on this in just one second.
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Okay, so.
As I say, the media's attention on the Ted Cruz jaunt is absolutely overwhelming.
59 pictures, 59 pictures from the UK Daily Mail.
The New York Times dedicated an entire report to the text messages between Heidi Cruz and friends.
Cruz told a television crew at the Cancun airport what's happening in Texas is unacceptable.
He was wearing a Texas state flag mask and a short sleeve polo shirt tucked into jeans.
The temperature in Cancun was above 80 degrees Fahrenheit on Thursday and in the 30s in Houston.
And then when he came back to the United States, Cruz offered a new statement with a different tone when he had tried to explain the vacation without regrets.
Speaking to reporters after his arrival home, he conceded the trip was obviously a mistake, said he had begun having second thoughts as soon as he boarded the plane to Mexico, intent on a few days of remote work in the sun.
He said the plan had been to stay through the weekend with the family.
That changes from his original statement where he said that he was going to go there, drop the kids, and come back.
He said, And of course, this trended on social media.
You got Flyin' Ted, which of course is a play on Trump's nickname for Cruz, Lyin' Ted.
take care of our families.
I also have a responsibility I take very seriously in fighting for the state of Texas.
As it became a bigger and bigger firestorm, it became all the more compelling that I needed to come back.
And of course, this trended on social media.
You got Flyin' Ted, which of course is a play on Trump's nickname for Cruz, Lyin' Ted.
You got Fled Cruz, which Fox News used.
Gilberto Quinojosa, the Democratic Texas party chairman, said this is about as callous as any politician can get.
He's a politician that has really never cared much about anybody but himself.
And of course, that criticism is going to stick with regard to Cruz, because you can make that case.
But the media are going further.
The media are going further, and they are suggesting that this thing not only ought to be national news for a day, but it's like the worst thing that has ever happened in the history of mankind.
Believe it or not, Reporters were deployed to Ted Cruz's house to check on his poodle.
I kid you not.
Apparently, Snowflake, that's the name of his dog, was spotted by a reporter at 1 p.m.
on Thursday looking out the front door.
A security guard stationed outside the property said he had been tasked with feeding and tending to the dog in the freezing home.
The dog was adopted by the family as a puppy in 2014.
So, much of this is just, you know, people hate Cruz, and this is a great, great way to dunk on Ted Cruz.
But the way that this is being played in the media is that this is some sort of referendum on Republican policy in some way, which is weird, because what the hell does this have to do with policy?
Again, it has to do with the politician making an absolutely bad-toned, optical decision.
What does it have to do with policy, per se?
I think the answer here is pretty obvious, not much.
But that's not stopping the media from, again, going too far.
Again, I gave all those examples of hypocrisy.
If you're gonna rank those examples of hypocrisy and how much attention they deserve, it'll go Cuomo, number one with a bullet, right?
I mean, Cuomo was treated as the greatest governor in the history of planet Earth, and it turns out that he was lying to people openly.
He was not just lying to people openly.
And by the way, we knew this since May.
The media just decided not to cover it until after the election.
He was actively threatening other members of the New York Democratic Party.
For example, New York Democratic Assemblyman Ron Kim, he came out yesterday and he was like, you know what?
My family was absolutely terrified of Cuomo.
Like, if you're going to talk about the disparity in coverage, Most of the major networks last night carried blanket coverage for Ted Cruz going to Cancun.
How many of them have ever had blanket coverage for Andrew Cuomo, the sitting governor of New York, actively lying about how many people died in nursing homes because of his crappy COVID policy, and actively threatening other members of the Democratic Party?
Which one of those is a bigger story?
Just on a pure objective level.
One might be more fun to meme.
One might be more fun to dunk on.
But it's pretty obvious which one of these is a bigger story the media should be paying attention to.
Here is New York Democratic Assemblyman Ron Kim explaining that the sitting governor of New York, the greatest of all governors in the history of the world, was actively threatening him.
Governor Cuomo called me the next day at 8 p.m.
while I was about to bathe my kids.
I was with my wife.
And for 10 minutes, He berated me.
He yelled at me.
He told me that, you know, my career will be over.
He's been biting his tongue for months against me.
It was loud enough for my wife to hear, and I tried to shield her, but she was in shock.
I mean, she didn't get any sleep that night.
And we were terrified.
And, you know, she left.
He left a shocking moment for all of us in our family.
Okay, but that's not nearly as worthy of coverage as the fact that Senator Cruz threatened no one, went to Cancun, and then came back.
Again, not a justification for the optics.
This is not whataboutism.
This is a pure referendum on how crappy the media are at their jobs.
In one case, you have a governor actively lying about how many people died in his state because of his policy, and threatening members of his own party.
And the media are like, Well, you know, it's a story.
We'll do a little coverage.
I mean, I guess we got to cover it.
And on the other hand, you have a Republican senator in Texas in the middle of a freeze that he is not responsible for.
Also, by the way, not a state official.
He's not the governor of Texas.
He's not the mayor of Houston.
He did what he was supposed to do as a senator in the sense that he's not flying.
He did what he was supposed to do in terms of policy by contacting the White House and asking for a federal emergency declaration, which was then received.
Biden put one out.
Okay, that is not even close to on par with even the active hypocrisy of Gavin Newsom, who is actively promulgating a policy that he himself was not abiding by.
Cruz is not responsible for the freeze.
Cruz is not responsible for going and thawing the pipelines.
Cruz is a senator.
He's responsible for the political dumbassery of not heading over to a local church and handing out blankets or something, the way that Beto O'Rourke is.
O'Rourke at least understands that side of the business.
He also understands how to skateboard.
You know, you're responsible for that, for sure, but that is not on the same part.
I mean, again, Bill de Blasio, the mayor of New York, was ripping into Cuomo yesterday.
How is it not a bigger story that the mayor of New York is ripping into the governor of New York for being a liar and an authoritarian?
It's a sad thing to say, Mika, but that's classic Andrew Cuomo.
A lot of people in New York State have received those phone calls.
You know, the bullying is nothing new.
I believe Ron Kim, and it's very, very sad.
No public servant, no person who's telling the truth should be treated that way.
But yeah, the threats, the belittling, the demand that someone change their statement right that moment.
Many, many times I've heard that, and I know a lot of other people in this state have heard that.
Remember, this is not a big story.
What's a big story is that Ted Cruz went down to Cancun with his daughters and then came back.
That's the big story here.
Politically tone-deaf, not hypocrisy, and not really having anything to do with policy.
Doesn't matter.
Doesn't matter.
You're seeing the media completely reverse that.
Of course.
We'll get to more of this in just one second.
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So the Atlantic, of course, tries to go too far.
There's an entire piece saying that Ted Cruz is worse than a hypocrite, according to David Graham.
Why?
Well, because Ted Cruz backs libertarian energy policy, and that means that he's really bad.
According to David Graham, Cruz's approach to politics and Texas' approach to electrical generation flow from the same libertarian-inflected, low-regulation, small-government vision.
In this worldview, the government's role is to set a minimal baseline requirement, offer market-based incentives to ensure they work, and then stay the hell out of the way.
Consider how this works out in the case of electricity.
The lower 48 U.S.
states are divided into two big electrical grids except for Texas, which maintains its own independent system.
The state maintains a separate grid to avoid having to comply with federal regulation.
If Texas had been connected to the broader national grid, the state might have been able to borrow power that would have filled the hole left when the large parts of the system failed in the storm.
Instead, Texas has experienced staggering blackouts.
What in the world does this have to do with Ted Cruz going down to Cancun?
Ted Cruz is not in favor of people living without electricity.
So what in the world?
Like, seriously?
So basically it's Ted Cruz went to Cancun, therefore all Republican policy is bad.
Same thing in Politico.
The swaggering Texas brand of free market governance that's central to the state's political identity is taking a beating, according to Mark Caputo.
So Ted Cruz goes down to Cancun, and the answer is, you know what, we need more regulation.
What do these have to do with one another?
Seriously.
There's a far better case that what Texas really needs is less investment in wind and solar and more investment in nuclear energy.
There's a strong case to be made for that, but I don't know what any of that has to do with Ted Cruz going to Cancun.
Why can't we keep these things separate?
Because people in the media do not want these things to be separate.
That is the answer.
People in the media wish to lump everything together, as always.
Because when it comes to the media narrative, understand, the antecedent in any if-then statement does not matter.
Only, only the consequence matters.
If X, then we should follow democratic policy.
And it doesn't matter what X says.
It could be literally anything.
If Ted Cruz goes to Cancun, then we should follow democratic policy.
If there's a big Texas freeze, then we should follow democratic policy.
If Florida and California have completely differing COVID policies that end with similar numbers of deaths, despite the fact that Florida didn't wreck its economy and has more old people, then we should follow democratic policy, right?
It doesn't matter what the antecedent is.
The end of the statement will always be exactly the same.
So every time a Republican does something that is dumb, this becomes an example of why Republican policy is bad in the extreme.
Now I can much more easily make the case that when Gavin Newsom violates his own strictures, then maybe the strictures are bad because he's not even living by them.
I can make the case that when Andrew Cuomo lies about his own policy, maybe that's because his policy was bad.
You can see the connection between the antecedent, the if, in the statement, and the then in the statement.
But for the media, there is no connection.
It's just about, hey, we can dunk on Ted Cruz.
And since we're dunking on Ted Cruz and we don't like Ted Cruz, and it's fun to dunk on Ted Cruz, that means that Texas's energy policy is super bad and you should vote for Democrats, not because you should get rid of Cruz, You should vote for Democrats across the board.
You should vote against John Cornyn.
You should vote against Greg Abbott.
You should vote against Dan Crenshaw.
Like every Republican.
Again, you can make a savvy political case that Cruz is going to face some really tough sledding in the next Texas election because of this, specifically.
But it's going to be hard to make the case that every Republican ought to pay the brunt because Ted Cruz went to Cancun or something.
That's a very, very silly argument.
Okay, meanwhile, COVID policy continues to be a complete mess from the Biden administration.
How much of a mess is COVID policy from the Biden administration?
So, there is a piece in Politico talking about Joe Biden's failures with regard to COVID, right?
He has not answered when we can take the mask off.
He has not answered when we are gonna be able to go back to normal.
He has suggested maybe we're gonna have to do it till next year.
He has put out bad information about herd immunity.
He has suggested that schools don't need to reopen, and then they should reopen, but they can only reopen part-time, but they should reopen full-time, and we should have ventilation and masking and vaccine.
It's all a mess.
It's all a complete mess.
And they keep shifting the timeline over and over.
So here's Politico's answer to that.
The real problem, the real problem for Joe Biden is that, you know, the reality is that reality's hard, man.
And Joe Biden is just running up against reality.
So you never heard this kind of throat clearing when it came to Donald Trump.
When it was Donald Trump and he was president, then it was every single death is to be placed at Donald Trump's doorstep.
Here's how Politico opens a story on Biden's completely mishkabobbled COVID policy.
Quote, President Joe Biden's presidency, hey, hinges in large part on his success in handling the pandemic. But nearly a month into power, he's beginning to discover just how much of that task is out of his control. Oh, you see, it's not that he's blowing it. And it's not that he's bad at this. And it's not that it's Mischka bobbled. It's that it's just out of his control, I mean, you can't blame the old sucker.
I mean, why exactly would you think that it was in his control in the first place?
So, after a year of everything that goes wrong is Donald Trump's fault, up to and including a crazy lady in Arizona feeding her husband fish tank cleaner and him dying of it, Everything is Trump's fault.
Every single thing.
Because the buck stops here.
Now Biden's in office, and we're like a month in.
And Politico's like, well, you know, a lot of things aren't in his control, guys.
I mean, can we really blame him?
The White House is locked in a delicate dance with governors over reopening schools, distributing COVID shots, and enforcing mask mandates, with Biden's team wary of alienating key state leaders, even as it takes stock of the lurching response to the crisis.
Governors, in turn, are starting to push back on the first federal efforts to pressure them.
The administration has poured energy into courting both Democrats and Republicans, pitching itself as an equal partner, an eager collaborator.
It's a sharp contrast from the Trump era, when most decisions were thrown to the states.
Yes, because most decisions should be done at the state level.
If it had been up to Biden, Florida would have been a lockdown like California, not the opposite.
This whole time, governors have felt like they're the ones under the guns, said one advisor to several governors.
They understand the way this has been set up.
People are inclined to blame them if things don't go well.
Yet the federal government's charm offensive threatens to bog down Biden's early efforts to rein in the virus and claim political credit for restoring a sense of normalcy.
Yeah, you know, it's tough being Biden.
The angle of these articles is so great.
I mean, it's so perfectly predictable.
Everything Donald Trump did was super duper duper terrible on every possible level.
Not just the bad stuff, all of the stuff.
Everything Joe Biden does that's incompetent and bad.
By the way, where is Joe Biden in the middle of all this Texas freeze?
He called a lid yesterday at like 8 a.m.
His campaign has just continued, meaning he's just asleep.
He's just watching Matlock all day.
So, whatever.
It's all wild.
Meanwhile, his administration continues to be a complete mess when it comes to exactly how to treat COVID.
So, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the greatest of all doctors except for Dr. Joe Biden, he is now saying, maybe we'll get back to normal in fall or winter.
In fall or winter.
I mean, now, in a second, I'm gonna explain why this is crazy, why we should be back to normal, essentially, by summer.
But here is Dr. Anthony Fauci saying, maybe fall, maybe winter, maybe never.
Here is Dr. Fauci, the greatest of all doctors, sexiest man alive, Dr. Anthony Fauci.
If you're going to ask is what about getting back to a situation where you can have theaters that might be able to have below capacity that restaurants indoor dining can be happening but with moderately diminished capacity.
That's going to be somewhere between the fall and the end of the year.
If you say no, no, no, wait a minute.
I really want to know when it's going to get to as close to normal that you almost don't know the difference between what it was before.
Maybe you're going to still have to wear masks.
That likely will be, as the president said, by the end of the year, by Christmas.
Maybe you'll still have to wear masks by Christmas?
No.
Here's my answer.
No.
No.
Once there's widespread vaccination, the masks are coming off, we're all going to ballgames, and if you don't want to do that, stay home.
Really, stay home at that point.
If you're so scared of your own shadow that after people who are vulnerable have taken a vaccine that creates 95% immunity for a disease that for people under the age of 65 Still was going to kill about five in 1,000 people who actually got it, and now you have 95% immunity from that five, which means, according to my mathematical calculations, you are now down to 0.5 out of 1,000, and you're still staying home?
Okay, at that point, it's on you, man.
I got nothing for you.
Really nothing.
Now, by the way, this is all very silly, because the reality is, according to Dr. Marty McCary, who's been a frequent guest on this program from Johns Hopkins University, he's a professor over there, At the School of Medicine, he has an article in the Wall Street Journal pointing out that COVID cases have dropped 77% in six weeks.
According to Dr. McCary, we're going to have herd immunity by April.
By April!
He says, amid the dire COVID warnings, one crucial fact has been largely ignored.
Cases are down 77% over the past six weeks.
If a medication slashed cases by 77%, we'd call it a miracle pill.
Why is the number of cases plummeting much faster than experts predicted?
In large part, because natural immunity from prior infection is far more common than can be measured by testing.
Testing has been capturing only from 10 to 25% of infections, depending on when the pandemic someone got the virus.
Applying a time-weighted case capture average of 1 in 6.5 to the cumulative 28 million confirmed cases would mean about 55% of Americans already have natural immunity.
Now add people getting vaccinated.
As of this week, 15% of Americans have received the vaccine.
The figure is rising fast.
Former Food and Drug Commissioner Scott Gottlieb estimates 250 million doses will have been delivered to some 150 million people by the end of March.
As more people have been infected, most of whom have mild or no symptoms, there are fewer Americans left to be infected.
At the current trajectory, I expect COVID will be mostly gone by April, allowing Americans to resume normal life.
He says the antibody studies almost certainly underestimate natural immunity.
Antibody testing doesn't capture antigen-specific T-cells, which develop memory once they are activated by the virus.
Survivors of the 1918 Spanish flu were found in 2008, 90 years later, to have memory cells still able to produce neutralizing antibodies.
Researchers at Sweden's Karolinska Institute found the percentage of people mounting a T-cell response after mild or asymptomatic COVID-19 infection consistently exceeded the percentage with detectable antibodies.
COVID-19 deaths in the United States would also suggest much broader immunity than recognized.
About 1 in 600 Americans has died of COVID-19, which translates to a population fatality rate of about 0.15%.
The COVID-19 infection fatality rate is about 0.23%.
These numbers indicate that roughly two-thirds of the U.S.
population has had the infection.
In my own conversations with medical experts, it says, Dr. Makary, I've noticed they too often dismiss natural immunity, arguing we don't have the data.
The data certainly doesn't fit the classic randomized control trial model of the old guard medical establishment.
There's no control group, but the observational data is compelling.
He says that his prediction that COVID will basically be gone by April is based on lab data, mathematical data, published literature, and conversation with experts.
It's also based on direct observation of how hard testing has been to get, especially for the poor.
If you live in a wealthy community where worried people are vigilant about getting tested, you might think most infections are captured by testing.
If you've seen the many barriers for testing to low-income Americans, you might think very few infections have been captured.
Keep in mind, most infections are asymptomatic, which still triggers natural immunity.
As Macari points out, herd immunity has been well documented in the Brazilian city of Manaus, where researchers in The Lancet reported the prevalence of COVID-19 infection to be 76%, resulting in a significant slowing of the infection.
So basically, what he's saying is there's a lot of public pressure not to talk about herd immunity because people freak out.
But the reality is we are almost there.
We are almost there.
But notice Democrats are not enthusiastic about talking about us being almost there.
Nancy Pelosi is out there saying maybe even after mass vaccination, we still won't reopen.
OK, at this point, you got to say these people love the they love the control.
They love the control.
At the beginning of this pandemic, I thought it was completely fair to talk about lockdowns.
I talked about it on the show.
Right, slowing the spread made sense.
I explained it on the program.
One of the things I said is the problem with slowing the spread now is that there will be widespread spread later, which of course was true.
But once it became clear, the trajectory of the virus and how it acted, it has become clearer and clearer.
And the way the Democrats acted about this.
I was living in LA where we were locked down.
I mean, locked down tight, welded in our homes.
I mean, you couldn't go out to a park.
They shut down parks.
They took yellow tape and put it around parks.
They shut down beaches.
They shut down hiking trails in LA.
And then, the minute the George Floyd protests started, then it was like, okay, everybody out in the street, let's party.
And I was like, okay, at this point, it's perfectly obvious that you guys are not serious about this.
I'm sorry, Nancy Pelosi and crew are not serious about this.
Here's Nancy Pelosi being so serious.
Serious as a heart attack.
She says, maybe we won't even reopen after the vaccinations.
Yeah, at this point, GFY.
The important point to make on this is where there is a high incidence of COVID, most of those schools are virtual or hybrid anyway.
They're not actual.
And the vaccination might not make it actual anyway.
So again, there has to be a judgment made from the community as to how they go forward.
Oh, well, you know, that's okay.
Well, I guess that if she says so, if medical expert Nancy Pelosi says that vaccination really does nothing, it's unbelievable.
You're trying to get people to take the vaccine right now, and then you are simultaneously telling them that even after mass vaccination and herd immunity, we're still going to be wearing masks in December.
Absolutely asinine.
The dumbest thing in the world.
Even if you don't believe it.
And we know that Dr. Fauci is fond of telling the noble lie, right?
I mean, he said that he told people wrongly.
He lied to them.
He said masks don't do anything because he wanted to make sure that only medical workers got the PPE.
Remember this.
But if Dr. Fauci is fond of telling the noble lie, even if he doesn't believe that we'll be back to normal by summer if we all get the vaccine, shouldn't he be saying it?
By the way, he would be more medically correct than he is right now when he's saying that we're going to be December, January of next year before we take off the mask.
That ain't happening.
It is not happening.
Yeah, I can see human behavior.
We're in a free state here in Florida, and you can see people who have had vaccines, they're not going to want to wear that mask for much longer.
You can see that people who have had the disease, and they've recovered, and they're okay, They're not going to want to do this for much longer.
People want to go back to their regular lives.
I know Democrats don't, apparently, but there are lots of people who do.
And if you don't like it, you're going to have to just get out of the way.
Nonetheless, the desire for control is astonishing.
Representative Katie Porter from California, she says, listen, we can't put kids back in school.
We just can't.
I mean, sure, all the data says we can, but we can't.
What's going to happen when they do all go back to school?
And that's where Senator Michael Bennett from Colorado and I have authored a letter to the Department of Education pointing out to them that we can't just put kids back in school as if their learning and social and emotional development has not been severely interrupted.
And this problem is particularly acute with regard to math and science education.
So it's a workforce issue.
Amazing.
We can't just go back to school.
Ever.
Yep.
No, it's not about control, though.
They're all about the science over here.
They're all about the science.
Meanwhile, they all send their kids to private school.
That would be hypocrisy, as long as we are talking about the politics of hypocrisy.
Okay, in just a second, we are going to get to a fascinating article in Reason Magazine talking about how the country is polarizing on every line.
I mean, like, consistently.
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So, meanwhile, it is important to note that politics is indeed ruining everything.
I think this is the biggest problem in the country today, really, right now, is that politics has infused every aspect of our life.
There is nothing in our lives that is not political.
And something that you saw with Gina Carano, you can't even watch an entertainment show now without having to think about politics.
You saw this with sports.
This is having a dramatic impact on the social fabric.
It's something I've been talking about for a very long time.
It is very, very bad for the country, and the left has wanted it for a long time.
Ever since the 60s, when the left declared that the personal is political, meaning that whatever you do in your personal life is actively a political move, right?
Your sex life is political.
What you shop for is political.
Where you went to school is political.
What this leads to is identity groups based on politics, and those identity groups feel threatened the moment somebody disagrees with them.
That leads to a tearing apart of the culture.
See, here's the thing.
Normally, an identity group is rooted in immutable characteristics.
Right?
Being black is being in an identity group, at the very least, because if somebody attacks the color of your skin, that is an attack on an immutable characteristic shared by millions of other people.
If somebody attacks your politics, that is not an identity group.
Right?
Politics as an identity group is mutable.
You can shift your politics.
People do it all the time.
So there's a difference between attacking somebody for race and attacking someone for politics.
But the problem is, once you make politics your identity, and that identity is expressed in a wide variety of ways across all of American life, what you end up with is a mathematics whereby where you shop is political, and if I don't shop at your store, this means I'm insulting you, and I'm offending you, and I've done something wrong to you as a human being.
Reason Magazine has a great piece out today by J.D.
Taseel, titled, Politics is Seeping into Our Daily Life and Ruining Everything.
He runs down some of the data on this point.
According to a new paper in the Journal of Public Policy and Marketing by researchers from Arizona State University, the University of Wyoming, and four other U.S.
universities, quote, political polarization is having far-reaching impacts on American life, harming consumer welfare, and creating challenges for people ranging from elected officials and policymakers to corporate executives and marketers.
The researchers find that people's chosen political identities become self-reinforcing through associations with groups with shared beliefs.
Our associations can even create a group-shared specific reality that makes it harder to relate to those with opposing views.
According to the researchers, as society has become increasingly polarized, politicians' objectives diverge and their animosity toward the opposition grows, thereby reducing opportunity for compromise.
Partisan incivility is a major reason for failed dialogue, uncivil exchanges result in disagreement, and greater polarization regardless of the evidence presented.
According to Reason, people's partisan identities influence the range of people with whom they are willing to have relationships, the brands they purchase, and the jobs they take.
In an era of public health concerns, people choose positions on matters like vaccines or mask-wearing, not based on rational assessment of the issues, but on a plug-and-play adoption of their tribe's stances.
The researchers say, with political positions influencing decisions, people may sacrifice wages, lose out on jobs, make suboptimal purchases, and disregard opportunities to save.
For example, research has found that employees accept lower wages to work for politically like-minded entities, and people may select higher-priced products or ones that offer less functional value.
Polarization has the potential to prevent neighbors or colleagues of opposing parties from developing friendships.
This ultimately deprives individuals of intellectual diversity among other things.
Now, this all builds on a mountain of data.
There was a 2018 survey that found that nearly two-thirds of consumers around the world will either buy or boycott a brand solely because of its position on a social or political issue.
In the United States, that number was 59%.
In 2020, there was another survey that reported that 83% of millennials find it important for the companies they buy from to align with their values.
Which means that the price and quality of the products is actually secondary, which is a problem in the marketplace.
If you want better things, you need competition in the marketplace, not based on the politics of the corporation, but instead based on the quality of the product.
That's how we all get better products.
The reason you get new iPhones every couple of years is because Android is on their tail.
But if you've decided that you don't like the politics and Android, as you're always going to buy the iPhone, well, that just means that you are providing a base for a company that no longer has to innovate.
Christine Moorman wrote for Forbes, Since then, the trend has only intensified.
Political activism will help shape public opinion and potentially lead to lasting change while simultaneously cementing their reputations as moral leaders or change agents.
Since then, the trend has only intensified.
Recent events accelerate a broader movement in business to address social and political issues, according to a piece in the Wall Street Journal from January.
Pennsylvania State University, Daniel, Professor Daniel Della Posta asked in a study published in June, 2020, what if polarization is less like a fence getting taller over time and more like an oil spill that spreads from its source to gradually taint more and more previously apolitical attitudes, opinions, and preferences?
Even many initially apolitical lifestyle characteristics, from musical taste to belief in astrology, can become politicized as signals for deeper beliefs and preferences, a tendency most aliently captured in the popular image of the latte liberal.
It also happens to be that when you do all of this, what you do is make American life worse, because there is no common way that we can share anything.
If I share a product with somebody, I have now poisoned the product.
This happens regularly, by the way.
There was a survey that was done fairly recently, in which, it was from Harvard Business Review, I believe it was 2018, and they created essentially a focus group.
And the focus group was made up of conservatives and liberals and people in between.
And the focus group examined two companies, One company, well, actually three.
One was a company.
It was just called, you know, Generic Corp.
And Generic Corp.
had no politics.
And they asked people what they thought of Generic Corp.
And it turns out people were okay with Generic Corp.
It was fine.
Then, Generic Corp.
identified as a liberal organization.
And the numbers were exactly the same.
People were like, okay, we're fine with that.
That's cool.
Then, Generic Corp.
identified in this study as a conservative organization.
And its public perception dropped 33 points.
33 points.
Obviously, that was all liberals and leftists who decided that they hated this corporation.
They understand that the default is that corporations are liberal.
This is the thing about renormalization of American politics.
I've talked about this at length, and this is really what Reason is talking about.
The renormalization of American politics happens when one intransigent group of people decide that they are not going to go along with commonly held beliefs, and they cudgel everybody else into silence.
They emotionally blackmail everybody else.
The left is the only group in America right now that feels comfortable in terms of our public daily life.
They're the only group of people who feel comfortable.
Polls show this.
Independents do not feel comfortable.
Republicans do not feel comfortable.
Mainstream liberals, many, don't feel comfortable.
They feel like they can't speak up and they can't speak out and they can't just, you know, go to a ballgame or go to a restaurant or decide what kind of product they want without having to fear that they are going to be judged and castigated.
That's a terrible thing for the country.
It means that we have nothing in common anymore.
I mean, it's been a long time since we could even pretend that we had the American flag in common.
Half the country thinks the American flag stands for oppression, apparently.
So what exactly is going to hold us together?
As things become more and more political, things get worse and worse.
The answer is not politics.
The answer is community connection.
The answer is church.
The answer is getting to know your neighbors and having conversations with your neighbors.
But all of this has been banned.
The local authoritarians don't want you to know your neighbor.
In fact, if you get to know your neighbor and your neighbor happens to be a Republican, they will cancel you.
They will go after you for having the temerity to have a conversation with that person.
This is the culture that we now occupy, and it's a culture that we're going to have to fight back against if we actually wish to preserve the country moving forward into the future.
Unfortunately, too many people don't want to preserve the country this way, which is the reason why you are seeing that big tech is about to be brought in before House Democrats, and they're going to grill top executives at Facebook, Google, and Twitter as Democrats take fresh aim at the tech giant for failing to crack down on dangerous political falsehoods and disinformation.
The idea here, again from House Democrats, being that if you allow people to speak freely in ways we disagree with, you're making the country worse.
No, you know what makes the country worse?
The idea that we don't all get to have our opinion and then have conversation about those opinions, lest we grant credence to the evil among us.
That is not treating your fellow American as a fellow American, it's treating your fellow American as an enemy.
And that's the direction in which we are moving.
Alrighty, well on that depressing note, we will see you here next week.
I hope you have a wonderful weekend.
Also, we'll be back here later today with an additional hour of The Ben Shapiro Show.
First, you cannot forget to end your week by watching The Andrew Klavan Show.
Drew's back every Friday.
He's got an exciting evening planned for you.
So head on over to dailywire.com this evening at 7 p.m.
Eastern and tune in.
Also remember to download The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special, very special episode this Sunday.
Like Saved by the Bell, except with Gina Carano, where Gina Carano is going to discuss everything that's been going down for the past couple of weeks.
Check that out over the weekend.
We have a lot of great weekend content for you, and I'll see you back here on Monday.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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