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March 3, 2021 - The Ben Shapiro Show

01:00:55

The Book Burners Are Here | Ep. 1207

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	Six Dr. Seuss books are removed from circulation, liberals make excuses for newfangled book burning, and Texas and Mississippi reopen.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
	The Ben Shapiro Show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.
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	Slash Ben.
	We'll get to all the news in just one moment.
	First, a reminder, the word is out.
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	Alrighty, so.
	Dr. Seuss has now been canceled.
	And don't listen to all the idiots out there who are saying, well, you know, he's not really canceled.
	You can still get some Dr. Seuss books.
	Right.
	So they canceled like six Dr. Seuss books.
	The arguments that we are saying, which we'll get to in just a second, in favor of canceling these Dr. Seuss books are asinine, ridiculous, backwards, and fully demonstrative of the kind of values that the left would love to cram down on your children.
	More importantly, Well, not more importantly, just as importantly, they are fully demonstrative of the fact that liberals have collapsed almost completely into leftism.
	See, I always make the distinction on the show between liberals and leftists.
	Liberals are people who disagree with me about taxes and about abortion, and leftists are people who disagree with me about all those things and want to destroy individual rights in order to pursue utopia.
	Liberals don't have to be leftists.
	In fact, liberals could just disagree with me about the extent to which government ought to lend a helping hand and such.
	But what has been happening is that liberals have decided that they are going to collapse full-scale into leftism.
	They're going to go right along with the utopian dreams of the left.
	Because as I've been saying for, at this point, years, the liberals have a choice.
	They can either make common cause with conservatism and stand up for individual rights, but their job becomes a little bit harder in terms of pursuing their policy goals because conservatives oppose those policy goals.
	So, preserve the rights, but you have to fight a longer, harder slog in order to achieve your policy goals.
	Or, you can throw over the individual rights, move along with the left, achieve your policy goals, but ditch the right.
	And the left And the liberals have decided, it looks like, to make common cause more often than not these days.
	There are a few old school liberals who are objecting to the hardcore cancel culture left, but not many.
	Not many.
	And by the way, what you're seeing is what the left likes to do, which is water down terms like cancel culture to mean anything.
	You see this on the right too, sometimes people will use cancel culture to apply to things that are not in fact cancel culture.
	But cancel culture does have a meaning.
	And that meaning is that people go after you and your career.
	They look to destroy your life based on a view that is relatively mainstream and or something that you did a long time ago that is not controversial.
	Or at least has not been controversial for years.
	Resurfacing old tweets in order to go after you.
	And going after your employment.
	And going after your individual rights.
	And unpersoning you.
	That is cancel culture, and we are watching it happen full-scale with Dr. Seuss now.
	And people on the left are doing this routinely.
	Why do you even care?
	There are certain cultural indicators that show a society is in a state of cultural collapse.
	And this is just a major cultural indicator.
	It is.
	Dr. Seuss is a major cultural figure in America.
	In fact, Dr. Seuss is, according to most estimates, the second highest-earning dead person in the United States.
	It goes Michael Jackson and then Dr. Seuss.
	Dr. Seuss' estate earned some $33 million last year from the sale of his books.
	He is the best-selling children's author in American history.
	It is not particularly close.
	And now, you see the left coming after Dr. Seuss and canceling some of his books.
	And when people say, well, he has other books.
	Yes, Mark Twain had other books.
	That is not a reason to cancel Huckleberry Finn.
	You don't get to cancel things just because you don't happen to like them.
	And again, I'm wondering, can you name a person, a human, who's been damaged by a Dr. Seuss book?
	Because I can name millions of people whose lives have been bettered by Dr. Seuss books.
	Hundreds of millions of Americans have grown up on Dr. Seuss books.
	Can you name a single person who became more racist as a result of reading a Dr. Seuss book?
	Seriously, can you name one?
	The answer, of course, is no.
	But that doesn't matter, because we now operate under a system in which if anyone even claims offense, this means all of society has to change and reflect their particular whims.
	And this goes back to the discussion we've been having over the past few weeks of expressive individualism.
	We now are a society that values your internal feelings To such an extent that if we refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy or justification of those feelings, then this means we are imposing on you.
	So if you feel a sense of discomfort at one picture from a Dr. Seuss book, the entire society has to cancel that Dr. Seuss book so as to make you feel better, because otherwise we are crimping your style, we are invading your individualism, and after all, that expressive individualism is who you are.
	It is a crime against your identity.
	It's just the same kind of crime against your identity as if somebody refused to serve you because you're black at a restaurant, as if we don't cancel a Dr. Seuss book because you feel sort of uncomfortable because some people read a Dr. Seuss book.
	This is where we have come as a society.
	And we have now gotten to the point where we don't need government to cram this down.
	This is not a matter of government.
	This is a matter of an intolerant, bizarre culture that has decided to buy full scale into this definition of atomistic individualism governing all of society.
	That is what we have decided as a society.
	We are getting people to preemptively cancel themselves, because that's actually what happened here.
	According to the AP, six Dr. Seuss books, including And To Think I Saw It on Mulberry Street, which was his first major work, and If I Ran the Zoo, which is a great book.
	Okay, I'm sorry, but If I Ran the Zoo is a great book.
	And name the person who read If I Ran the Zoo and came away thinking, well, you know, Hate Asian people now!
	Because if I ran the zoo, it has a picture of some Asian people carrying an exotic animal on their back, and Gerald McGrew, young Gerald McGrew, riding on top of the cage that holds the animal.
	Obviously, this is young, white Gerald McGrew making those Asian people subservient.
	No one has ever, honestly, come by that opinion.
	No one.
	Okay, the only way you come by that opinion is if some woke jackass decides that they are going to make it an issue, and then shame you into believing that that's what that page is about.
	I've read that book to my kids probably a hundred times.
	That has never once occurred to me.
	And by the way, it's never occurred to anyone, except for this tiny group of malcontents who believe that culture ought to be essentially made subservient to their dumbass, over-sensitive feelings.
	It's ridiculous.
	So they are canceling.
	And the thing I saw on Mulberry Street, and if I ran the zoo, it will stop being published at all.
	You cannot get them anymore.
	They've made them into samizdat, which is forbidden literature in the Soviet Union.
	You're not allowed to even get them anymore.
	Honestly, I think that we should... I'm very rarely into the idea of government regulation, but the idea of trademark and copyright were provided specifically in order to provide so that nobody could take advantage of your intellectual property.
	You write a book, nobody gets to infringe upon your copyright until a certain time has passed since your death.
	And at that point, then it becomes open to anyone.
	But the purpose of copyright was to ensure that things are published, because why would you publish your work if somebody could just copy it?
	Copyright was not designed in order so you could suppress material.
	Copyright was not designed so that I could buy up somebody's copyright and then just kill it.
	So perhaps we ought to rethink.
	I mean, this is federal regulation, right?
	Part of the Constitution of the United States involves patenting copyright.
	Perhaps there ought to be a piece of regulation that says that if you take a piece of literature off the market for more than two years, then it becomes public domain.
	Because otherwise, what you're going to have is exactly what you're seeing right here, which is Dr. Seuss Enterprises, who own the intellectual property of Dr. Seuss, literally just taking the books off the shelves.
	If I ran, the zoo was going for $1,500 a copy yesterday, which makes it a better investment than the U.S.
	dollar at this point.
	It's absurd, and it is book-burning.
	I mean, what we are watching right now is book-burning.
	And you can call it whatever you want, but the only difference is that you're not actively taking a physical book and burning it.
	Because all it takes now to cancel a book, to burn a book, is just a couple IT guys and a delete button.
	This is the danger of digitization, which we'll get to in just one second.
	First, let us talk about the fact that your rights are certainly under assault right now.
	If you believe in individual liberty, one of the best protectors of individual liberty, of your rights, is your ability to own a firearm.
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	If and when your life and liberty ever come under threat, firearms are first and foremost a means to preserve the life and liberty of ourselves and others.
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	Okay, so, Dr. Seuss Enterprises told the Associated Press in a statement, quote, these books portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong.
	These books were written in like 1940s, 1950s America.
	The notion that you are deeply offended 80 years later by something that was drawn then, we're not talking about in Der Schirmer, We are not talking about in the local KKK newspaper.
	We are talking about in a children's book that have been read by millions and millions of people.
	And no one of serious mind has ever been offended by this stuff.
	I mean, let's just be real about this.
	The depiction of Asian people in And To Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street has offended precisely zero people over the course of time.
	It has faux offended a lot of people because we live in a society where you're granted a sort of moral credibility by claiming you're a member of a victimized minority.
	And in order to prove you're a member of a victimized minority, you have to claim victimhood.
	But Dr. Seuss has not victimized you and children reading these books has not victimized you, obviously.
	But because digital book burning is so easy, all you have to do is hit that delete button and boom, the book is gone.
	Buy hard copies of everything.
	In the future, the only people who are going to have access to books are the Orthodox Jews who bought them so they could read them on Sabbath to their kids.
	Physical copies matter.
	By the way, they're going to do this with movies, too.
	If you think that the digitization process, which, by the way, was the single greatest, I mean, exponential explosion of information availability to the general public in human history, That has now been completely reversed.
	What we are now going to watch is digitization, which makes it incredibly easy to disappear material, is going to become the method by which they just disappear things.
	You will have bought a copy of Dumbo from Amazon Prime like three years ago, and one day you will just go on to Amazon Prime and it'll just be gone.
	It'll be as though you never bought it.
	It'll just be disappeared.
	You'll have bought a copy of Ryan Anderson's book on your Kindle and it'll just be gone.
	As though it had never happened in the first place.
	Digitization makes it super easy to disappear dissenting ideas.
	Which is why you should always buy hard copies of the things that you love by the DVD of the movies you love because they can't come in your house and grab it and burn it.
	At least, not yet.
	But the bigger story here is that you have a culture that pressures creators into censoring their own works.
	And pressures estates like Dr. Seuss Enterprises into taking books down.
	into taking those books off the market completely.
	Dr. Seuss Enterprises said ceasing sales of these books is only part of our commitment and our broader plan to ensure Dr. Seuss Enterprises' catalog represents and supports all communities and families.
	They're also getting rid of McGillicudd's Pool, On Beyond Zebra, Scrambled Egg Super, and The Cat's Quizzer.
	Apparently, they said, Dr. Seuss Enterprises listened and took feedback from our audiences, including teachers, academics, and specialists in the field as part of our review process.
	Okay, first of all, that's your problem.
	Don't pay any attention to the academics and the specialists because they're idiots.
	They are highly educated morons.
	Why don't you just listen to the general public that wants to buy it and about whom there is no evidence that Dr. Seuss book has ever turned them racist.
	We worked with a panel of experts, including educators, to review our catalog of titles.
	Well, if the experts say so, well then, we know that it must be true.
	The National Education Association founded Read Across America Day in 1998 and deliberately aligned it with Ted Geisel's birthday, right?
	That's Dr. Seuss.
	Because yesterday was Dr. Seuss's birthday.
	My kids celebrated it at school because they go to a non-crappy school.
	The NEA founded the day on Dr. Seuss's birthday, and now they're busily canceling Dr. Seuss.
	For several years, they've de-emphasized Dr. Seuss because he's bad, you see, and encouraged a more diverse reading list for children.
	As my colleague Matt Walsh has pointed out, basically, we should just cancel everybody who was not born over the course of the last 10 years.
	Because if you go 80 years ago, there was not a single human being in any living human society who did not hold a view you would find to be antithetical to your own today.
	Not one.
	No one held the views you agree with today.
	No one.
	But apparently, the NEA thinks that we should de-emphasize Dr. Seuss In 2018, a Dr. Seuss museum in his hometown of Springfield removed a mural that included an Asian stereotype.
	Because we can never have cartoons that are stereotypical about people in any way, right?
	You can't draw an Asian stereotype or a person who looks black because, like, how are cartoons supposed to work again?
	Aren't all cartoons stereotypes?
	There are some that are significantly worse than others, you know, namely the ones with racist or anti-Semitic or bigoted intent, but then they're just cartoons.
	And if you look at virtually any cartoon, it looks like a stereotype, like literally all the cartoons.
	As producer Elliot was pointing out before the show, Moana looks like a stereotype of Hawaiian people.
	Pocahontas looks like a stereotype of Native American people.
	In fact, it is impossible to draw a cartoon that does not look like a stereotype in certain ways, because otherwise you wouldn't know that cartoon from, you know, a white person cartoon.
	So it sort of depends on what the cartoon looks like and what the intent of the cartoon was, and what people take away from the cartoon.
	And for the 1000th time, you cannot name the individual who was damaged by any of these Dr. Seuss books.
	You cannot name them because they don't exist.
	The Cat in the Hat, one of Seuss's most popular books, has received criticism too, but will continue to be published.
	For now.
	For now.
	I'm sorry, this is a cultural sickness that has decided that all the hallmarks of Western culture ought to be done away with.
	And it is all the hallmarks of Western culture.
	We're cancelling Shakespeare.
	We are cancelling Plato.
	We are cancelling Aristotle.
	We are cancelling Dr. Seuss.
	Like literally all the things that Western culture celebrates are now going to be cancelled because they offend somebody.
	Jen Psaki yesterday was deliberately asked about Dr. Seuss being dropped from Joe Biden's reading proclamation.
	So Joe Biden put out a reading proclamation.
	And in this reading proclamation for Read Across America Day, he didn't mention Dr. Seuss.
	This was odd because President Obama had mentioned Dr. Seuss, like, repeatedly.
	In 2015, for example, Barack Obama put out a statement saying, That was his 2015 statement.
	Dr. Seuss Geisel, better known to us as Dr. Seuss, have sparked a love for reading in generations of students.
	His whimsical wordplay and curious characters inspire children to dream big and remind readers of all ages that a person's a person no matter how small.
	That was his 2015 statement.
	Then again, 2016, he put out a statement saying, March 2nd is also the birthday of one of America's revered wordsmiths.
	Theodore Seuss Geisel, or Dr. Seuss, used his incredible talent to instill in his most impressionable readers universal values we all hold dear.
	Through a prolific collection of stories, he made children see that reading is fun.
	And in the process, he emphasized respect for all, pushed us to accept ourselves for who we are, challenged preconceived notions, and encouraged trying new things, and by example, taught us that we are limited by nothing but the range of our aspirations and the vibrancy of our imaginations.
	And for older lovers of literature, he reminded us not to take ourselves too seriously, creating whacking wild characters and envisioning creative and colorful places.
	But we have to take ourselves super seriously, which is why Joe Biden has now participated in the cancellation of Dr. Seuss, right?
	Removed from the presidential proclamation.
	Speaking of which, 2018, Barack Obama.
	Direct quote.
	Everything you need to know about politics, you can learn from Dr. Seuss.
	But apparently he's bad now.
	Dr. Seuss is bad.
	So here's Jen Psaki responding to the fact that Dr. Seuss was left out of the presidential proclamation because essentially a bunch of woke academic morons decided that Dr. Seuss's books were somehow spreading racism.
	And Joe Biden took that up because the liberals have been so intimidated by the woke left that they refused to stand up even for iconic authors.
	The proclamation was written by the Department of Education, and you could certainly speak to them about more specifics about the drafting of it.
	But Read Across America Day, which as you're right, has not existed forever, has only been around for a short period of time, elevates and celebrates a love of reading among our nation's youngest leaders.
	And the day is also a chance to celebrate diverse authors whose work and lived experience reflect the diversity of our country.
	And that's certainly what they attempted to do or hope to do this year.
	Okay, so, meanwhile, over at Universal Islands of Adventure in Florida, they're now talking about removing an exhibit for If I Ran the Zoo, because it's no longer going to be published.
	So there's something called Seuss Landing over at Universal Studios.
	We must not allow people to see the The Tufted Mazurka, right?
	These fake creatures that Seuss created.
	We definitely cannot allow people to see all the bizarre creatures from If I Ran the Zoo, because, I don't know, kids might then go look at the book, and they might see a portrayal of an Asian person that looks stereotypical, and then they might, I don't know, go and hurt an Asian person.
	All of this based on zero, on nothing.
	Also, they're gonna get rid of a gift shop called Mulberry Street Store, which comes from And To Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, which was, again, only his breakthrough book.
	Now, the defenses from the liberals here are the part here that's truly telling.
	Okay, because again, up until five minutes ago, Dr. Seuss was one of the uncancellables.
	The fact is, politically speaking, Dr. Seuss was not on the right, he was on the left.
	I mean, he was so uncancellable that Michelle Obama was dancing with Dr. Seuss characters.
	While she was the First Lady of the United States, here she was, dancing with Dr. Seuss characters.
	Look right there, next to her, there's a picture of the cat in the hat.
	And all the kids are wearing Cat in the Hat outfits, including, you can see in the front row, some black kids wearing Cat in the Hat hats.
	But I guess they don't understand that they are contributing to their own subjugation.
	We have to cancel Cat in the Hat, too.
	Here's Michelle Obama, just a few years ago, dancing with Dr. Seuss characters.
	Hi!
	Hi, Cat in the Hat!
	Oh my God, that's so racist.
	Hi, everyone.
	There's the Cat in the Hat.
	Welcome to the White House.
	Are you excited to hear this new wonderful book by Dr. Seuss?
	Yeah.
	I can't believe she's participating in this sort of racial subjugation.
	You know who saw this book this morning before he got on a helicopter?
	The president.
	We love Dr. Seuss in our house.
	God, this is so racist.
	I mean, first of all, they're doing the limbo.
	I mean, all of this is just racially insensitive.
	And all those black kids who are celebrating Dr. Seuss, all those kids have just internalized their white privilege.
	That's all that's happened here.
	Clearly.
	By the way, just a quick note, the National Education Association, which is busily canceling Dr. Seuss, some of their recommended books for small children include I Am Jazz, in which children learn that they can be members of the other sex, in which a boy is treated as a girl, and this is considered a wonderful, wonderful thing, and Jacob's New Dress, which encourages children to cross-dress, which is really, really great.
	So we cannot have books from 1940 that include A stereotypical cartoon of an Asian person.
	But we can definitely be encouraging our kids to read Anti-Racist Baby by Ibram X. Kendi, which encourages people to think in racist and racially essentialist ways.
	And also, we can encourage our 3 and 4 year olds to cross-dress and or choose their own gender.
	Yes, our society might be completely effed.
	It might be completely off.
	And it's the liberal defense of this that's truly astonishing.
	Again, as I've been saying for a long time here, in the future of American society, the fate of American society does not rest with conservatives.
	It rests with people in the middle.
	It rests with people in the middle who might consider themselves good-hearted liberals, people who might be in favor of a little bit more government interventionism, or who don't follow politics all that closely.
	Are those people going to just go along with the woke crowd because the woke crowd is the loudest, and the most annoying, and the most irritating, or are they gonna stand up?
	Are they going to provide a full-throated defense of individual rights?
	The time for apathy is over here.
	Why are you making a big deal out of Dr. Seuss?
	Because you're taking iconic figures and canceling them, and then you play this little gaslighting mind game where it's like, how dare you pay attention to us completely destroying children's childhoods by suggesting that they can change their gender and sex, but they can't read Dr. Seuss?
	How dare you look into that?
	Why aren't you more worried about other things?
	Because that's the thing to worry about, gang.
	I'm mostly worried about the kind of country my kids grow up in and how I'm able to raise my children.
	That is my chief concern in life as a parent.
	And you are trying to re-indoctrinate my kids into values you hold dear by getting companies to cancel books that I like reading to my kids because you know better for my kid than I do.
	And then you claim that I should not feel imposed upon?
	You are literally imposing on me by banning me from doing things.
	And yet I should not feel imposed upon.
	I mean, this is utter madness.
	And people, mainstream liberals, are defending this, of course.
	We'll get to that in just one second.
	So, let's take some examples of mainstream liberals and their defenses of this kind of stuff.
	Ezra Klein, right?
	The vaunted Ezra Klein, formerly of Vox.com, now of the New York Times, because there's only failure upward in the world of the left-wing media.
	So, Ezra Klein, he tweeted out an article from his old publication, Vox.com, why Fox News is having a day-long meltdown over Dr. Seuss.
	It says a lot about the modern GOP that Biden and the Democrats are about to pass a $1.9 trillion bill with dozens of longtime liberal policies.
	And what's really generating the heat on the right is some nonsense about Dr. Seuss.
	Number one, it ain't nonsense.
	Book burning is not nonsense.
	Canceling books is not nonsense.
	What do you think is of more fundamental value?
	I care deeply about the national debt.
	I've been railing against this garbage $1.9 trillion bill that is unsupportable by fact or economics for as long as Joe Biden's been proposing it.
	And to make the brief case against that $1.9 trillion plan once again, here is the case.
	According to the most liberal institutions, the United States is going to experience about a $450 billion GDP shortfall this year due to COVID.
	The bill is $1.9 trillion, so four times that large.
	That bill also happens to include barrels of pork, barrels and barrels and barrels of pork for the teachers unions and for a variety of states that have blown out their own spending.
	There's a study that came out yesterday from the Brookings Institute, a left-wing institute that found Okay, so there's your case against that.
	Now, which is more important to me?
	and yet we are bailing them out with tens of billions of dollars from federal tax coffers, money that no longer exists and that we are borrowing from the future.
	Okay, so there's your case against that.
	Now, which is more important to me, bad public policy when it comes to taxing and spending, which has been endemic to both parties and has been the curse of the American Republic for as long as I have been alive, or the complete and wholesale destruction of children's innocence by a bunch of woke assholes who have decided that it is deeply important to remove content that my kids want to see because maybe, just maybe, There will be somebody woke enough to inform them that content is racist.
	What do you think has more of an impact on my daily life?
	The spending that's been going on every day, and that is a problem, and a persistent problem, and that shows no signs of going away?
	Or the complete vitiation of American culture, particularly aimed at children?
	I think we can tell.
	So yes, it's important as recline, and you know it's important.
	That's why the left keeps doing it.
	It's unbelievable.
	The left plays this trick.
	They do something utterly fringe and utterly crazy and the right reacts and they go, why are you even?
	It's a crazy thing.
	Why are you even reacting to it?
	I mean, sure.
	What do you even care that we're saying that boys are girls and girls are boys?
	I mean, there's a budget problem.
	It's like, well, you know what's more important?
	That boys are not girls and girls are not boys.
	And that has an impact on my life because I don't trust you to let this remain a fringe issue.
	Because guess what?
	Five seconds ago, you were talking about getting rid of books that you didn't like that were actually racist.
	And now you're talking about just getting rid of mainstream Dr. Seuss books that have never actually been interpreted by any sentient human being as racist.
	And so you just found a bunch of experts at college who have no actual jobs to push the notion that this stuff has to be removed from the public square.
	Okay, so you got Ezra Klein saying, we got bigger things to worry about.
	Then you have Mark Harris.
	Okay, so Mark Harris, is a writer and columnist for New York Magazine and Vulture.
	And he tweeted out, I read a lot about Theodore Geisel, Dr. Seuss, and his politics.
	When I was working on Five came back.
	And there's not a doubt in my mind he would have thought all the people at Fox News suddenly taking him up as a cause are the world's biggest a-holes.
	Well, there's no question Dr. Seuss was on the left, on the political left.
	Also, he would not have thought that we were the world's biggest a-holes.
	He would have thought we were the second biggest a-holes after people who think it's okay to burn his books.
	Probably, if I had to just make a guess.
	And listen to Mark Harris's justification for this.
	Geisel was a fascinating and remarkably non-defensive man who deplored racism and was also capable of recognizing where he himself had erred.
	So the blowhard right should stop panicking.
	There are still 39 Seuss books left.
	The Trump Library will be fine.
	There are still 39 Seuss books left.
	Well, guys, I mean, it's not a book burning if there are other books.
	Come on!
	I mean, that bonfire out there where they're just burning copies of books?
	There are a lot of other books.
	I mean, in Germany, when there are all those pictures of, you know, books being burned, that's not a big deal.
	There are other books in Germany.
	Everybody had a copy of Mein Kampf.
	That was a book.
	That was in everybody's house.
	Book burning isn't bad, so long as it's the right books you see.
	According to liberals, so long as the right books are getting burned, that is perfectly okay.
	In fact, it is recommended.
	And by the way, Dr. Seuss wasn't fully canceled.
	We're only burning some of his books.
	Sure, the cat on the hat might be next, but don't worry about the slippery slope.
	Just recognize that we are only going to burn the books today, that we want to burn today.
	And then if you ask them, what books are you going to burn tomorrow?
	Like, well, we'll have to see.
	Yeah, we know.
	We know.
	Meanwhile, you have CNN's Chris Chiles.
	Remember, these are members of the press.
	Who would have thought, honest to God, who would have thought that the biggest advocates for restricting freedom of the press and restricting freedom of speech in America would be members of the press?
	Who saw that one coming on their bingo card, on their woke, idiotic, left-wing bingo card?
	Who saw that one coming?
	Because that's where we are.
	Okay, where we are right now is that the press have decided they want to see Fox News and OANN and Newsmax de-platformed.
	They want to see Daily Wire basically taken off of Facebook.
	They want to see social media cracked down on anybody on the right.
	They'd love to see podcasts taken down.
	They want to go after Joe Rogan.
	They want to go after this podcast.
	And they want to go after all those things because those are competition.
	Members of the press openly stumping for companies to remove their service abilities from people they disagree with.
	And now you have members of the press who are openly arguing in favor of book-burning because that's what this is.
	When you take books down and you make them unavailable anymore, that is the equivalent of book-burning.
	The purpose of a book-burning is to make the book unavailable anymore because it has been burned.
	Okay, so we are now engaged in digital book-burning.
	So Chris Chilesa, the—the—doltish columnist over at CNN, has a piece today titled, Why Republicans Think Dr. Seuss and Mr. Potato Head Can Save Them.
	He says, Yes, that is, in fact, our argument.
	to cancel long cherished cultural touchstones.
	Correct.
	That is the message for Republicans, solely because it doesn't comport with their preferred vision for America.
	Yes, that is in fact our argument, that you're trying to cancel all the cultural touchstones because you have a utopian vision for what the world should be, and anything that stands in your way is an obstacle, so you burn it.
	Correct, that is a proper assessment of our argument.
	He says, if you look back at what has truly animated conservatives in the months since Trump lost the election, it's consistently been less about policy and far more about this idea that Democrats are trying to rid the country of our cultural icons.
	Well, I mean, yes, you literally spent the summer cheering on people burning down cities.
	Nikole Hannah-Jones, author of the 1619 Project, cheered the fact that these city burnings were being called the 1619 riots.
	People are literally being iconoclastic, tearing down statues of George Washington, of Abraham Lincoln, of a guy who's an abolitionist, fighting for the North, at like the Wisconsin Statehouse.
	So yes, we are worried about you, vitiating and destroying American history.
	Yes, we are worried about all of that.
	Now on Tuesday morning, says Chris Chiliza at CNN, comes word that six Dr. Seuss books would no longer be published by the company that owns them, because they quote, portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong.
	What's remarkable about these attacks, by the right, on so-called cancel culture is that they don't even fit the description.
	So he says that the Muppets, right?
	So the Muppets, Disney put a warning on some episodes of The Muppet Show, but they made the episodes available.
	Okay, that's fair, right?
	That's not a full cancellation.
	That is just a ridiculous attempt to contextualize humor.
	It's stupid, but it's not a full cancellation, so that's true.
	Or Potato Head.
	That's not a full cancellation because Mr. Potato Head and Mrs. Potato Head will remain characters.
	Okay.
	That too is fair.
	It's an idiotic thing to suggest that children are going to be deeply harmed by a toy called Mr. Potato Head.
	So you have to call the overall toy Potato Head.
	In honor of Brian Stelter.
	But this is the line that gets me.
	So Christian Lisa says, it's not cancel culture, the Muppets, they're still available.
	Potato Head, that's not cancel culture, that's still available.
	Or Dr. Seuss.
	While six of his books will no longer be published, the remaining three dozen or so will still be on bookshelves.
	That isn't a cancellation.
	One of those things is not like the others.
	One of those things just doesn't belong.
	So you've named three examples there.
	Okay.
	Two of those examples, the thing didn't go away.
	In one of those examples, the thing went away.
	And you're still saying it's not cancel culture.
	You're still saying it wasn't canceled.
	Except that it was literally canceled and unavailable and selling for $1,500 on Amazon.
	So what is Chris Chalisa's conclusion?
	What is happening in all three of these most recent instances is that the culture is changing, changing to incorporate more views from more varied perspectives, not just the opinions of what white people, white people, the ultimate insult, white people, you have to pronounce the H before the W or it doesn't sound right, white people, and mostly men, men with their penises sometimes, Do you see this?
	Do you see this?
	It's unreal!
	And he says that's not true.
	That's not true!
	Because all that's happening is the culture is changing.
	And it's changing to incorporate more views.
	is that, let me just read these two sentences back to back, okay?
	That conservatives have argued, liberals are trying to cancel long cherished cultural touchstones solely because it doesn't comport with their preferred vision for America.
	And he says that's not true.
	That's not true, because all that's happening is the culture is changing, and it's changing to incorporate more views.
	So you mean you like how the culture is changing, so it's okay to cancel things.
	So literally you are making my argument for me, Chris Chilesa.
	You're just calling it change.
	By calling things change, that doesn't mean that the changes are good, or positive, or decent, or that book burning became good today.
	I mean, it's incredible.
	So I'm arguing that you guys are trying to cancel cultural touchstones because you want the world to comport with your perverse vision of expressive individualism.
	And your counter-argument is, well, the world is changing, so you're wrong?
	No, it is that you have a vision of society.
	I disagree with your vision of society.
	I'm not trying to cancel you.
	You are trying to cancel everybody who you disagree with and all of their work.
	Change does not equal cancel, says Chris Chalisa.
	Except when it does!
	Except when the change literally involves taking books off the shelves and or pressuring companies to do the same.
	Then it does!
	Change and evolution in our culture and our society is both necessary and unstoppable.
	The idea we always have had everything right, or we can't always be growing closer to a more perfect union, is not only narrow-minded, but fundamentally anti-American.
	You see, not to remove the books is anti-American now.
	You see, Chrystaliza?
	Chrystaliza is making the argument that if you don't stand in favor of digital book burning, this means you are anti-American, because change is American, you see.
	Do you see the ideological perversion that is happening in front of you?
	Should I be upset that there's an entire wing of American society that now argues that you can justify the basic violation of individual liberty and free speech and you can start burning books because change is good?
	You know who has said that same thing?
	Every fascist in human history has said that same thing.
	There has never been a fascist who said that he is doing something in order to do a bad thing.
	No one ever believes they're doing something in order to do a bad thing.
	This is why we have neutral principles like individual rights.
	But he is saying, well, you know, sometimes change overrides individual rights, and to oppose that would be fundamentally anti-American.
	Chris Chilesa.
	Unbelievable.
	And then you have that same sentiment from Philip Bump over at the Washington Post.
	His argument is that if you oppose the cancellation of If I Ran the Zoo, this is because you're a racist and you agree with racism.
	So his article is such a giveaway, Philip Bum.
	Again, this guy is the media columnist, the politics and media columnist over at the Washington Post.
	Again, members of the press are super on board with destroying everything they disagree with.
	They are the cheerleaders for ideological authoritarianism here.
	Here's what Philip Bump writes, quote, This is the keyword.
	If you just keep saying change, change, change, as in like Barack Obama, hope and change, if you just keep saying change over and over and over, that allows you to override individual rights.
	If you just keep saying change over and over and over, that means you can burn books.
	can serve as spackle for frustrations over a changing world.
	This is the key word.
	The change.
	If you just keep saying change, change, change, right, as in like Barack Obama, hope and change.
	If you just keep saying change over and over and over, that allows you to override individual rights.
	If you just keep saying change over and over and over, that means you can burn books.
	Isn't that exciting?
	So here's Philip Bump.
	One of the books he sent was Dr. Seuss's If I Ran the Zoo, a book I had as a kid and that I remembered fondly.
	In it, a young boy imagines what he'd do with the local zoo were he in charge.
	It's Seuss, so the boy's conjurings are wild, weird creatures whose names rhyme with their points of origin.
	Okay, so, just note, quickly, that his recollection of the book is that it was charming, that he remembered it fondly.
	At no point here does he say, yes, that led me down my path to becoming a white nationalist and trying to murder Asian people.
	You notice he doesn't say that anywhere?
	Because it's not true!
	Right, so he read this as a boy, and then he wanted to read it to his kids, and at no point did it occur to him that the book was racist, but now he knows it's racist, and that means that his kid will presumably come out a vicious racist, or not, or maybe not.
	Maybe this is all perfectly harmless, because you can't name the... Harmless means not harmed, right?
	No one can demonstrate a harm here.
	In a court of law, in order to receive some sort of settlement, you have to demonstrate damages.
	No one can demonstrate the damages here, because they don't exist.
	They didn't happen to fill up Bump, but he's afraid.
	What is he afraid?
	That if his kid reads a Dr. Seuss book, that his kid might come away a vicious racist?
	I sat down to read it with Thomas and rambled along in rhythm.
	Then I turned the page to the African island of Yurka, on which lived the tufted Mazurka.
	In the Seuss's drawing, the bird thing is perched on a pole being held by two caricatures of African men that are so obviously and immediately racist that it was almost breathtaking.
	It would be like watching an interview with Tom Hanks in which he started suddenly casually dropping racial slurs, a grotesque act accentuated by astonishments at the source.
	This was Dr. Seuss, the benchmark for authors of children's book.
	And here are the racist caricatures he drew.
	Again, racism doesn't require intent anymore, and it doesn't even require effect anymore.
	It's just what you say is racist.
	Normally, in order for a thing to be racist, it has to either have a racist effect or a racist intent.
	It can be insensitive, but for you to call something racist requires either intent or effect as a general rule.
	Not so here.
	Philip Bump, who was never affected by this book as a child, now has decided that the book must be banned.
	It must be banned because he was personally offended on behalf of people he is not.
	This is just, it's ridiculous.
	So what is his idea here?
	The idea is that if you defend, if I ran the zoo, this means that you are in favor of racism, of course.
	The answer is that people who perceive criticism of casual racism of the past as criticism of their own behavior or as a reminder of how the world around them is changing.
	It's that Seuss is a benchmark for a particular sort of American upbringing.
	Calling out Seuss' infrequent racist imagery is therefore an attack on that view of American identity.
	It's a short hop from here to rhetoric demanding we make America great again.
	Ah ha ha.
	So, you're a Trump voter if you don't want these books burned.
	And again, the basic idea here is that you are a racist unless you agree that Dr. Seuss was a racist and unless you are in favor of the book burning.
	Seuss's caricatures are hurtful anachronisms.
	Are they hurtful?
	Really, who is hurt?
	What's more, until a few weeks ago, my son didn't know this book existed.
	So where's the harm in his not seeing its images?
	Oh boy.
	Oh boy, what a case that is.
	Until a few weeks ago, my son didn't know this book existed.
	So what's the harm in him never being educated?
	I could say the same about virtually all aspects of information.
	I don't want my kids to be educated about your crappy left-wing views.
	My kids have never been exposed to that.
	So why are you insisting they be exposed to your crappy left-wing views?
	In fact, why is it your business what my kids see or do?
	So you're libertarian when it comes to you, but you're an authoritarian when it comes to everybody else.
	And we're racist.
	This is what liberalism has become.
	In just a second.
	We are going to get to the book that predicted all of this, Fahrenheit 451, which is right on the money.
	Ray Bradbury was a prophet.
	We'll get to this in one second.
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	Alrighty.
	I had the pleasure of discussing minimum wage on my radio show this week with Representative Ro Khanna.
	You know what?
	It is refreshing to have a regular conversation outside of any forced safe space, especially in the current climate.
	Every political issue is now a hot button issue.
	Everyone.
	It's the same with minimum wage.
	Now, minimum wage has historically had all sorts of controversies and fallacies surrounding it.
	The left makes the emotional appeal by saying that, well, you know, you're just making people's wages higher.
	Well, there are also all sorts of unintended side effects.
	I break down the myth of the minimum wage and others like it on my new Daily Wire series, Debunked.
	Every single Friday, we are dropping a new mini documentary.
	Last week, it was about minimum wage.
	This week, it is teachers unions and unions in the public sector more generally.
	Tune in to get the simple facts and logic that Debunk left his claims on these and more issues to come.
	All the controversial issues, we're gonna deal with them week by week on Debunked.
	You're gonna have more material to argue with your friends with, have more material to edify yourself, or maybe to have your mind changed.
	Debunked is available exclusively to DailyWire members, so head on over to dailywire.com slash subscribe and use code DEBUNKED to get 25% off your new membership.
	That is code DEBUNKED.
	You're listening to the largest, fastest growing podcast and radio show in the nation.
	So here is the thing.
	All of this is perfectly predictable because authoritarians always are predictable.
	And if you read Fahrenheit 451 right now, there are a bunch of dystopian novels from the 20th century that people like to make comparisons to.
	1984 comes up a lot.
	Brave New World is obviously quite prophetic in how modern society treats pleasure, and hedonism, and sex, and how governments use such things to control people.
	But Fahrenheit 451 has some sections that are just absolutely prophetic.
	I'm gonna read you one of those sections from Fahrenheit 451, a book that I'm sure will be burned at some point in the future for being insufficiently woke.
	Here is what Ray Bradbury writes.
	He is writing in the voice of Captain Beatty, who is sort of the villain of the piece.
	Captain Beatty is one of the firefighters.
	For those who don't remember Fahrenheit 451, the book is about how there are firefighters.
	The firefighters no longer fight fires.
	They actually start fires.
	They go to houses and they burn books.
	That is their job.
	Okay, so Captain Beatty is explaining how it came to be that firefighters, instead of saving houses, ended up burning books and how society went along with it.
	Here's what he says.
	Now, let's take up the minorities in our civilization, shall we?
	Bigger the population, the more minorities.
	The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy.
	Remember that.
	All the minor, minor minorities with their navels to be kept clean.
	Authors full of evil thoughts lock up your typewriters.
	They did.
	Magazines became a nice blend of vanilla tapioca.
	Books, so the damn snobbish critics said, were dishwater.
	No wonder books stopped selling, the critics said.
	But the public, knowing what it wanted, spinning happily, let the comic books survive.
	And the three-dimensional sex magazines, of course.
	There you have it, Montag.
	Didn't come from the government down.
	There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship to start with.
	No.
	Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick.
	Thank God.
	That sound familiar?
	That sound familiar?
	It can have a vast minority of minorities, by the way.
	Most black people do not want if I ran the Zoo Band, and most Asian people don't want if I ran the Zoo Band.
	It's a small coterie of pseudo-intellectuals who earn their stripes on a college campus by saying extreme things and receiving attention for it, and get tenure for that, mainstreaming that through a bunch of allied liberal press members, and then pushing that into the halls of government.
	And they change the culture that way.
	And it is easier for corporations to go along with this small few than it is to stand up and just say no.
	Dr. Seuss Enterprises doesn't want controversy.
	So they figure it's okay, so we'll take the short-term hit.
	They're not going after Cat in the Hat after all.
	But here's the thing, they will go after Cat in the Hat, as we know.
	And here's the, and what's, again, the thing that is most amazing about all of this, to me, is that when you protest that children's innocence is being ruined, that the left has made an overt attempt to change how you raise your children, to censor what you can show your children on the one hand and cram down what you must show your children on the other.
	Then the left says, and you notice this, if you say anything about it, then the left says, why are you even paying attention to children's books and children's literature?
	Why are you even paying attention to that stuff?
	That's baby stuff.
	Yes, we know.
	That's why you're targeting it.
	There's a reason you are taking the time to go after Dr. Seuss.
	There's a reason you are taking the time to push I Am Jazz to small school children.
	There's a reason that you are taking the time to reorient how small children are taught in the United States and what sort of materials they are exposed to.
	It's because you know that that is how you reshape a society.
	And if parents don't stand up, then it will just continue.
	Again, I would at this point overtly call on Congress to pass legislation that ends trademark and copyright protection for people who deliberately bury material.
	If you have copyright and trademark and your entire goal is to never let literature see the light of day, you should not have copyright or trademark over that material.
	It should immediately be put into the public domain.
	If Dr. Seuss Enterprises doesn't want If I Ran the Zoo to be out there, it should be public domain.
	Because people have a right to see ideas.
	The whole point of trademarking copyright was to promote people's idea to see those ideas.
	Again, the goal of trademarking copyright was to prevent people from copying those ideas and putting them out there to remove the profit margin so that people wouldn't want to put out those ideas.
	But if you're deliberately suppressing material, then there ain't no profit margin to worry about.
	You're deliberately suppressing material.
	Deliberate suppression of material should not be given government exclusivity.
	That is something that Congress should move on, like, right away.
	I would love to see Republicans move on that, because censorship is a bad thing.
	It is a bad thing.
	And we all know that it is a truly terrible thing.
	But we're going to pretend that it's not, because so long as the right people are being cancelled, cancelled culture doesn't exist.
	That's just cultural change.
	It's just cultural change after all.
	And we know cultural change is good.
	Unless it's coming from the right, then it's bad.
	But if it's coming from the left, it's good.
	And cultural change justifies any and all invasions of those individual rights because utopia requires that individuals put their own selfish interests behind the interests of the community.
	And the interests of the community lie in creating a space where expressive individualism is respected, but only from the left.
	Only from the left, of course.
	Alrighty, meanwhile, the COVID controversies continue.
	Joe Biden continues to try to prolong this pandemic.
	I mean, there's no other way to put it.
	I don't mean like in practical terms, he's trying to prolong the inability of people to get vaccines, although I will say that he has been not wildly competent.
	And we keep talking about how we are tranching out vaccines, and it's good, right?
	He says that we'll have assured enough vaccine for everyone by the end of May.
	But you know, there's one area where the federal government really is in control, and that is in the creation of federal mass inoculation sites, right?
	By the end of February, he had a goal.
	His goal was to set up 100 new federally operated max vaccination sites.
	That's according to the AP.
	That was by the end of February.
	How many are up and running?
	Because now it's March.
	Seven.
	Seven.
	It's a slow clap.
	For the Biden administration on that one.
	The vaccines are important.
	You might have wanted to hurry up by making sure that more than seven mass vaccination sites on the federal level were actually created, especially given the fact that states are churning out their inoculations at wildly differential rates.
	If you're in Florida, much easier to get a vaccine than if you're in New York.
	There are people who are flying to Florida just to get the vaccine.
	There's a reason that, at this point, I believe a majority of seniors in Florida have been vaccinated, if I'm not mistaken.
	Well, meanwhile, in New York, Andrew Cuomo is still the governor.
	Anyway, Joe Biden continues to promote the idea that this pandemic is just going to continue forever because the longer the pandemic continues, the more political priorities he gets to push.
	So here he is saying that, you know, he's asked when we're going to get back to normal.
	And he's like, you know, maybe next year.
	Next year?
	Are you kidding?
	How about now?
	How about like right now?
	Hey, here is Joe Biden.
	I've been cautioned not to give an answer to that because we don't know for sure.
	But my hope is by this time next year we're going to be back to normal and before that, my hope.
	But again, it depends upon if people continue, continue to be smart and understand that we still can have significant losses.
	There's a lot we have to do yet.
	You know, we still have so much to do.
	Maybe it'll be next year.
	Maybe next year.
	Or we could look at, you know, the actual statistics as to infection rates in the United States, and we can actually see, for example, what that chart looks like.
	And what you can see is that the daily new cases, according to Worldometers, as of March 2nd, the daily new cases in the United States, 56,890.
	Okay, at its height in January, it was 300,000 a day.
	So we are down to a small fraction of what the daily new cases were before.
	Okay, coronavirus deaths have tailed off following the infections, of course.
	Now, people on the left keep claiming, ridiculously enough, that this has to do with social distancing and masking.
	That is nonsense.
	It has nothing to do with social distancing and masking.
	Those have been in place in places like California the entire time.
	They never stopped.
	Florida, people have been acting in a consistent way since the summer.
	The reason this happened is because you started to see saturation points.
	This is what Marty Makary from Johns Hopkins University was claiming in the Wall Street Journal and on this show.
	He said by April, we're going to hit herd immunity.
	And the stats are showing that we are coming closer and closer to herd immunity.
	We also have vaccinations taking place on a huge number of people in the population.
	We are now up to something like 15% of people who have had at least one dose.
	And by the way, one dose does provide significant protection.
	It's not as though the first dose of a Pfizer vaccine gives you 50% and then the second dose gives you 50%.
	It's not like that.
	The first dose gives you like 85 to 90% and then the second dose is a booster shot.
	Same thing with the Moderna shot.
	And now we have Johnson & Johnson rolling off the lines.
	We're doing over 2 million inoculations a day in this country.
	This pandemic is ending and the left cannot stand it.
	They cannot stand it.
	They don't like it.
	You're getting the impression they don't want it to end.
	Joe Biden is out there being like, now's not the time to let our guard down.
	Apparently, just into next year, gang.
	Into next year.
	Here's Joe Biden mumbling his way through his preferred solution.
	There is light at the end of the tunnel.
	But we cannot let our guard down now or assure that victory is inevitable.
	We can't assume that.
	We must remain vigilant, act fast and aggressively, and look out for one another.
	That's how we're going to get ahead of this virus, get our economy going again, and get back to our loved ones.
	So thank you, and please, please, it's not over yet.
	Okay, he keeps saying it's not over yet, but what if it's coming to an end?
	I mean, he's still talking about next year.
	Next year.
	And his administration keeps saying idiotic things like if you get the vaccination, you can't go back to your regular life.
	Nope.
	You can.
	I'm just gonna put that out there.
	You can go back to your regular life.
	The vaccinations are extraordinarily effective.
	Again, 99% reduction in death, 95% reduction in serious case, 90% reduction by Israeli studies in transmissibility.
	And that's the protection provided to you.
	And we are talking about the vast bulk of deaths in the United States having occurred for people age 65 or over, and a huge number having occurred in nursing homes, which at this point, virtually everywhere across the country, have been inoculated in mass fashion.
	And yet there's an obvious interest in continuing to prolong the suffering here.
	Meanwhile, in Texas, Greg Abbott said, you know what?
	We're done here.
	You know, we're going to open up Texas.
	If you have a business, you want to open it up at 100%, go for it.
	If you don't want to go, don't go.
	By the way, this is called liberty, gang.
	If you don't want to go, don't go.
	You can still stay home.
	You can still wear a KN95.
	You can still do whatever you want to do.
	If you're a business owner and you're still concerned about COVID breaking out at your business because it's a small business and people are still in close proximity and you think not enough people are vaccinated, you can still put a restriction on the front of your store saying that everybody has to wear a mask.
	That is very common where I live in Florida.
	I live in a free state.
	There are still local businesses that do this.
	That is their prerogative.
	But letting people make their own decisions used to be thought of as traditionally American.
	Here's Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas.
	I'm issuing a new executive order that rescinds most of the earlier executive orders.
	Effective next Wednesday, all businesses of any type are allowed to open 100%.
	That includes any type of entity in Texas.
	Also, I am ending the statewide mask mandate.
	Personal vigilance to follow the safe standards is still needed to contain COVID.
	It's just that now, state mandates are no longer needed.
	Okay, so he's not even saying take off the mask.
	He's just saying, I'm not going to try and punish you by law or fine you for not wearing a mask.
	Which again, those mandates were not particularly effective.
	You know what was effective?
	People using their own best judgment.
	You can see that the masking rate followed the increase in disease all over the country.
	People started masking up when they thought that the disease was going to get them.
	And then when they thought the disease was not going to get them, they stopped masking up.
	But you can start to see the creep here, the mission creep.
	No.
	My answer to that is no.
	And you know how long we're going to continue this further?
	that we should all mask up every winter so as to prevent flu?
	No.
	My answer to that is no.
	And you know how long we're gonna continue this further?
	The answer is not long, not nearly at all.
	Ted Fitzsimmons writing for NBC News, the governors of Texas and Mississippi both announced on Tuesday they would be lifting their state's mask mandates and rolling back many of their COVID-19 health mandates just one day after the CDC warned against complacency in the face of emerging coronavirus variants.
	Right, this is the new bogeyman, is that there are going to be variants and those are going to take over.
	Okay, so let's say there is a variant.
	Are we still going to shut down the society like for another year?
	How long can we do this?
	Seriously, how long can we do this?
	Are we going to continue to do this?
	Forever?
	Because I'm not seeing any timeline on the horizon for you guys.
	You keep just pushing the timeline out.
	Remember two weeks to slow the spread?
	And we're now a year in?
	And now Joe Biden is saying maybe another year?
	No.
	The answer is no.
	Shortly after Greg Abbott made his announcement, Governor Tate Reeves announced he would end Mississippi's statewide mask mandate effective Wednesday of this week.
	Reeves tweeted, our hospitalizations and case numbers have plummeted.
	The vaccine is being rapidly distributed.
	It is time.
	Now, remember, the whole purpose of the COVID social distancing and the masking and all of that, the whole purpose of the lockdowns was to prevent the overwhelming of the hospitals.
	Nowhere in America are the hospitals threatened with overwhelm.
	Nowhere.
	In fact, even the Texas regulations suggest that you can kick in local mask mandates if You get within 15% capacity in the ICUs, except that nobody's close to that.
	There's not a problem.
	There are actually reports coming out yesterday that there were certain hospital administrators trying to game the system so as to artificially decrease the number of ICU beds so they could say they were within 15% of capacity and thus kick in the mask mandates, which is just unbelievable perversion.
	CDC Director Rochelle Walensky strongly cautioned against those rollbacks.
	She said, I'm really worried about the reports.
	More states are rolling back the exact public health measures we have recommended to protect people from COVID-19.
	We stand to completely lose the hard-earned ground we have gained.
	Oh, do we?
	Really?
	Again, I would love some evidence that the lockdowns were super effective in the United States.
	Any evidence?
	At all?
	Bueller?
	Bueller?
	Okay, I'll tell you what was effective.
	Protecting the nursing homes.
	And then telling people to use their best judgment.
	And that was kind of it.
	As some of us have been saying from literally the second month of the pandemic, as soon as it was clear what this virus was.
	So, you know, they're gonna continue to push this.
	And at this point, it is fully political.
	I mean, it used to be, at the beginning, I didn't think this was political.
	Now, it has become obviously fully political.
	There's an amazing piece from Miguel Cardona, who is the new education secretary, talking about reopening schools.
	Now, the CDC recommendations for school reopening suggest 96% of kids should not be in school right now, or at least they should be in a hybrid program.
	Over 50% of kids are in schools.
	My kids have been in school the entire year, literally the whole year.
	You know what?
	Nobody got seriously ill.
	Nobody died.
	There were no major outbreaks.
	It is perfectly doable.
	And in fact, these 6-foot distancing notions?
	There have been a wide variety of scientists who have said those 6-foot distancing notions in classrooms are nonsense.
	It is come up with out of thin air.
	And it could be 3 feet.
	It could be 15 feet.
	Right?
	It could be anything.
	One thing we do know is that if you are in a small enclosed space for prolonged periods of time with people who are above the age of essentially 15, then there's a better shot that you get the thing.
	But with vaccinations and the fact that so many people have already had it, I mean like tens of millions of Americans have already had it.
	We are looking at herd immunity in the very near future, if we have not already hit it in certain places in the United States.
	Nonetheless, you have the education secretary putting out a piece explaining how he's going to reopen the schools.
	And let me just give you his steps to reopening the schools.
	He says, we must continue to reopen America's schools for in-person learning as quickly and safely as possible.
	Safely is code for, let me just sell out to the teachers unions.
	So here are his steps.
	The education secretary.
	Note, the schools in Europe are open.
	The schools in Israel have largely been open.
	The schools in the United States, in places like Florida, they never shut.
	Here are his recommendations.
	Joe Biden, Secretary of Education.
	Remember, this isn't political.
	It's all science.
	Oh, a summit!
	Wow!
	That's gonna be amazing!
	Like, we'll get together and we'll jabber?
	Sounds great!
	Maybe we should do it via Zoom.
	That's a little unsafe.
	Says Secretary Cardona, So we're going to have, you know, a problem-solving, solutions-oriented approach.
	Here's our plan.
	First, we'll convene the experts.
	Ah, more experts.
	to local COVID-19 data, my approach with the nation's schools will be the same.
	So we're going to have a problem-solving, solutions-oriented approach. Here's our plan.
	First, we'll convene the experts. Ah, more experts. Who will these experts be?
	Students, teachers, families, community organizations, and school leadership.
	Oh, so the unions.
	Second, we'll share best practices.
	You know, like the CDC has been doing with their best practices saying no one should ever go back to school.
	Third, we're gonna get to work right away on the education department's COVID-19 handbook.
	Well, handbook, that'll do it.
	And fourth, we need better data about how schools are operating during the pandemic.
	So a study.
	And then finally, we need more money, even though we still have $50 billion or something that is yet to be spent on the schools.
	They don't want these places to reopen.
	This is all politics at this point.
	We all know it's all politics at this point.
	It's pretty incredible.
	And meanwhile, I will just note that my theory about Andrew Cuomo, that the reason Andrew Cuomo is going down in flames right now on the sexual harassment stuff is because everybody secretly knows that Andrew Cuomo should be going down on his COVID policy stuff, that he was not the best governor in America.
	He was, in fact, the second worst governor in America after Phil Murphy of New Jersey.
	You know how I can make that statement clearly?
	Because all I have to do is look at the death per million rate.
	Number one, New Jersey.
	Number two, New York.
	In fact, I can do this ranking pretty solidly, and I can say that, you know, if we just gauge elderly population versus death per million rate, that's a pretty good metric for which governors did well.
	Andrew Cuomo is a damned liar.
	He shipped COVID-positive patients back into nursing homes, undoubtedly that led to more outbreaks and more deaths.
	Just basic common sense suggests so.
	But now they're going to oust Andrew Cuomo on the basis of all the sexual harassment stuff, which by the way is like nothing compared to killing old people and then lying about it to your own legislature.
	They're going to oust him for that because they don't want to come face to face with the reality.
	This is why you're starting to see the damn break against Andrew Cuomo.
	You'll note that New York lawmakers voted to remove Andrew Cuomo's emergency powers on the pandemic.
	According to the United Press, Senate Democratic Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins and Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie announced the legislature would pass legislation to immediately strip Cuomo of the powers set to expire April 30th. They said a year into the pandemic and as New Yorkers received the vaccine, the temporary emergency powers served their purpose, it's time for them to be repealed. Okay, notice they're repealing his emergency powers amidst the investigation into the COVID cover-up and the sexual harassment allegations.
	It never happened.
	Now's a convenient time for them to remove Cuomo's power, but we all should recognize that what's really happening here is just everybody covering their ass for the fact that they never should have gone along with the Cuomo train in the first place.
	In fact, Trevor Noah basically admitted as much.
	Credit to Trevor Noah here for at least a little bit of self-reflection.
	All those people who praised Cuomo so highly last year, whew!
	Those people really don't look so smart now.
	Delete the tapes, delete the tapes, delete them all.
	I mean, it must be so embarrassing.
	Can you imagine if you're one of those people?
	Ha, ha, ha!
	Just burn them, I don't give a burn them.
	You call yourself a Cuomo sexual and I agree with you.
	I feel like I'm a Cuomo sexual too.
	Yeah, I think it's been really, it genuinely has been very inspiring and refreshing to see a leader like Cuomo Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
	Yeah, so just remember, the real reason that Cuomo's going down, the real one, is because he was a crappy governor who handled COVID horribly and lied about it and probably got old people killed.
	And the reason they're gonna use is this sexual harassment stuff.
	That's just a reason to knock him off and then pretend that it wasn't about the COVID.
	Because if it was about the COVID, then they were also wrong, right?
	They didn't sexually harass anybody, but they went right along with him on the COVID stuff.
	So they would have to, you know, avoid all complicity in that.
	Alrighty, we'll be back here later today with an additional hour of content.
	In the meantime, go check out The Michael Nolans Show.
	On today's episode, Michael will be talking about Neera Tanden being spiked for her OMB nomination.
	That episode is available right this moment.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	Shapiro, this is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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	Audio is mixed by Mike Koromina.
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