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May 6, 2021 - The Ben Shapiro Show

48:43

Who Will They Ban Next? | Ep. 1251

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	After Facebook's oversight board backs the company's ban on Donald Trump, Democrats call for more.
	The Biden administration keeps playing politics with COVID and Kamala Harris makes out with her husband through a mask.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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	Alrighty, so the big story of the day continues to be that Facebook has maintained its ban on Donald Trump.
	Donald Trump, as you'll recall, was banned on January 7th from Facebook, as well as YouTube, as well as Twitter, as well as Instagram, pretty much everywhere.
	There was a blanket ban put on the sitting president of the United States because he said a bunch of stuff that people didn't like.
	And it was not clear how it had violated the rules in any substantial way.
	Certainly no more than Ayatollah Khomeini or Louis Farrakhan or a wide variety of other deplorables around the world.
	But Donald Trump was banned because the tech bros decided that he was innately dangerous and therefore he had to be banned until after the election.
	Or until after the inauguration.
	And then they just were like, okay, well, I guess we'll just leave him banned.
	Well, the Facebook Oversight Board made two decisions yesterday.
	One was, was the original ban appropriate?
	They said yes, based on the idea that Trump had said positive things about people doing violence, which, again, is an odd standard considering the entire Democratic Party came out in strong defense of people doing violence and looting during the summer last year.
	And continue, by the way, to defend a wide variety of criminals, as long as they are in some sort of tussle with the police.
	And then the Facebook oversight board did what Facebook didn't want them to do and they tossed the ball back to Facebook.
	So Facebook set up this oversight board specifically to avoid responsibility for these sorts of things.
	And then the oversight board was like, well, you can't suspend Trump indefinitely.
	So we're going to toss this back at you.
	And in six months or so, you will reevaluate whether Trump ought to be put back on the platforms.
	Now, all of this should frighten you because the reality is that the rules are just an excuse for Facebook to kick off whoever they want to.
	YouTube, same sort of deal.
	You don't actually have to violate the rules in order for public blowback to cause YouTube or Facebook or Twitter to throw you off the internet.
	This is the real problem.
	They like to say that all of this is algorithmic, and some of it is algorithmic, but somebody sets up the algorithms.
	And some of it is just not algorithmic at all.
	When you make the decision to ban the sitting president of the United States from social media, that is not a decision that is being made by a computer.
	That is a decision that is being made by high-level people at the companies in question, and in coordinated fashion.
	I kind of fail to see how it's not collusion, in fact, to see all of the social media companies all at once decide to ban the president of the United States, the same way they did, by the way, to Alex Jones or Milo Yiannopoulos.
	Doesn't mean I agree with a lot of the things that are said by these folks, but the fact that social media have this sort of top-down control is pretty astonishing.
	Now, there's this widespread perception out there, and it's a real misperception.
	that the left and the right agree on this stuff.
	They don't.
	People on the right are angry at big tech because they believe that big tech has too much control over the dissemination of information, that big tech can be cuddled and bullied by the mainstream media into basically shutting off all other sources of information.
	As I've discussed before, the real threat to establishment media is indeed social media.
	And the reason for that is because with the rise of the internet, you could now go to places like Fox News or Daily Wire if you wanted an alternative view of the news, or if you just wanted to hear news from a conservative perspective or maybe see news covered that the establishment media wouldn't cover.
	And then, because social media became so big, people started consuming their news via social media.
	You used to go directly to Fox News or directly to Daily Wire, and now most people get their news by going to Facebook and checking their news feed.
	Well, this created a sort of almost a sort of bottleneck in the pipeline for informational flow.
	And the establishment media saw this and they said, oh, look at that.
	Isn't that interesting?
	It used to be that all information flowing out through the internet through disparate means, you could go to this website here and this website over there, and it was very difficult to shut that off.
	But now if everybody is getting their news through Facebook's newsfeed, well, what if we just, you know, took that bottleneck and just kind of closed it?
	What if we just made sure the only things that could get through the bottleneck are the establishment media sources?
	And this is what the social media tech bros have been going along with.
	They set up this measure at Facebook for what they called sort of news authoritativeness.
	And the way they ranked that was if you're an establishment media source, then you are more authoritative.
	And if you are not an establishment media source, you are not.
	Which, of course, to conservatives is anathema because we look at CNN and we say these people report fake news and fake narratives on a fairly regular basis.
	Washington Post, same thing.
	New York Times, same thing.
	Facebook has attempted to sort of outsource, they're constantly attempting to outsource all of this to outside groups.
	So what they will do is they'll say, well, you know, to determine which news is authoritative, we'll go to fact-checkers.
	But then the fact-checkers are all left-wing fact-checkers.
	It's like PolitiFact or Snopes and all these folks are far to the left.
	And so Facebook basically outsourced its own perspective on free speech to a bunch of outside leftist groups.
	They tried to do this with the Facebook Oversight Board as well.
	And the Facebook Oversight Board basically said, look at that, Facebook did the right thing in the first place, but at a certain point, they're going to have to determine whether to permanently ban Trump or not.
	Okay, so the left's perspective is that the big problem with social media is that too much information is disseminated via social media.
	The right's perspective is that too little information is disseminated via social media.
	The right would prefer that there be a broader range of viewpoints that are allowed on social media.
	And the left would prefer, as always, that only their viewpoint be allowed on social media.
	And they have basically cudgeled and bullied all of these companies into mirroring that perspective.
	Because if you look back at the history of social media, if you look back at the statements made by places like Twitter and Facebook, when they first started, their main mandate was, we are going to allow more people to speak.
	And then it became, we are going to better the conversation.
	And by bettering the conversation, they meant that they were going to Work on what you could see.
	They were going to make you a better person because your betters in Silicon Valley were going to determine what you could and could not see.
	And so this is what you see from the left today in the aftermath of the news that Facebook is going to maintain that ban on Trump.
	The White House came out.
	I mean, this is, it's truly dystopian stuff.
	The White House came out and they said, you know what?
	Big tech companies should go even further.
	They need to stop the misinformation.
	Now, this is really dangerous because the White House, you may have noticed, is a government agency.
	This is the executive branch of the most powerful government in world history.
	And the executive branch is saying, we want all of these social media companies who are the chief mechanism by which Information is now disseminated.
	We want them actively to crack down on things we deem misinformation.
	Now, it's important to note here that the left has made a move linguistically from disinformation to misinformation.
	You remember just a few years ago, 2016, there was a lot of talk about Russian disinformation.
	Well, the term disinformation has a specific meaning.
	Disinformation means a foreign government is putting out false information in order to bamboozle or hoodwink Americans and pervert the political process.
	That's what disinformation is.
	The United States engages in disinformation campaigns against foreign regimes too, right?
	This is just something that happens in international politics.
	And there's certainly a strong case to be made that if Facebook knows that the Russians are disseminating disinformation, that they should shut that down.
	It's a foreign government attempting to affect American elections, for example.
	But there's a difference between disinformation and misinformation.
	By shifting one letter and conflating the two, now you can just declare anything you don't like misinformation.
	So Hunter Biden's story?
	Maybe it's misinformation.
	And this is the way that the White House views this sort of stuff.
	Pointing out that Joe Biden's agenda is extraordinarily radical.
	Well, that's misinformation.
	We can't allow that sort of misinformation to thrive.
	Even when people say things from an American perspective that are not true.
	If Donald Trump says that voter fraud and irregularity 100% decided the election, we won in Atlanta, that kind of stuff.
	Even if that's not true, to suggest that that is akin to a Russian source promoting active disinformation is not right.
	I mean, Donald Trump does have a First Amendment right to say things that are objectively untrue, that is not banned by the First Amendment.
	You do have the right in the United States to say things that, in your own viewpoint, you think are true, even if they are not true.
	And that holds true on both sides.
	I've never called for Ibram X. Kendi, who's a grifter par excellence, to be banned from social media, even though he routinely says things that are wildly untrue, because that's fascistic.
	You don't get to use the means of the government in order to push that.
	So what they've done is, instead, they've shifted over the onus to these corporations.
	They're working hand-in-glove with these corporations, and they're basically saying to the corporations, we'll leave you alone.
	You can have your monopoly.
	In fact, we will promote your monopoly so long as you do exactly what we want.
	They basically turned these corporations into agencies of the federal government and then used those corporations in order to shut down the First Amendment in a way they could not do directly.
	If the federal government were to legislate that information they don't like, Had to be shut down by social media?
	That would be illegal.
	If the federal government threatens Facebook that they are going to regulate them in some way, if Facebook does not do that, then the claim is that's not illegal, that's just good governance.
	So here's Jen Psaki from the White House saying we hope that they go further in fighting misinformation.
	The president's view is that the major platforms have a responsibility related to the health and safety of all Americans to stop amplifying untrustworthy content, disinformation and misinformation, especially related to COVID-19 vaccinations Okay, this is maddening and insane.
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	So you have Jen Psaki saying that it's the responsibility of these big tech companies to quote-unquote stop misinformation.
	Number one, that's just not true.
	It's not true.
	These big tech companies are platforms.
	The whole point of them is that it is not their job to police what's in the comments.
	Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act was specifically designed to protect companies so that those companies would not be held liable legally.
	So now they're just reversing this.
	Right now they're going to say that Facebook ought to be held responsible for stuff that a third party posts on Facebook, which completely defeats the purpose of open threads.
	It defeats the purpose of comment sections.
	It defeats the purpose of YouTube and Twitter and Facebook.
	It destroys them wholesale.
	If they are responsible for the material that appears on their platforms, Then this means that they are effectively the same as the New York Times or the Daily Wire.
	They're just editorial sites.
	That's number one.
	Number two, when she says that we want them to crack down on misinformation with regard to COVID and elections, let's just note here that the Biden administration has routinely lied about both COVID and elections.
	The Biden administration has suggested over and over and over again that Georgia's new voter laws are Jim Crow.
	That is an overt lie.
	It is an abject, disgusting, overt lie.
	Those laws are in many ways more permissive with regard to voting than, for example, New York or New Jersey.
	There's no one who has a shred of sanity who believes that those laws look anything like Jim Crow.
	The great lie the Democrats have been promoting, that voter suppression has been deciding elections, it is a lie.
	But they don't want that lie shut down.
	They want that lie promulgated.
	They want that lie promoted.
	They want it trumpeted from the highest rooftop so they can pretend to black Americans that the GOP is trying to shut down their rights.
	So those sorts of lies they want promoted.
	It just depends on the misinformation.
	And when it comes to COVID, I can't think of a bigger purveyor of COVID misinformation than this administration.
	They keep just saying stupid crap that makes no sense about masking and outdoor standards and the efficacy of the vaccines.
	It's just ridiculous on every level.
	But this is the going push by the folks on the left.
	The going push is shut down dissemination of information.
	It's what they want.
	This is authoritarian stuff.
	I have a new book coming out called The Authoritarian Moment.
	It comes out in July.
	One of the things that I discuss is one of the reasons that the left wants to keep focusing on January 6th, because January 6th was really terrible.
	It was a terrible, terrible event for the country.
	But the reason they want to keep their focus on January 6th is to overlook the fact that the reaction to January 6th on the left is significantly more authoritarian than the actual effect of January 6th.
	On January 6th, a bunch of authoritarians went in and tried to overturn the legitimate results of an election.
	That's true.
	And it was like several hundred idiots, and then they were immediately cleared out, and then a bunch of Republicans certified the election.
	It was over.
	The major institutions in American life, the biggest, most powerful institutions in American life, are attempting to destroy your ability to disseminate information, to see information.
	They are attempting to destroy your ability to raise your child as you see fit.
	They are looking to destroy your business if you fail to comply with their woke standards.
	The authoritarian movement in the United States is not chiefly from the right.
	This doesn't mean there aren't authoritarians on the right.
	There are.
	But the authoritarian movement in the United States, the dangerous authoritarianism that we experience in everyday life and at every level of American society is coming from the institutional heads inside blue America.
	Like, I don't know what to say about the fact that Hillary Clinton, who is Secretary of State and Senator from New York and nearly the President of the United States, she's out there saying, yeah, yeah, I know this is great.
	Big Tech needs to shut down Trump or we should shut down Big Tech.
	Hey, this is just authoritarian stuff.
	There must be a reckoning by the tech companies for the role that they play in undermining the information ecosystem that is absolutely essential for the functioning of any democracy.
	And it's going to be up to governments, and I would even hope some global rules, but let's start with governments, to try to rein in the disinformation on the social media platforms First of all, that should scare the living hell out of you.
	When Hillary Clinton and Democrats start talking about global governance, what, do we want Zimbabwe's input on how information gets disseminated?
	This is one of the big problems for Facebook.
	Facebook is a global company.
	What they should be doing is promulgating First Amendment American standards.
	They are not.
	They're seeking explicitly to have other governments regulate them because they don't know what to do, because otherwise they're held liable in places like Germany for speech they're not held liable for in places like the United States.
	So when you say, when Hillary Clinton says, we need an international global standard on free speech, Understand that's what we're talking about here.
	The idea that government's job is to rein in the dissemination of information is precisely the reverse of the First Amendment.
	It is precisely the opposite of the First Amendment.
	And the fact that they've gotten all these social media companies to basically do this stuff voluntarily under threat just demonstrates that essentially they're using these major corporations as their agents.
	We are now operating not in a free market capitalist America with regard to social media.
	We are operating in a corporatist America with regard to social media where they are given special privileges by the government and then the government tells them all you have to do is implement standards that we like about information that we don't like.
	Adam Schiff, one of the great purveyors of misinformation for years.
	I mean, this douchebag was on MSNBC every single day talking about how the other shoe was going to drop.
	It was going to come out that Trump was was actually peeing on Russian prostitutes and they were peeing on him.
	And all of this was it was all Russian collusion.
	The evidence would show up sooner or later.
	Here is Adam Schiff saying that he hopes that the ban from Facebook is permanent on Trump.
	Of course he does.
	The president here is continuing to go out and push the big lie about the election, continuing, I think, to endanger our democracy by doing that.
	And so he continues to make the case that he would violate the policies if they readmitted him.
	And I think, frankly, Pathologically, he's incapable of changing.
	So this is a temporary ban.
	It will likely be, if we're fortunate, a permanent ban, because the president is not going to stop the lies about the last election or lies about the next one.
	He will incite people.
	I swear, I don't want to hear about authoritarianism from a group of people who are using their perch in government to attempt to literally stop a political opponent from being able to speak.
	I mean, that is the essence of authoritarianism.
	What you're watching right now from the White House, from Congress, from Hillary Clinton, from this whole cadre of the mainstream establishment left, is we want to use the methods of informational dissemination to shut down our political opponents.
	We want to threaten them to do it.
	We're gonna threaten these companies in order to make that happen and give them special privileges and pat them on the head if they're good little boys and girls.
	It's insanity.
	But we're told that the authoritarianism is on the right?
	The hell it is.
	By the way, Not to be self-serving here, but the reality is this is one of the reasons why you should go subscribe to the services that you love right now, because at any moment, this entire tsunami of authoritarianism nonsense could be pushed against anybody, including places you like.
	It could be pushed against Daily Wire.
	It could be pushed against my show.
	Go subscribe right now over at Daily Wire, because again, you want to protect the content that you love, because I don't trust these people, do you?
	I don't trust these tech companies are gonna stand up to the overwhelming tsunami of authoritarian nonsense being pushed by the establishment left.
	This is the establishment left.
	It's amazing how fast the liberal movement caved in the United States to this insane, censorious left.
	How many liberals are left to stand up to this?
	How many liberals still stand for the original principles like the ACLU?
	How many people still believe?
	I remember in the 90s, people used to say, I'm left all the time.
	This was their great civil liberties moment.
	They would say things like, I may not agree with you, but I will defend to the death your right to say what you want to say.
	You remember dissent is the height of patriotism.
	You remember this during the Iraq war?
	No longer.
	Now, according to the establishment left, you disagree with us and we will find a way to shut you down.
	Including, by the way, the sitting president of the United States at the time.
	We will find a way to stop you from speaking.
	And it would be one thing if they had any sort of articulable standard that is consistently applied, but there is no articulable standard that's consistently applied.
	The Biden administration routinely lies.
	The Biden administration routinely says things that are untrue.
	Democrats, members of the media, have openly defended acts of violence depending on who is committing the act of violence.
	None of them have been banned.
	So what this really is, is just about power.
	It's so funny, the entire deconstructionist movement, the sort of philosophical deconstructionist movement, is about the idea that there are no centralizing principles, everything is just a power game.
	That when people talk about freedom and equality, when people talk about the principles of the Declaration of Independence, they're lying.
	That really all that was, was a guise for power.
	It's all just a facade.
	It's a way for rich white men to cram down their own version of the system.
	It's all projection.
	Deconstructionism, from the establishment left, is just projection.
	Because for them, there are no universal principles.
	It is just about power.
	There are no universal principles that apply to your rights.
	There are no universal principles that apply to the level of misinformation that can be disseminated.
	There's nothing consistent here.
	It is just about what they can get away with and what kind of power they can use in order to apply pressure.
	That's all.
	And that's authoritarian.
	There's no other word for it.
	And what we are watching right now, again, this is not just a pitch for my book, but it is a pitch for my book.
	The book is The Authoritarian Moment.
	You can go pre-order it right now on Amazon, because I go through all of this in detail.
	They have renormalized America's institutions in order to silence everyone they disagree with, and they are doing it with big tech right now.
	And so for people on the right who are like, yeah, there's a wide right-left agreement that we need to shut down big tech.
	No, they disagree for completely different, They don't like big tech for completely different reasons.
	The right wants big tech to consistently apply any standard, hopefully a very broad free speech standard.
	The left wants to simply run these companies.
	The left simply wants to make sure that you cannot speak, that you cannot share, that you are not allowed to have organic reach with the stories that you push, that you never see the information they don't want you to see.
	The most obvious example being that Hunter Biden story, the New York Post Twitter account shut down a month before the election because of a true Hunter Biden story?
	Facebook shutting it down?
	Preventing the dissemination of even the link?
	You couldn't even link to it?
	And you watch, this is the next move.
	What you will see is that now that Donald Trump has started his quasi-blog on his page, the next move by Twitter and Facebook will be, you are not allowed to tweet any link from that blog.
	Because again, this is not about freedom.
	It is not about protecting democracy.
	These folks don't give a damn about democracy.
	Are you kidding me?
	They want to completely rewrite the rules of the game.
	They want to completely federalize every election procedure in the United States.
	They want to make ballot harvesting legal.
	They want to make sure that voter ID cannot be put into law.
	And then they want to cram a bunch of seats into the Senate in undemocratic fashion in order to stack the system in favor of their own political priorities.
	They don't give a damn about democracy or the procedures of the Constitution.
	It's all just a power game.
	In the end, it's all about power for the establishment left.
	There are no principles.
	If you're a believer that there are principles from the same people who are saying that misinformation has to be shut down on the internet, but we can lie as much as we want, I don't know what to tell you.
	They're unprincipled.
	It is just power.
	We'll get to all of this with regard to COVID, because that is 100% true with COVID, in just one second.
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	Alrighty, so.
	When it comes to dissemination of misinformation for political purposes, this White House has no problem doing that.
	Not in the slightest.
	So, the entire administration approach to COVID and vaccines and masking is absurd.
	It's absurd on its face.
	We have now run into what people are calling the demand wall with regard to vaccination.
	What that means is that there's way more supply than demand.
	There's a lot of supply.
	The supply was ramped up by Trump.
	Biden continued that.
	Biden is the luckiest man ever to be elected president, not only because he's not sentient, but also because he inherited an entire vaccination program, an entire rollout program, and then he gets credit for it.
	Okay, so in any case, A huge number of Americans have already been vaccinated.
	Right now, we are going from like 3 million vaccinations a day down to like 1 million.
	Why?
	Well, number one, the people who wanted it the most already went and got it.
	And number two, they're now running into what's called the demand wall.
	One of the reasons for the demand wall, the reason that people are not out there clamoring for the vaccine, is because if you are vaccine hesitant, there is no incentive being promoted by this administration to get the vaccine.
	Like, none.
	They're not telling you you can go back to regular life, which you can, scientifically speaking.
	They're not telling you that after you get that second vaccine dose and you're two weeks out, you can unmask.
	Which, again, the data support that you can do this.
	I name a single study, one study, that's all I ask.
	One study demonstrating that the vaccinated are passing this virus in any significant numbers.
	There are no studies to support that.
	I mean, zero.
	And the administration admits this, by the way.
	The administration will openly admit that they're just doing this mainly out of a sense of virtue signaling.
	But they continue to promote it anyway.
	So they're promoting all sorts of just untruth and garbage about their standards.
	Okay, so their standards with regard to, for example, summer camps are absurd.
	They're absurd on their face.
	Philip Klein writes for the National Review.
	So the standards themselves are just ridiculous.
	The standards are like, kids have to wear masks outdoors, so you don't have to wear a mask outdoors, but only if you're vaccinated, which is ridiculous.
	There's no reason to be wearing a mask outdoors if you're distanced from other people.
	And kids, masking outdoors is absurd in the first place.
	Kids are not passing this in vast numbers.
	Kids are not affected, as a general rule, harshly by COVID.
	The number of kids who have died from COVID is still under 300 in a nation of 330 million people.
	So Anthony Fauci, for example, was asked about the summer camp standards, and he can't even defend it.
	I mean, it doesn't even make any sense.
	Here's Anthony Fauci.
	Again, how this guy became the most trusted doctor in America, or second most trusted after Dr. Joe Biden, the greatest of all doctors, is beyond me, because he has conflicted himself 1,000 times.
	He has lied about things.
	He's openly admitted that he has lied about things.
	He's terrible at his job.
	He needs to go.
	But here he is, promulgating standards on summer camps that make no sense at all.
	You know, I wouldn't call them excessive, Savannah, but they certainly are conservative.
	And I think what you're going to start to see is really in real time, continually re-evaluating that for its practicality.
	Because you're right, people look at that and they say, Well, is that being a little bit too far right now?
	Yeah, because aren't we supposed to be... I mean, we've been told, people have been preaching for a year, follow the science.
	The science doesn't suggest those CDC guidelines are too sensible for little kids outside in 90 degree heat running around with masks.
	Yes, you've asked me that question a couple of times before.
	But do it.
	I'm sorry, this is a joke.
	It's a joke.
	Even Fauci can't offend it.
	Right?
	These are absurd guidelines.
	They say vaccinated adults and children have to wear masks outdoors unless they are eating, drinking, or swimming.
	It's just, it's ridiculous.
	It's ridiculous on its face.
	And Fauci has asked about it.
	He has no answer for it.
	He laughs it off.
	Right, you still have Rochelle Walensky of the CDC, who again, should also be fired.
	Terrible at her job.
	Rochelle Walensky, you remember just a few weeks ago, she's saying, I have a feeling of impending doom.
	It feels in my, in my heart, like there's, like doom is coming.
	And I said at the time, there's no evidence doom is coming.
	Like give me some scientific data that doom is coming.
	Why the hell do I care about Rochelle Walensky's interior feelings?
	Oh my God, she feels like doom is coming.
	Yeah, so did Nostradamus.
	It's been a while.
	But again, the idea that she is, this administration promulgates lies about COVID.
	Lies about COVID.
	Here she is saying that heavily breathing kids playing soccer should mask outside.
	I'm sorry, this is absurd.
	You know, I think not all outside is the same.
	So outside playing tennis, outside swimming, all of those things where you're far apart from one another.
	If you have a group of 10-year-olds crowded trying to get over a soccer ball, and they're all breathing heavily, I think you need to wear a mask.
	Because yes, there's decreased infection risk outside, but if you're all breathing heavily on top of a singular soccer ball, that has the potential.
	And we've seen a lot of outbreaks associated with youth sports.
	These are the same people who said during the entire George Floyd summer that dancing outside and twerking in large groups was totally fine.
	And remember, in Arlington, Texas, they just had opening day.
	40,000 people were crammed into a stadium outdoors.
	No outbreak.
	None.
	Okay, the data to support these standards are non-existent.
	Like, there are no data to support the standards, which is why Rochelle Walensky is asked about the standards, and she can't even explain them.
	Right?
	She was asked on CNN.
	Good for CNN.
	She was asked, you know, why are vaccinated people being told they need a mask inside?
	Like, they're fine.
	We have over 87 million people in the United States who have been double-vaxxed at this point, or single-vaxxed with Johnson & Johnson.
	And the grand number of people, grand total number of people, last I checked, which was like three days ago, who had died of COVID after being fully vaxxed was 88.
	In other words, your chances of dying from COVID after being vaxxed are like one in a million.
	Literally one in a million.
	So Walensky is asked, why are you telling vaxxed people to mask inside?
	She has no answer to this because there is no reason.
	This isn't the science.
	This is just a bunch of horseshit.
	We're asking that people who are vaccinated remain in masks when they're indoors.
	Indoors?
	When they're indoors.
	But if I'm working with everyone in my office is also vaccinated, why?
	So I was going to say, indoors and really in public settings.
	So, you know, in our private settings guidance, we say if you know for certain that everyone around you has been vaccinated, they're not at risk of, they have no high-risk people in their households, then we say in those settings that you could take off your mask.
	Okay, so she can't even answer the question.
	And by the way, let's be real about this.
	If you're vaccinated and you are in a room with a person who has COVID, you will be fine.
	The data know this.
	The whole purpose of the COVID vaccine is to make you fine.
	The reality is, these vaccines are extraordinarily effective.
	Like, insanely effective.
	And yet you have this entire administration downplaying the efficacy of the vaccines.
	By the way, you know who says that if you're sitting in a room with a person with COVID and you have the vaccine, you're fine?
	The CDC!
	Because none of their standards make any sense.
	They say that if you are in a room, unmasked, with a person with COVID, and you have had the vaccines, you don't have to quarantine unless you become symptomatic.
	So they're not worried about you asymptomatically passing this thing.
	They're just lying to you.
	Okay, but don't worry.
	They're gonna be the police on misinformation.
	And the arrogance with which they spout this crap is just insane.
	Kamala Harris, the co-president of the United States, she was asked about Ron DeSantis.
	So Ron DeSantis, who actually analyzes the data, and you know, has presided over the great success story in America.
	It really is.
	You know, when people, it's amazing to me, people be like, you know, California and Florida, they have very similar death rates and they took opposite views.
	They don't have similar death rates because the thing you have to remember is that Florida has the second oldest population in America after Maine.
	And Maine has like seven people and a beaver.
	Okay, Florida has 21 million people.
	It has by far the oldest population in America.
	California has like the third youngest population in America.
	So if you have two states, one of which has a very young population and one of which has a very old population and their deaths per million ratio is the same, you know what that means?
	It means the person who ran the old population state did a fantastic job.
	But still, this administration is going to claim that Ron DeSantis doesn't know what he's doing, because Ron DeSantis put out an order that there are no more locally justified mask mandates.
	He said if you're a business and you want to have a mask mandate, that's your problem, you're a private business, you can do what you want, but no local mask mandate.
	Correct!
	Because there's no data to support local mask mandates at this point in time in Florida.
	But here's Kamala Harris saying, we have to follow the experts.
	Let's follow the experts.
	Governor DeSantis in Florida has rolled back the ability of cities and local government to enforce their own COVID restrictions.
	Do you believe that that is a mistake?
	Is that too premature at this point of the pandemic?
	I strongly believe that whatever rules, protocols, and procedures are put in place must be guided by the public health experts, period.
	Okay, so, again, follow the public health experts.
	So, let me show you what Kamala Harris does to follow the public health experts.
	Yesterday, she was walking to her car with her husband, Douglas Emhoff, and they had this very romantic moment.
	They're walking, they're walking, and as they're about to part, they lean forward, they're both masked, and they kiss through the mask.
	What is this?
	Eyes wide shut?
	And what the hell is that?
	Is that what the, is that what the CDC, is that what the health experts are saying?
	That you kiss your spouse, you have to wear a mask also?
	It's like that scene from Naked Gun where they're completely covered top to bottom in condoms and making out.
	Like, what in the world is this?
	These are our health experts?
	These are the people you're supposed to trust about COVID misinformation?
	Okay, there's a reality to why they're, again, there's no science to this.
	It's ridiculous.
	I'm sorry.
	This is ridiculous.
	What?
	There's no science to suggest that when you kiss your spouse, you're supposed to both be wearing masks outdoors.
	The hell?
	What?
	What?
	Then you have Mayor Muriel Bowser of D.C.
	who has turned into John Lithgow from Footloose.
	She is now telling people there will be no dancing because twerking might lead to dancing.
	Like, what?
	Here's Muriel Bowser explaining.
	Even after mass vaccination of the D.C.
	population, she may not green light dancing at weddings.
	She's like, you should just be glad we allow you to have weddings in Washington, D.C.
	Authoritarian crap.
	Here she is.
	Mayor, just is there any way that you would reconsider with masks on and say a card that shows fully vaccinated that you'd allow dancing?
	We're absolutely considering opening more activity as our case rates go down and our vaccination rates go up.
	And that's in our hotels and that's in our other venues.
	So banning the dancing.
	The Democratic Party, they've actually become the Puritans.
	They are masked Puritans at this point.
	There's a reason for this.
	The reason for this is not just because of their simple paranoia about the virus, although this has become a sort of virtue signaling lifestyle choice for a lot of Democrats at this point.
	It's not about the health.
	It's not about preventing the spread of COVID.
	It's about I'm a better person than you because I wear a mask.
	Just like everything else in American life, this is broken down into virtue signaling horse nonsense.
	OK, so in a second, I'll explain what really is backing this for the political actors and not for the common everyday Democrat who's decided they're better than you because they're wearing triple masks and a bag around their head with duct tape around their neck for the rest of time.
	But why exactly your political branches are pushing this?
	We'll get to that in just one second.
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	Alrighty.
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	Alrighty, so what is the actual agenda here?
	The actual agenda, of course, is to grow the government.
	If you can continue to promote the idea that America is in a state of crisis and that everybody has to mask up and that nobody's going back to work, then you can continue to promote these giant government programs.
	So Democrats right now are continuing to promote the idea of a national eviction moratorium.
	Okay, here's the deal.
	America's unemployment rate is down back to like 6%.
	We are adding jobs hand over foot.
	The only reason, hand over fist, the only reason why we have not added more jobs is because we have paid people to stay home.
	Right now, small businesses are having trouble getting people to actually come in and work because there are so many people who are making more money by being on unemployment.
	But Democrats don't want to accept that we are back in an upward economic swing.
	Number one, because they want to take credit for it with stimulus that has not yet even gone out.
	And number two, because they want to promote the idea that the pandemic continues so they can continue to ram through trillions upon trillions of dollars in spending.
	So, let's be real about this in the first place.
	The federal government did not have the ability to simply declare via executive fiat an eviction moratorium.
	The CDC does not have the power to simply declare across the nation.
	The Center for Disease Control, or the Center for Rent?
	Like, where's the empowering legislation that allows the CDC to decide that you no longer have to pay rent?
	And by the way, who exactly compensates the landlords?
	You know, you talk about these housing shortages in America's major cities.
	It turns out, when you deprive landlords of rent for like a year, The predictable response is, I'm not going to build any more buildings and rent them out.
	You end up with more of a shortage, like rent control.
	The more you prevent the free market from having its way, the more you prevent supply from meeting demand.
	Okay, in any case, a federal judge in Washington, D.C.
	on Wednesday, according to the Washington Post, ruled that the Center for Disease Control and Prevention overstepped its legal authority by issuing a nationwide eviction moratorium, a ruling that could affect millions of struggling Americans.
	Well, yeah, but that's not... Like, if Congress wants to pass an eviction moratorium, they can go ahead and try.
	First of all, I think that's probably unconstitutional.
	It violates the...
	Freedom of contract that is inherent in freedom of association in the United States.
	But since we long ago gave up on anything like limited government, I suppose that you could try to pass that via Congress.
	The idea that the CDC unilaterally gets to decide that you don't have to pay your rent anymore is an absurdity on its face.
	The order says it is the role of the political branches and not the courts to assess the merits of policy measures designed to combat the spread of disease, even during a global pandemic.
	The question for the court is a narrow one.
	Does the Public Health Service Act grant the CDC the legal authority to impose a nationwide eviction moratorium?
	It does not.
	The Biden administration says it will appeal the decision.
	So here's the thing.
	Why?
	We're at the end of the pandemic.
	What are you appealing?
	The ruling does not affect state or local eviction moratoriums.
	In Washington, D.C., for example, the city government's ban on all evictions remains in place.
	Landlords and property owners have consistently challenged the CDC order, arguing the policy sets an undue financial burden on business owners.
	Yeah, you think?
	It turns out that if you run an apartment complex and you can't evict anybody for not paying their bills, you're the one who ends up footing the bill for that.
	And they want to continue this, like indefinitely.
	They want to continue these eviction moratoriums.
	The question at this point is not even the legal authority to do this.
	The question at this point is, why are you even pushing eviction moratoriums when we are at the end of the pandemic?
	And the answer is, they want a forever pandemic.
	Folks on the Democratic side of the aisle want a forever pandemic because every crisis is an opportunity.
	So we're gonna promote bad scientific standards with regard to COVID.
	We are going to promote endless spending because COVID is still a crisis.
	This is why you have the entire Democratic Party Still promoting the idea that we need to spend tons and tons and tons of money on infrastructure Okay, let's be straight about this The United States does not have a major infrastructure problem The Brookings Institute says and has been saying for years the United States our infrastructure is actually in pretty good shape This ain't about infrastructure. It's about everything if you can call it infrastructure. It becomes infrastructure Here is co-president Harris yesterday suggesting that infrastructure is childcare I'd like to hear from each of you as though you are talking to the people in Washington DC
	To explain Why childcare is part of infrastructure And let me just tell you the way I define infrastructure, one of my definitions, is the things you just need to get where you need to go.
	So let's talk about why childcare is a part of that.
	I define infrastructure as anything I want, anytime I want it.
	So let's talk about why Free ice cream is infrastructure.
	This is why they need the pandemic, because otherwise everybody would look at this and go, are you insane?
	Healthcare is not infrastructure.
	You want to do something on healthcare?
	Try it.
	You want to call it infrastructure?
	You're out of your damn mind.
	But the entire Democratic Party is into this because, of course, they don't care about deficits.
	Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, she's out there, this genius, this economic genius, Democrat, Twitch, she says, You know, we keep worrying about deficits.
	Why are we even worrying about deficits?
	I mean, I've never had to actually meet a payroll, but sure, I know how to spend your money.
	I don't think that the deficit is the most important thing upon which we should be hinging our infrastructure and jobs plan on.
	I think it's not the deficit.
	It's things like employment.
	It's things like our poverty rate in the United States, or rather, unemployment as well.
	That's a long way of saying I don't want to pay for anything because I don't need to pay for anything because I've never paid for anything.
	That's a really easy way of doing that.
	Really well done right there.
	Joe Biden also defending his massive spending plans in his typically incoherent fashion.
	Everything I'm proposing that be done to generate economic growth, employment, and put us in a position where we can out-compete any other country in the world with research and development and moving ahead.
	I pay for it.
	We talk about, I love we talk about how this is going to cost so much money, I'm not paying for it.
	I mean, he's a joke.
	By the way, he says he's pushing higher taxes.
	The language he uses with regard to higher taxes is so patently crazy.
	And he says things like, First of all, talk to Bernie.
	He seems to like that lake house an awful lot.
	You seem to like your multiple houses an awful lot, Mr. President.
	But beyond that, that's not the question.
	The question is whether you confiscate wealth from the people who have typically created jobs and hand it to a bunch of doofy over at the federal government to decide how exactly to disseminate that wealth in the most inefficient possible fashion, or whether you allow the economy to grow.
	But for him, it's all about confiscation of wealth.
	The real motivating factor here is that Joe Biden wants to go down in history as not an inconsequential figure.
	That's all.
	Joe Biden knows he's a one-term guy.
	He's clearly a one-term guy.
	And because he's a one-term guy, he wants to just push everything through right now.
	And he's got the pandemic to bank on.
	And that pandemic is on the wane.
	And it's pretty much at the end of it.
	I mean, we all know this.
	Contra Anthony Fauci, who says we're in the bottom of the six, which is just nuts.
	We are nearing the end of this thing, and everyone is aware of this.
	Joe Biden is using that as the basis for the argument that we are just going to penalize them.
	Because he knows.
	The beautiful thing about being a Democrat is you can be the crappiest president ever.
	You can be just garbage.
	And they will continue to laud you as an amazingly transformational figure so long as you grew the government.
	It doesn't matter that FDR's programs expanded the Great Depression into a decade-long event.
	It does not matter.
	Because he grew the government.
	It doesn't matter that LBJ's economic program took a very strong economy, circa 1963-1964, and proceeded to transform it into a stagnating government, a stagnating economy, all the way from 1967 essentially to 1981.
	That's okay, because he grew the government.
	Joe Biden knows the same.
	He knows that history will judge him by how much he grew the government, not how well the economy did under his term.
	Right?
	Because if you think of historic American Democratic presidents, nobody thinks of Bill Clinton, even though the economy did great under Bill Clinton.
	Everybody thinks instead of who grew the government most.
	Joe Biden knows this, and that's why he's pushing this nonsense.
	And that's also why he's pushing his class warrior nonsense.
	Pretty ironic stuff from a guy who allowed his son to run around the globe, picking up bags of cash, using his last name.
	We're not going to deprive any of these executives of their second or third home, travel privately by jet.
	It's not going to affect their standard of living at all.
	Not a little tiny bit.
	But I can affect the standard of living that people I grew up with, if they have a job, I can expect to make sure the standard of living of the people I grew up with get childcare, can afford it, so 20 million women can be back in the workforce.
	I can expect the standard of living of the people I grew up with...
	This incoherent old doddered talking about how, you know, if he confiscates wealth from the wealthy and then he gives it to people at the other end of the spectrum, this is going to create jobs.
	Yeah, you know, they've tried this in many, many places.
	It does not create economic growth.
	It is a dumb idea.
	It has been disproved every time it has been tried.
	But you need the pandemic in order to push this sort of stuff.
	You need it.
	Because if we went right back to that 3% unemployment rate we had under Trump, everybody recognizes you don't need to do what the Democrats are talking about.
	Alrighty, we'll be back here later today with an additional hour of content coming up soon.
	The Matt Walsh Show airs at 1.30 p.m.
	Eastern.
	Be sure to check it out over at dailywire.com.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
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