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July 20, 2021 - The Ben Shapiro Show
48:04
The Endless Covid Power Grab | Ep. 1300
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The media and politicians break out the COVID panic, but do the statistics justify it?
Plus, Joe Biden is unwilling to accept the consequences of his own economic agenda.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
Today's show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.
I protect my data with VPN, so should you, visit expressvpn.com slash Ben.
Alrighty, we'll get to all the news in just one second.
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Alrighty.
Panic has broken out across the land with regard to the Delta variant.
It's resulting in some pretty dumb policy.
And here is the thing.
In order to understand what is going on with COVID, you actually have to look at the charts.
Because what's actually happening right now is that you are seeing an increased number of cases.
The people who are getting very ill and dying of COVID right now are almost universally unvaccinated.
The people who are getting the disease after having been vaccinated are typically getting very mild forms of it.
They're getting either asymptomatic or very, very mild symptomatic forms.
And anybody who's being hospitalized after having had the COVID vaccine and then getting COVID, these tend to be older people with significant underlying vulnerabilities.
And yet, if you look at the way that the media cover this stuff, it's totally wild.
I mean, they're not giving you the real story.
They'll tell you things like the increase in COVID deaths.
It's up 25%.
That's something that you saw from USA Today.
You're seeing that there's an increase in deaths.
It's 25% up.
Okay, well, that relies on the baseline.
What exactly is the baseline number of deaths?
That's really what we should be looking at.
Instead of looking at, you know, we are higher than we were two weeks ago in terms of death.
It should be, okay, what is the baseline level of death?
So in order to understand how bad things actually are, you have to have a little bit of perspective.
When things were at their worst in terms of the number of deaths in the United States, we were looking at Sometimes 4,000 deaths a day.
Sometimes just under 4,000 deaths a day.
You can see that sort of peak on this chart right there.
When you see that it reaches its height, you're looking at, again, sometimes 5,000 deaths a day.
Those are huge numbers.
Huge numbers.
Here are the top causes of death in the United States.
Deaths day by day in the United States.
Now again, These causes of death are average across all of the days.
So some days are higher and some days are lower.
This is just the average.
In the United States, every year, there are millions of deaths.
Every single year in the United States, because we're a very large country of 330 million citizens.
So here are the number of deaths per day by cause in the United States.
Heart disease is 2019.
Heart disease, about 1,806 deaths per day from heart disease in the United States.
From cancer, there are about 1,643 deaths per day, again, as of 2019.
Accidents, right, like car accident, fall off your balcony, get hit by an anvil, that's 474 deaths per day.
Chronic lower respiratory diseases, That'd be like 430 deaths a day.
Stroke is 410 deaths per day.
Alzheimer's is 332 deaths per day.
And diabetes is 240 deaths per day.
So why exactly am I bringing that up?
Because how many deaths per day are we having in the United States right now?
If you just looked at the media coverage, you would think that we were up near the top of that chart, right?
Just like we were when we were at the worst of this thing, when we were averaging, you know, we had two-week running averages of 3,000, 4,000 deaths per day.
You know, doubling the highest rate of death from another disease in the United States as of 2019.
You would think that we were up in the stratosphere, somewhere around like heart disease or cancer.
No.
The seven-day rolling average, as of right now, the seven-day rolling average in terms of deaths in the United States is under 300, which puts us in about the realm of Alzheimer's or diabetes.
A not even of heart disease.
It's like six times lower than the rate of death on a daily average for heart disease across the entire year.
Okay.
And right now we are talking about a seven day rolling average, not across the entire year.
And what does this suggest?
It suggests that while we are seeing an increased number of infections, the number of deaths are not skyrocketing.
And this is not a coincidence in the United States.
I'm looking at the UK's chart right now because the UK started seeing the Delta variant before the United States did.
Now, back in January, the UK sort of hit its height in terms of the number of cases that were being diagnosed in the UK day on day.
Back in January 8th, for example, they had about 68,000 new cases that had been diagnosed.
Now, they're having about 45, 50,000 new cases diagnosed every day, right?
So there are some pretty high numbers there in the UK in terms of diagnosis.
The difference is that if you look at the death levels, radically different.
Back in January, the UK was experiencing about 600 deaths per day.
Today, the UK is experiencing about 40.
Like 10 times lower.
More than 10 times lower.
Why?
Because as it turns out, the number of people who are getting this thing, who are vaccinated, are not being hospitalized and not dying, generally speaking.
And the same thing holds true if you look at the statistics from Israel.
Right now, what you're seeing, there's a lot of misinformation that is circulating right now about the fact that there are some breakthroughs of the Delta variant against the COVID vaccine.
Again, breakthrough as far as being diagnosed with it, but not a breakthrough as far as dying from it.
And this is the thing I care about.
I don't care if I get the flu, as long as I don't die and I don't get seriously ill from it.
Why would I possibly care about that?
The only thing that makes a difference, especially in terms of government action, is level of death.
If you're just talking about a bunch of people got diagnosed with the flu this year and very few people died, no one cares.
We don't shut down businesses for that.
We certainly don't mask up for that.
Okay, so in Israel, right, which has been sort of the big headline, wow, look at Israel, so highly vaccinated, and yet, and yet, and now Israel, because politicians always have a stake in control.
They do.
Our health apparatus has a stake in control.
They don't want to give it up.
And I think what the last year proved is that Americans are willing to give up their liberty for pretty much anything.
It is one thing for people to give up their liberty when there is a serious risk to them, but for people to willingly give up their liberty While they are already vaccinated against a disease is pretty messed up.
And to give up your child's liberty based on pretty much nothing is even more messed up as we'll get to.
So what is the story in Israel where there are all these headlines about how we need to shut down again?
Israel has now closed travel to foreigners again through August 1st.
So what exactly is happening in Israel?
Well, here's what's happening.
Right now, the vaccines, mostly Pfizer and Israel, are 90% plus effective against severe disease for people who are under the age of 65 in Israel.
90% plus effectiveness, which means we have now lowered the rates of death down below the flu for people who are under the age of 65.
It is 80% plus effective against severe disease for people over the age of 65.
So Israel right now is looking at booster shots.
One of the reasons that they're looking at booster shots is because older people have immunity that tends to wane faster.
But the COVID variant is still not effective against Pfizer in the sense of killing or hospitalizing tons and tons of people.
It just isn't.
And the reason that you're seeing some stats that are out there, again, people need to understand base rates.
The reason you're seeing some stats that are out there, like, for example, in Israel, 40% of all people who are being hospitalized for COVID are people who have already had the vaccine.
That's because, like, 75% of Israel's population has already had the vaccine.
I mean, theoretically, if it were supposed to be equal, then 75% of people who are being hospitalized would have had the vaccine, but that's not what you're seeing.
What you're seeing is that it is preventative of getting the disease, and it is super preventative of getting seriously ill and dying.
And as it turns out, the other thing to recall here is that when we are talking about the relative safety of populations, again, one of the reasons that you are seeing a lower level of death, even though you're seeing a spike in cases in both the United States and the UK, as well as Israel, Is that one of the things that has happened here is that the people who are getting COVID are much younger.
The people who are getting COVID right now are much younger.
If you look in the United States, for example, at the vaccination rates by age, and right now I'm looking at the statistics from the CDC.
Right now there are 85.42% of people who are aged 65 to 74 in the United States have had at least one dose of the vaccine.
65 to 74 in the United States have had at least one dose of the vaccine.
In fact, if you are 75 and older, 83% of that population has received at least one dose of the vaccine.
So you have like 76% of all people over the age of 65 essentially, 75-76% of that entire population is completely vaccinated.
Why?
Because people rationally risk assess.
If you're 65 plus, you're much more scared of COVID and you ought to be much more scared of COVID than if you are 20.
And so the people who are the most vulnerable are already vaxxed up.
And those people are tending to get less sick, they're tending to die less, they're tending to get the disease less.
And so while you're seeing a spike in cases among people who are younger and healthier, they're also not dying at the same rates as people who are 80.
Because this disease, thank God, because only thank God in the sense that it would have been much, much worse if it had targeted children.
But it doesn't really affect people who are younger nearly as much as it affects people who are older.
Right now in the United States, about 50% of the population somewhere in that neighborhood is actually vaxxed in the United States.
But it really matters what age you're talking about.
Because if you're under the age of 12, for example, apparently about 31% of people who are aged 12 to 15 have received a dose of the vaccine.
But I'm not sure, like, why that's a high priority.
To avoid infecting people who are 65 who already should have had the vaccine?
So here is the point.
Everybody is treating this stuff as a crisis.
It is not, in fact, a crisis.
We are not at crisis levels right now.
We're not.
And also, we're not at crisis when everybody had the opportunity to get the vaccine.
You see how the goalposts have shifted in terms of what the goals are of public policy here.
At the beginning, the lockdowns and the masking recommendations, they were all designed in order to prevent overwhelming of the hospital system.
Has anybody said anything remotely like that recently?
That the hospital systems are on the verge of being overwhelmed?
You're not hearing it.
The reason you're not hearing it is because it's not happening.
The hospitals in the United States are not even close to on the verge of being overwhelmed.
This is also true in the UK.
This is also true in Israel.
None of the hospitals in industrialized countries with high levels of vaccination are on the verge of being overwhelmed.
Okay, so that rationale is out the window.
That is not a reason for us not to go back to work.
It's not really even a reason for us to mask at this point, especially if we're vaccinated.
If you're unvaccinated and you want to prevent yourself from getting it and you don't want to spread it to somebody else unvaccinated, well then, by all means, go ahead and mask.
But if you are vaccinated, the idea that you should be masking in public places is really, really dumb.
Beyond that, the notion that we have seen here, which is that we are now experiencing the next goalpost that was set up, if you recall.
There's the goalpost of don't overwhelm the hospitals.
Then there's the goalpost of wait and shut everything down and mask up and be very careful until every adult has had the chance to get the vaccine.
Welcome to now.
Every adult in the United States above the age of 12 Has had the chance to get the vaccine.
Everyone.
And if you choose not to get it, no one can bully you into it.
And frankly, the attempts by public policy makers to call you an idiot enough times that you go and get the vaccine does not seem particularly successful.
By poll data, all it's doing is alienating people.
It's not driving them.
If people actually felt driven, the reason they would feel driven is not because Anthony Fauci was lecturing them, or Joe Biden was lecturing them, or because some actress from Hollywood was out there telling young people to get vaccines.
The reason That people would go get vaccinated right now as if they felt under serious threat.
The same way that older people got vaccinated en masse because they felt under serious threat.
And yet, our public policy makers, they don't have an end goal now.
There is no end point to this.
They are now using arguments that basically argue they can limit your liberty and force you to mask up under any and all circumstances.
There is no limiting principle to anything they're saying right now.
Because again, we surpassed that first goal post, which was don't overwhelm the hospitals.
Then we surpassed the much more important second goal, which was make sure everybody has an opportunity to vaccinate.
And now it's just this kind of miasmatic, well, you know, we might have to mask up forever because, you know, there could be another variant.
OK, well, if there's another variant, then we'll talk about it.
But this notion that we're all going to mask up right now for the rest of time, because this is true forever, right?
There could be another variant of this virus in five years.
In fact, there could be a completely different virus in five years.
Why not mask prophylactically for the rest of your life and mask your children at the same time?
There's no limiting principle to that.
The same thing is true with regard to some of the lockdown policies that are now being discussed.
We're supposed to lockdown travel.
We're supposed to prevent people from traveling across borders.
What's the limiting principle here?
Is there any?
As mentioned, in the United States, people are now dying at a rate that is similar to the rates that people die on a daily basis from, like, Alzheimer's disease.
Is that a rationale for locking down large cities in the United States?
And that's exactly what we're seeing.
We are seeing the public policy folks who run our health systems are obsessed with power.
This is a power grab.
Again, when this was rooted in ignorance, that was one thing.
When you were saying, shut it all down because we don't know what this virus is going to do, that was one thing.
It became clear that the lockdowns were ineffective, generally ineffective, by the middle of the summer last time, last year.
And now we're still doing the same routine based on a threat that is not even remotely close to what we were experiencing back in January, thanks to the presence of the vaccines.
Thank God.
How disconnected is public policy from reality at this point?
The American Academy of Pediatrics put out a recommendation yesterday that is utterly crazy.
Their recommendation is that we have to start masking all the children.
It is deeply important that we mask all of the kids, pretty much for the rest of time.
According to NBC New York, everyone older than age 2 should wear masks regardless of vaccination status when schools reopen in the fall, according to updated guidance from the American Academy of Pediatrics released on Monday.
The leading national pediatrician group said it recommends universal masking because so much of the student population isn't yet eligible for vaccination.
It's not clear how quickly that will change or how likely parents will be to get their younger children dosed when the federal government approves shots for kids under the age of 12.
And seriously, I'm not sure about dosing my kids.
I have kids who are 7, 5, and 1.
There are no longitudinal studies on the effect on children.
Not only that, the threat to kids from COVID is not severe.
If we were talking about something like polio, and if we were talking about something like even measles, mumps, rubella, that'd be one thing.
We are talking about a disease in COVID-19.
That has killed, from 2020 through 2021, a grand total in the entire United States where there are 75 million people under the age of 18.
Remember, 75 million kids are in the United States below the age of 18.
The number of kids who have died under the age of 18 from COVID-19, as of yesterday, was 335 out of 75 million.
By contrast, the number of kids who had died last year and this year from pneumonia was 809.
The notion that I'm going to start experimenting on my kids with non-longitudinally proven vaccinations, when the risk to my children from COVID is extremely low, is arguable at best.
I mean, that's a very arguable assessment.
So the idea now is that we're going to force you to mask your kid up.
Based on what?
Based on what?
If the idea is you have to protect the teachers, well, I have a way to protect the teachers.
In fact, I have two ways to protect the teachers.
One is That we could have the teachers wear masks if they are really upset about it, right?
Get every teacher an N95, because N95s protect you.
The idea of cloth masks is they're supposed to protect everyone else from when you sneeze, but an N95 is also supposed to protect you.
Or, I have an even better solution.
The teachers need to vax.
If the teachers are really worried about being infected by children, then they should go get the vaccinations, because it turns out the vaccinations are incredibly good.
They're terrific at what they do.
Instead, you have the American Academy of Pediatrics saying I'm supposed to mask my two-year-old or my three-year-old based on what?
The risk that they're going to get hit by lightning?
A risk lower than pneumonia?
Are you kidding me?
I mean, it's just bad public policy, and it's being pushed by all these people.
Why?
Because if you are in the public health situation, right, if you're a public health expert, your sole goal is to quote-unquote kill COVID.
But that's not a real goal, right?
It's never going to go to zero.
COVID is likely to turn into something seasonal, like a weak strain of the flu, maybe like a cold eventually, we can hope.
But COVID is unlikely to go away.
It is just too widespread.
It's not going to go away.
There are millions and millions and millions of people who have already had it, who might get it again.
We've been saying this since the beginning, is that it's likely to be seasonal.
So this belief that you can wipe it out, that zero COVID is the goal, that means that we're locked down forever.
Realistically speaking, it means that no one is ever going out again without a mask.
And yet you have all of these ridiculous, foolish, Public health leaders trying to suggest that this is rational public policy.
It's not even close to rational public policy.
Here, for example, is NIH director Francis Collins saying that masking children is a great idea.
They will not be popular amongst parents and kids who are sick of masks.
But you know what?
The virus doesn't care that we're sick of masks.
The virus is having another version of its wonderful party for itself.
And to the degree that we can squash that by doing something that maybe is a little uncomfortable, a little inconvenient, it's not like we're asking people to go to the trenches with a shooting war.
We're just asking you, if it looks like it's going to help, put the mask back on for a while.
Okay, we're talking about children.
I also don't send my kids to trenches in a shooting lore.
Like, what are you talking about?
This is unbelievable.
They can't explain why the vaccinated should wear masks.
Because, really, there's not a good rationale.
They can't explain, certainly, why children should be wearing masks, but they want you to do it anyway.
Because, after all, it's all we're asking of you.
The sacrifice is the point.
The control is the point.
You have Dr. Anthony Fauci, the greatest of all doctors, outside of Jill Biden, saying the exact same thing.
In every respect, the CDC always leaves open the flexibility at the part of local agencies, local enterprises, local cities and states to make a judgment call based on the situation on the ground.
So, I think that the American Academy of Pediatrics, you know, they're a thoughtful group.
They analyze the situation and if they feel that that's the way to go, I think that's a reasonable thing to do.
It is not a reasonable thing to do.
The fact that we are pretending it is reasonable to mask up three-year-olds is insane.
It's totally crazy.
And by the way, if you're worried your three-year-old's gonna get it, get your kid an N95.
Now you're gonna say to yourself, wait a second, my three-year-old isn't capable of properly wearing an N95.
Right, your three-year-old isn't capable of properly wearing a mask, period.
Right, that's the whole point.
It's such foolishness.
L.A.
County, by the way, here's like, let me show you how bad the reporting is on this stuff.
And it's from Yahoo News.
L.A.
County is now recording more than 10,000 coronavirus cases a week, a pace not seen since March.
An alarming sign of the dangers the Delta variant poses to people who have not been vaccinated and heightening pressure on health officials to reverse the trend.
So, what does this mean?
Okay, so, L.A.
County, um, how many deaths are they having?
Okay, because I know that you're talking about cases now, right?
Cases are su- Wow.
New cases.
My goodness.
They're seeing, like, 10,000 cases that are diagnosed every day.
Okay, here are the number of deaths in L.A.
County.
Okay?
Average.
Seven-day average.
Rolling average.
Per day.
Six.
Six.
The population of L.A.
County is, like, 10 million people.
So six people are dying a day in L.A.
County of COVID.
And you're talking about forcing everybody to mask in indoor places and masking up all the kids.
And you're talking about this as though this is a massive crisis because L.A.
County is seeing 10,000 coronavirus cases a week.
Not a day, a week.
A week.
Okay, again, let me remind you that the number of COVID cases that were being seen in L.A.
County As of like January, they were seeing like 20,000 cases a day, not a week.
This is all crazy.
New York City is doing the same stuff.
New York City Councilman Mark Levine, who chairs the Health Committee, is calling for the indoor mask mandate to be reinstated in the city, even for the vaccinated.
So what exactly are the COVID statistics for New York City right now?
The number of new COVID cases a day in New York City is like 700 cases in the entire city of New York.
The number of deaths in New York, this is actually the entire state.
The entire state is averaging six deaths.
Six!
This is madness.
And yet it's being treated as though it's a crisis.
And so the question becomes, why are we treating this as a crisis?
Why is it important?
And the answer, as we'll see, is control.
It's all about the control.
Because if you can treat everything as a crisis, this allows you to control everything all the time.
And this goes to the broader agenda that you see from the Democratic Party and the media all the time.
All right, so if you look at how the media and the Democratic Party see the world, crisis is always required in order to effectuate change.
This is why Joe Biden came into office and he said, we have four crises that are on the table.
Climate change, and racial polarization, and income inequality, and COVID.
None of those things, at the time you might've said COVID was a crisis.
We're rolling out the vaccines already, so it was a crisis that was on the way.
The other three are not crises.
Okay, climate change, Is it an issue that is worthy of consideration with regard to adaptive measures that governments can help take in order to protect, for example, low-lying populations?
Can you build more seawalls?
Sure.
Can you make sure that infrastructure is updated?
Absolutely.
Can you put some money into R&D?
Sure.
But it is not a crisis.
Climate change is not a crisis.
The gradual warming of the globe over the course of the next century is not a crisis.
Nor, by the way, are there any solutions to that crisis in destroying the entire economy of the globe.
That is not a solution.
All the stuff that's already in the air is going to stay up there for another 10,000 years.
So, the idea that climate change is a crisis is not right.
But, as you see, the left says climate change is a crisis.
Therefore, we need vast redistribution of wealth.
Green New Deal.
We need to We need to take capitalism and destroy it in order to save the planet because crisis.
Then you had the crisis of racial polarization, of the racial reckoning.
A crisis that demands, wait for it, equity policy from the White House.
That looks toward equality of outcome between the races and involves the subjugation of capitalism and merit in favor of equality of outcome regardless of the activities undertaken.
Right?
We need a transformation of how America works based on the crisis of racial reckoning.
Now, you may have noticed there was no crisis.
There was not.
As of 2008, race relations were the best point they'd been in the history of the United States.
And then, Barack Obama and the Democratic Party decided to play racial politics specifically in order to force him to re-election despite his unpopularity.
Then, there was the crisis of income inequality, and this one is perfectly obvious.
Income inequality is not a crisis.
It depends on poverty could be a crisis, theoretically.
Poverty could also just be an endemic condition of human life, but poverty could theoretically be a crisis.
But income inequality itself is not a crisis.
Just because Jeff Bezos is rich, that's not a crisis.
But this crisis of income inequality was going to drive Joe Biden to spend trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars that had not yet been minted.
We're just going to produce this money out of thin air.
Crisis is an opportunity.
This has always been the case with big government advocates.
Crisis is always the way that you maximize your own power.
And so if you declare COVID a continuing crisis, this allows you to maximize your own power.
Now, the way that the Biden administration and the media are seeking to maximize their power is by essentially saying that because COVID is a crisis, we should take the reins on informational dissemination.
We talked about this yesterday.
It continues today.
And it's going to continue for the estimable future.
The Democratic Party and the media have an agenda.
Their agenda is to control the means of distribution of information.
They don't want you to see information they don't want you to see.
And COVID is a perfect opportunity for them to declare anything they don't like misinformation and then to quash it.
So the game here is to pretend that vaccine hesitancy is solely the repository of the right.
Now, here's the problem.
Vaccine hesitancy is not solely the repository of the right.
As it turns out, by racial data, Hispanics and Blacks are the two racial groups in the United States who are least likely to get the vaccines.
Those are also the two racial groups in America that were least likely to have voted Republican in the last election cycle.
So, that is not a convincing case that the only people in the United States who are not getting the vaccine are not getting it because of right-wing propaganda.
It's also true that a huge number of people who aren't getting the vaccine or were vaccine skeptical or maybe already had COVID and don't want the vaccine.
And maybe a lot of those people live in rural areas.
Because one thing that we saw with regard to masking actually throughout the pandemic is that people undertook, as you would expect, rational risk assessment.
When pandemic numbers went up in people's areas, they started to mask.
When the pandemic numbers went down, people started to unmask.
Because that, again, is how people act when they are confronted with an actual risk.
But the media have an agenda, and the agenda is to suggest that if it were only, if we could only stop people like Trump from talking, stop people on Fox from talking, if we could just stop all of this, if we could end quote-unquote COVID misinformation, well then everybody would get vaxxed.
Because human beings don't have agency, obviously.
All we have to do is give them the right information from MSNBC and CNN, and then they will get vaxxed.
Now, this of course ignores a bunch of holes in this theory.
Hole number one, as I've mentioned, huge percentages of population that are not Republican are not getting vaxxed.
Hole number two in this particular theory, Is the fact that there are a lot of people who are not getting vaxxed, not because of watching Fox News or because of Donald Trump, but because they do not trust the authorities.
And the reason they don't trust the authorities is because the authorities have taken every single position on COVID it is possible to take from the beginning of this pandemic.
Dr. Fauci, the great and sainted, was saying, don't mask up, and then he was saying, oh yeah, I lied, you should mask up.
Dr. Fauci, the great and sainted, was saying, don't open the schools, and then he was saying, oh, well, you can open the schools.
Dr. Fauci, the great and sainted, was saying that once you get the vaccine, you still need to wear a mask, and then he was saying, well, you really don't need to wear a mask anymore, and now he's saying, well, maybe you do need to wear a mask.
Maybe there's a great lack of trust in our scientific institutions because they spent all of last summer saying that if you were protesting lockdowns, then you were going to spread COVID and kill everyone.
But if you were out there in the streets working for George Floyd, then probably you'd be fine.
In other words, maybe you lost your systemic trust because you don't deserve the systemic trust of the American people.
Now, again, that's not a case against the vaccine.
I'm not sure there's anybody on the right who's as pro-vaccine as I am.
I've been encouraging people to get the vaccine since literally the first day it was available.
I couldn't have been more excited to get the vaccine.
I got it.
My wife got it.
My parents got it.
I was pumped about it.
I think the vaccine is a medical miracle.
I also understand why people don't trust the people who have been saying this sort of stuff.
But, again, agenda is the only thing that matters here.
So, manufacture a new COVID crisis.
Again, we are not in a position of COVID crisis in the United States.
The stats do not bear this out.
If there is any sort of crisis in terms of people who are dying, it is a crisis among people who decided not to get vaccinated and then are more likely to die.
And they're adults, and they get to make those decisions themselves.
And as long as they're not overwhelming the hospital system, then we really don't have a public policy answer to that.
But the public policy answer for Democrats, of course, is shut down anyone who says stuff we don't like.
So here's Mika Brzezinski tearing into Trump and his media allies for vaccine hesitancy.
This, of course, is the predicate to the notion that places like Fox News should be deplatformed.
Whether you're talking about David Koresh in Waco, or the Jonestown mass suicides, or Donald Trump's lies about COVID, people died.
And people are dying.
And they are dying because Donald Trump and his evil allies on cable news and on social media and on Capitol Hill Seems like a very strong word, evil.
Until you understand just how many people this cult continues to kill.
Okay, I have just a question.
You know, by the way, that if Donald Trump had won re-election, there would be Democrats who are engaging in tremendous vaccine hesitancy.
You know that's the case, correct?
I mean, Kamala Harris and Joe Biden were saying they don't trust the process by which Trump developed the vaccine.
And then when they entered the White House, then all of a sudden it was, the process is great.
Everything's fantastic.
We fixed it.
MSNBC's Dr. Bedelia says the same thing.
It's social media and right-wing TV that are preventing vaccinations.
Again, this is just not the case.
People are independent actors in the United States.
They have the ability to make their own decisions.
Typically, it is younger people who are not getting the vaccines, more rural people who are not getting the vaccines because they live in more rural areas.
Low-income, Black and Hispanic people are not getting the vaccines at rates that really are where they should be.
The kind of one-size-fits-all, single-factor analysis, Tucker Carlson says X, therefore people aren't getting the vaccine, ignores the fact that even if you look at Tucker's audience, hey, Tucker might have 4 million people a night watching him.
A huge percentage of those people, by the way, are older and probably vaxxed.
But beyond that, the bizarre notion that widespread vaccine hesitancy is solely due to Tucker Carlson or social media, as opposed to all of the other factors mentioned, including some somewhat rational vaccine hesitancy.
I'm not saying that I agree with people who are not getting the vaccine, but to pretend that these people are all dullards who don't understand anything about how the... I mean, a lot of the people who are not getting the vaccine are like, I already had COVID, it wasn't that bad.
A lot of the people who are not getting the vaccine are like, I live in a rural area.
I don't have a lot of contact with people.
So do I really need the vaccine?
Is that like super duper irrational and crazy?
I'm not sure it's super duper irrational.
I might make a different risk assessment, but I also have respect for other human beings and their ability to assess risk.
But because the left believes that everyone can be controlled from above, their conclusion is that if people make a decision different than their decision, it's because they are controlled from above.
Therefore, if we just stop those people from controlling people, then we will get our preferred outcome.
Here is a doctor on MSNBC making this case.
What I liked about that that was released in the Surgeon General is that it's really pointing to the fact that this is everywhere, right?
It is a social media amplification in cases where, and it is, you know, sometimes it is influencers that are on cable television, right-leaning cable television.
But it's also anytime any one of us retweets something that without checking the source, we are adding to that misinformation that's out there.
And I think it's a whole, it truly is a whole of society approach.
Okay, meanwhile, Joe Biden, you'll recall over the weekend, he suggested that Facebook was killing people, which was the predicate for a governmental intervention in social media to shut down dissemination of information.
Yesterday, he quasi-reversed himself, he didn't really.
He said, Facebook isn't killing people, it's people on Facebook who are saying bad stuff who are killing people and Facebook letting them.
Which means by the transit of property, Facebook is killing people.
Here's Joe Biden doing it.
I had just read that on the Facebook, Facebook pointed out, it was pointed out that Facebook Of all the misinformation, 60% of the misinformation came from 12 individuals.
That's what the article said.
So I was asked that question about, what do I think is happening?
Facebook isn't killing people.
These 12 people are out there giving misinformation.
Anyone listening to it is getting hurt by it.
It's killing people.
It's bad information.
Okay, and Facebook allowing that is killing people, right?
So Facebook isn't killing people, but Facebook is killing people.
In fact, says Joe Biden, Facebook shouldn't take it personally when I say they're killing people.
They should just do a better job of shutting down all the information I don't like.
Which may change on a day-by-day basis, but since we run all dissemination of information from the White House via our media allies, we should club social media into doing what we want anyway.
My hope is that Facebook, instead of taking it personally, that somehow I'm saying Facebook is killing people, Don't take it personally that the President of the United States is saying that you're a murderer.
Instead, stop being a murderer, says Joe Biden.
That's what I meant.
That's what I meant.
Don't take it personally that the president of the United States is saying that you're a murderer.
Instead, stop being a murderer, says Joe Biden.
You can see the manufactured crisis here.
And again, it is a media manufactured crisis.
Is driving the sort of change that Democrats have been wanting for a while, which is restrictions on social media, which is crackdowns on people that they don't particularly like.
Meanwhile, and this is really amazing, Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary.
So she was asked, you know, if it would help stop vaccine hesitancy, would you praise Trump more?
Like really, instead of turning this into a partisan issue, why aren't you out there getting Trump to, for example, cut a PSA?
Why aren't you out there saying, the Trump administration did a wonderful job with this and there is a bipartisan agreement that this is a wonderful vaccine that everybody should get?
Wouldn't that be better than, you know, being out there and yelling at Trump and being out there yelling at people who won't take vaccines and telling them that they're fools and morons?
Wouldn't that be better?
And Jen Psaki's like, you know what?
We don't need to do any of that.
It seems to me your end goal isn't to get more people vaccinated.
It seems to me that your end goal is to polarize the constituency here.
Even if the administration doesn't partner with the former president, would he consider highlighting or acknowledging in a greater way his role in creating the vaccines to assure the rural voters who still support President Trump but are hesitant to get the vaccine?
Well, I think you're, do you have data to suggest that that's the issue that's preventing people from getting vaccinated?
We've seen.
Almost every former president play a role in putting out a PSA, making sure people understood in the country that the vaccine is safe and effective.
We don't believe that requires an embroidered invitation to be a part of.
Okay, but you could just ask Trump to do it.
Would that kill you?
I mean, the answer is yes, because it's all politics.
That's the answer.
In just one second, we'll talk about the impact of all of this on the stock market, which of course has been dramatic.
It's not because the stock market is afraid of the COVID upswing.
It's because the stock market is afraid that governments are going to intervene and quash the economic recovery.
We'll get to that in just one second.
First, let's talk about the fact you don't want to go to an auto parts store because who wants to go to an auto parts store?
You stand in line, you finally get to the front of the line, they answer all their very specific questions, and then they look in their inventory and they say, you know what we don't have?
The part you're looking for.
Which is super helpful.
And they order it online and upcharge you.
Or you could just skip all of that and go directly to rockauto.com.
Rockauto.com always offers the lowest prices possible rather than changing prices based on what the market will bear the way airlines do.
Why spend up to twice as much for the same parts?
Rockauto.com, it's family business serving.
Auto parts customers online for 20 years.
Go to rockauto.com, shop for auto and body parts from hundreds of manufacturers.
The catalog is unique and remarkably easy to navigate.
Quickly see all the parts available for your vehicle and choose the brand's specifications and prices.
You prefer.
Go to rockauto.com right now.
See all the parts available for your car or truck.
Write Shapiro in there.
How did you hear about us, Box?
So they know that we sent you.
Again, auto parts stores aren't great, even in the best of times.
Why would you want to wait around right now in a line?
Instead, just go to the internet.
The internet's the way you buy everything these days.
Why not get the auto parts you need from rockauto.com?
Great American company.
Write Shapiro in there.
How did you hear about us, Box?
So they know.
That we sent you.
Alrighty.
Yesterday, you may have noticed that NPR ran an insane hit piece on us here at The Daily Wire, complaining about our success as a news organization.
Basically, NPR was arguing that Facebook should quash our traffic.
Because we're really bad.
Because we're conservative.
The Democrats and the establishment media, they're ticked off that they don't have centralized control over the flow of information.
And now the establishment media is in for another hit.
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Brought to you by Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief John Bickley and co-host Georgia Howell.
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Also, as I've been discussing, the White House's attempt to censor anything they deem as misinformation, it is very authoritarian, and it is just part and parcel of a broader authoritarian movement of the left to take over all the institutions and weaponize them against you.
My next book, the new book, Authoritarian Moment, it's hitting shelves next Tuesday, July 27th.
It is a supremely important book.
You need to read it, you need to get your friends to read it, because if you wish for the country to be saved, the authoritarian moment is a must-read.
There's a lot happening right now.
I first saw it in the book.
You'll want to pick up your copy of The Authoritarian Moment right now to get a sense of what's coming next and, more importantly, how we stop it.
Go to dailywire.com slash ben.
You can order your signed copy today.
Again, dailywire.com slash ben to order your signed copy today.
And the fact that the White House is now trying to crack down on social media is just the latest indicator that the left's authoritarianism is creeping into your everyday life.
But you knew this already.
You know that your corporate overlords are going to fire you if you don't post the black square.
You know that your sporting team is going to chastise you if you don't have the proper politics.
You know.
That you'll have scientists like Dr. Fauci telling you that you don't believe the science if you don't believe every single thing that he says about everything, even if he's reversing himself from last week.
All of this is symptomatic of an authoritarian mindset that has taken root on the left and is now being crammed down upon you.
I will be doing a live stream book signing for the authoritarian moment.
Next Tuesday, the 27th.
Pre-order your signed copy now.
When you do, you'll be asked to type in a question at checkout.
Then, catch Tuesday's live signing.
See if I answer your question.
Watch me sign your book.
Get your copy at dailywire.com slash ben right now.
You're listening to the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.
Alrighty, moving on.
Meanwhile, Joe Biden continues to wish away inflation.
There are a lot of people, including Janet Yellen, who are saying that inflation is going to maintain for several more months at this point.
Now, as I've been saying, there are two forces that are at work in the American economy.
One is Joe Biden blowing dollars into the American economy, artificially lowering the labor rate because people are literally staying out of work because they're being paid to stay home.
And artificially inflating the price of goods because we have a bunch of bottlenecks in all the distribution systems, and that's being exacerbated by money chasing fewer goods, which leads to price inflation.
All of this rooted in the notion that somehow equity is achieved if you just helicopter cash to people, which has never been the case anywhere in history.
Okay, so Joe Biden is saying that that's not raising inflation.
No, no, no, you're crazy.
You might be looking at that inflation rate and saying to yourself, wait a second, aren't, I mean, the prices are up, aren't they?
He says, no, no, no, nobody, no one is suggesting unchecked inflation is on the way, says our garrulous president.
There's nobody suggesting there's unchecked inflation on the way.
No serious economist.
That's totally different.
I mean, look, the stock market is higher than it has been in all of history, even when it went down this month.
Even down this month.
Now, I don't look at the stock market as a means by which to judge the economy like my predecessor did.
But he'd be talking to me every day for the last five months about how the stock market is so high.
Higher than any time in history.
Still higher than any time in history.
So that's not how I judge whether or not we have economic growth.
Oh, well, you know, he's going to judge you by the stock market.
Weird.
He wasn't doing that when Trump was president, but that's always the way this works.
Then Joe Biden follows up that doozy by suggesting that the inflation is temporary.
And in fact, you know how you were going to solve inflation?
We're going to solve inflation by artificially boosting the growth.
This is like the dumbest thing, economically speaking, that I've heard recently.
His theory is that inflation is going up.
So if you blow more money into the economy, that will jog the spending, which will eventually bring the inflation down, which is a hell of a take.
That's a hot take.
Bull move there, Cotton.
Our experts believe, and the data shows, that most of the price increases we've seen were expected and expected to be temporary.
The reality is, you can't flip the global economic light back on and not expect this to happen.
As demand returns, there's going to be global supply chain challenges.
We've seen that in semiconductors, which are used in automobiles.
That global shortage has slowed vehicle production, creating a temporary spike in car prices.
That's a real challenge.
My administration is doing everything we can to address it.
But again, these disruptions are temporary.
Okay, you know what would be temporary is if you didn't artificially boost the money supply.
It would have been temporary.
There was going to be a natural economic recovery.
Go back, listen to my podcast.
Last year, I said when this was over, there'd be a major economic boom because the economy was doing great.
And then it was put into an artificial coma.
And now the artificial coma is ending.
Maybe, if the left will allow it to end.
And people are going to go out and they're going to spend again.
In fact, people ended last year with more net savings than they had the year before because the government had already put so much money in their pocket.
Joe Biden's idea is we're going to keep spending money up the wazoo.
And somehow this is going to check inflation.
Interesting idea.
Now, the reality is that when you remove this much money from the private economy and when everybody understands that the regulatory schemes that Biden is pursuing will hurt business and that taxation is eventually going to be around the corner, when everybody realizes that, the next move is that the economy starts to stagnate.
It's what we call secular stagnation.
We've seen it in Japan.
Japan was the country that was going to take over the world in the 1980s.
If you go back and watch Die Hard in like 1989, 1990, if you go back and watch Die Hard, what you'll see is that the Nakatomi Plaza, right?
The whole metaphor is supposed to be that Japan was a great threat to the United States.
They were going to be taking over all of our businesses, taking over the world, economically speaking.
And then they went into full on like a decade of secular stagnation because they'd inflated their currency.
And it turns out that the demand was not keeping up with anything remotely approaching the supplies.
So what you ended up with was this sort of very slow rate of growth that destroyed the Japanese growth and boom of the 1980s.
By the 1990s, Japan basically burned out.
You could see exactly the same thing here.
And Joe Biden's own administration is foreseeing this, by the way.
You wonder why they're trying to distract with things like all Republicans are Jim Crow, Donald Trump, January 6th.
The reason they're doing that is because they all know that within two years, secular stagnation is likely to set in and we're going to be growing not at 7% in an artificially boosted rebound from a pandemic, from an artificial coma.
What's most likely is that in a couple of years, we're going to be growing at like 1.8%, 2%.
In fact, if you look at Joe Biden's own 10-year proposed budget, That budget suggests that in just a couple of years, we're going to spend the rest of the decade growing at exorbitantly low levels.
Very, very low levels.
The reason that countries grow at very low levels is because they have put too many burdens on the actual entrepreneurs and job creators in their economy.
It's because they've made it difficult to do business in their economy.
Joe Biden doesn't care about that because he understands that the way that politics works is that the bigger the things you get done are, the less it matters whether they actually succeed.
One of the great annoyances that I have with regard to historians is the way that they treat, for example, the 1920s, which were a boom time in the United States, as some sort of horrible time for American governance, and the 1930s, which was the Great Depression, as a wonderful time for American governance.
Why?
Because political history buffs are people who are interested in action.
They're interested in action.
And if a president does big things, it doesn't matter that they're a complete failure.
LBJ, very important president, complete failure.
FDR, very, very important president, absolute failure on virtually every level except for the handling of World War II.
Hey, FDR's handling of the Great Depression was egregiously bad.
And there's a great hilarity to the fact that presidential historians rate Herbert Hoover super low, but FDR super high, when FDR literally did what Herbert Hoover did, except a little more.
In fact, everybody in the FDR administration acknowledged that they were doing what Herbert Hoover did.
The reason that Herbert Hoover is treated with disdain and FDR with glory is because FDR, of course, was a Democrat and Herbert Hoover was a Republican.
But the best presidents of the 20th century, at least up until Ronald Reagan, the best presidents of the 20th century were the presidents of the early 20s.
William Harding, Calvin Coolidge.
And these are the people who are disdained.
How do I know that they were good presidents?
Look at the economic growth rates from 1920 to 1929.
Massive.
And if you say, well, look at the Great Depression.
That was 1920.
Yes, that's true.
Because the reaction to the Great Depression was not to sit there and wait for it to peter out.
Instead, the reaction to the stock market crash of October 1929 was to get government involved in extremely invasive ways in American life.
But this again goes to why Joe Biden is doing any of this.
Because if you're Joe Biden, the incentives for politicians, and this is true for members of Congress, it's true for senators, it's true for presidents, the incentives, the incentive structure is to get big things done.
And this is the problem with centralizing this much power in the hands of government.
Whether you're talking about the public health establishment, where the incentive is to control, centralize, and quote-unquote get things done, or whether you're talking about in the financial sphere, where the incentive is to control and centralize and quote-unquote get things done, The first rule of politics and public health should be very simple.
Do no harm.
But that's not the political incentive.
The political incentive is do something.
You see this all the time.
When people talk politics, I say, yeah, I see a problem.
Why can't we just do something?
Just do something.
We should be treating politics like a doctor would treat a patient.
The first rule is don't kill the patient.
Do no harm.
And yet that is precisely the opposite of our modern incentive structure, particularly in the media, where people who are the most activist are considered the most thoughtful and the greatest leaders.
Why Andrew Cuomo was a hero while killing all the olds in his state, while Ron DeSantis, who basically restricted his action to protecting the elderly, was considered some sort of horrific human rights violator by the left.
We need to change our mindset with regard to what government is designed to do.
Otherwise, we are just going to get endless government quote-unquote action that brings about precisely the opposite of that which it intends to bring 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.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Elliot Feld.
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Our Supervising Producer is Mathis Glover.
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The show is edited by Adam Sajevitz.
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The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire production.
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