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July 21, 2021 - The Ben Shapiro Show
47:26
The New Private Space Race Is Awesome | Ep. 1301
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Jeff Bezos travels to space, and redistributionists are fighting mad about it.
Rand Paul and Anthony Fauci go to war, and lockdown advocates are eager to stymie freedom thanks to the Delta variant.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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Alrighty, so yesterday, something very cool happened to Jeff Bezos, who of course is the owner of Amazon, founder of Amazon.
He went up into space.
It's a very, very cool thing, right?
This is a unique moment in human history when we have moved beyond simple governments taking human beings to space.
We now have two separate billionaires in the past two weeks who have gone into either very, very low space or into slightly higher space.
And Elon Musk is planning to go into full orbit.
And the idea here is to eventually privatize space travel, which would be super duper cool.
I mean, that's a really neat thing.
Here's a little bit of the video of Blue Origin.
This is the Jeff Bezos rocket firing him and a couple of friends into space.
Check the plates out.
You can see the Dr. Evil-style phallic rocket flying directly up into space.
It would have been good aesthetically if they had made some changes, but there it is.
It's flying into space.
And that is pretty cool.
I mean, that is a human being who has a lot of money at stake, as well as his life, going into space as a civilian.
And the idea here is going to be to lower the price of space travel down dramatically.
And that actually is what is likely to happen here.
According to Reason.com, there's every reason to believe the democratization of space travel is upon us.
Bezos, Branson, Elon Musk have already delivered on that promise in other sectors, unless the government manages to screw things up.
Following the pattern of commercial air travel in the 20th century, a novelty for billionaires today may well be accessible to the ordinary rich and then to the middle class soon enough.
Also, the billionaires say they are taking a long-term view.
One day, the capacity to get off the planet cheaply and at scale could be humanity's salvation.
But It's not just what they want or what they envision that matters.
We'll figure out, as the market evolves, exactly what is important about all of this.
I know that people from SpaceX are openly talking about the idea of building a moon base to mine the moon for resources by the end of the decade, which is really super cool stuff.
By the way, they've already driven down the cost of getting a kilogram into low Earth orbit by 44-fold because they're building a competitive industry.
Where companies are actually competing to lower the cost on getting things into space.
And that does matter for even things as convenient as your cell phone coverage, satellite coverage.
If you can get satellites into space more cheaply, this is going to bring down prices for a lot of technologies here on Earth.
One thing that Bezos was suggesting was the ability to essentially fire pollution off Earth.
Right?
If there are heavy industries that produce, for example, nuclear waste, and you have no place to put that, could you actually just throw that off into space?
It doesn't really matter, in other words, who gets to space first.
What does matter is that we are creating a very cool, competitive industry here, and we are doing it with private dollars, which really does matter.
Now, this doesn't mean that the left isn't mad about all this.
The left is super mad about all of this, because according to the left, all wealth is collectively owned.
So you have Bernie Sanders, for example, tweeting out about this.
He tweeted, quote, Here on Earth, in the richest country on the planet, half our people live paycheck to paycheck.
People are struggling to feed themselves, struggling to see a doctor.
But hey, the richest guys in the world are off in outer space.
Yes, it's time to tax the millionaires.
Okay, so first of all, all net taxes in the United States, all net taxes in the United States after transfer of government benefits come from people who are very wealthy.
All of them.
Not some of them.
All of them.
The notion that people at the top end of the income bracket are not paying their quote-unquote fair share is just a lie.
It is an overt and silly lie.
And the reality is that if Bernie Sanders really wanted to pay for his vast blowout social programs, he would have to tax people at the same rates that they tax people in the Scandinavian countries he so loves, which means radically increasing taxes on the middle class.
Which, by the way, Bernie Sanders is not averse to doing.
But, Jeff Bezos pays a lot of taxes, he spends a lot of money paying a lot of taxes, and him using his wealth in order to foster a brand new industry is actually really cool.
Because here is the alternative.
We could, as a country, spend vastly more money than Jeff Bezos just spent in order to do the exact same kind of stuff by siphoning away your taxpayer dollars.
How much money did it cost you to send Jeff Bezos to space?
The answer is, it cost you no money.
You bought products from Amazon.
You subscribed to Amazon Prime.
In return, you got value.
Then, he used the profit that he derived from that to do something cool.
That's number one, none of your business.
But number two, something that actually does benefit humanity.
I've said this over and over and over.
Bill Gates has the Bill Gates Foundation.
He gives away hundreds of millions of dollars.
Jeff Bezos, yesterday, gave away like $200 million.
He has done more good for the world in building Amazon than in any of the charity that he just gave.
The reality is that in a free functioning marketplace, the stuff that we do together, namely the transactions that we engage in consensually, those are much more beneficial to us and to the world at large than people simply signing checks, which is something the left simply can't fathom.
There was Jeff Bezos yesterday saying this in maybe the most awkward possible way.
He sort of suggested that everybody else was paying for his flight to space.
In one sense, this is right.
In one sense, this is just a complete misspeak.
I want to thank every Amazon employee and every Amazon.
Amazon customer, because you guys paid for all this.
So seriously, for every Amazon customer out there, and every Amazon employee, thank you from the bottom of my heart, very much.
It's very appreciated.
Okay, in reality, did they actually pay for him to go to space?
Only in the sense that when you buy something at the grocery store, you paid for the grocery store owner's car.
Right?
They didn't pay for him to go to space.
It wasn't like he just seized their cash and then used it to go to space.
He actually paid them a salary.
The money from the Amazon employees only came from the extra productivity that they create because he is taking the risk of paying them.
But because people don't understand economics, this means that for some odd reason they have a tendency to trust the federal government when they should not.
The reality is that we should be trusting private industry to do all the things that make life better because historically it is private industry that has made life better, not really government.
Governments have existed since time immemorial.
Governments all over planet Earth have existed forever.
The question is not whether government exists or whether government decides to throw bread at the people as they did in ancient Rome.
The question is really whether there are industries that develop an economy strong enough to actually make products and services that are better.
One of the great ironies of people like Bernie Sanders complaining about very rich people spending their money to go to space is that Bernie Sanders is very much in favor of the fact that the federal government has now seized and siphoned away $22 trillion in wealth over the course of the last 50 years in order to reduce the poverty rate in the United States by about zero.
That doesn't bother him at all, because of course it is the high-minded use of the money that Bernie Sanders cares about.
More importantly, it's people like Bernie Sanders controlling the flow of the money that Bernie Sanders cares about.
But the ancillary benefits of market transactions that make the world better?
That's the stuff we should be focusing on.
We should want more of this, not less of this.
If you ever want to be able to travel to space, it ain't gonna be because the federal government makes that possible.
It is truly incredible that the same people who are complaining about Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos spending their own money to go to space, and Elon Musk building a space industry, those same people are like, you know what we should do technologically?
If I had your money, you know what I'd do?
I'd build a high-speed rail!
Mm-hmm!
Monorail!
Okay, so who do I trust?
The monorail gang over here?
The people who love Amtrak and just want to spend more money on higher-speed Amtrak because we must have high-speed rail?
A full-on 19th century technology?
You know, from 250 years ago, or should we, you know, maybe focus in on the new technologies, and more importantly, allow people to spend their own private wealth on that?
I mean, it's the coolest thing ever.
It is excellent the private industry has decided to advance science and advance the possibilities of humankind this way, and that you don't have to pay for it.
That's pretty damned awesome.
Again, people who value government over private industry simply don't understand either government or private industry.
We'll get to more of this in just one second.
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So one of the great things about private industry handling space travel is that you don't end up with the guns versus butter discussions that you have to have at the governmental level.
After the United States sent a man to the moon in 1969, we basically started cutting the space program right after that because there were a bunch of people on the left who said, you know what?
We don't need to go to the moon anymore.
There's no purpose.
What do we care about space?
We have enough problems here at home.
Well, when you have one taxpayer dollar to spend and you have to decide whether to buy off constituents or whether to advance science via NASA, usually it's a pretty easy call for members of the political class.
But the nice thing about private industry is you don't control it.
So if they decide to go do something uber cool with regard to technology, whether it is developing cell phones, forwarding the internet, or going to space, that is a zero cost to you thing.
It is a value add.
And the fact that people fail to understand this is beyond me.
Understand that taxes are a way of siphoning away from people who are not harming you and are in fact helping you with their developments of technology toward people who simply want to buy votes with your cash.
This should be your first suspicion when you hear people like Bernie Sanders shout about taxing the billionaires.
Who spends the money better, Jeff Bezos or Bernie Sanders who's never run a popsicle stand?
Who do you think is going to be forwarding the interests of better products and better services?
Jeff Bezos, who literally has provided millions of jobs across the globe and provided a better life for hundreds of millions of people.
I mean, I use Amazon every day.
I'm sure so do you.
Who do you think is going to better your life more?
Jeff Bezos with money or Bernie Sanders with money?
Whose entire history of spending money comes down to buying lake houses with your taxpayer dollars.
Who do you think?
Honestly, I'm constantly shocked at the fact that all these people who yell at billionaires and millionaires, they think that the people who are best positioned to control the money are a bunch of morons who have never run a business.
It's beyond me.
I wouldn't even trust a businessman to run a business where he has no level of expertise.
So you're trusting people who have never run a business at all to handle your money and determine where that money is going to go.
When you siphon money away from the private sector and into the public sector, it becomes less efficient.
When you take money away from people who are entrepreneurial and you put it in the hands of people whose sole job it is to buy off constituents and to create particular dependent classes...
The money is just gone.
This is why we have seen slow growth in the United States, historically speaking.
When you regulate business, when you take money away from business, this is why we are going to see after all of this inflationary growth, after we see Joe Biden blow out trillions of dollars, after we see the regulatory schemes he wants to put in place, this is why even Joe Biden is predicting the United States for the next decade is going to grow at below a 2% GDP rate.
And yet, Joe Biden's solution to that, take more money out of the private sector.
They support asking the wealthiest 1% of Americans, of corporate America, not to pay more than it should.
Just begin to pay their fair share.
Just step up a little bit.
The idea that 50 of the largest corporations in America pay no tax?
I think people should be able to be millionaires and billionaires if they have the ideas, but Lord's sake, the idea, let's start paying your fair share.
Again, it's just a lie that they're not paying their fair share.
And number two, it's not about who's paying.
It just demonstrates, really, that in the end, democratic policy is not, it really is not about forwarding any sort of collective good.
It is about punishing people who earn well.
I mean, Barack Obama made this perfectly clear in 2008.
He was running for president.
He was specifically asked, if raising the capital gains tax rate lowers the amount of government revenue that is brought in because people invest less, are you still for it?
And he said, yes, for purposes of fairness.
It is a childish mentality when it comes to economics.
It's a childish mentality when it comes to life.
People who have more money than you are not worse people than you, and you are not entitled to their money.
Most of us, in fact, will spend our lives in different income brackets.
Most of us will spend our lives in the bottom income bracket and then the middle income bracket, maybe the top income bracket, maybe back to the middle income bracket.
Year on year, our incomes differ pretty radically.
In fact, if you want to look at the factor that plays most into wealth aggregation, it's age.
People get wealthier as they get older because they have more asset bases.
They've spent more years in the workforce.
And yet the notion seems to be from the left that when billionaires spend monies in ways that you don't like, you should have control over that.
If Matthew Miller, who is an MSNBC analyst, Saying, quote, watching NASA takeoffs when I was a kid was such a moment of national pride and unity, having them replaced by billionaire vanity flights is one of the more depressing touchstones of this era.
This is the stupidest thing I've ever heard.
So you're more proud when the government spends a bunch of your money to send people to space than when you get to watch an American who built an American company, and in the process built literally hundreds of thousands of American jobs, use that money in order to do the same thing that NASA did except cheaper.
This is what pisses you off.
Truly amazing stuff.
Because honestly, I think in the end, what so many people want is government control.
It's the government control is the excuse.
It is not that they want government control because they want a better life.
It is not that they want government control because they feel that billionaires are doing something nefarious with their wealth.
There's nothing nefarious about going to space.
They want government control because they believe that the government will club the people they want clubbed.
They believe that the government will give them the things that they want.
The government will do their bidding.
It's pretty insane.
It really is.
And this is why you're seeing a widespread celebration, for example, of more and more government dependency.
You're seeing a new perspective on the left these days.
The new perspective on the left is that inflation of the economy is good.
That labor shortages are actually good.
Because it's good that we're paying people to stay home.
After all, why should people have to work?
After all, why shouldn't corporations be punished by the government for no apparent reason?
Lowering productivity, increasing prices.
Why would that be bad?
You know, it's good that we're inflating the currency because actually, it's now creating the incentive for people to work less.
There was an old bumper sticker that used to be on a lot of cars back in the 1980s.
It said, work harder.
Millions on welfare depend on you.
That sort of moved beyond being a cynical bumper sticker and now has become almost a democratic left wing slogan.
Bryce Covert, who is an independent journalist, who has a piece of the New York Times titled, 8 hours a day, 5 days a week is not working for us.
This doesn't mean we should work until we can afford not to work, it means the government should pay us not to work.
In truth, the debate over the return to the office is fraught.
Employers are used to being able to dictate when and where employees work, but we have now discovered a lot of work can be done at odd hours, between remote school lessons and from home offices, or even the comfort of one's bed.
So now, there's a tense push and pull over when and how much work people should start commuting, and how much power over the question employees can exert.
Everyone is focused on how we will make work work after such a severe shock to the system for how things used to get done.
But the ultimate answer won't be found in hybrid remote and in-person offices or even in letting employees shift around their hours.
The way to make work work is to cut it back.
So your solution in the middle of a labor shortage is people should work less.
Yes, this is going to make life better for everybody.
When a country becomes rich enough, there's a simple tendency for a lot of people to say, OK, you know what?
We're all rich enough.
Let's start redistributing the wealth.
We're rich enough.
We don't need any more growth.
We don't need better products.
We don't need better services.
You know, we'll just stagnate the economy and we'll just pass the money around.
The problem is you're either moving forward or you're moving backward when it comes to an economy.
Economies that stagnate fall back because there are competitors in the world and those competitors are not worried about working 40 hours a week.
Those competitors have their people working 50 hours a week.
It turns out that in a globally competitive economy, you will not continue to earn the same pay for your job, working 36 hours a week as you would working 40 hours a week, obviously.
But the notion is that the government should really continue to push people to work less.
Again, this is what's amazing.
They're siphoning money away.
They're taking control away from people in the private sector engaging in involuntary transactions.
And they're moving it over to government.
That is the goal.
And they'll do it indirectly by inflating the currency and paying people to stay home.
Says the New York Times columnist, there's a class divide in overwork in the United States.
The demand to spend 60 hours in an office is one that depletes the lives of professional, higher-paid workers.
What would appear to be an opposite problem plagues those at the lower end of the wage scale.
In 2016, about one-tenth of American workers were working part-time but trying to get more hours.
Despite current hand-wringing that these workers are refusing to come back to the job thanks to lucrative unemployment benefits, the problem is typically the opposite.
People who work in retail or fast food often struggle to get enough hours to qualify for benefits and pay their bills just to survive.
You know, one of the reasons for that is because people are being paid to stay home.
People are being paid a myriad of benefits.
And you know what corporations do when they see that you're being paid a bunch of benefits?
They lower their wages because you're getting paid from another source.
This is not hard stuff, economically speaking.
It is not difficult to understand.
If everyone worked less, says this New York Times columnist, it would be easier to spread the work out evenly to more people.
If white-collar professionals were no longer expected or required to log 60 hours a week but 30, that would be a whole extra job for someone else.
No, it wouldn't.
Because you know why that company can afford to pay other workers?
Because somebody's working 60 hours a week and generating productivity.
Also, jobs are not fungible.
Some people are better at them and some people are worse at them.
But this is what happens when you have bureaucratically minded idiots attempting to determine who should work and who should not.
And the predictable end result of that is that you have less efficiency in the economy, less cool stuff.
Really, people need to understand, here's the way the basic economics works.
People who create new innovation, people who take risks, people who spend their own money taking those risks to produce new goods and services in ways people have not thought of it before, those are the people who forward economies.
If it were up to government, all you would get is slightly better versions, maybe, maybe, over time, of an old crappy mousetrap.
Henry Ford famously said that if it had been up to other people, most people, when he really invented mass production of automobiles in the United States, he said, you know, the difference between what I did and what a lot of other people did is, if it had been up to other people, they would have produced a more efficient horse and buggy.
It takes a difference in kind.
It takes a different kind of mind to invent things.
We used to have respect for inventors.
We used to think that what they were doing was actually amazing and cool.
We used to idolize those people.
Now it seems that the people we idolize are the people who seize wealth from those people and punish those people and treat those people as though they are somehow expropriating wealth rather than creating it.
Which is totally insane and counterproductive and obviously makes life worse for millions of people the world over.
So, frankly, I think we should be celebrating the fact that Jeff Bezos went to space yesterday.
I think we should be celebrating the fact that Richard Branson went to space.
I'd love to fly to space at some point, and the only way that's going to happen is not by some government program.
The only way that's going to happen is if these three people continue to compete at high levels and continue to bring the price down on this sort of stuff.
That's when you're going to have the opportunity to fly to space.
Which, by the way, could actually wildly reduce the time that you have to travel, for example, across the planet.
It could wildly reduce the prices that you have on other products.
Space is a resource.
The fact that Americans are typically leading that resource race is a very, very good thing.
And the fact that you don't have to spend money on it is an unabashedly good thing.
So I'm, if you couldn't tell, I'm pretty enthusiastic about all of this and I think that everyone should be enthusiastic as well.
It's a story of American exceptionalism that we are able to produce so much wealth in this country via products and services that people voluntarily want to buy that somebody can then take that and then do something as cool as going to space and reopening an entire industry that was basically moribund for the last couple of decades.
Pretty impressive stuff.
Yesterday, there was this big exchange between Rand Paul and Anthony Fauci.
The left has declared that Anthony Fauci won this exchange, and the right has declared that Rand Paul won this exchange.
The entire exchange is over the question of whether the National Institutes of Health funded research in Wuhan that could have led to the creation of the COVID-19 virus.
It is unclear at this point whether that is true or not.
What is true is that the United States, via the NIH, funded a place called EcoHealth Alliance, which then gave a grant to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
They were supposed to pledge not to engage in gain-of-function research, but the question is, what is gain-of-function research?
So there are a couple of different definitions of gain-of-function research that have been utilized.
One particular definition suggests that gain-of-function research is a gain-of-function within viruses that already apply to humans.
Another definition of gain-of-function research is a gain-of-function for an animal virus that now is made transmissible to humans.
That's what this really comes down to, is a little bit of semantic wordplay here.
Now, we still don't know that this came from a lab leak.
It is very likely at this point that it came from a lab leak, but we still don't know, and we don't know exactly how that virus was developed, so a lot of this is speculative.
However, it is certainly worth questioning whether the United States scientific community should have been paying the Wuhan Institute of Virology at all, considering that we have no way of actually seeing what it is that they are doing.
So here's Rand Paul and Anthony Fauci going at it yesterday.
Dr. Fauci, as you are aware, it is a crime to lie to Congress.
Section 1001 of the U.S.
Criminal Code creates a felony and a five-year penalty for lying to Congress.
On your last trip to our committee on May 11th, you stated that the NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
And yet, Gain-of-function research was done entirely in the Wuhan Institute by Dr. Xi and was funded by the NIH.
I'd like to ask unanimous consent to insert into the record the Wuhan virology paper entitled, Discovery of a Rich Gene Pool of Bat-SARS-Related Coronaviruses.
Please deliver a copy of the journal article to Dr. Fauci.
In this paper, Dr. Xi credits the NIH and lists the actual number of the grant that she was given by the NIH.
In this paper, she took two bat coronavirus genes, spike genes, and combined them with a SARS-related backbone to create new viruses that are not found in nature.
These lab-created viruses were then shown to replicate in humans.
These experiments combine genetic information from different coronaviruses that infect animals but not humans to create novel artificial viruses able to infect human cells.
Viruses that in nature only infect animals were manipulated in the Wuhan lab to gain the function of infecting humans.
This research fits the definition of the research that the NIH said was subject to the pause in 2014 to 2017, a pause in funding on gain-of-function.
But the NIH failed to recognize this, defines it away, and it never came under any scrutiny.
Dr. Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist from Rutgers, described this research in Wuhan as, the Wuhan lab used NIH funding to construct novel chimeric SARS-related coronaviruses Able to infect human cells and laboratory animals.
This is high-risk research that creates new potential pandemic pathogens.
Potential pandemic pathogens that exist only in the lab, not in nature.
This research matches, these are Dr. Ebright's words, this research matches, indeed epitomizes, the definition of gain-of-function research, done entirely in Wuhan.
for which there was supposed to be a federal pause.
Dr. Fauci, knowing that it is a crime to lie to Congress, do you wish to retract your statement of May 11th where you claimed that the NIH never funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan?
Senator Paul, I have never lied.
The question is pretty simple right there.
Okay, so the question is, it's pretty obvious that we did actually fund the Wuhan Institute of Virology, that we said don't engage in gain-of-function research, but that we gamed our own definition of gain-of-function research.
And so what you're about to hear Fauci respond is sort of the Bill Clinton, it depends on the definition of the word is, defense.
Now, from a legal perspective, He may be right.
It may be why he is going to avoid any sort of criminal liability, for example.
Because gain-of-function research can be defined in a couple of different ways.
On the one hand, you can define gain-of-function research as taking animal viruses and mixing them with other viruses in order to create human pathogens.
But there's a definition of gain-of-function research that says really only human viruses that are made more deadly or more transmissible, only that is gain-of-function research.
So that's the game that we're now going to play.
It's a semantic game, but the underlying facts are really not in dispute.
Josh Rogin, who is a columnist for the Washington Post, says Rand Paul is right.
The NIH was funding gain-of-function research in Wuhan, but the NIH pretended it didn't meet their gain-of-function definition to avoid their own oversight mechanism.
So here you're going to hear Fauci get very angry and play word games.
Here he goes.
Senator Paul, I have never lied before the Congress, and I do not retract that statement.
This paper that you're referring to was judged by qualified staff up and down the chain as not being gain of function.
Let me finish.
You take an animal virus and you increase its transmissibility to humans, you're saying that's not gain of function?
That is correct.
And Senator Paul, you do not know what you are talking about, quite frankly.
And I want to say that officially.
You do not know what you are talking about.
Let's read from the NIH definition of gain of function.
This is your definition that you guys wrote.
It says that scientific research that increases the transmissibility among animals is gain of function.
They took animal viruses that only occur in animals and they increased their transmissibility to humans.
How you can say that is not gain of function?
It is not.
It's a dance and you're dancing around this because you're trying to obscure responsibility for four million people dying around the world from a pandemic.
Well, now you're getting into something.
If the point that you are making is that the grant that was funded as a sub-award from EcoHealth to Wuhan created SARS-CoV-2, that's where you are getting.
Let me finish.
We don't know.
We don't know if it did come from the lab, but all the evidence is pointing that it came from the lab, and there will be responsibility for those who funded the lab, including yourself.
This committee will allow the witness to respond.
I totally resent the lie that you are now propagating, Senator, because if you look at the viruses that were used in the experiments, that were given in the annual reports, that were published in the literature, it is molecularly impossible No one's saying those viruses caused it.
No one is alleging that those viruses caused the pandemic.
What we're alleging is that gain-of-function research was going on in that lab and NIH funded it.
Get away from it.
It meets your definition and you are obfuscating the truth.
I'm not obfuscating the truth.
You are the one.
Let me just finish.
I want everyone to understand that if you look at those viruses, and that's judged by qualified virologists and evolutionary biologists, Those viruses are molecularly impossible to result in SARS-CoV-2.
No one's saying they are.
No one's saying those viruses caused the pandemic.
We're saying they are gain-of-function viruses because they were animal viruses that became more transmissible in humans, and you funded it.
I'll admit the truth.
Senator Paul, your time has expired, and I will allow witnesses who come before this committee to respond.
And you are implying...
That what we did was responsible for the deaths of individuals?
I totally resent that.
And if anybody is lying here, Senator, it is you!
Okay, so what are they actually fighting about?
What they're actually fighting about is definitions and fungibility of money.
So what is gain-of-function research?
Rand Paul is saying gain-of-function research is, you take an animal virus, you make it transmissible to humans, that's gain-of-function.
Fauci is saying, legally speaking, really it's only if you take a human virus and make it more transmissible or more deadly, that's gain-of-function.
That's a stupid semantic game.
What we care about is whether the United States was in fact funding development of viruses from animals to humans that could have been transmissible and deadly to other humans, right?
Whether you call that gain of function, whether you don't call that gain of function, that is a bad thing for the United States to be doing, especially at an institute where there had been repeated reports of lab leaks, at an institute where the safety concerns were serious, and under the auspices of a government that is fascistic and communist in nature.
Okay, that's question number one.
Question number two is that the paper that Rand Paul is citing, if you talk about how they've been using animal viruses in order to make them transmissible to humans, that paper uses a specific subset of viruses that it's investigating.
And Fauci is saying those viruses in that paper are not COVID-19.
The viruses in that paper are molecularly impossible to be COVID-19.
And Paul is saying, I'm not saying that the ones in this paper are COVID-19.
I am saying this type of research could have created COVID-19, and that could have leaked, and we shouldn't have been funding this institute in the first place.
Paul has the better of this argument.
He does.
That doesn't mean that legal liability is going to be attaching to Anthony Fauci, or that Anthony Fauci is guilty of some sort of perjury, because perjury requires an intent to lie, and it also requires that you be legally untrue.
And that's arguable.
But again, Fauci's sort of living in this gray space here.
What it does mean is that the United States' complicity in working with the Wuhan Institute of Virology could create a significant level of moral culpability for the U.S.
government.
We should not be working with scientific institutions that run under the auspices of terroristic governments.
And I'm sorry, the Chinese government is a terroristic government.
It just took over Hong Kong and is currently arresting editorial members of Apple Daily right now.
It is threatening Taiwan.
It is threatening the globe in a wide variety of ways, ranging from internet surveillance, to belt and road connections, to funding of infiltrating groups in the West.
This is where Rand Paul is exactly right.
And the fact that we aren't willing to look this in the face is pretty ugly.
And what this really comes down to in the end is how we see China.
And until the United States starts recognizing that China is an enemy, the Chinese government is an enemy, not the Chinese people.
The Chinese people have been subjected to tyranny since the rise of Mao.
The Chinese government is an enemy to the United States, and funding that enemy and interacting with the enemy of this governmental entity is an insane abdication of responsibility, and that is a bipartisan abdication of responsibility.
It does not live in one party.
Okay, meanwhile, The left continues to push a narrative that whatever happens with the rest of this pandemic is now on the right.
We'll get to that in just one moment.
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Alrighty, when it comes to freedom, America is the world's last hope.
With lockdown protests getting increasingly violent in London, citizens and business owners facing prison time for disobeying vaccine passport laws in France, it's becoming increasingly clear we have to fight to keep the last free country free.
That means standing up to the Biden administration's new call for censorship across all platforms for misinformation.
All of this perfectly illustrates what I predicted in my new book, The Authoritarian Moment.
It's a really important book.
It hits shelves this Tuesday, July 27th.
There's a lot happening right now that I predicted.
The perversion of science and the use of science as a baton against the American people.
The perversion of the educational institutions via things like critical race theory.
I talk about all of this in The Authoritarian Moment.
How institution by institution, from your company to your kid's school, all of these institutions have been weaponized and militarized against people who dissent.
And more importantly, how we stop all of this.
Go to dailywire.com slash ben.
Order your signed copy today at dailywire.com slash ben.
I will be doing a live streamed book signing event next Tuesday.
The 27th.
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When you do, you'll be asked to type in a question at Checkout Ben.
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Get your copy at dailywire.com slash ben right now.
Also, despite NPR's latest hit piece on Daily Wire, where they covered nothing but their own anger and our success as a news organization, the Daily Wire is still going strong.
By the way, speaking of which, if you want a 25% discount off your subscription right now at Daily Wire, use code UMAD.
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Because the NPR, they are so mad at us.
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They literally wrote a piece trying to quash our traffic on Facebook because they admit, we tell the truth, and we tell you that we're conservative, and they said that's why we should be quashed.
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Meanwhile, the statistics show that we are nearing the end of this pandemic.
Okay, realistically speaking, we are nearing the end of this pandemic because the stat that matters is deaths.
The stat that does not matter is number of diagnoses.
No one cares how many people in the United States, for example, every year are diagnosed with a cold.
You only care how many people die from a particular disease.
Yesterday in Los Angeles, which is now requiring everybody to mask up indoors, it's a county of 10 million people.
10 million.
The number of people who died yesterday in Los Angeles or recorded deaths via COVID was four.
Four.
And this is true, day on day.
The average in L.A.
county right now is somewhere between two and six deaths.
Every day.
In a county of 10 million people.
There's a solid case that you're probably more likely to get shot in L.A.
than you are to die of COVID at this point.
Okay, this is madness.
And it is just insane.
I mean, I talked yesterday about the stats on this thing.
The notion that the Delta variant in high vaccination countries is going to shut everything down again.
All that is is a political ploy.
And you're seeing people, there are certain people who just love the government being in control.
There are certain people who are desperate for the government to be in control.
And it's not just in the United States, by the way.
There's a piece by a woman named Tanya Gold, a British journalist, writing for the New York Times.
England is free and in total chaos.
Okay, so says Tanya Gold, quote, England is free.
We are told on Monday, the government lifted the country's remaining COVID restrictions on social distancing, on face masks, on numbers for gatherings, the lot, effectively leaving protection from the coronavirus to vaccinations and the goddess of chance.
The timing was immaculate.
Over the previous week, 332,000 people tested positive for COVID, the most since January, as the Delta variant courses across the country.
New COVID-19 cases are expected to rise, perhaps reaching the dizzying figure of 100,000 a day later in the summer.
The number of hospitalized much lower than in previous waves of infections because of the vaccination program is steadily increasing.
Deaths are creeping up.
Okay, now I am looking right now at the number of UK COVID deaths.
And you can look at the chart.
According to the New York Times, according actually to John Hopkins University, their latest COVID data, July 19th, 2021, the number of deaths recorded in all of the United Kingdom was 19.
19.
At the height of the pandemic, they were losing somewhere on the order of 1,600 people a day.
How?
What?
1,700 people a day.
What?
So we're now losing, in the UK, somewhere between 50 and 100 people a day, it seems like, on average, according to JHU.
And this is requiring the entire government, like, this means Boris Johnson is bad?
Here's the thing.
What the elites want you to think the people want is not what the people actually want.
Tanya Gold is a perfect example of this.
She says, confined to his countryside residence, Johnson emitted the cracked-upon-hummy, the halting obfuscation that is his trademark because Johnson has to self-isolate because even though he has already had COVID and already he was vaccinated, He was in close contact with his health minister who was double vaccinated and tested positive for COVID on Saturday.
Now, here's the thing.
If you are double vaccinated and you get COVID, chances are you're not going to get seriously ill and you're not going to die.
These vaccines were not designed only to stop you from getting the thing.
They're designed to prevent you from getting seriously ill and dying, which is what I care about.
If I'm asymptomatic, what the hell do I care whether I'm diagnosed positive with COVID?
But, says this columnist, the Act, Johnson's Act, successful for a season is wearing thin.
In the first week of July, more than half a million people were contacted by the country's tracking service and told to self-isolate for 10 days, creating chaos for businesses and individuals alike.
Mr. Johnson's response was to eerily excuse some key workers from self-isolating.
Nevertheless, he said, we do need to stick to the system as is.
In Johnson's England, after all, yesterday is a lifetime ago.
But, this is the part that's hilarious.
Okay, this columnist is really angry at Johnson, saying that Johnson's botching this, there'll be mass death in the streets.
The Conservative Party, led by Boris Johnson, now enjoys a massive lead over its opponents.
The Conservative lead over the Labour Party in Britain is nine percentage points.
Says Tanya Gold, whatever the hair means, Johnson's hair, it's terrifying to think we still do not know.
We're likely to have a few more years to scrutinize it.
But no matter what Mr. Johnson says, nothing can dispel the sense we are a country in decline, segwaying to crisis.
And then it turns into all of these reasons why the government needs to be bigger.
And COVID is just an excuse for why the government needs to be bigger.
Or maybe, or maybe the vaccines are a medical miracle.
And the fact that so many people who are vulnerable have already been vaccinated is good.
But it's the feeling of perpetual crisis.
On behalf of political polarization that is driving both lack of vaccination and our political polarization.
So, for example, you have Jay Inslee as the governor of Washington State.
He is not a very good governor.
And he says that Trump voters are the bioreactor facility spreading COVID in Washington.
Now, here's the question.
If you actually wanted to convince Trump voters who are unvaccinated to get vaccinated, what you probably wouldn't do is insult them.
What you wouldn't do is say, you are a rube and a moron.
Get vaccinated.
That is a tactic that never works, ever.
As Ross Douthat points out, there are some people who have already had COVID and they actually need some sort of explanation of why they need to have a vaccine.
Maybe there are people out there who have serious doubts about the long-term testability, especially given the fact that the FDA still is operating under emergency use authorization for these vaccines.
Maybe acknowledging people's fears while suggesting that maybe in your particular case you ought to ask a doctor about your underlying factors and your risk for COVID and then make a rational decision that allows you to advance.
Maybe that is the way to approach all this.
But no, this isn't about getting people vaccinated.
For Democrats, this is no longer about getting people vaccinated.
For Democrats, this has turned into a way of, once again, clubbing people who they don't like politically.
Because again, you know what the stats show?
You see, Democrats are not yelling at black Americans for not getting vaccinated.
The racial group in America least likely to be vaccinated is coincidentally the same racial group in the United States that is most likely to vote Democrat.
Black Americans.
You don't see Democrats ripping on them.
So this isn't about whether people are good or bad for vaccinating.
It's about whether you're good or bad for liking Trump and not vaccinating.
The vaccination is an excuse not to like Republicans.
It's not that they don't like Republicans because Republicans won't vaccinate.
Here's Jay Inslee doing this routine.
You're making a risk for everybody around you when you don't get vaccinated.
You're a risk for your spouse, you're a risk for your kids, your grandkids, your parents, your coworkers, because you are a bioreactor facility generating virus and spreading it around, including to kids who can't get vaccinated.
I want to reiterate that.
If you're a 50 year old man who, you know, voted for Donald Trump and didn't think COVID was a problem and you don't get vaccinated right now, you're a risk to every kid in your city.
How are you a risk to every kid in your city?
The number of kids total in the United States who have died from COVID is under 340.
The number of kids over the past year who have died of pneumonia is over 800.
No adult is a risk to every kid in their city.
I don't care if you're spewing COVID.
The reality is that kids are generally not harmed by the virus on a statistical level.
Doesn't mean they can't be on an individual level.
But on a statistical level, kids are very unlikely to suffer grave harm from the virus.
Which, by the way, is the reason why only 45% of Democrats with kids under 12 intend to vaccinate them as soon as a vaccine is available.
45% of Democrats!
Because they're not that worried about the kids.
Meanwhile, again, you can see the vast disconnect between how Democrats are treated with regard to spreading COVID.
And taking the vaccine and how Republicans are treated by the media.
Here's Jen Psaki yesterday who refuses to call the Texas delegation, which is now apparently infused with COVID, like everyone on that plane from Texas, the Texas Democrats who fled, they all got COVID apparently.
Here's Jen Psaki saying that's not a super spreader event.
It's only super spreader when Republicans do it.
More than 10% of the traveling party with these Texas Democrats now claim to have a breakthrough case.
Is there any concern that this trip that was intended to advocate for voting rights is now a super spreader event in Washington?
Well, I would say that's not a characterization we're making from here.
We certainly understand there will be breakthrough cases.
Even vaccines that are incredibly effective are not foolproof.
They're not 100% effective.
We've seen that.
Well, it's not a super spreader event, unless they're Republicans.
Is this likely to get more people vaccinated, or is this just a political tool for power and fun at this point?
Pretty obvious.
Alrighty, we'll be back here later today with an additional hour of content.
In the meantime, go check out The Michael Knowles Show.
Today, he discusses Twitter suspending Marjorie Taylor Greene.
You can hear more details about that story over on Michael's show that's available right now.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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The show is edited by Adam Sievitz.
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Amazon founder Jeff Bezos goes to outer space, Texas Democrats spread the Wu Flu on their private jet booze cruise, and a supermarket magnate warns of 10-14% increases in the cost of groceries by October.
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