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July 30, 2021 - The Ben Shapiro Show
46:05
Biden's Insane New Mask Mandates | Ep. 1308
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President Biden calls on everyone vaccinated to mask again.
The CDC links its masking case to a COVID outbreak that killed zero people.
And the Biden economy is coming up short.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
The Ben Shapiro Show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.
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Okay, so yesterday, the president of the United States came out and said that it was time to remask if you were fully vaccinated.
So before we get to Joe Biden's actual explanation of this nonsensical policy, let's start with what we know and what we don't know at this point.
Here is what we know.
If you are vaccinated, you are very, very, very, very safe from COVID.
When I say very, very, very safe, what I mean is that 161 million people in the United States have been vaccinated against COVID.
Of those 161 million people, approximately 6,000 people have gotten breakthrough cases requiring hospitalization and about 1,700 people have died.
This means that your chances of actually being hospitalized with COVID after getting a vaccine are somewhere in the neighborhood of 1 in 27,000.
Somewhere in that neighborhood.
And your chances of death after getting a vaccine are somewhere, by these statistics, around 1 in 100,000.
Which means that you are very, very, very, very safe from COVID if you have been vaccinated.
Nothing that the CDC is now saying changes that simple fact.
And herein lies the problem for everything that Joe Biden is saying right now.
If being vaccinated means you are very safe from the virus.
This means that even if you are capable of transmitting the virus to the unvaccinated, if every single adult in the United States has had the opportunity to get vaccinated, and then they don't, and you infect them, that is their fault.
Not your fault.
It is not your job to prevent somebody else from getting a disease that they have the ability to stop themselves from being harmed by because they won't get a vaccine.
And the idea that you're going to require the vaccinated to mask up to protect the unvaccinated is not even asked for by the unvaccinated.
This is the part that's crazy.
The vaccinated are not in danger from the unvaccinated.
The unvaccinated are in danger from the unvaccinated.
Now we're learning that the unvaccinated may be in some form of danger from the vaccinated.
What does this suggest?
Well, it suggests the obvious solution, which is the unvaccinated should think very seriously about getting vaccinated, but they should not require the kindness of strangers in order to protect themselves.
They should not require that small children mask up in order to protect them.
They should not require that people who have already vaccinated mask up in order to protect them.
This is nonsensical.
In fact, if you want to encourage people to get vaccinated, instead of requiring that the vaccinated mask up, you should do precisely the opposite.
The Biden administration seems to be operating under the assumption That there is a link between mask mandates and vaccination encouragement.
And if you push mask mandates, you can also push vaccination encouragement at the same time.
Push people to wear masks, but also push them to get vaccinated.
This is nonsensical for a variety of reasons.
First, because very often when people hear mask mandates, what they think instinctively is, oh, the vaccines must not be working.
You're seeing a lot of that over the past 24, 48 hours from people who are unlikely to get the vaccine anyway.
People saying, well, you know, we were told that the vaccines were a cure-all, and now you're telling us that the vaccinated are still passing this thing off.
So what else aren't you telling us about the vaccines?
So that's number one.
Number two, people will start to think that the masks are actually a good way of protecting people.
When it comes to Delta, the evidence that the masks are very effective in protecting people is pretty skimpy, according to Scott Gottlieb over at the FDA, as we'll get to in a second.
And finally, let's even assume that masking the vaccinated lowers the rates of transmission to people who are unvaccinated.
That does not encourage the unvaccinated to get vaccinated.
It encourages them to mask up and rely on everybody else to mask up, which means that no one is ever going to unmask for the rest of human history.
So none of this makes any sort of logical sense.
Now, let's go through the data that prompted this change in heart.
Okay, so the CDC mask decision, according to the ABC News, followed a stunning finding from a Cape Cod beach outbreak.
Hey, this is literally, as we'll see, pretty much the only piece of evidence that the CDC is relying upon is that over the 4th of July, a big crowd went to Cape Cod and a bunch of people infected each other.
And it turns out that a large number of those people were fully immunized.
As of Thursday, according to ABC News, 882 people were tied to the Provincetown outbreak.
Among those living in Massachusetts, 74% were fully immunized.
Yet officials said the vast majority were also reporting symptoms.
Now here is the thing.
How many of those people got seriously ill?
Like really seriously ill.
Not like they got cold symptoms.
Like they got really, really sick.
Out of the 882.
7 people were hospitalized. 7.
Now remember, your chances of actually getting a symptomatic breakthrough remain pretty damn low.
So this does not mean that one out of every hundred people who's vaccinated is going to end up hospitalized.
This means that one out of every hundred, even according to these stats, okay, less than one out of every hundred people who is infected with COVID after being vaccinated, which is a fraction of a fraction now, is going to be hospitalized.
And how many of these people have died?
Zero.
Zero.
So you're seeing the CDC recommend that every vaccinated person in the United States, all 161 million of them, mask up because there was an outbreak in Cape Cod that resulted in zero deaths.
And this is what you're seeing across the country.
You got D.C.
that is now recommending that everybody mask up again.
Los Angeles recommending that everybody mask up again indoors.
How many deaths, day on day, is Los Angeles County having?
Again, a county of 10 million people?
The answer is nine.
How many day-on-day deaths is Washington, D.C.
having that requires an indoor mask mandate?
The answer is zero.
Eleven people have been shot and killed in Washington, D.C.
since the last time somebody died of COVID in Washington, D.C.
They are now more likely to die of being murdered in Washington, D.C.
Like on the street.
Then you are to die of COVID in Washington, D.C., and they are going back to mask mandates anyway.
OK, so the Provincetown outbreak is apparently sort of the key here.
And then the Washington Post reports.
on this new CDC sort of report.
It was a CDC slide deck that they put out.
And the slide deck is not particularly edifying.
So we're gonna go through some of the slide deck right now.
So let's begin with what they say about the Delta variant, which is supposedly this giant game changer.
So what they say is, number one, that people are still evidencing after vaccination that if they have a breakthrough case, right?
Remember, according to this slide deck, as we will see, your chance of getting a breakthrough case, period, have been lowered by about two-thirds if you are vaccinated.
In other words, you're significantly less likely to get a breakthrough case, even of the Delta variant, if you're vaccinated.
Okay, but what they say, in the case they make, is that the viral load that you are carrying, meaning the amount of virus in your nasopharyngeal passage, in your nose basically, the amount of virus that you are carrying is similar to the unvaccinated.
The study they are relying upon is an Indian study that was already retracted and was based on a vaccine that is not legal in the United States.
And they kind of admit this on page 16 of this slide.
Quote, India report of lower cycle threshold values in Delta breakthrough cases.
The lower your cycle threshold value is, the more virus, essentially, you have.
Compared to non-Delta breakthrough cases.
Also larger cluster size with Delta breakthrough.
They say the Delta infection is associated with a longer duration of having the virus in your body, as opposed to the alpha strain, for example.
And there may be a higher risk of reinfection, but only if you had an infection more than six months ago.
Okay, so all of this is rooted in this India study, and this is the only study they cite to this effect.
That India study was already retracted.
It was based on a vaccine that we're not allowed to use in the United States.
So, questionable at best, questionable at best.
Okay, then they get some more viral load information, and they suggest that, it says at the bottom of this, preliminary data subject to change.
Okay, so this is all pretty dicey stuff.
They say, breakthrough cases reported to National Passive Surveillance have lower CT values, cycle threshold values, by three cycles, a tenfold increase in viral load for Delta compared with Alpha.
So, again, they are saying that you have a higher viral load compared with Alpha, but that's not really, this particular stat is not really comparing the vaccinated and the unvaccinated, which they say are similar.
The only piece of data that they present outside of the Indian study here, Our data from Barnstable County, Massachusetts, right?
This is this outbreak that we're talking about in Cape Cod.
It says there's no difference in mean cycle threshold values in vaccinated and unvaccinated cases.
It's saying that they haven't actually done viral load cultures here, so it's unclear.
They make an assumption.
The assumption is if the amount of virus in the nose of an unvaccinated person is the same as the amount of virus in the nose of a vaccinated person, they transmit the disease in similar fashion.
That might be a fair assumption, but it is clearly an assumption.
It is also possible that the amount of virus in a vaccinated person's nose has been affected in some way because that person is vaccinated.
Perhaps they are shedding virus that is less lethal.
Perhaps they are shedding virus that is dead, right?
It is not clear because none of this has been cultured.
Alright, so this is part of the problem.
Okay, then you get to the only chart in this whole thing that really matters.
Okay, as far as logic, the only chart that matters.
Okay, here are the charts of Pfizer two-dose vaccine efficacy for alpha versus delta.
Alpha is the original strain that was going around the world, the European strain.
Delta is the current strain that people are very much afraid of.
Okay, here's what it shows.
It shows in England and Scotland that the Pfizer vaccine is still 79% effective at preventing infection.
Okay, so before it was over 90% against alpha.
It's still about 80% effective at preventing infection.
It is still 88% effective at preventing symptomatic disease.
And it is still 96% effective at preventing hospitalization.
Okay, that last number is the one that matters because that's the one you care about, gang.
I don't care how many people every year in the United States are diagnosed with the flu if nobody dies of the flu.
I only care how many people are dying of a disease.
If no one is dying of a disease, it is of no public health relevance to us at all.
At all.
The same thing is true in Canada.
In Canada, Alpha versus Delta.
The vaccines are performing very well against symptomatic disease in Canada, and right now they've had zero deaths attributable to Delta in Canada.
In Israel, which has had this vast sort of post-Delta outbreak, Israel currently is showing a 64% Protection against confirmed infection, right?
So that's a lot lower than the 90% against confirmed alpha infection.
But it's 64% still means that basically in 60, not basically, in 64 out of 100 cases where you have the Pfizer two-dose vaccine, you're going to avoid being infected with Delta.
64% effective against symptomatic disease.
But again, we don't care about symptomatic disease.
What we care about is hospitalization or death.
Okay, hospitalization or death, 93% effective against Delta, compared with about 94% effective against Alpha.
So in other words, these vaccines are extremely effective in preventing hospitalization and death, which last time I checked, is the main job of the vaccine.
Okay, now we get to the masking portion of what the CDC suggests.
There are many problems with what the CDC suggests here in terms of masking.
So, number one, they assume natural immunity is about 5%, okay, or about 35%.
Now, it's possible natural immunity is much higher, that many, many more people have had this than the CDC is willing to contemplate.
In fact, they created these models showing how many people will likely be hospitalized and die.
Or the probability of the increase in caseload based on natural immunity numbers.
The big problem here is the model assumptions, which they list here in the CDC report.
So they assume the vaccine effectiveness in preventing transmissibility is somewhere between 75 and 85%.
Okay, fair enough.
Looking at the foreign data, that's fair enough.
Then they assume that we have had 50% of infections reported in the United States at this time.
This is wildly incorrect.
There is no way that 50% of the infections in the United States have been reported ever at any time in the United States.
The reality is the vast majority of infections already prevalent in the United States probably have not been reported.
Scott Gottlieb, former FDA commissioner, says this is an utterly unreasonable assumption.
Completely unreasonable.
How many people out there who are vaccinated, for example, have had cold symptoms?
I've had a cold symptom.
I've been tested because I have cold symptoms and I'm vaccinated.
And until the last five minutes, the CDC was saying that I was protected against COVID, even being symptomatic from it.
Okay, so 50% of infections have been reported, according to the CDC.
Wrong.
That is completely wrong, which is why Scott Gottlieb says we may be much closer to the other side of this peak.
Then the CDC is letting on.
Other assumptions they make that are wrong.
They assume that for masking, masking is going to be incredibly effective.
They assume that source control, meaning your ability to infect others, that masking prevents that by 40 to 60 percent.
Now, all of the data that they gathered on masking efficacy were always very shoddy.
These were always very shoddy, not real-world data.
But, even assuming that those data were correct, the source control 40-60% effective, this is, again, Scott Gottlieb saying this, not me, those numbers come from control of the flu.
The flu virus is much less transmissible than Delta, which is now apparently as transmissible as chickenpox.
So it is quite possible source control from masks is way lower than 40 to 60 percent, especially depending on the type of mask.
A cloth mask is way lower than that.
Using personal protection is 20 to 30 percent effective.
So masking, in other words, is not necessarily going to do very much here.
And as we've already seen in the UK, you don't need a mask mandate in order to come down the other side of this particular hill.
Okay, meanwhile, they also assume, by the way, that there will be no adjustments for other interventions, meaning that nobody in the United States is going to stop going out and stop partying and stop doing what they're doing, which of course is very silly because when people feel there's an uptick in their community from COVID and they're unvaccinated, data show they tend to get vaccinated or they tend to stay home or they tend to not go to big gatherings.
Okay, so those are all the assumptions with regard to masking efficacy.
They also make some assumptions about immunity, Again, those assumptions about immunity are not particularly, I would say, compelling.
And then finally, they make the recommendations.
And the recommendations, according to the CDC, is they say, Except the war has not changed.
This thing is just moving faster.
That's all.
That's all.
That's really, that's all that's changed.
The thing's moving faster.
Improve public's understanding of breakthrough infections.
Improve communications around individual risk among vaccinated.
Risk of severe disease or death reduced tenfold or greater in vaccinated.
Risk of infection reduced threefold in vaccinated.
Prevention.
And here's where they get to where they're going to tell you what to do.
Consider vaccine mandates for for HCP to protect vulnerable populations.
So, vaccine mandates for healthcare providers.
Okay, again, I don't actually think that one is particularly either burdensome or unreasonable considering that healthcare providers are dealing with people with underlying conditions nearly all the time.
They also recommend universal masking for source control and prevention.
They've not provided the data that supports this or even the ideological and logical rationale for this.
And reconsider other community mitigation strategies.
So now they're opening the door to new lockdowns.
They're doing all of this based on the fact that we have a very low level of death in the United States right now from COVID.
Right now, again, I'm going to keep reading you these day-on-day averages because the stats still matter to me.
The day-on-day average of seven-day death in the United States is 320.
320 people approximately die every day in the United States of Alzheimer's.
I'm going to keep saying that because you need to understand what these numbers mean in context.
In the context of COVID, this means we've reduced the death rate in the United States by a factor of approximately 10 since the height of the pandemic.
That is thanks to the vaccines.
And compared to other causes of death in the United States, like for example, heart disease, about 1800 people a day in the United States die of heart disease.
About 300 people a day are currently dying of COVID.
And now they're recommending universal masking again and maybe lockdowns.
Okay, this is madness.
It is not oriented toward reality.
It's just crazy towns.
It's just crazy towns.
And again, if the idea here is that you need a mask mandate in order to hit the peak, let me show you this chart from the UK.
The UK was in the middle of the Delta variant about two weeks before we were.
The UK hit their height about a week ago.
As you can see from this chart, they've been plummeting in the past week.
None of our magical health experts seem to be able to explain any of this.
They don't seem to be able to explain any of this.
So in other words, the methods that are now being undertaken by the Biden administration, by blue states all over the country, they don't make any form of logical sense.
Even if you can see, based on the skimpy data available, even if you can see that breakthrough infections of the vaccinated are capable of higher transmission, that still does not result in universal mask mandates.
It doesn't.
The logical gap is just not bridge. It isn't. Then Joe Biden comes out and he announces this policy. And again, he undermines his own policy because none of this makes any internal logical sense. He starts off by saying breakthrough cases are rare.
Okay, if breakthrough cases are rare, then what in the world are you talking about masking vaccinated for? Here's Joe Biden.
Many of you who are vaccinated are concerned about what's called breakthrough cases. Yes, some fully vaccinated people will still test positive and some will show some symptoms of COVID-19.
That's expected with almost every vaccine there is, for other diseases.
But breakthrough cases remain rare, and almost all are mild cases.
In fact, virtually all hospitalizations and deaths are among the unvaccinated.
Okay, so if that is true, then what are you talking about?
By the way, further note, I mentioned earlier on that a lot of what they're talking about in terms of the vaccinated spreading this thing, and they're talking about Provincetown, Cape Cod, that's party central.
That is like the most efficient method for spreading virus, as Josh Barrow points out.
Nate Silver says, whether it's true or not of Provincetown per se, the bigger problem is that you don't want to make extrapolations from outliers. But that's exactly what the CDC is now doing.
So Joe Biden then continues. He says, even if you're fully vaccinated, you could theoretically have the Delta variant in your system and pass it on to others. The CDC recommends you wear a mask when you're in public and indoors, like work or in a grocery store. That's true for both the vaccinated and the unvaccinated.
Why?
Because even if you've been fully vaccinated and protected from severe illness from COVID-19, you could have the Delta variant in your system and spread it to someone who isn't vaccinated.
Okay, so if that's your chief worry, is that I, the vaccinated person, am going to pass it to you, the unvaccinated person, wouldn't that encourage you, the unvaccinated person, to get the vaccine?
Why?
Joe Biden still has not yet explained why it is a good incentive structure to force the vaccinated to mask up to protect the unvaccinated when the unvaccinated are fully capable of making decisions for themselves.
They are adults and they get to decide whether they want to take the vaccine or not, and it's available to them at any Publix anywhere in the United States.
We'll get to more of this nonsensical policy in just one second.
By the way, it's absolutely going to come back and bite Biden.
If he thinks this is a winner for him, he's totally wrong.
We'll get to more of this in just one second.
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Alrighty, so Joe Biden then lays it out.
He says, you need to wear a mask in order to protect the unvaccinated.
That's why you're going to be wearing a mask, gang.
We need to wear masks to protect each other and to stop the rapid spread of this virus as we work to get more people vaccinated.
And I hope all Americans who live in areas with substantial or high case rates will follow the mask guidance that's being laid down by the CDC.
I certainly will and I have because this is one of those areas in Washington.
Okay, by the way, Rachelle Walensky has been saying the same thing.
She says, quote, in rare occasions, some vaccinated people infected with the Delta variant after vaccination may be contagious and spread the virus to others.
Oh, so we're just going to vacc- Again, you're talking about masking up hundreds of millions of people at this point.
Based on circumstances that have been defined by the CDC director as somewhat rare, the only data that have been presented are a breakout case in Provincetown, In May, you made it sound like the vaccine was the ticket to losing the mask forever.
Even if you accept all that, the incentive structures still make no sense.
So Joe Biden was asked to explain why he changed his standards on post-vaccination masking.
And here he is not being able to explain himself, of course.
In May, you made it sound like a vaccine was the ticket to losing the mask forever.
And it- That is true at the time, because I love the people who are going to understand that getting vaccinated made a gigantic difference.
And what happened was a new variant came along, they didn't get vaccinated, it was spread more rapidly, and people more people were getting sick.
That's the difference.
Okay, well, that's not actually the difference.
The unvaccinated are in just as much danger as they ever were.
The vaccinated are in just as little danger as they ever were.
So actually the calculus did not change.
The only thing that changed here is that everybody panicked.
That's what changed here.
By the way, Biden did say that, right?
He said, if you're vaccinated, unmask.
This was Joe Biden just a couple of months ago.
It's vaxxed or masked.
That, by the way, is a lot more coherent than what he's saying now.
You'll recall the last year, by the way, Joe Biden, it's now been a year since this, Joe Biden said last year, quote, I'm not going to shut down the country.
I'm not going to shut down the economy.
I'm going to shut down the virus.
Oh, really?
Then why won't your White House rule out further lockdowns?
Yesterday, one of the White House press secretaries came out and explained that the White House would not be ruling out further lockdowns.
If scientists come to you at some point down the line and say, it is our opinion that there should be shutdowns and there should be school closures, you would do that?
Well, we listen to, like I said, we listen to the CDC and the expert and their guidance.
The CDC is a body that is very well respected, and again, we follow their guidance.
The CDC is not a body that is well-respected.
It is not well-respected by me.
It is not well-respected by people who watch the CDC.
I do not respect the CDC.
They've changed their guidance 1,000 times, not based on good data, but based on this sort of panicked, squirrel-like insistence that every new outlier case is a rationale for public lockdowns and mask mandates without any sort of actual understanding of how the human mind works or how people act.
This is madness.
It's absolutely crazy.
By the way, even the mandates that are now being announced by Biden, even those don't make any sort of internal logical sense.
So Joe Biden yesterday announced that federal employees are going to have to get vaccinated or they're going to have to test like every week.
So here's what Joe Biden had to say.
Every federal government employee will be asked to attest to their vaccination status.
Anyone who does not attest Or is not vaccinated, will be required to mask no matter where they work, test one or two times a week to see if they've acquired COVID, socially distance, and generally will not be allowed to travel for work.
Okay, so let's just note something.
They said that they're gonna be tested like once a week.
That's completely ineffective.
You test people for COVID once a week, what happens in the intervening week?
What if they test negative on Monday, and then they have COVID on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, or Sunday?
So no, this doesn't make any sense at all.
Like, at all.
But it's not meant to make sense.
It's not meant to be related to reality.
It's meant to create a forever reliance on government with no actual end point.
I've been saying this for weeks at this point.
There is no end goal.
There's no end goal.
If your end goal is zero COVID, it's because you're a fool.
No one seriously believes that zero COVID is a serious goal.
It's not.
To pretend that zero COVID is reachable or attainable is contra all available science at this point.
And yet that seems to be what they're going for.
Because obviously we're not worried about overwhelming the hospitals.
Nobody's even mentioned that.
We're not even worried about getting people availability of the vaccine.
All we're worried about right now is this idea that we have to have zero COVID.
Zero COVID is not a real goal, but it's the only goal that would make any sense of what they're trying to do right now.
Alrighty, so...
The Trust Us Brigade is here and they don't actually provide any rationale for what it is that they are doing.
As Admiral Brett Giroir said on Fox News yesterday, there's no transparency, there's weak data.
Why exactly are we supposed to trust these folks?
My major concern is we had a incredibly important policy announcement by the CDC to recommend mask wearing even for those who are vaccinated, but they have supplied zero data, no transparency, no information upon which we can have a debate.
Why do you think that is?
Why is that?
Because I think they don't really have the data or the data are weak.
Dr. Walensky said, in rare circumstances, a vaccinated person may transmit.
Well, if it's 1%, 0.1%, 0.01%, there's no reason for the mask recommendations, but we don't know because they won't tell us.
Dr. Girard is, of course, former Assistant Secretary for Health in the Trump administration.
Meanwhile, Another doctor on MSNBC, and this really does, I think, summarize the conflict in the country.
This doctor on MSNBC, Dr. Patel, she says that we have to believe Walensky and Fauci.
We have to.
Right?
Or, alternatively, we could check out the data they present, see whether it is weak or strong, and then determine whether they are even recommending anything remotely resembling sensical public policy.
But really, this is what it's come down to.
We have to trust them.
We must.
There's no question that CDC is one of the premier authorities on top of data and science, and we have to believe exactly what Dr. Walensky, Dr. Fauci said when they're seeing concerning signs that people who are fully vaccinated are at a risk of transmitting this virus.
Not getting sick and dying, but transmitting this, especially to half the country that's unvaccinated.
Okay, this is just...
All they want is a continuation.
That's the only rationale here.
They must like the control.
They must love it.
It's all paternalistic.
By the way, I don't think it's any coincidence that Joe Biden has now announced that he wishes Congress to extend the federal eviction moratorium.
The CDC put what is probably an illegal moratorium on eviction of tenants.
I was not aware that the CDC is anywhere granted legislative power to prevent people from evicting tenants who don't pay their rent.
The vaccines have now been widely available since March and April.
We still have prevented people from being evicted from their apartments for not paying rent.
Now Joe Biden wants that extended.
According to the Wall Street Journal, President Biden would have strongly supported a move to further extend the CDC moratorium, scheduled to expire on Saturday.
That option is no longer legally viable after a recent Supreme Court ruling the administration said in a statement by Press Secretary Jen Psaki.
State and local governments have struggled to distribute $47 billion in federal money aimed at helping tenants who can't pay rent because of the pandemic-triggered downturn, leaving many people at risk of being forced out of their homes when the moratorium expires.
Just $3 billion of that aid has even been delivered.
Good news, Joe Biden is going to be shoveling more cash out the door, as we're going to discuss in just one moment.
But the fact that the Biden administration continuously wants these big spending programs, that they need an excuse for it, they need some sort of lever in order to do all of it, is disquieting.
So, the blowback has begun.
I think it is a serious blowback.
I think that people are really not going to stand for this.
In the blue states, they will.
Because in the blue states, masking up has been a sign of compliance.
It has been a sign that you are the gold star A-plus third grade student who brings an apple to the teacher.
Your authorities told you to do something, and you are going to stand and cheer, and you are not going to be the first person to sit down.
That is the attitude that seems prevalent in places like Los Angeles County, which, let me remind you, L.A.
County has a total of 10 million people living in it, and their seven-day rolling death rate is nine.
Is nine.
They've masked up the entire county.
Again, the same thing is going to happen in New York, where the rolling death rate is in single digits.
I guess you're more virtuous.
You're just virtuous.
The amount of virtue is just incredible.
Incredible virtue.
Because if you do what your authoritarian leaders tell you to do, well, this means that you're a very, very virtuous person, obviously.
Well, the blowback is beginning here.
So, in the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi has put forward a mask mandate again, based on nothing.
Last I checked, every single senator in the United States Senate has had the vaccine.
When it comes to the House, a bunch of Republicans have apparently not had the vaccine.
That's on them.
That is their decision.
If they wish to bear the consequences of getting COVID and not having a vaccine, that's their problem.
Because, again, here's the magic of the vaccine.
Once you've had it, you're extremely safe from COVID by all available data, including the new CDC data.
Okay, so Nancy Pelosi announced this.
A bunch of maskless Republicans were like, fine, arrest us.
This is them marching into the House maskless.
And Nancy Pelosi, of course, has threatened to arrest them all.
Which, of course, is not tin-pot dictator kind of stuff.
In any way, shape, or form.
Meanwhile, Kevin McCarthy came out and said these standards that Pelosi is promulgating are nonsensical.
She called them a moron.
And then Tim Ryan, the Democrat from Ohio, did one of his usual sort of barn-burning speeches in which he ripped on McCarthy for mocking the magical mask, the most incredible of all masks.
Somebody in this chamber is coming from a hotspot.
Somebody represents the hotspots.
And they get in a plane, and they fly here, and they interact with all of us.
I just find it absolutely immature and appalling to somehow diminish it to try to score cheap political points.
And that's exactly what we saw a few minutes ago.
That is beneath a minority leader of one of the major political parties in the United States of America.
How dare you mock the mask mandate?
This mask!
This very mask!
Okay, let me explain.
You know what's gonna protect you?
Not the mask.
What's gonna protect you is the vaccine.
That's what's going to protect you.
The vaccine.
Doesn't mean masks don't work.
We don't know how well they work.
End of story.
What we do know is that vaccines do work to prevent death.
And if you choose not to get it, you're an adult.
At one point, like, it really does come down to sort of a... The reason this is broken down left-right is because for so many people on the right, at a certain point, they say, listen, you're an adult.
What you do is on you.
And for the left, it's, we think you're a moron and we're going to control everything that you do.
And even if you do what we say, you're a moron, and we're going to control everything you do.
And if you don't do what we say, you're a moron, and we're going to control everything that you do.
And if you're on the right, you're like, listen, now that the solution's available, you're on your own.
Be an adult.
Make good decisions, gang.
But that is not something the left can ever allow, which is why they are so—they're more adamant to teams this time than they were last time, which is wild.
Okay, we'll get to it.
So Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, who of course is coming under renewed fire because he has said, we're not doing mask mandates in the state of Florida quite properly.
Well, by the way, wildly encouraging vaccines.
And I don't know what the media does about this because DeSantis has been extremely pro-vaccine since the very beginning.
He was one of the best governors in terms of tranching this thing out to the elderly in the state of Florida.
So here's Ron DeSantis yesterday saying, no, we're not gonna do this Faucian dystopia routine.
Floridians are free to choose and all Americans should be free to choose how they govern their affairs, how they take care of themselves and our families, and they should not be consigned to live regardless of which state in the Union Consigned to live in a Fauchian dystopia in which we're governed by the whims of bureaucratic authorities who care little for our freedom, little for our aspirations, and little for our happiness.
No more we can't let it happen going forward.
This is correct.
And that's going to be the choice.
Because I have a feeling this is going to continue.
I put out a poll yesterday on Twitter.
How long is this crap going to continue?
Because really, there's no end point.
We could be down to one case of COVID in the entire United States, and they will still be saying, mask up, because after all, somebody could get infected.
You never know.
There's another variant around the corner.
So the question is, what is the endpoint?
The left has no endpoint.
And so this leads me to believe that this is going to be an ongoing issue for the next couple of years.
This leads me to believe that they are never going to let this sucker go.
Which really, in the end, means that this will turn into... We'll have an election based on it.
2022 may be based on this.
Maybe even 2024.
Alrighty, in just a second, we're going to get to the other issue that is going to be coming up in 2022 and 2024, and that is the faltering economy.
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Alrighty, folks, the CDC, of course, is now recommending that vaccinated individuals wear masks indoors, of course, because this is what we're just gonna do until the end of time.
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Meanwhile, the Biden administration is struggling because the reality of the Biden administration is they need a successful economy in order to ram through their gigantic spending agenda, at least in popular fashion.
Well, the economy is beginning to stagnate.
U.S.
economy?
grew at about 6.5% in Q2.
There's only one problem.
Virtually all economists thought it was going to grow at 8.5%.
And if you recall, just a couple of months ago, they thought it was going to grow in excess of 10%.
So it is not growing at the rate that they want it to grow.
That's not stopping the media from feigning enthusiasm.
You've got CNN Business saying the U.S.
economy in the second quarter expanded at a slower rate than expected, but still its fastest pace since last fall, growing at a seasonally adjusted annualized rate of 6.5%.
Their headline, by the way, at CNN Business is, US economy just posted the largest jump in growth since 2020!
Yeah, that's not the headline.
The headline is not the largest jump in growth since 2020.
The headline is, you missed your mark by 25%.
In terms of real GDP, the economy has now recovered in that it has grown bigger than its pre-pandemic size.
But does anyone feel that the economy is really at that rate?
The answer is no, because GDP is being racked up by government spending.
It's being held up by the amount of government spending that's being done.
The National Bureau of Economic Research designated the pandemic recession as the shortest on record, saying it lasted just two months, March and April of 2020, which is when the shutdowns were.
In normal times, says CNN Business, 6.5% growth would be a reason to celebrate.
It's still pretty good performance, but it's disappointment compared with the 8.5% growth rate economists had forecast.
It was only a little change from the first quarter when the economy grew at an annual rate of 6.3%, which, by the way, is kind of amazing because you'll remember that something happened between the first quarter of this year and the second quarter of this year, namely the mass vaccination of Americans.
And yet nothing is changing, which suggests two things.
One, the Biden administration's constant drumbeat of doom and gloom with regard to the future of the virus and their unwillingness to acknowledge that the pandemic no longer has public health ramifications.
means that people are staying home, and two, when you pay people to stay home and then spend trillions of dollars on nonsensical crap, you end up actually subjecting the U.S.
economy to headwinds that it can't fully overcome.
According to CNN itself, the acceleration in the recovery was spurred by consumer spending, not least spurred by the last round of stimulus checks, as well as the reopening of the economy and continued vaccination.
Consumers spent more on services, particularly on dining out and traveling.
Driven by the same dynamics, measures of inflation rose throughout the spring.
For example, the price index that tracks personal consumption rose to 6.4% in the second quarter.
That was its highest level since 1982.
Since 1982.
Even if you strip out the more volatile items like food and energy, the price index was at 6.1%.
The highest reading since 1983.
And here's the thing, the Federal Reserve cannot, they do not have the stones to actually jack up the interest rates in a way necessary to cut down on the inflation.
They're not going to do it.
Not when the economy is this slow.
If the economy is not faster than this, see if the economy really, really, if we were like 8.5% growth or something, then they could say, listen, we're growing super fast.
Natural economic recovery is happening.
We need to raise the interest rates a little bit to prevent overheating and to prevent price inflation.
Instead, because the economy is growing slower than expected, they are going to continue to rack up quantitative easing.
They're going to continue to jack money into the economy and keep the interest rates at zero out of fear that they are going to sink Joe Biden's economic record here.
Meanwhile, the Democrats are so disconnected from reality that they're worried that Joe Biden isn't spending enough.
According to The Hill, Democrats are now warning that any attempts by moderates to pare down a $3.5 trillion spending package could threaten President Biden's top legislative priority and leave the party empty-handed.
So Joe Biden wants to get everything done in this budget package.
He's got the bipartisan infrastructure bill, the trillion-dollar boondoggle, which is at least better than the $2 trillion boondoggle they were originally proposing.
Now, it's a trillion-dollar boondoggle, which still sucks, but is better than the alternative, presumably.
Then, they have their giant budget package.
That giant budget package, the $3.5 trillion budget package, as you'll recall, has been held up by Kyrsten Sinema in the Senate, as well as Joe Manchin, both of whom look at this and they're saying this is too much money.
Now, you've got Democrats in the Senate saying, we're not going to vote for the infrastructure package if you don't vote for the $3.5 trillion package.
And not just that, Joe Biden now is saying that he wants immigration reform in the budget package, meaning he wants to legalize some 8 to 10 million illegal immigrants in the United States in the budget reconciliation package.
By the way, the parliamentarian hasn't even said if you can do that under budget reconciliation.
The answer is probably not, but who the hell knows?
Progressive Democrats are sounding the alarm after Kyrsten Sinema warned Wednesday she doesn't support the $3.5 trillion price tag for the expansive package Democrats hope to muscle through.
Biden is saying he's basically negotiating with her.
He thinks she'll end up voting for it in the end, but they may have to cut a few things.
Democrats hope to move the legislation on party lines in the Senate with special budgetary rules, but every Democrat, because there are only 50 of them, every Democrat can hold this thing up with one vote.
Progressives are saying they're going to hold up the infrastructure plan unless they get the $3.5 trillion plan.
Bernie Sanders said, it's my absolute conviction, you're not going to have a bipartisan bill unless you have a reconciliation bill of $3.5 trillion.
So as we discussed yesterday, Joe Biden is now stuck between the progressive rock and the moderate hard place.
Right now, the Republicans aren't going to vote in favor of that bipartisan infrastructure plan at all unless the Democrats pare down the $3.5 trillion plan and the progressives won't vote for the bipartisan plan or the budget plan unless they continue to have it at $3.5 trillion.
Sanders says he expects the spending plan would be $3.5 trillion in the Senate, maybe even more in the House.
And Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut adds that any push to decrease the price tag for the spending package would make it hard to get the votes for it.
Man, the Democrats are just cruising for a bruisin' in 2022 on all fronts.
Whether we are talking about these authoritarian lockdown measures, Completely nonsensical.
Or whether we're talking about the vast spending that is resulting in reduced and tamped down economic growth.
They're just cruising for it in 2022.
Which is why they're so focused in, as always, on Trump in January 6th.
Because 2022 is looking to be an ugly year for them.
2024 could be even worse, especially if Kamala Harris is on the ballot.
Alrighty, we'll be back here later today with an additional hour of content.
First, you can't forget to end your week by checking out the Andrew Klavan Show.
Drew's show is every Friday.
He's got an exciting evening planned for you.
So head on over to dailywire.com, 7 p.m.
Eastern, 6 p.m.
Central.
Tune in.
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On today's episode, President Biden addresses immigration and crime, countries around the world loosen their travel restrictions, and Democrats push for student loan forgiveness.
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