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Aug. 2, 2021 - The Ben Shapiro Show

49:20

The 'Experts' Want To Scare The Hell Out Of You. Don't Be Frightened. | Ep. 1309

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	The media declare new COVID panic as the Biden administration tells everyone to mask up again.
	Mayors across the land violate their own COVID mandates and Democrats call for an endless eviction moratorium.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
	Today's show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.
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	Slash Ben will get to all the news in just one moment.
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	Alrighty, so the panic is out there.
	People are panicked.
	It's all over.
	Delta is just like, it's like a brand new virus.
	We're never going back to normal.
	Everybody freak out.
	Except don't freak out.
	And the reason I say not to freak out is because the stats say that you really should not freak out.
	And they say that for a couple of reasons.
	If you look at the United States COVID deaths right now, Day on day, they continue to maintain in somewhere in the 300 to 400 range in terms of seven day rolling average of death in the United States.
	According to the New York Times, the seven day rolling average as of today is 362.
	Once again, about 320 people every day die of Alzheimer's in the United States.
	About 1800 people in the United States die of heart disease every day.
	At the height of the pandemic for the 1,000th time, we are in the 3,000 number, 3 to 4,000 a day dying.
	We've now lowered that mark by about tenfold.
	And yet everyone is still telling you that you ought to panic and you never cease panicking.
	We should freak out.
	Just keep freaking out forever.
	Now, here is your quick reminder.
	If you are vaccinated, you certainly should not be freaking out at this point.
	You should not be coming close to freaking out at this point.
	Mark Levine, who is one of the New York City council members, very hawkish on shutdowns, was promulgating, I would say, bad information during the early days of the pandemic.
	Well, Mark Levine, he tweeted out earlier, and this is correct, among 165 million Americans who have been vaccinated, 99.9% have not tested positive. 0.004% have been hospitalized. 0.001% have died. This is correct.
	If you are vaccinated, the chances that you're going to die from this thing are exorbitantly low.
	Very, very low.
	And in any case, the reality is that the Delta spike that we are seeing right now, which is real, that Delta spike has been mirrored in other countries.
	And what we have seen in other countries, the spike goes away after a couple of weeks.
	In the United Kingdom, for example.
	The British COVID-19 cases are down by 33% over the past week, according to Reuters.
	Quote, Britain has reported 26,144 new cases of COVID-19, government data showed on Saturday, meaning the fall in cases between July 25th and July 31st stood at 33% compared with the previous seven days. A further 71 people were reported as having died within 28 days of a positive test for COVID-19, which means that there's been a slight increase in death, but nothing that you would freak out about to the extent of shutting things down or forcing mask mandates on anyone.
	And meanwhile, over at the New York Magazine, David Wallace-Wells, who again is not a right-winger, writes, The most hopeful and encouraging facts about the Delta surge are even harder to find in the media coverage.
	The first is that, thanks to widespread vaccination of the elderly, However fast this disease spreads, it will ultimately inflict a much, much smaller death toll than earlier waves, because vaccination has probably eliminated 90% or more of the country's total COVID-19 mortality risk.
	Over the weekend, we had 90% of people in the United States above the age of 65 who were vaccinated.
	That is the subgroup most likely to die from COVID.
	So while you are seeing much higher numbers of hospitalizations, hospitalizations in this case, they do not result in death in the same way that they did in January, when a lot of the people who were going to the hospital were much older and much sicker to begin with.
	Right now you're seeing a lot of people who are hospitalized between the ages of 20 and 40.
	That's not good.
	But the ratio of those people to the number of people who are going to die is a much smaller number.
	It's a much smaller number in terms of the number of people who are going to die out of the number hospitalized now than it was back in January.
	Also, as David Wallace-Wells points out, in the countries with roughly comparable vaccination rates to the United States, the surge has already peaked and begun a rapid decline, suggesting that such a turn here is possible or even quite likely within a few weeks.
	In the UK, the Delta surge began in mid-May and peaked in mid-July.
	In the Netherlands, it began at the beginning of July and has already peaked.
	If the US followed the British trajectory, our Delta surge, which began about a month ago, would peak by September 1st.
	If it followed the Dutch course, even sooner, perhaps even imminently.
	And while there still may be some rise in deaths in both the UK and the Netherlands, given the lag between infection and ultimate outcomes, in neither country have deaths reached even one-fifteenth of the level of the local winter surge.
	In the UK, they had almost as many new daily cases as they had had in January, in the Netherlands even more.
	So in other words, when people show you these stats from Florida, where you're seeing, like, record new cases, yes, that is among young and healthy people, which means that a subset of those people will be hospitalized, a much smaller subset than it was when they were older and sicker, and a smaller subset of those people will die.
	So right now, when you look at Florida and its big numbers, you're seeing the media prop up the narrative, by the way, that Florida is the worst place on earth.
	Everyone is dying in Florida.
	I'm looking at the Florida death stats right now, and the Florida death stats continue to be a little bit higher than they were, but the seven-day rolling average right now is 58.
	At the height of this pandemic, the seven-day rolling average, this is back in both August and also in January, the seven-day rolling average was like 250.
	So the rolling death rate right now is about one quarter to one fifth of what it was at the height of the pandemic.
	And it is also likely that we are already seeing many states peak.
	So what you're starting to see is all the people who are proclaiming mask mandates are going to claim early credit for lowering the curve or for the numbers peaking.
	We're already starting to see a peak apparently.
	Right now you can check out the charts and what you'll see is that state on state, for example, in Missouri, you've already seen the R peak.
	R is the number of people who are being infected by each person who has COVID.
	It already peaked like a couple of days ago in Missouri, in Nevada, in Alabama, in Florida.
	If Florida is reaching its peak right now, it's already starting to level off, which means that in pretty short order, just hold your horses, guys, in a couple of weeks, the Delta variant peak is probably going to be over, at least in the states that have already had it.
	Now, you may see another Delta variant peak in areas like New York.
	Why?
	Well, one of the reasons is because in Florida right now, it is extremely hot.
	It's like 95 degrees and very humid.
	Everybody is going indoors.
	We saw this last summer also.
	Remember the summer of panic last summer?
	Everyone in Florida's gonna die!
	Look at the terrible numbers!
	Georgia!
	Texas!
	Florida!
	And yes, California, because California is really hot right now.
	And then what we're likely to see as winter sets in, is we're likely to see the numbers go way down in Florida, because everybody goes outside in Florida, because it's really nice, like 75 degrees and breezy.
	And then in New York, where it gets really cold, people are likely to go inside.
	And this is likely to be the case for quite a while, because if COVID is still out there, when people are indoors transmitting it to each other, then likely, Those people are going to be in areas where they're indoors more often.
	In Florida, nobody's outdoors right now because it's way too hot.
	But in New York, everybody is outdoors because it's actually much nicer in New York right now.
	None of this ought to be a shock.
	In other words, nothing is new.
	The situation you are seeing right now is that the virus is just more transmissible.
	That's all.
	Should this scare the hell out of you?
	Listen, you should be more scared than you were earlier, before Delta, if you're unvaccinated, because you're more likely to catch it now.
	Before, it seemed like there were three options.
	The three options were get vaccinated, don't get vaccinated and don't get COVID, or don't get vaccinated and get COVID.
	Now, the second option has been removed.
	So basically, you're going to get COVID or you're going to get the vaccine.
	Immunity comes one of two ways.
	That is the likely possibility right now.
	But what you're seeing from the media is outsized panic that is unjustifiable because they are attempting to push national mask mandates and renewed lockdowns.
	And also to blame again, the blame of like the media want this.
	They desperately want this.
	Again, the number of cases, COVID-19 cases in Britain already spiked and it's already on the downslope.
	And yet you're still seeing pieces from CNBC saying things like health experts fear unlocked England could become an incubator for new COVID variants.
	Again, so long as COVID exists on the planet, there will be the possibility of new variants of COVID.
	Just like every year, there are new variants of the flu.
	This is why the flu vaccine, by the way, is not nearly as effective as the COVID vaccine.
	Thank God the variants of COVID have responded to the vaccine in ways that the flu is really like a basket of viruses.
	And so usually the flu vaccine is only like, it's somewhere between 30 and 70% effective.
	It really depends because basically the flu vaccine is developed by scientists.
	They try and guess which variant of flu is going to be most likely to affect people.
	Some years they hit.
	Some years they miss.
	With COVID, thank God, this vaccine has been extremely durable at preventing infection and hospitalization and death.
	Less so with infection now, but certainly with hospitalization and death.
	But the media are covering England as though England is going to be a petri dish.
	It's going to be a disaster.
	We can't let- They're always finding new excuses for why they can't just let you alone.
	Why they can't just let you live your life.
	And the excuses suck.
	They do.
	Okay?
	I'm vaccinated.
	I made a choice as an adult.
	My wife is vaccinated.
	My parents are vaccinated.
	I encourage others to get vaccinated.
	I've been doing so for months.
	You made your choice, too.
	You get to live with it.
	You're an adult as well.
	But our public health experts are constantly looking for new ways to lock you down, new ways to control you, and that is because they have made an unstated goal with regard to COVID.
	Their goal is completely unrealistic.
	It's nonsense.
	Everyone in the scientific community knows it's nonsense.
	They have made an unstated goal of zero COVID.
	There will not be zero COVID.
	It was not gonna happen last year.
	It's not gonna happen this year.
	It's not going to happen ever.
	The reason that it is not going to happen ever is because unlike smallpox, which killed one third of people, it affected.
	And so everybody had the incentive to get vaccinated.
	And unlike other diseases, which transmit a lot more slowly, this one transmits super fast and also is more deadly than the flu for the unvaccinated, but it's not so unbelievably deadly like the bubonic plague or something that it requires everybody to get vaccinated.
	It's also very age striated.
	OK, so what that means is that it is likely that this will continue to be a seasonal virus for basically as long as we are now alive.
	OK, so that every scientist agrees on this, by the way, there are zero serious scientists who agree that zero COVID is a serious goal.
	And yet our public health experts, because all they do day in and day out, I understand they have one mission.
	And this is why single variable analysis sucks.
	If anybody ever tells you that they understand the world based on a single variable, you know they're lying.
	The world is more complex than that.
	But public health experts have one single variable they focus in on, and that is preventing death.
	They don't care about your freedom.
	They don't care about your economic liberty.
	They don't care about your prosperity.
	They care about you not dying.
	Okay, well, you in your life make balances on all these issues all the time.
	You go out your front door every day knowing you could die.
	You get in your car every day knowing you could die.
	You go into the office knowing you could die.
	You know, the chances of that are really low.
	And you also understand that the countervailing possibility of you sitting in your house and not making money and not engaging in the world and not enjoying your family and not enjoying your friends, those possibilities suck.
	And so you make those decisions every day.
	You weigh all various competing factors and then you live your life.
	Public health experts, they don't do that.
	They don't care about any of those other issues.
	They don't.
	All they care about is, quote unquote, preventing death.
	And that makes them sound virtuous.
	But actually what it makes them is horses with blinders on running directly into a tree.
	Because it's not important whether the tree is there or not.
	What's important is that they stay on the path.
	And so what you end up with is this unstated assumption that they're going to get to zero COVID, which of course is never going to happen.
	It is not happening.
	They will not be getting to zero COVID.
	It also leads them, by the way, to ignore all sorts of relevant data in pursuit of zero COVID.
	Like, for example, they're taking this Provincetown situation as though this ought to be indicative of public health for everyone else.
	Provincetown is the case the CDC mentioned as how vaccinated people are passing this thing at extremely high rates and they're getting super infected.
	There's only one problem with that, which is that Provincetown is a wild statistical outlier.
	In Provincetown, 85% of the people who got COVID were male.
	That right there should tell you it's a statistical outlier.
	Why?
	The reason is because Provincetown, apparently over July 4th weekend, was basically gay party zone because Provincetown is a very gay town.
	And a lot of people, according to gay rights experts, were basically going up there and macking on each other.
	It is very likely that you're going to pass COVID.
	Much more likely you're going to pass COVID if you have a... even if you're vaccinated.
	If you are swapping spit with people, then if you're not swapping spit with people, it's not the same thing as going to a restaurant or sitting six feet from somebody else in an office.
	In any case, what this has led the public health establishment to do In their single variable analysis is to treat this as a renewed crisis in which everybody is going to die.
	We'll get to that in just one second.
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	Alrighty, so again, panic, panic, everybody panic.
	Now, I will say again, the media coverage here is not just what is driving the panel.
	We'll get to the media coverage in just one second.
	But it is our public health establishment, because they engage in one single factor analysis.
	How do we prevent death?
	And that is not how any human being lives their life.
	If all you cared about was preventing death, all you would do is eat vegetables and live in your house and go on the treadmill, and that's it.
	Those are all the things that you would do every day.
	And it would suck.
	It would be terrible.
	Nobody lives their life this way.
	And yet, and yet, our public health experts, they say, you know, we have to treat this like a brand new virus.
	No, we 100% do not.
	Here's the NIH director, Francis Collins, saying this is indeed a brand new virus.
	Delta is spreading.
	We know it's extremely contagious.
	And certainly in some parts of the country, like Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, it is reaching very high levels.
	And we are now once again seeing case levels per day closing in on 100,000, which we haven't seen since February.
	So this is really a different virus than last year.
	And everything we learned about COVID a year ago, you got to sort of hit the reset button on now how we need to react to it.
	No, you don't!
	For the vaccinated, nearly nothing has changed.
	For the unvaccinated, the only thing that has changed is you're more likely to get it.
	That's it.
	Those are all the things that we have learned about the Delta variant.
	I just did that in less than 10 seconds.
	And yet, apparently, according to our public health experts, because if they get to reset the clock, they get to do this all over again.
	And it's been so much fun for them.
	You didn't know who Frances Collins was until this pandemic.
	You didn't know who the hell Rochelle Walensky was.
	No one had ever heard of Dr. Anthony Fauci outside of a very select circle.
	But now these people are on the cover of magazines.
	Now these people get to do what they've always wanted to do, which is lecture you.
	Bureaucrats love lecturing you.
	Unelected bureaucrats.
	But this is the thing.
	When you define dictatorship, folks, when you define dictatorship, it is people who are unelected telling you what to do with your life without you having any control over that.
	Thank God we have a federalist system where certain states are saying no to this.
	But these people have dictatorial tendencies for sure.
	Okay, so Dr. Francis Collins also said, you know what?
	He's recommending that business locations bar people who are not vaccinated.
	Now, this is public health stupidity.
	The reason this is public health stupidity, really, is because if you bar people who are unvaxxed from particular locations, you'll have locations where everybody is vaxxed, right?
	But the vaxxed are protected.
	The vaxxed are not dying from this in any sort of significant numbers at all.
	Okay, so what you are now doing is you are forcing all the unvaccinated to be in a place with each other.
	To understand how segregation works, if you segregate one half of the population that is vaccinated and the other half of the population that is unvaccinated, what is your goal here?
	Is your goal to prevent death among the unvaccinated?
	Because if you actually want to prevent death among the unvaccinated, you have them hang out with the vaccinated, right?
	My whole family is vaccinated.
	If somebody from our office comes over and is unvaccinated, they are much safer than if they are in a bar with a bunch of unvaccinated people.
	If they are there with a bunch of unvaccinated people, they are much more likely to have a super spreader event.
	So this makes no sense at all.
	But here is Francis Collins recommending it anyway.
	Do you think, as a public health measure, it would be good for more businesses to require vaccine credentials in order to have vaccinated customers?
	As a public health person who wants to see this pandemic end, yes.
	I think anything we can do to encourage reluctant folks to get vaccinated, because they'll want to be part of these public events, that's a good thing.
	Ridiculous.
	I'm sorry, ridiculous.
	Also, Francis Collins, he adds, you know what, we should make the vaccinated mask because if you really want to pressure people to say, if you want to say people should have like a wonderful life, a wonderful free life, the best thing to do is tell them to get a vaccine and they can live exactly the same way they were living when they were unvaccinated.
	Makes perfect sense.
	Again, this is all self-contradictory nonsense.
	There's Francis Collins saying something that makes no sense.
	Vaccinated people are capable of getting the virus in their nose and throat, and they do seem to have high enough levels of virus that they might be contagious.
	And hence the reason, if you're in a community where this virus is spreading, which is about 75% of counties right now, it is prudent to put on a mask, even if you're vaccinated, just in case you might be somebody who's currently spreading it.
	What in the world?
	What in the actual world?
	I mean, no, no, because guess what?
	Everyone in the country has had the opportunity to get the vaccine.
	End of story.
	And despite all the scare stories about how children are wildly affected by COVID, the statistics prove that this is not the case.
	Overall, kids are significantly less likely to be hospitalized or die from COVID than any other subgroup of the population by a long shot.
	By a really, really, really long shot.
	And yet here is Francis Collins saying he doesn't understand why Ron DeSantis is stopping people from masking in schools.
	And again, the real reason that you are trying to mask up kids is to prevent them from infecting their teachers.
	All of whom, last I checked, are adults who have had the opportunity to get the vaccine.
	Here's Francis Collins saying stuff that is not based in data.
	Well, I don't understand the ban.
	Certainly, this seems like something local officials ought to be able to decide based on their community's circumstance.
	And we do know that kids are capable of getting pretty sick.
	We've lost about 400 children who have died from COVID-19 since this all started.
	And kids can also get long COVID where they aren't maybe that sick with the acute illness but then end up months later with difficulties with brain fog and fatigue that interferes with their school performance.
	So this is not to be just dismissed as a zero risk.
	I'm sorry this is just absurd.
	It's absurd!
	Okay, as Carol Markowitz points out in the New York Post, there's a reason much of Europe didn't mask kids under age 12 at all.
	It isn't that they care about their kids less than we do.
	Here in a country that starts masking at the insane age of two, in fact, it shows Europeans care about their kids' development so much they won't force them to play bit parts in a grand psychodrama.
	That is correct.
	Okay, but this is a recapitulation of what it means to be a free human being driven by our public health establishment at this point.
	That's what this is.
	And they're making perfectly clear they never want to go back to normal.
	Here is the Associate Dean of Brown University Public School of Health on CNN.
	Her name is Megan Ranney saying we're never going back to pre-pandemic reality ever.
	This is what they would love.
	They would love this.
	Can we ever go back to a pre-pandemic reality?
	We are never going to go back to a pre-pandemic reality and I do agree that we do have to become comfortable with the fact that this virus is going to be sticking around.
	Our goal is to decrease severe illness, hospitalization, and death.
	But there are still some things that we don't really know.
	We don't know how much this novel variant, the Delta variant, affects children.
	It is our responsibility to keep them safe until they can get vaccinated And it's our responsibility to stop these surges while there are still so many who are unvaccinated.
	No, it isn't.
	These are adults, and your talk about kids is unrooted in the data.
	Not rooted in the... We're never going back, but that's the goal.
	The goal is never go back to normal, because you know what?
	In normal circumstances, that lady wouldn't be on TV.
	In normal circumstances, you wouldn't know any of these people's names.
	In normal circumstances, you would be free and living your life.
	They don't like that, so they're not gonna let you go back to normal.
	Some of us don't listen to that, because guess what?
	I've been back to normal for four months.
	So has my entire family.
	Since we got vaccinated, back to normal.
	End of story.
	Most Americans feel that way.
	Public health officials combined with Democrats are courting a real backlash here.
	And we'll get to more of this in just one second.
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	Okay, so all of this has to do with a public health.
	Rethinking of the way we all ought to live our life.
	And this was stated nowhere better over the weekend than Dr. Anthony Fauci, the great and sainted, he who guards St.
	Peter's pearly gates, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the greatest doctor in all of human history, never flip-flopped on a single issue except for every single issue, has held more positions on every single issue in the pandemic than the Kama Sutra does with regard to sexual positions.
	Here is Dr. Anthony Fauci now explaining That you need to mask up.
	And the reason you need to mask up, even if you're vaccinated, is because let's say that you're vaccinated.
	And let's say everyone around you has had the opportunity to get vaccinated.
	You are encroaching on someone else's right not to get sick.
	I wasn't aware that someone else has a right not to get sick.
	Who guarantees this right?
	Should we all lock ourselves in our homes to prevent this from happening?
	What is somebody else's right not to get sick?
	Especially from people who don't know if they have the virus.
	We're not talking about somebody who's out there coughing and spitting.
	We're talking about somebody who, for all intents and purposes, is not sick.
	You have a right not to be sick from them, says Dr. Anthony Fauci.
	Interesting.
	Interesting.
	Here we go.
	A person's individual, individual decision to not wear a mask, not only impacts them, because if they get infected, even though they say it's my decision, if I get infected, I'll worry about that.
	But the fact is, if you get infected, even if you are without symptoms, you very well may infect another person.
	Okay, so, here's the thing.
	There may have been a certain logic to this particular position last year.
	When there was no vaccine, when there was no way to protect yourself, once N95s were widely available, this stopped being the case.
	Once N95s, which are very productive, apparently against transmission of the virus, once those were available, if you really wanted to be protected, you wore an N95.
	Okay, put that aside.
	Forget about the masking for a second.
	Now, everyone in the United States has had the opportunity to get a vaccine.
	In fact, the vast majority of people who are seriously vulnerable have gotten the vaccine, meaning everyone above the age of 65.
	90% of all Americans above the age of 65 have gotten the vaccine.
	He is now suggesting that I, the vaccinated person, Who did my due diligence, did my duty, got the vaccine.
	And it is now my responsibility, even if I am completely asymptomatic, to wear a mask because you have a right not to be sick.
	Okay, this means masking forever.
	There's no limiting principle at all.
	At all.
	Because it turns out that people are constantly getting sick from each other.
	My kids, in a normal circumstance, are constantly coming home with a cold.
	They're constantly coming home sick with something.
	This is what it means to be a child, right?
	Basically classrooms are giant petri dishes of kids getting each other sick.
	Do my kids have a right to be free of illness?
	When people don't know they are transmitting it?
	I'm unaware of this right.
	But once you establish this right, there has to be a gatekeeper.
	And who is that gatekeeper?
	Hmm.
	Who would own the power to tell you what to do on a daily basis?
	Why wouldn't it be Anthony Fauci?
	Wouldn't it be Rochelle Walensky?
	Wouldn't it be all of these people?
	Now, the media have glommed onto this with alacrity, and it's been fun to watch members of the White House angry at the media for upplaying the threat of the virus.
	This has been happening a lot.
	So, for example, the New York Times had a headline last week that is just inaccurate, right?
	It's just alarmist crap.
	The headline was, Okay, but that really wasn't the headline that they put out on Twitter.
	The headline they put out on Twitter was breaking news.
	The Delta variant is as contagious as chickenpox and may be spread by vaccinated people as easily as the unvaccinated, an internal CDC report said.
	Okay, that's just misinformation.
	That is not true.
	The reason it is not true is because vaccinated people are infected far less often than people who are unvaccinated.
	So the New York Times just puts out a false tweet.
	Okay, this actually led members of the Biden administration to yell at the New York Times.
	I've noticed that tweet has not been taken down.
	That tweet is still up over at Twitter.
	They've not been in any way cracked down on for misinformation.
	However, Sky Australia was taken completely, they were suspended from YouTube.
	They were suspended from YouTube supposedly for promulgating misinformation.
	What exactly was the misinformation?
	They suggested that mask mandates and lockdowns in Australia have not been a successful strategy and YouTube took them down.
	So, the way this works is that if you are super-duper alarmist in your misinformation, then it gets to stay up.
	If, however, you are not alarmist in your actual correct information, you may get taken down anyway.
	Now, here's the thing.
	We have set up a society at this point where the elites are not bound by any of this.
	I've seen this over and over and over.
	We saw experts in the UK who would recommend that everybody mask up and stay in their homes, but they had to meet their lover on the side.
	It was very important.
	And so they just broke quarantine and broke protocol.
	We got Chris Cuomo lecturing everybody on the importance of how to act during this pandemic while simultaneously covering up for his brother's malfeasance and also leaving quarantine in order to go check out a house that he was building.
	And now, over the weekend, we saw a wide variety of Democrats engaging in COVID hypocrisy.
	So, for example, Muriel Bowser decided that it was deeply important just hours before the mask mandate went into place to go take an unmasked photo with Dave Chappelle.
	I mean, hey, when you have the opportunity to take a photo with Dave Chappelle, COVID guidelines go by the wayside.
	According to the Washington Examiner, Washington, D.C.
	Mayor Muriel Bowser got in a maskless photo with comedian Dave Chappelle before her mandate requiring face coverings went into effect on Saturday.
	John Falsiccio, the district's deputy mayor for planning and economic development, tweeted a photo Friday of himself, Bowser, Chappelle, and two others together inside a room.
	Chappelle, a native of the district, performed at The Anthem, a local entertainment venue, to a sold-out crowd.
	The venue announced ahead of the show masks were required to be worn at all times, although it's unclear where exactly the photo was taken.
	Bowser had announced on Thursday that effective on 5 a.m.
	Saturday, every person older than 2 must wear a mask indoors regardless of vaccination status.
	But apparently, that no longer applied to Muriel Bowser.
	Right?
	That Muriel Bowser... She's special.
	She's a special.
	And that means that we don't have to worry about that, by the way.
	So, here's the thing.
	Muriel Bowser is acting like a normal person should act.
	She's vaccinated.
	She's safe.
	She's acting normally in her life.
	But she's preaching that everybody else, including the vaccinated, needs to mask up.
	Then over the weekend, she also hosted a large wedding, maskless, After the mandate went into place, there is some video of Muriel Bowser presiding over a wedding.
	This is outdoors.
	She's still very, very close to people.
	And then, of course, they moved indoors and she was taking photos of people.
	Invested in me as mayor of Washington, D.C., which will someday be the 51st state.
	I now pronounce you husband and wife.
	OK, it's not going to be the 51st state and also I noticed that After this, she then went inside and it was at a five-star hotel in Adams Morgan.
	And everybody inside was dancing maskless.
	I noticed.
	Really solid stuff.
	Bowser's office sent Fox 5 a statement that said, Because I'm looking at the pictures right now, and I'm noticing that there are a lot of people who are not masked indoors.
	Wow.
	I mean, so disastrous.
	So terrible.
	By the way, Barack Obama is planning a birthday bash.
	He's planning his 60th birthday.
	Hundreds of guests on Martha's Vineyard.
	Now, I've been told that large scale gatherings are a danger to us and others.
	That even with masks, I mean, let's be frank, people can pass this thing.
	We have been told.
	But Barack Obama's birthday party is different.
	It's like a George Floyd protest or something last summer.
	It is so important that COVID no longer applies.
	Francis Collins literally said, if you're talking about a small party like I might have in my house for six or eight people who are all fully vaccinated, I don't believe we need to put on masks to be next door to each other.
	But if there were 100 people, and of course, how are you really going to be sure about people's vaccination status?
	Apparently, there will be some safety measures put in place.
	Obama officials did not say whether guests will be required to wear masks.
	They are holding the party at the former First Family's $12 million home, which sits on 30 oceanfront acres.
	It's good to be an ex-president of the United States.
	Steven Spielberg will show up.
	Pearl Jam is set to play.
	Obviously, these people are treating the pandemic with all of the grave care that they say that we should treat it with.
	Also, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who you'll remember very early on in the pandemic, really, really needed a haircut.
	And so she violated her pandemic protocols to go get a haircut.
	She held a music festival in Chicago, Lollapalooza.
	She also went and visited it, apparently.
	She actually attended it.
	And she was caught with her mask off while hanging with the celebrities.
	Here is a picture of Lollapalooza over the weekend.
	Do you see a mask?
	Anywhere in the crowd?
	Anywhere?
	Euler?
	Euler?
	Did you see any masks?
	Nope.
	Not seeing any masks, are you?
	Weird.
	Look at that.
	People all crammed, all close together.
	Not masked.
	Look at this.
	I mean, this is all COVID safe, though, because after all, lots of lefties go to Lollapaloozas, so, you know, it's fine.
	It's probably fine.
	Probably nothing to worry about, right?
	Definitely not a super spreader event.
	This, by the way, is indoors, and you can see a lot of people unmasked.
	So that's great.
	Chicago Tribune reporter Gregory Pratt said, quote, So that is very solid stuff right there.
	It's very, very good.
	Really, really nice.
	200 per day, Mayor Lori Lightfoot is moving forward with plans to bring 100,000 a day to Grant Park for Lollapalooza.
	So that is very solid stuff right there.
	It's very, very good.
	Really, really nice.
	Three days of music euphoria with a huge maskless crowd as described by Lori Garrett, who is a person who writes for the Center on Foreign Relations.
	Again, it doesn't apply to them.
	It doesn't apply to them because they're special.
	They're special.
	Again, here's the reality.
	Everybody should act how they want.
	They're adults now.
	You want to get a vaccine?
	Get a vaccine.
	You don't want to get a vaccine?
	I think you're wrong.
	You should get a vaccine.
	But if you don't, that's on you.
	If you don't get COVID and you end up in the hospital, that's also on you.
	But There's just no interest on the left in allowing this pandemic to end.
	Because for them, the pandemic ending is zero COVID, because they understand zero COVID will never be achieved.
	And because zero COVID will never be achieved, this means they will have total control, particularly over policy.
	We're gonna get to that in just one second.
	First, let us talk about the fact that you need to constantly be upgrading the people who work at your company.
	According to Forbes, gyms, nail salons, hotels, mom pop stores and more are all set to go on an epic hiring spree in the coming months to meet the pent up demand for all of these services.
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	ZipRecruiter is indeed the smartest way to hire.
	Well, as the CDC continues to flip-flop on mask mandates and encourages the current administration to crack down on Americans' freedoms, public trust in our institutions continues to decline.
	It should, because what we are watching is the authoritarian moment.
	Hey, leftists have taken over nearly every major institution in American life, but we can fight back.
	The first step, go out and get a copy of my book.
	The Authoritarian Moment is now available everywhere that you buy books.
	It is a national bestseller already.
	Pick up the book.
	It is not merely a roadmap for how the left took over these institutions.
	It is also about how to fight back.
	The Authoritarian Moment.
	It's now available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, any other major bookseller.
	So go get your copy right now.
	Leave a five-star review to let others know that this book is worth their time as well.
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	You are listening to the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.
	Now there's still a lot of talk these days about institutional distrust, particularly in the scientific community.
	I wonder why.
	Well, maybe it's because our scientific community has gone completely political, like overtly political.
	According to WebMD, sex should be removed as a legal designation on the public part of birth certificates, according to the American Medical Association.
	That's exciting stuff.
	They say that requiring it can lead to discrimination and unnecessary burden on individuals whose current gender identity does not align with their designation at birth.
	Namely, when they register for school or sports, adopt, get married, or request personal records. A person's sex designation would still be submitted to the U.S. standard certification of live birth for medical, public health, and statistical use only. But it's not important anymore. We shouldn't actually put on your birth certificate which sex you are, says the AMA. Yes, I wonder why we don't trust our scientific establishment the way we used to. I mean, aside from the fact that they botched COVID in every way it is possible to botch COVID.
	This is why it's amazing to me when people treat all the scientific institutions as though they are the same.
	Nope!
	Big Pharma did an amazing job with COVID.
	You know what an unbelievably crappy job?
	Public health establishment.
	Unbelievably crappy job.
	But here's the good news.
	If you're a person who loves government actors in control of your life, they are always willing to take more control of your life.
	So over the weekend, the unconstitutional federal eviction protections put forward by the CDC expired.
	So there was a ruling last month by the Supreme Court 5-4.
	It said that the CDC was allowed to create federal eviction moratoria, which is insane, by the way.
	You have an unelected bureaucracy that is simply allowed to declare that no one in the country can be evicted from their home for failure to pay rent.
	That's particularly insane at a time when the United States Congress was blowing out the spending to the tune of $7 trillion last year.
	So the only people who didn't get in on that were the people who actually were owed rent.
	Instead, you were just supposed to absorb the entire cost of running the apartment building and doing all the upkeep without anybody paying rent because there was a federal eviction moratorium.
	Well, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who is the deciding vote in that case, also said in his majority decision that It was pretty clear to him that the only reason that this was constitutional in any way is because it was already coming to its end, its natural terminus, on July 31st.
	And if Congress wished to extend a federal moratorium on evictions, they'd actually have to act.
	Well, now Democrats are very upset about this.
	They're very upset that people have to start paying their rent again.
	Now, I've noticed that these same Democrats are claiming that the economy is roaring back.
	That people are getting jobs at record rates.
	They're claiming the economy is now bigger than it was before the pandemic.
	So why are they still pushing for a federal moratorium on evictions?
	Other than landlords are bad, even though they absorb all the costs.
	I mean, honestly, you want to create a perverse incentive for people to build new apartment buildings and lower the cost of housing.
	This would be about as good a perverse incentive as I can imagine.
	The reason that people don't build apartment buildings is if they don't believe they can make a profit by renting out those apartment buildings.
	If you can randomly shut down rent, why in the world would anyone invest in residential real estate for rental governed by the federal government?
	Vox.com, for example, is very upset that it's August 1st and rent is due.
	That's a big change for many Americans who have been unable to pay rent but were protected from eviction by a federal moratorium.
	Now those protections are gone.
	Last month, the moratorium was already on borrow time.
	The Supreme Court had warned it would not extend rent for protection past the end of July.
	This changes a lot for renters who now have to reckon with their landlords, some of whom have not received regular rent for almost a year.
	Renters are now required to pay any missed payments.
	And in some states, the landlord is owed late fees for any late payments since the moratorium was enacted.
	Utilities are a bit of a gray area.
	Generally, if the landlord is responsible for paying for a certain utility, in most cases, they're not permitted to turn it off.
	So, Democrats don't want to work out some sort of repayment plan here?
	Instead, they just want a further moratorium eviction.
	Instead of them saying, listen, there's some people who have racked up back rent.
	They're only getting back in the workforce now.
	And sure, we paid them a lot of money to stay home, to pay the rent.
	But what we really should do is maybe we'll like trench them back into paying regular rent by basically saying they have a course of six months to pay back their back rent.
	Instead of doing that, The Democrats have decided, no, no, no, we need to push for a further moratorium on evictions.
	Now, the cheapest way to do this, if you're Nancy Pelosi, is never to pass anything.
	So Nancy Pelosi...
	I mean, this is the most cynical political move I can imagine, really.
	She's the Speaker of the House of Representatives.
	And instead of her saying, I want to pass a new piece of legislation extending moratoriums on evictions, instead she tweeted out, the CDC has the power to extend the eviction moratorium.
	As they double down on masks, why wouldn't they extend the moratorium in light of Delta variants?
	And the answer is they don't have the power.
	The Supreme Court literally said last month they don't have the power to do that.
	Pelosi doesn't want to do it herself.
	Instead, she's trying to throw it on the White House and the CDC.
	Meanwhile, Alexander Ocasio-Cortez is saying, no, no, no, let's do it here in the house, right?
	Let's extend the more, I mean, indefinitely.
	Why not?
	Free rent for everybody for all time.
	There's a couple of contributing factors here.
	We have governors who are also not getting this emergency rental assistance out in time, which is forcing this extension, what we would like, an extension of the moratorium.
	The fact of the matter is that the problem is here.
	The House should reconvene and call this vote and extend the moratorium.
	There's about 11 million people that are behind on their rent at risk of eviction.
	That's one out of every six renters.
	Okay, so we should extend it indefinitely.
	Maxine Waters is on board with Nancy Pelosi because she too is a sort of authoritarian.
	She always wants the White House to just do stuff without any sort of congressional mandate.
	Here she was on CNN saying that Biden should just do it himself.
	We thought that the White House was in charge and we know that Kavanaugh over at the Supreme Court had said that they did not think the President had the authority to use executive power in order to extend the moratorium.
	However, I think the President should not have taken an opinion from one of the members of the Supreme Court.
	He should have gone forward with an executive order to expand Uh, and to extend the moratorium and then let whatever and whomever wanted to file a lawsuit or whatever they want to do to come after and challenge that opinion.
	But the president should have moved on it.
	Meanwhile, Elizabeth Warren over in the Senate, she's doing her best Bernie Sanders routine.
	She says, yes, let's stop all evictions.
	Again, the amount of power these people wish to wield in the American economy and over your life should scare the living hell out of you.
	And the fact that they think they can just write blank checks because the United States is so much stronger than other countries, that lasts only as long as the United States is stronger than other countries.
	And she's a proponent of Elizabeth Warren.
	It's amazing how Elizabeth Warren has shifted just as a human being.
	I knew her like a little bit over at Harvard Law School.
	That was back in the days where she was writing things like The Two Income Trap, a really interesting book about ways to prevent people from getting caught in sort of a spiral of having to earn more in order to buy real estate and stuff.
	She used to actually be very much in favor of, for example, school choice.
	Well, now Elizabeth Warren is just a Bernie Sanders progressive for no reason other than she still has presidential aspirations at whatever old age she is at this point.
	Here's Elizabeth Warren saying we should stop all evictions.
	The Delta variant is more contagious, threatening to spread faster among the half of the country that remains unvaccinated.
	Needlessly evicting families would risk escalating our public health crisis.
	The CDC understood that reality when it issued an eviction moratorium in September.
	The agency was clear, and I want to quote the language they used, housing stability helps protect health.
	It's right.
	They need the pandemic to last forever.
	It's the only excuse they have for spending us into oblivion.
	It's the only excuse they have for dampening the future growth of the economy and blowing out the debt and making American credit worthiness questionable.
	The only excuse they have is that you might die of COVID.
	There's only one problem.
	Vaccines are successful.
	And if you choose not to get the vaccine, that's your problem at this point.
	That is your decision at this point.
	You're an adult human being.
	But Democrats don't wish to treat you as an adult human being because they wish to rule your life.
	And yes, every benefit that the government hands you comes with the string attached which is they get to run you.
	Okay, the government is just like the mafia.
	They give you the loan, they now run you.
	It is that simple.
	There is no such thing as a free lunch, of course.
	And the fact that the government hands you benefits, like a federal eviction moratorium, comes with the proviso they can lock you in your home and force you to mask whenever they damn well please.
	Because after all, the great threat of COVID mandates that they control every aspect of your life, from how you raise your kid, to whether your kid can go to school, to whether you can go to work, to whether you can open your business, to whether you can appear in public without a mask after having been vaccinated.
	This is totalitarian control of the American economy, of the American individual.
	It's a complete recasting of individual rights along the back of a pandemic that is already waning.
	Again, the stats demonstrate we are now at death rates on a daily basis that are about the same as Alzheimer's on a daily basis in the United States.
	They will not let this go.
	And here's the scary part.
	Because y'all went along with it, because people continue to go along with it, particularly in blue states, because Americans went along with this, except in some of the red states.
	Because of that, the only question is, when do they do this next?
	Because eventually, the pandemic, people will accept that it has waned.
	But how long will it be before the Democrats declare another emergency?
	How long will it be before the Democrats decide that they need to lock you in your house, or seize control of your business, or do something to take control of your life?
	Because there is some emergency so grave that it requires their tender mercies.
	It requires their control.
	And one of the beautiful things about human life is that disparate knowledge, diffuse knowledge, is significantly more powerful than individual knowledge.
	Think of all the people you know.
	The smartest people you know.
	Those are people who couldn't handle what you handle in your daily life.
	And all the people you know together, put together, know a lot more than any individual that you know about basic decision making.
	But at the government level, they want, like a small cadre of people, they wish to rule your life because they are smarter than you, and they are better than you, and they are richer than you, and therefore, they ought to run your life.
	All they need is some sort of emergency to scare the hell out of you.
	So you need to ask yourself a question.
	Should you be scared?
	And if the answer is no, if the answer is no, you know they're lying to you.
	Alrighty, we'll be back here today with an additional hour of content coming up soon.
	The Matt Wall Show airs at 1.30 p.m.
	Eastern.
	Be sure to check it out over at dailywire.com.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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	Copyright Daily Wire 2021.
	John Bickley here, editor-in-chief of Daily Wire.
	Wake up every morning with our new show, Morning Wire.
	On today's episode, governments across the globe crack down on protests over vaccine mandates and renewed lockdowns, school districts and lawmakers clash over mask mandates, and police sound the alarm over police reform.

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