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Aug. 9, 2021 - The Ben Shapiro Show
47:42
Barack’s Very Covid Birthday Party | Ep. 1314
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Former President Barack Obama turned 60 years old and celebrates in maskless fashion.
We examine the numbers on who wants to return to normal and the vaccine mandates are coming.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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Alrighty, so, happy birthday to Obama.
He's the only person who gets to have a really big birthday party.
Now listen, here's my feeling about birthday parties or parties of any sort at this point.
It's a free country, do what you want.
I myself would be happy to have a birthday party for my wife, for any of my relatives, maskless, as you know, I don't care.
My feeling at this point is that every adult in the United States, every person in the United States above the age of 12 has had the ability to get a vaccine.
Once you've had the vaccine, your chances of dying from COVID-19 drop down to very close to zero.
If you get a breakthrough of the Delta variant and you're vaccinated, the high likelihood is that you're going to end up with a mild cold.
And thus, if There's a party and somebody shows up unvaccinated, and that person gets infected by a vaccinated person, that one is on them.
So on a pure principled level, I don't care whether Barack Obama has a maskless party.
But.
But.
The entire democratic infrastructure has decided.
That for the sake of being a good American, you must mask up.
You must.
You know, if you're a vaccinated person, you must put on that mask to protect everybody else.
If you're a good, patriotic American, you would not hold a large party for your own 60th birthday.
And you certainly wouldn't fly in your friends, like John Kerry, to come in maskless on a private jet in the middle of global warming, which by the way did happen.
John Kerry did take a private jet to Barack Obama's party, and then everybody at the party took off the masks.
And one of the DJs there made the unfortunate error of actually tweeting out the photos and then had to delete all the photos.
Some of the footage was out there already, however, and things were unfortunately leaked to the public.
I say unfortunately, even though it's actually quite fortunate, because I think it's quite important that the American people know that the elites who tell you that you need to mask up, the elites who tell you that life can never go back to normal, these same elites do not hold themselves to the same standard at all, at all.
And this has always been the case with the left.
When it comes to the left, the people at the top of the echelon are not interested in abiding by the rules they promulgate for everybody else.
The people at the top of the elites, the elitists in our society, the people in Hollywood, They will abide by the basic rules of success in the United States while ensuring that everybody else doesn't.
And this is basically Charles Murray's book, Coming Apart.
He talks about the fact that you have very liberal elites living off of Sunset Boulevard who promulgate social standards they themselves do not hold by, and so they become rich, and they do really well, and many of them are married, and many of them stay married, and then they promulgate values that everybody else holds by, and those people take those standards seriously, and they wreck their lives.
Well, the same thing holds true when it comes to things, for example, like whether to have a maskless birthday party.
You, the peasant, are not supposed to have a maskless birthday party.
In fact, one of our writers over at Daily Wire, Ryan Saavedra, he tweeted out recently that his grandfather just died alone in the hospital of COVID because there had been all of these revised protocols that suggested you couldn't go in and visit a dying loved one who had COVID, whether you were vaccinated or whether you were not vaccinated, because after all, you might spread it to somebody.
And so people are dying alone in the hospitals again.
Meanwhile, Barack Obama is having a party.
So this is where I start to get uptight.
Not when somebody has a party.
I don't care.
I live in Florida.
A lot of people having parties.
What I care about is if you promulgate a standard where no one else is supposed to have a party, just like nobody else is supposed to take a private jet except for John Kerry.
Just like nobody else is supposed to hold by sort of traditional moral standards, apparently, except for many of the people in Hollywood who actually counterintuitively do.
It's the same thing here.
Everybody else is supposed to mask up and watch grandma die alone, but Barack Obama gets to have himself the big party with John Legend singing at the party, and everybody partying without the masks.
Here's a little bit of the footage.
You can see, in the background, Barack Obama partying on stage.
There he is, going at it.
Really enjoying himself hugging people on stage?
Again, this isn't an indoor scenario.
I was reliably informed by the CDC, by Rochelle Walensky, by our most trusted physicians, by Dr. Anthony Fauci.
You shouldn't be having events like this.
I was told.
And I was told by all the Democratic higher-ups.
In fact, Barack Obama fibbed, and he said he was going to cancel the party, or at least wildly downgrade the size and scope of the party.
And then, of course, he just quietly re-upped the party.
And then all this information Started emerging again.
So you might think that at this point the media would be somewhat critical of this.
I mean, after all, Barack Obama is a pretty important person.
He's the former president of the United States.
And we've been informed that former presidents of the United States are not just important.
They are the most important people.
When Donald Trump puts out a statement on his email list, it immediately rockets around the internet because it's so damned important.
When Barack Obama has a masculine birthday party, you might assume that the media would be like, well, that's that's Odd, right?
I mean, that's worthy of coverage.
Well, you would be wrong.
Instead, you would have these CNN White House correspondents saying, it's different, guys.
It's different because these are the sophisticated people.
You are a rube.
You're a person who has a nine to five job, who still has to go to work.
You're not somebody who became president of the United States and then made just a buttload of money after having been president of the United States by being a prominent politician.
You go, you like have a regular job and you need to go to work.
But that's the problem.
You, you're the problem.
You Peasant you.
But Barack Obama's not a peasant.
And the people at his parties, they are not the peasants.
The peasants have a very different standard than the lords and ladies and royalty of unspecified gender who attend Barack Obama's birthday party.
Here's the CNN White House correspondent noting that it's a different thing when Barack Obama does it than when you do it.
You get a party in your own home for your kid's birthday?
That was bad.
But Barack Obama, he's turning 60.
And let me just tell you, that dude deserves a big birthday party.
Other people said, you know, this is really being overblown.
They're following all the safety precautions.
People are going to sporting events that are bigger than this.
This is going to be safe.
This is a sophisticated, vaccinated crowd, and this is just about optics.
It's not about safety.
By sophisticated and vaccinated, what they mean, sophisticated is code for very wealthy and Democrats.
That's what sophisticated means in White House correspondent for CNN language.
That's what that means.
Okay, now this has a pretty predictable effect.
When all the elites in a particular society decide that everybody is supposed to live one way and they are supposed to live another, This creates wild institutional distrust, but it also creates a standard where politicians are incentivized to pursue some of the dumbest policies ever.
So when the media and the democratic establishment say over and over and over again that masking is going to be the solution to the pandemic, when masking pretty obviously is not.
Vaccination is the obvious solution to the pandemic.
And at this point, the solution to the pandemic is let everybody live their own life and then bear the consequences of their own decision-making.
Which means that the government really has very little public policy role at this point at all.
But it has bled down to the American people.
And this is why.
This is a story.
Because Barack Obama, and the rest of the Democratic Party, and Joe Biden, and Dr. Anthony Fauci, and all the various members of the Democratic establishment, the Lori Lightfoot's of the world, who said you couldn't get a haircut, but she needed her hair done.
That was a very important thing.
Or Nancy Pelosi, who said that you couldn't get a haircut maskless, but she definitely could.
Or Mayor Muriel Bowser.
Listen, she had to have a picture, maskless, with Dave Chappelle.
Like, while everybody else was masking up.
It was super duper important.
You, the regular people, are supposed to change your life, not just for now, forever.
And they've changed what the standard is supposed to be.
Forever.
They've set up this incentive structure.
And this is what pisses me off.
You convinced a huge number of Americans to believe in things that are not reality and not related to reality.
You're scaring the hell out of people based on bad data.
It's one thing to scare the hell out of the unvaccinated and say to them that you have a much higher chance of dying from COVID-19 than the vaccinated.
That's true.
I mean, now, let's be real about this.
The rate of death among young, unvaccinated Americans remains very low.
I mean, compared to any other disease like smallpox or any global pandemic that people have considered a mass killer in the past.
The grand total number of Americans under the age of 30 or between the ages of 20 and 30 who have died in the United States is still just a couple of thousand people.
I think it's like 2,500, 2,600 people, according to the CDC, as of last week.
But you do have a much better chance of dying if you're unvaccinated than if you are vaccinated.
For sure.
For sure.
Okay, but they're not just restricting their crazy standards to the unvaccinated, they're extending it to the vaccinated.
They're basically saying you're supposed to be scared in perpetuity.
And you can see in school, you can see in the new polling statistics how this works out.
So according to the Washington Post, Two-thirds of Americans now say that once COVID passes, they plan to put on masks when sick and wear comfortable clothes more often than before, according to a Washington Post-Schar School poll that points to enduring cultural shifts the public health crisis may bring about.
When it comes to crowded places, the Nationwide survey finds that more than 4 in 10 U.S.
adults intend to wear masks in such circumstances after the pandemic.
That includes more than half of women compared with 1 in 3 men.
Okay, I will venture to say that this is bad.
Because what we are teaching Americans is that living life in a normal way, like seeing the faces of the people around you, is either of no matter at all, which I don't think is correct, or two, that you're just supposed to mitigate all risk to the most extreme extent humanly possible, Even if the data don't support it.
Remember, until last March, if you asked Anthony Fauci whether you should mask up for, for example, the flu, if there should be mass masking for the flu, Anthony Fauci would have said no.
And I'd be curious to find out whether Anthony Fauci has changed his opinion.
If Anthony Fauci thinks that during a normal flu season we should all mask up now.
Whether this is now a broad-based change with regard to masking or whether it is COVID-specific.
Whether if you have a cold, we're now encouraging everybody during cold and flu season to mask.
And what exactly is the standard here?
Because it seems like the standard has changed pretty wildly.
Among U.S.
adults of all ages, majorities expect that they're going to be outdoors more often, which is very nice, but it's the masking that really is kind of fascinating.
So, apparently, 67% of Americans now say they plan to wear masks when they are sick.
Which, by the way, if you apply that to children, your children will never go to school again.
Kids are just little petri dishes.
Apparently, 43% of Americans say long-term they plan to wear masks in crowded places, like forever.
Also, there's a pretty wide partisan gap here.
And this is the part that I think is really telling.
Who has returned to a normal life?
Who's returned to normal life?
So, as you would imagine, Republicans basically have returned to normal life at this point.
Independents have largely returned to normal life, although they're moving more in that direction.
And Democrats just don't want to return to normal life apparently ever.
So here's the partisan breakdown on that.
According to this brand new poll from the Washington Post, The question is, how much have you returned to your normal pre-coronavirus life?
If you're not fully returned, when do you expect to be able to fully return to your normal pre-coronavirus life?
Only 15% of Democrats say they are fully returned to normal.
Which is insane, given the fact that a huge percentage of Democrats are fully vaccinated, which means they are now at exorbitantly low risk of dying of COVID.
48% of Republicans, so three times that number, say they are fully returned to normal.
And about twice the number of Democrats, as it who are in independence 28% of independence twice the number of Democrats say that they have fully returned to normal.
Furthermore, when it comes to are you going to return to normal in the next three months, only 20% of Democrats say they are going to return to normal in the next three months in the next month and month to three months, 22% 22% of Republicans say they will.
So if you aggregate that, what that means is that about 35% of Democrats say they have fully returned to normal or they expect to do so within the next few months.
Fully 70% of Republicans say either they are fully back to normal or they intend to in the next few months.
And some 52% of independents say that they either have fully returned to normal or they expect to in the next few months.
Which means that the Democrats are preaching something and accepting something that is not going to be the long-term answer here.
That partisan breakdown is not even abided by by their own elites.
The criticism, it really is kind of incredible.
The criticism that has been leveled, for example, against the Obama birthday party is extremely minimal.
The amount of media attention that has been paid to Lori Lightfoot presiding over Lollapalooza in Chicago, and by the way, if you think that this idiotic notion that all these people crowded extremely close together waving vaccine cards as they walk in somehow kept everybody safe over there, that's nuts.
That really is crazy.
Number one, if you think that was a serious vaccine card check, you're wrong.
Number two, we now have been told that vaccinated people can pass to each other and to the unvaccinated.
But that's not stopping Anthony Fauci from having some very strong words.
Again, it is only directed at politics.
It is only directed at politics.
The bad ones.
It's a moral thing.
This is why the Obama birthday party matters.
It is no longer about the science.
It is no longer about the vectors of transmission.
It is no longer about even the morality of who is responsible for getting COVID and whether they ought to take responsibility for themselves.
Now, the answer is if you do not perform the pagan rituals that we have prescribed for you, Then you are bad.
And if you do perform those pagan rituals that we have prescribed for you, you are good.
And here's the thing.
Even if you don't perform the pagan rituals, but you say that the pagan rituals are good, then we leave you alone.
So if Barack Obama has a birthday party, violating all of these strictures, that's okay.
He preaches the strictures.
But you know, if Lori Lightfoot has Lollapalooza violating all the strictures, but she's in favor of the strictures, she's fine.
You know who's really bad, though?
The Sturgis Motorcycle Rally.
So here's Anthony Fauci, very, very concerned about the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally over in Iowa.
Or South Dakota, rather.
Well, I'm very concerned, Chuck, that we're going to see another surge related to that rally.
I mean, to me, it's understandable that people want to do the kinds of things they want to do.
They want their freedom to do that.
But there comes a time when you're dealing with a public health crisis that could involve you, your family and everyone else, that something supersedes that need to do exactly what you want to do.
Again, it's the selectivity of the criticism that is really off-putting here and really demonstrative of if you worship the system, then you can do whatever you want.
You don't have to abide by the rules.
It's the worship that matters.
It's the mirroring the sentiments of the most important that matters more than anything else.
Okay, we're going to get to the latest arguments in favor of masking kids and locking everything down in just one moment.
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Policy Genius, when it comes to insurance, it's nice and very, very important to get it right.
Head on over to policygenius.com slash ShapiroHome and get started doing the responsible thing right this very instant. Okay, so putting aside the partisanship, the push right now is pretty hard from the left and the public health establishment in favor of things like vaccine mandates.
And again, I think that this is coming from a place that doesn't make a whole hell of a lot of logical sense.
So Dr. Anthony Fauci is leading the way here, of course.
He says that, you know, we can't just act like nothing is going on.
Okay, nobody's acting like nothing is going on.
You may have noticed that the vaccination rates have gone up.
You may also have noticed that Republican governors are very much in favor of people getting vaccinated.
Ron DeSantis is being ripped up and down in Florida.
We'll get to more on DeSantis in just a second.
His rate of vaccinating the elderly, like people above the age of 65, is actually higher than virtually all of the blue states.
So, what does he mean before we act like nothing is going on?
Like, we're acting like something is going on, but that doesn't mean he can lock down everybody's freedom.
But, Anthony Fauci and the left have set up this standard.
Again, the standard is zero COVID.
They won't admit to you that that's what the standard is.
And what they're aiming for here is zero COVID, but that's what they're aiming for.
They're aiming for zero COVID.
They don't care whether you actually follow the rules, so long as you say that they are correct for pushing forward and popularizing their foolish rules.
So here's Anthony Fauci saying, you know, we have to get the pandemic under control.
Now, here's the thing.
No one has the pandemic under control.
I don't know what he's talking about.
This notion that if you just mask everybody up, that's magically going to fix the pandemic is belied by the fact that right now Australia is completely locked down and has record transmissions.
Okay, direct from Australia today, quote, this is Reuters, Australia saw a record daily number of new coronavirus cases this past Saturday, with the country's most populous states of New South Wales, Victoria, and Queensland recording a total of 361 cases of the highly infectious Delta variant.
With about 15 million people, or 60% of Australia's population, under a strict lockdown, the country also reported five COVID-related deaths, one of the highest this year.
New South Wales suffered its worst pandemic day, reporting 319 new locally acquired COVID-19 cases.
So, they're not doing, like, those numbers are really low because they've decided to lock everybody in their house, but they're still seeing higher numbers.
In Israel, Israel is like fully locked down at this point.
Israel is giving people booster shots.
They still saw about 3,900 new cases of novel coronavirus reported in Israel on Friday.
The number of patients in severe condition spiked to 324 on Saturday, the health ministry announced Saturday night.
Of the patients hospitalized, some 49 were on ventilators.
The death toll rose to 6,535 on Saturday night.
So again, Israel is seeing a spike.
Everywhere is seeing a spike.
This bizarre notion that Anthony Fauci knows how to get this... If he's known how to get this under control, I would love to hear how Anthony Fauci has gotten this under control at any point during the pandemic.
Like, seriously, at any point.
Like, a point.
Not many points, one point would be excellent.
Here's Anthony Fauci saying he can get the pandemic under control by apparently yelling at Republicans.
By the way, quick note, you'll notice they're yelling a lot about Florida.
They're not saying a damn word about Louisiana.
Why?
Let's get this pandemic under control before we start acting like nothing is going on.
I mean, something bad is going on.
Why is Louisiana not being mentioned?
What party is the governor again?
Democrat.
Here's Anthony Fauci.
Let's get this pandemic under control before we start acting like nothing is going on.
I mean, something bad is going on.
I mean, we've got to realize that.
Nobody is saying nothing bad is going on.
All we're saying is that you cannot force everybody who's followed all the rules and vaccinated and done all the right things to stay in their house and lock down and mask up.
You can't do that.
It is none of your damn business what the vaccinated do at this point.
And as far as the unvaccinated, it is still a free country.
And if they wish to put themselves at risk, that is now their business.
At a certain point, you have to let adults actually be adults.
It's kind of crazy.
I mean, you want to talk about the paternalism of the federal government at this point.
This is the paternalism of the federal government.
The NIH director, Francis Collins, he's going even further.
He says, let's just do vaccine mandates.
Let's force people to get the vaccine.
For me, as a non-political person, as a physician, as a scientist, the compelling case for vaccines for everybody is right there in front of you.
Just look at the data.
And certainly I celebrate when I see businesses deciding that they're going to mandate that for their employees.
And as a person who runs the National Institutes of Health with 45,000 employees and contractors, I am glad to see the president insisting that we go forward requiring vaccinations, or if people are unwilling to do that, then regular testing at least once or twice a week, which will be very inconvenient.
Okay, they're not just stopping with vaccine mandates for adults.
They're also going to start pushing this for kids.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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So, it is not merely that you've got NIH Director Francis Collins pushing for vaccine mandates and businesses kicking people out if they're not vaccinated, which, by the way, results in precisely the opposite of what it seeks to do.
If you kick everybody unvaccinated out of a business where most of the people are vaccinated, the unvaccinated go and hang out together.
And then you know what they do?
They spread the virus really, really, really easily.
Okay, but Randy Weingarten, and this is, by the way, his most cynical move.
It's perfectly obvious what she's doing.
The American Federation of Teachers, Randy Weingarten, who spent the last year basically leveraging governments into not forcing teachers to go back to work, and now she's been trying to set up all of these roadblocks to teachers having to go back to work.
Now she says, no, no, I'm very much in favor of vaccine mandates for teachers.
I think maybe we should do that after all.
Here's Randy Weingarten.
I want to be very careful that we have to honor those religious exemptions.
But, you know, there's ways of which you can do accommodations in all sorts of different ways, which is part of the reason you have to work together on these vaccine policies.
I thought what Joe Biden did in terms of the federal government of saying vaccine and test or test was important, and we are supporting that.
I thought what Bill de Blasio did was very important as well.
Okay, so she says, by the way, that she now wants the teachers to be forced to be vaccinated.
She said, I think the circumstances have changed and that vaccination is a community responsibility and it weighs really heavily on me that kids under 12 can't get vaccinated.
OK, well, how's that going to result?
What is the clever move that she's making here?
She understands a lot of places are not going to force the teachers to get vaccinated.
And so she's going to say, if you don't force the teachers to get vaccinated, legally speaking, they can't come back to school.
Right.
That is the little game that Randy Weingarten is playing right here.
But this has become, again, a Democratic talking point.
There's a Democrat named Representative Espiot.
Who was pushing over the weekend, I believe he's from Illinois, and he was pushing the idea that the federal government is going to have to step in on a federal level.
Sorry, it's Adriano Espiat from New York's 13th district.
He says that the feds are going to have to mandate masks in schools.
And so people that are not vaccinated are prolonging this pandemic.
We are feeding the virus when we don't vaccinate or we don't wear a mask.
And so these are particularly in schools with the children going back now in September.
How can we not think of making sure that our kids are protected, that they all have to wear a mask in school?
Certainly, this is a very practical and life-saving, in my opinion, a life-saving measure.
So the federal government at some point will have to step in and have four stringent policies that will protect everyone.
So much fun, guys.
So we went from states and localities are gonna do it to if a state resists, now the federal government is going to do this.
You see how all of this is getting centralized up at the top level?
And by the way, in variance with the data, so Jen Psaki, this is kind of an amazing thing.
So Michael Osterholm, he's an advisor, he's a COVID advisor to the Biden administration, Osterholm.
And last week, we played a clip of him on national TV pointing out that not all masks are equivalent and that cloth masks, in his opinion, do very little to actually Stop or retard the spread of COVID-19 via the Delta variant.
The reason being, the viral load of the Delta variant is significantly larger, like a thousand times larger, than the Alpha variant.
Than Alpha.
So, if that's the case, Cloth ain't doing much.
So he's like, well, maybe there's some other types of masks that would work better.
Osterholm's comments.
I'm not kidding you.
He's an advisor to the Biden administration.
Apparently they were taken off YouTube.
Apparently social media is now in the business of censoring advisors to the Biden administration if they do not mirror the party line with regard to the efficacy of masking.
Which is, like, that's wild.
I mean, that's crazy.
And then Jen Psaki decided she'd go to war with Osterholm.
Now, between Osterholm and Psaki, I think Osterholm knows more.
But here is Psaki saying, well, you know, some experts think that these cloth masks definitely are going to retard the spread of COVID-19 via the Delta variant.
Oh, well, if Jen Psaki says so, then the science is settled, apparently.
Let me first say that Osterholm is not an advisor to the president, to the administration, to the White House.
He doesn't work here.
He's a private citizen and a public health expert, but a lot of public health experts are out there speaking and good for them.
I will say that we are going to continue to rely on the advice of medical experts in the federal government on what kind of masks we all should wear, what kind of masks kids should wear.
And if they change that advice, then the Department of Education will be working with schools to make sure that's implemented as a mitigation measure.
By the way, Osterholm was a member of President-elect Biden's COVID-19 Advisory Board.
So when she says he doesn't work with Biden, she means like right now.
Not that he hasn't worked with Biden in the past, which he has.
So, I guess now, you can have him kicked off of YouTube.
Then, he was an advisor.
Now, he lost all of his legitimacy the minute that he was no longer connected with Joe Biden.
Marty McCary has a good piece over at the Wall Street Journal about whether kids should be masked.
He says, do masks reduce COVID transmission in children?
Believe it or not, we could find only a single retrospective study on the question.
Its results were inconclusive.
Yet two weeks ago, the CDC sternly decreed that 56 million U.S.
children and adolescents, vaccinated or not, should cover their faces regardless of the prevalence of infection in their community.
Authorities in many places took the cue to impose mandates in schools and elsewhere on the theory that masks can't do any harm.
That isn't true.
Some children are fine wearing a mask, others struggle.
Those who have myopia can have difficulty seeing because the mask fogs their glasses.
Masks can cause severe acne and other skin problems.
The discomfort of a mask distracts some children from learning.
By increasing airway resistance during exhalation, masks can lead to increased levels of carbon dioxide in the blood.
Masks can be vectors for pathogens if they become moist or are used for too long.
By the way, none of this is particularly controversial.
Like the WHO has said this.
The possible psychological harm of widespread masking is an even greater worry.
Facial expressions are integral to human connection, particularly for young children, says Marty Makary.
What about the risk of COVID, which mask mandates are intended to ameliorate?
The CDC reports that for the week of July 31st, the rate of hospitalization with COVID for children 5 to 17 was 0.5 per million per million, which would amount to roughly 25 patients.
And the CDC says not all these kids were in the hospital for COVID.
Viral testing and admission is routine.
So a lot of these kids were actually put in the hospital for not COVID, but they had taken a test showing they had COVID.
And so they're COVID-positive kids.
Children who do develop COVID symptoms are at minimal risk of long COVID, according to a Lancet study published August 3rd.
Almost all children had symptom resolution by eight weeks, providing reassurance about long-term outcomes.
Children have been known to transmit COVID, says McCary, but far less often than adults do.
The CDC's mask decrees are perversely permissive as well as needlessly strict.
Cloth masks aren't nearly as effective as N95s, but the CDC ignores the distinction.
We've been encouraging Americans to wear masks since the beginning of the pandemic, but special attention should be paid to the many children who struggle with masks.
This is correct.
Any child who wants to wear a mask should be free to do so, but forcing them to make personal health and developmental sacrifices for the sake of adults who refuse to get immunized is abusive.
Okay, but the abuse is the point.
It really is.
The goal here is you will abide.
You will abide by... We will scare the hell out of you to the point where you will mask up your kid and you will love it.
And if you don't want to mask up your kid, it's because obviously you don't take COVID seriously.
You're a COVID denier in the same way that the left now claims that even if you agree with all the IPCC assessments about climate change, as long as you're not in favor of AOC's Green New Deal, this means you're a climate denier.
They're now doing the same crap with COVID.
You can point out all the stats.
You can agree with the level of deadliness.
You can agree with the efficacy of vaccines.
You can even talk about whether masks are helpful or harmful, depending on the circumstances and what kind of masks.
You can do all of those things.
But as long as you are not mirroring what the left wants you to mirror, you're the bad guy.
And if you do mirror what they want you to mirror, you can do whatever the hell you want.
You can have a 60th birthday party with all your friends, they're maskless.
So long as you mirror whatever their garbage idea of the day is.
It really is amazing.
It is not at all about what is best policy.
It is mostly about just who you yell at.
And of course, right now, the person they all want to yell at is Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida.
So recall that last week, the President of the United States, Joe Biden, attacked Ron DeSantis and said it was just terrible.
He couldn't believe Ron DeSantis was getting in the way of school mask mandates.
Now, Ron DeSantis didn't say that kids aren't allowed to put on a mask in school.
Parents can buy kids an N95 or a KN95 if they're really that concerned.
What he said is that kids cannot be mandated to wear a mask in school.
And so, that prompted Biden to suggest that DeSantis was sort of a cheerleader for COVID spread, which is nuts.
Again, the evidence that mask mandates have done a damn bit of good anywhere on Earth, not masking, mask mandates, that they've done a bit of good anywhere on Earth, is completely missing.
There's no evidence for this.
Do you have a comment about the comment that President Biden made recently?
And he says, so then DeSantis slammed Biden back.
And then Biden said, governor who?
As though he'd never heard of DeSantis, which prompted DeSantis to smack him pretty hard here.
Do you have a comment about the comment that President Biden made recently?
Well, I guess I'm not surprised that Biden doesn't remember me.
I guess the question is, what else has he forgotten?
Biden's forgotten about the crisis at our southern border, I can tell you that.
Biden has forgotten about the inflation that's biting the budgets of families all throughout our country.
Biden has forgotten about the demonstrators who are fighting for freedoms down in Cuba.
Biden's even forgotten about the Constitution itself, as we saw with what he did with this moratorium.
But DeSantis is bad, you see.
Forget about the stats.
DeSantis is bad.
It doesn't matter that Florida continues to rank near the middle of the pack in terms of deaths per million, outperforming all of Democrats' favorite states.
With the second oldest population in America, it doesn't matter that the R on Florida's COVID spread is down pretty significantly over the last couple of weeks, which means that the cases are going to peak pretty soon.
And they're already starting to have a lower rate of increase than they had even a week ago or two weeks ago.
None of that matters.
DeSantis is the bad guy.
As the CNN medical analyst decided, DeSantis is the problem, obviously.
Right, so don't get your medical advice from the governor of Florida.
First of all, there's no 1918 flu floating around.
There are a number of tools that a chief executive has.
So a chief executive can allow localities to mask up their population.
They can certainly allow school districts to mask up kids who, first of all, many of whom cannot be vaccinated now, and protect them.
He's prevented that.
A chief executive of a state can allow vaccine mandates from businesses.
He is preventing that.
Okay, so again, the idea that they know how to get this under control, it's just people won't listen.
It's the children who are wrong.
You never had any idea how to keep this under control.
You failed.
You continue to fail.
The only thing that keeps this under control is the vaccines, which were created by the people you hate most over in Big Pharma and the Trump administration.
End of story.
The only thing that has gotten this pandemic under control is that.
As we saw in January when there were no vaccines and there was a huge wave and a crap load of people died.
And, again, by the way...
This particular doctor happens to be wrong.
According to History.com, and he cites the 1918 flu, just as it said that there are still variants of that walking around, quote, History.com, direct descendants of the 1918 flu combined with bird flu or swine flu to create powerful new pandemic strains, which is exactly what happened in 1957, 1968, and 2009.
Those later flu outbreaks, all created in part by the 1918 virus, claimed millions of additional lives, earning the 1918 flu the odious title of the mother of all pandemics.
So whoops.
Turns out the CNN medical analyst on CNN, as per CNN's usual rule, doesn't know particularly what he's talking about.
Alrighty, coming up!
We'll get to the latest.
In Cuomo world, will Andrew Cuomo survive his bout with grabbing ass?
We'll get to that in just one minute.
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Alrighty, we'll get to Andrew Cuomo, and we'll analyze the growing drama in New York.
First, as you may have noticed, We are living in a very authoritarian moment in which the federal government is seeking to assume power over pretty much everything from voting procedures in the state to whether your child needs to wear a mask at school and Joe Biden just didn't care about the Constitution anymore.
Plus, all of the major institutions have swung behind all of the centralization of power in the federal government and the woke agenda.
This is my book.
My book is called The Authoritarian Moment.
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If there's one person who's always trending for her controversial and thought-provoking takes, I know, like beside me.
It's Candace Owens.
And now you have a chance to meet her.
You can hear her drop her truth bombs live by sitting in her studio audience.
If you sign up now as a DailyWire member with code VIP, you'll get 25% off your new membership and be automatically entered for a chance to win a trip for two to the DailyWire studios in Nashville.
Not only will you be meeting Candace, you'll also be getting an inside look at her studio.
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All right.
Meanwhile, in New York, remember that?
Remember that Governor Andrew Cuomo?
He was the one everybody loved, right?
He was the good governor.
DeSantis is the bad governor.
Cuomo was the best governor.
I mean, he won an Emmy for goodness sake.
He wrote an entire book about leadership during COVID-19 while killing all the olds and then covering it up.
Well, now he's in a bit of trouble.
Melissa DeRosa, a fixture next to Governor Andrew Cuomo for months during his COVID news conferences, resigned late on Sunday, according to the AP, on the heels of a report that found Cuomo sexually harassed 11 women, leaving the governor without his top aide as he faces the prospect of impeachment.
DeRosa, who had been one of Cuomo's most fierce defenders and strategists, said in a statement sent to multiple news organizations serving the people of New York had, quote, been the greatest honor of my life.
She added, quote, personally, the past two years have been emotionally and mentally trying.
She didn't give a more specific reason for her resignation.
She said, I'm forever grateful for the opportunity to have worked with such talented and committed colleagues on behalf of our state.
Scores of Democrats, including President Biden, have urged Cuomo to leave office or face an impeachment battle he probably cannot win.
About two thirds of the state assembly have already said they favor an impeachment trial if he refuses.
Nearly all 63 members of the state Senate have called for Cuomo to step down or be removed.
More punishing news for the governor is expected on Monday when an assembly committee meets to discuss possible impeachment proceedings and CBS This Morning is scheduled to broadcast the first TV interview from an executive assistant who accused Cuomo of groping her breast.
In her first public interview in which she identified herself, Brittany Camiso told CBS and the Times Union newspaper of Albany what Cuomo did was a crime and that he needs to be held accountable.
She said Cuomo reached under her shirt and fondled her.
When they were alone in a room at the Executive Mansion last year, and on another occasion, rubbed her rear end while they posed for a photo.
She was the first woman to file a criminal complaint against Cuomo.
By the way, I'll speak to a quick Twitter trend here.
So, over the weekend, I trended a little bit on Twitter because there's a series of photos of me at the last Young America's Foundation event, taking a series of pictures.
And when there's a woman in the picture with me, my hand, which is sort of like around the person I'm taking a picture with, is out to the side so you can see my free hand.
The reason for this is what we'll call the Keanu Reeve rule, which is keep the hands off and visibly away for a very, very good reason.
This would be that reason.
In any case, it appears that Andrew Cuomo has a problem for himself.
He may not be the only one who has a problem.
It turns out Chris Cuomo may have a problem as well.
So it turns out that Chris now says that he is taking a vacation.
There's only one problem.
He apparently took a vacation like two weeks ago.
So according to Mediaite, Chris Cuomo is set to begin a week-long vacation from his primetime CNN talk show on Friday, a break the host described as a previously scheduled absence planned around his birthday.
He said, every year I take my birthday week off.
I'm looking forward to it.
Again, the only problem here is that he just took a little bit of time off like a couple of weeks ago.
This prompted Brian Stelter to try to explain how CNN was handling the Chris Cuomo of it all and completely failing.
Here is Brian Stelter on Reliable Sources failing to explain why his own network allowed Chris to cover his brother for months on end and then Chris to ignore the fact that his brother is about to get impeached in the state of New York.
This has been a conundrum for CNN that has no perfect answer, no perfect solution.
Some think CNN made it worse by letting Chris interview his brother when COVID-19 was ravaging New York.
But that was an unprecedented time period.
And so is this one.
A famous family in the news.
A governor who soared to the highest heights last year, now falling to the lowest lows.
Self-inflicted wounds.
And a brother who just wants to do his job.
Just wants to anchor his show.
But can he?
That's the key question.
Wait, Chris just wants to do his job and anchor his show?
That's just what he wants to do?
Weird, because it seemed like he wanted to do like a Smothers Brothers routine with his brother.
I love Brian Stelter, man.
Reliable sources.
It's a conundrum with no perfect... It's a riddle!
Wrapped in a mystery.
Wrapped in an enigma.
Wrapped in a conundrum.
It's like four different mysteries wrapped in one another.
Intertwined, inextricably, or it's a conundrum that ends with Chris Cuomo getting fired.
Possible?
Nah, CNN's never gonna do that, and y'all know it.
We all know that.
That's not how any of this works.
All right, meanwhile, the worst story of the weekend comes out of Chicago.
Again, nobody seems to care about cops who get killed every day on the job all over the United States.
This is why it is really galling when you hear the Democrats in D.C.
Pretend that they care deeply about the police officers who were assaulted on January 6th.
When I say pretend, what I mean is that they probably care about those specific police officers, but they don't seem to demand very much about the other police officers all over the United States who are harmed literally every day in the line of fire.
You know how many police officers were injured?
Like literally hundreds of police officers, maybe thousands of police officers injured last year during the Black Lives Matter riots.
Do Democrats have anything to say about any of that?
Not a word.
Not a word.
January 6th, they're all about, because obviously, when police officers are injured by people who are right-wing, then that is worth noting.
Again, if you're only situationally against violence against cops, this means you're not actually against violence against cops.
It's the same thing I say about anti-Semitism or racism.
If you're only situationally against it, you're really not against it.
If anti-Semitism only bothers you, when it's somebody who you politically disagree to in the anti-Semitism, you don't care about anti-Semitism.
If you're a Democrat, and you're like, I love Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, but man, that Marjorie Taylor Greene is just the worst when it comes to the Jews.
You don't care about anti-Semitism, you're just a liar.
And when you say, I care deeply about the police officers who were hurt on January 6th, But I don't care at all.
Like I have nothing to say about the police officers hurt every day on the job and in fact I will just continue to call police officers systemically racist and increase the risk to them by alienating entire groups of Americans from the cops and I'll mollycoddle people who call for defund the police.
I have a tough time believing that you care deeply about violence against the police on a root level.
In any case, in Chicago, Chicago Tribune reports, one Chicago police officer was murdered, another was critically wounded during an exchange of gunfire with at least one suspect during a traffic stop Saturday night in the West Englewood neighborhood on the South Side.
Police, family, and the Cook County Medical Examiner's Office identified the officer who died as Ella French, a 29-year-old who had worked as a Chicago cop since April 2018.
She was the first Chicago police officer to be shot and killed in the line of duty since Mayor Lori Lightfoot took office in 2019.
The other officer with the department since August 2014 is fighting for his life in critical condition at the University of Chicago Medical Center.
Andrew French said his younger sister always thought of herself before others.
He said my sister's always been a person of integrity.
She's always done the right thing even when nobody's looking.
She always believed in people and believed in doing the right thing.
She's always believed in taking care of people they can't take care of themselves.
Andrew French, an Iraq war veteran, said that even before she joined the force, his sister was a proponent of therapy or social services over jail time.
He said she wanted to see people get the help they needed more than just throwing people in jail.
He said she was a humanitarian.
She believes in human rights.
She was one of the officers on the force they thought, that thought they needed reform.
Because she's seen the front line like I have.
She's always been a very caring person when I was in Iraq.
Me and her, we talked.
She has some attributes you don't find in the world anymore.
And she was killed just after 9 p.m.
Saturday near West 63rd and South Bell Avenue when the officers conducted a traffic stop on three people in a vehicle.
Now, I've been reliably informed that traffic stops are basically not problematic.
That when police approach people during a traffic stop, they should maybe be unarmed.
You know, some social workers should show up.
During the stop, someone opened fire on the officers.
At least one officer returned fire.
Two officers, including French and one of the suspects, were shot.
The officers were taken to UFC Medical Center.
The wounded suspect was taken to Advocate Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn.
He and one other male suspect were in custody.
A female suspect at large after the shooting was arrested later on Sunday.
So, just a terrible, horrifying story.
Lightfoot lamented the pro-law enforcement world's complaints that society doesn't do enough for cops who feel there are roadblocks to doing their jobs effectively.
She also lamented critics of the police who have long denounced officers' treatment of neighborhoods of color.
Stop.
Just stop.
This constant strife is not what we need in the moment.
The police are not our enemies, she said.
They're human, just as we are.
We have a common enemy.
It's the guns and the gangs.
Eradicating both is complex.
We cannot let the size of the challenge deter us.
We have to continue striking hard blows every day.
Well, you know what's a good way to do that?
Not undermining the cops.
That is a major issue.
It will continue to be a major issue and it does get cops killed.
I know enough cops on forces all over the United States to know what their experience day-to-day is like and how politicians make it worse for political gain.
Lori Lightfoot is one of those politicians.
All righty.
Coming up, we have another hour of The Ben Shapiro Show a little bit later today.
Also coming up soon, The Matt Walsh Show airs at 1.30 p.m.
Eastern.
Be sure to check it out over at dailywire.com.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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On today's episode, the Taliban surges across Afghanistan, Apple plans to scan people's cell phones for evidence of child sexual abuse, and schools reopen amid more COVID concerns.
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