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Aug. 24, 2021 - The Ben Shapiro Show
47:56
The Biden Doctrine: Tyranny Abroad, Tyranny At Home | Ep. 1325
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Joe Biden believes if he yells at Americans about COVID, they'll forget about Afghanistan.
And the Biden administration continues to downplay the ongoing crisis in Afghanistan.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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Alrighty, so.
With the disaster in Afghanistan continuing to unleash itself, Joe Biden has decided it is time to distract.
He tried this last week.
Late last week, the President of the United States had a press conference about COVID.
And then he also had a press conference about the Build Back Better agenda and all of this stuff.
And everybody was like, well, aren't there like 10 to 15,000 Americans who are still stuck in Afghanistan?
He's like, I don't want to talk about that.
We're not going to talk about anything.
And then he fell asleep.
Well, he's still trying to do this.
The idea is that we are going to focus on COVID because he likes talking about COVID better than he likes talking about Afghanistan, which, by the way, does show you what an unbelievable disaster Afghanistan is.
Because COVID ain't great.
COVID in the United States right now is a problem.
COVID continues to roll out across the country.
The daily case count continues to be in the 100,000 range in the United States.
The daily death count in the United States is continuing to rise right now.
It's around 1,000 a day, 800 a day, depends on which day you're looking at.
It's already started to peak in a lot of states, and we'll get to that in a moment.
But Joe Biden would rather talk about this stuff because he is hopeful that he can yell at you about COVID and scare you about COVID and get you back to yelling at Ron DeSantis rather than talking about the fact that he precipitously pulled out from Afghanistan, leaving the entire country in the hands of the Taliban, revivifying Al-Qaeda, revivifying ISIS, and simultaneously preventing thousands of Americans from leaving.
He would rather you not talk about that, so he'd rather talk about COVID.
That's how badly things are going for the Biden administration at this point.
He'd rather talk about the disease he said was going to be over by July than the disaster he's now unleashed in Afghanistan.
And so let's talk about what he's saying about COVID because now his plan here apparently is that he's going to just push more and more restrictive activity.
And then if you push back against it, he's going to suggest you want Americans to die because he thinks that he got away with this with Trump last year.
And so he thinks he's going to do it again.
They're just going to keep running this playbook until you feel compelled to vote for Joe Biden.
It is that simple.
He's going to keep saying that you need to mask up forever and that you need to Keep getting booster shots forever and that your kids need to mask up forever.
And if you oppose any of these things, if you say, listen, I'm vaccinated and if I infect somebody else and they are unvaccinated because they chose not to get vaccinated, that really is their business.
And if you say there's no evidence that kids should be masking at this point.
Like, according to New York Magazine, no evidence kids should be masking in schools.
If you say that stuff according to Joe Biden, you're very, very, very bad.
And so yesterday, the big news of the day surrounding COVID is that the FDA finally approved the Pfizer vaccine.
Now, If you're waiting around on the FDA's full approval of the Pfizer vaccine, let me just say you're a buffoon.
The reason I say this is because the FDA had already given emergency use authorization and hundreds of millions of people around the world had already taken the Pfizer vaccine.
We have the biggest data set in world history with regard to a vaccine, with regard to Pfizer and Moderna vaccines being rolled out across hundreds of nations, or dozens of nations at the very least, with hundreds of millions of people having taken it and with the serious side effects being extraordinarily low.
Right?
We know that.
The big argument here is not that the FDA shouldn't have approved the vaccine.
The question is, where the hell were you guys for the last eight months?
I got vaccinated back in February, March.
My parents, same thing.
Last I checked, it is now August.
It turns out that your crappy regulatory bureaucracy actually inhibited people from getting the vaccine for months and months and months and months.
And by the way, I really don't think there are many people who are waiting around for FDA approval to get the vaccine.
People who are waiting around to get the vaccine are not going to be satisfied by the FDA approval.
And people who wanted to get the vaccine already got the vaccine.
That is, I think, the reality of the situation.
So what exactly is the great importance of the FDA giving full use authorization as opposed to emergency authorization on this thing?
Because, I mean, what exactly were they going to do?
Were they going to say, well, you know what?
We gave emergency authorization, but no full use authorization.
So all you suckers, all you 150 million Americans who already took the vaccine, We're going to have to suck that out of your arm.
We're going to have to find a way to get that out of your blood now.
Yeah, good luck to that.
So this was always going to get full use authorization because it should have full use authorization, but it should have happened like six months ago, seven months ago.
Okay, so what was this really?
This was really just an excuse for people on the left to start calling for mandates, to start politicizing this thing even more.
Now, here is the thing.
Once you have had the vaccine, the vaccine remains, by all available data, extremely durable against hospitalization and death from COVID-19, including the Delta variant.
It is not as durable against preventing infection.
There can be breakthrough infections.
This is true for virtually all vaccines, by the way.
I'm not aware of any vaccine where there are no breakthrough infections.
So, Delta breaks through sometimes the COVID vaccines, the Pfizer, Moderna, J&J, AstraZeneca COVID vaccines.
It breaks through them, but the result of the breakthrough is like you get a cold or you get a mild flu.
is in the we don't care about this category, or should be in the we don't care about this category.
Because when COVID first broke out across the world, if everybody had said, man, there's a bad flu going around this year, that would just be called a regular year.
The problem with COVID is that it was killing millions of people all over the world.
So if it has now been downgraded to you get a breakthrough infection, and man, that's a bad cold.
No one should care about that.
That should not be a question of public health concern.
But the idea is that now that you have the FDA-approved vaccines, now we can start doing vaccine mandates.
Now we have the excuse to do vaccine mandates and tell everybody they must get the vaccine.
Now, I've been vaccinated, as I say, since I believe early March, late February, somewhere in there.
And because I'm vaccinated, I don't care whether anyone else around me is vaccinated.
I don't care.
It is your business.
In fact, I'm sure that I'm one of the only people in my office who is vaccinated.
And you can ask the folks in my office.
Literally, in about one week after I got the second vaccine, I said to the people in my office, I don't care if you wear masks, I don't care if you're vaccinated around me, because I don't care.
I'm now protected.
Fine!
Okay, but the idea is, from Joe Biden, that we must cudgel everyone into vaccinating.
Now, again, I'm very pro-vaccination.
I think that if you are certainly above the age of 18, the risk factors tend toward COVID as opposed to toward side effects from the vaccine.
I think once you get below the age of 18, there's some serious questions to be asked about whether the risks from the vaccine outweigh the risks from COVID.
Once you're under the age of 12, even the FDA won't authorize that for use under the age of 12.
But as large an advocate of vaccines as I am, and I'm a huge advocate of vaccines, I'm probably the strongest advocate for vaccination on the right.
And this has been true for years and years and years, like going back well over a decade.
Despite that, I don't think that you should have to be vaccinated to work as a construction worker.
I don't think that you should be, you should have to be vaccinated in order to work at a hotel.
I don't think that that is necessary because again, the vaccine is available to all adults.
And if those adults are particularly vulnerable, they should be wearing an N95 mask.
And yet, the New York Times sort of let the cat out of the bag yesterday when they ran an article called, With FDA Approval, Pentagon and Others Add Vaccine Requirements.
The idea here is that what the FDA approval really was about, it was really not about the full use authorization per se, because again, hundreds of millions of people have already had the vaccine.
The full use authorization was about creating a leg for people who want mandates to stand on.
Within hours of the announcement, the Pentagon, CVS, the State University of New York system, and the New York City school system, among others, announced they would enforce mandates they had prepared to carry out, but had made contingents on the FDA's action.
One of the first and largest to move ahead was the Pentagon.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin had already received authorization from President Biden to mandate vaccines for all active duty troops once the vaccine was fully approved, and he was moving swiftly to put the plans into action.
So the question is, What are the vaccines and the mandatory vaccines designed to do?
And if the idea is that the mandatory vaccines are designed to prevent hospitalization and death, what you're really saying is that you have to have this treatment in order, you have to have this treatment to stop bad things from happening to you.
Now, normally in a free society, We say that things that you do to yourself are kind of on you.
We don't say you must do X in order to protect yourself.
That is a pretty rare thing in public policy.
So the other case that was made is that you need to get vaccinated so you're not passing on the disease to others.
But again, all adults now have the capacity to protect themselves.
And one of the things that we have learned over the course of the last several months is that even if you are vaccinated, there is a chance that you're going to pass this on to others.
Which is why, of course, you have seen the CDC idiotically recommending that even after you're vaccinated, you need to mask up with other people who are vaccinated.
Even though everybody who's vaccinated is going to get a mild cold or mild flu, statistically speaking, nearly everyone is going to get a mild cold or mild flu if they get a breakthrough case after having been vaccinated.
But again, all of this is just a political excuse to cram down mandates and then to claim that the people who oppose the mandates are in favor of death.
That's what this is really about.
I know this because they've been playing this game for the last year.
If you're Ron DeSantis and you said, let's protect the elderly, and if you're younger and you're healthier, if you want to wear a mask, go ahead and wear a mask.
If you don't want to wear a mask, that's on you.
But you got to take responsibility for what risk level you wish to assume in life.
If you're Ron DeSantis or if you're the country of Sweden, you're bad and you want death, right?
This is the case that the left has been making for a very long time.
I don't see it ever ending, by the way, because I don't see any limiting principle here.
The limiting principle, at least at the beginning, was we'll do this until we have a vaccine and everybody's had the opportunity to get it.
Now we have a vaccine.
Everybody in the United States has had the opportunity to get the vaccine.
So what are we talking about?
There is no limiting principle at this point.
There is no second vaccine around the corner.
And the evidence on the booster shots, by the way, is relatively skimpy.
The WHO, for example, does not recommend the booster shots.
The WHO says that the booster shots may not actually increase your antibody response.
The WHO is saying that there are serious questions to be asked about whether it actually prevents hospitalization and death to take a booster shot.
And yet you have the Biden administration pushing universal booster shots, which is even crazier than what they've been doing pretty much everywhere elsewhere, right?
There are some places, like Israel, where they've been doing booster shots, but they've really been pushing it on people who are older and more vulnerable first.
In the United States, you had the Biden administration and the FDA recommending booster shots for everybody.
The WHO is like, I don't know where you're getting any of that.
In any case, this is all the predicate.
It's all the predicate for talking about why you are bad, right?
This is the case.
You are bad.
If you won't mask your kids, if you won't mask yourself, you are bad.
So, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the greatest of all the doctors, the science, right?
He has declared himself the science.
So, he went on Mehdi Hassan's show on MSNBC, and he was asked about what kind of mask you should use.
And he gives a completely unscientific answer, because again, For many people, masking is not about protecting yourself.
If it were really about protecting you, you'd wear an N95.
It is not about that.
What it has become for so many people all over the United States, including vaccinated people, is the signal that I am deeply worried.
The signal that I deeply care.
The signal that you are never going to let go of this pandemic.
Anthony Fauci is involved in this task.
Because what he's about to say here is completely anti the science.
Are surgical masks good enough, or should everyone be wearing now N95s, KN95s in indoor venues?
You know, Mehdi, instead of worrying about what kind of mask, just wear a mask.
Wear a mask.
You know, wear a surgical mask, a cloth mask.
Some people can't tolerate N95s.
Rather than saying one versus the other, we need to wear masks.
And the Delta variant...
Has changed the playing field.
It absolutely has.
It has an extraordinary capability of spreading from person to person.
And that's why the CDC is saying, even if you're fully vaccinated, if you're in an indoor situation in an area of the country, which essentially is the whole country with very few exceptions, then you should be wearing a mask when you're in an indoor situation with other people, not in your home, in a public situation, Indoor.
Because we're seeing breakthrough infections.
You can get infected and have no symptoms at all and then inadvertently and innocently pass it on to someone else who is not vaccinated or is incapable of getting vaccinated.
That's the reason for the CDC recommendation about masks.
Okay, this is super anti-scientific, and what he is saying at the end is not a scientific question.
What he's saying at the end is a public policy question.
So, the notion that all masks are equivalent is a bunch of garbage.
Mehdi Hasan is asking him about that, and Fauci just ignores it completely.
Hey, the reality is blue surgical face masks do nearly nothing, according to a study from the University of Waterloo.
The study shows N95 or KN95s do the best job of containing aerosol droplets from the wearer's mouth, but blue cloth surgical masks, which are popular because they are more comfortable.
When I go out in public and I have to wear a mask, when I was in LA, for example, and they mandated it.
Then I wore a blue surgical face mask.
Why?
Specifically because it's lightweight.
And specifically because it is more comfortable than like a KN95, for example.
How effective are they?
They are 10% effective.
10%!
Which means essentially ineffective.
The study leader, Sergei Yarusevich, a professor of mechanical and mechatronics engineering, said, quote, there's no question it's beneficial to wear any face covering.
However, there's a very serious difference in the effectiveness of different masks when it comes to controlling aerosols.
And by the way, that is being done.
That study is being done by mechanically shooting the virus at the mask.
It is not being done how people actually wear masks, which is you put the mask on, you take the mask off, you put the mask back on, you spit all over the mask, it's wet, you have more aerosol droplets now exiting because the mask is no longer dry.
Yaroslavich and his team said many people wear masks that don't fit their faces.
This causes the aerosol droplets to escape through multiple openings between a person's face and the cloth mask, which could spread COVID-19 in populous areas.
By the way, even the N95 was only able to filter 50% of aerosol droplets.
The other half is dispersed around the wearer's head.
Nerocevic's team added that ventilation tests revealed even modest ventilation rates provide about the same level of protection as the highest quality masks.
So if you have like a HEPA filter and some open windows, he's saying that provides the same level of protection as if everyone's wearing an N95.
Earlier this month, of course, Michael Osterholm said on CNN that cloth masks basically don't do anything.
And YouTube tried to remove it.
Because how dare you contradict the science, which is not even science.
So you've got Anthony Fauci recommending, and then when Anthony Fauci at the very end, he says, and if you're vaccinated, and if you get it, you could pass it on to somebody who you don't even know.
And that person is not vaccinated.
And you're like, well, yes, but they had the opportunity to get vaccinated, did they not?
That's like, isn't that on them?
And then he's like, and people couldn't get that.
OK, well, if they can't get vaccinated and they are peculiarly vulnerable, they should not be out in public places in the first place or they should be wearing an N95 or both.
There's no limiting principle.
The idea is mask forever.
Mask forever.
Beyond point of death.
You got Anthony Fauci over here and he's like, even after you're dead, you could pass it.
I mean, your body, it's still, it's still given off.
The virus is still on you.
What if somebody is handling your body?
And it gets on the hands and then they put it in the eyes.
And then they innocently pass it on to a child.
What if you die and we put you in the grave and you don't wear a mask and now a tree grows its roots into your grave, into your body and now the virus explodes outward into the tree and it has fruit and the child picks the fruit and eats the apple and the apple has the COVID.
What then?
What if you chop down the tree and now you're an old man and you're sitting on the tree stump?
It's the giving tree.
And you're sitting there and you think you're safe, but you're not because you're old now.
It's been 80 years since the tree grew from the grave of the man with the COVID.
And you're sitting there innocently and up through the ground, through the tree stump, into your ass, comes the COVID.
What are you talking about?
There's no limiting principle.
It is all about the politics of trying to cudgel people to do things that do not make any level of public policy sense.
Every adult in America has had the opportunity to get the COVID vaccine.
If you do not, that is your problem now.
This is called freedom.
But they don't want the freedom.
The freedom is the problem, you see.
When there's no limiting principle, I was willing to go along with this crap when there was an endpoint.
At the very beginning, when we didn't know anything.
Go back and listen to my podcast.
At the very beginning, when we didn't know anything, I was like, okay, maybe we gotta lock down.
I mean, we don't know how unsafe this is.
It could be the bubonic plague.
It could kill my parents.
It could hurt my kids.
And then, over time, we got more data.
And then you respond to the more data.
That is usually how the scientific process works.
And then, you respond to the even more data.
That the vaccines are quite durable.
And that natural infection has also created an enormous number of people who not only have antibodies, but T cell immunity.
And one of the big problems with some of the studies that are now being done on the effects of the vaccine is that they are attempting to measure antibody levels.
Antibody levels wane over time for pretty much every vaccine.
The question is not antibody levels.
The question is T cell immunity, which is harder to measure.
So we've been using studies that measure antibodies, even though the real question is whether T cell, it's like your memory cells, whether your T cells actually have developed the immunity.
It is measured differently.
So be like, wow, the antibodies are waning.
That's scary.
That means that we got to get another booster or the vaccines aren't working.
No, that's not what that means at all.
Your body does not.
The antibody levels wane when the virus isn't in the system.
The T cell immunity remains.
You got the MMR when you were a kid, right?
Measles, mumps, and rubella.
You don't have tremendous antibodies running around your system for MMR because you currently don't have measles, mumps, and rubella in your system that your body is attempting to fight off.
You have T-cell immunity.
And by the way, you've had boosters on all of these shows.
Like, everybody who's saying that boosters themselves are sort of an undercutting of the vaccine.
When you're a kid, you have boosters all the time.
And if you've had natural immunity, there's good evidence right now from Israel that natural immunity is actually superior to the vaccine-induced immunity if you have to choose between one and the other, for example.
But again, so much of the crisis mentality is driven by the need for the political win.
This is why you have Joe Biden trying to, yesterday, say, we need to mask kids.
Hey, the data on masking kids does not exist.
It does not exist.
In fact, there's some pretty good counter data.
Here is Joe Biden saying, again, a thing that is not scientific.
Let me say this as parents, to the parents.
As you have, you have the tools.
You have the tools to keep your child safer.
And two of those tools, above all, are available to you.
One, make sure that everyone around your child who can be vaccinated is vaccinated.
Parents, adults, teens.
Two, make sure your child is masked when they leave home.
That's how we can best keep our kids safe.
Make sure your child is masked when they leave home.
Your kid is the safest person in the room without being vaccinated.
Your kid is safer than you are.
Okay, you got vaccinated and you're 40?
You are still less safe from COVID than your kid who is unvaccinated by the statistics.
Your kid has a lower chance of death if they are under 18 from COVID than you do after being vaccinated.
And he's like, well, you got to keep your kid safe.
He's a liar.
He is lying to you.
OK, it is untrue that your kids are at vast risk from COVID.
361 kids under the age of 18 have died, according to the CDC, over the course of the last year and a half Okay, out of 73 million people in that subpopulation.
This drives me nuts.
We'll get to more on this in just one second, because it's totally insane.
And again, it is politically driven.
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Alrighty, so.
Again, the evidence on masking kids does not exist.
This is not according to me.
This is according to David Zweig from New York Magazine.
Quote, the science of masking kids at schools remains uncertain, which is the reason why, for example, the UK, Ireland, Scandinavia, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Italy have exempted all kids, right, under the age of 12 particularly, from wearing masks in classrooms.
Conspicuously, there is no evidence of more outbreaks in schools in those countries relative to schools in the United States.
Not only that, basically this is all politics.
The CDC released guidance saying that kids should wear masks and then the American Academy of Pediatrics said everyone in school over the age of two should wear masks.
And then the American Academy of Pediatrics actually took down their own guidance on why kids need to see faces.
I'm not kidding.
This is how much the science matters to people in political positions.
But as New York Magazine says, There was a study.
It was published by the CDC and covered more than 90,000 elementary school students in 169 Georgia schools from November 16th to December 11th.
It was the first to compare COVID-19 incidents in schools with certain mitigation measures in place to other schools without those measures.
There was a provision in this study that said there was no difference between the schools that masked and the schools that didn't.
They didn't bother to actually publish that finding.
Instead, they did what they what is called file drawing.
They didn't like the results, so they just buried it.
I mean, which is insane, by the way.
They studied masking of kids.
It made no difference.
They said masking of staff might have made a difference, which makes sense because adults are getting sick, but it made no difference with regard to kids.
And yet you have Joe Biden saying you must mask your kids.
Why is he doing that?
Why is he saying mask your kids?
He's not just saying mask your kids, by the way.
And let's also point out here that it is completely inappropriate to vaccinate kids under the age of 12 at this point, right?
This is the other point that they make, is they'll say, well, you know, you should mask the kids because they can't vaccinate.
Well, you can't vaccinate the kids, right?
That is obvious.
But then Joe Biden didn't stop there.
He says, I want vaccine mandates from private companies.
Now that we've got FDA approval, I need your help, private America.
I need your help, business America, to try and bully your employees into getting the vaccine again.
What is the point of a vaccine mandate?
Really, what is the point?
If the idea is that all the people who are unvaccinated are going to be forced to be vaccinated, what's the goal of that?
Is the goal to protect them?
Or is the goal to protect others?
If the goal is to protect them, then this is a free country, and you get to decide whether you want to be protected against a given form of disease.
If the goal is to protect others, everyone else has had the same opportunity to get vaxxed that you or I have had.
Period.
And yet here is Joe Biden trying to use the power of government to cudgel private industry to do his work.
Today I'm calling on more country, more companies I should say, in the private sector to step up with vaccine requirements that'll reach millions more people.
If you're a business leader, a non-profit leader, a state or local leader who has been waiting for full FDA approval to require vaccinations.
I'm calling you now to do that, require it.
Do what I did last month, require your employees to get vaccinated or face strict requirements.
Okay, so he's actively calling on people to restrict other people in the United States.
This is rather authoritarian stuff.
By the way, it is worth noting here that we were told that once you reached like 80% of people who are vaccinated in a given society, you would be on the verge of herd immunity, right?
Herd immunity apparently really does not apply to the COVID Delta variant.
Israel reached 80%.
They're still locked down.
They said that they were going to return to normal.
Apparently not.
According to ABC News in Australia, Life is set to be very different once 80% of Australians are vaccinated, but one country has shown the dangers of being too confident and throwing out the rest of the COVID toolkit.
Israel, which has a population only slightly larger than New South Wales, reopened completely after reaching the 80% mark and took a giant step backward.
Israel shot to an early lead in the race to vaccinate, inoculating its citizens at an eye-watering pace to deliver the world's fastest vaccine rollout.
Around 78% of the eligible population are now vaccinated.
But in recent weeks, Israel has been hit by a surprising resurgence of COVID-19, with seven-day average daily case numbers surging past 6,500.
So bottom line is, if there is no return to normality based on the percentages of people who are vaxxed, then again, no limiting principle.
No return to normality ever.
Other things to point out here.
We have been told that Ron DeSantis and the South are evil.
If they'd only had mask mandates, this would have stopped everything.
First of all, we've seen a massive surge in COVID cases in California, which does have a lot of mask mandates.
Second of all, as predicted, On this show, repeatedly, Delta was going to surge and then Delta was going to recede.
We knew this because that's exactly what happened in the UK.
And guess what?
Delta has now surged and Delta has now receded in the American South.
That's not according to me.
That's according to Scott Gottlieb, former FDA commissioner, who's kind of a COVID hawk.
I thought there was an indication that the South was peaking, and I think it's very clear right now the South has peaked.
I mean, it doesn't feel that way because we still have a lot of new infections on a day-over-day basis, and the hospitals still have some very hard weeks ahead.
They're going to continue to get maxed out even after the infections start to decline, but there's very clear evidence.
You look at states like Arkansas and Louisiana, you see the cases coming down, but if you look at sites like covidestim.org, the RT, the rate of expansion of this epidemic, is below one in most of the South.
Okay, so that is good news.
You're not going to hear that from most of the media.
The media is going to continue to do the COVID panic routine about the South.
And then they're going to ignore the fact that the reason that there has been a COVID spike in the South is because it's very, very hot outside and we're all in crowded quarters, right?
We're all going indoors.
And so people who are unvaccinated are getting the disease.
And then people who are vaccinated, some of them are getting breakthrough cases, which means generally a mild flu or a mild cold.
And when I say generally, I mean, except for very, very rare circumstances.
So here's the question, and it's a question that nobody on the left has been willing to answer.
So the left wants the right to answer, how many deaths are you willing to take for freedom?
And the answer on the right is some, right?
Because this is true for virtually all human activity.
We all don't.
Here's the thing.
Human beings don't tend to think about risk level very often.
We don't.
If you thought about the risk level of driving your car every day, And it were just every day in the media.
If you get in your car, you had a one in 1000 chance of dying today getting in your car.
If you thought about that every single day, you might not want to get in your car.
Maybe like I'm gonna get an Uber, I'm gonna get on a bus, right?
But you don't think about it.
So in your mind, risk is binary.
There are things that are risky and things that are not risky.
It is not as though you actually sit there and you calculate the risks of all the things.
They're just the things that are quote-unquote risky and the things that are quote-unquote not risky.
So, for example, skydiving.
You think of this as a risky activity.
I think of it as a risky activity.
The truth is you're probably more, I think, significantly more likely to die in a car accident than you are to die skydiving.
But, one immediately goes to, I'm jumping out of a plane.
That sounds riskier than getting behind the wheel of a car.
So, one is risky and one is not risky.
In your mind, driving around every day is a risk factor of zero.
In reality, your risk factor driving around is significantly higher, depending on your age bracket, and certainly post-vaccination, than your risk of dying from COVID.
This is just statistically the reality.
Post-vaccination, there's no question, you are significantly more likely to die in a car accident than you are to die from COVID-19 after you're vaccinated.
And you see vaccinated people who have put living normal life in the category of very risky, living without a mask in the category of very risky.
And so the question for those people is, okay, so the question, so when it comes to freedom, We all recognize in normal areas of life, sort of in the back of our mind, we recognize that there's a risk of death to freedom.
Anytime you go to a ballgame, there could be a terrorist attack.
Anytime you go out driving, you could get in a car accident.
Anytime you walk out your front door, there's a risk of something bad happening to you.
And we all accept that as part of normal life.
And so the question is, how much risk are you willing to accept in order to continue normal life?
And the answer is post-vaccination, you should be living your normal life.
Post-vaccination, we should all get back to living our normal life post-vaccination because there is no alternative but to do so.
Otherwise, these are your choices.
Get back to normal life post-vaccination or spend the rest of your life masking and waiting for the government to tell you what to do.
Those are your choices.
For the left, there's no limiting principle.
For people who have become COVID crazy, there is no limiting principle to this.
For them, I ask a question.
What level of freedom are you willing to give up to prevent very small numbers of death?
What level of freedom?
In Australia, the answer is all of it.
This should scare everybody in the West.
In Australia, the answer is literally all the freedom.
Australia is a country of some 25 million people.
The Australian COVID death rates, day on day, are like three.
Australia has been having about three deaths a day from COVID.
They're having 800, 900 cases of Delta because it turns out you cannot just shield yourself behind Fortress Ocean forever, which is what Australia tried to do.
For a year, Australia basically made it that you could not travel into Australia.
They basically tried to have a plague city, right?
They were just going to cut off all outside contact with the outside world.
And then one person entered with Delta, and now they have an explosion in new cases.
By the way, they did not bother to get everybody vaccinated because they were so confident in their ability to shut out the outside world that their vaccination rate in Australia... Remember, America's terrible for our vaccination rate, right?
We're the worst.
We're just awful.
It doesn't matter that the vast majority of adults in the United States above the age of 18, like over 70%, have had the vaccine already.
In Australia, the number of adults, the percentage of adults who have been vaccinated in Australia is about 25%, about one quarter.
They have a huge, unvaccinated, vulnerable population.
So because of that, Australia has decided they're going to crack down.
And when they say they're going to crack down, I mean they are going to crack down.
So here is a little bit of tape from Nine News in Australia talking about the measures they are taking.
This is full authoritarian lockdown with no limiting principle in sight.
There's little sympathy for anyone ignoring the health orders.
Even this group of teenagers caught partying after dark at the bottom of the North Bondi cliffs.
Herded to higher ground by Polaire's spotlight and speaker, the eight boys were placed in handcuffs and left to explain a thousand dollar fine to mum.
681 penalty infringement notices issued in the last 24 hours.
More than 400 of those notices were again for people being outside of their home.
Without a reasonable excuse.
Okay, this is dystopian insanity.
They've locked people in their homes in a country of 25 million people for three to four deaths a day.
Okay, and they've locked them down.
They're locking them down for weeks over there.
They outlawed protests, by the way.
In fact, we were told yesterday on the program by a journalist from Australia that they have outlawed even saying things in favor of protests in Australia because that would be promoting breaking the law.
So what kind of tyranny are you willing to undergo In order to never get back to real life and avoid all risk forever.
And then you're going to have to ask another question, which is how much pressure are you willing to bring on the unvaccinated?
In order to get them to vaccinate, again, in order to protect their own lives.
There's a story on MSNBC that was making the rounds yesterday.
75 doctors claimed that they walked off the job to protest the unvaccinated.
In reality, that's not really what was happening.
Apparently, what was actually happening is they exited the building to encourage people to get vaccinated, which is fine, right?
You want to encourage people to get vaccinated, that's fine.
MSNBC covered it as though these doctors were saying that they did not want to care for the unvaccinated.
Here is a little bit of the tape from MSNBC.
As I step out here, I can see they're all standing here in white jackets, some coming off of their shifts.
Your thoughts about why it's gotten to this point that people are gathered like this?
We feel that people think it's political, and it's not.
It's medical.
I have all my colleagues behind me, and we're all here as physicians to say one message.
Vaccines work.
It's safe.
It's not political.
It's medical.
And we're very passionate about it because we're honestly tired of seeing unvaccinated people come in sick and have to be admitted.
Okay, so the way that the left covered this is their suggestion was that the doctors were refusing to care for the unvaccinated.
And there was a lot of talk in the media about how we should be triaging in favor of the vaccinated over the unvaccinated, as opposed to triaging based on who's most likely to survive in a crisis scenario, which is usually how you triage, right?
You actually look at the health conditions of the people underlying.
Is it an 85-year-old with terminal cancer?
Or is it a 30-year-old who's generally healthy but has the disease and now can be triaged?
The attempt here is to suggest that people don't deserve medical care if they're unvaccinated.
Now, I've said that if you're unvaccinated, that is on you.
But it is also true that doctors care for everybody no matter how they got sick.
If somebody wheels a person into the ER who was shot in a gang duel, in a bout of gang violence, the doctors don't say, well, you know, they kind of brought it on themselves.
They were in a sort of gang violence scenario.
I guess I'm not caring for this.
That's not what doctors do.
If somebody comes in and they're morbidly obese and they've been told by their doctor for literally their entire life that they need to start eating healthy and lose weight and now they have heart disease, the doctor isn't like, well, I did tell you, you shouldn't do that.
Right.
Nobody.
That is not how medicine is practiced.
And I find it rather dystopian and scary that there are people on the left who are saying People on the left are saying this.
They're saying if you're unvaccinated and you come into the hospital, the hospital shouldn't treat you.
I'm amused to see, however, many people on the left say things like, if you come into the hospital unvaccinated, you should be responsible for your own medical bills.
That I'm in favor for.
I'm in favor of that, except not with regard to vaccination and not vaccination.
I'm in favor of that for everything.
We call that a privatized medical health care system in which you are responsible for your own health.
Okay, but again, what this is really about is the politicization.
I'm amazed to watch people on the left say that the right is politicizing this.
No, when you have Dr. Fauci saying it doesn't matter what mask you wear, you just need to mask up post-vaccination everywhere.
And when you have Joe Biden saying you need to mask your kids every time they leave the house.
And when you have Joe Biden saying your business should tell people that they cannot work for you if they are unvaccinated.
Who's making that political?
And what's the real goal?
The real goal, of course, is to distract from the giant.
The reason we're doing that this week right now, the reason we've upped the ante is not because the stats show that we should up the ante this week as opposed to like three or four weeks ago.
The reason that we are doing this right now is because Joe Biden needs to redirect away from the gigantic failure we are currently experiencing in Afghanistan and the crisis that is likely to materialize over the course of the next week.
We'll get to that in just one moment first.
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So what is this really about right now?
Why is Joe Biden doing this right now?
Why is Anthony Fauci upping the game right now?
And the answer is, because this failure in Afghanistan is truly horrifying.
So Adam Schiff, you never expect to hear a true thing out of Adam Schiff, who, again, has a pup tent.
It is placed right outside of the MSNBC green room.
He spent four years lying about how there was going to be inevitable evidence that Donald Trump was a Russian cat's paw.
He was a Russki.
Right, you remember this?
Okay, but Adam Schiff, Who can always be counted on to back whatever is the Democratic talking point of the moment?
He did not when it came to Afghanistan yesterday.
It was very unfortunate for the Biden administration.
According to The Hill, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff said it was very unlikely the U.S.
will complete its evacuation of Afghanistan by the August 31st deadline.
He said, quote, I think it's possible, but I think it's very unlikely given the number of Americans who still need to be evacuated.
It's hard for me to imagine that all of that can be accomplished between now and the end of the month.
I'm encouraged to see the numbers of people evacuating increasing readily to the point where we evacuated 11,000 people in a single day.
Nonetheless, given the logistical difficulties of moving people to the airport and the limited number of workarounds, it's hard for me to see that could be fully complete by the end of the month.
He said, I'm certainly of the view we maintain a military presence for as long as is necessary.
To get all U.S.
persons out and to meet our moral and ethical obligations to our Afghan partners.
So Schiff admitted that there are people who are stranded.
He admitted that getting people out by August 31st is unlikely.
He said he is concerned about the security of the airport.
He said, I think the threat to the airport is very real and very substantial.
And he says this makes an attractive target for ISIS.
It does.
It is one runway and the gates are not properly guarded.
And the people who stand between ISIS and the Americans are the Taliban.
And finally, Schiff admitted that the intel community knew from the beginning that the Afghan government was likely to collapse if the United States pulled out, and the Taliban was likely to take over, which means that Joe Biden was just lying.
That he was just lying.
Intel committee member Jason Crowe, another Democrat, said, I do not believe at this point that I have any evidence of an intelligence failure.
So, um, then it's just, then it's just Joe Biden's fault, which is why he has to distract.
So Jen Psaki yesterday just gave an astonishing statement.
She was asked by Peter Giussi about the Americans currently stranded in Kabul.
Her answer was to play semantic games over whether they are actually stranded or not.
I'm pretty sure that the Americans who are now being relegated to their apartments in Kabul and are deathly afraid of walking out the front door for fear they will be beaten by the Taliban and there's nobody coming to get them, they probably feel a little stranded.
A little.
By the way, every major news outlet in the United States has called them stranded because they are.
Here's Jen Psaki denying it.
Does the president have a sense that most of the criticism is not of leaving Afghanistan, it's the way that he has ordered it to happen, by pulling the troops before getting these Americans who are now stranded.
Does he have a sense of that?
First of all, I think it's irresponsible to say Americans are stranded.
They are not.
We are committed to bringing Americans who want to come home, home.
We are in touch with them via phone, via text, via email, via any way that we can possibly reach Americans.
to get them home if they want to return home.
There are no Americans stranded is the White House's official position on what's happening in Afghanistan.
I'm just calling you out for saying that we are stranding Americans in Afghanistan when I said, when we have been very clear that we are not leaving Americans who want to return home.
Okay, no.
Now she's shifting the conversation, right?
He's saying, they are currently stranded.
And she's like, they're not stranded.
He's like, is that your position?
And she's like, no, I'm just, I'm just saying that we're going to go get them.
That's like saying there were not men stranded on the beach at Dunkirk.
Okay, they were, and then people went and got them.
There are Americans currently stranded in Kabul.
The question is, are you going to go out there and are you going to save them?
Well, one of the questions that needs to be answered before you even get to that is how many Americans are there even in Kabul?
Well, the good news is the American government has no damned idea.
In fact, the American government is not even willing at this point to say how many Americans they've gotten out.
They're giving you broad numbers as to how many people they've gotten out.
A huge majority of those are Afghan nationals who worked with the United States, which is fine, but They are not willing to say how many Americans are among that group.
Why?
Well, there's only one reason for that in terms of public relations.
The only reason for that is because the number is kind of low.
Here is Major General Hank Taylor admitting he doesn't know how many Americans have even left.
You mentioned that 42,000 have been evacuated since July.
Is that 42,000 just on military airlift, or does that include the commercial and chartered planes?
Yeah, so that total number is U.S.
military plus U.S.
civilian, State Department.
Some of that was State Department contract air that went out also early on.
Do you have any breakdown of the number of U.S.
citizens in that 42,000 that have gotten out?
I do, but I don't have that right now.
Well, they don't have that.
And then John Kirby of the Pentagon said the same thing.
He's asked how many Americans have actually been evacuated.
Well, we don't know.
Or we're not going to tell you.
Whoop-de-doo.
That's the most important number here, the number of Americans.
So if it's just a matter of checking the number, can you do that and give it to us?
Or if you're being deliberately vague, tell me why you're being deliberately vague.
I think I'm just going to leave it at several thousand right now, Dave.
Well, then tell us why.
Because I think the number is very fluid, and it literally changes nearly by the hour.
It's not more fluid than these 11,000, 37,000.
I'm going to leave it at several thousand right now.
That's unbelievable.
That's unbelievable.
And that is from the spokesperson for the Pentagon.
So things must be going great.
If they won't even tell you how many Americans they've actually gotten out at this point, things must be going just spectacularly.
Meanwhile, the Taliban has set a red line.
The Taliban has said openly that if you stay beyond August 31st, then bleep gets real.
Here's a Taliban spokesperson saying this yesterday to Sky News.
If the US or the UK wanted to extend the 31st of August deadline in order to continue evacuations out of the country, would you agree to that?
No, no.
Why not?
This is something you can say it's a red line.
While there is no need for that, I think it will deteriorate the relation, will create mistrust between us.
If they are intent on continuing the occupation, so it will provoke a reaction.
And the bleep is about to hit the fan, because we're not getting everybody out by August 31st, and the Taliban have said that's the deadline.
So, what is Joe Biden willing to risk here to get Americans out?
We're about to find out in very short order.
The military says he has one week to decide to extend the deadline, and that's it.
And past that, they don't know what they can do.
All right, we'll be back here later today with an additional hour of The Ben Shapiro Show coming up soon.
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