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Oct. 11, 2021 - The Ben Shapiro Show

46:43

Yes, Happy Columbus Day | Ep. 1351

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	We examine the recasting of Columbus Day into Indigenous Peoples Day, Dr. Anthony Fauci continues to preach doom and gloom, and Southwest mysteriously cancels thousands of flights while denying it has anything to do with pilots sitting home thanks to vaccine mandates.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
	This show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.
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	OK, well, today marks Columbus Day, or as it has newly been touted by now the Biden administration and by many major cities around the country, Indigenous Peoples Day.
	And it's worth examining in a little bit of detail how Columbus Day has morphed into Indigenous Peoples Day, because this really, I think, may have been the first step in the United States toward the dissolution of sort of national monuments.
	What I mean by that is that there are monuments that had been argued over for a long time because they honestly ought to be super controversial.
	So for example, confederate monuments, you understand exactly why people would look at that and go, why exactly is there a statue of a person who rebelled against the United States?
	You get that, right?
	You understand that.
	And certainly you see from a black American perspective, why you would look at a confederate statue and say to yourself, well, that person literally has a statue for fighting for the enslavement of my ancestors.
	The Confederate statue is not a statue to uphold the glory of the United States.
	It's a statue about people who were, legally speaking, traitors.
	And you understand the countervailing argument, which is that we have to actually recognize the ugliness of our history in order for us to move forward.
	And tearing down those statues is a mistake.
	That obliterating history in any of its forms is generally a mistake.
	That's the position of Connelisa Rice.
	Okay, and then on the other end of the spectrum, statues that should not be torn down, you have statues of George Washington, which over the last few years have been hit with red paint.
	You've seen statues of George Washington torn down.
	You've seen actual American heroes being obliterated.
	And the idea there is that virtually all American heroes participated in crimes and injustices of their time, meaning that were very common at the time.
	And so most Americans look at those people and they say, OK, what were their historic contributions to the United States versus what were their demerits of the time?
	Not meaning if there were a person who did what George Washington did today, what would we do to that person?
	That person would go to jail.
	Slavery is illegal, for example.
	But in the context of the time when slavery was near universal across Virtually all over the world, what did he do that was good?
	What was different about George Washington, not what was the same as his compatriots?
	Okay, well, when you look at Christopher Columbus, which has now become sort of a hot topic, when you look at Christopher Columbus, which is he closer to?
	George Washington or a Confederate monument?
	Or is he closer to a person who did something truly kind of amazing and heroic, but participated in the evils that were very common to his time?
	Or is he someone who's predominantly characterized by his evils?
	So for most of American history, the answer was pretty obviously the former.
	Christopher Columbus did something unbelievably heroic.
	He did more than any of us have done.
	He got on a boat.
	He crossed a giant ocean that had not been mapped.
	And he proceeded to find Hispaniola on behalf of the West.
	He found Cuba on behalf of the East.
	He landed in the Bahamas on behalf of the West.
	And this was considered a pretty damned brave thing.
	He had to go to multiple different countries in order to find funding for his voyage.
	He had to somehow withstand mutinous sailors who got about three quarters of the way there and they were like, we are in the middle of nowhere, would you like to turn around now?
	Kind of shortchange what Columbus did is not only a historic mistake, but reveals a certain level of historical ignorance because it's kind of an incredible feat just on the face of it.
	And you don't have to deny any of Columbus's sins or the sins of the people of the time in order to recognize the historicity of the feat, the historic importance of the feat, because the fact is that opening the North American continent to the West has paved the way for the United States.
	Which, of course, is why we celebrate Columbus Day, right?
	Benjamin Harrison was the President of the United States when Columbus Day was declared an official federal holiday in 1892.
	And he wrote a proclamation encouraging Americans to mark the 400th anniversary of Columbus's voyage.
	He said, On that day, let the people, so far as possible, cease from toil and devote themselves to such exercises as may best express honor to the discoverer and their appreciation of the great achievements of the four completed centuries of American life.
	Right?
	It was the discovery that was being celebrated, not Columbus's treatment of the natives.
	The discovery.
	Now the reason again this is important is because when we look at history we have to look at what made the person different not what made the person the same as all the other people who are doing evil things at the time.
	So over the past couple of decades particularly, there has been the rise of something called Indigenous Peoples Day, which is a celebration of the people who are here before Columbus.
	Now, I have no problem with a day celebrating the culture and achievements of people who are here before Columbus.
	But to put it on Columbus Day is very specifically political.
	In fact, if you wanted to have an Indigenous Peoples Day and you wanted to have it coincide with, for example, an American holiday, the better holiday to do that on would probably be Thanksgiving, considering that Thanksgiving is a day when Native American peoples actually helped new European settlers on the continent.
	I mean, this is why when you were growing up, the way that this was celebrated Thanksgiving in school is some of the kids would dress up a squanto and some of the kids would dress up as pilgrims and they'd all have lunch together.
	And if you want to celebrate the contributions of indigenous peoples, typically you don't do that on the day that is dedicated to the discovery of the Americas by the West.
	If you want to have an Indigenous People's Day, the only reason to have Indigenous People's Day on Columbus Day is to specifically hone in on the supposedly unique evils of Christopher Columbus or of the West discovering the Americas.
	In sort of the same way that you will see the Arab population in Israel.
	commemorate quote-unquote Nakba Day on the foundation of the State of Israel.
	The idea being that the State of Israel was the destruction.
	The State of Israel is the bad thing.
	It's a disaster.
	This is what indigenous people... It's a zero-sum game when you decide to place Indigenous Peoples Day on the same day as Columbus Day.
	It doesn't have to be a zero-sum game.
	You could have Columbus Day celebrating Columbus, and then you could have Indigenous Peoples Day celebrating indigenous peoples.
	They don't have to occupy the same day, but there is a reason they occupy the same day.
	And the reason they occupy the same day is because of an attempt to twist American history into a long procession, a long procession of abuses and evils unending even until today.
	The case for Indigenous Peoples Day on the same day as Columbus Day is basically the 1619 Project.
	You're just calling it the 1492 Project.
	The idea being that American history is just a long train of abuses.
	It began in 1492 and it has not ended today.
	I would say a lot of the roots of Indigenous Peoples' Day lie in the historian Howard Zinn.
	For those of us who are following the debate over critical race theory and the teaching of history in the schools, the truth is that critical race theory being taught in the schools is sort of the second wave of radicalism being taught in the schools.
	The sort of Howard Zinn version of American history, where America is indubitably bad, top to bottom.
	Howard Zinn was pushing that back in the 1970s.
	And on.
	And that's had a pretty marked impact.
	Because now, Indigenous Peoples' Day is being celebrated from the White House.
	To pretend that there is no ideology attached to this is to ignore the actual history of Indigenous Peoples' Day.
	If you look at history.com, for example.
	They talk about the fact that the original controversy over Columbus Day was actually nativist, because there were a lot of people in the United States who didn't like Catholics, and they thought that honoring Columbus was honoring Catholics.
	But, says History.com, in recent decades, Native Americans and other groups have protested the celebration of an event that resulted in the colonization of the Americas, the beginnings of the transatlantic slave trade, and the deaths of millions from murder and disease.
	So, number one, to pretend that colonization between tribes didn't exist before the West got here, or that the slave trade didn't exist before the West got here.
	There wasn't an official transatlantic slave trade, obviously, but there was certainly a ringing and robust Trade of slaves, or at least slavery happening, enslavement of captives happening routinely across the Americas before the West ever got here.
	The deaths of millions from murder and disease, right, is what they say.
	Millions of people died from murder and disease in the Americas long before Christopher Columbus ever set foot on Hispaniola.
	It's being treated as a zero-sum game.
	So for the White House to sort of embrace the zero-sum game is indicative of just how deeply rooted this ideology is.
	And I want to get deeper into what the ideology means in a second.
	Here's Jen Psaki saying that it's very important to this White House to commemorate Indigenous Peoples Day, not as sort of a generalized thank you to Native Americans for their contributions to the United States and also for their contributions to world history, but instead to do it directly on Columbus Day.
	Well, today is both Columbus Day, as of now, and this is why you're asking the question, as well as Indigenous Peoples Day.
	I'm not aware of any discussion of ending the prior federal holiday at this point, but I know that recognizing today as Indigenous Peoples Day is something that the President felt strongly about personally.
	He's happy to be the first President to celebrate and to make it the history of moving forward.
	Okay, so why exactly are we tying these two things together?
	Okay, the answer, obviously, is that the upside for the West is the downside for everybody else.
	And this is the general Howard Zinn take on American history.
	So Howard Zinn was a professor at Boston University.
	He wrote a very bad book called The People's History of the United States.
	It is cribbed from a bunch of other sources, frankly, and it's filled with a lot of pseudo history.
	Xin was a communist, and so a lot of his, or at least a communist fellow traveler, and so much of his writing is rooted in an almost Soviet view of American history as just completely evil, top to bottom, dominated by capitalist rapaciousness.
	In this view, I mean, Howard Zinn talks openly about this.
	The idea was that European dispossession of Native Americans is the root of property rights.
	That property rights are bad.
	That was the problem.
	That underlying the evils perpetuated by Columbus against Native Americans were property rights.
	And property rights are inherently bad because, again, Howard Zinn was a communist fellow traveler.
	So, Howard Zinn, I mean, I write about this in my, not the latest book, but the one right before it, How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps.
	I write about this.
	I say, Howard Zinn opens his masterwork by contrasting the Arawaks of the Bahamas Islands, who he says were, quote, very much like Indians on the mainland, who were remarkable, European observers were to say again and again, for their hospitality, their belief in sharing with the evil Europeans who were, quote, dominated as it was by the religion of popes, the government of kings, the frenzy for money that marked Western civilization, and its first messenger to the Americas, Christopher Columbus.
	So that's the contrast.
	The contrast is the sort of Rousseauian noble savage notion that everybody who was living in the Americas before the West got here was wonderful and it was kind of Pocahontas and the Disney movie and then the West got here and it was all rape and capitalism.
	In this narrative, Columbus was merely Western brutality writ small.
	The natives, by contrast, were, quote, the ideal of humanity, quote, Columbus and his successors were not coming into an empty wilderness, but into a world where human relations were more egalitarian than in Europe and where the relations among men, women, and children in nature were more beautifully worked out than perhaps any place in the world, right?
	This is what Howard Zinn writes.
	Now, begin with this.
	Even if that were true, Even if it were true, that everything was wonderful in the New World and then Columbus came here and this was somehow a representation of the evils of property rights, what that would demonstrate is not the evils of capitalism, it would demonstrate the evils of seizing land from people, which is actually not capitalism.
	But, the more important argument, which is Zinn's argument, that America was sort of born in sin and is thus irredeemable, Unless you just get rid of property rights is really silly.
	The reality, of course, is that you don't have to minimize the brutality of European treatment of Native Americans to recognize that the Rousseauian vision of what America was before the West got here is just not true.
	Harvard's Steven Pinker says, quote, But that, of course, is the entire goal.
	The idea is the West is uniquely bad.
	the noble savage, quantitative body counts such as the proportion of prehistoric skeletons with ax marks and embedded arrowheads or the proportion of men in a contemporary foraging tribe who died at the hands of other men suggest that pre-state societies were far more violent than our own.
	But that of course is the entire goal. The idea is the West is uniquely bad and everything that was before in order to contrast what happened before the West is uniquely good. Now that of course is not true.
	Human evils tend to be pretty common to pretty much all the humans.
	And again, the basic notion that everything was sort of hunky-dory on the continent before the West got here is also not true.
	I mean, there was vast enslavement of other warriors by tribes.
	There was, not by the Native Americans that Columbus dealt with, but there was apparently a tribe that had been engaging in cannibalism that was sort of nearby and had been actually preying on the Taino, according to the most recent sort of scientific estimates.
	The notion here is not to justify anything that Columbus did that was bad against Native Americans.
	The point here is that all of human history is replete with evil.
	When we pay tribute to people, what we are paying tribute to is the good that they did, not the evil that they did.
	And to pose those two things in direct contrast, as though what you have to do is choose between Columbus Day and Indigenous Peoples Day by putting them on the same day, as though they are the flip sides of one another.
	Or, as though Indigenous Peoples' contribution ended when Columbus got here is also very silly.
	You can pay tribute to Columbus, and then if you want to pay tribute to indigenous peoples, you can do that on a different day.
	It doesn't have to be the same day.
	The reason that it was done on the same day is because, again, the idea was that what was good for the West was bad for everyone else because the West is inherently kind of bad.
	And that is untrue.
	But that idea has led to some pretty bad law, actually.
	It's kind of fascinating.
	There is something called the Indian Child Welfare Act that is still on the books in the United States.
	And it actually harms Native American children, but again it's predicated on the idea that we have to treat people in different ways based on race, which is a mistake.
	Which was, in fact, the mistake of Columbus, as it turns out.
	We'll get to more of this in just one moment.
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	Now, removing history from its context is one way of uniquely condemning a civilization, and that is a huge Enormous mistake.
	And when it comes to doing good for Native Americans today, we do a lot in this country that is rooted in sort of symbolic attempts to appease Native Americans, for example.
	And it doesn't do anything for actual Native Americans on the ground.
	So, for example, we had a big debate over the Washington Redskins and removing the name and calling it the Washington football team and all this or the Cleveland Indians changing the name of the team.
	The idea is that that is inherently insulting, which again I find kind of bizarre because if you ever called the team the Cleveland Jews and they went around beating up the New Orleans Saints, I'd be like, wow, this is kind of great.
	But in any case.
	The idea is that the best way to pay tribute to particular racial groups in the country is to worry about their sensitivities as opposed to making their lives better.
	And the reality is that if you wanted to make lives better for Native Americans living in the United States today, you'd worry a lot less about Columbus Day and quote-unquote Indigenous Peoples Day, and you'd worry a lot more about the state of play in Native American reservations, which are disproportionately suffering from poverty and joblessness.
	And we've constructed laws that make it worse for those people.
	There's a really interesting article in the Orange County Register by a guy named Timothy Sandifer, who's vice president for litigation at the Goldwater Institute.
	And he talks about something called the Indian Child Welfare Act.
	He says more than a dozen states have recently chosen to recognize the second Monday in October not as Columbus Day but as Indigenous Peoples Day in an effort to acknowledge the nation's indebtedness to Native Americans as well as the many injustices they've experienced over the centuries.
	It's fitting that the Supreme Court is now poised to consider a case involving one of the greatest injustices ever inflicted on Native Americans.
	The case involves a federal law called the Indian Child Welfare Act, ICWA, which effectively bars states from protecting Native American children from abuse and denies them opportunities to find permanent caring adoptive homes.
	Enacted in 1978 with the goal of preventing state child welfare agencies from taking children away from Native American parents on insufficient grounds, ICWA went too far in the other direction.
	ICWA categorizes children as Indian based exclusively on biological ancestry.
	Even kids who are not tribal members, speak no tribal language, and have never lived on a reservation qualify because they are quote-unquote eligible for membership because of blood ties.
	Then the Act imposes a separate set of rules whenever state courts review cases involving their safety.
	And those rules are way less protective than those applied to other kids.
	For example, if a white or black kid is abused by a parent, the state can take her into protective custody, as long as it first makes, quote, reasonable efforts to preserve the family unit.
	This is not required if aggravated circumstances exist, like molestation or drug addiction.
	But the ICWA requires active efforts, a term the law doesn't define, but which is more demanding than reasonable efforts.
	And this is not excused by aggravated circumstances.
	This means state agencies must return Indian children to families they know are hurting them.
	The results are often tragic.
	Montana officials knew Anthony Renova was being abused, so they placed him in foster care for four of his five years of life.
	Had he been non-Indian, he might have been adopted.
	Instead, thanks to ICWA, the state was forced to return him to abusive parents in February 2019, and nine months later, they beat him to death.
	The ICWA requires that Indian children be adopted by Indian families instead of families of other races.
	Because there are not a lot of Indian families looking to adopt, Native kids in need are often bounced from foster home to foster home, never finding a permanent home.
	You remember that there was a pretty famous case recently in which there was a foster home where the foster parents wanted to adopt a Native American kid.
	The Native American kid had never met his Native American relatives.
	The court refused to allow the foster parents who had known the kid for years to adopt the kid because of the ICWA.
	In other words, very often the policies that people on the left think are going to help Native Americans very often actually hurt Native Americans.
	But the goal is symbolic here.
	Understand that the reason that we've transferred over from Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples Day is not really about helping Native Americans.
	It's about the symbolic notion that the West is inherently bad and that the sins that the West participated in, which were participated in by virtually all civilizations of the time, including civilizations that were present on the North American continent when Columbus got here, The idea is that Columbus's mere arrival was the worst of all the things.
	That he had somehow changed the nature of the game in terms of disease or murderousness or all of the rest.
	This is why you get all the claims that are made in schools now, colleges, that Christopher Columbus perpetuated a genocide.
	That is not true.
	A disease kills lots of people.
	The German theory of disease was certainly not in knowledge in 1492.
	And as it turns out, there was disease that had been killing Native Americans a lot longer than that, because disease is a universal to the human experience.
	The point of all of this is, again, not to downplay the contribution of Native Americans, whose contributions particularly in the northeast of the country, at the foundation of the United States, can be seen in some of the documents even of the time.
	Nor is it to downplay Native American culture.
	It's to point out that when you treat history as a zero-sum game, what you end up doing is placing modern people who live today in direct opposition to one another.
	And you end up undermining the roots of a civilization that has provided great prosperity for enormous numbers of people, including Native Americans, on the continent of the United States living today.
	Right?
	That does not mean the injustices of the past are excused.
	It does mean that if you're going to look at history in context, you have to actually be responsible about it.
	They can't pretend that only the bad exists or that the good that was done by Columbus arriving on the continent is outweighed by a bad that was universal to the time.
	If you do that, there will be no statues of anybody left in history because as it turns out, Pretty much every hero that we have anywhere throughout history has committed sins that were universal to the time.
	In 200 years, all the people we consider heroes today will be considered villains for a wide variety of new reasons that will have cropped up over the next couple of hundred years.
	Every single person who we're building a statue to today, that'll be torn down in a hundred years if this is the logic that you hold to.
	Because again, human beings are complex, we have our upsides, and we have our downsides.
	And it's very important to recognize our contributions, not just the villainy that was universal to the time, and that then had victims attached to it.
	Meanwhile...
	The attempt to control everybody throughout this COVID pandemic continues apace, and it does have some pretty significant downsides.
	So, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the greatest of all doctors.
	I'm sorry, Dr. Joe Biden is the greatest, Dr. Anthony Fauci is the second greatest.
	Dr. Fauci.
	Dr. Fauci.
	He continues to just panic people over and over.
	The idea is that the vaccines work, but also they don't work.
	The vaccines are very good, except when they are bad.
	You're vaccinated, which means you don't have to worry, except that you have to deeply worry.
	And this is why we have to use mandates.
	And this is why we have to control things top down.
	This is the smiling face of authoritarianism via your public health establishment, Dr. Anthony Fauci.
	Why they're still trotting him out when he really has no institutional credibility with precisely the people he's supposed to be talking to, right?
	Everybody who's vaxxed and everybody who trusts Fauci already is going to get vaxxed, triple-vaxxed, quadruple-vaxxed, quintuple-vaxxed, right?
	Whatever Fauci says.
	But there's a whole group of Americans who are not getting vaxxed, and many of them aren't doing it specifically because they don't trust Fauci.
	I trust that, frankly, I doubt as well.
	I do not trust Dr. Fauci.
	I think that he has been wrong on nearly every issue of the pandemic, sometime during the pandemic.
	And I think that he is a political cat's paw of the Biden administration, will do whatever they say, no matter whether they are doing so rooted in politics or whether they are doing so rooted in some sort of science.
	So over the weekend, he said it is tough to predict when vaccinated people can go indoors without a mask.
	The answer is now.
	If you're vaccinated, you can go indoors without a mask.
	The reason I say that you can do this is because I don't care whether you get sick from COVID.
	I care whether you get hospitalized and die from COVID.
	I didn't care whether you got sick from the flu.
	I didn't care whether you got a cold.
	I didn't care about nearly... Like, this is the first disease in human history that I am aware of.
	Where we care deeply about whether you contract a cold and a slight fever for a day or two.
	Because that is what you will get if you are vaccinated, by and large.
	And yet, Dr. Anthony Fauci is saying, it's tough to predict when vaccinated people can go indoors without a mask.
	Weird, because I went indoors without a mask, like, you know, for the past six months.
	Strange.
	And everything has been fine.
	And so has everybody that I know.
	Because we don't live by the mewling tyranny of Dr. Anthony Fauci.
	How long do you think it will be until it's safe for vaccinated people to once again be indoors without a mask?
	It's always tough to predict that.
	I think if we continue to go down in the cases that we're seeing right now, and more and more people get vaccinated, as the dynamics of the outbreak, namely the amount of virus circulating in the community, goes down, I hope we'll be able to pull back on some of those restrictions to get closer to what we really feel is normal in the community.
	So let me just point out for Dr. Anthony Fauci that you are safe right now.
	When he says we have to we can't determine when it's safe.
	No, you can.
	The vaccines are 80 to 90 percent effective against hospitalization and death.
	And that means that your death rates are probably lower than that of the flu, depending on your age stratification, and significantly lower than, you know, driving in a car, typically. And so, you can go inside without a mask.
	But he's going to continue this, right? We have to continue this. So here's Fauci saying, maybe we'll be discussing mandates for travelers.
	On the table is the issue of mandates for vaccine.
	It's always discussable.
	We always wind up discussing it.
	Do you support it?
	But right now, I don't see that immediately.
	You know, Dana, I don't want to say support or not.
	I think it's a decision that's made by input from a number of parts of the government, including public health.
	Okay, let me just point out, there's no necessity for this.
	Throughout the pandemic, the evidence that this thing was being spread on planes was basically none, since the beginning.
	Because these planes have HEPA filters, they have better air circulation than you typically have in your home, like by a long shot.
	Basically, the two safest places to be by the statistics during this pandemic were either outside, in open fresh air, or on a plane.
	I'm unaware of any evidence demonstrating that chief vectors of transmission were airplanes.
	And yet here he is saying that maybe we should have travel bans on people who are not.
	Maybe we'll consider that.
	What is he talking about?
	The caseload in the United States has been dropping rapidly for the past several weeks.
	But panic is the entire thing.
	Here's the thing.
	You are now going to run into resistance.
	It is not just in the United States.
	It is international.
	You're going to run into serious resistance across the board.
	According to the UK Daily Mail, hundreds of thousands of US service members remain unvaccinated or are only partially vaccinated against COVID as the deadlines to do so nears.
	About 90% of the active-duty Navy is fully vaccinated.
	72% of the Marine Corps are.
	The Army has 81% of its members vaccinated.
	More than 60,000 people in the Air Force still need to do so.
	Here's the thing.
	Those may sound like high percentages, but if the mandate is you are dishonorably discharged or you get vaccinated, and you're about to lose somewhere between 15 and 20% of the entire armed services of the United States, in the middle of a confrontation with China, for example, are you out of your damned mind?
	According to the Daily Mail, there are almost 340,000 such military personnel.
	The 2% who haven't been jabbed at all represents close to 7,000 people.
	There are 51,000 members of the active Marine Corps personnel who have yet to have the jab.
	Both branches have to be fully vaxxed by November 28th.
	The rate is worse for members of the Army National Guard and the Army Reserves, which have until June to meet the vaccination requirement.
	Military officials are hoping that the vaccination rates will boost.
	But, again, typically these are young, healthy people who are in the military and a lot of them are saying to themselves, is this something that I desperately need to do?
	Is this something I desperately want to do?
	Now, listen, there are all sorts of health mandates on being in the military, although we've been increasingly getting rid of those.
	We've moved down the BMI and we've decided that we're going to lower physical standards for entrance into various branches of the military because we have to make sure that there are more women who are being recruited and all of this.
	With that said, these vaccine mandates, if you end up taking 10-15% of the military off the board, how is that going to work out for the country?
	We're seeing how it's working out for Southwest.
	So, right now, Southwest Airlines has cancelled 1,800 flights over the weekend, disrupting the travel plans of thousands of customers and stranding flight crews.
	They are blaming the meltdown on a combination of bad weather, air traffic control, and its own shortage of available staff.
	Now, the Southwest Pilots Union, they are saying that this is not a result of their attempt to fight back against the vaccine mandates.
	Because right now, the Southwest Union has a lawsuit against the airline attempting to put in place an injunction to stop all of this.
	And so they are, I think a lot of the unions, right, they have union contracts, you're still supposed to show up.
	And so they're doing what would be called, in sort of police or teachers parlance, a sick out.
	This is the theory, is that many of these pilots, many of the staffers are saying, listen, if you continue with this mandate thing, I'm just going to take my sick days now.
	We're all going to take our sick days at the same time.
	We're just not going to go to work and then we'll see how it works out for you.
	The rates Uncanceled flights for Southwest over the weekend were something like 28% as opposed to 2 or 3% for other airlines.
	I know this is an incredibly difficult time for all of you and our customers are not happy.
	Alan Kasher, Executive Vice President of Daily Flight Operations, told staff in a note on Sunday.
	The airlines had initial problems were bad weather and an FAA-imposed air traffic management program.
	They said, although we were staffed for the weekend, we could not anticipate the significant disruption that was created from unexpected ATC issues and bad weather across our Florida stations.
	Now, I'm a little confused by that because I live in Florida, and let me tell you, the weather was not uniquely horrifying over the weekend.
	In fact, the weather yesterday was actually very nice.
	The Federal Aviation Administration said there were a few hours of flight delays on Friday afternoon because of severe weather and staffing issues at Jacksonville Air Route Traffic Control Center, which controls airspace in five parts of Alabama, Georgia, Florida, North Carolina, and South Carolina.
	They said no FAA air traffic staffing shortages have been reported since Friday, the FAA said.
	Some airlines continue to experience scheduling challenges due to aircraft and crews being out of place.
	Now again, the Dallas-based airline cancelled over 1,000 flights on Sunday.
	That is 28% of its entire schedule after cancelling 800 flights on Saturday.
	American, which operates a hub in Miami, cancelled only 66 flights, or 2% of its operation.
	Last I checked, Miami is also in Florida.
	Spirit Airlines, which is legit the worst airline, cancelled 32 flights, 4% of its schedule.
	So there were staffing shortages that fueled hundreds of cancellations and delays at Southwest over the summer because Southwest basically ramped up the flights that it was booking before they had all of their staffers back.
	The airline had to trim its schedule after the summer to avoid further disruptions.
	But, with that said, the vast lack of flights was leading a lot of people to suggest that maybe it was just people who were calling out sick because of the COVID vaccine mandate.
	A Southwest spokesperson said, quote, it's inaccurate.
	There's a lot of unfounded rumor and speculation circulating.
	Southwest Airlines Pilots Association, the labor union, they said we can say with confidence our pilots are not participating in any official or unofficial job actions.
	They said our pilots will continue to overcome SWA's management's poor planning as well as any external operational challenges and remain the most productive pilots in the world.
	Earlier on Sunday, the union said the company's announcement last week it'll join other airlines in complying with the Biden administration requirement is contributing to distractions for aviators.
	They said, quote, make no mistake about it.
	Due to months of staffing issues and inefficient scheduling practices, we have been operating at a higher than normal operational risk.
	It said reports of fatigue, which require pilots not to fly, are triple historic norms.
	I said all these challenges have led to added distraction in the cockpit.
	This week's COVID-19 vaccine mandate announcement by the company only exacerbates the situation.
	Well, I mean, you can either think that it's a coincidence or not a coincidence that the week after Southwest announced the vaccine mandate, 30% of flights get canceled on the weekend.
	Maybe it's maybe it's a coincidence.
	Maybe it is not.
	Blaming it on extraneous circumstances seems somewhat suspicious given the fact that very few of the other airlines are experiencing, like none of the other airlines, are experiencing anything close to the flight delays and cancellations that Southwest has seen.
	We have been speaking here at the Daily Wire to people who work for Southwest.
	We're speaking on background with them.
	What they're saying is that employees from all areas are using built-up sick time to try and get ahead of being fired by the vaccine mandates.
	Southwest has not been offering a COVID testing option.
	They're federal contractors, they say, so they are not allowed to.
	There are rumors that air traffic controllers and Amtrak and other transportation services might do the same soon.
	And some pilots are filing Aviation Safety Action Program reports to the FAA claiming unsafe flying conditions in the cockpit because so many pilots are concerned about losing their jobs.
	Because basically, if some pilots lay off, that means the flights either get delayed or some other pilot has to take over.
	So, it turns out that forcing people to do something they don't want to do has some pretty dire consequences.
	Or may have some dire consequences.
	By the way, this is not unique to the United States.
	In Israel, which has unbelievably high rates of COVID vaccination, young people are largely refusing to get the third COVID booster.
	So Israel has decided that in order to have a vaccine green card, you need to have a COVID booster shot.
	You have to have a third shot.
	Now, Israel is unique in this respect.
	I'm not aware of any other country where they are saying that everybody has to have a COVID booster shot, a third shot, in order to be given some sort of green card.
	And young people are largely saying, nope, Only a quarter of 16 to 19-year-olds in Israel, according to the Wall Street Journal, have received a booster, along with 40% of 20 to 29-year-olds and 47% of 30 to 39-year-olds.
	So a minority of people under the age of 40 who are eligible for the shots have gotten the booster at this point.
	Tamar Herman, who's been conducting opinion polls on vaccine policy at Israel Democracy Institute, says, quote, younger people are less afraid of COVID.
	Some are confused and bewildered whether they're really at risk or it's part of the government propaganda.
	On Monday, Europe's top health regulator recommended boosters for anyone 18 and over who received their second shot of the vaccine developed by Pfizer and BioNTech.
	The UK has begun providing boosters to anyone over the age of 50.
	The US is offering them to anyone in their 65s and up.
	But in Israel, some younger people say they are being coerced into having the third shot.
	I mean, a lot of people feel this way, especially because, again, the third shot is basically driving up antibodies so that you don't get infected, but it is not actually Really radically raising the rates of prevention against hospitalization and death, which again is the thing that you care about most.
	Basically, all of the public policy interventions are now creating massive economic turmoil downstream.
	We'll get to that in one second.
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	Alrighty, so the fact is that all the COVID panic being driven by people like Dr. Anthony Fauci, it is bad science and it's bad for the economy.
	When I say it's bad science, what's kind of amazing, honestly, is that we continue to trust these public health figures after they are wrong and wrong and wrong again.
	You would not trust your investment banker the way that you trust these public health figures.
	Really interesting article from John Tierney in the Wall Street Journal over the weekend talking about how wrong Dr. Anthony Fauci was about AIDS.
	Remember, he became famous for being the guy fighting AIDS in the government in the 1980s.
	Says John Tierney, when AIDS spread among gay men and intravenous drug users four decades ago, it became conventional wisdom the plague would soon devastate the rest of American population.
	In 1987, Oprah Winfrey opened her show by announcing, quote, research studies now project that one in five, listen to me, hard to believe, one in five heterosexuals could be dead of AIDS in the next three years.
	The prediction was outlandishly wrong, but she wasn't wrong in attributing the scare to scientists.
	One early alarmist was Dr. Anthony Fauci, who made national news in 1983 with an editorial in the Journal of American Medical Association JAMA, the most prestigious American journal of medicine, warning that AIDS could infect even children because of the possibility that routine close contact, as within a family household, can spread the disease.
	After criticism that he had inspired a wave of hysterical homophobia, Dr. Fauci, who in 1984 began his current job as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, promptly pivoted 180 degrees, declaring, less than two months after his piece appeared, it was absolutely preposterous to suggest that AIDS could be spread by normal social contact.
	But other supposed experts went on warning erroneously that AIDS could spread widely via toilet seats, mosquito bites, and kissing.
	The CDC's own epidemiologists objected to this message.
	They were arguing that resources should be focused on those who are most at risk, but they were overruled by superiors who decided that presenting AIDS as a universal threat was the best way to win both attention and funding.
	The campaign succeeded because polls showed Americans became terrified of being infected, funding for AIDS prevention surge, much of it squandered on measures to protect heterosexuals.
	So, as we have seen, our public health experts, they are not good at this, as it turns out.
	And there's some pretty dire downstream effects to all of the COVID panic at this point in time.
	There are reports of soaring energy costs that have been raising concerns about U.S.
	inflation in the economy.
	We have a huge bottleneck at the ports, and a lot of that is due to staffing shortages, according to the New York Times.
	The ports all around the world are now involved in the great supply chain disruption.
	They're running out of places to put things at the largest ports in the United States, as major ports contend with a staggering pileup of cargo.
	But what's seemed like a temporary phenomenon, a traffic jam that would eventually dissipate, is increasingly viewed as a new reality that could require a substantial refashioning of the world's shipping infrastructure.
	Ships are waiting at sea for more than nine days at the Savannah Port.
	On a recent afternoon, more than 20 ships were stuck in the queue anchored up to 17 miles off the coast in the Atlantic.
	Such lines have become common around the globe.
	From the more than 50 ships marooned last week in the Pacific near L.A.
	Two smaller numbers bobbing off terminals in the New York area to hundreds waylaid off ports in China.
	The turmoil in the shipping industry and the broader crisis in supply chains is showing no signs of relenting.
	It stands as an annoying source of worry throughout the global economy, challenging once hopeful assumptions of a vigorous return to growth as vaccines limit the spread of the pandemic.
	The disruption explains why Germany's industrial fortunes are sagging, why inflation is a cause for concern among central bankers, why American manufacturers are now waiting a record 92 days on average to assemble the parts and raw materials they need to make their goods, according to the Institute of Supply Management.
	On the surface, the upheaval appears to be a series of intertwined product shortages.
	Because shipping containers are in short supply in China, factories depending on Chinese-made parts and chemicals in the rest of the world have had to limit production.
	But the situation at the port of Savannah attests to a more complicated and insidious series of overlapping problems.
	It's not merely that goods are scarce.
	It's that products are stuck in the wrong places, separated from where they are supposed to be by stubborn and constantly shifting barriers.
	The shortage of finished goods at retailers represents the flip side of the containers stacked on ships marooned at sea and massed on the riverbanks.
	The pileup in warehouses is itself a reflection of shortages of truck drivers needed to carry goods to their next destinations.
	The supply chain is overwhelmed and inundated, says one of the supply chain managers in one of the ports.
	It's not sustainable at this point.
	Everything is out of whack.
	Again, some of this is due to the massive lack of labor.
	Early this year, when shipping prices spiked and containers became scarce, the trouble was widely viewed as the momentary result of pandemic lockdowns.
	With schools and offices shut, Americans were stocking up on home office gear and equipment for basement gyms, drawing heavily on factors in Asia.
	Once life reopened, global shipping was supposed to return to normal.
	But half a year later, the congestion is worse, with nearly 13% of the world's cargo shipping capacity tied up by delays.
	Many businesses now assume the pandemic has fundamentally altered commercial life in permanent ways.
	Those who might never have shopped for groceries or clothing online have gotten a taste of the convenience.
	Many are likely to retain the habit, maintaining pressure on the supply chain.
	Also, the supply chain disruption has imposed new frictions.
	Because the upheaval on the seas is slowing delivery, it's limiting sales, and it's having significant downstream effects.
	And again, a large part of this is when you tell people they don't have to go back to work.
	They don't go back to work.
	According to the Wall Street Journal over the weekend, the Labor Department on Friday reported another disappointing month for employment.
	The problem wasn't a dearth of job.
	The question is, where the hell are the workers?
	Employers added a mere 194,000 jobs in September.
	That's the second negative monthly surprise in a row.
	The unemployment rate fell sharply to 4.8% from 5.2%.
	But that's because 183,000 Americans dropped out of the workforce.
	So we added as many jobs as people who dropped out of the workforce.
	There are now 5 million fewer Americans employed than before the pandemic lockdowns.
	3 million of those people have permanently left the workforce.
	The number of Americans unable to work because their employer closed or lost business dropped 600,000 from August.
	COVID cases declined by a third.
	Many industries unaffected by the virus also failed to add workers.
	So what exactly is happening?
	One possible culprit is government and employer VAX mandates that set ultimatums for workers.
	President Biden's vaccine order first applied to nursing homes.
	Those lost jobs this month.
	Many state and local school districts have imposed mandates.
	State and local education employment fell 161,000.
	The White House claims the vaccine mandates will boost job growth by getting people comfortable with going back to work, but they're paying people to stay home.
	And a lot of the people who would go back to work because they're not worried are now out of jobs.
	Democrats have also made quitting an easier economic option, says the Wall Street Journal.
	Pandemic-enhanced unemployment benefits ended in early September, but that was one week before Labor's monthly jobless survey ended.
	Next month might provide better data, but there are still many other federal financial payments that don't require work, including a $300 monthly allowance per child, food stamps, and rental assistance.
	Many people have saved some of their transfer payments.
	Now Democrats are promising more.
	Inflation may also be tilting the scale to leisure instead of work.
	Average hourly earnings are rising fast.
	They are 7.4% in the annualized rate, but wage growth after inflation has been declining because food and energy prices are wildly up.
	The lack of workers is creating a drag on the economy, slowing production, contributing to supply side strains.
	Ships are backed up in ports because there aren't workers to unload and transport them where they need to go.
	And Democrats, of course, are planning trillions of dollars in new taxes and spending in order to fix all this.
	Meanwhile, we have an energy situation.
	I mean, this is just back to the 1970s here.
	The soaring energy prices, I mean, they're really up.
	Crude oil is up 64% this year.
	It's at a seven year high.
	Natural gas prices have doubled over the past six months to a seventh year high.
	Heating oil is up 68% this year.
	Prices at the pump are up nearly a buck over the past 12 months to a national average of just over three bucks a gallon.
	Coal prices are at records.
	This is according to the Wall Street Journal.
	And meanwhile, the Biden administration is like, what if we made energy more expensive through green mandates?
	For consumers, it's like a tax, says economist Kathy Bostjanczak of Oxford Economics.
	While consumers will likely be squeezed, the energy price rise would have to be extreme and prolonged to halt the economic recovery.
	But, more likely, we'd see growth decelerate more or a longer pause before growth resumes.
	So we have shortages in supply chains, we have shortages of energy, we have increased taxes and increased regulation, and businesses who are not investing as much because they literally don't know how much money they have to hold back before taxes.
	And Joe Biden continues along this path.
	Joe Biden is just going to continue this.
	And it's a bold move, Cotton.
	We'll see how it works out for him.
	All righty.
	Coming up a little bit later today, we'll have an additional hour of content.
	In the meantime, go check out the Michael Mulls show.
	Today, he discusses how the Biden administration is canceling all remaining border wall contracts.
	You can hear more about that story over on Michael's show that's available right now.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	Shapiro, this is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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	Two Indiana children suffer heart problems after accidentally being injected with a COVID vaccine.
	Joe Biden issues a first-ever Indigenous People's Day proclamation from the White House.
	And the New York Times says we need a new American flag because they want a new American nation.

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