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Dec. 14, 2021 - The Ben Shapiro Show
48:25
How The West’s Covid Policy Betrayed The Young | Ep. 1395
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The stats are in, and they show that COVID-19 targeted the elderly, but lockdowns targeted everyone.
Jen Psaki calls a Congressional Budget Office report fake news, and Democrats blame global warming for tornadoes.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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We'll get to all the news in just one moment first.
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Okay, so we have some good news on Omicron.
Here's the thing.
People continue to freak out about Omicron.
And the reason they're freaking out about Omicron is because they cannot let up the control.
To let up the control means to admit that they never could have controlled this thing in the first place.
That basically the only thing that government did right is to help produce the vaccines by incentivizing all of the big pharma vaccine makers to take on the risk of mass producing the vaccine.
That's what government did right.
They did production, they did distribution, they did incentivization.
That's a good thing.
It's a very good thing.
But that is not the promise your government made to you.
The promise your government made to you, and this happened particularly in blue states, Joe Biden made this promise as well, is that he would shut down the virus.
No one is capable of shutting down the virus.
I know that we live in a pagan era in which people think the government is literally God and can control every element of your life, including protecting you from death.
Wrong.
It can't do any of those things.
But here's the thing.
Omicron is not a crisis.
According to Will Salatin, who again, writes for Slate.
This is not somebody on the right wing.
T-cell memory constrains Omicron.
It doesn't protect against the initial infection, but on demand, it kicks in to keep it there.
This later appears to be the main reason why Omicron appears mild.
So that means that you may still get Omicron, but it ain't gonna hurt you.
Also, Pfizer is now announcing that it has a brand new COVID pill.
Its COVID pill helps starve off severe disease, the company announced on Tuesday.
The antiviral pill worked in lab studies against Omicron as well, and is 90% effective in terms of preventing hospitalization and death if given within five days.
That's an amazing thing.
It means that basically these things are as effective as taking the vaccine is.
And it's a pill that you take after you're actually diagnosed.
So what else do we have to do for this to be over?
And the answer is it's never going to be over for the left.
The left will never give up the power that it has gained throughout this pandemic.
Now, here's the thing.
Many of us said very early on, That this was largely a pandemic of the elderly.
The people who are most likely to die are people who are elderly.
This was clear inside the first couple of months of the pandemic.
And some of us were ripped up and down in the legacy media for making the suggestion that this changes how you do public policy.
It means you shield the elderly and you encourage younger people to get back into the workforce.
And if people who are 20 start getting COVID, that is not the end of the world.
That's actually partially a solution because many of the people who are 20, so long as they're not infecting people who are innately vulnerable or elderly, those people getting it now have natural immunity.
But this was considered very bad to talk about.
You shouldn't talk about it.
And if you mentioned the fact that years of life lost, which is a common statistic used in the actuarial investigations, right?
Constantly insurance companies are using number of years of life lost.
They call it potential years of life lost, PYLL.
Insurance companies do it all the time to determine what sort of risks they're going to insure and what sort of risks they're not going to insure.
And you have to look at those stats in order to determine how to make public policy.
If you even mentioned this at the beginning of the pandemic, you were considered immoral and bad.
Well, now the media have caught on to the fact, you know, a year and a half later, when we all know the data, that this was chiefly a risk to people who are very elderly.
According to the New York Times, as the United States nears 800,000 virus deaths, one of every 100 older Americans has perished.
That's a really bad stat.
That means that of the people above the age of 65 over the past couple of years, about 1 in every 100 has died of COVID.
That sounds particularly bad until you realize that on average in like 2019, out of every 100,000 people age 65 plus, about 4,000 will die.
Which means that if you reduce that down, you're talking about essentially four in 100 people who are above the age of 65 in the United States are going to die every year.
So was there excess mortality because of COVID?
Yes, it was about 20% excess mortality because of COVID.
But the way that the newspapers play with stats is to make you think that zero out of 100 older Americans would have died without COVID.
And now one out of 100 Americans will die with COVID.
That is not right.
There was an incremental increase.
It was a pretty significant incremental increase.
But to pretend that elderly people were not already innately vulnerable because they are elderly is, of course, incredibly silly.
And trying to, like, I don't understand why it took the media so long to come to a conclusion that we all knew from the very beginning.
Specifically, and here's why it matters, because the lockdown policies currently being pursued are directed not at the elderly, they are directed at the young.
They're directed at people who are in schools.
They're directed at five-year-olds.
In New York City, you cannot take your five-year-old to a McDonald's without getting your five-year-old vaccinated, even though your five-year-old is safe from COVID by all available statistics.
In New York City, you are more likely to be locked down if you are not vaccinated.
You are not allowed to go to work in New York City.
And this is happening in blue states across in California, vaccinated or unvaccinated.
They just went back into masking everyone in the state.
That is a policy that targets everyone, including people who are younger and not vulnerable to COVID.
To protect the elderly, many of whom Would have died anyway.
That does not mean we're not seeing excess death.
We are seeing excess death among the elderly, although now that you have the vaccines, that's about all you can do for the elderly anyway.
But it's amazing how the media are upplaying something that we already knew from the very beginning, as though it doesn't undercut their case for a broad spectrum, quote unquote, solutions to COVID.
Some of us were pointing out that there was age striation from day one.
And the media said it was really bad to point that out.
Instead, they would send out Anthony Fauci on TV and say, well, yeah, well, it's true that older people are dying, but younger people could die too.
So, well, yes, but not at the same numbers, not at the same rates, which would suggest that you should construct policy that is not designed to harm young people.
And yet the left continues to design one size fits all policy when it comes to COVID, which makes no sense.
According to the New York Times, People are very worried right now, said Ann Cunningham, 84, who lives in a high-rise designated for seniors in Chicago, where a TV room and community room have remained shut down since March 2020.
If you've been inside for a long time, and the only time you talk to somebody is to get your mail or go down to the deli, that's a lot of isolation and loneliness for some people.
They feel like nobody in the world cares for them.
By the way, this is 100% true.
One of the things that people apparently don't care about when it comes to the elderly is their social lives, which makes an enormous difference.
I have two grandmothers, thank God, in their 90s.
And they've both lived the last couple of years in basically social isolation.
That is terrible for elderly people.
It's terrible for anyone.
But particularly if you're elderly and you don't have a spouse because your spouse passed away 10 years ago and now your family can't come visit you and you can't hang out with anybody else.
That's unbelievably depressing and terrible for elderly people.
But we were supposed to ignore all of these costs because government knew best and government would save us all.
And it's not true.
It is just not true.
Again, we have pretended that the only risk in life is COVID, and that's just not correct.
Okay, the reality is that in 2020-2021, yes, again, COVID, major cause of death among the elderly.
Still, on average, more people who are elderly die every month from heart disease and cancer than died on average in 2020-2021 from COVID.
2020-2021 from COVID.
About 27,660 people died on average every month in COVID from March to now, above the age of 65, which amounts to about 580.
So a lot of people have died.
And every one of those is a tragedy, obviously.
44,000 people every month during that same period died of heart disease if they were in the plus 65 group.
Again, this is not to suggest that COVID didn't kill extra people.
It did.
But to pretend that elderly people weren't already vulnerable is silly.
And to not make policy geared toward age striation is even more silly.
And it has costs.
And we're watching those costs.
It's going to have generational ramifications, what we just did over the last few years.
Not just in terms of the financial world, where we blew out the economy to the point where we basically incentivized a huge number of Americans never to work again.
Same thing in Europe.
But it's going to have generational costs in terms of social isolation, in terms of the ability of young people to recover from an educational vacuum.
The last two years were a horrible, horrible policy mistake, and it was made because your policymakers lied to you about what they can do and what they cannot.
And they're still lying to you.
This is the proof.
You could say all of this is justifiable, at least morally, back in May or June of 2020, because we didn't know enough.
We now know enough, and we have therapeutics, and we have vaccines, and they're still doing it, which demonstrates that the control is the point.
It is no longer about, if you do X, the government will allow you to be free.
They don't want you to be free.
And if you don't beg to be free, then they're not going to care.
So if you don't resist, they're not going to care.
This is why we have started over at Daily Wire.
A petition has 850,000 signatures.
You should join it at DoNotComplyPetition.com.
You should join it right now because, again, it demonstrates resistance to the mandates and authoritarian top-down nonsense pushed by this administration.
We're trying to get to a million signatures, so go check it out right now at do not comply petition dot com.
But if you don't show resistance, why would they resist?
You've set up an incentive structure where they're going to continue to crack down and ruin lives, particularly young people's lives.
We'll get to more of this in just one second.
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Okay, again, the media are trying to now apparently continue to push panic, but I don't understand on what basis they continue to push the panic.
It doesn't make any sense at this point.
Again, three quarters of all COVID deaths in the United States are people above the age of 65.
Every one of those is a tragedy, but you don't direct policy at five-year-olds in order to save 65-year-olds.
No policy ever has done this.
It's a bizarre idea.
And there are costs to this.
According to the same New York Times, quote, across the world, COVID anxiety and depression take hold.
Yeah, no bleep, Sherlock.
It turns out that when you tell a bunch of five-year-olds they have to mask up and sit six feet apart from each other and sit on the floor while eating lunch, that's going to depress them and make them upset.
According to the New York Times, a recent cartoon in the French daily Le Monde featured a bedraggled man arriving at a doctor's office for a COVID-19 vaccine.
I'm here for the fifth shot because of the third wave, he says, or vice versa.
His bewilderment as France suffers its fifth wave of the pandemic, with cases of Delta variant rising sharply along with Omicron anxiety, captured a mood of exhaustion and simmering anger across the world two years after the deadly virus began to spread in China.
Uncertainty bedevils plans.
Panic spreads in an instant, even if, as with Omicron, the extent of the threat is not yet known.
By the way, so far, we have one documented death from Omicron.
One.
It's from the UK, it's not even clear it was from Omicron.
One.
This means that, as I said yesterday, Alec Baldwin has so far documentedly killed more people than Omicron.
It means that the Waukesha murderer has killed multiple times more people than Omicron.
And we are locking down all of society for this.
According to the New York Times, The sense of endlessness, accompanied by growing psychological distress leading to depression, was a recurrent theme in two dozen interviews conducted in Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Americas.
After two years of zigzagging policy and rollercoaster emotions, terrible loss, and tantalizing false dawns, closing borders and intermittently shuttered schools, people's resilience has dwindled.
That is sure to pose new challenges for leaders trying to protect their people and their economies.
Will the weary obey new restrictions or risk seeing family and friends after months of forced separation?
The question of just how draconian leaders can be when people's mental health has become so fragile appears to be a core dilemma as the pandemic enters its third year.
First of all, I love the New York Times' take on this.
Because the New York Times' take here is it's the people who are wrong.
It's the people who are fragile.
It's not that your leadership is authoritarian.
It's not that your leaders understand the political incentives at play.
And when they lie to you and tell you that they can protect you from every bad thing in life, you tend to give them your support?
Instead, it's they really could protect you if you were just compliant enough.
If you were just... And the stronger you are, the more compliant you are, according to the New York Times.
You're weak if you're not compliant.
Which is precisely the opposite of the truth.
They say, quote, real progress in fighting the virus has been made.
A year ago, vaccine rollouts were in their infancy.
Today, about 47% of the world's population is inoculated.
If case numbers remain high, death rates have plunged.
Yet life seems out of control.
Maybe it seems out of control because you're all being crazy.
Because you're being crazy.
That is why life is out of control at this point.
And again, the statistics show that natural immunity, I know we're supposed to pretend natural immunity is not a thing, natural immunity is a thing.
Martin Koldorf, who's an epidemiologist, he, who's a member of the Great Barrington Declaration, he's one of the more free society guys, he points out, like, several months ago, that in Israel, vaccinated individuals had 27 times higher risk of symptomatic COVID infection compared to those with natural immunity.
In other words, natural immunity is a thing, but we're supposed to pretend it's not a thing, and focus only in on vaccinations.
Why?
Because the government can't control natural immunity, but it can control vaccinations.
It's like a drunk searching for his keys under the streetlight.
He loses his keys and he's searching for his keys under the streetlight, and somebody asks him, why do you keep checking under the same area?
He says, well, that's where the light is.
The solution to the pandemic is not necessarily pure vaccines.
Listen, I like the vaccines.
I'm double-vaxxed.
Maybe I'll get a booster at some point.
My wife is double-vaxxed.
She'll probably get a booster because she's in the medical industry.
Both my parents are triple-vaxxed.
So this is not about being pro-vaccine or anti-vaccine.
It's about pointing out that if you get Omicron, it ain't the end of the world by statistics.
That if you're young and you get COVID in the first place, it wasn't the end of the world by statistics.
And yet we are being told that it is the end of the world.
I mean, it really is not.
Rochelle Walensky, who is the awful head of the CDC, she was asked about that Pfizer pill that lowers the rates of death if you take it within the first three days by 90% and 88% in the first five days.
And her answer was, quote, another great tool in our toolbox, but the best way to protect yourself against COVID is not to get it in the first place.
Who said that that's a possibility?
The vaccines don't even prevent you from getting COVID.
Entirely, at this point.
I know many people who have gotten breakthrough infections at this point.
So, the answer is, they're lying to you.
Inherent in that is a lie.
Inherent in that is a lie.
The lie, of course, is that we can reach zero COVID if you just listen to the government enough.
And this, of course, as I keep saying, this has very serious consequences.
Back in September 2021, Sarah Napton wrote, Over at the UK Telegraph, quote, while focus remains firmly fixed on COVID-19, a second health crisis is quietly emerging in Britain. Since the beginning of July, there have been thousands of excess deaths not caused by coronavirus.
According to health experts, this is highly unusual for the summer, although excess deaths are expected during the winter, when cold weather and seasonal infections combine to put pressure on the NHS.
Summer sees it all. But according to the Office for National Statistics, between July and August in Britain, there were 10,000 excess deaths in England and Wales, 48.
48% of those were not caused by COVID-19.
Why?
Because people were having ischemic heart disease.
People were having heart failure.
People were not coming in for cancer.
There was a massive increase in acute and chronic respiratory infection.
Because people were not coming into the doctor to get diagnosed.
And then there's the mental health problems that we are seeing that are now widespread, thanks to the insanity of all of this.
There's a paper in PLOS One, which is a scientific journal, came out early September and it pointed out that the crackdowns were significantly more, in terms of health effects, the effects of COVID-19 We're far worse directly among people aged 65 plus.
If you're 65 plus, COVID hurt you worse than the lockdowns did.
But, on the other hand, if you were between the ages of 5 and 44, you were heavily affected.
This is a direct quote from the study.
Heavily affected due to the indirect effects of COVID-19 in comparison to the direct efforts.
It was the crackdowns that made a difference.
And yet it's the crackdowns that the left seems to be completely focused on.
More crackdowns, more crackdowns.
And then they say children is a rationale for the crackdowns.
That's not a thing.
Your kids are fine.
We'll get to more of this in just one second.
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So again, the media continue to push crackdowns.
The Biden administration continues to push crackdowns.
And they keep suggesting that the crackdowns are the solution, when in fact they are, for the vast majority of the population at this point, the problem.
So yesterday, Elon Musk, who was recently given the Time Magazine Person of the Year well-deserved honor for an innovator who is changing the face of everything from Bitcoin to space exploration, he was asked about his position on vaxxing, on vaccinating and vax mandates.
And he was ripped up and down by the media for this answer, even though he's obviously completely correct.
Are you vaccinated, if I may ask?
Yeah, I'm very pro-vaccination.
I believe the science is unequivocal.
I treat it to that effect.
But by the same token, I am against forcing people to be vaccinated.
I think this is just not something we should do in America.
I think we should encourage people to be vaccinated, strongly try to convince them to be vaccinated, but not force them to be vaccinated.
Or, for example, force them to get vaccinated or get fired.
Okay, he of course is exactly right about this, but people on the left can't stand it.
They're very upset about it.
And they believe that we should actually start triaging patients at the hospital based on VAX status.
So David Frum, who used to be a Republican in some sense of the word, I suppose, he tweeted out, seems the best option is keep encouraging vaccines and boosters.
Impose VAX mandates where it can be done.
Otherwise, return to normal as fully as we can, especially the schools, and let hospitals quietly triage emergency care to serve the unvaccinated last.
Okay, that's not how you triage emergency care, by the way.
The way that you triage emergency care is by triaging the risk factors of the patients.
If you have an 85-year-old who's vaccinated and you have a 5-year-old who's unvaccinated, why would you possibly triage the 85-year-old before the 5-year-old?
And by the way, if the underlying notion here is that you bear responsibility for your own health decisions.
And so if you're unvaccinated and then you get COVID and then you get very sick from it, you should be held accountable for that on a personal level.
As I've said before, and the media, they get very angry when I say this, it happens to be true.
If we are going to start triaging based on your prior health decisions, good luck with obesity and smoking, gang.
Half this country is fat.
Half this country is obese.
And if the idea is that any health condition caused by something that you yourself could have avoided is now your responsibility, and so we should triage the guy who exercised a lot before you, even if you are in worse condition than the guy who exercised a lot, then I don't know how you... Where's the limiting principle there?
It's a violation of the Hippocratic Oath to do exactly what David Frum is talking about right there.
But they don't care.
Because again, the idea is that we are going to assert our control over your life in any way possible, and we'll blackmail you with your own possible death if we don't like the decisions that you made.
Meanwhile, yesterday, the Supreme Court announced that they would not allow for a Bax Exception when it came to religious exemptions.
The Supreme Court turned away two emergency requests on Monday from healthcare workers, doctors, and nurses in New York to block the state's VAX mandate.
Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Clarence Thomas dissented.
Because there were a bunch of people who challenged the mandate, arguing it allowed exemptions for those with medical exemptions, but not for people with religious objections.
The court turned that away because apparently the idea is that it's very bad to cite religious objections on this basis.
Gorsuch in his dissent said, even if one were to read the state's actions as something other than signs of animus, they leave little doubt the revised mandate was specifically directed at the applicant's unorthodox religious beliefs and practices.
But apparently that wasn't good enough for the Supreme Court.
So, the Supreme Court is now allowing states to ram this down with any sort of exceptions.
By the way, no exception for natural immunity either, which is anti-scientific.
In just a second...
We'll get to the economic take of this administration.
They're creating crises and they don't know how to get out of them except with more cowbell.
We'll get to more of that in a moment.
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Okay, meanwhile, the Biden administration continues to push forward with its attempts to spend more money than God has ever seen.
The other day, yesterday, the Congressional Budget Office came up with an estimate of how much Joe Biden's Build Back Better plan would actually cost if it weren't filled with lies.
So the Build Back Better plan was essentially altered in a pretty obviously dishonest way.
They created false sunsets for programs.
What they did is they said, okay, well, what if we put in place a child tax credit, but for only the next two years?
The reason they're saying that is because if it were estimated over the next 10 years, it would cost a lot of money.
So it's sort of like buying a subscription to a magazine and saying, I'm going to allow it to expire three years from now.
But meanwhile, you know, you're not going to allow it to expire three years from now.
You know, it's going to go for 10 years.
And that is what they're doing with Build Back Better.
So Build Back Better, they set up these false sunsets they know are never going to actually apply.
And then they say, well, it's only going to cost a certain amount of money.
No, it's not.
So CBO analyzed what exactly would the bill cost if all of these programs became permanent.
And it turns out it would cost something like $4 to $5 trillion over the course of the next 10 years.
And this, of course, is very bad for Jen Psaki and the White House and Joe Biden and all, because there are still Democrats in the Senate who are going to have to go home and explain to their voters why they voted for a bill that is going to increase the national debt by trillions and trillions of dollars.
So Jen Psaki's immediate response was to call it fake news.
Now, I'm old enough to remember.
When a press secretary calling things fake news was a full frontal assault on the journalistic establishment.
It was a threat to freedom of the press.
I'm old enough to remember when if Donald Trump had said about the CBO that it was filled with people who are making fake analyses, that would be an attack on our institutional integrity here in the United States.
Now the Biden administration does this routinely and everybody sort of shrugs.
Here's Jen Psaki going after the CBO.
Where you're talking about here is a fake CBO score that is not based on the actual bill that anybody is voting on.
This was a ask request by Senator Graham to score a bill that is not currently being debated.
And the president has conveyed very clearly, multiple times publicly, that he would like programs if they're extended to be paid for.
That remains his commitment.
But it's important to understand that when anybody raises a question about this new CBO score, it is a fake score about a bill that doesn't exist.
Oh, so it's a fake score about a bill that doesn't exist, but which would exist if you guys weren't lying about what you're doing right now.
It's not an attack on the press when Democrats say it.
It's not an attack on the CBO when Democrats do it.
When Democrats attack the Supreme Court, it's not an institutional attack.
When Democrats attack the filibuster, it's not an institutional attack.
When Mitch McConnell doesn't vote, I think it would be very transparent for the public to see exactly what they'd be getting for what we're spending for 10 years.
So you won't support it if these programs are temporary?
No, we're going to talk.
We're still talking.
I'm just, you know, I'm listening to everybody, but, you know, I'm just telling you, ask me about inflation is real.
It is not transitory and everybody who's saying differently is lying to you.
I think it would be very transparent for the public to see exactly what they'd be getting for what we're spending for 10 years.
So you won't support it if these programs are temporary?
No, we're going to talk. We're still talking. I'm just, you know, I'm listening to everybody, but, you know, I'm just telling you, ask me about inflation is real. It's not transitory. It's alarming.
It's alarming.
It's going up, not down.
Joe Manchin's body language here is no, no, and no, which it should be, considering that Joe Biden is 1 million points underwater in his home state of West Virginia.
If Joe Manchin wishes to retain his job, he is not going to be voting for Build Back Better.
According to the New York Times, he is the most prominent Democratic holdout on Biden's $2.2 trillion social safety net, climate, and tax bill.
That, of course, is not the real price.
It's more like $5 trillion.
He cast fresh doubt on Monday on his party's plans to speed the measure through the Senate before Christmas, saying he still had grave concerns about how it would affect the economy.
He said anything is possible.
He said he was still engaged, but it is very unlikely that this is going to happen quickly, which means it's not going to happen at all.
Once we are into an election year, nothing is going to happen here.
Meanwhile, there is the real possibility of a Biden stagflation.
Phil Graham and Mike Solon writing for The Wall Street Journal.
They say the White House continues to insist that inflation will soon fade away and the country will return to its pre-pandemic prosperity.
But the Biden administration's regulatory agenda virtually ensures that the post-pandemic economy will be nothing like it was before.
Announcing regulatory burden of Mr. Biden's executive orders, his regulators' open hostility toward America's economic system, and the return of progressive-era antitrust enforcement will stifle growth, all the ingredients will be present to turn the current inflation into stagflation.
And this is right.
Okay, as I've been saying before, I don't know how long the inflation is going to last before it starts to even out.
What I do know is that Joe Biden is setting up a system that is going to be a low growth system.
You know who admits this?
Joe Biden.
His actual projections for the next decade are that we are supposed to grow for the next decade at like 1.6, 1.7% a year.
That is a zero growth policy considering inflation, even if it's at its lowest point, is going to be like 2%.
So what we are talking about is an economy that is in complete comatose state.
And Democrats are pushing it.
According to Phil Graham and Mike Solon, America's experience with regulatory excess is recent and painful.
When the subprime recession ended in mid-2009, economists predicted a strong recovery.
In early 2010, the OMB projected 3.7% average real gross domestic product growth through 2016.
The CBO estimated 3.3% growth for the same period.
The Federal Reserve expected 3.5 to 4% through 2014.
3.5 to 4% through 2014.
Instead, we got 2.1% from 2010 to 2016.
Now Democrats are openly claiming it's gonna be below 2% for the next few years.
Democrats claim the nation suffered from secular stagnation when subsequent deregulation and tax cuts revived the economy and the Biden administration needed justification for more stimulus spending.
Democrats suddenly decided Obama had not done enough to stimulate the economy.
So they're going to continue to double down on all of this and you will get people investing less in the economy.
Why would you invest in an economy where the government seizes more of your money and regulates your ability to control your own business?
Why would you do that?
The answer is, you're not going to do that.
And all of this, of course, ties into the alarmism, the environmental alarmism of this administration.
They're always looking for an excuse to do the thing they wanted to do anyway.
So anytime something bad happens in life, this administration immediately jumps to, we need more regulation and we need more top-down control.
COVID, more regulation, more top-down control.
A tornado in Kentucky, more regulation, more top-down control.
It's always the same solution.
If you went to a doctor, and no matter what symptoms you complained of, he offered you morphine, you might start to think that maybe the guy was a drug pusher.
Well, that is what you've got right now.
You've got a government that is offering the same solution to every problem.
So either you believe that this solution really is the gold standard, the all-purpose solution, or it turns out that these people are just pushing an addictive drug of spending and regulation, regardless of the first part of the statement.
Regardless of the contingency, the solution is always the same.
We'll get to more on this in just one second, because the environmental policy of this administration is a full-scale disaster, and it happens to be based on lies.
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All right, in just one second, we'll get to the insane environmental policies being pursued by this administration.
Now they're blaming tornadoes.
It's incredible.
First, as you know, as I've discussed, the Biden administration is not going to stop.
They're never ever going to stop.
These vax mandates, mask mandates, whatever they can do, they will do in order to control your life.
Don't comply.
Sign our do not comply petition.
We have almost a million signatures on it.
We need a million signatures on it.
As I mentioned, the Supreme Court turned away two emergency requests on Monday from healthcare workers, doctors, and nurses in New York to block the state's vaccine mandate.
So we really do need to sound off, push back when we do.
It makes it very clear to political actors there is a consequence to this.
Actually, over the last couple of days, Jared Polis, the governor of Colorado, he came out and he said, we're basically done here.
If political pressure matters, you can help exercise political pressure by going over to dailywire.com slash do not comply and sharing our petition with all of your friends and family.
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So meanwhile, the Biden administration, which is pushing massive expansionary monetary policy, pushing huge spending.
Meanwhile, they're pushing more and more regulation and they're using the environment to do this.
The New York Times has an unbelievable piece of propaganda out about the world burning.
They say this is their next big thing.
Their next big thing is what a failed planet looks like.
They say this is their next big study.
Well, considering their last big study was the 1619 Project, which was just laced with garbage and lies, they say this should be taken with a grain of salt.
So they have an entire interactive exhibit over at the New York Times called What a Failed Planet Looks Like.
And then it's a picture of planet Earth literally on fire.
It says cities swallowed by dust.
Human history drowned by the sea.
Economies devastated.
Lives ruined.
These 193 stories show the reality of climate change in every country in the world.
Postcards from a world on fire.
Okay, so let me explain.
The world is not on fire.
The world is gradually warming.
It has been warming for quite a while.
It's actually been warning for decades at this point.
And that global warming is caused, at least in large part, by anthropogenic climate change.
It means that carbon emissions actually do make a difference.
That stuff's going to be up in the air for thousands of years.
The globe is going to gradually warm and human beings are going to adapt, because it turns out that we are excellent at adaptation.
And fewer people are dying of climate-related events now than were dying of climate-related events, say, 50 or 60 years ago, because we are so good at adaptation.
But it's a crisis.
Why is it a crisis?
It's a crisis because they need a crisis in order to justify the policies that they are pushing.
By the way, some of the things that the New York Times labels as postcards from a world on fire, there's actually a sort of hilarious video of a man ice skating on one of the Netherlands canals in his bathing suit and going sailing right through the ice headfirst.
I'm not sure why that's supposed to make me afraid as opposed to making me laugh.
According to the New York Times, skating on the Netherlands' many canals has long been a favorite winter activity.
But in the past decade, Amsterdam's canals have frozen only three times.
When canals do freeze, as they did in February, skaters can find themselves on dangerously thin ice.
Well, clearly we should be sacrificing trillions and trillions of dollars that the skaters can go to the Netherlands' canals and not fall through thin ice.
Okay, so the latest example of global warming that's going to kill us all, of course, is this tornado in Kentucky.
It's a horrifying event.
Also, it is not unprecedented.
The worst tornado in Kentucky history is actually in 1925.
But Joe Biden is blaming the tornadoes on climate change.
As we will explore, this is not backed by the data.
The intensity of the weather across the board has some impact as a consequence of the warming of the planet and the climate change.
The specific impact on these specific storms, I can't say at this point.
I'm going to be asking the EPA and others to take a look at that, but the fact is that we all know everything is more intense when the climate is warming.
Everything.
And obviously it has some impact here, but I can't give you a quantitative read on that.
Oh, there's no quantitative read, but we know that everything is more intense because of global warming.
Well, thank you, Scientist Joe.
His wife is a doctor, so maybe she's a doctor of climatology as well.
Maybe we should ask her about that since she's a doctor of medicine and also of everything else.
The expertise here is just off the charts here from Joe Biden.
I have no idea if the tornadoes have anything to do with global warming, but rest assured, they definitely have something to do with global warming.
Meanwhile, here's the FEMA administrator, Deanne Criswell, who's saying this is going to be the new normal.
Really?
Is it, though?
Because I feel like it's kind of abnormal for tornadoes to rip across the state and kill dozens and dozens of people, which is why it's a big news story.
If it were normal, I wouldn't even know about it.
Here is the FEMA administrator saying the new normal is going to be Mad Max Hellscape.
This is going to be our new normal, and the effects that we're seeing from climate change are the crisis of our generation.
We're taking a lot of efforts at FEMA to work with communities to help reduce the impacts that we're seeing from these severe weather events.
Oh, is it going to be the new normal?
The good news is it's an excuse to do whatever you want to do.
It's a good excuse to regulate business.
It's a good excuse for taxation.
Now, the reality is, again, there are a few things that we can do with regard to climate change.
Geoengineering is something that some states have been exploring.
There's machinery that is going to be built if climate change becomes this grave a threat that is going to be subsidized, presumably by government, to suck carbon out of the air.
We can be building seawalls.
Ron DeSantis, by the way, down in Florida, he said, I'm not going to use the terms climate change to use the sort of lingo of the left, but We are going to make our infrastructure harder and we're going to make it more difficult for the climate to affect that infrastructure.
So we're going to build new seawalls, right?
This is actual responsible policymaking.
You'll notice that one of the things that our policymakers like to do is yell about climate change and then do nothing except say you should pay higher taxes.
If you stop driving your car today, 100 years down the road, the climate will be helped by 0.0000000000 degrees over the course of the next century.
But they will not do anything to, you know, actually like build new seawalls or there's a giant hurricane you may have noticed that hit Louisiana this year.
It didn't do anything remotely like the damage that Hurricane Katrina did.
Why?
Because the infrastructure was way better than Hurricane Katrina.
It turns out a good solution to hurricanes down there, at least in preventing death, is to actually harden your infrastructure.
Meanwhile, when that storm made its way all the way up into the New York, New Jersey area, and there was a lot of flooding, you started to see Phil Murphy and Andrew Cuomo, then governor of New York, talking about the evils of climate change.
How about this?
How about stop?
How about do a better job building your infrastructure, you idiot?
This is like you go to the doctor and you say, I have a broken leg.
And the doctor says, well, over the course of the next 30 years, if you eat better, then presumably you'll have less of a risk of future leg breaks.
Okay, right, but my leg is broken right now.
Would you like to fix it?
I mean, it's all about avoiding actual culpability for the things they could be doing right now.
Also, it's about making excuses for things they want to do anyway, like shutting down their opposition.
Michael Mann, was famously embroiled in a rather large-scale controversy over whether he had skewed his data in order to achieve particular visual effects.
You remember he was famous for the hockey stick chart, which went back only a certain amount of time in terms of the temperature, but didn't go back far enough.
That was some of the accusation, or that he had sort of gamed the stats on it.
So Michael Mann was on Democracy Now!
claiming that thanks to the tornadoes, we should now actually Censor people, like actively censor people who are quote-unquote climate deniers.
Now, it's unclear what he means by climate denier.
One of the things you've seen from the left is the constantly shifting terminology and definitions.
So, it used to be that to be an anti-vaxxer, you had to actively oppose vaccinations.
Now, according to Webster's, you're an anti-vaxxer if you oppose vax mandates, which of course is crazy.
I can be very pro-vaccine and also anti-vax mandate.
Well, they've done the same thing with climate denial.
They'll suggest that you are a climate denier, which of course is supposed to Ring with echoes of Holocaust denial, which is in and of itself pretty gross.
Denying the Holocaust is not the same thing as denying the human impact on climate change on a moral level.
But even put that aside, climate denial has now shifted in its definition from you deny the climate is changing at all to you accept everything the IPC says, the international, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
You accept everything they say about climate change.
You just don't agree with our solutions.
So I don't even know what definitions he's using.
But here's Michael Mann calling for censorship of all of his political opponents.
It's fairly easy for these big tech companies, these social media companies to stop, you know, showing COVID denial for suppressing COVID denial videos and posts.
There isn't a huge corporate interest that's going to get in their way.
With climate change, it's a whole different story.
We are talking about an effort by the world's largest, most powerful industry, the fossil fuel industry, to prevent any meaningful action on climate and to accomplish that in part by using social media to promote denialism and dismissal.
So he's calling on tech companies to literally stop people from saying things.
This is what they want.
And they want this on virtually every score.
It's pretty amazing.
By the way, what is the evidence that these tornadoes are being caused by climate change?
Well, it isn't coming from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is supposedly the scientific gold standard.
Quote, trends in tornadoes associated with severe convective storms are not robustly detected.
Attribution of certain classes of extreme weather, like tornadoes, is beyond current modeling and theoretical capabilities.
How tornadoes will change is an open question.
That's from the IPCC.
Roger Pielke, who's a professor from Colorado, he points out that from 2000 to 2020, the U.S.
experienced four F-EF5 tornadoes.
That's the most extreme form of tornado.
From 1954 to 1974, which you will notice is not now, it is half a century ago, the U.S.
experienced 36 F-EF5 tornadoes.
So where is the data to back the idea that these tornadoes were caused by climate change?
The answer is they can't present the data because they don't have the data.
Instead, it's just part of their broader... As always with the left, it is not important that the individual incident actually be connected to their larger narrative.
They will force it in there.
They will cram it in there.
They will stuff it in there.
Right?
If Kyle Rittenhouse doesn't shoot black people in Kenosha, Wisconsin, it doesn't matter.
They're still going to shove that into the racial narrative that they have formed about the United States of America.
And if these tornadoes don't fit in their climate change narrative, they're just going to shove it in there.
Some of them are pretty clear about this.
Eugene Robinson has an entire piece at the Washington Post today.
The title is this, quote, climate change is a disaster, whether or not it caused Kentucky's tornadoes.
Oh, so so then why are we talking about Kentucky's tornadoes?
I mean, just make that case.
Make the case that climate change is a full-scale disaster without mentioning things you don't know about.
But the speculation is the point.
Any sort of news hook is going to push the policies they want.
Eugene Robinson says, it's not unprecedented to see tornadoes late this year.
But the ones that ravaged Kentucky and neighboring states Friday, killing at least 74, are likely to end up the most powerful and lethal December storms on record.
They were fueled by unusually warm air.
Temperatures in the area were more than 20 degrees above normal, creating atmospheric conditions more like April than the weeks before Christmas.
Meteorologists say the path of the jet stream was another key factor.
Climate change may or may not have played a role in Friday's rare and deadly storms.
But there's plenty of circumstantial evidence suggesting it did.
In fact, climate scientists have been warning us for years that extreme weather events of all sorts would become more frequent as the planet heats up thanks to humankind's burning of fossil fuels.
This year has been one long and tragic.
We told you so.
Has it, though?
Because I've been in Florida.
Florida is frequently prone to hurricanes.
This year, we didn't have major hurricanes hitting the east side of Florida.
Like, at all.
The entire season.
It was an active hurricane season.
There were a lot of hurricanes that were out there in the middle of the ocean.
Not a ton of them hit land and did severe damage.
It used to be that people who are anti the climate change agenda would say things like, it's really weird because I'm noticing that it's snowing a lot.
They're like, oh, that's weather, not climate, you idiots.
You can't cite individual weather instances as proof that the climate is changing in a way that you say it is.
Now they just use it themselves.
Like, I don't know whether this tornado was caused by global warming, but it was very warm outside when that tornado happened.
The data is completely unimportant to them.
It's completely unimportant to them.
The only thing that matters is being able to push the policies that they hope for.
It's pretty amazing.
Those policies, by the way, include pushing electric vehicles.
Now listen, I love electric vehicles.
I'm in the process of buying a Tesla right now.
I think electric vehicles are great.
They're also wildly unaffordable for the common man.
They're not in the same ballpark as gas-powered vehicles.
Also, it is worthwhile noting that the vast majority of emissions on planet Earth are not caused by gas-powered vehicles.
They're caused by factories.
Coal factories, gas factories, oil factories, right?
That's what they are caused by.
And the vast majority of emissions at this point are coming from the developing world.
So we could get rid of all of the gas-powered cars on America's roads today and replace them with electric vehicles, and it would not even put a dent into the kind of climate change we're talking about.
But that's not stopping this administration from saying we're going to waste presumably hundreds of millions of dollars trying to incentivize people to get electric vehicles.
Again, they're cool.
I want to buy one.
That has nothing to do with whether the government should subsidize them on behalf of global warming.
Here's Kamala Harris trying to make the case.
Our Build Back Better Act will cut the sticker price of new electric vehicles made in America by union workers by up to $12,500.
And it will also include, and this is a new approach, a tax credit of up to $4,000 for used electric vehicles.
So here's the bottom line.
We want more families in America to be able to afford an electric car that is made in America.
Again, the electric cars are not going to change the trajectory of climate change.
But it's not about that.
Again, it's always about what they want.
It's never about what is going to fix the problem.
That's true from COVID to climate change.
Alrighty, we'll be back here later today with an additional hour of content.
Again, please sign our petition at dailywire.com slash do not comply.
That is our do not comply petition telling the Biden administration that we will not comply with his vax mandates, mask mandates.
In the meantime, you should go check out our newest podcast, Morning Wire.
On today's episode, they discuss the record-breaking number of police deaths in 2021 in the United States.
They also have some updates on the famous Olympic physician, Larry Nassar's lawsuit.
That episode is available right now on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Make sure to tune in.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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On today's episode, governments tighten restrictions over Omicron, shootings of police officers reach record numbers, and USA Gymnastics settles with Larry Nassar's victims.
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