All Episodes
Previous Next
Jan. 11, 2022 - The Ben Shapiro Show
46:58
Why I’m Glad I Fled California | Ep. 1409
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
California considers universal health care and doubling its taxes.
An LA Times columnist makes the case for mocking unvaxxed Americans who die of COVID.
And Democrats insist on running against January 6th, 2021 in 2022.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
2021 in 2022. I'm Ben Shapiro. This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
Today's show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.
I protect my data with a VPN.
So should you.
Visit expressvpn.com slash Ben.
We'll get to all the news in just one moment.
First, here's a reminder.
Inflation is currently at 40-year highs.
This might be a great time to think about diversifying.
See, here's the thing.
Historically, like throughout history, People have valued gold.
Gold has never been worth zero.
There's a reason that leprechauns hide it at the end of the rainbow.
They're not hiding government bonds at the end of the rainbow because you might get to the end of the rainbow and inflation has eaten away the value of the pot at the end of the rainbow.
So if you are interested in the leprechaun's gold or any other type of precious metals as a hedge against inflation and uncertainty, you should be checking out Birch Gold today.
Right now, inflation rates are higher than the interest on treasury bonds.
So every day that passes, the government owes less on its mountain of debt.
Imagine if your mortgage had a negative interest rate.
Would you start paying it off?
No, you absolutely would not.
Your pain is their gain.
So protect your savings right now.
Hedge against inflation with gold from Birchgold because the government is sabotaging the value of the United States dollar and it's only going to get worse over time.
Text Ben to 989898.
Get a free information kit on gold.
And when you buy before the end of the month, Birchgold will send you a copy of my newest book, The Authoritarian Moment.
Text Ben to 989898 to get your free information kit right now today.
Text Ben to 989898 to get started.
Alrighty, so I have to say that each and every day that I look at the news from California, I am just delighted by both the news and the fact that I no longer live there because they've just decided in California to go pedal to the metal.
We are going to destroy this state as fast as humanly possible.
According to KTLA.com, California lawmakers on Tuesday will start debating whether to create the nation's first universal healthcare system.
A key measure of whether the proposal has the support to pass this year.
Progressives have tried for years to create a government-funded universal healthcare system to replace the one that relies on private insurance.
Voters overwhelmingly rejected a 1994 ballot initiative that would have created a universal healthcare system.
Another attempt passed the state senate in 2017 but it died in the state assembly because there was no funding plan attached to it.
This year, Democrats in the state assembly in California, where Democrats have a supermajority, have filed two bills.
One that would create the universal healthcare system and set its rules.
The other would lay out how to pay for everything by raising taxes on quote, some wealthier individuals and larger businesses.
As we will see, they mean we are going to raise taxes massively on pretty much everyone and destroy all business in the state so we can pay for the healthcare for illegal immigrants, which is really what they are talking about in the state of California.
Because the reality is that poverty stricken Californians who are American citizens are still eligible for things like Medicaid.
Illegal immigrants are not eligible for things like Medicaid.
However, California now wishes to extend quote-unquote universal health care to everyone.
Now, there are other states that have experimented with this sort of stuff in the past.
So, for example, Vermont tried universal health care years ago, right?
The Bernie Sanders attempt.
Vermont tried health care reform.
They created a state-level single-payer healthcare system in 2011.
By 2014, they said, we can't do this anymore.
Within three years, they were like, yeah, this doesn't work.
We can't pay for any of this.
That was in Vermont, which has seven people and an elk.
So think about California, which has a population of 40 million people, and they're not talking about providing universal healthcare.
What that means is that they're either going to have to pursue rationing or they're going to have to pursue massively higher taxes or both.
That is what universal healthcare means in the state of California.
Because right now, there's an undersupply of medical care in the state of California.
If there's an undersupply and an overdemand, this means you either have to jog the supply by paying doctors a lot of money, or you have to artificially lower the demand by rationing care.
Right?
Those are the only two things that you can do in order to make supply meet demand at the governmental level.
The bill is getting a hearing on Tuesday before the Assembly Health Committee, where Chair Jim Wood, a Democrat from Santa Rosa, has already said he'll vote for it.
Because the proposal was introduced last year, it has to pass the state assembly by the end of January to have a chance at becoming law this year.
Universal healthcare has been debated for decades in the United States.
State lawmakers in Vermont, of course, as I say, tried and failed to implement their own universal healthcare system.
New York considered it, and then they were like, nah, but California?
Pedal to the metal, stupid.
Supporters in California are adopting a divide and conquer strategy this year.
They're trying to separate the idea of a universal healthcare system from how to pay for it, because the minute the Californians realize what exactly they would have to pay in order to ensure that illegal immigrants don't just go to the emergency room and clog up the emergency room, once they realize what the cost is on that, they're like, yeah, not so sure we're into this universal healthcare thing.
Assemblyman Ash Kalra, Democrat from San Jose and the author of both proposals says, we can debate the policy.
If someone says, how are you going to pay for it?
Well, those are two different issues now.
By the way, this is how Democrats think.
I want to do this giant costly thing.
And how do you pay for it?
According to Democrats are two completely separate issues.
In no other area of life does anyone think like this.
If you say to your spouse today, you know, sweetheart, I really want a Lamborghini.
I mean, that is a nice set of wheels.
I want a Lamborghini today.
And your wife says, well, how are we going to pay for that?
We can't afford it.
That's two separate issues, guys.
The Lamborghini is super nice.
And as for paying for it, well, we can have that discussion a little bit later.
This is how you bankrupt yourself.
This is how you bankrupt the state as well.
Ashkara says if we can agree on a policy and get that policy passed, then it becomes more real.
Then you're actually telling the voters what they're voting for.
That's really important.
In other words, you lead with the dependency and then you tax everybody in order to pay for the newly created dependency.
Assembly Republican Leader Mary Waldron said, I'm in the Health Committee.
I look forward to a robust discussion on the impacts of socialized medicine in California, including how much taxes will increase on the middle class.
The plan for universal health care requires at least a two-thirds vote in both houses of the state legislature.
After that, the voters have to approve it in a statewide election.
Democrats have large majorities.
Getting all of them to support the tax increases will be difficult.
The California Taxpayers Association says it would raise taxes by $163 billion per year on businesses and individuals.
But that number doesn't mean a lot to people because when we talk about billions and trillions, none of these numbers mean anything.
So what exactly?
So what exactly do you think the tax rates mean?
Well, National Review has a good rundown on what exactly the tax rates are supposed to mean.
What they mean is basically the end of the world.
We'll get to that in just one second.
First, let's talk about the simple fact that if something were to happen to you, you need to make sure that your family is taken care of.
Let's say that you and your wife, you bear a child.
And this child is a very special child.
This is the kind of child who could theoretically change the world.
And suddenly, A noseless man appears from nowhere and starts trying to kill your child.
So you step in front of that noseless man's fire and you take the hit.
Your son is scarred across his forehead.
You perish in the flames.
Well, you know that your son, he might have been better off just a little bit if you'd actually bothered to get life insurance instead of having to live under the stairs at like a terrible uncle's house.
Instead, you theoretically could have just gotten some life insurance and put him in a much better financial position.
This is why you should have headed over to policygenius.com slash Shapiro to answer a few questions about yourself.
In minutes, you can work out how much life insurance coverage you need and compare personalized quotes to find your best price.
You could save 50% or more on life insurance by comparing quotes with PolicyGenius.
Their licensed experts will help you understand your options and apply for a policy.
The Policy Genius team works for you, not the insurance companies.
You can trust them to offer unbiased help and advocate for you at every step until you are covered.
Policy Genius does not add on extra fees.
They don't sell your information to third parties.
They have thousands of five-star reviews across Google and Trustpilot.
Since 2014, Policy Genius has helped over 30 million people shop for insurance and placed $120 billion in coverage.
Head on over to policygenius.com slash Shapiro.
Get your free life insurance quotes.
See how much you could save.
That's policygenius.com slash Shapiro.
Okay, so.
California, according to the Tax Foundation, is considering doubling its taxes.
Doubling it.
According to Jared Walczyk, writing for the Tax Foundation, a proposed constitutional amendment in California would increase taxes by $12,250 per household, roughly doubling the state's already high collections to fund that single-payer healthcare system.
The top marginal rate on wage income would soar to 18%.
Just to be clear, that means that if you're making above, say, $500,000 in the state of California, you'll be paying an 18% income rate on every dollar that you earn above that mark.
So that means that on dollars you earn above that mark, you're going to pay that plus the, what is it, 36% top federal tax rate?
So 54 cents out of every dollar you make above a certain point goes to the government and that doesn't include any of the other taxes.
So it looks more like 65 cents out of every dollar going to a government of some kind.
By the way, nationally, the median top marginal rate is 5.3%.
You wonder why people like me fled California for Florida, where there is a 0% state tax rate?
By the way, I told my wife when we left, when we left, the top marginal tax rate in the state of California is about 13%.
I said, within three years, it'll be 20.
She was like, nah.
Yes.
Yes.
Within three years, it will be 20 because the left cannot abide the idea that rich people are not paying for every single thing that they could ever possibly want.
They're like spoiled children.
By the way, that is not the only tax increase that California is currently contemplating.
The state also wants to adopt a 2.3% gross receipts tax.
That is a rate of more than three times that of the country's highest current pure GRT.
So what exactly is a gross receipt tax?
A gross receipt tax means any dollar that your business receives will now be taxed at 2.3% in the state of California.
What makes this weird?
Well, let's say that your business makes $10 million this year, but your costs are $12 million this year.
So you're actually running in the red.
You're not a profitable business.
According to the state of California, you are still going to have to drop 2.3% of your gross receipts.
2.3% of your gross receipts into the state tax coffers.
A couple hundred thousand dollars, even though you're already running 20% below margin.
So your entire profit margin is gone if you're profitable, and if you're not profitable, then you're paying on top 2.3% just to operate.
The new taxes would take three forms.
Surtax is atop the current individual income tax structure, beginning at $149,000 in income.
A graduated rate payroll tax system with the top rate kicking in for employees with more than $49,990 in annual income and a gross receipts tax of 2.3%.
By the way, how bizarre is this bill?
This bill is so bizarre that if you have 50 employees, then you have to pay more in terms of payroll tax.
If you have 49 employees, you don't have to pay more in payroll tax.
What this means is that if you are paying your 50th employee a little bit under $50,000 a year, you would never hire that person because they're going to cost you about $90,000 a year.
There are two states that currently have payroll taxes for purposes other than funding their unemployment insurance system.
In Massachusetts, there's a recently adopted payroll tax of 0.68%.
It's dropped to top that state's 5.0% flat individual income tax.
In Nevada, there's a 1.5%.
On payroll tax.
And they add that to their income tax.
Well actually, Nevada doesn't have an income tax.
California would impose a payroll tax of up to 2.25% atop an individual income tax that already has a top marginal rate of 13.3% and they want to jog that to 18%.
This is insane.
So as I say, the payroll tax exempts employers with fewer than 50 resident employees, punishing small businesses for expanding and creating a meaningful tax cliff.
Imagine, for instance, the overly simplified hypothetical of a company with 49 employees making $80,000 each.
At 49 employees, the company has no payroll tax burden.
If you hire one additional employee, that generates a tax bill of $90,000 more than the employee's entire salary.
A gross receipts tax, they're going to drive business out of state.
None of this is shocking.
It's just insane.
It's totally, totally insane.
Again, that top tax bracket in the state of California would kick in.
That 18% tax bracket would kick in about $2.4 million.
But if you are making above, say $299,000, actually $150,000 in the state of California, under the new plan, you would still be paying 12% income tax in the state of California.
That is not a ton of money, $150,000.
And that's for a couple, by the way.
That is not for a single.
So all of this is crazy, but California is going to pursue it.
And then they're shocked when people leave.
CNBC points out yesterday, yeah, you can see just from the census how Americans are leaving high-tax states for low-tax states because it turns out people are economic actors.
We've heard the anecdotes, now we have the actual numbers.
More than 600,000 people leaving New York and California for lower taxed states during the pandemic.
That's according to census data.
California lost 300,000 residents between April of 2020 and July of 2021.
between April of 2020 and July of 2021.
New York lost a net 365,000 people, about 2% of its total population.
Now, the biggest winners, not surprisingly, were Texas and Florida, which have, of course, no income taxes.
Texas gaining $382,000, Florida adding $243,000.
Now, people move for many reasons.
Lower housing prices, lower cost of living with remote work, their families may be there.
But there is a continued shift from high tax to low tax states.
So keep it up.
Keep sending your revenue down to us here in Florida.
We are more than happy to take it.
Just leave your bullcrap politics where they were when you come.
That means you, Facebook.
Apparently, Facebook's parent company, Meta, has now signed the largest ever lease in downtown Austin.
According to Fox Business, the tallest tower in Austin, Texas, still under construction, will soon be home to Meta Platforms.
That's the parent company of Facebook.
Which is not a surprise.
Silicon Valley is relocating to Austin and Nashville and Florida and everywhere else.
Miami is now becoming a financial hub because everybody is getting the hell out of California and New York.
And by the way, along with these universal health care proposals, there are some social proposals that are going to come into play.
Because it turns out that when California provides quote unquote universal health care to everyone, it's going to come along with the social values California is famous for.
You can already see this happening in Washington State.
Our friend Jason Rantz over at 770KTTH, mynorthwest.com, he points out that Washington State now appears to allow minors to undergo life-changing gender reassignment surgery without parental consent.
Under a new law, health insurers must cover gender-affirming care, including surgical treatments that were previously denied coverage.
Democrats rejected a proposal to apply the new law to patients over 18 years old.
That means that children as young as 13 years old can make the health care decision to undergo gender reassignment surgery without parental consent.
And insurers are forced to cover it.
If you don't think that's going to happen in California when they have quote-unquote universal healthcare run by the state, and they essentially get rid of private insurers altogether, which is what you sort of have to do, you are out of your mind.
That's exactly what they are going to do.
And then they wonder why the rush continues to red states.
So, you know what?
More of this.
More of this.
I'm in favor of federalism.
And I'm very much in favor of California burning itself out so that we can take all of their productive citizens.
I was one of the productive citizens of California all my life.
And now I took my company with 150 employees and we put it in Nashville.
Took another 10 employees, came down to South Florida.
And let me tell you, everybody's happier, everybody's wealthier, because that is the way that incentive structures work.
But what is the left left with?
What they're left with is an unearned sense of moral superiority.
That's what it comes down to.
Unearned moral superiority is all that the left has left.
And right now they are getting high on their own farts with regard to COVID.
So here is the thing about COVID.
We're all getting it.
Omicron will hit everyone.
Triple vaxxed, double vaxxed, quadruple vaxxed.
You're all getting it.
The reason is because it is not going to prevent transmission.
Again, the CDC announced this yesterday.
If you said that before the CDC did, they would ban you from YouTube.
But now Rochelle Walensky has said it, so I'm allowed to say it.
Because that's the way our ridiculously censorious and tyrannical social media apps work.
If the government says it, now I'm allowed to say it.
If the government doesn't say it, I'm not allowed to say it.
But the left must cling to its sense of moral superiority over the vaccine.
Now, here's the thing.
I've been saying all along that I think that if you are vulnerable, you should get the vax.
I think that in virtually all cases, people above the age of 18 have higher risk factors from COVID than they do from the vaccine.
So that means that you should probably get the vaccine.
Again, I am double-vaxed.
My wife is triple-vaxed.
My parents are triple-vaxed.
So I'm a fan of the vaccine.
That does not mean that if you choose not to get vaccinated, I am rooting openly for your death.
And yet that is exactly what some people on the left are doing, because it makes them feel superior.
It makes them feel as though this entire pandemic can be blamed on you, as opposed to on their own stupid decisions.
I've been making the point since the vaccines were available, which was February-March of this year.
That now we all get to make our own decisions.
And you should leave everybody else alone.
The left can't let go of that.
Because if they were to let go of it, then they might be admitting that perhaps freedom is a better solution than government tyranny.
And that the government is incapable of fulfilling promises the left believes it can make.
The left believes the universal healthcare means that everybody is healthy.
That is not what that means.
Hey, check out the NHS in Britain.
That is not what it means.
The left believes that when the government promises it can keep you safe from an epidemic virus, that means it can keep you safe from an epidemic virus.
That is not true.
So now we have to find someone else to blame that's not the government.
Who are they going to blame?
The unvaxxed.
Now, again, if you die because you are unvaxxed, I think that you have made a generally poor decision because the vaccine does prevent hospitalization and death in large measure.
It's not as effective as it was 10 months ago, that's why some people are getting boosted, but it does create T-cell and B-cell immunity, and that is a very good thing.
However, should anyone be quote-unquote laughing at those who are unvaxxed who die?
I mean, you don't even know why they're unvaxxed.
Maybe they're unvaxxed because they had natural immunity.
Maybe they died from a complicating condition.
But according to Michael Hilsik, a business columnist for the LA Times, Mocking anti-vaxxers' COVID deaths is ghoulish, yes, but maybe necessary.
That, by the way, is not the HTML address at the top of the column.
The HTML address at the top of the column is, why shouldn't we dance on the graves of anti-vaxxers?
The answer is because it makes you a crappy human being.
I don't dance atop the graves of people who are obese who die of heart attacks.
Why would you dance atop anybody's grave?
Because they die of a health condition that's absurd.
But for the left, the it of the left apparently thinks this is okay.
So Michael Hiltzik says, How should we react to the deaths of the unvaccinated?
So I have a question.
Why is that a profound moral dilemma?
It seems like a pretty easy moral dilemma.
We should be sad.
When people die of health conditions, generally speaking, we should be sad.
I mean, honestly, I see no distinction morally between people who are saying, like Michael Hiltzik, that you should be celebrating the death of the unvaccinated, and people in the 1980s who are saying that if somebody died of AIDS, it's probably because they deserved it.
Both are crappy moral stances.
I don't understand.
On the one hand, says Michael Hiltzik, a hallmark of civilized thought is the sense that every life is precious.
On the other, those who have deliberately flouted sober medical advice by refusing a vaccine known to reduce the risk of serious disease from the virus, including the risk to others, and end up in the hospital or the grave, can be viewed as receiving their just desserts.
That's even more true of those who not only refuse the vaccine for themselves, but publicly advocate that others do so.
It has become common online and in social media for vaccine refusers and anti-vax advocates to become the target of ridicule after they come down with COVID-19, and especially if they die from it.
Witness the subreddit Herman Cain Award, which Lily Boothborough of Slate identified in September as, quote, a site for heartless and unrepentant schadenfreude.
The site is named for the former Republican candidate for president who became one of the first political notables to succumb to the disease after publicly defying social distancing measures.
But, wait a second.
I thought that Herman Cain, was there any information that Herman Cain was unvaxxed?
I'm unclear on that.
We'll have to check that out.
I'm pretty sure that the question for Herman Cain was about social distancing.
And social distancing, as it turns out, is kind of made up and arbitrary when it comes to that six foot rule.
Particularly, like the CDC admits that.
The issue of how to think about the deaths of the unvaccinated has been thrown into high relief locally by the case of Kelly Irnby, a prominent Orange County Republican and Deputy District Attorney who advocated against vaccine mandates and died of COVID around New Year's Day unvaccinated.
So I have a question.
Isn't there a difference between advocating against vaccine mandates and advocating against vaccines?
The idea here from the left is that we have to expand the definition of anti-vaxxer to mean that if I don't think you should be forced to get the vaccine, this means I'm anti-vax, which is crazy.
So, says Michael Hiltzik, I have a different take.
To begin with, let's stipulate that not all people unvaccinated for COVID are alike.
Some have remained unvaccinated for legitimate medical reasons.
Some may have legitimately faced obstacles in getting to a vaccination site.
Others may have refused the vaccine because they've been deceived.
Finally, there are those who have voiced public opposition to the vaccines, not all of whom are unvaccinated themselves.
Some have couched their opposition in policy terms.
Irnby fell into that category.
She asserted opposition not to the vaccines as such, but to vaccination mandates.
She said, I don't think the government should be involved in mandating what vaccines that people are taking.
That town hall predated the pandemic, but Irnby made clear her opposition extended to COVID vaccines.
In August, she posted a statement on her Facebook page supporting Huntington Beach firefighters who are opposing a vaccine mandate.
The vaccine is not a cure to COVID and mandates won't work, she wrote.
Okay, so mandates have not worked.
And the vaccine is not, in fact, a cure to COVID.
She's not wrong about that.
The vaccine is preventative against hospitalization and death.
In large measure, that doesn't mean it's a quote-unquote cure.
It should be clear that opposing VAX mandates as a substitute for opposing vaccination itself is a fundamentally incoherent position, says Michael Hiltzik.
It's a little more than a garden-variety small-government Republican ideology.
That's what it was in Earnby's hands.
Contrary to Ernbee's assertions, mandates do work.
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
So the bottom line is, he's not actually saying that if you die unvaxxed, that's bad.
He's saying if you oppose any element of my agenda, you deserve to die, which is totally crazy.
He says, mockery is not necessarily the wrong reaction to those who publicly mocked anti-COVID measures and encouraged others to follow suit before they perished of the disease, the dangers of which they belittled.
You don't have to belittle the dangers of COVID in order to recognize that government crackdowns may be overbroad blunderbuss instruments that are violative of American freedoms.
It's not wrong, says Michael Hiltzik, to deny them our sympathy and solicitude, or to make sure it's known when their deaths are marked that they had stood fast against measures that might have protected themselves and others from the fate they succumb to.
Here is the problem.
Omicron is coming for all of y'all.
But the left can't let it go.
Unearned moral superiority is the name of the game.
We'll get to more of that in just one second.
First, let's talk about getting your mortgage refinanced.
So you're paying too much for your mortgage right now if you haven't refinanced in the last couple of years because the rates are really, really low.
Timing the market can be a dangerous game.
So if you're holding off on a mortgage refi in the hopes that the rates drop, you might want to rethink your strategy.
I mean, the latest forecast projects a few interest rate hikes this year alone.
The first increase could come in the next month, making now the best time to call American financing.
Take advantage of a free, no-obligation mortgage review, where you will learn about custom loan options that can save you up to $1,000 a month.
That's right, every month.
From lower rates to shorter terms, even debt consolidation, they can do it all.
And they never charge upfront or hidden fees.
So, why not see what they can do for you?
If you like what you hear, you can pre-qualify for free, possibly skip two mortgage payments, you might close in as fast as 10 days.
Just call 866-721-3300.
866-721-3300. That's 866-721-3300 or visit AmericanFinancing.net and MLS182334 and MLSconsumeraccess.org.
Give them a call at 866-721-3300 or visit AmericanFinancing.net to get started.
Now is a great time for a mortgage refi.
Don't wait until it's too late.
AmericanFinancing.net.
Okay.
So again, the left.
Their policies have failed, and so they are left with nothing but unearned moral superiority based in fiction.
So, for example, Sunny Hostin of The View, who, you know, there's sort of a running gun battle on The View as to who is the stupidest person on The View.
There are a lot of not particularly bright people on The View.
Sunny Hostin, in my view, is the worst of the people on The View.
She is just awful.
She repeatedly repeats things that are untrue.
She just says things straight out that are flat-out lies.
Here she was yesterday trying to defend Justice Sonia Sotomayor's bizarre assertion that 100,000 children were in the hospital thanks to COVID, which is totally crazy.
The actual number is like 3,500, and most of them are totally fine.
Many of them are in the hospital with a broken leg and COVID.
They're not in the hospital for COVID.
Here is Sunny Hostin trying to make the case that Sonia Sotomayor is correct, that the left should get to cram down whatever policy they want on you based on pure fiction.
She may not be accurate for current hospitalizations in children.
She is correct that we have more children in the hospital now more than ever before.
And it certainly reflects the current cases in children.
Right now we have 82,843 children sick with COVID.
More than 1,000 children have died from the virus.
children are sick with COVID.
More than 1,000 children have died from the virus.
And in addition, about 7.8 million children have caught COVID since the pandemic started.
And so those are just the numbers.
And so while fewer than 83,000 kids have been hospitalized with the virus, we have kids sick with COVID more than we ever have before.
And so that's a real thing and those are real numbers.
Okay, but so Tim Mayer did not cite real numbers.
And by the way, the current death count for kids under the age of 18 remains below 700 for two years of pandemic.
And new studies suggest that for kids hospitalized between the ages of 12 and 17, 66% of them There are significant underlying conditions that contribute to whether or not you are going to die of COVID.
According to the CDC itself, quote, COVID-19 was the only cause mentioned on the death certificate for about 5% of deaths.
For deaths with conditions or causes in addition to COVID-19, on average, there were 4.0 additional conditions or causes per death.
And that is according to the CDC.
So, again, the sort of panic-stricken notions of the left are designed to suggest that you are bad if you oppose them, which is why, again, there is no case anymore for the Biden administration pushing forward with its VAX mandate.
Omicron has totally killed it.
The entire basis for the employer VAX mandate was that you have to stop the spread at your workplace, but you're not stopping the spread.
Everyone is getting Omicron.
Now you on an individual level, as I've said, I'm going to say it again, you on an individual level, if you're above the age of 18, the chances that you're going to get seriously ill or die from COVID are still better than the chances you're going to get seriously ill or die from the vaccine, absent some sort of complicating factor.
Which is why you should talk to your doctor.
Your doctor will probably recommend that you get the vaccine.
That does not mean that the federal government has the power through OSHA, of all things, to mandate that you get a vaccine that is predominantly geared toward protecting you, not toward protecting others.
Nonetheless, the bulk of the Biden vaccine mandate has now taken effect, according to the Wall Street Journal.
As of January 10th, all employers with more than 100 employees must have a procedure in place to ensure employees are vaccinated and keep track of workers' vaccination status.
Employers must also track whether their workers are infected and keep those who test positive away from work.
Workers who are not vaccinated must wear a mask while indoors.
The Labor Department in December gave employers an extra month to require that unvaccinated employees take weekly COVID-19 tests.
That goes into effect February 9th.
The rule covers about 84 million workers.
We are still awaiting the outcome of the Supreme Court case that was heard on Friday.
Meanwhile, the Biden administration continues to maintain that people will die if the vaccine mandate is struck down.
Well, I'm going to need some evidence that people are going to die if the vaccine mandate is struck down, given the fact that everyone is associating outside of work also.
These people act like the only place you ever see anybody else is inside work.
And that the vaccine mandate inside work is going to stop transmission, which of course is very silly.
Here's HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra.
Hopefully the plan is that the Supreme Court will recognize that the federal government, the Biden administration, has the authority to require these vaccines.
We know they work, they save lives.
We've proven it here at HHS with 88,000 workers.
Nearly 100% of our workers are vaccinated already.
And it is important.
And if they don't, well, I think that will be on their conscience.
I think there's some clear authority, legal authority, for us to move forward as we have proposed, both for the private sector workforce and for the health care workforce.
And we understand that if we don't get people vaccinated and covered this way, people will die.
And if you're a health care worker, for sure.
I have a more basic question here.
The more basic question here is, if everybody is going to get Omicron anyway, why are we actually attempting to prevent the spread?
This is a serious question and we should think it through logically.
If the argument is that you should get vaccinated, I generally agree.
For the third time in this particular episode, I totally agree with that.
However, if Omicron is making its way around, why should we be attempting to shield you from getting Omicron at all, given the fact that there could be future variants that are significantly more deadly?
Delta was more deadly than Omicron.
As in like three to four times more deadly than Omicron.
Are you supposed to just wait out there and take the chance that you will be able to avoid this disease forever?
Or maybe you're better off getting a mild version of the disease.
My friend Vivek Ramaswamy and his wife, Apoorva Ramaswamy, who's a doctor.
They have a piece today in the Wall Street Journal titled, Slow the Spread, Speeding It May Be Safer.
The Omicron variant is spreading across the globe, but so far, the strain appears to be less deadly than its predecessors.
That's good news.
Here's a risk that policymakers in every country should appreciate.
Policies designed to slow the spread of Omicron may end up creating a super-variant that is more infectious, more virulent, more resistant to vaccines, which would be a man-made disaster.
To minimize that risk, policymakers must tolerate the rapid spread of milder variants.
This will require difficult trade-offs, but it will save lives in the long run.
We should end mask mandates and social distancing in most settings, not because they don't slow the spread, the usual argument against such measures, but because they probably do.
So either way, you probably shouldn't be engaging in these sorts of measures, say the Ramaswamis.
This is correct.
If they don't slow the spread, then there's no reason for them.
And if they do slow the spread, Then what exactly are you waiting for?
Are you waiting for a new variant that's going to become even milder?
Because that's taking an awful chance, considering that Omicron is significantly milder than Delta in the first place.
By the way, the number of cases, like 1.5 million cases in the United States per day at this point, let me just point out, that's way too low.
That is way too low.
I know a lot of people who have not tested positive for COVID who almost certainly have COVID.
And that does not mean that they are out there killing everybody.
It just means everybody's getting Omicron.
Say the Ramaswamis to understand why, first consider an important scientific distinction between antigenic drift and antigenic shift.
Antigens are molecules, such as the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2, that an immune system detects as foreign.
The host immune system then mounts a response.
Antigenic drift describes the process by which a single-point mutation randomly occurs during the viral replication process.
The result is minor alterations to antigens like the spike protein.
If a point mutation makes the virus less likely to survive, that variant gradually dies off.
But if the mutation confers an incremental survival advantage, say the ability to spread more quickly from one cell to another, that strain becomes more likely to spread through the population.
Antigenic drift is a gradual, varying process.
A single point mutation alters one peptide or building block of a larger protein.
Those with immunity against a prior strain generally enjoy at least partial immunity against drifted variants.
This is called cross-protection.
Each time an immune host is exposed to a slightly different antigenic variant, the host can tweak its immune response without becoming severely ill.
And the more similar the new strain is to the last version, the less risky that strain will be to the host.
By contrast, antigenic shift refers to a discontinuous quantum leap from one antigen or set of antigens to a very different antigen.
New viral strains, such as those that jump one species to another, tend to emerge from antigenic shift.
The biological causes of antigenic shift are often different from those of drift.
For example, the physical swap of whole sections of the genome leads to more significant changes to viral genes than those caused by individual point mutations.
But there's a sorites paradox.
How many unique point mutations collectively constitute an antigenic shift, especially when human hosts are deprived of opportunities to update their immune response to drifted variants?
Here's the key. A vaccinated and naturally immune people can revamp their immune response to new viral strains created by antigenic drift. But social distancing and masking increase the risk of vaccine-resistant strains from antigenic shift by minimizing opportunities for the vaccinated and naturally immune to tailor their immune responses through periodic exposures to incrementally drifted variants. So to simplify, what they are saying is that there are new variants.
They have slight changes.
If you are exposed to these new variants, your body fights them off.
If you are never exposed to new variants, then this means that after several changes, you're going to get a variant that is so different from the original variant, your body doesn't know how to fight it off.
So maybe we should stop focusing on preventing transmission, and we should start focusing, as always, on hospitalization and death.
And if those numbers remain low, and if we are protecting and shielding the most vulnerable, there's not much else that we should be doing.
Say the Ramaswamis, the absolute risk of a more virulent strain of SARS-CoV-2 is low.
That's because viruses care more about propagating themselves than about killing the host.
Most viruses evolve to become more infectious and less virulent, but that's only a rule of thumb, not a biological law.
Mask mandates and social distancing measures will have created fertile ground for new variants that evade vaccination even more effectively.
Significant antigenic shifts may create new strains that are increasingly difficult to target with vaccines at all.
There are no vaccines for many viruses, despite decades of efforts to develop them.
And by the way, you can see how this is true from the death stats in South Africa and the death stats in Sweden.
South Africa had very little vaccination, but everyone got Delta.
And then when Omicron hit, no one died.
Sweden had a shield and protect strategy for the elderly and the vulnerable.
And then everybody else was allowed to go live their life.
So a lot of people got Delta.
Not a lot of people died.
And now they had the best 2021 of pretty much any country on the planet because everybody in Sweden was already immune to the virus.
By the way, I'm seeing headlines today about Sweden re-locking down.
By lockdown, Sweden means they're shutting their restaurants at 11pm.
When do you normally shut your restaurants, guys?
That thing down is a lockdown.
Come on.
By the way, all of the outside panic over the hospitals are being overwhelmed.
We're all going to die.
The stats demonstrate that this actually is not true.
Phil Kirpin.
Who's on top of this stuff on Twitter.
He put out a chart demonstrating what the hospitalizations look like.
Basically, hospitalizations, total staffed inpatient beds, fairly even and have been since September of 2020.
And as you will see, there's an increase in the number of confirmed COVID patients, but there's really not a massive increase in the number of inpatient beds used.
It's been pretty stable all the way through the pandemic.
So this belief that we are in the midst of a massive hospital shortage, if it is, that's only because the Biden-Vaxx mandates have basically driven healthcare workers out of the business.
According to the Wall Street Journal, rising numbers of nurses and other critical healthcare workers are calling in sick across the United States due to COVID-19, forcing hospitals to cut capacity just as the Omicron variant sends them more patients.
Hospitals are leaving beds empty because the facilities don't have enough staffers to safely care for the patients.
Staff shortages prompted Mass General Brigham Hospital in Boston to keep 83 beds empty on Friday.
So, I said on Fox News, now it's ripped up and down by media matters, that the Biden-Vaxx mandates and the attempt to test all of your healthcare employees is leading to less healthcare, which is leading to less capacity.
That happens to be absolutely true.
Limiting capacity is a last resort for hospitals, doctor and healthcare officials say.
The facilities do it to preserve proper care and safety for current patients.
That means leaving people in limbo in emergency rooms, making ambulances wait, and postponing treatment for cancer, heart disease, and other conditions, all to prevent the transmission of a very, very mild variant of COVID.
It's pretty astonishing stuff.
Again, and the federal government's response here is completely confused and confusing.
Now, by the way, the Pfizer CEO is admitting that the two COVID vaccine doses are quote-unquote not enough for Omicron.
What he means by that is that they are not preventing infection, which we already know.
Real-world data from the UK has found the two vaccine doses are 52% effective at preventing hospitalization 25 weeks after receiving the second shot.
Two doses of Pfizer or Moderna's vaccines are only about 10% effective at preventing infection from Omicron 20 weeks after the second dose.
So basically, you're going to get it.
But that does not mean that you're going to die.
Here is the head of Pfizer announcing that everyone's going to get infected, basically.
The two doses of the vaccine offer very limited protection, if any.
The three doses with a booster, they offer reasonable protection against hospitalization and deaths.
Against deaths, I think, very good.
and less protection against the infection.
Okay, so again, the federal government response here is a complete mess.
Yesterday, Peter Doocy asked Jen Psaki, you guys keep saying this is a pandemic and the unvaccinated.
I've noticed that everyone is getting this, including you who are triple vaxxed.
I understand that the science says that vaccines prevent death.
But I'm triple vaxxed, still got COVID.
You're triple vaxxed, still got COVID.
Why is the president still referring to this as a pandemic of the unvaccinated?
Okay, and she says, well, you know, because the unvaccinated are the ones who are going to the hospital, which is true.
But that's not changed the fact that the infections are being carried forward by everyone, by everyone.
Alrighty, in just one second, we'll get to the Biden administration's response to all of this, which is throw up your hands and start talking about election law or something.
We'll get to that in just one moment first.
I'm thrilled to announce an incredible app that everyone who buys gas needs to know about, GetUpside.
My listeners are making up to $0.25 for every gallon of gas every time they fill up.
Just download that free GetUpside app in the App Store or Google Play right now.
Use promo code SHAPIRO to get a bonus $0.25 per gallon on your first fill up that's up to $0.50 cash back.
Do not pay full price at the pump anymore.
Get cash back using GetUpside.
Just download that app for free.
Use promo code Shapiro to get up to 50 cents per gallon cash back on your very first tank of gas.
Some people who drive a lot are making as much as $200 to $300 a month in cash back.
There is no catch.
The cash back gets added directly to your account.
You can cash out anytime to your bank account, PayPal, or an e-gift card for Amazon and other brands.
Just download that free GetUpside app.
Use promo code SHAPIRO.
Get up to 50 cents per gallon cash back on your very first tank of gas.
Gas prices are just too high right now.
I think we all know that Brandon is at least partially to blame.
And that is why you should get that GetUpside app right now.
Again, use promo code SHAPIRO.
Get up to 50 cents per gallon cash back on your first tank of gas.
And then up to 25 cents per gallon off for every subsequent tank of gas.
Use promo code SHAPIRO when you download that free GetUpside app from the App Store.
Alrighty, we'll get to more in just one second.
As everybody knows right now, The Daily Wire is rapidly expanding into entertainment.
With that expansion, we are searching for a Council of Business and Legal Affairs to join our legal team in Nashville as our in-house legal expert on the film and television industry.
The Council of Business and Legal Affairs will manage all legal aspects of The Daily Wire's entertainment content, including development, acquisition, production, and finance, as well as production, legal, and intellectual property work for all of The Daily Wire's shows.
We need someone with eight plus years of experience in the film and TV industry.
This is a perfect opportunity for an entertainment lawyer who is ready to get out of Hollywood's woke groupthink.
To apply for that opportunity and to view a full list of our current openings at Daily Wire, because we are a fast growing company, please visit dailywire.com slash careers.
Also, if you haven't heard of Jonathan Isaac yet, you might be living under a rock because Jonathan Isaac is awesome.
He's the NBA star who stood strong with his values while everyone else in the NBA was kneeling for the lie that America was systemically racist and evil.
Jonathan Isaac stood.
He would not kneel with the rest of his teammates.
He faced heavy criticism from the media for his views on social issues and vaccines over the past few years, which is why I'm so excited to announce he has decided to write a book with The Daily Wire.
It's called Why I Stand.
You should buy the book and show him your support.
Jonathan's book will be about the rise of his basketball career, his journey into faith, his strength to stand alone in the face of immense pressure.
Check out this teaser.
The Orlando Magic's 23-year-old starting forward is deeply religious and proudly unvaccinated.
On Friday, Isaac got attention for choosing not to kneel in unison with his teammates or to wear a Black Lives Matter shirt.
My name is Jonathan Isaac.
I play for the Orlando Magic, and I'm writing a book with The Daily Wire.
Courage does not mean the absence of fear.
And in today's day, there are so many things that you can be afraid of facing because of believing what you believe or deciding to stand for what you believe in.
And I believe this book gives you a blueprint of my story of how crisis made the difference in my life.
from a young kid who struggled with fear, anxiety, self-insecurity, to a man willing to stand for what he believes in.
Jonathan's book will be one of the very first under the Daily Wire's new publishing arm, DW Books.
We couldn't be happier to have him on board.
The book is available for pre-order right now at Amazon, so reserve your copy today.
You're listening to the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.
Well, Joe Biden's administration is on the rocks.
They've got millions of new cases of Omicron.
They have no way of handling it because they boxed themselves in.
And their message on inflation continues to be so bad that even the Washington Post editorial board is like, guys, what are you talking about?
Here is the Washington Post editorial board today.
Quote, President Biden is facing mounting criticism for inflation's rise to its highest level since 1982.
Unfortunately, the White House's latest response is to blame greedy businesses.
Economists across the political spectrum are rightly calling out the White House for this foolishness.
Even some within the White House are questioning this approach, The Post reports.
Inflation, which was relatively low for decades, did not suddenly rise in recent months because businesses decided now was their ideal time to squeeze their customers.
What actually happened is that demand soared for many products as the economy recovered.
Often there were not enough products to meet it.
In a surprise to many, consumers kept buying goods like cars and washing machines even at higher prices.
What the White House is really struggling with is an inflation messaging problem.
Officials' initial insistence that higher prices would be short-lived flopped as the annual inflation has now been about 5% since June.
The reality is that the best tool the nation has to fight inflation is the Federal Reserve raising interest rates.
But the Fed operates independently from the White House.
Biden could help by finally announcing his nominees for the three seats on the Federal Reserve's Board of Governors.
They're saying that we should destroy the Federal Reserve's independence in order to save Joe Biden.
But what they really mean is that Joe Biden is incredibly bad at this job.
So what this means is that Joe Biden now has to rely on a secondary message for 2022, and so do the Democrats.
That secondary message is Republicans are trying to stymie the vote.
Hey, this is all crazy talk.
If they think this is going to work, they're crazy.
First of all, more Democrats voted in the last election cycle than in any election cycle in American history, and it is not close.
The turnout rates were extraordinary.
Joe Biden won 81 million votes.
Hey, those are big numbers.
If there is election stifling going on, there is no evidence that there is election stifling going on.
There's less evidence that people are being kept from voting in the United States and that people are engaging in widespread voter fraud.
Less evidence.
And so for all the people on the left who keep saying that Donald Trump is propagating the big lie by talking about electoral fraud and the notion that he won the 2020 election, it is a much bigger lie when you suggest that there are millions of people being disenfranchised at the ballot box.
That is just a lie.
It is not true at all.
And yet this is what Democrats are relying upon.
So Nancy Pelosi goes the furthest.
She basically makes the argument that conservatives, Republicans, they ought to be treated like terrorists.
She says January 6th was a terror attack.
And then she also says that Republicans in the states who are pursuing voter verification methods, they are just a continuation of the terror attacks of January 6th.
Basically, you're all terrorists.
I do have to note here that whoever is doing Nancy Pelosi's Botox needs to be stopped.
Someone needs to be stopped here.
She has gone full Jack Nicholson Joker, fell directly into the vat of toxic waste.
I don't know what's going on here.
Those of us who suffer from a family receding hairline, I've never seen before receding eyebrows.
That is a new one.
Her eyebrows are literally receding all the way up her face.
They started off just above her eyes, and now they're halfway up her forehead.
And if she continues in this manner, her eyebrows will eventually be all the way at the back of her head.
She'll be talking, you'll just see her eyebrows wiggling all the way up here.
I don't know what's going on.
Like, these are the people who run our country.
Here is Nancy Pelosi, crazy Nancy Pelosi, who looks like a marionette, like an Edgar Bergen marionette, talking about how you are basically a terrorist if you support voter ID.
There's nothing more important for us to do than protect our Constitution and our democracy.
What the Republicans are doing across the country is really a legislative continuation of what they did on January 6th, which is to undermine our democracy.
It's a legislative continuation of January 6th undermining our democracy is the line.
So this is the line they're going to carry into 2022.
Good luck with this.
You've got bad inflation.
You've got bad COVID policy.
You've got underemployment because not enough people are getting back into the labor force.
You have a completely failed foreign policy.
And Nancy Pelosi's pitch is that everybody who is pushing voter ID in states like Georgia was complicit in January 6th.
Really good luck with this.
And then trotting out Maxine Waters to back this?
My goodness.
You guys have a very, very weak pitch.
Yours is Maxine Waters doing the same thing last night.
This is not something that they have any real issues about relative to how the system is working with this, this, that or the other.
This is about racism.
This is about exclusion.
This is about not wanting us to be able to participate in the policies that govern this country.
It's about racism and exclusion, and also you should confront people you don't like in parking lots and scream at them.
Also, I will admit that I was not expecting the John Lennon 1980s style.
Like, John Lennon was dead by that point, but if he had blown up those sunglasses, the crazy sunglasses, and made them very large, and plunked them down on Maxine Waters, that would have been the look.
This is great.
By the way, Chuck Schumer is trying to force a vote on the filibuster.
Like, this is how desperate they are.
He's not demonstrating his own incompetence.
He's demonstrating full-scale his own incompetence.
The Senate majority leader is going to try to vote on the filibuster and see if Kyrsten Sinema in Arizona and Joe Manchin are going to kill the filibuster on behalf of a voting rights bill that does not have majority support.
Good luck with that.
And then what's he going to claim?
Well, what is Biden going to claim?
What's Schumer going to claim?
That he's been obstructed by Republicans when he can't even get his own Democrats on board?
Seriously, they are so incompetent and they are so boxed in, and 2022 is going to be so ugly for them until they are left merely with dreams of universal health care and a hatred for those who don't think like them.
If that's your pitch, you're going to get skunked come November.
All right, we'll be back here later today with an additional hour of content.
Coming up soon is the Matt Walsh Show.
It airs 1.30 p.m.
Eastern.
Be sure to check it out over at dailywire.com.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
Shapiro, this is the Ben Shapiro Show.
The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Elliot Felt.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover.
And our production manager is Pavel Lydowsky.
Associate producer, Bradford Carrington.
Editing is by Adam Sajovic.
Audio is mixed by Mike Koromina.
Hair and makeup is by Fabiola Cristina.
Production assistant, Jessica Crand.
The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire production.
Copyright Daily Wire 2022.
On the Matt Wall Show, we talk about the things that matter.
Real issues that affect you, your family, our country, not just politics, but culture, faith, current events, all the fundamentals.
▲
Export Selection