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Feb. 8, 2022 - The Ben Shapiro Show

56:25

Blue States Reverse Themselves On Mask Mandates | Ep. 1429

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	California, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Oregon all announced they are reconsidering mask mandates a year too late.
	Accusations of racism continue to be the left's favorite weapon for institutional change.
	And Andrew Yang throws Joe Rogan under the bus.
	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.
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	The Biden administration has been steadily moving toward the idea that we need to move beyond the pandemic.
	And the reason that they are doing this is they must just be getting crushed in their internal pollings.
	This must be true for all Democrats across the country.
	They're looking at their internal polls and it is showing that they are just getting absolutely wrecked because the data did not change.
	The data did not change, but now they are changing their policies, which demonstrates once more, it was never about what was best.
	It was always about what was politically useful for them.
	It was always about ideology.
	It was never about the best available policy, because when you've got the best available policy, you don't have any problems discussing that policy and discussing the data and showing your work.
	But nobody was ever willing to show their work.
	All it was, for literally a year and a half, was, if you disagree with us, it's because you hate toscience, TM.
	It's because you deny the science.
	It's because you want the virus to win, et cetera, et cetera.
	But the fact of the matter is this.
	If you are that confident in your science, you know what scientists do?
	They typically spend a lot of time showing data to one another in order to verify that the measures that they are prescribing are the ones that are proper.
	For a year and a half, we've been told that to show your work means showing lack of faith.
	It was a matter of faith and heresy for the left-wing community.
	So what has changed?
	The answer is that people are done with this crap, and they've been done with this crap for quite a while.
	The economic data prove it, by the way.
	You'll recall that just about four days ago, the Biden administration was preparing us all for a really, really bad jobs report in January.
	Why?
	Because they said that Omicron was going to shellack the economy.
	It turns out Omicron did not shellack the economy.
	You know why?
	Because most people just went to work.
	Most people did not care.
	Most people were done.
	And the great irony of the booming economy of January Is that it came in spite of the fact that according to Joe Biden, it should have been really bad, not just because of Omicron, but because of the failure to pass Build Back Better.
	Remember, he suggested that the revitalized American economy was reliant on us spending trillions of dollars in Build Back Better.
	Then Joe Manchin murdered Build Back Better with an axe and buried it in Iowa cornfield in late December.
	And it didn't pass, and then the economy boomed.
	So the two things that Joe Biden has been focused on, quote-unquote pandemic response and build back better, both of those things failed and the economy boomed.
	In other words, every time Joe Biden fails to get what he wants, life gets better for everyone is the basic synopsis here.
	And so now they're attempting to move off of this because if they get stuck in full pandemic restriction mode forever, they're toast.
	Joe Biden has to know this.
	We got three weeks until Joe Biden gives his much ballyhooed State of the Union.
	I promise you, by the time we hit the State of the Union address, it's not going to be Nancy Pelosi saying that there are only 25 people in the Capitol Rotunda.
	Instead, she's going to be saying that there are tons of people who are available for the joint session of Congress.
	Everybody can come.
	Everybody who's vaxed gets to be unmasked.
	If you're vaxed, if you're unvaxed, then we're going to tell you not to come so that she can create controversy about the evil unvaxed Republicans.
	But that is going to be her move.
	And at that State of the Union address, Joe Biden will be declaring that the pandemic is basically over.
	He's going to say that we now have the tools to fight issues if they crop up again.
	We know how to manufacture RNA vaccines.
	We know how to get you masks.
	We know how to do all the things we need to do.
	And so I'm happy to tell you I have defeated COVID.
	That will be Joe Biden's line.
	No, it won't be true.
	COVID defeated COVID.
	I mean, Omicron defeated COVID because the more deadly strain, Delta, was killed off basically because Omicron out-competed it because it's 70 times more transmissible than Delta.
	So that means it moved way faster through the population.
	It gave a huge percentage of the population natural immunity, including, by the way, people who already had vax immunity.
	So for me, I had vax immunity, and now I also have natural immunity, I think.
	And what that means is that I am good to go.
	I am golden.
	But listen, I've been golden since I got the vax last year, and I really haven't cared about what happened post that.
	Alrighty, coming up.
	The Democrats are all shifting their position with regard to Omicron and masking.
	What changed?
	What changed?
	Maybe it's that they got caught with their mask in the cookie jar.
	We'll get to that in just one moment.
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	In the last week, the Democrats realized that they are on the wrong side of the American people.
	Because they're a series of really, really bad photo ops for Democrats.
	It began at one of the big NFL games with the LA Rams when Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, appeared next to Magic Johnson.
	Unmasked.
	Magic Johnson is a 62-year-old overweight black man who has HIV.
	Okay, so he is immunocompromised, in the classic sense of being immunocompromised.
	That is what HIV does.
	And Gavin Newsom was right next to him, unmasked.
	And Gavin Newsom tried to make excuses for it, and he said he had his mask on his hand as though his hand was transmitting COVID or something.
	But everybody understood that for the specials, the rules do not apply.
	So it looked really bad for Gavin Newsom.
	And then he wasn't the only one.
	Right, then we also had Eric Garcetti, the mayor of Los Angeles, who was unmasked, standing directly next to Magic Johnson.
	Cause everybody apparently in the stadium had to get a photo unmasked with Magic Johnson.
	So Eric Garcetti took a photo with Magic Johnson.
	He got shellacked.
	And then he said, well, I was holding my breath and everybody laughed at him because that's ridiculous.
	What are you going to do?
	Hold your breath for like three hours at one of these LA Rams games?
	Is that the idea here?
	And then Stacey Abrams made the gigantic, enormous Terry McAuliffe-like political boo-boo of appearing in front of a classroom filled with small children, all of whom are masked, and she is sitting there grinning her ass off, sitting in front of the kids, no mask on her.
	I mean, this photo is going to be in every campaign ad that is run by whichever Republican wins the primary in Georgia from now until Election Day.
	This will be the most famous photo in America.
	And it should be, because it's everything.
	The children always come last.
	In fact, in her excuse making for why this happened, Stacey Abrams, she explained the reason this happened is because she insisted that if she was going to unmask, everybody else be masked.
	So it was at her behest that everybody was masked in that classroom.
	And it wasn't just her.
	There's a representative named Elise Slotkin from New York, and she also appeared in a public setting, and you can see kids behind her, see adults behind her, they're all wearing N95s, and there she is, completely unmasked.
	So everybody knows this is ridiculous, and the blowback has been intense.
	Stacey Abrams got hit so hard that by the next day, after releasing that photo, and then deleting the photo, by the way, by the next day she was looking for a new online director.
	She said she'd done nothing wrong, but a good indicator that you've done something wrong is when you start firing the people who did it.
	So all of this was really bad.
	And the polling for the Biden administration has been really bad.
	There are polls showing more than half of Americans believe that America is moving in the wrong direction.
	And the reason for that is because a huge percentage of Americans believe that their government officials are out of touch with them and what they need and what the realities are of the situation on the ground.
	And so now you've started to see the Biden administration move, and not just the Biden administration, states across the country.
	So the Biden administration has been caught flat-footed on this.
	They're giving mixed messages.
	So Jen Psaki, for example, at the White House yesterday, she was saying it's still our position that kids should be masked.
	She could not explain why.
	On the mask mandate question in New Jersey and other states, the CDC is still recommending universal masking in schools.
	That's correct, and that still remains our recommendation.
	So are you pleased with and fine with the New Jersey governor's decision?
	Again, our advice to every school district is to abide by public health guidelines.
	It continues to be at this point that the CDC is advising that masks can delay, reduce transmission.
	There are also a number of other mitigation measures that we've put in place, but that continues to be CDC guidance.
	Okay, but by today, this will shift.
	I promise.
	By the end of the day, the White House will have already started to shift its tune on this.
	Already, coming up, Democrats are now saying they want to remove mask mandates like two years too late.
	Well done, guys.
	We'll get to that in just one moment.
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	And so you've got, I mean, too little too late, but I'm glad they're doing it now.
	Now you've got, for example, New Jersey announcing that they want to end school masking.
	Now remember, right now in Virginia, you got the left yelling at Glenn Youngkin for doing the exact same thing.
	Glenn Youngkin was like, listen, I ran on, we're unmasking the kids, we're unmasking the kids.
	And then you have Glenn Youngkin going into stores where there is no mask mandate for adults and getting yelled at by random people.
	But when Phil Murphy in New Jersey says that this makes him good, even though he's doing it five minutes after Glenn Youngkin did it.
	Phil Murphy, by the way, the real reason that Phil Murphy in New Jersey is doing this, he's been an awful governor.
	He has one of the worst death rates from COVID of any governor in America.
	He has apparently, according to Statista, the third worst death rate from COVID of any state in the Union, New Jersey, despite his massive restrictions.
	Governor Phil Murphy.
	But he almost got his ass blown out of office by a no-name whose name I can't even say.
	I don't even know who is running against him.
	And he nearly got kicked out of office as governor of New Jersey because of the pandemic restrictions.
	So now he's like, you know what?
	I can't do this anymore.
	We're getting rid of the mask mandates for kids in schools.
	And he was asked, OK, so what was the evidence for mask mandates in the first place?
	He's got nothing.
	So don't tell me the data changed.
	The data did not change.
	You guys changed because you were lying for months that you had data to back it.
	You never had data to back this.
	This is all about trust us, give us the power, and we will protect you.
	And then you didn't.
	You made everybody's life worse.
	You set kids back a year.
	You made businesses shut down.
	You drove people out of their minds.
	You made them into paranoid freaks about COVID.
	And now you're like, the data changed.
	The data did not change.
	You just got wise to the fact that Americans are sick of this nonsense, even in most blue states.
	Here's Phil Murphy, unable to answer any basic questions on why mask mandates ought to apply.
	Have you seen data that definitively proves that these mask mandates have worked?
	I mean, the numbers you just presented are impressive, but are they different from the numbers in states where they didn't have mask mandates?
	Yeah, again, I know Jersey Jake the best, but I'm highly confident and I'm sure our health officials could say it definitively.
	There's no question they've worked.
	No, there is question that they've worked.
	I love that he has no data.
	I'm just going to cite the authorities.
	Not one shred of data that the mask mandates worked in schools.
	The data does not exist, which is why Europe was never masking kids.
	Europe was not masking kids.
	Anyway, Bill Murphy has now decided to reverse himself.
	So according to the New York Times, he says that he's going to stop forcing masks on kids in school.
	He said, quote, this is not a declaration of victory as much as an acknowledgement that we can responsibly live with this thing.
	The new policy will take effect the second week of March, two years after New York and New Jersey became the early epicenters of a virus that has since mutated and resurged, killing more than 900,000 people nationwide.
	Now, just a quick note.
	Why is he doing it second week of March?
	What's so great about second week of March?
	Okay, the reason that he is doing it the second week of March is that Joe Biden is giving his State of the Union address the first week of March.
	That's why he's doing it the second week of March.
	Joe Biden is going to announce that we are done basically with pandemic measures and the next week magically all the blue states will reopen and the sun will shine and the clouds will clear and all the rest of us who have been saying for literally a year and a half that you ought to be following the data.
	All of a sudden, we will be the bad guys again.
	Because what they will say is, you know, we were the ones who were always, we just wanted a real reopening with following the data.
	And eventually we got there, guys.
	It just, it took some time.
	Don't believe the propaganda that they're about to pour onto your head.
	They are the ones who made this pandemic last longer than it had to in terms of public policy.
	They are the ones who masked kids for a year with no purpose.
	Two years with no purpose.
	And now, the polls cut against them, and suddenly we're supposed to believe that they were good faith actors all along, despite the fact that they never showed the data, ever.
	Murphy's move follows a decision last month by the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, Tom Wolf, to rescind his state's school mask mandate.
	And then, Democratic leaders in Connecticut, Delaware, and Oregon also announced they would end their state's in-school mask mandates.
	Connecticut will permit students and staff members to stop wearing masks by no later than February 28th.
	Delaware and Oregon will end their mandates by March 31st.
	Meanwhile, Gavin Newsom in California, he announced that the indoor mask mandate will end next week, but only for the vaccinated.
	Because of course, we have to keep pretending that the unvaccinated are somehow killing everybody while the vaccinated are not killing anyone.
	So Gavin Newsom's gonna pretend that it's because Omicron is waning.
	He says, citing a 65% drop in COVID-19 cases since the peak of the Omicron surge, California will end its statewide indoor mask mandate for vaccinated individuals next week, nearly two years after it was first implemented, according to Governor Gavin Newsom on Monday.
	This is CNN reporting, quote.
	On February 15th, California's statewide indoor mask requirement will expire.
	Unvaccinated people must still wear masks in indoor public settings.
	Notice how this basically justifies him taking a photo next to Magic Johnson with no mask on, right?
	Because he's vaxxed, so it's okay now.
	So the attempt by the left to now move into the rational category after spending two years being completely irrational about this entire thing is pretty astonishing.
	Same thing is happening in New York, by the way.
	Governor Kathy Hochul apparently is hinting that she may soon end the COVID-19 pandemic-related statewide mask mandate for public indoor spaces.
	But she says it may not come for another month, which again would put you, wait for it, right at the beginning of March, a week after Joe Biden does his State of the Union address in which he declares that he has ended the pandemic.
	Again, it is amazing to watch all of these people who've prolonged crappy public policy measures and have completely sunk the future of the American economy based on a $30 trillion national debt declare that they have created victory.
	It's quite galling.
	I mean, just a couple of days ago, Joe Biden was out there in public suggesting That we cut the COVID crisis in half is clip eight.
	Here's Joe Biden, like a couple of days ago, trying to take credit for the ending of COVID in the United States, which, honest to God, I've never seen somebody find parades to jump in front of faster than Joe Biden.
	He's great at this.
	There's a natural upswing in the economy.
	He jumps in front of the parade and he says, I'm the one who made this happen.
	COVID went up and then it went down and he had nothing to do with any of that.
	And now he's jumping in front of it and pretending he had something to do with that stuff.
	I mean, it's just crazy.
	The COVID crisis has been cut in half, down in half in just three weeks.
	Still too many cases, still we have to be on the alert.
	But to be clear, this is a dramatic decline.
	I mean, look at the magic of Joe Biden standing there and not doing anything.
	It's like he fixed COVID just by not even doing anything.
	Honestly, if he had not done anything, the economy would be in much better shape right now.
	We wouldn't have had a wildly inflated economy last year in which our wage gains are being eaten up by the rates of inflation because he decided to blow money into the economy for no apparent reason.
	Again, America only succeeds when Joe Biden's policies fail.
	When he doesn't get what he wants, America does great.
	When he gets what he wants, America just gets blown up.
	That is the Biden way.
	Don't pay attention to the man trying to jump in front of a moving parade and pretend that he's leading the thing.
	Don't believe the Democratic governors who are doing it either.
	They had to.
	They had no choice.
	The American people aren't with it.
	Now, what's fun to watch is as all of the quote-unquote misinformation of the past couple of years becomes the new good information.
	That's fun.
	So, for example, the Biden administration is amazing.
	According to Politico, they're now trying to recalculate COVID-19 hospitalizations.
	So, for two years, it was considered a conspiracy theory to suggest that the stats that were being kept by hospitals were not very good when it came to hospitalizations and COVID.
	There are a lot of people who are saying there's a difference between being hospitalized of COVID and hospitalized with COVID.
	If you break your leg and then you test positive for Delta, you're not hospitalized because of COVID.
	You're hospitalized with COVID.
	And the same thing is true for a lot of people who are elderly who are dying.
	Did they die of COVID or did they die of a bunch of complicating factors, which means that if they got anything, they were going to die.
	This disease killed disproportionately very elderly people with multiple underlying conditions.
	And if you said that, this was considered wild conspiracy theory insanity.
	Now, the Biden administration, which is being hit by the case rates of Omicron, because people on the left are like, wait a second, you want to relieve the pandemic restrictions?
	We still have a lot of cases of Omicron.
	So what is the Biden administration trying to do?
	Now they're trying to recalibrate how hospitals count the stats.
	According to Politico, the Biden administration is working on recalculating the number of COVID-19 hospitalizations in the United States, according to two senior officials familiar with the matter.
	A task force comprised of scientists and data specialists at the Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are working with hospitals nationwide to improve COVID-19 reporting.
	You know when this would have been useful?
	In the middle of the pandemic, not two years later, you idiots!
	The group is asking hospitals to report numbers of patients who go to the facility because they have COVID, separate from those individuals who go in for other reasons and test positive after being admitted, the two officials said.
	The administration's goal is to get a more accurate sense of COVID-19's impact across the country and whether the virus is causing severe disease.
	Senior Biden health officials have increasingly relied on hospitalization numbers rather than case counts to determine how to respond to the virus, as well as the efficacy of the vaccines.
	Lower hospitalization rates could inform the administration's thinking on public health measures such as masking.
	There it is.
	So now we are going to go back and ask the questions that many of us were asking at the very beginning.
	How many people are actually in the hospital of COVID versus with COVID?
	And now they're going to do it.
	Two years later.
	I'd just like to note here that our public health establishment is just hot garbage.
	They're just terrible with their jobs.
	There are a few questions that we needed to know, like, right up front.
	Like, for example, the number one question, what is the infection fatality rate of this disease based on age and pre-existing health condition?
	That is the number one question of this pandemic.
	And you still cannot get a straight answer.
	You know why?
	Because the CDC and the NIH did not do a widespread study on transmission of the disease outside of diagnosis.
	They never did any sort of serotological study looking at antibodies in the blood of people to determine whether they'd already had COVID.
	It was left to private industry to try and figure out how many people had actually had COVID without receiving a formal diagnosis.
	Well, you can't calculate the infection fatality rate of the disease until you actually know how many people have had it.
	You know what the CDC and the NIH never bothered to calculate?
	That.
	And that's why they kept lying about natural immunity.
	I mean, openly lying about natural immunity.
	We've known about natural immunity, by the way.
	on planet Earth for hundreds and hundreds of years.
	This is not a new thing.
	The new thing was the scientific establishment trying to suggest that natural immunity didn't exist.
	Right?
	That was just, you want to talk about science denial, suggesting that there's no natural immunity after you get the disease, that's science denial.
	And half of our public policy was rooted in that science denial.
	And they would do no studies at all in order to verify their own position.
	In fact, they would suppress anybody who said something different.
	The amount of public health establishment suppression of good information.
	It's truly amazing, which is why I don't trust them when they say that they just want Joe Rogan off the air because of misinformation, or they just want to have big tech shut down misinformation.
	It's a lie.
	The biggest promoters of bad information throughout this entire pandemic are the people in the public health establishment.
	When I say the biggest promoters, I mean the people who affected the most people.
	Because yes, of course, there are people who just said silly things like COVID is not a threat at all, and no one's going to die, or it's just like the flu, or that kind of stuff, or the vaccines are completely ineffective.
	That stuff is ridiculous, and it is silly, and people who took that advice were taking bad data.
	The public health establishment are the people you're supposed to trust, and they never provided the data for what they were talking about in any serious way, and they never did the studies to even find the data for the stuff that they were talking about this whole way.
	And so when they say now the data have shifted, that's a lie.
	The data have not shifted.
	All that's shifted is the politics.
	And finally, David Leonhardt at the New York Times.
	He has a piece over at the New York Times called The Mask Debate.
	More Democratic governors are saying that masks can come off in schools.
	He says, at a recent high school sports event in my community, I ran into a teenager I've known for years.
	We gave each other enthusiastic hellos and started to have a conversation.
	But it was impossible.
	There was some background noise in the gym.
	He has a disability that affects how he communicates.
	Usually it doesn't keep us from talking at length.
	This time, with both of us masked, neither of us could follow what the other was saying.
	We smiled and gave up.
	It was not a big deal, but it reminded me that masks have both benefits and costs.
	They can slow the transmission of COVID-19, especially medical-grade masks worn properly.
	See, this is the part nobody ever wanted to talk about, is the fact that if you wear a mask improperly, it does not do its job.
	The masking study is typically done where they would put a mask fitted properly over a mannequin, and then they would fire particles at the mask.
	That is not how anyone in the United States has been wearing a mask for two years.
	What you've actually been doing with masks is putting it in your pocket, taking it off, putting it back on, fussing around with it, adjusting your face, pulling it down to eat, pulling it back up to drink.
	You know, like all of this stuff means that you are not using PPE properly.
	I know this because, again, my wife is a doctor who went through medical training at a hospital.
	This is not how you wear PPE.
	In any case.
	David Leonhardt is pointing out that the national debate over mask mandates in schools is picking up again.
	Yesterday, Democratic governors in Connecticut, Delaware, New Jersey and Oregon all announced the end of their statewide mandates to take effect in coming weeks.
	It's a sign that more Americans, not just Republicans, are ready to move to a new phase of the pandemic.
	Polls found that many Democrats, especially younger Democrats, seem to be overstating their personal risk from COVID.
	This is correct.
	In response, some readers argued that exaggerating individual risk is good.
	It leads to more support for COVID mitigation measures.
	The real problem is that the United States has done too little to protect people from COVID.
	There's some logic to this thinking, but the arguments depend on the assumption that almost all COVID restrictions improve public health.
	That is not necessarily true.
	Nearly every restriction has both benefits and costs.
	The question is, when do the benefits outweigh the costs?
	With vaccines and boosters, the answer is clear.
	The benefits are really big.
	Masks, however, have benefits and costs that have to be traded off against one another.
	So all of this is highly irritating, mainly because we're now going to be sold a bill of goods about how this is all done in good faith.
	The public health experts were right all along.
	They followed the data.
	They did not follow the data.
	They followed the politics.
	When it became convenient for Democrats to ditch all of this, or rather inconvenient for them not to ditch all of this, then they started talking about the rights of free American citizens.
	Until that point, they had nothing to say.
	In fact, reverse.
	They wanted to maintain these restrictions.
	And make no mistake, the kind of restrictionist mentality you see from the left, it applies across the board.
	It is not just with regard to COVID.
	It will declare emergencies from here till the end of time.
	And then they will use those emergencies as the predicate for measures that invade your personal liberty and your personal autonomy.
	This is what they want to do.
	This is their goal.
	Meanwhile, those in the media will declare that the public health establishment, they're all, it's all well-intentioned.
	They were just following the data.
	But here's the thing, the members of the media are even less trustworthy than the people in the public health establishment.
	A great story out of the Wall Street Journal.
	Apparently, the folks at CNN are still ticked off that CNN president Jeff Zucker had to resign.
	Now you'll recall that Jeff Zucker's great crime is that he was schtuping his top associate, the CNN chief marketing officer, Allison Golas.
	So apparently he's been schtuping, according to Rolling Stone, since 1996.
	And then he's been elevating her throughout her career to the point where she was actually slated to take over CNN as a whole, as a network, based on the fact that she was nailing Jeff Zucker, right, for 25 years, since I was 12 years old.
	So she was about to take over the network.
	He was going to get elevated up in Discovery.
	And then it turns out that both of them were hanging out with Andrew Cuomo and basically giving him political advice.
	And this came out in the Chris Cuomo investigation.
	And Chris Cuomo wanted all sorts of documents related to this, so Jeff Zucker was forced to resign.
	So are the CNN anchors upset about Jeff Zucker being corrupt and awful?
	No.
	The CNN anchors are actually really, really upset that Jeff Zucker is gone, according to the Wall Street Journal.
	Some of CNN's biggest on-air hosts during a meeting Monday pressed WarnerMedia chief executive Jason Killar for details regarding CNN president Jeff Zucker's resignation.
	Zucker resigned last week, citing his failure to disclose a consensual relationship with a close colleague.
	New York-based anchors including Don Lemon, Brian Stelter, Richard Quest, and Alison Camerota asked Mr. Killar a range of questions relating to Zucker's departure and its aftermath, including what to tell network viewers and employees about the executive shuffle.
	Killar appeared in the meeting through a video connection.
	Mr. Quest, the anchor of CNN's Quest Means Business, asked Mr. Killar during the question-and-answer session whether he considered alternate decisions that would have allowed Zucker to stay on.
	Quest said, there was the possibility of a more imaginative result that would have allowed you to keep the captain instead of throwing the captain overboard while the ship is about to go through iceberg.
	Oliver Darcy, a reporter who covers media at CNN, asked Kilar whether CNN would pay former Cuomo primetime host Chris Cuomo a severance package.
	Zucker had previously said CNN would not pay Chris Cuomo severance.
	Lemon followed up on Darcy's question, asking whether Killar had weighed the signals he might be sending by compensating individuals who break with company standards.
	Lemon said he was asking on behalf of people who posed that question to him.
	He said, did you think about what message it sends to the journalists in the company and also to the larger public?
	Someone can be found to break with journalistic standards and then get paid handsomely for it.
	I noticed that you're asking this about Chris Cuomo, but you are not asking this about Don Lemon, I noticed.
	Interesting.
	Killar said those are all theoreticals.
	He declined to comment on whether CNN would pay Kris Cuomo severance.
	In fact, they will end up settling out of court.
	Apparently, Stelter also is trying to push Killar.
	And then, Erin Burnett said the network's journalists needed more information.
	She said, we are grieving.
	Moving on will require answers to these questions.
	They're grieving.
	These are the people who are supposed to be our trustworthy sources of information.
	Alrighty, coming up, the media, they've been defending the public health establishment and Jeff Zucker, but they are really, really mad at one guy, Joe Rogan.
	We'll get to that in just one moment.
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	We'll get to more of this in just one second.
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	Meanwhile, while our media have been defending the public health establishment and defending Jeff Zucker, they are very, very angry at Joe Rogan because they want their competition And Joe Rogan's very bad because he has been providing misinformation about COVID by interviewing a wide variety of people ranging from Sanjay Gupta to Robert Malone.
	How dare he do such things?
	And now, of course, there's this concerted hit job on Joe Rogan to try and take him down from Spotify based on a compendium of him saying the N-word over the course of the last 20 years.
	Quoting rap lyrics.
	By the way, it's worth noting here that Joe stopped saying the N-word in rap lyrics like a few years ago and actually explained why on the air.
	But none of that matters because none of this is done in good faith.
	So Brian Stelter, who's supposed to be the reliable source.
	Again, there is no more ironically named show in America than reliable sources.
	Here is Brian Stelter explaining that Spotify does not have to do a deal with Rogan.
	And if Rogan gets thrown off of Spotify, this puts freedom of speech in no danger at all.
	It is highly amusing to watch journalists suddenly determine that there's no threat to freedom of speech unless it comes directly from government.
	Like, these are the people who are supposed to be the broadest advocates for freedom of speech.
	Now, they just want anyone who is not them shut down.
	Daniel Akko last night in his memo, the CEO of Spotify, he said, well, we don't want to silence Rogan.
	So we're going to do more.
	We're going to consult.
	We're going to hold meetings.
	We're going to give money to other people, but we don't want to silence him.
	That's the wrong frame for this.
	It's not about silencing.
	This isn't about censoring him.
	Spotify has an exclusive deal with him.
	If he wanted to just put up his podcast on Spotify, just like I do, he could go right ahead and do that.
	But Spotify pays him tens of millions of dollars to be promoted exclusively on Spotify.
	This is really a media relationship between Spotify and Rogan that has gone sideways, and that's Okay, this is hilarious.
	So, Brian Stelter is just jealous that his crappy podcast gets put up on Spotify for free, and they're willing to pay Joe Rogan an inordinate amount of money so that they have the exclusive license to his show.
	But of course, Spotify has exclusive license to a bunch of shows, with a variety of different viewpoints, and to a bunch of music, with a variety of different artists.
	So the media are trying to bully Rogan off of Spotify, is the basic idea here.
	And they're using their all-purpose tool now.
	Because for the left, there is one tool that they always go back to no matter what, and that is racism.
	So this is why the N-word tape came out.
	It's not because anybody on the left actually thinks Rogan's a racist.
	They don't think Rogan's a racist.
	They just know that if they call Rogan a racist, they can maybe get a little bit of leverage.
	This is what they do constantly.
	All the time, they call people racist without proper evidence in order to gain leverage over that person.
	And frankly, I think Joe made a mistake in apologizing for any of this stuff.
	He should have just said, I'm not a racist.
	No one actually thinks I'm a racist.
	You just want me off the air because I don't fit your priors about what I should be saying politically.
	But again, this is the goal.
	If you just shout racism a lot, then the media can tsunami you into silence.
	So here is Karen Attia from the Washington Post suggesting that Joe Rogan is demonizing people.
	He's literally a comedian.
	That is what he does for a living.
	I've handled this, I mean, as any brand that still wants to be able to say that they can profit off of
	A podcast that not only frequently has dehumanized Black people and other groups, women, but, you know, it's Black History Month, and I feel like these sort of brands are the types that will be like all, you know, hashtag Black Lives Matter one minute and curate Black History Month's Spotify playlist for us one minute and then say that, well,
	We aren't going to do anything about Joe Rogan and this podcast because we want to promote quote-unquote open debate.
	Okay, so open debate is of no consequence, because after all, if he says things that we don't like, he has to go away, which I thought was sort of the purpose of open debate.
	Now the goal here is twofold.
	One is to get rid of Rogan, because Rogan actually is the tip of the spear for people hearing a bunch of voices they wouldn't otherwise hear in the mainstream media.
	Okay, so that is one thing that's happening.
	The other thing is bully all of Rogan's friends into silence, and by proxy, the rest of America.
	Side with us.
	Or shut up.
	Those are the two choices.
	If you speak up, if you raise your head above the water level, we will bang you on the head so hard you'll have a headache for a month.
	That is the idea here.
	And the person who got hit hard over the course of the last couple of days is Andrew Yang.
	And frankly, I'm super disappointed in Andrew Yang, who I've always thought is a super nice guy, right?
	He came on my Sunday special.
	He's been a guest with Rogan as well, as far as I'm aware, I think a couple of times.
	And he had started his own party and all of this.
	Well, Andrew Yang, I mean, I'm disappointed in him just as a human, because here's what happened with Andrew Yang.
	Apparently, according to Yahoo, he had put up a tweet defending Joe Rogan and saying that Joe Rogan isn't racist.
	And then he was forced to delete the tweet.
	According to Yahoo, former Democratic presidential hopeful Andrew Yang has now apologized for saying that podcast host Joe Rogan isn't racist because he works with black people.
	Yang, who has since deleted the tweet, stepped into the furor surrounding the embattled Spotify host over the weekend when Rogan and the company were compelled to address a compilation video showing Rogan repeatedly using the N-word on the Joe Rogan experience.
	The politician defended Rogan Sunday by tweeting, I don't think Joe Rogan is a racist.
	The man interacts with and works with black people literally all the time.
	Yang then added, do I know black friends of Joe's who would swear by him?
	Yes, I do.
	But the backlash came quickly, and Yang's reasoning was called out by many, including the DNC chairman, Jamie Harrison.
	Yang then backtracked with a new thread.
	I like to believe the best of people, especially if I've met and spent time with that person.
	Sometimes it makes me miss something.
	I think we should have the capacity to forgive people, whether a podcaster or a mayor, if they mess up.
	Maybe it's because I mess up too.
	He admitted that racism is real, deep, corrosive, even lethal.
	Admitting, I made a mistake in an earlier tweet tonight that downplayed these realities.
	And he said he deleted the tweet because it was wrong-headed.
	And then he added, it also hurt people, which is never my intent.
	I'm sorry.
	I'm learning.
	And I appreciate those who reached out to express their feelings.
	Okay, but that's not what this is about.
	He didn't like the criticism.
	The dirty secret of politics is that if you've never gone through the fire, you are likely to be burned by it and do exactly what the arsonists want.
	You wonder why so many public figures do this?
	It's because they've never expected it.
	Okay, there are people like me who've been under constant media attack for 20 years.
	I've been doing this for a very, very long time.
	And we literally built a company in order to shield ourselves from the predations of the left.
	Daily Wire is an independent company.
	I wouldn't sell our company to Spotify specifically because of this kind of thing because I don't trust the people at Spotify to back our play.
	And we hope to set up new wings of the free speech movement where people of a lot of different perspectives can say what they want to say safely and without fear that they are going to be deplatformed or that the left is going to be able to cow them into silence.
	But if you're Andrew Yang, then you've never been hit.
	You've never had to deal with this.
	And so the typical instinct for people is to turtle.
	Well, that's the goal of the left is to force everyone to turtle.
	That is the goal.
	And so you're going to see this happen over and over and over again.
	It's not just going to be with regard to Spotify.
	It's not just going to be with regard to Rogan.
	It's going to be with regard to a wide variety of other companies.
	If you claim racism, then the people at the head of these companies have an ugly tendency to want to immediately cave.
	They want to flagellate themselves and suggest that you're so right.
	I just didn't understand racism.
	Maybe they'll leave me alone.
	Maybe you'll just leave me alone.
	If I say I didn't understand, will you leave me alone?
	Please, please will you leave me alone?
	And the answer is they might leave you alone if you become part of the mob.
	It depends.
	Are you useful to them?
	Can you be useful to them?
	If you can't be useful to them, your apologies have no consequence.
	And then, you're just Ned Stark, and they're Joffrey, and you've offered your fealty, and they chop off your head.
	If you can still be of use, then they turn you into Reek, and they castrate you, and then, they have you trot around the castle, doing their little spying errands for them.
	So, these are your options, if you surrender to the left.
	You can either be Ned Stark, or you can be Reek.
	These are the two choices, in this particular universe.
	So, look at some other companies that are now being attacked this way.
	So, Tesla.
	So, Elon Musk is now a target of the left.
	Again, like Rogan, he's a target of the left because he refuses to abide by the strictures of political correctness.
	He says, for example, that capitalism is good, and that his company, its growth is good, and that Elizabeth Warren is an idiot, right?
	He says all of these things publicly.
	And so, it was only a matter of time before the media tried to find an employee to accuse the company of racism, and now this is what they have done.
	According to the Daily Beast, Last week, former Tesla employee Kailyn Barker filed a lawsuit against the electric car maker for allegedly disregarding her complaints of racial discrimination, saying that being black worker at Tesla's renowned California factory is to be forced to step back in time and suffer painful abuses reminiscent of the Jim Crow era.
	Okay, so first of all, that ain't true.
	And I'll tell you why that ain't true.
	Because in the Jim Crow era, you wouldn't have been working at the Tesla factory.
	It is hilarious to me that people don't seem to understand what Jim Crow was in the first place.
	The 25-year-old, who is black and gay, claims a white co-worker at the company's Lathrop plant called her the N-word and assaulted her with a hot grinding tool.
	After Barker complained to Human Resources, Tesla allegedly retaliated by withholding her wages.
	I do not believe this.
	I straight up don't believe this.
	The reason I don't believe this is because if someone assaults you with a hot grinding tool, you know what you do?
	You go to the cops.
	You don't go to HR, you go to the cops.
	If someone assaults you with a hot grinding tool, if someone calls you the N-word, you think any HR department in America doesn't fire that person and do a full investigation?
	Any HR department in America, this is literally their job.
	And Tesla is a company worth billions and billions and billions.
	It's the most valuable car maker on planet Earth.
	You think their HR department is going to blow off a claim that someone called you the N-word at work?
	Are you kidding me?
	I don't believe this for half a second.
	Barker's civil suit is one of multiple cases in recent months to paint a disturbing picture of a hostile work environment for women and people of color at the clean energy giant's factories.
	And it comes a mere four months after the jury awarded another former employee, Owen Diaz, nearly $137 million over racism he encountered in the workplace, which included co-workers hurling racial epithets and telling him to go back to Africa.
	Now Tesla is facing a civil rights complaint from California regulators over employees' accusations of pervasive racial discrimination.
	Last month, the California Department of Fair Housing and Employment issued a Notice of Cause Finding and Mandatory Dispute Resolution following an investigation into undisclosed allegations of race discrimination and harassment at unspecified Tesla locations.
	So, question.
	This Notice of Cause Finding and Mandatory Dispute Resolution?
	Includes, just to get this straight, undisclosed allegations of race discrimination.
	So they've not been disclosed.
	We have no idea what the allegations are.
	At an unspecified Tesla location.
	So what we now know is something bad allegedly happened at a time in a place.
	We don't know what the thing is, where it happened, or when.
	Let's open a government investigation.
	The agency gave notice that based upon the evidence collected, it believes it has grounds to file a civil complaint against Tesla.
	As for Diaz's multi-million dollar case, Tesla's report said the company does not believe the facts in law justify the verdict and that it has requested a retrial or reduction in the jury's award.
	Tesla's report also noted it received an SEC subpoena last November requesting information on how billionaire CEO Elon Musk was complying with a 2018 settlement with the securities watchdog that required his tweets to be vetted by a company lawyer.
	So you now have the government cracking down on Elon Musk's tweets.
	Yes, clearly this is not a power game.
	This is really just about preventing racial discrimination.
	It's not a power game in which you find a company you don't like, and then you target it with racial discrimination, and then the media whips everybody into a frenzy, and then government regulators of the left decide to come in and crack down on the company.
	I mean, this is truly frightening stuff.
	It really is.
	Now, good for Musk for not surrendering to it.
	But if you want to see somebody surrender to it, all you have to do is take a look at the NFL.
	And here's the thing.
	The philosophy seems to be, if I admit that I am racist, then maybe they will leave me alone.
	And this is exactly what Roger Goodell, a horrible NFL commissioner, has been doing at the NFL.
	So, former Dolphins head coach Brian Flores filed a lawsuit this week in Manhattan federal court.
	We've discussed at length the Brian Flores lawsuit.
	It's garbage.
	It's a terrible lawsuit.
	It looks like it was written in crayon by a seven-year-old.
	As a lawyer, I can firmly guarantee you there's not even an allegation of a violation of lawbreaking.
	There isn't.
	All of the statutes that are cited are not justified.
	There's no class action because the plaintiffs are not similarly situated.
	Brian Flores himself has said on Open TV that he has no justification for suggesting that any specific incident involving him was motivated by race rather than maybe by the fact that he hasn't developed the Miami Dolphins quarterback and that his record with the Dolphins kind of sucks.
	He's not that good a coach.
	Instead, he sued the NFL, and the NFL, because they believe that the publicity is bad, started doing what all these companies, except for Musk, do, and he started self-flagellating.
	That's exactly what Goodell did.
	So he issued a memo on Saturday morning to all 32 teams, in which he said we must, quote, acknowledge that the results of their efforts to promote diversity with respect to head coaches have been unacceptable.
	Ah, the efforts have been unacceptable because there aren't enough black coaches.
	70% of the players are black.
	Seems like it's acceptable with regard to the players.
	And by the way, since when is the player pool the coach pool?
	I mean, really, this is two separate pools.
	If you take a look at college coaches, how many of those college coaches were wildly successful players?
	Many of them are just people who coached high school, and then they coached Division 3, and then coached Division 1.
	But no matter, Goodell has to pretend obeisance to this ridiculous lawsuit.
	So Goodell's memo is his first reported comment since former Dolphins head coach Brian Flores filed that lawsuit.
	In the memo, Goodell says the league will re-evaluate all policies, guidelines, and initiatives relating to diversity, equity, and inclusion, including as they relate to gender.
	The league will also retain outside experts to assist in this review.
	He says racism and any form of discrimination is contrary to the NFL's values.
	We have made significant efforts to promote diversity and adopted numerous policies and programs, which have produced positive change in many areas.
	However, we must acknowledge that, particularly with respect to head coaches, the results have been unacceptable.
	So not unacceptable with result with regard to special teams coaches or offensive line coaches or D-line coaches, but with results of head coaches, all you have to do is see that there are not enough black head coaches.
	Now, they're gauging that by percentage of the NFL that is black.
	Well, why not gauge it by percentage of the American population that's black?
	Because that looks more proportional.
	Why aren't there 3% of head coaches who are Asian?
	Why aren't there 0.5%, 0.3% of the NFL's players who are Jewish?
	Why not?
	Anyway, Goodell says, we will reevaluate and examine all policies.
	We are retaining outside experts.
	Our goal is simple.
	Make our efforts and those of the clubs more effective so the real and tangible results will be achieved.
	Now, here is the hilarious thing.
	Bye.
	The folks who are using charges of racism as a tool of power, they're giving away the game now.
	I mean, they're really, really giving away the game, and it's pretty hysterically funny.
	So, for example, Stephen A. Smith is very pissed.
	Why is Stephen A. Smith pissed?
	Well, I mean, first of all, today ending in Y, so Stephen A. Smith is pissed.
	But Stephen A. Smith is also pissed because after Brian Flores was fired, the Dolphins hired to replace him the San Francisco 49ers offensive coordinator, Mike McDaniel.
	So Mike McDaniel is multiracial.
	Mike McDaniel is the league's fourth minority head coach.
	This is not good enough for Stephen A. Smith.
	And Mike McDaniel is multiracial.
	So here he was explaining that, no, no, no, no.
	You see, when we accuse the NFL and the Dolphins of racism, what we mean is only racism against my friends.
	So here's Stephen A. Smith.
	When we look at Mike McDaniels, we wish him nothing but the best.
	When you say he's mixed, is that what you said, Molly?
	Multiracial is how he identifies.
	That's how he identifies as a multiracial?
	Yeah, multiracial.
	OK, fine.
	No problem.
	This was a conversation last week about black men.
	What I'm saying is the conversation last week pertaining to the Brian Flores situation is the scarcity of black men who have been given opportunities to be head coaches in the National Football League.
	His father is of black descent, by the way.
	So, um, what?
	But again, it's only about the black people that Stephen A. Smith says it's about.
	By the way, you want to know the real proof in the pudding?
	This is the best one.
	Okay, so the Houston Texans hired Lovey Smith.
	First of all, crappy hire.
	Lovey Smith was not a good football coach.
	Just gonna put it out there, as a Bears fan, Lovie Smith was not a good football coach.
	And by the way, in his last couple of years in the NFL, which is in terms of as a head coach, his actual stats were garbaggio.
	He has a career 92-90 record, which is not a stellar record in the NFL.
	He used to lose in the playoffs pretty much Every year, he had two good seasons early on.
	In 2004, he went 5-11 with the Bears.
	And then in 2005, he went to the NFC Divisional game.
	That's when Brian Urlacher was on the team.
	They went 11-5.
	Then they went 13-3 and went to the Super Bowl and lost with Rex Grossman as quarterback.
	You can't put that on Levy Smith.
	Rex Grossman was not a very good quarterback.
	But then, He basically was terrible the rest of his Bears career.
	They were mediocre every single year.
	He couldn't develop a quarterback no matter what he did.
	And then he went to Tampa Bay in 2014-2015.
	And his record with Tampa Bay was a whopping 8-24.
	And now, lest you think that that is a good record, that means that he won 8 times and lost 24 times for a winning percentage of 250.
	So Lovey Smith is not like some great shakes as a head coach.
	But the Houston Texans decided to promote Lovey Smith to their head coaching role.
	Apparently, they decided that they were going to interview three candidates twice.
	Josh McCown, the Philadelphia Eagles defensive coordinator, Jonathan Gannon, and Brian Flores.
	Okay, so they actually interviewed Flores.
	Herein lies the problem, and this is the really funny part.
	So after they hired Lovey Smith, Brian Flores then said, so Brian Flores put out a statement about Lovey Smith, and this is my favorite thing.
	Okay, because supposedly this is just about empowering black men, right?
	This is the only reason why he filed the lawsuit was to empower black men.
	Well, actually, Brian Flores is upset that Lovey Smith got hired.
	Quote is from his his lawyer's statement.
	Mr. Flores is happy to hear that the Texans have hired a black head coach, Lovey Smith, as Mr. Flores.
	His goal in bringing his case is to provide real opportunities for black and minority candidates to be considered for coaching and executive positions within the NFL.
	However, We would be remiss not to mention that Mr. Flores was one of three finalists for the Texans head coach position.
	And after a great interview and mutual interest, it is obvious the only reason Flores was not selected was his decision to stand up against racial inequality across the NFL.
	So they hired a black guy, Lovey Smith, and Brian Flores is like, you're still racist because you didn't hire me.
	Yeah, we know.
	We know.
	We know what the agenda here is.
	Come on.
	And this is always the agenda from the left.
	It's just this shtick.
	It's a ridiculous shtick.
	The Washington Post has a piece in the opinion section today.
	Same kind of shtick.
	Quote, I used to work on the Hill.
	The Dear White Staffers Instagram account is a long overdue reckoning.
	It's by a woman named Melissa Sullivan.
	And she talks about how she landed an internship on Capitol Hill and people were abusing her because she was a first generation Latina American.
	And then there is this new Instagram account by a bunch of people of color.
	called Dear White Staffers on Instagram, that is supposed to be ripping into the treatment of people of minority status in the legislative offices.
	And so she says she's very happy about all of this.
	She says, in response to that launch, hundreds of current and former Hill staffers began submitting anonymous stories about their bosses, pay inequity, sexual harassment, racism, and the harmful consequences of working on Capitol Hill.
	Drug use, depression, and anxiety.
	Now, here's the thing.
	If you actually have been sexually harassed in a congressional office, that's a lawsuit, is it not?
	Where are the lawsuits?
	People are pretty litigious in this country.
	If actually you've been experiencing real pay inequity in violation of civil rights law, where are the lawsuits?
	Especially because it sounds like this is a really bipartisan or maybe a Democrat issue.
	Where are the lawsuits?
	If you're accusing people of racism, you have a lawsuit on your hands.
	So where's the lawsuit?
	And the answer is there is no lawsuit.
	What is the end goal according to this piece?
	Quote, the survey has spurred an unprecedented conversation about salary disparities and how staff can institute more workplace protections.
	House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and a handful of other members now openly say they support unionization efforts for Hill staff.
	Yeah, there it is.
	Yeah, the Democratic Party.
	Buying off all of their own racism and supposed sexism and all of this by saying it's time to unionize, which is precisely what they wanted to do in the first place.
	Charges of racism as just another tool in the portfolio toward the pursuit of power, as always, as always.
	It's never about the data.
	It's never about the actual on the ground situation, because when people are sexually harassed, we all agree, bad, punishable.
	When people are hit with actual racism, we all agree, very bad.
	In some cases, punishable, depending on the kind of Racism you're receiving.
	Under law.
	But that's not what they want.
	That's not what the left wants.
	What the left just wants is to throw out accusations of things that they can't verify and then get you to kowtow to them and give them enormous power.
	That's what they want.
	On every subject.
	From COVID to race.
	On all of them.
	Alrighty, we'll be back here later today with an additional hour of content.
	In the meantime, go check out The Michael Molls Show.
	That's available right now.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
	Editing is by Adam Sajovic, audio is mixed by Mike Koromina, hair and makeup is by Fabiola Christina, production assistant Jessica Crand.
	The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire Production. Copyright Daily Wire 2022.
	Sorry.
	now sorry breaking Jessica I can smell the weakness from here
	Oh Wow owes me money Let me out, please Good is this doing now You
	Far away...
	Oh I'm scared.

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