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Feb. 9, 2022 - The Ben Shapiro Show
47:58
Canadians To Trudeau: Truck You | Ep. 1430
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Canadian truckers shut down the Ambassador Bridge as Justin Trudeau struggles to respond, and Democrats turn on a dime and begin talking about ending COVID restrictions.
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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In Canada, things are happening that are worth covering, which is a rarity.
We don't cover Canadian politics all that extensively here on the Ben Shapiro Show because, hey, I mean, it's Canada.
However, the trucker protests that have now spawned like-minded protests all over the world are a major, major news story, and they should be a major news story.
You have literally thousands of truckers who are descending on Ottawa, which is the capital, and they are also now blocking the Ambassador Bridge in Toronto.
Which is the single biggest bridge connecting the United States and Canada in terms of trade, according to the Washington Post.
The busiest crossing on the US-Canada land border was blockaded Tuesday as demonstrations against vaccine mandates that have paralyzed Canada's capital spread to a crucial trade artery while inspiring similar protests from Europe to Australia.
The Ambassador Bridge, which links Windsor, Ontario to Detroit, was temporarily closed for passengers and commercial traffic, authorities on both sides of the border said on Tuesday.
The Windsor Police said limited traffic was being allowed into the United States.
The 1.6-mile suspension bridge is an important trade link, particularly for the region's auto industry.
It also connects families, friends, and essential workers, including Canadian nurses who work in Detroit-area hospitals.
The blockade there apparently began on Monday.
It was unclear when it might end.
Local law enforcement said there were between 150 and 200 vehicles and roughly 200 people involved.
The U.S.
Transportation Department estimates the bridge carries about 30% of all annual trade between Canada and the United States.
This is all part of the so-called Freedom Convoy, which has jammed major thoroughfares in downtown Ottawa with idling big rigs and other vehicles.
He told them that they need to go home.
Justin Trudeau, who definitely, definitely, definitely is not Fidel Castro's son.
I'm just going to put that out there.
I know there have been some rumors out there that Justin Trudeau is Fidel Castro's son because he looks exactly like Fidel Castro because his mom was known to be a swinger and because his mom was visiting Cuba, apparently about eight and a half months before Justin Trudeau was born.
That said, he's definitely not Fidel Castro's son, either ideologically or biologically.
So I'm just going to put he is not.
Stop that right now.
Don't you dare call him Justin Lito.
Don't do it.
Don't do it.
In any case, here is Justin Trudeau, handsome Bernie Sanders, explaining that we need mandates.
Because if we don't have mandates, then how are we going to avoid further restrictions?
You see, we have to curb liberty so that we can have liberty.
Now, this has been the case the Democrats have been making all throughout the pandemic.
And you know what caused them to lift the mandates in the United States, as we'll get to?
What caused them to lift the mandates was not the changing science.
What caused them to lift the mandates was not following the data.
What caused them to lift the mandates is that the American people finally said no.
And you're starting to see the same thing in Canada.
So good for the truckers.
Here's Justin Trudeau trying to talk his way through this one.
We've seen...
We've seen the curves lower in Canada than elsewhere.
We've seen lower death rates.
We've seen quicker economic recovery because Canadians stepped up, because Canadians got vaccinated.
And I can understand frustrations with mandates, but mandates are the way to avoid further restrictions or having to be restricted.
As people get vaccinated, as Canadians have gotten vaccinated, we've been able to get through things.
I'm sorry, he's so irritating.
And by the way, I'm not the only one who finds him irritating.
The Canadian public finds him extraordinarily irritating.
In fact, Trudeau's own party is starting to turn on him over COVID restrictions.
According to Politico, a backbench lawmaker from Justin Trudeau's own caucus is accusing the Prime Minister of dividing and stigmatizing Canadians by politicizing vaccine mandates and COVID-19 restrictions.
Joelle Lightbound delivered a stunning scathing assessment Tuesday in Ottawa with the big rigs of the so-called Freedom Convoy just outside the door.
The convoy protests against COVID measures have grabbed global attention and paralyzed Canada's capital city for more than a week.
Lightbound said both the tone and policies of my government changed drastically on the eve and during the last election campaign.
A decision was made to wedge, to divide, and to stigmatize.
I fear that this politicization of the pandemic risks undermining the public's trust in our public health institutions.
This is exactly right, of course.
Lightbound insisted he's not the only member of Justin Trudeau's team who feels, to varying degrees, as he does today.
He said he raised his concerns clearly with fellow liberal MPs and with Trudeau.
Trudeau, for his part, he keeps saying that individuals... It's amazing.
He says things like, individuals are trying to blockade our economy.
Individuals are trying to shut down our economy.
They're trying to shut down our way of life.
Dude, that's you.
Buy a mirror.
Well, actually, I'm sure Justin Trudeau has mirrors pretty much everywhere in his house.
He probably welded them to the walls himself.
Well, actually, probably he didn't weld them.
He doesn't seem like a welder.
He probably paid a peasant to weld.
Well, actually, he probably didn't pay the peasant.
He probably used Canadian taxpayer dollars to pay a peasant to weld.
Actually, that's probably not true.
He probably just mandated that a peasant should weld mirrors on his house.
Anyway, here is Justin Trudeau explaining that he's shutting down freedom to protect your freedom.
There's a lot of burning the village in order to save the village rhetoric that's come out of the COVID restrictionists.
Individuals are trying to blockade our economy, our democracy, and our fellow citizens' daily lives.
It has to stop.
It has to stop.
Well, I mean, the same thing could be said of the mandates that you have placed on your country over the course of the last couple of years.
In just a second, we will get to a Wall Street Journal editorial talking about the message of the Canadian trucking protest.
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The Wall Street Journal has a piece today talking about the message of the Canadian trucker protest by the editorial board.
Here's what they say.
This latest act in a week-long show of civil disobedience is more akin to political life in France or the United States.
That it happened in restrained Canada is a signal to the political class across the West Large swaths of humanity are done with COVID-19 restrictions, mandates, and excessive meddling in their lives.
They want to go back to making their own health risk assessments.
The Ambassador Bridge, which carries some $323 million in goods daily in cross-border trade, and an estimated $137 billion last year, reopened on Tuesday morning.
But truckers continue their protest in Ottawa, which is disturbing the peace and wars in that usually peaceable Canadian capital.
The truckers should be prosecuted if they break the law, says the Wall Street Journal, but As the Omicron virus shows itself to be less lethal and positive test rates fall, the truckers are sending a message to Democratic governments.
It's time for the pandemic emergency orders to end.
And of course, this is true.
Nobody wants giant bridges shut down.
I mean, obstructing traffic is bad no matter what you are protesting for.
However, the cause of this protest happens to be righteous.
For two years, says the Wall Street Journal, the truckers were classified as essential workers and therefore exempt from vaccine mandates.
About 85% of them are vaccinated.
But Justin Trudeau, who heads a minority government, has chosen this moment to order that truckers be vaccinated if they want to cross back into the country from the United States.
The Canadian left is calling all of these people Trumpians.
Trudeau smeared them as, quote, a few people shouting and waving swastikas.
But of course, that's not what this is at all.
And just as part of the general left-wing attempt to paint anyone who disagrees with them as a racist or a Nazi, they have this bag of insults that they go to every time somebody disagrees with them, God forbid.
And then they just throw that, here comes the swastika, boom!
Just hit them with the swastika.
Just say that they're a Nazi.
And what is the evidence that the thousands and thousands of people in Ottawa protesting so they can maintain their jobs that those people are Nazis?
He doesn't have any evidence.
Instead, what the media have been doing in Canada and elsewhere is they have been finding they've been nut picking is what it's called.
They find a few fringe members of the protest, and then they say these people represent the entire protest as opposed to the core ideology.
And the media, by the way, will do precisely the opposite when it comes to Black Lives Matter.
So Black Lives Matter, the cause was not righteous.
The cause of Black Lives Matter was predicated on a basic lie, which is that law enforcement across the United States are systemically racist and targeting black people, which is the only reason a disproportionate number of black people end up in prison for violent crime, for example.
It was predicated on a lie.
And then, a disproportionate number of those protests broke into actual violence.
So what the left said is, you're not picking.
Stop not picking.
The people who are burning down stores are not the mainstream of the protests.
You have to separate the protesters from the rioters.
Okay, fine.
Fair enough.
But you never do this with people on the right.
Ever, ever, ever, ever.
You find the craziest person on the right, and then you link them to the entire protest movement.
And that's exactly what they've done with the Canadian truckers.
And again, this is a global thing.
This is not just in Canada.
It turns out that human beings do not like having their liberties restricted in this way in the West.
They're used to it in China because China is an authoritarian tyranny.
They may be used to it in Russia.
They may be used to it in actual tyrannical states, but they're really not used to it in the West and they don't like it.
Says the Wall Street Journal, a majority of Canadians don't support the Ottawa protests, according to polls.
But a recent survey by the Angus Reid Institute found a majority favors lifting restrictions, suggesting the Trudeau mandate, which went into effect on January 15th, was a political miscalculation.
By energizing a significant part of the electorate, until now less present in public discourse, he set off a backlash, deepened Canadian polarization and raised the stakes in a showdown with the truckers.
The global left is beginning to feel it because they've spent the last two years insisting they're on the side of the science and they're not on the side of the science.
It turns out that the best thing that they could have done would have been to shield the vulnerable, as they did in Sweden, and then to allow people to live their lives.
Instead, they decided to restrict everyone.
And, again, the pitch is that freedom itself is bad.
We have to crack down on people using the word freedom.
There's a much-trafficked op-ed from a national affairs columnist for the Globe and Mail in Canada called Gary Mason.
And the name of the column was, How Truck Convoy Protesters Like Pierre Poivre Have Weaponized Freedom.
Weaponized freedom!
How dare you use the words freedom to mean freedom?
Weaponizing freedom.
By the way, it's always the case that for the left, whenever the right does something bad, whenever the left does something bad, according to the left, this means that the right is pouncing.
That's the real story.
We're weaponizing freedom here on the right.
I mean, I would hope that we weaponize freedom.
It seems like a good thing to weaponize, frankly.
And this columnist says, if you watched any of federal conservative MP Pierre Polivre's video announcing his candidacy for the leadership of his party, you might have discerned a theme.
Freedom.
Variations of the word were used nine times in his three-minute performance.
If he is elected leader and is ultimately successful in becoming prime minister, Mr. Polivre promised, among other things, to make Canadians the freest people on earth.
With freedom to make your own health and vaccine choices, freedom to speak without fear.
Freedom over fear, he recently tweeted.
This is not by accident, of course.
Freedom is a word that gets bandied about a lot these days, but has mostly been co-opted by the alt-right, both here and in the United States.
See, if you say freedom, what they hear is Nazi.
This is how perverse the wild left, the COVID restrictionist left has become.
This columnist says freedom as an ideology has been appropriated by the Make America Great Again wing of the U.S.
Republican Party.
There's a strong MAGA fan base in this country, apparently with prominent supporters, such as Candace Bergen, the new interim leader of the Federal Conservative Party of Canada.
Undated photos circulating on social media appear to show Ms.
Bergen sporting a camouflaged MAGA hat.
Wow.
Oh no.
Wow.
Man.
Trump hats?
This is weaponizing freedom, guys.
Freedom, of course, says this columnist, has not always been a concept usurped for selfish, malicious purposes.
It's been a rallying cry behind great triumphs, such as the end of slavery and the civil rights movement.
But others have believed freedom is about protecting property rights, even if that has to occur at the diminishment of democracy.
Freedom has nothing to do with property rights, according to these folks.
True freedom is seizing other people's property, of course.
More recently, political leaders and others, with an unprecedented megaphone in the form of the internet and social media, have used the call for freedom to promote bigoted, racist, anti-democratic ideals.
Again, freedom is bad.
Freedom is bad because they might say something that this guy doesn't like.
As Elizabeth Anker, a professor of American Studies at George Washington University and author of Ugly Freedoms recently wrote in the New York Times, Today, more and more, laws, caucuses, rallies, and hard-right movements use the language of freedom as a cudgel to erode democratic governance and civil rights.
These laws expand the creep of authoritarianism.
Yes, nothing says authoritarianism quite like leave people alone so they can make their own choices about vaccinations and masking.
Alrighty, coming up, a bunch of folks are now saying that it's time for not Fidel Castro's son, definitely not Fidel Castro's son, Justin Trudeau, to get out of politics.
Yes, he's very, very bad at this.
We'll get to that in just one moment.
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All of this is ridiculous.
It's ridiculous, but because it's ridiculous, they're having a tough time getting out of it.
Because to admit they were wrong is kind of a problem for them.
Again, Canadian parliamentarians have had it with Trudeau.
Trudeau is not popular in Canada.
They had an election recently.
It sort of re-enshrined the status quo.
But nobody actually likes Trudeau.
There's polling out saying that a majority of Canadians think that Trudeau should resign following the election.
This was in September.
According to the National Post, a vast majority of Canadians believed the country was more divided than ever following that federal election.
More than half said Justin Trudeau should step down after a cynical and opportunistic campaign.
In a survey by Meru Public Opinion, 77% of respondents said Canada feels more fractured than ever following a summer campaign that produced roughly the same seat count as the last parliamentary session.
Just 23% of respondents said the country is now more unified under Trudeau.
A slim majority of respondents, 52%, said that Canada's democratic system is entirely broken and needs a major overhaul.
So Canadians sound a lot like Americans at this point.
This is what happens when the left pushes too far, too fast.
One parliamentarian came out against Trudeau yesterday and said, why is it impossible for you to just articulate an off-ramp?
This parliamentarian, Raquel Dancho, How is it that other highly advanced, developed nations like the UK, Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway, Denmark, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland, the United States, how is it that they have all the same tools we have, they have all the economic resources we have, their citizens have done all the work and made all the sacrifices.
Why is it that those citizens get a plan for hope of when we get back to normal, when we get our lives back, when the people outside, you think they want to be here, Mr. Speaker?
Those people don't want to be here.
They want to be working.
But that right was taken away from them.
She, of course, is exactly correct.
And Justin Trudeau is about to feel the wrath of the Canadian people, which is inherently hilarious.
The wrath of Canadians sounds like a really bad horror movie.
In any case, the Ottawa police chief, here's the thing.
This has been combined with a fascistic crackdown on freedom of speech in Canada.
This has been a serious problem in Canada, in Australia, people outlawing protests that they just don't like.
Here's Ottawa's police chief saying, well, you know, we can identify and target protesters, not rioters, protesters.
We have increased ability to identify and target protesters and supporters of protesters who are funding and enabling unlawful and harmful activity by the protesters themselves.
Investigative evidence gathering teams are collecting financial, digital, Vehicle registration, driver identification, insurance status, and other related evidence that will be used in prosecutions.
By the way, can you imagine if the US police had said this during the BLM riots?
Like, even during the riots, not just during the protests.
But imagine they had said during the protests what this guy is saying.
We can track all of the financial information of anyone who gave to a BLM organization, and we intend on finding people who support and enable bad activity.
Can you imagine the outcry?
The justified outcry?
Because that's not how freedom of speech is supposed to work.
Meanwhile, in the United States, Jen Psaki is busily dismissing the Canadian trucker protests, pretending that they don't matter, even though they're now shutting off a main trade artery to the United States.
I know there's been some suggestion, not by reporters necessarily at all, but that this congestion is related to the vaccine requirements.
It's not.
I mean, I'm saying I'm going to get to the protests, but the protests going on across Canada, which have spread to a bridge, are leading to sporadic congestion and blockages.
While we do see some of these congestion due to protests, it's just clear that these disruptions have broadened in scope beyond the vaccine requirement implementation.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Again, just dismissing it or broadening out to be a bunch of Nazis.
This is a typical tactic.
Now, in reality, these politicians are being mugged by reality, which is why Alberta announced that it would be ending its vaccine passport program midnight on Tuesday, according to the Edmonton Journal.
Albertans are waking up when states what could be the beginning of the end of COVID restrictions in this province, despite warnings the government may be moving too quickly.
Alberta Premier Jason Kenney announced Tuesday the province's COVID-19 vaccine passport program will end immediately.
At an evening news conference, Kenney said the restriction exemption program has served its purpose, but it's no longer needed because Alberta passed the peak of Omicron infections about three weeks ago.
Okay, so do you think he is doing this because of the data?
Or do you think he's doing this because of the protests?
It turns out public protest does mobilize politicians.
Politicians are not motivated by data.
They're not motivated by quote unquote, doing the right thing.
They're motivated by political incentive structures.
This has always been true.
Kenny said, none of this has anything to do with a few trucks parked at the Coutts border crossing.
He said, I think a bit of a bit of a mugs game to say, keep this going for a few days when we know that many areas are already having compliance problems.
Oh, okay, so it has nothing to do with the protests, according to these folks.
Sure, sure.
Meanwhile, CNN is very upset about the trucker convoy that's been blocking the US-Canada bridge.
Again, they had no problems whatsoever with mass widespread rioting in the United States across 2020.
But when a bridge is blocked, then we've really, you know, now we've reached the end of democracy here.
The question is, how is it going to stop?
Justin Trudeau does not seem like he is going to be getting out here to negotiate or mediate anything at this point.
They are saying that, look, this is a fringe minority.
And yet people here say that is not the case, that there is a significant minority.
Kate, I will tell you, this isn't something the Biden administration can ignore, especially given those bridge crossings.
There could be impacts of supply chain between the United States and Canada.
Okay, so here is the reality.
All across the world, left-wing politicians are learning the hard way that their populations are not willing to do this crap indefinitely.
And so they are shifting.
Now, they're going to pretend that they're shifting because they're, quote-unquote, doing the right thing.
Because the data have changed.
Because, you know, the underlying conditions have changed.
And this now allows them to free up.
They were right in the first place, and they're right now.
Wrong.
That's a lie.
The simple fact is precisely the opposite.
They are changing because the people have finally decided they have had enough and they are feeling the writing on the wall.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Right now in the United States, COVID deaths are at the highest in a year as Omicron targets the unvaccinated and the elderly, according to the Washington Post.
And so we are now at the highest death rate in the United States in a year.
And yet politicians all across the left have decided now is the time to loosen the restrictions.
Weird.
Now they say that that's because the data have changed.
But that makes no sense.
So when you had 60 deaths today in California, you had Ted Lieu of California saying, no, no, we need mask restrictions.
We need to lock this thing down.
Now you have like almost 200 deaths today in California.
He's saying, you know what?
Now's a great time to open up.
Does that sound like he's following the data?
Or does it sound like he is following the public polling?
Again, the internal polls for the Democrats must be just devastating.
And for the left across the world.
Whatever right wing populist movement was in its infancy in 2016 is about to be just completely multiplied exponentially by what the left has done during COVID.
Because it turns out that when an elite cadre of people tell you that they can save grandma and that number one, they can't save grandma, but they can destroy your job and destroy your life and destroy your children's lives.
When the elite tell you when they promise you the world and they deliver a pile of flaming dog crap, people get mad.
And the left is about to feel the wrath.
Again, in the United States, according to the Washington Post, though considered milder than other coronavirus variants, Omicron has infected so many people and has driven the number of daily deaths beyond where it was last spring, before vaccines were widely available, according to Washington Post data.
Omicron has been particularly lethal to people over 75, the unvaxxed, and the medically vulnerable, according to doctors and public health officials.
The soaring death toll also illustrates why experts pled with the public to beware of the highly contagious variant, even though it is less virulent than others.
Jennifer Nuzzo, epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins, says this feels quite jarring to people, who may have assumed Omicron is generally, on a per-case level, less severe, and given the fact we have been vaccinated, at least some portion of the country.
Even if, on a per case basis, fewer people develop severe illness and die, when you apply a small percentage to a very large number, you get a substantial number.
That, of course, is true.
But none of that changes the underlying logic here.
Either you're vaxxed, or you're unvaxxed.
If you are vaxxed, you are very unlikely to die from Omicron, just as you are very unlikely to die from Delta.
If you have natural immunity, you're very unlikely to die from Omicron, just as you are very unlikely to die from Delta.
If you are a person who has severe underlying health conditions, or you are elderly, There's a much better shot that you're going to die from Omicron, just as you are much more likely to die from Delta.
So even if Omicron is less severe, which it is, just because it's less severe on an individual basis doesn't mean that if a bajillion people get it, you're not going to have a large absolute number of people who end up dying from it, which is what's happening right now.
But none of the actual underlying logic has changed.
The left is just pretending that the logic has changed because the people have had it.
They've had it.
According to CNN, governors are now telling President Joe Biden the country needs to, quote unquote, move away from the pandemic.
That's what Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson, a Republican, said at the White House on Monday.
He said, there's a number of areas we have agreement on, and that is one, we need to move away from the pandemic.
We asked the president to help give us clear guidelines on how we can return to a greater state of normality.
And it's not just Asa Hutchinson.
It's a bunch of Democratic governors who are beginning to say the same thing.
You can see it happening across the country.
And so the White House, belatedly, because they're very bad at reading tea leaves, the White House is belatedly moving in the right direction.
The White House is beginning to realize that they have to start leaving people alone.
They're going to have to tell their own base that their own base needs to stop panicking, like, right now.
According to Politico, blue state governors and state health officials who most vigorously embrace pandemic restrictions are now pivoting toward a new era, using Omicron's decline to dial back precautions that have become a hallmark of the last two years.
Health departments from Oregon to Maine have, over the last few weeks, ended almost all of their government-run COVID-19 contact tracing operations and shifted the responsibility to the public.
Now, again, have the underlying data changed?
They have not.
The COVID tracing program has been a giant fail since day one because it wasn't in place early enough.
The only way that... I've been saying this for two years!
The only way that contact tracing works is when you have a low number of people on an absolute level who are transmitting.
Once you have what is called community spread, where you're getting COVID from anonymous guy on the subway, this means you can no longer trace how you got COVID or who you gave COVID to.
There are just too many people with COVID to trace.
But we kept fighting yesterday's battles like, oh, well, you know, we must have testing.
No, we need a testing in February of 2020.
According to Politico, at the same time, Democratic governors in the North, East, and West, where case counts are dropping dramatically, are loosening mask policies and preparing residents for the reality that COVID-19 will be around long-term.
Oh, you mean it's going to turn into a generalized background noise?
As some of us have been saying for a year?
Like, since the vaccines?
Some of us have been saying this?
We're not going to manage COVID to zero, said New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy.
This is so maddening.
It's so maddening because, again, when you know that the right public policy was not pursued a year ago, and now all these people flip on a dime and pretend that they are doing it for the right reasons, don't believe them.
They are lying to you.
They are lying to you right now.
The data did not change.
The polling changed.
It's because of you that they are changing.
It is not for you that they are changing.
It is because of you that they are changing.
Phil Murphy says we have to learn how to live with COVID as we move from a pandemic to the endemic phase of the virus.
You know who was saying this, like, almost two years ago?
Ron DeSantis.
But he was bad.
Sweden was bad.
All these places were bad.
The best policy was to lock everybody down like China.
We needed to weld people in their homes.
That was the best policy.
Governors in Connecticut and Delaware, as well as Oregon's Health Department, announced on Monday students could soon remove their masks.
Governors in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and New York have also signaled forthcoming changes to their mask rules, while California Governor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, announced he is ending the indoor mask mandate next week, but keeping masks in classrooms for now, because they still have to keep holding on to the lie that they are doing this for public policy purposes, as opposed to the real reason they're doing it, which is they got walloped by reality.
Vermont Health Commissioner Mark Levine said last week Omicron has, quote, hastened our pathway to the endemic state.
I'm glad he gets to say this now.
I said this as soon as the data started emerging in November on Omicron.
I said, this is the end of the pandemic because it is really, really, really transmissible and not very deadly.
So this means we are now in the endemic phase.
I said, this presents the end of the pandemic.
And people mocked me for this on the left, because how dare I?
Now they can all say it.
You know, solidly five months too late, four or five months too late, they can say it.
Colorado has put out a request for a proposal seeking the private sector's help in developing an endemic response plan.
And Gavin Newsom is expected to unveil an endemic strategy for the state after L.A.
hosts the Super Bowl this weekend.
In Republican-controlled states, where governors have largely resisted mask mandates and economic restrictions, declining case counts are providing a reason to end remaining traces of states' pandemic response.
Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds announced her final emergency declaration extension and plans to decommission the state's COVID data sites.
Well, yeah.
Again, don't pay attention to the lie that they are doing this because of public policy.
They are doing this because you said no.
And we all should have said no a year ago.
As soon as the vaccines were available, this pandemic was, for public policy purposes, over.
It's so frustrating to hear these people flip.
It really is.
Like, welcome to the party, and I'm glad for the American people that many Americans living in blue states will now have additional freedoms.
Also, the people you elect are douchebags.
Your public health officials are douchebags against Dr. Anthony Fauci.
Fauci, man.
So, yesterday, Anthony Fauci, who, until, like, the last five minutes, was telling you that, you know, there could be another two years of pandemic response and we can't let it up too early.
We might have to mask children until they're adults.
If they're five now, perhaps when they're 25 and they've been through 87 rounds of COVID.
And I am still, at the NIH, I'll be 122 years old.
At that point, maybe we can discuss how life will change.
So here's what Fauci said yesterday.
Quote.
As we get out of the full-blown pandemic phase of COVID-19, which we are certainly heading out of, these decisions will increasingly be made on a local level, rather than centrally decided or mandated.
There'll also be more people making their own decisions on how they want to deal with the virus.
Oh, screw you, you old jerk!
What did... ugh!
We had to go through like a year and a half of you pretending you knew what you were doing for you to get to the same point that Ron DeSantis was making a year and a half ago?
Put the quote back up for a second.
Let me read that slowly.
Because it's just, it's so maddening.
It's so crazy.
As we get out of the full-blown pandemic phase of COVID-19, which we are certainly heading out of, these decisions will increasingly be made on a local level rather than centrally decided or mandated.
There will also be more people making their own decisions.
You know you could have done this.
The whole time, he could have done this.
Local decision making as opposed to centralized decision.
But that would have deprived him of his powers.
He wasn't going to do that.
Asked when restrictions might end.
He said he hoped it would be soon and agreed with the suggestion it was likely to happen this year.
Even then, even when like every blue state governor is like, please leave us alone.
Fauci's like, maybe by the end of the year.
It's February, the end of the year.
Meanwhile, the gaslighting that's going on to Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the gaslighting is just astonishing.
Because now we're being led to believe that the reason that we can have these mandates reversed is because Joe Biden's done such a wonderful job.
So more people died under Joe Biden than died under Donald Trump, despite the fact that he had an actual working vaccine.
And Hakeem Jeffries is telling us that now we can remove all of these mandates because Joe Biden has been such a wild success.
No one believes this.
There's not a human on planet Earth who believes that Joe Biden has been such a wild success that he defeated COVID.
Not one.
Man, the overt attempt to just lie directly to your face is astonishing.
Here's Hakeem Jeffries.
The Omicron variant is in retreat.
And that's not by accident.
That's because under President Biden's leadership, a public health infrastructure was put into place beginning with the American rescue plan without a single Republican vote to ensure that we can do everything possible to crush the virus.
And that is what has been happening.
You're an insane person.
That is the biggest lie in the entire.
This is such a lie.
I'm trying so hard not to curse right now.
I'm trying so hard not to curse.
I'm about to fail.
So get ready with the bleep button.
He's a f***ing liar.
That's ridiculous.
That is ridiculous.
He crushed the virus with the American Rescue Plan?
Are you f***ing kidding me?
What?
No.
Two trillion dollars in useless spending that blew up inflation last year.
That's what did it.
It was his magical public policy plan.
Are you kidding me?
He had the exact same Omicron spike that every other country had.
And then it receded.
And then the old man got out of bed while watching Matlock and shuffled while eating oatmeal and drinking Ensure.
He got shuffled out and said, Omicron.
Then he keeled over and Nakeem Jeffries drags his body out.
He's like, this old man has done it.
It's the old man.
If it had not been for Joe Biden, Omicron would still be washing through every community on earth the exact same way.
Ah, these people, these people.
Punish them at the polls for what they have done.
They've wrecked people's lives.
They've wrecked people's businesses.
Those businesses are not coming back.
People who started small businesses, who invested hundreds of thousands of dollars, their life savings, grandma's inheritance.
They wrecked all of that.
They destroyed hundreds of thousands of small businesses.
They destroyed children.
They told children they're still telling children.
That they can't unmask in class and have normal social relations and see what their teachers are saying to them.
They're still saying that in many states, including California.
They mandated that schools be closed early on in the pandemic.
They gave grounds, people like Randy Weingarten, who, by the way, I mean, talk about out of touch.
Randy Weingarten is still saying that she's only going to support unmasking at zero COVID.
Randy Weingarten.
Here is the head of the actual Democratic Party, Randy Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers, saying that regardless of what these public policy officials are now saying, she's going to make the policy, and the policy is, our teachers feel unsafe, never unmask.
I am in favor of an off-ramp on masks.
The real issue becomes, is the spread low enough so that there's no dissemination or transmission in schools?
And it's not the teachers transmitting to kids, it's more kids and kids, particularly in elementary schools right now.
This lady runs the Democratic Party.
She does.
And you've still got people who are attempting to backfill all of the rationales for these bad public policies in the first place.
MSNBC's Dr. Patel, Kavita Patel, saying, you know, masking kids doesn't harm them at all.
Oh, really?
It doesn't harm them at all?
Hmm.
Interesting.
Because I have actual data that it does harm them.
There have been multiple studies.
I mean, we've known this forever.
That kids who don't see faces are worse off than kids who see faces.
This is perfectly obvious.
My wife used to work in a child neuroscience lab.
This is what she studied.
Here is Dr. Kavita Patel explaining there were no downsides to the masking.
And you know how she can tell because she has a picture.
I always am amused by the stuff that people have in the background of their offices.
I like that she has a picture frame with the word doctor defined in the background.
Well, this doctor should actually take a look at the data.
We have not seen evidence that having masks even in the younger age group prohibits kind of recognizing emotion.
In fact, quite the contrary.
Younger children use all parts of the face, even when masked, to look for emotion.
But you're bringing up, I think, a very important point.
When parents are surveyed about, you know, wanting to have masks or not have masks, it becomes so emotional that I think we have to acknowledge that we're all frustrated and we all need to understand when we can remove masks and when we need to put them back into place.
What do those measures look like?
These people are a joke.
The reason that they are collapsing right now is because the American people have had it.
All righty, coming up, we'll get to the real reason that Democrats decided that now is the time to move away from the COVID restrictions.
It has to do with the fact that they look horrible.
They keep making mistakes, and those mistakes are not stopping.
We'll get to that in just one moment.
First, let's talk about a mistake that you can stop.
A mistake that you can stop?
Not having life insurance.
Let's say that you're walking down the street one day, and suddenly, A mob of ravaging hyenas just starts charging down the street at you.
They knock you over.
You start screaming.
You're screaming to the sky.
Why?
Well, as you're doing that and as a hyena chomps directly into your face, you might think to yourself for just one fleeting moment, Man, I really should have listened to Shapiro and gotten life insurance from PolicyGenius.
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Okay, so I really want to get to more on this in just one moment and some other news we got to talk about.
But first, I got to tell you, tomorrow, February 10th, it's the world premiere of Shudden, the Daily Wire's first original film at 9 p.m.
Eastern, 8 p.m.
Central, over at Daily Wire's YouTube page.
The suspenseful thriller follows a young mother trapped by her violent ex and his meth addict friend.
She must escape to save her children before it's too late.
It's a tale of redemption to the beat of a seat-gripping thriller, and I have to say, it's a phenomenal piece of filmmaking.
check out the trailer.
And I'll see you next time.
♪ Whose heart is aching for breaking? ♪ Jessica!
I can smell the weakness from here.
Lady!
Rob!
Rob owes me money.
Rob!
Let me out, please!
What good is this doing now?
You had your way.
Oh I'm scared.
Now you must pay.
Your daughter, she's very pretty.
It is chilling stuff.
My wife watched it with me.
She was freaked out for probably two days afterward.
The film premieres this Thursday, February 10th.
9 p.m.
Eastern, 8 p.m.
Central, over at DailyWire's YouTube page, after this month's episode of Backstage.
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Okay, so what's the real reason they're doing all this?
It's because they got caught with their hand in the cookie jar.
They don't care about the restrictions.
They never cared about the restrictions.
It was for the little people.
It was for the people who were too dumb to run their own lives.
They have to tell you what to do because you're stupid, but they're smart.
So they get to control everything.
And then they get to claim credit for things they have no control over, like the course of the COVID pandemic as a general rule.
It is not a coincidence that the entire Democratic Party began to run screaming away from their own policies here as soon as there were a million photos of Stacey Abrams unmasked with a bunch of small children.
There are a bunch of these photos now.
So here she is, bunch of kids masked, everybody masked in the presence of Stacey Abrams, the great and good representative of the people.
She's going to get shellacked in November, or at least she should.
And look, there she is behind a classroom of what, 50 kids here, all of them masked.
The kids always come last for these folks.
Always.
It is about what the adults want.
The adults want to create an unlivable world for everyone but themselves.
And the kids are just pawns.
Stacey Abrams with a bunch of adults, all of them wearing masks, some wearing N95s.
And there she is, grinning, one foot away from them.
What a hero.
What a hero of the pandemic.
So, you remember that Stacey Abrams first said that anybody who noted this was racist.
And then she fired her comms person and put out a listing that she needed a new online comms person.
And then yesterday, she actually rolled out an apology.
But I thought that it was all racism to point this out in the first place, but now she's apologizing for it, which is confusing.
Here is Stacey Abrams, the greatest politician in American history, the sitting governor of Georgia.
Here she was on CNN.
I went to read to kids for an African American Read-In Day.
I approached the podium with my mask on.
I followed the protocols.
I told the kids I'm taking my mask off because I'm reading to kids who are listening remotely as well.
And we were socially distanced.
The kids were socially distanced from me.
I told them that's what I was doing.
And then the excitement after I finished, because it was so much fun working with those kids, I took a picture.
And that was a mistake.
Protocols matter, and protecting our kids is the most important thing, and anything that can be perceived as undermining that is a mistake, and I apologize.
Okay, what she should be saying is, I was unmasked because I'm vaxxed, and I'm already immune, and these kids don't need to be masked either.
But she can't.
So instead, everybody's doing it for her, right?
They're gonna backfill this thing now.
Just the way that Gavin Newsom and Eric Garcetti, they took pictures unmasked with an HIV-positive, 62-year-old, overweight black man.
And black people have been dying at a higher rate during the pandemic, as we've been told repeatedly by the media.
Certainly immunocompromised people.
So what did they do?
They said, well, if you're in a public place and you're already vaxxed, you can now unmask.
Magical.
Magical.
So as soon as all of this started to hit home for the Democrats, that is when they shifted their policies.
Even Kathy Hochul in New York says that she's expecting to start releasing the mask mandates.
According to the New York Times, POCA will drop New York's stringent indoor mask mandate on Wednesday, ending a requirement that businesses ask customers for proof of full vaccination or require mask wearing at all times, and marking a turning point in the state's COVID response, according to three people briefed on her decision.
Why, it's almost like it's coordinated.
Now I have a question.
Did the data change that fast for all of these Democratic governors?
Of course not!
It was a cascade effect.
This has been true throughout the pandemic.
You know how I knew that L.A.
was about to impose sharper mandates on everything?
Because New York did, and then San Francisco did, and then L.A.
did.
And this was always the pattern.
And so as soon as a few of them did it, there's a cascade effect and they all do it.
You think that's the data?
Or you think that that is about the politics of the situation?
Of course it is about the politics.
It was always about the politics.
Do not believe these liars.
Do not allow them to pretend that this was ever about the data.
It was never about the data.
The data were clear two months into this pandemic.
The public policy was clear two months into this pandemic.
And it got even clearer when the vaccines were available.
And they didn't stop.
For a year, they didn't stop.
And they're only stopping now because they see doom coming for them.
And doom should come for them.
Their power should be removed permanently.
They should never be allowed near the levers of power again.
The number of lives these people wrecked is extraordinary.
Extraordinary.
And the number of lives they saved is absolutely minimal.
If it exists at all, honestly.
Leanna Nguyen is again one of these.
She has a piece in the Washington Post pretending that she is part of the data-driven crowd.
She's not part of the data-driven crowd.
She never was part of the data-driven crowd.
She says in this piece of the Washington Post, throughout much of the pandemic, there were two camps, one that opposed restrictions and one that supported them.
As both sides became more entrenched, a third has emerged.
This group advocated restrictions from the start, but now believes circumstances have changed enough that mandates can go.
Policymakers would do well to heed this group.
Some of us were part of that group from the beginning, Leanna, but you weren't, so don't pretend you were now.
Alrighty, we'll be back here later today with an additional hour of content, including some talk about why Joe Biden is handing out free crack pipes to people.
In the meantime, go check out our newest podcast, Morning Wire.
On today's episode, they report on the American-born skier winning gold while representing China.
That episode is available right now on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Make sure to tune in.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
Shapiro, this is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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Sorry.
now sorry breaking Jessica I can smell the weakness from here
Oh Wow Oh money Oh Oh Let me out, please!
What good is this to me now?
I'm scared.
Now you must pay
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