Ep. 443 - Sifting Through The Myths And Facts About The Coronavirus
Today on the show we will try to come to a better understanding of the coronavirus and the threat it poses to us. There's a lot of information and misinformation out there. Hopefully we can find a way to navigate a course through it. Also, Five Headlines, including Canada's plan to ban so-called "conversation therapy." And a very special and rare Daily Cancellation.
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Today, on the show, we're going to talk about the coronavirus.
And I'm probably like you.
I don't know what exactly to think about all of this.
It's overwhelming.
It's confusing.
It is pretty scary.
And so we're going to try to talk it out, sift through the facts and the fictions and the myths and everything surrounding this.
I'll tell you what some of the experts are saying.
I'm not an expert.
So I can't speak with any expertise, but I can tell you at least what some of them are saying.
And we'll try to figure out what our approach should be and our response should be to all this.
So that's coming up.
Also, five headlines, including Canada trying to ban so-called conversion therapy.
Is that a good idea?
I think it is definitely not, and I'll explain why.
And in your daily cancellation, remember the woman who made the hilarious math mistake on MSNBC a few days ago?
Well, she got a lot of grief for that, people making fun of her, which is going to happen in the Internet age.
But she's not happy about it, and she's come back, and you'll never guess.
You'll never guess what direction she decided to take it.
She says that you're racist if you made fun of her for it.
And so we're going to talk about that as well.
All of that and more on the way.
But first, as I said, I want to talk about the coronavirus and try to sift through this.
There's been a lot of focus on the panic, the mass hysteria, and I've talked about that too.
But I'm beginning to think that We're worried about panic.
Are we getting to the point where actually mass denial is more the problem?
Have we been so focused on stopping people from panicking That we have been maybe unintentionally encouraging denial, and is that becoming the bigger issue?
My thinking on this has shifted.
I will fully admit that.
And it's hard for me to say that my thinking has changed completely, or to say that I've changed my mind completely, because I'm in the same boat as a lot of you.
I don't know exactly what to think.
There's a lot of information, a lot of people screaming from every side of this thing, a lot of people trying to exploit it for political reasons or for ratings or for whatever else.
There are many pundits and commentators like myself who are very desperate to have the best take on the issue.
So, I just want to, as I said, talk through some of this and I do that with the disclaimer, again, repeated.
That I am no expert at all on this.
Not that you'd be tempted to take me as one, hopefully.
But just to be clear, what I'm doing right now, this is like the conversation that you're having in your living room with your family and friends about this.
The conversations I've had with people about this.
I'm not sitting here teaching you about the virus.
Let me teach you about how pandemics work.
No.
What the hell do I know?
We're just, as I said, talking through it and seeing if we can't find a little bit of clarity, just a bit amid the confusion.
Now, to begin with, let's get some updates on this thing, starting with President Trump giving an address from the Oval Office last night, announcing some rather dramatic steps, justified steps, I think, including a travel ban from Europe.
After consulting with our top government health professionals, I have decided to take several strong but necessary actions to protect the health and well-being of all Americans.
To keep new cases from entering our shores, we will be suspending all travel from Europe to the United States for the next 30 days.
The new rules will go into effect Friday at midnight.
These restrictions will be adjusted subject to conditions on the ground.
There will be exemptions for Americans who have undergone appropriate screenings, and these prohibitions will not only apply to the tremendous amount of trade and cargo, but various other things as we get approval.
Anything coming from Europe to the United States is what we are discussing.
These restrictions will also not apply to the United Kingdom.
At the same time, we are monitoring the situation in China and the South Korea.
And as their situation improves, we will reevaluate the restrictions and warnings that are currently in place for a possible early opening.
Of course, Trump is being attacked.
By the Democrats for this.
Yada yada.
I'm not really interested in getting into the politics of it.
Yeah, the Democrats are trying to make this... They were complaining Trump's not doing enough, and now they're complaining that he's doing too much, it's too draconian and strict to restrict travel from Europe.
They're obviously wrong about that, but I don't want to make that the focus.
I think that's a mistake to make that the focus.
To try to use the coronavirus.
Let's talk about how the Democrats are wrong about the coronavirus.
I mean, they are wrong, but a lot of other people are wrong, too.
And that's not really the point.
That's not what's going to keep us safe.
And, you know, that's not the most important thing to us and our families, I don't think, in this.
So that's not what we're going to discuss.
I think the measure makes sense.
It's good.
This is what we need to do.
But there are two things in response to it or reaction to it that I want to say.
One is that it's too late, of course, to keep the virus out of our country completely.
It's good to prevent more sources of it from entering, so that's why I think this is a good thing to do, but it's here already, obviously.
So our primary focus would seem that it needs to be on measures that we can take within our country to fight it.
Trump did not address or focus on that very much in his speech.
He focused on it a little bit, but not nearly enough.
I was hoping to hear a lot more about it, including testing.
Because right now, one of the biggest problems we have is that not very many people have been tested for it.
And it's difficult to get a test if you think you need one.
We should be testing everyone who might even remotely have come in contact with.
That's what South Korea did.
And we'll get back to South Korea in a moment.
Meanwhile, the NBA has chosen to suspend its season, another drastic step that will result in massive losses of income, not just for the wealthy basketball players and the officials and the owners, but think about the working class people that work at the stadiums, the concession stand, they work at the gift shop, even the Restaurants around the arenas in these cities, many of them rely on that foot traffic on game day to stay afloat.
How many of them are going to go under because of things like this?
Lots of lost money, lots of lost jobs, and this is just the start of it.
Also, it was reported yesterday that Tom Hanks and his wife have coronavirus.
They were shooting a movie in Australia, I believe, and now they have it.
They're reportedly doing well, though.
And Dr. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, this is all stuff that happened yesterday with coronavirus.
That's why I'm going through all of it now.
Dr. Fauci, by all accounts, very reliable, non-political person, was talking to a congressional committee yesterday about the disease.
And this is how he tried to explain the lethality of it.
especially relative to something like the flu.
Dr. Fauci, can you, by way of comparison, briefly explain how does COVID-19 compare to other previous
health situations, SARS, H1N1, things like that?
Sure, sir.
Thank you for the question.
Well, SARS was also a coronavirus in 2002.
It infected 8,000 people.
And it killed about 775.
It had a mortality of about 9% to 10%.
8,000 people and it killed about 775. It had a mortality of about 9 to 10 percent.
So that's only 8,000 people in about a year. In the two and a half months that
we've had this coronavirus, as you know, we now have multiple multiples of that.
So it clearly is not as lethal.
And I'll get to the lethality in a moment.
But it certainly spreads better, probably for the practical understanding of the American people.
The seasonal flu that we deal with every year.
Has a mortality of 0.1% the stated mortality overall of this when you look at all the data including China is about 3% it first started office two and now three I think if you count all the cases of minimally symptomatic or asymptomatic infection that probably brings the mortality rate down to somewhere around 1%, which means it is 10 times more lethal than the seasonal flu.
So the good news is that the mortality rate isn't as high as has been reported, the 2 or 3%, probably not that high.
The bad news is, according to him and most other medical experts that I've read, it's at least still 10 times deadlier than the flu.
And the flu is, all these comparisons to the flu, and people saying, and I've said this too, that at least early on I was using this comparison, which I've come to see is not exactly legitimate, or at least not very helpful.
But this comparison to the flu, it's just the flu.
The flu is already a serious illness.
I just had the flu.
It's not a walk in the park by any means.
And if you've actually gotten the flu, when you have it, You could kind of tell how people die from this.
I'm not saying that I was on my deathbed, I wasn't, but you get very sick, high fever, you could have some difficulty breathing, you're up coughing, you feel like you can't breathe, things like that.
And you can see how, if somebody's elderly or if they're young, they got an underlying medical condition, you could see how this might result in some very serious issues for them.
So, the flu is a serious illness to begin with.
Now, if you're saying that it's 10 times deadlier than the flu, which is what Dr. Fauci just said, that should really make our ears perk up.
I'm not saying it should make us panic, but that's something we need to pay attention to.
When you got a man like Dr. Fauci telling you that about a disease that's just entered this country and is spreading exponentially as we speak, that's something you can't just waltz past that, I don't think.
And we hear 1%.
Maybe the death rate is 1%.
And we think, that's not so bad.
But first of all, 1% translated to, if we're talking about potentially many thousands or even millions of cases, 1% of that is quite a lot.
And it's growing exponentially.
We're at 1,300 cases right now, reported cases.
That's without much testing.
But it was only two weeks ago that Donald Trump did a press conference, you might recall, and said it was exactly two weeks ago.
Or two Wednesdays ago.
He said, 15 cases and we're expecting soon there will be no cases.
Fast forward 14-15 days, we have 1,500 reported cases.
But on this issue of the mortality rate, just because you survive an illness doesn't mean that it was a mild case, necessarily, and that you came out unscathed.
So let me read a little bit of an article by James Hamblin, who's a doctor and lecturer at Yale School of Public Health.
I think you need to hear what he has to say, and the whole article is worth reading.
I'll read you a little bit of it.
We'll get to that in just a second.
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Okay, back to this article.
This is from Dr. James Hamblin.
He says, COVID-19 is not the flu.
We have a vaccine for the flu.
We have antiviral medications designed to treat the flu.
We have a sense of what to expect when we catch the flu and when it's necessary to seek medical attention.
Doctors have experience treating the flu and tests to help diagnose the flu right there in the office while you wait.
Against the new disease, we have none of this.
This coronavirus is unknown to our species.
Once it breaks into one of our cells, the extent of its spread through the body seems to vary significantly.
The experience can slowly progress from the familiar cough-congestion-fever to a life-threatening inflammatory response as the virus spreads down into the lungs, filling the airways with fluid.
Survivors can have permanent scarring in the lungs.
The virus can also spread into other organs, causing liver damage or gastrointestinal disease.
These effects can play out over longer periods than in the flu, sometimes waxing and waning.
Some patients have begun to feel better than falling critically ill.
The disease can be fatal despite receiving optimal medical care.
I think that's an important reference point, important context for this.
Is it scary?
Yeah, but I don't think we can just ignore it on that basis.
Or on the basis that it's going to make people panic.
Another article in the Atlantic by a Johns Hopkins professor provides more details.
He says, the first fact is that, at least in the initial stages, documented cases of COVID-19 seem to increase in exponential fashion.
On the 23rd of January, China's Hubei province, which contains the city of Wuhan, had 444 confirmed COVID-19 cases.
A week later, it had 4,903.
cases a week later it had 4,903. Another week later, by the 6th, it had 22,112. The same
story is now playing out in other countries around the world.
Italy had 62 cases on the 22nd of February.
It had 888 cases by the 29th.
On the 22nd of February, it had 888 cases.
By the 29th, 4,636.
By the 6th of February.
Because the United States has been extremely sluggish in testing patients for the coronavirus,
the official tally of 604 likely represents a fraction of the real caseload.
But even if we take this number at face value, it suggests that we should prepare to have up to 10 times as many cases a week from today, and up to 100 times as many cases two weeks from today.
The second fact is this disease is deadlier than the flu, to which the honestly ill-informed and the irresponsible insist on comparing it.
Early guesstimate.
made before data were widely available suggests that the fatality rate for the coronavirus might wind up being about 1%.
If that proves true, it's 10 times as deadly as the flu.
But there is reason to fear that the fatality rate could be much higher.
According to the World Health Organization, the current case fatality rate, a common measure of what portion of confirmed patients die from a particular disease, stands at 3.4%.
That figure could be an overstatement because mild cases of the disease are less likely to be diagnosed, or it could be an understatement because many patients have already been diagnosed with the virus but have not yet recovered and may still die.
So, more facts and context there.
Michael Osterholm, who's an epidemiologist, was interviewed on Joe Rogan's show the other day.
It's about an hour and a half interview.
I'd recommend watching the whole thing I did.
And I would also recommend reading the entirety of both of the articles I just read pieces of.
You can find both of them in The Atlantic.
But let me play just about a minute of Osterholm.
Again, an epidemiologist.
He's an expert and this is what he does for a living.
This is him talking about the coronavirus and what kind of threat it does or does not pose to us.
How serious is this?
Is this something that we need to be terrified of?
Or is this overblown?
How do you stand on this?
Well, first of all, you have to understand the timing of it in the sense that it's just beginning.
And so, in terms of what hurt, pain, suffering, death has happened so far, it's really just beginning.
This is going to unfold for months to come yet.
And that's, I think, what people don't quite yet understand.
What we saw in China, I'm convinced, as are many of my colleagues, as soon as they release all of these social distances, these mandated stay-at-home, haven't-left-your-home-in-weeks-and-weeks kind of thing, when they go back to work, they're on planes, trains, subways, buses, crowded spaces, manufacturing plants, even China is going to come back again.
And so this really is acting like an influenza virus, something that transmits very, very easily through the air.
We now have data to show that you're infectious before you even get sick.
And in some cases, quite highly infectious, just breathing is all that you need to do.
So from this perspective, I can understand why people would say, well, wait a minute, flu kills a lot more itself every year than this does.
And I remind people this is just the beginning.
Probably the best guesstimate we have right now on what limited data we have would say this could be at least 10 to 15 times worse than the worst seasonal flu year we see.
And there have been many articles and interviews and so on with doctors, epidemiologists, people who do this for a living, people who know the science, not pundits, not talk radio hosts, not podcast hosts like myself, but people who actually know how this works.
And most of them, from what I have seen, with a few exceptions, are saying things like this.
They're not screaming it.
They're not saying, oh my god, we're all going to die.
But they're saying, this is serious.
This is a big problem.
And this is a serious illness.
And it is worse than the flu.
And it just is.
I'm sorry, but it is.
So I look at this and I listen to it.
And I look at the fact that governments have been quarantining whole populations, shutting down events, taking drastic steps, costly steps, absorbing massive hits to their economy in order to stop this.
I look at companies like the NBA willingly losing millions, if not billions of dollars.
I look at the numbers, the numbers as they stand right now, exponential growth in the United States, Italy in such bad shape that they're having to decide, they're having to decide which patients to treat and which to let die.
And if you think that could never happen here, we'll also keep in mind that we're being warned by healthcare professionals that if there's a massive influx of people who need medical treatment because of this, and I think the hospitalization rate right now is about 10%, which is high.
If there's a massive influx, we don't have the capacity to treat all those people right now.
We don't have enough ventilators.
We don't have enough hospital beds.
We don't have it.
And we already know, we don't have enough tests.
So you look at all that.
And then South Korea.
There are people who point to South Korea for encouragement.
I was doing that myself.
I was looking at South Korea.
Well, they're containing this.
That's encouraging.
Maybe Italy's an outlier.
Who knows?
But South Korea took very dramatic steps.
We have to keep that in mind.
Decisive and quick steps.
Including, they opened up drive-thrus.
Where you could drive through and get a test.
Easy as that.
Don't even get out of your car.
They were testing everybody.
They're doing about 15,000 tests a day.
We're doing, we have done total less than 7,000.
So they do more, we do half, we've done half total of what they do in a day.
Just to put that in perspective.
They shut down big events.
They practiced very disciplined social distancing.
They even, according to a Washington Post article I just read, they put GPS trackers on the infected people anonymously so that other people, and then that information was available online, you could go and find out where the infected people are and then avoid them.
Now, I'm not saying that we should do that.
I think there's serious privacy concerns there.
Very serious.
I am saying that before you feel too good about South Korea, realize they did things to stop this that we are not doing.
Some of which we should do, like mass testing.
I have a friend who came here just this week.
Flew here from Israel.
And he has cold symptoms.
No fever.
He's probably fine.
Probably just a cold.
And he has, you know, he's got a runny nose and things like that.
And that, as far as I understand, is not really a symptom that is typical of COVID-19.
But, even so, he's an international traveler with, you know, flu-like symptoms.
He should be able to get tested.
He called up, though.
They told him, you know, you don't need to get tested.
Call us back if you have a fever.
Maybe we'll help you out then.
That's not the way it should be.
In South Korea, he's getting tested.
Here, doesn't get tested.
So I look at all this and I begin to suspect that my initial take was wrong.
As much as I hate being wrong.
Initially, I thought that this was media hype.
Going back a month ago, when we first started hearing all these reports, there was warnings of global pandemics.
And I said, my reaction was, yeah, well, here we go again.
The media is always hyping up some doomsday scenario, some new apocalypse, some vehicle of doom and destruction they're always talking about, and then it always fizzles out.
Whether it's a pandemic or a hurricane, I mean, how many times have we seen this?
The boy who cried wolf, right?
But the point of the boy who cried wolf story is that the wolf actually shows up one day.
Is this our wolf?
Has the wolf come?
I don't know.
Should we panic?
Obviously not.
But I don't think the... I'm not sure if the don't panic takes are really helpful at this point.
And I have shared those takes as well.
I even wrote an article about, oh, we shouldn't panic.
Well, yeah, of course we shouldn't panic.
Everybody already knows that.
Everybody knows, in theory, that you shouldn't panic.
It's not like anybody is suggesting actual panic as a strategy, or it's not like anyone ever panics.
No one ever makes the decision, you know what, I think I should panic right now.
Yeah, that seems like the right approach, and then they start panicking.
That's not the way it works.
So saying don't panic already is pretty useless.
Everybody knows that.
It's like saying to someone, don't have road rage.
Nope, don't have it.
You shouldn't have road rage.
Well, yeah, of course.
Nobody thinks road rage is a good strategy.
No one is pro-road rage.
It happens because their emotions get the best of them.
And I doubt that someone in the midst of, they're about to explode in a road rage event, I don't think they're gonna stop and say, you know what, why don't I hear someone tell me once about how I shouldn't have road rage?
Oh yeah, they did tell, okay, so I think I won't.
Yeah, you shouldn't panic, fine.
But you also shouldn't panic even if you're in a really dire situation.
If you're drowning in shark infested waters, You shouldn't panic then either.
Panic's not going to be helpful, but that doesn't mean that you're not in a dire situation.
And if somebody's shouting from the shore, don't panic!
That's not going to be a lot of help.
It's a fat lot of good that's going to do for you.
And in any case, it doesn't negate or minimize the fact that you really are in a tough spot.
Zombie apocalypse, don't panic.
Yeah, sure.
But it's still a zombie apocalypse.
Now, I'm not saying that this is tantamount to us all drowning in shark-infested waters.
I'm not saying it's a zombie apocalypse.
But I don't know if we really need to keep telling people not to panic.
And besides, are people actually panicking over this?
Some people are panicking that they might run out of toilet paper.
We've seen a few videos of people fighting over toilet paper.
I think that's not really panic over the disease.
That's more panic that they're gonna need toilet paper and not have it.
I understand that panic.
In fact, we have all in our lives had panicky moments where you need some toilet paper and can't find it.
So, that I can almost understand.
Other than that, I don't see people running through the streets with their hair on fire.
I don't see it.
I think some people are concerned, very concerned.
I'm in that camp now.
I'm officially there.
The facts on the ground as they stand right now, I think justify serious concern.
And now what I'm starting to worry is that the issue is less panic and more denial.
This is all anecdotal, but the people talking about panic, it's anecdotal for them too.
So anecdotally, what I have seen, Denial is, at this point, far more common than panic.
I haven't actually seen or talked to anyone who's legitimately panicking, so I haven't met that person.
I have met people and talked to people who are in straight-up denial about this.
And then you have to also think, if we are in a pandemic situation, which the World Health Organization officially declared a pandemic, what is more dangerous, do you think?
What's more dangerous, to panic Or to be in complete denial?
to take too many precautions or to take none.
What I've seen online especially, a lot of people saying this is all a media hoax.
That's a real point of view.
A not insignificant portion of people seem to have that this is either completely invented by the media or they are hyping it up to kingdom come and it's really not a big deal.
It's just a cold and they're trying to take down Trump with it.
It may be true that they're hyping it up and they want to take down Trump, but it's also true this is a serious issue and that's why you don't need to listen to Don Lemon or Anderson Cooper about this or Chris Cuomo, okay?
Listen to the epidemiologists and the doctors.
Unless they're gonna say that all of them are also engaged in a conspiracy to take down Trump, then I think we see that there is cause for concern.
And I have seen someone just yesterday, I was talking to someone online on Twitter, and they said, you know, I'm not worried about it because for everybody 40 and under, it's harmless.
That was the word they used.
Harmless.
Harmless for people 40 and under.
That is not true.
It's true that it hasn't killed any children, thank God.
There are certain diseases that, for whatever reason, don't really affect kids, although kids are still carriers of the disease.
And they're going to bring it to people who it will affect.
But it gets worse and worse, it seems, as you get older.
So if you're in your 30s and you get this, you're probably not going to die, but you could.
And you could have, even if you don't die, a very serious response to it.
Harmless?
But it seems like there are those who are inventing comforting facts about this to make themselves feel better.
This is someone who just is telling themselves, oh, it's harmless if you're under 40.
They just made that up.
No doctor has said that.
No epidemiologist, no expert, no health organization has said that it's harmless for people under 40.
That's just someone who's made it up.
And I ask you, what is a greater danger and threat to your health?
To be someone who thinks it's harmless, or to be someone who's too freaked out about it?
I think we'd all do well to heed the warning of... I'm trying to pull up this article.
There was an article in Newsweek, written by a doctor in Western Europe, And a little bit of what he says.
He says, I'm a doctor in a major hospital in Western Europe watching you Americans and you Brits in these still early days of the coronavirus pandemic.
It's like watching a familiar horror movie where the protagonists yet again split into pairs or decide to take a tour of a dark basement.
The real-life version of this behavior is pretending this is just a flu, keeping schools open, following through with your holiday travel plans, going into the office daily.
This is what we did in Italy.
We were so complacent that even when people with coronavirus symptoms started turning up, we wrote each off as a nasty case of the flu.
We kept the economy going, pointed fingers at China, urged tourists to keep traveling, and the majority of us told ourselves and each other, this isn't so bad.
We're young, we're fit, we'll be fine even if we catch it.
Fast forward two months and we are drowning.
Statistically speaking, judging by the curve in China, we are not even at the peak yet, but our fatality rate is at over 6%, double the known global average.
Put aside statistics, here is how it looks in practice.
Most of my childhood friends are now doctors working in North Italy.
In Milan, They are having to choose between intubating a 40-year-old with two kids, a 40-year-old who is fit and healthy with no comorbidities, and a 60-year-old with high blood pressure because they don't have enough beds.
In the hallway, meanwhile, there are another 15 people waiting who are hardly breathing and need oxygen.
And he continues from there.
The problem, I think, And so you listen to people in Italy and they look at the denial that we're in right now, some of us, and they're saying, snap out of it right now because this is coming for you.
Yeah, it's a different kind of healthcare system.
Yes, Italy is an older country, but we're not immortal, right?
We're not superheroes.
We are, we are humans.
We're mortal just like them.
We're not impervious to disease and viruses don't discriminate.
They don't care that it's America and we're different.
I don't think a virus recognizes that.
The problem I think, and I know this is my issue even now, part of my issue, well part of my hesitation in taking this as seriously as I probably should, is not knowing who to trust.
And I think that's a big issue.
It's a crisis of trust.
There's so much information out there.
We know there are a lot of people lying, a lot of people with agendas, and there's just so much of it.
There's such an influx of information for us now from so many different sources.
What do you trust?
Well, I feel fairly safe trusting epidemiologists and doctors and health organizations on the topic of infectious diseases and pandemics.
Even the CDC and the World Health Organization.
Now, I'm not going to trust these organizations or these people implicitly on every topic.
But on the issue of infectious diseases, pandemics, how viruses work, well, if I don't trust them, then who do I put above them?
Who am I going to trust instead of them?
I'm not an expert on it.
I'm not going out there into the field to do research.
I'm not getting my microscope out and studying this thing myself.
I'm sure you're not either.
So you got to trust somebody.
You have to get your information from somewhere.
If you're not going to get it from these people, who are you getting it from?
Cable news hosts?
Talk radio hosts?
But the other issue is that it just doesn't feel real, does it, for us right now?
Right now, for me, I mean, I hear what they're saying in Italy, I saw China on the news, I hear about the measures they took in South Korea, I read the stories of quarantine, people getting sick and dying, even in this country, even young healthy people, I read it, I hear it, I understand it, but it doesn't feel real because in my life, things look normal.
And there's still this thought in the back of my head, That, uh, no, no, you know, this kind of stuff doesn't, this kind of stuff doesn't happen anymore.
Not here.
Not in the middle of my comfortable life.
Pandemics?
What is this, the Middle Ages?
That's not gonna happen.
It's 2020.
Don't be ridiculous.
Now, I don't think that to myself explicitly.
I don't literally think that it couldn't happen here because, for some reason, it's, we've, we've grown past it in modern society.
But that's the attitude in the back of my mind.
Maybe you can relate.
In fact, I know that a lot of people can relate.
Based on the demeanor of so many people, and based on the people who are still, in spite of all the facts on the ground and everything we're hearing from experts on the subject, still they insist that this is nothing to worry about.
Based on what?
On what basis do they wave all this stuff off?
I think it's on the basis of arrogance, denial, and a misplaced belief and confidence that the normalcy and comfort of our modern life will continue indefinitely.
I know that because I feel it too, and it's hard to resist.
So have I changed my tune on this?
Yes, absolutely.
Do I think the world is coming to an end?
No, I do not.
Do I think we should panic?
No, nobody does.
Do I think that the more dire predictions of millions of people being infected and many, many dying, do I think that will come true?
I don't know.
I really don't.
I'm not sure.
But I will go out on not much of a limb And say that there is reason for serious concern for us and reason to make some adjustments to our lives and the way that we conduct ourselves to protect ourselves and our loved ones.
That's where I am right now.
If it all sounds kind of confused and contradictory and unhelpful, well then I guess good, because I don't want you coming to me for help on this.
I'm not the guy for that.
No show host is.
You shouldn't be going to anybody None of us should be going to someone who gives opinions for a living for advice on something like this.
All we can do is listen to what the doctors and epidemiologists are saying.
Not just your local pediatrician, who isn't necessarily an expert on viral pandemics, though he certainly knows more than I do and you do, but the men and women who do this work for a living, if we listen to them, look at how governments and powerful institutions across the world are handling this at great cost, And then we make up our minds about how we should treat it.
And that's the best I think that we can do at this point.
Let's move on to some news headlines.
Number one, Bernie Sanders called a press conference yesterday and most people thought he was going to drop out.
But those people forgot that Bernie Sanders is an old man obsessed with power and the sound of his own voice.
So they forgot about that and thought he would drop out.
He didn't.
Instead, he did this.
We are winning the generational Well, Joe Biden continues to do very well with older Americans, especially those people over 65.
Our campaign continues to win the vast majority of the votes of younger people.
And I am talking about people not just in their 20s.
So Bernie's staying in this thing.
He's not going anywhere.
He's not going to win.
generations of this country continue in very strong numbers to support our campaign.
So Bernie's staying in this thing.
He's not going anywhere.
He's not going to win.
He really can't win.
And his continued presence is only going to hurt the eventual nominee, Joe Biden, who
Who, by the way, is a guy who could really use a break at this point.
He could really use some time off his feet, as it were.
But instead of giving that to him, Bernie is going to keep harassing him and forcing him to stay in it and keep arguing.
Which, as a conservative, I'm a big fan of.
I love the approach.
If I were a Democrat, I'd be pretty...
Pretty upset.
But remember, as I always say, it requires an immense amount of ego and self-delusion to run for president in the first place.
I mean, just thinking to yourself... Imagine thinking to yourself, seriously, I should be president and I can actually win.
I should be in charge of the whole country.
I am the guy.
And I could really win, too.
Imagine thinking... Imagine the...
Narcissism required to have that thought in your head.
And the near psychotic level of delusion you have to have to think that you could actually win.
Now, of course, it does end up being true.
One of those deluded narcissists will really win, and so maybe in the end they weren't so deluded, though they're still narcissistic.
But that's why, when we understand that, it becomes less mysterious why a guy like Bernie Sanders stays in the race, acting like a deluded narcissist, to the very end.
Well, because that's what he is, and that's why he got in, and that's been the animating force behind his run this entire time.
Number two, Harvey Weinstein, as you probably heard, is going to jail for 23 years, convicted of rape.
He's also going to be, I imagine, In solitary confinement, essentially, for his whole time in prison.
I would think that, although I did recently read that they moved Bill Cosby out of protective custody and put him in the general population, which is kind of surprising.
It seems unlikely they would do that with Weinstein.
I don't know.
Either way, an astounding turn of events for Harvey Weinstein.
Not astounding at this point.
The fact that he's going to jail, if you're looking at the last three years, the fact that he's going to jail for rape is not very astounding.
But if you go back five years, ten years, He was one of the most powerful people in Hollywood, whined and dined by the world's elites.
Now he's going to prison as a rapist, and he'll die there in a cell.
Of course, this should have happened much sooner, and those elites who are whining and dining him, a lot of them should be in jail with him.
But the point is, evil doesn't look so glamorous anymore when it's hobbling into a jail cell as an old, fat, broken man to sit there for the rest of his life and then eventually die.
Forgotten and scorned.
That's what evil gets you.
Number three, a bill in Canada, speaking of evil, would criminalize so-called conversion therapy.
Here's the language of the bill.
Any practice, treatment, or service designed to change an individual's sexual orientation or gender identity, or to eliminate or reduce sexual attraction or sexual behavior between persons of the same sex, for greater certainty, this definition does not include a surgical sex change or any related service.
So that's how they describe conversion therapy, and the bill would ban that.
Now, in a pretty powerful testimony against this bill, a woman who used to live as a man recorded a video that was going to be presented to the lawmakers in Canada, urging them to vote against the bill, because she's someone who relied upon so-called conversion therapy to come to a point where she's happy and satisfied in her own body as the person that God made her.
Here's some of what she had to say.
Senators of Canada, I would encourage you to vote NO on S-202.
Without the help of discipleship ministries and counseling, I could not be living in my biological sex, healthy and whole.
Giving those who struggle with gender confusion hormone is only treating the symptom and not treating the real underlying issues.
In voting no, you would allow hope to continue for those, like me, who are seeking help from counseling or from a ministry or help through their church.
These places are offering healing and restoration to those who struggle with unwanted same-sex attraction, homosexuality, or gender confusion, not conversion therapy.
Now let's think about this.
Think about a bill that criminalizes so-called conversion therapy.
First of all, what happened to being pro-choice?
If someone wants to seek this counseling, why shouldn't they have the choice to do it?
What you're really saying with a bill like this is that a person in the LGBT community should not be able to find and receive and choose to receive this sort of counseling, even if they want it.
How is that not infantilizing, patronizing, controlling?
Also, let's focus on the transgender piece of this.
Because this is where it's really, really evil, in my opinion.
What the bill seems to be saying is that if somebody, if a man, let's say, thinks he's a woman, it should be against the law to help him accept his natural biological sex.
To try to relieve him of this delusion that is destroying his life and causing him despair, and which he is seeking.
He has gone to a counselor seeking to be rid of it.
What Canada is saying is, no, it should be illegal.
You can't treat that.
You can't give him what he wants.
You can't help him.
If he thinks he's a woman and he's unhappy with that delusion and wants to be free of it, sorry, you can't help him.
But it's not illegal.
It's explicitly not illegal to castrate him.
So that's what you're allowed to do.
He comes to you, thinks he's a woman, he's in despair.
You can castrate him.
You can't give him psychological treatment.
Castration is going to be the only acceptable treatment option, one of the only acceptable treatment options for someone with gender dysphoria.
Canada has completely lost its mind in conclusion.
But actually, wait a second here.
Because, let's think about this.
If a gay man wants to be a woman, becomes a woman, quote-unquote, and is still attracted to men, then if his new gender is legitimate, and if we're told he's a woman now, it's what he is.
Well, hasn't he just gone from gay to straight?
According to you?
Now he's a woman attracted to men.
He's a straight woman.
Went from gay man to straight woman.
He went from gay to straight, right?
So isn't that conversion therapy then?
Haven't you effectively changed his sexual orientation?
Which you've told us is impossible to do.
Well, you just did it.
So you're telling me it's illegal to change someone's sexual orientation unless you do it by castration.
In which case, you're good to go.
Four, Sarah Palin was on the show, The Masked Singer.
That's the one where celebrities, or former celebrities, come out in masks and sing, as the name would suggest.
This show is somehow very popular.
Sarah Palin showed up, and I'll show you the clip.
I'm not really sure of the context, because I don't watch the show, because I have an IQ over 82.
But, so, I don't know the context.
She's singing, but she doesn't have a mask on, so I don't know what, I thought she was supposed to have a mask on.
So here she is singing, or rapping, actually.
And, well, here it is, watch.
The art is formerly known as the bear.
Y'all make some noise for Governor Sarah Palin!
Can I be your hype man?
Yeah, yeah!
Come on, Sarah!
I'm like Big Pops, and I can't not lie.
You motherfuckers can't deny.
When a girl walks in, who's a dizzy, getting wasted around, peeping in your face.
You get sprung.
Oh, my god.
What is her show?
Ha, ha, ha, ha.
Deep in the jeans she wearing.
I'm hooked, and I can't not dare at all.
Oh, baby.
I'm born to be a witch, y'all.
And to take your picture.
My homegirl trying to warn me, but that's what you got me, so.
Ooh, got my smooth skin.
Sickle my penis.
Use me, use me, cause ain't that average Ruby.
God's wrath has really come upon this nation.
And for good reason.
Very, very good reason.
Thank you.
Five.
A bit of a disturbing tweet, I thought, from the Chicago Transit Authority.
Here it is.
It says, our crews continue to work all hours of the day to ensure trains, buses, and stations are cleaned and disinfected daily.
And there's footage of CTA crews cleaning and scrubbing down the trains very diligently, which is good.
That's not the disturbing part.
That part is not disturbing.
The disturbing part is the apparent insinuation that they don't do this every day, anyway, regardless of a virus.
In fact, I've become sort of uncomfortable with that.
All of the wash your hands stuff, Even tutorials you find, the media, newspapers publishing these how-to's on how to wash your hands.
I think, don't people do that anyway?
Is anyone learning anything from this?
Who's the person who saw a tutorial on washing your hands in the newspaper and said, oh, that's how you do it!
And I see people on social media saying, man, I'm washing my hands so much now, it's crazy!
Okay, but what were you doing before is my question.
Because you should be washing your hands frequently throughout the day anyway.
Not just when you go to the bathroom, but like throughout the day you should wash your hands.
It's just something you should do.
Good hygiene.
So I'm glad everybody has discovered hygiene.
My point is I hope that this becomes a habit that outlasts the virus.
Which may help us prevent another one.
Number six.
Here's a bonus story.
Usually I do five, but here's the sixth one.
I just want to play this for you.
This is from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
One of the... I know it sounds banal, but one of the key parts to preventing transmission is washing your hands and not touching your face.
Okay, wait a second.
What was that?
Banal?
Banal.
Okay, it's banal.
It's not banal.
Banal rhymes with canal.
It's not banal rhymes with anal.
Now, I want to be a little sympathetic because I think many of us have been in a spot before where we use a certain word and then somebody corrects us and tells us that we mispronounced it and then we think back and we think, oh my goodness, I had been saying this word wrong my entire life.
This is a word I use a lot and no one has ever told me I'm pronouncing it.
How many people have I said this to and they thought to themselves, what an idiot and never told me anything?
It's kind of like if you're, you know, it's like 6 p.m.
and you went to the bathroom six hours ago and somebody says, hey, your fly's unzipped.
And you think, you're the first person to tell me.
So it's a similar kind of thing.
I had that experience recently when I went to go to a food truck to order a gyro.
And I noticed, for the first time, I noticed that the guy behind the counter referred to it as a yeero.
I think that's how you pronounce it.
Yeero?
Like with a Y?
And I thought, is that?
And then I looked it up, and I went, no, that, okay, that's actually what I'm supposed to be saying, gyro, not gyro.
I've been saying gyro this whole time.
And that's a problem because I love gyros, and I eat them all the time.
So how many times have I gone up and said, can I have one gyro, please?
And the person thought, what a, what a dumb American, and never bothered to tell me.
Although I'm sticking with gyro because I think gyro just sounds weird.
All right.
That was a long story.
A little bit banal.
I'm sorry.
Sorry for that banal story.
Now, finally, we'll go to our daily cancellation.
We're not going to have time for the emails today, but we had a couple of good Why I'm Wrong emails.
We'll do those tomorrow.
Remember, you can become a member, DeliWire member, and send emails to the mailbag.
All right.
Today, we have a rare double cancellation to end with.
Not a person being canceled twice.
We've done that already.
But in this case, it's a person being canceled twice for basically the same infraction or a related infraction.
And here we have Mara Gay, who earns this distinct honor of the double, the rare double cancellation.
She was the woman, well I'll just play it for you to remind you, she was the woman involved in this famous, rather infamous exchange.
You see it as a possibility if he wants to spend a billion bucks beating this guy, he could do it.
Absolutely.
Somebody tweeted recently that actually with the money he spent, he could have given every American a million dollars.
I've got it.
Let's put it up on the screen.
When I read it tonight on social media, it kind of all became clear.
Bloomberg spent $500 million on ads.
U.S.
population, 327 million.
Don't tell us if you're ahead of us on the math.
He could have given each American $1 million and have had lunch money left over.
It's an incredible way of putting it.
It's an incredible way of putting it.
It's true.
It's disturbing.
It does suggest, you know, what we're talking about here, which is there's too much money in politics.
So that obviously was incorrect.
They were both off by a factor of about a million.
500 million divided by 327 million gives each person a buck and a half, not a million dollars.
And that woman, Mara Gay, as well as Brian Williams, Both came in for some criticism.
A lot of criticism.
Because this is the internet age and this is what happens when you say something stupid.
You're gonna have 10 million people calling you stupid.
It's gonna last for about 3 or 4 days probably.
Maybe a little bit longer in a case of something like this.
I've been through it.
A lot of us have been through it.
It's not fun.
You just gotta ride with it.
Ride it out.
People will move on.
Especially these days, we're in the middle of a pandemic, people have other things to talk about.
So you could just go into hiding, go into a bunker, it's good anyway, you avoid the pandemic that way.
Come out in three days, everyone's moved on.
Well, Mara Gay, she didn't want to do that.
She didn't want to take this in stride or play along or be self-deprecating about it.
So instead, how do you think she handled it?
What angle do you think she took?
What narrative did she try to construct to explain the criticism?
Well, of course we already know.
She said that it was racist.
She wrote a piece in the New York Times with the title, My people have been through worse than a Twitter mob.
When you're a black woman in America with a public voice, a trivial math error can lead to a deluge of hate.
A deluge of hate, I should say.
A deluge.
I'm making fun of people.
I mispronounce words all the time.
I'm aware of that.
And here I am making fun of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Uh, and she goes on from there to talk about the racist attacks that she suffered, all the horrible racism, the racist mob that came after.
She doesn't- never mind the fact that Brian Williams, again, is a- is a white man, and he came in for the same criticism, same exact amount, probably more.
That doesn't count.
That doesn't matter.
People were criticizing a black woman, so obviously it has to be racist and sexist, too.
Of course, she threw that in there.
And the moral of the story, according to her, is that she's a hero.
She's Rosa Parks.
She's a civil rights martyr, actually.
She's a warrior, withstanding courageously all the people on the internet calling her stupid for making a math error.
First of all, it was not a trivial error.
You were off by a factor of a million.
That's not trivial.
Second, no.
You see, Mara, that's not how this works.
You said something dumb, People reacted.
They would have reacted the same if you were a white man saying it, and we know that because a white man said it too, and he got the exact same reaction.
And that's it.
You might be able to sift through the thousands of tweets that came at you, laughing at you, and find a couple that had a racist tinge to them, and that's bad, they shouldn't have done that, but that doesn't make the entire mob racist.
If there are 10 million people making fun of you, and three of them make it into a racial thing, you can't say that the entire 10 million are racist.
If you wanna call them a bunch of jerks, a bunch of petty jerks who are laughing at you, fine, I would agree with that.
And I'm one of the petty jerks who laughed at you.
Not racist, though.
Not everything is racist, it turns out.
All right, we're gonna leave it there.
And I hope you guys all have a great day.
Stay safe out there.
Remember your social distancing.
And we'll talk tomorrow.
Godspeed.
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The Matt Wall Show is produced by Sean Hampton, Executive Producer Jeremy Boring, Supervising Producer Mathis Glover, Supervising Producer Robert Sterling, Technical Producer Austin Stevens, Editor Danny D'Amico, Audio Mixer Robin Fenderson.
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Hey everyone, it's Andrew Klavan, host of The Andrew Klavan Show.
Stuff is getting real in the WuFlu crisis, but at least Bernie Sanders is still living in a fantasy world.
