May 5, 2021 - Dennis Prager Show
03:57
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Right. | |
| And one of the stranger episodes of 2020 was that in the midst of a pandemic, certainly one of the worst since the 1950s, we suddenly had vast nationwide protests in hundreds of different locations against police violence. | |
| Now, the Latin expression non sequitur comes to mind. | |
| It seemed like a strange time to have that debate in the midst of that. | |
| of a public health emergency, but we did. | |
| And then what was even more surreal was that people who had been previously opposed to any kind of gathering, even quite small gatherings, were suddenly entirely fine with very large gatherings of people protesting against the police and, by the way, protesting on distinctly spurious grounds, given the relatively... | |
| There's a small number of incidents in which the police use lethal violence against unarmed black suspects. | |
| But we'll leave that aside. | |
| I think it's fair to say that it made no sense to encourage or at least tolerate those protests, given the guidelines that had already been issued and which seem to apply to everybody else except the Black Lives Matter protesters. | |
| I wrote in April of last year that this was the greatest mistake in world history. | |
| I made it clear I wasn't saying the greatest evil. | |
| Clearly there were greater evils. | |
| But I thought it was the greatest mistake. | |
| And I want you to comment on Sweden. | |
| Do you think Sweden was the one country in the West to have handled it more properly? | |
| I think it would be wrong to say that Sweden did a brilliant job because a number of the mistakes that were made in other countries were made in Sweden, too. | |
| For example, they didn't protect the elderly in care homes, and so they got a significant number of avoidable deaths there. | |
| However, they were right, I think, to say that you could control the disease with I don't think the poster child | |
| is Sweden, though, because ultimately I think the real success stories were countries... | |
| That I mentioned already, Taiwan and South Korea, which dealt with this problem in a smart way. | |
| And I want to just address one issue that often comes up when one discusses this. | |
| You know, their use of technology, in particular their use of contact tracing, so that they were quickly able to find out when an infected person... | |
| I've been in contact with other people. | |
| I heard again and again last year from big tech companies as well that we couldn't do this in the United States because it would be a violation of our civil liberties. | |
| I thought that was wrong for two reasons. | |
| One, because in Taiwan they've been very careful to make sure that the kind of data that they use was anonymized and couldn't be used for any other purpose. | |
| I mean, they have thought about this issue because they care a lot about their liberties in Taiwan. | |
| After all, they are threatened by The People's Republic of China on a daily basis. | |
| But also because being locked in your own home under house arrest, as people in California, New York, and many other states were, is hardly a triumph of civil liberty. | |
| And if the choice for me is between having some contact tracing that works and being locked in my own home, I'll take the contact tracing. | |
| That's a very interesting point. | |
| Back in a moment with Neil Ferguson. |
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