Democrats ONCE AGAIN Block Emergency Relief For Social Justice Demands, Media Blames Republicans
Democrats ONCE AGAIN Block Emergency Relief For Social Justice Demands, Media Blames Republicans. Mitch McConnell wanted to increase emergency loans for small businesses from 350 billion to 600 billion.This is a bill Democrats have already voted in support of but for some reason are now opposed to. Democrats demanded a negotiation. They wanted the new measure to include social justice stipulations as well as more money for hospitals.Republicans were criticized for pushing forward with a vote knowing that Democrats would not support it. To me that seems like an odd excuse for trying to leverage social justice demands into a small business relief bill but sure whatever.Now is not the time for partisan bickering especially on bills already supported by Democrats.But even though Bernie Sanders is out and Trump is expected to win we will still likely see more of this far left pandering in the future as the socialist wing of the party grows and becomes more powerful.
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If you are a regular viewer of my content, then you will not be surprised to hear that, once again, Democrats have blocked a coronavirus stimulus package.
Republicans wanted to increase the amount of money going to small businesses by $250 billion, which I find particularly important, considering we are in a major economic breakdown.
Though the markets have been improving, we are going to need a major kickstart.
I have been dealing personally with these issues pertaining to the CARES Act and how this will impact my business, and talking to my friends about their businesses as well, so I think this is an important measure.
Now, the Democrats blocked it, and first, let me give them the harsh criticism.
They did because they want guarantees on how this money will be spent for social justice issues.
Surprise, surprise, ideology is interfering with the ability of the American people to maintain their businesses at a time of serious crisis.
To be fair, one of their criticisms is that hospitals need more resources, but that's more of an accounting issue.
Sure enough, the Democrats blocked this, the bill was not pushed forward, it will be delayed, and we don't even know if they will get the job done tomorrow.
So yes, my criticism all around to everyone in Congress regardless, but yes, it was the Democrats who blocked this.
Now, we did see Bernie Sanders drop out.
But many people are wondering how far the social justice ideology will continue to infect the Democrats.
Because that's one of the big issues that jammed up this relief package.
Calls for, you know, minority and low income and other social justice narratives into how people can get, you know, loans for their crippled businesses amid this pandemic.
And even with Bernie Sanders leaving, there's a few things we have to recognize.
Bernie Sanders raised substantially more money than Joe Biden did.
And some people are arguing now that the relief packages we're putting forward are socialism themselves, though others argue it's just an emergency package.
We are going to see more of the Democrats embracing socialism and social justice.
It will not end with Bernie Sanders.
But first, let's get started by going over exactly what they blocked, why they blocked it, and guess what?
What if I told you that certain media outlets were trying to protect the Democrats by blaming partisan issues instead of the fact that they blocked this bill because they wanted to put things in it?
You would not be surprised by that either.
Well, I'm going to show you how CNN ran a headline and then changed it later to blame Republicans or to make it fair and balanced when it's not really.
This is CBS News with the accurate headline.
Senate Democrats block $250 billion expansion of small business loan program.
Why?
Well, we're going to find out.
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Let's read the news.
CBS reports the Senate failed to approve legislation Thursday that would expand funding for the Paycheck Protection Program, which provides loans to small businesses to mitigate the economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic.
Republicans had hoped to approve an additional $250 billion for the program, which was established as part of the massive $2.2 trillion relief package signed by President Trump last month.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell tried to approve the measure by unanimous consent, which doesn't require the presence of a majority of senators, most of whom have returned home.
He took to the floor Thursday morning to urge Democrats to support the measure.
Quote, I'm literally talking about deleting the number 350 and writing 600 in its place, McConnell said, referring to $350 billion originally allocated for the fund.
Do not block emergency aid.
You do not oppose just because you want something more.
So let's break this down.
The Republicans are saying, we already agreed on this.
We already know what the money is for.
We want to give more money.
And what did the Democrats say?
No, we want money for other programs and we want stipulations on how the money can be used.
We already agreed to this.
Is it?
You know what?
Let me just read it for you.
Senate Democrats immediately held up McConnell's unanimous consent request, accusing Republicans of trying to ram through the expansion with no negotiation and calling for more funding for hospitals and state and local governments.
I get it, you want something more, but we're talking about a small business loan program, not Hospital relief or state and local government relief.
If you want to negotiate on those things, then I think it's fair to negotiate on those things.
But don't block up aid you already voted to support, simply because you want a different bill to be put forward.
The majority leader knew full well there was not agreement and consensus, Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland said.
This was, in fact, designed to fail, designed as a political stunt.
Now, I won't go that far, but it is true.
We knew the Democrats were not on board.
You could argue McConnell didn't need to bring this forward because he should have known it would fail.
But I kind of feel like an attempt to try and bring it forward, it's not necessarily a negative on the part of the Republicans.
They said, hey, we're going to go for it.
The Democrats blocked it.
The Democrats are the ones who blocked it.
I wouldn't call it a political stunt, but I would throw some criticism all around for everybody.
I don't care if you're a Republican or a Democrat.
This is absurd.
The reality is, the Democrats are trying to shoehorn in other funding.
If they already agree with the aid, if they agree with the amount, they shouldn't be blocking this.
If the Democrats said, we do not agree with this number, it is too large, I'd be fine with it.
I'd say, okay, well, you know, that's what you get.
But that's not the issue.
McConnell objected to the Democratic proposal put forward by Van Hollen.
The Democratic senator then objected to McConnell's proposal.
The Senate adjourned without approving any new funding for the PPP.
The Senate is officially scheduled to reconvene on April 20th, but another pro forma session may be called before then to try to approve the additional funding.
So that's good news.
Treasurer Secretary Steven Mnuchin on Tuesday requested Congress approve additional money for the loan program, which is designed to help small businesses keep employees on payroll and cover their bills during the pandemic.
The Trump administration has said that billions of dollars have already gone out the door, but many small businesses who have applied for the loans say they have yet to receive any funds.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi made further requests Wednesday for an interim legislative package in addition to the $250 billion loan expansion.
The Democratic leaders want $100 billion for hospitals and health systems to support rapid testing and personal protective equipment.
$150 billion for state and local governments and a 15% increase in the maximum food stamp benefit for families.
Hey, man, that's great.
I don't disagree.
I think that's a good idea.
The Democrats in the past have been saying hospitals need more money.
I'm down.
This is an emergency relief package.
We're going to be spending a ton of money.
We will reap the negatives of this in the future.
I personally am not an economist, can't tell you what the major negatives are going to be, but I think it's great to allocate money to hospitals, especially when we're seeing some nurses and some doctors getting their pay slashed or even being furloughed.
That being said, that sounds like a different bill.
I'm not quite sure why you're blocking an expansion on loan programs.
Ah, here we go.
Here's exactly why.
Of the $250 billion for small businesses, Democrats called for $125 billion to be specifically for farmers, women, minority, family, and veteran-owned businesses and non-profits, and want to improve the loan program to ensure small businesses seeking loans are not rejected by banks.
Hey man, noble causes, I guess.
But it's not really the time to say that women, minority, and, you know, we'll get priority on this stuff.
Farmers, veterans, look, I get it.
But it really seems like they're injecting pandering into something that doesn't need to be... Well, you don't need to pander to people.
The loans go out to people.
However, Mr. Trump signaled that he would not support Democratic demands, and Senate Republicans appeared uninterested in negotiating.
We don't have time for the partisan games, Mr. Trump said during the Coronavirus Task Force briefing at the White House.
Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve announced Thursday that it would take additional action to provide up to $2.3 trillion in emergency loans to support the economy, including bolstering the PPP by supplying liquidity to financial institutions providing the loans to small businesses.
The economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic has been devastating.
On Thursday, the Department of Labor announced that 6.6 million people filed initial unemployment claims in the week ending April 4th, the third straight week of massive job loss, now putting the number near 17 million.
Let's take a look at how our friends over at CNN reported the news.
Senate at stalemate over more COVID-19 aid after Republicans and Democrats block competing proposals.
Is that what happened?
I thought it was Mitch McConnell who brought to the floor with a plan for what he wanted.
You can criticize him for knowing, and I'll show you the story, but let me show you what CNN initially reported.
Democrats block GOP-led funding boost for small business aid program.
That is the correct headline.
The GOP was trying to increase the amount of money that will be allocated to small businesses.
The Democrats blocked it.
Can we move on?
Oh, but because some Democrat said we want something in that bill, it's now a partisan issue?
Apparently so.
Politico reports that it fails to approve new coronavirus relief after partisan stalemate.
Yes, technically the truth.
Fine.
Now, even CNBC has no problem saying that Democrats block McConnell's bid to add $250 billion in small business aid.
Can we just be honest about this?
You've got CNN and Politico trying to make it a partisan thing.
That's what's called false objectivity.
CNBC actually, I think, has the best headline of any of these outlets.
McConnell had a bid to increase the money.
The Democrats blocked it.
It wasn't proposed by the Democrats.
It was proposed by McConnell.
We saw this yesterday.
We knew it was coming.
So, yes, you can criticize McConnell.
I've never been a big fan.
Democrats tack on demands to $250 billion boost for small businesses.
And they specifically point out that they wanted the social justice women and minority family and veteran owned.
Now, look, I get it.
Farmers, family and veteran owned.
That's not social justice.
But it is putting in special interest groups into this bill, which I don't think you need, and it seems strange to put in.
But the women minority thing is where you're getting the ideology digging into the relief that many people need.
Look, I know many of you are probably not small business owners.
Some of you probably are.
I am a small business owner.
I have friends who run small businesses.
We're looking at how this is going to impact everything.
We're looking at how we pay the bills at a time with collapsing ad revenues.
We're looking at major media companies, many of whom I am critical of and not a fan of, laying off staff Furloughing staff and cutting their own salaries.
We're seeing stories of major CEOs cutting their salaries.
AMC theaters announcing they may not survive this.
We need relief for businesses, and it includes larger ones like AMC.
We want to get back to normal, and we don't want economic damage across the board.
So please, can we drop the pretense and drop the ideology?
Unfortunately, it would seem we cannot because this is not the first time they've tried doing it.
Over at the Washington Examiner, we see this story.
Social justice has infected Democrats' coronavirus response.
Now, we can go back, what is it, like seven years to the origins of the culture war, however you think it may have began, may have started.
Some say it started during Occupy Wall Street, but here we are now at high-level federal politics, and these fringe ideas that weirdos were preaching about privilege and the progressive stack and these other things are now making their way into our legislation.
Politicians like Ocasio-Cortez want social justice-style reparations for the coronavirus pandemic relief, which makes literally no sense.
She says black and brown communities are being negatively impacted more than anyone else.
Well, yeah, it's just low-income communities.
How about we provide relief to low-income communities, which includes black and brown communities, as well as white communities?
Why does it have to be racial segregation with these people?
Well, here we go!
This is the story from back on March 25th.
To give you some context, I'll read you a little bit, because this is not the first time.
It was a couple weeks ago when the Democrats blocked the other relief package for like a week.
Why?
Pelosi wanted her own bill, which included a ton of weird ideological propositions.
The Examiner writes, As bumbling as the Trump administration has been in addressing the current health scare, count on Democrats to come out of this looking so much worse as they try using the crisis as an excuse to push their irritating social justice causes.
Yeah, they're sparing no words.
Imagine learning that a third of the U.S.
economy has shuttered amid a pandemic.
And to address the emergency, Democrats swung into action by crafting a multi-trillion dollar bill that, among other things, mandates that any business in need of financial relief, quote, has adopted a policy plan or strategy to promote racial, ethnic, and gender diversity.
Are you kidding?
The small business that needs a loan that's run by like seven people is going to have a diversity plan?
Imagine learning that tens of thousands of people have been infected with a new disease, traced back to a wet, unsanitary seafood market in China, and the response from Democrats and liberals in the national media is to aggressively shame anyone who dares note the virus's origins.
Imagine being confronted with a new worldwide deadly virus, and the action taken by the president to contain its spread Again, where the contagion started was labeled by the presumed Democratic presidential nominee as xenophobic and racial.
Yes.
Thank you, Joe Biden.
We appreciate it.
So we get it.
Now is not the time for whatever it is they're doing, but it's a coming.
It's not going to end here.
While we did get this passed, I believe Pelosi backed down on these weird demands.
They exist and they want more.
We can see how it's actually becoming a part of the Democratic Party, even with Bernie Sanders finally dropping out.
Joe Biden proves centrist Democrats have lost to the social justice mob.
This story from March 16th points out how Joe Biden pledged to have a woman female, you know, a female vice president.
Why?
Can we just have a good vice president?
Can you find someone who's going to do a good job, be it a male or a female?
I mean, most of us liberal types, be it, you know, center right or center left, you know, I mean liberal in the true sense of the word, social or classical.
We don't care if you're a woman, or a man, or LGBTQ, or whatever.
Whatever your religion is, we care that you're effective.
You're going to do a good job, you're going to respect the Constitution, and do right by the American people, even if, to some extent, we disagree politically.
There are many people I absolutely think are wrong, but I think are still good people trying their hardest.
Yet, Joe Biden says this is the factor that's most important.
Not even Bernie Sanders would go that far.
He said, yeah, you know, presumably.
Which brings me to the change coming to the Democratic Party.
Like we're seeing now, the Democrats are obstructing small business relief because of weird social justice issues.
Well, I'll tell you what.
Joe Biden, according to Open Secrets in the 2020 campaign, has raised mostly from large contributors around, I believe, I believe the number is, where are we at?
86 million dollars.
He has spent $74 million.
Well, guess what?
Bernie Sanders raised $179 million, nearly $100 million more than Joe Biden did.
I will tell you what, Joe Biden may have won because he's got a big push from the Democratic establishment, the people in media, but the people on the ground, they are not all about Joe Biden.
They are about Bernie Sanders.
And even though Bernie Sanders lost, these people are not going away.
So I'll tell you what I think is going to happen.
I think Donald Trump is going to win in November.
I think Joe Biden is going to be completely crushed.
Assuming they debate, it will be more... It's going to be devastating to Joe Biden, to say the least.
That guy can't debate Trump.
That guy can't even speak.
Tucker Carlson recently asked some serious questions.
Would Joe Biden be able to find his car in a three-tiered parking garage or navigate a salad bar?
I know they're silly questions, but I saw that and I was like, look, man, all joking aside, he's right.
Bernie Sanders base is here to stay.
They're not going away.
They're going to push harder.
The Democrats in Congress will continue to accept this ideology.
Joe Biden himself is trying to pander these people desperate to win.
He won't get their support because Joe Biden is old school.
You know, he's not even really a centrist.
He's trying to pander to these politics.
But we are we are eventually going to see more and more of this.
Now here's what I find truly interesting in the whole coronavirus socialism debate, is the conflicting ideas around whether or not we will get more or less of socialism.
The New York Post argued that socialist ideas lost their appeal once the pandemic actually struck and we saw how things were faring.
Some people argue that the relief package itself is socialism.
It's not as an emergency relief package.
The Hill asks, will coronavirus launch the second wave of socialism?
You see, amid this crisis, we absolutely are seeing not just from the Democrats, but many activists calls for universal health care as the only solution.
It's not.
We're seeing many people say, see, they announced they're going to pay, you know, $6 trillion into this.
They're going to put $6 trillion into this market, into our economy to help relief, relieve the economic damage, which proves we could have Medicare for all.
You theoretically could because Medicare for all would cost less than $6 trillion.
What they ignore is that that $6 trillion injection into the economy is going to be very, very bad for us in the long run, but we're willing to accept the damage.
To kind of, well, stem the bleed as the economy is hurting.
So certainly I fall on the side of no, socialism is not a good idea.
And no, this isn't socialism, it's an economic stimulus.
Socialism would be seizing the means of production and nationalizing parts of the economy, which we've seen happen in Spain.
Spain now wants to have a universal basic income permanently, and they use this as pretext.
So I don't believe it will launch a second wave of socialism, but it will get us closer than we've ever seen.
Commentary Magazine says, the Democratic Party's socialist makeover is only delayed.
I read this on my second channel, and I agree.
Just because Bernie Sanders dropped out doesn't mean that the massive support he received is going anywhere.
The Democratic establishment is under fire from both sides of the culture war.
You've got the progressive left and the social justice warriors, as well as the Trump supporters and conservatives and everybody in between, wagging the finger at the establishment resistance DNC.
They're, you know, what did someone say?
Yogurt-eating women in their upscale New York apartments pretending like they're the resistance because they're going to vote for Joe Biden over Donald Trump.
You're not the resistance!
And I'll be fair, not even many of these progressive Bernie supporters who live in New York as well are really the resistance.
But to their credit, Bernie Sanders, for all of his faults and all of his bad ideas that I do not agree with, he was a guy who could speak English and form cohesive sentences.
So now the Democratic establishment is putting everything on this guy Biden, who has no idea where he is, has no idea what's going on, and he can't speak straight.
That says to me the DNC is on its last leg.
The establishment, cronies, they're not going to make it out of this.
So now we have Bernie Sanders' base, still active, still riled up, and maybe they haven't given up.
Maybe now they'll start voting for people in Congress.
We've already seen the squad get their victory.
Maybe it's a fluke.
Maybe come November we'll see all of these, you know, progressive Democrats lose out as the establishment comes back.
Even if the Democratic establishment can win back many of these seats and push back on the far left, I think it's fair to say that in order for the Democrats to win in the first place, they will have to adopt more social justice rhetoric, more socialist perspective.
In which case, we are going to see substantially more socialism in the Democratic Party moving forward.
Don't take my word for it.
Jacobin Magazine absolutely thinks so, saying we lost the battle, but we'll win the war.
The Bernie Sanders campaign fell short, but it assembled a coalition that, if expanded only slightly, can reshape American politics for generations to come.
Well, they're right, 100%.
It's very similar to what Rep.
Clyburn told Nancy Pelosi when she and the other Democrats worked to block the first coronavirus stimulus.
Now is our chance to reshape things in our vision.
I'm not interested in your ideology or reshaping anything in anyone's vision.
I care about the people who have companies and who have jobs, keeping those jobs and keeping those companies afloat.
There's a couple ways we can go about doing that.
We can give every American an emergency unemployment stimulus check with a bonus, and we can give small businesses loans that will be forgiven if they are used for payroll.
That's what we are doing right now.
Perhaps we need more money in that.
So if Mitch McConnell puts forward a bill that says we're going to increase the loan by $250 billion, all I can really do is shrug and say, I don't know what the right number is.
I'm not an economist.
Perhaps it's too much.
Perhaps it's too little.
I can tell you that trying to block the relief package that you've already voted in support of simply because they're not setting aside stipulations that mandate women, minorities, farmers, families, and veterans get specific access to that money makes no sense.
Think about what that means.
Half of the money proposed by McConnell would have to go to these particular groups.
Well, what does that mean?
What if most businesses are run by dudes without families?
I don't know.
Why would you even put that in there?
And why would you block relief, which goes to everybody, to guarantee half of it goes to some specific groups?
Look, I get it.
Social justice.
That's why.
Political pandering?
I don't know.
But here we are once again with Democrats obstructing a relief package that will go to businesses at a time when we desperately need it.
I think we'll get out of this.
And I'm glad, I'm actually, you know, kind of happy that the biggest problem we have today is to bicker about partisan issues, because the truth is, things are actually starting to get better.
We're seeing the CDC say that we could start reopening some businesses, you know, that people who have been exposed can now get back to work very slowly.
It looks like we're coming down, you know, we're at the back end of the bell curve on this peak, and it's gonna start getting better for everybody.
I'm glad that political bickering will be the norm once again because the alternative is scarier.
People losing their lives, dying in their homes, I don't even want to think about it.
So, for now, they're blocking a relief package that's going to help us weather this storm.
I do not like it.
They should not do that.
But I'm warning you now.
What we're seeing, there will be more of this.
The democratic establishment has lost the battle and they are going to adopt this ideology.
They're going to try to reunify, which means Joe Biden and whoever comes next will have to pander to all of these people.
And to those of you who are For Bernie Sanders supporters, you can certainly see I'm framing it in a way away from your perspective because I don't agree with it, but at least you can revel in the fact that I'm telling you straight up you are going to beat the Democratic establishment 100%.
It'll just take a little bit more time.
For all the Trump supporters and conservatives, you're probably worried because they have a weird ideology like the social justice stuff, but regardless, the Democratic establishment is out.
The obstructing they're doing won't necessarily, it won't be the same in the future.
But maybe Donald Trump, as a populist, will try to adopt many more policies to actually court the progressive left as of right now.
We've already seen people like Joe Biden, who's a relatively lefty dude, say he would rather have Trump than Joe Biden.
What does that mean for the Democratic establishment?
Now, there's a lot of resistance types who refuse to accept it.
I think it's possible Donald Trump will adopt some left populist policies, and he will attract many Bernie Sanders supporters.
I absolutely think so.
I'll leave it there.
Thanks for hanging out, everybody.
Stick around.
The next segment will be coming up at youtube.com slash TimCastNews.
It is my other YouTube channel.
That'll be at 6 PM and I will see you all then.
Bye.
You see, we recently learned that the initial projections of 100,000 to 240,000 dead were high.
We have flattened the curve, we have done what we set out to do, and it is not going to be as bad as we thought.
I'm not going to play conspiracy theory because you are getting conspiracy theories from some on the right and many on the left, but you're not really seeing mainstream high-profile conservatives going full conspiracy nutter like MSNBC's Chris Hayes has done.
Listen, our projections were wrong.
It happens all the time.
I literally said this would happen like a week ago.
The analogy that I used was that I was in Florida, and we had all these projections saying the most likely scenario was a hurricane slamming into Florida.
There was no grand conspiracy to sell toilet paper in Florida.
We just thought a hurricane was a coming.
So people went out and boarded up all their shops, they bought a bunch of supplies, and then the hurricane turned because the forecast models were wrong.
I said, expect something similar.
We're looking at this map, this is what we think will happen, and we're often wrong about it.
So this is good news!
60,000 deaths is horrifying.
Absolutely horrifying.
And it's weird that we're actually happy to see that number, but it's true that it was gonna be a lot worse, or we thought it was gonna be a lot worse, and it's not so bad.
Well, now Chris Hayes, of course, can't just accept that, congratulations, things are going to be better than we expected.
We're now hearing the CDC is saying we can actually start getting back to work at a time.
We just got the report, 6.6 million unemployment claims again.
It's absolutely insane.
So we're getting good news right now.
We should be happy about this.
We should thank the president for the job he did, because we thought this was going to be way worse.
That the administration was claiming it would be worse so that when it was all over, they could claim they did a good job and saved us from the nightmare.
The Blaze reports, MSNBC host tosses out new conspiracy theory about coronavirus.
The most cynical interpretation of all of this.
Oh, spare me, dude.
MSNBC host Chris L. Hayes theorized that the Trump administration could have overestimated the number of pandemic deaths in order to declare victory when the numbers came in on the low side.
Okay.
You tell me to trust Dr. Fauci.
Alright, now you're mad that Dr. Fauci, he's the one who's doing the math.
Him and the other doctors.
They say Trump won't listen to the doctors.
He's touting a medication that won't work.
Why won't he listen to Dr. Fauci?
The rift between the doctor, the media, and the left.
They just can't give Trump a single good day.
It will never happen.
Now that the numbers are being revised, and it's not like Trump is at a chalkboard on the press briefings writing up numbers like, here's what I think's gonna happen.
He's got people telling him.
So it's funny that when the numbers are bad or when, you know, the treatment he's touting is in question, they say, I don't know about this.
Trump's putting lives at risk.
Then when the expert, because Dr. Fauci says, you know, it's unproven.
Then when the experts come out and say the numbers are gonna be better, they're like, I don't know about this.
This is Trump's fault.
Okay, I get it.
It's only Trump's responsibility.
Trump is only held responsible when... You know what?
You get the point.
Everything he does is bad.
Let's move on.
Hayes was likely responding to new estimates showing coronavirus deaths will likely be lower
than earlier approximations. Here's what he tweeted. So Aaron Rupar tweeted Trump quote,
if we can stay substantially under 100,000 American deaths, which was the original projection, I think we did a very
good job.
Chris Hayes responds, the most cynical interpretation of all of this, one I can't quite bring myself to accept, is they rolled out the model showing 100K deaths after they knew it would be less, less than that, so they could anchor everyone to that number and take a victory lap when only tens of thousands died.
Are you kidding me?
I'm absolutely impressed by his ability to spin a negative.
Wow!
I thought it would have been cause for some hope, some optimism, I guess.
I mean, it's still a horrifying number, 60,000 dead, but at least we could be like, wow, okay, we dodged the bulk of that hurricane, you know?
The Blaze says, I said I can't bring myself to accept it.
with video comments of President Donald Trump during the coronavirus task force briefing.
Even though that's a lot of people, Trump added.
Hayes was immediately criticized by many members of the media for
floating what appeared to be a conspiracy theory.
I said I can't bring myself to accept it.
Oh, thanks for that qualifier that absolves you of all responsibility in pushing nonsense.
He responded to one of his critics, but he's been very, very weird about coming in under the model in this unnerving,
dissociated way.
Oh Oh, my stars and garters.
Is it possible that Trump doesn't want Americans to die?
Do they really think the president is that evil to where they're shocked when the president's like, we did a very good job.
We saved many lives.
Why does he want to save lives?
I think he's trying to get reelected.
Well, yes, but perhaps he's trying to save lives and keep that number down.
These people live in this paranoid, delusional reality where Trump has no soul and he's just some kind of like mustache twirling villain.
On Monday, a frequently cited model revised the estimated deaths down from 81,000.
The model cited by the White House was developed by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington School of Medicine.
So I got to pull up his tweet.
John Levine of New York Post says, we have surpassed galaxy brain.
Chris Liu says, imagine FDR saying this after Pearl Harbor or Bush 43 saying this after 9-11.
You can't.
Because it's not how a president should talk when 14,000 Americans have already died and tens of thousands more will die in the months ahead.
They're always able to find a way to make Trump the bad guy.
Guy Benson says Fauci announced it, Berks echoed it.
Experts.
It's amazing.
I love it.
MSNBC has been a conspiracy hub for the past several years, yet people still take them seriously.
Oh, Alex Jones is a step too far, but the crazy lady ranting about Russia coming to get ya!
And that Trump is secretly flubbing the numbers to scare Americans.
You know, which is it?
Here's what I tweeted.
Tell me which is it.
I tweeted in response to this just to make sure I have this right.
Trump is an incompetent authoritarian mastermind, too weak to use his own federal authority,
but he's running the country like a dictator while failing every step of the way.
But his master plan to win re-election is succeeding.
Tell me which one I'm supposed to believe. I can't believe all of it.
You've spun a yarn so insane, I don't know which direction I'm looking.
I can't look both left and right at the same time.
I linked to these two stories that I pointed out the other day.
It's time to say it.
Trump is handling COVID-19 like a dictator.
Oh, heavens!
Dictator Trump!
And then this one.
Trump is an authoritarian weak man.
Too weak to actually use powers that any autocrat would dream of.
I just, you know what man, I get it, they're different outlets, but it was Nate Silver, after the raid on Baghdadi, where he was like, they really can't give him one good day, can they?
They say we gotta trust the experts, then the experts put out numbers that make Trump look good, and then they're like, nope, Trump's, it's a conspiracy, and then Chris Hayes' response, no, I didn't really mean it, I couldn't believe it.
Let me show you some glorious media from the past few days.
This might be one of the funniest things I have ever seen the Washington Post reports.
That's an opinion piece, I'll be fair.
Sitting on a throne of skulls, Mitch McConnell confirms his 8,999th judge.
What?
When I saw this, I couldn't help but laugh hysterically.
Mitch McConnell, the turtle guy.
You're trying to make him sound like some kind of warlord, you know, sitting on a throne of skulls.
Why?
Dude, the media is insane in this country, man.
What is wrong with these outlets?
And then when you criticize them for being biased, they say, there is no liberal media, it's just that conservatives are crazy.
Yeah.
Is there a moderate media in this country anymore?
I don't know.
I think everything is, to varying degrees, agenda-driven.
I mean, it's true, you've got conservative outlets, and they will often push pieces and stories and perspectives that will benefit some kind of political goal, but often it's a lot of media criticism.
You know, you go to a conservative site, maybe like the Daily Wire, Daily Caller, and I use conservative, you know, whatever, I don't know.
They're typically conservative.
And a lot of the stuff they put out is just criticizing this.
It's probably why so many people would accuse me of being conservative, because I point to them and call them insane.
Why would you write that Mitch McConnell is sitting on a throne of skulls?
Are you implying that he's killed people?
Because the Turtle Man doesn't have it in him, I'm sorry.
Here's what the- here's- I'm just gonna read a little bit of this.
Uh, the whole landscape was barren.
Maybe it's a joke.
Maybe this is supposed to be, like, satirical.
I don't know.
Maybe I'm missing the joke.
joke.
Woosh over my head.
The whole landscape was barren, and the fires burned everywhere.
And in the smoldering remains of the Senate, Mitch McConnell sat on a throne of skulls
making preparations to confirm his 8,999th judge.
Mitch McConnell would leave no vacancy behind.
The people were long gone.
The streets were empty.
And some old scraps of burned newspaper tossed on the hot sulfurous wind.
And Mitch McConnell was still confirming judges.
Are they praising Mitch McConnell?
Like he's the last man standing after the apocalypse and he's gonna keep doing his job?
I don't understand what they're trying to say.
The sky was a dark, angry red.
The sun was not visible and had not been visible for a long time.
Excellent writing, by the way.
There were no longer any rhinoceroses whatsoever.
There were exactly three birds, the halls of Congress were empty except for John Quincy
Adams' ghost, and one horse buzzard perched on a cracked torso in Statuary Hall.
And Mitch McConnell was still confirming judges.
Just one more, he muttered.
His voice echoed in the rows of bones all around him.
He had been assiduously confirming judges for a very long time.
Although night and day were now the same and were difficult to measure, clocks had ceased to exist.
Just one more lifetime appointment.
What am I reading?
This is better than The Onion.
This is better than The Babylon Bee.
I mean, Babylon Bee, you guys should make a photo of this.
Someone crawled toward him through the dust on hands and knees.
Why?
creaked forth from his chapped lips.
Which why?
It might have been Chuck Grassley, no one could say.
There was no one there to say.
Is there some curse you are trying to break?
Is there some reason?
the voice asked.
Quote, We can walk and chew gum at the same time, Mitch McConnell said.
As though that were an answer, there had not been chewing gum for a long time.
Surely there had been a reason long ago.
Power.
Or the desire for power.
Or the desire to build a legacy.
Or a judicial vacancy had gravely insulted his father.
Or he had been told by a sea witch that if he just confirmed a hundred judges to lifetime appointments, his brothers would all be restored to their human form.
Or was it two hundred he had forgotten?
He had to keep confirming them, there would be no vacancies.
Once there had been other things to do with his power that might have helped people in their brief spans on the globe.
Those things were all gone.
All that remained was vacancy.
And Mitch McConnell was determined to fill it with judges.
What was a judge?
Where would the judge sit?
What would the judge uphold or overturn?
What did any of it matter?
It was not even clear what he was confirming, except that he was confirming something, and would continue to do so even after the sun burned out and the whole world was cast into ice and shadow.
Just one more, Mitch McConnell hissed.
No vacancies!
Leave no vacancies!
The fates gave up spinning and measuring and cutting the threads of human lives.
Perpetual motion machines wound to a halt.
What?
Why would they exist?
The world tree Yggdrasil cracked, and a great serpent swallowed the earth.
I have no idea what the point is you're trying to make.
Are you praising Mitch McConnell?
No, they're obviously making fun of him or deriding him for being so laser-focused on these appointments, but let me just stress, the media has gone completely insane.
Is this a negative?
The people who elected this guy are probably happy he's appointing judges the way he is.
Are we supposed to be upset by this?
I guess.
I mean, if you're a liberal, that's probably your view of the world, that Mitch McConnell is a cackling fiend who's appointing all these conservative judges to the federal courts that's going to rule over you for the next generation or longer, and you're frightened of it.
I get it's supposed to be silly, but you can see how these people view what's going on.
They've lost it.
Look, I don't know why people take things so seriously.
And it's kind of this view I've had for a long time, you know, why I don't care for the most part.
It's because I'm an adult.
It's because when it comes to politics, very little actually changes.
You know, it's actually surprising when someone actually gets something done and something happens.
The world won't end.
There will not be thrones of skulls.
The president is not making up fake numbers to make himself look good.
You people have lost your minds.
You live in a conspiratorial nightmare realm where you think the world is burned out because a Republican appointed a judge?
We've had politicians appointing judges for like 200 plus years.
It's literally what we do in this country.
Why are you freaking out over this?
I get it.
I appreciate it.
It's kind of funny.
But let me give you some light at the end of the tunnel.
While we do have some bad news, this is from the Associated Press.
10% of the U.S.
labor force now out of work since virus slammed economy.
6.6 million file for jobless aid.
This is following the rent payments being due.
Now, according to the Wall Street Journal, it's only down around, I think, 13 or so percent rent payments.
So it's not like nobody's paying rent, but some people aren't, more so than usual.
And now we've got 6.6 million jobless claims.
But there is good news, because as much as I am deserving of some criticism, and I always say this, we're all sort of playing the same game, right?
Chris Hayes is going to throw some shade at Trump.
I'm going to throw some shade at Chris Hayes.
I don't know where it starts and where it ends.
I just tell you how I feel.
And I think these people are disingenuous.
I'm sure there are many people who would say similar things to me, but let me give you some good news so that I can at least try to do better than what they've done while talking about a world in ash.
That was a funny article, I gotta admit, but I have no idea what their point was supposed to be.
The CDC issues new guidance saying essential workers who have been exposed to COVID-19 can return to work if showing no symptoms in first step towards reopening U.S.
It's the 9th.
We're going to start.
There it is.
We're going to start reopening to people already exposed.
This is huge.
I mean, Trump was saying he wanted to get it done by Easter.
Then everyone said you can't do it, so it's got to be April 30th.
Now the CDC is saying it can be done earlier than we even expected.
Not like we're completely opening everything, but we're getting things back up and running.
Awesome!
The numbers are down.
The projections are down.
We did it, everybody.
It wasn't that difficult.
I know it's difficult for a lot of people.
A lot of people lost their jobs.
10% of the workforce is out of work.
It is horrifying what happened to this country.
But what I mean to say is, we're not looking at storming the beaches of Normandy.
We're not looking at, you know, hundreds of thousands dead.
We've actually done a good job.
We've succeeded in our battle, or we're winning this war.
As much as there are a lot of negatives that come with it, and each and every life lost is horrifying, 60,000 dead is still horrifying.
From a certain perspective, we're actually relieved to see that it won't be as high as it should have been.
So the only thing I can really say as I wind this down to my friends over in the media, there's some good news right now.
Trump gave you good news.
The total projections have gone down.
He didn't make the numbers.
He's just reporting them to you.
But you have to spin everything into the most absurd negative possible.
Look on the bright side.
Maybe give your audience some good news.
Maybe tweet out, I'm glad to hear this.
Thank you, Donald Trump, for what you've done.
For all your faults and for all the criticism, I believe you've at least tried.
No, they don't see it that way.
They only see a throne of skulls and nightmarish demon creatures.
That's how they really view the world.
It's like that saying, conservatives think liberals are misguided, but liberals think conservatives are evil.
They can't figure it out.
Confused.
As to why Donald Trump would be happy the number has gone down, Chris Hayes can only surmise that it's because he was tricking us to win re-election.
Maybe Trump is worried that people were going to die and it kept him up at night.
Maybe when he got the new projections he was relieved and happy to see that people will pull through this and the country will survive.
Maybe he doesn't really care at all.
Maybe it has nothing to do with anything.
Maybe he's just like, I got the numbers, there you go.
The assumption that everyone has this sinister motive is just insane to me.
I don't think Chris Hayes is an evil demon monster.
I think he's stupid.
That's really it.
I think he lives in a twisted reality where he views the other as a nightmare demon because he's got some kind of weird paranoid delusional bubble world wrapped around him.
Many of these people do.
And it's partly due to this toilet spiral, right?
It's like Chris Hayes trapped in a toilet, spinning faster and faster, going down the drain.
When he tweets things like this, he's got... How many followers does this guy have?
He's got 2 million followers.
We're going to see this, and they're going to agree with him.
They're going to be like, oh, Chris is right.
Trump is evil!
Why would you say this?
What are you doing, man?
You're freaking people out!
Now, the Washington Post thing is just funny.
I don't know what they were trying to say, I guess.
It was funny, I'll give them that.
But they really do view the world this way.
They create stories and they push opinions that rope other people into the toilet spiral, and they all go down the drain together, believing this lunacy.
And when Chris Hayes and the media report these things, and then Democrats and other liberals just blindly believe it, it makes them all go insane.
You end up with regular Americans confused as to why they're saying these psychotic things.
They really can't give Trump one good day, can they?
The numbers are down.
The expert said so.
Ah, it must be a conspiracy!
It must be a conspiracy from the president.
Well, you can expect more of it, because it's not going to stop, and the election is coming up in November.
If we get through this faster than we expected, it'll be good news for everybody.
I think a lot of people will be very happy.
Their jobs can start coming back, but there's damage to the economy that can never be repaired.
We'll slowly start rebuilding and fixing those areas that were damaged.
But that means politics will start lighting back up.
This narrative that Chris Hayes has started, don't be surprised if they go full steam ahead.
They're going to start investigations.
They already are.
Schumer and Pelosi.
And after this is all finally done and over, you're gonna see this from Chris Hayes, you're gonna see Pelosi shift, you're gonna see Schumer.
It's gonna be another nightmare realm.
But I gotta be honest.
You know, as I look to the news and the horrifying projections for deaths, I long for a world where I can complain about the absurdities of Chris Hayes and the Democratic Party and not have to worry about people losing their lives in this country.
So I welcome that nightmare around, because the truth is, as much as I call it absurd and freakish and insane, I mean, it's not that bad.
We love to complain about politics, we love to argue these ideas, but we really had it good, didn't we?
Before this broke out and people lost their lives, maybe this will give us some perspective moving forward.
Maybe not them.
I don't know.
But I will have more segments for you coming up later today.
The next segment will be at 1 p.m.
on this channel.
Thanks for hanging out, and I will see you all then.
We've reached a point that many of us hoped we wouldn't reach, something we saw with Italy.
In Italy, the military had to come in to cart away dead bodies because the coronavirus pandemic was severe.
People are losing their lives.
Now in New York City, the National Guard uses enterprise rental vans to pick up hundreds of dead bodies from New York City homes, as the city prepares to include suspected coronavirus cases in the death toll amid test shortage.
I have several friends that have been posting on Facebook about catching this and how bad it was.
Many of them have complained they weren't able to get tests, but they had all the symptoms, so they could only assume that it was COVID-19.
I've heard stories from people I know about endless sirens outside at night.
Now, I don't want to make this a really horrifying doom and gloom story, because we do have good news.
We have apparently hit the peak, at least for New York.
They're projecting substantially less people will lose their lives in this.
All good news.
And the CDC is even saying we can start getting back to business slowly, as people who have already been exposed or may have already recovered can start working again.
So there's good news here.
But this is still serious.
We're still in the midst of the storm.
And I gotta say one thing.
I do not, for the life of me, understand why there are so many people adamant about claiming this is not happening.
It's a weird mix.
There are many people on the right who are downplaying this, saying the numbers were flubbed, they were trying to hurt the economy.
I don't get it.
Donald Trump has been, his poll ratings have skyrocketed due to his efforts.
This has been, As horrifying as this is, it has allowed Trump to prove himself in a crisis to which many people really liked him.
Democrats and independents absolutely supported his efforts.
And now he's polling better than ever.
So I'm confused as to what the conspiracy theory is, that they wanted to take the economy to hurt the president, but the president's not being hurt by this.
The fact is, sometimes we get numbers wrong, and I am seeing a ton of high-profile Trump supporters celebrating the good news.
It's weird to me that there are so many people who want to believe this is a conspiracy theory, that the numbers are being flubbed or increased.
I gotta tell you something, man.
Take a look at this.
On Tuesday alone, 256 people died at home in New York City.
On a normal day, between 20 and 25 New Yorkers would die at home.
We are looking at 10 times the amount of people dying in their homes.
If they're not dying of the coronavirus, what are they dying of?
Some other kind of pandemic or ailment that's assailing us in New York City?
I mean look, the simple solution is we have a global pandemic, we are seeing these symptoms, people I know have gotten it and are talking about it, and people are dying in their homes.
We saw the same thing happen in China.
Videos were emerging of locals, police, going into apartments and seeing people just dead on the floor.
In one instance, apparently they tried claiming it was a couple who had just passed out because of Parkinson's and they were okay.
No.
We've seen the videos.
People are just collapsing.
It was a story the other day.
A retired NYPD sergeant, he tested positive, was discharged from the hospital, walked outside, dropped dead.
Right in the street.
Here's what I think is happening.
I think the city is undercounting because they don't know how to actually count.
It's an instance of a nefarious plot between Donald Trump, the Democrats, together with Italy and China, all working for this grand scheme to inflate numbers.
Now, there's some concern that hospitals will get access to funding if they have COVID patients, but I really just do not believe that to be the norm.
That's the exception I'd imagine.
I'm sure there's some people who are like, let's just err on the side of safety.
We've heard that Dr. Birx, I believe said something to the effect that if somebody dies and they have COVID, they will say it was COVID.
Maybe that's not perfect because some ailments are really obviously not COVID related.
Like, you know, if somebody, the meme is that a guy jumps out of a plane without a parachute and they mark it as a COVID death.
But what they're actually talking about To be fair, I guess, is that someone might be brought into the hospital sick and then die of a heart attack, and they'll say it was because of the coronavirus.
Now, it is presumptive, to a certain extent, but I think it's fair-ish.
It's really hard to know.
I don't think it's a grand plot.
I think it's just hard to know.
Everybody— Listen, man.
I think some people have this idea that experts are smart.
No, experts are people who just like read a lot about a specific thing.
It doesn't mean they're actually smarter than you or anyone else.
They might know how to treat someone and save their life, but are they really going to be able to map out a pandemic and track all these numbers?
That's very difficult to do because all of us are standing at ground level.
We get the numbers we get.
So in New York City, they're now announcing that they're going to start counting these people as COVID deaths.
Breaking 911 says New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio says the city will begin labeling coronavirus victims who weren't even tested for the disease if their symptoms fit certain parameters.
Now there are problems with this.
We may actually end up over counting.
That could be bad.
But look at what's going on in people's homes.
Now, I've had some people say to me, Tim, where did you even get those numbers?
How do you know how many people are dying?
I looked up the census.
I looked up the data.
You do a Google search for New York City population, deaths, births, etc., and you will see their 2017 data.
I didn't see 18 or 19.
I saw 2017.
In 2017, in New York State, around 425 people would die per day.
In New York City, it was around 150.
At home, it was between 20 and 25.
So, at home is literally like, you're at your house by yourself, and then for some reason you die.
Most of the deaths were outside something had happened.
Car accidents, you know, there's not so much violent crime, but violent crime happens.
We track all those things.
Right now, At the time I tracked these numbers, New York was around double the average daily deaths.
They're not counting all of those COVID deaths.
When you look at the 850, I think yesterday in New York it was like 750 people may have died.
So it's almost double.
They're not counting the people who die at home.
That's the problem.
They want to start doing that.
But they can't, because they might show up at someone's house and see them pass out on the ground, and they say, looks like a heart attack, looks like asphyxiation, I guess, we don't know, and they're not being counted.
If anything, it's fair to say the number is undercounted.
I don't know.
Look, I'm not an expert.
What I can tell you is lots of people are dying.
I really don't think there's... It's not the coronavirus.
As some people are saying, they're taking non-COVID deaths and labeling them as COVID deaths to increase the numbers.
But then what are all these people dying from?
You know, some people have said, but flu and pneumonia deaths have dropped off.
They haven't.
I mean, I looked at the data.
I just did not see any of that being true.
People are still dying of heart attacks.
They're not counting it.
That's a problem.
New York now wants to change this.
We'll see how it plays out.
But for the time being, the National Guard has come in to start removing bodies because there are too many.
I don't know what you want to believe.
You're free to believe what you want.
I just don't get it.
Even if you think it's political, the president is coming out on top?
of this. I guess there are people on the left who don't believe it's true because it's helping the
president. But for the most part, even Trump supporters and the left, everyone's kind of in
agreement it's happening. But there are still some people who I'm getting emails are like,
Tim, you don't understand. They're like, Bill Gates and ooh, and I'm like, all right, man.
You believe whatever you want.
I can't tell you that the media is always honest and trustworthy.
But I got my friends talking to me about this.
Or I should say posting on Facebook.
People I know and trust saying, like, I can't believe this just happened.
And I'm like, wow.
I mean, I believe these people.
They're people I know and trust if it's happening to them.
Let's read the story from the Daily Mail.
The National Guard is renting vans to transport hundreds of dead bodies from their New York City homes as a startling number of people are dying there without ever being treated for coronavirus.
City officials announced Wednesday that they will begin counting people who died at home and who had not been tested or treated for coronavirus in the official death toll.
Shocking figures emerged confirming that there are now between 200 and 250 New Yorkers dying in their homes every day.
And Mayor Bill de Blasio confirmed that it is believed the recent spike is directly linked to coronavirus.
On a typical day, around 25 people would be found dead in their homes in New York City.
The revelation sparked fears that the city's death toll is drastically undercounted.
Even as it soared to 4,260 on Wednesday, and images emerged of the National Guard taking people from their homes in body bags.
Not a job I would want to do, so I can only express my gratitude to those who have to do such a horrifying job.
You know what, man?
I've dealt with conflict crisis.
I have seen some things, and I wouldn't want to do this.
I couldn't imagine regular people wanting to do this either.
That's why we have a National Guard and we have a military.
As seen in the Daily Beast, members of the National Guard have been drafted into collecting bodies from home as the stretched emergency services battle against a surge in 911 calls.
The city's overwhelmed services are using rental enterprise vans as they struggle to respond to the overwhelming numbers dying at home.
Spokesperson for the New York National Guard confirmed that rental vans are being used during this mission as additional vehicles were needed.
They have been using the van since the mission began a week ago.
Enterprise were also reached out for comment but have not yet responded.
Tuesday alone, 256 people died at home in New York City.
Before April, this number was generally 25 a day, meaning that 10 times the normal number are now passing away at their houses.
Just think about it.
It's a respiratory, severe respiratory illness.
People are being put on ventilators.
Around 15 to 20% are being hospitalized.
Not everyone is getting hospitalized.
Some people are collapsing in the street and dying, like that police sergeant.
So what do you think happens to somebody who gets sick and doesn't think it's that big a deal?
I mean, it's always a challenge when you're really sick, like when to call medical services.
I was telling a story before about how I got the flu.
Maybe like 10 or so years ago.
I haven't gotten it since.
But it was so bad, I was actually questioning whether or not I should go to the hospital because it was bad.
It was like a constant, excruciating pain.
I lost like 20 pounds or something ridiculous.
All the water weight just gone.
Sweating like crazy.
And I was told, just sweat it out.
But what about... I was a young guy, I was in my 20s.
What about somebody who's older, who gets a fever and chills and is sick?
Some people... I'm sure at this point everybody knows about it.
But some people who are being told, you can't get tested, you can't get treated, the hospitals are full, we don't have room.
What about somebody who just doesn't think it's a big deal?
Many people have been downplaying this, thinking, ah, it's just the flu.
What happens then when they stay at home, all of a sudden they can't breathe, they pass out, and there's no one?
That means eventually there's going to be like a wellness check.
Someone's going to, you know, call and say, look, I haven't heard from my neighbor.
I knocked on the door.
Nobody's answering.
I think they're hurt.
They go in.
What do they find?
They find a person who's passed away.
The daily tally of New York City residents who died at home with coronavirus-like symptoms exploded from 45 on March 20th to 241 on April 5th, according to Fire Department of New York data, suggesting the city may be significantly undercounting COVID deaths.
Look, I get it.
They may be over-counting in some areas, but they're definitely under-counting this.
I don't know how else to explain this, especially when we saw the same thing happening in other countries.
In the past two weeks, first responders reported 2,192 DOA calls.
Compared to 453 at the same time last year, I see these same stories on social media.
Someone was posting about a cop they knew, and I know it's all hearsay, right?
But take it with a grain of salt.
I saw a post from someone saying that their buddy was a cop who responded to four DOAs in that day alone.
That they had calls saying like, you know, my neighbor hasn't responded, they're not answering their door, and they show up and there it is.
They break the door in and People have lost their lives.
I don't know how they respond to DOA calls normally.
Maybe they kick the doors open in most of these cases.
The number of calls referencing cardiac or respiratory arrest has also drastically risen from 20 to 30 a day at the end of March and the beginning of April in 2019 to 322 on one day in April 2020.
There have been more than 100 calls a day since March 28th.
The fatality rate on these calls is also much higher than the usual.
It had risen to 75% by April 5th.
In 2019, the fatality rate was between 30 and 50%.
I gotta tell you, man, I think we're seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.
The CDC relaxing its guidelines on businesses.
Steve, I think it was Mnuchin saying, we may get everything back up and running by May.
Cuomo saying, you know, we're nearing the peak.
It's all good news.
We may be slowing things down.
I don't know for sure.
I'm not the expert.
But I can tell you, look, take it seriously.
We may be seeing some good things.
It may be getting better now.
We're still in the midst of it.
I don't know what else to say.
Now there's another story I want to get to because I think we understand the severity of this.
Check this out.
A California nursing home was evacuated after its staff didn't show up.
This is what I've been fearing.
The reason why I want to bring up again the light at the end of the tunnel is because I want to be hopeful and optimistic.
You know, I think Trump has tried to do that and the media doesn't want to let him.
So I'll try at least to be like, hey, I think we're getting through this.
But what's worrying to me is when medical staff, nursing staff decide that their lives
are more important and they can't do this anymore.
I don't blame them, man.
You know, at a certain point when you're in a conflict, you have to make a choice about
saving yourself or trying to rush in and save someone else.
I think of it like a fire.
You might be outside and you might hear someone inside screaming for help.
If you run in, will you actually be able to save them or will you just become another
casualty?
For that matter, I heard a story once about a guy who went to, I think, like Yellowstone
or whatever, the hot springs, or like boiling pools.
And he opened his car door and his dog runs out full speed and then jumps into the boiling pit.
And the guy, freaking out for his dog, ran up to jump in and people tried to stop him saying, you know, don't jump in, it's boiling.
And he said something like, the hell I won't.
and jumped in and guess what?
They both died.
Jumped in a boiling vat.
And so it's not necessarily the same thing, but at a certain point the nurse is going to say,
I'd love to save some lives, but if I go in, I'll just be another one of those, you know,
dying.
It's too risky. At a certain point, no one's going to want to step into those flames
because they don't think it can be done.
I was told a long time ago by a firefighter that they never go into a building think they're going to
die or get hurt.
They're confident in their abilities to navigate this building and save lives.
And if they thought they wouldn't make it out, they wouldn't go in.
I think most people assume that police and firefighters are thinking like, well, I'm going to go risk my life.
This is it.
This is the end, but I'll try anyway.
No, absolutely not.
I mean, some people maybe.
But my understanding, based on the people I've talked to, is we always have confidence in our abilities to get in and get out safely.
And if we feel like it can't be done, why would we make one casualty two casualties?
It doesn't make sense.
It's not about being selfish.
It's about realizing the limits of your capabilities.
Now we're seeing nursing homes being evacuated.
Nobody's there to help anybody.
We've seen stories of nurses quitting.
We've seen fake stories of nurses quitting.
That's a whole other issue.
The fact is, doctors and nurses are under no obligation to risk their lives for anyone.
They tend, seemingly, to be good people who do that.
But there was an op-ed in the New York Times from a doctor saying, what is our obligation to treat?
Bill de Blasio wanted to draft 40, 45,000 medical workers, bring them to New York.
You can't do it.
You can't force people to do it.
I'm sorry to say, but for all the lefties, healthcare is not a human right.
And I hope you've learned that lesson through all of this.
Whether it be a firefighter, a police officer, whether it be an EMT, a nurse, or a doctor, they have their own freedom and autonomy to decide when to risk their lives for you, and they don't have to.
When it comes to healthcare, many of these people just assume.
They have this image of what healthcare is in their mind.
It's going in and the doctor gives you, you know, a lollipop and he patches up and sends you on your way.
What people don't realize is that hospitals are rife with disease.
People are coming in and getting sick, and so there's like, you know, MRSA and other, you know, flesh-eating bacterias that can grow in hospitals.
In fact, if you go to a hospital and there's COVID patients, you're surrounded by people who are infected, touching everything.
Which means the doctors need protective equipment, they know.
That's why we've been talking about mask shortages.
Healthcare's not a human right, I'm sorry.
A firefighter goes into a fire wearing a mask, an oxygen tank, and all the good stuff, the big heavy gear to protect them from the heat.
And doctors go in wearing masks and scrubs and, you know, glasses, hazmat suits, and some even going to the extreme, you know, full-on, full-body, you know, single-layer hazmat suits.
And if they don't have it, they're not going to want to go in.
And they're under no obligation to.
The nurses at this nursing home were also under no obligation.
And that means some people might lose their lives.
That's the reality of this world.
You don't own people.
You can't force them to do this.
I wouldn't want to live in that world.
New York is getting hit pretty bad.
There's a light at the end of the tunnel.
I hope we're getting through this.
And, you know, particularly because I'm really tired of talking about it.
We had a great time last night on the IRL podcast talking about Ellen DeGeneres, which was fun.
It's still COVID-related, though, so hopefully we get through this.
We can go back to talking about silly movies.
Movie theaters can open up.
And it looks like it might be May.
Now that's crazy because we've heard things like, you know, Dr. Fauci saying, no, no, we'll need a vaccine, it could be 18 months, MIT, and I think it was MIT and Harvard saying, we're gonna be in, you know, two months on, one month off of quarantine.
Maybe it's not as bad as we thought.
Maybe the projections were wrong.
That would be a really, really good thing.
Instead of getting mad about it and screeching about conspiracies, you've got the weird, you know, Chris Hayes conspiracy that Trump is flying out the numbers to make himself look good, and then you've got some people on the right who just don't want to accept it's really happening, think the numbers are all fake.
Maybe we just chill out.
We just... We do what we gotta do to get through this, and we can go back to talking about whatever we want to talk about, and complaining about movies and culture and all that stuff.
I hope everyone stays safe.
These stories from New York are sad, but hopefully we'll get through this.
I think we will.
I'll see you all in the next segment at 4 p.m.
YouTube.com slash Timcast.
It is a different YouTube channel.
I will see you all then.
Bernie Sanders does indeed have a sordid past with campaign finance and the misuse of taxpayer funds, as I see it.
I gotta be careful about how I phrase this.
But many people have been wondering, where does all that money go?
I decided to look into it.
And as it turns out, for the most part, there's no grand, nefarious plot by Bernie Sanders to siphon off campaign funds for himself, or as far as I can tell, even the DNC.
It's likely that some of that money may go to the DNC.
Bernie Sanders gave the DNC $100,000 in 2017, but that had something to do with some kind of tour event he did with Tom Perez.
Well, the meme right now is no refunds.
Well, actually, people are getting refunds.
So, sorry to spoil the meme for all of you.
Bernie Sanders is indeed giving refunds like any other campaign.
Now, I asked on Twitter.
What happens to all that money that Bernie Sanders raised in the past couple of months now that he's dropped out of the presidential race?
I got over a thousand responses and most people said, a fourth mansion, a fourth mansion, another house.
You get the joke.
So I decided to dig into this.
The bigger question I had was not, look, you can't legally take campaign funds to buy a house, so I didn't think that was likely what was occurring.
There was some speculation that he hired his wife to do, you know, his wife worked for a company that he contracted with, essentially paying her out of campaign funds.
Now, as far as I can tell right now, I don't believe I have any information to claim that's true.
But Bernie Sanders does have some stuff in his past.
He's created, well, let's just put it this way, nepotism.
Bernie Sanders is not special.
He's given his wife special benefits and used taxpayer funds in ways most people would find unethical.
When it comes to his campaign, it seems like he's on the up and up.
My bigger question is whether or not that money would be funneled to the DNC.
Joe Biden has raised very little money, all right, relative to Bernie Sanders, at least.
Bernie Sanders raised around like $100 million more than Joe Biden did, which makes me wonder, Could it possibly be that the true goal of Bernie Sanders' campaign was to attract progressive money to then funnel off to Democratic causes?
I don't believe I can definitively answer that as a yes, but I think there is a residual benefit from Bernie Sanders' fundraising campaigning into the Democratic Party, considering Joe Biden has sort of tacitly endorsed Joe Biden.
He stopped short of saying it was a full-throated endorsement when he was talking to Stephen Colbert, but you get the point.
Let's get started and I want to show you this story first from CNN.
Bernie Sanders raised massive $46.5 million in February, campaign announces.
This is from March 1st, 2020.
And I'm wondering, where does all that money go?
That's a lot of money.
Certainly he can't spend all of it.
Some people have speculated that what he does is he raises all this money and then he hires a company where he enriches his friends and his family, that they get a commission on all that money raised and then run ads so the money is accounted for by the FEC, meaning it's spent legitimately, but that he gives benefits to his buddies who run the job like most government people do.
I can't speak to what he's done in this cycle, but I can show you this story from The Atlantic.
This is from March.
Let me just show you the title.
The Sanders and Biden families have been cashing in for years.
Joe Biden likes to say he's the poorest man in the Senate.
Bernie Sanders rails against the establishment.
But family members have long benefited from the Democratic frontrunner's political careers.
Take a look at this section.
Jane and Sanders, so Jane is his wife, were living together while he was approving her paychecks after paying her $4,900 in 1982, about $13,000 today.
$1,900 in 1982, about $13,000 today.
The mayor put her on what became a $21,000 annual salary, about $54,000 in today's money,
accounting for inflation.
As part of a formal seven-person expansion of the city staff.
Her position, quote, was not advertised and no applicants were considered aside from her, according to Sanders, the Burlington Free Press reported in 1985.
They say, quote, for a man who once proclaimed himself an enemy of patronage, Mayor Bernard Sanders has done a remarkable turnaround on the issue in a relatively short time, the Free Press complained in a 1983 editorial.
That same year, Sanders responded.
I'm tired of hearing innuendo, especially regarding Jane, he said.
If she is not competent to do the job, I want to hear someone say it.
Cronyism is hiring people for specific jobs because they are friends and not because they are qualified.
If someone can explain to me that Jane is not qualified for the job, I'll listen to them.
No, I don't care!
Bernie, nepotism is hiring your friends and family members for the jobs, period.
And if it's true what the Burlington Free Press reported, that he created a position, was not advertising it, and no applicants were considered to give to his wife to get the equivalent of $54,000 a year, you do not get any special favors simply because the amount of corruption you engaged in was a smaller number than, say, Joe Biden or Donald Trump.
If you want to complain about Trump hiring his kids and his friends and his family members for government positions, look, I don't care.
That's fine.
Criticize the guy.
I don't care.
He gets no special favors from me.
Now, I will be fair.
I think the meme about Bernie Sanders not giving refunds and smuggling away millions of dollars As far as I can tell is dubious.
Has Bernie Sanders engaged in crony nepotism type behavior in the past?
It would seem so.
Does that mean that he's doing it today?
I don't necessarily think so, though he has been accused of that repeatedly over the past few years.
Of course, Bernie Sanders supporters will tell you that it's just a smear from the establishment.
Fine, whatever.
We do see smears from the establishment to Bernie Sanders a lot, as well as Donald Trump.
So take it with a grain of salt.
Vanity Fair reported Bernie Sanders accused of using campaign money to benefit family.
Vanity Fair is a lefty publication, mind you.
This story is from January of 2016.
They say a new report suggests that Democratic presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders and his wife have repeatedly done the most socialist thing ever, funnel thousands of campaign and nonprofit dollars towards family members and friends.
According to an investigation by the right-leaning Washington Free Beacon, Sanders' spouse of 27 years, Jane O'Meara Sanders, and his stepdaughter, Karina Driscoll, both drew sizable salaries from Sanders' House campaigns between 2000 and 2004.
Public records examined by the online paper reportedly saw O'Meara Sanders was paid more than $90,000 for consulting and ad placement services between 02 and 04, while Driscoll received $65,000 from the campaign over the course of four years.
But while it's not unheard of for campaigns to bring family members on board, the Free Beacon's revelations about Sanders' wife tenure as the president of Burlington College will certainly raise eyebrows.
During her time there, the college paid nearly $500,000 to the Vermont Woodworking School, run by Driscoll for classes, according to the Free Beacon.
The college also reportedly paid tens of thousands of dollars to an all-inclusive Caribbean resort run by Jonathan Leopold, the son of a family friend, for a study abroad program.
Between 2009 and 2011, when Omira Sanders stepped down, Burlington College paid around $68,000 to the resort.
The Free Beacon reports that payments to both the woodworking school and the resort stopped soon after she left.
All right.
If you want to accuse Bernie Sanders of all these things, I'm listening.
If you want to accuse Trump, Biden, anybody else, absolutely.
I've criticized Biden relentlessly over this.
And Donald Trump gets no special favors.
I've reported several times when he had the military staying at resorts in the UK.
And look, it is what it is.
Is Bernie Sanders doing this?
Let me tell you what I see here.
Bernie Sanders is playing the same game as everybody else.
Hiring friends and family members through public taxpayer funds.
If you run a private business and you want to hire your son, brother, or whatever, that's fine.
And that's what Trump did with his private businesses.
I'm not a big fan of Trump appointing family members to government positions, which he's been doing, and the benefits they will receive.
I'm also not going to let Joe Biden get a pass when he flies his son to China on Air Force Two or whatever it was that happened, and the whole Burisma thing.
Bernie Sanders gets no special passes for any of the criticism.
Bernie Sanders does the same thing.
The difference?
He's not playing with, you know, billions of dollars.
He's playing with hundreds of thousands.
I don't care if it's a dollar or a million dollars.
If you're taking taxpayer funds to pay your buddies and your friends and your family members, you're not going to see me, you know, celebrating that.
Now one interesting thing we saw is in Politico they reported, the since-ended presidential campaigns of Bloomberg, Warren, Pete Buttigieg, and Amy Klobuchar all filed, as well, a quick read over their filings.
It wasn't a lack of fundraising that likely pushed any of these candidates out of the race, because they all out-raised Biden.
Where does all of that money go?
My bigger concern is whether or not Biden, a non-viable candidate, was receiving donations or campaigns from other groups because they raise all this money and then afterwards dump it to the DNC, which then goes towards Biden, who's not viable.
It's effectively taking the support for candidates who people like and dumping it on top of Biden, who nobody likes, and I have to wonder why they would do that.
Now, according to Bernie Sanders filings, this is going back to 2016, and we can clearly see, I'm sorry.
I know it's a meme, and the graphic is funny with Bernie running away with all the money.
But according to these filings, yes, while Bernie may be paying friends and family members, and you can dig through that, and it's likely true, we've seen it in the past, he is giving refunds.
He's given 5.2 million dollars in refunds for the 2016 campaign and that accounts for his expenditures.
It looks like he's actually down a bit of money.
According to Elite Daily, Bernie Sanders used his excess campaign funds to send delegates to the DNC, which apparently he didn't need to do.
I don't know.
He raised in contributions $231 million.
He spent $226 million and refunded $5.2 million.
So it does seem like he is down a little bit.
His campaign might have had some debt.
We can then jump to the 2020 cycle, which only just ended, and see that he raised $168 million.
He brought in money from other campaigns, which was around $12 million.
That may have come from his past campaigns.
I'm not entirely sure.
But he did issue $1.86 million in refunds.
I can't tell you what Bernie Sanders is doing with all of his money.
My bigger question is whether or not the money was going from Bernie to the DNC.
I can't find anything for now that shows that, so that's my only real concern.
The reason I bring this up is that some people are concerned Bernie was essentially a trap.
Progressives wouldn't support Biden or the DNC, so they use Bernie Sanders to raise exorbitant amounts of money he can then funnel into Democratic causes.
I'd be curious to see how many of the ads put out by Bernie were not necessarily pro-Bernie, but just pro-Democrat in general or anti-Trump, in which case his ads greatly benefited the DNC.
After Bernie Sanders lost in 2016, he endorsed Hillary Clinton and everyone got mad.
And once again, he's now throwing his support behind Biden to a certain degree.
He said on Colbert that he's going to talk with him and we'll see how things turn out.
So one thing you can walk away from, I mean, by all means, go investigate, see what you find.
One thing I'm not concerned with is whether or not Bernie will issue refunds, of course, like any campaign he will.
The question I have is, can we actually track where the money's going?
Who's benefiting from it?
Where this money will end up at the end of everything, because it looks like he still has some money left over.
My question is, will Bernie Sanders use that money to support Joe Biden in any way, directly or indirectly?
I'll leave it there.
The best assessment I can come up with is Bernie, of course, issues refunds.
He can't use the money to buy houses.
It's a silly joke.
He's got extra houses.
But he's definitely getting very wealthy off of all of the campaigning.
And we're talking about a lot of money.
I guess we'll see who it benefits in the long run.
I'll leave it there.
Stick around.
I got a couple more segments for you coming up in a few minutes, and I will see you all shortly.
You know, I don't trust the media.
I hope you've figured that out by now.
And when I saw this story, I ignored it, for the most part.
There are a lot of stories I see that I'll think are suspect, and I will avoid them until more information comes out.
This has helped me avoid being wrong in many circumstances, especially in stories like the Covington kids.
I saw the videos and I said, I don't know why that matters, that's ridiculous, and then sure enough found evidence that it was fake news, and the media had been lying.
Well, now we have this story.
Intelligence report warned of coronavirus crisis as early as November.
Even in January, China was still saying there was no human-to-human transmission, and they were pretending like they didn't know about it.
So how could anyone have informed the United States or Donald Trump or anybody?
I don't believe this story.
In fact, in this story, they do something wonderful the media tends to do.
The Pentagon did not comment Tuesday, but on Wednesday evening, following the publication of this report, the Defense Department provided a statement from Col.
jump down and read to you. This is kind of funny. So let me see if I can find this.
The Pentagon did not comment Tuesday, but on Wednesday evening, following the publication
of this report, the Defense Department provided a statement from Colonel R. Shane Day, director
of the NCMI. Quote, as a matter of practice, the National Center for Medical Intelligence
does not comment publicly on specific intelligence matters.
However, in the interest of transparency, during this current public health crisis, we can confirm that media reporting about the existence, release of a National Center for Medical Intelligence coronavirus-related product assessment in November 2019 is not correct.
No such NCMI product exists, the statement said.
The White House National Security Council and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment.
This story has gone around quite a bit, and there's a reason why I ignored it, because it didn't seem like it made sense.
How could someone, how could our intelligence know about the coronavirus before even our earliest assessments of that it existed?
The reports we have so far, and maybe they're wrong, maybe intelligence just knows a lot more than us, that's possible, are that around December, doctors in China started to notice a severe pneumonia-like illness.
Into January, there was only a few cases.
How did we draft a report in November?
How did we know this was going to happen, write the report, and then submit it?
That doesn't seem to make sense unless the story is false.
And as we can see, the NCMI says no such product exists.
Then who are your sources?
How can you run a news story with anonymous sources but an official source from the organization denying it?
You have to back up your claims beyond a reasonable doubt.
Simply telling me that a source told you means nothing to me when the officials have denied this.
It's why organizations get comments from major organizations when they're writing about them.
And guess what?
Typically, when you have, say, like a leaked email or a document, they just confirm it.
They don't refute it or deny it when it turns out to be true.
Why should I trust your unnamed anonymous officials when the actual official says it don't exist?
I shouldn't and neither should anyone else.
Now we have this story from the Daily Mail.
And then we'll get to the other one I just flipped through.
Medical intelligence chief denies there was a memo warning about coronavirus in November after revelation Donald Trump was told about it in early January.
Yes, he was told about it in early January.
In the World Health Organization in early January, he said, or in mid-January.
There was no evidence of human-to-human transmission, says China.
And that led to serious problems.
So no, I'm not going to hold it against Trump that he was getting bad intel from the World Health Organization.
The Daily Mail says the head of a defense intelligence agency center has denied a report that its medical health team issued a memo to the White House warning of a spreading outbreak in Wuhan, China based on information it gleaned back in November.
The denial followed a report Wednesday that officials around the U.S.
government received a warning about the growing contagion, culminating its conclusion in the president's daily brief in early January.
As a matter of practice, that's what we actually saw from ABC News.
However, in the interest of transparency, yada yada, no such report exists.
The language of the denial appeared confined to November and to a formal work product.
President Trump said Wednesday he learned about the scope of the coronavirus outbreak just prior to his issuance of an order shutting down travel to the U.S.
from non-U.S.
citizens departing China.
He said he learned about the gravity of it sometime just prior to closing the country to China, and when we closed up the flights coming into China, various other elements and, as you know, we closed up to Europe.
So I don't know exactly, but I'd like to see the information, Trump said.
A defense official told CNN officials, searched for every possible product that might be related to the topic but came up empty.
Interesting.
So even CNN is reporting that the report is fake news.
I don't know how we're supposed to navigate the current media waters when ABC News is considered credible, fact-based, impeccable journalism, and they're just telling us, sources say.
Well, I don't have to trust your sources.
I have no obligation to do so.
But when you come out with this information, I assure you, the partisans will latch onto it and say, good enough for me, the mainstream media said so.
And everyone's going to ignore the official who's like, I have no idea what you're talking about.
Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff John Hyten told the network he didn't see intelligence reports about an outbreak until January.
We went back and looked at everything in November, December.
The first indication we have were reports out of China in late December that were in the public forum, and the first intel reports I saw were in January.
Information including both that from public sources and other methods about the outbreak was compiled in the President's January 3rd daily brief.
U.S.
intelligence officials who focus on medical developments around the world got information on a spreading outbreak in Wuhan, China in November that they used to brief White House and other officials around the government, ABC News reported Wednesday.
That makes literally no sense.
So you mean to tell me, listen, News organizations are what I refer to as public intelligence organizations.
There's private, there's public.
There's governmental, private, and public.
There are some private intelligence organizations that send this information off to news outlets to let them know what's happening if these journalists can't source the information.
But often, information on something emerges from journalism.
You mean to tell me?
That in November, when all this was happening, you had no idea, news organizations.
Not one journalist knew this was going on and reported this to any outlet.
None of these private intelligence firms that charge tens of thousands of dollars knew this was happening.
Yet, the U.S.
government certainly did.
They beat everyone to the punch.
And they predicted this well before anyone anywhere could have seen it coming, even China.
Sounds to me like ABC just published fake news to make the president look bad.
Don't ask me why.
I don't know who these officials are, and they're not telling us.
U.S.
intelligence officials who focus on medical developments around the world got information on a spreading outbreak.
Intelligence officials memorialized what they learned and presented it to the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Joint Staff of the Pentagon as well as the White House, according to ABC.
Those warnings would have anticipated the coronavirus outbreak that has tanked the global economy.
Based on anonymous sourcing, it was not immediately clear from the report, based on anonymous sourcing, who in the White House had access to the information and precisely when.
As the information was refined and verified, it was only included in the president's daily brief, a key intelligence document, in early January, days after China informed global health officials of the new coronavirus outbreak.
However, sources, sources, Described repeated briefings through December for policy makers and decision makers across the federal government, as well as the National Security Council of the White House, according to the report.
The briefings of an issue... The briefings of an issue the military needed to be aware of went back as far as late November, according to the report.
The National Center for Medical Intelligence, part of the nation's sprawling military intelligence service, with offices in Fort Detrick, Maryland, produced the report.
Yet, so they say.
The NCMI says it doesn't exist, so who am I supposed to believe?
It wasn't the only warning of the growing threat as the coronavirus outbreak spread and ultimately became a pandemic.
Now I'll play devil's advocate.
It's possible we're being lied to by the government.
The government lies.
It's possible that they knew about this because they have very powerful spies around the world and sources.
The US military probably has access to information and it's fair to say they will preempt journalism.
I'll tell you what though, man.
I kinda err on the side of government is not nearly as powerful as people think it is.
They are bureaucratic, they are spinning in circles half the time not knowing where they are, and they're sluggish.
I would much more prefer to believe, again, it's me making my choice on this one, That the private sector does a better job of sourcing information and catching these things.
Because if it were true that the government knew about these things before they were going to happen, they'd have planned for it.
They'd have done something.
But I guess that's the tail they're trying to weave.
The president should have known, the White House should have known, and they did nothing.
And now here we are.
I'm sorry.
I just don't think it's true that the government is this all-powerful, all-seeing eye that can predict everything with tendrils everywhere.
I think we can see the stuff.
It's fairly obvious.
There's no great Illuminati scheme, no overarching power between globalists within the government.
They have no idea what's going on, man.
It's a bunch of dumb people who think they're smarter than you.
That's typically how it tends to be.
Some of them actually are smarter than you and me.
That's how they become successful in business and become heads of state.
That's fair.
Many of them are just born into the stuff or get access to it.
But for the most part, Look, man, we're a chicken with our head cut off running around in circles.
I don't think that anybody could have seen this coming.
They would have done things so dramatically differently.
Unless you want to believe in some grand conspiracy where China let it happen, or planned it, and the US let it happen.
Like, I just don't buy it, man.
I'm sorry.
There's no grand conspiracy between Donald Trump and the Democrats and the intelligence services to make this happen.
They're not targeting their own people.
So explain to me how, then, this occurred.
Now, the conspiracy they're trying to weave is that Trump is just incompetent and the White House should have known, but they didn't.
Nah, I'm sorry, man.
The reality is, they are incompetent, but so is China and so is everybody else.
We acted two weeks too late, causing this major crisis, and now here we are.
The media would do well to stop relying on unnamed individuals who none of us can trust because we don't know who they are, and do their best to source information when they have hard evidence of it.
How about you produce the documents, publish them, and then we can talk about it?
I'll leave it there.
I got one more segment coming up for you in a few minutes, and I will see you all shortly.
CNN is crying again because Mike Pence is not going to allow health officials to appear on the network because CNN apparently won't cover their press briefings, and I don't care.
CNN, I don't care.
How about you do this?
You get rid of Jim Acosta, bring in a real reporter, And I'll start caring about what your network is doing.
How about you get rid of Don Lemon?
Stop pretending like you're a bastion of the truth and good information and you're the victims of this awful administration that won't allow your personalities to grandstand.
Okay, I'm sorry.
You're pretending like you've got reporters in this room.
You don't, CNN.
You're playing the same game as everybody else and pretending to be victims.
Let me tell you something.
Here's the headline.
Mike Pence is blocking health officials from going on CNN To pressure the network to air Trump's full coronavirus briefings.
This is not news.
In no way should I or anyone else care that CNN can't get a guest.
How many videos have I done where I'm like, I reached out to Mike Pence and he wouldn't come on my show?
Do I deserve to have Mike Pence or Fauci or Trump come on my podcast?
No, and neither does CNN.
CNN, you're not better than anyone else.
You think you're special, you're the gilded news network?
No.
You're the same as everyone else.
Oh, but you can pretend.
Oh, it's not fair.
The White House should have to go on my network.
Nope, sorry.
It's not news.
If you can't book a guest, go cry about it somewhere else.
I don't need you to write a diary entry every time someone says no to you.
I'll tell you what.
You get Jim Acosta out of there, I'll care.
Fox News reported the other day, Jim Acosta accused of downplaying World Health Organization's errors to attack Trump.
That's what CNN is.
So do I care that no one wants to go on your network?
I don't.
I remember when the New York Times didn't want their reporters going on CNN because it said Don Lemon was partisan and Don Lemon got all angry about it.
You guys gotta stop pretending like you're better than the rest of us.
We're all playing a game.
I get how it works.
I'll talk about it.
I'll be completely honest.
People like to say that I'm objective or unbiased.
Well, you know, I don't necessarily agree, because I just talk about what I feel, and I definitely think my criticism points in specific directions.
So, look, if you come to my content, you're going to see me ragging on Democrats and ragging on CNN or the media.
And rarely am I, you know, ragging on Republicans.
That's just the way I feel.
I look at things, I say, hey, I don't like that, I'm gonna talk about it.
CNN's playing the exact same game, so I'll even be fair.
You know, when they get their pundits to come out and rag on Trump for all of these things, yeah, I get it.
I'll criticize them when it's unjust criticism, but I don't bring up every single thing CNN says.
Even to a certain extent, I'm willing to accept similar criticism that Rachel Maddow would receive.
She rags on the president all the time.
The main issue I have with these networks Is that literally everything Trump does is always bad.
Always.
There's never a moment where they're like, that was good.
Good job, Trump.
They don't do it.
They falsely frame things, misrepresent facts.
And as far as I can tell, the reality is the truth is on Trump's side slightly more than it's on the side of the media and the Democrats.
And they're desperately trying to win.
Some people have said, Tim, the reality is whenever someone's in the losing faction, then they become this way. Republicans did the same, and
Fox News did the same thing to Barack Obama. That may be true. We'll see how things play out in
the future. And I think it's very likely that, you know, you know, at some point Trump's going to be
out of office, some Democrats going to win, and then Republicans will start behaving similarly
and Fox News will start behaving similarly. Yes, I get it. But for now, here's what I can
tell you.
I'm not going to speculate on the past or the future.
I'm going to tell you what CNN is doing right now.
They're crying because they can't book guests.
I'm sorry, man.
Fauci didn't come over to my house to come on my show.
I feel for you.
We're in the same boat.
Is that what you're saying?
Perhaps they should be forced to go on your network.
Business Insider says, Vice President Mike Pence has blocked the U.S.' 's top public health officials from appearing on CNN over the past week in an effort to pressure the cable news network to air President Donald Trump's White House coronavirus briefings in their entirety, CNN reported Thursday.
Now this is only technically the truth.
The reality is that Mike Pence said don't go on the network, CNN asked why, and a spokesman said why don't you try airing the press briefings or something.
To insinuate that proves that Pence is doing this for a specific reason is incorrect.
I mean, it may be, but you can't say that, can you?
CNN is one of several networks that often cut away from the briefings to fact-check the president's statements and don't always air the full events, which can last a few hours.
Trump regularly makes false or misleading claims in the briefing rooms about the pandemic.
Yeah, well, you know what?
The American people didn't seem to think so.
They seem to like what he's saying.
The polls show it.
When you guys cover the briefings with the health officials, then you can expect them back on your air, a representative for Pence told CNN.
CNN reported those officials included the Coronavirus Task Force members Deborah Birx, Anthony Fauci, FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn, and Surgeon General Jerome Adams.
CNN said the president had also refused all of its requests for an interview during the health crisis.
On Tuesday, CNN didn't air the president's portion of the daily briefing, but tuned in for some of the health officials' remarks.
The president's favorite network, Fox News, has aired the briefings in full.
Well, it's no wonder he likes them.
I'll tell you why Donald Trump doesn't want to go on CNN.
And I'll tell you the real reason that Mike Pence probably doesn't want the officials going on that network either.
That's probably true.
They're annoyed that CNN and other networks won't air the press briefings in full, but they're singling out CNN.
I mean, other networks have pulled away, right?
Is Mike Pence only going after CNN for this, or is it possible that Mike Pence is going after CNN for other reasons?
How about this?
Let's read this story from Fox News.
CNN chief White House correspondent Jim Acosta took fire on social media Tuesday as critics suggested he was downplaying serious mistakes made by the World Health Organization to go after Trump.
During Tuesday's coronavirus task force briefing, Trump said he may put a very powerful hold on funding for the World Health Organization as he lashed out at the United Nations Specialized Agency and accused it of being very China-centric.
Reiterating his complaints from a tweet earlier in the day, The president said the WHO has been wrong about a lot of things.
Trump has been critical of the World Health Organization for opposing travel restrictions from China and Europe.
Acosta seemed to dismiss Trump's condemnation of the organization by turning to the president's own rhetoric.
Quote, Trump slams the World Health Organization for calling it wrong.
But it was Trump who was calling it wrong for weeks on the coronavirus.
The World Health Organization called the outbreak a pandemic on March 11th.
Trump cited the World Health Organization in address to the nation on the same day.
Acosta tweeted, including a link to the transcript of Trump's Oval Office address.
Donald Trump, in early February, in his State of the Union address, pointed out the threat of the coronavirus from China.
So while I can be critical of myself, like I said, we're all playing the same game.
Here's how I see it.
Jim Acosta is trying to make Trump look bad, ignoring the fact the World Health Organization was promoting Chinese propaganda, claiming that China said there's no human-human transmission on January 15th, when China had data to suggest there was.
The World Health Organization said the travel restrictions were ineffective and were bad.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump was enforcing them and warning of this.
If you go back to the root, it would seem that while Donald Trump was far from perfect, he was raising, you know, red flags and setting up policies to combat this early on when the World Health Organization was late to the party.
The World Health Organization called it a pandemic on March 11th.
If you start from there, and then criticize Trump afterwards, you make it seem like the World Health Organization was in front of the problem.
They weren't.
They were behind it, and they made this all worse.
There's the problem.
I can call out Jim Acosta and CNN for fake news, but I'd like to go back to the beginning of this.
China had data.
They ignored the data.
The World Health Organization promoted fake information.
The US reacted poorly.
Trump downplayed things but did take actions.
Actions well before the World Health Organization was treating this as seriously as they did on March 11th.
We can go back a week and see that Jim Acosta is, in fact, ignoring the serious errors because he's just trying to getcha!
That's all they do.
So why would Mike Pence say don't go on CNN?
Because that's all they do.
I watch CNN and I'm surprised.
They don't go on the ground anymore.
They become a pundit network.
They claim to be journalists, but they don't do journalism.
In fact, Jim Acosta has been slammed and smeared by other journalists, including the head of the White House Correspondents Association.
I believe that's the guy's position.
But apparently he wrote in a book that Jim Acosta is an opinion journalist.
Yeah, he's a guy who gets up, states some opinion, complains, refuses to sit down or shut up.
Okay, CNN, if you want to do news, get rid of Acosta and maybe they'll do news.
But guess what?
I'm not going to cry that I don't get to go to the White House press briefings because I'm doing political commentary.
Yes, there is an air of journalism about what I do, but for the most part, I'm sitting here talking about the media and being critical.
I can fully recognize that.
Now, I know a lot of critics will say, Tim is not a journalist.
Yeah, I'm mostly doing political commentary.
I got no problem acknowledging that, but there is journalism in what I do.
I source and fact-check a lot of information every single day.
I literally just did a segment digging into the financials of Bernie Sanders, so cry about it.
Jim Acosta, on the other hand, doesn't do journalism.
Or I can at least say, kind of.
It's opinion advocacy journalism, call it what you want.
But he gets up at these events and he complains about his personal beef with the president, falsely framing things in order to score points.
I wonder when these third-party fact-checking agencies will start labeling Jim Acosta as untrustworthy, because instead of talking about what is, he complains about what things, you know, should be, and what he wants.
He's not doing journalism.
It's just gotcha.
Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha.
He falsely frames things, he exaggerates to push his position, which I believe isn't even political.
I believe it's about enriching Jim Acosta.
It's about selling his stupid book on Amazon, whatever it's called, Enemy of the People.
Dude, you're worse than a pundit, you're a clown show.
If you had an important point to make and you made that point, fine, I'd be okay with it.
But if CNN wants to claim to be on some high horse as a victim, first of all, you are Pence is under no obligation to send his staff, his task force, to you.
You're not special.
There's no guarantee.
There's something in the Constitution that says that CNN shall have the right to access.
You want access?
Then you gotta work for it.
For the time being, you're in the same boat as everyone else.
Quit crying about it.
I'll leave it there.
Next segment will be coming up tomorrow at 10 a.m.
