The Shift from Quarantine to Unrest w/Ben Shapiro

You know, there was two moments where I was like, this is a real opportunity for us to come together. And one of them was the moment the lockdown happened. It felt to me very similar to right after 9-11, where everybody was confronted with their own mortality. Like, holy shit. Like, we might be on the verge of a pandemic, like in a movie, where a lot of the people we know die. And here, we have to be kind to each other. This is what's important. It's always important. And I remember thinking, I've never been closer to my family, never been closer to my friends. We're calling each other all the time. It was like, there was real hope in that. I was like, if we get through this, we're going to be tighter. We're going to know what means something, what counts. Fuck stand-up comedy. Fuck everything else, man. What's important is love and friendship. Then it started to get angry. It only took like three or four weeks, where people started getting, like they were scared. So people started getting shittier with each other online. And then I basically swore off Twitter. I was like, this is just too toxic and too hostile. The second moment where I thought we had the opportunity to come together was George Floyd. So George Floyd died. And all of a sudden, you have these Black Lives Matter protests. And I'm like, maybe we can finally make a dent on racism. Maybe we can finally make a dent in police brutality. Maybe this is a moment where we can come together and realize what's important, this community, solidarity that we're all in this together. This is crazy. And then the cops need to be reformed. They can't live like that. And maybe we should take into account PTSD. Maybe we should take into account the fact that these fucking guys are pulling up on people every day that might shoot them in the face. They might never be able to see their family and their kids. Let's rework this. Let's think this shit through. Yeah. Nope. And then chaos. And then all of a sudden it became like what we saw yesterday where they're breaking into Amazon Go in Seattle. Like that fucking guy owns the Washington Post. He owns the most left wing newspaper in America. And you're like, not good enough. Well, you saw this set up like a fake guillotine outside of Bezos' house in Washington, D.C. It's insane. It's just it's madness. He's too rich. I totally agree with you, by the way. Like when when the when COVID happened, I thought, I can't really see how we're going to split in partisan fashion over this thing. Like everybody wants to live and everybody would also like to eventually get back to regular life. And the better we can live, the better we can get back to regular life. So it seems like, OK, we're on board when it came to the lockdowns, the original lockdowns. I was like, OK, I'm on board. I'm taking this thing really seriously. I've got parents in their 60s. I feel like, you know, I'm in good health. I'm fairly young. I'm 36. But for my parents, I want my parents getting this thing. And so we're still taking this thing real seriously. I mean, I'm still wearing a mask around to public places. And I think people should. That's a responsible thing to do. But it immediately turned into who can we blame for this? Who can we blame? Who's doing it wrong? And it seems like there were only like a couple of things that you really can do that are obviously wrong. Like nobody has a good solution on this thing. OK, it ravaged Italy. It ravaged Spain. It ravaged New York. Like there are a couple of things you shouldn't do. Don't take the old and send them back into the nursing homes with COVID. I mean, that's like an obvious one. But beyond that, like just staying away from each other and socially distancing, like this is all kind of commonsensical stuff that people have known since the flu pandemic event in 1918. Like nothing has really changed. And yet it immediately turned into who can we blame? Who's to blame for all these dead people? Maybe it's Ron DeSantis or maybe it's Cuomo. Who can we blame? So that was terrible. And then on the Floyd stuff, I had the same feelings. I don't know a single human being who watched that tape and didn't think, OK, that guy deserves to go to jail. Shelvin, the officer in that case and the George Floyd. Didn't think that. Yeah, everyone I know, every single person was like, yeah, that's real bad. Like that's cops. Like I know tons of cops. I'm friendly with tons of cops. And not one of them was like, yeah, that's good police procedure. I'm glad he did that. No one thought that. And so when people are like, OK, we're going to look at police brutality. Maybe we'll take a look at qualified immunity. Maybe we'll take a look at police unions and the kind of restrictive covenants that they have with the cities and and how we make sure that everybody knows who the bad cops are so they can't get hired at different places. Like all those are solutions. But they quickly turn from what we don't want to talk about solutions. Solutions are a bad idea. What we need to do is we need to shout about everything we can possibly imagine all at once. You know what? Instead, let's have a conversation about like, was George Washington a bad guy? Let's have a conversation instead about like just completely defunding the police. We don't have like a responsible conversation about things that make sense. We'll talk about like what if we just got rid of the police? How crazy is that discussion? That discussion when people were really saying defund the police, I'm like, cooler heads will prevail. But they're going to realize. And I think they're realizing it now in New York City. I mean, New York City has had record crime, record homicides. Who would have thought? Who would have thought? De Blasio is I mean, I would have never I would have never imagined I would look at Garcetti and go, well, he's better. That's exactly right. I look at Garcetti and I look at De Blasio. I'm like, Garcetti, I have him over my house for dinner. He's way better than De Blasio. Giant groundhog murderer. So weird. You can have protests, but only Black Lives Matter protests. That one was that was that was a solid. That may have been the moment when I realized that we were all aft. That was the moment when like we're in the middle of a global pandemic with hundreds of thousands of people dead and an entire swath of our media and healthy leads just decided randomly that if you're protesting against lockdown, you're very bad. Then you were a racist and you're going to get people killed and you should wear a mask. And I was like, well, if you're I sort of agree with the mask thing like, yeah, OK. And then you get millions of people in the streets yelling at each other and breathing on each other and spitting on each other. And you got health professionals on TV being like, well, racism is a public health threat. I guess that you can do that now. It's like, well, what I know people who died in the hospital of covid and their family could not visit them. Like they literally died alone in the hospital of covid and family could not visit them. And you're telling me that it's deeply important that we have like dance lines. This was stuff happening at rallies like dance lines in the streets in New York to fight racism. That's deeply important. But a daughter being able to visit her dad before he dies, that's not important. I am. But what bullshit I am for your freedom to protest. I'm 100 percent for your freedom to protest. I'm also for your freedom to go to the gym. I'm also for your freedom to go to a comedy club. If you so choose for your freedom to go to a restaurant. Look, they figured out how to do restaurants in a lot of places. The servers wear masks and many of them wear face shields. You distance the tables apart from each other. You do temperature checks. You take people's names and addresses down when they enter so that if anybody gets sick, if there's any sort of company and they've been able to do this. No, this is right. The vectors of transmission are typically closed areas. People in solid proximity with each other for long periods of time. Yes. That's the stuff where people are getting this stuff. And I trust most Americans not like some Americans meet dumbasses. Some people are just dumbasses. There's a lot of videos. Oh, yeah. Watch YouTube. Plenty of Karen's out there. How sad is it if your name is Karen and you're a good person? All the good guys out there. I'm sorry, ladies. I'm really sorry. But it's like this. I made this point online. I got shellac for it. But I was pointing out that most Americans are wearing masks right now. By polling data, 59 percent of Americans say that they always wear a mask when they leave the house. And if you look at the map of mask wearing across the board in the places where there are the most cases, people are wearing masks. That's not I wasn't saying masks don't work. I wear a mask. I think that the evidence shows that they do something. We don't know that they're not like full protective. They're the cloth masks are not as effective as surgical masks, which are not as effective as on 95s. But wear a mask. Good. The point that I was making is people are acting in fairly rational fashion. Meaning if you think covid is like around you, you're wearing a mask and you're socially distancing. So this this idea that Gavin Newsom knows best how you ought to live your life. I got some trouble with that, especially because California saw the same uptick as Texas and Florida and California never opened. I mean, we've been here the whole time. California never really opened. Well, we were doing pretty good up until the protests. Yeah, everything seemed like it was on an uptick. The Comedy Store was talking to them about becoming an essential business and opening up because they had opened up bars and they had opened up restaurants. And they didn't really have a designation for comedy clubs. They sort of talked about it as a live performance venue. But then that puts comedy clubs at the same place as the Staples Center, which sounds crazy, right? So like, listen, we can do this. We can just have half capacity temperature checks. Do it right. They're doing it right in a lot of places all over the country. We can do this. The audience has to wear masks. This is totally doable. And so they were right about to do that. And then post. This other thing is we were trying to figure out, like, is it protests only? I think it's bars, too. The thing about bars is close talk. People are in loud talk. Yeah, they're drunk and they're on top of each other. I think bars probably such churches. Right. Lots of singing. Lots of lots of vocalizing churches and synagogues who are remain vector for this. Yeah, I mean, but again, these are all things that are fairly common sensical and we can agree on. And yet we're beating the hell out of each other over this stuff. And there's this suggestion. We know what to do. If only we just did it, this would stop. It's not going to stop. OK, it's not going to stop. It's a very transmissible disease. We don't have a vaccine. As long as people are out there, it's going to continue to pass. Wear a mask if you're in close proximity with others. And that's pretty much it. The hospitals are getting better at this. Thank God. Yes, they are. And the crazy thing was that they were saying like the you can only protest if it's a black lives matter protest. What about a protest for increasing your immunity? What about a protest for educating people to the techniques and the strategies for increasing your immune system? It is there are they're out there. And there's no discussion about this amongst health professionals. Excuse me, amongst politicians. If you listen to health professionals, people that really understand the human body, they'll tell you there's a lot of strategies, a lot of things you could do. First of all, eliminate alcohol, eliminate caffeine, eliminate sugar, eliminate all the bullshit in your diet. Start taking vitamin supplements. Get outside, get some vitamin D. Get get your body healthy. Exercise. Do do all these things and you will increase your immune system. Increase your body's health. You don't hear a word of that. All of it is just stay inside. You know, we have to stay apart to keep everybody safe. And God damn. The number one vector for transmission remains the home. Right. That's still the number one vector in every society is the home. People going home and giving it to each other. And when they remember, for me, one of the breaking points in L.A. was was when they decided they were going to shut down all open areas. They're going to shut down all the parks, they're going to shut down all the beaches. And I was like, what is this? Well, not only that, it goes against science because there's been papers that have been studied that show that this virus dies almost instantaneously when it's exposed to sunlight or even artificial sunlight. Yeah, none of it makes any sense, but it does feel like bottom line, there were a bunch of gaps in American society and then a bad thing happened and everything just sort of fell apart. It was sort of like a house of cards and then there's a little bit of weight put right on top of the house of cards and everything just collapsed in on itself. Well, people are panicking. You know, they're getting scared and then the economy is collapsing. So the economy collapsing at the same time as the George Floyd protests. Led people to start looting and then people that didn't give a fuck about George Floyd or Black Lives Matter were just stealing shit. And then the police was letting them steal shit. They were standing down in Beverly Hills in Santa Monica, literally cops standing there while people were smashing doors. I got to say, the media coverage of this stuff is just awful. The media were cheering this stuff on. I mean, they were simultaneously making two arguments that conflict with each other. One was these are mostly peaceful protests. First of all, mostly peaceful is the most it's the most loosely defined, arbitrarily applied term in history. Well, if you get to pick a thousand people that night, OJ Simpson was mostly peaceful that night. For like an hour fifteen, he was really not peaceful. But for the other hours between sunset and sunrise, he was unbelievably peaceful. Like I've never heard this term before where a protest turns into a vast riot wrecking all of Melrose. And everybody's like, well, it was mostly peaceful. Well, what what is that? What is that? So so how about this? How about you either say that the protesters and looters are two different groups of people and we treat them differently. If you're protesting, that's First Amendment activity. The minute you shatter a store window, you go to jail. Right. That's the way they should read. Or alternatively, if it's if you if you're saying they're the same group, then they need to be treated as lawbreakers. So I believe the first I believe if you're a protester, you should be protesting. If you're a looter and a rioter, then you should go to jail. But the media refused to make that distinction. And then they act like the cops are the bad guys when they come in to arrest people who are violating the license in Portland right now. They're trying to burn down the damn courthouse. Yeah. And the and the feds come in and start arresting people and people like this is the Gestapo. It's like, OK, speaking as one of the tribe, let me say this is not like the Gestapo. OK, like the Gestapo was not famous for rolling up on people and then charging them. And then if they didn't have a charge releasing them, that wasn't like the Gestapo's thing. I'm sorry, but you decided that you wanted to throw a firebomb at the federal courthouse and your local mayor said he wasn't going to let the police do anything. And so DHS came in and arrested you. Tough shit. I mean, like, I'm sorry, that's at some point somebody's got to restore some semblance of law and order here. Well, it's it's a weird situation because I don't exactly understand why they're attacking the courthouse. I don't exactly understand why they're smashing the windows at Amazon. Go. It's Steve Martin. Right. They must hate these paint cans. Right. From the jerk, right. But it's it's it went from this to the literally tear down the structure of society.