 You know, I don't know why this is so difficult for Republicans, but they just can't help themselves. They can't not be wrong on an issue. It doesn't matter what the issue is. It doesn't matter how big of a consensus has been built around said issue. It doesn't matter how common sense the solution is. They just have to be wrong because, of course, they want to be wrong. That's what they do. So take a nonpartisan issue like COVID-19 where everyone agrees that there's a real necessity for social distancing and self-quarantine because that's what's going to help to flatten the curve. All of a sudden, they're trying to make that a partisan issue. It's a pandemic. I don't necessarily think that COVID-19 will discriminate on the basis of your political affiliation. And, you know, these types of solutions, these are things that scientists and experts say we need to implement. Not Democrats or Republicans. Nonetheless, they're making this into a partisan issue. And, you know, this is getting worse as we see more and more anti-quarantine protests. But look, this entire wave of anti-quarantine momentum has been catalyzed by pundits on the right because it started when you had, you know, the lieutenant governor go on Fox News and say, look, if I'm going to die to make sure that we don't tank the economy, I think that that is something that I should do. That's a noble and just cause. I'm paraphrasing, of course. Then you saw Glenn Beck say it. Candice Elman say it. And right on cue, Republicans all swarm on the wrong side of this issue because they think that everyone should sacrifice, you know, their lives to the gods of capitalism. Now, if you're going to talk about the economic suffering that people are experiencing, that's a good thing. You should be talking about this if you're a pundit. But contrast what the right-wingers are saying to what's being said on the left. On the left, we're talking about the need for rent cancellation, mortgage suspension. We're talking about the need for health care, a universal basic income. Whereas Republicans like Tucker Carlson, like Glenn Beck, they're not talking about the need for these economic solutions. They're talking about the solution being let's send everyone back to work. Even if we know that doing that will endanger their lives and we're cozy in our studios as we make this recommendation, it doesn't matter. Send them back to work. So rather than actually trying to get people to acknowledge that they should be demanding their government, both parties who have failed Democrats and Republicans to do better, they're trying to get them to believe that their lives aren't worthy of being protected, that maybe they should go back to work and possibly be exposed to COVID-19 and die. It's just despicable. So you have Dennis Prager of PragerU, not a real university, by the way, saying it's time to call it what it is. The lockdown is the greatest mistake in the history of humanity. And he included a picture of himself with this quote of his big dumb face. And you could just tell he's really proud of this tweet, except I have a counterpoint. No, it's not. I think that most people who are saying would agree that the Holocaust was a bigger mistake. Slavery was a bigger mistake. But what does he say is the biggest mistake in human history? Convincing people to stay home so they don't catch a deadly virus that is highly contagious. They're nuts. If these right-wing pundits actually cared about you and the economic situation that you're in, why aren't they telling you to call your representative and demand cancellation of rent? Demand health care. I mean, isn't it obvious what they're doing here? These are stooges for our capitalist system. They want you to go back to work. They want to reopen the economy in whatever capacity that's possible, because that's what's best for the industry. Lots of industries are suffering right now. So as they pretend to care about you, just understand they don't care about you. Now, this is going to continue to be an issue. So long as right-wing pundits continue to push this anti-quarantine bullshit as they fuel the momentum of these protesters. And one of the most, I think, influential propagandists on the right is now saying the same dangerous thing. Tucker Carlson, who decided to also push the same narrative that we should just reopen the economy. This isn't that bad. It's not that serious. Let's send everyone back to work. Take a look. Here's a physician and researcher from California called Dr. Dan Erickson. Erickson and a partner just delivered a 50-minute briefing on the latest numbers from California. The video they made has been viewed millions of times in a few days online. The bottom line is after looking carefully at the data, these two researchers have concluded that California should end its shelter-in-place order. Watch. We've seen 1,227 deaths in the state of California with a possible incidence or prevalence of 4.7 million. That means you have a 0.03 chance of dying from COVID-19 in the state of California. 0.03 chance of dying from COVID in the state of California. Is that, does that necessitate sheltering in place? Does that necessitate shutting down medical systems? Does that necessitate people being out of work? These are serious people who've done this for a living for decades. They have in their hands the largest currently available data sets on this question. And the question they're asking after analyzing all of those numbers, are the lockdowns worth it? So what is the answer to that? What's so striking is that so many politicians, the ones enforcing the lockdowns, don't seem at all interested in asking it. Instead, they're bullying forward as if nothing has changed. Just today, the San Francisco Bay Area announced it'll be extending its lockdown until the end of May. That's five weeks from now. What is the scientific justification for doing that? They didn't tell us because there is none, none. You may remember what they first told us back in February and March. They said, we have to take radical steps in order to, quote, flatten the curve. Well, six weeks later, we're happy to say that curve has been flattened, but it's likely not because of the lockdowns. The virus just isn't nearly as deadly as we thought it was all of us, including on this show, everybody thought it was. But it turned out not to be. Hospitals never collapsed. Outside of a tiny number of places, they never came close to collapsing, at least not from an influx of infected patients. Instead, something remarkable happened, something amazing, really without parallel in American history. The opposite happened. Thanks to the lockdowns, hospitals have begun to collapse. Why? From a lack of patience. Politicians who couldn't pass ninth grade biology decided that practicing physicians should not be allowed to calculate the risk of transmitting the virus. They're just not qualified, unlike us. So these politicians banned so-called nonessential procedures, many of which are in fact essential. The results of this policy in many hospitals, entire floors have been mothballed. Doctors and nurses are being furloughed in the middle of a pandemic. This is insanity. It weakens our healthcare system. Its effects will last for many years. That's all from the lockdown. So how long will we have to live with these lockdowns? Earlier this month, Dr. Anthony Fauci, whom we are apparently required by law to respect, no matter what he says, suggested that in fact we may never be allowed to resume normal life. If back to normal means acting like there never was a coronavirus problem, I don't think that's going to happen until we do have a situation where you can completely protect the population. If you want to get to pre-coronavirus, that might not ever happen in the sense of the fact that the threat is there. Now we should tell you that is the same Dr. Fauci, and keep this to yourself because as noted, it's not allowed to show any skepticism whatsoever. But that's the same Dr. Fauci who also announced that shaking hands, the ancient custom of shaking hands, should be done away with forever. And then a week later, told Snapchat that actually it's fine to have sex with strangers you meet on Tinder. What he did there was very effective. That is propaganda that works because people aren't necessarily going to fact check him or question what he's saying here. They're going to take what he says because he's a trusted figure and they're going to run with it. They're going to think, well Tucker Carlson is telling me based on evidence that he's citing that this isn't that serious. So maybe it's okay if I kind of get a little bit more loose with my own standards when it comes to social distancing. But what he's saying is horseshit. So he starts off that segment by citing doctors, Dan Erickson and his partner, Arton Masihi. And if you didn't know, as KQED's Barbara Ostrov points out, these are two individuals who used flawed data based off of a sample size. That's too small to denote general applicability. So what they did, the way that they reached the conclusion that they came to was they set up their own private COVID test site and based off of the sample of people that they saw, they took that low rate of positive COVID tests and they extrapolated to the rest of the Californian population. Now that's a problem because when you actually look at credible data from the CDC, the death rate in California isn't 0.03%. It's around 4%. So understand why what he's doing is so dangerous. His impressionable audience is going to run with the information that they believe is accurate because someone that they trust told this to them. They were maybe social distancing because they're immunocompromised, but now they realize that the death rate is actually pretty small. And maybe it's not as contagious as we previously thought because that's what Tucker Carlson, who I watch every day and trust, said. So maybe I can go out in public again as frequently as I used to. Maybe it's not that big of a deal after all. Maybe I was wrong to believe the hyperbolic mainstream media and individuals like Dr. Fauci. I mean, this is dangerous. This is dangerous. You are spreading misinformation that could literally kill people. The death rate is not 0.03%, Tucker Carlson. That's not correct. And you know it. And if you actually were confident in those numbers here, you'd cite more than a YouTube video from two quacks. You'd cite maybe CDC information, more data sets, not just what two people said. And he then suggests that there's no scientific justification for extending the lockdown, which is untrue, and that we've managed to flatten the curve not because of the lockdowns, but because the virus, quote, just isn't nearly as deadly as we thought it was. Again, factually incorrect, verifiably untrue. At the beginning of this pandemic, we were told that the death rate was around 2% to 3%. But guess what? When we look at the observed case to fatality ratio, it's actually higher than we thought. It's over 15% in Belgium. It's 13.4% in the United Kingdom. It's 5.8% in the United States. And this is probably a conservative estimate, right? Because this is based off of observed cases. So maybe somebody died and they didn't get a test for COVID-19. They didn't know they had it. So it's not illogical to assume that these numbers could be even higher, but we don't know. And I don't know because I'm not an expert. I'm not a doctor. We should listen to the experts. Now, you can understand why what he's saying here is persuasive. It's because if you accept that the dubious dataset from the two quacks that he cited are correct and people are going to believe it's true because he said it's true, well, then it makes sense that you'd think, well, maybe this isn't so serious. But here's the thing. The fact that hospitals, quote, never collapsed in every state isn't evidence that it's less serious. Rather, it speaks to the effectiveness and importance of social distancing and self-quarantine because it's working. It's a good thing that most hospitals around the country didn't collapse. That means that what we're doing is helping. It's a pandemic. It's not a partisan issue. It's not like Democrats proposed this solution. Trump is the president, so shouldn't you blame him of all people? Like, this is just infuriating because it's dangerous. He knows what he's doing. He's smarter than this, but he's towing the party line because he is a propagandist for the Republican Party. And every once in a while, he'll stray away from the talking points that Donald Trump and the Republican Party probably want him to use, but never, ever underestimate the hackiness of Tucker Carlson. Now, he then moves on to attack the credibility of Dr. Fauci, who is someone who is not a political figure. This is an individual who is largely apolitical, right? He's from Trump's administration, but he's a doctor, right? He's been doing this for decades. So, I mean, the fact that he's trusted, but he's contradicting some of what Trump is saying, that may be, you know, a little bit of a reason why Tucker Carlson is going after him, so that way it doesn't make Trump look bad, who he absolutely supports. But he says that, you know, it's outrageous that Dr. Fauci would dare to suggest that we do away with this ancient custom of handshaking. I mean, who cares? Is that really that important? We can't come up with a different custom? Fist bumping? I don't know. Is that really that important? I mean, I personally have always been against shaking people's hands because I have OCD. I'll admit it. I have obsessive compulsive disorder. I don't like shaking hands. I don't know where your hands have been. I don't know what you've touched. I don't know if Tucker Carlson, you know, scratches his disgusting stinky balls, and I don't want to shake your fucking hand. Get over it. I mean, customs change. There are customs throughout the world that change and evolve with time. It evolved due to things like this. So, if he is suggesting that we move on from a different custom, he's not going to authoritatively command us all to stop shaking hands. It's going to happen organically if that doesn't, in fact, happen. And I personally hope it does. But he then tries to make it seem as if Dr. Fauci is a hypocrite because he says after he suggests that we should stop shaking hands, well, a week later, he told Snapchat that it's actually fine to have sex with strangers you meet on Tinder. Now, if this were true, I would think, okay, maybe Dr. Fauci needs to be a little bit more consistent and responsible in what he's saying because he could be endangering people's lives if he gets a little bit loose with his words. But I actually found what Dr. Fauci said and he didn't say that. He didn't encourage people to have sex with strangers through Tinder. This is what was said. If you're swiping on a dating app like Tinder or Bumble or Grindr and you match with someone and you just kind of like, maybe it's fine if this one stranger comes over. What do you say to that person? You know, everybody has their own tolerance for risks and it depends on the level of the interaction that you want to have. You're looking for a friend, sitting in a room, put a mask on and, you know, chat a bit. If you want to go a little bit more intimate, well, then that's your choice regarding a risk. It's your choice regarding risks. Nowhere in that answer to the question did he say, it's fine to have sex with strangers you meet on Tinder. He's literally saying, if you do in fact do that, you're taking a chance. But Tucker Carlson is trying to smear him. Tucker wants to smear him because this is someone who challenges Donald Trump who is also an idiotic reactionary buffoon. So you can't have anyone who might make Daddy Trump look bad. And as a propagandist, you've got to defend the chief chud, right? You can speak out once in a while against what Trump is doing or the Republican Party or condemn war. But you've got to make sure that you never cross too much of a line and that at the end of the day, Trump knows that you're loyal to him, right, Tucker? It's just, it's so embarrassing. And to show you how reckless these types of segments are, one of the anti-quarantine protesters who led the protest, she actually tested positive for COVID-19. So if you're a right winger and you're suddenly believing that you should return to work, you've been misled. Ask yourself why these pundits who supposedly care about you and don't want your life to be ruined economically, why aren't they commanding people like Donald Trump to pass a UBI? I mean, Donald Trump literally watches Tucker Carlson's program. So he can easily suggest, hey, you know what? Donald Trump, if he truly wants to help Americans, don't send them back to work. Give them healthcare. Cancel rent. Extend unemployment further. Give them a universal basic income at least throughout the duration of this pandemic. But what is Tucker Carlson choosing to do instead? Encourage individuals in power like Donald Trump to send them all back to work to die for capitalism. And he does this conveniently in his cozy studio where he never has to worry about the risk of COVID-19. To him, it's not going to make a difference. So understand that people like Tucker Carlson and Prager are charlatans. They don't actually care about you. And if they were worried about this economic situation that you're in, they wouldn't be pushing for you to go back to work and possibly run the risk of contracting COVID-19. They'd be pushing the leaders that listen to them to adopt policies that would help you get through this, help you weather the storm of COVID-19. But because they are reactionary and wrong on every single issue, of course, they're going to turn COVID-19 into a partisan issue as well. Because we live in hell and our country is run by sociopaths and psychopaths. And this is, you know, what we get. The Humanist Report is fake news. Mike only cares about Crazy Bernie and his wacky socialist ideas. Sad, very sad. I'm unsubscribing.