Best of The Program | 4/6/20

Welcome to the podcast.

Today, Glenn takes a bunch of phone calls from people trying to figure out the world right now and what they've been seeing.

It's interesting to hear from around the country right now.

As you know, from the mainstream media, all we're hearing is basically what's going on in New York City, which is where most of these people live.

So, they are very focused on it, but there's a whole world out there and lots of different things going on.

We go through a bunch of that today.

We go into whether the new Malaysian approach to the the coronavirus is the right one.

It's kind of interesting.

Boris Johnson in the hospital with coronavirus.

We'll get into that a little bit.

Also, what to do with your kids in quarantine.

If you're in that situation, you know it's interesting to say the least.

We have a coronavirus update.

We have

the incredible new development of left-wing media sources

who have been touting the reusable grocery bag for a very, very long time.

Now having to deal with the fact that they're banning them everywhere because of coronavirus, which is just bizarre.

That's all coming up on today's program.

Also, to let you know, you can subscribe to Blaze TV at blazetv.com slash Glenn.

If you use the promo code Glenn, you can get 30 bucks off.

It's our biggest discount ever.

And tomorrow, Tuesday, April 7th, the big release of Arguing with Socialists, Glenn's new book.

We're going to need arguments against socialists more than ever after this coronavirus thing is over and throughout it, I'm sure.

So, it's a very well-timed book that is fun to read and has all the facts you'll need to win every argument against a socialist.

It's available in every bookstore that's not going to be open, but you can order it, of course, online at Amazon or anywhere else to get your books or glennbeck.com.

You're listening to

the best of the Glenn Beck program.

All right, so our coronavirus update from Johns Hopkins University, total confirmed cases worldwide now, 1,284,000.

That's up over a quarter of a million since Friday.

Total confirmed deaths, now 70,000.

That's up 1600.

Sorry, 16,100 from Friday.

Total confirmed recovered,

5% of active cases are considered serious, steady from 5% on Friday, down from 19 back at the high in February, and 11% of U.S.

confirmed cases are still requiring hospitalization, roughly on par with Italy at 12%.

Spain, 17%,

are requiring hospitalization.

We now have 336,851

new confirmed cases.

That is up almost 100,000.

On Friday, I gave you the death count of 6,000.

Today, it is 9,620.

We now have

about 1% of the population tested.

They're saying now, according to the New York Times, that the U.S.

death toll is off a bit, only by about 100%.

COVID-19 deaths in the U.S.

may be undercounted by half.

Inconsistent protocols, limited resources, patchwork of decision-making have led to an undercounting of people with the coronavirus who have died.

Let me give you a couple of examples from the New York Times.

First one, a coroner in Indiana wanted to know if the coronavirus had killed a man in early March, but said her health department denied a test.

Example two, paramedics in New York City say many patients die at home, are never tested for coronavirus, even if

they showed all of the signs of infection with death certificates marked as cardiac arrest, respiratory failure, or unknown.

An example three in Virginia, funeral director prepared the remains of three people after health workers cautioned her that they each had tested positive for coronavirus, but one of the three, only one of the three, had COVID-19 on the death certificate.

We definitely know there are COVID-19 deaths that are not accounted for.

That's across the country.

They say that it is

100%

off.

The same effect has occurred in Italy, Spain, Ecuador, and China, where the rate at which patients are dying and lack of testing led to chronic undercounting of COVID-19 related deaths.

As reported by the Blaze last week, citing the Wall Street Journal and Al Jazeera, Ecuador healthcare officials in some areas have taken to burning bodies in empty parking lots or burying bodies in mass graves, with most of the

deaths never tested for COVID-19.

In one Italian village, a mayor reported he had more than 300 bodies, presumed COVID-19, which officials had not picked up or counted in Italy's official numbers.

The Army told us on Friday, then Sunday, we're still waiting, he said.

Virus can contaminate face masks up to seven days.

Have we decided on what the face mask thing is, Stu?

Are we?

They did a national recommendation that when you're out in public, you should wear them.

However, they also say that you need to be washing them because if you just keep popping on the same one or handling the mask after you've used it, there may be virus on the mask anyway, so it's not really going to do you much good.

It's like one of the one of my favorite parts about, I mean, look, there's not a lot of positives coming out of this, but one of my favorite stories was the the fact that now all of these grocery stores are banning the reusable bags and going back to the disposable bags

because I love that because of you know the virus which you know it's funny because this has been a legitimate problem for a long time with reusable bags because people take their bag and they put the meat in the bag and the the juice or whatever leaks out and it you know does all this stuff you're supposed to wash it every time every time and the fun part about about washing it every time is it eliminates any environmental positive that you would get.

So if you don't wash it every time, there's a slight environmental positive, though you're risking your health in serious ways.

If you do wash it out, it's worse for the environment than plastic bags.

So no big deal.

No big deal.

So your face mask could be infected for seven days, but don't worry about it.

The fact check from USA Today I found interesting.

Finally, they got around to this one.

Did Obama deplete U.S.

national stockpiles of N95 masks?

Did you hear this?

If you're a conservative, you probably heard this.

If you're a liberal, you probably didn't hear this.

Yes, according to USA Today, now they've finally taken up the

task.

He geared us up for swine flu.

and hurricane and flooding cleanup operations in 2009.

And then again in 2012, they used all the N95 masks or a lot of them and then never put them back in stockpile.

So didn't replenish.

That's one of the reasons why Donald Trump, he's so bad.

We don't have any masks.

Yeah, that would be somebody didn't put more on the shelf.

That would be Barack Obama.

Yeah, there actually is an interesting story today, too, about how George W.

Bush was obsessed with the pandemics.

He read the 1918 flu pandemic book, which we've talked about before.

It's a pretty you know, it's probably the biggest.

It's a great influenza.

It's great.

Yeah, it's probably the biggest, well-known, best-known book about the 1918 flu.

And he read it and he was like, look, this is serious.

We need to be prepared for it even when we don't see it coming because right around when it hits, it's going to be too late.

And he spent tons of

time and resources preparing the U.S.

government for this.

And then it was whittled away by

largely Obama.

I mean, it was really a big deal to Bush personally.

It was abandoned once Obama took over.

And, you know, you could make the argument that Trump should have

brought all these things back in his first three years.

There's not, you know, there's no blameless person here overall, but still, Obama seems to be the one who really did not prioritize this as much as you would have hoped throughout this.

And it's costing him.

Well, it didn't prioritize, quite honestly, anything.

I mean, when it comes to disaster, you don't have a stockpile and then not replenish it.

If you're using it, you have to, at the end, go back and replenish.

And they didn't.

And,

you know,

I don't blame Donald Trump for that.

And I don't blame Obama for not carrying through with George Bush's thing.

I do blame him for, or his administration, for not replenishing it.

That's your responsibility.

I mean, you know, we all learn that with our moms.

Can somebody, I mean, you just want to replace the toilet paper?

Or is that all I live for?

Is just just replacing everybody's toilet paper.

There's a new role underneath the sink.

I mean,

we all got that from our mom.

That's exactly what Barack Obama should have heard.

Latest casually, as we told you earlier today, Corona beer has officially stopped production.

No, it's not that we're that stupid.

Mexico has finally gotten a clue and said that that's not an essential business.

I think there'd be a lot of people that would disagree with that, but they have shuttered the beer business.

Japan and Hong Kong may declare a new state of emergency because the virus has re-emerged.

Both Japan and Hong Kong saw new waves of COVID-19 cases as travel and work restrictions were lifted about 10 days ago.

This couldn't be worse news.

And then the Surgeon General came out and said, this is going to be the hardest and saddest for most Americans' lives.

He said, this is going to be the grimmest period of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States.

This is, quote, going to be our Pearl Harbor moment, our 9-11 moment.

It's going to be localized and it's going to be happening all over the country.

And I want Americans to understand that.

I want Americans to understand that as hard as this week is going to be, there's light at the end of the tunnel.

Do you have that feeling at all, Stu, that this is going to be the hardest, most grim?

or the, or I thought you were going to say, is there light at the end of the tunnel, is what I'm feeling.

Yeah, no, I mean, do you feel like it's that?

Like, do you feel this?

What he was saying?

Well, I don't.

We're going to be seeing, we're seeing thousands of people die a day.

I mean, remember at the beginning, your

whole...

You said this, I think, last week.

It's currently the third largest cause of death in America, right?

Would you say that right now?

It's third.

Yes.

And if it just stayed stable, didn't grow, just stayed stable, by the end of the month, it would be the number one killer.

The number one pandemic in the last hundred years.

The number one pandemic in the last hundred years.

Yeah.

So, I mean, it's been.

That's pretty remarkable.

It's been pretty significant.

I mean, again, like, especially my situation is different than probably most of the people listening in that I'm still coming to work every day.

Like, I was talking to people this weekend.

They were like, wait, what?

You're still going in?

Like, how is that possible?

You know, in a lot of parts of the country, you know, it's not like it is in New York.

But, I mean, there are several major cities who are about to go through the same thing that New York is going through.

We've bought a little bit of time, hopefully, and some of the resources will get to the right spots.

The president was pretty upbeat about getting the right amount of ventilators and such to each location.

Hopefully, that can actually.

Seattle's sending their vent.

Seattle's sending their vents to New York, which is great.

Yeah, I mean, so hopefully, I mean, I do have a lot of confidence that when the United States decides something's a legitimate thing to focus on, we do pretty well at it usually.

You know, it takes us time sometimes to pick these things up early.

We talked about this with terrorism, right?

Like, you know, we were not necessarily taking it seriously for a long time.

And then all of a sudden,

one Tuesday morning, we all kind of like, holy crap, this is a really important thing.

And we took it very seriously after that.

And we tend to do those things, you know, when we we really put our mind to it, we do pretty well.

And you can see like the way that these companies are coming together, making you know, building the masks and the face shields and ventilators.

And,

you know, we are, the testing is another one.

I keep, I keep spouting this, and no one seems to care about it.

It's because it was a narrative apparently two weeks ago and no longer applies.

But the idea that the United States had basically no tests at all three weeks ago and is now doing 150,000 a day, we're up close to 2 million tests already.

We've tested now more than any other

country.

And who knows with China?

You'd throw them out because we don't know.

But

we've stepped that up quickly.

We have these rapid tests coming.

And between that and the potential antibody tests, you have a situation where we could get a handle on this and operate our country in a relatively somewhat normal fashion even before we get a cure or a treatment.

You know, it's amazing because

I told you, I think on Friday that I watched Sky News from England, and there were two stories that stuck out right at the top of the hour.

One was the private sector saying, please let us make ventilators, let us make masks.

The private market was begging the government to allow them to make medical things, and the government wasn't doing it.

The very next story was the government's, and look it up, it's unbelievable, the government's

five-step plan

to be at a hundred thousand COVID tests by the end of this month.

What?

What?

The five-step plan?

I mean, holy mother, you're kidding me.

We're doing a million a day.

And we were the country that was, oh, we have no clue as what.

No, this is the capitalist system.

Yep.

This is the capitalist system.

And, you know,

there's this thing going around about how, oh, there's no libertarians in a pandemic.

It's the opposite.

Everybody turns into libertarians in a pandemic.

The most left-leaning, I want big government people all see when it gets really important, they get rid of all those dumb restrictions, all the licensing issues, all of the long approval processes.

You know, there's these things we talked about, Glenn, a little bit, certificate of need laws, which are laws that say, hey, when you want to build a new hospital, you have to go to the state and say, I think they need a new hospital.

And the state has to tell you, yeah, we agree with you after hearing the opposing opinion from people in the community who know best, namely the competition you'd have in the hospital that already exists.

So they come in and they say, of course, don't approve a lot of these hospitals.

The same thing goes with

important medical equipment like MRIs and ventilators, right?

So

they go through this.

They had, at one point,

49 states had these.

They started to whittle away as you know, as Reagan went on.

But I think it was something like 36 states when the pandemic started.

I think it's 15 of those states, most of them, most hard hit by this

pandemic, have all waived those laws now so that people can bring in more beds and can bring in more ventilators.

But it does very little use once the pandemic has already begun.

Like, if you had an open system and there were enough beds there already, you wouldn't have to worry about these things last second.

Instead, they're bringing ships in off the coast.

These are the kinds of things that you will learn about in Arguing with Socialists, the new book.

It comes out officially tomorrow.

You can order it on Amazon right now.

I think this is really important to make this a number one best-selling book, even top five best-selling book from the New York Times.

It would send a real message

this week in the pandemic.

If everybody's like, oh no, we want government, we want government.

No, no, no.

Arguing with socialists, buy your copy now

and get it wherever you buy books.

This is the best of the Glenn Beck program, and we really want to thank you for listening.

A great battle against an invisible enemy.

All of these things that Donald Trump has said,

they're true and they make perfect sense.

Even Trump's most ardent supporters and

his most ardent opponents, both of them,

say this is a once-in-a-generation emergency and we should be on wartime footing.

And the opponents of Donald Trump, many of them, have called for more and more power to be handed to, no,

no, let me get this right.

To be taken by the president to do battles against this invisible enemy.

Everything from commandeering manufacturing plants to logistics to shipping companies, pharmaceutical manufacturing, research, nationalizing the banks.

What is going on?

You said he was a tyrant.

You're opposed to him.

And you're just telling him to do all these things.

No.

And thank God, we have a president that understands the free market, president that has preferred to form a partnership with private industries to wage the war, turning America's great companies to produce masks and respirators and and ventilators and medicine and vaccines, all the things that will ensure our country can and will prevail while keeping them private.

The United States and the entire world are engaged right now in a great battle against an unseen enemy.

An enemy that threatens to kill our people, destroy our nation, and our way of life.

And it's an enemy that we have seen and fought before as a people.

We've faced this enemy throughout human history over and over and over again.

We've had to battle it.

All of us are descendants of survivors of the countless previous wars that humanity has had to fight against this hidden enemy of man.

The enemy is a disease.

The enemy is a virus.

But the enemy is not SARS COVID-2 coronavirus.

The virus we're actually fighting against, the unseen, the one that wants to remain unseen, is slavery.

And you can call it what you want, socialism, collectivism, communism, statism, despotism, authoritarianism, whatever you want to call it, it's slavery.

People's individual liberty captured for the benefit and the betterment of everybody else.

Those are all forms of enslaving some men to the will of others.

That's slavery.

A virus is a biological construct.

And doing battle against a virus requires treating both the symptoms caused by the infection as well as finding a vaccine that can destroy the virus as well.

But slavery

is also a political and moral construct.

It's a social disease caused by an immoral idea spread by unthinking, unfeeling human beings who transmit the disease to others, turning them into factories that produce more unthinking, unfeeling human beings.

They take over the lives of more and more people within a society or a country until that country is completely destroyed.

Its defenses exhausted.

And doing battle against slavery requires treating both the symptoms caused by the infection within a society as well as finding a cure that can destroy the idea itself.

President Donald Trump is absolutely right.

This is a war.

He's also correct that we've fought this type of war before.

But this is not a war against the coronavirus.

That, quite frankly, is child's play.

As terrible as it is, COVID-19 is not going to kill us.

Might kill a few of us, but we will prevent the spread.

We will find a cure.

America and the world will survive this pandemic as it has survived millions of others in the past.

Each of us is a descendant of survivors of a thousand biological plagues.

The president is right.

We cannot let the cure for COVID-19 be worse than the disease itself.

And he has the right idea in terms of the outcome here.

We can't let our response to coronavirus destroy the American economy.

Now when I say in the American economy, it seems cold and callous

because that's not really the objective.

To save the economy is not the objective.

A healthy, productive American economy

will enable people to generate wealth and accumulate things

and to be healthier,

to be safer, to be more free.

That's a consequence, that's an outcome.

It's not a cause in itself.

What has enabled the American economy to be the most robust and powerful engine for human ingenuity, productivity, wealth generation?

Individual liberty.

Men free to think, men free to build, men free to fail, to seek new achievements, and to be rewarded for doing so

and punished by their own actions, the consequence of their own actions.

A natural consequence.

They fail.

They have a right to compete with each other, driving each other to be smarter, to work harder, to find the better way to solve solve problems.

That's America.

That's not the economy.

That's America.

That's the battle we're in.

That's the battle we're fighting to save.

If the cure for COVID-19 is the slavery of some men for the benefit and betterment of others, then COVID-19 perhaps should take us all.

If the cost of defeating the biological virus is that we

then die on the table to political and moral disease of collectivism,

then Trump's fear will have proved to be right,

and the cure will have been much worse than the disease.

I want you to look at what's been proposed.

In the U.S., the government should take over every major industry from healthcare to pharmaceutical companies.

Grocery, food delivery, airlines, shipping, transportation, construction, take it over.

Banking, take it over.

Stock market, take it over.

On the global scale now, the United Nations is now calling for a permanent 10% global tax on the GDP of every country.

Now, they say this is designed to, you know, fight COVID-19.

Permanent, permanent 10% tax to enable the UN to fight future pandemics as well as the ongoing pandemic, climate change.

Oh, and poverty and income inequality and sexism and nationalism and a thousand other isms that are really, really super unfair.

The United States is less than 5% of the world's population, but we represent 25% of the world's GDP.

So the UN is effectively proposing that about 4% of the population transfer 10% of our wealth each year to support the remaining 96% of the human race.

If you don't think that's fair, well, I just call it a progressive income tax.

But I will tell you this,

that leads to our destruction.

And if you think it's unfair, then maybe you should do some rethinking.

Because

maybe you've been pushing from the wrong policies here in America.

Because it kind of feels like the world wants to destroy us.

What's proposed here is nothing short of permanent enslavement of the United States for the betterment and benefit of every other national on earth.

There's no doubt in in my mind that humans will survive COVID-19 and will do it in spectacular fashion.

But the plague of collectivism, the idea that some men should be slave to others, that's the oldest idea in the book.

That some people have some sort of right to lay claim to the intellect and productive energies of others.

That's the real battle here.

That's the true invisible enemy that we must yet again defeat.

Ask yourself this.

Would you have some right to charge into Mike Lindell's MyPillow bedding factory and point a gun to him and his workers and force them to produce cotton face masks to avoid being shot?

Now this sounds ridiculous sounds preposterous and all rational thinking human beings would clearly see that is immoral and a criminal act But they don't see it as immoral and criminal in vast amounts of the

the world.

That's happening in the world.

And yet there are people here proposing to do that.

They just didn't say you'd get shot.

But they're coming in with the full force of the government.

And at the end,

it's whoever has the guns.

Now, maybe some people say, well, I don't want the United States to do that.

I want the UN to do that.

I want somebody, you know, in a blue helmet.

But I'm okay if they have a U.S.

Marshals badge.

Now, let me ask you this.

Does Mike Lindell have the right to choose to convert his factory over to making cotton face masks at his own expense and to pay his workers to make those masks instead of making pillows?

Yes.

Yes, that is his moral choice.

It's a human being engaged in activity that he believes to be virtuous and right.

And yes, for the love that all is of all that is holy and profitable.

Just as with COVID-19,

the defeat of all forms of slavery

should be an inevitability.

And yet from every corner of our country, there is a call for the forced enslavement of some people for the benefit of others.

We are on the verge of losing everything that we have always held dear.

On the verge of losing the things that matter

the most to not just us, but what we want our children to be able to have.

A future where they chart their own course, a future where they can live and grow and be free and live their dreams.

Yes, experience some nightmares from time to time, but those nightmares won't define them unless they choose the nightmare.

Trump has this exactly right.

We cannot let the cure for COVID-19 come at the cost of our economy.

And if that's the objective, then it's our original principles, individual liberty, freedom of movement, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom to defend yourself.

Those are the things that need to be defended.

That's how we protect and restore our economy and our our country.

That's how we ensure that our children's children will also be descendants of survivors of plagues and pandemics, whether they're biological or the moral kind.

This is why I wrote Arguing with Socialists,

because I know the fight is on.

And we have to be in that fight.

And I wrote this not only for you, it's easy to read.

It's very, very funny.

It's in the style of Arguing with Idiots, which was our biggest seller, I think.

And it's for color.

It's almost like a comic book in parts.

And it's one of those books that you can pick up and read from anywhere.

And we did that because I'm riddled with ADD, but also because it was really effective.

We saw...

In all of the books that we have written, Inconvenient Book and Arguing with Idiots, those two books in this style were the ones that people consumed themselves learned a lot from and then gave it to their children or their grandchildren and their grandchildren used it in college essays high school essays elementary school essays and I've heard for for years

how those books had been used because they all have footnotes in them, so you don't ever quote me.

You quote the people who actually said it.

We need to arm ourselves with ammunition.

We need to know that this cure is not being called socialism, but this cure is socialism.

It is the modern monetary theory.

It is universal basic income.

It's a socialist dream

Book is officially out tomorrow.

You can have it at your house tomorrow if you order it now at Amazon or wherever you buy your your books.

Arguing with socialists, it is out tomorrow.

Make sure you grab it.

You're listening to the best of the Glendeck program.

This is the Glenbeck program.

So, there's a couple of things that are going on that we should probably talk about.

Don't buy into any of this 5G crap.

I don't know if you've seen it yet.

It's big overseas in

Great Britain.

They're burning down the 5G masts,

the big cell towers,

because apparently 5G

is weakening our immune system.

And so

that's why the Chinese got it, because they were the first to be able to have 5G.

Their immune system was so weak.

And now if you have 5G, your immune system is, that's what's causing this.

So they're telling people now to act now and burn those towers down.

And

I don't know,

is Great Britain making cell towers out of like, you know, old wooden roller coasters?

Or

how exactly are they burning them down?

most of them we like to make them out of steel most of them out of asterno logs which is a strange thing to build a tower out of once you start them yeah once you start them they don't usually get struck by lightning or set themselves on fire but once they start burning they're going

uh all that stuff drives me out of my mind out of my mind um here's another story this one comes out of um massachusetts looks like the governor charlie baker

uh is not real popular popular in the gun world.

Gun shop owners are not taking kindly to the demand that they close their doors during the coronavirus crisis after he labeled them non-essential.

In March, Baker, a Republican, ordered all non-essential businesses to close their physical workplaces and facilities, both workers and the public, until April 7th.

Last week, he extended that order through May 4th.

The state published a list of businesses and organizations it considers essential that would allow to keep their brick-and-mortar facilities open.

Notably, not on the roll of essential businesses were gun shops.

However, firearms and

ammunition manufacturers, importers and

distribution centers were on the list.

But that hasn't stopped the gun owners.

A guy who runs the Gunrunner, dedicated to your psyche and amendment rights.

was on WBZ-TV.

His name is John Costa.

He owns the Gunrunner Runner in Middleborough.

He told WBZ that he not only disagrees with Baker's belief that his gun business is non-essential, but he also stated that he was constitutionally protected to stay open by the Second Amendment.

He said, okay, under the Second Amendment, we have every right to defend ourselves.

And he's not taking any social distancing precautions either.

He says,

you know,

no, I'm sorry, he's not taking those for granted.

He is doing it.

He's saying, I'm letting my customers come to the curb, and I do all my business curbside outside.

That seems.

I think he's right.

Yeah, it's interesting to see

the

constitutional lines being drawn here because I have a real problem with the idea the government would be able to tell church that it can't meet under basically any circumstances.

Now, I think if I'm a church, I don't want that to happen right now.

I don't want to have church.

I want to do it online.

I want to do it.

I know we had someone called in.

I've heard there's a few of these that have happened across the country where they're kind of spreading out in like drive-through movie theater sort of patterns, and they have big loudspeakers, and everyone kind of sits on their back, the back of their car, or whatever, and does it that way.

I think that's seemingly totally acceptable.

But, like, I think as a church, I think you'd want to be able to protect the people as well as you can and do it online or whatever.

But, like, I don't, I think if they decide, you know what, we're going to do it the way we want to do it, no social distancing, like, I don't know that you can,

I don't know that you can stop people from meeting.

You can have regulations.

They have regulations on every church, right?

Every building has to be made, you know, to certain, there's certain regulations that every building has to make to be safe.

And there's those sorts of things you could probably put on churches.

But to say they can't meet, even if it is for a limited time,

is

a really weird constitutional line.

I know I feel weird about it when it comes to guns.

That's what they did in New Orleans after Katrina.

Exactly right.

And the problem is that it's A, the state doing it, not the federal government.

So the states doing it, Constitution and Bill of Rights

is applied differently in the states because the states have the quarantine power.

The United States of America, the Fed, does not have the quarantine power.

The states have that.

And if they say all businesses, see, where they're getting in trouble is essential businesses.

And then they're saying that that's not essential.

Well, a lot of people would say faith is essential.

A lot of people would say guns are essential.

And I would tend to agree with them.

On the gun thing, you can only get it at that store.

It's not like faith.

We can get online and we can do things and we can talk and

share that way.

But on guns, if I want to buy a gun, I got to go to the store.

I got to get it.

I'm buying it from them.

Oddly enough, because of regulations, they can't send them to you.

So, correct.

You have to physically go into the store to get them.

Yeah, that's true.

Exactly right.

It's a weird line, though.

I talked to Jeremy Dice over at First Liberty, and they do, and this is what they do for a living, which is like, you know, making sure that religious rights are protected all around the country.

And he said that, you know, there's a

pretty long history of limited time quarantine and the ability for states to stop this as long as it's very short and limited in scope.

But it is, it just makes me nervous that they could do it even for a minute.

You know, this is, I understand that this is important.

And I'm, you know, I'm not going to church.

If they opened up my church, I would still watch it online.

I mean, I want to, you know, you want to take these precautions.

It's just, I don't understand.

There has to be some sort of

like you could see these pastors that are getting in trouble now because of doing full-out services.

You could see them going to court after this and winning.

I mean, you know, the courts have generally speaking supported the state's rights to be able to limit this stuff, but you could see it being overturned.

Oh, and especially in places like we, you know, we talked to that pastor, where was he in Louisiana, where he said, we don't have internet.

You know, our church does not have a big, you know, television broadcast kind of component to it.

We don't have internet.

And a lot of the people that live here in that community,

he serves the underserved community.

And he said, we got to gather or we're not seeing each other.

And so you, what are you going to do?

What are you going to do?

You're telling these people that faith is not essential?

I beg to differ with you on that.

But

it's a tough place to be.

I think a really tough place to be.

Seems like if you want to start with essential, maybe

the constitutionally guaranteed rights might be a place to kind of start with and say, hey, these things are pretty essential.

Remember,

what is it, mid-March, where Joe Biden is still encouraging people to go to the polls and vote?

They thought that was pretty essential.

You know, I mean, that's something you could do, absentee, but they still were like, no, go out.

That's no big deal.

Go in Florida and go vote.

It'll be great.

So did you see, Stu, the

thing about

how much of the businesses have been closed?

Because we took a wild guess on when we say we've closed down America.

How much of America have we actually closed?

How much

is

not functioning right now?

Right.

And the reason I was talking about that was because I think in our heads, we think it's like 80 or 90 percent.

Like, just like that's the feeling, or in our hearts, or the feeling that we're getting is 80 or 90 percent closed down.

But we all realize that that can't be accurate, right?

I mean, there's there's a lot of things functioning.

Most people I know who have jobs that are not like, you know, hands-on jobs, they're working at home.

There's a lot of people who are working at home.

Many of these businesses are continuing to operate.

They're just operating in a totally different way.

So I think I asked you, like, what, give me a percentage.

What percentage of the economy do you think is actually shut down right now?

And you said.

So I said 30.

Yeah, 30%, which was your estimate, which is a,

I think would be an estimate most people would think that's too small.

But that was kind of what I wanted to get out of you to see if that's w how you felt too.

Because when I really tried to do the math on it, it seemed a lot smaller than I would have originally thought.

Yeah, I gave 30% and I felt like

that's a price is right number, you know, the closest without going over.

You know, it could be 50 or 60, but since I was the only contestant, you know, I felt I felt for sure 30%.

And you lost on the price is right, apparently, because you went over.

I did.

It was 29% is what they are now estimating, which is amazing.

That That was really amazing.

That's just off the top of your head, 30% guess.

But I mean, I think that's an interesting, and I will say, in a weird way, I'm a little optimistic about that number because I

right.

Like, you know, look, can we deal with the economy being shut down for a year?

The answer to that, of course, is no.

We're in

probably never-ending depression in some ways that way.

Can we deal with two months of a 30% decrease?

I mean,

probably,

right?

I mean, it's, I think, with the, you know, look, we're going to have all sorts of long-term problems associated with these trillion-dollar bills they keep throwing out there.

There's no doubt about that.

We're going to have major problems to deal with, obviously, with the actual virus, which is a huge thing, but also, you know, the way that the government is cracking down on things, and they're going to be grabbing power like crazy, and there's going to be all sorts of craziness that happens after this.

It's going to be a big fight for all of us.

But I mean, if the economy is really, we lose 30% of it for, let's say, two or three months, you know, you're talking about a GDP drop, which will be devastating in many ways, but it might be something that's not as devastating as in our head where we're shutting down and it's just like empty streets everywhere and burned out buildings that never get rebuilt.

There is that sort of walking dead thing that's in our heads.

And if we can come up with a way to turn this around relatively quickly, maybe there is reason for optimism.

Maybe this thing can come back the way Trump has been talking about it.

So, do you want to pin in

your bubble?

Or

are you ruining my optimism already?

I just finished outlining the case.

So, you want me to let you, I'll let you sit with it for a second.

Okay, let me just talk for one second.

Okay, there we go.

Here's the downside of this.

I have a feeling that 30%, though, are all of the real entrepreneurial-style businesses.

They're the small business person

who

operates a brick and mortar shop or restaurant or something like that.

You know what I mean?

Oh, yeah.

So all those stores that line all of our downtowns or even in the malls, those things are all closed.

And that's a, you know, that 80% of the economy is small business.

Yeah, one of the things I thought

started with that point.

One of the things I thought about is like, we obviously do a lot of online shopping already.

And we're not going to stop buying things necessarily.

We're just going to be buying those things online instead of a brick and mortar.

How much of that is going to reverse?

Because it was only like 20% of buying was online, which I was surprised.

I thought it would be a little higher than that.

It was going into this, it was about 20%.

Still, 80% of stuff was bought, you know, in brick and mortar stores, apparently.

But, you know, that number is going to go up, but it's not going to make up for all the loss.

And the question is, if it comes back and it's now, you know, 50% of stuff is bought online, it's going to to be a huge adjustment for

any store.

I mean, look, the whole thing is, the landscape is going to change in massive, massive ways because of this.

But, you know,

again, when you're, I've been talking, we have a bunch of small business owner friends that we, you know, that we know.

I'm sure you know them as well, Glenn.

And it's like, you talk to them, and it's just like, they're trying to figure out this program, which is

been a total disaster so far.

It's rolled out in a terrible way.

I don't think they communicated it well.

A lot of these banks don't even have access to these loans yet.

So

it's terrible.

They'll give you loans that will pay for, let's say, two months of salary for your workers, but then you have to keep them employed for four months for it to turn into a grant.

So you have this gap there of like, if we don't come back online,

you know, we're in trouble.

The president is saying, like, you know, look, if this doesn't, if it's not enough, we're going to pass more money, which again is a terrifying long-term aspect.

So, I mean, it really is, it's a mess right now.