Best of The Program | Guest: John R. Lott, Jr. | 3/27/20

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Welcome to the podcast.

Today we have, we look deep into the bill that they're trying to pass for a couple trillion dollars, what's in it, and what is the process that's going to go forward.

We have Pat Gray on the program.

He is talking about the media and the way they're handling this.

And Bill O'Reilly gets into that a little bit as well today when he comes on.

Talk about guns in the coronavirus era.

Are they essential?

Are gun stores essential businesses?

I feel like they are.

And we get into a lot more as well.

Plus, a brand new $30 off,

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Here's today's version.

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

Our coronavirus update for Friday.

If you look at our coronavirus update, every stat is locked in at 5:30 in the morning Central Time from John Hopkins University.

Total confirmed cases worldwide, 542,000.

That is up from 486.

That's quite a jump.

Total confirmed deaths worldwide, up 24,000, only 2,000 worldwide.

Total confirmed recovered worldwide, 125, up from 117.

5% cases are considered serious, up from 4% yesterday.

7% of confirmed cases here in the United States, however, do require require hospitalization.

The U.S.

has 85,000 confirmed cases, 1,304 deaths, up from 65,000 cases and 1,000 deaths yesterday, so up about 300.

United States of America now leads the world in total confirmed cases, with 4,409 more cases than China.

We have officially 1,800 official recovered against the 1,300, rounding the numbers off on deaths.

So the big news yesterday was after terrifying the world governments into committing financial suicide, the UK scientist has reduced his death forecast by 95%.

Now, Stu is the guy that I trust with all of the stats and everything else.

I asked him at the time that Al Gore came out with his global warming movie.

I said, I'm going to go see his movie.

I'm going to go do my own research.

And Stu was like, oh, dear God, no.

I came out of that and I had a pretty good idea

of where I stood on it.

But I said, Stu, I want you to look at these stats, look at these facts, and tear them apart.

Show me where it's wrong.

I'm going to say, I don't know.

I believe them.

I'm not acting on them, but I want to see them proven or disproven.

And that's what Stu really does best.

You've read what he wrote.

I've read what he wrote.

Is it fair to say

he's not recanting?

He's pointing out that the lower part of his scale is accurate.

Yeah, it's been reported almost everywhere that he recanted his initial, oh, 260,000 people were going to die in Britain sort of projections.

And now he's saying 20,000.

So that's, it would be reasonable to note that difference.

It's pretty major.

However, I think part of this is just a reporting issue.

If you read his study, what he says is he gives two different approaches.

He gives more than that, but the two that we're focusing on.

The two approaches were mitigation and suppression.

Mitigation is sort of like the

approach that has been sort of the alternative approach a lot of people on the right have suggested, where you would

isolation of suspect cases, home quarantine of those who are living in the household of suspect cases, social distancing of the elderly and other risk cases, right?

So not what we're doing now, but that kind of alternative approach where the elderly and the sick would be isolated, anyone who might have the disease would be isolated, but other people would be able to kind of go about things a little bit more normally.

That's mitigation.

Suppression is kind of what we're doing now, which is everybody social distances.

You know, we isolate anyone who has it.

We isolate the household of people who have it.

We close schools.

We close universities and everything like that.

Much closer to what we're doing and what Britain's doing.

The way I took his comments, and I think is what he's saying, is Britain has now implemented the suppression strategy.

Which was his most draconian.

Right.

And that one, his death count was 20,000.

Exactly what he put in the study.

So what he's saying is, we've now implemented the thing I thought we should implement.

and now the death count is going to be a lot lower.

He's not saying, oopsie-doopsie, I said 260 last time, and now it's only 20.

They changed strategies.

Great Britain hadn't.

Right, but they hadn't really been in that

lockdown for more than a couple of days.

Right, but what he says here.

No, it's true.

And

he's saying that the peak of this would be in two to three weeks, which is how long he said the suppression strategy would take to actually go into effect.

So it is, again,

I'm not defending his analysis here.

I think he's off base, and I don't believe the worst case scenario.

So I'm not saying he's right on this.

I'm just saying I don't think he recanted it.

He's trying to walk this line, which he did outline pretty clearly in the study between these two different approaches.

I still think, I mean, we said this from the very beginning.

I think there's two major problems here.

One,

you know, I think his estimates are, you know, sky is falling type estimates.

But, you know, I'm not in this field.

I'm sure he knows more about it than I do, obviously.

Secondarily, though, there's a real problem with us and the entire world seemingly basing all of our decisions on this one model.

And I think what we've

just, it's just, you know, anybody, even if, you know, like the most honest person with the most information.

might not be right.

You don't blame these things usually on one model.

And it seems to be this model is what scared the hell out of everybody, which is why we made these drastic changes.

But to his point, I don't think he recanted it.

It really goes to show how we have to be so careful.

You know, we're looking at these models for global warming.

Guys, this one, we at least know right away and we can pull back and adjust.

Global warming, we could spend ourselves into oblivion and have absolutely no idea.

the effects, none, because they keep moving the goalposts and keep saying, well, you know, what we did there, that worked.

And so it's not going to happen for another 25 years.

So we're going to have to keep pushing on.

I mean, you just don't know.

At least with this one, we'll know.

But it shows again

how much we don't know.

These guys were so absolutely positive.

And as I said before, and I want to make clear on this.

I don't believe that this virus, and nor have I ever believed this virus was going to be as deadly as everybody worried.

I have not been worried about this virus.

I have been worried about overwhelming the health care system.

We don't want to overwhelm the health care system.

If we do that, we're into a whole nother kettle of fish that we just don't want to get into.

However, as I started to see what it's taking now, $6 trillion,

and I think it's actually more than that, with what the Fed has done before this, this is just $6 trillion between the Fed and the United States Congress.

Those two packages this week were $6 trillion.

I bet we're closer to $10 trillion with everything that's been put into this.

That's an awful lot of money.

And we've got to go back to work to be able to pay for some of this stuff.

Now, let me go back to England here for a second.

Government guidelines.

Government guidelines had everybody separate, including Boris Johnson.

But Boris Johnson now has confirmed he has tested positive for COVID-19.

Over the last 24 hours, he said, I've developed mild symptoms and tested positive for coronavirus.

I'm now self-isolating, but I'll continue to lead the government response via video conference as we fight this virus.

His partner, Carrie Simones, is pregnant.

She'll also isolate for two weeks.

Together, we'll beat this, he said.

In one of the most irresponsible things I've ever seen, news from Mexico.

And this should concern every single American because Mexicans are going to pay for this and they are going to start making a run for our border and overwhelm our health care system.

And nobody's going to stand up against that in Congress and they should.

Mexicans are making their own bed right now and it's going to cost us, possibly our health care system, if we don't guard against it.

The governor of the central Mexican state of Puebla told reporters yesterday,

you ready?

The majority of people that are getting sick, I'm quoting, are wealthy people, you know.

If you're rich, you're at risk.

But if you're poor, well, no, us poor, we're immune.

What?

Wait, so, yeah.

Does the disease check the tax returns?

How exactly is that?

Yeah, I'm not sure.

I'm not sure.

I'm not sure.

But how many poor people in Mexico who are not paying attention because their government is not making a big deal out of this are just going along with that and going, yeah, well, that's only a rich person's disease.

Yeah, I mean,

the one thing that's interesting about this, too, going back to the projections we were just talking about, we're not going to necessarily know the answer with the UK and the U.S.

because we've taken sort of these more drastic steps.

Places like Mexico and probably two-thirds of the globe have not.

So we will see if this guy's projections wind up being true in places like Mexico and

in the Middle East and Africa

because these countries haven't done anything.

I mean, they're not, they're not, many of them are not doing even any testing.

You know, Mexico has 300 cases in their country of 129 million people, and it's across a border where the most cases are in the world.

It's obviously not true, and they're just ignoring it at this point and hoping for the best.

Here's what we should be doing.

We should be having our National Guard stand on the border and

have some sort of health care,

some sort of health care facility in a tent or something

that is just on the other side of the border.

We should work with the Mexicans.

They should pay for it.

But, I mean,

that is going to become a humanitarian crisis, and every bleeding heart is going to say, we've got to let them into our hospitals.

No, we don't.

They've made their bed, and they'll swamp our system.

We've already done all of this, and we've put ourselves in a situation where we might be in a depression.

They did nothing.

They did nothing.

And we

can offer help.

And doctors can go down across the border when it starts to hit them if that's what they want to do, but we cannot have them flooding in and swamping us.

I'm sorry.

Your country is your lifeboat.

You chose incorrectly as a nation.

All right.

I love this story.

Even in a pandemic,

fake meat

won't sell.

Apparently at grocery stores all across the country, I've seen these pictures everywhere.

Even in a crisis, people will not buy fake hot dogs.

I don't know that that's actually true, but

because I mean, they are projected to make, you know, the market is like tripling every single year at the moment for these things.

But there's certainly a lot of people who will not buy them no matter what.

They'd rather die.

Yeah, no.

You see the pictures of the shelves?

Everything's gone.

All of the vegan and vegetarian stuff, all that fake meat still sitting there.

Everybody's like, man, I'm starving to death.

Well, there's that stuff.

Not that.

That's crazy.

What are we?

What are we in Somalia?

I'm not eating that crap.

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

Yeah,

this is the Glenn Beck program.

We're glad you're here.

Welcome to Friday.

Pat's joining us from Pat Gray Unleashed.

Pat, we're just having this conversation back and forth about how

we're not sure.

I have this feeling that this is going to be like

the scientists that were telling us all about global warming.

Because we're kind of like, could be, don't know.

Yet they panic and say we're all going to die.

I still think we're two weeks away from seeing how bad this thing can get.

But because we're all staying in, or most of us are staying in, we are, you know, we are really slowing the growth down.

So we'll never know how bad it could have been.

Do you think that we have overreacted at all?

At all?

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, I think there's been some overreaction.

And what I hate are the dire predictions.

That, you know, the 2.2 million dead Americans and all that.

How does that help in any way at all?

It doesn't.

It causes people to panic.

It hurts the market.

And people just lose all sense of

reality.

Unless it's true.

Unless it's true.

But even if it is true, even if that's going to happen, why would you tell people that's going to happen?

How does that help us?

It doesn't.

I guess it just to get people to take it seriously, right?

Well, I think we're pretty well there already.

We've already given up half of three-quarters of our liberty.

Wait a minute, wait a minute.

Is it only me that has friends that are still texting?

They're still out going, yeah, I'm having friends.

Is no one else having a problem with their friends where you're saying, hey, dude, you guys should take this seriously?

I mean, we're all kind of staying at home.

Yeah, it's all overblown.

Am I the only one that has friends who are still going out doing things and, you know, going over to friends' houses?

And

I'm the only one?

Maybe, because I don't know anybody like that.

And there's nowhere to go if you were to go.

Where are you going to go?

They're going to friends' houses and they're doing stuff as friends.

Like yesterday.

Yesterday.

Yesterday.

I went out.

My wife and I were like, okay, I got to go take a drive.

And I've been working on the remodel of our studio complex.

And I'm way behind now because of all this stuff.

And we have to do landscaping.

And I said, honey, let's just go to that tree farm.

And she said, is it open?

And I said, I hope not, but we'll just go and we'll walk through it because, you know, you can still walk through it even when it's closed.

Well, I get there and I turn into the parking lot and it is packed.

And I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa,

let's not park here.

And so we went around the corner and we just walked through the trees where there was nobody, but that place was packed.

People were in close to each other doing stuff, talking to people, buying stuff.

I was like, what is happening?

I don't see that.

I mean, even at the grocery store, everybody's kind of distanced themselves from each other.

And I think just because they have their own common sense, they don't have to be told where to stand like some Krogers have done, where they show you where to stand in the checkout line.

Yeah, I think I can noodle that out for myself.

I'm not going to get, you know, ride it, do a little ponyback ride on the next guy in front of me.

I'm not going to do that.

So

it's just,

if we just exercised our common sense, we wouldn't have to be told exactly what we should be doing and what we shouldn't be doing.

I mean, even in Britain, the prime minister, Boris Johnson, just tested positive for this.

What has he been doing?

You've been out partying?

He might have been making out with Prince Charles because they both have it.

So maybe that's a thing.

We now know.

We now know.

The prince is like, Boris, I confused you with Camilla.

You look so much alike.

Did you see, have you seen any of their press conferences over there?

Because even their podiums, unlike ours, where the president's like, you know, got his arm around people like, hey, we're all in this together.

And given a press conference where they're all right there

in Great Britain, they had the podiums six, seven feet apart.

It was bizarre.

Six or seven feet apart, way across the room from each other.

And then this enormous television where the press could ask questions.

And they were all in separate rooms, too.

I mean,

it's not like ours

at all.

Well, according to the press, we've taken no no precautions whatsoever.

I mean,

I don't know what they want us to do.

I don't know what they want Trump to mandate, but they're still saying he's rudderless, leaderless.

He's done nothing.

He's handled this poorly.

I don't get that sense.

I mean, even though, yes, they do the close contact press conference, but they all know each other doesn't have it because they've all been tested.

But I don't know what else you can do

in this country.

I don't know.

I go back and forth on this, but I think so far, I think what Trump has done has been the right thing, right?

Like, I think,

you know, he, look, it's unlike global warming, because you brought up global warming before, and I think this is a good comparison.

Global warming is something where they're saying we have to act right now because the

effects will be horrible and irreversible in 10 years.

And then you go five years in, and they say, it's going to be in 10 years.

That's when it's going to be horrible or irreversible.

And they kind of give you this constant moving deadline about what, you know, in the future.

And of course, you know, human nature.

It is long into the future.

Here we have a situation where I think there's a lot of reason to believe that perhaps some of these estimates are too aggressive, right?

However, when the

information is going to be available to you as to how bad it is in two weeks, and if the worst case is really bad,

if the experts believe this, maybe this is the right step.

He said 15 days, right?

And yes, this is really hurting people right now.

Obviously, they're going to do this package and hopefully solve solve some of those wounds.

But the bottom line at the end of this is we should know in real in a really close amount of time whether we need to continue this or how aggressively we need to continue it.

So I don't know.

Everyone's beating up on him because either he went too hard on these on these 15 days or that he's trying to get everybody out and workforce by Easter and that's crazy.

But like

The best thing to do is get the information that is coming in and making the decisions based on that, right?

And it seems that what Fauci is saying and Burks is saying,

he's reacting to the information on the ground, where it looks like maybe it's, you know, like Washington's a great example.

It looked like the first big breakout.

Then it does not seem like it's been as bad as they would have expected it.

So

that's real information that they're able to take in and say, okay, what right there and what's going wrong in New York?

Right.

So here's, here's the thing.

We just don't know

what's true and what's not.

But when I watched The President yesterday, and I've watched him, I watch him every day at 5 o'clock.

It's kind of like I think how people felt about my show maybe at 5 o'clock.

It's like appointment television.

I watch it every day.

My wife is like, hey, president's on.

We're not watching any other show like this.

And so we were watching it yesterday, and every single one of them were like, calm down, people.

Calm down.

And they weren't talking to the American people.

They were just talking to the press.

You can't win with the press.

You've either done too much or you've done too little.

And they can't make up their mind which it's supposed to be.

So they use both essentially.

They use both all the time.

They do.

Yeah.

In the same report sometimes, which is bizarre.

And I, you know, this is the United States of America.

If you think he's done too little, I don't know what you expect him to have done at this point.

Yeah.

No, I don't either.

Short of soldering people into their homes like China did.

Is that what you want to do?

They keep saying that, you know, he's going to open up the, are you really going to open up the country?

No, you dummy.

Listen to what he's saying.

He's saying, for instance, let's go county by county.

Let's look at the counties where it's high risk.

Let's look at the population.

Basically, he's saying the same thing that Cuomo is now saying.

We shouldn't have done it like we've done it.

We did it because that's all we knew what to do at the time.

And now

let's re-look at things.

Let's re-examine this and see what the hell we're doing here.

And they don't accept that.

They just think that he is...

He's just going to say, it's Easter.

Everyone, get your butt in church.

I don't care how sick you are.

It's crazy.

I know even

they described it, I think Fauci described it as his aspirational goal, right?

But he's considering the information as it comes in.

And if that goal doesn't make sense, then you it's like my goal, my aspirational goal is to buy a Bugatti.

That doesn't mean I'm going to the dealership today.

Like you've got to go to see what the situation is.

At some point, maybe I'll be able to afford one, but not right now.

That's right.

Like my aspirational goal is to lose another 25 pounds.

That's not stopping me from getting a bowl of ice cream in this next break.

It doesn't mean I'm going to do that.

This is the best of the Glenn Beck program.

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And if you like what you hear on the program, you should check out Pat Gray Unleashed.

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We're so glad you're here.

You know, there's a couple of essential businesses, if you will, that are being closed down that I think should be marked as essential.

One is our faith centers.

I'm not saying that we all should be going into church, but we have to remember that faith is essential to the American people.

The other one that is much more clear-cut on remaining open is a gun store, especially when you have the governments all around our country just letting prisoners out.

I don't even understand that.

Isn't shelter in place the perfect place to do that in prison?

How is this

not a,

how is releasing prisoners a good idea?

I really don't understand that.

Then on top of it, they're closing the gun stores.

And on top of that, they're telling us, oh, well, our first responders are going to be swamped with calls.

Well, then, who's going to protect you?

We have John Lott on.

John is, John is, he's really, truly a national treasure.

He is probably one of, I would say this directly, he is the most important voice when it comes to guns, gun crime, gun statistics.

And that's why he's despised by people on the left because he's, no pun intended, bulletproof with his stats.

He is the president of Crime Prevention Research Center.

Welcome to the program, John Lott Jr., how are you, sir?

Oh, great to talk to you again, Glenn.

You bet.

So tell me what your thoughts are on,

you know, places like L.A.

saying, no, a gun store is not essential.

Great.

Well, I mean, people are concerned about what will happen to the social order.

I mean, we have kind of a perfect storm in the sense that prisoners are being released from prison because of the concern that some people may be particularly susceptible in closed spaces to gain the disease.

We're not arresting people because they don't want to have new people put into the prison system.

In police departments across the country,

you have two things that are happening.

One is that many police departments simply aren't responding to many types of calls from victims because

they want to limit the exposure that the police are receiving.

Some departments like Los Angeles have issued gloves and goggles and face masks to police.

But the thing is, when you're dealing with the rough and tumble of actually arresting a criminal,

you know, just because you have a face mask on doesn't mean it's going to stay there at the end of the process that you have.

And,

you know, it's...

You also have a fair number of police who are getting the illness themselves right now, and

so you're going to have fewer police officers available to

be called on.

So you make it less

for criminals.

You have states now and counties that are starting to close down these gun stores.

I think it's surprising what happened in Illinois

where the governor did the exact opposite.

Right.

Yeah, well, there are a couple states now where you've had fairly strong

gun control advocate Democratic governors who have actually allowed gun stores to keep operating.

But you have a large number in major states like New York and New Jersey and

other places, which have made it impossible for people to be able to go and buy guns for protection.

And

they've

and they've in some of the states where the state actually operates the the background check system,

you don't directly go to the federal system.

They've just refused to process any more

purchases.

Yeah, somebody told me they were trying to buy a gun here in Texas recently, and they said that they were told it's almost a month's wait to get it

through the system.

And

that's what they said.

I don't know if that's true, but that's crazy if it is.

Yeah, I've talked to a number of licensed dealers, and they've told me that it's just impossible to get through the system right now.

When they call up, the line's busy.

And,

you know, I assume that's occurring across the country there.

People now,

is that because people are going out and buying guns?

Or, you know, during the Obama administration, that was happening a lot, too.

And during the Clinton administration, you talked to people who were

gun store owners, and they said, boy, the day George Bush was elected, all of a sudden all those phone problems went away.

Is that the same thing, or is this just because they're overwhelmed?

I think it's largely because they're overwhelmed, but of course, the system can break down when they have a huge number of calls going into

the system there.

But,

you know,

we know ammunition sales, for example, in the last three weeks have probably gone up about 300% from what they were

in the three weeks prior to that.

One can only assume that maybe gun sales have been going up similarly over that period of time.

But you know one thing just to mention about the police, that is you and I can telecommute to do our jobs.

I mean you could go and do your job from your home.

But police officers don't have that option.

They have to they can't they have to actually come in physical contact with criminals, and that allows them to face risks in terms of the disease that you and I and many others don't have to worry about.

So, John, is any of this going to be corrected, assuming this virus passes without any kind of real problems?

Are we going to be able to take the states to court about this to be able to fix this and shore this up?

Or do they have a right to just shut all this stuff down when it comes to gun stores and guns?

Right.

Well, I mean, there are a number of court cases.

These things take time to wind through,

and it's been kind of a mixed bag so far.

The Pennsylvania state Supreme Court, which is almost completely dominated by Democrats, voted 4 to 3 that the state was allowed to go and shut down the gun stores that were there.

You know, I think the federal courts,

Trump, while he's accomplished a lot in the courts, he's only kind of brought it into balance.

The Democratic nominees had so completely dominated the courts prior to him being there.

People talk about the number of federal judges that he's put on, but

if you look at the circuit courts, 24 of the states are in circuits where Democrats have a majority and 26 are in

states where Republicans now have a majority.

And so the states which which are most likely to put these types of restrictions on are the heavily blue states.

And they tend to be in those circuits like the Ninth Circuit, for example, which are still dominated by Democrats.

So

John,

as you're looking at what's happening with

the situation with guns, what should the average person do and know

today?

today?

Well, I mean, I think just as you have a fire extinguisher because something might happen, a fire might occur, we're not talking about the zombie apocalypse right now, but people have concerns about their safety.

If police can't respond to calls, either because the police officers aren't there or because

they're simply limiting the number of calls that they're willing to take because they don't want to expose the officers, people have to be able to go and protect themselves.

You know, if you make it less risky for criminals to go and commit crime, they're going to go and commit more crimes than they would have otherwise.

That's happening.

They're already in Philadelphia and other places saying we're not going to prosecute for certain things.

Wait a minute, what?

Right.

I mean, they're giving them a license.

Right.

If you steal up to $1,000 in some places, you're not going to be prosecuted.

You have these

district attorneys that George Soros and others have supported to get in there.

And they,

you know,

you can have these horrific videos of people just going into the stores and taking stuff off the shelves because they know that they're not going to get into serious trouble for doing that.

Criminals are like anybody else.

If you make it less risky, less costly for them to go and do something, they're going to do more of it.

John Lott, Lott, thank you so much.

Appreciate it.

President of Crime Prevention Research Center, John Lott Jr.