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Clay and Buck

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Joe Goes for Guns: You Need a Nuke to Overthrow Me Anyway

24 Jun 2021

BUCK: The Democrats are pretending it’s not defund the police that’s the problem, folks. It’s guns, again — just suddenly, guns. That’s what Joe Biden gave a speech about yesterday. Clay and I are going to break this down. And I mean break it down because it was a lot of absurdity, misdirection, and silliness.

CLAY: Should we play the Joe Biden ridiculous clip first as we’re about to go to break here and then play it again for people to enjoy as we come back to break all this down? When stupid clips exist, Buck, I feel like there’s a lot of value in being able to enjoy it more than once.

BUCK: Let ‘er rip.

CLAY: So, let’s go ahead and do that. Put up Joe Biden letting everybody know that if they really want to overthrow the government, they need F-15s and nuclear weapons, not guns.

<iframe width=”560″ height=”315″ src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/mMUQU4m9Z5U” title=”YouTube video player” frameborder=”0″ allow=”accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture” allowfullscreen></iframe>BIDEN: (whispering) The Second Amendment from the day it was past limited the — the type of people could own a gun and what type of weapon you could own. You couldn’t buy a cannon. Those who say, “The blood of liber — the blood of patriots,” y’know (confused pause) and all this stuff about how we’re gonna have to (confused pause) move against the government.

Well, the tree of liberty is not watered with (slurs) the blood of patriots. What’s happened is that there (pause) never been… If you wanna to — think you need, uhh, to have weapons to take on the government, you need F-15s and maybe some mmm… nuclear weapons. The point is that there’s always been the ability to limit, rationally limit the type of weapon that can be owned and who can own it.

BUCK: It’s like he’s never heard of Afghanistan for the last, well, going on decades now, actually, quite some time.

CLAY: A lot of money we spend over there.

BUCK: And also I’m pretty sure there was a group of ragtag rebels a few hundred years ago who were greatly outmanned, outgunned, and yet a bunch of guys in Redcoats had to find somewhere else to hang out because turns out that an armed citizenry can be quite effective against tyranny. But we don’t… Clay, we will return to that.

CLAY: We’ll play that clip for you again. It’s an embarrassment, by the way, that that’s the president of the United States in just the way he’s talking. I mean, come on. That is a ridiculous —

BUCK: Joe Biden is a sub-mediocrity.

CLAY: It’s embarrassing.

BUCK: The guy has just been around for that long. He’s the guy that was in the back office, you know, like, “What exactly do you do?” And now they’ve made him president. What does he even do here? He’s Milton Waddams at the top of the Democrat Party, for you Office Space fans out there.

CLAY: It’s one of the best movies of all time. It really is.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

BIDEN: (whispering) The Second Amendment from the day it was past limited the — the type of people could own a gun and what type of weapon you could own. You couldn’t buy a cannon. Those who say, “The blood of liber — the blood of patriots,” y’know (confused pause) and all this stuff about how we’re gonna have to (confused pause) move against the government.

Well, the tree of liberty is not watered with (slurs) the blood of patriots. What’s happened is that there (pause) never been… If you wanna to — think you need, uhh, to have weapons to take on the government, you need F-15s and maybe some mmm… nuclear weapons. The point is that there’s always been the ability to limit, rationally limit the type of weapon that can be owned and who can own it.

BUCK: Welcome back to The Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Show. Buck Sexton here, Clay Travis right with me, diving into Joe Biden’s I think largely diversionary speech yesterday meant to take away from the notion that defund the police, as we discussed on this show, took quite a hit — at least in the New York City mayoral election where the pro-police candidate came out on top.

And that could have been ramifications for similar races and certainly raises the eyebrows of some Democrats looking closely as what it’s gonna turn into for the midterms. We want to hear your thoughts on the Biden gun speech. I mean, here he goes again. This is the same stuff we always hear, Biden going anti-gun. It’s 800-282-2882.

Remember to go to ClayAndBuck.com for news stories that we’re talking about and also transcripts and other fun stuff from the show. Clay, what do you find…? This is one of those sound bites that we have where we could tear it apart in five or 10 different ways and go on for an hour, but I want your top-of-the-line, why is this among the dumbest — probably the worst, but among the dumbest — things that Biden said yesterday in the speech?

CLAY: What jumps out to me, Buck, is this is the exact opposite of the argument surrounding the, in quotes, “insurrection,” which is really just, let’s be honest, a riot among a billion riots that took place surrounding 2020 at the Capitol. And what do I mean by that? You heard and have heard and continue to hear from Democrats that this was a legitimate assault upon government.

That’s the entire purpose of calling it an insurrection. Yet virtually no one was armed with anything, Buck. Everyone just about who went into the Capitol… By the way, the most majority of people just kind of did it as a gallivanting-type thing.

But even the ones who went into the Capitol and have been charged with serious wrongdoing, almost none of them had what we would consider to be any sort of traditional weapon. Right? Yet people are saying, “Oh, this was an insurrection. They were trying to overthrow the government.”

Well, now we have Joe Biden here, Buck, saying, “If you’re gonna really try to take over the government, you need F-15s and maybe some nuclear weapons!” I’m not an expert in exactly what everybody had who was involved in the, quote, “insurrection.” But, Buck, I didn’t see any F-15s parked outside of the U.S. Capitol and I certainly didn’t see anybody with any kind of tactical nuclear weapons that they were trying to storm the Capitol with.

BUCK: And you also have to wonder, this is the commander-in-chief — he is, folks — in Joe Biden who seems to have very little understanding of the history of rebellion, of counterinsurgency, of U.S. military operations and other countries’ military operations in developing world countries stretching back now for a long time.

It’s not just as easy as, “We have nukes so we will control you.” This is an idiotic thing that the left often says. They roll this argument out, and it’s because they honestly… Guns is an area — and I want to come back to this with you, Clay. I want to put this thought out there. It doesn’t matter how ignorant a leftist is when it comes to guns as long as they are opposed, and they know that. It’s virtue signaling with ignorance attached to it, and they don’t care. Journalists? It doesn’t matter to them whatsoever.

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EIB 24/7: Clay & Buck’s Stack of Stuff

24 Jun 2021

“The First Amendment and boobs” — Why CNN Banned Clay:

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Rush’s Timeless Wisdom: The Second Amendment

24 Jun 2021

BUCK: It’s certainly not new that the gun grabbers in the Democrat Party and on the progressive left — the stealth-Marxists running around — want to disarm you. They want to take your Second Amendment rights away. Rush was always a champion for your Second Amendment rights, and here’s some wisdom from him.

RUSH: The objective here, folks… The long-term, the epitome — I mean, the nirvana dream — is the confiscation of all weapons. They’re not gonna stop ’til they get that, and they’re never gonna get that, which means they’re never gonna stop. The objective is the confiscation of all weapons, and it’s not because they think that will stop the killing. This is what’s so offensive me about this. This is not about stopping the killing.

It’s not about saving the children. It’s not about any of that. It’s only about leftists wanting to control and have control over as much of the population as they can. It’s why they hate the NRA, and it’s not because the NRA spends a lot of money. The NRA spends very little compared to other major donors. The NRA is a very, very large and very, very successful grassroots organization.

The NRA’s strength comes from the depth of its membership and who those people are. And left cannot undermine that no matter how hard they try, and they will never be able to undermine it. So they have to go after the guns. And all of this talk about changing regulations and laws, never forget: The only people who are regulating are people who already obey the law. By definition, people are gonna break the law. By definition, people are gonna go get guns that are banned. In fact, the more they’re banned, the more attractive they’re gonna be. It’s not the way to deal with this.

CLAY: And a lot of you want to weigh in. We’ve obviously been talking about the defund the police movement and how quickly it has pivoted into an attack on Second Amendment rights. The idea that crime is skyrocketing because of guns is fundamentally absurd if you look at the actual data.

The police are pulled back from being able to do their jobs in cities because of defund the police movements, Black Lives Matter protests. Suddenly, the murder rate skyrockets. The gun situation has not changed, but now Democratic politicians are coming out and saying, “Oh, the reason why the murder rate is up is because of guns.”

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Exclusive 24/7 Video: Behind the Scenes on Day One

24 Jun 2021

In this exclusive video available only to EIB 24/7 Members, take a peek behind the scenes as Clay and Buck open the very first broadcast of The Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Show. See what it looked like as a new chapter in EIB Network history began.

Watch the Video:

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Ron DeSantis Stands Up for Freedom

23 Jun 2021

Who doesn’t love Governor Ron DeSantis? He signed an anti-totalitarian teaching bill that would educate kids about the evils of authoritarian, totalitarian, communist ideology. That’s something that resonates in a big way with the Cuban community in Florida, but also all across the country.

Buck said: “It’s like he just keeps doing — not just victory laps — but he’s spiking the football, running up into the stands, and kissing the opposing quarterback’s girlfriend.”

Clay added: “Thank God for federalism as it pertains to covid. And you talk about Greg Abbott in Texas and Ron DeSantis, to me, in Florida, both of those guys, if you compare what they did in Texas and Florida with what Cuomo did in New York and what Gavin Newsom did in California, if we didn’t have federalism in place, I think we might all still be locked down. Because DeSantis and Abbott looked at the data and said, ‘We’re gonna open up our states.’ And that’s why I like both of these guys because, despite all of the attacks, Cuomo and Newsom never looked at the data. They curled up in the fetal position and they listened to the Faucis of the world.”

Republican governors are taking a lesson from Trump — and pushing back. We need to fight back — but we need to fight strategically — and the clip Clay and Buck play of Ron DeSantis in this segment is very strong evidence of that.

Listen Here:

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Friedman Freaks on Dems: You’re Gonna Elect Trump Again!

23 Jun 2021

BUCK: Big thesis for this hour, I guess you could say — our big, major contention here — is defund the police. Is it on the way out, at least as a slogan, as a movement? Is it gone? Is it gonna linger on? Will AOC manage to push this thing back into the headlines? Clay, one thing about the activist radical left: Do not ever expect reason or rationality to get in their way.

CLAY: It’s a good point, and today Joe Biden… The reason why I’m saying defund the police is done is Joe Biden is coming out today. And, Buck, this won’t surprise you. But what do you think Joe Biden is attributing the rise in violence to? It’s not gonna be because of police, because that would acknowledge that they were wrong. What do you think he’s going to blame? What is he gonna try to address? I’ll give you one guess.

BUCK: Can I just say, “Not only will I get it right but the whole…”

CLAY: Every single person listening.

BUCK: Everyone right now with us, everyone with us here knows, “Oh, it’s the gun’s fault!”

CLAY: Guns. He’s gonna blame guns today. He’s gonna come out and say, “Hey, the reason why we have these numbers,” which no one can deny. We’ve got homicide rates in large cities up 30% last year — and, up so far, another 24% from the beginning of this year. That is a generational rise in violence.

And so Joe Biden, recognizing that the tide has turned, is going to try to shift the focus to, “Hey, the reason why all this is happening is guns,” even though every single person listening to us right now with a functional brain, which is hopefully all of you, knows that criminals have always had guns.

And so this idea that somehow we’re gonna change some gun rules and that the murder rate’s gonna go down doesn’t make sense. And what I think is so fascinating about this is they’re already trying to pivot. Thomas Friedman, New York Times: “Want to Get Trump Re-elected?” we don’t know if Trump’s running or not, “Dismantle the Police,” and there are a couple of big details in here that I think are significant.

He kind of muddles his way to this conclusion, using the city of Minneapolis, which is where George Floyd obviously took over the country and basically has led — I think, legitimately, to thousands of additional deaths — our response to the George Floyd incident in terms of not allowing police to do their jobs since that incident went viral.

BUCK: That’s where BLM 2.0 got going. It was the George Floyd incident, or you could say the second Ferguson moment was Minneapolis this year. And it was one of the places that has had the most substantial increase in shootings and homicides. There were other cities too, you know, I visited Austin, Texas, not long ago, ’cause I went down to the border — which obviously is not where Austin is. But I was at the border, then I went to the Austin. Somebody else might be going to the border, Clay.

CLAY: We’re gonna talk about that soon.

BUCK: Ah! Ah! Ah!

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: We won’t spoil it for everybody. Someone may be heading to the border that hasn’t been willing to go before. But I remember when I was in Austin I spoke to a member of the city council who happened to be a listener to the show, and she told me that they had defunded their police $100 million, and it was really… The numbers, you could just line up.

You defund police $100 million in the city of Austin and you have 100% increase in a 12-month period in homicides. These aren’t hard statistical things to put together. You know, when you do a survey of 200 police departments across the country — this is just in the last week or so — retirements are up 45%. Resignations are up 18% compared to the last full year for which we have data. This is all very obvious, and yet cities like Portland, just to give everyone… I keep talking about it, ’cause that’s the place where —

CLAY: They’ve just given up.

BUCK: That’s right. They’ve ceded downtown Portland to the lunatics. I mean, really, to the Antifa, the anarchists.

CLAY: They have completely given up on the idea of having any sort of police presence.

BUCK: And yet the city of Portland — which just recently had its rapid response team resign. It’s like, in New York City they call it ESU, Emergency Services Unit, colloquially known as riot police, but we don’t like that. They’re not really called the riot police, but that’s really what they are. They resigned all together because one of their officers was charged criminally for hitting somebody with a baton during, you know, one of these Antifa people, during a riot. And so that obviously really hurts morale. You know what they’re doing now? They’re saying, “We also should have less enforcement.”

This goes to what I was saying before about, you know, the pyramid of law and order: Less enforcement of more minor traffic infractions and things like that. And when people say, “How is that gonna make things better?” you know what the answers they’re getting? “Well, we don’t have the cops on the force right now to deal with it.” Oh. So that’s the answer.

CLAY:  It’s a cascading sea of stupidity, Buck.  And this, to me, in this Thomas Friedman column that I wanted to hit — where he’s talking about, oh, we gotta be careful we don’t dismantle the police or Trump’s gonna come back — there’s an interesting quote.  People like this typically don’t get a lot of attention. It’s actually birthed in this column, but he quotes a woman named Sondra Samuels.

This is Minneapolis, where obviously George Floyd happened and all the issues. She wanted to talk about “a 9-year-old girl, Trinity Ottoson-Smith.” She was killed, Buck, “by a stray bullet while jumping on a trampoline.” I bet this is the first time anybody is hearing her name because stories like these don’t get attention, and Sondra Samuels directly addressed this.

She said, “For the last year, I and my neighbors have watched Black mothers react with incredulity when their child is killed in community violence and not by a white cop. Their tragedies do not trigger citywide protest rallies, people don’t say their child’s name and there are no citywide demands that this has to stop.” Buck, that! That paragraph from this woman…

I have no idea what her politics are, Sondra Samuels quoted in this Thomas Friedman piece.

That should be what every Republican politician in the country is focused on because — and I don’t think this gets enough attention — over 80% of inner-city residents don’t support defunding the police. This is a white, liberal, rich environment argument to defund the police that isn’t supported by the people who actually live in communities where 9-year-old girls are getting killed by stray bullets while jumping on trampolines because police aren’t protecting them.

BUCK: It’s virtue signaling by elite liberals on the top of the graves of those who suffer 88% consequences of the defund movement. And people — whether we’re talking about Pelosi or we discuss Maya Wiley, the New York City mayoral candidate — who came in second place, by the way — who has private security for her neighborhood.

She’s big on defund the police and disarm the police! You know, there’s defund, disarm, abolish. Those are actually on the continuum of leftist anti-cop lunacy, that’s the one, two, three. And what we see here, as you point out, is an unwillingness to deal with where the real violence is happening in society, what communities are really affected by this, to take serious measures to address that.

Although, to your point and to the whole notion of dying of defund police as an idea, that may be changing now. But what we also have to understand is the fundamental, foundational lie of the BLM movement is that… I mean, the Washington Post compiled data on this, and in 2019, they claim that 13 unarmed… That’s the year that they’ve done this last full spectrum data.

CLAY: It’s a lie.

BUCK: That’s a lie. And until we can get to a point where we can all look at the data, the reality, the facts, and start from there and then focus… I’m not saying that — and I know you agree with me — every one of those cases of police-involved force should not be fully investigated and when someone transgresses who wears the badge and carries the gun, they should face the full consequences too.

By the way, every cop I know — and I know a lot of them — feels that way too. Their job is made harder when somebody… They call them “perps in uniform” in the NYPD. They say sometimes there are perpetrators in uniform. Anytime that happens, they know it makes their lives, their jobs harder. It also puts them at greater risk, by the way.

Another statistic from the Washington Examiner is you’ve had a 40% increase in cops killed in 2021. Now, people that have just heard me talk about the number of unarmed black men, 13 killed in 2019, would say, “Buck, you know, how many cops are we talking about?” It’s less than a hundred.

But again if we’re looking at the trend, for every law enforcement officer who’s killed in the line of duty, there are a whole lot more who are attacked, assaulted, spit on, have a more difficult, more violent interaction with the public, right? I mean, I’m thinking about this like a pyramid.

So when you have a substantial increase in what is admittedly a pretty small number in the grand scheme of things of law enforcement officers in a lethal-force incident like that, you could assume that people think that they can get rougher with cops. And that’s going to lead with more bad outcomes on both sides.

More people get shot who are unarmed and more law enforcement officers who are killed, and I’m sure you’ve seen there’s some of these recent viral videos of exactly that happening. And they get far less attention, to your point about that mother and how she’s outraged. The focus gets to the point where it’s almost dishonest.

CLAY: It’s totally dishonest, and I think there’s a lot in what you said. One stat that jumps out to me: I believe the most recent data is police officers are about — of all races — 18,000 times more likely to be killed by a black person than they are to kill an unarmed black person. Think about that. A police officer about 18,000 times as likely. I believe they were Heather Mac Donald stats I was reading about that.

You talked about police shootings, and I think this goes to the fundamental essence of the lie behind the Black Lives Matter movement: 75% of people who are shot and killed by police every single year are white, Hispanic, or Asian; 25% are black.

I think the vast majority of Black Lives Matter protesters would have no idea that that data is actually 100% true when you look at the statistical numbers. And then the larger context here, we have a society right now that is run by anecdote. Whatever you believe, there is a viral video out there to support it.

The George Floyd case in particular to me is founded in many ways on a lie because I’m not convinced, Buck — and I don’t know what your perspective is on this. But in the Derek Chauvin-George Floyd interaction, was race the overwhelming reason why that situation happened? I don’t believe so at all.

In fact, if you watched the criminal trial, there wasn’t a suggestion that Derek Chauvin behaved that way with George Floyd because of his race. And I hate to go A Time to Kill on you again, but let’s pretend that that same exact incident happens in Minneapolis and the police officer who is on the ground is Asian and the person that he is kneeling on is white?

Is race an issue in any way there? Would our thought process on what the response should be differ? In other words, you have to be very careful of the lazy analysis of “white guy/black guy involved, it’s automatically a hugely race-related incident.” Because if you go look, there’s a situation in Dallas, Texas, that was nearly identical involving a white guy getting kneeled on.

And it received almost no attention. Same thing on video. Everything else associated with it. Bad things happen. It’s unfortunate. But we can’t allow our world to be driven by anecdote, Buck, because if we do, then we end up with thousands dead. That’s what’s happened here with the defund the police movement. There are thousands of people dead today that would not be dead if defund the police did not exist.

BUCK: And people who have had their cars stolen, their homes broken into, home invasions, assaults, all kinds of things.

CLAY: All of it.

BUCK: The reason this increase is happening is because of a narrative that was, as we said, built on a lie. The BLM movement is built on some foundational lies. We want to hear from you on this ’cause I know we got a lot of law enforcement, family of law enforcement, just folks with strong opinions on this all across the country.

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Bernie’s Mad as Hell at Manchin and Sinema for Saving the Filibuster

23 Jun 2021

BUCK: Now, Clay, yesterday we were having our big chat about the filibuster.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: And this is something that the Democrats have been talking about for months. You’d think that because you had Manchin and Sinema come out and say, “All right,” but then Manchin gets a little weak in the knees, it seems, over this thing, and now Bernie Sanders is out there telling everybody that it’s time. (impression) “You know, our democracy is at risk and we gotta do this. We gotta do that.”

CLAY: (laughing) That’s pretty solid.

BUCK: “I’m sitting here with this evil capitalist with no mask on named Clay Travis — and I’m telling you, he’s a threat — every day on radio — to democracy,” and here’s Bernie saying that the filibuster is also a threat to democracy. Go ahead.

SANDERS: I’m tired of talking about Mr. Manchin, Ms. Sinema. Uh, you know, we have got to do what we can to bring people together. The American people I think all over this country understand that now is the time to act. And I will also tell you, you know, clearly we are restrained by the fact that we only have 50 Democrats. And to my mind, what this next election is gonna be about is whether the American people want us to have a government that represents all people, that believes in democracy or not. And we need a hell of a lot more Democrats in the Senate than we have right now.

CLAY: What’s so interesting about these comments from Bernie Sanders is there’s the usual fluff — and, by the way, your Bernie Sanders impersonation is almost spot-on. I mean, that is a very good impersonation, I have to say. Bernie sounds like he’s acknowledging that basically the “don’t let a crisis go to waste” argument is effectively given up the ghost here because that’s an argument for 2022. It’s not really an argument for 2021.

That’s what stands out to me about what he’s saying even though he’s trying to not want to talk about Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, two of his Senate colleagues in the Democratic Party. He’s acknowledging that they don’t have the votes to change the filibuster. And if they don’t have the votes to change the filibuster, then effectively they have to work with Republicans or nothing’s gonna happen. This feels to me like a very defeatist statement by Bernie Sanders.

BUCK: Let me just say that anyone who leans on the phrase a lot in public life “crisis in our democracy” is —

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: — somebody that you gotta wonder about what they’re saying no matter what the subject matter is. It’s like somebody that’s always putting forward their pronouns when somebody asks. They’re telling you a lot just by using the phrase “crisis in our democracy,” and I think that with Bernie Sanders, obviously there is a degree of him just pushing this issue so that the left-wing base feels like, you know, the revolution is alive and well.

CLAY: He sees us. He feels us.

BUCK: He knows —

CLAY: The resistance is still living!

BUCK: He knows where they are on this issue. But I also think it’s important for everyone to recognize that the very people who are constantly talking about the undermining of our democracy when they don’t get their way — Bernie Sanders is just an example of this — and the undermining of our institutions, are people who want to radically transform our institutions and, therefore, our democracy.

So you add this all together and say, “Hold on a second. They always talked about… For four years under Trump, it was, ‘Oh, our sacred institutions,'” and now they’re trying to dramatically change those very institutions all under this idea that if they don’t get their way, then we’re all under threat. “The insurrection is coming.”

CLAY: And I’m like a lot of people where I feel like we have gotten a big win, even though it’s not being talked about as much by Joe Manchin. I know you’re skeptical they’re gonna stay committed being opposed to the filibuster — and in Kyrsten Sinema because — and you made an argument yesterday — and I think it’s a good one, Buck, where you were saying, “Hey, the seducing of these Democratic politicians is not going to end.”

But once you put it in writing in your local West Virginia newspaper — and, by the way, I think there’s a strong argument that the last statewide Democrat to ever be elected from West Virginia in any of our lives is Joe Manchin, and he knows that, and if he wants to be reelected in 2024, he barely was reelected in 2018, and I think Kyrsten Sinema knows that the state of Arizona in 2020 was an aberration.

And I think she recognizes how much of a balancing act being able to be reelected in John McCain’s home state and a historically strong conservative market is going to be. So I tend to believe that once they put it in writing, they’re not gonna be willing to bend on the filibuster. Do you think that the filibuster is truly done, or do you think that it could still come up that the Democrats find a way to overturn the 60 vote number?

BUCK: I was somebody who back in the Obamacare era, when it was a bit of a consensus position, “They won’t really do this without a single Republican vote,” right? “They won’t go that scorched-earth and hard-core on this issue,” and they did, and they got it through as we all remember to what we agreed on yesterday that Democrats are willing in a way that Republicans are just simply not to go for it.

You know, to make that final push, to pull the trigger, so to speak. The Democrats are willing to make it happen. I think that this is something where they’re gonna try to read the room a bit, read the polls, really, and see, is it enough to merely play the, “Oh, they’re obstructing us” card, and so they’ll back off. The Republicans are obstructing.

So they back off going into the midterms in an effort to keep the House, — which you and I know is gonna be very tough for Democrats this many times around. But they want to try to keep that because they know if you have divided government and a Biden presidency, this guy’s not a leader. This guy’s Mr. Magoo.

CLAY: If Biden is even still there.

BUCK: Right. I mean, if he doesn’t step down. I always tell everyone this, try to get this on the record. The moment that Biden — and who knows when it will be — decides that for personal, health reasons, whatever it may be, he’s gonna step down, everyone who’s currently saying that’s a crazy conspiracy theory will act like, “Oh, of course he’s stepping down! He’s almost 80 years old.” Guys, this is the game that they’re playing all along here.

CLAY: We just saw it happen with covid and the leak from the lab. “Oh, it’s the crazy conspiracy theory! How dare you have that perspective?” As soon as it starts to go into mainstream, Jon Stewart comes out, makes a joke, everyone in the Stephen Colbert audience is rolling over with hysterical laughter at the idea that anyone ever believed that covid didn’t come out of the Wuhan virology lab.

BUCK: I also think there’s a childishness that is running rampant. You have kids and I don’t, so you actually have to deal with children.

CLAY: My wife, by the way, might say that I’m the biggest child in the house if she were sitting in the studio with us right now. But, yes, I have three kids under 13.

BUCK: But there is a childishness at the heart of the Democratic Party with the argument about the filibuster because what they’re really saying is we want to get it our way this time now, because there’s this false urgency. But I would counter with that the kind of transformational things in federalizing national elections should be hard from a legislative perspective.

CLAY: D.C., Puerto Rico, getting four senators should be hard. Adding six Supreme Court justices? That should be a pretty high standard, I think, to meet.

BUCK: And gridlock is just a way of saying balance of powers, working together.

CLAY: People aren’t agreeing to radical change. Gridlock is not a bad thing to me.

BUCK: I think it’s fascinating with all the flip-flopping, and we should bring back that term. Remember when that was basically the end of John Kerry —

CLAY: Yes. Yes.

BUCK: — when he was running for president? You were before it before you were against it?

CLAY: That’s right.

BUCK: Ant rallies, it was always, “Flip-flop! Flip-flop!”

CLAY: Yeah, yeah.

BUCK: Not quite as fun as “build the wall,” but “flip-flop” had its moment. The Democrat flip-flopping on issues having to do with our institutions of government but also the narrative against Trump was the hashtag resistance.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: And it was the hashtag resistance judiciary, legislature, anything anywhere in government where they could — and this was, by the way, people I know well from the previous White House said that it’s just the tip of the iceberg what you’ve heard of, what has been reported about how many people in the federal bureaucracy would just essentially say, “No. Make us.

“Yeah, you’re the president, you’re the head of the executive branch, but we’re not gonna do that. We’re gonna take our time.” So there was an intransigence, a kind of internal sabotage. And that was all the hashtag resistance. Now when Republicans use the very system of government that we have in a completely legitimate way to say, “We’re not going along with you,” the Democrats are like, “It’s time for the steamroller! Let’s get that steamroller.”

CLAY: And to her credit in the Washington Post editorial that she put out yesterday that we talked about, Kyrsten Sinema pointed out that 31 Democratic senators including Joe Biden himself had been opposed to doing away with the filibuster in 2017 as a part of the resistance. The thing that they held to most stringently was the idea, “Well, at least you’re gonna need to get 60 votes in order to enact radical transformation,” and it should be hard, Buck. Think about this. If you’re gonna go from nine Supreme Court justices to 15, it should be insanely hard. To add senators in Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico and states, that should be massively hard as well. It shouldn’t be an easy thing to do.

BUCK: And yet we’re told that the false urgency of now dictates that everything we’ve known in the past about government no longer matters. Everything they’ve said. Forget about what we know, everything the Democrats used to say about the balance of powers and how this all works does not matter. For me, there are so many great phrases from the Obama era. There was “leading from behind.” There was “strategic patience.”

CLAY: “You didn’t build that!”

BUCK: You didn’t build that. (chuckles) But if you wanted the really defining — and of course Rahm Emanuel didn’t come up with this. I think you could go back to Sun Tzu.

CLAY: The Art of War.

BUCK: You could go back to ancient Chinese wisdom.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: And you could go back and realize that when Rahm Emanuel as the White House chief of staff said, a crisis is a terrible thing to waste, Democrats would lurch from one crisis to the next, and that’s the pitch. Covid is an opportunity. The debt is an opportunity. The border even for them is an opportunity.

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Is Defund the Police Dead… Or a Zombie Ready to Rise Again?

23 Jun 2021

BUCK: Whenever we can lead a show with something other than, you know, “The country’s falling apart; it’s all terrible,” we can say, “Okay, we got challenges, but let’s take our wins where we can.” What happened in New York City — even though it’s a Democrat primary and it’s just one city — is a big win for those of us who believe that law enforcement deserves our support and safe streets are something that aren’t even a partisan issue.

CLAY: I think defund the police died in New York City last night. And that may be an expansive take, but I want to make a little case here, and I’m gonna use data to make that case. We talked about yesterday on this show, Buck — and you know these candidates far better because they’ve been running a big campaign in New York City, your hometown, for the past year, basically, past several months for sure.

We said it was gonna come down to the candidate Eric Adams who represented a 22-year police veteran who wanted to allow police to do their jobs, and Maya Wiley, who was the AOC-endorsed candidate, who said effectively, “Hey, police shouldn’t even almost have guns.” She also said, “Hey, we need to defund the police.” That was an aggressive part of her platform.

And I want to hit a couple of data points here on this and then I want you to unpack, because you’ve lived this reality as New York City has moved from one of the safest big cities in the world to start to return to the pre-Rudy Giuliani era where you walk through Times Square and you look over your shoulder. You’re on the subway; you’re not comfortable.

You’re walking through Central Park, and it’s starting to get a little bit dark and you think to yourself, “Ah, I don’t know that I feel very safe.” I think a lot of people — whether they live in New York City or whether they’re thinking about going there on vacation — had stopped to have those thoughts in their mind; and now they are returning. And what we saw from the electorate…

I’m a big believer in — the same way I talk about putting my lawyer hat on — when you talk to a jury, Buck, ultimately the wisdom of a 12-person jury most of the time is pretty good. I think the wisdom of collective voters is pretty good, too, and what they were saying in New York City was this was their number one overall interest of all the issues out there.

Fifty percent of them cited crime or violence as the primary issue that they cared about. Covid was 30%. We know that story is going away. The Democratic obsession with racial injustice, 20%. That is seismic! Fifty percent of the voters in a very liberal city in New York, Buck, they went to the polls, and they said, “We care about crime and violence,” and you’re seeing it, I bet, in the way that people are reacting in New York.

BUCK: Well, you gotta remember I also was assigned to the intelligence division of the NYPD for a little over a year. It was a rotation, effectively. But I know still a lot of guys who are in the NYPD.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: So I can ask them and reach out — and I have been — about morale and what’s going on. And they’ve been saying things like, “You have to remember that when you’re talking about, you know, murders and shootings, the reason that that’s such a focus is that, one, those are very…”

CLAY: Kind of a serious. Kind of a serious issues.

BUCK: The most serious issues. Two, they’re hard to fudge the numbers with, so to speak, right? Like, there are a lot of other things where it doesn’t get reported or doesn’t really make it into stats necessarily. Murders get reported.

CLAY: A dead body is hard to disappear.

BUCK: So it’s a strong indicator. But that also it’s at the top of the, you know, law enforcement hierarchy of urgent needs. But then you realize below it there’s all these other things — the quality of life crimes within the more minor things — and when people realize that there’s effectively a reverse broken window is happening, right?

CLAY: That’s well said.

BUCK: The broken windows policy. You deal with the low-level stuff so that the high-level stuff doesn’t happen. When the high-level stuff — murders, homicides, assaults, rapes — are going up, when you look below, all the other stuff is always happening too. And that’s why even if you live in… I want to just make sure we broaden this out too.

What we’re talking about in New York is really the same story. I’m sure you have friends in these cities, too, in San Francisco, in Los Angeles, in Atlanta, in Chicago, in Houston. Name a city, and you’ve seen an increase in crimes, but you’ve also likely seen an increase in some of these other indicators that are just quality-of-life stuff.

Because police are in places where they’ve been defunded less able to and even in some cases told not to enforce that stuff. So there’s a general lawlessness that these numbers that you’re talking about are reflective of. There’s a general sensibility among the population of the whole country that this is the trend, this is the trajectory.

But I will just… I want to put an idea out to you, Clay, and I want to hear your response in just a moment but you’re saying that defund the police is dead. I think that this is a huge blow for defund the police, but I think that defund the police is a zombie issue, meaning it’s going to rise again.

CLAY: Oh?

BUCK: So it’s a question… Because if you look at the history of… So I don’t disagree with the assessment, but I think we have to make sure that we really dive into, first of all, just the early stage I think we could agree of the repudiation or the pushback, right? New York is the turning of the tide, maybe. We hope.

CLAY: Tipping point.

BUCK: Tipping point. Tipping point. That’s the best way to say it but now we have to make sure that everyone understands that this was predictable and in fact predicted. You did; I did. Everyone on the right who’s been looking at this issue for the last year has said, “Guys, this is just gonna keep getting worse.”

And I just want everyone to remember, though, that BLM, which coincided with this whole thing, this is BLM 2.0 as a movement we’ve seen in the last year. The original BLM came out of Ferguson under the Obama administration. So there is already… To your point about history and repeating, this is history repeating itself. You used the term yesterday on the show the Ferguson Effect.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: It’s almost like we forgot the lesson of the Ferguson Effect over the last 12 months and we had to live through the nightmare of it again. So can we return to it?

CLAY: Now, 100% we need to dive into that because history has repeated itself. But I do think that this is a monumental and massive and I think your point is a good one. New York City is reflective and embodies what’s going on in the rest of the country, and I think their voting occurring when it did is a pretty seismic issue to unpack.

BUCK: And I got some Portland stuff. I want to spread this around, right? ‘Cause there’s New York and then there’s Portland, there’s other cities. Minneapolis. No one on the left wants to even talk about what’s happening in Minneapolis.

CLAY: Thomas Friedman wrote a column in the New York Times. The headline… I want to dive into some of this, because I think he tends to be Mr. Conventional Wisdom himself. The headline in the New York Times editorial page today from Thomas Friedman: “Want to Get Trump Re-elected? Dismantle the Police.” They are running scared, Buck. Thomas Friedman! My gosh.

BUCK: If even Friedman…!

CLAY: He’s putting it out there.

BUCK: If even Friedman is on this!

CLAY: Yes. He’s a Minneapolis guy originally.

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Trump Shames Border Czar Into Visiting Border

23 Jun 2021

CLAY: One thing I bet that a lot of people on Twitter and Facebook and certainly many of you listening out there are ready for is — you know what happened with Kamala Harris, Buck. She’s been saying she didn’t need to go to the border. She hadn’t been to Europe, either. But now all of a sudden, Donald Trump is scheduled to be at the border in five days, and what has happened, Buck Sexton?

BUCK: Oh, she’s going, Clay. She’s going down. In fact, Trump effectively shamed the border czar into going to said border, which is a remarkable thing when you think about it. Ninety-one days, friends, after she was named immigration czar, she has finally come out or her spokespersons or whatever have said that she will go down on Friday, just in time to beat former President Trump.

He’ll be down there just a few days after that with Governor Abbott of Texas, and one thing about Texas on this one — and, yes, there’s going to be jealousy. We don’t ever want to make any of the other states jealous. There’s a fair amount of Florida high-fiving on the show. There’s also some Texas high-fiving that goes on here because, you know, the state of Texas, Clay, has decided to take border matters into its own hands at some level.

They are building some sections of wall themselves. They’re bringing in additional law enforcement officers from Florida among other states to help with the surge and help with the issues at the border. And having been down there just a couple of months ago myself, we were talking about law enforcement being overwhelmed.

The Border Patrol is completely overwhelmed with, let’s all be very clear, the worst numbers of apprehensions and illegal crossings — and got-aways who are people who just made it into the U.S., never got taken into custody at all — really ever. It’s at least 20 years. But based on the trend and the trajectory, you could pretty much say this is the worst the border has ever been.

CLAY: Which is not a good thing I think no matter what your politics might be. Kamala Harris, I think this is significant that she’s going, but also don’t miss what she’s trying to do, Buck. She’s going in on a Friday, hoping that her friends in the media will bury this story rolling into a summer weekend, right? Going on Friday you hope, “Hey, Saturday, Sunday, everybody’s going out to the pool, everybody’s on vacation, everything else.”

BUCK: Well, this goes to show you that there really was a belief, I think, in the Harris camp that she could get away with saying that it’s not a big deal. “Why do I have to go to the border as the border czar?” and then when all the criticisms got piled on and all the folks out there were saying hold on a second. And we should actually play if we have it —

CLAY: It’s a classic.


BUCK: Oh, yes. You remember it. Let’s play for everybody just a trip down memory lane with our border czar.

HOLT: Do you have any plans to visit the border?

HARRIS: I… At some point… Eh… (sputters) Y’know…. I… (deep breath) We are going to the border.

HOLT: You haven’t.

HARRIS: We’ve been to the border. So, this whole… This whole thing about the border… We’ve been to the border. We’ve been to the border!

HOLT: You haven’t been to the border.

HARRIS: (sputters) Uh, I… And I haven’t been to Europe. (pause)

HOLT: (silence)

HARRIS: (fake laughter) I mean, I don’t… I don’t understand the point that you’re making!

BUCK: This was one of those awesome moments where you just… This is Lester Holt. I mean, he’s trying to just do his interview thing, and he’s like, “Look, you’re the vice president. I’m not trying to cause issues here, but you have not been to the border. You can’t look me in the eyes in an interview on my show when we all know it.” The whole point is you haven’t been! You don’t get to say, “Oh, yes, we have,” Clay. “We’ve been to the border.” Who’s we? Have you, Kamala Harris, the border czar been to the border?

CLAY: What I think is so interesting about Kamala Harris in general, she’s got a Cruella De Vil about her personality, like, where she tries to kind of laugh her way and smile her way through answers to questions like these. But, Buck, she’s been in prime time, in theory, for a long time. She ran for president. She was a a senator from California.

She was attorney general. She’s dealt with the media for a long time. I think certainly they’ve used kid gloves with her. But how is it that she wasn’t prepared for a question like this? I still… Every time I hear that, I cringe because it’s almost a veep moment. I think about her staff when they were watching that and seeing it.

And I wonder, did they not prep her? Were they so stunned that Lester Holt asked? Like, go listen to that clip again, because I know it’s a classic. But the degree of arrogance from her, to, first of all, lie directly to Lester Holt about something that is very clear that he could call her on, and then to follow it up with such a dismissive line about, “Well, I haven’t been to Europe, either.”

I’m not quizzing you about NATO. I’m not quizzing you about Brussels. I’m quizzing you about the border. Why would you focus and even try to pivot in such a stupid way? Listen to this again, because I think it is an emblematic moment with Kamala Harris where you really get the sense that she’s not very good on her feet.

And also that she’s expecting for Lester Holt to just accept her lie and move on. This is… Sometimes you hear a 30-sec clip, and I think it’s an important window into the larger media universe both for the candidate and/or the vice president in this case, but also the media environment in general. Let’s listen to it one more time.

HOLT: Do you have any plans to visit the border?

HARRIS: I… At some point… Eh… (sputters) Y’know…. I… (deep breath) We are going to the border. We’ve been to the border.

HOLT: You haven’t.

HARRIS: So, this whole… This whole thing about the border… We’ve been to the border. We’ve been to the border!

HOLT: You haven’t been to the border.

HARRIS: (sputters) Uh, I… And I haven’t been to Europe. (pause)

HOLT: (silence)

HARRIS: (fake laughter) I mean, I don’t… I don’t understand the point that you’re making!

BUCK: Well, we all understand the point, right?

CLAY: Everyone understands the point!

BUCK: Everybody knew exactly what it was. I can see, without being there, the looks on the faces of her staffers just all —

CLAY: That’s what I’m saying, the veep moment.

BUCK: That could have been… But let’s go into the why. Why would she…? I mean, now we know it’s because Trump look Trump gets results once again. He’s getting results on this. She has to go down, because otherwise Trump going down creates a photo-op that’s even more damaging than the photo-op she was trying to avoid, which was Kamala Harris at the U.S.-Mexico border as a border czar as the numbers keep coming out, and it continues to get worse.

This is an issue… On a policy level, the take-away here that everyone needs to understand is the Democrats don’t want this situation to stop. They want to control the optics of what’s happening, which is the massive… You want to talk about systematic? This is the systematic gaming of our asylum process by people who are entering and they are breaking the law.

So many commentators get that wrong. Even if you surrender at the border and say, “Here I am! I want to claim asylum,” when you enter onto U.S. soil to do that, not at a port of entry, that is a violation of statute. And then they’ve so overwhelmed the system and the cartels are making hundreds of millions of dollars on this now, on top of all the drugs that they’re running by having Border Patrol have to deal with all the people that are coming across.

So this, then, becomes an issue of, “How do Democrats stop something, Clay, that they actually think in the long run benefits them politically?” Because they still want an amnesty, and they feel like this is… First of all, the virtue signaling on this is great, “Yeah, open borders. Let’s give away free health care,” as they said on the debate stage in the Democrat primary to illegal immigrants.

So the party, the Democratic Party has moved so far left that they can’t even pretend to want to stop illegal immigration from occurring. That’s where we really are and so Kamala Harris doesn’t want to go down because she’s not gonna fix this problem ’cause she doesn’t really want to fix this problem.

CLAY: And she’s going on Friday because she hopes it gets buried into weekend, and to your point because she knows when Donald Trump with other Republican congressmen goes next week, they were going to be able to wield a massive attack on her and the Biden administration in general by saying, “Hey, I’m not even president right now.

“But I can make it down to check to see what’s going on at the border. Your current administration hasn’t still not managed that.” So what she’s trying to do is blunt that attack by going down on Friday, hoping a lot of people aren’t gonna pay attention and then she can say, “Well, I’ve now been to the border.”

BUCK: And it’s amazing that this is the first real thing that has been put on the Kamala Harris ledger, so to speak, and yet we all know — and we’ll be talking about this a lot — there’s a widespread believe that she will be the next Democrat nominee. I don’t know if it’s incumbent, but the next Democrat president of the United States.

CLAY: It would be racist and sexist for her not to be the nominee in 2024 by the Democrats’ own standards.

BUCK: And yet what has she shown us so far of actual ability and results in my office? I’ll never forget, back during the primary, the Democrat primary when she said in a very nonchalant and arrogant fashion, “I mean, it’s clear I’m a top-tier candidate.”

CLAY: (laughing)

BUCK: Actually, the voters, the Democrat voters had a very different feeling about that.

CLAY: Well, she’s not likable. That’s the essence, and this is why I hope she’s the nominee in 2024, because Kamala Harris, if you put here on a stage, ultimately this is a TV contest. Kamala Harris has no children. She is married to a dorky white dude lawyer — and I can say ’cause I’m kind of a dorky white dude lawyer. She doesn’t have a history of being particularly likable.

And depending on who the nominee is for the Republican Party in 2024, I believe that what Kamala Harris is going to lean on is the same thing that Hillary Clinton leaned on, which is, “I’m a woman; I deserve this,” and she’s also gonna add in, “I’m a minority woman. I deserve this.” And I don’t think America responds to “I deserve to be elected because of my identity.” I really don’t.

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EIB 24/7: Clay & Buck’s Stack of Stuff

23 Jun 2021

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